Absaroka Ambush

by William W. Johnstone

  The rain continued to come down in torrents. But the men knew it could not last much longer. It would slacken as the storm moved on.

  The mountain men rode for another hour, following the wagon tracks. The rain began to abate, finally dwindling down to no more than a drizzle. Preacher stood up in his stirrups and pointed.

  “There it is,” he said, his voice flat.

  Ned took a spyglass from his saddlebags and opened it full. He peered through the lenses for a moment, then silently handed the spyglass to Preacher. The hard look in his eyes told the entire story.

  Blackjack, Steals Pony, and Ring had turned their horses, to cover the other directions. All had a hunch the war party had not gone far, knowing that someone from the train would come looking for the women.

  Preacher’s face hardened as he viewed the scene. Two of the three women were clearly visible through the magnification. They were naked, of course. And they were dead. Both had been scalped. The Indians had taken the mules, although many Indians disliked the fractious animals. Preacher handed the spyglass to Ned without a word.

  The men cautiously walked their horses up to the savage scene. Nora Simms had been the youngest and the prettiest of the three women. She was gone. They had taken her.

  Betty Rutherford had been used badly and the back of her head bashed in by a stone war-axe. She had then been scalped. Phyllis Reed probably had broken free sometime during the struggle and tried to run away. She had gotten only a few yards before an arrow in her back brought her down. She lay facedown and naked on the wet prairie grass, her inner thighs bruised.

  Steals Pony dismounted, covered the lower part of Phyllis’s body with a discarded blanket, then broke off the arrow and looked at it. “Pawnee,” he said, then threw the arrow to the ground in disgust.

  “Yonder’s two of the mules,” Ned said, pointing toward the southeast. “Draggin’ their harness.”

  “Stay where you are,” Steals Pony said. “I will look to see if it is a trap while you bury the women. If it is safe, do you want the mules, Preacher?”

  “Yeah,” Preacher said, rummaging around in the clothing-strewn bed of the wagon for a shovel. “We’ll take the wagon back and tear it down for spare parts. You watch your butt out yonder, Steals Pony. It ain’t like them goddamn Pawnee to go off very far. With them knowin’ somebody would come lookin’.”

  It was easy digging in the soaked earth, and the men worked swiftly, digging down as far as they dared, constantly looking over their shoulders. The women were wrapped in blankets and buried. Then the men went looking for stones to cover the mounds, to keep animals from digging up the bodies and eating them.

  Blackjack found a Bible in a trunk and handed it to Preacher. Preacher opened it at random and read a few verses while they stood over the lonely graves. Two small fresh mounds of earth on the vastness of an untamed land.

  “That sounded strange, Preacher,” Blackjack said. “What did you just read?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked down at the page. “It’s from Romans. I thought it sounded pretty good.”

  “What do intercession mean?” Ring asked. “That sounds kinda vulgar to me.”

  “I ain’t got no idea,” Preacher replied, closing the Good Book. “I ain’t no student of the gospel. But it’s in the damn Bible. So it can’t be bad, can it?”

  “I reckon not,” Blackjack conceded.

  “’Sides,” Preacher said, “I thought that part about ’groanings which cannot be uttered’ sounded about right.”

  “Amen,” Ned said, looking around him. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  Steals Pony had found all four mules and brought them back to the wagon. “The Pawnee are gone. They left in a big hurry for some reason. One horse is carrying double, so they took Nora with them for sure.”

  “She’ll soon wish she had died with these others,” Preacher said ominously.

  “For a fact,” Steals Pony said. “I do not envy her existence from this moment on.”

  The men stood around the graves and looked at one another for a few seconds.

  “Well, hell!” Blackjack said.

  “Now what do we do?” Ned asked.

  Preacher kicked at a clump of dirt. Then he sighed heavily. “What say you boys?” he asked, looking around him. “Do we go after her?”

  “By the Lord, I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t at least try to fetch her back,” Ring said. “I think we got to at least try.”

  “I say we go after her,” Steals Pony said.

