Stamping Ground

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You use words like a weapon, white skin.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t expect to win you over. After twenty-two years, though, I thought it was time you heard the other side.” I paused. “You know that Lame Horse is after your job.”

  If I’d expected that to surprise him, I was disappointed. He went on studying the floor between his feet as if his future could be read in the patterns his moccasins had made in the dust. “Some of my warriors have told me this. They are wrong. He knows his place.”

  “The problem is you don’t agree on where it is. I saw that argument you had with him back at the mission. I didn’t have to understand Cheyenne to know he’s got ambitions.”

  He met my gaze then. A faint smile played over his lips. “At last you have become tangled in your own net of words. Have you not already said that it is Lame Horse who tried to free me tonight?”

  “Naturally. There’s no guarantee that you’ll hang soon even if we get you to Bismarck. With all the publicity you’ve been getting it’s a real possibility that the sob sisters back East will pressure the President into commuting your sentence to life in the penitentiary. As long as you live you pose a threat to your successor. Dead, you’re a martyr and powerful medicine, nothing more. The best thing that can happen to Lame Horse is that you get killed in the confusion while he’s trying to break you loose.”

  “Only a white would think such thoughts.”

  There we were, back at the beginning. Nothing brings out the stubbornness in an Indian like cold logic. I changed the subject.

  “Where’d you get the dog?” I nodded in the direction of the baggage car, where the mongrel could be heard whimpering frustratedly and digging splinters out of the door. Like its master, it never gave up.

  “Why do white men place so much value in owning things? He is my companion, not my property. I got him nowhere.”

  “Meet him, then.”

  He ran the fingers of his free hand over his plaits—searching, most likely, for lice. He found none. He was cleaner than most Indians, a condition ingrained in him during his stay with the whites, whether he liked it or not. “We met in the Black Hills, in your year eighteen seventy-two. We have been together ever since.”

  “Who bobbed his tail?”

  “The white trader who claimed to own him. I cut off one of his ears to show him how it felt.”

  He watched me out of the corner of his eye for some reaction. It was his turn to be disappointed. I have a high threshold of shock. “Why did you name him Custer?”

  “Their hair is the same color.” He toed the dust. “Was the same color.”

  I stared at him, but he didn’t add anything. “It really goes deep, doesn’t it?” I asked him. “The hate.”

  “Before I was born,” he said, eyes still on the floor, “when still in my mother’s womb, I saw the plight of my people as clearly as others see it now. The spirits sent me this vision so that I would be prepared to take up the reins and lead the People to their rightful destiny. I knew before I took my first breath that the way would be hard and my enemies many. Still I did not turn away. I have seen our braves slain and our women and children defiled. Always I held to my course. While a single Cheyenne breathes I will not lay down my arms in defeat, not if it means the death of my people and the end of our way of life for a thousand generations.”

  It was a sad speech. Sad not because of the certain doom it carried, but because he didn’t believe it, not one word of it, any more than I did. His exposure to our culture had ruined him for his own beliefs. I might have felt sorry for him if the memory of Pere Jac’s death weren’t so fresh.

  I was about to pursue a different line when Colonel Locke came in bearing two glasses filled nearly to the brim with cognac. I sat back as if caught whispering in class.

  “I thought you might be getting thirsty back here.” He held out one of the glasses.

  I didn’t take it. “There’s one missing.”

  He stared at me for a moment, uncomprehending. Then his eyes slid toward the Indian and understanding clouded his features.

  “Keep your liquor,” snapped Ghost Shirt, before the colonel could say anything. “It is one of the main reasons for our troubles. The Comanche do not touch it and they are still a great people.”

  “Next time offer him one.” I accepted the glass.

  Locke made a nonchalant gesture of concession with his free hand and lowered himself onto the edge of the seat across the aisle. He did all this on board a moving train without spilling a drop from a full glass. I wondered how much it would take to get him drunk enough to lose his natural poise. He took a sip and frowned at the glass as if its contents weren’t strong enough.

