“Do they all get that excited over white men?” I asked the marshal.
“What did you expect? They’re more than half white themselves.”
The métis, I was to learn, were no less mongrel than their pets. Also called bois brûlés, or “burnt wood,” because of their swarthy complexions, most were descended from Huron or Algonquin women and foreign trappers who had come west in the middle of the last century and married into the tribes. Since then interbreeding had become a way of life, until now there was precious little to separate them from the equally dark French Canadians who were prevalent in the area. Nevertheless they retained their essentially Indian ways. They were nomadic and depended for their existence almost entirely upon the buffalo of which they were undisciplined butchers. They also knew every rock and bush in Dakota territory by its first name, which was the reason we were here.
Whatever was going on inside the circle of firelight, it was receiving the full-throated approval of the colorfully clad mob that surrounded it. Their shouted encouragement was a stew of English, French, and one or two other languages I couldn’t identify. It was so loud it almost drowned out the sound of blows.
The free-for-all was well in progress by the time we got there. In the center of the circle, cheered on by the howling spectators, half-naked men shining with the sweat of their exertions wrestled and fought in a tangled throng, grunting, snarling and muttering oaths in a variety of tongues as colorful as their audience’s garb. Kicking seemed to be in, as was biting and eye-gouging. It was an elimination contest. Every now and then a man battered and torn beyond his limits staggered or was carried from the action over the outstretched forms of his predecessors, while in the middle the meiee raged on without flagging. Those left sported shiners and smeared lips like I hadn’t seen since the bank runs in the early days of the Panic. All about their feet bloody teeth twinkled in the firelight.
One brawler in particular, a squat breed whose powerful build belied the iron-gray hair falling about his shoulders, looked to be giving more than he got, as he answered his opponents’ blows with Helena Haymakers that sent them reeling back into the crowd of spectators. Little by little, as Hudspeth and I watched from the backs of our horses, the heaving mass dwindled until only a handful remained to slug it out among themselves, with the old man in the heart of it. The air was heavy with the rank smell of turned earth and sweat.
All in all, I reflected, this spectacle was playing hell with what I’d been told about the gentle ways of the métis. But then there are exceptions to every rule.
Down to the bare boards, the rules of combat underwent a subtle change. The younger men, apparently recognizing the threat to their reputations should they fall to someone thirty years their senior, stopped fighting each other and teamed up, at odds of six to one, to take out the old man. They whooped and hollered and charged headlong into a beehive.
He was a magnificent specimen, this old breed who could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy-five but fought like a Blackfoot brave in his twenties. Muscles writhed beneath his naked torso like snakes beneath a sheet, and scars thick as cables crisscrossed his great chest and shoulders. He reminded me of a king buffalo I had once seen defending its throne. Old and grizzled though he was, he was still more than a match for the youngsters who challenged his authority. Besieged from all sides, he met them in silence, snaggled teeth bared in a determined grin as he felled this one with a blow and hooked that one viciously in the groin with the toe of a moccasin. Those lucky enough to connect found their best shots glancing off him like a blacksmith’s hammer bounding from an anvil. Then a clout from an axelike fist would bring their participation to an end. In this manner he disposed of four assailants in as many minutes.
He had both arms wrapped around a fifth and was bear-hugging him into unconsciousness when the sixth, a lean young breed with features more Indian than white, snatched up a chunk of wood from the fire and charged him from behind, swinging the glowing end above his head. I have no special love for rules, but this seemed to be going astray from the spirit of healthy competition. I drew my revolver and was debating whether I should drop him and risk the hostility of the tribe or gamble on a dime-novel try at shooting the club out of his hand, when a shot like the Fourth of July in Chinatown crashed within a foot of my left ear. The young breed shrieked, dropped his weapon, and clapped a hand to the side of his head. It came back bloody.
Every eye in the vicinity, including mine, swung to the big man astride the horse next to my own. A plume of metallic gray smoke wandered from the snout of the Smith & Wesson in Hudspeth’s right hand while with the other he struggled to keep his startled mount under control. He had drawn the clumsy thing from its unlikely position beneath his left arm and fired while I was still figuring the angles. And he said he was slowing down.
