They both knew the problem would not be solved while the Indian lived. When the Indian had disappeared along with the antelope and the buffalo, when the whiteman could no longer be reminded that he had wiped out a whole breed of man …
At that moment Steiner wished that he had abandoned the West. He should have shucked the West along with his uniform, gone back East where it was possible to lead a civilized life with books and pretty women.
Now the Sioux was talking. It was as though the warmth of the cabin had at last succeeded in loosening his tongue. He spoke to Sammy, but his eyes were on Steiner. It was the agent whom he had to convince. Now he was pleading for his people, no longer playing the proud warrior. He desperately wanted help for his people ... in this case the band of Cheyenne somewhere to the south. Sammy began translating, putting the Indian’s eloquent Lakota into eloquent English until finally Steiner’s nerve seemed to crack under the weight of it all and he cried: ‘All right, all right, Sammy. For Christ’s sake, you don’t have to labor the point, man. We’ll get help to them somehow.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better if they could come here, boss?’ Sammy asked. ‘They’re scared. They know that the soldiers at the fort don’t want them in the vicinity. They know Brevington and his merry men are searching the country for any Indians they can find. If they were here under the American flag, they’d feel safe.’
‘No,’ said Steiner very definitely. ‘Not here. We’ll go to them, Sammy. We have to.’
‘It’ll take some doing,’ said Sammy. ‘Maybe it’s not even possible. The weather’s getting worse by the day.’
‘We have to try. There’s women and children there. We’ll pack a sled with supplies. We’ll take them a US flag they can sit under. Nobody would touch them with the Stars and Stripes over them.’ He hesitated and said: ‘Just the same, I don’t feel too damned happy about giving an amnesty to a bunch of renegade Sioux.’
Sammy kept his mouth shut. He had got what he wanted – supplies to the People.
‘When do we start?’ he asked.
‘First light,’ said Steiner. ‘Give this fellow some blankets and let him bed down here. Is he strong enough to guide us back?’
Sammy spoke to the Sioux. The man grunted and Sammy said: ‘He’ll do it.’
Chapter Eleven
When a man like Hickok demanded breakfast before he went out to do a job, he got what he wanted. Bacon and beans went into the pan an hour before daylight. Shortly after, it was washed down by scalding hot coffee. With his mouth full, McAllister explained what he intended.
His main aim was to get his precious stallion back. Meting justice out to the thieves was a bonus which chance might offer them. He was going ahead and would be in position by daylight to lift his own horse. What he wanted Hickok to do was bring these two horses to the near-end of the break in which the outlaws’ horses were penned. He would find sufficient shelter for them there where they could be hidden from Lawson and the others if they came for their own horses. After Hickok had tied the horses, he could work his way down the break and be in position by first light to cover McAllister when he made a break for it on Caesar’s back.
‘Ain’t you forgetting one thing, Rem?’ Hickok asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘For one, Lawson can shoot the eye out of gnat.’
‘I’m not forgetting it, Jim. Can you think of any other way of making sure Dom don’t ride off on my horse. If he does that, neither of us could risk a shot at him for fear of hitting the stud.’
‘Maybe Dom’ll have the same qualm,’ said Hickok dryly. ‘Just remember, I don’t see so good with my eyes this way.’
‘Just be damn sure you don’t shoot me,’ McAllister said. A thought hit him and he cursed himself for not thinking of it before. ‘Jim, is the snow playing hell with your eyes?’
Calmly, Hickok said: ‘Let’s say it don’t help.’
They saddled the horses together. McAllister left his rifle in the saddleboot. If he was up on Caesar bareback, he did not want to be encumbered by a rifle. They killed the fire. Hickok said: ‘Time’s getting on. I’ll come with you now so you can ride and save a little time.’
