by John Jakes
The wind dried the sweat gathering in Charles’s beard. Magee crept closer, to the opposite side of the door. Charles held up three fingers, then silently mouthed the count. On three, he leaped in front of the door and booted it. Some huge heavy thing hurtled from the darkness straight at his face. He fired twice.
The echoes of the shots sank into the storm’s rumble. Magee’s eye followed the bird that had swooped away above Charles’s head, almost knocking his hat off. “Gray Owl’s helper.”
The owl vanished into the dark roiling mass of cloud. With one hand over the other on his Colt, Charles jumped inside the sod house. He smelled the residual odor of tobacco smoke beneath the stronger smell of the ashes. Someone had indeed splashed water on the fire; he saw the bucket. Everything pointed to a quick departure. Who knew the reason?
He put the revolver away. “Tell Gray Owl to bring up the horses. We might as well shelter here until the storm’s over.”
Magee nodded and left. There was no need to say anything. Charles’s discouragement was evident.
The rain fell, hammering torrents of it. They broke up an old chair and relit the fire. It provided some light but didn’t do much to relieve the pervasive damp. The horses neighed loudly and often. The lightning was bright, the thunder-peals deafening.
Gray Owl squatted in a corner with his blanket drawn around him. He looked years older. Or perhaps Charles thought so because he felt that way himself. He gnawed on jerky and watched Magee practicing shuffles and cuts with an old deck.
They’d been searching for two and a half weeks. They’d circled southwest to avoid Camp Supply and had found this house on Wolf Creek. Charles had hoped to question the occupants but whoever they were, they had made an abrupt departure, which made him nervous.
The steady rain deepened his discouragement. It fell hour after hour. Coming down so heavily, it would flood away any sign that might have helped them. Not that they had found much so far, beyond the inevitable tracks of Army detachments on patrol. If there were other human beings round about, perhaps white men trading illegally, this house was the first indication.
Charles lay awake long after the fire went out. His mind kept turning to images of his son, and imaginary ones in which Bent, pictured as Charles remembered him, murdered George Hazard’s wife and stole her earring. That detail more than any other filled him with enormous dread. Years ago, in Texas, Bent was marginally sane. Not even that could be said now.
They discovered in the morning that two of the horses had snapped their tethers and escaped.
The storm lasted until noon, flooding low spots and carving new gullies. As they prepared to leave the sod house Charles noticed Magee’s face. Saddling his horse, the black man looked gloomy, which wasn’t like him.
Gray Owl approached with a certain deference. “How much longer do we search?”
“Until I say otherwise.”
“There is no trail to follow. The man and boy could have gone anywhere. Or turned back.”
“I know that, but I just can’t give up. You go back if you want.” There was no resentment in his voice.
“No. But Magee, it is not easy for him to be away.” Puzzled, Charles waited. “He has a squaw now. A good Delaware woman whose husband died.”
“Until he tells me he wants to go back, we’re going on. All three of us.”
Gray Owl felt pain for his friend. The pursuit was futile. Not even the cleverest tracker could find a man and a child when the trail was so old and the country so huge and full of hiding places.
One misty morning in a stand of pines—on the ninth of April, by Charles’s careful count of the days—the three men stood with hands muzzling the fretful horses while, not a hundred feet away, three troops of cavalry trotted by in a shallow creek. They were Kansas state troops, probably some of the Nineteenth Volunteer Cavalry old Crawford had raised and brought in to support Sherman. Gray Owl’s pony tossed his head free and whinnied. Charles cursed under his breath. A yellow-haired lieutenant, a pink-faced farmer boy, glanced sharply to the misty pines. He pulled his horse out of the column and sat staring at the trees. Charles prayed a clumsy wordless prayer. The farmer boy on horseback chewed his lip, doubtful about what he’d heard because the horses and men in the column were quite noisy. He tugged his rein and rode on. In five minutes the splashing stopped; the water flowed calmly again; the troopers were gone.
