High Plains Massacre

by Jon Sharpe

  “You’d rather take orders than give them?”

  “It’s not that,” Davenport said. “All my life I’ve been treated as if I’m special just because I’m General Davenport’s son.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Fargo asked once more.

  “I don’t want to be treated special. I want to be treated like everyone else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not fair that an accident of birth places me above them.”

  “Most men would give anything to be in your boots.”

  “That doesn’t make it right. Our common brotherhood demands the same opportunities for all.”

  “Your common what?”

  “Deep down, all men are brothers. We share a common heritage. Life itself.”

  “Where the hell did you get that from?”

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years,” Davenport said. His face clouded. “My father calls me immature, if you can believe it.”

  “You are.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The only brothers a man has are those his mother gives birth to.”

  “I beg to disagree. Surely you’ve heard that we’re each our brother’s keeper?”

  “You should be a parson,” Fargo said.

  “That wouldn’t prove anything to my father.” Private Davenport plucked at his sleeve. “This will. I wear it to show him I’m willing to live just as he did, but by the principles I believe in, not his.”

  “That’s fine and dandy,” Fargo said. “Just so you’re willing to die for them, too.”

  13

  The next morning they were up at the crack of dawn and under way before the sun was up.

  Fargo hadn’t gone two hundred yards when he drew rein. There, in a patch of dirt, was the clear imprint of a shod hoof. Climbing down, he examined it. As near as he could judge, it wasn’t an hour old.

  “A lone white man, this close to our camp?” Lieutenant Wright said when he was informed. “Was he spying on us?”

  “Stay put,” Fargo said. On foot he backtracked the rider. Most of the prints were partials or scrapes but he found enough to show that the rider had circled their camp, staying well out, and then had gone off in the direction they were headed, toward the Black Hills.

  “So he was spying on us,” Lieutenant Wright said.

  “My money is on Skye’s one-eyed friend,” Bear River Tom guessed.

  “He’s ahead of us now?” Wright said.

  “And in a hurry, too,” Fargo told him. The spacing between prints revealed the one-eyed man had brought his bay to a trot as soon as he was out of earshot.

  “Well, at least we won’t have to worry about him being behind us anymore,” Wright said.

  “He can shoot us from the front as easy as from the back,” Bear River Tom mentioned.

  But the rest of the day proved uneventful. As did the day after that, and the next.

  The young troopers became used to the heat and long hours in the saddle and their pale skins became red and then bronzed from the sun.

  It was about two hundred miles from Fort Laramie to the Black Hills. Fargo went easy to spare wear on the horses, and because the troopers were so green. They managed twenty to twenty-five miles a day.

  Nine days after setting out they drew rein on the crest of a grassy ridge and beheld a dark spine in the distance.

  “At last,” Bear River Tom said.

  “Those are the Black Hills?” Lieutenant Wright said. “They look more like mountains.”

  “They are,” Fargo said. To the best of his recollection, the highest peak was over a mile high. Most, though, were considerably less. The reason the range appeared so dark and why they were called the Black Hills became apparent once they were nearer.

  “Look at all the trees, sir,” Private Davenport marveled.

  The change was striking, from rolling grassland to thick timber broken by rocky heights. And every square foot of it sacred to the Sioux.

  According to Colonel Jennings, the gulch the settlers picked was along the northwest edge of the range. Fargo hoped that worked in their favor in that the Lakotas were less likely to be this far out.

  They were skirting the bottoms of the forested slopes when Bear River Tom pointed at the ground and said, “Lookee there, pard.”

  Wagon tracks, old ones, the ruts worn shallow by rain and wind.

  “The settlers,” Bear River Tom said. “It has to be. All we have to do is follow them and they’ll take us right where we need to go.”

  The homesteaders had chosen well. The mouth of the gulch was hidden from the outlying prairie by a spur of forest. It was only because the ruts brought them right to the opening that they realized it was there.

  “I’ll be damned,” Lieutenant Wright said. “Quite clever of them, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Almost too clever, Fargo mused. Judging by how the wagons had made a beeline for the gulch, the settlers hadn’t stumbled on it by accident.

  The gulch widened. A small stream gurgled to their left. Beyond rose forest, a mix of pine and juniper and mahogany. To the right reared granite spires and cliffs.

  The sun glistening on the water, the green of the pines, the frolicking sparrows and squawking jays, prompted Bear River Tom to remark, “It’s downright pretty here.”

  “No wonder they liked it,” Lieutenant Wright said.

  They rode around a bend and then another, and suddenly the pretty aspects melted away like so much dew.

  In the shadow of a great granite cliff, cabins and tents lined the stream’s bank. The tent flaps hung limp while most of the cabin doors were wide-open. There wasn’t a living soul to be seen. Here and there lay scattered possessions: a dish, a torn blanket, a shirt.

  “This is plumb strange,” Bear River Tom said.

  “We should call out,” Lieutenant Wright said, putting a hand to his mouth.

  “Sound carries a long ways,” Fargo warned. “The quieter we are, the less chance the Sioux will find us.”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Alighting, Fargo yanked his Henry from the scabbard. “Have your men spread out and search every cabin, every tent.”

