The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Carrington’s a broken man.”

  “You really know him?” Forsyth’s voice rose from the next pit.

  “I was there, Major,” Seamus answered. “From the beginning of it. Fought the skirmish at the Crazy Woman Fork.”

  “There at the time of the massacre?”

  “Rode out with the relief party.”

  “When’d you come down this part of the country, Irishman?” McCall inquired.

  “Last fall. After some of these same bastards pinned us down in a hayfield not far from C. F. Smith. They shot up a friend of mine pretty bad the next day down at Kearny.”

  “The wagon-box fight?”

  “That’s right, Major,” Seamus replied. “I figure this republic broke its promise to Colonel Carrington.”

  “You’re right, Irishman,” Forsyth finally answered. “Because the republic had to punish someone, it chose Carrington. But the army will defend him.”

  Seamus snorted sourly as he gazed at his uncle, watching the bloody shirt rise and fall, rise and fall beneath the steamy shadow of the improvised awning.

  “Way I see it, Major Forsyth—your army won’t even consider defending Carrington.”

  “I happen to believe in the honor of my fellow officers——”

  “Major,” Donegan interrupted with his deep colic, “your gawddamned army will side with that bastard Fetterman.”

  “Why do you say that, Irishman?”

  “It’s your army, Major—and on any day, your army will always choose dead heroes over a living symbol of a national defeat.”

  Chapter 22

  His blood went cold.

  Watching his pony rear back, thrashing its front legs, tearing its rawhide halter from the willow where he was about to tie it before kneeling there on the riverbank overlooking the island. The animal ripped itself from his grasp as the two bullets thudded home, whining past his cheeks like angry, red buffalo-gnats.

  Round and round the pony pranced, its side pumping bright, liquid ooze as it danced its life away. The hawks’-bells he had tied for medicine in its mane tinkling with every dusty step into death.

  Jack O’Neill watched the animal crumple to its side twenty yards out on the prairie. It had been a gift presented to him by Roman Nose. Now leg-running its way to a last breath.

  As the four painted legs slowed to a stop, Jack sensed the hair standing on the back of his neck. His eyes muled, turning back to gaze at the island through the leafy willow-branches. Realizing but for seconds and inches, he would have been the creature breathing his last on the sandy prairie at this moment.

  He found himself giving thanks to the Cheyenne’s Everywhere Spirit, and for the first time was not ashamed to raise his face to the summer sky overhead in real prayer. Not the dancing, hand-waving, all-consuming trance both the black Bible-thumping preachers and sorcerers alike preferred to work up among their sweating congregations.

  Jack felt the first tingle of real deliverance. For some reason he had been allowed to escape the white man’s bullets fired from that hole on the end of the island.

  As the battle had dragged on earlier in the day, before the first charge that had taken the life of Roman Nose, the mulatto had joined Two Crows and other warriors in crawling through the swamp-willow near the riverbank, searching for the bodies of Weasel Bear and White Thunder. Among the plum-brush they came across Cloud Chief, Black Moon, and Bear Feathers, three who had gone into the willow as well to rescue bodies of their fallen friends.

  Black Moon whispered, his eyes wide and expressive, “Be careful how you creep through the grass. The whitemen watch the grass. And when they see it move, they shoot at us. Three times they came close to hitting us.”

  “I have a wound to show how close they come,” Bear Feathers said, pointing to a flesh wound across his right shoulder.

  “You should go back,” Jack replied.

  “No, Nibsi. We all come to fight the whitemen this day, eh?”

  Jack nodded, smiling. “Yes. We have much blood to spill yet.” He sank to his belly once more, and led the rest into the grass, slowly parting the tall stalks, then inching forward, causing as little disturbance as possible.

  He came to a stop, old Two Crows bumping against his leg.

  “What is it, Nibsi? You stop.”

  He smiled. “I see the bodies. Weasel Bear. White Thunder. They are ten feet from me.”

  Jack rolled carefully onto his side when his eyes caught the grass moving directly behind them. The faces of two warriors poked through the dried stalks of grass. Spotted Wolf and Star.

