Cries from the Earth

by Terry C. Johnston

  Scrambling into the boat, Benson made it rock so much that his wife screamed in fear that he would swamp them. The moment Albert got seated, Brown passed his brother-in-law the rifle, then heaved against the floating dock to cast off the boat. Once it was easing into the current, H.C. leaped in and went to his knees at the bow.

  “Row, goddammit!” he ordered, taking up one of the oars himself.

  Together the two men used the oars like canoe paddles, digging deep in the Salmon as they heard the cries of the warriors.

  His sister shrieked in horror. Brown looked over his shoulder, finding more than a handful of the red bastards emerging from the trees on their ponies, halting right at the floating dock. Some of them brandished firearms.

  “Row for it!” Brown screamed. “They got guns!”

  The first bullet whined harmlessly past Brown’s head as he ducked, feeling lucky. Then more of a ragged volley erupted from that shoreline behind them.

  “Dig with that paddle, Albert!”

  “Can’t—”

  “I said row, goddammit!”

  Then H.C. suddenly spotted the blood oozing between Benson’s fingers where he gripped his upper arm. “Paddle for him, Sister!”

  Just as she rocked forward to take the oar from her husband, H.C. felt his own shoulder burn.

  Brown looked down, finding the bloody furrow a bullet had carved across the top of his upper arm. Flexing his fingers in that hand, he figured he could still grip the oar.

  “Dig, Sister—dig with all your might!”

  As they pulled at the snow-swollen Salmon, the boat slowly turned sideways in the current and was swiftly carried away downstream. Brown listened as the gunfire slowly faded behind them. Eventually no more angry bullets hissed past their heads the way wasps did when he knocked down their muddy nests from under the eaves of the porch.

  Eventually he and his sister managed to get the boat over to the west bank, where he jumped into the shallows, seizing the bow with his good arm so he could lunge toward the grassy shore. Only then did H. C. Brown realize his sister was quietly sobbing, her eyes clenched shut as she continued to stab her oar into the water, blindly rowing, still fighting the river as if it were the embodiment of those savages who had come to murder them all.

  “We’re safe,” Benson cooed at his wife the moment the rowboat lurched against the riverbank.

  “That’s right, Sister,” Brown said, his own voice cracking as he reached out and took hold of her wrist, stilling her frantic oar sweeps, each one biting more at the air than she bit into the river. “We’re safe for now.”

  Chapter 17

  June I4, 1877

  “Sounds to me like all the rest of ’em figger Baker’s place is closer,” William Osborn declared after listening to what messenger William George had to say when he returned from spreading the alarm to the neighbors.

  Harry Mason nodded, turning all of it over in his mind. He dragged the big turnip watch out of the pocket in his canvas britches, snapped open the case with his dear, departed Anna’s photo inside to protect it from fading, and found it to be just past six o’clock that Thursday evening. “So everyone you saw said they were heading up to the old man’s place?”

  George bobbed his head. “Afore I turned back for here.”

  “All right,” Mason relented. “Let’s get those two horses saddled and hurry up there ourselves then. The more guns we got at Baker’s, the less chance the Indians gonna try something slick on us.”

  In less than a quarter-hour, Mason had those who would ride the horses among the rest starting on foot for the Baker homestead. At the front of the group rode his sister, Helen Walsh, who was holding her young daughter, Masi, on her lap. On the other horse sat the two eldest Osborn children and little Edward Walsh. Walking behind the two animals were William Osborn and his wife, Elizabeth, along with two more of their four children. William George and Harry Mason brought up the rear on foot. They didn’t have far to travel before they passed the Benedict place, which stood on the other side of White Bird Creek, then quickly crossed the narrow footbridge and started upstream for the Baker homestead.

  The group was no more than twenty yards from the darkened, too-quiet house when Harry heard the hoofbeats, then some scattered whoops, even before he saw the warriors appear out of the growing gloom. Mason sprinted to the front of the group with George. The war party halted some distance away in the shadows, their ponies restless, standing there as if they were thinking over the situation.

