by Tim Bryant
Long Gun was gone. So was the entire Buffalo Gap party. Yost had taken his pick and pushed off early.
“Looks like your friend double crossed you.”
It was Hanley, up in his shirt sleeves and having a first cigar. He seemed too amused to realize he’d been double crossed as well, or maybe he had been in on it all along. I didn’t know and didn’t much care. I’d heard enough talk at night between soldiers to know how to proceed. There was a reason Lieutenant Hanley and Colonel Dolon had been so quick to sign up two ruffians, no questions asked. Soldiers were deserting on a weekly basis, prodded first by bad food and equipment and then by a big cut in pay direct from U.S. Grant himself.
“I’m going to Amarillo,” I said. “My brother has called for me.”
If Hanley knew anything about Greer, he didn’t let on. It occurred to me that he may have forgotten he’d selected me for the Buffalo Gap trip. He had bigger problems.
“I have the power to punish you for abandoning your post,” he said.
I thought about mentioning that I was still only sixteen years old, but I knew Civil War soldiers younger than that, especially in the South. Hanley was from Louisiana or Mississippi. It was doubtful he’d be sympathetic.
“I’m not the only one,” I said.
Might not have been the best thing to remind him of. He swished a mouthful of coffee around and spat beneath me.
“You might feel tall sitting up on top of that horse, but we both know better.”
First call bugle call sounded as we faced each other, me several spans over the lieutenant. It was bad timing on his part. Hanley looked back to the south and made a half-hearted motion to salute. I acted on pure impulse, bringing the Sidehammer up and firing a single shot right into his ear. He slid into the damp dirt, the blood gurgling loudly enough from his mouth and eyes as the bugle faded into the morning. As Roman stepped over him, I saw his coffee cup still clutched tightly, its contents spilled out on the ground.
I left Fort Griffin to the north, away from the waking soldiers and followed Mill Creek for several miles before I circled back southwest. I figured I was at least an hour behind the Buffalo Gap group. If I made good time, I would catch them soon enough.
Bricky might be pretty sure he’d outsmarted me. I could guess that Greer, in an overly optimistic moment, told him of our plans. I couldn’t blame her. Wouldn’t have done it if I could. No doubt, Bricky wasn’t keen to see Amarillo. Wasn’t keen to have me as a son-in-law. As I made my way along the rocks and hills, I imagined Bricky sending for Yost and preparing to leave early. Get his daughter out of harm’s way, get his family on their way to Mexico. There was rain coming in, and they would need to make good time to meet the Mexican party who would take them South into Mexico.
I could picture Bricky, as the group saddled up and prepared to leave, sending Yost for Long Gun.
“I don’t want the white boy,” he said, if only in my head. “Bring the Indian instead.”
Greer would have fought it, but, when the fighting was over, she would’ve gone along. She had no other option. It was her father, her family, her life. She didn’t know what might happen to me, especially if Hanley had been made aware of things. I might not even be allowed to leave. She certainly wouldn’t have risked being left alone in the fort.
As I rode along, I didn’t consider Lieutenant Hanley. I didn’t consider that I had now killed a soldier in the U.S. Army. Didn’t consider the danger I was leaving behind me or the danger I was riding into ahead of me. I was thinking about a girl who’d been born on a river called Clyde, half a world away, and was now headed for the Rio Grande.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I met Elijah Caliber on the morning of my trial. Because he said he was responding as a man of god and not a man of the flesh, he refused to meet inside the Black Elephant, and so me, Pearlie, and Kitch Howard trudged off to find him in a part of the town I’d never been to. The Methodist Church on one corner and the Baptist Church on the next, I’d be lying if I said the folks who filled the pews on Sunday weren’t the same the perched atop bar stools the night previous, but it was a part of town that liked to pretend Hell’s Half Acre was only for cowboys passing through. If they had ever seen Caliber creeping down the back stairs of the saloon with Sunny on his arm, they’d have been shocked. They would have lynched him just like they were about to lynch me, even if it was pointed out they were in the saloon as well.
Now I should state for the record: I’m not in any standard way of thinking a religious man. I’ve never believed in any kind of man in the sky waiting to hear anything from my lips. All the same, I wasn’t against a little assistance, and if it came from above, I was willing to be shown the error in my thinking. I was willing to concede Reverend Caliber might be my ticket to earthly salvation, if not necessarily to the next world.
He wasn’t as long as Gentleman Jack, but he was big, and his head of shoulder-length white hair put one in the mind of an Old Testament saint, if not Yahweh himself.
“Miss Pearlie,” he said, “Jesus surely does love you, and so do I.”
He flat out refused to call her Madam. With the Reverend, it was always Miss Pearlie. It sounded unnatural to my ear, but I reasoned that “madam” was a dangerous word in the mouth of the reverend, being so suggestive and all. Pearlie, who was usually quick to recognize bull corn, smiled in a way that made her look like a whole other person—a younger, happier, more foolish one—when he said that.
“Reverend Caliber,” she said. “I need to remind you that the Good Lord hears you even when you’re not praying.”
He looked Kitch Howard over good.
“So this is the man I’m speaking for,” the Reverend said.
