Standing out of the way watching them, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, I had grown so drowsy by about three o’clock that the first owl hoot didn’t register. I perked up at the second one. Hollow and echoless, it sounded very far away. A pause, then a third. It would have been soothing but for my knowledge that it wasn’t far away, and wasn’t made by anything that remotely resembled an owl.
Chapter Twenty
Nor did it stop at the owl. A moment later there was an answering hoot from another quarter, and then, farther off, the complicated scan of a mockingbird. Closer—too close—a mourning dove’s sad refrain tooted like air passing through a pipe. We might have been in an aviary.
They weren’t fooling anyone, not out there in the middle of a lonely prairie with no place for a bird to roost, and they knew it. They were just reporting their positions to each other in the only way they knew how, a highly efficient form of field communication that went back some two thousand years. More important, they were trying to scare us. Fright is the strongest medicine there is, and no one ever used it to greater advantage than the war-loving Cheyenne.
At the first calls Hudspeth and the others had stopped working and gone for their arms.
“Go on working.” I spoke loudly enough to be heard over the engine without shouting. “If they don’t know how many men we have, acting scared is the quickest way of telling them.”
“And if they knows?” said Ephraim.
“Then we’ll die no matter what we do.”
“I’d heaps rather die fighting.” This from the marshal.
“Either way you end up a handful of bloody hair. Go back to work.”
There was a pause while they bounced glances around among themselves. Slowly they returned their guns to their proper places and took up their tools. Steel clanged.
Time crawled after that. I figured that if Lame Horse knew our strength he’d attack within half an hour of his arrival. I spent every minute tight as a coiled rattler. As the half hour drew to a close and minute piled laboriously upon minute without a bullet in my back, I began to relax by degrees. If they were planning to hit us before dawn we’d be five minutes dead.
A metallic glimmering over the eastern horizon foretold that event some three hours later. “Break it off,” I snapped, surprised at the sound of my own voice after all those hours of silence.
The others looked up from their labors. Aside from that nobody moved.
“Ain’t finished yet,” Gus protested. “Next train comes down this track, without no warning—”
“That’s their lookout. If you’re really worried about it you can leave behind that red lantern on the caboose as a signal. Don’t forget to couple those last two cars. Locke, Hudspeth, put the tools away and join me in the coach. No hurrying. We don’t want them to know we’re leaving just yet. Start stoking, Ep.”
“Just who made you ramrod of this here outfit?” demanded the marshal.
“A sore shoulder. Get moving.” I picked up the Winchester and threw the Spencer to the fireman, who caught it in one hand. The first bullet found him in that position. He spun and fell, spread-eagled with the rifle flung out to the side. Another one clanged against the boiler, then another and another, whistling off the base of the stack. More kicked up dirt all around us. At that moment, a line of shadowy riders spilled up out of a cleft between the rolling swells to the south like ants from a kicked hill. They were snapping off wild shots and yammering at the top of their lungs.
“Get on board!” I shouted, backing up and firing the Winchester from my hip as I went. I nearly tripped over Ep, who was still kicking with a hole the size of a man’s fist over his left breast. Tossing the carbine to Hudspeth, I called for him to cover me as I gathered up the Spencer and a handful of the fireman’s belt and dragged him to the coach. My shoulder was forgotten.
“I need a fireman!” Gus shouted from the cab.
“Locke!”
The colonel waved his understanding and ran a zigzag pattern between flying bullets toward the engine. His Remington bucked twice in his hand, its muzzle flashing. An Indian who had been galloping up on him shrieked and back-flipped over his horse’s rump. Whinnying, the animal lost its momentum, executed a wide, clawing turn to the right, and took off bucking for the open prairie, narrowly missing Hudspeth as it brushed between us.
A Cheyenne slug splattered the corner of the coach an inch above my hat as I hoisted Ep’s limp, heavy body onto the platform and bounded up behind him. Either their marksmanship was improving or God was on their side. Hudspeth, hammering away with the Winchester at every target that presented itself, swung aboard directly behind me.
