The Vigilante's Bride

by Yvonne Harris

  After a long pause, Black Otter said, “The cows you driving, they New Hope cows. Why you drive New Hope cows to Wyoming?”

  Axel blinked in surprise. “Why . . . ah . . . they’re mine. I bought them from New Hope.”

  The chief stared at him. Slowly, he shook his head.

  Axel’s mind raced to come up with something better. Then he remembered. The chief couldn’t read.

  “Yes, they are. I got the paper right here says they’re mine.” Axel fished inside his jacket for a leather folder and took out a newspaper column – the advertisement he had placed for a bride months before. He shook it out importantly. “There,” he said, handing it to the chief, “you can see for yourself.”

  Black Otter stared at the meaningless black marks on the paper for a full minute, then solemnly handed it back.

  It worked. Bart tucked the clipping back inside the folder and made a great show of replacing it in his jacket. “I’d like your approval to drive my herd through. Just this once, I promise.”

  Black Otter said nothing.

  Axel held up two fingers. “I give you two cows to let us pass.”

  The chief spoke to the other men seated around the fire – short, guttural sounds, deep in his throat. He grunted and shook his head. Holding up both fists, Black Otter snapped his fingers open.

  Ten! Bart Axel swore under his breath. He’d hoped to get away with one, perhaps two at the most. The fool Indian had been around whites too long.

  “Ten, it is,” he growled. With a little bow he started to rise. He had to get back to Clete and the men and get those steers moving.

  Black Otter reached over and grasped his arm, pushing Axel back down. “You give me paper say so.”

  A sheen of perspiration broke out on Axel’s forehead. “But no one would doubt Black Otter,” he said.

  “No paper, you no drive herd. Soldiers say we steal them.”

  Axel sighed. That did it. He didn’t dare put anything in writing about those cows. Or did he? Black Otter wouldn’t know. Out came the leather folder again and a stub of a pencil. Axel scribbled on the back of an envelope, then signed his name with a flourish and a jab of the pencil. He handed the envelope to the chief, saying, “This is a legal bill of sale. It says that I, Bart Axel, give you ten cows in return for permission to cross your land.”

  Black Otter turned the paper over in his hand and nodded. “Good. We will feast.”

  Axel watched the chief rise, cross the dirt floor, and disappear into the long entryway leading outdoors. Apparently, the Indian had gone outside to get Axel an escort. It had been easier than he’d thought.

  Axel looked around the earthen lodge. Over forty feet across, the floor had been dug out a few feet in from the walls, leaving a wide shelf for seats running around the outer edge. The air was thick and warm, not smoky at all. A constant current of fresh air drawn through the vestibule by the fire carried the haze up and out the smoke hole in the top.

  Outside the lodge, Black Otter’s hand closed on his son’s shoulder as Two Leggings chased by, playing a game with his friends. He led him behind the lodge. Standing next to the tripod holding his shield, he handed the boy the envelope.

  “Read this to me,” he said in Crow.

  Two Leggings ran his finger under each word. He grinned and looked up at his father.

  “It no say Iron Hair give me cows?” the chief asked.

  His son shook his head.

  “What it say?”

  Two Leggings read aloud:

  “When the moon comes up, and the sun goes down, Sullivan, the cowboy rides to town.

  Bang! Bang! Sullivan, Sullivan!

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Is silly song we sing in school to tease Light Eyes,” Two Leggings said and shrugged.

  “As I thought. Iron Hair lies to me.” Black Otter stared at the paper and then back at Two Leggings. “Sullivan your friend. You not ever sing that song again.”

  The wide forehead of the chief of all the Absarokas dug into deep lines, and an unforgiving bitterness settled around his mouth. The white man had made a fool of him. Three times he clapped his hands and shouted. Every brave within earshot ran to the chief. As Black Otter spoke, the men’s dark eyes began to shine. The chieflaid a finger across his lips and pointed to his lodge.

  In minutes, dozens of braves with bows and arrows and spears and rifles slipped out of the village. Many of them squatted beside their ponies before they mounted, scooped their fingers through the black earth, and dragged broad dark stripes down both cheeks.

