The Frontiersman

by William W. Johnstone

  “That don’t hardly seem fair.”

  “The politicians in Washington call it Manifest Destiny, and fairness has nothing to do with it.”

  Breckinridge gazed off into the night and said, “As big as the country is, seems like there ought to be room here and there for folks like that to live the way they’ve always lived.”

  “You’re an enlightened thinker, Breckinridge. Or at least you don’t think like a politician.”

  Breckinridge snorted and replied, “I reckon that’s one of the best things anybody ever said about me.”

  Mallory lowered his voice and said, “To be honest, I have a few misgivings myself about what we’re doing. Don’t misunderstand. I believe the country should be civilized. I love the surveying and the cartography. Seeing all this new territory is wonderful. But I worry that inevitably it’s going to lead to war. Blood will be spilled partially because of the work that I’m doing.”

  “You don’t have to be part of the army to go out and see new places,” Breckinridge pointed out. “Look at me. I’m settin’ off for the mountains, and I ain’t got to answer to nobody.”

  “And I envy you that freedom,” Mallory said with a sigh. “But my father and his father before that were in the army. My grandfather served under George Washington during the Revolution. It was expected that I uphold the tradition, even though my own interests run more toward the sciences. The Corps of Topographical Engineers is just about the only place I fit into the military.”

  “Your enlistment will be up one of these days, won’t it?” Breckinridge asked.

  “I suppose it will.”

  “Then when it is, you come out here and hunt me up. By then I’ll know the mountains backwards and forwards. We’ll go fur trappin’ together.”

  Mallory laughed and thumped a hand against Breckinridge’s shoulder. He said, “I think I’d like that. You have a deal, my friend. We’ll be mountain men.”

  Breckinridge nodded. The suggestion had been a spur of the moment thing, but he didn’t regret it. Mallory was a decent sort, and smart as a whip, no doubt about that. It might be a good thing for both of them if they partnered up, somewhere down the line.

  The party pushed on into the west. The Oregon Trail was to the north of them, Mallory explained to Breckinridge, and the Santa Fe Trail was to the south. Their goal was to discover if there was a middle route equal to those two great immigrant trails. Breck was no expert on the subject, but as far as he could see, there wasn’t.

  The terrain was easy enough for traveling, mostly flat and grassy with occasional rolling hills or a clump of brush or scrubby trees to break up the monotony. Wagons would be able to make it through country like this without much trouble.

  The problem was water. The expedition came across a number of small creeks that allowed them to water their horses and fill their canteens, but the supply wasn’t abundant enough for a wagon train with several hundred people and even more livestock. There was a good reason why the main trails followed rivers for the most part. As the party penetrated farther into the plains, Breckinridge began to understand why some folks called this the Great American Desert. It would seem that way to anybody accustomed to the woodlands back east.

  Breckinridge had already stayed with the group longer than he’d intended when he accepted Lieutenant Mallory’s invitation to join them. But he and Mallory had become friends, and besides, Breck was still headed west, the way he wanted. Mallory assured him the mountains were up there ahead of them. Hundreds of miles away, to be sure, but Breck was confident he would get there sooner or later.

  * * *

  The expedition was three weeks out of St. Louis, far from the bounds of civilization, when the Indians jumped them. They were riding along the southern bank of one of those little streams, Mallory and Breckinridge in front, the dragoons strung out behind them, and Sergeant Falk bringing up the rear. Tom Lang was out scouting somewhere ahead of the party.

  Suddenly, figures stood up in the tall grass across the creek. They had been invisible until now. The movement caught Breckinridge’s eye, and when he turned his head to look he caught a glimpse of the Indians before they opened fire with old-fashioned muskets and bows and arrows. The savages were tall, most of them more than six feet, and the topknots of hair on their otherwise shaved heads made them appear even taller.

  Osage! Breckinridge thought, remembering Tom Lang’s description of the people through whose hunting grounds they were passing.

