by Tony Masero
‘But these Indians have murdered our people, you saw what they did and how they treat Elizabeth.’
Oban shrugged indifferently, ‘She is only a girl.’
Nathan frowned at that and fell silent.
But it was the gradual change in Elizabeth that most shocked him. She became more slovenly and almost arrogant in her demeanor as if the lustful time spent with Kowa gave her some kind of adult status. As she walked amongst them there was an almost permanent sneer on her lips and she no longer displayed the niceties or any of the gentility that that she had carried so proudly before. There was no doubt that Kowa had taken her for himself as none of the others came near her now.
Her clothes were falling off her they were so ripped and torn and Kowa set his mark by supplying her with a gifted blanket that Elizabeth accepted and wrapped around herself as if it were pearls given by a prince.
As they travelled on, at night the war band became steadily more agitated and Nathan noted their intense conversations increasing and their often repeated glances up at the night sky. He was almost in sleep one night when a sudden press of air next to him awakened him and he opened his eyes to see Esacona crouching beside him.
‘There,’ he said to Nathan, pointing up at the sky where the moon was rising. ‘I Esacona,’ he said bunching a fist and beating it against his bare chest. He turned and looked up, holding his arm at full length and capturing the almost full moon between finger and thumb. ‘Comanche moon,’ he said, his lips peeling back in what Nathan took to understand as a grin.
‘You own the moon?’ Nathan asked curiously.
Esacona snatched his fingers tight as if grabbing the moonlight and he drew his hand in an exaggerated fashion down to his chest again. ‘Esacona, Comanche,’ he said with a growl of contentment. Then as silently and quickly as he had come he was gone.
Nathan was nonplussed and rolled over for sleep believing that he would never understand these savage people.
The next day they reached a broad and level escarpment and the young warriors were told to take the ponies away to somewhere in the rear. Cautiously, Esacona and Kowa approached the edge of the drop on their bellies and spied out the land below. They stayed there unmoving for a long time before worming their way back to join the others. Instructions were given with hand signs and in hushed voices and the band was divided. The group of captives was all led away down a gully that opened out onto a narrow and shadowed rock platform and there each of them was bound at wrist and ankle and with a gag forced about their mouths. Even little Butler was tied up in such a way and then they were all propped against the rock wall in the deeper shadows behind. From this vantage point, Nathan could see the Indian’s objective.
Below them lay a plain locked in the curve of the sheer rock wall where a small stockade stood; it was a timber-walled fortress known as Rockfall Station and covered enough area to encompass a large main building with a long covered porch inside the walls. Obviously an outlying station and given by the wide circular corral built alongside, a place for captured mustangs to be brought. Inside the corral ponies milled and Nathan estimated that there must be around fifty animals inside.
There were men also and he counted three of them, all were heavily armed and one wore the blue uniform of a soldier. It indicated to him that it was a military station for wild mustangs to be rounded up and broken in as remounts for the army. Two women came from out of the house, one of them middle aged and the other younger and they ushered before them two children with baskets who scampered off to attend to some task in an outhouse.
With a heart full of sinking dread, Nathan knew that the Comanche intended to attack the place and only wished he were free to offer a call of warning. He struggled desperately with his bonds but they were tightly done and he could not move them. One of the young Comanche’s had been left to guard them and he squatted down on his haunches some way away from them at the edge of the platform with his spear held upright before him and attentively watched all that was happening below.
It was Esacona and Kowa that made the first move.
They approached the stockade, riding openly and at an easy walking pace, stopping and waiting when they were a hundred yards out. They sat there in plain view, both of them couching their feathered lances on their moccasin boot tops as they waited. To one of the spears, Esacona had tied a white strip of cloth as a sign of truce.
At last the heavy door in the stockade wall swung open and a solitary man bearing a rifle approached the two. A conversation ensued and Nathan saw the Indians gesticulating and the white man shaking his head negatively. The talk lasted for five minutes before the white man made a dismissive gesture and turned his back to walk away. At that moment both Indians sprung into action, with a loud whoop they charged down the man, pinioning him on their spear ends. He had no chance to call out or defend himself as his pinned body was shed and the two raced for the open stockade door.
At the same instant, from both sides the rest of the Comanche warriors burst from cover and rode for the gateway. Of the two men left inside the stockade, one was trying to push the door closed whilst the other, the soldier, was firing his rifle from the space left by the closing door. Nathan saw the two women inside running in panic for the house, dragging the children with them as they went.
None of them made safety, the raid was fast and efficient and before the defenders could close the gate Esacona and Kowa had burst through, quickly followed by the rest of the war band.
What followed were the same awful acts of violence Nathan had witnessed before.
The two remaining guards were struck down almost immediately, the trooper dispatched by lance and hatchet the other struck by a whole series of arrows that drove him to his knees where he was bloodily scalped before his throat was cut.
The middle-aged lady had returned to the porch of the building holding a Henry rifle and bravely brought down one of her attackers before a thrown lance transfixed her arm. She was pulled from the porch and pinned to the dust of the yard by an Indian who planted the spear firmly in the ground. Then the poor woman was systematically stripped and raped. The younger woman fared no better and after being dragged screaming from the house by her long hair she received the same fate before both women were slain with a knife across the throat.
