Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Find what?” asked Simon Pierce.

  Seamus turned in the saddle, finding the two civilians halting their horses, allowing Stanton and his ten horsemen to pass as the wagon rumbled out of the narrow creek and onto the prairie, driven east, away from the prairie fire.

  Graves patted his coat pocket, his eyes filled with panic. “I always carry it here.”

  “What?” Pierce repeated.

  “The … the—” and Graves skidded to a verbal halt when his eyes caught the Irishman staring at the two of them. “I’ve got to go back, Simon!”

  Pierce glanced at the advancing wall of flame. “You can’t. What can be so damned important that you—”

  Graves grabbed Pierce’s arm, almost pulling the smaller man out of the saddle, whispering huskily. “It’s what this whole damned expedition is about, Simon!”

  Pierce flung off the arm. “You’re insane, William. Always feared you would be. But be that as it may—you can’t go back. See for yourself.”

  Graves studied the far side of the creek as the fire roared closer, the air become heavy, stifling with live cinder and ash. He turned back to study the wagons and horsemen continuing away from the creek, onto the open prairie at a rapid clip.

  “Go with me, Simon!” he begged. “I’ll show you something that will knock you back on your heels. Just go with me to find it.”

  “I don’t know what it is. Forget it—and come on.”

  Graves shook his head. “Donegan. Come back with me—I beg you.”

  Seamus almost felt sorry for the man. “If you left it—it’s gone for now, Graves. We don’t have much time—”

  Donegan watched Graves hammer his heels into his horse’s flanks and saw the reins about, galloping the animal back to the creek.

  “Goddamn you,” he muttered as he kicked his own horse into motion and plunged past a darkly amused Simon Pierce.

  Graves had his mount out of the stream and up the west bank before Seamus got to him. When the Irishman reached out for the civilian’s elbow, Graves yanked his arm back, his eyes gone wild.

  “Help me!” he screamed, dropping to the ground, his fear-filled eyes scanning the campsite.

  “I will help you! Get on your horse and we’ll get out of here.”

  It was hard to hear much of anything now, even a man’s loud voice. The roar of the all-consuming fire bore down on them, blotting out most of the light with clouds of suffocating smoke, the air alive with cinders like fireflies on a summer night.

  “Yes! This is where our tent stood!” Graves shouted, falling to his knees and crawling about through the dusklike darkness, muttering, his hands feeling along the ground as he inched forward, not stopping even as the ground around him began to smoke, the dry grass catching fire from the meteor shower of flaming cinders.

  He winced in pain, slapping out the smoldering flames on his wool coat, his wool britches. His bare hands blackened as he groped through the brittle, dry grass, his face a smear of sweat and smoke, wide, fear-tinged eyes white in his darkened face.

  “What can be so bloody important to you, Graves?”

  The man looked over his shoulder at Donegan for only a moment then said, “It’s what I’ve worked years for—something my family just didn’t hand to me. Mine, all mine. But I don’t expect you to understand that. Besides … it’s something that’s already cost a lot of people their lives—I must find it!”

  “Tell me what it is … what I’m looking for, so we can find it and get the hell out of here!” Donegan flung his voice into the roar of the onrushing prairie fire.

  “The damned things’s wrapped in a bit of corduroy fabric,” Graves explained breathlessly, eyes wide in his blackened face.

  “What color?”

  “Brown … no—gray-brown.”

  “How big?”

  “Does it make any—” Graves snarled. “This big,” he said, holding out his two palms less than six inches apart. “It’s small.”

  “You’ll never find it,” Donegan said, beginning to climb down.

  “I must find—” he started, then his hands filled with something he held up before his eyes. As if suddenly aware of the Irishman’s presence, Graves turned his back on Donegan and unwrapped his prize only enough to be sure it was actually back in his possession.

  “You found it?”

  “Damn right I did!” He rose clumsily, for the moment unaware of the danger.

