by Peter Bowen
The hole where the little German’s shop had been was cleaned out and there was lumber piled there, so someone was going to build a shop. Laramie was growing and it would a while, anyway, the West was a place for druggists and dry goods merchants as well as cowboys and the vanishing Indians.
We’d seen and turned when there was a shot and it hit me, just a shallow furrow across my shoulders and it missed Alys’s neck by not much. The wound burned like hell and I had left my guns in the rooms, but Alys had hers and she had it out and she was blazing at an alleyway across the street while tugging me on. We dived behind a water trough and it warn’t long before a lot of folks with shotguns and rifles showed up.
Digby and Masoud and the boys was some of them, and Digby got them white flecks at his eyes and the wings of his nostrils.
The fellers searched but found nothing.
Whoever it was had taken the one shot and gone.
Digby cleaned my long shallow wound carefully and put ointment on, so it wouldn’t crack and bleed as I rode. I’d ridden with much worse.
We would leave in the morning.
What bothered me was I didn’t know if it was me or Alys the bullet had been meant for.
44
WE PASSED THE BURNED station on the way, about four that afternoon. It was like it was, and the graves had been dug at by coyotes, but they was deep enough so the bodies was still down there. It ain’t always the case.
There was a spring five miles past large enough to water the stock, with grass in plenty. Even though the fire had come close enough, on the prairie the grass grows faster after a burn. The Indians had long known that, and they set fires because it brought game. They knew their country.
I rode a long circle around, but saw no sign there was anyone been camped waiting on us, just a few piles of them rocks Indians put up on boulders so they can peek through and not have their heads show.
I was full of heart, even with the gouge in my back. I loved it here, the huge sky and the air so clear you could see miles.
Toward evening I come on some antelope, and I shot one and gutted it and carried it back to camp, where Masoud’s cook made chops out of it in about three minutes. Then he boned them and rolled the chops in garlic and herbs and grilled them. They was delicious.
We was traveling light, no wall tents, just tarps, and even Masoud had an ordinary canvas, though the precious rugs was brought and comfortable down-filled blankets. His guards stood all night like statues and slept on their horses by day.
The next morning we went on ahead, while the skinners packed up and made the air blue with encouragements to their stock to behave, which is not a mule’s natural intentions. Other than the noise, the skinners was gentle with the animals and rough as the men were they liked their beasts. Also, you abuse a mule it will accept that and wait, years if necessary, for that one kick that can kill. They are smarter than horses.
The weather was fall and perfect and the alders and cottonwoods had turned color and prairie chickens broke from the cover near us and Masoud swung an expensive shotgun and brought down bird after bird. I’d have been leery of shooting from the back of a horse, but the big black A-rab he rode didn’t even twitch.
Masoud had threatened to take that goddamned duck plucker right up to the last minute, finally ordering the flunks to stand down and take the damned thing back to the big tent. I was part relieved but worried since lacking that I expected Digby and Masoud to come up with other annoyances.
We come up over a rise and saw buffalo below and I shook my head. We didn’t need that much meat, and the skinners still had the roasts of beef they’d left Laramie with, partly cooked and rolled in rock salt. They would keep up to two weeks if the weather warn’t too warm. After we got short enough of grub we could kill a fat cow, but I knew the warning Red Cloud had given me stood. I remembered the tongues of the German party on the thong.
Whinny was off looking over the country and I saw him wave from up a hill off to the west and so I rode on over to see what he wanted.
There was a couple of dead men behind the hill, they’d been staked out and had fires lit on their chests. Enough of their clothes hadn’t burned so we could see they was wearing suits, for the love of God, and I gathered from the busted pencils and blank paper scattered about they was newspaper reporters.
I looked round the ground and figured maybe eight bored young Cheyenne warriors off on a horse-stealing lark had happened on these two fools and done this and wandered on.
The coyotes and birds and skunks had been at the corpses good, so Whinny and I shrugged. We had better things to do than plant idiots, there was country to see before sundown and our charge was the living.
What they was doing here I couldn’t guess, but it often happened that pilgrims like these would just up and wander off thinking they was somehow exempt. The lucky ones, and there were a lot of them, made it through and they never understood how you could come on a war party you’d have missed if you left your last camp a couple hours before or after.
We went back, each carrying another antelope, in time for Masoud’s cook to work his wonders again, and as we come in I seen we’d been joined by a goddamn preacher and three sallow assistants.
The fool ranted a while about saving the souls of the Sioux and how it was our Christian duty to assist him in getting far enough north so he could pester them perfectly happy folk before winter set in.
This lunatic then looked round for heathen to convert, and his pale blue eye landed on Masoud and he fell to his knees calling on the Lord to help him save the Savage Turk.
The Savage Turk listened politely to this rot a while but when the preacher tried to come close enough to whack him with his damned Bible the guards flicked up their scimitars and cut off the exhortations in mid-howl.
“I am quite happy with Allah,” says Masoud civilly enough, “but just today Digby remarked that he felt his soul was in peril.”
