Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

He closed his teeth with an audible snap, cutting off the unfinished thought.

  Reaching down, he seized the protruding arrow by its head, pulled it forward through the wound until its feathers lodged at the shaft’s entering channel in his back. He then broke off the bent, soft iron point, drew the headless shaft back through the wound channel, unclenched his teeth and was at last free of its seesawing pinion. He did not carelessly drop or throw the parts of the broken arrow but secreted them skillfully among the bushy needles of a hand-close clump of pine seedlings, leaving Sayapi’s well-trained trailers no reason to suspect he was not still hampered by the bowman’s shaft.

  The ten-second surgery performed and its postoperative evidence disposed of, he turned swiftly into the deeper shadows of the forest, was gone from sight in less than a dozen soundless strides.

  24

  Now the chase had grown an hour old, and Kelly was mightily pleased with it.

  His wound had bled just freely enough to cleanse itself and to leave exciting fresh sign on the broken snow patches through which he deliberately wove his tracks. Yet it had not flowed hard enough to weaken him seriously. He had lost a good bit of blood, it was true, but it was what he and his hardened hunting colleagues along the Yellowstone and the Missouri called “nosebleed” blood, the nice medium-colored kind a man could lose a pint or two of and never notice the drain.

  Of course the trailing Sioux could read blood color as fast as he could shed it. They would know they were not looking at the dark blood of a viscera wound or the bright scarlet froth of a lung puncture. But beyond that they would have to guess whether he was carrying a surface scratch or a crippling deep muscle penetration. Meanwhile, the more red splotches among his moccasin prints, the better for the whetting and making careless of Sioux appetites for the big coup on Lone Wolf Kelly.

  But now he had played with them long enough, had led them far enough away from his meadow nest and helpless loved one.

  It was time to open up ground. To get far out past the sound of their eager tracking yelps. To make his double-back and his straightaway run to reach the side of his beloved little Kangi Wicasi wife.

  Reckoning as he limped along, he guessed he had brought his pursuers at least three miles east of the lookout rock above the cabin. This would have to be far enough. He could risk no more of this deliberate allowing of them to keep almost within shooting sight of him. He opened his stride with the decision, his head swinging from side to side as his eyes darted through the heavy growth seeking what he needed for the remainder of his ruse.

  Presently, he saw it—a ninety-foot patriarch of a cedar deadfall free of snow and with its bark not yet rotted soft or turned punky. Beyond it lay a tiny creek foaming across the game trail he was following. The fallen cedar’s rust-red length lay almost directly at right angles to the trail, its cleanly broken top-spar protruding a convenient foot or more into the trail’s foliage-free tunnel.

  Waste. Very good. Very good indeed.

  He passed the deadfall without a break in stride. As he did, he reached into his war bag for the wad of trunk moss he had pulled from a trailside conifer some moments gone. Nearing the small stream, now, he plugged both entrance and exit holes of the arrow wound tightly with the absorbent lichen, stanching the telltale drops within the last stride short of the water.

  Coming to the very edge of the brawling rill, he suddenly reversed, stepping meticulously backward in his own moccasin prints until he again reached the fallen cedar. Here he twisted his body agilely, not moving his moccasins a hair, planted his rump gratefully on the tip of the deadfall’s broken spar, swung his feet free of the trail, peeled off his wet footgear so that no snow water would show on the dry red bark, leaped up, and ran along the rough trunk at full speed in his bare feet. He reached the upheaved root end of the big tree just in time to dive into the snow-filled crater torn out of the shallow earth of the mountainside by the old giant’s sundering fall. Three seconds later, Sayapi led his string of anxious Sioux hunting dogs into sight along the backtrail.

  As the Hunkpapa party split up at the creek, some to go up it, some down, looking for his emerging footprints, Kelly knocked the snow dust from his eyes, toed his wet moccasins back on, slid out of the snow crater, and swung westward in his high-shouldered, swift-going wolf gait.

  Luther Kelly was well pleased with himself.

