“Why not Jim here?”
“What? Ye turned squaw now?” Hugh barked.
Augie hated to go. “Can’t it wait awhile?”
“By the beard of bull barley, lad, ye’re the ones as saw the kids and squaws and dogs hid. And saw the chiefs puttin’ on red clay, didn’t ye?”
“True enough,” Augie said reluctantly. “All right. I’ll go. Shall I tell him Aaron’s dead then?”
“What else? Unless the Resurrection has commenced in the meantime.”
Shortly after Augie Neill left, the storm quit, the sky became silent, the cottonwood leaves fell to whispering, and the restless mustangs took to flailing their whistling tails at the mosquitoes again. Hugh slapped at mosquito bites on his neck and under his chin and over the backs of his hands. He hit the back of his right hand so hard he almost pulled the trigger.
A quick series of yipping animal sounds, then of bird calls, came to them from the Ree picket fence.
“Listen,” Hugh said, cocking his grizzled head.
Jim listened; said after a moment, “Signals, them is. They’re callin’ to each other.”
Hugh put his ear to the ground. “They’re movin’ their horses too,” he grunted. “Just what I was afraid of. Well, it’s the butcher shop for sure now at dawn.”
Jim shivered and his eyes half-closed over.
“Jim,” Hugh snapped, “Jim, I want you to make sure all the men’re awake, every dag one of them, and tell ‘em to dry their flint and frizen and make sure of their charge.”
Jim said, “Maybe we should let the ponies go and get the devil aboard the boats again.”
“What, show tail to the red devils? Not in this country we don’t, not if we want to live in it. If we do, every red nigger up the river, the Blackfeet and the Minnetaree, even our friends the Mandans, will know about it and then we’ll really be in a fix.”
The quick thunderhead moved north. Stars came out. Then the delayed dawn opened up the east at last, and light came up all around them like a lamp turned up rapidly in a dark room. The cottonwood butt, the sand ahead, the picket fence curving around and slightly above them, and then the live cottonwoods beyond showed up clear and true in the crisp pink light.
The moiling Missouri came up clear too, below the island, spreading wide and immense to where its shoal waters lapped a cutbank a half-mile away. The tan river was almost wide and mighty enough to suggest a little of the earth’s curvature. Ripples raced, eddies curled and uncurled, and tiny foaming whirlpools appeared and disappeared and reappeared. Floating uprooted trees and caught snags and riding sawyers sloshed about like old skeletons in a half-submerged dinosaur boneyard. A low roushing sound rose from the wrestling waters. Far over, on a sand bar in a farther shoal, the body of a blue heron hovered above the water, its stick legs lost in the distant perspective. The sharp cutbank of the far shore lifted abruptly into sleek-grassed tufted tumuli. And above them rose the rolling bluffs of the endless Dakota prairie lands.
Hugh saw Jim crawling in among the men, saw the men give one wild look around and then recharge their priming pans. There weren’t enough cottonwood butts and other driftwood boles to go around; so some of the men barehanded began to scoop out low trenches in the sand bar. The men with the wild Indian ponies carefully kept horseflesh between themselves and the bristling Ree picket fence. The oncoming red dawn deepened the colors of the ponies, making gray a gun-barrel blue, and white a flashing silver, and chestnut a vivid maroon. The manes and tails of the ponies glowed like fox brush in firelight. Most of the ponies were broomtail hammerheads, though a few of the stallions were handsome. All were grassers and all were as mean as Satan.
Augie came back, dripping from his swim in the swift Missouri. He slid along the grit sand, the sand sticking in patches to his wet buckskins. “The general says not to worry, Hugh.”
Hugh glared at Augie. “Not to worry? Can’t he read sign?”
Augie’s young freckled face was mottled blue with river cold. Before Old Hugh’s fierce whiskered glare, Augie’s brown eyes slid off to one side. He shrugged. “Well, the gen’ral says he’s goin’ to take Grey Eyes’ word for it that the Rees mean to keep peace with the Great White Chief. He thinks Grey Eyes’ll honor his pledge.”
