Papa was looking at Gunn when he nodded, but when he looked at me I could see that he was worried. He soon went off to be alone.
I washed Gunn’s wound and bound it with makeshift bandages ripped from the shirtsleeve we cut off him. He couldn’t move his arm, so Joseph helped me bind it to his chest with a sling made from the sleeve of an Indian hunting shirt we cut away. I had no clue if what I did was right, but Papa nodded at my handiwork when he came back. Apparently, he had gone to the nearby spring and stripped and washed himself, for he was clean of dried gore and he had traded his stained shirt for another.
“Something is stirring the dust out there,” he said. “Looks like we’ll soon have company.”
I saw the dust cloud he was referring to. The country where we were was much more open than where we had settled, and you could see for miles in many places. It could have been buffalo moving out there in the distance, or it could have been men on horses.
“Kiowa?”
“Whoever it is, we’d best put some distance between us and them,” Papa said.
Papa helped us get Gunn on his mule, and then tightened the cinch on Shiloh and got in the saddle. The buzzards were already circling overhead, and everywhere you looked there was death. I don’t know how many of them Papa killed. Maybe nine, maybe ten or more, counting the one Gunn and I had done for. He never even looked around at his victims as we rode out of that Indian camp. It was as if he was blind to what he had done . . . what we had done.
“Sonny boy, I know you’re hurting, but we need to ride hard,” Papa said to Gunn.
Gunn looked about to fall from the mule’s back at any second, but he nodded anyway. “I’ll be all right.”
“What about those horses?” Joseph pointed to the Kiowa ponies scattered a mile out of camp.
Papa, ever a practical-thinking man, had us gather those loose horses up and drive them before us, at least those that we could turn in with us in a hurry.
Papa spurred Shiloh up to a lope. “Gunn, you yell out if you need us to stop.”
Gunn hunched over his wounded arm and with his teeth gritted kicked his mule up beside Papa. He looked down at the scalps tied to Papa’s saddle strings and nodded.
And then Gunn looked at Joseph loping along beside him on that Kiowa roan. The orphan boy rode like he was born in a saddle, even though his feet in those outsized boots, made for a man three times his size, didn’t even reach the stirrups.
By the time we were well on our way east, that dust cloud in the distance had turned into mirage shapes of men on horseback, their wavy, thin images distorted and rising from the ground like steam. If those were Kiowa, I didn’t have any hope that we could outrun them.
I’ll give it to Gunn, he hung in there and didn’t beg to stop, not once. Shiloh usually could run all day and all night without breaking a sweat anywhere but under his saddle blanket, but he’d been too long without corn and he looked gaunt and less than himself after so long traveling and living on nothing but grass and too little water. Papa spoiled and pampered Shiloh, and that horse wasn’t used to such hard living.
And nobody would call the mules Gunn and I rode racing Thoroughbreds. By evening, both of them couldn’t be kicked out of a trot and threatened to balk or fall over and die.
Papa let us stop and rest for a couple of hours, and then he put Gunn and me on two of the gentlest-acting Kiowa ponies that he could catch. We rode through the night and didn’t stop again until daylight. We would have moved on again after another break, but we couldn’t get Gunn up. He was talking some, rambling on about dream things but not making sense, and his fevered eyes not seeing any of us.
We were sitting around him, fretting about what to do for him, when the riders appeared in the distance again. We couldn’t do anything but stack our saddles and fort up behind them and wait for another fight to come to us.
Chapter Twelve
The riders following us turned out not to be Kiowa at all. Instead, they were a company of Texas Rangers on their way back to Parker County from pursuing a band of hostiles into the Tongue River breaks. To a man, they were as worn-looking as they were well armed. Their horses looked equally hard used and to have come a far piece.
“Captain Lucius Pike,” the Ranger captain said as he dismounted with the rest of his men. He was a short, squatty man of middle age with the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.
“Argyle Dollarhyde, and these are my boys.”