  Given time, Sayapi’s boys would unravel the knot he had tied in his trail back there. There was no question of that. But that time was all Kelly wanted or needed. Well within its tense span, he and Crow Girl would have picked the two top mounts out of the Sioux ponies at the cabin, shot the others through the head, taken off down South Pass at a High Plains gallop.

  With the thought, the Irish scout allowed himself the luxury of the first flicking grin he had shown since glassing the innocent lower end of South Pass at sunup.

  And why not, pray tell? he asked himself cheerfully.

  Sayapi had fallen for his deliberate bait like a toothless, old, rheumy-eyed squaw reaching blindly for her tin cup of brown sugar at the post trader’s store. When the young subchief came presently to measuring his own bitter cup of Luther Kelly brand sweetening back there at the cedar root crater, he would be very unhappy with himself for not realizing that Lone Wolf was no different from any other cheating white man when it came to weighing out the unsuspecting red brother’s apparent fair measure—he, too, kept his big broad thumb deep in the cup!

  Opening up his rolling lope, the black-haired scout laughed softly and joyously aloud.

  It was good to know that a man could still give the red scoundrels cards and spades and beat them out of the big pot, regardless. Of course there was that old saw about the last pasteboard to be uncovered always proving the real blanket cleaner. But from where Luther S. Kelly loped along right now, it looked as if the luck of the Irish would hold good all the way downhill to Reed’s Ranch. And, after that, on out through the lovely valley of the Yellowstone to the fabled Land of the Absaroka far beyond.

  A panting twenty minutes later, he was standing at the northern edge of Crow Girl Meadow and was, for the second time that morning, hitting the soft snow on his startled belly. He had time, then, to recall another old saw much more apropos of life’s realities at the moment than any happily laughed allusions to last cards or bitter cups of Sioux sugar. This one would be from the works of his old friend Bobbie Burns and would go as any fool but Luther Kelly might have remembered in time, thus:

  The best laid schemes o’ mice and men

  Gang aft a-gley;

  An’ lea’e us nought but grief and pain,

  For promis’d joy.

  But he had not remembered in time, and his chance for doing so was just now gone with the rising morning wind which brought to his cedar-rimmed hiding place from across the intervening sweet-scented mountain grasses, the familiar acrid smell of sweated Indian horseflesh.

  Down the meadow, winding up out of the ages-old weatherworn throat of South Pass, starting in toward the silent cabin, their ponies caked with old lather and stiff with the weariness of long hard driving, came Gall and a seemingly endless line of war-painted Hunkpapa braves.

  It went very quickly after that.

  The war chief came to the cabin, studied his missing nephew’s abandoned horses, dismounted, and went inside. He was out immediately, carrying Crow Girl in his arms.

  Kelly clearly heard the angry bark of his order to Black Fox—“Fire the signal shots. Bring that young fool in.”

  Then he saw, but did not hear him say, something else to Frog Belly. Apparently, however, it was a request for the latter to help him with the girl, for the big-paunched Hunkpapa swung lightly down from his mount, took down and unrolled from his saddle a beautiful cow buffalo sleeping robe. This he placed upon the ground in the strip of shade remaining along the cabin’s west-facing front wall and, when Gall had lowered the unbound Absaroka girl
gently to it, joined his chief in carefully chafing her slim hands and feet. Kelly grimaced and entered another debit in the mental credit ledger he was keeping on Gall’s nephew. Although savagely passionate and persistent, Sayapi was clearly a brutally insensitive lover. He had bound the tiny, heavy-with-child Crow girl so thoughtlessly as to entirely cut off circulation to her extremities. But the white scout’s attention could not long linger on his mistreated mate. Too much other movement was going forward in the meadow.

  Black Fox now drew his Model 66 Winchester from its heavily fringed saddle scabbard, upended the polished repeater, and triggered off the Sioux bad medicine signal of five shots. As he did, Kelly’s trained eye noted with alarm that at least half of Gall’s big band of over one hundred and fifty braves were newly armed either with Model 66’s or the earlier Henry sixteen-shooters.

