Sudden Country

by Loren D. Estleman

  I thanked him and did just that at the next wagon in line. Wedlock grinned, winked his good eye, and tossed a coil of rope and some other truck into the bed to make room for me on the seat.

  There wasn’t time for talk. Leaving Rudeen, the Deacon cantered to a rise, wheeled to face the party, and removed his hat. The sun came up red behind him. The wind stirred his hair, white as birch ashes.

  ” ‘We have dealt very corruptly against thee,’ ” he began, in a voice that was not loud, but whose resonance swept like summer thunder over the flats, ” ‘and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandest thy servant Moses.

  ” ‘Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandest thy servant Moses, saying, if you transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations;

  ” ‘But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there.

  ” ‘Now these are thy servants and thy people, whom thou hast redeemed by thy great power, and by thy strong hand.

  ” .‘O Lord, I beseech thee, let now thine ear be attentive to the prayer of thy servant, and to the prayer of thy servants, who desire to fear thy name; and prosper, I pray thee, they servant this day, and grant him mercy.’

  “Amen,” he finished, and for the space of ten seconds there was silence except for the wind threading the grass, and behind us the inveterate splattering of tobacco juice from among the Amarillo irregulars. Then Hecate put his hat back on, stood in his saddle, and swept his long right arm forward. The procession started unevenly, like a chain tautening: first the Deacon, then Rudeen’s cavalry, then Mr. Knox’s wagon. Ben Wedlock picked up his reins.

  “A thousand-mile journey begins with a single step, Davy,” said he, flipping them. “Chief Red Cloud told me that himself.” And as we started with a lurch, he broke into a song that was seized and borne along by the men at the rear:

  Oh, I’m a good old rebel, now

  that’s just what I am!

  Chapter 11

  THE BLAZE-FACE HORSE

  Oh, it was a grand adventure! I have done many things in a life that I may with some modesty consider to have been eventful, and met men enough to fill any body of memoirs, but for richness and excitement the intervening years have yielded no crop to match that early harvest.

  The reader has already met Blackwater, who fought with John Chivington of evil memory and told stories of Nelson Miles’s thirteen-hundred-mile pursuit of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to the border of Canada; and Christopher Agnes, whom I saw catch a grandfather diamondback in mid-strike in his bare hands and, in almost the same motion, whirl it around by its tail and dash out its brains against the trunk of a cottonwood, then curse the reflexes that had cost him such a fine specimen. Add to them a Negro wrangler named Eli Freedman with a withered arm he claimed to have burned when General Sherman set Atlanta to the torch, and who seemed far more at ease with the horses in his charge than with his fellow men; a long-haired dandy named Mike McPhee, who had toured with Colonel Cody’s show until the Colonel fired him for paying attention to a trick rider the Colonel admired himself, and boasted, in an Irish brogue as thick as turned earth, that he could pluck out a prairie dogs eye at forty paces with either hand, had he but access to the matched and specially balanced Americans that now resided in the wagon with the other weapons; and Bald Jim, whose surname was never known to me, whose benign aspect and prematurely nude scalp moved the younger members of the party to call him Dad, and who, Wedlock confided, had slain three Arapaho braves who broke into his cabin on the Powder River during the terrible winter of 1873, then eaten them. Any one of them had seen and done more than the five younger men that Mr. Knox had recruited in Cheyenne put together.

  And of course there was Ben Wedlock himself, he of the quiet speech and terrible countenance, who served as trail cook and was never heard to issue an order, but who moved among the civilian volunteers with an air of command unchallenged. For all that he stressed a sedentary attitude, affecting discomfort with the chuck wagon’s bumpy motion and an old man’s groan of relief when at the end of the day he lowered himself to the ground with the others around the fire. I, who had seen him leap into his seat of a morning like a boy one third his age, and who had hung on while he whipped the team forward to keep the road when a wheel dropped into a hole that would have upset a lesser man’s wagon, was not taken in by this artifice, although others were. It is a curious habit of some older men to exaggerate their infirmities. -

  From the start, however, I was in his trust. Sometimes during the day he would pass the reins to me, sit back, charge a blackened lump of pipe, and tell of the bad times while mountains rolled past under tall sky.

