McAllister 4

by Matt Chisholm

  ‘Yessir, boss,’ said Lige. He and Hickok rode away down the straggling column of soldiers, the stud, Caesar, and the travois following behind.

  The blacksmith said: ‘On your horse, McAllister.’

  McAllister put one foot in a stirrup-iron and rested for a moment against the horse. He turned his head and looked at the blacksmith. He said: ‘Don’t get yourself shot by some Indian in the next few days, feller. I want you alive so I can take your head off your shoulders and kick it around some.’

  The blacksmith brought a fist back and the colonel said: ‘Stop that.’

  The man looked at his commanding officer appealingly and said: ‘This bastard is full of shit, Colonel. Leave me knock some of it out of him.’

  Brevington laughed, a man among men, and said: ‘Time enough for that, I daresay. Let’s get on now.’

  McAllister swung into the saddle.

  He thought: If I don’t find some goddam Indians, there’s going to be no living with these fellows. If I do find some, there’s going to be no living with me. He did not think that the next forty-eight hours were going to be very pleasant to live through. He suspected that before too long he was going to wish that he was dead. It was not a new experience for him. However, it was not one that he would ever get used to.

  Chapter Fourteen

  McAllister had been in some tight corners in his life, but he could not remember ever having been in one like this. One good look at Colonel Brevington and he knew that a lot of grief lay ahead of him if he did not come up with the Indians. Maybe just any Indians. Just so long as there were some abergoins for this self-righteous son-of-a-bitch to shoot at.

  McAllister, however, as you will have gathered, had no wish to find Indians of any kind. Furthermore, he did not know where to find them even if he had wanted to. The snow had seen to that. Though when he metaphorically looked himself in the eye and faced up to the truth of the matter, had it been in his interest to find Indians, there were other ways of deducing where Indians might be without having plain tracks to follow.

  He and the army, with a sergeant and an enthusiastic trooper pointing their guns in his general direction, reached the place where the band of White Bull had been camped and here McAllister halted. This was the spot where he had once built his own cabin and had lived for a space of two years. That being so, he pretty well knew every inch of this end of the valley. If he had been an Indian chief and had wanted to put his band in a comparatively safe place, there was one direction only in which he could go and that was west. There the breaks lay. There a handful of men could lose themselves in no time at all. It was also a place which, if used judiciously, could be defended by a handful of men against an army. Which was the reason why Greg Talbot had lived there. Somewhere there had been a lawman with his name on a warrant. Greg had put himself in a safe place from which escape would have been easy and where he could make a stand if necessary. But old Greg was now beyond fretting about warrants. He would not be fretting about anything anymore.

  Rage burned in McAllister. His cold hands gripped the saddlehorn and he shut his eyes for a moment.

  A voice sounded like a foghorn beside him.

  ‘Well, man, don’t sit there dreaming. I have two hundred and fifty men waiting here eagerly for action.’

  McAllister opened his eyes and look into those of the colonel.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is where the Indians were camped. Can you see the tracks of where the band went?’

  The man shouted furiously: ‘You can cut out that insolent tone as soon as you like, McAllister. I have no time for frontier riffraff of your kind. Now, get a grip on yourself and sniff out these savages. It’ll go damned hard with you if you fail me.’

  McAllister snarled: ‘You think I have second sight or something? How the hell do I know where the Indians went?’

  ‘You talked with them. The nigger boy told me that. You can’t fool me they didn’t tell you where they were headed. Where’s your conscience, man? These bucks are fresh out of battle, their hands are still red from the blood of our gallant soldiers. You owe it to your own kind? Or are you more Indian than white?’

  ‘This band,’ said McAllister, ‘was made up of folk who were not in the fighting.’

  ‘You can’t fool me with that story,’ the man said. ‘Every goddam redskin we ever met told us that. Bloody scalps hanging from their belts and pleading innocence. I intend to bring them to book, no matter what, so go ahead. Lead us to them or you won’t live to see that ranch of yours again, that I promise you.’

