Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  In that time, providing he could cover fifty miles a day on foot, a man could reach Fort Buford, borrow a fast horse, turn him around, and run him to death back up the Yellowstone and be bellied down on this selfsame ridge again with the glasses once more safely on his captive bride and her Hunkpapa hosts, ready to follow them to the ends of the Indian earth if need be.

  There developed only one slight flaw in the nearly perfect crystal ball of Gall’s immediate future, and it was but a temporary one. Shortly after it became apparent that a hunt was in preparation, the Hunkpapa chief dispatched Sayapi and his surviving, still loyal little group of eight eager young men down the south bank toward the Big Horn Valley. Kelly, on the point of letting this unexpected maneuver spoil his afternoon, realized Sayapi’s band had merely been sent ahead to the Little Horn rendezvous to report in to Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse that their fellow war chief would be delayed a few days killing meat up the river. With that supposition accepted, he dismissed the Sioux youth and got back to himself and the lad’s dark-tempered uncle.

  The passing-whim halt of Gall’s war-painted cavalcade was more than a typical example of Plains Indian indirection. It was a rare piece of prairie luck with which Kelly did not intend to fool around. He had backed down from his skyline vantage point and was wolf-trotting toward the Missouri and Fort Buford before the first bright Sioux lead hissed into the rusted bullet molds across the Yellowstone.

  He made good time—time comparable to that of a well-mounted horseman going an average, unhurried gait. It was no great feat for his iron-limbed kind, of course. The properly conditioned, inherently powerful plainsman could easily move four or five miles an hour over reasonable terrain such as he had under him at present. And, moreover, could keep it up hour after untiring hour. In fact, upon many of his most advertised travels, Kelly had gone afoot by preference. He insisted that a trained man enjoyed more “reach and freedom” if he did not have a “temperamental equine” to worry about, and it was only upon matters of the most urgent nature, such as his famed ride for the army to open the military mail route between Forts Buford and Stevenson, that he would condescend to seek the help of a horse. So it was that at present he had every confidence of his ability to make the necessary time toward the Missouri.

  His course lay east by north up the north bank of the Yellowstone; a course he would continue to hold to journey’s end, where the tributary Yellowstone entered the parent Missouri opposite Fort Buford. The going was open and level along the lazy sweep of the broad stream. The day was cool, clear, windless; made for jogging a long smooth piece of country. His only concern was to keep a constant eye out for possible war parties converging on the Little Horn rendezvous—if, indeed, there was actually going to be any such rendezvous. In any event, it was an active concern, or stood to be one, from the proximity of the gathering site. The Big Horn, with its Little Horn Fork, was the Yellowstone’s next main tributary east of Clark’s Fork. Business could pick up sharply at any time along this stretch.

  An hour later, it did.

  In the next sixty minutes, he saw ahead, and had to lie up in cover or detour in route to avoid, no less than three small and one sizable bands of Sioux. All were wearing the black charcoal paste and yellow ocher paint which were the Throat Slitter war colors, and all were bearing in toward the Big Horn crossing. There were two Oglala, one Miniconjou, one Brulé group.

  The traffic was growing a bit heavy. Further daylight travel became a matter of very questionable policy.

  When the fifth hostile band, thirty-six Wolf Mountain Cheyenne looking meaner than sin and twice as uncertain, loomed ahead, Kelly quit cold and quick.

  He made, perforce, for the only cover momentarily available—a dense riverside stand of alder, cottonwood, and willow scrub too low and marshy to invite any Indian campsite consideration. Here he lay up until nightfall, pinned down by the continuously passing war parties and suffering the torments of Montana purgatory from the attentions of an early hatch of black deerflies swarming the swampy growth. Yet, he told himself, these were the unadvertised joys of scouting life in the Far West. A man endured them at the moment, left them out of his memoirs later on. Who would believe that a hatch of flies could break a man’s mind? Or drive him beyond the endurance of a nervous system which would not quail in the least under hostile war whoop or feathered rifle fire? Obviously, no one. So you endured. You sat there, and you plastered your hands and face with slimy blue-bottom silt, and you endured.

