Shortgrass Song (21 page)

“I killed three,” Matthew said, drawing himself up like a decorated hero. “Got one on the roof and two along the creek.”

Ab stared. “You?”

Matthew nodded and brandished the repeater.

“It's a good thing you had the Henry,” Javier said. “They would have killed you if you had to stop to reload. You can load that Henry on Sunday and fire it all week.”

Ab shook his head. “Thank the Lord your mama's not here to see you boys turn killer. That would break her heart. Let's drag the bodies together and burn them.”

“I can't scalp mine?”

“No!”

As the slain braves burned under a great heap of timber, Ab and Javier took stock of the damages. “How many horses did they get?” Ab asked.

“Just two,” Javier said.

“Well, Buster got two of theirs and we killed five of them on top of that. I guess we got the better of them. Which two horses did they get? Any good ones?”

“Not really,” Javier said. “They got the black with the stocking feet and the one with the blue eyes.”

“Blue Eyes?” Caleb said. “They got Blue Eyes?”

Javier squatted and rubbed his hand through Caleb's hair. “
Sí, muchacho.
They got your little pony. I tried to shoot the one who did it, but you know I can shoot nothing but wolves with that wolf gun Buster made for us.” He shook Caleb and laughed, but the boy didn't laugh in return. “Well, maybe you can have one of the horses we got from those two that Buster killed.”

“No,” Ab said. “We'll get him a gentle horse when he gets big enough to ride. I don't want him riding those wild Indian ponies.”

“But, you said,” Caleb protested. “You said when I get big as Pete I can ride along with him and Matthew. I'm big as he was when you said it.”

“Hush, boy,” Ab snapped. “I said when you get big as Pete. Are you big as Pete now? No, you're not, are you? You'd better thank God you're alive and stop complain-tag.”

Caleb opened his mouth, but no words would come to him. He would never be as big as Pete. Pete was older and kept ahead of him. He would never chase Holcomb cattle. He wasn't going to be a rancher. He was going to be a farmer's helper for the rest of his days, and plod in the dust wake of oxen while his brothers lost their hats in the wind.

He turned away from his father with tears in his eyes and looked over the bald hill at the mountains, wavering strangely through the heat and smoke of the cremation fire. Someday he was going all the way over the hill, he told himself. Someday he would go up into that high country. He would find a place where people rode horses and played music all day. A place where he could do whatever he wanted.

Sometimes he glimpsed a hint of something on that hill, heard a stray echo from some distant canyon—a vagrant chinook moaning over a lonely crag. It would sigh the soft sounds of his name like an Indian chant. Someday he would answer that call.

TWENTY-THREE

Long Fingers lay on his buffalo robe and stared up at the light of dawn streaming weakly through the smoke hole of his tepee. The warmth of his wife felt good beside him, but he had little else to comfort him. He had slept very little, and even in his fleeting dreams he had thought only of his people's precarious existence on the earth. A death song kept breaking the circle of his thoughts:

Nothing lives long except the earth and the mountains.

Long Fingers and a few other chiefs the Indian agents regarded as “reliables” had brought their bands to Fort Wise to seek peace. Even Kicking Dog had come, swayed by a majority of his dog soldiers, who were weary of fighting with blue coats and settlers. The Indians had turned over their weapons, received rations, and had been promised protection.

But the rations dried up all too soon. Starving, the Indians were given their weapons and told to disperse and hunt. The commander at Fort Wise ensured them that they were under army protection and would not be attacked by white settlers seeking revenge for recent depredations.

When they left Fort Wise, Long Fingers's band fell back to Sand Creek with White Antelope and Black Kettle of the Cheyenne. Most of the young braves were scouring the plains for game. Winter was coming, and there was not enough food. At least they were hunting instead of raiding, Long Fingers thought. At least now his people were under the protection of the white soldiers and not pitted against them.

Yet, out on the plains, not more than a mile from Long Fingers's Sand Creek camp, Horace Gribble was belching the fetor of whiskey up from his stomach and trying to clear his head for battle. He shouldn't have drunk so much on the long night march, but the Gribbles had always had a taste for whiskey.

