Ride to Valor

by David Robbins

  “To look for the Sioux.”

  49

  The prairie was an oven. The grass that had been so green during the wet months of early spring was now shading to the brown of summer and would stay brown until the fall.

  James was in the lead. They had ridden for half an hour without any sign of their enemies. James was beginning to think that Broken Ear had indeed gone.

  A killdeer cried. James saw it pretending to be hurt to draw them away from its mate and their nest. A hawk soared on high, and to the south antelope were clustered, watching warily and poised for flight.

  James smiled. God help him, but he did so love the prairie. It was a vast ocean of life, at times sublime and beautiful, at other times savage and brutal. It was so unlike New York City, and Five Points. They were distinct worlds, the grime and greed and lusts of civilization contrasted with the picturesque splendor of the wilds. He wasn’t poetical by nature, but when he gazed out over the rippling waves of grass shimmering bright in the golden light of the setting sun, he felt a stirring deep inside him, a sense of grandeur that he had never felt in Five Points.

  Lost in his musing, James became aware that Chester Gilliam had come up next to him and was talking.

  “—much farther we goin’ to go, Lieutenant? Strikes me that if we ain’t come across the redskins by now, we ain’t liable to.”

  “I need to be sure,” James said.

  “Nothin’ is ever certain where red devils are involved,” Chester said. “They’re unpredictable critters.”

  “They’re people, like you and me.”

  “Not so, Lieutenant. Not so. They have their skin and we have ours and what’s under our skins ain’t the same as what’s under theirs.”

  “They have organs just like ours,” James said. “Stomach, hearts, livers, kidneys.”

  “Why, Lieutenant, are you joshin’ me? That’s not what I said and I suspect you know it. I was talkin’ about natures, not organs. White folks have their natures and redskins have their own.”

  “Their natures are no different from ours.”

  “Not true, Lieutenant. Not true. They don’t think like us. They don’t feel like us. They crave blood more than we do, for one thing.”

  “Have you forgotten the Civil War?”

  “That’s not possible, seein’ as how I was in it,” Chester replied. “But that was for a cause. Redskins kill just to count coup.”

  “Or to keep from being forced off their lands.”

  “It sure is peculiar, you takin’ up for them.” Chester shook his head in disbelief.

  James was scouring the ground. The tracks were plain enough; Broken Ear and the war party had continued on to the east and were miles away by now. He abruptly drew rein. “I guess you’re right. This is far enough.”

  “Now you’re talkin’,” Chester said.

  The privates were equally glad. Plover, in particular, was so relieved he shouted for joy, then caught himself and looked sheepish.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  The whole ride back James thought of Peg. He missed her more each day. They had been separated before, but this time she was with child and his feelings were stronger. He couldn’t wait to take her in his arms again.

  James wondered if he was being fair to her and their unborn child. Here he was, putting his life at risk. She could end up a widow, his child could end up fatherless. As if it were yesterday, he remembered the hardships his mother had faced. Did he want the same for Peg? He was still debating when they reached the wagon train.

  Guttman and a dozen others came out to meet them. “Well?” the wagon boss asked.

  “They’re long gone,” James said.

  “Hallelujah!” Ezekiel cried.

  “We can be on our way at last,” another man said happily. “The Lord be praised.”

  “On to find our new homes!” declared a third.

  “No.” James burst their euphoria. “Nothing has changed. You will be escorted to Fort Sisseton.”

  “But the danger is past,” Ezekiel said.

  Another settler nodded. “We’ll be perfectly fine on our own. And we’ve already been delayed long enough.”

  “As soon as Captain Stoneman arrives, we’re heading for the fort,” James reiterated. “Whether you want to or not.”

  Their smiles changed to frowns.

  “This is damned unfair,” Peter Dermit said. “But I’d expect no less from the likes of you.”

  James had nearly forgotten about him. “What are you doing out of your wagon? You were to stay there until I say differently.”

  “You weren’t here,” Dermit said, “and I refuse to be treated like some sort of prisoner when all I did was speak my mind.”