“Pledge! Might as well take the pledge of a snake. What a curious fix we’re in now. The gen’ral’s green as grass and the Rees have put on warpaint as red as buffalo blood and—”
A rifle popped from behind the Ree barricade. There was a quick whistling sound and then a groan behind Hugh. Hugh whirled around just in time to see Johnnie Gardner stagger against a sorrel pony. Johnnie’s eyes rolled and he grabbed at his belly. The sorrel pony snorted; tried to rear away from Johnnie. But Johnnie grabbed the yellow mane and hung on. Men all around on the ground instinctively cowered in their shallow trenches.
“Johnnie!” Hugh yelled. “Johnnie lad! Down with ye. Down you darn fool. I told ye . . . oh! the boy’s been hit mortal.”
A whole series of shots rang out then, one after the other, irregularly, the balls whistling by overhead. More groans escaped Johnnie and he pitched ahead in two little forward motions. Feathered arrows sailed in, whistling; hit the sorrel pony with dull punking sounds.
“Them red devils got my Johnnie lad!” Hugh groaned. He blinked his eyes. “Poor devil. Hit by so many balls he’s been made a riddle of.”
There were more erratic shots, this time coming from all points along the circling Ree barricade. A deadly crossfire poured in among the exposed mountain men. Puffs of smoke rose in the wet air and slowly floated northward across the picket fence and above the breast-shaped dirt-covered lodges behind the fence.
The mountain men dodged and cursed. They began to return irregular fire. They reloaded methodically, swiftly, pouring in powder, driving home the patched ball with hickory wiping stick.
Another mountain man finally got hit. His slow writhing on the sand set off a howl of triumph from behind the Ree picket fence. When still another mountain man was hit, the Ree warwhoops rose to a shrill earsplitting crescendo.
“Listen to that horrible hubbub,” Jim Anderson said, shivering. “It’s enough to curdle your blood into fly pepper.”
Hugh said, “Fust time ye heard it, is it, lad? Wait’ll ye hear the Ree death cry. Right after he’s skulped ye with a whole pack of cheerin’ squaws lookin’ on.”
The ponies smelled blood; began to whistle shrilly. They plunged from one end of their rawhide tethers to the other and in desperate terror shat quick mounds of steaming droppings and pawed at the moon.
“Rise and shine, boys!” Hugh yelled. “It’s hard doin’s now.”
Carefully studying the puffs of smoke and flashes of fire coming out of the Ree cottonwood pickets, Hugh thought he saw a movement at the foot of a particularly large upright barked pole. After a second he saw a red-streaked oldpenny face peer out at him. The dark cherry eyes danced wildly; the sensitive mobile mouth was drawn up into a ferocious pout. It was a Ree and he wore a warrior’s headdress—the thighbone of a hawk caught in braids over the temple and standing up on each side of the head like horse ears. Hugh aimed Old Bullthrower carefully; fired. The red-streaked wild-eyed face vanished.
Arrows and balls continued to thud into the cluster of mountain men and dancing mustangs on the sand bar. The ponies shrieked like ravaged mothers; reared up at the skies, fear-crazed eyeballs flashing; fell mortally wounded. One blue stallion, hit in the rear quarters, whistled shrilly as it dragged itself around with frantically chopping forefeet. Blood poured down its rain-soaked hide and spilled on the sand.
Jim Clyman, Reed Gibson, Jack Larrison, Dave Howard, Prayin’ Diah Smith, George Flager, Wes Piper, and others lay forted up behind the fallen ponies. Clyman took dead-aim at a Ree only to have his flesh fort give one last convulsive heave and throw his aim off just as he pulled the trigger. The ball whacked into a picket instead.
As the light increased, the crossfire from the roaring Ree barricade became murderous. Men
to either side of Hugh got hit by arrows and balls. Mathews, Collins, Sneed, Penn, Ogle. They rolled over; groaned. They looked inward, then outward at the red dawn and their comrades, then inward again, and died. The dead men continued to get hit, and the dead men grunted, and shook a little each time. The dead men soon ran watery blood from their new wounds.
Through it and over it all the mosquitoes kept working. Flies too came out of the riverbank willows and buzzed wildly and thickly around the rich feast of flowing blood.
There was sudden activity on the gray keelboats anchored out on the Missouri River. Men boiled on the bow of General Ashley’s gray keelboat, Rocky Mountains, with the general, a slim figure in Missouri state militia blue, waving commands. The general tried to get the voyageurs to move the keelboat closer to shore in order to take on men. But the pork-eating neds were panic-stricken and they refused and ducked down out of sight in the hold. The general then called for volunteers, and finally a dozen men climbed down into a white skiff below the keelboat on the water. Oars flashed out; began to clobber the tan and turbulent Missouri. The white skiff started to move toward the sand bar. Another gang of men on the stern of the general’s boat boiled around the swivel-gun.
