Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  The screams of the soldiers rang in his ears, accompanying the painful grunts of Chapman clung like a swollen tick to his back as each ramming footstep in that race shot pain through the half-breed’s broken leg. Billy collapsed at the edge of the wallow, flinging Chapman past him, over the scooped-up sand and into the bottom as the screeching warriors came within range and the soldiers opened up, letting fly what they could.

  Dixon wished he had something in his stomach to puke up as the pain in his leg sent cold shards of ice to his brain. But there was nothing left in his belly but a little water and some yellow bile. His leg was oozing more blood now as he tore his canvas britches away from the wound.

  He yanked the greasy bandanna from around his neck and knotted it around the calf. Then looked up at Amos Chapman lying across the dusty buffalo wallow from him.

  The half-breed swiped sand from the side of his face with a grimy hand. “Thank you, Billy Dixon. I owe you my life.”

  He knew that was a tough thing for a man like Chapman to bring himself to say. So Dixon smiled as he dragged his Sharps into his shoulder, ready to pass it off.

  “By damn, you better help hold these bastards off, Amos. I didn’t come all the way out there to drag your brown ass in here for nothing. I brung you here to work.”

  33

  September 12–13, 1874

  “Amos! Heya, heya! We got you now, Amos!”

  The slope rang with the warriors’ taunts after Dixon’s rescue of Chapman had driven the brown-skinned horsemen into a fury. They charged again, circling the buffalo wallow for a few frantic minutes, then rode out of rifle range once more. Then they began to taunt the half-breed they knew.

  “Good to have friends, ain’t it?” Billy Dixon asked, half a grin on his face, gritting as he tightened the bandanna around his calf.

  “Yep—you are that: a friend what saved me,” Chapman agreed.

  Billy chuckled. “Naw, Amos. I was talking about them redskins. Friends like that—them knowing your name: Chapman.”

  The half-breed nodded. “Yeah. Them knowing me just makes ’em want my scalp more’n yours, Billy.”

  “Damn shame,” Dixon replied. “’Cause mine’s sure a lot prettier’n yours, Amos.”

  For the next several hours as the sun made its brief appearance that morning, climbing into the growing overcast of the autumn sky, those Kiowa and Comanche warriors who had just abandoned their siege of Captain Wyllys Lyman’s wagon train when they unexpectedly bumped into the six white men attempted to draw their red noose all the tighter around the enemy bellied down in that shallow buffalo wallow. True to the season, it did grow warm for a time. But hotter still were the white man’s guns each trip the warriors chose to burst from the brush atop their paint-smeared, feather-bedecked ponies, spurring the animals around and around the wallow, firing when they could, each young warrior screeching out his war song, intent on counting coup on this miserable handful of white men.

  Of a sudden Harrington raised himself up against his side of the wallow, desperation etched on his young face, and yelled, “It’s no use, boys. No use. We might as well give up!”

  A bullet stung the side of the wallow where they had scooped up the dirt, spraying sand into Harrington’s mouth, gagging the soldier.

  “Damn you!” Woodall growled. “Get down, Private!”

  “Giddown,” Chapman ordered.

  Dixon dragged the soldier down to the center of the pit, holding the young private there as the bullets sang overhead. “It ain’t no use, true enough, soldier—if you go and give up. But we got us a chance: we keep our heads, and make our guns answer them Kiowa bastards.”

  It got quiet a few moments as Harrington settled, still trembling like a wet hound shaking himself from muzzle to tail root. Dixon eventually took his hand off the soldier’s chest and dragged his wounded leg back to the edge of the rifle pit as the charge dissipated and the warriors rode back to confer at the edge of the mesquite.

  “Wish we had that gun,” Sergeant Woodall said absently, gazing across the slope at the body.

  “Smith’s?” asked Private Rath.

  “Yeah,” Woodall replied. “Ain’t seen him move a bit.”

  “He’s gone. Sure as hell, we could use that gun of his,” Dixon agreed. “Suicide to try it, though. For now, anyway. Besides, as long as Amos keeps shooting center, you soldiers got two of the finest marksmen on the high plains right here, don’t you know?”

