Joe said, “Gabe was most afraid of his claim to the fort.”
“Fort Bridger?”
Milner had nodded, balling a fist up and laying it alongside his own neck. “He weren’t the same man, Shad. Hardly could twist his head without causing hisself some pain from that knot of goiter eating away on his neck.”
“What’s this about the fort? Why, I helped him raise one of them buildings and a corral there myself. Ain’t his claim with the army settled yet?”
“That ten-year lease he said he give the army is up now, but he ain’t seen a dollar cross his hand in payment.”
“Government ain’t paid him for using that fort—all ten year worth?”
“No—and now even Sheridan hisself told Bridger the army’s went and declared his land what they call a military reservation.”
That bit of news had caused a cold knot to grow in Sweete’s belly. “So they took it all from him—same as the army’s gonna take anything else it wants.” He waved a hand in a wide, western arc. “Take everything it wants from the Injuns, Joe.”
“Blessed God, Shad. Should’ve seen how that old man longed for the olden days.”
So it hurt now to think of Jim Bridger, gone blind, gone sad and melancholy tucked away there on his daughter’s farm back to Missouri, tricked out of the deed to his fort by the army he said could use it. A sad, sad man who had made many fortunes over in his lifetime, forced now to spend his last days penniless, what with the money the government had stole from him.
Then Shad found out about Carson.
Already a year dead. Sweete didn’t get word of it off the army grapevine until Kit was long gone. Buried a year last May.
Why, it seemed like only yesterday that Carson himself had lost his beloved Josefa, his Mexican wife.
Could it be true? So much time gone?
From the tales around Fort Lyon, Kit’s last year was one that saw the old trapper’s own ailments increase in number, especially the severity of the pains in his neck and chest.
“I come to be troubled with this great affliction because of that footrace I had with the Blackfoot, you know,” Carson had explained to Shad many a winter ago—five, maybe six. “Staying alive back then just may be what’s gonna kill me now.”
“Always better to wear your hair and die a old man, Kit,” Shad told him.
Carson had said he wasn’t so sure.
An old man.
Damn, but Carson was no older than Shad himself was. And that realization shook Sweete to his roots now as he gazed down into the wide river valley covered with rolling swales of belly-high grass, the watercourse clearly marked by the leafy cottonwood and scrub plum brush.
Losing his Josefa likely had just about meant the end of Carson’s string, Shad thought, staring west into the brilliant golden rays of crimson light as the sun sank out there on Colorado Territory where a year ago that old friend had taken his last breath.
“Damned shame too, Little Kit,” he spoke to the hot summer breeze, squinting his eyes to make a vision of the short trapper swim before him in the shimmering waves of heat rising from the plains. “Damned shame any of us grow old afore our time.”
More than anything Shad felt a sense of being lost, more that than he felt any sense of loss upon learning that Kit had gone ahead and crossed the great divide that one last time. Seemed he felt lost a little more every year, feeling as if he were being left with fewer and fewer of the fragments of his memories of those seasons spent with the old ones. What were Meek and Doc Newell and some of the rest doing out to Oregon now? How about Scratch—was he still lodged up with that Crow gal and their young’uns, high up on the Yellowstone? There were a few who hung on by their fingernails, refusing to give in to the women and the canting preachers and the whining barristers come to curse this great, open, free land.
But now even Jim Bridger had give up and gone east to die. And Christopher Carson more than a year buried in Taos.
Kit was no older than Shad.
Fact was, the army was hiring younger and younger scouts all the time. All Shad had to do was look around him every morning when the scouts rode out ahead of the column, every evening when they came in to report on the day’s foray. This was a young man’s business—this making war on the Indians of the high plains.
For the better part of the last year Carr’s Fifth Cavalry had employed the services of two youngsters who knew their business—both William F. Cody and James Butler Hickok. At first a sullen Shad Sweete had no choice but to figure the army was intent on driving him out—what with the way it was bringing in all these young, snot-nosed kids.
