Black Hills (9781101559116)

by Thompson, Rod

  If they were careful, they had enough food for three or four days, plenty of water, and a better-than-expected shelter. There was enough of a shallow overhang leading off to one side to give them a path around the corner from the living area to allow them a place to take care of private concerns.

  It would be necessary to ration the horses’ grain a bit, but there was a decent amount of tall dead grass somewhat protected by the trees, most likely not needing too much effort to keep open. They’d get by.

  Cormac surveyed their situation while he quickly got on the outside of Mrs. Ferguson’s more-than-welcome vittles. She had rationed their portions to make what food they had stretch as far as possible. That woman had a head on her shoulders, she did. All in all, their little group was in pretty good shape; they were going to be just fine. And, for a few days at least, Cormac was going to have food that actually tasted good.

  CHAPTER 7

  Although Mrs. Ferguson’s coffee wouldn’t float any horseshoes, it did hit the spot, and she did right well on the stew, especially considering the few ingredients with which she had to work. Cormac allowed as how it was far better than anything he would have made. He was more than happy to turn the cooking over to her.

  They had themselves a real, old-fashioned blizzard kicking up a fuss. Outside of the area protected by their overhang, visibility was down to five or six feet. The stream twenty feet away was invisible in the whiteness, obliterated by the primeval force driving the sleet and snow nearly parallel with the ground. Forecasting outward in his mind, Cormac knew from experience that nothing was moving for miles around except that icy-cold, powerful Missouri River.

  The fancy riverboat would be tied up someplace, people and animals large and small would be hunkered down and tucked into houses, holes, barns, or anyplace they could find to hide from the ferocity of the storm. He knew they were in better shape than most. The people and animals in the open and exposed to the full onslaught of the storm would huddle and group together; only the strongest would survive. This was nature in the raw—every bit as terrible as it was awesome.

  “Shortly after we were married, I received an appointment as a professor of history at Harvard College,” said John Ferguson in answer to Cormac’s question about his previous occupation. “I had applied for it nearly two years before. It was almost like a wedding present. We had to move there, but the extra money came in handy.” Once they had everything arranged the way they wanted, they had settled in for a chat by the fire, and the talk had turned to frontiers. “The frontier was one of the subjects I included in some of my history lessons,” he said. “Having found history interesting since I was a pup, it’s easy for me to talk about it.

  “Since the beginning of time, people have always pushed out new frontiers; that’s what they do. The definition of a frontier is the part of a country next to an unexplored region. It was taken from a French word meaning borderland. In the very beginning of America, the frontiers were on the fringe of the settlements on the far eastern coast, and any exploration was, of necessity, to the west. Hence the frontier, in this country, has always meant the Western Frontier, and the people moving there were said to be moving ‘out West’ and were changed by the doing.

  “The frontiersmen shed their restraints, made bold decisions, and considered themselves to be more ‘American’ than their eastern counterparts because they were taking great risks and helping in the expansion and growth of our country.”

  A particularly hard gust of icy wind was redirected into their hollow, flaring up their fire and sending a thick trail of fiery sparks harmlessly out into the storm and causing them to hold shut their unbuttoned coats until it passed.

  “There was the Appalachian frontier west of Connecticut that instigated the French and Indian wars in 1760, and the western part of Georgia was a frontier before heavy population pushed the frontier farther westward. Kentucky and Tennessee were frontiers with heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, and in turn, the Dakota Territory became a frontier, and then on to Wyoming and Montana. Piece by piece, frontiers swept the nation, and now it’s populated coast to coast, with a lot of open spaces in the middle of course.

  “Someday the oceans will be considered a frontier, and who knows, it’s outlandish to think of, but maybe someday a thousand years from now, maybe even the stars and the heavens will be a frontier. Looking up at the stars from our farm on a warm summer night, Rebecca and I often talked about what it might be like to look down at the earth from the stars, from God’s point of view. It must be really beautiful. I’ll bet he’s proud of his work.

  “It sounds silly now, in light of all that has happened, but I guess the romance of the whole frontier idea was part of our decision to move west. We wanted to be involved in that expansion. We wanted to do our part to help shape America. I know it sounds foolish now, but we didn’t realize the depth of the risk we would be facing.

  “In retrospect, whatever possessed us to think we could become farmers with no experience to back us up is totally inconceivable. The accounts we read in periodicals and fiction stories made western life out to be appealing and romantic, but we were totally unprepared.”

  Mrs. Ferguson listened intently to her husband, nodding her agreement from time to time. “Lest you somehow think otherwise,” she interjected, “we would do it over again. We would just have prepared more thoroughly. I was in complete agreement with my husband’s decisions.”

  “Even his poker bet?”

  She smiled wryly. “Especially his poker bet. He had no choice; the situation had gone too far. He had been sold a bill of goods by some very experienced con men who led him like a lamb to the slaughter. I’m from the hills but I met John on a shopping trip to town and for the last ten years before moving to Missoura, we had been living in cities under police control, letting somebody else protect us, and again, we have no experience or knowledge of this sort of thing.

