Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Waller straightened and saluted. “Company H will be saddled and standing to horse at sunrise, Captain.”

  Carpenter answered the salute and smiled, his eyes slowly crawling over the bright faces of his brunettes as wisps of foggy breath-smoke clung over their heads like frozen garlands of wispy gauze.

  The captain nodded. “A change of scenery might do us all some good, fellas.”

  Reuben watched Carpenter turn and leave into the bright, cold afternoon sunlight beginning to stab the western doorway with streaks of artificial warmth. Suddenly, Carpenter stopped and turned.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Meant to tell you that rumor has it Lone Wolf is grieving something fierce. We’re to be on the alert tonight. Colonel Davidson and Haworth have no idea how the chief is going to take the news.”

  “Grieving, Cap’n?”

  “Post interpreter Horace Jones claims Lone Wolf’s just got word his son was killed last month down in Texas.”

  “War party off the reservation,” Reuben said. “We’d heard Lone Wolf’s boy and nephew was leading a bunch south to Mexico.”

  Carpenter nodded, sullenly. “They were caught on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos last month. Nine warriors killed.”

  “Lone Wolf won’t sit around camp grieving for long, Cap’n.”

  “We all figure for the worst of it. He’ll cut his braids, kill some ponies, slash himself up a bit. But when it comes down to it—Lone Wolf’s the sort who’ll ride off the reservation to salve his wounded spirit.”

  “By getting the bodies of his boy and nephew?” Waller asked.

  Squinting, Carpenter licked his lower lip. “The only way I figure Lone Wolf can salve his wounded spirit is to shed some white blood. His warriors will have to cross the Red River somewhere, Sergeant.”

  “And H Company will be down there at Camp Augur when they do, Cap’n.”

  Carpenter nodded one time, his face gone solid as late winter ice. “See you at sunrise, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Word around Fort Still had it that new recruits were on their way from Jefferson Barracks. The Tenth Cavalry was finally being brought up to fighting strength—for only the second time in its eight-year history. New men were on their way, to arrive before spring found the Tenth marching off to war again.

  Besides the new recruits, Carpenter had assured his company that new weapons were bound for the Tenth as well. Replacing the old, well-used Spencer carbines handed down from white regiments would be brand spanking new 1873 Model Springfield carbines. And for their hips would be the much-talked-about Colt’s breech-loading revolvers.

  Reuben Waller shuffled his men back to their work of currying and mucking and soaping down both saddles and tack. He turned back to his own mount, a sore-mouthed mare with a good heart.

  No matter what, the sergeant thought as he began to gently brush the aging mare, the Tenth would be ready, by God.

  If the Kiowa and Comanche and Cheyenne wanted to start a war in earnest … then, by God, the Tenth Cavalry would be ready this time.

  * * *

  He had mourned for the full waxing and then waning of the moon. And now it was the Moon of Ice in the Lodge.

  Lone Wolf felt as if it were the moon of ice in his heart—so cold with grief and anger and rage did his chest feel.

  The prescribed time of mourning was now complete and he could do as he had promised: take the trail south to recover the bodies of his favorite son, Tauankia, or Sitting in the Saddle, and his nephew, Guitain, Heart of a Young Wolf. Together with his brother, Red Otter, Lone Wolf had grieved piteously for the deaths of the two young warriors at the hands of the soldiers.

  Both fathers had chopped off fingertips, hacked off their long braids, dragged knives across arms and shoulders and bellies and legs, praying that with the seeping of their own blood they might find some relief to their excruciating, unending grief. But all the wailing and fasting and praying and maiming did was to give the old chiefs more resolve than ever to see to it that not only were the bodies recovered, but even more so that the soldiers would pay for the murders.

  Back in the Moon of Deer Shedding Horns the young men had slipped off from the reservation, a combined war party of Kiowa and Comanche. The survivors told the story that they had made their successful raid south into Mexico and were almost home when they had bumped into a strong reconnaissance force from Three-Finger Kinzie’s Fourth Cavalry. Eleven warriors had fallen during a bloody, running skirmish with the yellowleg soldiers. Besides Lone Wolf’s son and nephew, a well-known Comanche chief had fallen to the white man’s guns. The uncle of a powerful, rising young Comanche shaman named Isatai.

