by Will Henry
Chapter Fifteen
By Stark’s army maps it was 169 miles to Fort Reno.
The way Ben rode it, on point with Clint the whole fifteen days of it, it was four government freight wagon burn-outs and the charred ashes of three big emigrant outfits.
The blackened wagonboxes and heat-twisted wheelrims of the latter parties were long weeks past their firing, the half-burned oak planks already mercifully sinking into the shadow of the summer grass, the wheel irons, bed braces and scattered tracechains red-scaled with fresh rust. But the last of the government freight parties was something else again.
Bodies keep well in the high, dry air of central Wyoming.
And these had not been too long in the keeping.
Where they buried the last of them, shallowly scooped into the thin soil, dignified only by a brooding cairn of loose rock, the tenuous, blue-white wisps of hardwood smoke were still curling skyward from the embers of the gutted Conestogas.
Ben rode quickly on with the burial party.
The herd dust was growing faint ahead, there was nothing more a man could do for the poor devils.
But in their staring eyed, twisting limbed stillness there was something they could do for him. They could tell him, without him thinking too hard about the yellow sign on that Arkansas buffalo skull, which of the red brothers had passed this way.
The variety and imagination displayed in the mutilations were pretty standard for the breed: some scalped, some partly scalped, some not scalped at all; an ear missing here, a forearm or foot, there; one, a pincushion of arrows in the bowels, another, a sieve of buffalo-lance holes through the kidneys, a third, leg-spraddled, with the genitals excised.
But all, and every one, no matter his other disfigurements, was bound to his dead fellows by one common brutality: the throat, opened and gaping from ear to ear.
The scouts at Laramie had told Ben much about the Sioux. Enough and to spare, for him to correctly read the stark sign around the freight wagon burn-out.
The northern Indians were not, unlike their southern Kiowa and Comanche cousins and in defiance of popular eastern belief, commonly given to mutilation of their victims. The burning pole, the rawhide rack, the sun stakeout, the ant heap and the hundred-and-one refinements of the art of doing in the white brother were not ordinarily for the taller, more patrician warrior of the north plains. When he did so stoop to conquer, a man could know that the last milepost had just been passed and that business as usual was out the Oglala window. Any step he took beyond the point of finding Sioux mutilations, he took with the certain knowledge that all the red chips were in the middle of the trade-blanket and that the next raise would likely be his own scalp.
About now a man could take some comfort in the fact that Fort Reno would be reached with tomorrow’s drive. And while taking that comfort he could compound it with the uneasy thought that wagon burn-outs or otherwise, they had not seen so much as a Sioux feathertip or fleeting glimpse of distant paint-splashed pony, the whole of the one hundred and fifty miles behind them.
It was anything but a salubrious air which settled in over the little camp with the thin, quick chill of the Wyoming night, five hours later.
Stark and Ben sat long over the chuckwagon fire, watching and listening into the outer darkness. The former consoled himself with the repeated statement that the nearness of Fort Reno guaranteed their safety for the moment. The latter, not arguing the hopeful point, kept his thoughts to himself. Shortly after nine o’clock they had visitors. And shortly after that, considerable of the starch went out of the Montanan’s self-stiffening optimism.
They both heard the cheery hail at the same time. Looking up, they saw an old man and a boy sitting their stout mountain ponies just beyond the fire’s farther reach.
“Where in the devil did you come from!” Stark’s indignant question exploded with nerves, and with the upset of the fact that two horses could be walked right into his camp past the pickets Ben had insisted on putting out every night since Laramie.
“Git down and come in, dad,” invited Ben soberly. “Coffee’s on and boilin’ away.” Then, curiously. “C’mon now, how’d you git past our boys, old salt?”
The old man was still smiling as he and the youth got down and left their reins trailing.
“Not much to playin’ whites when you practice on reds,” he shrugged. “Me and the boy, here, been a long time north of the Powder.”
He was a trapper from the old days, before there was an Oregon Trail or John Bozeman had been born. The boy was his grandson, raised by him when the Crows had cornered his parents up in the Three Forks country, “along about ’59.”
When he and the boy had eaten, the old man packed his short stone pipe, answered a few equally short, hard questions.
