“Wait,” The Nose signed. “I will go with you as well. This is momentous news for us all. Sioux and Cheyenne must once again talk of battle with the whiteman.”
Around them all the Cheyenne and Dog Soldier camps came alive as they waited for ponies to be brought up, the entire village throbbing to the exciting news of the whitemen coming. A force small enough that this time every warrior knew they would not merely protect their villages while women, children, and old ones escaped onto the prairie as they had done when Long Hair attacked last summer.
This time, the men exhorted one another, this time we will attack and wipe these half-a-hundred off the face of The Mother of All Things.
Turning from the tribal leaders to the milling crowd of onlookers, The Nose found the one as tall as he.
“Nibsi!” he shouted.
Immediately the big mulatto knifed his way through the throng to stand before the war-chief. “You call,” he replied in his unsure Cheyenne.
Roman Nose smiled, the wide, white teeth glimmering in the mid-morning sunshine. “The others you see preparing for war. I will go counsel with the Sioux of Pawnee Killer so that we can move in force to attack.”
“Do I come with you this battle, Roman Nose?” Black Jack inquired, his honey-colored face beading with anticipation.
Roman Nose laughed lustily, head thrown back. “Yes, Nibsi! This time you ride with Roman Nose. It is as I saw in my medicine dream at the sundance on Beaver Creek. You and I will together make this valley our medicine place.”
“Our medicine place,” Jack O’Neill repeated, as if enjoying the taste of those words on his tongue. “The … the white man comes?”
“Many,” he answered. “Half-a-hundred. Some are wearing scalps that soon will hang from your belt.”
One hand Jack laid on the butt of his old percussion pistol. The other rested on the wide belt-knife given him by an affectionate squaw. His eyebrows newly plucked, his cheeks clean-shaven and as smooth as the inside of Emmy’s milky thighs, Jack O’Neill’s face lit up with a strange light. “My first scalps! Aiyee-yii-yii!”
“Prepare yourself, little brother,” Roman Nose advised as he turned away. “I will return soon to lead our warriors in the slaughter.”
As the acknowledged leaders of the Dog Soldiers, White Horse and Tall Bull led the way to the Sioux camp with the young Sioux warriors in the lead. Roman Nose rode behind them all.
“Make ready!” Pawnee Killer shouted, standing outside his lodge when the delegation rode into camp, announcing the presence of white men. “No more shall we wait for the soldiers to find and surround us as did Long Hair last summer, burning our lodges and winter meat. This time we attack the whiteman!”
Instantly the Sioux camps buzzed with the electricity of the news. While the Cheyenne delegation joined Pawnee Killer for a brief meal, the young warriors in all camps stripped off their hunting clothes and donned their finest war regalia. At this warm season, most wore nothing more than moccasins and breechclout. Yet what marked each individual’s battle costume was not the clothing, but rather the headdress or simple hair-covering, perhaps the body and face-paint, or those decorations now lavished on a favored warpony.
Small, fleet, wide-chested little cayuses that would now carry their owners into battle as the Sioux and Cheyenne butchered that small band of white men foolish enough to ride into the steamy gut of Indian hunting ground.
Instead of the white men stalking the villages, Forsyth’s plainsmen had become the quarry.
By the time the masses of Sioux had dressed and made their medicine, assembling to ride south where they would join with Cheyenne warriors, the sun had fallen past mid-sky. A young, flat-nosed warrior announced their readiness at the doorway of Pawnee Killer’s lodge.
“We ride!” the Sioux chief exclaimed, indicating the time had come for leaving.
The immense Brule village hummed and shrieked with activity as the war-chiefs emerged from The Killer’s lodge. Young boys still scurried here and there, bringing war-ponies in from the herds.
Women chattered loudly, no one in particular listening, as they brought forth the weapons their men would use. Out into the sunshine of this battle day came the short horn or Osage-orange bows, skin quivers filled with long iron-tipped arrows fletched with owl feathers. Axes, knives, and war-clubs—some stone, others wood, a few nail-studded like archaic mace. Long, grooved lances, many more than ten feet long, tiny grooves radiating from the huge iron spear-points to drain a victim’s blood. Here and there, the afternoon light glinted from a firearm, either pistol or rifle. White-man weapons bought with blood beyond the Lodge Trail Ridge when many of these same warriors had butchered the hundred-in-the-hand.
