Quanah nodded. Across the council fire he saw Esa Tai, Coyote Dung, stand to speak. And he curbed his impatience. He had heard what Coyote Dung had to say many times. Coyote Dung was young, but already he was a powerful medicine man. He had witnesses who swore they saw bullets bounce off him and who saw him belch wagonloads of cartridges. Others had watched him ascend to the sky and confer with the Great Spirit. He probably bored the Great Spirit too, thought Quanah.
Coyote Dung was a man with a vendetta against the whites who had murdered his uncle. And he had a need for recognition that was unusual even for one of the People. But he was useful. Warriors were flocking to join the war party. Quanah and Coyote Dung had smoked with the leaders of the various bands and tribes who refused to live permanently on the reservations.
They were with Sun Name’s Yamparika now. They discussed possible targets for the raid, and planned where and when to meet. When Quanah received the pipe, he wrapped his robe around him and spoke.
“I have heard the words of Sun Name, and they have found a place in my heart. As we rode here, we passed among dead buffalo lying as far as the eye could see. Where once herds moved and grazed and followed the seasons, there is now only death. The crows and the vultures are so gorged they cannot fly.
“The Medicine Lodge treaty of seven years ago promised our people that the white men would not hunt buffalo south of the Arkansas River. But now their guns are heard along the Canadian. They break the law and the soldiers don’t stop them. They have built houses near the crumbling walls of the trader Hook Nose’s old store. From there they send east wagons piled with robes. They are far from the forts. The patrols do not go there often. I say we attack them and stop their slaughter of the buffalo.”
As the men discussed Quanah’s plan, he elaborated on it in his head. By the time the council was over he had a clear vision of the form his hatred and vengeance would take. Through a steady, misty rain he walked to Sun Name’s guest lodge, where he was staying. A figure huddled outside the door, shivering under a blanket. The mist had covered the blanket with tiny drops that sparkled in the firelight coming from inside. Perhaps it was one of the women who had prepared the lodge for him. But why was she waiting outside? Then the figure coughed, and Quanah realized it wasn’t a woman.
“Sore-Backed Horse,” he whispered harshly, startled to see the old man. “Why are you here? The young men are talking of killing you and the Penateka who have sided with the white men.”
Sore-Backed Horse coughed again, unable to stop. He choked on the blood caught in his throat. With a hemorrhaging lung, he had ridden for days through the cold rain of spring to find Quanah.
“Come inside,” said Quanah, taking him gently by the arm. He dropped the flap shut after them, closing them from view. He replaced the soaked blanket with a warm, dry robe. Sore-Backed Horse’s large, sad eyes were bright with fever. His gray-streaked hair was cut short in mourning like a woman’s. The deep lines that went from his nostrils to the corners of his drooping mouth were carved by sorrow. Quanah saw the hunger on the old man’s gaunt face, and offered him some of the stew left by Sun Name’s first wife. Then he asked again, “Why are you here, Uncle?”
“To ask you to come to the agency so there will be no more bloodshed.”
“And do you live well on the reservation?”
“No. You know we don’t. The rations don’t arrive on time or they’re stolen. There’s dust in the flour and maggots in the meat. I’m too old to hunt, and my family is dead. I must beg my food from the officers at Fort Sill.”
“And you want us to live like that? Give up our old ways for that?”
“Quanah, they’ll eventually kill you all if you don’t surrender and come in.”
“And be counted.”
“Yes, and be counted.”
That was as bad as anything else the white eyes did. Everyone knew it was bad luck to count the People.
“I loved your father as a brother and you as a son. I do not want to see you hunted and brought in in chains. They hang renegades. Strangle them so their souls are doomed.” Sore-Backed Horse didn’t mention that the whites had given him the terrible responsibility of choosing whom among the raiders would be executed. “I do not want to go looking for your bones, bleaching somewhere among those of the dead buffalo.”
“Uncle, I know that to fight the white men is to be doomed as a people. But they give us no choice. I would rather starve here as a free man than to be forever a prisoner.”
