by Mark Henry
By mid-August, many of the fires appeared to be under control. Then, a low-pressure system moved into the West from the Pacific Ocean, spawning hurricane-force winds in the rolling grasslands of southeastern Washington. By late afternoon of August 20th, sustained gales of over seventy miles an hour roared into the northern Rocky Mountains.
Fanned by these fierce winds, sleeping fires sprang to life. Separate blazes rushed together engulfing each other and melding into a huge firestorm.
Some five hundred miles away, in Billings, the sun was completely obscured. At five P.M., eight hundred miles distant, a forty-two-mile-an-hour gale ripped through Denver, Colorado, bringing with it a swirling amber cloud of thick smoke that engulfed the entire city. The temperature fell by nineteen degrees in ten minutes. The next day, the sky was dark enough in the eastern United States that streetlights in Watertown, New York, stayed on all day.
Hundreds of settlers were blinded or permanently maimed. Official records show eighty-five—including seventy-nine firefighters—lost their lives in the inferno. No one truly knows the actual number of dead.
* * *
The characters here are works of fiction, and while they move in a historical setting, their adventures spring purely from my imagination. Though based on real locations, beyond the main roads and towns the geography is also fictionalized—out of respect for the brave souls who died along the various ridge-tops, valleys, and creeks doing battle with the fires on August 20, 1910.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to mentors Henry Chappell and Jimmy Butts for their critique and comment; and to Tyson Bundy for reading just because he wanted to see what happened next.
I am indebted to my agent, Robin Rue for her tireless work on my behalf and Gary Goldstein—an editor who understands the written word and the West.
Most especially, I’d like to thank my fellow gun-toters and trackers—all of whom added in one way or another to this story.
THE HELL RIDERS
As always, for Victoria
PROLOGUE
October 5, 1877
Montana
Alikos Pah—The Place of Dung Fires
Thirty miles south of the Canadian border
Looking Glass was dead. Ollokut, Poker Joe—most of the young warriors were dead or dying in the freezing mud.
Maggie Sundown, of the Wallowa Nez Percé, struggled against the stiff rope that bound her wrists and ankles and wished she was dead as well.
The once-beautiful fourteen-year-old was covered in mud, her fingernails blackened past the quick from frantic digging in the soggy prairie muck in advance of Colonel Miles’s unrelenting army. Dirt and bits of grass matted her waist-length hair into a tangled nest.
Only hours before, she’d been reloading rifles for Broad Hand in a hastily dug pit, while he poured fire down on the blue-coats. Now, the blood of her childhood friend mingled with the grime on the side of her face.
In the ghost-gray fog of early morning, a group of soldiers had flanked their position and shot her brave friend in the eye with a big-bore rifle. He was only fifteen.
Maggie had taken up one of Broad Hand’s Sharps to continue the battle. Tiny crystals of snow spit against the barrel, sizzling and evaporating on contact from the heat brought on by heavy fire. She fully expected to be shot at any moment. Instead, a blond soldier with freckles across his nose like the spots on an Appaloosa pony leapt into the sodden hole. He clubbed her in the head with his pistol before she could turn the big gun back toward him.
When she awoke, Maggie found herself bound hand and foot with rough hemp, slumped against the wheel of a supply ambulance. A searing pain, made worse by the earlier blasting of the soldiers’ artillery, roared in her head. The copper taste of blood cloyed, hard and bitter, in the back of her throat.
The battle had fallen off to a lull of sporadic pops and hollow shouts of distant skirmishers. Yellow-tinged gun smoke drifted like soiled cotton across the rolling plain and hung in blurred layers. Dead horses and fighters from both sides, corpses tight from the cold, littered the frosted grass. Gossamer flakes of snow drifted down through the haze in serene indifference to the murderous landscape.
Dozens of soldiers milled about in small groups. Phlegmatic coughs rattled their chests and they stomped their feet against the chill. Some wore capes; others pulled wool blankets tight around their whiskered necks.