“Wal, now, it’s thisaway,” he squinted in reply to Ben’s query as to what had put him and the boy to nightriding. “Ye see, I bin in these hyar parts a tolerable spell. Long enuf to know plumb nigh ever Injun south of Canady by his fust name. Ye treat ’em white and ye don’t go to hoggin’ on their buffler and ye stays a decent piece out’n their way, ye gits on with ’em and ye gits to know ’em. En they’re funny onct they ever take to ye.”
“Uh-huh,” grunted Ben. “How’s thet? How funny I mean, old-timer?”
“Wal, hyar’s a case in p’int, me and the young un, yonder. Long ’bout three days gone, one of ’em rides up to our cabin one night. He gits down, hogs four, five pounds of our fresh buffler hump, he’ps hisse’f to three, four pipefuls of my long-leaf, gits back on his potbellied scrub and grunts, ‘Kola tahunsa he mani-mani.’ Thet thar’s Sioux palaver fer, ’Friends, Romans and feller country-folk, take yerse’ves a walk.’
Ben nodded. “Thet there ‘mani-mani’ means pasear, thet it?”
“Wal, I lay it does. Mani means walk. When they double it up on you, they don’t mean trot.”
“The buck was tellin’ you to git out, eh?”
“And fur out,” grunted the trapper. “Likewise, some fast.”
He paused, not grinning anymore. “Me and the boy didn’t wait fer sunrise. We been a hundred and fifty miles since then. Got another hundred and fifty yet to Laramie, I calculate.”
“On the nose,” said Ben. “You see any Injuns on yer way down?”
“Country’s thicker with ’em than screw worms in a heelfly hole. Never see it so bad since the Crows ris up and cleaned out Jackson’s Hole.”
Nathan Stark, silent through the brief exchange, now said quickly. “You and the boy better stay with us, old fellow. You’ll be safer here.”
“Youngster,” said the old man eying him. “We’re beholden to ye fer the supper, but I allow ye’ve got a sight to l’arn about redskins. The further’st place I hanker to be shet of is this hyar camp o’ yourn.”
He broke off the words to nod to the boy, and move with him toward their drowsing ponies. Mounted up, he kneed his horse close in to the fire, accenting the observation with stabs of his stone pipe. “Anytime ye got more’n two white cow chips stacked in the same pile they’ll draw Sioux flies till hell won’t cut the crust they’ll lay on ye.”
“Hold up, old hoss,” said Ben. “What Sioux we got in front of us? Oglala, ain’t they?”
“Wal, now thar’s some Hunkpapa mixed in with ’em but they’re mainly Dirt Throwers, like as not.”
“Dirt Throwers?”
Ben wasn’t set on making a life study of the Sioux, but all a man could learn of them wouldn’t be a shade too much for right now.
“Oglala,” grunted the old man.
“I thought they was the Throat Cutters,” said Ben, puzzled.
“Now, thet’s the name fer any Sioux. Thet’s what their Nation calls itse’f—Throat Cutters. They’s six er seven tribes of ’em, all told. Thar’s the Brule, them’s the Burnt Thighs, the Hunkpapa, as calls themse’ves the Border People, the Wahpetons, Fallin’ Leafs, and such like. The Oglalas is the Dirt Throwers.”
“Obliged,” nodded Ben soberly. T
hen, quickly adding. “Red Cloud’s their big chief, thet right?”
“Old Makhpiya? Hell no. He’s a tame Injun, mister. Been to Washin’ton, shook the Grandfather’s hand, rid the iron hoss and all thet. Folks back yonder gen’rilly think he’s the bad un, but he ain’t by a fur piece. Out hyar, we know a heap different.”
“How different, Old-timer?”
Somehow Ben knew his questions were getting close. He could feel, without being able to say why, that the last answer was going to be the big one.
“Young un,” said the old man, peering long and thoughtfully at him. “You look to have a fair-sharp eye in yer haid.” He turned his horse with the final nod, his warning coming back to them from the closing darkness beyond the fire.
“See you keep it peeled fer a raunchy leetle buck don’t look no more like a chief nor a half-starved Osage squaw. Mean-skinny leetle bastard, alius rigs hisse’f out in a black wolfskin and bright red Three Point.”