It seemed like a good idea. McAllister said: ‘All right, let’s go.’ Outside the snow had stopped falling and the surface of the snow on the ground was hardened by the extreme cold of the night. They rode their horses a good way before the surface broke suddenly beneath the animals’ hard hooves. Cursing a little, they dismounted to get their horses out of the soft snow. They sank deep themselves, fought their horses out on to a firmer footing and then promptly fell into a deep drift. Now, McAllister took the lead on foot and broke trail. It was getting dangerously near daylight by the time they led the horses down into the break. At this far end from the house, they found a fairly sheltered spot where some dwarf conifers grew and where snow-laden boulders lay strewn. They tied the horses and Hickok urged McAllister to hurry ahead or he would be caught in the open by daylight.
McAllister at once started down the break and pretty soon came to the loose horses. He found that he could not climb out of the break and avoid them, though he wanted to, for if he disturbed them they could alarm the men in the cabin. He stopped as they stirred uneasily at his approach, and spoke to them in a low and, he hoped, reassuring voice. The sorrel looked as if he did not like mankind in general and McAllister in particular. He kicked up his heels and whickered loudly and McAllister mentally slew him a few times. He hurried over the brush barricade, which was now plastered with snow, and got among some pines to the left of the mouth of the break. From here he could clearly see two sides of the cabin and the shed. Smoke trickled from the stone chimney. He thought he heard a man’s voice, muffled, but could not be sure. He began edging his way through the pines, watching the cabin carefully the whole time. Pretty soon, he had the shed between himself and the cabin. Getting to his feet he began to tread his laborious way through the snow to the rear of the shed.
As he approached it, he was glad to see that it was not in the best of repair. It was constructed crudely of thick, upright planks of wood, green and warped. He supposed it provided some kind of shelter for the horse inside, but he reckoned it would still be pretty draughty. He put his eye to a wide crack between planks and saw at once that Caesar was aware of his presence. The horse was standing within a few feet of him, head up and ears forward.
McAllister drew his gun and used it as a lever to prise the gap wider. As he did so, the stallion rumbled his greeting. If they had not heard the sound in the cabin, they must have been deaf.
In spite of the cold, he started to sweat. He swore a little. The planks might be green and warped, but they seemed immovable. He put the gun away, gripped the edge of a plank with both hands and bore his weight back from it. Nails screamed as they began to loosen. He brought the flat of one foot up against the wall of the shed to increase his leverage. With an ear-splitting crack, the plank came free in his hands and he fell back headlong into the snow.
As he hit the snow, so he heard the crack of a rifle.
As he staggered to his feet, he thought he heard a muffled shout or two from the cabin.
The rifle cracked out again and he heard Hickok bellow: ‘This is Hickok, Lawson. You put your fool head outside of there and I’ll blow the goddam thing off. Hear?’
There was a short burst of firing. McAllister got hold of a second plank and started to give it the treatment he had given the first. This one came away more willingly. He stooped quickly and found himself inside the shed. At once he felt the warmth which had accumulated there from the horse. Caesar now showed his excitement at the appearance of McAllister. He knew that his arrival meant action and that was what his young blood wanted more than anything.
McAllister slapped him a couple of times on the neck, then went to the door and tried to open it a crack. The weight of the snow outside prevented him from moving it more than an inch or so. This enabled him to see the full side of the cabin and the front at an acu
te angle. The door of the cabin was open slightly and the black line of a rifle barrel showed there.
McAllister ducked back just in time as a bullet splintered the edge of the door and thudded into the far wall of the shed. This at once worried the man who was scared that his horse might be hit.
He returned to the door down on one knee, lined up his Remington with the dark opening of the cabin and fired two shots. That done, he put his gun away and backed up.
Now he took a hasty look around the shed.
Old Greg’s tools were hung on nails on the walls and in one corner. There was a heavy sledgehammer among them. He heaved a pile of hay away from the rear wall and, now having room to move, he attacked the planks with the sledgehammer. In no time at all he had removed a number of them.
Then he smashed the support rail and there was an opening wide enough for a horse to pass through.
There was a bridle hanging from a nail and a saddle in hessian sacking in a corner. He untied Caesar and moved him away from the door. The animal stood obediently while McAllister saddled him.
