Lost Lands

by P. J. Keogh

  Scanlon expressed acceptance, asking for two more beers.

  Sanchez, being not the kind to attend to menial chores with his own hands, signalled to a Mexican in vaquero-dress, one of two who were standing by, wearing guns, and looking watchful.

  The man went to the bar. The beers came. Sanchez sat down at the table, to join the round.

  “Saludes, Gentlemen.” The caballero raised his glass.

  Scanlon followed suit, but thoughtfully. Sanchez was an aristocrat, not one who, in the normal way, drank beer in sawdust-floored Gringo saloons. He had sought them out for a reason, and the major would bet his last red cent that this had not one damn thing to do with talking over old times.

  “Now shall we turn to serious matters?” Once again, it was a request—Sanchez-style—and the grandee awaited no reply. “Would I be correct in thinking that you both would be open to propositions of a financially attractive nature?”

  Scanlon nodded his confirmation. Now they were getting to the point. “You would, most certainly.”

  “Good.” The Mexican smiled approval. “And am I also correct in my belief that neither of you has any more love for Tejanos than have I?”

  Scanlon’s ears pricked up at this. Yet it was a question he could answer truthfully, and with ease. “You are, Senor.”

  Sanchez’s smile broadened. “You had cause to kill two men today, Major. An affair of a stolen horse, I am told.”

  “A stolen mare. My mare.”

  “The gender of the beast was not made clear.” Sanchez took a sip from his beer glass. “But that is not of importance. What is of importance is that the men you killed were working in my employ.” He raised his hand in a gesture of disclamation. “Not in the matter of stealing your mare, Major, but in other things.”

  To Scanlon this was news. Lorca and Julio came from the scum of the Earth. The traitor, Armandez, had busted the pair out of the calabozo in Durango, when the regimiento had raided there, and had used them for the dirtiest jobs in what was the dirtiest of wars. Riff-raff like them were the last men the ex-major would have put alongside Sanchez, had he been asked to guess.

  Then, asked to guess, he would not have placed Sanchez in this Gringo drinking-mill. There were shifty goings-on here, for a certain fact.

  As if reading Scanlon’s thoughts, or part of them, Sanchez said, “They were recent hirelings. Though, I quickly realised that they were not men of high type. But such have their uses for certain tasks.”

  “In which case, Don Leopoldo, I apologise for having deprived you of their services.”

  “Do not apologise, Major.” Sanchez was gazing at Scanlon keenly, assessing him. “You and Sergeant Fisher here, being men of more substantial caliber, can more than compensate for their loss. To your advantage as well as to mine.”

  “I would be interested to hear what you propose, Senor.” The ex-major kept his tone even, though his mind was working fast. If Lorca and Julio had been in Sanchez’s swim, then the grandee’s waters were murky ones for sure—with Armandez in there too, a man could bet. Also Sanchez had mentioned Texicans and his ill-intent toward them. One way and another, Scanlon had the feeling that here would be as likely a place as any to pick up the comanchero trail.

  Chapter 6

  Six riders made up the main group, Scanlon and Fisher in the lead. They were replacing the late-unlamented Lorca and Julio, who, Scanlon had gathered, had been meant to replace two more who had come to messy ends of their own.

  Then, messy ends were to be expected in a messy business. Which fact offered not much hope for his prospects, or Fisher’s.

  The major was mounted on the roan mare over which Lorca and Julio had died. Lije rode the big-chested cavalry mount that a reluctant farrier at Worth had allocated him.

  The four who followed were all young men. The eldest—and him no more than twenty-one—was Pedro Ividrio, from down on the Rio Bravo. Pedro was a handsome youth with a ready grin and a reckless streak in him. The son of Sanchez’s sister, who, word had it, had married beneath her station, Pedro had been taken in by his uncle, Scanlon had been told, so as to escape the influence of gun-slinging elder brother, Pablo, whose portrait decorated wanted posters, from El Paso to Brownsville.

  Pedro was given to sporting ways, but had punched cows in the brasada country and, it was said, knew the herding business inside out and backwards.

  Like the other three vaqueros, Pedro led a pack-mule, on the back of which was bagged-up ammunition brought north from Mexico by the late and unlamented Lorca and Julio.

