Warpath of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “Are you sure the Indians who raided Tom Burke’s ranch came from Purgatory, Colonel?” Captain Roach asked. Normally, Roach was teamster for a wagon-freight line, but he had joined Covington’s Company of Indian fighters.

  “Of course they came from Purgatory,” Covington said. “This is the closest Indian village, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, but that’s my point,” Roach said. “It just don’t seem likely to me that they would shit so close to their home nest.”

  “Did it ever occur to you, that is exactly what they want us to think? What do you think about it, First Sergeant?” Covington asked. He rubbed his hands together and blew against them, warming them with his breath.

  “I figure it’s more’n likely these here Injuns is the ones who done it,” Dingo said. “But even if it ain’t these, it don’t matter, ’cause once this here war gets started, all Injuns is going to be the same.”

  “I think you are right, First Sergeant,” Covington replied. “Captain Roach, how long will it take you to get your men to the other side?”

  “Half an hour,” Roach said.

  “Then get your men into position, Captain. It looks like we have caught them completely by surprise, and I want to attack before it’s light.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh, Colonel, what about the women and children in the camp? By attacking while it is still dark, I am afraid we will be putting them at great risk.”

  “Will we now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about the women and children at Mr. Burke’s ranch? Were they at risk?” Covington asked.

  Roach was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, sir. I guess I see what you mean.”

  “Once your men are in position, fire one shot,” Covington ordered. “That will be our signal to attack from both sides.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  A small clinking sound of metal on metal came from somewhere among the soldiers. The sound was an unnatural intrusion into the soft whisper of wind in the trees. In her tepee in the village, Sasheena heard the sound while in the deepest recesses of her sleep, and her eyes came open as she wondered what it might have been. Automatically, she looked over toward her baby. He was sleeping nearby, dimly visible in the soft golden glow of the coals that still gleamed in the warming tepee fire. She felt the place beside her, empty now because Quinntanna and nearly every other young man in the village had gone hunting.

  Sasheena smiled as she remembered the excitement her husband felt over the expedition.

  * * *

  “Why do you hunt for meat?” she had asked him. “Our village has enough money from leasing grazing rights to the white man to buy all the pork, beef, lamb, and chicken that we need.”

  “You are a woman, and I do not expect a woman to understand,” Quinntanna had replied. “But the traditional hunt is something a man must do. I only wish there were buffalo to hunt.”

  * * *

  The bed robes were warm, and Sasheena realized she must have dreamed the unusual sound. She closed her eyes, and quickly dropped off to sleep again.

  * * *

  Outside, the silent horses and the quiet men were now in position. They stayed motionless for several minutes. Then they heard what they were waiting for: the crack of a rifle shot echoing from the far side of the village.

  “All right. Attack, men, attack!” Covington yelled. “Remember the Burke ranch!”

  At Covington’s orders, the militiamen galloped forward from both sides of the Indian camp, firing as rapidly as they could at the conical tepees that rose up in the darkness before them.

  It had been so long since there was any battle between Indians and whites in this area that many of the Indian residents of the village hadn’t even been born then. Because of that, the sleeping villagers had no instinctive responses to call upon. They poured out of the tepees, not to join in the fight, but to see what was going on.

  “Keep calm, men,” Covington shouted to his troops. “Keep calm and fire low.”

  Though the Indians were totally surprised by the unexpected attack on their village, they realized quickly that they were in mortal danger. Many of them tried to run, only to be cut down by the gunfire. One young Indian in his early teens suddenly burst out of one of the tepees and jumped on an unsaddled and unbridled pony. Covington started after him, not realizing that the boy was armed. The boy whirled around and fired, the bullet whizzing by Covington’s ear. Then the boy, displaying unusual courage, rode directly toward Covington, firing twice more, but missing both times. Covington returned fire, killing the boy with one shot.

  Sasheena had awakened as quickly as the others, and when she moved to the door flap of her tepee to look outside, she saw the swirling melee of soldiers and Indians. At first she was as confused as everyone else in the village. Then, looking around, she saw Stone Eagle going toward the soldiers, holding an American flag over his head. As a young girl she had heard stories around the council fires of the flag, for it had been given to Stone Eagle by the Great White Father in Washington, the man the whites called President Grant.

  “Do not shoot!” Stone Eagle was shouting, waving the flag over his head and trying to be heard above the rattle of musketry. “We are friends to the white man! I am friend of Grant!”

  Stone Eagle was shot down within twenty yards of his tepee. But it wasn’t only Stone Eagle, for Sasheena could see old men, women, and children being shot as well, slaughtered by the indiscriminate firing of the soldiers. Suddenly, a fusillade of bullets punched through her tepee, and she knew she had to leave.

  Grabbing a robe, Sasheena wrapped it around her naked body. Then she picked up her baby and left the tepee, running toward the edge of the trees. Two soldiers on horseback galloped after her. One of them reached down and grabbed the robe, then jerked it away.

  Sasheena screamed, and tried, in vain, to cover her exposed body.

  “I’ll be damned! She’s naked!”

