The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  His fingers inched down the bearded jawline. Into the slashed, cleaved neck wounds.

  “Feel this, Sharp. Here on his neck.”

  Grover knelt forward in the murky darkness. Groping. Donegan heard the scout’s breath catch as he discovered it.

  Sharp sat back on his haunches. “Liam didn’t die from his head-wound, Seamus.”

  “’Sactly what I was thinking meself, Sharp,” he snarled.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Grover whispered, his eyes piercing the darkness. “These Injuns wouldn’t skulk on this island and go murdering Liam in his sleep. Just listen to ’em, Seamus.” He flung an arm off to the north, pointing out the ridges back-lit with glowing fires. Drums and singing, wailing, and the high, eerie cries of squaws echoed down into the riverbed.

  “Who the hell else gonna come up here to this pit and kill me uncle?” he demanded, his tone shoving Grover backward as much as Donegan’s big fist would in cracking against the scout’s jaw.

  “It … it ain’t like these Injuns … they’re scairt of fighting … killing in the dark, Donegan,” Grover tried, grappling for an explanation.

  He slowly lowered the body from his lap as he said, “I got more reason now than ever to kill me these Cheyenne. Bastards crawl in this hole and murder a man already dying. These red h’athens ain’t got no soul——”

  Grover sensed something strange in Donegan’s voice as he broke off. “You hear something, Irishman? Somebody still around?”

  “No,” Donegan finally answered, his voice grown hard. “But, whoever was here left something behind. I just found it. Put your hand down here along Liam’s chest … here on your side of his body.”

  Grover did as told. Reaching out with his hand until he felt the cool, thick moistness that told of much blood having oozed from O’Roarke’s side before he died. Then he touched Donegan’s hand. Held in the Irishman’s hand, still sticky and protruding from the side of Liam’s chest, was the hilt of a knife.

  “Pull … pull it, Seamus,” Grover instructed. “I want a look at it.”

  As Donegan slowly pulled the long-bladed knife from his uncle’s chest, Sharp Grover dug round in his vest pockets and located a lucifer. He dragged the sulphur-headed wooden match across the butt of his pistol as it stuck out of his waistband like a goat’s hoof. The rifle-pit flared into yellow brightness.

  Grover moved the flickering light over the body. Seamus held the knife across both palms, moving it under the hissing match.

  “It’s Indian, all right. Damn!” Grover moaned. “Can’t figure them bastards taking the chance creeping onto the——”

  “Red bastirds didn’t kill Liam,” Seamus interrupted him sharply. “It’s an Injin knife for certain. But, I’ve seen this one before.”

  Grover searched Seamus’s eyes in the yellow light as the match burned down. “You … you’re sure?”

  “I’d never forget that knife,” Donegan hissed. “Or the murdering bastird who I saw using it, cutting plums a few days back.”

  “What?” Grover asked, shaking his head as if were coming all too quickly. “What’re you talking about … you saw the … not an Injun?”

  “That’s the Confederate’s knife.”

  “Shit!” Grover growled. “None of it makes sense to me, him coming here to … why the hell’d he wanna kill Liam?”

  “I figure he either killed Liam knowing it was a sure way to get me to come after him,” Donegan said as he began wiping the blood from the knife across his thigh. “That, or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or that rebel bastird figured he was murdering me.”

  Chapter 28

  Jack crouched beside old Trudeau in the last rifle-pit on the far end of the island. From here by the lone cottonwood, his eyes darted to the south bank, across the river.

  Beneath the starshine, the streambed lay drenched in silver light.

  He shivered beneath his army blanket. Both wore the blankets wrapped about them Indian-fashion. Time of night it was, these plains had grown more than chill. He was cold.

  Yet Jack shivered from more than the cold.

  Then the clouds shrank over the ragged patches of starry sky and it began to drizzle once more as they listened and looked from the end of the island. Their friends behind them. Nothing but scalp-hunters and a hundred miles of cactus between them and Fort Wallace now.

