by Judd Cole
Wild Bill knew that a lodge erected by itself on a lone hummock must be the chief’s. In Sioux camps, the chief was required to live outside the clan circles to symbolize his fairness to all. Bill dropped the tepee cover back into place and aimed straight toward this lodge.
But his luck finally ran out. He was perhaps thirty feet from the chief’s entrance flap when a shout halted him. Within moments, Wild Bill was the hub in a wheel of scowling, well-armed braves that encircled him.
“Watallah!” shouted a warrior who held the stone tip of his lance at Bill’s throat. He pointed at the long blond curls. “Watallah!” he shouted again—and Bill palavered enough Lakota dialect to know they were calling him by the dead Custer’s name: Yellow Hair.
One of the braves proved unable to abide this eerie similarity to the Lakota’s worst enemy. Before Bill saw it coming, the brave slammed Hickok’s head hard with the butt of a stolen Army carbine. Pain exploded in his skull, and Bill staggered. But he caught himself before he fell.
Knowing he was dead if he showed fear, Bill boldly spat in the brave’s face. This show of defiance immediately impressed some of his captors. Now the famous gambler played his ace: He pulled a feather, dyed bright red, from his shirt pocket. He held it out so all could see it.
“Yellow Hair was a fool,” Bill announced, combining Sioux and Cheyenne words, for the Lakota spoke both languages. Bill also knew sign talk, and signed with his hands when he couldn’t find a word he needed. “Yellow Hair did not respect the red man or his might. I do. Do I demand that you grow gardens and wear shoes? Have I come into your camp bearing weapons, like Yellow Hair? No! I come to you in humility, unarmed, carrying only the odjib.”
The odjib . . . the feather of friendship. In 1867, on a scouting mission for Generals Hancock and Sheridan in the Rosebud territory, Bill happened upon a dying Lakota sub chief. The Indian’s horse had tripped in a badger hole, leaving the brave stranded helpless with a broken leg.
Bill set the leg, fed the half-starved brave, and built a travois to haul him back to his camp. Hickok was rewarded with the feather of friendship, which declared the holder to be a true friend of the Sioux nation.
At sight of the odjib, the Indians did not lower their weapons. But a new uncertainty came into their faces. By now all the commotion had alerted an older brave, who approached from the direction of the pest lodge. Bill recognized him, from his feather-trimmed scalp cape, as Chief Catch-the-Bear. Not all those scalps, Bill noticed, were Indian—nor all male, either.
One of the braves spoke to his chief and showed him the dyed feather. Catch-the-Bear looked at Bill for a long time, his face as blank as windswept stone.
“Any spy for the bluecoats can color a feather red,” the chief declared. “Why have you sneaked into our camp?”
“Sneaked? I walked in,” Bill corrected him. “And notice a thing—how your dogs lick my hand. For they understand that I have come to save your dying people.”
This dramatic announcement startled all. Clearly, the braves didn’t know what to make of this.
“You are a shaman?” the chief demanded. “We have our own medicine man. Why would we want yours?”
“Indian big medicine cures Indian problems,” Bill replied. “But only white man’s medicine can cure white man’s problems. And fever was brought to your ranges by the white skins.”
There was undeniable logic here, and Catch-the-Bear only grunted. “Even if your hair-face magic is strong, why would you come to help us? You white men use Indian skulls to prop open the doors of your lodges! You go into our secret burial forests and rob the dead on their funeral scaffolds! Why help us now?”
“This is no mission of mercy,” Bill admitted. “You took a woman from the train. I want her back. If you will give her to me unharmed, I promise to save some Indian lives. Perhaps not all of your sick. But I can save some.”
Bill knew it was not the Indian way to haggle and dicker. A man simply stated his best offer first, and the Indian either took it or left it.
Clearly Catch-the-Bear wanted to take this one. But just as clearly, he was suspicious of such extraordinary claims.
“My daughter, Mountain Laurel, lies among the dying,” he said. “This very night, we are set to begin testing”—Bill knew this actually meant torturing—“the prisoner. Her life for my daughter’s! Can you save my people now? This night?”