The old man wasn’t one to let the grass grow. While his would-be attacker was still hopping around and lamenting the loss of his right ear, he whirled and slung the limp breed he was holding six feet into the other’s arms. One hundred and sixty pounds of métis struck him full in the chest, tore the wind from his lungs in a loud woof, and bore him, a tangle of arms and legs, to the ground on the other side of the fire.”
For a long moment there was silence. Then the air erupted and the crowd surged forward, closing in on the old breed, the women babbling excitedly, the men pumping his hands and slapping him on the back. Our presence was forgotten. A half-full whiskey bottle was produced from some hoarder’s lodge and, after it had been admired for a while, was presented to the victor with a flourish. He seized it in a bloodied right hand and tipped it up, letting the contents gurgle down his throat without seeming to swallow. Two more tilts and he slung the empty vessel away over his shoulder. It bounced once in the grass and rolled after the retreating form of the vanquished breed as if pursuing him. Everyone seemed to find that amusing. Everyone, that is, except the old man, who caught the eye of a dark-skinned young woman standing on the edge of the crowd and jerked his head toward the injured man. She nodded and moved off to follow him. The old man’s will, it appeared, was law—rare among Indians, where a leader usually led by example only and would not presume to issue anything so harsh as an order.
“Hey, Pere Jac!” called Hudspeth, dismounting.
“A.C.!” The aged métis squinted through the gathering gloom. “A.C., is that you?”
“Who the hell else would waste a bullet on your worthless hide?” He started leading his buckskin in that direction. I stepped down to follow.
Pere Jac barked something in French to the man nearest him, who took the reins from Hudspeth and those of my bay and led them toward camp.
“They will be fed and rubbed down well,” the old man explained.
He had a French accent you couldn’t suck through a straw. “How are you, A.C.? That was respectable shooting.” He seized the marshal’s outstretched hand and shook it every bit as energetically as his own had been shaken moments before.
“Not as good as it looked,” said the other, wincing as he disengaged his hand from the other’s grasp. “I was trying to put one between his eyes.”
“I am glad that you did not. He is my sister’s only son.” He looked at me curiously. He was almost a foot shorter than I, but built like a warhorse. He had well-shaped features despite the numerous bruises and swellings, and eyes of washed-out blue in contrast to the mahogany hue of his skin. His jaw was fine, almost delicate, his face shot through with tiny creases and wrinkles, as if it had been crumpled into a tight ball and then smoothed out again. His gray hair, dark with sweat, hung in lank strands to his shoulders. Perspiration glistened on his skin in the firelight and trickled down the cleft that divided his chest into twin slabs of lean meat. Yet he was not the least bit winded.
Hudspeth introduced us and we shook hands. His grip wasn’t much, if you were used to sticking your hand inside a corn-sheller and turning the handle.
“Page Murdock,” he said, with unfeigned interest. “You ar
e the man who brought Bear Anderson out of the Bitterroot Mountains last winter, one step ahead of the Flatheads.”
I said that I was. I could see that those were the words someone was going to carve on my tombstone.
“And yet you do not look like a foolish man,” he observed.
I grinned. “Pere Jac,” I said, “you and I are going to get along.”
“My name is Jacques St. Jean. Marshal Hudspeth and these others insist upon calling me Pere Jac because for a brief period in my foolish youth I sought the clergy. The clergy, alas, did not share my enthusiasm. Now I content myself with reciting the Scriptures and instructing my people in the ways of the Lord.”
“That was some Bible-reading we caught just now,” said Hudspeth dryly.
“Man is an imperfect animal, full of hostility and sin. He must be given the opportunity to cleanse himself of both from time to time if he is ever to pass through Purgatory.”
“You do this often?”
“Every other Wednesday, without fail.”
“How about sin?”
“Sin is for Tuesday. But you have not come all this way to speak of religion, A.C.”