  Pete nudged Jack, by signs showing the youngster it was time to walk backward from here. They rose together, quietly stepped into the riverbed and backed into the mist that Jack hoped would conceal them from watchful eyes on the shrouded banks.

  Every few painstaking yards, Pete signaled they must drop to their hands and knees when the cover along the riverbank grew skimpy. Then they rose once more, walking backward in their stockings, boots slung round their necks, hidden beneath the thin blankets.

  Jack worried of doing the right thing as his heart hovered in his throat those first long, dark minutes grinding past as they began their escape.

  A thousand to one is what you got here, Jack, he cursed himself. Things weren’t bad enough during the light when the bastards was charging and shooting at us—I’ll bet they’ve tightened their noose ’round us come nightfall. Figuring on someone sneaking off the island. Someone … like me …

  The mist was turning the brim of Jack’s hat soft. Cold water began to spill down the neck of his shirt, slipping beneath the blanket. Each step they made quietly, one foot at a time, until they had crept close to a quarter-mile in the sandy bed. Inching over to the grassy bank, old Pete heaved himself into the willow and lay still, panting, waiting for Stillwell to join him near the mouth of a ravine that opened into the streambed.

  Trudeau turned to whisper, something Jack just sensed the old man was about to do. He clamped his fingers over Pete’s mouth.

  Jack also sensed Indians nearby.

  Pete understood. His hands talked for him as he explained they must lay buried in the tall grass. Pickets likely were out, riding in search of any white man intent upon escape from the island.

  A scritch-scritching arrested Jack’s ears. His heart sealed his throat shut as he laid an ear against the ground, hearing for certain the steps of a pony slowly moving through the damp grass along the riverbank.

  The hoofbeats stopped. Then, more came. From what Stillwell could tell with that one ear on the damp earth, three more riders joined the first.

  All four quietly continued in the same direction. Toward the mouth of the ravine dumping its run-off into the riverbed. The grassy mouth where Jack and Pete lay waiting in the mist.

  A frightening vision of it came before his eyes there in the darkness, made real once more as he recalled the guttural words the old ones like Trudeau had used to describe what Cheyenne and Sioux warriors could do to torture a man. From that first day at Fort Hays, Stillwell had listened to tale after tale of mutilations and butchery. And every one of the seasoned plainsmen, from old man Farley to Pete Trudeau, said the tales shared the same moral.

  Don’t ever let the red bastards catch you alive.

  Here in the tall grass, his mind echoed on that grisly warning.

  Stillwell turned slightly, rolling onto his side, letting the blanket slide from his shoulders as he reached for his knife. Pete’s hand was there in the next breathless heartbeat, clamping Jack’s. Stillwell felt Pete shaking his head slowly in the drizzle.

  Trudeau wagged a finger, pointing.

  Jack nodded. Then followed the old frontiersman into the tall, damp grass that was their only hope for escape. Had the grass been day-time dry, discovery would have been immediate. But with the cold drizzle that continued to soak their blankets and britches, seeping down the collars of Stillwell’s sweaty shirt, that same drizzle softened their escape, dampening the summer-cured grass so it would not tattle-tale the desperate crawl of the whitemen from the mouth of that ravine.

  They’re coming!

  Jack dropped to his belly in the grass at the same instant Trudeau yank
ed him down.

  With one ear against the sodden ground, Stillwell listened as the hooves clopped out of the darkness. Stopped. And waited.

  One of the horsemen whispered orders. Two riders headed off upstream once more. While the other two moved into the tall grass along the riverbank.

  As he waited there, eyes clenched as if to shut out discovery, Stillwell imagined he saw the ponies’ legs slicing through the dewy grass, slowly, ever slowly inching toward the white men.

  Ten yards. Eight … then four. And when the horsemen were no more than an arm’s length away in the sodden, drizzling darkness, they clopped right on by.

  He hugged the ground, his fingers clawing at the damp stalks of grass, feeling the water running down his cheeks and into the week’s stubble of fuzz. When his ear told him the horsemen had gone off downstream, Jack realized that not all the droplets on his cheek were cold rain.

  Some were warm.