  Then men began to cry out and topple from their saddles. Arrows had skewered some of them, and others fell when struck by the heavy lead balls from the muskets. Instantly, the air was full of chaos: screams, booming gunshots, the ugly thud of lead against flesh, the whinnying of spooked horses, angry shouts from the soldiers, shrill war cries from the Indians.

  Breckinridge whipped his rifle to his shoulder as a musket ball hummed past his ear. He drew a bead on one of the Osage ambushers and fired. The warrior jerked backward as the ball punched into his bare chest. His knees folded up and dropped him back into the tall grass.

  “Forward!” Lieutenant Mallory shouted. “Forward!”

  Breckinridge knew what the lieutenant intended. He wanted his men to gallop straight ahead along the creek in the hope that it would take them out of the line of fire. But as the dragoons who were still mounted surged forward, more Indians appeared, this time on the same side of the creek. The warriors grabbed the soldiers and dragged some of them off their horses. Other Indians carried long lances that they thrust upward so that unfortunate soldiers rode right into the sharp weapons and were run through. This battle was quickly turning into a massacre.

  Two of the Osage warriors charged toward Breckinridge. They must have believed it would take both of them to pull him off his horse.

  Breckinridge didn’t give them a chance to find out if they were right. He jerked out his pair of flintlock pistols, leveled them, and fired them simultaneously. The Indians went over backward as if they’d been slapped down by a giant hand.

  Another warrior came at him with a lance. Breckinridge grabbed it, wrenched it out of the man’s hands, and banged his heels against his horse’s sides. The animal leaped forward as Breck spun the lance around. With his own strength and the horse’s weight behind it, the lance went all the way through the Osage’s body so that the bloody point stood out a couple of feet from his back.

  Breckinridge shoved the dead man out of the way and kept the horse moving. He wanted to reach Mallory’s side. The lieutenant had drawn his saber and was slashing back and forth with it as the Indians closed in around him. Mallory’s tall hat fell off and was trampled underfoot by the warriors.

  Breckinridge kicked one of the Indians in the head as he charged past the man. The warrior’s neck snapped and he dropped as every muscle in his body went limp. Another Osage fired an arrow at Breck, but he saw it coming in time to duck. He felt the feathers on the arrow’s shaft brush his cheek as it went past.

  Breckinridge had almost reached Mallory when one of the Indians shoved a lance into the belly of the lieutenant’s horse. The animal screamed. Its front legs buckled, and Mallory was thrown forward out of the saddle. Breck made a grab for him but wasn’t in time to catch him.

  Mallory managed to hang on to his saber as he hit the ground and rolled over. He came up fighting, but as he swung the saber, one of the Indians fired a musket at him. The ball hit Mallory in the right arm, shattering his elbow. He cried out in agony as the saber flew out of suddenly nerveless fingers.

  Another of the Indians drove a lance into the lieutenant’s back. He staggered forward, obviously fighting to stay on his feet.

  “John Francis!” Breckinridge bellowed. That was the first time he had called Mallory anything other than lieutenant, as Mallory had requested. But Breck felt like they had become friends, and rage filled him as he saw Mallory struck down.

  Breckinridge spread his arms and dived off his horse. He tackled two of the Indians closing in on Mallory. As they a
ll went to the ground, Breck wrapped his hands around their necks from behind and slammed their heads together as hard as he could. Bone crunched as the impact shattered their skulls.

  One of the downed warriors had been carrying a lance. Breckinridge snatched it off the ground where the Indian had dropped it and came up swinging. He laid around him with the lance like it was a flail. The weapon was fairly lightweight, but with Breck’s strength behind it, it was deadly. More bones broke. The Indians fell back as Breck cleared an area around the fallen officer.

  Breckinridge stood there with his chest heaving as Sergeant Falk and several more of the dragoons fought their way through the chaos and joined him to form a defensive ring around Mallory. Blood dripped from a long gash on Falk’s forehead, but other than that he seemed to be all right.

  Breckinridge did a quick count. Twelve men were still on their feet, out of a company of more than twice that many. The other soldiers all sprawled on the ground, some dead, some seriously wounded.

