“Then why do you send us south?”
“Yes, your woman is right about this buffalo cave business,” Little Wolf answered. “Nothing will come of it. If Maheo is willing to see the buffalo disappear from the south, there is nothing we can do about it. But your going there will allow me to see how I-sa-taí’s war develops. You must learn how the blue soldiers fight. They have big guns, what they call cannons. See how they work. They also seem to fight more as groups than as individual soldiers, as we do. Try to figure how they manage that. I could use this knowledge in the war that’s coming.”
“Haáhe, Father.”
“But the most important thing is this,” Little Wolf said. “Yellow-Haired Woman wants to find the hide man McKay. She has a feeling for him, love or hate, I don’t know which. McKay is now with the Long Knife chief, and the Long Knife chief has the Gun-That-Shoots-All-Day. I saw it demonstrated in Washington, as a guest of the blue soldier chief. They call it a Gatling gun. It shoots the same bullets as the spider soldiers shoot, the .45-70—so we can always get more ammunition if we should need it. I want that gun. It could save us in the war that is sure to come. Imagine the surprise on the faces of the blue spiders if they charged into our camp, only to be met with that gun! This I know—the Long Knife chief keeps the Gatling gun hidden under a stiff black blanket on one of his wagons. But remember, it is loaded all the time, so be careful when you try to take it. It can kill a hundred men in less time than it would take you to count your dead.”
STRONGHEART HELPED JENNY with the last of the packing.
“Take care of my brother while I’m away.”
Strongheart laughed.
“What does that mean?”
“You can take care of him yourself,” Strongheart said. “Here he comes now.”
She gestured behind her.
Jenny looked over her shoulder. Yellow Eyes and Otto were coming—both mounted on ponies, with a laden packhorse tagging along. Wolf Chief rode without reins, but he seemed well-balanced nonetheless.
“Herr Gott!” Jenny said. “What is this?”
“Wolf Chief rides,” Otto said. “A little trick I’ve been practicing for a while. With the aid of Two Shields and Yellow Eyes.”
He nudged the horse with his right knee and it turned to the left. Then the other, and it swung right. He whistled through his teeth and the pony stopped in its tracks. He kicked its sides with both knees simultanously and it started forward again.
“A clever little pony,” he said.
“You’re riding with us?”
“With your permission, sister. For I, too, have scores to settle, particularly with Milo Sykes. I’m sure we’ll find him in the Yarner, along with Raleigh McKay.”
LITTLE WOLF WATCHED them over the horizon. He was thinking of Grant. A squat, hairy man, plainly dressed and smelling of spider water, but he had a killer’s eyes. Little Wolf knew his own eyes were strong, and he used them consciously to keep his people in line. Grant was unconscious of his eyes. When Grant looked straight at him, Little Wolf could not help but look away. How many men had those eyes killed? Little Wolf had killed plenty himself, but he knew his dead would make only an anthill on the slopes of Grant’s mountain.
On the Iron Road coming back from the East, the Traveling House had hit a wagon stalled on the tracks. The train came to a halt. Little Wolf and Morning Star got down from the cars and walked back to where the wagon lay in splinters on both sides of the track. A strong west wind blew red and gold leaves from the trees over the tracks. Corn tassels rattled in the fields. Two spiders who had been riding in the wagon lay bloody and dead under the cars, one of them a man with a white beard, cut in half across the belly. A horse was down, its rear legs crushed by the big iron wheels of the House. It was trying to pull itself forward with its front legs, but the steam from the House had glued its hindquarters to the gravel by the juice of its leaking entrails. A big bay mare, in the prime of her life, and she looked at them, pleading for help.
“We should kill her,” Little Wolf said.
Morning Star shrugged.
Little Wolf took a pistol from one of the blue soldiers standing nearby and walked over to the mare.
It was the first time he had felt compassion since he was a boy. But it was more than that.
What had happened to the horse could happen to the Sa-sis-e-tas.
PART
IV
19
“I SAY, BLANDISH, where’s my chai? Get your arse over here with it—chop-chop, you sorry sodomite!”
“On my way, Your Lordship! Sorry!”
“Christ, what’s the bloody world coming to? If I’ve told that fool once, I’ve told him a thousand times—I want my tea piping hot, the instant I emerge from my bath.”
Lord Malcontent was in one of his moods again.
