Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Once more wiping a bloody weapon across the dead man’s britches, dark now with glistening blood, Lone Wolf turned to the rest, many of whom were young warriors yet to earn their first coup.

  “Thank you, Spirit Above,” he prayed. “Oh, thank you—for what has been done today. My poor son, Tauankia, has been paid back. His spirit is satisfied. Now listen! It was Mamay-day-te who made the first coup on this enemy by touching the white man with his hand. Because of this, and because Mamay-day-te loved my son, I am going to honor him today. I am going to give him my name. Everybody, listen! Let the name of Mamay-day-te remain here on this battleground. Let the name of Mamay-day-te be forgotten. From now on—call this warrior Lone Wolf!”

  The young warrior, a boyhood friend of Lone Wolf’s son, knelt down and ripped off the scalp of the enemy. When Mamay-day-te finished, the hot-blooded warriors poked the body with their lances, filled it with arrows and bullets, hacked at the limbs and fingers and manhood parts while Lone Wolf sang his old victory song.

  “I have seen my enemy, Spirit Helper.

  He is over the hill.

  I have seen my enemy, Spirit Helper—

  And death is his companion!”

  Mamanti, the war party leader, stepped beside Lone Wolf. “The death of your son is avenged. None of us are hurt.”

  Lone Wolf nodded, looking over the group of young warriors butchering the white man’s body. “Yes, and we captured the gray horse you saw in your vision. This was a good day!”

  Turning from the chief, Mamanti gave his orders. “Mount, all of you. We are returning home … in victory!”

  * * *

  They waited until dark was swallowing the valley before moving out on the major’s orders.

  At dusk, Lieutenant Hiram Wilson found a pony that had been abandoned by the war party. With some struggle, the Rangers hoisted the body of Billy Glass across the pony’s back, lashing wrists to ankles so it would not fall during their march through the dark. Then Jones pulled out, marching his men north for the Loving ranch.

  Thirst was still as much a problem as it had been when Bailey and Porter had galloped off and disappeared. So after traveling some two miles before one of the men discovered moonlight reflecting from a small pool among the mesquite, the Rangers greedily hurried forward and surrounded the pool on their knees. Jones did not like the brackish taste of the water. Too, they had to scoop aside inches of scum to get down to something drinkable. But it nonetheless satisfied a day-long suffering in most. The Rangers pressed on to the north, refreshed.

  Still, Jones had four men unaccounted for and needed to get word out on the attack. Such was all the major thought about during that long march.

  It was close to midnight when the Rangers reached the Loving ranch, less than five miles from the Lost Valley fight. While some of his men ripped boards from the smokehouse to build a crude box for Billy Glass, John Jones sat down to pen his plea.

  July 12th

  To the Commanding Officer of U.S. Troops at Ft. Richardson,

  Sir,

  I was attacked today four miles South of Lovings Ranch by about one hundred well-armed Indians. Had only thirty-five men and lost one man killed, one wounded and five missing. Fought them three hours and drove them off, but have not force enough to attack them. Can you send me assistance to Lovings. The Indians are still in the valley. Lost twelve horses.

  Jno. B. Jones

  Maj. Comdg. Frontier Battalion

  Knowing that Jacksboro and the army post were less than twenty miles to the southeast, Jones wanted most to send Lee Corn out with the message. He was his best rider. But while Corn was still among the missing, Corn’s horse had been one of the three to survive the Kiowas’ onslaught. Again Jones called for volunteers to carry his plea. He chose the first man to raise his arm.

  “After you get out about five miles,” Jones explained to the Ranger mounting up on Lee Corn’s horse, “give the animal his head. He ought to know his way back home, even in the dark. Let him take you in.”

  Young John Holmes nodded, his eyes bright in the moonlight. “I’ll make it, Major.” He saluted and reined out of the yard, gone in the darkness.

  Just before dawn, the three missing Rangers hobbled in to the Loving ranch. Corn, Wheeler and Porter were accounted for, making their way north on foot after darkness fell. It had been a harrowing journey, one in which they described stopping every few yards to listen to the sounds of the night, sure the warriors had left behind sentries and were ready to pounce on them at any moment.

