by Mari Sandoz
Back in the saddle the man spurred out to rouse the country. At Crazy Woman Creek he met half-a-dozen men heading for Gillette and the Democratic convention down at Cheyenne. Instead, they scattered to warn the settlers. Then he headed his lathering horse on to Buffalo.
At KC the Invaders knew nothing of Smith's ride but they were wasting ammunition and no telling when the wagons would get through. In the shack Champion was keeping the men back and trying to ease his dying friend and write snatches in the little memo book from his pocket, a little story of an army shooting against two lone men. Between runs around the loopholes he managed to write a few words, or several lines:
It is now about two hours since the first shot. Nick is still alive; they are still shooting and are all around the house. Boys, there is bullets coming in like hail. Them fellows is in such shape I can't get at them. They are shooting from the stable and river and back of the house.
The delay infuriated Canton and the Texans. The joint attack was planned for tonight at Buffalo, with all those men to be killed for bounty, and the loot and booty to take. "What's to keep the whole stinkin' outfit up there from getting away and hitting it for the wild breaks, to pick us off if we follow?" Canton demanded of Wolcott for the tenth time, one way or another.
It was true that the men were worn and hungry, and as is usual with creatures of prey, the urge to kill, and the fear of it, lay very close to the surface here. Old animosities and new ones flared up. Half a dozen of the men were watching each other like coiled rattlers, poised, it seemed, to strike with lead. The saddle-sore DeBillier tried to joke a little, and Wolcott made a puffing circle among the men, stooping to keep his twisted head down as he ran. "I'll get the son of a bitch out of there," he promised, and sent men riding to a ranch a few miles off for hay to burn Champion's place. Two, three hours later they came back without it. This was April; no winter hay within twenty miles.
In the quiet Champion wrote a little more:
Nick is dead, he died about 9 o'clock. I see smoke down at the stable. I think they have fired it. I don't think they intend to let me get away this time.
But the men were just warming their trigger fingers and the toes of the Texas Kid in his tight boots. They made no move to face the gun of Nate Champion. Instead, they settled to waiting, watching, some of them dozing a little, wondering what had become of their wagons. In the shack the man looked all around the valley and then took out the little red book again:
Boys, I don't know what they have done with them two fellows that staid here last night. Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once. They may fool around until I get a good shot before they leave. It's about 3 o'clock now.
Outside somebody saw a wagon, stripped to the running gears, come over the hill from the south, the boy riding the bolster having trouble with the bronc on his team, faunching and shying, trying to run, to drag his gentle old teammate along. Horseback behind the boy came his stepfather, Black Jack Flagg, high up on the Dead List of the Invaders because he ran the settler roundup wagon and had had Johnny Tisdale and his wife and children around the ranch before they moved to the homestead.
There had been no firing around KC for a while and nobody was in sight as the wagon rattled down the hill, past the KC, and out upon the rumbling bridge. By then Flagg had turned his horse back toward the house door for a greeting, and suddenly found himself faced by two men hidden at the corral, one throwing his Winchester down on Flagg. The settler laughed, thinking it was a joke, but then he saw it was a stranger, and, pivoting his horse, he stooped flat over the saddle and spurred for the bridge, bullets flying all around him.
"Shoot the bastard! That's Flagg!" Canton and Elliott both yelled, as though nobody had troubled to fire.
At the first shot the boy had lashed the old mare into a gallop beside the bronc, off the bridge and up the road, until a bullet struck the wild horse and sent him up on his hind legs. By then Flagg was alongside. He helped cut the team loose and with the boy on the gentle mare, they whipped over the ridge. Half a dozen of the Invaders, horseback and hard after them three, four miles, got a couple of bullets from Flagg, in broken country now, and they let him go.
After the sound of rifle fire stopped Champion wrote:
There was a man on a buckboard and one on horseback just passed. They fired on them as they went by. I don't know if they killed them or not. I seen lots of men come out on horses on the other side of the river and take after them. I shot at the men in the stable just now; don't know if I got any or not. I must go and look out again. It don't look as if there is much show of my getting away. I see twelve, fifteen men. One looks like Frank Canton.
