by John Jakes
Evidently Big Arm knew. “Bad,” he said.
The line halted at the edge of the trampled dooryard. From horseback, Charles read sign there and in the beaten-down grass at the edge of the homesteader’s small, dying vegetable patch. “I count eight ponies, maybe one more.” Big Arm’s grunt agreed.
“How’s he know that?” one of his men muttered behind him. Charles preferred to keep them in awe of his plains craft; he never explained that Wooden Foot Jackson had taught him everything, and that hardly a day passed when he didn’t remember and use one lesson or another. They didn’t know it was that simple. When he had them whipped into shape he might take some of the mystery out of it, and begin to teach them. Not yet, though.
He sent three two-man teams, dismounted, to search the ground in different locations. He led Magee, Big Arm, and another trooper around the square house, which was made of mud brick with a sodded roof. Tall grasses jutted from the sod, a weed patch against the hot sky.
The stench grew worse. “Smells like cooked meat,” the trooper said. They turned the back corner and saw what remained of the white homesteader, staked out on the ground. Charles wiped his mouth.
“God. They built fires on him.”
Magee, not easily impressed by anything, registered a sick astonishment. “The last one on his chest.” The other soldier rushed away to tall grass and threw up.
Charles pushed Magee. “All right, let’s go back and find a shovel.” Both were eager to get away from the body. Around in front, he discovered Big Arm prodding at the sod house door with his telescope. “For Christ’s sake, don’t go in there until we’re sure it’s safe—”
While he was in mid-sentence, Big Arm pushed the door open and stepped inside. A roar flung him out again, a foot off the ground. He landed on his back amid drifting smoke. A hole in the bosom of his buckskin shirt welled red.
Charles jumped against the front of the house beside the door and flattened. “We’re soldiers. United States Army. Don’t shoot again.”
He listened. Heard breathing. Then a whimper. A shadow passed by him on the ground. A circling vulture.
“Hold your fire. I’m coming in.”
While the others watched, Charles sucked in a breath and stepped into the doorway. “Soldiers,” he said, loudly, as he moved forward in almost impenetrable shadow.
The homesteader’s wife, a girl with auburn hair, lay in a corner amid broken furniture. Torn pieces of clothing were scattered around. She tried to cover her nakedness while her right hand shook under the weight of her pistol. Charles only glanced at her wet thighs, but it was long enough to humiliate her. He didn’t have to ask what they’d done.
Violet eyes filled with tears. “Eulus gave me the gun. I was supposed to save the last bullet for myself. They took the gun away before they—before—is Eulus all right?”
Charles wanted to sink into the ground. “No.”
A kind of mad misery glittered in the violet eyes. Her free hand moved across her thighs, as if to rub away the shameful stains. He thought little of it, trying to get hold of his feelings and organize his mind to handle this.
“Look, I’m sorry. Lie back and I’ll find a blanket to cover you. Then we’ll bring up our wagon to take you—don’t!”
He lunged too late. His flung-out hand trembled in the air a yard from her as she pulled the trigger of the pistol she’d slipped into her mouth.
Magic Magee touched Big Arm’s body with his beaded moccasin. “I’m only a city boy, Lieutenant, but it seems to me this here tracker didn’t know his trade too well.”
Charles stared at the white horizon and bit on his old cigar. “Fucking fool. Fucking savages. Fucking Hancock.” He turned away to hide a typhoon of emotion.
To Shem Wallis, who had tears in his eyes, Magee said, “Going to be a mighty long summer.”
Hancock’s War, the press called the spring expedition, recently concluded. Hancock’s belligerent demonstration-in-force was meant to promote peace; his impulsive burning of the village on the Pawnee Fork insured war. The Plains tribes saw the destruction of tipis, buffalo robes, willow backrests and other personal possessions as a reenactment of Sand Creek and a direct repudiation of the Little Arkansas Treaty.
And they retaliated.
Bands of young Sioux and Cheyennes led by hot-bloods like Pawnee Killer and Scar were pouring into Kansas, attacking homesteads like the one Charles had found, burning stage stations, swooping down on unarmed construction crews of the U.P.E.D. laying track in the desperate race to be first to the hundredth meridian. Between Fort Harker, the temporary railhead, and Fort Hays, an even more primitive post about sixty miles west, the U.P. crews were refusing to work without armed guards.
