It was only a faint metallic click but it sliced the silence like a razor. Tom knew instantly what it was. Nothing else made a sound like that but the cocking of a rifle. He whirled around immediately and a cold shock numbed his body along the entire length of his spine. He was looking into the barrel of a rifle, aimed directly at his eyes, no farther away than ten feet. There was no time to raise his own carbine. He braced himself for death.
But death did not come at once. In the fraction of time following, when he could not understand why he was still alive, the image of the man who would be his executioner was burned into his brain. He was taller than most Sioux or Cheyenne. One eagle feather adorned his long black hair and the necklace of bear claws told him that the man who was holding him helpless was none other than Little Wolf.
He already carried one bullet from Little Wolf’s rifle. Now the savage was back to finish the job! Why did he hesitate? Maybe he wanted Tom to make a move to save himself. Custer had said the man was really a white man gone renegade. Tom couldn’t say—he looked Cheyenne enough to him. It mattered little at this point. Tom thought about making a try with his carbine, but knowing he didn’t have a chance, he just sat there, almost in a trance. Finally he blurted, “Dammit, shoot if you’re going to!”
Little Wolf’s finger slowly tightened on the trigger but something made him hesitate. While the soldier sat stunned before him, he had recalled a picture in his mind of another river, on another day, and another young officer sitting a horse, his weapon drawn and aimed at a young Cheyenne girl. It was the same soldier.
In English, Little Wolf said, “Drop your rifle on the ground.” When the rifle fell to the ground, he ordered, “Now the pistol, slowly.” When the officer was disarmed, he spoke quickly and quietly. “I am giving you back your life in payment for sparing Morning Sky’s life at Black Kettle’s village on the Washita. You could have shot her but you did not. I know, too, that you saw me on the riverbank and you turned away. So I turn away now. But know this. The debt is paid. The next time we meet, I will kill you.”
Tom, barely seconds from his grave just moments before, could scarcely believe his life had been spared. He was unable to react, sitting numbly in his saddle, his eyes held captive by the icy gaze of the savage. He watched, helpless, as the tall warrior quickly picked up his pistol and rifle and turned to leave. He was surprised himself when he heard his own voice. “Little Wolf?” he asked.
The Indian hesitated, surprised. “Yes, I am Little Wolf,” he stated and stood there for a moment before he suddenly disappeared into the bushes and was gone, leaving the stunned lieutenant staring after the empty space where he had stood.
Tom did not move for a full minute. He had never been that stunned before. He couldn’t explain it. He wasn’t frightened by the face to face meeting with death as much as he was simply rendered helpless, like a fly in a spider-web. The Indian, Little Wolf, wore the look of a predator, calm and deadly. He had caught Tom dead to rights. Tom was still shaken when he heard Squint’s horse approach.
“Lieutenant! You all right?”
“Yeah . . . yeah, I’m all right.” Tom shook himself out of the near-trance he had been caught in. “It was him. I let him sneak right up behind me and get the drop on me, like a damn tenderfoot shavetail. He lit out across the river I think.”
Squint turned momentarily as Andy reined up beside them, then looked back at Tom. “Yeah, I seen him when he come out on the other side. That’s why I come a’runnin’. I was feared he might have cut your throat.”
“What happened?” Andy asked. He had not heard or seen anything until Squint broke cover and galloped toward Tom.
“Little Wolf,” Tom answered.
Squint’s eyes went wide, the shock registering on his awestruck face.
“Little Wolf?” Andy responded. Then noticing that Tom had neither rifle nor pistol, he looked first at Squint and then back at Tom. “Are you shore it was Little Wolf?” He found it hard to believe Tom was still among the living if he had been jumped by Little Wolf.
Tom knew what he was thinking. “It was Little Wolf.” Then he told them why his life had been spared. “But we’re wasting time sitting here. He’s getting too much of a start.”
“Hold on, Tom.” Andy usually called him Lieutenant except when he felt the need to give fatherly advice. Then it was always Tom. “We ain’t got a chance in hell of catching that redskin now. For one thing, we done run these horses near to death already just gittin’ here and his’n is pretty fresh. Even if our’n weren’t wore out, we’d play hell trying to catch that pony he’s riding.”