  The two had not been careful crawling. A volley of shots erupted from the island, splitting the air inches above the ground.

  “Uuunnhhh!”

  “Cloud Chief!” Two Crows growled in a harsh whisper. “See?” he rolled, whirling on Star. “You cause this with your stupidity!”

  “It is only my arm,” Cloud Chief explained, his fingers moist with red. “I go on.”

  “They are right over there. Only a little way,” Jack instructed.

  Cautiously parting the grass, he showed Two Crows where the two bodies lay, a third close by on the bank. Having struggled that far to safety after reaching the island in their courageous first charge.

  Very few had held their ponies behind Roman Nose. Most had veered off before reaching the island. But these three brave ones had given up their life-breath in the heroic charge into the muzzles of all those rifles.

  As the rest inched up close, two more bullets whined overhead. But neither struck a warrior. Jack thought on the pony that had carried him into the charge, onto the end of the island, then into the willow on the riverbank at Roman Nose’s side, until the chief could ride no more. The pony dead.

  Jack knew the war-chief lay dying at this moment. While the sun began its quick journey from mid-sky into its western bed for the night.

  Peeking through the grass, he could see the bodies of Weasel Bear and White Thunder, lying so close to each other they might be sleeping with their feet to a fire. Just in front of White Thunder lay Ermine Bear.

  “Can you get him, Nibsi?”

  Jack nodded. He reached out, his bare, coffee-colored arm, blending well with the summer-stunted grass and willow. By twisting the dead warrior’s leg, he turned White Thunder onto his back, revealing the huge, blackened hole in his chest.

  Jack found the body stiff already. “He is dead, Two Crows.”

  “Can you reach the others?”

  “If I show myself,” Jack replied.

  “Do not, Nibsi. We come after dark has settled on the land,” Two Crows advised. “Bring White Thunder with you.”

  As O’Neill pulled on the ankle, dragging the stiffened body into the tall grass, Cloud Chief took his hand from his bloody wound and pointed. He whispered loudly.

  “Look! See Weasel Bear! He is not dead!”

  “Yes!” Star added, excited. “I too saw him move.”

  Two Crows bellied up beside O’Neill, peering at the strip of sand where the bodies lay. “Weasel Bear? Are you alive?”

  They waited, all watching the body. It moved slightly.

  “Yes,” came Weasel Bear’s weakened reply.

  “Wait for us,” Two Crows went on, his voice louder now in his excitement. “We are trying to get your nephew, White Thunder, away from here. When we have him away, we will return for you.”

  “Is that my brother-in-law who speaks to me from the grass?” Weasel Bear asked, a little hope in his voice.

  “Yes,” Two Crows answered.

  “Good,” came the reply. “I have a bullet through my hips and cannot move my legs. But I will live. Come back for me when you can.”

  “Two Crows,” Jack interrupted, “have one of the young ones return to their pony for a rope.”

  Star signaled, passing the word down the line. Minutes crawled by until one by one the warriors passed the end of the rope back to Nibsi. He lashed it round White Thunder’s ankle.

  Turning to Two Crows
, he said, “Pull now, slowly … slowly.”

  Although they pulled the body through the grass slowly, the tall, dry stalks rustled, giving them away. Volley after volley sailed into the brush around them as they yanked the body to safety. One bullet slapped against the thick, rawhide shield Spotted Wolf had lashed to his back. Made from the glued and heated thick neck-hide of a bull buffalo, it was enough to turn the white man’s lead.

  Two young warriors dragged the body from the willow, and, draping it over a pony, hurried the dead man out of range, over the hill to the place many squaws and medicine dancers were nursing the wounded. Others prepared the dead for burial.

  Two Crows bellied up beside O’Neill once more to whisper to Weasel Bear. “My brother-in-law. We have returned for you.”

  “That is good.” Weasel Bear’s voice grew weaker from blood-loss. “I am glad you come, Two Crows. Help me, for my legs do not move when I command them.”

  “Tie this to my brother-in-law, Nibsi,” the Cheyenne chief instructed. “As you did the last one.”

