by Win Blevins
Weary and discouraged, Smith rode into the canyon of White Tail Creek and into the Cheyenne camp just at dark. He had worn himself out catching up with the Human Beings, just as they had worn themselves out getting here. He’d read the tracks all day long and had figured out most of it.
From the two forks of the Geese River, which the whites called the Platte, it was the old story. The Human Beings were being chased hard by soldiers, two separate, large groups of soldiers from behind. The Indians were desperately short of horses. The men took turns—riding awhile, then sending the horse back to a partner so he could ride, meanwhile running in the all-day-long warrior’s lope. So the double-used ponies covered the ground three times.
Smith found the result of that tactic along the way—horse carcasses. He was glad he had his own horse and the three cavalry mounts to help out. But he knew that with the army constantly putting in new troops and horseflesh, such a flight was doomed.
He needed to sit in his own lodge behind his own fire, with his wife at his side, eat and listen to his children playing, smoke a pipe, and talk about something simple and domestic with his wife, perhaps what goods they would trade for at the post. Except that he had no wife, no lodge, no children, no tobacco, and nothing to trade. The post was still there. He thought of his mother Annemarie at the trading post on the Yellowstone. It was a post he had never seen, for his mothers had moved it from the Yellowstone after he left home. Yet it was in the heart of Cheyenne country, and it would be home. Certainly home if the Human Beings were there. Certainly home if his family was there. And the sights, the sounds, the smells of the first two decades of his life, his memories, his sense of the earth under his feet in the right way.
As he looked about the camp, he saw that not only the horses were worn out. The people were like old cloth, tattered at the edges and rubbed thin in the middle. They wouldn’t last long at this pace.
Lisette did have a small fire among some rocks. When he dismounted, she held him for a long moment, for she knew what it meant when he came alone, leading three riderless horses. “He is riding the Milky Way Trail to Sehan,” Smith told his mother formally. He felt tears well in his eyes again and roll down his cheeks. “A mob lynched him in Ogallala,” he murmured softly in her ear. “Hanged him. Killed a deputy getting him.” Smith felt his slender mother was comforting him, not he comforting her. Yet she was the one who called Sings Wolf father. “I couldn’t….” His voice clotted, and he stopped trying to speak.
His mother led him to the fire. Hindy stopped eating and started cutting Smith some meat, doubtless horse meat. Rain nursed Big Soldier. He did have a family, of sorts. He smiled at them wearily and, before he sat, touched Rain gently on the cheek and tousled Hindy’s hair, like she was a boy. He took the meat gladly and sat by the fire, legs crossed. He was grateful for his family, his women. He wished he had Elaine among them.
Smith felt his mother’s hand, gentle, insistent. He wondered how long he’d napped here by the fire. An hour, perhaps. He looked into Lisettes eyes. “Two men have come in from Little Chief,” she said. Her eyes were troubled.
He raised his long frame off the ground and shook himself. His thought was, What now?
Little Chief and those who camped with him had been left behind on the march to the south. Now these two men had run away from Little Chief’s people while they were being escorted to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency by the army.
The people shook their heads. Even as they risked their lives, and lost lives, to escape to their home country, their relatives were being forced south. Is’siwun, the sacred buffalo hat, and Mahuts, the four sacred arrows, were in the south. It seemed that the Cheyennes were fated to live far from Nowah’wus, the sacred mountain, their power perhaps broken. Unless the will of fewer than three hundred fleeing Cheyennes was stronger than fate.
Smith stood with Lisette in the crowd to hear whatever the runaways from Little Chief had to say.
Little Wolf asked, with an unexplained tone of significance in his voice, whether the country around Red Cloud Agency was full of soldiers. The runaways nodded. Soldiers everywhere, they said.
Morning Star stood to speak. “We are almost in our own country, my friends,” he said. Smith supposed the handsome chief had been terribly stricken by the death of one of his wives, Short Woman, about a week ago. Now he seemed a weak, old man. “The soldiers up there with our friends the Sioux have always been good men.”
Little Wolf leaped in, “They are up there to catch us and kill us.”
