Brand, Max - 1925

by Beyond the Outposts (v2. 1)

  "Get down," I whispered to Chuck. "Get down... or they'll see you."

  He said without trying to keep his voice down: "They'll never see us. The fire blinds them... let alone the whiskey. They'll never see us. Come on. We want to make every bullet tell."

  It was plain that he intended to go through with his bloodthirsty scheme. He directed me to go to one side of the fire, and he would go to the other.

  "When you begin," he said, "shoot as fast as you can... without missing. That'll make them think that they're surrounded by a lot of us, perhaps. Take your horse. They'll see the horse no more than they'll see you."

  I never went at anything in my life that I liked so little. Not that the idea of cold-blooded slaughter troubled me any. I had seen the work of those red devils too recently. I would have been glad to blow the whole tribe into their happy hunting grounds. What I worried about was simply the safety of my own skin. Those fellows who were still trying to dance were obviously helpless. But some of the sleepers might have worn off the effects of the liquor, and they might come to their feet quite capable of fighting effectively.

  However, I did as Chuck had directed me to do. I went to one side of the fire with the brown gelding and watched him go to the other. It seemed a miracle that the Indians didn't spot us. Because, even looking across the firelight, I could see Chuck, like a ghost, moving on the other side. I suppose the reason was that I was looking out from darkness to darkness, across the light, but the Indians were in the full flare of the fire, and even while I looked, taking out my revolver, one of the Indians heaped more brush on the fire and sent the flames crackling and towering into the sky.

  Then Morris's gun cracked, and he who had brought the fuel leaped up into the air with a screech like a wounded cat and fell on his back in the fire, knocking up a vast cloud of sparks twice as bright as the flames themselves and showing me, I thought, the face of every prostrate Indian.

  Only they weren't prostrate very long. The alcohol fumes were not able to keep them numb and stupid with that death shriek ringing in their ears. They came swaying to their feet. Out of the grass not twenty feet in front of me rose a giant I had quite overlooked.

  I shot at the first human being that had ever been my target, and that man slumped to the side and lay still. He had not uttered a sound. I wish I could say that I felt a great pang of horror and remorse when I saw that Indian fall. But I didn't. Instead, there was a rush of savage delight, and I knew in a flash what the Indians themselves must have felt as they swooped in on that helpless caravan of traders. I took the ones nearest me, as they came staggering to their feet. On the far side of the fire the revolver was chattering from Morris's hand. My own work was almost as fast, and every bullet found a mark.

  In the meantime the whole hornet's nest was up, screeching and waving their hands, leaping and catching up weapons, and shooting them into the air or into one another for all I knew. No, there were a good many in that lot who were not dead with drink. Half a dozen seemed to locate me at the same moment, and they lurched in my direction. I had only two shots left in the Colt, and I dropped two of that crowd and then snatched up the rifle and downed a third before the others had enough of it and broke and ran back toward the fire.

  Then I swung into the saddle. Morris was already in his and was charging through the frightened herd of Indian ponies, waving his hat and shouting. They broke away before him and stormed across the prairie with Morris, whooping along in their midst. That living wall of horseflesh undoubtedly saved his life, for it was on him, for some reason, that the braves centered their fire, while they let me go galloping off with only a bullet or two singing around my head to make me ride harder.

  Three miles or more away I joined Morris, who was reining the gray mare in to wait for me. I was well over my enthusiasm and covered with cold perspiration by this time, but Morris was laughing and shouting like a madman. He seemed to feel that he had performed one of the best of good deeds. I didn't pause to moralize, for I could hear those red wasps buzzing far behind us as they caught horses and rushed on in pursuit.

  I have no doubt that they would have caught us in half an hour, considering the weariness of our horses, but Morris adopted a new and very brave maneuver. He turned at more than right angles to our original course, actually inclining back somewhat toward the fire, which we could still see glowing like a great, angry red eye far away. On this new course we put our tired, galloping horses. At least, I can answer for it that the gelding was so spent that every stride he took I feared might be its last. Yet the gray mare with the strain of White Smoke in it was still flaunting along with head held high. Even in my terror I could not help admiring the wonderful animal.

  So we got out of the hornet's nest for the time being, though we still had not heard the last of them. At the end of an hour, when the brown no longer so much as flinched under spur, but stumbled along at a trot, head down, Morris called a halt, and we stripped the saddles from the nags and lay down to rest.

  I have narrated this event with care, and, looking back over the details, one by one, I see nothing that is not the truth, as far as I can remember. The whole thing is still bright in my mind, and I can still quiver with that fear and then that savage rage which I felt as I crouched in the glimmer of that campfire and shot into the drunken crowd.

  I want to be peculiarly exact, because I realize that the great fame of Chuck Morris is largely built on that slaughter of the Cheyennes. If the name of Lew Dorset is also fairly well known to some of the old-timers, I have no doubt that the same bit of slaughter is more closely connected with my name than anything else that I have ever accomplished. That story rang so loudly, for a time, that nothing else was talked about when men sat over campfires. To this day, I know that there are many honest men who lived on the prairies during the early days who contend that the whole tale is a fabrication.

