Shortgrass Song (13 page)

“Hey, Buster!” he shouted, waving with joy. In return, he received the sternest look he had ever seen cross the black man's face, and he knew he should keep his mouth shut. It seemed Buster thought the whole thing was his fault. Then Snake Woman came running from somewhere in the camp, and Buster gave her the same look, so at least Caleb knew he was not the only one in trouble.

Buster lost no time letting Laughing Wolf know he could communicate pretty well in signs. He told the chief he had grown tired of living among the whites who did not treat him as an equal, so he had followed Snake Woman to live as a Comanche. He could hunt and fight. He was strong and a good shot.

The bits of metal on Laughing Wolf's garments tinkled as he signed. He pointed to the horse pistol under Buster's belt. He wanted to know if that was what Buffalo Head hunted and fought with.

No, Buster replied. The pistol was good only for killing camp dogs. But if the chief would produce a rifle, he would show the entire camp how well he could shoot. He would hit a rock as big as a man's head at three hundred paces. And then he would pick up the rock and throw it farther than any warrior in camp could throw it to prove his strength.

Children ran to all the tepees along the creek, shouting the news of the boasting black visitor. The women and the few warriors who were not out hunting began moving toward Laughing Wolf's lodge. Buster pulled Caleb behind a nearby tepee.

“Are you all right, boy?”

“Yeah, Buster. What are you doin' here? Are you gonna take me home?”

“No. Not yet, anyhow. We gotta make 'em think we want to live like Indians. Then maybe in few weeks we can sneak away. You're just gonna have to stand it that long. Understand?”

“Sure,” Caleb said. “I don't mind.”

Laughing Wolf appeared with an old Hawken rifle. Its wooden stock was decorated with brass tacks hammered in to form swirls and circles. It was rather worn, but looked as if it would shoot straight. The chief also had some bullets, a supply of percussion caps, and a powder flask. The flask was made of lead so it could be melted down into bullets when empty of powder.

Buster was happy to have killed so much game over the past year. His marksmanship was pretty good. “Come on, Caleb,” he said. “Watch me show these Comanche how to shoot.”

He carried the rifle out of the creek bottom and up to the plains. He found a rock about the size of a man's head lying on a stretch of ground with just a slight pitch to it. He paced three hundred steps from the rock. A gang of warriors dressed in buckskin shirts and leggings tagged along behind him, followed by the blanketed women and the half-dressed children.

Laughing Wolf hadn't given Buster a ramrod or a patch, so he put the bullet in his mouth before he poured in the powder. The saliva would make the lead stick to the powder and keep it packed if Buster shot quick enough. He dropped the bullet in and tapped the butt on the ground three times to tamp the load.

He sat in the grass and pulled his hat low over his brow to keep the sleet out of his eyes. He wanted to go ahead and shoot before his heart got to pounding so hard that it threw his aim off. His elbows rested atop his knees and his right eye looked along the top of the barrel. The only sound he could hear was the pitting of sleet on his brim. The Indians were silent behind him. He could only hope the rifle in his hands shot like Ab's piece, with the bead low in the rear iron.

The gun went off almost without Buster's realizing he had pulled the trigger. The recoil blurred his vision, but he saw a spray of dirt kick up at the very base of his target. Above the ringing in his ears, he could hear the Indians grumbling.

Buster turned around grinning. He poked himself in the Adam's apple with his finger to suggest that it was a very good place to shoot a man. If the rock had been a head, it might well have been ripped from its body.

Laughing Wolf nodded and declared the shot adequate, but the test of strength was still ahead. The chief introduced the strongest warrior he had on hand—a short, keg-trunked, bowlegged brave called Moon Bull who would try to throw the rock farther than Buffalo Head. Buster didn't see much muscle to the little man, but he didn't intend to take any chances. He didn't know what the Indians would do to him if he lost the contest.

Moon Bull and Buffalo Head strutted to the rifle target, followed by the entire camp. Buster saw that his bullet had actually clipped the bottom of the target, and he complimented Laughing Wolf on his excellent vision, to have seen from three hundred paces that the shot was good.

