The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

His loud voice brought immediate rifle-fire from the bank, bullets kicking up the sand and slamming into the still, bloating horse carcasses the men huddled behind in the rising heat.

  “Keep yer goddamned voice down, Nephew!” Liam hissed.

  McCall crawled over their legs, heading away. “You’ll get plenty enough chance to kill some Indians in a few minutes, Donegan.”

  “Not Injins I want my hands on right now,” Seamus spat, one eye trained on the far end of the island. “It’s the Confederate I want to pay——”

  “Some of you just won’t let that war be over, will you!” McCall joked, smiling. “Just you both remember—Major’s orders. No more firing at the creekbanks or the brush. Save your ammunition and keep your eyes skinned up yonder. Grover thinks the big charge is coming from upstream.”

  “We’ll keep our weapons loaded, Sergeant. Won’t we, Seamus, me boy?”

  “Just ’cause I want to have a bullet or two ready for that damned Rebel what tried to kill me coming over.”

  “You was late getting saddled and taking off,” Liam soothed. “Nothing more than getting caught in the redskins’ cross-fire.”

  “Cross-fire, hell!” Donegan snapped, realizing that the sniping from the creekbanks was slacking off. He dabbed some fingers on the left forearm that oozed along the messy flesh-wound. “The Johnnie wanted me dead for some reason … and he smiled doing it, Liam.”

  “Listen!” O’Roarke ordered. “You hear it getting quiet?”

  “I’ve heard that sort of thing afore meself,” Donegan growled, still sour, his mind more on sorting out the means to work his way down the island and confront the Confederate named Smith.

  “The snipers quitting … and them riders gone off to form for their charge. C’mon, Seamus—we’re needed on upstream end of the island.”

  He shrugged off his uncle’s hand, staring downstream, refusing to budge. “Staying right here till I get him in my sights.”

  A loud grunt brought them both around. Frank Harrington tumbled back against them, hands at his head, the front of his shirt covered with blood.

  “Is he alive?” Liam asked as they pulled Harrington down.

  “I am, you dumb Irishman,” Harrington growled. “Took me an arrow for my trouble.” For only a moment he pulled a bright red hand away from his right eye, showing the iron arrowpoint embedded in his skull.

  “You’re bleeding like a lamb in slaughter,” Donegan said.

  Harrington inched up against O’Roarke. “I’d swear … the arrow … it come from that end of the island.” He pointed downstream as O’Roarke picked the arrowshaft from the sand.

  That pricked Donegan’s interest. “Down toward the tree?”

  He nodded, then winced in pain. “I figger so.”

  Seamus gazed at his uncle. “Makes sense, doesn’t it, Liam? Some of those horsemen dismounted down there … just so they could work their way up behind us.”

  “Wilson’s hit!” someone shouted close by.

  “Bill?”

  “That’s right,” the voice answered. “It don’t look good.”

  “Get the doc.”

  “Doc ain’t no good to nobody now hisself.”

  Liam’s eyes narrowed on Seamus. “All right. I’m throwing in with you, Nephew. Let’s go sweep the far end clean of the red naggers.”

  Seamus smiled. “And find the bastird Confederate as well.”

  “Where you going?” The voice bellowed behind them as they clambered over the mule carcass.

  Both turned. Donegan answered Beecher first. “We both make out that some of the horsemen dropped off at the end of the island.”

  Liam grinned widely. “We’re off to clean out the vipers, Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t expose yourselves needlessly,” Beecher advised. “What with the number of wounded and dead … I can’t chance losing any more riflemen.”

  “You watch upstream, Lieutenant. The boy and me will scrub the far end of the island clean.”

  Fifty yards of sweaty crawl through the tall grass brought them to a stand of plum-bushes. As they began to circle either side of the brush, bullets whined overhead, knocking Donegan’s hat into the tumble of trampled grass.

  “I smell ’em, boy,” Liam whispered, wagging his pistol to give directions.

  They would both crawl toward the solitary cottonwood——

  A raucous war-cry split the air when five warriors rose as one barely twenty yards away, sprinting for the white men. Their mouths open and their weapons a blaze of smoke and fire. Only one sent hissing arrows into the grass at the younger Irishman.

