by Will Henry
There was the red hand, the broken gun, the yellow-ocher throat-cut line, all of it. A fifteen-foot billboard printed in circus colors and the King’s English, and signed by a scrupulous, Spencerian hand, could not have told a man any clearer or quicker who had killed his brother.
Or who was waiting to do as much for him.
It was Crazy Horse.
Ben lifted the buffalo skull away then, hating to touch it, hating to look beneath it—but having to.
It was the way he had thought it would be. The way, in that last minute, that his Kwahadi blood had read the sign of the picketed pony, the empty cartridges, the five Sioux warbags.
They had not scalped him, and his face and throat were unmarked.
Ambushed in the open, with no rock larger than a man’s head to hide behind, no tree thicker than a girl’s arm to put his back to, Clint had got down five Oglala braves before the blunthead buffalo arrow that was still in him had been driven to its feathers through his back. He had died a warrior’s death and the Sioux had given him a warrior’s due: the personal warbags of the braves he had taken with him, the powder-burned shells with which he had taken those braves, his pony picketed by his side with ample cut feed and clean water to bear his departed master on the long journey into Wanagi Yata, the Sioux Land of the Big Shadow. And they had left him his hair, the highest tribute of Sioux respect for great bravery.
Only his matched stag handled Colts were missing from among the trophies of last honor at his feet. Ben saw that and understood it. Human nature had its limits, even the inhuman variety owned by the Sioux. Two such wonderful specimens of “The Little Guns That Speak Six Times” would be of more use to a living chief than a dead cowboy, warrior’s due, or no. The devout Crazy Horse had no doubt paused to pray over the trespass. But the guns were gone.
Ben hid in the grove all day, not daring to leave it in broad light. Between constant glances across the five-mile open of the meadow, he worked the hours away gathering creekstones and piling them by a shallow sinkhole he had found among the alders.
When the sun was low and red-fading over the Squaws, he cut the hardened rawhide bindings from Clint’s wasted arms, carried him into the trees.
He laid him in the shallow depression, arranging his neckerchief and worn Levi jacket with rough, big-fingered tenderness. At the last moment he felt in his own cowhide vest, dug out the crumpled banknote Stark had made out to Clint. He tucked it in the frayed denim pocket, stood back, head bowed, looking at his brother. “Like you said, Clint—” he said it clearly and aloud—“over yonder where the Bozeman peters out.”
With the last stone rolled carefully into place, he returned to the clearing. Cutting the horsehair rope, he led the little sorrel away, bringing her to a weary, spraddle-legged stand over the mounded stones. A man hated to do it, but she was too far starved to live anyway. And besides, her carcass would give the carrion eaters something to take their minds off Clint. He brought out the Kwahadi knife, ripped it with quick mercy across the great vein in her throat. She went down without a sound, gratefully and slowly to the waiting rocks. “You’ll keep the coyotes off’n him till spring,” said Ben, thick voiced. He turned quickly away and did not look back.
In the clearing, he swung up on the restless black. He gathered the reins, glanced for the last time toward the silent alders.
“Don’t spend it all in one place, boy,” he muttered brokenly, and heeled the black eastward, out of the grove.
As he went, all understanding of the Indian way, all allowances for its child-simple chivalry, left his heart. They were left in the grove with Clint. Underneath those rocks. In the torn shred of his poor hands, where the buzzards had been at them. In the grimace twisted onto his swollen face by the rupturing shaft of the broadhead arrow in his back.
In Ben Allison’s heart, as he raced the black back along the moondark miles of the Bozeman Road, there was only a great, aching emptiness; an emptiness closing slowly and for the last time around the lonely memory of Clint’s faraway smile and wild, soft laugh.
And in place of that heartsick emptiness, starting now to pulse through him with thick, soundless fury, an endless, cold anger began to grow.
Chapter Twenty-one
Ben got into camp about ten o’clock. Stark, Waco, Chickasaw and Nella were waiting up for him. He told them briefly about Clint, said nothing about the buffalo skull or Crazy Horse. The peculiar light in his pale eyes forbade both sympathy and pointed inquiry, and by common, uneasy consent they let him do the talking. With his cold beans and bitter, reboiled coffee down, he turned to Stark.
