The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  Nichols eyed the two soldiers. Then his eyes filled with genuine fear as he watched the warriors bearing down on them.

  “Addle-headed fools!” Beecher dashed over, dodging lead from the riverbank snipers. “Have you men no sense?”

  “Get back to the breastworks!” Forsyth ordered, waving the muzzle of his pistol at the wavering deserters.

  “They’re about on top of us!”

  “Fire low … dammit! Fire low!” McCall shouted, sensing a sudden river of flame along his neck. He put his hand up to touch it. The fingers came away wet. Hot and wet.

  “Don’t waste a shot, boys!” Beecher shouted, sprinting to the far end of the island, firing his Spencer as he dodged horse carcasses.

  Just as Beecher and McCall hit the grass behind a thrashing mule, the charge broke like water parting for a boulder in the middle of wild, foaming white-water. All the warriors reined away but one. While the rest swept over their dead and wounded to drag them away, the lone horseman rode directly over the island, leaping his pony over the dead-horse breastworks and the white men who shrank from the slashing hooves as he hurtled over them.

  Astonishingly, this solitary warrior reached the cottonwood at the far end of the island without a bullet touching him. His snorting pony splashed across the stream to the north bank, then carried its rider atop a low hill where he reined up, stopped, and surveyed the white men imprisoned on the sandy island.

  “How you figure none of us hit him?” someone asked.

  “Nobody was shooting at him till he was past ’em, you idjit!” another scout replied.

  “Damn straight—I was hunkered outta the way of that bastard’s war-club!”

  “Billy!”

  McCall turned, finding Beecher and Forsyth waving him over. He crawled to his feet and made a dash toward the end of the island, diving in behind a dead mule as Indian bullets smacked into the carcass with a soapy slap.

  “You’re wounded, Sergeant!” Beecher exclaimed.

  McCall touched his neck. “Flesh-wound, Lieutenant.”

  Forsyth smiled warmly, admiration written on his face. “You ever see anything like this, Billy?”

  “No, I ain’t,” he answered, slamming home another Blakeslee loading tube into the stock of his Spencer.

  All three whirled to find Liam O’Roarke tumbling into their midst. He crawled through the sand and collapsed against the bloody mule, catching his breath.

  “That’s their women and children up there, ain’t it, Irishman?” McCall asked, pointing with the muzzle of his Spencer.

  Their eyes surveyed the surrounding hills. On the crests of many appeared spectators from the Cheyenne and Sioux villages. Besides the women and little ones, come to watch were the old ones and the boys too young to fight.

  Liam smiled. “The bastards planning to make a grand show of rubbing us out now. Bringing their kin to watch the fight.”

  McCall watched Forsyth rise. “We best stay down now,” McCall suggested. “You can’t move around standing up, Major.”

  “I must see that the men are digging in,” Forsyth argued as he clambered to crawl over the mule carcass, one leg at a time.

  “I’ll help, Major,” Beecher said as he rose.

  Forsyth grunted in pain as he tumbled back against Beecher, biting his lip from the bullet-wound in his right thigh. McCall and O’Roarke helped drag Forsyth behind the breastworks once again.

  “The major hit?” a scout hollered close by.

  “You say Forsyth’s dead?” Another echoed the frightened call.

  “He ain’t dead!” McCall countered, gazing down into Forsyth’s face as O’Roarke and Beecher ripped open the hole in the major’s britches to inspect the bloody wound. Billy could tell Forsyth was in far too much pain to answer for himself.

  “If the major’s dead, then we——”

  “He got hit in the leg is all!” McCall hollered back at the wild talk.

  “Major”—Beecher leaned over Forsyth—“sounds like the boys still at the riverbank are doing their share of damage. Every time one of the snipers creeps up to get a good shot at the far end of the island, he gets his head blown off for his trouble.”

  Billy watched Forsyth nod, wordlessly, teeth gritted in pain.

  “Lieutenant?” John Mooers shouted from nearby.

  “Major’s been hit, Doctor!” Beecher replied.

  “If you fellas help me enlarge my rifle-pit, I’ll have room for Forsyth in here.”