Bill shook his head. “Not until tomorrow. Our medicine is a machine back on the train. If you agree, I will take one of your fastest horses and return this very night. We will bring it to your camp in a wagon. And then you will see big medicine, I swear it by the four directions.”
“Meantime,” Catch-the-Bear probed suspiciously, “the prisoner remains here?”
“Yes, but only if you promise not to hurt her, at least until I work my medicine.”
Catch-the-Bear was no fool. The Holy Ones did not always work in direct, simple ways. What could this bold white man hope to gain from such a ruse, if that’s what it was? No man need risk his life to steal a horse—the common corral was full of them. More likely, this sun-haired stranger was the agent of the Day Maker.
Finally, Catch-the-Bear’s eyes regained their focus as he returned to the present. He nodded. “Come and eat something quickly,” he said. “Then go cut out the pony of your choice. But I warn you now, white skin shaman—hurry. If my daughter goes under while you are gone, you will return to find your woman’s brains bubbling over a fire. And you will join her.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Goddamn it!” Big Bat Landry exploded.
The barrel-chested gunsel was so outraged that he heaved the Sharps Fifty rifle as far as he could, cursing again. It landed in the sand fifty yards away. The round in the chamber detonated upon impact.
Damn that Hickok straight to hell! All night long, Big Bat had maintained his vigil in the erosion gully north of the derailed train. But despite his best efforts, he had dozed off at the first dull, leaden light of dawn.
And then, while he was still tumbling down the long tunnel into sleep, the rapid pounding of hooves had wakened him.
Even before he could curl his finger around the trigger, Hickok had raced past on a trim little black mustang with a roached mane. Far too quickly for Big Bat to tag Wild Bill.
Still cursing, Big Bat retrieved the Sharps and jacked another round into the chamber. Then he began the three-mile trudge back to the railroad tracks. To his east, the newborn sun was balanced like a brass coin just above the horizon.
When Big Bat’s initial anger passed, a renewed determination took its place. He would kill that damned blond dandy, and he would be fifteen thousand dollars richer for his risk.
“Your clover is deep, Hickok,” Big Bat said out loud, quoting his boss. “But luck can’t last a lifetime unless a man dies young.”
“Landry is back now,” Josh told Wild Bill. “But he went out last night, armed to the teeth.”
“I was expecting to be dry-gulched,” Bill admitted. “So I pushed that little cayuse like a bat out of hell. But never mind Landry for now— he’ll get his comeuppance. Right now we best hustle—and mister, I mean quick. We don’t get to that camp on time, it ain’t just Elena in trouble—we’ll all be doing the hurt dance. Hep! Hep!”
Bill, Josh, Professor Vogel, and Hilda the ice-making phenomenon were all crowded into a rickety buckboard, Bill driving. Junebug Clark’s hardscrabble farm was located only a half hour’s ride from the train. He had gladly loaned Wild Bill a conveyance and team—any effort to placate area Indians was fine by Junebug.
“Ach, must you go so fastly?” Professor Vogel demanded in his fractured English, almost toppling off the board seat when they jounced through a series of dry washes. “Hilda vill fall out!”
“Sorry, Professor,” Bill replied, laying into the team with a whip. “But it’s root hog or die now, so hang on, old-timer. Haw! Hep! Hep!”
Josh glanced nervously at the vast prairie behind them. It was all so big, a man
lost his confidence for feeling so little in it.
“Landry will come back out here again,” Josh told Bill.
Hickok nodded, his face half in shadow under the wide brim of his black hat. “He will for a fact. But like I said, kid: One world at a time. Landry can’t kill me if the Sioux beat him to it.”
Despite his fear and exhaustion, Josh was excited at the story prospects here. Ideas for a catchy lead paragraph were already popping in his brain like firecrackers. His editor might even increase his remittance payments after an exclusive about Wild Bill going right into a Sioux camp, bold as anything. Especially since Bill’s dangerous mission was both a rescue attempt and a mission of mercy.
“Man alive!” Josh announced. “This is going to be front-page stuff!”
“That,” Bill agreed, lashing the team again, “or a triple obituary. Haw, gee up there!”
Evening shadows seemed to hover over the camp by the time the three weary white skins arrived.