  Still, Kelly thought the lengthening spring twilight would never close. At last, however, its western rose and eastern turquoise horizons were gone, leaving only the velvet blue and silver of the young night. An hour later, Luther Kelly was another five miles up the Yellowstone.

  With daylight, he had made forty more miles and was safely past the mouth of the Big Horn.

  And here he got the pleasantest shock of his venturesome young life.

  Just over the stony, brush-lipped rise upon which he lay hidden preparing to glass the country ahead, and idling brisket-deep in the fat grass of an unnamed creek coming in from the north, grazed the only voting mule in Montana Territory. Beyond him, alongside a little motte of misplaced cottonwoods, was displayed a prairie breakfast tableau beautiful past apt description.

  Kelly laughed aloud, his dark eyes shining. He sprang up from his hiding place, his laugh startling the cross-creek camper into a blundering rise to his own unbelieving feet. Striding delightedly down the rise, rich voice rolling in a happy abandonment of his usual dependence upon the masters, the Irish scout brought forth a double couplet of his own, specially tailored for the occasion:

  “Where feeds yon Phineas with mouth of brass

  Content upon yon creekside grass,

  Methinks a man is bound to find,

  His noble lord not far behind—”

  For his flabbergasted part, Big Anse Harper could do no better than stand staring across his clear-flamed little coffee fire, his spilling cup suspended in midair, his slack lips moving soundlessly around words of astonishment and joy too compounded for his simple tongue to utter.

  The reunion with Anse was as brief as it was gladdening. Neither man was given time to fully unburden his heart. Necessity forced the parting as good fortune had guided the joining. The big southerner was enthusiastically agreeable to the abandoning of his interrupted return to Crow Girl Meadow, reluctantly so to Kelly’s request of reversing his course and carrying the word about the possible hostile assemblage on the Little Horn to Fort Buford.

  Frowningly, Kelly cautioned the drawling Georgia giant that he must make it clear to the troop commander at Buford that the hidden valley of the Little Horn was precisely the most likely place to look into. It was famous among the Sioux and Cheyenne for its good wood and water and especially for its wonderful forage conditions. Its very name, the “Greasy Grass,” had come from the fact the ponies always took on such hard fat and high finish in its rich level bottom meadows and low treeless hill pastures.

  When he was satisfied his huge friend understood the message, Kelly urged him on his way. They shook hands, the big man breaking down at the last minute to start pleading that his friend allow him to come back to join him in “shaggin’ them red scuts which tooken the little Injun gal.” Anse was “sure as tarnal sin not aimin’ to set by fer any of them redskin sons to bring no more grief to thet pore little crippled up Crow gal, especially now that she was fixin’ to have a young ’un by Mr. Kelly.”

  It was a crude and clumsy compliment but so clearly heartfelt that Kelly’s sensitive Irish feelings were touched. He impulsively shook hands again, turned hurriedly away to busy himself hiding the evidence of Anse’s coffee fire. The slow-witted Georgian swallowed hard but said no more. Heaving his two hundred fifty pounds up onto the groaning Phineas, he turned him away downstream. The last Kelly saw of them, sneaking the glance with his back turned to make the big mar think he had already put him ou
t of mind, Anse had halted the mule at a river bend point of willows which would take him out of sight of his friend and was waiting for Kelly to look around and see him.

  But Kelly did not look around and, presently, Big Anse, like an only child being sent off down the road on the first day of school, waved forlornly, swung Phineas around the point of trees, and was gone.

  “A-ah,” grunted Whistling Horse, staring across the big river’s swirling current and shaking his head uncertainly with the Sioux warning word, “I don’t know if I would go over there or not, Sayapi. It is not what your uncle said to do.”

  “He-hau, that is true, Sayapi,” said White Bear, another of the eight young Sioux sitting their horses on the south bank of the Yellowstone nineteen miles below the mouth of the Big Horn. “Your uncle told us to take his word to Tashunka up on the Little Greasy Grass. We should have been there with it last night. But no. You had to go chasing off down the Yellowstone because those thieving Cheyenne we met yesterday said they had seen many Pony Soldier smokes down that way.”

