Dade didn’t want us along on this hunt. He’d made that quite clear to Jim and Spy while they were standing around the ruins of his mine.
“He says we purposely dawdled and misled him on the trail these past few days,” Jim said. “And by refusing to join Lenny in that damn fool attack on Owen up in the Sangre de Cristos, we ‘needlessly if not indeed maliciously brought about the death of my good friend and trusted secretário Monsieur Leonard LeNapier.’ He’s even considering pressing charges.”
Well, we could count on no further help from Lafcadio Dade in our business affairs; that was for sure. As for my dream rancho in California, forget it. …
“Dade’s still going to need a couple of days to pull his posse together,” I said. “We can get the jump on him if we start today.”
“If he doesn’t know where Owen’s headed,” Spy said, “he’ll probably go to his new mines in Colorado first off. He’s already sent riders ahead with warnings to the supervisors to take all precautions against more bombs. That’ll give us more time.”
With luck we could get to White Hart Hollow a week in advance of Dade’s gang, intercept Owen before he made his attack on the mine, rescue Jaime, and hustle them both out of that country—even if we had to overpower my brother and carry him off in chains to do so.
The sooner we left the better.
Plover was out at the stable, saddling horses.
“So, she’s coming with us,” Jim said.
“There’s no gainsaying her. The girls are coming as well.”
“You’ve allowed her to get too sassy,” he said. “Give a woman an inch; she’ll take a mile—no, two miles and half. Perhaps you should consider a brief course of the Plume treatment.”
He reached for the tomahawk at his belt.
“Goddamnit, cut it out.”
“Easy,” he said. “Aw, hell, I was a just young hothead in those days. Maybe I shouldn’t have clouted her. She was a good wife while it lasted. But you don’t have to worry about Plover and the girls slowing us down. Crow women travel well. They’re tough, these Indians. They’ve been wandering for longer than they can remember. I’ve known many a woman to give birth on the trail while the band’s on the move. The whole business is over in twenty minutes, wherewith she rejoins the main body as if nothing had happened. The kids start riding horseback when they can sit up. I’ve known some who could ride before they could walk. Esme’s not too young to learn. And I’ve watched Gwen ride. She’ll do.”
“Girls make better riders than men anyway,” Spy said. “They’re lighter, easier on the horse. As for fighting … well, look at Pine Leaf.” A point well taken, but perhaps the Quick Killer had carried that quality a bit too far. Still, Spy’s mentioning her renewed a worry, and gave me an idea.
“I assume she’s still out there, somewhere in the hills,” I said. “She’ll follow us up to White Hart Hollow.”
“No doubt about it,” Jim said.
“But on the way back to Santa Fe she allowed us to see her,” I told him. “It’s as if she’d like to approach us but doesn’t quite dare. You know how a horse that’s left the herd and run wild for a time is pulled by the sight of your horses but can’t quite get up the nerve to come in? Spy thinks Bar-che-am-pe may want to rejoin our merry band. Perhaps you could get her to do it. After all, you’re her old war chief and would-be husband. At least, if she’ll talk with you, we might be able to figure out her intentions in all this. I must admit I haven’t been sleeping well knowing she’s out there, not after having seen what she did to Lenny. And now with Plover and the girls along, well… What do you say?”
“She never really liked me,” Jim said. “But I guess I can try.”
PLOVER AND I made a quick dash down to the oficina to show Ros alinda what to do while we were gone. It only amounted to collecting payment from the gringo rancher, Eli Boardman, whose horses Spy had retrieved from the Apaches last week, and taking the names of any prospective new customers, explaining to them that we would be back in a month or six weeks. As we went back out to the buckboard, Plover saw her friend Doña Ana across the road. Doña Ana was a blind old Pueblo woman, a bruja and profeta who told fortunes. Plove only half believed her prophecies, which were all rosy at any rate, but paid her handsomely for them nonetheless. She felt sorry for the old dame, whose eyes had been put out by a brutal husband of hers whom she’d caught in flagrante delicto with another woman.
“I want to say good-bye to Doña Ana,” Plove said. “Come on over with me; let’s see what she says about this journey we’re about to undertake.”
“Ah, la Senora Griffit’,” said the old dame, all gums and winks and wrinkles. Tobacco juice had dried in the runnels of her sagging jowls, and sprouts like those on potatoes that have been too long sequestered grew from her witchy chin. “I knew you would come to consult me today, though I had expected you earlier. The baby has recovered from her illness as I predicted, no?”
