Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Felt to be summer was aging fast. While all of spring had been unseasonably wet, June had turned dry as baked rawhide. The grass gone brittle. Prairie flowers drooped and withered. The ground underfoot went dusty as fine talcum powder, then shriveled up and cracked like a brittle puffball shell.

  “And if she truly understands, then perhaps she’ll be willing to live with a man like Seamus Donegan: poetry in me soul and fire in me heart,” he whispered as he strode across the meadow, rounded the corner of the Myers & Leonard stockade and walked on to the saloon where the noisy voices were rising against a background of squeaky fiddle and plaintive mouth harp, a French harp twanging rhythm as someone else pounded on a table.

  You could do worse, Seamus. Hell, you’ve done a lot worse, he told himself as he strode through the semicircle of greasy yellow light thrown out from that door at Hanrahan’s. Samantha’s a real looker, city, settlement or prairie. And for certain she knows how to make a man feel good climbing atop her. Damn, if she didn’t push him down not long after they had finished that first time, her gentle hands kneading his limp flesh into readiness then climbed atop him. He remembered that with a genuine smile as he stepped through the open doorway—how that half-dressed Samantha Pike had climbed into the saddle there atop him and took that long, furious ride until they both collapsed, exhausted.

  And slept until the next time she awoke him with her insistent fingers. Suddenly acquainted with the joy that could be experienced between man and woman, Miss Pike was not to be denied her pleasure.

  “What the devil you smiling so about?” Billy Dixon asked, waving the Irishman over to his table.

  Young Bat Masterson, Jim Hanrahan, Billy Ogg and Billy Tyler, along with Dixon’s skinners, Frenchy and Charley Armitage, all sat on crude benches pulled around the table. Other hunters and skinners called out their halloos to the newcomer then went back to their tin and china cups.

  “Bet he’s been thinking of women—like we been thinking of women,” said the handsome Masterson, slapping Donegan on the shoulder as the Irishman plopped down beside the young hunter. “Have yourself a drink and let’s all be miserable together.”

  “Miserable, is it?” Seamus asked.

  “Aye,” said Billy Ogg. “Injuns riding over the country-side, scalping, driving stakes through the bodies of our friends—”

  “And us down here with no women to poke!” shouted Billy Tyler.

  That brought a round of cheering coupled with many a growl of disappointment from the other tables.

  “Just drink up, boys!” Hanrahan called out to the room. “Drown your sorrows, I say!”

  “And make Jimmy Hanrahan the richest man in buffalo country doing it!” Masterson replied, leading the rest in loud laughter.

  “Don’t know if you really look any better than you did a few days back, Billy,” Seamus said to Dixon, who sat across the table. “You were the sight that day you and Sewell dragged in, like something I’d find at the bottom of a buffalo wallow.”

  “Poor Old Joe,” Dixon said, eyes dropping to stare into his china cup filled with red whiskey.

  “That mule of your’n is as much a casualty of the Injuns as was Dudley and Wallace,” replied Charlie Myers as he strode into the saloon.

  The two men had been working as skinners for Joe Plummer when they were attacked on Chicken Creek while Plummer was away at Adobe Walls for supplies. Finding the butchered bodies upon returning to his camp, Plummer had galloped back to the settlement to spread the alarm. When Dixon had straggled in later that day after crossing the swollen Canadian River, there was but one thought on his mind—to get back to his own outfit. With only a mule, no horse or rifle, he was in sad shape for Indian country.

  Nonetheless, Charley Rath did have a round-barreled .44-caliber Sharps, and Billy Dixon had quickly snatched it up on his good credit. And that very evening while the young hunter was putting together a new outfit, another hide man name Anderson Moore arrived on a lathered horse announcing that two men had been killed in his camp over on the Salt Fork of the Red River.

  “Cheyenne Jack?” Rath had asked of Moore. “The Englishman was working skinner for you?”

  Moore nodded.

  “And Blue Billy?” asked Dixon himself. “He was that German fella, weren’t he?”

