The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “See here, captain,” says he, “it’s near a hundred miles to Bent’s Fort – why, that’s another week with empty bellies! Now, we know that if we cross the river on the Cimarron road, there’s the big cache that Mr Wootton spoke of – and it’s less than thirty miles away. Well, me and the boys are for heading for it; it’ll mean only two more days of going short, and then we can replenish with all the grub we want! And everyone knows it’s the short way to Santa Fe – what d’you say, captain?”

  “I say you’re going to Bent’s.”

  “Why so? What’s the point in five days o’ discomfort?”

  “You ain’t in discomfort,” says I. “And your bellies aren’t empty – but they would be if we went the Cimarron road. We’re going to Bent’s as agreed; for one thing, it’s safer.”

  “Who says that, now?” cries this barrack-room lawyer, and his mates muttered and swore; other folk began to cluster round, and I saw I must scotch this matter on the spot.

  “I say it, and I’ll tell you why. If we were fool enough to leave the river, we could be astray in no time. It’s desert over yonder, and if you lose the trail you’ll die miserably—”

  “Ain’t no reason ter lose the trail,” cries a voice, and to my fury I saw it was one of Grattan’s guards, a buckskinned brute called Skate. “I bin thataways on the cut-off; trail’s as plain as yer hand.” At which the Pittsburgh oafs hurrahed and clamoured at me.

  “We’re going to Bent’s!” I barked, and they gave back. “Now, mark this – suppose the trail was as good as this fellow says – which I doubt – does anyone know where Wootton’s cache is? No, and you’d never find it; they don’t make ’em with finger-posts, you know. And if you did, you’d discover it contained precious little but jerked meat and beans – well, if that’s your notion of all the grub you want, it ain’t mine. At Bent’s you’ll find every luxury you can imagine, as good as St Louis.” They still looked surly, so I capped the argument. “There’s also more likelihood of encountering hostile tribes along the Cimarron. That’s why Wootton insisted we make for Bent’s – so you can yoke up and prepare to break out.”

  “Not so fast, there!” says the cutaway coat. “We got a word to say to that, if you please—”

  I turned my back. “Mr Nugent-Hare, you can saddle up,” I was saying, when Skate pushed forward.

  “This ain’t good enough fer me!” cries he. “You don’t know a dam’ thing more’n we do, mister. Fact, yore jest a tenderfoot, when all’s said—”

  “What’s this, Mr Nugent-Hare?” cries I. “Have you no control of your rascals?”

  “Easy, now, captain,” says he, pulling his long Irish nose. “You’ll mind I said we weren’t in the army.”

  “I say we take a vote!” bawls Skate, and I noted that most of the guards were at back of him. “We all got a say hyar, jest as much as any high-an’-mighty lime-juice sailor – oh, beg pardon, Captain Comber!” And the scoundrel leered and swept off his cap in an elaborate bow; the Pittsburgh clowns held on to each other, guffawing. “En I kin tell yuh,” continued Skate, “thet Dick Wootton wuz jest as consarned ’bout Ute war-parties up on the Picketwire, as ’bout any other Injuns by Cimarron. Well, Picketwire’s nigh on Bent’s, ain’t it? So I’m fer the cut-off, en I say let’s see a show o’ hands!”

  Of course the Pirates yelled acclaim, sticking both hands up, and Skate glared round at his mates until most of them followed suit. Grattan turned aside, whistling softly between his teeth; the fathers of the emigrant families were looking troubled, and our invalids were looking scared. I know I was red in the face with rage, but I was holding it in while I considered quickly what to do – I was long past the age when I thought I could bluster my way out of a position like this. In the background I saw Susie looking towards me; behind her the sluts were already seated in the wagons. I shook my head imperceptibly at Susie; the last thing I wanted was her railing at the mutineers.

  The Pittsburgh Pirates made up about half our population, so a bare majority was voting for Cimarron. This wasn’t enough for Skate.

  “Come on, you farmers!” roars he. “You gonna let milord hyar tell you whut you kin en cain’t do? Let’s see yer hands up!”

