Yellow Moon stepped forward then and offered her hand to help Lena down. “Welcome,” she said. “You must be tired and hungry. Come and we will prepare food for you.”
Lena looked at Joel, as if asking if it was all right. “Go along with Yellow Moon,” he said. “I’ll take care of your horse.”
Red Shirt stepped forward to help him pull the saddles off the two horses and carry them, along with a canvas bag filled with some clothes and personal items that belonged to Lena, to his tipi. They turned the horses out with the Indian herd, leaving their bridles on to identify them quicker, no longer feeling the precaution to tie them up next to the tipi.
“I’m hopin’ one of the women will take Lena in,” Joel told Red Shirt as they led the horses out to the meadow where the Shoshoni horses were grazing.
“Already done,” Red Shirt said, “when Yellow Moon take her. You tell me now what happened.”
Joel related all that had taken place since he rode off to kill Beauchamp, and why the Ute woman came to be with him. “I’ve been thinkin’ a lot on the ride over here, and I’ve been makin’ some plans on what I’m gonna do now that we don’t have to worry about Beauchamp and his gang of killers. I’m gonna build another house on that piece of land Boone filed on. I’m plannin’ on raisin’ some cattle and horses on that mountain, and open that mine up again. I was kinda hopin’ you’d help me do it.”
Red Shirt started to shrug but stopped and grinned instead. “I help.”
“It’s a deal, then,” Joel said, and offered his hand. Red Shirt took it and pumped it up and down in an exaggerated handshake, causing Joel to remark, “That oughta make it official. There’s one more thing I’ve gotta do before we get started. I’m goin’ into Silver City and have a talk with the sheriff and that city council to make sure they all know that’s my land and I intend to keep it. I’d like to convince all of ’em that I’m peaceful and plan to do business with ’em.”
“I go with you this time,” Red Shirt said. “I not sure you come back last time.”
Joel laughed and said, “All right, if you want to. We’ll go in the mornin’. Ain’t no use in losin’ any more time. We’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re gonna make a goin’ operation outta that place.”
• • •
Before leaving the next morning, Joel told Lena why they were going and that if all went well, they should be back in two days. She should know by then if there was a place for her in the Shoshoni village, but if there was not, she would be welcome to go with him and Red Shirt. She seemed at ease with the situation, so they saddled up and rode out.
As they crossed over the stream, Joel saw White Fawn standing alone a few dozen yards upstream watching them. He touched his finger to his hat as a salute, but she turned and walked away without responding, leaving him at a loss as to what he had done to cause her icy reaction to him. It was just going to keep her on his mind that much longer.
• • •
Since Silver City was too far from the Shoshoni village to get there before nightfall, they camped that night in the barn on Joel’s property. He figured the business he had in mind would be better conducted in daylight. They rode into the north end of town a little before noon, walking their horses slowly up the middle of the street until reaching the Miner’s Rest and the sheriff’s office across from it. Everyone they passed along the way stopped to gape at the pair, causing Joel to wonder if maybe he might be riding into an enemy camp. It was too late to reconsider now, so he pulled the Henry from his saddle scabbard just in case when he dismounted. His last meeting with Jim Crowder had not ended well.
Toby Bryan looked up from his desk when the door opened to find it filled with the formidable figure of Joel McAllister. His initial reaction was to hope everything Fuzzy Chapman had told him was true, because the expression on Joel’s face was not friendly.
“McAllister,” Toby said.
“Blacksmith,” Joel returned, surprised to find him in the sheriff’s office. “Are you the sheriff now?”
“I am,” he said. “Toby Bryan’s my name.” He guessed that Joel had forgotten it. “What can I do for you?”
That explained why he had been riding with Beauchamp on the trail to Blackjack Mountain. “I’ve had some trouble up at my and my brother’s place, and I wanna make sure you and the folks here in town know that I’m a peaceable man. As far as I’m concerned, the war between my land and Beauchamp’s is over, and I didn’t start it in the first place.”
