Blood Bond

by William W. Johnstone

  Bodine and Two Wolves ran back to the horses and mounted up, riding around the valley and coming up to Last Stand Hill from the west. They sat their horses and stared at the scene, total shock and disbelief in their eyes. All bodies of slain Indians, including that of Medicine Horse, had been taken away.

  “God have mercy on their souls,” Bodine finally whispered.

  Bodine and Two Wolves stared in shock at the bloody awful sight on the hill.

  Bodine finally swung down and walked to where Custer lay. Medicine Horse’s coup stick lay beside Custer’s body. He pointed to it and looked at Two Wolves, questions in his eyes.

  Two Wolves shook his head and broke the silence. We are in great danger here, Brother. It will not matter who we are. If we are found by either side on this hill, we will die.”

  Bodine mounted up and they rode away from the slaughter, heading first west and then, when they were well away from the valley, they headed south, following the river.

  It was well after dark when they reined up, seeing many small fires along the river.

  “A dollar says that’s Travers heading north from the fort,” Bodine said.

  “No bet. Brother, no one must ever know that we were on the ridge overlooking the battle. For many reasons.”

  “I know. Do we ride into Travers’ camp?”

  “Might as well.”

  As they rode, they tidied up the story they would tell.

  A few hundred yards from the encampment, Bodine called out to the sentries and they were waved in.

  Over coffee, Bodine told the story to a stunned Travers and Gerry and other officers and sergeants.

  “All I know is that it was a hell of a battle. It was pretty well over by the time we decided not to go any farther into the Rosebuds. Really all we could see was a lot of dust in the air.”

  “But you did see the Indian camp?” Travers pressed the question.

  “Yes. Early this morning. By the number of lodges, I would guess about seven thousand or so Indians. Perhaps as many as three thousand braves.”

  “Dear God in Heaven!” Sergeant McGuire breathed.

  “And you think they’re still in the valley?”

  “I would have no reason to think otherwise.”

  Travers looked at Gerry. “We’ll try to link up with Terry and Gibbon. It would be suicide for us to ride in there alone.” He looked at Bodine. “Will you ride with us—both of you—and scout?”

  “All right.”

  * * *

  Bodine found Terry’s column and stayed with it while Two Wolves rode back to Travers to guide them in. The two forces linked up on the afternoon of June the 26th just as the sun was setting. They were only a few miles from the valley of the Little Bighorn.

  Benteen and Reno had watched the Sioux and the Cheyenne break camp that afternoon and start their pull-out. Not knowing whether the Indians were trying to trick them into leaving their positions, the surviving members of Custer’s forces stayed behind their breastworks and waited it out, knowing that Terry and Gibbon could not be far away.

  On the morning of June the 27th, Bodine and Two Wolves led the column to Last Stand Hill, coming up from the south end of the valley. The stench was awful. Many a hardened trooper leaned out of the saddle and vomited. Several of the younger troopers fainted at the stench and again at the crest of the hill when the hideousness came into full view.

  Bodine and Two Wolves found the position of Reno and Benteen and led them to the generals, who listened to their stories in stunned silence.

  Burial parties had few tools, so very shallow graves were scooped out for some; only sagebrush covered other bodies. The burying was soon over.

  Daisies and mariposa lilies and tiny roses bloomed in a pinkish purple blaze as the still-stunned survivors and rescuers who came too late rode away from the silent, blood-drenched hills above the Little Bighorn.

  * * *

  Bodine and Two Wolves drifted away from the column and went their separate ways. Each had to somehow erase the sight of the massacre from their mind, and each had to do it in his own way. Somehow.

  Sam August Webster Two Wolves rode in search of his father’s burial site, and Matt Bodine rode to search for peace of mind. Both quests would prove to be very elusive for the young men.

  For the Cheyenne and the Sioux, the victory at the Little Bighorn would be their last. Within two years, the majority of the plains tribes would be on reservations, for the Army, after the humiliation at what was being called Custer’s Last Stand, would become relentless in their pursuit of the Indians . . . but that’s another story.