  “ ‘It’s not Napoleon,’ ” he said, swallowing his voice in imitation of the senator’s stentorian tones, “ ‘but with the country just emerging from a depression it’s inadvisable to flaunt one’s affluence.’ ”

  Pleased with his impersonation, he smiled and crossed his legs, holding the long-stemmed vessel delicately between thumb and forefinger. I noticed that his socks were handwoven and bore a tiny gold monogram. So his job did pay better than the army. I didn’t look close enough to see if the initials were his or if he wore Firestone’s brand.

  “Is it worth it?” I asked.

  He looked at me, still smiling, and raised his brows. Tiny threads of blood gave the whites of his eyes a pinkish cast.

  “The money,” I said.

  He glanced down at his glass and saw in it what I was talking about. Then he sipped again. “Is it any of your business?”

  “It is if trouble comes and you’re too soaked to remember one end of that shoulder gun from the other.”

  “In my valise are three sharpshooter medals I won during my last hitch. I was so blind drunk when I took two of them they tell me I couldn’t see my group when it was shown to me.”

  “What about the third?”

  “I couldn’t locate a bottle in time. Worst score I ever made. But I won just the same.”

  “You’re having fun with me, aren’t you?”

  “My valise is in the baggage car. Shall I fetch it?”

  I didn’t bother to answer, which for him was answer enough. Relieved, he started to sit back, then remembered that the way he was perched left nothing behind him for support, and straightened again. “Good. I didn’t want to have to shoot that damn dog.”

  “How’s the senator?”

  “Sleeping, thank God. I gave him enough laudanum to keep a horse happy for a week. Diluted, of course. Like his reason.”

  Again I said nothing. If he insisted on acting like a supercilious ass it was no business of mine. He was good at it, though. I almost believed him.

  At length I had to give in and say something. If I hadn’t, the monotonous sway and rumble of the coach would have taken me under for sure. “I was just asking Ghost Shirt why he named his dog Custer.”

  “No surprise. I met the man in Washington when he was testifying against Secretary Belknap. A mutual friend introduced us in a restaurant. I was with a young lady at the time. The way the Boy General preened himself in her presence you would have thought he was a pup in its first heat. I don’t think he even knew I was there after we shook hands. And him with that vision of a wife of his sitting right across from him. I proposed a toast to him in Chicago when the news came in about-the Little Big Horn. They were still talking about it when I left.”

  “The Little Big Horn?”

  “No, the toast.”

  I said Locke was poised. I’ll add that he was charmed to boot. How else explain his timing in having just drained the last drop from his glass when Gus hit the brake?

  As if shoved violently from behind, Ghost Shirt pitched out of his seat so hard he sprained his wrist when the manacles binding him drew taut and the seat’s wooden arm split down the middle with a sharp report. Later I found that even the steel links between the cuffs had been stretched out of shape. Colonel Locke slammed shoulder-first into the back o
f his own seat, but caught hold of it before the backlash could throw him into the one opposite. Seated as I was facing the rear, I was spared the first trauma as my seat back absorbed most of the concussion, so that I did no more than spill what was left of my drink over my shirt and lap, but when the coach bounced back I duplicated the Cheyenne’s headlong dive. There was no chain to stop me, and only a last-minute twist to the right saved me from a broken neck when I came into contact with the seat opposite. A sound like walnuts being crushed in another room filled my ears as my shoulder struck the wooden framework. I hoped it was the polished hickory giving away and not my shoulder, but I doubted it because an instant later the pain came and my brain cells began to blink out in clusters. All around me oaken pegs groaned beneath the pressure of a well-built coach tearing itself apart, and a screech like half a dozen eagles being castrated all at once burned a red-hot hole through my eardrums.

