Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  From time to time snipers fired into Mackenzie’s camp, causing some momentary excitement here and there, then they were gone. Minutes later firing erupted elsewhere on the perimeter, successfully keeping everyone jumpy and jittery well past midnight when wagonmaster James O’Neal’s long overdue supply train rumbled and squeaked into the canyon.

  “Lucky they was,” Donegan said later as he swabbed out the barrel of the Henry repeater. “Riding in here dumb as rocks, not knowing the country was crawling with h’athens.”

  While roaming bands of warriors kept sniping throughout the shank of the night, most of the soldiers tried to get some much-needed sleep, knowing the next two or three days would allow them even less.

  As soon as there was enough light before dawn, more than three hundred warriors gathered along the ridges north of the camp, content for the time being to fire at long range.

  “Grover!” shouted Lieutenant Thompson as he trotted up on horseback in the gray light of that twenty-seventh day of September, his mount parting some of the sleepy-eyed scouts just then being rousted after less than three hours of rest. “You and Donegan come with me! We’ve got orders to go with Captain Boehm and drive those Indians off.”

  Quickly pulling pickets and loosening knots on the cross-lines, the two joined some of Thompson’s Tonkawas and Lipans as they led Captain Peter Boehm’s E Company northward toward the ridge held by the Comanche.

  The wind cut cold slashes at them as the sun first breached the horizon. The coming warmth felt good going down into his lungs as they loped up the broken, rocky slopes toward the taunting enemy. Bullets stung the air sporadically around Donegan as the Comanche began to fall back toward their ponies tied at the mesquite back among the narrow ravines that honeycombed the country north of Tule Canyon. A few kept firing until the soldiers were almost in among them. One beautifully dressed warrior stood his ground as long as he dared, covering the retreat of the others, then whirled, sprinting to his pony. He leaped atop it as a Tonkawa named Henry surged past the Irishman, firing his pistol rapidly at the Comanche.

  The warrior spun and fell from his pony as Henry closed on his ancient enemy.

  Reining up in a clatter of rocks, Henry stuffed his pistol in his belt, ready to take the Comanche scalp. But just as Seamus turned to leave, the Comanche had other plans for the hated Tonkawa.

  Springing from the ground where he had been feigning death, the warrior yanked a much-surprised Henry from his army mount. Striking the ground so hard it knocked the breath out of him, the Tonkawa struggled to collect his senses as the Comanche yanked his bow from the quiver at his back and repeatedly struck Henry with it.

  “Kee-yip! Kee-yip!!” the warrior shouted each time he counted coup on his enemy.

  It was becoming one of the most amusing vignettes Seamus could remember seeing in his short but bloody time on the plains. He was laughing uncontrollably as Grover rode up. The older scout began roaring at the Tonkawa’s predicament as well, while the Comanche unabashedly refrained from killing Henry, preferring instead to beat his enemy with the bow, shaming him.

  “Why you no shoot?” Henry shouted at Donegan and Grover, along with a handful of soldiers who rode up, curious at the laughter and noisy racket.

  “Something this damned funny gonna make me bust a belly seam, Seamus!” Grover said, laughing.

  “Shoot bastard! Shoot bastard!” the Tonkawa demanded as his bloodied arms canopied his face and head.

  “You had enough, Henry?” growled Henry Strong as he rode up in a clatter of pebbles and dust.

  “Shoot bastard!”

  Strong pulled up his pistol and fired, dropping the Comanche.

  Donegan whirled on Strong, bringing his Henry up.

  “You got something to say to me, Irishman?”

  Seamus felt Grover’s hand on his arm. He slowly lowered the repeater. “We could use him, Strong.”

  The interpreter laughed. “You stupid mick. He’d be no good to us alive. A Comanche never talks. The only good one’s a dead one.” He nudged his horse over to the bloodied Tonkawa. “The scalp’s yours, Henry. Be sure to take the goddamned ears with it.” Strong glanced over his shoulder at Donegan with a smile as he urged his horse off toward Boehm’s main flank.

  “You no help Henry,” growled the Tonkawa as he pranced past Donegan and Sharp with the full scalp, complete with dangling ears and silver earrings. “Maybe Comanche get you—you no help Henry.”