  After sunrise that morning, the Rangers and Loving’s ranch hands held a short burial service for Billy Glass. His grave was dug next to that of the cowboy killed by Comanches two days before.

  It wasn’t long before a rustle of excitement shot through the ranch. Two companies of brunettes, I and L of the Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry from Richardson, marched into the yard. Jones mounted as many of his Rangers as he could atop Loving’s stock and rode south to Lost Valley, accompanied by Captain T. A. Baldwin’s soldiers.

  There, between the arroyo and Cameron Creek, the Rangers located the butchered remains of young David Bailey. His head was gone, severed from the body then likely dragged off by a predator, Jones told the rest. While Baldwin divided his troops and sent them out to scour the valley for trail sign of the hostiles, Jones called his Rangers together.

  “Dig him a grave and be quick about it,” the major ordered.

  Then Jones pulled off six of those who were having the most trouble looking at the naked, bloody remains.

  This half-dozen he spread out to act as guards while they buried what was left of Bailey where the Ranger had fallen. His final resting place little more than a shallow trench the men had dug out of the flaky soil with their knives and tin cups, anything they could use to bury one of their own.

  “Not a sign of them anywhere, Major,” admitted Captain Baldwin when he dismounted upon returning later that morning.

  “I feared they would escape,” Jones replied, clearly bitter.

  “Where to from here for you?”

  “We’ll ride in to Jacksboro with you, Captain. It’s there we’ll reoutfit and push on.”

  “Push on, Major Jones? Hunting Indians?”

  The small, lithe dynamo nodded, his lips a thin line of determination for a moment. “Yes, Captain. That’s my job, don’t you see? I hunt Indians.”

  25

  Late July–August, 1874

  “How is it you know Sharp Grover?” asked Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie.

  Tearing his eyes from the soldiers, Seamus Donegan glanced at the older scout, grinning. “You mean Abner, Colonel?”

  Mackenzie smiled, winking at Grover. “Well enough to call him by his Christian name … and not get a broken nose for it, I see.”

  This young commander of the Fourth Cavalry turned and settled into his simple ladder-backed chair. He was not the sort who cottoned to the amenities of fort duty, Seamus figured. Mackenzie was a man who preferred the world of campaign and action to this fort duty. The colonel’s office here at Fort Concho was spare, just like the man himself: here one found very little that did not serve a purpose. Mackenzie had devoted his life to this army. But for all those years chasing after the raiders of the Texas Panhandle country, the colonel had little to show for all his time except a single arrow wound in the leg.

  From time to time the Tonkawa trackers, perhaps the Lipans or Seminole guides the army would hire, would cross the trail of a raiding party, follow it and bring Mackenzie’s troops to a small village—but had yet to bring the colonel to the village where Mackenzie could finally prove that all his chasing up and down the length of the Staked Plain had been of real purpose and worth after all. For all the prisoners taken, for all the Indian ponies captured, for all the lodges and blankets and robes and winter meat burned to blackened ash—Ranald Slidell Mackenzie yearned for something more.

  He wanted Quanah Parker.

  And, Seamus Donegan knew, Mackenzie would hire o
n anyone who could shoot and ride and track as well as Sharp Grover said the Irishman could.

  “Very well then—you’re hired, Mr. Donegan. A dollar a day and found. You’ll feed your horse like we will most of the time: off the land,” he told Seamus, his fingers forming a steeple in front of his narrow chin. “Sharp, get this new scout squared away. I’m putting him in your care, and we don’t have much time left before we’ll be ordered out.”

  Grover slapped Seamus on the back, nudging Donegan toward the door. “So I’ve got to nursemaid you again, is it, Irishman? Lordee, if you aren’t like a stubborn tick on a old bull’s hide—hard to get rid of.”

  Outside Seamus stopped and said, “You wanting to get rid of me, is it?”

  “Hell now, Seamus,” Grover replied. “That was just joking. Not grown to be thin-skinned, have you?”

  “Naw,” he answered, shoving a fist in Grover’s direction.

  “Good. Why, Becky and Samantha both would have my hide nailed to the barn wall if I let you get away.”

