I picked up the confiscated Spencer from the ground where I’d left it, and then I said something that wasn’t clever. I said, “Happy birthday,” and handed it to Pere Jac. To show how much strain we were under, we both laughed like idiots.
Hudspeth had our saddles, bags, and blankets laid out on the ground when we emerged, leading the roan by its army bridle, and was cinching his rig onto the mustang’s back. He could move fast when he had to. We’d left them where I’d killed the guard because it’s hard to look like an Indian when you’re carrying fifty pounds of leather over your shoulder, and Hudspeth had run there, loaded them up, and gotten back before his mount could stray out of reach, with bullets flying all over hell. He flicked his eyes over our burden and yanked tight the cinch.
“You got him,” he grunted. “Good.”
I could have clubbed him with the butt of the Winchester. Jac had his eight cases of whiskey and I still had my job whether we brought back the Indian or not. We had risked our hides to help him keep his badge, and all the thanks we got was something my father said when his hunting dog fetched its first duck. Even the dog got a pat on the head. But I supposed that was as high as he gushed, so I let it slide.
“Why don’t you give me the mustang and take the gray?” I asked him. “You’ll scuff your fancy boots dragging them on the ground.”
“I grabbed it, I’ll keep it. You’ll find fresh jerky in your saddle bags, both of you, and them buckskin bags hanging on your horns is half full of water. I got ’em from a bottomed-up tipi.”
“That’s not all you got,” I said, one hand in my saddle bag. I drew out a box of Deane-Adams cartridges.
“I found that on the ground. The injun must of dropped it when he got shot.”
I dropped it back into the bag. “Where’s that Spencer I gave you?” I had just noticed he was no longer carrying it.
He snorted. “It wasn’t worth the extra weight. The action was jammed full of powder. I wouldn’t trust no gun of mine with no redskin if it meant my life. I heard once—”
A bullet nicked the top of his saddle. He ducked behind the horse, drawing his revolver. Jac and I shouldered our rifles.
“Come out of there, you onion-skinned sons of bitches!” A master sergeant’s voice if I ever heard one, Ohio twang roughened by weather and grit and years of bawling orders at green recruits.
The herd had begun crowding around us, blocking our view of the cavalry stragglers. Now, gray light perforated the shadows and the horses shied away before the harsh bellow, and in the clearing beyond stood a heavy-chested trooper in a dusty uniform with a knife in one hand and an Army Colt in the other. There were others with him armed similarly, but he was the one who had shouted. A .45-caliber bullet had pierced the right cheek of the Sioux lying at his feet and carried away the left half of his skull on its way out. I had to admit that the trooper was dedicated. He had given up the chance at a furlough—or a bonus—in order to take a few prisoners.
I said, calmly as possible, “You need spectacles.”
This being friendly country, more or less, we had doffed our disguises and put on our hats, not counting Jac, who wore none. The sergeant (his stripes were visible now) had expected Indians, and at worst he might have been prepared for other soldiers, but two white civilians and an elderly half-breed were too much for him to sort out at one time. But they’re conditioned to hold onto their guns when in doubt, and this one held true to his training.
“Just who the hell are you, and what you doing with that there dead injun?” His features were Scandinavian, deeply tanned and dusted across chin and cheeks with blond stubble. He had pale blue eyes, which contrasted vividly with the burnished copper of his complexion, and yellow side-whiskers that came to the corners of a jaw so square a carpenter could have used it for a miter. The hand holding the gun had an equally square black thumbnail and knuckles banded with white scar tissue. He had burst them on his share of out-thrust chins.
“In the first place,” I said, “he’s not dead. As for the rest, we’re civilian peace officers on special assignment with Major Quincy Harms and this is our prisoner.” That was a gamble. If the sergeant and his companions were from Fort Ransom we were sunk.
He scraped his chin with the back of the hand holding the knife, ostensibly on the theory that it helped him think. Still he didn’t lower the revolver.
“I don’t know. You got a badge?”
That request was beginning to wear thin on me. I was standing behind the gray; resting the carbine across its rump, I fished out the star with my left hand and held it up. There’s no doubt that pinning it to your shirt simplifies things, but anywhere you wear it, it’s too close to your heart. Hudspeth pulled open his coat to show his. The sergeant squinted from one to the other in thoughtful silence.
“All right, so you got tin. That comes cheap. Anything else?”
“For Christ’s sake, can’t you see we’re white?” One of these days, I thought, the marshal’s nose was going to explode in a big red cloud.
The sergeant glared at him. He was going to say, “Shut up, fat boy,” or something as inflammatory. It was on his lips. When he did, Hudspeth was going to throw lead and we would all die right there, smack in the middle of the earth’s left armpit. I wondered how St. Peter would take it when he asked me what I was doing at the gates so early and I told him I had acted in defense of my partner’s waistline, and the marshal was standing behind me in line broad as a chuck wagon across the beam. My grip tightened on the Winchester.
But I was disappointed, although I doubt that’s the proper word for what I felt. Instead of saying it, the sergeant nodded curtly, as if he had just come to the decision that we were, indeed, white. He wasn’t finished yet, however.