“And your wives and children? What of their future?”
“We are fighting for their future.”
“Then I wish you well. If one of us kills a white man’s ox to feed his starving family, the white men come to punish us, they make war over it. But they continue to kill the buffalo that we need for food. They don’t eat what they kill, and they go unpunished. I am an old man. My hope has been all used up, wasted. But I must have some left, enough to pray that you are successful.”
Quanah began packing his supplies of pemmican and jerky into saddle bags. He added piles of blankets.
“Here,” he said. “Take these. They will last you a while anyway. I’ll ride with you until dawn. It would not be safe for you to be here when the sun rises.”
Sore-Backed Horse hesitated.
“Take them, Uncle,” said Quanah gently. “You would have done the same for my father or myself.”
Unable to speak, Sore-Backed Horse took the food and blankets and went with Quanah out into the night.
Billy Dixon was staggering with exhaustion when he entered Jim Hanrahan’s saloon at the tiny settlement of Adobe Walls. Like the other three buildings, the place was made of double rows of posts set upright in the ground and then filled in with packed dirt. Even at that hour of the morning there were men drinking at the splintery bar made mostly of packing crates.
“I need a drink, Jim.”
“You look it, Dixon.”
“Dudley and Williams are dead. God, are they dead.”
“What happened?” William Barclay Masterson was a fastidious dresser, a dapper young man. He looked out of place among the grimy faces in the saloon.
“Injuns. They propped their heads up.” Billy Dixon downed the glass of whiskey in a long swallow and coughed.
“What do you mean?” asked Hanrahan, leaning over the counter.
“The Comanches propped Dudley and Williams’ heads up so they could see what was happening to them.”
“I don’t think I want to hear this,” someone mumbled.
“The Injuns cut off their tongues and ears and stuffed their balls in their mouths. Williams had a stake driven through his belly. They were both sliced into neat ribbons.” With his knife Dixon demonstrated the pattern of the cuts in the air. Then he tapped his glass on the bar for a refill.
“Where were their bites?” asked Hanrahan as he poured. Most of the men carried homemade fifty-caliber cartridges emptied of powder and filled with cyanide. “Bites,” they called them. A man would no more be without one than without his extra keg of water. When Indians attacked and there was no escape or defense, a hunter could always bite the bullet.
“I don’t know where their bites were. Jesus! Another drink, huh, Jim?” Dixon turned to the men around him. “Anybody got a gun for sale? I lost mine in the river. The Indians were after me. Lost a wagonload of hides and all my supplies too.”
“There must be something to all the rumors about Indians,” said Masterson. “Think I’ll see to my own weapons.”
“Hey, Bat, how about selling me that extra round-barreled forty-four of yours.” Dixon and Masterson were the two youngest men in the camp, and more than a cut above the average. They didn’t associate much with the others, choosing each other’s company instead.
The men at the camp spent an uneasy week. Buffalo hunters and their crews of skinners drifted in to take shelter. And they brought word of more killings. Antelope Jack and Blue Billy had been found in pieces.
On Saturday, June 27, 18
74, twenty-six men had thrown their bedrolls down in the two stores and the saloon. The only woman in camp was Mrs. Olds, who helped her husband run the restaurant in one of the stores. The horses were locked in a corral made of heavy, sharpened pickets.
On a ridge overlooking Adobe Walls, Quanah and his pony were poised against the predawn sky. The dark gray clouds overhead looked like rippled slate formed on an ancient streambed, but they were beginning to break apart. The sky would be clear soon.
If his mother could have seen her son and his pony, she would have been startled. Painted for war, they looked like Wanderer and Night. Naduah would have had to come much closer to notice that Quanah’s face was fuller than his father’s. His eyes were deep gray rather than black. And the lids drooped over them, giving him a sleepy, sensual look that was accented by his broad cheekbones and wide, full mouth. From the front he looked like a warrior of the People. But in profile his nose sloped like his mother’s rather than arching like his father’s.