The preacher then took off after Digby, who finally pulled out his Navy Colt and said his soul was in fine shape now shut up.
I didn’t feel we needed to have our sleep broke by this fool’s bellerin’ to Jesus all the damned night so I told him he’d done worn out his welcome and to take his traps and flunks and go away, far enough so we didn’t have to hear him calling on the Lord.
“’Sides,” I says, “them Sioux been long familiar with Christ. A couple hundred years ago Father Brulé come to spread the word. Now, he wouldn’t make medicine to help the Sioux steal horses or get scalps in battle or nothing useful, but they was impressed by the single-mindedness with which Father Brulé pursued their souls. They held a council and did adopt him into the tribe, sort of.”
The preacher looked at me.
“They are not completely lost, then,” he says. “I thank you, my friend, and I shall pray for your soul.”
“Neither is Father Brulé,” I says, “since the Sioux et him. He is even got a memorial back in Minnesota the Sioux gave him. It’s called Place-Where-We-Shit-The-Blackrobe, a day’s journey away from where the feast was held.”
The fool goggled at me for a moment like a turkey seen something it can’t figure out, cocking his head this way and that, and then the whole damned camp broke out in howls and bellers of laughter and men was slamming each other on the back and the preacher and his flunks went all pale and they got back on their horses.
They didn’t have but a couple pack animals, and overloaded at that, so they’d run out of grub in a week or so and then they’d either starve to death or run into a war party.
In a final burst of genius I rode after them and pointed the way to the two somewhat charred journalists, as folks who could use a good sermon over them before being buried.
That was far enough away so we’d be spared, and them two fellers the Cheyennes had killed was past having theological disputes.
Masoud’s cook had a big pot of stew bubbling and the smell of onions come off it, and then it occurred to me we hadn’t packed any, and
I tried to find out from the man where he’d got them.
Masoud finally come over and he translated, and it seemed this feller had found a whole patch of wild onions not far from the spring and he’d dug them up and they was in with the antelope now, cooking right nice.
I told Masoud they was likely death camas, the two kinds grow right together and one is a root and the other a poison. So we dumped the mess in a little hollow and covered it over with stones and when we come back the cook was setting there by the fire and a big pool of blood under him. He’d been shamed, hell, he’d almost killed his prince. He’d jabbed a dagger into his throat and cut the jugular and then he’d sat there till he died.
“I forgave him,” says Masoud, “but it wasn’t enough.”
He looked real sad.
“Lots of folks out here don’t know the country end up eating them camas and thinking they are wild onions,” I says. “I found most of an emigrant train dead or dying once. They had scurvy and they thought the wild onions was a godsend.”
I was sure as hell going to miss the cook, but damned if Jake didn’t try his hand and he managed to make antelope in little chunks on skewers of willow and a couple Dutch oven loaves of bread and that with some dried fruit was pretty good.
We was tired and turned in early, the light was failing now and every moment we had was useful.
I was to sleep in Alys’s arms and along toward dawn there was a tug on my shirt and I whirled around and had my gun coming up and I smelled Mulligan, who had been far enough away from his bath he had his own stink back.
I slipped out and saddled my horse and Mulligan led me away from the camp, over the hill four or five miles away where the two journalists had died and the preacher and his flunks was to camp.
“They come about two maybe, by the Dipper,” says Mulligan. “One warrior for each man, I guess. Just used war clubs; they was too close to you to do any torturin’.”
The four had been brained and scalped and mutilated, as usual.
Mulligan had watched it, of course, but there wasn’t a thing he could do.
45
US FOLKS WHO WAS paying for and runnin’ the expedition could travel light and fast, but we was held by the mule train and the need for the protection of the skinners and packers. You never really could know what the Indians was up to, and it was a mistake to think that the chiefs was dictators. The tribes ran somewhat on the advice of people like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and Bull Shield, but it was finally just advice and the young warriors was like young men pretty much anywhere, all fire and few brains. Wars depend on having ample supplies of stupid young men who know they’re immortal.
We could roam some, as long as if we was attacked we could draw the others in hearing our gunfire. Digby had enough sense to know this, and if he could keep Alys from going that extra half mile it might mean the difference between life or death. It was hard for her, when she’d spot a layer of that yellow-brown rock that the fossils was usually in and want to go look and it was just a little too far.
Mulligan would slip into camp likely wriggling between the sentry’s legs for the sport of it, and he kept me up on who was near and passing by. I’d get up and make up some cold grub for him and give him a twist of the cheap tobacco we had as a gift for the Indians and he’d be gone. He didn’t come I would worry some, that my best ears was threaded on a thong somewheres, but he’d come in a day or two and allow as how when he had nothing to say he would not say it.
Without wagons we could move pretty fair, and if the trail was open and didn’t have too much by way of good ambush spots had to be checked before the long train could file through, we could manage thirty miles most days.
