by Still Life
Pendergast strode toward the porch, suit coat flapping.
“Just hold it right there,” Brushy Jim called out, “and state your business. Now.”
Corrie swallowed. If something bad was going to happen, it was going to happen now.
Pendergast halted. “I understand you are Mr. James Draper, great-grandson of Isaiah Draper?”
At this, Brushy Jim straightened slightly. The look of mistrust did not go away. “And?”
“My name is Pendergast. I’m interested in learning more about the Medicine Creek Massacre of August 14, 1865, of which your great-grandfather was the lone survivor.”
The mention of the massacre wrought a dramatic change in Brushy Jim’s countenance. The suspicious glare in his eye softened somewhat. “And the young lady, if that’s what she is? Who’s she?”
“Miss Corrie Swanson,” Pendergast replied.
At this, Jim stood even straighter. “Little Corrie?” he said in surprise. “What happened to your pretty blonde hair?”
Ate too much eggplant,Corrie almost said. But Brushy Jim was unpredictable, and he had a hair-trigger temper, so she decided that a shrug was the safest response.
“You look terrible, Corrie, all dressed in black.” He stood there a moment, looking at the two of them. Then he nodded his head. “Well, you might as well come in.”
They followed Brushy Jim into the stuffy confines of his house. There were few windows and it was dark, a house crammed full of shadowy objects. It smelled of old food and taxidermy gone bad.
“Sit down and have a Coke.” The refrigerator threw out a rectangle of welcome light as Brushy Jim opened it. Corrie perched on a folding chair, while Pendergast—after a quick scan of the premises—took a seat on the only portion of a cowhide sofa not stacked with dusty copies ofArizona Highways. Corrie had never been inside before, and she looked around uneasily. The walls were covered with old rifles, buckskins, boards with arrowheads glued on, Civil War memorabilia, plaques displaying different types of barbed wire. A row of moldering old books ran along one shelf, bookended by huge pieces of unpolished petrified wood. An entire stuffed horse, an Appaloosa, worn and moth-eaten, stood guard in one corner. The floor was littered with dirty laundry, broken saddle trees, pieces of leather, and other bric-a-brac. It was remarkable: the entire place was like a dusty museum devoted to relics of the Old West. Corrie had expected to see mementos of Vietnam: weapons, insignia, photographs. But there was absolutely nothing, not a trace, of the war that reputedly had changed Brushy Jim forever.
Brushy Jim handed Corrie and Pendergast cans of Coke. “Now, Mr. Pendergast, just what do you want to know about the massacre?”
Corrie watched Pendergast set the Coke can aside. “Everything.”
“Well, it started during the Civil War.” Brushy Jim threw his massive body into a big armchair, took a noisy sip. “You know all about Bloody Kansas, I’m sure, Mr. Pendergast, being a historian.”
“I’m not a historian, Mr. Draper. I’m a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
There was a dead silence. Then Brushy Jim cleared his throat.
“All right, then, Mr. Pendergast. So you’re FBI. May I ask what brings you to Medicine Creek?”
“The recent homicide.”
Brushy Jim’s look of suspicion had returned, full force. “And what,exactly, does that have to do with me?”
“The victim was a relic hunter named Sheila Swegg. She’d been digging in the Mounds.”
Brushy Jim spat on the floor, twisted it into the dust with his boot. “Goddamned relic hunters. They should leave the stuff in the ground.” Then he looked quickly back at Pendergast. “You still haven’t said what the murder has to do with me.”
“I understand the history of the Mounds, and the Medicine Creek Massacre, are intertwined. Along with something I’ve heard referred to locally as the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives.’ And as you may know, a large number of Southern Cheyenne arrows were found arranged with the body.”
A long time passed while Brushy Jim seemed to consider this. “What kind of arrows?” he finally asked.
“They were of cane, feathered with bald eagle primaries and tipped with a type II Plains Cimarron style point of Alibates chert and Bighorn red jasper. A matched set, by the way, in almost perfect condition. They date to around the time of the massacre.”
