Greenhorns

In the spring of 1904, a young man arrives on a ranch in Wyoming, pursuing a singular aberrant desire. What follows is one of the strangest annals in the closure of the Old West.

***Content Warning: This episode contains potentially disturbing themes, scenes, and imagery, deals frankly with animal cruelty, murder, and suicide, and makes reference to the historical 1903 incident at Lightning Creek, Wyoming. Listener discretion is advised.***

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(Sounds of distant horse whinnying)

NARRATOR

Episode 51: Greenhorns.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The May sky, blue and bright as a robin’s egg, stretches cloudless between the razor’s-edge horizons. A westerly wind scours over the prairie, parching the soil of the last remnants of the winter snowmelt.

Willard Ortham, all of nineteen years old, urges his nag northwestward, toward the still-unseen Carston ranch. The last of his money was spent in the Douglas stables on the scrawny old black mare, who refuses to move at anything more than a plod, and the only worthwhile work he heard tell of in town was with the Carston, the oldest and largest ranch in the surrounding three counties. 

And he feels another pull from such a place, far removed from the auspices of the town and its law officers, an urge which he has not yet divulged to anyone. It is the yearning that has drawn him all the way from his native Ohio, from the large house of his lawyer father and his seven siblings, none of whom he particularly misses.

His right hand drifts toward the secondhand 1892 Army Colt at his side, delicately tracing the smooth walnut grips with his forefinger. A slow, toothy grin spreads across his thin, weak-chinned features, giving his face an almost skeletal cast.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The evening finds the thirteen Carston hands gathered around the cookhouse, eating their portion of bacon, beans, and biscuits under the open air. The talk of the men falls still as they all  become aware of the slow hoofbeats of an approaching rider, and a lone horseman enters the yard, his underfed and overtaxed steed looking just on this side of death.

The foreman calls a cautious greeting, leaving his finished plate and moving toward the newcomer, who has drawn up his nag about twenty feet from the cookhouse. The stranger does not dismount, and the implied condescension irritates the foreman. Forbearing for the moment, he introduces himself as Aldon Vandries.

The rider offers his name flatly as Wil Ortham, and asks if there is work here.

Might be, Aldon replies, spitting a stream of brown tobacco juice.

For a long moment, Ortham sits motionless in his saddle, staring at the foreman blankly. Then he smiles and at last dismounts, coming a few paces forward and offering his hand. The foreman takes it, noting its paleness and the smoothness of the fingers.

Wil assures him, with a widening smile, that he can do any job set before him. Aldon peers into the youthful face, trying to get a measure of the psyche behind it and feeling slightly disconcerted by the grin, which he cannot help but think looks a little “painted on”.

Still, he’s been meaning to round out the unlucky number of hands, who are a little too short for the seven-thousand-head herd, especially with the spring roundup looming. And, he thinks, there’s nothing like good, honest work to wear away callowness, and to put leather on those smooth hands.

Aldon welcomes him, and shows him to the stables to put away his horse. Then he tells the lad to get a good feed and pick out one of the empty beds in the bunkhouse, because tomorrow, there’ll be papers to sign first thing, and then a long day of hard work.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The first week after the new hire, Aldon is pleased. The boy is inexperienced and sometimes a little rash, but he is a quick study and more than willing to put in the same long hours as his fellow hands, even with his blistering palms and saddle sores.

Yet after those first few days, he notices a rift between the new hand and his more senior fellows. He sits apart from them during their shared meals, and maintains a placid silence unless directly addressed, which the older hands seem uninterested in doing. Aldon does not at once perceive this as a problem, taking little interest in the personal feelings of his subordinates, but after another week he decides to unobtrusively inquire, to make sure there are no simmering resentments among the crew. Such things, he knows from experience, can poison a healthy ranch if left unchecked.