Raleigh McKay grunted and spat in the fire. Sir Henry Charles Windham Fitzwilliam Malevil, fourth Baron Malcombe, of Malcombe Manor, County of Antrim in northern Ireland, was mighty particular about his “bawth.” As indeed he was about many things. He could not begin a day, he often said, without his copy of The Times, which he preferred to consult in his morning bath. To that end, before they left England he had had his manservant, Blandish, arrange shipments of the London daily to wherever he happened to be in America. Each month a bundle of papers was rushed to a waiting steam packet in Southampton, whence it was whisked across the Atlantic to New York. There it was transshipped by rail to the End of Track and thence to Fort Lyon on the Purgatoire River in Colorado. An express rider carried it the rest of the way to Sir Harry’s camp, wherever that might be. The newspapers arrived only a month or two out of date, but to His Lordship’s way of thinking, the important thing about a newspaper was tone, not timeliness.
Often of a morning Raleigh had seen him submerged to his aristocratic armpits in the canvas tub, clouds of steam rising into the chill, a pair of spectacles perched at the end of his long nose, rattling and turning the crisp, blanket-sized pages of his cherished Times, chuckling or clucking or cursing as the news unfolded.
Right now he was following correspondent Winwood Reade’s firsthand coverage of the Ashanti War on the Gold Coast of West Africa. A force of British regulars, mainly Black Watch, Welch Fusiliers, and Rifle Brigade, had set out for Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, to teach King Kofi Karikari a lesson. “Ah, there you are, Blandish,” Sir Harry cried when that worthy rushed into the bath tent. “Listen to this. Some black scoundrels have abducted our ally the King of Accassi’s Queen from her vegetable garden, where she was tending her plantains. ‘Fears are expressed for her chastity,’ The Times says, and quotes from a dispatch sent by an officer on the scene to Colonel Wood: ‘Please do what you can to save Her Majesty’s honour—or the plantains—for I cannot make out which is rated at the highest figure by the King.’ That’s niggers for you, what?”
RALEIGH HAD MET Sir Harry at Camp Supply back in January. His Lordship was engaged in a two-year sporting tour of the Great West, as were so many monied Englishmen of late. And His Lordship had money to burn—”Sixty thousand pounds sterling per annum from my estates alone,” he had boasted to Raleigh in the sutlers’ saloon that first night.
“I need a guide for this new, more southerly game country—Tay-Hass, I believe you call it?”
“We call it Texas, suh.”
His Nestor on the northern plains, Lord Malcombe said, had been a splendid old trapper and veteran of the Oregon Trail named Henry Chatillon, who had guided such luminaries as the Bostonian scholar Francis Parkman and Sir St. George Gore in decades gone by. Raleigh had heard of neither. Chatillon, though, was pushing sixty years of age and had finally wearied of the swift pace set by His Lordship. He retired from the field, having been compensated handsomely for his labors at the rate of $100 a day.
“Your remuneration would be no less, of course,” His Lordship said, “as I’m told you’re quite knowledgeable concerning this corner of the country.”
McKay looked up from his gla
ss of Bourbon whiskey and studied the man who’d addressed him. A tall, petulant, pigeonchested fop whose lower lip drooped like a slab of pale liver. Nice hair, though, Raleigh noted with a pang of envy. Freshly washed, golden yellow, replete with lustrous waves, it hung clear down to His Lordship’s sloping shoulders. In the lobe of one ear gleamed a golden ring. A bottle-green shooting jacket, carefully pressed corduroy breeks, and knee-high riding boots of soft black leather completed the ensemble. His Lordship’s eyes, magnified by his spectacles, were close-set, pale, and shallow as the Cimarron in high summer.
“Let’s reckon, feller,” Raleigh said in his best backwoods drawl. He took off his hat, pulled the ivory comb from his hip pocket, and slowly, deliberately, ran it through his own thick mane. “Me and my partner have been killin’ up to a hundred buff a day so far this season. Two bucks and a half per hide, today’s rate. What does that come to?” He fumbled a stub of pencil from his pocket, wet its point on his tongue, and haltingly scrawled some numbers on the back of his hand. “What’s two and a half times a hundred?”
In fact, he’d been shooting no more than twenty or thirty buffalo a day—a slow winter since Otto’s departure.
“One hundred and twenty-five,” His Lordship countered. “You may add to that a ten-dollar bonus for every cougar, bighorn sheep, royal elk, or grizzly bear we kill, and all the champagne or whiskey you can drink of an evening—unless single-malt Scotch is not to your liking?”