  Fighting off a wave of nausea, Axel started to rise. “I must leave now,” he said. He felt a little green. Waving his hand, he refused another gourd full of pemmican. His mustache was oily and plastered around his mouth, with buffalo grease covering his lips and hands. The dried raw meat and crushed berries were glued together with layers of melted fat and marrow and then poured into animal bladders.

  Axel shuddered. Nasty stuff. Only sheer willpower and a herd of cattle marooned in Indian territory had enabled him to swallow it and keep it down. And he wasn’t too sure about the latter. He averted his eyes from the heaping gourd. It made his insides churn just to look at it.

  For nearly an hour, the men sat there, feasting, celebrating their agreement about the cows, Axel blatantly flattering the chief and pretending great interest in the Crow Nation, praising its “achievements,” as he called them, biding his time until he could leave and get the cattle moving south for Wyoming.

  Black Otter munched his food with gusto and smiled at Axel. Four pretty girls in soft, fringed dresses and high moccasins padded around silently, waiting on them. For reasons Axel didn’t understand, the chief had kept him there in the lodge, talking, as if stalling for time.

  Axel climbed unsteadily to his feet, determined to leave. “Let’s go get your cows, Chief,” he said.

  Luke and Tom Cosgrove stationed themselves high on the ridgeline, while Henry, John Cosgrove, and Will Brown spread out halfway down the cliff behind the rocks.

  At a shout, Luke looked up. Nearly fifty braves lined the rim of the canyon, tall, grim-faced men with cheeks and foreheads streaked with circles and bars of mudlike war paint. A wave of red-skinned men washed down the hillside, digging in, blending in with the surrounding foliage.

  Turning to the Crow beside him, Luke said, “Curly Bear, keep those men out of sight. Get them to the other side of the canyon and get them up high. Make sure they know those cows will run once the shooting starts.”

  Curly Bear’s eyes gleamed. “Like buffalo?” he asked.

  “I guess you know.” Luke grinned and squeezed the Indian’s shoulder. To Curly Bear, with three eagle feathers stuck rakishly over his ear, two hundred docile cows were nothing. He’d ridden bareback into buffalo herds of thousands.

  Ahead of the herd, Clete Wade rode along, scouting the terrain, speculating why Axel was gone so long. From time to time he shifted around in the saddle and checked the horizon. Not a cloud in the sky, and yet an expectant heaviness hung in the air, as if a storm were coming.

  From the time they pulled the herd out of the Little Bighorn the day before, he hadn’t liked it.

  They were driving the herd due south from where the Little Bighorn and Bighorn Rivers came together. It was a rolling landscape, rough grassland parted by a few low hills and ravines, gouged through by the occasional deep canyon like the one he was riding in now.

  He slowed the horse to a walk and rolled himself a smoke. It had taken him two days to swallow his anger at not going with Haldane to Parker. He’d wanted to be there when they took Sullivan out. Clete put a hand on his chin and worked his jaw from side to side, his eyes narrowing at the popping sounds it made. Luke Sullivan would pay for that if it was the last thing Clete did. He looked up, scanned the dark gray walls of the cliffs. There!

  One minute, they weren’t there, and the next minute they were. Give any white man the creeps, he thought. When he spotted a tall figure in buckskin slipping behind a
rock, Clete’s scalp rippled. And over there, another one. On the rocks above, three more hunched and moved into the trees. It seemed everywhere he looked, copper-skinned men clung like brown spiders to the cliffs on both sides of the canyon.

  Images of Sullivan, bleeding and down on his knees, flashed in front of him, and arrows coming from nowhere. Riding a horse made him too easy a target. Clete kicked his feet free of the stirrups and slid off the horse. Running, he dove headfirst into a dry ditch carved out by the rains.

  Axel and Chief Black Otter appeared on the ledge of the cliff above. Clete slid the barrel of his Winchester over the side of the ditch and lined up the Crow chief in his sights. He squeezed the trigger. A white scar blew out of the rock at the chief ’s feet, the slug ricocheting down the canyon.

  Quickly, Clete cocked the rifle and fired again, trying to get the range right. This time, the bullet whined over the Indian’s head. Better. As Black Otter broke for the shelter of a boulder, Clete’s Winchester roared once more. The bullet’s impact sent the chief to the ground. He slid on his back halfway down the hillside. His leg useless, Black Otter elbowed his way behind a boulder and shouted in Crow.

