These Violent Times

by C. Courtney Joyner

  The brave pulled a bowie knife from the sheath on his belt. He pointed it at Bishop. He gave a command. “Mount!”

  Goddamn it, Bishop thought. This was the third day running that someone wanted to kill him. Someone so different from the others that it would be comical if the situation weren’t so grave.

  The revolver was in his waistband but even if he were uncommonly lucky and hit an enemy with every shot, there were only five bullets, which would leave five very angry braves riding him down. Plus: these were White Fox’s people. Killing them would put a chasm between them, one that might never be broached. Besides. If, as he expected, she were a part of this—unwittingly—there was no avoiding the struggle.

  “Firecrow, if I must fight you, I will. But that is not what I wish.”

  The Cheyenne dismounted. He removed his warbonnet. Handed it to the mounted brave to his left. “Then fight.”

  Firecrow stood a few inches taller than Bishop, powerfully built. And he had a pair of arms. He strode forward with a hip-forward swagger that was meant to impress his warriors, not to frighten Bishop. The knife was supposed to do that, held blade-backward. The Cheyenne did not stab when they fought, they slashed. Raising his arm to the opposite shoulder, Firecrow would be able to cut down diagonally across Bishop’s chest.

  Bishop had already shifted to kill-mode. The doctor in him: studying the body, looking for the most vulnerable patches. A rack of beads hung from Firecrow’s narrow neck. The girth of that neck meant he could move his head out of danger with a jerk here, a dodge there. His wrists were thick, biceps powerful. From riding, not from fighting; the equestrian muscles were the most finely developed. His legs were not unusually strong. He rode with his arms, not using his legs very much. He did not walk a great deal. A constable, responsible for tribal law and order under the terms of the white man, would be accustomed to giving orders as Firecrow had done just now.

  Bishop handed the reins of the painted to a brave. The horse was led to the outside of the circle. He put the revolver and knife on the ground. He palmed the hatchet, holding it loosely. Tight sinew inhibited the flow of energy. He was going to attack with fluid blows, not savage chops. Bishop was not a proficient fighter with the tomahawk, but he had cut wood at his homestead. The moves were familiar. The angled blade. The efficient downward stroke—short down, then lateral. The motions between his own chin and pelvis, so that a blow could also be used as a block, protecting his vital organs.

  “If I fall, they will take you,” Firecrow advised.

  It was a caution, not an attempt to avoid a fight. He wanted Bishop to know this was a losing struggle.

  “If you fall, there will only be nine to try,” Bishop replied.

  Whether or not the others spoke English, the remark drew no response. Bishop didn’t expect it to. But he wanted them to hear his voice. Unafraid.

  The men were only a few feet apart when Bishop brought White Fox’s tomahawk up so that the head of the blade was facing his nose. He was staring right across the edge, at his opponent. Firecrow did as Bishop had anticipated. He brought the blade up diagonally, prepared to cut downward. The Cheyenne’s left arm lay taut at his side, slightly bent at the elbow. He did not intend to surrender the advantage of possessing an extra limb. That was fine with Bishop. He was accustomed to doing everything with one arm. Except killing. He had explored movement, change-ups, foreign to most men. They were second nature now. Instinct.

  Bishop surprised Firefox by taking a big crescent step forward, up the center and planting his foot wide, to the left. That moved his entire torso to the right of the knife. When it flashed down, Bishop’s body was already not there. Firecrow cut air. At the same time Bishop made a small circling, outward motion with his wrist. The little ax flipped to its side, just beyond Bishop’s shoulder, and cut horizontally from the outside in. It met the flesh of Firecrow’s upper arm. The left arm, the spare. Firecrow shuddered, momently freezing in the position of his downward slash: bent forward, his momentum having carried him down.

  The gash in his arm wasn’t deep, but it was enough to distract him while Bishop took another step to the side. Now Bishop was facing his opponent’s right side. Firecrow was facing only the outer perimeter of braves.

