by Will DuRey
The thought that the watchers were Sioux troubled Wes. Everything depended on the outcome of last night’s council. If Black Raven was the new chief, or if he now led a breakaway band, then Wes’s life and Ellie’s were at risk. Wes reached across and grabbed the bridle of the horse that carried Ellie Rogers.
‘Let’s see if we can pick up the pace a bit,’ he told her. ‘The sooner I get you to the fort the sooner I can head back to the wagons.’ It was an excuse to get out of the high-grass country as quickly as possible, though not without an element of truth.
Ellie made no reply. Her grip on the leathers tightened, as did the firm set of her mouth. The look in her eyes was one of alarm, as though she disbelieved him, but her thighs gripped against the saddle and her body leant forward in anticipation of the gallop.
Wes didn’t put Red to a full gallop, but for ten minutes they maintained a brisk pace. Every so often he threw glances to right and left of him, wherever he spotted a likely rise, a grove of trees or an outcrop of rock that would be a suitable observation point for anyone watching them. No one appeared. Any watchers, he began to tell himself, had been just that, and had never had any other intention. He hoped it was a good sign, that Red Knife’s view had prevailed and he was still chief in the village.
When they slowed again to a walk, Ellie Rogers fussed once more with her makeshift wardrobe. She pulled the hat higher on her head so that its brim didn’t flop in her eyes and, at the same time, showed more of her face to Wes. He inspected her for a while, taking note of the small scrapes and discoloration on her cheeks and jaw. Ellie noticed his examination.
‘Fell in the river,’ she explained. ‘Trying to escape.’ She paused for a moment, looked down at her hands clasped on the saddle horn. ‘He wasn’t too gentle with me but I won’t die.’
‘Any other injuries?’ He’d watched the way she’d sat uneasily astride the mare, wondering if he was mistaken in his original conjectures about her horsemanship. Perhaps the awkwardness was due to damage he couldn’t see, not because she was accustomed to riding sidesaddle.
Her eyes met his, sensitive of the question he was asking; she was coy with her answer even though, at first, it was nothing more than a slight shake of her head. After a moment she added,
‘The Indians attacked almost as soon as he’d dragged me on to the bank. He was the first one they killed. The other two fled. I expect the Indians killed them, too.’
‘Can you describe them?’
Wes’s question went unanswered. Before Ellie could speak two riders came over a rise immediately ahead.
At first Wes thought they might be soldiers, part of a troop on patrol in the hills. But that thought lasted only an instant. These two were riding too quickly, like men who needed to be somewhere quickly, or wanted to be away from somewhere in a hurry. When the riders were a hundred yards away they pulled their horses to a slithering halt, one of them executing a full circle as he brought his animal under control. The size of them, their shape, the red hair and bushy beard of one and the long, lank hair of the other straggling down from beneath a wide-brimmed, gleaming white hat were enough to identify them as the men he had last seen in Clancy’s bar in the Laramie settlement. If confirmation were needed it came from the girl to his left. Ellie gasped. Wes asked the question.
‘Know them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they the men who robbed the stagecoach?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’d better ride into those trees. Get out of the line of fire.’
Quick though Wes and Ellie had been to recognize the outlaws, Lew Butler and Charlie Huntz had been just as quick to recognize the two people on the trail ahead of them. Although they were amazed that either Ellie or Wes were still alive, that didn’t impinge on their reactions when it came to self-survival. Before Ellie could turn her mount towards the slope to her left they had drawn their rifles and fired. Neither man hit his target but the gunfire spurred Wes and Ellie to ride hard for the protection of the trees.
Bullets flew around them as they rode but none came close enough to damage either horses or riders. Lew and Charlie threw plenty of lead but neither thought to pause long enough to take careful aim. By the time such an idea occurred to Lew the targets were zigzagging between the trees and no clear shot was available.
‘We’ve got to finish them this time,’ he told Charlie, and they rode up the slope in pursuit.