  “Now, we’re going to Pierre so he can take the job working for my sister’s husband, and I will take in laundry until we get enough money to buy another farm, a place to raise our children and teach them the things that we have learned. We know more about it now, and we won’t make the same mistakes. But he was just trying to salvage our money the best he could and take care of me.

  “He found himself in a stressful situation, and people don’t always make the right decisions under those conditions. One can only do what one can do based upon the experience they have, and in this case, he had no experience to draw from. But considering the facts, I think he did quite well. I’m very proud of him.”

  She smiled at her husband, and he mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”

  She squeezed his hand again, total absolution in her smile. “But he did get us out of there.”

  They would make the best they could of a bad situation and die together holding hands if that was meant to be. Their life had taken a bad turn, but they weren’t complaining, they were dealing with the situation as it sat. They were westerners now.

  The transition had been made; they were learning and growing. They may have made some bad decisions, but they were good people, strong people. The kind of people America needed to keep up the expansion. They would raise their children—two boys and two girls if they got their wish—their crops and their horses, and they would help raise their grandchildren. They would work hard, and they would face many challenges, but they would face them together, hand in hand, and they would make it. They didn’t deserve to get treated the way they had been and have their money taken from them. Maybe after he got them to Pierre, Cormac would have to go see about that.

  On the morning of the second day, the snow was a foot deep with a coating of frozen ice covering the top of everything between them and the creek, which was also ice coated along with all of the tree limbs and branches. With the shovel from his pack, crunching through the frozen surface of the snow with every step, Cormac expanded the area of open grass in the trees and broke the ice from the stream enough to
get some water for cooking, fill his canteens, and allow the horses to drink.

  Cormac hadn’t tied the horses, but they weren’t going anywhere. He spent a great deal of time petting them and running his hands over their bodies and their long legs, cleaning their hooves, and using a special comb for their manes and tails and a brush for their coats. In warm months he would use a currycomb, but he did not want to thin out their hair, especially during weather as cold as this. He brushed the air two inches in front of their faces repeatedly, “accidentally” brushing their faces from time to time until they moved forward enough to feel the brush. After that, when he again began brushing the air in front of them, they would automatically step forward to meet the brush. They were learning to analyze situations and react accordingly. They were learning to learn.

  On day two, the sleet turned again to snow and was now beginning to drift. With a general depth of more than three feet, the drifts were becoming substantial and creeping into their area. Cormac and John Ferguson had to work harder to keep the horses’ grass and a trail to the stream open.

  By day five, they knew everything about each other that they wanted to share, the food was running low, and Cormac was becoming concerned about his ability to get them out once the storm stopped. If the storm stopped. Cormac was remembering being told about the rain having once fallen for forty days and forty nights, but that was highly unlikely so he would just worry about people-sized problems. As his pa had taught him, and as he related to the Fergusons, the first two priorities of survival were shelter and water, in that order. As long as they had those two things, they could live several days without food. He would worry about getting out when the time come.

  Professor Ferguson was impressed that Cormac’s mother had been giving him schooling and teaching him to scribe. He shared some of his learning about poetry, the arts, and music. A favorite of Mrs. Ferguson’s was a little ditty written by a doctor around 1750 titled “Little Bess, the Ballad Singer.” She sang the only verse she knew in her best accented voice:When first a babe upon the knee

  My mother us’d to sing to me.

  I caught the accents from her tongue

  And e’er I talk’d, I lisp’d in song

  With nothing to do but talk, they discussed many topics, and Cormac was envious of the vast amount of knowledge they held between them. Knowledge they would pass on to their children and grandchildren as a basis from which to continue their educations.

  After learning Cormac had been raised close to the Black Hills yet knew next to nothing about them, Professor Ferguson was expounding upon a subject for which he obviously felt great passion.

  “Great poets,” Professor Ferguson was saying while he rearranged the burning logs and added more wood to the fire, “write thousands of words in their lifetimes. They read and study and ponder and experiment with the various meanings and sounds of word combinations, striving to give just the right emphasis and implications that will allow readers of the works to make the desired inferences, and sometimes, just sometimes mind you, everything comes together perfectly, and the result is exquisite perfection.” He paused and repeated himself for emphasis. “I like the sound of those two words. Exquisite perfection, only two words, but what magnificent words they are. Two words that can be applied to only a very few things in this world, but for those certain things, they are the only two words that accurately do them justice.

  “A French artist named Leonardo di ser Piero Da Vinci painted a great many pictures in his lifetime, but in 1519, after working on it for seven years, he completed a half-length portrait depicting a seated woman with an enigmatic smile that has been called by some the greatest portrait ever painted: a masterpiece. That’s what the Black Hills are: one of God’s greatest masterpieces, exquisite perfection.”

  “God at her very best,” broke in Mrs. Ferguson with a private-joke smile to her husband.

  “Yes, yes, dear.” He smiled back, nodding. “I know. I know.”

