Backed to the Wall

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Jack tossed the porcupine’s innards away from the fire and cut holes in the critter’s shoulders and back legs. “Way I figure it, the next ambush won’t be with Blue Boy”—he threaded a stick through the critter’s legs—“any more than the last one was. We won’t see him until his warriors are all dead and he’s got to come after us himself.”

  Tucker walked to the pool’s edge and scooped water into his pan. He set it on the rocks skirting the fire and dropped the cut parsnips into the water to boil. “Blue Boy needs to get Lorna to the Badlands. If he reaches it, he knows we’ll never find them. Even if we manage to kill every warrior he sends after us, he knows it’ll slow us enough that he’ll likely make it to the Wall with her.”

  “If she’s alive,” Jack said. “We haven’t found any strips of her dress for a day.”

  “She’s alive,” Tucker said. He reached in his vest pocket. He took out the small lead beads he spotted earlier and handed them to Jack.

  “Lead shot. Where did you get these?”

  Tucker motioned to where he had found them in a neat mound between some rocks in the trail. “Lorna left this, knowing it was as much out of the ordinary as her dress was, and we’d spot it.”

  “Where’d she get lead shot?”

  Tucker clamped his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You visit that dancer whenever you’re in town, as I recall.”

  “Is there a point to this?” Jack’s face had begun to flush, but Tucker wasn’t through embarrassing him just yet.

  “Ever take her outside? Maybe for a stroll or to supper?”

  “Now and again,” Jack answered warily.

  “And what does she wear?”

  “That’s kind of personal . . .”

  “A dress by any chance?”

  “Of course she wears a dress.” Jack tested the porcupine’s doneness with his knife.

  “And when the wind blows, does her dress blow up with it?”

  “That’s kinda’ personal . . .”

  “Does it?”

  “No. It stays down. Just what are you getting at, besides nosing into my romance?”

  Tucker slapped Jack’s hand, and the shot spilled onto the ground. “Ladies’ dresses don’t blow up in our damnable wind because they sew lead shot in the hems to weight the material down. Lorna hasn’t left any of her dress for us to spot since yesterday. My guess is Blue Boy found she was tearing strips and took her dress from her. But somehow she managed to rip the hem out and keep the lead shot hidden until she could leave some for us.”

  “So she has to be alive.”

  Tucker nodded. “For now at least.”

  That night, to the calls of a coyote somewhere on the prairie, Tucker and Jack prepared to hit the Indians’ trail. He broke the grouse egg he’d found and dropped it into the boiling pot to settle the coffee grounds before pouring them each a cup.

  “Got some of that molasses?” Tucker asked.

  Jack fished into his saddlebag and came away with a small jar of the sweet liquid. He tossed it to Tucker. “My coffee that bad?”

  Tucker laughed. “Your coffee is always that bad. But right now, we need it stout like this if it’s going to keep us awake.” He looked over at Ben hobbled beside Jack’s paint by the edge of the pond. They had decided Lorna could not afford for them to get more than a few hours’ sleep. They needed to strike the camp while the full moon allowed them enough light to pick up sign. Still, just a few moments more . . .

  “Think Aurand’s on our trail?”

  To Tucker’s surprise, he poured another cup of Jack’s coffee. “I’m sure of it. But if he’s counting on that fat ass Philo Brown to cut our sign, we’re home free.”

  Jack scrunched his nose up and tossed the rest of his coffee out. “I hear a but in there somewhere.”

  Tucker forced himself to look away from the glow of the coals. He’d soon need his night vision. “But if he’s got Red Sun tracking for him, that changes things.”

  “I thought he was scouting for the 7th Cavalry?”

  “He was, until Aurand managed to swing the territorial government into paying Red twice what the army did. Now I hear Red’s running deserters to ground with Philo Brown.”

  “Then they are somewhere along our back trail.” Jack whistled. “Think we can handle Aurand and Philo and Red?”

  “Forget about Red—he doesn’t fight them; he just finds them for Aurand.” Tucker slipped on his socks and tugged his boots on by their mule ears. “Philo’s dangerous in his own right but only when your back is turned. Now Aurand’s a different matter. The man is pure poison-mean.”

