Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  They were pushing her away, shoving Sophia off with her three sisters. She turned to look back at the wagon, now in a full blaze. The warrior woman drove a foot into her back, causing the white girl to stumble and grunt in pain as she fell.

  Little seven-year-old Julie and young Addie, who was only five, helped pull her up from the dust and trampled grass. They were crying. Quiet tears seeping down their young, ruddy cheeks.

  “Don’t look,” little Addie told her older sister. “Just don’t look.”

  32

  September 12, 1874

  Billy Dixon was certain of it. As much as the soldier might try to pass it off, Colonel Nelson A. Miles was worried about that ammunition and food getting down to him from Camp Supply. Lyman’s wagon train should have made it back long ago.

  From his camp on McClellan Creek in the eastern extreme of the Texas Panhandle, Miles had dispatched Dixon and the half-breed Amos Chapman to ride northwest on the Fort Supply Road and find out what they could.

  “You can take as many soldiers as you want, Dixon,” the colonel had explained in firelit darkness two nights before.

  Billy had glanced at Chapman. The interpreter from Camp Supply had merely shrugged.

  “It’s better we don’t go with a whole passel of soldiers,” Dixon replied. “Gimme four.”

  Miles shook his head. “That’s all?”

  Dixon had only nodded.

  The colonel selected four veterans of the Sixth Cavalry to go along with the two scouts. Besides hurrying along the Lyman supply train, the colonel wanted the six to carry some urgent dispatches on to Camp Supply. The six had plunged into the prairie darkness the night of 10 September, two days back.

  True to his vow of last July, Dixon had left Dodge City and volunteered his services to Miles not long after the wagon train of buffalo hunters made it north to the Arkansas River settlement. Since then Billy had been scouting for one of the five columns the army and Indian Department hoped would end this outbreak once and for all.

  Back on 26 July, Bill Sherman had talked his old friend Sam Grant into ending civilian control of the agencies. By the time Sherman got through, Grant’s “Quaker Peace Policy” was nothing more than an abandoned memory for the history books. Immediately word went out from Washington City to all posts and agencies: the army was assuming control; all friendly Indians were to come in and enroll with the agents by 3 August; those bands who did not report for enrollment by the closing date would be chased, harassed, captured, dismounted and disarmed, becoming prisoners of war. If they were not killed.

  By the second week of August the battle lines had been drawn. Those on the reservation were considered peaceful. Those bands who had fled to the ancient security of the Staked Plain were hostile. It was to be a classic Sherman campaign: five columns would converge from different directions to effect the final clean-up before winter set in. Major William R. Price was marching east along the Canadian River from Fort Union, New Mexico, with eight companies of the Eighth Cavalry to effect a junction with Miles.

  Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell, leading four troops of the Ninth U.S. Negro Cavalry and two from the Tenth, along with two companies of the Eleventh Infantry and thirty scouts, was moving northwest across the Brazos from Fort Griffin, Texas.

  Lieutenant Colonel John W. “Black Jack” Davidson was leading six troops of Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry, three companies of the Eleventh Infantry and forty-four scouts west from Fort Sill, I.T.

  Due south of the caprock and Staked Plain, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie was probing north out of Fort Concho at the head of a column comprised of the largest prong of the attack: eight companies of his famous Fourth Cavalry, four more of the Tenth Cavalry, one from the Eleventh Infantry along with some thirty scouts.

  And Nelson A. Miles himself, marching at the van of eight troops of the Sixth Cavalry, four companies of the colonel’s own Fifth Infantry, along with one Parrot ten-pounder and two Gatling guns.

  That made for more than three thousand soldiers converging on the ancient buffalo ground of the Kiowa and Comanche—with orders from Washington City to disregard the various army departmental lines, not to mention disregarding reservations. As Major General C. C. Augur wrote to Mackenzie on 28 August, “You are at liberty to follow the Indians wherever they go, even to the Agencies.”

  The war was on.

  On 11 August, Billy Dixon left Fort Dodge with the Miles column. He was headed back to Indian country. But this time he wouldn’t be hunting buffalo. This time he would be looking for what Miles was hunting: Indians to fight.