What became of the children, Nathan could not see. The Comanche braves crowded their way inside the building and soon black smoke began to billow from smashed windows. The Indians came out carrying all kinds of objects, including pots, pans, furniture and chinaware but the children never appeared and Nathan feared the worst for them.
Their guard on the platform leapt to his feet and jigged in excitement at the success below and as members of the band swept over to the corral and herded out the ponies he turned to stare wildly at the prisoners and screamed loud war cries into their faces. Nathan and the others could only watch in numbed silence their gags precluding any sound.
It was a devastating massacre and the bound captives looked on in horror as the raiding party trailed slowly away from the blazing fortress carrying their bizarre collection of loot and with their victory cries reaching up far into the heights of the escarpment.
Chapter Six
Britt sent the two Navajo out wide to search for sign as he approached the mud wagon raid site.
He was aware that buzzards and coyotes will have had their fill by now and he was not surprised to see the ripped and torn remains of the corpses spread over the ground. The empty mud wagon still stood, its loose canvas blinds flapping desultorily in the breeze. He searched the ground, making what he could of any remaining sign in the dust but mostly it had been overladen by the feasting predators or been blown away by the wind.
Britt rested against the mud wagon’s wheel and waited for the column to catch up. He was considering his few options when Sergeant O’Brien and Corporal Shane came into sight at the head of the small troop.
Britt had known O’Brien for the best part of eight years. He was a gruff
Irishman who had first joined the military as a rough and tumble bare-knuckle brawler fresh off the boat from Ireland. Something though, perhaps the enforced discipline, had steadied his hand and he had come to like army life. There had been a few girls when he was younger but now he had settled for marriage to the post laundress, Catherine Marie, another native of Ireland. They were a tough old childless couple, who had seen service on a number of difficult frontier posts, but were now content in their situation at Fort Rosebud.
His often partner-in-crime from the old days had been Shane, who O’Brien had first met as an arranger of fistfights. Slight and wily and always up for a deal, be it honest or circumspect, Shane sported a thin mustache on a gaunt face and had been broken down to private and made up again more times than he pruned his mustache. There was no doubt that the cunning Shane had joined up primarily as a means of escape from vengeful debtors or cheated entrepreneurs of some sort. But O’Brien had taken him under his wing and now the two were inseparable and no fort commander dare do otherwise than allow them keep service together.
Of the five others that rode behind, two were up on the driving seat of the chuck wagon that they had borrowed from a local rancher. The wagon allowed them faster movement, carrying their long guns, bedding and food supplies, water, cooking implements and grain for the ponies. Britt knew all of the accompanying soldiers to be steady and trusty fighting men who had served their time in earlier battles with him against the Apache.
‘What do you say, Mister Marley?’ asked O’Brien as he drew up.
‘Nothing yet,’ he answered. ‘Still waiting on the Navajo. You might like to have your boys put those bodies in the ground, at least what there is left of them.’
O’Brien looked across at the strewn remains and wrinkled his nose, no mean feat as the flattened object had been broken so many times before in his bareknuckle days that it was bore little resemblance to human nasal passages, ‘A beastly business. Never a job for soldiers, putting their own in the grave.’
‘They’ve seen it all before.’
‘That they have,’ accepted O’Brien with a sigh. ‘Right y’are. Corporal Shane, darling boy, will you have the fellows sink a few holes for these poor lads.’
Shane tipped a finger to his shako cap brim and pulled his pony away to give the order.
O’Brien eased himself down from his pony, patting the beast and stretching his back awkwardly as he did so, ‘God’s teeth, d’you know what, Mister Marley? I reckon these old bones are nearing the end of their tether.’
‘Get on, O’Brien,’ chuckled Britt, who knew O’Brien was a born complainer. ‘You’ll be around to bother us for many a year yet.’
‘Now don’t say that, dear man. You’ll be putting a hex on me with such thoughts. I’ve enough ailments to fill a good doctor’s book already. If I was to tell you….’
He was interrupted as one of the men called out, ‘Indian grave here.’
They strolled over to take a look and Britt bent to study the wasted corpse exposed by the digging.
‘Comanche all right,’ he said.
‘Stinks like one,’ observed O’Brien.
‘You’ll smell just as ripe after three days underground.’
‘Don’t need to put him underground for that,’ joked the gravedigger in a stage whisper.
‘Now you hold your whist, Bellamy,’ growled O’Brien, overhearing the comment. ‘You should be treating them above you in station with some little respect. Besides I get any more of your lip and I’ll be forced to box your ears together.’
Bellamy feigned regret with a sly grin, ‘Apologies, Sergeant.’
‘I should think so too. Now go dig a hole away from this red devil and find our boys a decent resting place, will you?’
O’Brien was a popular non-com amongst the troops who knew he would brook no trouble from them and was always fair and just in his treatment. But if he did come across an antsy trooper, O’Brien was not one to bring an offender up before the post commander on any charges, his style was more to take the man behind the stables and simply beat the bejasus out of him. It usually worked and in such a way O’Brien retained his respected and somewhat feared place amongst the troopers.
