by Will Henry
There was no warning.
No orthodox gathering atop the nearest hill, to form a line of painted ponies and eagle feather war bonnets.
No accepted protocol of hurled insults and dire predictions of the brief and bloody shrift facing the rash white brother, ahead of the warwhooping charge.
And, in fact, not even any warwhoops to begin with.
One minute the herd was passing peacefully around the precipitous flank of a curving, timberless ridge. The next second a silent, crouched double horde of ocher-smeared tribesmen was bombarding its unshod ponies over the southern shank of the ridge and down onto the straggling drag.
Perhaps “horde,” historically, was an overstatement. It only seemed like one to the startled cowboys hazing the drag. They could see nothing but herd dust, stampeding cattle, flashes of piebald horsehide, the bob and whip of feather headdresses and, now that they were full into the herd, the harshly screaming faces of the hostile riders.
Actually, there were only about fifty of them. But to the dumbfounded cowboys of the drag, four in number, under the dour chaperonage of old Chickasaw Billings, they seemed like fifteen hundred.
Technically, they may as well have been. The Indian never sends a papoose to do a brave’s work. These dark-skinned Wyoming missionaries were long years off the cradleboard. They did their work quickly and with honest pride.
Three thousand cattle on drive, no matter you’re nervous and have them bunched as close as they will walk, cover a lot of trail. Ben, riding point with Clint and Stark, was a full mile north of the point of ambush and well out of sight of it around the bend in the ridge, when the distant shrill of the first war cries stood his ash-blond hair on end.
By the time he raced his black clear of the ridge and could see what was happening, it was no longer happening.
The hollow boom of the Indian trade muskets and the staccato bicker of the cowboy Colts died as suddenly as it had started. He could see only the dust hanging over the rear of the herd. In the time it took him to gallop the black back along the bawling cattle, picking up the eight swing riders on the way, that dust had begun to lift and he could see a little more. Enough, at least, to let him see what was under it.
And what was under that dust was—nothing.
The drag was gone.
He slid the black to a stop, legging off of him and running to where Chickasaw crouched over the two white men on the ground. He was in time to get the old cowboy’s dry-cursed story, and to verify it with his own squinting glance along the southern spur of the ridge.
Just disappearing over that ridge at stampeded tilt, howled on their way by the wheeling red riders behind them, were the two or three hundred cattle of the drag.
The two cowboys stretched in the trail were not dangerously wounded, but they would never see Montana that fall. One had an arrow through his left side, low down and in the flesh and missing the bowel, but driven clear through. The other had taken a smoothbore musket ball where it hurt his dignity as a worthy son of Texas more than it endangered his immediate future among the living.
It was Clint’s hard-grinned guarantee that he wouldn’t “likely set a saddle in any notable degree of comfort till the grass turned green agin.”
Stark, even amid the uproar, holding bluntly to business as usual, insisted the first duty lay with the injured riders. Ben, sparing a quick look at the degree and nature of their wounds, and exchanging dry Texas diagnoses with their indignant sufferers, allowed they wouldn’t die short of sundown and, with the entire cursing agreement of the stricken twain, reckoned the prime responsibility lay with the missing cattle.
Stark at once bucked him. When he did, western good humor in the face of adversity lost its earthy salt and turned alkali.
“By God,” said Ben slowly, “you go ahead and squander your time ridin’ to the fort and fetchin’ back your army ambulance. These boys ain’t goin’ to expire, less’n it’s from shame. But happen we don’t git them cattle back and stomp them damn redguts into the dirt, expirin’ is apt to git wholesale hereabouts. You onct leave a Injun run over you, he’ll stampede you silly, you hear me?”
“Ben!”
Stark jumped it at him, bulldog jaw outthrust.
“I don’t want any pursuit of those Indians. I say it’s a trick to draw us away from the trail. Let them have the cattle, we can spare them. We’ll drive on right now. That’s an order, Ben.”
“Why, yes sir,” said Ben soberly “I’ll take thet order jest as soon’s I git back, too. You see iffen I don’t.”
He broke away from Stark, wheeled on the gathering cowboys.