  Bodine spent the summer alone, riding aimlessly along the Montana/Wyoming border.

  Two Wolves finally located his father’s burial site—after speaking with various bands of Indians—his father’s body wrapped in a blanket, suspended high in the air on a lonely ridge. Two Wolves picked sweet sage and sprinkled it around the site and on himself, to purify both. Then he prayed and fasted.

  Bodine and Two Wolves met again in the valley of the Little Bighorn. Both had been drawn there by the many visions they suffered alone through the long nights. They camped there for several weeks, and it was a balm to soothe invisible wounds. When they finally pulled out, they knew they could now live with the memories of that day back in June, 1876.

  The ghosts that still ride the ridges and would do so forever spoke to them. They would never mention those ghostly riders to anyone, and they would seldom talk about them to each other. But both knew what they saw, and they knew better than to question the order of nature.

  And Tom Thomas, his empire shattered, his men scattered, and Terri Kelly gone to only God knew where, decided to ride west.

  He awakened one morning with fear clutching his heart with cold fingers.

  He was surrounded by Indians, Lone Dog smiling down at him.

  “Tom Thomas,” Lone Dog said contemptuously. “Do you believe it is a good day to die?”

  Chapter 33

  Bodine and Two Wolves returned to their home range as summer was waning. Bodine’s parents took one look at the young men and knew they had been forever changed. They did not know the how or the why of it, only that it had happened.

  And being people of the West, who minded their own business, they did not press the point.

  Over coffee on the front porch, the elder Bodine said, “The Army found what was left of Tom Thomas. The scout with the patrol said, from the looks of things, he did not die well.”

  “Lone Dog?” Two Wolves asked.

  “The scout thinks so. Did you boys stop by the battleground at the Little Big Horn?”

  “We stopped.” His son told him that much and nothing more.

  The man looked at Two Wolves. “Was your father . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was for a time. I am no longer in sorrow. My father died a warrior’s death, counting coup. I believe he went on the hill to die.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I have talked to Indians who were in the battle.” This was true. “My father was armed only with a coup stick.” That was also true, but no Indian had told him that.

  “Well,” the elder Bodine said with a sigh, “I reckon you boys will settle down now and ranch, right?”

  The young men exchanged glances. “Wrong,” his son told him.

  “Boy!” The father half rose from his chair, a note of exasperation in his voice. “You’re twenty-five years old, damnit! You both have ranches that could be money-makers; are money-makers. What in the Sam Hill are you two going to do?”

  “Drift,” Two Wolves took the heat off his brother. Mrs. Bodine stamped her foot on the porch floor and crossed her arms under her breasts. She looked like she wanted to cuss.

  “Drift,” the father said disgustedly. “Two twenty-five-year-old kids.”

  Bodine and Two Wolves said nothing in rebuttal.

  “It won’t be forever, Dad,” Bodine assured him
. “And I wish I could tell you the reason, reasons, for our feelings. But that’s going to have to stay locked up for a time. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Are you wanted by the law, boys?”

  “No, Dad. No. That isn’t it. Both of us have got to go up into the timber and the High Lonesome. We’ve got to ride the rivers and see what’s over the next mountain. Call it an . . . inner search, if you will.”

  “Your sister is getting married next month,” his mother told him.

  “I’m glad. But I won’t be here.”

  His mother said no more about it. She knew her son; knew that when he said he was going, even though he might have to move heaven and hell, he was going.

  “What about your ranch, boy?”

  “I’ll give Carl a working interest in it. I’ll draw up the papers all legal-like and you can witness it.”

  “That’s fair,” the father conceded. “The boy needs to get out of this house and stand on his own. Two Wolves?”

  “Slim Man is on my place now. I will hire others to help him. It is settled.”