Brushy Jim issued a long low whistle, and then fell into silence, his brow furrowed with thought.
“Mr. Draper?” Pendergast prompted at last.
For another moment, Brushy Jim was still. Then, with a slow shake of his head, he began his story.
“Before the Civil War, southwestern Kansas was completely unsettled, just Cheyenne and Arapaho, Pawnee and Sioux. The only white folks were those passing through on the Santa Fe Trail. But settlement was rolling this way from the frontier, which at that time was eastern Kansas. Folks had their eye on the good range in the valleys of the Cimarron River, the Arkansas, Crooked Creek, and Medicine Creek. When the Civil War broke out all the soldiers went off, leaving the territory defenseless. The settlers had been brutalizing the Indians and now it was payback time. There was a whole string of Indian attacks along the frontier. Then when the Civil War ended, a lot of soldiers came back, armed and bitter. They’d seen war, Mr. Pendergast. And I meanwar. That kind of violence can do something to a man. It can damage the mind.”
The man paused, cleared his throat.
“So they came back here and began forming vigilante groups to push the Indians west so they could take the land. ‘Clearing the country,’ they called it. There was a group formed over in Dodge, called the Forty-Fives. ’Course, it wasn’t Dodge then, just the Hickson Brothers ranch. Forty-five men, it was, some of the worst dregs of humanity, murderers and crooks pushed out of settled towns farther east. My great-grandfather Isaiah Draper was just a boy of sixteen, barely in long pants, and he got sucked into it. I guess his thinking was he’d missed the war, so he’d better hurry up and prove his manhood damn quick while he still could.”
Brushy Jim took another noisy sip.
“Anyway, in June of ’65 the Forty-Fives went on a rampage, heading down the criks south of the Canadian and Cimarron and into the Oklahoma panhandle. These were Civil War veterans who knew all about fighting a mounted enemy. They were hardened men, tough, survivors of the very worst sort. They’d been through the fires of hell, Mr. Pendergast. But they were also cowards. If you want to survive a war, nothing helps like being a chicken-livered, yellow-bellied poltroon. They waited until the warriors had gone off on the hunt and then attacked Indian settlements at night, killing mostly women and children. They showed no mercy, Mr. Pendergast. They had a saying: nits make lice. They even killed the babies. Bayoneted them to save ammunition.”
Another sip. His low gravelly voice in the dark cool room was hypnotic. It almost seemed to Corrie that he was describing something he himself had seen. Maybe he had, in a way . . . She averted her eyes.
“My great-grandfather was sickened by what he saw. Raping and killing women and cutting up babies wasn’t his idea of becoming a man. He wanted to leave the group, but with the Indians all riled up it would’ve been certain death to peel off and try to get home alone. So he had to go along. One night they got drunk and beat the hell out of him ’cause he wouldn’t join in the fun. Busted a few ribs. That’s what saved his life in the end—those broken ribs.
“Toward the middle of August they’d rampaged through a half dozen Cheyenne camps and driven the rest of them north and west out of Kansas. Or so they thought, anyways. They were returning to the Hickson ranch when they came through here. Medicine Creek. It was the night of August fourteenth they camped up at the Mounds—you been to the Mounds, Mr. Pendergast?”
Pendergast nodded.
“Then you’ll know it’s the highest point of land. There weren’t any trees back then, just a bare rise with three scrub-covered mounds on top. You could see for miles around. They posted pickets, like always. F
our sentries at the compass points, posted a quarter mile from camp. Sun was setting and the wind had kicked up. A front was coming in and the dust was a-blowing.
“My great-grandfather had those broken ribs and they’d laid him down in a little holler right there behind the Mounds, maybe a hundred yards away. With the broken ribs he couldn’t sit up, see, and the dust at ground level was just about driving him crazy. So they put him in this little brush shelter out of the wind. I guess they felt sorry for what they’d done to him.
“Just as the sun was setting and the men were getting ready to eat dinner, it happened.”
He tilted his head back, took a long swig.
