Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

“Has what?”

  “Declared you without the grace of the Church.”

  That seized Usher cold, low in the pit of him. “He has cast me out?”

  “Your father told me—”

  Jubilee clamped his hands on Welch’s shoulders as a man would seize a brother in crisis. “Is he bedridden?”

  Welch nodded, his thin lips pursed in resignation. “There is little fight left in him now, Colonel.”

  Releasing Welch, Usher turned away, staring into the west once more. “Brigham Young waits only for me to return—so that he can excommunicate me. Is that it, friend Heber?”

  “Yes,” he sighed, as if admitting something reluctantly. “Yes, Colonel.”

  Usher was a long time in replying. Behind him the men stood quietly for the most part, taking this sudden turn of their communal affairs in stunned silence.

  When Jubilee finally did utter a sound, it came behind a long sigh. “The Prophet has become concerned for his own private power, men. Any fool could see that. Brigham Young is casting out all those who pose any threat to his godless usurpation of the Church’s power. My father knows this—that’s why Young saw him removed from the ruling Council.” He whirled on Welch. “Isn’t this what my father told you, friend Heber?”

  “Y-yes, Colonel.”

  Usher turned on the rest, some three dozen of his most faithful. “The time will come to test the Prophet’s power against my own.” Jubilee liked the effect those words had on that band of brigands he had nourished over the years. The eyes of a handful showed some recognition of that power held by Brigham Young. Usher vowed to remember those who showed such outright fear of the man who was of a time the best friend Jubilee had in this world.

  But the rest of the faces showed instead the intense glee he himself felt at the thought of pitting his power against the dynasty of Brigham Young. These he would remember as well, and reward them once he had ripped the mantle of the Church from the hands of the false Prophet.

  “Young’s hands are tired, men. We have no choice but to remove the Church from his control one day soon. Not now—but soon.”

  “Colonel,” Welch reminded. “Your father.”

  He gazed at Welch. “We will make sure my father, my family, is safe before moving against Young. You can return with word from me that he will be safe.”

  Heber shook his head. “No. Not that he is in danger. Just that—he worries for you, Colonel. Wants you to stay away, ride far around the City. He wants me to remind you of Brigham Young’s power to send gunmen.”

  “Gunmen? Heber—I was always one of those gunmen. The blood I shed in those early days for the sanctity of the Church. The lives I took in the name of Brigham Young!”

  “Your father wants you to stay far from the City.”

  Usher’s stomach leapt with bitter shock. “Ride far around? Just where should we be bound now, if not back to the seat of Zion itself?”

  Welch pointed. “South. To the far lands. Where your father suggests you stay and recruit yourself. Until he can regain his health and send word for you to return at last. In triumph.”

  “South,” Jubilee said the word almost reverently. “What in God’s name is south of the City of Zion, except … desolate waste?”

  “Your father told me your family has an old friend there. A man you will remember. A friend who will remember you.”

  “Yes?”

  “You are to stay with his people. Your father said them folks don’t get along with Brigham Young neither. Not much anymore.”

  “Who is this my father suggests we stay with until our appointed hour, friend Heber?”

  “Name of Lee.”

  Usher nodded, a grin forming that lighted his face. His dark eyes crawled across some of his faithful. “Do any of you remember brother Lee?”

  He saw a few heads nod in recognition. “Yes. Then you will remember the Mountain Meadows. And how brother Lee led an army of our faithful against a wagon train of vagabond Gentiles come out of Missouri to invade our sacred State of Zion.”

  “The righteous killed ’em all!” a voice called out.

  “Lee took up the sword and killed them all!”

  There came a sudden explosion of cheering, a roaring of blood lust remembered.

  “Men, women, and children! Yes—all!” Jubilee shouted above the melee. Then as suddenly he shushed the crowd into silence. With a long, mighty arm he dragged Welch beneath his shoulder, clutching him there fraternally.

  “Yes, my faithful. For the time being we must wait, forcing us to ride south … and there we will stay within the bosom of our own kind. At dawn we ride for the land of John Doyle Lee.”

