by John Shirley
Wyatt and Sanchez both raised their right hands and tried to smile. The Indians drew up their horses, and looked them over. Wyatt felt the older man was sizing him up. He saw the Indian look at his gun, and his Winchester. The Indian was taking his measure, trying to decide, Wyatt suspected, if he were a fighter. A few words were passed between the Indians. The youngest one pointed at Henry, made a comment in his own language, and laughed.
Wyatt cleared his throat. “You speak their lingo, Tomas?”
“A little. I stayed four, five month with a band of Sioux, when I first come to Kansas. These are Dakota people. I don’t know …”
He began talking in their language, using hand-signs when his vocabulary failed him. The man with the silver streaks in his hair—the senior warrior in this band, if not their chief—replied at length, pointing at Henry.
“Wyatt … What’re they …” Henry began.
Wyatt signaled him to keep quiet. “Well, Tomas?” He’d let his right hand fall to his pistol but kept it there as if he were resting it on the butt of the gun.
“They say,” Sanchez murmured, “they are not at war with us, unless we refuse them.”
“Refuse them what?”
“The chico. Henry.”
Henry sat up straight on the wagon’s seat. “What!”
“They want him,” Sanchez said, simply, shrugging. “And your riding horse. And some food. And any gold you have. And your Winchester. And whiskey. But they especially want the boy. The chief man there, he wants a servant. He had a Chinese girl for a slave but she died. He needs a new slave.”
“The devil he does!” Henry burst out.
The Indians laughed at that, probably not understanding the words but realizing Henry’d been told what they intended.
“And if we give them Henry they’ll let us go, eh?” Wyatt asked, winking at Sanchez.
“Si, that’s what he say,” Sanchez said, his expression blank.
“Is it now …” Wyatt said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully and glancing sidelong at Henry. “The boy does eat a good deal …”
“Wyatt—you’re not going to …” Henry began. He broke off, and looked close at Wyatt. Then Henry’s shoulders slumped with relief. “You’re making game of me, damn you.”
Watching Wyatt and Henry, the warriors laughed again—which is what Wyatt had been hoping for. Men who will laugh with you might be less apt to kill you.
Wyatt sighed and shook his head. “I expect we’ll have to keep you, Henry.”
Sanchez spoke to the Indians again, pointing to Henry and shaking his head.
“What’d you say?” Henry asked.
Sanchez shrugged, chuckling at some private joke. “I say that Wyatt is a great warrior and you—you are wakanisha …”
Henry blinked. “What is that Walkin-Knees-a?”
“Means you is Wyatt’s son—and sacred to him.”
Henry looked at Wyatt, and then at the ground.
Sanchez made a gesture that was universal to white people and Indians—hold on, don’t be hasty, it said. Then he turned to Wyatt, speaking in an undertone. “They are Yanktonai Sioux. It is Humpapa Sioux who fight with white men, not the Yanktonai, he says—but he says they will do what they must, to get what they need. He has decided he need the boy.”
“They can’t have the boy,” Wyatt said, “and they can’t have any of my horses. Or my guns. But they can have what supplies I’ve got, for we’re almost to Deadwood. Tell them I’ll give them all the coffee I have—all the tribes love coffee, from what I’ve seen. They can have a five dollar gold piece, all my jerky and oats, and they can have my respect. Don’t leave out the respect, if you know how to say it.”
“Almost the first thing I learned to say,” Sanchez said. He spoke to the Indians, pointing at the wagon. The band conferred amongst themselves. They pointed at the horses, and again at Henry.
Wyatt said, “Ask the chief as respectfully as you can how good he is with that Springfield rifle. Tell him I’ve heard that men of his tribe are good shots. I’d like to know if he can shoot better than me. Just a friendly contest. We can shoot at pine cones. Make sure he understands I’m not threatening him …”
Sanchez smiled thinly, knowing that, in a careful, indirect way, Wyatt was doing just that.