Maggie thought little of the cold. She felt nothing but a hot, seething anger—tight in her breast—a fist around her heart. All around her, the air was filled with the drawn-out twang of the white men’s chatter. The foreign whine of it bit at her nerves like a swarm of mosquitoes in her ears.
The Nimi’ipuu—her people—were silent.
A Crow Army scout with a pockmarked face and a mean scar from chin to ear squatted on his haunches beside her, leering with rheumy, black eyes and a cocked head. He touched himself lewdly, then licked his lips and reached out for the hem of her muddy calico skirt.
A swift kick from the freckle-nosed soldier sent him sprawling. It was Broad Hand’s killer.
“Get from here, you heathen cur.” The blond soldier drew his pistol and thumbed back the hammer. His pale fingers were blackened from putting the gun to much use during recent hours. “Do you understand me, you miserable wretch? Touch her again and you’ll not leave this place alive.”
The Crow gave a sullen shrug and padded off out of pistol range in search of an unguarded prisoner.
“You understand English?” Maggie’s savior took the Indian scout’s place and squatted beside her, only inches away from her knee. She held her breath, not knowing what to expect from the young soldier. He had a yellow bar on his shoulder. She knew enough of the military to know this meant he was one of the leaders. There seemed to be a lot of men with such decorations. Joseph said that was the trouble with the whites—they had too many chiefs who didn’t know what the others were up to.
Leader or not, Maggie planned to bite the nose off of any man who touched her again. This one kept his hands to himself. He wasn’t too many years older than her. Not yet past twenty-five.
“Lieutenant Peter Grant.” He pointed to himself as if she couldn’t understand him, then wrapped his arms around his own shoulders and pretended to be shivering. “You need to warm up, child; you’re soaked to the skin.”
He disappeared into the gray mist for a moment before trotting back through the muddy grass with a wool blanket. Squatting, he moved to drape it over her.
“I’m not cold,” Maggie grunted, focusing on the falling snow. She’d learned English from the Christian missionaries in Oregon who’d been intent on converting her people.
The lieutenant grinned when she spoke and clapped his hands together like a happy child. His eyes played over her in silence for a time as if he were coming to some decision. He opened his mouth, but a commotion behind him caught his attention.
“It’s him,” he whispered, rising to his feet. “Joseph himself, under a truce flag. Thank the Good Lord in heaven. I reckon it’s finally over.”
Maggie stared at the ground. At first it was pleasant to hear the words pour out in her own tongue, but the longer Joseph spoke, the more those words cut her spirit. Another soldier translated for Howard, the one-armed Bible General who had pursued her people almost two thousand miles—and for the colonel, who had finally caught them.
A tremor beset Joseph’s voice as he spoke from the back of his tired pony. “. . . I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. My heart is sick and sad. . . .”
The once-proud leader dismounted and with a nod from the Bible General, gave his rifle to Colonel Miles. Then, in shame, he pulled his blanket across his face.
A single tear, the first Maggie had shed since leaving her homeland in the Wallowa Valley, creased her dirty cheek.
Lieutenant Grant turned his attention back to her. He gave a thin smile. “Don’t you worry,” he sai
d. “This is all for the best.”
Whose best? Maggie thought, but she didn’t say it. “Will you let my people return to their homes?” She refused to look at this soldier, refused to let him see her cry.
Lieutenant Grant remained silent, watching her. At length he shrugged. “I don’t have any say in such matters. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure the general does either. I’m sure he’ll try if he says he will.”
He knelt down next to her again. His saber scabbard rattled when he pushed it behind him. “No matter what happens,” he said, “I’ll personally see to it that you’re well taken care of.”
Maggie was young, but she’d celebrated her womanhood a year before. She knew what it meant when a soldier said he would take care of an Indian girl. The old women often told bawdy stories of such things while they gathered camas bulbs in the spring.
