In this instance, the leather cup had eaten his flesh raw. Bishop and White Fox had found themselves in a cave, a huge, yawning smile beneath a jagged slope of blue rock, sheeted by snow and protected by daggers of ice formed by the flowing water flowing from up-mountain. Sequestered there from trouble—from the trouble that had caused the arm its discomfort—White Fox had loosened the ties that held the cup tight to Bishop’s arm, and pulled the entire rig away, revealing a bleeding stump. She had fed him what little mescal remained in the heel of the bottle they had, and Bishop’s head lolled back as she checked the arm for fresh wounds. Nothing had opened up too badly, but he remembered her examining the corrupted skin and muscle that was a knot around the bone. He watched her check, check closely, without flinching, to make sure that none of the crude surgical scars lacing it together had ruptured. The blood was smeared from small wounds around the elbow, where the amputation point met the healthy rest of the arm. White Fox had swabbed away the streaks of wet red.
Bishop could still hear himself saying, in the mescal-rough voice, “I’m the doc, but you’re the surgeon.”
And he could hear White Fox reply, as she dressed the wound with salve and wrapped, “I still am, Bish-op.”
It wasn’t long ago, just—weeks? Yet it seemed as if it had been years the two had been a team. A unit.
A couple?
Bishop kept returning to the idea, angry that he denied it out of loyalty to his dead wife. As long as White Fox accepted that, and him, he did not try to fight it.
A blubbering sound from Avery’s cheeks, beneath the mask, snapped Bishop to the present. He looked at the man’s eyes, waited, hoping. He put the back of his hand on the man’s forehead. There was fever but it was not as high as in the doctor’s ledger.
“Avery.” Bishop leaned nearer and said it again. “Avery.”
There was no response as such. But the man sighed from deep in his throat. The airway had opened. Bishop got more rum, poured it through the mask so it would reach his tongue and nose. The man sighed again, then his head moved a little from side to side.
Bishop went to the open door. His “honor” guard was still there. “One of you get the major. I think one of our patients is waking.”
The former lieutenant sat back down, watched as Avery’s eyeballs moved a little beneath the lids. Major Terry charged in, pulling on his mask, and stood beside Bishop. Dr. Gibson followed. All saw the man coming to life and watched without speaking.
And then the beady eyes opened and teared from both sides and squinted in the light and tried to focus.
They saw Gibson without recognition. They saw Terry—the same. And then they saw John Bishop.
That was the greatest balm of all.
* * *
It was not an army.
At a total of thirty-two souls, plus one leader, it did not have the manpower, discipline, or boundaries to defend. It lacked artillery and ships. There was no flag. The clothing was more or less identical yet no one would call them the Muddy Linens uniforms. But this fighting force had something that few armies possess: just one target to defeat. The only soul in the territory with the mind and experience to stop him. And, failing that, the leader of this army had a disaster scenario that would still achieve his goal. The goal of the megalomaniacal mind, as even he himself would admit.
The forced march of the makeshift cavalry began at dawn. Smith and his whip were in the lead, Cavanaugh beside but slightly behind him, everyone else in a column of two. The general, Weiber-Krauss, was in the rear. Each man was armed with a repeating rifle, two six-shooters, one hundred rounds of ammunition, and a bayonet. There were canteens in the trunk on the back of the black buggy Weiber-Krauss drove. He also had his Bible, his map, and duty roster of the fort, bought from a chicken farmer who had delivered eggs to the place until beak necrosis killed his livelihood . . . and his glass globes. The ones with toxins. Enough poison, in each, to make dozens sick directly and thousands or more by contact with the ill. Those were in a carpetbag at his feet.
The plan of action was simple. They were riding west to find one person. And, finding that person, they would use her to bring John Bishop to them. It did not have to be quickly, though he suspected it would be. Weiber-Krauss intended to leave White Fox with the Muddy Linens until John Bishop showed up and then died. Their only instructions would be to make sure she did not escape . . . and not to kill her. He needed her alive. Smith would be there to supervise. As the Muddy Linens knew, he could flick a bug from a sleeping man without waking the man.
