The party had ridden steadily to the south-southwest, crossed the Pawnee Fork, where a large party of Crazy Knives—Kiowas—was camped as if expecting their arrival. An older warrior called Big Face was leading the party. With the Kiowas were a few young Southern Cheyennes. Tom and his Elk brothers knew them from past adventures. One was the son of the famous Peace Chief Stone Calf. The son’s name was Red Arm, a handsome young man, though sullen, a look of death in his eyes. He was so ashamed of his father’s pleas for peace, Tom said, that he had taken the war trail and vowed not to return alive—a “suicide soldier,” Tom called him.
“They’re headed to the Yarner to kill spider hide men. Red Arm knows this country, he’s been many times to the Buffalo Butte and can take us there. It’s as Little Wolf told us—the place where the buffalo come from. We’ll travel with them then.”
“Don’t go haring off on any raids, Tom. We can’t afford a costly fight, not until we’ve completed the task Little Wolf assigned us.”
She might as well have cautioned the wind, and she knew it. The Elk Soldiers merely smiled and nodded assent, and raided anyway. She went with them.
Somehow they knew, perhaps by some extrasensory means, when there were people in remote places. She’d seen Tom do the same with animals. Once, while hunting sheep high in the Big Horns, she had spent the better part of an hour scanning a barren cirque for signs of life. Nothing but boulders. Then Tom came up, put a finger to his lips, motioned her to sit, and disappeared over the lip. She heard a shot. Half an hour later he returned with blood beneath his fingernails and the head and hide of a freshly skinned big horn draped over his shoulders.
“How did you know it was there?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” he said, puzzled for a moment. Then he smiled. “Well, I did, really. I just felt it. Wouldn’t you know where your food was in your house, or your money? Wouldn’t you know if a thief was in your home?”
The Cheyennes had done the same on the trip south, often sneaking off at night to return in the morning with scalps or ponies or meat. Sometimes all three. The meat was beef from the many herds of cattle being driven up from Texas. She had seen the dust from a few of these herds and thought at first they were buffalo. But there were no buffalo left in that country—not in Nebraska, or Kansas, or even in eastern Colorado. The hide men had done a thorough job.
TOWARD MOONSET ONE evening Jenny rode with the band toward yet another cattle herd. It was full dark when they neared it, riding quietly up a deep coulee. Gnarled mesquite lined the banks, black against the night like hanging trees. Leaving the horses in the care of Yellow Eyes, they crept through the sagebrush toward muttering cattle. A single young cowhand rode watch on the longhorns, singing to them in a sweet choirboy tenor to calm their night fears as he circled the herd.
And when I die, take my saddle from the wall.
Put it on my pony, lead her out of the stall.
Tie my bones to her back, turn our faces to the west,
And we’ll ride the prairies that we love the best . . .
Tom sent his Elk Soldiers creeping upwind of the herd, signing them to await his cry. Otto disappeared into the sagebrush, down a meandering dry wash.
The cowboy was riding toward Tom and Jenny, slouched in his saddle, swaying rhythmically as he sang, backlit by the dim glow of the drovers’ campfire half a mile away. As he approached, Jenny could see his face in the starshine, young and guileless, unsuspecting, dreamy-eyed, half asleep as he rode his round. Tom nocked an arrow to his bowstring, raised the bow, and began his draw. The cowhand was close now, serene in his innocence. Jenny laid a hand on Tom’s bow arm—Wait. Tom looked at her in puzzlement. He shrugged her off and shot. The cowboy shrieked once, loud, and toppled backward over his pony’s rump. Tom yipped. In the near-distance the Elk Soldiers began to howl like wolves, running their ponies forward into the herd, waving their blankets. The longhorns leaped instantly to their deerlike feet, whirled, and pelted away from the threat—back toward the drovers’ campfire in full stampede. Tom’s bow twanged again and a steer fell, skidding forward on its far shoulder. Then another arrow, and another fell. The Elks ran up and began to butcher the still-quivering cows as Yellow Eyes approached with the pack ponies.
Jenny walked over to where the cowboy lay staring up at the stars in sightless amazement. She wrenched the arrow from his chest and threw it into the darkness.
