Nathan Stark, Army Scout

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  He hadn’t gone much farther when he smelled the tang of wood smoke. The fires in the village might have all burned down to embers, but that scent would linger in the air for hours. He approached through loosely grouped aspen, being careful not to brush against the low-hanging branches too much and make them rattle together.

  The ground began to slope down gently under his feet. He paused, rested his hand on a tree trunk, and looked down into a little valley visible by starlight. A dark, meandering line of vegetation marked the course of a creek. In one bend of the stream, he saw the lodges of the Sioux, several score of them. A dark mass farther on was the pony herd, grazing in a field.

  Nathan had no proof that this was the village of Hanging Dog’s band, but he was sure it was. This was what Colonel Ledbetter was looking for. Nathan could back away, pick up Buck, and gallop back to the column, confident in the knowledge he could lead the soldiers right back there in the morning.

  But if he did that, he might not find out what had happened to Moses Red Buffalo.

  If Nathan had been able to locate the village, he had no doubt that Red Buffalo had, too. But if that was true, why hadn’t the Crow scout returned to the column with news of the discovery?

  Nathan could think of only one reason that made sense. Red Buffalo hadn’t come back because he couldn’t.

  That meant he was either dead or a prisoner right down there. Either way, Nathan wanted to know the answer.

  For a moment, however, he stayed where he was and thought about what would happen when the soldiers got there. Colonel Ledbetter claimed he wanted to negotiate with the hostiles and demand their return to the reservation. Maybe the colonel told himself that was the plan, but Nathan doubted it was what Ledbetter would actually do.

  No, it was a lot more likely that Ledbetter would order an attack without even hesitating. More than two hundred men would open fire on the village without warning, and their bullets would rip through everyone—men, women, and children alike. After killing as many of the Sioux as they could in that initial barrage, the troops would mount up again and go thundering down to finish off any adult male survivors. They would probably spare the women and children ... the ones who hadn’t been killed already.

  Nathan had seen it all before at Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita. He had been right there with the soldiers during the fighting, and he had killed a good number of the Cheyenne warriors that day. Never lost a minute’s sleep over it, either. The way he saw it, they’d had it coming. With every pull of the trigger, he had gotten a little bit more revenge for what had happened to his parents and to Rena.

  As he watched in the dark, though, he felt numb when he thought about the column attacking the Sioux village and wiping out everyone. Such slaughter wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t bring his folks or Rena back.

  Had all the years of killing finally started to wear the hatred off his soul, like a constant touch of fingertips rubbing away the gilt letters on the cover of a book? He never would have guessed that such a thing was possible, but he was unutterably weary, and he knew it had nothing to do with not getting any sleep while he searched for the village.

  You came to find out what happened to Red Buffalo, he reminded himself. It didn’t matter that Red Buffalo was an Indian. Didn’t matter that Nathan disliked him. Red Buffalo was his partner, and never before, not once, had Nathan Stark turned his back on a partner.

  He started carefully down the slope toward the Sioux camp.

  Halfway to the big cluster of lodges, a dog began barking again. Nathan froze where he was crouched next to some brush. After a few minutes, a man shouted at the dog, and a second later there was a yelp, then some whimpers that trailed off as the dog fled.

  The cur had just gotten a swift kick in the ribs. Still, that was better than winding up in a stew pot.

  As soon as things quieted down again, Nathan resumed his cautious approach to the village. If the savages had caught and killed Red Buffalo, there was no telling where they might have thrown his body. Likewise, if he was a prisoner being kept in one of the lodges, Nathan would never be able to find him. His only chance of rescuing the Crow lay in the possibility that Red Buffalo was still alive and tied up somewhere outside.

  As far as Nathan could see, no one was moving around in the village. The place was quiet and dark. There might not even be any guards out, since the Sioux probably considered themselves safe in the camp. As long as he didn’t make any noise or literally trip over one of the Indians, Nathan believed he stood a good chance of not being discovered.

