“By alternate companies, form as skirmishers, left and right. Draw pistols. Prepare to charge. Trumpeter, sound the charge!” As the crisp, tingling notes sounded, Danvers drew his saber. “Chaaaaarge!”
Haunches flexed, the big Dragoon horses bounded forward. Clods of turf flew in the air around them. Snorting and grunting, they increased their pace increased with each step. Quickly the Dragoons closed on their enemy. Suddenly, frightened faces turned toward them. Isolated islands of resistance formed here and there. The big, broad-shouldered soldiers in the two-tone blue uniforms grew huge in the eyes of the Pawnee. At extreme pistol range, the chilling order came.
“Take aim . . . fire! Take aim . . . fire! Take aim . . . fire!” On they thundered. “Fire at will!”
At that point, the flankers returned and struck the enemy in the rear. Quickly the huge, six-shot Dragoon pistols turned the tide. The Pawnee held fast for a moment, then broke in wild disarray, to be swept from the field. Within minutes, the battle ended. Silence settled over the field, save for the groans of the wounded. Abruptly, Preacher stormed up to Danvers.
Seeming furious, he lashed out verbally. “I thought I said no damn trumpets.” Then he grinned broadly. “But it sure was a sweet, purty sight.”
Danvers relaxed his usual brittle, disapproving attitude toward Preacher. “Yes, it is. A full-out, Dragoon charge is awe-inspiring.” Then he frowned. “I see only one advantage coming out of this fierce, protracted fighting. It has blooded these green troops.” He had not finished with that.
“This skirmish could have been, should have been, avoided. I want a plan drawn up that will insure we are not delayed by such actions. Those savages are supposed to be on friendly terms. What can we expect when we encounter real hostiles?”
It had been intended to be rhetorical, but Preacher took delight in answering. “More’n likely you’ll git yer hair lifted.”
Despite himself, Danvers cut his eyes to Preacher and acknowledged the remark, which made it more to the point. “That is not amusing. Any more delays like this will make us seriously overdue on our arrival in the high country.”
Preacher considered the colonel’s upset over the raid to be excessive. Yet, he bided his time for the present. What would come, would come.
Early in the afternoon, the forsaken wagon train arrived in what was seen as a safe haven tucked into a fold of the northeast slope of the Medicine Bow Mountains, a lush, gentle valley spread along a buttress of the foothills. The clear water of the Platte River ran in front of their hidden vale. Their tired eyes explored the bounty and found it good.
Isaac Warner halted his wagon at the entrance and repeated his instruction to all who came by. “Go on in, find a likely space and settle in. We’ll organize a hunting party soon as everybody is unhitched.”
Each family quickly staked out areas of the belly-high grass for their draft animals and saddle stock to graze on. The women set about preparing firepits and rigging lines to air out long-confined clothing and blankets.
With her chores completed, Eve Billings ambled over to the site selected by the Honeycutts. Eve spoke her innermost thoughts to Hattie as she approached. “What a pure delight, all the water we want.”
“And pure, too,” Hattie added with a shake of her gray-streaked auburn hair. She had started the trek with uniformly coppery tresses.
“There will be plenty of game. And the chance for our livestock to fatten up for a long haul.” She saw the older woman strain to move a boulder that she wanted elsewhere. “Here, let me help you with that.”
They worked together for the better part of an hour. Eve soon noticed that neighborliness had once more come to life all over the encampment. Gone was the bickering and petty spite of the trail. It took far less time than usual to establish comfortable living areas. With the work out of the way, and the animals at graze, everyone seemed to decide at once that the time had come to wash away the dust and grit of the sun-blasted Basin.
While the adults and older youths decorously washed themselves in the shallows of the North Platte River, Eve watched as Charlie joined the other boys under fourteen and, along with the others, gleefully threw off his clothes and leaped into the chill water of the river. Eve could only cluck her tongue and shake her head. Not a streak of modesty in the lot of them. How like his father as a boy Charlie is, she thought.
