Pere Jac was silent for a time. A dead seed came rattling down between us from the cottonwood’s upper branches. A crow had come to light upon a high twig and began to scold us raucously. A newcomer, screaming for those already there to leave. Thus harangued, I understood for a moment the feelings of Ghost Shirt and his followers. But only for a moment.
“You are to kill him?” asked Pere Jac.
I hesitated, thinking at first that he was talking about the crow. “No,” I said, catching his drift. “We’ve strict orders to bring him back alive for execution in Bismarck.”
“That is a foolish thing. Dead, he is a threat ended. Alive, he remains an open sore. There is always the hope among his people that he will return to lead them. If we are able to capture him, our troubles will just be beginning.”
“Look at the bright side. We won’t live long enough to take him prisoner.”
He laughed and brushed at the sparks that had showered from his pipe down onto his leather leggings. “You are right, Page Murdock,” he said. “We are going to get along.”
We basked in the warmth of that for a while. Then the sound of galloping hoofs shattered the late morning stillness and Hudspeth, the loaded pack horse tethered behind his own mount, reined to a dusty halt in front of us and heaved himself out of the saddle, nearly going down on one knee as he landed on his feet with a jarring thud. His nose was flame-red and his eyes held an urgent glitter. He barely gave us time to scramble out from under the tree before he thrust a crumple of paper into my face.
“This was waiting at the telegraph office,” he announced. “It’s from Judge Flood. A force of twenty injuns ambushed a patrol out of Fort Ransom last night and killed Colonel Broderick and twelve others. Ghost Shirt was leading them.”
Chapter Five
“Why?” I looked up from the scrap, torn and wilted from being jammed into a pocket and carried across eight miles of Dakota territory.
“How in hell should I know why?” Hudspeth demanded. “He’s crazy mad. He’ll do anything.”
“I don’t think so. If he were that crazy he’d have been dead long ago. Ghost Shirt must have had a reason to attack that patrol.”
“It don’t much matter if he did or didn’t. What matters is he went ahead and attacked it. I wired Flood to tell him we got the message, and Fort Ransom to let them know we’re coming.”
“Any answer from the fort?”
He shook his head. “Likely they’re on alert. Operator’s too busy hunting up reinforcements to acknowledge.” He grunted and flicked a drop of sweat from his beacon of a nose with the tip of a blunt forefinger. “The only good thing about this whole business is now we know he ain’t met up yet with the Sioux and Cheyenne from around the territories.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s a trap.”
“We’ll know soon enough.” He swung back into the saddle. “Mount up. We’re heading out.”
I straddled the bay. “What’ll we do once we get there?”
“We’ll think of something on the way.” He wheeled west.
Pere Jac didn’t move. “Where is my whiskey, A.C.?”
The marshal reached into a saddle bag, hoisted out a quart bottle full of tobacco-colored liquid, and tossed it to the breed, who caught it in one hand. “There’s ninety-five more coming day after tomorrow,” Hudspeth told him. “You want to see the receipt?”
Jac drew the cork and helped himself to a swig. “I trust you, A.C.,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
The métis slid the bottle in with his other belongings, said his good-byes all around, and stepped into the paint’s leather with the ease of a man forty years his junior. Five minutes later we were clear of camp and heading southwest, fifty miles of which separated us from our destination.
We reached the Sheyenne at dusk. There, a shallow ford stretched between us and the fort, which was a purple blemish on the muted red glare of the setting sun. No sooner had Hudspeth set a hoof in the water than a shot rang out. Riding behind him, I heard a thup and saw his broad-brimmed black hat tilt over his left ear. He hauled back on the reins to keep his horse from spooking, but it was too late. The buckskin kicked up its heels and arched its back, whinnying and trying to turn so it could bolt. The marshal spun it around three times before dizziness took over and the animal stopped to regain its bearings.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
A lanky trooper stood up to his knees in water in the middle of the river, a rifle braced against his shoulder, smoke draining from its barrel. The challenge lost a great deal of its force, however, when the young voice issuing it cracked in the middle.
