The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Some say you have a blood-debt to avenge for Roman Nose,” Two Crows spoke without raising his voice.

  O’Neill felt the sting of the chief’s words. Accusation in them. “Roman Nose asked me, in his final minutes, to take up his medicine quest.”

  “Because of it, some say you stalk one of the whitemen on the island.”

  “The one who killed Roman Nose,” O’Neill replied proudly. “There is great power in this blood-debt I take on my shoulders.”

  Two Crows looked over the fifty horsemen, young men mostly, of both tribes, eager to hurl themselves at the island again, not content to run from the huge guns of the white men. The old chief turned back to the mulatto.

  “How many of these will die before you give up your hunt?” he asked.

  O’Neill glanced over the young, copper-skinned warriors. Licking his lips. “They do not matter to me, Two Crows. Only two lives matter now. The whiteman I hunt. And mine … only so that I can live as long as it takes to kill the man who robbed Roman Nose of his life.”

  “In the short time you have been with us, Nibsi … you have become a dangerous man,” Two Crows said as he clambered aboard his pony. He eyed the lodges coming down, the others loaded on travois and already on their way, spreading out as did the fingers of a hand across the trail they would take to the north. Away from the soldiers they knew would come.

  The soldiers always came.

  Jack swelled his chest. “I am proud to be a dangerous man, Two Crows. Perhaps the Dog Soldiers no more belong camping with your Cheyenne. Perhaps we are the last fighters on these plains, the ones who do not know how to live among people who will run from a fight.”

  “You come to this land from a faraway place. How do you know——”

  “I know hate for the whiteman, Two Crows!” he spat.

  The old chief fell silent for a minute, chastised by the mulatto’s anger. “If you would be Cheyenne, then you must learn. Learn there are some fights you must leave … so that you are free to choose another place, another time to do battle.”

  “Perhaps. But time will tell the Cheyenne. Time will tell the Dog Soldiers. And Nibsi will know when it is time to kill again.”

  Two Crows tore his eyes from the mulatto, gazing for a moment at the small brush arbor some of the young warriors had constructed to shade Nibsi and the other war-leaders when they were in conference during the days of battle.

  “Tell me one last thing, Nibsi. When is it time to kill the whiteman?”

  “The one on the island?”

  “No,” he answered, turning. “The one you keep in there.” Two Crows pointed to the brush arbor.

  O’Neill smiled, turning, his face gleaming with sweat beneath the high-plains sun. “Clybor!” He shouted the English name of the Sioux renegade from Custer’s 7th Cavalry.

  Jack Clybor poked his head out of the arbor. “What d’you want, O’Neill?” he answered in English.

  “Bring our guest out now. Two Crows wants to say farewell to him,” he snarled.

  Clybor’s head disappeared into the shady arbor, then reappeared a moment later, tugging on a man’s arm. A bloody, white arm. At the end of which was dragged a beaten, bruised, and bloody white prisoner. His shaggy, disheveled hair, hung clotted with blood. One eye puffed shut. The other watering, filled with fright as it darted anxiously over the crowd.

  “Bring him here,” Nibsi commanded.

  Clybor dragged the white man over to the pony ridden by Two Crows. The shirt had been long ago ripped from the prisoner’s back, and his leather britches hung in bloody shreds above his bruised and burned feet. O’Neill smiled. He had enjoyed watching the Cheyenne and Sioux women make sport of the prisoner, anything just short of death.

  “The Arapaho village left a day ago because you did this to him, their old friend,” Two Crows accused.

  “The Arapaho are old women,” Nibsi retorted. “They left because they are guilty.”

  The big mulatto stomped over to Clybor, grabbed the prisoner’s hair and yanked it backward, coming close to snapping the man’s neck.

  “They call him North among his own people,” O’Neill explained. “But he ran away to live for a time among the Arapaho.”

  “I know this,” Two Crows replied acidly.

  “Do you know he left me with these scars?”

  O’Neill flung the prisoner’s head down with a harsh snap, watching him crumple at the knees before he marched boldly to the old chief on the pony. The mulatto held up the backs of both wrists, showing the old chief the wide, puckered scars where North’s knife had slashed in that whore’s crib near Fort Lyon.

