Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  Kelly gave the hand sign of understanding, turned for the low entrance.

  Ducking to pass within, his face paled. A moment before, he had taken the name of the Dark One in vain. Now his fearful nose had just made an honest prophet of him. There was no mistaking that cloying, sweetish, fetid odor. Decaying human flesh. A man never forgot that smell once it had sickened his nostrils. Before he ever touched the suffering Crow’s rumpled wolfskin coverlet, he knew what he would find beneath it. Gangrene. His patient was already rotten with proud flesh. Rotten enough to be smelled ten feet away on a wind-still day. Sight unseen, the captive Crow was as good as dead. And, likewise, Luther S. Kelly along with him.

  Yet the white scout had received only his first shock of two that early autumn afternoon.

  He got the second moments later, while his spreading pupils were still adjusting to the inner gloom of the noisome shelter and while he was still holding his hand on the burning forehead of the sufferer to gauge his fever.

  The white-toothed flashing of the wan smile seemed to touch the hidden face with fading starlight for a fleeting instant, then was gone.

  “Hohahe—” said a voice, as soft as the fall of a first snowflake. “I am glad that you have come. I have been waiting for you.”

  Kelly said nothing. He was literally unable to speak. It was all he could do to comprehend.

  Gall’s Crow captive was a woman. And, unless a man’s straining eyes were playing tricks on him in the shaded darkness of that cedar shelter, a startlingly young and strangely beautiful woman.

  BOOK TWO:

  CROW GIRL MEADOW

  9

  Kelly did not try to look at the girl’s leg in the shelter. The dim light was far too uncertain for such a critical diagnosis. Further, the fouled air was unendurable. “Owan-yeke waste,” he reassured his silent patient in Sioux, “everything here is good for the eye.” It was a bald lie, but the girl, too, could smell the presence of death in the stench of her decomposing wound and was very frightened. It was, Kelly felt, no more and no less than any real doctor would have done for her—or could have, as a matter of apparent medical fact. On the frontier a man’s instincts grew primitive. He could feel things. This girl was going to die.

  He laid his hand lightly on her forehead again. She turned her flushed face gratefully into the coolness of his big palm as he did so, and he grimaced silently. “Do not struggle, and do not be afraid,” he told her gently. “I am going to have them carry you outside now. That is so the clean sunlight can help me see what is the matter with your leg. I am here to make you well. Do you believe that?”

  “I believe it, Wasicun,” she murmured, pressing her cheek harder still against his comforting hand.

  “And is your heart good for me, Crow Girl?” he asked her soberly.

  “Yes,” she said. “My heart is good for you, Lone Wolf.” The husky accent was so low-voiced, he scarcely made it out, but he felt the slight movement of her head in agreement and, as he brought his hand away, felt also the swift course of the silent tears across her dark cheek.

  He came stooping out of the shelter, his long jaw clamped, throat aching tight, black eyes smoldering.

  Straightening, he flung his orders with peremptory abruptness at the waiting Sioux. When the latter did not move at once in response to the white man’s commands, Gall whirled upon them, his face contorted.

  “Do as Lone Wolf says!” he snarled. “Or account to me hinmangas!”

  Since the literal translation of the concluding Hunkpapa term was “you and I tear each other with a knife,” and since each of the sullen braves understood the peculiar tribal significance of the challenge, there was a rush of eager red hands to bear the suffering Crow girl out into the sunlight.

  Observing the terse exchange, Kelly made a mental note of it. He had heard of the Hunkpapa hinmangas duels but had never witnessed one, nor talked with any white man who had. But even in the tension of his concern over his own immediate fate, he could not miss the reaction of Gall’s hardened crew to the mention of the term. Quite certainly the combat must present some refinements of cruelty and courage-testing not included in the standard knife fighting of the plains tribes. He was given no more than time to file away the ominous fact for future reference before the braves were bringing the Crow girl toward him.

  “Put her on this clean rock by the little stream, here,” he ordered them, indicating a flat sheet of weathered stone which lay close to the source-pool of the welling mountain spring near which the Sioux had camped.