“We have a right to be with Red Cloud,” said Morning Star as though to a child. The Human Beings had been with Red Cloud when they agreed to go look at the agency in the south.
“With the whites you have a right to nothing that you do not already hold in the palm,” asserted Little Wolf plainly.
Now Morning Star lost his temper. He turned on the Sweet Medicine chief and ordered him to shut up. He said they would never make it to the Powder River country. Winter was coming. The people were exhausted—some babies had died, just today, from banging around in the hide sacks hanging from their mothers’ saddles as the Human Beings ran from the soldiers. Little Wolf was a fool not to see that the Human Beings were forced to go in to Red Cloud, a fool.
This was fighting talk, and right away men of the Dog Soldiers began to step in close behind Morning Star, men of the Elk Society behind their leader, Little Wolf. Faces mottled with anger, and hands tightened on weapons. Smith and Lisette didn’t move.
Little Wolf got up slowly and made his declaration. “We cannot divide now. We cannot.” He paused. He repeated his motto: “An Indian never caught is an Indian never killed. Together we can get away.”
But Dog Soldiers and others still stood behind Morning Star looking angry. Little Wolf waited, but their faces didn’t soften. He understood. They were tired, tired unto death. They thought going to Red Cloud, even if a slender chance, was the only chance they had.
So the Sweet Medicine chief relented. He said he would move his camp a little apart. Those who wanted to go on to the north, to the Powder River country, could camp with him tonight.
In the morning, Morning Star and his followers were gone. The division of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio was about even. The men of the Elk Society and their families and some others elected to try for the northern land. The Dog Soldiers and their families and many of the young men went toward the Red Cloud Agency. Little Wolf supposed the young men anticipated that there would be more young women to choose from among the Sioux.
Smith’s women moved their few belongings to Little Wolf’s camp, and Smith staked his horses there in a little grass. Powder River, he thought. Home.
No one had energy for more than lying about in blankets and occasionally putting a small log on the fire. They ate from the soup Rain had made of the horse meat, without vegetables and without salt. Smith couldn’t get enough of the hot liquid.
He looked around at his family. What family he had left. His father dead, one mother several hundred miles away, his brother dead before the age of twenty, one sister moved to the settlement at Helena, the other, the palsied one, dead in her youth, his grandfather lying on a scaffold back near Ogallala. Here with him, those who would be of his lodge, if he had a lodge, his mother, his cousin’s widow, the infant Big Soldier, and an adopted white girl. Quite the motley crew, Smith, he told himself.
“What will happen to us?” asked Hindy.
He liked her. She hadn’t been cared for, she’d been abused, she’d seen more of the brutal side of life than a teenage kid should have to see. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Didn’t see a way to make a life, present or future. She was afraid. But it seemed to Smith that she might endure it all. She wore her pain right out in front, on her face. Lisette said she’d even started doing some wisecracking. She might come through.
After too much thought, Smith said quietly, “I don’t know what will happen to us.”
“What will happen to me?” Her catawampus face was courage and fe
ar, both rampant.
Smith looked fondly at her. “You are my daughter. You are a Cheyenne. You may do whatever you want in the world.” He chuckled. “If we’re alive tomorrow.”
The next morning before dawn the Morning Star people were gone. They had left a buffalo robe with hair on it. On the robe were ammunition and powder, a gift for those who would continue fighting. Little Wolf would go on with one hundred and twenty-six people, including forty men of fighting age. Five hundred miles to Powder River.
Elaine sat on the steps of her porch, getting a little sun and making herself do some work. The Kansas sun was warm on this Indian-summer day in late October, so she wore only the wrap borrowed from Fran over her nightdress. It wasn’t polite, sitting outdoors in a nightdress, but she didn’t feel polite. She knew she’d never looked worse. Her hacked-off hair was unflattering. Her fingernails were bitten for the first time since she was a teenager. She’d developed the strangest nervous habit the last week—she would bite on the knuckles of her fingers until it hurt. She didn’t know why she did it, but she couldn’t stop herself.
