Beneath a Dakota Cross

by Stephen A. Bly

  “It was a trap, Brazos …”

  “I reckon it was.”

  “I cain’t believe Jamie Sue’s brother would do this to us, wounded like he was.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t wounded,” Brazos suggested.

  The injured man from the creek rode into the clearing on a stout bay horse. The bloody rag hung from his saddle horn. He displayed no sign of an injury. “You two is the most gullible we’ve had in a month,” the man sneered.

  “Drop those guns in the dirt!” the man behind Brazos insisted.

  “I’m not going to do that,” Brazos replied.

  “We can shoot you right where you are.”

  “And one of you will have a hole the size of a watermelon in his gut when this .50 caliber hits him.”

  “But you’ll be dead!”

  “So will the man with the hole in his guts.”

  “You don’t need to shoot anyone,” the man behind him said. “You get down, and we’ll just take your horses and packs and leave you here with your guns. That’s a deal, and you know it.”

  “It’s a lousy deal. I’m not gettin’ down,” Brazos replied.

  A fourth man strolled into the clearing leading a string of saddle horses. On the last horse was an Indian woman, bound and gagged.

  “You stealin’ women, too?” Brazos quizzed.

  “That ain’t no woman, that’s a squaw. We found her all doubled up and sick. We nursed her back to health, and now she helps us locate water holes.”

  Brazos glared at the man across the clearing. “Is that why she’s tied up?”

  “We got tired of her kickin’ and bitin’ us,” Milan replied. “Now, are you goin’ to drop those guns, or do we shoot you?”

  Brazos gave Grass Edwards a look. Grass dropped a quick glance down at his revolver, dangled on a wire from his belt. There was a barely visible nod at the man standing nearest him.

  Brazos gripped the receiver of the carbine tight in his right hand. I agree with you, Grass, we aren’t lettin’ go of our gold, let alone our lives, without a fight. They have no intention of letting us go.

  Lord, have mercy on us all.

  “Well?” the man behind him shouted.

  Still mounted, Brazos held his hands up, the carbine in his right hand, the barrel parallel to the ground, pointed over the top of his head to the north.

  “I said, drop the—”

  Brazos opened his hand as if to let the gun drop, instead he twirled it to the back and pulled the trigger without looking behind him. At the sound of the blast of the .50-caliber Sharps, Grass Edwards yanked his gun and fired a quick round at the man standing closest to him, who promptly dove behind the boulders.

  Brazos threw himself low on Coco’s neck and spurred across the opening, frightening the cavvy of horses held by the fourth man. He had dropped the lead ropes in order to pull his own gun, and the horses, including the one the Indian woman rode, bolted to the open prairie to the east.

  The scream from the man behind him let Brazos know he had wounded the spokesman. Whipping around fifty feet beyond the boulders, he fired a second shot. Grass Edwards swung up into the saddle, galloped out of the boulders, riding so low on the horse’s neck he could hardly be seen above the saddle horn.

  Brazos sprinted off to the east with Edwards. Several shots rang out, but they didn’t slow until they crested the next roll of the prairie and the boulders dropped out of sight.

  “Are you all right?” Brazos called out.

  “I ain’t shot, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did I hit that guy behind me?” Brazos asked.

  “I reckon. He dropped to the rocks like a rotten apple topplin’ from a tree in winter.”

  “I think you wounded one, too,” Brazos added.

  “I didn’t aim too much. I was in such a hurry to mount up. We ain’t going back after them, are we?”

  “Nope. They’re in the middle of Sioux land on foot, several wounded. I surmise that’s punishment enough.”

  “There’s their horses!” Edwards pointed to the next ridge.

  Brazos grabbed his spectacles out of his vest. “Is the woman still riding one?”

  “Yep.”

  “She can sit a horse, if she stayed on during that romp, all tied up like that.”

  “You reckon we should unbind her?” Grass asked.

  “That’s what I’m thinkin’.”

  The loose horses trotted further out on the prairie as they approached, but the woman’s horse stood fastened by a lead rope that had snagged a sage.

