Slowly he pulled the mouth of another bottle from his lips, slathered up the thick, sweet brandy with his tongue, and kicked at the corner of the canvas still draped over a portion of the white man’s plunder. Shore Crossing knew a whiskey keg when he saw one. Forget this sweet, thick syrup that he had been drinking. And forget those bottles of bubbly foam that tickled his nose.
He had just discovered more of the potent, hard-smelling, mind-numbing, courage-endowing whiskey!
* * *
By the time the sky became gray enough to recognize the tops of the waving prairie grass from the sky behind it, Jennie Norton realized the war party must have left.
She hadn’t heard anything from them for some minutes … or was it hours? She had no way of knowing, numbed the way her mind was with the terror, not to mention the pain in her wounds.
Jennie had torn a wide strip from the hem of her long dress and made two crude bandages with it, knotting them tightly around both calves. Later on she saw no fresh, moist blood on the bandages, so Jennie figured the bleeding had stopped. Still, she could think of nothing to do for that ankle of hers, lying swollen and twisted at the end of one leg, the tender, puffy skin already growing purple as indigo dye.
She began reckoning how she might drag herself into the brush and start for Grangeville on her belly once she got rid of the confining skirt that would only get tangled and caught on the clinging branches. No more than two miles this side of the settlement lay the John W. Crooks place.… If she could just reach it before tomorrow morning … maybe she might find she’d have enough strength to crawl that far—
Jennie heard voices. Rolling onto her shoulder as she tugged the bloodstained skirt down off her bloomers, she realized it was Moore’s voice. He must be talking with Lew Day.
Amazing that the courier was still alive. Last night in the dark when Day fell silent, Jennie was sure the man had died. Just the way her Benjamin had gone quiet, slipping further and further from her as the night crawled on. Lew Day was wounded more times than her Ben … so why should he live with all those holes in him and Benjamin slide into death?
“Mrs. Norton?”
The hired man’s voice.
“It’s Joe Moore, Mrs. Norton,” he called to her again. “You got any water over there for Mr. Day?”
“N-no,” she said, finding her voice cracking from disuse.
After Joe asked if there might be anything in the wagon bed, she told him she couldn’t stand up to find out because of her leg wounds, because of that broken ankle. Then Jennie asked him why he just didn’t come on over to check in the wagon himself.
“Them Injuns might’ve left some scouts to keep watch on us, ma’am,” Moore warned. “They’re likely watching us, so if I stand up—”
“You’re right, Mr. Moore,” she confessed with a bitter sigh. “Your guns are the only thing kept the savages off us last night. If you move out of hiding, if they shoot you … then they’ll come in here for the rest of us.”
“Truth is, Mrs. Norton,” Moore admitted, “I can’t get over there myself. One of ’em made a lucky shot in on me and put a bullet in my hip. Cain’t move my leg—”
“Please just get me some water!” Lew Day begged her, interrupting the hired man.
She spotted the satchel the Chamberlins had left behind, its flap open and the contents half-spilled across the ground at the edge of the road where the family had taken off into the dark. Among the waxed bundles of foodstuffs and sulphur-headed lucifers lay a tin cup.
“I got a cup, Mr. Day,” she declared. “Maybe I can find a puddle of rainwater what ain’t dried up. Or just scrape some of last night’s dew off the leaves if I have to.”
“Any—anything, Mrs. Norton,” he pleaded in a splintered voice. “P-please.”
Dragging herself over to retrieve the cup, Jennie pulled herself into the brush by planting one elbow and inching forward, then planting her other elbow before dragging herself a little farther—foot by foot, no more than that at a time.
She found some broad-leafed prairie cabbage that had collected a lot of droplets through the chilly night. Lying among the thick clumps, Jennie licked one leaf after another until her mouth was no longer so dry. Then she began holding a single leaf over the cup and scraping its glistening surface against the rolled, soldered edge of the tin. Leaf by leaf, she slowly drew each one back, collecting the moisture drop by drop as it spilled down the inside of the cup for Lew Day—
Hoofbeats!