  “You should’ve let me put a bullet through him, Sharp,” Donegan hissed.

  Sharp shook his head. “More trouble for you than one Comanche’s worth. Strong’s a bad number, likely a back-shooter too. That’s his sort of work: back-shooting. ’Cause his kind’s so weak he needs a brass rail under his boot and a bar to rest his elbows on. A genuine hairless Mexican pup—”

  “Grover!”

  They both looked up, finding Thompson and Strong on the ridge above them. The lieutenant was waving them on. “C’mon, boys. Boehm’s got ’em on the run and they’re fanning out. I’ve got my orders to follow their trail so we can report back to Mackenzie, where the sonsabitches are heading.”

  Seamus watched the pair disappear over the lip of the ridge. “Those Comanche are scattering—just like the Cheyenne did to Carr in ’sixty-nine.”*

  Grover wearily hoisted himself aboard his horse. “But the general damn well found those Dog Soldiers at Summit Springs, didn’t he?”

  “You might say,” Seamus recalled as they pushed their mounts up the loose, red-hued talus after the rest. “It was Bill Cody found Tall Bull’s village for Carr.” He spit out what he had left of a chew. “Now it looks like it’s up to us to see if we can keep any of these sonsabitches from getting away from Mackenzie.”

  Grover wagged his head, urging his horse up the rocky scree of the slope. “I’m getting too damned old to be doing this much more.”

  “Sounds like you’ve decided to make this your last trip courtesy of the U.S. Army?”

  The older man scowled. “Let’s just say I been doing a lot of praying that I go home forked on a horse, Irishman … and not laid flat in a pine box.”

  36

  September 27–28, 1874

  It was as evident to Mackenzie as it was to any Indian fighter then on the plains that in retreating to the east, the warriors who had attacked and harried his column were doing their best to draw the soldiers away from their villages filled with women and children.

  No one needed to explain that old ruse to the colonel. Mackenzie had fought these very same warriors again and again in previous campaigns. And this time he was not to be deterred. Three-Finger Kinzie had a surprise for the Comanche and Kiowa and Cheyenne.

  But to make his enemies believe he had been fooled, throughout the entire day of the twenty-seventh Mackenzie marched his column to the northeast, following the freshest Indian trail. Still, while his troops were marching northeast, Mackenzie’s scouts were slipping around to sniff over the country to the northwest.

  Soon enough it became evident to Seamus Donegan that the warriors who had been keeping an eye on the soldier columns had grown satisfied enough that the army was marching out of danger that they could abandon their spying on the soldiers. Despite all that consoling talk he gave himself, this ride was proving to be every bit as spooky as any night he had spent in the darkness on Beecher Island. He didn’t need reminding to keep his eyes moving now across the vast, muddy expanse of the Staked Plain. But not one of the trackers had found a single feather, pony or war lance. Lots of tracks. But no warriors. And certainly no villages. The Indians had simply disappeared, as if swallowed by the earth.

  Sergeant John B. Charlton, second-in-command with Lieutenant Thompson’s scouts, pressed forward with Donegan and a handful of Tonkawa trackers. Other groups were pushing across the wilderness in different directions. Mackenzie demanded answers, demanded to know how the enemy could simply vanish into the rarefied air of the southern plains. More to the point, Mackenzie demanded to know whe
re the hell his quarry had gone.

  Mile after mile they rode, eyes sweeping over the endless inland sea of summer-burned buffalo grass until suddenly the Lipan and Tonkawa riding ahead halted. One threw up an arm, alerting Sergeant Charlton and the others.

  “They found something,” said the sergeant who owned a narrow, over-long face.

  “And I doubt it’s pony tracks,” Seamus replied.

  Catching up with Johnson and Job, the latter a Tonkawa tracker, Charlton dismounted with Donegan and moved forward on foot. After another twenty yards Johnson stopped, signing that they should leave their horses with the others. Only then could Charlton and Donegan proceed through the wind-shorn grass with the two trackers.