  “Now you others cut four cedar stakes,” he called to the remaining braves. “Cut them long and make them sharp and drive them deep into the ground at the four corners of the rock. Bring also four well-greased tether ropes, old ones that are soft and pliable, yet still strong. Hopo! Hopo!”

  “What is it that you will do?” asked Gall, stern-faced, as the warriors went grudgingly about Kelly’s orders. “Stake her out in the sun like a miserable dog of a Tshaoh?”

  He referred to the Comanches, literally “the Enemy People,” and to their frequent habit of torturing captives. Contrary to lurid popular belief, the North Plains tribes seldom mutilated their victims before death. Such barbarities were distinctly beneath the proud Sioux. Torture was the specialty of the southern Plains Indians and the haughty northerners held them but little better than brutes for the practice.

  Kelly knew this, but had no time for tribal niceties.

  “Exactly in the same way!” he rasped. “When you are cutting with the little knife, the least slip can mean the difference between living and dying. The one who is being cut must not be allowed to move. Especially,” he added, eying Gall unblinkingly, “when the one who is doing the cutting is being watched by thirty-nine Hunkpapa rifles.”

  Gall broke his eyes from the white man’s in time to see his braves lowering the Crow girl onto the bare surface of the sun-scrubbed rock.

  His thin temper flared instantly.

  “Bring a robe, you fools!” he roared. “Place it beneath her. And gently! What do you think you are handling there? A sack of Pony Soldier oats?!”

  Before the startled braves could move, or Gall could further upbraid them, the chiefs angry orders were quietly countermanded. “No robe,” said Luther Kelly softly. “The rock is clean. That is the way I want it.”

  Gall swung on him, eyes blazing.

  Red Paint stepped in, shifting his knife belt.

  The remaining braves moved forward, rifles coming up, wide lips tightening.

  The warriors by the rock did nothing.

  “What did you say?” growled Gall.

  “There will be no robe,” repeated Kelly. He did not raise the level of his voice, nor move so much as an eyelid muscle. The stillness grew as though it had life and form, swiftly and with a great heaviness. Red Paint was the first to find its weight intolerable.

  With an animal snarl, he leaped at the motionless braves by the rock. “Here, you sunkes! Give her to me!” He seized the feverish girl from them, held her savagely yet tenderly as a child to his broad chest.

  “Now bring the robe!” he barked. “Hookahey—!”

  Again the white scout did not move, nor raise his vibrant voice. But there was, as always when he spoke with feeling, a strange compelling quality to the Irish adventurer’s words. The departing Sioux halted in their moccasin tracks.

  “There is going to be much blood, my brothers. And much need of cleansing waters to wash it away. There is to be no robe. No anything. Nothing beneath the girl but the stone, nothing above her but the sun. Hear me, my brothers. I will not touch her with the little knife unless I am obeyed at once.”

  He addressed the braves in form only. His words were for Gall and the sensitive Sioux leader knew as much instinctively.

  There was a long silence while Red Paint pressed the girl to his breast, and Gall stared first at him, then across
at Kelly. At last he bowed his dark head, made the submission sign with his left hand.

  “Bind her on the rock as Lone Wolf says,” he directed the defiant Sayapi. The latter hesitated as though he would not do it, then, without a word or look for Kelly, placed the now restlessly turning girl with exquisite care upon the sun-washed surface of the white scout’s operating table. Stepping back slowly, his glittering eyes found Kelly’s. Their glances locked across the slender body of the suffering captive with an almost audible click and fall as of steel tumblers going into irrevocable place.

  “Do with her whatever Gall says,” agreed the handsome Hunkpapa youth expressionlessly. “And while you are doing it, pray to your gods that what Gall says is not wrong.”

  The braves moved forward to tie down the Crow girl but Kelly held up his hand. “First bring a clean blanket,” he instructed quickly. “And do you have any hupistola? Any Indian soap of the yucca root?”