  The brave enlisted men were outnumbered, Breck realized. The two groups of Osage had joined forces, and now there were at least twenty warriors surrounding the soldiers. Breckinridge figured he and his companions would give a good account of themselves, but their odds of surviving this fight were pretty low.

  A rifle cracked somewhere nearby, and one of the warriors fell with a good chunk of his head blown away. That made the Osage scatter. The warriors didn’t know where the shot had come from or how many men were coming to the soldiers’ aid. As the Indians disappeared across the grassy prairie, Breckinridge watched them go in stunned disbelief. He’d been certain he was about to die, but now it appeared that the attackers had had enough.

  “What the hell just happened?” Breckinridge muttered.

  “Once an Injun’s spooked, he’s done fightin’,” Sergeant Falk said. “He thinks his medicine’s gone bad. His luck’s turned. Doesn’t matter whether there’s any truth to that or not. He thinks it, so it is.”

  Breckinridge accepted Falk’s explanation. He knew the sergeant had fought Indians a number of times before as a member of army details escorting wagon trains on both the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. Falk knew what he was talking about.

  A groan made Breckinridge look around. Mallory was still alive, although his uniform was sodden with blood and his ruined arm lay limply at his side.

  Breckinridge dropped to a knee next to his friend. He looked up at Falk and said, “We got to do somethin’ to help him!”

  “There’s nothing we can do for him,” Falk said grimly. “He’s stabbed through and through, and between that and his arm, he’s lost too much blood.”

  “Damn it—”

  “Breck . . .”

  The whispered name interrupted him. He looked down at Mallory and saw the lieutenant struggling to speak. Mallory’s eyes were open, but he seemed to be having trouble focusing on anything. Breckinridge leaned closer and said, “I’m right here.”

  Mallory looked at him then and said, “You’ve got to . . . promise me something.”

  “Whatever you want,” Breckinridge said, and he meant it.

  “You’ve got to swear . . . you’ll go on to the mountains . . . and live a life of adventure . . . for me, too. When you get there . . . when you’re looking at all those things . . . you’ve never seen before . . . you’ll be looking at them . . . with my eyes as well.”

  “Sure, John Francis. I’ll do it. You’ll be right there with me.”

  “In . . . spirit . . .” Mallory grimaced. “One more . . . thing . . . My maps . . . they have to get back. I can’t . . . finish my mission . . . but what I’ve done . . . has to be delivered.”

  Breckinridge didn’t see why. As best he could tell, this expedition hadn’t accomplished a damned thing. Mallory hadn’t found a better trail to the west. He hadn’t even found a route as good as the ones that had already been established. His death, the deaths of the other soldiers who had been killed, were all a waste.

  But his duty was important to him, whether it wound up serving a point or not. Breckinridge knew that from the conversations they’d shared. If Mallory wanted the maps he had made on the trip so far to be taken back and turned over to his superiors, then Breck intended to see that was done.

  “I’ll take ’em back,” he vowed. “I’ll do it myself.”

  Mallory lifted his left arm and reached across his body with a trembling hand. It closed for a moment around Breckinridge’s arm as Mallory whispered, “Thank . . . you . . .”

  Then his arm fell away and his head sagged to the side, and Breckinridge knew he was gone.

  “Damn shame,” Falk said. “For a greenhorn officer, he wasn’t a bad sort. At least he was willin’ to listen and learn. Most of ’em aren’t.”

  Breckinridge’s face was bleak as he stood up. He saw that Tom Lang had reappeared, cradling his long rifle in the crook of his arm. Breck asked, “You fired the shot that dropped that Osage when they had us surrounded?”

  “Aye,” the scout replied. “When I heard the shootin’, I got back as quick as I could, but I didn’t get here in time to help much. From the looks of it, the red-skinned varmints slipped in behind me after I’d gone by and set up their ambush.”

  “You spooked them and made them run off,” Falk said. “If you hadn’t, we’d probably all be dead by now.”

