Stamping Ground

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It got heavy in my holster. I put it on top of the desk to rest. Like this.” I lifted the five-shot .45 from my lap and deposited it, still cocked, atop the table. His buzzard’s beak turned crimson.

  “Where’s your badge?”

  I flashed metal.

  “Why don’t you wear it?”

  “For the same reason I don’t paint a big red bull’s-eye on the back of my coat.”

  “You need a lesson in good manners,” he said. “Judge Flood’s expecting you over to the courthouse. He’s been waiting ever since we got word an hour ago you were in town. He don’t like to be left hanging.”

  “Neither do most of the defendants in his court. But that doesn’t keep them off the scaffold.”

  That was a shot to the groin. Abel Flood’s record of hangings was no worse than that of any other judge in the territories, where prisons were a long way apart and lumber for building gallows came cheaper than armed escorts. But when they leave openings like that, I leap through.

  All of Hudspeth’s emotions showed in his nose, which was beginning to resemble a railroader’s lantern. It was a knotted lump of flesh trussed like a rodeo calf with hundreds of tiny burst blood vessels. You saw a lot of noses like it in canteens throughout the West, not uncommonly on men who wore badges, but seldom on federal marshals, who, like cavalry officers, were usually selected for their heroic good looks and little else. I decided he was probably a pretty good lawman, because he certainly had nothing else going for him. I might even have admired him if he weren’t such a pain. I let him stew while I tossed down the rest of my drink the way they do in the dime novels, in one confident jerk. You could do that when most of it was water.

  His voice was choked, as if he’d emptied the glass himself. “If you’re through, the judge wants to see you. Now.”

  I took just enough time leathering the five-shot and getting up to let him know what I thought of his implied ultimatum without seeming self-conscious about it. I found when I stood that he had a couple of inches on me and that I’d been all wrong in thinking him soft. Although he was thick in the middle, his weight was pretty evenly distributed upon a heavy frame, and solid. His eyes were as clear and bright as bullets fresh from the mold.

  “Strictly speaking,” Judge Blackthorne had explained before I’d left Helena, “Bismarck shouldn’t even have a federal judge, Yankton being the territorial capital. But there’s talk in Congress of dividing Dakota in two once it becomes a state, and it’s a sure bet it’ll be the capital of the northern half soon now that the railroad’s in. That’s why Flood keeps his chambers in the county courthouse.”

  This structure was a squat log affair within smelling distance of the river, identified by a sign that swung from a rusted iron rod with crude letters burned into the wood. Hudspeth entered without knocking and tracked mud across a big room with a judge’s bench, three rows of seats, and empty echoes in the rafters. An American flag, spanking new (nothing in Bismarck was old), hung on the wall behind the bench at a discreet distance from a much-missed spittoon near the witness-box. Beyond that was a door before which the marshal stopped and rapped upon with a ponderous fist. A voice like two blasts on a steam whistle bade us enter.

  Fat law books crowded the shelves of the corner cubicle in which Flood shared chambers with the county magistrate. He got them in sets straight from New York City and never read them, or so I divined from the lack of wear on the expensive leather bindings. Unlike Blackthorne, who had scrimped and worked nights to buy a book at a time while putting himself through college, and had studied each until he knew it by heart, Flood had come from a family of rich eastern politicians who had been only too happy to grease the skids. “Don’t let him fool you, though,” the judge—my judge—had warned. “The old bastard knows more about human nature than you’ll find in any legal record, and that’s all it takes to dispense the brand of justice our founding fathers talked about.”

  A quarter ton of flesh wrapped in twenty yards of black broadcloth was seated in a stuffed leather armchair near the window as we entered, that day’s edition of the Bismarck Tribune spread open across his fat knees. His bald head shone like a wet egg in a nest of cobwebby fringe, and black-rimmed pince-nez wobbled astride his round pink nose. He was clean-shaven except for fluffy side-whiskers. The knot of a narrow black necktie was obscured beneath the folds of his chin. He looked as if he had never been out of that chair. The room had been built around him while he sat there reading his newspaper. Looking at him, I wondered how I had ever thought of A. C. Hudspeth as fat. A gold watch was attached by a chain to his swollen vest, and this he was consulting in the palm of a pudgy flipper.