Later, as they were riding back to the night camp, Otto came up beside her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You seem angry.”
“Why did they have to kill that young cowhand? Couldn’t they just have overpowered him and then stampeded the herd?”
“This is war,” Otto said, “and he was an enemy. We kill our enemies before they can kill us, if we plan well and bring it off right. The outrider might have drawn his pistol and fired a warning shot. Then the other drovers would have been on us in an instant and a lot more men would have died, red and white.”
“Killing from ambush is a dirty thing,” she said.
“Death is a dirty thing,” Otto countered. “Death from ambush, when a man is taken completely by surprise, is arguably less awful than death at the end of an infantry charge, with the preparation and worry that precedes it.”
“Still, it’s an ugly thing.”
Otto looked over at her. “Nobody ever said it was pretty.”
_____
BUT WAR CUT both ways, as Jenny learned during a raid on a buffalo camp. As they passed through the broken country near the headwaters of Wolf Creek, a Crazy Knife scout smelled bacon cooking and tracked the scent to an isolated canyon. There he found three well-armed hide men camping. Their horses were not grazing loose or he would have stolen them; the mounts were tied to the wheels of the bullwagon, an indication that these men were wise to the ways of the country. The scout rode back and told Big Face, who without hesitation ordered an attack. As Tom and the other Elks rode off with the Kiowas, Jenny, Otto, and Yellow Eyes trailed behind. Approaching the canyon, they heard war whoops and gunfire—the slow, heavy boom of Big Fifties counterpointing the sharper crack of the Henrys and Spencers of the Indians. Jenny looked down from the canyon’s rim. The white men had dived under the wagon and were firing from behind bales of flint hides. Firing accurately. She saw two Kiowas down and dead already, their ponies milling around them in panic, and four more Indians firing at the wagon from behind their dead mounts. Clouds of burned gunpowder, mixed with the tantalizing smell of the bacon still frying over the hide men’s cookfire, rose up the canyon walls.
Then, to her horror, Jenny saw Tom and his Elks charging the wagon from the side. Pony Quirts rode with them on his father’s buffalo pony. As they swept past the front of the wagon, Tom and the Elks swung themselves sideways and under the bellies of their ponies, their bodies protected from the hide men’s gunfire by solid horseflesh, and fired their own rifles one-handed as they passed. Pony Quirts, trailing behind the others and unfamiliar with this maneuver, remained upright. A Sharps boomed and his horse fell. One of the whites dashed out, grabbed Pony by the hair, and dragged him under the wagon.
“That’s Lew Winziger down there,” said Otto, who had crept up silently beside her. “He’s the one who grabbed the boy. I don’t know the other fellows.”
“Will they kill Pony?”
“Maybe. They might have no other choice if our friends press their attack home. But probably they’ll try to use him as a bargaining chip.”
Big Face’s Kiowas tried one more charge, screaming hideously as they whipped their ponies down the open slope directly into the hide men’s guns. More ponies fell, two at the very start of the charge, when the Kiowas were still three hundred yards away, and others halfway down. As the Indians came closer, two Kiowas themselves were shot. Jenny saw the big bullets tear out of their backs like suddenly blooming red flowers. The remaining Kiowas fled back up the slope.
Then Jenny saw a ramrod poke out from under the wagon with a white handkerchief
tied to it. It waggled back and forth, a call for a parlay.
Tom rode alone back down the slope.
A man crawled out from under the wagon. “That’s Winziger,” Otto said.
Tom and Winziger stood a hundred yards apart, and Jenny could see the muzzles of the two other buffalo rifles aimed square at Tom’s chest. Then someone touched her shoulder. It was Yellow Eyes, carrying Otto’s big rifle. She pointed downhill at Winziger. Jenny took the Sharps, checked to see that there was a cartridge in the breech, and, resting the heavy barrel on a dry buffalo chip that lay before her, sighted on Winziger’s belt buckle.
“You talk English?” Winziger asked.
“Little bit,” Tom said.
“We got this young’un of yours. We also got plenty more bullets. You want the boy back in one piece, just call off your wolves.”
Tom turned and looked uphill. Big Face stepped into the open. Tom told him in sign language what had been said. The Crazy Knife leader went back to talk to his men.