His upper body was bare. Beaver oil glistened on the muscles of his back and shoulders and chest. The elaborate tassels on the ends of his red breechclout reached below his knees when he stood. The wide edges of his leggings and the tops of his moccasins were crusted with intricate beading. Two tiny stuffed birds dangled from his pierced ears. His thick braids were wrapped in silky otter fur. An eagle feather hung from his scalplock.
Slowly, forms became visible behind him. There were men from the Quohadi, the Yamparika, and the Kotsoteka as well as Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kiowa. The warriors from each band and tribe were led by their own chiefs. Coyote Dung rode off to one side. He was naked except for his rifle and lance. He had covered himself and his horse with ochre paint, and he wore sage in his hair. He said he needed no other covering. His medicine would protect him.
Quanah almost believed him. Coyote Dung had predicted that there would be fire in the sky as a sign that the Great Spirit would help them. And the fire had appeared, a glowing ball with a long streamer, like smoke, that moved imperceptibly across the black sky. It hung there still, advancing a little each night. Coggia’s comet was unusually brilliant. The nebulous, hazy region around its nucleus had sharply defined layers visible to the naked eye. It was an awesome sight.
This raid couldn’t fail. Even if Coyote Dung’s medicine wasn’t as powerful as he and his followers claimed, there were seven hundred picked warriors, the finest of four tribes. And Quanah had planned the raid well. There were only twenty-five to fifty men in the camp. Asleep.
He felt excitement stir deep inside him, below his stomach. Soon they would ride screaming through the flowers of the hillside and kill the hunters in their beds. They would teach the white eyes a lesson and drive them from the plains. None would dare venture back after this defeat. The black bugler, a deserter from the cavalry, held his horn ready to sound the charge.
The day was getting lighter. Quanah could now clearly see the four square, solid buildings nestled at the bottom of the high valley. They looked tiny there. Yet the Canadian River was far below even that, its sinuous course outlined in willows, cottonwoods, chinaberries, and hackberries below the bluff that defined the valley. Beyond the river was a magnificent view of layers of dark blue hills sweeping to a pale, blue-gray horizon. Birds began to sing in the tall grass. It would be a perfect day to fight.
From his position Quanah didn’t see the spots of light shining from the small windows of Hanrahan’s saloon. Nor could he see that the men inside weren’t asleep. The crack of a ridge pole, strained to the breaking point under the tons of dry dirt that roofed the saloon, had awakened the men inside. For two hours they had labored to replace it. While the warriors prepared to attack, the white men were lined up at the bar having a drink at Hanrahan’s expense.
Billy Dixon and Bat Masterson walked out into the clear, crisp morning air. They were relieving themselves, trying to spell their names in the dust, when Billy detected a slight movement at the top of the hill. Masterson saw him tense.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
The two of them were backing toward the saloon, searching the crests of the hills around them, when the bugle sounded. As if a sorcerer had waved his wand, the ridges sprouted Indians. Each man was painted in wild patterns of ochre, red, and black, or white and yellow. The ponies were also decorated with streamers and feathers and paint. The warriors flowed down the flower-covered hillside, their war cries blending into one loud yodeling call that filled the valley. They looked as though they were pouring out of the rising sun itself. And they were bathed in its golden light.
Dixon and Masterson sprinted for the saloon door. They pounded on it as the bullets began kicking dust over their shoes. The door opened a crack, and they tumbled inside. Billy braced the barrel of his Sharps forty-four on a window ledge and began methodically picking off the riders before they even came close enough to use their own weapons. Other hunters, not dressed yet, were loading their rifles from belts of ammunition slung over their scratchy long wool underwear.
“Whooee!” Dixon couldn’t contain his exuberance. He turned to grin at his friend. “Isn’t this something? There must be a thousand of them. I’m glad I got to see it. Wish I had my Big Fifty, though.”
“Dixon, you’re a crazed lunatic.” Masterson crouched against the wooden wall. He fed cartridges into his Remington with trembling fingers.