  “Captain Calhoun reported the place to be deserted.”

  “It can’t hurt to check again,” Fargo said. Especially for sign of recent visitors.

  Bear River Tom was the last to climb down. “I have a spooky feeling, pard.”

  “Since when did you become superstitious?” Fargo asked.

  “I laugh at rabbits’ feet and four-leaf clovers, true,” Bear River Tom said. “This is different.” He gazed the length of the settlement. “I think we’re being watched.”

  Fargo had experienced the same sensation from time to time but he didn’t have it now. Hefting the Henry, he moved to the first tent and pushed on the flap. He reckoned to find the inside a shambles but except for a few cups and silverware on the ground by a table, everything was neat and tidy.

  Next was a cabin. Fargo poked his head in and let his eyes adjust before he entered. A table was set as if for supper, with plates and forks and spoons, and with a pitcher in the middle, barely a third full. He sniffed and dipped a finger in and licked the tip. Rosemary tea, unless he was mistaken, gone bitter from sitting there so long.

  A half-knit shawl lay on a rocking chair. A candle on the mantle had burned down to a stub. The bed was fully made, with not so much as a ruffle in the quilt.

  Fargo went back out.

  Bear River Tom was just emerging from a tent, and he gave a little shudder. “When I said this is spooky, I wasn’t kidding.”

  “You’ve seen worse,” Fargo said, thinking of the aftermath of an Apache massacre they came upon a couple of years ago.

  “Blood and ripped guts I can handle,” Bear River Tom said. “F
orty or fifty folks up and vanishing makes my skin crawl.”

  “We’ll find out where they got to,” Fargo predicted.

  “What if we don’t? What if something came along and took them?”

  “Something?” Fargo said.

  Bear River Tom shrugged. “A parson told me once that demons walk the earth.”

  “Demons, my ass.”

  “You don’t reckon there are things in this world we can’t see or hear but they’re there anyway?”

  “I never would have took you for a—” Fargo began, and stopped.

  Up the gulch, a man screamed.

  14

  Troopers burst out of cabins and tents as Lieutenant Wright pointed and hollered, “That way! That way!”

  Fargo broke into a run.

  The scream rose to a piercing shriek, quavering with terror and pain, then ended in a ghastly throaty bubbling.

  “Jesus!” Bear River Tom exclaimed, puffing to keep up. “Whoever that was is a goner.”

  Fargo thought so, too. He knew a death rattle when he heard one and that had sounded like a man in his final throes. He raced past the last of the tents. Ahead was a bend, the streamside thick with junipers.

  “Be careful,” Bear River Tom said, slowing. “We don’t know what’s around there.”

  Fargo aimed to find out. He raced around the turn and drew up short in consternation.

  A figure was shambling toward him, a scarecrow in filthy clothes that hung in tatters. His hair was a matted mess, his face caked with dirt. His bloodshot eyes were wide in shock and his mouth worked but no sounds came out. He had his hands clamped to his throat but couldn’t stem the scarlet spurting from between his fingers.

  Bear River Tom dug in his heels and exclaimed, “Good God.”

  The man reached for them, his hand dripping blood. He took one more lurching step and then his legs buckled and he pitched onto his face.

  Fargo was the first to reach him. Sinking to a knee, he set down the Henry and carefully rolled the man over. The care wasn’t needed; the man was dead.

  “Looks like someone slit his throat from ear to ear,” Bear River Tom observed.

  Fargo became aware of Lieutenant Wright and Private Davenport and the rest of the soldiers ringing them.

  “My word,” the lieutenant said in horror.

  One of the troopers turned and took a few steps and retched.

  “This ain’t nothing, boy,” Bear River Tom said. “Wait until you see what’s left after the Sioux carve on a man.”

  “Do you suppose he was a settler?” Wright wondered.

  Fargo went through the rags but found nothing. No poke, no papers, no clue at all to who the man had been.

  Practically skin and bones, the palms of both his hands were thickly callused. Most puzzling of all, a sole on one of the man’s shoes was missing and the man’s foot was torn and bleeding.

  “This poor bastard has been to hell and back,” Bear River Tom remarked.

  They followed his tracks all of six feet, to the stream. The man had waded out of it, apparently with his throat already slit.

  Since they hadn’t seen any sign of him downstream, he had to have come from upstream. Fargo and Tom paralleled it, seeking sign of where the man entered the water. After a quarter of a mile they stopped.

  The sun was setting.

  “We can’t track in the dark,” Fargo said, and bent his steps toward the settlement.

  “What do you make of all this?” Bear River Tom asked.

  “I’d like to know who killed that settler,” Fargo said.

  “You think he was one of them, then?”

  “Who else would he be?”

  “Where have the rest of them got to? What the hell were they doing here in the first place? Why did they walk off and leave everything? And what does that one-eyed devil who was shadowing us have to do with it? That’s a heap of questions we need answered.”

  “You’re forgetting one,” Fargo said.

  “Which is?”

  “Where did their wagons and the teams and their other animals get to?”

