Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  “You goddamned right I will,” Billy replied.

  Together they hurried on their hands and knees to Smith’s side, where Dixon found the private shot through the left lung. Across the greasy undershirt he was wearing spread a great splatter of stain that looked like molasses. His skin the color and texture of old honeycomb, Billy realized the soldier was likely drowning in his own blood. The wound quietly wheezed, whistling with each shallow, labored breath.

  “Get him atween us,” he told Rath. “Can you help us, Smith? Help us by standing some?”

  The private groaned his answer, struggling on wobbly legs to rise. It had been hours that he had been unconscious, losing blood beneath the unrelenting sun, loosing body heat before the driving thunderstorm.

  Across the soggy, rain-cut sandy slope Rath and Dixon dragged a stumbling, dying George Smith, into the mud of the buffalo wallow, where they laid him a few feet from Woodall.

  “Good to see you reporting for duty, Private,” said the sergeant, his voice cracking.

  Smith’s eyes did the talking for him, buried like darkened twelve-hour coals in his ashen face.

  Dixon knew the private didn’t have long.

  “We need your gun, Smith,” Dixon said as his trembling, numbed fingers fought the buckle on the private’s gun belt.

  The soldier nodded dumbly. He tried to say something, but the air only wheezed from the bullet wound.

  That’s when Billy remembered the willow switch dropped by one of the wounded warriors not far from the wallow earlier that morning. He scrambled to the edge of the pit, spotting it where he had remembered it would be, then clambered out of the mud once more. Back in the wallow he used his knife to hack a swatch from the silk bandanna he had tied around his leg wound earlier—then knelt over Smith, pulling the private against him as he worked below the soldier’s left shoulder blade. Dixon gently, yet persistently, inserted a portion of the silk bandanna into the bullet wound, using the thin willow switch as a probe. The wheezing stopped as Dixon laid the private back against the side of the wallow.

  And of a sudden his belly felt hungry for the first time in hours. Something so strong that it began chewing in his gut like a wolf. He had to get his mind off that pinched belly—

  “You been shot up pretty good yourself,” Rath commented, a look of real admiration in his eyes as Dixon dragged himself away from Smith.

  “What?” he started to ask, then looked over his shoulder at the blousy, cashmere shirt he was wearing. “Oh, yeah. Looks like they damned well tried their best, didn’t they?”

  “You’re a lucky man, Dixon,” Woodall said.

  Billy nodded, realizing the warriors had fairly peppered his shirt with bullet holes. Then he gazed at Smith as he said, “We’re all damned lucky, fellas. Every last one of us.”

  34

  September 13, 1874

  As the sun sank yesterday, so did the spirits of those men huddled in the buffalo wallow.

  The stars came out to twinkle overhead like mica chips as wisps of clouds on the tail end of the electrifying thunderstorm danced across a thumbnail sliver of a moon. At night this rolling land was whittled down to shards and remnants, streaked of starlight and shadow.

  The wind came up, carrying on its brutal chill the songs of nearby prairie wolves. Billy Dixon shivered with every gust whipping through the bullet holes in his shirt. He pushed some of the long hair out of his face and kept his eyes moving. He reminded himself again: keep your eyes moving.

  Just because they had seen the warriors turning away at sundown and riding off to the north did not mean the Indians wouldn’t try something sneaky. Like coming back and making a rush at the wallow in the dark. Billy was experienced enough a plainsmen not to believe that horseshit about Indians never attacking at night. If the red bastards figured they could overrun the white men without the loss of their lives in doing it under the cover of darkness, then the Kiowa and Cheyenne surely were the sort to give it a try.

  Best he could, Billy kept his eyes moving throughout that night. A couple times he caught himself jerking awake—cursing himself that he had dozed off. In the dim moonshine he would turn, finding the five other dark shapes huddled at the sides of the wallow. From time to time he heard someone turn atop the huge tumbleweeds the size of bushel baskets he and Rath had slipped out and gathered after sundown. By crushing the weeds down somewhat, they kept the men out of the muddy, blood-tinged soup at the bottom of the wallow, serving much like a nest of comfortless bedsprings. Throughout that long night, the others turned and tossed, huddled as best they could out of the wind that came to rob them of what little heat their bodies could produce.

