I didn’t sleep at all that night, and when the first gray light came I could see that Gunn was still awake, too. He was staring at me with his carbine already in his hands. If he was as scared as I was, he didn’t tell me. Papa had already gone to saddle Shiloh before I had time to ask.
Once again, we left Joseph in the dry streambed to hold the horses. He didn’t beg us not to leave him, but his crying said it without words.
“Buckle down, boy,” Papa said to him and gave him a pat on the shoulder.
Papa led us through the grass toward the Indian camp and I looked back at Joseph as we climbed over the bank of the streambed. He looked so sad and abandoned that I would have known him for an orphan at first glance, even if I were a stranger. I guess he had no reason to expect us to return to him, having already lost both his real parents to Indians. So, I couldn’t blame him for crying. Maybe Papa wouldn’t judge him too harshly, either. Papa understood a lot more than he ever let us know.
We moved slowly, stooped over and stopping when Papa stopped, listening and studying the camp for any signs of early risers. The Indians had a herd of ponies—about thirty of them—a bowshot from their camp. We slipped to within sixty or seventy yards of it before Papa hunkered down on his heels and gave us our instructions.
“You two stay here. Those camp dogs are going to start barking when I get closer, and the first time you hear them I want you both to shoot a horse apiece,” Papa said.
“Shoot horses?” I asked.
Gunn looked equally confused. “I want to go with you, Papa. Fight with you.”
“Shoot the horses, then reload as fast as you can,” Papa said more firmly. “As soon as those dogs find me, someone’s going to come out of those lodges. When they hear you shooting their horses they’re going to come running for you.”
“And what are you going to do?” Gunn asked.
“I’ll put myself to the side between you and the camp. Anybody that comes for the herd is going to have their attention focused your way and pass before me.”
Gunn and I both nodded.
Papa noticed how I was shaking and rested his hand on my head. “Buckle down. Remember what they did to your mama, Baby Beth, and Old Ben.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I won’t forget,” Gunn added.
“Can I count on you to do like I said?” Papa asked.
I nodded again, trying to look fierce enough to make him believe me.
“Remember, keep your eyes peeled for a horse guard. From what I hear, there’s liable to be a boy or two close by and keeping watch on the herd,” Papa said. “Load quick once you shoot. The horses you don’t down will run, and you be looking for men coming out of the camp after that. Take turns shooting so that both of you don’t get caught empty at the same time. If things get bad, hightail it back to that gully and get Joseph and run.”
“I won’t run on you, Papa,” Gunn said.
“You’re both good boys,” Papa smiled. “Give me Old Ben’s revolver.”
Gunn looked put out about giving up the Dance pistol but he handed it over anyway. Papa shoved it in his belt alongside the brass-framed Griswold he had carried since the war. He left us then, ghosting his way through the gloom toward the camp, but staying well to our right and out of our line of fire, should anyone come our way.
The Indians’ conical, buffalo hide lodges, tepees they’re called by some, were huddled together on a stretch of open country. Still, Papa was so stealthy moving through the morning that I had a hard time following him. I lost him for a bit when he neared the camp but finally spotted his head above a clump of yucca.
It was about then that the dogs started barking. Whether they smelled him or saw him, I don’t know. What mattered is that they were loud, and Indians always have a lot of dogs around camp.
“Shoot, Hamish!” Gunn already had his Maynard shouldered and was peering intently down its barrel at the horse herd.
I threw up my musket and took aim at a gray horse easy to pick out. The sun was just coming up and I could barely see my sights. Papa said we should think about Mama and Baby Beth when it came time to get mean, but I couldn’t think of anything. I only knew that I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t want to shoot a horse or anything else. My hands gripped my gunstock so hard they shook.
Gunn’s carbine boomed. I was determined to pull my own trigger, but it was as if it took more strength than my finger possessed. So small a thing, no more than a few pounds of pressure to set it off. I closed my eyes tight and fired.
