In the Shadow of the Hills

by Madeline Baker

“You might at least remove the irons from his hands,” my mother remarked when he locked me up. “After all, he is just a boy.”

  “Some boy,” the sheriff retorted. “I heard he knifed two of Chivington’s men.”

  “Be that as it may, Sheriff...?”

  “Wagner,” he supplied. “Mordecai Wagner.”

  “Sheriff Wagner, I see no reason to keep my son in chains while he is confined to a cell.”

  “Listen, lady, this is my jail, and I’ll run it as I damn well please!” Wagner shouted. “Now, visiting hours is over, so get the hell out of here.”

  “You are the rudest man I have ever met,” my mother replied icily, and lifting her skirts, she swept out of the jailhouse.

  Muttering an obscenity, the sheriff dropped his bulk into a sagging brown leather chair and closed his eyes.

  Feeling somewhat like a lost sheep, I surveyed my surroundings. The cell was small, dark, and cold. A cot topped by a straw tick and a thin gray blanket stood against the far wall. A foul-smelling slop jar stood in one corner. A square window, heavily barred, looked out into the alley than ran behind the building.

  It was a dismal place for a boy born to the wild. And yet, as much as I yearned for my freedom, at that moment I wanted nothing so much as a bath. The Cheyenne bathed every day, summer and winter, and I was long overdue. My clout was filthy, my body begrimed with layers of mud and dust acquired on the long march from Sand Creek.

  I stared down at what was left of the little finger on my left hand. The stump was red and ugly, but there was no infection, thanks to the quick-thinking trooper who had cauterized the wound.

  I glanced at Mordecai Wagner. I did not want to ask this man, or any vehoe, for anything. But I could hardly abide my own stink.

  Feeling my gaze, the sheriff opened his eyes. “You want something, boy?”

  “A bucket of water.”

  “Water?” he asked, clearly surprised. “What the hell for?”

  “I want to wash.”

  “Wash!” he exclaimed, chuckling. “Ain’t no soap in the world strong enough to wash that Injun stink off ya, boy.”

  Still chuckling, he pulled a cigar out of the humidor on the corner of his desk. Leaning back in his chair, he chewed on the end of the stogie. I could tell by the look in his little pig eyes that he was contemplating some way to devil me, and I was right.

  Minutes later, he heaved his fat ass from the chair and unlocked my cell. Then, with a gun in one ham-like fist and a hefty two-by-four in the other, he entered my cell.

  “Down on your knees, Red Stick,” he demanded gruffly, and when I failed to obey, he rammed the end of the two-by-four into my stomach.

  I immediately doubled over, choking back the bitter vomit that rose in my throat, and as I did so, he struck me across the back, hard. Gasping for air, I dropped to my hands and knees.

  “Lesson one,” Wagner purred. “You do what I say when I say it. Now, you just stay there until I tell you to move, savvy?”

  Wagner, Polanski, and Casey, I thought bitterly. Three bad apples off the same rotten tree.

  That bastard, Wagner, made me stay on my hands and knees the whole damn day, and every time I so much as twitched, he smacked me with the flat of that two-by-four until my back and shoulders were ridged with long red welts.

  Once, I reared back on my heels, toying with the idea of lunging at him, only to find myself staring into the yawning maw of a cocked Colt.45.

  “Come on, boy, make your move,” Wagner challenged. “I’d be pleased as hell to shoot you down and get your stink outta my jail.”

  He wasn’t bluffing, and I wasn’t ready to die, so I resumed my cowed position on the floor, hating myself for being too much of a coward to stand up and die like a warrior.

  Time dragged. My arms, neck, shoulders and back ached with the strain of remaining in one position for so long. Gradually, the ache turned to a dull, throbbing pain. Finally, at sundown, the sheriff let me get up.

  “I wouldn’t mention this to anyone,” he warned as he shoved me into the cell and locked the door, “or you might get shot trying to escape, if you take my meaning.”

  The next morning, after a meager breakfast of lumpy, lukewarm mush, Wagner unlocked the cell door and motioned me outside. Prodding me with the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun, he marched me around to the back of the jail. For a tense moment, I thought he was going to stand me against the wall and blow my brains out, but he only jerked a callused thumb toward a towering pile of wood.

