by Clay Fisher
By the scout’s educated guess, the brief September dusk was only minutes away. Its fall would leave them twelve hours of darkness in which to get up and roof over the cabin walls before daylight brought back Sayapi and his now thrice-humbled braves. It would be a herculean effort, even for five frontier-hardened men and a Montana-bred mule. Kelly set his big jaw, brought out his best grin to cloak its grimness.
“After you, Harper.” He bowed to the delighted hillman, sweeping the pine needles with the brim of his beautiful beaver hat. Then, starting off behind Big Anse’s proud lead, he clucked to the eye-walling Phineas, flung a long arm dramatically toward the sun’s last thin rim, even then slipping beyond the cloud-banked shoulder of Judith Mountain, and rolled the startling quote thunderously forth:
“Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow:
From fringes of the faded eve,
O, happy planet, eastward go—! ”
As Big Anse and Kelly moved into the darkness, the three remaining wolf hunters stood staring after them, the Irishman’s elfin bit of Tennyson still ringing in their uncomprehending ears.
“The mon’s entirely daft,” said Alec MacDonal to the bewildered Jepson and Caswell. “Dippy as a Slave Lake loon, or I will buy the drinks all winter.”
“Drunk, more likely!” snapped Jepson, whose busy blue-veined nose and sharp simian eye had previously noted that Kelly carried an unannounced and unoffered bottle of Kentucky bourbon in his war bag. “He totes a pint along. I seen it in his sack.”
“If so,” countered the Scot, “I’m put in mind of what Abraham Lincoln told them that was wantin’ him to get rid of General Grant because of his boozin’.”
“You mean,” said Jepson irritably, “thet old wheeze where Abe says, ‘What brand does he drink? I’d like to send a barrel of it to my other generals?’”
“Aye, mon, that’s the one.”
“Well, so what? Where’s the point in it fer us and Kelly? Drunk or sober, he’s still crazy!”
“Aye, lad, and there’s jest the point,” said Alec MacDonal, picking up the hand axe and starting off after Big Anse and the Irish scout. “I canna help but wish we were all as crazy as he is.”
In the next nine hours, five men and a mule—by sweat and starlight—built a notched and mortised cedar log cabin twenty by fourteen feet square, complete to unchinked fieldstone fireplace and raftered over, heavily sodded roof.
Kelly, standing back with Big Anse to survey the finished fortress, felt proudly that as much had not likely been done before, by so few in so short a time. He was proud of his work and proud of his workers. He had reason to be. Hidden talents had come to light under his cheerful, driving example.
Jepson had been a shipbuilder in his east coast youth; what he could do with an ordinary camp axe by way of fitting and interlocking contrary timbers was pure witchcraft. MacDonal had for years bossed a Canadian logging crew in really big timber; he knew a dozen ways to move a down and trimmed “big stick” sawlog with a little pack rope, and the one available draft animal, that most men would have been at a loss to budge with sixty feet of log chain and a steam winch. Even Caswell had come through; remembering that in his Nebraska boyhood he had cut prairie sods for roofing a cowshed, and fashioning now a sod-cutting rig of their sturdy camp shovel set behind Phineas with a pair of pack rope tugs and a spare axe helve singletree, he had peeled away the clean furrows of meadow turf like bow waves from a keelboat cordelling up an eight-mile current. Lastly, of course, Big Anse was a lifelong artist with the double-bitted steel, having worked in timber from the time he could toddle and tote a splitting wedge.
But the best thing about this new-found esprit was that Kelly did not enjoy it alone.
The joint effort had drawn the little company together and now, as they leaned pantingly on their axes or shovels staring at their handiwork in the frosty light of the Montana morning stars, the community feeling was far different than it had been only short hours before, when Jepson had refused to trust Kelly to so much as toss a coin without trickery.
“She’s about four a.m., boys,” said the scout, breaking the proud silence as he eyed the changing sky professionally. “There’s a full two hours for you to catch up on your sleep before we get the kind of shooting daylight the Sioux like. I’d suggest you all bed down inside, right off.”
“Yeah? How about you?” demanded Jepson quickly.