The work she’d started was an article about the flight of the Cheyennes toward their Powder River homeland, for the Atlantic. She and her sister had published poems in that magazine when they were teenagers, and one of the editors professed himself an admirer of theirs. Maybe her welcome would still be good. And maybe a few words in the Eastern press would make a difference, would mitigate the punishment the Cheyennes were headed for. So it was worthwhile.
She was also reading everything about the Cheyennes in the local newspapers, the Dodge City Times and Ford County Globe, which were as informative as a fit of apoplexy. She had written Dora for whatever she saw in the Boston paper, or other Eastern papers, and had even written the editor of the Kansas City Journal in the faint hope of getting some of the coverage done in that newspaper. Kansas City was near the turmoil, but not in the midst of it, and possibly not so bloodthirsty.
“Mizz Maclean?” came a voice.
The man stood in the street, for Dodge City mostly hadn’t the graces of sidewalks yet. He was an interesting-looking man, only medium-sized but powerful-looking and with a certain aura of … something.
“Yes?” said Elaine.
The man held a telegram. He came forward gently, with a smile that was mere politeness. His eyes were gray and had a glint of devilment about them. Something was familiar about this man, something in the eyes.
“I’m Bat Masterson, Mizz Maclean. The sheriff here. Thought you ought to see this.”
The telegram was from the provost marshal of some division of the army in Fort Leavenworth. It described two Cheyenne Indians, companions, a young man estimated to be six and a half feet tall, and an old one. It said they were wanted for the murder of the Reverend Somebody Ratz, the kidnapping of his daughter Hindy, a juvenile, and the murder of three scouts of a brigade of the cavalry, U.S. Army, these crimes committed near Dodge City, Kansas. The younger man was suspected to be a half-breed, Adam Smith Maclean, formerly a physician at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency in Indian territory, well educated and able to pass for a white man. No guess was ventured about the identity of the older man. County sheriffs located in Dodge City, Wallace, and Hays, Kansas, and Ogallala and Sidney, Nebraska, were asked to be on the lookout for these fugitives.
Well. They army had done its work well enough in figuring out who Adam was. That’s what happens when you’re outstanding, she thought. The old man must be Sings Wolf. She snorted a little. It was still hard to think of her as a man—him as a man.
She realized the sheriff was waiting, his eyes sharp on her. “Yes, Sheriff … I’m sorry I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Masterson, Mizz Maclean, Bat Masterson.” He just stood there, eyeing her. Now she wished she didn’t look such a fright, in this half-decent wrap and her hair ugly. “Is Adam Smith Maclean your husband, Mizz Maclean?”
“Certainly, Sheriff … Masterson. But my husband hasn’t killed anyone unless he was attacked. He’s a physician—he saves lives.”
The sheriff smiled a little, as though he’d expected her to say that.
She expected him to say that decision of who was a murderer and who was not was made by a court of law, not by him, and not by her. Instead he said, “These are strange times, Mizz Maclean. Strange times.”
He kept looking and smiling a little, perhaps with a hint of … what? A hint of menace, she thought. Now she knew him. The man getting a shave in the barbershop. She knew him, too, for what he was, a masher, a seducer, what men called a ladies’ man. Well, he had an attractive devil-may-care air. She was a little shocked at herself for thinking so.
“Where is Mr. Maclean now, Mizz Maclean?”
“I don’t know where Dr. Maclean is,” she answered.
“Dr. Maclean,” Masterson repeated. He waited a couple of beats. “It’s a crime to protect a fugitive from the law,” he said.
“I wish I could protect him,” she said. “I fear that he’s in grave danger. He’s trying to help his people return to their homeland at Powder River, and the army is treating them like criminals. I don’t know where they are, or where he is. I’m confident he’s done nothing wrong.”
Masterson nodded a couple of times again, an odd mannerism, perhaps confirming something to himself. “How long do you plan to be in Dodge City, Mizz Maclean?”
“Sheriff, my right leg has been amputated below the knee. I’m sure I’ll be in Dodge City for some weeks. Dr. Richtarsch hopes I’ll be able to start walking with a wooden leg in perhaps two more months. I may move into a boardinghouse in the meantime, if you need to ask other questions.”