  A number of them complied, and the cutaway coat darted about, counting, and turned beaming on me. “I reckon we got a democratic majority, captain! Hooraw, boys! Ho for Cimarron!” And they all cheered like anything, and as it died down they looked at me.

  “By all means,” says I, very cool. “Good day to you.” And I turned away to tighten the girths on my pony. They stared in silence. Then:

  “What you mean?” cries Skate. “We got a majority! Caravan goes to Cimarron, then!”

  “It’s going to Bent’s,” says I, quietly. “At least, the part of it that I command does. Any deserters—” I tugged at a strap “—can go to Cimarron, or to hell, as they please.”

  I was counting on my composure to swing them round, you see; they were used to me as wagon-captain, and I reckoned if I played cool and business-like it would sway them. And indeed, a great babble broke out at once; Skate looked as though he was ready to do murder, but even some of the Pirates looked doubtful and fell to wrangling among themselves. And I believe all would have been well if Susie, who was fairly bursting with fury, hadn’t cut loose at them, abusing Skate in Aldgate language, and even turning on the sober emigrants, insisting that they obey me.

  “You’re bound on oath!” she shrilled. “Why, I’ll have the law on you – you treacherous scallawags, you! You’ll do as you’re bidden, so there!”

  I could have kicked her fat satin backside; it was the worst line she could have taken. The leader of the emigrant families, who’d been muttering about how the wagon-captain was the boss, wasn’t he, went dark crimson at Susie’s railing, and drew himself up. He was a fine, respectable-looking elder and his beard fairly bristled at her.

  “Ain’t no hoor-mistress gonna order me aroun’!” says he, and stalked off; most of the emigrants reluctantly followed him, and the Pittsburgh boys hoorawed anew, and began to make for their wagons. So you see the wagon-captain with his bluff called – and not a thing to be done about it.

  One thing I knew, I was not crossing the river. I could see Wootton’s face now. “Not Cimarron … poor bull.” The thought of that desert, and losing the trail, was enough for me. It was all very well for Skate and his pals; if they got lost, they could in desperation ride back to the Arkansas for water, and struggle down to Fort Mann – but the folk in the wagons would be done for. And our own little party was in an appalling fix; we had our eight wagons and the carriage, with their drivers, but we faced a week’s trip to Bent’s without guards. If we met marauding Indians … we would have my guns and those of the teamsters and savaneros.

  But I was wrong – we also had the invalids. They approached me with some hesitation and said they would prefer to continue to Bent’s; the air on the north bank of the river was purer, they were sure of that – and they didn’t approve of Skate and those Pittsburgh rapscallions, no, indeed. “We, sir, have some notions of loyalty and good behaviour, I hope,” says the one whose diagnosis of the Cheyenne had proved so accurate. His pals cried bravo and hear, hear! and flourished their sprays and steam-kettles in approval; dear God, thinks I, whores and invalids; at least they were both well-disciplined.

  “I’d better see to the rations, or friend Skate’ll be leaving us the scrapings of the barrel,” says Nugent-Hare.

  “You’re not going with them?” says I, astonished.

  “Why would I do that?” says he. “I hired for the trip to California, and I keep my engagements.” D’ye know, even then, when I should have been grateful at the thought of another good pair of hands, I didn’t believe a word of it. “Besides,” says he, with a gallant inclination to Susie, who was now standing alarmed and woebegone, “Grattan’s never the boy to desert a lady in time of trouble, so he’s not.” And he sauntered off, humming, while my fond spouse assailed me with lamentations and self-
reproaches – for she was sharp enough to see that her folly had tipped the balance. If I’d had less on my mind I’d probably have given vent to my feelings, full tilt; as it was I just told her, pretty short, to get into the coach and make sure Skate’s bullies didn’t try to run off any of our crinoline herd.

  There was a pretty debate going on round our supply-wagons; Skate was claiming that he and his mates were entitled to food since they had been part of our caravan; Grattan was taking the line that when they stopped working for us, they stopped eating, and if they tried to pilfer he’d drop the first man in his tracks. He pushed back his coat and hooked a thumb in his belt beside his Colt as he said it; Skate bawled and gnashed a bit, but gave way, and I judged the time right to remind the emigrants that if they wished to change their mind, they’d be welcome. None did, and I believe it was simply that they clung to the larger party, and to the firepower of Skate’s fellows.

