by Bowen, Peter
Like I said, Mulligan had hit it off with Stefano and Libretta and even helped them snatch some eaglets, which is not easy to do, since goldens nest in cliffs and they favor straight down as an angle.
Them two big birds—prey birds grow real fast—had been stuffed with prairie chickens and gophers and they’d fletched out good but was still in the highly experimental stages of the flying trade. They’d leap into the air and flap but they was so fat they’d just land splot on the gound and Libretta would coax them onto a T-stick and put them back on the top of the wagon, which was mostly bird shit white these days—the red was visible only where the wagon got scraped.
Come the day Mulligan’s soul was to be saved we all gathered at the river, so to speak, and the convert was ushered along and he had been provided a nightshirt some sister had sewn out of worn bedsheets and it was even mostly white where Mulligan hadn’t touched it. The little bastard’s mad face shoved up out of the top of the folds, and he looked like a crazy man trying to figure out how to untie the straitjacket.
Stefano and Libretta had parked their wagon right next to the sump where Mulligan was to be reborn and them two fledgling eagles was perched on their crossbar, and I thought their eyes looked rather like Mulligan’s.
Stefano had dug out some organ grinder’s monkey Eye-talian military uniform, heavy on the chartreuse and puce and feathers, and he even had a sword long enough to spit a sheep for roasting in a chased-leather scabbard.
The brethren gathered and rewarded us with hymns all sung off-key and heavy on the monotones.
Libretta fell to her knees screaming in fair English that Mulligan’s immortal soul was soon to be charcoal and he would fry for all eternity, abandoning the Mother Church like that.
“The Whore of Babylon is the Catholic Church!” says the bishop, eyes righteously flaming.
Libretta made an obscene gesture easy to read the world around, indicating that his wives were happily home screwing about anybody came along. Which they probably were.
The bishop screamed curses of biblical nature.
Stefano asked me, “Is insult, no?”
“Is insult, yes,” I replies, faithful translations being the heart of diplomacy.
Stefano drew his sword and held it both hands over his head and he screamed some war cry and lit out after the bishop, who was unarmed since he was to get wet and, well, rust, you know.
The sword of the faithful was a well-kept piece and the edge gleamed clean and the bishop soon was covering ground at a pretty good clip with Stefano close behind, waiting for the chance to smite the Ungodly.
The bishop’s fellers were staring that direction in horror, and I seen Mulligan get handed something by Libretta, which was a couple fans made out of prairie chicken feathers. Mulligan waves these at the backsides of a couple of the missionaries, and in a trice, so to speak, I knew.
They must have starved them eaglets because both birds looked and their dim brains said FOOD! and they launched off the top of the wagon and stuck them big yellow talons into, count them, four gristly rump roasts, Mulligan having meant it that way, and there was a duet of screams and the two missionaries so honored lit out after the bishop and Stefano only some slower as it is hard to run with huge talons in your ass and big birds flapping their wings.
We was all highly amused and mostly collapsed on the ground with the wonder of it all and the other three who had been standing around gape-mouthed looked over at the wagon and they lit out, too.
Libretta was shouldering the shotgun that Stefano couldn’t hit anything with, but she had a lock on them missionaries and she swung and didn’t rush and the gun boomed and one give a yelp and put on more speed and the next one howled and I suspected the charges was rock salt from the way their tried to run and scratch at the same time.
The last missionary was a real young man, almost a boy, and so Libretta’s mother’s heart softened and she put the gun back down after taking a bead on his ass.
Mulligan was giving off adenoidal hoots of joy and pointing at the retreating Saints.
Jake showed up sudden at my elbow, and I looks over and he’s holding a bar of soap, that yellow kind that’ll take the spots off a hound.
“We was thinking,” he says, “be a shame to waste all this.”
Bob and Will and Whinny and Blackie and Lou stood there real grim-faced, a sense of right gleaming in their eyes.
“Of course,” I says, unbuckling my gun belt and giving it to Alys.
Poor Mulligan was so rapt with the view of the running Saints we was right up on him before he turned around, and I am here to tell you I have never seen a look of horror on a man’s face like that, not even if they were dying.
We grabbed him before he had a chance to light out or get armed, and strong as the little bastard was he was no match for six of us. We bore him to the font and ripped off his sheet and gave him the first bath Mulligan was ever known to have taken.
We scrubbed the little bastard and used up all the soap and left him spluttering on the bank with his eyes burning.
“He’s sayin’ something,” says Jake, looking at me.
I listened close.
“You know what he’s saying?” says Blackie.
“Yup,” I says. “He’s saying he’ll pick us off one by one.”
“Still worth it,” says Jake.
“We’ll see about that,” I says.
30
IT GOT TO BE summer overnight as happens in Wyoming and a hot wind blew and the dust rose and the land dried and water become a problem to us. There was springs all over but they didn’t yield all that much and with all the stock and people and thirst there wasn’t water enough to warsh specimens and Cope was annoyed.