Last into the light of a battle day were the shields, pulled ceremonially from their hide wrappings by the women. Gently each wife smoothed feathers and tiny brass cones, brushed a finger over the magic symbols painted across the bull-hide surface, stroked the tiny weasel skull or a badger jaw, elk milk-teeth or a buffalo scrotum. Potent totems. Powerful medicine evoked come this time of war. Come now this time to slaughter the half-a-hundred.
As the ponies were brought up to the Cheyenne delegation, Roman Nose turned slightly, greeted with the fragrance of stewing meat and fry-bread pungent on the afternoon breeze. As was custom at this time of year, the women cooked outside, usually beneath a hide awning, so that the interior of the lodge was not heated beyond anyone’s endurance.
What he saw as he stood there beside Pawnee Killer’s lodge caused The Nose to feel his throat constrict.
Three squaws huddled round two steaming kettles where they had boiled the hump-meat the Sioux chief had just served his guests. A third kettle crackled with spitting grease, where the women fried their bread made with flour stolen from raids on the white man’s roads and settlements.
The big Cheyenne’s eyes narrowed as he was handed the reins to his war-pony. He watched the old Sioux woman repeatedly pull the fry-bread from her kettle … impaled on the tines of an iron fork!
Quietly, Roman Nose began to keen as his eyes fell to the ground. He turned slowly, then clambered aboard his pony like a man touched by the moon. Drunk with grief.
“What is this?” Tall Bull demanded, pulling his pony alongside the great war leader’s. “Why are you crying as if a relative had been killed?”
“Yes!” agreed White Horse. “It will be the whiteman and his soldiers who will this day be killed!”
Yet, they both stopped their chiding, reading on the face of the tall warrior between them the unmistakable truth.
“My medicine-helper long ago instructed me not to eat food that had been touched with the whiteman’s iron.”
“Yes … all Cheyenne know of The Nose’s powerful medicine calling,” Tall Bull asserted. “But, what does——”
“I can use the whiteman’s weapons,” he went on. “Touch anything with my hands—but not take the food into my body that has been touched by the whiteman’s own medicine!”
“What is this you are saying?” White Horse demanded, his own eyes flaring with the first tinge of fear.
“Behold,” Roman Nose announced, pointing to the awning where the old Sioux woman dipped her fry-bread from the spitting kettle with a crude iron fork. He turned away without another word, knowing the power of his medicine was gone.
And that his life was now on his fingernails.
* * *
For the last few days Forsyth’s scouts had been following an Indian trail so wide and deep, to young Jack Stillwell it resembled the scars of a wagon road. From time to time, they had come across a broken lodgepole. Old Trudeau told his young partner the squaws carried extras, replacing a bad travois pole with a new pole. Or they might run across dried strips of discarded buffalo meat, a torn legging, a worn-out moccasin. And always the dry, brittle horse-droppings that stretched at times a full quarter-mile wide across the prairie.
Only today, the sixteenth of September, those pony-droppings did not readily crumble in Sha
rp Grover’s palm, or when rubbed between the immense paws of Liam O’Roarke. More trouble still, no man among them had spotted any game for the past two days along their march. Game hunted away, and driven off. A man didn’t have to be a superstitious cuss to know that was a bad sign.
Jack scratched the fuzz on his smooth cheeks and swallowed his apprehension. Reminding himself that no one had yet seen an Indian. Consoling himself that his face showed no more fear than the faces of the older, more proven veterans in the major’s command.
Each day young Stillwell grew more proud to be a member of Forsyth’s fifty. True, he had to admit, they were a shaggy, ragged, Falstaffian lot, but most remained intent on the task to come. He was like them. Yet, he was not. These farmers burned off their homesteads. These hide hunters hungering for quick, easy money. These Indian-haters eager for a way to even a score. And always, like the ranks of the army itself, Forsyth’s ranks were filled with the restless veterans become drifters with no home to return to after the war.
