“Bindweed.”
Tucker nodded. The horse’s dropping showed the undigested white petals from the twining plant. “Eagle’s Nest Creek?”
“ ’Bout the only place this time of year with enough moisture to grow it,” Jack said. “The Indian ponies live off the stuff. If most horses eat this, it’d drive them crazy.”
“Not ours,” Tucker said, untying the hobble and swinging a leg over the pony. “Your paint and my mule can eat damned near everything. Speaking of which, unless you throw a leg over that government mount and help me catch my mule and your horse, we’re sentenced to ride these two critters for God knows how long.”
“Don’t you want to bury them?”
Tucker looked at the dead men. He did want to bury them. But he wanted to find Lorna alive and well even more. They hadn’t the time to give their enemies a burial. Still, the two men took a moment to lay them in the arroyo Tucker had hidden in and covered them with rocks.
Before he swung a leg over the paint, Tucker debated whether or not to take the old man’s Henry and thought not. Tucker had a scabbard for his Sharps, and lugging another rifle around would slow them down even more. He flung the rifle hard, and it landed in the mud of the Bad River. He handed Jack the rifle rounds he’d taken off the old man.
They rode in the direction their horses had run when the shooting started. They would capture them and turn the Indians’ mounts loose. They would find their way back to Blue Boy, and he would know his warriors were dead. Tucker counted on Blue Boy’s hatred of white men to stop their ride to the Wall long enough to avenge their deaths.
If he and Jack didn’t rescue Lorna by the time Blue Boy reached the Badlands, they’d never rescue her.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
That night as the sun set over the rough river bluffs, the boat ran aground onto an enormous sandbar. Merriman shouted frantic orders to the first mate, who ran around yelling orders at roustabouts and deckhands. Aurand watched all this with detached interest. In this little trip downriver, it was the closest thing to entertainment they had to break the monotony.
The first mate bolted past passengers watching the spectacle from the main deck. The rooster Aurand talked with yesterday worked furiously on the derrick connecting the capstan engine to the cables. The first mate ran behind the rooster. He slapped him hard on the head and dragged him along to the engine room. Philo rubbed his bloodshot eyes and joined Aurand on deck. “What’s going on?”
“Grounded. Looks like we’re going to grasshopper off the sandbar.” He pinched his nose and moved upwind of Philo. “Any sign of Red?”
“None.”
“Where can he be?”
“How should I know?” Philo said.
Aurand faced him. “You ought to. You’ve tracked with him more than anyone else.”
Philo waved the air. “He’ll be along. Red don’t come out unless he feels like it.”
“Well, he better be feeling like it soon. By the looks of this mess, we might need him sooner than later.”
Simon Cady strolled along the desk. He had replaced his buckskins with dungarees and a long-sleeve flannel shirt to stave off the mosquitoes. He grinned as he approached Philo and Aurand.
“Get in my room and tell Jess to stay out of sight,” Aurand whispered to Philo. A brief look of terror crossed the fat man’s face as he passed Cady on the deck.
“Looks like we got us a little delay, Marshal.”
“What do you want, Cady?”
“Want?” He dipped his pipe into a muslin tobacco pouch as he looked down at the sandbar. “Why, nothing. I want nothing. I’m just here watching the show, same as you.” He drew his first puff and blew it out slowly. The smoke hung over him in the windless air.
The rooster stoked the nigger engine with wood and tossed in a handful of lit tinder. The engine coughed to life once, then twice, before the wood caught and the engine belched nosily, nearly drowning out their words. “Looks like we’ll both be delayed by this.”
“How so?”
Cady drew in a deep puff of tobacco. “I need to get to Yankton, maybe farther south to find the little missing lady, and you got to off-load at Crow Creek.”
Aurand looked at him and frowned. “Who said we’re off-loading at Crow Creek?”
Cady smiled. “Word gets around when a manhunt is underway.”
“Like I said, Cady, stay the hell out of my way.”
“Yankton is as far out of your way as I can imagine.”