  “Ain’t it the damnedest luck?” William Osborn grumbled as he came up to stand at Harry’s elbow.

  “Come talk!” an Indian voice called from the twilight.

  “We chance talking to ’em?” William George whispered at Harry’s right elbow.

  “Hell no!” Mason snapped.

  He knew how much these red-bellies hated him for all the cheating and skimming and back-stabbing he had done against them. Talk? Harry Mason knew what awaited him if those goddamned red-bellies got anywhere close enough to him to talk.

  The voice called out again, “Come talk! Come talk!”

  “No!” Mason hollered back now as his one good eye flicked left and right, quickly landing on Baker’s orchard and garden. “Just you stay there so no one gets hurt—”

  Out of the deepening indigo of evening he saw the bright yellow flare spew from the muzzle of a distant rifle. Heard that first round slap through the branches and leaves right over their heads. Instantly every one of the women and children set up a caterwauling that Harry would never have thought possible.

  “Get into the orchard!” he ordered, waving his rifle toward the fence line at the same time he was whirling to grab hold of the horse Helen and little Masi were riding.

  Like a clot of worker ants, the whole group turned as one and clambered toward Baker’s orchard and garden, around which the old man had constructed a fence to protect his fruits and vegetables from his own marauding cows. Within the corral stood grass already grown some three feet tall this early in the season.

  “Get down in the grass!” Mason ordered the first of the children diving between the fence rails. “Get down!”

  A few bullets sang overhead as the warriors made the final turn from the road and started into the yard. Harry vaulted over the fence and tumbled into the grass just as a bullet kicked splinters from a nearby post. Both of Mason’s horses immediately clattered off toward the timber.

  “There goes our only chance for escape,” muttered William George.

  “Ain’t any of us gonna get out of here on those horses anyway, Billy,” Harry reminded him. “Just stay down. And you kids hush up! They can’t see us to shoot us, but they can damn sure hear where you are if you keep bawling like you are!”

  Behind him the mothers shushed their children, perhaps even clamping hands over the mouths of those who hadn’t been made believers by Harry Mason.

  A bullet buzzed through the grass. William Osborn yelped in surprise.

  “They get you?” Harry asked in a harsh whisper, trying to spot his friend through the tall grass and deepening shadows.

  “Just my hand,” Osborn grumbled.

  “How bad?”

  “Shot off the end of my little finger.”

  “Wrap it up. Should stop bleeding.”

  “We gonna shoot back?” Osborn asked, grumpy with the pain.

  Mason vowed, “They come any closer, I sure as hell am.”

  Minutes later when some of the warriors dismounted and started to advance, Harry fired a warning shot in their direction. The Nez Perce stopped and ducked for cover.

  “We talk!”

  “No!” Mason shouted back. “You go, or I kill you!”

  “We kill!”

  That might be, Harry thought, but he said, “Lots of you will die, you come any closer!”

  The last slivers of light were rapidly draining from the sky as the warriors appeared to be arguing over the likelihood of flushing the whites out of the garden. As long as they w
ere arguing about it among themselves, the Indians weren’t going to rush the fence line surrounding the tall grass where Harry had them hidden. Still, every now and then one of the warriors fired a shot toward the garden, more and more unsure of where the settlers were hiding as the shadows blackened.

  And for every Nez Perce bullet, Mason or Osborn or George answered back, firing a round at the warriors.

  “Let’s keep ’em edgy,” Harry kept reminding the others. “That way they’ll be thinking on just how many men and guns are in here when they figure to get brave and want to rush us.”

  But he still wasn’t about to sit there and wait for the Nez Perce to work up the courage for an assault.

  When slap-dark had crept on down off the mountainsides and swallowed the valley of White Bird Creek, Harry whispered to the other two men, directing them to gather up the rest of their charges and follow him out of the back of the orchard, beyond the fence line, where they could take up new hiding places across the stream.