Still, Jack felt more a part of them every day, this company of scouts who talked crudely and spared no graces. They were no different from the men he had known at home, wearing their wide-brimmed, floppy hats that drooped after many soakings, decked in a rag-tag of greasy Indian buckskin or tattered army britches, perhaps a homespun cotton shirt or frayed army tunic.
Stillwell knew in the days to come, he would become a man among these plainsmen. A man among these men.
At noon break, Forsyth halted along a dry creekbed to rest the weary horses. Most of the men stayed near their mounts, fearing an attack. Others sat in the shade of the horse as it ate its fill of the stunted, brittle forage. In small knots, men argued the wisdom of following the swelling Indian road.
“Shit!” hollered Sergeant McCall as he stomped up on one group. “Sooner or later these red bastards will come out and fight us!”
“More’n likely, they’ll break camp and skeedaddle fast,” offered John Donovan. “Like they done time and again to Hancock and Custer last summer.”
“Donovan’s right,” old Trudeau piped up. “They running from us. Leaving behind what they don’t carry.”
“Major’s gonna be damned angry,” McCall whispered, bending over the heads of the group as if sharing a secret with them. “He don’t get a crack at this bunch—he’s gonna be one mad whelp.”
“Major may get his chance yet,” Liam O’Roarke offered as he strolled over with his nephew at his side.
“Don’t say?” McCall inquired, straightening.
“These Cheyenne don’t look all that concerned with our little bunch, Sergeant. Ain’t in too much the hurry.”
“Liam’s got a point,” Grover joined in, knocking dust from his boots with blows from a hatbrim. “They ain’t acting all that concerned. Like they know a small bunch like us can’t do ’em much harm.”
“Well, boys—that’s just what Forsyth wants that bunch of red buggers to believe, I tell you!” McCall cheered. “Maybeso then they’ll stop running and turn around.”
“Then what, Sergeant?” Stillwell asked as the group fell quiet.
“Then … then we can get down to what we come out to this blazing-hot hell-hole to do … once’t and for all.”
“What’s that, McCall?” Trudeau asked the question.
“Kill Injuns, old man. Kill some bloody Indians for Forsyth and Beecher.”
“What happens we run out of food?” asked the young Sigmund Shlesinger, stepping forward.
McCall eyed him quickly. “You’re the Jew, ain’t you?”
“Y-yessir.”
The sergeant considered his answer, flicking a look at the piece of shade nearby where Forsyth and Beecher sat in their own discussion. “True, we’re sore on supplies, fellas. But we got us salt and coffee. And, all that ammunition as well.”
“Sergeant’s right,” Seamus Donegan said, surprising his uncle as well as others. “Never did take a liking to army salt-pork during the war, I didn’t. Better for us to hunt our own game.”
“Providing there’s game to be had, Nephew,” Liam reminded everyone.
Some of the men rose and moved off. Those few who stayed on were as quiet as the shadows sprawled beneath their mounts with the high sun hung in mid-sky.
“Shit, fellas,” Sharp Grover cheered, standing and dusting his britches, “we’re bound to find game before too long. Not too far up yonder lies the Dry Fork of the Republican.”
“That’un called the Arickaree?” John Donovan asked as he stood, working kinks out of his back.
“One the same,” Grover replied.
“Major and Beecher both figure the next stream we cross will be Delaware Creek,” McCall said to those still listening.
“I know they figure it for the Delaware,” Sharp growled, winking at young Jack Stillwell. “But if those two’d listen to their chief of scouts—they’d realize that’s the valley of the Arickaree up yonder.”
“Arickaree?” Stillwell marched off alongside Grover as the group busted back to their hobbled mounts.
Grover grinned at him. “Arickaree, Jack. Just another small chunk of God-forgot country ’bout as dry as these boots of mine.”
“Why we going there, Sharp?”
Grover shook his head. “Damned if I know, Jack. Except that Forsyth knows it’s medicine ground to the Cheyenne.”
Chapter 13
Seamus watched Forsyth signal a halt, the major’s neck craning as he scanned the narrow valley. He pulled the fob from his pocket, cracking open his watch.