  “The chief had a niece he was fixed to marry onto me,” he said one afternoon. “Her name was Spring Shower or somesuch; they don’t always translate, injun names. Anyway she was pretty as they go, but you got to look at the older squaws to know how they’ll wind up. Well, I got out before anything come of it. I don’t know, though. There’s lots worse ways to live. Lots worse.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “My guard went to sleep. Guard duty bores an injun. I parted his hair with a rock just to make sure and cut out one of the chief’s horses. I seen Red Cloud at the agency years later, after the peace. He didn’t hold it against me about his niece nor the brave I split open; but he did want to know what become of the horse.”

  “Did you ever marry?”

  “Married a storekeeper’s daughter in Council Bluffs. They was the only fambly for miles wasn’t Mormon. It didn’t take. I moved flour sacks and sold sardines for a year and left when snow was on the ground. I never looked back on it. I guess the old man’s dead by now. I’d be a storekeeper with ten kids. But I never could make tracks on them Mormons.”

  Judge Blod suffered mightily with his gout and took to the back of his wagon nights, where he had cleared a space among the confiscated weapons and lay moaning with his foot propped on a stack of revolvers. One night Ben Wedlock persuaded him to let him wrap the foot in a poultice he had made from sage and cottonwood bark and rock mold, dried and then boiled and wrapped in damp ticking. The Judge was instructed to keep it on when he slept and to leave his boot off in the morning. The procedure was repeated the next two nights, at the end of which the Judge began to feel better, and by the time we drew within sight of South Dakota, his pain had ceased. His earlier reservations about the one-eyed man’s character forgotten, he pronounced Wedlock a wizard and proposed to write a book about his past adventures to show gratitude. Genially Wedlock declined. When we were alone I asked him if the poultice was an Indian remedy.

  “Made it up on the spot,” he said with a wink. “Tell a man you’ll cure what ails him and if he’s in enough misery he’ll cure himself.”

  The Bad Lands had intrigued me since I first heard the name. Encountered at first hand, the country was planed flat by wind and glaciers and cluttered, as by a great diffident hand, with granite towers and sandstone cliffs butting into blue sky, their surfaces tapped and fluted like refugee parts from a machine shop. This was the Red Valley, scarped incongruously with gray Dakota sandstone fanning out from a charcoal-colored blister that Ben Wedlock informed me constituted the storied Black Hills. There for the first time I understood the Indians’ insistence that the region was sacred. How to explain those jarring features, if they were not placed there as part of some divine perverted plan? The wind razored their square edges with a half-human chant.

  “This is good-bye,” said Major Rudeen one dawn, when the shadows of the buttes and needles clawed the ground. He had ridden out to reach down and shake the Judge’s hand from his seat aboard the gray. “Any farther and I will be in violation of the treaty. Again I must implore you to abandon this quest.”

  “Thank you, Major. The thing is in motion.” Judge Bl
od’s mood was jovial, His foot was booted once more and planted in a normal position on the board.

  “It would grieve me to see that fine white scalp decorating some buck’s lodgepole.”

  “No more than it would me, I assure you. The Deacon will see us through.”

  The patrol left us in column-of-twos, pulling a shadow as long as the major’s face as we last saw it. Shivering a little–the morning air was brisk–I took my leave of the Judge and mounted the seat beside Wedlock. He was staring at the hills.

  “I never lay eyes on them without my gut draws up,” he said. “More hair’s been lifted over them than flies in a pasture.”

  “Are Indians as bad as everyone says?”

  “No good nor bad to it out here, Davy. Just dying and living and trying to do the one without the other.” He drew into line behind Mr. Knox’s wagon and tied off to wait. The air still smelled of woodsmoke and grease from breakfast.

  “Judge Blod calls them savages in his books. But I guess you don’t have to be an Indian to be a savage.”

