Her shadow animated and distorted on the skins behind her—like a demon herself, she thought—White Fox parted the girl’s lips carefully with one hand, poured the bluish liquid with the other. The barely conscious girl, blotched and awash with perspiration, coughed weakly as it went down. A hmmm came from her throat, then, as soothing liquid settled in.
Capping the bottle and setting it on the ground, White Fox eased under the child, slender fingers combing through tangled hair. As the fire burned lower and the sun rose higher she dosed the girl again. This time the girl swallowed of her own accord. The sounds of the settlement were muffled, seemed far away. Exhausted, White Fox shut her eyes, allowed her head to sink until her strong chin fell to her chest.
* * *
It was dark in the tepee, bright outside, the painted face of the fox on the outside seeming to stare down and watch over the occupants. There was no noise inside, no movement, save for small breaths until a soft voice caused White Fox to start. The girl was looking up, her eyes clear and wide. The woman smiled down at her and was met with a tiny, healthy grin.
“Did you have a nice rest?” White Fox asked.
The oval face nodded. She understood. She was Cheyenne. The medicine woman touched a cloth to the remnants of sweat from the broken fever, saw the spots that were already fading. “Can you tell me your name?”
t she said, pointing.
“Blessing Medicine?” White Fox said, following the finger. The girl was pointing to the jar. “Oh yes. Yes. This is the medicine that blessed your life and returned it to us.”
The girl’s smile widened. she repeated, turning the finger toward herself.
White Fox was uplifted. Raised and touched by innocence in a way she had not been for too, too long. “You will have a new name,” she agreed. “But—your parents? Your tribe?”
The girl shook her head.
“Were you in migration? Your tribe?”
Another shake of the small head.
“Lost?” White Fox asked.
The girl shook her head again.
“Were you carrying things?” the woman asked.
The girl nodded. White Fox felt her heart tear in two. She had been sent away. Possibly to avoid sickness from the other settlement. Perhaps to escape a conflict between the Cheyenne and the Arapaho. The tribes, long allied, had been fighting for territory of late as settlers seized their lands. It was the inevitable result of the failure of Red Cloud’s War, a recent and foredoomed struggle between American Pony Soldiers and braves of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations. The Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud struck in response to miners, but the struggle flowed south and spread and soon turned brave against brave as they competed for a limited amount of game and land. Blessing Medicine could have been sent away or hidden by her parents to escape capture by Lakota or Arapaho.
“Blessing Medicine,” White Fox said. “It is very, very fitting.”
The camp was still . . . too still. It told her that only the ill and the healers were here, the men having departed.
“Blessing Medicine,” the woman continued, “I want to ask you something. Something important. All right?”
The girl nodded with a little more enthusiasm now, having been addressed by her new name.
“When you came to us, brought by the constable Firecrow, you spoke of Hávêsévemâhta’sóoma. The Demon. Do you recall?”
The girl shook her head.
“Let me try and help you,” White Fox said, wiggling her nose at the girl, getting her to laugh a little. “You told us you saw someone who was half a man, but also half a gun. Does that—”
“Yes, I saw him,” she said in a musical little voice.
“Can you tell me?”
She pointed to the tepee. “Like that.”
White Fox followed the skinny little finger. “Like—deerskin?”
The girl tittered a little. “No. On it.”
On it. White Fox was puzzled until her eyes settled on the fox that Spirit Eyes had rendered on the skin. “Tell me more,” she urged.
“He scared me.”
“Did he move or say anything?”
“No,” the girl said. “And he was like my father’s great father when we found him in his blanket, gone from his body. He had no color.”
And then White Fox understood. The girl had not seen John Bishop. She had not seen the man at all. Before hiding in the rotted log, she had seen something else, something far deadlier than the man with the gun-arm.
* * *
The carthorse was grazing and White Fox did not want to take him. He had done his work for the day. Armed with a blanket, her club, and her knife, and a half-full deerskin water pouch slung over a shoulder, she went to the small corral and then to the tent of Young Bear, a bold youth in his tenth year, still shy of proficiency but with a magnificent painted.
“I wish to borrow your horse,” she told the sulking boy who was squatting nearby and chipping stone for arrows.
“To go where?” he asked, eyeing her hands full of weapon.
“Did you see the war party?”
He stopped chipping, nodded glumly.
“Headed east?”
He nodded again.
“I must go to meet them, quickly,” she informed him, already moving past him back to where the animal stood nuzzling another mount.
“Take me,” he said, rising and putting his shoulders back.
“You will slow me,” she said, adding critically, “as you do now.”
She hurried on, the boy running after her. “I can fight!” he insisted over a shaking fist.
White Fox ducked under the single log rail, threw the blanket on the horse. “I do not need a fighter,” she said, hooking the knife to her belt and pulling herself onto the painted by the dark mane.
“But you go to join the war party!”
“No,” she replied. “I go stop them!”