The sheriff smiled and got up from his chair. He extended his hand, and said, “I’m glad you came in. I think we know the real story behind that war you had. Fuzzy Chapman told us the whole thing. Beauchamp had us all fooled for a long time.” Joel shook his hand and Toby went on. “We’ll welcome you to our community.” He paused, then continued. “Say, I thought I got a glimpse of the woman who cooked for him lyin’ on the kitchen floor, but she wasn’t at the house when I went back the next mornin’. You know anything about her?”
“Maybe,” Joel replied, hesitant to say too much in case they were looking to hang Lena for the killing.
“I was just wonderin’ if she was all right. I know she’s the one who killed Beauchamp, but I know that it was self-defense. She ain’t in no trouble.”
Joel nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I can tell you that she got beat up pretty bad, but she’s gonna be all right. Can’t say where she’s goin’, just that she’s gone.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Toby, and Joel decided it best to be cautious, just in case. They stood there for a few moments of awkward silence, neither man sure if there was anything more to say.
“Well, I reckon I’ll be on my way, then,” Joel finally said. “Are you still shoein’ horses?”
Toby chuckled. “Yeah, I’m just sheriffin’ till we find somebody wantin’ the job permanent. You wouldn’t be interested in the job, would you?” The idea seemed like a good one to Toby.
“I ain’t gonna have the time,” Joel answered as he went out the door, where Red Shirt stood holding the horses.
• • •
After camping overnight in the barn at the ranch, they splashed across the stream by the Shoshoni village late the next morning.
“I got something I’ve gotta do,” Joel told Red Shirt. “You go on in. I’ll be there in a while.”
He wheeled the gray then before Red Shirt could question him, and loped into the meadow where the horses were grazing. Red Shirt shrugged and continued on into the village. He had learned to like coffee as much as his partner, and he was ready for a cup then.
He had just gotten a fire going and was about to go to the stream to fill the pot when he heard the sound of high-pitched yelps coming from many of the people in the village. He looked back to see Joel riding into camp leading seven horses on a line behind him. Astonished, he ran back to the circle of lodges in time to see Joel pull up in front of Walking Eagle’s tipi, dismount, tie the lead end of the rope to a stake in the ground, then climb back onto the gray and ride away, leaving the seven horses behind.
Red Shirt threw his head back and laughed. “He listen when I tell him he need wife.”
A small crowd gathered a short distance from the chief’s tipi in hopes of seeing Walking Eagle’s reaction to the proposal. It was not uncommon for a father to let the gifts remain outside his lodge for a long time, even overnight while he considered the offer, while an anxious suitor waited and watched to see if the horses were taken away. In the event they were, he knew that his marriage proposal had been accepted, and he was spared the embarrassment of having to go to retrieve the horses himself.
From Red Shirt’s tipi, Joel could just see the horses outside Walking Eagle’s lodge, so he sat with a grinning Red Shirt, drinking the coffee he had made, only getting up once in a while to see if the horses were gone. His answer was short in coming, for he saw Walking Eagle come out of the tipi and look the
horses over. As Joel watched, Yellow Moon came out then, and the two talked for a while, before White Fawn came out, marched over to the stake, and untied the rope. Then, in what looked to be no uncertain terms, she handed the rope to her father and pointed toward the pony herd in the meadow. Walking Eagle dutifully led his new horses away to the cheering of the people gathered close by.
Unaware that Red Shirt had come out behind him, Joel was startled when the Bannock warrior suddenly slapped him on the back.
“You not free man no more. We make big family now.”
“Maybe so,” Joel allowed. “I ain’t been able to get her out of my mind, so I might as well have her in my tipi.”
