Cheyenne Justice

by Charles G. West

  He led them across a long, low ridge, toward the setting sun, looking for a good spot to do his business. He had led them much farther than the few miles he had originally proposed but, he figured, as long as they were willing to follow he might as well lead them in the direction of Two Moon’s camp. On the back side of a long, treeless ridge, a series of coulees led down to a sizable creek—Pike had no idea what creek it was. He rode back to the wagon and pulled in alongside.

  “That there’s Wolf Creek down below. You can turn back toward the Black Hills from there. Shouldn’t have no trouble a’tall from there. I know there’s a little daylight left but my advice is to make camp here. There ain’t no more water after this until you strike the Cheyenne River.” He knew they had no idea whether there was water or not.

  The brothers talked it over for a minute and decided to take him at his word. He certainly acted as if he knew the territory well. Besides, there was wood here for a fire and grass for the mules. Why risk getting caught in darkness with no water or wood? The decision made, they drove the wagon down beside the creek and Harley unhitched the mules while Seth and Pike gathered wood for a fire. While Seth started the fire, Pike stood across from him, making conversation.

  “I need to be gittin’ on my way but it’s too durn late to start out now. Reckon I’ll stay here with you boys tonight and head out first thing in the morning. That is, if you boys don’t need me anymore. I can take you further on if you want me too.”

  “Nah, ain’t no point in troubling you further, Mr. Pike,” Harley said as he approached the fire. “We’ll be just fine and we’re obliged to you.”

  “Fine, then. ’Cause I got folks waiting fer me.” He cocked his head toward Seth and added, “I notice he don’t never put that rifle down. You don’t have to be so careful here. Ain’t no Injuns nowhere near here.”

  Harley didn’t change his expression. He poked the end of a burning branch, pushing it toward the center of the flames. “Just a habit, I guess. I wouldn’t pay it no mind.”

  Pike didn’t comment any more on it but it irritated him to have to continue playing his game. The brothers shared their supper with him and then Pike allowed as how he wanted to get an early start the next morning so he got his blanket and rolled up on the edge of the firelight and pretended to sleep. Harley and Seth moved over toward the creek to talk.

  “I don’t know. Whaddaya think, Harley? It looks like he ain’t got nuthin’ on his mind but goin’ to sleep.”

  Harley stared back at the prone form stretched out by the firelight. “He probably don’t mean no harm, but I don’t trust him as far as I can tote one of them mules. I think one of us had best keep an eye on him all night. He don’t have to know we’re watching him. We’ll roll up in our blankets but won’t but one of us’ll sleep. We’ll split it up. You can take the first watch and when you start to get sleepy, just poke me with your toe. I can watch him the rest of the night. That all right with you?”

  “Yeah, that’d be best. You’re better at staying awake than I am. I might poke you before too long, though.”

  Harley nodded. “That’s all right. I only need a couple of hours.”

  They walked back to the fire and, making it obvious they were turning in, both men rolled up in their blankets. But, unlike Pike, who had left his rifle and pistol belt on the ground beside him, Seth and Harley hid their pistols inside the blankets. Harley was soon asleep, as evidenced by the resonant sound of his snoring. Seth stretched out so that he could see any move Pike might make, his eyes half closed to convey the picture of a sleeping man.

  The fire began to die down and still there was no sign of stirring from the man on the other side of the fire. Seth had almost decided it was a waste of time to watch him, but he wouldn’t take any chances; Harley was usually right about those things. He wondered how long it had been since Harley went to sleep. His eyelids were getting heavy already and he wasn’t going to wait much longer before poking his brother. It was warm and comfortable by the fire and he closed his eyes for a moment to rest them. The moment turned into several and he quickly popped his eyelids open. Uh-oh, he thought, that could be dangerous. Better keep ’em open. That was his last conscious thought.

  Undetected by anyone, there was a thin smile on the face of the supposedly sleeping form across from them. You think you’re a right slick young pup, Pike thought, but I knew you’d be sleeping like a baby before the fire died down. Like a serpent sliding from his hole, Pike slowly peeled off his blanket. Silently he moved, placing one foot carefully after the other, ignoring the urge to hurry in spite of the excited beating of his heart. This was as close to passion as Pike ever came—when he knew he was about to kill someone.

