Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  “This command of more than four hundred men looked more like a large body of Esquimaux than like white men and United States soldiers. In fact, with their masks over their heads, it was impossible to tell one from another.”

  But for all Miles’ imaginative precautions and his chief of scouts’ good-natured enjoyment thereof, Montana’s winter hell very nearly had the last laugh, at that.

  The mercury continued to plummet.

  Three days later, when the column moved out of the cantonment, it crossed the Yellowstone—heavily loaded supply wagons, field ambulances, horse-drawn artillery, et al.—on solid ice. And from that moment until the fateful 18th of December, and the discovery of Sitting Bull’s fugitive camp at the head of the Red Water River, the thin bright line in the army thermometers did not again climb beyond flat, dead zero.

  The frozen days glittered with sun frost. The subarctic nights groaned and cracked and exploded with the expanding deepness of the cold. The weeks went by, and the snows came and the winter march went on. One hundred miles north up the Big Dry to the Missouri. One hundred miles west to the Musselshell, after crossing the Big Muddy. And one hundred and fifty miles southeast from the Musselshell, after recrossing the narrowing “mother of waters.” Closer and ever closer upon the flagging heels of the Hunkpapa.

  Miles’ men did not remove their buffalo coats after leaving the Yellowstone. They slept, fully clothed, in the dry snow by blazing cottonwood fires, careful to keep their rifles near their bodies beneath their blankets, so that the actions would not freeze solid and fail to function. Food ran low. Wood and water were in desperate scarcity. For one seventy-two hour period, crawling across the barren spine of the high divide between the Missouri and the Yellowstone, there was no wood at all and no fires; and no water to drink, save that melted from snow in a mess kit held hard against a horse’s hot and acrid belly. But no man dropped behind. No man deserted. No man died of the cold. And ever harder, ever more desperately close, they drove in upon the starving Hunkpapa.

  At last the stark signs of disintegration began to appear along the Indian trail. A thinly clad old woman. A young squaw heavy with child. A boy of ten. A warrior who was young when Meriwether Lewis came west with William Clark, forty years and more now gone. A cradleboard babe, hours old, still swathed in a cloth showing the blood of the broken umbilicus. All mercifully dead. All grotesquely frozen. All huddled and blind and blankly staring, where the black frost had struck them down.

  In his great wolfskin winter coat, Kelly shivered and felt sick. This was not war. This was not high excitement. This was not carefree adventure. Nor was it any of the romantic things he had persistently pictured in his own portrayal of the dashing frontier scout. This was a far different, less pretty, grimmer thing. There was nothing of drama, nor excitement, nor adventure in it. This was murder.

  From the hour the pitiful Hunkpapa dead began to appear along Sitting Bull’s backtrail, Luther Kelly knew that, for him, the eight-year happiness of the Yellowstone Dream was forever done. It died with the first small Indian child that gray, long-gone November afternoon in the twilight dark of the Montana winter.

  The snows had been incessant since they had left the Musselshell. The one hundred and fifty miles marched southeast from that point to strike the head of the beautiful Red Water Valley had been put behind entirely by compass needle. Day became scarcely distinguishable from night, yet so acute were Kelly’s tracking abilities and so infallible his knowledge of the fierce terrain that not once in those terrible last ten days had the column been held up by loss of contact with the hostiles. But now, with the freshness of the trail telling Kelly the Sioux were almost in sight, the “wind turned upside down,” as the Indians put it, and what had been merely a run-of-the-winter Montana snowstorm became a high-country blizzard.

  In the half-hour lull before the big wind struck, Kelly and Billy LeBeau, feeling ahead through the stale breath of the old storm, perhaps three miles in front of the following troop column, ran the Hunkpapa track to a dead halt. They sat their horses staring down at the grim story not yet covered by the shifting snows, neither saying anything, both knowing what must come now. Sitting Bull had made his terminal move. Kelly and LeBeau were looking at the historic Hunkpapa “parting of the ways”; that now-forgotten, exact spot high up on the West Fork of the Red Water where Tatanka Yotanka, Pizi, and Mato Hopa smoked their last pipe and said goodbye: where the trails of Sitting Bull, Gall, and Pretty Bear went away from each other and did not meet again.