  He felt delivered as the old man nudged him, motioning that they would strike out onto the prairie. The hot sting at his eyes reassured young Stillwell he was still alive.

  But he balked, shaking his head, arguing in sign with Trudeau that they would stand a better chance staying with the riverbed.

  Old Pete shook his head. Telling Jack that was just what the Injuns would figure as well.

  Stillwell finally relented. He followed Trudeau onto the prairie, into the cold mist, his feet banging against the first of the spiny cactus that dotted the plain. Jack bit on the inside of his cheek, then his lip, to keep from crying out in frustration and pain. Needle after needle snapped off in the soles of his stocking feet as they crept onto the yawning expanse of the Central Plains.

  When the drizzle left them behind agonized hours later, a stiff wind swirled out of the east, chilling Jack to the bone. As it came up, Trudeau turned them face-on into the wind.

  The clouds scattered, breaking apart as they scudded across the endless dark canopy, forming huge cracks for a sprinkling of dim starshine. For what seemed like days the old man had them walking into that life-robbing wind, eventually turning south by southeast now that they could read the patches of stars overhead.

  Without saying a word when he altered their course every so often in their walk beneath the swirling night-sky, the old man led the young map-bearer into the uncharted darkness of that rolling, desolate wilderness.

  * * *

  He hunched over the jumble of tracks, slowly inching the tiny, burning brand he held over the sand. The mist drew an angry hiss from the driftwood torch he carried.

  Looking, hoping to find something.

  Twice already Seamus Donegan had circled the rifle-pit where the Confederate had murdered his uncle. Trying to make some sense out of the crossed-over, stomped-on tracks of men and horses, moccasins and ponies.

  “No telling where he went, Seamus.”

  Donegan squatted in disgust, and eventually nodded to Sharp Grover. “Likely he went from here to the riverbank.”

  “Trouble is knowing which one,” the army scout added.

  “Not a track in sight, I gotta figure what Bridger’d do.”

  “Jim Bridger?”

  He looked up in the early-morning darkness at his friend. “Ol’ Gabe himself, Sharp.”

  “You met him up the Montana Road?”

  “More than met. He taught me a thing or two. So that’s what I figure he’d do. You haven’t a track of the bastard you’re trailing to put you on his scent … Bridger would likely sit down and try to think like the man he’s stalking.”

  “By damned, Irishman. It’s a smart notion!”

  “I sit here looking at it, figuring what the killer would do. South bank or north,” he moped, minutes of head-scratching later. “Nothing to go on … but my gut tells me that from here at the pit, the north bank is closer by a few yards.”

  Donegan stood, bringing Grover up with him.

  “You can’t be figuring on creeping off this island again, are you? We already been through that——”

  He whirled on the army scout. “You spoke your piece, Sharp. Be pleased you stand out of my way.”

  Sharp Grover did just that. Watching the Irishman check his holstered pistol. Then stuff Liam’s Colt in his own belt. From O’Roarke’s sheath, Seamus pulled a knife before replacing the damp blanket over his uncle’s body.

  “I’ll see you afore breakfast in the morning,” Seamus whispered, stepping into the heavy drizzle.

  “Coffee for damn fools, is it?”

  Donegan turned and grinned, giving his hand to Grover. They shook. “Don’t expect me to eat no more of that horse’s ass, do you?”

  “Good luck, Irishman,” Grover replied as he released Donegan’s hand.

  “If I don’t see you again, Sharp,” Donegan rasped, “see that Liam gets buried proper. With some of the right words said over him.”

  “I’ll find a Catholic boy to say ’em, Seamus.”

  “Whoever you choose, probably end up knowing them words better’n me.”

  “Just you come back afore first light,” Sharp ordered sternly. “Major’ll have your hide he knows you’re gone.”

  “Bloody right! It’s Forsyth … or them red h’athens gonna have Seamus Donegan’s hide by first light.”

  He turned and slipped into the night, inching off the gentle slope to the water.

  Crossing on hands and knees, Seamus held up at the grassy north bank. Waiting and listening to the night-sounds. Feeling the icy cut of the wind dallying with his wet sleeves and britches. Thinking there under some overhang of willow about old Trudeau and the youngster who crept away some two hours back.