  “You’re wise beyond your years, Davy. I’ve ridden with men twice your age didn’t have half your brains.”

  I glowed at these words. “What makes a man come to this country, Ben?”

  “Depends on the man. Some come running ahead of the law. Some pack it in with them. Some bring God, like the Deacon there. I reckon the rest just come looking for a place to be born all over again.”

  “Why did you come?”

  He smoked his pipe. “Well, Davy, I done my share of running, no use denying it. I was a wild’un when I was a yonker, though I don’t reckon there’s innocent blood on these hands. I wore a star myself a time or two, if you can feature it. Everyplace I went, God was there first if you looked for him. The getting born all over, now; that never lost its shine. There ain’t that many places left a man can do that. I’ll miss it when it’s gone.”

  Just then the procession started, crossing the invisible line into the country of the Sioux–and of Quantrill’ s buried gold. He untied the reins and took them between his fingers. “Yes, sir,” said he, releasing the brake, “I’ll sure miss it.”

  Coming up on midday we saw our first Indian. He appeared atop a rise as suddenly as if he had been conjured, seated astride a whitestocking black with nothing but sky behind him and only his long hair stirring in the wind to indicate that he was anything but carved out of the hill. In leggings and breechclout and blue cavalry coat and campaign hat he was like a spirit caught between worlds, with a carbine slung from a strap over his shoulder, quiver fashion, and his feet in moccasins and the moccasins thrust into conventional white man’s stirrups. Ben Wedlock, following the wagon ahead, sensed my excitement.

  “Easy down, Davy. He don’t mean us no harm.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because we can see him.”

  And then, as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone. After a moment he came around the curve of the hill farther down, leaning inside, back arched and one arm hanging as if coming in at an easy lope, although the black was in full gallop. Queen Victoria on her seventieth birthday could not have shown more grace.

  Deacon Hecate, sitting his bony claybank at the head of the column, raised a hand and the visitor drew rein thirty yards short and again sat motionless, his black shaking its head and throwing lather. Presently the Deacon turned in his saddle and caught Wedlock’s eye. Wedlock pulled the chuck wagon out of line and we joined our guide.

  “A Sioux policeman out of Standing Rock,” Hecate reported. “I know him not, but that’s a grain-fed mount he is riding, with an army brand.”

  “He’s a deal from home,” said Wedlock.

  Mr. Knox pulled his wagon abreast of ours. “What business has he here?”

  “One way to find out.” Wedlock made a sign. After a pause the Indian signed back. His movements were as graceful and economical as his horsemanship. “He wants a parley.”

  “Tell him to come in,” said Hecate.

  The black picked its way through the fallen rocks at the base of the hill. Up close the Indian was young, not more than ten years older than I, his face made up of ovals, with a thick nose and dark eyes from which the lashes had been plucked. He was naked-chested under the army coat and wore a Colt pistol with a smooth cedar grip in a holster on his right hip. He said something in a harsh guttural.

  “He wants to know who we are and why we’re here.”

  “Ask him the same thing.”

  The Indian appeared to think it out. Finally he replied at length.

  “You was right about Standing Rock,” Wedlock told Hecate. “This here is Panther, a corporal with the Indian police there. He’s tracking a band of renegades bolted the reservation ten suns back. Their leader calls himself Lives Again and he’s got him a bellyful of the Ghost Dance sickness. That’s what Panther calls it anyway.”

  “He’s tracking them alone?”

  Responding, the Indian pulled open the right side of his coat, where a raw scar bisected his rib cage. It had bled recently and dried yellow-brown.

  “He says five of them was ambushed by Lives Again’s men hiding in the rocks. The others was kilt. He played possum and got two of Lives Again’s bunch when they came down to finish him off. The others ran.”

  “Why has he not gone for help?”

  When Panther spoke this time, I saw that he was not young at all, whatever his years were. There was a deadness in his eyes, and a setness to his cracked lips that might have been described, on a white man, as a grim smile.