  He stood over the two sleeping forms for a moment, deciding which one to shoot first, anticipating the pleasure he was about to experience. Then he became angry at the two brothers, angry because they had not trusted him. You wanted him to poke you awake, he thought. I’ll poke you. With that, he drew his boot back and placed a kick squarely in Harley’s back. When Harley jerked his head up, it was to meet the barrel of Pike’s forty-five a split second before the bullet cracked his forehead. Pike turned immediately and shot Seth in the back of the head before the boy was fully awake. His anger abated, a thin smile returned to his face as he looked down at the work he had done.

  “Well, boys, I reckon I saved you from the Injuns, just like I said I would. I reckon I’ll go back to bed now and wait for sunup to see what you’ve got in that there wagon.” He tossed a few more branches on the fire and rolled up in his blanket, pleased with his night’s work.

  The morning sun found Pike unhurriedly moving about his camp, tending the fire and enjoying a breakfast of salt pork and dried apples from the Dawson brothers’ wagon. The bodies of the brothers still lay where he had murdered them the night before, undisturbed, save for the stripping of anything valuable Pike found on them. He was in no hurry to leave the scene of his cowardly act, for he had climbed to the ridge above the creek and scanned the horizon all around and seen no sign of a living soul anywhere. He felt confident that he had lost Jason Coles.

  An inspection of the wagon revealed some merchandise of value, primarily food stores and ammunition, but there were only a few weapons. There was another rifle, a Winchester, in addition to the one Seth Dawson had constantly held. He also found the pistols they carried on their bodies and an old Sharps buffalo gun wrapped in a woolen blanket. It was disappointing—he had expected a much more valuable inventory. There were some tools for digging and panning but Pike had no use for them. “Damn fool greenhorns.” He spat, and kicked Harley’s body in contempt.

  When he had sorted out what he could use, he made up a pack saddle for one of the mules and loaded his things on it. Pike had no use for the wagon—it would slow him down too much. Ready to start out for Two Moon’s camp, he paused to take one last look at his handiwork. He looked at Harley’s balding skull and then back at his younger brother’s long blond hair. “That there’s a right fine-looking scalp you got there, sonny. It’d look right shiny hanging in a Cheyenne lodge.” He drew his long skinning knife and took the boy’s scalp and held it up to the sunlight to admire it.

  * * *

  Jason dismounted to look at the saddle lying on the ground. There were a few odds and ends scattered about also, things that Pike had obviously thought expendable. A few hundred yards away a spent pony grazed on the long grass. It was plain to see that the man who murdered Abby knew he was being chased. And from the look of that horse, Jason knew he was riding his horses into the ground in an effort to put distance between them. Pike had a good head start but that fact did not overly concern Jason—he would track him for as long as it took. He would find him and he would kill him—this much he vowed to himself. He would get Pike if he had to walk into the middle of a hostile camp to get him.

  Back in the saddle, Jason took up the hunt again. He gave no thought to the consequence of riding alone into a country that was a hotbed of hostile
activity. He had one purpose, and that was to hunt down Jack Pike. He stayed doggedly on the trail of the two horses, sometimes losing it temporarily, then doubling back until he found it again, pushing on until he had to remind himself to rest his horse. He himself needed no rest.

  After allowing the paint to rest for close to an hour, he resumed the hunt. It was close to sundown when he spotted the five mules grazing in the grass of a shallow ravine. Their traces had been cut and were dragging behind them. Glancing up toward the northwest, he saw the buzzards wheeling overhead and he knew that he could expect to find more of Pike’s handiwork. Pulling his Winchester from its sling, he headed for the ring of buzzards.

