“We know Judge Kinney of course, Colonel,” J. R. Porter said, stepping forward with a hand extended. He took Kinney’s pudgy paw into his, shaking it briefly before Gilmore stepped up.
“Judge. Good to see you again.”
“Laramie, wasn’t it?” Kinney asked.
“Yes,” Porter answered. “While you were down there preparing testimony for the commission looking into that Fetterman matter.”
“Yes … quite,” Kinney answered absently. “Thank you, Colonel.” He took his cup of whiskey from Wessells. “I will recommend the whiskey to you, gentlemen. As fine as any you’d sample on your tongue back in the states.”
“You sell quite a bit of this, do you?” Gilmore inquired, his lips glistening with droplets.
“Not as much as the colonel’s men would like,” Kinney answered. “Most of the enlisted can’t afford it.”
“So they satisfy themselves drinking the likes of what we brought along with the goods delivered to your store?”
“Yes,” Kinney replied. “A strong … potent libation. Though not as … fit for sipping gentlemen.”
“You were pleased with the condition of your goods, I take it,” Gilmore asked.
“Quite, Mr. Gilmore. Everything in order on the bill of lading. What little damage occurred on the trip north from Laramie is duly noted. But that’s not what’s exciting in the least … although it has been one long winter since last I received supplies for my store.”
“Oh?” Porter asked over the lip of his cup. “What’s more interesting than sugar, coffee, pork and the rest?”
Kinney sputtered, his black beads of eyes dancing from man to man. “Surely, the most interesting item of discussion this day and for days to come will be those new rifles you brought up in your wagons.”
“Some of those wagons belong to A. C. Leighton and a pair of freighters out of Ohio,” Gilmore admitted.
“I understand Leighton’s going on to Smith in a few days,” Dandy said, entering the conversation.
“Yes,” Porter replied. “He won the hay-cutting contract for the post, and has permission of the new department commander to erect a trading post near the fort stockade, the likes of which Judge Kinney operates here.”
Porter eyed Wessells. The colonel knew the others watched him as well with any mention of the new department commander recently assigned and reportedly on his way west to assume the reins at Fort Phil Kearny.
“Leighton will have his hands full with the civilians, I imagine,” Wessells said. “Up there at Smith I understand they’re quite an undisciplined lot.”
Dandy snorted. “As a rule, civilians are undisciplined … wherever the army finds them in our employ.”
“I beg your pardon,” Kinney blurted.
“In no way am I referring to present company in the least, Judge,” Dandy apologized. “You’re several cuts above the likes of the quartermaster employees I’m forced to hire. By damn, if only the road were more fully open—and I had more a selection of civilians to work with.”
“Disappointing, isn’t it,” Gilmore began, edging over beside Captain Dandy, “the quality of man who ventures west on his own hook.”
“The truth be known, Mr. Gilmore—the quality of soldier we’re given to fight this war is rarely above the board as well.”
“But do the job we must!” Kinney roared, toasting the room.
“And with my new rifles and a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition,” Wessells said as he held his cup in the air, “why—we’ll finally sting Red Cloud in the backside now.”
“Is it true, all this talk we’ve heard about these rifles sent you?” Porter inquired of the lieutenant colonel.
“What did you hear?”
“That those rifles Captain Dandy’s men are off-loading into your stores right now are something more than the normal Springfield muskets your men have been forced to use since Carrington broke ground here last summer.”
“You’ve heard correct, sir,” Dandy himself answered proudly before Wessells could speak. “At the conclusion of hostilities in the South, the army had some fifty thousand of a recent modification to the Springfield left over.”
“A modification?”
“Something they’re calling the Allin conversion.”
“Used at the end of the war, you say?”
“Yes,” Dandy answered enthusiastically. “A modification tooled on the 1863 models at the U.S. Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts.”
“What does this modification do to the weapon?”
“It puts in the hands of our soldiers a Springfield repeater,” the quartermaster replied, smiling broadly.
