There was no time to stop and admire his performance, for there were a couple of other Indians who seemed interested in tearing asunder my body and soul. They never had an opportunity to turn their interest into concrete action. There came a drumming of hooves, I heard the rapid fire of a revolver and smelled burnt black powder. One Indian collapsed in a heap, another yelped, leapt into the air and did all he could to mount his horse rapidly and ride out of the fight.
I looked around and saw McAllister above me on a horse, his smoking Remington in his hand.
I stood there, panting, not able to get a word out.
He gave me one of those how-do-I-manage-to-be-so-patient-with-you-? looks. “My God, old timer,” he said, “don’t you ever learn? Dead heroes ain’t no use to nobody.”
He spun his horse and rode hard for the wagon, around which several Indians were circling and darting, reining their ponies first one way and then another in the face of Mr. Smith’s threatening shots.
I tried to shout: “Go to hell” after McAllister, but I could not raise so much as a whisper. So I staggered to my horse and pulled myself slowly into the saddle. Putting away the Spencer, I drew my Colt for the close-quarter work that lay ahead.
As I rode towards the wagon, the Indians there turned tail at McAllister’s charge and went off riding around the rear of the herd in the wake of their fellows who were now going in a wide arc around the van of the cows. Each hand popped off shots at them as they came near. And at each shot the cattle grew more restless.
I think the only thing that held them was the fact that the shots came from all around them and they did not know which way to run to get away.
By the time I reached the wagon, McAllister was on his way, riding around the herd in the opposite direction from the Indians so that in a matter of seconds he would be eyeball-to-eyeball with the first bunch of them. I dismounted and tied my horse to a wagon wheel. Drunk Charlie rode up and tumbled out of his saddle. There was a long deep gash down the line of his jawbone so the bone showed white and his shirt was covered with blood. I’m sure a lesser man would have been down and out under such treatment. But not Charlie. He just looked grim and capable.
The girls, I found, were armed and had been shooting, as I could tell from the black powder marks on their faces and hands. They looked remarkably calm. Old Smith was sitting up there on his wagon seat, reloading the shotgun, with an air of remarkable tranquility.
“Nice work, young Matthew,” he said with avuncular weight. “Miss Janet, I wonder if you. would be so good as to oblige and tend that cut on Drunk Charlie’s face. It surely do upset a man to see it.”
To have that ghastly wound referred to as a cut brought a laugh out of me from somewhere.
“No call,” said Charlie without a touch of flamboyance. “Wait till the shootin’s done, miss, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Here they come,” said May, crouching down by a wagon wheel and putting the old Springfield to her shoulder.
We forgot Charlie’s wound for the moment. The first bunch of Indians had shied away from McAllister’s burst of shooting and had turned up the slight grade towards the wagon. They rode straight into the fire from four carbines and one shotgun. We emptied two saddles and the rest got away. The other Indians following behind must have seen this because they at once turned northwards and rode straight out across the plain until they were out of rifle range.
I guess we all stood and took a breath or two then. I found that I was shaking slightly, as I always do after a shooting. My legs were not feeling too certain of themselves and I felt a strange desire to sit down.
There was no chance of that, however. McAllister rode up to us and said: “There’s a man hit on the far side of the herd, Matt.”
Before he could go any further, I said: “You watch the Indians. Leave the hurt to me. Miss Janet, fix old Charlie here, will you? Miss May, load every rifle in sight.” I untied my horse and got into the saddle.
On the fair side of the herd I found Hopper Roberts. He was trying to sit up and act nonchalant, as they say, but he wasn’t doing too well. The cows nearby were acting up and were starting to wander off, tossing their heads and bellowing. One or two looked as if they would like to toss Wyatt and me on those long horns of theirs.
“I’ll get you over to the wagon, Hop,” I said.
“That should be a lot of fun,” he said. “They put a spear through my guts an’ my leg is broke.”