“Chickasaw, Waco, Hogjaw, Slim, Charley—you go along with Clint and me. The rest of you git back around the herd. Hold it right where it damn stands. Bunch the wagons and make these two heroes comfortable. Mr. Stark—” he spun back to the Virginia Citian—"you give my regards to Major Whoozis at Fort Reno. And git the goddam hell out’n my way.”
He took the black from Clint, who had been holding him, swung up and kicked him into a gallop. He did not look back at the men he had named. The five stared after him a minute, ran for their reins-trailing ponies. Boarding them on the fly, they slapped the Petmakers home, bunched in a sod-showering gallop on Ben’s rear. Their surprise wasn’t anchored in the gangling trailboss’s all-out hurry, but in his unexpected, back-to-the-wagons direction. Chickasaw voiced their company confusion the minute he could spur his rawboned gray alongside Ben’s big black.
“Whut in the name o’ Christ you aimin’ to do, Ben? Change inter a goddam pink coat and set o’ lilywhite draws, and mebbe set out a dish o’ blighty tea ’fore we up and dash off arter the friggin’ fox?”
“Suthin’ like thet,” grinned Ben.
The weathered Chickasaw had noticed that the time these Allison boys went to grinning on you was along about the stretch most others would be weeping themselves red-eyed. Especially this damn, sobersided, six-and-a-half foot Ben, who never seemed to smile unless it was raining and the herd washing away down the river.
“Sech as suthin’ like what?” he shouted sourly.
“Foxes,” waved Ben. “Them’s tolerable big ones, I reckon. And a right sizable pack of ’em. I ain’t aimin’ to run ’em down with Sam Colts and slow-loadin’ muzzleguns.”
Chickasaw peered at him. Most of the boys carried Colts only. The few who packed saddleguns had either old Civil War carbines or even older, whipstick muzzleloaders. “Hell!” he snorted. “They’s only fifty o’ the bastards!”
Ben slid the black up to the lead wagon. “Save your breath, oldtimer,” he laughed. “Gimme a hand with these here boxes.”
It was the first time Chickasaw or any of the boys had seen the five big packing boxes. Even Clint was getting his first eyeful of them.
But in a land where a man’s best friend is his gun, and his next best, his horse, and dogs didn’t even come close to it, the stenciled legend along the narrow sides of the five boxes was in a language they could read as clear as the click of a Colt hammer. “THE REMINGTON ARMS COMPANY, IL-LION FORGE, N. Y.” was a tongue understood and accepted in the West, second only after that of “COLT PATENT FIREARMS COMPANY, HARTFORD, CONN."
It was seven o’clock and full dark when Ben first caught the telltale red stain against the night sky off to their left. “Jest like I thought,” he grunted to Clint. “They didn’t allow they’d be shagged.”
“Yeah,” nodded Clint. “I bet they ain’t bin really slapped down since the damn army let ’em bluff it inter closin’ the Bozeman. You know what thet blunthead, Stark, told me, Ben?”
“How’s thet?”
“That goddam Carrington’s got six hundred men up to Kearney and another two hundred down to Reno. Kin you imagine thet many whites knucklin’ to two, three thousand Injuns?”
“Well,” grinned Ben, “there’s herd-run whites, and then there’s Texicans.”
“You jest said a mansize mouthful,” laughed Clint. “Leave us git on along and live up to it.”<
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“At the same time,” broke in Waco Fentriss acidly, “leave us remember the dear, sainted Alamo.”
“Yeah,” breathed Charley Stringer uneasily. “Even Texicans kin be outnumbered.”
“Bushway!” growled Chickasaw, sticking manfully to his earlier estimate. “They’s no more’n fifty o’ the bastards.”
“Agin seven,” drawled Ben, reining the black westward, toward the fire’s glow. “And a box of Remin’ton Rollin’ Block rifles.”
“They shore load like a dream,” was Hogjaw’s irrelevant comment. With it, he headed the others after Ben and Clint, pushing his horse forward into the darkness.
Twenty minutes later, the seven cowponies were standing, reins trailing, in a slash of pine fifty feet below the skyline of the last ridge. And their baker’s half-dozen bow-legged riders were bellied down in the pine needles and rimrock of its crest.