  McAllister peered closely at the man. He could scarcely believe he had heard the open threat.

  He said: ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  A major rode up and reined in alongside the colonel. ‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘this man here is a man of some repute. I don’t think it wise to treat him in this cavalier fashion.’

  The colonel made a great show of turning in the saddle to stare at this source of irritation.

  ‘When I want your advice, Major,’ he said, ‘I’ll ask for it. While I am in command here, I shall brook no interference from my officers. Do I make myself clear?’

  McAllister watched the major’s face go purple with rage. He marked the fellow down as a possible ally. Before he was through here, he was going to need one.

  He thought: I don’t doubt White Bull has gone into the breaks. But you could lose an army in there and I reckon that Indian knows how to lose himself as well as the next man. So I’ll lose this man’s army in there.

  It could prove risky, but anything was better than having this fool charging down on an innocent village.

  He said: ‘I don’t doubt they’ve gone into the breaks, colonel. But where they are in there is anybody’s guess. We could hunt them for a week in there. On top of that, if they want to put up a fight, you could ride clean into an ambush. You could lose this regiment inside a few minutes.’

  The colonel grinned a like a fox.

  ‘No Indian,’ he said with authority, ‘will expect the army in this kind of weather. He won’t expect the Volunteers. We’ll catch him with his pants down, McAllister, and we’ll make good Indians of every last one of them. Men, women and children. They’re all poison.’

  The major said: ‘It is my opinion and that of the other officers, Colonel, that we should turn for home. Even if we started back now we would have been out for over one hundred days. There could be serious trouble over this.’ The colonel smiled in a superior way.

  ‘Newton,’ he said, ‘there’s never trouble for a commanding officer who returns after a sweeping victory.’

  ‘Killing a bunch of old men, women and children ain’t going to be a hell of a sweeping victory,’ McAllister said.

  The colonel’s only response to this remark was to raise himself in his stirrups and wave his hand above his head. His cry of ‘Forward’ rang out on the cold air; horses and men once more began their stumbling advance. McAllister turned and looked back at the soldiers as they huddled, pinched-faced, on their horses. They would be walking again pretty soon in the breaks where the drifts would be twenty foot deep. At the moment they looked as if they could not successfully fight a kindergarten, but he knew that if they met Indians they would be soldierly enough for the work demanded of them. He knew that if he were riding with such a troop against a powerful array of Indians, his attitude would have been quite different. His trouble was that he had a mental foot in either camp; he could not help regarding Indians as human beings since he knew so many of them personally. Only if you could generalize as these boys did could you hate a people. He headed into the breaks and, as he did so, he wondered where Dom Lawson was. If he was hanging around here, there was still a chance that he would seek the opportunity to place a bullet in McAllister’s head. The thought did not help to cheer McAllister much.

  It began to snow again. When he looked back now, the soldiers had become like wraiths among the falling flakes.

  They pushed on for nearly an hour before McAlli
ster halted.

  Now was the time when he started his delaying tactics.

  The blacksmith demanded: ‘What you stopped for?’

  McAllister snarled: ‘Get your fat colonel up here. I want to talk to him.’

  The blacksmith said: ‘You talk polite about our officer, bub, or I’ll reshape your face for you.’

  McAllister said: ‘That’s only something you can talk about with an army standing behind you.’

  Somebody was sounding off with a hacking cough. McAllister saw that it was the major whom the colonel had rebuked in front of McAllister a short while before. In a few minutes, Colonel Brevington fought his way through the snow and demanded to know what the hold-up was.

  McAllister said: ‘There’s a dozen breaks meet here. The Indians could be up any one of them.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘They have to be somewhere.’

  ‘Can’t you do better than that?’

  ‘That’ll have to do for now. If you search them, your men had best be alert or they could walk into an ambush.’

  The colonel snapped: ‘My men are always alert.’ He bawled for the major and the man came, coughing. McAllister thought he was on the edge of being a very sick man. The colonel said: ‘We’ll camp here, Newton. See to it. Picket the horses. I want four squads of men on foot, each under the command of an officer. Each one will search a break before nightfall. The men will be on the alert at all times in case of attack. Understood? While they are gone, the cooks will prepare a hot meal. Pitch my tent yonder.’

