Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

“It is I,” said Kelly softly in Sioux. “Lone Wolf.”

  “Lone Wolf!” gasped the brave. Then recovering from the effort of the surprised expletive, “You have come to kill me for what we did down there yesterday?”

  He moved his hand weakly to motion off down the Yellowstone, but Kelly did not follow up the question, and Antelope Boy did not press it.

  If Lone Wolf did not yet know what had been done down there, all the better. It was not a very proud thing. Not the sort of thing a dying man would want to talk about or admit his shameful part in. So the moment’s fleeting opportunity slipped past. It was as close as the white scout came to knowing, in time, that his message was never delivered.

  “No, I have not come to kill you.” He shook off the Indian youth’s query. “No one is going to kill you. You are already killed, don’t you know that?”

  “Yes,” said the Indian youth bravely, “I guess that I do.” There was an awkward pause, then he asked haltingly, “Could you come in, Lone Wolf? Sit here by me? Talk a little? Let me touch your hand, perhaps?”

  Kelly slid into the little tepee, touched the young Sioux’s hand. “I am here, do not be frightened.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “What is your name? How do they call you?”

  “Antelope Boy.”

  “That sounds like the name of your childhood, as if you hadn’t been given your full name yet.”

  The Sioux youth nodded imperceptibly, the trace of a shy smile flicking his tortured face. “I was to have received my manhood name after the fight on the Greasy Grass. It was to depend on what deeds I might do there.”

  Kelly patted his hand clumsily.

  “Do not feel bad about that. You are too young—perhaps no more than seventeen winters.”

  “Oh, no!” Proudly. “I am nearly eighteen!”

  Kelly touched his forehead gently, recoiled involuntarily at its clamminess, knew his time for questioning was short.

  “You are one of Sayapi’s band?” he probed quietly. “One of his eight young men who came back from my meadow?”

  “Yes, but we are only five now. Soon it will be but four. There was a little trouble down the river, as I said.”

  “I see. About Sayapi now. Where is he? And the others too. Where is Gall? Where is the Crow girl, H’tayetu Hopa, where is she? Where are all the braves?”

  Again, the young brave’s wan smile flickered briefly.

  “Was that her name? Beautiful Evening? How very soft and pretty it sounds when you whisper it. She was a fine girl, Lone Wolf. I liked her a lot. Brave. Strong. A good mate. Is that your child she was carrying?”

  “Yes. Will you tell me what I ask now, please?”

  “Gladly. What little I know. May I have some water first though?”

  “It is here.” Kelly uncorked the canteen, tipping it.

  The brave gulped spasmodically. Kelly winced and set his teeth as the water bubbled out of the bullet perforation in the youth’s belly, down into his blood-caked breechclout.

  “Thank you. Will you hold my head a little higher, please. The blood comes up in my throat when I try to talk to you, Lone Wolf.”

  Kelly propped him up, and the words came out between choking drinks, rusty gaspings for breath, rattly throat coughs, and low cries of impossible pain. It was a short story, soon done, and its teller with it.

  Sayapi had ridden into camp from down the Yellowstone about two a.m. of the present morning. He had apparently sought his scarlet blanket and gone to rest with Antelope Boy and his other companions. But when the camp came awake in the gray dawn to set out for the hunt, Sayapi was gone.

  And gone with him were Gall’s two best buffalo runners, his famous iron-gray mare, and his matchless midnight-black gelding, also a fine pack mule lightly loaded with sugar, salt, pemmican, ammunition, and extra blankets and, oh yes—the pretty little Crow girl!

  In a frothing rage, Gall had ordered the hunt abandoned and his warriors to follow him along his errant nephew’s track away westward up the Yellowstone. The war chief had sworn his personal oath that this time Sayapi must die. He had taken out his knife and put his lips to its haft and said one fearful word—hinmangas! All had known the nephew was as good as dead in that moment. But in the very act of his uncle’s touching the knife haft, the reckless youth had gotten a startling reprieve. Even as Gall flung up his arm in the signal to start after him, a rider had come in on a staggering horse from Tashunka Witko over on the Rosebud.