Sheriff Masterson didn’t appear inclined to take the hint. “Yes, ma’am.” His eyes twinkled wickedly, the rogue. “I knew a lady once lost her leg like that,” he said. “She learned to ride with a sidesaddle, it being her right leg that was short some. Dr. Richtarsch tells me it’s your right leg.”
Elaine said, “I sold my sidesaddle, Sheriff.”
He nodded. “That’s what I heard. Over to Ham, at the livery.” Cheeky fellow, and certainly not Elaine’s sort. “That lady learned it,” said the sheriff giving all his phrases an extra pause. “Course, she was a sporting lady.” Only his cool, gray eyes smiled at that.
Well, Mr. Masterson, she thought, saying such a thing to a lady. All right, if you want to play that game.
He touched his hand to his hat brim. “Mizz Maclean, you let me know if you hear from your husband now, will you? Be sure. Army looking for him—that’s not too serious, because they don’t look too hard. Too busy fighting Injuns. But it’s best to get things like this straightened out.”
“Of course, Sheriff Masterson.” Of course if I knew Adam was headed into hell, I’d point you toward heaven.
The sheriff touched his hat again and walked off, the walk of a man who supposed he was being watched by an attractive woman, and liked it. Elaine gave a quiet hummpf.
An hour later the liveryman brought her sidesaddle. The note read simply, “Compliments of Bat Masterson.”
Chapter 10
Little Wolf told his people to scatter into the Sand Hills. He said they’d leave many trails, like birds scattering through the brush. The soldiers would not follow any trail so small, he said. Let the soldiers follow Morning Star, who was going in to surrender anyway, and who said he trusted the soldiers of this country.
Little Wolf named a place on the north side of the Sand Hills and west of the head of the Snake River where they would meet. Not far from there Little Wolf knew a place to make a winter camp. It was time to stop running, and time to hide.
The camping place they reached two weeks later was Lost Chokecherry Valley, a small, cupped formation with a lake. It promised some warmth and lots of ducks and geese. Some of the men said it was too close to the Black Hills Road, that they would be discovered, but Little Wolf said it was the best choice, and that was enough for everyone. The people were tired, desperately in need of rest.
The next morning Wooden Legs and some of the other young men brought in a few cattle for food. Luckily, they were even unbranded cattle, so the cowboys of the ranches would not come looking.
No one knew whether the Human Beings could hide here all winter. But the Elk Society men would keep a diligent watch. When army scouts came, the people would hide in the bushes, and if spotted, they would scatter into the little hills and come together again somewhere else. It was the best they could do. For now the people must rest and eat.
Smith thought it would be a damn rough winter. No buffalo-hide lodges, the pride of every Cheyenne family. No canvas tents, not even any blankets to speak of. They would have to live in brush huts and in holes in the hillsides. He wondered if they could get enough food. It would be dangerous to shoot the guns so near the road, and they didn’t have much ammunition anyway. So they would have to live on what they could get with the bow and arrow, and then be careful not to leave a moccasin trail back into Lost Chokecherry Valley. Smith had not hunted with a bow and arrow in fifteen years, but he could do it, and he would get his skill back this winter.
Smith kept his mind off Elaine, three weeks along toward a mended leg now. She would survive there at the Wockerleys’ house. She would still be stuck in her bed, in traction, surely lonely and bored, but safe. He couldn’t help her except by giving her some company. And right now his family and his people needed his company, his support, his protection, and whatever else he could offer.
Elaine had her mind made up to try to ride by Thanksgiving day, and she did. The day before the pilgrims of her native state gave thanks for a bountiful harvest, Sheriff Masterson led a mare around opposite the porch door for her, with the sidesaddle already cinched on, and the mare tied to the back of a surrey.
Of course, she’d refused the sheriff’s gift of the sidesaddle. But Sheriff Masterson had prevailed upon the liveryman he called Ham to loan it back to her without charge. The man had done some repairs, too. It looked smart.
