“I’m glad it’s working out for both of us.”
“Well, Frenchy, let’s get the hides loaded,” Armitage said. “The quicker we can get these lads out of here, the quicker we can get another hand to help us with the skinning.”
Back at Adobe Walls, Sybil Olds was hanging up a wash she had just done, not only for her husband, but for the other six or eight men who were full time residents of Adobe Walls. She looked up to see Joe Plummer riding into the settlement.
“Hi Joe, what brings you in? Haven’t found any buffalo?”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Olds,” Plummer replied. “I’m a’ slayin’ ‘em faster’n Dave and Tommie can skin ‘em. But we need a few supplies, and maybe I’ll have a beer or two. Maybe pick up a few dollars playin’ cards.”
“There’s not much going on,” Sybil said. “Everybody’s gone except the help and a few hunters in and out, but you can get a good meal. Bill and I have our café going, now.”
“I been a hankerin’ fer some good cookin’,” Plummer said. “What ya’ servin’ today?”
“Ham, beans, greens, and cornbread. Oh, and a plum pie. I picked ‘em myself.”
Plummer smiled. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll for sure be there,” he promised. “But don’t you be goin’ off by yourself to pick no plums. They’s Indians around.”
“We haven’t seen a one. I think you hunters have scared them off.”
Joe shook his head. “Don’t be too sure of that. We all knows they’s out there. Just a’ waitin’.”
Plummer stepped into Hanrahan’s saloon and ordered a beer. He drank half of it before he took the mug away from his lips.
“Ahhh,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction. “You don’t know how good that tastes.”
“Oh, but I do,” Hanrahan said. “Why do you think I put the saloon out here?”
“Why, to make money from the buffalo hunters, of course,” Bat Masterson said, stepping up to the bar. “But, I am ready to add to your coffers. A beer, if you please.”
“Hello, Bat,” Plummer greeted. “Ain’t you gone out yet?”
“Sure, I have,” Bat said. “You saw that pile of hides out there. About a thousand of them are mine.”
“Is that so,” Plummer said.
“You know it’s not,” James Hanrahan said. “This is Bat talkin’. We all know what kind of yarns he spins.”
“Maybe I don’t have a thousand, but I brought in a load a couple of days ago,” Bat said. “Now I’m just waitin’ for enough boys to get in so I can scare up a good card game.”
“Count me in for tonight,” Plummer said.
The Quahadi Village of Quanah Parker:
“It was not wise for Mean To His Horses to take a raiding party against the white buffalo hunters,” Standing Bear said to Quanah and Wolf Tongue.
“I told him so, but he would not listen to my counsel. It would be better not to do the small raids, which will only anger and awaken the white man before we are ready to go to war with him,” Quanah Parker replied.
“We cannot go to war against the whites,” Standing Bear said.
“Why not?” Quanah Parker asked.
“There are too many of them. There are more whites than we have bullets for all our guns.”
“I can give us bullets. All the bullets we need,” White Eagle said as he walked up to join.
“How will you come by so many bullets?” Wolf Tongue asked,
“I will cough them up from my belly,” White Eagle promised.
“This, I must see,” Standing Bear said.
White Eagle put his hands over his mouth, then began coughing and gagging. When he was through, he opened his hands to show that they were full of bullets.
“How did you do that?” Wolf Tongue asked.
“White Eagle has much magic,” Quanah Parker said, a smile crossing his face. “Did we not all see him go into the sky?”
“Yes,” Wolf Tongue said. “This, I saw with my own eyes.”
“Do not fear to attack the white man,” White Eagle said. “I will make my magic so that the bullets of the white man’s guns will not harm you. And I can raise the dead.”
Quanah Parker wanted to ask why it would be necessary to raise the dead, if the bullets of the white man’s guns could do no harm. But Quanah Parker wanted to make war with the white man and, it was best that he let the others believe White Eagle’s power, for if they believed him, his task of convincing them to go to war would be easier.