Indians were clattering all over the place now. Crouched on the platform, I fired the Deane-Adams at an occasional flash of horse and rider in the light of the lamps still burning inside, without visible result. I heard the snapping of a light gun in the direction of the engine, and once the deeper roar of the Walker, and hoped Gus wouldn’t forget to pick us up. Ghost Shirt’s dog was going wild in the baggage car, which was no longer connected to ours.
The grayness to the east had given way to dirty pink. I had enough light to shoot by, but if there had been a friend among the riders harassing the train I wouldn’t have known him from the others. I figured there was little chance of that and kept popping away at the fleeting forms.
Over everything, the panting of the engine grew loud and rapid. I was relieved to see for the first time that the rear of the baggage car was looming near, and threw out a hand to brace myself against the railing just as we made contact with a smashing jolt that threw me sideways into the marshal, pinning him between my shoulder and the wall. The couplings caught and held. We began rolling forward at a painfully slow pace, but picking up speed as we went.
I placed a hand over the gaping mass of gore that was the fireman’s breast to see if his heart was still beating. Warm blood squirted between my fingers. At that moment his great chest swelled with air and expelled it in a long, drawn-out sigh. I waited, but it didn’t fill again and no more blood came. Gus was right. He would never be an engineer.
Hudspeth had ducked inside the coach to see to the other side of the tracks. After a space I felt the platform rock beneath me and figured it was him returning. At the same time, a solitary rider sitting a black and white pony drew abreast of the coach and swung the muzzle of a Spencer in my direction. It was Lame Horse.
Hudspeth had extinguished the lights inside the car, but there was enough natural illumination now for me to recognize the shiny, ebony-painted face with the jagged streak of yellow lightning slashing from his right temple to the left corner of his jaw. The necklace of shrunken human fingers bounced on his breast as he galloped to keep up with the accelerating train, slapping his reins one-handed back and forth across the animal’s withers. You had to hand it to him for spunk. Hitting a moving target from the back of a horse in full gallop is next door to impossible, yet here he was fixing to do just that. He set a lot of store by the medicine in that necklace. Using it as a guide, I was steadying the foresight of my revolver on the top of the vulnerable arch below his breastbone when something burst behind my eyes and the lights went out.
The blackout lasted less than a second, but by the time my senses came swimming back I found myself sprawled on the platform, my head humming and my right leg swinging over the edge where the wind of our passage set my pants cuff to flapping. The Deane-Adams was nowhere to be seen. My first thought was that Lame Horse got lucky, but then I realized that the blow had come from behind. I looked up to see a familiar figure crouching over me.
My handcuffs dangled glittering from the swollen wrist of the hand holding the engineer’s Colt by its long barrel like a club. That meant that he had been inside the cab, which in turn meant that he had been hiding in the one place I had given only a cursory search, the wood car. He had sprung from beneath a layer of camouflage, dispatched Gus and likely Colonel Locke, and scrambled over the roof of the baggage car to do fo
r me. All this came to me in the instant of awakening. The moment he saw me lying helpless at his feet, Ghost Shirt let out a whoop and, swinging the revolver over his head as if it were a tomahawk, leaped up to hail Lame Horse.
The medicine man was ready for him. Within arm’s length of the platform now, he thrust the bore of his rifle into his chief’s midsection and blew him into history.
The force of the bullet slammed him against the door of the adjacent car, where he sank down with surprise on his face and both hands buried in what remained of his stomach, his feet still on the platform of the coach so that he formed a human coupling between the cars. Behind the baggage door an animal throat let go with a howl that made my scalp crawl.
Lame Horse was losing ground now to the train, which although it had begun to lose momentum with no hand at the throttle was still traveling too fast for a horse to keep up, but he had time enough to turn the heavy rifle on me. Before he could pull the trigger I snatched up the Spencer that was lying beside Ep’s corpse and slammed an ounce of lead into the middle of his war paint. The yellow slash dissolved behind a cloud of red. He clutched at his face with one hand, but it was just his nerves reacting. I didn’t see him topple. By then both horse and rider had slid out of sight behind the corner of the coach.
