“What was it about?” the corporal demanded. “You can’t just ride in here and half kill one of my men …”
“I came in here to stay the night and do you a favor,” Staley said. “I’ll do more than half kill anybody who acts like that bastard.”
Jones stood half a head shorter than Staley and was by far the oldest of the seven soldiers in the hay camp. He was a roly-poly man, but he didn’t give the impression of being soft. Staley figured him to be a career soldier who had joined the service before the Civil War and would stay in until he retired.
“All right,” Jones said. “What’s the favor?”
“Are your horses in?” Staley asked.
“No. We didn’t need them today, so we turned them out to graze.”
“Then get ’em in,” Staley said. “There’s Indians all over the country. They’ll have ’em before morning if you leave ’em out.”
“Aw, what kind of bull are you giving us?” Al Cady asked. “We’ve been here most of the winter and we ain’t seen no Indians.”
Jones nodded agreement. “They wouldn’t come this close to Fort Laramie, mister. I’ve fought Indians from here to the Río Grande and I can smell ’em if they’re anywhere around.”
“Then you’ve got a damned poor smeller,” Staley said. “I had dinner at Barrone’s horse ranch and he told me there was a dozen bands drifting through the country. I’ve only run across the tracks of one band, but that was only a few miles east of here. I judged there were eight braves in the party.”
Jones scratched a bronze cheek, his eyes thoughtful. “All right, we’ll run ’em in.”
“Come on inside, Staley,” Allison said. “I’m the cook tonight.”
“I don’t trust our friend Risdon,” Staley said. “I’m going to see how well he’s taking care of my horse.”
“I’ve got a couple of minutes,” Allison said. “I’ll walk to the stable with you. But I think you’ll be surprised. Risdon is a good hand with horses.”
When they were a dozen steps from the others, Staley said in a low tone: “Looks to me like Risdon has got this outfit buffaloed.”
“Yes, I guess he has,” Allison agreed gravely. “I’m glad you handled him the way you did. I never saw him down before.”
“Have you tangled with him?”
“No.”
“It’ll come,” Staley said.
“Yeah, it’ll come.” Allison sighed. “If we live long enough. I’m not looking forward to it.”
Staley nodded, knowing how men like Risdon fought. He would butt, elbow, and kick. He would even gouge eyes out if he got his man down. Allison would be lucky if he wasn’t maimed for life.
Chapter Five
As soon as Staley finished eating, he picked up his Winchester and went to the door.
“You soldier boys get a good night’s sleep in your bunks,” he said. “Maybe it don’t make any difference whether you lose your horses or not, but I can’t afford to lose my buckskin.”
“If the Indians show up,” Corporal Jones said, “just holler. We’ll be there to give you a hand.”
“I’ll watch for you,” Staley said. “I’ll watch till my eyes bug out.”
He stepped outside and walked to the stable. The evening was warmer than a man had a right to expect at this time of year. Tomorrow it might snow, but it was still spring tonight. He leaned his Winchester against the wall of the stable, then looked in on his buckskin. Allison had been right about the way Risdon took care of a horse. The man had spent more time on the buckskin than a hostler in a livery stable would. Stranger still, he acted as if he enjoyed doing it.
“This is a hell of a good animal,” Risdon had said. “I wish I owned him.”
“I don’t aim to sell him,” Staley had said. “He’s carried me a lot of miles and he’ll carry me some more. After a while you get to thinking a horse like this is your friend.”
Risdon had nodded thoughtfully, his knobby, scarred face turning bleak. “He’s a gelding, so you can depend on him. Same thing with a stallion. But you can’t count on a mare. Fact is, you can’t count on any female.”
Risdon had walked out of the stable then, fists knotted at his sides. Some woman had sold him out, Staley thought. Maybe his wife had run off with another man. Staley had no figures to prove it, but he suspected that unfaithful women caused more men to join the Army than any other reason.