Hudspeth let out a roar and sprang to the ground. He hit the water running, tore the rifle from the trooper’s hands before he could react, and sent it spinning far out into the river. Then he swept the trooper off his feet and prepared to send him after it.
“Do it, and you’ll be dead before he hits the water.” A harsh croak, dry and empty as a spent cartridge. It crackled in the charged air.
The marshal froze, legs spread apart, the trooper squirming in his arms. He turned his head slowly in the direction of the voice.
Three soldiers were mounted on horseback on the opposite bank, each with a rifle snuggled against his cheek. The broad brims of their dusty campaign hats left their faces in shadow. Two of them, anyway. The man on the left, although obviously cavalry, wore the cocked forage cap of an infantryman, a style of headgear made famous by both sides during the late unpleasantness out East. A rain cape hung to his waist, performing double duty as a duster. His features were invisible against the sun. Softer now, the wallowing light glinted off gold epaulets on the square shoulders of the man in the middle. A hammer was thumbed back with a brittle crunch. Late, but persuasive as hell. Hudspeth returned the trooper, a callow youth with blond hair and freckles, to his feet. He put several yards between himself and the marshal as quickly as possible.
“Hands up, all of you.”
We did as directed, raising our open palms above our shoulders. Hudspeth was last to comply.
“Now suppose you tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.”
“We’re federal officers,” growled Hudspeth, after a pause. “I’m Hudspeth. The mean-looking one is Murdock. Here from Bismarck on the injun problem. I got a letter from Abel Flood, federal judge for the territory of Dakota, for Colonel Broderick.” He started to reach inside his coat but stopped when all three rifles rattled.
“Keep your hands up!” The command was metallic. “Colonel Broderick is dead.”
“I know. I wired you this morning to tell you we was coming.”
The officer turned his head a fraction of an inch toward the soldier Hudspeth had just released. “Go to the telegraph shack. See if there’s a wire from someone named Hudspeth.” When the youth had gone: “The Indian. I suppose he’s a federal officer too.”
“He’s our guide, and I bet he’s got more white in him than you.”
The pause that followed put an extra twist in the tension.
“You make a bad first impression, friend.” The words were bitten off.
After about a year of silence, the trooper returned bearing a telegraph blank with a spike-hole in the center of it. The officer glanced at it, then handed it back. He lowered his rifle. At a signal from him the others followed suit a moment later. Then he spurred his big black forward into the water. He stopped in front of Hudspeth and ran his eyes over the three of us. They were brown eyes, with flecks of silver in them. His heavy brows were startlingly black in comparison, downward-drawn and prevented from running into each other only by a thin pucker line that went up until it disappeared beneath the forward tilt of his campaign hat. His beard too was black and cropped close to the skin so that it resembled General Grant’s. That came as no surprise. In spite of his dismal presidency, in spite of the endless congressional investigations that had hounded him during his last days in office and after, Grant was still the hero of Appomattox, the hard man o
n the white horse whose preference for whiskers had inspired men from New York to California to lay aside their razors. Among army officers there were two distinct types, the Grants and the Custers, and you didn’t venture into many posts without finding yourself virtually surrounded by either long-hairs in buckskin jackets or silent men who fingered their beards meaningfully when they could think of nothing significant to say.
This officer—a major, now that I could make out his insignia away from the sun’s glare—had a long, one might say Roman, nose and the beginnings of jowls beneath his whiskers, which had undoubtedly contributed to his decision to grow them. The sun had burned his flesh to match the red Dakota dust on his saddle. His eyes were not the steely type one expected in men accustomed to command, but large and luminous and cowlike, strangely unintelligent—like Grant’s. His physique beneath the coarse blue tunic (buttoned to the neck, even in that heat) was powerful but beginning to loosen around the thighs and belly. I placed his age at about forty.
His side arm was an Army Colt with a smooth wooden grip, the rifle he held across his lap, a Spencer. Like his uniform, both were covered with a skin of fine dust. Beneath him his horse was lathered and blowing.