The train was moving perceptibly slower now. Hudspeth emerged from the coach carrying my Winchester in one hand and his own Smith & Wesson in the other. He helped me to my feet.
“What the hell happened?” he wanted to know. “I leave you alone for one minute—”
I ignored him. Ghost Shirt was still breathing. I stepped across to the other platform, where he lay with his mouth working soundlessly. Planting a finger in one ear to close out the noise of the train, I bent over him and placed the other ear so close to his lips that they almost touched. For a moment I froze in that position, straddling two cars and leaning against the door of baggage to maintain my balance. Then the Indian’s neck muscles let go and his head rolled of its own weight to one side. The hypnotic light drained slowly from his half-open eyes. I straightened.
“What did he say?” The marshal’s voice was so hushed I may only have guessed at his words.
“Something about Lame Horse,” I said. “It wasn’t, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ ”
When the train had rolled almost to a stop we sprang down and made our way to the locomotive. There were no Indians in sight. In the cab we found the engineer slumped over the throttle, the back of his head a pulpy mass covered with matted hair. Locke was leaning against the wood supply busily tying his handkerchief around his right wrist. A dark stain was spreading over the fine silk.
“He hit Gus with a chunk of wood the size of a man’s thigh,” he explained as we mounted the cab. “The damn fool was too busy replacing the one bullet he’d fired from that cap-and-ball to notice him. I had just put away my gun. Ghost Shirt searched me, but I guess he didn’t know about shoulder holsters. I went for it while he was picking up Gus’s revolver. I wasn’t fast enough. The Remington went over the side and I played dead. Did you see which way he went?”
I nodded. “He isn’t playing.”
“This one’s skull must be near as thick as yours, Murdock,” said Hudspeth, examining the engineer. “He’s still breathing.”
“How bad is the wrist?” I asked Locke.
“Just a graze. I would’ve given anything for one like it when I was in the service. The wound pension would have served me in good stead.”
“Trouble.” The marshal hefted the Spencer, which I had exchanged for the return of my carbine. I turned in the direction of his gaze.
A dozen Indians were approaching slowly on horseback from the east. Some of them led other horses, across the backs of which were slung their dead. The brave mounted at the point, powerfully built like Ghost Shirt but several years his senior, wore his hair in a pair of plaits that hung almost to his belt, the ends tied with bright red ribbon, and had his face painted black on one side, red on the other, with a white line the width of a finger separating them down the middle. Across his chest he sported a breastplate made of bones fitted together by a squaw’s patient hands. The Cheyenne at his left carried a rifle upright with its butt resting upon his thigh. A scrap of white cloth swung from its bore.
“It’s a trick,” said Hudspeth.
“If it is they’re taking an awful chance. We’ll let them come.”
They stopped a few yards away. The silence that ensued was broken only by the occasional shuddering snort of an exhausted mount. Finally the man holding the flag of truce spoke. A young brave with a pouting expression beneath his dead black paint, he had the high, thin voice of a born Indian orator.
“This man is Broken Jaw, of the Cheyenne nation.” He indicated the breastplated warrior, whose hard eyes remained fixed on a point somewhere above our heads. “He wishes to say that the white men fought bravely and well this day, and that he is not angry with them because of this.”
I said nothing. Indians take a long time to get to the point.
“He wishes also to say that while there was one among the Cheyenne who did not behave this day as a Cheyenne should, and whose soul will wander forever the Place of the Dead in disgrace because of this, the black white man who died this day will take his place beside Heammawihio, the Wise One Above.”