  He could see no rhyme or reason to how the village was laid out. Each family had put up its lodge wherever the notion struck. Reaching the edge of the dwellings, all he could do was slip along the open areas between them, winding his way deeper into the camp as he searched for Red Buffalo.

  He paused frequently to listen for any sounds of alarm, but so far everything remained quiet. But all it would take was one warrior waking up at the wrong time and stumbling outside in the wrong place. Every time Nathan passed one of the buffalo-hide flaps that covered the entrances to the lodges, he eyed them warily, ready to duck back into the shadows.

  He hadn’t seen any sign of Red Buffalo.

  As he neared the center of the village, the smell of burned wood grew stronger. Each lodge had a fire pit in its center, but Indian villages often had large open cooking fires, as well. Nathan saw a cluster of glowing orange embers ahead of him and knew he was approaching the remains of such a fire.

  A dark shape stirred, passing between him and those embers.

  Nathan dropped to one knee and held his breath as he tried to make out what was going on. Footsteps shuffled in the dirt. Somebody was moving around.

  Nathan waited, hoping whoever it was would go away.

  He wasn’t that lucky. His eyes were well enough adjusted to the starlight that he was able to make out a vague man-shaped figure sinking down on the ground to sit cross-legged near the remains of the fire. The figure rested something across its lap. A rifle?

  Nathan peered at the area near where the man sat and realized someone else was there, stretched out motionless on the ground. No one would be lying there with a guard sitting nearby except a prisoner.

  And of all the people who might be a prisoner in that Sioux village on that night, Moses Red Buffalo was the most likely.

  A grim smile tugged at Nathan’s mouth in the darkness. If he was wrong, what he was about to do would give away his presence in the camp, but he wouldn’t know for sure until he tried. He went to hands and knees and started creeping up on the guard.

  The Indian muttered to himself. Nathan couldn’t hear him clearly enough to understand the words, but he got a definite sense that the guard wasn’t happy about being given the job. He would have preferred being curled up in a buffalo robe with his woman, instead of sitting on the hard ground watching over a prisoner.

  Nathan was close enough to be sure the sentry was sitting with his back toward him, watching the still shape beside the remains of the fire. Nathan grimaced as he wondered if the Sioux women had pulled burning brands out of that fire earlier and used them to torture Red Buffalo. That was the sort of thing those harpies would do. Anyone who spent much time on the frontier quickly learned that no matter how fierce the warriors were, the Indian women were even more cruel and vicious.

  Nathan emerged from the shadow of a tipi. Ten feet of open ground separated him from the guard. He tried to move in absolute silence as he started closer.

  A guttural voice suddenly spoke, shocking him into immobility. The words were in the Sioux tongue, but spoken with an accent that told him the speaker belonged to a different tribe.

  “The birds will come and peck your eyes out, dog, if you continue to make war on the white man,” the voice said. “You will be left dead on the battlefield, and the wolves will tear the flesh from your bones and feast upon it.”

  “Be quiet, filthy Crow,” the guard snapped. “You call me dog, but it is you
who cower before the white man and lick his hand as you beg for scraps.”

  The first voice belonged to Red Buffalo. Nathan saw him shift slightly.

  The Crow scout said, “The whites are as many as the pebbles in the beds of every stream from here to as far as a man could ride in many moons. And there is no end to them. You can kill every one on this side of the Father of Waters, and more will come. The Sioux can never drive them away.”

  “The Sioux will drive them away,” the guard insisted. “When we have spilled enough blood, the whites will grow weak in the belly and turn away, leaving the true people to live their lives again the way we always have since the world began. Our medicine men have promised that this is so.”

  “Your medicine men promise what your people want to hear,” Red Buffalo said. “Always it has been so, and always it will be. Even though many of the whites are foolish and slow to act, the time will come when they do what needs to be done.”

  Nathan realized with a shock that Red Buffalo was talking to him. The scout was talking to the Sioux guard to distract the man and keep him from noticing that Nathan was creeping up behind him. Nathan started forward again as Red Buffalo continued insulting and harassing the sentry.