• • •
Feeling the need to splash some cold water on his face, Joel knelt by the stream in the same spot she had come to talk to him before he went after Strong and Zach. He knew what he had done was rash, and he wondered if he would live to regret it. In the last few weeks, it seemed that he had never had time to think about anything but killing and keeping from being killed. But the few moments that he had thought about her were troubling to him. There was so little that he knew about the girl, other than the fact she was impulsive and strong-willed.
“Joel.” He heard her call his name.
The sound of it was soft and lilting. He turned to find her standing there. When he turned, she came into his arms, and he knew at that moment all he needed to know.
Read on for a look at another exciting historical novel from Charles G. West
WRATH OF THE SAVAGE
Available from Signet in March 2014.
Second Lieutenant Bret Hollister swallowed the last of his coffee and got to his feet. He took a few seconds to stretch his long, lean body before walking unhurriedly over to the water’s edge, where he knelt down to rinse out his cup. When he stood up again, he glanced over to catch the question in Sergeant Johnny Duncan’s expression. Knowing what the sergeant was silently asking, Hollister said, “Let’s get ’em mounted, Sergeant. We need to find this fellow before nightfall.”
“Yes, sir,” Duncan answered, anticipating the order and turning to address the troopers who were taking their ease beside the stream. “All right, boys, you heard the lieutenant. Mount up.”
He stood there holding his horse’s reins and watched while the eight-man detail reluctantly climbed back into their saddles. When the last of the green recruits mounted, Duncan climbed aboard and looked to the lieutenant to give the order to march.
A sore-assed bunch of recruits, he thought, although not without a modicum of sympathy for their discomfort. Not one of the eight men had ever ridden a horse before being assigned to the Second Cavalry just three months before. Duncan knew that the reason they had been assigned to this detail today was primarily because of their greenness. He also knew that the reason he had caught the assignment was because Captain Greer felt confident he could nursemaid the raw troopers and maybe the lieutenant in charge of the patrol as well.
Bret Hollister might make a good officer one day, Duncan speculated, depending upon whether he stayed alive long enough to wear off some of the polish associated with all new lieutenants coming out of West Point. He had only been with the regiment a year and a half, right out of the academy, and as far as Duncan knew, he hadn’t distinguished himself one way or another. This rescue detail would be the first time the sergeant would report directly to Hollister, so in all fairness, he supposed he should give the young officer a chance to prove himself.
Hollister had been posted to Fort Ellis in time to participate in the three-pronged campaign to run Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to ground. That campaign resulted in the annihilation of General George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. By the time the four hundred troopers from Fort Ellis had made the two-hundred-mile march to the Little Big Horn, they were too late to reinforce General Custer. So the only combat experience Lieutenant Bret Hollister had was in the burying of slaughtered troopers of the Seventh and relief of the survivors under Major Marcus Reno. It was hardly enough to test the steel of the young officer.
Duncan’s thoughts were interrupted briefly by the order to march, but his mind soon drifted back to his dissatisfaction with being assigned to nursemaid a green patrol commanded by a green officer. It was especially aggravating when the rest of the regiment was preparing to move out to intercept a band of Nez Perce intent upon escaping the reservation. He didn’t like being left behind by his company and regiment, the men he had soldiered with for more than two years.
“Damn it,” he muttered, “orders are orders.”
“Did you say something, Sergeant?” Bret asked, reining his horse back a bit.
“Ah, no, sir,” Duncan replied. “I was just talkin’ to myself.”
Bret smiled. “Better be careful. Talking to yourself might be a sign of battle fatigue.”
“Yes, sir,” Duncan said. Don’t know what the hell you’d know about battle fatigue, he thought. Then he reprimanded himself for his attitude. Best forget about my bad luck and think about why this patrol was ordered out.
The admonishment made him feel a little guilty, for the patrol was an important one. Reports of two separate raids by renegade Sioux and Cheyenne on homesteaders along the Yellowstone River had come in to the post just hours before the regiment was prepared to march to intercept the Nez Perce. From the report of the young man who had ridden to Fort Ellis with the news of the attack, both families were massacred. Duncan figured the Indians had too great a head start for there to be any reasonable chance of overtaking them. He supposed the real purpose of the patrol was to show some response from the army, even with only an undersized patrol of eight privates, one sergeant, and one officer.