“It’ll do.”
Sir Harry lived in luxury, even on the prairie. His baggage train alone strung out for a mile along the trail—sixteen newly built Studebaker wagons, drawn by color-matched oxen and mules. One strongly sprung carriage carried nothing but small arms—cutlasses, pikes, Colt’s and Webley’s revolvers, shotguns by Purdey, Boss, and Dickson in bores ranging from 16 to 8 gauge, and double, single, or repeating rifles by Manton, Gibbs, Holland & Holland, Sharps, Remington, and Winchester.
A separate wagon traveled near the head of the baggage train carrying a long ton of refined bar lead for rifle and pistol bullets, oak-staved barrels of chilled English birdshot, and others of close-grained French gunpowder, as well as case upon case of U.S. Army rifle ammunition, all of it protected from wind and weather by a heavy, leakproof deck of teak planking sealed at its seams with bitumen. Atop the deck, housed beneath a waxed cover of heavy storm canvas, rode Sir Harry’s favorite toy, a new, improved model of Dr. Richard J. Gatling’s “machine gun,” purchased for $1,250 at the Colt works in Hartford, Connecticut, on His Lordship’s way west. Mounted on a sturdy, brass-shod tripod, the Gatling was capable of firing more than a thousand rounds of .45-70-caliber center-fire metallic cartridges per minute, Sir Harry said. “It should quickly dissuade any banditti foolish enough to attack us, redskinned or white. The only limiting factor to its use is the amount of ammunition one can carry, and as you see, I have plenty. We’ll fire it one day, somewhere down the line, and you’ll see how devastating a weapon it is.”
“I know already,” Raleigh said. “Old ‘Beast’ Butler’s Yanks had a dozen of them at Petersburg back in ’64. The .58-caliber model that fired copper rimfire cartridges. Word has it that Butler bought them from the doctor with his own money, $12,000 hard cash, when the Union refused to invest in such newfangled nonsense. They tore us up pretty good.”
“Is that why you call him ‘Beast’?”
“No. He got that nickname earlier in the war, when he was in command of the Union forces occupyin’ New Orleans. I guess he was rude to the ladies.”
Lord Malcontent wanted lions, bighorns, and grizz—lots of them. As soon as the snows melted and the trail was hard enough for travel, they fared forth into the Bayou Salado of southern Colorado, hounds howling, servants grumbling, a cavallard of sixteen tall, blooded hunting horses trailing behind under the watchful eyes of three Texas wranglers named Sliding Billy Gomez, Perce Watling, and Sidney Omohundro.
Raleigh didn’t know the Rockies all that well, but Milo Sykes had hunted there in the sixties just after the war. It had been Raleigh’s plan to dump Milo the moment they reached Camp Supply, but His Lordship’s offer changed matters. Milo’s knowledge of the country they would be hunting won him a reprieve.
And thanks in large part to Milo, this had proved a good hunt. Fine weather, lush grazing for the cavvy, no Hostiles, and plenty of big game. They made camp in a meadow beside a clear stream bulging with cutthroat trout. Sir Harry had brought along his own English fly tier, and in the mornings on rising, His Lordship and Raleigh caught enough trout for the whole camp’s breakfast. Then they ranged out onto the prairie or into the high country in search of trophies. One clear April day above timberline, both men and horses breathless, they came on a herd of bighorn sheep grazing in a boulder-strewn cirque. Sir Harry potted six full-curl rams, all running shots as the sheep scrambled up the far scree slope, his diminutive Welsh gun loader Dai Jones handing him a freshly charged Manton each time another brace of rams fell. The strong brown sheep grunted and flinched as the bullets took them, but leaped on, staggering finally and rolling like dirty snowballs back down the slopes. Rock slides tumbled after them. It was slaughter on a grand scale, the way the English liked it.
Some days they ran wolves or lions with Sir Harry’s pack—tireless, long-legged brutes, huge Irish and Russian wolfhounds, mastiffs, burly, bouncy Norwegian elkhounds, slim whippets and greyhounds, and a few rangy Airedales that delighted in tearing the cornered coyotes to pieces when they finally ran them down, the little wolves cowering in submission at last, grinning up with their ears laid back, their bushy tails between their legs, and the Airedales descending upon them with swift, strong, wrathful jaws to rip them limb from limb. The dogs quickly treed the lions, and Sir Harry shot the tawny, long-tailed cats as they crouched on flimsy branches high in the ponderosas. The cats fell twisting and screeching, and the pack had to be whipped off before they ruined the pelts.
