Wylie leans across the table. In a voice low, husky with emotion, he says, “Shorty taken care of me. He did. I do the same for him. Remember that.” Then he sits back, satisfied, a self-righteous smile on his lips.
“Settle yourself, Wylie,” Shorty says quietly. “The milk’s already spilt. Now I got to see how much I can spoon back into the bottle, dirty or not.” He lifts his eyebrows. “Isn’t that right, Harry?”
“Believe me, there’s none of it you can spoon back in,” I tell him. “Don’t think you can.”
“Oh,” says Shorty, “I ain’t going to rest until I’ve tried. I wouldn’t talked to you but you promised me the truth would be proclaimed.”
“He promised me the same. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Then it seems to me the two of us is obliged to try put the milk back in the bottle,” says Shorty with a flat, terrible authority.
27
The wolfers remained pinned down in the coulee, forced to trade shots with the Assiniboine. The mathematics of that was not in their favour and they knew it. Although they had taken no casualties as yet, it was clear to everybody that with each passing hour their situation grew more dire. Their hunted, desperate faces announced that knowledge. One or two of them had already had to shamefacedly scurry further down the ravine to relieve themselves, terror proving a powerful purgative. Hardwick called a council of war, his lieutenants Evans and Vogle hunkered to the right and left of him. He began with an attempt to put some heart into his men. “Well, boys, we burned their asses good. I counted at least fifteen or sixteen dead Indians lying out there and not a one of us with a hair harmed on our heads. And we’re safe here for the time being. They can’t shake us out. But, on the other hand, we ain’t going to shake them out neither. If we try to skedaddle for the fort, they’re likely to pick a few of us off while we cover open ground. If we squat here, we cook in our own juice, seeing as we’re low on water, and ammunition ain’t going to last forever and a day. Also I’m thinking, could be there’s more than one band of Assiniboine in these hills. Could be they already sent a runner to round up the relatives and bring them in.”
A ball sizzled overhead; everyone flinched. Hardwick glanced up at Trevanian Hale, the lookout. “How’s she hanging, boy?” he said. “Got them eyes peeled?”
“That one near peeled my scalp. Them bastards got our range.”
“Well, look sharp. And take your goddamn hat off.”
Hardwick turned back to the sombre circle. Vogle said, “I elect we make for the fort. Take our chances.”
It sounded like drawing straws on death. The men looked at one another.
“I don’t know,” said Evans. “They’re organized now. Organized as an Indian gets. If we raise up out of here, they’ll put thirty, thirty-five ball at us. If we all get clear of that, dandy. But I don’t figure we’ll all get clear of it. Somebody’s going to get winged.”
“Then what the hell we supposed to do?” said John Duval. His red little eyes were angry. The way he spat was angry.
“The war taught me one thing,” said Hardwick. “Take high ground wherever you can. Then hold it. There’s a promising little rise to the right of us. If we get a good covering fire on them from here so as to keep their heads down, we can get some men up top that knoll. Couple of men with repeaters blazing down in that coulee can do a heap of damage.”
No one dared speak. Finally, Duval put the question no one else would. “Who?”
“I told you boys I hate a slacker,” said Hardwick. “I ain’t going to shirk. I’ll go.” He shifted on his heels. “What about you, Chief?” he asked Evans. “You game?”
Evans didn’t lift his eyes from the ground. “All right.”
“She’s settled then. Leave us a minute to collect our hosses. When I give the word, you boys let fly at them. Don’t skimp on the lead. Keep the red bastards ducking.”
The men dispersed to the lip of the gully. Evans and Hardwick led their mounts to the end of the coulee where it rose in a gentle, gradual slope to merge with the prairie. At a signal from Hardwick they sprang up on the horses, spurred them out of the ravine with the cry, “Give ’em hell, boys!”, a cry which triggered a fusillade to flash and crash the length of the coulee.
They galloped breakneck for the rise, dismounted on the run, and scrambled up the hillock. In minutes they had gained the top, fell prone, and began to pour deadly repeater-fire into the enemy below while their compatriots raked the top of the coulee with an enfilade. A gauze of blue gun-smoke hovered in the still air, a lethal miasma.