Another roustabout joined the deckhand as they swung the long spars over the side of the boat and held them tight. The mate operated the derrick, and the cables slowly lowered the long poles into the sandbar. The small engine groaned and slowed, but the spars began inching the boat through the sandbar towards free water thirty yards down river.
Aurand caught the reflection of something on the bank, and he strained to see. At first he saw only scrub trees situated back of the river bank. Then Red Sun stepped from the tree line holding his roan mare, her white socks contrasting with the brown trees. He faded back into the trees, and Aurand turned to see if Simon Cady had spotted Red. But Cady had left as quietly as any Indian shadow.
After the Belle of the Ball was freed from the sandbar, Captain Merriman pointed the boat’s bow into the river for the night. He came to each passenger and reported that the pitman connecting the paddle wheel to the crank had bent during the grounding. “The engineer will be making repairs during the night,” he told Aurand. “Between the banging on the pitman and the noise the fireman’s going to make cleaning the river’s crud from the boilers, my suggestion is that you and your deputies sleep ashore tonight.”
Aurand gathered his bedroll and led Con and Philo down the plank that had been dropped on shore.
“What the hell about me?” Jess said when Aurand told him he needed to stay in the room aboard the boat. “Why do I need to keep cooped up in here?”
“Because Simon Cady is still here.”
“I told you, he’s not here for me. I didn’t do anything . . .”
“You want to take that chance? Another day and we’ll be at Crow Creek.”
“Maybe I ought to just sneak up on that SOB . . .” Jess drew his finger across his throat. Jess was a dangerous man in his own right. Aurand had seen him fight three soldiers at once, crippling two and sending the other one to a government grave. Yet Simon Cady was no soldier. He’d lived a lifetime of scouting and bounty hunting dangerous men by being even more dangerous himself. And cautious. Jess would have a hard time putting the sneak on Cady.
Con disappeared into the darkness while Philo gathered wood for a fire. Twenty minutes into situating their bedrolls, two shots echoed from somewhere off in the distance. And another twenty minutes later, Con returned to their campfire dangling two sage hens beside his leg. He tossed them at Philo’s feet.
“What you want me to do with these?”
“Dress them,” Con answered.
“Think I’m some camp cook?”
Con grinned. “With that belly of yours, I figured you did more than your share of cooking. Now get to it if you want to eat tonight.”
Philo dressed the birds and stuck them on a skewer over the fire while Con cleaned his Colt. Out into the darkness, tiny campfires flickered from a dozen other passengers sleeping off the boat for the night.
Aurand bent to feel the doneness of the birds. When he looked back up, Red Sun stood at the periphery of their fire. Aurand drew his gun as suddenly as a drowning man draws a frantic breath before going under. “You ought to give a man some warning.” Aurand holstered his gun.
Red walked into the full light of the fire. His Spencer rested lightly over his shoulder, and he squatted by the flames. He laid his rifle across his knees as he warmed his hands over the glowing embers. “I start by giving you warning, maybe the next man I meet I also give a warning to. And the next. Before long, I warn everyone I come across. And just maybe one of those men decides to kill me. Then y
ou’re out the best tracker in the territory.”
Aurand nodded. The man’s logic was flawless. Men like Red Sun—and Simon Cady—lived as long as they did by trusting no one. “Tell me where Tucker is.”
Red took his belt knife and sliced a wing off one bird before sitting back on a washed-up oak log. He nibbled the meat as he withdrew a weathered map from inside his flannel shirt. “Your men went thisaway . . .”
“Men?”
Red nodded. “Tucker’s travelling with another. My guess is it’s Jack Worman. ’Bout the only friend he has in these parts.” He spread the map out and began tracing a line on the cloth by the light of the fire.
“You two get over here,” Aurand commanded, and Con and Philo approached the map.
Red pointed to the rough terrain of the river bluffs west of town. “From there, Tucker and Jack began following the Bad River. Little water this time of year. Rough going for them.” He finished off the wing and eyed the bird for another. “They took the hard way, but not by choice. They had to go that way.”