  The blanket was no problem, it appeared, but as to the hupistola, an ebb of negative headshakes washed around the waiting circle. In the midst of the little silence, Red Paint, who had stepped back to stand icily aloof after his surrender to Gall’s will, called suddenly across the heads of his restless fellows. “Sayapi has better than that. Some haipajaja, some Wasicun soap!”

  “No! Real soap?” asked Kelly hopefully.

  “From the old man in the valley,” interjected Gall. “He said it would be good medicine for the girl’s leg. Better than nothing. We knew he lied, but we took it anyway, so that he would not think we were fools.”

  “He did not lie!” snapped Kelly, the prolonging tension of the exchange beginning to edge his ordinarily unshakable nerves. “Bring it at once.”

  “Bring it,” echoed Gall to the fiercely proud Red Paint. This time the stony-faced youth touched his left fingertips to his brow without hesitation. He was back in a moment, after a quick search of the elk-skin parfleche slung across his pony’s withers. He handed the grimy, lint-caked bar of soft-milled ash-and-lye settlement soap to the white scout and turned away without meeting his eyes. But Kelly had no time to worry about brooding Sioux subchiefs or countermanded Indian swains. Two lives were at stake, one of which happened to be his own. He flung up a long arm, waving it around the entire circle of his intent watchers.

  “You will all go back by the fire now. Turn your eyes away from this spot. I must do a personal thing.”

  “How is that?” said Gall suspiciously.

  Red Paint, in the same instant, saved words but joined in the sentiment by once again stepping forward and dropping his sinewed hand eloquently to his knife haft.

  Kelly gave them both a scathing look.

  “Would you then spy upon your own women bathing in a clear stream after a hot and dusty day upon the trail?”

  The two Sioux flushed deeply, and Gall bowed his head in quick shame. “We will all turn away, of course,” he murmured to Kelly. Then, gutturally, to his braves, “Go to the fire at once. As Lone Wolf says, this will be a personal thing. A warrior does not look at women bathing.”

  “I still need that clean blanket,” the white scout called, as the group began to move away. “Who will bring it?”

  It developed, again without a single exchanged word between them, that once more it was Red Paint who had the necessary article. He brought the blanket, a gorgeous new Hudson’s Bay Four Point of black and scarlet, never used, gave it to Kelly and retreated after his fellows.

  When he had turned away, Kelly got on at once with his risky and unwanted gamble.

  He first cut away the girl’s vermin-infested camp dress with his skinning knife, throwing the filthy serum-and pus-stained garment aside and trying not to look at the young body beneath it as he did. The girl said nothing and did not move to resist his probing hands. She was far too ill to think about a strange white man bathing her naked form with harsh Wasicun soap and soft mountain water.

  Kelly sponged her methodically, all over, using the soap on a wadded handful of downy pine grass and cedar moss, rinsing away the residue of pore-deep trail dirt with copious hatfuls of running springwater dipped in his low-crowned beaver from the eddying rill beside him. His set face glistened with the pale sweat of nerve and thought control, yet despite his best efforts to detach himself from certain distracting male instincts, his breath was coming hard and fast before he got even to the girl’s slender waist. He felt the guilt of his reactions but could not channel the latter regardless. Luther Kelly had never seen a woman’s body before this one. And this one, fevered sick or not, was such a body as few men ever see. The young scout’s hands were shaking like the leaves of an aspen grove before the first crash of thunder in a mountain shower as he finished cleansing the final soft contour of the dusky copper form upon the sunlit rock.

  But he came at last, and shaking hands or nay, to the pitifully shattered knee itself. Giving it his first full look in good light, he nearly vomited.

  The wound was fearsome.

  Four days old and infected no doubt within the minute of its reception, there was no hope to treat it successfully. It was a raging, festering, gray-green, bulbous mass of sloughing proud flesh, protruding bone snags of sick white fracture splinters and yellow, crustingly granulated serous scab. The swollen angry area of the infection’s spread, beyond the site of the wound itself, extended a good six inches above the knee. The entire right leg, below the knee, was a distended shapeless colon of flamingly discolored flesh.