“We need an experienced tracker, Jac, and unless there’s someone around here who reads sign as good as you I guess you’re it.”
“That is what I thought. Come with me to the river.” He signaled for a torch to be brought. When one was handed him, he motioned the others to remain where they were and strode away, carrying the flaming instrument. As we hastened to catch up: “How much are you offering this time, A.C.?”
“I was thinking four cases.”
“A man’s thoughts are his own, mon ami. But that one is beneath notice.”
“That’s the price we agreed on last time!”
“The last time was four years ago. It costs much more to subsist in these days of revolution and expansion.”
“We’re talking about whiskey, not money. And you got no more bellies to fill now than you had four years back. All right, six cases. But that’s as high as I go. We’re talking about taxpayers’ money.”
“I do not think that ten cases would upset the economy.”
“Ten cases!” Hudspeth stopped walking. At the base of the grassy slope, the Red River hissed and gurgled at high water. But the métis kept walking, so he had to sprint to catch up.
“Seven cases,” he said.
Pere Jac made no reply.
“Eight, damn it! But you’d better guarantee results.”
We were at the river now. The old man handed me the torch and stepped off the bank, Levi’s, moccasins and all. He dipped his swollen and bleeding hands into the water and splashed it over his face and chest.
“Eight it shall be,” he said at last. “But I guarantee nothing.” He dug a finger into his mouth, withdrew a loosened tooth, saw it was gold, and thrust it into a hip pocket. “Who are we going after, A.C.?”
“A Cheyenne by the name of Ghost Shirt.”
The dusky-skinned woman Jac had sent earlier to look after the wounded breed appeared bearing a bundle of clothing. She held out a calico shirt while he stepped out of the water, and helped him on with it. I figured her for his granddaughter; she turned out later to be his squaw. He shook his head at her offer of a dry pair of leather leggings, accepted a military-style red sash instead, and knotted it about his waist. “I think, A.C.,” he said finally, “that you had better give us the whiskey in advance.”
Chapter Four
We were Pere Jac’s guests for the night, which meant that despite our protests, he, his woman and his three children slept outside and the lodge was ours. This was the same structure we had seen being repaired earlier by the boy who turned out to be Jac’s son Lucien. Sleeping on buffalo robes didn’t come easy after an extended period of city life, but I’d got along on worse and so had Hudspeth. We drifted off in short order—me from exhaustion after the unsettling activity of the past few days, the marshal after reacquainting himself with the flask in his pocket.
It rained sometime during the night without our knowing it. There were puddles on the ground the next morning and the air had that damp metallic smell, but the sultry and unseasonal heat that had dogged me since leaving Montana had not been washed away. If anything, the atmosphere was more oppressive than ever. It hung from last night’s burned-out torches, beaded on the outside of the lodges in droplets of moisture, clung like moldy rags to our throats and the insides of our nostrils when we tried to breathe. The very act of taking in oxygen was exhausting. Two steps outside the shelter I felt as if I hadn’t slept at all.
Our host and his family were wet but cheerful—the métis’ natural state—and greeted us warmly in order of rank. We muttered something in response and sat down on the ground to a breakfast of dried buffalo meat and herbs fresh from the soil. That finished, Hudspeth mounted his buckskin and took off to fetch supplies and the pack horse we had left in Fargo, and to make arrangements for the delivery of Pere Jac’s eight cases of whiskey, while I stayed behind to get to know our guide. This was more important than it sounds. Armed men forced to travel in each other’s company for an indefinite period are well advised to get acquainted before they set out, or the first argument on the trail could well be the last.
I had nothing to worry about in Jac. He packed no side arm but carried a Sharps carbine and rode an unprepossessing paint pony, and the confident but careful way he handled both as he made ready for the trip reflected a familiarity with the rugged life that earned my approval. One of his few concessions to the white man’s way was a weatherbeaten McClellan saddle complete with a pair of army issue bags. Into these he packed a leatherbound copy of the Scriptures and enough pemmican to last three weeks on the trail—roughly an ounce and a half of dried buffalo, berries and sugar pounded into a hard cake the size of a cowboy’s brass buckle. These were his only provisions.