  The echoes of the signal shots were still being flung flatly back by the surrounding ridges when they were answered by a good medicine signal of four shots from Sayapi’s band, meaning, Kelly figured, that Sayapi was engaged in important work and did not intend to be called away from it. He further surmised that the content of those labors, right now, would have to do with the young subchief having succeeded in backtracking him to the cedar’s root crater and being once more in full bay along his track line. It was an uneasy proposition, but help came from an unexpected quarter.

  At the sound of his nephew’s negative return signal, Gall grabbed up his own Winchester to fire five more thundering shots in instant, short-tempered reply. This time, after a little proud delay and while Gall waited glaring eastward, Sayapi answered with five raggedly spaced shots and, half an hour later, trotted sullenly into the meadow with his eight followers.

  The hostile tempo picked up at once.

  First, the four Indians Kelly had shot were brought down from the outcrop behind the cabin. Two of them were able to walk with support from both sides and would probably live, the Indian animate force being what it was. The third brave was dead, the fourth dying. While the latter were being ministered to, Gall left Crow Girl’s side, raised both long arms aloft, called for a council session of his principal lieutenants.

  Kelly was able to make a nearly word-perfect translation of the following tableau through the twin media of his field glasses and a frequent wind-carried Sioux phrase. Between the two sources he was able to understand what was being said almost as well as though he had been squatting in the circle of subchiefs and leading warriors now forming around Gall. And as he read the flowing hand signs which always accompanied a Plains Indian speech of any passion, his scalp began to crawl.

  First, there was Gall’s lecture to Sayapi on his breaking of the Musselshell camp’s march discipline to outrace his uncle to Crow Girl Meadow.

  But the arrogant youngster was the war chief’s besetting weakness. Having no warrior son of his own, the wild-riding, reckless-willed Sayapi was the darling of his uncle’s fiercely jaundiced eye. Kelly could make out that Gall, although he thought it was a great pity Sayapi’s haste had lost them Lone Wolf, forgave his errant nephew once more. After all, he had recovered the Crow girl for Gall and she had been the whole reason the war party had swung thus far out of its course to the great rendezvous with Tatanka Yotanka and Tashunka Witko on the banks of the Greasy Grass.

  The watching scout’s eyes narrowed as these last signs carried clearly to him through the glasses.

  Now Gall was sorry, the guttural Sioux phrases and fluent hand signs continued to tell him, that he had had to call Sayapi in off Lone Wolf’s trail. But time would permit of no more delay. This was the last of May, and the great gathering along the Greasy Grass had been cried through the villages for early June. All must now put aside personal matters and devote themselves fanatically to Sitting Bull’s Big Medicine Dream, his great vision of a vast wikmunke of the hated white Pony Soldiers and Walk-A-Heaps at the place of the rendezvous. It was known that Three Stars Crook was creeping cautiously up the Rosebud from the south. That Star Terry and Red Nose Gibbon were moving up the Yellowstone by boat to come down from the north. And that Yellowhair Custer was riding bravely out from Fort Lincoln to the east with his feared maroon pennants flying their big white “sevens” and his famous ripe-corn curls waving and tossing in the Dakota wind. Now it was Tashunka’s war plan (of Tatanka’s dream) to let them all come, let them all close in—on the greatest gathering of horseback Indians in the history of the High Plains. If all went as Tashunka had told it to Tatanka and if the Cheyenne and Arapahoe came in as promised, the unsuspecting mila hanska would ride, open-eyed, into a war-camp of no less than ten thousand heavily armed Shacun fighting men.

  These unbelievable facts and figures came so fast, Kelly had to shake his head to clear it for reducing the incredible whole to an acceptable part.

  What he came up with, finally, was that the hostile Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe had, under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, at last agreed to a united and coordinated effort to fight a major military action against the white cavalry which was pushing them to the brink of total surrender. The expressions and signs Gall used to inform Sayapi and the others of this closely held, intertribal decision left a man no other translation.

