Must have Apache blood in him.
Then another Cheyenne stepped up beside the first and said something. The first Cheyenne laughed and nodded. The other, just a boy, Milo saw, drew aside his breechclout and hauled out his whang. He flourished it and laughed. Then he began pissing on Billy’s skinned-out face. A ragged burst of laughter . . .
“Beasts,” whispered His Lordship.
Of a sudden Sliding Billy reached up, quick as a cottonmouth, and grabbed the boy by cock and balls. Yanked hard. The boy screamed, and the first Cheyenne plunged his lance into Billy’s neck, pinning him to the ground. Immediately the other Indians grabbed Billy by the heels and hauled him out of sight. A few moments later Milo smelled smoke. Over the crackle of flames he heard Sliding Billy’s first heartfelt scream.
“Hellfire,” Milo whispered. “They’re burnin’ the wagons.”
PONY STRUTTED AWAY from the fire, the spider’s scream a scalp song to his ears. At least he strutted as best he could. His groin still ached from the spider’s grip. He had counted his first coups on two white men today, taken the hair of the man he pissed on before they threw him on the fire, and he felt proud. He affected a warrior’s swagger, his face showing no emotion, his back straight and square-shouldered, walking perhaps a bit more bowleggedly than his limbs demanded, now and then allowing a slight manly sneer to appear on his lips as befit a blooded Elk Soldier. One spider he’d killed at full gallop with the stoneheaded war club Two Shields had given him, overtaking the man and reaching across with his empty hand to slap him on the back before swinging the long, whippy-handled club with his other hand in an upward sweep that connected squarely with the base of the spider’s jouncing skull. The satisfying crump of stone on bone still felt sweet up the length of his arm.
The second spider he confronted on foot, a hairy-faced man with two empty revolvers and a red jacket and huge, desperate eyes, crazy eyes, pale blue behind the spectacles that covered them, the spider running out of the smoke and dust toward another rolling thing, away from the one with the black tepee on it. Pony had seen him coming, though, and stepped from the concealment of the wagon with the club dangling at his side. The spider saw his club, but also saw Pony’s youth. He pointed one of the six-shooters at him, pulled the trigger, then stopped when he heard the futile clack of hammer on empty chamber. Pony walked toward him until he was within arm’s reach and stuck out his hand and pulled the spider’s long yellow sidewhiskers. The crazy-eyed spider swung the barrel of his pistol at Pony’s head, but Pony ducked and with the club knocked the spider’s legs from under him. Crazy Eyes fell, staring up into Pony’s face. Pony leaned over, plucked the spectacles from the spider’s nose, crushed them, and placed the palm of his hand on the man’s fragile chest. He could feel the man’s heart thumping. He seemed paralyzed except for his racing heart, his rapidly blinking ugly white eyes.
Pony swung the club and smacked Crazy Eyes on the side of his head, a glancing blow, then spun on his heel and strode away without looking back. Later, when he returned to the spot to pick up the spider’s revolvers, he could not find them, nor even the body. Perhaps he hadn’t hit Crazy Eyes hard enough to kill him and the spider had crawled away, maybe under this very wagon.
He turned and saw Two Shields approaching on foot, leading his horse. Pony smiled and started to speak. But Two Shields did not smile back. Blood streaked his red-and-black paint from a bullet gouge on his cheekbone that had left the flesh ridged and ragged at the edges. Burned gunpowder from a close discharge had stippled his chest, throat, and chin with black dots like those on a trout. He dropped the reins of his horse and stepped up to Pony still unsmiling and punched him in the mouth, hard. Pony fell back, on his rump. Tears sprang to his eyes, blood from his lips.
“I saw you make water on that man whose scalp you carry. Never do that again,” Two Shields said. “An Elk Soldier does not humiliate a brave enemy, even in defeat. That spider was brave, he wouldn’t cry out even when Crazy was skinning his face. You’d have seen that if you’d bothered to look. But you wanted to make a big show in front of your brothers. That’s no way for a man.”
He reached down and took the limp, dripping scalp from where it dangled on Pony’s belt and slung it into the fire of a burning wagon.
