The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  Silently the Confederate crawled on his belly to the edge of the slow-moving river. At this time of the year, it presented no problem in fording on his belly as well. It flowed less than two feet deep, so he decided he would crawl across the sandy bottom, keeping his head and the pistol just above waterline. In the dim light, no man on the island would see him inching across the dark water.

  At the island bank, only some twenty feet from the rifle-pit, North stopped, breathing shallow, conscious of the noise it caused. Hearing some reassuring laughter from the central pits. His eyes widened in the growing darkness as a few clouds scudded past. A breeze drifting from upstream carried on it the muted noises of the Indians removing their dead from the streambed. Behind it all, the constant beat of drums rose beyond the hills, accented by the keening wails of the women and old men.

  Then he heard the most reassuring sound of all. The raspy snores of a man asleep in the Irishman’s rifle-pit.

  Foot by foot he inched himself out of the stream, still on his belly, into the dry grass. He froze at the rustle it made. Then, hearing the heavy breathing continue, North slithered on. Each foot brought him closer and closer to the snoring Irishman. Closer to the man whose bullet had caused North’s belly to burn with a pain that never left him.

  At the lip of the rifle-pit, North held up, listening to the night-sounds. Then carefully peered over the edge, between some saddles, allowing his eyes to adjust to the shadows in the hole scooped from the sand. Straining his eyes for a few seconds, he located the dark form contrasting against the lighter sand.

  North drew his knife, slipping one leg over the hard lip of the pit where damp sand had been piled as a bulwark. He waited three heartbeats for the sleeping man to move. When he did not, he slid on down into the pit.

  Inching to his victim’s side like a scorpion, knife raised like its deadly stinger, poised in the starlight and ready to fall, North held a moment, savoring this last taste of triumph. After so many months and so many miles, to be crouching here, ready to spring.

  Still, more than anything he wanted in a long, long time, North wanted the Irishman to know who had killed him. Just as he had this morning during the dawn attack when he was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea of shooting the Irishman out of his saddle during the mad rush to the island. North jabbed the point of the thin-bladed weapon against his victim’s throat, at the same time jamming his fingers into the thick hair, yanking the head back, chin jutting, exposing more of the bearded throat.

  The man below North exploded into life, cursing in a garbled Irish brogue. And twisted his head aside, thrashing, pulling his neck from the knife-point as his arms vainly struggled to toss off the damp, heavy horse-blankets.

  One fist came free, wildly swinging with the blows of a man dying, yet not ready. Once, then twice, a fist glanced off North’s head as the Confederate sprawled atop his victim.

  Grunting in effort, North fought the surprising strength of the Irishman cursing, babbling incoherently beneath him, until he got one arm pinned beneath his leg. And rose over his victim.

  He brought the point of his knife to the throat again, his other hand yanking the bearded chin to the side so he would have a clean slash at the jugular.

  The entire massive bulk of his victim convulsed beneath him like the power of horse ready to shed its rider. North held the beard, slashing back and forth with his knife at any flesh he could sink the knife into.

  At last he felt the warm syrup splatter over his fingers. North’s victim slowed his thrashing enough that the Confederate could bring the bloody knife-hand back for one last blow.

  He shoved the long, thin blade between the ribs on the victim’s left side, sensing the Irishman sag even more, a few last words mumbled from the lips.

  As his dying curse fell silent, North wheeled.

  Footsteps approaching from down-island.

  Two, perhaps three, men. Boots dragging across both sand and summer-cured swamp-grass.

  Frightened like a weasel discovered in the chicken-yard, he lunged for the side of the pit. The footsteps were joined by voices. At least two men drawing close.

  If North was anything, he was a man who never fought against a stacked deck. One on one might be a flip of a coin for the renegade. Bob North wanted nothing to chance when he went for the kill. And, grinning like a wolf slipping into the darkness, Bob North had killed again.

  The Confederate rolled over the lip of the pit, bellied into the tall grass, and slithered quickly to the water. There he let his eyes grow adjusted to the starshine once more, then slipped into the river again. This time heading for the north bank.

