Return of the Tall Man

by Clay Fisher

  “All right, Frank,” Ben said at last, “let’s go.”

  They went quickly riding down and across the swale and up the far rise—the last rise short of the Washita. It could come as no great surprise when they saw what they did beyond it, yet Ben’s stomach pulled in like green rawhide in the hot sun. There were upward of fifty of the hostiles sitting their shaggy ponies across the trail where it sloped down to water. Their long buffalo lances with the dyed horsehair tassels and their unique cartwheel warbonnets stamped them Kiowas past question. And Frank Go-deen, squinting hard at their short-bodied, bigheaded chief, grunted the final identification as he gathered his reins.

  “Satank,” he said and threw a swift glance to their rear. Ben saw his eyes go narrow and turned hurriedly.

  “Oh, that’s just great,” he breathed, eying the second blossoming of cartwheel bonnets along the rise behind them. “That the bunch you spotted trailing us?”

  “Yes, that’s Satanta. The tall, gaudy chief on the bay paint. He’s like you, a real big talker. Down here they call him the Orator of the Plains.”

  “Thanks. It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to learn on the job.”

  With the curt comment, Ben fell to studying the situation, eyes darting desperately right and left. Upstream on their right, the country roughened within the mile, its piling up of sharp rocks and water-cut prairie earth, trapped with willow scrub and cottonwood saplings, making horseback escape in that direction a certain snare. To their left downstream, the land lay more open, and Ben’s eyes lighted up for a moment as he saw a possible racing avenue in this parallel course. But only for a moment. As he started to point out the route to Go-deen, a third band of Kiowas pushed their ponies out of a willow grove flanking the downstream way. They held up their horses, sitting them in the same silence as Satank and Satanta, waiting for the cornered enemy to commit himself.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Ben; “give me one guess.”

  “You’re right,” growled Go-deen. “Big Tree.”

  It was in that same instant, when his harsh sounding of the name was still on the breed’s lips, that Little Tree cut viciously at Lame John’s Appaloosa with his Kiowa quirt and drove his borrowed Sioux pony like a shot arrow down the eastern slope toward his savage father.

  Lame John, fighting his nervous horse, could not fire. But Frank Go-deen, lance-scar leer set hard as Arkansas bedrock, slid out his heavy Sharps and laid its needle-eye sights in the small of the fleeing boy’s back. In the instant of squeezing the trigger, Ben flung out his arm, skying the Sharps’ barrel, sending the deadly lead wide and high of its mark.

  “You fool!” screamed the breed. “Now what do you think you’re going to do? Talk them to death?”

  Before Ben could reply or even before he could think to tell himself why he had saved the traitorous Kiowa youth’s life, Lame John brought his mount up beside theirs. On his handsome features, they saw the play of the sober smile he saved for such precise, blind turns in the trail.

  “The Nez Percé have another saying,” he told them gravely, “Would you care to hear it?”

  “By all means,” said Ben, easing his Winchester free of its scabbard. “Philosophy’s my long suit.”

  “‘When in doubt,’” said the young Wallowa, “‘ride for the river.’ What do you think?”

  Go-deen bobbed his bullethead.

  “I think your people are pretty damn smart. Hookahey!”

  He struck his pony with the rifle’s steel-shod butt. The little brute snorted and jumped like a rabbit, bombarding down the decline in wild leaps. Behind him came the pounding mounts of Ben and Lame John. And behind them, free of lead ropes or any other encouragement to follow and stay faithful, lumbered Malachi and the old white gelding.

  Even so, it was a thin charge. Its makers knew they had no better than a ten-to-one chance to wedge through Satank’s line. Providing they did, they would have no remaining chance whatever of beating the angry Indians to the tangled cover of the small island in mid-river, which they now saw behind the Kiowas. This tiny sanctuary, sticking out with sore-thumb lonesomeness from its dead-level surroundings of shallow water, bank sand, and buffalo grass, loomed as their one forlorn hope for a fort-up. Yet Ben was certain they would never reach it. His reaction, looking around as he saw Malachi come puffing abreast of his Sioux pony, was to laugh and yell at the old mule.

  “Come on, goat-head! Last one into the water’s a pea-green cow chip!”