“There’s still one spider left,” Pony said, “maybe more than one, alive and hiding beneath this rolling thing.”
Two Shields listened, heard spider voices arguing under the wagon. He smiled at last. “Then let’s get them out, into the light of this wonderful day.”
Pony yipped, reprieved. Before Two Shields could stop him, he had ducked down to peer under the back of the upside-down rolling thing.
“Don’t look yet!” Two Shields yelled. “He may have a . . .”
But his warning came too late.
“WHAT’S THAT?” LORD Malcontent whispered. He had been slipping cartridges into the empty chambers of his pistols. Now he was staring at Milo with a look of madness in his eyes.
“What?”
“Shining there on your face, Sykes. Is it pair of specs?”
“So what?” Milo said. “Let’s keep quiet or they’ll have us out of here for the chop.”
“You don’t even wear spectacles,’ Lord Malcontent hissed. “Those are my glasses.” He grabbed for them. Milo slapped his hand away and stifled a groan. The arrow shaft was working in his chest.
“Give them over, you swine!”
“No. Without them I can’t see to shoot.”
“So what? You’ve no bullets to shoot with, anyway.”
“Give me some of yours. We’re both shooting .44s.”
“Give me the spectacles, then maybe I’ll give you some bullets.” *
“Shut up! Here they come.”
Moccasined feet rushed up to the open end of the overturned wagon. A young Indian face appeared, staring into the dark. It saw them and grinned.
Lord Malcontent fired at point-blank range . . .
The red devil fell backward and kicked in the dirt.
I warned him not to look under there, Two Shields thought.
Then he and Cut Ear, on horseback, roped the rear axle of the overturned wagon with their riatas and pulled it up on its side. Another pull and it toppled upright.
Sir Harry stood quickly out of the dust and fired twice in rapid succession. One shot knocked Cut Ear backward. He blinked rapidly as he toppled, dead when he hit the ground.
The other hit Two Shields. He jolted to the hit but did not fall. A black hole below his collarbone began to well with blood. He couldn’t raise his arm. On his bare back a fist-sized hole had appeared, opposite the first, raggedly fringed with meat and fragments of his shoulder blade.
Otto, crouched beneath the wolfskin not five paces away, whipped his spontoon and skewered Sir Harry through the belly.
Two Shields watched and tried to say something. He couldn’t speak. He slid to the ground, then sat down and laid his head on his knees.
Now Milo staggered to his feet, blood trickling from the corners of his cracked lips, glasses gleaming in the smoke. He threw his empty pistol into the flames. A tall, gaunt figure stepped up to him, limping, a one-armed man clad in a wolfskin, his face sun-blackened except for his eyes. They were blue-green as the lakes of Wisconsin. Otto Dousmann.
Milo couldn’t look at him.
A mirror dangled from a rawhide thong on the chest of the dead Indian boy Sir Harry had killed. Milo reached down and removed it. He raised his eyebrows, grinned, looked into the mirror. Then he laughed, a wheezing liquid sound. He spat blood and phlegm into the dust.
“I ain’t seen nothin’ but ugly since I put these things on,” he said.
He plucked the spectacles from his face and threw them into the smoke, after the empty revolver.
“Come on and kill me, ye red nigger lover.”
Otto stuck the spear point first into the ground, then reached forward and placed his maimed hand over the stub of the arrow shaft protruding from Milo’s chest.<
br />
“You’re dead already,” he said.
Milo looked down and laughed again.
Then Wolf Chief smiled, took up his weapon, and killed Milo Sykes with one hard upward thrust of the spear.
A MOMENT LATER the flames of the burning wagons reached the gunpowder stowed with the Gatling. The explosion threw the gun high into the sky, where it twirled brightly in the sunlight before falling, broken, back to the smoke below.
22
VIE WED FROM THE flats as Jenny approached, the butte more and more closely resembled the head, hump, and shoulders of some mythic buffalo bull, thrust upward from a cruel and ageless captivity in the depths of the earth to erupt onto the freedom of the plain. Misshapen to be sure, stained yellow in leprous blotches across its craggy face and the sides of a great bulging hump, the entire massif torqued and skewed, frozen in mid-thrust at the very climax of that effort, with one horn truncated as if snapped off just below its tip in that final battle. He hadn’t quite made it. The shoulders and neck of the bull sloped upward more gradually than its steep, bulging face or the vertical sides. Raleigh would certainly have climbed the more gradual slope.
