Summer Warpath

by Wayne D. Overholser

  “I need a man who knows the country and knows Indians. A man who can eat berries in order to survive, and then tell me the truth about what he’s seen when he returns. I want a man who avoids unnecessary fighting, but can fight if he has to. As I’ve already said, I know you by reputation. Louie Barrone speaks highly of you. I believe you’ll fill the bill, and I can promise that the job will not be dull. It will be dangerous.”

  “The pay?” Staley asked.

  Crook held up his hand. “Let me tell you about the job first. I want a messenger to carry dispatches to other forts and other commands. Plans are being made for an extensive campaign this summer, probably beginning next month. The country will be alive with Indians, so it will be necessary to ride by night and sleep in the daytime.”

  “The pay?” Staley asked again.

  Crook pretended he didn’t hear. “Right now the wires are down between here and Fetterman. I have dispatches to send. You will leave as soon as you have your supper.”

  Staley took a long breath. He suspected that Crook was baiting him. Patience was a basic virtue when it came to working your way through Indian country. If he blew up now, Crook would say he was not the man for the job.

  “General,” he said, “I’m prepared to carry your dispatches through every Indian tribe between here and hell … if the pay is worth it.”

  Crook smiled. “The pay is one hundred twenty-five per month if we furnish your horse, or one fifty if you have a horse.”

  “I have the horse,” Staley said.

  “All right,” Crook said. “Be back here within an hour.”

  The sun was almost down when Staley left Fort Laramie. He was going to be out in the storm after all. The air was cold and damp, and lightning kept playing all along the western horizon. He would be wet long before he reached Fetterman, but at $150 a month he could afford to get wet.

  Chapter Nine

  Dave Allison and Johnny Morgan unloaded hay, picked up mail, and headed out of Fort Laramie. The forbidding darkness of the sky guaranteed that the storm would hit them long before they reached the hay camp.

  They probably could reach the hog ranch, but Madame Fifi did not favor soldiers who used her place as a haven to escape a storm. She was there for business, not conversation.

  Allison was a better hand with horses than Morgan, but this team was gentle enough for Morgan to handle. Allison hadn’t looked at the mail, so he handed the lines to Morgan and went through the contents of the mail sack. Most of it was impersonal: newspapers, magazines, and a package from Corporal Jones’ wife, who lived in Cheyenne. Among the half dozen letters Allison found one from his father.

  “Anything for me?” Morgan asked.

  “Not a thing, Johnny.”

  Morgan sighed. “I had a letter from Mom last week. I probably won’t get another one till next week.” He sighed again. “I dunno why I ever joined up, Dave. I could be home with one of Mom’s good suppers in me and no Indian in five hundred miles.”

  Allison only half heard. He stared ahead at the twin ruts running through the sagebrush.

  He had known for a long time that he couldn’t go home. He loved his father but he could not face his neighbors, or Franny Knowles’ aunt and uncle, or even Franny herself if she ever came back. Foolish pride, perhaps, but that’s the way it was.

  His mother had died when he was ten years old and his father had raised him. His father had done a good job, considering the fact that he was forty years old when Allison was born and had never been around children.

  Allison’s father had a small farm that gave them vegetables and meat. He preached every Sunday at a nearby country church, and that gave him a few dollars. He usually had more vegetables than dollars.

  Somehow his father had never understood the world outside, the world of violence and brutality and wickedness. Perhaps he did not even know this world existed. He loved his neighbors. Most of them belonged to his church.

  Few strangers came into his community and he seldom left it. Neighbors helped each other, and Dave Allison, growing up in this rural community where nothing ever seemed to change, thought that was the way people were.

  He’d gone as far in school as he could while staying at home, and he had no money to go away. He helped his father on the farm, and he spent much time reading. His father owned many books: classics and history and biography as well as religious tomes. Allison read them all, then borrowed every book he heard of within a ten-mile radius.

