Slocum and the Comanche

by Jake Logan

  “I know they’s tricky bastards all right, an’ real hard to kill in a fight.”

  “That’s what I tried to explain to young Captain Carter on the ride up here. When we rode up on that bunch of fifty or sixty Kwahadies, the damn fool reached for his pistol. If I hadn’t stopped him, he could have gotten all of us killed.”

  “I just met Carter yesterday. He’s a kid from Ohio. He wouldn’t know which end of a polecat gives off stink. That’s the trouble with this army these days. They sign all these kids to short hitches now. By the time they learn how to stay alive in Injun country, their hitch is over an’ here comes another batch of raw recruits. It’s a goddamn wonder ain’t all of ’em dead as fence posts.”

  “I reckon it’s because the army doesn’t need experienced soldiers any longer,” Slocum said. “No more wars to fight. Most of the Indian tribes are on reservations now. Nothing much for a horseback soldier to do except keep an eye on ’em.”

  “You got it figured right, Mr. Slocum. We ain’t really soldiers no more.”

  Slocum didn’t mention how glad he was not to be a soldier anymore. Fighting for a losing cause as a Confederate all those years had taken all the soldiering out of him. He’d lost a brother to that war, and a part of his soul too, he reckoned. The last thing John Slocum would ever do again is put on any kind of uniform.

  He shifted the subject. “Who found the settlers first?”

  “Seems I heard it was a couple of cowboys comin’ back from a trail drive to Kansas. One of ‘em rode back toward the fort an’ run into one of our patrols. He told where to find ’em an’ then he headed back down to the river. Sergeant Steven and Corporal Baker was the first soldiers there. A burial detail went back down to dig the holes.”

  Slocum frowned. An army burial detail would leave shod hoofprints all over the place, possibly hiding the trail the killers left behind. It meant he would have to ride bigger circles to find the escape route of the culprits, if he could find any trace of them at all.

  He’d promised Major Thompson to do the best he could to lead a patrol in the right direction. But with the trail grown cold by now, the cavalry would be days behind the killers.

  “It ain’t far now,” Sergeant Watson said, pointing to a row of low hills dotted with red oak and maple. The leaves were turning bright red, yellow, and brown as fall deepened. A brisk wind came at their backs, and Slocum thought he detected some moisture in it.

  The search for the killers would come to an abrupt end if the rain came. It would wash out whatever tracks were still left to follow. But when he looked over his shoulder to the north and west, he saw clear skies behind them.

  To pass the time, he thought about what Fannie had done when he returned to his room this morning. She was one hell of a woman. Not the least bit bashful. When he got back, he had to send a wire to the railroad asking for Mr. Ford’s personal attention to a pressing matter. He wouldn’t need to explain why he needed the ticket for Fannie. Tom Ford had been a good friend over the years and he wouldn’t ask.

  But then, oddly enough, with his thoughts still on Fannie, Slocum found himself remembering the Comanche girl, Senatey. It was rare to find an Indian woman, or a woman of any breed, who took his fancy so abruptly. It wasn’t the eye-catching way she was dressed. Hell, she wore a dirty piece of fringed deerskin and not much else. It was her face, something about her dark brown eyes when she looked at him, that made his heart beat a little faster.

  He wondered if he would ever see her again. It was not likely. And Major Thompson said she hated white men for what they had done to her people. He decided that it was best to put Senatey out of his mind for good.

  7

  Two log cabins sat beside a creek in a shallow valley beyond the hills. As Slocum rode out of the trees on a crest above the cabins, small barns, and pole corrals, Sergeant Watson signaled a halt.

  “You can see them graves on the slope behind that shed, the fresh mounds of dirt an’ all.”