Below them, sharp and clear against the spark and boom of a victory fire, not seventy-five yards away and with their red paunches sleepily swollen with good Texas beef, squatted thirty Sioux braves.
The missing twenty-or-so of their fellows were undoubtedly bedded down and sleeping off the gastronomic fruits of heavy Oglala industry. In any event, what time Ben and his companions felt they had at their disposal was not squandered in guessing games as to the whereabouts of the missing score of red celebrants, but in laying a calm Texas eye down the barrel of a new Remington rifle onto the thirty victors then present—and soon to be accounted for.
Even in the dark, the new rifles loaded delightfully.
“Son of a bitch!” shouted Waco, flipping the falling block back and dropping in his third shell. “They go in like antelope tallow to a dry hub!”
“You ain’t jest whistlin’ Dixie!” chortled old Chickasaw, one up on Waco and slamming his fourth round, closed “And, mister, do they hold tight! Watch thet bastard runnin’ to the left, yonder—”
Waco, presently drilling his third Sioux out of the yelling mill of startled redmen below, had neither time nor inclination to observe Chickasaw’s called shot. Had he, he would have seen the thirteenth Sioux grab his belly and bounce into the sagebrush.
It was that wild and that short, from start to finish.
Within five minutes after the firing broke out along the darkened ridge, there wasn’t an Indian within buffalo-gun range of the stolen herd below.
Having but one way to estimate the numbers of their attackers—by the rapidity of their fire—the Sioux could only assume there were at least two dozen white riflemen along the ridge. These were not odds to the Oglala liking, and an every-redman-for-himself exit was in instant order.
Ben and his triumphant Texans had only to blow out the hot barrels of their new guns, amble down and board their ponies, put them over the ridge and into the level draw beyond, leisurely collect their borrowed cattle and head for home.
Well, there were one or two other little things.
Of the thirteen braves seen to drop, they could find but five. They were left to figure that the hostiles, as they always did when sheer guts and superb horsemanship could bring it off, had somehow gotten the other eight aboard ponies and carried them off. The “one or two other little things” came in when it was discovered that two of the braves left behind were still alive.
Chickasaw did the honors, with a hand well trained in such basic courtesies from thirty years, and more, of life beyond the fringe of white settlement life in West Texas.
When Ben ordered him out and away, to join the other boys with the cattle, himself lingering behind to kick out the fire, all five of the red brothers were long past pain: the final two of them staring peacefully up at the Wyoming stars around a powder-burned hole between the eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
They lost another three days at Fort Reno while Stark fretted over the advice of his friend Major Randall, Randall’s opinion was that of Colonel Lamine at Laramie, ominously compounded.
Lamine had given them a slight chance, Randall gave them none.
He did, however, give them tacit permission to move on to Fort Kearney. It was first suggested by him and agreed to by Stark that a courier be sent to Kearney seeking Carrington’s clearance to that point. Ben, sensing a risk in this, argued weather with Stark. It was October 18. They could not chance an hour’s delay. It was the fractional uncertainty of the Sioux against the dead-zero sureness of a deep snow.
Stark, looking at the herd and seeing thirty-five dollars every time he saw a fat steer, folded. He went back to Randall and put the pressure on.
The old army game already had a long beard in 1866. You played it no differently, using the same weary buck and tired pass thereof. Nathan Stark was a big man; a political power in the territory with friends up to the rank of major general strung through the chain of command from Leavenworth to the Powder and beyond to Carrington himself.
The herd moved out for Fort Phil Kearney and Colonel Henry Carrington.
But after a long night of trying to sleep with his unauthorized decision, the good major wrote a covering letter and dispatched it to Kearney. He had, reluctantly, the report stated, permitted a Mr. Nathan Stark of Virginia City, Montana, to pass a herd of three thousand mixed breeding and beef cattle with clearance to Fort Kearney on the basis of the fact that Colonel Lamine had cleared the herd up the Bozeman from Laramie and that his, Randall’s, authority could not take precedence in the matter without written direction from Carrington. There had been, further, some concern of a personal friendship with the commander at Kearney brought forward by the Montana civilian. Major Randall expressed his regrets and respects and requested further orders.