  Malachi, walling his off-color eyes, pulled ahead of the Sioux pony, passed him lurchingly by. Here was no time for histrionics. If idiots wanted to play games with the Kiowas on three sides and sharp rocks on the fourth, well that was fine for idiots. But china-eyed Montana pack mules knew better. Malachi pinned his ears, took aim on the island, let out the last notch.

  He went past Frank Go-deen in a bony blur, smashed headlong into the massed Kiowa ponies. He struck their bunched line with such an iron-skulled impact and startlingly hideous, brass-lunged bray, that the thin-nerved Indian mustangs shied off uncontrollably. In the grace note of opportunity so provided, Go-deen, Ben, and Lame John drove through behind him and broke free for the river.

  13

  “Big Bat” Pourier

  The Kiowas, who had held their fire hoping to take the strangers alive, now began shooting to get their horses down before they might make the island in the river. In the excitement many of the shots went wild, but with so many rifles at work it was only a question of seconds before some of Ben’s party took lead. And it was almost an equal certainty that none of them or their mounts would get under cover unwounded.

  Ben and his friends rode hunched over the withers of their ponies, no thought of anything but getting the last ounce of speed out of the little animals. As for firing back at the closing Indians, this would have been worse than a waste of time. Go-deen and Lame John knew it consciously, Ben, instinctively. If they could make the island, of course, all odds changed. Aimed fire was another matter entirely.

  The three friends drove their horses, yelling and shouting them on as wildly as the pursuing Kiowas. But a hundred yards from the riverbank Ben could see they would not make it. Satank’s band, directly behind, was less than arrow shot away, a fact announced by the sudden cessation of the Indian rifle fire and the commencement of the deadly sibilant hissing of the fletched shafts past the fugitives. Ammunition on the South Plains was always too precious to burn up needlessly. Where the arrow or lance or knife or ax would work, why blow up bullets? As the thought of the meaning of the Kiowa shift to “silent fire” flashed into Ben’s mind, it was confirmed by Frank Go-deen.

  “They’ve got us!” he shouted to Ben and Lame John. “When they start using arrows, the next thing out is the scalping knife! Get ready to take a few of them with you!”

  Ben and Lame John dropped their looped reins, twisted in their saddles, brought up their Winchesters. But before either could pull a shot or Go-deen unlimber his ponderous Sharps, a steady bark of carbine fire began to cut into the Kiowas from the island ahead. Amazed, the three comrades again crouched low over their horses and sent them full gallop through the sunlit shallows of the near channel, the friendly fire continuing to stream over their heads into the close-packed Kiowas. Never of a military mind to press the attack in face of well directed resistance, the hostiles split off and pulled away from the pursuit. The fugitives splashed ashore on the sandy spit in midstream, spurred their mounts into its tangle of red willow and cottonwood, leaped off them, and ran back to help their hidden ally hold off the red horsemen. But the action at Sand Island was over for that afternoon. This information came from a mountainous figure which now reared up from behind a fortress of flood-lodged tree limbs, as they blundered up through the brush behind him.

  “Compliments, mes amis,” the bearded giant waved, “but there is no more requirement for haste. We have driven off the red devils très bien.” A w
hite-toothed grin split the black immensity of his whiskers. He reached over and fetched Go-deen a clout on the shoulder that would have parted the withers of an ox. “François!” he bellowed. “You have grown a little something here since last we met.” He whacked Go-deen across the paunch, staggering him two steps backward. “You better take it off, I think. You have nearly lost that race just now.”

  Go-deen rubbed his belly.

  “I might have known it was you.” He glowered. “Who else would be crazy enough to be down here in a war summer. I mean, beside myself.”

  The huge French-Canadian shrugged.

  “Cherchez la ‘squaw.’” He smiled. “You know me, François. But you should have seen this one. Ah! What a creature!”

  “Brothers,” said Go-deen, turning disgustedly to Ben and Lame John, “this is the great Baptiste Pourier. He calls himself the best scout on the plains. Actually, he’s not bad for a Canuck. Works for the army when they’ll trust him, which isn’t very often.”

  Lame John limped forward.