  “One hour and six minutes,” he bellowed, snapping shut the face of the watch. “I’ll have the accountant deduct that from your salary at the end of the month.”

  I was to learn presently that this was his normal speaking voice, and that he was almost deaf. The trials over which he presided, I was told later, with both sides shouting to be heard by the man who wielded the gavel, could be followed from halfway across town. The Tribune’s court reporter had only to sit next to an open window in the newspaper office and take notes.

  I didn’t say anything, but scooped out a handful of crumpled scraps of paper from my left hip pocket and dumped them over the newspaper in his lap.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Receipts,” I said, and repeated it in a louder voice when he cocked his ear. “Food. Boat fare. A bath. Whiskey. Judge Blackthorne said you’d reimburse me.”

  “For the necessities! The taxpayers of the United States will not subsidize your self-indulgence!”

  “All right, forget the bath.”

  The top of his head grew pink. His scalp and Hudspeth’s nose made good barometers. I took pity on him and stopped being smart.

  “I’m kidding. The whiskey’s on me.”

  To my surprise, the fat judge broke into a guffaw that set the window behind him to rattling in its frame. He handed the receipts to the marshal.

  “See that Deputy Murdock is compensated for his expenses. All of them, including whiskey.” He returned his attention to me. “I’m a man of temperance myself, but I can appreciate the importance of that first drink after the journey downriver. Henceforth, however, the spirits will indeed be on you. Well, what do you think of our little community?”

  “The prices are too high and it’s full of bastards. Aside from that it’s a nice little trap.”

  That didn’t amuse him at all. I was having difficulty getting his range.

  “Well, no matter,” he said finally. “You won’t be here long. Tomorrow I’m sending you to Fargo.”

  “Why Fargo?”

  “You’re picking someone up.”

  “A prisoner?”

  “No.” He smiled secretly—the kind of expression you get by practicing for hours in front of a mirror—and removed his pince-nez to polish them with an acre of white silk handkerchief taken from his breast pocket. His eyes, in contrast to the marshal’s, were vague and lifeless. “Not yet, anyway. It’ll be your job to make him one. The gentleman’s name is Ghost Shirt, but as far as the Dakota Cheyenne are concerned he’s the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The families of one hundred and forty-nine men, women and children massacred by his band in the Black Hills last year might not agree. I hope you find the rest of the territory more to your taste than Bismarck, Deputy. You’re likely to see a lot of it before you finish this assignment.”

  Chapter Two

  The Indian they called Ghost Shirt might have died a minor sub-chief of the Cheyenne nation had not George Custer’s 7th Cavalry discovered gold in the Black Hills of southern Dakota in 1874.

  The following year, frustrated by its consistent failure to reach a treaty with the resident Casts No Shadow and his Cheyenne followers, the federal government opened the hills to gold-seekers in an attempt to force the Indians out. Casts No Shadow, a provincial brave who had never ventured east of the Red River of the North, struck b
ack by attacking and slaughtering the first wagon trainload of prospectors that rolled into his stamping ground. Then the army came, and after the chief’s two sons were killed in a skirmish with the cavalry, he lost heart, surrendered himself, and was hanged six weeks later for his part in the massacre. His brother, Kills Bear, who had departed with half the tribe for Montana at the time of the surrender, threw in his lot with Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn and, in the charged aftermath of Custer’s slaughter, fled to Canada in ’77 to escape the vengeance of the new administration in Washington City.

  With him was Ghost Shirt, a young nephew filled with an all-consuming hatred for the white man nurtured throughout the three years he had spent in the East learning the ways of the enemy. During the trek north he grew restless and peeled forty braves off the main shaft for his own foray into the Black Hills. The immediate result was the Dry Hole Massacre.

  Dry Hole was a tent city erected near the gold strikes fifteen miles from Deadwood, where some seventy miners had settled with their families while they eked out a bare living chipping away at an anemic vein above a tributary of the Belle Fourche River. Ghost Shirt and his warriors came upon the settlement one morning soon after the men had left to work their claims. Without warning the Indians swept down on the women and children who remained behind. The few miners who heard the commotion in time to go back and do something about it ran straight into an ambush. By the time the others returned in force, they found their tents and wagons in flames and the camp a litter of corpses. The Indians had salvaged everything of value and fled.

