Blood Bond

by William W. Johnstone

  Bodine looked at him. “May your medicine stay good, Brother.”

  Two Wolves smiled, a twinkle in his eyes. “There was a Jewish fellow in one of my classes at the university. We became friends. He used to say, ‘And a little bit of luck wouldn’t hurt nothin’, either.’”

  * * *

  The sounds of the gunfire drifted to those in the now silent town and the men on the hill. It was a very brief battle. Soon the rolling hills became very quiet.

  “I hope the men killed the women before the hostiles got to them,” Sergeant McGuire said, as he stood by Bodine’s side.

  “I doubt if they did. We’ll know just after dark.”

  “How?”

  “Lone Dog will move the prisoners in close enough for us to hear them screaming. It’s a good psychological move on the Indians’ part. Very demoralizing to a lot of people.”

  “But not to you, Bodine?”

  “I’ve heard it before.”

  “In the camp of Medicine Horse?”

  Bodine looked at him to see if the sergeant was serious. He was. “Oh, no, Sergeant. Medicine Horse is a very civilized person. He was educated back East. While he chose to return to the old ways, he retained many of the white man’s ways. But don’t ever think he wasn’t a great warrior before and after he married white. Because he was. Medicine Horse rejected torture because it wasn’t civilized and didn’t prove anything. That is in direct conflict to many Indian beliefs. They believe that the longer a man stands torture, the better his dying. If he dies well, they will sing songs around the campfires, praising his bravery.”

  “Even if he was an enemy?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I will never understand the Indian, Bodine.”

  “Probably not. And neither will I.”

  “But you lived with them off and on for fifteen years!”

  “That’s true. You may live with wolves all your life, but that doesn’t make you a wolf.”

  * * *

  As full night spread its dark cloak around the hills, Gerry came to stand beside Bodine at the stone fence around the complex on the hill.

  “It’s about time for Two Wolves to be pulling out, don’t you think?”

  “He left about a half hour ago.”

  “He told you goodbye?”

  “No.”

  “You saw him leave?”

  “No.”

  “You heard him leave?”

  “No.”

  “Well, hell, man!” The lieutenant’s voice held a note of exasperation. “How do you know he’s gone?”

  “I know.”

  Before Gerry could retort, the screaming began. It drifted in to them, touching hidden emotions among them all, peeling back the skin and exposing the raw nerve endings.

  “Mother of God!” Sergeant McGuire hissed. “Is that a man or a woman?”

  “I don’t know,” Bodine said. “At this point in that poor being’s life, it doesn’t matter. They’ve been reduced to something less than a human being. That was deliberately done out of our earshot.”

  “Do you suppose the women were, ah, molested?” Gerry asked.

  “Probably. It’s best not to think about that.”

  “Why do they want us to hear all that awfulness, Lieutenant?” a young trooper asked, walking up.

  Gerry looked at Bodine.

  Although there probably was not five years’ difference between Bodine and the young trooper, Bodine was frontier-toughened and more experienced than most men many years older. “You’ll see in about five more minutes, troop.”

  It didn’t take quite that long. The first screaming had scarcely bubbled off into a merciful death when another yowling took its place. This time it was plain to all that it was a woman.

  She began begging for someone, anyone, to please God come and help her.

  “Sergeant McGuire,” Lieutenant Gerry said.

  “Sir.”

  “Pass the word up and down the line: I will order the court-martial of any trooper who leaves his post without orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The savages want us to come out there, don’t they, Lieutenant?” the young trooper asked. “So they can kill us.”

  “That’s it,” Gerry pushed the words through tightly compressed lips.

  The screaming and crying and begging intensified. Gerry looked at Bodine. The man’s face was impassive. His eyes as cool and unreadable as always. Gerry wondered if he would ever possess that type of coolness in the face of adversity. Then he wondered if he wanted to.

  “Any minute now,” Bodine said. “That screaming will prove too much for somebody in town.”

  The sounds of galloping horses reached them as men from the town went to the rescue of the tortured.

