Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Vol. II

by Edward A. Grainger

  Lightning Cloud shook his head. He slashed his hand in front of him as though killing an enemy. "No filthy unfeeling white man doctor who has no respect for our people will touch the mate of my heart. I will not have it. I have spoken."

  White Deer bowed his head so his father could not see the tears that threatened to leak from his eyes. "Without my mother, this village is not my home," he said. He clenched his teeth. His jaw muscles rippled. He raised his cold blue eyes to meet the green ones of the man who had been his father, if only because he was the husband of Elina, the woman who saved White Deer, who nursed him through the days after his birth mother was gone, who was always there with a soft word, a loving touch, a tidbit to eat. Always there. But soon she would be gone ... Lightning Cloud had spoken.

  The chief studied the young white man who was his son. He met the ice of White Deer's blue eyes with compassion. "My son," he said, "you fight so hard. Someday I believe you will come to see that the one you fight against most of all is yourself."

  The medicine hut stood at the outer edge of Lightning Cloud's village, a domed structure of box alder woven with willow withes and covered with buffalo hides. White Deer bent low to enter. The scent of herbs tossed on the smoldering fire mixed with the scent of death.

  "I would have come sooner," he said to Elina. "I didn't know."

  The women watching over Elina smiled at White Deer, but gave him tiny shakes of their heads. Elina, his beloved Arapaho mother, was on her final journey. He lifted a hand to her dear face, now etched with pain. Even so, she gave him a tender smile. The women left the hut.

  "A few days ago, or maybe more, I was fine," she said. "But now ..."

  White Deer's chest constricted so he had to fight for breath. His mother lay dying. "I'm so sorry, mother. I would do something, anything, to ease your pain."

  Elina raised a feeble hand to his strong, square-jawed face. "You are here. It is enough. You are so strong, my son. But it is time. You must now make your way alone."

  "I cannot," he said. His grief brought tears to his eyes. They streamed down his cheeks. Dripped from his chin. He didn't notice. Gently he lowered his forehead to touch his mother's breast. How frail. How bird-like. Her breath fluttered in and out.

  "My son." Her voice was hardly a whisper. "My son. It is time to open the chest."

  "Chest?"

  "The wooden one that has been here since you came. Over there." She cast her jaundiced eyes toward the far side of the hut.

  White Deer had often seen the locked steamer trunk, but had thought little of it. Now he found it unlocked.

  "Look inside, my son."

  He raised the lid. A flat tray fit into the top of the trunk. Only a few items: a locket, a roll of bills, some coins, a knife, a shawl, a Colt 3rd Model Dragoon revolver, a box of paper cartridges, some caps, a handful of conical lead balls. He touched each item in turn, and at last, picked up the locket.

  "Our people got these from the site of the Fall River battle," Elina said.

  Your mother was alive, though mortally wounded. She lived three days. She was so beautiful, with long dark hair, and strong face. So very beautiful, as you can see if you open the locket."

  Elina coughed, wet and hacking. She shifted positions, seeking one more comfortable.

  White Deer pried the locket open. Inside, a photo of a man standing beside a woman who held a small child. "My father? Mother? Who is the child?"

  "You mother wore the locket. The images must be you and your mother and father," Elina said. "Is she not beautiful?"

  "Why did they have to die?"

  "Why do we all die? They were unfortunate, caught between Cheyenne and Arapaho on one side, bluecoat cavalry on the other. Your father killed by bullets from the white soldiers. Your mother was hit in the back by a Cheyenne arrow as she rushed to his side, Lightning Cloud said."

  Elina coughed her wet hacking cough again. Blood flecked her lips. She wiped it away with a scrap of cloth. "Lightning Cloud carried her and you to the safety of our village. Away from Fall River, as you know."

  White Deer examined his dead father. Bowler hat. Dark coat and trousers. A scarf tied at his neck. He smiled and looked happy. His dead mother was indeed beautiful. Strong cheekbones. Hair piled on her head. A slight smile. White Deer himself on his mothers lap. "Did she name me?"

  "We do not know, my son. She never was strong enough to speak to us. She never spoke your name. You are White Deer, whatever other name the white man may give you," she said.