  Donegan saw the danger first, how the fire suddenly leaped from the ground a few yards off, cinders flying all around Graves, enveloping him in smoke and ash. And when the civilian emerged coughing, sputtering from the dense wall of smoke, he was on fire, the back of his wool coat fully aflame. Shrieking like a madman—

  “Drop it, dammit!” Seamus ordered

  But the frightened man refused to drop his prize. Instead he clutched it to his breast and took off running, screaming, his whole back being whipped into furious flames.

  Seamus hammered his heels into the horse, taking off after Graves. As they both reached the creek, Donegan surged past the civilian and kicked the man in the back of the shoulders with the heel of his boot. Crying out in panic, in surprise, in pain, Graves went spilling into the shallow stream. The Irishman was off the right side of his horse into the cold water, kicking Graves over, again and again, scooping handful after handful on the back of the man’s head, across his legs, everywhere that still smoldered after the soaking in the icy water.

  Looking up, Donegan found his horse on the far side of the narrow stream, tossing its head in fury at the air filled with burning cinders. The government man’s horse was nowhere to be found. Reaching down, Seamus snagged the back of Graves’s collar and dragged him across the pebbled stream bottom then up the bank as Stillwell appeared out of the thick smoke.

  “He dead?”

  “I don’t think so,” Seamus replied breathlessly. “Just a good soaking.”

  “Where’s his animal?”

  Donegan shrugged. “Looks like I’ll have to carry him meself till we reach the wagon.”

  “They’re covering ground. I came back when Pierce told me he was turning ’round to find something he’d left—and that you was coming back to help him.”

  “I came back to save his bleeming hide, Jack.”

  “Looks like that’s what you’ve done,” he said, dropping from the saddle and grabbing hold of the civilian. Unconscious, Graves still growled, an animal-like sound at the back of his throat.

  “Is he coming to?”

  “Sounds like it,” Jack said, hoisting the man up as Donegan pulled on the civilian’s arms until they had him slung over the Irishman’s legs.

  “He ever find what he was willing to die for, Seamus?”

  “Figure he did: I saw him pick something off the ground—but I still don’t know what it was he tucked under his arms just before the fire got to him.”

  “He’s still holding it,” Jack said.

  Sure enough, Graves clutched his cloth-wrapped treasure beneath one arm, the other drooping off the far side of the horse.

  “Was it worth the trouble, Graves?” Stillwell asked after he came around Donegan’s horse to take up his own reins.

  Graves growled again, a wordless, predatory sound as the air filled with suffocating heat.

  “Let’s get, Seamus!” Stillwell hurled himself into the saddle without using the stirrup. He wrenched his horse around and was off, slapping the rear of the Irishman’s mount.

  The fire was starting to jump the creek in fits and starts.

  Above the dry, leafless brush and trees, the air grew choked with soot and live embers, driven across the stream on the back of the tireless wind. A wind made hotter and stronger by the fire itself. A wind that acted like some monstrous tongue of heat searing everything in its path even before the flames came in to finish the destruction.

  Behind Donegan now arose a renewed rumble, the fire regaining strength and speed as it lurched across the stream and grabbed hold on the east bank a
fter faltering for only a moment. Like a phoenix rising from its own ash, the great wall of flame rose once more, yellow-red fingers clawing at the prairie grass, almost laughing as it strained to run down more of the wild, frightened creatures driven before it’s death song.

  Far ahead of them through the smoky haze, Seamus could make out the wagon and the horsemen, gold dust spun up from the four iron tires as the sky continued to darken. Behind him arose the rumble of what he recognized as thunder. A low, long blat that for but a moment overpowered the roar of the grass fire. Splitting the air with its might, then gone as quickly as it had come.

  Stillwell reined around at him, his face taut with strain, waving Donegan on frantically. “I gotta leave you behind!” he spat his voice into the robbing wind. “Don’t wanna,” and he pointed at the soldiers far ahead, “but that bunch is going off in the wrong direction!”

  “Go—I’ll come along as fast as I can.”

  Stillwell glanced down at the semiconscious Graves slung across Donegan’s saddle. His eyes found the Irishman’s, showing his grave concern and earnest affection. “You have to—just leave the bastard behind. Get yourself out.”