Staley carried his saddle and blanket out of the stable and dropped them near the door. He sat down and filled and lighted his pipe. Some of the soldiers drifted out of the bunkhouse. Allison was the only one who came to the stable, which suited Staley just fine.
Allison hunkered beside Staley and filled his pipe. When he had it going, he said: “Ready for the Indians?”
After a pause in which he decided Allison was sincere in asking the question, Staley said: “As ready as I’ll ever be. The fact is, you’re never really ready for an Indian. He’s too tricky. Before daylight I’ll hear some coyotes out yonder and the chances are I won’t know whether they’re Indians or coyotes.”
“You must like Indians,” Allison said, “or you wouldn’t live with them.”
“You live with white soldiers,” Staley said. “Does that prove you like all of ’em?”
Allison took the pipe out of his mouth and laughed.
“My guess is, you don’t like any of the men you’re living with,” Staley said.
“That’s taking in too much territory,” Allison said. “I like Johnny Morgan. Or maybe I feel sorry for him. He’s the kind you have to look out for.”
“Well, redskins are like whites,” Staley said. “You cotton to some of ’em and others are pure poison. Sure, Indians are superstitious and ignorant and in a lot of ways they’re so damned cruel it makes you sick. But in other ways they’re a brave, freedom-loving, independent kind of people and I respect that.”
“That makes sense,” Allison admitted.
“There’s one part of this quarrel the white man has with the Indian that I don’t savvy,” Staley said. “Uncle Sam makes a treaty with some tribe like the Sioux. The treaty says the Sioux can keep a certain piece of land. The Black Hills, for instance. The Sioux ride home after the palaver, aiming to keep the treaty and be peaceful, but then something happens.
“A white man sneaks into the Black Hills and finds gold. He tells other white men and pretty soon you’ve got ten thousand people on Indian land that was supposed to be theirs forever. So then Uncle Sam works it around until we have a war going. The Indians get in a few licks, but in the end they lose.
“Then the Sioux have to sign a new treaty that gives the Black Hills to Uncle Sam. And Uncle Sam says to the ten thousand people who broke the law by going onto Indian land that it’s all legal now. He says they can stay and keep on digging the gold they’ve been digging all this time. You tell me who’s civilized and who’s a savage.”
“You sound bitter,” Allison said.
“It’s just that I know the Indian side of the row,” Staley said. “But that won’t help me one damned bit if the Cheyennes who are sashaying through the country get their hands on me. I’ll die slow and full of pain.”
“If the Indian is bound to lose in the end,” Allison said thoughtfully, “why can’t he see it?”
“Some of them do,” Staley said. “The point is, they’d rather die fighting than get kicked in the butt all the time. The average Indian won’t die fighting, though. He’ll get beaten because he’s starved and he’ll wind up being put on a reservation that’s the worst land in the country. That’s where he’ll stay till the white man finds gold on that worst land … and then he’ll get shoved off regardless of how many sacred treaties have been signed. Aw, hell, Allison, sometimes it makes me ashamed of being a white man.”
Allison knocked his pipe against his heel and filled it again. Night had moved across the pra
irie, and here and there stars were beginning to show in a steadily darkening sky. He lighted his pipe and asked: “Were you raised out here in the West?”
“Yeah, except for the first ten years of my life. My folks lived in Ohio, I came out to Denver with ’em in ’59. They died from typhoid fever the next year. Since then I’ve made it by myself. Of course, there’s been times when I’ve gone mighty hungry.”
Allison nodded, pulling on his pipe.
“I guess men join the Army for all kinds of reasons,” Staley said. “What about Risdon? He ever tell you where he came from and why he joined up?”
“He doesn’t talk much about himself,” Allison said. “He’s been in the Army two years. I think he came from Chicago, but I’m not sure. It’s the only city he’s ever mentioned.”
Staley told Allison about Risdon’s remarks concerning females.
“It ain’t the way most men feel,” he added. “I mean, a lot of us get kicked in the teeth by a woman, but we get over it. He hasn’t. He’s bitter. I got a notion he hates all women.”
