Stamping Ground (15 page)

Major Harms, or whoever was calling the shots if not him, was a student of General Nelson Miles. The second wave, which came in from the northeast, was backed up by squares of infantry, the kind of troops the armchair generals back in Washington City swore were hopelessly ineffective against Plains Indians, but which Miles had been using to great advantage since the beginning of the wars. By this time Sioux and Cheyenne snipers had taken up positions along the eastern rim, and as they took aim the horse soldiers hit them at breechclout level with their 45-70 single-shots. The cavalry just kept coming. I had no idea how many there were, but it was obvious that both Fort Lincoln and Fort Yates had been all but emptied out for reinforcements and that the Indians' superior weaponry wasn't worth a leaf in a torrent against numbers like these.

Now that the focus of battle had shifted to the other side of the hollow, a handful of troopers from the first attack took advantage of the lull in this quarter to grab a few scalps. I wasn't shocked. The first one taken was worth a bonus or a furlough depending upon who was in command, and anyway they weren't worth much to the corpses from which they were lifted. What bothered me was the officers back East who acquired the trophies without any risk except to their pocketbooks and either sold them at a profit or hung them in their parlors to add weight to their tales of personal prowess told to entice fashionable young ladies into bed. Barbarians come in all types and colors.

Jac and I cut away the hobbles on our captured mounts, including Hudspeth's, and were about to make a run for it when the marshal cried out and pointed behind me. I swung around, hugging the rifle to my hip.

Ghost Shirt, astride his roan, had broken through along with half a dozen warriors and was making for the high ground west of camp. At his side rode Lame Horse, minus paint. The soldiers who had been cutting dead hair fired in unison. Two Indians fell. Ghost Shirt clapped a hand to his
head and reeled. His horse whinnied in terror, wheeled right, and blundered into the milling relief herd. The remaining braves, one of them the medicine man, returned fire. The troopers dived for cover as they galloped through, then sprang up and snapped shots at their backs. Another Indian tumbled from his horse, I couldn't tell which.

While the soldiers' backs were turned, the chief, his mount trapped among its fellows, lost his grip on the mane and slid like a rag doll to the ground.

“Get him!” I snapped at Jac, who was closest to the herd. “Before he's trampled.”

He left his paint, calmer now that it had recognized its master, and sidled his way in between the horses. Hudspeth held my gray while I went in to help.

Ghost Shirt was lying on his face next to the roan. Together we turned him over. He had a crease on the left side of his head where a bullet had grazed it—I couldn't tell how badly, there was too much blood—but he was still breathing. So much for the god theory. Being the only one of us with a shirt, I tore a long strip from the tail of mine, used it to clean away what blood I could, and bound it tightly around his head. My Winchester was slung over his shoulder by a makeshift strap, a welcome sight but hardly a surprise. It was too good a weapon to leave in the hands of a subordinate. I transferred it to my person, unbuckled the gun belt containing my Deane-Adams, and strapped it on around my waist. That made me feel fifty per cent human again. I inspected both guns to see if they were loaded and found that they were, which completed the cure. Then Jac and I heaved the unconscious Cheyenne up and over the back of his horse. The métis held the animal while I braided two more strips into an approximation of a rope and tied Ghost Shirt's hands and feet together beneath its belly. If he survived that, I decided, I might reconsider my opinion of his so-called immortality.

I picked up the confiscated Spencer from the ground where I'd left it, and then I said something that wasn't clever. I said, “Happy birthday,” and handed it to Pere
Jac. To show how much strain we were under, we both laughed like idiots.

Hudspeth had our saddles, bags, and blankets laid out on the ground when we emerged, leading the roan by its army bridle, and was cinching his rig onto the mustang's back. He could move fast when he had to. We'd left them where I'd killed the guard because it's hard to look like an Indian when you're carrying fifty pounds of leather over your shoulder, and Hudspeth had run there, loaded them up, and gotten back before his mount could stray out of reach, with bullets flying all over hell. He flicked his eyes over our burden and yanked tight the cinch.

“You got him,” he grunted. “Good.”