Wes Gray’s mind was occupied with a similar thought. The two men firing at him had caused enough trouble and had to be stopped. He glanced behind and spotted them still some thirty yards from the trees. As he rode deeper among the dense collection of hillside pines he looked for suitable cover from where he could better resist their attack. A double stand of tall trees surrounded by chest-high bushes and knee-high ground foliage seemed to offer what he sought. In addition to protection, it gave him the advantage of high ground. From there he would be able to oversee any manoeuvre of his adversaries.
He reined in, jumped from the saddle and with one hand pulled his rifle from its saddle boot. With the other hand he dragged Ellie from her horse. Letting go of her for an instant, he slapped the hindquarters of both horses, urging them further up the hill and using their movement as a decoy.
‘Not a sound,’ he said to Ellie as, grabbing her arm again, he moved her towards the shelter of the high bushes.
She was shivering or, more accurately, quaking. For the first time since the shooting had begun he looked at her. Her face had lost all its colour, her eyes were wide and her lips trembled. Low in her throat a sound rumbled, uncontrolled, unintelligible. Fear was evolving into panic. Any moment now, Wes knew, she would scream and that scream would not only remove the element of surprise, his main advantage, but would also pinpoint their location to the oncoming outlaws. He punched her on the jaw and she collapsed, senseless, in his arms.
Swiftly he laid her on the ground between the trees and thick bushes. There she was obscured from sight and safe from stray bullets. He threw some fern fronds on top of her for extra camouflage, hoping she wouldn’t regain her senses until the fight was finished. A bullet whistled near his head and embedded itself with a thunk into a tree behind. Wes wasn’t sure if it had been a lucky shot or if he had compromised his position by gathering up the fronds with which he’d covered the girl. He chanced a look between the trees.
Lew Butler and Charlie Huntz had dismounted. Charlie had his rifle at his shoulder and Wes pulled back behind the tree trunk as the trigger was pulled. The bullet sliced a huge slick of wood from the pine close to Wes’s head. If the first shot had been close by chance, the second definitely had not. They knew where he was and now unleashed a fusillade towards the bushes and trees he was using as cover.
Sparingly, Wes returned their fire. Two shots, neither fired with the expectation of hitting a target, were simply a by-play to give him a moment in which to think. His first need was to draw the outlaws away from Ellie. She had neither the means nor the ability to defend herself. If she fell into their hands they would show no mercy.
Some six or seven yards to his right, a little further up the hill, a fallen tree offered him the cover he needed to take the fight to the enemy. If he could reach that tree he would be able to use the surrounding undergrowth to crawl away unseen in any direction, but the gap between it and where he was now was an open glade; he would be a clear target if he attempted to cross it. He needed to give himself an advantage, find some way of distracting them while he made the dash further uphill. He elected to use a simple tactic, one he had used several times in the past.
Crouching low, gripping his rifle in his left hand he prepared for the uphill run. He took his hat in his right hand and skimmed it low so that it wasn’t seen by those below until it emerged, mere inches above the ground, from the bushes behind which Ellie lay. Gunfire roared and bullets flew towards the scout’s hat.
Meanwhile Wes took his chance, running at a crouch in the opposite direction, finally throwing
himself over the fallen tree. In the last two strides slugs dug up chunks of earth and smashed into wood as his headlong dash was spotted. The discomfort he experienced from his chest and head wounds when he hit the ground made him grimace, but he was still able to turn it into a grin as he rolled himself tight against the trunk.
‘Got you,’ he said, confident that his adversaries were no match for him in the wood.
He crawled to the further end of the fallen tree before taking a look down the hill to see what the outlaws were doing. For the moment they were lost from sight but Wes could see their horses, ground hitched just below the tree line. He scanned the area as best he was able without exposing himself to the gunmen. He expected gunfire to be aimed in his direction at every moment but nothing happened. Looking back to where he’d left Ellie Rogers he detected no movement. As yet she hadn’t regained consciousness, for which he was grateful.