“Andy’s right, Lieutenant. We missed our chance. That one’s gone.” Squint had been listening to Tom’s account of the incident on the Washita and he had been doing some thinking. Up to that point, they had been chasing a nameless Indian. It was a pretty sobering statement to Squint when Tom called the Indian Little Wolf. More than one Indian was named Little Wolf but this one sounded uncomfortably close to the Little Wolf he knew as a boy. He began to add up some facts in his head and the conclusions presented a bizarre situation, one he had to clear up in his mind.
‘We might as well camp here tonight,” Andy said. “This day’s about done. We can ride back and meet the troop in the morning. That all right with you, Lieutenant?” The question came as an afterthought.
“Yeah, all right.” Tom wanted to continue on after the renegade but he knew his scouts were right. His detachment wasn’t prepared to go on an extended patrol deep into hostile territory and he didn’t want to chance getting anybody killed.
After they took care of the horses and arranged their saddles into beds, they settled in for the night. Andy hustled up a fire in an attempt to make some coffee before Squint did. Whenever Squint made it, it was always so strong he was afraid it would melt his tin cup. While Andy busied himself at the fire, Squint sat down beside Tom.
“Lieutenant, how do you know that Injun’s name was Little Wolf?”
“I ought to know. I’ve run across him before.”
“Yessir, but how do you know his name is Little Wolf?”
Tom shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, I asked him.”
“You asked him? In English? And he told you . . . in English?”
“He did. I forgot, you weren’t with the company then, back at Fort Reno, when we got ambushed by his band. Yeah, he told me in English. The story is that he’s not really an Indian, just raised by them. It’s hard to say though, when you meet him.”
Squint’s mind was racing. “Tell me about him. I mean, you just saw him up close. What did he look like?”
“Like a damn Indian,” Tom replied, but when he saw the intensity in Squint’s face, he described the tall, dark-haired warrior who had spared his life that day. “Why are you so interested?”
Squint ignored the question. “Did he have on a shirt?”
“Not when he jumped me.”
“Did you notice anything odd about him? Like a scar or something?”
Tom thought for a moment, trying to picture the man in his mind. He didn’t want to tell Squint that he was too numb at the time to notice very many details. “Come to think of it, there was an odd-looking place on his shoulder. Could have been a scar . . . a big one.”
This seemed to satisfy Squint’s curiosity. He settled back against the tree they were seated under. “It was a scar all right. I put it there. Leastways, there was a bullet there and I put a big hole in him trying to git it out.”
This sparked Tom’s interest in a hurry. “You know Little Wolf? You never mentioned you knew Little Wolf!”
“It never come up.”
Tom pulled a rock out from under his blanket and threw it aside. “If I ever get him in my sights again, I’ll put a bigger hole than that in him.”
Squint, sure of himself now but still scarcely believing what he had discovered, replied smugly, “Maybe, but maybe you wouldn’t want to at that.” When Tom responded with nothing more than a puzzled look, he continued,
“Lieutenant, where are you from?”
“I was born in St. Louis.”
“You had a brother, did you?”
“Well, I had one younger brother but he left us when he was just a little fellow, ten or so.”
“Your brother, he went off with a mule skinner, right?”
Tom was astonished. “How the hell did you know that?”
“He told me. His name’s Robert, ain’t it?” He didn’t have to wait for an answer—Tom’s wide-eyed expression confirmed it. Squint went on, “I shoulda put two and two together I reckon but I never thought nothin’ of it. I mean your name being Allred and his being Allred. Why, hell, Lieutenant, I wintered with your brother up in the Wind River country.”
Tom could hardly believe what he was hearing. Little Robert had been taken from the family when he was just a tyke, no more than nine or ten years old as best he could remember. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “Squint, are you sure? Are you sure it’s my brother?”
“Sure as spit.”
When Squint did not elaborate, Tom pressed for more. “Well, where is he now? I’d like to see him. Where can I get in touch with him?”