  “You had better,” said Kelly softly to his companion, “get the General up here right away. I’ll sit on this sign till you get back. Best hop to it, Billy. This lull won’t hold long.”

  The other nodded quickly. “Wagh! No waste!” he grunted uneasily. “Pretty quick him snow blow every which way same damn time.”

  It was a good enough description of a Montana blizzard. Kelly did not argue it. “Tell the General to hump his tail,” he said. “Tell him,” he added, with a peculiar intensity of emphasis, “that I’ve found Sitting Bull for him.”

  The dark-faced scout bobbed his head again. He took a last peering look along the fading track line of his Indian brothers, shook his head slowly. “Him poor damn devil,” murmured half-breed Billy LeBeau, and sent his shaggy pony on the gallop to bring up Colonel Nelson A. Miles for the keeping of his forgotten bargain with Luther S. Kelly.

  Miles came forward in a matter of minutes. He had been but a mile behind Kelly, two ahead of the column, riding with Liver-eating Johnson, Clubfoot Boyd, and Charley Bass. Now he studied the three diverging lines of Sioux pony tracks, turned on Kelly, and demanded bluntly, “Well, what do you make of it?” As bluntly, Kelly told him.

  “They left here within the hour. The main bunch, about two hundred or so, went straight ahead, down the Red Water. The second bunch, less than one hundred, went east across the Fork. Third bunch, no more than thirty or forty, split off northwest, back toward the Big Dry. It’s their last gamble; you’ve got them, General.”

  “We’ll push on at once,” said Miles, excitement beginning to light his pale eyes. “Baldwin’s the best Indian fighter in the army; we’ll give him the big band. I’ll take the bunch that went east, and Snyder can take the handful that headed northwest. What do you think they have in mind, Kelly?”

  “It looks to me, General, as though the second bunch is pulling out and will quit. But the other two are heading north and will likely reunite. Now we know Sitting Bull has always said he would go to Canada before he would stay here and surrender. We also know that Gall is not the kind to quit.” Kelly paused and Miles was at him instantly.

  “Well, well, man! Go on, go on!”

  “There’s hardly a doubt, General. Your big due-north bunch is Sitting Bull’s. Your east-turning quitters are Pretty Bear’s. Your little band of northwesterners is Gall’s.”

  “Good, good,” cried Miles, in a rare show of feeling. “Now as for scouts, Johnson and Bass can go with Baldwin, Boyd, and LeBeau with Snyder, and you can stay with me. That way, we can—”

  “That way,” broke in Kelly, low-voiced, “we can forget.”

  “What the devil do you mean?” snapped Miles, scarcely accustomed to being countermanded in mid-stride.

  “I mean,” said his chief of scouts levelly, “that we made a deal. With all due respects, General, I intend to hold you to it.”

  “Well!” huffed the latter, staring down his high-bridged nose at his wolf-skinned guide. “I must say your Celtic insubordination is exceeded only by your Irish optimism. However, a deal’s a deal. What was it I promised you, sir?”

  Kelly pointed north along the trail of the main Sioux band. “You said if I would find you Sitting Bull, you would give me Gall. Yonder goes Tatanka’s track. Baldwin will be up to him before this blizzard blows itself out.”

  Miles’ searching look picked the pockets of his mind with a single deft glance. His f
amiliar decisive head-bob cemented the brief inspection.

  “All right, Kelly, you go with Snyder. Who do you want along?”

  “Only LeBeau, sir. And thanks, General. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Don’t thank me, man!” snorted Miles. “I only hope you know what you’re doing—that you’ve picked the right bunch of redskins to go after.”

  Kelly’s dark eyes narrowed as they flicked again to the faint track line veering northwest. And narrowed yet further as they singled out the peculiarly twisted left forefoot print of a certain blue roan gelding a hundred and forty-four days familiar to him since the great silence along the Little Big Horn. “Don’t worry, General,” was all he said to Miles. “I have.”