  Bone-numbing cold hurried along on the hoary fingers of that wind shuffling out of the north.

  Not too long before slap-dark, while Billy had begun cleaning every gun one by one with a scrap of his shirt and that willow twig he had used to plug the hole in Private Smith’s chest, they had begun talking. All of them except Smith, that is. The private was in a delirium, for the most part, and there wasn’t a damned thing any of them could do. So while Dixon swabbed a scrap of his cashmere shirt in and out of every pistol and down the long barrels of their carbines, the men discussed the fact that they would live only by getting help. Then talked about just how they were to get help. Every man jack of them realized what it would mean to walk away from this wallow alone, to plunge into the unknown out there, with more than a hundred warriors all worked up by their failure to overrun the wallow and likely still lurking nearby. A most dangerous proposition—something akin to taking one’s life like a handful of puffball dust and tossing it into the cold wind that caressed this high land of the Texas Panhandle.

  “I’ll go,” Dixon volunteered, knowing there was only one other physically able to make the journey. “I figure I know the way better’n Rath, and how to get through to Camp Supply.”

  The others wrangled over it.

  Then Rath himself abruptly interrupted the argument. “It really doesn’t matter much what you decide. ’Cause there’s only two of us can go. Dixon and me. And I should go—”

  “You don’t know where you’re headed,” Dixon said.

  “I don’t, for now.” Rath nodded in the starshine darkness, his lips a thin line of determination. He was some older than the young Dixon, a soldier who had marched for the Union army through the last fourteen months of the rebellion. “You tell me how I ought to go, where—and I’ll do it.”

  “No,” Dixon replied quietly. “You ought not take the chance of getting lost and running smack into them red bastards.”

  “No,” Rath said even more firmly. “The others—they need you here. Can’t you see that? You mean more to them here, where you can handle a gun—than out there. No, you stay, Dixon. Just tell me how to go, show me how to follow the stars or something,” and he shrugged, pointing at the night sky. “I’ll find my way. You’re needed here, watching over the others. And when those Indians come back, they’ll need you even more.”

  It was finally decided. Rath listened intently to Dixon explain that they should be close to the Camp Supply Road, absorbing the scout’s explaining of how to lay east of the tail on the Big Dipper and keep the north star off like thus. Dixon figured Rath could feel the well-cleaved ruts of the wagon road, even if the soldier couldn’t see them beneath the pale moonlight.

  Sergeant Woodall shook hands with, then saluted Private Peter Rath, then they all fell quiet as the soldier bellied over the side of the buffalo wallow and was as quickly gulped by the immense, cold darkness of that endless prairie.

  “Will he make it?” Woodall asked in a whisper sometime later as Dixon sloshed through the freezing, muddy water to check on George Smith.

  Dixon stopped, measuring his response carefully. “If it’s God’s will, Sergeant, he’ll make it.”

  The moon was sinking in the west on its quick autumnal ride across the night sky, more than two hours after Rath had left, when the darkness brought a change in the night sounds
to Dixon’s ear. Slowly he rolled onto his belly, attempting to make sense of the change between the rumbling, labored breathing of the men in the wallow. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded to be as if someone were sneaking up to the edge of the wallow.

  Perhaps a scout, maybe more than one. Come out of the darkness to determine the condition of the white men.

  Billy couldn’t gamble that the Kiowa or Comanche scout would return with news of how bad off they were. He had to get to that redskin and gut him before he could get back to the war party.

  Dixon dragged himself over the side of the sandy pit.

  Woodall turned. “Where you—”

  “Shhh,” he warned harshly. “I’ll be back.”

  Into the darkness he crabbed, his pistol in his left hand just in case. But he intended to do it with his right. With the bone-handled knife he held there. It had gutted and skinned its share of buffalo in his time, honed and sharpened around many a night fire, until the blade was but a fraction of its original width. But Billy Dixon figured it could do the job on one or more red niggers.

