Shortgrass Song (47 page)

Buster's letter went into a detailed account of things that had happened since the year of Sand Creek, and Caleb paused in the reading to add his own observations as they arose. Of particular interest to Long Fingers was the sawmill fight in Colorado City, where Cheyenne Dutch had killed Matthew Holcomb, and Javier Maldonado had killed Cheyenne Dutch.

“I had my knife between Dutch's ribs at Sand Creek,” the chief said. “I am sorry I did not have the strength to finish him then. That way he would not have lived to kill your brother.”

Then came several paragraphs of questions. Where was the new reservation? How was it fixed for game, water, grass, livestock, farming? How was the chief's wife? Was Kicking Dog still on the warpath?

Long Fingers answered each question aloud, as if Man-on-a-Cloud could hear through Caleb's ears. He knew Caleb would take the news back to Monument Creek.

Caleb continued reading, turning the pages to catch the light of the fire Red Hawk had lit: “‘I have not been able to find out what happened to the Snake Woman after Caleb and me escaped the Comanche in the Wichita Mountains. Do you have any news?'”

“Snake Woman stays with the Comanche, still,” Long Fingers said. “She is with the Quahadi band—the Antelope Eaters. The son of Man-on-a-Cloud and Snake Woman is called Medicine Horse. He will be a warrior in three, maybe four, winters.”

Caleb had been listening carefully to every reply Long Fingers made so he would be able to report accurately when he returned to Monument Creek. But the news about the son of Man-on-a-Cloud and Snake Woman bogged his thoughts beyond extrication. “Whose son?” he asked.

“Medicine Horse,” the chief replied, “the son of Man-on-a-Cloud and Snake Woman.”

Caleb rifled through his vague memories of the Comanche in the Wichita Mountains and of Snake Woman, a mute and wild-eyed witch. He remembered her being pregnant that winter, but for the life of him, he had never wondered by whom. He tried to picture her in union with Buster, but the image evaporated. It was impossible. Not laughing, singing Buster Thompson, the man of calm common sense, thoughtfulness, and inventive genius. Buster was beyond temptation. He didn't care about women. He avoided even looking at the whores in Old Town. Buster's hands were meant for tools and instruments. Music and work satisfied all his lusts.

And the Snake Woman! She was coming clearer to Caleb now. He saw her mouth, thin lipped and straight as if pulled taught toward her ears; dirty legs; sinewy forearms and hands, bulging with veins, lugging buckets of water. What would have made Buster do such a thing?

“He never told you,” Long Fingers said, reading Caleb's confusion, “but it is true. I have seen Medicine Horse. He has dark skin—almost black like Man-on-a-Cloud's. And he has the same hair, like the buffalo.”

Buster was a father! It made Caleb wonder what else Buster had never told him. He had never talked much about his slave days or his escape from the South before the war. He had never mentioned his boyhood or his upbringing. Here, far away from the farm on Monument Creek, Caleb wasn't sure he knew Buster at all.

“Go ahead now,” the chief said. “Read the rest of the letter.”

He ran his finger down the pen script and found his place on the page. “It just says, ‘Come back to the mountains to stay with us for a while if you can. The country has changed, but you will still know it. Good luck,' signed, ‘Man-on-a-Cloud.'”

“Where does it say his name?”

“Right here at the bottom.” He pointed to the signature. “He sure likes that name you gave him, chief. He brags on it all the time.”

A warrior approached the circle of firelight in front of the tepee and said something in Arapaho.

Long Fingers took the letter, folded it, and put it back in the envelope. “They have cooked a big meal for you,” he said. “Let's go to eat it now. It is ready.”

Caleb rose and walked with the chief. “Do you want me to tell Man-on-a-Cloud you're comin'? I'm goin' home myself in the spring. You can ride with me if you want to.” He couldn't see Long Fingers' expression in the dark.

“I cannot leave here now,” the old chief said. “I keep telling my boys we cannot move around the way we used to. We have to live here all the time now. Maybe so we can take some tepees and camp at another village for a while, but we have to stay on the reservation. If I go to see Man-on-a-Cloud, they will say I do not know how to follow my own words. Anyway, the Comanche are always trying to get my boys to go with them and kill the buffalo hunters. If I leave, they will all go, then there will be big trouble for us from the soldiers. Maybe so someday I will go to the mountains, but it will be many winters from now. Tell Man-on-a-Cloud I am coming, but I will follow a long and crooked trail.”

