It didn’t. Even as the bullwhacker scowled darkly and defiantly and started to come up onto the boardwalk, the doors behind Bill opened. He didn’t take his eyes off the bullwhacker as he heard Mayor Roy Fleming’s voice rolling out over the frightened crowd.
“Folks! Folks, please! There’s no need for trouble!”
Fleming moved up beside Bill. The mayor’s hands were raised, motioning for calm and quiet just as Bill had a moment earlier, but in this case, the angry, upset townspeople paid attention.
“Please, just settle down and I’ll tell you everything you want to know!” Fleming went on. He stood there and waited as the shouting gradually died down.
Bill finally felt it was safe enough to look away from the bullwhacker and glanced over his shoulder. All the town council members were there, lined up in a row behind Fleming. Behind them, peeking past her father’s shoulder, was Eden.
“All right, everyone, listen to me,” the mayor said when the street was quiet at last. The crowd looked up at him silently, expectantly. “As you may have guessed, the council and I called this meeting because of some news that Captain Stone delivered to us earlier today while he and his troops were in town. According to the captain, a sizable number of Pawnee Indians are on the warpath—”
That was as far as he got. A woman shrieked, “Oh, my God! The redskins are going to attack the town and scalp us all!”
That caused hell to break loose again. The racket was even worse than before as women screamed and cried and men shouted angry questions.
Bill’s mouth tightened into a grim line as he watched and listened to all the carrying-on. There was a good chance that most of these people had never been through an Indian attack. Probably a lot of them had never even seen a hostile Indian.
But they had all heard stories about gruesome atrocities carried out in other places, and now they were afraid it was going to happen in Redemption.
And to be perfectly honest, Bill reminded himself, he had no reason to think it wouldn’t. Those Pawnee warriors could show up at any time, looking for blood and scalps.
Phillip Ramsey fought his way close to the boardwalk and shouted, “Why didn’t the cavalry stay here to protect us? Why did the troopers just ride away?”
“Their job is to warn all the settlements in this part of the state,” Fleming said. “Captain Stone said they couldn’t stay. It would be against his orders.”
“To hell with his orders!” another man said. “It’s the army’s job to protect us! You’ve gotta get them back here, Mayor!”
Fleming shook his head and looked pained. “I can’t,” he said. “Don’t you think I would if I could?”
The words flying back and forth caught the attention of some in the crowd and caused the shouting to die down a little. More and more people started to listen as Ramsey asked, “Well, then, what are we going to do?”
Bill was startled when Fleming’s hand came down on his shoulder and the mayor said, “I’ll let Marshal Harvey explain that. He’s the law here in Redemption, after all.”
Bill turned his head to give Fleming a wide-eyed look. The mayor leaned closer and urged quietly, “Go on, son. Just tell them how we’re going to protect the town.”
There was no way out of this. Bill took a deep breath and said, “First of all, folks, we’re not gonna panic—”
“That’s easy for you to say!” a man accused. “The jail’s nice and sturdy! You’ll be locked up in there when the savages come, I’ll bet!”
“Now hold on! What I was about to say is that we don’t even know for sure the Pawnee will show up here. The cavalry has patrols out lookin’ for them now, and the last time anybody saw them, they were quite a ways off from here.”
“They could be coming in this direction,” a man in the front ranks of the crowd said.
Bill nodded. “Yeah, they could. That’s why we have to be on our guard.” His brain was working furiously. “We’re going to post sentries on the highest buildings in town. That way we can keep a good watch in all four directions. We’ll need volunteers for that. And we’ll need volunteers to patrol outside of town, too.”
“You mean out where the Injuns can get ’em?” a bearded old-timer asked. Bill had seen the man ride into town a week or so earlier but hadn’t met him yet.
“The outriders won’t get too far from town,” Bill explained. He was putting together this plan on the fly, but so far the things he’d come up with seemed to make sense to him. “And nobody will go out alone. There’ll always be two or three men together. At the first sign of any Indians, they’ll hightail it back to town.” Something else occurred to him. “Not only that, but we’ll work out some sort of signals so the outriders and the men on the roofs can communicate with each other.”