In a fury Quanah assaulted the door of the saloon, backing his pony into it in an attempt to batter it down. As the white men knocked mud from the chinks in the logs and began shooting through the openings, the crossfire became murderous. Quanah retreated to a safer distance and joined the riders circling the buildings. He hung from the far side of his pony and fired from under the horse’s neck. But a truly safe distance was far beyond the range of Quanah’s rifle.
The booming of the buffalo guns began drowning out the popping of the attackers’ smaller weapons. The hunters themselves could recognize the sound of each one’s Big Fifty by the way its owner chose to load it. The fourteen-pound Sharps could land a heavy, homemade cartridge, overloaded with one hundred and ten grains of powder, farther and more accurately than any gun made. And while most of the men in the camp knew little besides drinking and gambling, swearing and whoring, and perhaps horse stealing, they did know how to shoot.
As the hours went by and the day heated up, it became obvious that Coyote Dung’s holy war wasn’t going well. Many men had fallen, and their bodies had to be rescued for later burial. Quanah’s pony was shot from under him, and as he took cover behind a rotting buffalo carcass, he was hit in the back by a ricocheting bullet. It wasn’t a serious wound, but it paralyzed his shoulder and arm for hours. And it seemed to mean that one of his own men had tried to kill him.
The war party withdrew to a ridge high above the camp to find out who had fired on him. They didn’t worry about the hunters escaping. There wasn’t an animal left alive in the corral. When every man swore he hadn’t fired the shot, the leaders were faced with the conclusion that the white men could fire unseen from behind.
A low muttering began against Coyote Dung, who still sat aloof on his pony. Then, as though the gods were playing with them, a stray bullet hit Coyote Dung’s horse and dropped him where he stood. After that, no one had the nerve to attack the camp directly. For the rest of that day and into the next they laid siege to it from the cover of wagons and piles of hides, bushes and the corral fence.
Finally, disillusioned warriors began drifting away, defeated by the hunters’ marksmanship and the range of their guns. Coyote Dung had found another horse and stood at bay on the ridge. He glared at the angry leaders who surrounded him. Quanah watched stonily as one of them, brandishing his quirt, advanced on the medicine man.
“It’s not my fault the attack failed,” shouted Coyote Dung. “A Cheyenne killed a skunk before the fight. He destroyed my medicine.” He backed his horse away from the threatening men.
That may not be the only skunk
who dies. Quanah turned his pony. He would return to the Staked Plains. There was no more he could do here.
In the buildings below them, the hunters began to relax. The acrid stench of gunpowder was clearing and someone had brought water from the well. The saloon still stunk of unwashed bodies, made even more pungent by fear, but the men were used to that.
“Bat, hand me your Sharps,” said Dixon.
“What are you going to do? They’ve withdrawn.”
“I can see some of them on that ridge over yonder.”
“You’re loco, Dixon. You can’t hit them. They’re a mile away.”
“You wanna bet?”
“Hell, yes.” Masterson held out his natty black bowler, and men dropped money into it.
Dixon squinted into his sight and took careful aim.
Quanah saw the tiny puff of smoke from the saloon window and saw the man with the quirt fall before hearing the rifle’s faint boom. That ended the fight. Warriors scattered, totally defeated by a gun that could hit a man at a distance of a mile.
Night was falling. It was bitter cold. The wind moaned around the columns and misshapen lumps of rock in the narrow corridor off Palo Duro canyon. Quanah pulled his buffalo robe more tightly around him and hunkered as close to the shelter of the cliff face as he could. He sat alone on the ledge, halfway up the high canyon wall. One hundred lodges huddled below him along the frozen river.
The dark poles splaying out from the blackened hides around the smoke holes were all that set the tents apart from the snow that covered everything. The pony herd foraged for bark among the bare cotton woods in the grove. The horses’ mouths were cut and bleeding from gnawing on the frozen wood. The ground there was gray with the litter of stripped twigs, but Quanah was too far away to see the spots of blood that dripped from the animals’ muzzles.
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 74