  Brazos rode alongside her and untied the bandanna around her mouth, her hands still fastened behind her back. The moment the dirty red cloth dropped from her mouth, she let out a high-pitched, blood-curdling scream.

  Brazos held up his hands. “Quiet, we aren’t going to hurt you,” he shouted.

  She continued to scream.

  “Put the gag back on her!” Edwards shouted.

  “What?”

  “The gag!”

  Brazos reached back over with the gag, and she snapped at him like a bobcat cornered in the barn.

  But she did stop screaming.

  “Look, lady, we aren’t going to harm you,” Brazos insisted. “Do you speak English? What is your name? Where do you come from?”

  She looked at him, then Edwards, then back at Brazos with her fiery brown eyes. “Táku eníciyapi hwo? Tuktétaņhaņ yaú hwo?”

  “What did she say?” Edwards probed.

  A sly smile broke across her face. “I said, ‘What is your name? Where do you come from?’ Don’t you speak Lakota?”

  “No, ma’am,” Brazos admitted. “Let me untie your hands, and we’ll be on our way, and you can go on yours.”

  “You will let me go free?” she said.

  “I reckon you’ve got family around here.”

  “Yes, these men kidnapped me when I was at the creek drawing water. They demanded I tell them where the next water was to be found.”

  “Did you?”

  “Oh, yes. It is about ten miles straight east of here.” As Brazos leaned over to untie her hands she looked back at the boulders. “But I did not tell them there would be two hundred lodges of Lakota camped there.”

  “Two hundred lodges?” Grass stared at Brazos. “I reckon we’re not going east.”

  “Are you going to Fort Pierre?” she asked.

  “That was the plan.”

  “My people are scattered from here to there. It is better you go north to Bismarck.”

  “She might be right,” Brazos admitted.

  “She might be lying,” Edwards added.

  “She has been taught at the mission school not to lie.”

  “How do you know I’ve been to the mission school?” she asked.

  “You speak good English.”

  She rubbed her wrists, then leaped to the ground and untangled the reins from the sage. “It was a very good school.”

  “Are you going to take their horses?” she asked as she remounted by grabbing the horse’s dark mane and yanking herself to the saddle in one motion.

  “Nope. We won’t steal a man’s horse, no matter how despicable he might be.”

  “I do not steal horses either. However, if they happen to follow me into our camp, there is nothing I can do about it,” she grinned.

  After two steps Brazos turned back and laid his hand on the horse’s rump. “Ma’am … is there a water hole to the north?”

  “Yes, ride northeast under the noon sun, and you’ll find water at Tatá¸nka Wiwíla.”

  “Where?”

  “Buffalo Springs.”

  “Will we find buffalo there?”

  “No, but there is plenty of Buchloe dactyloides.”

  Grass Edwards jerked back as if he’d been kicked in the shins. “Buffalo grass? Where did you learn the proper names?”

  “I told you, the mission school was very good.”

  Brazos and Grass Edwards rode northeast for several minutes then stopped to lo
ok back.

  “You see anyone?” Grass asked.

  “Nope. How about you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I reckon she got those horses to follow her,” Brazos mumbled.

  “Yep,” Grass concurred. “Horses is funny that way.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The streets of Bismarck, Dakota Territory, were filled with men.

  Railroad men.

  Army men.

  And, especially, gold-seeking men.

  No one talked openly about going to the Black Hills. After all, it was Indian land. Off-limits. Sioux territory. The army had cleared everyone out. Just a mountain ridge of hidden treasure protected from exploitation by the United States government.

  But everyone was making plans to go there.

  As soon as they bought supplies, they banded together with others, gathered up courage, and slipped out of town.

  Just a dozen here.

  A dozen there.

  A trickle.

  A stream.

  Not a flood.

  Not yet, anyway.

  The biggest deterrent now seemed to be the weather. Bulging numbers of gold rushers resigned themselves to wait for spring.

  Brazos knew it was absolutely crucial to get back to Deadwood as soon as possible.