Plove explained that we were about to depart on a hazardous journey to the north to save our son from a bandido and asked her to foretell the outcome.
Doña Ana sat there a moment, summoning up the proper gravity. “I knew your son was in grave peril, though I knew not the source. Your esposo is with you now; that I can feel,” she said at last. “I must place my hand on his brow to know what will transpire.”
“Kneel down before her,” Plover told me.
“Don’t be silly. This is stupid. Let’s just pay her something and get going.”
“Please, for me?” Plover asked.
I knelt. Doña Ana spit in her grubby palm and slapped it to my fore head. Tobacco-flavored spittle ran down my face and stung my eyes. Doña Ana seemed to go into a trance, then inhaled sharply in surprise. In a suddenly deep, throaty voice she intoned; “You will lose something precious to you—your life, perhaps, or your love? I see bodies lacquered in blood. Skulls green with mold. I see fire, strangulation by smoke, a heart lost in smoke, drifting away on the smoky horses. Do not undertake this journey. It is fraught with peril—a jornada del muerto
When I arose, Plover was ashen beneath her tan. Her eyes seemed glazed.
“Are you happy now?” I asked her. “Come on; this is a lot of rubbish. She doesn’t want you to go because of the money. Every day for the past year you’ve given her a few pennies. She needs it to live. I suggest that you give her—here, five dollars. No, make it twenty.” I fetched a gold eagle from my pocket and thrust it into Doña Ana’s palm. Then I grabbed Plover’s arm and hurried her to the buckboard.
CHAPTER VII
WE LEFT THE casa well before sundown and rode hard to the north, on into the dark. We were out of the mountains now, in open prairie on the high road to Taos. A three-quarter moon rose before the trail got too dim to follow, so we pressed on. Gwen seemed tireless astraddle her pinto, and Esme slept soundly in a pack on Plover’s back. Toward midnight we halted and made a quick, rough camp. Supper was tortillas, chilis, and beans. No coffee. Plover was up before dawn, making breakfast. When the smell of ham, beans, and coffee woke me, the sun was just clearing the horizon. We hit the trail again. Barring disaster, it would take us at least three weeks to cover the distance from Santa Fe to White Hart Hollow—seven or eight hundred miles—and we all wanted to make time.
Once out on the prairie, Plover seemed a new woman. Or, even better, the girl I had known and loved of old. She was dressed in the height of Crow fashion: her old deerskin shift with all its beads and spangles, her hair flowing loose in the wind behind her. The reading spectacles were stowed in her possible sack, dangling from the tall pommel of her saddle, and her eyes seemed young again. As we rode onward, day after day, she told the girls Crow stories, of how the world came into being, of the tricksters and heroes of her tribe, tales of talking animals and foolish humans, and of the great wars with the Blackfeet and Cheyenne. She told them at first in English and Spanish, but slowly she shifted to the tongue of the Sparrowhawk People, which Gwennie had known as an infant but long since
abandoned in favor of those other languages. Suddenly I realized that in their day-to-day conversations Gwen was talking Sparrowhawk again.
I recalled a time, trapping with Bill Sublette up in the Winds, when I mentioned that I was married to a Crow woman. “Good for you,” he said. “They’re a cuddly lot, very handy around the lodge, too. But I do not think I could last very long, were I married to one.”
“Why not, Bill?”
“Well, in my experience they talk your ear off. Jabber jabber jabber all day long, and often well into the night.”
Thank God for that loquacity, I thought now out on the trail.
Esme, who had tanned up under the kiss of the sun so that her eyes glowed like their namesake gems in an Indian-dark face, listened to these tales enraptured. She rarely cried and now spent most of each day riding just forward of Plover in the saddle. Soon I noticed that my wife’s hand, which had been resting lightly on Esme’s back or shoulder to help the child keep her balance, was now touching her only occasionally. Then not at all. A week up the trail and we allowed Esme to ride by herself, on one of the half-dozen spare horses we’d trailed along with us, a gentle elderly mare with a gait smooth as tallow. Spy took to riding beside the child, ready to catch her if she teetered, but Esme seemed bom to the saddle. He was fond of both my daughters. In the mornings he and Gwen would saddle the horses, two by two, and buck the wildness out of them before we mounted up. In the process, he made a proper bronc peeler of her.
