As the wagon train crossed the prairie one morning, Sir Harry’s eye was caught by a band of pronghorn antelope grazing half a mile away. “Good time to try the Gatling,” he told Raleigh. “Five years ago in Carlsbad, the Prussian general staff tested one of these guns against a hundred of their best riflemen, all of them armed with the new Dreyse needle gun. The range was 800 meters. Prussian volley fire scored 27 percent hits, the Gatling 88.”
With the wagons halted, His Lordship whisked off the gun’s canvas cover. “Voilcil” he said, grinning. “Behold the true ‘Beast.’”
Raleigh had to agree. The Gatling gun was squat, ugly, about as elegant as a cotton gin. Six separate muzzles protruded from its gleaming brass barrel. A dizzying array of knobs, studs, and set screws to control elevation and rate of fire bulged from the contraption, and a crank which both rotated the barrels and fired them protruded from the right side of the breech. Sir Harry pointed to a heavy black drum made of metal attached to the top of the gun.
“This is a new loading device patented by a man named Broad-well,” he said. “The drum on this model holds four hundred rounds. It’s too heavy for one man to lift, so we have to use a block and tackle. Once it’s in place, though, the operator merely has to take aim and turn the crank. Dr. Gatling’s ingenious bolt-and-cam mechanism does the rest—loads, fires, extracts the spent shell case, then spits it out and starts all over again, quicker than you can say ‘knife.’” He stepped aside. “Here, old man, why don’t you have a go?”
Raleigh leaned in behind the gun and aligned the sights, adjusting them to 800 yards. He swung the muzzle to the left-hand side of the antelope band, now standing steadily, their heads up, all of them staring at the wagon train but uncertain of what this strange sight portended. Raleigh took off his hat and waved it back and forth above his head. Three or four bucks stepped quickly toward the wagons, curious as always about the flagging motion. Raleigh took a deep breath and turned the crank handle twice, traversing the gun slowly from left to right as he fired. A near-continuous roar fractured the prairie silence. Clouds of billowing smoke obscured his sight picture. When it blew clear, eight pronghorns lay dead in the sage, while four more struggled feebly to regain their feet. The rest of the band had fled, white rumps bouncing away from the slaughter into the dusty distance.
“Welcome to the Industrial Revolution,” Sir Harry said. “Can you imagine what Bonaparte might have done with one of these guns at Waterloo? We’d all be eating snails.”
_____
NOW THEY BEGAN to cut the trails of many unshod ponies mixed with human footprints, small parties for the most part, but in aggregate a considerable number.
“Mr. and Mrs. Lo on the move to new huntin’ grounds,” Raleigh said.
“Not a war party?” Sir Harry asked.
“No. See the drag marks left by the travois? The Indians use their tepee poles to haul their goods. If a trail shows lodgepole tracks, it means they’re travelin’ with women and children. But if you find the tracks of many ponies and no drags, then you’d better look out. War party more than likely. Best thing to do, move out in the opposite direction—fast.”
“We have enough men and guns to defeat any Indian tribe in the West,” Sir Harry said. “At least on the defensive. Give me a troop of English cavalry and I’d pacify this wilderness in a month’s time.”
“I doubt it,” Raleigh said. “This is Kiowa and Comanche country.”
“What does that signify?”
“Persistence.”
“Hah!”
“Bloody-mindedness.”
“We’re bloodier of mind.”
I’ll agree with you there, Raleigh thought.
“Command of the country—they know every wrinkle in it, every waterhole, every place to lay an ambush. It’s their own back yard.”
“It’s not a difficult country,” Lord Malcombe said. “Flat as a billiard table, this terrain. Our horses are longer of limb, sounder of lung; we’d run them down in a mile. From what I’ve seen of these sorry redskins, they shoot arrows or old muzzle loaders. We have modern repeating rifles and the Gatling. All my men are chosen marksmen. Even McIntosh, my fly tier, is a crack wingshot. Some of these lads, the best of them, were with me in India, fought against real Indians—Sikhs and Pathans and British-trained sepoys in the Mutiny. Old Dai, rest his soul, not to mention Bentley, who succeeds him, were with me north of Cape Colony against the kaffirs. Cetewayo’s Zulu impis weren’t much when faced with a true British square, and your red niggers aren’t half the soldiery the Zulus were. Bring them on and I’ll show you.”
