Frontier America

by William W. Johnstone

  He came up on his knees, drew back the bow, and loosed the arrow toward the soldiers. The other warriors followed his example. The flint-tipped missiles arched through the air and came down around the white men, narrowly missing.

  Before those arrows even landed, another volley was on the way. These came even closer, although none of them struck any of the riders.

  Frantically, the white soldiers yanked their mounts to a stop, wheeled the animals around, and began riding back the other way. That didn’t stop Broken Pine, Hawk, and the others from firing yet another flight of arrows after them.

  Preacher figured it might be a good idea to hurry them on their way even more, so he lined up the Sharps and fired again, deliberately pulling his shot a little wide. The soldiers leaned forward in their saddles and urged their horses on faster.

  “Look at them run!” said one of the warriors. “They are full of fear!”

  “We should go after them and kill them all!” another man urged.

  “Many Pelts was right,” said a third warrior. “No white men can be trusted! They should all be driven far away—or killed!”

  Hawk glanced over at Preacher. Neither of them liked to hear talk like this. It could only stir up more trouble. And these warriors, like most Indians, really didn’t understand just how many white men there were. Hawk had seen the teeming swarms in St. Louis, and Preacher had been to some of the even larger cities back east. If it ever came down to an outright war between white men and red men, it probably wasn’t going to end well for the vastly outnumbered Indians.

  Preacher knew he couldn’t say that to them, though. The mood they were in right now, they wouldn’t listen to such a warning if it came from a white man. He couldn’t blame them for feeling that way, either. They hadn’t attacked the soldiers, probably hadn’t even noticed them yet, when they had come under attack themselves.

  Being half-Indian, though, Hawk could risk speaking up. He said, “The best thing for us to do is to leave them alone and let them go on their way. One of their men is wounded, as was one of ours. Let there be an end to fighting.”

  At one time, Hawk would have found it difficult to advise such a thing. He’d been as hotheaded and ready to fight as any of his friends. He had grown wiser in the past ten years, reflected Preacher . . . although some of the Crow warriors doubtless would say that he had become too timid.

  “We cannot allow this to go unavenged,” one of the men argued. “And it was Preacher who wounded the white man, not one of us! We must have vengeance for Swift Water!”

  That brought mutters of agreement from most of the other warriors.

  Preacher couldn’t stay silent. He said, “Swift Water ain’t dead. But if you keep up this fight, there’s a mighty good chance some of you will wind up that way.”

  “No true warrior fears death in a cause that is right!”

  Preacher couldn’t argue with that sentiment. He felt the same way. But he had already thought of something that hadn’t occurred to his Crow friends: that small group of soldiers hadn’t come ’way out here on the plains by themselves. Somewhere, probably not too far away, was a bigger bunch.

  Maybe a whole heap bigger.

  He might have pointed that out to the Crow and made that argument, but before he could do so, a rattle of gunfire sounded. Something hummed past Preacher’s head. He had been shot at enough times, and experienced enough near misses, to recognize the wind-rip of a bullet when he heard one.

  “Get your heads down!” he barked. “They’re shootin’ at us.”

  As he and the Indians stretched out just below the swell of earth, more shots crackled. Preacher took his hat off and eased his head up for a better look. He couldn’t see any men or horses out there, but he saw clouds of powdersmoke hanging in the air. The soldiers had gone to ground, found some cover of their own, and opened fire.

  They didn’t want this fight to be over with, either.

  * * *

  Corporal Mackey led the three horses while Jamie helped the wounded Private Jenkins retreat. Jamie had spotted a couple of old buffalo wallows that would be better shelter than nothing. He lowered Jenkins to the ground in one of them and waved Mackey on.

  “Go back yonder at least a hundred yards and then picket those horses,” he told the corporal. “They won’t be out of range of that Sharps, but at least it’ll take a longer shot to hit any of them. Then come back here and bring your rifle.”

  “I . . . I dropped my rifle when I got shot,” Jenkins said.