I never had liked them A-rab horses, thinking they was flighty and easily winded, which was true, but you had to ride them some different than our stock. They was fast and needed a rest exactly every so often, and Masoud and his men know that and once I began to follow their rhythms even my horses worked better. I felt a little foolish, but Masoud said that his people were people of the horse and had been for thousands of years. He rode like he was part of the animal, for sure, more graceful than a big man should be.
But then when we was about eight days out we come right to a bank of clay that had been stone before it rotted and there was bones weathering out of it and Alys gave off a whoop and she was down off her horse peering at them and clapping her hands.
They was a mixed bag of camels, horses, and, so help me, hippopotamuses. With one long terrible fang used to belong to an overgrown mountain lion. Mountains lions aren’t given to attack people, but I was right glad this one was extinct. That fang was a good eight inches long.
I thought we might make camp there, but Alys said the bones was from critters that was known to science and nice enough but what we was after were the two monsters that Washakie had shown us, locked together in the stone.
Alys said that them two hadn’t died together, that they was killed somehow and their carcasses was in the water and when they bloated up they floated off to a sandbar on the ocean she said used to be here. If they were on land something would eat them and if they was out to sea something would eat them, but at the river’s mouth nothing could and so they was buried many millions of years ago.
I couldn’t quite believe all of this, for we was a good mile above sea level, but she assured me the earth moved around a lot given enough time. She pointed at Africa and South America on a map and said they was stuck together once. Well, they did fit like that.
Like any boy raised by doting parents I had had parsons try to scare me into good behavior and they was always ranting about how God just made up everything one week, but this was a lot more marvelous than having some Thing men dreamed up. It seemed right.
I could see why science was thought to be enthralling. The secrets of the world was being unraveled.
We went on the next day and a couple Shoshones out scouting buffalo come to camp. I knew them as Washakie’s people, and they said he was still camped on the Wind River and waiting on us. I give them some tobacco and they asked for whiskey. I refused. The old chief knew well what firewater did to his people, and he would be angry with me I poisoned these two youngsters. Oh, they’d get it somewheres else, but I couldn’t stop that.
At night the wind would quarter around to the north and it smelt of pines and snow. It would be winter already up high, and could be winter down here anytime. You never can tell. If we wasn’t hit by the blizzards the old-timers talked of in ’46, when there was eight feet of snow and blizzards for weeks and the sun never came up without two sun dogs, one to either side, we could have even up to three weeks or a month there and still get out before the deep cold, which seemed to come in January, the month the Indians call the Moon of Exploding Trees.
One morning the sentry started hollering and I went off to the noise and he was pointing at a lone Indian off on a hilltop a couple miles away, and I squinted hard and made out the long white hair and the full formal dress of the great chief of the Shoshones, Washakie. He carried a rifle and nothing else, and the man’s force was enough even at that distance to put a scare into the young skinner standing guard.
Washakie was far too smart to fight the whites, and so his people was spared the slaughters more belligerent tribes brought down on themselves. He knew he couldn’t win, and that was that and so he did what he could.
Not long back some of his young men called him an old woman for not letting them take revenge on some miners who let their hogs root up the camas meadows that was the Shoshones potatoes.
Washakie disappeared for a month and he come back with seven scalps taken from the Blackfeet and Crows, and he had to be over seventy when he did it.
Having made his impression Washakie walked his horse slow down the hill and toward us, taking his own damn sweet time and every eye in the camp on him. Well, a passel of howling warriors in paint was one thing but this tall straight old man was even scarier, just alone and coming on and not a care.
We watched fascinated and Washakie dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and come on at the last at a gallop, riding like he was on a stuffed chair, loose and easy, and he rode right up to Digby and Alys and he stopped the horse cold and slid down, graceful as a cat, and he grinned at them. Alys threw her arms around him and she kissed the old bastard and they beamed at each other a moment and then she introduced him to Digby.
I went over and watched the old goat turn on the charm. Alys and Washakie was beaming at Digby and she rattling away about what a wonderful man the chief was.
“But,” I says, “I have known the chief for many years and ... he cheats at cards.”
Washakie gave me a bored look.
“Kelly,” he says, “loses at cards, which is worse.”
Masoud had been watching all this and he come over with his two guards who was never more than a sword’s length away from him.
Washakie looked at the prince of Arabia and them two knew each other, master in their own lands and no mistake. And then the damnedest thing—Masoud bowed. A courtesy, I figured, from one prince to another.
This odd scene was then interrupted.
There was a yell from back down the trail and I turned and saw about the last damn thing I cared to see here and now.
Buffalo Bill, the Great Scout of the Plains, was riding hard toward us, on one of them big damned white horses he favors, so he’d stick out.
His fringes was flapping in the breeze and he was standing up in his stirrups, and had a lance and pennon, with what I guessed would be his own personal coat of arms, this from a farmboy raised amid the hogs and chickens in royal Iowa.
Cody sure looked the part, that is if you wanted to draw the attention of every pair of eyes could see you. Difference between Cody and Washakie was Washakie could dress modestly and act the same while poor old Bill had to be got up like some actor in vaudeville.
I looked at Cody again.
He was rocking back and forth a little.