Down from Sherman at Division came orders assigning cavalry and infantry units to guard the crews. The railroad’s own security force, headed by a former Pinkerton agent named J.O. Hartree, supplemented the Army details. Hartree had a reputation as a killer, but that wasn’t enough to stop the raids. The directors of the railroad screamed for more men, more guns.
Governor Crawford of Kansas screamed for protection of his citizens and started to raise a special state cavalry regiment. Sherman wanted the Army turned loose: “We must not remain on the defensive. We must follow them on all possible occasions. We must clear out the Indians between the Platte and the Arkansas.”
All went well, except for the reaction of the Olive Branchers—these Congressmen, bureaucrats, preachers, journalists who took, the Indian side and blamed every Indian outrage on an earlier one by whites. From Boston pulpits and New York editorial rooms, they spoke powerfully and persuasively. They called the Pawnee Fork burning cowardly and provocative. They printed handbills, held rallies and torchlight parades, circulated memorials and more memorials to be sent to President Johnson. One of the strongest constituents of the Olive Branch faction was Willa’s Indian Friendship Society—a fact Charles tried not to think about.
Before the incident at the homestead, he had taken his detachment into the field with a good feeling. Patrolling the Smoky Hill and hunting Indians beat living in one of the sorry, rat-infested mud huts that passed for housing at Fort Harker. He’d soon realized, however, that a small detachment lacked the firepower necessary to pursue and destroy large roving war parties. What’s more, they didn’t have the authority. They were not supposed to act, only react. The more this sank in, the worse Charles’s attitude became, so that by midsummer he felt as murderous as he had when he discovered the bodies of Boy and Jackson.
Charles and his men had undertaken the sickening chore of burying the homesteaders and checking through their few belongings in hopes of identifying them. They found a Bible, but there was no inscription in it. All they had was one name. Eulus. Ironically, in the face of this kind of butchery, the Olive Branchers were temporarily taking control. Senator Henderson, of Missouri, a powerful member of the peace lobby, was introducing a bill to establish yet one more commission to negotiate permanent peace with the Plains Indians.
Like so many in uniform, Charles felt beleaguered, held back from winning a war steadily taking its toll of innocents like the man Eulus and his wife. Charles believed the peace faction would not prevail forever, nor succeed if they did prevail for a little while. Ultimately the Army would have to be turned loose, with permission to fight to win. Then he’d have his chance to fulfill his vow of vengeance made over the mutilated bodies of Wooden Foot and Boy.
As he headed back to Fort Harker with Big Arm’s body, Charles told himself that he should be thankful. Although his black brunettes were despised by their white brethren, he could have been somewhere a lot worse. With the Seventh Cavalry, for instance.
The Seventh was a regiment already torn by factionalism and racked with trouble. Custer had taken part in Hancock’s expedition and, later, had been sent up the Republican River to chase the Indians. A series of forced marches he ordered started wholesale desertions. One night thirty-five men left. In a fury, Custer sent his brother, Tom,
an adjutant, and a Major Elliott in pursuit, with orders to shoot any man they caught.
The pursuers recovered five, wounding three. Custer denied them medical treatment for a while. One died at Fort Wallace, and Charles heard that Custer had boasted about his ability to make snowbirds think twice before flying. Not all of Custer’s superiors cared for his disciplinary methods.
Just before departing on patrol Charles had heard something else about the Boy General. Apparently he’d left Fort Wallace without permission, dashing through Fort Hays and Fort Harker in order to find his wife, whose health and safety concerned him. There was, in addition to the Indian problem, the threat of a cholera epidemic on the Plains.
Captain Barnes cast his cocked eye at the stout Indian. “Lieutenant August, this here’s your new tracker, Gray Owl.”
Charles’s heart sank. Compared to this hangdog specimen, Big Arm had been a sparkling personality. The Indian was about forty, bundled up in a buffalo robe despite the weather. He had broad, dark cheeks and a nose like a blunt axe blade. Painted buckskin strips bound his braids but beyond that, Charles saw no design or mark to identify his tribe. Certainly the tracker was neither Delaware nor Osage. Some branch of the Sioux, then? Very puzzling. The Sioux were at war.