“At long last,” Wessells added. “You fellas brought us a shipment of the converted rifles that had been reduced from .58 caliber down to .50 caliber.”
Dandy edged forward immediately. “Reduced by brazing a smaller barrel tube inside the .58-caliber barrels on the existing rifles.”
“We’re told that by next year the armory at Springfield will begin replacing the barrels themselves rather than using a barrel insert,” Lt. John Jenness added.
Kinney stepped up to Dandy and Wessells. “These are the same, reliable weapons the army has long used?”
“Yes,” Wessells was quick to answer the sutler’s suspicion. “They maintain the same iron furniture, the same three-leaf rear sight, the same fifty-three-inch length … all of it.”
Kinney sighed, grinning. “About time the army issued itself an adequate weapon for the job at hand out here.”
“Now we can hold our own against any repeater on the market, Judge,” Dandy remarked. “While the Winchester and Henry are repeaters, both lack the range and killing power of the Springfield.” He curled a fist up before Kinney’s face. “We’ll have Red Cloud’s balls in the palm of our hands before long!”
The judge snorted. “Now all you need is some army commanders with backbone enough to pacify this land for the godfearing white folks who want to husband the prairie, seeing this rich land produce food for our great Republic’s food basket.”
“More backbone?” Dandy inquired, testy already.
Kinney’s cheeks flushed, his thick lips pursed defiantly. “Yes, by God, Captain. Ever since I became acquainted with the army last summer, from that nervous Carrington on down to the present, I’ve been … dismayed at the lack of … wherewithal—albeit determination to get the job done.”
Dandy took a step forward, halted after that single step behind Wessells’s arm. The lieutenant colonel spoke quietly, setting his cup atop the desk, “What job would you, as a civilian and former federal justice, have us do out here, Judge Kinney?”
Kinney’s small, feral eyes bounced furtively from the soldiers to the two civilian freighters. “Why, to put outlaws like Red Cloud and his bunch of murderers on a gallows.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest?” Kinney echoed Wessells’s question.
“Women, children … the old ones.”
“I’d lock the women and children onto a reservation—the sort that has worked well down in Indian Territory. In fact, that might be where the army should drive all the plains Indians as well. Yes!” he nodded, satisfied with himself. “One great, well-patrolled compound … where the army can contain the Indian until he learns to civilize himself and till the soil as God Himself meant mankind to do.”
“As God Himself intended you to do, Judge?” Wessells couldn’t help asking.
He sputtered, then sipped the last of his whiskey before looking back at the lieutenant colonel. “Someone must supply those who till the soil, Colonel. I feel I have been brought to this place at this time to do just that. To be on the cutting edge of this opening of a great land to settlement. A man with my ideas, here to see that those ideas are spread for the glorification of our great Republic!”
Wessells shook his head, briefly glancing at Gilmore and Porter, both of whom wore looks of embarrassment, if not pity, for their fellow civilian.
“I genuinely
feel sorry for you, Judge,” Wessells said, eventually filling the uncomfortable silence in his office. “It’s your kind caused this war my army must wage with Red Cloud.”
“M-My kind?”
“That’s right. Civilians like you who aren’t content to let the Indian be.” Wessells saw Kinney swelling up like a cock clawing dirt in a hen yard. “By God, you hear me out, Judge. Your kind makes no bones that it’s your God-given right to wrench this land away from the redman. Your right to possess all that walks upon it, or the riches that exist below the surface of the land. And at the first moment you find the redman resisting your theft of what was his—you call for help.”
“By damn—” Kinney sputtered, turning to shove his way out.
“You’ll listen to me before you go, Judge!” Wessells barked, barring Kinney’s exit. “You and all your kind with money and influence and power—you civilians who have the ear of Congress and the Indian Bureau as well—here the army has to come running at your every beck and call.”
“I’ll not listen to another word of your blasphemous drivel, Wessells!”