  “Didn’t speak but a handful of words of English,” Seamus commented, remembering the young man who had so enjoyed the singing and dancing, recalling how caught up the German could get in the entertainment that he sang along at the top of his lungs, mimicking the sounds while not understanding the words, as he clapped and plopped ’round and ’round in those oversized dry-split broughams of his.

  But for many the playing had grown old during the past few days of waiting out the Indian scare. Some horse racing. A lot of cards and drinking. But very little of the shooting at a mark that had kept them occupied so often before. If there were to be a general outbreak of the warrior bands, then a man need save all his powder and lead for that serious business.

  It was during the past few days that some of the hunters had captured a wild mustang colt that had become separated from its mare and been lost among the settlement’s stock. They proudly presented the colt to Hannah Olds, the one woman at Adobe Walls, the one person around whom every man became suddenly well-mannered and respectful and downright docile.

  Like men would around someone who reminded them of home and a mother …

  As much as he wanted to smile at that thought, the vision of two more dead men—their bodies in all likelihood mutilated, as he himself had seen the mutilation of Dudley and Wallace in Plummer’s camp—came crowding in on Donegan. From far up on the Bozeman Road to the high rolling plains of that Kansas Territory, Seamus had seen his share of Indian butchery. But, never before had he witnessed mutilation such as what beheld his eyes at Joe Plummer’s hunting camp on the Staked Plain: the skulls of both Dudley and Wallace had been cracked open, brains removed, and the seeping cavity filled with prairie grass; eye sockets gouged out and filled with sprigs of sage; tongues skewered with sharp sticks; huge stakes driven through the skinners’ groins, pinning the bodies to the ground.

  “Might’n been the same bunch tried to jump us,” Hanrahan said.

  The rest nodded in solemn remembrance of that bloody day when warriors attacked Hanrahan’s own wagon outfit returning from Dodge 150 miles away with a load of whiskey, warriors who succeeded only in running off their horses. They were fortunate that the warriors did not press their advantage, lucky too that Charlie Myers showed up the next day to share his mules with the muleless Hanrahan. Had the horsemen known that the entire shipment was barrel upon barrel of crazy water …

  “Much as you fellas think so, I still can’t figure that what few scalps these damned savages been lifting and a little hell they been raising works out to be an Injun war,” Billy Dixon said.

  “Dixon’s right,” Masterson agreed. “A few scalps ain’t a war. Any of us can hunt north and west of here and not see a feather, by damn. But if you stick your nose south and east of the Canadian, you’re liable to get your nose chopped off. That’s Injun ground, for certain.”

  “That’s why you’re all sitting here, isn’t it?” Donegan asked, swiping whiskey from his mustache. “Because you don’t want your scalps hanging from some warrior’s belt?”

  Hanrahan nodded, chuckling. He had the saloonman’s insight and knowledge of all the sins of men tucked into every one of the knowing wrinkles and crevices of his face. “We’re all here because we know the red bastards won’t be crazy enough to try this place on for size—right, fellas?”

  “Damn right!” Charlie Myers cheered. “There’s safety in numbers, by God.”

  “And look around at these walls,” James Langton said. “No Injun would dare try to attack us when we can hunker down behind these walls.”

  “Here’s to being safe as you would be in your mama’s arms here at Adobe Walls, boys!” Hanrahan cheered, lifting his cup. “No place safer unless you’re roc
king in your own mama’s lap.”

  * * *

  Isatai was finally satisfied.

  They had been on the move for three suns now, using every bit of daylight to march northwest from the Elk Creek encampment. The Comanche scouts had led the entire war party up the North Fork of the Red River until they reached the Staked Plain. Once there, the great procession of more than seven hundred warriors struck almost due north for the Canadian River and the white man’s settlement of earth lodges.

  A few bands of young Comanche warriors, a band of Kiowa too, had grown eager and hurried ahead of the rest. One war party returned with two scalps. Later that day a second group rode in to celebrate the taking of two more white scalps. Sign everywhere showed there were many more buffalo hunters in the country. It would be a glorious victory, Isatai told them, so enjoying the answering fury of their war cries.

  Now they were drawing close to the white man’s earth-lodge settlement. Very, very close.