Noticing Charles’s stare, Barnes said, “He’s Southern Cheyenne. He’s been tracking for the army long as I’ve been out here.”
“I’ll be damned. Don’t tell me he ran off a buffalo herd too?”
“No, but he doesn’t like his people. He won’t say why.”
Charles saw a swift flicker of pain in the tracker’s eyes, or thought he did. He felt peculiar discussing the Indian as if he weren’t there. “Well, come on, Gray Owl. I’ll introduce you to my men.”
“Yes, thank you,” Gray Owl said. Charles nearly fell over. The Cheyenne’s speech was clear and almost accent-free. He must have spent a lot of time among white people. He turned out to be better than Big Arm in one respect. He’d answer, and with more than a few words, when addressed. He had another problem, however. He wasn’t sullen, but he absolutely refused to smile.
“Y’see, Magic,” Charles said to his corporal, “I can’t make him perform if I can’t reach him. To reach him, I have to know something about him. What he wants, what he likes, who he really is. I’ve asked twice about the reason he turned against his tribe. He refuses to say. We’re building a good detachment. I don’t want him spoiling it, the way Big Arm did. We’ve got to break him down. The first step is to crack that stone face. I figure you’re the man to do it.”
“I want to tell you a little story,” Magee said. “But first I have to check on something. The way I understand it, you’ve hung around the forts a while, is that right?”
Gray Owl nodded. He sat cross-legged, wrapped in his buffalo robe, showing as much emotion as a rock from the bottom of a creek.
The summer evening carried a hint of a break in the weather, a slight cooling in the breeze out of the northwest, where purple clouds helped bring on the night. The wind flared the campfire and strewed sparks above it. Charles and his men had agreed to pitch tents on the prairie, between the post and the river, to avoid sleeping in those dark, rank huts, on old mattresses filled with moldy straw, ants, lice, and God knew what else.
“Then maybe you know what this is?” Magee said, whipping out a worn deck of cards. “You’ve seen troopers playing with decks like this, right?”
Another nod.
“Are you sure you know what’s in a deck, though?” He fanned the cards. “The spots, the picture cards? See, there’s four different kinds of kings, four different—”
“I have looked at cards,” Gray Owl interrupted, a flicker of his eyes suggesting annoyance.
“Well, good. Good! I just had to find out, so you’d appreciate the full meaning of this story I’m going to tell you. It’s a good story, because it shows how far you can go in this man’s army if you’ve got plenty of ambition. In fact that’s the name of the story, the Ambitious Noncom.”
Magee knelt in front of Gray Owl. “Now this noncom, he was a mighty quick young fellow named Jack.” He turned over the top card, the jack of diamonds. Wallis and another trooper drifted up to watch. “Jack was ambitious as the devil. He wanted to be first sergeant and soon received the promotion.”
Magee waved the card for the onlookers. Amused, Charles sat smoking and watching the performance.
“Trouble with Jack, though, he had a saucy tongue. He got smart with one of his officers, and they busted him.” He held out the cards. “Lieutenant? Facedown. Anywhere you please.”
Charles took the jack and slid it in the middle of the deck. Magee squared the deck on his palm. “But old Jack, he was still ambitious. He worked hard. Before long, he made sergeant again.”
Magee turned over the top card. The jack of diamonds.
Gray Owl’s eyes closed, a single slow, reptilian blink. It spurred Magee on.
“Poor Jack—spite of all that ambition, he had the common problems of us soldiers. He liked his drop of spirits, and one night he had several drops too many, which got him busted the second time.”
Responding to a nod from Magee, Wallis took the jack from the top and put it into the deck. After the cards were squared, Magee again revealed the jack as the top card.
“Jack fancied the ladies, too. He made an innocent remark that a general’s wife considered fresh, and that got him busted. But he was ambitious.”
Again Magee repeated the effect, managing to produce several blinks from the tracker.
