Stamping Ground

by Loren D. Estleman

  He didn’t say much, but whatever it was it had a question mark on the end of it. Reluctantly, as if afraid he’d miss something outside, Many Ponies turned his face from the window long enough to flick his eyes over us, then returned them to the landscape beyond the empty pane. His lids were bald where he plucked his lashes, and deep crow’s feet pulled them down at the corners, giving his elderly face—he might have been forty-eight, far past prime for an Indian—a sad expression. His reply, in Sioux, was brief and without inflection.

  Gimpy launched a fresh tantrum—or maybe it was the same one—as if he’d been holding it back during the others’ exchange only with great effort. But he pulled up short when Ghost Shirt held up a callused palm. Annoyance glittered in the lame brave’s eye. He’d had more to say.

  Unlike his fellow tribesman, the Cheyenne chief kept his attention fixed on one or the other of us all the while he spoke, and he spoke at length. He was calm for the most part, but certain words brought out his emotions from time to time, twisting his face into a mask of hatred and rasping harshly off his tongue like the buzz from a snake’s rattle. Once I caught the Sioux word for the Arapaho nation—uttered, no doubt, for the Miniconjou’s benefit—when it came lashing out in this manner. I wondered about that, since the Cheyenne and the Arapaho were supposed to be like brothers, but perhaps this was a matter of personal preference. From there he dovetailed deliberately into more placid speech. Broken occasionally by interruptions from the gimp, which were themselves cut off when Ghost Shirt resumed as if unchecked, the monologue went on for about five minutes, at the end of which stretched a silence complete enough to reveal that the warriors in the compound had returned for a fresh go at the bugle. I could have sworn once that I heard the opening bars of “The Campbells Are Coming,” but it was probably just coincidence.

  We had not been addressed, nor had we heard a word of English since we’d been ushered into the room. It wasn’t ignorance, because Ghost Shirt had spent enough time in the East to have picked up at least the rudiments of the language. I saw his strategy. As long as he refused to acknowledge our intelligence by speaking to us, we were less than human. He had nothing to gain by it other than revenge, but then that must have been one of the things that ate at him when he was locked up at Fort Ransom. It meant something else as well, although I dared not put it into anything so dangerous as a hope: As long as he preferred to play this kind of game with us, we were going to live.

  Evidently this was lost on Hudspeth, who had also seen Ghost Shirt’s motives, as his flush had spread beyond his nose over his forehead and down into his collar. His buckskins creaked as he worked his wrists. Before he could blow I ground my heel surreptitiously into the toe of his Mexican boot. Rage gurgled in his throat and he glared murder at me out of the corner of his eye, but he held himself back. I had succeeded in splitting his anger into two channels and preventing him from saying or doing something that would cost us our hides.

  The lame Cheyenne plainly didn’t like what was going on. He stamped around a few seconds longer, flapping his arms and dragging his useless foot and not looking at us, slid an eye toward the door as if longing for the nerve to stalk out, gave up finally, and turned his back on the room to see what was outside the window that Many Ponies found so diverting. At that point the Sioux apparently decided that anything the other might find worth looking at wasn’t, and turned his attention to the rafters atop the opposite wall. I got the impression the two were less than eager comrades.

  A pair of sharp notes delivered on the bugle seemed to bring the young chief out of the funk into which he’d fallen. He said something to the guards, waving a hand toward the door. One of the Spencers nudged Jac and we turned to leave, but not before Ghost Shirt spoke his first two words in English.

  “Here, Custer,” he said, and leaned down to set the bowl of meat scraps on the floor for the dog.

  Back in the chapel, Hudspeth waited until the door was slammed shut and barred, then sat down on the floor and tugged off his left boot. “You damn near busted my foot!” He massaged the injured area.

  “Better that than some buck wearing our fingers on a cord around his neck.” I rubbed my wrists to get back the circulation cut off by the thong, which had been removed.

  “The hell with that! First you trip me, then you try to screw my foot to the floor. You’re more dangerous than the injuns!”