  Circling slowly, he got behind the sounds of the man, then slowly made his way in until he was close enough to make his lunge—sweeping his arm around the enemy’s throat, yanking him back, ready to plunge the knife—

  “Oh, God—don’t kill me!”

  “Rath?”

  Dixon virtually hurled the private away from him, shaking—his blood hot for the killing. Suddenly interrupting that bloodlust left him trembling like an aspen leaf in a winter gale.

  “I … I couldn’t find the road, Dixon,” Rath started to explain in a whisper, the look of shame evident on his face beneath the dim starshine. “I been wandering about.”

  Billy could tell the man was close to sobbing. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t know where I was,” Rath said, his lower lip thrust out like a raw slice of deer liver. Then he was sobbing, with what seemed to be some relief. “I was afraid from the sounds of it, I had bumped into some of that war party. And when you grabbed me—I was certain of it. I was afraid I would … was gonna die.”

  Billy grabbed the soldier’s sleeve. “C’mon. Let’s go before we do get caught out here. The others—they’ll be glad to see you. ’Specially the sergeant. I think he was worried ’bout you.”

  By the time the two made it back to the wallow, they found Woodall and Harrington at Smith’s side, Chapman watching the far approach.

  “He wants us to kill him,” Harrington explained as Dixon sloshed over to them.

  “You find the road?” Woodall asked Rath.

  The private shook his head.

  “Is Smith getting worse?” Dixon asked.

  “Put me out of my pain, please,” Smith gurgled, his speech laden with phlegm as his chest filled with blood, slowly suffocating himself.

  “None of us can do that,” Dixon explained.

  “Gimme gun,” Smith said, one hand weakly imploring the rest. “I do it.”

  Billy gazed a long time at Smith, the soldier’s face gone as pale as a limestone bluff. Then he looked at Harrington and at Rath. “You two stay with him. Keep him from doing himself harm. Make him comfortable as you can—maybe he’ll sleep.”

  Then Dixon dragged himself across the swampy wallow.

  “How’s the leg, Amos?”

  Chapman snorted, dragging a hand beneath his runny nose. “Still broke, Billy. How’s yours?”

  “Still got a hole in it. We’re a pair, ain’t we, Amos?”

  “As poor a pair as I’d ever hope to draw from the deck, I’ll tell you.”

  Dixon sighed, staring up at the Big Dipper. “I’m going in the morning.”

  Chapman nodded eventually, gazing back out on the starlit slope, the hulking mesquite seeming all the larger beneath, with the play of silver light. He didn’t say anything, as if Dixon’s declaration didn’t need his approval. What Billy had said was not up for discussion. More a statement of cold fact.

  “Likely you’re right, Dixon.”

  “You in shape to watch over things here?”

  “As good as all the rest,” Chapman replied.

  “Get some sleep while you can, Amos. I’ll wake you afore sunup.”

  An hour later, when the wind died and the last of the clouds had swept across the dusting of stars pricking the prairie blackness overhead, sounds seemed more clear. And then Billy noticed that something else had changed. Quietly he crawled through the bloody slush slicking the bottom of the wallow, put out his hand and held it an inch from Smith’s face. Nothing.

  His fingers laid on the private’s skin. He took them away after a minute. The flesh gone cold. Dixon slowly pulled down the two eyelids and dragged himself back across the wallow to wait out the coming dawn.

  When it came time for Billy to go, he and Rath gently took the dead soldier’s body and laid it out just beyond the lip of the wallow. Sergeant Woodall handed Rath a silk handkerchief he carried inside his shirt.

  “Put this over Private Smith’s face,” Woodall said.

  Rath did so. Everyone knew it was all they had to serve as a decent shroud for the dead.

  Shaking hands with the three soldiers, then wordlessly embracing Amos, Dixon rolled out of the muddy wallow onto the prairie in the gray light of predawn and pointed his nose north by northeast, feeling his way up the gentle rise of the divide that rose between Gageby Creek and the Washita River here in the uncharted wilderness west of Indian Territory.

