A slow smile curled the corners of the sinister brute’s mouth. “You’re a sassy little bitch, ain’tcha?”
Luke tensed at the comment, and started to reach for his quiver of arrows, but Katie stopped him with a raised hand. She did not reply to Slocum’s remark, standing defiantly with her hand resting on the butt of her pistol.
Glancing in Luke’s direction, Slocum grinned openly. “You pretty handy with that bow, sonny?” Luke’s expression didn’t change as he continued to stare stone-faced at the unwelcome visitor. Laughing at the lack of response from the half-breed boy, Slocum jerked on the reins, turning the big gray’s head back toward the trail. “Much obliged,” he said to Katie, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Not one to miss many things in the pursuit of his business, he did not fail to notice the tip of the rifle barrel in the corner of the cabin window.
Heading back down the wagon track at a leisurely pace, he was confident that what the storekeeper and the woman at the cabin had told him was true. Culver had, in fact, left the valley. He was confident the rifle he spotted in the window was being held by the woman he had seen standing in the door. There were still possibilities, however. He was not convinced that they had no idea where Culver was heading. So the thing to do now was to find a good spot to hide out where he could watch the cabin for a while. One thing for sure: Culver ain’t headin’ for Oregon territory.
* * *
When Slocum had ridden out of sight, Lettie emerged from the cabin, still carrying the rifle. She walked into the garden to join Katie and Luke. “What did that awful-looking man want? He scared me so bad just looking at him that I thought we might be in trouble.”
Katie couldn’t help but smile. “So you were going to shoot him,” she chided, impressed by the young girl’s show of bravado.
“I don’t know. I guess I was, if he made one move toward you. That was the meanest-looking man I’ve ever seen.”
“Bounty hunter,” Katie said. Then she related Slocum’s story to Lettie.
“Jim didn’t murder anybody,” Lettie exclaimed. “You know what happened in Virginia. That lieutenant shot at Jim first, and Jim shot in self-defense.”
“I know,” Katie calmly replied. She was thinking hard on what she could do to warn Jim. “We need to let Jim know that animal is after him.” She turned to Luke. “You and Clay talked to Jim about seeing the mountains and all that horseshit you men think is so important. Do you have any notion where he was going?”
Luke shook his head. “Nope. He was just going. Him and Clay talked a lot about the Wind River country. I expect he might have rode up that way.”
Seeing the sudden distress in Lettie’s eyes, Katie laid a comforting hand on the young girl’s arm. “Jim strikes me as a man who is pretty good at taking care of himself, honey. I wouldn’t worry.” Then she looked back at Luke. “All the same, Luke, you’d best go find him. You know that country as well as anyone. If he’s up there somewhere, maybe you can strike his trail.”
“Yes’m,” was all Luke replied. Wasting no more time, he immediately went about getting some possibles together for a long scout in the mountains. In a matter of no more than half an hour, he was in the saddle and on his way.
* * *
“Well, that didn’t take long,” Slocum muttered. “I didn’t have a chance to even make myself comfortable.” He stood at the head of a shallow ravine, hidden by thick pines, watching the young half-breed boy as his horse loped by. Motionless until Luke had passed out of sight, he then stepped up in the saddle and rode after him. “All right, sonny, lead me to him.”
Chapter 5
Iron Bow pulled his pony up abruptly when he heard the single shot. With a quick motion of his hand, he signaled his warriors to stop and listen. He waited for more shots, but none followed. Earlier that morning they had heard one shot. It had come from the direction Jim Culver had taken with his prisoner. Iron Bow had puzzled over it. Had the young brother of Ghost Wind decided to kill his prisoner? Or had Johnny Malotte managed to overpower him? It aroused Iron Bow’s curiosity enough to cause him to want to follow the sound.
Some of the warriors voiced their concern over the wisdom in riding deeper into Shoshoni territory. Already they had ventured deep into the land of their enemies to take back the ponies Malotte had stolen. They had recovered their ponies, they reasoned. Why risk running into a Shoshoni war party? Iron Bow listened to their words and agreed that it would be the wiser thing to break off and return to their own country. But he had taken an instant liking to Jim Culver, so he still had a desire to see if anything had happened to him. “I can only speak for myself, but I’m going to ride as far as the line of hills we see on the horizon.” After a brief discussion, the others reluctantly decided to follow, since he intended to go no farther than the hills they could see.