“You’ll listen—”
“I will not! But you’ll hear about this, you can be sure!”
“You’ll go nowhere till you hear me out, Judge. There’s just one more thing I’ll say to you about your kind. It’s men like you who always start these miserable little wars. And it’s my kind who has to come in and clean up after you.”
“How dare you!” Kinney roared. “Mind you, sir—unblock that door!”
“When I’m finished, Judge.” Wessells stuck his face down into Kinney’s. “Brave men have to come clean up what you stirred up, Kinney. Usually young men as well. Soldiers, Judge. Soldiers asked to do an impossible job by an ungrateful public, like yourself. Men like you—growing fat and rich on the government’s welfare.”
“Welfare?”
“Your tradership.”
“I bid for this position—”
“You and the hundreds of others like you have someone in Washington in your hip pocket, Kinney. Don’t try to bamboozle me.”
Flushed to the point of apoplexy, Kinney hurled himself against Wessells’s arm, forcing his way out the door.
Behind the lieutenant colonel the room remained quiet, the contractors and officers alike stunned into silence. Wessells stood framed in the doorway, watching the squat figure scurry across the parade like a prairie hen furiously after her brood. Arms fluttering, savagely kicking up gravel, grass and dirt with every step.
“Yes, Judge Jefferson T. Kinney,” Wessells repeated. “It’s the army who has to come in and clean up after your kind get through stirring things up.”
* * *
He stared into the brilliant summer sun. Climbing near the middle of the sky, here close to the middle of the Moon of Fat Horses.
Dancing.
For more than a day now he had stared at the brilliant sun, then the hours of watching the night-sun track across the starry heavens before seeing a second day dawn in the east. Still dancing. Always dancing round the pole in the center of the huge arbor erected for this annual celebration of life and thanksgiving.
Without food or water for a second day. Hoping for a vision. Some revelation. Some answer to those prayers he sent to the spirits on the shriek of the eagle-wingbone whistle between his parched lips.
Roman Nose shuffled to the left, a foot at a time, following the beat of the drums. So many drums. The loudest throbbing in his skull.
With each step he pulled a little harder, bearing back on the long rawhide tethers lashed to the top of the pole his dance steps slowly circled as the sun crawled overhead. Rawhide tethers reaching down from the sunpole like the fingers of the Everywhere Spirit himself to bind Roman Nose and the others to this dance of self-torture. Willow skewers pushed beneath the pectoral muscles, binding the rawhide-tethered dancers to their vow to dance in prayer.
Prayer for another successful year in the hunt. Prayer that the Cheyenne people would not have to suffer a third hard winter, like that they had just endured. Forced to hear the whimpers of the little ones, the cries of the old ones—no man nor woman left untouched by the great hunger. Game chased off by the coming of the white man. Bellies pinching—as if the spirits were teaching the Cheyenne people to fight back.
Roman Nose remembered now … remembered the teachings of his youth: a man with a full belly did not fight long enough, nor hard enough for what he needed. Only a man with an empty belly knew what it meant to fight as a warrior for the lives of his people.
The hot tears stung his eyes again, and his mind cried out. This! This I give … for my people!
He knew it was his mind. For he could still feel the whistle between his cracked lips. He had not spoken aloud.
Dancing on and on in a circle. Women and children and the hunched, old ones gathered in a ring around the huge arbor. Drummers and the medicine men clustered nearer the dancers. And at the center stood the sunpole itself. Colored red and blue, yellow and green. The sacred colors, one at each of the four winds.
Four buffalo skulls, each painted with stripes and hailstones, sacred sage stuffed in the gaping eye sockets, sat at the base of the sunpole. Gone the time the buffalo were plentiful, like the blades of grass.
Roman Nose brooded darkly, the tears streaming down his cheeks. But now only the white man is as plentiful as the blades of grass. He kills the buffalo, and so grows stronger. More of him. Spreading the stench of his gathering places farther and farther out onto the land once run only by the buffalo … and my fathers.