  “I know, son. That’s all right. You’re not in any shape to be shooting, anyway.”

  Jamie knelt beside the wounded man, pulled a bandanna from his pocket, and knotted it around Jenkins’ arm. The wound would still need to be cleaned as soon as there was a chance, but at least that makeshift bandage would slow down and maybe stop the bleeding from it.

  Then he stood up and waved his hat over his head to get the attention of O’Connor, Albright, and Stallworth. The three men swerved toward him as they slowed their mounts.

  “I sent Mackey back yonder with the other horses,” Jamie told them. “Take your horses and picket them, too, then come back to these buffalo wallows. The Indians have gone to ground on the other side of that little rise, so we’re out of arrow range here.”

  “Why don’t we just go back to the wagons?” Stallworth asked.

  “Because that fella with the Sharps is liable to pick off one or two of us if we try. But if we hunker down here, we can wait for the wagons and the rest of the troop to come to us, and those Indians will light a shuck when they see a force that size coming toward them.”

  Judging by the expression on his face, Sergeant O’Connor didn’t like Jamie making decisions and giving orders that way. For the time being, though, he kept any response to himself.

  Within a few minutes, the horses were all picketed to the rear and the six men were stretched out in the small depressions, three in each of the buffalo wallows. Jamie was in the one with Mackey and Jenkins. O’Connor called to them, “Keep up a steady fire on that rise! I want those redskins to stay pinned down!”

  Mackey looked inquiringly at Jamie, who said, “Go ahead and do what he says, Corporal. I don’t think you’re going to hit anybody over there, but all it costs you to try is a little powder and shot.” Jamie chuckled, but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “O’Connor’s wrong about them being pinned down, though. If they pull back away from that rise, we can’t do a thing to stop them.”

  “Do you think there’s a chance they might do that?” Mackey asked with a note of hope in his voice.

  Jamie shook his head and said, “It’s not very likely as long as they’ve got us outnumbered even a little bit, and from what little I saw of them, I’m convinced they do. O’Connor shot one of them. We don’t know how bad he was hit. If he’s dead, or hurt bad, his friends won’t just forget that. They’ll want to settle the score for him. If there were more of them, they probably would have overrun us by now, even though we would’ve killed a few of them, more than likely.”

  “Sergeant O’Connor shouldn’t have shot at them and started this fight in the first place.”

  “You’re right about that, Corporal.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good to tell Lieutenant Davidson about it, though,” Mackey said. “He wouldn’t believe the sergeant did anything wrong. He’d just find a way to make it all your fault, Mr. MacCallister.”

  “More than likely,” Jamie agreed, smiling ruefully.

  Shots began ringing out from the other buffalo wallow. Mackey joined in, firing slowly and deliberately and not rushing his reloading between rounds.

  Jamie didn’t fire. He had something else in mind.

  After a while, when he had given both sides a chance to settle in to this standoff, he said to Mackey, “I’m going to see if I can circle around and get behind them, Corporal. I want to take a better look at that bunch.”

  “Why, Mr. MacCallister? So you can see which tribe they belong to?”


  “That, and I’m curious about that Sharps rifle they’ve got. I wouldn’t have expected any Indians to have one yet.”

  “They probably took it off some white man they killed, didn’t they?” Mackey asked with a frown.

  “That’s the most likely explanation, I reckon, but I’d like to see for myself.” Jamie rubbed his chin. “Could be there’s a white man traveling with them, and the Sharps belongs to him.”

  Private Jenkins asked, “What sort of traitor would do that, sir?”

  “Plenty of white men feel some sympathy, even liking, for the Indians,” said Jamie. “I do myself . . . although it’s a little hard for me to do that since the Shawnee wiped out my family when I was a boy and carried me off to make me a slave for years.”

  Jenkins’ eyes widened. He said, “Seems to me like you’d want to kill all of them, no matter what tribe.”

  Jamie shook his head.