  Donegan drank deep of the hot, late-summer air. It reminded him of another summer campaign, that one spent following Major Sandy Forsyth with fifty ragtag civilians hoping to snip long enough at Roman Nose’s ass that the Cheyenne would turn and fight. Turn and fight they had. But it was more. Here again his nose brought the smells of gun oil and soaped leather, the fragrances of chewing tobacco and pipe smoke and cheap whiskey, the heady aromas of potent coffee and of urine-stained britches and the stench of men too long in the saddle for too damned many days without rest.

  His mind grew a’swirl of campaigns wherein he had worn Union blue, a gold slash down his leg, and a few chevrons hurriedly sewn at his arms in those later years. Campaigns east and campaigns west: the white man doing his damndest to wrench this land from the squatters who had roamed and ruled it for generations, and drawn from it their life force. Their culture. Their spirit.

  Across the parade some officer bawled out a command and a mounted company put their horses into motion. The army had to be like that, he mused. On a campaign, someone had to give orders. The rest had to take them. Here at Concho, Mackenzie was gathering six hundred different men—each a different mind and soul and character in six hundred different bodies. But out on the coming campaign, Mackenzie had to see to it that things were put in order. On a march like this after the Kwahadi and the Kiowa Koitsenko and the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers all rolled into one nasty, dirty little war of it—Seamus understood that Ranald Slidell Mackenzie had to weld them all into one.

  If they were to survive, much less be victorious, out there on the Staked Plain where the brown horsemen had ruled for centuries, Mackenzie had to fuse the six hundred into one.

  “Man needs something to do with his time, I suppose, Sharp.”

  “Yes. A man does,” and suddenly Grover grew morose as they set off across the sun-baked parade of Fort Concho. “This damned drought all but made a beggar out of me, Irishman. What crops didn’t burn in the field aren’t worth my time harvesting. And the stock isn’t coming along like it should. I’ll need another year, maybe two, before I can afford to buy the kind of breeding mares it will take to make horse-raising pay.”

  “You’ll do it,” Seamus said with an air of confident certainty. “If anyone can make a go of it in this country, Sharp Grover sure as blazes can.”

  Seamus admired the older man more than he could ever begin to tell Grover. And one thing the Irishman doubted he could ever bring himself to telling Sharp was that Grover had become like an uncle to him. Hardly knowing either Liam or Ian since the time they had shipped to Amerikay when he was but a small lad, Seamus had come to know Grover far better: as a trusted friend, and the closest thing to family he had left. There were brothers and sisters back in Eire. But their faces were the faces of children—what he could remember of them standing alongside his mother at that dock the gray day his ship set off from the green isle in search of those two uncles disappeared across the ocean in Amerikay.* Brothers and sisters, likely cousins and aunts and uncles back there in County Kilkenney and County Tyrone too. But they, yes, they might as well be strangers to him for all it was worth. It was a far different life from theirs that he chose to live. With people who became family by choice, not by chance.

  Across the years he had wandered the west, Seamus had surrounded himself with family of choice.

  So it was with some real joy that Donegan had marched south to Jacksboro the day after he and Billy Dixon and all the rest had made it back to Dodge City without spotting another brown horseman wearing paint or sprouting feathers. As soon as he bailed out of Dixon’s light wagon, which had carried him north from Adobe Walls, Donegan pulled both pistols and checked the loads, a gesture sure not to escape Dixon’s keen eye.

  “Where you headed that you’ll need all that lead and powder, Seamus?” Dixon had asked there in the dust of Dodge City’s Front Street.

  “Going to look up Louis Abragon,” he said quietly. “Figure he was the one who wants to see me rubbed out. I’ll oblige him and show up on his doorstep.”

  Dixon leaped down from the front of his huge freight wagon and called Frenchy and Masterson over. “You finish up here for us, fellas. I’ll be back in a while. Me and the Irishman going to call on an old friend.”

  “I can do this myself,” Donegan had protested.

  “I know you can. Just want to see for myself what you do.”

  “You need help?” asked young Masterson.