  Charlton’s eyes narrowed, his mouth working a moment before he spoke, that brindle mustache of his extending over his upper lip like a shake awning over a mercantile’s front porch. “Just keep our heads up and our peckers down and do what we’re told to do, I s’pose. Figure this is a mite important.”

  Leaving their animals with the rest of the Tonkawas, the pair of white men followed Johnson and Job forward, quietly and slowly.

  In moments a great crevasse in the prairie opened up before them.

  As Seamus crawled on his belly to the lip of the ravine, it became clear that this was no small arroyo. The bottom of this canyon lay more than a thousand feet below them. As the sun climbed toward mid-sky it began to illuminate the lush stands of cedar and cottonwood and mesquite down below along the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River. The changing quality of light brought to play the changing hues of ocher and pinks, yellows and white striated through the millennia of erosion carving this wonder of nature out of the austere severity of the Staked Plain.

  Donegan lay there with the others in silence, every one of them clearly in awe of this wonder of nature.

  “Injun,” Johnson whispered finally, pointing for Charlton, who lay beside him at the lip of the crevasse. “Much Injun.”

  As more clouds moved off the face of the sun, they could begin to make out the shadowy movement of a horse herd far below, feeding in the luxurious grasses along the stream.

  “Don’t that break a tooth, Irishman? You’re an old cavalryman. How many you figure?” asked the sergeant in a harsh whisper.

  Seamus shook his head, unable to estimate at first. “Fifteen hundred. No more than two thousand.”

  “And that’s about what we see,” Charlton replied. “Look there.”

  Down the canyon from where they lay, the shafts of sunlight were beginning to play on the blue-gray wisps of morning wood smoke rising from hundreds of lodges. While he could not make out most of the lodges themselves for the trees and the twisting course of the canyon, Seamus nonetheless could recognize the clear evidence of camp smoke. They had found the enemy.

  Charlton slid backward on his belly a few yards before he rose, dusting himself as Donegan stood. He appeared anxious as a church mouse as he said, “Let’s go tell Mackenzie he’s got ’em cornered.”

  During that kidney-hammering ride back to rejoin the main command, Donegan found himself turning in the saddle to look over their backtrail, finding it hard to believe they had not been discovered. Every bit as hard to believe that the Indians had watched Mackenzie’s troops march off to the northeast then abandoned their surveillance. Yet it was a fact: Charlton’s scouts were not followed.

  Back with the slow-moving column just past midday, the sergeant lost no time reporting the momentous news to Mackenzie.

  With his eyes probing the distance, the colonel declared, “Not that I give a shake in hell for it, but on the outside chance we are being watched, I won’t give the enemy any reason to suspect that we’ve found their villages. I’ll only slow the order of march for the rest of the afternoon.”

  In late afternoon a halt was ordered and the entire command went about as if they were making camp for the night near the headwaters of Tule Creek.

  But as soon as dark descended upon the land, orders were passed up and down the valley. This time there would be no wagons along, no brake-blocks snarling against their creaking wheels. Mackenzie was traveling light and lean. With the regimental pack mules burdened with twelve days’ rations, Mackenzie remounted his cavalry beneath the stars, turned about at the head of Tule Canyon and pointed them northwest under the cover of night. The Fourth Cavalry was no longer stalking elusive warriors. They were closing the jaws of their trap around the enemy’s villages.

  Beneath rose-tinted gold light of dawn on the high plains that Monday morning, after covering some twenty-five miles in light marching order from Tule Canyon, Thompson’s Tonkawa trackers again stopped the command, this time only yards from the crimson-tinged crevice of the Palo Duro.

  Once more Seamus was struck by the sudden, raw beauty of this canyon—like a deep, bloody laceration of a fissure cracking the deadly monotony of the Staked Plain. All lay quiet below them in the cold, chill shadows of dawn.

  And for a moment he knew how it must feel to be a prairie wolf crouched, its prey within reach, ready to spring.

  * * *

  It was called the Place of the Chinaberry Trees.

  Here his Kwahadi Comanches had been joined by the Cheyenne of Stone Calf, then the Kiowa of Lone Wolf and Mamanti and Poor Buffalo camped farther upstream. A few lodges of Arapaho had been raised among the Comanches. Three separate villages, three separate pony herds.