  “He says that he has sung his song and that it’s a good day to die.”

  “Heathen,” muttered Hecate; but it was plain from his tone that he was not unmoved. “Ask him where he thinks this Lives Again is now.”

  “I know English.”

  We stared, as if at a graven head from which words had issued. The Deacon broke the silence. “Why did you not say so before?”

  “When dealing with strange white men I prefer time to choose my words.” Panther spoke carefully, as one who is not thinking in the language in which he is speaking. “You come to this place with many questions but no answers.”

  “We are prospectors,” said Mr. Knox. “I am Henry Knox. These gentlemen are Philo Hecate and Ben Wedlock. The boy is David Grayle.”

  The Indian regarded me. “He is old enough for manhood.” To Wedlock: “Go back, False Eye, or leave your bones. The gold is gone from this place.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Hecate pointed his chin. ” ‘Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?’ “

  Now the expression on Panther’s lips was a smile indeed, albeit a sad one. “The words of Goliath. The Philistine. I am the son of Gray Fox, who laid your fire winter mornings. You grow old, Deacon, that you forget those whom you taught your Bible.”

  Hecate seemed only slightly taken aback by this revelation. “Not well, or you would not speak of it as mine.”

  ” ‘Thy belly is like a heap of wheat.’ ” He was still smiling. “My wife’s is the color of clay. I think that it does not speak to us.”

  “Where is Lives Again?” demanded the Deacon a second time.

  “Not far. I found a pile of manure with the steam rising from it this morning. He has twenty braves with him. They have sworn to murder every white man they find in the Black Hills. It is not my business. My business is to die. I have sung my song.” He gathered his reins. “You would do well to sing yours, or else leave this place.” And before any of us could address him again, he spun and galloped back the way he had come. The hill swallowed horse and rider.

  “They will not all come to Jesus,” said the Deacon sadly. “Get back into line.”

  “Should we arm the men?” Mr. Knox asked.

  “There will be time for that. If young Panther has not just been’ smoking up dreams.”

  “What did he mean about singing?” I asked Wedlock, when the formation was regained.

  “His Death Song.” The saloonkeeper knoc
ked out his pipe and put it away in his clothes. “When an injun gets ready to die he sings to the Great Spirit for courage and goes out.”

  “To die?”

  “Be kind of foolish to sing the Death Song and then go out for a beer.”

  “Will Panther die?”

  “If he goes up against twenty renegades I don’t see he’s got a choice.”

  “That is the most heroic thing I have ever heard.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Ben?”

  He grunted.

  “Would you ever do it?”

  “I already did once.”

  He involved himself with the traces then, putting an end to the conversation. But I was burning to know the story.

  We saw no more Indians nor anyone else that day. At evening, Mr. Knox, Judge Blod, and the Deacon gathered at the rear of Mr. Knox’s wagon to discuss the route through the Black Hills. Bored by this geography lesson, I set out to find Wedlock, who was relaxing after supper with the Amarillo party. Mr. Knox called me back.

  “David, see to Cassiopeia, will you?” He had brought the mare from home to serve as a saddle horse.

  “That is Eli Freedman’s duty,” I pointed out.

  “She is off her feed. I don’t trust him to keep after her until she eats.”

  “Can it wait until later? I was going–”

  “I would deem it a favor.”

  I could not refuse, although I knew the request was but a design to prevent me from spending more time with Ben Wedlock than Mr. Knox considered necessary. Ruminating upon the difficulty with which old conflicts died, I took myself under a naked three-quarter moon to the ridge where the horses were picketed. The Black Hills loomed darker than night beyond: ancient, feral, sinister in their crouched attitude.

  Eli Freedman was absent–availing himself, I supposed, of a late supper now that the mounts were fed and made ready for the night. He seldom dined with the others. I had been told that this was his way going back to the time he was burned trying to rescue plantation horses from a blazing stable during the siege of Atlanta. Thus unobserved, I determined that Cassiopeia was indeed content, and turned to leave. Something white caught my eye.