Sioux Slaughter (A Davy Crockett Western Book 2)

by David Robbins

  With the strength of a mountain lion and a wanderlust just as powerful, Davy Crockett always had to know what lay over the next hill. With only his long rifle for protection and his old friend, Flavius Harris, for company, the pioneer set out, determined to see the legendary splendor of the Great Plains. But that may have been one gallivant too many. The intrepid frontiersman barely survived a mammoth buffalo stampede with his hide and coonskin cap intact. And that was nothing compared to the fate in store for Crockett when he was ambushed by a band of Sioux warriors with blood in their eyes!

  SIOUX SLAUGHTER

  DAVY CROCKETT 2

  By David Robbins Writing as David Thompson

  First Published by Leisure Books in 1997

  Copyright © 1997, 2015 by David Robbins

  First SMASHWORDS Edition: January 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover © 2016 by Ed Martin

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  To Judy, Joshua and Shane

  Chapter One

  “Have you ever seen so much grass in all your born days?” Davy Crockett asked in an awed tone. Before him stretched an unending sea of it. Even when he rose in the stirrups and placed a hand across his brow to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun, all he saw was grass, grass, and more grass.

  “No, I reckon not,” Flavius Harris answered glumly. He did not share his friend’s excitement about the vast prairie. All he cared about was ending their gallivant and heading back to Tennessee.

  “It’s just like Lewis and Clark said it was,” Davy marveled, kneeing his sorrel onward. For years he’d heard tales of the sprawling, mysterious plains. Now, to actually see the gently waving ocean of grass with his own eyes filled him with joy beyond words. “One day we can brag to our grandkids that we were here.”

  “If we live that long,” Flavius grumbled. In his view they were tempting fate by straying so far from home. He thought of his wife and how much he missed her, in particular the wonderful meals she made. What he wouldn’t give for five or six helpings of her delicious chicken stew with dumplings! Or a dozen eggs with half a pound of bacon. Just dreaming about it made him giddy.

  Sighing, Davy turned to regard his portly friend. Ever since they had parted company with the Ojibwas, Flavius had grown more and more moody. “Consarn it all,” he said. “What will it take to snap you out of your funk?”

  Flavius looked Davy right in the eyes. “You know darn well what it will take.”

  “Didn’t I say we would head for home as soon as I saw the plains?” Davy reminded him. “All I want to do is ride on a ways and see me a buffalo. Once we do, I wish I may be shot if I don’t turn around and light a rag for Tennessee.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Flavius said. As much as he liked and admired his companion, he was almighty tired of Davy’s constant hankering to see what lay over the next rise or beyond the new horizon. He’d never met anyone so powerful curious about parts unknown.

  Flavius had only himself to blame for being there, though. Weeks ago, when Davy first mentioned his notion of going on a gallivant, he could have declined. It was not as if Davy twisted his arm to make him tag along. No, he’d gone because he wanted to get away from his wife’s constant nagging for a spell. Not to mention being spared the backbreaking chores she made him do from dusk till dawn six days a week.

  “It shouldn’t be long,” Davy said. From the tales he’d heard, the prairie was crawling with buffalo. Lewis and Clark claimed to have seen herds so immense that it took hours for the thousands of great shaggy brutes to pass by. Now, that would be a sight! His hopes high, Davy surveyed the grassland from north to south.

  Time passed, and Davy’s hopes dwindled. Other than a few deer and a half-dozen buzzards that circled overhead for a while, there was no wildlife to speak of. It appeared that finding buffalo was going to be a lot harder than he had counted on. Just as he considered giving up, he spotted a high knoll to the northwest. From the top they would be able to see for miles. Reining toward it, he brought his mount to a gallop.

  Flavius saw it too, and frowned. “Here we go again,” he muttered under his breath.

  They were sixty yards out when Davy detected movement at the knoll’s base. Small animals, scores of them, were scurrying for cover. Some stood erect on two legs and whistled shrilly, a warning, he figured, for the whole colony.

  The ground around the knoll was dotted with mounds of earth and more holes than a man could count. Davy slowed so his horse would not step in one of them. He could ill afford to have his horse break its leg.

  Flavius’s interest perked. He’d never seen any critters like these before. “What the blazes are they? Rats?”

  “They look more like squirrels to me,” Davy said.

  But as they drew closer, it was apparent they were both off the mark. The animals were shorter than squirrels and thicker than rats. Their tails were similar to those of chipmunks, only longer. They would shake them when alarmed, then hold them stiff and straight when scampering into their burrows.

  Flavius chuckled. “Look at ’em go! They sort of remind me of my kin when the supper bell is rung. You never saw so much pushing and shoving.”

  Dismounting, Davy walked in among the dens. Every last animal had disappeared. A small head popped out of a hole a few yards away and just as promptly dropped from sight when the creature spied him. Its ears, Davy noticed, were like a squirrel’s, only shorter, the fur fine and grayish.

  “I bet they’d be downright tasty,” Flavius commented. His stomach, as always, rumbled at the mention of food. “What say we kill five or ten for our supper?”

  “You’d have to dig them out, and all we have to dig with are our hands,” Davy noted. Sinking onto a knee, he peered into one of the burrows. It wound down into the bowels of the earth. “Would take us forever.”