The other hands, though, seem unwilling to discuss it, and only after losing his patience and pressing the third hand, a youth named Ed Drighton, a little too hard does Aldon learn anything at all. Ed, though of an age with Willard, has worked with cattle and horses since his tender childhood, and is in Aldon’s opinion one of the ranch’s most reliable employees. Still, Aldon cannot help but feel that the kid’s vague mumblings about Wil Ortham’s wrongness are a little skittish, an unworthy trait in a cowhand.

Then comes the day that he and the Ortham boy are riding alone toward the north fence line, to return an errant hundred and fifty-some head to the main herd. The cattle prove compliant, making it an easy two hour’s work between two horsemen, and on the return ride Aldon tries to make conversation with Wil. The boy offers only laconic responses until the foreman once makes passing reference to the trouble at nearby Lightning Creek the previous Halloween. The boy’s eyes alight at this, and he asks if Aldon took part in the fighting himself.

A little unsettled by the boy’s apparent eagerness, Aldon clarifies that he was not part of the posse, and would have wanted no part of it. The first of the five Oglala killed that day, he explains, was an eleven-year-old boy, shot in the back of the head as he ran for safety.

Ortham stares at him uncomprehendingly, and then finally shrugs.

Then, slowly and so softly that Aldon is not sure he is meant to hear the words, Ortham murmurs that he would love to have been there, as he delicately, almost sensuously, caresses the revolver handle at his hip.

They do not speak again the rest of the ride back to the ranch headquarters.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Over the following few days, Aldon notes that the tension between Wil and the other hands seems to be growing still more dire, very nearly coming to blows one night over dinner. And his worry is only deepened by an overheard conversation between two of the oldest hands, a pair of Texans, about the boy’s strange prayers at night, for the Lord to send him a man before the West is closed.

That night, Aldon prays himself for the first time in twenty years, for the Lord to send him a man as well, one to replace the bloodthirsty boy as soon as he is able. And for once, his prayer is answered, for the very next morning, a second newcomer rides in.

Tall he is, and very pale, with mousy grey hair to his shoulders and colorless grey eyes. He is dressed, Aldon thinks, like a preacher, all in black and white, but his clothes are dusty and worn. Looking at his face, the foreman cannot guess the man’s age – he could be in his twenties, or past forty. His horse, an ashy dapple grey gelding of indeterminate breed, looks a little undernourished, and its eyes are cloudy, and yet its hooves are certain and unfaltering.

The man dismounts easily, and bows with antiquated formality that is wholly out place in his surroundings, introducing himself as Larry Upman. He says that he has heard there may be need of him here on the ranch, and that he would be happy to be of use, removing his riding gloves and offering a hand to the foreman, which Aldon takes. His grip is very strong and distinctly chilly, despite the warmth of the day.

Nevertheless, Aldon cannot suppress a genuine smile at the man’s arrival, and says that he is an absolute godsend, welcoming him to the Carston ranch with a hearty laugh. As the two of them begin to walk back toward the ranch house, Aldon notes that the Ortham boy is eyeing the newcomer with a hard and distinctly distasteful look.

Mr. Upman remains affable and polite throughout the formal hiring process, which primarily consists of signing a standard company contract in lieu of the verbal agreement more common on ranches. Nevertheless, Aldon detects a certain aloofness in the man’s demeanor which is not wholly unlike that of their other recent hire, the one which Aldon privately hopes he will be able to let go as soon as they test out the newer man. As Upman signs the papers, the foreman notices that the full name he writes, in a flowing and almost flowery hand, is Lazarus A. Upman.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The Ortham boy seems to have decided that his prayers were also answered, and he spares no time in beginning a campaign of verbal antagonism against Larry. Larry, for his part, ignores the boy almost entirely, which only seems to incense the teenager more. At his work, Larry Upman proves exceptional, a natural in the saddle and seeming to intuitively sense the mood and instincts of the herd. This, too, feeds the young man’s cold hatred, and more than once the foreman notices the youth’s hand drifting toward his revolver before silently recalculating the likely outcome in the company of the other men, and restraining himself.