“That’s all well and good,” the old-timer said, “but I’ve fought Injuns before, and I’m here to tell you, there ain’t no sneakier critters anywhere on the face o’ the earth. I’ve seen ’em pop up where you would’ve sworn up and down there weren’t no hidey-holes. It’s like they come up from the ground itself, like worms outta the earth.”
“Now, there’s no need to exaggerate—” Fleming began.
“Exaggeratin’, am I?” the old man interrupted. His beard seemed to bristle with anger at the mayor’s suggestion. “How many Injun fights have you been in, mister?”
“Well, ah…none,” Fleming admitted.
“I been in a whole heap, goin’ all the way back to the Shinin’ Times when the only white men west of the Mississipp’ was fur trappers like me. More recent-like, ’fore I drifted over here to Kansas, I been in scraps with the Comanch’ down in Texas and the ’Pache out yonder in Arizona. So I know what I’m talkin’ about when it comes to fightin’ Injuns.” The old-timer snorted. “Know a lot more’n any of you folks, I’ll bet.”
“So you don’t think we should send riders out of town?” Bill asked.
“Didn’t say that. Just lettin’ you know it could be mighty dangerous. I wouldn’t send no married men with young’uns, if I was you.”
Bill nodded. “All right, we’ll keep that in mind. You have any other suggestions, Mister…?”
“Flint. Mordecai Flint. And yeah, I got some suggestions, and the main one is to make sure ever’ able-bodied man in town’s got a gun and knows how to use it. Repeatin’ rifles, if there’s enough of ’em to go around.”
Fleming turned to look at Perry Monroe. “What do you think, Perry? Can you and the owners of the other mercantiles supply some extra rifles if we need them?”
“I reckon we can,” Monroe said with a nod. His forehead was creased on a frown, and Bill knew what caused it.
Monroe had to be aware that if there was a battle, some of those rifles would be damaged or lost. Monroe wasn’t a skinflint by any means, but still, he had to be thinking about what he stood to lose by providing those extra weapons.
But if he didn’t, he might stand to lose a lot more, starting with his daughter. Bill had no doubt that his father-in-law would do whatever was necessary to protect Eden.
So would he.
“Next thing you do is get some barrels and stack ’em up here and there around town,” the old-timer called Mordecai Flint went on. “That’ll give you some extra cover, and if the varmints manage to get in town without any warnin’, folks in the street might be able to get behind a barrel quicker’n they could make it to a buildin’.”
Fleming nodded. “That makes sense. We appreciate the advice, Mr. Flint. Is there anything else?”
“Get all your preachers prayin’ double-time,” Flint said. “If a bunch o’ bloodthirsty Pawnee show up, you’re gonna need all the help from the Almighty you can get.”
A grim silence descended over the crowd after Flint said that. After several moments, a man in the rough work clothes of a farmer spoke up.
“My wife and kids are out at my farm,” he said. “I just came into town this morning to pick up a new blade for my plow. All these precautions you folks in the settlement are taking aren
’t gonna help us one little bit.”
“I’m sorry, friend,” Fleming said. “We can only take care of the people here in town. Maybe you can go get your family and bring them back in. You can find a place to stay here until the crisis is over.”
“And when’s that gonna be?” the farmer wanted to know. “Those soldiers who were here didn’t even know where the Indians are. You said so yourself, Mayor. They might not ever show up. I can’t just abandon my farm! There are crops to be harvested and other work that has to be done.”
Several other men who had farms nearby echoed that sentiment. The level of anger in the street began to rise again.
“I’m sorry,” Fleming said over the commotion. “There’s just so much we can do. We can’t protect the town and all the countryside for miles around! You just can’t expect us to do that. It’s not possible.”
