“And they’re distracting us until their main column passes,” shouted McCulloch. “Break through the outer circle of warriors and go for the horse herd. Drive them toward that swamp to the northeast. Get the animals on the run and the whole outfit will fall apart.
“But Lord Almighty, look at them ride.” John Ford was lost in admiration. “That one just climbed clear under his horse’s belly and up the other side. And the horse running as fast as it can.”
“Only a Comanche can ride like that,” shouted McCulloch. And he added in a much softer voice, “They ride horses the way eagles ride the wind.”
Upstream was herding the mules when the Texans charged, screaming like mad banshees. He heard the screaming and the shots and the pounding hooves as their momentum carried them through the outer ring of warriors and headlong into the women and children and pack animals beyond. Then he was choking in the added dust, trying to hold the animals in his section of the herd. Bucking and braying, their loads slipping and clattering, the mules started to swerve, looking for an opening. Their big eyes bulged with terror, and their stumps of teeth were bared.
The young herders yelled and waved their arms to steer them back, but a few broke through, then others. A figure loomed out of the dust cloud, and for a moment Upstream thought he was seeing the great evil thunderbird with huge wings flapping. It was Bill Wallace, towering over everyone and waving a buffalo robe to spook the animals. His face was contorted in a howl and his fox skin cap with the ears standing straight up, tail flying, made him look half man, half beast. And quite mad.
Upstream’s pony panicked and was swept away with the herd. The boy pulled his legs onto his pony’s back to keep from getting them crushed as mules crashed into him, their loads sliding off. Loot went flying as the animals bucked and leaped. Upstream was wedged in so tightly he couldn’t see the ground. He could only cling to his pony, hoping there were no holes or crevices that would trip him. He had no idea what the terrain was like until the first mules started to go down far ahead of him. They had been driven into the quagmire that Ben McCulloch had pointed out.
The animals went down struggling and shrieking as those behind fell over them or tried to climb onto their backs. Women and children, their own horses caught in the stampede, screamed as they were trampled. There was no way Upstream could stop, and he steeled himself to jump. He could clearly see the hundreds of fallen animals ahead trying to rise, pawing and rearing up halfway from the heaving sea of backs. Their necks and heads lashed from side to side with the effort, then sank again.
When he felt the first falter in his pony’s stride, Upstream leaped clear. His foot slid on the curve of the next mule’s back and he put a hand on the animal’s sweaty neck to steady himself. Without thinking, he jumped from back to back, bounding across the mass. He dodged flailing legs and hoofs and one human arm, the hand grasping desperately at the air. Using both hands to haul himself forward, he clambered over the bulky packs and rolling bodies, as though climbing the steep side of a boulder-strewn mountain shifting in an earthquake.
He moved reflexively, his legs and feet finding footing and balancing with no conscious thought. His whole being, his years of play and training, orchestrated his muscles and sinews, eyes and nerves. He didn’t hear the snap and crunch of bones, the clatter of metal, the cries or the shots around him. He saw only the next place where his feet would land. He heard only his own blood pounding in his temples, felt only the slide of skin and muscle and hair under his feet and hands.
As he cleared the last fallen animal, he leaped for solid ground, and hit it running. His goal was a thicket of plum, but he didn’t make it. He felt a pair of wiry hands grip him, the bony fingers digging into his armpits, as he was swung onto a pony’s back. He turned to struggle and saw Cruelest One’s face. It was grim and hideously painted, but comforting and beautiful to Upstream.
Panting, the boy lay against the pony’s neck and gripped with his knees to keep from falling off. As though his body had delayed the relay of messages from his eyes, horrors from his flight across the floundering mules flashed through his mind. He saw people pinned in the crush, their faces looking up at him in agony as he bounded over them. The adrenaline washed out of him, and he went limp and shaking.
Cruelest One plunged into the dense growth of bushes and trees bordering Big Prairie, beating his pony viciously with his quirt to force him through the thorny tangle. They cleared the thicket and slid down the steep side of an overgrown ravine, the sounds of the battle dimming behind them. Cruelest One had no family to protect, and he didn’t waste time fighting. They pushed on for a mile or two, always using the ravine bottoms and stopping still from time to time while white men passed on the ridges overhead. Finally Cruelest One stopped and listened. Then he hooted, and was answered by another call in the distance. He spoke for the first time.
