Shortgrass Song (12 page)

In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,

In a corner obscure and alone,

They have fitted a slab of granite so gray,

And sweet Alice lies under the stone.

“That's what they call waltz time,” Buster said, clearing his throat and rubbing a sleeve across his face. “One-two-three, one-two-three. You better get on to the house now. Time for bed. Bar the door and pull the strap in.”

“Aw, can't we just play one more?”

“Oh, all right. Somethin' lively, though.”

“How about two?”

Buster held Caleb to a single rendition of “Down in Alabam'” and then sent him to the cabin. He waited until he heard the door close and then climbed off the creek bank and into the dugout.

*   *   *

At dawn, Buster shuffled up from the cutbank and collected what eggs the hens had left in the converted milk wagon. He knocked on the cabin door until Pete, draped in a red wool blanket like an Indian, let him in. Matthew poked his head out of Ab's bedroom, which he had taken over since his father's departure.

“Caleb up?” Buster asked.

“He's in there with Matthew,” Pete said.

“No, he ain't,” Matthew replied.

“Well, he's not in here with me.”

Buster looked in both bedrooms for himself. Caleb was in neither. He went back outside and ran to the covered wagon. Snake Woman was gone. He ran to the shed built next to the corral. Soupy and the spotted mare were gone.

“Where is he?” Pete asked when Buster returned to the cabin.

“Be quiet. Let me think.” He had waited to hear the door close the night before. He knew Caleb had made it inside. No one could have entered to take him away. It had to be Snake Woman. She had waited inside, grabbed Caleb, and stolen him.

“Matthew,” Buster said. “Get Mister Ab's rifle.”

“Yes, sir!” Matthew said, with rare respect.

“Pete, get you and your brother something to eat for dinner.”

“What for?” Pete asked.

“You gotta walk to Gribble's place and stay there.”

“Walk?”

“Yes, boy, walk! The horses are gone! Snake Woman took Caleb off to the Indians!”

Buster started Matthew and Pete up Monument Creek, then ran to his dugout for his things. He shoved his horse pistol under his belt and looped his powder flask and shot pouch over one shoulder. He rolled a blanket, wedged it under his arm. He filled a canteen and stowed some smoked venison in a piece of cloth. With a long stick he went looking for the cattle, cut two slow cows from the herd, and on foot drove them down the creek.

He made Colorado City by noon. The ugly little town had started out as headquarters for some prospectors hoping to find gold on Pikes Peak. The prospects had failed to materialize, but the town had hung on as a trading post and way station for occasional supply trains coming up from New Mexico on the Fort Bridger Road. It was peopled by hardened souls, but Buster hoped the worst of them had gone off to fight in the war.

He traded the two cows for a swayback sorrel horse, threw his blanket over the washboard ribs, and rode down the Fountain River. A grove of cottonwoods became his campground that night. He reached the Arkansas two hours into the next morning and turned east for Sand Creek, hoping to find Long Fingers there on his worthless reservation. The chief would know how to find Snake Woman.

THIRTEEN

Before, Caleb had thought he would never tire of riding horses. Now he was so saddle sore that he never wanted to hear another hoofbeat as long as he lived. Snake Woman had grabbed him in the cabin that first night, lifted his feet from the floor, and clamped her hand over his mouth. She had carried him outside and dragged him over the plains until they came to the horses, saddled and waiting. He hollered for Buster once when he got on Soupy, but Snake Woman pulled him off, threw him on the ground, and threatened to hit him.

He lost track of the days. Snake Woman made him sleep on the ground with only his saddle blanket for cover. He drank mere swallows of water and ate only dried meat. He didn't know which way they were going, but the mountains got farther away until they vanished altogether. He missed his instruments and worried that his fingertips would soften if he didn't have them to play.

They crossed a river, Snake Woman leading Soupy behind the spotted mare. The thought of being swept away in the cold water made Caleb hang on to the saddle horn with an eagle's grip. He was glad his mother wasn't there, for the sight of him crossing the river probably would have killed her. Then he remembered she was dead anyway.