  Seamus fired his pistol once. Rolled to his right and fired again, dropping the bowman. Rolled back to his left as quickly to fire, bringing another warrior skidding onto his knees. The painted Cheyenne slowly toppled forward, his face gone in a spray of crimson.

  Nearby, O’Roarke’s pistol cracked four times. Then all was quiet. Upstream, the sporadic rifle-fire from the creek-banks continued. Down at this end of the battle, everything fell too quiet.

  Seamus sensed his pulse slowing, some of the loud roar disappearing from his ears. He crawled on his belly to the first warrior. Then the second. Neither body what he wanted most of all.

  Slowly, Donegan parted the grass foot by foot, bellying it toward the last sounds heard from Liam’s side of the island. Too quiet, it was. A knot of fear rose within him. Fearing his uncle dead and the warriors lying in wait for him to show up.

  He heard the hammer click about the same time the muzzle appeared out of the grass. Then a sigh of relief from the big man holding the Colt pistol.

  “Good thing you make more noise than a Cheyenne, little nephew,” O’Roarke whispered.

  “They all dead?”

  “On their way to Perdition as we speak, lad.”

  Something tensed within his belly again. “You seen the Confederate down here?”

  Liam’s eyes narrowed as his face lost its smile. “No, Seamus. He’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Not a sign of him.”

  He felt the wings of sheer anxiety batter within the pit of him. “But—I saw him down here … he crossed to the island, fired the last few rounds at me from here as I was crossing … by that tree.” He pointed to the cottonwood.

  Liam wagged his head. “Not here now. Likely these warriors killed ’im … mayhaps they captured the poor bastard and dragged him off. Save you the trouble of shooting him yourself … likely the savages will have their sport with him tonight after the sun goes down.”

  Seamus struggled to make some sense of it. The half-dozen or more they had seen scampering off the end of the island minutes ago. The five who had stayed to fight and lay dead in the grass for their trouble. And the mysterious disappearance of the Confederate. Perhaps Uncle Liam was right after all. Seeing how he knew the Indians in this country.

  Yet something didn’t cipher out right in Donegan’s less-than-blissful ignorance.

  “I don’t think so, Liam.” And he shook his head, the sun scorching the back of his neck. “Not captured. That bastird’s laying off out there … somewhere. I don’t know why—but I’ll wager he’ll be back—to finish what he didn’t get done this morning.”

  Chapter 18

  Seamus stared down at the bloody bandanna wrapping Forsyth’s muscular leg. A strip of shirt-tail, an improvised bandage stained with a rusty brown patch on his shattered left calf. Another dirty patch drying on the bandage tied at the major’s scalp.

  “You looking at something funny, Irishman?”

  Donegan glanced at Liam.

  “I believe my nephew’s thinking the same as me, Major,” O’Roarke replied as he slid down into the rifle-pit. “You’re lucky to be breathing, Forsyth.”

  “Bad thing about it, O’Roarke, I’m not the only one lucky to still be breathing.” He struggled into his pants pocket, pulling free a tarnished watch. Snapping open the cover, he looked up at the sky a moment. “Like I thought. Not yet ten.”

  “
We’ve had us four good hours of hell already, Major,” Fred Beecher said.

  Forsyth appeared to have to catch his breath after a new assault of pain. “How many wounded … Fred?” he whispered.

  “Maybe a dozen.”

  “Including me?”

  “Probably more,” McCall advised.

  Beecher nodded. “Didn’t want to tell you, Major.”

  “Bad it is, Lieutenant.” He smiled bravely. Looking around the group. “I’m sure we can all remember tougher scrapes we’ve … we’ve all been in—during the war, fellas.”

  Donegan watched Forsyth grind his teeth, fighting the mist in his eyes by blinking the tears away.

  “Major,” Seamus began.

  “O’Roarke … you and your nephew get the hell out of here, will you? Go find someplace where you two can do some damage when the charge comes, by God.”

  “Yessir, Major,” Liam replied, tugging Donegan along as he clambered out of the damp, sandy pit. “Be a good lad and obey the man, Seamus.”

  They crawled on hands and knees, skirting rifle-pits and horse carcasses, wounded scouts who moaned and called out for them to help, quietly whimpering for laudanum or a taste of tepid water from the canteens. Under the heat of a relentless sun, the stench of carcasses and blood, horse droppings, and dead men’s bowels were enough to turn any stomach.

