“I reckon not…” He felt like there was more but let it go. “Picton’s less than two day’s ride from here. His scouts are going to find this camp tomorrow evening or the following morning unless he changes direction. It don’t seem likely that’ll happen. I’m going to try to help these people.”
“Your friend…Standing Elk?”
Henry shook his head. “There aren’t any fighters here. A few boys, and a few men too old to draw a bow.”
“What do you intend to do? I’m with you, regardless.”
“I’ll show you. Might be you can tell me if I’m being foolish.”
5
The camp was set close to the bluffs in the crook made by their sharp bend to the northeast. A narrow but fast running stream hugged the contour of the rocky face. Lodges were scattered about; a lot less than there should have been for how many people there were. Henry guessed families were sharing lodges. Something he would have found unlikely just four years prior.
When Henry and John neared the camp, Henry pointed to the women laboring over holes they were digging with knives and broken pieces of lodge pole.
John stopped and surveyed the women. “You’re going to try to tumble their horses? You’re going to have to dig a lot of holes.”
“Yes. And I’ve got a few lengths of rope I thought I’d use to trip some of them up.”
“You might get a few, if you conceal it well enough, but Picton has more than sixty men— experienced men who can ride and shoot. How far are the holes from the base of the bluffs?”
“A little farther than my rifle can shoot. I figured I’d aim at the ones who make it through, try to make every shot count.”
John removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “We should try and get these Indians away from here.”
“There’s nowhere to go, and no way to get them there if there was.”
John dismounted and walked over to where a young woman was digging a hole in the stony soil with a paddle-shaped piece of driftwood. She looked up at him questioningly, and he gave her a reassuring smile. He stared down at the hole for a moment, then looked back at Henry. “Tell them to dig the holes smaller and closer together. And have them concentrate mostly on the south end and work their way to the north. Picton will almost certainly ride straight on from the south.”
They rode the rest of the way into the camp. The old men and the seven young braves were repairing arrows and talking animatedly. They fell silent and stopped what they were doing, eyeing John suspiciously as he dismounted. Henry climbed down from Harriet and they turned their attention to him, looking at him with something close to awe. He put a hand on John’s shoulder and said, “Néséne.”
“What does that mean?” John asked quietly.
“I said you were my friend.”
“Am I?...your friend?”
“I reckon.”
The group looked dubious but returned to their work. After a moment a boy of about thirteen rose and walked up to Henry. He held the previously broken war-club. It had been repaired. A smooth, heavy rock from the stream had been seated and bound to the carved wood handle. He held the hammer out to Henry and spoke in Cheyenne: “I am Little Mouth. This belonged to my father. He was a great warrior and hunter. He is there,” the boy cocked his head once toward the sky then stood silently with the hammer held out in both hands. “You will defeat the white warriors with this.”
Henry stared at the hammer but made no move to take it. The boy lowered his eyes. He was clearly disappointed, but he stayed where he was, arms outstretched.
After a long moment Henry took the club. The boy smiled brightly, then turned and ran back to the group. There was laughter and exclamations.
“This location would be easily defensible if you had adequate weapons and a dozen good men with rifles. Nestled where it is, in the bend of these bluffs, Picton can only come at it from one direction.”
Henry regarded John seriously. “Do you reckon they’ll lose their taste for it if we kill ten or fifteen of them on their way in?”
“No. No, I do not. Your weakness will be apparent. They are going to kill you and everyone else here. Where are they camped?”
“South, along these bluffs. Forty miles back, give or take…unless they’ve been riding hard. But he’s been keeping near regular days, so I don’t have reason to believe they have been.”
John turned and climbed back on his horse. He looked down at Henry, who wore a slightly bewildered expression.
“How did you get that scar?”
Henry ran his hand over his stubbly left cheek, letting his fingers glide over the smooth, irregular line where no hair would grow. “Tip of the overseer’s whip. I was a still a boy.”