  Tom Lang shrugged, clearly upset. He said, “If I’d done my job better, maybe none of you would be dead.”

  Breckinridge turned to Falk and said, “Are you turnin’ around and goin’ back to Saint Louis?”

  “There’s nothing else we can do,” Falk replied. “The lieutenant was the only one who knew anything about makin’ maps. The rest of us were just along to keep him safe.” A bitter note came into the sergeant’s voice as he added, “We did a mighty poor job of that, didn’t we?”

  “We were outnumbered, Sergeant,” one of the dragoons said. “And they took us by surprise.”

  “Aye, they did. I don’t want them to do the same thing again.”

  Breckinridge was worried about the same thing. He picked up the rifle and pistols he had dropped during the battle, reloaded them, and then said, “I’m gonna take a look around, just to make sure those Osage are really gone.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Tom Lang said.

  “We’ll make camp here,” Falk said. “We’ve got wounded to tend to and dead to bury. Also, we need to round up as many of the horses as we can. They scattered pretty good, but I think we can find some of them. That’ll make it a lot easier to get back.”

  Breckinridge and Lang left the others where they were and trotted across the prairie, making a large circle around their position to insure that the Indians weren’t trying to double back and spring another ambush. Breck was hardly what one would call experienced where these plains tribes were concerned—today was his first encounter with them—but he had a keen eye and the confidence to take care of himself in the wilderness.

  The Osage were well and truly gone, Breckinridge and Lang discovered. Breck said, “I don’t hardly see how they could have disappeared that fast.”

  “That’s the way they do,” Lang said. “Ain’t nobody better’n an Injun when it comes to blendin’ into the landscape. If you don’t have a keen eye and a lot of experience, sometimes you might walk right past one of ’em, close enough to touch, and never see him.”

  “That’d be a handy skill to have. Can white men learn it?”

  “Very few. Only one I ever heard tell of who was the equal of an Injun is an old fella called Preacher. He’s supposed to be the best that ever was. Not even the redskins can see him if he don’t want them to.”

  “I’d like to meet him someday,” Breckinridge said.

  “Traipse around the mountains long enough and you’re likely to.”

  When they got back to the camp, they told Falk what they’d found. The sergeant said, “I reckon we’ll stay here tonight, then start back in the morning. By the way, Wallace, that promise you made to
the lieutenant about takin’ his maps back . . . you don’t have to worry about that. We’ll see to it. Anyway, you’re a civilian. Those maps are the property and responsibility of the United States Army.”

  “Maybe so, but I gave Lieutenant Mallory my word. I was brought up to keep the promises I made. I reckon you can take charge of the map cases, Sergeant, but I intend to see to it that you and them all make it back safe and sound.”

  Falk shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. I know you were headed west, and I thought you might want to keep on going that way.”

  Breckinridge did, but he didn’t see any way he could continue his journey right now without breaking his promise to Mallory, and he didn’t want to do that. For the first time since leaving home, he had to turn around and go back in the other direction.

  Back to St. Louis, where he was no doubt wanted for the murder of Rory Ducharme.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The soldiers rounded up enough of the surviving saddle mounts and packhorses so that everyone in the party was able to ride as they started out the next morning, leaving more than a dozen freshly filled graves behind them.

  The burial sites were unmarked—there were no trees nearby to furnish branches for crosses—and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, Breckinridge knew. The elements would soon claim anything left behind.

  More graves would be dug along the way. Several of the wounded men succumbed to their injuries during the journey.

  Since there was no mapmaking going on anymore, the trip back proceeded at a slightly faster pace than the expedition had been making before. They didn’t see any more Indians, but Tom Lang said it was likely the Osage were watching them.

  “There’s a good chance they’ll leave us alone now,” the scout told Breckinridge and Sergeant Falk. “They can see for themselves that we’re goin’ back where we came from. That’s all the Injuns really want, for us to leave ’em alone and stop crowdin’ in on ’em.”

  “It won’t be that way once we have enough soldiers out here,” Falk said. “We’ll teach those savages they can’t stand in the way of progress.”