With Flagg, so high on the Dead List, gone to rouse the country Wolcott knew a thousand men would probably be riding against them by morning. Somehow they had to cover the sixty miles to Buffalo before he got there. Nick Ray was checked off but there was still Champion, one of the kingpins of the resistance up here.
There was fuming and uneasiness that the wagons hadn't come in with the dynamite, with grub, too, but mainly the dynamite. Finally a couple of horsebackers dragged Flagg's wagon up by their saddle ropes. Planks torn from the stable were laid lengthwise over the bolsters, four, five high, with split pine knots from the wall piled on top, and the little rough brush and weeds from the mangers added. Wolcott, Jack Tisdale, Big Dudley from Texas, and some others pushed this breastwork before them, moving with the north wind. Awkward as a great dung beetle, it crept toward the shack, the men with matches ready, their pistols drawn if Champion made a break for the open.
Through a loophole he saw the go-devil come and planted bullets around the feet of the men, but almost at once they were out of sight and Canton's Winchester, even in Champion's hands, wouldn't carry through the breastwork. Besides, he had been hit again, not bad, but hit, and his ammunition was very low. He glanced over what he had last written:
I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive. Shooting again. I think they will fire the house this time. It's not night yet.
Outside the go-devil wobbled slowly to the barricaded window, flared to the matches, and under the flames and smoke that whipped over the log building the men escaped. As the logs caught, the wind drove the fire running up the wall and over the roof. Smoke blew thick along the ground southward across the bottoms, the grass along its path smoldering from the sparks as the pitch of the dry logs exploded. The Invaders scattered down along its trail, watching for the man to make a run for it, come out shooting.
The flames spread until all the building was a blazing, roaring pile. Yet no one came out. Could Champion have shot himself? It would be a great disappointment.
But he was still alive, still fighting smoke and heat and the falling chunks from the roof. The room was a blazing box, searing Champion's face, his eyes. Now he had to go. He threw a blanket over Nick Ray's body and ended his little account:
The house is all fired. Good-by, boys, if I never see you again.
Nathan D. Champion.
With the memo book in his pocket, his clothes smoldering but his hat set tight, the Winchester carbine in his hand, Nate Champion leapt from the blazing window into the rolling smoke that the wind carried southward thick and low.
"There he goes!" somebody yelled as a shifting gust exposed the bent and running man.
But it was only for a moment and the bullets missed him. He made it to the gulch crossed by the thick smoke, running hard, coughing, blinded. But as he dodged down the cut, he ran straight into Canton and Tom Smith's sharpshooters. Champion fired one shot, just as a bullet from Dudley's pistol got his gun arm. Another struck him in the breast and then a whole volley flung him back, lifted him a little, like a dark overcoat thrown back by the wind, and dropped him flat upon the carbine. The Invaders swarmed in, running, yelling, coughing through the black smoke. Major Wolcott came, too, puffing, and stood looking down upon the shattered and bleeding body a long time. Fina
lly he spoke. "By God, if I had fifty men like you I could whip the whole state of Wyoming."
With their rifles across their arms, most of Wolcott's men were drawn to see this lone man who had stood them off all day. They did not come too close, as though still afraid, and for a long time none of them spoke or moved. Then, as Dudley edged a little closer, perhaps to reach for the Winchester under Champion's arm, his by right of the first hit, Frank Canton pushed in.
"That's my gun," he snarled, and as big Dudley looked angrily around the dark faces, the Wyoming men nodded. It was Frank's gun, all right, lost in the attack the four men had made on Champion on the Powder last fall, but now that seemed less a cowardly running—four men driven out of the house by a barely awakened Nate Champion—certainly less cowardly than these fifty men here who let themselves be held back a whole day.