  By the time Tall Bull, White Horse, and Pawnee Killer had led their blood-hot warriors south to the Dog Soldier camp beside the shallow flow of the Plum River, the sun was nestling into its western sleep. High-Backed Bull sensed they would not be marching down on the white men this day.

  As quickly he decided to ask a few others to join him on a black-night raid on the white man’s horses. If no others would join him, he had decided he would ride alone. No matter what, the young Shahiyena warrior was not about to wait out the night before spilling white blood.

  As the war chiefs gazed over the combined forces of Shahiyena, Lakota, and Arapaho warriors, numbering more than ten-times-ten, and ten times over again, a thousand horsemen in all, they reluctantly gave in to the failing, red-earth light of that summer day. No man in fear of his own soul would consider fighting at night. If a warrior were killed during a battle after the sun had disappeared from the sky, his spirit would forever roam this earth, unable to walk the Seamon, the sacred road of the dead. He would not spend his forever days beyond the stars in Seyan. No man dared tempt such a fate.

  That is, no man but High-Backed Bull.

  “The rest won’t ride until the sun climbs out of its bed,” Bull told the first friend he felt he could trust with the horse raid.

  Wrinkled Wolf’s eyes grew big. “You aren’t waiting?”

  “We will go as soon as it grows dark enough,” the Bull answered. “There won’t be but a fragment of moon tonight—”

  “We will get caught!”

  “I won’t!” Bull whispered harshly, slapping his chest. “There are white men wearing scalps this night, scalps that I want to carry on my belt. I want to take that hair before the others have the chance. Are you with me?”

  Wrinkled Wolf nodded reluctantly. “Yes. You said I would get the American horses we take.”

  “You, and your brother, Four Bulls Moon. Get him to come along with us too. You will share the white man’s horses. I don’t want any—only the scalps. Only to cut out tongues and eyes. To hack off hands and feet, to slash off the manhood parts and stuff them in the lying mouths. That is all I want this night. Go. Get your brother. See if he has friends who still have courage to ride against the white man in darkness.”

  As High-Backed Bull waited in a plum thicket at the edge of the Dog Soldier camp, his pony picketed nearby in readiness, tearing noisily at the summer-cured grass, the warrior listened as the great Shahiyena village assumed a festive atmosphere. With news of the white riders drawing close behind them, every man sixteen summers and older had prepared for battle, readying his medicine, caring for his weapons. Most of the firearms now possessed by these warriors had been spoils of the Fetterman Massacre two winters before: single-shot muzzle-loading Springfield muskets. Only a handful owned repeaters captured in recent raids on the white man’s roads.

  In this merry village of Dog Soldiers the Shahiyena hosted Pawnee Killer’s Brule as everyone—men and women, children as well—reveled the coming night before they would resume their march to wipe out the half-a-hundred. Word spread from fire to fire this evening that the fighting force stalking the villages had camped no more than ten miles downriver, within easy reach before the sun rose to heat the ground where the mighty horsemen would spill white blood in one swift charge come morning.

  The thunderous horde of horsemen wo
uld surround and attack the half-a-hundred, the camps cheered. No more to it than squashing a tick grown plump and lazy between your fingers, watching the blood trickle and ooze over your hand. A momentary distraction only, thought High-Backed Bull—then the warrior bands would continue as planned on their sweep of their ancient buffalo country.

  Along with Roman Nose, chiefs Tall Bull and White Horse had sworn to stop the smoke-belching medicine horse that rode on the iron tracks. The Shahiyena bands had joined Pawnee Killer’s Lakota for the greatest of all raids against the white man’s settlements as summer began to abandon this high land. With the coming of autumn on that full moon following the first frosts licking the prairie ponds with ice, there would come the planned sweep through the white man’s villages. Enough of them now to drive the white man back from the buffalo ground for a long, long time to come.