A second scan among the trees brought him some reward. Lew and Charlie had split up, Charlie working his way uphill off to the right and Lew to the left, stopping for cover at every tree. They were executing a pincer movement. With their positions fixed in his mind, Wes crawled higher up the slope through the long grass. After two or three minutes he stopped and, using a tree with a particularly wide girth for cover, stood.
He scoured the hillside for movement. There was none. The outlaws were more stealthy than he had expected, perhaps more accustomed to hunting than he had earlier given them credit for. He stood and listened. There was only silence. The bird and animals of the wood had stopped their normal work to witness the violence of men. He waited. He watched. He listened. There was nothing to see. Nothing to hear. The place where he’d left Ellie was undisturbed; he wasn’t sure how much longer that would last. She would soon be recovering her senses, stirring, making a noise that would attract the attention of the killers.
Wes Gray waited another minute; then, when still nothing moved, he decided it was time to become the hunter. He propped his rifle against the big pine and dropped to his knees. At that moment he heard a sound, a soft drumming of hoofbeats. Suspecting that something had driven away his pursuers he chanced a look around the tree. The outlaws’ horses were still ground-tied where he had last seen them, which meant that someone else was riding the trail.
Perhaps a posse or a cavalry troop were out searching for Ellie Rogers. Lew Butler and Charlie Huntz, he reckoned, had already spotted them and were lying low, hoping their pursuers would pass by without becoming aware of the nearness of their prey. It would be a simple matter for Wes to destroy their plan. One gunshot would do it.
On reflection, Wes hesitated to take such action. The killers’ horses were tethered below the tree line, their presence apparent to anyone near by. No posse or army patrol would ride by without investigating. But the sound of the hoofbeats was now receding; whoever had passed by had shown no inclination to discover the identities of the riders of the grazing horses, so they weren’t likely to involve themselves in trouble if they heard the sound of gunfire.
Wes also reasoned that not only would that gunfire not bring back the unknown riders: it would also give away his position to those he was about to hunt. He withdrew his knife and began to snake through the grass, downhill, in a wide arc to his right.
Charlie Huntz was the first one he found. He lay, unmoving in long grass. When Wes slithered alongside him he saw that someone had got to Charlie before him. His eyes stared sightlessly at the sky, his shirt was bloody, covering a chest caved in by a series of hatchet blows and his red-haired scalp had been taken. The Sioux had taken their revenge for the deaths of Pony Holder and Little Otter. The sensation that Wes had experienced earlier, that Ellie and he were being watched, had not been imagination. They had been followed but it could only be that Red Knife was still chief of the Ogallalah village and that they were under his protection. That protection hadn’t extended to Lew Butler and Charlie Huntz. Wes found Lew Butler a few minutes later. His fate had been similar to Charlie’s, except that his death blows had been delivered by the knife that had taken his hair.
When he got back to the bushes where he’d left Ellie Rogers Wes found her stumbling around on unsteady feet. Concussion and a sore jaw, combined with the belief that she was alone in a strange and dangerous land, were causing panic to mount within her. When Wes stepped into sight her nerves were so taut that she screamed.
‘Nothing more to worry about,’ he told her. ‘Those men are dead.’
He didn’t tell her how they’d died, nor that he’d dropped their bodies into a narrow crevice where he hoped they wouldn’t be found for a hundred years. He couldn’t take the mutilated bodies back to Fort Laramie because he didn’t want the authorities to know they’d been killed by the Sioux. As with Jim Taylor, even though the white men had committed the first crime and deserved to die, the truth of their death would only lead to trouble for the Indians. Everyone would be happy if they thought he had killed them for robbing the stagecoach and kidnapping the girl.
Wes rounded up the horses, retrieved his rifle and hat, then helped Ellie back into the saddle. Comforted by the knowledge that her ordeal was over, she regained a little of her composure and managed a brief smile. After attaching the lead reins of the ground-tethered horses to his saddle horn he checked the contents of the bulging saddle-bags slung across their backs. He wasn’t the least bit surprised to find them full of bundles of paper money – the proceeds, he figured, of the robbery.