Arrows and balls streaked across the water. The rowers hesitated. The general’s mouth opened into a little black working hole, and he waved his arm commandingly once more and the white skiff moved again.
The white skiff came on, the buckskin-clad men in it huddled low, firing at the Rees from over one another’s shoulders. The rowers pulled like madmen, ducking shot and arrow as best they could.
The white skiff came on slowly, bucking the tan tossing Missouri, working like a frantic centipede trying to swim water.
At last the white skiff touched the ensanguined sandy shore and the riflemen piled out and, like hurrying lizards, slithered up behind the fallen ponies. The rowers, still in the skiff, ducked down and hid behind the gunwales.
The riflemen first picked up Johnnie Gardner—he was still miraculously alive—and lifted him aboard the skiff. Then they loaded other wounded men aboard the skiff. Full up, the skiff pulled back to the Rocky Mountains; unloaded; came back for more.
All the ponies but one had fallen. The one left was a black stallion, fifteen hands high with a windcombed purple mane and huge flowing purple tail. By dint of massive muscle-coagulated leaps the black stallion managed to break its leather hobbles and rip loose its tether. The black stallion had swallowed its head and was running madly about inside the circle of fallen horses and men. The black stallion screamed; whistled a great cry. Its nostrils fluttered like rags in a violent wind. The black stallion’s great opal eyeballs rolled and glistened. Then a dozen Ree balls hit the big black boy, and with a final whistling shriek, more hellish than human, the stallion pitched forward head first, hit the ground, collapsed, rolled over, four legs stiff and upright like a roast pig on its back in a platter.
Suddenly Rose the horse-faced interpreter was puffing at Hugh’s side behind the cottonwood butt. Rose was a halfbreed: part Indian, part Negro, part white. “The gen’ral says to get the devil out of here!” Rose shouted between breaths. Rose’s blue-red face was drawn up into a half-snarl half-smile. His redblack cherry eyes rolled. His buckskins were blotted with dark sweat rings. Rose puffed. “Get back on the boat, the gen’ral says!” Rose knew he wasn’t very well liked, and he couldn’t quite look Hugh in the eye.
“Why didn’t he follow my advice in the first place?” Hugh raged. The red rivulets down either side of his big Scotch nose began to pulse a little. “Should have let some of the men pull out with the ponies before it got light, and let the rest of us aboard.”
“I know, I know,” Rose shouted over the uproar. “I know. I told him that too. But it’s too late now.” Rose puffed and he spoke in surges, like an Indian. He had a heavy guttural voice. “The gen’ral trusted Grey Eyes when he shouldn’t’ve.”
Hugh gave it all a quick once-over. More than half the men were already gone under, and all the ponies were dead or dying, and the Ree fire was getting to be more accurate by the minute. “I hate to leave the gone-under lads behind to be skulped. Them red devils’ll mangle them something awful. Specially if their wild squaws get hold of ‘em. You won’t know ‘em from slaughterhouse waste after. They deserve a decent burial at least.”
“I know.” Rose puffed. His redblack cherry eyes flicked from side to side, from Hugh’s grizzled dark tan face to the Rees ahead and back again.
Hugh said, “Damme if I’ll retreat, now that the ponies is all dead. Might as well fort up behind them here on the bar and hang on. The Rees won’t dare rush us, and if the gen’ral’ll start using them swivel-guns on them we’ll make out yet.”
Rose muttered under his breath. It was plain he thought Hugh’s idea crazy. “The gen’ral says to pull out pronto.”
“Well, damme, pull out then, if you’ve got squaw blood. Me, I’m stayin’.”
Rose gave Hugh an evasive, almost pouting look and then crept back to join the men still alive behind the fallen ponies. Rose told the men what the general had to say. The men listened with open slack mouths—then suddenly rushed the white skiff, almost swamping it. The overloaded white skiff turned slowly in the current, shipping water. Those in the rear who had been hidden behind the men up front found themselves suddenly exposed to the fire, and they promptly crowded toward the other end, once again almost swamping it. Two rowers were hit; slid wounded to the bottom of the skiff; were trampled underfoot.
