Nathan Stark, Army Scout

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

Nathan didn’t allow himself to think too much about that.

  As dusk settled over the landscape, they rode into a grove of aspen along a creek. The trees would give them a good place to camp and plenty of cover if any hostiles came along. No fire tonight, Nathan reflected. A large, well-armed force like the column from Fort Randall could build cooking fires when they called a halt, but two men out on their own in Sioux country couldn’t afford to take that chance.

  They picketed their horses, unsaddled the animals, and spread blankets on the ground underneath the trees. In the morning they would refill their canteens from the creek, but they had enough water to wash down the jerky and hard biscuits in their saddlebags.

  Nathan propped his back against a tree trunk and stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. The shadows were thick enough that he could still see Red Buffalo but not make out many details. He swallowed a bite of biscuit, then said, “You’re eating like a white man. How come you’re not gnawing on a hunk of pemmican?”

  “I like white man’s food. Couldn’t you tell that from our supper at Mrs. Blaine’s?”

  “Don’t remind me of that,” Nathan said with a scowl. Knowing Red Buffalo probably couldn’t see his face any better than he could see the Crow’s, he glared anyway.

  “You are the one who asked the question. Truly, though, I have never cared for pemmican. Are there no foods eaten by white men that you find unappetizing?”

  “Plenty of ’em.” Nathan thought about it for a moment. “I never have understood why anybody would ever think it was a good idea to eat brussels sprouts.”

  Red Buffalo laughed softly. “I do not know what that is, but I admit, they don’t sound very good to me.”

  “But I do like a good buffalo steak.”

  “So do I.”

  Nathan asked himself what the hell he was doing, sitting there talking to Red Buffalo almost like he and the savage were friends. Sure, they had been thrown together and forced to fight side by side, and more than likely Red Buffalo was his only ally within ten or fifteen miles, but that didn’t mean he had to be pleasant toward the redskinned son of a bitch.

  “How long have you had that horse?” Red Buffalo asked, taking Nathan by surprise.

  “Buck?”

  “That’s what you call him ... because he’s a buckskin, I suppose.”

  “What the hell else would I call him?”

  Red Buffalo said, “I once met a man who named all his horses Horse and all his dogs Dog. He claimed it was simpler that way, and since it worked, he saw no reason to change the habit.”

  That sounded familiar to Nathan, and after a moment he realized why. “You’re talking about that old mountain man, the one they call Preacher.”

  “You know him?” Red Buffalo asked.

  “Never met the man, which is sort of surprising, since to hear folks tell it he’s done everything and been everywhere out here on the frontier. But our trails have never crossed. I’m not surprised yours have, though. I seem to recall hearing that he never got along real well with the Blackfeet, either.”

  “They have long been his mortal enemies. Years ago, when I was a young man, I met him and another mountain man, a fellow named MacCallister. They were tracking down some outlaws.” Red Buffalo grunted. “I would not want to have those two on my trail.”

  “No, I reckon not. I’ve heard of MacCallister, too. Pretty salty hombre.”

  “For a man to survive out here, often he has to be.” The Crow paused. “You did not answer my question about your horse.”

  “Buck and I been together, oh, five years now, I’d say. I bought him off a fella in Colorado who couldn’t handle him. Buck was young and pretty high-spirited in those days. The man who owned him took a whip to him. Buck didn’t take kindly to that, and neither did I.”

  “So you came to the horse’s aid.”

  “Let’s just say I showed that fella the error of his ways,” Nathan drawled. “Then I dropped a couple double eagles on his chest while he was out cold and took Buck in return.” Nathan snorted. “Hell, that bastard should’ve paid me for saving his life. If he’d kept on mistreating Buck like that, Buck would’ve killed him sooner or later.”

  “You are kind to animals, then.”

  Nathan said sharply, “Animals never did me any harm. Never saw a point to shooting any of them except to eat, or to make a coat or a robe out of.”

  “Another way in which we agree.”