Sudden tears sprang to her eyes at thinking of the man she had loved so dearly and who had died in her arms. She lowered her head to conceal her private grief from the others. Slowly her suppressed sobs, changed from gulps to sighs, and at last into long, slow, deep breaths. Eve looked up to see a sparkling, naked Charlie leap from a slippery boulder into the water in an awkward dive. A worried mother’s words escaped her before she could cut them off.
“Charlie! Look out!”
A deep rumble of thunder came from the northwest to drown out her appeal. Swiftly, the temperature dropped fifteen degrees. The children ran shouting from the water to hurriedly wipe themselves down and dress. Eve chuckled softly. At least there was something that would get Charlie into clothes without an argument. If only Howard could see him now, she thought with fierce pride. This time, fond, loving tears filled her eyes.
She glanced up to see a blurry figure on horseback across the river. Curious, and wary, Eve wiped away mistiness to discover the same Indian she had seen nearly a week before. Behind him were foothills and huge columns of boiling black clouds. Again he raised his lance in a salute and smiled at her. Mystified, Eve stood, the hem of her dress dripping, and watched him until he turned and slowly rode away.
THIRTEEN
Celestial keglers made strike after strike ahead of the route of march. From north to south, the horizon had turned a boiling black. Skeletal fingers, edged in orange, lanced through the obsidian stew. With a swiftness known only to denizens of the West, the towering, anvil-headed cumulonimbus arched out to engulf the whole dome of the sky.
Preacher had been watching the approach of the storm. He prudently exchanged his hunting shirt for one of faded green flannel and his fringed buckskin jacket for an oiled-skin capote. His floppy felt went into his saddlebag along with his skins. A spanking new, stiff-brimmed one took its place. Preacher used a fist to punch the crown into a faint resemblance of its original shape.
While he industriously made these alterations in his clothing, the thunder rumbled, increasingly louder. To his dismay, when he looked back at the column, the Dragoons appeared to ride along in blissful ignorance.
“Them fellers is gonna get a first-class soakin’,” he confided to Three Sleeps.
Norris nodded. “I reckon so. They’ve got them those fancy India-rubber capotes they use for ground sheets. I wonder why nobody’s given the order to break them out?”
Preacher’s face twisted into an expression of sudden enlightenment. “Now, that’s the entire trouble with the Army. Somebody’s always got to tell you what to do. They yell and cuss at a body until he forgets how to think for hisself, an’ then they don’t let them anyway.”
Three Sleeps removed his coonskin cap and scratched at a thick thatch of silver-blond hair. “I think I understand what you jist said, but I ain’t gonna answer any questions on it.”
Preacher started to make a wounded reply when the light breeze that had been in their faces dropped to dead still. That held for several heartbeats; then a strong, cold blast rushed at them out of the east. At once, the temperature plummeted ten degrees and continued to fall.
Preacher tightened the chin strap of his hat; the brim fluttered wildly. “B’God, here she comes.”
A tremendous peal of thunder came right on the heels of a searing, white tongue of lightning that slammed into a pile of boulders a hundred yards from the trail. The ground shook with the violence of it. Despite the powerful gust of wind, the air tingled with the scent of ozone.
Insubstantial shouts came from the column. Preacher looked down to see the Dragoons halted, dismounting now, and digging into the cylind
rical valises behind their saddles. From them, the troops hurriedly took their water-proof ponchos and donned them.
“That seems to have got their attention,” he said dryly.
Widely spaced, huge, fat drops made silver streaks in the air. Another blinding flash and boom. The thunder erupted directly overhead and continued to grind and growl across the sky. Echoes of its passage bounced from the sun-baked ground. More rain fell, thicker now, with the main downpour close behind. It arrived with a seething hiss and swept like a giant’s broom across the ridge where Preacher and his friends sat their mounts.
Tarnation made wall-eyes and twitched his ears. His hide followed suit when the heavenly cannonade fired another battery of forked electricity at six wide-spaced places in rapid succession. Down below, Preacher saw the Dragoons had a lot of trouble with their horses. Having dismounted, they could barely control the animals in the fierce teeth of the storm.
“Those boys are gonna lose some horses,” opined Antoine Revier.
