McAllister 4

by Matt Chisholm

  The colonel glared at him and Lige could tell that the two men did not like each other.

  ‘We remain here,’ the colonel said, ‘until I damn-well say we move.’

  The major said: ‘I have to remind you, Colonel, that we shall soon over-run our ninety days. With the scrip we have issued for supplies and quarters tonight, we have already overspent our budget considerably.’

  The colonel stood staring at the major, clenching and unclenching his hands in anger.

  ‘I have a better consideration of my duty, sir,’ he said, ‘than I have of mere economics.’

  So that was that. Before he fell asleep on the floor, Lige thought about the Indians. He could not see what the army wanted with a band of Indians who had seemed, according to what his boss had told him, perfectly friendly. He wished that McAllister were there to give this dominating colonel his come-uppance. He had the feeling that, if McAllister walked in here now, all these officers would be out in the snow double-quick.

  Chapter Nine

  McAllister did not return to the cave for over two hours and Hickok was beginning to be anxious for him. He knew well enough that McAllister was able to look out for himself, but he also knew that Dom Lawson was a tough and resourceful man.

  When McAllister tramped into the firelight and held his frozen hands gratefully to the flames, Hickok said: ‘I was beginning to think ole Dom had gotten a bead on you, boy.’

  ‘It’s Dom all right, Jim. Him and another fellow, maybe two, are holed up in Greg’s cabin.’

  ‘What about Talbot?’

  ‘He’s out back with a couple of holes in him.’

  Hickok frowned. ‘That’s something you owe Dom for, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Right.’

  They prepared a meal and were thankful to get the hot food into them. They laced their coffee with whiskey and McAllister began to thaw out. They did not speak during the meal, but when they were through and McAllister had cleaned the dishes in the snow, they sipped coffee and talked a little, huddled in their buffalo coats close to the fire.

  ‘I aim to hit ’em at dawn,’ McAllister said.

  Hickok groaned.

  ‘Jesus, how I hate this attack-at-dawn shenanigan,’ he said. ‘The enemy’s always more wide awake than me. I need a good breakfast under my belt and an hour or two to warm up.’

  ‘No call for you to leave your blankets,’ said McAllister. ‘I can handle these punks.’

  ‘Punks, my ass,’ said Hickok. ‘And you’re being insulting. You need any extra gun you can get against Lawson. I make one stipulation – we’re a good distance from the nearest law and nobody ain’t going to ask us questions. We settle these boys’ hash any which way we can. They’re real nasty and they won’t see their way to give us an even break, Rem. We see ’em, we shoot and no questions asked.’

  McAllister laughed.

  ‘I was thinking along the same lines,’ he said. ‘I’m set on not letting one of them getting away on Caesar.’

  ‘You bet,’ said Hickok. ‘Well, let’s get some shut-eye. And let’s eat before we start out. All right?’

  ‘Keno,’ said McAllister. ‘Maybe we won’t get a chance to eat before the day’s out. You got jerky?’

  ‘Never move without a pocketful,’ said Hickok.

  They broke out their bedrolls and, having built up the fire, they rolled in their blankets and were both asleep within minutes.

  Chapter Ten

  He was known officially as Captain William Steiner; but he was not a captain any more. Now he was Bill Steiner and he was an Indian agent. He had an agency of sorts, but the agency did not stand on a reservation. Bill Steiner often wondered why his office had been created, but saw no reason to raise any great objection about its conditions. He had come out of the army tired of campaigning and never getting promotion and tired of being broke on army pay. He was still broke.

  His main trouble was that he was honest. He had been an honest soldier and now he was an honest Indian agent. Honest soldiers were not so rare, but around that time honest Indian agents were pretty hard to find.

  As to his duties – they never seemed too clear to him, but he assumed that he was there to look after the interests of the Indians, peaceful Indians that is, and to see that they behaved themselves. How he was supposed to make them behave themselves if they had no wish to, he had no idea, except that he could call on the army.