Kelly smiled. Though he could not see the gloomy New Englander’s face, the change in the latter’s attitude was unmistakable. This question was mothered by honest concern, not fathered by specious doubts.
“Mr. Jepson,” he reached through the darkness, putting his hand on the older man’s bowed shoulder, “you don’t need to worry about me. I’m used to going three days without sleep if need be; presently I’ve been but two.”
“Nobody’s worried about you!” denied Jepson, as quickly. “I jest don’t want you sneakin’ off on us agin!”
“Aye,” MacDonal backed him. “We’re payin’ ye a handsome ten percent fer yer services, mon, remember that. We’ve a right to know what ye do with yer time.”
Again Kelly could not see the speaker except as a blurred silhouette in the morning blackness. But he could sense the gruff out-countryman’s change of heart as certainly in the tart little Scot as in the grumbling Jepson.
“That you have, gentlemen,” said the scout, seating himself on a convenient stack of cut timbers with an obvious sigh of resignation to his humble status as an employee of the company. “And you shall have an accounting in detail the moment I return.”
“The moment you ‘return?’” exclaimed Jepson.
“By Gawd, now wait jest a minute here!” It was Big Anse, beside himself with childlike excitement. “If you’re agoin’ summers, I’m agoin’ with you! I got a hankerin’ to learn me some of yer Injun tricks.”
Kelly shook his head.
“No, nobody’s going with me. You all get some sleep. You won’t need a guard, the Sioux don’t move around at night, but come daylight and I’m not back, post a sharp lookout.”
“Now see here—” MacDonal began, then broke off, sensing something wrong. “Kelly, lad? You hear me?”
There was no answer.
The four men rushed as one to the pile of cut and stacked lodgepole pines upon which Kelly had been perched the moment before. Big Anse blundered over and around and behind the tumbling heap of dislodged poles like a green bird dog breaking on the point to put a big covey to flush from dense cover. His yelp of disappointment was equally canine and keen.
“Cripes Amighty, he’s gone! Mr. Kelly! Mr. Kelly! Where the hell are you—?”
Once more the only answer was the stir of the freshening dawn wind through the crested heads of the summer’s rustling crop of stem-cured meadow hay.
Luther Kelly had disappeared into the same element from which he had originally arisen to join the Fort Buford wolf hunters twenty-four hours before—the solid mountain ground.
15
Kelly had both a purpose and a plan. Sayapi’s camp should not be hard to find. He would have trailed his uncle a short ways to ascertain his intention and direction—to make sure Gall was truly bound for home—then would have doubled back to wait for daylight. He would almost surely have lain up not far east of the white cabin site. The prevailing wind in this part of the high country, east to west, would only make the searching out of his bedding grounds so much the easier, providing Kelly was right.
He was, and it did.
He had not drifted three miles through the night when he caught the acrid faintness of banked woodsmoke. Another two miles of quartering this vagrant scent to its pungent source brought him to the edge of the Sioux camp.
It was set in the open on a small stream bank, after the nomad Indian custom. The ponies were on picket—an uncommon situation which ga
ve the white watcher an unwarranted sense of security—about a hundred yards downstream in a swale of rich September hay. There was no horse herd guard that Kelly could see, and he did not look too hard. With the ponies on picket, a man did not have to worry about a guard being out. The braves were all spread out around the fire, moccasin bottoms inward, rolled tightly in their stolen US army or honestly traded-for Hudson’s Bay blankets. Kelly had come out on an elevation twenty feet or more above the campsite. There was thick timber immediately behind him and an open boulder-dotted slope directly below him. It was perhaps eighty yards to the little stream and the Sioux fire.
He gauged the wind both with wetted finger and by studying the drift of the wisping woodsmoke from the banked embers. It lay almost due into him, quartering a bit to the south, toward the horse herd. That was not good. A stray shift of air current, possible at any minute in a high mountain draw, could carry his alien scent to the shaggy ponies. Still, it was a standard risk. The enemy getting winded by the home-camp horse herd had saved more Indian bands from extermination than any amount of warrior-manned outposts or picket lines had ever accomplished. There was no watchdog, human or canine, to compare with the raw-nerved, hypersensitive little mountain mustangs. Knowing this, a man took a tight hold on his luck and prayed that the breeze would lie steady for the ten minutes he would need. And while he was still praying, he slid on over the edge of his elevation and went gliding soundlessly toward the sleeping camp.