Preacher nodded agreement. “I reckon they will.” Another near miss by a sizzling bolt put Preacher in motion. “Let’s quit playin’ target for that stuff.”
Halfway down the grade toward the column, the rattle and drumbeat of swiftly approaching hail reached the ears of Preacher. He drubbed heels into Tarnation’s ribs and streaked for a low, spreading plain tree that stood in valiant isolation in the shelter of a gully. He reached it only seconds behind his companions.
Shredded leaves fell in green confetti around them, while out in the open, the Dragoons did not fare so well. Two horses, painfully pelted with fist-sized ice stones, squealed and reared. Rain-slicked, the reins slipped through the hands of the Dragoons who held them. At once, the frightened, hurting animals bolted.
In spite of orders to the contrary, their hapless riders ran after them. In no time, the Dragoons and their mounts disappeared over a low swell. Preacher spat on a fallen leaf.
“There goes a couple of damn fools.”
“You got the right of it, Preacher,” Antoine Revier agreed.
“Any bets as to who’ll have to go after them?” Three Sleeps Norris put in.
Preacher grimaced. “None at all. Soon’s this downpour ends, we’d best be making tracks.”
For all its violence, the storm had been a welcome sight for the unfortunate members of the wagon train. Eve Billings had hurried back in time to gather in the bedding and clothes she had out to air. The rain, when it came, was warm and inviting. At the insistence of her children, Eve relented and erected a screen of spare wagon-top canvas. Within its confines, Charlie and Anna cavorted, bare as the day they had been born. The only protest the youngsters made was when Eve produced a bar of soap.
“Mind you do your ears, Charlie Billings,” she admonished.
Smiling and humming an old tune, she sat out the tempest in the shelter of the wagon box. Blue-lipped and shivering, Charlie and Anna had held out to the last drop, then had oohed and aahed over a rainbow that formed on the northern end of the storm’s back. At last, they climbed, dripping, over the tailgate. Eve toweled them dry.
“Ow, Mom, that hurts,” Charlie complained of the stiff, prickly cloth.
“Yeah, that hurth,” Anna lisped.
Another sacrifice of the trail. Eve had been able to wash clothes in the water of streams they had passed, many of which were rich in lime and iron particles. Her supply of bluing had long since run out, and she regretted the stiffness her efforts put into the items she had washed. She would have given anything to capture barrels of that marvelously soft rain water.
Now that the tempest had rolled away to the east, the leaves of beech and oak, and pine needles, dropped, as if doing a slow dance, into puddles that had formed on the long-dry ground. The pioneers began to stir in their wagons. Eve reflected on her mystery Indian as she laid a fire from dry wood that she’d sheltered from the elements in a net sling under the floor of the Conestoga.
Obviously he was not hostile, she told herself. Why was it he only appeared to her? She had mentioned him after the first sighting, but none of the men had admitted to seeing the lone figure. Gus Beecher had even snidely suggested that she was seeing things. Maybe she was, her mind mocked.
Dismissing that, she knelt by the pyramid of sticks and pulled a tuft of oily wood tinder from the brass box. She struck sparks from flint and steel and gently blew an orange spot in the kindling into lively flames. Careful not to burn her fingers, she shoved the lintwood in under a mound of shavings. They reluctantly ignited and sent larger, hotter tendrils of fire among the larger pieces of wood. She looked up as Charlie approached. He was dressed as usual, shirtless, in his one-piece overalls, bare toes squishing in the mud.
“Mom, I want to go with the hunters. I’ll get us something good.”
“I’m sorry, but no. It’s not safe. Some of the men can’t . . .” Eve cut herself off short. She had admonished herself not to criticize the men in the group after Charlie had repeated her scathing evaluation of their abilities weeks ago. It did little good this time, as Charlie provided her opinion of their marksmanship.
“Hit the broad side of a barn.”
Mad at herself more than the boy, Eve spoke hotly. “Charles Ryan, what have I told you about speaking ill of your elders?”
“Oh, boy, am I in trouble?” His lower lip protruded in a pink, wet pout.