  “I remember you telling me about that Indian family he killed down at Ft. Laramie.”

  Off in the night the coyote howled again. Close. As long as it was nearby, the Lakota weren’t. And neither was Aurand. “When he was mustered out of the army in Ft. Laramie, he hung around Cheyenne. Got involved in the Vigilance Committee in ’sixty-eight to deal with the rowdies down there. Aurand bragged how he personally slapped the rump of Shorty Burn’s horse and left Shorty doing the dangle of death from a telegraph pole. They killed seven or eight men in a few months, before people got fed up and put the run on them. I always thought Aurand got a taste of murdering during the war with Bill Anderson and his bushwhackers that stayed with him. How the hell he wrangled himself into a territorial deputy marshal job is beyond me.”

  “But you can take him if you need to, right?”

  Ever since he beat Aurand that day he killed the Indian family, Tucker looked over his shoulder for him. But he didn’t have to; Aurand would never shoot him in the back. He would prefer killing Tucker up close, so the last thing he saw was Aurand’s smile. “Some say I’m as good as Aurand, but I know I’m not. He’s faster by just enough to make the difference. But that kid who deputies now and again—Con Leigh—he’s faster by far than either of us.”

  “Eighteen men is what folks say he killed,” Jack said. “And not a back-shot in the bunch. Con faced them all.”

  “You mean men he goaded into a gun fight. But, with any luck, we’ll come onto Lorna before they find us, and we won’t have to find out just how fast he is.”

  They stared into the dying fire until Tucker finally stood. “You ready?”

  Jack sighed and looked lovingly at the pool, the last fresh water they’d find for some time. “I’m ready, but then, I’m a mite younger than you.”

  “Don’t let these old bones fool you,” Tucker said as he untied the hobble on Ben’s legs. “If need be—like when some Lakota are running down our throats or Aurand’s nipping at our backsides—I can ride mighty fast.”

  Tucker led the way, looking into the moonlight for any contrast that revealed sign. The tracks were easy to follow, with the Indians making no effort to hide them. And two miles from the pond where they’d just drunk and caught some sleep, the tracks faded into nothingness, as if the Lakota’s Wakan Tanka itself had plucked the band of renegades from the hard-packed earth.

  “Problem?” Jack asked. He dismounted and walked to where Tucker squatted on his heels eying the ground.

  “Blue Boy’s become mighty secretive all of a sudden,” Tucker answered. “Like he knows we’re right behind him.”

  “Their ponies must have found them.”

  “That’s my thinking.” Tucker stood and grabbed a small miner’s headlamp from his saddlebag. He lit the kerosene wick and walked hunched over, looking in a semicircle of light to where he saw the last tracks. He gauged the length of the ponies’ strides, then looked ahead as he visualized where they would turn up next. “Go out a hundred yards and see if you can cut sign,” Tucker said. He handed Jack the headlamp and pointed southwest. “Over thataway.”

  While Jack worked far, Tucker led Ben close in a semicircle, keeping low to the ground where moonlight would cast shadows. If Blue Boy had left anything to see.

  Jack zigzagged ahead of Tucker, the light barely visible the farther Jack worked away from him. When he was a hundred yards out, Tucker shouted
at him. Jack moved the headlamp in a lazy arc.

  Tucker led the mule to where Jack stood in a field of dried bluestem grass. “Here,” he said when Tucker had dismounted. He held a broken branch from a scrub bush. The branch had been cut, not broken. The green bark had turned brown. But the fresh bark toward the end of the branch had been abraded to white meat where the Indians had dragged the branch over their tracks.

  Something fluttered twenty yards farther in the moonlight, and Tucker drew his gun. He let Ben’s reins drop as he advanced toward the movement. A tiny corner of gingham material—Lorna’s dress—stuck out of the dirt where it had been buried. Perhaps with her in it.

  Tucker fought the urge to dig into the earth, instead taking the headlamp and studying the ground. A single moccasin print—half again as long and wide as Tucker’s boot print—had been left beside the fresh dig on purpose. Blue Boy’s.