“What about Grandpa?” he challenged, jerking his chin toward Jac. “Don’t tell me R. B. Hayes is deputizing half-breeds now.”
I explained who he was and what he was doing there. The sergeant’s eyes left me and took in our gear lying on the ground a couple of yards away. I answered his next question before he could ask it.
“Our horses were shot out from under us. Pere Jac, there, took a lance in his shoulder as he went down. We’re in the midst of changing mounts.”
I must have been pretty convincing, because the top kick glanced down impatiently at the Sioux he’d been preparing to scalp. He was losing interest. But for duty’s sake he got in one more lick, a good one.
“What’s so all-fired important about that particular injun?” he demanded. “There’ll be hundreds to choose from in a few minutes.”
“This ain’t no ordinary—” Hudspeth began. But before he could finish he had something else to occupy him, namely the pain in his ankle where I had struck it with the side of my boot.
“It’s one of Ghost Shirt’s inner circle,” I broke in quickly, to draw attention from Hudspeth’s cry. “Tall Dog, a Cheyenne warrior. He may be able to shed some light on his boss’s plans.”
The sergeant snorted. “Hell, that’s no secret. He was on his way to link up with Spotted Cat and his Arapahoes down south. What he didn’t know was they surrendered to General Crook last week.”
“Surrendered?” It flew out. Right after it did I knew it was a mistake.
He nodded. It hadn’t dawned on him yet. “Every last one of ’em, right outside Deadwood. Not a shot fired. Christ, everyone’s talking—” He broke off. Realization flushed over his face. He’d been about to holster his weapon, but now he raised it again. “Say, where you been? If you was with Major Harms all this time like you say, you would of knowed all about the surrender. It’s all over the army. Speak up!”
I could have given myself a swift kick. Not because I had opened my trap without thinking, which was reason enough, but because of what happened next and what it meant. If I hadn’t been all aglow inside over how glib I was and how I was going to talk us out of this, I might have seen it coming, as Jac had, and taken steps to counteract it—as Jac had. All the time the sergeant was questionin
g me, the métis had taken advantage of the fact that all eyes were on me and had sidled around the horses until he was standing within lunging distance of a quaking trooper who looked too young for the uniform he was wearing and who was having trouble holding onto his revolver with both hands. When the sergeant raised his Colt again, Jac dropped his Spencer noiselessly in the grass, curled one of his trunklike arms around the trooper’s windpipe, pinioned one of his ankles in the crook of a knee so that he was balanced precariously on one leg, and thrust the point of his knife against the tender flesh beneath the young man’s chin. At the same time, the half-breed bumped him from behind with his pelvis and the revolver sprang from his hands like a slippery frog. All without a sound, until the trooper went and spoiled it by crying out.
I was sure the sergeant was an old-line campaigner who knew better than to let his attention be distracted from his primary objective no matter what. I still think that, even though he did what he did. A man on the shady side of forty doesn’t give up the reactions of a lifetime just because a little brown book tells him they’re no good. He turned his head just far enough to see what the noise was about, realized his mistake, and turned back, but by then it was too late. The muzzle of my Winchester came swinging around, cracked against the back of the hand holding the Colt, and was staring at the third button down from the collar of his tunic by the time the revolver hit the ground. My nerves were strung so tight I nearly blew him into the next world when he doubled over, hugging his shattered hand between his knees.
“This carbine fires a forty-four caliber round,” I told him, “and so does the revolver the marshal has trained on the man behind you. One of them is enough to make a corpse your loved ones won’t want to kiss before they lower it into the ground, but they don’t kill any deader than the knife Pere Jac is holding at Tom Sawyer’s throat there. That leaves two soldiers uncovered. Are you a gambling man, Sergeant?”
He took enough time to swallow twice, but I can’t say if he used it for that purpose. I was looking at his eyes. I saw in them that although he was still doubled over, the pain in his hand was no longer a priority. He was figuring the odds. So he was a gambling man. A smart one too, if what I read there next was on target.
It was. “Drop your guns,” he told his men. When there was no response he repeated it, bellowing this time. Two Colts and a Springfield thumped the grassy ground.
“The belt gun too,” I said to the man who had discarded the rifle. He hesitated, then unbuckled the belt one-handed and let it fall. Hudspeth stared at it.
“Hey,” he said. “Is that a Smith American?” The trooper said it was. “I’ll be damned!” He stepped forward, hugging his own Smith against his rib cage, and picked up the belt, which was loaded with cartridges.
“Get all of them while you’re at it,” I told him.
“You won’t make a mile.” The drillmaster’s bawl had shrunk to a croak. Now that the decision had been made, the throbbing in the sergeant’s hand must have been terrific. I risked a downward glance and felt a twinge of remorse. I hadn’t meant to finish his army career. As far as a lifer like this was concerned, I supposed, I might just as well have killed him. I decided to let him have the last word. I was out of smart answers anyway.
The marshal came back carrying the discarded iron. I told him to unload the pieces and leave them there in a pile. We were carrying too much weight as it was, and I didn’t want to leave the troopers unarmed in the middle of a fight. We were still on the same side, no matter how it looked. Hudspeth obeyed but retained the belt full of .44’s.