In less than three minutes, Kelly was crouched behind a buffalo-sized boulder not thirty feet from the Indian fire and set in the damp sand at the edge of the noisy little creek.
Reaching inside his elk-skin shirt, he brought out a small buckskin bag of the type in which the horseback brave habitually carries his war paint and personal medicine. It took him perhaps another thirty seconds to load and pack the little bag with the damp creek sand. Thus weighted, it hefted just so when grasped by the draw-stringed neck and swung tentatively into the tensed muscles of his thigh. He was ready.
Now came the part that shrunk a man’s stomach. That put a tingle in him from his neck hairs to the beaded tips of his moccasined toes.
Which one of those shapeless sleeping Sioux lumps was the one he wanted?
The devil take it! If a man knew that, it would cut his gamble in half. And where would his fun be?
Kelly grimaced acridly and went on in.
He started the way he had to start, by picking an Indian and working around the circle from him. He had gone over four braves, using up five precious minutes, before he came to the one he sought. Even so, he was lucky to hit red pay dirt that quick. He acknowledged his gratitude with a quick-flung grin to the starry vault above and got on with the real business of the evening.
Sayapi was curled peacefully on his right side, the purloined Winchester wrapped in his loving arms like a favorite squaw on a February night. There was no chance, nor was it any merciful part of Kelly’s plan, to pry the young Sioux painlessly loose from his unearned prize.
Luther Kelly appreciated his red brothers more than did the run of his fellow white frontiersmen only because he knew more about them. He looked at the Indian with the common eye of the times. The red man was like any dangerous big game; you had to admit his bravery and sometimes even the beauty of his wild abilities, but you never let that blind you. He was still an Indian and not worth wasting a drink of good whiskey on.
Kelly studied the angle of Red Paint’s head dispassionately. It was set just right, turned nicely away from the white scout to expose the bony processes behind the left ear. The sand-packed buckskin pouch went home almost soundlessly. Above the brawl and chuckle of the creek, the small noise it made could not possibly have been heard. It was just the least sort of pleasant little “tunk”; and Sayapi relaxed to it as satisfactorily as though he had been permanently anesthetized by a hickory pick handle or a ten-pound rock.
Kelly deftly lifted the Winchester from his cradled grasp and lay beside him without another move for a full minute.
Nothing stirred.
The thought cynically crossed Kelly’s mind that Cooper would never have made things work out so well for the deer-slayer. Truly, if he, Kelly, got away with this bald invasion and lived long enough to later write it up in his memoirs, he would have to remember to add a bit of what Mark Twain called “the stretcher” to it, to liven it up for the readers. It just wouldn’t wash, the easy way it was going.
At the moment, no matter, he was still lying in the middle of a circle of twelve healthy young Sioux who had not been sandbagged. Any man in such a spot was scarcely in a position to settle back and start dictating the exciting story of his life and times along the Yellowstone.
Kelly came soundlessly to his feet. Lean body bent nearly double, he started away from the slumbering Sioux circle. His trained eye automatically swept around it with a last glance. Something registered belatedly. He stopped, frozen in mid-crouch. He had gone over four Sioux before coming to Sayapi. With the latter, that made five. Now he had just seen that, beyond the unconscious young chief, there were not eight but only seven blanketed forms.
Of such oversights are scalp belts inspired. He had made a very bad medicine miscount. There had been a horse guard out.
He wheeled instinctively, coming upright and shifting his grip on the Winchester’s barrel as he spun about. “H’g’un!” snarled the Hunkpapa horse guard, and struck for his bowels with his buffalo lance.