  When he was twenty, two things happened that changed his life. He started to read law in Judge Croker’s office in Oak Grove, the nearest town, and he fell in love with Franny Knowles, who had come to live with her aunt and uncle, Jared and Martha Knowles.

  He stayed in Oak Grove during the week, sleeping on a cot in the judge’s office. He walked home late Saturday afternoon, so he had Saturday evening and most of Sunday with Franny. He had never been in love before.

  Franny was two years younger than Dave Allison. She was a big girl, not particularly pretty and certainly not very graceful, but she wanted a man and he needed a woman, and more than once she almost took him to bed. Because his father’s attitudes had been drummed into him so thoroughly, Dave always drew back in time. And he never understood what he did to Franny.

  They talked about marriage, but Dave would not give up his opportunity in the judge’s office. Obviously he could not marry her and take her to Oak Grove. He assumed she would wait until he could support her, practicing law. It simply never occurred to him that Franny was becoming desperate.

  He called on her one Saturday evening and Martha Knowles met him at the door. She told him that Franny had married a middle-aged widower with five children. Allison stood and stared at Mrs. Knowles for a long, long time.

  Finally, he turned and walked away. He walked as long as he could, and then he sat down and cried. He considered killing himself. Then he got up and began walking again. He was simply driven to walk and walk until he reached Oak Grove. He had to get away. He could not go home. Everyone knew about him and Franny.

  When the story got around, folks would laugh at him. He couldn’t face them. He didn’t think he could even face his father. He went into a saloon in Oak Grove and got drunk.

  He stumbled out of the saloon. He passed out and spent the night in the gutter, lying in his own vomit. In the morning he was still sick. He cleaned himself up the best he could and started walking again.

  When, on Monday, he staggered into Springfield and sat down to rest, the memories rushed back and filled him with despair. Then, for no reason that ever made sense to him, he joined the Army.

  The Army sent him to Columbus Barracks in Ohio. He was issued the usual dark-blue blouse with its row of brass eagle buttons, two pairs of light-blue trousers, two gray flannel shirts, two suits of underwear, a light-blue wool overcoat, a pair of boots, a forage cap, a leather waist belt, and a black wool campaign hat.

  His clothes didn’t fit. His boots raised blisters on his feet. The underwear itched. The food was badly cooked. He had no privacy. He was assigned a bunk and a wood footlocker. The barracks had a peculiar odor, and even after he and the other recruits swabbed the floor and scrubbed the bed slats and filled the bed sacks with new straw, the odor was still there.

  He drilled. He learned to march across the parade ground with his head up, stomach in, chest out, arms close to the body. He worked in fatigue details, and discovered Army discipline. He was carrying such a load of resentment that he committed one misdemeanor after another until he was fined or thrown into the guardhouse or into the bull ring, where he ran and ran, first double time and then triple time. He hated the sergeant who counted cadence while he ran. He hated the privates because they were not the kind of men he had known at home. He seemed to have nothing in common with anybody.

  He welcomed being sent out to Fort D. A. Russell, where he became a part of Company A, N
inth Infantry. He drank too much, and he made a reputation as a first-class brawler because the monotony of garrison life was unbearable.

  It was a long time before he could bring himself to write to his father, a long time before his letters could express affection, a long time before he could force himself to ask his father to forgive him for running away.

  In time he changed. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe the resentment ran out. Or maybe he reached the place where he could be honest with himself and accept the fact that he had been a damned fool and had nobody to blame but himself. Or maybe some of the things Corporal Jones told him began to get through.

  Whatever the reasons, he was not the same man who had joined the Army nearly three years ago. He stopped missing roll calls and being absent without leave. He began to look after Johnny Morgan, who had a talent for doing the wrong things or doing the right things wrong. Even Pete Risdon recognized him as a man who was not to be taken lightly. Maybe they would fight someday. It didn’t matter, really. He’d fought other men just as tough, and he’d learned that there was no profit in backing away from a fight.

  “Dave,” Morgan said.

