by Doug Thorne
In almost the same moment he caught a glimpse of the man’s hair in the moonlight. It looked to be bone-white. And that was when he realized that Hank Ketchum was figuring to finish the fight he’d been hoping to start earlier, in the saloon.
‘You know what I do to Injun-lovers, mister?’ asked Ketchum, his voice a low, hate-filled growl in the darkness. ‘I break every bone in their lousy, Injun-lovin’ bodies, an’ then I rip their souls right out through their guts!’
Hennessy climbed back to his feet, feeling his own anger growing and bunching his fists because of it. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said.
‘Not so drunk that I can’t take you,’ Ketchum replied, taking a couple of eager paces forward. ‘Minute I seen you sneakin’ past the saloon jus’ now, I says, “Here’s your chance, Hank. Here’s your chance to even things up for poor ol’ Sam.” ’
Hennessy was seized by a sudden feeling of disbelief. ‘You really are spoiling for this, aren’t you?’
The moonlight caught on something else this time – the quick flash of Ketchum’s teeth as he grinned like a wolf. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said in a low rasp.
And then he slid a skinning knife from the sheath at his hip.
Hennessy’s gaze was immediately drawn to the blade. It was short, thick and deadly, the bottom edge as sharp as a stropped razor, the upper edge notched by a row of tooth-like serrations that would have little trouble in sawing through bone. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the blade ended in a point that then turned back on itself to form a needle-sharp hook, ideal for ripping.
‘I’m not armed. Hank,’ he pointed out softly.
Hank said, ‘Too bad.’
He lunged forward then, his knife-hand thrust ahead of him, and Hennessy quickly lurched backwards, out of reach. Momentum pushed Ketchum on another few paces, but before he could recover Hennessy closed on him fast and grabbed his knife-hand by the wrist.
He brought the wrist down hard on one upraised knee, once, twice, once again, grunting with the effort of trying to break bone, but Ketchum stubbornly refused to drop the weapon, instead swatted him away with a powerful swipe of his left hand.
They circled for a time, each man looking for an opening, until Ketchum made another stab at Hennessy’s guts. Hennessy dodged left, avoiding the blow, kept going, came around behind Ketchum, locked one arm around his throat, clamped the other back around the wrist of Ketchum’s knife-hand.
Wriggling like an eel, Ketchum tried to elbow him in the belly, but Hennessy tightened his choke-hold and started twisting the knife-hand around so that the hook-ended blade slowly but surely began to turn inward, towards Ketchum’s belly. That Hennessy was hoping to skewer him with his own blade was obvious. That Ketchum was determined not to let that happen was equally apparent. But there could be only one winner in this contest, and both men knew it.
Ketchum tried to rake Hennessy’s shin with the heel of his right boot. Reacting quickly, Hennessy hooked Ketchum’s left leg out from under him instead, and Ketchum went down onto his knees, and under Hennessy’s weight nearly plunged forward onto the knife.
Realizing how close he’d come to disaster, the big buffalo hunter suddenly started fighting even harder to break Hennessy’s hold and regain the advantage, and now the only sounds were the rasp and saw of their breath and the low, straining, cursing sounds each of them made as he pitted his strength against the other.
Hennessy wasn’t having it, though. He was tired and sore and sad and angry, but he had Ketchum right where he wanted him now and wasn’t going to let him go.
He drove the knife an inch or so closer to Ketchum’s hard-breathing belly. Ketchum clamped his rotten teeth and struggled to push it away, managed to move it by half an inch but no more. Hennessy, his face flushed and sweat-run, forced the knife nearer still, nearer until the needle-sharp blade finally gave Ketchum’s buckskin shirt the lightest, deadliest caress.
That was enough for Ketchum. With a roar he half-dropped, half-threw the knife into the darkness, thrust his elbow back again and this time caught Hennessy on the left hip.
Hennessy went backwards, and Ketchum flung himself away, scrambled up off his knees and tried to locate the knife with a hasty scan. Hennessy saw it first and beat him to it, kicked it into some brush and then went back after his opponent.