  Poor devils, he thought, looking down at the two bodies still half out of their blankets. Murdered in their sleep, I reckon. One of them, the one who had been scalped, was no more than a boy. The sight sickened Jason inside and he knew he had to stop this mad dog. Looking around him at the wagon and strewn articles of clothing and mining tools, he pictured the evil Pike rummaging through the miners’ belongings like a coyote plundering a campsite—the story was clear to see. Pike had taken what he wanted and one of the mules to pack it for him and headed out toward the north. Jason figured Pike to be maybe a day and a half ahead of him and he looked to be heading somewhere in the Wolf Mountains or maybe the Big Horns.

  The buzzards were swooping right above the two bodies when he climbed aboard the paint once more and continued on, following the obvious trail left by Pike. Now there were two horses and one shod mule to follow, which made tracking that much easier. He made good time until he reached the banks of the Cheyenne River, where he lost the trail. Unfazed, for he expected the man to try to cover his trail at some point, he crossed the river and scouted the other side looking for the point where Pike came out of the water. From the tracks he had been following for two days, Jason knew Pike was running flat out and, since he was, it figured that he would have gone downstream. Going with the current would be easier and faster, so Jason started working the riverbank downstream from the point where Pike entered the water.

  Patiently, Jason combed the bank of the river, carefully examining every likely place where rocks or grass were handy to disguise the trail left by the two horses and the shod prints of the mule. He was no longer following the horse with the nicked shoe—that was evidently the spent pony he had seen near the discarded saddle, though Jason had not thought to inspect the animal’s hoof. But it didn’t matter anyway, unless Pike’s trail doubled onto somebody else’s trail, because the mule would be hard to disguise.

  In spite of the mule, Pike had done well to cover his tracks. Jason spent the better part of three hours working the riverbank without finding a single print. The man had to come out somewhere, he thought, and unless he swam two horses and a mule all the way to Pumpkin Buttes, he’d find where he came out. On the thought that Pike might be trying to lead him in the opposite direction, Jason crossed back to the other side of the river and started scouting that bank. He had not worked down a quarter of a mile when he found the tracks where Pike came out of the water. No effort had been made to disguise them—they stood out plain and clear up a sandy gully until they disappeared in the grass of the slope above the river.

  Jason was not misled by the trail. Pike wanted him to see those tracks. It wasn’t until he reached the grass on the slope that Pike tried once again to hide his real intentions. Jason dismounted and studied the grass carefully. It was not difficult to pick up the trail again and follow it for another half mile until he found the place where Pike had crossed the river again and resumed his original course. Relentlessly, Jason tracked his man from the point where he last left the river. Pike was heading northwest, deep into hostile country. Jason followed him past Pumpkin Buttes on his left, toward the Little Powder. The trail was no longer evasive, for Pike evidently believed he had lost Jason by then and he was traveling in a straight line. Ahead and to the south Jason could see the Wolf Mountains. Pike seemed to feel secure in this country—maybe he had reason to believe he had nothing to fear from the Cheyennes or the Sioux. Jason could well imagine why—he wondered how many troopers had been killed with rifles supplied by men like Pike.

  Chapter XIV

  Jason sat by a wide stream that had made its way through a little valley where cottonwoods competed with a few skinny willows for the water’s nourishment. He watched the paint drink from the stream while he cut up strips of flesh from the pronghorn he had taken with one shot behind the shoulder. He had not realized that he had gone two days without eating until he began to feel weak from hunger—such was his focus on the task he had set for himself, a task that superceded all others. Finally giving in to the incessant cries from his empty stomach, he left the trail he was following and rode off toward the mountains to hunt. In the dangerous country he traveled, he thought it best to ride some distance away from the trail he followed before risking the one shot it took to bring the antelope down.

  Now, as he sat before his small fire, waiting for his supper to cook, he reflected on his life since first signing on as a scout at Fort Cobb, an unusual train of thought for Jason Coles, who tried to avoid serious thought on things past and things that might have been. But the recent turn of events that had brought about the wanton killing of Abby Langsforth had struck a melancholy chord in Jason’s mind, one he found hard to explain. He had certainly felt no closeness to Abby and yet he felt a deep loss at her death. There was just no sense in it and he felt badly that someone like Abby had had the misfortune to cross paths with vermin like Jack Pike. Jason felt a need—more than that, a driving force—to eliminate the Jack Pikes from the earth. The thought of Abby’s horror just before she was shot made Jason’s bile rise and he told himself to be patient. At this point, he honestly didn’t care what happened afterward, but he wanted to be damn sure nothing kept him from finding Pike. Once that was accomplished, he would deal with whatever came next.