The shot just heard was much closer than the one heard that morning. The hills were no more than three or four miles away now. Iron Bow cautioned his warriors to be alert and keep a watchful eye for Shoshoni hunting parties. Leaving one of the younger men to watch the extra ponies, he led the others toward the sound of the shot.
As they approached the tallest in the line of hills, they came upon the tracks of a shod horse. “Culver’s horse,” Iron Bow said, and directed his scouts to follow the tracks. The Crow war party was about to follow Toby’s tracks up the hill when one of the forward scouts discovered a body lying in the narrow stream at the foot of the hill.
“It’s the white man Culver,” Wounded Leg reported as Iron Bow brought his pony to a stop before the stream.
“I was afraid so,” Iron Bow replied. “Is he dead?”
Wounded Leg bent low over Jim to examine him more closely. Putting his ear to Jim’s chest, he listened for a few moments. “He walks the path between life and the spirit world,” he decided. “I think his path is closer to the spirit world.”
Iron Bow dismounted, and he and Wounded Leg pulled Jim out of the water and laid him on the grassy bank. The others crowded around to watch while the two decided whether it was worthwhile to try to help him. Whether he was aware of the importance of the discussion over him was not certain. But at that moment, Jim opened his eyes.
Iron Bow smiled. “We thought you had already started on the long journey to the spirit world.”
Jim managed a grimace that hardly passed for a smile. “I still got things to do here,” he uttered, his voice halting and labored.
“You have lost a lot of blood. The rifle ball went all the way through your body. The wound looks very bad. I think you should already be dead,” Iron Bow said. “I can take you back to my village. It is a long ride. We will have to travel fast because we are in the land of our enemies, and we are few in number. The ride may kill you. Maybe you would rather stay here and die where you would be more comfortable. It is your choice.”
The Crow war chief’s candor brought the hint of a smile to Jim’s face in spite of his pain. “You don’t have much faith in my will to live, do you? I’m not ready to lay down for old man Death just yet.”
Iron Bow smiled. “Good. We’ll make a travois and take you back to our village. Old Red Wing will make you well again. He is very wise and makes strong medicine.”
* * *
Before they reached the Crow village, Jim began to wonder if maybe he should have remained back by the stream to die a peaceful death. Iron Bow’s warriors fashioned a travois using two lodgepole pines lashed to a bearskin platform, and mounted it on one of the ponies recovered from Johnny Malotte. After making Jim as comfortable as possible, the band of Crows headed northeast. The mountains he had crossed the day before were now to the west, but Jim took little note of the direction.
For three days he bounced along over the rough terrain, his wound weeping almost constantly, relief from the searing pain coming only with occasional escapes into unconsciousness. It seemed that every time he awoke from one of these blackouts, he would open his eyes to discover Iron Bow riding beside the travois, gazing down intently at h
im. Jim soon realized that the somber Crow war chief was curious to see if he was going to come back to life again. Jim would do his best to smile at Iron Bow, and Iron Bow would simply shake his head as if amazed.
On the morning of the fourth day, the party of Crows entered a wide valley that descended the low hills to a river that flowed serpentine among the willows and cottonwoods. Jim was aware of a general chorus of greetings from the camp as the people welcomed the war party home. But the sounds came to him as if through a dense fog, echoing around his head with bits of speech and laughter, mixed with the neighing and nickering of horses. He didn’t know what was happening around him, and he was too weak to care.
It was the following morning before consciousness returned. He awoke from a deep sleep, groggy and confused, staring up into an open flap in the peak of a Crow lodge. The patch of sky visible through the flap was the milky gray of early dawn. He attempted to rise from the bed of animal fur he lay upon, but immediately sank back when a searing pain shot through his chest.
“Well, damned if you ain’t alive after all.” The voice came from behind him. “I’ve been waitin’ to see if I was gonna have to waste any food on you.” The man moved around to Jim’s side and knelt down beside him.