  At the creek bank, Harry and the other men were the first to wade across in order to find themselves a good ford, then returned for the first three of the children. Helen Walsh hiked up her dress and waded right into the cold, rushing torrent with them to reach the far side. On the second trip across with the children, Elizabeth Osborn dropped off the bank into the stream, immediately lost her footing, and came up with a sputter to stumble on across, shivering and mumbling a blue streak.

  Wet and cold, they were nonetheless that much farther from the savages, Harry thought as the women settled the children within a thicket that completely hid them while the first stars winked into view. Now came an even scarier time. With darkness those bastards could slip up out of the black and be on you before you realized it.

  “Listen!” William George announced in a sharp whisper.

  The hair on the back of Mason’s neck was standing. He listened, figuring George must have heard one of the warriors creeping up on them.

  “Horses!” William Osborn whispered as the sound faded.

  “You figger they’re leaving, Harry?” George asked.

  “Could be laying a trap,” Mason advised suspiciously. “We can afford to wait some and see what we hear from over at Baker’s place before we leave this brush.”

  Sanctuary, some would call it. A hidey-hole is what it was. The sort he and his brothers had always sought out when they were children back in Massachusetts. Always hoped to find just the right spot where no one else knew your hidey-hole when they came looking for you in a game of hide-and-go-seek. For now, sanctuary would do nicely.

  He couldn’t read his watch in the dark, but Harry was sure more than an hour had passed since they had crossed the creek. He heard some slow, deep breathing, so he was sure a number of the children were sleeping, their heads resting in their mothers’ laps.

  “We can’t stay here, fellas,” Mason finally whispered.

  “Where you figger to go?” William George asked.

  “Back to my place. Safer’n staying here till it’s daylight, when they can catch us out in the open,” Harry explained.

  “All right,” William Osborn relented.

  Mason got the rest awakened and standing in the thicket, preparing to recross the stream, when George stepped up to Mason’s elbow. The young man had never been a particularly brave sort, so it sure as hell surprised Harry when George grabbed Mason’s arm.

  “Mr. Mason, I ain’t going back to your place with you.”

  He studied the intensity on the hired man’s face. “You can’t stay here, Billy.”

  “I ain’t,” and George shook his head. “I figger them folks up on Camas Prairie oughtta know of the troubles.”

  “You’re gonna walk up there by yourself?”

  George nodded. “I think I can find my way.”

  Mason shook the young man’s hand, squeezing it hard. “Good luck to you.”

  Harry watched his employee turn into the darkness and start upstream, following the White Bird as it climbed its narrow, confining valley.

  It was slow going in the dark for the rest of them as they struggled alongside the road that led them downstream toward the Salmon River, slow helping the children along, carrying those youngsters so frightened they didn’t want to move, their mothers clucking like hens with their broods, the two men staying well ahead of the women and children to be sure they didn’t stumble into another war party. It proved to be such slow going that William George caught back up with them as Mason’s group approached the Salmon River Road.

  Harry was surprised when he heard the hired man coming out of the night. “What happened? You see some Injuns?”

  Osborn shook his head and shrugged, admitting, “Got turned around somewhere in the dark.”

  “That’s all right, Billy,” Mason said. “You tried a brave thing. You think you could find your way over to Mount Idaho?”

  George shook his head. “Not sure. Only know by going the road.”

  “All right—I’m gonna tell you how.”

  As soon as William George believed he had enough of Mason’s directions to get himself cross-country in the dark, the young man bid the others farewell a second time, promising to get through with word of the attacks and depredations if it took all the rest of that night.

  For those who had remained with Harry, it took three, maybe four, times as long to plod back to the Mason place by keeping to the timber as it would have traveling on the road without the children. But by the time the sun was coming up, Harry had convinced himself he was smelling wood-smoke. Maybe nothing more than his lifelong association of sunup with cooking breakfast over a fire.

  “I’ll be go to hell,” William Osborn marveled just about the time Harry spotted French Frank and old man Shoemaker stepping out onto the porch of the Mason store.

  “Got something cooking?” Mason asked as his bunch came out of the woods and approached the porch.

  “Just what we could find after them Injuns made a mess of ever’thing else, Harry,” Shoemaker admitted.