He cantered toward the horizon.
“How old do you reckon that pup to be, Milo?”
“Not yet thirty, I’d say. Twenty-four or -five.”
“Hellfire. He’d have still been foulin’ his diapers at the time of the Indian Mutiny. Mere bullshit he’s givin’ us. All blow, no show.”
RALEIGH DRANK THAT night. This country was flat and empty, as Lord Malcontent had said, but both Raleigh and Milo had seen it sprout Kiowas and Cheyennes and Comanches in the wink of an eye, thick and fast as buffalo grass after spring rain.
“I don’t like this,” Sykes said.
“Me neither.”
“What say let’s draw our pay first thing tomorrow?”
“He won’t give it to us.”
“No. But we by God should oughta get out of here anyways. We won’t have lost so much on the deal. We can cut out a few of those blood horses, sell ’em at Griffin to the blue shirts for a whole lot more’n he’d pay us.”
Raleigh thought about that for a minute. He knew the Limeys would never be able to track them. But His Lordship might possibly report the horse theft to the Army at Fort Griffin, and horse theft was a hanging offense.
“Let’s see them as far as the North Canadian anyways,” he said. “It’s only a few days ahead.”
Sykes grunted. Yes or no? Raleigh wondered. But Milo wouldn’t go anywhere without Raleigh along for protection. The poor dumb redneck couldn’t see a Hostile a quarter mile off, his eyes were that weak. As weak as His Lordship’s, but Sykes had no eyeglasses.
_____
IN THE MORNING Raleigh rode out ahead of the train toward a butte to the southeast. He’d saddled Vixen because she had the smoothest gait in his remuda, and what old Otto used to call the Katzenjammer was on him bad today. He felt fragile and tried heavy breathing. It didn’t work. Something had left him during the night. The whiskey had stolen it. Another dream of battle had drained it away. He couldn’t remember the dream, but he knew it was awful, as usual, and he knew it was his manhood that had been sapped from him, as usual, but he also knew that it would return as time burned the booze away. That was the thing about whiskey. It gave you time off to confront your woes.
He contemplated the butte. He couldn’t very well scale the granite tower, not in this condition, so he circled it. The best way up was from the south. Leaving Vixen to graze near a spring at the shallow base of the butte, he slogged his way to the top through heavy chaparral, lugging the Sharps with him, pausing often to catch his breath. From the high point he scanned the horizon with his field glasses. Nothing. He could just hear the faint, distant boom of buffalo rifles, unless it was his hungover heart pounding in his eardrums.
I’m boozin’ too much lately, he thought, and not for the first time. But it’s the only way I can get rid of it.
Rid of what?
Her, goddamnit, the memory of her, of what we did to her.
He squirmed in his bones as he recalled it.
He’d been surprised to learn, from a cavalryman at Camp Supply, that Jenny and Otto Dousmann were alive. Surprised, at first elated; then, when the fact sank in, the possible repercussions frightened him. The trooper had been up at Fort Dodge and told a sad story of a woman who’d come in after the norther, a yellowhaired woman, with her brother, a hide man so badly froze that the doc had to saw off one of his arms.
Hellfire . . .
&nbs
p; You were once an officer and a gentleman, by act of the Congress of the Conflagrated States of America. But you were never a gentleman, or even a very good officer. You’re poor white trash, always have been. You killed the best goddamn general officer in the world, Old Blue Light, your own commander, and you killed him at the moment of his greatest triumph. You killed him because you were scared that night—you were pisswilly scared all through the war, admit it, you . . . poltroon.
No—those were buffalo rifles, all right. Scattered over the plains ahead of him, to the east and the north and the south. Through the dirty yellow-brown heat haze of the horizon he could see darker clusters, black, slow-moving blotches of living meat—buffalo as far as the eye could see. And the hide camps would be nearby, havens of hope away from this elfin English madness, good solid Americans with real food, buffalo steaks, and corn dodgers, grease over it all, and likker to cut the grease.
