“Heard in Hays City she’s gone back to the blanket.”
“My, but you are picking up the tongue out in these parts. So she went back to her people?”
“What I’m told, asking about her in town. Gone back to her mother, and they both headed north to someplace in Nebraska to find their old village.”
“Lotta Pawnee up there. You figure on looking for her?”
“Enough folks for me to look for, Shad. She’s with her mama now—and I need to be finding some work while I keep my nose to the ground for that bunch out of Missouri.”
“You got any idea what we’re to be doing come freeze-up?”
He smiled at the old trapper. “We, eh? Well, now—for this boy, I’ve gone and found me a job with a new bunch of scouts being formed.”
“That the bunch under the North brothers?”
“Yeah. The major remembered me from Connor’s expedition to the Powder two years back. North needs help getting his Pawnee Battalion back together.”
“I hear the Norths both fought on the Union side.”
“Don’t matter, I suppose. Long as they can use me, I figure I can learn what I can from them Pawnee. Maybeso some tracking.”
“You learn what you can while there’s time. Come freeze-up this fall, the army will cut you loose.”
“That’s when I’ll be ready to ride south again—pick up that trail that went blind on me down in the Territories.”
Shad nodded. “I’ll be ready to ride with you. Your cousin—he going to go with us come winter?”
“Artus? I s’pose he is. Come winter, he figured he wouldn’t have no more work on that crew laying track up north on the U-P.”
“Nebraska?”
“Yeah.”
“I wish he’d hire on somewhere else, Jonah. Injuns still making things a might hot for track crews up there on the U-P.”
Jonah shrugged. “Artus, now, he’s come out of that damned war back east and got through just about everything else that’s been throwed at him. He’ll do all right, laying track. I don’t worry none ’bout Artus.”
34
Moon of Geese Shedding Feathers
ONLY THE NIGHTS were cool this season of the year. The days hot, sticky, steamy. But when the sun went down, a man could feel halfway alive once more.
Turkey Leg sat with the others. Their council held outside, at the center of the great circle of Cheyenne lodges. Too warm for any of them to huddle as normal inside a lodge to debate, argue, make plans. The breeze was better out here. Besides, the stars were out and bright this night.
“If the young men want to go to investigate this smoking, noisy monster,” said Burns, one of the older warriors, “I say let them.”
“Yes,” Spotted Wolf agreed. “We know the soldiers are back in their forts already. And they show no desire to again march after us.”
“It is true, the soldiers are no longer sniffing on the trails taken by our villages,” Turkey Leg said when all had grown quiet. Though he was chief, every man had his say in this warrior band. “Perhaps they do not have the heart to make war on us.”
“These soldiers,” spat Spotted Wolf, “they only want to make war on women and children … burn empty lodges.”
“Then go marching off aimlessly to wear both men and animals down without food or water,” Burns said.
“The white man is back where he is safe,” Spotted Wolf continued. “The young men want to ride with me to see what we can of this great smoking monster making noise in the north.”
“We have all heard tales of the monster, Spotted Wolf,” said Turkey Leg, an aging chief. “I would go with you to see it myself.”
Spotted Wolf rose before the others, all of them seated beneath the starshine. “This is a great honor, Turkey Leg. I will tell the others we ride in the morning.”
Turkey Leg chuckled, nodding. Many of the rest in the group were smiling at the young warrior’s enthusiasm. “But not too early, Spotted Wolf! An old man enjoys his sleep too much. Let me ride out to see this smoking monster when the sun has come to greet the day. You will see my old head come from my lodge door when the sun is rising. And no sooner!”
For all he knew, it could be the end of the world.
There wasn’t a thing out here but the endless hills covered with the tall grass rustling in the incessant breeze, the white-rumped antelope who stopped, cocked their heads, and watched the two men on the handcar pumping by on the noisy iron rails, and the endless blue mirror overhead that seemed to reflect all the sun’s heat back down on the rolling, swaying tableland.