I kept them covered while he and Jac, who had released the callow soldier, saddled up and stepped into leather. Behind us, the whooping and shooting continued, farther away now as the Indians were bottled up against the high southern rim of the lake bed. Bright yellow flames blossomed in scattered places as the tipis were set afire. Another ten or fifteen minutes and it would all be over for everyone but the buzzards. I leathered the five-shot, mounted, and together we broke into gallop and topped the western rise in the direction of the Missouri River. The troopers dived for their weapons, but by the time they had them loaded we were well out of range. Their popping was drowned out by the drumming of our mounts’ hoofs.
We stopped at the river to water the horses and fill the buckskin bags Hudspeth had liberated from camp, then wheeled right and headed north. Ghost Shirt was still alive, no thanks to us. I had bunched my bedroll under his chin to keep his head up; the gash above his ear was bleeding again, but slower now. He was still out. I wondered if he would ever come to, and if he didn’t, if Flood would still insist upon hanging him. I decided that he would. In the judge’s case, the quality of mercy was strained through a sheet.
After a couple of hours of hard riding—tempered, of course, by the condition of our prisoner—we got off and led the horses to give them a rest. No one had spoken since leaving camp.
“Where to now?” asked the marshal. He seemed more out of sorts than usual, which was understandable after several miles on the back of a horse three sizes too small.
“The scenic route,” I replied. “In another few miles we’ll swing east for three days or so and then north again. We can’t take the chance of being spotted by whatever troopers might be left in Fort Yates, and if Dakota’s like anywhere else there’s too much civilization strung out along the river. It’ll take us a hundred miles out of our way, but with any luck we’ll be able to catch the train to Bismarck and be there by the end of next week. Whenever that is.”
“That’s one hell of a long ways to travel with a red-hot injun, even if he does live. Some of them Cheyenne got through back there, you know. And don’t forget the army.”
“The Cheyenne will be too busy licking their wounds for some time, and the army’s got its hands full. Worry about them later.”
“I got as much confidence in that as I do in Jac. He’s the one said they wouldn’t attack unless we was moving.”
Jac shrugged, both shoulders this time. His wound was coming along. “I did not expect infantry support.”
“Stop grousing,” I said. “You didn’t think we’d capture Ghost Shirt in the first place.”
“Now the hard part begins.” Pere Jac’s face was wooden.
Chapter Thirteen
The first words Ghost Shirt uttered upon coming to were English, and they weren’t very nice.
We had set up camp in the shadow of the buttes along the edge of the plateau twenty-five miles northeast of the hollow where the battle had taken place. Jac and Hudspeth were breaking out the jerky and I had a hand under the Indian’s head and a buckskin bag full of water in the other when his eyes opened without any fluttering and he spoke the words, which needn’t be quoted here. I clucked my tongue.
“Shame on you. Is that any way to talk to someone who helped save your life?”
He said something else just as colorful. Apparently he had picked up quite a few of our quainter expressions during the time he had spent among us in his youth. But he didn’t resist when I forced the neck of the water bag between his lips. He drank greedily. Then he closed his eyes again. I lowered his head gently onto the extra horse blanket I had folded beneath it. The even rise and fall of his chest told me he was asleep, or doing a good imitation of it.
“He ought to eat,” grumbled the marshal. His jaw worked as he ground away at a piece of jerked meat. I shook my head.
“He needs rest more. When he’s ready to eat, he’ll eat. Besides, with his head in the condition it’s in, he’d be lucky if he didn’t break open the wound just chewing on this saddle leather.” I produced my own strip, looked at it, sighed, took a bite, sighed again, and put it away. I was hungry, but my teeth were still sore from the last meal. “I hate Dakota,” I said.
Pere Jac had finished his meal and was looking over his pony, grazing with the others at the end of their tethers on the other side of camp. He muttered an oath, the first I had ever heard from his lips.
“What’s wrong?” I aske
d.
“Split hoof.” He was inspecting the pony’s right front. “He has not yet begun to limp, but he will. If I get another day’s ride out of him it will be a holy miracle.”
“That’s what you get for not shoeing him,” said Hudspeth.
“Are there any settlements nearby?” I asked Jac.
He released the hoof and straightened. “A ranch, three miles the other side of the buttes. It belongs to an old Scot named Tyrone, or it did. It has been many years since I saw him. Perhaps he is dead.”
“Any horses?”
“He raises them, or used to. But he will charge an arm and a leg.”
“So long as he don’t charge money,” put in the marshal. “We ain’t got none of that to spare.”
“Get it up, both of you.” I got out my wallet and spread the bills on the ground. “Thirty-three dollars. See if you can sweeten it.”
Hudspeth carried a dilapidated billfold with a picture of Lola Montez on the back of an advertisement for chewing tobacco. Reluctantly he drew out a pair of ten-spots and six ones and placed them next to mine. Neither of us was carrying pocket change because you don’t go Indian-hunting with anything on you that jingles. I looked up at Pere Jac.
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