  I ignored him, looking at Pere Jac. “What was that all about, anyway?”

  The activity had started the métis’ wound bleeding again. He leaned back in the semidarkness and staunched it by pressing the heel of his hand against the bandage and holding it there.

  “They argued over us. Lame Horse—the one who limps, he is the medicine man who dressed my wound—wanted us dead. It seems he has dreamt that white men in their midst will bring them ill fortune. He was quite vehement about it. Colorful, too. You should have heard what he wanted to do with your head, A.C.”

  The marshal muttered something unintelligible and wiggled his toes to see if they still worked.

  “What about Many Ponies?” I asked.

  “He had no opinion about it one way or the other. He has brought a new squaw with him and he was anxious to get back to her. When Ghost Shirt asked him how he voted, he said that he would go along with whatever the others decided.”

  “And Ghost Shirt?”

  Jac’s brow furrowed. “He is not so simple. He hates us worst of all, and I think that if he had his choice he would agree with Lame Horse. But he has other things on his mind. Many Ponies has not been able to deliver as many braves as promised. The Sioux sub-chief, Blood on His Lance, has a child down with fever and could not come to tonight’s meeting as he is the medicine man of his band. The Cheyenne lost three of his best braves in the fight with A.C. this morning. The fourth is not expected to survive the night. I think he was strongly tempted to see us roasted to a turn.”

  “So why aren’t we roasting?”

  “I am getting to that. Now that the army knows where he is, he has decided to leave the mission before more soldiers come. Spotted Cat, the Arapaho chief, is camped with eight hundred warriors just this side of the Black Hills. Ghost Shirt plans to meet up with him there and, with his help, fight the blue coats on his own ground. He knows now that final victory is impossible, but he wishes to teach the whites a great lesson before he goes to join Kills Bear and Sitting Bull in the land of the white grandmother. He wishes, he said, to make the whites speak his name henceforth in whispers, like old women around a campfire.”

  “He’s a fool. Eleven hundred Indians don’t stand a chance against the U.S. Army.”

  “Against the entire army, no. But they can do great damage to a single garrison that is not expecting them, to say nothing of what will happen when they descend upon the unprotected gold camps in the Black Hills. Further, there are as many as two thousand Indians unaccounted for on reservations throughout the Northwest. Once the news of what Ghost Shirt is up to spreads, there is little doubt around whom they will rally, and then many lives will be lost.”

  Here the métis smiled sardonically. The tight-lipped expression reminded me of Judge Blackthorne and made me homesick all over again. “Spotted Cat,” he said, “is no friend of Ghost Shirt’s. But he needs Spotted Cat’s warriors, and he is confident that a generous gift will seal the rift that separates them, at least for the time being.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “We’re the gift.”

  He nodded, still smiling. The mirth fell short of his eyes. In front of the door, Hudspeth stopped playing with his foot and gaped at him.

  “Torture is Spotted Cat’s specialty.” His bleeding under control now, the breed got out his pipe and blew lint from the bowl. Then he began poking tobacco into it. “Moreover, he shares Ghost Shirt’s sympathies concerning white men and half-breeds. The Cheyenne feels that the gift of two white federal lawmen and a métis will ensure his alliance in the forthcoming struggle.” His face was bathed briefly in the flare of the m
atch as he puffed life into the pipe. Then he shook out the flame and retreated into shadow once more.

  “So when are we leaving?” Hudspeth demanded.

  “First light.”