“There was a sound of beating hooves right on top of them. Thirty warriors on white horses, painted with red ochre, came out of the dust. The Indians were all duded up with painted faces and feathers and rattles—and they came howling, arrows flying. Right out of nowhere. Surprised the hell out of the Forty-Fives. Made a couple of passes and killed them all, every last man. The sentries saw nothing. They hadn’t seen any sign of riders approaching, hadn’t heard a sound. The sentries, Mr. Pendergast, were among thelast to be killed. Now that’s just the opposite of what usually happens, if you know your western military history.
“It weren’t no cakewalk for the Cheyennes, though. The Forty-Fives were tough men and fought back hard and killed at least a third of the attackers and a bunch of their horses. My great-grandfather saw the whole thing from where he was lying. After . . . after killing their last man, the Indiansrode back into the huge clouds of dust. Disappeared, Mr. Pendergast. And when the dust cleared there were no Indians. No horses. Just forty-four white men, dead and scalped. Even the Indians’ dead warriors and horses had vanished.
“A patrol of the Fourth Cavalry picked up my great-grandfather two days later near the Santa Fe Trail. He took ’em back to the site of the massacre. They found the blood and piles of rotting guts from the Indian horses, but no bodies or fresh graves. There were hoofprints all around the hilltop but nowhere else. No tracks went beyond where the sentries had been killed. There were some Arapaho scouts with the Fourth, and they were so terrified at the lack of tracks coming and going that they began wailing that these were ghost warriors and refused to follow the trail. There was a big uproar and several more Cheyenne villages were burned by the cavalry for good measure, but most folks were glad the Forty-Fives were gone. They were a bad bunch.
“That was the end of the Cheyenne in western Kansas. Dodge City was settled in 1871 and the Santa Fe Railroad came through in 1872, and pretty soon Dodge became the cowboy capital of the West, the end of the Texas Trail, shootouts, Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, and all that. Medicine Creek was settled in 1877 by the cattleman H. H. Keyser, cattle brand bar H high on the left shoulder, horse brand flying H on the right. The blizzard of ’86 wiped out eleven thousand head and the next day Keyser leaned his head against the barrels of his shotgun and pulled both triggers. They said it was the curse. Then sodbusters and nesters came and the days of the cattle barons were over. First it was wheat and sorghum, then the dust bowl, and after that they replanted in feed corn and now gasohol corn. But in all that time no one ever solved the mystery of the Ghost Warriors and the Medicine Creek Massacre.”
He took one final sip and dramatically clunked down his can.
Corrie looked at Pendergast. It was a good story, and Brushy Jim told it well. Pendergast was so still he might have been asleep. His eyes were half closed, his fingers tented, his body sunken into the sofa.
“And your great-grandfather, Mr. Draper?” he murmured.
“He settled down in Deeper, married and buried three wives. He wrote up the whole thing in a private journal, with a lot more detail than what I just gave you, but the journal got sold off with a lot of his other valuables in the Great Depression and now sits in some library vault back east. Never could figure out where. I heard the story from my dad.”
“And how did he manage to see everything, in the middle of a dust storm?”
“Well, all I know is what my dad said. When you get a dust storm in these parts, sometimes it blows on and off, like.”
“And the Cheyenne, Mr. Draper, weren’t they already known to the U.S. Cavalry as the ‘Red Specters’ because of the way they could sneak up on even the most vigilant sentry and cut his throat before he even realized it?”
“For an FBI agent, you seem to know quite a lot, Mr. Pendergast. But you got to remember this happened at sunset, not at night, and those Forty-Fives had just fought as Confederates and lost a war. You know what it’s like to lose a war? You can damn well be sure they were keeping their eyes open.”
“How was it that the Indians didn’t discover your great-grandfather?”
“Like I said, the men felt bad about whomping him and had erected a little windbreak for him. He pulled that brush over himself to hide.”
“I see. And from that vantage point, lying in a hollow, covered with brush, at least a hundred yards downhill from the camp, in a dust storm, he was able to see all that you just described in such vivid detail. The Ghost Warriors appearing and disappearing as if by magic.”