In an instant, there were two horses down and thrashing and the rest of them were stampeding away from the camp. I fumbled with my shooting bag and took too long reloading. I was seating another ball home with my ramrod when Gunn shouted something at me.
An Indian was running toward us with a war club held in one of his pumping arms. He must have been guarding the horses and close by, exactly like Papa warned us, for he appeared out of nowhere. He fairly flew over the ground. Gunn had spilled his percussion caps on the ground and was digging around for one and couldn’t shoot. About five more strides and that young brave would be in swinging distance of my brother. The problem was, I was directly behind Gunn and couldn’t shoot without hitting him.
“Look out!” I shouted.
Gunn fell to his side and I was so scared I didn’t even think to shoulder my gun. I fired from the hip and the running brave staggered and took a few more wobbling steps to crash atop Gunn.
Gunn kicked his way free and reared back with his carbine held like a club to smite his attacker. But the brave was all but dead, gargling and choking his last breaths and clutching at my loading stick protruding from his throat. I had been so excited that I had fired with my ramrod still in my barrel.
“Better load again,” Gunn said, his voice shaking like a leaf on the wind.
I ran to the dying brave and closed my eyes and drew my ramrod free of his flesh. Up close, he was only a boy, no older than us. But death isn’t particular about who it takes, and it’s always ugly.
Gunn had found a cap to ready his gun but he waited for me to load again before he would shoot. If I was shaky earlier, I was even worse reloading the second time with Gunn watching me and a handful of Kiowa warriors charging toward us from the camp. They came on with the rising sun behind them, no more than silhouettes, and all the scarier because of that. Something whished through the air beside me, and it took another arrow burying in the grass beyond me for me to realize that they were already shooting at us.
I capped my musket and nodded at Gunn. He was too short to see above the grass and he stood to take better aim. I can still picture him there, standing with that Maynard pulled tight to his shoulder and his fierce face pressed against the stock. He aimed for what seemed like forever.
When his gun finally did go off, I didn’t get to see if he hit or missed. I heard him grunt and then the carbine slipped from his grip and his knees buckled. He twisted away and clutched at his arm, and I saw the arrow buried in it.
I fired at the nearest warrior but was in too much of a hurry and missed. Gunn was moaning and I couldn’t think straight with the enemy screaming at me and sure to be upon us in a matter of seconds.
And then Papa opened up with his Sharps. Those Indians were so intent on getting to Gunn and me that they ran right past Papa. He had them scattered in front of him like ducks in a shooting gallery. His first shot tumbled one of them and then he was standing up with a pistol in either hand.
All but one of the warriors was on foot and that one was running Mama’s black mare straight at me with a long lance leveled at my chest. I intended to run but I’ll be the first to admit that I froze. Just knelt there in the grass and waited for him to impale me.
People will tell you that a pistol isn’t much good for shooting at any distance. And there are those who will say that a Griswold revolver was a cheap Confederate copy of a Navy Colt and more prone to blow up on you than to hit with any accuracy. Well, they never saw my Papa s
hoot, and his old Griswold must have been in fine feather that morning. Or else God smiled down on me.
Papa was at least seventy yards away, but he plucked that mounted warrior right off Mama’s mare. It was so close a call that the mare had to leap over me to keep from trampling me, and her rider rolled into me as he hit the ground.
Taking Gunn’s example, I clubbed at him with the barrel of my musket as I scooted away from him on the seat of my pants. I wouldn’t have scrambled away from him any faster if he had been a rattlesnake thrown at my feet.
Soon, Gunn was there with me, both of us wailing away on that warrior. Maybe he was already dead from Papa’s bullet, I don’t know. I guess we did awful things to him before we ran out of breath and we were too tired to swing anymore. I’ll use the excuse that we were scared and not thinking. Papa said that bad things happen in war, but I never knew what he meant before that morning.
Gunn stumbled to where he had dropped his gun while I fell to my knees heaving for air. Papa’s pistol was still going off, and I watched as Gunn struggled to load his carbine with one arm.