The blow he aimed at Ketchum’s stomach was the kind that would have stopped any other man in his tracks. But Ketchum was bigger, stronger, meaner than any other man, and it didn’t even slow him down. With a sudden rush of speed that Hennessy hadn’t thought possible, Ketchum crowded him and swung a punch that he couldn’t quite dodge. It struck him a grazing blow to the forehead, and he dropped his guard.
Seeing that, Ketchum blurred in and tried to kick him in the crotch, but Hennessy turned sideways on and took the blow on the thigh instead. It hurt like a bitch, but he knew it could have been worse. He shuffle- limped to one side, his leg already starting to numb, and still Ketchum came after him, moving like a runaway freight train. He threw a clubbing left that Hennessy blocked, then managed to land a right to the jaw that rocked Hennessy’s head on his shoulders and almost put him back on the ground.
But somehow he stayed on his feet, stayed there and shoved all the hurt to the back of his mind and hit back at him with a jab to the stomach. He followed it with another, another, and suddenly it was Ketchum’s turn to do all the retreating again. Hennessy slammed him in the guts a fourth time and Ketchum reeled away, starting to realize that maybe he was too drunk to give of his best, that he’d made one hell of a mistake and now he was going to pay for it.
Too bad, Hennessy thought savagely, remembering what Hank had told him just moments earlier.
Again Hennessy hit him in the belly, threw a surprise right that caught the other man on the temple and totally confused him.
Staggering now, Ketchum dropped his guard in order to protect his stomach, but that left his face wide open and Hennessy wasted no time in exploiting the fact. He reached out with his left hand and grabbed a fistful of Ketchum’s shaggy grey beard, yanked hard to pull him forward and hit him another solid right that broke a tooth. Ketchum gurgled, spat the fragment out, and Hennessy whacked him with another powerful right that brought blood from his nose in a crimson cascade.
Two more blows, each one carrying everything Hennessy had in him, and Ketchum was as good as finished. All the life went out of his legs and once again he dropped to his knees, breathing hard – and that was when three deafening rifle-blasts, coming one after the other in quick succession, suddenly echoed from the direction of the watchtower.
As good as finished himself by this time, Hennessy released his grip on Ketchum’s beard and the bigger man fell onto his back, spent. He turned at the waist, already stiffening from the beating he’d taken, and looked back towards the hide yard, where the buffalo hunters who’d been making merry were now storming out of the saloon to meet or otherwise confront a single rider who was walking his horse casually through a gap in the crumbling walls. A dog – most likely the Newfoundland Hennessy had made friends with earlier – started barking excitedly.
Hennessy pulled down a steadying breath and carefully checked his ribs. He didn’t think anything was broken, but he knew he’d have some lumps to show for tangling with Hank Ketchum, and that he’d better go easy over the next few days or risk making the injuries worse.
Talking of Hank….
He glanced down. The hide man was making feeble attempts to roll onto his side and get back up, but his eyes were crossed and glassy, his mouth working slackly and without sound, and one big hand was swiping ineffectually at the air in front of his face, as if he were trying to swat an imaginary fly. For the time being, at least, he was no longer a threat.
Wincing at the effort, Hennessy limped back the way he’d come, hugging himself to help support his aching ribs and flexing his skinned knuckles to stop the fingers from seizing up altogether. To take his mind off his hurts, he focused his attention on the newcomer, wondering
who he was and whether or not he’d brought any fresh news about the Comanches.
The rider angled his horse towards the saloon, but drew rein before he got there so that the hide men, Billy and Mike Welch prominent among them, could gather around him. Slowing, Hennessy found a place in the deep shadows about a dozen yards away from which he could study the man more closely.
An ill-used Hardee hat threw most of the fellow’s lean face into shadow, but what Hennessy could see of it looked to be long, weather-worn and bony, with a pointed jaw across which was sketched a three-day growth of whiskers. The whiskers were the same gunmetal-grey as the dry, straw-like hair that stuck out at odd angles from beneath his hat. Hennessy put him at about fifty or so.
He was loaded for bear, too: that was, heavily-armed and ready to fight. He wore two long-barrelled Army Colts stuffed into the tack belt at his narrow waist and carried a sabre in a scabbard on his left side. There was a .45/.70 Henry repeater in a sheath attached to his saddle and a Spencer carbine in .56 calibre balanced across his lap, its stock decorated with mottled brass tacks.