  His eyes searched the land to the east this second predawn morning. Already the horizon had turned gray. To the west what he could see of the sky was a jumble of black-bellied storm clouds. They’d be wet before the day was out, Billy figured. But if he and Chapman could find them a dry place to wait out the day, they’d do just fine.

  It had been that way for the last two nights. Moving by feel as much as by moonlight and starshine across the countryside, picking their way north by northeast as they went. Come sunrise yesterday, they had hidden and slept and kept watch in rotation throughout the day. They would do the same today. And in a couple more sunrises, this bunch could be in sight of the flagpole at Camp Supply.

  From the looks of the country, Billy figured he was ascending the divide between Gageby Creek and the Washita River. Perhaps they should stop here on this side of the divide and go into hiding, he argued with himself as he glanced over his right shoulder once more, watching the gray go to a thin red line that reminded him of the bloody phlegm dribbling from a bull’s nostrils when he had drilled him in the lights. The sky was going red. Maybe, just maybe, they could push it a little and cover a bit more ground before they had to find some cover.

  Besides, he really couldn’t see anything here on the Gageby Creek side of the divide that would do if the sky opened up on them the way it was threatening to do. Already the coming dawn seemed to be ripping back more and more of the land, exposing more and more of the ominous, roiling western horizon. The rain would be just fine, just fine, he figured. They had been without fresh water to fill their empty canteens in more than a day now. This ride was turning into a real badlands doings, and things appeared to be getting worse with every mile—until the sky lit enough to expose that faraway promise of rain.

  Anxious to get over the divide and into cover as the sky paled, Billy nudged his horse into a trot. Behind him the others followed and picked up the pace, Chapman closing the file.

  As he crested the rise, Dixon could not believe his eyes. He blinked them, his heart shooting into this throat.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” he cried, sawing the reins about, nearly bringing his horse down as he did so.

  Sergeant Z. T. Woodall cried out, “What the hell are you—”

  Then it seemed the whole of the northern extent of the divide erupted in a bright show of feathered horsemen who had suddenly spotted the half-dozen white men in the gray light of dawn. Without a moment’s delay, they were racing for their quarry, screeching, hammering their ponies into a gallop. So close were they to Dixon’s party when Billy bumped into them that the warriors were able to surge around the white men on three sides. In a matter of seconds they closed the circle.

  Dixon had his pistol out, his eyes frantically searching for a place to make a stand of it. Not that he was anything new to fighting Indians—it was just that a fella had to have him a proper place to do it.

  “Dismount!” he shouted to the four soldiers.

  “Stay in the saddle!” countermanded Sergeant Woodall, his black mustache quivering with anger. “We can make a run for it!”

  Dixon yanked on the sergeant’s bridle, staring up at the older man. “We run, we’ll get cut off one at a time in a running fight. Now, get down and fight!”

  Woodall muttered as the bullets began to whine overhead and the sun’s rays lanced out of the east in a brilliant crimson. “A good cavalryman—forced to fight on foot! Arrggg!” he sw
ore. “Smith—you’re horse holder!”

  Dixon turned away as the others were dropping to the ground, opening fire with his pistol as the air buzzed around him. He recognized that first unforgettable sound of lead smacking into flesh. Private George W. Smith, designated to be horse holder for the rest, crumpled in half with a cry of desperate pain. He stretched out slowly like a dying man will, clawing the ground for the pistol he had dropped, just out of reach. Then Smith quit moving.

  One of the mounts the private had been holding screamed as it was hit and began kicking its rear legs, ’round and ’round in a frantic circle before it tore off through the closing red noose.

  Dixon pulled his second pistol as Chapman went down with a grunt, holding his leg below the knee.

  “Billy! I’m hit!” Chapman groaned as he squatted there in the new light of day, bright darkness seeping between his copper fingers.

  The half-breed tried to hold his own as Private John Harrington was winged in the left arm. The soldier cried out for help.

  Woodall started for Harrington as the ground around the sergeant began to erupt with dirt funnels. Just as he reached the private, Woodall’s face went white. He put his hand to his belly and brought it away, dampened with crimson.