  A few women were listening, among them the young woman with the baby. “Isn’t that strange?” she said, half absently and in a low voice.

  James gratefully turned his back on the men. “What is?” he asked.

  “That,” the young woman said, and nodded to the east.

  In the distance dust was rising to the sky. A cloud so large, it lent the illusion of being a thunderhead, only the dust was brown and not the black of a storm cloud.

  Others noticed and another woman cried, “My God! The hostiles are coming back.”

  James tried to distinguish shapes. There was too much dust for it to be Broken Ear and his war party. It couldn’t be Captain Stoneman, either. It was too soon for Stoneman and there were too many.

  “If they are they’ve brought a lot of friends,” Guttman said.

  “We’ll be overrun,” Dermit cried. “We have to get out of here.”

  “How far do you think you’d get in these heavy tortoises of yours?” Guttman countered. “They’d catch us before we went a mile.”

  “Anything is better than sitting here waiting to be butchered,” Dermit said.

  “Do you hear that?” the young woman with the baby asked, her head cocked.

  “Hear what, Adeline?” Ezekiel said.

  “That noise.”

  James heard it, too, a far-off rumbling.

  “It’s their horses,” Guttman said.

  “Doesn’t sound like horses to me,” Chester Gilliam mentioned.

  It did not sound like horses to James. But he was mystified as to what it could be.

  “By the Eternal,” Ezekiel said, and took a step back in shock. “I know! I’ve never been west of the Mississippi River, but I by God know. The fiends! The vile heathen fiends. Only they would be so cruel.”

  “What are you babbling about?” Dermit snapped.

  The truth dawned on James and a cold fist closed around his chest.

  “It’s buffalo!” Ezekiel cried. “The redskins are driving a herd of buffs down on our heads.”

  50

  Disbelief sparked exclamations.

  “Surely not!”

  “It can’t be!”

  “How could they?”

  James recalled the parting words of Broken Ear. “Soon all be broken,” the renegade had said. Now it made sense.

  From out of the dust rose the whoops and cries of the warriors driving the herd.

  “What do we do?” Dermit cried in panic. “We can’t just sit here. They’ll stampede right over us.”

  “You run for your lives,” Guttman said. “Hitch up your teams and get the hell out of here.” He pushed several of the stunned settlers. “What are you standing around for? Move, damn you, or you’re all undone.”

  James marked the dust cloud. The herd was a long way off yet.

  “Can we delay the critters or turn them somehow, sir?” Private Howell asked. “Buy these folks time to harness up?”

  “The four of us can’t turn a tide of horns and hair,” Chester said.

  The settlers were dashing about like souls gone mad.

  Women and children screamed. Men roared lusty oaths. Guttman was trying to keep them calm, and failing.

  “We have to try,” James said. “Bring the horses.” Back when he was in Kansas, D
Troop had come across a herd of cattle being driven to market. That evening the subject of cows and cowboys came up, and someone mentioned that a herd of stampeding cattle could be turned if it was done right. He wasn’t a cowboy, but he would try.

  “At a gallop,” James urged when they were mounted. The dust cloud had expanded to monstrous proportions. In its depths dark forms moved. The rumbling was thunderous. He caught glimpses of horns and shaggy coats.

  They were half a mile out from the train when they saw the buffalo clearly. There were hundreds if not thousands of the huge brutes, shoulder to brutish shoulder in a moving mass. The very ground trembled.

  James drew rein.

  “The four of us against all those?” Private Plover said, his eyes wide.

  “We could charge ’em but I doubt they’d scatter,” Private Howell joked.

  “The three of us will charge them,” James said, “while Mr. Gilliam sets the prairie on fire.”

  The Southerner touched a finger to his ear as if he wasn’t sure he had heard right. “You want me to do what, now, Lieutenant?”

  “The wind is right but there’s not much of it,” James said. “Get a fire going and it might do what we can’t.” He raised his reins. “We’ll slow them if we can. Howell, Plover, you’re with me.”