He slid down off the horse, looking tall and skeletal in his loose homespun shirt and blanket leggings, and deftly untied a large jute bag from around his saddle horn. With a weird cackle he lifted the bag high above his head and gave it a shake, calling, ‘Here you go, boys! Full to the brim! Anyone care to take a look an’ see how busy ol’ Milt’s been of late?’
He raised his head a little so that he could rake his gaze across the faces surrounding him, his head moving in short, bird-like movements, all stop, start, stop, start, and when the light from one of the saloon windows caught his eyes, Hennessy almost recoiled. They were a pale, piercing blue, even paler and bluer than Hennessy’s own, as if all the colour had been sucked out of them. But more than that, they held a weird kind of restless animation that didn’t look quite normal, somehow, and it came to him then that no man would look comfortably into them, for to do so would be to catch a glimpse of complete and utter madness.
‘Eh?’ the man demanded, breaking his line of thought. ‘No takers?’ He crowed again, said, ‘Then it seems I’ll have to show you!’
Tucking the Spencer under his arm, he opened the neck of the bag and up-ended it in one quick motion. Its contents – long tufts of jet-black hair, most of them still connected to blood-encrusted shreds of skin – landed in a heap at his feet.
A shocked hush went through the crowd, and almost as one the assembled men took a quick, disgusted step backwards. In the shadows, Hennessy swallowed hard.
‘I caught ten o’ them crazy sons, this time out!’ the thin-faced man announced, again raking the faces around him with his not-quite-right eyes. ‘Ten redskins less, eh, fellers?’ He giggled again. ‘But they’s still plenty work left for ol’ Milt yet! Oh, sure, make no mistake ’bout that! Plenty more where these came from!’
That said, he stamped towards the saloon, stepping over the scalps to do so, and the buffalo hunters swiftly opened a path for him, none of them anxious to get in his way or impede his progress, even for a second.
He’d only gone about five paces, however, when he suddenly hauled up sharp, turned and stared hard into the darkness, his free hand automatically moving to the sabre at his hip. How he knew Hennessy was there in the shadows was a mystery, but he knew all right. Even though Hennessy was cloaked in gloom, the other man looked him straight in the face across a distance of more than thirty feet, his wide, bluer-than-blue eyes almost seeming to glow, and Hennessy had no choice but to return his stare and wait to see what happened next.
A long five seconds passed. It seemed much, much longer. Then the other man shrugged his bony shoulders and cracked his face with another loose chuckle that revealed brown stubs of teeth, and a moment later he strode on towards the saloon, the sabre in its scabbard knocking softly against his leg.
It was then that Hennessy realized he’d forgotten to keep breathing. As he started again, the hide men, still watching the newcomer vanish into Hanrahan’s, murmured uneasily to each other and began to drift away, none of them eager to follow him back inside.
Alerted by the thin man’s reaction, Billy and Mike Welch peered into the shadows, finally spotted Hennessy and headed in his direction. When he was near enough to see the state of Hennessy’s face, Billy frowned and started to ask the obvious question, then answered it for himself.
‘Ketchum?’
Hennessy nodded.
‘Did you—?’
‘He’s still breathing, if that’s what you mean,’ Hennessy replied wearily. He indicated the saloon with a thrust of his chin and said, ‘Since when did you fellers tolerate scalp-hunters around here?’
‘That’s Milt Hagerman,’ said Billy. ‘An’ best you walk a mile in his boots before you judge him, Cal. Used to be a sodbuster, had hisself a nice little place jus’ north of the Canadian, a wife an’ two younkers, too. Then, one day he set out for Dodge, fixin’ to buy seed an’ stock. That’s when the Comanches hit.
‘They battered his boys to death, defiled his woman an’ slit her throat, killed or ran off his livestock an’ then burned his buildin’s. If that ain’t sufficient to break a man’s soul an’ shatter his sanity, you’ll have to tell me what is.’
Hennessy considered the story. It was an all too common one, and the rest of it wasn’t difficult to figure out. ‘So he’s been killing Comanches ever since?’ he guessed.