  “Jesus…” Billy growled when he saw Woodall blanch.

  Already four of the six were wounded. Their horses with extra ammunition in the saddlebags had been driven off. And all of that inside the first two minutes.

  Worse still, the way the warriors were pressing in on them was proving a closer fight than anything Dixon had been in—closer even than having the damned Comanches battering at the very doors of Jimmy Hanrahan’s saloon with their pony hooves and rifle butts and fourteen-foot lances draped with scalps.

  Maybe this was it, something suddenly cold in his belly told him. Today was Billy Dixon’s last stand.

  He decided then and there in the space of one heartbeat that if this sunrise were to be his last, he would do his best work with his gun this day, making every shot count, and giving back hurt for hurt, blazing away at this war party as much as he could before they overwhelmed his wounded, whittled-down party.

  Of the six men—Smith dead and three more wounded … against more than 125 warriors already painted, their ponies decked for battle.

  How had he been so damned stupid to walk right into them in the dark?

  Then, by some miracle, the warriors were pushed back momentarily. The screaming faded. Dixon caught his breath, trying to make sense of it. The five of them, most wounded like they were, had nonetheless turned that first frightening charge come so close Billy swore he could almost smell the buffalo jerky on the warriors’ hot breath. If he and the rest were to survive another five minutes, ten or more, they needed to find some cover.

  But without the horses to shoot and barricade behind … Billy grew desperate, his eyes searching this way then that across the heaving ground … there! That old depression atop a low rise on the open, rolling land dotted with mesquite. Several hundred yards away to the south—a long-abandoned buffalo wallow, where the great bulls had come during the rut of a bygone day, horning the ground, tossing dust over their heads then rolling in the depression they had formed to relieve some of the itching from the ticks and fleas and mosquitoes and buffalo gnats that tormented the shaggy beasts. A few inches deep, and less than a dozen feet across …

  What that wallow offered wasn’t much. But it was a damned sight better than anything else they had on this bald, sandy knob of ground. And it beckoned to Billy Dixon like a hearth in a prairie storm.

  “C’mon, fellas!” Dixon shouted, pointing his pistol. “To the wallow—let’s make our stand there!”

  Private Peter Rath was at Woodall’s side, and with the help of the wounded Harrington, the two privates got the wobbly sergeant to his feet and started with Dixon.

  “Anything’s better’n dying out here,” Woodall barked, forcing a smile onto his well-seamed face, which was a war map of his Civil War battles. “Get me there, soldiers. Just get me to that goddamned hole.”

  Dixon saw them beginning their charge, coming in again, then the racket grew thunderous in his ears once more as the two soldiers took off together, scurrying across the dusty slope, half dragging the third. Billy sprinted past them, running like sunlight on creek water, reaching the wallow where he whirled and flopped to his belly, firing at the incoming horsemen as the air around him grew suddenly light with the emergence of the orange globe at the edge of the earth.

  “Amos!” Dixon shouted, seeing Chapman had not moved across the slope.

  “G’won, B-Billy,” he hollered.

  “C’mon, goddammit! Hurry!” Dixon screeched at the trio of soldiers, wagging a pistol arm. Then he was clambering out of the wallow and running toward Chapman as the keening war cries grew deafening. But of a sudden all he could hear was the huffing of his own breath and the pounding of his boots across the sandy soil.

  Chapman saw, heard him coming. “I can’t, Billy—”

  He fired his pistol once, aimed and fired a second time. “Jesus, Amos—I’m coming for you!”

  Chapman growled forcefully, his face gone white with pain, “Stay back, you skittle-minded fool!”

  Then the enemy fire grew too hot and Dixon did something he was ashamed of as soon as he whirled and lunged back toward the wallow. The bullet wound burned through the calf of his leg as his throat went dry as sand. The ground around him snarled as lead ricocheted from the rocks, rattling the mesquite brush angrily. On grit alone Billy clawed back onto his feet, limping … hobbling away from the open ground where the half-breed lay on his belly, plugging away as best a man can when his lower leg is broken.