  Behind him the voices grew louder. He reached midstream on his belly. Clambered to his hands and knees, his eyes searching the willows and plum-brush on the bank for Indians who might mistake him for a white man escaping the island.

  Who you kidding, boy? he chided himself. You are a white man. But, you got Arapaho friends out there in the night. And, much as you’re ’fraid of that big bastard, the red devil Roman Nose hisself ought’n remember you from last summer … when you and he went riding down to burn up Fort C. F. Smith.

  Ol’ Roman Nose hisself. Him looking to wipe the soldiers off the Big Horn River. And you, Capt. Robert North—you was looking to find a certain tall, dark-headed, brogue-spitting Irishman!

  Chapter 27

  “By damned, you’re a darkie!” exclaimed the thin man standing before Jack O’Neill with a battered bugle hung over one shoulder. His tobacco-stained smiled shined in the firelight. “I ain’t seen a darkie since I left home in Ohio back to ’66. A damned darkie … out here——”

  “My mother was African,” Jack replied, studying the sun-bronzed white man dressed in nothing but a breechclout, moccasins, and held a blanket round his shoulders to ward off the cool breezes of this summer night on the high plains. He was still somewhat in shock to find himself addressed in English here at the fires in the great Sioux and Cheyenne war-camps hidden behind the low ridge by the river, not far from the sandy island where the soldiers lay in their burrows this night. “I mean … her parents were——”

  “Your mother was a slave ’swhat you mean,” the stranger corrected. “My name’s Clybor. Jack Clybor. Pawnee Killer’s Brule Sioux gave me name of ‘Comanche.’”

  “A white man!” O’Neill exclaimed, holding forth his hand.

  They shook, a gesture both suddenly realized to be very out of place in this war-camp still very much alive at this late hour, its inhabitants mourning for the dead with eerie chants for those wounded waiting to die.

  “Year ago this summer, I was a young recruit to Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. Out on patrol with Lieutenant Kidder. We was jumped, tried running for it.” He shook his head, grinning. “Never had us a chance. I was wounded,” he explained, pulling the blanket from his shoulder to expose the bullet wound pocked and strangely white in the copper firelight. “Pawnee Killer’s band butchered the rest. Always figured it strange they didn’t knock my brains in.”

  “They saved you, like the Cheyenne done me.”

  Clybor grinned all the bigger. “Looking at you, darkie—you could almost pass for Cheyenne, you could.”

  “Roman Nose watched over me more than most.”

  “That big buck’s forked his last horse, darkie,” Clybor replied.

  “Call me Nibsi—something meaning black in their tongue,” the mulatto explained.

  “What’s your slave name?”

  “O’Neill. Jack O’Neill.”

  “Lordy, you got a Christian name too!”

  “My daddy took a special shine to my mama. Raised me up right, down in Georgia. Had schooling with his other children.”

  Clybor grinned and clucked. “I can tell. You talk better’n any darkie I ever knowed back to home.”

  “How come you stayed on after your wounds healed?” O’Neill asked, noticing the women hurry about their errands, bathing wounds, boiling roots, preparing poultices for the medicine men.

 
“I figured if I went back, I’d have to go back into the army,” Clybor explained. “Sonsabitches left me for dead. Don’t want no part of ’em. Least with Pawnee Killer’s bunch, I can get my fill of killing … and the squaws is good too. They like taking a roll with a whiteman.”

  Clybor leaned close to O’Neill. “Bet you like diddling them Cheyenne squaws, darkie.”

  O’Neill regarded Clybor a moment, then looked away. “You like killing, you say.”

  Clybor straightened, his eyes narrowing, as if confused that the mulatto had not risen to his bait. “Sure. What you ask——”

  “I’ve just come from talking with Two Crows and some of the others … after Roman Nose died. We are going to search for the three whitemen who hid under the bank on the north side of the river during the first charge this morning. They might still be there.”

  “Them bastards did a handsome job on Roman Nose.”

  O’Neill glared down at the white man. “My chief was not killed by the three under the riverbank. He was killed by one who stood in his rifle-pit on the island.”

  Clybor bit his lip, struck with a feeling more than nervousness by this haughty, muscular Negro. “So … Nibsi. You gonna go do some killing tonight?”