Oh, God! Now they’ve come back to finish us!
She twisted with a jerk of terror, pain shooting clear into her groin. Gasping, she stared down at her legs, afraid she would wet herself in fear—finding her bloomers muddy, grimy, bloodied from her two wounds.
The hoofbeats were coming closer. Several horses, many horses!
Jennie Norton knocked over the cup as she pressed her head down into the grass and covered it with her forearms. Hoping they would not see her, not hear her breathing, not spot her trembling here in the brush.
A horse … just one, was at the wagon. Footsteps—one of the sonsabitches stomping around the wagon, likely finding her Benjamin dead … Oh, no … the heathen was coming toward her now—
Jennie heard the click of a hammer, not knowing if it was a pistol or a rifle. Knowing only that the godless red savage was about to shoot her. Better that than to defile her. Better to die with a bullet in her brain than to live with that nightmarish vision of them rutting between her legs for all the rest of her days—
“No! Don’t shoot!” Joe Moore screamed. “For Chrissakes—it’s us! Can’t you see it’s us!”
She heard the footsteps shuffle even closer in the grass as the hired man pleaded some more.
“That’s Mrs. Norton!” Moore shouted. “For the love of God—that’s Jennie Norton!”
More horses came pounding up suddenly, lots of hooves now. Voices calling out. Angry shouting.
Gradually she opened her eyes and dared peek through the crook of her elbow at the man standing over her.
“M-my God, ma’am. You … why—all covered in mud and bloodied up the way you are—I took you for an Injun in the brush.”
He knelt beside her as she slowly inched her arm down from her face. And she realized he must see that she was crying.
“It’s all right now, Mrs. Norton. My name’s Frank Fenn. We come to get you. Come to tell that your boy got through, ma’am. By the grace of the Lord … your boy Hill got through to Grangeville.”
Chapter 22
June 15, 1877
Captain David Perry pulled his hat down snugly on his head and stepped out into the grayish first light of this fifteenth day of June. He stopped at the edge of the porch and returned the salutes of those two soldiers who next stepped around their mounts and climbed into the saddle, joining a civilian already on horseback.
Then Perry asked, “Corporal Lytte, do you fully understand your orders?”
Joseph Lytte of Perry’s F Company, First U.S. Cavalry, nodded as he settled in the saddle between Private John Schoor, also of the same company, and half-breed Joe Rabusco, one of the agency interpreters. “Yes sir, Colonel. We’re dispatched to Mount Idaho to look up a man named Loyal P. Brown who sent you a message about the Injuns stirring up some trouble.”
“And when you find Mr. Brown?”
“You want us to see for ourselves if the Injuns are causing trouble for the settlers in that area, Colonel.”
“And besides doing that snooping around for me, what else have I asked you to do, Corporal?”
The thirty-three-year-old, Ohio-born Lytte grinned a little sheepishly before he admitted, “You want us to make Brown and the rest of ’em feel like the army is staying right on top of things.”
“Yes, Corporal. Make those civilians feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of their army. Mr. Rabusco, you are under this soldier’s command, understood?”
“Yeah, Colonel,” the half-breed replied tersely.
�
�Very well.” Perry snapped another salute to his soldiers and took a step back from the edge of the porch as the breeze picked up, scented with rain. “I’ll expect you men back before the week is out.”
The captain watched the three turn their horses away, heading east for the road that would lead them south along Lapwai Creek before it climbed over Craig’s Mountain to the Cottonwood, on across the Camas Prairie where the Non-Treaty bands had been gathered for more than a week now, on to the community of Mount Idaho to find Loyal P. Brown.
When they were gone from sight, he stepped back into his office, closed the door, and sighed, weary of all the paperwork a real soldier had to do anymore, now that there were no more Confederates to fight or Modocs to round up and hang, now that it appeared everything had been put to rest over in Sioux country.
Now his First Cavalry had become nothing more than constables with no Indian wars flaring. Perry sank into his wooden chair with a squeak, realizing that in the span of less than five short years he had become nothing more than a bureaucrat.