April brought the crows and the redbirds. Any shower brought a profusion of hoptoads afterward. The sweet blooming fecundity of the spring embittered Charles unreasonably. He slept deeply at night, and had many dreams. He had never felt so tired or hopeless. Conversation among the three men had long ago diminished to the minimum necessary to convey a question or the day’s plan.
One morning, early, they spied the distant mass of the southern buffalo herd, returning north with the warm weather. They rode hard and reached the herd in two hours. They killed one cow, gorged themselves on fresh roasted meat, and packed all they would be able to eat before spoilage. Buzzards kept them company, awaiting their departure.
The ride to the buffalo reminded Charles again of the vastness of the Territory. A whole army corps could be maneuvering and they might miss it. He’d convinced himself that he could search the Territory as you’d search a room. He was desperate; he had to think that way. Now he saw the foolishness of it. He was thinking more realistically. That befitted a man who’d partnered with the Jackson Trading Company, but it whittled away his hope.
The mood of his companions didn’t help. Magee was morose because of the Delaware woman, and Gray Owl because he couldn’t guide them with any success. He was failing in his life’s purpose.
They rode for hours without speaking, each man sunk into himself. The Wichitas rose in the south like monuments in a flat field. Wending across the lower slopes of the western side, they found abundant sign. A large number of Indians had pitched their tipis about a week ago. So many Indians—several hundred by Charles’s estimate—that time and weather had not yet been able to erase all the traces.
After they camped that night, Charles went searching on foot in the sparkling dewy morning. He discovered a rusted trade kettle which he picked up and pressed with his thumb, immediately making a hole in the thin rust. It was an impoverished village that had camped here.
Gray Owl trudged up. “Come see this,” he said.
Charles followed him down to the base of the peak to a set of travois pole tracks that had survived. He knelt to study them. Between the pole tracks he saw the prints of wide moccasined feet. He brushed his fingers lightly over one print, half obliterating it. The print belonged to a woman, and a heavy one; no man would pull a travois.
Charles pushed his black hat back and said what Gray Owl already knew. “There are no more dogs. They’ve eaten them. They’re starving. They didn’t move because they wanted to; they’re in flight. From here they could logically go south. Or west, to Texas. Maybe all the way into the llano.”
Gray Owl knew the llano—the staked plains; a scrubby, inhospitable wilderness. “West,” he said, nodding.
They rode with a little more energy. Here at last was a large group of people, one or more of whom might have seen a white man and a boy. Charles knew the odds against it but at least it was a crumb. Until now, they’d been starving.
The sign of so large a migration was easy to follow. They tracked the village to the North Fork of the Red, then northwestward along it for a day and a half. Suddenly there was confusing sign. The remains of another encampment and, across the river, trampled hoof-marked earth, which showed that a second large body of Indians had joined the first.
Gray Owl left for a day, scouting north and east. He returned at a gallop. “All moved east from here,” he said. His skin was free of sweat despite his blanket and the hot spring day.
Magee used his nail to scratch bird droppings from his derby. “Don’t make sense. The forts are east.”
“Nevertheless, that is the way.”
Charles had a hunch. �
��Let’s go up the river a while. Let’s see if all of them rode east.”
Next morning they found a campsite where perhaps thirty lodges had stood. The day after that, they found the grandfather.
He was resting in cottonwoods with a few possessions from his medicine bundle—feathers, a claw, a pipe—spread around him. The malevolent odor of a chancred leg seeped from under his buffalo robe. He was old, his skin like wrinkled brown wrapping paper. He knew his death was imminent and showed no fear of the oddly assorted trio. Gray Owl questioned him.
His name was Strong Bird. He told them the reason for the great migration eastward. Some six hundred Cheyennes under chiefs Red Bear, Gray Eyes, and Little Robe had decided to surrender to the soldiers at Camp Wichita rather than die of starvation or face the bullets of the soldiers of General Creeping Panther, who was roaming the Territory sweeping up bands of resisters. The grandfather was part of a group that had bolted with Red Bear after he changed his mind about surrendering.
“Thirty lodges,” he said, his eyes fluttering shut, his voice reedy. “They are eating their horses now.”