‘A terrible affair,’ frowned O’Brien, his puffy forehead deepening. ‘Those poor children. Do they stand a chance, d’you think, Mister Marley?’
‘Who can say,’ shrugged Britt. ‘It’ll be a damned miracle if they do.’
‘Or even if we can find them at all.’
‘That too,’ Britt agreed.
Kilchii appeared on the rise above them, swiftly tossing one leg over his pony’s neck and coming down to join them.
He held a bunched fist up and then opened the fingers three times.
‘Fifteen of them, you say?’ asked Britt.
Kilchii nodded, ‘They go this way,’ he gave direction with a speared hand.
‘What’s out there?’ asked O’Brien.
Britt was thoughtful, ‘Only two places I know of, there’s the post at Rockfall Station and the Tumbler ranch.’
‘It’ll be the ranch then,’ suggested O’Brien.
Britt bit his lip, ‘I don’t know, what do you think, Kilchii?’
Kilchii shook his head, ‘Cannot say. Comanche maybe on killing raid but maybe want pony too.’
Britt rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, ‘The Tumbler place is nearer but Rockfall will have the ponies, how many men do they have there. Five, six? I know it’s a stockade.’
O’Brien shook his head, ‘Not that many, three I think. The Colonel, dear man, recalled a couple last month, if memory serves.’
‘Three men! Is that all? Are there women and children?’
‘I believe that Corporal Blaine has his mother, wife and children out there.’
Britt breathed heavily through his nose, ‘We must split our forces then. Corporal Shane will go over to the Tumbler Ranch with Pyotowski and Zagreb on the chuck wagon; we’ll send Niyol with them. Meanwhile, you and I will go to Rockfall with Bellamy, Rawlings and Governance.’
‘That won’t be many for Shane against fifteen of the rascals, dear man,’ observed O’Brien.
‘No, but they can give warning and lock down if they are in time. Besides, I have a feeling it will be the ponies they will go for.’
‘And if not?’
‘Then we are close on their trail,’ said Britt grimly.
It was Kilchii who found the corpse.
‘Oh, no!’ moaned O’Brien. ‘The dear sweet thing.’
The broken body of Samantha Childs lay pressed against the rock wall in a crumpled heap. The small pale face stared back at them blindly, her dead eyes filled with opaque vacancy and she was coated in blown dust so that the body had the powdered look of a cloth doll rather than a child.
‘Will you look at that?’ hissed Bellamy.
‘One of you,’ ordered Britt. ‘Wrap her in a blanket, we’ll bury the child when we get to softer earth.’
They were all tough fellows who had seen the same and worse during their service but it never became any easier and the effect was always a sickening blow in the pits of their collective stomach.
‘Why, in God’s name?’ breathed O’Brien. ‘A small weak thing like this.’
‘Because she couldn’t keep up or made too much fuss,’ explained Britt, his face expressionless.
‘For the life of me, I’ll never understand them.’
‘It’s all simple practicality to them,’ said Britt. ‘You don’t get to survive out here by being saintly.’
Rawlings and Bellamy dismounted and grim-faced, Rawlings unlashed his bedroll to cover the corpse.
Britt noticed that Kilchii was still, his face turned away from them in a northwesterly direction. Head tilted upwards, he moved his head slightly from side to side testing the wind.
‘What is it?’ Britt asked.
‘Smoke,’ the Navajo answered.
‘What kind of smoke?’ asked O’Brien.
Kilchii spread his
hands, not knowing quite how to describe the faint odor he picked up on the breeze. ‘Building smoke, not cook fire, house burn.’
‘They’ve hit the stockade,’ said Britt.
O’Brien spat, ‘That’s too bad.’
‘Maybe not,’ mused Britt, scrubbing at his beard with his fingers. ‘They’ll have a herd of ponies with them now. Could well be they’ll be heading back this way.’
‘You think so?’
‘Kilchii,’ said Britt, ignoring the question. ‘Will you go ahead and see?’
Without a word, the Navajo swung up onto his pony and headed off along the ridgeline track.
‘Must be seven, eight miles off, how the devil does that Indian smell it from here?’ asked Bellamy.
‘Sometimes,’ Britt answered thoughtfully. ‘I think they see hidden meanings in water and hear birds on the wing telling them tales.’
‘You mean like some kind of witchy thing?’
‘They’ve been here a lot longer than us, soldier. This is their place not ours and they know it well, it’s best not to forget it.’
Rawlings meanwhile picked up the small tied bundle and fastened it across his pony’s flanks then they mounted up and in single file followed in Kilchii’s trail along the narrow track.
‘Keep sharp, boys,’ admonished Britt. ‘We’re close now. No smokes and no noise.’
Despite his warning the ponies clopped on the stony path and there was no avoiding the noise that rattled down the path.
They were in a rocky steep-sided defile when Kilchii returned to them and Britt called a halt. The party dismounted and gathered around the Navajo.
‘They come,’ said Kilchii. ‘Have many horse,’ he held up bunched fists then opened and closed them five times.
‘Did you see the children?’
Kilchii nodded, ‘On horse now, not walk.