  Anger sparked inside Nathan. He knew good and well what Red Buffalo was up to. The Crow was goading him by pointing out the ways in which they were alike, along with the contradiction between Nathan’s kind heart toward animals and his burning desire to kill Indians. Red Buffalo was like Delia—he thought he could sort of steer Nathan around to feeling differently about things.

  Not gonna happen. Nathan’s voice was curt when he said, “I’ll take the first watch.”

  “All right. I do not believe we are in any danger from the Sioux . . . yet ... but we cannot ignore that possibility.”

  Nathan didn’t say anything. He finished his sparse meal, drank some more water from his canteen, and tried not to think about how good a cup of hot, black coffee would taste. He picked up his Winchester, which he had placed on the ground beside him when he sat down, and stood up to move deeper into the trees, where the thick shadows would conceal him.

  The night was quiet enough that within a few minutes he heard deep, regular breathing as the Crow scout slept. Red Buffalo had the frontiersman’s knack of being able to fall asleep almost right away when the opportunity presented itself.

  Nathan tucked the rifle under his left arm and leaned his shoulder against a tree. After a long day in the saddle, he was weary but not particularly sleepy. His brain was too full of thoughts, most of them about everything that had happened since he’d come to Fort Randall. Cullen’s departure, the alternately happy and strained reunion with Delia, the forced and unwelcome partnership with Moses Red Buffalo, the mysterious attempts on his life ... and the quite possibly ill-advised campaign against the Sioux.

  Nathan didn’t necessarily believe it was a mistake for the army to go after Hanging Dog. The war chief needed to be brought to heel before he could stir things up even more. It was the fact that Colonel Wesley Stuart Ledbetter was in charge that worried Nathan. He had seen the combination of ambition, inexperience, and downright incompetence before. When a commanding officer like that marched out into the field against the enemy, he nearly always got men killed.

  Nathan didn’t trust Dietrich Bucher, either. To be honest, Nathan had never witnessed the German doing anything to question whether he could handle the job of a scout. It was more a matter of how Bucher just rubbed him the wrong way. Nathan’s gut said not to trust the German. And Nathan had learned to rely on his gut’s wisdom.

  His forehead creased as another worry occurred to him. While he was at the fort, he had done his best to avoid and ignore those four Sioux boys who worked in the stables. They had seldom even crossed his mind.

  But in the quiet of the night their presence at Fort Randall was more troubling. With a depleted company of around a hundred men left there to protect the place, the post would make a mighty tempting target if Hanging Dog ever found out just how few defenders were on hand. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all for Billy or one of those other young heathens to slip away and ride upriver in search of his people. All he’d have to do was find Hanging Dog and tell him what was going on, and then Hanging Dog could lead a horde of bloodthirsty savages down on the fort where Delia and all those other helpless women and children were.

  Son of a bitch, Nathan thought as his jaw clenched so tight it was painful. He should have told Colonel Ledbetter that he wasn’t going along on the campaign. He should have stayed at the fort to keep an eye on things, and if Ledbetter didn’t like it, well ... Nathan could have told him to go climb a stump.

  He’d had just about enough of the army, anyway.

  Those thoughts filled h
is head, but his senses were still fully alert, working at a high level without conscious awareness. He realized suddenly that something was wrong. A hint of a smell caught on the night breeze, a tiny sound ... he couldn’t pin it down, but whatever it was made him turn sharply toward the place where he had left Red Buffalo sleeping.

  He had just started to move when the roar of a gunshot filled the night.

  CHAPTER 28

  Nathan ran through the woods with the Winchester held at a slant across his chest. More shots boomed, and he could tell by the sound that they came from two different guns. Muzzle flame licked back and forth in the darkness. Nathan thought he knew which of the flashes marked Red Buffalo’s position, but it was hard to be sure and he didn’t want to blunder right into an enemy.

  He stopped, put his back against a tree trunk, and during a lull in the firing called, “Red Buffalo! Sing out!”

  “Here, Stark!” the Crow replied, confirming Nathan’s guess about his position.

  “Who’s that shooting at you?”