  The “Greasy Grass” was the Little Horn River. A wikmunke was a trap. The mila hanska were the “long knives,” another Sioux name for the Pony Soldiers, taken from the curved field sabers of the regular US Cavalry. The hand sign names for the four famous white officers referred to completed the hair-raising red jigsaw: Crazy Horse meant to set a trap for the combined forward forces of Crook, Terry, Gibbon, and Custer, somewhere along the banks of the Little Horn River early in June.

  Now a man was faced with the toughest decision of his Indian-fighting life.

  He was calmly resolved, on the one hand, to trail Crow Girl to the last breath of life in his body. But he was compelled, on the other, to break off that trailing long enough to detour into Fort Buford and apprise the military of what he had just seen and heard. It made no moral difference that in all actual likelihood the grandiose Indian scheme would never materialize. The identical rumor, in a dozen different forms, had been heard along the frontier ever since Red Cloud had stalked out of the Laramie Council in ’66. But no matter for that. Who would want such guesswork on his conscience?

  For a three-year regular army man like Luther Kelly, there was no real choice, of course. He would simply hang to the Sioux trail as long as it went toward the Yellowstone, leave it when it crossed over, cut east to the fort, alert the post commander, return, and pick up the hostile track on the south bank.

  That settled with a grim clenching of his broad jaw, there was nothing for him to do but wait for the cross-meadow conference to break up. This it did almost at once.

  Crow Girl was given a mount, the torch was thoughtfully put to the little cedar cabin, the Sioux caravan swung away across the meadow and was gone down South Pass, leaving Luther Kelly to watch in jaw-set silence as his impossible dream of happiness for himself and his gray-eyed Absaroka child bride went snaking skyward on the roiling, clotted smoke of three thousand dollars’ worth of prime-baled wolf pelts.

  BOOK FOUR:

  THE YELLOWSTONE

  25

  The Hunkpapa war party went southward toward the Yellowstone, bearing east to skirt the sunrise slopes of the Snowy Mountains, rather than following the regular Indian trail passing to the west between the Snowies and the Little Belt range. The Sioux were clearly in no hurry, which fact materially added to Kelly’s temper and tension while at the same time considerably easing the physical chore of keeping pace with their ponies afoot.

  It took them two full days to reach and ford the Musselshell where it bent sharply westward below the Snowies and another day and a half to cross over from the Musselshell to the Yellowstone. Here, at high noon of the fourth day, in the rich bottomland meadows of the Clark’s Fork confluence, they halted. Turning their ponies loose and shaking out thei
r blanket rolls, they gave every evidence of resting a few days or, since for the past twenty-four hours they had been moving through one herd after another of spring-grazing buffalo, more likely of organizing a major hunt before going on to the rendezvous. This latter idea had especial merit, because no Indian is so welcome in a big war camp or, for that matter, at any large tribal gathering place, as the one who comes bearing juicy hump ribs, sweet marrow bones, and fresh tenderloin fat. Kelly understood this; and prayed mightily, as he lay atop the closest small foothill north of the river glassing the Indian activity on the south bank, that it was indeed a hunt Gall’s braves had in mind.

  Presently, he began to grin and shortly put the glasses aside with a sigh of real relief.

  Over there across the beautiful clear-bottomed Yellowstone, the plier-jawed, old-style bullet molds and the little lead-melting pots had begun to come out of the saddle-slung parfleches. Beaded elk and antelope and doeskin carrying cases had begun to be peeled from the precious Winchester and Henry repeaters, and from the older Spencers, Sharpses, Springfields, and smoothbore British trade muskets. The proud and lucky ones who had factory ammunition for the newer guns busied themselves counting out and inspecting their gleaming brass treasures, to the obvious envy of their less wealthy fellows.

  There was no doubt about it now. It was going to be a hunt. And, more than that for Kelly, it was going to be the most timely stroke of fortune he had enjoyed in many a risky moon.

  Cutting out and running just the right animals—fat young dry cows or second-year open heifers—then dressing them out, cleaning, preparing, and packing the meat for transport was a process which would not be completed tomorrow or the next day. The Hunkpapa, given good hunting, would be at the Clark’s Fork camp at least a week and more likely ten days before moving on over to the rendezvous on the nearby Little Horn Fork of the Big Horn River.