  “Count me in,” Blackjack and Ned spoke together.

  “All right. Let’s do it,” Preacher said. “We’ll brush corral the mules over yonder by that thicket and come back for them. If we don’t, well, they’ll bust out of it when they get hungry. Somebody take that shovel yonder with them. If Nora kicked up too much of a fuss, they’ll just knock her in the head and dump her. Personal, I hope they do. We’ve all seen what a war party can do to a woman.”

  “I’ll bring along that Bible I found,” Blackjack said. “Just in case.”

  “If we need it, let me read the passages,” Steals Pony said, looking over at Preacher. “I know a more appropriate verse or two.”

  “Which one?” Preacher demanded.

  “The Twenty-third Psalm,” the Delaware said gently.

  “How do that go?” Ring asked.

  “It starts: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’”

  “Give him the Good Book, Blackjack. He’s got me bested, this time.”

  Nine

  The mountain men found Nora Simms less than three miles from the new twin graves on the prairie. The Indians had bashed her head in, scalped her, and dumped her. She was a pitiful sight, lying naked and bloody on the ground. Ring had brought along a blanket and he wrapped her up, and all together the men took the body back to where they had buried the others and laid Nora to rest beside Betty and Phyllis.

  Steals Pony read the Twenty-third Psalm and the men stood for a moment over the graves. The initial storm had blown itself out and for a brief moment, while the Delaware was reading from the Bible, the sun broke through. But already, dark storm clouds were beginning to gather, and the men knew they were in for a couple more days of terrible weather.

  Just like Steals Pony had predicted.

  The mules were hitched up and Ned tied the reins of his horse to the rear of the wagon and took the seat. The men started back for the wagon train. They were a silent bunch for most of the way. Ever vigilant, for that was a way of life, but not talking much. It was not that they were unaccustomed to death; they’d been around violent death for all of their adult lives. Violent, and in this case, the needless death of innocents.

  Ring broke the silence. “We’re being trailed, boys.”

  “Yes,” Steals Pony said. “Pawnee Bearmen. But they are holding back. I think they have bigger plans and don’t want to waste them on us.”

  “The wagon train?” Blackjack asked.

  “Probably,” Preacher said. “But they’re fools if they attack. We could hold off one hell of a war party. But did y’all notice the torture marks on the Rutherford woman? She might have broke and told them about the wagon train bein’ mostly women. That might have got them all excited. That may be why they bashed in Nora’s head and dumped her.”

  “I never thought of that,” Ned called from the wagon seat. “But you might be right. If that’s the case, they’ve sent for more bucks.”

  “That’d be my guess,” Preacher said.

  “We’re in for a long night,” Ring opined.

  It was dark when the men arrived back at the wagon train. Preacher gathered the women around and leveled with them about the fate of Nora, Betty, and Phyllis. His words were brutally hard, deliberately so, for he wanted the women to know every detail. It just might save their lives in the future. He spared them nothing. Then he told them about the Pawnee war party trailing them.

  “We’ve got a good defensive spot here,” Preacher said
, speaking to the group. The other mountain men were standing guard, with some of the Missouri men. “And before you ask, put everything you ever heard or read about Indians never attackin’ at night out of your heads. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. It all depends on how strong they believe their medicine is at the time. Now let’s get supper cooked and eat and everybody in place. I think we’re gonna have us a wet and wild night.”

  Faith sidled up to him when he was alone. “I have noticed, Mister Preacher, that your quaint manner of speaking sometimes vanishes and you do seem to be able to speak proper English. Why is that?”

  “I ain’t got no idee, Missy.”

  “There you go again. Do you wish people to believe that you are nothing but an ignorant buffoon?”

  “I don’t give a damn what people believe me to be, Missy. What other folk think ain’t no concern of mine. It’s what they do that I pay heed to.”

  “What are you running from, Mister Preacher?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s obvious to me that you are hiding out here in this desolate place because of something terrible that occurred in your past.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. It is. Did some lady break your heart years back and you had to run away to ease the pain of love lost?”

