Shortgrass Song (46 page)

“Maybe you should find Javier's place down in New Mexico,” Pete suggested.

Caleb remembered the creased, stubbled chin and the wry grin of the vaquero. And the guitar music, the rowels like spokes on his spurs, the saddle horn big as a tin plate. “I might just do that, if I knew where his place was,” he said.

“He said it was in the Sacramento Mountains, somewhere way down south, close to Old Mexico.”

“Maybe I'll try to find him after I knock around in Texas for a while.”

“On your way to Texas,” Buster said. “I wonder if you'd do me a favor. I want to write a letter to the agent of the Arapaho reservation in Indian Territory. I wonder if you'd see that it gets delivered there.”

“All right, but what for?”

“I want to find out whatever happened to Long Fingers.”

“I heard he got killed at Sand Creek,” Pete said. “He had a knife between ol' Cheyenne Dutch's ribs when somebody shot him. Just think, if Long Fingers had killed Dutch there, then Dutch wouldn't have been around to shoot Matthew. Oh, well…”

“Some folks say Long Fingers got carried off,” Buster said. “He might have lived.”

“I doubt it,” Caleb said. “But I'll take your letter for you if you want me to.”

“If he's alive, I'd like to have him back this way to visit. If Kicking Dog is still alive, I don't see why Long Fingers shouldn't be. He was ten times a better Indian.”

“I'll vouch for that,” Caleb said. “Kicking Dog ought to be hung.” His brain was doing flip-flops, trying to make his right hand use left-handed knowledge.

Pete and Caleb searched upstream the next morning to find eight healthy heifers for Buster's pasture. Caleb rode a strong, surefooted Nez Perce gelding called Powder River. From a distance he looked solid sorrel. A pattern of small white spots showed on his flanks and hips only from a near point of view. He was just three years old, and every year his blanket of specks grew thicker. Pete predicted he would look like a blizzard from the shoulders back by his tenth year.

As the brothers herded the eight heifers toward Buster's new pasture, a brindle made her first of a dozen attempts to escape. Each time, one of the horsemen ran her down and turned her back toward the herd, but she was relentless. When they were almost to Buster's place, the heifer made a break toward the Holcomb cabin on Caleb's side of the herd. He spurred Powder River and gave chase.

Ab was plucking blossoms from the wildflower patch when he heard the hooves pounding the parched ground. Dust blew away in a floating trail behind the running animals. He knew at a glance it was Caleb on Powder River, and he felt his whole body jerk, tense with worry—even the missing leg. The brindle came toward him at breakneck speed, the horseman gaining her side, hollering, whistling, waving hands that should have been pulling leather.

With her tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth, the heifer bawled in anger, planted her front hooves, and tried to cut behind the horse. But Powder River was too canny; he met her dodge in mirror image. She broke back four times, looking for a way around the horse, but he stayed right with her, cutting so sharp that Caleb's hat flew off. At last the heifer turned for the herd and kicked a hind foot ineffectually at the gelding.

When she had rejoined the other heifers, Caleb galloped Powder River back toward the cabin, hung from the left side of the saddle like a lashed-on corpse, and swooped down to grab his hat. Powder River then doubled back like a cottontail rabbit as the rider pounded the dust from his hat on the white-speckled rump.

“Did you see that?” Ab said to Ella. “He does that on purpose. He does it to spite me.” He leaned a bundle of flowers against her gravestone. “I swear he's trying to kill himself just to spite me. Did you know he's going to Texas? Do you know why? Because he knows it will worry me crazy.”

FIFTY-THREE

The dust cloud hung in the sky like a giant plume, its wide feathery top rising in the north and its quill-like point touching the ground in the east. Long Fingers had studied it for an hour from the buffalo robe spread beside his tepee. Because it was moving south, he figured the herd that made the cloud probably consisted of trail horses returning to Texas after a cattle drive.