Philo leaned over and studied the map. “You saying they went that way to make it hard for us to follow them?”
“No,” Red answered. “They had to go that route because they follow Indians.”
“Indians?” Philo said. “No one said anything about Indians.”
“Shut up,” Aurand ordered and turned back to Red. “What Indians?”
“Lakota,” Red explained. “Miniconjou. Maybe one is an Oglala.”
“How many?”
Red held up his hands. “Seven ponies. But they travel slow. Too slow.”
“Passing through?”
Red shrugged. “Who knows? I think they think no white man will follow them. But Tucker and his friend do.”
“Why?”
Red shrugged again. “You are the lawman. You tell me.”
Philo plucked a bird from the fire and sliced into the breast. “Where do you think they’re headed?”
“Here,” Red pointed to the map with his knife. “The Badlands. They crossed the Bad River yesterday. I am certain the Lakota head for the safety of the Great Wall.”
“You think we can get ahead of them?”
Red nodded. “By following the White River, we will have easier going and more water for the horses. We will have easier and faster travelling. Maybe too easy.”
“Too easy?” Philo said.
Red tossed his stripped wing bone over his shoulder. “Maybe you ought to have second thoughts about finding this Tucker Ashley. I have heard stories of him from the soldiers. He is not like the deserters we have hunted.”
“Nonsense,” Con said. “He can be taken like any other man.”
Red grinned at Con and turned his back on him. “The scouts at Ft. Sully talk of this Ashley as if he were a ghost. A very dangerous ghost.”
“And so am I,” Aurand answered coldly. He stood and started for his bedroll. “You guys turn in, too. No telling when that crazy Merriman will get under way again. We damn sure don’t want to be left behind.”
Aurand spread his bedroll away from the light of the fire beside a tree stump and looked at the stars in the west. Tucker was out there somewhere: out in country where Aurand and his deputies would be hard pressed to follow him. They were suited to tracking green deserters and drunks who stuck to known trails and easy going in their escapes. He had heard of the ruggedness of the Badlands and that route Tucker took, of the hostilities and dangers waiting around every bend of the dried river beds. But Red Sun believed they had a good chance using the southern route to get ahead of Tucker and Jack.
And thanks to the Belle of the Ball, they’d get that jump on them. “Good luck, Tuck,” Aurand said to himself. “Don’t let those Lakota get you, ol’ friend. I want you lively when I catch you.”
CHAPTER 14
* * *
The sun beat down on the parched earth, while the constant west wind dried everything the sun missed. Tucker’s mule picked its weary, plodding way among the cactus scattered along the dry banks of the Bad River. His eyes followed the thin rivulet of water as it struggled to reach the Missouri. Another year, and things might be different. Tucker and Bob Mallet had been caught in a flash flood in this canyon in the summer of ’sixty-six. Tucker had managed to hang on to a huge, drifting oak until he reached the safety of the bank. Bob hadn’t been so lucky, and Tucker never saw him alive again.
The following year, while scouting for the army a mile down river, he’d come upon a skeleton, yellowed, not yet sun-bleached white. The bones had been picked clean by coyotes and cougars and hawks, and Tucker had imagined the size of the man when he’d lived. He concluded the bones were those of Bob Mallet, and he took precious time to bury Bob reverently.
Tucker looked skyward at turkey vultures circling overhead. He took off his hat, but no sweat remained inside the band, as if his head itself were rationing water. There was no danger of a flash flood now. But Tucker would have preferred one to the insanely intense heat, with the only relief the icy cold nights when the sun abandoned them.
Jack rode down the hill to the creek bank and stopped beside Tucker. He shielded his eyes as he scanned the ground ahead. “Wish that pool up ahead were real.” Jack grinned through parched lips that were cracked and bleeding. “I’d jump off my cayuse and get me some swimming in. Damned mirage.”
Tucker had seen the mirage, too. A half mile down the dry rock valley, Dead Eagle Creek stood shallow and stagnant. Yet Tucker knew the small pond in the shadow of the creek to be fed by an underground spring, its inviting waters cool and sweet, untouched by the filth of Dead Eagle Creek. Even from here, Tucker saw the steep walls that surrounded the pool shading the valley from the sun, slowing evaporation of the precious water.
