Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873

by Terry C. Johnston

  Donegan felt like a boiled potato wrapped in the steamy, wet blanket—his clothes heavy with dampness, his skin tight and tender, seared by the severe heat. The air was still warm, but every now and then arose a rattle of breeze rushing along the floor of the washout—cool enough to remind them that winter had indeed come to the southern plains. Seamus dropped the blanket and stood, his eyes blinking, looking up the coulee, then down, finding Stillwell doing the same.

  “You look a sight, Irishman,” said the young scout, grinning.

  “Don’t look so bad yourself, Jack, me boy.” He wrapped Stillwell in his arms fiercely. “Thanks, friend. You saved my arse again, didn’t you?”

  “Someone’s gotta watch out for you, that’s for sure.”

  Donegan sighed, turning back to the wagon and sticking his head beneath the canvas. “C’mon out.”

  They came out singly and in pairs, most still clutching their soaked blankets, shedding them only when they truly believed they were safe, that the fire had passed over them. The only celebration they allowed themselves at that moment was to mutter relief to one another.

  “We’ll go up, Lieutenant,” Stillwell said. “See what there is to see.”

  “What about our horses? The mules for the wagons?” asked Stanton.

  “Like I told you—the odds are they didn’t survive. I told you it might come down to the stock or us.”

  The lieutenant finally nodded. “Don’t know what’s worse, Stillwell,” he admitted. “Getting burned alive … or being out here in the middle of Comanche and Kiowa country—set afoot like we are.”

  “Don’t rile the rest,” Donegan warned in a whisper. “We’ve got to do the best we can—with what’s left us now.”

  “I suppose we can do that,” the lieutenant agreed. “You two made it through that siege at Beecher’s Island on the Arickaree—you’ll see that we make it through this too.”

  Stillwell and Donegan turned and walked quickly down the coulee to a gentle slope still scarred by the wagon tires in its wild descent. They struggled up the slope, digging in toes and clawing with their hands until they gazed over the lip of the washout, gazed across a surreal world.

  The fire was gone, far to the east now. Greasy smoke filled the air like a murky wall on that distant horizon. All that was left behind was a blackened world. Streamers of bluish smoke steamed up from tufts of buffalo grass and matted buffalo chips, all still smoldering, burning slowly after the intense flames had passed by.

  Bursts of translucent, saffron sunlight shot down from the sky overhead, while to the east, darkness greased the horizon. To the far west, the first gray storm clouds threatened, drawing closer as he watched.

  But below that great, multicolored canopy there was no living thing to be seen from horizon to horizon to horizon.

  “Where you figure the horses went?” Seamus asked, sensing the despair in his own gut.

  Jack shrugged. “Run off—if they’re still alive.”

  He sighed. “You think we have a chance of finding them?”

  “Don’t know.” Stillwell seemed as morose as Seamus had ever seen the man.

  “I suppose you’re right, Jack. We won’t know, if we don’t give it a try.”

  Stillwell smiled, cracking his smoke-blackened face. “Let’s go tell the rest … have the lieutenant form up a few search parties. We might find some of the stock before sundown.”

  * * *

  Jack had made sure he told all the soldiers who were going out in groups of three to give themselves enough time to make it back to the washout before slap-dark.

  Most of the young soldiers looked worried, a few downright scared when they were hit with the lieutenant’s orders to go in search of some of the missing horses and mules. Two dozen animals they needed to account for. And though he never said it to the others, Stillwell knew the chances were damn slim they would find them all together, if at all.

  He couldn’t blame the soldiers, most of them his age or older. Some of them German, a few Irish. All of them poor, and this frontier army the surest way to assure themselves of two squares a day and a blanket each night. But the thought of going out into this trackless wilderness of rolling tableland now covered by the black scar of the prairie fire’s passing was enough to give pause to even a well-seasoned plains scout.