In the old days he had seen buffalo raise such plumes against the sky—whole wings of them. But the buffalo on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation were getting shy and hard to kill since the white hunters had come south of the Arkansas River in violation of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. Hunting them was not like it once was anyway. He had to get permission from the Indian agent to go hunting. It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

He rose from his old buffalo robe and walked to the corrals he had ordered some of his braves to build. Several boys were waving blankets at some colts in a pen, to break their fear of objects that leapt or flailed about. The chief called to one of the boys who was resting his arms.

“Those cowboys will camp close to here,” he said in English when the boy ran to him. He made all the young boys in his band go to the agency school to learn English. “They will probably camp down the river. Take the fastest horse you have and ride there. Run all of our horses away from the river before the cowboys get there, so they won't steal them.”

The boy nodded and crawled between two corral rails to catch a horse.

Long Fingers strolled among the tepees and found several braves loafing under a brush arbor. He listened for a moment as they talked about the war that had started on the Red River—white hunters and soldiers on one side, Indians on the other. Many Cheyenne warriors had ridden south to join the fighting, but most Arapaho were remaining neutral.

“Red Hawk,” the chief finally said, “take two of these braves and go talk to the white men with that herd. Ask them if they want to buy some good horses. Take a gun, but do not wave it around or they will shoot at you.”

Red Hawk stared at the dust cloud for a long moment. He was a promising young man, well regarded among the youths in the lower ranks of the warrior society. He was thirty-one years old and already a leader in the Order of Club Men. In past battles with Utes, he had distinguished himself by riding ahead of his comrades to strike enemy warriors with his club, then returning to lead the general charge.

But now, with the Utes so far away, Red Hawk hardly knew how to prove himself. He had been absent from the village for some time, and it was said that he had ridden with some Cheyenne against buffalo hunters and soldiers in Texas. Long Fingers frequently put him in charge of minor expeditions on the reservation, hoping to channel his talents for leadership toward peaceful ends.

Red Hawk picked two warriors to ride with him to the camp of the cowboys. Each plunged the gourd dipper into the water bucket and drank heavily before sauntering out into the stifling sun.

On the way back to his tepee, Long Fingers passed the garden patch he had tried to establish this spring. The vegetables had withered and blown away. Weeds had taken over the crooked furrows. The agency's farming instructor had not come back to help them as he had said he would. A plow stock was lying on the ground. At least it wouldn't rot, the chief thought. Wood had to have moisture to rot, and the reservation hadn't seen rain in weeks.

Plowing had proven difficult with the small Indian ponies, ill-trained and fitted with a makeshift harness. Some of the old ones—especially among the Cheyenne—had ridiculed him as he plowed, but they did not know how to survive in these new times. The chief smiled. Some of those old ones were younger than he was. They would die “blanket Indians,” as the government agents called them. Long Fingers was a progressive. His name would go down in the books of white men.

He returned to his tepee and wished for wind. Then he prayed for rain. Then he dreamed of mountains. There was no sense in wishing or praying for the mountains, for they would never appear on his reservation. But he could always dream.

The high country was the place to live during the hot season. He remembered the patches of summer snow under pine trees, where the sun never shined. He recalled the way the elk antlers, velvet covered, swept far through the cool air as the bulls turned to run. He longed for the music of water running down a mountain slope—cold water in his cupped hands, on his face, across the back of his neck. He yearned for battle with the Utes—the mounted charges across mountain meadows, the song of arrows in the air, the war cries. Long Fingers missed the Utes; they were always his enemy. They were not like the whites: some friends, some foes.

He dozed, and when he woke, the sun was setting, and the great plume of dust had settled. In its place a smaller spout of dirt had risen from the plains. The riders had who kicked it up came over a roll in the prairie, mere dots wavering in the heat, and Long Fingers counted five. The three braves and the boy were bringing one of the cowhands back with them. He rose to prepare himself for their arrival.

FIFTY-FOUR

Caleb recognized the chief instantly, though only a few strands of raven hair remained to streak his otherwise gray head. He sat astride a white stallion and a Texas saddle; wore a white shirt, a vest, and striped trousers. In his stirrups a vestige of the old life remained: moccasins, beaded and fringed. Boots and shoes hurt the chief's feet.

“Hello, chief,” Caleb said, riding Powder River near enough to shake hands. “Do you remember me?”