  The youthful brave elevated his hands helplessly.

  “Now here we are, having seen the cursed mila hanska campfires, on our way back upstream still many miles even from the Big Greasy Grass, and you are seized with a new inspiration. Now you will go galloping off up north on a wolf hunt! What is the matter with you, Sayapi? Have you been chewing peyote again?”

  “No, he does not need peyote to make him crazy,” grinned a third young warrior, refusing the premise that Sayapi was addicted to the herbal drug so commonly used by the Plains tribes to work themselves up. “He has his hatred of Lone Wolf to make a heyoka out of himself.”

  Sayapi, who all this time had been looking scowlingly across the Yellowstone, now turned his thoughtful frown on his restless companions.

  “Now, listen,” he said quietly. “It has been hanging in my mind that Lone Wolf has been following us down from the mountains all the while. I think he may be hiding back there right now, watching my uncle’s camp and that Crow girl we took back from him. Now I have sworn to take his hair, you know that. So all I want to do is circle around up that way and see if we can cut his trail, before he gets nervous and slips away.”

  “A-ah,” repeated Whistling Horse unhappily. “Someone should go to Tashunka with your uncle’s word. You may be a big fool, Sayapi, but I am not. I am afraid of your uncle.”

  “I, too,” agreed White Bear candidly. “And of Tashunka, as well.”

  “Then that is good!” barked Sayapi. “Someone will go to Tashunka with my uncle’s word. You and you!” He pointed disdainfully at Whistling Horse and White Bear. “You will be the ones! Your hearts are too weak for wolf hunting anyway. We are well rid of you. Tell Tashunka,” he added loftily, “that I will bring him the long black hair of Lone Wolf Kelly by way of apology. Nohetto. Get out!”

  “Waste,” nodded the sagacious Whistling Horse, glad enough to be relieved of duty he had already had far too much of.

  “Wagh!” agreed White Bear, his belly as full of chasing Luther Kelly as that of his friend. “Good hunting!” he grinned at the half-dozen braves who would accompany Sayapi. “We will see you six fools along the Greasy Grass. Or,” he emphasized leeringly, “whatever small number of you Lone Wolf decides to spare.”

  His listeners, for some reason, had no ready answer to this sally. They sat silently with Sayapi, watching their young leader’s two couriers to Crazy Horse ride off up the Yellowstone. Then they turned their horses, after his, northward into the swift shallows of the crossing.

  Ten minutes later, riding over a low rise going east along the north bank, they drew their still wet-legged ponies to a hock-sliding stop.

  Coming toward them, cheerfully whistling a melodious Wasicun marching song, which no Sioux could have been expected to recognize as “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and his huge moccasins almost dragging the ground despite the fact he bestrode the tallest mule in Montana, was a white man they remembered well.

  And who remembered them well. But only after a tense moment of shading his widening blue eyes against the glare of the morning sun. By then, it was too late.

  “It is the red-haired giant,” said one of the Hunkpapa, vastly pleased. “Isn’t that a fine axe he wears in his belt?”

  “Aye, and that’s a good mule he rides, too,” nodded another.

  “And a good gun he carries,” grinned a third, “even though it shoots but once. What do you say, Sayapi?”

  “He is Lone Wolf’s friend,” answered Sayapi quietly. “I say let us go to greet him as we would Lone Wolf himself …”

  26

  Sayapi’s band pushed their ponies relentlessly. The little horses were tired, hot, hungry, but their red masters were broodingly immune to their sufferings.

  Sayapi’s young men had other problems.

  Or at least three of them did.

  Of the other three, excluding always the dark-browed Sayapi who rode alone out in front of his six followers, two would never worry again, the third was unable to express his concerns by reason of being in deep shock and dying from loss of blood.

  Glancing back at the sodden jounce and flop of the three slack bodies tied across the flyblown backs of the little pack line of led-ponies, Sayapi’s scowl grew blacker.

  Of course, in a certain grisly meter, there had been a measure of the malignant poetry of justice in the hurried departures of his friends for Wanagi Yata, the Sioux Land of the Great Shadow. But it was not easy to console oneself with that bitter logic.