The courier was an old hand and a wise one. He rode only by night, and a roundabout course. Result of this Sioux circumspection was that an infuriated Carrington received news of Stark’s approach only when Ben had the herd sixty-two miles north of Reno and a short seven south of Kearney.
Further result was that the wary Texan, outriding his point by four miles, rode up over a saddleback rise in the trail three miles from the fort, squarely into Company F, Troop C, Second United States Cavalry, Captain William J. Fetterman, Commanding.
Fetterman was a career officer, very impressed with his two silver bars, his unrecognized genius as a cavalry tactician, and his oft expressed disdain of the red brother. It had been his repeated boast that with fifty troops he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation. Accordingly, a simple company should be ample to halt three thousand cattle and thirty cowboys.
As a matter of record, it was.
Ben received Fetterman’s version of his superior’s ultimatum, along with the unauthorized sneer which came with it, calmly enough. A man had eyes, he had ears, he had, anyway, a part of a brain. There was the pompous little red-haired captain. There were his twenty nervous, green troopers. There were Colonel Henry B. Carrington’s angry orders. A man could take them or leave them.
Ben compromised.
He took the orders, left Captain Fetterman and his down-faced boys in blue.
But when, twenty minutes later, he galloped into Stark and the head of the herd, he was anything but calm. “We’re up agin another blockade,” he rasped. “This un ain’t goin to be no run-around like the Jayhawkers.”
“You’ve seen Carrington!” ejaculated Stark, thinking he had been to the fort and back.
“Naw, a sawed-off captain named Fetterman. He’s the colonel’s boy, howsomever. Brought us a billydoo from headquarters, likewise.”
“Well, man, what is it?” Stark scowled. “Don’t tell me they’re not going to let us through?”
“It ain’t mine to tell you nothin’, savin’ what Fetterman told me. You kin take it from there, and to Carrington, I allow.”
“Go on, for God’s sake.”
“We been give a quarantine line three mile south of the fort. Colonel needs the grass past that point fer his own stock. We ain’t to set a heifer’s hoof acrost thet line.”
The herd was held up at o
nce, thrown off the trail and onto graze. Stark departed for the fort. He was back by nightfall and, as Clint soberly put it, “You could see the dust from his cussed tail a’draggin’ a mile off.”
Fetterman hadn’t told them the half of it.
And Stark, ahead of that, in reporting the number of troops Carrington had at Kearney, had told them twice too much.
In the half-finished stockade ahead were less than three hundred men, a good part of them civilian packers and supply troops. Of regular troops, and most of them grass-green replacements, there were not over two hundred. Any question of a military escort up the Bozeman was grimly out. The order to halt the herd and not move it a stray head north of the three-mile line was official. And friendship or no friendship between him and Nathan Stark, Carrington would not hesitate to use his two hundred troops to enforce it.
Now they all knew where they stood.
In the middle of Wyoming, with winter coming on.
This time Stark took no vote. The grass and water were excellent where they were. There was good shelter from the high hills to the north, east and west. There was plenty of sizable timber within short hauling distance. And there were two hundred U.S. troops standing official guard only three miles away.
The Montanan continued to make his hard points as the cowboys gathered to listen in nodding silence.
They still had from three weeks to a month of open weather, barring a squaw winter. Lodgepole pine for corral rails stood by the slim thousand along the near hills. Heavier timber for sod huts and shelter sheds stood mixed in with it. By hard work and careful herding they could hope to winter through with reasonable losses. Then, with spring, they could backtrack, going over South Pass as originally suggested by Stark.
Clint, scowling at the stress on the last point, knew exactly what Stark meant.
The big slicker was going over Ben’s head again, getting to the men, putting the blame on his trailboss, saving none of it for himself. Again, he would have braced the Montanan on the spot, but once more Ben interceded, defending Stark. Before the call for fair play was decently out of Ben’s mouth, Stark was concluding his rationalization with the customary deft touch. With that touch, to Clint’s cynical satisfaction, he proved three points.