  His agency consisted of a storehouse and a fairly roomy cabin some twelve miles south-west of the fort. At the fort, Major Robert Whitehouse commanded. Whitehouse and Steiner had served together in the Army of the West on a number of campaigns and their antipathy was mutual. Neither knew why, except that they were opposites. Whitehouse was pompous and a stickler, Steiner was an easy-going fellow, not short on courage or conscience, but one to live and let live. Steiner never felt about Indians in the way Whitehouse did. Steiner considered that the Indian had some arguments in his favor. Whitehouse did not. It was as simple as that.

  At his little agency, Steiner was supported by not one single Indian policeman, but only by a clerk whose mother had been a Sioux of the Oglala people. He could read and write and he spoke both Sioux and Cheyenne. When they had some free time the clerk, Sammy Samson, was teaching the agent Sioux. Snowed in now they had plenty of time for their studies. ...

  Tonight, with the stove red hot and the coffee pot boiling, Bill Steiner was uneasy. His mind would not concentrate on the lesson Sammy was giving him. He looked across at the man and studied the flat Sioux face, the skin so light for an Indian. He did not get the lightness from his American father. Many Sioux were as pale. His eyes were wholly Indian and often Steiner could not read him. But the halfbreed was a good man, steady, intelligent and holding his own with dignity in an increasingly white world.

  Steiner stood up abruptly and walked to the window. He could hear the wind howling outside, the crack of a tree snapping off in the icy blast. The night was pitch black. The snow had stopped falling and lay level with the window sill. Sammy said: ‘What’s fretting you, boss?’

  ‘Everything’s fretting me, Sammy. Goddam everything.’

  If Sammy felt any sympathy his face showed nothing.

  He said: ‘Nothing can happen in this weather, captain.’

  The agent turned from the window and said: ‘Washita happened in this weather. Does history repeat itself? Could that happen again here?’

  Sammy did not know what to say to that. That kind of thing could always happen to his mother’s people. Such things would happen until the troubles between the Indians and the whites came to an end. And he knew how it must end. A patch of brown bodies would be lying in the snow or in the dust and the blue-coated soldiers would stand around grinning for the photographer. The newspaper headlines would call the killing a battle. If the reverse had been true and the bodies on the ground had been soldiers, that would be called a massacre.

  Without believing what he said, he told the agent: ‘Nobody would dare, Captain.’

  Steiner said: ‘Did you ever see Colonel Brevington?’

  Suddenly, Sammy was alive. His eyes showed his feelings abruptly with a sudden ferocity that startled the agent.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I saw him.’

  Steiner knew there was a story here. When two men were alone for a long period as they would be, they talked. It was inevitable.

  Steiner walked back across the room and poured them both a cup of coffee. Sammy remembered when he had first seen the man ten years before. Steiner had been leading a patrol against the Cheyenne down in southern Kansas. He had to contact the Indians and, if possible, talk with them. Sammy had gone along as an interpreter. It was then that Sammy realized that he was accompanying a man who was just not another army officer. This man had some understanding and some imagination. Maybe too much of both for his own good.

  They had got themselves into a tight spot. It had been a winter campaign. The weather had been almost as bad as this. Surprisingly, they had found some
Indians: a band of Cheyenne under the chief Many Horses. And old Many Horses at that time was in his prime and not in any kind of mood to touch a humble forelock to an army man no matter how many guns he commanded.

  Steiner had realized that if he started the shooting match, a blood bath would follow. There were women and children there. So he and Many Horses had talked. And they did so through Sammy. Never in his life had he been more careful how he translated two men’s words for them. He knew there were subtle nuances in the talk and he did his level best to keep them when he put them into a very alien language.

  The upshot of it had been that Many Horses had promised that he would not raid any more that winter. He and his people had sufficient food till spring. He would stay still and he promised that his young men would do the same.

  Then Sammy had told Steiner: ‘This Indian is a fighting man, captain, and he would fight quick enough if he had to. But he has given his word and I never heard that he broke it. Was I you, I’d shake his hand and believe him.’