The pale lieutenant’s boyish face suddenly grew somber, a serenely benevolent look in his water-blue eyes. “There’s too much sickness on the rez. You’re so very beautiful . . . or at least you could be.” He had the condescending look of piety about him, as if he were about to give money to a beggar. “My uncle sits on the board of a Presbyterian Indian school down Missouri way. They can help you there—teach you to be a proper Christian American. Help you become civilized.” His wide eyes brimmed with youthful dreams. He spoke slowly so she would understand him. “I’ve cleared it with the colonel so you have nothing to worry about.”
She shuddered when he put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Listen to me, now,” he said. “I know this is hard. But take my word for it. The folks at the school are good, solid people. It’ll be a darn sight more tolerable than any reservation.” He smiled and took her hand in his. Rather than pull away, she let it sag.
“I’ll be up for a promotion to first lieutenant in three months.” He spoke to her as though he was convinced she must share whatever dreams he held for their future. “I’ll look in on you then when things settle down some. Would you mind that? If I came to visit you, I mean.”
Maggie sat still. She could think of nothing but Chief Joseph’s words and her defeated people.
The lieutenant pressed on with his objective. “I know a good number of men who made happy homes with Indian women. Met a squaw man once down in Kansas who appeared to be a right happy fellow.”
Grant gazed at her for a moment—locked in a daydream—then shook his head as if to cast off the thought. He put both hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet with the groan of a much older man.
“I just realized—I don’t even know your name.”
Maggie nodded, but didn’t speak.
Grant smiled. “It’s all right, I guess. We’ve got plenty of time to get to know each other.” He let his eyes play over the pitiful groups of Nez Percé dragging in from the low hills and brushy draws along Snake Creek.
“Poor souls,” he whispered. “I wish I could send them all to school.” His pink face glistened in the flat light.
Maggie had seen the look before, back in Oregon. The lieutenant was a missionary in a uniform, a man with an unbending surety of his own beliefs and righteous purpose.
He had the clear eyes of a man with no guile. His heart was good—but at that moment, if given the means, Maggie Sundown would have gladly cut it out of his chest.
“There are worse futures than marrying an officer in the United States Army.” The freckled nose wrinkled when he smiled. His eyes twinkled. “Don’t you fret now.” His mind made up regarding his future wife, other more immediate duties called him away.
Perhaps, Maggie thought, he should go wash the blood of her people off his hands before he takes me to his bed.
He turned to smile at her as he walked away. “They’ll take good care of you at the school,” he said softly. “I’ll be there to get you soon enough. I promise.”
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
November 1910
Montana
The nine A.M. Great Northern train out of St. Regis rarely pulled away from the station before a quarter to ten. That gave Deputy U.S. Marshal Blake O’Shannon a little over an hour to make the trip that normally took twenty minutes. But normally, he didn’t have to plow through stirrup-deep snow.
O’Shannon urged his stout leopard Appaloosa forward, into the bone-numbing cold. A fierce wind burned the exposed areas of his face above his wool scarf. Important news weighed heavy on his shoulders and pressed him into the saddle. He groaned within himself and prayed the train would be late in leaving—not so much of a stretch as far as prayers went, considering the rank weather.
Driving snow lent teeth to the air and gave the sky the gunmetal face of a stone-cold killer. The young deputy stretched his aching leg in the stirrup. He’d only been able to walk without a crutch for a few weeks. If not for the message he carried, a message his father needed to hear, he never would have attempted a ride in such frigid conditions.
“What’s a hot-blooded Apache like you doin’ up here in all this white stuff?” he mumbled. A bitter wind tore the words away from his lips. He often talked to himself on lone rides, letting the three aspects of his heritage argue over whatever problem he happened to be chewing on at the time.
His gelding trudged doggedly on, but cocked a speckled ear back at the one-sided conversation.
Blake pulled his sheepskin coat tighter around his throat. “Better not let your Nez Percé mama hear you talk like that about her precious mountains,” he chided himself. White vapor plumed out around his face as he spoke. He wished he’d inherited his mother’s love—or at least her tolerance—for the cold.