  “They’re going to rescue them!” the young trooper cried.

  “No, they’re not,” Bodine told him. “All they’re going to do is insure the torture goes on all night. With their own bodies.”

  The young trooper swallowed hard.

  Chapter 22

  Those townspeople who went charging into the dangerous darkness with hopes of aiding the prisoners only succeeded in riding to a horrible death. Lone Dog’s braves took them without firing a shot; and now they had enough prisoners to fill the night air with painful shrieking until the dawning. Then they would destroy the town.

  “Try to get some sleep,” Bodine told Gerry.

  “How in God’s name do you expect people to sleep with that painful screaming in one’s ears?”

  Bodine looked at the man, then walked to his bedroll, laid down, put his head on the saddle and his hat over his face, and was asleep in less than a minute.

  “Damn the man!” Gerry muttered. “Sometimes I don’t think he’s human.”

  “He’s human,” Sergeant McGuire said. “He was born out here, Lieutenant. Twenty-five years ago there weren’t fifty whites for a hundred miles in any direction. Maybe not that many. He’s wang-leather tough, both in body and mind.”

  For a moment, the screaming abated, and both men could breathe a little easier. Then it began again.

  “Will this night ever end?” Gerry wiped sweat from his face, even though the air was cold.

  “I imagine them folks under the knife out yonder are wondering the same thing, Lieutenant.”

  Bodine was up long before dawn, walking among the troopers, many of whom had not slept a wink all night. But the screaming had finally stopped.

  “Brace yourselves,” Bodine told Gerry and McGuire and a few other troopers. “At first light you’re going to see with your own eyes what Lone Dog did to some of those people last night.”

  “I do not believe that the Indians could have crept into the town and left the bodies without someone down there in town seeing them,” Gerry said.

  McGuire spat on the ground.

  “You are not one with the earth, the sun, the wind, the sky, or the night, either, Gerry,” Bodine told him.

  “All that nonsense is Indian hooey!”

  Bodine smiled. “You’d be surprised how many people believed just like that, Gerry. They changed their minds seconds before they died.”

  The lieutenant walked away, his back stiff.

  “He’s a fine officer, Bodine,” McGuire said. “Really cares about his men. He’s just a little wet behind the ears yet.”

  “Lone Dog is just about an hour away from drying him off,” Bodine told the sergeant.

  “How do you get to be one with all those things you mentioned, Bodine?”

  “You believe, Sergeant. You fast, you pray, you endure pain, you seek visions.”

  “And you did all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Bodine pointed to a barely discernible object lying in the middle of the wide street in town. “Come into the light, get your field glasses, Sergeant. I want the men to see just how, as Gerry put it, inventive the Indians can be. I think it’ll make them fight better.”

 
; Several of the newer and younger troopers lost their meager breakfast after viewing the tortured remains lying in the dirt. Others had already steeled themselves. But all took a look through the long lenses.

  “Jesus, God, and Mary!” Lucy breathed, her face pale as she lowered the glasses. “I knowed that woman. I didn’t like her, but no one deserves to be treated like that.”

  Bodine remembered the tortured body of the man he’d found not far from Cutter. “There are some people in that town down there just as bad, Lucy. If it comes to it, Lucy, I won’t let them take you alive.”

  “Don’t let me see you do it, Bodine,” she requested. “Just shoot me and let it be.”

  “All right. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. Two Wolves should be reaching the fort within the hour. Say it’ll take Travers an hour to gear up. It’s a full fifteen to twenty hours forced march from the fort to here; and they’ve got to spare their horses for the march back.” Gerry and McGuire were listening. “We’ve got to hold out today and tonight.”

  “That’s providing Sam made it,” Gerry tossed cold water on the statement.

  “That is correct.”

  * * *

  “How many Indians does Lone Dog have, Two Wolves?” Colonel Travers asked the weary man.

  “At least four-hundred, Colonel. And they’re well armed, mostly with repeating rifles.”