“Skinny And Ugly.” They headed in the direction of the sound and found Skinny And Ugly and Hunting A Wife and their captive. Mrs. Watts was gagged as well as tied, and she was still naked except for her corset. Cruelest One was absolutely calm, which was when he was at his deadliest. He spoke in an almost conversational tone.
“Why do you still carry that piece of baggage with you?”
Skinny And Ugly squirmed and tried to look defiant. “She’s beautiful, worth many horses. I’m going to keep her for a slave.”
“She’ll be burned to a cinder by the sun before you get her home.” Already Mrs. Watts was a deep pink color and her skin was peeling in huge flakes. Her terrified blue eyes stared at them over the tight leather strip in her mouth.
“I’ll cover her.” Skinny And Ugly wavered. He was as close to being a follower as one of the People ever came, and a leader had arrived.
“We have a brave here who needs a horse,” Cruelest One said. And Upstream sat a little straighter in front of him.
“She’s mine.”
“Then you have the right to dispose of her any way you want. Do you want to take her here before you do it? We’ll wait five minutes.” It was an enormous concession on Cruelest One’s part.
Skinny And Ugly was angry and sheepish all at once.
“I can’t get her unwrapped. I tried yesterday during the rest stops, but we haven’t stopped long enough to really work on it.”
“Then she’s of no use to us, and we haven’t time to waste. We need that horse.” Cruelest One leaned down and untied the ropes holding her on the pony’s back. With his moccasined foot he shoved her off onto the ground. The other two men dismounted and helped him tie her to a nearby tree. Upstream watched with amusement as Mrs. Watts squirmed and struggled, tears streaming down her face and soaking into the leather gag. The men paced off seventy-five feet and nocked an arrow each.
“We’ll see who can hit the heart.” Cruelest One fired first, and his aim was perfect. The other two arrows split his.
“That was easy,” called Upstream. “You should’ve stood farther back.”
The woman’s chin had fallen onto her chest, and she hung lifelessly.
“Upstream, get on that horse. Hurry.” There was the sound of hoofbeats in the distance, and the three men ran to their ponies. They all raced off, leaving Mrs. Watts hanging near the trail.
She had revived and was almost hysterical when Noah Smithwick and his men found her. The arrow was deeply embedded in the corset, but it had wounded her only slightly, stopped by the tough whalebone. She was lucky. As the Comanche split up and fled, they unburdened themselves of the spoils that had slowed them down. The corpses of their captives, black and white, women and children, were found littering the trails.
The men of Smithwick’s patrol stopped talking. Their faces were hard as they rode, or stopped to dig another grave. The last one had been tiny, for a baby whose head had been smashed against a tree trunk. This had become a hunt for dangerous prey.
“Hold up. I gotta take a piss.” Ezekial Smith had run out of powder and was carrying a captured lance. Its slender shaft was dwarfed in his huge hand
as he walked off the cleared trail and into the bushes that grew over his head.
“What do you need privacy for, Zeke? Do it where you stand.” The men were tired and irritable and nervous. But they were grateful for even the brief rest. They heard a scuffle and a rustling, and everyone took aim at the spot where Smith had disappeared.
“Hey, boys, look what I found.” Smith was a hulking man. His belly hung over the waist of his pantaloons, and his chest strained the filthy cords that served as suspenders. But he grunted with the effort as he pulled the body of the Comanche woman behind him, his free hand twined in her braids as though hauling on a rope.
Deer lay panting where he dropped her, her eyes sullen behind the pain. Her knee had been blasted and her arm was broken, the bone jutting through purple skin.
Before anyone could stop him, Smith kicked her hard in the ribs with his iron-patched boots, breaking a few more bones. Then he drove the lance between her eyes, pinning her to the ground like an insect specimen. She twitched and spasmed, then lay still, her eyes open and staring at the sky. Noah spurred his horse and grabbed Smith’s knife arm as he was about to take her hair. The two men glared at each other, and Noah began to worry about whether his men would support him. Finally Smith backed off. They could hear him muttering as he rode along behind.