  “You are the one they call ‘Big Bat?’ The one the Sioux fear so much?”

  “I am he,” admitted Pourier. “Though why the Teton should fear me, I have never understood.”

  “It might have something to do with the number of them you have laid on the grass.” Go-deen scowled. “Just like those damn Kiowas over there.”

  They all turned to look at the four bodies sprawled along the bank of the Washita, as Big Bat shrugged again.

  “I never shoot an Indian unless I have to, François, you know that. Would you have me let them ride over you just now? You, an old friend of the better days?”

  “Bah!” said Go-deen. “I would rather have been saved by somebody with a full brain. I already have two crazy ones on my hands, and now you make it three. I think I will go home as soon as it gets dark.”

  Ben stepped forward, nodding anxiously.

  “I think we’d all best go somewheres as soon as it gets dark,” he suggested. “It looks to me like four’s a crowd for this sandspit.”

  “The Tall One is right,” said Big Bat quickly. “What do you call yourself, mon ami?”

  “Ben. Ben Allison.”

  “You claim to be a white man? With that face?”

  “Far as I know,” said Ben. “Which ain’t far.”

  Big Bat put out his hand.

  “Baptiste Pourier,” he said. “I, too, claim to be a white man.”

  Ben took his hand, then introduced him to Lame John. After he had shaken hands with the Nez Percé, the giant French-

  Canadian scout waved them into his driftwood fort.

  “Come in and sit down; we’ll make a little fire. You brought some tea, of course?”

  “No tea,” said Go-deen. “A little coffee only.”

  “Coffee?” The big man’s disappointment showed keenly. “I saved you—I risked my own fine hair—for coffee? Zut! It’s no use. There are days, positively, when it is preferable not to have left the blankets. Give me the damn stuff. What a blow of fate. Voilà tout!”

  While Big Bat laid the fire, and Ben brought the coffee can full of water, Go-deen ground the beans. Nothing was said until the water had come to a race, and the breed carefully rationed in the powdered beans. Then Big Bat sat back against the riverside wall of his barricade, eying them all for a long moment before nodding.

  “All right, mes amis, now let us talk.”

  Big Bat did his part of the talking first. He was down there in Kiowa country for the army, sent from the north because he would not be so well known on the South Plains as would be the local scouts and buffalo hunters who served as the army’s eyes and ears out beyond the fringe of forts garrisoning this restless frontier below the Arkansas. A rumor had been blowing all spring that the Kiowas were working up a deal with the Comanches, their blood cousins directly south, to make the war summer a real success. These negotiations were principally suspected of the Satank group, including Satanta and Big Tree, and the Kwahadi Comanches of Quanah. This Quanah was the son of a Kwahadi chief and a white woman stolen from the Texas settlements. This latter was named Cynthia Ann Parker, the fact leading to the whites calling her red son Quanah Parker. The Indians used only his Kwahadi name, and though still young, this tall, half-white Comanche was already a chief of reputation and a fighter against the whites more dangerous than his full red tribesmen brothers. Next only to Satank, who was the more purely vicious because he was old and ill, Quanah was the most feared Indian on the South Plains.

  Now Big Bat’s job had been to drift down into Comanche country seeking to find a nomad people called the Comancheros, a half-Mexican, half-Indian band who hunted buffalo commercially for the white and Spanish-American markets in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos. Finding this band, which was led by a Kwahadi-Sonora Mexican breed named Soledad Dominguin, had been a nice thing. A matter of delicate judgment. A situation of the very keenest judgment. But Baptiste Pourier had brought it off.

  Having seen Dominguin and having determined from him, with the aid of the small bag of army gold provided for the purpose, that the Comanches did indeed have thoughts of joining the Kiowas in a cleanup of the settlements from the Rio Pecos to the Panhandle, Big Bat was easing his way back toward Fort Cobb when he had, late yesterday, been caught in the middle of a considerable Kiowa movement in the local vicinity. He had been lucky enough to avoid detection, but to do it he had been forced to turn his horse free. The animal, unshod after the Indian fashion, would attract no attention if seen riderless and with all saddle-sweat stains removed, as Big Bat had removed them, with springwater and dried buffalo grass. Big Bat himself had made it to the Washita under cover of darkness, burrowing into the brush of Sand Island to lie up and wait out the Kiowa activity.

