by Jon Sharpe
Ahead, a great deciduous forest sprawled for a good two or three miles in the north and south, stretching before them like a lumpy, jade quilt to the far western horizon. Above the quilt, the black smoke of a dozen fires lofted skyward.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Prairie Dog said, his voice hushed and nervous. He hipped around in his saddle to rake his cautious gaze in a complete circle around them. “I think we might’ve just found what we’re lookin’ for, Mr. Trailsman, sir.”
Fargo had fished his spyglass out of his saddlebags, and directed it toward the trees, lips stretched back from his teeth as he adjusted the focus. “The Box Elder buttes,” he muttered. “Twenty square miles of woods and buttes, and right in the center, Cottonwood Creek meets up with the north fork of the Squaw in a deep ravine.”
He turned to spit a weed seed from his lips, then returned his eyes to the glass. “With all those buttes and trees, it’s a right good place for warring Injuns to hole up unseen.”
“Yeah, they got ’em a natural buffer against interlopers, that’s for damn sure.”
“It’s too hard a place to get into twice. Let’s try to find the girl and follow through with our original assignment.”
Prairie Dog looked around again, scrubbed sweat from his bearded jaw. “How you wanna wrestle this hog? Them woods and buttes are probably peppered with pickets. And Miss Valeria—if she’s here—ain’t gonna be unattended.”
Fargo scanned the woods for another minute, then reduced the glass and slipped it back into his saddlebags. “Let’s mosey a half mile back the way we came, picket our horses where they won’t be found. We’ll wait for sunset, then move through the woods on foot.”
Prairie Dog snorted. “You mean, just walk into their camp, say, ‘Pardon me, boys, but I’m here to shoot the crazy fuckin’ white man poundin’ the drum for this here powwow. Oh, yeah, and could you tell me what ya done with the white girl you nabbed?’”
“Well, shit,” Fargo said with feigned exasperation, reining the pinto around. “Why ask if you already know the answer?”
11
The Trailsman and Prairie Dog Charley tied their horses to saplings in a box canyon offshoot of Squaw Creek. They removed their boots and socks, then grabbed their rifles and extra ammo, and crept back along the shallow watercourse toward the woods.
They moved with practiced stealth, heads moving constantly as they scanned the terrain around them for Indians, noses sniffing the breeze for the wild, greasy odor of a native. When they were a hundred yards from the woods, they discovered an Indian picket perched on a southern bluff, hair blowing in the breeze as he stared straight west, a bow beside him, a war lance angled across his outstretched thighs.
Fargo and Prairie Dog ran crouching along a ravine bottom, Prairie Dog narrowly escaping the strike of a coiled sand rattler. They paused at the edge of the woods—mostly ash and box elders with a few giant cottonwoods churning in the evening breeze, blackbirds cawing amongst the branches—then glanced carefully around once more before turning into the trees.
The woods had appeared much denser from a distance. Inside the sprawling copse, the trees were spaced ten and sometimes twenty feet apart, with deadfall humped on the ground or leaning like crutches against standing trunks. Occasional willows clumped with chokecherries or burr oak snags.
There were several winding deer paths, many marked with fresh horse prints. Fargo and Prairie Dog each chose a paralleling path and moved westward through the woods, about fifty feet apart, putting one bare foot down in front of the other, making as little noise as a coup-counting redskin.
The air was rife with the smell of loam and decaying leaves, the wild-rose smell of chokecherries. Dim light shafted through the canopy to speckle the forest floor.
They’d pushed a hundred yards into the woods when something thrashed wildly in a hawthorn snag ahead and right of Fargo. Both men froze, crouching, hearts pounding, bringing their rifles to bear. Fargo threw his left hand up as a white-tailed buck sprang from a hawthorn snag and bounded off to the north, leaping over fallen trees, its knotted, sprawling rack trimming low branches with riflelike cracks.
The men shared a glance as the crunching hooffalls dwindled into the distance. Adjusting the grips on their rifles, they continued forward at roughly the speed of a racing turtle.
They moved at the same pace for over an hour, until the trees thinned. Ahead, the smoke from several fires thickened, scented with the smell of burning wood and roasting meat. A low din sounded, like that of a town heard from a distance, drowned occasionally by dog barks and the screams of playing children.