  True, Lame Elk, the brave who had coveted the huge one’s belt axe, had gotten it—right to the haft through the frontal complexes of his skull. Also true that Antelope Boy, the youthful warrior who had assayed the big man’s old Sharps bull gun as a weapon of sterling worth had had his judgment sustained—by a .50-caliber slug which had opened up his belly, shattered his spine, left his body frozen from the waist down, his life draining away through the ugly hole in his stomach. And true as well that Yellow-Eye-Wolf, the young man who had imagined the rangy mule to be an animal of desirable parts, had also had his evaluation vindicated. With his last breath and fading of sight, the giant white man had knocked the latter off his pony and in under the mule’s flailing feet with his clubbed rifle butt. The tall mule’s ironshod hoofs had pulpingly completed the work begun by the white man’s gunstock. Not even Yellow-Eye-Wolf’s mother would know her son now. Even by Hunkpapa standards, he was not a pleasant thing to look upon.

  And so Sayapi was depressed.

  And so he was more angry and more full of vengeance than ever against Lone Wolf Kelly and against all the Wasicun invaders.

  Brooding thus, he did not keep his usual keen eye upon the trail, nor allow his superb instincts their ordinary rein or watchfulness. Glumly, he led his silent cavalcade of living and dead warriors westward along the north bank of the Yellowstone toward the mouth of the Big Horn. When, shortly before noon, he forded a lonely little creek coming in from the north but a few miles below the Big Greasy Grass, he did not even look at the small growth of yellow-pollened cottonwoods clustering its upstream bank. Instead, he splashed his black and white stud quickly through the limpid shallows, his burning eyes straight ahead, his handsome face darkening with each jarring shift of the runty stallion’s sharp withers.

  Behind him his three companions were as preoccupied and downcast. They did not look up and search the trees either.

  And behind them their three companions, forever careless, only bumped and bobbed along, trailing their dangling hands and feet in the cleansing waters of the little stream.

  Thirty-five feet away, hidden behind a screening clump of buckbrush, just within the first straggly rank of trees but luckily up and across a stiffly quartering wind from the wearily grunting Indian mounts, Luther Kelly slumbered peacefully on.

  He did not see the bloody axe in the first brave’s belt.

 
Nor the oily rust-brown length of the old Sharps in the hands of the second.

  Nor the balky shuffle of the tall, wise-eyed mule bringing up the rear of the pony pack-string led by the third.

  Nor did he see, drying upon Sayapi’s saddle horn and smearing the yellow-sweated white shoulder patch of his piebald studhorse, the clotting, fly-encrusted tangle of bright red human hair.

  Twenty seconds after they had come upon it, the Sioux were gone across the little prairie creek. The reedbirds and redwings scattered by their approach settled back into the stream-mouth rushes, resuming their endless cheery argument of scolding raspy-filled and incredibly clear sweet bobolinking notes. The sun slid swiftly toward the tops of the Big Horns, the Little Belts, and the Bear Paws. Kelly awoke. The strength was back in him from his first full sleep in five day and four nights. It did not worry him that he had slept the sun up and down. He had yet plenty of time, thanks to Big Anse.

  Cautiously, he made no coffee fire but ate heartily of the cold bread and cooked pork the good-natured southerner had left him, washing the meal down with dipped creek water. Ten minutes later he, too, was gone westward up the Yellowstone. The view behind him was open and straightaway, the lingering prairie twilight clear as good telescope glass. But he did not turn to look back again on the rendezvous he would never keep with Big Anse Harper.

  Antelope Boy was still alive when Kelly found him in the abandoned camp of Gall’s Hunkpapa shortly after sunrise of the following day. The story the former told was as strange and startling as the deserted camp’s echoing dead-still emptiness.

  “Who are you?” asked the dying brave, as Kelly’s stooping form loomed in the opening of the small buffalo robe tepee Gall had ordered constructed for him. “I can see your shadow there between me and my last sun. But your face is not clear. There is a blackness all about you there in the bright light. Is it you, Sayapi, come back to be with your old friend? You, Buffalo Child? Pesla? Broken Hand—?”