  “I reckon it is,” the father spoke the words. “I only hope that someday you boys will tell me why you’re doing this.”

  * * *

  Bodine drew up the papers giving his brother a share in the ranch in exchange for his staying on it and running the sprawling spread. A large responsibility for one so young, but in the West, one grew up quickly.

  “You boys picked a hell of time to get itchy feet,” the elder Bodine pointed out. “What with winter lookin’ us in the face. Where are you headin’?”

  “We honestly don’t know, Dad. South, for sure, but how far south is up for grabs.”

  “I have never been to Arizona,” Two Wolves said. “I have talked to people who have told me about the deserts there. I would like to see them.”

  The father grunted. “Way I hear it, it’s too damn hot for my tastes. You boys be sure to post Mrs. Bodine a letter every now and then. Wimmen get right touchy about things like that.”

  “I shall write her regularly,” Two Wolves promised. “That way I know that she will at least hear from one of us.”

  “Very funny,” Bodine groused, tightening down the cinch on Rowdy. “I’ll write.”

  “It’ll damn sure be the first time,” his father said dryly.

  * * *

  They got to the west side of the Powder and looked at each other.

  “You serious about heading south?” Bodine asked.

  “I certainly have no desire to ride north with winter coming.”

  They pointed the noses of their horses south. They would follow the Powder all the way down to the South Fork of the river and then leave the river, heading into the Rattlesnake Hills and then over to cross the Sweetwater, staying to the east of the Green Mountains and the Great Divide Basin, which was not the most hospitable place in which to wander. They took their time, but always riding alert for trouble.

  They lost track of the days as they drifted, but they were forever being reminded of the slaughter they had witnessed at the Little Bighorn. Nearly every person they met on the trail, Indian and white, when they learned Bodine and Two Wolves were from the upper Wyoming country, wanted to know if they knew anything about the great battle between Custer and the Sioux and Cheyenne. Bodine and Two Wolves would tell them no and let the subject die.

  Then they began hearing about this beautiful blond lady who was running a bar down on the North Platte in the Medicine Bow Mountains. Young, people said. A real looker, others told them. It was worth the price of a drink just to look at her.

  “Has to be,” Two Wolves said.

  “Yeah. Terri Kelly. Want to drop in for a drink and some friendly conversation?”

  Two Wolves shrugged. “Why not?”

  They were still days away from the Medicine Bow range, with no plan to hurry along just to see Terri.

  “She’s got some gunslicks with her,” a grizzled old trapper told them over the fire one night. “Story is she robbed some rich man up in Montana; used to own a whole town up there, he did. So the talk goes. She grabbed his poke and run one night, she did. Her and some Texas gunfighter named Walker. He’s a bad one, boys. And mighty jealous of that blond-haired woman. I’d fight shy of that place was I you.”

  “You said gunhands. How many?” Bodine asked.

  “No tellin’. They come and go. Maybe ten, maybe thirty. Salty bunch. That place of hers is worser than them joints out on the Barbary Coast. Lots of folks gone in there alive through the batwings and come out dead through the back door, they pockets all turned inside out, if you know what I mean.”

  As they rode south, Two Wolves asked, with a smile on his lips, “What are we striving to be, Brother: the Robin Hoods of the West?”

  “I’m on no mission of mercy, Two Wolves. If folks want to get robbed and beat up and tossed in the alley, that’s their business. I want a hot bath, some food that you or me didn’t have to cook, and some corn for Rowdy. But we don’t have to get it in Terri’s town.”

  “I’d never hear the end of it if we didn’t. You’d be complaining about it all the way to Arizona.”

  They were still arguing when they rode into the little town.

  They rode in quietly, stopping first at the stables and seeing to their horses, then walking across the street and checking into the hotel. They left clothes at the laundry for the Chinaman to wash and iron and then went to a barber shop for a haircut and bath in tubs out back of the shop while they sent a boy over to the general store for fresh long-handles and jeans and shirts and socks.

