Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  This was a dark day indeed for the hopes and prayers of the Kiowa. Darker than the day he had learned of the deaths of a son and a nephew. Darker still than the day he and Red Otter had been forced to abandon the two bodies among the rocks as they were pursued by the yellowleg soldiers.

  Here in his later years, the old chief felt like a sucked-on plum, no longer with much to celebrate. There were too few horses to steal, and the white man’s cattle were too skinny. Besides, there never were enough scalps. And with today’s fight, all they had to show for their trouble was a little coffee and sugar, the scalps of two white men and a long strip of fur from a snarling, black dog that had torn up three Kwahadis before it was killed.

  The Cheyenne had to be kept from striking Isatai by the Comanche chiefs. They were furious, these Cheyenne. And were saying they were going north on their own to wreak their vengeance on the settlements just beyond their reservation.

  It was better, Lone Wolf thought. Find the white man’s settlements instead of fighting these hunters burrowed in the shadows of their earth lodges. These men had evil weapons that they fired today and killed tomorrow. Weapons that fired without sound or that shot bullets good at circling behind an enemy. To fight an enemy such as this was a foolish undertaking. Two scalps and the fur of a dog was not enough to make an old warrior like Lone Wolf foolish enough to stay around and try again tomorrow.

  True, some of his warriors had the scalps of four of the buffalo hunters they had killed on the way to the earth lodge settlement. The Kiowa had discovered the camp of two men they promptly captured and tortured, tying them down then propping their heads up so the white hide men could watch as they were opened up then had their manhood cut off and stuffed in their lying mouths while burning embers were dropped on their bellies. The next day, his warriors found a camp with two more hunters.

  With a snort, Lone Wolf glanced over at the shamed Isatai.

  Alone, the Kiowa chief and his warriors had accounted for more scalps than all these hundreds of warriors had taken, with all the powerful medicine and incantations of this yellow-smeared shaman. Were it to do any good, to avenge the deaths of good Comanche and Cheyenne warriors killed this day, Lone Wolf hungered to kill Isatai with his own bare hands. Slowly, slowly choking the life out of the shaman.

  The way the white man was slowly, slowly choking the life out of Lone Wolf’s people.

  20

  June 28–29, 1874

  More times than he wanted to count, Billy had awakened during that short, summer night, sweating like a lemonade jug in July from the frightening, nightmarish visions he suffered, more than from the sultry heat.

  Time and again he had bolted upright, drenched, remembering what had slapped him awake: those dreams of charging horsemen racing toward him across the valley as the first rays of light broke the horizon like bloody, sparkling lances fanning into the sky; the booming of the hunters’ guns and the cracks of the Indian weapons; the screams of horses and terrified cries of men; along with the persistent smell of burnt powder and drying blood on the breeze as the day grew old.

  And every time he blinked his eyes clear, realizing it was the middle of the night and he was still lying on the dirt floor of Hanrahan’s saloon, Dixon found the black silhouette of the long-haired Irishman leaning back against the doorframe, his Henry across his curled legs, a pipe curling shadowy smoke about his head.

  Each man to his own thoughts, Dixon brooded as he again found a place for his cheek on a curled arm. Each man, his own demons.

  The graying of the sky in the east came sooner than any of them wanted. Billy was the first to stir from his bedroll, awakening Donegan at the doorway where the Irishman had kept his silent vigil through that first dark night.

  “Fix us some coffee, Billy,” Seamus said, hawking up some night-gather in his throat.

  The rest were not long in rising, one by one coming to the loopholes in the walls to have themselves a look at the sky slowly draining of black. A few quickly wandered out into the faint coolness of the predawn to relieve themselves on the dusty, hoof-hammered ground.

  “You see anything through the night, Irishman?” Hanrahan asked as he passed Donegan at the door.

  “Nor heard a sound.”

  Hanrahan sighed as Dixon buttoned his britches and came back to join them. The noisy crow fluttered past them, swooping like a bat out of the blackness of night, coming to rest on the carcass of an Indian pony.