  To them I need only reply that old Chief Black Feather himself - and he was as honest as any horse-stealing Cheyenne who ever lived - made statements corroborating everything that I have said. Except that he always declared mat, from the fact that the fire was so rapid, he was sure that more than two men were there. Also he declared that no two men would have the courage to attack a war party - even a drunken war party - from two separate sides where they would lack the support of one another. However, he also confesses that, when they struck our trail, they only found two sets of hoof prints, though he explained that away by supposing some of the party had ridden off in a different direction. Nonetheless, the truth is exactly as I have stated it. There were only two men at that fight, and no third person has ever so much as claimed a share in it.

  For my part, I freely confess that I don't think the thing was so creditable as it may sound. In the first place, those Cheyennes were a pretty groggy lot with the alcohol they had in them. In the second place, the fire from the two sides undoubtedly made them feel, at first, that two large bodies of men were attacking them. In the third place, the surprise was complete. I have done other things of which I am much prouder.

  Of course, the vast majority of the credit goes to Chuck Morris, because he originated the plan and led in its execution. Though when we had passed the age of foolhardy youth, neither he nor I would ever have attempted such desperate work. The Cheyennes themselves have always declared that the Great Spirit was punishing them for their sins.

  Before I leave this incident, I want to call attention to the result of our attack, as we afterward learned the details from the Cheyennes themselves. We had fired fourteen shots. These killed six men outright and wounded eleven others. The explanation is simply that the drunken Indians, shooting off their guns at random in the first attack, sent some of their bullets into one another. I distinctly remember seeing one fellow, at whom we had not fired, leap up from the grass with a shout and fall back again, groaning.

  INTO THE RED MAN'S CAMP

  I said that at the end of our day's run we lay down to rest, completely fagged. After half an hour, when I w
as sound asleep, I was wakened by Chuck Morris, standing up from his blanket. I saw him go to the gray mare and begin to work over her patiently, steadily. It made me wonder to see him.

  "Is she sick?" I asked him.

  "She's getting her rubdown," he answered. "And she's earned it."

  I got up without another word and went to the brown. Not that I knew anything of the fine art of rubbing down a horse, but at least I could wipe the sweat off the poor beast. I found him, standing with his head down, trembling with the cold of the night coming on, and only making an occasional nibble at the buffalo grass. He had the look of a sick horse. He was sick, and another day of following that streak of gray lightning which Morris had between his legs would have killed the gelding beyond a shadow of a doubt. I worked over it until I had whipped the thickly beaded sweat out of its hair and brought a bit of a glow to the surface. I worked until it gathered itself together a bit and went ahead industriously with its feeding. Then I heard Morris's voice, speaking low. All men, except the fools, speak low on the prairie.

  "A good many more would rather have walked tomorrow than worked over their nags tonight. But you and me are going to ride, Lew, and maybe we'll have to ride. Those red devils will be after us, I think."

  "They've had enough of us," I said. "Besides, haven't you told me that they rarely stay with a trail very long?"

  "That crowd is different," said Chuck. "They're all picked men."

  "How could you tell that?"

  "You're like others. God gave you eyes, but He didn't give you the sense to use 'em. Didn't you see that every man in that gang had a good rifle?"

  "What of that?"

  "I'll tell you what. The majority of the Indians have three bows to every gun, and their guns are mostly old flintlock muskets, no good at all. But these bucks had rifles... every one of them had a rifle. Lew, I tell you that they're the pick of the whole Cheyenne nation."

  "Are they Cheyennes?" I asked.

  This was too much for Chuck. He gave up on me in disgust and turned back to his blanket, though he really could not have expected me to know a Cheyenne from any other of the Indians. But he had been reading the prairie language for so many years that he could not understand those who lacked the same knowledge. I had to wait until morning to ask any more questions, and in the morning there wasn't much time for talk. I was still deeply asleep when Chuck prodded my shoulder with the toe of his boot.

  "Get up," he said. "It's morning."

  "You be damned! It ain't more'n midnight. Besides, I'd rather be scalped than wake up now."

  I can still remember the agony of that waking. Chuck simply walked away without arguing. For the prairie kind never wasted their words; they spoke once and went about their business. It was a habit I never acquired. I always enjoyed talk, and the Indians could never grow accustomed to my garrulity. It was Chuck's silence that told me he meant business. I dragged myself into a sitting posture and saw there was only the faintest sort of a gray rim in the east. But even that had been enough for Chuck. Winter and summer, at that moment in the day he always wakened. And as soon as the sun went down he grew dull and sleepy. He seemed to need the sun, and he seemed to respond to it as flowers do.

  We saddled the horses at once. The gray mare was as frisky and happy as though she had not carried a rider a mile in a fortnight. I was beginning to understand from her the value of symmetry in a horse. These hulking monsters are not necessarily the great weight carriers. There was the gray that had been flaunting along with Morris's two hundred pounds as though it was a feather. And yet she was really a small horse. I don't think that she stood more than fifteen hands and one or two inches. But she was made with a wonderful neatness and aptness that gave her strength where she needed strength. I looked at her with wonder and with delight this morning. For that matter, the brown had come through the struggle astonishingly well. But there was simply no comparison between the two.