  "I wonder," White Deer said. "Is there some reason why these things were kept secret?"

  Elina's face reflected her pain. Pain of body and pain of soul. "My son, rearing a child, any child, is a great test of its parents. You, one so young yet one who saw things that even adults shrink from." She shifted her body to a new position, unable to find comfort. The words sapped her strength, but she continued. "Your father and I did not always agree on what was best for you. Lightning Cloud is good. He is a man of honor. He is a man of passion. And he loves you dearly, as if you were his own flesh and blood."

  White Deer shook his head. "It cannot be so. Always he reprimands. Never am I good enough to please him."

  "He is pleased. He also believes you can do much more, and if pushed, you can become a great man, a man of justice."

  White Deer's disbelief showed plainly on his face.

  Elina tried to smile, but her strength was almost gone. "My son," she whispered. "The little leather pouch. The one in the corner of the tray. Give it to me. Please."

  He scooped the little pouch from the wooden tray and offered it tenderly to his mother.

  It took almost more strength that she had to open the pouch. From it she took three arrowheads chipped from blackest obsidian. Each hung from a thick thong of buffalo leather. "Come close," she whispered.

  White Deer bent close and his mother put one arrowhead over his head to hang by its thong from his neck. "The hearts of your Arapaho mother, your Arapaho father, and every member of our village live within the flawless obsidian of this arrowhead. Keep it always, that we may be with you. But remember this wisdom—the arrowhead is only as good as the shaft that bears it, the feathers that make it fly true, and the heart of the hunter who uses it. Use this arrowhead well, my son. The Creator be with you."

  She went limp, and for a moment, White Deer panicked. "Little Dove," he called, summoning one of the women who attended his mother.

  Elina opened her eyes. "Call my husband," she said. The woman hurried out. She closed her eyes as if very tired. "One more thing, my son. Beneath the tray you will find white man's clothes and a letter. Twisted Root says it is addressed to someone named Eh Van Jay Hick Kerry. No one has read the letter and I know not what message it bears. Members of our village say there is one called Hick Kerry in the white man's village of Cheyenne. When you are ready, seek this man. Find what your parents wanted of him."

  The long conversation sapped the remainder of Elina's strength and she lapsed into unconsciousness, but she managed to revive and open her eyes when Lightning Cloud arrived. He knelt by her side, tears on his cheeks.

  "Do not be sorrowful, my love, my mate. Soon the pain will be gone and I will await you in the world of spirits beyond the horizon." She struggled to hold up a hand.

  "My son."

  White Deer clasped her warm, dry husk of a hand in his.

  Elina pulled at Lightning Cloud's and White Deer's hands until she brought them together. "You two," she said. "All that I love in this world. Be at peace with each other wherever you may be. Promise?"

  "I promise," Lightning Cloud said.

  "I promise," White Deer said.

  "Good," Elina said, and closed her eyes for the last time.

  2

  The tipis came down. The hides were rolled up and placed at the bottom of travois. Lightning Cloud's people filled in the fire pits and scattered the rocks that lined them. A season after they left, no one would know a village had been there.

  White
Deer watched until the last travois-burdened horse was out of sight. He sighed. His people went to freedom in Canada. He elected to be alone, to work out his own fate, to become whoever and whatever he could become. To find out who he really was.

  The winter came late, but when it hit, it struck with a vengeance. White Deer made a small shelter hardly bigger than a sweat lodge. Nearby a small stream chuckled under its sheath of ice. He weathered three storms that piled snow over the shelter, helping keep the warmth in. White Deer sometimes broke the ice on the stream and caught fish to supplement his pemmican. Still, his supplies would soon be gone, and he now had no mother to run home to, no village to seek shelter in, and no father to clap him on the shoulder when he returned with a deer, saying "Well done, son." He was alone.

  The fact of his aloneness made the scars left by the Sun Dance of his puberty burn. He was alone. Yet not alone. He had the skills taught him by all of his uncles in Lightning Cloud's village, and he had the power and determination instilled during the Sun Dance. Today. Today he would hunt. Today he would feast on venison.