  Don’t get too carried away with that, Nathan thought. If Red Buffalo angered the guard enough to make the man shout at him, that could rouse the warriors in the nearby lodges and ruin everything.

  Nathan was almost within arm’s reach of the guard and paused long enough to slip his Colt from its holster. The sound of steel against leather was only a faint whisper, covered up by Red Buffalo’s haranguing of the sentry.

  Nathan crawled a little closer as he shifted his grip on the revolver. Holding it butt forward, he raised his arm over back of the Sioux warrior’s head.

  CHAPTER 31

  In spite of Red Buffalo’s distracting conversation, as the gun in Nathan’s hand streaked toward his head, some instinct warned the guard. He started up and twisted around. Instead of a solid blow that would have knocked the Sioux cold or even cracked his skull and killed him, the Colt glanced off.

  The impact was still enough to knock the man over. As he rolled, he tried to bring the gun around toward Nathan. Even if the shot missed, it would wake up the whole camp ... and thus prove fatal to him and Red Buffalo.

  With his left hand, Nathan grabbed the rifle’s barrel and yanked on it as hard as he could. The Indian’s finger was already on the trigger, and Nathan heard him pull it desperately.

  Nothing happened.

  In that split second, Nathan realized the guard had failed to work the Winchester’s lever and throw a cartridge into the chamber before he sat down to keep an eye on Red Buffalo. At the late hour, the man was probably the second or even the third warrior to stand guard, and his grogginess had betrayed him and made him careless.

  Nathan suddenly threw his weight against the weapon and drove it backwards, ramming the stock into the man’s belly. That forced the air out of the guard’s lungs and kept him from shouting as Nathan threw himself forward again and slashed at the guard’s head with the gun butt. The blow landed the way he wanted it to ... with a solid thud that rippled back up his arm.

  The guard quivered once as he stretched out on the ground, then lay silent and motionless. There was a good chance he was dead, or at least out cold, and Nathan didn’t care which. He intended to be out of there with Red Buffalo before it was even possible for the guard to regain consciousness.

  Nathan flipped the gun around, shoved it back in the holster, pulled his knife from its sheath on his left hip, and crawled quickly over to Red Buffalo, who was squirming around and trying to sit up.

  “Just stay still,” Nathan told him in a whisper. Strips of rawhide had been used to lash Red Buffalo’s ankles together, and he went to work on them with the knife he kept sharpened to a razor keenness. Although those bindings were tough, he was able to saw through them fairly quickly.

  Red Buffalo’s wrists were tied together behind his back. Nathan told him to roll onto his side so he could reach them.

  “Try not to slash my wrists,” Red Buffalo whispered.

  “Try not moving, and I’ll be less likely to.” Nathan worked the blade under the rawhide strips and moved the edge back and forth. “How bad are you hurt? Can you walk?”

  “I can run, if I have to. Hurry.”

  “First you tell me to be careful, now you tell me to hurry. There just isn’t any satisfying you, is there, redskin?”

  “If you handled a knife like an Indian instead of a white man, I would be free by now.”

  The bindings came apart.

  Nathan said, “Well, there you go. Let’s get out of here.”

  Red Buffalo sat up and brought his arms around in front of him. He rolled his shoulders and flexed his hands to get the blood flowing properly again. “I have to find my horse. It should be with the rest of the ponies. ”

  “How about you just grab a horse? We don’t have time to sort out all of ’em while you look for a particular one.”

  “That horse and I have ridden many trails together,” Red Buffalo snapped. “Would you want to leave your buckskin?”

  Nathan supposed he had a point about that, although he still didn’t like the idea of hanging around the Sioux camp any longer than was absolutely necessary. He sheathed the knife, straightened to his feet, and extended a hand to Red Buffalo. “Come on.”

  If the Crow was surprised that Nathan would offer to help him up, he didn’t show it. Old hostilities had a way of receding into the background when a fellow was surrounded by enemies. He and Nathan clasped wrists.