Ben’s eyes widened, his mind flashing to Timpas Creek and back in the second it took him to come up off his heels.
“What’s he call hisse’f?”
He shouted it quickly over the fire, into the darkness, the excitement in it narrowing Nathan Stark’s eyes as suddenly as it had the tall Texan’s. When Ben Allison jumped up like that, it had to be something.
Stark knew his trailboss.
The old trapper’s answer, soft called and fading back over the clip-clop of his mount’s departing hoofbeats, was indeed something. With a fair amount to spare.
“Tashunka Witko,” came the muffled reply. And then, still farther off, just before all sound died away—“Crazy Hoss!”
Minutes later, with the late moon three quarters past full and smoky orange with the pocking shadows of old age, climbing wearily up out of the distant Big Horns, Ben came to Nella’s tent.
It was a commodious, new, army shelterhalf provided by the solicitous junior officers at Leavenworth, and pitched now, as always, in the campside lee of Stark’s lead wagon. Ben stepped softly as he came up to it, thinking to find the girl asleep and not wanting to awaken her if she was.
“Get down and come in, tall man.” The soft voice startled him. He had not seen her sitting in the inky triangle of the tent’s entrance. “We haven’t seen you since the Sedalia Trail.”
“Seems like it,” sighed Ben, sinking to the folded buffalo robe beside her. “Herdin’ cows is a forty-eight-hour job, I reckon.”
“You’ve been wonderful at it, Ben.”
He thrilled to the continuing caress of her voice. And thrilled, too, to the signal it gave him that he had come up to her in one of those moments of strange, rare softness she could show.
“Mebbe,” he said awkwardly. “Mebbe not. Leastways it’s all I got to offer. Somehow, it don’t seem like much, lately. Not near enough, anyhow. I dunno, it’s what I come to see you about.”
“What, Ben?”
“You and me.”
“What about you and me?”
He looked into the darkness, trying to find the words. “It’s what I dunno, Nella. Mebbe you kin tell me. Where are we, girl?” he finished haltingly. “And where we goin’?”
“In Wyoming, boy.” He could not see the smile, but he felt it. “Going to Montana, I hear.”
“It’s not what I mean.”
“I know, Ben, I know—”
He didn’t say anything, and presently she went on.
“You’re good, Ben. Tall and strong and gentle and kind. And sweet, too, Ben. Inside-sweet, the way that gets into a girl, and deep into her, to where she can’t see you without her breath pulls long and slow and her arms hurt and for no damn reason at all she wants on a sudden to let down and cry her heart out.”
“Nella—!”
“Wait, Ben. I got to say it.”
“Say it, then.” He drew back, the sharpness in her voice warning him and holding him away. “Say it soft if you kin, Nella.”
“Oh, Ben, that’s just it. I can’t say it soft. It isn’t in me that way. I don’t feel it like that. Ben, it’s no different now than it was when you stumbled in out of the snow on that cussed black horse of yours. Nor than it was when you slid in under that emigrant wagon and yelled at me to keep the bastard covered. Nor than when you toted me into that blessed cave, carrying me in out of the wind and putting me down, and patting me and holding my hand the whole while like I was a little kid or something. Nor than when you looked at me like a wet hounddog somebody had kicked out of the kitchen, when I told you I was going to deal a table for Stark in the Black Nugget.”
“All right, Nella—”
She swept on, not hearing his patient, tired acceptance of the way it was.
“No, Ben, nor than it was when you stood back out of the way all of that long ride to Fort Worth. Letting that crazy Clint make over me like a lovesick Comanche. And watching Stark ogle me and give me all that tall talk about Virginia City and what a hell of a swath he was going to cut through Montana, and letting on like half of it could be mine if I was smart enough to tell a big man from a dumb cowboy, and all such like. And you all the time looking at me like a rib-gaunted herd bull with the bellyache, not having sense enough to know where it was hurting you nor what to do about it. Nor yet being bright enough to get out of the way and go along when you’d been tailed-up and told off—”
She paused, breathless from the building emotion of the long outbreak. She took his hand in the darkness, suddenly, fiercely.