  And that was what Steiner had done. Sammy heard later that he had lost his chance of promotion by so doing.

  A simple friendship had grown up between the army captain and the halfbreed. They understood each other so far as two men with such disparate backgrounds could. They had gone out on other missions together in later years. When Steiner had left the army and taken the job of agent (fixed, it was said, by a cousin in Washington), he had asked Sammy to join him.

  Now when Sammy looked at his superior he saw a man who was physically not half the man he had been. He had grown stout. Soon, he would be fat. His jowls had thickened and his hair thinned. But his eyes still retained their amused humanity.

  Sammy thought: He is a good man born with bad luck. And the thought made him sad, for he had a great respect for Steiner.

  He thought of Sand Creek and a shudder went through him. All America had shuddered or been exhilarated by the killing of men, women and children in the Cheyenne-Arapaho camp. The Colorado Volunteers under the infamous Colonel Chivington had done their work thoroughly. Young white boys, under the orders and example of their elders and superiors, had become berserk killers. Christian opinion had been horrified. There were courts-martial. Chivington had been a famous lay preacher.

  Just as Colonel Brevington was.

  ‘What happened, Sammy?’

  The captain’s question brought Sammy back into the present.

  ‘You’d maybe not think the story worth hearing, boss.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘There’s not much to it.’

  ‘Now you’re making me real curious.’

  Sammy laughed. ‘Just I was in this church. Not being white, I sat at the back. I listened to this preacher. It was hell-fire and brimstone stuff and he talk about the Indian being the Amalekite. He even talked about the only good Indian being a dead one.’

  Steiner said: ‘Brevington?’

  ‘Yes. But that wasn’t all. He spotted me. And he had me thrown out of there, shouting about how he wasn’t going to pray in the same church as an Indian. He could see from my face that I was a Sioux, he said. Sure, there was one or two who protested that we were in the house of the Lord. But that didn’t wash with Brevington. So I was thrown out.’

  ‘Enough to turn a man heathen,’ Steiner said.

  Sammy smiled. ‘It did that to young George Bent, but not to me.’

  George Bent had been the halfbreed son of one of the great Bent brothers who had been in the Indian camp during the Sand Creek massacre. After that he had reverted to Indian in spite of his education and had run wild against the whites.

  ‘So now,’ Steiner said, ‘that preacher’s a colonel and he’s commanding two hundred and fifty men. He’s hunting Indians and he don’t know one Indian from another. What’s more, he don’t care. Every Indian in sight is a hostile.’ Sammy said: ‘You seem to know this man.’

  ‘I know him all right.’

  ‘What about the major at the fort?’

  Steiner gave a short, braking laugh.

  ‘The major is not going to push his nose out of the fort in this weather. I don’t think I would either in his boots. He’s built the fort and the Sioux have watched him put every log on top of another.’

  Sammy said: ‘I can’t be sure, of course, but I’d say there wasn’t a war party within a hundred miles of here.’

  The agent looked at his clerk with interest: Sammy did not make claims like that for nothing. ‘You sure of that?’

  ‘I can’t be one hundred per cent sure, Captain. But that’s my feeling.’

  ‘Well, your feelings have been right enough in the past.’

  Suddenly his attention was taken by one of the dogs asleep near the stove. The wolf-like animal sat up abruptly, looking towards the door, ears forward. As it began to growl, its mate also started up. They bared their teeth. Sammy rose quickly and lifted his rifle down from its hooks on the wall.

  As something slammed against the door, both dogs launched themselves forward, barking and snarling ferociously. Through it the two men thought they heard a half-human voice wailing in tune with the wind outside.

  Sammy beat back the dogs with the butt of his rifle and put his mouth close to the door. He shouted something in Sioux and there came a reply. Over his shoulder, he told Steiner: ‘It’s a Sioux. Do I open?’

  ‘Sure you open.’

  Just the same, the Indian agent reached for his own rifle. He had been too long on the frontier to be caught easily with his pants down. He stood well back from the door while Sammy lifted the bar on it and stepped back, taking the door sideways with him.