I raised my hand up like a school kid who had the right answer. But my answer wasn’t going to win me any prize.
“No, it’s me.”
He seemed shocked by the news. Maybe I looked too young or too innocent. More likely, I looked a shade or two undercooked.
“You’re the big bad man everybody’s talking about?”
He smiled big and wide like only a preacher or a snake oil salesman can. Maybe he thought his job was going to be easier than he’d been led to believe. I was hoping that wasn’t the case. All I needed was a Baptist preacher with a false sense of security.
“I’m bigger than I look, but I’m not so bad, once you get to know me,” I said.
It was a line I had practiced the night before, unsure if I’d use it on the reverend or the crowd at the trial or, to be honest, anyone at all. I tested it on Caliber, and he acted like he didn’t hear it.
“Miss Pearlie, were you able to write down all the information I asked from you?”
I had the papers in my vest pocket, wrapped around a gold medallion I won at a carnival in Mobeetie a year before. At the time, I took the thing to be a token of good luck, having won it with a beautiful woman on my arm and a half moon of witnesses egging me on from behind. Now, it seemed tarnished. A false hope if any kind of hope at all, it had only survived this long out of spite. I believed in luck—both the good and bad variety—about as much as I did Reverend Caliber’s little black book.
“Here they are,” I said.
I handed him the pages, torn from a ledger in the Black Elephant. The medallion was transferred from my hand into his.
A veritable history of Wilkie John Liquorish, in detail not from the beginning of the cattle drive forward but from my days as a child in the District and even going back to my father’s heroic deeds, was written out in one long scribbly scrawl that I couldn’t make out for love or money. Sunny had read from it and assured me it was on the level. She read it like she was reading from a great book, which made me like her even more.
“Where did you get this?”
He turned the medallion over in his hand and looked closer.
“I won it at a carnival for knocking chickens over with baseballs,” I said.
“Chickens?” he said.
I was embarrassed I
had unloaded it on him. Knocking chickens over with baseballs wasn’t the equal of shooting rabbits with a rifle.
“It looks like a magic coin,” Sunny said.
“They weren’t real chickens,” I said. “Wooden chickens.”
Reverend Caliber held the coin up to his mouth and tried to take a bite out of it.
“It’s an Indian Peace Medal,” he said. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”
I hadn’t been sure it was a real coin. I still wasn’t sure. Could you walk into a general store and buy candy with it? Could you leave it in a church’s collection plate?
Caliber had no problem reading the sheets of paper, and he asked me questions about what he was reading.
“Ira Lee and you had the same father?”
I explained that our mother hadn’t been a whore until after Henry John Liquorish was killed. “She had to do something to put food on our table,” I said. “She couldn’t very well join the Army.” By the time Ira Lee was old enough to make a wage, bad habits had settled in. She had no belief left in either herself or her ability to get along in a world outside the District. It defined her and confined her. I knew I had to get out.
“But you joined the Army and then what? Deserted your post?”
I’d conveniently left out the manner in which I left Fort Griffin. In the days between, a soldier coming through Hell’s Half Acre told me it had been abandoned. I had seen that coming. Eaten up by a town immediately to the north called The Flat. Far as I was concerned, Fort Griffin was now a thing of the past.
“They don’t have Fort Griffin no more,” I said.
He was adding scribble scrabble to the piece of paper in front of him.
“So the whole fort abandoned camp then?”
Having no religion, I could lie to a preacher just as easy as anyone. Still I was happy when I didn’t have to.
“You could say that.”
All in all, Reverend Caliber was alright, at least for a preacher.
He asked me to tell him more about what happened after I left Fort Griffin, and I obliged to the best of my ability. I felt free to mix in a fib or two along the way, when it suited the story, but for the most part, I was straight up with him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I wasn’t a stranger to Indians. I had seen plenty in San Antonio. Some posed for pictures, noble, some even smiling. I’d gotten to know Long Gun fairly well. I had even seen a few Cherokees come by Fort Griffin, anxious to talk to Colonel Dolon. Most of those were worried about getting shot by overzealous soldiers. All the Indians I had come in contact with had been friendly and peaceful.
Now, we were out on our own, just me and Roman, and I was looking at evidence of wild Indians on the Buffalo Gap trail. When I say evidence, I was looking right at two groups of Blackfoot Indians, about a quarter mile ahead of me. There was no doubt about that much. The evidence indicated that they weren’t out for a morning stroll. The rain had finally turned into a full blown storm, of the kind that discourages such activity among most people. The Blackfoot were a big problem in several areas around the middle of the state. They snuck up on families asleep in their farmhouses and scalped them all, grown men and women and babies alike. I was worried about the way they split off into two groups, as if to surround something. Mostly I was worried because I could tell they were Blackfoot.
The Blackfoot were big trouble.
The storm did benefit me by making it impossible for them to hear me behind them. I could see one Indian at the very back of the pack that took the north route through the rocky hills that began to grow up out of the ground. He would stop periodically to look back, and I thought he might have seen me once, but he moved on without incident.