  “I see ’em,” Slocum replied, counting seven wooden crosses at the head of the graves. “If this was an Indian massacre, they would have burned those cabins down, most likely. Let’s take a closer look, and tell your men to stay in formation so we don’t add to the tracks left by that burial detail. I’ll ride circles until I pick up any sign of unshod ponies.” He frowned. “What don’t make sense is why they slaughtered those people and left everything else alone. I reckon they stole their livestock, if they had any worth stealing. All those pole corrals are empty. Two wagons behind the sheds. You can see by the looks of things these folks didn’t have much. Makes it hard to understand why a party of Indians would bother. If it was Indians to start with.”

  “Who the hell else would scalp ’em?” Watson asked.

  “I haven’t got an answer. Don’t reckon we’ll know till we find whoever did it.”

  He heeled his Palouse off the rise at a walk, puzzled by what they found. Two homesteads were left untouched, yet seven people, including two women, were scalped. When the Indians that Slocum had experience with wanted white settlers off their traditional hunting ground, they burned everything to the ground to discourage more whites from taking up residence. This was beginning to look like something other than an Indian massacre. But, like Sergeant Watson, Slocum couldn’t fathom who would want to have Indians blamed for what happened here.

  The first cabin was a two-room affair with a dog run. Nothing but logs chinked with mud and a sod roof to protect its owners from the weather. The door to the cabin stood open. On part of the rough-hewn split-log porch, dried bloodstains showed where a settler had lost his life.

  Slocum gave the ground around the cabin a cursory inspection. Then he returned to Watson. “Have your men dismount and see if they can find anything inside, like personal effects, that’ll tell us who these folks were. No names on any of the grave markers.”

  Sergeant Watson gave the order to dismount. Slocum eased his stud away from the cabin to begin riding widening circles around the valley until he found hoofprints.

  He rode past the graves, then eastward toward land that was open and easier to travel. This was the most likely direction for attackers to leave in a hurry. Despite the beautiful fall colors in the trees around him, he felt gloomy. He imagined that he could hear the last sounds heard on this spot: the screams and cries of dying men and women.

  It would require patience and an experienced eye to find any tracks. In this type of country, the grass grew thick. Only the rare barren spots would reveal any clues, and even then they would appear only if the killers were careless men.

  At a tiny stream half a mile east of the cabins, he swung down to examine some prints in the soft mud at the edge of the streambed. Some of the tracks were two-toed animals, no doubt cattle stolen by the murderers after the raid.

  And then he found what he was looking for—the prints of a dozen or more unshod horses.

  “Big, for pony tracks,” he muttered to himself.

  The prints were headed due east. Here was a trail to follow, as he’d known all along there would be. Men of every other race left proof of their passing in open land. Only the Comanche seemed to understand that their tracks were as clear as a signpost pointing in their direction.

  He mounted his stud and swung back to inform Sergeant Watson of his findings. As he’d agreed, Slocum would guide the patrol along the trail of the killers for a while, but not for long. He would put a cavalry unit on the right track behind whoever had slaughtered the settlers. The rest would be up to the army. Thompson had sent patrols in three directions, spread out in a triad to cover as much territory as possible. With the information Slocum provided to Sergeant Watson, they could follow the tracks all the way back to the killers’ lair.

  He held his stud in an easy lope, galloping back toward Fort Sill while Watson’s cavalrymen followed the hoofprints. Slocum’s job was done. He had done all he’d promised to do. But as he rode between a pair of heavily wooded knobs, he heard voices coming from a deep thick
et off to the west. Men’s voices and then a woman’s scream.

  He swung the Palouse in the direction of the cries and asked it for a hard gallop, opening his coat for an easier reach in case he needed his pistol in a hurry. The woman’s shriek was plainly one of pain or fear. He wondered if the same killers who had attacked the cabins were about to claim more victims.

  When he entered the forest, he was shocked by what he saw. In a small clearing about a quarter mile ahead, he saw three uniformed troopers surrounding a naked copper-skinned woman who was bound by ropes to a tree trunk. The soldiers were laughing, taunting the girl, and playing with her breasts and her cunt.

  One of the soldiers heard his horse. He wheeled around just as Slocum rode into view at the edge of the clearing. When the trooper saw that he was a white man, he lowered the pistol he was holding in his fist and grinned.