“Looks like that boy there is bad hurt.”
“He took an arrow in the arm,” Papa said, still keeping hold of his rifle and acting leery, no matter that our new arrivals claimed to be Texas lawmen.
“Best run a rag soaked in kerosene through that arrow hole,” the captain said, clucking his tongue.
“We don’t have any kerosene.”
The captain must have seen the hard way Papa was looking back at him. “Not to be meddling in your business, but I’ve had more than my share of experience with arrow wounds. The arrowhead wasn’t hoop iron, was it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Did you get all of it out?”
“We did.”
“Well, that’s good. Hoop iron is bad to fester, and the blood poisoning is apt to set if you can’t dig the head out right quick.”
The other Rangers were already unsaddling their horses and staking them out, even though Papa hadn’t invited them to do so. They looked like they were so tired that manners were liable to be the last thing on their minds.
“If you’ll share a little bit of that water you’re camped on, we’ll share what grub we have with you and I’ll see what I can do for that boy’s wound,” the captain said.
Papa looked at the little hole of brackish water in the bed of the creek we’d camped alongside—more mud and cattails than standing water. “I wouldn’t refuse a man a drink.”
“That’s awful Christian of you. Thanks.”
Gunn started babbling again. He was saying something about a big black Mexican eagle that was hovering over him and wanting to swoop down and carry him off. I looked up in the sky but couldn’t see a thing except for the sun.
“What’s that boy saying?” the captain asked.
“I think he’s got a fever,” Papa said.
“Already? That’s a bad sign. Usually takes two or three days.”
The captain knelt and began unwrapping Gunn’s bandages while Papa stood over him. The rest of the Rangers threw their saddles on the ground and built a fire, no matter how hot the afternoon was.
“Is that a good idea?” Papa asked.
The captain paused his examination of Gunn’s wound long enough to look over his shoulder at his men. “Is it Indians seeing our fire that has you worried?”
“It is.”
Gunn quit talking gibberish and moaned when the captain probed the wound with his fingers. The captain clucked his tongue again.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“You thought what?” Papa asked.
“His arm has to come off. The bone’s busted all to hell and the poison has already set in,” the captain said.
“You aren’t going to cut my boy’s arm off,” Papa said.
“Then he’ll die.”
Papa looked from the captain to Gunn and back again, fear and anger written all over him.
“Be a shame, fine-looking boy like that,” the captain said. “If you don’t cut that arm off he won’t last long.”
“Thought you were a lawman and not a doctor.”
“Doctor, no, but like I said, I’ve tended to a few wounds in my time. Snakebites, broken bones, colicky bellies, gyp water trots, and even an arrow or bullet wound or two.”
“You let him tend to that boy, unless you can do better,” one of the other Rangers said. “Captain Pike saved my life once when I had a bandit’s bullet in my neck, and he might do the same for your boy.”
“See this here?” the captain pressed on Gunn’s wound and showed the yellow serum and fluid percolating
from the hole. “He isn’t going to use that arm ever again. Bone’s busted past mending. You let the infection go farther and he’ll die.”
“Papa, don’t let them take my arm,” Gunn said. For an instant, his eyes were clear and he was all too aware of reality.
The captain saw Papa wavering. “It’s got to come off.”
The Ranger company went to gather more buffalo chips for the fire. Wood was scarce out on those plains, and the sun-dried patties of dung left behind by the passing herds burned hot and bright.
“What do you want me to do?” Papa asked, setting aside his rifle and letting out a sigh that said he was resigned to what must happen.
“You talk to him. Pray over him if you’re of a mind to, but for the most part, just hold him still and talk to him.”
The captain squatted beside the fire and drew a skinning knife from his sheath and stuck it in the flames. He held his hat between his face and the heat while he sterilized the blade.
“No telling where this knife has been,” he said as he pulled it out of the flames and studied the lightly blackened steel.
Papa knelt at Gunn’s head. “Hamish, you come hold his legs.”
