Buffalo Trail

by Jeff Guinn

  “Stay strong,” Gray Beard said. “Tonight the white men will try to gather their courage and tomorrow they’ll run. We’ll get them then.”

  The dog soldiers sent out warriors to guard the edges of the valley and report any attempts at a night escape. The rest of the war party camped on the bluff. They ate pemmican. The dried buffalo meat was flavored with honey but no one cared to savor the taste. They drank creek water and those who were hurt nursed their wounds.

  Spotted Feather, Quanah’s Cheyenne friend, came over to where he was sitting and offered some pemmican.

  “You need to eat something,” he told Quanah. “You’ve been injured and you need nourishment.”

  The pemmican didn’t seem worth the trouble of chewing, but Quanah choked down a few bites to be polite. “What’s that black thing on your belt?”

  Spotted Feather pulled free a hank of dark fur and held it out for Quanah’s inspection. “The dog that fought me had great courage. I scalped it to do it honor.” In the fading light, Quanah saw that Spotted Feather’s arm had been deeply scored by the dog’s teeth; he would have many scars.

  “It was a brave dog,” Quanah agreed, and settled himself as comfortably as he could. He lay awake all night because his back hurt so much.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Warriors pulling their injured comrade away thwarted Billy Dixon’s plan to finish off the Indian leader. Billy took down a brave with a quick shot and had hopes of sharpshooting the wounded one in the headdress, but then another Indian on horseback swooped in, hauled the injured man up behind him, and galloped off before Billy could shoot again.

  “Goddamn, he got away,” Billy said. “I wanted that one bad.” But there were other targets out in the grass, and he kept firing. So did McLendon and the others down below them. The barrage drove back the attackers who’d slithered forward in the grass. They stood and ran, and then behind them the other Indians stopped shooting altogether. It seemed to McLendon that they were in full-scale retreat. “What’s happening?” he asked Billy. “Why are they running? There’re still so many of them.”

  Billy rested the heavy barrel of the Sharps on the bottom of the window opening. “They may be running short of ammunition, I expect. The Indians seldom have much of a supply, and they’ve put down a fearsome amount of fire all day.”

  For the first time, McLendon felt a surge of hope. “Are we home free, then? Are they finished?”

  “Oh, I doubt it. They made this fight in a different way, all the tribes combined. They’ll not want to leave here defeated. Even lacking bullets, they still have considerable numbers on us. We’re not out of this fix yet.”

  They went down the ladder and rejoined the others on the ground floor of the store. William Olds still coughed in his corner, and Hannah Olds had her fist pressed to her mouth. But everyone else was jubilant.

  “They run, damn them!” Andy Johnson exulted. “We fought them off. Tales will long be told in our honor.”

  “We don’t know the end of this tale yet,” Billy cautioned. He peered through a window on the north wall and, craning his neck to see around the far corner of the corral adjacent to Myers and Leonard’s, pointed to where the war party had gathered at the foot of the hills. “They’ve reconvened at some distance. I believe it’s far enough removed so that we might step just outside this room, should any of you wish to. But be alert. They could turn and be back on us in an eyeblink.”

  William and Hannah Olds stayed inside. The others followed Billy out the door, blinking like moles in the late afternoon glare. Men emerged from Myers and Leonard’s and the saloon, too, looking around cautiously, rifles ready. They edged away from the buildings but not too far, stepping carefully over bodies of dead Indians, poking them with gun barrels, but eliciting no signs of life. McLendon looked at the corpses, at the swarthy skin torn by bullets and smeared with paint, dirt, and blood. Most had their eyes open. He tried to think of them as fellow human beings, but couldn’t. They were Indians and they had been trying to kill him.

  “I believe they’re all properly dead,” Mike McCabe said. “The hurt ones were carried off. I hate the damn savages, but they demonstrated courage doing that, not abandoning their wounded.”

  “Mike, it seemed to me that you at Myers and Leonard might have lost one or two of your own,” Billy said. “It was about the time that the Indians killed off the animals in the corral.”