  Preacher stood in the light rain and blinked. “What are you talking about, Missy?”

  Old Snake had slipped up and was standing a few feet away, behind Faith. He was listening and struggling to contain his laughter.

  “You can tell me, Preacher,” Faith said, stepping closer. He could feel the heat from her body. “I want to be your friend. I really, really do.”

  “Uh-huh.” Preacher resisted an urge to grab her and run off under a wagon with her. Faith was ripe in all the right spots and even with a dark floppy hat covering her cut-off strawberry curls, she was lovely to look at and quite desirable. Faith was pushing hard to get bedded down. However, with anywhere from twenty to two hundred Pawnee, or more, prowling around the encirclement, Preacher concluded that this was a poor time to be thinking about romance.

  “Yes,” she whispered, stepping closer still. Another two inches and she’d be crawling inside his buckskins.

  Steals Pony unknowingly saved Preacher from what was fast becoming a very awkward moment. “They come, Preacher!” the Delaware called.

  “Get back to your wagon, Faith,” Preacher said. “This night’s about to blow up in our faces.”

  Preacher turned and was gone, old Snake right behind him. “How many?” Preacher asked Steals Pony.

  “Too many,” the Delaware said softly. “We’re not that far from the Platte, and they must have just broken their winter camp there. This would be quite a prize for them.”

  “I can smell war paint,” Snake said. “My God, there must be hundreds of them.”

  “Several hundred, at least,” Steals Pony agreed. “I think they know about the women.”

  “I got the women under the wagons and behind boxes and the like,” Blackjack said, striding up, big as a bear. “They’re scared, but game.”

  “I don’t understand this,” Preacher said. “Something’s got ’em all stirred up and we ain’t it. We’re just bearin’ the brunt of whatever it is.”

  “You reckon Jack Hayes and that trash with him somehow is mixed up in all this?” Ned asked.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me none. I just can’t figure out what it might be.” He turned his face skyward. The rain had stopped for the moment. “They’ll be hittin’ us right about now,” he said. “Get in place.”

  The first wave of the war party came at the westward women and their few men in a silent surge of painted-up fury. “Now!” Preacher shouted, and nearly a hundred rifles smashed the wet night, turning it into a bloody, pain-shrieking darkness.

  Whatever the Pawnee expected, it certainly was not this. The only white women they had ever encountered were all cowering, trembling types, and that is what they believed they would encounter on this train. They were wrong. The heavy balls from the rifles tore their flesh and bloodied the ground. The Pawnee lost nearly fifty men in the first few seconds, and that was quite enough for this night, thank you.

  They gathered up their wounded and their dead and pulled back to talk this over. They looked with contempt at their medicine men, who had promised them that their medicine was good. The medicine men shrugged and took the hostile looks stoically. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, the shrugs seemed to imply. Sometimes the thrown bones lied.

  Those women whose jobs it was to reload the rifles and pistols worked fast, and within seconds, the women behind the rifles were ready for another charge.

  But it did not materialize. The night grew steadily quieter as the Pawnee pulled back, well out of range. Some of their dead were too close to the wagons for them to recover, and the mountain men were quick to take advantage of that.

  Most of the women and many of the Missouri men looked on, horrified, as Preacher and his friends pulled out knives and began mutilating the bodies.

  “Stop that!” Faith shouted.

  “Shut up,” Preacher told her. “We ain’t likin’ this no more than you all. But it’s got to be done.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Cut out the eyes so’s they can’t see their way to the Great Beyond. Cut off their hands so’s they can’t fight any enemies they might come up on. Now they’ll be forever lost in the darkness. To wander forever.”

  “That’s the most unchristian thing I have ever witnessed!” Miss Claire Goodfellow said.

  “You shoulda seen Nora Simms, Betty Rutherford, and Phyllis Reed,” Ring called over his shoulder, his long-bladed knife flashing bloody in the night. “Then mayhaps you wouldn’t be so aghast at this.”

  Steals Pony let out a blood-chilling wild war cry and held up two severed hands. He called out loud in Pawnee, heaping insults on the dead. Faith shuddered. Eudora smiled.