The captain shook his head. “You might want to have one of my men do that. This won’t be pretty.”
“Hamish will do as he’s told.”
“Suit yourself.”
One of the Rangers brought over a piece of leather he had cut off one of his saddle fenders. “Chew on this, boy.”
Gunn went wild and fought against us, but the captain’s hands on his chest and Papa’s and my added weight kept him pinned.
“Don’t let them, Papa,” Gunn pleaded.
“Son, your arm is ruined. If we don’t cut it off you’ll die.”
The Ranger that had brought the piece of harness leather handed his captain a bottle of whiskey. “That’s the last sipping liquor in the company, Captain. I admit, I’m going to miss my evening constitutional, but it could be this boy could use it more than me.”
The rest of the Rangers were cooking buffalo steaks held over the fire on the ends of sticks they packed on their saddles for that purpose. Most of them acted as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, but one of them was sitting with a pair of glasses on the end of his nose and a black Bible propped open on one knee.
“Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak,” he read aloud. “O Lord, heal me, for my bones are vexed.”
“That’s nice of you to pray for him,” Joseph said. “That’s from the book of Psalms, isn’t it?”
The Ranger, a tall thin man with a mustache that hung below his jawline, nodded. “I’ll keep reading if you don’t mind. Scripture might do some good, but mostly, my reading might cover up some of that boy’s screaming.”
No matter the piece of leather Papa put between Gunn’s teeth, Gunn soon spit it out and commenced to scream like the skinny old Ranger had said he would. He screamed and he screamed while the captain cut.
“Return, O Lord, and deliver my soul. O save me for thy mercies’ sake,” the Bible-packing Ranger’s twangy voice rose up with Gunn’s cries of anguish.
Joseph joined in from memory. “For in death there is no remembrance of thee. In the grave, who shall give thee thanks?”
“Papa!” Gunn screamed until his voice went hoarse and faint.
I wished that he would pass out, but the captain had the arm off before Gunn finally went limp. His bony chest rising and falling ever so gently was the only thing that let me know he wasn’t dead.
“I am weary with my groaning,” the Ranger read on with Joseph’s high voice slightly behind and out of sync.
The captain took up the whiskey bottle, pulled the cork with his teeth, and doused the bloody nub of Gunn’s upper arm with the liquid. “We’re lucky. The bone was busted so bad that there was nothing there to have to saw through.”
“Oh God,” Papa said.
“Stay steady, Mr. Dollarhyde. We’re about done.” The captain set aside the lower part of Gunn’s arm. “Pinch off this vein for me, or he’s going to bleed out.”
“Mine eye is consumed because of grief. It waxeth old because of all mine enemies,” read the Ranger.
“It waxeth old,” repeated Joseph.
Papa’s teeth grated together, but he didn’t say anything else and helped where he could.
Once the captain had picked out the pieces of bone and anything else he could find that didn’t belong, he doused the wound with whiskey again and asked for the needle and thread that one of the Rangers had brought up without even being asked for it. It was just an ordinary sewing needle with about two feet of thread hanging from it.
“What’s that thread you’re using?” Papa asked.
“Tail hairs from one of the horses,” the captain answered. “Works pretty good in a pinch.”
The Ranger captain sewed as carefully as a seamstress, making sure to cover the exposed bone and trimming flesh and adding a stitch here and there. “Trick is to leave some skin to fold back over the wound. I won’t promise you that he won’t have a bad scar.”
When he was finished he stood to his feet and clucked his tongue, as I was beginning to think was his habit when he was pondering things.
“What next?” Papa asked.
It wasn’t until then that I noticed that the Ranger with the Bible had quit reading from it, and that all the Ranger company were gathered around us looking at Gunn.
Captain Pike shrugged. “Nothing left to do but bind him up in some fresh, clean bandages and wait. Maybe he’ll pull through and maybe he won’t. He’s out of our hands now.”
“He’s a tough boy,” Papa said.
“I’m sure he is.”
