Backed to the Wall

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “Might be their campfire he smells.” Jack dismounted and stretched his legs. “They must have ate supper by now.” The sun had begun its nightly descent, and Tucker continued looking into it. They had been lucky today. When Jack led him along the Missouri to the tracks of the raiding party, Tucker thought it strange that Lakota stealing a woman from a white man’s town would do nothing to mask their escape.

  Yet after two miles, their tracks disappeared. The Indians had begun hiding their trail.

  Jack and Tucker had worked first west, then north until they cut the sign of the raiding party a mile away. They finally located the switchback where the raiders had turned north to parallel the Bad River.

  Tucker climbed off Ben and led him to the water’s edge. The mule drank the brackish water while Tucker sipped from his canteen as he tried reading the countryside. They had lost the Indians’ tracks again.

  “There,” Jack pointed. He broke a vine off a dead thistle and bent to circle the track he found.

  Tucker squatted beside him. The low-lying sun cast perfect shadows and filled impressions for anyone looking into the brightness. “They dismounted here,” Jack said.

  Tucker put his hand on the faint scuff mark on the red rock. The hard ground would yield her secrets grudgingly, and Tucker was grateful for this one mistake their enemy had made. He looked farther to the west. A broken sagebrush lay askew. The raiders were following the Bad.

  While their mounts drank, Tucker and Jack leaned against a cottonwood tree. Jack bit off a chew of plug tobacco and offered it to Tucker. He waved it away and unbuttoned his shirt to cool off before he grabbed a chunk of jerky. He bit off a piece and stared at the scuff mark.

  “You figure they took Lorna to sell her?” Jack asked, his cheek puffed out. How he could sip from his canteen and not wash the plug down his throat, Tucker never understood. “It wouldn’t be the first time Indians sold women captives.”

  “But not the Sioux,” Tucker said. “They’re not about money. They’re about honor and ego. It would give a brave powerful bragging rights to parade a looker like Lorna through his village.”

  “Especially a woman taken in the middle of a white man’s town,” Jack added.

  Ben snorted, and his head jerked upward, testing the wind. Tucker rose and tipped his own nose into the stiff breeze. He caught a faint odor of something decayed carried through the air.

  He led the mule from the water’s edge, and handed Jack the reins. He’d scouted with Tucker long enough to know the drill. Jack grabbed Ben’s reins and kept his own horse well away from disturbing any sign while Tucker walked hunched over the ground in the direction the odor came. Forty yards from the broken sagebrush he spotted dirt darker than the sun-bleached prairie earth.

  As if the Indians had buried something.

  Off to one side, a dead cottonwood switch with dirt caked on the end had been absently tossed on the ground. “They’re getting confidant nobody’s following them.” Tucker took out his knife. He prodded the soft earth. His knife hit something hard, and he moved the dirt away.

  “Looks like they had a campfire.” Tucker scooped sand off a blackened tree branch, and he uncovered more burnt firewood. “A bigger campfire than I would have made if I stole some white woman.” He dug until he hit something hard and grabbed it. He shook dirt from a bone of a prairie chicken and tossed it aside. “At least they’re eating good, even if they are becoming careless.”

  “Careless is an understatement.” Jack pointed. He led his paint to a thicket of scrub chokecherry bush and plucked a piece of white gingham from the middle of the barbs. It had been impaled on the thorns like a miniature distress flag.

  Tucker held it to the light. “This has been torn straight.” He held the piece of dress to his nose before carefully folding it and stuffing it inside his shirt. “At least we know Lorna’s alive.”

  “But in what condition?” Jack asked.

  That worried Tucker. He had no way of knowing if she had been hurt when the Indians took her. Or what they might have done to her on the trail. “She’s in good enough condition to keep her wits about her.”

  “But for how long?”