Brushy Jim’s eyes flashed dangerously and he half rose from his seat. “I ain’t selling you anything, Mr. Pendergast. My great-granddaddy ain’t on trial here. I’m just telling you the story as it came down to me.”
“Then you have a theory, Mr. Draper? A personal opinion, perhaps? Or do you really think it wasghosts? ”
There was a silence.
“I don’t like the tone you’re taking with me, Mr. Pendergast,” Brushy Jim said, now on his feet. “And FBI or not, if you’re insinuating something, I want to hear it flat out.Right now. ”
Pendergast did not immediately reply. Corrie swallowed with difficulty, her gaze moving toward the door.
“Come now, Mr. Draper,” Pendergast said at last. “You’re no fool. I’d like to hear yourreal opinion.”
There was an electric moment in which nobody moved. Then Brushy Jim softened.
“Mr. Pendergast, it appears you’ve smoked me out. No, I don’t think those Indians were ghosts. If you go out to the Mounds—it’s hard to see now with all the trees—but there’s a long gentle fold of land that comes up from the crik. A group of thirty Cheyenne could come up that fold, hidden from the sentries if they walked their horses. The setting sun would have put them in the shadow of the Mounds. They could’ve waited below for the dust to come up, mounted real quick, and rode in. That would explain the sudden hoofbeats. And they could’ve left the same way, packing out their dead and erasing their tracks. I never heard of an Arapaho who could track a Cheyenne, anyway.”
He laughed, but it was a mirthless laugh.
“What about the dead Cheyenne horses? How did they vanish, in your opinion?”
“You’re a hard man to please, Mr. Pendergast. I thought about that, too. When I was young I saw an eighty-year-old Lakota chief butcher a buffalo in less than ten minutes. A buffalo’s a damn sight bigger than a horse. Indians ate horsemeat. They could’ve butchered the horses and packed the meat and bones out with their dead or hauled them out by travois. They left the guts behind, you see, to lighten the loads. And maybe there weren’t more than two or three dead Cheyenne horses, anyway. Maybe Great-Granddaddy Isaiah exaggerated just a little when he said a dozen of their horses had been killed.”
“Perhaps,” Pendergast said. He rose and walked over to the makeshift bookshelf. “And I thank you for a most informative story. But what does the story of the massacre have to do with the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives’ that you mentioned, which nobody seems willing to talk about?”
Brushy Jim stirred. “Well, now, Mr. Pendergast, I don’t think ‘willing’ is the right word there. It’s just not a pretty story, that’s all.”
“I’m all ears, Mr. Draper.”
Brushy Jim licked his lips. Then he leaned forward. “All right, then. You know how I said that the sentries were among the last to be killed?”
Pender
gast nodded. He had picked up a battered copy ofButler & Company’s New American First Reader and was leafing through it.
“The very last to be killed was a fellow named Harry Beaumont. He was the leader of the Forty-Fives and a real hard case, too. The Indians were furious at what had been done to their women and children, and they punished Beaumont for it. They didn’t just scalp him. Theyrounded him.”
“I’m not familiar with that term.”
“Well, let’s just say that they did something to Harry Beaumont that would make sure none of his family recognized him in the afterlife. And after they were done they cut off his boots and skinned off the soles of his feet, so his spirit couldn’t follow them. Then they buried the boots on either side of the Mounds, as a backup, like, to trap his evil spirit there forever.”
Pendergast returned the book, pulled out another, even more battered, titledCommerce of the Prairies. He flipped through the pages. “I see. And the curse?”
“Different people will tell you different things. Some say Beaumont’s ghost still haunts the Mounds, looking for his missing boots. Some say still worse things that I’d just as soon not repeat in front of a lady, if it’s all the same to you. But the one thing I can tell you for sure is that, right before he died, Beaumont cursed the very ground around him—cursed it for all eternity. My great-granddaddy was still hidden in the hollow, and he heard him with his own ears. He was the only living witness.”