Oh yes, the guns were among them now, real sharpshooters making their stands, skinners ripping the hot thick two-dollar hides, oh sure, clawing at the vermin under their greasy shirts, cursing and spitting cotton in the heat of the morn, rotten teeth in hairy faces, bloodshot eyes, the stench of stale sweat and fresh gore, buffalo guts leaking a foul thin gruel from poorly thrown rifle shots, the ugly incessant whine and nip of the buffalo gnats . . .
But do I want to go back to that?
He thought for a long, sorry moment.
I don’t want to go back to that.
Raleigh put down the field glasses and fell into the old familiar hunker, butt back on one heel, which all Southerners worthy of the name can hold for hours—our natural posture, he thought, in the plowed red fields or under a tulip tree in the flourlike roadside dust, or whittling and spitting in the cool shade of storefront galleries from Richmond to Savannah to Natchez to Galveston. He felt a sudden pang of homesickness. Why sure, he missed those ugly paintless bare-boards cool shadowed galleries, the leather-faced men squatting there in the shade, straw hats tipped back on their bone-white foreheads, chewing plug, spewing neatly in long dark arcs an artillery of spit into the dust of the street, the long, soft, slow, drawling talk of crops and horseflesh and niggers and womenfolk, the easy circulation of a cool, beaded stoneware jug among the conversationalists, the sharp hot bite of clear corn . . .
He pulled a flat pint bottle from his hunting shirt, drew the cork with his teeth, and took the first grim slug of the morning. Sir Harry’s single-malt Scotch. He’d hated it at first, the medicinal odor and taste of it, but he’d grown used to it; indeed, he’d grown to like it. Many things in life were like that. At first he’d hated the scent and taste of his cowardice, woke up sweating the night after a skirmish from which he’d run, but soon he grew accustomed to the familiar feel of funk, it felt natural. Now perhaps he was growing fond of it, perversely so, but fond none-the-less. He took another swallow of whiskey, shuddered, and replaced the cork, pounding it down with the heel of his hand. Better to save some for the ride back.
As he slipped the bottle back in his shirt, a sudden certainty struck him. Hostiles out there. The hair on the back of his neck tingled. He knew they were there, somewhere, as surely as he knew the gripe of his own bowels at the prospect. Raleigh sniffed the air—a faint hot breeze wafted up the face of the butte from the prairie below. No, he couldn’t smell them. Maybe he’d seen something from the corner of his eye. He crouched and raised the glasses, remembering to shade the lenses from the high climbing sun with the cupped palms of his hands so they wouldn’t throw a giveaway flash.
Only on his third careful sweep of the prairie did he spy them, a dozen riders at least, just slow-moving specks at first, then more clearly; two dozen spotted ponies with skinny men aboard, snaking along the base of a low ridge to the northeast. His eye caught the glint of a weapon—gun barrel or lancehead—that’s what gave them away. That’s what I must have sensed before, that flash in the corner of my eye. Northeast. The Indians were between Sir Harry’s column and the North Canadian River, the safety of the establishment at Adobe Walls where Rath and old Myers had their stores now, and Jim Hanrahan his saloon. To the south lay only sagebrush tangles and alkali pans and prickly pear for a long, long way, until you came to Rio Grande del Norte and Mexico, which wasn’t much better than hell.
At this distance, even with the glasses, he couldn’t make out what tribe they were, but in this country they’d be Comanche or Kiowa, or possibly Apache, which wasn’t much better for the future of a man’s hair. He watched them a few minutes more, to make sure of the war party’s direction. It was on a collision course with Lord Malcontent’s baggage train. Raleigh went over the western end of the butte and scanned his backtrail. He could just make out the canvas of the first wagons emerging through the haze. He started for the edge, to begin the laborious climb back down. Then the worm bit him once more—the old familiar worm of his fear . . .
