At first, he assumed that the little greyish cloud was dust kicked up by a rider. It pretty soon became apparent that there were more than one or two riders heading in their direction. By the time he knew that there must be at least two or three dozen men on horseback there was little Morton could do about it. His van would be shaken to pieces off the road unless he either carried on north or turned tail and tried to outrun those coming towards him.
Jack Morton had no especial prejudice against executing what, in his army days, was known as a ‘strategic withdrawal’, but on a purely practical level he couldn’t see the nag that was drawing his van and had already put in about twenty miles that day, succeeding in outrunning men on horseback. He’d just have to take the chances as they came. Robert was asleep on the bedroll, so Morton just checked that his pistol was loose in his belt and all the cylinders primed. Then he shook the reins and carried on down the road.
When the body of riders was three miles or so from him Morton could see the white flash of feathers on their heads, along with the coppery sheen of bare skin. It was a group of Indians. By straining his eyes Morton could make out a few travois. This was promising. It might mean that this was just a bunch of wanderers, moving from one hunting ground to another. If these boys were on the warpath then surely they would not wish to burden themselves with several travois? He reined in and waited. If they wished to kill him and the child, then there was little enough that he could do about it. There were at least thirty riders coming along the road. He would just have to see what attitude they were minded to adopt.
As the men approached little Robert woke up in the back of the van and began to cry.
‘You picked the right time there, boy!’ said Morton. There was nothing for it but to fetch the child out and set him on his lap. He had a bottle of snake oil lying on the buckboard and he absentmindedly popped out the cork and applied a liberal dose to the crying child’s gums. The effect was magical, because Robert at once fell silent. Then, when he caught sight of the horses heading towards them, he began gurgling and pointing at them excitedly.
‘They ain’t acoming to entertain us, you know,’ Morton told him. ‘Like as not they’re going to cut our throats.’ Then, even though the child couldn’t understand him, Morton felt a little ashamed at speaking so. He might himself be ready to die if need be, but this little fellow was a different story altogether. He stroked the boy’s head and bent over to whisper softly in his ear: ‘Don’t be afeared. I’m telling you now, once for all, as long as I have breath in my body, I’m going to see that no harm befalls you. Even if it means giving up on my own life.’ Even as he said this so lightly to the innocent baby in his arms, Jack Morton knew that he was pronouncing a solemn vow.
One problem that Morton had with Indians was that you never knew what they were thinking. The young men trotting towards him now might have been coming to invite him to a barn dance or they might equally well be fixing to scalp him. He had no idea at all. When the riders were twenty yards away, they halted. Their faces were quite expressionless, giving not the remotest hint as to their intentions. The travois came up more slowly, being dragged at a leisurely pace by the tough little ponies.
There were three travois and Morton saw that an old woman was sitting upon the packs and equipment of one of them. When the pony pulling this particular travois halted, the woman got down and stretched herself before walking in a slow and stately way to where the stand-off had developed between him and the young warriors.
Jack Morton was no ethnologist and wouldn’t have cared to venture even a tentative opinion on what tribe these people belonged to. He guessed Kiowa or Comanche, because of what the old night watchman had said. From all that he was able to collect these boys were ready for action, because they were certainly armed to the teeth and, now that they had stopped, it was clear that every mother’s son of them had a weapon in his hands, ranging from rifles to lances and bows. This might be a mite tricky, thought Morton.
The old woman, whose face was as shrivelled and wrinkled as could be, walked slowly up to the young men on horseback, then continued forward to Morton. Just at that very moment Robert began crying and there was a stirring among the Indians. Seemingly, none of them had taken note up to that point that Morton had a baby sitting on his lap.
The old woman came right up, past the horse, until she was standing only a few feet away. The little boy was still making mewling sounds and the woman looked at him, her eyes creased in what might have been the beginnings of a smile. She said something to Morton, which he could not understand. He figured that she was most likely talking Kiowa or something.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he said politely, shrugging to show what he meant, ‘I can’t make head nor tail o’ that.’
She repeated the words, but they still made no sense at all to Morton. Then the woman stretched out her arms and the gesture was plain. She was asking him to hand her the baby. He hesitated, but then took a chance. She was, after all, a woman and her face was kindly and wise.
‘I don’t mind you dandling the little fellow for a minute or two,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you’re asking for.’
Very slowly, making quite certain that he did not do anything that could be open to misinterpretation, Morton climbed down from the buckboard, holding Robert in the crook of his left arm. When he was standing on the ground, he walked over to the old woman.
‘Mind,’ he said, ‘I trust you to hand him back again afterwards.’ Her face gave nothing away and he had no idea at all if she had understood what he said. Morton held out the infant to her and she at once reached out her arms to receive him.
Almost as soon as young Robert was being held by the old Indian woman he ceased crying and stared curiously at her face. She smiled toothlessly at him and the baby chuckled.
‘Well,’ said Morton, ‘I reckon you’ve made a friend there all right.’ He did not know how things were going to pan out, but he was convinced that this woman meant no harm to the baby he was charged to take care of.