There was no way I could follow both packs, so I chose the one leading south, mostly because there was more vegetation that way. More places to hide. It was noon soon enough, although you couldn’t tell. There wasn’t a piece of blue sky to be found anywhere. It looked like the rain would never let up.
When the Blackfoot stopped to water their horses, I did the same. When they suddenly picked up speed, I did too. I had the Sidehammer close by, loaded and ready. Every strange sound around me, I feared the worst. I’d heard tales of Blackfoot Indians circling around on their enemies, drawing the circle tighter and tighter like a noose. As I went along, I began to lose them in my vision. Where there had been at least a dozen, I now saw three or four. What were they doing?
And then the three or four became none.
I moved slightly to the north, thinking maybe the southern party had met back with the others. If not, I thought, maybe I would at least see a sign of the other group. I wandered through that area until night fell, and it fell early because of the thick cloud cover. Finally, it seemed impossible to continue on. I knew the Lusk party would be camping for the night as well. In the morning, with any luck, skies would clear and we would all sweep on into Buffalo Gap.
Everything was too wet to start a fire, and I didn’t dare make myself obvious anyway. The Indians seemed to have moved on, but you could never be sure. Under a canopy of silent clouds, any sound, sight or movement out there in the dark could mean your death. It’s no stretch to say I didn’t sleep much either.
My eyes were wide open when I first heard the sound. It seemed like the earth shook. Maybe it was only me. I knew immediately what it was. The Blackfoot Indians. They were a couple miles due south of me, and they were whooping up enough dust that you could see a cloud rise above the horizon. I got Roman and took off under a sky that was so blue, so clear that, after the previous day’s angry gray, almost didn’t seem real. Less than a mile off, I could smell smoke and knew it hadn’t been dust on the horizon. Soon enough, I could hear the crackling of fire swirling around the war whoops. I listened for the sound of Long Gun’s rifle. It never came.
When I got to the site, I could see what had happened. The Lusk party, with its escort of soldiers and other folks, had stopped to camp next to a creek in about a half acre clearing. The problem—and they probably hadn’t realized it in the dark of the storm—was that it was situated in a bottomland between two slightly elevated areas. The Blackfoot waited on both sides and attacked just before dawn. Just like the stories I’d heard from Hanley. And I knew how they ended.
I took three shots from farther away than I had ever shot at anything. The sound of gunfire caught them unaware. They immediately turned and rode away, leaving the smoldering remains of a camp, not fifty feet away from water that coursed by unaware.
Long Gun had fallen in an area halfway up and out of the camp area, as if he’d either been advancing toward the Blackfoot to fight them head on, or maybe to try to talk to them. Alas, he didn’t know their language. They scalped him and left him there on the ground, his blood pooling with yesterday’s muddy water. All under the bluest blue you could imagine.
Yost was dead at the other end of the camp, his rifle at his side. His men lay around him, all scalped, most with their eyes open, as if they couldn’t believe what had happened.
“Greer!”
I checked Long Gun’s rifle and found it fully loaded. I took a box of shells from his coat and rode over to a row of four pup tents, ragged and far from waterproof. I knew it was standard practice to bring the tents for any ladies traveling, and there were four in the company. Walking up and looking into each of those tents may very well be the three hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life, each tent being harder than the last. The first one held the remains of a lady I had only seen in passing at the camp. She was a quiet lady who kept to herself. She seemed to have died that way too, cut from the throat down to the torso, like an animal. The second tent held Greer’s mother. I don’t know why I cried when I saw her like that. Was it because you could see Greer so easily in her face? Was it because of the sadness there? The brutality of her death? What must it have been like to follow her husband across the world, only to die on a beautiful morning and be gutted like a deer?
Was there family bac
k home on the River Clyde? Would they ever learn what happened or would they go to their graves imagining their loved ones far away in the streets of Mexico?
Greer’s sister Arabel was still alive when I found her, curled up in the end of her tent. I pulled her out by her feet and tried to give her water. A deep stab wound spilled a trail behind her. She looked at me, but I could tell she was seeing something else. I listened to her insides sputtering and dying, growing softer and then more violent again as her body seemed to go into distress. I took a blanket from her tent and suffocated her. I sat there and waited. I knew why I was waiting, even if I refused to acknowledge it. I told myself it was because of Arabel, but it wasn’t. There was one tent left. I couldn’t see into it, and part of me wanted to keep it that way.
I wanted the rain to come back.
Finally, I crawled over to the fourth tent on my hands and knees.
“Greer?”
And then a little louder,
“Greer?”
I shifted to where my line of vision allowed me to glimpse the interior of the tent. It was empty. I stood up and called her name. It must have been eight, ten times. Maybe a dozen. I scoped out the area and finally found Bricky under an oak tree on the path leading toward Buffalo Gap. He had no gun on him. It had surely been taken from him. But he hadn’t been scalped.
Looking more, I began to piece together the events, matching them up to the sounds I’d heard and the length of time I’d heard them in. It appeared that the Blackfoot had taken Greer as a trophy. Good old Bricky had put up a fight, chasing them as far from the camp as he could, before being shot dead and left to die. They were moving out, in too big of a hurry to do any more scalping or mutilating.