Stamping Ground (11 page)

They were Cheyenne. One, a brave with a nose like a razor and a lightning-streak of yellow slashing diagonally across his blackened features, wore one of those human-finger necklaces for which the tribe was notorious, its macabre pendants brown and wrinkled and shrunken so that the nails stood out like claws. They didn't look as if they had ever strung a bow or braided beads into a horse's mane or, to put an even grimmer face on it, drawn a needle through an embroidery hoop or followed a passage in a family Bible. Interspersed among these were tiny medicine bags that looked to have been fashioned from human flesh. The ornament carried strong medicine, too strong for an ordinary warrior. But there was only one chief in Ghost Shirt's crowd, so he must have been no more than a sub-chief or a brave who had proved himself in many battles. Possibly a medicine man. In any case, he seemed to be the leader of this band, as my Winchester was turned over to him without hesitation by the Indian who had seized it. He eyed it lovingly, passed a hand over the engraving on the action, then, decisively, thrust his own dusty Spencer into the hands of the brave nearest him and tucked the carbine under his arm. He grunted a terse order. The point of a broad-bladed knife was thrust inside my left nostril and hands rooted around inside my saddle bags. At length my cartridge boxes were produced and tossed to the ranking warrior. The sharp scent of steel tickled the hairs inside my nose. I controlled myself with an effort. A sneeze now could have cost me a substantial amount of blood, to say nothing of what a startled Indian might do. Not that I was going to live long enough to see the last of the sun, wallowing now in a blood-red pool behind the fortress on the distant ridge.

Another order was given in guttural Cheyenne and my horse began moving with no encouragement from me. In a mass we struck out toward the mission. I glanced in that direction, but Ghost Shirt was no longer there. Having served his purpose as bait, he had left the situation in the hands of his subordinates and returned to his stronghold. Such confidence in the obedience of his warriors bordered on arrogance.

Up close, the wall of the mission turned out to be constructed of weathered stone, tightly mortared and forming a barrier nearly twenty feet high around the buildings inside. Three decades or more ago it had served as a place of refuge for the settlers who had dwelled nearby in farmhouses long since reduced to their foundations by fire and the elements. A few pulls on the great bell that swung in the central tower and the Mormons would come streaming in for protection from Indians, blizzards, or religious persecution, three of the many dangers they had learned to live with in order to uphold their creed. I wondered which of the three had brought an end to it all in this lonely quarter, or if they had simply thrown everything over to join Brigham Young's exodus to Utah. Whatever the reason, only this fire-blackened, bullet-chipped fortress remained as a monument to the brotherly existence they preached.

The gate was made of logs bound and pegged together vertically, all but petrified with age. It swung open in one piece to admit us, then was secured by a handful of Indians who lowered another log into steel cleats on either side of the opening, much as at Fort Ransom. The ground inside the enclosure had been pounded over the years into a dust fine as face powder and loosened by the activity of the present occupants to form a layer two inches deep. It puffed up around the horses' fetlocks in reddish clouds that drifted across the compound like gunsmoke across a busy battlefield. Fresh rope ladders hung from the catwalks on all four walls, atop which Sioux and Cheyenne sentries stood watching me, their eyes hostile slits in faces dried and cracked
beyond their years by constant exposure to sun, wind, and grit.

There were women and children in the compound, which surprised me, although there was no reason it should have. Sex and age were of little consequence among a people for whom hardship and danger were a way of life. It didn't matter to the children running naked, their ribs showing beneath their brown hides, that there was a war on, nor to the stout squaws who hardly glanced at me as they sat cross-legged in the hot sun chewing on large squares of buckskin to make soft leggings for their braves or lugged clay pots of water and baskets of dried buffalo chips to their cooking fires. They were doing the work their mothers and grandmothers had done before them, all the way back to when the Earth-Shaker fashioned the first woman out of clay to mate with and free the first brave for hunting and making weapons.