  “I wish I knew.” Tucker swung atop Ben. “I just hope she can slow them enough to allow us to catch up before they reach the Wall.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  Lorna dipped the edge of her dress into the muddy waters of the Bad River. Stinking and brackish, it was nonetheless water, and she was grateful for it. By the diminishing depth and width of the river as they made their way southwest, she feared this might be the last time she’d have the luxury of washing the dust off.

  A mudpuppy flopped against the silt-covered bank, and she jumped back, startled. Her father’s creek had no such creatures, and she forced herself to close her eyes. She let her mind drift to another place besides here. Another time besides now, when there was nothing in her future but pleasant tidings. She imagined that the Bad River she washed herself in was the cool, clear creek meandering past her father’s house just off the Mississippi on the Sioux City side of the river. Horses romped in the vast green pasture, fitting for a man who made his fortune in dry goods and mercantiles across the West.

  On her school breaks from Rhode Island, she would return home and ride any thoroughbred in her father’s stable. She would sleep late in the mornings and stay up as late into the night as she wished. She had few cares then. Even with the war raging between the Union and Confederates, she was insulated from it at the college.

  A stone rolled down the bank and landed in the water beside her. Jimmy Swallow guarded her from the hill above. The young brave had treated her well thus far, and even now he kept his back turned while she bathed. She kept Swallow in her peripheral vision as she tore a piece of material from her dress and stuck it on a thistle beside the water.

  She dipped her dress in the river once more and winced as the fabric touched the blisters on her neck. Always, the blazing sun that beat down on her and blistered pale skin left unexposed. Swallow said the Badlands to which they rode had a different kind of sun—an angry sun that seemed to beat hotter and brighter than any other. It was the kind of sun that protected the Lakota against the pale wasicu.

  The leader of these criminals—the very large man riding a horse that looked altogether too small for him—had freely spoken of Lakota women, and of his many wives, on the trail. They could travel endlessly, he said. They never complained, he added. She was no Indian, yet something inside her wanted to show this man she was the equal of any Lakota in his . . . stable. Was it pride she inherited from her father? Or was there something else that forced her to want to show she was equal to any woman this Indian knew? She had met many Lakota who came into the mercantile for goods. They were sedate, even polite, as they bartered corn or meat for dry goods. But this one was different. This one was as wild as any bronc that escaped its rider at branding time. So why did she care what he thought of her?

  She felt as if someone watched her, and she looked about. Swallow remained atop the bank with his back turned to her. There was no one else, yet she knew—just knew—other eyes watched her every move. Then she caught the flutter of black hair behind clumps of sage twenty yards upriver. She strained and watched as a small form rose from his crouch behind the bush. Wild Wind grinned at her and slowly walked up the bank to the camp. Had he seen her tear a piece of her dress off and leave it as a sign?

  She gathered her dress and stepped into her shoes. She laced them before stumbling up the bank. Swallow heard her and turned around. He offered his hand, but she hesitated. There was nothing in Jimmy Swallow’s gesture that led her to believe that he was anything but honorable. As honorable as raiders stealing a woman can be. She accepted his help and scrambled the rest of the way up the bank.

  She looked around the Indian camp. When the band had stopped earlier by the big cottonwood, the ones called Pawnee Killer and Hawk had ridden out in opposite directions. She had been around soldiers long en
ough to know they were flankers, lookouts. But looking out for whom? The only man she knew who was skillful enough to follow them in this country was sitting in jail for murdering a roustabout.

  She closed her eyes and recalled the terrible news Maynard had given her—with as much glee as he could muster—the morning Aurand arrested Tucker. “The marshal’s got Tucker dead to rights,” Maynard said. “Hanging’s certain. They’re giving odds down at the Bucket of Blood that he’ll swing before the week’s up,” he added. Maynard went on to relate in grisly detail how Tucker had robbed a roustabout and slit his throat. “At least that’s what the marshal said at breakfast this morning.” He laughed. “He’ll get a confession, he said. Whenever Tucker comes to, that is.”