  He could almost smell the stink of those hide men. They smelled of death, smelled of this killing of the buffalo. Soon these tai-bos would reek of their own death.

  This very morning as the sun had risen, Quanah had ordered all warriors to stay with the main party before selecting seven scouts to find the exact location of the earth-lodge settlement and count the white men who would defend it.

  There were a few Kiowas along, those riding under Lone Wolf and Swan, Big Bow and Howling Wolf. And some Cheyenne under Stone Calf and Crazy Mule, Medicine Water, White Shield and Whirlwind. Even the handful of the old Cheyenne chiefs who had openly refused to go on the raid had been held in that great sun-dance encampment by the Bow String soldiers, some of the Cheyenne tribal police, for fear they would alert the agent or soldiers of Isatai’s great war.

  As the week of celebration continued at the mouth of Elk Creek, a few Comanchero traders had even wheeled their carts in, selling whiskey to a thirsty clientele. Adding to the festive atmosphere, a few Arapahos under renegade Yellow Horse had slipped off the reservation to join the sun dance and the coming fight too, although most of the Arapaho bands resolutely stayed to the white man’s road.

  He had to laugh at that, Isatai did. The white man’s road led only to self-destruction. It was just as he harangued the warriors at the fires every evening they stopped to rest the ponies.

  “Look at the Caddos!” he would shout at the gathering come to hear the great shaman speak. “Have you not seen the Wichitas? Both once great peoples. And look at them now that they have taken the white man’s road, scratching in the earth like the white man. Wearing the white man’s clothes. Reading from the white man’s holy book. Would any man of you claim the Tonkawas are holy people? The white man and his ways are evil! He wants only to destroy us—if not with war, then the white man will destroy us with his religion … pulling us away from the Spirit Above!”

  Some unquenchable flame within Isatai had compelled him to call the hundreds together each night at the cooking fires. To keep the young men whipped to a fury. To assure them of their forthcoming victory over the hide men asleep at the earth lodges.

  “You will fight with us?” asked Wild Horse, a noted Comanche war chief. “With your own hand you will club the white hunters as they sleep?”

  Isatai knew a veiled challenge when it was thrown at him. But he refused to rise to the bait the way the catfish hungered for what was on the end of his string. This was his fight, and his war—make no mistake about it. Isatai believed he would right the terrible wrong done when the soldiers killed his uncle in last winter’s first moon. He had been given powers of magic and sleight of hand by the Spirit Above, had he not? Then surely the Spirit Above would expect him to use all his powers of magic and persuasion and threat and presence to gather behind him a great fighting force to wipe the land clean of the white man’s stain.

  “No, I do not fight. I am not a warrior. The Spirit Above has called me to walk a different path,” he declared to the hushed assembly, surprised at his calm. “I alone walk this road of the spirit. You cannot walk this road. I alone make it possible for your great victory. I alone will turn the bullets into puffs of air and make the white man’s rifles useless, Wild Horse. My prayers will drape each warrior with power, just as I will mantle myself with a sacred yellow paint.”

  “Surely you will want to see for yourself how brave Kwahadi warriors kill the white buffalo hunters,” challenged Wild Horse.

  “Soon enough, we will all see how you kill the tai-bos … but only if you believe in the word of the Spirit Above—told you from my lips. Why do you doubt me?” he asked them strongly, his voice raised so that every one of them was stunned speechless. “Ask those who have seen my powers—they will tell you I can make bullets come from my belly. Ask, and they will tell you I can raise the dead with the power of my breath blown into their mouths.”

  Isatai stepped before the Comanche war chief, looking up at Wild Horse’s face. “Did I not predict a great dry time for this summer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that dry time upon us, Wild Horse?”

  Again, “Yes, it is.”

  Isatai enjoyed this, watching the war chief squirm like a crawls-on-his-belly. “Our war camps swelled with the recent converts as the air grew hot and the grass drooped for want of rain. Don’t any of you dare to question me, for my powers are the powers of the Spirit Above! And all those who stay on the reservation will mourn with empty bellies and sad hearts that they too did not join me in wiping out the tai-bos!”