Ezekial Smith wasn’t bright, and he wasn’t easy to get along with, but Noah knew that in this case, many of the men agreed with him. She was only an Injun, after all. And a scalp was a souvenir to brag about to the folks back home.
“McCulloch wants a live Comanche. He wants to ask him some questions. You boys remember that.” And Smithwick tried to ignore the looks that passed among his men.
As night fell, most of the men walked their weary horses toward their isolated homesteads, some close by, some a day or two away. They melted silently into the trees and copses of the tangled river bottoms. Many of them had been trailing the Comanche army almost a week, and they were ready to quit. Only a few kept doggedly in pursuit, and most of those were Rangers.
Ben McCulloch watched the Texas volunteers lead their extra animals loaded with the abandoned Linnville loot. There was no use trying to recover it, and no one even suggested it. On the rolling lawn of Big Prairie, the Tonkawa were celebrating the victory around roaring fires. McCulloch had ridden back to talk to them. There was still something he had to know. He had a sullen Comanche woman with him, a prisoner who could give him the information he needed. He searched out Chief Placido as he was enjoying a late dinner.
“Chief, ask this woman who was in charge of the Comanche war party.”
Placido relayed the question. “Potsana Quoip.”
“What does that mean?”
“Potsana means buffalo.”
“And Quoip?”
Placido’s hands spoke eloquently. The woman made an obscene gesture in the vicinity of her groin, as though a man were urinating.
“She say him name Buffalo Pizzle.”
“Buffalo Penis?”
“Maybe so. I know Potsana Quoip. Brave man.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Woman doesn’t know. Maybe dead. Maybe alive.” Placido was obviously eager to get back to his meal, and McCulloch rode off, wondering what to do with his prisoner. Around him the bodies of the dead Comanche were strangely truncated, their hands and feet missing. The Tonkawa had cut them off and packed them to take to their women and children for feasting. Then they had borrowed a huge washtub, and were boiling up a stew of sections of their enemies’ thighs. They were in high spirits because they had helped defeat the Comanche and they had been rewarded with horses. Silhouetted against the fires’ light, they danced and sang among the corpses, mutilating them even more.
After leaving his prisoner with a man who said he needed a housekeeper, McCulloch sat on his exhausted horse, looking over the scene. Tomorrow he would gather his men and track the Comanche. But now he would get a full night’s sleep for the first time in a week.
“John.” McCulloch tried not to smile at Ford. “You can’t write the word ‘penis’ in an official report to the Texas Secretary of War.”
“But Ben, you said to write it up as it happened. And that’s his name. Buffalo Penis. You told me so yourself.”
“Nevertheless, President Lamar will throw a shoe. The Texas legislature may not have money to pay us, but they still think they’re in charge.”
“How about Buffalo Balls, or Donkey Dick? Or Bison Pisser?” Bill Wallace looked up from his poker game.
“Wallace, that’s enough.” But Wallace was full of suggestions.
“I know, Ben. Call him Comanche Cock or Buffalo Humps.”
McCulloch ducked his head and pretended to study John Ford’s report on the splintered ammunition crate that served him as a desk. Four small rocks anchored the comers of the paper to keep it from blowing away.
“Buffalo Hump will do,” he finally said, when he could do it without laughing.
Wallace left his poker hand face down on the hide spread out as a table. He walked over to the crate and pulled the corncob plug from the gourd he always carried.
“I christen thee Buffalo Hump. May your tribe decrease.” And with a flourish, he poured a drop of whiskey onto the report.
“Wallace, what are you doing? We’ll have to send to Austin for more paper.”
“They have plenty of paper in Austin,” said Ford. “The only thing they have more of than paper is lawyers. What is it about government that attracts lawyers?”
“Well, he’d have had to write it over anyway.” Wallace sat back down with a grunt and surveyed his neglected cards.
“It’s a waste of good whiskey, Wall-eye. Hand it over.”