Somehow no one seemed to think that the score had really been evened, although after a while a card, CATTLE THIEVES BEWARE, was pinned to the blood-soaked, bullet-ripped shirt of the man. By then most of the invaders had scattered to their own needs. Wolcott pulled out his copy of the Dead List and checked off the second name for the day. In the meantime somebody ran through Champion's pockets and drew out the blood-soaked little memo book torn by a bullet. It was passed to Wolcott, who glanced it over quickly and handed it to Canton. He rubbed his name out and handed the book on. There was a shouting from the dying fire, where Billy Irvine and some of the Texans were dragging out the charred body of Nick Ray. A long time the rancher from Nebraska looked at the man he had hated for some deep and private reason. But Nick Ray was only a flattish roll now, black and unrecognizable, smelling more of charcoal than scorched human flesh.
"Phil DuFran ought to see this. Better job than they did burning Mitchell and Ketchum down there in Nebraska."
By now the three supply wagons were coming into the valley and the Invaders got their first hot meal, their horses a little grain. The three men hit got their wounds dressed as well as could be done, now that the expedition had lost Dr. Penrose. Two of them were sent back to Douglas, to go on to Cheyenne if Douglas proved too unfriendly. The captured Jones and Walker demanded pay for their stuff burned: their guns, bedrolls, even their overcoats and Walker's $50 fiddle. The economical Billy Irvine wanted Walker to accept Champion's Stetson in place of the one he lost in the fire. Finally Bob Tisdale, son of Jack, the senator, gave them a note to his ranch for blankets, wearing gear, and a little grub. From there the two men were to be taken south, out of the country. "And keep your mouths shut if you want to go on living," they were warned.
Canton could hardly hold himself together while the others ate and swallowed burning coffee from the tin cups. "Night's coming on, and no telling what's happening to our men up to Buffalo," he kept reminding Wolcott. Finally the expedition started on the night ride of thirty miles to the ranch managed by Baxter and the fresh horses Shonsey promised. They rode hard, still hoping to make Buffalo by dawn. At Baxter's they switched saddles to new horses and set off wearily once more. They were out of the thin snow by now, with only thirty miles to Buffalo, the grained horses rearing and bucking in the frosted, cloudy night air, hot to go.
Toward the Carr ranch on the Crazy Woman old Pap Whitcomb got off to put an ear to the ground. There were riders up ahead somewhere, many horsebackers and stopping out in the sagebrush, he said. In a little while one rifle shot cut a red streak through the darkness, apparently a signal to the Invaders, because they swerved, snipped the Carr fences, and, following the dark blur of Shonsey's horse, swung around through broken country and back to the Buffalo road. They changed horses again at the Hesse ranch and once more at Harris TA, empty but with the horses ready. They were only fourteen miles from Buffalo now and Wolcott ordered a short rest. In the meantime Charley Ford, the foreman, wanted to ride over home to see about his wife, Wolcott grumbling at this delay almost as much as Canton. Would one of Custer's sergeants have asked to go see his wife when the Sioux camp was just ahead?
Big Jim Dudley, who wished he could get back to his wife in Texas that easy, had had saddle trouble all the way and now insisted on going with Ford to get another horse, an easier rider. They didn't come back and finally a cowboy loped in through the April dark. Dudley had tried a big tender-mouthed gray with his hard Spanish bit and was thrown. In the bucking the Winchester was jerked from the scabbard. It went off, shot Dudley in the thigh.
The story sounded pretty tall but plainly Dudley was no bronc peeler. He was, however, one of the first to hit the escaping Champion, so Wolcott borrowed Ford's spring wagon and sent the wounded men to the hospital at Fort McKinney up near Buffalo. "Remember to say he's a cowpuncher looking for work, and got shot when his horse threw him and the gun," he ordered.
The Invaders straggled away, Canton far ahead, determined to make the last hitch without a stop. But with the graying dawn two men came spurring in—Phil DuFran and Sutherland, the relative of Hesse's wife. Phil had been planted in a saloon at Buffalo as lookout. Always pleasant and agreeable, he managed to talk to everybody in spite of his known connection with Man-burner Olive and the Association.
"Turn back! Turn back!" he warned from far off. A mob of at least 100 men was on the road here, the whole country around Buffalo up and riding. To this Sutherland agreed, with some uneasy side talk to Hesse.
Wolcott roared his fury at the blunderers everywhere. Now he needed the ammunition in the wagons but he couldn't weaken his force to send back for them, or even protect them from the rustlers. They had to dig in some place themselves.