  There was great news!

  Tashunka had caught old Three Stars Crook camped in a bad place over there and thought he could trim his famous red whiskers if he could get enough help. All who heard his call were to answer it at once. He, Crazy Horse, would wait as long as he could for them, but he did not think Three Stars would stay in camp more than another two weeks. He was shoeing his pack mules and that meant he was going to move soon, of course.

  It was the kind of order no war chief could, or would want to, ignore.

  Gall took his braves off Sayapi’s fleeing track, swung them eastward and southward toward the middle Rosebud.

  They had been gone about two hours now. Sayapi, before them, had been gone nearer five. He, Sayapi, had very fast horses and even the mule, tall on the leg and not too coarse in bone, looked like a fine mover, one which could get over a distance of ground with all but the very best of ponies. And Sayapi, of course, rode like a Tshaoh, a Comanche; he would be very far away by now.

  Where to? Toward what exact place?

  Who would know.

  Sayapi was a little crazy, everyone realized that. There was simply no telling where his wild mind would guide him, or what it might make him do. Nohetto. There was no more anyone could say.

  When he was sure Antelope Boy had meant his “nohetto,” Kelly thanked him seriously, gently eased his flaccid body down onto the deep pad of blankets his departed companions had arranged beneath him. The suffering youth’s own blanket, together with a liberal parfleche of food, salt, tobacco, and ammunition was fastened upon his war pony, grazing on short picket just outside the little death lodge. The stunted animal, a scrubby Nez Percé Appaloosa, had been left after the Plains Indian custom to bear his master along the steeply climbing trail into the endless buffalo pastures of Wanagi Yata. And it was of his horse—next only to his rifle, the dearest possession of any prairie warrior—that Antelope Boy spoke now.

  “You will not take my pony!” he pleaded with Kelly suddenly. “You would not leave me afoot to go on the long trail—”

  Kelly said nothing, only patting him reassuringly on the shoulder. The youth relaxed, moving his head and muttering gratefully. “You will give him a little water, too, before you go. And perhaps lengthen his rope. Already I have taken longer to start the journey than my brothers thought. I fear he has eaten all the grass within his reach.”

  Again Kelly touched his shoulder, and again the young Sioux nodded his understanding gratitude.

  “His real name is Wanbli K’leska, the Spotted Eagle. But many times I call him little Ya Slo, the Whistler. He makes a funny little noise in his lungs when he is tired after a long run. Like an eagle-bone flute or like a small boy’s green willow whistle. But he can go all day eating only the air and drinking the wind. He is truly sunkele ska waste, a good little spotted horse.”

  With the last words about his beloved pony, Antelope Boy closed his now unseeing eyes, sighed a final time, long and slow and heavy. Thinking he was gone, Kelly arose to depart. But he spoke again.

  “Lone Wolf—”

  “Yes, my brother?”

  “Can you find it in your heart to do one more thing for your enemy?”

  “You are not my enemy. When the Dark One hovers, all men are friends.” Kelly came back to his side, knelt once more beside him, put his big hand lightly on his pallid cheek. “You see I am here. And I am your friend.”
>
  “Yes, yes! I feel that now, I feel that you are my friend, and I am glad. It is dark now and very cold, but I am not afraid, because you are with me. Surely you will grant me, then, this last favor, you who are my true friend and who stays beside me.”

  “You have only to name it,” murmured Kelly, taking his cold hand and holding it in both his strong warm ones.

  “Thank you, it is this. I may lie here a long while yet. My heart is strong, but in my belly the pain is very great. My gun is by my right hand, here, hidden beneath the blankets. It is a good Pony Soldier gun, shooting hard and close. I would consider it a—”

  “Say no more now,” muttered Kelly, reaching for the gun and rising noiselessly to his feet. “I understand that you would do the same for me. H’g’un, Antelope Boy.”

  “Woyuonihan, Lone Wolf,” smiled the dying youth, gray-lipped. “I salute you …”

  “Woyuonihan,” said Luther Kelly softly, and eased back the hammer of Antelope Boy’s old Spencer carbine to full-cock and shot him through the head.