  “Know this too, Two Crows—last winter this man was not with the Arapaho. He left them. Returned to the whiteman’s towns.”

  “Is that not where you truly belong, Nibsi?”

  He spat on the ground. “Old man, I am not like this prisoner, North. Nor am I like Comanche. They are white. While I … I do not belong among them. If there is a man out here in this land who is hated more than the Indian, it is a man like me. Yes, Two Crows. You are right. I am dangerous. But, dangerous only to whitemen like this man, North.”

  “What did he do among his own kind that brings his death at your hand?”

  “Not what he did among his own kind … but what he did to me. And someone I loved.” Jack watched the old man’s eyebrow lift at that.

  “A woman?”

  “I loved her. Back near Fort Lyon. This one killed her,” O’Neill explained.

  “You need say no more,” Two Crows replied. “The prisoner is yours to do with as you wish. Kill him if you want.”

  The chief tapped his heels against his pony’s ribs and eased into the dust cloud rising above the many travois scratching the earth as thousands of ponies spread the villages across the prairie.

  O’Neill stared after him a moment, then looked down on the unconscious, bloodied form of Capt. Robert North, Arapaho renegade captured on the banks of the river as he was seeking to escape the sandy island.

  “The joke is on you, Two Crows,” the mulatto sneered, his eyes half-closing. “North was mine to do with as I wish all along. And like North, the tall, gray-eyed one still on the island belongs to me.”

  * * *

  Yesterday, their fifth on the island, none of the men worried of eating the mule and horsemeat any longer. The stench of the flesh turning to a putrid, gray soup was enough to cause any of them to lose his appetite.

  Because his stomach still growled a little, Seamus Donegan pulled a small canvas satchel of roasted coffee beans from his saddlebags. Throughout that day and into slap-dark he sucked on the beans for their strong flavor, to keep himself awake beneath the cloudless sky and blazing light reflecting off the surrounding ridges and bluffs. And to give his dry mouth something to salivate on instead of the grim curses he wanted to hurl at the empty hills.

  A few of them wandered some short distance from the island, returning with prickly pear fruit, sweet and chewy and sticky enough. But there was still not enough of it to give all of them more than a taste. Another hapless coyote wandered in too close, within the range of their Spencers. Four-legged soup was on the menu that fifth evening, the first boiling for the seriously wounded, the second boiling for the rest of those who had spilled some blood. A third and final thin, almost tasteless, broth was warmed for the rest.

  That evening as the sun sank, allowing the furnace of this land to cool, they no longer noticed any warriors dippling the hilltops, keeping watch on the island. Near sunset a handful ventured upstream a few yards to inspect the three warriors abandoned by their comrades when the bodies could not be recovered.

  “I’ll go with you, Mr. Donegan,” Sigmund Shlesinger said quietly as he came up beside Seamus.

  He tried to smile, tired and weak from hunger and blood loss the way he was. “Let’s see if we can get you something to show your grandchildren of this day years from now, Slinger.”

  At the bodies, several of the scouts stood back, waiting on
others. Some took moccasins. Others claimed the guns. There were knives to distribute and a belt pouch or two.

  “Who wants these scalps?” Joe Lane asked, blustering. He wheeled on Shlesinger. “Hey, boy … a scalp that this’un here would surely be some big medicine to show to your Jew-folk. You want it?”

  Slinger glanced up at Donegan. Seamus nodded, saying, “Go ‘head. If you want it.”

  The youngster knelt beside the body, lifting a braid crusted with blood from a massive head-wound. Donegan could see Slinger was going pale as he stuck his knife-blade behind the Indian’s ear as Lane was instructing him. Suddenly the boy dropped the blood-crusted braid and struggled to his feet, working at keeping the vomit down.

  Lane rared his head back, laughing as he knelt, yanking up the bloody braid. “Say, Jew-boy—this make you sick, eh? Well, watch this.”

  He inserted the point of his knife beneath the taut skin, quickly slashing round the entire head, then held the neck down with one hand while the other yanked the scalp off with a moist, sucking pop that reminded Donegan of freeing his boot from thick mud.

