by Logan, Jake
The men near the fire threw their hands up and howled as if they fully intended to shred their throats with the effort. Spirit Bear went on, trembling with emotion.
“Do not see them as anything but the demons they are!” Spirit Bear continued. “Some may be small and some may have fairer skin, but they are all foul demons!”
Now the men on the periphery of the camp started shouting. They were closest to the wooden bowls that burned with the Dreaming Dust. Some fired their guns in the air while others began flailing so powerfully that they knocked into each other. Random fights broke out among them and a few looked around in a panic before running toward the hills, leaving the camp behind altogether.
Spirit Bear chanted, but none of the others chanted back. He shook his staff and chanted louder, which only seemed to create more of a panic among the men, who now ran in a frenzy of flailing arms and thrashing legs.
“Looks like a good time to join the dance,” Slocum said. He ran through the door and exploded from the cabin with Hevo following closely behind. The first time Slocum passed through a cloud of the acrid smoke, he held his breath beneath the mask he’d created. The smoke sung his eyes, causing tears to flow and a painful ache to take root at his temples. Whatever he was feeling, however, the men who breathed it in directly were feeling a whole lot worse.
Three men closest to the cabin saw Slocum and Hevo charge out and immediately turned their backs to them. Slocum had been expecting resistance right away, but hadn’t expected to see such well-armed braves scamper away like children who’d just seen a strange shadow in the corner of their bedroom. Hevo shifted his focus to a bare-chested warrior holding a tomahawk in one hand and a rifle in the other. Although the warrior held his ground, he cowered when Hevo hunched over and snarled like a wolf that had been raised in the lowest regions of hell.
The warrior tried to turn tail, but Hevo was already upon him. He snatched the tomahawk away and swung it viciously across the warrior’s throat. Even when the warrior dropped, his arms and legs thrashed wildly as if he was still trying to run away. Hevo knocked him out with a swift kick to the chin and then scooped up the warrior’s rifle.
Slocum emptied both barrels of his shotgun at a pair of warriors who rushed at him. Although his mask was doing a good job of filtering out the Dreaming Dust, it was making his hands shake so hard that he dropped the spare shells he meant to use to reload the shotgun. He found time to reload, simply because the warriors in his vicinity were too busy either fighting each other or bolting into the hills surrounding the camp to worry about him. When the shotgun shells were spent, Slocum found a few rifles that had been cast away by warriors too intent on escaping whatever visions they were seeing. He took one rifle and slung it across his back before picking up a Spencer model that had been decorated with tribal charms and feathers.
All this time, Spirit Bear continued to chant. He stood his ground in the thick of the smoke, wailing to the sky above and stomping the ground in steps that became heavier and faster with each second that passed.
Some of the warriors that Slocum and Hevo found next still had some fight left in them. Whatever Namid had done to the Dreaming Dust made it difficult even for the most focused warriors to concentrate long enough to use their weapons. The ones who bore firearms couldn’t see straight enough to hit the broad side of a barn. Any shots they fired either hissed several yards over Slocum’s head or clipped one of the other painted braves and spun them around like broken marionettes.
Slocum kept his breaths shallow whenever possible. He focused on the putrid tastes and smells of the mask he’d crafted, hoping that some of the tangy scents he detected weren’t from wisps of the modified dust seeping through the protective layers. Taking in some of the smoke was unavoidable, however. Slocum’s vision began to blur and shadows started writhing as if they had lives of their own. Noises became a slurred mess within his ears until his own footsteps sounded like a snarling voice. By the time he’d fought his way to Spirit Bear, Slocum pitied the crazed wretches who’d gotten a real taste of the altered smoke.
“You . . . are . . . demons!” Spirit Bear hollered in slurred English. His eyes were wide beneath the bear skin hood, and his muscles trembled beneath his cloak. “White demons come to . . . eat my soul!”
“Just one white man,” Slocum replied.