Squint could not help but laugh. “You already have. You met up with him today.”
At first Tom didn’t understand but, after a moment, it dawned on him what Squint was telling him. For the second time that day, he was stunned. “Little Wolf?”
“Little Wolf,” Squint confirmed.
CHAPTER 22
In the months that followed Tom’s startling discovery on the sandy banks of the Little Missouri River, he began to almost doubt the incident had happened at all. The shock of Squint Peterson’s revelation, that the savage he had sworn to kill was none other than his own lost brother, shook him more than the actual face-off with the murderous Cheyenne war chief. He had not thought about his brother for years. Their family was hardly a close one. For that exact reason he had escaped as soon as he was old enough. In fact, he considered himself lucky there was a war to give him a reason to go into the army.
When he left, he left for good. There was no contact with his mother or his sisters, and his father drank himself to death before Tom was fifteen. And now this. It was still inconceivable to him that his brother could be the notorious Little Wolf and he was not really sure how he felt about the turn of events. There was some degree of curiosity, he had to admit. The man was his brother after all. Still, he was, in fact, his enemy. Tom sought any information he could on the whereabouts of Little Wolf, but no one was able to supply any. None of the Indian scouts could offer any clue. It was as if the man had vanished from the earth. It became like a dream in his mind as winter set in, restricting troop movements for the most part.
Winter that year was a hard one and many of the scattered tribes wandered into the reservations to keep from starving to death. But Little Wolf was not among them. In fact, Little Wolf seemed to have vanished into the mountains, according to reports from Shoshone scouts friendly to the army. Sitting Bull’s Sioux were not among those Indians retreating to the reservation. His winter camp near the Yellowstone was home to a great many Cheyenne but Little Wolf was not one of them. From information provided by the Shoshone scouts, Tom was able to find out that Little Wolf had not returned to the village after their encounter on the Little Missouri. No one there knew where he was. It was common belief that he was still grieving over the death of his wife and had chosen to become one with the spirits and live in solitary communion somewhere in the mountains. In his absence, one of the members of his band of Cheyenne warriors, Bloody Claw, had replaced him as war chief.
Gradually, as winter loosened its grip and spring reluctantly arrived, Tom’s mind was less absorbed with the sudden appearance of a forgotten brother. The initial shock of it had been severe enough. But to be told that his brother was the same renegade who had killed and pillaged all over the territory was almost too much for the young lieutenant to accept. He became dismayed that fate had played such an ironic trick on him. As the days passed, Tom began to look at the situation with a somewhat more callous eye. At first, he had questioned Squint extensively about Little Wolf, seeking to learn everything he could about his brother. Little Wolf was his enemy but at least he could understand the man’s motives. Squint never failed to stress that his brother was legitimate in his Indian leanings. Little Wolf was raised as a Cheyenne. But as the months passed and Tom moved farther away from that confrontation on the Little Missouri, compassion for his Cheyenne brother waned.
The army certainly harbored no feelings of lenience for the man they knew as a renegade white turned Indian. There was a price on his head and Custer in particular wanted him brought in. The colonel found it hard to believe an Indian, or any man, for that matter, could walk right into an army fort and bust two prisoners out of jail. The man’s audacity infuriated Custer and he was determined to make an example of the renegade. When the weather permitted a more frequent routine of patrols, they still searched for information on the whereabouts of Little Wolf but to no avail. In truth, Little Wolf had vanished from the earth. In time, the subject of his brother receded to the back of Tom’s thoughts and as weeks, months and finally years passed with no word of the hostile, Little Wolf became little more than a ghost in his memory. Even Custer conceded that he had most likely perished in that brutal winter three years past.