  Tucker could no longer contain himself. He dropped to his knees and began scooping dirt away with his hands. He expected the worst, but when he reached the bottom of a shallow trench, all that greeted him was Lorna’s dress. He pulled on it and jerked it free.

  Tucker stood and held the dress close, as if Lorna herself were there. He turned the dress over in his hands. Tiny blood spatters, dried days ago, spotted the bottom of the hem where it had been ripped out, probably when she tore at the fabric to get to the lead shot.

  “Think Blue Boy had his way with her?” Jack asked. “If she’s not wearing her dress, then no telling . . .”

  “Blue Boy could have had her long before now if he wanted. Besides, Blue Boy’s a Lakota. And Lakota braves are gentlemen in their own right. He might slit Lorna’s throat if she showed him disrespect, but he would never force himself on her.”

  “Then why bury the dress here? As a warning perhaps?”

  “Or as a way in which to ensure we follow him.” Tucker looked about in the night and put his hand over the headlamp reflector. “And, if that’s the case, that ambush we talked about could be just around the next bend in the Bad.”

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  Lorna let loose of the pony’s mane and scratched her shoulder under the buckskins. She took hold again when the animal dipped into a depression in the hard earth. Jimmy Swallow, riding behind her on the pony, laughed heartily. She turned her head to see his grin cross the knife scar along one cheek. “What’s so funny?”

  “You,” he answered, with only a hint of Indian accent. “You would think this was the first time you ever sat a horse.”

  “This is no horse,” she insisted. “This is little more than a painted mule. A real horse has a gait you can anticipate, feel its pitch and movements, so you know what it’s going to do.” Lorna recalled the Arabians her father raised and showed in Sioux City. Those were powerful animals, graceful, elegant, able to outdistance other horses in the surrounding counties. Lorna had been reared atop such horses. Those had been fanciful times that she yearned to return to right now: times filled with social functions, flirting, and finding fault with every eligible suitor the colonel thrust her way. And riding the Arabians across the lush grounds of their estate. As the Indian pony beneath her now loped ahead, she felt its awkward gait, the power of the animal—she was certain—to get away from the rider. The horse carrying her and Jimmy Swallow was no Arabian. But she grudgingly admitted that any of her Arabians would have died on the trail they’d ridden thus far, while this scrub pony continued tirelessly through the heat of the midday sun.

  She let loose of the mane again and scratched her back, then her shoulder again before grabbing tight once more.

  “Maybe you picked up some lice,” Jimmy chuckled. “Or ticks.”

  “Neither,” Lorna blurted out. “It’s these clothes I have to wear. They’re hot. And they’re driving me crazy.” She scratched some more.

  “You are the one who chose to leave something for those following us,” Jimmy said. “Wearing those clothes—my best buckskins—was your own doing. Besides, you will get used to them.”

  “Never.”

  “You have no choice.” Swallow’s hot breath blew over the back of her neck as he spoke. “A chief’s woman cannot be seen in white woman’s dress.”

  “I’ll be no such thing.” Lorna snorted. She turned just as the pony dropped into a depression, and she clutched the mane again. “If your great leader wants a woman so much, make it one of his own kind.”

  “He cannot.” Swallow rode the pony around a deep buffalo wallow. “Blue Boy’s vision was of him taking a woman to be his wife. White like his own mother.”

  She watched Blue Boy riding in front of them. He had taken off his shirt when the sun rose overhead, and his thick neck muscles strained as he looked about. His horse started at the bark of prairie dogs, and the Indian’s forearms thickened even while he held his horse back, his muscles taut bands along his arms. His long hair flowed to just below his broad shoulders and seemed to point to his lower back. Lorna imagined what he would look like in denims and a flannel shirt, sporting a fresh haircut and wearing polished boots, taking him to one of the many dances surrounding her father’s home. He would not, she concluded, be as magnificent as he was here on the prairie.

  She became aware that Swallow had caught her watching Blue Boy. “Do not be ashamed.” He laughed. “Most women look upon him that way.”

  “What way?” She tried to minimize her interest.

  “The way a woman should look upon a man.” He grinned. “The way you did just now.”