They crossed miles of grass and sand hills strewn with buffalo chips and buffalo skulls. Occasionally Snake Woman would get off the spotted mare and point the noses of several skulls in the direction she and Caleb were traveling.

Once, in the distance against a hill, Caleb saw a huge blanket of darkness rolling over the grass. Then the blanket began to break up, and he knew it was a herd of buffalo, more animals than he had ever seen at one time.

Three times they met Indians. Hunting parties with lances, bows, and rifles. Snake Woman made her signs at them and they pointed, giving her direction. One of the warriors frightened Caleb by poking him with the end of a bow, never smiling, never scowling, just staring with cold eyes and jabbing him hard with the bow.

They crossed another river, then another, and another, until Caleb thought the whole world had turned to grass, rivers, and canyons. Then, just as he began to get used to riding day after day, he saw a range of mountains looming against the horizon. He hoped they were going home.

But the next day he realized the mountains were not his own. They were not as huge or beautiful, but at least they were more interesting than the monotonous, rolling plains. They rose like tepees from the prairie. Buffalo and antelope skimmed broad carpets of tall grass stretching between them. He sensed Snake Woman's excitement and knew his trip was almost over. He wondered how soon Buster would follow. He did not doubt the black man would come for him.

*   *   *

Snake Woman found Laughing Wolf's camp at the place she remembered—a hundred lodges lining the creek that wound among the mountains. She asked to see Laughing Wolf, and the chief agreed to speak to her, mainly out of curiosity.

He was a young chief, arrogant in deportment, with tinkling bits of metal tied all over his buckskins and moccasins. When Snake Woman entered the lodge, he demanded to know why she had returned. Had she offended Long Fingers by running away after Laughing Wolf had traded her for six hides and two blankets? And where had the white boy come from?

Snake Woman told of the signs she had received from the spirit world. She had brought the Comanche two great warriors. The white boy came from fighting stock. His father was away right now with the blue coats, fighting the Texans. The child she carried inside her now was the son of Buffalo Head, a strong, black brave who drowned his captors and counted coup on the crazy white man called Cheyenne Dutch who thought he was a horse god.

All of this bewildered Laughing Wolf. He gave Snake Woman and Caleb some buffalo meat to gnaw on while he conferred with the peace chief in his lodge. Caleb tore at the meat like a hungry dog, barely mindful of the Indian children who ran past him, shooting at him with imaginary bows.

When the sun had moved well west in the sky, Laughing Wolf returned to talk to Snake Woman. “If you give birth to a black son,” he explained, “it will prove you are telling the truth about the spirits and the signs, and you may marry one of my warriors who will adopt the white boy and the black baby. If your child is not black, or if it is a girl, I will kill it and cook you and the white boy over the fire, or else the evil spirits will destroy us.”

Snake Woman started singing her most joyous song—one given to her by a Comanche warrior who had once owned her. She left Caleb behind, and walked through the entire camp so all the members of the band would know how happy she was to be back among the proud Comanche.

Caleb listened to the weird wailings of the tongueless Indian woman fade. He felt alone and scared, but he was still hungry. He spotted a hunk of buffalo meat broiling over a fire. Two women and several children were waiting for the meat to cook. Caleb looked all around. He wasn't being guarded. It seemed he could move around the camp if he wished. He took a few cautious steps toward the cooking meat. No one objected. He walked closer. A boy about his size looked up as Caleb neared the fire. Before he knew what had happened, the little savage had leapt and knocked him down. He thought he would be scalped or tortured in one of the horrible ways Matthew had told him about.

A scowling woman picked him up and pointed to the sun, then to his shadow on the ground, and explained with gestures that it was not allowed to let one's shadow fall on meat that was cooking over the fire.

The white boy nodded and sat to one side of the fire, fearful that another Indian was going to knock him down again if he broke some other strange rule. He wanted Buster to come and take him home. He wanted his mother to fret over him like she used to.

“In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt.” He caught himself singing, under his breath, and glanced at the Indian woman who had taught him the rule about the shadow. Though she didn't look at him, she smiled, and he figured singing was within the rules. “In a corner obscure and alone…”

It made him feel better. The Indian boy was staring at him with his mouth open.