Hevo yelped like a coyote as he shoved aside a pair of staggering warriors and hurdled a group of Dirt Swimmers who clawed at the ground in an effort to live up to their name. His eyes were so wide and his voice so powerful that Slocum wondered if too much of the poisoned dust had gotten into his lungs. Spirit Bear looked at the Cheyenne warrior and dropped to his knees to chant crazily as Hevo rushed toward him. When he arrived, Hevo grabbed hold of Spirit Bear’s headdress, raised his tomahawk, and then swung it with a mighty war cry. Although he stopped short of burying the blade into Spirit Bear’s neck, he lifted the headdress up and wailed as if he’d just slain the most fearsome beast the prairie had ever seen. He continued to shout as he kicked Spirit Bear over and held him down with that foot.
Many of the Indians in the immediate vicinity didn’t notice the performance right away. But when one of the warriors caught sight of Hevo standing over Spirit Bear, the man screamed. His voice caught the ear of others and silence worked its way through the camp like ripples in water.
Hevo stood with his prize in hand, glaring at any eye that dared to look in his direction.
Sensing a fear that was powerful enough to make the air feel like a taut bowstring, Slocum fired his rifle and shouted his own string of nonsense words. Any other time, the display may have been laughable. To the men who’d been affected by the smoke Namid had poisoned, Slocum may as well have been the devil himself.
More warriors ran away.
The ones who attempted to fire at Slocum and Hevo didn’t come anywhere close to hitting them. All Slocum had to do was fire a shot in their general direction to send that group running like scalded dogs.
Dirt Swimmers cast their netted cloaks aside and bolted from the camp.
Before long, Slocum, Hevo, and less than half a dozen others were all that remained. Those others were either sprawled unconscious on the ground or babbling like lunatics in an asylum.
The smoke was clearing. Hevo kicked Spirit Bear aside and walked toward the largest tent. A woman cried inside and he could not get to her fast enough.
Slocum stooped down to prop Spirit Bear up to a seated position. Once his skins were off and his ceremonial trappings had been stripped, Spirit Bear was nothing more than an old man with wide, clouded eyes. His cracked lips moved to form words that could not be heard. His hands trembled and panicked breaths caused his sunken chest to quake beneath filthy undergarments that most likely hadn’t been washed for months.
“Whatever you were trying to do,” Slocum told him, “it’s over. You’re through with your damn war. You hear me?”
Spirit Bear kept babbling his silent chant. Without an army to follow him and without anyone to listen to his big talk, he was exposed for what he truly was: a feeble, yammering old man. Slocum brought him to his feet and shoved him toward the livery that had been set up beneath a makeshift shelter.
By the time Spirit Bear was tied up and tossed over the back of a horse, Hevo was escorting Namid from the big tent. She was sobbing and rubbing her eyes. Hevo comforted her in their native language, but wouldn’t be heard for some time. Even so, he continued to try and calm her down as they rode into the hills.
* * *
They retraced their steps across the prairie. Along the way, they crossed paths with a few crazed Indians who were still feeling the effects of the Dreaming Dust. The ones that weren’t easily knocked out and tied up were convinced to run away by a few loud noises.
The following day, as they continued to ride, a few more Indians tracked them down. Slocum and Hevo had been watching for stubb
orn ones like that and managed to gun them down before they got close enough to do any damage. The fights were as short as they were one-sided.
“They are just animals,” Namid said. “Without Spirit Bear to guide them or bring them together, those men are nothing but wild dogs.”
“Looks that way,” Slocum said. “Soon as I get to an Army post or even a town with a telegraph, I can send word out to keep a lookout for them.”
“Considering all the suffering Spirit Bear has caused,” Hevo said while looking at the old man still tied up and draped across a saddle, “there will be plenty of white men who are more than willing to begin a hunt of their own. For once, I cannot blame them. Men like these make all tribes look like savages.”
“Well, there are plenty of palefaces out and about who make handsome fellas like me look just as bad,” Slocum said. “I’m just glad we were able to come out of that camp in one piece. Speaking of which,” he added while looking over to Namid, “what on earth did you do to that dust?”