A weak sun made a feeble attempt at burning through the clouds over the mountains to the east, but the gathering light only added to the sense of urgency welling up inside Blake’s gut. He had a train to catch.
He came upon the stranded wagon suddenly in a blinding sliver swirl of snow at the edge of a mountain shadow.
The driver, a sour man named Edward Cooksey, worked with a broken shovel to free the front wheel from a drift as deep as his waist. A flea-bitten gray slouched in the traces with a drooping lower lip. The horse was almost invisible amid the ghostlike curtains of blowing snow.
Blake reined up and sighed. St. Regis was less than a mile away to the west. He took a gold watch from his pocket and fumbled with a gloved had to open it. He was cutting it close.
Cooksey had a half-dozen arrests under his belt for being drunk and disorderly. Each time he’d gone in only after an all-out kicking and gouging fight.
Blake didn’t have time for this. Still, he couldn’t very well ride by and leave someone to freeze to death—not even someone as ill-tempered as Ed Cooksey.
The deputy cleared his throat with a cough. “Hitch up my horse alongside yours and we’ll pull you outta that mess.” Wind moaned through snow-bent jack pines along the road and Blake strained to be heard.
Cooksey had a moth-eaten red scarf tied over his head that pulled the brim of his torn hat down over his ears against the cold. He wore two tattered coats that together did only a slightly passable job of keeping out the winter air. Stubby, chapped fingers poked out of frayed holes in his homespun woolen gloves. The man was no wealthier than he was pleasant.
“Damned horse bowed a tendon on me. She ain’t worth a bucket of frozen spit for pullin’ anyhow,” he grunted against the wheel. When he looked up from his labor, his craggy face fell into a foul grimace as if he’d just eaten a piece of rotten fruit. “Push on,” he spit.
“You don’t want my help?” Blake was relieved but not surprised.
Cooksey leaned against the wheel and wiped a drip of moisture off the red end of his swollen nose. He brandished the broken shovel. “I’d rather drown, freeze plumb to death, or be poked with Lucifer’s own scaldin’ fork than to take assistance from a red nigger Injun—’specially one who’s high-toned enough to pin on a lawman’s badge.”
Blake caught the sent of whiskey, sharp as shattered glass on the
frigid air.
“Suit yourself then.” He lifted his reins to go.
“Twenty years ago, boy,” Cooksey snarled, “you and me woulda been tryin’ to cut each other’s guts out.”
“Twenty years ago, I was four years old.”
Cooksey gave a cruel grin. “I reckon that woulda just made my job all the easier.”
The Appaloosa pawed impatiently at the snow with a forefoot, feeling Blake’s agitation through his gloves and the thick leather reins.
“I doubt that,” the deputy said.
“I tell you what.” Cooksey sucked on his top lip, an easy chore since there were no teeth there to get in the way. “I don’t need any of your help, but I will take that horse off your hands.”
“I said I’d be glad to hitch up the horse and pull you out.”
“I don’t want you to hitch the damned thing up.” Cooksey’s gloved hand came out of his coat pocket, wrapped around an ugly black derringer. “I want you to get your red nigger tail out of that saddle and let me ride back into town.”
Like most derringers, Cooksey’s hideout pistol was a large caliber, capable of doing tremendous damage in the unlikely event it happened to hit anything. Blake was less than ten feet away. At that distance, even the bleary-eyed drunk might get lucky.
“Think again, Cooksey.” Blake gritted his teeth, racking his brain for a way out of this predicament. “You’re not getting my horse.” He’d had enough sense to strap his Remington pistol outside the heavy winter coat, but wearing gloves and sitting in the saddle made him awkward at best. Cooksey definitely had the advantage.
“Hell, you probably stole it from some honest white man anyhow,” Cooksey sneered. “To my way of thinkin’, that makes it more mine than it is yours.”