“They have fitted a slab of granite so gray, and sweet Alice lies under the stone.…”

FOURTEEN

Buster stopped at Bent's Fort, a large thick-walled trading post with adobe parapets and cactus growing atop the walls to discourage intruders. An assistant to the Indian agent there told him he would find Long Fingers camped up Sand Creek.

The Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation impressed Buster as the most inhospitable land he had seen in the West. There was grass for the horses to eat but little else to help the Indians survive. He saw no game except for a few jackrabbits. Some large cottonwoods grew at a place called Big Timbers at the confluence of the Arkansas and Sand Creek, but otherwise the reservation seemed destitute of wood. Long Fingers's camp wasn't hard to find. A wisp of buffalo-chip smoke in the air gave it away.

Most of the chief's warriors were out scouring the plains for herds, but none large enough to warrant a hunting party had been located, and little meat hung in camp.

“We will go to the mountains soon,” he told Buffalo Head. “We should have more meat, but we must go before it is too cold.”

“If you help me find the boy, you can come get a cow any time your people get hungry,” Buster promised.

Long Fingers sent every available warrior in camp to the surrounding tribes to ask about Snake Woman. As the buffalo hunters straggled in, he sent them, too, back to the plains and mountains to search for Caleb and his kidnapper.

“I hope she does not go with the boy to the Utes,” he said. “They will never trade him back to us.”

As the days passed, Buster grew more anxious about Caleb's fate. The warriors were able to learn nothing from the nearest tribes. The Cheyenne, the Kiowas, the Apache, the Pawnee—none of them had seen or heard from Snake Woman. Buster knew the boy could be in Mexico by now. The poverty of the Indian camp depressed him, and each day brought him closer to disgrace and failure as Caleb's protector.

Yet, he knew Caleb was alive. Snake Woman had taken him alive for a reason—to barter her way into some tribal society. The horses and the life she cradled in her womb would serve the same purpose. Buster had figured it all out and wondered why he hadn't seen it clearly when the diabolical squaw came five nights in a row to his dugout. If he couldn't find Caleb, the boy was going to grow up a savage.

Finally, two full weeks after Buster arrived at Long Fingers's camp, a warrior came in from the southeast with positive news.

“Buffalo Head,” shouted the chief, running across the camp to rouse Buster from his tepee. He leapt in through the oval entrance hole. “Snake Woman takes the boy to live with Comanche. One of my boys saw them there.”

“Where?” Buster asked.

“Seven days southeast. A place the whites call Wichita Mountains.”

“Will they trade for him? What do they want?”

“They will not trade anything. Not even twenty horses. They say Snake Woman is big medicine for their people. And the boy is, too.”

Buster rubbed the wrinkles in his forehead. “But … What am I gonna do? How can I get him back?”

“I know a way. Maybe so it works. Maybe so it kills you.”

Buster and Long Fingers spent the rest of the day planning. The next morning Buffalo Head left the reservation on the best horse in camp and rode to the southeast with an Arapaho guide. Six days later a norther was whipping sleet down his collar, and the Wichita Mountains were in view. His guide left him and rode back to Colorado. He would have to face the Comanche nation alone.

Buster saw the Wichita Mountains as islands of tree-speckled rock towering above the rolling plains. He looked for buzzards to lead him to the main camp. When a sentinel rode out to challenge him, he clasped his hands together in the sign of friendship. The warrior was so astounded that he thought Chief Laughing Wolf might want to see the visitor alive.

When Buster rode into camp, Caleb was playing with a bull roarer: a notched slab of wood tied to a long string of rawhide and whirled overhead to make a sound like the moan of a bull. Though it had taken a few days to get used to, Indian life was agreeing with him. He stayed in a tepee with Snake Woman, and though no one took much interest in him, he had been given the bull roarer and some other toys and had the run of the camp. He had never known the exhilarating pleasure of playing outside in a freezing drizzle. When he saw Buster's familiar face, he let the bull roarer fall to the ground.