She found Vixen standing in short hobbles, still saddled but grazing near a spring at the base of the butte. The mare raised her head as Jenny approached, her nostrils flaring to taste the air, then nickered in recognition. Jenny dismounted from her Indian pony, slapped it on the rump to send it back to the herd. She laid a palm on Vixen’s soft, damp muzzle and kneaded gently. “No. ja, mein Pferdchen, I’ve got you back now, my good pony, and in a while we’ll ride away from all this. We’ll go someplace quiet and green and peaceful where it’s never winter and the grass grows deep.” She loosed the hobbles. Vixen tossed her head and nickered again, then resumed grazing.
FROM HIS VANTAGE point at the top of the butte, Raleigh had watched her ride up, first through the field glasses, then over the sights of his rifle. It would have been easy to kill her, and he knew he should. But he also knew that if he bushwhacked her, what lingering grip he maintained on his self-respect would slip away entirely. Maybe she’ll just take the horse and go, he thought. But he knew she wouldn’t be content with that. She was out to find him. Maybe to kill him. He pressed the set trigger until it clicked, then snugged down over the comb of the stock, held her in the sights, the bead in the middle of her chest, his trigger finger still resting on the guard. One touch on the hair trigger and she would die.
How many buffalo had he killed this way? Two thousand, three thousand, no, more like five . . . Don’t even try to count them. Too many.
He was sick unto death of killing.
LEAVING THE MARE on faith and green grass, Jenny studied the rock face. If he’s smart, he’ll be covering the route of his own climb, she thought. He could drop me from up there near the horns before I heard the shot. I’ve got to find a better way up.
She walked around the butte looking for it, and found a route on the far, sheer side of the buffalo’s neck—a steep and dangerous climb, but safe at least from Raleigh’s rifle. Or so she hoped.
This climb would require both hands. Jenny cut a length of rawhide from the riata looped over her shoulders and knotted it securely, top and bottom, to the wrist and barrel of the Sharps, slung the rifle across her back, and confronted the cliff. The Sharps weighed nearly eleven pounds, the bandolier of spare am munition another five, and although at first the added weight threw her off balance, she learned to lean forward in compensation. The entire base of the cliff was sharp, shifting rubble, tumbled scree rattling under her feet as she started up the slope. Hell hear me, she thought, and shoot down from the lip. She picked her way more carefully, her moccasins sensitive to the give and play of the rocks beneath her feet.
When she reached the top of the scree, she gazed for a long time upward. A groove seemed to run down from the stone bull’s earhole to where she stood, a wind- and rain-worn channel eroded over the eons into the shape of a shallow S, about two or three feet deep, as best she could see. Seams and crevices—black lines and bruises of purple shadow under the noonday sun that now glared down on the prairie—would provide hand- and toeholds for her ascent.
Picking her way carefully from seam to bulge to fissure, she climbed toward the buffalo’s head. Now and then, as the sun worked hot on the rock face, stones fell free above her and came rattling down the chute with murderous speed. A few of the smaller ones hit her. The bigger ones, those which might have smacked her like a fly from the face of the cliff to fall—probably dead before she hit the ground—bounced clear and missed her. She timed her climb in spurts, from one protective outbulge on the channel’s route to the next, resting for minutes sometimes between bulges. The feature which represented the buffalo’s ear was a tall, lichen-grown outcropping of extruded granite that stuck out a good three feet from the vertical wall, angling upward from the channel she’d just climbed. Out of breath from the climb, shoulders bruised, blood from a rock cut trickling down through her hair into her eyebrows, her toes and fingertips raw, she crouched beneath it and tried to compose her thoughts.
Would Raleigh still be up there when she reached the top? She was on the far side of the butte from the battle. She had heard no heavy gunfire for a long while now, only a few sporadic shots. McKay might well have departed, gone back down the gentle slope of the buffalo’s neck and shoulders and remounted Vixen, be on his way to God knows where. I should have waited for him by the horse, laid an ambush for him there, instead of climbing a cliff I’m incapable of climbing, risking my life in a fool’s game.