His tongue was well past the point of being sticky. It clung to the inside of his cheek like a thin membrane of connective tissue he would slice with his knife in butchering an elk in the cool shadows of the mountains. Where the waters ran sweet and cold.
He pushed the thought of water from his mind, as tangibly as one man would shove aside another who is troubling him.
Trying to swallow again, he gave up. There was nothing left in him to swallow. Roman Nose knew it would come soon. The vision he had thirsted for even more than the cool waters of the streams that flowed through the Piney Woods. Where now the white soldiers defiled the valley with their fort.
The vision would come soon. The one he had begun praying for in the sweatlodge where he sat for more than a day before emerging into the dawn’s light yesterday to begin this ordeal beneath the sun. For a second day the bright, unforgiving globe of the life-giver sucking all the juices from his body. Drying him out, breaking him down—crushing him beneath its hot, stifling paw before it would remake him into a powerful warrior once more.
The powerful warrior his people needed to drive the white man from this land.
A vision begun in the sweatlodge, in fragments like fleeting bits of cottonwood down caught on a spring wind, floating now on the hot air before his eyes blurred by tears and sweat. Stinging …
And in his mind the swirling blur began to slow. Edges of his mind began to clear, like the border of a rain puddle on the plains beginning to dry, become more defined. Sharper. And in focus now.
He recognized the fort. Dirt walls.
The one the white man calls Reno!
Dirt walls. Yes! He knew it. A vision of what had been the raid on Fort Reno. The four scalps taken … but there were so many pony-riding warriors sweeping down on a tent camp of soldiers in his vision.
He tried to swallow, the back of his throat more parched than old rawhide. Scared a little. Unsure as well. For now he realized this was not the Reno fort he saw in his vision.
Roman Nose struggled to remain standing. Stay on his feet until the vision had spoken to him. He sensed his knees softening, like the hoof-meat the women boiled for glue the old ones used on arrow-fletching and hardening shields. Knees softening and giving way until—
Then he suddenly felt the hot, foot-pounded, sun-banked earth beneath his wet cheek. Realizing he was unable to rise. Knowing he was not to rise until the vision had finished with him.
&nb
sp; What he saw was not the Reno fort. Another place. Where, he wondered—troubled with each passing drum-throb of his heart as it pounded in his ears.
Then from the walls of the fort marched a caravan of wagons, driven by white men … pushing their wagon animals down the river into the wide, grassy valley where the wagons cut the tall grasses, piling the green shafts high, to dry beneath the same sun bearing down now on his brain.
And one of them—a tall one—the only man taller than Roman Nose himself, stood back from the others, so that now the Cheyenne war-chief could see his face.
I do not know this one … yet.
He said it to himself … prayed it to the sun itself, which had granted him this vision, realizing that one day soon he would meet this white man who stood alone.
Then, as if caught in the slow flow of a late-summer stream, the solitary white man seemed to move farther away from the others … until he stood alone on an island in the river by himself. A single cottonwood tree straining against the sky behind him. Sand at his feet and his head bleeding … the crimson juice flowing into one eye as he raised his rifle, aiming it at Roman Nose.
And as the Cheyenne chief forced his tongue to move, pushing the wingbone whistle from his lips to speak—to yell out—Roman Nose felt the muscles of a strong pony throbbing beneath his legs … an animal charging down on the white man who had his rifle raised and pointed at him.
It was to be this way, he knew at the last as blessed, cool sleep overtook him, the vision blurring around the edges once more, draining into darkness. Roman Nose understood in the pit of him that it would come down to something between him and this single white man now at the dirt fort.
But as his breathing became more regular and he realized dreamily that some of the old medicine men were pulling his body away from the sunpole into the shade—where they bathed his tortured, burning flesh with the cool waters of the Rosebud—he knew the place had been decided.
He had recognized the soldier fort the white man had emerged from—it was not the one called Reno.
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