War Valley

by Lancaster Hill

  * * *

  Constance was not surprised to wake and learn that Gannon had gone. She was also not surprised to be handed a note by the doctor.

  “I found it pinned to one of the last laundered towels,” he said. “Guess he wanted to make sure I found it.”

  The doctor gave Constance her privacy, and the young woman read the brief message quickly, then again:

  Dearest: DO NOT FOLLOW.

  I will come for you before I head west.

  It occurred to Constance that this was the first written note she had from Gannon, the first time she had seen his handwriting. The schoolteacher in her was impressed with his bold, correct script. The woman in her was moved nearly to tears by his love and devotion. Despite what had been stolen from her, she felt complete in a way she had never known.

  Constance folded the note and put it in her blouse, close to her heart. It would live there, she vowed, every day of her life until it hung on the wall of their home, wherever it was.

  * * *

  The area outside the hole in the valley wall was a ring of savage resolve.

  After the white men had failed to follow them into the valley, Buffalo Eyes convened a war council. They said words over the body of Strong Elk, which they had recovered, then sat in a circle in the cool shadow. As long as the enemy had horses, they represented a threat. Because both sides had lost fighters, the Comanche had not achieved the advantage Buffalo Eyes had sought.

  “They will not come in for us,” the war chief told the others. “They do not need to. We must attack again.”

  There was no dissent among the braves. There was silence as Buffalo Chief considered the best approach.

  “I have my own battle to finish, but I would like to make a suggestion,” a voice said from outside the group.

  “Roving Wolf may speak,” Buffalo Eyes told him.

  Not having participated in the previous raid, the brave had been excluded from the circle. It was not a reflection on his courage. But it was tradition, which held that only he who fought had a voice.

  “My experience with white men over these last few suns has taught me that they are soft,” Roving Wolf told them. His dark eyes narrowed with purpose and he put a fist on his chest, over his heart. “They will show a woman’s concern if we ask for a truce to bury our dead. This being achieved, our fallen warriors may still serve us.”

  “How?” Buffalo Eyes asked, though like the other braves in the circle he was already considering the many ways in which injury could be inflicted on the white man.

  Roving Wolf said, “With something I learned from the white man.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  October 23, 1871

  The procession was nothing that Calvin and his men had ever seen, nor expected ever to see. Lee Bates, the reporter from Houston—who had remained in the back of the camp, writing about the heroic Death River Valley stand of his fictional hero Archer Barrington—came over to witness the sight. Calvin wondered if it was the closest the reporter had ever been to an uncivilized red man.

  A line of Indians, minus the war chief, had emerged from the valley under a white flag. There was a small population of the remaining Comanche force, five of them, walking single file, their hands free of weapons, toward the sergeant.

  Calvin undid his gun belt and left it with Garcia. “Send someone to keep the lady in the ambulance wagon,” he said and walked forward.

  “I’ll go,” Rufus Long said, overhearing. He ran off.

  “Stay with her!” Calvin shouted after him.

  Bates stepped closer to the Tejano. “Do you think they’re surrendering?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Garcia’s certainty caused Bates to recoil several steps. His literary Indians were mindless savages, like the Cossacks of Russia he also wrote about in The Adventures of Prince Sergei Novgorod. He did not know at all what to make of Indians who did not simply scalp and burn.

  “What do you think they want?” the reporter pressed.

  “Nothing less than they wanted when they got here,” Garcia replied with equal confidence.

  Calvin continued to approach the men with long strides. He noticed a few minor wounds that had not been attended to. One of the braves seemed to have added to his war paint with his own blood, judging from the way the markings on his face glistened. He did not think they were here to assess the strength of the white men; they could just as easily have determined that from the valley. When the sergeant met the leader, the first brave lowered the flag to his side.

  “We take our dead,” the Comanche said. “Then go.” He pointed back to the valley, not to the west.

  So this was only a truce, Calvin decided. He had suspected as much when the war chief remained behind, unwilling to parlay with the enemy. Just the same, Calvin asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to end this thing altogether? Go home to the Comancheria?”

  “Bury dead,” the man repeated.

  Calvin stepped to one side and walked down the row of braves. None of them carried any weapons. They appeared prepared to do exactly as they said.

  “You will bury them where they are?” Calvin asked when he returned to the front of the line.

  The man nodded once.

  “We don’t have any extra tools,” he said.

  The man held up his strong left hand.

  “Why don’t more of your people come out and help?” Calvin asked.

  The Comanche pointed his hand away from his chest, swiped it from side to side. That, plus his expression, told Calvin that they didn’t trust the white men.

  “I don’t trust you either,” Calvin told him, though he did not repeat the gesture. Something had to be up; he just could not figure out what it was. His biggest concern was that they might still make a run at the horses, either scattering them or jumping on the backs of five of them. The Indians did not need a saddle to ride.

  The Comanche don’t play by our rules, and they don’t deal in goodwill, Calvin thought. They’re as likely to keep my officers tied up watching them and launch another attack from the valley.

  Calvin stared at the Indian, who was the tallest of the braves. “You attacked our camp, defiled our woman, and ask for courtesy,” he said. “But I do not wish to become like you. Gather your dead. But if you do anything except that, you will be shot.”