  “Nonsense.” Lorna looked away and concentrated on the itching under the deerskin clothes. She so wished she had her dress instead of Swallow’s clothes, which were better suited for the winter than this heat. The one who watched her constantly—the one Swallow called Wild Wind—had been told to bury her dress in the dirt. She had slipped out of it and had just managed to pull the hem apart and spill the lead shot into her handkerchief when Wild Wind approached her. She had seen his expression a dozen times, from the suitors who came around her father’s estate, to the drunk cowboys and river men who came into the mercantile who hadn’t visited a woman in months. Perhaps years. She told herself she would keep a watch out for this Wild Wind.

  Blue Boy rode farther ahead, his head pivoting side to side, his nose testing the wind. Black Dog rode behind him, with Wild Wind and the young warrior Pawnee Killer trailing.

  The sound of approaching hooves startled Swallow, and Blue Boy jumped down from his horse. He met the two riderless horses as they ran to him. Black Dog grabbed the reins of one, while Blue Boy snatched the other’s. Sweat covered the horses’ lathered chests and backs, and dust caked thick on their muzzles and withers.

  Black Dog ran his hand over the chest of the large army mount whose reins he held. “Hawk’s.”

  “Yes.” Swallow waited until Lorna had dismounted to hop off the mare. Wild Wind sat his horse, looking at the other ponies and at Lorna, while Pawnee Killer sat back and waited to be told what to do. If anything.

  “This was Paints His Horses’s mare,” Blue Boy said.

  “You talk as if he is dead,” Lorna blurted out.

  Blue Boy looked at her. His anger rose. His mighty chest muscles twitched. His face flushed the color of chokecherries, and his fists clenched and unclenched. She had only seen Blue Boy as a stoic leader of these Indians. Now she saw something else, and it frightened her.

  Blue Boy handed the reins of the mare to Pawnee Killer and turned to Lorna. He seemed to be even taller as he looked down on her with controlled rage. “The men who rode those horses were good men. And now they roam the Ghost Road.”

  “He means they are dead,” Swallow whispered in her ear.

  “And you are the cause,” Blue Boy gritted out between his teeth.

  Lorna stepped back and ran into Wild Wind. He grinned at her and spun her back around to face Blue Boy.

  “Those two warriors are as dead as if you killed them.”

  “Nonsense,” Lorna answered, but there was no
friendly face in the circle of Indians.

  “The two wasicu who follow us killed them. That is a certainty, for these ponies would not come back here without their riders unless their riders were dead.” He stepped closer, and Lorna tried stepping back. Again, Wild Wind stood close behind her. “If you had not left sign for them, they would not be able to follow. You have put us all in danger.”

  “Who follows?”

  Blue Boy held Hawk’s army horse by the head and stroked its muzzle. “Does it matter who they are? For the next time I will not leave it to an old man and an impatient youngster to kill them.”

  Blue Boy motioned to Black Dog and Wild Wind and they stepped away from the others.

  “What’s happening?” Lorna asked.

  Swallow chin-pointed to where the three stood talking. “Black Dog and Wild Wind will ride back the way we came. They will kill those who follow.”

  Blue Boy announced something in Lakota, and instantly Pawnee Killer spoke. He walked to Blue Boy and stood nose to chest, talking fast, his hands moving as if they were possessed. “Now what?”

  “Pawnee Killer wants to take Wild Wind’s place.”

  “To kill those who follow us?”

  Swallow nodded.

  Blue Boy spoke quietly to the young man and draped his arm around Pawnee Killer’s shoulders.

  “But why does he want to go?” Lorna asked.

  “Pawnee Killer was stolen when just a small child from the Pawnee in a raid by some Oglala. Even though he was raised one of us, all think that he still maintains his loyalty to the Pawnee. He is a thinker, and so he argues that he has never counted coup on an enemy. He is four or five years older than me, but he has never been tested. He begs Blue Boy to allow him to go with Black Dog.”

  “And be killed like the other two that Blue Boy sent back?”

  Jimmy Swallow’s smile faded. “Black Dog has never been bested. If he departs to kill those that follow, they will die.”

  “Why doesn’t your great leader go himself if he wants to avenge their deaths?”

  “Blue Boy has other plans. Tonight he goes into Cowtown.”