Because of the nature of the mission, and the need to travel light, the men had been ordered to leave all personal items and clothing behind at Fort Ellis. Each man was issued four days’ rations and told to take only one blanket, one rubber ground cloth, one hundred rounds of ammunition, no cooking utensils except one tin cup, and four days’ horse feed. Those marching orders told the sergeant that they were expected to return to base as soon as they confirmed that the hostiles were no longer in the area.
Duncan had persuaded Captain Greer to let them seek out Nate Coldiron to help track the Indians responsible for the raids, just in case the trail was hotter than the young man reported. One day of their rations would already be gone in the time it would take to find Coldiron, but it couldn’t hurt to have the old trapper along. He was a hell of a hunter, and Duncan thought the patrol might be out longer than four days, in spite of their orders. If that was the case, he was confident that they wouldn’t go without food.
Coldiron, a cantankerous old trapper and former army scout, had a cabin on the east side of the Gallatin River, at a point where a wide stream emptied into it. Duncan had been to the cabin once before, when Coldiron had agreed to lead a scouting mission a year earlier. He knew he could find it again, so he led the small patrol west from Bozeman to intercept the Gallatin River, the point from which they were now departing. As best as he could determine, the stream that flowed by Coldiron’s cabin was about twelve miles south, so the patrol set out to follow the river.
The farther south they traveled, the nearer they drew to the rugged mountains that hovered over the narrow river, the rougher the country became. Along the way, they passed many streams that fed down into the river, all looking enough alike to make it difficult to identify one particular one, especially after a year’s time.
“Are you sure you’ll recognize the stream we’re looking for?” Bret felt compelled to ask Duncan. “It’s not easy to tell one of these from all the others.”
“Oh, I’ll know it when I see it,” Duncan assured him. “We ain’t gone far enough to strike it yet.”
It was toward the later part of the afternoon when they finally reached what Duncan referred to as Coldiron Creek. “This is it
,” he proclaimed, and pointed toward the top of the mountain. “It goes straight up that mountain. Coldiron’s cabin is about half a mile up.”
Bret could see why Duncan had been so confident in his ability to identify the proper stream. It emptied into the Gallatin between two big rocks. He followed the winding stream up the slope with his eyes until it disappeared into the thick foliage of the tall trees. Above the tree line, the steep mountain peaks stood defiantly, discouraging the casual climber. “It looks pretty rough. Maybe we’d better dismount and lead the horses up there.”
“It looks rough,” Duncan replied, “but there’s a game trail followin’ the stream up the hill, and we can ride it if we take it slow. It’s just hard to see it from here. I’ll lead the way.”
He didn’t wait for the lieutenant’s order, but started up through a thick stand of fir trees that bordered the river. Bret fell in behind him with eight unenthusiastic troopers following him, complaining about the occasional branches that slapped at their faces.
“Quit your bellyachin’ and keep up,” Duncan called back over his shoulder, admonishing the men.
As Duncan had said, they soon struck a game trail that circled around from the north side of the mountain and started up the slope beside the stream. Bret couldn’t help thinking how far removed he was from the cavalry combat training he’d been drilled in at the academy. There had been very little time spent on the basics of Indian fighting. He was convinced that it was certainly a worthwhile patrol. But what were the odds of tracking a war party of Indian raiders that had a two-day head start? Not very high in his estimation. Then he reminded himself not to question orders. He didn’t want to start complaining like the privates following him. His thoughts were interrupted then by the sounds of a rifle cocking and a booming voice.
“Somethin’ I can help you soldier boys with?” The question was followed almost immediately by an exclamation. “Well, damn me—Sergeant Johnny Duncan! I thought you was dead.”
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