  “I’ve only seen photographs,” he continued, still looking into Mrs. Ferguson’s eyes and returning her smile, “but would dearly love to take Rebecca to see them sometime. The Fort Laramie peace treaty gave the Black Hills to the Sioux Indians forever,” he explained, “on the condition they remain there, and quit scalping white people. The government also promised white people would stay off their land, but an army general named Custer claims to have found gold there, and now more and more people have been breaking the treaty and begging the government to reclaim the land. However, even before that happened, some Indians were coming out of the hills to attack white travelers and settlers and then running back to the hills to escape, so they were themselves breaking the treaty.

  “The government has been refusing to give permission to go into the Black Hills or to protect any people that do. On the Indians’ side, the war parties are conducted by individuals, and not necessarily condoned by the Indian chiefs. Anytime some young buck with a few loyal followers gets to feeling his oats or wanting to prove something, they go out on their own to do some raiding. Our government can’t control all of our citizens, and the Indian government can’t control all of theirs. It’s a recipe for disaster, that’s what it is, and I think it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when.”

  That night the storm broke, and they awoke to sunshine-blanketed snowdrifts, where snow backed up as high as their heads against some restraint. Lainey would have loved this view.

  “We got our work cut out for us,” he told the Fergusons. “Pushing a trail through that snow is going to be hard work; it’ll be too soft to walk on top of without snowshoes. But we got to do it; we’re out of food. We can’t be any more’n a mile and a half from the river, and once there, according to you, it’s probably about thirty miles as the crow flies to Pierre, but following the winding river, who the heck knows.”

  After washing down the last few bites of jerky with some coffee Mrs. Ferguson made by re-boiling the grounds she had been wisely saving, and giving the horses the last of the grain, they packed up and headed out. Away from the snowdrifts, the snow depth averaged between three and four feet. With Mrs. Ferguson riding Lop Ear, and Horse carrying the pack, Cormac and John Ferguson, each leading a horse, alternated breaking the way in ten-minute intervals.

  They were both strong and John proved to be no slacker and up to the task, as was the sunshine. The day was pleasantly warm and when they weren’t leading, the men walked with their coats unbuttoned and held open to allow more ventilation.

  Progress was slow but steady, and dinnertime came around to find them nearing the water with their stomachs wishing there was something coming down the chute. A rabbit or other varmint would make a fine lunch, and Cormac unhooked the hammer thong and loosened the gun in his holster in preparation of an animal or bird suddenly flushing from a snowbank or the brush. As a group, they broke though the last of a tightly grown grove of green spruce trees not far from the water.

  “Well, well. Look what popped out of the woods. Good to see you folks. I was worried about you.” There were all seven riders with the bluffer, still the apparent leader, sitting comfortably on his horse with a gun in his hand, pointing at John Ferguson, who had promptly thrown his hands into the air. With no more warning than that, the man pulled the trigger, and Professor Ferguson staggered backward and fell unmoving to the ground. Cormac was stunned.

  “What was that for?” he asked numbly as Mrs. Ferguson ran to her husband.

  “I couldn’t have him running around the country with his lies about crooked poker games and such, now could I?” As he was swinging his gun toward Cormac, Cormac palmed his and put two .44 caliber bullets into the middle of the big man’s chest. He was slammed backward off his horse with his eyes and mouth open wide in surprise. As shocked as Cormac had been at the senseless killing of Professor Ferguson, so were the big man’s friends, and that may have contributed to their next mistake.

  Grabbing for their guns, three of them cleared leather before Cormac, shooting qui
ckly but not hastily, placed his bullets exactly where he wanted them, and they joined their friend on the ground in the same condition as he: dead. Being killed quickly was more’n they deserved. Cormac would do it again more slowly if it were possible.

  Cormac turned his attention to the last three. Their hands were as high as they could reach. They were suddenly decidedly lacking of enthusiasm in their venture.

  “Take it easy, mister, please! Just take it easy! We ain’t doin’ nothin’, really. We didn’t even want to come, but it’s not healthy to cross Luther. He was mad at the guy for crossin’ him and wanted to teach him a lesson, and he had his eye on the woman. But we didn’t want any part of it, mister. Honest.”

  “Well, let’s us consider the situation,” Cormac said seriously. “My friend had his hands up, and your friend shot him anyway while you three sat there and watched. Now you have your hands up, and I have a gun pointed at you. Kinda funny how attitudes can change dependin’ on your point of view, ain’t it?” Cormac clicked the hammer of his pistol for effect and the men started. He had their undivided attention.

  “Mister, wait, please!”

  “Oh, shut up! Thank God I’m not cut from the same lowlife crud as you and your friends. I’m not going to shoot you for no reason. Just make sure you don’t give me one. Keep your hands right where they are, and you might leave here in one piece.”

  Cormac looked at the Fergusons. The whole story was told in a glance. Mrs. Ferguson was holding and rocking her husband, crying uncontrollably. What a waste, Cormac thought. What a damn shame and a waste. A peaceful man, John Ferguson had willingly complied with the implied contract. The man had pointed a gun at him without shooting, indicating that if he didn’t resist, he would not be shot. Mr. Ferguson acknowledged acceptance of the agreement by raising his hands in the air away from his gun, and the son of a bitch killed him anyway.