  “Go on, Jack! Get!” he shouted into the oncoming roar of the fire that already heated the cold winter morning beyond anything the sun itself could do.

  “That way!” Stillwell shouted as he leapt away, an arm out. “Point yourself that way!”

  Cinders and ash, antelope and deer and cottontails all hurried past his plodding horse, handicapped and sidestepping with the ungainly double weight.

  “By the saints,” he muttered to himself, feeling the heat growing at his back, afraid to turn around and see for himself, “I’ve got the notion to leave you behind myself, Graves.”

  “But you won’t, will you?”

  Seamus was surprised at the answer to his question. Seamus said, “Coming to, are we?”

  “I’ve never experienced such exquisite pain before!” he growled. “Just hurry this blasted horse up or we’ll both have problems.”

  “No—we won’t, Graves,” he replied, shifting the smaller man’s weight across his thighs. “You give me any trouble, I’ll leave you off here for the fire, just like Stillwell—”

  The words caught in mid-sentence as he felt a twinge of something unexpected and looked down at William Graves, finding a derringer jammed into his rib cage, just below his heart.

  “Just a reminder, Donegan—how badly I want to make it out of here alive, you see. Now ride, goddammit!”

  The minutes crawled by and still there was no change in his odds. The army escort and wagon and Stillwell all had disappeared beyond, somewhere in the rolling swales of prairie grassland soon to become blackened wilderness. And behind him roared the angry flames. For but a moment he thought back to another moment of helpless fear he had managed to swallow down—another fire he had stared in the face, set that time by Cheyenne Indians near the hayfield corral a few miles from Fort C. F. Smith on the Bighorn River, M. T. Montana Territory.*

  Praying now in his own way that the wind would come up as it had then. Just such a wind to slap at this fire, snuffing it before it came any closer.

  But this time the wind conspired in deadly partnership with the flames, driving them to a fury, speeding them on their eastward path, swallowing everything in their wake.

  The prairie ahead of him was alive with the small creatures, throbbing, falling, running over one another to escape the searing heat. Some had patches of hair burnt off, ugly patches still smoldering as they scurried past, falling then rising to run again blindly. Some with paws reddened, bloody flesh raw from running across blackened, smoking grassland in making their escape from burrows and dens.

  “Seamus!”

  Through the haze of black smoke and fiery cinders that burnt his eyes to the point of blindness, seared his lungs to the point he hesitated taking his next breath, he thought he heard Jack Stillwell’s voice.

  “Here! Over here, Irishman!”

  There was a second voice yelling to him. Then a third and fourth, screaming out—giving directions in the murky light.

  A gust of sudden, shifting wind brought another low blat of thunder to his ears, somewhere behind him. Odd that it would rain this time of the year, he thought, his weeping eyes still straining into the darkness ahead for the disembodied voices.

  “Goddamn you, Seamus.”

  Then Stillwell was beside him, yanking on the weary horse’s bridle. A pair of soldiers were dragging Graves off the animal and into their arms, half carrying him, half dragging his half-burnt body toward a dark scar on the prairie.

  “Where the divil—”

  “Just c’mon—it’s our only chance!”

  Stillwell did not wait for a reply but began to run faster, his boots kicking up the dry dust in shallow puffs as he pulled on the Irishman’s bridle. Seamus let the horse have its head, clutching the horn in sudden, overwhelming weariness as they reached the steep edge of a dry washout. For a moment he saw Jack’s face swim before him in the black smoke billowing over them like grease smoke off a pork fire. But he could not hear a word the scout was saying—so loud was the hammering freight train of the on-rushing flames now. So close behind them that he felt it on his neck like never before, smelled the acid stench of hair burning and didn’t know if it was the horse or if he were on fire.

  Really didn’t matter when the animal suddenly collapsed on its rear haunches just over the abrupt lip of the washout, catapulting the Irishman against the far side. He shook his head, clearing his eyes to find the horse sliding on its side coming down to the bottom, its legs thrashing, its tail smoldering.

  Jack was pulling on his arm, forming wordless, open-mouthed orders he could not hear. But he understood. Without looking back, they hurried together down the washout toward the others, already clustered in the deepest part.