  O’Neill smiled. “Now you have it … Comanche. You come. You stay. Makes no difference to me.”

  “No, no. I’m coming,” Clybor explained hurriedly. “Count me in, you got some blood work to do. I like it best when it’s up close … close enough you can smell the fear in their mouths, see it in their eyes as you come for ’em.”

  “You have your weapons?”

  Clybor nodded. “I have a pistol. Knife and a club.”

  “Then you are ready to go with me?”

  “Lemme get my shirt over yonder by the rocks. If we’re crawling out there in them bushes, I’m gonna leave my blanket here. ’Sides, one of these Sioux gals will wanna wrap herself up in it till I come back. I loan her my blanket, she’ll diddle me when I bring her one of them white bastard’s scalps. Something to sing over later.”

  O’Neill smiled. “It is good, Jack Clybor. Good that you come to do this killing with me tonight. We’ll creep down the north bank … just this side of the near end of the island … where the first rifle-pit is.”

  Clybor started to turn away, then stopped, and turned as he scratched the back of his neck, coming away with a small, white louse. “Say, didn’t you just tell me that’s where the fella was who killed Roman Nose this morning?”

  O’Neill, grinned. A sadistic, wolf-slash of an expression he drew no little pleasure in basking on young Clybor. Seeing its effect on the Ohio boy.

  “Yes, Comanche … I’m hunting whitemen tonight.”

  * * *

  “Major, I been thinking.” John Donovan crouched at the edge of the pit, where Forsyth lay against the sand after Seamus Donegan and Billy McCall joined Sharp Grover in patrolling once more toward the far end of the island.

  Jack Stillwell and Pierre Trudeau slid to the bottom of the trench.

  “What you got on your mind, Donovan?” Forsyth asked.

  “Trudeau’s too old to make this race to Wallace with Stillwell. I’ll go in his place, you let me.”

  “Am not, too old, Major,” Trudeau growled.

  “You heard Pete yourself, Donovan. Besides, Jack picked ol’ Pierre.” He turned to Stillwell. “Still want Trudeau?”

  “If I’m going, sir—he’s going with me.”

  “It’s settled,” Forsyth said, giving a wave of his hand that told everyone it had been finalized, turning back to the two couriers who were leaving the island. “You have an idea what direction you’re going to start out, Jack?”

  “Pete and I talked some while we was roasting meat, Major. Figure we’ll go straight south by the north star. If the clouds don’t blow off, we’ll keep pushing south by feel.”

  “All right. Just want you to have this for tomorrow.”

  “What is it, Major?” Jack asked, accepting the thick folds of paper from Forsyth.

  “My only map. I’m trusting you with it. I know you can read a bit, and ol’ Pierre can’t. So, it’s yours to carry, Jack.”

  “Thank you, Major,” Jack replied, already sensing an immense loneliness as he stuffed the map inside his damp shirt. He figured Forsyth considered him the more intelligent of the two. “I’ll keep the map safe and give it back to you in a few days, sir.”

  “Explain our situation to Colonel Bankhead.” Forsyth chewed at a lip. “Let us all pray you get through, Jack. We’re going to be here awhile, and it’ll take some doing for you two to get away. Have you fellas got a plan?”

  Jack glanced at Trudeau. Then both looked back at Forsyth, and shrugged.

  “Just getting off the island is the bone of it, Major,” Jack replied sourly.

  “We take our boots off, walk backward in stockings,” Trudeau finally spoke up. “Old Injun trick. Our footprints will look like moccasin tracks, coming toward the island.”

  “Take two pistols apiece, fellas.”

  “Decided we’re not carrying carbines, sir. Just get in the way,” Stillwell added.

  Forsyth nodded. “I understand. We can use your Spencers here come morning. Besides, where you two are headed, no amount of fire-power is going to help if they catch you.”

  “No, sir,” Stillwell replied softly. “They catch us, we’ll do what we can to take some with us. But … me and Pete here——”

  “We talk ’bout it some, Major,” Trudeau interrupted. “Them red bastards circle us, and start closing in—we’ll kill ourselfs.”

