Shortgrass Song (19 page)

Then the smile slid from his face. He had turned to look at the mountains, and something had moved along the tree line. No matter how quickly his eyes darted, they could not catch it. It vanished like a bird in a thicket, but he heard the wind moan his name in the treetops far up the trail. It was calling again. It wanted him to follow.

*   *   *

“Let's put them last four planks down on the ground,” Buster said.

“What the hell for? Why not throw 'em on the stack with the rest of 'em?” the captain asked.

“We can use 'em for a floor to clog on tonight, and I'll play some fiddle music for your men.”

“You a fiddler?”

“Yes, sir,” Buster said.

“Say, you're not that nigger fiddler that rode off to Indian Territory to get the boy back, are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Where's the boy you brought back?”

Buster pointed to the hill. He could see the horses on its ridge against the Rampart Range. It looked as if Pete was teaching Caleb how to swing a loop from the saddle. “That was him on that blue-eyed horse. He plays a little music, too. I taught him.”

That night, after helping Buster entertain the freighters, Caleb lay in his bed and dreamed of riding. He could feel the wind in his face and the roll of the horse under him. His dream horse ran to the rhythm of the songs he had played for the jig-dancing freighters, taking him far from Holcomb Ranch, over the mountains to glorious new places. And always before him, just out of reach, flew something he could see only from the corner of his eye. Something that lured him into mystery.

TWENTY-ONE

Buster's lumber remained stacked near the cabin all winter. Some of it went toward building a bunkhouse for the cowboys who would come to work as the herd grew. The rest of it would have to wait until Buster got around to damming the creek.

At night, he and Caleb worked on their wind wagon. They wanted to have it ready for the chinooks that would rake the eastern slope in the spring. First, there was the mast to construct. Even before he ordered the buggy, Buster had picked out and chopped down the straightest pine sapling he could find in the Pinery, about the diameter of a lodge pole. Now it was cured and ready to finish. Caleb thought he would rasp the whole thing to sawdust before Buster was satisfied with its straightness and smoothness.

Buster had built a sheet-metal forge in the log shed, and used it to cast some brackets that would hold the boom to the mast. He also fashioned iron loops for the sheet and halyard to run through, and rings that would slide up and down the mast and attach to the sail.

He put hours of thought into the stepping of the mast, finally deciding that he would center it among the four wheels, to discourage strong gusts from capsizing the craft. The spring seat was in the middle of the buggy, so Buster unbolted it and moved it aft, over the rear axle. He sawed a perfectly round hole of the proper diameter in the floorboard of the buggy and bolted the foot of the mast to the coupling pole that ran between the axles. Rawhide shrouds held it firmly aright.

Next, the inventors had to rig a steering system to turn the front wheels. Buster had decided to let the turning wheels ride forward this time, instead of trying to make the craft sail backward, as his milk wagon had done when it crashed into Long Fingers's tepee. He ran thick cords of twisted rawhide from the front axle, just inside the wheels, around a system of spools, to a location just in front of the spring seat. There he wrapped them around the hub of a wheel taken from the old milk wagon, changing it to a steering wheel like that of an oceangoing vessel. The sailors would be able to steer, trim the sail, and swing the boom, all from the spring seat at the rear of the vehicle.

Most of the construction went on in secret. Not because Buster excluded spectators, but because the other Holcomb Ranch residents had better things to do with their evenings than watch a perfectly good buggy get desecrated without reason. Buster and Caleb refused to tell what the conversions signified.

“What are we gonna do with this thing when its finished?” Caleb asked one winter night. Buster was working by lantern light, and Caleb was practicing a song on the banjo.

“Ride in it,” Buster said, adjusting the rawhide cables around the steering-wheel hub.

“Where to?”

“I don't know. Maybe we'll go to Colorado City and play for a couple of dances on Saturday night. Pass the hat and make some money.”

“Can we carry anything in it?”

“It ain't very big,” Buster admitted. “But it'll carry a little. And, if it works, then maybe I'll build us a bigger one. I'll build one out of a Conestoga that'll carry a whole ton.”

“What for?”

