Planting his feet, Lemuel reached into his pocket to make sure he hadn’t shaken loose his treasure.
They were still there: two ten-cent pieces, the full purchase price for places unknown, women chaste and beautiful, and heroes as unflawed as they were unbowed. Mr. Max Meyer would have no cause to throw him out today. When he approached him and said, “what, you think maybe this is a library,” Lemuel would reveal his hard-earned money and assure Mr. Max that his browsing was merely the necessary preamble to the purchase of not one, but two works of literature.
Peering through the wavy glass, Lemuel saw that Mr. Max wasn’t in either of his usual places—sitting by the cash box or refilling the tobacco jars. Instead, he was pacing back and forth across the shop’s worn wood floor, shouting at a young man in a magnificent uniform.
The officer couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but the insignia on his shoulders was embroidered with the eagle of a full colonel, the yellow field surrounding the bird indicating cavalry. On his head sat an immaculate blue slouch girdled with the special braid that pegged the wearer as an Indian fighter, and from his thick belt hung a sword fit for a knight. Its scabbard and handle were of a black so shining that they seemed dipped in water, and its brasses so polished they shimmered like true gold. It was raiment designed to command respect; but Max Meyer seemed unaffected by it, dressing the colonel down as if he were an employee caught at theft.
“It is already thirty days mein brother is missing,” Lemuel heard Max say. “You send men out, you bring men back, but still no boy you bring and I am out my outfit and all that I have traded with the savages. A fortune this is!”
Lemuel watched and listened as Mr. Max excoriated the young colonel. He berated him for laziness; accused him of collusion with rival merchants; even intimated that perhaps he had struck some sort of arrangement with Standing Bear or another of the thieving primitives.
“What, maybe Red Cloud lets your men have his squaws at night? Or maybe you think these animals should mix in. Be with us, with houses and in our schools and in church with you and Jesus Christ. Let me tell you, Colonel Miles, you look very nice in your suit. You hurt my eyes from your shining buttons. But maybe you should a little get that uniform dirty looking for my goods?”
Colonel Nelson Appleton Miles stood straight as if a superior had called him to attention. If he betrayed any indication of insult, it was only a slight reddening of his complexion that began at his brown-blond mustache and extended to his eyes. Lemuel Norcross imagined the colonel was waiting for Mr. Max to exhaust himself, run out of names to call him and his army; and at length, this is what appeared to happen. Max’s words shortened and slowed, then finally stopped. He went to the stool behind the cash box and sat down heavily, plucking a cigar from a wooden box and glaring at the young soldier.
“Mr. Meyer,” the colonel said, “I wonder if you might be finished?”
Max cast his eyes down in disgust and said nothing.
“Sir, I do not wish to add to your burden. But I tell you now that if your brother and his guide have fallen in with a hostile tribe, then I beg you, for your own sake, to give up hope now, so that any good news may come to you as a boon.”
Max nodded. He placed a dime into the cash box as payment for the cigar and lighted it.
“So you are saying they are dead.”
“I am stating only the facts, Mr. Meyer. The bodies of Mr. Freytag, the railroad site superintendent, and those of a six-man party of our cavalry, were found some two hundred-odd miles from here in the Niobrara, near the Dakota line. They were filled with arrows and shot, and some had been scalped. With them was the wagon containing what little remained of the goods your party had traded. We found neither your brother nor Mr. McGarrigle, dead or alive. This could mean that they escaped; it could also mean that they have been taken captive. If this is the case, I fear it would be better for them had they joined my dead compatriots.”
Max inhaled deeply. “What is done is done. Who is dead is dead. Mein brother, he knew the risk. The Prophet John is one less drunk. But mein stock cannot die. Mein investment cannot be tortured or made a slave. Those goods are mine; and I tell you, Colonel, you must get them back. This is a business. And who can do business without what to sell?”
For Lemuel Norcross, there was now no mistaking the change in Miles’ face: it was the same expression that his mother gave him when he returned from the rat baitings, covered in sawdust and blood. But there was an element other than mere disgust in the young officer’s face, a weariness. Miles stepped closer to Max Meyer, drew himself up yet again, and put his right hand on the hilt of his saber. For the first time, the boy heard anger in his voice.