  Off to the north, the left flank, a small horse-remuda cantered, Scanlon’s army bay in with it. Two manaderos, little more than kids, from the Sanchez grant herded the remuda.

  The party was a week out from Albuquerque, and across the Texas line. They had forded the Pecos north of Fort Sumner, two days earlier. The peaks behind them now, they were deep into the Llano Estacado, a high meseta that shelved out of the New Mexico Rockies, and stretched east to fall off, Fisher said, in steep cliffs to the Texas plains below.

  Scanlon would take the Negro’s word for that. Fisher had patrolled the bases of those cliffs in his hitch with the Buffalo Soldiers. For his own part, the major had hunted Mescalero into the Llano, back in ’63, but the country this far east was new to him.

  The Llano was a flat-to-undulating land, well grassed, and drained by creeks that wended their routes, through deep-slashed canyons, to join the big rivers flowing eventually to the Gulf—the Red, the Canadian, the Brazos.

  It was Indian country. The Plains Apache hunted here. So did the Kiowa, the Southern Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Comanche.

  No white settlement was to be found on these high plains—and no white man who valued his scalp, and was up to any good.

  Suddenly a rider appeared, as if from out of the ground. He was less than half a mile ahead, and Scanlon knew that he had ridden up over the rim of one of the canyons. It was Manuel, their guide. Manuel was another of Sanchez’s people, a man of indeterminate years and some Indio blood, though how much and of which nation Scanlon did not know.

  The old man rode forward. Drawing his pony to a halt alongside Scanlon’s roan, he pointed toward the canyon from which he had emerged. “Llegaremos luego, Commandante.” He was a man of few words. Having said what he had to say, he turned his wiry pinto, to lead the party on.

  Fisher looked at Scanlon. The runaway sergeant had enough command of Border-Spanish to have understood. “Almost there, huh?”

  Scanlon nodded. “Seems so.” He waved a gesture to the horseboys, telling them to swing the remuda in behind.

  They reached the canyon’s rim. From there a trail led downward. It was too wide and too well-trodden to have been made by deer or small game.

  Looking at the excreta dried along the path, Fisher saw traces of dog as well as horse. He saw also grooves traced into the trail, twinned pairs as wide apart as the width of a mustang’s butt-end, pony-travois tracks. Other grooves ran closer. Dog-travois had left these. His time with the 9th had taught the sergeant sufficient about the plains tribes for him to know that they were following the true trail to an Indian village.

  A big one too, he judged.

  He said as much to Scanlon, who nodded his agreement. The ex-major had chased enough desert Indians to be enabled to make good guesses on these plains.

  Cattle-pats, a lot of them, were mingled with the signs of other animals. Whichever band had come down here last had made an early-season beef raid, a successful one, and not long ago.

  As they rounded a curve on their downward route, old Manuel drew his pony up. A group of horsemen, Indians, eight of them, sat their mounts, further down-trail.

  A clicking metallic sound to his rear caused Scanlon to turn. He saw that Pedro had his rifle out and cocked. It was a Colt’s revolving piece of which the head-vaquero was proud.

  Scanlon shot the young Mexican a warning. “!No hay necessitate para carabines!” He watched Pedro until he was satisfied that the messa
ge had been understood, and the weapon put away.

  Ahead of them the lead-Indian was walking his mount in steps that traced a ‘Z’ in the trail—peace sign.

  Old Manuel rode toward the braves, handling his pony in the same way.

  Scanlon and his followers stayed with the old man, and the two groups of riders converged.

  Scanlon saw that the Indians’ ponies had circles and other patterns painted upon their hides. Though each of the braves carried a shoulder-slung bow, with arrows in deerskin quivers, all held rifles also, Lebel breech-loaders, weapons Scanlon recognised as standard issue to the French cavalry he had fought in Mexico. Despite this armament, the Indians were not painted or stripped for a fight. Their ponies’ tails hung free.

  This was not a war-party, then.

  Fisher took note of the arrows the Indians carried. These had colored bands painted on their shafts. “Southern Cheyenne,” the Negro said.

  The lead brave halted his horse. Facing Scanlon, he moved his right hand outward from the level of his left ribcage, in a flowing motion. This was a talk or friendship sign. “Comanchero.” The Cheyenne stated this as fact.

  “Comanchero,” Scanlon confirmed.