  With a cry, Firecrow did not bother to rise but cut laterally back, low along the line of his hips, to where Bishop was standing. The doctor brought the tomahawk down to meet the bowie. There was a clunk as metal struck wood. Firecrow pushed the blade against the carved oak handle, trying to muscle the blade into Bishop. The doctor used the other part of the weapon. He brought the club-back straight up. Firecrow’s force carried him in a semicircle while the blunt metal mallet struck his chin. Snapped his head back.

  The Cheyenne roared, stepped back, charged forward with the bowie over his shoulder. The gleaming point was aimed at juncture of neck and shoulder. It connected by sheer, savage force. But the knife struck the leather bandolier and, apart from a punch in the clavicle, Bishop was unaffected. And Firecrow had left himself vulnerable. Not to the hatchet but to his adversary’s powerful human arm. An arm accustomed to doing everything.

  As the Indian struck, Bishop circled the tomahawk and his arm around the neck of the Cheyenne, from the back. Circled it so that the back of the weapon was on the other side, then encircling, then reaching the Adam’s apple. Bishop closed, choking with strength the Cheyenne had clearly not anticipated. One painted hand reached up, was unable to get purchase. Firecrow was forced to drop the bowie and bring his second hand up. But Bishop had already put his knee in the small of the Indian’s back, wrestled him so he was arched backward, then bent so his weight was on the throat of the off-balance man.

  Bishop did not look at his opponent. His steely eyes were on the circle of braves. If they moved, he would be forced to use this man as a shield. He felt they would be less likely to attack if their leader might be the first victim.

  Firecrow was gagging. Bishop pulled him a few staggering steps to the side so he could plant his own heavy foot atop the bowie. Then he said, “I want to talk, not kill.”

  The Cheyenne continued to pull at the powerful forearm up against his windpipe, artfully cutting off the flow of air and blood.

  Using surgically trained fingers, Bishop skillfully turned the tomahawk so it was now the blade, not the club, against the man’s throat.

  “Do not make me cut,” the doctor warned. “I do not want this!”

  Firecrow did not yield. Bishop fought the urge to draw blood. He thought again about White Fox—

  “Pa’sééstsstse!” bellowed a familiar voice. “Stop this!”

  The cry came from across the prairie. A freakish coincidence or demented fate. Either way, Bishop did not have to look to know who it was but he did look anyway. And what he saw was a punch in the belly. White Fox was galloping forward . . . but not. The horse was moving hard and fast but she was slumped onto the animal, one fist full of mane, the other arm wrapped around the great neck for support. After the effort to shout, the woman slumped toward the side holding the mane.

  Bishop dropped the half-conscious Firecrow and ran toward the circle of braves. They seemed hesitant to let him out. But did, at the last moment, seeing that he would have pushed through. None went to help their leader, who was on his knees. If he rose it must be of his own effort. A leader who could not help himself was a former leader. That was ancient law.

  Bishop flung the ax into the soft ground so he would have a hand free. The horse slowed as Bishop approached. It had been looking for guidance for miles; the hand on its mane had been less and less in command. It trotted toward the man who extended his hand, palm out—a target for the big brown eyes of the stallion.

  He turned his armed side toward the animal as it slowed to a walk. He caught White Fox as she rolled from the strong back like a sack of grain whose ropes had snapped. Bishop bent under her weight, slowing her fall and laying her on the grassy earth.

  “Oh no,” he said more to himself.

  W
hite Fox’s eyes were closed. Her brow was beaded with hot sweat. Her breathing came in quick, sharp gasps. He placed his palm on her forehead, was alarmed at how feverish she was.

  “No,” he said again. Without looking away from her sweet, bloodless face he partly turned and shouted, “Water!”

  “Bish . . . op,” she said. “Another. Not you. Little . . . Hen . . . saw . . .”

  “Hush,” Bishop urged.

  White Fox closed her eyes and her mouth, in that order.

  One of the braves wheeled his mount and covered the few yards in moments. He passed down a water skin while at the same time taking the mane of the other horse. Bishop reached across his chest to take the pouch. He undid the leather knot on top with his teeth, emptied the contents in splashes onto White Fox—her face, her neck, her bare arms, her shins. He rubbed the cooling liquid in and she stirred, a little. Her eyes opened dully.

  “Bishop,” she said with a broken smile.