“I never heard him say he did,” Allison said thoughtfully. “But every time we go to the hog ranch he gets ornery. I pity any girl who goes to bed with him. She earns her money.”
They sat in silence for a time, smoking. Then Allison said: “You going to the fort tomorrow?”
“I figured on it,” Staley said, “though I ain’t real anxious to make the ride alone. I didn’t much more than miss that Cheyenne band yesterday. I hate to push my luck.”
“Johnny and I are taking a load of hay to the fort tomorrow,” Allison said. “You’d better ride with us.”
“I’d sure like to,” Staley said. “Three rifles beat one.”
“We’ll be in a hell of a fix if they attack us here,” Allison said.
“Only if they catch you out loading up hay and you’re scattered,” Staley said. “Unless it’s a big band, they won’t give you any trouble except to burn your haystacks or steal your horses.”
“The trouble is, we’re almost out of ammunition,” Allison said. “I was out here last summer and I helped put up the hay and build these buildings. Then they ordered me back to the fort for the winter months so I could be the post schoolteacher. I just got back here the First of April. Sometime while I was gone, the men shot up most of the ammunition and the corporal hasn’t asked for more.”
“Then he’s a fool,” Staley said.
“You may be right at that,” Allison said, and sighed. “They wasted the ammunition on jack rabbits and antelopes, but they never saw any Indians. So now it’s a proposition of Jones having to own up that he let them waste the ammunition. He can’t lie about being attacked by the Indians and make it stick.”
“Something is sure as hell going to stick if you get pinned down here without any ammunition,” Staley said.
Allison rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe. “Guess I’d better roll in. We’re working tomorrow. Today was an off day.” He slipped the pipe into his pocket, then he said: “You were asking about Risdon. None of us has figured him out. He got into so much trouble on straight line duty that they made a bedpan pusher out of him. Then one night he drank the whiskey he was supposed to be doling out to a patient, so the next stop was the guardhouse. When he got out, they put him on detached service, loading hay. Now we’re stuck with him.”
“He must hate everything and everybody,” Staley said, “or he wouldn’t be on the prod like he is.”
“He has only contempt for a man he can whip,” Allison said, “but if he gets whipped, he thinks the man who did it is great. That doesn’t happen often. But he doesn’t hate everything. He loves animals, males anyway. He showed that with a dog we had at the fort. It’s the same with horses.”
“Sometimes I think a man is almost as much of a mystery as a woman,” Staley said.
“Almost,” Allison agreed. “Almost.”
He walked away, leaving Staley to wonder if some woman was responsible for Dave Allison’s being in the Army.
Staley finished his pipe and lay down, his head on his saddle, the blanket pulled over him. The talk with Allison had stirred old memories. Ordinarily he was not a man to dwell on the past, but now, once again, he lived through that hot night in Denver. It had been so long ago, but he could still hear his fever-stricken parents groaning and rolling in the rickety bed. Before the night ended, typhoid had burned their lives out of them.
He remembered how helpless he had felt, and he remembered the funeral and the preacher’s futile effort to comfort him. After that, the memories blurred until he was sixteen and big enough to draw man wages on a ranch.
No, he didn’t want to think about the five years in between, years of beatings and abuse and being kicked from one home to another. He’d done his share of hating in those days. If he hadn’t taken up with an old trapper in South Park, he might have turned out to be another Pete Risdon.
The trapper’s name was Jake Dice. With Jake, Staley had learned the wilderness. He and Jake had tramped all over the Colorado Rockies. They had even lived for a time with the Utes. He got over his hating during those years because Jake didn’t hate anything or anybody.
“You just make yourself sick if you hate,” the old man used to say. “Hate’s a slow poison.”
It was true. Staley had seen it work time after time. It was working now with Pete Risdon. Risdon was a sick man.
Staley had been able to accept Jake’s death without bitterness. Jake was old and crippled up with rheumatism. It was time for him to die and he knew it. After that, Staley drifted around all over Colorado and Wyoming. He’d had some bad times and some good ones, but of all the good ones, Sir Cedric Smith’s hunting trip was the best.