“Go into the freight business. No oxen. No mules. No hay to buy. A man could freight between the Platte and Arkansas almost all year long the way the wind blows around here.”

“Where are you gonna get a Conestoga wagon?” Caleb asked with a smirk. The Conestogas he had seen were high enough to walk under without bumping his head, and almost as big as his house. He knew Buster didn't have the money to buy something like that.

“That's what I need this little one for,” Buster explained. “I can use it to show folks how a big one will work. Maybe some of those rich gold men up in Denver will put up some money for me.”

“Will they put up some money for me, too?” Caleb asked.

“Sure. You're my partner, ain't you? Now, tune that thumb string up. Can't you hear it's flat?”

*   *   *

The wind wagon was ready to roll by February, but its captain decided to postpone the maiden voyage until the snows melted. He did not want for inventions to tinker with, however. Javier had been complaining about the wolves killing his calves, and wanted Buster to do something about it.

“Why don't you make something we can use,” he asked one evening, “instead of cutting up that wagon? Make one of these.” He slapped a newspaper down in front of Buster and pointed to an ad in the center column. The ad included a woodcut of a diabolical firearm called The Wolf-Getter. It was made to be driven into the ground on a steel spike. The trigger was a hook that extended forward into the path of the bullet. The idea was to bait the hook with meat, load a metallic cartridge into the breech, and leave the weapon cocked in the woods. When a wolf or another predator came along and tried to eat the bait, the gun would discharge, blasting the carnivore in the head almost point-blank.

Buster bought an old single-shot pistol from a gunsmith in Colorado City and had it bored to take a forty-five-caliber cartridge. Then all he had to do was mount a spike on the butt of the pistol and rig the trigger with an extension that ended in front of the muzzle.

Javier baited the wolf-getter with veal from a wolf kill and set it in the timber about a mile up the creek.

The first victim was one of the dogs that Cheyenne Dutch had left at Holcomb Ranch. Caleb cried for an hour.

The next victim was a white wolf. Javier made a daily point of loading and setting the wolf-getter from then on. Raccoons, foxes, and coyotes triggered the gun more often than wolves, but any dent in the predator population was welcomed by Javier.

*   *   *

When the snows finally melted in the spring of 1864, they joined one night with the runoff of a thunderstorm in the mountains and flooded Monument Creek. The torrent filled in Buster's irrigation ditch and ripped away the timber and rock dam he had begun to build to impound his irrigation reservoir. Then the storm roared down onto the plains, pounding the land with rain and hail. The creek ran icy cold, choked with hailstones the size of hens' eggs. It climbed high enough on its banks to lap into the old dugout nobody had used since Buster moved into the toolshed. The winter wheat was beaten flat, annihilated.

Buster was slogging through the mud, surveying the damage, when the low drone of a mouth harp reached his ears. He hadn't seen Long Fingers since he went to the Indian Territory after Caleb, two years before, but he knew the chief's musical style. He looked downstream to see Long Fingers riding alone.

“Howdy-do, Buffalo Head,” the chief said. He was still wearing winter fur, and his magnificence surpassed that of any Indian Buster had ever seen. His mood, however, was somber.

“Hello, chief. Look what the weather did to us.” He swept his arms to indicate the obliterated wheat field.

“It is a circle. Your tribe does not know the circle of time?”

“My tribe?”

“African Baptist.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, where my tribe comes from the circle goes a different way. I ain't never seen no hail like this.”

“You better learn the way the circle goes here, or it will kill you.”

When they arrived at the cabin, Long Fingers merely glanced at Ab's peg leg. He shook Javier's hand and gladly agreed to join the Holcombs for supper. While Buster cooked, the chief gave the reason for his visit.

“Kicking Dog is a dog soldier now with the Cheyenne,” he said. “He makes big trouble for everybody. On the beaver moon, before the winter, he took a bunch of my boys away from me and they catch a white woman at a ranch on the Platte. I think they sell her to the Sioux. He makes war for everybody. We have no buffalo. No good land. Kicking Dog believes he can kill all the whites and have buffalo again, and land. Now he is coming this way. I think he will come to get your cattle, Holcomb.”

