The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  And they all had a laugh at that. The Irishman too. Seemed they were all a little more ready to laugh this time.

  Now they knew they could turn this one back. The red bastards might take a man or two, but if they kept reloading and firing from the very first sight of the horsemen, they’d beat this charge back as well.

  Just knowing you wasn’t beat into the sand by the red bastards was enough to make you a little looser.

  And then Jack couldn’t hear the laughter anymore, the song momentarily drowned out. Just the hammering of a thousand hooves.

  This time the horsemen rounded the bend and broke past the cottonwoods without a leader. Just a solid phalanx of riders coming like thick clouds of prairie dust boiling between the riverbanks. A roiling, throbbing mass of blazing colors bearing down on them once more. Row after goddamned row of naked, brown, screaming terror.

  Bank to bank, working themselves and their ponies into a wild lather, throwing sand into a silvery grit caught in the afternoon light. Then, suddenly, above it all rose that peaty brogue again, singing, shouting in a lusty roar … giving them all the cheer they needed as the hoary, copper countenance of death bore down upon them.

  “Up from the South, at break o’ day,

  Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay …

  Hurrah! Hurrah for Phil Sheridan!

  Hurrah! Hurrah for horse and man!”

  Chapter 23

  The taut skin across Billy McCall’s cheeks felt less of the heat now. He glanced over his left shoulder, finding the sun sinking toward the far rim of the prairie. Soon enough it would disappear behind the cottonwood and swamp-willow and plum-brush. He grew remorseful that he would not be able to see the sun actually sink beyond the far rim of the earth this night.

  A lull had settled over the island following that second massed charge the scouts had beaten back around two o’clock.

  With things so quiet now, one heard the wounded moaning, begging, some screaming for the gritty water they were dredging out of Martin Burke’s pit. Burke had dug down, persistently between every skirmish, so that he now had a sizable pool of brackish, cloudy water collecting at the bottom.

  Beecher had never uttered another word after taking his wound that first mid-morning charge. But Mooers moaned and whimpered like a castrated calf from time to time. Shame of it was, McCall brooded, the surgeon and Forsyth were stuck in the same rifle-pit together now. Seemed the doctor’s foot occasionally kicked out, striking one of the major’s wounded legs, causing him immense pain. Yet Forsyth appeared to understand that in some mysterious way, the blinded Mooers was tapping out with his leg to assure himself that Forsyth, someone, was still in the pit with him.

  “Strange as it seems, Billy,” he recalled the major explaining an hour or so before, “this is Mooers’s way of keeping touch with his surroundings as he descends into death.”

  McCall had moved his eyes to Beecher. “Lieutenant ain’t gonna last much longer, sir.”

  “Fred’s lost too much blood. Internal bleeding … I can’t do anything more for him.”

  “None of us, Major.”

  “I want to rest now, Billy,” Forsyth had said. “Just close my eyes for a little while.”

  “I’ll be close—you need me, sir.”

  From a nearby pit the sergeant kept an eye on Forsyth. Though he didn’t have to. Wasn’t an able-bodied man there on that sundown island who wouldn’t do anything to help the major. Billy liked the man. More than respected Forsyth. Now himself at thirty, a year younger than the major, Billy figured Forsyth was the sort of officer he wanted to be one day.

  Ever since leaving Fort Hays behind, the major had never asked a man to do those sorts of things officers always had done for them in the army. Instead, Forsyth always stripped his own saddle each night and built his own fire and made his own bivouac like the rest of them.

  And while he never stood watch himself as assigned in rotation by Sergeant McCall, Sandy Forsyth was nonetheless up and down throughout the cool summer nights, always restless and moving about from picket to picket on each watch. Talking quietly, reassuring his men. Letting them know he was no better than they. Only their leader on this trip out to catch them some Indians.

  And catch them they had.

  Just like Forsyth and Beecher wanted, McCall brooded. And look what it’s got the two of ’em. God help me—I pray I’ve got what it will take to get these men back to Wallace. If we get back to——

  “Sergeant!”

  McCall turned at the young Irishman’s call. “You want me?”