  “What you do is pick out something far off in the direction you’re going in,” he had told them all after they had climbed out of the washout and stood in the middle of that black desert ready to depart the questionable safety of the commissary wagon. There were four groups of them. Seamus and Jack would walk south. Three parties of soldiers would take the other cardinal points of the compass—three troopers in each group.

  “That way, you won’t get turned around until you need to stop and come back for the night. If you don’t find sign by the time the sun is two hands above the horizon—like this,” he showed them how to hold two flat hands side by side off the far western edge of the earth, “then get your asses on back here, using another high point on the land to guide you in.”

  “The sergeant here will have a flag rigged up and flying over the washout for us,” the lieutenant explained. Then Stanton assigned two soldiers to the sergeant: to stay with the civilians and protect the supplies.

  “Good luck to all of you,” Jack told them as he and Seamus Donegan waved good-bye and set off to the south.

  What Stillwell did not say aloud was that he was praying for those first few hundred yards of march into the blackened, smoking, smoldering Hell created by the prairie fire. Praying that they would run across some sign—hoofprints … anything—something to hold on to with more than mere hope.

  So it was they had walked, and walked some more, without much said between them. Each man carried a pistol and a rifle—Jack’s a Spencer repeater that gave him seven shots in each Blakeslee reloading tube. Jack was packing ten of those heavy tubes along in the haversack strapped over his shoulder. Donegan cradled the big, heavy, brass-mounted Henry repeater over the crook of his shoulder, extra cartridges gently rattling in the huge, slash pockets of his blanket mackinaw.

  Each of them deep in his own thoughts, perhaps his own pain, more so despair for their lot at this moment.

  “Jack—it’s time we headed back,” Seamus said late that afternoon.

  Stillwell stopped and sighed, standing inches deep in the blackened ash that had drifted up into his nostrils and eyes and had coated his tongue with its acid all day long. Hot, stinging, rancid.

  “All right,” he replied, turning around completely on that spot. “See that knob off yonder?”

  “Yeah—but it looks to be a little west of north.”

  “Just keep walking to the right of it some,” Jack explained, “we’ll get back to the wagon and the others.”

  “I pray the others get back to the wagon,” Seamus said as they set off on the back trail, able to follow their outbound footprints for more than a mile.

  It was after that first mile or so that it grew difficult to see the bootprints. The ceaseless wind saw to that—blowing away all traces of their passing from the scorched prairie. Only hours after the fire, herewith beginning the healing of this wilderness.

  By now the sun was shining only through a few patches of open, blue sky above. Yellow light streamed down on the cold land like saffron streamers from a forbidding gray canopy. Far off to the left gathered some ominous clouds with black underbellies. The sky thickened, like Cheyenne blood soup, blotting out the setting sun completely.

  “We don’t have as much time as I figured we would,” Jack admitted. “We got to walk faster, Seamus. I was counting on us having some light from the sun even after it went down. But with those storm clouds hanging up there in the western sky—we’re going to have to push it to get back to the wagon before dark.”

  “You set the pace—I’ll keep up,” Seamus said.

  “And keep your eyes moving too. Don’t want to be caught out here.”

  “What the divil a
difference it make, Jack? There’s no place we can hide that I can see. We’d just have to stand them off.”

  Stillwell smiled back at the Irishman’s blackened face, those gray eyes twinkling as they regarded Jack. “Yes,” the young scout sighed. “I suppose we’ve done a bit of standing off Injuns before, haven’t we, Seamus?”

  On into the fading light of dusk they pushed at a renewed pace, until at last, more to their right, Jack spotted something in the distance, fluttering, waving on the horizon.

  “You make out what that is, Seamus?”

  He squinted, blinking his red, swollen eyes some. Rubbed them, then looked again. “It ain’t really moving. Don’t look like a Injun, though—on foot or sitting top his pony.”

  “You think it could be the sergeant’s flag?”

  “Pray it is, Jack. Let’s go.”