* * *
Harry Mason had them running the best they could—what with the women slowed down by their ankle-length dresses and the little children being dragged along in spite of their short strides. Harry figured their one chance to get through to Mount Idaho was to make it to the boat landing near the Osborn cabin a half-mile or so up the Salmon. Maybe they could row upstream part of the way, then go in overland once they couldn’t row any farther. Maybe a good place to put in and start cross-country would be that French claim, where some of Chodoze’s parley-voo friends worked their placer outfit.
Bill Osborn, French Frank, and Harry all carried small burlap bags now, each of them filled with what food the warriors had neglected to leave behind in the ransacked house and store. Back behind a loose board in the pantry Helen Walsh had located a small cache of food. In one stone crock was some bread and a little butter cake, and in another crock they found some cold beef. Hungry as everyone was after what they had endured last night, Harry had nonetheless allowed no one any more than a bite or two; then the rest was stuffed away in those three sacks for their journey over the White Bird Divide to safety.
Only old man Shoemaker had elected to stay behind at the store. “I got to let them calves out to graze,” he declared. “’Sides, them Injuns don’t think an ol’ coot like me is worth a bullet. Now you go on by yourself, Mr. Mason—and get the rest of them outta here.”
So they had darted from the store as Shoemaker calmly headed for the barn. Mason wondered if the old man would live out the day.
Less than ten minutes later when they were approaching the boat landing, a party of warriors came into view up the road. Spotting the white people, the horseman began to whoop and bellow.
“Back to the house!” Harry roared, pushing, shoving the children and women before him as he pitched his burlap sack aside.
Sweeping up young Edward Walsh in his arms, Mason was the last to reach the store with his nephew, just as the war party burst into the yard. Osborn already had French Frank and the two women dragging crates and furniture up to the doors, barricading themselves the best they could, while Harry went to the back wall and used his pocketknife to chip through a wide spot in the chinking between the logs. Through that tiny hole he poked the barrel of his Winchester and prepared to knock one of the bastards off his pony as they began to dismount at the side of the house.
“Don’t, Harry!” William Osborn warned.
“Why the hell not?” he demanded, angry at the interruption.
“Maybe we got a chance to talk our way outta this,” Osborn reasoned. “But you go shooting one of ’em, there won’t be no talk. I know a little Nez Perce, so maybe I can palaver our way out of this.”
“Bill’s right,” Elizabeth Osborn begged. “We gotta give it a try, Harry.”
Mason wanted to shoot one of the sons of bitches anyway, to go down fighting. But seeing how the group beseeched him, he relented. As he slowly dragged the barrel of his carbine from that hole in the chinking, Harry was suddenly struck with the overwhelming sense that he was as good as dead right where he stood.
Osborn turned away and stepped over to the side of the only window in that front wall, where he hollered, “Clatawa!”
“What’s that mean?” Mason demanded.
“I told them to leave.”
“They aren’t gonna leave,” Harry snorted with despair. “And we’re never getting out of here alive either.”
“I’ll try getting them to talk,” Osborn suggested as he slipped between Mason and the Frenchman, inching up to that lone window and putting himself in full view.
An immediate volley rattled the timbers surrounding the window and splintered through the door nearby. Bullets came crashing through the panes.
“Give ’em billy-be-hell!” Mason shouted as he leaped to his feet and whipped around, pointing the Winchester out the window.
French Frank stepped into the open with the other two at the same moment, preparing to fire back at the warriors, when the Nez Perce released a second volley.
“You g-goddamned devils!” Osborn groaned as a bullet toppled him. He spilled backward, tripping over the Frenchman who already lay twitching on the floor, a bullet hole in his forehead.
Mason staggered to the side, propping himself against the windowsill, doing his best to hold onto the rifle, to pull the trigger again—but finding he couldn’t, not with the way blood was streaming from both arms. The weapon clumsily tumbled from his grasp as he settled backward onto his haunches, listening to the shrill cries of the warriors out front, the haunted wailing of the women and children behind him echoing in his ears.