Bill had an idea. He said, “There are…what? Fifteen or twenty farms hereabouts? Why don’t you men go back to your homes and fetch your families in? Let your neighbors who aren’t in town today know about what’s going on, too. Then every day the whole passel of you can ride out and tend to the chores on two or three farms, maybe more, since there’ll be quite a few of you. That way you can keep things going, but there’ll be a big, well-armed bunch together in case of trouble.”
A couple of the farmers still objected, but more of them nodded as they thought about Bill’s proposal. “That could work,” one of the men admitted. “It’s not perfect, but it would keep our wives and kids safe, and taking care of our places wouldn’t be as dangerous for us.”
It didn’t take long for those who saw the wisdom of the idea to win over the holdouts. Bill was starting to feel a little better about the situation. They had a plan of sorts for defending the town, and the outlying settlers would be safer, too, and not on their own if the Indians came.
And as soon as word came that the Pawnee had been rounded up and forced back onto the reservation, then everything could go back to normal.
The surly bullwhacker wasn’t through muddying the waters, however. He spat disgustedly at the base of the boardwalk and said in a loud, abrasive voice, “You people are fools. What about the freighters?”
“You and your men are welcome to stay here in town as long as you need to, mister,” Fleming said. “We’re not going to turn anybody away in this time of crisis.”
“That’s not what I’m talkin’ about. I’m not goin’ anywhere, sure enough, and neither are any of the wagons in my train. But you can bet every other teamster and bullwhacker in this part of the state feels the same way right now. There’s no spur line from the railroad down here. The only way you can get supplies that don’t grow on farms is by wagon. What’s gonna happen when none of ’em have been rollin’ for a month or six weeks? How long are the bullets gonna hold out while the Pawnee are on the rampage?” The man looked around with an arrogant sneer and shook his head. “Run out of ammunition and see how long you last then.”
Chapter 9
Costigan didn’t see any more signs of Indians that day. He stayed up on the wagon seat while the rest of the shooters finished killing enough buffalo to fill all the wagons with hides.
Bledsoe called a halt when they reached that goal. There was no point in wasting bullets killing beasts that would start to rot before the skinners could get the hides off them. Left overnight, the carcasses would bloat, damaging the hides and making them difficult and even more unpleasant to remove.
Dave McGinty cleaned his rifles and stowed them away in the sheaths strapped to his horse’s saddle, then ambled over to the wagon where Costigan was still standing watch.
“Well, we made it through the day with our hair still on our heads,” McGinty said with a grin.
Costigan nodded. “Yeah, but I can still feel ’em out there somewhere, Dave. The thing of it is…I don’t know what they want. With the Rebs, I always knew. You could just feel it in the air that they wanted us all dead. Maybe all those Indians want is to be left alone.”
“They’ve got a funny way of showing it if they do, what with all the spyin’ on us they’ve been up to. First that one last night, then the three this mornin’…”
“But when a big bunch showed up, they went around us,” Costigan pointed out. “That doesn’t sound like somebody who’s looking for a fight.”
McGinty’s brawny shoulders rose and fell. “Who can figure out what a redskin’s thinkin’? Not me, that’s for sure.”
The skinners finished their work by late afternoon, and the party of hunters headed back to the main camp. There the hides would be unloaded, spread out, and pegged down to dry, a process that took five to eight days. The hides would be turned over and pegged down again several times during that interval.
The hunt had been successful enough so far that a large swath of prairie around the camp was black with hides in various stages of drying. Every day, wagons came out from Dodge City to pick up bundles of the hides that were ready and take them back to the Rath & Wright warehouses in town, but fresh hides came in to take their place.
Bledsoe had a partner in Dodge who dealt with the hide buyers, Charles Rath and Bob Wright. The colonel himself, as he was fond of pointing out, preferred being out on the open plains. Sitting in an office was no way for a war hero to spend his days.
When they got back to the main camp, Costigan took his rifles and put them in his tent, then unsaddled his horse and picketed it along with the others.