  Lone Wolf was certain Isatai would not let the murder of his uncle go unanswered.

  Once again this afternoon he stopped at the greasy ring where his buffalo hide lodge had stood a month before. But in the prescribed ritual of mourning, Lone Wolf had burned it and most of his possessions, forced now to live with his wife’s relations until they could once more secure hides in the spring hunt. As he kicked at the scattering of collapsed, charred lodgepole and rawhide and fragments of buffalo-hide lodge cover, Lone Wolf knew he would not be joining that hunt for the great shaggy beasts. Instead, he would be riding with the young men as they hunted the white man—both yellowleg soldiers and the Tehan buffalo hunters.

  His eyes were a dull, slate-colored pair of murky windows that clouded up with hate.

  Had not the treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek guaranteed that the last great buffalo herd on the southern plains belonged to the Kiowa and Comanche and Cheyenne? The chiefs had touched the pen to that treaty more than six years before, after hearing the promise of the white peace-talkers that no white man would be allowed onto the great buffalo range. That was Indian land. And those buffalo were promised to the Indians.

  But in the past two winters, the white man was venturing farther and farther south of the dead line—that imaginary boundary that marked the northern extent of the no-man’s land. Originally, the hide hunters had been forbidden to travel south of the Arkansas River. Then they pushed south to the Cimarron, and later south to the North Canadian. And now, stories told of small groups of white hide hunters occasionally seen in the country of the South Canadian. Come to steal what belonged to the Indian. Pushing, ever pushing, farther and farther south until they had reached the land of the Llano Estacado. The Staked Plain.

  To the land of the whispering walls of mud.

  When Lone Wolf had been but a boy entrusted with others to guard the great herds of the Kiowa warrior bands, the traders had come from far up the Arkansas River to the land of the Kiowa and Comanche, where they built their mud trading houses. Blankets for hides. Beads and pots and vermilion for hides. Whiskey for hides.

  Yet the white man knew little of the legends of that very place where they raised their mud walls. Lo, the stories told by the old ones around the fires, tales passed down to them from the bands who had inhabited this land even before the coming of the Kiowa. Fables of the metal-heads who had marched out of the south on foot or rode the first horses the Indians had ever seen. Long columns of fair-skinned tai-bos with their shiny metal breasts and gleaming helmets that frightened the old ones who kept out of sight and watched in awestruck wonder the progress of these men who could remove their heads at each night’s encampment. With their long lances aflutter with colorful pennons, the old fables stated that the metal-heads strode ever northward on some meaningful purpose.

  Riding what those old bands first took to be large dogs—elk-dogs. What later came to be the ponies of the Kiowa and Comanche. They carried and used from time to time the loud roaring fire-sticks that spat smoke and belched in monstrous, fearsome reports that made the old ones tremble behind their sandy hills. The metal-heads pointed their fire-sticks at antelope and deer, killing their game the way the Indian pointed his arrow at what he needed to eat.

  And the metal-heads walked on to the country beyond the South Canadian, then turned east, marchi
ng into the land where the sun rose each morning. Some of those were never to be seen again, like some mythical, many-headed and fearsome beast that was swallowed by the far horizon.

  Come to search for the golden splendor of the Seven Cities. Then gone as mysteriously as they had appeared out of the south.

  In all that time, in all those many generations gone since that long-ago time, Lone Wolf again realized as he stood looking over the greasy, blackened ruin of what had once been his lodge, no man had ever realized the full extent of the great wealth to be had out there in that land once traveled by the greedy, gold-seeking metal-heads … a land where the Kiowa and Comanche had struggled against one another before forming an uneasy alliance against all the rest.

  No man realized what wealth lay out there at the edge of the Staked Plain.

  At least, no white man knew the riches to be won.