Long Fingers took in the horse and the man. He noticed the humanlike whites in the eyes of the gelding. He remembered the Nez Perce horses on Monument Creek. Then he saw a guitar neck sticking out behind the saddle. “Holcomb?”

Caleb was astounded. “Yes! By golly, you do remember me!”

“Do you still play that song?” Long Fingers asked. “‘Old Dan Tucker and I got drunk, he fell in the fire and kicked up a chunk…'”

Caleb joined the chief in reciting: “‘The charcoal got inside his shoe, Lord bless you, honey, how the ashes flew!' Yes, sir, I still play that.”

“Red Hawk, get my friend a drink of water,” the chief ordered. “Boy, take these horses.”

Caleb dismounted with the chief and grabbed his guitar before the Indian boy led Powder River away. He had made a saddle wallet for carrying the instrument. It was an old feed sack with both ends sewed shut and a new opening made across the middle. The sack, when tied to the cantle strings, draped across the saddle skirts with the opening facing up, like a crude pair of large saddlebags with one common opening. He had made it expressly for the guitar, but it served to carry just about anything from spare ropes to buffalo chips for fuel.

“Look,” Long Fingers said, reaching into the pocket of his vest. “I still have this harp that Man-on-a-Cloud gave me many winters ago.” He blew a discordant combination of notes on the old instrument. “But now I say
harmonica.
I learn much more English here.”

“You speak it good,” Caleb said.

They sat down in front of the tepee and played “Old Dan Tucker,” Caleb clumsily plucking his left-handed guitar, Long Fingers blowing notes in rhythm, if not in key. Red Hawk brought the bucket of water with the gourd dipper in it and sat down next to his chief to listen.

When the song ended, Long Fingers closed his eyes and allowed a thin laugh to pass between his lips. “What happened to your fingers?” he asked.

“Well, as a matter of fact, it was sort of Kicking Dog's fault.…”

Caleb entered eagerly into the story, surging through it, embellishing it, improving it over its last telling. He relished the spell he held over his listeners. It took him till sundown to tell it all. By that time the braves had killed a steer that had drifted out of some trail herd, and the women were butchering it. Caleb knew he had earned his share of it.

“I have heard of the white man called Angus,” the chief said. “The Cheyenne call him Black Beard. He gets guns and whiskey for Indians who want to fight, and they give him cattle and horses they steal. And Kicking Dog, he fights with the Comanche now. He forgets that he has Arapaho blood.”

Caleb nodded and dipped the gourd into the bucket again, the yarn having parched him. “Buster will be glad to hear that you all are getting on so good,” he said, looking down the row of tepees. “We heard you got killed at Sand Creek.”

“That was the last fight for us,” Long Fingers said. “Now we stay in one camp. We try to farm, but we don't know how to do it. We need to learn how to do more work that the white man wants us to do, but nobody will show us how. Some of my boys want to buy wagons and haul things. That way, they could move around a little more, like the old days. The women sometimes tan buffalo hides for the traders—three dollars a hide—but they do not send us enough hides. We five here okay and raise good horses. Do you want to buy any?”

“The boss said he'd buy some two-year-olds at fifteen dollars a head if they're broke. Or ten dollars a head for broncs.”

The chief shook his head. “No broncs. We break our horses. That gives my boys plenty of work to do. I will show your boss some horses in the morning, but I think he will pay more than fifteen dollars.”

Caleb smiled. “I have a letter for you,” he said, picking up his guitar. He held the instrument horizontally over his head, strings down, and shook it until he could see the envelope in the sound hole. He forced his fingers through the strings, pulled the letter out of the hollow body of the guitar, and handed it to the chief. “It's from Man-on-a-Cloud.”

Long Fingers looked at the writing on the outside of the envelope, opened it, and unfolded the papers that came from it. He shuffled through the pages a few times, then handed them back to Caleb. “I do not read,” he said. “You read it for me.”

Caleb put the pages back in order. “‘Dear Chief Long Fingers,'” he began. He cleared his throat and tilted his hat back on his head. “‘I hope this letter finds you alive and well on the reservation. We are getting along good here on Monument Creek.…'”