His brothers, Hank and Bill, were in their graves, and Horace wanted vengeance. After striking Holcomb's Ranch, Kicking Dog had ridden north and found much greater success at the Gribble Ranch. Horace had been away in Denver. He had returned to find his home burned and the bodies of his brothers stripped and mutilated. When Colonel Chivington started recruiting men for hundred-day enlistments in the Third Cavalry, Horace signed on. Sand Creek was to be his first battle.

Dawn gave enough light for him to see all the way down the skirmish line Chivington had ordered the men to form. Most of the seven hundred mounted men belonged to the Hundred Dazers, as the Third was called, but two battalions of the old First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers were present, too.

Chivington trotted before the line, his baritone striking the clarion call to arms as if spouting from the pulpit. He badly needed a victory today. The fame he had won at Glorietta Pass, that which had elevated him to Commander of the Military District of Colorado, had already faded in the rash of Indian troubles.

“It is honorable in the eyes of the Lord to exterminate these heathen reds,” he was saying. “Think of the farms they have left smoldering in their wake upon your prairies. You, soldier, strip that coat off. You'll get hot enough.…”

As the colonel harangued his volunteers, his scout loped up from the creek bed to report. “Did you ever whop the wild pigeons down from the roosts back east, colonel?” Cheyenne Dutch asked.

“Pigeons? No. What about the Indians?”

“Don't feel slighted for the sport. You'll get a taste of it this mornin'.”

“A taste of what, man? Report sensibly.”

“A taste of whoppin' down the pigeons. Killin' them Indians won't take no more trouble.”

“How many lodges?”

“Three hundred, I'll wager.”

“Who are the chiefs?”

“Cheyenne for the most part. White Antelope, Black Kettle, War Bonnet, Little Robe, and Standing-in-the-Water. I saw one band of Arapaho, too. Long Fingers's.”

“Which one is he?”

“Talks American.”

“Oh, yes.” The big reverend soldier sneered with hatred. “How many warriors do you estimate?”

Dutch scratched his whiskered neck as he made his tabulations. “Maybe a buck in every lodge. Them squaws and boys'll fight, too, though.”

The colonel nodded and told Dutch to choose his place in the line. “The Indians will fight to the death,” he shouted at his men. “Take no prisoners!”

“Colonel,” one of the soldiers said, “what about their women and children? Will we give them time to clear out?”

Chivington turned his huge dapple gray to face the questioner. “As an officer of the United States Army, I cannot order you to fire upon women and children. But I will offer an observation: Nits make lice. Damn any man in sympathy with the Indians.…”

*   *   *

Chivington's four howitzers found their places on the sand hills overlooking the creek, and the skirmish line moved forward. “What do you think the colonel meant about nits?” the man next to Horace asked. “Does he want us to kill the younguns or not?”

“Hell if I know. Don't reckon I'll shoot any unless they're shootin' at me.”

“You'll wait one shot too late if you let them shoot at you first. Here, you want a drink of this?”

“Oh, Lordy, put it away,” Horace said. He saw the bed of Sand Creek dropping off in front of him. The sooty pinnacles of the hide lodges emerged, standing among a few old cottonwood trees along the watercourse. “Wait a minute,” he said. “On second thought, let me have just one gurgle.” He took the bottle from his companion and turned it up on his parched lips.

*   *   *

Long Fingers came back from his musings of peace at the terrified shout of a squaw. He threw the buffalo robe off, startling his wife, and shoved his feet into his moccasins. From the flap of his lodge he saw the howitzers against the morning sky. Families stumbled from their lodges, waking in terror to the sights of the white man's war. A company of cavalrymen was galloping to get between the camp and the horse herd.

Kicking Dog came from his tepee with his weapons already in hand. “Now what have you brought us, old fool?” he said to Long Fingers.

“Wait,” the chief replied. “They do not mean to fight us. Maybe it is an escort. They have come to take us to another place.”

An officer shouted, and the main body of the force appeared over the sandy slope of the creek bank. Kicking Dog shouted for all the warriors to arm themselves and prepare to cover a retreat of the women and children up the creek bed.