He demanded that we find a nice deposit next to a river, which was a tall order, and the water Wyoming has got mostly flows north toward Montana Territory and either the Yellowstone or Missouri. I knew where there was plenty of fossils in the Big Dry, that huge triangle between the two big rivers, but there was Sioux and Blackfeet there, too, and I could go through it alone but they would not take kindly to a mob.
I did not want to go north farther than I had to and I had fine feelings for Washakie and didn’t want him or his people disturbed by Cope, who was arrogant and plain mean. The flap over his bad call on the bones of the Flopposaurus et at him, and the fact that Marsh was there at all et at him, and so did the dust, the bugs, and the lack of conveniences.
He complained constantly and he was so damn rude to some of the people working for him that about twenty up and quit and got a little train together and headed back down to Laramie. They was to be paid off there, but I learned Cope had sent a letter to the bankers along with the group denying them their pay. There’s no worse reputation for a man to have than cheating employees out here.
Cody had rode over from where Masoud was camped and told me the prince was going back—half of his people were sick and one of the elephants had died. If he was smart, I says, he’d wait till the lot croaks and change his name and habits, but Cody said DUTY CALLS HIM and I wondered why I was talking to this fool. It was because I liked Masoud and wished him well and he was an unhappy man.
Every one of these expeditions has a time when folks are fed up and want to go home and that’s when you find out who’s fit to ride with. Alys stayed even-tempered and my boys did and the wagon men did, but Cope’s flunks was whining all the time and one of them lost his mind one night and started screaming and then he fell to his hands and knees and barked like a dog and then he convulsed and was dead.
He’d been stealing laudanum from the medical kit and took too much and when we run out, well, he died.
Cope got everyone together and speechified, saying he was here till the snow flew, which made some folks turn pale. His flunks was city folks and this was the high desert and first it was huge and menacing and then monotonous and boring.
Quite a few buffalo was close by, since it was a little cooler high up than down lower, and we shot a f
at cow once in a while for camp meat. I just made damn sure the boys knew that we was being watched and that God Help Us if we shot more buffalo than we used.
Red Cloud is plainspoken and he means every damn word he says.
I explained to Cope that we had a ways to travel if he really wanted that much water and fossils, too, but I’d not recommend it. Rumors showed up that there was gold in the Black Hills and the Sioux loved the Black Hills, having stole them from the Pawnees, Sauk, and Foxes, and some other lesser tribes less than a hundred years before, when the Cree run the Sioux out of the Great Lakes country.
Indians was real adaptable and could go from trapping and fishing and eating the occasional moose to getting damn near everything they needed from the buffalo. They was very intelligent and in a few years the Sioux had gone from canoes to horses and they was very good horsemen, indeed.
Gold in the Black Hills.
I’d been in them, and they was beautiful, just rising up out of the Plains, and all covered in firs and pines and cedars. The children loved it up there, way above the heat and dust of the Plains, and it was healthy, too, the water was good.
We found sign time to time, places where scouts had been for a while, but none of them stayed long and there was no horse stealing nor killing.
But every time I looked north I got uncomfortable, like I get when there’s a storm over the western horizon but I can’t see it yet. The air changes, all I can say.
Marsh had staked out most of the deposits to the west and so it was the north or nothing, and so I said it warn’t a real good idea and another year would be better. For one thing, there was fossils all over the place where we’d been, and water, too, and it would be closer to the railroad, so easier to ship specimens east.
Cope said he’d think it over.
Then things began to go all to hell, and from a quarter no one expected.
Lou had been up north swinging wide to count pony tracks and see if there was any movement of big camps and he come riding like hell into camp and he says there is another expedition maybe fifty miles up the trail, not Marsh, not anybody we knew, and where the hell they’d come from had to be from the west, because there wasn’t a way through the tribes to the east and northeast and the passes was few this end of the Rockies.
Cope threw a screaming fit like he always did these days and he yelled at me to find out who these people might be, and damn quick. I was curious, too, and so I took Mulligan, who so far had refrained from exacting vengeance, just to make us sweat a while longer, and we rode north hell-for-leather to find out who it was.
Turned out they was a German expedition that was in California and they had got off the train in Salt Lake and gone up to Montana and around the Bighorns and down easy as you please. They was after fossils, too, and they had maybe twenty wagons, and no guide, but they had maps and could read them.
Herr Professor Gottmund had heard of Cope, of course, and Marsh, of course, and he looked forward to making their acquaintance. It had taken the better part of three months for them to make that long hook round the Yellowstone and Pitchstone Plateaus and head down our way.
They offered us dinner, but we said no and made ready to head back down.
Well, then, would we take some delicacies for Herr Professor Cope? Jah?
And the cook comes out with maybe a hundred smoked buffalo tongues on strings.
Oh, God.
“Did you buy these?” I said, hoping to hell they had.
“No, they had shot a lot of buffalo, but there were a lot of buffalo, hein?”
Mulligan pulled at my sleeve and we went off and we stopped a mile south and he said he seen three scouts on the northern horizon and that warn’t a good sign. One was keeping watch, more was marking tracks for the war party, which would travel in small groups and meet up the day before the attack.
I goddamned the idiot Germans and hoped they was all killed and scalped. Mulligan seconded my sentiments.