  The closer they drew to that high point of land, the clearer it became, until they both could make out the flapping of the old sergeant’s handmade flag: a large strip of greasy hand towel from his kitchenware. Jack had to admit that nothing had ever really looked that good to him since the day he spotted the black faces of those buffalo soldiers who rode up to him on the dusty road between Cheyenne Wells and Fort Wallace.*

  “Hurry!” A voice was hurled at them from the figure standing beside the flag, waving them on.

  They rolled into a clumsy, weary trot, their feet sweating from the heat of the ground, their lungs stinging from the acrid smoke and ash still drifting up from the burnt grass like wounded ghosts of the fire’s passing.

  Jack could make out the words as the soldier turned to the side and hollered down into the washout.

  “They’re coming, Sarge. Two of ’em.”

  There was a pause, likely while the old sergeant said something, then the soldier yelled back in reply. “It’s them two scouts. Just them.”

  “Anyone else come in yet?” Jack asked when he was close enough to shout.

  “Just the bunch from the west. Got in here a short while back.”

  “The lieutenant still out?” Seamus asked.

  The soldier’s head bobbed up and down as the two civilians ground to a halt near the wash-towel flag.

  “Hurry, fellas—the sarge needs you bad.”

  “Goddammit!” came the old sergeant’s growl from below them. “I don’t need ’em—but this pilgrim from the east sure needs help.”

  Jack and Donegan came to the edge of the coulee and peered down at the men gathered about William Graves.

  Simon Pierce turned around to gaze up at Stillwell and Donegan. His eyes pleaded with them. And then it was that Jack realized William Graves was being held down by two soldiers and Pierce himself.

  “We’re trying to dress this wound he has,” Pierce explained as the two civilians skidded down to the bottom of the washout.

  “How’d he get hurt?” Donegan asked.

  “That’s a nasty looking one—he get bit by some critter?” Jack inquired, glancing up then down the coulee.

  Pierce nodded. “This morning, not long after all of you left—I heard William cry out. Sounded like he was in pain. We all looked up, found him standing there holding his arm—like this. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he was bit.”

  “What bit him?”

  Pierce gazed at Stillwell. “The sergeant shot it—soon as Graves could get out of the way.”

  “It was a mean sonbitch, boy,” explained the sergeant. “But I blowed it to kingdom come. Popped it—just like that. Shoulda seen it.”

  “What was it, dammit!”

  “A skunk,” the sergeant answered snappishly.

  “Where is it?” Jack asked, glancing down at Graves with a bit more concern now, the confusion gone from his eyes.

  “I throwed it down there,” the sergeant answered, pointing up the washout.

  “It smell strange to you?”

  The old soldier shook his head. “No worse’n a polecat skunk will smell anytime.”

  “Get me some lye soap.”

  “I already washed the bite, Stillwell,” explained Pierce. “I tried to do everything I could think of.”

  Stillwell pulled the government man aside by the arm to whisper, “You figure it the same way I do?”

  Pierce nodded. “I had no idea—”

  “Skunks carry that poison in ’em … it makes the critters fearless. I imagine the fire scared hell out of it anyway, and it found a place to hide out somewhere in this washout with us while the fire crossed over. Then Graves likely did something to rile it.”

  “He said it came running at him, spitting and hissing—snapping its jaws,” Pierce said.

  “Skunks don’t usually come out in broad daylight—do they?” Seamus asked.

  Jack pointed to the sky. “It ain’t exactly been full daylight since sunup.”

  “Rabies is a death sentence,” Pierce said quietly to the two civilians, wringing his hands together, fear etched on his narrow face.

  Stillwell swallowed hard. “If we’re to save him, we’ve got to burn the wound.”

  “Purge the poison?” asked Simon Pierce.

  “The only caustic we got in camp is fire,” Donegan replied. He turned to the soldiers. “Sergeant, get one of your cooking irons out after you’ve started a fire. We need something red hot.”

  “You gonna cauterize that bite he’s got?” the old soldier asked as he pulled a long iron poker from the back of the wagon.