There was no time to rest or eat—two more fever victims had crossed over during the night. And Catch-the-Bear’s daughter, Mountain Laurel, had entered the make-or-break crisis stage of her fever.
At first Josh could tell the Indians were clearly skeptical when Professor Vogel began filling Hilda’s cooling chamber with water. But some time later, when the refrigeration compressor began to hum and rumble, awe replaced the skepticism in their faces.
But the true shock came when—smack in the middle of the hot moons of summer—ice began to slide down Hilda’s chute!
Women and children, even a few stoic-faced warriors, fell to the ground at the sight of such magic. Indian shamans claimed they could work such miracles as turning enemy bullets into sand. But no one had ever produced such big magic as this before their very eyes.
Soon, however, led by the curious children, Indians were sucking on cool chunks of ice. Even so, Josh feared it would all be for nothing. For once Catch-the-Bear and the rest understood that Vogel actually intended to pack the fever victims—and nude, at that—in ice, anger replaced their awe.
“They mean to kill our people before our eyes!” insisted the shaman, Coyote Boy. He had been jealous of this magic all along, but too awed by Hilda to speak out. “Ice does not give back life—it takes life! Cold is not a good thing! How many of our people have frozen to death during the short white days?”
But Bill took Catch-the-Bear aside. He thumped the chief hard on the chest, Sioux style—a sign that the speaker’s words came from a strong and honest heart.
“At least pretend you have more brains than a rabbit,” Bill goaded him. “If we kill your people, we will end up dead also. Even if you think we white skins are fools, are even fools eager to die hard?”
“You speak straight-arrow,” the chief agreed. “Then work your medicine, Sun Hair. But do not forget what you said about dying hard.”
Vogel drafted Indians to help. They used blankets and cooking kettles to carry ice inside the pest lodge. Eleven suffering Indians were moved to a shallow, ice-lined pit dug in the ground. A thin layer of boughs protected them from direct contact with the ice.
Once they were in the ice pit, more glittering chunks were packed over them on boughs. Once every fifteen minutes, under Vogel’s constant supervision, each patient was pulled from the ice and briskly massaged to maintain blood flow.
As ice melted, Hilda faithfully replaced it, never once flagging. Toward morning, Vogel decided the patients had been refrigerated to the limits of bodily endurance.
“Let ziss last ice melt,”’ Josh heard him say, pointing into the cooling pit. “Now zey are beyond za help of science.”
Too weary to sustain their vigil any longer, Josh, Bill, and Vogel crawled into the back of the buckboard and slept like dead men until just after sunrise.
A strong hand shook Josh roughly awake. He sat up, thumbing crumbs of sleep from his eyes, to a gut-chilling sight: A dozen well-armed, stern-faced Lakota warriors circled the buckboard, staring in silence at the white skin outsiders.
“You came in among us making great noises, yellow curls,” the chief said tonelessly to Wild Bill. “You spoke the strong-heart talk of the shaman. Now come, all of you. Come see the results of your tricks with solid water.”
Josh couldn’t interpret these expressionless faces. But the words sounded mighty damned ominous. Josh felt a cold fist grip his heart.
“It must not’ve worked, Bill,” he said with quiet shock. “Aww, man, it must not’ve worked! We’re—”
“Cinch your lips, kid,” Bill snapped, still stretching out the kinks. “And stop looking like a nervous Nellie. Whatever happens, don’t ever show fear around red men. They despise a squaw-man as much as they despise a liar.”
Josh tried to do as ordered, but it wasn’t easy. With a lance point probing his kidney, he marched across the central clearing. It had rained again during the night. Now the camp was so quiet, Josh could hear the trees drip.
The group paused in front of the elkskin entrance flap of the pest lodge. That fist around Josh’s heart squeezed tighter. Show no fear, he willed himself. He copied the bored, slightly amused mien on Bill’s face.
“See with your own eyes,” Catch-the-Bear told them, “what your big magic has wrought.”
Josh paused on the edge of his next breath. Catch-the-Bear threw the entrance flap back. Despite his best efforts, Josh almost had to sit down, his legs were suddenly so weak at what he saw inside.