Namid had recovered from her dose of the smoke, but had been withdrawn ever since. “I did as you asked. I made it . . . more.”
“What was the ingredient that caused all of that insanity?” Slocum asked.
“I do not know and I do not want to know. Spirit Bear showed the women how to mix the Dreaming Dust and he gave us the ingredients. He showed us the powders we needed to handle most carefully and those are what I put into the smoke when I mixed it for the last time. I put more than we should have used for three doses. Maybe more.”
“You convinced all the women to help you?”
She nodded. “All of us were in our own nightmares at the hands of those killers. When it came time for it to end, I knew the others would want to help.”
“Hopefully nobody else stumbles upon that stuff,” Slocum said.
“They won’t,” Namid told him. “We burned it all. Some of those killers who breathed in so much of it may never wake up from their nightmare.” Slocum wasn’t about to pity the warriors and Dirt Swimmers who’d raided innocent wagon trains and killed good folks to steal their belongings, but when he thought about the madness that would grip them for the foreseeable future, he came awfully close.
21
When Slocum approached the spot outside of the town where the wagons had been left, he was nearly shot by an overly anxious Josiah. As it turned out, the near-miss was the most excitement the group had had since Slocum and Hevo had struck out on their own. The entire group was more than ready to get moving, and even though there was barely enough daylight for the wagons to travel a few miles, they did so in high spirits.
Hevo and Namid bade their farewells almost immediately. Their lands were to the northeast, and they were anxious to get back to them. Even so, the McCauley children wouldn’t let them go before they’d had a chance to tell Namid how beautiful her flowing hair was. James Wilcox smiled at her and wouldn’t say a word. It seemed the young boy was taken with her as well.
Despite his obligations to remain with the wagons, Slocum felt it more important to deal with Spirit Bear once and for all. There was an Army supply post a day’s ride to the northwest, and he took the old man there before any of his more persistent followers took it upon themselves to find him on their own. Every step of the way, Spirit Bear muttered and chanted. Just when it seemed the old man had found a soothing melody, he would shift into a heated tirade about the death of all white men. For the last stretch of trail leading to the outpost, Slocum stuffed a bandanna in Spirit Bear’s mouth so he could ride in peace.
The man who took custody of Spirit Bear was a sergeant named Owen Teales. He didn’t seem to know what to do with Spirit Bear until Slocum explained that the old man was behind the recent attacks scattered across this and many other territories.
“Just take some men to his camp in the hills,” Slocum told the young sergeant. “Be sure to keep your guard up, though. There’ll be more redskins than you’ll know what to do with in those parts.”
Feeling he might be able to impress his superiors, Sergeant Teales agreed to send a cavalry unit to Spirit Bear’s camp in the hills. Slocum gave him directions, made sure Spirit Bear was locked up, and headed out in the morning to meet up with the wagons. Normally, pointing a group of Indian hunters toward a cluster of targets wouldn’t set well with Slocum. Having met those particular targets on more than one occasion, however, he found it fitting that those crazed killers and thieves meet their end at the hands of a bunch of well-armed palefaces.
Once he’d reunited with the wagon train, Slocum rode with them all the way into Colorado. It was a quiet trip, marred only by a few tough river crossings, during which they lost a pair of horses and busted a wheel. Upon arriving at the portion of the Rockies where Ed’s mining claims were, the group disbanded to begin their new lives.
“Stay with us, John,” Theresa said when she’d carried her first armload of possessions into an old log cabin that was to be her and James’s new home. “At least for a little while.”
“That’s not part of the deal,” he replied. “I was only paid to get you here.” When she scowled at him, Slocum grinned and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll check in on you two when I come along to collect my percentage of that claim.”
She pulled him close and whispered, “How about staying until the morning? I’d love to have one more night with you.”
Slocum felt a pull toward the open trail, but he wasn’t about to refuse a lady.
Watch for
SLOCUM AND THE GRIZZLY FLATS KILLERS
408th novel in the exciting SLOCUM series from Jove
Coming in February!
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