  Downstream he was certain he heard the guttural, yet hushed voices of unseen warriors dragging bodies over the riverbed. Removing their dead. Laying here against the north bank, away from the noise on the island, the sounds of the Indian camps had new dimensions. Heartbeat drumming, hair-prickling wails, and high-pitched trilling of mourners. No doubt working themselves up to finish come dawn what they had only begun that first, long day.

  As much as he hated the thought, Trudeau and Stillwell might have the better part of it. At least they were out there, doing something right now. And from the sounds of things, they had evidently made it some distance. At least, none of those who had remained behind on the island had heard any war-whoops or gunshots after the pair trudged off into the drizzle and darkness. Lucky so far.

  Four grueling days or more getting back to Wallace on foot. Most likely, he brooded, take Bankhead another day to organize and outfit his relief column. Then the better part of two more days galloping here to this stretch of sandy riverbed.

  A week more of holding out …

  And every day, the brown riders would come roaring down on the island, whittling away at the twenty-eight who weren’t wounded. Every hour increasing the stench of dead horses turning to a putrid soup, while the moans of the wounded men were becoming more desperate with every sunrise.

  Any way he put his mind to adding and subtracting, Seamus couldn’t come up with a figure that showed the scouts had a chance to last seven more days. With the way fifty-one men had been reduced to twenty-eight that first morning, his crude ciphering as he clung beneath that overhang of swamp-willow didn’t spell success for Major Forsyth’s little bunch.

  But Seamus Donegan had been in tight spots with slim odds before.

  In the mid-distance, among the ridges and hills, he could make out for the first time the yapping of coyotes. Brought in by the smell of blood in this place. Closer still, the yammering of Indian dogs answering back their feral cousins, claiming this feast as their own. Then in the midst of the night around him, faint sounds of horsemen prowling the riverbanks, scouting for any white man foolish enough to escape the island.

  He asked himself how the Confederate could begin to hope of eluding the milling warriors in the drizzling rain. Then something bright came on in his cold thinking, like someone had reached inside his head and turned up the wick-roller on an oil-l
amp. And Seamus Donegan cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner.

  “The knife,” he murmured to himself as he hunkered into the shadows beneath the willow’s overhang. “That bleeming knife.”

  That was the key. Only explanation it could be. The reason now for all those odd things about the Confederate. The way he only ate with his hands instead of using the iron forks the rest of them carried in their mess-kits.

  That pony of his wasn’t a white man’s horse at all, now that he thought of it. More a rangy cayuse. A war-pony if nothing else.

  Especially the way the man slipped in and out of some guttural, nonsense gibberish he was forever apologizing for.

  “Sonuvabitch talks Injin,” Seamus hissed silently, as the hoofbeats inched up the riverbank.

  He doesn’t have to worry about escaping from these h’athens … he’s a damned turn-coat renegade hisself!

  Lying there hidden in the night-shadows, the cold drizzle plipping off the willow above him, Seamus realized he had made one big mistake trying to track the Confederate. He sensed that Liam O’Roarke’s murderer already sat at some warm fire, eating his supper, while a dusky-skinned, comely wench snuggled at his side, waiting the bastard’s bidding.

  While the man who had minutes ago dreamed of stalking that murderer down lay in the darkness to see the night through, with a puddle of cold water gathering round him, he heard two … no, three horsemen slipping from their ponies not far away.

  Donegan clenched his eyes shut for a moment, cursing himself like only the Irish in him could. Thinking strangely on the others he had left behind on the island. Forsyth and McCall. Grover and Donovan. And the rest of them as wasn’t laid out with bullet-holes seeping red life into the sand.

  Good men, he was proud to say.

  Good men who this night have laughed for fear of the darty Reaper hisself.

  And when good men are all laughed out … they cry in the dark.

  Chapter 29

  “Who was the one said he thinks a whiteman passed him in the dark?” Jack O’Neill demanded in his throaty Cheyenne.