Then the Comanche chief stood to speak again, looking this time not at Commissioner Smith, but at Lieutenant Colonel Davidson. “I make this offer to you, soldier chief. I—Cheevers—will lead your buffalo soldiers toward the Antelope Hills in search of the renegades who are responsible for all this trouble between our peoples and the Tehannas.”
“You aren’t going to get anything better than that, Mr. Smith,” Davidson advised. “You’d better take this chief up on his offer, or prepare to have your Quaker peace policy go up in smoke down here on the southern plains.”
“I don’t think the whole program—”
“I’ve said my piece, Smith. And, by God, I’m going to let Washington know what I think of your pigheaded priggishness. Now, tell Cheevers you’re agreeing.”
It was clear to everyone in that room watching the commissioner that Smith had trouble swallowing down his pride. At last he spoke in subdued tones to the assembly.
“Cheevers will lead the colonel’s soldiers in search of these raiders causing all the trouble. I will give the Comanche chief thirty days to bring in five of those renegades responsible. If, after the end of thirty days, there are no results—then I will withhold monthly rations and not issue annuities to all bands.”
“You would not feed our children?” Kicking Bird asked, staring incredulous at Smith.
The commissioner sneered, finding himself in possession of the upper hand once more. “Bring me the raiders—and your children will not go hungry.”
Chapter 21
October 1873
“You seriously think that Comanche chief will find any of the raiders?” Seamus Donegan asked the other two civilians at their smoky breakfast fire.
Jack Stillwell looked up, wagging his head. “Cheevers is a Yamparika. They might be looking for warriors from other bands—but I figure he and his bunch will lead Reuben Waller’s brunettes on a merry chase, but never find nothing.”
“No matter where Cheevers leads Waller,” added Sharp Grover, nodding, “they’ll never find a sign.”
“So he’s pulling a fast shuffle on the government officials?”
Grover shook his head. “No. It’s just because he’s a Yamparika.”
“What’s that?” Donegan asked.
“One of the Comanche bands,” Grover answered.
“And a Yamparika will never be able to track down and find the Antelope Eaters.”
“So who are these Antelope Eaters?” Seamus asked, rising, stretching and tossing out the last of his coffee gone cold.
“The worst of the lot,” Stillwell answered. “Called Kwahadi. Running under a chief named Quanah. Word has it his mother was white as you and me. Took from her people when she was a girl. Growed up with the band. But make no mistake, Seamus—from the stories I’ve heard, this Quanah can’t have a single drop of white blood in him, from the way he’s sworn to kill white men.”
“You figure it’s time to go, Jack?” Grover suggested, rising as well. “This is your show, but I consider we should get moving south. You’re the one needing to be back at Fort Richardson before the last week of the month.”
“That’s when the easterners I’m guiding, Pierce and Graves, ordered me to be back,” Stillwell explained, kicking dirt over the firepit and smothering the flames. “Besides, that’s when the new escort assigned us should be riding in from Fort Griffin to relieve that first bunch.”
“You got any better idea who the hell this Pierce and Graves are?” Grover inquired as all three laid saddle blankets atop their mounts and began saddling up.
Stillwell shook his head. “They been real close-mouthed about everything but their names—and that they’re the ones giving out the orders.”
“Jack loves a secret,” Grover said to Donegan with a wag of his head. “Damn, but them two make a man suspicious of what they’re up to. Government fellas out here where they don’t belong.”
“They surveyors you figure?” Seamus asked.
“No,” Grover replied. “For sure they got themselves a passel of maps, they do. But—they ain’t like any other government fellas I ever knew in many a year of working for the army. Damn well keeping their secret squeezed tight in their grubby little hands, ain’t they?”
“That’s just what this is, Sharp—a secret,” Seamus replied, drawing up the cinch. “They’re government, no doubt of that. And the lieutenant in charge of the last escort let it be known them two work for the bureau.”
“Indian Bureau?” Grover asked.
“The only bureau I know of,” Stillwell replied. “Those last few days there in Jacksboro before we rode over to Dallas to fetch Satanta and Big Tree—I can’t remember them two doing anything else but camping out over at the telegraph office.”
Donegan nodded. “Day and night. Sending and receiving. Would make a man wonder, I’ll say.”
“Who they wiring to?”
“Don’t know, Sharp. They’re playing everything so close to the vest.”
Stillwell nodded as he finished strapping his bedroll behind his saddle. “They don’t let them canvas valises of theirs out of their sight at all. Right under their arms or plopped on the table beside them when they eat.”
“Bet those pilgrims sleep with the valises too!” Grover hooted.
“And their maps,” Donegan added.
“They got maps?” Grover sounded intrigued.
“I suppose that’s what it is they keep rolled up in a long, leather tube,” Jack said. “Saw one of the maps once—walked in on ’em before they knew I was coming to tell ’em we were pulling out. They both rolled it up quicker’n quail spooks into flight.”
“What I can’t put straight is what the government’s looking for down south toward Mexico anyway?” Donegan inquired.
“That where they’re gonna lead you two?” Grover asked.