  Flavius stepped to another hole and bent. “Maybe not,” he said, imagining one of the critters roasted to a fine turn and garnished with wild onions. His mouth watered. “We could at least try.” He stuck his nose close to the opening—and nearly jumped out of his skin.

  A squat, broad face was inches from his own. Large unblinking eyes regarded him coldly. Flavius was so startled that he stiffened and made a stab for one of the two pistols that adorned the wide belt at his waist. “Land sakes alive!” he blurted.

  Davy came over. The fattest toad he had ever beheld stared calmly up at them. It was so fat, it nearly plugged the hole. “There’s your supper,” he joked.

  Flavius had momentarily lost his appetite. Toads and frogs and snakes and such were some of the few things he wouldn’t eat. Truth was, creepy-crawly critters had scared the bejeebers out of him since he was knee-high to a nanny goat. “Not on your life!” he said. “That thing is ugly enough to gag a maggot.”

  Chuckling, Davy headed for the crest. He was halfway through the rodent village when suddenly a loud rattling noise broke out almost under his moccasins. The sorrel whinnied and shied, nearly yanking him off his feet before he could clamp hold of the bridle.

  “Look out!” Flavius cried. Coiled at the mouth of a den was a big, da
rk rattlesnake, its scaly rattles quivering like a leaf in the wind. Flavius brought up his rifle.

  “No!” Davy said, holding perfectly still. A shot would carry for miles, and there was no telling who might hear. Hostile tribes abounded on the plains.

  The rattler might as well have been carved from stone. Other than its tail, it was motionless.

  “You’re taking an awful chance,” Flavius whispered. He had the snake dead in his sights. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger.

  “No,” Davy repeated, praying the sorrel would not act up again.

  The reptile abruptly shifted, and Davy saw a large bulge a third of the way down its body. It dawned on him that the snake must hunt the little squirrel-like creatures and have swallowed one not long ago. In which case it might be more inclined to crawl off to digest its meal than to attack.

  The next moment the rattler proved Davy right by curling sinuously over its own body and slithering into a burrow. For a while they could hear the eerie crackle of its rattles, then there was welcome silence.

  “We’d best keep our eyes skinned for more,” Flavius said anxiously. The prospect of accidentally treading on a snake covered him with goose bumps. He’d rather wrestle a painter barehanded.

  Davy nodded and walked higher. More careful from then on, he was almost to the end of the colony when swift motion to his right drew his attention to yet another animal the likes of which he had never seen before. This one resembled a weasel, but it had a tan coat and was black around the eyes. It also had a young rodent in its blood-flecked mouth. He lifted a hand to point it out to Flavius, but the thing disappeared down a hole with the quickness of thought.

  Davy had to grin. Two new animals in two minutes. The day was looking up. Given that it was the shank of the afternoon, he hoped his luck would hold and they would spot some buffalo once they reached the top of the knoll.

  As hills went, it was right puny. Only a hundred feet high, if that. Yet it towered over the surrounding flatland, so much so that when Davy gained the flat crown and paused, he was astounded by how far he could see. Even more riveting were the beasts grazing in a winding basin below and on the prairie beyond.

  Davy had found his buffalo. He began to count them but stopped at two dozen. There had to be hundreds, strung out over half a mile or more, foraging contentedly on the sweet grass. Nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for the wonder of the experience. He’d been told they were huge, but he had not grasped exactly how huge.

  They were enormous. Mighty, hairy brutes, as tall as a man at the shoulder, some probably weighing upward of two thousand pounds. Wicked curved horns framed massive, bony heads. Back in Tennessee, black bears had been the biggest animals around. Yet the buffalo dwarfed them.

  Close to the knoll a bull was rolling on its back in a circular depression, caking himself with mud. Davy did not understand where the mud came from until he saw a different bull in another depression urinate on the dirt to moisten it, then roll around as the first one was doing.

  For the life of him, Davy could not guess why they did it. Maybe it was for relief from the flies that swarmed over them like miniature dark clouds.

  He saw many bulls, young and old. He saw cows. He saw calves. It boggled his brain to think that he was looking at enough meat on the hoof to feed the entire population of Tennessee for a whole winter.

  Flavius was equally dazzled, and not a little frightened, besides. He could not help but wonder what would happen if the buffalo realized they were there. Would the bulls come after them? Maybe the herd would stampede. Fingering his rifle, he whispered, “Let’s light a shuck while we can. I wouldn’t want to rile those critters.”

  “Not so fast,” Davy said, squatting. He was in no rush to spoil the moment. It made all the hardships they had endured along the way worthwhile.

  As a boy, one of Davy’s chief delights had been to roam the countryside just for the sake of seeing what he could see. He’d wandered near and far, covering more territory than most grown men. Always, the lure of the unknown had beckoned him on. It was safe to say that if he had not fallen in love and been forced to settle down, he might have wound up in California.

  Not that Davy regretted either of his marriages. His first wife, Polly Finley, had been a precious darling who abided his quirks better than any man had any right to expect. It had devastated him when she died. For long months his soul had been in torment, a hurt soothed only when he met Elizabeth Patton, who was recovering from the loss of her first husband in the Creek War.