As they rode away towards the fort Wes turned in the saddle and looked back towards the Mildwater Creek country. On a ridge, a single Indian sat astride his pony, watching their progress. The wind ruffled his long hair and the mane of his pony. He held a small round shield in his left hand and a long lance in his right. The feathers and decorations with which they were adorned also danced in the wind. It was Throws The Dust, Sky’s brother. Wes raised his arm in salute.
They had been travelling for almost an hour when Wes spotted a riderless horse below the rim of a ridge off to his right.
‘Wait here,’ he told Ellie Rogers before making a detour to investigate. He approached cautiously lest the horse was skittish and ran off, but the bay mare watched him with nothing more than curiosity. Satisfied that the horse was sound he began to search for its owner. There were boot marks leading to the top of the ridge, so, drawing his gun, Wes began the climb.
His first impression was that the man who lay near the cottonwood tree on the floor of the depression was dead. Scurrying down the slope he quickly reached the prone figure and gently raised his shoulders to see his face.
‘Curly!’ he exclaimed. As the word hung in the air the Wells Fargo agent slowly opened his eyes. Relieved to find that the man still lived, Wes settled him on the ground once more and ran back to the top of the ridge. He signalled to Ellie, who rode over to join him. Meanwhile he collected his water canteen from his saddle and rushed back to where Curly lay.
It was a miracle that Curly Clayport was still alive; Wes suspected it would be another miracle if he survived the journey to Laramie, but he knew there was no alternative but to get him to a doctor. So the remainder of the journey to the fort was a slow affair. Curly was unable to ride alone, Wes sat behind him to make sure he didn’t fall. But despite the pain and the weakness through loss of blood, Wes’s news cheered Curly. News of dead road agents and the recovery of money and passenger were the best medicine he could get.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was late afternoon when Fort Laramie came into view as the trio rode over the plain. Their slow, unsteady passage brought many of the Laramie Loafers from their tepees and those same Indians followed silently in their wake right up to the door of the commanding officer. By the time the horses were pulled to a halt news of their arrival had spread throughout the encampment and a large group of soldiers and civilian helpers had joined with the Indians to hear the news at first hand. Before the identities of the new arrivals was known, the immediate gossip was that they were survivors of some vio
lent incident; more than one of those gathered in front of the camp office voiced the opinion that the expected Sioux uprising had begun.
It was little wonder that the populace of the fort should believe that a battle had been fought because the three stricken riders were having difficulty in staying in the saddle: all were slumped forward as though injured or wounded. Curly Clayport was unconscious, his chin touched his chest, which was bound tightly with strips of his own bloodied shirt.
Behind him, his arms aching with the effort of holding on to the Wells Fargo agent, Wes Gray’s gaunt expression gave testimony to the exertions of the day. Under Apo Hopa’s ministrations, the wounds he’d sustained in the Sioux village had begun to heal; gashes had begun to smart as new skin bridged the gaps but now they burned like branding-scars, as though with every sudden movement they were being ripped open.
He’d endured them from the moment he’d thrown himself over the fallen tree when trading gunshots with Lew Butler and Charlie Huntz. Carrying their bodies to the rocky crevice in which he’d deposited them had added to his discomfort and the pain had begun in earnest when he’d lifted Curly on to Red. From that moment every quick movement and every stretch to ease his muscles had sent a spasm of pain across his back. Now he welcomed the hands that reached up to ease Curly Clayport from his grasp. People in the crowd began voicing their recognition of the men.
‘It’s Curly Clayport,’ said one. ‘He looks bad. Better get him to the hospital.’
‘Hey! Wes Gray,’ called another. ‘What happened, Wes? Was it Sioux?’
An officer-like voice issued a command:
‘Sergeant, get the colonel.’