  Chapter 7

  Fisher’s early guess had hit the nail’s head square-on. The village was a big one.

  The riders came across its beginnings as the canyon widened. Tepees were lined up ahead of them, along the banks of a slow-flowing creek. It was fertile land. As the canyon spread into a valley, Scanlon saw the thickly grown clumps of cedar trees that grew along the creek bank. The grass was abundant. Water, good grazing, and timber for cabin-building this place had.

  Before too many more years passed, it would be cattle-country. On that, a man could put his shirt.

  They passed a pony herd, grazing between two small cedar forests. Fisher estimated their number at more than two hundred. Young boys, thirteen years of age or so, herded these. Further off, other riders were policing cattle, stolen ones. The herd was sizeable. How many in it, Fisher could not guess.

  A cluster of riders, larger than the one that led their way, galloped from the village. They brandished weapons, but, like the Indians riding ahead of Scanlon’s group, were not painted for war. They swung their mounts alongside Scanlon, Fisher, and the vaqueros. They made a kind of ‘yipping’ sound not unlike a canine bark.

  “Dog Society,” Fisher grunted, “showin’ off.”

  As the procession entered the village, it picked up an entourage of children, boys and girls both. There were dogs too, wolf-like animals, but shorter-legged and heavier-set than wolves. Scanlon was reminded of pictures he had seen of malamutes, which, he had read, were employed as draft-animals in the snows of Canada far to the north.

  Women broke off from their camp-labor, to watch the riders pass. Young girls in their teens, dark-skinned, and many of them pretty, pointed to the visitors, commenting and giggling. Some hid their mouths behind their hands. They reminded Scanlon of convent-schoolgirls in the Rio Arriba country, let out of class in the afternoon, escaping for a while the good sisters’ watchful eyes.

  The mounted Indians drew up facing a buffalo hide tepee, no larger than the rest, but located in a central position in the village.

  Manuel said something in a language Scanlon did not understand.

  Fisher caught a piece of what the old man said. It was a name. One he had heard of in his trooping days.

  “It’s the chief’s tepee,” he told Scanlon. “This is Bull Bear’s band. They raided in Kansas and the Colorado territory, after Sand Creek. Been up north for a season or two. Now they’ve moved down here.”

  The words ‘Sand Creek’ struck a chord with Scanlon. He had not long been drummed out of the volunteers, when the killing up there in Colorado took place. By all accounts, some Plains-Indian chiefs were amenable to the idea of peace ’til then.

  A Colorado colonel called John Chivington had kiboshed that.

  Chivington, a fanatical ex-preacher from the backwoods, who held to all commandments but the fifth, had faith in profusion, hope by the bucketful, but damn-all in the way of charity, had hit the Indian village on the creek, despite old Chief Black Kettle’s overtures of friendship, and the fact that most of the warriors were off in other places.

  Chivington’s troops had wiped out some old men, children and women, Cheyenne and Arapaho, mutilated them too, then ridden into Jim Denver’s town, claiming the massacre as a victory.

  Scanlon recalled Chivington from the war. It was the Bible-beater’s volunteers—hard-rock Colorado miners, most of them—who sided the New Mexico troops in the big brawl up at Glorieta Pass in ’62, where the fighting parson had been the hero of the day.

  He was brave was Chivington, no doubt of that. But, Scanlon had thought at the time, there was a craziness about the man that was a long way from being healthy for anyone, and likely would prove fatal to some.

  It had done that all right, not least to the Whites who died, from the North Platte to the Nueces, as the plains tribes settled their Sand Creek accounts. Signs were that Bull Bear’s bookkeeping would mean good business for a comanchero.

  A tall Indian wearing a deerskin shirt and leggings came from the tepee—Bull Bear, Scanlon guessed. A buckskin-clad man was with the Indian. Swarthy-skinned, this man wore his long black hair in plaits. He carried a Colt’s revolver and a Bowie knife in his waistband. Scanlon placed him as a half-blood.

  The man stepped forward to announce himself. “I’m George Bent.”

  The name was one both Scanlon and Fisher knew. Then, every mother’s son in the Southwest had heard of the Bents. William and Charles—father and uncle to this one—had hunted beaver with Carson, in the far-back days of the mountain men. After the fur market died away, the Bents set up a trading fort on the Arkansas, where William’s Cheyenne wife bore him sons.