With a deep, firm “Hyaah! ” White Fox wheeled the horse to the east with a strong, certain pull on its mane and heeled it in the ribs. The animal neighed, stopped, stood its ground, and got the two heels again, harder. Twice. With a whinny it bolted forward, responded to a pull to leap the fence, and kicked up a cloud of dust as it galloped away, leaving the sullen boy holding his flint and standing bony-shouldered in the late morning sun.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
No Man’s Land
Loping. That was the word that best described Avery’s day.
He loped from the room to an office to a staircase to a buckboard. The horse came loping from the makeshift stable that used to be a large storage shed, from the looks of the axes and shovels and other rusted implements still hanging from the wall. There were over thirty animals in all, fed by a man who forked hay from one to the other to the next. Avery could have kicked himself. His instincts had been right when he first asked Weiber-Krauss about horses. He thought back to the riders who came to town with ponies to sell to “some European” who had purchased the mine buildings and planned to turn them into a ranch. He had never been able to find out anything about the man, because all the documents on file were with a shipping concern in Germany. He had never been able to ride out here because the property was private and he had no cause to obtain a warrant.
Avery could not get out of there fast enough. He knew all these implements well, and from this very bloody mine. And finally, after the man in the marshal’s uniform was carried to the cart, blanketed and sweating, and placed beside a sack of food and a water barrel, Avery loped to the step-up, sat, and with a map handed him by Cavanaugh, started loping to the road.
“You didn’t look at your chart,” the Confederate sailor noted.
“I know the way to Fort Collins, friend,” Avery insisted.
“You sure? You took a good blow on the head.”
“I’m seein’ a little bleary-eyed on my left side,” the man acknowledged. “Didn’t affect my memory.”
“Good to know,” the Southerner said. “Because you know that Weiber-
Krauss meant what he told you.”
“I remember everything he told me,” Avery replied. “Loyalty, rewards.”
“Right. Don’t think for yourself.”
“Never do,” the man replied. That was what got him into trouble in New York. Shaking down one too many establishments, thinking his fellow Municipals would support him instead of concluding they could have more themselves if he were gone.
Cavanaugh backward-leaped to the ground as Avery loped on. He didn’t ask about it, didn’t say anything, but he noticed that there was no one new at the mine office. He had seen Smith and Weiber-Krauss outside, had waved to them but got no return, and suspected that the men they were waiting for did not arrive. If they were out hunting John Bishop, as Avery had surmised, he was not surprised. That was one of the reasons he did not give too much thought to the possible loss of his other meal ticket. Bishop hated this about him, but Avery had recognized the value in having feet in both camps of a struggle. Whoever came out on top, he’d be right there bringing the other foot into alignment.
The sun felt good on his bald, throbbing skull. Even the clouds above had a lope to them, drifting in the way he was headed, company. They were certainly livelier than the man on his back, who didn’t make a sound. Cavanaugh had told him to water the man’s mouth once every hour, as though he were a houseplant. He was to pour the water and massage his throat so he didn’t choke or drown but swallowed.
Avery would mark the time with the sun. It would take him at least until the late afternoon to reach the fort; he would certainly be there by dusk.
* * *
The plains sun was hot, but Avery knew it was not that hot. He reached around to ladle water from the barrel, poured it over his head. He noticed, then, that his passenger was shivering with dark spots forming on his face.
“You ain’t healin’,” he said. Spoken aloud, the words carried a frisson of concern. It gave him his first hint that either the medicine was not working—or it was not medicine.
He kicked that thought from his mind. Booted it hard. This was just a kind of cycling-through something, getting the disease so it could be cured. He loped on, pausing to cut himself bread from the loaf they had given him, slapping on a thin slab of the boiled ham they had included as well. He was perspiring and the thought of a salty lunch sounded right. The plain was flat, a well-worn straight ribbon of dirt leading to distant mountains in whose foothills—like those he had recently departed—lay the fort. To the south of them, Cheyenne territory. There was no path in that direction. No one from the mine or from the town had a reason to go that way.
He chewed loudly, which seemed to enhance the taste. Avery had thought that hunger was the reason he had been feeling a little faint. When the ham didn’t improve his condition he decided it had to be the sun and took another ladle of water, this time to drink. Halting the horse, he slid from the seat to relieve himself. He watered a scorpion, as much to keep it back as to keep from wetting his boot; he was dizzy. Climbing back on, Avery filled his mouth with the last of the meat and leaned back to see if there was something he could use to cover his head. He was annoyed that he hadn’t thought to ask for a hat.
He reached for the blanket to see if the marshal were wearing a neckerchief.
He was, a yellow one. It was stained through with perspiration. But that wasn’t what arrested Avery’s attention. The man was now covered with pocks, with pox it seemed to him.
“The bloody maniacs,” he muttered. He was still chewing the last of the ham and flecks flew. He swallowed, trying to get his suddenly scattered mind to make sense of this. To give this man a fatal disease and then not monitor the cure? How was that any kind of research?
The feeling of discomfort rose, along with the beat of Avery’s heart. He couldn’t fathom reasons. He couldn’t concentrate hard enough, woozy in the seat, to try to fathom reasons. His passenger needed medical help. Prompt attention. He shook the weathered reins hard, lurched back as the horse moved, and while he was leaning back searched around for a buggy whip. There was one behind him, halfway under the marshal. Avery used extended fingers to tickle the handle and pull it over; then he grabbed it, turned swinging, and snapped the horse to greater speed. He rocked back again, but this time had taken the precaution of bracing his fat palm on the seat back.