  “That a fact?” Woodall said, starting to chuckle, then wincing when it caused him pain.

  “A damn undisputed, bald-face fact,” Chapman said, winking at Dixon. “Why, Billy’s handier with that Sharps than a Comanche with a new knife.”

  “You boys just be sure to make every bullet count,” Billy told them. “Don’t waste ammunition. Make sure you hit something you pull the trigger.”

  “Here they come!” Chapman roared.

  This time there appeared a dozen warriors carrying their long buffalo lances riding in the vanguard. From the fourteen-foot spears dangled scalps of different colors tied amid a flurry of feathers fluttering on the hot wind.

  “Amos—take the one on the right,” Dixon ordered as his cheek nestled against the stock.

  They fired almost together, the two leaders of the lance charge pitching backward into the sand and mesquite. Harrington and Rath cheered as the charge broke up with the fall of the leaders.

  “Them two had more brass than a saloon monkey’s butt,” Chapman hissed.

  “You know, Amos—they could’ve had us in that first charge,” Dixon said as he shoved another cartridge in the Sharps.

  Chapman nodded. “Stupid Injuns. Brave, but stupid.”

  Dixon winked. “Then I suppose that only makes you half smart, right?”

  “Smart enough to get a feather-headed runt like you to come do a damn fool stunt like dragging me back in here, Billy. Now, you tell me who’s more stupid: you, or me?”

  “Chapman makes a good point,” Woodall said at the far side of the wallow. “Can’t blame him for being stupid if he got you to run that lead gauntlet for him.”

  Dixon smiled, turning back to look down the slope where the warriors were gathered. “Needed the exercise, don’t you know.”

  As the morning dragged closer and closer to noon, with the sun rising higher and higher, the heat increasing while the boiling black thunderheads continued to roll their way out of the west with the swiftness of spilled coffee staining a freshly laundered blue tablecloth, the men alternately dug their rifle pit deeper and fired with each renewed attack. With each successive charge, more ponies fell, more warriors dragged off by other horsemen, and more shields and lances and tomahawks and rifles littered the sandy soil of this lonely little battlefield.

  “Hot enough to boil gravy in here,” Woodall commented sourly, then grinned that crooked smile of his.

  “Injuns call it, sam-ya ceze-t’e,” said Chapman. “The time of blackened tongues, boys. The thirst devil.”

  Dixon gazed into the brassy, breathless sky, squinting beneath a shading hand. Wondering if the Indians didn’t get him, then that goddamned sun sure would. Maybe, just maybe, he was already laying in the sand of his own burying box. He swallowed it down and looked back over the fear-pinched faces of the soldiers.

  “By the way, boys,” Billy said offhandedly, as cool as he could make it, “just so you’ll remember: always keep a last bullet in your pistol. Never go empty.”

  “You want us to always have one of us with a gun loaded, that it?” asked the sergeant.

  “No,” Dixon said eventually, looking at Woodall squarely. “Keep the last bullet for yourself.”

  From the expressions on every soldier’s face following his statement, Dixon knew they understood the heavy stakes they were playing. These soldiers realized that they could not take the chance of falling into the hands of the warriors. Billy himself had heard enough of the old-timers’ talk, besides seeing with his own eyes too many stripped and butchered stark white
bodies staked out on the prairie, tortured with fire or sliced limb from limb with slow, meticulous precision. He would just have to keep their juices up, their fighting spirit aroused, to have half a chance to come out of this alive. And to do all that, Billy Dixon would have to be as determined to live as dog salmon fighting fast water.

  “None of you happen to have a flask along, would you?” asked Sergeant Woodall as the bright sun began its slow descent from mid-sky.

  The heat had turned brutal.

  At the moment of attack when they were dismounting, Billy had tossed off his wide-brimmed slouch hat, as it made him too fine of a target. Now he cursed himself for pitching it as far from him as he could. Dixon felt as if the wallow were no better place than a cast-iron skillet in which the five of them were simmering slowly, slowly broiling in their own juices by some devilish design.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” Billy replied. “Know how you feel. We’re about as scant of water as whiskey is at a Shouting Baptist prayer-tent meeting, aren’t we?”