  That was the first. Others were to follow. Names like Teamstrike and Crooked Creek and Blind Man’s Hollow conjured up images of smoldering bodies and babies dashed against trees and women in the final stages of pregnancy writhing at the ends of lances skewering them to the ground. The newspapers back East were crammed with wild-eyed descriptions of how the renegades ate the hearts and livers of their victims and wore leggings made of human flesh. These last were fabrications, but the troopers sent out to investigate the disturbances knew that the reality was far worse.

  The near eradication of a large cavalry patrol from Fort Abraham Lincoln by the diminutive band of braves at Elk Creek in December of ’77 opened the floodgates. With Sitting Bull and Kills Bear in Canada, Ghost Shirt became the Red Man’s Great Hope. From all over the Northwest they flocked to his standard—Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, and even a disgruntled few of the despised Crow, all united for the first time in living memory. Rumor had it that the battle-wise Cheyenne who had accompanied the old chief into exile were trickling south to join the “loinclothed Messiah,” as General of the Army Sherman referred to him bitterly during an unguarded moment at a press conference. The War Department made hurried preparations for a stepped-up Indian war. New forts were planned, while existing ones as far away from the seat of trouble as Fort Buford near the border of northern Montana were reinforced to capacity, and a massive recruitment campaign was launched throughout the eastern states in an effort to bring the peacetime army up to its Civil War strength. Within two months of Ghost Shirt’s return, all of Dakota had become an armed camp.

  On New Year’s Day, 1878, four hundred troopers under the command of General Baldur Scott descended on a Cheyenne camp south of Castle Rock and slaughtered everything that moved. When the carnage was over, it developed that Ghost Shirt was not present and that most of those killed were old men, women, and children. Never one to let slip an opportunity, Scott ordered everything burned so that the warriors would have nothing to come back to and then took off in pursuit.

  Ghost Shirt now was on the run for the second time in his young life. At the head of his band of homeless braves, he struck out across the Badlands toward Canada, but was forced to turn east when two cavalry regiments from Fort Yates opened fire on them at Thunder Creek, and crossed the Missouri River below Mobridge. A forced march followed, with pursuers and pursued covering a hundred miles in two days. The Indians were nearly overtaken at Napoleon and again at Jamestown, only to escape with bullets singing about their ears. Outnumbered two to one, they made a stand, aptly enough, at the Sheyenne River and were all but annihilated at the cost of one hundred and twenty-six troopers. Ghost Shirt was wounded in the leg and taken prisoner along with three warriors. The rest fell in battle. The survivors were incarcerated at Fort Ransom and tried within the week for the Black Hills massacres. The verdict was guilty. At the age of twenty-two, the nephew of the last chief of the Cheyenne nation was sentenced to hang.

  He and his trio of condemned followers were kept in the guardhouse under close watch while work progressed on a special gallows designed to accommodate four men at once. Shortly after the changing of the guard on a starless night in March, an argument broke out among the prisoners, blows were exchanged, and Ghost Shirt collapsed. The guards thrust bayoneted rifles between the bars and held the others at bay while the door was unlocked and a delegation entered to examine the stricken man. Suddenly a strangled cry rang out. A sergeant who had been stooping over Ghost Shirt reeled back, clawing at a bloody shard of wood protruding from the socket where his right eye had been. In the confusion that followed, one of the Indians snatched the rifle out of the hands of a guard and placed the bayonet point against a paralyzed trooper’s throat. Then Ghost Shirt, who had sprung to his feet after attacking the sergeant, relieved the private of his side arm and got the drop on the remaining trooper in the guardhouse. It was all over within seconds.