Even so, Aldon hesitates to dismiss the younger hand, feeling for the first time in months that the ranch’s workload is not outpacing his crew every day of the week.

This hesitancy ends on the last night in May, when the men have been sharing a bottle of whiskey over the evening fire and the simmering tensions at last boil over. Drunk on only a few drops, Wil begins laying into Larry as never before, crassly mocking his manhood and the way he rides his horse.

Upman, who has taken only a single polite sip from the bottle, acts as though he has not heard the youth, but Aldon can see the tensing shoulders and coiling limbs, the hard eyes of the other hands, whose disquiet and irritation have now become something else. One of the Texans, an older Black hand named Danny Hawson, tells the boy to can it, and Wil’s lip curls as he turns his abuse on Danny.

At that instant, all of the men aside from Larry are on their feet, the younger Texan, Red Williams, tackling Ortham to the ground and scuffling with him while the others cluster around, cheering him on. Aldon shouts for order, but the men either do not hear him or do not care – until he draws his Schofield revolver and fires a shot into the air.

The men pause, all turning to look at the foreman – all except Wil, whose murderous gaze flits between Red and Larry, and Larry himself, who is still placidly eating his biscuit. Just as Aldon is beginning to speak, another shot sounds, this time the bark of an 1892 Army Colt. Red falls away from the shot, hands clapped over his ears at the unexpected blast, and several of the men rush to his side, thinking that he has been wounded. But Aldon sees at once that the smoking barrel is directed at the seated Larry Upman.

Mr. Upman, showing for the first time a visible reaction to the events around him, sits stone still, his eyes gone wide. The biscuit has fallen from his hand, which now slumps to rest on his knees.

Goddamn it! Aldon roars. Take his gun!

But he hardly has begun to say it before Danny Hawson has knocked the Colt from the boy’s hands and handed it to the foreman.

Boy’s crazy as a bedbug, boss, the Texan says softly.

Aldon nods, taking the second revolver, unloading it, and stowing it in his belt. He strides forward to where the men have seized Ortham, and looks down at the youth, feeling a rising disgust at the weaselly face which no longer attempts to conceal its owner’s cruelty.

Get gone, you son-of-a-bitch, the foreman grates between clenched teeth. I don’t want to see you round here ever again.

The boy rises, shaking off the hands of the other men, who relinquish their hold readily enough now that he is disarmed. With a disdainful smirk, Wil Ortham asks for his gun.

Aldon laughs in incredulous surprise, then shakes his head, saying that the boy is lucky they don’t take him into town for the sheriff to deal with. Then he repeats his demand for Ortham to leave, and with a parting sneer, the lad walks to the stables for his nag, who has gained healthy flesh after weeks of proper feeding and rest. Two of the hands follow at his flanks, ensuring that he doesn’t get into further mischief before he leaves.

Aldon turns then to talk to Upman, who still has not moved at all. A chill runs down Aldon’s neck that perhaps, even though he still sits upright, the bullet struck true and killed Larry. Hawson and two other men kneel beside him, talking to him gently, but Upman simply stares into the fire glassily, his whole body unmoving and his arms limp.

Then he draws a long, shuddering breath, and blinks twice. After a few moments, he offers a polite smile, and assures them all that he is well, just a little shocked. Then, without any further explanation, he rises and moves toward the bunkhouse.

The other men watch him go, then look about at one another, seeking an answer to a question that none of them know how to ask. At last, they begin to disperse in the falling night, as the open-air cookfire dies under the cook’s watchful eye.

As he moves toward the ranch house and his own bed, the foreman wonders if anyone else noticed the bloodless bullet hole in Upman’s jacket, or if he merely imagined it.

(Unsettling music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

A pall of silence falls over the ranch after that, despite the apparent lack of lethal consequence, and the hands go about their work with a nervous listlessness. Aldon has an unpleasant sense that they are all waiting for something to happen, something none of them can name or define, and yet which they all feel is sure to come.

Still, a week passes, and only the weather changes, becoming hotter and drier.