  Startled, Allison turned to Morgan, and a drop of rain hit him in the face. Lightning was slashing the sky and the rumble of thunder was closer than it had been. He took a long breath, realizing he still held his father’s letter in his hand and now it was too dark to read it.

  “I guess I was a long ways off,” he said as he slipped the letter into his pocket. “What’s on your mind, Johnny?”

  “The hog ranch is over yonder,” Morgan said. “What do you think?”

  Suddenly Allison felt reckless. “Why not?” he said, and hoped Pete Risdon would be there. It was a good night for a fight.

  Chapter Ten

  Madame Fifi’s hired man, Nero, came out of the darkness holding a lantern high. He said: “Oh, it’s you, Mistuh Allison.”

  “And Johnny Morgan,” Allison said. “Put the horses in the barn, will you?”

  “You bet,” Nero said.

  Allison and Morgan ran for the front door. Just as Morgan closed the door behind them, the rain roared across the grass in a solid sheet. When it struck the house, the building shook as if a giant bucket had been emptied against the west wall.

  Morgan leaned against the door and grinned. “Close, wasn’t it?”

  “Poor Nero,” Allison said. “He’ll think he’s drowned.”

  Madame Fifi hurried into the front room to see if the door and windows were closed. She was grotesquely fat, a huge, shapeless mass of painted, powdered, greedy flesh topped by a curly blonde wig that didn’t fit. She never wore a corset and her dress appeared to be testing every seam.

  She stopped, surprised to see them.

  “Well, well,” she said. “The pride of Company A. I suppose you’re here for business and not to get out of the storm.”

  “Certainly,” Allison said. “We know you have principles.”

  “You’re damned right I do,” she snarled. “The girls are eating supper so you’ll have to wait.”

  “We can’t stay that long,” Allison said. “We’ll just have a beer and go on to camp. We were coming back from the fort, you see, and we saw your welcome light, a beacon for weary travelers …”

  “A beer for a roof over your heads during a storm? That’s a hell of a good bargain, ain’t it?”

  “We think so,” Allison said smugly.

  “I oughta throw both of you back in the rain,” she grumbled. “All right, I’ll send Chris in.”

  She turned and waddled back to the kitchen.

  “Someday she’s gonna get sore at the way you talk to her,” Morgan said, “and then we won’t get to look at Christine no more.”

  “Don’t worry about her bark,” Allison said. “It’s a lot worse than her bite. Besides, even a nickel’s worth of business is not something she could overlook.”

  The room had a rough pine bar on one side with a number of shelves behind it filled with bottles. Three poker tables and chairs took up most of the space, but very little poker was played here. The tables were used for drinking and visiting with the girls. A piano stood in one corner. Occasionally the tables and chairs were stacked to make room for dancing, but Fifi discouraged it. Dancing wasn’t part of the business—not the profitable part anyway.

  Allison had tried to tell her she could make the dancing pay very well if the customers had to buy drinks for the girls after each dance, but she shook her head stubbornly and said nobody came here just to drink. Allison had quit trying to tell her anything. Nobody could, he thought, and that included Christine.

  Allison and Morgan sat down at a table near the door and listened to the rain pound against the house. Morgan shook his head. “It’s gonna be hell driving to camp in this, Dave. You reckon Fifi would let us stay the night?”

  “She’d let us drown first,” Allison said. “Forget it.”

  Christine came in, smiling as she crossed the room. She was a small girl, scarcely five feet tall, with honey blonde hair and eyes that were more violet than blue. She brushed her hair back from her forehead and tied it with a red ribbon, letting it fall down her back almost to the waist. Christine’s figure was as nearly perfect as nature would allow. She always dressed attractively, and tonight her black dress with the gold trim at the neck and sleeves did wonders for her.