Fargo and Prairie Dog dropped to their hands and knees and crawled to where the forest stopped abruptly at the lip of a broad, deep canyon. A few feet back from the lip, the men stopped and, shielded by rocks, brown wheatgrass, and shrubs, stared into the broad sweep of the canyon cut by two streams.
One of the streams, only twenty or thirty yards wide, curved through the canyon directly below Fargo and Prairie Dog, flowing from west to east. The other meandered in from the southwestern side of the canyon, joining the first about a half mile right of the men’s position atop the ridge.
The Indian village nestled inside the broad L shaped by the two streams, amongst cottonwoods, willows, and musk grass—a good forty or fifty lodges of tanned buffalo skin, all doors facing east and fronted by smoldering cook fires. Women in doeskin dresses tended the fires or scraped hides stretched between stakes, while naked children frolicked and dogs milled. A stout woman in a calico dress and deerskin leggings chased one mongrel from a bucket of what appeared to be buffalo brains with a bone-handled broom, her voice rising in raucous admonishment while the dog yelped and ran.
Fargo’s gaze followed the dog to the sandy flat bordering the confluence of the two streams. Near the gently churning water, a pit had been dug and lined with red, green, and white colored stones. A couple of braves, clad only in loincloths, were clearing the pit of charred wood, throwing the logs into the stream, while another split logs with a hatchet and stone mallet nearby.
The braves near the fire pit were the only males within sight. The others were no doubt napping in their lodges, waiting for the women to cook their supper, or off hunting or rampaging. A hundred yards southeast of the camp, where the prairie rose away from the streams, a good fifty mustangs milled in a broad brush corral. They grazed or trotted friskily, whipping their manes in the breeze.
There was no sign of Valeria. But then, the Trailsman knew that locating her amongst a group this size would be at least half as hard as rescuing her.
Fargo glanced at Prairie Dog, who scanned the village through his spyglass. “That pit down there near the confluence is for ceremonial bonfires, or I miss my guess.”
“Maybe a powwow tonight.”
Prairie Dog patted his sleek, brass-chased Schuetzen as though it were a beloved pet. “If Duke’s involved, he’ll be well within range of my sweet Brunhilda.”
Fargo fished his own spyglass out of his boot, directed it toward the village. “If we don’t spy the girl soon, I’ll sneak down after good dark, try to pull her out of there. Most of the Injuns’ll no doubt be attending the festivities around the fire pit.”
“You’ll be lookin’ for a needle in a haystack, Skye. If Miss Valeria’s even still alive.”
Fargo shrugged, but anxiety over the girl nagged him.
“What about Lieutenant Duke?”
Fargo stared through the glass, slowly sweeping the village from left to right and back again. “We’ll pass on him till we get the girl.” He lowered the glass and turned to Prairie Dog, pensive. He kept his voice low. “Give me a good hour after sundown. Then, if you get a shot at Duke, take it.”
He raised the glass again and continued scrutinizing the village. He stared through the glass until his vision blurred and his head ached from the strain. Slowly, the sun sank into the western prairie, splashing a painter’s palette of colors into the sky. Then the colors faded and the
first stars kindled.
In the village below, torches flickered to life, and shadows began scuttling about the lodges. A drum sounded with the rhythm of a slowly beating heart.
A few minutes later, a soft glow appeared in the fire pit below the ridge and on the far side of the stream. Soon the flames were leaping six and seven feet in the air, sparks rising and dying as they drifted toward the stars.
Fargo heard the crackling and snapping of the burning logs above the drum’s beat and the stream’s murmur against the ridge. Warm air rife with the smell of burning ash and box elder pushed against his face.
“Show time,” Prairie Dog said, keeping his bald head low, adjusting his elbows in the dry grass.
Fargo lifted the spyglass, shifted the magnified spear of vision around the fire. The silhouettes of feathered warriors circled the fire pit. Some danced wildly, throwing their hands in the air with warlike yelps, others merely shuffling, hop-skipping, or taking short, buoyant strides while shaking rattles or spears.