  “This bunch didn’t have anything to do with that. I’ve read that in some parts of the world, folks still hold grudges against other kinds of folks because of things their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. That never made a lick of sense to me.”

  Staying low in the grass, Jamie began to back away from the other two. Corporal Mackey called after him, “Be careful, Mr. MacCallister!”

  Over in the other buffalo wallow, Sergeant O’Connor lowered his rifle as he noticed what Jamie was doing.

  “MacCallister!” he yelled. “MacCallister, what are you doin’? Are you runnin’ out on us, you son of a—”

  “He’s going to circle around and get behind the Indians, Sergeant,” Mackey interrupted. He started to make a gesture to describe what Jamie was doing, then evidently thought better of it. The Indians wouldn’t be able to hear much of what was said, but they might see Mackey’s motions and figure them out. So the corporal just went on, “He’s not deserting us.”

  Jamie heard that exchange. It annoyed him that O’Connor would think he would run out on them and try to save his own skin. It didn’t particularly surprise him, though. Somebody like O’Connor would always think the worst.

  He stayed low until he had moved back several hundred yards and could no longer see the rise where the Indians had taken cover. Then he began trotting to the west and didn’t curve back to the north until he had gone at least half a mile.

  It took Jamie a good while to make the big circle that was going to take him behind the Indians. As he did that, he continued to hear the troopers’ rifles going off.

  Not the Sharps, though. The distinctive boom of that high-caliber weapon was significantly missing. Whoever owned it was holding his fire.

  Or else he was trying to flank the soldiers and get behind them so that he could pick them off . . .

  That thought made Jamie move a little faster.

  The grass was fairly high and waved back and forth some as a breeze blew across the prairie. Jamie crouched as he approached the rise. As big as he was, he would have to get down on his belly and crawl if he wanted to be completely hidden, and he wasn’t going to do that. But at least he tried to make himself less conspicuous.

  He came to the spot where the Indian ponies were grazing. They shied away from him, and one of them nickered. Jamie dropped to a knee as up ahead on the rise, one of the warriors heard the sound and turned to look. Jamie froze. After a moment, the Indian turned back around. Jamie waited longer, just to be sure the man wasn’t trying to be tricky and pretending not to have seen him. Finally, he resumed his approach.

  The warriors definitely weren’t Pawnee. He could see them well enough now to know that. Could they be part of the Crow band with the village on the smaller stream above the Sweetwater? The village that was the army detail’s destination?

  That would be ironic if it was true, thought Jamie. If that was a Crow hunting party, they were quite a distance from home, but it was certainly possible they had ventured out onto the plains in search of a buffalo herd.

  He saw now that his speculation about a white man being with the Indians was correct. The man wore a buckskin shirt, as well as brown trousers, boots, and hat. That broad-brimmed hat really identified him as a white man, as well as the crossed gun-belts supporting a pair of holstered revolvers. Jamie had never known an Indian to dress like that. However, the man was clearly an ally to the Crow, if that’s what they were.

  The white man turned his head to say something to one of the Indians, giving Jamie a better look at him. Something about the craggy face with the dark, drooping mustache immediately struck Jamie as familiar. He had seen that man somewhere before . . .

  Recognition hit Jamie like a punch in the gut. It made his memories go back more than twenty years to a place hundreds of miles away, to a time when he and Kate were young, newly married, and on their way to Texas intending to settle there.

  But there were enemies on their trail, and they might not have survived the journey if they hadn’t encountered a mountain man who helped them. Jamie had run into that same mountain man a few times since then. The frontier, for all its vastness, seemed like a small place at times.

  One thing was for sure, he told himself now. If he was right about who that man was, then O’Connor touching off a fight with this bunch was even dumber than Jamie had thought it was.

  Feeling certain that he was correct, Jamie straightened to his full height and strode forward, no longer trying to conceal himself or sneak up on the Indians. One of them, a great big fella who was tending to the wounded man, saw him coming and shouted a warning. Jamie didn’t understand all the words, but he recognized the language as the Crow tongue, meaning he’d been right about that, too.