He spoke to the Indians again, and waved a hand at the trees. The Indian with the silver in his hair—Wyatt thought of him as Silverhair—made an elaborate gesture which Wyatt didn’t understand, then swung his left leg over the horse’s neck, and slid easily off like a man jumping down after sitting on a high fence, the rifle held loosely in one hand. He gestured with the rifle, pointing at a lightning-blasted tree about sixty-five feet away—one side of the tree was burnt black and ashen, the other still green. One pinecone remained on the blackened side, easy to see between two twigs projecting down either side of it.
Wyatt gauged the distance to the pinecone. This would test his shooting, right enough. He was pretty good but not as good a shot as Bat, or a legendary shot like Hickok. Still, Wyatt had let himself in for the contest, now. He nodded his assent at the Indian.
The Indian popped his rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the pine-cone; he became motionless as a pillar of stone. There was silence for the space of a breath, and then he fired.
The pinecone flew into pieces, as the sound of the gunshot echoed through the hills. Rifle smoke wreathed around the Indian’s head, like laurels. The braves whooped with pleasure, and Silver-hair gave a single barking laugh.
Wyatt nodded, smiling. He climbed down off the wagon, and cocked his Winchester, feeling his palms sweaty against the cold metal and wood. He hoped to God he didn’t miss.
“Henry,” Wyatt said softly, “sit still as ever you can and keep your damn mouth shut.”
Wyatt brought the rifle-butt snug into his right shoulder, and aimed at a twig on the same branch.
He quieted his mind, and dropped his gun sights onto the twig. He pretended he wasn’t shooting to save his life; he pretended he was shooting with his brothers, for fun, back on the farm in Missouri. He fired, and the twig snapped in half.
“Ah!” said the Indians, appreciatively: a twig being harder to hit than a pinecone. Wyatt looked inquiringly at the weather-beaten chieftain, and could see the Indian hadn’t yet made up his mind.
So Wyatt put the rifle in the back of the wagon. He drew his pistol, cocked it, extended his arm, steadied his right hand with his left, aimed at a second twig on that distant branch—and fired in the way that Bat Masterson had taught him to shoot a pistol, out on the prairie: you look at what you’re shooting at, not at the sights, and you hope for the best.
The sound of the gunshot racketed off the dark rocks of the hillside …
He missed the twig. But the bullet struck the branch, which broke in half, and hung down without breaking off.
The Indians murmured approval, assuming he’d been aiming at the branch.
Wyatt lowered his gun, hoping the Indians couldn’t see his hands shaking. He rested the butt of the six gun on his upper leg, pointing at the sky; he put his thumb on the hammer spur, ready to cock it, and he looked Silverhair in the eyes.
Slowly lowering his gaze, Wyatt looked at the Indian’s chest. He deliberately and consciously picked out a spot there, to shoot at. Just above the rows of porcupine quills, on the right side. He looked again into Silverhair’s eyes—and back at that spot on his chest.
Then Wyatt waited, sitting with his back straight, ready for anything but trying not to seem hostile.
You’ll be first, Wyatt was wordlessly saying. And I’m ready to make it so, if I have to. But I’m in no hurry for a fight.
The Indian grunted to himself and spoke to Sanchez.
“He say okay, he take only the coffee and the other things you say. And he ask, can he have that ax, in back there?”
Wyatt nodded. “Sure. I can buy another. I’ll throw in a good knife too.”
The Sioux spoke again. Sanchez said, “I think maybe he asks
for ammunition. I do not know their word for it.” He tapped his own cartridge belt inquiringly. The Indian nodded and made a sharp, decisive gesture with his hand. “Yes. And he makes up his mind for these ammunitions, because you make him waste a shot—he does not have many bullets.”
Wyatt considered. They might use any ammunition he gave them against his own people. Then again, they seemed disinclined to fight. They weren’t a warring bunch. Strictly speaking, what with the fighting that’d been going on in the Black Hills, he should give them no ammunition. But he had Henry to think of. And out here, a man had to be willing to bend some of his principles, just a little, if he was going to get through alive. He made up his mind. “Sure, I’ll give him a box of shells, if he promises to use them only for hunting.” It was not the first compromise on his standards he’d made in his life. Nor would it be the last.