  She told Maynard she felt a little nauseous then—something she ate hadn’t agreed with her—and excused herself that morning. She walked to the jail to see Tucker and find out about the charges against him. But that heavy man Aurand had working as a deputy—the one she smelled long before she actually saw him, Philo Brown—told her with a grin, “Only one who’s gonna’ see Ashley is the hangman.”

  She returned to her room and lay in the bed mulling her options for helping Tucker. She could wire Yankton or Bismarck, and the finest lawyer would be on the next paddle wheeler here. But would there be time? She knew Aurand Forester’s trials were historically swift for those who even made it to a trial.

  She had concluded she had no idea how to help Tucker but decided to wire her father the next morning. He’d know what she should do, and so she went downstairs to the store and blindly went about the job of running it with her father’s partner, Maynard Miles. And when Maynard asked her to stay late to work on inventory again, she could think of no logical objection why she should not.

  They had wrapped up inventory late, and Maynard took advantage of Tucker being in jail. He had escorted Lorna to her room above the mercantile and haughtily proposed they merge their efforts in marriage. He had even bent to kiss her, when she shoved him away. Maynard was her father’s selection of a mate for her, but he wasn’t hers, and she managed to escape to the safety of her room.

  She unbraided her hair that night and sat in front of the vanity mirror, brushing the hundred strokes as her mother had done up until the day she died. How could Lorna make her father realize she came out West for adventure? To meet someone just as . . . wild as she, she thought, when she heard faint scratching outside her door. She turned on the vanity stool, prepared to yell at Maynard, when the largest man she’d ever seen burst through ahead of a much smaller Indian. The sight of them caused her to take a deep breath, and, in that moment of hesitation, before she could scream, the smaller Indian clamped his hand over her mouth. She rubbed her lips thinking she could still taste his blood when she bit down, a moment before her lights went out. She still felt the numbing of her chin where one of them had hit her.

  Blue Boy squatted by the fire talking with Black Dog and the old man Paints His Horses. No one paid any attention to her, and she thought for the briefest time that she could leap atop one of their ponies and be out of camp before they realized it. But as good a horsewoman as she was, she knew these men were born to horses and would catch her in little time. Then there were the two braves riding somewhere out in the brush as lookouts; they would quickly seize her and return her to camp.

  And then what? She had heard so many frightening tales of the Sioux that she knew they would beat her, and she’d never again try to escape. But nothing she had heard or read about them fit with what she’d experienced these last two days. She had been fed and accommodated when she needed to visit a bush pile alone. And except for Wild Wind watching her bathe in the river, she believed none of the warriors would violate her. She bit her chapped lips to remind herself these were enemies of the United States government, not gentlemen of the plains just out for a camping trip.

  Wild Wind hunkered down apart from the others. He had positioned himself so that he could watch her and Blue Boy at the same time. She was certain there had been words between them over her, and she thought she might be able to exploit that somehow in the days ahead.

  She turned her thoughts back to her rescue, if there were such a thing under way now. Surely the town would have been alerted that she had been taken. Men would literally fall out of the Bucket of Blood stumbling toward their mounts, eager to be the one who located her and received the reward money Maynard was sure to post.

  And she was just as certain they’d have little more luck finding her than Marshal Forester would. He was no tracker and confined himself to arresting drunken soldiers and rowdies at the faro table he owned at the Bucket of Blood.

  Philo Brown? She knew Philo and the Crow Indian Red Sun often tracked deserters for the marshal. Would they track her? If the reward Maynard posted was sufficiently high, they would. But that was assuming Maynard had recovered from the sting of her rejection and offered one.

  Blue Boy caught her attention as he plucked a piece of rabbit roasting over the fire and glanced at her. She saw that same dreamy look in his eyes that she’d seen earlier. It wasn’t a frightening look like the first impression he’d made that night in her room. This was a look of tenderness, and something more. Desire? Perhaps this was something she could use to her advantage as well.