  He prepared carefully, checking the condition of every dogwood arrow, inspecting his bow of hickory backed with buffalo sinew, and placing pemmican in a carry bag of tanned deer hide. He added the pouch containing the two leather thong-strung arrowheads that matched the one he wore around his neck. He needed his mother's help on this hunt. He donned the poncho-like cape his mother had made from the hide of the first buffalo he killed.

  The white man's clothes he left in the old wooden chest, along with the Colt revolver and its powder and ball. A deer hunt was no place for a noise firearm. He paused a moment, then hung the locket on its gold chain around his neck. Perhaps his white mother would help with the hunt as well.

  White Deer followed a game trail through stands of lodgepole pine and quaking aspen. The snow piled up against obstructions to depths of ten feet or more, and walking across any expanse with no trail was tempting fate, as the snow often hid sink holes that could break a hunter's leg. "Always walk the same paths as the animals," Lightning Cloud said. "The deer and the wapiti always take the easiest path. We should do the same."

  At dusk, White Deer found the watering place. The stream curved sharply and the swiftly rushing waters kept it from freezing. Many deer, some antelope, and several wapiti used the watering hole, and left their hoof prints behind to tell their story.

  "More than half a hunter's success can be found in his patience," Lightning Cloud taught him. White Deer set about making a blind from which to watch the watering hole. Behind it, he prepared a shelter, cunningly contrived so the heat of his fire flowed beneath his sleeping place and up out of the back of the shelter to be dispersed by the limbs and needles of a bristle-cone pine. He built a fire, stacked alternating sticks of oak and pine so they dropped into the fire as the stick ahead burned away, rolled into the poncho-like buffalo cape his mother Elina made, and slept until just before dawn. Something inside him said it was time to get into the blind as the animals would come to drink in the half-light of early morning.

  He strung the hickory bow with care. He inspected five arrows and put them into his quiver. He checked the edge of his knife to make sure it was sharp. Then he went to the blind.

  The blind was built so White Deer could take a step to his right and have an open shot at whatever drank at the stream. He put his sparse belongings in the blind and settled in to wait.

  Two porcupines waddled down to the water when there was just enough light to see. They drank and disappeared into the underbrush. Nocturnal animals, they probably climbed one of the nearby ponderosas to spend the day.

  A red fox came. Then a young doe, heavy with fawn.

  The light increased.

  A bull wapiti and two cows came. Too big for White Deer's needs. Then a young two-point mule deer that still had his antlers. The buck stopped short of the water and held his head high, sampling the air for a whiff of danger. His big ears switched back and forth, searching for sounds that did not belong.

  So slowly that he hardly seemed to move, White Deer lifted his best dogwood arrow and laid it across his bow, nocked it, and held it in place with his index finger. Slowly, slowly, he stood.

  The buck took another step forward and stretched its neck toward the rippling water. The moment his muzzle touched the stream, White Deer stepped from his blind and sent his arrow whizzing across the thirty-pace distance to plunge into the buck's side, just behind his shoulder. The arrow slid between the buck's ribs and through its lung tissue to lodge in its heart. The buck reacted with a high bound, then half a dozen leaps out into the meadow across the stream. Then it dropped, skidding across the frozen snow.

  "Hééteenew," White Deer said. "I respect you. I am now going to share this feast with you, Man Above." He snatched up his belongings and ran to the dead buck.

  He rolled the dead deer on its side and cut its jugular vein so it would bleed out. Hungry for meat, anything other than fish and pemmican, he cut the deer's belly open with his knife. He reached into the steaming intestines to find the liver. He pulled it out and cut it free. Liver. Hot, succulent liver. He cut off a thin slice and stuffed it into his mouth. The warmth flooded his body. The ironish taste made him smile. He cut off another slice. So intent was he on the food that he didn't hear the footsteps sneaking up behind him. All he registered was a blinding pain in the back of his head and blackness.

  ***

  Cold. Cold. So very very cold. White Deer came to when the sun was well past the meridian. All he could feel was the terrible cold, and the throbbing pain in his head. He lay spread-eagled in the snow. He wore no buffalo cape. He wore no red flannel trade shirt. He wore no leather leggings. His hand went automatically to his throat. No obsidian arrowhead on its leather thong, or oblong locket on a golden chain. He struggled to his hands and knees. So cold.