  Porcupine had told his young friend what the war chiefs had decided on for the coming time of war. No more hit-and-miss raids along the roads nor striking an outlying settlement. Instead, the Lakota and Shahiyena had decided to ride toward the east in bands of fifty to a hundred warriors at most, scattering out to do their killing, leaving no white man alive, carrying his women and children away into captivity. Leaving the white man’s lodges in smoking ruin. Driving off all his horses and slow-buffalo for their own.

  For but a short time would they raid and kill and burn, while that full moon shrank to half its size. Then all warrior bands were to turn from their destruction and point the noses of their ponies north, to journey toward the land where Red Cloud himself defended the ancient hunting grounds west of the sacred Bear Butte. No more could the soldiers bother them there, for word had it on the moccasin telegraph that the white man was abandoning that country, leaving his forts behind, from the dirt fort on the Powder River, to the one high on the Sheep River.* The red man had won!

  But High-Backed Bull had sternly refused to ride with them when the time came. He had decided his destiny could not lie in a land where the white man would not be found. Instead, with narrow, hate-slitted eyes, the young warrior had vowed to stay close to the land of the whites— there the better to kill them, one at a time … spilling their blood until he once more ran across the one white man he wanted more than all the others.

  Until at last Bull could gaze into the fear-glazed eyes of the one who had fathered him.

  *Bighorn River

  8

  Moon of Black Calves 1868

  “IT IS COLD, High-Backed Bull,” whimpered the young warrior to his friend walking beside him.

  He was shivering too with the retreat of the sun, but still his blood ran hot, his heart burning in his ears as they drew farther and farther from the Shahiyena camp. “Soon enough. Little Hawk—you and Starving Elk won’t have time to think about the cold of this night.”

  The two Cheyenne brothers walking their horses downstream from the village circles with the Bull had been on many raids against the white man’s wagon roads and his outflung settlements of dirt-scratchers. But not one of them had ever attacked a camp of white men who had so boldly stalked them. Of a sudden, the Bull held his hand up and stopped in the darkness, listening.

  “I hear it too,” said Starving Elk.

  “The white men aren’t coming to attack at night?” asked the young Little Hawk.

  He was certain they would not. Yet the white man was known for often doing the unexpected. As the quiet plodding of hooves drew closer, he held his breath, following the sound around the brow of the nearby hill, knowing the horsemen would not dare expose themselves along the rolling skyline.

  When he squinted into the starlit darkness, the Bull was certain he could not see a thing. Yet when he did not try so hard, in fact did not look directly at what he wanted most to see, then he saw them: movement at first, then the shadowy forms of horses, the smoky men atop moving slowly, yet steadily downstream.

  And just as his own mind was attempting to sort out why the enemy probing at the warrior camps would not be marching upstream, the half-dozen horsemen halted, and the buzzing of their talk carried through the still summer night’s air.

  He thought he saw the fluttering of feathers atop the head of one. Then the rustling fan of unbraided hair washing out from the shoulders of another. It all made him bold enough to call out.

  “Who is there, in the darkness?”

  “Shahiyena?”

  “Yes.”

  “Burnt Thigh, we are. We thought you to be enemies.”

  The Brule Lakota urged their ponies back along the curve of the hill toward the three who remained on foot beside their animals.

  “I thought you might be some of the white men, come to see how strong we are,” the Bull told the others as they halted before him. “My name is High-Backed Bull.”

  The leader nodded. He was young too: that much the Bull could tell of the cheeks and nose under the dim starlight.

  “Our camp, like yours, is celebrating the victory to come tomorrow when the sun arises from its bed,” the Lakota said quietly. “I am Bad Tongue.”

  “The fight will be over all too soon,” the Bull replied sourly, perhaps a little too sharply. “And there are too few scalps to go around.”

  “You wanted to take some scalps tonight?” asked the Brule.

  “We came for the white man’s big horses,” Starving Elk replied quickly.

  “I came to take a few scalps for myself before they are gone in the morning,” the Bull boasted. “Brought down like the buffalo cows that they are, hamstrung by the quick-footed wolf pack.”

  “Ponies and scalps,” said another of the Lakota. “You come with us and we’ll find enough for all of us.”

  The Bull turned to the two brothers.