When the gifts were given and the Sioux had ridden past them single file down the trail, Henry blew a long breath out and turned to Wyatt. “It’s tolerable hard to hit something at that distance with a pistol, ain’t it?”
“It is,” Wyatt admitted.
“Well why didn’t you use the rifle for your second shot?” Wyatt considered. “Because—I can fire the pistol more rapidly. There was plenty of Indians to shoot at, if it came to that. I wanted that six gun in my hand. And I figured it’d impress him more if I hit the target with the pistol.”
“What if you’d missed?”
“To tell you the truth,” Wyatt said, “I did miss. I was aiming at the twig.” Sanchez laughed, and Wyatt went on, “But they seemed to think I was aiming at the branch. I reckon you got a guardian angel, Henry. Because the plain truth is, it’s a miracle I hit either the twig or the branch with that handgun. I’m just not that good a shot …”
* * *
They had come to Whitewood Creek, the stream that ran through Deadwood Gulch, and found a rutted track running alongside it toward the boomtown. Every forty yards or so was a broken-down placer-mining sluices, built of splintery wood angled along the creek with here and there an abandoned rocker-box. Hillocks of earth were grouped randomly along the trail, some of them six feet high, as if giant gophers had been at work: miners had been digging exploratory shafts, in places where they’d found the right kind of quartz—or where some gold-dousing rod had seemed to tug.
The town was still some miles off, Wyatt guessed, thinking back to the crude map he’d bought in Wichita, and the going was slow with the rattling, second-hand wagon; now and then it slowed even more as the team labored through patches of snow.
A lot could happen, Wyatt reflected, between here and Deadwood.
They rounded a bend to see, across the creek to their right, the entrance to one of the deeply etched valleys typical of the Black Hills. Rising beyond the farther end of the valley was another set of darkly eroded hills, and above them, snowcapped in the distance, was Harney’s Peak. But Sanchez was squinting south: he’d caught the flash of sunlight off metal on a hilltop, less than a mile back.
“Maybe a gun—or saddle-silver,” Sanchez said, pointing. “You see it?”
Wyatt turned in his seat. He saw nothing but hilltops, but he didn’t doubt Sanchez.
“Could be miners,” he said. “Or more Indians.”
“Could be Burke too,” Sanchez said. “That looks to me like light on silver, Deputy Earp. I have seen his saddle …”
Wyatt nodded, not bothering to remind Sanchez he was no longer “Deputy” Earp. He remembered the silver ring around the base of Burke’s saddle-pommel. “We’ve got some choices to think about …”
“We can get to town before he jumps us, maybe,” Henry said, squinting so hard toward the man on the hill that Wyatt suspected he needed spectacles.
“Not unless I want to abandon this wagon,” Wyatt said. “And I don’t. But you two could go ahead on.”
Henry snorted. “Then what the dickens is the p’int of coming along to this godfersaken parcel of ground? I come to find you. No sir, I’m staying with the wagon.”
Sanchez nodded, looking toward the far horseman. “Could be it is not him too,” he muttered.
Wyatt felt sure it was Burke. He didn’t know why he was so sure. But he was used to having intuitions that turned out to be right.
“Tell you what we’ll do, Tomas …”
* * *
Johann Burke was tired of this job. He had ridden long in the cold, expecting to get a Sioux bullet in his back at any moment; he had ridden hard, fording the Belle Fourche River, following deer trails and ridgelines, to get to this spot on the ridge, a place without women, without steak and whiskey—and no sensible man would go to any such place. He didn’t care for country outings. He didn’t even like to go to a city park. He liked to take a train from town to town, bring his horse along in the freight car. Ride out to the ranches if he had to, shoot whoever he had to shoot, collect his money, and get back on that train. Head to Kansas City or St. Louis, even Chicago for all the holiday he could afford. But working for Pierce was turning out to be a series of damned uncomfortable country outings. He’d even had to ride up to Kansas from Texas. He had sworn long rides off, after serving in the cavalry; after nights in the saddle hunched in the freezing rain, days baking in the sun. They’d done him a favor, reading him out of the cavalry. He had smiled, when the Captain had signed the papers, and thanked him for the dishonorable discharge—and then he’d laid for Captain Horton, one moonless night, and shot him from his horse. It was a matter of principle, even though he was glad to be out of the Army—it wasn’t right he should be drummed out just for raping an Indian girl. That Horton was a self-righteous Bible thumper. Would Custer have cared he’d had his way with the squaw? No. And the girl had lived, after all. Probably.