  Kelly knew perfectly well what was indicated—amputation. And high-up amputation. At least six inches beyond the head of the inflamed area into the healthy tissues of the upper thigh.

  He also knew something else perfectly well.

  The prairie Sioux did not practice amputation.

  There was no use even suggesting it to Gall.

  The Hunkpapa, in fact all the horseback tribes, were a body-proud race. To them, death was preferable to disfigurement. Knowing this, Kelly had no choice.

  As was his perverse Irish way under pressure, he laughed. His hands were steady now, his black eyes unclouded. He threw the fresh blanket over her body above mid-thigh, signaled for Gall and Red Paint to return quickly.

  “Now tie her fast to the stakes,” he rapped out, when they had come up. “Tie her hard. Until the rawhide bites into the flesh to make it white.”

  Gall repeated the order to the first of his warriors to come up, and the latter fell swiftly to work spread-eagling the pale-lipped Crow girl as viciously as though they meant to put lighted pine splinters under her toenails, Apache-style, or to strip a roll of living skin from her firm young belly with a peeling-stick, after the fashion of the Kiowa and Comanche.

  While they grunted unfeelingly about their ruthless trussing, Kelly was busy with the contents of his “big medicine” kit.

  Squatting by the pebble-bottomed spring branch, he meticulously scrubbed needle, lancet, probes, and forceps with the fine white bank sand. Next, he repeated the process with soap lather, rinsed the instruments, and laid them to dry upon the surface of his granite surgery. He then opened the bottle of carbolic, placed it conveniently to hand, and was ready.

  Making a thin roll of the soft leather instrument wrapping, he told the girl to take it between her teeth. “When you feel the knife,” he said tersely, “this will keep you from biting off your tongue.” To Gall and the brooding Red Paint, he muttered aside, “Stand close by her head, one on either side. See that she does not spit out the biting roll.” The two Sioux nodded their understanding and stepped into position.

  Kelly began his work.

  He moved about it with the speed of brute mercy. There could be no help for what was to come, save to make it come quickly.

  He carved away the curling layers of protuberant dead tissue in thick ugly gray slices. No sound issued from the rigidly braced girl, nor from the slant-eyed watchers surrounding her. The lancet sped on. Midw
ay in the seventh cut, it rode searingly into living tissue.

  The Crow girl screamed, spat the gag, convulsed, and went limp.

  10

  It went very quickly after that.

  With the forceps Kelly picked out the eruptive bone splinters, arranging the damaged kneecap in as near its natural posture as his limited knowledge could suppose was correct. He then heavily irrigated the curetted wound site with more springwater drenches, augmenting the bleeding which was cleansing the incised area. When the loss of blood began to slow, he let the leg dry in the sun, meanwhile sprinkling the operative field with baking soda, a tin of which he always carried in his war bag for the manufacture of frying-pan light bread. The bleeding stopped entirely within three or four minutes.

  The moment it had, Kelly took the needle and bundle of suturing gut, grasped them in the forceps, plunged the whole into the water he had ordered the Sioux to boil meanwhile for the purpose of sterilizing some undyed trade cotton which one of the braves had bought at Reed’s Ranch.

  He grimaced wryly at the crude contrast in civilized aim and savage method; the Sioux were boiling the bandaging cotton in a green buffalo paunch!

  Kelly pulled his hand quickly away from the steaming Sioux cook pot. Moving back to the girl, he made his simple sutures, laterally, across the gaping openness of the knee, pulling the edges to within an inch of each other and thus holding the kneecap, under pressure, in place for the bandaging.

  He wrapped the hot, wrung-out cotton stripping as he had been taught in the service, leaving it just free enough to accept a pushing fingertip beneath its edges. This done, he splinted the knee with pliant green willow withes, set the splints by wrapping them firmly in the remaining cotton, covered the whole, ankle to mid-thigh, with a piece of clean manta, or canvas pack covering, bound in place with plaiting rawhide.

  When he had made his last tie and trimmed its ends, he stood back, making the simple hand sign of completion to the red audience.