  “Don’t speak,” he said. He rose and turned to the disrupted circle. Firecrow was standing uncertainly in the middle. “Come around here. Create shade. At once!”

  Rubbing his throat, the Cheyenne leader translated for the others. They did as instructed while Bishop went back to retrieve the bowie. Firecrow made as if to protest but said nothing as the doctor turned and hurried back to where White Fox lay. He immediately began hacking the ground. Hacking with a fever of his own, the need to get her into cooler earth, out of the afternoon heat, as quickly as possible.

  “Firecrow! I want a blanket and long sticks,” Bishop yelled back. “Four of them!”

  The Cheyenne told a man to dismount and bring his warrior’s blanket over. He told another to take two spears to the doctor. With uncertain expression, the braves did as asked. It was not unusual for a tribe to limp home from combat. The act of having fought was more important than whether or not a victory had ensued. Courage was all; skill was relative; death proved nothing. And enemies one day, gathered around a pipe of peace, could be blood-brothered allies the next. Still, they were not used to so rapid a turnaround.

  Bishop hacked out a trench, gently lay White Fox in the dark soil. He tried not to think of it as a grave, as it had been for Randy Coward and Innocence Lee. It was the womb of Mother Earth where White Fox could be reborn. He stood and with powerful drives he plunged the native spears into the earth—top, bottom, sides.

  “Tie the blanket on top,” he instructed.

  Firefox translated but the Cheyenne had understood. Their expression now showed admiration. They did not know of this man and this woman, other than what the constable had said of the Demon. What they saw now did not appear to be any kind of a monster.

  Bishop stood back from the makeshift field hospital. He faced Firecrow, who had come over to assist.

  “I will need more water,” Bishop said. “And send a rider back to the settlement. Quickly, before the medicine is used up. Bring me a bottle from a blue box, with blue water inside.”

  Firefox moved as if to go himself but Bishop grabbed his arm.

  “No. I’ll need you to talk to the others.”

  The constable understood. He sought, selected one man. Short, light, eager. His name was Knob Pipe, and he smelled of tobacco. He was up on his steed and turned to the west even as Firecrow was finishing.

  Then Bishop, not content but content with all he could do at the moment, turned back to White Fox, sat beside her with his legs crossed, and took her hand lightly in his.

  * * *

  “Major!”

  The man on the wall had let the binoculars drop across his chest, turned to cup his hands around his mouth, shouted again into the compound.

  “Major Terry!”

  Major Burton Terry was taking his three-o’clock circuit of the compound, with his three-o’clock cigar. He turned his gray eyes toward the private who had shouted down. Bellowed around the rough stogie he had rolled himself, through his neatly clipped beard, “Yes, Private Ford?”

  “There’s a wagon just sitting on Ingham Hill,” he said. “Just sitting. Driver asleep. Looks like a man in the back. Possible uniform.”

  The tall officer, a battle scar from forehead to cheek, barked orders for two men to bring it back.

  “Search for explosives, first,” he said cautiously. “And tricks.” He was thinking first and foremost of that crackpot place they had investigated, with designs for booby traps and explosives and unearthly new devices. John Bishop was still out there, still free to work madness on the civilization he clearly hated.

  The gate was opened by the sentries there, and the men rode out on puffy clouds. Both approached wide, their sidearms drawn. There was always a chance the men were not unconscious or asleep, were not even white, were Cheyenne with a new and devious trick. Terry remembered one instance, during the war, when a pale Apache named Powder Face had infiltrated a Union camp in a Union uniform and shot three men before he was killed with a picket post shoved through his back.

  Terry watched the dust billow and fade, the gate close, the sounds of the hoof beats swallowed by distance.

  “Private?” he shouted up at the wall.

  The observer was back behind his binoculars. “No movement yet, sir,” he reported.