  Travers had not hesitated. He had listened to Two Wolves, and immediately ordered a company to gear up. He would lead the unit personally, leaving Major Dawson at the garrison with less than a company of mostly green and untrained troopers.

  “We’ll pull out in about an hour, Two Wolves. You’re not thinking of returning, are you? You’re beat, man.”

  “I’ll sleep until time to leave. That’s my brother back there, Colonel.”

  * * *

  During the night, Lone Dog’s braves had crept close to the town. Usually low on ammunition, the warriors normally did not waste their shots. They picked their targets carefully and conserved ammo. And they did not immediately try the Army dug in on the hill, concentrating first on the town and its badly rattled citizens. The bodies of the tortured lay in the street, bloody and naked and hideous to the eyes of the defenders.

  Which was Lone Dog’s intention. The Indians did not know the word and could not pronounce it had they known it, but they were masters in the use of psychological warfare.

  By eight o’clock in the morning, several buildings of the small town had been burned, set afire by flaming arrows. Many of those people who ran for safety didn’t make it, being cut down by gunfire from the hills. And fighting the fires proved far too costly in human life, for the Indians were very close and their aim was true.

  On the hill the Army occupied, only a few shots had been fired at the elusive enemy, and Bodine had fired most of them.

  He was sitting behind the stone fence, motionless, his eyes on a bush on the side of a hill, about two hundred yards away. Lieutenant Gerry lay beside him.

  “What do you see out there, Bodine? I can’t see a damn thing except empty land.”

  “There’s an Indian close to that bush, Gerry. But I don’t know, yet, which side he’s on. He’s dug in, sometime during the night, and covered himself with dirt, breathing through a tiny airhole. Might be using a reed from the creek or a hollowed out stick. I’m sure there are others much closer to us than him, but I just haven’t been able to spot them.”

  A strangled yell cut Bodine’s eyes. A brave had obviously crept up to the fence line during the night, laying close to the stone, and waiting for his chance to kill.

  A young trooper had presented himself just in time to die with his throat cut.

  The brave ran toward an outbuilding. Bodine’s rifle barked, the bullet taking the brave in the side, dusting him through and through. Bodine shot him in the head for insurance.

  “Sneaky bastards!” Gerry said, as the body of the dead trooper was dragged off by other soldiers, staying low as they pulled their dead comrade’s body from the fence.

  Bodine smiled. “Just good fighters, Gerry. That’s all.”

  “Don’t you hate them, Bodine? These Indians, I mean. Lone Dog’s bunch.”

  Bodine shook his head. “No. They were here before we came. They’re just fighting for a way of life. You can’t hate somebody for fighting for land that has been theirs for hundreds of years.”

  Gerry shook his head. “I don’t understand you, Bodine.”

  Bodine chuckled. “You’re not part of this country, Gerry. If you live here the rest of your life you won’t really be a part of it. Although you’ll be closer than you are now.”

  “Whatever that means,” the young officer said wearily.

  Bodine glanced at him and laughed at the expression on Gerry’s face. His eyes cut away from Gerry to watch the arc of a fire arrow as it came soaring from behind a low hill behind the main street of the frontier town. It landed on the roof of a building. A careless Indian stuck his head up and Bodine snapped off a shot. He didn’t know whether he scored a hit or not, but he probably caused the brave a few anxious seconds either way.

  Bodine looked back at the roof of the building. A small fire had been started by the arrow. The building would be gone in ten minutes, with more people pouring out onto the street.

  A sentry stationed belly down on the roof of the old headquarters of the mining company yelled, “Here they come. Jesus Christ, there must be five hundred of them!”

  The pounding of hooves reached the ears of the men on the hill as Lone Dog’s braves thundered over the hill and galloped into the few smoky streets of Cutter. A few soldiers began firing their single shot carbines.

  “Hold your fire!” Gerry yelled. “Cease firing. The range is too great. You’re wasting ammunition.”

  A bullet clipped the stone fence, stinging Gerry with tiny shards of rock splinters. He quickly went belly-down, cussing.