  He was tired, every muscle in his lithe body tested in the past few days of fighting, feinting, drawing off the yellowlegs who had continued to march despite the bad weather. With every mile the soldiers put behind them, Quanah Parker grew more convinced these yellowlegs were commanded by the obsessed Three-Finger Kinzie.

  A resolute enemy, this Kinzie. One who would not give up easily, nor one who would not turn about unless convinced to do so by defeat or by the weather. Still, Quanah knew he had come up against Three-Finger Kinzie twice before. Perhaps more. Yet Quanah still rode at the van of his people. His Kwahadi still free to roam the southern plains.

  He had awakened not long ago, finding the delicious, warm dampness of her flesh against his beneath the buffalo robes. Last night when he had returned at last, staking his pony out beside the lodge before he ducked through the doorway, Quanah had been too weary to do more than gulp down a few mouthfuls of antelope before his head sank to the furry mat of their bed clothing at the rear of their lodge. But when he had slept a few hours, awakening in the cold stillness of early morning, Quanah’s loins stirred with desire as he ran his hands over the firm fullness of Tonarcy’s small breasts, sensing how the nipples grew rigid beneath his touch.

  Her hands had urgently sought out his flesh, her lips and tongue sought out his mouth as she guided him toward her waiting heat.

  Now she was snoring softly beside him as sparks leaped from the kindling he set on the coals of last night’s fire, tiny dancing fireflies that climbed ever upward toward the darkness of the smokehole at the top of the lodge where the great spiral of poles met, then spread once more.

  Such was the seasonal fate of his people, this coming together from afar, meeting in this Place of the Chinaberry Trees—bound together as the lodgepoles were bound one to another with that thick rope, then parting once more, each band to make its own way on the prairie. Without the white man. Without the settlers. Without the railroads. And without the buffalo hunters come to slaughter and leave in ruin all that the Kwahadi had been before the white man had come to this high land the Comanche called home.

  For many lifetimes the Kwahadi had been coming to this Place of the Chinaberry Trees. He remembered many trips here: as a young child carried in the arms of his blond-haired mother, later following his father, Nocona, after Quanah had learned to ride. A great, cool place this was in the summer. A safe place this was, warm and out of the cruel wind when the winter blizzards ravaged the prairie overhead. The last few days that wind of a changing season had grown ugly and carried with it the hint of cold spit.

  Cut down throu
gh the heart of the Llano Estacado by the Prairie Dog Town Fork until the canyon lay more than forty miles in length, stretching from one to six miles of torturous, winding width. Here Quanah’s people had always found the rich grasses to fatten their great herds, plenty of firewood to warm their lodges, and safety while the women scraped and cured the hides of the brother buffalo.

  But of late every thought of the buffalo brought a gnawing twinge of pain to the young war chief. More than once he had seen with his own eyes the litter of rotting carcasses stretching mile after mile after mile across the killing ground. Still Quanah held out some hope that the red man could hold back the white, despite the fact that to the north and south of this canyon the tai-bos had scratched at the earth and raised his earth lodges and were killing off the buffalo. East of here the enemy was laying the great iron tracks for his smoking horse. Perhaps the white man would be satisfied, Quanah prayed—be finally sated and leave this last best place to the Kwahadi for all time to come, as they had lived for all time gone before.

  Up there on the prairie itself across the past several moons, the streams had dried like a newborn’s birthcord cut from their tiny belly, dried and shriveled. Grasshoppers and locusts and winged insects of all nature had descended from the pale skies to seize dominion over the hot expanse of the summer-ravaged buffalo grass. Normally high enough to brush the soles of his moccasins as he rode across this inland kingdom, this past summer had seen the grass stunted, yellowed early.

  Had such a drought come to this land in summers gone by, the great herds of buffalo would have starved to death without the rich grass to survive on; would have stampeded in thirst as the creeks and streams and rivers slowly dried and turned to choking dust beneath the relentless sun.

  But now there were few buffalo left to feed on the inland grasses any more. Few left to wander in search of the ancient watering holes.

  Perhaps it all had something to do with Isatai and his failed medicine.