When thirty or so dancing braves and older, potbellied warriors had circled the fire, women and girls of all ages traced another circle behind them, some dancing to the rattles and drums, some merely walking solemnly and holding the hands of children. The women were dressed in beaded doeskin and moccasins, some with their hair pinned up while others let it hang down their backs, the bear grease glistening in the umber firelight.
When the women had completed their circle behind the men, the drumbeats increased and grew louder. An old man—tall and broad but weathered like an old cottonwood, shoulders bowed, and wearing a warbonnet with streaming eagle plumes—lifted his chin and began singing softly. A buffalo robe hanging off his shoulders, and a necklace of his enemies’ teeth hanging around his neck, he gradually increased the volume until his keening voice echoed shrilly around the canyon, and distant coyotes yammered in answer.
This was Iron Shirt, Chief of the Coyote Band of the Assiniboine—a wily, cunning old war chief with whom Fargo had skirmished on the plains between the Missouri and Souris Rivers, barely escaping with his life each time.
Fargo dropped his spyglass to his chin and glanced at Prairie Dog. “Looks like most of the village has gathered for the hoedown. Duke must have convinced them they’re invincible—that’s why there aren’t many pickets. You stay here. I’m gonna go down and look for—”
“Hold on,” Prairie Dog growled as he stared through his own glass at the fire.
Fargo directed his glass toward the east side of the dancing, billowing flames. A tall, white-skinned figure entered the sphere of firelight.
The man’s pale blond hair hung to his shoulders, held back from his face with a rawhide thong encircling his forehead. His face was painted like that of a warring savage, the eyes deep-sunk and shadowed, broad chest bare and massed with tattoos of many shapes and colors including bright red serpents surrounded by ravens rising from his ribs. He wore a calico loincloth and fringed deerskin breeches, which hung to just above his knees. A dagger jutted from a beaded sheath on his right hip.
As Lieutenant Duke approached the fire, he raised his arms straight out from his chest, slowly flexing his knees. His singing rose to meet that of Iron Shirt, the otherworldly keening of both men becoming one demonic dirge.
The coyotes yammered even more shrilly, a bizarre accompaniment to the cacophony rising from the village.
The hair on the back of Fargo’s neck pricked.
A shadow moved behind Duke. Fargo shifted the spyglass slightly, and adjusted the focus.
“Sweet Christ,” Prairie Dog muttered to Fargo’s right.
Two braves stepped into the firelight. They carried between them a long platform bedecked with deer or antelope skins. On the skins sprawled a pale, naked girl, her slender arms hanging down from the platform’s edge. Valeria’s distinctive hair—long and thick and the bright red of a prairie sunset—hung down from the end.
Valeria Howard.
The braves positioned Valeria beside the fire, to Duke’s left, and lowered the platform to their shoulders. The fire glistened off Valeria’s pale, curving body, the full globes of her naked breasts casting oval shadows across her belly. She lifted one knee, dropped it across the opposite thigh, and wagged her head back and forth, face pinched. She’d been drugged.
Fargo’s heart quickened. He continued staring at Duke and Valeria through the spyglass as he snarled, “Dog, grab Brunhilda and draw a bead on that son of a bitch!”
“What about…?”
Prairie Dog’s voice trailed off as, through his own spyglass, Fargo watched Lieutenant Duke lower his hand to the sheath on his right hip, and draw the bone-handled dagger. The man lifted the dagger toward the fire and continued singing along with Iron Shirt, slowly flexing his knees, staring into the flames with the countenance of a man mesmerized by his own madness.
“Shit!” Prairie Dog lowered the spyglass and grabbed the Schuetzen. He inspected the muzzle-loader, made sure he had a patch seated on the nipple, then snugged his cheek up to the rifle’s sleek stock, and drew back the hammer.
Fargo stared through the spyglass as Duke sang on one side of the fire, Iron Shirt on the other, both raising their hands high above their heads, the war chief’s eagle plumes dancing in the fire wind. The others—women as well as men—sang softly, dancing in place.
Duke’s trembling dagger glittered in the firelight. Slowly, he lowered the blade to the flames, as if to sterilize it. The singing grew louder. Quickly, Duke removed it, swung around toward the girl.