  27

  Even the ugly death wound of Antelope Boy fell into the happy pattern of Irish luck Kelly imagined he had been enjoying in his trailing of Crow Girl. Had not the Hunkpapa youth been given that ghastly hole in his stomach—most probably by some chance cavalry patrol from Crawford’s command, a man would guess—Kelly would not now be standing outside his lonesome last resting place in the confluence meadows of Clark’s Fork and the main Yellowstone, looking over his prized Nez Percé pony and the treasure trove of supplies the latter bore against his master’s journey to the Big Beyond.

  Outside of a good blanket and settlement belt axe, there was a fairly decent saddle of double-rigged southwestern design (a man could bet that saddle had cost some Comanche wanderer his life and, before him, some Texas rancher his), two cross-slung parfleches crammed with pemmican, salt, flour, tobacco, dried larb leaves, ammunition, and even a little precious sugar and pejuta sapa, “black medicine,” coffee beans.

  Kelly threw a grateful glance accompanied by a wordless acknowledgment of help from higher up, skyward. And not simply because he was a devout Christian who accepted his God as a literal power, either. The actual truth was that a man could not have outfitted better for a long tough trailing job had he gone clear into Fort Buford or even Fort Berthold.

  Coming to the horse, however, only time and doubtful trial would tell.

  He looked like anything but the noble sacred bird of the Dakota Sioux after which his admiring master had named him. He might physically answer to the proud title of “Spotted Eagle,” Kelly decided, but he could never qualify for it artistically.

  He was, in a word, a true Appaloosa.

  The rangy “leopard horses” of the Nez Percé were famed along the northwest frontier for their speed and endurance and, before these things, for their high intelligence, easy gait, and eagerness to work. They had been, in the opinions of the original mountain men, the “doingest” little horses to be had. These hairy-eared early comers had considered one Appaloosa worth six ordinary Indian ponies, and this high reputation was still fully intact thirty to forty years later, in Kelly’s day. Still, looking candidly at Spotted Eagle, the puzzled scout allowed a man would have to incline to the uncharitable diagnosis that Bridger, Colter, Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, Jed Smith, Father DeSmet, and all the rest of them had been more than a “leetle teched.”

  Viewed dispassionately, Antelope Boy’s equine pride and joy was a sight to make any compassionate horseman reach for his pistol. A merciful ball behind the ear was the only remedy for such a pitiful prairie rosinante as Spotted Eagle.

  A rusty red roan with four high white socks and a big blaze, he looked as if he had been hit across the haunches with a five-gallon drum of white lead and linseed oil in the middle of a March blizzard. He was, in hideous truth, a leprous splatter of bursting white spots from tail root to mid-barrel and back again.

  But “for a’ that,” as Burns would say, he was a horse.

  And Luther Kelly needed a horse.

  He wedged his empty Winchester into the blanket roll behind the saddle, slung Antelope Boy’s Spencer in the fender-guard scabbard, gentled the little beast for a brief moment, stepped up on him, and gave him the knee to go west.

  Spotted Eagle spun around and went.

  By sundown that night, some ten hours later, Kelly had made a surprising seventy miles up the Yellowstone along the clearly marked trail of Sayapi and Crow Girl. He had come, with the rose and saffron skies of that long-ago twilight, to the sweeping “big bend” of the river, where it angled southward to enter the roughening country of its canyon and to enter, too, some forty miles farther along, that arcane northwest corner of Wyoming called in the old days Colter’s Hell or Gardner’s Hole, but newly christened and set aside by the government only four short years ago in 1872 as “Yellowstone National Park.”

  It was a sacred area forbidden to the white man by Indian legend, and one of surpassing interest to the peripatetic Kelly. For all his wanderings up and down the Yellowstone, he had never been inside the Park itself. But he had long cherished the ambition and intent to one day explore its every wild nook and eerie cranny. Now, gazing intently through the gathering dusk at the fading track lines of the two barefoot Sioux ponies and the shod pack mule, he knew the hour of actuality drew close.