  Those on the hill could but watch as those in the town closed with the Indians, in many cases a hand-to-hand battle.

  Gerry looked at Bodine, questions in his eyes.

  “You’re in command here, Gerry. But if I were you, I’d move some sharpshooters over there,” he pointed, “to protect on that most vulnerable side, and then send some troops down the hill far enough to put them in range of the town. When the Indians attack, pull them back. We’re going to have some townspeople up here very shortly and we need to give them some covering fire.”

  Lieutenant Gerry nodded and glanced at Sergeant McGuire. “Do it, Sergeant.”

  When the Indians saw what the Army was doing, several groups broke off from attacking the town and charged the hill, exactly what Bodine hoped they would do. The troopers slaughtered the first wave of mounted Indians and, the Indian concept of warfare being what it was, Lone Dog waved his braves back rather than lose another twenty or thirty men to the withering fire from the troopers.

  Bodine had already moved to his horse and saddled up. In the saddle, he made sure his Winchester was loaded up full and checked his Colts. Sergeant McGuire and a dozen other troopers were in the saddle, doing the same.

  Bodine looked at a young trooper with a bugle hanging from a cord over his shoulder. “Can you blow that thing, Troop?”

  “Yes, sir!” the young man said, grinning.

  Smoke from the burning town was billowing, the cold winds whipping it in all directions, smarting the eyes. The screaming from those trapped in the town was intensifying.

  “All right, McGuire,” Bodine said. “Let’s do what the Indians don’t expect us to do.”

  With the reins in his left hand and his right hand around the butt of a six-shooter, McGuire yelled the orders: “Charge!”

  The young trooper lifted the bugle to his lips and blew the command as loudly as he could as the small force galloped down the hill, screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs.

  Because of the smoke, the Indians had no way of knowing whether they were being attacked by ten or a hundred cavalry
men. Many of them broke and galloped away from the fire and smoke and confusion and death, heading for the cover of the hills.

  An Indian holding a bloody scalp leaped out of a storefront just as Bodine reached the first short block of the village. Bodine shot the brave in the chest, the slug knocking him back into the burning building.

  An Indian jumped behind the saddle of McGuire’s horse. The sergeant threw him off and another trooper shot the brave before he could rise.

  Bodine spotted Tom Thomas and Terri. “Get up to the hill!” he shouted at them. “Move, damnit!”

  He struggled to see through the acrid smoke. Whacker Corrigan rode up to him, mounted on a huge mule, a long-barreled pistol in one hand. The New York City man grinned at him. “I want to keep you alive so I can give you a proper whipping, Bodine, so I’ll stay with you. We’ll watch each other’s back.”

  “Glad to have you, Whacker,” Bodine yelled over the roaring of combat and the wild screaming of the wounded and the frightened and the dying. “But don’t count on whipping me.”

  The former shoulder-striker laughed and lifted his pistol, shooting a painted brave in the back as he tried to run into an alley.

  Bodine watched as Simon Bull and Stutterin’ Smith came charging up the middle of the bloody and smoky street. The reins in their teeth and both hands filled with six-guns. They were guns for hire, to be sure, but there was no questioning their bravery.

  The pair of gunslingers rode right up to and through the jaws of death, each with a red-light lady behind them, the powdered arms around the waists of the gunfighters, clinging tightly, the rouged lips saying prayers they hadn’t uttered since childhood.

  “To the hill!” Bodine yelled at them.

  The gunfighters nodded and galloped up toward safety.

  “To the hill! Sound the call!” McGuire yelled at the bugler.

  As they gathered around the sergeant, Bodine could see that several of the troopers had been wounded, but all were still in the saddle as they began battling their way back to the hill and safety; safety at least for a time.

  Bodine stabled Rowdy and stripped the saddle from him, giving him a bucket of water and a bucket of corn. He carefully inspected the big stallion for any wounds he might have received and, finding none, patted him on the rump, moving quickly as Rowdy tried to step on his boot and then tried to give him a little sign of affection by kicking him in the butt.