  38

  Kelly led Belshazzar very carefully up the night-dark, rocky gorge into which Gall had turned in a despairing final effort to dodge or outdistance Snyder’s relentless riflemen. The scout had lost all track of time in the blizzard which had broken away but the hour before, to leave the dead-still blackness through which he presently moved upward along what must almost certainly be the last mile of the war chief’s retreat. It might have been three days or three weeks since they had left Miles and Baldwin. It did not matter to Kelly, and he did not care. That was all behind now, left there with the many other things which had come too fast in these past weeks to bear individual remembering and which had no real remaining importance in the life of Luther Kelly, anyway. (Like finding Johnny Brughière at the Tongue cantonment when they had gotten back from the abortive talks with Sitting Bull, ready at last to “walk the white brother’s road,” but deathly afraid to let Old Tatanka catch him at it!)

  Now all that mattered, or was important to what was left of the Irish scout’s life, lay directly ahead.

  Pulling up the tall thoroughbred, Kelly let him blow out while he scanned the narrowing way ahead. As he did, his thoughts leaped instinctively beyond the limited range of his rock-trapped vision.

  What was waiting for Luther Kelly up there?

  Life or death? Love or hatred? Happiness or bitter disillusionment? Would his final reward be the murmuring caress of Crow Girl’s soft lips, or the whispering kiss of an ambushing Sioux bullet? Had Gall turned at bay, or was he still staggering onward? Would the implacable white-hater surrender or die fighting? Had he alienated the love and loyalty of the hero-worshiping little Kangi Wicasi girl? Or was she still, and fiercely, Lone Wolf’s woman? There was but one way to find these answers: go on up the gulley.

  Kelly glanced behind him.

  Back there somewhere, at best no nearer than thirty minutes, Billy LeBeau was leading Snyder’s men upward. Ahead, Gall had either halted or was going on. Above, the black belly of the blizzard was beginning to moan again. Even as Kelly hesitated, the first hard flakes came whistling down the draw. He hunched deeper into his wolfskin coat. If a man had been waiting for an answer, here it was. In considerably less than thirty minutes, in such a deep cleft, the returning wind could wipe out Gall’s track completely. He could go up any one of probably a dozen side-draws and be well on his way to Canada before you could get Snyder’s men turned around and worked out of the gully. If you meant not to lose him now, your choice was quite simple—if somewhat spine-tingling.

  Kelly spoke softly to Belshazzar. He dropped the reins in the snow, and the cavalry-trained gelding did not move to follow him by more than the curious flick of his pointing ears. He had moved up the precipitously steepening throat of the gorge perhaps three hundred yards, just scaling a ten-foot rock shelf to top out on a level, snow-free surface above its drop-off, when the well-remembered bear’s growl rumbled out of the inky darkness closing off the trail ahead.

  “Hohahe,” said Gall, “welcome to our wikmunke, my brother. We are glad to see you. It has been a long hunt, and we are very tired.”

  Kelly could say nothing. When Gall had mentioned a wikmunke, he had meant it. The flat rock upon which the scout stood was the floor of a cave. The war chief’s last turning had taken him into a blind-box, dead-end canyon. He was trapped.

  Kelly kept staring, his startled eyes adjusting to the cave’s gloomy light as his mind struggled to do as much for its contents. With Gall on the thirty-foot half-circle of the roofed-over rock shelf were thirty-three other Indians: thirty-two Hunkpapa men, women, and children; one sixteen-year-old Absaroka girl.

  When he saw Crow Girl’s gray eyes burning at him through the December darkness, all rational thought ceased. He made an instinctive move toward her, arms opening, lips parting, halting cry of glad relief and recognition welling in his tightened throat. But the cry died abuilding. Its formed words never left his mouth. Crow Girl turned on him like a cornered animal, shrinking behind Gall to crouch against the cave’s rear wall and bare her teeth at him for all the savage world like some senseless wild thing caught and held and driven crazy by brute fear. Her once-beautiful lips, now blackened and cracked and bleeding with frostbite, writhed and curled like a she-wolf’s warning back an unwanted male. Her slender hands, so soft and lovely but a dream ago, were clawed and twisted into swollen painful talons which she held drawn back, as though she would sink them blindly into the first thing that moved or came near her. Her tiny feet, only short moons gone tripping with such light fantasy and pure delight at his side, were shapeless bundles of frozen flesh wrapped in bloody butcher’s packages of torn blanket, lichen moss, and pack-saddle canvas. Her face, the home of angels five months before, was a devil’s mask of hell endured past human sufferance. It was not the face of a young girl or even a matron of the middle years. It was the skull-tight, parchment-wrinkled face of an old, old woman. And from that face stared the final heart-sickening evidence; the empty, tortured nothingness of the luminous gray eyes, once the very light and meaning of life itself to Luther Kelly and now the gaping, vacant windows of a mind which no longer remembered him.