  They laughed a little as Dixon ran his tongue around inside his mouth, sensing it gone pasty. Reaching inside his shirt, he pulled out a small plug of dark tobacco, sliced a chew off of it and tossed it across to Woodall and Harrington.

  “Go ahead and share what’s left there among the rest of you. Might keep your mouth wet.”

  Rath choked on the tobacco and spit his out a few minutes later, preferring to dream of water, he said, rather than have to swallow that tobacco juice.

  “Listen to that, will you?” Chapman said after the first distant clap of thunder rolled in from the west.

  “You don’t suppose we’d be lucky enough to get some of that rain, do you?” asked Rath.

  “Looks like we might,” Dixon assured him as another thunder roll rattled like dried buffalo bones across the sandy hills. “The way these goddamned flies been biting, it’s a sure sign of rain coming.”

  Billy twisted slightly to gaze down the slope, watching the warriors. They too were glancing now and then at the onrushing storm, listening to the distant rattle of thunder on the open land. “Them red bastards been playing with us, ain’t they, Amos?”

  Chapman nodded. “Yep.”

  “What do you mean, playing with us?” asked the sergeant.

  Dixon chewed on it, selecting his words. “They could’ve had us first off, run us right into the ground. This bunch is wanting to make some sport of this—this is big medicine to them, riding up close to this wallow, daring us. They want to count as much coup as they can before they figure to wipe us out.”

  “That coming?” Rath asked sourly.

  “Could be. If the rain don’t get here first,” Dixon replied. “I figure they’ll make as much sport of it for as long as they can drag it out.”

  By the middle of the afternoon the five had been pinned down in the bottom of their simmering skillet for more than nine hours. Dixon watched the others between each wild circling charge the warriors made, while he reloaded his guns and those of the others from time to time. Studying these men whose lives and whose deaths had suddenly been thrown together with his.

  The sergeant was likely the worst off. It seemed he could barely move. Chapman wasn’t all that much better, though. Amos winced in pain each time he tried shifting his position. Not only did he have a broken leg, but he was continuing to lose blood just like Woodall was. At the same time, Harrington was growing more and more useless with every hour as his wounded arm made it increasingly difficult for him to hold a rifle.

  Looking down at the warriors conferring in the mesquite, then glancing at the dark thunderheads rolling all the nearer, Dixon realized that if those Kiowas and Comanches realized just what straits the white men were in, they would charge up here and be done with it in one fell swoop. Somehow, he had to keep the others sitting up, conscious, and returning the Indians’ fire, bullet for bullet … if only to fool the redskins and hold them at bay.

  Suddenly the ground shook, making Dixon jump—as if it was the thunder of nearby hooves. But instead of warrior ponies, this was a nearby jolt of lightning so close it seemed day ballooned all around them, followed immediately by a tremendous clap of thunder. As if on cue, the sky began to dribble loose a few drops, causing a sensation among the warriors down in the mesquite. After a moment it seemed someone had slit open the underbelly of the sky. The torrent fell in slate-colored sheets, driving the warriors back among the trees, where they attempted to find as much cover as possible.

  But up the sandy slope in the buffalo wallow, there was an immediate cry of relief as the men stuck their tongues out, licked the driving rain off their hands, raised their chins skyward, eyes closed, drinking in every precious drop they could. Billy said a quiet little prayer, remembering how his departed mother had taught him to pray at her knee. He swallowed hard, a sudden overwhelming emptiness pummeling his gut. His mother …

  * * *

  For years he had carried a picture of her. The only tangible thing he had of her, of his entire family. For all these years of growing up and roaming the prairies, that faded chromo had been his only link with family, with something that wasn’t transitory and temporal. But now it was gone. In the saddlebags on that horse the warriors had run off at dawn at the moment of attack. Then for a moment he was thankful to God for the blessing of this rain for an altogether different reason. The others would not be able to see how the hot moisture rolled from his eyes, and the dribble from his nose would not betray his pain.