  Dixon slid into the wallow behind the others, the wave of pain passing over him, threatening to engulf him like the rain-swollen Canadian River had earlier that spring. He finally caught his breath and bellied over to fire the pistol, emptying it before the second charge was turned in a noisy, profane show of the warriors’ disappointment. He glanced over the rest of them, wondering how these young soldiers were holding up. Likely one or two would wet their britches from belt to brisket with each new assault now.

  “’Bout as noisy as a Gypsy tinker’s cart, don’t you think?” asked the sergeant, grinning crookedly beneath that bent horseshoe of a mustache.

  “Start digging, fellas,” Dixon told them as he shoved a cartridge in the Sharps then dragged out both pistols to reload.

  “Dig?” Harrington asked as he gazed down at his own wounded arm.

  “Damn right. Get digging,” he snarled at the soldiers. “Make this deeper. Throw your dirt up here on the lip. Now—do it!”

  Rath and Harrington looked at Woodall for confirmation. The sergeant did not hesitate. He nodded, then painfully dragged his own belt knife out of its scabbard and went to work at his corner of the buffalo wallow. Using knives if they had them, only hands if they didn’t, the four were like prairie rats, badgers and wolf spiders spraying sand from their excavations as fast as they could dig, shoring up the rim of this long-abandoned buffalo wallow. Making it just a little tougher for those brown-skinned horsemen to find a target down in this dusty pit scraped out of a hillside in the middle of nowhere.

  “We’ll damn well sell our lives dearly,” Dixon told them.

  Woodall’s eyes were the first to tell Billy that the veteran sergeant agreed. Beneath that bulb of a nose, Woodall’s mustache was a well-waxed affair, bent like a gleaming black horseshoe over his mouth as he said, “The scout’s right, boys. Give ’em hell to the last man.”

  “Lemme wrap your arm, Harrington,” Rath offered, jabbing his knife into the tail of his own tunic and sawing off a dirty bandage he secured around the wounded soldier.

  “Do anything for you, Sergeant?” Dixon asked.

  Woodall swallowed hard, gritting behind his grin. He glanced briefly down at his bloody hand. “Just keep me sitting up, boys. Gut wound can be nasty.”

  “Dixon … look,” Harrington
said, wagging his service revolver across the slope:

  He was afraid it was another charge, but what he saw was only Amos Chapman, slowly dragging himself along through the brush, pushing with one leg, pulling with one arm. Inch by inch, foot by foot across the sandy ground as bullets spun and whined about him.

  “They’ll get him! God, they’ll get him for sure!” Harrington squealed.

  “Shuddup,” Woodall growled, yanking Harrington back against the side of the pit. “Stay down and you’ll stay alive.”

  It was more than Billy could take. No man who wanted to live that much should have to fight alone, out there, making an easy target of himself with hundreds of red-skinned marksmen making sport of him.

  No man who wanted to live that much should have to die alone.

  With the protests of the soldiers in his ears, Billy was out of the wallow, over the sandy rim, sprinting as he had sprinted only once before in his life: racing alongside Seamus Donegan and Billy Ogg when they had run for Jimmy Hanrahan’s saloon of another sunrise on these Panhandle plains.

  Chapman growled, a grin forced in the thin line of his lips, “Glad to see you, Billy.”

  “Shuddup and grab a’holt of me, Amos,” he snapped, stuffing one of the pistols in his wide belt. “Sling you on my back.”

  Raising himself on his good knee, Chapman heaved himself up and slung his arms around Dixon’s neck as the shorter man struggled to rise, clearly straining. Chapman let go.

  “You can’t make it with both of us—”

  Dixon whirled on the half-breed. “Goddammit—you hold onto me, or I’m gonna drag you there by myself!”

  Chapman swallowed down his pain and nodded, circling Dixon’s neck again as the warriors kicked their ponies back up the sandy slope dotted with mesquite brush.

  With a grunt, Billy finally got his legs under him and started forward. The wounded calf cried out … but once he was moving, he was not about to stop. Moving this fast, under the head of steam, he was like the pistons of a locomotive and would have fallen if he had stopped. His momentum and the greater weight of Amos Chapman carried him along that hillside toward the buffalo wallow.