  “Capital idea!” Beecher cheered.

  Work began immediately to enlarge Mooers’s pit while others kept up some cover fire, including the doctor. With his dark beard flowing to mid-chest, the young physician who had eagerly signed on with Forsyth at Fort Hays was making good use of every shot from his Spencer. One of the few along on this ride who had retained his sense of humor, Mooers was known as an incurable practical joker. For now, he seemed intent on making the snipers the victims of his pointed jokes.

  “Billy, that man … he’s firing too quickly for good shooting,” the major muttered, pointing out one of the scouts.

  Forsyth hitched himself up, painfully dragging the wounded right leg when another Indian bullet crashed into his left leg halfway between knee and ankle, shattering the bone.

  “Dammit—get the major down in here now!” Mooers shouted, crouching over to reach Forsyth. “He’ll be dead if we don’t!”

  More bullets whined and slapped through the willows as the doctor and McCall scrambled to Forsyth, then dragged him into the enlarged pit.

  “Chances are that’s army lead, Major,” McCall grunted as they plopped him against the side of the pit scooped out of the wet sand.

  Forsyth appeared unable to catch his breath, finally opening his eyes, filling with tears of silent pain. “How well I know, Billy. Guns and bullets captured at Fort Phil Kearny almost two years ago.”

  “No fort there no more, Major. Army gave the country back to Red Cloud already.”

  “Suppose these same warriors who butchered Fetterman’s men want us to give up as well, eh, Billy?”

  McCall grinned. “Not a damned chance of that, Major.” He watched the major turn his head aside, not knowing if it was the pain that misted Forsyth’s eyes.

  Billy looked away as well, not wanting to embarrass his commanding officer. Just beyond the fringe of willow and brush out of range from the island rode a milling horde of warriors, brandishing a variety of weapons, each one shouting his angry disappointment that they had not cut off the soldiers’ retreat to the island.

  “Get Grover for me, Billy.”

  Minutes later, Sharp Grover slid into Dr. Mooers’s rifle-pit beside Forsyth.

  “See the big one up there on the hill, Sharp?” the major inquired.

  “The one with the long headdress?” He gazed at the major.

  Forsyth nodded. “Is that Roman Nose?”

  “Most likely,” Grover replied quietly. “Not another Indian like him on the plains.”

  “That’s sure a dark sonuvabitch riding beside him,” Mooers commented dryly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that’s a darkie renegade.”

  Forsyth appeared to let some pain wash over him, then caught his breath. “If that’s Roman Nose, then we’ve found the Northern Cheyenne.”

  “That’s right, Major,” Grover replied. “Plus Oglalla and Brule Sioux. Outcasts from other bands as well—outlaws and criminals among their own people.”

  “How many you make of it, Sharp?”

  He was a moment in answering. Not that he was calculating, just that it wasn’t good news to tell any man, much less your commanding officer lying beside you, his blood soaking into the sand from two bullet wounds.

  “I make at least a thousand of ’em, Major,” Grover grunted.

  “I … can’t seriously believe there’s a thousand there.”

  “Major, Roman Nose leads at least half that himself.”

  “Nonsense!” Forsyth shouted, his eyes darting.

  McCall und
erstood that the major had no desire for that discouraging news to become general knowledge on their little island.

  “Surely, Grover—you must be counting the women and children, the old men on the hillsides as well,” Forsyth continued, imploring the learned scout with his eyes.

  “I understand, goddammit!” Grover muttered almost under his breath. “You asked, Major. All I done was answer your question. If you want to keep it a secret from the rest, that’s your business and I’ll respect your wishes. But, as sure as the sun is rising in the east right at this moment—there are a thousand of the baddest red outlaws surrounding us.”

  “At least I’ve found Roman Nose.”

  “Major, you may’ve found Roman Nose—but I don’t think that big red bastard is gonna work up a sweat worrying about us slipping away on him.”

  Chapter 17

  This band of war veterans and iron-hardened men forged on plains warfare had sprayed a cool and deadly fire into the front ranks of the horsemen bearing down on them, parting that first sunrise charge, turning it into a sweeping surround while the taunting grew louder from those warriors sniping in the creekbank brush.