  2

  March 1874

  Seamus Donegan tore his eyes away from the shimmering surface of the red whiskey in his glass and glanced once more over the motley collection of customers in this Dodge City saloon. Winter was quickly soaking away into the first warming of the spring earth.

  The more time he spent on these far, lonely plains, the more he enjoyed these all too brief visits to what passed for civilization here at the edge of an immense frontier. It wasn’t just the whiskey. A man could take enough of that along if he were of a mind to. And he had to disagree with those who said it was for the company of a soft-skinned, honey-smelling woman that he had come to this hive. There were few like that soft-hipped, well-rounded Samantha Pike. Fewer still the likes of the mysterious Jennifer Wheatley … wherever the world had swallowed that auburn-haired beauty.

  He tossed back the whiskey to kill the hurt of missing them both and poured himself another before digging into a coat pocket to drag out his corncob pipe and a beaded pouch in which he carried his tobacco. He stared at it a moment—a gift from Bill Cody. The pipe from trader McDonald at Fort McPherson, Nebraska Territory. Up on the Platte where that mulatto renegade nearly had the Irishman stuck and gutted like a hog to slaughter … had it not been for young Bill Cody’s curiosity and fast pistol hand.*

  Buffalo Bill, he had been called for the first time in that winter of 1868. Killing buffalo for the railroad and the army had brought him a little fame in the ensuing years. And it had brought the rest to Dodge City on the Arkansas. Out there at the end of this street where saloons and chippie nests stood shoulder to hip lay the huge sod corrals, crowded with the huge mountains of buffalo bones destined for shipment east, there to be ground into fertilizer. Farther still stood the long rows of hide ricks, some fifty to sixty hides high—the stacks of dried flint hides a man could smell as far as he could see as the weather grew warm and the wind shifted out of the southwest.

  As slow as spring was to make its full, tantalizing appearance, winter had not worn well on this town, nor its many temporary inhabitants. What with the numerous blizzards that kept the men hunkered down for weeks at a time with nothing to do. Or the fact that the buffalo appeared to be gone far, farther still to the south this year than ever before. On top of that, none of the merchants were making all that they normally made come this time of year with the first rains of spring mixed with the last snows of winter. Too few were in need of a new outfit before he rode off for buffalo ground.

  Trouble was, as young as Dodge City was, it seemed the town had already seen its heyday. Time was, Jack Stillwell had told him, there were buffalo hunter camps strung up and down the Arkansas in either direction from Dodge City like glass trade beads on a gigantic necklace. And a man would be hard pressed to ride out of hearing of the big guns the hunters used, the booming heard from gray of first light until well past the falling of the sun. Those were the days the buffalo came to drink at the Arkansas and every man with enough money to buy a Sharps rifle could make himself a small but quick fortune.

  But inside of three years the fates had begun to frown on the likes of the hide men in Kansas. A good number of those who had hunted through ’72 and ’73 had already seen the elephant and given up, bucking back east, some perhaps gone on west to try something different out California way.

  Only the tough had stayed on, squeezing out their last few dollars through their fingers this past winter, waiting until the time came that they could wander south from Dodge, south far enough to find the buffalo ground. Word had it in Kansas that these were the toughest of their breed—the toughest that ever would be. The holdouts, knowing little else but skinning knives and buffalo loads, Sharps and needle guns. They were the toughest, if for no other reason than every man jack of them knew where the buffalo ground would be come this season.

  Down in Indian country. On the Staked Plain. Home of the Kiowa and Kwahadi Comanche.

  The smelly men in their bloodstained clothing and long, greasy hair which draped past their shoulders huddled at their tables or lounged against the wobbly bar, regaling one another with one story after another of past hunts. And no season better than the year just gone. It had been the peak, they knew. So, why wouldn’t the hunt of ’74 be all the better?

  Last year had seen better than a quarter-million buffalo hides hauled east by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway alone. A million and a half pounds of buffalo tongue. Two and three-quarter million pounds of bone gone east for fertilizer. Estimates from the railroads had it that in the last two seasons, more than 3,698,730 buffalo had been killed.