  “Hey, she ain’t bad-lookin’! Get the kid away from her!” the other said. “Get the kid away from her, and we’ll have us some fun.”

  “No!” Sasheena screamed, trying to keep the baby from being taken.

  “Hell, don’t fight her, Ed, just kill the damn kid.”

  Using the butt of his pistol, the first soldier hit the baby on the head, crushing its skull. Shocked almost senseless by the brutality, Sasheena felt the life leave her child. She screamed in anger and grief.

  “Now, let’s see what this little ole Injun gal can do for us,” the other soldier said, dismounting and coming toward her, unbuttoning his pants as he did so.

  Suddenly a shot rang out, and a bullet hit Sasheena right between the eyes.

  “What the hell?” Ed said, looking around to see who’d shot her. He saw Dingo.

  “We’re here to kill Injuns,” Dingo said. “Not make some half-breed brats that we’ll have to deal with in the future. You want a woman, get yourself a whore like ever’one else.”

  “There ain’t nothin’ says we can’t have a little fun now,” one of the two men said.

  “Yeah, there is somethin’ says that,” Dingo replied. He pointed to himself. “Me. I say it.”

  “The first sergeant is quite right,” Covington said, arriving to see what the discussion was about. “We are here to conduct war against these people, not commit rape and other atrocities. You will conduct yourselves with dignity. Now, get on with it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the two soldiers replied contritely.

  “Good work, First Sergeant,” Covington said. “It’s a shame the young woman had to be killed, but it is serving a higher purpose.” Covington turned his horse then, and rode back into the swirling melee of dust, running, screaming Indians, and mounted cavalrymen.

  Very soon thereafter, most of the shooting had stopped, simply because there were no more targets of opportunity. Covington held up his hand, then described a circle, calling all his men together. The ground was strewn with Indians. Most were dead, though a fe
w were still groaning.

  “All right, men, I congratulate you on a fine victory here today. Surely this will go down in history as one of the greatest Indian battles of all time. Now I want you to search all the tepees and remove anything of value, especially any weapons that you might find. And bear in mind that you are liberating contraband, not for yourself, but for the entire company. We will make a fair and balanced division of plunder once we return to Big Rock.”

  “Some of these people are still alive,” Captain Roach said. “What do we do about them?”

  “Shoot them, I guess,” Covington said, almost in an offhand way. “That would be the humane thing to do. No sense in letting them lie here and suffer.”

  “What about the tepees?” Dingo asked.

  “Burn them.”

  For the next several minutes the men of Covington’s Militia moved through the encampment, removing blankets, cooking utensils, knives, furs, and anything else of value they could find, including, in several cases, money. There was an excited babble of voices as they displayed their treasure to one another, interrupted only by the occasional sound of a gunshot as the wounded Indians were killed.

  “Colonel, I suggest that we not stay around much longer,” Roach said.

  “Why is that?”

  “Have you noticed that there are no young men among the dead?”

  “What are you suggesting, Captain?”

  “I’m saying that, for some reason, all the young men are gone. If they come back from wherever they are, and see us here with all this”—he took in the camp with a sweep of his arm—“they aren’t going to take it very well. And we would be very vulnerable right now.”

  Covington stroked his cheek, then nodded. “A most astute observation, Captain Roach. Very well, give the order to withdraw back to Big Rock.”

  “Yes, sir,” Roach said.

  A few minutes later, with most of the tepees burning behind them, Covington led his militia back into the woods from which they had come. The bodies of 137 old men, women, and children lay on the ground, while the fires of scores of tepees sent a large column of smoke climbing into the air above them.

  16

  The travois of several horses were laden with the results of the hunt: deer, elk, wild turkey, and other game. It had been a good hunt, and as Quinntanna led the hunting party back to the village, he was thinking of the celebration they would have on their return. The meat would be put on spits and turned slowly over a fire, and the smell would cause everyone’s appetite to grow. They would tell stories of the hunt, and some of the older men would speak of the early days when buffalo were plentiful.

  Quinntanna could remember when, as a young boy, he had gone on a buffalo hunt. That had been one of the last hunts to actually take a buffalo, because the herds were all gone now. For hundreds of years the buffalo had served the Comanche. Then the white men had come and within one lifetime, the buffalo were gone.

  None of the others were thinking about the vanished buffalo. They were thinking only about the last two days and the success of their hunt. They talked about it, reliving certain shots and honing the stories they would tell around the campfires. Everyone bragged of their exploits except Quinntanna.

  “Quinntanna, have you no stories to tell?” Teykano asked. “We are all waiting to hear how it is that you killed only one half of an elk.”

  “Yes,” one of the others said. “Is the back half still running around somewhere in the woods, waiting to be taken at the next hunt?”

  The others laughed.

  “I will tell my story when there are better ears to hear it,” Quinntanna teased. “Such a story to ears as yours would be a terrible waste.”

  “Quinntanna,” Teykano said, pointing ahead. “Look ahead. There is smoke. Is it a forest fire?”

  The hunting party stopped for a moment to study the smoke. Then Quinntanna shook his head. “I think it is not a forest fire,” he said. “If many trees were burning there would be much more smoke.”