“Good whiskey!” It was Ford’s turn to snort. “Wallace wouldn’t know good whiskey from privy squeezings.”
Ben McCulloch raised the gourd. “Here’s to Buffalo Hump.” They all laughed as they passed it around.
CHAPTER 33
Upstream slept as he rode, stretched on his belly along his pony’s back. His arms dangled at the horse’s neck, and his cheek lay against it. His small, full mouth was partly open. His eyelid twitched and his lip jumped from time to time, as though startled, even in his sleep. Cruelest One rode ahead of him, leading the boy’s horse. The tiny warrior was not much taller than Upstream. But his body was so lean and muscled, it was as though all excess had been whittled off, leaving only the tough heartwood of him. In another hour he would waken Upstream and sleep while his own pony was led. Skinny And Ugly had the same arrangement with Hunting A Wife.
For five days the party had eaten only what little jerky Skinny And Ugly happened to have in a pouch tied to his surcingle when the Texans attacked. The meat was gone now, and their stomachs cramped with hunger. Cruelest One was chewing on a piece of leather in an attempt to fool his muttering insides. He wouldn’t stop long enough to hunt. They would make the rest of the journey on water, and not enough of that. They rested for an hour three or four times a day, and rode all night. This was the usual method of traveling when they were pursued. They were used to it, but it was hard on Upstream.
Far behind them smoke rose beyond the line of flat-topped ridges. It came from the fires they had set to cover their tracks. A day’s ride from Plum Creek they had stopped for a night’s rest, and had almost been caught by a Ranger patrol. They hadn’t laid down to sleep since.
That morning they had ridden through steep hills carpeted with a dark green nap of scrub oak. Now they were at the Clear Fork of the Brazos, on a grass-covered hill overlooking the river as it flowed lazily through deep-cut banks. Cruelest One was headed for one of Pahayuca’s regular campsites. There would be signs left there for those who knew how to read them.
The campsite had been occupied recently, and it was easy to find. The ground around it had been thoroughly trampled, although new shoots were already pushing up to cover it again. Cruelest One and Hunting A Wife squatted at a pile of buffalo bones thrown into a heap. They looked hap
hazard, but Cruelest One was studying the scratches on them carefully.
“Two days north. They must be at Pease River.”
“This is all Tenawa country. We don’t belong here.” Hunting A Wife had been brooding the entire journey.
“We have no choice. The white man is crowding us together like cattle in one of his corrals. Let’s go.” Cruelest One didn’t waste any more time on reflection than he did on compassion. He had picked Upstream up reflexively, acting on his training for tribal survival. If he had known how grateful the boy was, he would have dismissed the whole thing with a snarl. He ignored Upstream as they rode the swells of the grassy hills to the north.
In small groups the survivors of the Plum Creek fight wandered into the Penateka camps strung along the upper Colorado and Brazos Rivers. They had lost at least one fourth of the army that had ridden out so proudly. They had buried their dead in crevices along the trails. Most of those who were killed in battle had to be left at Plum Creek for the wild hogs to eat. Many of the men were without horses and had run behind their comrades, holding onto their ponies’ tails to keep them going.
The men separated when they entered camp, dropping in silently, one by one. They painted their faces black and shaved their horses’ tails to show their sorrow and shame. The sounds of mourning went on for weeks. Buffalo Piss left on a journey to Medicine Mounds to bargain with his spirits and try to find out what he had done wrong. Upstream arrived safely and ate enough to carry him through the winter. Then he slept through two sundowns like a brown little chipmunk hibernating.
He began following Cruelest One around camp, ignoring the threats and scowls and finally the clods of dirt thrown at him in exasperation. He would squat nearby like a devoted dog while the warrior smoked or talked to the other men. And he would rush forward to bring a coal for the pipe or ask if there were any messages Cruelest One wanted delivered. At last, in disgust, Cruelest One packed his few belongings onto his animals and left on one of his meandering journeys. Upstream moped around for a few days, and then consoled himself by recounting his adventures to his friends. He could usually be found with a group of them, acting out the sacking of Linnville and the disaster at Plum Creek.
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 39