The bandanna tied around his neck was soaked from the work this handle pumping had become. The shirt worn by the man on the other side of the handcar was darkened with sweat as well.
“How far we come, Harris?” Artus Moser asked. He was the lead man, which meant he was up-track and could only look where they had been. Unless he craned his neck around, which was damned difficult while you were pumping the handle.
Harris rubbernecked around his sweating partner and gazed up-track, considering. “Five mile. Maybe more.”
“We ought to spot that break in the line soon enough then,” Moser grumbled.
“You didn’t want to come with me, did you?” Harris asked.
“No—but you needed another man for this damned handcar,” Moser explained, trying to make the best of it. “And a hand with the repairs.”
“We’ll make it quick,” said the older man. Nels Harris was in his second summer with the Union Pacific, hired on year-round for his knowledge of telegraph that he had earned during the war. He could repair a downed wire quicker than any man out here. When word came from the last station east that the wire was down somewhere between it and track’s end, Harris was asked to go and see to it.
“Didn’t have me enough breakfast to work all day on,” Moser grumped. It was nearing sundown, and his belly hollered for supper. The muscles in his back crying out for what comfort his three blankets spread on the cold ground could give him. It was enough to wish for.
“Neither did I,” Harris replied.
It was minutes later when Artus thought he smelled wood smoke and glanced over his shoulder. Looking up-track, he sniffed the air carefully. Then figured he must be imagining things. Wanting something for his growling belly so badly that he imagined the smell of a supper fire where he would be roasting juicy hump ribs. Remembering now the crackle and spit of the red, lean meat he and Jonah would carve from the huge carcasses they had provided for the track crews. A year gone now and he still remembered the taste of that red meat on his tongue.
The mind … maybe his gnawing belly … had a way of playing tricks on a man.
They were entering a short range of low, rolling hills.
“I’ll bet next week’s wages the break is no farther than the other side of this draw,” Harris huffed.
“You’re ’bout done in, ain’t you, Harris?”
“I’m not a young, strapping lad like you no more, Moser.” The sweat clung to the tops of the whiskers on his cheeks where it beaded, each droplet catching the pinkish, orange light of sunset. “Work like this makes a man old before his—”
Above the beads of sweat, Moser watched the older man’s eyes squint with confusion, then dilate with fear. His head snapped around, gazing up-track at the faint glow of the firelight.
There was no damned good reason for a fire to be built there beside the track, up yonder a hundred yards.
“I don’t like this,” Moser muttered.
“I got a bad feeling myself,” Harris echoed quietly.
But it was as if the handcar had a rhythm all its own once they had set it into motion on the downgrade side of the series of low hills. Both men no longer pumped hard as they had been getting it upgrade. Not really pumping at all now—but the handle kept on rocking up and down as the handcar hurtled them toward the fire glowing among the shadows come here to the hills at sunset.
“Goddamn! There’s Injuns up there!” Harris shouted
, his eyes now filled with horror.
Moser didn’t pump for a few moments, craning his neck around to stare at the fire, watching the black figures lope off the side of the hill atop their ponies, blotting out the glow of the fire. The flames grew higher the closer they drew.
“Stop this car!” Artus growled. He was shoving his weight against the handle, but Harris started pumping with all he had.
“Don’t do that, goddammit!” growled the older man. “We don’t stand a chance stopping this thing … getting it started again back down-track. Pump, dammit—for all you’re worth! Pump right on through ’em!”
Artus was pumping. Like nothing he had ever done—not driving spikes into rail ties or chopping wood with the double-bit axe. Artus was pumping, glancing over his shoulder, watching everything come upon him much faster than he wanted it to. Pumping that handle as the rush of cooling breeze and the huffing of the older man across the tiny car from him were blotted out with the growing crescendo of war cries.
“Pray we can shoot on past them,” Harris was saying. “Faster. Faster!”