  Bear River Tom stopped in surprise, then kept walking. “Son of a bitch. I didn’t even notice about the wagons. They’ve up and disappeared, too.”

  Fargo grunted.

  “That’s impossible. A wagon is heavy as hell. They leave tracks.”

  “Did you see any?”

  “Only coming into the gulch. What happened to them after they were unloaded?” Tom scratched his chin. “I can’t make hide nor hair of any of this.”

  The troopers had placed the body in a tent and covered it with a blanket. With Wright looking on, they were busy kindling a fire and preparing their supper.

  “I take it you didn’t find anything?” he said as they came up.

  “I’ll look again in the morning,” Fargo said, and motioned. “What’s this?”

  “What does it look like? We have to eat.”

  “Out in the open where you can be picked off as easy as flies?”

  “Where else do you suggest?”

  Fargo motioned at the cabins and tents.

  “I considered that,” Lieutenant Wright said, “and put it to the men.” He turned and raised his voice. “Private Davenport, front and center.”

  The general’s son had just set down some firewood he’d gathered, and hurried over. “Sir?”

  “Would you tell Mr. Fargo what the men told me when I suggested we sleep in the abandoned cabins?”

  “We’d rather not,” Davenport said, looking embarrassed. “This place has us jumping at our own shadows.”

  “You’re safer inside than out,” Fargo said.

  “We know that,” Davenport said, and lowered his voice. “Some of the men are afraid that whatever took the settlers will get them, too.”

  “The settlers were taken by surprise,” Fargo said. The state of the camp clearly showed they were about to sit down to supper when calamity struck. “We won’t be.”

  Davenport lowered his voice even more. “Some of the men say it couldn’t have been Indians, like we first thought. That it has to be something else.”

  “You mean someone else,” Bear River Tom corrected him.

  “No, I mean something,” Private Davenport said.

  “Bullshit,” Fargo said. He didn’t believe in the supernatural. In all his travels he’d never encountered anything he couldn’t explain. “We’re sleeping in the cabins.”

  “We’d rather not,” Davenport said.

  “I wasn’t asking,” Fargo said. To Wright he said, “Pick three cabins. Assign three men each to two of them. You’ll be in the third with Tom and me.”

  “He will?” Tom said.

  Lieutenant Wright turned to Davenport. “You heard the man. Colonel Jennings says we’re to do as he wants. So get cracking.”

  “I don’t blame the soldier boys for being spooked,” Bear River Tom said as the troopers hustled to obey. “I’ve never seen anything like this in all my born days.”

  “Don’t forget Roanoke,” Lieutenant Wright said.

  “Who?” Tom asked.

  “Not a who, a what. An early settlement in North Carolina.”

  “What about it?”

  “Over one hundred men, women and children disappeared and were never found again.”

  “The hell you say,” Tom said.

  Lieutenant Wright surveyed the tents and cabins. “This could be Roanoke all over again.”

  15

  Their cabin was the farthest into the gulch, with only a couple of tents deeper in.

  Bear River Tom got a fire going and put coffee on to brew.

  Fargo stood outside, the Henry cradled in his arms. To the north a wolf howled. To the south an owl hooted. And somewhere, the cry echoing and reechoing among the hig
h peaks, a mountain lion screamed. He heard someone come out of the cabin and knew who it was without looking. “You’ll need to keep a tight rein on your men.”

  “I know,” Lieutenant Wright said. “They’re young. It’s to be expected.”

  Fargo refrained from pointing out that Wright wasn’t much older.

  “It’s so dark without the moon,” the lieutenant said. “I can barely see my hand when I hold out my arm.”

  “They call that ‘night,’” Fargo said.

  Lieutenant Wright chuckled. “So you do have a sense of humor.”

  “I get drunk enough, I’m hilarious as hell.”

  “I doubt that,” Lieutenant Wright said. “You have a grim air about you.”

  “News to me.”

  “Your friend Tom says you’re a natural-born hard case.”

  “Tom is full of shit sometimes,” Fargo said, “especially when you get him started on tits.”

  “I resent that,” Bear River Tom said, striding out to join them. “I’ll have you know that I don’t exaggerate more than the next gent.”

  “You once said that tits were God’s gift to creation,” Fargo reminded him. “If that’s not being full of shit, I don’t know what is.”

  Lieutenant Wright laughed.

  “Just because you’re more fond of legs than tits is no reason to speak ill of them.”

  “I’m not saying tits are full of shit,” Fargo said. “I’m saying you are.”

  Wright laughed louder.

  “Listen, you consarned nitpicker—” Bear River Tom began, and abruptly stopped.

  From out of the depths of the gulch wafted a faint sound. It made Fargo think of a groan or a moan, only it rose and fell in ululating fashion, and ended with what sounded like a long-drawn-out sigh.

  “What the hell?” Bear River Tom blurted.

  Lieutenant Wright went pale and put his hand on the flap of his holster. “That didn’t sound like an animal to me.”

  It didn’t to Fargo, either. He led them past the last of the tents and cocked his head to listen but the moan or groan wasn’t repeated.

  “I’ve got more goose bumps than a goose,” Bear River Tom whispered.