  For the past few minutes the soldiers had been busy at what Stillwell had ordered them to do: some to haul out the thousands of rounds of ammunition and hurriedly bury it a hundred yards down the narrow washout, bury it as deeply as they could in the time they had left them. Others he ordered to pull free the canvas wagon cover; drag out a blanket for every man, including the Irishman and Graves; splinter open the tops of the water barrels and use cups or coffeepots or their kepis, but use something to soak the canvas and especially the blankets. The commissary sergeant and another soldier freed the last of the animals, slapping them into motion, driving them on down the washout.

  “We gonna lose the animals, Jack?”

  Stillwell nodded. “Likely we will.”

  Seamus ground his teeth, feeling the surge of fear rise in him like vomit. “It’ll be all right, Jack.”

  A brave grin crossed the scout’s face. “Damn right, it will.” He whirled on the others. “Everyone got their blanket sopping wet?”

  A chorus of frightened men answered. Their eyes smarted, flecks of burning grass and fiery cinder drifting down into the sharp-sided coulee, dancing on the furious wind created by the prairie fire.

  “We ain’t got no more time to do anything more!” Stillwell shouted. “Get under the wagon! Every one of you.” They started moving, slowly. Too slowly. “Hurry up, dammit!”

  “Wrap yourself in your blanket when you get under the sowbelly!” Donegan ordered, the skin on his cheeks reddened with the unimaginable heat, stretched taut like rawhide. He could barely hear himself talk, not knowing if anyone else could.

  “It’s your turn!” Jack hollered.

  “You first, son!”

  “Don’t be no hero again, Irishman!”

  “Me?”

  Then the roar of those flames jumping the coulee slapped Donegan to the ground, with one blow hammering the air from his lungs. He was stunned, shaking his head, robbed of breath as he realized the others were pulling him under the soaked, dripping canvas wagon sheet.

  “Sweet Mother of Jesus,” he muttered. “I’ve fought the best of ’em—but I’ve never been knocked down like
that.”

  “You’ve never fought a bitch woman before,” the old sergeant’s voice growled in the darkness beneath the wagon and canvas.

  “You’re daft, ol’ dodger! I’d never fight a woman.”

  “Just what the hell you think Mother Nature is, if she ain’t a bitch a’times.”

  Some of them laughed, and the laughter died quickly, swallowed, sucked right out of them all, by a renewed rush of roaring fire passing overhead, consuming everything. Even the air they desperately needed to live.

  The fire took his breath away, the super-heated air searing his lungs. Seamus didn’t know if he could hold out. He heard some of the others crying in the sudden, frightening darkness, and he knew how they felt. He did not want to die here in the darkness either. Better in the light of day, staring down your enemy.

  Instead of crying, Donegan bit down on a bit of the soaked blanket he had wrapped around himself and chewed, sucking air through it. Chewing to loosen some more water, then sucking in another breath of air.

  Time passed. How slowly time passed.

  Chapter 26

  Early November 1873

  He was sniffling, his nose weepy, eyes burning with the smoke, knowing this must truly be Hell—at least purgatory itself … when he finally realized the deafening roar was fading.

  Seamus Donegan swallowed hard, then took another small breath. The air not so hot now.

  Slowly he peeled the hot, damp blanket back from his face. Peering up at the bottom of the wagon and the canvas sheeting they had stretched out tent fashion to drape over them all.

  “Jack?”

  Stillwell poked his head out like a tortoise emerging from his shell. He blinked, cocking his head to listen. “I think it’s gone over us, Seamus.”

  “Praise God and the Virgin Mary.”

  “You pray while you was under there?”

  “By damn, we all did, son!” growled the sergeant who came out of hiding.

  “Is it safe now?” asked Lieutenant Stanton.

  “Let’s go see for ourselves, Irishman,” Stillwell suggested. “Rest of you wait here.”

  Throwing back the edge of the canvas wagon cover, Seamus squinted into the murky light, brighter now than it had been ever since yesterday at sunset. This morning’s sunrise never had a chance to light the land.