Except for the stone bell tower, now in the early stages of decay, the structures inside the compound were made of less sturdy stuff than the wall. Soddies mostly, with here and there a long, low adobe building scattered among them, its thatched roof sagging in the middle like a Conestoga wagon, they were ramshackle affairs slapped together more for shelter during the hours of sleep than for actual living purposes, and had begun falling apart twenty years before. Cones of buffalo hide strewn about the grounds offered mute testimony to some Indians' contempt for the white man's idea of quarters.

The foundation of the tower—which, if the weatherbeaten wooden cross pegged into the mortar on the front of it was any indication, had once been the mission chapel—was square, sunk below the ground, and entered by means of a shallow flight of earthen steps leading down to a low plank door. Rough hands yanked me from my horse and half-carried, half-dragged me to the top of the steps. Teetering on the edge, I was patted all over for hidden weapons, relieved of the knife I carried in my right boot, and shoved head first down the stairwell. I sailed through
the air just long enough to experience that eerie weightless sensation you get when falling in a dream, then, suddenly, slammed into a great blank wall of nothing.

Someday, when they build a home for retired lawmen, they'll have to provide a row of chairs in which those fortunate few who survive the profession may sit while they stare at the wall. I had scarcely gotten rid of the headache I'd acquired last winter when a wife-murderer I'd been escorting back to Helena had parted my hair with a rock during an unguarded moment, and now, as I swam to consciousness through a pool of thick, multicolored glue, I wondered why Grant and Lee were fighting the Battle of the Wilderness, complete with thundering twelve-pounders and rattling musketry, all over again inside my skull.

I was flat on my back on what had to be the hardest stone floor this side of Yuma prison. My first act, after the necessary vomiting, was to raise a gentle hand to the top of my head to see if anything was leaking out. A white-hot bolt of pure pain shot straight down to my toes when the tip of my index finger stroked a lump the size of a cobblestone in a nest of matted, sticky hair. After that I quit. At least this time my skull was in one piece. That was a relief, even if whatever was locked up inside it was pounding to get out. Nobody ever told me if we're allowed more than one cracked head to a lifetime.

I decided that I was inside the chapel. If so, I now saw where the work that had not gone into the other buildings on the mission grounds went. I ran a palm over the surface of the floor. It was made of flat rocks, polished to as high a finish as sandstone ever achieved, and bunted up against one another so snugly that in places I couldn't squeeze my fingertips between them. Above me, the crudely vaulted ceiling opened into a shaft that shot straight up to the sky, where the rusted bell stood out. in sharp relief against the jagged, moon-washed square beyond. The thing must have weighed half a ton. One good tug on the frayed old rope that dangled down between the rotted rafters, I thought detachedly,
and the great hunk of iron would come singing down and squash me like a roach. With my head in its present condition I didn't much care.

Now and then a solitary bat flapped its pendulous course to and fro inside the rim, the framework of its membrane-covered wings etched starkly against the pale sky. The sight of it jarred me into reality. How long had I been out?

“Two hours.”

My head jerked around in the direction of the unexpected voice, the pain following close behind. When the popping lights and purple spots faded, I saw moonlight playing over the angular bones of Pere Jac's face in the darkened corner where he was sitting. The orange glow of his pipe brightened as he sucked on the other end, then faded as he took it from between invisible lips. He was shirtless, which came as no surprise since I'd seen the garment hanging from Ghost Shirt's rifle earlier.

“It is the third question a man asks when he comes to after a blow,” he went on without salutation. “First he asks himself where he is, then what happened. When he has answered those he is left with the passage of time, to which only another can reply.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience.” My tongue moved sluggishly. My face began to burn and I realized that my forehead and the bridge of my nose were skinned where I had come into contact with whatever I had come into contact with.

“A man who has reached my age without being knocked senseless at least once has not lived. They carried you in here after it became apparent that they could not open the door simply by throwing you against it. Not that they did not come close. Two of the boards you sprang will never be the same.”