"Back to the TA!" he commanded, and spurred his horse into a run that showered pebbles into the dawn-gray sagebrush.
Now Canton, Smith, and the other range protectors had the ranchers on their side. They rode to overtake the major. "We'll never fight our way out of the TA alive!" he protested. "We'll be starved out."
"Burnt out!" another added, with horror in his voice.
"Perhaps we should make an orderly retreat to the railroad," Teschemacher suggested, his Harvard accent still clear although he had been separated from his sleeping bag in the wagons far too long. But Hesse and the others with ranches up here insisted on a hard ride for Buffalo, agreeing with Canton's "Hell! We can't quit the country now. That means giving up everything we got!"
Wolcott whacked his loaded quirt hard against the swell of his saddle. "Goddammnit, who's in command here? It's all arranged with the senators in Washington to get us troops any time we need them, and I got plans for a little bushwhacking somewheres along the road if they have to come—empty a few of the McClellans, make it look like the damned rustlers done it. That ought to get Van Horn shooting in the right direction."
Reluctantly the men fell in behind the major and now Smith found himself blocked by the Texans. "Give me my pay. I'm heading home," one demanded, for all.
"You try it and you'll carry something besides money in that belly belt of yourn," Smith roared out loud enough for all those gathered around him to hear. And because his hand was on his gun, and most of the Texans here were only kids and odd-job men, they fell in behind him. But Smith reined back behind the drags so at least his back was safe, with Shonsey and Elliott riding flank for him.
Up ahead Wolcott spurred on as to an overwhelming attack, but there was uneasiness among his men. A couple of them slipped away into the canyons. One of them was Tom Horn. He was more determined than ever to work alone, from ambush, clean, with nobody shooting back.
At Buffalo, Sheriff Red Angus had listened to Terrence Smith's story of the attack on KC and then headed right out there, hoping to stop the killing, even though he knew the invasion was aimed at him first of all. Two forces were raised, one to follow him toward KC and intercept the Invaders, the rest to defend Buffalo.
In fourteen hours Angus was back from the 120 mile ride, a dour and an angry man. He slid heavily from the settler's horse they had borrowed on the way back, and told the gathering crowd what he had found. The Invaders were gone, the KC a smoking pile
of ashes in the new light snow that lay over the bottoms. A man, probably Nick Ray, had been dragged out of the fire, burnt to a cinder, another scorched offering to the cow. Champion lay where he had fallen, the snow caught upon him unthawed, reddened on his torn breast and all around him, but pure white on his hair and mustache, the eye sockets drifted full.
Now nobody could remain neutral. Angrily men from everywhere streamed to the main street to be deputized to capture the Invaders, hold them for the brutal murders, hold them or something better. In the meantime a messenger rode in from Dunning, the man that Ijams of the Association had hired up in Idaho. The messenger told the story of the recruiting, the bounty, so much a head for every man they wanted killed—including the sheriff, county officials, businessmen. This news spread over town like a prairie fire in a high wind. Foote, the storekeeper, rode through town on his black pacing stallion, his long white hair and beard blowing to both sides, raising men for the fight. "My doors are open to you!" he shouted into the raw wind. "Take anything you need: guns, ammunition, saddles, grub. Take everything you need to fight the White Cap Invaders!"
In the meantime Sheriff Angus had gone to the Buffalo National Guard for protection of the town, for help to capture the Invaders, and was told Parmalee had special notice from the governor not to move to any request except on special orders from him no matter about the law of Wyoming, compelling response to the sheriff's call. The telegraph was still down for Angus, at least, and so he swore in 100 of the waiting men as his deputies.
"Take the Invaders prisoners if you can but they are murderers, man burners!" the terse-mouthed Scotsman told them, his voice hoarse from weariness, the long, cold ride, and the fury and shock of what he had seen. Then he sent the men out under Snider, the former sheriff, Arapaho Brown, and Jack Flagg. Two hundred more men joined the Defenders, with more and more hurrying up as they rode out to meet the Invasion.