  Movement within the fort had slowed—imperceptibly—but apart from routine drilling and patrols, so little ever changed in here that any new business was met with a blend of anticipation and readiness. Terry was one of those Easterners, a Bostonian, who had been with the 1st Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry Regiment from 1862 on. He had taken his saber wound in the Battle of Secessionville, when the Rebels stopped the Union’s only attempt to seize Charleston by land. After six months in the hospital, Terry took to the field with a vengeance—quite literally. He hated gray. He hated treason. He hated, period. It probably had not been the best idea to read what he thought was a seafaring adventure while recovering. Growing up, he knew about whalers. Injured by “the Confederacy” he learned about white whales. But a flimsy bed in Hagerstown, Maryland, was also where he learned to make his own smokes to help fix the sight in his right eye. That was his own therapy, his own determination to work around the scar tissue that had formed on the upper and lower lids.

  “Sir!” the private called down, watching for hand signals that were crafted for and unique to this unit. “Party signals that—sir, Marshal Duffin is the passenger in the buckboard!”

  “Alive?”

  It took a moment for the private to respond. “Yes, sir!”

  “The other?”

  Another moment. “Alive—no identification. A wound on his scalp.”

  Terry’s first thought was an Indian attack, but then it wasn’t likely the two would have gotten away in a wooden cart.

  “What else are they carrying?”

  “Cargo—buggy whip. Blanket. Water cask. Some food supplies. No weapons.”

  “Undercarriage?”

  That took a longer moment. “Clean, sir.”

  “Horse?”

  “No markings, sir.”

  It was a standard checklist that the sentry could have answered without being prompted. But the major liked to keep an orderly flow to things, with himself a part of it.

  “Bring ’em in,” Terry ordered, patting his pocket for a match to relight the dead cigar. “I will see Duffin in the infirmary.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The major returned to his office. There was a detail to investigate unscheduled arrivals and sanctuary seekers. It was led by Sergeant Manat—who had been a sergeant over Terry when the young man had enlisted, stayed a sergeant after supposedly raping a Southern girl. There was no proof, though, and—Terry had investigated—no youthful issue nine months later. Manat was slavishly loyal to the man who had rescued his career from safeguarding a shuttered Union bullet factory in upstate New York.

  The giant of a noncommissioned officer strode out like Paul Bunyan, followed by four much smaller men carrying canvas bags for contents and stretchers for the two men. They wa
lked through the open gate. The wagon would be cleared before being allowed inside. As with captured Cheyenne, even wounded men were not permitted to stay together inside the fort. Nor with whatever they carried. Quarantine was a regulation, and Terry was all about the rulebook— unless it conflicted with that other book, the one about the whale. Out here, as on the sea, he was the injured commander who established and enforced policy.

  Terry went to his office but left the door open so he could hear and see what was happening outside the gate. The unit moved methodically. The two inactive souls were removed, carried at a fast walk to the doctor, who stood shielding his eyes from the slanting sun, watching from his command. He stepped aside to admit the bearers, motioning where the new arrivals were to go. Terry could not see that, but he could see Manat taking his big steps back with one thinly stuffed sack and the bullwhip, which he cracked to check its operational status. Details like that would have to go in his report. Terry liked details. Like how to turn a whale into lantern oil. Details were the true stuff of big pictures. Pull the right peg and even something as large as an Indian nation could topple in on itself.

  Pull the wrong one and it could drag you down, the Pequod with it, he reminded himself.

  Manat saluted at the door, ducked to enter.

  “Is Duffin awake?”

  “Mute as a flapjack,” Manat said. He hoisted the bag and whip. “Nothing too interesting here, as the private said. But I think you ought to go to the infirmary.”

  “When the doctor—”

  “Pardon, but before then, sir,” Manat interrupted.

  Terry sat back, puffed, waited.

  “The time you spent in Hagerstown,” the deep voice said. “You saw a lot of bad health. I want to know if you saw anything like this.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Exodus

  The Cheyenne brave, Knob Pipe, scudded his horse to a stop, dismounted in the same movement, and unshouldered a horsehide pouch as he ran over, his stumpy legs churning. He went to hand the bottle to Firecrow, who was squatting beside Bishop. Bishop remained half under the blanket holding White Fox’s hand. With a grunt and a sweep of his arm, the constable indicated that the bottle was to be handed directly to Bishop. It was a show of respect—and submission, as the defeated party—which the doctor had not been expecting.