Eve looked down on his sweet face and could only shake her head in the negative. Then she had to turn away to keep from breaking out in gales of laughter.
After two hours of searching, Preacher had nothing to show for it but some muddy hoofprints. Again he cursed the Army, and Lieutenant Colonel Danvers in particular. The muddle-headed nincompoop had insisted that at least some of the guides remain with the column. His idea of some turned out to be all save Preacher. Well, Mrs. Houghton’s little boy Arthur had not turned out dense.
Preacher figured it was Danvers’s idea to get him killed by the Pawnee, which likely had happened to the idiots he attempted to track. He sighed heavily and urged Tarnation forward. While the miles ticked off, he grumbled about the stupidity of officer-type soldiers or gnawed on a strip of jerky which he had softened between saddle and blanket.
With only three hours of daylight left, he at last found the missing men right enough. A big cloud of bluebottle flies led him the last fifty yards to a dry wash that cut like a knife slash across the prairie. They made quite a sight, one that wrenched even as experienced a stomach as Preacher’s.
They had been stripped, staked out, mutilated, killed and scalped. Though not necessarily in that order, Preacher noted. One had been slit from sternum to groin, and had his private parts stuffed in his mouth. The other had been cut deeply from crotch to ankle of both legs and armpits to wrists. It had been done slowly, Preacher reckoned from the contorted condition of the unfortunate fellow’s muscles.
Cautiously, Preacher looked around the scene. His keen eyes took in everything. First, he noted that there was no sign of their uniforms, weapons or gear. There was plenty of sign of Pawnee warriors. Oddly enough, one of the dead men’s horses placidly chomped grass at the bottom of the ravine. It had been stripped of all equipage.
“Damn an’ double damn,” Preacher swore aloud.
Moving with care, he walked to Tarnation’s side. There Preacher fetched a short length of rope from a latigo tie and fashioned a crude hackamore. He approached the Dragoon mount with patience. When the creature’s bulging eye first registered his presence, Preacher began to coo to it and speak softly.
“There now. There, nobody’s gonna hurt you. Good boy. Stand still, ya hear?”
Step by mindful step, Preacher’s moccasined feet took him up to the heaving flank of the horse. He touched the animal lightly, ran his hand along the curve of its back to the neck. Another pace forward, a second. Murmuring platitudes, he raised the makeshift halter. Then, with a deft movement, Preacher slipped it over the muzzle.
Only a slight jump came from the creature. Preache
r patted his arched neck firmly and blew gently in a cocked ear. Then he carefully led the beast away from the patch of grass.
“Come on, boy, you’ve got an unpleasant task to do.”
After adding a lead rope to the hackamore and fixing that to a ground anchor, Preacher cut free the dead Dragoons. He wrapped them in his ground sloth and an old blanket and slung them over the back of the captured horse. A nervous twitching rewarded his efforts. With a grunt of acceptance of a bad job done the best he could, he mounted Tarnation and took up the lead. Mindful of the bodies he brought, he put the noses of the horses in the direction of the column. He did not relish making a report to Danvers on what happened.
Preacher had predicted the result accurately. Lieutenant Colonel Danvers stomped back and forth in his tent, cursed and railed, then concluded his tirade with a wholly uncalled-for accusation.
“Why did you not get to them sooner?”
Preacher cocked his head to one side. “I don’t put up with that kind of talk from you or anybody. What did you expect me to do? I counted sign of fully sixteen Pawnee warriors around them bodies. I ain’t fool enough to ride in among ’em and pass the time o’ day, or bargain for the release of those idiots what ran after their mounts in hostile country. Besides, I don’t think it would have done much good. They looked to have been dead since shortly after the storm passed by. Now, Colonel, I’ll accept your apology, or I’ll demand satisfaction right here an’ now.”
Surprise painted Danvers’s face. “Duel with you? Why, you’re not even a gentleman.”
Preacher looked astonished. “I didn’t intend on no duel. Death’s a serious matter.” He turned abruptly and started for the front flap of the tent.
Blackfoot Messiah Page 12