Buster had previously noted the slight pitch to the ground where the target lay. After he picked it up, he faced in the uphill direction, as if getting ready to throw. Then he looked at Moon Bull, tossed the miniature boulder to him, and dared him to throw first. Moon Bull could hardly refuse. He stepped up to the point Buster had established, facing the almost unnoticeable uphill grade, and prepared to throw. He cradled the rock on his palms at chest level, squatted deep, and threw his whole body into the effort. The rock arched admirably through the air and rolled to a standstill about twenty-five paces away.

Buster felt magnanimous enough to applaud, causing the squaws to giggle.

“Come on, Buster,” Caleb shouted, “you can do better than that!”

The nearest squaw switched him with a stick she was carrying.

“Ouch!” he said.

Using his boot to scuff the ground, Buster drew a line where Moon Bull had thrown from. But he purposely made the line a few degrees off the perpendicular. It was not quite square with the flight of Moon Bull's throw. He scuffed a good ten feet across the ground.

When he went to pick up the rock, Buffalo Head turned back around to face the line he had drawn with his boot. Now he had two advantages. The slight downhill pitch would give his effort a better roll, and he would throw to the side of the boot mark that angled slightly toward him.

All the conniving turned out to be unnecessary. Buster let a mighty shout loose when he threw; braves, squaws, children, and one camp dog had to make way for the rock as it rolled among them, beating Moon Bull's throw by a good ten paces. Laughing Wolf applauded, jingling his sleeve tinklers in the sleet.

“Are we Indians now?” Caleb asked on the way back to the lodges.

“We're worse than just Indians,” Buffalo Head replied. “We're Comanche.”

FIFTEEN

Ab hunkered against the wall of an adobe corral, but the wind still found him. It whipped dirt, smoke, and snowflakes in his face and around the piece of meat he held over his meager fire. He couldn't tell what cut of beef it was. The quartermaster had doled it out in random chunks, still warm from the fresh carcass.

He pulled his blanket back over his knees as he rotated the meat over the struggling flames. To get the beef cooked, he had to gnaw the roasted part away from the outside edges, then expose a raw layer to the coals. The fire was so spent by the time he got to the last bit of meat around the skewer that he had to lay it directly on the dying embers to sear it. He ate it—dirt, ashes, and all—and was glad to have it.

The blanket helped ease his shivering, but Ab knew Pard needed it more than he did. Many mules and cavalry mounts had died crossing the Raton Mountains into New Mexico, but the Nez Perce gelding hadn't missed a footfall. Ab got up and draped the cover over his horse, leaving only his old wool coat to turn back the wind. He intended to keep Pard sound enough for the charge when the time came for him to die.

The Texans were coming. Word was that they had fought past Fort Craig, overrun Albuquerque, and captured Santa Fe, three thousand strong. General Canby had ordered the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers south to Fort Union. They would meet the bloody Texans somewhere between there and Santa Fe.

The irony of the matter in Ab's view was that most of the Colorado Volunteers were no better than the Texans they would have to fight. At Fort Wise the Firsters had broken down the sutler's door with a rock and diminished a month's provisions in a matter of days. They had raided every Mexican rancho they passed on the way south and helped themselves to horses, beeves, and daughters. B Company and K Company had almost gone to war with each other after K's drunken sergeant shot B's lieutenant.

Ab belonged to F, the only mounted company in the regiment. His fellow horse soldiers had elected him third duty sergeant by virtue of his service under Captain Samuel Walker in the Mexican war. They might have made him a lieutenant if he would drink or cuss.

The nine hundred volunteers—busted prospectors almost to a man—huddled under their blankets at a place called Maxwell's Ranch. The wagons had been abandoned crossing the mountains into New Mexico as the mules died pulling them. There were no tents and few provisions. Each man carried only a blanket or two and a Springfield rifle. Some of the cavalry troops had revolvers. There was nothing to oil the guns with but bacon grease, and a scarcity of even that.

Ab crouched against his wall and cursed the whole campaign as he looked across the wisps of smoke curling from the willow-brush campfires. How he longed to catch sight of a Texan. He fondled the cylinder of his old Walker Colt as if it were warm.

Staring into the snow-speckled darkness, he thought he saw a phantom horseman approaching camp—a spotted horse carrying the rider among the scrubby piñon pines. The image vanished behind flurries, materialized again, closer, more vivid—real. The rider wore a beaver top hat held on with a scarf that ran through slits in the brim, covering his ears, and tying under his iron-gray beard. An eagle feather waved violently in the wind. He entered camp not forty yards from Ab's place against the adobe corral.