Only six Indians had answered Mean To His Horses’ call to battle, but he wasn’t worried that the number of his warriors was small. He had listened to the talk of war; he had heard Standing Bear say that it would be wrong for the People to go on the war path. But what did Standing Bear know? He was old, and his time had passed. No longer could he be with a woman, or take part in the hunt, or in battle. If there was to be war with the white buffalo hunters, Mean To His Horses must bring it about.
He knew that while the white men were many in number, the buffalo hunters who were in their camps were few, never more than three or four. Let the others talk, and let the others be swayed by the war talk of Quanah Parker and the magic of the shaman. When he came back with the scalps of the enemy hanging from his lance, he would look big in the eyes of the others.
Chicken Creek
Dave Dudley and Tommie Wallace were back in camp, waiting for Joe Plummer to return from Adobe Walls.
“I wonder how long he’ll be gone,” Dudley asked.
“I don’t know, but to be honest, I’m sort of enjoyin’ just sittin’ around waitin’ on ‘im,” Wallace said. “We’ve caught up with what he’s done kilt, so at least we ain’t skinnin’ buffalo right now.”
“No, but that also means we ain’t makin’ no money either,” Dudley said.
“If the hunt keeps a goin’ like it is, this here’s gonna be the best year yet. “What ya gonna do with all your money, Dave?”
“I don’t know,” Dudley said. “Maybe, if I get enough of it, I’ll see if I can find me a good woman and buy me a ranch. What about you?”
“You’re goin’ to go out a’ lookin’ for a good woman?” Wallace laughed. “Me? I’m gonna buy me the baddest woman in Dodge.”
Dudley laughed with him.
Unseen by the skinners, Mean To His Horses and the six warriors he had gathered for his war party, were on a nearby ridge looking down toward the campsite. One of the white men was lying on the ground by the fire; the other was sitting on a box of some sort. They were drinking coffee and he heard both of them laugh.
“You laugh now, you devils. Soon your laughter will turn to begging me for mercy,” Mean To His Horses said, quietly. He turned toward the warriors who were with him, and motioned them on.
“Speakin’ o’ bad women, have you ever been with any o’ them women at Fat Tom’s?” Wallace asked.
“Only to dance is all,” Dudley said. “It cost too much to take any o’ ‘em upstairs, ‘n most o’ the time I don’t hardly have enough money to keep a roof over my head, ‘n to get me somethin’ to eat.” He smiled. “But I ‘spect after we get back in to town, why I’ll . . . uh!”
Wallace watched in shock as an arrow buried itself deep into Dudley’s chest.
Neither Wallace nor Dudley had a gun close by, as neither of them was expecting danger. Their guns were a few feet away and Wallace scrambled to get one. He felt a blow in his back, concurrent with the sound of a gunshot.
Wallace turned and saw several Indians rushing toward him, shouting loudly, some of them holding war clubs over their heads. He had no way to defend himself, and with the gunshot wound to his back, he knew that he couldn’t do it anyway.
“Dudley, goodbye, ole’ pard,” he said, just as one of the Indians brought a club down on his head.
14
Joe Plummer had spent more time at Adobe Walls than he should have, but several freight wagons from Dodge City had pulled in bringing more supplies. Both Charlie Myers and Charles Rath had come to see their respective inv
estments, and in celebration of their being there, they had made all the drinks at James Hanrahan’s free to anyone who walked in. That meant any hunter or any skinner or any freighter.
“Boys, have you looked at that pile of hides in my corral?” Charlie Myers asked. “The eastern newspapers are saying that the buffalo are gone, but they don’t know what a group of determined men can do. I’m going to make a wager that you’ll take at least 100,000 hides this year.”
This proclamation was met by wild cheers from the men who were present.
Charlie Myers sat down at a table with Wright Mooar, a businessman who employed more than a half dozen shooters and two dozen skinners. Mooar had set up his main camp about a mile from the settlement. His shooters were sent all over the area.
“Do you think I’m exaggerating?” Myers asked.