Holding the horse’s lines, he stepped out into the snow again and looked toward the mouth of the break. Hickok fired a shot and McAllister was able to locate him at once. Now McAllister waved an arm to attract Hickok’s attention. Hickok shouted: ‘Go ahead.’ Then he started firing again, no doubt placing his shots through the oiled-paper of the window on his side of the cabin. McAllister pulled the horse out into the open and vaulted into the saddle.
Now came the part he did not like. He intended to make a dash for the trees. Three or four jumps by Caesar and, he would be in sight of the men in the cabin. A horse in deep snow is not the fastest thing in the world. Lawson’s bullets would be as fast as ever.
Caesar was dancing with eagerness.
McAllister kicked the stud in the belly and yelled to it. The canelo leapt forward and hit running. He went along the trail packed by McAllister’s approach to the shed. As though from a long way off, McAllister heard the sound of a gun in the cabin. If any shots came near him, he was not aware of them. The wind cut cold across his face from the stud’s speed. It seemed that almost instantly they were among the trees and the horse was weaving his path, this way and that, through them.
They went about one hundred yards into timber before McAllister swung the stud to the left and headed back towards the break. When he was near enough for his voice to carry to Hickok, he reined in and shouted. Hickok’s bellow came back. McAllister wanted Wild Bill to pull back, but the gunfighter refused. McAllister slipped from the saddle and tied the stud. It was not content, for it still wanted to run.
McAllister was thinking about old Greg Talbot, killed and tossed carelessly into the snow. He stood close to the bole of ' a pine and wondered what Dom Lawson would do now. That the man could not escape from the cabin without his horses, McAllister was almost certain, though there was no telling what a mad dog like that one would do. McAllister and Hickok were between the cabin and the outlaws’ horses.
A small voice inside McAllister’s head told him: You have your horse. Get out while the going’s good.
But he knew that he would not. Talbot had died because of that same horse.
Hickok’s rifle was silent. The men in the cabin had ceased firing. The silence extended itself. Finally, McAllister became uneasy. That silence could mean any number of things. Maybe Lawson was low on ammunition. Maybe the men had sneaked from the cabin on the blind side. Something cold and wet touched his cheek. The snow had started to fall again.
He showed his hat around the tree, but nothing happened.
The cold was beginning to get to McAllister and he started to shiver. Looking toward Hickok’s position, he saw that the gunfighter was on his feet, rifle in hands and his eyes on the cabin.
McAllister stepped out from behind his tree. Nothing happened. He glanced at Hickok and saw that he had seen him. Hickok started working his way through the brush barrier. Snow fell from it like a curtain. He saw Hickok flounder in the snow to his waist and then come on again. McAllister shucked his right hand glove so that he could handle his gun more easily. He circled to the left and Hickok took the other side of the house. They both watched the solitary window, ready to shoot anybody who appeared at it.
Suddenly, Hickok shouted and pointed. McAllister knew that he had spotted a man out in the main break. McAllister began a clumsy slow run through the thick snow. Once, he floundered into a deep drift in a small gully. By the time he had climbed out of it, Hickok had gone from sight around the far side of the cabin. McAllister hit firmer footing and went forward at a fair pace.
Greg Talbot had shored up the terrace-like rise of ground to the front of the cabin with rocks so that the whole of the ground on which the cabin stood looked as if it were man made. He had edged this with a stone wall. The whole was now covered with snow, but the wall was still evident. As McAllister rounded the corner of the house, a man’s head and shoulders appeared on the far side of this. He snapped a shot off. Glancing right, McAllister saw Hickok standing knee deep in snow with a pistol in each hand. Wild Bill was the only man McAllister had ever known to shoot this way with two weapons.
As the man fired, so Hickok fired twice, one shot from each weapon.
The man let out a short hoarse cry and fell back out of sight.
Hickok, pistols smoking, said coldly: ‘Where’s the other son-of-a-bitch? Can you see him?’ McAllister could see nothing moving.
Nothing seemed to move on the white landscape. He darted his gaze everywhere, uncomfortably aware that a shot might come at any second and a bullet find its mark in his body.
The thought hit him that there might be a man behind them in the cabin, lining his gun up for a shot. Turning, he jumped for the open doorway, shouting for Hickok to watch his back.