I could have clubbed him with the butt of the Winchester. Jac had his eight cases of whiskey and I still had my job whether we brought back the Indian or not. We had risked our hides to help him keep his badge, and all the thanks we got was something my father said when his hunting dog fetched its first duck. Even the dog got a pat on the head. But I supposed that was as high as he gushed, so I let it slide.

“Why don't you give me the mustang and take the gray?” I asked him. “You'll scuff your fancy boots dragging them on the ground.”

“I grabbed it, I'll keep it. You'll find fresh jerky in your saddle bags, both of you, and them buckskin bags hanging on your horns is half full of water. I got 'em from a bottomed-up tipi.”

“That's not all you got,” I said, one hand in my saddle bag. I drew out a box of Deane-Adams cartridges.

“I found that on the ground. The injun must of dropped it when he got shot.”

I dropped it back into the bag. “Where's that Spencer I gave you?” I had just noticed he was no longer carrying it.

He snorted. “It wasn't worth the extra weight. The action was jammed full of powder. I wouldn't trust no gun of mine with no redskin if it meant my life. I heard once—”

A bullet nicked the top of his saddle. He ducked behind the horse, drawing his revolver. Jac and I shouldered our rifles.

“Come out of there, you onion-skinned sons of bitches!” A master sergeant's voice if I ever heard one, Ohio twang roughened by weather and grit and years of bawling orders at green recruits.

The herd had begun crowding around us, blocking our view of the cavalry stragglers. Now, gray light perforated the shadows and the horses shied away before the harsh bellow, and in the clearing beyond stood a heavy-chested trooper in a dusty uniform with a knife in one hand and an Army Colt in the other. There were others with him armed similarly, but he was the one who had shouted. A .45-caliber bullet had pierced the right cheek of the Sioux lying at his feet and carried away the left half of his skull on its way out. I had to admit that the trooper was dedicated. He had given up the chance at a furlough—or a bonus—in order to take a few prisoners.

I said, calmly as possible, “You need spectacles.”

This being friendly country, more or less, we had doffed our disguises and put on our hats, not counting Jac, who wore none. The sergeant (his stripes were visible now) had expected Indians, and at worst he might have been prepared for other soldiers, but two white civilians and an elderly half-breed were too much for him to sort out at one time. But they're conditioned to hold onto their guns when in doubt, and this one held true to his training.

“Just who the hell are you, and what you doing with that there dead injun?” His features were Scandinavian, deeply tanned and dusted across chin and cheeks with blond stubble. He had pale blue eyes, which contrasted vividly with the burnished copper of his complexion, and yellow side-whiskers that came to the corners of a jaw so square a carpenter could have used it for a miter. The hand holding the gun had an equally square black thumbnail and knuckles banded with white scar tissue. He had burst them on his share of out-thrust chins.

“In the first place,” I said, “he's not dead. As for the rest, we're civilian peace officers on special assignment with Major Quincy Harms and this is our prisoner.” That was a gamble. If the sergeant and his companions were from Fort Ransom we were sunk.

He scraped his chin with the back of the hand holding the knife, ostensibly on the theory that it helped him think. Still he didn't lower the revolver.

“I don't know. You got a badge?”

That request was beginning to wear thin on me. I was standing behind the gray; resting the carbine across its rump, I fished out the star with my left hand and held it up. There's no doubt that pinning it to your shirt simplifies things, but anywhere you wear it, it's too close to your heart. Hudspeth pulled open his coat to show his. The sergeant squinted from one to the other in thoughtful silence.

“All right, so you got tin. That comes cheap. Anything else?”

“For Christ's sake, can't you see we're white?” One of these days, I thought, the marshal's nose was going to explode in a big red cloud.

The sergeant glared at him. He was going to say, “Shut up, fat boy,” or something as inflammatory. It was on his lips. When he did, Hudspeth was going to throw lead and we would all die right there, smack in the middle of the earth's left armpit. I wondered how St. Peter would take it when he asked me what I was doing at the gates so early and I told him I had acted in defense of my partner's waistline, and the marshal was standing behind me in line broad as a chuck wagon across the beam. My grip tightened on the Winchester.