  “Billy Tyler and Fred Leonard made a foolish dash out. Fred somehow got back unscathed, but Tyler took one through the lungs. He was alive when we pulled him back inside but passed soon afterward. He suffered considerably.”

  McLendon stared at the Indians near the base of the hills. There were still so many. They weren’t that far away. He thought that if they turned and charged together, they would probably cut off at least some of the whites before they could get back inside the sod huts.

  “They’re not leaving, Billy,” he said to Dixon. “What should we do?”

  “They’ve made us jump all day, now it’s their turn,” Billy said. He told the hunters—Dutch Henry, Bermuda Carlyle, Charley Armitage, and a few others—to lift their Henrys. Together they fired a barrage at the Indians, who were about five hundred yards away. Several fell back off their horses. The white men reloaded and fired again. The Indians began riding away hard; they pounded across the creek and were lost to sight behind the bluff. A few stayed behind, trying to help away wounded braves. Dutch Henry dropped one of the would-be rescuers with a fine shot and yelled exultantly.

  “We’ve drove ’em off, boys!” he proclaimed. But Mike McCabe pointed to the top of the bluff.

  “Nope, they’ve just repositioned,” he said. “Up there’s a good three-quarters of a mile distant, well beyond our shooting range. They’re going to perch awhile, I expect.”

  “To what purpose?” George Eddy asked.

  McCabe jerked a thumb toward Eddy. “There speaks a man who keeps books in an office. Mr. Eddy, those Indians are working out new ways to slaughter us.”

  “But I heard Billy Dixon say that they’ve run out of bullets.”

  McCabe heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Mr. Eddy, maybe they have no more ammunition, but they’ve still got arrows and lances and knives and the surliest of dispositions. Look at them all up there. Likely there’s further fighting to come.”

  Dutch Henry, Jim Campbell, Old Man Keeler, and Tom O’Keefe made their way to the Scheidlers’ overturned wagon. They called Billy Dixon over and McLendon went too. Isaac and Shorty Scheidler’s corpses had been butchered like cattle, cut into chunks that were strewn for yards in the dust. Both had been scalped, pubic hair as well as head. The Indians had even ripped off the growth in their armpits. O’Keefe turned away and puked.

  “We can’t leave ’em like this,” Campbell said. Bat Masterson fetched two shovels from Myers and Leonard’s and he and Campbell hastily dug a wide grave. Then, using the shovels, they picked up Scheidler body parts and deposited them in the hole. Mostly there was no way to tell one brother’s bits from the other’s, except Isaac’s legs were longer and of course their heads looked different. Then they took Billy Tyler’s body from the Myers and Leonard store and placed it in the same hole.

  “When all this is finished, we’ll dig those boys a proper grave,” Billy Dixon said. “Let’s fill this one in for now and get back inside. We can take turns on guard tonight, and everybody can get some supper and sleep. We’ll need to be fresh for whatever happens in the morning.”

  McLendon had tried not to look at the Scheidlers or Billy Tyler. Instead he found himself gazing at the body of Maurice, the black Newfoundland. There was a pink patch on its head where some fur between its ears was missing, and McLendon wondered what happened to it. When Billy Dixon called for him to come on, McLendon reflexively leaned down and patted the dead dog’s side. As he did, he noticed that there was still something on the sleeve of his shirt, stiffened matter that
he knew was dried blood and brains from the Indian whose head he’d burst during the battle. Before, the sight, even the thought, would have repulsed him. Now he simply tried brushing the gore off with his fingers. He felt that something in him was changed forever. If he lived, he’d try to think about what it might be.

  After the guard was posted—Ed Trevor, Billy Ogg, Jim Langton, and Frenchy stood first watch—the others gathered in the Myers and Leonard store, since it was the biggest space. Old Man Keeler fixed a good supper of buffalo steaks and coffee. Mrs. Olds was supposed to help him but didn’t. She and her husband stayed away from everyone else. He coughed and she cried. McLendon and Masterson tried to comfort her but couldn’t. After a while they gave up, got plates of food, and ate. McLendon was surprised to feel so hungry. Bat told him that it was natural after a long, hard fight.