  “Every other person get some rest for a few hours, then take your partners’ place,” Preacher called. “Work it out, ladies. It’s gonna be a long night.”

  “I thought you said they wouldn’t return?” Faith’s voice cut into the damp night.

  “I said they probably wouldn’t be back,” Preacher replied. Under his breath he muttered, “I wish I hadn’t a said nothin’.”

  “What’s that?” Faith called.

  “Nothin’,” Preacher said. “Just nothin’ at all.”

  “Are you going to leave those disgusting bodies right there?” she called.

  “No, Missy,” Preacher replied wearily, for it had been a long day. “We’re gonna pick ’em up and tote ’em over to where the Pawnee have made camp and dump the bodies there.”

  That shut her up for about five seconds. “Well, you don’t have to be sarcastic about it.”

  “Hush up,” Preacher told her, wiping his hands on the wet grass to remove the Pawnee blood.

  It was the wrong thing to say to Faith. Whatever ardor they might have experienced a few moments past suddenly cooled and evaporated into the night air. She told him to absolutely, positively never again tell her to hush up. Of course she was quite vocal about it and it took considerably longer to express her thoughts, but that was the sum of it.

  Blackjack looked at her in awe. He shook his head. “That woman can shore string words together, can’t she?”

  “If Preacher don’t give her what she’s a-cravin’ pretty soon,” Snake whispered, “we’re in for a long trip.”

  “Have mercy on us,” Steals Pony replied.

  About that time, a lady named Madeline Hornbuckle found a very large rattlesnake curled up in her blankets and she let out a war whoop that brought the whole camp running. The snake disappeared, but no one got into their blankets for the rest of the night.

  It poured from the skies the next day, and Preacher told the ladies to rest—and shake out their blankets for the umpteenth time.

  “Go kill a rattler and bring it back her
e,” he told Steals Pony. “That’s the only thing that’ll calm these women down. Damn bunch of city women anyways.”

  “I have a better suggestion,” the Delaware said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You go kill a rattlesnake and bring it back here. And good luck finding one in this rain.”

  “And watch out for them Pawnee,” Blackjack added with a smile. “’Way I see it, most of them hightailed back to camp. But I figure they’s maybe fifty or so who stayed behind with revenge on their minds. And they’d just love to find you ridin’ out there alone.”

  “What a bunch of friends I got,” Preacher muttered, making another walk-around of the circled wagons, slopping through the muddy and churned-up ground, the rain beating down on his hat. “Smart alecks, all of them.” Then he grinned, knowing that a man could not have better friends than those who accompanied him on this journey.

  He stopped by a wagon when he heard a hard, wracking cough. Squatting down, he looked at the three women huddled on the ground under the wagon bed. “Get that woman inside the wagon and get her warm,” Preacher ordered. “If you got any ginger root, make some tea. She’s on the verge of pneumonia. Strip ’er down to the buff and rub her good; get that blood to the surface and keep her warm. Pneumonia’s a killer out here. Oncest you get her dry, warm, and full of ginger tea, add some clove to it and she’ll go right to sleep. She’s got to rest.”

  When the men who were to be called mountain men had first arrived in the west, they had discovered that the ’poor ignorant savages,’ as whites called the Indians, knew a hell of a lot about medicine and healing of the body.

  Perhaps one of the reasons the breed of men called mountain men were considered so tough is that they just simply would not succumb to illness. No matter how they felt, they just kept on going.

  Rain continued to pound the pioneers during all that wet and gray day. The only bright spot was that the Pawnee had chosen not to launch another attack. Charlie and Steals Pony rode out about noon and completed a wide circle around the area. The Pawnee were indeed gone.

  “They headed north,” Charlie said, huddled under a canvas, his hands clutching a tin cup full of hot coffee. “Then they cut west. I reckon they figured the rain would cover their tracks, and it would have in another hour or so. That bunch of revenge-seekers will be hittin’ us somewheres along the Platte.”