“Where, Grandfather?” Gray Owl asked.
“They meant to push up the Sweet Water. Whether they did, I don’t know. I know your face, don’t I? You belong to the People.”
Gray Owl seemed heavily burdened. “Once long ago.”
“Age has rotted my flesh. I could not keep up. I asked them to leave me, whether or not the soldiers found me. Will you help me die?”
They hewed down branches and fashioned a burial platform in one of the strongest cottonwoods. Charles carried the old man up to it, with Magee bracing him below. He could barely stand the stench but he got the grandfather settled with his few possessions and left him with warm sun shining on his old face, which was composed and even showed a drowsy smile.
As they rode out, Gray Owl said, “It was a generous thing to help him to the Hanging Road. It was not the deed of the man they named Cheyenne Charlie. The man who wanted to kill many.”
“There’s only one I want now,” Charles said. “I think our luck’s changed. I think we’re going to find him.”
That was his blind hope speaking again. But the sunshine and the springtime buoyed him, and so did the possibility that Red Bear’s band of holdouts might have seen a white man. Gray Owl warned Charles and Magee that Red Bear, now a village chief, was formerly a fierce Red Shield Society chief, which no doubt explained why he’d balked at giving up along with the others.
They found the village far up the Sweet Water’s right bank. The Cheyennes made no effort to hide themselves. Cooking fires smoked the sky at midday and from a rise, through his spyglass, Charles saw several men with raggy animal pelts on their heads shuffling in a great circle around the edge of the encampment. The wind brought the trackers the faint thumping of hand drums.
Magee used the spyglass. Uncharacteristically sharp, he said, “What they hell have they got to dance about? Aren’t they starving to death?”
“Massaum,” Gray Owl said.
“Talk English,” Magee said.
“That’s the name of the ceremony,” Charles said. “They put a painted buffalo skull in a trench to represent the day the buffalo came to earth, and the dancers pretend to be deer and elk and wolves and foxes. The ceremony is a plea for food. The old man said they’re starving.”
Magee rolled his tongue over his upper teeth. “Damn mad about it, too, I guess.”
“You don’t have to go in with me.”
“Oh, sure. I came this far to be a yellow dog, huh? That isn’t the kind of soldier somebody trained me to be.” Staring at Charles’s haggard eyes, at the long pointed beard nearly down to his stomach, Magee suddenly winced. “I’m sorry I sound sore. I just think all this is hopeless. Your boy’s gone, Charles.”
“No he isn’t,” Charles said. “Gray Owl? Go in or stay?”
“Go.” The tracker eyed the village, but not in a comfortable way. “First, load all the guns.”
It was a splendid balmy day. The wrong sort of day for the tragedy of a lost son or a starving belly. The wind floated fluffy clouds overhead and the clouds cast majestic slow-sailing shadows. In and out of the shadows, in single file, the three rode in the Z pattern Jackson had taught Charles.
One of the pelt-clad dancers was first to spy them. He pointed and raised a cry. The drumming stopped. Men and women and children surged toward the side of the camp nearest the strangers. The men were middle-aged or elderly; the warriors were undoubtedly off somewhere searching for food. Well before Charles was within hailing distance, he saw the sun flashing from the metal heads of lances and the blades of knives. He also saw that no dogs frolicked anywhere. The tipis were weathered and torn. There was an air of despair about the village beside the Sweet Water.
The wind still blew in their faces. Charles smelled offal, smoke, and sour bodies. He didn’t like all the gaunt angry faces lining up behind the dancers, or the truculent expression of the stout old warrior who strode out to meet them with his eight-foot red lance and his round red buffalo-hide shield. The horns of his headdress were red but faded; he had distinguished himself in war many winters past.
Charles held his hand palm outward and spoke in their language.
“We are peaceful.”
“You are hunters?”
“No. We are searching for a small boy, my son.” That touched off whispers among some of the grandmothers. Magee caught it too, raising an eyebrow. Those starved old women with their watering eyes acted as if they knew who Charles was talking about. “May we come into the village a while?”
