Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  And when the celebration to the sun was over, the voices of the hundreds were raised exultantly to the heavens. Never before had there been such a gathering on the southern plains: Kiowa, Shahiyena, Kiowa-Apache, and Comanche. The hot summer breeze toyed with Tall One’s single feather lashed to one of his braids. His heart filled standing there, witnessing that grand union of fighting men.

  “We want to follow the buffalo herds as in days of old!” the chiefs bellowed.

  “We wish to stay a strong people, needing nothing from the white man!” cried others.

  Isatai had harangued the chiefs, bellowing, “The strong of heart will prevail in the coming war. If we take to the warpath and wipe our land clear of the white man-only then will the buffalo return to blanket our hunting ground.”

  “Unless we drive the white man out now, the buffalo will disappear!” shouted one.

  “The white man must go!” agreed another in the same fervor.

  “No!” Isatai barked at them, worked into his own blood frenzy. “The white man must die! All of them. Man. Woman. Child!”

  Tall One sensed what the rest felt: that magnetic charisma of the shaman, able to think of nothing else at that moment but slaughtering all whites where the warriors would find them. Amid the great noise of celebration and the fury of the war council, he paid little heed to the quiet voice inside that reminded Tall One he had of a time been white.

  In the end it was the old and proven chiefs of the Shahiyena Nation who decided what would be their first objective.

  “We think the Kwahadi need first to wipe out the buffalo hunters gathered on the Canadian River,” White Wolf told the gathering. “Kwahadi go accomplish that first. Then I think your hearts will be ready for war. You kill all the buffalo hunters—then we follow you to make war on Texas.”

  Another Shahiyena, Otter Belt, agreed. “The real threat to the survival of our peoples remains the buffalo hunters. If we stop them—we stop the white man.”

  “Those hunters have guns that shoot a long, long way,” came a voice from the council ring, filled with doubt.

  Isatai whipped round on the doubter, banging a fist against his own chest. “Let them empty their guns shooting at me!” the shaman shrieked, scuffling around the center of the gathering, spitting his words into the faces of the gathered war chiefs. “Do any of you doubt that I can make medicine so powerful that it will protect our warriors as they charge down on the white man’s earth lodges? Do you doubt the power of my medicine to turn their bullets into water?”

  In the end not one of them doubted Isatai’s power. Not even the tall, handsome, gray-eyed Kwahadi war chief.

  “When the white man wanted to put us all on a reservation six winters ago—he wanted us to live in one place as he does,” he had told the hushed assembly. “I was born of the prairie, where the wind blows free. Where there is nothing to bend the light of the sun. I was born where every living thing draws a free breath. I want to die in my own country—free—and not within the walls of the white man.”

  That night as many of the Kwahadi were rolling into their blankets, anticipating an early departure at dawn, Tall One and Antelope hung close to the gray-eyed chief, hanging on his every word as he continued to exhort his faithful.

  To Tall One it seemed the war chief was even more a mystic than Isatai. Even more perhaps a man who believed in the power of the human spirit over the powers of magic.

  “No Comanche will ever again die a captive of the white man,” he promised his warriors at that late-night fire. “A warrior dies riding the prairie. A Kwahadi dies charging into the face of his enemy. We will take the power of our people to the buffalo hunters’ settlement. The white man’s days on this prairie are numbered.”

  The war chief had made a tight fist he held up before them all as he concluded, “I hold the last days of the white man in my hand!”

  34

  Midsummer 1874

  THINGS WOULD HAVE been hot in Comanche country even if it had been down in the deep days of January.

  It wasn’t only the weather.

  The southern plains had exploded in full-scale war.

  First came the rumors of some of the bands moving off from the agencies, heading southwest to Elk Creek to attend a big war-talk. But by the time any of the army got around to checking out what sounded like the wildest of stories—the Comanche holding a sun dance and crazy whispers of a powerful shaman whipping the tribes into a blood lust against the white man—the whole affair was yesterday’s news. Why, just about the time the army was getting set to check out the rumors, word out of the Territories was that some of the Cheyenne were even coming back to their agency after the big medicine stomp of the war bands.