He took in my face, clothes, horse, the Deane-Adams in my holster, the Winchester in its scabbard, then went on for a similar inventory of Pere Jac. Then he returned to Hudspeth.
“You owe the U.S. Government the price of a new Springfield rifle, Marshal.”
“Tell them to take it out of my taxes.”
I stifled a grin. Either the lawman had qualities I hadn’t suspected or a little of me was beginning to rub off on him. I was starting to enjoy my subordinate role in this thing.
He wasn’t finished. “I told you who we are. It’s polite to introduce yourself back, ain’t it, Lieutenant?”
“It’s Major,” snapped the other. “Major Quincy Harms, acting commanding officer at Fort Ransom until Washington City appoints a permanent replacement for Colonel Broderick. I’m sorry, Marshal, for all the inconvenience, but you must understand that the situation here is tense. We can trust no one.” There was no apology in his tone.
“So you shoot everyone on sight?”
“Trooper Gordon will be reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. I believe you mentioned a letter from Judge Flood.” He held out a hand.
The marshal drew out the paper Flood had given him the morning of our departure and handed it over. Harms unfolded it and read. The muscles in his jaw twitched. Then he thrust the letter inside his tunic.
“Sergeant Burdett, relieve Trooper Gordon of his duties and place him under house arrest until further orders.”
An infantryman, the private had no side arm to be taken from him. The man in the forage cap merely leaned down, screwed the muzzle of his rifle into the other’s collar, and began walking his horse forward. Rather than be trampled, the trooper let himself be prodded along like a stray calf. Somehow I got the impression that he was going to be punished not so much for firing a premature shot as for allowing himself to be overpowered by a civilian.
“Come with me, please, all of you. Bring your horses.” The major reined his black around and splashed through the water toward the fort entrance. The third rider, a middle-aged corporal with a plug of tobacco bulging beneath his lower lip, followed him.
“Damn tin soldiers,” muttered Hudspeth as he mounted the subdued buckskin.
One half of the huge double slat gate swung inward to allow us entrance, then was pushed shut by two troopers and secured with a timber bar that must have been shipped, like the logs of which the fort’s framework was constructed, downriver from Montana or by rail from Minnesota. From there we rode past crowds of hard-eyed men in uniform who watched us with hands clasped tightly around their Springfields and Spencers. They had the desperate look of animals left too long at the ends of their tethers. Before the post livery a company of troopers was dismounting wearily, their horses, faces and uniforms covered with a mud of sweat and dust. Among them was a pair of empty mounts bearing the army’s brand.
From the porch overhang of a long adobe building swung a sign that identified it as the garrison commander’s office. The major and corporal left their saddles in exhausted unison, their square-topped boots double-crunching on the carted-in gravel. Jac and Hudspeth and I dismounted more earthily and hitched up at the watering trough, where the horses wet their noses eagerly. Harms handed his reins to the corporal.
“The right front needs reshoeing. And see to it that our guests’ mounts are rubbed down and fed. They’re dead on their feet.”
The corporal saluted and led off his and the major’s mounts.
The office smelled of coffee and stale tobacco. The walls were bare adobe reinforced by wooden timbers, and the floor was made of pine planks eight inches wide and scrubbed white as bears’ teeth by some miserable trooper on punishment detail with a scouring pad and a toothbrush for the cracks. The desk was battered, scarred in numerous places where matches had been struck against its scaly surface, and covered by a large-scale map of eastern Dakota. Holes in the corners and a pale spot on the wall behind the desk indicated that the map had been taken down recently for close study. A curled corner was held in place beneath a white china mug with damp brown grains clustered in the bottom. Behind the desk stood a high-backed swivel chair, its dark wood covered to within an inch of the age-polished edges by hard, dry leather secured with large brass tacks. From fort to fort, the decor never varied.