“What kind of mirage shows trees?” Jack said.
Tucker slapped him on the back. “None. That’s no mirage. That’s where we’re headed.”
“No mirage?”
“You think those Lakota would lead us into a mirage? Even they wouldn’t do that.”
Jack threw his hat high into the air. He tilted his head back and hollered while he put the boots to his paint. The animal bolted, as if knowing water lay just ahead. Jack raced toward the pond, slapping the reins on his horse’s neck.
Tucker smiled and bent to pick up Jack’s hat. He dropped the reins and let Ben meander toward the pond at his own pace. The mule never got excited, even now, when water was so close. By the time Tucker reached the shallow pool, Jack had plunged into the shale-shielded spring. The yellow and red mudstone colored the water an off-crimson that contrasted with Jack’s wet, calico shirt. But the water was good water, and Jack stood knee deep in the pond, yelling, waving Tucker in.
He started toward the pond when he paused and looked about. They had come upon it too easily. The Lakota could have led them a long way away from the pond, yet they’d made no effort to. He concluded the ponies of the two dead Indians hadn’t yet reached Blue Boy. For all he knew, his warriors had successfully left Tucker and Jack scalped meals for the vultures.
Then Tucker saw the first tracks beneath where Jack had ridden headlong a moment ago—hoof prints of unshod ponies. And another, a large horse that made deeper impressions in the caked dirt. Tucker wondered about the tracks as he continued examining the sign, looking into the sun, picking up shadows the Indian ponies had made. He dismounted and studied them; they had been made sometime this morning. He and Jack were gaining on Blue Boy.
Tucker stood to leave when a mound of tiny lead balls caught his eye. He scooped them up before joining Jack at the pond.
“Jump on in!” Jack splashed water over his parched face.
“Might just do that.” Tucker led the mule toward where Jack had hastily tied his horse to a large rock close to the pond. Ben dipped his muzzle into the water, oblivious to the crazy man in the middle of the pool whooping it up.
Tucker sat on an outcropping of rusty-red sandstone sparkling with fool’s gold and took off his socks and
boots. He wiggled his toes, relishing the relief his bare feet offered. He walked gingerly toward the pond and stepped around a clump of beggar’s tick. He sat on the edge of the pool and dipped his feet in the cool water. For a moment, he forgot about this last day with no more than a canteen of water between him and Ben.
Tucker dipped his hat in the cool water and put it on. Rivulets of water felt unnaturally good running down his dirty face and sunburned neck. He soaked his feet while Jack dove under the water. He came out clutching a bulrush in his mouth.
“I’m not impressed,” Tucker said. “Now if you come out of there with some water parsnips, then we got the start of a supper.”
Jack disappeared into the water again. When he came up, he clutched four large parsnips that looked inviting.
“You start the fire.” Tucker reached for his boots. “I’m going to bag us a rabbit.”
Tucker found no rabbits, but he did find a scrawny porcupine waddling out of a stand of prairie dog weed. He returned to where Jack tended a fire and tossed the animal to him. Jack jumped back away from the hide of spines. “I started the fire. Least you can do is dress that out.”
Tucker watched the nearly smokeless fire, small enough that the Indians wouldn’t spot it; just large enough to cook a porcupine. He sat by the fire and peeled parsnips with his Barlow knife while Jack carefully skinned the critter. “Way those tracks look, we’re getting closer.” He pricked himself with a quill and sucked blood from his finger. “Think those Indians’ ponies made it back to Blue Boy yet?”
“I figure that’s why it’s been so easy for us to follow them these last days,” Tucker answered. “Blue Boy still doesn’t realize his braves failed. It’s just a matter of time before those horses make their way back to Blue Boy’s camp. I’m counting on it to make him come after us. And Lorna with him.”
“Then we can get a look at Blue Boy in the flesh.”
Backed to the Wall Page 8