  When this killing of the hide men was done, Isatai told them, he would lead them on to the first of the soldier forts in the land to the south. There they would attack the white and buffalo soldiers while they slept, clubbing them as they would do with the buffalo hunters. He had been assured by the Spirit Above in the most recent visit Isatai had made to the land of the clouds that the soldiers’ guns would be rendered useless, as would the long-shooting buffalo rifles of the hide men. This settlement of earth lodges on the Canadian was but the beginning.

  Killing the white men who reeked of blood and death would merely be the opening chapter to a long and glorious war to drive the white man from Indian country. And those tai-bos who would not flee the buffalo ground?

  They would die where the Comanche found them.

  12

  June 25–26, 1874

  “Just who the hell is this Amos Chapman anyway?” Donegan asked.

  Billy Dixon motioned for the Irishman to walk with him. If he was going to talk about Chapman, it had best be done in private, away from the saloon, the buildings and the rest of the hide men.

  “You remember—you met him up at Dodge the morning we was pulling south. He’s a half-breed,” Dixon explained in a low voice as they walked toward the setting sun. “Army scout and interpreter. Works out of Camp Supply mostly.”

  “I remember him all right,” Donegan replied. “Recognized him a week ago when he come in with that army escort, them five soldiers. What I want to know is what he’s told you and why’s it so damned important.”

  Dixon sighed, looking over his shoulder and coming to a halt to face the Irishman. “Two fellas named Lee and Reynolds—they’re contract traders at Camp Supply—they had a Kiowa from Kicking Bird’s band come in to tell them the warriors was up to no good.”

  “We damn well know that, Billy. It’s summer and that means it’s time for raiding. And they’ve raised four scalps … four is all we know of.”

  Dixon shook his head. “This is something bigger, Seamus. The warrior said the Kiowa was joining the Cheyenne and Comanche to make war.”

  “They’re riding north into Kansas again—like they did back to ’sixty-eight?”

  “No. This time word has it the war party is heading this way. Lee and Reynolds paid Chapman their own money to come tell us. They both know Robert Wright, Charley Rath’s partner—so they convinced the commanding officer at Camp Supply to give Chapman an army escort for the trip.”

  “Whoa,” Donegan sai
d. “Wait a minute. You said that war party is coming our way?”

  “No telling how big this will be.” Dixon watched worry etch the Irishman’s face.

  “You don’t know how many … so, do you know when?”

  “Chapman brought word that them traders think it might come in the next couple days.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Day after—twenty-seventh.”

  “Why’s this such a damned secret anyway, Billy?”

  “The traders don’t want word getting spread around and it running the hunters off—bad for business. Besides, it’d leave ’em with no way to defend their investments.”

  Donegan snorted. “Ain’t that just like ’em? Not sharing news of a coming fight to save their bleeming business!”

  “You gotta keep it quiet—I’m trusting you.”

  “I ain’t so sure that attack will ever come, Billy.”

  “Rath and Myers and Hanrahan all think we’ll be attacked.”

  Donegan wagged his head. “It don’t make sense. I asked one of them soldiers with Chapman what they was doing down here. He said they were on the trail of horse thieves. Now, who’s lying?”

  Dixon shrugged. “All I know is Chapman said the soldiers was told by their commander to lie if they were asked anything about what they was doing out here—so I figure they made up that story about tracking horse thieves.”

  Gazing for a long moment at the distant saloon, stars making a cloudy glitter overhead, Donegan finally said, “I don’t know. I figure the rest of them fellas what know this Chapman just might have that half-breed man pegged. Like them—I figure he’s the liar. He’s got him a Cheyenne wife, so like Billy Ogg says: Chapman’s here spying on us for them Injins. If there’s any war party coming our way, likely Chapman’s already gone and give ’em news of what’s here for the taking.”

  “Damn you, Irishman, if you’d just listen to me—”

  “That half-breed is a spy for the Cheyenne, Billy … or Chapman damn well did bring those soldiers here looking for horse thieves. I figure there’s some in this jailhouse bunch what wouldn’t be above pinching a horse here or there.”