“They informed me of that back in Kansas—that this trip of ours might take them as far south as the Rio Grande,” Jack answered. “Said that if they had to cross on over into Mexico—they’d see to it we got the required papers for the military escort to cross the river and push on into foreign country.”
Grover scratched at his jawbone, taking up the reins to his horse. “Mexico. Well, my friends. Sounds serious—and it looks like it could be a long trip for you both.”
“For Jack,” Donegan protested as he climbed to the saddle. “I came along to see you, Sharp. Not to go riding off to Mexico.”
“Shit, Irishman,” Stillwell said, smiling as he nudged his mount away from their camping spot on the south bank of the Red River, once more plodding south, deeper into north Texas. “If I was to tell you about the aquardiente them Mexicans make down there—you’d likely do more’n just lick your lips for a taste.”
“What’s aquardiente?” Seamus asked. “Some type of Mexican food?”
Grover chuckled. “Hell no, Seamus. That’s Mexican whiskey so powerful it comes on like a crack of lightning. Brewed from corn and strong enough to pop the top of your skull.”
“Sounds mighty good, fellas. Where’s a man gonna find some aquardiente?”
“Plenty of it down south where we’ll likely head,” Stillwell said. “But since you plan on busting up this partnership—looks like I’ll just have to drink your share.”
“Bring some back with you, Jack,” Donegan suggested with a grin.
Grover chuckled, then said, “How ’bout one of them dark-skinned señoritas too, Seamus?”
“Mexican women any good once you get ’em skinned and down in the blankets with you, Jack?” asked Donegan.
Stillwell shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, Irishman. Never had a Mexican gal before.”
“And besides, the Irishman won’t be dealing with no Mexican whores,” Sharp protested, “Seamus Donegan is already called for.”
The other two looked quizzically at Grover. Jack was the first to speak. “What you mean—Seamus is called for?”
“Samantha Pike’s got her mind set on making the Irishman a honest-to-goodness
husband, appears to me.”
“Appears to you?” Donegan squeaked.
“She’s aiming to make you hers, Seamus. Plain and simple,” Grover declared.
“Samantha tell you this?”
“She didn’t have to. Rebecca told me.”
Donegan felt his face go flush, becoming hot and prickly, wondering if Grover knew … or Rebecca knew … maybe Samantha actually had told her sister of the night that began on Sharp Grover’s porch and ended up on a few blankets tossed carelessly atop some freshly mown grass stacked in the corner of Grover’s lopsided barn.
For the longest moment Seamus studied the older man, peering at him for any clue that might betray Grover’s knowledge of that night.
“Reb … Rebecca told you about Samantha wanting to get her hooks in me?”
Grover nodded, grinning as he threw a punch at the Irishman. “Stupid mick. Where the hell you think I come up with an idea like that—all on my own? Samantha told my wife!”
Donegan shrugged. “I suppose I’m just a bit put-off at the woman talk behind my back, is all.”
Then Seamus studied the country ahead as it opened up to them, helplessly thinking on Samantha Pike. Remembering with such vividness the full, vital fleshiness of her body and how she had given herself to him so willingly, with such a fury that it had startled him.
With a hunger that had matched his own. A ravenous, insatiable hunger.
* * *
Simon Pierce had gladly escaped a muggy summer in Washington City.
And now that the promise of success loomed that much closer on the horizon, Pierce believed the excruciating discomfort he had suffered traveling through this savage frontier might not all be for naught.
The ancient map might not be a hoax.
At first he and other scholars had truly believed it was some very sophisticated and well-executed ruse. Nothing more than a well-contrived hoax on the world’s scientific community, but albeit an elaborate hoax dating back centuries … a historical practical joke nonetheless.
Now, it appeared of late that the brittle parchment map and its cryptic promise were not some ancient jokester’s plan to laugh at them from beyond the grave.
Simon Pierce had been brought onto the small team at the Smithsonian when the map first made its appearance, and only then because he was the country’s foremost scholar on the most ancient of Castilian dialects.
But by the time Pierce had been brought down to Washington City from his native New England, the others had covered a lot of ground. Enough of it by then that Pierce and fellow researcher William Graves could plan a trip to the Great Plains, far from the security and creature comforts of the East Coast that was all the two men had ever known.
From his study of the ancient dialect used on the map, Pierce grew certain of its richness, either as a joke or as a true linchpin in locating what would prove to be an unbelievable treasure. A mother lode, only hinted at and whispered about in every schoolboy’s history of the exploration of the New World. Until now, Simon knew the map could only have been compiled by one who had a command of the old tongue—the language of the most royal of Spanish conquistadors.
But in the last two days conclusions the two had come to here in this hovel called Fort Richardson and highly secret discoveries made back east in the lamp-lit cellars and dusty archives of the institute itself told Pierce and Graves that the map had to be genuine. The ancients were pointing their fingers to Indian country where untold wealth beckoned from beyond the grave.
The pair would soon be walking on ground where the great explorers once stood … looking at the landforms as the conquistadors had. Not for the purposes of discovery in this new and foreign land had the Spaniards come but to look instead for a place to hide their most valuable treasure.
It was enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck—to one day soon be close enough to feel the presence of those ghosts, countless soldiers left behind on the long marches, their bones left to bleach in the eternal sun.