  “While there’s buffalo,” those holdouts waiting in the Dodge City saloons toasted one another, “there’ll be hide hunters!”

  “And when you shoot your way through the last of the herds?” asked Seamus Donegan more than once. “What then?”

  The question usually brought a smile and a sweep of a hand to brush the long hair from the shoulder of their thick, woolen coats which had taken on the patina and character of countless campfires.

  “Then a buffalo hunter finds something else to do till there’s some other critter to hunt. Something else to do—like drinking bad whiskey, my friend!”

  They were of a breed that Donegan had to admit he liked, if not admired. While a few were of a kind that no man could call friend, the sort that drew trouble like honey drew flies, or caused it wherever they trod, Seamus had found most to be likable, honest, hardworking and downright enjoyable folk. A few were even the sort he would not question at his back in a serious fight of it.

  Men like that young Billy Dixon, who stood among a gaggle of others against the bar. It had been last summer when first he met Dixon, here in Dodge City. And therein learned that Dixon was a friend of Sharp Grover’s, back when the old frontiersman had scouted for Custer’s campaign down to the Washita in ’68. Dixon had been nothing more than a wet-eared teamster back then, but learning all the time because he was the sort to keep his mouth shut, eyes and ears open to the likes of Sharp Grover.

  Some five and a half years later now, wasn’t a man in this part of the country who didn’t know who Billy Dixon was, who hadn’t heard of his prowess with a Sharps rifle, a man who didn’t like his ready smile and offer of a friendly hand.

  Dixon’s long hair gleamed like a shiny coal shuttle in the greasy light of the oil lamps glimmering against the fading afternoon light as he pantomimed a shot, throwing an imaginary rifle to his shoulder, squinting down the barrel of this make-believe octagon barrel, cocking the hammer and easing back on the trigger to make that boasted kill. Others listened in rapt silence, men like Jim Hanrahan, a noted frontiersman in southwestern Kansas in his own right; men like the fiery-headed “Brick” Bond and the cruel-faced “Dutch” Henry Born, who, while he had a reputation as a man-killer and a horse thief, had harmed no man that Donegan knew.

  Guns.

  Out here, one way or another, a man always made his living with a gun. Or kept his life with a gun, Seamus thought, sipping at the whiskey that scalded his tongue no more.

  Word up from the Darlington Agency where the Southern Cheyenne were penned up h
ad it that the bands were getting their hands on better and better weapons all the time. Down on the Kiowa and Comanche reservation too. Seemed there were always the white traders who preferred to barter for buffalo hides rather than hunt the buffalo. Whiskey and weapons. Liquor and gunpowder traded on the shadowy fringes of Indian Territory.

  Donegan didn’t doubt it. Where there was a chance to make a dollar, someone would be there to steal that dollar. And if the whole dirty business meant selling the latest in rifles or that new Colt’s breech-loading revolver to the tribes corralled on the reservations—the young warriors would have those weapons.

  Lovingly, Seamus touched the butts of both pistols belted at his waist, a separate belt for each holster astraddle his hips. The army .44’s had seen him through a lifetime and more since coming to Indian country back in ’66, when he had a hunger for gold and the Bozeman Road had beckoned him north through Red Cloud’s country.*

  These old pistols with their scratched barrels and well-rubbed grips would do nicely, thank you, he thought.

  As well as doing nicely for those men who in the next few weeks would finally venture south of the dead line, stepping foot into that no-man’s land of Indian country to search for the southern herd. They were to be admired, he offered. If only for the size of their balls. A hundred miles or better south and west of Dodge City they would have to go to find the buffalo.

  Yet it would be there too that the hide men were sure to find the warriors jealously guarding the last of the great, shaggy animals. Something to admire in the likes of Billy Dixon and the rest of these men, each man of them willing to walk into that lion’s den like modern-day Daniels.

  The remembrance made his eyes smart more than the heavy pall of thick, blue smoke in this stinking place ever could. Just that gentle prick of his childhood memory on a biblical story of old made him remember his mother. He drained the glass and stared at the last drop left against the thick, opaque bottom.