  A dark, pinched face seemed to lurch and swing out of the dark night at them. The figure of a man emerged from the night, brows frosted. He was alone, and as he stepped into the heat of the cabin he seemed to have his very breath taken away by the warmth. Sammy hastily shut the door and propped his rifle against the wall. He put an arm around the frozen Indian and half-carried him to a chair.

  Steiner simply looked at the man and said: ‘My God!’

  His exclamation expressed his astonishment that a man so flimsily clothed could have survived the weather outside. He poured hot coffee and dropped a little whiskey into it. The Indian’s hands were too frozen to hold the cup. Sammy held it for him and let him sip at the hot liquid.

  Now his face was all pinched up with the cold, his eyes showing them that the cold had been and was still a physical agony to him. He wore nothing more than a hunting shirt, breech clout, leggings and tattered moccasins. He had draped a threadbare blanket over his head and shoulders. The only weapon he carried was a knife in a beaded scabbard at his side.

  As the man crouched in the chair, watching the hot stove and sipping at the coffee, he said nothing. Sammy talked to him softly in his own language.

  An hour later, the man spoke. It seemed to take a great effort to get the words from his constricted throat. Sammy reckoned he was pretty ill besides being badly frozen. The man wanted almost to hug the stove, but Sammy prevented him from getting too close to it. After an hour, the pinched look in his dark face had almost gone. His eyes came alive. Now he started to talk. Every now and then, Sammy interpreted for Steiner and slowly they shared his story. He came from the camp of White Bull, he said.

  Steiner queried that at once. He had great sympathy for the Indians in general but that did not mean they could easily pull the wool over his eyes. If he came from White Bull’s camp, how was it that he was so badly equipped? Steiner had been in White Bull’s camp and, while the Indians there had not been exactly rich, they looked as if they were well enough supplied.

  The Indian did not like that question much when Sammy put it to him.

  ‘And while you’re asking him that,’ Steiner said, ‘ask him what a Sioux is doing in a Cheyenne camp?’

  ‘That’s possible, Captain,’ Sammy said. ‘We both know that. The Sioux and Cheyenne are allies.’

  ‘When did you last see a Sioux in a small band of Che
yenne’s winter camp?’

  ‘I would not call him a liar for saying it,’ Sammy persisted. ‘He may be in the same society as some of the Cheyenne. The societies go across tribal lines.’

  But that did not satisfy Steiner.

  He said: ‘Sammy, ask him if there is food in White Bull’s camp?’

  Sammy put the question. The man answered very shortly. ‘Captain, he says there is very little food in the camp. Soon the children will be crying because there will be no food left.’ Steiner paced up and down the floor a few times.

  ‘It don’t wash, Sammy. When we were in that camp, there were supplies aplenty.’ Their eyes met. Sammy knew the answer to that and he was not saying. ‘We both know that a bunch of refugees from the fighting has taken shelter in that camp. And old White Bull feels obliged to feed them. Or maybe they threatened him and took what they wanted. Ask this fellow how many warriors have run from the soldiers and taken shelter in White Bull’s camp.’

  Sammy looked a little doubtful and Steiner had to say:

  ‘Go ahead, ask it,’ before he once more spoke to the Indian.

  The man look worried and cast a half-scared look at Steiner.

  Sammy said: ‘He said there has been no fight with the soldiers. He and a few friends were caught by the snow at the end of a hunt and they stumbled by accident on White Bull’s camp.’

  Steiner thought about that for a while and then said: ‘I’ll accept all of that except the crap about being on a hunt. The only hunt this s.o.b. has been on is after whitemen.’ He glared at Sammy, as if inviting him to challenge that statement; but Sammy had been suspended mentally between the Indians and the whites for too long to fall for that kind of thing. He knew that Steiner knew what was in his mind – this very Indian had possibly been committing savage atrocities not so many days before … and they could not blame him. The whites had done it to his people, were still doing it. You did not expect a savage to behave like a Christian. Neither did you expect a Christian to behave like a savage.