  He motioned for her to approach the fire, and she neared cautiously. Blue Boy handed her the piece of meat skewered on a stick. “Eat as much as you can,” he told her. “Sometimes it is days between meals.”

  She tested the meat: charred a bit, but tasty. “You do speak very good English. Tell me more. And tell me of this.” She pointed to scars running over both sides of his massive chest that looked as if he had been in a knife fight.

  He looked down and closed his eyes as if he were thinking of something painful. “The Wiwanyag Wac’ipi,” he said reverently. “The Sun Dance,” he said, and no more. None was necessary, for Lorna understood. Tucker had told her about the ritual of the Sun Dance, and how the bravest of warriors underwent the grueling ritual of piercing their chest muscles, offering flesh to their god. They would endure the ordeal of seeking a vision for four days that would guide them through life. But Blue Boy explained none of this, and Lorna concluded he was a very private and humble man not used to talking about himself. “We will talk another time of me,” he said. “And of you. Eat now.”

  She sat atop a large rock and ate the rabbit. When she caught Blue Boy looking at her, he quickly turned away. She thought that his face reddened, easier to tell by his complexion, which was as light as hers. She thought as she ate that Tucker living out of doors was darker than Blue Boy. And he did not possess the high cheekbones of the Sioux she’d seen come into the store from Crow Creek, nor did he have the angular nose many Dakota did. In another time, another area of the country—dressed differently—Blue Boy could pass for a white man.

  “Tell me,” she called to him, “is it true we ride to the Badlands?”

  The old man asked something of Blue Boy, and he translated what Lorna had asked. “Paints His Horses thinks I should not tell you,” Blue Boy said. “He does not trust you. But it matters little what you know.” He chin-pointed to the west. “We go to the Great Wall. To the Badlands of my people.”

  She casually looked around the camp, weighing the options for escape. The band had turned south and west yesterday. And to the southwest lay the Badlands, a foreboding place if you believed travelers fresh in from the frontier. A place where one could go for days without water except what you carried over your saddle. A place where the seemingly solid ground gave way to popcorn shale that sucked horse and rider down into hundred-foot drop-offs and crevices. Travelers wanted nothing more to do with the Badlands, and neither did Lorna. Before they reached the Wall—that place of two-hundred-foot cliffs and secret trails—she knew she must escape.

  And, oddly, she knew that she would be protected until they reached the Wall, and she berated herself. If she ever wanted to flee these heathens, she needed to throw aside
any emotion of empathy for them and plan her escape.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Blue Boy studied Lorna out of the corner of his eye, careful not to appear to watch her lest she catch him staring again. She squatted by the river bank and picked at barbs of porcupine grass that had embedded themselves in the hem of her dress. Beneath the ruffles he imagined her lithe form. She dipped her dress once again into the river, and her dress rode up, exposing her pale calf.

  He quickly turned his head away as he thought of times he’d seen other white women exposed. Blue Boy often dressed in white man’s garb to enter a town looking for horses or guns to steal. On more than one occasion in saloons he had walked past, women exposed themselves to entice men to enter. He would be drawn to look at them as the white men looked, only to feel shame in doing so. If Lorna were an Indian woman, dipping her dress in the water—or even fully naked—it would be normal, expected if a woman were to keep herself clean. But she was not Indian, and looking at her in that condition brought that inner shame back.

  “Did you hear me?” Paints His Horses asked.

  Blue Boy turned his back on Lorna and on temptation. “Tell me again.”

  The old man sighed while he stroked the shaft of his buffalo bone war club. The old man—the only Oglala Lakota in his band—had made a lifetime out of counting coup on the enemy and was once a living legend among that band. He had killed soldiers at the Battle of the Hundred Slain and at the Wagon Box fight outside Ft. Phil Kearney. And had more scalp locks dangling from his war shaft in front of his tipi than any other warrior. If he made an observation, Blue Boy had better listen to him. “Two men follow. At first I thought they came our way by chance. But they follow us by design.”