Chief Red Bear thrust his shield out. “No. I know that man beside you. He turned his face from the People to go and help the white devils of the forts. I know you, Gray Owl,” he exclaimed, shaking his shield and lance. One of the dancers with a scrap of pelt on his head sank to a half-crouch, his knife moving in a small provocative circle.
“You are soldiers,” the chief said.
“We are not, Red Bear—” Gray Owl began.
The chief pointed his lance at the trackers and shouted: “Soldiers. Call Whistling Snake from the Massaum lodge.”
Magee brought up his Spencer from the saddle where he’d been resting it. “Don’t,” Charles said in English. “One shot and they’ll tear us up.”
“ ’Pears they’ll do it anyway.” There was a slight quaver in Magee’s voice; Charles feared that what he said was so. More than a hundred people confronted them. In terms of physical strength each of the Cheyennes was no match. Hunger had shrunk them and age enfeebled them. Numerically, however, they had the fight won before it started.
“Do you know this Whistling Snake?” Charles asked Gray Owl.
“Priest,” Gray Owl replied, almost inaudibly. “Ugly face. As a young man he scarred his own flesh with fire to show his magical powers. Even chiefs like Red Bear fear him. This is very bad.”
Small boys darted forward to pat the horses. The animals sidestepped nervously, hard to control. Indian mothers chuckled and nudged one another, eyeing the trackers as if they were so much contract beef. Charles didn’t know what to do. He had bet on having an ace facedown and turned over a trey.
One last try. “Chief Red Bear, I repeat, we only wish to ask if anyone in your village has seen a white man traveling with a small—”
The crowd parted like a cloven sea. There was a great communal sigh of awe and dread. The old camp chief’s gaze was curiously taunting. Along the dirt lane fouled with human waste came the priest, Whistling Snake.
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
April, 1869. The school has a new globe, a world map for the wall, eight student desks to replace the homemade ones. A party of distinguished Connecticut educators plans to visit next month. Prudence insists we must clean and refurbish the place.
The rasp of the mill saws and the rattle of the mining carts I hear amidst the sweet noise of house construction remind me that we can afford windows to replace the schoolhouse shutters. Andy will
glaze them. Prudence and I and one or two of the youngsters can do the other tasks at night. It is suitable work for lonely women: demanding, tiring. Prudence, strong as a teamster, grows a little stouter every month. Though she still quotes her favorite passage from Romans, I now detect a sadness in her eyes. I think she knows she will remain a spinster. As I will remain a widow. To work until the body aches is the best medicine for the loneliness that seems to be one of God’s great blights on existence.
I share sadness of another kind with Jane. She told me that despite long effort she cannot conceive a child. Prudence, the Shermans, Orry’s dying as he did, senselessly—they are all linked somehow. Is it because they all testify that we are never guaranteed a happy life, only life itself? …
Encountered a man, young and poorly clothed, riding a white horse on the river road. He gave no greeting, though he stared as if he knew me. Despite his youth there was a cruel aspect to his face. He is no good-hearted Northerner come to inspect our school, I think. …
… Andy saw him this morning.
And again I met him. I hailed him. He charged his white horse at me as if to trample me down, forcing me to throw myself aside and take a bad tumble in the weeds. For one moment his face flashed by above me, a perfect study of hatred. …
… No sign of him for two days. I suspect and hope he has gone elsewhere, to terrorize others…
The small Negro cemetery overlooked the Ashley in the scrubs outside Charleston. The ground around the grave mounds was a musty carpet of brown decaying leaves. Bunches of wilted sunflowers and even a few brown dandelions lay on the graves; the place was poor, and poorly kept.
Des LaMotte knelt and prayed before a wooden marker from which he’d chiseled a shallow circular depression. Into this he had wedged a common-looking plate, chipped at many places on the edge and showing a long crack. On the marker, above the slave’s plate, he had carved an inscription.
JUBA
“thou hast been faithful
over a few things,
I will make thee ruler over many things”
Matt. 25,21