  Then it was all over and the car had settled and my brain cells opened up one by one, allowing me a rare view of a cobweb sagging hammock-like an inch from my eyes in the corner I had somehow managed to jam myself into. It wasn’t what you expected to see first thing upon coming back from the dead. Even so I could have kissed it. My left shoulder, numb now, gave up on me when I tried to push myself up off the floor where I was kneeling, but with the help of my right hand on the window sill I was able to hoist myself back into my own seat. My knees tingled sharply. I looked down and saw that they were bleeding through my trousers. Six months later the last sliver from my shattered glass would work its way out of my flesh.

  I was sitting at an angle, or rather the coach was, the curtains on the windows dangling at a forty-five-degree tilt from the rods. Across from me, Ghost Shirt had slid back into a sitting position and was busy testing his fettered wrist between thumb and forefinger for breaks. It wasn’t broken, but it was beginning to darken and swell. Locke, across the aisle, picked his glass up from the floor, still intact, and set it on the seat facing him. Of the three of us, he alone had emerged unscathed from the upheaval. Fools and drunkards.

  The silence parted when a window at the other end of the coach, jarred loose from its frame, fell forward, executed a complete flip, and crashed to the floor. Then the quiet closed back over it, swallowing the last tinkle so effectively that after a moment it seemed as if there had been no such disturbance. We stared at each other like mourners on all-night watch over a corpse. At length:

  “This is getting to be a habit,” said Locke.

  That did it as far as the tension was concerned. I got up, swaying to catch my balance on the tilted floor. Pain blazed through my left shoulder when I grabbed at the back of the seat for support. I stifled a curse.

  “I’m going up front,” I told Locke before he could ask questions. “You’d better see to the senator.” I pulled my carbine down from the rack and headed toward the door without waiting for an answer.

  The locomotive was perched at a crazy angle, its stack heeled away over to the left and pouring smoke out of it at a tilt that suggested a strong wind, although there was none. Steam rolled out through the spaces between the wheels and swirled in the yellow beam of the lantern mounted over the boiler. In it I saw the twisted ends of the rails pointing heavenward at an even sharper angle only a few yards ahead. Someone or something had torn them up and given them enough English to derail a train whose engineer had not been as alert as Gus. That individual was climbing down from the cab as I approached. He spotted me and, out of instinct, snatched for the Walker Colt that was no longer in his belt. I held up my hands, palms forward, to show that I was friendly.

  “How come you were able to stop in time?” I asked him.

  “Two-mile grade up ahead.” His southwestern twang held a sharper note than usual. “I was slowing down some to take it when I seen the ends of them rails glint in the lantern beam. I didn’t have to see no more. Holdup men done the same thing down in Colorado when I was with the U.P. in seventy-one. We keeled over then, and I lost one of the best firemen I ever had. Not this time, though. This time I got her stopped quick enough. Quicker’n I expected, truth to tell.” He hooked a finger inside his mouth. He was bareheaded, and in the reflection of the light coming off the bent irons I saw a thin trickle of blood leaking out of a split lip and down his chin. It mixed with the smudge on his cheek when he rubbed it, so that I couldn’t tell what was blood and what was soot. Like the rest of us, he had kept moving when the train stopped.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve lost teeth before. Forget it. Worry about getting them rails fixed before any holdup men come around. That’s what I thought you was when you come up on me so sudden.”

  “I wish that’s all it was,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “Can’t you put her in reverse and take her back to Fargo?”

  “Not enough wood.”

  “We’ve got three cars and a caboose. If you’ve got a fire axe we’re in business.”

  “Nothing doing. I got retirement coming up and I ain’t about to tell James J. Hill that I burned up four of his cars, one of ’em a private Pullman. No, sir.”

  “Would you rather face whoever tore up the rails?”

  “Same difference.”

  “What if I told you it was Indians did it?”

  He squinted at me through the gloom. Suspicion glittered in the slits of his eyes. “You know something you ain’t telling?”

  “It would take too much explaining. What about it? Hill or the Cheyenne?”