“Mr. Meyer, not very long ago, it was my duty to preserve the union. I fought and watched my soldiers die to end the bondage of the black man. I had the honor to serve at Antietam and was shot twice at Chancellorsville.”
Colonel Miles walked toward the counter. He stopped as close to Max Meyer as the glass top between them would allow and then leaned forward. Max put his cigar down. The respect that had been missing in his face seemed to arrive all at once.
“Since then, my duty has become quite different. I have gone from freeing one inferior race to eliminating another. I’ve killed more of those ‘animals,’ as you call them, than I care to count. I have shot them from their horses and ordered their wikiups and lodges burned. I have seen their children legally kidnapped and sent to schools charged with turning them white as sow bellies. I have seen treaties signed and then become the instrument to break them. Once an officer and a gentleman, I am now a garbage man—charged with dispatching any and all refuse that might collect upon the railroad tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad. This refuse consists mostly of Indians. Braves, yes, but also the females and the children and the old and sick. My orders are to take my big blue broom and sweep them from the earth.”
Lemuel Norcross watched as Miles stepped back from Max Meyer, his eyes blazing as he struggled to regain his composure.
“And so, Mr. Meyer, if in the course of my next garbage run, I should run across some of your precious items, I shall do my best to return them. And should we, by some miracle, find your brother alive, I shall also facilitate his safe homecoming, although, having now met you, I am sure you will feel far more joy at the return of the former than the latter. Good day to you, sir.”
Colonel Nelson Miles turned smartly on his heel and left the shop. Lemuel could hear the sharp clank of his sword and spurs as he passed him at the doorway and strode onto the street. Miles mounted his horse—a big chestnut with a white blaze—and kicked him hard enough to make the animal cry out. It reared for a moment and then galloped hard in the direction of Fort Kearney.
Lemuel Norcross looked after the horse and rider until they disappeared in the dust. He hesitated a moment and then stepped into the store. He hurried to the rack, picked up the latest Colonel Custis’ Weekly and Dixon Hawke’s Case Book and brought them to the counter.
Max Meyer did not seem to see the boy as Lemuel plunked the two dimes onto the glass surface. He waited for some acknowledgement of his payment, but all the shopkeeper could manage was a grunt toward the window. He turned away from the boy and disappeared into a back room.
Lemuel Norcross looked after him for a moment and then, stuffing his prizes in his shirt, ran from the shop. He vaulted over a horse rail and turned twice in the air over a salt lick. He imagined himself in the uniform of Colonel Nelson Miles, shooting down Confederates, Old Glory high above his head. The brasses of his uniform shone even brighter than the colonel’s own, his sword brightest of all. He could almost feel it penetrate the neck of Robert E. Lee or Standing Bear or all foes foolish enough to risk his steel.
Chased By Owls had never understood his chief’s patience for the white man.
To the tall brave, they were no different from the plagues of mosquitoes in summer or the rattlesnakes that emerged from their holes in spring. All were messengers of evil, sent b
y That Which Cannot Be Known to test the resolve of the human being. There was no offense in dispatching the snake and the mosquito; they had long ago proven themselves wicked. So it was with the white man, a fool who respected nothing. He squandered all that was given to him and blasphemed as a way of life.
Like all demons, the whites practiced invisibility. Yes, the Brulé Sioux might try to push you west or east, take your water or enslave your women; but their chiefs met you face to face, leading their soldiers and painted for war.
The Ponca never saw the white chiefs. They sat in Washington and sent agents to do their stealing; mercenaries dressed in blue and paid in gold. With the stroke of a pen, they took a hunting ground. With fire and sword, they stole a sacred altar or a tract of soil the buffalo had enriched for a million years.
Now they sought to take the Niobrara. Chased By Owls spat in disgust when he recalled the sordid history of this greatest of thefts.