  At this point on the Yellowstone, the main north-south travel route of the High Plains tribes—called by them the “Great Trail”—came down out of the buffalo pastures above the river to follow its banks southward into and through the Park and on to Colorado’s famed mountain-fenced South Park buffalo range. Kelly had scouted the trail north but never south of the river. Nor had, for that matter, over a dozen single-traveling white men before him.

  But now the prospect lay immediately ahead.

  Studying it, boring deep through the sinister stillness which seemed suddenly to lie all about him, his dark eyes narrowed yet further.

  The tracks of Gall’s two best buffalo horses and those of the long-striding pack mule led straightaway down the Great Trail toward the distant twelve-hundred-foot-deep maw of the Fourth, or Grand Canyon, of the Yellowstone.

  There was no doubt remaining. Red Paint and Beautiful Evening were heading for the many-mysteried, Indian-worshiped “Land of the Smoking Waters.”

  28

  The Great Trail, in places as wide and sweeping and clearly delineated as Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, in places as narrow and crooked and hard to find as Carondelet Street in old St. Louis, bore away westward from the river as the rearing rhyolite walls of the stream’s First and Second Canyons began in roughening earnest below the Big Bend.

  Some miles later the wandering track passed through a towering gap into a secondary canyon which it followed southward to open out into a region of spectacular rockfalls of bright rusty red detritus. This area Kelly believed to be the fabulous “Devil’s Slide,” long thought to be composed of virtually pure cinnabar ore, albeit his own present, passing examination convinced him the decomposing mother material was but ordinary stone brilliantly stained with red hematite ores and containing no least trace of mercuric sulphide.

  In any event a man had little time to wonder about the mineral content of the slides. The important thing about them was that they marked, less but two or three miles, the northern boundary of the Park.

  The ex–Lima Academy student was, among his other accomplishments, something of an amateur cartographer. He had made maps of his own of practically every mile of the uncharted Montana Territory he had traversed. And had copied, in addition, all the available Government Survey and military maps of the country to the south of the Yellowstone’s outer valley, including the one rather sketchy plot of the Park then in existence.

  But at the present moment, Yellowstone Park was a complete new world to Luther Kelly. Every stride of the little Appaloosa stud was moving him deeper int
o the virgin unknown. Indeed, since leaving the Big Bend country early that morning, he had been traveling through a land familiar to him only by white hearsay or red legend. Yet, after all, it had been up to this point a type of High Plains topography with which he was at least somewhat comfortably familiar.

  Now, suddenly, he had an eerie feeling of having just lost contact with reality.

  Ahead of him, as he rested Spotted Eagle beneath the sunset flaming palisades of disintegrating rhyolite and feldspar towering above the Devil’s Slide, lay a two-million-acre mountain wilderness whose plunging canyons, crenelated peaks, gemstone lakes, lofty timber, lush meadows, rock crystal streams, thunderous thermal fountains, and brilliantly mineralized formations were as incredibly fantastic to the unwarned discoverer as would have been the cratered, unlit backside of the frozen moon.

  Kelly was stunned.

  The brooding, unbroken silence hovering over the deserted trail bore down on him like some great invisible hand.

  Shivering, he clucked to Spotted Eagle, and the little Nez Percé horse took him forward again. Refreshed by the brief blowing out and still showing life after ten hours on the trail, the wiry mustang wanted to go. Kelly let him stretch, wanting to “get across the line” and commit himself to the “Land of the Smoking Waters” before full sundown. In a place like this, a man felt the compulsive need to make camp and secure himself ahead of nightfall, no matter how foolish the notion of his being afraid of the dark might strike him.

  Shortly, again following the Yellowstone briefly now before it entered its Third Canyon just south of the Park’s north line, he struck a fork where a beautiful stream came in from the south, as the main channel itself veered sharply off to the east.

  From the fact that the Great Trail crossed over this entering tributary above its junction with the Yellowstone, to continue paralleling that stream by passing behind seventy-nine-hundred-foot Mount Everts and going on to cross present-day Blacktail and Tower Creeks down to the Great Yellowstone Lake, he judged correctly that the smaller stream was the Gardner River, leading of course to old Johnson Gardner’s celebrated “hole.”