  The warriors whirled around, nocking arrows and drawing back bowstrings. But before they could loose the arrows at Jamie, the white man with them called out sharply, telling them to hold their fire. He got to his feet and looked at Jamie with a slight frown on his rugged face.

  Jamie walked right up to him, nodded, and said, “It’s good to see you again, Preacher. Been a long time.”

  CHAPTER 19

  It took a lot to surprise Preacher, but having this big fella appear seemingly out of nowhere, then walk up and greet him like that almost did the job. The reaction lasted only a heartbeat, though, before Preacher recognized him.

  The mountain man stuck out his hand and exclaimed, “Jamie Ian MacCallister! Never expected to run into you out here.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Jamie said with a grin as he clasped Preacher’s hand in what would have been a bone-crushing grip for most men. The two of them were pretty evenly matched when it came to strength, though. “We sort of travel in the same circles.”

  Preacher chuckled and said, “Yeah, I reckon that’s true.”

  The Crow warriors still had their bows drawn back. Their faces made it clear that they would like nothing better than to fill Jamie full of arrows.

  Preacher went on, “These fellas are honin’ after turning you into a pincushion, Jamie. Walkin’ up here like this probably ain’t the smartest thing you ever done.”

  “I figured if they’re your friends, they’ll likely listen to reason.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Preacher’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at the Sharps Jamie held, then at Swift Water. “You’re the one who winged my friend there.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  At least some of the Crow spoke enough English to understand that. They drew back on their bows even more, and the rest followed suit.

  “But you’re the one who shot that young dragoon who’s with me,” continued Jamie, “so I reckon we’re sort of square on that score.” He looked at Swift Water. “How bad is that fella’s wound?”

  “From what I’ve seen, I reckon he’ll probably be all right.” Preacher paused, then asked, “How about the soldier?”

  “Just a graze on his arm. He’ll be fine.”

  Preacher nodded curtly and said, “That’s good to know.”

  “So how about we call a truce?” Jamie suggested. “Nobody’s b
een killed so far, and I’m hankering to keep it that way.”

  “How many more soldiers are in the bunch those came from?”

  “A whole troop, and two supply wagons,” Jamie said. “They’re probably less than a mile away by now. They may have heard some of those shots earlier, so there’s a chance a patrol could show up anytime.”

  “That’s about what I figured,” said Preacher as he nodded slowly. He turned to the warriors and went on in Crow, “It would be a good idea for you fellas to put down those bows. There are a lot of white soldiers not far away, and they all have rifles.”

  “We can fight them!” one of the men said.

  “And you can all die.” Preacher’s tone was grim. “But right now, this is all just a big misunderstandin’. And it was the soldiers who opened fire on us, not the other way around. If we explain that to their commandin’ officer—”

  Preacher saw the face Jamie made at that. Switching back to English, he said, “You savvy enough Crow to know what I was tellin’ them?”

  “Yeah. And that commanding officer you were talking about . . . well, he’s not the most understanding sort in the world. However, I reckon I can make him see what actually happened here, and maybe he won’t lose his head. His orders are to go to the village of Chief Broken Pine—”

  “I am Broken Pine.” The declaration came from Preacher’s old friend in English.

  Jamie looked a little surprised, but he nodded and said, “It’s good to meet you, Chief. I wasn’t expecting to run into you this far away from your village.”

  “The huntin’s been bad in these parts,” Preacher explained. “We were after those buffalo.” He added with a touch of wry humor in his voice, “And those critters must’ve heard the shootin’ and smelled the powdersmoke, because they’ve all done run off.”

  Broken Pine said to Jamie, “You and those soldiers are on your way to my village?”

  “That’s right,” Jamie replied.

  “Why do you go there?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know if that’s for me to say. My government . . . the leaders of my people . . . they have business with you, Broken Pine. They want to talk to you.”