  Still, that left the Kiowa and Comanche out there roaming about, adding their numbers to the Kwahadi, who had never come in to their assigned reservation.

  “Kwahadis led by one of Satan’s own,” Deacon Johns told Jonah. “The devil’s own whelp, that one.”

  The old fellow with iron-crusted hair wore a set of dentures that gave Johns a pretty smile but were not too good for talking, what with all the clacking. He got in the habit of slipping them from his mouth behind his hand when he had a big piece to say. Which was most of the time with the deacon, his slack jaws at work like a well-used, wrinkled blacksmith’s bellows.

  “Quanah Parker’s his name,” explained Lamar Lockhart.

  “Got a English name, does he?” Hook inquired. “So the bastard’s a renegade, eh? Back to sixty-five, I rubbed up against my first half-breed renegade. North to the Platte Bridge fight. A Cheyenne name of Charlie Bent.”

  “This one’s a half-breed too,” Lockhart replied. “His mother was took by the Comanch’ almost twenty-eight-some years ago, just a girl as I remember the story of it. Her seed’s turned out about as bad as they come, with a reputation as smelly as his breechclout.”

  “He’s spilled blood from down on the Pecos all the way past the Prairie Dog Town Fork,” offered Niles Coffee, sergeant of Company C, his tanned, wind-seamed face a java color beneath a crop of red whiskers that gave the Ranger an air of raffish gaiety.

  “We’ll get him,” Lockhart said sternly at the fire. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Wanna see him swing,” murmured John Com, one of Hook’s messmates. His nose seemed oversized, it and his cheeks perpetually red, scored over with little chicken-track blood vessels. He was a walking barrel of a man, with toothpicks for legs.

  “Shooting’s too good for that heathen fornicator,” Johns grumbled.

  “Rest assured, he doesn’t have long to roam free,” Lockhart repeated.

  Over the past months he had been riding with this company of Rangers, Jonah had come to have a real respect for the quiet captain of Company C. A year younger than Hook, Lockhart had been born late in the autumn of 1838.

  “My parents came to Texas from Georgia when all this still belonged to Mexico,” Lockhart had explained one of those quiet prairie nights when men gathered at their cook fires just like this, watching the embers die slow at their feet, the stars dusting the dark canopy like coal water flecked with diamonds.

  “My father came west to Texas like many of the rest in those days, intent on finding the length of his own stride. He fought in the revolution that drove out Santa Anna. When Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was first elected president of the Republic of Texas in thirty-eight, my folks named me after him—a man they both admired. He come from Georgia too, matter of fact. A dreamer, a poet—besides hating Injuns to the bottom of his craw. Probably why my father liked Lamar so much.”

  “You hate Injuns as much as your father?”

  “No. Not anymore,” the captain admitted thoughtfully. “Last couple of years I’ve been trying real hard to understand Injuns more than hate ’em. Hate will eat you up until you got nothing to feed on but it, Jonah. Still, I do understand men like my father. Men like Mirabeau Lamar. Neither one of them give a inch.”

  “Tough on the Injuns?”

/>   “President Lamar tough on Injuns!” Coffee hooted.

  “These Comanche bands, yes,” Lockhart replied. “Lamar wasn’t in office a little over a year when three Comanche chiefs come riding into the village of San Antonio, saying they were sent by the rest of the chiefs to make arrangement for some treaty talks with the Texans. Tehannos they called us—probably from the Mexican tongue.”

  “Comancheros?” Jonah asked, his interest growing more piqued as Lockhart went on with the story.

  “Likely that’s where the Comanche learned the word,” the captain answered. “Seeing a chance to free some of the white captives held by the Comanches suddenly dropped in their lap, the Texans agreed to treaty-talks to be held at the Council House there in San Antonio—if … if the Comanche would bring in all their white captives to sell to the peace commissioners.”