  “Better than the torture them sonsabitches can do on a man,” Sharp Grover added.

  “They damned sure got enough firearms. Been slinging lead our way all day.” Forsyth groaned, shifting his position from one tired buttock to another.

  “Army guns and army bullets,” Sergeant McCall growled sourly. “Taken off Caspar Collins’s outfit at Platte River Bridge.”

  “Don’t forget what they took from Fetterman’s dead on Lodge Trail Ridge,” Donegan echoed.

  “Got enough meat?”

  Stillwell tapped the canvas haversack he had filled with charred strips of half-raw flesh. “I got the horsemeat. Pete’s carrying two canteens.”

  “Strapped ’em to me so they won’t rattle and give them pesky brownskins news.”

  “From what I remember of the map, fellas—Wallace is about due south of here. A relief column will have to march almost due north to get to us, on the bearing Custer used marching south from the Republican last summer.”

  “We make it, Major,” Pete replied, rising. “If I have to smell with my nose that terrible latrine in the walls of Fort Wallace.”

  Stillwell rose beside Trudeau, noticing how the short, silvery whiskers, aglow in the dim firelight, looked all the more ragged against the old man’s browned, leathery face. “Avalanche will see us through, Major.”

  “Why do you call Trudeau Avalanche?”

  “Marching up here, Pete told me ’bout a time couple years back when he was scouting for the army and got stoved-up by a mule-kick. They laid him in an ambulance … but Pete couldn’t say it right. So, I call him Avalanche.”

  Forsyth held his hand up to Trudeau. “Pete, you and young Jack here don’t take any unnecessary chances. Get back here if you can’t make it tonight. We’ll figure something else out.”

  “Good-bye, Major,” the old man almost whispered. “Been a honor serving you.” He pulled his hand out of Forsyth’s grip and dragged it under his bulbous, red nose, turning away.

  Trudeau clambered out of the pit and squatted as he yanked his boots off, lashing them together with a strip of hide he looped over his neck. He unfurled two blankets as Jack finished shaking hands with Forsyth.

  “You best be going,” Forsyth explained. “It’s nearly midnight.”

  “So long, Major.” Stillwell felt the words catching in his thickening throat. He tried to smile. “Rest of you too.”

  Some of the
others pounded him on the back as he got his boots off, slung around his neck, and took his blanket from Trudeau.

  “C’mon, li’l one,” Pete whispered, turning into the darkness.

  Jack looked over his shoulder a last time, staring at the faces of those he was leaving behind, haggard faces red-lit with the dim glow of fiery coals.

  He turned away, gliding noiselessly into the black of prairie night behind Trudeau.

  Before any of the men he left behind saw his eyes moisten in the starlight from above.

  * * *

  “He ain’t breathing, Sharp!”

  Seamus’s raspy whisper came quick as he slipped and skidded over the saddles and sand they had built up around the parapet of their rifle-pit. Grover was on his heels, kicking loose sand on his way down to Liam O’Roarke’s side.

  Donegan drew his uncle’s head into his lap, cradling it in both arms as Sharp came to a stop and knelt on the other side of the body.

  “Seamus,” he began quietly, “we both knew he was gonna die. Just a matter of——”

  “I know,” Donegan whimpered, whispering, rocking his uncle back and forth in the darkness. “I needed to know, Sharp. Needed to know what’s west … if California ain’t.”

  “Liam’s brother?”

  He nodded, choking back the hot, sour ball clogging his throat. “We come all the way from Wallace … seemed like he was going to tell me so much last night.”

  “Major had me and him out, sniffing round——”

  “By Jesus, I know that, Sharp!” Donegan snapped. “Look what good Liam did us, him being out. What good it done him as well.”

  As he ran the fingers of one hand along his uncle’s face, Seamus felt the sticky, cool syrup. Coagulating blood.

  “Wait a minute, Sharp!” he hissed, something instantly pricking his suspicions.

  Donegan twisted his uncle’s head gently. “He’s shot on the right side of the head.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “But here’s some fresh blood just starting to dry on the left side of his face and neck,” he explained, his fingers exploring. “By the Mither of God, Grover! Fresh wounds!”