The wind is full of dust and horn flies the day that the Texans ride back to tell Aldon of the breach in the southwest fences, with at least a couple hundred head escaped. Swearing, the foreman sends them back with barbed wire, and then rides east himself to fetch hands to help round up the errant cattle.

The first man he finds is Larry, who is helping to move the east bunch to higher, greener pastures. Giving the hand his new orders, he sends Larry on ahead westward and turns to find more help. He has only ridden a few yards when he hears the crack of a rifle from somewhere to the south.

He turns to see Upman slump in his saddle as the pallid horse beneath him slows its pace and then stops, its ears flicking nervously as it turns its long head in the direction of the shot. The rider slowly leans to his left and then spills to the earth, motionless.

Aldon’s own Morgan gelding squeals and begins to paw, his tail swishing violently, clearly spooked and on the verge of bolting. It takes him several anxious moments of gentle but firm coaxing to calm the bay, before he can even spare a glance in the same direction that the now-riderless dapple grey’s attention is focused. The slight pale hollow of a dry creek bed lies just shy of a hundred yards away, but he can see no one there, no sign of motion.

He turns his horse and nears the downed Upman, softly calling to him without shifting his gaze from the creek bed.

Just as he draws near, Upman stands, as unceremoniously and unhurriedly as though rising from his bunk in the morning. Calmly, Upman picks up and dusts off his beaten black bowler and places in back upon his head, then walks to his horse and swings up into the saddle.

When the foreman recovers enough from his surprise, he rides to Upman’s side and asks him if he’s alright. Upman simply nods, and when the foreman begins to outline a plan for getting out of the shooter’s range, Larry says simply that he is already gone.

A chilly shudder grips the foreman’s neck, and he asks Upman how he can be so sure.

The other man turns to him, his voice and expression perfectly flat as he replies that the gunman thinks he’s done what he came here to do.

Before Aldon can ask if he thinks it is the Ortham kid, Upman is riding away to the southwest to round up the escaped cattle.

The foreman watches him ride away for a long time. A feeling of breathless suffocation has begun to overwhelm him, one that has nothing to do with the hot and dusty wind.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Work on the Carston ranch has never gone more smoothly, and even the minor disaster with the downed fences is soon corrected. The spring branding comes and goes without major incident, and still, Aldon is ill at ease.

He is not alone. The other hands begin to shun Upman just as they did Ortham, though with less complaint. It seems they do not even want to talk about him, finding his mere existence too disturbing. Though they make no mention of it aloud, Aldon wonders if they have begun to notice the same things that he has.

Twice since that day in the east pastures, Upman has ridden back with new holes and small bloodstains in his clothes, without saying a word about anything being amiss. And it is only now that the foreman realizes that he has never seen Upman wear any weapon, not even a good knife, a strange habit among cowpokes even now that the frontier is all but closed.

He thinks about this often in the dark, when sleep refuses to come and leaves him staring wide-eyed at the shadowed timber ceiling, creaking as it settles with the cool night air.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When the time comes to drive the culled heads from the roundup into town, Aldon is ready to leave the ranch behind him. He leaves only a few hands behind to tend the ranch in the meantime, three of the older wranglers and also Upman – this latter to the drive crew’s unspoken but palpable relief.

The drive, usually the work of two or maybe three days, goes easily enough. Not for the first time, Aldon takes silent pride in his ability to judge a good wrangler on sight – the Ortham boy, and perhaps Larry Upman, being rare exceptions. Reaching Douglas late in the afternoon of the second day and driving the cattle to the rail yard, Aldon negotiates the sale terms with a pair of commission agents from the stockyards in Omaha and Chicago while the hands disperse to their various pleasures in town.

After having reached acceptable terms, the foreman walks down the street to the general store to arrange for an order of supplies for the ranch, mostly dry goods, nails, and barbed wire. But halfway across the street, he pauses, spying a familiar horses hitched outside the nearby saloon – the dark nag that the Ortham kid rode, once more looking malnourished. And scabbarded in the saddle is a shiny new Winchester 94 repeater.