  “White men would shoot unarmed braves,” the Comanche said. “Then call us savage.”

  Calvin didn’t feel like debating this further. He gave the order to Garcia to assemble a group of guards, one for each man, as they gathered the bodies. He did not trust this man and his people, but even if their plan was as simple as infiltrating the camp and distracting the police and guardsmen, the Indians were already here.

  I should have had them shot on sight, he thought, feeling a strong sense of foreboding. Calvin did not have much schooling, but he had heard, somewhere, at some point, the story of the Trojan Horse.

  The braves went about their business slowly, reverently. The dead Comanche had been laid side by side, and the Indians dropped to their knees at the feet of each fallen brave, bowing and remaining low over the body as he sang words in the Comanche tongue. Five police officers stood a barely respectful distance behind the warriors, their rifles or sidearms pointed down, barely, and ready.

  Calvin’s sense of omen increased. He had collected his gun belt from Garcia, who had his own revolver in hand. The sergeant held the belt in one hand, the firearm in the other. He checked the barrel, filled it up, snapped it shut.

  “Why are they doing a ceremony now?” The Tejano leaned toward the sergeant.

  “I don’t know,” Calvin said as he glanced back toward the valley. “And I don’t like it. I don’t like the way they got us all watchin’ two spots simultaneous—”

  Suddenly, in a blur of movement, Calvin’s five men gagged, dropped their weapons, and fell to the ground like sacks of grain. They were indistinguishable from the braves who were tangled among them. The only clear difference was th
at the leather bands which had been clandestinely removed from the ankles of the dead were pulled tightly around the throats of the white men.

  The men and their attackers were too close and tangled to shoot at, so other men ran forward—just as Buffalo Eyes and his braves charged toward the eastern end of the camp and the horses. This time they were not in a row but, with clothes and blankets and a few branches tied to their tails, brushing the ground, in a surging mass hidden in dust.

  * * *

  The peace outside the valley was disturbing. The high, sloping, wall of the mesa was to his right, the flatlands leading to the lowlands leading to the dead, dark mounds of Pilot Knob were on the left. To think that so little could be happening here—a light wind stirring occasional dust devils, lizards scurrying on rocks, dead brush blowing by now and then—while cultures were at a deadly standoff on the other side filled Gannon with deep sadness.

  Leaving Constance also gave him an enormous sense of discomfort. He believed that this time, this leave-taking, she would stay where she was. But he questioned his own insistence on that. Was he thinking of himself or her?

  Roving Wolf would have tracked me, he told himself. If we had left together, headed west from here, and if I had been killed—? No, he told himself. It was the right decision. The Comanche had to die.

  And if the Comanche were victorious, at least Constance was with people who could get her home.

  Unless they were slaughtered, Gannon told himself. Then Constance would once again be in the hands of the braves. His only consolation, and it was a miserable one, was that if the Indians were somehow victorious, they would not burden themselves with hostages. They would slaughter every survivor, quickly, and move on to Austin.

  “Lord,” he said aloud, his eyes turning heavenward, “I have not had a Comanche-type vision for all the time I been out here. If you’d care to send one, Sir, I would be most indebted.”

  But the only uncommon sight was the rippling waves of heat rising from the warming earth as the sun rose higher in the sky, dropping the illusion of water or sky on the ground. Perhaps that was a foreshadowing after all, Gannon thought: the bright, blue sea of the Pacific.

  Gannon’s side actually began to feel better the more he worked it, which made him think—with relief—that the doctor was probably right, that no ribs had been damaged. He was lucky he hadn’t been killed. Gas like they were flirting with down there had been known to bring down entire mine systems and the mountains that contained them.

  The sun had moved a little across the sky when two things happened at once. First, Gannon thought he heard the distant drum of hooves. It sounded as if it were rising from the northwest—the direction of the police encampment. Whatever it was, there was nothing he could do about it. The sound was too far from where he was.

  The other event—that was different. It was very near and very perplexing.

  * * *

  It was a devilish and brilliant tactic.

  Either the Indians killed five men and had five braves at their flank; or five, six, seven men would have to go to their rescue. That left the horses vulnerable to a party of mounted braves . . . Comanche who would ride on toward Austin, unopposed. And there was no way to signal the citizenry. The Indians might not want to fight in darkness, when the spirits could not watch over them. But they could wait until dark, sneak into the city, and start fires or kill families in their sleep—there was no limit to what a guerrilla party could do.

  Calvin should have shot the white-flag Comanche on sight.

  “Shoot the Indians and their horses!” he shouted, then shouted it again as he ran toward the northeastern end of the camp. The job was protecting the city, not themselves.

  This kind of chaotic, close-quarter fighting was the birthright of the Comanche. It was not the kind of fighting for which any of these men had drilled; not in the Civil War and not in their respective services. But most of these men had served in the War and had experienced brutal, hand-to-hand and muzzle-to-gut fighting. Almost at once, the veterans exploded in remembered fury, more aggressive than in the last attack, where ranks had broken into pockets of war.