Ab regarded the chief suspiciously.

“The Comanche want that boy back.” He pointed at Caleb. “The little one. Snake Woman tells them that boy is strong medicine for them. I think maybe Kicking Dog will catch him to sell to the Comanche.”

Caleb knew Long Fingers was a friend, but he had a terrible dread of any Indian that looked and pointed at him that way.

“Comanche?” Ab said. He scratched his head. He had almost forgotten Buster's wild tale about the winter in the Indian Territory. “Buster, what in Hades does he mean?”

“It's Snake Woman. She thinks the spirits gave her a sign to make Caleb be an Indian. She's got the Comanche all believin' it.”

Ab took the first good look at Caleb he had indulged in for a long time. He had a hard time envisioning Indians riding all the way across Colorado Territory for one scrawny boy. It didn't make sense, but he was not about to take any chances with Caleb's safety. He had Ella's ultimatum hanging over his head like the ridge log that had killed her.

“We better post a guard by day and keep the doors barred by night. Javier, you and me and Buster will take turns standing guard on that hill across the creek. You can see a long way from there.”

Buster frowned. He had too much to do to spend every third day standing on a hill, looking for Indians. “Matthew could stand guard, too,” he said. “He's fifteen now, and he can shoot good.”

Matthew couldn't believe his ears. Ol' Buffalo Head rarely had anything good to say about him. “Will you let me, Papa?” he asked.

“Well, all right,” Ab said.

After supper the boys ran to Buster's shed to get the instruments so Long Fingers could hear “Old Dan Tucker.” He and Buffalo Head were alone on the cabin porch for a minute.

“What else have you heard about Snake Woman?” Buster asked. “Last time I saw her, she was gettin' big.” He indicated her shape around his own stomach.

“She has a papoose now,” Long Fingers said. “Very black, with hair on the head curly, like the buffalo. They say it is your son.”

Buster pictured the baby, felt his remorse. He should have been strong enough to resist Snake Woman in the dugout.

*   *   *

The hailstorm pulled a chinook down from the mountains. It blustered across the plains and caused the men to walk around outside with their hands on their hats. Wind conditions were perfect for the maiden voyage of the Thompson Wind Wagon. The ground was still muddy, but Buster wanted to test the wind wagon while Long Fingers was at the ranch so the old chief could see how the wind could move a wagon like a cloud.

“Well, do you want us to come with you, or what?” Ab asked as Buster hitched a horse to the buggy. Buster and Caleb had dismasted the vehicle and covered it with its own sail so no one would figure out what it was. They intended it to surprise.

“No, sir,” Buster said. “Just stand there on the porch and we'll ride back by and demonstrate. Don't let on what we're up to, chief.”

Long Fingers gave the sign for silence, putting the fingers of his right hand over his thin lips.

The inventors drove south and disappeared behind a rise in the ground about a mile away.

Ab waited a quarter hour. “Pete, go saddle me a horse,” he said. “I'm going to find out what they're up to.”

Pete sprinted for the shed and soon brought Pard back, cinched under Ab's hull. Buster had built a socket in the right stirrup of Ab's saddle that enabled him to keep the end of his peg leg firmly seated. Just as he fixed the peg in the socket and got ready to ride, he saw Buster's buggy horse running back toward the ranch, her hooves kicking up clods of mud, her head high and cocked to one side as if fleeing from the worst order of horror.

Over the swell in the prairie a white triangle appeared. It grew until it looked as broad across the bottom as a chief's tepee. Under it a black dot appeared, rolling toward the ranch so fast that the buggy horse could barely keep her distance ahead of it.

“What in Hades…” Ab muttered.

Pete squinted.

Matthew and Javier stood with their mouths open.

“The wind pushes it like a cloud,” Long Fingers said, pointing.

The buggy horse ran right past the cabin. Pard caught her fear, snorted, and perked his ears forward. He heard the rattle of the buggy, saw the cloud-sail billowing over it, and pulled against the reins in Ab's hands.

The wind wagon sailed past the cabin, Buster grinning at the wheel, Caleb waving with the sheet in one hand. Pard lunged against the reins until the hollering voices faded away.