  Slocum reined his Palouse to a halt. He looked at the woman for just an instant before he glared down at the trooper. “What the hell are you doing to her?” he demanded. Suddenly he was sure he recognized her. He looked at her again. A trickle of blood ran from her nose, and more blood surged from the edges of her mouth. He recognized Senatey.

  “We caught her takin’ a bath naked in that creek yonder,” the soldier replied. “She ain’t supposed to be off the reservation. So we tied her up.”

  Slocum turned back in the soldier’s direction with a hard stare. “I saw what you were doing to her. It’s enough to get you a damn court-martial, soldierboy. Now cut her loose. I’m headed back to Fort Sill to report directly to Major Thompson. I want your name and the names of these other yellow bastards.”

  “How do you know the major?” the soldier asked defiantly.

  “He hired me to find whoever was responsible for scalping those settlers south of here, if it’s any of your goddamn business. Cut her ropes and do it now! Otherwise I may be forced to take more drastic measures.”

  “You can’t give me no orders, mister. You’re a civilian. I only take orders from officers. An’ I don’t believe nothin’ you said ’bout bein’ hired by Major Thompson.”

  Slocum swung down before the trooper was finished with his protest. “I’ll show you where I get my authority,” he said in an even, controlled voice.

  He stepped forward within arm’s reach of the soldier’s jaw, and before the corporal knew what was happening, Slocum’s fist went slamming into his left cheek, cracking bone when his knuckles landed.

  He staggered back and slumped to the grass on his butt just as Slocum drew his .44, aiming it at the other two cavalrymen. “Untie the goddamn ropes!” he shouted, cocking his pistol. “I’ll shoot the first son of a bitch who don’t do exactly as I say!”

  “Yessir,” the youngest man stammered. He ran behind the tree to untie Senatey.

  Now Slocum aimed his gun down at the sore-jawed corporal. “Get on your feet, soldierboy. Go fetch me a horse for this girl to ride and don’t be slow about it. If you aren’t back in five minutes with a horse, I’m gonna start shooting your friends here, one at a time. I’ll tell Major Thompson they were about to rape this woman, and I had no choice but to kill ’em. Then I’ll come looking for you, Corporal, with or without your name. And you can be damn sure I’ll put a bullet through you same as I will the two boys over yonder. Now give me your name, or I’ll just start shooting now and explain to the major later.”

  “I’m Dave Sims,” the soldier said softly, rubbing his chin. “Them two’s Jacobs an’ Woods.”

  “Go fetch the horse,” Slocum demanded. “One of you is gonna walk back to Fort Sill, and I don’t give a damn which one it is.”

  “Yessir,” the corporal mumbled, staggering off toward the trees south of the clearing.

  Slocum started over to Senatey. Her torn deerskin dress was lying near her feet. He picked it up and handed it to her as the soldiers untied the ropes. She covered herself quickly, lowering her eyes, then wiped the blood off her lips and chin with her forearm. A large purple bruise swelled on her cheek and there were other dark red marks on her face.

  He spoke to the two remaining soldiers. “You so make damn sure Sims gets me that horse for this woman. Don’t test me to see if I mean what I say about putting bullet holes in you.”

  “Yessir,” the young private said, taking off in a trot followed by the other trooper. “Don’t you worry, sir. We’ll be back with that horse right quick.”

  He let them go and turned back to the naked girl. “I’m sorry for what they did to you,” he said. “Do you understand? I only speak a few words of Sata Teichas.” Sata Teichas was the Comanche tongue.

  “I ... know what you say,” she said to him, trying to cover her breasts and groin with her dress.

  “Hie hites, ” he told her, meaning that it was good and he was a friend.

  She made no move to put on her dress. “How you know Sata Teichas, Tosi Tivo?”

  She had addressed him with the Comanche word for a white man. “I learned some a long time ago. I forgot most of it by now.”

  “Why you help me?” she asked, looking into his eyes with a strange expression on her face.