Still not sure if she understood him or not, Morton spoke again.
‘I’ll be having that child back again now, ma’am, if it’s all the same to you. I promised to deliver him to his kin and I’ve still some way to go.’ The old woman looked at him and smiled once more. Then she turned her back on him and headed back to the party of braves waiting a few yards away. Without any doubt she proposed to hang on to the baby for herself.
Chapter 6
When Morton realized what was happening: that somebody was making off with the child he’d sworn to protect, he took a pace or two after the Indian woman, not even thinking what he was doing. There was the click of a gun being cocked and two of the warriors took arrows from quivers and fitted them to their bows. The old woman said something, though, and nothing happened.
The young men continued to stare menacingly at Morton, however, and he understood very well that if he attempted to regain the child by main force he was apt to be shot down on the spot. There was nothing at all to be done. He stood in impotent fury as the Indians trotted past him; veering off the road to bypass his van.
As the travois carrying the old woman and the baby for whom he was responsible passed him Morton was tempted to rush forward and snatch Robert back. Perhaps something of what was going through his mind was visible on his face, because some of the young warriors watched him closely and he was certain that he would have been shot down the second he made a move.
Then they had all passed him by and Morton could only stare after the party as they disappeared down the road. He kicked a stone savagely, altogether at a loss to know what to do next. There wasn’t, as far as he could see, anything to be done. He could hardly ride against thirty well-armed braves. He might as well just accept that Robert was gone and that was the end of it.
He didn’t for a moment suppose that the child would come to any harm in the care of the old woman. She had looked too kind and wise for Morton to imagine that she would be hurting the little bo
y. Most likely, she loved children and had a hankering to have one for her own again. He had heard of such cases, where grandmothers had adopted little children and raised them as their own. Most likely, she would care for the baby better than Morton himself was able to do.
Slowly and with great reluctance Jack Morton got back up on to the driving seat and made ready to leave. Then he recollected the oath he had sworn earlier that day. He wasn’t a one for churchgoing, but that had been a solemn promise made to he knew not whom. He would be acting wrongly were he do abandon that child and simply forget his vow.
Morton shook the reins. ‘Giddyup!’ he said loudly. Once the beast was moving Morton turned the van round in a wide circle and set off after the Indians.
The plain stretched as far as the eye could see; it was flat and almost entirely featureless, other than for a line of red sandstone cliffs that lay to the left of the road. The riders whom he had encountered were still in sight and they wouldn’t, he calculated, be able to travel much faster than his van. Those three travois would ensure that they moved at a steady and not overly fast pace.
It wouldn’t do at all for the men he was pursuing to know what he was about. Morton had a notion that if those boys thought that he was going to cause them any mischief they would send back a few men to make an end of him. He didn’t rightly know why they hadn’t killed him anyway, but he would be ill-advised to press his luck. This would take some little consideration. It wouldn’t help that child if Morton just charged in and got himself killed for his pains. He reined in the horse and sat for a good quarter of an hour, reasoning things out.
One thing was definite: he wouldn’t lose track of those men who had carried off Robert. Even when they were too far off for him to see them directly, the dust they kicked up would betray their whereabouts. As long as the light held Morton would be able to see where the riders were heading. Next off was to think on where they were heading. If those men and the old woman were on their way to a large village or other settled land belonging to their tribe, then the whole enterprise was hopeless. He could hardly ride this van of his through Indian country, stopping off just long enough to snatch a baby from some old female relative of theirs.
He didn’t think, though, that that was what they were doing. The presence of three travois hinted that this group was either wandering, or seeking refuge somewhere. Maybe they’d been displaced by this army activity of which he’d been told. If that was the case and they were refugees, then it could be that they were the only men he’d have to contend with. Even so, he would be ill-advised to ride up against them openly, but it might mean that he could raid their camp by night.
Morton continued sitting there, watching and waiting until the Indians were quite out of view and the only indication of their presence was the grey smudge of dust hanging above them. Then he set off in pursuit.
During the War Between the States Jack Morton had been part of a group of saboteurs who had struck deep behind the Union lines. They had operated in civilian clothes, which mean that they were all liable to be hanged as spies if they were identified, but he’d never heard of any of his unit being caught. The Union forces called Morton and his comrades ‘The Ghosts’, due to their positively uncanny ability to slip in and out of occupied territory, inflicting maximum damage for little or no losses on their side. Posters went up describing them as bandits and murderers and offering thousands of dollars in gold for their capture, dead or alive. He had abandoned all that foolishness during the Reconstruction and had even taken the Ironclad Oath. That did not mean that he could not, in a good cause, return to those ways for just one single night.
Morton made his way along at a leisurely pace, making sure that he allowed the Indians ahead of him to be so far in advance that they would not find it convenient to dispatch a few men to investigate who else might be travelling along this road. He ran over in his mind what resources he had for the little expedition that he planned. There wasn’t a great deal, to be sure.
For his rifle and pistol, Morton had a small copper flask of powder: a ‘Stand of Flags’ flask, which he had had since before the war. There was also a drum of camphor oil, which he used in the manufacture of his ‘liniment’. That really was about it, apart from various items such as a coil of rope and so on. He’d just have to make the best of things.