  Once Christine had confided to Allison that she made all her own dresses. He was not as naïve as Morgan, who believed everything the girl told him, but he did believe what she said about her clothes. Morgan believed Christine was as virtuous as an angel. Allison wasn’t so sure, but as he watched her come to their table, he had to admit that her air of demure innocence was astonishing for a girl raised in a place like this.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said. “What will you have?”

  “Beer,” Allison said. “We can’t stay long.”

  “You’ll want to stay till the storm’s over,” she said, “so make the beer last.”

  She brought the beer to them, then sat down at the table, her right hand sliding under the green top to search for and hold Allison’s hand. This was strictly against the rules. Fifi had laid down the law when she opened the place. Christine must not show the slightest affection for any customer, but she disobeyed the rule whenever she was with Allison.

  Morgan leaned forward, his eyes shining. “You sure are pretty tonight, Christine.”

  “Thank you, Johnny,” she said, glancing briefly at Allison. “It’s a new dress.”

  “I thought it was,” Allison said. “I hadn’t seen it before.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Sure I do.”

  She sighed. “I always have to pump you, and your opinion is the only one that matters.”

  Allison wondered if she talked that way to other men. He didn’t think so. At least he hadn’t heard any of them bragging, and they would, he thought, if they had any encouragement from her. She was always cool and distant with the others, and with Allison, too, when there was a crowd.

  He didn’t pretend to understand her, but it had been this way between them from the first time they had met. If it had not been for his bitter memories, he could have fallen in love with Christine. He instinctively liked her, but love was something else.

  “Better start drinking your beer,” she whispered. “Fifi’s coming.”

  Allison ignored his beer and grinned as Fifi tromped across the room, the floor squeaking under her weight. Before she reached their table, he said: “We had a little affair with some Indians this morning, Fifi. You’d better keep a lookout for a while.”

  “Indians?” She snorted contemptuously. “You’re a liar, Allison. All you want to do is keep my mind off your slipping in here to get out of the rain. Well, sir, it’s almost stopped, so finish and git.”

  Allison leaned back in his chair.
He said blandly: “I keep wondering about your name, Fifi. I’ll bet it was Lizzie Glutz. Your real name, I mean.”

  “My name is Fifi Laffite, damn it.”

  Allison laughed. “That’s the first time I ever heard you claim Laffite for your last name, but it might be right. If I remember my history correctly, Jean Laffite was a pirate. I’ll bet you descended from a long line of pirates.”

  Her big hands fisted. “I oughta hit you right in the snoot. My pa wasn’t no pirate.”

  “Where were you born?” Allison asked. “Kalamazoo? Oshkosh? Paducah?”

  “Aw, go to hell,” she snarled, and lumbered back into the kitchen.

  “I don’t know how you do it, Dave,” Christine said. “Nobody else can talk to her the way you do.”

  “I told him a while ago he oughta quit it,” Morgan said, “or she won’t let us come in here no more.”

  “Oh, she won’t keep you from coming in,” Christine said. “She never does anything to stop business.” She glanced quickly at the kitchen door. “The rain stopped, hasn’t it?”

  “I guess it has, Chris.”

  She leaned toward him. “Dave, I want to talk to you outside. Go out and wait along the west side of the house. It’s dark there. I’ll join you in a minute. Johnny, if Fifi comes in and asks about us, tell her Dave went to get the horses and I had to go out back.”

  Morgan nodded. “Sure, I’ll tell her.”

  Allison hesitated, not sure what Christine had in mind, and worried about Morgan. The boy was in love with Christine, but he asked nothing of her. Even harder to understand was his good-natured attitude. He never seemed upset over her obvious affection for Allison.

  “Fifi will raise Cain if she figures out what happened,” Allison said.

  “She won’t,” Christine said. “Hurry.”

  He rose, laid a coin on the table, and went outside. The rain had stopped, but the wind was still cold and damp. He slipped around the corner and waited. Christine came in less than a minute. She put her hands on his shoulders and stood very close to him, breathing hard. Then she said: “Dave, I shouldn’t have done this. It isn’t right for you to have dreams about me.”