Kelly got far and fast enough aside to avoid the blade’s finding his vitals, but took its searing rip through the meat and muscle of his left side between hip point and ribcage. The Sioux came with the thrust, lunging off balance, and the white scout shattered his face bones with the steel-shod, in-driven stock of the rifle. The next instant the camp was alive with blundering, stumbling, cursing braves. And Luther S. Kelly was running for his life straightaway up the boulder-strewn slope to the west of Sayapi’s swarming campfire.
In the coal-pit darkness of the timberland, Kelly easily lost his pursuers.
There was much running around and shouting and blind firing, after the Indian manner of making a great show. But there was precious little sincerity of chase once the trees began in earnest, and a man could not see a knife-swing past his nose, nor tell a friend’s from a white man’s shadow in the small time such a one as Lone Wolf Kelly would give him to make up his mind in the matter.
Within seconds Kelly was able to drop his speed to the tireless, high-shouldered lupine gait that was his peculiar style of covering long ground.
Forty-five minutes later and without incident, he reached the cabin-site meadow.
As he moved across the open ground, the backing pine and cedar timber was beginning to sharpen its murky silhouette against the ghostly half-light which grows just ahead of the coming day. He was pleased to note, by the orange-bellied smoke issuing from the stone chimney of the little log fortress, that his friends had followed orders this time and were up and on the alert. A few seconds after that, he was stepping through the door behind them with a softly laughed “Surprise, boys! Guess who?” and moving cheerily in to join them where they sat crouched around the fire waiting for the charred coffeepot to bubble over.
That was as far as the good spirits went that morning.
One glance at the resentfully worried faces turned to him over the hunched shoulders was enough to let Kelly know that once again the wind had shifted against him in his absence.
“Surprise, is it now, lad?” said Alec MacDonal, coating it with an inch-thick frost rime of Scotch sarcasm. “Aye, and likely we’ve got one fer ye, as well. Only ye’ll not be needin’ to do any ‘guessin’ who’ about ours. Jest turn yer smilin’ Irish eyes to yon far corner, mon”—the diminutive Scot hunched his head and shoulder unhappily in the direction, grimacing wryly—“that’s it, right to your own wee cozy bedroll, there.”
Kelly came around, peering through the
firelight into the darkened corner. He saw the shapely form beneath his bedding move to come up on a coppery elbow and greet him with the white-toothed flashing smile he remembered as though it were not five minutes since he had last been warmed by its shy glow.
There was a painful silence then while Kelly was not able to speak and the Crow girl apparently saw no reason for doing so.
Alec MacDonal felt otherwise.
Behind him, the furiously blushing Kelly heard the Scot’s reedy voice begin.
“She speaks a bit of English, ye know, lad. And I’ve picked up a wee smatherin’ of Sioux in my Canadian travels.” Kelly winced, waiting for the rest of it, knowing it was coming and knowing, too, there was no honorable way in God’s great dark green Montana timberland that he could duck out from under it.
“She tells us,” concluded MacDonal witheringly, “that she has come back to share Lone Wolf’s fire and to sleep beneath his blankets forever!”
16
Kelly did not say a word to the girl. Turning his back on her deliberately, he stood stroking his jaw and staring at the ground, as was his habit when taken with a problem of plainly serious proportions.
He knew the uselessness of challenging the Indian mind, once its purpose has been publicly announced. There was no point whatever, at this late hour, in quizzing the Crow girl as to her motives and meanings. Besides, it made no real difference why, or by what heroic labor of pain, she had made the journey back to the white camp. The only and whole point now was that, regardless of her feelings, she could not be allowed to stay there. Not unless he and his friends meant to make an awfully short winter of their sojourn in Gall’s game preserve—say, such as being prepared to leave for Fort Buford within the next five minutes.
Kelly had no intention of leaving.
He had always wanted to winter in the Judith Basin foothills. Moreover, he was beginning to enjoy the company of his newfound friends and was looking forward to a long, snowbound time of cabin-snug good fellowship and intellectual comradery. In his pack he had his beloved thin rice-paper editions of Scott, Poe, Burns, Tennyson, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Caswell spoke as though he had had some formal education, MacDonal clearly had a superior if untutored mind. Both men could be developed and drawn into worthwhile fireside literary debate. This would be a fine winter, perhaps the very best he had spent since coming on the frontier.