“Hey-ho, this is a real gala day,” I remarked. I caught his horse and brought it alongside. Getting Hopper on to it was not a lot of fun, mostly not for him. His face was ashen. The lower part of his right leg hung at an unnatural angle. Blood seeped between his fingers where he was holding his guts in. I thought: His brother dead and him about to be. Old Dice should be overjoyed at the results of this drive.
Hopper didn’t make a sound as I slowly led his horse around to the wagon. When we got him down from the saddle, he was unconscious, his left hand still clutching the saddle horn. Give credit where it’s due: the girls did not make a sound when they saw what the Indians had done to Hopper. They went a little white maybe, but they gave no sign that this kind of thing was new to them. Maybe it wasn’t at that, because they’d lived on the Comanche frontier all their lives.
They had tied rags around Drunk Charlie’s face and he looked kind of comical. McAllister had found a bottle of the whiskey which he was mostly not without. Charlie had been allowed a cup of this and he looked cheerful enough. The spear wound in his chest was what he called a scratch. This meant there was a rip in the surface flesh about six inches long. The girls had dressed this too.
May had all the rifles standing against the side of the wagon in a neat line, all loaded. I took a good pull on the whiskey bottle and poured some down Hopper’s throat. Whiskey was rather new to him and he choked on it. But it and the pain of it brought a shriek from him which made him look mighty ashamed a moment later. Men hated to show any kind of weakness at that time. I believe it ain’t so now, but that doesn’t make these times any better.
The wound in his belly was a different matter. One glance at it and I didn’t think the boy would see the day out. If he lived through the next hour, I would have been surprised.
“I’m a goner, Matt,” he said.
“A goner?” I said, showing a pretty convincing amazement at such a statement, I thought. “When you’ve seen as many wounds as I have, son, you wouldn’t say a thing like that. This wound of yours ain’t small-time, but it’ll be healed in a couple of days. I’ll take bets on it.”
“Five’ll get you ten,” he said, “it don’t.”
“Done,” I said.
I sewed him up with the catgut I’m never without. To my mind, I did the most incompetent job I ever did and I’ve sewn a good few up in my time. I reckon it was so ghastly, that I was convinced that I must be doing more harm than good. But I couldn’t sit still and see that boy bleed to death. The girls turned away and could not watch. I would have turned away myself if I’d been able. I noticed that Mr. Smith made himself pretty busy watching for Indians while the primitive operation was going on. Only Drunk Charlie watched, his eyes bright with interest.
“You’re a goddam ghoul, Charlie,” I told him.
He looked at me blankly, just not understanding. When I was through and sat back exhausted, he nodded patronizingly and said: “You didn’t do a bad job there, boy.”
McAllister rode back and said: “Don’t relax, Matt, the boys’re bringin’ Jim Bayard in. He ain’t too bad, but he needs fixin’.”
The news that another of the crew was hurt caught me below the belt.
“Not another,” I said.
McAllister read me right. Just as I read him right. We had been partnering each other so long, I reckon it was natural the understanding should go both ways. I looked at him and I thought how strange he was. In times of peace he was wild and in times of war he was so tranquil it made you wonder. It was as if he needed war like some
men need drink.
He said: “You just keep goin’ ahead, Matthew. It’ll all come right in the end.”
I’m not sure I believed him, but just hearing him say it made any kind of future at all look possible.
When the boys brought Jim Bayard in, I found he had a large bullet wound in the top of his left arm and a broken-off section of arrow through the same shoulder. If McAllister thought this was not too bad, what did he call really bad? I should know the answer to that. The boys laid Jim down on a tarp and rode back to their duties.
The wounded man wasn’t making any kind of a fuss. He even gave me a grin.
“Thank God it’s my courtin’ arm, not my drinkin’ arm, Matt,” he said.
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” I told him, and it sounded damned silly.
“Hot water, ladies,” I said to the girls.