Nothing moved inside the cabin, except for the lifting of a weak hand from Talbot’s bunk. The grey face of Dufay showed over the side of the bunk.
‘I’m bleeding to death,’ he said.
McAllister turned and walked outside. Together he and Hickok walked to the low wall, climbed over and inspected the man lying in the snow on the far side. This was Honniger. They both knew him. Hickok had shot him through head and heart. Exactly the way Greg Talbot had died. McAllister wondered if that had been intentional. He knew that Wild Bill was superstitious.
Hickok said briefly: ‘If ever a man needed killing …’
McAllister looked around.
‘Dom Lawson is somewheres out there,’ he said.
Hickok nodded. ‘We’d best clear out of here before he plants a bullet in one of our backs.’
Now McAllister thought of Caesar and realized that the man might have headed for the stud. The way Lawson felt about horses, he would be tempted to risk his neck for the animal. McAllister started running, slipping and stumbling in the snow. When he reached Caesar, he was pretty breathless, but at least he had worked up a little sweat and no longer shook with cold. The animal was safe and sound and as pleased as ever to see McAllister again.
The two men brought all the horses in near to the house and gave them a feed of Talbot’s hay. They debated what to do about the wounded man.
Hickok said: ‘Knowing this son-of-a-bitch, I’ve a mind to leave him to rot.’
‘But we won’t,’ McAllister said.
‘I guess not, goddammit.’
They cut poles and constructed a travois. McAllister was in a pretty evil temper, because hauling this man through the snow would slow them up and he wanted to reach home. Neither thought the travois was practicable in snow, nor was it. So they wasted more time making a litter. It was noon before they were ready to move. By this time, it was McAllister who expressed the idea of abandoning the wounded man. To bely his words, he put a fresh dressing on the wound and declared with some show of regret that he thought the fellow would live. They had quite a chore getting the heavy man plus a buffalo coat into the litter, but after a good deal of heaving and shoving they made it. Onc
e in the litter, the man complained that he was cold. They did not pay too much attention to him. They were also cold.
Hickok said when they were mounted: ‘We’d best keep our eyes skinned, Rem. That bastard Lawson may be laying for us.’
Dufay heard that. He said: ‘Laying for you. You two ain’t going to live the goddam day out.’
‘Aw, hell,’ Hickok said, ‘my vote says we dump him in the snow and leave him.’
But with profound regret, they did not. Slowly, they made their way out of the breaks and headed along Black Horse Valley.
Chapter Twelve
If Captain William Steiner never did anything else in his life which was, in his poor opinion of himself, worth remembering, he would never forget that trip through the snow with the Sioux Indian and Sammy Samson. He was never quite sure why he did it, except that maybe he wanted to do something worthwhile before he died. He knew that back in the regiment his fellow officers would have laughed at him for it or been angered by it. Who the hell cared a cent’s worth about a passle of goddam Indian?
There were most likely two ideas in the ex-army officer’s mind. One, that he was an Indian agent and the Indians were his responsibility; two (and this he shied from admitting to himself) he could not sit still while women and children died in the terrible winter through cold and starvation. He had seen it happen before.
The going was bad and, until he reached the point of no return, the idea of turning back occurred to him frequently. He never gave way to it because his two companions obviously had no thought in their heads but to reach White Bull’s band and save it.
There had been some debate between Steiner and Sammy about whether they should attempt to take horses, but they decided against it. They loaded the single sled with all it would take in the way of supplies and blankets and left the agency in the sole care of an old halfbreed trapper and his Indian wife. The three men harnessed themselves to that sled like beasts and walked, or so Steiner thought, forever. Their great asset was that not only did the Sioux have a fair idea of which way to go, but also Sammy Samson possessed an almost perfect memory for country through which he had once passed. As he said, country looked very different under snow from ordinary times, but, just the same, he guided them unerringly. This in itself must have saved them miles and hours of needless travel. As it was, after five hours of pulling on the heavily laden sled, Steiner, softened by a year or more of soft living, too much food and drink and not enough hours in the saddle, found progress a torture.
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