His woman’s name was Arabella. Save for the dusky brown of her features and a thoroughly Algonquin mode of dress, from the polished snail shells strung around her neck to her elkskin moccasins, there was very little about her that said she was part Indian. Her hair was chestnut and hung in braids to her breasts. Her eyes, more oriental than native, rode at a slight tilt atop high cheekbones. Her mouth was wide but handsomely sculpted, the line of her jaw strong but not stubborn. She seldom spoke in Jac’s presence. In that respect at least she was all squaw.
The children took after their father in looks, with Lucien, the oldest at ten, already beginning to show in the girth of his chest the beginnings of Jac’s warrior build, and Jerome, six, and little, black-haired Paulette, three, watching every step of the preparations for departure with identical pairs of the old man’s pale blue eyes staring out of their chocolate faces.
This, I had been told over breakfast, was Pere Jac’s second family. His first wife had been killed fifteen years before when a herd of buffalo spooked prematurely during a hunt near Pembina and trampled the camp. His first son, now grown, left shortly before Jac’s second mating along with his own squaw to start a new métis settlement below the Nebraska line. The old chief had taken Arabella as his bride after her first husband, his brother, succumbed to smallpox in the epidemic of ’67. Jac remarked with pride that two of his five grandchildren were older than Lucien, and that Arabella was expecting another child in November.
Once the paint and my bay were saddled and ready to go, we sat down in the shade of the only tree for miles, a cottonwood beginning to die out at the top, and swapped a lie or two about past manhunts while he charged a stubby clay pipe from a pouch he carried on his belt and lit it with a sulphur match. Then we sat and listened to a faint breeze too high to reach us stir the branches twenty feet above our heads.
“Ghost Shirt,” I said then. “What do you know about him?”
“Only what I have heard.” He was having trouble keeping the tobacco burning. He struck a fresh match, puffed at the anemic glow in the bowl, got it going, shook out the match. Bluish smoke curled before his bruised a
nd weathered features. “There is nothing haughtier than a full-blooded Cheyenne in his prime. Tell him that he is Christ reborn, as they have done with Ghost Shirt since he was old enough to understand, and he becomes impossible. Ten days before his birth, it is said, Ghost Shirt’s father, Paints His Lodge, dreamed that he saw the sun rising from his squaw’s loins. When the story was repeated to him, the tribal shaman prophesied that a son would be born who would lead his people to greater glories than had ever been known, a son who was destined to be a god, yet who would remain on earth to guide the Cheyenne to their rightful place as conquerors of the land.
“It did not help matters that the boy proved himself a superior athlete long before the time came for his test of manhood, nor that when that time came he fulfilled all of the requirements with ease. Sent east to study the white man’s world, he returned after three years seething with hatred for the entire race. He commanded the right flank of his uncle Kills Bear’s warrior band in the Custer fight and proved himself an adept tactician as well as a born leader of men. Had the Little Big Horn never happened. Ghost Shirt might have enjoyed limited authority for a number of years and attained the rank of chief sometime in middle life. As it is, he has risen too fast too soon. He is a rash young man with more power than he knows what to do with. Unfortunately, of late he has been finding uses for it.”
“Is he as crafty as they say he is, or just lucky?”
“Craft and luck are difficult things to separate. A man must have a little of both if he is ever to be successful. Ghost Shirt is fortunate. Moreover, he is brilliant. It is a dangerous combination if you are not on his side.”
“You’re describing a young Sitting Bull.”
“Or a young Napoleon,” said Jac.
He thought about it, then shook his head. “No. Not like Sitting Bull. He at least has learned to temper his distaste for the white man with wisdom. There is no wisdom in Ghost Shirt’s brilliance. Only hate. He cares not for the future of his people, only for revenge. He will be the ruin of the Cheyenne nation. You have a saying for it: He burns down the barn in order to destroy the rats.”
Stamping Ground Page 4