But I was disappointed, although I doubt that's the proper word for what I felt. Instead of saying it, the sergeant nodded curtly, as if he had just come to the decision that we were, indeed, white. He wasn't finished yet, however.

“What about Grandpa?” he challenged, jerking his chin
toward Jac. “Don't tell me R. B. Hayes is deputizing half-breeds now.”

I explained who he was and what he was doing there. The sergeant's eyes left me and took in our gear lying on the ground a couple of yards away. I answered his next question before he could ask it.

“Our horses were shot out from under us. Pere Jac, there, took a lance in his shoulder as he went down. We're in the midst of changing mounts.”

I must have been pretty convincing, because the top kick glanced down impatiently at the Sioux he'd been preparing to scalp. He was losing interest. But for duty's sake he got in one more lick, a good one.

“What's so all-fired important about that particular injun?” he demanded. “There'll be hundreds to choose from in a few minutes.”

“This ain't no ordinary—” Hudspeth began. But before he could finish he had something else to occupy him, namely the pain in his ankle where I had struck it with the side of my boot.

“It's one of Ghost Shirt's inner circle,” I broke in quickly, to draw attention from Hudspeth's cry. “Tall Dog, a Cheyenne warrior. He may be able to shed some light on his boss's plans.”

The sergeant snorted. “Hell, that's no secret. He was on his way to link up with Spotted Cat and his Arapahoes down south. What he didn't know was they surrendered to General Crook last week.”

“Surrendered?” It flew out. Right after it did I knew it was a mistake.

He nodded. It hadn't dawned on him yet. “Every last one of 'em, right outside Deadwood. Not a shot fired. Christ, everyone's talking—” He broke off. Realization flushed over his face. He'd been about to holster his weapon, but now he raised it again. “Say, where you been? If you was with Major Harms all this time like you say, you would of knowed all about the surrender. It's all over the army. Speak up!”

I could have given myself a swift kick. Not because I had opened my trap without thinking, which was reason enough, but because of what happened next and what it meant. If I hadn't been all aglow inside over how glib I was and how I was going to talk us out of this, I might have seen it coming, as Jac had, and taken steps to counteract it—as Jac had. All the time the sergeant was questioning me, the métis had taken advantage of the fact that all eyes were on me and had sidled around the horses until he was standing within lunging distance of a quaking trooper who looked too young for the uniform he was wearing and who was having trouble holding onto his revolver with both hands. When the sergeant raised his Colt again, Jac dropped his Spencer noiselessly in the grass, curled one of his trunklike arms around the trooper's windpipe, pinioned one of his ankles in the crook of a knee so that he was balanced precariously on one leg, and thrust the point of his knife against the tender flesh beneath the young man's chin. At the same time, the half-breed bumped him from behind with his pelvis and the revolver sprang from his hands like a slippery frog. All without a sound, until the trooper went and spoiled it by crying out.

I was sure the sergeant was an old-line campaigner who knew better than to let his attention be distracted from his primary objective no matter what. I still think that, even though he did what he did. A man on the shady side of forty doesn't give up the reactions of a lifetime just because a little brown book tells him they're no good. He turned his head just far enough to see what the noise was about, realized his mistake, and turned back, but by then it was too late. The muzzle of my Winchester came swinging around, cracked against the back of the hand holding the Colt, and was staring at the third button down from the collar of his tunic by the time the revolver hit the ground. My nerves were strung so tight I nearly blew him into the next world when he doubled over, hugging his shattered hand between his knees.

“This carbine fires a forty-four caliber round,” I told
him, “and so does the revolver the marshal has trained on the man behind you. One of them is enough to make a corpse your loved ones won't want to kiss before they lower it into the ground, but they don't kill any deader than the knife Pere Jac is holding at Tom Sawyer's throat there. That leaves two soldiers uncovered. Are you a gambling man, Sergeant?”

He took enough time to swallow twice, but I can't say if he used it for that purpose. I was looking at his eyes. I saw in them that although he was still doubled over, the pain in his hand was no longer a priority. He was figuring the odds. So he was a gambling man. A smart one too, if what I read there next was on target.