Stamping Ground

by Loren D. Estleman

  I decided that I was inside the chapel. If so, I now saw where the work that had not gone into the other buildings on the mission grounds went. I ran a palm over the surface of the floor. It was made of flat rocks, polished to as high a finish as sandstone ever achieved, and bunted up against one another so snugly that in places I couldn’t squeeze my fingertips between them. Above me, the crudely vaulted ceiling opened into a shaft that shot straight up to the sky, where the rusted bell stood out. in sharp relief against the jagged, moon-washed square beyond. The thing must have weighed half a ton. One good tug on the frayed old rope that dangled down between the rotted rafters, I thought detachedly, and the great hunk of iron would come singing down and squash me like a roach. With my head in its present condition I didn’t much care.

  Now and then a solitary bat flapped its pendulous course to and fro inside the rim, the framework of its membrane-covered wings etched starkly against the pale sky. The sight of it jarred me into reality. How long had I been out?

  “Two hours.”

  My head jerked around in the direction of the unexpected voice, the pain following close behind. When the popping lights and purple spots faded, I saw moonlight playing over the angular bones of Pere Jac’s face in the darkened corner where he was sitting. The orange glow of his pipe brightened as he sucked on the other end, then faded as he took it from between invisible lips. He was shirtless, which came as no surprise since I’d seen the garment hanging from Ghost Shirt’s rifle earlier.

  “It is the third question a man asks when he comes to after a blow,” he went on without salutation. “First he asks himself where he is, then what happened. When he has answered those he is left with the passage of time, to which only another can reply.”

  “Sounds like the voice of experience.” My tongue moved sluggishly. My face began to burn and I realized that my forehead and the bridge of my nose were skinned where I had come into contact with whatever I had come into contact with.

  “A man who has reached my age without being knocked senseless at least once has not lived. They carried you in here after it became apparent that they could not open the door simply by throwing you against it. Not that they did not come close. Two of the boards you sprang will never be the same.”

  “Neither will my head.” I rolled over onto my side so that I could see him without straining my eyeballs, which creaked in their sockets. It was then that I discovered that every muscle in my body was in the same condition as my skull. “Where’s Hudspeth?”

  “Beside me, sleeping. Can you not hear his snores?”

  I’d thought it was the foundation settling. Now I became aware of the rhythm in the rumbling noise coming from the blackness at the base of the wall. I had to hand it to the marshal. He could sleep on the gallows.

  “Care to tell me the story?”

  “It is very exciting.” The red glow arced upward, flared, faded again. Black against the milky-water color of the moonlight, threads of smoke unraveled up the shaft. “An hour after you left we decided to bed down the horses so that they would be fresh for whatever would be expected of them when you returned. I heard a noise on the other side of the hill as I was unsaddling. I was reaching for my Sharps when a Cheyenne lance pierced my right shoulder. A.C. shot the brave in the throat with his revolver while he was turning to draw his knife at the top of the hill. The bullet nearly took his head off. Before he hit the ground fourteen or fifteen Indians came whooping and shrieking over the crest, waving rifles and those hatchets my French ancestors traded their great-grandfathers for furs and blankets. A.C. killed two and wounded a third, but there were too many of them and they were too fast, even on foot. They fell on him and would have torn him to pieces then and there had not Ghost Shirt stepped in to prevent it.”

  “That doesn’t fit in with what I’ve heard about him.”

  “I think that he has something special in mind for A.C.”

  And yet he slept. I shook my head in wonder. Judge Flood didn’t know the quality of the iron he was getting set to toss on the scrap heap.

  “How’d they know you were there?” I asked Jac.

  “Perhaps they spotted us when we were watching them earlier. It is more likely that someone noticed the sunlight glancing off the lens of the spyglass.”

  “Seems to me I should have heard the gunshots. I wasn’t that far away.”

  “You wouldn’t. These hills soak up noise.”

  “That’s not all they’ve soaked up. How’s the shoulder?”