FIFTY-FIVE

For days Caleb herded the horses down the well-worn route to Texas. He had only thrown in with the cowboys to ensure safe passage across Indian Territory. He got free grub in exchange for his songs sung around the fire at night, but he didn't collect any wages. He didn't mind. The work went easy; the horses knew the way.

Because he had not yet mastered the left-handed guitar, he had taken to singing more ballads. He had always sung in a sure, clear voice, but in the past he had relied on his instruments to carry a song. Now he favored tunes meant for a tenor—mostly sad songs of old trails and lost loves. One that the cowboys made him sing every night was “Annie Laurie:”

Her brow is like the snowdrift, her throat is like the swan,

Her face it is the fairest that e'er the sun shone on,

That e'er the sun shone on, and dark blue are her eyes,

And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me down and die.

Even the hardest hand turned his eyes from the firelight when Caleb sang “Annie Laurie.”

Ten days south of Long Fingers's village, they approached Fort Griffin on the Texas plains. When the drovers spotted Government Hill in the distance, they turned the horses onto fresh grass and argued about who would get to go to town. Caleb said he would stay and night-herd the horses since he had no money to buy drinks with anyway, but his camp mates insisted on treating him to a night of debauchery in The Flats, below the fort.

“I'll stay with the horses,” a black cowboy named Nate said. “Last time I went to Griffin I had to shoot my way out and hide in a thicket all night. There was about a dozen of 'em after me.”

“A dozen of who?” Caleb asked, suddenly concerned about going to town.

“They've got Negro troopers at the fort,” explained a cowboy called Bandanna Dan Montgomery. “They're good Indian fighters, but some of the Old Law Mob don't like 'em drinkin' in the same saloons as white men. They run Nate out of town with a lynch rope last time we was there.”

“Old Law Mob?”

“That's their vigilante outfit,” Bandanna Dan said. “They're hell on rustlers, but some of 'em are old Rebels and don't like to see a black man get ahead. You'll be all right though. You're white as a lily.”

Nate and two other black cowboys agreed to stay with the herd that night while Caleb, Bandanna Dan, July Pierce, and Bud Redden went to town—providing the white cowboys would bring back some refreshments and smoking tobacco for the night herders to enjoy the next day. They crossed the horses to the south bank of the Clear Fork of the Brazos River and trotted to Fort Griffin.

Sunset was kind to the ramshackle barracks where the black troopers lived. It bathed them in a fine hue. The four cowboys cut between the parade ground and the sutler's store on Government Hill, then rode down to The Flats. When they mounted the main street of the town, Caleb knew he had scarcely seen the likes of buggies, freight wagons, mules, oxen, and saddle horses in his life. They all but choked the flow of traffic in the rutted street.

Every man in town seemed to harbor a deep aversion to the rules of civilization. A cowboy spurred his mount onto the boardwalk to get around a wagon jam in the street. A buffalo hunter proudly carried a new Sharps rifle from a store, test-firing it even before he had closed the door behind him. A drunken Tonkawa brave staggered along a hitching rail, one hand on his knife handle, the other around the neck of a whiskey bottle. A mule skinner and a bull whacker cussed each other up and down in the street, then resorted to fists.

“What we need is a plan,” Bud Redden said. “We want to make sure we get to the river before we run out of money.”

“What are you gonna do with money at the river?” Caleb asked. “Throw it away?”

“More or less,” July Pierce said. “That's where all the disorderly houses are.”

“We'll have a drink at every saloon on the way to the river,” Bandanna Dan said. “There's only three or four of 'em. Then, if we have any wages left over after whorin' up and down the riverbank, we can drink our way back up to Government Hill.”

“Don't forget the whiskey and tobacco for Nate and them,” Caleb reminded him.