“No, my men say the buffalo are out there. And most that they see, are young so that means the herd is not disappearing like the crowd back east is saying.”
“If 100,000 are going to be killed, no matter how young they are, isn’t that going to take a big chunk out of the herd?” Jacob Harrison asked as he joined Myers and Mooar.
“Jacob, why do you care? Aren’t you makin’ more money than ever?” Myers asked.
Jacob laughed. “That I am. I’ve never made so many trips as we’re making this year.”
“You need to invest in a couple more wagons. I could send you out every day if you wanted to make a run that often,” Myers said.
“I can’t make that decision without my partner agreeing,” Jacob said.
“And where is your elusive partner?” Mooar asked.
Jacob laughed. “You know where he is. He’s out hunting with Billy Dixon.”
“I knew that,” Mooar said. “One of my hunters passed by their camp at the mouth of White Deer Creek. Those two tried to hire one of Mart Galloway’s skinners, but he wouldn’t let him go. Mart said Billy and Cade had a pile of skins seven feet high. I expect they’ll be bringin’ some of ‘em in fore too long.”
“Then maybe I’d better hang around for a day or two or I could ride out to White Deer and see if I can convince Cade to come back to work,” Jacob said.
“I wouldn’t be riding out by myself,” Mooar said. “Nobody’s seen any Indians around, but you know they’re out there. Some renegade wanting another scalp would be happy to take one from a lone rider.”
“I’m surprised there hasn’t been any Indian trouble,” Myers said. “I would have thought they wouldn’t want to see their commissary taken away.”
“Maybe more of them have decided to go in to the reservations. One of my drivers was over at the Cheyenne Agency, and he said it was teeming with Indians,” Jacob said.
“I’ll bet that’s not happening at Anadarko. The Comanche aren’t ever goin’ in,” Mooar said. “They tell me they’ve got a young chief who’s a breed that will fight till the bitter end.”
“Well, in his defense, what would we be doing if everything we knew was being taken away from us?” Jacob said.
“I don’t believe I heard you say that,” Charlie Myers said. “They’re Indians. They’ll do what the government tells them to do and they’ll like it.”
Chicken Creek:
“Dave! Tommy!” Joe Plummer called as he rode into camp. He felt guilty that he had been gone longer than he should have been. “What’re you boys doin’ sleeping just because I’ve been gone so long? Turn out, boys, turn out! I’ve got coffee, pepper, some more bacon, and peaches!”
Plummer held up a can of peaches.
“Peaches, boys, if you don’t wake up, I’m goin’ to eat ‘em all by my . . .” Plummer stopped in mid-sentence. He could smell smoke, not just smoke from a campfire, but the lingering odor of something much larger than a campfire. He rode on in, feeling the hair rising on the back of his neck.
“Oh, God in heaven,” he said, when he reached the campsite.
Jumping down from the wagon, he stared at the bodies of his two friends. He found Dave Dudley’s blackened body next to the fire ring. Tommy Wallace had been pinned to the ground by a stake that was driven all the way through his chest, and into the ground beneath him. Both men had been scalped.
“Oh, my God, I shouldn’t have left you. As God is my witness, boys, I had no idea anything like this would happen.”
Plummer, fearful that the Indians were watching, cut one horse loose from the wagon and made a mad dash back to the safety of Adobe Walls.
In the Village of the Comanche:
When Mean To His Horses and the six who had gone with him returned to the village, they had the scalps of the two white men to show off to the others. They had also taken anything of value they had found at the hunter’s camp, to include coffee, sugar, and a slab of bacon. And as on Mean To His Horses’ earlier raid, he and the warriors who had gone with him, again returned with large chunks of buffalo, taken from the animals the white hunters had killed.
“You did not wish for me to go, but the raid was good. We returned with food, and we killed the white hunters.”
“That is good, but it is only two of the white hunters,” Quanah said. “I think when we make war, we should kill many.”