Custer had other projects on his mind, opportunities to further his image as a military leader, that pushed the desire to punish one renegade white Indian to the bottom of his list of priorities. In the summer of 1874 he persuaded his superiors to authorize a great expedition into the Black Hills. The purpose of this expedition was, supposedly, to explore the territory, make maps of the area, study geological formations, catalog the existence of different species of wildlife—things of a peaceful nature. Of course the presence of a couple of gold miners on the mission might have caused some folks to become a little suspicious. The fact of the matter was that there were dozens of prospectors camping in the Black Hills already, in spite of the fact there was a treaty with the Sioux that guaranteed no white man was to enter these hunting grounds. As far as Squint Peterson was concerned, the handwriting was on the wall. If there was gold in the Black Hills, there was no way to keep the prospectors out, treaty or no treaty. It wouldn’t be the first time the government backed out of a treaty when they found something of the Indians’ that they wanted. Custer had no business in that territory, peaceful or not, so Squint decided to sit this campaign out. He didn’t like riding with Custer anyway. The man was obviously too fond of himself to suit Squint so he decided this would be a good time to take a little vacation.
* * *
“You shore you don’t want to come along on this here party?”
Squint turned in his saddle to face a smiling Andy Coulter as he reined up beside him. “I reckon not. Reckon you can find your way to the Black Hills without me?”
Andy laughed. “Well, if I can’t, I reckon I’ll have help a’plenty. Ole Longhair is taking about thirty scouts, most of ’em Crows.” He sent a stream of brown tobacco juice into the dust of the parade ground. Gesturing with his outstretched arm, he expounded, “Did you ever see a party as big as this one? Look at them supply wagons.”
“No, I never,” Squint allowed. “I just been setting here looking at all this fuss. There must be nigh to a hundred supply wagons lined up out there.”
“Closer to a hundred and fifty,” Andy corrected. “Hell, there’s four columns of men. Ole Longhair ain’t taking no chances.” He pulled his battered campaign hat from his head and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Already hot and the sun just barely up. Sorry you ain’t goin’ along for the fun. Where you goin’ anyway?”
Squint shrugged off the question. “Oh, I don’t know, up in the hills a piece. I been workin’ an idea in my mind for a while and I just got curious enough to go check it out. I don’t know. I might just lay up somewhere for a while, do some huntin’ and fishin’, a little trappin’ maybe. I ain’t
sure.”
Andy studied his friend for a moment. Squint obviously had a burr under his saddle about something but he didn’t particularly want to talk about it, so Andy didn’t pursue the subject. “Well, I reckon I better git on down there. I wouldn’t want them to leave without me. I’ll see you when we git back. You mind yourself up in them mountains. You’d look kind of silly without no hair.” He gave Squint a little salute, wheeled his horse and headed for the front of the column.
Squint sat there a while longer and watched the expedition pull out. Custer was at the forefront, riding his big Morgan that he was so fond of, returning the sentries’ salutes as he passed through the gates of Fort Lincoln. Benteen’s battalion passed and Tom Allred nodded to Squint. Squint touched his forefinger to the brim of his hat as a form of salute. As he looked back along the column, he estimated that there must have been about a thousand cavalry, and at least that many more on foot. A multitude of wagons, driven by six-mule teams were followed by a herd of two or three hundred beef cattle. He was amazed by the size of the expedition. “Ole Sittin’ Bull is really gonna love this,” he thought out loud. Joe snorted in reply and Squint figured his horse was telling him it was time to go. He dug his heels in gently and Joe started for the mountains. The mule, Sadie, followed obediently behind. Squint didn’t bother to tie a line on Sadie. The mule would follow Joe wherever he went.
* * *
The sun was warm on his shoulders and he pulled his shirt off to let the rays soak into his skin. Every once in a while he felt the need to absorb the sun into his body just as he felt the need to occasionally seek solitude. This was one of those times. He had stayed on at Fort Lincoln longer than he had imagined he could when he rode in almost four years ago. It wasn’t usual for him to stay in one place that long. Were it not for the fact that he liked Andy Coulter and young Tom Allred, he would have been gone long before. Scouting for the army wasn’t bad. It gave him grub and a place to sleep and a little bit of money for tobacco. But Fort Lincoln was getting too big and busy to suit him, and he was getting just a bit tired of being around the army anyway. Whatever the reasons, he needed to get away for a while, get back to the mountains in a place where he could have enough room to get acquainted with his own soul again. For him, that was Wind River country, so deep in the mountains that even the Indians couldn’t find him.
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