“Wait,” Long Fingers ordered. “They mistake us. Black Kettle, raise the American flag and tie a white flag under it.”

The Cheyenne chief tied the flags to the end of a lodge pole and raised it overhead; a throng of women and children gathered at the foot of the staff for protection. But just as the banners reached a zenith, the howitzers spoke. Grapeshot ripped through the hide tents. The shrieks of women and children split the air, and Indians fled in every direction. Chivington's voice thundered. Soldiers cheered, and two thousand hooves drummed down the creek bank.

White Antelope ran at the cavalry charge, holding his hands high overhead. He yelled in English: “Stop! Stop!” His band of Cheyenne followed him, trying to surrender before the senseless battle could begin.

Horace saw White Antelope running unarmed at the Hundred Dazers, but when the old chief saw the soldiers would not obey, he lowered his arms, folded them over his chest, and met the onslaught as if it consisted of nothing more than a fair breeze.

The first pistols cracked, and White Antelope rolled under the trampling hooves of the cavalry. The whiskey drinker riding next to Horace spurred his horse in front of Horace's Kentucky stud and jumped off as he passed over the body of White Antelope.

“Damn you!” Horace said, whirling the stud around. “Don't cut my charge!” He had his Remington revolver drawn and pointed skyward, his thumb on the hammer.

The whiskey drinker didn't look up but drew his knife, and cut the leather leggings from the dead chief's hips. He cut the thong of the breechcloth and tossed it aside. He took the testicles of the corpse in his hand.

“My Lord,” Horace said. “What in God's name do you mean to do?” Screams and gunfire cut through the dust in the creek bed.

“I'll take and fix me a tobacco pouch,” he shouted above the racket, grinning up at Horace. He put his blade under the grisly trophy.

Horace spurred his stud away from the scene of mutilation. He would remember the soldier's face and report his atrocity after the battle. But for now he had to catch the warriors fleeing up the sand hills and along the creek bed. Somebody was going to pay for what had happened to Hank and Bill.

Squads of soldiers swarmed everywhere in pursuit, setting up a cross fire that proved more dangerous to themselves than anything the Indians had organized. The artillerymen hadn't stopped blasting, even though their own men were now in the line of fire.

Horace galloped among the tepees and the bushes, heading up the broad, sandy creek bed. Ahead, the warriors seemed to be making an attempt at fighting back, and he wanted to join the battle. His horse dodged bloody bodies as he weaved his way among the deserted tents.

Before he could reach the battle up the creek bed, he ran upon six soldiers preparing to set a tepee on fire. “Hey, soldier, give us a hand,” one of them said. “They're in this one thick as fleas.”

“They're fixin' to flush,” another shouted.

Horace turned his horse and cocked his pistol, waiting for the braves to bolt from the lodge. The burning buffalo hide sizzled like grease, and smoke billowed from the lodge as the soldiers lined up and prepared to fire. The flap of the tepee flew aside, and a little girl tripped out. Strands of black hair covered her face. She held a stick with a dirty white handkerchief tied to it. Horace pointed his gun back to the sky and heaved a sigh of relief. “Just kids,” he said.

He couldn't explain the gunfire that came next. It was too torrential for accident; too cruel for intent. The body of the little girl jerked, then crumpled and reeled under the hail of bullets. Women and children poured out of the burning lodge. Some dropped to their knees for mercy, some ran for their lives, but none escaped the deluge of lead. One wounded old woman attempted to crawl away. A soldier rode over her and fired down into her head.

Most of the soldiers rode on then, but two got down to search the bodies. When one pulled out a knife and grabbed a handful of hair, Horace holstered his pistol and turned away, choking to keep the whiskey down in his stomach.

A wounded soldier was returning from the fight in the creek bed, almost falling from his saddle for loss of blood. Horace caught the man before he fell and guided his horse back through the smoldering Sand Creek village. He looked at the bodies he had galloped past earlier. All women and children, except for one young brave.

Horace helped the wounded man to the hospital tent, then sat in the sand outside to watch the swarms of soldiers riding like vultures on the winds, looking for victims. He could hear the roar of the howitzers and the rattle of pistol shots.