Gwen sometimes rode at the head of the column, alongside Jim. He was teaching her such things as how to distinguish a horse track from that of a mule, a deer from a prongbuck (the antelope has no dewclaws). He pointed out elk feeding on the horizon by the flash of their dirty yellow rump hairs and once a huge grizzly, white in that hot sunlight, lumbering toward the mountains like an ox wagon. He named the hawks that circled over the hills, named them both in the Crow tongue and in English or Spanish. He taught her how to select good wood for our cookfires, hardwoods like scrub oak or mesquite or madrone that wouldn’t make too much smoke and yet would give off an intense heat, then die down after the meal to an enduring bed of coals that could be banked to last the night. He allowed her to help him at night, when he’d shot some meat for our larder, by cleaning and reloading his rifle. When she failed to get the barrel entirely clean the first time, he made her boil more water, pour it down the muzzle, and then work the brass brush through it once again, followed by patches on the cleaning rod, until the bore was spotless. It amazed me that she obeyed him without argument until Plover pointed out the obvious: “He’s Tio Jim; you’re only Papa.”
Indeed, it was sharp-eyed Gwenivar who described our first visitors on the trail, a hunting party of Indians following a buffalo herd north of the Arkansas River. I had been watching the dust from the herd, trying to determine the line of their movement, when Gwen, who was riding beside me, said, “Papa, those aren’t buffalo behind the herd. Those are men on ponies.” I hadn’t even seen them up to that point. Now I pulled the spyglass from my saddlebag and focused on the riders. “I can’t make out their tribe, but ride back and tell Jim that we may have company soon. Warn your mother to stay back with Esme, and you stay back there, too.”
The Indians had spotted us by this time and altered their course in our direction. I checked the Hawken to ensure it was loaded and placed a fresh copper cap on the lock. Jim and Spy came galloping up.
“I think they’re Cheyennes,” Jim said after studying them through the glass. “There’s an outlaw band of them in this country. I made their acquaintance ten years ago or so when I was trading up here for William Bent. A testy lot, if it’s Old Smoke’s outfit. Better check our locks and loads.”
We spread out abreast of one another, about ten yards apart, so as to present them with three distinct targets rather than a knot of men who could be covered by a single blast of buckshot from a fusee. The Indians, a dozen of them, reined in their ponies just beyond rifle range. I was glad to see they were not painted for war, but nonetheless they presented a fearsome picture, wild black hair blowing in the prairie wind, hard faces dark with the sun, eagle plumes fluttering from their lances, and scalps flapping down the outer seams of their leggings. A few of them wore serapes taken from Mexicans they’d killed or captured, but the rest were bare-chested. An older man with much gray in his tangled hair rode out from the band at a gallop.
Suddenly I was aware that Gwen was sitting her horse just beside me and slightly to the rear. “Dammit, Gwennie, I told you to stay back with Mother.”
“I wanted to see the wild Indians,” she said.
“Jim, tell her...”
But now Beckwourth was riding out to meet the leader. They stopped about twenty yards from one another.
“Old Smoke!” Jim shouted in Cheyenne. Both Spy and I had enough of that tongue to follow the exchange that ensued. “It is I, the Medicine Calf of the Crows. Come in and drink black soup with us.”
“Ah, yes, I can see it now!” he yelled back, squinting his eyes to slits in his wrinkled brown face. “You are indeed O-tun-nee, the Crow from Bent’s Fort! You always gave us strong whiskey! You traveled with Left Hand in those days”—that was the Indian name of Andrew Sublette, Bill’s younger brother and a partner of Beckwourth in the early forties—“but now you travel with women and children. Or is that Shawnee a man?” Old Smoke laughed. “Do you wish to trade? We have no robes, and that is why we chase the buffaloes. But we are dry, and a pot of mo’kohtávi-hohpe would taste good right about now.”
He wheeled his pony and galloped full tilt back to his men.
Again I told Gwen to ride back to her mother. “Ask her to brew some coffee for our guests. And stir in plenty of sugar.”
“Aren’t we going to fight them?” Gwen asked.
“No, thank God. Now get a move on.”
Her face fell, but she obeyed.