“Load!” he said to me.
I don’t remember doing as he said. It was as if I reloaded in a trance. Maybe that was because Papa had drilled us so on the way to Texas. Load and shoot; do it until you don’t have to think about it. Ground the butt plate and tilt the barrel away from you to pour the powder from your horn, in case there was still an ember in the barrel that might touch off your powder and flash in your face. Cut a patch with your patch knife and lay it across the bore. Spit a round ball into your hand and set it on the patch. Forget the patch if you’re in a hurry. The gun won’t shoot as well that way, so be your own judge. Start the ball down the barrel, being careful not to snap your hickory rod until it’s started far enough down the bore to go easy. Seat the ball all the way home and place a percussion cap on the nipple. Aim and fire.
Nothing to it, unless you’re fourteen years old, you’re under attack, your brother’s shot and groaning like he’s dying, and you’re so scared that you’ve pissed your pants and would like more than anything to be somewhere else.
I didn’t manage to shoot again before I realized that there was nothing left to shoot at. Gunn was groaning, and I was sure he had taken another arrow and would die any second. I started to him on hands and knees, but he held up his good arm to stop me.
“Help Papa,” he managed to gasp, bile and slobber hanging from his chin and his eyes watering.
“Are you all right?” I was too shaken to realize what a stupid question that was until I had already asked it.
“Hurts like hell.”
The arrow buried in his arm looked awful, and worse was the way his arm hung so limply and lifelessly. I didn’t know what to do for him.
“Come on.” Gunn started toward the village. His jaw was quivering with pain, and I could hear his teeth chattering.
Papa was nowhere in sight, but his pistols were popping among the lodges.
The Indian woman was screaming something at Papa when we first walked among the lodges. She was half-twisted away from him with a baby’s cradleboard held tight to her chest. Papa’s pistols were holstered, and he held only a war club that he had picked up somewhere. The triangular, steel blade on it was covered in gore.
“Papa?” I called out.
We’d passed the scattered bodies of three warriors on our way into the camp—victims of Papa’s unerring aim and his wrath. The body of an old man, almost as small as a child and wrinkled and withered and decrepit, lay at my feet. Papa had bashed his forehead in.
Papa didn’t hear me, and the Indian woman screamed at him again with her back to her lodge wall. The club in Papa’s hand reared back.
“No, Papa!”
The words hadn’t even finished spilling from my mouth when the club came down and crumpled her to the ground with a sickening thud. Words have no power in a time like that. Again and again, the club rose and fell, timed perfectly with Papa’s grunts of exertion. The baby she held squalled until Papa silenced it, too.
Papa hovered over the bodies, his shoulders slumped and his body heaving with exhaustion. While he stood there, another squaw dashed behind him, hoping to break free of the camp. Papa wheeled at the sound of her feet and grabbed at one of the pistols at his belt.
He tracked the running squaw with the barrel of his pistol, but the hammer snapped on an empty chamber, once, twice.
I stared at my father, thinking he was someone else—someone that I did not know.
Papa hurled the club at the squaw and struck her full between the shoulder blades, staggering her. Before I could call out to him again, he was already running after her. They disappeared behind one of the lodges.
I noticed the body of another squaw lying halfway in and halfway out of the doorway of one of the lodges. I looked to Gunn and found him sitting on the ground beside me, holding his wounded arm across him and rocking back and forth and muttering to himself.
“Papa’s gone crazy,” I said.
“You smell like piss,” Gunn answered.
Yes, I’d wet my pants from fear. Pissed my pants and wasn’t ashamed. Didn’t give a damn. I was never going to shoot a gun as good as Papa. Never be as big and strong and sure as him. I was never going to be like Papa and didn’t want to be.