  “You’ll wanna see this, McCall!” Sharp Grover added his voice.

  Billy slipped into their rifle-pit at the front of the island, gingerly crawling round the wounded, delirious O’Roarke.

  “Have a look, Sergeant.” Grover pointed upstream.

  From bank to bank near the far bend of the river the horsemen were gathering once more, milling off the sandy slopes into the riverbed itself, huddling and swelling in numbers. Here and there among them, war-chiefs shouted and waved arms and weapons, exhorting their warriors into formation.

  “What you make of it, Grover?”

  He frowned. “One more run at us for the day.”

  “For the day?”

  Grover nodded. “They won’t fight after sundown.” He pointed to the pink-orange underbellies of the thick, gray clouds scudding out of the northwest, quickly across the sky.

  “This is it, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Grover added, with no smile. “Darkness or the rain coming will put an end to the fighting for this day.”

  “They’ll be back tomorrow?” McCall asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No doubt. But for today, this is their last hurrah, Sergeant.”

  “I’ll bet they make this charge a bloody good one as well,” Seamus Donegan remarked as he slipped the big, brass .44-caliber cartridges into the openings between his fingers, then pressed five more between his lips. He worked his left elbow into the dry sand at the lip of his rifle-pit.

  The breeze shifted slowly, out of the northwest, as the warriors disappeared upstream. That breeze carried on it the thick, humid smell of prairie rain. Billy had been out here long enough since the end of the war in the regular army to recognize the smell of prairie rain. Not like back home in Pennsylvania.

  He squeezed the thought of home out of his mind the way a man wrung his dirty socks out each night, leaving them to dry over the end of his bunk in barracks.

  Whispers from the others nearby hung round him like ghosts, like a filmy cotton gauze dress …

  The thought brought his mind around to her. Back home, waiting for him. Her, and their two-year-old daughter. He sensed his eyes moistening with the thought of his two, waiting for him. Billy swiped his eyes. Then a second time angrily, to be sure he could see. He could hear them now, and he needed to see. McCall clamped his lids shut, forcing his wife’s face from his mind so that he could focus on the riverbed, three, four, five hundred yards off.

  The riders were coming …

  They came as they had before, massed shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, flank to flank, spread from riverbank to riverbank. Shouting, drumming, screeching their blood-oaths as the willows on both sides of the island suddenly erupted with puffs of burnt powder and the cry of bullets singing into wood and sand-pits and the stiffening bodies of the gassy, bloating horses.

  The scouts kept their heads down, as McCall had ordered. Telling them he would give the volley call in place of the major this time. Sensing they all knew what was expected of them anyway. Wasn’t a one of them he could figure was going to do anything foolish now. Their only chance was to stay here, and stay alive. If only … they could just stay alive——

  “Now!”

  The island exploded with the roar of the Spencers as the forty-odd rifles cut a swath through the brown-skinned phalanx at two hundred yards in a full gallop. White-hot acid smoke spewed with jets of bright flame igniting rifle-muzzles from the plum-brush. Ponies
reared, screaming in pain, throwing their riders into others. And still they came.

  “Fire, goddammit!”

  The horsemen came on, swaying side to side, their pistols and rifles at ready, riding low along the necks of their ponies. Some few crazy ones sitting full-up, their glistening chests an inviting target.

  Between each rattle of rifle-fire from the riverbanks that was meant to keep the scouts’ heads down while the horsemen rode the island down, Billy McCall heard that incessant pulsing of the drumbeat echoing off the surrounding knolls. From the top of every ridge rumbled the chants, wails of rage and cries for revenge from the squaws ministering to their dead and dying.

  “Fire!”

  He jerked around after yelling out his order, hearing Forsyth cry out. “You hit, Major?”

  “N-no, Billy,” Forsyth answered in a strong voice above the rattle of gunfire. “The firing set Mooers off again … kicked me with his foot … like before—my leg——”

  “You need help, sir?”

  “No-no! Stay where you are, Sergeant. I need you … we all need you right there. Issue the fire order now, Sergeant!”