Morton knew, from coming that way earlier, that the road between Oneida and Claremont ran straight as an arrow, yet the cloud in the far distance now looked to Morton to be veering to the left somewhat. He watched, intrigued. After another quarter-hour he was convinced that the Indians must have left the road and be striking out towards the cliffs. He might be wrong in his reading of the situation; it might very well be that there was a vast encampment of Kiowas or Comanches in that direction, with hundreds of comancheros milling around into the bargain; but Morton didn’t think so.
He had a hunch that this little group of Indians was, for reasons at which he could only guess, on the move alone. That being so, if they were now fixing to hole up for the night in the hills that probably lay behind those red cliffs, then that would be as good a chance as he was likely to get to retrieve that child.
It was time to start moving. These days Jack Morton was not an aggressive or vindictive man, but he was most decidedly vexed with the people who had taken the baby in such a casual way. He would fetch Robert back or die in the attempt, and at the same time make damned sure that those boys knew that it would have been better to leave him be. They’ve started this business, thought Morton, let’s hope that they’re ready to bide the consequences of it.
Watching the plume of dust as it moved along ahead of him, Morton could see now that it was almost at the foot of the cliffs. Unless he missed his guess, there was some trail or path leading through the rocks there, for which the Indians were heading. It would be evening soon and they were most likely heading to some spot that they knew, where they could rest for the night.
All right then; let them do that very thing. But, unless he’d grown old and silly in those years since the war ended, Jack Morton was the man to see to it that they didn’t rest easy the whole night long. He’d have that child back again before dawn.
The cloud of dust that he had been observing and by which Morton was able to see where the Indians were heading, vanished as abruptly as if it were a lamp that had suddenly been extinguished. One moment it was there and then the next it had dissipated in the glow of the early evening sun. That was no great mystery; the riders had moved from the dusty surface of the plain on to the bare rock of the sandstone formations that lay to the left of the road.
It was safe to speed up a little now, since the men he was trailing would presumably be in the canyons and gullies of the rocky hills and, before long, out of sight of the road. They would no longer be in a position to see the little bit of dust that he was himself kicking up.
Morton didn’t take his eyes from the place in the cliffs where he had last seen the dust cloud. He wanted to be certain-sure of finding the same route up into the hills that the Indians had used. The cliffs were maybe a mile off from the road he was on and he was a little dubious of the ability of his van to travel over the rock-strewn land that lined the road.
When he had drawn close to where he thought the Indians had vanished into the cliffs he was pleased to note a crevice or gap in the sheer rock face. That’s a path, he thought, or I’m a Dutchman.
Rather than rattle across the rough and uneven terrain, so risking a broken axle, Morton got down from the buckboard and led the horse along. That way, down closer to the ground, he could see any especially large rocks and steer round them. His horse was just about at the limit and it would be good to unharness her and allow her to eat and drink a little. They were running low on feed and the water keg was also perilously low, but Morton figured that he could perhaps go without water more easily than the horse. After all, if she gave up the ghost, then he would be in a disastrous state.
Having reached the foot of the cliffs
Morton hobbled the horse and turned her loose. Then he shared the remaining water, settled down and waited for nightfall. There would be little point in setting off up that rocky trail before it was completely dark. He didn’t want to tip his hand before he was ready to lay down.
As evening fell and the twilight turned slowly to night the materials he would need for his little adventure were removed, one by one, from the back of the van. There was a metal can, containing perhaps a gallon of camphor oil, a coil of rope and then his rifle. After these were arranged neatly on the ground, he climbed in one final time and brought out the powder flask. He weighed this carefully in his hand and gauged there to be perhaps three ounces of powder in it.
There were too many imponderables in the operation for Morton’s liking, but there was precious little that could be done about that. He would have to play the hand he’d been dealt, not the one he would have chosen had he been able to fix the deck beforehand.
When it was quite dark he slung the rope over his shoulder, tucked the flask of powder into his pants pocket, picked up the can of camphor oil in one hand and his rifle with the other and set off up the path leading through the cliffs. The night was a little chilly, although not actually cold, and Morton hoped devoutly that the men he was hunting for had seen fit to light a fire that evening; if only to cook their evening meal on. Otherwise his scheme was apt to miscarry at once. When he reached the top of the slope, though, his sensitive nostril caught the acrid tang of wood smoke. There was a fire going not far from where he stood.
What little experience he had of Indians led Morton to think that they would most likely go to sleep as soon as it got dark, then rise at first light. Would they put a sentry on duty? He would have to keep a wary eye out for that.
The path snaked through the cliffs and then came out on to a little plateau. It was a new moon, which gave him the cover of darkness. Below, in a natural rocky amphitheatre nestling in the hills, he could see the ruddy glow of a campfire. Nearer at hand he could just make out the silhouette of a man who was seated on a boulder, his head resting on his chest, giving the impression of a fellow enjoying a refreshing nap.
Snake Oil Page 6