  “But them Texans weren’t about to buy the captives back, were they?”

  Lockhart shook his head. “Plan was to capture all the chiefs and hold them prisoner. Exchange ’em for the white captives even up.”

  “What came of it?”

  “That meeting come to be—but the sixty-five Comanche chiefs, with all their women and kids that come in, brought only one white prisoner with them.”

  “It was Matilda Lockhart,” Deacon Johns broke in.

  Hook brought his eyes back to the captain. “She kin to you?”

  He nodded. “My father’s sister-in-law. My uncle had been killed in a raid on the Trinity. Folks who watched her brought in said she had been starved down to hide and bone. Bruised and cut up something bad.” And the captain swallowed hard in its telling, the cold-banked fires glowing behind the man’s eyes. “When Matilda was brought into the Council House, she told the others there were several others at the big camp only three days away. The bastards brought her in to see if they could get a high price for her—planning to ransom each prisoner separately to get the most they could for each one.”

  “But them God-fearing folk at San Antone took up the sword of the righteous!” exclaimed the deacon. “Rangers, they was. The ones closed the trap on those Comanch’.”

  “Colonel William Cooke, our republic’s secretary of war, got his Rangers spread out around the walls inside that Council House while the peace-talkers tried to find out about the other prisoners. Red bastards claimed the other captives were with bands far, far off. So Cooke told the chiefs they were prisoners of the Texans and would be exchanged, one for one, for the whites.”

  “That’s when the hoedown was called!” said Niles Coffee, his red hair lit with life in the fire’s glow.

  Lockhart nodded. “When the chiefs and their women pulled out knives and bows, rushing the doors, Cooke gave his order and the Rangers opened fire.”

  “Damn—but that would have been a sight!” marveled Johns, with a big smile dancing across the war-map wrinkles of his face.

  “What come of it? How many dead?” Jonah asked.

  “Half the Comanche were killed on the spot: thirty-five, including three women and two children.”

  “The seed of the devil will suffer the gall and wormwood!” growled Johns.

  “Twenty-seven women and children—plus two old men—were captured when the shooting stopped.”

  “And the Rangers—what of them?”

  “Seven died,” Harley Pettis said, the veins in his neck bulging like a river boatman’s hemp rope. He was a cliptongued sort with a dark broom of burr-length hair sprouting from the top of his head. “Another eight was wounded.”

  Jonah shook his head in wonder. “Can’t believe there wasn’t more Rangers killed in all that gunplay.”

  “The deacon here might tell you it was God’s own hand helping the Rangers against the devil’s children,” Lockhart said. “Whatever we are, Jonah—this is a flinthard bunch you’ve sworn allegiance to and joined, my friend.”

  Hook squirmed anxiously on the stump where he sat. “So tell me—they ever get them other prisoners back?”

  “Colonel Hugh McLeod of the Rangers sent one of the squaws out on a pony to tell the rest what bargain they could strike.”

  Jonah looked sour at that, saying, “They didn’t come in, did they?”

  Lockhart gazed at Hook a moment. “No. Not these Comanche. Maybe Lipans or Caddos or Tonkawas would’ve seen the writing on the wall. But not these Comanche.”

  “Them heathens gathered up and marched south to the gulf coast,” Deacon Johns took up the story now. “Made their famous raid on Linnville, a tiny port village of Christians!”

  “Looted all they could,” Sergeant Coffee added. “Burned everything to the ground.”

  “But McLeod’s Rangers went after ’em,” Lockhart continued, staring into the fire. “Four days later they caught those Comanche moving north. At a place called Plum Creek. First and only time we know of those red sonsabitches fighting a pitched battle.”

  “They made a real stand-up fight of it,” Wig Danville said, speaking for the first time. He had a high forehead that said something of his great even-mindedness and ready sense of humor. “Not like usual: hit and then run off when things get tight for ’em.”