  For the next hour, things quieted over the island, although the Cheyenne and Sioux snipers kept up a steady rattle of rifle-fire from their brushy shelters. Men silently scratched at the sandy earth with their hands, knives, tin cups … anything they could use to claw holes in the ground and scoop up walls of the damp sand. The scouts were ordered to fire back at the banks only when there was a chance of hitting something.

  From the downstream end of the island, Major Sandy Forsyth heard a mule’s brass-lunged scree-haws as it collapsed, thrashing in its messy death. He was sighing, gritting with pain in the two leg wounds when the voice called out loudly from the far creekbank.

  “There goes the last damned horse, anyhow!”

  Forsyth couldn’t believe his ears.

  “You hear that, Major?” Fred Beecher inched over on his belly to the lip of Forsyth’s rifle-pit.

  “They’ve got a white renegade with ’em,” Mooers growled.

  “That, Doctor—or they’ve got one of old man Bent’s half-breed sons riding with ’em this time out.”

  “Major’s right,” Beecher replied. “This is the country the Bent boys grew up in. Word has it on this part of the plains that Charlie Bent’s become a bad seed, gotten worse for taking up with them Dog Soldiers.”

  “The voice came from that direction,” Forsyth said, swallowing down the pain as he twisted himself against the side of the pit. “I’d like that bastard who speaks English to give a listen to what I’ve got to say——”

  “Be careful, dammit!” Mooers said.

  “I will, Doctor,” the major replied.

  “I wouldn’t stick my head up like that,” Beecher said, wagging his own.

  “Just want to tell that bastard a thing or——”

  A bullet caught Forsyth’s regulation felt hat at the top of the crown where it sat creased on his head, knocking the major backward across the rifle-pit.

  Mooers and Beecher were on him, sheltering the major with their bodies while McCall hurled himself to the edge of the pit and fired his carbine at the puff of smoke drifting above the creekbank. An instant thrashing and groaning from brush beside the Arickaree told the sergeant he had shot center.

  “You’re a lucky man, Major,” Mooers declared as he inspected the furrowed row of bloody scalp across the top of Forsyth’s head. “You lay here with two wounds already, and sustain a third that had it been a half-inch lower would have blown out the back of your skull.”

  “My lucky hat,” Forsyth said, blinking till the temporary blindness caused by the wound faded. He groped about, his head pounding like nothing he had ever experienced. He retrieved the wide-brimmed felt hat, and poked a finger through the four holes in the crown that showed the bullet’s path.

  “Damned lucky,” Beecher repeated, bellying up from the next rifle-pit. “Let’s get us some Cheyenne while we can, Major.”

  Forsyth heard them as well as the rest of the men. Hooves hammering the sandy riverbed. “Got us a chance soon, Lieutenant.”

  About a dozen mounted horsemen dashed from the nearby trees along the creekbank, riding into rifle range as they darted past the north side of the island.

  “I’ll get me one of those bastards myself,” Mooers vowed, rising on one knee and slapping the Spencer’s stock against his cheek.

  “Watch yourself, Doctor.”

  Mooers waited, watching the horsemen over the front blade of his sights while one of the group swooped ever closer to the near side of the island. Then pulled his trigger, dropping the warrior into the shallow creek.

  “That rascally red bastard won’t trouble us again, Major,” he said, turning with a grin that slashed his bearded face.

  In the next moment that grin became something akin to astonishment, as Forsyth recognized the familiar crack of a bullet shattering human bone. Mooers sank slowly into the rifle-pit, both hands to his head, bright crimson spilling down his cheek, onto his shoulder.

  “I … my God—I’m hit, M-Major——”

  Mooers fell face forward, across Forsyth’s wounded legs. Painfully dragging himself out from beneath the doctor, Forsyth muscled the man over. Mooers gurgled, still alive, his breathing gone shallow and rapid. The purple hole over the right eye told the major that Mooers had a mortal wound.

  Forsyth found the doctor’s dark eyes staring dimly at him, faint with a recognition that it was all but over. No words fell from Mooers’s lips.