  “I have no idea, but he missed!”

  Two more shots hammered out from the unknown gunman and thudded into a tree trunk. Nathan had him spotted and dropped to one knee. He brought the Winchester to his shoulder and squeezed off three rounds one after the other, working the rifle’s lever quickly between shots. He placed them around the spot where he had caught a glimpse of orange flame from the ambusher’s gun.

  It seemed like there were a lot of cowardly back shooters in that part of the country, and he was getting damned sick and tired of it. The life he had led had made him accustomed to people trying to kill him, but most of the time his enemies were right in front of him, not behind him.

  More booming shots blasted from Red Buffalo’s revolver. Return fire spurted from the shadows. Nathan snapped two more rounds in that direction.

  The bushwhacker had had enough. As echoes died away, Nathan heard something splash through the creek, then the rapid drumming of a horse’s hooves as the hidden gunman fled.

  Waiting until the sound had faded away into the distance, Nathan finally called to Red Buffalo, “You reckon there was only one of them?”

  “I saw muzzle flashes from only one gun,” the Crow replied.

  “Were you hit?”

  “No. The first bullet came close, but shooting in such bad light is tricky.”

  Nathan knew that from experience, all right. He thought about the situation. If there had been two bushwhackers, one could have opened up first to draw the fire of their quarry, then fled to make Nathan and Red Buffalo believe they were safe. There could be another man lurking in the shadows in absolute silence, just waiting for a good shot at them.

  Even though that was a possibility, Nathan knew he and his companion would have to move sometime. After another five minutes had passed with no sign of danger, he stood up and walked toward Red Buffalo’s position. “Don’t get hasty on the trigger. It’s me.”

  Red Buffalo stepped out from behind a tree. “You are unharmed as well?”

  “That’s right. I’m gonna take a look around and see if I can find anything that’ll tell us something about that varmint.”

  “I will check on the horses. Neither of them made any noise of being hurt, but there were quite a few bullets flying around.”

  That was true, and Nathan was grateful that Red Buffalo was going to make sure Buck hadn’t been hit. He moved quietly toward the spot where he had seen the ambusher’s muzzle flashes, and when he thought he was in the right place, he slipped a lucifer from his shirt pocket and snapped it into life with his thumbnail.

  Nathan had his eyes squinted against the light before he ignited the match, so it didn’t blind him. He held it up high enough for its flickering glow to fall over the ground and caught a glimpse of a reflection in the soft duff under the trees. He leaned his rifle against a trunk and bent to pick up the object he had found. It was an empty .44-40 cartridge, which told him exactly nothing since there were thousands, maybe millions, of them around on the frontier. It was the most common load for Winchester repeaters. Nathan’s own rifle carried them.

  The lucifer burned down and he struck another as he hunkered there, studying the ground. Catching sight of something else, he leaned forward and frowned. The bushwhacker had left part of a footprint behind, and from the sharp edges caused by the foot pressing down into the earth, he knew the track was left by a man wearing a boot, not a moccasin. That wasn’t absolute proof the ambusher had been a white man, since some of the Sioux wore boots they had stolen off the bodies of slain settlers, but it was more likely the lurking gunman hadn’t been an Indian.

  Nathan found a few more empty shells but no other footprints. He went back to the camp where Red Buffalo waited for him. “Horses all right?”

  “Both fine,” was the reply. “What did you find?”

  “Just some .44-40 shells, and we both know the hombre was using a rifle from the sound of it. And some boot tracks.”

  Red Buffalo drew in a sharp breath. “Boot tracks,” he repeated. “A white man.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.” Grudgingly, Nathan went on. “But shooting at a fella in the dark isn’t usually the way a redskin does things.”

  “My people prefer to attack their enemies openly, other than skulking dogs such as the Apaches.”

  Nathan laughed.

  “Something amuses you?” Red Buffalo asked coolly.

  “You look down on some of the tribes, too. You so-called noble red men aren’t really any better than anybody else, are you?”

  “We are all people, good and bad alike. But I believe our history displays less treachery and dishonor than that of the whites.”