  Scrubbed clean of dirt and any fleas they might have gathered during the long dusty days on the trail, the two young men resupplied for their journey, took the supplies back to the hotel, and then walked across the street to a cafe for a hot meal.

  They had wiped the dust from their guns and checked the action carefully, loading the cylinders up full. Two Wolves had taken to wearing a second gun, the left-hand gun butt-forward. He had been practicing his draw, since, as he put it, “If I am to be in the company of a notorious gunfighter, I’d better practice if I plan to stay alive.”

  “Very funny, Brother,” Bodine had told him. “You’re a real comedian.”

  They ate well and polished off a pot of coffee, conscious of the cafe’s counterman eyeballing them. “I know you,” he finally said. “You’re Bodine.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’d be the half-breed, Two Wolves.”

  “Correct.”

  “Thought it was you, Bodine. I seen you when you was just a kid; back when them hardcases braced you after that stagecoach run when they tried to rob you of that gold you was guardin’. That was some mighty fine shootin’. Mighty fine.”

  Bodine rolled a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He knew the counterman was leading up to something.

  “You boys headin’ over to the saloon after your smoke?”

  “We might be,” Two Wolves told him.

  The man smiled. “Thought that might be the case. I’ll just close up early and head on over there for a drink. The meal and the coffee is on the house.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Two Wolves acknowledged. “But why the generosity?”

  “This used to be a right nice little village. Had us a church and a little school for the kids to learn. Then that damn Terri woman and them gunslicks of hers come in. Must have been twenty-five or thirty killin’s over the past few months. Probably more than that; sometimes men go in that place and don’t nobody ever see them agin. Lots of miners drift in here with a hefty poke. Don’t nobody ever see them drift out agin. That woman is evil, boys. And that Walker is a devil. He’s supposed to have been kilt a dozen times over the years. But he’s still standin’ in his boots and still raisin’ Old Nick with them guns of hisn.”

  “I never heard of anybody or any gang ever treeing a western town,” Bodine said.

  “Oh, the town wasn’t treed right off. Terri and them gunhands of hers wa
s too smart to just ride in and do that. First the town marshal was kilt; shot in the back one night. We got us another one and he went out the same way. Nobody else wanted the job. The church and the school was burnt down. The mayor got hisself all in-volved with that blond-haired witch. It kinda went downhill from then on—if you know what I mean.”

  “Only too well,” Two Wolves said softly. He looked at the counterman. “Can you handle a gun?”

  “Shore can. I rode cavalry in the War between the States. They’s about a half dozen of us in town who still got the belly for some gunplay.”

  “You round them up,” Bodine told him. ‘We’re going to go back to the hotel and sit in the lobby; read the papers. Give us a sign when you’re ready. How many people does Terri have on her payroll?”

  “Twenty-five or thirty.”

  “Damn!” Two Wolves said. “All gunhands?”

  “Most of ’em, yeah. She’s into all sorts of things: robbin,’ rustlin,’ killin.’ You name it, and she’s got her finger in the pie.”

  Bodine and Two Wolves stepped out onto the boardwalk. Two Wolves said, “Well, here goes Robin and his Hood to the rescue.”

  “Which one of us is the Hood?”

  “I think we’d better leave that up to history.”

  “Let’s go read the papers.”

  “Right. Nothing like dying with a full stomach and a mind full of current events.”

  Chapter 34

  The counterman—he’d said his name was Max—walked by the hotel and nodded at the young men. He had a six-gun belted on and wore it like he knew how to use it.

  It was early in the afternoon but the saloon—the only one in town—was jumping with business.

  Bodine nodded at Max and the man walked on. Bodine waved a boy over to his side; the boy should have been in school and would have been had not Walker and his thugs burned the school—on Terri’s orders.

  Bodine handed the lad a note. “Go into the saloon and give this to Walker.” He gave the boy a silver dollar and that put wings on the boy’s feet.