  “There’s not a thing out there alive,” Dixon replied quietly. “’Cept that damned crow.”

  “It’s going to have the feast of its life this day,” Donegan said as he set the Henry against the wall and unbuttoned his britches.

  “Yeah, that sun comes up—this place is going to stink something fierce,” Dixon complained.

  After breakfast of hot coffee, pan biscuits and fried meat, the men formed themselves into work details. The greatest problem was in moving the huge carcasses of horse and oxen. Without teams and tackle to perform this heavy work, the men had to improvise sleds from dried hides rigged with ropes, moved with man’s muscle. Beneath the rising, relentless sun, they began to roll the bloating carcasses onto the flint hides, then dragged them downwind and as far as possible from the buildings. Three to four men could move a horse or oxen in that manner. But when they began work on a dozen ponies and horses that lay clustered between Rath’s store and the saloon, the hide men decided to dig a shallow pit and bury the carcasses right where they were found.

  Without any ceremony or sign of joy, the thirteen warrior bodies were dragged off onto the prairie to the west of the buildings and left to the predators that were already being drawn to the feast.

  At mid-morning one of the men hollered out, pointing to the bluffs to the east where sat a band of feathered horsemen. While most stood watching, curious and speculating, a few snatched up their heavy rifles and attempted the long-range shot. After the warriors returned some of the desultory fire, they disappeared beyond the top of the ridge.

  “We’ll show ’em we still got plenty of fight in us,” Dixon explained as he brought the big fifty down from his shoulder, watching the last of the horsemen disappear from the distant skyline. The warriors would not be seen for the rest of the day.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a horse right now,” Charlie Armitage sighed.

  “Even a old mule,” Mike McCabe echoed the lament.

  Dixon chuckled. “Anything so you could ride on out of here, eh?”

  “Something, anything—to ride, so to get word out,” Billy Ogg agreed with the general sentiment.

  Despite the fact that they had scared off that last bunch of horsemen, and despite the fact that there had been no renewal of attack at dawn, Dixon realized there hung a specter of gloom over the settlement nonetheless. The men went back to work on the bloating carcasses. It was, after all, something to do. And something to do just might keep their minds off their desperate situation for the moment.

  “Riders coming in!”

  At the warning from a sentry posted on the roof of Rath’s store, Dixon and the rest turned, snatching up their weapons as the first horsemen appeared from the southern treeline. Then a wagon rumbled out of the shadows, and shortly a second wagon materialized out of the shimmering waves of heat rising from the sun-baked prairie. Billy swiped his greasy sleeve across his eyes, clearing them of the stinging sweat.

  George Bellfield reined up before the gathering. A German immigrant and Union veteran of the Civil War, he looked over them all, then found Hanrahan among the crowd.

  “I tink you play fun on Bellfield,” he said in his broken English, tapping a thick finger against his chest.

  “Why you say that, George?” Hanrahan asked, inching up.

  Bellfield pointed at the top of the saloon as his two skinners brought their wagons to a halt nearby. “We see flag. Black says trouble. Bellfield did not know what trouble you be in, Jimmy.”

  “Injuns.”

  Bellfield sniffed the air. He grinne
d, grimly. “Lots of dead Injuns, eh, fellas?”

  “Thank God you’re here now,” gushed William Olds as he stopped beside Bellfield’s mount. “I can get my Hannah out of here on one of your horses.”

  “We’ll figure some way to get her out, Bill,” Hanrahan replied, stepping closer to Bellfield.

  “You have a goot fight of it, Jimmy?” the German asked.

  “Yes.”

  Bellfield leaned back in the saddle, pulled his hat off and swiped a finger around inside the band. “I see that flag first—say to my boys, ‘Dem fellers think dey’s damn smart alretty.’ But you fellers do all right fighting, eh?”

  Hanrahan answered, “Three of us is all they got.”

  “You see any sign of feather coming in?” Dutch Born asked.

  Bellfield wagged his head, then eased out of the saddle. “Notting out there. Can’t smell them.”