“Just past four, Sergeant,” the major advised in the hearing of those at the head of the column. “The horses are pretty well done in. Let’s make camp down opposite that island in the riverbed.”
“Splendid idea,” Fred Beecher piped up, slapping a hand across his thigh, knocking free some trail-dust. “This animal under me is turning to paunch-water, Major.”
Forsyth said to his sergeant, “Keep the column closed up until we’re down by the stream.”
“To camp!” McCall hollered, then brought his weary mount around once more, waving an arm and pointing down into the beckoning valley where cottonwoods offered shade and that creekbed might offer a trickle of cool water born of the mountains on the far, far horizon.
Minutes later, as the scouts made camp on the north bank of the Arickaree, Liam O’Roarke and Sharp Grover rode in. After reporting to Forsyth, Liam joined his nephew in digging a firepit where the young Irishman had chosen to bivouac in a grassy swale, just north of the sandy island at the middle of the stream.
“I’ll sup with you, then must be gone until after dark. The Indian trail we’ve followed goes upriver a good many leagues, then turns south by west.”
“Sounds like the major’s got you doing more riding.”
“That’s the cut of it, Seamus. Grover, we two. Make no mistake about it”—and he paused, gazing directly into the younger man’s eyes—“Sharp senses well as I we’re practically hammering up the backsides of the red buggers.”
Seamus licked his sunburned lips, sensing an unfamiliar apprehension in his uncle’s voice. For a moment he regarded the low, red-rimmed bluffs just to the south, accented now with the sinking sun. “I been too damned close to red backsides afore … and too many times to tell.”
“You’ve told me of the Crazy Woman, Seamus,” Liam said, scooping sand out of their firepit. “And the time you rode into that ambush trying to save that foolish lieutenant’s life.”
Seamus snorted. “Bored you already?”
Liam roared with laughter, quick and ready. “No, Nephew. Sweet saints of us all! But when you told me of that red bastard’s arrow pinning your leg to a saddle … and finding yourself pinned down in that hayfield corral while the soldier boys twiddled their thumbs—them’s the stories worth the stuff of legends, Seamus.”
“When will you be sharing your stories with me, Uncle?”
O’Roarke quit scooping, but his eyes did not leave the widening hole. “The time has come, yo
ung Seamus. Yes.”
Liam raised his eyes, gazing into Donegan’s. “Time tonight to tell you of lost loves and a brother’s hate. Of the discovery of gold that trickled so many, many times through me fingers that I lost count. Time to tell you of hiring on as a paid gun for a man who calls himself a god out here in all of this splendor.” O’Roarke wagged his knife in the air, his lips for the moment pressed in remembrance.
“You speak of leaving Deseret, Liam?”
“That … and my coming to Wallace to find you, Seamus!” His voice suddenly had a happier ring to it as he slapped a big hand on his nephew’s shoulder, smiling.
Donegan was struck with the bleak feeling that O’Roarke considered his time among the Saints in Salt Lake City too fresh and raw a wound to discuss.
“Tonight, Uncle?”
“You’ve me word on it, Seamus.”
“We can talk at last of you going home to your sister?”
O’Roarke sighed, his eyes gone misty, a wistful look there. “Erin. Sweet, green, cool land of our birth, Seamus Donegan. Yes, lad—let’s talk of home. And talk of why you let a woman get away from you.”
Liam rose from the sandy ground, taking up the reins to his horse as he stepped wearily into the saddle. “Let’s you and me talk of affairs of the heart, Seamus. How foolish or crazy can be a man in love … yet fool or crazed—I tell you this, Nephew. Do what your soul tells you. Go where your heart leads.”
Seamus stood, silently watching O’Roarke’s back until his uncle disappeared upstream.
Then he whispered, “It will be good … good to talk of these things … after waiting so many, many years, Uncle.”
By and large, most of the riverbank was grassy, providing some of the best grazing in many days for the horses and pack-mules. Donegan stripped The General of the Grimsley, finding some brush to lay the thick saddle-blanket upon so that it would dry, never a problem on these high, arid plains. After gathering kindling and driftwood, and getting a small fire started, Seamus curried both horses with handfuls of the fragrant grass.
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