  He stared at the blood in the snow, all that remained of the little buck his arrow had felled. Arrow. He looked about, his near-freezing condition narrowing his field of vision. His hickory bow lay in the snow, broken in two, the fletched half of the arrow beside it. The buck was gone, along with his meager possessions. He took a deep breath and looked inside himself. He was White Deer. He was one of the people of this land. "Great Spirit," he said aloud. "My life is in your hands, but I would live to find those who desecrate my mothers. The ones who stole their talismans. I would find them and take my revenge."

  A fire started deep in his heart. A fire of rage such as one so young as White Deer rarely found. A rage that helped him struggle to his feet to live. His eyes swept the scene, looking for clues. Boot tracks. The print of a rifle butt. Traces of the buck's carcass dragged between two lines of boot prints, across the little stream to where horses waited. Shod hoof prints showed they left at a walk. The robbers were in no hurry.

  White Deer went to his blind. The robbers had found it. The rest of his arrows lay broken on the snow. The quiver was gone. They'd not found the possibles bag he'd left in the fork of a tree, above normal line of sight. Now he had some pemmican and his fire-making tools. He ate a mouthful of pemmican.

  The robbers had not bothered to backtrack him to the little shelter where he'd spend the night. He took the broken arrow with the best point, because he had no knife. The arrow point with its sharp-edged flint must suffice. He built a small fire and warmed himself in the shelter. When he stopped shivering, he started planning.

  Dressed only in breechclout and ankle-high moccasins, White Deer struck out for his base, the sweat lodge-sized hut he'd built to weather the winter storms. He ran, and the movement helped warm his body further. When he reached the hut, it was undisturbed. He plunged through the entrance. The chest stood against the wall. He opened the lid and removed the tray. He dug in the clothes and found a union suit, which he put on because he knew white men wore one under their shirts and trousers. The union suit was too big, but would do. A faded wool shirt hung loosely on his shoulders, and the old canvas pants were too long and too big a
round. He folded up the trouser legs and tied two bandanas together for a belt. There was even a floppy felt hat.

  The clothing warmed him. He glanced at the wooden tray and noticed the old letter. He could not read the writing, but knew Elina had told him the truth.

  Now is the time.

  White Deer didn't touch the letter. He picked up the Colt revolver, checked its loads and caps, and laid it on the floppy hat, out of the way of any moisture. Cartridges and caps and bullets could stay in the chest. He decided to travel by day as he had no cape to ward off the cold, so he built a fire in the center of the hut, stacked wood so it would burn all night. Tomorrow he would start for Cheyenne. Tomorrow he would find Evan J. Hickey. Tomorrow.

  He slept.

  3

  White Deer saw Cheyenne's smoke long before he saw the town. Raw as a two-year-old colt, Cheyenne consisted mostly of canvas tents and tarpaper shacks. Yet the makings of a city had already begun. The Union Pacific railroad ran east and west along the southern boundary. Corrals lined the rails on the southwest, waiting for the cattle driven up the Goodnight-Loving Trail from Texas. White Deer approached from the northeast. No one said anything to the boy in worn clothes, although some watched him drag the battered wooden trunk along the side of the street that fronted the railroad tracks.

  Lightning Cloud said the buffalo liked this flat plain north of Crow Creek. Each season they came, he said, and the Arapaho killed them, not by the hundreds and thousands as the white hunters do with their long guns, but ten or twenty, one buffalo for each tipi in the village. But now, Cheyenne and the railroad and the white hunters meant no more herds of countless buffalo. White Deer wondered if Lightning Cloud's village found buffalo in Canada.

  White Deer came upon a large barn with several corrals. It had a sign over the doors, but he could not read the letters. In the dim interior he could see a man mucking out the stalls. He decided to hide his chest behind an old wagon at the side of the barn. Lack of tracks said the wagon had not been moved recently. Its weathered sideboards were bleached a uniform gray and the iron wheel rims were red with rust. White Deer shoved the chest up against the barn behind the old wagon. He left most everything he had in the old chest, taking only the old letter, some of the bills, and three coins. The Colt revolver stayed there with its extra cartridges and bullets, but he took the arrowhead on its six-inch shaft.