  When Little Hawk had nodded to his older brother, Starving Elk said, “Yes. Let’s join the Burnt Thigh.” He gazed out at the night sky, shivering, perhaps with more than the cold.

  The Bull turned back to the Lakota leader. “One must be very brave to fight both the white man and the night spirits. It is good to have friends along, Bad Tongue.”

  “Yes,” the Brule replied. “Good to have friends along. Come, ride with us.”

  The three Shahiyena mounted their ponies, the two brothers on animals they had crept into the herd to catch without a sound—for had either of them been discovered, the punishment would be severe. The old ones and war chiefs wanted no foolish coup-hunters alerting the white men prior to the massed attack at dawn.

  They inched over hill after hill, searching for the camp, looking for the faint glow of the white man’s fires, stopping from time to time to listen for the snuffling of his horses and mules, to put ears to the ground while others held their ponies quiet, to sniff the air for the distinct smell of fresh offal dropped by those weary animals driven in the chase up the Plum River. No sight of the white man here. No sound to hint they were drawing close. No smell to betray the big animals.

  Sandy, grass-shrouded hill after bare knob they climbed until—

  “High-Backed Bull!” Bad Tongue hissed sharply in his crude, unpracticed Cheyenne. When the oldest of the Shahiyena drew alongside at the crest of the hill and knelt with the others, Bad Tongue began his hands-dancing, talking in sign.

  “Yes, I can see!” High-Backed Bull answered with his hands, his heart leaping, his blood throbbing at his temples. Quickly he glanced at Starving Elk and Little Hawk, their young heads bobbing eagerly in anticipation.

  Still far off across the starlit prairie twinkled the faintest glimmers of light: enough to see that they were a handful of fires, their dim, bloodlike glowing beneath the star-dark skies. White-man fires gone low with neglect. He knew that the white horsemen would likely be asleep.

  “They will have guards on their herd,” the Bull said softly.

  Bad Tongue agreed with a nod. “We will not have to worry about their guards.”

  “Into their horses and drive them out again before the guards know what bad wind blew through camp,” the second Brule added. />
  “Let’s go close enough to see these soldiers?” Little Hawk asked.

  Bad Tongue turned on the youngest of that group. “Yes, my little friend. We will go close enough for you to see all the white men.”

  “When we have driven off these horses, then we can ride back to wait for the others to attack at dawn?” Starving Elk added. On his face was written that look of apprehension, as plain as his earth-paint.

  The Sioux warriors stood with Bad Tongue, all five as one.

  “We Lakota did not come to see the white man, my Shahiyena friends. We came to take his horses.”

  “You may come to take the horses and mules,” sneered High-Backed Bull. “The Shahiyena came to take scalps this night. Do you ride with me, Starving Elk?”

  Starving Elk took a deep breath, looking at his younger brother. “I … I go to steal the horses. My brother, Little Hawk, can choose if he wishes to return to camp now—before the attack.”

  “No! I will ride with Starving Elk. He is my brother and I will follow him.”

  Without another word Bad Tongue led the half-dozen Sioux atop their barebacked ponies, unfurling blankets, some unrolling stiff pieces of rawhide brought with them. One even pulled a large hand drum from a coyote-skin cover he had slung over his shoulder.

  “What is this you are doing with these things, Bad Tongue?” asked High-Backed Bull as he pulled his old Walker Colt’s revolver from the belt around his waist.

  The Sioux warrior glared at his Cheyenne companion. “Make ready, Shahiyena. For the Burnt Thigh are making ready to put the white man afoot!”

  “Aiyeeee!” shouted the Bull as he nudged his pony past the Lakota horsemen, heels pounding his animal into a lumbering gallop. “The Shahiyena are not content to take horses. I have come to make the white man’s knees turn to water—to let him hear the sound of my war music!”

  In the darkest time of that night, Usher found the one he was looking for among the recumbent, formless mounds beneath the blankets, their feet to the fires in that camp on the west bank of the Muddy River. He stood a moment more above him, listening to the tone of the snoring, only to be sure. Then he knelt and shook the man awake.