She squinted upward at the sun. Calm down, she thought. The sun hasn’t moved a handspan since you’ve been climbing—not fifteen minutes yet. You’ve made good time, with a heavy load at that. She breathed deeply for a minute or two. In the shadow of the overhang, her blood cooled. She looked downward. She had climbed a long way. The height did not frighten her. Rather, it elated her. She had always been easy with altitude. As a girl in Wisconsin she had scaled the tallest white pines on the farm, in search of birds’ eggs or nestlings or glossy pinecones, often staying up there for hours on end in the silken green heights, cool in the breezes and the astringent perfume of pine, watching the busy flights of the mother birds feeding their young, quite to Mutti’s earthbound consternation. She had enjoyed the view from the top of those trees, from the top of anything, for that matter, and often she’d thought back then as a girl that she would be happy to have been born an eagle. She had watched a nest of eaglets pip out of their shells one afternoon, scrawny, unfeathered, big-headed, clumsy, quite ugly—but in many ways people were uglier.
Make no mistake, though, girl. You are not an eagle. Don’t fall.
She worked her way up onto the overhang, almost losing her grip once, pulled backward for a frightful instant by the sudden, shifting weight of the Sharps, but caught herself by the tips of her bleeding fingers. On the ledge of the buffalo’s ear she saw a cave leading in and down into the bowels of the butte. She stuck her head in the cave opening and heard what sounded like a burble of water coming from within. She tossed a pebble in. It skidded across the rock and fell, clattering, for a long time before she heard the splash.
Yes, the spring rose inside the butte, as the Cheyennes had said.
From the buffalo’s ear to the top of his steeply crowned skull was only a short climb. She scrambled to the base of the bull’s truncated right horn and looked carefully around, toward the skyline. The “wool” of this granite buffalo consisted of mesquite, cholla, ocotilla, and prickly pear. Everything lay in shadows, every shadow moved with the wind. But then she saw something that did not move. It was linear, blue-black—the barrel of a rifle.
Suddenly, as with animals she had hunted, Raleigh sprang clear to her eyes against the background. His fringed deerskin hunting shirt blended smoothly with the sun-blanched vegetation. He was lying on his belly, the rifle beside him, its action oddly enough open, peering through field glasses away from her toward the battle. Slowly she ros
e to her feet. She brushed a trickle of blood from her eyes. She was drenched in sweat. Her knees trembled, whether from the climb or the imminence of her final confrontation with this long-sought enemy she did not know. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got him now.
She unslung the Sharps, eased the loading lever forward to lower the breechblock and ensure that there was indeed a round in the chamber, saw the welcome gleam of the brass cartridge, then cocked the hammer all the way back. The sear clicked. Raleigh did not seem to notice. She reached her trigger finger backward carefully and pressed the set trigger. It clicked, too, but less sharply than the hammer. The rifle was ready to fire. Just the touch of her finger on the hair trigger now would drop the hammer with explosive force.
She walked toward him, slow and Cheyenne-quiet.
Then from the killing ground half a mile away came the sound of a great explosion.
AS HE SAW the mushroom cloud rise from the blast and a moment later felt the slap of the shock wave, Raleigh felt a nudge between his shoulder blades. He started to put down the field glasses.
“Keep them up there near your eyes, Captain McKay,” Jenny said. “I wouldn’t think twice about touching this trigger.” He lowered the glasses despite her words, rolled over into a recumbent position, and grinned up at her. She did not shoot. But the rifle was still aimed squarely at his chest, her forefinger near the hair trigger.
“Jenny, ol’ gal, I been expectin’ you, saw you nosin’ around down there by the pony half an hour ago. You must’ve come the long way up the mountain.” He looked toward the cliff and nodded admiringly. “Stiff climb, too tough for an ol’ bag o’ bones like me. Say, it’s sure good to see you.” Raleigh offered her the field glasses. “Lie down here next of me and take a gander at this. Your Hostiles’ve won the battle.”
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 25