  His braves shot to their feet with yells of fury. Until that moment, not a bow had been drawn. Axel shouted down at Clete, gesturing wildly, pointing behind him. Clete lifted his head and peered over the edge of the ditch, saw what looked to him like a whole tribe of enraged Crows swarming down the hillside after him. He scrambled out of the ditch and made a frantic dash for his horse.

  Luke aimed and fired. A geyser of mud and dirt blew out of the ground between Clete and the horse. Half a dozen archers drew.

  Clete snatched the bridle and held the frightened horse still. He had his boot in the stirrup when the first arrow hooked in hard in his upper arm. Face twisted, Clete grabbed for the shaft and tried to pull it out. A red-hot poker drove into his hip, burying itself and a piece of his trousers deep into muscle, and slamming him against the horse. The animal snorted and ran away, holding its head at an odd angle to avoid the trailing reins.

  Clete had hardly hit the ground when Little Turtle and three Crow braves shinnied down the cliff and dangled from an overhanging ledge. They dropped, landed on their feet. Knives drawn, they ran to the downed white man.

  Clete tried to get his gun up but with no success, as he was knocked flat on his back by a moccasined foot. Cursing, he grabbed the fist clenching his hair, and then his oath turned into a long, hoarse scream.

  On the hillside across the ravine, Luke’s stomach roiled.

  He’d heard those screams before. Swallowing, he turned away, and for the first time, Bart Axel got a look at the Indian in buckskins who’d shot at Clete.

  “Sullivan!” he yelled.

  Face twisting, Axel yanked the Schofield from its holster and fired. The impact of the slug tore into the fleshy part of Luke’s arm and knocked him to the ground. Red gushing from his sleeve, he slid in the dirt partway down the embankment.

  Axel turned and jumped down the hillside, zigzagging, sliding, half falling in a race for the ravine and Clete’s excited little mare. Grabbing the saddle horn, he threw himself onto her back and kicked her into a run.

  Luke struggled to a sitting position. Leaning into the steep incline, he braced his feet against a rock, lifted the butt of the rifle to his shoulder, and clenched his teeth into the fringed sleeve on his left arm, pulling it up like a sling. The buckskin was slimy with his blood, and pain stabbed down to his fingernails.

  Supporting the barrel with his injured arm, he raced the sights ahead of Axel on the horse and fired. Missed.

  Clumsily, he tried to cock the lever to shoot again, but his left hand had gone numb and shook uncontrollably. He couldn’t hold the gun up, couldn’t feel the weight of the barrel anymore. Feeling sick and shivery, he watched Axel ride away.

  He felt it before he heard it – the ground vibrating under his hips. Like a distant avalanche, the rumble of hooves came from around the bend. Hemmed in by the high rock walls, the herd thundered around the curve.

  Axel heard it too, and looked back over his shoulder, then flailed his legs into his horse. Lashing the reins back and forth in a stinging arc across its neck, he drove the animal faster, trying to get out of the way of the herd.

  The lead bulls barreled alongside him, jostling the little mare and her rider, spooning up clods of dirt. The others followed right behind, overtaking them, surrounding them. Caught in the middle of a crushing mass of steers and clacking horns, Axel fired his revolver into the air and whipped the horse toward the outside of the herd. Encircled by crazed cattle on all sides, Axel galloped along in the suffocating din with no choice but to ride it out.

  From the ledge above, Luke saw the horse’s shoulder dip as it broke stride. For a moment, she seemed to rise above the heaving backs of the herd around them, thrust upward by the surging momentum. Axel’s hat flew off, cartwheeled across a steer’s back, and disappeared. Then horse and rider sank together into a cloud of yellow dust and hooves. The last of the herd disappeared down the canyon.

  The distant rumbling of the herd grew louder, and with it the bellowing racket of cattle approaching.

  Luke slid down the hill to Black Otter, snatching, grabbing at brush with his good arm. Crows at the other end of the canyon had turned the herd. Confused, the cows were stampeding back this way.

  Black Otter started to slide. Wide-eyed, he reached his hand up to Luke.