  Since the island was much too small for an Indian campsite, and since he had no horse with him to be seen or heard or smelled by either the Kiowas or their nervous mustangs, he would have been entirely safe except for the thoughtlessness of his present guests in getting themselves jumped under his very nose.

  Now that all was as it was, however, why, naturellement, he would need to look after them. In turn, they would need to allow him this necessary privilege sans argument. If this arrangement was understood, he would be happy to continue giving them the benefit of his many years experience in slipping out of such warm quarters as the present ones. N’est-ce pas?

  Ben didn’t know who Nez Say-pah was or what he might have to do with their possible escape from Sand Island. He didn’t even know what tribe he belonged to. In consequence, he kept quiet, always a safe bet in a strange game. Go-deen, however, who spoke some of the Canuck patois from his Milk River upbringing, replied quickly to Big Bat, “Oui fait,” and urged him to please go right ahead and unburden himself of any such wisdom as was his in regard to making four friendly fellows from Montana disappear from a fifty-foot sandspit in the middle of a hundred feet of water so shallow a short cow could wade it without getting her teats wet; that water, moreover, surrounded on three sides by seventy or eighty Arkansas Kiowa Indians and on the fourth side by sharp rocks and steep gullies that would discourage a Wyoming mountain goat; and, as well, to do all this with such dispatch and lack of sound as would guarantee no great loss of life or livestock among the departers.

  At this point Ben felt compelled to interrupt and restate briefly his own business along the Washita. He reasoned that it might have some bearing either on Big Bat’s decisions or those of Go-deen and Lame John in response to what Big Bat was about to propose. Accordingly, he retold the Amy Johnston story for the latter, ending it with the inevitable query as to whether the new listener had, in his own travels throughout the Indian country, seen or heard anything of the missing white woman. To his delight, Big Bat’s eyes struck sparks, and his gleaming teeth flashed from their dark ambush of beard.

  Ah! That one! Sacristi! By God and damnation, yes, he had both he
ard and seen her! He could, as well, tell them precisely where she was at this moment. Indeed, he could lead them directly to her, had he not more pressing business—his own life—to concern him. Zut! That woman had a body, though! The remembering of it made a man doubtful. For anything less than his life, he might be tempted to go back with them. That body she had was better even than that of the young Kiowa squaw he knew over at Fort Cobb—the one the memory of whose gifts upon the blanket had induced him to take the army’s risky offer in the first place; the one who had told him where to find the Comancheros of Soledad Dominguin; the one who waited for him, even now, over at the fort; the one whose breasts were like the famed cantaloupes of Colorado’s Rocky Ford country, whose buttocks were a round mellowness more beautiful and shining than the moon’s, whose soft belly was silkier and of a greater sheen than prime beaver, whose sweet thighs had the perfume of fresh prairie hay, whose movements when the moment approached were of a madness to drive—

  Here Ben, plunging in manfully, succeeded in halting the full gallop of Gallic enthusiasm. He managed, also to guide the narrator of Kiowa charms back upon the wanted track of Amy Johnston. With due apology for the detour, Big Bat sobered frowningly.

  Well, all right, if they insisted on knowing, here was the way it was with that poor damned once-white girl, he told them. First, it was true Satank had bought her from the Cheyenne. But the old Sarsi-Kiowa was no more a match for her on the buffalo robe than the senile Cheyenne chief before him. He had, in turn, passed her off on Soledad Dominguin who wanted her for the Apache trade: probably for the Mimbreños of Mangas Coloradas, although Dominguin had said nothing as to that. It would be an excellent guess, however, that he had meant her for them because, since the treacherous killing of old Mangas, the Mimbreños had been wolf hungry for white prisoners. At any rate, the last Big Bat knew of her, she was camped down on the Clear Fork of the Brazos with the Comancheros of Soledad Dominguin, waiting for the New Mexican Apaches to show up and look her over for possible purchase. That was the headwaters of the Clear Fork, way, way out in the buffalo country under the shadows of Double Mountains, four days pony ride from the nearest army post.