Staley had been the Englishman’s guide, and a Denver reporter named Patrick O’Hara had ridden with the party. Staley had liked O’Hara from the first, and because Sir Cedric believed in sharing his own good fortune at every stop along the trail, they had lived high on the hog. When it was over, Smith had gone back to England with his trophies, O’Hara took a job with the Cheyenne Leader, and Staley felt as if he had just moved out of paradise.
The big money he had earned that summer slipped through his fingers. He had lived his shiftless years. Now he had nothing, and he wanted to marry Tally Barrone. Well, he’d always found a way and he’d find it this time. He went to sleep at last with that comforting thought in his mind.
Chapter Six
Staley had just finished his second cup of breakfast coffee when Johnny Morgan, who was standing in the doorway rolling a cigarette, let out a scared yell. For a moment the other soldiers just stared at him. Staley was off the bench and halfway to the door before anybody else made a move. He grabbed his Winchester and ran outside.
A man in a wagon was racing his horses toward the hay camp. A band of Indians was gaining on him. There were eight of them, or nine. Staley couldn’t be sure in that first quick glance.
They were strung out for fifty yards behind the driver, but two braves were well ahead of the rest and coming up fast on opposite sides of the teamster. One had a rifle in his hands, the other a lance ready to sink into the teamster’s back.
Staley dropped to one knee and eared back the hammer of his rifle. It was a long shot, so long that luck more than skill would determine whether he scored a hit or not. In any case, he could not get both lead Indians in time to save the man’s life.
Staley took careful aim, then squeezed off the shot. The brave with the rifle threw up his arms and went off the horse in a rolling fall. In that same instant the other Indian drove his lance into the teamster’s back. He fell forward off his seat, the horses coming straight on toward the hay camp in a hard run.
Staley emptied the Winchester, but he missed every shot. The Indians picked up the fallen brave, wheeled, and raced away. Staley stood up and filled his magazine.
“Have you got any s
addles?” he called to Jones.
“Three old McClellans,” the corporal snapped. “But you ain’t leading any of my men out there to get killed.” He wheeled to face the men who stood behind him. “Cady, you and Plunkett fetch in that wagon. We’ll see if the teamster’s dead.”
Staley waited until Jones turned back, then said: “Have you got enough ammunition to fight off an attack?”
“No,” Jones said. “We sure as hell don’t.”
“Give me three men on horses and we’ll chase ’em a while,” Staley said. “They won’t stand and fight, and they won’t bother you for a spell if we give ’em a run. If we don’t, they’ll hang around and try to pick off some of your boys. Now how about it?”
Jones scratched the back of his neck, scowling doubtfully. Then he nodded. “All right, if you can get three of ’em to go with you.”
“I’ll go,” Allison said. “Come on, Johnny. We might as well get in on the fun.”
Morgan held back, glancing at Staley, then at Jones, and finally at Allison. He gulped and said: “All right, I’ll go.”
“You two saddle up,” Staley said. “I need one more.”
The rest shifted their weight from one foot to another. They stared at the ground or across the prairie as if wanting suddenly to become invisible. Then Pete Risdon laughed.
“Well, you only live once,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Get ’em back here by noon,” Jones said to Staley. “Allison and Morgan are taking a load of hay to the fort this afternoon.”
“If we don’t jump the Indians and throw a little lead,” Staley said, “the chances are you won’t get that load halfway to the fort.”
He ran to the corral and saddled his buckskin. Five minutes later they rode east.
Young Morgan looked as if he was sorry he’d agreed to go. By the time they had ridden half a mile Staley was sorry he’d let the boy come. Morgan rode like a sack of wool, weaving from side to side in the saddle. He had all he could do to hold the reins in one hand, the rifle in the other, and keep his butt against leather. Staley had to motion repeatedly for him to move up.
Summer Warpath Page 3