  As his eyes darted about, inching slowly toward Weasel Bear’s foot, Jack O’Neill spotted the three white riflemen not hiding on the island. Instead, they hid beneath the riverbank. He pointed them out.

  “They are the whitemen who have killed Dry Throat and Prairie Bear this morning at dawn, Two Crows.”

  The old chief nodded, his wrinkled face drawn taut in anger. “We did not know they had those rifles hidden under the riverbank.”

  The mulatto gazed into the sky. He smiled, thinking it was good to see the dark, tumbling thunderheads gathering above, reaching far, far into the sky. It would rain tonight. Perhaps sooner. And with a cloudy sky, there would be less chance of moonlight.

  “I will bring others back with us this night, old one,” Jack promised. “We will clean out this nest of scorpions for you.”

  * * *

  Jack could smell the old man’s sweat. The others repeatedly said old Trudeau always had some whiskey in his saddlebags. True enough, Stillwell figured—there was a good measure of whiskey in the saddlebags crushed beneath the dead horses now.

  So it was no wonder that this afternoon, half a day gone since that first dawn rush on their camp, the old man was still sweating sour whiskey from every pore.

  Stillwell sniffed. His own sweat gone old, grown cold. His gut no longer churning after that big charge some four hours back when the men cheered and called Roman Nose a godless fornicator. That was a word Jack had grown accustomed to, often hearing it back home when his mother and maiden aunt would discuss someone in town, speaking in their holy voices he had grown to despise.

  To be a fornicator, Jack had decided, must have some element of fun. And too, fornicating must be the way a nineteen-year-old boy got himself turned into a man.

  Jack prayed he would live long enough to survive this attack. Live to get off the island. Live long enough to find out how much fun fornicating could be.

  “You wanna drink?” C. B. Piatt bellied up with a big, blanket-wrapped canteen in his hand.

  Jack took it, sniffed. Held it against his tongue. Then handed it back. “Thanks.”

  “No more?”

  “No.” He shook his head, sensing his stomach rumbling at the tepid, gritty water he had already swallowed in an attempt to slake his thirst.

  Strange, but the smell of that canteen filled with harsh water spiked his nose with more of the growing stench of this place. The blood going bad. The horses and men both collecting the insects. Hardbacks that came crawling, the buzzing ones droning in black clouds overhead. Searching out the blood that sizzled beneath this mid-afternoon sun.

  And the sour odor he recognized like an evil memory of that night in Wallace when he had himself too much bad whiskey and spent the night out at the edge of the prairie, passed out in his own vomit.

  From the smell of it, someone nearby had spilled his belly. Maybe more than one. No matter that they called him boy from day one of this ride.

  Jack Stillwell ain’t bleeding, he thought proudly. And he sure as hell hasn’t spilled his sour belly on the sand.

  It lurched, and just about got away from him. What with all the brown grit and murky water he’d had to drink. Didn’t have no food now. A few of the older ones had been chewing on coffee beans. Sweat and coffee and mule to eat. He sighed. Time enough to try some of that damned mule.

  Looking at the animal, stiff-legged and gas-bloating, Jack watched the big-bellied September flies busy on the mule. Clustered on eyes and around the lips. Nostrils and anus. Encircling every moist arrow-wound and bullet hole.

  Anywhere those sonsabitches can lay their eggs.

  Flies fat and sassy and summer-sleek, feasting on all the gore and muck and blood the tiny critters could lap up. Flies and spiders and beetles getting drunk on the juices of the island’s dead and dying.

  Not far away he listened to Lieutenant Beecher mumbling. Earlier when the sun had hit mid-sky, Dr. Mooers had been shrieking incoherently. The men said the doctor was thrashing his way into St. Peter’s Gates. Jack wanted it to come clean when it was time. He didn’t want it to take so long as it was for Beecher and Mooers and Farley.

  Quick. Like it had been for Culver and Bill Wilson in that first action of the morning, every man alone on his own hook, racing here to this sandy patch of hell in the middle of God knows where.