  The major nodded miserably and coughed his way towards the men to give the orders.

  The colonel turned and looked at McAllister. He said to the sergeant: ‘Tie this man up to that tree there. Armed guard on him at all times.’

  The sergeants starting bawling their orders. There was little cohesion in the men. They were tired and all they had on their minds were a hot meal and sleep. McAllister heard them grumbling. The blacksmith prodded him with his carbine and told him to get over to the trees. The sergeant produced a length of rawhide rope. McAllister’s hands were tied behind his back and he was secured to a tree. All he could do was promise himself that someone one day was going to pay for this.

  The snow stopped and the temperature dropped again. McAllister was not the happiest of men. Tied up to this tree, he could freeze to death. He said so to the sergeant and the blacksmith said he would not mourn him too much.

  The sergeant asked civilly enough: ‘You reckon there’s Indians in these hills, McAllister?’

  McAllister said: ‘Could be. Who knows? But they won’t be hostiles. All the Indians I’ve seen aren’t in the fighting.’

  The blacksmith said: ‘How the hell do you know a thing like that?’

  ‘Because I’ve talked with them. I speak their language. They’re scared the soldiers will attack them. They have very few young men to do any fighting. They’ve come here so they can be protected by the soldiers at the fort.’

  The blacksmith laughed. ‘No soldiers ain’t going to protect no Indians. Not while the Volunteers is around.’

  ‘I’m liable to freeze to death,’ McAllister said. ‘How about getting me a blanket or something?’

  The sergeant said: ‘I don’t know about that. Our boys only carry what they need themselves.’

  ‘There’s a blanket on my saddle.’

  The sergeant said to the blacksmith: ‘Rogers, go fetch the man his blanket.’

  ‘Like hell I do,’ said Rogers.

  ‘That’s an order.’

  ‘You can order till you’re blue in the face, but I ain’t running this way and that for this Indian-loving son-of-a-bitch.’

  The sergeant went and fetched the blanket himself. He draped it around McAllister’s shoulders. McAllister said ‘Thanks.’ He rested his back against the tree and watched the details marching off into the breaks, struggling through the snow, their carbines ready in their hands. Men were busy chopping wood, cooks were lighting fires. McAllister realized that he was hungry. The blacksmith walked to the next tree, sat down with his back against it and filled his pipe. Puffing at it, he looked utterly contented. The sergeant told him: ‘Well, I have work to do. You watch the prisoner, Rogers. I hear he’s a slippery one.’

  The blacksmith said: ‘Not slippery enough to dodge a bullet, Sarge.’

  ~*~

  The search parties did not come back into camp until a short while after dark. They stumbled into the firelight and hugged the heat to them. They had found nothing. They cursed the Indians, they cursed the army and they cursed their commanding officer. It was always so with soldiers. Towards sleep time, somebody thought to bring McAllister some stew to eat. He asked for his hands to be untied, but Rogers refused him. The man who brought the food ladled a few mouthfuls into McAllister, then grew tired of the exercise and threw the remainder away. McAllister laid his head back against the tree and slept. He could sleep anywhere. In times of stress, he preferred to sleep. Before he closed his eyes, he did the best he could to remember exactly where the component parts of the regiment where – the horses here, the colonel’s tent there; the officers, the men, the stores. Occasionally, he opened his eyes during the night. He never did so without finding Rogers, the blacksmith, watching him until he was driven to wonder if the man needed any sleep at all.

  The sergeants were bawling the men out of their sleep before first light. Fires were built up and the cooks had the coffee going. It seemed that a great space amid the great expanse of dark and snow was packed with men, horses and fires. If somebody had told him there were a thousand men here, he would have believed them. McAllister, cold, stiff and miserable, wondered what the hell he was going to think up today.

  Major Newton came to speak to him. The man looked even more ill than he had the night before. He squatted down for a while as he coughed. When he was through coughing, he wiped his eyes with his gloved hand.