  Later I wished the marshal hadn’t asked that question. I was the rest of the night trying to get to sleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  Three hundred warriors, their women, dogs, three prisoners, and assorted children don’t set out on a long journey at the drop of a hat, but the dust had hardly settled on the crown when we began moving through the heavy mist of dawn of what was shaping up to be another humid day. War ponies and their riders were first out the gate, followed by the relief string herded along by the women, with travois of all sizes bringing up the rear behind plugs too old and worn out for any other duty. These last contraptions were simply lodge poles roped together to carry weapons and ammunition and folded tipis and jerked buffalo meat and infants, which had to be dragged slowly to keep down the dust and friction, standard hazards among a people who had never developed the wheel. Once outside, the warrior band split into thirds, with Ghost Shirt riding point at the head of his Cheyenne and Many Ponies and Blood on His Lance, a Miniconjou who looked to be in his late twenties and wore his hair in plaits braided with otter skin, protecting the flanks with their Sioux. None of them wore paint, but then they weren’t anticipating any fights just yet or they would have been stripped down to keep the wounds clean. Jac, Hudspeth, and I ate dust astride our own mounts behind the leading band of Cheyenne.

  At least we weren’t traveling on empty stomachs. Even Ghost Shirt had been forced to admit that dead men made poor torture victims, and so we had each been treated to a heaping bowlful of half-raw horse, or maybe it was dog. If the latter, it wasn’t the one Ghost Shirt called Custer, as I saw him darting in and out among the horses’ shanks later as we’d been getting ready to leave. Whatever it was, it stayed down, and that’s all I’d been asking of my meals for some time. Nobody had bothered to tie us up, which was a compliment to our common sense. You don’t outrun an Indian on horseback, not astride anything that eats grain or grass.

  I’d thought riding with two partners was dusty but I hadn’t seen clouds like this since the army. Tying my kerchief over my nose and mouth wasn’t much help. The stuff was so fine it came right through the cloth into my nostrils and down my throat. By midday I’d eaten that peck of dirt we’re allotted during our lifetime. Reddish mud caked my clothes, skin and horse. My armpits were chafed raw from the grit, my eyelids gummed so tight I had to pry them open with my fingers to see. I could only imagine what it was like at the rear of the column.

  We traveled slowly, climbing the Missouri Plateau twenty miles west of the James River shortly before sunset and camping on the edge of a watering hole just beyond effective rifle range of the buttes that lined the eastern ridge. For supper we were issued buffalo jerky and warned, in the halting English of the glowering Cheyenne who gave it to us, to make it last because that was all we were going to get between now and trail’s end. I gnawed at my portion in silence and, after the same brave had bound my hands and feet, turned in without a word to my companions. After all the time we had spent together we had very little to say to each other.

  The blue-coated Indian was standing atop the central ridge of the nearest butte when I awoke the next morning. Not for long, though; one moment he was there, the next he had vanished. I kept still about it until our guard had cut us free of our bonds and walked away to attend to other matters.

  “See him?” I asked of my fellow prisoners as we crouched together, grinding away at our jerky.

  Jac nodded. “Crow, most likely. Or Arikara. Some of them still scout for the army. He has been with us since before dawn.”

  “What do you think they’ll do?”

  “Follow us until their messenger brings back reinforcements from Fort Abraham Lincoln, or Fort Yates, or both. Then they will attack, probably while we are preparing to move out.”

  I glanced around. We were not the only ones who had noticed our observer. Here and there a brave was smearing black paint over himself from a hollow horn, while others tested their bowstrings or loaded their rifles, stopping at one or two shells because ammunition was limited and some Indians believed that a fully loaded rifle led to extravagance. A Sioux crouching a few yards away used the point of his knife to scrape a cake of excess powder from the action of his Spencer. I winced. Give an Indian a brand new firearm and inside of a month he’ll turn it into junk.

  “What makes you so sure they won’t hit us now, while we’re sitting?” asked the marshal.

  “For the same reason that cavalry does not storm an artillery emplacement without infantry support,” Jac said, chewing. “They would be cut to pieces. Besides, there is a little matter of their being outnumbered nearly two to one.”

  “In that case, why don’t the injuns force a fight right now?”

  “They are unaware of their advantage. Only we know Harms’s strength. And even if they did, the soldiers will not fight with the odds so strong against them. We would be here forever. In the meantime Spotted Cat may move beyond Ghost Shirt’s reach. Here he will not gamble. So all the paint you see being applied will go to waste.”

  “How long before the reinforcements come?” I asked.