I perked up at that. Broken Jaw had witnessed the medicine man’s treachery as well as Ephraim’s death. In that tribe, the worst thing you can say about a fellow warrior is to accuse him of not behaving “as a Cheyenne should.” I wanted to hurry the spokesman along, to find out what he was getting at, but if I tried I’d only be butting my head against twenty centuries of tradition.
“But there was a great sadness this day as well. Tomorrow the heavens will weep and the sun will hide its head.”
At last we were making some progress.
“Broken Jaw has come to claim the pod in which dwelled the soul of Ghost Shirt so that he may prepare it for its final great journey in a manner befitting a great warrior of the Cheyenne.”
“Tell him his wish is granted,” I said, after I had translated that into plain English.
The spokesman told him nothing, but then he didn’t have to. It was obvious Broken Jaw understood most of what had been said. I told Locke and Hudspeth to wait there and turned my back on their protests as I led the party back to the baggage car. There, the head warrior dismounted to gather up the body.
“One moment,” I said. He watched in silence as I produced the key to Ghost Shirt’s handcuffs and removed them from his lifeless wrist. “So his soul will not wander in chains.”
There is no word for thanks in the Indian languages, because none is needed. I saw the gratitude in Broken Jaw’s eyes as he nodded at me.
The renegades had come away from the fight at the Missouri with no lodge poles with which to construct a travois, and so the pod in which Ghost Shirt’s soul had dwelled was committed to the indignity of being draped over the back of an empty horse. Then Broken Jaw and the Indians who had helped him mounted up and left without a word. They didn’t break into their death chant until they were almost out of sight on the eastern horizon. By then it was hard to distinguish the toneless dirge from the morning breeze that had just begun to stir the grasses on the prairie. Sometimes, when I’m alone and the wind comes humming beneath the cornices outside the window in gusts that rise and fall with no recognizable pattern, I hear it still.
Chapter Twenty-one
Gus sat on the floor of the cab with his turbaned head in his hands, his legs dangling over the side. When he spoke he lisped wetly through the space where his bottom two front teeth had been before the train’s sudden stop had rammed a healthy share of the ironwork into his mouth. That stop seemed a week old now. It was midmorning. Taking turns with a shovel they had found in the cab, Locke and Hudspeth had just finished burying Ephraim and the conductor deep enough to keep the wolves and coyotes from scratching them up for a day or two.
“Can you run the train?” I slipped my arms into the sleeves of my jacket, which I had taken off to clean the wound, apply the bandage and a liberal dose of cognac from the community flask. The left one went on carefully. My shoulder was beginning to set up.
“I need me another fireman. Lately I been going through ’em like cigars.”
“I can still stoke wood.” Locke returned from the rear of the train, where he had gone to check on the senator. A fresh shine in his eyes told me he’d made a stop at the bar, where burgundy was still available. “I’m learning to enjoy physical labor all over again.”
“We’ll cure that soon enough,” said Gus.
“How’s His Lordship?” I asked the colonel.
“Happily ignorant. I gave him a drop more laudanum. He’ll sleep the rest of the trip.”
“Is that how you usually handle him?”
He shrugged. “It can’t do him any harm. His doctors say he has a stomach cancer. He won’t see winter.”
“Does he know?”
“If he didn’t, do you think he’d be in such a hurry to make a name for himself in history?”
“All right, then, get her up.” I turned toward the passenger coach, where Hudspeth was waiting.
“What time is it?” the engineer demanded.
I hauled out my watch. “Quarter of nine.”
He swore, scrambled to his feet, got dizzy, grabbed the side of the cab for support, swore again. “There’s a freighter due in Bismarck at noon. If it’s nine she’s an hour late now. We got to get moving.”
The rest of us had managed to keep up a head of steam without a crash course in locomotive operation. Gus released the brake and the train was churning at a stiff clip by the time I reached the coach. I grabbed hold of the platform railing with my good arm and swung aboard.
“Figure on keeping a pet?” Hudspeth was sitting in the first seat facing the door on the right, Locke’s flask in hand. His nose was flushed and all was right with the world.
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