  While Bellfield and his skinner set about unhitching their animals and making camp for their outfit, the rest returned to their grisly labors. However, it wasn’t long before another crew rolled in from the north—the English brothers, Jim and Bob Cator.

  “No, we didn’t hear a damn thing,” Jim Cator explained.

  “Not a shot,” agreed Bob Cator.

  “How far were you camped from us?” Dixon asked.

  “Couldn’t been more than twenty, maybe twenty-five miles,” answered Jim Cator.

  “I don’t believe this,” Bob Cator sighed. “How do you figure they would have the balls to attack this stronghold—with all of you armed and ready?”

  “Armed maybe,” Donegan replied. “But we were far from ready, boys.”

  “I been thinking we ought to send a few of us out to warn some of the other hunting camps in the nearby countryside—let ’em know what the red bastards done here,” Hanrahan suggested.

  “Spread word that the sumbitches let the wolf out and are coming for scalps,” growled Billy Keeler.

  Two men volunteered to ride, one east, the other west, both circling back to the north carrying word of the fight. No one dared ride south for the time being.

  Dixon cleared his throat as he wiped sweat from his face with a bandanna. “Any way you cut the deck, at least now we got us some horses so we can send for help.”

  “I’m wanting to go,” Henry Lease volunteered as he stepped to the front of the group. One of Bellfield’s skinners, Lease had just ridden in. “I’ll make the ride north. What you fellas think it’s worth?”

  “Anyone against Henry going?” asked Jim Hanrahan, peering around the group.

  When no one opposed Lease, Dixon replied, “I figure that ride oughta pay you at least a hundred dollars, Henry. I’ll pass the hat for you. A man got balls enough to volunteer—no man’s about to stand in your way.”

  Lease grinned. “I’ll get ready to ride out at sundown. Leave when it gets slap dark.” He strode away from Bellfield’s wagons purposefully.

  “You figure he’ll make it all the way to Dodge City, Irishman?” Dixon asked.

  Seamus shook his head slightly as the rest of the men scattered on other business. “I don’t figure we’ll ever see Henry Lease again.”

  Early that evening in the saloon, the hunters took up a collection of $250 to pay Henry Lease for his courageous ride. Blinking back some salty tears, his voice husky with appreciation, Lease climbed aboard George Bellfield’s strongest horse and reined north past the Myers & Leonard compound, quickly swallowed by the inky darkness.

  The rest went back to cleaning their guns, trying their best to wait out another short, sultry night. To Dixon it seemed the weather grew all the hotter that first day after the battle, and sundown brought little in the way of relief from the mean, muggy temperatures. By day they had baked beneath a brassy, domed sky. And this second night found the settlement’s defenders once more broiling in their own juices.

  Again Dixon tried sleeping. Still the nightmares haunted him. He decided not to chance it. Pulling on his boots, he quietly moved over to the dark figure crouched in the doorway.

  “What’s a man like you think about all night, sitting up like this, Irishman?” he asked as he settled against the outside of the wall near the doorjamb where Donegan sat his post.

  “Women.”

  The answer came so quickly, so decisively, that it caught Dixon off guard.

  “Bet you’ve had a lot of women in your time. So, it stands to reason you’ve got a lot to think about.”

  In the darkness, Donegan nodded. “Lot of women perhaps, Billy. But only two … maybe three, worth remembering—worth thinking this hard about.”

  * * *

  Already the full moon under which Quanah Parker’s warriors attacked two days ago was waning. It was now the Moon of Black Cherries.

  With each new night to come on this long trail, the moon above would shrink until it was but a sliver of its previous grandeur when he had allowed himself to believe in the shaman, allowed himself once more to hope. With each succeeding winter since the battle of Antelope Hills, when the white man had recaptured his mother, Quanah felt a little more of his hope die inside him like a puffball shriveling as the season aged.

  But this past spring he had at last allowed himself to believe.

  Having watched his warriors hurl themselves against the might of the buffalo hunters’ guns would prove a cruel memory he would have to suffer for the rest of his life.