“Oh. Ben, I’ve tried not to hurt you. Tried to keep you from selling yourself notions I didn’t want to pay off when it came my turn. I can’t keep it up any longer. You’re all that’s good and sweet to me in the whole world, Ben. Oh, God! It isn’t fair this had to happen to you—”
Ben looked away, and far away. To the Arkansas and back, slow-traveling every hurtful, heart-tug mile of it in his lonely memory.
“Nella,” he said at last, “I came here to tell you I love you.”
He had never put it in the words before. He felt her hand tighten suddenly in his, when he did. But the miles had grown too long for sympathy, the night too late for any hand squeezing. “I’m sorry.” He went on, fighting down the sink and sickness inside him, keeping his voice down.
“Ahead, we got bad trail. It may be we don’t make it through. I wanted you to know how it was with me, and will alius and forever stay. A man don’t like to square into what we got waitin’ fer us, uptrail, with suthin’ like thet inside him. I’ll alius love you, Nella. There ain’t been none afore you. There cain’t be none after.”
He stood up then, but she did not free his hand. Instead, she arose with him, stood watching him, waiting and wordless. He hesitated a moment, helpless in that last dead silence after a man has offered his heart, only to have it handed back, and before he can bear to take it again and turn away.
“Thanks,” he said at last, “for listenin’ and lettin’ me know.”
There was no cynicism, no reproach in the way he said it. It was just goodbye in the best, honest way he knew to say it. “Git some sleep now, Nella, and don’t fret about the Injuns, you hear? We beat ’em once, you and me. I reckon we kin do it agin. And jest fergit the rest of it, girl, you hear now?”
The moon was angling above the wagonsheets, then, slanting its waning light across his lean face. She saw the shadow of the remembered grin, felt its slow-turning edge twist in her heart.
“I reckon, Nella,” said Ben Allison softly, “you don’t have to shove the backhouse over atop me to run me out’n it.”
He saw her smile, then. The old, quick, bright smile. And saw behind it in the same unbelievable moment, the moon-glitter of the black-lashed tears.
“Oh, Ben! Ben! You’ve still got it just as backwards and blind-wrong as ever. The moon’s in my eyes, boy, look at me, Ben, look at me! Do I have to tell you—”
“Mebbe you do, Nella,” he muttered hoarsely, hearing and seeing her, not able to believe it, or not daring to. “You said you didn’t want
to hurt me no more. I—”
Her hands slid to his shoulders, the soft weave of her body coming into him, warm-close and full. The tears were running now, racing the hollows of the shadowed cheeks, choking the throaty catch of her voice. “My Ben,” she sobbed. “My sweet, dumb, wonderful, big Ben! You’re making me say it, boy. You’re tearing it out of me—”
The slender arms tightened convulsively as she pulled herself swiftly up and into him.
“I love you, Ben. God forgive me, I love you—!”
Chapter Sixteen
The badlands of central Wyoming began in brooding earnest some miles south of old Fort Reno. For most of the remaining way the Bozeman Road skirted their fringe, being relatively level and open. Nearing Reno, however, the road veered sharply into them, the last fifteen miles below the fort being a trap of crossridges and timbered hills of considerable elevation.
It was this country into which Ben nervously eased the herd at five o’clock the morning of October 15.
Nothing happened.
By noonhalt they had seen no hostile sign whatever. The only things silhouetting the crowded hills were the stunted yellow pine and native hemlock of the region. The sole alien force sweeping down from them upon the restless Texas herd, was the lonely sough and whistle of the autumn wind.
With the cattle back on trail at two o’clock, moving briskly with the smell of water ahead and with Reno and the Powder River but eight miles, four hours, ahead, Ben eased back in the saddle. For once Stark had been right. Apparently they did indeed have the herd too close to the military for Sioux comfort.
The scouts at Laramie had done their best for Ben in the few hours the big Texan was available to them. But you don’t teach the more delicate shadings of Sioux culture in a few hours, regardless how hard the student listens. Ben’s Indian education left off a little short of Fort Reno, Wyoming Territory.
About four miles short, to be exact.
At precisely 3.30 P.M. by Nathan Stark’s fine gold pocket watch.