“Time fer questions and answers,” he said bluntly. “How would you go about gittin’ three thousand cattle through Snow Mountain Medder and one thousand Sioux?”
Stark dropped his gaze, stared for a full minute into the fire.
In the big Montanan’s mind, many months, many miles, were turning swiftly. He thought of his blunder in seeking a western passage in the deserts of Utah. Of three horses roped together with Texas lariats, fighting out from behind an Arkansas riverbluff and into a high plains blizzard against his advice. Of his counsel to take the Sedalia Trail and of its following Jayhawk trap below the Kansas line. Of his insistence on driving north through Colorado, without turning back to Leavenworth and its Rolling Block rifles. Of his decision to let the Sioux have the stolen cattle below Fort Reno and his judgment, which had led to Curley’s death, in trying to wintercamp at Kearney. Of the lethal wisdom in his careless leaving of the whiskey for Clint. And lastly he thought of the lean, darkfaced Texan crouched across the fire and waiting now.
Suddenly Nathan Stark was not so sure of himself. He had held his cards too close, and too long. The blanket was down, the chips all in the middle of it, right where he had wanted them all along. But with the next-to-last hand laid down and his turn to deal coming up, he knew he did not have the power to raise or call. Quietly, almost humbly, he passed.
“I’d ask Ben Allison,” he said.
Ben studied him, said nothing. He swung quickly on Chickasaw.
“Chickasaw?”
The old cattleman shifted his quid, drowned a fire-edge ember.
“I’d ask Mr. Stark to leave me know whut Ben Allison told him.”
“Waco?”
“I’ll play those.”
“All right,” said Ben.
He turned back to Stark.
“It’s fifteen mile through these hills inter the medder. Five across it. Four out the canyon on the fur side. Thet’s twenty-four mile.”
“At least,” nodded Stark.
“How does the land lay where she opens out of the canyon?”
“Fairly level and wide open. It’s a downhill drive all the way to the Yellowstone,” answered Stark.
“No more hills or narrer spots?”
“Not till just this side of the river.”
Ben’s eyes lit up. “How fur this side?”
“About a mile.”
“How’s she lay at thet spot? The road, I mean.”
“Passes between two ridges that funnel toward the river. Where the road leaves the ridges to open out into the Yellowstone bottoms, they’re no more than two hundred yards apart.”
“Thet’s the place then, by God.”
“For what, Ben? You’ve lost me again, man.”
“To let ’em hit us!”
“Good God, no! Once we’re in that funnel we’re worse off than we are here!”
“Not the way I figger it,” snapped Ben.
“How do you figger it?” drawled Chickasaw acidly.
“Happen you was a Sioux, Chickasaw,” said Ben, “how’d you work up a ambush in thet funnel?”
“W’al, lessee, now. Fust off, I’d bottle up the narrer end with about two thirds of my bucks laid up to jump us when we tried comin’ out fer the river. Then I reckon I’d take the other third and lay ’em up on this end of the funnel, split fifty-fifty ’twixt the two ridges. Thet’s so’s soon as we got the critters all in
ter the funnel they could jump our butts and drive us out the river-end and right inter the main bunch of their boys as was waitin’ there.”
“Chickasaw,” said Ben. “You ain’t all white.”
“Got a sixteenth Cherokee sum’ers on my daddy’s side,” drawled the weathered hand. “How’s she look to you Comanches?”
“I’ll let you know when we’re out of the other end of Four-Mile Canyon.”
“You mean ’if,’ don’t you?”
“I alius say whut I mean,” grunted Ben.
The little moment of lightness was gone now. The big Texan’s dark face was once more expressionless. He stood up.
“Waco, would you say the cattle was purty dry?”
“W’al, they ain’t drippin’. Last water we had was Bush Crick, yestidday. They sure ain’t suckin’ none up off’n this goddam dead grass we got ’em on here. I’d say there’d best be good water and lots of it in thet medder of yers, yonder.”
“Ordinarily you’d say right,” muttered Ben.
“Whut you mean?”
“Thet there’s more water yonder than six thousand cattle could soak up all winter.”
“So?” scowled Chickasaw, breaking in.
“So,” replied Ben cryptically, “we ain’t goin’ to let the last calf tech a son of uh bitchin’ drop of it!”
“Gawd Amighty, boy! What you got in mind?”