  “Pick up that there axe, real slow,” he growled, “and get to work. And don’t try nothing funny with that axe, or I’ll splatter your guts from here to Christmas.”

  Sullen-faced, I did as bidden. I had seen what a ten-gauge could do at Sand Creek.

  Cold as it was, I worked up quite a sweat in the next few hours. Noon time came and while I continued to make little logs out of big ones, Wagner gobbled down his mid-day meal, which consisted of a thick steak smothered in onions, fried potatoes, beans, and a can of peaches, topped off by a fat cigar. Then, while I stacked cord after cord, Wagner warmed himself with a couple of long pulls from a bottle of redeye.

  I was swinging the axe again when a man in a clean white apron strolled by. “Oughta string him up, Sheriff,” the man called cheerfully.

  “Thinkin’ about it, Charlie,” Wagner replied. “Thinkin’ about it.”

  Two girls in matching frilly pink dresses stopped to watch me work.

  “Imagine, a real Indian,” the first girl remarked, her blue eyes as wide as saucers as she stared at my naked torso.

  “Isn’t it awful?” the second girl said, giggling. “He looks so wild and ferocious.”

  Arms wrapped around each other’s waists, they skipped off down the road.

  A fat matron tottered by, her nose in the air. “Disgusting,” she muttered, loud enough for Wagner to hear. “Simply disgusting, letting that savage run around practically naked!”

  “Get along, Emma Simpson,” Wagner called, “or I’ll strip off his clout, too.”

  “Vulgar man!” the woman exclaimed, and hurried down the street to safety.

  My fingers were blistered, my palms bleeding, when Mordecai Wagner called it a day and herded me back into my cell. Aching in every muscle, I stretched out on the cold wooden floor, irritated by the clanking rattle of chains that accompanied my every move.

  The sun went down and the interior of my cell faded from gray to black. A dog growled in the alley. Piano music echoed in the distance, accompanied by raucous laughter and a woman’s high-pitched squeal. I had rarely felt so alone in my whole life, and I was contemplating a dismal future when I heard a noise at the window.

  Wary of treachery, I glanced over my shoulder to see a dark silhouette outlined behind the bars. Rising, I moved cautiously toward the opening.

  A young woman wrapped in a long black cloak stood in the alley, peering into my cell. Tendrils of flaxen-colored hair peeked from beneath the hood of her cloak. Her eyes were light, blue or gray, I couldn’t be sure. She smiled uncertainly as she thrust a brown paper bag through the bars.

  A pleasant fragrance wafted from the sack and when I opened it, I found several thick slices of roast beef, half a loaf of bread still warm from the oven, two red apples, and a dozen molasses cookies.

  “Why?” I blurted the question without thinking, puzzled that a stranger would bring me food. How could she have known I had not eaten since early that morning?

  “I saw you chopping wood this afternoon, and I felt sorry for you,” she whispered. “I...I know the sheriff can be nasty sometimes. And sometimes, when he’s drinking, he forgets to feed his prisoners.”

  “How could you know that?”

  She didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was low and full of shame. “He’s my father.”

  I stared at her, speechless. It seemed impossible that a gross, mean-spirited man like Mordecai Wagner could have fathered such a lovely child.

  “I don’t think you�
��ll have to put up with him much longer,” she murmured, and hurried away, leaving me to wonder if she was hinting that I would soon be released from jail, or warning me that I was about to be hanged.

  * * *

  Even in jail, I managed to hear some of what was being said about the massacre. News of the fighting at Sand Creek spread quickly among red and white alike. Many of the vehoe believed that Chivington’s surprise attack would so demoralize the tribes that they would tuck their tails between their legs and head for the hills, thus bringing peace to the plains at last.

  But they were wrong. Dead wrong. The Cheyenne sent the war pipe to their allies, the Brule Sioux and the Arapaho, who were camped along the headwaters of the Republican River. And our allies struck with a vengeance, cutting a wide and bloody swath of death and destruction across the plains of Montana and Dakota.