From Old Smoke we learned that the road ahead, crossing the ridge that separated the Arkansas River from the South Platte, was bone dry. It had been a near-rainless spring, and the waterholes along the way had gone alkaline through the heat of the summer, then dried up entirely. He advised us to stay close to the mountains as we proceeded north, for there we would still find an occasional spring creek that hadn’t submerged into the sand yet.
“Near the Greasy River,” the South Platte, “you will find the village of your friend Mo-he-nes-to, the Bugling Elk,” he said. “There you will be welcome. I wish we had robes to trade with you, fat meat to offer you, but we are poor right now.”
Mo-he-nes-to was another outlaw chieftain, he and his small band of warriors driven away from the mainstream Cheyennes for transgressions against the All-God, in most cases the killing of another Cheyenne but sometimes nothing more than a failure to observe certain taboos.
Gwen found the old chief fascinating. She slipped away from Plover’s side and eased slowly over to him where he sat crosslegged before the campfire. She hunkered down at his knee and began stroking the scalp hair sewed to his leggings.
Old Smoke laughed. “She will make a good wife someday, always urging her husband on to greater coups.”
“Perhaps she will be a soldier-woman herself,” I said.
The old man frowned at that remark, then finished off his coffee and held out the tin cup for more. “A soldier-woman,” he said. “Such a one is following you, do you know?”
“Yes,” Jim said. “Have you seen her?”
“Ask Oh-kum here about her,” Old Smoke said, indicating a young warrior seated beside him. “The Little Wolf nearly lost his hair to her yesterday.”
“I cut her track where she forded the Flint-bottomed River,” their name for the Arkansas, “and followed her over the prairie for a while,” the young man said, unsmiling. “When I finally caught sight of this person, I could see it was a woman, though dressed like a man. An Apache, I thought. She rode a gray but trailed two ponies with her, a bay and a sorrel, as for a long journey. What could a lone woman be doin
g this far from the Apachería? I thought to catch her up and, if she was young and pretty, to make her a wife. She never looked back, but when I followed her into an ash brake near the river suddenly she was behind me. Running at me on the gray. An arrow nocked and full-drawn on her bow. I spurred my horse out of there fast, let me tell you. What a face! Like death itself: black with the sun, lined cruelly by war and hardship, with no spark of life behind the glitter of those wide, cruel eyes. I am no coward, but in that moment I felt my bowels turn to water.”
“She is no Apache,” Jim said.
“I thought not,” Little Wolf said. “Of what tribe is she then?” “She was born a Crow, but now she is a tribe unto herself. She is Tats-ah-das-ay-go, the Quick Killer.”
“Such a tribe deserves extermination.”
“No,” Old Smoke said. “She needs a man strong enough to run her, to fuck some softness into her heart. Fatten her with babies and she will quit the war trail. I would take her myself, my old wife having died last winter, but I prefer younger females. That girl there”—he pointed to Gwen, who had been sitting beside him—“who just stole my knife, she would make me a good wife in a few years. Will you sell her to me?”
“No,” I said. “Gwen, give him back his knife.”
“She may keep it, with my wish that she use it with good fortune. I may forget her, but perhaps she’ll remember me.” He got up from the fire and mounted his pony. “Who knows? Perhaps someday I’ll appear in your camp to reclaim it.”
With that Old Smoke departed, his men at a gallop behind him. Soon they were dust on the horizon.
WE FOUND MO-HE-NES-TO’S village at the confluence of the South Platte and Grow Greek, near where the town of Greeley, Colorado, now stands. Jim was welcomed like a long-lost brother, until the Indians learned he had brought no whiskey, as in days of yore. We assuaged them with gifts of Navajo blankets, gunpowder, and bar lead, which Jim had had the foresight to pack along on one of our mules. “Yes, I used to trade liquor for robes,” he admitted, “but truly it’s the most infernal practice ever entered into by man. Nothing but trouble comes of it: war, thievery, murder, poverty, death. But think of the profits. A gallon of whiskey costs thirty cents in Saint Louis. You add four gallons of water and sell the resultant forty pints at a buffalo robe apiece. Each robe will bring five dollars back east. That’s $200 on a thirty-cent investment. I’d show up at this camp with 200 diluted gallons—1,600 pints. That’s $8,000 a visit. All the poor redskin got out of it was a headache, and a thirst for more firewater. Meanwhile the buffalo are slowly being exterminated, and with so little remorse that their very hides are now known among the tribes as ‘a pint of whiskey.’ ”
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