  Pere Jac shrugged his good shoulder and thrust his jerky away inside his left moccasin. “If the messenger heads north and waylays the train from Fargo to Bismarck, three days. Otherwise, a week. Give or take a day. Two riders left this camp an hour ago, heading west. I suspect their mission is to try to catch and kill the messenger. If that fails, it will be a forced march all the way to the Black Hills.”

  I followed his example and put away my own strip of jerked meat. “Why don’t they wire the other forts?”

  “If Ghost Shirt has not had the telegraph line cut by now, he is unworthy of his reputation.”

  “All the same it’s stupid,” said Hudspeth, still gnawing. “That’s what alerted Fort Ransom.”

  “He had no choice. It was either that or take the chance of finding himself knee-deep in soldiers before he reached the Missouri River.”

  “Hell of a note, us being scared of our own army.”

  Jac said, “Now you know how the Indians feel.”

  Lame Horse approached, shuffling his dead foot and carrying a buckskin sack. He was painted and wore his grisly necklace and something new, a headdress made from a wolf’s head with the fangs of the upper jaw encircling his brow and a fur mantle hanging down the back of his head like a cowl to the shoulders. His deformity was concealed beneath a buffalo robe that swept from his neck to his heels. The flame-yellow streak knifing diagonally across the middle of his blackened face was starting to run at the edges where he had already begun to sweat. Without a word he squatted beside Jac, tossed the robe back from his shoulders, and undid the dressing that covered the métis’ wound. He then smeared the ugly, jagged gash with a piece of buckskin soaked in some greenish, evil-smelling salve carried in a hollow horn taken from the sack and bound it afresh with cured hide. The way he shoved his patient around as he treated him said little for his bedside manner, but then you don’t expect a lot of courtesy from someone who was calling for your death a little over twenty-four hours ago. Finally he drew out a rattle with a bone handle and a head made from the painted skull of some small animal, possibly a prairie dog, tilted back his head so that the dead wolf’s glass-bead eyes glittered in the light of the rising sun, shook the rattle perfunctorily three times in each of the four directions, chanted something in an emotionless drone, packed up, and left, dragging his half-developed leg behind him beneath the trailing robe. No pipe smoking, no ritual of purification, no change of song. Either he had disposed of all that the first time around or he didn’t think his patient was worth the bother.

  “Tender, is he not?” commented Jac.

  “Wait till you get his bill,” I told him. Then our guard jostled me from behind and we saddled up.

  There are p
eople who spend their lives studying the migrating habits of western nomadic tribes, for whom these next few pages might make fascinating reading, but I was too preoccupied to take notes even if I’d had the necessary material. Back-breaking hours in the saddle, sleeping on damp, hard ground with one eye open for rattlesnakes, wrists chafed bloody and hands swollen by rawhide thongs drawn too tightly during the hours of darkness when an escape attempt might be made, mosquitoes the size of horseflies that whined in our ears when we tried to sleep and drew blood, leaving crusts of it all around the hole, days so hot the sweat seemed to sizzle when it hit the air, nights so cold our perspiration-soaked garments grew stiff and crackled when we moved, the salty leather taste of jerky morning and night, the ache in our jaws from trying to chew it, wading through fresh horse manure and old buffalo chips, horse froth drying white and stinking on our pants legs, warm water drunk from earthen jugs, blisters on our palms, boils on our backsides, dogs barking, babies crying, horses snorting, men sweating, dust, dust, dust. Dust in our eyes, noses and throats. Dust in our boots and pockets. Dust that rose and rose in great, strangling clouds that obscured the sun and stained sky and grass the color of old blood. Dust so fine we couldn’t feel it between our fingers but which stirred and shifted in our lungs when we coughed, and we coughed often, hacking so hard it seemed our throats would turn inside out with the pain of it. Dust that never settled but continued to drift aimlessly hours after we had camped, etching swirling black shadows against the pale night sky. Dust so thick a finger drawn down a cheek left a furrow a blind man could feel. Each day was like the one before, only it was worse because we were older and less able to take it.