  “Fire!”

  And the rifles erupted, spitting orange flame in the fading light of early evening. That last volley wasn’t really needed, he figured. They were already splitting at a hundred yards. Breaking off their charge. Heading for the riverbanks in a spray of gritty, silvery sand. Getting nowhere near the island as they had twice before. Only then did Billy realize the warriors knew how suicidal these charges had become. The riverbed still littered with the bodies of fallen warriors, some dead, others dying and unable to move out of the way of the slashing pony hooves.

  Always, in the wake of each assault lay the wounded, butchered ponies, crying with that eerie, humanlike screeching whistle of theirs that had never failed to raise the hairs on his neck since the first battle at Bull Run, the first time he went to fight for Lincoln and Pennsylvania.

  Watching the ponies clawing at the sand until they all fell silent with the sinking of the far sun.

  “Hurrah!”

  Several of the scouts were up and dancing about as the firing from the riverbanks fell off in despair of making a successful ride over the island. A few of the men pounded one another on the back again, as they had done twice before, congratulating themselves on making it through another charge alive and unscratched. And above it all rose the stench of more gases spewing from the punctured horse carcasses. Each time a bullet hit, the bloating gases hissed, reminding Billy of the stench around a trench latrine.

  “Sergeant McCall?”

  He turned at Forsyth’s voice fifteen yards down the island. “Major?”

  “Report, Sergeant.”

  Billy drew himself up amid the pounding he was taking on his back from both Grover and Donegan, looking down at Stillwell in the nearby pit, seeing the tears in the boy’s eyes. Realizing he had a mist in his own.

  “By God, boys—we been delivered of this day!” he shouted, shaking a clenched fist at the far riverbank. Daring them to shoot him as he ran in a crouch to the major’s pit.

  “Here.” And Forsyth handed McCall a blanket-wrapped canteen, its wool soaked with water and coated with sand. “See if Mooers wants some.”

  Billy tried, turning back to Forsyth with the sound of Beecher’s frothy, labored breathing in his ears. “Sorry, Major. He’s still gone. Him and the lieutenant both.”

  Forsyth sighed. “I’m surprised Fred’s lasted this long, Billy. He’s … a strong, determined man to hang on way he has.”

  McCall swallowed hard, sipping at the murky water himself. “You wanted a report as well, Major?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Forsyth answered, pushing some of his wavy hair from his eyes, and inching himself up on an elbow.

  “Only the two dead. Culver and Wilson.”

  “What of the wounded?”

  “Sixteen now, sir.”

  “Seventeen, Sergeant,” the major replied, pointing to McCall’s neck-wound.

  He nodded, a grin cutting his face. “Yessir. Seventeen. Just a scratch … but, by damn, we turned those red bastards, Major.”

  He couldn’t help it now, try as he might. Billy McCall felt the first of the hot tears spill down his cheeks.

  “By God, Major—this rag-tag bunch of misfits turned ’em!”

  * * *

  The hands turning him were gentle. Not like the big, hard hands that had pulled him from the willows where he had dragged himself after falling from the chestnut pony. These hands were soft. A woman’s.

  How he missed never taking a woman now. Never coupling. Much less marrying. Roman Nose denied himself for his people. The Shahiyena.

  He tried to say something, not even sure if he got the words out to thank her for bathing him with the cool water from this last river he would ever see. Accepting the death-coming here as the sun sank. Even though his eyes had glazed, clouded in pain, Roman Nose nonetheless knew the sun was setting. Throughout the day he had tracked its heat across his face. From the heat on his forehead in the plum-brush and swamp-willow. To the waning warmth on his cheek. Even that was fading with night-coming.

  Like his own life, falling away into the cool nothingness of his medicine vision.

  One more time he remembered again the thrilling leap into the jaws of those spitting guns, as the sun sank from his face. Remembered smiling as he sang his death-song and aimed his rifle at the tall, bearded one who rose to his feet in meeting the charge of Roman Nose. Exciting too was the ride across the island, over all those gopher-holes the white men had dug with their bare hands, until the pony could carry him no more. So severe were its many wounds.