Pierce pitied those expendable men, the mighty right arm of the ancient Spanish Empire. But now that military might had eroded and Spain was nothing more than a mere shadow of what greatness it had once experienced. Simon understood the need for expendable men—the soldiers and civilians who guided early explorers across the trackless wastes of this godforsaken land. Those guides too were most expendable when the time came.
Yes, with Spain’s economy a thin shell of what it once was, it had not been hard to convince the poor and venal Spanish scholars to free the map once enough American money had been coughed up and put on the table.
That’s where Graves had come in, and proved his worth.
A member of a wealthy family from which he inherited a sincere interest in ancient Spain and exploration of the New World three centuries before, William Graves had both redeeming and despicable qualities, if Simon Pierce was to admit it. While Graves was indeed born to countless riches accumulated through generations of savvy entrepreneurs who bankrolled America’s early decades, Graves had known enough of the ancient archaeology to actually make himself invaluable to the entire research project as well. And, when a great amount of money was needed by the institute to purchase the map—more so to bribe the Spaniard in Barcelona who said he would let it slip through his hands if the price were right—William Graves assured the institute he could put his hands on the required amount.
In a week Graves was back with every last American dollar required by the institute to secretly acquire the ancient map from its Spanish caretaker. The money, and a contract that required signatures of the institute’s directors, demanding a four percent per annum charge for the luxury of borrowing against the possibility that the map might actually be the genuine article.
Graves had known all along, Simon Pierce thought now as his fingers once more brushed lightly over its parchment surface. He looked at the bowed head of the other man as Graves studied more of the northwest corner of the map, comparing and recomparing the lines and landforms and watercourses between it and the most recent of surveys performed by government crews sent out to prepare the way for the coming of the railroad to Santa Fe.
The railroad had been laid—from Kansas down to the territory of New Mexico … across the corner of a stretch of unforgiving wilderness some called the Staked Plain, what others called the Llano Estacado. And little had those filthy-rich railroad barons known that they had passed through a country rich with possibilities.
Pierce did not like Graves that much, but he would never tell the man. For all his upbringing, all his wealth and position, Graves was a renegade historian—not content to believe and study and reinforce what his betters had proven to be scientific fact. History was, after all, just that—scientific fact. But then, Simon thought, only the wealthy had enough aplomb, or downright nastiness to go against the established grain. And only then if they had the venal side William Graves did.
But that was exactly why Simon Pierce liked Graves at times. Because they had that trait of venality in common. Both had begun this quest fully realizing it as the search of the centuries: a chance to turn the scholars of the civilized world on their ears. And by now, what with the correlations of the Barcelona map to the most recent topographical surveys, along with the continuing efforts to decode the inscriptions at the border of the map by scholars back at the institute in Washington City—it appeared both Pierce and Graves stood not only to make themselves a reputation that would shine resplendent in the scientific and historical texts for all time, but stood to make themselves some of the richest men in the history of the world.
“Excuse me, Mr. Pierce?”
Graves and Pierce quickly drew the sheet of crimson velvet over the old map as soon as the first syllable had come from the soldier’s mouth when he presented himself at their tent flaps. Simon turned, disturbed.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Colonel Mackenzie asked me to come over to see if you’d care to dine with him again this evening.”
Pierce looked down at Graves, who was gazing up at him, smiling.
“Yes. I believe we will,” William Graves answered. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea, Simon? Tonight is, after all, our last night here at dear old Fort Richardson.”
“There, you have your answer … Lieutenant, isn’t it?”
“Yessir. Colonel Mackenzie’s adjutant.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Pierce said. “I never served myself, so I never got the meaning of the different ranks. You were in the war, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” the young officer answered with resignation. “Wasn’t old enough before Appomattox. But I satisfy myself by listening to the colonel’s stories. The others regale me with their experiences whipping the Johnnies in fine fashion, from Manassas to the Georgia campaign.”
“I bought my way out,” Graves said, quite matter-of-factly. “Money can do that, you know. As far as I understand, the taker of my bounty was killed at Gettysburg. A nasty affair I’ve heard.”
The young officer blanched, his mouth moving wordlessly until he said, “I’ll see you both for dinner at the colonel’s quarters.”
“Will Mackenzie have that soldier who plays the mouth harp there, as well as the one who sings so beautifully?” Pierce asked, remembering past dinners at the colonel’s.
“Yes,” the lieutenant answered. Clearly distressed at Graves’s disclosure, the young man fled and the flaps fell behind him in his leave-taking.
“Why did you do that, Graves?”
He looked up at Pierce, his face as innocent as the day he had been born. “Do what, my dear Simon?”
“That young man idolizes those other, proven soldiers. He probably dreams of campaigns filled with gleaming sabers and daring men and mighty, painted red savages screeching past on horseback.”
“And what, Simon? Did I puncture his martial fantasies—let the air out of his schoolboy’s dream by giving him a dose of cold reality? Yes, and I damned well enjoyed it too. These military types bore me. Were it not for the fact that we need them, and those unseemly civilian guides—”
Shadow Riders: The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 22