“You talk of killing many, but it is I, Mean To His Horses, who has made two raids to kill the white man and take his food, while you stay home with the women and children. I think the time of Quanah Parker being the best warrior of the Quahadi has passed. I think that it is I, Mean to his Horses, who shall now be the warrior the others look up to.” He beat his chest as a way to emphasize his words.
With a satisfied smirk, Mean To His Horses turned away and joined the six who had ridden with him. They were regaling the village with stories of their daring.
One of the Indians, who took particular notice of the hero status now enjoyed by Mean To His Horses, was Straight Arrow.
“Look, how others pay honor to Mean To His Horses,” Quiet Dove said. Quiet Dove was a beautiful young woman.
“Would you like me to do something as brave?” Straight Arrow asked.
Quiet Dove lowered her gaze and smiled at him. “If you would be as brave, I will honor you as the others now honor Mean To His Horses.”
“I will do such a thing. And not only you, but all will honor me,” Straight Arrow promised.
Approaching the Canadian River:
Cade and Billy started toward Adobe Walls, with close to 400 hides on their wagon. If they sold them in Dodge City, using the Harrison and McCall wagons, these hides were worth $1,200.
“I wish we could’ve brought all the hides,” Billy said.
“I know,” Cade said, “but if we get another skinner, maybe we can send Armitage back and forth.”
“Or one of us can do it,” Billy said. “Twelve hundred dollars for one load of hides. That’s a far cry from my first job where I got $50.00 a month.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was 14 years old—my ma and pa were both dead, my sister got typhoid and died so I was all by myself. I thought I’d join the army, but they said I was too young, so I got a job as a driver in a government bull train. But what I really wanted to do was fight Indians and kill buffalo.”
“I’d say you’ve done that, at least the killing buffalo part,” Cade said.
“I have, but the fighting Indians part, I’ve really never done. In a way, I feel sorry for the Indians,” Billy said. “You know, I was at Medicine Lodge.”
“You mean for the treaty?”
“I was. I was on a bull train, hauling supplies back and forth to several forts. While we were at Fort Harker, we were told we were going to go with a party of peace commissioners to meet with some of the main tribes.”
“And when was that?”
“Sometime in the fall of ’67. I thought it was sort of funny that on a peace commission, we were all given our first Sharps carbines.”
“Did they expect trouble?”
“Of course, they did. These were Indians—Indians who had been told over
and over what the government would do, and then the treaties were broken. And now here we are, being a part of the biggest breach of that treaty there is.”
“You mean hunting south of the Arkansas?” Cade asked.
Billy nodded. “I remember seeing old Satank, the chief of the Kiowas. He was riding one of the most beautiful horses I had ever seen and the outfit he was wearing was unbelievable, but the thing I remember most was the way he carried himself. There was a pride and dignity that we don’t usually think about when we talk about Indians. He gave a speech about how the Indians didn’t want the railroad coming through to cut off the buffalo migration, and how he didn’t want the buffalo slaughtered.”
“What about your gun? Did you have to use it?” Cade asked.
“No but we were ready to,” Cade said, “and if any hothead would have fired his gun, we would have had an all-out war right there at the peace treaty. It was the morning of October 28, 1867. We were all in camp when out on the plains, about two miles away, a bunch of Indians, about 1,500 I’d say, came up from behind a low swell. They were dressed for battle and they were all spread out. We heard them chanting and singing, and the closer they got, the more they spread out. Then when they got about a quarter mile away, they all started firing their guns and charging at us. I thought for sure that would be the end of me.”
“Well, what happened?”
“General Harney was in charge, and he came through yelling that every man get out of sight, but have his rifle ready to fire. He kept saying we had more men than they did, and that we could hold them off if we had to, but watching those Indians charge, was something to see. When they got to about 200 yards from us, they all stopped like they had had a signal, but nobody heard one. Then the General went out to meet them and asked for the chiefs to come into camp.”
“And the Indians? What did they do?”
The Western Adventures of Cade McCall Box Set Page 71