Major Harms peeled off his hat and pegged it beside the door. His hair, like his beard, was jet black, short at the temples and neck and full on top. A bald spot the size of a ten-dollar goldpiece showed defiantly at the back of his head. He made no attempt to conceal it. He stepped around behind the desk and dropped into the swivel chair in a cloud of powdery dust. His forehead just beneath the hairline was ringed unevenly with several different shades of tan where he’d settled and resettled his hat under the scorching sun.
Hudspeth sat down on the edge of the sturdy captain’s chair that faced the desk as if easing himself into a scalding tub of water. Evidently it had been some time since he’d sat a saddle as long as he had during the past few days. I chose a bench that ran along the right wall and wished it were the back of my horse, it was that hard. Pere Jac remained standing. In his dusty half-Indian, half-white man’s attire, his pewter-colored hair loose about his shoulders, eyes impassive as the heads of newly driven nails, he might have been posing for the stamp on a penny. The mingled scents of leather and dust and sour sweat and, faintly, old bear grease wafted from him. Aside from the grease, I was at a loss to determine how much of it was his and how much mine.
“Frankly, gentlemen, I don’t see how I can help you, nor why I should try.” Harms folded aside the map on his desk, revealing mottled traces of green blotter paper beneath a pattern of dead black ink.
“The letter calls for your co-operation,” Hudspeth rapped.
“Not mine, Broderick’s. And it calls for something which was not his to give. He had no authority to bring in an outside party. Hostile Indians fall within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army and no other. Their crimes are not a matter for the civil courts.”
“Judge Flood thinks different.”
“Judge Flood can go to bloody hell.” The words came lashing out. He fell silent, rolled the map back farther, found a hand-worked wooden humidor standing on the corner of the desk, and removed the cover. He drew out a cigar the length of his wrist, struck a match—placing a fresh groove on a previously unmarred section of desk—and ignited it. Blue smoke came billowing out in true Grant style. I don’t smoke, but it would have been nice if he’d offered us one. He used the same match to light a lamp with a milky white glass shade on the opposite corner and sat back as the soft glow gulped up the shadows.
“Forgive me, gentlemen,” he said. This time he sounded sincere. “I’ve been in the saddle eighteen hours straight. We’re short-handed, but it’s important we show the enemy a stern face. I�
�m tired and my patience is on a short halter.”
“Any luck?”
He looked at me quickly. “Luck? Doing what?”
I didn’t answer. Finally he shook his head.
“We hit every arroyo and dry wash between here and Jamestown. No trace of Ghost Shirt or his warriors. Two of my Indian scouts deserted. They’re afraid the Great Spirit is on the other side. Superstitious heathens!” He puffed furiously. His features swam behind an azure haze.
“You’re lying, Major.”
He stared. Something akin to rage glimmered in his dull brown eyes. I went on before he could blow.
“Your horse was heaving and covered with froth. They don’t get that way unless they’re ridden fast and hard. Two riderless horses came in with the patrol, and I know enough about Indians to know they don’t desert on foot in this country. My guess is you buried what was left of those scouts after Ghost Shirt got through with them, then took off in pursuit. Where’s he holed up?”
Harms made a thing out of picking all the lint off his cigar.
“We sent them on ahead to scout out the territory.” He spoke slowly. “When they stopped leaving sign we tracked them to the James River. We found them hanging upside down from a cottonwood over a smoldering fire. Their skulls had exploded from the heat.”
“Ghost Shirt. Where is he?”
For a moment it looked as if he might answer. Then his dazed expression cleared and the stubborn glint returned to his eyes. “That’s army business. So far all the casualties in this quadrant have been sustained by the military. I won’t take the responsibility for any civilian deaths here.”
“Colonel Broderick—” Hudspeth began.
“Colonel Broderick was a good soldier, but he was weak. He worried more about holding onto his command than keeping the peace in his sector. As a result he lost his own life and those of a dozen of his men while on routine patrol. There will be no such blunders beneath my command. As long as you three are here you are welcome, within limits, to the facilities of the post, but you will not be allowed to leave until the situation is in hand.” He started to rise.
Stamping Ground Page 5