  He turned that over, frowning. Then he shook his head curtly. “No, by God! Hill’s got nothing to do with it. I ain’t never run from no fight before and I ain’t about to start now. We’re staying and fixing the rails.”

  I was in no position to fight reasoning like that, especially since I had made much the same speech to Hudspeth on the east bank of the James River when I was younger and more foolish. I sighed. “All right, I guess I can’t make you. You’re the only one who can run the train. Have you got the tools?”

  “A crowbar and a pair of sledges in the cab. No spikes, but we can use the ones what’s there if they ain’t been busted or throwed away. Might be we can get it done before morning, if the irons ain’t too bad twisted and we don’t get jumped first.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of ifs.”

  He shrugged.

  “How are the others?”

  “Ep’s burned some, not bad. You better see to your friend, though. His head damn near busted the throttle when we stopped.” He went ahead to inspect the damage to the rails while I mounted the cab.

  I announced myself first and was glad I had. Ephraim, the fireman, was waiting for me at the top with the aforementioned crowbar raised over his woolly head. The light of the flames crackling in the open box turned his skin from iron to bronze and made the burned flesh on his right breast and cheek look worse than it was. His hair was singed where it met his forehead. He must have stuck his head right into the box when the wheels stopped rolling. His eyes had a hunted animal look. When I got close enough for him to see me clearly he relaxed and dropped the bar clanging to the floor.

  “How bad?” I asked, indicating his burns.

  “I done had worse, I ’spect.” His dungeon-depth voice was soothing. There was a church choir in Helena that would have given anything to have that bass in its ranks, if he weren’t black. “I’d sho’ feel better, though, if’n you’d ask your friend there please don’t open no holes in this child’s hide with them there cannons he’s aholdin’.”

  I looked in the direction he had nodded, where Hudspeth was sitting on the floor with his back propped up against the opposite wall of the cab, his Smith & Wesson in one hand, the obsolete Colt in the other. He had the Spencer pinned beneath his not inconsiderable bulk. His forehead was smeared dark with blood, but I could tell by his heavy breathing that he was conscious.

  “It’s me,” I told him. “Murdock.”

  “I knew that.” He spoke laboriously. �
�It’s the nigger I was watching. He tried to take the Walker a minute ago.”

  “To pertect us,” flared the fireman. “I heerd footsteps acomin’ and thought it was them holdups come to shoot us. He was gonna put one in this child’s belly when I backed off,” he added.

  “Give him the Colt,” I told Hudspeth.

  He stared at me, his barrel torso heaving. His breath was coming regularly now. I decided he wasn’t hurt badly. “You must of thunked your head harder than me,” he said at last.

  “I don’t know how you feel about it, but I prefer to fight one enemy at a time. You and I aren’t going to stand off the Cheyenne all alone. Give him the Colt.”

  “Injuns, sho’ ’nuff?” Ephraim rolled his eyes at me, the whites showing in the light of the fire. He sounded more eager than frightened. Black or white, they were all the same, these Easterners, coming out here thinking the West was something put on for their own entertainment. I ignored him. Hudspeth took nine, then handed over the Walker as I’d known he would all along. We had gotten to know each other pretty well during the time we’d spent together.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he growled.

  “So do I.” I gave the revolver to the fireman. He accepted it enthusiastically, checked the cap beneath the hammer, thrust it into his belt.

  “Lame Horse isn’t as impulsive as I thought,” I said. “The way I figure it, he put his braves to work tearing up the track with their lances and trade axes on their way to where they met us, just in case we made it on board. We’ve got till dawn before he catches up to us, maybe less. If we don’t get those rails fixed by then we’ll have to fort up and hope for the best. Does it hurt?”

  Hudspeth rubbed the bloody spot above his eye with the heel of a hand. It was congealing now over a jagged gash an inch and a half long. “Not so much that a belt of good whiskey couldn’t cure it,” he said.