“You’re Lew Winziger, ain’t you?” Tom said. “I seen you last year up on the Cimarron.”
“That’s right. Who are you?”
“Two Shields.”
“Cheyenne, ain’t ye?”
“Yup.”
“What you doin’ this far west?”
“Just huntin’, like you fellers.”
“Huntin’ ponies and scalps, more like.”
“It’s huntin’ however you do it,” Tom said. “Even better if the game shoots back.”
Winziger laughed.
Big Face came back out of the brush at the top of the canyon and made the sign for agreement.
“Okay,” Tom told Winziger. “You got a deal. But you let us carry away our dead with their scalps still on, right?”
“Fair enough. No market for Injun hair. We’ll finish our breakfast, hitch up our wagon, and take the boy with us till we’re clear of the canyon. Then you can have him back.”
Tom nodded and rode back to the top.
When the hide men rolled away half an hour later, they had Pony Quirts walking behind the wagon with a noose around his neck and his hands tied. The Indians trailed just out of rifle shot. Once the wagon reached the prairie, Winziger untied Pony, turned him around, and slapped him on the rump.
“Hi-yah! Run, you murderin’ little red devil!”
Pony ran. As he rejoined them, Jenny saw tears in his eyes.
That night in the Indian camp there were loud lamentations for the dead.
ONE DAY AS they neared the Prairie Dog Fork they spied a lone wagon creeping across the plains. Tom and Crazy rode out to intercept it, while the others circled around concealed by folds in the prairie to cut off escape. Jenny rode after Tom. The wagon was halted when they came up. A frightened, middle-aged man in a dark suit and a bowler derby was driving the team of matched bays. He relaxed a bit when he saw Jenny.
Great shiny coils of wire filled the bed of his wagon.
“What have you got there?” Tom asked.
“Armored fencing,” the man said.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a new product, sir, brand-new on the market, from De Kalb, Illinois. Finest fencing in the world, sir, lighter ’n air, stronger ’n whiskey, cheaper ’n dirt! All steel and a hundred miles long! Sparks won’t set it afire, nor buffler knock it down. It’ll keep your cattle from roamin’, that it will. The cow ain’t been born yet can get through this fence. Notice how sharp and long the prickers?”
He turned in his seat and twanged one of the glittering barbs. It gave forth a muted plink.
“It’s bob wire,” the man said proudly. “It’s the Moultrie Steel Armored Fence. And I’m that very man, J. Eldon Moultrie, who’s done gone and invented it. Don’t be taken in by inferior products—the weak and paltry strands of Lalor & Slammon, Glidden & Vaughn, Kelly or Judson or Haish. ‘Moultrie Steel’s the Better Deal,’ and you’d better believe it!”
Tom translated for Crazy, who laughed and said something Jenny didn’t catch.
“My partner here wants to know why you’d fence in your cattle. All that grass out there, everywhere, just for the eating. Why not let ’em roam?”
“Why, it’s the wave of the future, my man! Property lines, property lines! You don’t want your neighbor’s cows trampling your corn, do you? Nor yours theirs. Makes for bad blood in a neighborly community. Ain’t that right, ma’am? You don’t want Bossy chompin’ your peas and beans, or flattenin’ your backhouse, do you? The open range—why, it’s gonna be closed someday, sooner more likely than later, ma’am, mark my words.” He smiled his teeth at them all, but Jenny in particular—eyes pleading, though his cheeks were pink with his vision of the future. She did not reply.
“It’s called Progress, ma’am.”
Jenny lowered the rifle and shot J. Eldon Moultrie through the chest. The salesman’s eyes widened. Crazy reached across and removed the barbed-wire man’s long, gray-blond scalp with a quick flashing circle of his knife point. Popped it loose. Shook off the blood. Handed it to Jenny. Moultrie slumped sideways in the wagon, emitting a bubbly sigh as if relieved of a burden. Tom cut loose the frightened horses and herded them off to the west. Looking back as she rode away, Jenny saw Cut Ear, Pony, and Badger rolling the salesman’s body in a coil of his own bright wire, then dragging him at a rope’s end across the prairie.