  His mama would be angry for his taking the Lord’s name like that, he decided. But, for the first time Jack didn’t care. She wasn’t here. She didn’t know how afraid he was. How afraid any of the rest were as well, listening to the chants rocking off the hillsides, the shrieks of those squaws, the throbbing cadence of the incessant drums beyond the river-bend and over the brow of the low hills. Every ridgetop resounding with drums. And always the hammering of hoofbeats. On all sides of them. In an ever-tightening noose that felt like a starch-stiffened, strangling church-meeting collar his mother ironed and buttoned on him as a boy every Sunday.

  He choked. And closed his eyes a minute. Remembering some of the words the preacher used in praying over the dying. Words used over the sick ones in their town. Maybe words he could use over the wounded here on this island now. After all, they had no medicine. Mooers had brought along enough to fill a whole pannier loading down one side of a mule when they left Hays behind last month.

  Last month …

  He forced that out of his mind. Because the mule with the bandages and the sulphur and the laudanum was gone. The Indians had it now. That peace-giving narcotic laudanum. That tincture of opium such a blessing for a wounded man anywhere on this frontier. None of that now to make the lot of the wounded more bearable. The surgeon’s bag and all his plunder gone to the hostiles now. Jack figured the Indians were having themselves a time with those bottles of medicines now as they cracked open the supplies and other truck found on the captured mules. Maybe the red bastards would drink the laudanum and get drunk, the way old Pete got stiff from his rot-whiskey.

  This morning when they were first digging, old Trudeau cursed most the fact that Mooers let his surgeon’s kit get away because the good doctor had carried an ample supply of stout brandy along.

  Jack licked his chapped lips, tasting once more the brackish, harsh water. Making his sun and wind-raw lips burn.

  With the brassy cry of the bugle, Stillwell jerked up, his bowels instantly tightening as they had before.

  “Goddamnsonsabitches coming at us again!” Lane was hollering as he plopped on his belly at the edge of his pit beside Jack’s.

  “If you ain’t reloaded, boys … now’s your last chance to think about it!” Sergeant McCall was up and shouting as the rifle-fire from the riverbanks began again in earnest.

  Sniper bullets kicked up sprays of dry sand, thudding into the stiff, juicy horse carcasses, spraying the flies into the air with a loud, buzzing protest before they resettled amid the singing, ricocheting lead balls.

  In and out again, McCall dove from one pit to another, issuing orders gruffly as h
e checked weapons, helped others recover the wounded with coats and blankets retrieved from behind saddles on the dead horses. Time and again the Indians in the willows tried to find him with their bullets.

  Jack figured McCall hollered so loud and stern just so the men would obey him without hesitation in the face of the coming charge they each could hear pounding the riverbottom. Upstream. Out of the mouth of the same gorge they had used that morning.

  Then Jack realized that McCall talked gruff because he was probably just as scared as the rest, and if he didn’t talk loudly right now with the sun staring down on their little island, he just might mess his pants like some of the others had done already.

  “Tighten up your guts, son,” A. J. Eutsler growled, turning to Lane and Stillwell. “They riding down on us again.”

  “We done it before, men!”

  It was Forsyth’s voice now, raised above the hubbub of moaning wounded, men crying out for water. And others telling them to shut up. The rumble of horsemen, and the rattle of rifle-fire. And filling every pause was the constant drone of wailing women and throbbing drums that caused Jack’s head to ache. He’d have to find a bandanna to tie around his head when the charge was over since he had lost his hat in the race to the island at dawn. A bandanna—something to keep the sun from boiling his brain in a skull-kettle.

  “Whiskey is the life of man!”

  He looked up and to his left, finding where the familiar, loud voice originated. A voice thick with a peaty brogue. And saw the tall, young Irishman leaning on the front lip of his rifle-pit, the brass-mounted Henry in his hands, two Spencers atop the sand beside him. Next to Donegan sat Sharp Grover. The old scout was laughing at his young partner. Jack figured Grover laughed because Seamus was crazy. No one was supposed to sing when the goddamned Indians was riding you down.

  “Whiskey is the life of man!

  Whiskey, Abner—Abner, me friend!

  I’ll drink whiskey whenever I can,

  Whiskey for me friend, Abner!”

  “I hope you shoot better’n you sing, Irishman!” someone shouted, back a ways.