  He shrugged, then right away regretted it. I heard a sharp intake of breath in the darkness. He let it out carefully, through his nostrils. “They have applied a bandage, of sorts. The medicine man—Lame Horse, I think he is called, my Cheyenne is rusty—said some words over it. I shall live in spite of them.”

  “Decent of them to have left you your pipe, matches and tobacco.”

  “We are the only things here that will burn. Am I to assume that the army is not coming?”

  I told him about the river. He sighed.

  “ ‘For it is better,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.’ ”

  There isn’t much you can say to a thing like that, so I let it stand. Hudspeth’s snoring dominated everything for a time. Then, from outside, a high, thin wail was borne in on the night air. An unearthly sound, brazen and eerie. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “What in hell was that?”

  “A bugle.” He knocked out his pipe against the wall at his back. A shower of sparks fell to the floor, glowed there for a while, then blinked out, one by one. “Captured, I suppose, when they attacked Colonel Broderick’s patrol. They have been taking turns blowing it for the past hour. Probably they hope to use it to confuse the soldiers next time they fight.”

  “It won’t work unless they know the calls. The way they’re blowing it sounds chilling as hell.”

  “That is the next best thing.”

  We listened to it for a while.

  “How come we’re still alive?” I asked then.

  He hesitated. “I have been wondering the same thing. It worries me.”

  “Hostages?”

  “I think not. What would they have to bargain for? They have their freedom. No, I fear that they have some other use for us. The reason I fear is that I have no idea what it is.”

  Outside, the bugle fell silent. We listened to that for a while.

  I said, “Ghost Shirt knew my name.”

  “Of course he did. I told him.”

  That took a minute to sink in. I’d suspected it, of course, but I hadn’t expected him to admit it so readily. “What do you plan to do with the thirty pieces of silver?” I asked then.

  He chuckled, without humor. “Page, you have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. He asked me who was with us. I might have said no one. He would have read the ground and seen that there were three sets of tracks, not counting those made by the pack horse. Hudspeth and I would have been strung up by our heels over a fire until we either talked or our skulls burst. I thought it best that we were all spared the trouble. Can you honestly say that you would have acted differently?”

  “I might have made him work for it a little.”

  “That is where our characters differ. I fight only for what is mine. It is enough that I lost a fine shirt. Besides, once he had us dangling over that fire he would not have bothered to have us cut down whether we talked or not. This way it was more of a burden for him to do it than to undo it.”

  There was no arguing with logic like that, but I was in that kind of mood, so we hashed it out for another five minutes or so. We were so busy neither of us noticed when Hudspeth ceased snoring.

  “Can’t you bastards shut the hell up and let a man sleep?” He sat up, lifting his head and shoulders into the pale light. His face was a map of cuts, swellings and bruises. One half of his handlebar was cocked upward where his upper lip was puffed and crusted over with dark blood.r />
  “Jesus, you’re hard to look at,” I said.

  “That’s your problem.” Absent-mindedly he reached for his flask, grumbled when he came up with a handful of air. “One of them black-faced sons of bitches took the time to lift my whiskey whilst the others was kicking me around.” He hawked and spat out a jet of what looked to be blood that had collected in his mouth. It splattered loudly on the stone floor.

  “It is fortunate that they did not lift your scalp as well.” Jac blew the sludge out of his pipe with a sound that put me in mind of a boy blasting on a broken whistle.

  “Wouldn’t much matter if they had, since they’re going to anyway. This ain’t no weekend in St. Louis we been invited on.”

  “They don’t usually take the scalp of an enemy not killed in battle,” I said. “They might, however, hollow out your skull and use it for a bowl to grind meal in. That is, if it isn’t solid bone.”

  “You should talk. You took a look at that door you knocked on with your forehead?”

  I had a snappy retort all ready, but I didn’t get to use it. Pere Jac made a noise like steam escaping from a boiler and clutched our wrists in a vise grip, listening.