  Wearing a new suit, sporting a freshly shaven face, Grass Edwards surveyed the stack of crates crammed into the corner of the warehouse. “You reckon we bought too much?” he asked.

  Brazos rubbed his neatly trimmed gray-and-dark-brown beard and pulled off his spectacles, slipping them into his worn, leather case. “Prices were high, but not nearly as high as we figured.”

  “It’s that train that done it,” Grass reported. “The Northern Pacific makes a run in here ever’ other day. One ol’ boy said he sent a telegraph order to Chicago and got the goods within seven days. Seven days from Chicago! Don’t that beat all?”

  Brazos studied his hands, clean for the first time in six months. Dark age spots were sprinkled across the suntanned surface. “It will take a little longer than seven days to get back to Deadwood.”

  Edwards’s shirt collar was so starched, his head reminded Brazos of a lollipop. “I don’t see how we can do it at all. We could load it in two freight wagons,” Grass offered, “but there’s no way to get a wagon into Deadwood.”

  Brazos wiggled his toes inside his boots and felt the comfort of new, store-bought socks. “That’s no problem, pard … we’ll probably be scalped before we ever reach the hills.”

  “You know, I was thinkin’, if you and me hadn’t run across that Lakota woman, we’d have kept going straight into two hundred lodges of Sioux,” Grass said.

  “Must’ve been Divine Providence for that gang to try and bushwhack us.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinkin’. Now, if the Lord led us out, don’t it seem cruel for him to let us be slaughtered on the way back in?”

  Brazos folded the long inventory and shoved it back into his pocket. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you … Thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

  Grass plopped down on one of the crates. “Where did you find them words?”

  “Jeremiah 29:11.”

  “Yeah, but does that mean the Good Lord will give us our expected end,” Edwards spun his new, wide-brimmed hat in his hands, “or his expected end?”

  Brazos rubbed his beard as if brushing some invisible crumbs. “Does it matter?”

  “No … I don’t reckon it does.”

  “Then I say we take freight wagons,” Brazos suggested. “We’ll buy a couple of six-up teams for each. With our saddle horses, that gives us fourteen animals. We’ll take the wagons as far as they go, then use the horses for a pack string, and freight it in the rest of the way, even if it takes ten trips. Who knows, maybe the Jims will be cutting logs out along the trail, and we can snake the wagons part of the way through the hills. We could disassemble the wagons and bring them to town, too. Sooner or later we’ll have a road into Deadwood City.”

  Grass strolled around through the crates, surveying the goods. “How much you figure this would be worth in the Black Hills?”

  “If we make it back before Christmas, I would guess about five times the money.”

  “Fifteen thousand? Don’t that beat all? A man could make more money sellin’ goods than diggin’ gold. Three thousand dollars for each of us … that’s more money than I ever made in five years of pushin’ cows.”

  “I think if we hold on to our claims until spring, then sell out when all these rushers finally find their way to Deadwood City, we should end up with twice that amount,” Brazos suggested.

  “Six thousand dollars? I bet there’s many a nice ranch that can be bought for less than six thousand cash dollars. If you find one under a cross, you could have your Dacee June up here by July.”

  “That’s what I told her in that letter I sent out with the Swedes last month. It might take most of next summer to find the right place.”

  “Shoot, with six thousand dollars in each of our pockets, we could stick a cross up on some windy hillside ourselves.”

  “I don’t think that’s what the Lord has in mind,” Brazos corrected. “But it might not be around this country. I heard the Sioux turned down the government’s offer for buying or renting the Black Hills at that Grand Council they held in September.”

  “Yeah, I heard there was ten thousand Indians down there in Nebraska at that meeting,” Grass said.

  “I heard twenty thousand.”

  “You reckon that’s part of that big band we almost stumbled into?”

  “That’s what I surmise.”

  “The army likes to fight out on the prairie, and so do the Sioux and Cheyenne. Maybe them mountains is the safest spot,” Edwards offered.

  “The Black Hills are either a fortress or a trap, depending on how many Indians come up the gulch,” Brazos concluded.

  “You get them telegrams of yours sent?”