Moser had it figured that way too. The faster they went, the sooner they could sail right on past the Indians and their fire and be on their way toward track’s end, pumping with all their might. Closer and closer to the fire and the yelling warriors and that mishmash stack of …
—the whole world was topsy-turvy. Moser was in the air, turning over and over. Catching glimpses of Harris sailing through the sundown sky as well, the handcar tipped over, keeling onto its side slowly as Artus came down in a heap among the grass and sage and graveled roadbed. Tumbling … rolling. The cries of the warriors louder now than before.
As they swirled over him, their shadows like nighthawks swooping down on a moth or other flying thing, he thought of Grass Singing. Wished he had lain with the Pawnee girl instead of Jonah. It had been so long since he had been with a woman—he could not remember how they smelled when they got aroused with him, taking his hot, hard flesh in their hands eagerly, wanting the poke as much as he.
Did Grass Singing smell like these warriors? Rancid grease on their braids. Stale sweat gone cold.
The lights twinkled before his eyes. A dull thunk echoed in his mind, like a man driving a wedge down into a resistant chunk of timber. A wedge slowly cracking the wood with the sheer power of his sweating muscle. The lights glowed once more, showering sprays of meteors.
And he realized one of the warriors was beating his head in with a stone war club.
Artus put his hand up into the blackened blindness of what he could not see. His eyes filled with something hot and sticky, blinking them did not help. Put his hands up and then felt his throat opened up.
Sensing that last good breath of air. Struggling to feel, no—struggling to drag more of that shocking air down into his lungs. Gurgling. Gasping. The cool prairie air wheezing through the huge, gaping hole in his neck.
The club sank deep into the back of his head. And as he rolled over on his belly, his legs convulsing out of control, he cursed himself for pissing in his pants, for his bowels voiding.
Realizing that wasn’t a stone war club that had crushed the back of his head, driving his bloody face into the gravel of the graded roadbed.
That had been a huge, gleaming war-axe that had likely split his head open like a juicy melon ….
Near the small wagon that ran along the iron tracks before the warriors had tipped it over, two of Spotted Wolf’s men found the two rifles.
Piling wood on the tracks had worked. The small wagon had run into the timber and gone tumbling off its tracks.
Turkey Leg watched the young warriors finish off the two white men, strip their victims, then mutilate the bodies when the two warriors came over with Spotted Wolf and the rifles.
“These are broken,” the war leader told Turkey Leg.
“Broken when the wagon fell off its tracks?” asked the chief.
“Perhaps.” Spotted Wolf held one of the rifles across his two hands. “I was looking at it, claiming one for myself, touching the rifle when it broke in half. Like this.”
“Perhaps it is bad medicine for us,” Turkey Leg tried to explain. “We are not meant to have these rifles—I am sure of it now. They are broken. Leave them here, with them,” he said, pointing at the naked, bloody bodies as the last glimmer of the sun’s fading light drained from the far western sky.
“We go back to the village now?”
“No, Spotted Wolf. Come morning, we will finish our work here.”
The leader of the war party grinned in the deepening twilight. “To tear up these iron tracks the smoking monster rides upon?”
“When these two do not return, there will be more coming,” Turkey Leg said. “We will prepare a welcome for them when they do.”
In the cool before sunup the next morning, Spotted Wolf’s warriors were busy over the iron tracks: building fires on the wood ties, a few yards away using two long iron bars found on the small pump-handle wagon to pry at the rails themselves, doing their best to bend the rails upward. One after another of the young warriors joined the group, grunting and struggling together as they pitted the muscle of their bodies against the iron strength of the white man’s smoking monster.
They succeeded in twisting the bent rail and were whooping their joy when Porcupine hollered out from atop the nearby hill where he had gone to watch both east and west along the path of the iron monster.
Porcupine signaled east with his outstretched arm. “The morning star is rising! It is brighter than ever before.”