  “My brave … and damned fool friend,” Forsyth whispered, cradling the doctor across his wounded legs, nestling the bleeding head against his damp tunic. “Come all the way here to the plains from your beautiful Vermont. Just to die in this hole scooped out of hot sand in the middle of this hell.”

  He sensed a sob rising, threatening to choke him, but swallowed it down along with the pain gripping his legs.

  “Come here for adventure and excitement … see what it got you, Doctor. See what it got the lot of us.”

  He gently laid his friend against the sandy slope of the pit, beneath the shadow of overhanging swamp-willow and tall grass, shading Mooers’s face with the doctor’s hat. Then inched back to his side of the pit. Digging in with his hands and elbows, Forsyth painfully crawled to the edge and peered over. He and the rest intently watched the swirling horsemen sweep by, then gather upstream. Sweep by again——

  Another bugle’s blare sounded up the Arickaree Fork. Obeying the call, the circling horsemen turned off and slowly made their way beyond the first bend of the shallow river. Others appeared on both banks, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all leading their ponies toward the mouth of a gorge hidden beyond the trees, just past that first bend.

  It’s Roman Nose, the murdering bastard. Forming his legions for their charge … out of sight and rifle range.

  Forsyth sank below the lip of the rifle-pit as he turned away, exhausted already. For the moment no longer concerned with his wounds. Nothing any of them could do about the pain of the wounded. One of those two mules run off before dawn was packing Dr. Mooers’s medical supplies.

  He looked at his useless legs. All the major could do now was to try stopping the flow of blood before he grew too weak while the sun sizzled the rest of his juices out of him in this frying pan of a rifle-pit.

  He knew he had to get his mind off his legs, and the pounding headache that drove shards of pain behind his eyes like splinters of broken glass.

  “Beecher?”

  “Over here, Major,” came the voice from the adjoining rifle-pit.

  “It’s my belief the Indians are about to rush us, Lieutenant.”

  “Was thinking the same thing,” Beecher answered.

  “They’re coming, Major.” Sharp Grover’s voice rose from the lieutenant’s pit. “Soon enough.”

  “Fred…” And he swallowed down some pain. “Fred, get McCall … and you both quickly spread the word to all
the men—that they’re preparing a charge. Get the men ready … get us set up to turn their attack—and quickly…”

  Beecher’s head appeared over the edge of Forsyth’s pit. “We’ll turn ’em,” he cheered. “I’m on my way.” Then disappeared.

  Forsyth listened to the soldiers go. Heard the scraping of boots on sand, the muttering voices in rifle-pits farther and farther away still.

  Sandy Forsyth closed his eyes to the climbing sun, hung halfway now to mid-sky. He judged it was the middle of the morning, not having the inclination to pull his watch from his pocket again. So damned hot, and they weren’t in the heat of it yet.

  He only hoped Beecher would order every gun charged with a full loading tube: one in the breech and six in the Blakeslee for each Spencer. And he knew without asking that a plains-savvy lieutenant like Beecher would load the weapons of the dead and wounded as well, stationing them close to those who could still use them against the coming charge.

  Slowly twisting to the side, his legs crying out in torment, he pulled up the mule-ear on his belt-holster and inched the pistol free. He caught his breath from the wave of pain that made him want to throw up what little lay in his nearly empty belly. Then breathed easier. Knowing when the island was overrun with the coming charge, he would have a few bullets waiting for those red sonsabitches who would come leaping over the side of his rifle-pit.

  And one last bullet saved for himself.

  * * *

  “You gonna be all right, Irishman?” Sergeant McCall whispered.

  Donegan nodded his head. “I will.”

  Liam gently slapped his nephew’s shoulders in their rifle-pit as he nodded to Billy McCall. “He just took him a bad tumble from that wee horse of his. Shame of it,” he tsked. “A bloody good animal he was, Seamus.”

  “I can’t wait to get the bastard who killed him,” Donegan growled, peering round his uncle at the far end of the island.

  “Seamus is still a bit daft, Billy,” Liam O’Roarke grumbled. “Keeps saying one of the scouts shot his horse out from under him.”

  “He did, the bleeming bastard!” Seamus cried.