In the white year 1858, the Ponca had signed yet another treaty with the devils. In return for their lands—ninety-six thousand acres of good earth and water—the tribe was to receive thirty years of their enemy’s money, a school, grain and timber mills, and instructors to teach them how they all worked. The tribe, who had been warriors since the Creator scooped the earth from the claws of a turtle, would now become farmers and herdsman living on a strip of land between the Niobrara and Ponca rivers. The paper promised that all of this would serve to “colonize and domesticate” the tribe: a fitting fate for Whip and Strong Walker and Heavy Cloud, the spineless jackals who had sold them out.
As a boy, Chased By Owls had watched as the Ponca tried to become farmers. He saw men who had once brought down beasts that could feed the tribe all winter holding rakes and hoes. The Wakanda, angered at such an unnatural display, set the very earth against them. In the first year of planting, locusts descended on their corn and wheat; in the next, drought and flood. And even when the tribe managed to bring in a meager harvest, the Dakota and Brulé raided their villages, taking the food from their mouths. Hemmed in by hostile tribes, the Ponca hunted buffalo only at the greatest risk. Soon, some could be seen begging on the docks of the Missouri River, their gums bleeding from scurvy.
This was bad enough. But in the last year of the white men’s war with each other, the treaty was amended and the chiefs, afraid to fight, agreed to a new indignity. The thieves would now move the Ponca from the miserable tract of land remaining to them to another sliver farther east. The pact claimed this action was necessary to return the tribe’s burial grounds and move them out of range of the Dakota Sioux, who were attacking them from the west. By 1868, however, even this insulting fiction was altered by the so-called “Fort Laramie” agreement. The government now said that the Ponca were to be moved once more, this time to a place called Oklahoma, the current dumping ground for all the yellowbellies and turncoats who had spent too much time with their enemy and now valued life more than freedom.
In view of such history, it had been especially irksome for Chased By Owls to spare the two devils now stumbling behind his horse.
Had it been his decision, he would have buried them alive near an anthill or roasted them like fresh elk. Such methods had been useful in keeping the whites away back when the Ponca had had the courage to use them. But he was a soldier, not a politician: and tribe policy stated that, regardless of color, there was to be no killing of any holy man or his familiars. Still, there was nothing in this code that obligated Chased By Owls to provide comfort to the shaman in question. If the captive’s wrists bled from the pressure of the rope or their legs had trouble keeping pace with his horse, this was not his fault. If the whites fell and were dragged for some distance, this was regrettable, but he had a schedule to keep; and the convenience of two demons was far less important than making camp before nightfall.
The sun had not yet burst the horizon when the party reached the village. At the sight of the victors, the houses emptied of their inhabitants. Laughing and dancing, the Ponca poured onto the dirt common, delighted to see their warriors dressed in the coats of their enemy, fresh hair dangling from their belts and spears. Fists raised high, the people descended upon Julius and the prophet. The women and children pushed them. The old men pelted them with stones.
Chased By Owls was in no hurry to effect a rescue. It was a good thing for the most powerless of a powerless tribe to vent their frustrations on the prisoners. Besides, a little pause would allow him to hear his people call his name and sing his praises. He would wait until the moment blood was drawn, then order them away. The tribe would be satisfied with their small revenge and he would be seen as not only strong but just. Combining slaughter with mercy was a quality required of a leader.
Made slow by his journey, Julius was the first to bleed, a sharp stick drawing a line of red over his left eye. The boy had attempted to defend himself against the villagers; but with his hands bound he could do little more than raise them to his head, defending his brain and eyes from hands and rocks. He understood nothing the Indians said; but he knew well their gesture and expression. In their savage smiles, he saw the Germans and Poles who had beaten him back in Prussia. In their grunts and groans, he heard the same mocking and derision.
Chased By Owls could see the terror rise from Julius like fog from a lake. On the journey from the site of battle, he had considered a quick death for the boy. But for such a weakling, death must be a lesson: and lessons take time.
The brave thought differently about the old man.
Chased By Owls smiled with respect as McGarrigle lashed out in every direction. Deprived of his fists, he struck with his feet, kicking high into the faces of men and women alike. Every salvo of spit was met in kind and doubled; and every Ponca curse was answered in that very language, plus English.