Suddenly Grace shook the shoulder of the Englishman’s boy and pointed to five figures emerging from the timber the women and children had escaped into, figures which flitted so swiftly across open ground and vanished into the spotty brush at the base of the hill that the Englishman’s boy wasn’t sure if he’d seen them at all.
“They’ve flanked Hardwick and Evans,” said Grace. “They’re going to run off their horses. Cut them off.”
Oblivious to the danger at their backs, Evans and Hardwick continued to pepper the Assiniboine position. Grace shouted a warning down the cutbank. “They’ve got behind Hardwick and Evans!”
Several men rushed to Grace, peered to where he pointed. There was nothing to be seen, not a leaf of the brush moved.
“I don’t see nothing,” said Duval.
“I seen them,” the Englishman’s boy said.
“Well, how in Christ’s name are we supposed to get out of this mess?” said Duval. “Can’t shoot what you can’t see.”
“Flush them,” said Grace. “They’ll be in that brush laying plans to steal up on Hardwick and Evans. If we charge, they’ll scatter in surprise. Either we run them off or we run them down.”
“Fuck you,” said Duval. “Hardwick got us in this infernal spot. Let him look after his own hide.”
With their leaders gone, the men were indecisive, lost. “That’s true. Hardwick did get us in this spot,” Grace said quietly. “But I don’t remember anybody raising objections to coming along.” He paused. “And I don’t remember anybody except Hardwick and Evans offering to risk his skin to get us out of it.”
No one contradicted the Eagle, but no one was volunteering to take part in the rescue either. The Englishman’s boy thought that when Grace turned and walked away from them, that was the end of it. But Grace unhooked a cavalry scabbard from Trevanian Hale’s saddle, slung the sabre on his own saddlehorn, sheathed his Henry rifle, broke his revolver, checked the chambers, slapped it shut. “I reckon this is a pistol-and-sabre charge,” he said to no one in particular. No one moved. Grace shrugged, put his foot in the stirrup, swung up. “I can’t swear to it, but they looked to be youngsters. A little determination should break them.” The men stepped aside to let him pass when he kicked his horse into motion. “Cover me,” he said.
They did. As rifle-fire crashed about him the Englishman’s boy ran to collect his horse and vaulted onto it. Already the Eagle was crossing ground at an easy lope, his handkerchief a dab of blue, his back erect. The Englishman’s boy tore after him, his horse’s pricked ears bouncing like crazy rifle-sights striving to take aim at Grace’s back. Fifty yards off, Grace whipped his horse into a cavalry charge, closing fast on the scrub at the bottom of the hill. When he was thirty yards short of the brush, the Englishman’s boy heard a muffled clap which buckled the legs of the Eagle’s horse, sledgehammering it in full stride. The gelding somersaulted and Grace bucked over its head, pitching into a dreadful, awkward tumble which smashed him to the ground. He staggered to his feet, left arm dangling broken, pistol gripped in his right hand as two boys burst out of the brush, one brandishing a hatchet, the other a bow. Grace knocked aside the first with a pistol-shot just as the second dropped to his knee and let fly an arrow.
Grace reeled, the pistol fell to his feet, one hand lifted in bewilderment to paw feebly at his throat. At full gallop, the Englishman’s boy snapped off two shots, missed with both. The Assiniboine gave a
triumphant whoop, darted forward, struck the swaying Eagle twice with his coup stick, and turned to bolt back to cover just as the Englishman’s boy slammed his horse into him full tilt, trampling him to the ground. He scrambled up and the Englishman’s boy leaned down from his saddle, thrust the revolver into his face and fired.