  The bison horde was terrible to behold. They poured across the prairie in a tidal wave of bobbing heads and rising and falling humps. Curved horns bristled like sabers. Their bellows and grunts and snorts created a discordant symphony.

  James drew rein several hundred feet from the front ranks. He vaulted down, wrapped the reins around his wrist, and tucked the carbine to his shoulder. He recognized the futility but he took aim anyway. “Fire at will as soon as they are in range!” he commanded, and at the right moment, he banged off shot after shot at hairy beast after hairy beast.

  Howell and Plover contributed lead of their own.

  “It’s having no effect, sir,” Private Plover yelled, lowering his Springfield.

  “It’s like chuckin’ peas,” Howell said.

  James turned to his horse. “Mount and make for the wagons.” As he rose into the saddle, he caught sight of a warrior in the thick of the dust. What he wouldn’t give for a shot at Broken Ear. Reining around, he galloped to the west with thunder in his ears. He caught up to Private Plover, who was whipping his reins like a man possessed.

  Sudddenly Plover’s horse squealed and crashed to the earth. Shattered bone ripped from a leg, gleaming white in the sun.

  Plover was thrown clear and tumbled. Dazed but unhurt, he raised his arms imploringly. “I’m down! Help me!”

  James was already hauling on his reins. Only now did he see the prairie dog burrows. He reached Plover’s side, bent, and bodily swung the private on behind him. Another wrench on the reins and they were flying to the west.

  Not just the ground but the air pulsed to the beat of thousands of heavy hooves. The roiling phalanx of mammoth monsters pounded implacably on.

  Private Plover clung to James as if trying to climb inside his body and wailed for him to go faster, faster, faster.

  Smoke rose ahead. Chester had done it; he had set the grass on fire. But the flames were small and extended in a line of no more than twenty or thirty yards. As a defense it was pitiful.

  Private Howell overtook Chester and now both Southerners were racing toward the prairie schooners, many of which were in motion, the drivers frantically whipping their teams. Other settlers were yet hitching their animals with a haste born of desperation.

  James reached the crackling flames. He figured to ride right through them as Private Howell had done. It didn’t occur to him that his horse might be one of those that was deathly afraid of fire or that it would do what it did—namely, slide to a terror-spawned stop and then rise onto its back legs and rear.

  James instinctively clung to the saddle and wasn’t unhorsed. A squawk of fear rang in his ear and the pressure on his shoulders was gone, and he twisted to find that Private Plover had fallen off. Before he could reach down to pull Plover back up, his horse took several bounds to get clear of the fire.

  James brought it to a stop, and wheeled.

  Plover was on his feet. He had landed in the fire and now his coat was giving off smoke and flames of its own. He swatted at them, shrieking, “No! No! No!” Without looking where he was going, he ran—toward the stampeding buffalo.

  “Plover! Stop!” James shouted, and went to go after him, but it was too late.

  The buffalo were on them.

  51

  The fire didn’t slow the herd at all.

  Private Plover must have realized his mistake and glanced up. He shrieked as a horn hooked him in the chest. The bull that gored him tossed its huge head and Plover sailed over its hump and into the thick of the swarm.

  James fled.

  Private Howell and Chester Gilliam had swung to the south to try and get clear of the herd. The prairie schooners were scattering, but they were, as Guttman called them, tortoises on wheels, and much too slow. A few settlers were running off on foot, stragglers who had been left behind in the urgency of the exodus.

  James was so intent on flying for his life that he almost didn’t hear the squall of an infant.

  Adeline wasn’t in a wagon. She was hastening after a man on a prairie schooner and beseeching him to stop, but he didn’t heed her plea.

  James didn’t have much of a lead on the buffalo. Fully aware that if his horse went down he would share Private Plover’s fate, he reined to intercept her and shouted her name at the top of his lungs.

  Adeline heard him. She had the presence of mind not to stop and instead, while still running, she flung up an arm for him to grab, her face a portrait of heartfelt appeal.