  With one of their comrades in his death agonies and two more in the hands of the prisoners, the troopers outside the cell were forced to stand and watch while Ghost Shirt and his companions prodded their hostages before them through the opening and backed across the compound into the shadows along the east wall with them in tow. Not until they were out of sight did the soldiers act. They ran for the wall, raising the alarm as they went, and snapped off shots at gray figures spotted scaling the ladder to the battlements. One brave, Standing Calf, fell at the foot of the ladder when a bullet crashed through his brain. Another, identified later as Ghost Shirt’s cousin Bad Antelope, was struck twice in the back as he teetered atop the wall, and toppled into the Sheyenne River on the other side. A third, a Crow called Silent Dog because his tongue had been cut out when as a youth he had been captured by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner before he could reach the ladder but was killed later under mysterious circumstances which the army was still investigating. Ghost Shirt was nowhere in sight.

  The bodies of the two troopers who had been taken hostage were found lying in pools of blood at the bottom of the ladder, their throats slashed by the captured bayonet.

  The next day, a search party discovered Bad Antelope’s corpse bobbing against a rock at a bend in the river a mile south of the fort. When a week of searching failed to turn up either Ghost Shirt or his tracks, it was decided that he had perished while trying to swim the rapid waters of the Sheyenne at spring thaw, and that his body was already halfway to Minnesota, if it hadn’t snaggled on a fallen limb in some uninhabited part of the territory. The search was called off after ten days, and Washington began processing new orders for the now unnecessary reinforcement troops in Dakota.

  Then, two weeks after the escape, a Swedish farmer was found murdered in his cabin two miles east of Fort Ransom. A neighbor who called on him from time to time became alarmed when the immigrant, an aged widower, failed to answer his knock, and entered through the unlocked front door. The house was a shambles. Someone had gone through the cupboards, scattered their contents over the floor, overturned flour barrels, dumped out the woodbox, torn out drawers, and pawed through the linens and clothing inside. Amid this confusion lay the elderly Swede, naked except for a nightshirt, the latter stained where he had been disemboweled with some sharp instrument the moment he stepped out of his bedroom.

  Further investigation revealed that there was not a scrap of food left in the house. Missing also was the dead man’s only weapon, a pre-Civil War Colt pistol which he was known to hav
e kept next to his bed. That he had been carrying it when he went out to investigate the strange noises in the other room seemed a reasonable assumption. His buggy horse was gone as well. The hasp on the barn door had been forced with great difficulty and the animal removed by a man wearing moccasins—as shown by the tracks left in the soft earth inside. The considerable effort that had gone into breaking the hasp was borne out by the shattered half of a bayonet blade found in the grass beside the door.

  The discovery sparked panic among settlers throughout the territory. The commanding officer at Fort Ransom issued a hasty statement to the press declaring the evidence inconclusive, but as no other explanation was forthcoming his words went unheeded. Washington was bombarded with telegrams demanding protection from the Antichrist in the settlers’ midst. Congress, still involved with its investigation into the more interesting legacies of the Grant Administration, sent a terse directive to the General of the Army: Either deal with Ghost Shirt once and for all or learn to get along without allocations from next year’s budget. Sherman’s immediate reaction to this ultimatum went unrecorded, as this time no reporters were present. Nevertheless the laborious process of reassigning men who were already enroute to their new posts was begun.

  The turnaround was too slow. In mid-April, while the troop strength at Fort Ransom was still at low ebb, Ghost Shirt, accompanied by twenty renegades believed to have been recruited from among the disgruntled Sioux south of the Red River Valley, raided the post armory and made off with a wagonload of rifles and ammunition, enough to equip a force five times as large. They struck while the troopers were busy fighting a fire the braves had set at the north wall, and, in a bloodless battle—the first such since the trouble had begun—shot their way out through the gate, wagon, horses, and all. The weapons stolen were part of a new shipment of unissued .56-caliber Spencer repeating rifles, which made the outlaw braves among the best-armed Indians in the West. The average cavalryman was still carrying the single-shot Springfield that had helped lose the Civil War for the Confederates. A pursuit patrol dispatched within minutes of the raid came upon the wagon half a mile west of the fort, its bed a jumble of empty crates. After that the fates appeared to be on Ghost Shirt’s side, as at that moment one of those sudden downpours for which the region surrounding the Red River of the North was notorious opened up and washed out all traces of the Indians’ escape route.