Up on his seat, Mr. Smith: “Keep your heads down, ladies and gentlemen, our colorful friends are returning.” Drunk Charlie picked up a carbine and walked around to the rear of the wagon. The elder sister, Janet, armed herself and got under the wagon. May brought me a pan of hot water. She gave me a little tight smile and I told her: “Don’t you fret now, ma’am. Our guns’re too much for these Indians. They won’t have you again.”
She said: “They were too much for all the guns in our family, Mr. Chisholm. You can’t fool me.”
Across the flat of the plain I could hear an Indian singing. I said to myself: This is where they get really serious.
Twelve
JIM SAID: “Leave me be, Matt. Pick up a gun and shoot Indians.”
I said: “Oh, hell, Jim, I ain’t needed.”
The arrow-head was embedded in the bone and the bullet wound must have been made by an immense ball from a crude fusee. Luckily, the ball had bounced off the bone, torn the flesh a little and gone on its way. But it had left one whale of a mess behind it. I did not know which to start on first, the lower or the upper wound. I gave Jim a drink of whiskey. The precious fluid was disappearing fast and I wondered if McAllister had yet another bottle cached away someplace. When Jim was looking pretty flushed with drink, I took a good healthy swig myself. My courage was upped a couple of notches. I even felt a little good. I corked the bottle with enormous care and carefully laid my pocket knife to heat on the fire.
Mr. Smith kept up a running commentary so that I would know what was going on.
“They’re all bunched up about three hundred paces east of us, Matthew. No call to even rustle up a sweat yet. They’re kind of hesitatin’. They ain’t actin’ yeller in no way. No, sir. But they sure look like they have discovered what we can do to ’em. That’s the way I like it. I predict that they will stay right there talking up their spunk for a while, then they’ll try a rush.”
The damage done by the ball was bleeding most, but the flesh was so mashed up that I didn’t have any chance to sew it together. I washed it out with whiskey, then plastered bear fat on to it. Mr. Smith had found a small tub of the stuff for me. I believe in bear fat. Jim did not take to the whiskey in his wound as well as he took to it in his mouth and he rolled up his eyes. But he didn’t faint and when I poured some more booze down his throat, he brightened up a mite again.
“Have you right in no time at all, Jim,” I said.
“They’ll try a rush,” said Mr. Smith, “but when we raise our pieces for a shot they’ll fade away.”
“You talk too much,” Jim said. “I know you can do it so just go ahead, will you?”
“They’ll try it again and again,” said Mr. Smith, “till they have enough sand to follow through. Then we’d best be better at the game than they are.”
Somebody rode a horse between the wagon and the herd. I did not raise my head to see who it was. I was thinking that I was no doctor and that I might be doing these wounded boys more harm than good. But I had to do something, didn’t I?
“Here they come,” said Mr. Smith. “Hold on to your hats, folks.”
I could hear the roll of hooves and my right hand almost reached out for a gun, but I reached for my pocket knife instead and the metal in the handle burned my flesh. I put the hot metal over the raw flesh and it sizzled. As I felt nauseated by the sound and smell, I knew that patching men up was harder than shooting holes in them. I would rather be standing with a gun in my hand than doing what I was doing now. In that moment, I sickened of the wound I was staring at and I sickened at the whole damn world that brought men to this. Did putting beef into the bellies of some miners in Colorado and putting a few dollars into old Dice Roberts’ pocket have to add up to this? My father would have said: “You have to be a man, Matthew.” Isn’t that what McAllister was really saying?
“I was right,” exclaimed Mr. Smith with some pride. “Their sand ran out this time, folks. It’ll maybe run out next time. But, rest assured, it will not run out every time.”
There was a kind of quiet triumph inside me when I saw that the hot iron had cauterized the living flesh in my care. To my surprise, the boy under my hands was still conscious. His eyes were wet with tears of pain and his teeth were set together, but he tried to grin and he said: “You just saved my life then, Matt. I know it.”
That was nice, I thought, and I wished I had the same faith.