  A short scraping sound, such as might have been made by a human foot wrapped in dead animal flesh scuffing hard earth, reached us from just outside the door. A heavy bolt was shot back and moonlight fanned out across the flagstones. Two Indians stood outside the doorway, one a little behind the other because there was not enough room for them to stand side by side in the narrow passage. Cold light painted silver stripes along the barrels of their rifles. The one in front signaled for us to stand up. When we obeyed, he covered us with his rifle while his companion slid in past him, carrying coils of what looked like buckskin thong. He stepped behind us.

  I knew what was coming. I put my hands behind me so he’d have no excuse to yank, and in a few seconds he had the first cord wound tightly around my wrists. Tight as it was, though, he gave it an extra tug that almost pitched me forward onto my face, then secured it and spat on the knot. He did the same with Jac, but when he got to Hudspeth he surpassed himself, forcing the marshal to curse through his teeth when the knot was set. That finished, the other Indian came in and joined his partner. Steel dug into my back and we started forward.

  “I feel like a bride on her wedding night,” I whispered to Pere Jac as we approached the steps. “What do you say when you meet a god?” Then the gun punched me behind the ribs and I shut up.

  Chapter Ten

  Dakota nights being cool the year around, there was a snap in the air as we made our way across camp, our Indian escorts close behind. I shivered in my thin canvas coat and wondered how Pere Jac, naked to the waist, managed to keep from turning blue. But he was a native and accustomed to extremes of temperature. The fact that his breath, like mine and Hudspeth’s, was visible in gray jets of vapor seemed to bother him not at all. He seemed equally unconcerned with the boiled strip of buffalo hide that swathed his injured right shoulder, which, now dry, must have chafed his skin at the edges like rusty barbed wire. The blood had dried into a yellow-brown stain on the hide. Around us, firelight glimmered cozily behind panes of oiled paper in the windows of the soddies and huts and behind the skin walls of the tipis. The smell of wood smoke teased my nostrils and caused my stomach to grind when I detected in it the sweet aroma of roasting meat. I hadn’t eaten since I’d shared a piece of salt pork with the marshal that morning, a hundred years ago.

  We were conducted to a large adobe building near the south wall, which had, I supposed, served as a place for the Mormons to meet and be preached at and marry their legions of wives. The door had long since been blown off or taken down and chopped up for firewood or used for lumber in a country where wood fetched higher prices than whiskey, and now a buffalo robe hung in its place over the opening. The barrel of a Spencer blocked my way as I was about to step inside. Its owner, one of our guards, held us at bay with the business end while his companion went in. Half a minute later he returned and pulled the robe aside for us to enter. The other brave resumed his position behind us as I stepped across a threshold worn hollow by foot traffic, followed closely by Jac and Hudspeth.

  The room was long and narrow, the mud-and-timber walls unpaneled, the floor earthen. At the far end a fire of wood scraps and buffalo chips burned bluish and smokeless in the grate of a large stone fireplace, casting its buttery light over the floor and walls, where giant shadows licked and flickered against a dingy yellow background. The owner of one of them sat in a rickety wooden chair with his back to the fire, a colorful blanket draped shawl-like over his bare shoulders and my gun belt buckled around his waist, the Deane-Adams resting in its holster. That came as no surprise. The five-shot was a rare piece this side of the Atlantic. Any Indian, even a Messiah who had been educated at the hands of the white man, would find it enough of a novelty to prefer it over Hudspeth’s Smith & Wesson or any of the other more common firearms seized over the past several weeks. There was no sign of my Winchester, but then it was dark in the room and I doubted that he’d let a weapon so obviously superior to the Spencers his tribe was using get very far out of his sight, even if it had already been claimed by someone else.

  Seen up close, his features, which had once been described as “satanic” by a newspaper writer who had never been west of Manhattan, were rather ordinary, although even enough to be considered handsome by some mooneyed schoolgirl with visions of being abducted by a virile savage to a tipi in some far-off prairie. His nose was strong but hooked only slightly, his lips full for an Indian and sculpted, his chin square. Somewhere along the line someone had told him his eyes were hypnotic, and he played them for all they were worth, glaring at each of us in turn from beneath drawn brows, like Napoleon in his portraits. He did his best to make the rough-hewn old chair look like a throne by sitting as erect as possible, and I have to admit that the effort wasn’t altogether unsuccessful. He might even have pulled it off if he weren’t suffering from a bad summer cold.