There had to be something at the fort, something Weiber knew could help. That was why he had been sent there. They had to be working together.
Sweat filled his eyes, stinging them, as Avery cracked the whip again, then fumbled it as he tried to put it on the seat. It fell and he left it, the horse swaying before him even though it was trotting straight.
“Go,” he told the animal quietly. “You just go.”
And then the sun and clouds swirled together as he slumped over on the side of the bumping buckboard.
* * *
Bishop was up with the birds and on his way before the sun had done more than peek over the horizon. Reigniting the campfire, he caught a fish using thistle, as White Fox had shown him, the pink flower acting as bait. He gutted it with her knife, and while it cooked he changed into his dry clothes, stiff from the river but a better fit than Randy Coward’s wardrobe. Bishop did keep a bandolier he found on the man’s horse, slung it over his shoulder. He wouldn’t use the loops for shells. But he had an idea for a new medicine kit. It would be more efficient, he reasoned, if a doctor did not have to carry a bag, if tools and vials could be tucked in a strap. Bishop didn’t know, but he suspected this. Seeing his old drawings had rekindled that spark he once had. The spark of invention. It was a good feeling.
Bishop rode off, chewing casually on the lake trout, spitting its bones from the tip of his tongue.
There was no reason to rush. The ride would take a half-day at least and there was no reason to push the painted. He was enjoying the uncustomary quiet, the unchanging view, the sunny fleece above and the reasonably green grasses ahead. His thoughts were still rich with White Fox and their time here. Their connection enriched him. It may well have saved him. He let that, like the warm sun, roll around him as he rode.
He was hungry again shortly after noon, and used the hatchet to dig out a rabbit warren. He caught the male, broke its back, and cooked it over a fire he built in a natural circle of rock. The painted chewed grass, occasionally looking to the west as though wondering where his mistress had gone. Bishop had removed his rig, relaxing his shoulder along with the rest of himself before he set out.
It was shortly after his meal that Bishop noticed the line of braves coming toward him. He counted ten in the wavering heat that hovered near to the ground. They weren’t just riding. They were heading. They were not pushing hard, but they were moving quickly enough to suggest a mission. A purpose.
The purpose might be him, though he could not understand why Cheyenne, to whom White Fox would have brought the medicine, would mean him any harm.
But Indians were strange. It was easy to rile them with a good deed that insulted their manhood or interrupted a ceremony or diminished a shaman who felt that healing was his job and his alone. Bishop did not understand Indians, and he did not understand very many women. It was his misfortune to be able to read mostly people who wanted to kill or exploit him.
He tried not to think the worst. They might be a welcoming party sent by the tribe to escort him to the settlement. It was not. It was the worst. The men were painted for war. Red lines across their upper arms. White lines down the face. Full array of warbonnets.
There was not enough time to slip into the rig, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Though he could cut them all down in moments, he did not want to do anything belligerent if it wasn’t necessary. He had the hatchet and he had the knife and he had Randy Coward’s Remington. All were within easy reach. Bishop rose to face them, walking over and taking the reins of the painted so it would not be spooked.
Bishop stood on the side of the horse facing the Indians. He wanted to show them he was not afraid. He did not have to hide behin
d the horse of a squaw. He remained in place, sucking rabbit grease from his gums as he waited. He did not like what the men did next. The line widened, arced, and they came around in a wide circle. Bishop did not look around, did not watch them. The leader was the one in the middle, the brave who continued to ride straight toward him as the circle closed behind him. Bishop kept an unyielding gaze on that man.
“You,” the man spoke when he was about fifteen yards distant. “Bishop.”
“Yes. I’m Bishop.”
“You kill many.”
“You do not bring me fresh rain,” Bishop said, the closest expression the Cheyenne had to “news.”
“You kill many Cheyenne.”
“No.”
“They die in the settlements, in their tepee.”
“That’s not my doing,” Bishop said. “I am a medicine man—good medicine. That is bad spirits. Not me.”
“You!” the man said again. “Little girl see you. Spread sickness.”
“I don’t know what little girl you’re talking about and I do not spread sickness.” Bishop wondered just how thorough this campaign against him must be if the perpetrators had poisoned the Indians against him as well as the fort.
“You will come with me,” he said.
“I know you,” Bishop said as the man was finally close enough. “You are the constable. Firecrow. Your friend is my friend, White Fox. I helped her get medicine for your people.”
“She brought it. Not you.”
“I had other business.”
“You will come with me.”
“Where? Why?”
“To the tribe, the elders.”
“I was headed there anyway,” Bishop told him. “If you’ll just let me get my things—”
“No things,” Firecrow insisted. He threw a hand toward the rig. “It stays.”
“It does not stay,” Bishop replied firmly.
“You come now ! Mount!”
Bishop shook his head. “Firecrow, we don’t have to scuffle over this. We want the same thing. But the rig comes with me.”
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