  “Don’t pretend you’ve ever experienced anything else like this,” McLendon said.

  “I haven’t, it’s true, but neither has just about any other fellow living. We’re making history here, C.M. Books will be written about it.”

  “Will you be the one to write them?”

  “I might. But right now, I’m thinking that in the morning we can maybe run off that bunch on the bluff and then make our way back to Dodge City. I expect to entertain the whores there for hours with thrilling tales of my exploits in the Battle of Adobe Walls.”

  “All that’s happened, and you’re thinking of whores.”

  “I don’t have a lady friend like yours to run to, that one out in Arizona Territory.”

  McLendon realized that he hadn’t thought of Gabrielle once during the entire day. He made up for it the rest of the night, working out how he’d tell her about fighting the Indians, how he’d felt, what he’d done—not exaggerating his actions, of course, but if she wanted to think that he was the bravest man in the West, well, that was her right. Although, since Gabrielle understood him so well, she’d undoubtedly know better. He’d be with her soon, thank God.

  Exhaustion set in. The terrors of the day had caught up with them. Billy Dixon urged everyone not to slip over to the saloon for a quick drink. The Indians were still out there; the defenders would need all their faculties tomorrow. They changed the guard—Mike McCabe, Andy Johnson, Jim McKinley, and Charley Armitage took the next turn—and everyone else slept as best they could. Hannah Olds cried all night, but her soft sobs actually seemed soothing after a while.

  • • •

  MCLENDON MISSED GUARD DUTY. He suspected Billy passed him over because he was so inexperienced, but he didn’t mind. Just as the sun sent its first morning rays over the hills to the east, he went outside. He hoped the Indians were gone from the top of the bluff but they were still there, mounted and watching. Most of the morning the whites braced themselves for another attack, but the Indians didn’t move.

  “They want us to run,” Bat said. “They know we’ve got no mounts; we’d have to go on foot. We do that, they’ll overtake us on their horses and cut us down. They’re out of our rifle range up there. We seem safe if we stay where we are.”

  “So what happens?”

  “I got no damn idea.”

  Everyone in camp stayed close to the buildings. They couldn’t relax in case the Indians charged from the bluff. It was another hot day, and the bodies of the dead Indians and animals began to bloat and stink. They needed to be buried, but that would attract too much attention from the war party on the bluff.

  By late morning the stench and the tension had everyone on edge. Dutch Henry and Bermuda Carlyle almost came to blows over a twist of tobacco. Old Man Keeler told Hannah Olds to please shut the hell up with the sobbing. William Olds, still hacking, perked up at that and told Keeler to apologize to his wife or fight him. Keeler apologized and Mr. Olds took his Sharps Big Fifty and made a show of standing guard by the Rath store front door, though he had to set down the heavy gun after a few seconds when he was wracked with a particularly heavy coughing spell.

  Billy Dixon and Jim Hanrahan talked about what to do. Hanrahan thought the only choice was to stay where they were.

  “We’ve got food, we’ve got water,” he said. “We just have to show more patience than the savages.”

  Billy disagreed. “They’ve got water, too, and there’s plenty of game in the area for them. Besides, there’s lots of small white hunting parties scattered around the area. Some of them are bound to come this way, planning on selling hides in this camp, and they’ll be picked off as they do. We got to get those Indians down from that bluff, drive them off.”

  “You figure out a way, be sure and let me know,” Hanrahan said. “Less than thirty of us, probably still more than a thousand of them. Bastards are having a fine time, sitting up there and watching us sweat.”

  Shortly after noontime the wind picked up, blowing across the camp from west to east. Peering up at the Indians, McLendon thought he could see some of the feathers in their war bonnets being pushed back by the breeze.

  “Feels good to have some air, Billy,” he said to Dixon, who looked thoughtful. Billy wet his finger with some spit and held it up.

  “Maybe,” he muttered to himself. “Nothing lost if not.” He picked up his Big Fifty and walked to where a wagon stood near the front of the saloon. He pointed the rifle at the Indians high on the bluff, resting the barrel on the rim of the wagon bed.