Still, as time went on, two of those youngsters had proved themselves up to muster during Sheridan’s grueling winter campaign. Cody and Hickok would do to ride the river with. Sweete figured he could trust them both to cover his backside in any tough scrape of it.
Shad gazed off to the right, finding the distant rider on the big buckskin horse he had traded from one of the Indian trackers. Bill Cody, chief of scouts for Major Carr and the Fifth. Between them rode a half-dozen trackers from Frank North’s Pawnee battalion. Behind those Pawnee came Can’s cavalry and the rumbling wagons of their supply train. Cody was signaling to Sweete, waving his big slouch hat at the end of his arm, reining his horse around and heading back to the head of the column. Likely they’d make camp down on the good grass there in the valley beside the creek. The Driftwood.
More than two weeks ago they had marched out of Fort McPherson on the Platte in Nebraska. Carr’s orders were to clear the country south as they searched for the bands of marauding Cheyenne wreaking havoc among the settlements of Kansas. It was easy to see even from this distance that Cody rode right past the Pawnee without giving sign of how-do or saying a thing one. Bill didn’t care a lick for them—cared even less for Frank and Luther North. Shad had to agree with Cody’s feeling for those North brothers earning their handsome reputation at the expense of the Pawnee. Ever since the Connor expedition back to sixty-five, Shad wasn’t shy in admitting that those bald-headed Pawnee trackers worked hard at their job—this hunting for their old tribal enemies.
He talked with them in sign when he had to, and they gave the old mountain man their grudging respect. With their hands they called him “rawhide man,” because, they explained, he was like an old piece of leather chewed on and spat out, and still none the worse for wear after all his years.
With a smile Shad had accepted the handle hung on him by the trackers, and with respect for their abilities his hand had gone up to crook a finger at his brow: plains sign talk for Pawnee—the Wolf People.
For those past two weeks the Pawnee were always the first to rise in the morning and the first to go to saddle. Under Luther North, the younger of the brothers, the Pawnee kept ahead of the Fifth Cavalry a distance of two to three miles throughout the day, as well as dispatching outriders to cover a wide piece of country on both flanks. Down from the Platte River, Carr had driven them. They saw no sign of hostiles as they pushed across Medicine Lake, then Red Willow and Stinking Water creeks, Black Wood and Frenchman’s Fork, until the Fifth Cavalry struck the Republican River.
It was there on the fifteenth they had been hit by a small raiding party for the first time one evening. The seven Cheyenne warriors had disappeared over the nearby hills with more than half of the wagon master’s mules, leaving behind one of the civilian herders on the slope of a hill, scalped and stripped. A second herder wore three arrows in his back for all his trouble, and clung to life tenaciously across the next few days.
Immediately pursued by the Pawnee, the Cheyenne quickly abandoned their mules, hopeful of making good their escape into the rolling hill country south of the Republican. In the end Captain Lute North’s trackers dropped two of the horse thieves from their ponies, while five escaped. But Carr was fuming when North got back with his Pawnee. Angry at the trackers for charging out like an undisciplined mob without any orders, the major discharged Luther North from command until his older
brother rejoined the column two days later when the entire outfit reached the Solomon River.
Where the Pawnee promptly found some recent sign of the hostile village.
After a fruitless search for the Cheyenne up and down the Solomon, Carr moved his column northwest to the Prairie Dog. From time to time across the next week, the trackers had come across sign of a small war party here and there. But, no travois trails scouring the earth.
Angrily growing desperate to find the enemy, Carr-pressed on to the northwest, crossing the Little Beaver, then Beaver Creek itself, and back to the Driftwood. As summer matured, the sun hung higher, it seemed—hotter too. June grew old as they plodded across each small drainage, creek, and stream, climbing north by west, each new day stretching longer and longer still like a rawhide whang.