  Five minutes later, as the dawn brightened and spilled from the horizon across the faintly rolling waves of the prairie, we were riding for our lives again. I saw nothing. My eyes were still filmed with sleep, and I was sick for the want of it when Morris brought me to my senses with a cruel jerk.

  "Cheyennes!" he said.

  I sat my saddle, while Morris was already scudding away. I thought for a chilly instant that he intended to ride right away from me, he was so seriously bent on jockeying the gray along. Then I saw the Cheyennes. There were nine of them in sight, four whooping in on the right and five on the left, beating and kicking their nags along. They could do nothing with Morris, of course, and even my brown was too much for them. Indeed, the astonishing thing about Indian horseman ship was always the great average speed of a large body. One hundred Indians would travel twice as fast as one hundred ordinary mounted white men. But, individual against individual, I don't think that they either rode as well or raced as well as a white man.

  At a certain point in the chasing they were apt to smell blood and stop thinking. And thinking's what one should be doing all the time, whether it's whittling a piece of wood or reading a book or shooting a gun. One should be thinking hard of what one is doing. Perhaps that sounds like Mother Goose wisdom, but too many men in these days are giving one half of themselves to their work, and with the other half of their brain they are wondering how the accounts of their greatness will appear in the newspapers. While I was riding to put myself out of reach of those nine Cheyennes, I was not thinking of what would happen if they caught me, or how a scalping knife would feel against my skull as I lay half dead on the ground. I was thinking of only one thing, and that was how to put the brown through the gap in time.

  Chuck Morris now looked back and brought the gray beside me. It was a very fine thing. He could have shot the mare through to an easy escape, but he preferred taking that terrible chance at my side.

  "God bless you, Chuck!" I shouted at him, with tears stinging my eyes.

  He did not even hear me, he was so busy watching the Indians, and now his hand began to fumble eagerly at his rifle. It was a beautiful thing to see him. To keep the mare at the brown's speed required no effort from him. He simply dropped the reins and rode her with his heels and his knees, leaving both his hands free. He sat very erect, with the wind whistling under his hat and combing his yellow hair out behind his head. He was smiling, too, in a sort of devilish, happy way that said as plain as day that he loved the danger more than he loved his life.

  We flew past them. Then they straightened out behind us until they came to the next little hummock of ground. There they halted, dropped on their bellies on the ground, and began to take pot shots at us. However, I almost fear bows and arrows more than I fear an Indian's gun. They simply are not natural marksmen, and the exceptions are mighty few and far between. There seems to be a desire in them to close the eyes as they pull the trigger.

  We slipped out from the danger zone in ten seconds, and not a bullet came closer than humming distance. I felt that this was the last of the Cheyennes, but a moment later I saw that Chuck Morris was a little excited and a little angered - I could not say that there was any fear in such a man.

  "They're still after us," he said, "and that means that we may have a month of hell dodging in front of us, Lew. If they turn into bloodhounds, they'll stay with the scent a long, long time. Probably we killed a chief or a chief's son."

  That, of course, was exactly what had happened. Morris's very first bullet of all had killed the only son of Chief Black Feather, and that chief himself was among the nine who gave us that early morning rush.

  I did not see exactly what we had to fear when we could ride away from the fastest horses in that party. Morris merely shrugged his shoulders. "You wait," he said.

  About mid-morning he called my attention to two columns of smoke rising close, side by side in the rear. An hour later he showed me two more smoke columns straight before us, for the air was clear with no wind, and those streams of smoke seemed to go like shadow hands into the hear
t of heaven.

  "Now watch these prairies grow Cheyennes thicker'n grass!" said Chuck Morris.

  He was right. In the mid-afternoon we came on a party of a dozen braves, headed out of the north, whereas we had been running up from the south. They did not have to be told that we were their quarry. They merely made for us with a yell, and the only reason that we escaped was, again, owing to the superior foot of our nags.

  "They can never catch us!" I shouted, as they dropped away on the rolling green sea of the prairie.

  "Why, you fool," said Morris as calmly as you can imagine, "your horse will not be able to raise a gallop tomorrow. There's no real heart in that mongrel dog."

  There was no doubt that the brown lacked strength of spirit. It was failing fast when, later, we saw tiny forms bobbing against the southern horizon. Our original friends were catching up with us. When I tried to raise a gallop from the gelding, the spur made it groan, but it only broke into a faltering trot.

  "Go on and save yourself!" I cried to Morris.

  His silence made me fear that he would take me at my word. Then I saw him, sitting perfectly still, and staring straight ahead of him.

  "Don't talk like a fool," said Morris.

  He began to push the gray mare straight ahead toward something he made out, though I could not. What an eye he had, like an eagle's, always marking down prey. We had gone on for some time when, at last, I saw what he had seen long before - the crisp little outline of an Indian village against the sky. There were scores and scores of teepees.

  "Chuck," I called to him, "are those friendly Indians?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "You don't know. Then we may be running bang into the fire. They may be more Cheyennes."

  "They may."

  The very name turned me sick. He answered my thought: "It's either that or else those fellows behind. They'll have you in a few minutes at this rate."