  Slocum glanced over his shoulder in the direction the three soldiers had gone. “Because you needed my help. All Tosi Tivo are not like those soldiers. Some of us are friends to the Sata Teichas. You are a woman. It doesn’t matter what color you are. Men who aren’t cowards don’t abuse a woman under any circumstances.”

  “I see you before,” she said, “with other soldiers.”

  “I remember. Major Thompson told me your name was Senatey, a warrior woman.”

  She gave him a weak smile.

  “How did you get separated from the others, the hunters led by Conas?”

  “Conas say we must go back. Too many soldiers. Bad thing happen.”

  “What kind of bad thing?”

  She seemed hesitant to tell him.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “Many bad men kill Tosi Tivo. We see bad men. Conas say army will say we do bad thing. He send me and other women back to Stinking Place.”

  “Stinking Place?”

  “In Tosi Tivo say ‘reservation.’ ”

  Slocum grinned. The reservation did have a bad smell to it, the smell of too many people crowded together in too small a space. “Who were these bad men?”

  Senatey frowned. “I can no say word in Tosi Tivo. They be men who take hair, take scalp for money.”

  “Mexican scalp hunters?” he asked.

  She gave him a blank look. “Senatey no say word. Bad men who take hair.”

  He wondered if Mexican scalp hunters could have come this far north to look for trophy scalps. In Mexico, in Monterrey, he had heard Indian scalps were bringing as much as five dollars apiece. But the settlers who were scalped at the cabins were white. Her explanation didn’t give him much to go on, not enough to convince Major Thompson this wasn’t the work of the Comanches.

  “Put on your dress,” he told her. “I’ll take you back to the fort, the Stinking Place, so you’ll be safe.”

  She turned her back on him to step into her garment. “What happened to the other Sata Teichas women who were with you?” he asked.

  “All run away. Tosi Tivo soldiers shoot our ponies. We run and hide. Soldiers find me.”

  “I’ll report what they did to Major Thompson. No one will harm you now. I’ll make sure you get back safely.”

  “Why you do this for Senatey?” It was as though she couldn’t believe a white man would do anything to help her.

  “Because you need help and because the Sata Teichas are my friends.”

  With her dress covering her magnificent body, Senatey turned to face him. “You different. No be bad man.”

  “All white men aren’t bad, Senatey. Some of ’em will take advantage of a woman. You had the bad luck to meet up with three soldiers who need a lesson in manners.”

  “I no understand. What is manner ... s?”

  He grinned again. “I’ll explain on the way
back to the fort ... to the Stinking Place.”

  When she looked at him now, he sensed she was beginning to trust him.

  8

  Off to the west he heard the sounds of running horses. He knew what it meant.

  “Those soldiers took off,” Slocum growled, looking in the direction of the hoofbeats. “Damn! I shouldn’t have trusted ’em to bring a horse back. When I get to the fort, it’ll be my word against theirs as to what happened here. They played me for a damn fool....”

  “I walk,” Senatey said. “They kill all ponies where we take bath in stream.”

  “I oughta go after ’em,” he said, realizing now he’d been hoodwinked by the three cavalrymen, who wanted to avoid a court-martial if Slocum brought charges.

  He let out a sigh and turned back to the girl. “Where are the other Sata Teichas women who were with you?” he asked.

  Senatey appeared to have trouble with his question. “Other women?”

  “The four Conas sent back to the reservation after the bad men showed up. They were with you before.”

  “Run. I no see after Tosi Tivo chase me away from water where we take bath.”

  “I reckon we’d better look for ’em,” he said. “You’ll have to ride in front of me on my horse.”

  She nodded that she understood. Again wiping blood from her mouth and nose, she walked over to the Palouse and swung up on its back, using only the saddlehorn as if the stirrups were not needed.

  “I’ll take you to the doctor at Fort Sill,” he said as he put his foot in the left stirrup. “You’ve had some mighty rough treatment.”

  “No go to Tosi Tivo medicine man,” she said, as he swung his leg over the stud’s rump, settling in behind her with the reins in his left hand.