Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (41 page)

“Following horse thieves.”

“You catch any?” Jack asked.

Waller wagged a finger for the two scouts to follow him. He stopped by the canvas wagon shroud and pulled it back to expose two white men, lashed back to back in the dark, out of the cold.

“Shut that flap, nigger!” one of them snapped.

“Damn you, Sergeant Coon—that wind's cold!” the other growled. “You give me a knife, I'll show you whose balls I can cut off, boy!”

Waller dropped the canvas and turned to his friends, smiling.

“What's this all about?” Stillwell asked.

“Horse thieves—like he told you, Jack,” replied Donegan, turning to the sergeant. “You went all the way to New Mexico after them?”

“Had a good trail to follow—so we followed,” Waller answered. “Tracks led right off the reservation.”

“Those white fellas steal Injin horses?” Seamus asked.

Waller nodded. “We're taking 'em back to the Kiowa.”

“Whose bunch they belong to?”

“Lone Wolf's band. These two and a half-dozen others rode in a while back and stole about fifty head of Kiowa stock.”

“What happened to the rest of the horse thieves?” Jack inquired.

“We shot three when we caught up to 'em in New Mexico. Couldn't stop to give 'em decent burying 'cause the other three took off with a high tail behind—like they wasn't ever going to stop.”

Donegan glanced over the group of some twenty brunettes. “You lose any of your men?”

Waller appeared to swallow down the pain of owning up to that. “Two of my own—H Company.” He nodded to the west while he dug his heel in the snow. “We buried 'em out there. Someplace no one will ever know—out there.”

“That's only fitting,” Donegan replied quietly. “Those men fought out there on the Staked Plain. They died where they fought—like soldiers. It's right what you done, to bury 'em there, Reuben—with the sky to look down on 'em for all of eternity.”

“One of the men said some words over the graves,” Waller said quietly. “And them words made me think, Seamus—think on when you and me carried the body of your uncle up to that high place looking down on the island where you and the rest waited for nine days.”
*

“A man like me uncle Liam chooses to live his time in this open country, Reuben—it's right he should be allowed to rest out here for the rest of all of God's time.”

“So what you do with them two now?” Stillwell asked, throwing a thumb back at the canvas shelter where the prisoners waited out of the cold.

“We'll take those two on back to stand trial before Colonel Grierson at Fort Sill,” Waller told them, “after a side trip to Fort Richardson.”

That surprised Donegan. “Why so far south?”

Waller grinned, his teeth bright beneath the fading light in his dark face. “Here, and I took you for being a smart man, Seamus. We got us a heap of horseflesh here to tend to, and your lieutenant ain't got a single animal. How can I live with myself, I don't ride on in to Richardson with you, then turn my bunch north back to Sill from there?”

Seamus looked at Stillwell. “Reuben makes a lot of sense to me, Jack. Don't he?”

They laughed and pounded shoulders once more as the old commissary sergeant strode up, his pipe smoking in a thick wreath about his head.

“We'll get this wagon over before the rest of the lieutenant's men come on back—I'll have us some warm vittles to greet their bellies with,” the old soldier told them.

Waller put his men to work with their mounts and several ropes and in short order had the wagon righted and what camp goods the commissary sergeant had left squared away. The brunettes then devoted their efforts to enlarging the buffalo chip fire as the sun eased toward the far west and the last of the search parties straggled in to celebrate new faces and horses and a warm meal among friends with all the rest.

Twilight deepened into a shocking purple as the cold stars came out one by one by one overhead, like a saloon keeper in Dodge City would turn on his oil lamps come sundown. The smell of hot food and fresh coffee made the Irishman's belly gnaw all the more.

“We ain't et proper in more'n two days, Seamus,” Jack said as he squatted beside Donegan with a couple cups of coffee.

Seamus took his. “Whatever Sarge is cooking going to be fine with me. Smells good, don't it?” He sipped at the scalding coffee, then asked, “When you figure we can head north to Dodge City to get some answers from that Spanish map, Jack?”

“We could fight our way north anytime,” Stillwell said. “But I been figuring it might be a better idea to wait until late winter. Weather might be more predictable. And…”

Donegan looked over at Jack, waiting for the rest. “And what?”

“And,” he got a sheepish look on his face, “with us spending the winter down near Jacksboro with Sharp Grover like he asked you to, well…”

“Spit it out, Stillwell,” he growled, blowing steam off his coffee.

“All the better for you to burrow in for the winter with that pretty Samantha Pike.”

Seamus sputtered on the hot coffee. “Jack—not you too! First Sharp's trying to marry me off to the woman. And now you! Saints preserve mother Donegan's boy if I stand a whore's chance in Sunday mass with you two matchmakers around!”

HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM
DYING THUNDER
—THE NEXT VOLUME OF TERRY C. JOHNSTON'S EPIC WESTERN SERIES
THE PLAINSMEN:

Prologue

Moon of Deer Shedding Horns 1873

“There are only six of them, Quanah.”

Quanah Parker nodded, still staring into the distance at the austere ocher and white snow-covered ridges. The winter wind nuzzled his long, braided hair this way and that, gently clinking the silver conchos he had woven into that single, glossy queue almost long enough to brush to the back of his war pony.

“You waited long enough to be sure there were no more inside?” Quanah asked the scout who had ridden back across the snow from the valley southeast of where the Kwahadi warriors waited anxiously this bright, cold winter mid-morning.

“Six.”

“How many of the white man's log lodges?”

“Two. One in front. The other in back, with the wood pen for his horses and two of the spotted buffalo.”

Quanah turned his nose up at that. Spotted buffalo. The white man's cattle. Docile and spineless. With less courage than even a buffalo cow. Good only for milking. And he wondered what the white man saw in milk anyway. If the Grandfather Above gave the milk to the cow, why then did the white man drink it?