  They were drawn together by their mutual grief, and their bond had grown from friendship to romance to wedlock in short order. Although each had children from their previous marriages, they were working heartily on a new crop.

  Davy thought of his family now, and how much he missed them. Maybe Flavius was right, he mused. Maybe it was high time they bent their steps homeward. Elizabeth was a forgiving woman, but she might not take kindly to his being gone for so long when there were so many mouths to feed.

  A grunt from close at hand brought an end to Davy’s reverie. Glancing to his right, he was taken aback to see a bull buffalo not thirty feet away, lower down on the slope. It was regarding him intently, its head cocked, its nostrils widening.

  “Don’t move!” Davy cautioned his friend.

  Flavius turned in the direction his partner was looking, but his horse blocked his view. Thinking that it must be another rattlesnake, he took a step past the dun, then felt his veins turn to ice. It was all he could do to keep from snapping off a shot. “Lordy!” he exhaled. “What if that monster gets his dander up? Let’s light out while we can!”

  “Hush!” Davy whispered as the bull took a few lumbering paces toward them, its broad back rippling with muscle, its horns glinting dully in the sunlight. He’d heard it said that full-grown bulls could bowl over a horse and rider with ease, and now that he had encountered one up close, he readily believed it.

  Petrified, Flavius felt his palms dampen with sweat even as his mouth went dry. He licked his lips and wished the stupid animal would go elsewhere.

  Instead, the bull stalked closer. It acted uncertain, tossing its head to better catch the breeze that fortunately was blowing from it to them and not the other way around. Snorting, it angled to the right until it stood between them and the herd proper.

  Davy got the impression that this was an older animal, a sentry of sorts. Other old bulls ringed the perimeter of the herd, a first line of defense against marauding wolves and grizzlies, as well as roving human hunters.

  For tense moments the outcome hung in the balance. The bull stopped sniffing and cropped some grass, leading Davy to conclude that the danger was past. The bull soon lost interest and moseyed off.

  Just then, at the far end of the black mass, a commotion erupted. Yips and whoops rent the air. Figures on horseback appeared, streaking across the prairie toward the buffalo.

  Appalled, Davy saw the herd break into motion, like a wave spawned by a stiff wind, sweeping eastward in a roiling mass of flying hooves and bobbing heads. Eastward, straight at the knoll.

  “Oh, God!” Flavius wailed, forgetting himself.

  “Ride like a bat out of hell!” Davy directed, suiting his actions to his words. As he vaulted onto the sorrel, the bull below them bellowed angrily, lowered its wide head, and raced toward them as if fired from a cannon. For something so huge, it moved incredibly fast.

  Davy reined to the right to flee, then saw that his friend was in trouble. Flavius had hooked a foot in a stirrup and had a hand on his saddle, but the dun had spooked and was running in small circles, forcing poor Flavius to bounce alongside it like an oversize jackrabbit.

  In another few seconds the bull would be on them. Davy cut to the left and hollered to draw the bull’s attention away from his friend. It took the bait, slanting toward him while huffing and puffing like a runaway steam engine.

  Davy flapped his legs and lashed the reins, goading the sorrel into breakneck flight. The bul
l gained rapidly, drawing closer and closer, so close that one of its horns swatted the sorrel’s tail. It was a hand’s width from the horse’s hindquarters when the sorrel, in a burst of speed, pulled slightly ahead.

  Bending low to the sorrel’s neck, Davy glanced over his shoulder to check on Flavius. The last sight he had before his mount swept around the slope and down the far side was of Flavius keeling backward. He had to get back there and lend a hand before the stampeding herd reached the knoll.

  But for the moment, it taxed Davy to merely stay alive. The bull was holding its own and showed no sign of giving up the chase anytime soon. Snorting noisily, the animal sent clods of dirt flying in its wake.

  Davy tightened his grip on his rifle, which he had named Liz in honor of his second wife. In the distance he could hear thunder rolling across the grassland. Only it wasn’t thunder. It was the drum of countless heavy hooves, growing louder second by second.

  As much as Davy hated to stray far from Flavius, his sole hope in eluding the bull lay in reaching the level land below, where the sorrel’s stamina would stand him in good stead. Accordingly, he reined down the knoll, hell-bent for leather for the high grass.

  Too late, Davy discovered that he had blundered. He was making for the rodent village, and there was no time to avoid it.

  A single misstep might cost him not only the sorrel but also his life.

  Heart in his mouth, Davy raced in among the holes and mounds. Almost immediately the sorrel’s left foreleg came down dangerously near a burrow. Dirt cascaded from under the hoof, but the leg did not slide in.

  Davy straightened so he would have a better chance of avoiding the dens. There were so many, though, that it was impossible for him to spot them all in advance. No sooner would he cut to the right or left to avoid one than another would materialize in his path. To make matters worse, something slid out from under the sorrel’s front legs, inciting it to bound to one side as if it had springs on its legs. In landing, a rear hoof lodged in a hole. Davy braced for the crack of bone he was sure would ensue, but the horse pulled free with hardly any effort.