“Amen.” The Ranger with the Bible slapped it shut.
“I’ll pray for him,” Joseph said.
I wanted to slap Joseph for that, and it shamed me.
The captain went to wash up while Papa and I bound Gunn’s stump. I was carrying Baby Beth’s lacy yellow blanket inside my shirt and I gave it to Papa for the new bandage. Papa gave me a strange look but used it anyway. Gunn’s face was as pale as a sheet but he was still breathing regular.
“Hamish, you go on while I clean your brother up,” Papa said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about until it struck me how bad Gunn smelled. It took me a bit longer to realize that the pain of the surgery was so great that he had soiled himself.
“You take that and bury it.” Papa jerked his head toward the remains of Gunn’s left arm lying on ground beside him.
Captain Pike picked it up for me and carried it out from our camp. I took my knife and scooped a shallow hole in the sandy ground and we buried it there.
“I never expected this,” I said, looking down at the fresh little mound at my feet.
The captain put his arm over my shoulders and started me back to camp. “You do your best to forget about this and be thankful your brother might live.”
I sat with the Rangers at the fire, and one of them offered me a chunk of buffalo meat. But I didn’t have any appetite, despite how long it had been since I had eaten. However, Gunn’s surgery and the oppressive heat didn’t seem to affect any of their appetites, and they ate like starving wolves.
Papa finally came to sit with us. He swiped at the sweat running off his face and looked to the captain. “Thank you.”
“How’s he doing?” the captain asked.
“I think he’s sleeping.”
“Make him drink some salt water as soon as you can. Good for the blood.”
“Mix a little gunpowder in with it,” one of the other Rangers added. “That always helps.”
Several of the Rangers nodded their heads in agreement.
“Mr. Dollarhyde, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but this is an unusual bunch of Indian fighters you have with you.” The captain pointed at Joseph and me with a jab of his thumb and then at Gunn lying on the grass behind us. “I’d be interested to hear your story.”
“Kio
wa hit our place. Killed my wife and my baby daughter.”
The captain looked at each of his men, one and then the other around the fire. A few of them shook their heads, and a few of them gave Papa a look that I couldn’t interpret other than that they seemed to be judging him in some way.
The captain cleared his throat. “Where was this at?”
“To the west of an abandoned settlement on a tributary of the Wichita, maybe another day’s ride or so from here.”
The captain nodded again. “Was a promising place at one time but there hasn’t been any people there since not long after the war began. Comanche and Kiowa ran them off.”
“It was Kiowa that hit us. At least that’s what one of my hired hands believed.”
“I’m pretty sure it was you and these boys that hit that village we passed a day ago to the north, or you wouldn’t be driving a bunch of Indian ponies and your boy about to die from an arrow in his arm.”
Papa had to get ahold on himself because he choked up. Maybe what we had done to Gunn was finally hitting him, or the rage over losing Mama was coming back. “We set in on their trail and had a fight with them when we found their village.”
“Those weren’t Kiowa you hit in that village. They were Wichitas.”
“Wichitas?” Papa asked. “No matter, it was them. They had my wife’s horse.”
“That was a little hunting camp belonging to old Chief Big Belly.”
“So?”
“You see, the Wichita normally live in grass lodges and farm most of the year. Corn and squash and beans and such. Spring and fall between crops, they take out tepees to do a little camping and hunt buffalo.”
“Damn it, it was them!” Papa said loudly.
“I don’t think so, Mr. Dollarhyde. The Wichita bands out here haven’t bothered folks in twenty years, and old Big Belly’s bunch has always been good friends with the white men. Me and my Rangers have visited with him many a time.”
Papa stood, his right hand dangerously close to one of his pistols. “I don’t like your tone, Captain.”
The captain continued to stare at Papa calmly. “If your wife’s horse was there I would imagine that the Wichita had traded for it from the Kiowa or Comanche that raided you. Those that done it might even have been the Comanche we were chasing.”
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