“Neither will my head.” I rolled over onto my side so that I could see him without straining my eyeballs, which creaked in their sockets. It was then that I discovered that every muscle in my body was in the same condition as my skull. “Where's Hudspeth?”

“Beside me, sleeping. Can you not hear his snores?”

I'd thought it was the foundation settling. Now I became aware of the rhythm in the rumbling noise coming from the blackness at the base of the wall. I had to hand it to the marshal. He could sleep on the gallows.

“Care to tell me the story?”

“It is very exciting.” The red glow arced upward, flared, faded again. Black against the milky-water color of the moonlight, threads of smoke unraveled up the shaft. “An hour after you left we decided to bed down the horses so that they would be fresh for whatever would be expected of them when you returned. I heard a noise on the other side of the hill as I was unsaddling. I was reaching for my Sharps when a Cheyenne lance pierced my right shoulder. A.C. shot the brave in the throat with his revolver while he was turning to draw his knife at the top of the hill. The bullet nearly took his head off. Before he hit the ground fourteen or fifteen Indians came whooping and shrieking over the crest, waving rifles and those hatchets my French ancestors traded their great-grandfathers for furs and blankets. A.C. killed two and wounded a third, but there were too many of them and they were too fast, even on foot. They fell on him and would have torn him to pieces then and there had not Ghost Shirt stepped in to prevent it.”

“That doesn't fit in with what I've heard about him.”

“I think that he has something special in mind for A.C.”

And yet he slept. I shook my head in wonder. Judge Flood didn't know the quality of the iron he was getting set to toss on the scrap heap.

“How'd they know you were there?” I asked Jac.

“Perhaps they spotted us when we were watching them earlier. It is more likely that someone noticed the sunlight glancing off the lens of the spyglass.”

“Seems to me I should have heard the gunshots. I wasn't that far away.”

“You wouldn't. These hills soak up noise.”

“That's not all they've soaked up. How's the shoulder?”

He shrugged, then right away regretted it. I heard a sharp
intake of breath in the darkness. He let it out carefully, through his nostrils. “They have applied a bandage, of sorts. The medicine man—Lame Horse, I think he is called, my Cheyenne is rusty—said some words over it. I shall live in spite of them.”

“Decent of them to have left you your pipe, matches and tobacco.”

“We are the only things here that will burn. Am I to assume that the army is not coming?”

I told him about the river. He sighed.

“ ‘For it is better,' ” he quoted, “ ‘if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.' ”

There isn't much you can say to a thing like that, so I let it stand. Hudspeth's snoring dominated everything for a time. Then, from outside, a high, thin wail was borne in on the night air. An unearthly sound, brazen and eerie. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

“What in hell was
that?
”

“A bugle.” He knocked out his pipe against the wall at his back. A shower of sparks fell to the floor, glowed there for a while, then blinked out, one by one. “Captured, I suppose, when they attacked Colonel Broderick's patrol. They have been taking turns blowing it for the past hour. Probably they hope to use it to confuse the soldiers next time they fight.”

“It won't work unless they know the calls. The way they're blowing it sounds chilling as hell.”

“That is the next best thing.”

We listened to it for a while.

“How come we're still alive?” I asked then.

He hesitated. “I have been wondering the same thing. It worries me.”

“Hostages?”

“I think not. What would they have to bargain for? They have their freedom. No, I fear that they have some other use for us. The reason I fear is that I have no idea what it is.”

Outside, the bugle fell silent. We listened to that for a while.

I said, “Ghost Shirt knew my name.”

“Of course he did. I told him.”

That took a minute to sink in. I'd suspected it, of course, but I hadn't expected him to admit it so readily. “What do you plan to do with the thirty pieces of silver?” I asked then.

He chuckled, without humor. “Page, you have an exaggerated sense of your own importance. He asked me who was with us. I might have said no one. He would have read the ground and seen that there were three sets of tracks, not counting those made by the pack horse. Hudspeth and I would have been strung up by our heels over a fire until we either talked or our skulls burst. I thought it best that we were all spared the trouble. Can you honestly say that you would have acted differently?”