  Luke grabbed it and crooked a leg around a small tree, praying it would hold them and keep them both from rolling into the herd below. The ground trembled with the pounding of hooves.

  Lord, quick, I need some help down here!

  Feet first, three braves dropped over the top led by Curly Bear, digging their heels in, skidding down to the two men.

  Luke bent over the chief and tugged at his leggings, trying to get to the wound to stop the bleeding. Curly Bear shoved him aside and drew his knife. With a flick of his hand, he slashed the leather open from hip to ankle.

  Luke tied a strip of the cut legging into a tourniquet.

  The gush of blood slowed. It wasn’t nearly good enough, but it was all he could do for now. “Let’s get him to New Hope and a doctor,” he said.

  Wincing, Black Otter said something to the men that Luke didn’t understand, then closed his eyes. The four of them, lifting and crawling, got the chief up to the top and boosted him over the edge. Tom Cosgrove, lying on his stomach, hauled Luke up the last few feet.

  Luke sagged against a tree trunk, panting and holding his arm. “Go get Doc Maxwell. Tell him to meet us at New Hope. Tell him to hurry.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  As night settled in, the Indians began arriving at New Hope. Some walked, while others rode in on horseback, dragging loaded travois through the woods and setting up their tipis in the field beyond the barn. Members of the Dog Soldiers and Fox Warriors, solemn, straight-backed men with braids down to their waists, simply appeared a few hours after the stampede. In small groups of two or three they stood around the yard, talking quietly, waiting for word from inside about Black Otter.

  On the back porch, three braves stepped aside, one of them holding the kitchen door as Emily came out with a bucket and headed for the well again.

  Every window was ablaze with light. Inside, Doc Maxwell and Emily had turned the library into an infirmary, a makeshift operating room. He and Scully rolled the piano against the wall, while Emily padded the long oak reading table with newspapers and quilts and covered it with sheets. It took three men – Doc and Scully and a Crow medicine man – to move the big Indian onto the table. They worked on him for hours.

  The chief ’s face was sunken, wrinkled with pain. From hip to ankle, his leg was splinted and wrapped in bandages. Maxwell squeezed his shoulder gently. It had been an ordeal for all of them. Twice, his patient had fainted on the table as Doc struggled to stop the hemorrhaging, set the bones, and stitch the gaping wound closed. Maxwell gave him
another injection of morphine.

  Black Otter’s gaze held on the shaman kneeling by the fireplace. At the chief ’s request, he’d remained in the room, occasionally bending over Black Otter’s injured body with Doc’s stethoscope plugged in his ears, listening, wide-eyed, to his chief ’s heartbeat as Maxwell removed chips of bone from the chief ’s leg.

  The man’s presence reassured Black Otter, and for Maxwell that – and the relief in the chief ’s eyes as the painkiller took hold – was enough. However crude and rudimentary the shaman’s knowledge of medicine, the two men shared this patient.

  “Your medicine puts him to sleep,” Maxwell’s barefoot assistant had said, shaking his head in disapproval.

  Maxwell nodded. “Sleep is good.”

  Daybreak brightened the windows at the end of the library before Doc Maxwell finished and they got Black Otter into a bed brought into the library. With a sigh, the doctor straightened up over the chief and rolled his sleeves down.

  Maxwell snapped his bag shut and started for the door. As he did, the shaman slung a white buffalo robe over his shoulders and opened a leather pouch. He sorted through the sacred bundle, preparing for the prayers and rites with which he would heal his chief as soon as the white doctor was gone.

  Doc Maxwell smiled and slipped out into the hall.

  It seemed all wrong to Emily. The morning after the stampede had dawned with birds chittering and a sky so bright, so blue, it hurt her eyes to look at it. As if nothing had happened, she thought. Life went on.

  For hours last night, she’d dozed in Luke’s arms on the sofa in the darkened parlor, listening to the serious voices in the hall, and waiting until Doc Maxwell could leave Black Otter and attend to Luke.

  Early this morning, she slipped from his arms and stood up. She straightened her clothes and patted her hair, trying to put herself together. Still sleepy, she rubbed her face. Coffee – she needed some coffee to clear her head. Trying not to wake Luke, she left the room quietly and went off to the kitchen.