John looked out at the horizon. “My family never kept slaves. Not even my grandfather’s grandfather. I truly believe the practice to be unconscionable. Still, up until now I have never regarded a negro in the same way that I would a white man. It isn’t a subject I ever put any thought into, it’s only…circumstances. I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by men of wealth and purpose, and have never met a finer or more noble man than you, Henry.” He twisted around and retrieved an envelope from his saddlebags. “Would you do something for me?”
“If I can.”
“If you survive this, would you post this letter for me?” He held the letter out toward Henry.
“What are you going to do?”
“I have to cut off the head. I’m going to tell Frank Picton that I have reconsidered my position, then I am going to shoot him. With him dead, this will end. For the present, at least.”
“I reckon they’ll kill you.”
“It’s nothing more than I deserve. And if my death means these people are spared, then perhaps it would be a small measure of atonement. I’d like to think so.”
Henry wondered if there was such a thing.
“Will you post the letter?”
He took the offered envelope. “I will. If I can.”
John removed the Burnside and the bundle of cartridges from underneath his bedroll. “Here, I won’t be needing this, but you might.” He turned the horse. “Good luck to you, Henry. And thank you, for what you did for Clara.”
Nineteen
1
“Scouts are coming back. Got another rider with them, Colonel,” Bill Taylor said, while handing the field glasses to Frank Picton.
Picton raised one bushy eyebrow. “Is that so?” he said, taking the glasses and raising them northward.
After a long moment he muttered, “Curious indeed. It appears our discontented young officer has returned, Mister Taylor. It is a world of wonders.”
“The men won’t want to follow him, Colonel.”
“The men will do as I tell them. If the…ahh, lieutenant, has had a change of heart, he will be permitted to demonstrate it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll stop here for the night. Bring me my southern whiskey. And have a pull, yourself.”
2
Fifteen minutes later John rode into camp under the curious and mostly contemptuous eyes of Picton’s men. Conversations ceased, and tasks were momentarily forgotten as he passed. Frank Picton was several yards away from the bustle and dust of the newly struck camp, seated in a folding chair under the only tree in the immediate vicinity. He had a wool blanket on his lap with a book lying on it. In his left hand he held a small tin cup, he lifted it in John’s direction. “The prodigal son returns.”
John stopped about fifteen feet away and dismounted. He smiled, took two steps toward Picton, and drew his sidearm.
“Beware the ides of March,” Picton said, while dropping the cup from his left hand and bringing up the ten gauge coach gun with his right. The reports were nearly simultaneous; the crack of John’s pistol shot was swallowed by the roar of the big double-barrel.
John was pushed backward, his mid-section ripped open, his bowels spilling from the wound and onto the dusty ground as he landed in a sitting position with his
legs splayed. He vomited up blood through his nose and mouth, then lifted his hand and looked at the pistol with dazed and cloudy eyes. Picton stood, blood staining his red shirt a darker maroon. He dropped the shotgun and took a few staggering steps toward John. John caught the movement; his eyes cleared, and his confused expression transformed to one of rage. With great effort he leveled the pistol at Picton. Picton’s eyes flicked quickly over John’s shoulder just as another shot thundered. The front of John’s head exploded outward, bits of bloody skull and brain flecked Picton’s trousers. John Elliot’s lifeless body crumpled ungracefully to the rocky Dakota soil.
Picton couldn’t remember the man’s name. He was a southerner. Was it Emerson?…Henderson? Or perhaps it was Denison? “Thank you, young man. Now please find Doctor Paulson and…never mind, here he comes now.”
John’s bullet carved a notch in the left side of Picton’s neck. Richard Paulson, the veterinarian turned field-surgeon, told him that if the bullet had been an inch to the right it likely would have severed his jugular vein, then minced his spine before it blew out the back of his neck.
After Paulson finished bandaging the wound and took his leave, Bill Taylor asked Picton how he knew John was set on assassinating him.