  In something less than a mile he struck the wagon ruts of the Camp Supply Road, pointing like a beacon to the northeast, both deep creases in the prairie eventually converging far off at the gray edge of the horizon. As the sky grew ever more light, he hurried along, until he was almost loping. Having found his wind, Dixon figured he could keep up the pace all day if he had to: running some, then walking, then running a bit more. He had to hurry. There were others back there who were waiting, depending on him. Their time was running out.

  He had covered a little more than two miles, the eastern side of the world caressed now with a brightening crimson-tinged orange presaging the coming sun, when he made out a moving, throbbing mass of horsemen coming in his direction. The bunch grew and grew in size until the entire caravan covered more than an acre in size.

  Frightened, Dixon plunged into the brush, then crabbed to the top of a small knoll where he lay among the mesquite, watching the distant horsemen approach. Perhaps the warriors had worked themselves into another fighting frenzy and were returning at dawn, just as they had attacked the six yesterday.

  With his heart in his throat, trying his best to make out the throbbing shapes coming out of the newborn daylight to the east, Billy finally stood, waving his Sharps at the end of his arm. The horsemen were moving in columns of fours, not in single file, as warriors would ride across the plains.

  Quickly Dixon fired a shot from his rifle. Then reloaded and fired a second shot on down the hillside. Then he stumbled down the slope of the hill, still waving, his mouth moving, almost unable to utter a sound, tears streaming unashamedly down his mud-crusted cheeks, softening the mud crusted in his mustache and beard.

  A blue-clad flanker reined up before him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Billy Dixon,” he answered, finding his voice a strange thing there in the gray light of day-coming on the Camp Supply Road. “Courier for Miles.”

  “General Nelson A. Miles?” another soldier asked, urging his horse forward from the ranks of the horsemen, stopping before the civilian.

  “Yessir.”

  “I’m Major William R. Price, Eighth Cavalry—out of Fort Bascomb,” the man boomed. “Yesterday we ran onto Captain Lyman’s wagon train. He was hit a few days back by a large war party.” Price flung a thumb back along his column. “Lyman’s right behind us with the general’s supplies and forage. By God—we’re looking for Miles ourselves. Where the devil is he?”

  Dixon pointed. “We was carrying dispatches bound for Camp Supply, Major. Me and
another scout and four of the general’s soldiers got ambushed by Injuns yesterday. We’re shot up pretty bad. Not far back there—in the mud of a buffalo wallow.”

  “You held them off?”

  “Yes, Major.”

  Price pushed his slouch hat back, regarding the civilian.

  “You suppose it was that same bunch we skirted around, Major?” asked one of the soldiers at Price’s side.

  Then Dixon saw the major shoot the officer a disapproving glance. Price had evidently been doing his best to avoid conflict with the huge war party, and by doing so had instead stumbled right into Dixon’s half-dozen couriers.

  “You got a surgeon along, Major?”

  “I do,” Price replied, the look in his eyes almost thankful for Dixon taking him off the hook. He turned in the saddle. “Bring Surgeon Fouts up.”

  When the physician had reached the major’s side, Price said, “This courier has some wounded I want you to examine, Surgeon. Take your two stewards and determine the nature of their wounds.”

  “All right,” Fouts said, sounding almost bored. “Show us to your couriers.”

  Dixon pointed down the road. “Just keep going over in that direction, not by the road. Bear hard to the south, sir. You want me to show you?”

  Fouts shook his head. “No, son. You stay with the major. We’ll find it.”

  He watched the surgeon and his two stewards ride off as Price began asking him questions regarding the fight at the buffalo wallow. Glancing over his shoulder minutes later, Dixon realized the surgeon was bearing too far to the north. He tried yelling at them but they had gone too far away to hear his voice. Dixon instead fired his rifle, getting the surgeon’s attention. He waved them to the left, pointing them more to the south. In a matter of moments they would be within rifle range of the wallow. Dixon turned back to Price as the major resumed his questioning.

  “You have one dead?”

  “When I left, sir. Three of the other four was shot up. Some worse’n others—”

  The roar of Chapman’s buffalo gun cut off the rest of Dixon’s words. Billy recognized the sound of that gun, as any good hide man learned to recognize the sound of another hunter’s loads. In the distance, halfway between where he stood and the wallow, one of the steward’s horses was keeling over to the ground.