  ‘McAllister,’ he said, ‘the colonel wants to know if you have dreamed up any ideas about these Indians during the night.’

  McAllister said: ‘Does the colonel realize you’re a sick man, Major?’

  ‘He wouldn’t notice a thing like that,’ the major replied. ‘How about an answer to my question?’

  McAllister said: ‘If I was free and could range around for sign, maybe I would come up with something. As it is you’ll have to go ahead searching all the breaks. If they aren’t in the breaks, they’ll have moved on to higher ground. Up there, the cold’ll freeze your balls, off.’

  The major looked despairing. He said: ‘The colonel will never lose you so you can search, bank on that. Tell the truth now: if we freed you, you wouldn’t look for Indians, would you?’

  ‘You bet your sweet life I wouldn’t. There’s no sense in it. Chances of finding ’em are small. If I find them, I’m flushing out a bunch of innocent folk who can do no harm to anybody. It would be a massacre and you know it.’

  ‘I know it,’ said the major. He looked sick and resigned. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Arrest the crazy bastard,’ McAllister said without hesitation, ‘and take him back in irons.’

  The major said: ‘You could be accused of inciting to mutiny.’

  ‘Mutiny my ass,’ said McAllister. ‘It’s your plain duty. It’s been done before by a man in your position and it’ll be done again.’

  ‘You underestimate Brevington, McAllister. He is a powerful man. A fellow that crossed him could be all washed up in the territory.’

  McAllister said: ‘If he finds and kills these Indians, it’ll be him who’s washed up. I’m an impartial witness, Newton. Stop him while he’s stoppable, man. Right now the men’re tired and they’ve had enough. They’d back you. If we sight Indians, every man jack of them will be turned into a hero.’

  ‘I know it,’ Newton said miserably. ‘But, as you say, I’m a sick man. I couldn’t carry this through. I don’t know how much longer I can sit a horse.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mc
Allister, ‘my suggestion is, go ahead searching the breaks here. That should occupy the boys till dark.’

  The major coughed some more and McAllister thought he was going to choke. Finally, he coughed himself too weak to cough anymore and he staggered to his feet, to stand there uncertainly, staring down at McAllister.

  ‘I’m damned sorry about this, McAllister,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘I believe you,’ McAllister told him, ‘but that don’t help me, lying here tied to this goddam tree.’

  The major wandered away.

  The cold of the night, intense and physically painful, continued on into the daylight hours. Men hugged the fires, great blazing bonfires, and huddled in anything they could wrap around them. They cursed when the sergeants sorted them out to scout for Indians. A bunch of them surrounded an officer, telling him they wanted to go home. Now. Brevington heard them and roared up, telling them they were cowards and traitors. He promised them Indians that day.

  ‘We’ll find ’em, lads,’ he said. ‘We’ll find ’em as sure as God made little apples. And we shall wreak our revenge on them. We’ll go home with red scalps to show our girls, boys. They’ll strike a medal for this campaign, boys. Every last one of you will be remembered as a hero.’

  One of the men made a pert remark which was not to the colonel’s liking, and was promptly put under arrest. The man said that suited him fine as it would prevent him from hunting goddam Indians. The colonel danced with rage. He gave the order to break camp. It was not good for men to sit around on their butts all day. The whole command would move five miles west.

  An hour later, they moved out. McAllister rode with his hands tied to the saddlehorn. A squad of men went in advance to break trail for the horses and the going was pretty firm. The snow held off, but the cold intensified. Men had the brims of their hats tied down over their ears with scarves. Every now and then, finding it too cold to ride, they dismounted and walked, pounding scraps of warmth into themselves with flailing arms. McAllister had his teeth chattering like castanets. When they halted, he was so stiff that he could scarcely get out of the saddle. The blacksmith thought that was pretty damned funny. He found a tree and tied McAllister to it. A steaming cup of hot coffee in his hands, he sat and watched his prisoner. An hour later, the sergeant brought McAllister something hot to drink.