  Hurrying up the steps and to the door, he peered into the store. Mason’s heart sank.

  Osborn said, “They was looking for guns and bullets.”

  “And whiskey,” Shoemaker grumbled.

  Mason turned to the old man. “Where’d you two go off to hide?”

  French Frank grinned and tossed his thumb over his shoulder. “We get out. Go to trees. Stay down.”

  “They never come looking for us,” Shoemaker continued. “Likely didn’t know we was anywhere about the place. The two of us didn’t come on in here till it started to get light. My meat bag was hollerin’ for fodder by then. Damn, if I wasn’t hungry! Had to fix me some breakfast.”

  “You boys can stay if you want,” Mason offered, “but soon as the children eat, I’m taking everybody across the Salmon.”

  “Across the river?” Shoemaker echoed. “What the hell for?”

  “Lay out the day,” Mason said. “While the little ones eat, Bill and I are going to stuff as much food as we can in a couple of burlap bags and take ’em with us. Stay over across the river where them Indians aren’t likely to go, and wait till dark.”

  “Then what, Harry?” Osborn asked.

  “Then we’ll recross the Salmon and follow Billy George ourselves,” Mason replied. “After sleeping out the day, we can head out on our own. Way I see it, we should reach Mount Idaho by sunup.”

  * * *

  After Jennie Norton bound up Lew Day’s wound the best she could with some clean cotton bandages that stanched the flow of blood, Ben Norton, John Chamberlin, and Joe Moore emptied the Chamberlin wagon of its load of flour, hauling the hundredweight sacks inside the Norton house. With the weight of the women and children in the back of the dead-axle wagon, not to mention the wounded Lew Day as well, Chamberlin’s four horses would have enough of a load to pull now. It made a lot of sense to lighten the load as much as they could before setting out for Grangeville once twilight was done deepening the hues of the ti
mber around them.

  When Norton and hired man Joe Moore returned from the barn with the two saddle horses they would ride, Ben found Chamberlin helping Lew Day hoist himself back into the saddle atop that racer. “What the hell are you doing, John?”

  “He said if I didn’t help him, he’d get up there his own self,” Chamberlin apologized as Day straightened atop the horse.

  “You strong enough to ride, Lew?” Norton asked as he stopped beside Day’s knee.

  “I got here, didn’t I?”

  “I figgered you for the wagon, Lew. In there where you don’t have to worry ’bout hanging on—”

  “I’m up here now, Ben,” Day sighed stoically. “Let’s get going.”

  Without another word, Moore and Norton rose into the saddle as Chamberlin clambered onto the seat alone. Behind him in the wagon box were his pregnant wife and their two small children, along with Jennie Norton, her son, Hill, and Jennie’s sister, Lynn Bowers. It was just past 9:00 P.M. as they pulled out of the yard and started down the south side of the divide for Grangeville. Overhead, the stars shined brightly in a moonless sky, but visibility was good.

  After no more than a half-dozen miles, Ben Norton spotted the flickering light of a campfire up ahead at one of the wide spots in the road where travelers preferred to camp on their way across the Camas Prairie. As they drew closer, he spotted the two high-walled freighters with their tongues down, a dozen horses grazing in the meadow just beyond.

  A figure rose beside the flames, rifle in hand, and quickly stepped back to the edge of the firelight.

  “Ho there, fellas!” Norton called.

  “That you, Ben?”

  As a second figure emerged from behind one of the wagons, Norton answered, “It’s all of us, boys. Chamberlins, and Lew Day too.”

  Pete Ready came into the firelight with his carbine in his hands. “Lew Day?”

  “Goddamned right,” Day grumped as he brought his horse to a halt in the light.

  Luther Wilmot was beside him in a heartbeat. “You run into trouble?”

  “One of the red bastards shot me in the back.”

  “Damn,” Wilmot sighed, then whistled low as he stepped around to peer at the bloodstained back of Day’s shirt, blinking in disbelief. “You better get down here and sit by the fire, Lew. Get warm and I’ll rustle you up some coffee to drink, too—”