  They passed through most pits without a word. Men sat grimly, studying the overgrown banks in solitude. From his position on the south side of the island, A. J. Pliley turned and nodded as the two Irishmen crawled past, then went back to scratching at the bottom of his pit. Patiently working his way down to murky, brackish water. Chauncey Whitney and Howard Morton dug in tandem to deepen their pit before the expected rush roared downstream.

  “Up here!” Grover hollered when he turned to find the two Irishmen crawling his way. “Make yourselves to home, boys. Long as we can, that is. I figger these Cheyenne are about to let the wolf loose on us.”

  From this end of things, Donegan could gaze at the umber ridges, sun-burnt bluffs, and grass-cured hills. With an ache they reminded him of the warm corduroy of his boyhood britches back in County Kilkenny. He blinked his eyes, smarting at the tears in remembrance of her face as she stood on the dock at his sailing to Amerikay. Donegan hoped no man noticed his tears as he ground his knuckles into both eyes.

  Looking about quickly to see if anyone had noticed, Seamus saw how the elder Farley and the Southern boy Dick Gantt among others had piled up the sand scooped from their pits on the upstream lip of the holes. Then both had sawed the barrels of the carbines down through the lip of damp sand to form narrow vees in which to rest their Spencers. Now they would command a wide field of fire when the charge materialized.

  Every one of them, in his own way, knew the riders were coming.

  Here the upstream end of the island was more blunt. Down at the other end where he had gone hunting for the Confederate near the crooked tree the island tapered off more sharply.

  Fifteen yards of shallow water separated the long, narrow island from the north bank. Twenty yards, perhaps a little more, of slow-moving water trickled past the south side of the island.

  Less than five yards away lay a half-dozen naked warriors. Some of them crumpled as they had hit the riverbed. One lay crushed beneath a dead war-pony.

  Seamus swore that if he tried, he could reach out and touch one of the copper-skins with his hand. The painted Cheyenne wore a magpie tied to his greased hair. Tiny crow’s-feet scored the corners of the warrior’s eyes as they stared blankly at the sky.

  Donegan looked away, remembering other battles. Other screaming warriors. And knew once again, try as he had to escape it, he had been pulled like a fleck of iron to a lode-stone, drawn into the life of a soldier. These civilian mercenaries wore little he could call a uniform. Pieces, britches, tunics, blouses. Yet beneath the hodgepodge of this rag-tag bunch Forsyth proudly called his frontiersmen, Seamus knew this fifty were of a kind.

  A grateful Republic would move west in their wake.

  “Looks like you boys seen the most of it up here,” Liam whispered.

  Jack Stillwell turned at the brogue. His eyes caught Donegan’s. They smiled at each other till Jack went back to watching the bend upstream.

  “That’s right, you dumb Irishman,” Grover said quietly. “Up here we stare ’em in the eye. You know well as me when you turn your back on a Injun—you’re his meat.”

  Beside young Stillwell lay the oldest of them all, still frantically digging at his half of the rifle-pit. Scratching savagely first with his huge knife, then jamming the blade into the dirt breastwork while his hands scooped out the cool, wet sand to fortify his position. Lou McLaughlin lay in a nearby pit. A dark, wet stain blotting his chest. Flecks of pink foam bubbled at his lips as he sucked in the hot air that hung like an ache over the island. Seamus could see he was in terrible pain. McLaughlin had dug at the grass while he was conscious, pulling up huge tufts with both hands. In McLaughlin’s slack lips lay a short willow branch he bit into to keep from screaming until he passed out from the pain. That, and the blood seeping into the hot sand.

  In the same pit lay old man Farley, and his boy, Hutch. Young Farley tied a knot again and again in the bloody bandanna around his father’s arm, slowly twisting and untwisting the tourniquet to slow the loss of blood while his father fought down the pain.

  Others continued to kick with their boot-heels, shoveling dirt up all round them as they gradually scraped themselves deeper and deeper into the sand. Certain the charge would come. It grew too damned quiet once the horsemen stopped circling and disappeared upstream. The snipers on both banks had eventually ended their withering fire.