  I would dearly have loved to be riding with my red brothers. Sun Seeker and Quiet Antelope lay dead along the banks of Sand Creek, and their blood cried out for vengeance.

  But such was not to be. Instead, I was a prisoner, held captive in the white man’s iron house.

  My mother came to see me the next day. I hardly recognized her. Gone was the loose-fitting doeskin dress and moccasins she had worn in the village. Now, she wore a long-sleeved dress of some soft blue material that clung to her trim figure, showing off a tiny waist and full breasts. Shiny black boots peeked out from beneath her full skirt. Gone, too, were the twin braids she had worn, and now her dark brown hair was piled high on her head, giving her a regal appearance.

  With a shock, I realized that my mother was a lot younger and a lot prettier than I had ever imagined. I suddenly understood why my father had desired her, and why he had put up with her bad temper and shrewish tongue.

  There was revulsion in her eyes when she looked at me. I guess I couldn’t blame her for being disgusted by my appearance. I know I was. I was dirty from head to toe. My hair was a tangled mass, my clout was torn, my moccasins were covered with mud.

  We had never been close, my mother and I. Now, with her standing there looking like a fine lady and me looking like a dirty street beggar, the gulf between us seemed wider than the Missouri River and twice as deep. But it was more than the disparity in our outward appearance. I did not want her for my mother. And she did not want me for a son.

  We had nothing to say to each other save for the empty phrases that strangers toss back and forth, and a heavy silence fell between us. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to stay in this ugly little town because of me, that she could go off and live her own life, the kind of life she had talked about so often, but I couldn’t find the words. Maybe, deep down, I was afraid she would do just that.

  “Is he treating you all right?’ she asked after a while. There was an obvious note of disdain in her voice, revulsion in the glance she threw in Wagner’s direction.

  I glanced at the sheriff, saw the veiled warning in his eyes.

  “I guess so,” I replied sullenly.

  Katherine nodded curtly, accepting my lie as the truth. “You won’t have to stay here much longer,” she promised. “Do you want anything?”

  I wanted a lot of things. A bath. A decent meal. My freedom. Slowly, I shook my head. “No.”

  “Very well,” she said, and left the jail.

  I spent the next morning on my hands and knees, scrubbing the jailhouse floor. And when that was done to Wagner’s satisfaction, he made me wash the raw plank floor in the cellblock. I couldn’t say for a fact, but I’d have been willing to bet that those floors hadn’t seen soap or water since the jail had been built.

  Lunch time came and went pretty much as it had the day before, with Wagner stuffing his fat face while I white-washed the interior of the jail. The place fairly glowed by the time I crawled into bed that night.

  The third day I was back outside again, chopping the last of the firewood stacked behind the jail, exercising muscles I never knew I had until they began to knot up on me.

  The fourth day was the worst. The sheriff’s brother owned the livery stable at the north end of town, and Wagner hustled me down there and put me to work shoveling horseshit. Passersby nodded their approval.

  A few voiced their thoughts aloud.

  “I see you finally found some suitable work for that redskin, Mort!”

  “Don’t know what smells worse, Sheriff, that Injun or the shit he’s standing in!”

  It took the better part of the day to muck out the barn, the stalls, and the four corrals located behind the barn. And when I finished that, Wagner’s brother suggested I scrub out the feed bins and the water troughs.

  It was going on sundown when I finished, and I was dog-tired. I felt like a dog, too, obediently trailing at Wagner’s heels as he ambled down the main street toward the jailhouse.

  Mordecai Wagner was in fine spirits and he stopped here and there to pass the time of day with the local citizens. It was humiliating, having to stand there in chains, my whole body reeking of sweat and manure, while people gaped at me. I was pretty sure I was the first live Indian most of them had seen up close, and I must have made a hell of an impression, half-naked as I was, and splattered with dirt and horseshit.

  Sitting in my cell that night, I wondered what had become of my mother. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days and it crossed my mind that she might have decided she was better off without a half-breed son and skipped town for greener pastures.