“Imagine,” Weiber-Krauss had reminded them, “what he could do to your private members if you do irreparable harm to the squaw.”
The men rode with the rising sun, as if the solar orb were their guiding light and guardian spirit. They rode if not proudly, then at least with interest in their work and eyes on the multiple prizes.
Weiber-Krauss and his nearly two-score men did not try to conceal themselves or their journey. The only force capable of stopping them would be under quarantine by now, not permitted by regulation to ride out. And Major Burton Terry was a man of regulations. The chicken farmer had assured Weiber-Krauss of that too.
A march played in Weiber-Krauss’s head as he watched the tail end of his militia. It was the Radetzky Opus 228, composed by Johann Strauss Sr. in honor of Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radetz. Weiber-Krauss had heard the great work when he was a boy, at its debut in Vienna in August 1848. It was the first music he remembered, and Weiber-Krauss considered it his.
He was annoyed, still, at those who had failed him. But the beauty of Anton Weiber-Krauss III was that he refused to rely solely on any one person for anything. Therein lay disaster—with one exception.
Weiber-Krauss had never let himself down.
* * *
“Bi-Bishop?”
It was not a word John Bishop ever expected to enjoy being puffed from the mouth of Mayor-Sheriff Avery. But this was an exception. And it was the second time that day the moody avenger smiled. First for White Fox, now for this antagonist. Days did not come any stranger.
“It’s John,” Bishop said.
“We . . . we are both . . . dead?”
“Not dead,” Bishop assured him.
Avery squinted up at the other man’s mask, put thick fingers on his own face, felt the fabric there. “Wha-what?”
“You were infected with a highly contagious disease,” Bishop said evenly. “You are mending. The rest of us do not wish to catch it.”
The big bald head nodded. “That . . . creature.”
Bishop’s expression darkened slightly. “Tell us.”
Avery’s eyes looked away, took in the others. “Who . . . ?”
“Major Terry, the commander of Fort Collins—that’s where you are—and his medical officer Dr. Gibson. Who saved you.”
Avery was still disoriented. Bishop had to bring him into focus.
“Someone put you in a cart with Marshal Duffin. He is still unconscious and may not recover. Who did this? And where?”
Avery jabbed a fat index finger toward Bishop. “You . . . know.”
“I know?” Bishop shook his head, not comprehending. Then, suddenly, he did understand. “I know him. Is that what you’re saying?”
Avery’s chins nodded; his head stayed deep in the pillow. “Bastard.”
His eyes began to close. He turned, picked the rum up from the floor where he’d left it, right beside his gun-arm. He poured a long glug through the mask, intentionally making Avery gag. The man coughed, his head rising as his chest convulsed. It was uncultivated bedside manner but it kept Avery from drifting.
“Who is the bastard?” Bishop demanded.
Avery cleared his throat once, then again, then a third time. His eyes opened, a little livelier now.
“German. Name . . . Weiber-Krauss.”
* * *
Little Hen was upset to have been moved from White Fox’s tepee to a smaller one with another little girl. But Knob Pipe promise
d she would be allowed to return as soon as the woman was well.
The chubby little Gray Bird had also been sick and she breathed too loudly for Little Hen to be able to rest. So Knob Pipe allowed her to take a blanket and lie where the horses were kept, at least during the hours of sunlight.
Little Hen liked it out here. There was no smoke, nothing closing her in. Lying under the blue sky, the girl remembered the fire. She did not want to; she preferred to look at the eagles. But the fire came, like it came then, burning through everything in its way.
She remembered getting in the river with her mother, but falling trees, fire, forced them to go to the middle where the water was fast and deep. Her mother was lost in a raid. Little Hen floated. The fire still burned and she could not come ashore. There were places where trees hung over the water. A few had berries. Her mother had shown her how to pick the ones that would not make you ill.