Others turned to see. Turkey Leg did not think it was the morning star at all.
“No,” the Cheyenne chief said to the muttering group. “That light comes from one of these smoking monsters we have seen with our own eyes. Not the morning star—”
“Look!” Spotted Wolf shouted. “There are two of these far-off stars. And they draw closer all the time!”
True, there were two lights, pulsating in the distance, there on the far edge of the horizon where the sun was spreading pink-orange mist before its rising for the day. Two morning stars emerging from the bowels of the earth where the sun would itself greet the morning.
“Two smoking wagons,” Turkey Leg said.
“The iron monsters?”
“Let us prepare a welcome for them, as Turkey Leg has told us!” hollered Spotted Wolf.
With yelps like young coyotes ready for their first hunt with the pack, the warriors gathered up their ponies and weapons and rode behind the low hills where they would await the coming of the white man’s noisy wagons.
“Send three riders east,” Turkey Leg said, turning to Spotted Wolf. “When they have seen the iron monsters coming, seen that these are indeed the white man’s wagons, tell them to ride back here as fast as they can and tell us so that we might be ready for their arrival.”
The three eager warriors did just that. As soon as they could see that the first of the dancing lights was mounted on the front of the first smoking, belching iron monster, they reined their ponies about and headed back toward the ambush. But on came the growling monster, and behind it a second with its own dancing light spraying brightness over the graveled roadbed the white man had smoothed for the iron tracks of his noisy, wheezing wagons.
The train steadily gained on the three galloping warriors, no matter how fast they rode or whipped their war ponies. One brave rider loosened his best buffalo rawhide lariat and tried to guide his pony toward the smoking monster, where he could rope it to slow it down. But his pony would not get close enough, fighting the reins, resisting, its head jerking away from the steaming, spitting, hissing monster.
On the smoking wagon pressed into the low hills, passing the three riders on their weary ponies without slowing. And the second wagon as well. Both of the monsters disappearing into the night about the time Spotted Wolf’s warriors began firing at the first smoking wagon.
Sparks flew up from the great, spinning wheels, lighting the whole of morning
itself. With a wheezing sigh the sparks went out as two white men riding atop the monster shouted to one another and fired back at the warriors along both sides of the track, others racing after the monster on horseback.
The smoking wagon was slowing, gradually slowing when it hit the bent rails and burned ties. The wheels spun and screeched, trying to grab for a hold on the tracks as it heeled over onto its side. White men hollered, jumped clear at the last moment. One by one the smaller wagons behind the smoking wagon came crashing up the tracks, not slowing.
One by one they crunched into the smoking wagon and keeled over, falling, tumbling, careening off the iron tracks, spilling on one side then the other of the roadbed.
A white man burst from the smoky haze of the wreckage, waving a bright light at the end of his arm.
“Get that one!” Spotted Wolf called out. “He warns the other wagon!”
The white man was running back down the track, swearing and hollering, when the young warriors rode him down and brought him to his knees. He clawed at the arrows sprouting from his back. His bright light fell into the gravel of the roadbed as he sank slowly to his face, still clawing. The young ones were upon him as he breathed his last.
Yet the damage was done.
The second smoking monster wheezed to a halt. Loud voices from that far wagon. A shrill whistle sounded, startling Turkey Leg’s warriors. Every one of them stopped what he was doing, crawling over the smoky wreckage, butchering the two white men from the wagons—every one watching the second monster as it screeched into motion—backward up the iron tracks.
Four or five white men hollered at one another. They had jumped off the second wagon and had started for the wreckage when they saw Spotted Wolf’s warriors. Now they were screaming wildly, sprinting for all they were worth toward the retreating second wagon as it backed into the coming of day.
That was where the white men belonged, Turkey Leg thought to himself proudly, watching some of the young warriors race across the nearby prairie with bolts of cloth pulled from the wreckage, bright colorful streamers fluttering from their ponies.
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