“I knew no such thing,” Picton said. “It’s merely prudent to be prepared for more than one eventuality. My bottle of whiskey and a second cup were every bit as ready as the shotgun.”
Twenty
1
The sun was sinking low in the west as Henry sat perched on the rocky outcrop thirty feet above the camp. Using a stunted pine that was stoically clinging to the thin soil of the outcrop as cover, he watched Picton’s scouts through his field glasses. Two of the scouts were Pawnee, the other two, white men. They were less than a half-mile to the south, at the base of the bluffs. One of the whites had field glasses of his own and was looking through them in the direction of the camp. After a moment he passed the glasses to one of the Pawnee. A short but animated conversation followed, and soon they turned their horses and headed back to the south.
If John killed Picton, these men shouldn’t be here, Henry thought. John is dead and Picton is coming.
He was saddened by the likelihood of John’s death, but it was Clara he mourned. She hadn’t left his thoughts since John had arrived with the news. In the short time Henry knew her, he grew to love her; not in the way a man loves a woman, but in the way he imagined a father must love his daughter, though he was far too young to be hers.
He scrabbled down the side of the bluff to where Harriet was tethered by the creek, untied her, and walked her over to where Spotted Bird sat sharpening a knife on a flat stone. The old man’s gnarled fingers worked the blade across the stone with practiced precision. Outside of the seven young braves, who were working with their bows in seclusion behind a thicket of cottonwood trees across the stream, the rest of the camp had resumed their normal routine—at least under casual inspection. The truth was, that morning four women packed up a lodge and took one of the horses—presumably it belonged to one of them—and their children, and fled. The remaining women and old men stole fearful glances at each other and paid close attention to Henry’s every move. He often saw them scanning the horizon, most likely with hope their men would return
from the hunt. Only the young children seemed unaffected.
“They’re coming,” Henry said in Cheyenne. “Tomorrow. I will return soon.”
Spotted Bird nodded his head without looking up from his work.
Henry mounted Harriet and rode out to follow the scout’s back-trail. He didn’t expect the attack to come before the morning—more likely in the afternoon—because the scouts were almost surely several hours ahead of Picton and the rest of his men. It could be as late as midnight before they even reached him to share their discovery.
But he had to know for certain. What if Picton and his men were only two or three miles south of the camp? As unlikely as he thought it was, it was still possible. If they were that close, they may not wait for tomorrow. They could attack before the sun completely dropped over the horizon.
He guided Harriet down the middle of the stream to avoid the holes the women had dug and then concealed with sagebrush, grass and twigs. It was good work—three day’s worth. If you didn’t know they were there, they were almost invisible. He decided he’d follow the back-trail for two hours. If he didn’t come upon Picton’s camp by then, he would assume Picton stuck to his usual pattern and was well behind his scouts.
2
When Henry returned it was still two hours before midnight. The seven young braves and some of the old men were dancing and singing by the light of a fire. War dance, Henry thought desolately. He noticed Spotted Bird wasn’t among them. Henry sat far away from the sacred event and ate some of the stew the women had saved for him. It was a bitter tasting brew made from boiling certain roots and seed-pods for hours until they were soft enough to eat. It’s what they were cooking when he first saw their smoke from afar. Not tanning hides, but cooking the only food they had available to them.
He was at odds with himself. He wanted to send the women and children a few miles to the northeast to wait out the attack. But if he did, the camp would look abandoned—or nearly so.
If Picton believed there was only a handful of Indians in the camp, he might not send in his full strength, or worse, think something was amiss. Henry couldn’t have him sending men out into the surrounding area. He needed Picton to come at the camp with all of his men and at a full charge. Henry cursed to himself, something he rarely did. He wasn’t a soldier, not a dark warrior as his Cheyenne name would imply. He wished John would have stayed. John was a soldier. Henry knew he’d left because there was little hope that two men with rifles and a few boys and old men with bows could turn Picton’s attack. It was bitter medicine. He would talk with Spotted Bird. Perhaps Spotted Bird could pick twenty women to take all of the children away from the camp. It wouldn’t make any difference if Henry and the others failed; the children would die just the same as if they would have remained in camp. But it was a chance. And it would still leave over thirty people to make a show of numbers for Picton’s field glasses—thirty people who were almost certain to die.