  “All there is to it, Jew-boy!” Lane shook the scalp in front of Shlesinger’s face.

  “I don’t want it——”

  “Take it, Jew-boy! Said you wanted the goddamned thing!” Lane shoved it at the youngster’s face, shaking the hair and gore.

  Until he winced in pain, his neck caught in the vise of Donegan’s big hand.

  “Drop the scalp, Lane,” Seamus hissed. “Or there’ll be one more dead man for us to scalp.”

  “Didn’t mean the boy no harm,” Lane whined, attempting to turn within the vise. “Lemme go, goddammit.”

  “Any the rest of you want to poke your fun at Slinger,” McCall’s voice boomed behind them all, “you’ll take it up with Major Forsyth and me!”

  “Just having ourselves a little fun, we was, Sergeant,” Lane said, scampering away from the Irishman when Donegan released him.

  “I’ve made myself clear,” McCall said. “Major wants you all back in the pits. Now, listen. Eutsler and Curry come back without any game from their hunt. But they didn’t come back empty-handed. They’ve filled their hats with plums.”

  “Plums!” another man shouted, bolting away.

  The rest hurried as well, eager for the treat.

  After each man had been given a plum to eat, the rest of the fruit was simmered over some low flames licking along a driftwood fire as the sky sank in a blazing sunset. A thick plum stew was spooned into the mouths of the seriously wounded.

  Seamus sat next to Forsyth, watching the wounded eat their stew as he sucked the last juicy fibers off the plum pit, making at the back of his throat those same muted sounds migrating geese made on good feeding grounds.

  “Better than the rotten meat,” Forsyth said as he licked his fingers.

  “I’ve myself eaten rotten meat of a time before,” Sharp Grover commented. “Not all that bad when you don’t worry ’bout the smell.”

  Forsyth laughed a little now this morning of the twenty-second, laughed pitifully. Remembering last night’s grim supper as the men sucked on their plum pits and lapped at their coyote stew. Their sixth day on the Arickaree Fork of the Republican somewhere on the Central Plains.

  By midday many of the wounded had become delirious with the fever caused of infection in their maggot-filled wounds. Try as they might, the able-bodied scouts were powerless to stop the big flies from continually reinfesting the bloody, oozy wounds with their eggs, which daily turned into squirming, writhing maggots.

  Some of the wounded already suffered from advanced gangrene. Those who could see their own wounds knew it, watching the slow, painless creep of the angry, red welts running up limbs, toward the heart.

  Seamus had about given up on keeping his own arm wound clean. From all he could remember, it had been at least two days now since he had last rinsed out the dirty bandage and bathed the wound, washing it free of the eggs flies continually laid in the moist bullet holes. He had all but given up on his wounds as closer he drew to abandoning the hope of ever making it off this sandy stretch of low-water island.

  As the sun eased out of the day, Donegan stared at his arm, hypnotized by the monotonous whirring buzz of the green-backed September flies warming over the oozy track of the Confederate’s bullet. He didn’t brush them off any longer. Staring. Mesmerized as the flies reminded him of a black, writhing mass, something pulsating with life while his own was ebbing away.

  The rustle of the wild plum nearby stirred him from his reverie, time and again squeezing painful images out of his mind: his mother and home. Jennie Wheatley and the home he wanted with her. He stared at the deepening sky for a long … long time.

  Seamus did not know how long he had been asleep when Grover hunched over him, rousting him.

  He blinked. Night was coming slowly down on them once more. “What day is it?”

  Grover helped him to his feet. “Why, it’s the sixth, Irishman.”

  “Good.” He sighed. “Dreamed I was out for a long, long time.”

  “C’mon,” Grover urged, lines of concern crossing his brow. “Major wants to see every man able to make it in his trench.”

  “Whyn’t you leave me, Sharp? I’m sleepy.”

  “You’re able, Donegan,” he chided, helping Seamus along. “And as long as I’m able, you’ll not get down so bad you can’t get back up.”

  As the scouts came to a rest in and around Forsyth’s rifle-pit, the flies descended on them once more like a noisy cloud.