  The next day I was back at the livery stable, grooming horses while Mordecai Wagner and his brother sat in the shade, swilling beer and telling crude jokes. A couple of the stable mounts looked to be in pretty good shape, and I probably would have swung aboard one and made a break for it if it hadn’t been for the irons hobbling my feet, and the shotgun lovingly cradled in the sheriff’s arms.

  Apparently Wagner ran out of things for me to do after that because I spent the next two days locked in my cell, restlessly pacing back and forth as I wondered what was to become of me.

  Most of the townspeople were in favor of a quick hanging, contending that, white blood or not, I was Cheyenne through and through and therefore not fit to live. Others thought I should be shipped off to some distant prison where I could do no further harm to decent white folks. Neither choice was particularly appealing but of the two, I thought I would prefer hanging. That, at least, would be quickly over and infinitely better than a life behind bars, which was no life at all.

  Nights, I lay on the cold wooden floor, staring at the small square of sky visible through the narrow barred window of my cell. Sleeping, I dreamed of killing. Armed with a knife, I ran through a column of bluecoats, indifferent to their bullets as I drove my blade into their pale flesh, reveling in the sticky warmth of their blood as it flowed over my hands, laughing as they fell at my feet, their pale eyes glazed with pain, their mouths slack in death.

  Wagner’s daughter came by late each night, always bringing me something to eat: fresh-baked bread, apples, cookies, fried chicken, slices of roast beef. She was tall for a girl, big-boned, like her old man, but pretty, for all that.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked one night.

  “I told you why. My father...I know how cruel he can be.”

  “Do you bring food to all his prisoners?”

  Her gaze slid away from mine. “Not all.”

  “Why me?”

  Even in the dark, I could see the flush rise in her cheeks.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Amanda Lynn.”

  “It’s pretty.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Black Wolf.”

  She regarded me for a moment, her head tilted to one side. “It suits you,” she decided.

  She was wearing a dark blue bonnet, and she fiddled with the ribbons. “I’ve been watching you every day,” she confessed shyly.

  “Really? Why?”

  “I’d better go.”

  “Amanda...”

  “Goodnight, Black Wolf,” sh
e whispered, and disappeared from sight.

  I stared into the darkness. Watching me? Why?

  It was a mystery I didn’t unravel until much later.

  The next morning, my mother showed up with a court order authorizing my release. How she managed to win my freedom I never knew, but she told me I had been released into her custody and that I was not, under any circumstances, to go anywhere without her. My presence in town was most unwelcome, she said, and there were many men who would not hesitate to shoot me on sight.

  Under the malevolent gaze of a dozen men, my mother and I left the jail and went directly to a small two-bedroom house located at the end of a quiet side street. It was the first such building I had ever seen. The main room was a parlor and kitchen combined. There wasn’t much in the way of furnishings, just a lumpy brown sofa, a table, and two ladder-back chairs, a cast iron stove, and a large cupboard that took up most of one wall.

  I stared out the window, fascinated by the clear glass that let the light in while keeping dust and insects out.

  No sooner had we entered the place than my mother began heating several pots of water on the stove. When they began to boil, she rummaged in the cupboard for a towel and a lump of yellow soap.

  “Get out of those clothes,” she said, pouring the hot water into a zinc tub she had pulled from behind a screen.

  “What for?” I asked, eyeing the steaming water with suspicion.

  “Because I said so,” she retorted. “You’re going to take a hot bath with real soap, and then I’m going to get you into some decent clothes.”

  “No.”

  “Listen to me, young man!” she snapped. “You get out of that filthy clout now, or I shall undress you and bathe you myself!”

  Muttering under my breath, I turned my back to her, removed my clout and moccasins and stepped gingerly into the tub. I had never had a hot bath before. It seemed to drain all the strength from my limbs, leaving me feeling limp and lazy, and I decided then and there that I much preferred the chill invigorating water of a mountain stream to the enervating waters of the white man’s tub.

  While I was washing, my mother gathered up my clout and moccasins and tossed them into the fireplace. While they burned, she unwrapped several packages, disclosing a pair of black whipcord britches, a blue wool shirt with long sleeves, a set of long handles, and a pair of heavy black shoes.