Puzzled by the man’s speech, Jim stared hard at his benefactor. He was an old man, dressed in animal skins like an Indian, but he was obviously not an Indian. Grinning widely at Jim through a beard almost completely gray, he held a small bowl filled with water up to Jim’s lips.
“Here, drink some. It’s water.” Jim accepted eagerly. “My name’s Newt Plummer. The Injuns call me Red Wing. Iron Bow brung you in here half-dead last night, said you’d been having a battle with death for four days and wouldn’t give in.” Newt laughed when recalling it. “Told me to patch you up, ’cause you was a warrior. Ol’ Iron Bow don’t git too folksy with many white men, but he sure took a likin’ to you, for some reason.” He paused to take the bowl from Jim. “He said you come ridin’ right into their camp and told him you was taking your horse and gun. Did you do that?” Jim nodded. Newt laughed again, shaking his head in amusement. “Well, it sure impressed ol’ Iron Bow.”
Newt got up and went outside to fill a bowl with some boiled antelope from a pot sitting in the coals of a cookfire. When he returned, he helped Jim sit up on his fur bed. “I believe you’re gonna make it. You better put some of this in your gullet, though. You lost a helluva lot of blood—need to build your strength back up.”
Jim took some of the meat and started to chew it. Reluctant at first because he didn’t feel like eating, he soon gained an appetite after a few bites. Newt watched him intently, as if expecting to see the food running out of the holes in his body. After a few long moments of silence while Jim cleaned out the bowl, Newt spoke again. “Yep, I believe you’re gonna be all right—just need to rest up awhile till your body mends. Somebody upstairs must think a lot of you. You were mighty lucky. You’ve got two neat little holes in you where the bullet went clear through. But they were high enough to miss your heart and lungs, else you’d be dead for sure. You’d bled pretty good outta both holes, so I put a hot iron on ’em to seal ’em off last night while you was asleep. You didn’t even wake up.”
Jim pulled aside the cloth that bound his chest, and stared at the cauterized wound. He could only hope Newt Plummer knew what he was doing. “How do you happen to be here?” he asked.
“I’ve been with ’em since sixty-one,” Newt replied. “I took a Crow woman to wife and come to live with ’em when Iron Bow’s daddy was chief. Old Two Bears, he died a year after that when a bunch of Blackfoot raided our village on the Tongue River. Two years after that, my woman took sick and died.”
“But you stayed with the Indians,” Jim commented.
“Well, sure. They’re my people.” He grinned. “They think I’m some big medicine. That’s why Iron Bow brung you to my lodge. I wouldn’t go back to what white folks call civilization now if you held a gun on me.”
Jim, feeling tired from sitting up so long, lay back on his bed, reliving the events of the past several days in his mind. It seemed like a month since he had decided to leave the mountain lake and ride to Fort Laramie. “Where the hell am I, anyway?”
“We’re camped on the Bighorn, about a day and a half’s ride below the Yellowstone.” Newt rose to his feet again, preparing to leave his patient to rest awhile. “I expect Iron Bow’s right about you being tough enough to whip old man Death this time. But it’s gonna take a while before you’ll be ready to do any high kickin’.”
* * *
Almost one hundred miles from the Crow camp on the Bighorn River, as the hawk flies, young Luke Kendall knelt by a narrow stream. Some small stones that had been dislodged near the edge of the water caught his eye as he followed a single set of shod hoofprints. It was not the stones themselves that caught his attention; it was what appeared to be dried bloodstains on some of the stones. On closer inspection, he found traces of blood that had spattered the sand and blades of grass near the water.
Not sure what it meant, but with a sudden feeling of dread, he stood up and looked around him. Someone or something had gotten shot here, but that was as much as the sign told him. It only added to his confusion. At the top of the hill he had found a perfectly good Colt .45 pistol lying beside an antelope hide. From the sign around the hide, it appeared that wolves had been there before him.