And then, just before dark, she saw the Demon. It floated by her on its back. There was a large hole in its chest, a pair of black birds nesting inside, picking at strings of tissue. One side of the Demon was a little more under the water. In the glow of the fire she could see the orange-silver glint of a gun. The Demon was so stiff it just turned and turned as it passed by. And then she saw its eyes, open, staring at her. One of the birds cawed her off.
Fire and the dead, like the old woman without teeth, xaaméné, Smiling Face, was always talking about. Around the campfire, making shadows with her fingers, using words that painted horrible detail in those black images. Words that told of a place where bad children and frightened men and disobedient wives were sent to burn for all time and be eaten by buzzards. Where each new day their picked-off flesh would grow back so it could be bitten away all over.
“If the demons of this dark place, this , should see you, you must hide!” the woman had exclaimed. “Hope that they pass you by and then make yourself a better child so that they may not come again.”
As the Demon passed, its cold metal hand touched her leg under the water, and the birds roused, splashing her with its wet, red insides . . . the little girl had run. Run to the log bobbing at a place where the shore had eroded and a tree had fallen. Crawled inside, tearing shredded wood flakes from the pulpy interior. Bleeding as they scraped her, bleeding from her fingertips, putting her fingers into her mouth to send the scream back down her throat so the hávêsévemâhta’sóoma would not hear her. She held her legs together, tightly, so it would not smell her as dogs did one another. She pulled herself into a ball so tight inside this space so narrow that she felt like the wood grubs she used to watch as they coiled whitely in and out of trees.
Little Hen did not fear the fire, now. Or the Demon. She was safe again under happy skies. She was loved by White Fox, by the funny little Knob Pipe who walked and scowled like she imagined the vo’estane-hesono did. The race of little men that Smiling Face used to tell of. Angry dwarves who mined precious metals, lived in the mountains, and made war with the Cheyenne when the sky was dark and the moon was hidden. White Fox and Knob Pipe would care for Little Hen until her mother and father returned.
Thinking of her parents, of her home, caused her eyes to grow heavy. She slept with the first smile she had known since her mother swam away. She remembered something else, too, that Smiling Face had once said.
“The Earth is the mother of us all. She will never leave us orphans.”
* * *
Knob Pipe gave White Fox another few drops of blue medicine, poured water between her lips, and then left the tepee. He pulled his pipe from its pouch on his belt, scooped in tobacco leaves, pressed them down with his little finger, and walked to a campfire to light it. He had wanted to hit the one-armed man with a club when he spoke of the spirits of illness. The little man had been to a talk at Fort Collins about hygiene. The boy doctor, Gibson, had told them about treating diseases that marked the skin.
However, the Cheyenne was pleased that Bishop knew enough to stop this plague. White Fox was no longer shivering, and the few blotches that had appeared were not joined by others. It appeared that most in the camp would be well again.
As Bishop had also instructed, as many people as possible had been placed in the open air. The sun was low in the sky and there was a chill in the air. He went to check on Little Hen by the corral. For all the doctoring knowledge Bishop possessed, he did not think to allow nature to heal nature. The horses, immune to this sickness as White Fox’s mounts had proven, had their own power and health to give. Any rider knew that, mounting, the spirit of the horse infused him with increased strength and courage. He felt that Little Hen would benefit there. Children did not yet possess the schooling that shielded them from real knowledge.
The settlement was unusually quiet because of all those who were not up and about, cooking dinner, tending to family, playing games, discussing tribal politics loudly and often angrily. There were few campfires, adding a shroud to the ordinarily proud array of tepees with their painted sides and the bold statements they made, the sagas they told.