“Sergeant Jack, he got busted so often and climbed back up so often, he was sort of a legend on the Plains. Everybody wanted to be able to spring back like Jack.” He turned over the top card, by now familiar, and placed it facedown again. “Everybody liked Jack’s brand of ambition, which was powerful. And you know what? Pretty soon it rubbed off on the whole Army. Even the trackers.”
He gave Gray Owl the deck with the jack facedown on top. He signed for the Indian to take the card and place it back in the deck. Forehead deeply creased, Gray Owl took the card, held it while he thought, and then carefully slid it in very near the bottom of the deck. Magee took the deck, keeping it in plain sight, and snapped the top card over.
Charles clapped. Wallis whistled. Incredulous, Gray Owl took the jack of diamonds and examined both sides. He bit it lightly with his front teeth. He bent it, waved it, flicked it with a nail. Magee waited.
Gray Owl handed the card back.
And smiled.
A trooper brought more buffalo chips to fling on the fire. Gray Owl’s reticence seemed to melt in the heat of a fascination with Magee. “The shamans of my people would honor you.”
“Shamans?” Magee didn’t know the term. “Do you mean there are Indians who practice hocus-pocus?”
Gray Owl didn’t know hocus-pocus. “Magic? Yes. They have strong medicine. I have seen them change white feathers to white stones. I have seen a shaman’s body travel invisibly from one tipi to another, fifty steps away.”
Magee screwed up his face. “Tunnel,” he announced. “They got to be using a tunnel somehow—”
“And even chop a man’s head off and put it back. Among the Cheyenne who work miracles, you would be a great man. Honored. Feared.”
Magee cast a speculative eye on his deck. Charles said to him, “Keep that in mind if you ever need to save your hair.”
During the week spent at Harker reprovisioning and repairing horse gear, Charles daily expected—wished, anyway—that the mail would bring a letter from Willa. None came. He started two of them himself, disliked the apologetic tone that crept in and tore them up. He dispatched a note to Brigadier Duncan instead, enclosing an eagle feather for little Gus.
The detachment rode out again. The warrior societies kept roving, attacking. The war spirit on the Plains burned as hot as the July sun.
Gray Owl talked to Charles now. Even smiled once in a while. They got along. The tracker was expert, far superior to Big Arm, and followe
d orders without question. Still, Charles wasn’t any closer to the secret of Gray Owl’s abandonment of his people. Until he understood that, he couldn’t confidently manage or entirely trust the Cheyenne.
Three wandering Rees crossed their line of march. The bad-tempered trio complained about a new whiskey ranch that had opened up half a day’s ride south. The proprietors, half-breed brothers, sold guns and unbranded whiskey. One of the Rees had nearly died from too much of the whiskey.
Charles decided the story was true, so the detachment veered away southward. Whiskey ranchers were simply saloons out in the wilderness, set up by unscrupulous men to make a profit on arming the Indians and getting them drunk. The soldiers found the ranch amid some sand hills, overran it by firing a few rounds and took the owners into custody without difficulty.
The firearms the half-breeds sold from their place of business—perhaps it had been a homestead once—were rusty, short-barrel, big-bore Hawkens, from that family’s works in St. Louis. From the condition of the pieces, Charles guessed they might date from the early manufacturing runs of the 1820s. The whiskey for sale was a dark brown fluid, probably grain alcohol laced with red pepper, tobacco juice, and similar hellish ingredients. Even a pilgrim dying of thirst in a desert would think twice about drinking it.
The two ratty traders also sold the favors of a sad, pudgy Comanche woman, who told Gray Owl she’d been abducted from her husband’s lodge in Texas.
When Charles said he intended to send the traders back to Fort Harker and let the Indian Bureau deal with them, the older brother suddenly burst out with a harangue about his fear of jails. Abruptly, he thrust his right hand under his coat. Charles put a bullet through each of his legs before the hand reappeared.
Magee knelt, gingerly lifted the man’s lapel, and pried something from the limp fingers; the man had fainted. Magee held up a roll of bank notes.
Charles examined them. “A bribe. With Confederate bills, the damn fool.” He flung the paper money in the air. The prairie wind shot it upward and whirled it in clouds of worthless wealth. His eye on the bleeding man, he said, “You can never be sure of what a man’s carrying under his coat.”