“Haáhe,” she shouted.
“My God, Jenny,” Otto said later as they continued over the prairie, “why did you kill that man?”
“He was the enemy,” she said stiffly. “We kill our enemies.”
“Oh hell, he was perfectly harmless.”
“What he was selling wasn’t,” she said. “Don’t you see what’s happening? It’s just what General Sheridan told me back at Fort Dodge. The government wants the Indians on reservations, under its control. The hide men are killing off the buffalo to make the Indians dependent on American beef. The drovers are already bringing cattle into the country to replace the buffalo. The cattle all wear brands, and even a white man can be hanged for stealing one. The barbed wire will allow the cattlemen to fence off their ranges and keep out everyone, white or red, who doesn’t have money to buy their beef.”
“You’ve got a point,” he admitted. “But murder in cold blood—have you become a savage? Aren’t you afraid for your. . . well, your soul?”
She laughed. “Tom and the others would have killed him anyway. At least he died quickly. Didn’t you tell me that a death by surprise is better than the torture of anticipation? When Pony came back from the buffalo wagon the other day, he told me what he’d do if he ever captured a white man. It was something the Cheyennes worked on a Colorado trooper they captured down in the Big Timbers. They cut the man’s belly, pulled out a length of his gut, pegged one end to a tree, then made him walk around it. Later they skinned him and left him to die. Pony said it was revenge for the Sand Creek Massacre.”
“‘Revenge is mine, saith the Lord.’”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,’” she countered. “Besides, that barbed-wire salesman presumed on me. You could see in his eyes that he thought a woman, a white woman, would surely spare him.”
She spurred her horse forward and rode up to Pony Quirts. Otto saw her hand him the white man’s scalp.
TWO DAYS LATER they reached the Llano Estacado, a bare, dry, featureless country. The Kiowas knew the waterholes, though, and each night they camped near one spring or another. She kept her eyes peeled for the Buffalo Butte—it shouldn’t be hard to spot in this seemingly infinite flatness. Then in the clarity of morning, walking out to bring in the horses one day, she suddenly saw it—bold, horned, and massive, rising above the plain like a ruined god. It must have been visible all yesterday afternoon, she thought, but I couldn’t see it for the heat haze and the dust. She felt her heart thump faster.
Tom walked up beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“It does look like a buffalo,” she said.
; “Yes, but we won’t be able to go there until tomorrow.”
“Why? It’s only an hour or two away.”
“Well, today we have the battle, you know? You’d better start putting on your paint.”
“What battle?”
“Spiders ahead,” Tom said. “Those strange ones Little Wolf told us about, with the big pretty horses, the men we call Long Knives—you know, English?”
“Where are they?”
“Straight on in front of us, coming our way. Pony and Badger Walker went out before dawn and saw them. Dozens of ponies, and those big pretty lodges of silk and canvas. They saw your old chestnut pony—you know, from last winter?”
“Vixen?”
“The very one. And they saw Captain McKay, too. He’s up on the Buffalo Butte right now, probably having what he calls a look-see.’”
Jenny glanced to her left where the butte stood stark on the morning sky, a gaunt black skull against southern brightness. Raleigh McKay was up there. She felt the shame again; it burned in her heart, yes, but more in the pit of her stomach. He was up there with a rifle. Her fingers trembled on the stock of the Sharps. Tom was still smiling, but now he raised his eyebrows.
She had never told him about the rape. She’d told no one, not even her brother or Strongheart. The shame was too great and she was afraid she couldn’t speak of it without weeping.
Jenny said, “You’re going to fight the English, right? Leave Vixen and Captain McKay to me. But just tell Otto that I’m out hunting. I don’t want him worrying or coming with me.”
Tom nodded. He didn’t laugh this time. He had long suspected, from Jenny’s bitterness whenever the captain’s name was mentioned, that something shameful had transpired between her and McKay, perhaps that he’d taken her “on the prairie.” Though Tom would gladly have killed him for that, not to mention the savage beating he himself had received at McKay’s hands, he knew she must exact her own revenge.
“Now you’re a Cut-Arm,” Two Shields said.
She nodded and rode off toward the Buffalo Butte.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 23