  The charge would come soon. And no man wanted to talk about their chances if five hundred or more horsemen rode down on … well, maybe there were thirty left who could hold a rifle.

  He turned round, looking back down the island. In a rough ellipse of some twenty yards by forty yards, the remnants of Forsyth’s fifty huddled in their pits. Like burrowing sowbugs hiding from swooping jays, the few still breathing waited.…

  Thirty against——

  Donegan stopped thinking about it. Shaming himself. A sane man never thought about the odds when he was down in it like this.

  Beecher figured this was the Delaware Fork. Grover was every bit as certain this was the Arickaree. No matter the name, he figured. A shallow flow of yellowish water, seeping slowly down the middle of a wider channel between rows of cottonwoods and cutbanks of grassy sand.

  Except for the stream itself, the riverbed lay as dry as uncured rawhide at this late season of the year. The broad, cornsilk-yellow sky overhead and the sand of the Arickaree conspired with the undulating, heat-struck hills to form a bowl shimmering like a mirror down on the island, baking the top of Donegan’s head until he wondered if his brain were simmering like the blood soup his mother loved to cook.

  He cursed himself again for thinking about home, remembering that he had always thought about home before every battle.

  Then he remembered there might no longer be a home for him back in County Kilkenny.

  Before him, inches from his face, out where the barrel of the Henry lay, the breezes nudged the dry, brittle grasses left untrampled by the first waves of proud, brave warriors riding down the white men on the island. The way the wind snapped the brittle stalks, it reminded him at first of the horses and mules eating last night as he fell to sleep in the cool of darkness.

  Yet, the snap made Seamus remember how at the first battle of Bull Run, he had come under fire for the first time in his life. How after four unsuccessful charges against the Confederate lines, riding back to regroup with fewer and fewer men each time—men cursing to the heavens that the Rebels were holding … Donegan remembered how the young regimental flag-boy, pimple-faced and peach-fuzzed, had taken his folding knife and begun slashing at their unit’s flag.

  With tears in his eyes, the boy explained to the young Irishman that wi
th the next charge he knew he was going to fall, knew it as certain as he stood there cutting that flag into ribbons. So that was why he was cutting—to keep that flag from falling into the hands of those Johnnies … when it came time for him to die.

  Donegan recalled turning away as the order was hollered, passed down the line for the next charge, sabers drawn and presented once more, watching that young, pimple-faced boy stuffing his flag down his shirt, holding the flagpole out like a lance as they broke into a gallop. And in the smoke and black cannon soot of that battlefield, he lost track of the boy. Not seeing him again, until Seamus found the youngster, pinned to the ground amid the carnage with a short chunk of that flagpole he had so proudly protected with his life.

  The smells here reminded him of that day, and so many come later. Odors of men sweating fear, waiting to die alone in some unnamed place that existed on no map yet drawn. Knowing their bodies would know no grave, marked or otherwise.

  He recognized the smell of sun warming the oiled wood of their rifles. The heat-stench of hot gun-oil sizzling in the breeches of the Spencers. Horse piss and the butchered mules’ fetid organs drying on the grass. Blood seeping slowly, slowly into the sand of this unnamed little riverbed in the middle of …

  Donegan felt himself start to cry inside. He didn’t even know the name of the place he was asked to die for.

  “Likely it’s coming, boys!” someone shouted from behind.

  It sounded like Forsyth.

  “One in the chamber and a full tube!” McCall this time.

  “You heard the major,” Grover growled. “If you ain’t loaded, do it quick. The ball’s about ready to open, girls!”

  “Aye!” Liam roared, lusty. “And we’ll dance every tune, you and me, Sharp Grover!”

  As they laughed like men gone crazy, Seamus jammed hands into his dirty pants, each pocket filled with .44-caliber brass. He dug out a handful, then a second. He shoved what he could into the receiver. The rest he slipped between the fingers of both hands, leaving the trigger finger free. That gave him five shells he wouldn’t have to dig for when it came time to reload.

  He rolled to his side, inching an elbow down into the sandy lip of Grover’s rifle-pit. And watched his uncle quietly sliding a Blakeslee loading tube from the wooden ammunition box that lay open at the rear of their pit. O’Roarke rammed it home, locking it up the butt of his Spencer.