Fargo turned away from the spyglass. “Shoot the son of a bitch, Dog!”
“I told you my eyesight ain’t as good as it used to be,” the old scout spat. “And it’s even worse at night!”
Below, Duke flapped his arms slowly, and the braves lowered the skin-draped platform until Valeria lay writhing on the ground in front of the mad lieutenant. Duke dropped to his knees, raised the knife in both hands above his head as if in prayer, and sent a wolflike howl rising to the stars.
Despite himself, Fargo jerked with a start.
Duke lowered his left hand slowly, leaving the right one holding the dagger high in the air, the glinting, silver blade angled toward the girl struggling languidly upon the skins.
Fargo snapped, “Goddamnit, Prairie—!”
To his right, the Schuetzen belched and flashed, the stench of burnt powder instantly filling the air. Below, a half second after the rifle’s bellow, Lieutenant Duke’s right arm jerked forward. At the same time, one of the two braves before him twisted around and back, grabbing his side with both hands and showing his teeth through a snarl.
Fargo steadied the spyglass as Duke fell forward over Valeria, dropping his knife, then twisting around to glare in the direction from which the shot had come, eyes bright with fury. All at once, the Indians dancing around the fire stopped and turned in the same direction, their singing transforming into a cacophony of angry snarls and exclamations.
An enraged voice rose in English, “Attackers!” Duke translated the shout, and instantly the crowd began scattering, the men dashing northward along the stream, heading for the bluff, the women and children fleeing toward the lodges.
Fargo lowered the glass and glared at Prairie Dog. “Nice shot!”
“It was a pretty good shot for these old eyes, ya damn ingrate.” Prairie Dog stared down the bluff, at the surging black mass sprinting toward the river, the fleetest braves already splashing into the water. “But what the hell we gonna do now?”
Fargo cursed and looked back toward the fire. Valeria lay sprawled atop the animal skins. Duke knelt on one knee beside her, clutching his right arm as he glared toward the bluff.
Fargo cursed again as he dropped his spyglass into his boot well and grabbed his rifle. He and Prairie Dog might have spared the girl for the moment, but, doing so, they’d pretty well blown their own lamps while doing nothing for Valeria’s future. To try to get around behind the approaching horde of raging Indians would be sure suicide.
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And, to top it off, Duke was still alive…
“Well,” Fargo said, on one knee as he stared down the bluff at the Indians yowling and crossing the stream, his steady voice belying his frustration, “I reckon we’d better run.”
Down the slope before him, the Indians grunted and yowled, loosing rocks and gravel as they scrambled up the bluff toward the interlopers. Clutching the Schuetzen, Prairie Dog scrambled to his feet and bolted into the trees behind Fargo.
“Skye, old son, I like how you think!”
12
Fargo squeezed off three rounds over the lip of the ridge, hearing a couple of grunts and enraged screams amongst the Indians approaching from below, then turned and followed Prairie Dog further into the woods. In spite of the inky tree columns and low-hanging branches, he ran hard, overtaking Prairie Dog in about seventy yards.
“Keep going!” Fargo growled. “I’m gonna circle around, see if I can sneak the girl outta the village!”
Prairie Dog took several more leaping strides through the woods. “But, hell, I won’t make it, neither, so I reckon I’ll see ya on the other side!”
“I’ll see ya back at the fort!”
Fargo swung right into the trees, his keen night vision picking out deadfalls, which he hopscotched, ducking under branches, tracing a wide angle down hill and back toward the stream. He bolted through a juneberry thicket then stopped, listening.
Behind, branches and shrubs cracked under running feet, and the rasps of labored breaths rose.
Fargo ducked behind the thicket and edged a look back the way he’d come. Two jostling shadows ran toward him, starlight dancing on spear heads and on bone talismans hanging around the braves’ necks.
Fargo snapped the rifle to his shoulder, triggered a shot. The Henry’s bark shattered the heavy silence, and the brave on the left screamed. There was a heavy, crunching thud as he hit the ground and rolled.
The brave on the right kept coming, screaming, starlight reflecting from his wide eyes as he bolted into the thicket, drawing his spear back behind his ear, preparing to throw.