“A night-drive. Right now, Round ’em up.”
“First light will ketch us in the medder, boy,” the old man objected.
“Iffen it does,” growled Ben, “we’re dead.”
“Meanin’?” It was Waco, again.
“We ain’t dead,” said Ben.
“See here, Ben,” Stark broke in earnestly. “What are you getting at? I’m damned if I follow you.”
“You’re damned if you don’t!” rasped Ben.
“Good Lord, Ben, talk sense—!”
Ben nodded, cutting in on him, deep-voiced. “You’d best ketch-up yer longest legged wagonmules, Mr. Stark. Or you and yer precious freight wagons are goin’ to be a long time burnin’ in Snow Mountain Medder. We’re pullin’ out."
Ben’s camp breaking orders to the hurriedly rolledout cowboys, were chillingly short: either they got the herd out of Four-Mile Canyon by daybreak or they had wasted six months’ wages—not to mention a lot of long Texas hair which would look just dandy drying over a Sioux-lodge smokehole!
It meant making five more miles in six hours of pitchdark than they had been able to make in the best ten-hour, daylight drive they had put behind them since leaving Fort Worth. It meant shoving three thousand cattle that were bone dry and bawling for water twenty-four miles before dawn. It meant putting them across a clear mountain stream of the best water in Montana on the way and not losing five minutes to let them drink doing it. And it meant, at last, in terms of Texas arithmetic simple enough for any bowlegged, Lone Star mathematician to tot up without his hardboiled trailboss’s help, averaging four miles an hour through cut up, narrow pass, new country, with a mile-long mill of pear-thicket longhorns that were already half wild for water and mean-hard to handle.
It was a Texas sized order.
By 2 A.M., hazing the tiring drag into the lush bowl of Snow Mountain Meadow, they had filled the first half of it.
Ahead lay Snow Mountain Creek and Four-Mile Canyon. Facing the prospect across the darkened meadow, Chickasaw cursed and spurred his panting gray up to Ben. “Goddam it, boy, we ain’t goin’ to quite cut ’er. The fresh-dropped calves and the nursin’ vealers are startin’ to straggle out and drop like flies off’n a stricknyne wolfbait. And them goddam lead steers are smellin’ crickwater and wantin’ to run. We cain’t hold ’em, boy. Whut’re we goin’ to do?”
“Let ’em run!” gritted Ben. Then, bellowing it into the darkness. “Tex! Tex Anderson—”
“Here!” The bearded cowboy drove his pony up through the boiling ground-dust. “How you want ’em headed, Ben?”
“Fast!” rapped Ben. “Me and Chickasaw and my point boys here will cut on ahead and git set over in the mouth of the canyon. You and the rest of the boys git on the drag and shove the sons uh bitches fer the crick on the hightail. You got to pile ’em inter thet water so fast they cain’t stop, and not so fast we cain’t stop ’em on the fur side. You hear, boy?”
“Shove off!” shouted Tex. “I’m gone.”
Ben swung the black, yelling for Waco, Hogjaw, Slim and Charley Stringer to let the leaders go and to follow him and Cherokee “on the busted run.”
The six ponies bunched up, hammering down the road toward the midmeadow crossing. Behind them, the first steers were already hoisting their stiffened tails and rattling the ground with the dry clack of their excited trot. Ben led his riders across the stream on a digging run for the yawning canyon ahead. He split them three-and-three, he and Chickasaw and Waco taking the right wing, the others the left.
“Try and turn ’em in when they hit you!” he yelled across to Hogjaw. “We won’t be pickin’ our noses on this side.”
“I gotcha!” echoed Hogjaw.
“Fer Gawd’s sake,” roared old Chickasaw, “don’t nobody git in front of them!”
“Jest whut I had in mind!” hollered Hogjaw, acidly. “You goddam ol’ mossyhorn, who the hell you think you’re ridin’ with? The Fo’t Wuth Baptist Ladies Auxiliary?”
“Fork you!” yowled the old man, angrily. “I was ropin’ and th’owin’ rangebull-stuff when you wasn’t straddlin’ nothin’ wilder’n a wet bedsheet, you bantylegged leetle bastard!”
“Shet up and spread out!” yelled Ben. “Yonder they come.”