Now he got down off that same horse, which he’d appropriated from the Captain. He squatted and stood, two or three times, to stretch his aching legs, wondering if he had a saddle sore. It felt like it. He’d have to get a plaster for it. He’d make Earp pay for that, in advance.
Pierce had sent him to silence that loud-mouthed Henry McCarty brat; not to go after Earp. But McCarty had joined Earp—whom Burke had hated on sight—and he figured that’d save him work in the long run. As for that half-breed, it was just bad luck for him.
Pierce had only wanted Burke to put a scare into the boy, to keep him quiet. The cattle baron didn’t want his dirty laundry aired and the boy had spoken to a judge. Might be he wouldn’t stop at a bribed judge. There was a newspaper in Deadwood who might pick up on it, for starters if the boy opened his yawp there …
But scaring people wasn’t Burke’s specialty. And they’d tried scaring Henry McCarty quiet already, at the whorehouse that night. The only way to be sure of McCarty’s discretion was to shut him up for good. Burke figured he’d tell Pierce that the boy, old enough to use a gun, had tried to fire on him. Naturally, pressed with gunfire, Burk had to shoot the boy down. The McCarty kid might open up on him, at that.
Got to shoot him. And that means, Mr. Pierce, you owe me an extra two hundred in gold. Considering this long ride, make it three hundred.
Anyway, he’d would enjoy ridding the world of that goggle-eyed, bucktoothed little son of a bitch and that gaunt, self-righteous deacon of an itinerant lawman: a mere deputy, a fired deputy at that, who’d stared at him like he was some kind of vermin.
Burke got his spyglass from his saddlebag, and walked stiffly to the edge of the rocks rimming the cliff, then went down on one knee to peer over the edge of a low rectangular boulder. He focused the lens on the trail down below.
They’d pulled off the trail, right enough, though it was early in the day. He could just make out Earp, afoot, leading his team down to the creek. Looked like they were watering the horses, and getting some rest. They’d be long enough, Burke figured, for him to get within pistol shot. Or maybe the rifle was the way to go. He’d get the lay of the land as he went.
One way or another, he’d get them.
* * *
“Just stretch out there, Henry,” Wyatt said, “and don’t poke your head out no matter what you hear.”
“Goddamn it Wyatt—” Henry began. “I don’t want to lie around under the wagon while you do all the—”
“Don’t swear that way, boy,” Wyatt said absently, thumbing rifle cartridges into his Winchester.
Henry rolled his eyes. “I can shoot too, you know. Some.”
“Just stay under there. He’ll figure you’re taking a nap—or you’ve taken sick. There’s a shotgun next to you, loaded, but don’t you touch it, Henry, unless he gets past us and comes right on down here. You don’t use it unless you can make out the stitching on his boots.”
Wyatt hesitated, pretending to check that his rifle was fully loaded, though he knew it was. He was wondering if he were making a mistake in stopping here. Maybe just setting himself up for Burke. The swishing and clucking of the stream offered no reassurance: it would go on, ceaselessly, though they were all shot dead.
“We should get out from this open place, Wyatt, you and me,” Sanchez said. He started to look at the ridge, then remembered that Wyatt had told him not to. They were to pretend they didn’t know anyone was up there.
Wyatt decided he was already committed. He nodded, and cradled his rifle in his arms, setting out as if he were going into the trees to hunt.
He and Sanchez started across the creek, leaping from rock to rock to reach the farther side in four jumps.