Throwing himself off the horse he ran to Grace. The Eagle’s right hand clenched the shaft of the arrow buried in his throat, a bloody cravat spread down his shirt front. He gave a convulsive twist of the wrist, breaking the shaft off in his hand, stared uncomprehendingly at the markings and feathers, and fell. Grabbing his shoulders the boy dragged him to shelter behind the dead horse. There they both lay, breathing quick and hard. The Eagle mumbled something the Englishman’s boy didn’t catch. He laid his ear to the panting mouth. “Pull it,” Grace begged. “Pull it.” Rolling him on his side exposed six inches of arrow protruding from the nape of his neck, revealed the cruel barbs of an arrowhead filed out of an old frying-pan bottom. The Englishman’s boy clasped it and drew it in one long, sticky sigh of grasping flesh; when the arrow jerked free blood shot in spasms on his shirt sleeve. He ripped off Grace’s bandanna and stuffed it in the wound, the Eagle groaning under his ministrations. Grace made a vague gesture with his hand, his eyes glazing blue like the eyes of a butchered animal, murmured something faintly. The boy lifted his head, nestling it in the crook of his arm. The Eagle gave a long, bloody snore, the blood gurgling in his throat, stretched his legs luxuriously like a man making himself comfortable in his bed. “That’s better,” he whispered, and died.
The Englishman’s boy heard a musket-shot, the woody thud of a ball embedding itself in the body of the dead horse. He flopped across its belly and raised the Colt in both hands; both were shaking fearsome. The leaves of the stunted willow, the buffalo berry, the choke-cherry, hung dead and lifeless. He wiped the palm of his left hand on his pant leg, then his right, so as to get a better grip on the ivory handle of the Colt. He could see his horse forty yards off, cropping grass, reins trailing on the ground. Another thirty yards lay between him and the Indians in the scrub.
Five. Grace had said five Indians. He and Grace had done for two. That left three in the bush.
He had the strange feeling of fading out of the scene, standing apart from what was happening to him. Where had this second set of eyes come from? He felt himself floating, peering down from above. He saw old Grace lying dead behind him. The horse dead. The Indians dead. He could see himself scrunched as small as he could make himself. He saw it all. God, but didn’t he look small. Didn’t old Grace look small. Didn’t they all look small. He wondered if maybe he weren’t dead too, maybe a ghost, seeing as he could picture it all. He bit his tongue, fiercely, and the salty tang of blood in his mouth told him he wasn’t no spectre yet.
They’d started yelling at him from the bush. Indian jabber. You could tell by their voices they were young ones. But a youngster had killed Grace. Youngsters might kill you dead as any buck, give them their chance. The musket clapped again and he ducked and grovelled as it dully smacked saddle leather.
He started to yell back. Every unholy thing he’d ever heard anyone give tongue to in a stable or grog shop. It came out of him like pus from a lanced boil. He yelled until he was hoarse, trying to out-yell the three of them. The blood of his bitten tongue kept welling in his mouth and he had to keep spitting it so as to be able to keep shouting back. The blood was of no account. Nothing was of no account.
Now they were singing the same song the other had in their cracked boys’ voices, singing like very angels of death. He commenced to singing too. Roared “John Brown’s Body” back at them. He knew when they had done their own song they would be ready to come for him; he was letting them know he would be ready to give them their fitting welcome. He ran through his song beginning to end twice before they give it up. Then he give it up too.
In a long minute of anxious silence, he heard somebody sobbing. Grace? He looked back. No. It wasn’t coming out of Grace’s throat but his own. He croaked at them to come. “Come on, you clappy whoresons! Come on!” he screamed.
They did. He didn’t trust his aim with no short gun. Give it to them at spitting distance. Colt locked steady in both hands, forearms propped on the saddle-seat.
They flew for him, dogs for the throat. One red bastard tripped, picked himself up, gimped after the others, plucky but slow on a sprained ankle.
At five yards he put two shots into the lead runner. The second was on him as he was cocking the hammer the third time. There was only time to stab the Colt against the belly and jerk the trigger. It blew the Assiniboine back over the horse with the weight of the lead, the thrust of expanding gases.
The third one was still coming, hop-step, hop-step like a grasshopper, hunting lance poised in his hand. The Englishman’s boy centred the bead on his breastbone, squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell with a click. He cocked and squeezed again. The hammer snapped hollowly. Breaking the revolver, he fumbled a bullet out of his belt. Dropped it. His eyes ran back and forth between the Indian closing on him and the bullet at his feet.