  His eyelids were puffy and he wiped his nose from time to time with the edge of the blanket, but that only made his sniffles worse. The idea that he was prey to the same ills that plagued the rest of us plainly bothered him more than the cold. It showed in his expression. His face was more easily readable than the average Indian’s, which irritated him no less. He would be that kind, I thought, growing more disgusted with himself each day for his inability to live up to his reputation. It was a weakness he shared with many another legend I had known. I filed the knowledge away in my memory for future reference.

  All the same, he made me feel old. At the age of twenty-two I had been a penniless veteran with a game leg and no prospects. Thirteen years had healed my leg and improved my outlook, but that was about all. At twenty-two, Ghost Shirt was the undisputed chief of all the renegade tribes in the Northwest, with more braves flocking to his standard every day. Is it a white man’s trait always to be comparing his lot with others? In any case, we did have one thing in common, and that was that in our respective occupations we both stood a better than even chance of being dead tomorrow. At the moment, however, the odds of it happening to me were much the stronger.

  But there must have been something to the god theory, because it wasn’t until I had exhausted myself on Ghost Shirt that I noticed the room’s other three occupants. One, a scruffy, grime-yellow dog of uncertain forebears, lay stretched across the hearth with its chin on its front paws, bright eyes resting on Ghost Shirt, whom I took to be its master. Its tail had been bobbed, from the look of the ragged stub, by a jack knife or some other instrument just as inadequate. It twitched whenever the chief’s eyes flickered in that direction. The others in attendance were not seated—partly, I assumed, out of respect for the chief and partly because most Indians were uncomfortable sitting on chairs, and the floor was too hard and cold even for them. For some reason I knew that the Sioux standing near the farthest of the four windows was the Miniconjou whom Jac had identified earlier as Many
Ponies, even though I had seen him before only at a distance and he had since doffed his paint and feathers. But he carried himself like a chief, and the strong, beak-nosed face, partially in shadow, was too old and seamed to belong to a warrior one would choose to take along on such an arduous campaign as this. He appeared to be more interested in the moonlight-drenched scenery beyond the window than anything inside the room. The third was a nervous sort with a sharp face and lean brown body set off by sun-bleached buckskins, who hadn’t stopped pacing since we’d entered. He too had scraped off his paint, but I recognized him instantly as the streak-faced warrior who had commanded the party that had taken me prisoner. He had exchanged his necklace of human fingers for a more conventional one of copper and semiprecious stones. Apparently he felt no need for strong medicine in the presence of his chief. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now that he was on foot I couldn’t miss his withered left leg, which looked as if it had been shattered in his childhood and stunted, so that his foot dragged sibilantly across the floor as he paced up and down the length of the room.

  On the long, low table that stood before Ghost Shirt, chunks of lean red meat, the remains of a meal, floated in a pool of bloody juice in a pottery bowl. My stomach began to work all over again at the sight of it. I tried to devour it with my eyes, but that was less than satisfying. But since it was the next best thing to eating I kept my eyes on it from then on. I even imagined that I could smell it, although there was no steam rising from it and it was probably cold as ice. As far as I was concerned it was tender sirloin hot off the griddle.

  The warrior with the game leg was holding forth in a harsh guttural I took to be Cheyenne. His voice was a nasty bleat and he spoke with a pronounced, buzzing lisp. He was angry as hell about something and his tone reflected it as he continued to pace rapidly in spite of the dead limb, gesturing agitatedly with his long, bony arms. Although he pointedly avoided looking in our direction, it was plain enough who were the subjects of his tirade. Ghost Shirt waited until he had finished, then blew his nose on the edge of the blanket and said something over his shoulder to Many Ponies. His voice was moderate but high strung. It’s unfair to pass judgment on a man’s tones when he’s speaking in a foreign tongue, and more so when his adenoids are swollen, but I blamed the tension on the pressure of command. You’ll hear the same quality in the calmest of voices at an officers’ cotillion if you’ve an ear for it.