  Indian horses fell, crippled or wounded, when the riders were too far to hit with precision. But the way the charge had been bunched together, horses had to be killed to get through to the animals behind them. When Indians were within easy range they were targeted by gut-shot, rifle butt, and by men leaping from where they stood at passing Comanche, grabbing at a leg or blanket in the hope of unseating them. The gunfire was frequently so close that it was muffled in the clothing or occasionally the flesh of the Comanche.

  The Indians did not fire at the soldiers, saving their bullets for the riderless horses. It was a wave with two clear purposes: to leave the white men stranded and to break through to the plain beyond with as many braves as possible

  Calvin stopped firing and grabbed Garcia by the collar.

  “We have to get ahead in case they get past us!” the sergeant yelled.

  Garcia nodded and, ducking low, the two men ran around the back of the camp to where the horses were spread over a wide area—three of them already having fallen. Calvin paused only to take a clear shot at one of the party who had come to claim the dead, punching a red hole in the small of his back and saving the guardsman who was beneath him. Hacking and gasping, the young man threw the body off and clawed to his nearest comrade—who was no longer moving. The Indian who had killed him was beneath him and threw him off, only to get a rock in the face, crushing his skull.

  Crouching low and using the boulders as cover, Calvin and Garcia reached a spot where two horses were, for the moment, protected by rock and landscape. There was no time to saddle them. Garcia had grown up riding bareback; Calvin was less experienced, but he had the strong legs for it. Side by side, their fists full of mane, the men steadied the uneasy mounts and waited as if for a starting gun, watching ahead.

  The police and guardsmen had managed to form an arc on the southern side of the thinly grassed grazing area. The fighting there was a fierce confusion, with cries of rage and pain and hints of motion within the dusty fog.

  Garcia was openly disturbed by his inability to join the other police. He saw men fall along with Indians and grimaced with his forced inactivity.

  “Steady, friend,” Calvin cautioned.

  “I don’t like them thinking we deserted.”

  “No man is thinking of anything but his fight,” Calvin assured him.

  The Tejano nodded sharply, and the sergeant saw his fists tighten around the mane. Soon the battlefield was too dusty for them to see anything.

  “Walk ’em north,” Calvin said. “Slow.”

  The men moved carefully, trying to keep enough of the dust between them and the Indians so that they would not be noticed.

  And then it happened.

  Three Comanche emerged from the northeast side of the perimeter and raced into the plain. Calvin had placed two men there to make sure the Comanche did not avoid the valley altogether and go wide around the mesa, but those men had moved in to save the horses.

  “Go!” Calvin yelled.

  Like a coiled spring, Garcia launched ahead in pursuit of the enemy, Calvin several paces behind.

  * * *

  Rufus Long was standing outside the ambulance wagon, in back, watching the battle taking place roughly 150 yards to the southwest. He had a pair of Colts in his hands, both from dead police.

  Constance Breen had heeded his advice and remained in the ambulance with the doctor, who had Long’s own sidearm and ammunition.

  The black officer was perspiring and his lips were tightly pursed to keep the sweat from his mouth. Apart from the rivulets, his eyes were the only things that moved on him beneath a rigid, attentive brow. In his head he was thinking, Come on, come on, aching to be part of this fight but not wanting to waste any shots.

  And then a Comanche on horseback surged through the haze in his direction. The Indian was bent low behind the pinto’s neck an
d there was no target but the horse that was coming straight-on. Long aimed and shot at the area below its windpipe, between both shoulders. The animal went down silently, somersaulting and snapping its neck, and throwing the Comanche free.

  Buffalo Eyes landed flat on his chest, arms splayed, and was either uninjured in the fall or sufficiently enraged to ignore any pain and scrabble to his feet. He had lost the spear he was carrying and did not bother to search for it. Instead, he drew his tomahawk from his belt as Long fired a second shot from the other gun, piercing the war chief’s side. That did not stop him, and in one motion he twisted away from the third shot while simultaneously bringing the stone head down on Long’s neck. There was a crack of bone and a ripping of skin, and the officer screamed as he went down. His mouth twisted with fury, Buffalo Eyes barely paused as he picked up the two guns and thrust himself through the flap. His eyes were not adjusted to the dark and he would not have known where the doctor was if Zachary had not fired. The bullet struck the war chief’s shoulder but did not stop the two stolen handguns from coughing. The medic’s arms flew back and he fell with a pair of uneven red cavities straight through to his spine.

  Buffalo Eyes looked ferociously at Constance, who was crouched behind the still-upended cot, the doctor’s gun out of reach. The war chief was angry at having been unhorsed and kept from immediately joining the rest of his party and intended to take it out on the woman.

  Before the Comanche could advance, his back arched so hard he would have fallen from the ambulance if a lance hadn’t been propping him up. It was his own weapon, thrust through his ribs, scraping his spine, and emerging from the front of his chest through his heart. It was held there by Captain Amos Keel, who had dragged himself to the ambulance when he saw Rufus Long go down. The captain’s expression was wild, his eyes big circles, as blood ran down the shaft onto his hands. Only when the Indian went limp, became deadweight, was the officer forced to drop the spear and stagger back himself, falling to the ground almost simultaneous with the Comanche.