It would be a whole lot easier, a lot safer, to stay right here. The Indians would have scouts out. They’d surely see him hightailing it back to the wagons. Maybe they’d cut him off—Vixen was a smooth-riding pony but not a fast one, not as fast in a sprint as those quick wiry little war ponies of the Comanche. Surely they’ll cut me off, he thought. That’s what I’ll do, then. Stay put. Let Lord Malcontent have his grand and much desired Armageddon with the redskins, the one he’s so confident of winning. And maybe he will win. More power to him: let him win, pray for it. He certainly has men and rifles and powder and ball enough to handle a war party of only twenty or thirty savages. He has the Gatling. What could I do for him, anyway? Hungover like this I couldn’t hit my hinder with a hoe handle. Do I owe him anything? I’m no more than another servant to him. And what the hell, he’s just another greenhorn, a pampered, pompous foreigner, full of himself to overflowing. Let the Comanches have his hair.
Keeping low so as not to skylight himself, Raleigh went back to his first vantage point. The Indians were closer now, only a mile off. He saw that there were more than he’d counted before. Many more. Perhaps as many as a hundred in the war party. And it certainly was a war party—he could make out the paint now, reds and yellows and sky blues, blacks and bone whites, some of the warriors with blue-white hailstones painted on their chests, others with skulls and leg bones and severed hands in garish yellow. The ponies were painted, too, with spoked red suns and stars and comets and yellow-black lightning flashes. He scanned the column carefully. Mainly bows and arrows, lances, a few rifles. Most of them were Kiowa, he saw from the way they dressed their hair. But also some Cheyenne in there—taller, slimmer, paler-skinned men with long black braids, one carrying the wicked crook-handled lance they favored, and one . . .
Hellfire—it was Jenny Dousmann!
His heart hammered as if it were busting his rib cage. He fumbled the pint out of his shirt, uncorked it, and took a long pull—then another. Then he raised the glasses again.
He’d know that blond hair anywhere, that jounce of bosom beneath the doeskin shirt. And Tom of course, he saw Tom now, riding beside her on that pony of his. All savage now, white man begone, his leggings black along the seams with human hair, a pipe hatchet at his belt, the only thing modern about him the shiny blue-black rifle in the panther-skin boot under his leg—a brand-new Winchester, it looked like. Tom’s face was painted red and black, teeth flashing through black lips as he talked animatedly to Jenny.
Her face looked harder than Raleigh remembered, no paint but burned almost black as Tom’s from the sun of early summer, the winds of the prairie. She carried a bow case slung across her back and Otto’s Sharps across the pommel of her high-ridged Cheyenne saddletree.
And who was that riding just behind her, draped in a wolfskin? Then he recognized the face, the set of the rider’s shoulders. It was Otto, by God. With only one arm. Otto dressed as a buffalo wolf. Carrying a spear couched beneath his armpit like some ghostly reincarnation of the Visigoth, come back to purge the plains of Christians, rip raw meat from the bones of the godfearing, reduce the
civilized world to ashes.
God help Sir Harry.
20
JENNY WAS IN control. All the way south from the Big Horns she had felt the doubts falling away, felt the bonds of her upbringing burn away in the fire of a new-sparked passion. Death to the Pale Intruders. At first she tried to keep the attention of the Cheyenne soldiers on their primary mission—get down to the Yarner as quickly and quietly as possible, locate the Buffalo Butte and complete their quest, no fuss, no casualties, no side trips for any purpose, and particularly not for war or thievery. If only one of them was killed, even wounded, their strength would be diminished—certainly they could see that?
But they couldn’t. Surely if the mischief they worked was directed at whites, there would just as surely be pursuit and fierce retribution. Yet Tom merely smiled when she urged caution.
“That’s not how we play this game,” he said.
“Then how do we play it?”
“For fun,” he said, laughing.
“For keeps,” she said.
He thought about that for a moment. “You’re right. The spiders think death is a matter of choice. They all want to live forever.” He shook his head, still smiling. “No fun living like that.”
“War is fun?”
“Try it. You like to hunt. I’ve seen you happy with death. Hunt men for a while. They hunt back.”
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