I laid down the knife on a rock and I said: “Just going to get the arrow-head out, Jim. How do you feel about that?”
“Go ahead.”
I took hold of the broken arrow shaft and gave a small investigatory pull. It did not budge. I heard a high, muffled keening sound which was the only kind of scream the boy would permit himself. He went limp and I thanked God he’d fainted. Standing up, I put my foot on his shoulder and pulled with both hands. The arrow came away so suddenly that I fell on my back and felt foolish. May Jessop looked around and seemed surprised to see me on the ground.
When I went back to the arrow wound, it was bleeding profusely. I cleaned this out as best I could with whiskey and sewed it up with my catgut. If this kind of thing went on, I’d be clean out of catgut. I plastered the sewn wound with my magic bear fat and bound it up. I reckoned we’d soon run out of shirts too.
“Here they come again, folks. This one looks mighty like the real thing.”
I could hear the roll of hooves again. I covered Jim up with a blanket. Far away to the right of us, somebody fired a rifle. I turned my head and saw that there was a line of Indians riding an arc around the front of the herd to the north. There was one of the crew I could not recognize, sitting his horse and blazing away with his belt gun. One of the Indians fired at him from under the neck of his racing pony, but I reckon he missed. The Indians tried darting in towards the herd around the position of the swing, but there was one of the crew behind his horse and shooting with a repeater. That was more than they bargained for and they pulled off to the right and rode west.
Something hit the wall of the wagon behind me with a sound like thunk. The girl under the wagon fired. Mr. Smith said: “A very handsome shot, young lady.” But his shotgun did not sound and I decided the Indians were pulling back again. I turned and stood up, looking past the cook. The Indians were still coming straight for us, bunched too close for comfort. The girl at the rear of the wagon fired and Drunk Charlie joined in.
Mr. Smith had not moved.
My nerves started to crack at the sight of a dozen Indians coming down on us. They were all yelling at the tops of their voices. A gun blossomed black smoke. It must have been the fusee. It made enough smoke for a cannon and when the ball hit the wagon, I reckon the vehicle rocked with the impact of it. The team started fighting each other and the traces. They were in one hell of a tangle.
The cook raised his shotgun.
Every Indian there must have known what that weapon could do at close quarters. They opened out at once. Their yelling stopped and they concentrated on getting away from it. They fanned out left and right and one came close enough to the offside leader to touch it. For a second, the rider and I looked into each other’s eyes. I ra
ised my gun to shoot him as he departed, but I was too late. At risk to his team, Mr. Smith let fly with one barrel.
The Indian was killed instantly. His naked brown back was opened and his smashed body fell helplessly on to the neck of the pony. He bounced there once and was thrown clear by the motion of the horse. I heard the sound of him as he hit the dirt.
A sound behind me.
Drunk Charlie was shouting.
I turned and saw the Indian on his horse, striking downwards at Charlie. The man fell forwards. I raised my Colt and sighted hastily. But I never fired. Janet Jessop was between me and my target. She fired her Springfield.
The ball hit the horse in the head. Its front legs collapsed under it and it went down, narrowly missing Charlie. The Indian came out of that saddle as if he had been catapulted. He tried desperately to land on his feet, almost made it, then failed. He went down, but he was up almost at once, his feathers knocked awry, dirt mixed with his paint. He looked like a drunken old tart. He ran straight at the girl and would have broken her head with his ax if somebody had not fired a shot into him. This knocked him back over his fallen horse. He was badly hurt, but not even that stopped him. He started to scramble to his feet. I shot him through the head.
I looked around and saw Jim Bayard lying there, looking like death itself, with a smoking gun in his hand.
“All gone,” said Mr. Smith. “But they’ll be back. I can feel it in my water.”
I walked around the wagon and surveyed the scene. The cook was right, the Indians were gone, bunched out there on the plain, the whole gaggle of them, heads together, talking. If they were as shaken as us, they must have been in pretty poor condition.
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