  “Yep. Dr. Ferrar bought a steam sawmill east of Waco, and he’s just lettin’ it sit in his barn. Told him Deadwood would be a great place to open a mill, if we had a way to ship it north. Told him to wire me right back, and we’d start makin’ the arrangements.”

  Grass unbuttoned his tight collar button and his face resumed a more normal color. “Did you find your boy Robert?”

  “I learned he’s still stationed at Fort Lincoln, but he’s been transferred to the Seventh Cavalry.”

  “General Custer’s outfit?”

  “Colonel Custer’s outfit.”

  “I thought Custer was a general?

  “He was a brevet general during the war. He’s a Lt. Colonel now.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Some figure he’s lucky to hang on to that rank. Anyway, they said Robert’s on personal leave,” Brazos reported.

  “Maybe he went back to Texas to visit ever’one.”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t think he had that much time. Then again, maybe he does. If a man went downriver he could take the train most of the way back.”

  “Wouldn’t that beat all?” Grass hooted. “You comin’ all the way to Fort Lincoln, and he goes home. ’Course, it could be he went downriver a couple of days to drink and chase the ladies. You know them soldier boys.”

  “Not Robert. He does everything by the book.”

  “Army rule book?”

  “The Good Book.”

  “Well, if you cain’t visit Robert, you can come with me to Fort Pierre while I find my sweet Jamie Sue. I could tell her you’re my father.”

  “I wouldn’t want to give her a bad image of your kin,” Brazos chided. “Besides, I may be old, but I’m not nearly old enough to be your father.”

  “I suppose I could tell her you’re my older brother and a little touched.”

  “Some folks probably think I’m a whole lot touched.” Brazos grinned. “I think I’ll stay here in Bismarck. Robert might return. Besides, I’ve got to hunt arou
nd for two teams and wagons.”

  “It’s kind of a strange time, Brazos. Ever’one knows that land is going to open up, but those that wait will miss the rush. California … the Comstock … we just heard about those from a distance. This time, we’re there, partner. You reckon they’ll mention us in the history books?”

  “Only if we get massacred in a particularly gruesome fashion, or freeze into statues during a blizzard.”

  “If fame is that expensive, I believe I’ll pass,” Grass added. “I’m going to pack my satchel and buy a present for my Jamie Sue. The boat goes down to Fort Pierre about noon. If you change your mind, meet me there.”

  “I’m goin’ over to the depot. I’ve been thinkin’ about telegraphin’ a mail order into Chicago and have them send Dacee June one of those great big mail-order dolls for Christmas.”

  “I reckon that ought to work,” Grass concurred. “Bet they can have it to her in seven days!”

  The stern-wheeler, Far West, sat high in the water. Its cargo had been unloaded the previous day. There was very little to ship back downriver: buffalo hides, buffalo bones, and a few passengers.

  The wooden ramp creaked and sagged as Brazos Fortune led a saddled Coco onto the main deck. He had just checked the horse into the horse pen, when a voice called down from behind the railing of the second deck.

  “You changed your mind?” Grass called out. “I knew you was dyin’ to meet my Jamie Sue! I was just tellin’ this …” Edwards’s words faded with one glance from Fortune.

  Brazos pushed his hat back and marched toward the purser. By the time Grass Edwards reached him, he had purchased his ticket, paid for horse passage, and was standing near the ship’s bow, waiting for it to cast off.

  “Brazos, what happened? You look like you was hit in the stomach with an axe handle.”

  Fortune yanked a telegram out of his pocket and stared out at the Missouri River.

  “From home? Oh, Lord … it ain’t about your Dacee June, is it? She didn’t get the dysentery or pox, did she?”

  “I should have never left her,” Brazos replied. “I knew better. I was runnin’, Grass. I didn’t want to fight, so I just ran off.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It’s from Milt. Dacee June got the letter I sent out with the Swedes. When she read about me maybe not comin’ home until next summer, she …” Brazos could feel tears begin to swell in his eyes. “She ran off, Grass … my baby girl ran away!”