Billy nodded. ‘Just as many as he can, as often as he can.’
‘He needs help,’ Hennessy said softly.
‘Sure he does,’ growled Mike. ‘But you can’t talk to him. No one can. The only thing Milt Hagerman wants to do now is kill every redskin he can lay his hands on – men, women, children – jus’ kill ’em and go on killin’ ’em till there ain’t none left to burn powder on.’
‘An’ that’s another reason the Comanches won’t show their painted faces around here,’ muttered Billy, a thin, funereal smile finding its way to his lips. ‘ ’Cause Milt Hagerman scares them even more’n he scares us.’
*
The tall half-breed with the long blue-black hair stared into the flames of his small fire and listened to the regular, low rumble of drums beyond the tipi’s buffalo-hide walls, which were decorated in traditional Comanche fashion with a wild jumble of circles, squares, triangles and oblongs. The erratic rise and fall of orange flames threw dancing shadows across his handsome face.
‘What ails you, my brother?’ asked a thick-set Kiowa on the far side of the fire. In his mid-forties, he had a round, flat face and slanting eyes above a broad nose, and unlike the man he had just addressed, he wore his hair to collar-length. This was Satanta, also called White Bear, and he had recently jumped the reservation in south-western Oklahoma in order to take part in the Kwahadis’ Sun Dance. ‘You look troubled.’
‘I am always troubled,’ Quanah Parker stated quietly.
At that, Satanta glanced uneasily at the tipi’s third occupant, who was also Kiowa. After a moment he said quietly, ‘This I know. But sometimes you are more so – as now.’
The Kwahadi war chief and spiritual leader didn’t reply immediately, for it was important that he choose his words carefully with this man. ‘My heart is sad when I think of my people,’ he confessed at length. ‘Daily I see their bewilderment and despair. They are afraid and they are angry. They wonder where the buffalo have gone and when they will come again, and they look to me for answers. But I have none – none that will bring them any comfort.’
‘Then you must find the buffalo,’ Satanta advised earnestly, ‘or what remains of them. And you must let your people see for themselves how the whites kill him in such numbers not only for his hide and his bones and his tongue, but also in order to deny us all the things we need to survive. More than any number of words, that will give them the answer they seek.’
Quanah considered this with a heavy heart. Satanta spoke the truth, of course. First and foremost, the buffalo was meat, either fresh or dried as pemmican.
But he was so much more besides. Without the buffalo there was neither bedding nor fuel. There were no tools, no weapons, no clothing and no medicine, for it was said that the contents of at least one of his two stomachs could fight and sometimes cure disease.
From the buffalo came the thread with which the women sewed, the rope with which the men caught and corralled horses. His hoofs were boiled for glue. His sinews became the strings that fired arrows. and his hide, once hardened. could be fashioned into shields that turned away bullets.
To acquire even some of these necessities elsewhere, the Comanches would have to deal with the white-eyes, and to do that would mean also to observe the white-eyes’ laws or suffer the consequences.
Such a course could have only one outcome – war.
Still, that had ever been the way with Satanta. He had always preferred aggression over agreement. In the past he had signed treaties with the whites, but still continued to make war on them until finally they had captured him. At first they had sentenced him to hang, but then changed their minds and told him he must instead spend the remainder of his days in prison. But as was typical of the whites, there had followed yet another change of heart three summers later and they had given him something called parole and set him free. He was still a firebrand, though, still one to be treated with the utmost caution, and Quanah never made the mistake of forgetting it.
‘If I do this thing,’ he returned, ‘the hatred that already runs deep within the Nermernuh will burn brighter, stronger. They will make war on the whites, and they will die because of it.’
‘Quanah,’ said the other Kiowa, speaking for the first time. ‘You must listen to your people. They starve and they worry. They need guidance, and if they do not get it from you then they will seek it from another. Your own days as leader are short unless you act now!’
Quanah regarded this man thoughtfully. He was Lone Wolf, sometimes called Gu. He had a sloped forehead and a heavy brow, and lips that seemed always to be pinched in disapproval. He wore his raven-black hair in braids.