  “Eighty warriors killed that day,” Lockhart said, that slash of his mouth beneath the bushy black mustache. “Stock recovered, along with three more white captives abandoned when the fight turned bad.”

  “An amazing miracle from the Lord!” Johns cheered, dribbling the front of his old ticking shirt with some tobacco juice. “Most normal the Comanche kill their prisoners if they can’t take ’em along with the fleeing village.”

  “Was the tribe whipped for a while?” Jonah asked.

  “Not by a long chalk,” Deacon Johns grumbled.

  “Those what got away went right back to raiding the small settlements, same as always,” said Coffee. “Stealing, burning, killing, and kidnapping.”

  “Ranger Captain John Moore caught another bunch down on the Red Fork of the Colorado later that fall,” Lockhart explained. “Caught them asleep. One hundred thirty Comanche killed, and one more white person freed from terror.”

  Jonah leaned back, studying the faces of these men gathered around the embers left by the evening cook fire. Nearby, two other mess fires had gone to a red glow, circled by other Rangers.

  “This the way it’s been ever since?” Hook asked. “They raid—you go try to even the score. They raid again—you ride out again to kill more of ’em.”

  Lockhart only nodded.

  “They strike when and where they choose—especially that bunch of Kwahadis with the half-breed,” Coffee said, scratching at his red whiskers.

  “In their hearts still burns a rage against white folk for what those red fornicators suffered at the Council House all these decades gone,” Johns added, his steely eyes aglow in the dying flames.

  “Things got no better during the war, Jonah,” Lockhart said. “Especially afterward, when we all figured that since we were part of the Union, that the goddamned federal government would now take care of the Injun problem for us.”

  “Instead, the carpetbaggers come in to run our government for us,” Coffee snarled.

  “A carpetbagger governor named Davis sat on his thumbs while the Injuns just got all the bolder too,” June Callicott added.

  “That scalawag disbanded the Rangers for nine ever-loving years!” Johns bellowed.

  “Not until seventy-one did the army finally get the idea that there was a serious problem down here,” Lockhart continued. “Back in Washington someone finally got some ears and started to believe that the Comanche were actually raiding. That spring the Sixth Cavalry was moved to Kansas, and Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry was assigned to Texas—anticipating a bloody spring.”

  “Gotta give ’em credit,” Coffee said. “Mackenzie kept his boys in the saddle for the better part of seventy-one and seventy-two, chasing them red bastards.”

  Lockhart scratched his crop of three-day whiskers, saying, “An uneasy peace came of things last year, so that scalawag Gove
rnor Davis cut back the money, meaning Ranger companies dropped from a thousand to just over three hundred men. And now this year Davis has gone and pardoned a couple of Kiowa chiefs who have the blood of white folks on their hands—why, the whole southern plains has took fire all over again.”

  “Less’n three hundred Rangers—with all this ground to cover?” Hook looked at Lockhart, wagging his head.

  “That’s why we had us another revolution here in Texas this past spring, Jonah,” Lockhart said, a wry smile below that bushy black mustache. “Bunch of Rangers went in and threw that copper-backed Davis right out of office—put in a good man, Richard Coke.”

  “First Democrat since the war,” Johns declared.

  “If there’s only about three hundred of us—what’s the army doing now?” Jonah asked.

  Pettis shrugged, his jaw muscles working like the current of a river, and said, “Mackenzie’s down on the border, told to chase the Kickapoos back into Mexico.”

  “And all the while—up here the devil goes on the prowl!” added Deacon Johns.

  Lockhart gazed steadily at Hook. “Isn’t that the reason you joined us, Jonah? Instead of signing up with the army?”

  “The army chases Injuns a lot. They don’t always find what they go after,” Jonah admitted. “I’ve seen enough of that with my own eyes to know it’s the truth.”

  “The Gospel, that is!” Johns exclaimed.