“Pickets!” the rider shouted above the wind. “Where's your goddamn pickets?”

A private rose from a campfire. “It's Cheyenne Dutch, boys! What the hell are you…”

“Where's your captain?” Dutch barked.

“I'll run find him.”

A crowd of volunteers gathered as the mountain man lowered himself from the spotted horse and limped to the nearest fire. Ab got up with his Colt and approached.

“Whole damn company of them Texan lancers might have rode in here and speared the lot of you,” Dutch was saying. “Best put your pickets out. War's on.”

“Lancers?” someone said.

The private came back with his officer.

“Captain Bonesteel, D Company,” he said, extending his mitten.

Dutch refused to shake. “Where's your goddamn pickets, captain?”

“Pickets? Why, Major Chivington didn't give orders for any pickets.”

“Gave orders for no pickets, did he?”

“Well, no. No orders on the subject at all.”

“No orders for no pickets means pickets, captain. See to it.”

The captain turned to his sergeant. “Sergeant!” he said.

“Corporal!” the sergeant said.

The corporal turned to his men: “Riley! Thomas! Flynn! And, you, whatever your name is!” He sent them grumbling into the dark woods.

“Who's got command?” Dutch asked.

“Colonel Slough.”

“Find him.”

The order went down the ranks until a private went to find the colonel.

“What's this all about, Dutch?” Captain Bonesteel asked. “Where have you come from?”

Moist eyes glistened through squints above Dutch's bearded cheeks. “Shit from the devil's bunghole.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Val Verde. General Canby sent me to make sure your regiment gets to Fort Union. The Texans are in Santa Fe.”

“What was that about lancers?” a nervous private asked.

“Not a moon ago,” Dutch said. “I was scout with the Second Colorados at Val Verde. Foot Volunteers, they called us. Left flank, the rebels charged us with two companies of mounted lancers. A hundred Texans! Blades a foot long, four fingers wide, shafts nine feet. Red guidons to sop your blood. Son of a bitch, the rebel yells! Rode right at us, never stopped. We fired, half of 'em fell. The rest came on. One got me through the leg, but I still kick!”

The volunteers looked at Dutch's thigh, swollen so that it pulled his buckskins tight. The bloody slit from the lance blade showed where the weapon had entered.

“We turned 'em, but here come the infantry behind 'em. They got shotguns, pistols, muskets. We fell back, gave 'em ground. Directly, they charged our cannon and took 'em. We had to fall back to Fort Craig, whipped. They come all the way on up to Santa Fe after that. You miners better get your sand up. Them Texans fight. Best fightin' men I ever seen. Backbone clean down to their assholes.…”

Ab pushed his way through a clot of D Company privates. “Shut up!” he said. “I won't listen to any man brag on a Texan. They brag enough on their own.”

“Who's that?” Dutch said, squinting through snowfall.

“I should have shot you at Monument Creek like Ella said. I wish I had done it instead of listening to you brag on a blasted Texan now.”

“Holcomb! You still riled over that squaw? Hell, I left the horses to settle up. Bone like to never healed where she chopped me. Couldn't be helped anyhow.” He narrowed his crazy eyes. “One of them spells come on me.”

“You're sane as the next man. You're a liar about those spells.”

The D Company men backed away, expecting Dutch to reach for his knife in the fringed saddle scabbard.

A private ran recklessly between Dutch and Holcomb. “I found Colonel Slough, Dutch. This way.”

The scout took his bridle reins in hand to follow the private. “I reckon you miners know Holcomb's wife died. He don't mean all he says.” He limped stiffly away.

“God strike me down if I don't!” Ab yelled.

The next day, the First marched thirty miles south, out of the mountains, down to Fort Union on the Santa Fe Trail. At dusk Ab rode Pard over a low roll in the plains and saw the fort sprawled across the prairie floor. It looked like a colossal scar welt on the land, an eight-pointed star burned there by an impossible branding iron. The embankments were of dirt, surrounded by a dry moat. Under the dirt parapets were quarters. Ab saw adobe-brick chimneys jutting above the earthworks. The Star Fort, as it was called, had been newly and hastily erected to deal with the Confederate threat.