We had to pull back nearer the railroad and if possible get some troops to escort us. The one damn thing I promised Red Cloud wouldn’t happen had, and though he knew I kept my word his warriors didn’t know one band of whites from another and they would want blood for this.
It was late the next morning before we come on Cope, and he listened and then he shrugged.
“I pay you to see to these things, Kelly,” he says. “So see to them.”
The teamsters had been in the country long enough so when I explained what trouble we had coming, they loaded up and made ready to leave that night. It was hot enough now so it was better on the oxen to travel at night anyway.
Cope ranted and screamed a while but when it got real clear he and his assistants was staying on alone—and I’d hog-tie Alys I had to to get her out of here—he give in with real bad grace and flat forbade me to warn Marsh off to our west.
I sent Jake with a message anyway, of course. If the Sioux and Cheyennes killed Marsh, Cope would be a happy man but myself I was hoping that both of them would get slow-skinned over hot coals. I had about had it with disinterested science.
Cope tried to insist that the specimens all be loaded and the teamsters to a man said next year would do.
Sir Henry stayed glued to Alys. He was silent as death and steady as a stone and he meant to get her back safely and he would, I was sure of that.
We left a lot of stores and the tents. Cope bitched about that, too, but I pointed out that living was the first thing and famous came later, if you wished to enjoy it.
My boys drifted out all blackened in the face and their horses had their feet wrapped in leather, to muffle the clank of iron on stone.
The Indians was going to find us and so it was only necessary to know just when, we would have to make a fort from wagons and whatever terrain was handy and hope we had plenty of bullets.
We creaked along for a while and then we got up to a crest and I looked back north and there was a red glow on the horizon.
It was real reddish and it was growing.
Probably the German train, I thought, and the fire’s in the dry grass, and the wind’s from the north, and so it’s headed our way.
31
THE INDIANS KNEW THEIR land and winds and seasons better than we did, and they warn’t above using wildfire to fry up a nice mess of white men. If the fire caught good and the wind carried it well, we would have a couple problems, the first getting burnt up and the second moving at all. We was grass-powered, and the oxen had a three-part day. Pull eight hours, graze eight hours, and chew their cuds eight hours. No grass, and we was stuck, for the beasts would get weak and we would have to start abandoning the wagons.
Cope was having none of that, and his first thought when the red flames crested the horizon was to save his rocks, as though the fire would bother them at all.
“Do something!” he screamed at me. I sat on my horse thinking how much I would just like to put a bullet in the son of a bitch’s forehead and be done with it all.
We was close to some places that was nothing but hardpan and only a few blades of grass on it, and so the teamsters moved the wagons and the stock up to it and we pulled the wagons in a circle and put the stock inside. When the fire run past and the night come I expected that the Indians would attack and try to steal horses, or anything else come to hand.
Cope’s precious specimens was left down in the old camp, the Indians wouldn’t bother with them. He ranted and raved and demanded until he run out of wind and then he just sulked. His daddy did not whip his ass enough when he was a little boy, so he mostly still was one.
If you’ve never seen a prairie fire before, you will never forget what they are like after. The flames was forty feet tall and they bloomed red and orange and billowed gray smoke and threw embers on the wind in front of it. There was a good breeze shoving this one along and it roared past below faster than a good horse could run. I saw a couple antelope overtaken and when the fire passed they was just black logs in the gray ash.
The f
ire roared on south and the wind blew clouds of sour ash over us and we choked and the stock gagged and stirred, they wanted water and the water was full of ash and when they drank it they would just be thirstier. The little springs that fed the dry creeks here were stout and would flow clear soon, but for now all were clogged and black.
We had a pretty good defensive position, and I thought it best that we stay there the night, even though the animals was miserable and hard to hold, it was better than where we had camped, which had too much good cover for Indians sneaking in. They don’t need much.
The ashfall slacked off near sunset, and there was only about an hour of light left when Sir Henry whistled and I run up to the rock he was setting on and looked north and there was an Indian riding toward us, eagle feathers on his lance and headdress and his right arm over his chest, sign for parley.
Sioux.
I rode out alone, and we met maybe two hundred yards from the wagons.
It was Long Runner, who I knew pretty well, a Minneconjou.
“Ah Kelly,” he says. “This is for you.”
He hands over a thong with about thirty tongues on it, and they wasn’t from buffalo.
“I thank you,” I says. Though the German party hadn’t been with us, shame to an Indian is a general thing.
Long Runner wheeled his horse and left.
So there would be no attack.
Reasonably enough, they had cut the tongues out of the German party, for wasting the buffalo. I didn’t blame them for it. Indians have their laws and habits just like us and I suppose they got them because they worked.
I rode back to the wagons and announced we could go back down to the camp.
The teamsters would have to go up and cut wild hay in the pocket meadows where there was water, and when they had enough we could maybe go back down to Laramie. I’d send scouts south to see if the fire left any grass and where.
Folks was quiet. A prairie fire is a natural disaster and living through it, or just even watching close by, will shut up the gabbiest folks.