The plan was agreed upon, and the four men hitched their horses in front of the first saloon. It was early in the evening, and most of the customers were still sober. A piano plinked out familiar tunes. There were girls to dance with at a dime per whirl. Most of them were drumming up business for their houses down on the river. One told Caleb that she worked in the Palace of Beautiful Sin, the swankiest den of debauchery on the Clear Fork.

After the third saloon, Caleb reached his favorite stage of drunkenness. He still had control of his faculties but felt oblivious to any prospect of danger around him. He embraced the chaos of The Hats. There was one more saloon left on the main street before he and his friends made their visit to the river.

As he tied Powder River to the hitching rail, he happened to notice the sign that hung down by chains from the saloon front. The place was called Starling's Lone Star.

“I used to know an old man named Starling,” he said as he walked in through the free-swinging double doors. Just as the name crossed his lips, he spotted Old Milt shuffling across the floor, carrying a tray stacked with whiskey glasses. “Well, I'll be damned. There he is!”

“You know that old man?” Bandanna Dan asked. “See if you can get us free drinks.”

Caleb pushed between two men standing at the bar and shouted at Milt. “Hey, old man! Remember me?”

Milt turned with a scowl and wiped the tail of his apron over his brow and bald head. “Who said that?!”

“I did. Remember? Black Hawk.”

Milt stared at Caleb, squinted, and backed away. “I don't know what the hell you're talkin' about.”

Caleb laughed. “I used to fiddle in your place at Black Hawk. Don't you remember throwing me in the creek that night I got drunk?”

Milt's eyebrows perked, then a look of relief swept his face. “By God, it is you!” He slapped his hand down on his bar. “I was fearin' somebody else. What was your name? Let's see, Cal somethin', wasn't it?”

“Caleb. Caleb Holcomb.”

Milt invited Caleb to sit with him at a table. “Where's the fiddle, boy?” he asked. “Dancin' music would bring in some of them damsels of spotted virtue—whores, that is.”

“I don't fiddle since I froze my fingers off,” Caleb said, holding up his left hand. “I'm learnin' guitar left-handed, but I haven't got around to the fiddle yet.”

“The guitar will do. How are you fixed for money?”

“Flat broke,” he replied, as if he was proud of it.

“Then you could stand the weight in your pockets. Turn your hat up on the bar and pluck a few songs for us.”

“Well, maybe. If you'll advance me and my friends a drink.” Caleb pointed to his three acquaintances standing by the door.

The old saloonkeeper cussed, but he waved the three cowboys over to the bar and set up a round.

“Thanks, Milt,” the musician said. “Say, how come you give up your place in Black Hawk for this dive?”

Milt hissed through the gaps in his teeth and covered his face in shame. “The fever got me, boy.”

“The fever? You mean the gold fever?” Caleb laughed.

“I swore I was too old and smart for it, but it got me all over again just the same.”

“What happened?”

“An old Californee friend of mine went broke on a prospect hole above Nevadaville. He asked me to come take a look at the place and see if I couldn't find him a buyer for his claim. I swear, as soon as I set foot on that claim, all my old broken joints started achin'. The fever got me like a vise. I could smell the ore down the shaft!”

“Did you find your friend a buyer?”

“Hell, yes, boy, I found him a right handy one! I sold my store and sunk all my money down that shaft myself. I blasted fifty feet before I went broke.”

“So you left for Texas?”

“No, no, no! There was gold under that hill, boy! I could taste it in the shaft dust I'd been breathin'. There was a vein in there thick as my crippled leg.” Milt leaned toward Caleb to speak confidentially. “I had a friend with a payin' mine in Central City. So I borrowed a little ore from him and had it assayed. I said it came out of my mine and got some Denver bankers to stake me.”

“You salted your own mine?”

Milt shushed him violently. “Would you ruin me right here in my own home? Keep it down, boy. Yes, I salted it. Don't judge me, boy, the fever had me. It ain't like I run off with the money. I sunk it all down the shaft. I blasted a drift at seventy-five feet and worked like a fool, muckin' out the chunks, but there wasn't a sliver of color in nary a one of 'em.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you think I did? Them Denver bankers wanted to see profits. When I ran out of their money, I skipped the territory. That's why you scared me so spoutin' off about Black Hawk. I thought they had sent a bounty hunter to find me.”