  “Tie him up for now,” Seamus said to the others, all of whom had returned, then nodded to the sergeant.

  “He doesn’t have much of a chance, does he?” Pierce inquired weakly, the strain and outright fear evident in his voice.

  “I figure we’re going to give him the only chance he’s got,” Jack replied. “It’ll either heal him—or we’ll find out it’s too damn late as it stands.”

  Chapter 27

  Mid-November 1873

  Another two days had turned up half of the mules and a handful of the horses. Two of the army mounts Seamus and Jack Stillwell ran across had hooves burned so badly they were limping and had to be put down.

  As for concern about the noise of the pistol shots, Jack said a man would be foolish not to worry that a wandering Comanche buck might just hear the solitary shot they made that second day, another lone shot fired their third day of looking.

  “But,” Jack had told Donegan, “the Injuns usually go where the white settlers are. And if they aren’t raiding the white man, they’re hunting buffalo.”

  “It’s for damned sure there aren’t any white settlers out here,” Seamus had replied, gazing over the blackened wilderness. “And I haven’t seen buffalo in so long, that army salt-pork is starting to taste like real food!”

  While a fourth day of searching the wide prairie of the Staked Plain did not turn up any more of the stock, nonetheless they had enough animals and human muscle to sweat the wagon out of that coulee. Hitching the four mules to the tree took care of all of the sergeant’s wagon stock they had managed to find. And after the lieutenant claimed his animal, along with Donegan and Stillwell given mounts for tracking purposes, that left only three soldiers who would not have to ride in the wagon with the two civilians.

  That fourth night after the fire, they were back by the stream where they had been camped the morning the flames pushed them east. Water had never been a problem. Finding wood, even unburnt buffalo chips to heat coffee over, was a different matter altogether. As the horses and mules were turned up, the men would take one along each morning they went out in search, using the mount to carry back to camp any and all firewood and chips they could find at the end of the day.

  “A man might do without a lot of things out here,” the old commissary sergeant announced that fourth night as the sky grew as black as the burnt scar of never-ending wilderness they found themselves surrounded by. “But he won’t do without his coffee.”

  Sure enough, Seamus figured, he could choke down the half-raw salt-pork and hardtack with some water. T
ime was he had even chewed on some coffee beans for the pure, heady flavor. But nothing in the world could replace the pleasure of a steaming cup of coffee in the morning, and another in the evening when the day was done and he was back among friends and the cold, prairie night closed in about them like a tightening, frosty fist swallowing them up.

  They never took the ropes off William Graves. Even though it seemed he had lucid moments, but only in between the increasing fits of laughter and rage, the fits of convulsions. Even in those rational moments when he begged and pleaded and bribed and cried and cursed as sane as the next man, even then no one took the ropes off Graves.

  And Jack Stillwell had made sure the lieutenant assigned a man to shoot Simon Pierce first—if Pierce was caught trying to release his companion.

  “They have their secrets, Lieutenant,” Donegan had agreed with Stillwell. “And there’s no telling what Graves, or Pierce for that matter, might offer a man to get himself released. But the man’s done for.”

  “It’s for the best that all your men stay away from him now. Let Pierce see to his needs until the poison works its way to his heart,” Stillwell suggested, trying his best to explain what he had seen happen to others more than a dozen times since childhood.

  “There’s no chance he’ll heal—no chance that he can fight it off?” Pierce asked, walking up to the group that fourth night after Graves had fallen into a fitful sleep, anchored against a wagon wheel with a short tether.

  Stillwell shook his head. “I’ve seen some of those get bit what don’t get hydrophobic until months later. Folks thought they was cured—by some magic potion. But of a sudden one day—they was wild and most of them run off. Never heard tell of ’em again.”

  “Damn luck of it all,” Pierce said.

  “This change your plans?” asked the lieutenant.

  “No, it doesn’t. We’ll go south to reoutfit, back at Richardson. Then I’m under orders from my superiors so we’ll turn right around and come back out here.”