As he peered down at himself, Harry could feel the painful heaviness of his left arm. But his right forearm was shattered. The bullet that had gone through the left had splintered the Winchester’s forestock before it drove shards of lead and wood into what was now a useless right arm.
A third noisy volley made him flinch as pieces of timber and chinking went spinning overhead. Rubbing grit from his eyes, Mason spotted the two thin tick mattresses supported on their rope-and-pine frames.
“Helen! Get everyone under them beds!”
As the two women shuffled the children toward the beds at the back of the room, Mason tried one last time to hoist up his repeater. Perhaps if he could only rest it across one knee, he might just get one, maybe two of them, when the bastards came busting through the door.
But he couldn’t even pick it up with the weakened left arm, much less the shattered right arm. Instead, he sprawled onto the floor and began pumping his legs, shoving himself across the floor toward the others when Helen started shrieking in horror. Twisting about was agony, but Mason looked back over his shoulder, finding a bare bronze arm at the broken window, one of the bastards swinging a burning bundle of smoky rags onto the cabin’s puncheon floor, where it smoked and raised a horrible stench.
Harry crawled all the faster as the children set up a deafening caterwaul, what with the stifling smoke filling the room. Just as he reached the mattress where his sister Helen was waving him in, Mason turned back to look at the door where the sons of bitches were slamming themselves against the weight of those crates and sacks. At the window he spotted a warrior standing boldly in relief as he hurled a second bundle of coal-oil-soaked rags into the cabin.
Dragging himself across the last yard of bare floor, Mason slid beneath the bed where Helen held a corner of the tick up for him. Elizabeth Osborn had the last of her children scampering beneath the other bed as more of the warriors joined in to heave their shoulders against the door, gradually shoving the massive wooden crates and hundredweight sacks of beans back so they could leap inside after their quarry.
With no more gunfire coming from the house, Mason brooded, the bastards know we’re good as soup. They won’t have to burn us out now—
“Kill ’em, Harry!” Helen Walsh growled as she shoved her revolver into his bloody left hand. “Kill as many as y
ou can!”
But he didn’t have the strength.
Staring down at his lap where she’d laid the pistol, he couldn’t get the hand to grip that weapon, much less raise it and fire at the warriors who were storming in around the barricade of boxes and bags, all of them shrieking in victory.
He felt so helpless: “If … I could only shoot—”
Suddenly the thin tick was yanked back and there stood three warriors staring down at him. Sick grins crossed the red bastards’ faces as they shouted and pointed to the other bed. Then, as Mason watched, two warriors leaped onto the other mattress and began to jump up and down, laughing and screeching in evil joy until they flushed the children and Elizabeth out of hiding.
From out of nowhere one of the warriors kicked him. Harry cried out and tried to raise his left arm to protect himself as the son of a bitch kicked him again. Then another warrior seized Mason’s right wrist, yanking on the shattered arm.
A hot, blinding pain shot straight up his arm, through his shoulder, and right into the back of his head as the warrior dragged Mason from behind the tick and into the middle of the floor while the white man screamed nonstop in utter agony.
Foot by foot, the Nez Perce warrior repeatedly lunged with Mason again and again across the floor. The others kicked at him, stomped on his head, and spit at him drunkenly.
It became more than he could stand, reckoning how they were going to drag out this torture for as long as they could … make it last for their own goddamned enjoyment.
The drunken bastards. Red niggers never could handle their goddamned whiskey.
Harry struggled to twist his whole body about even though he felt his right arm was about to tear itself loose at the elbow. Gasping with the blinding pain, he gazed through squinted eyes at his sister, at Elizabeth Osborn too—watching as both women were dragged up by the hair, one of the dirt-crusted hands suddenly ripping Helen’s dress down to her bodice.
Cries from the Earth: The Outbreak Of the Nez Perce War and the Battle of White Bird Canyon June 17, 1877 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 22