  Red Buffalo stumbled a little as Nathan hauled him to his feet. “Feet still feel like chunks of wood. The Sioux tied me too tight.”

  “I doubt if they were worried about making you comfortable.”

  The horse herd was on the far side of the camp from where Nathan had left Buck, which chafed at him even more. On the other hand, as tired as the buckskin was, Nathan couldn’t expect him to carry double for any length of time, and certainly not with any speed. Maybe they could find Red Buffalo’s pony fairly quickly. All he knew for sure was that he was itching to get away before they were discovered.

  They weaved through the camp quickly but carefully, staying in the shadows wherever possible. There was still a chance they would run into some early riser. Dawn was several hours away, but the eastern sky was beginning to lighten in places.

  “You should have cut that guard’s throat, just to make sure he was dead,” Red Buffalo said. “If he wakes up, he will raise the alarm.”

  “I hit him hard enough he won’t be waking up any time soon, if ever.”

  “You still should have cut his throat.”

  “You sound like a bloodthirsty Injun,” Nathan said, grinning in the darkness.

  “I didn’t like the Sioux to start with. After the way they’ve treated me, I’m even less fond of them.”

  “Well, hell, they didn’t kill you.”

  “No, they were enjoying themselves too much working up to it.”

  They reached the edge of the village. The nearest of the grazing ponies was about fifty yards away ... fifty yards of open ground along the creek bank that Nathan and Red Buffalo would have to cross. If anyone in the camp happened to look in that direction, they were bound to be spotted.

  There was also the chance that the horses might spook as the two men approached and make enough racket to rouse the village. That couldn’t be helped.

  “There,” Red Buffalo said, pointing. “That’s my horse.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “He still has the saddle on. Sioux ponies don’t wear a white man’s saddle.”

  Even under the desperate circumstances, Nathan couldn’t resist a gibe directed at the Crow scout. “So you’re saying that something the white men came up with is a good thing?”

  “Stay back. I don’t want you upsetting those ponies with your white man’s stink.”

  Nathan almost l
aughed. He had to give Red Buffalo credit. He could give as good as he got.

  While Red Buffalo drew closer to the horse herd, Nathan turned and kept an eye on the camp. Everything appeared to be quiet and peaceful back there. Difficult as it was to believe, they were getting pretty close to a successful escape.

  Just as Nathan was thinking they’d get away, someone in the village let out an angry shout. More yelling followed immediately. Either the guard had regained consciousness sooner than Nathan expected, or else somebody had discovered him.

  Either way, the Sioux would realize in seconds that their prisoner was gone, and they would fan out to look for him.

  The horses stirred behind him, blowing and snorting. Nathan looked over his shoulder and saw the animals spooking as Red Buffalo lunged toward his pony and reached out for the trailing reins. He missed with his first grab.

  If the horse stampeded away—

  Red Buffalo snagged the reins on his second attempt. He tightened up on them and grasped the saddle horn as he tried to steady the horse. His foot found the stirrup and he swung up.

  At a distance of twenty yards, Nathan saw that and kept glancing back and forth. Men with torches moved around the Sioux village. Some of them ran toward the horse herd, no doubt suspecting that the escaping prisoner would try to get his hands on a mount.

  In the other direction, Red Buffalo wheeled his pony around to face away from Nathan. All he had to do was jab his heels into the animal’s flanks to send it galloping away. Nathan might be able to catch one of the other horses, but it was doubtful.

  He could pull his gun and keep the Sioux occupied while Red Buffalo got away. He would sell his life dearly, by taking as many of the savages with him as he possibly could.

  Before he could make any decisions, hoofbeats pounded nearby and Red Buffalo called, “Stark! Come on!”

  Nathan turned and saw the Crow scout riding hard toward him. Red Buffalo’s right hand was extended as he leaned from the saddle. Nathan didn’t waste any more time thinking. He ran to meet Red Buffalo and reached up. They caught at each other’s wrists. Nathan’s feet came off the ground as he leaped and Red Buffalo pulled at the same time.