  “Men.” Forsyth paused, drawing himself up. It reminded Seamus of the way the major had steeled himself to cut that bullet out of his own swollen leg. “Stillwell and Trudeau probably got through to Fort Wallace. I believe that with all my being because the Indians haven’t sent their bodies back in to us. Very likely, Donovan and Pliley made it in as well. If any of the four arrived, we can count on having a relief column reach us in two … perhaps three more days.”

  He waited while some of the scouts murmured their agreement to his optimism.

  “Yet, we must steel ourselves for the possibility that none of the four will make it. Maybe the Indians. Or, wandering off and getting lost in all that country out there…” And he waved an arm to the south, an arm that finally collapsed back into his lap. “So, if none of those four made it, we’re in bad straights, boys. Help won’t be coming like we’ve hoped.”

  “You sure know how to cheer a fella up, Major,” William Reilly said during the quiet pause.

  He looked at Reilly. “All of you who are still able-bodied, I want to give the chance to save yourselves. Decide now if you want to stay here with us … or go try for the settlements.”

  Forsyth’s red eyes, rimmed with liver-colored bags, slewed round the group slowly. “If you fellas do go, leave us half the ammunition to defend ourselves.”

  “Ammunition?” McCall asked, shaking his head as if trying to make sense of what Forsyth was saying to them.

  The major turned slowly on his sergeant. “Billy, you boys take half the cartridges and weapons. I don’t think the Indians in this country will give you a try, since we’ve delivered them as sound a whipping as they’ll ever get. But … if they catch you on the plains making good your escape, you can defend yourselves equitably.”

  “Escape?” asked the big bruiser James Curry.

  Seamus listened to the mutterings of the men. Then a hollow pounding in his ears caused him to look away from the ring of scouts hunched at the lip of Forsyth’s pit.

  For the first time in all their days here, he noticed a pack of wolves slinking over the crest of the bluffs to the north. Ten. Twelve. Fifteen and more. Black and gray and brown. Lanky animals with their long snouts and lolling tongues bobbing as they came on, drawn by the smell of blood and carrion. Their sleek, lean legs rhythmically carrying them down into the valley of the Arickaree. Come for the meat.

  Perhaps come for the men …

  “——want you each to take
some time now to decide if you want to leave tonight like the first four,” Forsyth was saying in the background.

  … Now the smaller coyotes started their evening yammer from the tops of the ridges. Perhaps angry that their wolf cousins had come in to boldly claim what the coyotes had been staking out as their feed for days now …

  “——to move the wounded now would be to kill them … us.”

  … The four-leggeds circled, snarling quietly, nipping at one another in anticipation of the feast …

  “——any event, the wounded would slow you boys down. And, well—honestly, we’re all soldiers, no matter that you don’t wear uniforms,” Forsyth continued, as tough as it was. “And a soldier knows how to meet his fate. So, men—I leave it in your hands to decide.”

  Forsyth sank back against the side of his pit, exhausted from his speech, watching, waiting for the scouts to disperse as he had suggested. A dead silence fell over the island for a few moments while the men looked at one another, stunned speechless.

  “Never, General!” a voice suddenly called out from the rear.

  Eli Ziegler’s.

  “Damn right, Major Forsyth!” Another voice, Thomas Ranahan’s, joined Eli’s.

  Seamus felt the sting of it in his throat, the surge of strength returning as he discovered himself among these strong-hearted men. “By glory, Major … you damned well won’t find any of us running off on the rest of you!”

  “Hear! Hear!” the crowd raised its voice as one, strong. Proud. Resolved to fight on.

  “We’ll stand by you, General—to the end!” Issac Thayer vowed.

  Billy McCall stood in the center of the pit now, his arm pointing round the men until his eyes locked on Forsyth’s. “We’ve fought together, Major … and, by heaven, if need be … we’ll die together!”

  “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” The island rocked with the courageous oath of those steadfast souls.

  “D-dismissed,” Forsyth issued his orders quietly, watching the men disperse into the deepening gloom of night. His eyes moist.

  Awhile later, Donegan lay alone in his pit, thinking on Liam O’Roarke and the life his uncle had chosen to lead among these men. Seamus knew anyone could expect regular soldiers to stay and persevere under orders.