  “Grass, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps it is grass, though it does not seem to me that the smoke is wide enough for a grass fire.”

  “Then what is the cause of this strange thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Quinntanna admitted.

  Quinntanna urged his horse ahead, and the hunting party followed him, riding quickly toward the smoke that rose before them. Though he didn’t share it with the others, there was something about this that he found extremely troubling.

  Then, when they reached the meadow where the village had been, Quinntanna realized what was bothering him. This was his dream, come to life, his worst fear realized. Ahead of him he saw several blackened circles. He also saw about fifty people moving through the pall of smoke. He wasn’t close enough to see whether or not they were crying, but he knew without a doubt that they were.

  Then he saw something that he had not seen in his dreams, even though he had always known they were there. He saw several bodies stretched out on the ground.

  With a scream of rage, Quinntanna slapped his legs against the side of his horse. The steed bolted into a gallop, closing the remaining distance in but a few seconds. When he arrived, he leaped down from his horse and started searching for Sasheena.

  “Sasheena!” he called. “Sasheena, where are you?”

  “Quinntanna,” an old man said. “Your woman and your child are here.”

  The old man who called him was Isataka, Sasheena’s grandfather. Quinntanna looked down at the two bodies. The baby’s head had been smashed like a gourd. Sasheena’s face was deformed by the effect of the bullet that had ended her life. With grief and confusion in his eyes, Quinntanna looked up at Isataka, who had summoned him.

  “Who?” he asked. “Who did this?”

  “It was white soldiers,” Isataka replied.

  “Soldiers?” Quinntanna was shocked by the answer. “Soldiers of the white man’s army did this?”

  “Yes. They came before light this morning, and began firing. Stone Eagle was going to reason with them, to ask them why they are doing this thing, but they shot him down before he could get to them. Then there was much confusion. Some of us got away during the confusion, and we hid in the forest and watched as they slaughtered those who did not get away.”

  Suddenly, Quinntanna recalled his conversation with Smoke Jensen. Jensen had told him that someone had attacked the family of a white rancher.

  “I think I know why the white soldiers attacked,” Quinntanna said.

  “Why?” Isataka asked.

  “The home of a white rancher was attacked, and the rancher’s wife and children were killed. According to the sign left, the attack was made by Comanche.”

  “That cannot be true,” the old man said. “There are no Comanche on the warpath.”

  “We know that, but the whites do not. And I can think of no other reason why they would attack our village.”

  “I think they do not need a reason,” Isataka said. “There is an evil in the white man that cannot be kept down. It has been many years since there was any trouble between our people. Perhaps the evil could wait no longer.”

  From all over what had been the village, Quinntanna heard the wails of grief and anger from the young men of the hunting party who were returning to find their own families slaughtered.

  “Quinntanna, we must do battle with the white man,” Teykano said angrily. Like Quinntanna, Teykano had lost his wife. He’d also lost two children.

  “We can’t fight the white man,” Quinntanna said. “There are too many of them. There are as many white men as there are blades of grass. If we make war against them, we will all be killed.”

  “Better to be killed fighting than to die a coward. And that is what we will be if we do nothing,” Teykano insisted.

  “We will do something,” Quinntanna promised.

  “What? What will we do, Quinntanna?”

  “I will talk with the spirits,” Quinntanna said. “It is for the spirits to decide what we must d
o.”

  * * *

  Quinntanna buried his wife and child, then went into the mountains to consult with the spirits. He took neither water nor food with him, for the nourishment he sought was for his soul, not his body. And to nourish his soul, he took a supply of peyote buttons.

  He went high into the mountains, above the snow line, and there he sat, wrapped in a buffalo robe, looking out over the valley below. He didn’t know how long he had been there when he saw a warrior mounted on a horse. The warrior was wearing a headdress of many feathers that stretched all the way to the ground. He also wore a shirt and trousers of beaded buckskin, and there was a glow around him that was so bright that it hurt Quinntanna’s eyes to look at him.

  “Shining Warrior!” Quinntanna said.

  Shining Warrior looked at Quinntanna for a moment, but he didn’t speak. Instead, he uttered a war cry, then urged his horse into a gallop. Shining Warrior rode for some distance away, then turned and rode back toward Quinntanna. As he galloped toward him, Shining Warrior held his war club over his head and leaned to one side as if he were going to strike Quinntanna. Quinntanna was frightened, but he knew, instinctively, that he must not flinch. Shining Warrior let forth a mighty yell, and swinging the club at Quinntanna’s head, stopped it just inches away from smashing his skull.

  Then Quinntanna noticed a very strange thing. Even though the horse had galloped back and forth across the snow-covered plain, it had left no tracks. Except for the footprints Quinntanna had left, the snow was completely pristine.

  Shining Warrior leaned down then to put his hand on Quinntanna’s forehead. Quinntanna shut his eyes, and when he did, he saw a vision of what was left of his people. In the vision, he saw that his people were being attacked yet again by soldiers.

  “No!” Quinntanna shouted.