  They were just starting to struggle over the crossing when our depleted party rolled off up the Arkansas, and I scouted to a ridge to see what lay ahead. As usual, it was just rolling plain as far as you could see, with the muddy line of the Arkansas and its fringe of cottonwoods and willows; nothing moved out on that vastness, not even a bird; I sat with my heart sinking as our little train passed me and pitched and rolled slowly down the slope; Susie’s carriage with its skinner, and the servants perched behind; the four wagons whose oxen had been exchanged for mules, and the other four with the cattle teams, all with their drivers. The covers were up on the trulls’ wagons, and there they were in their bonnets against the early sun, sitting demurely side by side. The Cincinnati Health Improvement Society came last in their two carriages, with their paraphernalia on top; you could hear them comparing symptoms at a quarter of a mile.

  We made four days up the river without seeing a living thing, and I couldn’t believe our luck; then it rained, such blinding sheets of water as you’ve never seen, sending cataracts across the trail and turning it into a hideous, glue-like mud from which one wagon had to be dragged free by the teams of four others. We took to what higher ground there was, and pushed on through a day that was as dark as late evening, with great blue forks of lightning flickering round the sky and thunder booming incessantly overhead. It died away at nightfall, and we made camp in a little hollow near the water’s edge and dried out. After the raging of the storm everything fell deathly still; we even talked in undertones, and you could feel a great oppression weighing down on you, as though the air itself was heavy. It was dank and drear, without wind, a silence so absolute that you could almost listen to it.

  Grattan and I were having a last smoke by the fire, our spirits in our boots, when he came suddenly to his feet and stood, head cocked, while I whinnied in alarm and demanded to know what the devil he was doing. For answer he upended the cooking pot on to the fire with a great hiss and sputter of sparks and steam, and then he was running from wagon to wagon calling softly; “Lights out! Lights out!” while I gave birth and glared about me. Here he was back, dropping a hand on my shoulder, and stifling my inquiries with: “Quiet! Listen!”

  I did, and there wasn’t a damned thing except my own belly rumbling. I strained my ears … and then I heard it, so soft that it was hardly a noise at all, more a vibration on the night air. My flesh prickled at the thought of horsemen – no, it might be buffalo on the move … too regular for that … and then my mouth went dry as I realised what it must be. Somewhere, out in that enveloping blackness, there was a soft, steady sound of drums.

  “Jesus!” I breathed.

  “I doubt it,” whispered Grattan. “Say Lucifer, and ye’ll be nearer the mark.”

  He jerked his head, and before I knew what I was properly doing I was following him up the slope to the west of our hollow; there was a little thicket of bushes, and we crawled under it and wormed our way forward until we could part the grass on the crest and see ahead. It was black as the earl of hell’s weskit, but there, miles ahead in the distance, were five or six flaring points of light – Indian camp-fires, without a doubt, along the river bank. Which meant, when you thought about it, that they lay slap on our line of march.

  We watched for several minutes in silence, and then I said, in a hoarse croak: “Maybe they’ll be friendlies.” Grattan said nothing, which was in itself an adequate answer.

  You may guess how much we slept that night. Grattan and I were on the watch as dawn broke, when their fires had disappeared with the light and instead we could see columns of smoke, perhaps five miles away, along the river; it looked like a mighty camp to me, but at such a distance you couldn’t tell.

  There was no question of our stirring, of course. We must just lie up and hope they would move, and sure enough, about noon we realised that the dark strip which had been the camp was shifting – down-river, in our direction. Grattan cursed beneath his breath, but there was nothing for it but to lie there and watch the long column snaking inexorably towards us past the cottonwood groves. It wasn’t more than a mile away, and I was all but soiling myself in fear, when the head of the column veered away from the river, and I recollected with a surge of hope that our hollow lay in a wide bow of the river; if they held their march along the bowstring, they might pass us by, damnably close, but unless one of them scouted the bank they would never realise we were there.