How Shad hungered for some of Toote’s cooking. All too quick the army fare had grown tasteless: salt pork and hard-bread, beans and biscuits. Even the coffee tasted as if it had been boiled in the wagon master’s axle grease and stirred with one of the engineer’s rusty nails. The country hereabout lay alkaline, cursed with natural salt licks.
Hardly buffalo country.
Yet just yesterday the Pawnee had run across a small herd of buffalo and succeeded in dropping more than thirty in a surround. Then Cody did just what had earned him a reputation in supplying the army and the railroad with meat: on his new buckskin pony the young scout dashed off on a half-mile run, dropping thirty-six bulls and cows all by his lonesome. From that moment on, Cody was big medicine with North’s trackers.
“Why you figure we haven’t found any travois sign yet, Shad?” asked the young scout as he settled down beside the older plainsman at their evening fire.
Sweete stared into his cup of coffee and finished chewing the mouthful of buffalo loin contemplatively. “Could be there ain’t no villages on the move. Only war parties.”
“What’s the chance of that?” Cody asked, sweeping some of his long blond hair back from his bare cheek. “Pretty damned slim, you ask me.”
He nodded. “Damn slim, Bill. Or, you told me I had to put money on it—I’d say they got their village hid away someplace, far enough away from where they been raiding that we ain’t run across sign of it.”
“What happens if we keep up the pressure on the war parties?”
“They’ll split up until there ain’t much of a trail to follow.”
“Long as we got one trail to follow, Shad—we got ’em. Right?”
“You know well as me, Cody: we only need one trail. We follow it—we’ll find the rest eventual,” Shad answered.
The young scout smiled as he leaned forward to cut a slice of the buffalo loin staked over the coals in Sweete’s fire pit. “And when we find the rest of the war parties—we’ll sure as hell find Carr’s village of Dog Soldiers for him.”
Here in the first days of the Moon of Cherries Blackening, High-Backed Bull found himself disgusted with Tall Bull and the way the man yearned after the white woman they had captured many suns ago.
Since then the Dog Soldier chief had lusted after the captive, keeping her to himself as his private concubine. Each night when he was done with her, Tall Bull threw the woman from the lodge, where the camp dogs were immediately drawn to her—likely drawn by the smell of the blood from her beatings, perhaps the earthy fragrance to her after Tall Bull’s coupling.
Bull almost felt sorry for the woman as night after night he watched her crawl away naked from the chief’s lodge, her small bundle of bloodied clothing clutched beneath an arm, doing her best to fend off the curious camp dogs.
So the disgust he first felt for Tall Bull had grown to revulsion. Not because the chief was a man who claimed his carnal rights to the white prisoner—but because Tall Bull was slowly losing interest in making war on the whites. Because of the woman, it seemed Tall Bull thought of little else but coupling. Not of attacking. Not of stealing horses and the spotted buffalo. Not of killing the whites. Every day he appeared to think of his loins a little more.
Though she was white, Bull could not bring himself to blame the woman. He cursed any man, especially a war chief, who thought of little else but coupling with a white person. That thought alone stoked Bull’s inner rage. More and more it took increasing effort to keep from hating the white part of himself.
“You are always cleaning that gun,” Porcupine said. “Come with us, Bull.”
He looked up from cleaning the big Walker revolver to the handful of older warriors standing in a crescent around him. Bull gazed down the barrel, finding satisfaction in the gleam of metal in evening’s fading light.
“Where do we go?” he asked almost absently.
“To talk to Tall Bull,” said a war chief of great reputation. “You will want to hear what we have to say.”
“Does White Horse grow weary of this waiting too?”
The war chief started to turn away, saying, “Come with us, High-Backed Bull. And you will hear me speak what burns in your own heart.”
They found Tall Bull and took the chief to White Horse’s lodge, where they quickly smoked a pipe without great ceremony.
“It is time we spoke of making more attacks,” White Horse said directly.
Tall Bull’s eyes flicked slowly from man to man around the circle. Yet he said nothing.