  At Sand Creek, the Bent boys were among the few men of fighting age of whom Black Kettle’s village could boast. Afterward, they took sides with their mother’s people, and learned the habit of shedding the blood of Whites. Fisher remembered reports of the half-breed warriors in fights along the Platte and as far north as Tongue River. George was held to be a bad one. Though, word had it, Brother Charlie was worse.

  Bent invited the riders to dismount. They did so, and old Manuel introduced Scanlon and Fisher, the vaqueros and manaderos likewise.

  Bent, in return, took them through the ritual of acquaintance with Bull Bear, shifting from the Algonquin idiom of the Cheyenne to English and back again, as fast as Scanlon could have moved between his parent’s native tongues.

  Bull Bear stepped aside, gestured to Scanlon and Fisher that they should enter the tepee. Trading would begin.

  Suddenly a warrior burst into the circle they had formed. He was painted for trouble, and carried a Bowie knife and a fighting-axe in his belt. He had gotten those by trade or by killing, and it was killing he now had on his mind. He spat angry words, making sign with his hands, as he spoke. He pointed to Fisher, as he did these things.

  The Negro, no wiser than any New York City lawyer when it came to making out what the Redskin had to say, was in no doubt as to what the man’s intentions were. He held the Indian’s eye steadily, nonetheless.

  “What the Hell is this all about?” Scanlon demanded of Bent.

  “This is Running Elk, a warrior of the Dog Society,” Bent told him. “He says the buffalo soldier here killed his brother, in the fight with the Rope Thrower at Adobe Walls. Now he wants revenge.”

  Scanlon knew that ‘Rope Thrower’ was the name the Arapaho had given to Carson, in the days when the frontier legend lived among them, and that other tribes had taken it up. He knew, too, of Carson’s big fight at Adobe Walls at the end of ’64. It was the biggest Indian scrape ever, he had heard, and one reason why so few warriors were with Black Kettle at Sand Creek.

  It was a fight that he had missed himself, due to having been cashiered on account of San Alberto.

  Bull Bear spoke up the
n, and Bent translated what the chief had to say. “Bull Bear says that Running Elk speaks the truth. He, too, recalls having seen the Blackman at Adobe Walls.”

  Fisher shrugged. “I was at ’Dobe Walls. Don’t deny it. Likely, I killed this fella’s brother there. Maybe a passel of his cousins also. But what of it? That was war.”

  Scanlon said to Bent. “Explain to Running Elk. Lije and I joined-up, to fight the Greycoats, in the Whiteman’s War. As soldiers, we had to follow orders and fight Indians, too. I have killed Mescalero, Lipan, Chikonen, Navajo, and others. Lije killed Cheyenne, at the Rope Thrower’s command. Now it is over.”

  “You can tell him that I’ll kill him, in the bargain, if he’s of a mind,” Fisher put in. “On the other hand, I’d as soon let bygones be.”

  That last expressed a sincere wish. Lije had no fond memories of Adobe Walls.

  By some accounts, it was James Blunt—a fire-eating Yankee One-Star, smarting from the rough-handling that reb, Jo Shelby had handed him not long before—who set that business off.

  Then, maybe, it was Satanta, a Kiowa chief, and no stranger to the taste of fire, himself, who was to blame.

  The two had met for parley, up at Fort Larned, Kansas. What happened next, men found it hard to agree upon. Shots were fired, that much was sure, and Satanta’s braves made off for the Panhandle, driving a big piece of Larned’s horse herd with them.

  Blunt—as mad as Hell, and who wouldn’t be?—then marched his men out in pursuit, sending a request to Carleton, in Santa Fe, for supports.

  At Carleton’s order, Carson proceeded east, to trap the redskins in a pincer-move. His force numbered three hundred and twenty-five men, and it surprised the Rope-Thrower somewhat, when better than a thousand warriors from four tribes came against him at the crumbling walls of the old abandoned hide-trader’s post on the Canadian.

  Had it not been for the howitzers Carson had shown the foresight to bring along on muleback, likely he and his men would have gone down in the books as dead heroes. Even with the ordnance, it had been a close-run thing, with blood spilt and shed by both sides.