  No matter, he had thought as he had sailed into the swamp-willow in a jumble of pony and falling men. No matter, for he could no longer hold onto the pony himself anyway.

  The lead from those white-man guns had kicked up the grass and sand around him as he tumbled to a stop within the brush. And found himself feeling no pain at first, only a sense of remorse. Looking down and ashamed to see that he had soiled himself.

  Then understanding why he had disgraced himself when he failed to move his legs. No power left in them.

  As his breathing slowed, and the throbbing in his neck-cords became regular once more, Roman Nose had suffered the first shards of icy pain. Like cold slivers radiating from the core of him. And he realized he had been shot in the side at least once. Perhaps once in the front as well. Most certainly many times in the back for he could feel the sting of the many pucker-holes growing icy-hot in the great muscles like twisted rope beneath the damp, copper skin.

  No more would he ride a pony. Perhaps the cruelest fate he could imagine a warrior made to suffer. That, and missing the gentle touch of a woman here with the falling of the sun. Yearning for her, yet he laughed to himself. If he could not move anything from his lower back down, Roman Nose was certain his manhood part would not rise strong and swollen for the mating.

  Too late for so many things now as he let the woman bathe him, listening to the chants of the medicine men nearby, their hand drums throbbing, a scrotum rattle filled with stream-pebbles shaking. More drums and singing and women wailing not far away. He figured there must be many dead and dying nearby.

  It had been a charge the Shahiyena would talk about for robe seasons to come as the old ones passed down their winter-counts and battle-stories. A charge when Roman Nose knew he was destined to die, yet led his warriors into the face of those hot-mouthed white-man guns spitting fire into their ranks. To be proud as you rode to your death. To be a man was enough.

  To die having carried the struggle onto the island itself when so many others had turned away seemed to Roman Nose as if his prayer had been answered by the Everywhere Spirit.

  He recalled the joy on the faces of the many as he had ridden into their midst atop the great chestnut, hearing them sing his praises that now, at last, they would take the island, wiping the white man out. Sending a message to soldiers up and down
the Central Plains that the Dog Soldiers were a force to be reckoned with.

  The mud-colored face swam before him, milky, like a rain-filled pocket on the prairie coming clear after you had stirred the bottom looking for the little swimming ones.

  “Nibsi.” He choked the mulatto’s name, able to speak for the first time in hours.

  “I am here, my chief.”

  He tried to raise his hand to touch the friend’s face. “Tell me … did you see him?”

  O’Neill nodded, sweeping up the chief’s hand in both of his. “I saw, Roman Nose. I saw the one who killed you.”

  “He was tall, was he not?”

  “Tall as a cottonwood. As tall as you, my chief.”

  “The hair on his face?”

  “I saw. With the words from your sundance vision, you described him to me. When I rode at your side to the island, with my own eyes I saw him. Now I am certain, while the others aimed at you, my heart is sure his bullets found you.”

  His eyes fluttered. “The way I was told it would be, Nibsi.” He felt the mulatto squeeze his hand, wrapping it with great strength.

  “You must not go,” O’Neill pleaded.

  “Do not be afraid, Nibsi. My people are your people now.”

  Through the fog he gazed into the mulatto’s face, watching the tears course down the coffee-colored cheeks. Falling on his bare chest where the woman’s hands had bathed him in cool water moments ago.

  “I will miss you, Roman Nose.”

  “No, do not miss me. For my spirit rides with you. Nibsi will not stalk the tall, gray-eyed one alone.”

  “Yes.” O’Neill drew back, with fingers of one hand angrily slapping the hot tears from his dark cheeks. “I will follow that one—your killer—into the bowels of the Earth-Mother if I must. Until I hold his life in my hands.”

  The great Cheyenne war-chief’s eyelids fluttered, then fell slowly with his last, painful breath.

  O’Neill felt the hand sag within his two. He laid it on the brown chest and rose, intent on finding Two Crows.

  Then gazed one last time upon the face of Roman Nose.

  Finding there the smile of blood’s work, the smile of revenge.