  A new moon always gave the dreamers among the Kwahadi cause to hope. But they were the dreamers after all, not the warriors. Not the chiefs charged with the welfare of the bands. But if he would allow himself to believe one more time, perhaps this new moon was an omen that he must return to his people, to gather them about him once more, doing his best to forget the shame and humiliation heaped upon the Kwahadi by the grave mistakes of Isatai.

  Perhaps … the Kwahadi were never meant to hold a sun dance.

  Yes, he decided. That had been their sin, their transgression. Whereas the other tribes held their annual sun-gazing dances, the Comanche had never celebrated in that fashion. Perhaps, Quanah thought, the Spirit Above was telling the Comanche to return to their old ways, the trusted path.

  Do not follow the ways of the Shahiyena or the Kiowa. Trust only in the path walked by the ancient ones.

  So now Quanah Parker would go. Reluctantly turning his back on the meadow where the tai-bos raised their earth lodges, Quanah led most of his Kwahadi away from that evil place, leaving behind only a dozen warriors to keep an eye on the hide hunters for a few days, then turn about and ride quickly to catch up to the main column, bringing their intelligence with them when they too put the meadow behind them.

  Once again he would counsel that his people avoid the white man, as they had attempted to do for far back in the generations. Only when it proved wise for the young men to attack outlying settlements for horses and scalps and plunder had Quanah approved of such violent contact with the tai-bos. In just the past generation, after all, such raids on the white settlers had come to mean that the yellowlegs would come chasing after the warriors who always disappeared onto the Staked Plain like breathsmoke gone in a winter gale.

  What bothered Quanah most, like a wolf spider incessantly crawling about in the pit of him, was that the yellowlegs appeared to have given up on chasing the fleeing warriors. Now the tai-bo and buffalo soldiers preferred to track the villages of women and children and old ones, especially while the warriors were off hunting buffalo or raiding for ponies and scalps. Whenever the soldiers went in search for the villages, they always found what they were looking for. Especially when the eyes and ears for the yellowlegs were those hated Tonkawas—the Indians who ate the flesh of other people. With the Tonkawas leading the yellowlegs, more women and children and the old ones would soon be killed or captured.

  How best to walk this road? Quanah wondered. A road between raiding the settlements, as they had always done far back into any man’s memory, and keeping the hated Tonkawa trackers from finding the villages filled with t
heir families.

  His thoughts flowed as quick as a prairie stream after a spring rain, flowed back to Tonarcy and their three children in the village nestled among the trees, in the sheltering shadows of a deep canyon far out on the Staked Plain.

  How he wanted to cup his hands about her small, firm breasts and suckle at them now. Feeling her hands roaming up and down the length of his brown body, then taking his rigid flesh in her palms and kneading it insistently until he could stand the torture no longer and drove himself furiously within her.

  Tonarcy would arch her back, thrusting her lithe body up at him, the way this great stretch of prairie thrust itself against the endless horizon. And as surely as that horizon of brown earth was forever locked to the pale blue of the summer sky, Tonarcy would lock her legs about him, pulling him ever deeper into the heated moistness of her.

  How he loved the way her fingernails raked the great muscles of his back as he rocked above her, watching those breasts quiver with the driving power of each thrust. How he loved the way she pulled on his hair, yanking his head down to her lips so she could bite his neck, down his shoulder, across his chest—leaving bruises that marked him for many suns.

  The last bruises she had left him with were long gone now.

  Quanah needed to be home in their lodge, to hear their children snoring softly beneath the stars of a prairie night. To once more taste the stale flavor of buffalo and prairie onions on Tonarcy’s breath as his mouth sought hers in those cold, delicious moments just before the first streaks of dawn burst out of the bowels of the earth.

  The way the explosions erupted from deep inside him as he burst inside his woman.

  Then slowed his mighty, bull-like thrusts and lay with his woman cuddled within the shelter of his arms and legs, protecting her as she returned to sleep.

  Quanah prayed nothing would steal her from him. How he needed the shelter of her arms and legs and mouth and moist heat right now.