He had been confident that the tracks he had followed from the lake down through the hills belonged to Jim’s horse, Toby. Toby was a big horse, easy to trail. Besides that, the camp he had found by the lake looked like one a white man might make. If he read the sign correctly, Jim had evidently met up with a band of Indians somewhere on an old game trail that led down the mountain. From the base of the mountain they had started toward the southwest and camped close by a creek. In the confusion of tracks, it had been difficult at times to pick out Toby’s shod prints among the many others, but he found enough of them to be sure Jim had still been riding with the Indians.
From the camp, it had become more difficult to follow the trail because of the short grass that covered the prairie, but he had picked out enough tracks to tell him that Jim had left the others and headed out alone. This was what now worried him. The Indians had left the camp, headed in a different direction from that taken by Jim. But before reaching the point where he now stood, they had converged on Jim’s trail. When Luke added all this up with the bloodstains by the stream, it painted a picture that he dreaded to take back to Katie and Lettie. It became very clear to him that Jim had been jumped by the Indians he had befriended and camped with. The fact that there was no sign of a body told him that the Indians probably took him with them, no doubt to kill him slowly. There was a possibility that Jim might still be alive, but Luke knew that to be unlikely.
The one thing he had no explanation for was the pistol and antelope hide on top of the hill. He pulled the .45 from his belt and examined it closely. He remembered that Jim owned one like this. He looked around him again, wondering if he should return to Canyon Creek and tell Katie what he had found. What should he tell Lettie—that Jim was probably dead? He considered the possibility of following the war parry’s tracks, but they would only lead him deeper into Crow and Sioux country—not a healthy situation for a Shoshoni boy alone. He had no fear of entering enemy territory, it was just that he felt strongly that Jim Culver was beyond any help he could give, and it would be wasted effort.
* * *
Watching the hesitant young boy from a clump of sage on the side of the hill, Slocum turned his head to spit. Hell, he thought, he don’t know where Culver is. He’s just following sign, same as me. He’s wasted enough of my time. Slocum had trailed Luke for almost four and a half days, thinking the boy knew where to find Jim Culver. He might have been irritated enough with Luke to take it out on him, but the army was paying him by the day. So he was a bit more patient than usual. He was willing to bet at this stage that Culver was going to Fort Laram
ie, judging by the direction the trail was now headed. “Where else would he be going?” he asked aloud as he turned to retrieve his horse.
By the time Slocum returned to the clump of sage, leading his horse, Luke had made his decision. The fearsome bounty hunter watched as the young half-Shoshoni boy jumped upon his pony’s back and set off toward Canyon Creek. “Huh,” Slocum grunted. “Where the hell’s he going? That’s the way we just come.” He climbed into the saddle and rode down to the shallow stream where Luke had been studying sign.
First he searched the bank of the stream and found the bloodstained rocks and grass that had prompted young Luke to assume Jim Culver was most likely dead. Slocum was not as ready to assume as much. There weren’t many stains—he allowed for the possibility that more blood could have been washed away in the water. Culver might just be wounded—or it might not be Culver’s blood. A careful search around the stream and the trees that framed it turned up no evidence of a body. He reasoned that the Indians would have left the body where it lay if they had killed Culver. And if animals had eaten him, there would be bones scattered about. So he had to conclude that Culver was still alive.
Next, he looked carefully at the tracks just left by Luke. Try as he might, he could not find any trail older than the one the boy left. He ain’t following no trail, he concluded. He’s hightailing it back to Canyon Creek. Slocum didn’t spend much time contemplating it. The boy had decided to quit looking for Culver. That was all there was to it. It did not serve to influence the bounty hunter’s resolve. He would assume Jim was dead when he found a body.
Still firm in his original assumption, he figured Culver was on his way to Fort Laramie. So he searched in that direction, looking to find tracks that would prove him right. It was easy enough to see that the band of Indians had cut back and headed northeast. Still betting on his instincts as a manhunter, Slocum ignored the multitude of tracks and continued searching on an arc south of the stream. Less than twenty yards from the stream, he found what he was looking for; prints of a single shod horse. And they were heading in the general direction of Fort Laramie. That was enough for Slocum. He didn’t waste time tracking, but spurred the dingy gray and took off for Laramie straightaway. “If the boy had took a closer look at all them tracks heading thataway, he’da seed there wasn’t no shod horse with ’em.” He laughed at the thought.
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