It went slick. Slicker than a man dared hope.
They got the leaders turned and chuted into the canyon, and the main herd jamming in behind them, five minutes after the first steers blundered up through the dark. After that there wasn’t anything to it but to lay back and join the other boys in shouting and rope-whipping the drag in after them. By two-thirty the last stumbling heifer was on her way down Four-Mile Canyon, with the first hitch of Stark’s wagonmules hard on her lagging heels.
At four o’clock the first steer broke out of the canyon’s mouth onto the vast plateau of the Middle Yellowstone. By five, the last of Stark’s supply and freight wagons were a clean mile beyond the canyon wall. They had made it.
Ben, hanging back in a brushy water-cut with Chickasaw and Waco, watched the wagon train follow the herd over a distant swell of the plateau and drop out of sight toward the Yellowstone. He flicked his glance back to the sharpening silhouettes of the ridges buttressing the canyon exit behind them, waiting for what the coming daylight should show them along those ridges—happen he had been right.
Ten minutes later the clearing wash of the daylight, filtering westward and around the backsides of the two Squaws, showed him and his silent companions a sight few white men have lain on their bellies in the brush to see; and lived to laugh about: hundreds and hundreds of Sioux horsemen, dot-small with the distance and the morning dimness, filing down out of the canyon’s flanking ridges, north and south, and streaming off to the west to disappear, within bare minutes and their own angry dust, beyond the bulge of the prairie.
“Ben,” said Chickasaw soberly, “yore eyes are younger’n mine. Whut you see along them yonder ridges which them red bastards jest come down off’n?”
“Oldtimer,” murmured the tall Texan, “fur as I kin see, piled up there along them ridges, ten days deep, there ain’t nothin’ but hot Injun hoss manure.”
“Amen,” said Waco, rolling to his feet. “They shore frittered away a bad week waitin’ fer Little Ben Allison and his boys in Snow Mountain Medder.”
They went for their horses then. Chickasaw swung up last. He was still looking back toward the fading Sioux dust. When he turned to Ben, his eyecorners weren’t crinkling anymore.
“I allow I never thought you could do it, boy, bringin’ the herd through so far, so fast and ketchin’ them Sioux asleep like we done back yonde
r. They’s one thing troublin’ me, all the same. Ain’t we jest put it off by one more drive?”
“You mean the massacree, old hoss?”
Ben actually grinned it.
Old Chickasaw scowled, looked sharply at him. True, it was a nippy November morning, not all the frost being on the buffalo grass, and some little of it touching the corners of the big trailboss’s mouth. All the same, happen you had spent some years along the North Concho and could read Comanche sign, it was a grin.
“Sure funny, ain’t it,” Chickasaw growled irritably.
Ben kneed the black toward him, reached his hand and laid it on the bony old shoulder.
“Chickasaw,” he said, the grin disappearing but the frost not going with it, “happen old Ka-dih is still on my side, the joke’ll be on Crazy Hoss this time.” Then, quietly, as he turned the black to follow the wagons. “These happy little Oglala bastards ain’t begun to learn how uncommon hard a Comanche kin laugh at suthin’ thet’s real funny—”
With the pause and the sudden ugliness in the words, he laughed. It was a short, bad sound, and Chickasaw exchanged narrow glances with Waco.
“Yeah, suthin’ thets real funny,” repeated Ben Allison slowly. “Like whut they done to Clint!”
Chapter Twenty-two
They saw no more of the Sioux that morning, nor all of the long afternoon. Which proved nothing. The slope of the plateau toward the Yellowstone, despite Stark’s description of it as “wide open and fairly level,” was one of those pieces of high prairie which waves like an ocean. A flanking swell of low, eastwest ridges paralleled the trail for miles, and the Indians could have been moving their whole nation west and never shown a travois pony in the process. Adding to that discomfort, the ground cover of the plateau shortly turned to the matted, close curl of true buffalo grass and wouldn’t raise a decent dust if you drove a locomotive through it.
They did not dare attempt a noonhalt because of the condition of the cattle. It was all they could do to hold them on the trail and keep them moving. To have stopped and let them spread would have been to tempt the disaster of not being able to get them gathered and going ahead again. It was a ticklish piece of timing Ben was trying to achieve, too, anyway you look at it.