A sudden urge to change course toward the saloon and confront the would-be killer seizes him, but he tells himself that the Ortham kid is no longer his problem, and settles on briefly stopping by the sheriff’s office before leaving town to advise the lawman about the boy’s wicked tendencies.

When he leaves the store, the poor old mare is gone.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Aldon urges his gelding to a speed that risks exhausting the horse before they reach the ranch, his mind racing. The men behind him are silent, sullen that their rare trip to town was cut so unceremoniously short, and even more so that their foreman has given them so little explanation as to why – but Aldon does not dare to utter his fearful misgivings aloud, lest he tempt fate into making them reality.

The words of the sheriff seem to echo in his skull, about how he and his deputies had certainly taken notice of the strange youth, who at first had seemed decent enough, even spending good money at the local businesses. But after several weeks in the hotel and the saloon, not to mention the purchase of his new rifle, it seemed Wil Ortham’s money had run dry, and he’d taken to sleeping in the alleys or sneaking into the loft of the stables. Some folks around town had even complained of him begging or stealing, and generally making a nuisance of himself, but so far he had done nothing serious enough to land him in real trouble.

Of greatest concern to Aldon, though, was what the sheriff told him the boy had been overheard saying, drunken promises of vague vengeance and of finally getting that man that wouldn’t stay down.

Aldon digs his spurs into the gelding’s side, feeling his pulse keenly in his wrists and his temples, feeling an aching strain in his chest.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Two of the older hands they find in the yard, sprawled dead on the earth where they had fallen, riddled with bullets. Clearly they had been surprised at their dinner, with fly-strewn remnants of their last meal lying spilled in the dirt beside them. One seemed to have died quickly, but the other seemed to have tried to crawl a ways, the pale soil caked with his rust-brown blood. The holster on his belt is empty.

Danny Hawson lies on his bed in the bunkhouse, having left a thin and blurry hand-smear of his own blood on the door. He is gut shot and feverish, but still breathing. Breathing hard, he points vaguely toward the stables when they try to ask him what has happened.

Their guns drawn and ready, Aldon leads the men toward the stables. They are eerily silent, and entering, they find that all of the remaining horses housed within have been brutally slaughtered.

Standing in the middle of the aisle is the black-clothed Lazarus Upman, a trickle of blood trailing down his face from the small bullet wound in his forehead and his suit peppered with similar destruction. He stares at them calmly, unblinkingly, as they approach. At his feet lies Willard Ortham, an emptied Winchester discarded nearby and a pistol stolen from one of the dead hands still in his right hand. The back of his skull has been blown apart by a single well-placed shot, and blood leaks from his ruined mouth.

The men stare at this hellish scene, dumbfounded. Before any of them find their voices, Lazarus Upman at last breaks his silence, saying that he is no longer needed here, then turns and slowly walks out of the stables.

When the foreman returns from his reverie of shock, he runs outside after Upman, demanding that he return and make an account of what has happened in their absence. The man continues to walk westward toward the red sunset, neither answering nor even glancing back.

For a mad moment, the foreman considers drawing his own gun and more forcefully repeating his demand, but the thought of what he would do if Upman continued to walk away, or worse yet, if he fired and still Upman walked so unconcernedly, stops him.

And so he stands, mutely, as the pooled blood dries in the dust and the dusk slowly gives way to darkness.

Later, as he gulps down glass after glass of whiskey, his hands shaking over a letter of resignation hastily and clumsily drafted by lanternlight, he will think of that awful moment over and over, like a damaged phonograph record repeating the same seconds endlessly. And he will know that, no matter how far behind he leaves the Carston Cattle Company or its property, and no matter how much liquor he swills, the Ortham boy’s senseless killings – and the one man he could not kill – will forever continue to trouble his thoughts.

From the stables, the dapple grey rises from where it lay mere moments before in a deep pool of its own blood, and leaping out of its stall, it races out to meet its master.

(Haunting music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]