  “I would have spared you this, my brother,” said Gall, breaking the long silence as Kelly stepped back and away from Crow Girl, “but there was no way. After we had eaten the last pony, after we had turned away from Tatanka back there on the Red Water, that was when it happened. She has been like this these past ten days that you have pushed us so hard. She knows only me, trusts only me. Soon we would all have been the same way. Like animals and not men. Now we can rest. Now it is over. That is why I said you are welcome, and we are glad to see you.”

  Ten days, thought Kelly. Good Lord, it must be nearing mid-December! No wonder the poor devils were ready to quit; were crowded to the very edge of sanity and far past the will to fight back; were driven beyond even the ability to any longer hate and were capable only of the blank-faced apathy of surrender by starvation.

  Of them all—the two subchiefs, five able-bodied warriors, ten old men and women, twelve younger squaws, and small children—only Gall retained his full pride and self-possession. Even the fierce Black Fox and the ebullient Frog Belly squatted on their wasted hams and waited for the soldiers to come up like old women whose day of youth was long gone, and whose only remaining worries were to fill the stomach and find a warm place to sleep.

  “Why did you not kill me just now?” he asked Gall, low-voiced. “You know the soldiers are well behind me, that they will not be up here for some little while yet. Why did you not do it?”

  “We thought of it.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Many things.”

  Outside the cave’s warm shelter, the thickening drive and slash of the snow cried off down the canyon. Its gusting, growing wilder by the moment, rose suddenly to the full hideous crescendo so familiar to Montana ears. Kelly glanced over his shoulder at the outer blackness, peered back at Gall again. The first impossible seed of the thought began to germinate in his mind as he did. It was monstrous, his conscience told him. A thing beyond all frontier law, counter to all settlement sympathies, alien to all white interests. And yet—

  “Do you hear that
?” he said to Gall.

  “Aye, Wasiya has returned. Perhaps he wants to cover the shame of his Hunkpapa children.”

  “Or their tracks,” said Kelly softly.

  Gall’s fierce eyes narrowed.

  “What do you mean, my brother?”

  “A life for a life,” said Luther Kelly. “It is a law written in the old book of my people’s god.”

  “I am waiting.”

  “Many moons ago it was within your power to take my life—or worse.”

  “You mean the hinmangas, my brother?” Gall shrugged self-deprecatingly. “It was a moment of weakness. I could truly not help myself. You fought too well.” The least trace of a grim smile lit the Hunkpapa’s savage face. “My people were very unhappy with me, Lone Wolf.” The smile was gone. “They said that I was no longer fit to lead them. That I was become an old fool. That because I fought for the love of a woman half my age and honored a white warrior for a great fight, I was no good anymore, that they could not trust me to lead them as before.” He paused, his mind weary with remembering, then asked with the unaffected guile of a child hoping to find parental agreement or approval of some minor sin of omission. “Do you believe that, Lone Wolf?”

  Kelly grimaced, nodded slowly. “Yes, I believe it, my brother. Your people are right. This can happen to a man. Love and war do not sleep well in the same lodge.”

  “You walk in circles, as if you were going around a trap. What is it you are saying?”

  “That my people, too, are the same. That if they were to know what is in my mind now, they would never trust me to lead them again. And they would be right.”

  “What is in your mind, Lone Wolf?”

  “As you said yourself—many things.”

  Gall only nodded. Like all Indians he knew the golden rule of silence and practiced it with a chief’s pride.

  “I have heard that Tatanka will go to the Land of the Grandmother. Is that true?” said Kelly.