  Half afraid he would tear the arm from its socket, James bent and grabbed and heaved. He got her and the baby over the saddle in front of him and shouted for her to hold on. They passed the wagon she had been chasing and the man on the seat glanced at them and said something.

  James didn’t hear what it was. He was holding on to Adeline and her child for dear life and slapping his legs against his horse.

  “Dear God!” Adeline cried. She was looking back.

  James glanced over his shoulder and witnessed a spectacular spectacle.

  The buffalo had overtaken the slowest prairie schooner. Some broke to right and to left to avoid it, but the press of beasts from behind drove as many more into the rear of the wagon and into its wheels. The crash and rending of wood mixed with their bellows and cries. Some of the brutes went down and were trampled by their brethren. The back of the prairie schooner collapsed and dragged, possessions spilling pell-mell. Another instant and the whole wagon canted. The man in the seat saw that it was about to go over and leaped clear to save himself. But the buffalo had enveloped the entire wagon and his leap carried him into them. He screamed as he disappeared.

  James rode for his life and that of Adeline and her baby.

  Her pale face, streaked with tears, was turned up to him.

  They overtook another prairie schooner. The man and woman on the seat were half turned and holding rifles. They fired and a couple of buffalo dropped, but then the rest were on them. The wagon was pushed broadside, seemed to bounce, and overturned. Hammering hooves reduced the man to pulp. The woman tried to scramble onto what was left of the box, but a horn sheared into her thigh and most of her dress, with her leg, was ripped from her body.

  Ahead were three prairie schooners bunched together. James reined around them. On one was Peter Dermit, wielding a whip. Dermit was pasty with fear.

  James could sense his horse was tiring. He had been told that buffalo could run for miles, and if that was the case, he would never see Peg again.

  Out of nowhere a steep gully opened in their path. James wrenched on the reins, but his horse couldn’t stop in time. It squealed and pitched headlong. James pushed against the saddle, pulling Adeline and her baby with him, and contrived to come down so that he bo
re the brunt of their fall. They rolled to a stop at the bottom, with James on top of her and the child.

  Adeline screamed.

  An upended prairie schooner had filled the sky above them.

  It crashed down, the wagon wedging across the gully, the hickory bows that braced the canvas shattering like toothpicks, the canvas tearing and splitting at the seams. The grease bucket smashed within a few inches of James’s neck. A brake block struck him in the leg. From out of the bed spilled clothes and utensils, tools and flour and blankets. Fighting the downpour, James pushed up just as a chest of drawers careened into his shoulder. He was thrown to his hands and knees.

  The weight of the avalanche of effects was irresistible.

  James and Adeline and the baby were buried.

  For a harrowing minute James feared they would be crushed or suffocate. But the rain of articles stopped. Propping his hands on either side of Adeline and the baby, he exerted all his strength. The press of weight shifted. He tried again, every muscle straining. The possessions moved but he still wasn’t free. Once more he thrust upward and clothes and a pan and a saw went sliding away. His head and shoulders burst out and he sucked in air. Quickly, he shoved objects aside and cleared a space for Adeline.

  They were in a pocket between the spilled possessions and the upended wagon. Above them the prairie schooner and the ground quaked to the passage of the buffalo. The gully was filled with a pungent reek. A cacophony of bellows assaulted their ears. Dust fell in fine particles like an artificial snow, fine yet thick, covering everything.

  The baby was crying. Adeline held the child to her bosom and caressed and consoled it, her fright giving her face a ghostly pallor.

  Suddenly the prairie schooner shuddered to the impact of a heavy body. A buffalo had fallen on top of it and was struggling to free itself. James saw a dark leg and a hoof kick at the shattered bed. He thought that maybe the buffalo would fall on top of them, but it broke out and ran on with the rest.

  “God preserve us,” Adeline breathed.

  James could hardly hear her for the roar. The yips and whoops of the Sioux succeeded the thunder, and faded. He reasoned that most of the Indians were at the rear of the herd, goading them on, and he dared hope that the worst was over.