The aroma of stew simmering drifted from the cook pots. Some of the skinners brought back fresh meat every day, although the hunting party could eat only a small fraction of what was available. The rest of it was left on the plains.
Costigan could understand why the Indians didn’t like that. A warrior whose wives and children might be hungry had to be filled with rage every time he saw all those hundreds of dead buffalo going to waste.
A decade earlier it had seemed that the herds were so vast as to be endless, but Costigan was already starting to see signs that someday, the buffalo might be gone.
If that happened, many of the Indians would be done for as well. They depended on the buffalo for so much, and some of them just weren’t capable of becoming farmers the way Washington insisted they should. Costigan understood that, too.
After the war, he could have returned to the farm where he had grown up. That was what his brothers had done. They had married local girls, tilled the rich Ohio soil, and were raising families there along with their crops.
Costigan couldn’t do that. If he had found a girl to marry, he always would have worried that she could smell the death on him. He couldn’t get away from it himself. How could he expect some innocent girl to put up with that?
He couldn’t. All it had taken to realize that was a few days back home. Then he had packed up what little gear he had and headed west…
Eleven years gone since then, he thought as he picked up a pot of coffee from the edge of one of the fires and filled his cup. Eleven years and still the stench clung to him.
Of course, it didn’t help that he killed buffalo for a living, he told himself wryly. But he knew that even if he didn’t, the smell would still be there.
From the first time he had seen a man’s head explode from the impact of a ball fired from his rifle, it had been there.
Colonel Bledsoe came over to him and said, “You’ll be on guard duty tonight, Costigan.”
“All right,” he nodded.
Bledsoe peered at him through narrowed eyes. “What’s bothering you, son? Frightened of the Indians?”
Anger welled up inside Costigan. He didn’t like the colonel’s patronizing tone, and there wasn’t enough difference in their ages for Bledsoe to be calling him “son.” Besides, Costigan’s father was still alive back in Ohio, as far as he knew.
“Nothing’s bothering me, Colonel. And I’m not afraid of the Indians, just cautious, the way any man ought to be out here if he wants to stay alive.”
“It’s just that if t
rouble comes, I’ve got to be able to count on my men, each and every one of them.”
“You think I’ll run and hide if the Indians attack?”
“Now, I never said that—”
“Because I won’t, Colonel,” Costigan said. “If anybody tries to kill me—red, white, or hell, even blue!—I’ll fight. You can count on that.”
Bledsoe started to lift his arm, as if he intended to clap a hand on Costigan’s shoulder, but something in the buffalo hunter’s gaze must have stopped him.
Instead the colonel said, “Well, ah, that’s good to hear. Mighty good to hear. Get you something to eat, Costigan. You’ll stand first watch along with Tolbert and Stennis.”
Costigan nodded. He didn’t care about which watch he stood. He just wanted Bledsoe to go on and leave him alone.
The whole world could leave him alone as far as Costigan was concerned…but that wasn’t likely to happen.
There were no thunderstorms that night, and no bad dreams for Costigan. His shift on guard duty was quiet. When it was finished, he crawled into his tent and slept like a dead man.
The next morning the hunters rode out again, trailing the herd and being trailed by the hide wagons. Costigan felt better, and he even summoned up a smile at some of McGinty’s joshing.
For years now he had gone through bleak moods like the one that had gripped him the previous day. Some were worse than others, but he always shook them eventually.
It was hard to dwell too much on the bloody past on a beautiful day like this. A fresh, slightly cool breeze blew out of the west, carrying a few white puffballs of cloud through a magnificent, arching blue sky.
The hide wagons were behind the hunters, so Costigan couldn’t smell the blood stink that had soaked into them over the months. Soon enough the musky smell of buffalo, the thick, cloying odor of their dung, and the sharp tang of powder smoke would fill the air, but for now Costigan breathed in the aromas of grass and earth and wildflowers.
The smell of life instead of death, he told himself. The thought brought another faint smile to his lips.
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