  Pike’s trail led him across the Little Powder and the Powder, turning more northerly to skirt the Wolf Mountains. It was obvious to Jason now that Pike was heading to the Cheyenne camp of Two Moon’s. He was still more than a day ahead of him and Jason was not likely to catch him before he reached the Tongue River, where Two Moon was camped. It would have been more to Jason’s liking to catch the renegade before he reached his Indian friends—if indeed they counted Pike as a friend. In earlier days, under different circumstances, Jason would have been more cautious. Knowing Pike would find refuge in a hostile camp, Jason would have had to change his plans and watch the village, waiting for a chance to catch Pike alone. At this point, however, Jason’s frame of mind was such that he really didn’t give a damn if it was crazy to ride into the Cheyenne camp after Pike or not. He was not especially suicidal—if the choice was between life or death, he would choose life—but at this point he did not dread death that much. He had already made up his mind to go in after Pike, wherever the hell Pike went. And if he caught a bullet in the process, well, that was just something that was bound to happen sooner or later anyway. He pushed on toward his inevitable settlement with Pike.

  * * *

  Jack Pike guided his horse down to the water’s edge. His horse had scarcely set foot in the shallow water before he was spotted by some women working skins on the far side. The camp was alerted almost immediately so that, by the time he had made his way across, leading the horse and the mule, there was a reception committee of half a dozen warriors to meet him. They recognized him at once, since he had been to their village several times in the past, the last time with Selvey and a wagonload of ammunition and supplies.

  “Friend, friend,” Pike called out, making use of his limited vocabulary of Cheyenne words. He signed the peace sign and kept repeating, “Friend, friend,” as if afraid Two Moon’s warriors might have forgotten that he had brought them guns before. It was unnecessary because the warriors could hardly forget the dark lanky man with the thin face and the broad black hat with the brim that flopped down, hiding his e
yes. Like their friends, the Lakotas and Arapahos, they knew him as Black Hat.

  “I come to see my friend, Two Moon,” Pike said, using sign to help convey his message.

  One of the warriors, an older man called Bear Hump, looked Pike over carefully before nodding understanding, then turned his pony toward the camp and beckoned Pike to follow. The small procession trotted up from the river and into the assembly of tipis. They reined up before the chief’s lodge and Bear Hump slid off his pony and stood at the flap of the tipi, calling Two Moon.

  “Ahh, Black Hat,” Two Moon acknowledged as he stepped out of the tipi. “You have come to trade.” The greeting was not cordial, but neither was it uncivil. Two Moon had traded for guns with Black Hat in the past. He was not fooled by Pike’s insistence that he was a loyal friend of the Cheyenne. He assumed that Pike had stolen the property he brought for trade, but it served Two Moon’s purpose to trade with him. He wanted the guns.

  Pike tried to force a grin. “I got a few things to trade but I really come this time to visit my friends, the Cheyennes, and to bring my friend, Two Moon, a present.” He dismounted and went around to the mule and pulled the old Sharps buffalo gun from the pack. “You can set in the door of your tipi and shoot buffalo across the river with this here gun.”

  Two Moon took the gun and turned it over in his hands, examining the powerful weapon. He smiled and nodded his head to Pike. “It is old and worn, but it is a fine gift. I thank you for it.”

  “Oh, it’s old but it’s still a Jim Dandy buffalo gun,” Pike quickly replied. “Yessir, that there’s a fine enough gun.”

  “You do not come to trade? Then why do you come?”

  “Oh, I got goods to trade, all right. Look at that there mule there. But I got gifts too. I got some flour and some pots and pans. I got some dried apples. I brung ’em to my friends.”