Then the sun broke over the horizon, limning the white skiff sharply in streaming saffron light. Ree crossfire increased still more, some eight hundred howling whooping braves firing with everything they had, London fusils, double-curved bone bows, single-curved wood bows. The coffee waters churned around the skiff as much from shot and arrow as from the frantic oars. Slowly the heavy skiff made for the Rocky Mountains.
The general waved frantically from his keelboat and his mouth worked little and black and soundless, and presently a second white skiff came out hesitantly from the other keelboat, Yellowstone Packet. When it was nearly ashore a second rush of men nearly swamped it too as they all, wounded as well as hale, tried to climb aboard at once.
The swivel-guns aboard both keelboats began to pitch in then. The heavy shot whacked into the toothlike cottonwood pickets.
Finally stubborn Hugh saw too that he was doomed if he stayed up front behind his cottonwood fort. Waving to Augie Neill to follow him, he slithered behind the bloodied dead mustangs. He and Augie found only Jim Clyman and Jim Anderson left alive and behind on the shore.
Hugh caught Jim Clyman’s grim look. “Well, Jim, what do you say?”
“Dummed red devils. But I guess we better swim for it.” Jim Clyman was a strapping young fellow, well over six feet tall with a big bulging forehead and sharp small blue eyes and dark brown hair hanging in ringlets to his shoulders. Like all mountain men he was dressed in buckskin.
Hugh looked out toward the keelboats, saw that the skiffs were safe enough under their bows. Hugh cursed. “Them cowardly neds.” He waved an arm at the blue-clad general for him to order one of the white skiffs back to shore.
The general caught Hugh’s signal. Immediately the general leaned over the railing on the bow and, exposing himself recklessly to the flying shot, made angry commanding gestures at the rowers in the white skiff.
The white skiff hesitated; went out a way on the rousting coffee waters; then went back despite the general’s fierce working mouth and waving blue arms. The rowers aboard the skiff surged up the sides of the keelboat instead, in their haste letting the skiff drift away with some of the riflemen still aboard. The white skiff drifted down river toward the shore. In an instant a dozen pennynaked high-shouldered Rees, clad only in breechcloth and hawkbone headdress, darted from behind their barricade and, whooping and waving knives and tomahawks, ran splashing out into the tan water; and before the white skiff even touched shore, they catapulted into the water and began t
omahawking and slashing at the riflemen. Almost immediately three braves leaped up out of the melee of legs and arms and butts and triumphantly proclaimed coups by waving aloft dripping paleface scalps. A savage roar of triumph burst up from behind the pickets.
A particularly daring brave came out on all fours through the opening in the barricade through which the men had passed in and out the day previous. The high-shouldered brave was dressed like the others, but with a single golden eagle feather in back, and a necklace of grizzly claws. The single eagle feather rode in a socket made of hawk thighbone and it tossed back and forth in the light wind. Mimicking a grizzly, the brave carried what was left of Aaron Stephen’s body, shagging it along in his teeth. The body would have been unrecognizable except for what was left of Aaron’s golden hair. He’d been scalped; his nose had been cut off; his feet and hands were gone; he’d been gutted and castrated; his nipples had been torn off; and even part of his right thigh was gone. The pennyskinned Ree dropped his griesly burden and pretended to tear out lumps of flesh with his teeth, growling, pawing, tearing, in perfect mimicry of a raging grizzly.
Hugh recognized the brave as Bear Mouth, a brother of Stabbed, the Ree policeman. Hugh bellied up behind a dead bay mustang; leveled Old Bullthrower on Bear Mouth; shot him.
The white skiff at the foot of the other keelboat, Yellowstone Packet, started to come out then. It came out a dozen yards and then everybody in it ducked down and the skiff began to drift downstream toward the shore too. Again some high-shoulder pennyskinned braves rushed out, waiting for it to hit shore. But one of the riflemen, a grizzly mountain man, stood over the men and, using his flintlock for a club, drove the pork-eaters back to their oars. They rowed a way; then buckled completely. It was all the mountain man could do to get the skiff back to the Yellowstone Packet’s side again by himself.
Hugh gave the other three still with him on shore a quick flicking look. “Well, lads, Clyman here is right. There’s nothin’ left but to swim for it.”
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