His eye caught the sabre-handle. He grabbed it and tugged. It came hissing out of the sheath just as the Indian thrust, driving the lance through the heavy tweed of his jacket below the armpit, popping open his coat in an explosive spray of buttons. The blade grazed his ribs, snagged in the back of his jacket, wrenched it off his shoulder. He snatched the shaft with his left hand just as the enemy tried to withdraw it, yanked it hard toward him, and lunged with the sabre.
They stood locked together, the Englishman’s boy’s fingers knotted on the lance-shaft, the Indian spitted on the sabre, his mouth gasping like a fish out of water. In the second before his face altered irrevocably and his legs melted in a slow collapse, the Englishman’s boy recognized who it was: the saucy boy who had sat the horse by the creek that morning, counting the wolfers as they passed.
He began to sag on the blade, dragging it down with a great heaviness beyond the tug of gravity, the greatest weight the Englishman’s boy had ever supported, a profound dream-like mass which slowly bent his arm like water bends the dowser’s wand. The Englishman’s boy was fighting it with all his strength, fighting to keep the dying Assiniboine on his feet every bit as hard as he had fought to defend his own life. Because he knew that when his arm finally bowed to the earth, it would bow to a grave.
He’d seen some tough doings in his short life, but nothing to compare to this. When the Assiniboine had finally cut and run, the wolfers crept out of their hidey-hole, sniffed the air like cautious dogs before they commenced to scalping. It was like an egg hunt, Easter morn. They ran back and forth in the grass and bush searching for bodies, cutting and tearing off scalps with one almighty jerk of the arm, foot planted on the body. They whooped and pranced and shook the bloody hair they’d lifted. Vogle, laughing, plunked a scalp on top of his hat and started to sashay like a society lady in a new bonnet. Now and then the Englishman’s boy heard shots when they located a wounded Assiniboine in the grass.
They lost some of their swagger when they went down into the Indians’ ravine. It had a turn or two in it and maybe some hurt brave was lying around a corner with a musket, ready to take a white man to the Mystery World with him. They had totted up eighteen dead on the flat and found twelve more corpses in the coulee. The five youngsters dispatched in the fight at the hill brought the grand total to thirty-five.
When they came to lift the hair of the Englishman’s boy’s Indians he swore he’d shoot any man laid a hand on them. Nobody dared gainsay him, on account of the dreadful look in his eye. The boys who had fought in the War between the States had seen men who would go thankful and joyous after surviving some terrible battle while others went broody, black, and contrary. It didn’t do to meddle with the black ones.
Neither did he accompany them when they rode to complete the destruction of the Assiniboine camp; he just sat in the grass alongside Grace, waving the flies off him with hi
s hat. Grace was too big a man for him to lift onto a horse and carry back to the fort. He needed help for that, but Hardwick said they’d take care of that business when more pressing work was finished.
He watched the teepees catch fire and burn like tallow tapers, one by one. A black pall of smoke crawled sluggishly into the sky, showing a little yellow in it here and there, like a four-day-old bruise. After a bit, he heard a passel of shots. A little later, he spied Vogle capering about with something stuck on a long pole, maybe a lance. Some of the smoke came creeping his way, sickening whiffs smelling like spilled grease frying on a stovetop. That was Hardwick burning the Indian’s store of pemmican. He had said he was going to follow army procedure, destroy their lodges and supplies, so they had no reason to come back.
After an hour, they all rode back in a laughing, lightsome mood for finding Little Soldier in his lodge too drunk to stir when the women had cleared the camp. There he had sat, a bottle of whisky in one hand and himself wrapped up in Old Glory, trusting in the Bluecoats’ medicine flag to save him. The joke was they’d pumped a shot into him for every star of the Union. When they had finished emptying their weapons, Vogle had chopped his head off with a hatchet, stuck it on a pole, and marched him up and down through the burning village so he could get his eyes full of the consequences he had wrought by being unmannerly and by trifling with a white man’s property.
On their way back to Farwell’s, by accident they’d rousted a girl of fourteen or fifteen from under one of the banks of Battle Creek. Likely she’d been fetching water when the fight started and ducked into hiding there. The Englishman’s boy watched her stumble by, wrists bound in a rawhide rope lashed to the horn of Hardwick’s saddle. “Looky at the young hen we caught,” Hardwick sang out to him.
The Englishman’s Boy Page 30