“This summer heat makes you grow restless, eh?” Wolf Friend asked his question of White Horse.
Bull watched for a sign from the face of Tall Bull, then that of his closest companion—Wolf Friend, one who would do his best to support the chief.
Bad Heart was hardly a friend to any man who did not want to make war on the white man. He and Bull were the two who stayed most loyal to Porcupine across the seasons. Bad Heart sneered as he asked, “Why does Wolf Friend ask this of White Horse? Does he think White Horse grows restless because he does not have a white woman to copulate with?”
The group laughed together, a little uneasily as they passed around a water gourd. Outside, the lodge skins were rolled up; beyond, a group of children hurried by in the deepening dark of twilight while the moon rose yellow as a brass rifle cartridge in the east.
“White Horse is right,” agreed Plenty of Bull Meat. “We dare not let up on the white man now.”
“Aiyeee! It is for us to keep attacking until the white man and his kind are driven out of this country for good,” Yellow Nose said.
“What of the soldiers?” prodded Tall Sioux. “We go in search of the white man’s settlements to attack … then the soldiers come after us. No—it is not the earthscratchers we must attack now. I say we must go after the soldiers who come marching winter after winter to attack our villages.”
“Tall Sioux speaks true,” said White Man’s Ladder with a cautious tone. “Soldiers search out our villages, butchering our women and children who cannot escape. Remember Black Kettle’s people?”
“Black Kettle ate the scraps of food the white man didn’t want to throw to his dogs,” Porcupine muttered angrily.
“This is true! And now Black Kettle is dead!” Bull roared angrily. “Killed by the Yellow Hair on the Washita—because he believed in the word of the white man.”
“Yes,” Porcupine agreed. “Because Black Kettle thought he could have peace with the white man!”
“These old men who want peace … the ones who act like old women,” White Horse growled, “their villages are filled with those who want to make peace with the white man. I say it is good that the soldiers catch and destroy them!”
Bull’s voice rose. “We should not cry for any who die, for any who are caught by the soldiers—for they were stupid not to fight back with the last ounce of their strength!”
Tall Bull raised his hand for silence, ready to speak at last. “Perhaps High-Backed Bull’s words are right. We cannot go on wandering this prairie, trying to avoid the white man. Instead, as you say—we must attack … and attack again. Track down every one of his outlying settlements. Kill the white people squatting there on our buffa
lo ground.”
“Still, what of the great smoking horses that move back and forth across this land once grazed freely by the buffalo?” Bullet Proof asked.
“Because of the smoking horses, the herds have been cut in half,” Feathered Bear moaned with a wag of his head. “No more will the buffalo cross the iron tracks the white man has planted for his smoking horse.”
“It is as if the white man has laid down two lines on the prairie,” said Red Cherries. He pointed an arm. “One north of us in the land of the Lakota. One south toward the reservations. Now the herds can no longer move freely.”
“We no longer move freely across the land of our fathers!” White Horse growled.
“This was the land of our fathers at one time,” said Yellow Nose. “Will we be known as the sons who gave away this land of our ancestors to the white man?”
At that moment on the far side of camp, there arose a commotion. Muffled shouts were heard coming from the east, along with the metallic barking of dogs.
“Let our words rest now where our hearts lie,” said White Horse. “We must not be the last generation to ride free across this prairie. We must fight, Tall Bull.”
“Yes!” agreed Porcupine. “While other bands may run away, it remains for us to carry on the fight.”
Energized, his blood running hot with talk of the coming struggle, Bull said, “While other bands tuck their tails like scared rabbits, running away to hide on their reservations—we Dog Soldiers must take the fight into the lap of the white man!”
“When?” asked Heavy Furred Wolf. “When will we ride again!”
Tall Bull looked at the one who had asked the all-important question. “From the mood of this council, I see no reason to delay.”
“Tomorrow!” White Horse replied.
“Yes—let us ride tomorrow,” Tall Sioux echoed.
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