There comes a time when we realize that our parents are actually two people—the characters we shape in our minds and claim in surety as our own, and those who they really are in spite of our assumptions—the real and what we make up because we want them to be that way. There was Papa, my father, and there was Argyle Dollarhyde, a man I did not know and might not ever know; a man who could kill effortlessly, women and children, bash their heads in with Stone Age weapons that he had never held before, yet fit his hand like old friends; chase after more of them, mad with the lust of the kill. Not me. For all the pain in me over losing Mama and Baby Beth, I couldn’t find that much hate, only emptiness.
“I can’t get up,” Gunn said. “You go help Papa.”
Help him? I could not. There was no help for any of us. Another squaw screamed somewhere outside the camp. We were all damned.
Chapter Eleven
Joseph led the horses into the Indian camp an hour later. He impressed me with that act. There was no way he could have known whether we lived or died from where we left him hidden in the streambed. For all he knew, the shooting and screaming he heard could have been the sound of our demise at the hand of the Kiowa. But he came anyway to find us. I wouldn’t have. I would have taken that Kiowa roan and run for all he was worth.
We found Papa about midday. He was curled into a ball asleep in one of the lodges. Beside him were the bodies of another squaw and what we presumed was her mother, at least old enough to be. It was as if he had spent the last of his venom and then his body folded up and fell right there the instant he slew the last of them. I can’t explain the contrast of the peaceful look on his face and the dried blood that coated him from head to toe. The only thing that wasn’t relaxed about him were his hands. Clenched in one, as if someone might steal them, were a handful of bloody scalps. In the other was the war club.
He didn’t say anything when I woke him. He stumbled from the lodge and squinted at the sun and stared at the bodies littering the grass as if seeing them for the first time. Then he spied Gunn lying on the buffalo robe I had taken for him from one of the lodges.
“How are you?” Papa asked as he knelt over Gunn and examined the arrow protruding from his thin arm.
“I’ve been better,” Gunn rasped. Although he was in the shade of the wall of one of the tepees, beads of sweat still dotted his forehead, and his lips trembled so much that it was a wonder he could talk at all.
“Are you cold, son?”
“No, Papa. I just can’t stop shaking.”
“It’s the pain,” Papa said when he turned his head to me. “I’ve seen it before.”
“He puked right after it happened and again about an hour ago,” I
said.
Papa nodded, as if he had seen that, too. I kept my eyes turned away from him, afraid that he would see how I recoiled from him.
“Fetch some hot water to bathe his wounds.”
I did as Papa said and found water hanging in a bladder bag inside one of the lodges. I used a copper pot I plundered to heat the water.
By the time the water was ready, Papa had cut Gunn’s shirtsleeve away. We bathed the skin around the arrow to better see the wound.
The tip of this arrowhead, perhaps at one time a bit of a barrel hoop or some German farmer’s plow, hadn’t gone all the way through the bend of Gunn’s arm. Only the tip of it protruded from his triceps. Bits of bone and strings of tendon were pushed out of the wound.
As I learned later, the tribes of Texas had quickly learned to gather scrap metal during their raids on the white settlements and to shape that iron into blades for their weapons. There was no telling where the metal that pierced Gunn’s flesh had come from, for it was said that the Comanche and Kiowa raided from Kansas down to the heart of Mexico.
“Hold him down,” Papa said to Joseph and me. “Put your knees on his shoulder, Hamish, and Joseph, you sit on his legs.”
Both of us did as he told us, and Gunn’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets when Papa gave the arrow a fierce yank. Twice more, Papa tried to pull the arrow out while Gunn bucked and groaned beneath us, but the shaft wouldn’t come free.
“I’m afraid I’ll break the arrowhead off in him,” Papa said.
With that, he drew one of his pistols, held it by the barrel, and with the butt of it for a hammer drove the arrow through Gunn’s arm. He snapped the arrow in two once the head of it broke free, and held up the two pieces before me. Gunn arched his back and kicked little Joseph, rolling him across the ground.
“There now. It’s all over,” Papa said and then flung the pieces of arrow away like they were serpents.
“Will he be all right?” I asked.
Destiny, Texas Page 6