  “Believe whatever you want,” Nathan said. “I believe I’d like to know who it is that keeps trying to kill me.”

  “Those shots were aimed at me,” Red Buffalo pointed out.

  “Only because you’re with me. That varmint wanted to kill both of us, and you know it.”

  After a moment, the Crow admitted, “You are probably correct. We have more enemies out here than just Hanging Dog and his warriors, Stark.”

  Nathan just grunted. He was getting tired of agreeing with Red Buffalo, but he knew the other scout was right.

  * * *

  The rest of the night passed without incident. In the morning they ate another cold, unsatisfying breakfast, filled their canteens at the stream, and saddled up.

  “Who goes on and who rides back to find Bucher and the rest of the column?” Nathan asked. That was different, he realized. In the past, he had simply decided such things based on what he wanted, without caring what Red Buffalo’s opinion was.

  “I will go ahead,” the Crow said. “If any of the Sioux see me, they will be more likely to believe I am some lone brave passing through this area, and no threat to them.”

  Nathan frowned dubiously, but he supposed Red Buffalo was right. Any Indians who spotted a lone white man would go after him with no hesitation, figuring it would be an easy kill.

  “If you find Hanging Dog’s village, backtrack and let us know,” Nathan said. “Otherwise the column will just continue to follow these tracks.”

  Red Buffalo nodded. He wheeled his pony and rode along the creek at a leisurely pace without looking back, following the tracks left several days earlier.

  Son of a bitch didn’t even say good-bye, Nathan thought, then asked himself why he would care about such a thing. He turned Buck and rode back the way they had come.

  By midmorning, he saw the dust haze hanging in the air ahead of him and knew that marked the column’s location. Sure enough, half an hour later a man on horseback came into view. Nathan recognized Dietrich Bucher’s derby hat and burly shape. Both scouts reined in as they rode up to each other.

  Bucher said, “The column is half a mile behind me. Red Buffalo has continued tracking the Sioux?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You did not locate their village?”

  “Not yet,” N
athan said. “We probably still have a ways to go.”

  “No trouble, then.”

  That was an odd thing to say, Nathan thought. Almost like Bucher expected something to have happened. Nathan shrugged a little and shook his head. “Nope. We didn’t run into any problems.”

  Bucher scowled, but only for a second then he forced a grin and said, “Das ist gut. Come on. We will report to Colonel Ledbetter.”

  Nathan lifted his reins and nudged Buck into motion. Bucher had looked puzzled and confused for a moment, and that was mighty interesting. Nathan glanced over at the German as Bucher fell in alongside him. Bucher didn’t seem to be paying much attention to him, but that could easily be a ruse.

  Within minutes they came in sight of the column. Colonel Ledbetter saw them coming and raised a hand in a signal to stop. As the column ground to a halt, Ledbetter rode on out to intercept the scouts, accompanied by Captain Lucas.

  “We’re still on the right trail, Stark?” the colonel asked without any greeting.

  “We are, Colonel,” Nathan replied. “Red Buffalo’s gone ahead. He’ll be trying to locate the Sioux village or at least make sure we haven’t lost the trail.”

  “The sooner we find those hostiles and deal with them, the better,” Ledbetter snapped. “Deal with them harshly, I might add.”

  “I figure they’ll be trying to deal harshly with us if they find us first,” Nathan drawled.

  Ledbetter frowned. “No ragtag band of savages will ever be a match for the best fighting men and the finest officers the country can muster.”

  The problem with that boastful declaration was that while Companies G and H were, for the most part, experienced soldiers, there was no guarantee they were the best fighting men in the country. Despite his hatred for the redskins, Nathan was pragmatic enough to know that most of them didn’t suck hind tit to anybody when it came to fighting.

  He was damned sure that particular assemblage of soldiers wasn’t being commanded by the finest officer the army had to offer, but there was no point in saying that to Ledbetter’s face. Such an opinion would run smack-dab into the brick wall of the colonel’s arrogance.