  “Oh, don’t waste a bullet, Dixon,” Bermuda Carlyle said. “Three-quarter mile, you won’t come within twenty yards.”

  “Maybe not,” Billy replied, squinting as he sighted. “But I’m using a charge I packed myself, extra powder grains for more carry. And the wind will help.”

  Everyone gathered behind Billy. It seemed to McLendon that the Indians up on the bluff weren’t concerned. They didn’t pull back from the edge or try to take cover.

  “Now,” Billy said, and he fired. The Big Fifty gave a concussive thump. It seemed like a very long time and then up on the bluff an Indian screamed and fell back.

  “Goddamn,” Carlyle blurted. “Ever’body with a big Sharps, fire away.” They did. Puffs of dust partway up the bluff indicated that their shots were falling well short, but the gunfire was noisy and the way the Indians milled about indicated that they were panicking, Billy’s shot had been that spectacular. As the whites in camp watched, the Indians gradually moved back from the edge of the bluff and out of sight. The last one left wore a long headdress, and one of his arms dangled at his side. By now McLendon knew him well; he would appear in his nightmares for years to come. Headdress Indian stared down at the camp for several moments before turning away.

  “Get ready to duck inside, they may be massing for a charge,” Billy warned, and everyone moved toward the buildings. They waited almost an hour, but no Indians came. Some of the men wanted to go out toward the creek, see what the war party might be up to, but Billy said they needed to wait some more just in case. It was mid-afternoon before he said it might be all right to take a look, though it would be very dangerous if the Indians still lingered back behind the bluff where they couldn’t be seen from camp. Bat Masterson, Mike McCabe, and Billy Ogg volunteered. They went out cautiously, looking behind every tree and rock, and eventually disappeared into the brush by the creek. They were away for a long time, and when they returned they said that there was no sign of Indians anywhere, even down past the bluff. The war party was gone.

  THIRTY-NINE

  In the morning, the mood of many in the war party atop the bluff approached mutinous. All night, warriors gathered in small groups and complained, about false prophets and poor preparation and the unfair advantages of the white men down below—their earthen huts, their endless supplies of ammunition, their near-magical rifles that fired so far and so accurately. There was rampant grief, too—almost everyone among the attackers had lost a father, son, brother, cousin, or at least a close friend. The remaining hope for victory was that the whites would try to escape
the valley on foot, but they stayed where they were. Inaction gave the warriors even more time to brood.

  “We should wait through the day and go in at them after dark, maybe,” Quanah suggested. He and some of the Cheyenne leaders were huddled, discussing possible strategy. “We might take them by surprise.”

  “They put guards out last night, and tonight they will again,” Stone Calf said. “They know we’re still here, we can’t surprise them anymore.”

  “Let’s pretend to leave,” Quanah said. “We’ll let them see us ride away. Then tonight we can circle back.”

  Stone Calf shook his head. “No. If my people leave, we’ll keep going. Most of my warriors want to go back to the agency. Then, when the white army hears about this fight and looks for someone to punish, we can say we were never here.”

  Quanah thought that was cowardly and started to say so, but Gray Beard intervened. They might as well stay up on the bluff a while longer and watch the white camp, he said. Perhaps the men down there would still try to escape on foot. If they didn’t, then at the end of the day the war party could disperse. At that point, everyone could make his own choice: to return to a village or the agency, or to stay out and find other white victims who might be easier to kill.

  “I know what I’ll choose,” Quanah said angrily as Gray Beard led him away from the others.

  “You won’t be able to fight for a while, until your arm is healed,” Gray Beard said. “Anyway, this fight is over. You know that. Those whites down there are too smart to let us attack them out in the open. We’ll stay up here a little more so they’ll know we’re leaving because we choose to, not because they chased us away. Stone Calf is right: when they hear what’s happened the white soldiers will come. We’ll need all of our warriors to be willing to fight then, so it will be good to get away from this place and its bad memories. There are going to be more battles—many of them. Be wise: Know when to give up in one fight so you can lead in others.”