  The rain was a blessing.

  Yet then the wind caught up with those black-bellied clouds, sending silver tongues of fire shooting to the ground, rumbling, brass bellows echoing across the parched land. Where before they had been broiling beneath the brassy sky, now the five were drenched, squatting like five mud toads in their gray, blood-tinged pond. The wind grew to be a troublesome enemy, robbing Dixon and the others of every residue of body heat they could produce. Weakened already by loss of blood and the extremities of pitched battle, the pitiful heroes of the buffalo wallow began to wonder what more could conspire against them than the weather and the red horsemen of these plains.

  “Damn, if it don’t seem heaven’s belly been knifed from breechclout to breastbone,” Dixon sputtered into the driving rain that stung their sunburned, rawhided faces.

  More lightning slashed the side of their hill, like ragged platinum chains flung out of the dark clouds directly overhead.

  Their coats, extra clothing, their very life line had been run off with the horses. Even the hats of most had been lost in the first panic-filled minutes of attack. Woodall wore Harrington’s hat, now a soppy, shapeless shelter atop the sergeant’s head.

  Billy thought once more about his coat—gone now, tied behind his saddle. Yet most important was what had been in the pocket of that coat, what he had carried all these years. The chromo of his mother.

  Billy sniffled, angry at himself for it, and turned back to look at how the others were holding up as the rain softened, pattering the cold inches of water gathering around their legs.

  “Help me sit him up,” Dixon asked Private Rath, crawling through the bloody water.

  Together they struggled to prop Sergeant Woodall against the side of the pit. The soldier was freezing, being robbed of all body heat, trembling like leaf shadows hung over still water. Although Woodall’s condition was worsening, Dixon and the rest realized they all must give the appearance of being able-bodied and ready to fight off any resumed charge from their enemies.

  “I … I’m sorry,” Woodall groaned, fighting to come to, his lips quivering.

  “It’s all right,” Billy said softly as they propped the sergeant upright. “Just try to stay awake. Your life … our lives may depend on you too, Sergeant.”

  He dragged his wounded leg back across the bottom of the wallow. By now several inches of muddy, cold water had collected, mixing with the defenders’ blood in an evil concoction that continued to drain them of strength, suck out their resolve, sap the very fiber
that until now had been what demanded they hold out against great odds.

  When the thunderstorm had relinquished its fury, rolling on to the east, Dixon studied the mesquite flats for signs that the warriors would resume their wild, suicidal charges. But for the moment, at least, it appeared to the young scout that the cold wind and numbing rain had done much to destroy the martial ardor of the war party. As their ponies grazed on the brittle, sun-cured grass, recouping their strength, the warriors argued and debated with one another, their blankets drawn tightly, almost forlornly, about them.

  “I’m going after the gun,” Dixon announced to the others.

  “S-Smith’s?” chattered Private Rath, his teeth rattling like a box of dominoes spilled across an oak table. His lips were blue and quivering as he bit down on them, hair stringing in his eyes.

  “Yes. We need the gun, bullets too,” Billy explained.

  “Y-You’re no shape to go: your leg,” Rath said, raising himself off the side of the pit. “Stay and c-cover me.”

  Dixon was stunned, stunned enough to sit there in awe as the older soldier crawled past him, sloshing through the bloody mud and up the sandy side of the wallow, bellying across the parched slope toward Private George W. Smith’s body.

  He watched Rath reach Smith, where he gently rolled the body onto its side, intending to loosen the buckle on the gun belt. Of a sudden Rath let the body slump back onto its belly, then turned and quickly crabbed back to the wallow.

  Dixon was angry, watching the soldier approach. Rath had volunteered, after all. “Why the hell didn’t you—”

  “He’s alive!” Rath sputtered.

  “Alive?” Woodall asked, appearing to perk up with the news.

  Rath nodded. “I can’t get him myself.” He looked squarely into Dixon’s eyes. “Help me drag him in here.”