If he was so fond of milk, why didn't the white man suckle at the breasts of his wives?

It was not as if Quanah had never tasted human milk. He had. Many times. For a moment now, here in the cold of this open land, with the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon the Llano Estacado, it was good to remember. At times he had thought about taking a second wife, but his first filled his life with all that he needed.

She satisfied him even more now than ever before. Mother to their three children, he recalled how her belly had grown swollen with that first child. Thought about how he still made love to her when she grew as big as a antelope doe. How she had never been shy about expressing her hunger for him … the warm softness of her fingers as they encircled his excited flesh, kneading him into readiness. How he would roll her over, bringing her up on her hands and knees, that ripe belly of hers and those swollen breasts suspended beneath her as he drove his hard flesh into the moistness of her own warm readiness.

Quanah always answered her rising whimpers with his own growl of enthusiasm in the coupling, for none had ever satisfied him like she.

And after he had exploded inside her, Quanah would suckle at first one, then the other of her warm breasts. It seemed she was never without milk from the birth of their first child. And it had always been a warm, sweet treat for Quanah—after making warm, sweet love to his wife. This drinking of her milk from her small, swollen breasts—something that often made him ready to mount her again.

He had never understood that … yet had never questioned it either.

Quanah shook his head, feeling the cold blast of winter air once more. Something that reminded him he was not in his warm lodge, wrapped in the furry robes with her.

Perhaps he needed her badly.

He acknowledged that he had been away from the winter village for too long perhaps. He was thinking on his wife and that sweet, warm and moist rutting he shared with her, when he should be thinking about those six white men down there in that valley less than two miles off.

Many suns ago he had led a large hunting party away from their village to hunt buffalo. The Comanche were running low on dried meat. With a disappointing fall hunt, Quanah's Kwahadi band were forced to hunt much earlier this winter than they normally would have to hunt. More than a moon before, he and the warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they found south of the dead line, that place where the white treaty-talkers said the white buffalo hunters were not to cross.

But more and more the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne were discovering the white man south of the Arkansas River, on the hunting ground guaranteed to the Indian as his own. A worthless, heartless act, this talking treaty with the white man, Quanah thought.

Ever since the time the old chiefs had signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek six winters before, it seemed the white hunters were crossing south of the Arkansas in greater numbers, crossing south too of the Cimarron. And Quanah feared they would one day soon come to the Canadian River—what he rightly believed was the last stand for his people: that northern boundary of the great Staked Plain, the Llano Estacado of the ancient ones with metal heads who first brought the horses to The People of the plains.

Besides those hide hunters they found and killed more than a moon gone now, his scouts had also returned with news of a small group of soldiers marching northwest onto the Staked Plain. Quanah knew that killing the soldiers boded no good for his people. The army would only send more next time. And the yellowlegs never found the roaming warriors—instead the army's Tonkawa guides sought out the Kwahadi villages filled with women and children and the old ones.

Rarely were the young warriors punished by the white soldiers. It was their families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons, when they ran quickly to flee the white man and his Tonkawa trackers, who led the soldiers to the valleys and canyons where the Kwahadi always camped to escape the cold winter winds or to find shade come the first days of the short-grass time.

No, he had told his warriors. We are not going to kill these soldiers. Which had made them howl in angry disappointment.

“But we will drive them out of Kwahadi land,” he had instructed them, “by burning the prairie!”

For miles in either direction along a north-south line, the horsemen set their firebrands to the tall prairie grass dried by the arid autumn winds. The winter wind did the rest: whipping the sparks into a fury that forced the yellowlegs to turn about and flee to the east for their lives.
*

However, in the days that followed, his scouts reported finding no sign of the soldier party. No charred wagon or burnt carcasses.

From time to time the mystery had made Quanah shudder: to think that those white men had merely vanished into the cold air of the Staked Plain. But if they had, he argued with himself, where would they find food for their animals?

And besides, that great storm that thundered down upon the plains, riding in on the bone-numbing breath of Winter Man, leaving behind tall snowdrifts and many hungry bellies, would surely have killed the white men so unprepared for such a blizzard.

While he was certain that storm had killed the retreating soldiers, it had also driven the buffalo farther and farther south. The little ones in Quanah's village cried with empty bellies. The women and old ones wailed as well. It was only the warriors who could not cry out in the pain of their gnawing hunger—for it remained up to them alone to go in search of meat to lift the specter of starvation from the Kwahadi.

After many days of endless riding to the south, Quanah and his hunters found themselves near the southernmost reaches of the Staked Plain, without having seen any buffalo or antelope. It was as if Winter Man had wiped all before him with his great, cold breath.

As the days of searching grew into many, they had come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge there—no longer strong enough to go on with the rest. A few had been left to rot by the passing of winter storm … like the white hide hunters left the thousands upon thousands to rot in the sun.

Where had the rest of the herds gone? Farther and farther south still—to the land of the summer winds?

If they had, they would likely not return until the short-grass time on the prairies, when the winds blew soft and the Grandfather Above once more told the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their great seasonal migrations.

“You wish to attack these white men?” asked the young warrior sitting beside the Kwahadi chief.

He blinked, his reverie broken and brought back to the now. “Yes.” Quanah turned to his scouts. “You tell me there is a hill looking down on the place where the white man built his log lodges?”

The scout dropped quickly to the ground, his buffalo-hide winter moccasins scraping snow aside from a small circle. In the middle he formed up two frozen snowballs. Circling the snowballs on three sides he mounded up some of the snow he had scraped aside.

“Yes, Quanah,” he said, gazing up into the bright winter sun behind his chief. “These are the white man's two lodges. And these are the hills.”