Tossing out almost half of his stew, Henry rose and walked to the lodge Spotted Bird shared with his granddaughter’s family. He was curious but wouldn’t dishonor Spotted Bird by asking why he wasn’t attending the ceremony. Instead, he explained what he wanted. Spotted Bird listened carefully, then rose and began walking through the camp from lodge to lodge. By midnight, eighteen women and all of the children save the seven young braves were walking northeast along the stream.
Henry removed the Spencer from its scabbard, and a box of ammunition from his saddlebags, then walked back to Spotted Bird’s lodge. He spent the next thirty minutes having Spotted Bird load, unload, then reload the rifle. The elderly Indian’s malformed hand was surprisingly dexterous, and he mastered the task swiftly. Henry planned to fire the seven-shot Spencer empty, then fire John’s single-shot Burnside while Spotted Bird reloaded the Spencer. He rarely missed, even when shooting at a moving target, and his plan was simple enough. He hoped that if he shot enough of the men who made it past the holes, the rest might turn back before they ever got the chance to kill an Indian.
3
Dawn.
Henry, Spotted Bird, and an old man named Fast Horse watched Little Mouth and the other young braves practice with the bows. All of their faces were painted for war. The old men, also painted, watched intently. There were seven boys and only five bows. Spotted Bird and Fast Horse would choose who used the bows, and who would stay at the thicket with the old men to protect the women with knives and clubs.
Once it was decided—Henry thought only two of the older boys actually shot well—and the arrows divided among them, Henry had the chosen five follow him. There were several small outcroppings at different heights above the camp, four of them provided fair cover. Two were low enough—ab
out fifteen feet—for the inexperienced bowmen to be within their range. He pointed at these and instructed the two most accurate bowmen to climb up to them and wait for the attack. The remaining three—including Little Mouth—he staged among the lodges. There was little cover otherwise.
Once the bowmen were in place, Henry helped Spotted Bird climb up about thirty feet to an outcropping almost directly above the cottonwood thicket. Once Spotted Bird was situated, Henry climbed back down and collected the two rifles and all of the cartridges for them: twenty-seven for the Burnside and thirty-three for the Spencer. He looked down at Emmet Dawson’s pistol on his hip, and without any deliberation he set down the rifles and ammunition, removed the belt, and walked over to where Little Mouth was sitting against a lodge. Henry took the Colt from its holster and removed the percussion caps, then he showed a wide-eyed Little Mouth how to cock and fire the pistol. He explained the best he could in Cheyenne that the pistol should be used at close range. He picked up several rocks and threw them about twenty feet to emphasis this point. Satisfied that Little Mouth understood, Henry replaced the percussion caps, slid the pistol into the holster, and showed Little Mouth how to fasten the belt.
Little Mouth frowned when the belt simply slid down his thighs and landed as a ring around his feet. Henry chuckled and gestured for Little Mouth to give it to him. Little Mouth stepped out of the belt, bent, and picked it up. He looked at it but made no move to give it back to Henry. Henry held out his hand, and after a moment the boy reluctantly handed it over. Henry drew his knife and Little Mouth took a step back. Henry smiled and quickly drilled two more holes in the belt with the tip of the blade. Still smiling, he handed the belt back to Little Mouth. This time it fit.
Henry gathered up the rifles, ammunition and his canteen, and climbed back up to the outcropping. The space was tight for both him and Spotted Bird, but they were well-concealed behind a wagon-sized boulder that had broken away and fallen from somewhere farther up the bluff.
In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree Page 25