“Wouldja look at that,” Bill said quietly.
Josh gawped. Mountain Laurel lay propped up in her buffalo robes, hungrily sipping yarrow tea and smiling weakly at them! Josh counted six, seven—no, eight—more conscious, weakly smiling Indians.
Chief Catch-the Bear made the cutoff sign for the dead. Then he explained in a sad tone: “Two passed over to the Land of Ghosts during the night. And I have wept hard for them. But nine more, my little doe among them, were snatched from the jaws of death! May the High Holy Ones bless these three white shamans and their cold magic that gives warm life!”
Despite his relief, Josh was shocked by what the chief did next: He drew his steel knife from its sheath and cut deep into his own left arm, letting scarlet ribbons of blood run into the ground at his feet. But as Bill told Josh later— that dramatic wound was to ensure that the gods paid attention to Catch-the-Bear’s oath.
“The girl,” the chief added, “is free to leave with you. Go in peace, and may the Day Maker ride with you.”
Chapter Nineteen
After speaking briefly with Elena, Josh and Wild Bill learned how Bodmer had deliberately left her to die a horrible death by fire aboard the train.
That tore it for Wild Bill.
“It was also Bodmer’s direct order that got Yellowstone Jack killed,” Bill said quietly to his friends. “Let’s put the quietus on that murdering bastard.”
So before the white skins departed Catch-the-Bear’s camp, Bill requested another brief meeting with the chief. He explained who Bodmer was and the nature of his crimes.
“Chief,” Bill suggested, “maybe your shaman had the right idea all along—I mean, about a hair-face sacrifice to your holy ones. Sure, your daughter has come sassy again. But what about protection against future adversity? This is no decent man—this is a murderer. Any tribe’s God would welcome his death.”
Catch-the-Bear nodded once. “I have ears. What is your plan?”
As Bill explained, even this stoic Sioux was forced to smile at the brilliance of Hickok’s scheme. Bodmer’s greed would literally become the death of him.
“It is justice,” the chief agreed. “Ipewa! Good! We will do it.”
Bill returned to his friends, now waiting in the tepee where Elena had once been a condemned prisoner.
“We’ll fix Bodmer’s wagon,” Bill promised them. “But first I’ll have to lock horns with Mr. Big Bat Landry. Here’s how we’re going to play it.”
Bill had no intention of taking the others with him for the rendezvous with Big Ba
t. He explained that he was leaving alone, ahead of the rest, on Junebug Clark’s old plow nag, which Bill had left grazing just south of the Lakota camp.
“Give me an hour,” Bill told Josh. “Then you come along behind me in the buckboard. If all goes well, I’ll be waiting for you to catch up with me after I take care of Landry. But whatever you do, don’t return to the train with the machine or the buckboard.”
Josh frowned. “What do we do with them?”
Bill grinned. “Give me your pencil, Longfellow, and a scrap of paper.”
Bill quickly drew an accurate sketch map of the area—his years as an Army scout had left Wild Bill an excellent “minute cartographer.”
“Three miles north of the tracks,” Bill explained, “there’s this little stock pond to the right of the trail we took. There’s a thick stand of cottonwoods and a screen of buffalo berry bushes. You and Elena leave the buckboard, the machine, and the professor hidden there. You two will walk back to the tracks.”
Josh cast a shy, sidelong glance at Elena.
Three miles all alone with her! Bill’s plan was fine by Josh. But not by Vogel.
“Ach,” he protested. “You vill leave me in ziss ugly dessert?”
“Just hold your taters, Professor. I figured you’d insist on staying with Hilda,” Bill said.
“Ja, of course! Ver she go, I go.”
“You’ll be safe,” Bill promised. “Just watch out for snakes. The Sioux are in on this with us.”
“I trust you,” Elena told Bill. “But will you be safe?”
Bill grinned. “I’ll be safe, pretty lady, when I’m dead.”
Bill looked at Josh again. “Now listen, kid,” he added, “here’s your story when you return to the train. ...”
It was late afternoon, a westering sun throwing long, flat shadows toward the east, when Wild Bill finally reached the sand hill country of the northern Nebraska panhandle.