  We scurried down and had the teamsters stand by their beasts, enjoining utter silence; my chief anxiety was the invalids, who were such a feckless lot that they might easily blunder about and make a noise, so I ordered them into their carriages with instructions to sit still. Then Grattan and I wormed back to the crest, and took a look.

  That was a horrible sight, I can tell you. The head of the column wasn’t above three hundred yards away, moving slowly past our hiding-place. There was a great murmur rising from it, but not much dust after the rain, and we had a clear view. There were warriors riding in front, some with braided hair and coloured blankets round their shoulders, others with the lower part of their skulls shaved and top-knots that bristled up, whether of hair or feathers I couldn’t tell. Then came what was either a chief or a medicine man, almost naked, on a horse caparisoned in coloured cloth to the ground; he carried a great staff like a shepherd’s crook, ribboned and feathered, and behind walked two men carrying little tom-toms that they beat in a throbbing rhythm. Then more warriors, with feathers in their hair, some in blankets, others bare except for breech-clouts or leggings; all were garishly painted – red, black and white as I recall. Almost all were mounted on mustangs, but behind came the usual disorderly mess of travois and draught animals and walking families and cattle and dogs and general Indian foulness and confusion. Then the rearguard, after what seemed an interminable wait; more mounted warriors, with bows and lances, and as they drew level with us I found myself starting to breathe again: we were going to escape.

  Whether that thought travelled through the air, I don’t know, but suddenly one of the riders wheeled away from the others and put his pony to the gentle slope running up to our position. He came at a trot, straight for us, and we watched, frozen. Then Grattan’s hand came out from under his body, and I saw he had his Bowie turned in his fist; I clapped a hand over it, and he turned to stare at me: his eyes were wild, and I thought, by gum, Flashy, you ain’t the only nervous one on the Plains this day. I shook my head; if the savage saw us, we must try to talk our way out – not that there’d be much hope of that, from what we’d seen.

  The Indian came breasting up the hill, checked, and looked back the way they had come, towards the camp-ground, and I realised he was taking a last look-see. He wasn’t twenty yards away, close enough to make out every hideous detail of the buffalo-horn head-dress, embroidered breech clout, beaded garters wound round his legs above the moccasins, the oiled and muscular limbs. He had a lance, a little round shield on his arm, and a war-club hung from his belt. He sat at gaze a full minute, and then rode slowly along just beneath our hide, with never an upward glance; he paused, leaning down to cle
ar a tangle of weed from his foot – and in the hollow behind us some fool dropped a vessel with a resounding clatter.

  The Indian’s head lifted, the painted face staring directly at our bush; he straightened in his seat, head turning from side to side like a questing dog’s. He looked after his party, then back towards us. Go away, you awful red bastard, go away, I was screaming inwardly, it’s only a kettle or a piss-pot dropped by those infernal hypochondriacs; Christ, it’s a wonder you can’t hear the buggers wheezing … and then he trotted down the hill after the retreating column.

  We waited until the last of them were well out on the plain and vanishing into the haze before we even stirred – and then I made the terrifying discovery that while Grattan and I had been lying too scared to breathe, and Susie had been sitting tight-lipped in her coach with her eyes shut, three of the sluts – Cleonie, black Aphrodite, and another – had crawled up to a point on the crest to watch the passing show! Giggling and sizing up the bucks, I don’t doubt; how they hadn’t been spotted …

  We moved out in some haste. You ain’t seen galloping oxen? Within the hour we had passed through the appalling filth and litter of the deserted Indian camp, and it seemed reasonable to hope that a band of such size would be the only one in the vicinity. I asked Grattan who they were; he thought, from the bright-coloured blankets and the buffalo-scalp cap, that they might be Cumanches, but wasn’t sure – I may tell you now, from a fairish experience of Indians, that they’re a sight harder to indentify by appearance than, say, Zulu regiments or civilized soldiers; they ain’t consistent in their dress or ornament. I remember Charley Reynolds, who was as good a scout as ever lived, telling me how he’d marked down a band as Arapaho by an arrow they’d fired at him – he found out later they’d been Oglala Sioux, and the arrow had been pinched from a Crow. That by the way; Grattan didn’t cheer me up much by remarking that the Cumanche are cannibals.