  Dixon shook his head, his eyes finally leaving Donegan’s face. “No. Thanks all the same, Bat. The Irishman’s just got some business to take care of.”

  “You need help, Donegan,” Masterson said, catching hold of the Irishman’s sleeve, “you just call it. I’ll be there. I figure someway I owe you—what you tried to do saving Billy Tyler back there at the Walls.”

  “I’ll remember, Bat.”

  “Don’t you ever forget—I owe you,” Masterson repeated as the pair walked away from the long train of wagons.

  But as things turned out, Abragon wasn’t around so that the Irishman could throttle him, choke the breath out of him and beat him until the Mexican was ready to talk about what precious secrets the map hid that would make the saloon owner want to kill Donegan for them.

  “He’s … he’s dead?” Seamus shrieked at the bartender in Abragon’s place who had just informed them of Abragon’s demise.

  “Yep. Got hisself killed. Uh, almost three weeks ago now.”

  “Killed? Someone shoot him?” Dixon asked.

  “No,” and he wagged his head. “One of the girls, fact be—we all think it was Kate ’cause Abragon was especially hard on her. Think he was more’n just sweet on her. Kept too much the eye on her, you see—well, rest of us figure it was her poisoned Abragon. Seems reasonable she got ahold of some wolfer’s strychnine and dumped it in Abragon’s food, maybe in his drink. Anyway—strychnine ain’t a pretty death, fellas. And the old Mex went kicking all the way till he just lay still. Right over there,” and the bartender pointed in the direction of Abragon’s private table in a smoky corner.

  “He’s dead and buried?” Seamus asked, his voice rising in frustration and disbelief.

  “Saw him choke down his last breath for myself. Lord how Kate laughed and laughed as Abragon was foaming at the mouth, his tongue swelling, struggling to get a breath. She stood over him and laughed and laughed.” He wiped the inside of a dirty glass with a greasy towel. “Women do have a strange sense of humor, don’t they, fellas?”

  Donegan and Dixon had looked at one another. Dixon rolled his eyes as he turned from the bar. Seamus laid down his money and swept up the bottle of whiskey they had been served. He had paused a moment over the spot where the bartender said Abragon had died. Donegan couldn’t help it—he was bitter. Bitter that he had been robbed of another chance to exact some revenge on the Mexican.

  “Women do have a strange sense of humor,” Billy Dixon said, repeating the bartender’s words as Donegan settled in the ricke
ty chair at an empty table. His eyes were going over the girls in the smoky room, noisy with the hurrah and celebration of incoming buffalo men just up from the notorious fight at Adobe Walls.

  “Problem is,” Donegan replied as he poured them each a drink, “we men don’t know for sure just when the women are being humorous, or being downright serious.”

  “Here’s to women,” Dixon proposed the toast, lofting his glass in the air. “What we don’t know about ’em can downright kill a man.”

  “Amen to that,” Donegan said, his mind beginning to slip back down to Texas and a certain woman said to be waiting for him there.

  He remembered the smell of her, the full fleshiness of her as he gripped her tight, pinning her down in that hay inside Grover’s fragrant barn. Remembered too the taste of her now, even as the whiskey burned a big, raw hole straight down to his belly. He licked his lips, recalling the earthy flavor of her sweaty skin as she writhed beneath him.

  It was their first night together in the barn that he had remembered, sitting there in Dodge City that hot July day. But something inside him told Seamus it was not to be their last.

  From Dodge City the very next morning Seamus had ridden out on a new horse purchased with a stake given him by Billy Dixon. With a promise to repay the money before another winter passed, the Irishman had hurried to put Kansas behind him, pushing south by east through the Territories. If he keep his eyes and ears open, Seamus figured, a wary man could avoid any young coup-hungry bucks wandering back and forth between the reservations and the Staked Plain. Too, he had learned he had to be watchful of any white men he happened across. There was a hard breed of man making a life for himself on the fringes of the reservations—outside of any white settlement, outside the law and army justice. And just because their skin was pink did not cancel out the very real chance they wouldn’t love to knock Donegan in the head and steal his horse, his guns and everything he carried. Maybe even put a bullet in his head. Just so to simplify things.