“Magnificent,” His Lordship said.
ON ONE MEMORABLE evening just at dusk, as Raleigh, Milo, Dai Jones, Perce Watling, and His Lordship rode back to camp after a fruitless day in pursuit of Rocky Mountain goats, they suddenly confronted a small, humpbacked, shovel-nosed bear pawing tentatively at a dead mule deer.
“Where’s his mama?” Milo whispered.
“Hand me the ten-bore, Dai,” said His Lordship in plangent tones.
“We’d better wait a bit, sir,” Raleigh said quietly. “That’s just a baby bear. He wouldn’t be traveling on his lonesome just yet, so there’s likely a mother around here somewhere.”
“The rifle, please, Mr. Jones.”
Dai looked at Raleigh, shrugged his eyebrows and shoulders. “Aye, Your Lordship.”
He slapped the rifle into Sir Harry’s hand and stepped back respectfully.
The baby bear squinted upward, searching out the sound of their voices. Then it gave up and took another whack at the deer’s haunch.
Raleigh said, “You’d better wait, Harry. There’s bound to be a bigger one nearby. Best save your lead for the mama.”
“I require a family group, Captain McKay,” Lord Malcombe said stiffly. “The British Museum have made it quite clear. As you’re no doubt aware, I already have a fine male, a fair female, and two cubs from up north. This juvenile will round out my group quite nicely. Should the mother come and by chance prove better than the female now in my possession, all the better. Now let me shoot, and the rest of you keep alert to whatever other bears may be lurking in the vicinity. Leave none of them alive.”
He shot.
The baby bear yowled and bit its shoulder.
Sure enough, at her offspring’s cry the mother bear materialized from a patch of nearby brush and ran at the party with the speed of a racehorse. Before Perce Watling could raise his rifle, she had crushed his head with one blow of a front paw. As she passed Dai Jones, she slapped him across the belly and he fell. Then she turned toward His Lordship.
Raleigh, ten paces off to one side, shot her behind the lef
t ear, a quick shot with the Sharps. She fell with a thump that frightened the horses and sent pine duff cascading over His Lordship’s boots. He stood there with his mouth agape, pale beneath his tan.
“My God, that was fast,” he said finally. “Thank you, McKay—not only were you right about the mother bear, but you saved my bloody neck with that shot.” He went over to where Dai sat in the dust, looking down at his lap. Blood had soaked the lower front of his shirt and his trousers. “Ah thinks she gutted me, look-you.” His Lordship knelt to study the wound, pulling back the torn shirt with hesitant fingers. Gray-green coils of intestine poked through the ragged rips in the loader’s abdomen. Sir Harry winced, rose, and walked away to retch behind a nearby sage.
Raleigh and Milo lashed Watling’s body to the back of his horse and built a travois for Dai after wrapping his midsection with the remainder of his shirt. They could come back later to skin the bears. It was a long ride to the bivouac. Dai was dead by the time they reached camp, his bristling eyebrows locked in permanent bemusement. They all drank a lot that night and buried their dead at sunup.
Sir Harry insisted that the dead men be interred in proper coffins, which he had his carpenters construct from the floor boards of a broken-down wagon. Then as Perce and Dai were lowered into the rocky ground, His Lordship spoke a few words over them. Teamsters, pastry chefs, muleteers, dog tenders, sommelier, wranglers, grooms, farriers, and half-breed Shawnee trackers looked on solemnly.
“‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keep / The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,” Sir Harry said. “‘And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass / Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.’”
“Amen,” intoned the mourners.
THEY HUNTED SLOWLY south and east, onto the Staked Plain. Summer came sweltering ever more intensely upon them with each day’s drop in elevation. Pine and spruce gave way to sage and prickly pear and ocotillo. Spanish bayonet stabbed the horses’ legs and they left a blackening trail of blood spattered across that hard-baked, hoof-clanging earth. Mirages plagued them, and one day they saw a great city rise from the plain in the distance, its towers gleaming white as quarried marble, shimmering in the heat, men falling from the parapets as if in the act of mass suicide, falling into the broad avenues below. Closer at hand, the city faded into a band of scrawny, hammerhead ponies cropping panic grass. Many of the wild horses were pintos whose blotchy white markings no doubt accounted for the imagined marble of the dream city.
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