Soon a spot of blood appeared on the prophet’s neck. It was little more than a scratch, probably from some old grandmother’s nails. Satisfied, Chased By Owls called out to the village to end their assault.
“I did not spare this waste of humanity out of compassion,” he told the crowd. “None other of their party survived. We took their battle dress and now wear it ourselves. We carry their hair and will soon burn it in a fire of derision. We attacked them by stealth and none of our party died. We left their bodies as food for brother vulture, may he cover their bones in his excrement.”
The tall brave now walked toward the prophet. McGarrigle lunged at him but was restrained by three warriors.
“These were left breathing because our chief seems to think this one has magic. We have seen him before and witnessed how gods work through him. But I tell you, Chased By Owls gives this no weight. The whites have long fornicated with demons; and any medicine that comes from them must be of the devil.
“Still, magic or not, the status of the old man does not absolve this stripling. The Unknown willing, that magnificent head of curly hair will soon become a wig for our children’s play. See how without honor he is! He has even lost control of himself. The yellow pool sits by his boot. I think now I will make him a slave. It is what the coward deserves more than death.
“Cowards may also live if I wish it.”
The man emerging from the lodge was small. His face was high-cheekboned and deeply creased from mouth to nose. The eyes were set deep in the brow and slanted slightly downward, their pupils a color between agate and amber. Around his shoulders he wore a huge chain of bear claws, and his neck was girdled with the teeth of his rivals.
“Look alive,” McGarrigle whispered to Julius.
The small man stopped to smile at his people and then strode across the compound. He nodded to John McGarrigle and, walking past him to Julius, placed a brown hand on his shoulder.
Something broke inside the boy and he began to weep. Standing Bear turned toward Chased By Owls, the amber eyes daring him to laugh. The tall warrior remained as silent as everyone else.
Through his tears, Julius saw hope. Perhaps he would enjoy a death quick and merciful. Soo
n the breath returned to his lungs; and the sorrow that had blinded him ceased flowing long enough for him to see a woman emerge from the lodge of the chief.
Her dress was a strange mixture of the savage and the civilized. Her short jacket was of stiff green corduroy, its lapels piped in white and its cuffs encircled with silk-covered buttons. At her neck were two pieces of jewelry: one, a gold-plated locket of the kind sold from his brother’s jewelry case; the other, a choker with its beads in a blue, red, and yellow ziggurat pattern. Below this, she wore a long skirt of buffalo hide, painted with flowers and animals. Her black hair was down and set in braids reaching to her waist. The huge disc earrings of the Ponca framed her beautiful red face.
Julius Meyer fainted with her name on his lips.
The boy looked thinner than she remembered, and, with the kind of beard that travel creates, older. Almost before he struck the earth, she and two slaves were ordered to carry him into the main lodge and provide him rest and water. Voice Like A Drum, the old medicine man, ran for his herbs and salts.
She cared little for the boy’s welfare; to her, he was just another of the whites lucky enough not to be at the Dime when she torched it. She saw in his face the features of his hated brother and Adrian Calhern and every other man who had robbed her and held her in bondage. She followed the order to tend him as she did every other command; when told to raise his arms, she obliged; when instructed to apply a stinking paste to his chest, she complied.
It was a far cry from her life as the Red Rose of Omaha.
When she had first appeared in camp, hungry and exhausted, Standing Bear had immediately recognized the beauty common to the clan of his brother’s third wife. Satisfied that the girl was not a white decoy or some Brulé spy, the chief honored his obligation to receive her. Whore or not, she was Ponca. She was given food and water and, after what seemed hours of public discussion, made to stand under a linden tree at the rear of the main lodge. Shivering in the night air, she watched perhaps a dozen men enter the building, all carrying long ceremonial pipes and pouches of Indian smoke. From inside, she could hear them grunt and moan. After so many years away, her native tongue should have been as mysterious as Sanskrit; but she caught many more words than she would have thought possible, once again hearing men make her the subject of a bargain. Only this time, the men were red.
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