Knob Pipe had lived for thirty summers or more. He had dwelt in many fields and foothills and in the lower mountains where the snows remained year-round. His bowlegs had straddled many a stallion. He knew a horse the instant he mounted; he knew a place the moment he arrived; he knew before entering his tepee when his wife Bright Fawn was less than glowing. That was one reason he so often smoked. It gave him something else to think about. The smooth smoke of the red leaves briefly obscured the world and its struggles large and small.
The Cheyenne walked from the corral to the field surrounded by chicken wire, the plot where the Indians grew their tobacco and vegetables. The tobacco was used for trade at the fort and trading post. It was the longest Knob Pipe had been anywhere, in his life. Moving here, moving there. Sometimes by famine or drought, sometimes by the cavalry, sometimes by the Arapaho, sometimes by the restless feet of a chief or medicine man who was searching for something. Searching and made everyone else go with him. That was one thing he admired about the white man. Alone or with a family, they went where they chose. Communities were built for their permanence—though that did not always work, as Good Fortune had proven. He had been there twice, once during the silver boom and once after. The first time was life. The second time—
A dead place is a grave. All those white corpses waiting to be buried—that was something a Cheyenne was too wise to do.
He rounded the field and was struck by the stillness out here as well. He looked back at the settlement, curiosity dipping his brow. It was as though a storm was coming but the skies were beginning to fleck with stars. Peering intently to the east he noticed a pale spot of yellow that was not, could not be, the sun—which clung to life in the foothills behind him.
He felt it. Someone was coming. Many someones. Many horses. A dog barked; he smelled it, heard it, saw it too. Knob Pipe did not believe that the white man was bringing more medicines. Overturning his pipe, the man stomped smoldering tobacco into the ground. Then he ran toward the tepee where the chief would be offering his thanks for the recovery of his people and praying for guidance.
Typically, a chief asked for the spirits to talk to him while he slept. Knob Pipe feared that they would not have so long. As he ran, the radiance of the false sun expanded, growing on the wings of many torches.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
An Uncivil War
The name was a shock wave, like the recoil of his arm. It was as though, in that moment, cloud struck cloud, producing rain and thunder. Worlds collided, the past and present. The healthy and the unhealthy . . . and he was not thinking about the patients they jointly treated. It was the mind of a man who was willing to sacrifice the ill to learn more about cures.
Try this. Try that. Heat them. Freeze them. Transfuse them with the healthy until they were well. Transfuse those giving blood with others. Set up a line of bloody tubes, cot to cot to cot. Anton Weiber-Krauss had a mind as active as Santorini, which burned for four years. A mind with tho
ughts that were as dark as that volcano’s clouds.
Bishop had stepped outside, pulled off his mask, leaned his hand against the guardrail for support. Major Terry followed him. He waved away the rifle squad, which was showing signs of fatigue.
“What is it?” the officer asked, hooking his own mask away with a finger. “Who is this Weiber-Krauss?”
“A brilliant madman,” Bishop replied. “I should have recognized the signs. But I thought he was gone.”
“Gone where? What signs—”
“Shut up,” the doctor snapped. “This is not a bayonet charge, Major.” He turned to the officer. “I’m sorry. You’ve been very patient. Trusting.” He shook his head, looked back across the torch-lit compound. “He is a medical doctor who was, is, obsessed with disease. If sickness were a woman, he would be bringing it flowers after each epidemic.”
“Your man in there said something about Lady Freemont.”
“The mine,” Bishop said.
“Right. That’s where I heard it. Outside of Good Fortune.”
Bishop nodded. “He must have set up a laboratory there. Experimented. Tested what he bred on—on human subjects. And when he was happy with the results, he floated some of them down the river to test them on the Cheyenne. I suspect the first test was to transmit disease by water. The second”—he cocked his head toward the infirmary—“airborne.”
“Good Jesus Christ.” The shock wave had finally hit Major Terry. “What the hell do we do?”
Bishop was thinking. “Those globes at the shack, the grenades. He tested those there too. Infected the blacksmith. Then killed him to implicate me.”
These Violent Times Page 20
