Stamping Ground (18 page)

A jackrabbit exploded out from beneath the gray's hoof as we were cantering down one of the hillocks and thumped through the grass toward a burrow some twenty yards away. Ghost Shirt's dog was after it an instant later. There aren't many dogs that can catch a jack on the run, but Custer was no ordinary mongrel. A rabbit has only one trick, when you come down to it, and that's that it can stop and turn on a dime. Nine times out of ten nothing else is needed. It'll run so far, then halt suddenly. Almost invariably its pursuer, unable to duplicate the feat, will run right past, and before it can turn the rabbit has already reversed directions and gotten a head start that nothing short of a horse at full gallop can touch. Fifteen feet short of the hole
this jack chose to rely on the odds and stopped abruptly. In the next instant Custer was upon it. There was a savage snarl, a squeal of pain and terror, and then the dog tore away its throat and settled down to devour the warm flesh. It was all over in less than a second.

“He won't eat grass today,” I told Hudspeth. He made no answer. For another four or five miles, in fact, he said nothing. Then, as we were nearing the crest of yet another of the endless swells:

“We got company.”

The marshal was riding at my left and a little to the rear. When I turned to look at him he jerked his head backward. As he did the wind caught the brim of his hat and folded it back against the crown, Indian scout style. Weeks on the trail had beaten all the newness out of it. I looked beyond his shoulder.

He had sharp eyes, despite what I had said that morning when he was unable to spot the soldiers through the spyglass. Far to the southwest, a flying wedge made up of dark, irregular shapes had just come into view atop one of the undulating hills and was traveling with great speed down its face.

“Making up for lost time,” I said. “They've gained an hour on us.”

Jac said, “They cannot keep up that pace. Even so they will be upon us by nightfall. Something should be done.”

“That's what I like, a man who makes decisions.” That burning wind in my face had dried up my patience. It wasn't as bad as the “hot southerlies” that blew up from Mexico from time to time, baking the beds of rivers and turning grassland into desert, but it would do until one came along. “How about making one that's worth something?”

Hudspeth reined in next to a burned-up wild rose bramble and leaped down from the saddle. My common sense was deadened by the heat. For a moment I thought he had decided to make a stand against eight or ten seasoned troopers and get it all over with, but when he stooped and twisted off the bramble at its stem I couldn't see how that fit and
abandoned the theory. Sun and lack of rain had cooked its branches brittle and many of its tiny, shriveled leaves shook loose and rattled to the ground with a sound like shot falling through the trees as he worried it from its moorings. Then he straightened, holding the trophy as if it were a priceless artifact.

“Matches.” He held out a hand to Pere Jac.

The métis caught on at the same time I did. After only a beat he reached into his belt and produced the square of oilcloth in which he kept his matches and tobacco. Hudspeth struck one on the heel of his boot and, shielding the flame from the wind with his body, touched off the bramble. The dry leaves caught like pitch and went up in a bright orange blaze. After returning the package to Jac, he mounted up, holding the makeshift torch at arm's length to avoid frightening the mustang, then leaned down from the saddle and set fire to the brown grass where he had been standing.

“Start riding,” he shouted over the wind and the fierce crackling, controlling with his free hand the horse, which had begun dancing backward nervously from the spreading flames. “If this wind shifts we'll all be fried where we sit.” He galloped west, touched off fires in two more places, then hurled the burning bush in the direction of the distant riders and wheeled to join us in our northern flight.

I heard a raucous noise just behind me and twisted in my saddle, drawing my gun. A yellow blur dashed past me. I realized then that it was Custer just catching up with us after finishing a fresh meal. The dog had darted straight through the flames without a qualm. It had its master's grit.

“Where did you get an idea like that?” I asked Hudspeth as he drew alongside me.

“From my parents, though they never knowed it.” His face was flushed from the heat of the flames. “Once when I was ten years old I come home from school and found a smoking black hole where our cabin used to be. Land charred for a square mile. Turned out a spark from the ungreased hub of our neighbor's Red River cart sparked off
a fire on our south forty. My ma and pa was inside eating when it hit the cabin. It come so fast there was nothing they could do. I buried what was left of them in one hole.”

I never know what to say in a situation like that, so I kept my mouth shut. That's usually the best course anyway. Behind us, the grass went up like tinder as the high winds whipped the flames westward at unbelievable speed and sent a great cloak of black smoke spreading over the prairie. Over my shoulder I caught a glimpse of the dark-clad riders as they reined in a mile or so shy of the blaze, but then the smoke from three separate sources came together and blotted them out.

“And there came out a fire from the Lord, and consumed them,” said Pere Jac, but he was speaking so low that I doubt anyone heard him but myself and his God.

Nothing breeds co-operation like a common enemy. Once the threat of Sergeant Burdett and his pack of two-legged hounds was ended, however, it came time to think about restraining Ghost Shirt. For this purpose I produced from my saddle bags the special pair of handcuffs a blacksmith had struck to my order in Montana some years back and used them to secure his hands behind him as we were preparing to bed down. I hadn't brought them out before because they were shiny and sent out a flash in the bright sunlight that a half-blind drummer couldn't miss, but with the hostiles, red and white, out of the running for at least the present it seemed safe to put them to work now. That the Indians had left them in the bag said something about the way things had changed over the past couple of decades. When the wagon trains began rolling west they would have sold their souls for such an attractive bauble, but now they shoved it aside in their search for ammunition. If they'd known what use I'd be putting it to the story would have been different.

A tiny spring inside the mechanism—an addition of my own—locked them automatically with a metallic snick when I closed the manacles about his wiry wrists. Since Indians are as dangerous with their feet as with their hands I used a length of rawhide left over from our captivity to bind his ankles where he lay on his blanket. He made no protest, but then I hadn't expected him to. His kind didn't do much talking when not among its own, and never when words were useless. The dog slunk toward him as I was tucking him in, but he snapped something at it in Cheyenne and it returned to its place beside the fire. That was wise. He knew that it wouldn't be able to resist attacking me next morning when I came near its master, and had no wish to spend the rest of a brief life in those irons. Hudspeth, Jac, and I took turns standing watch as always.

The procedure was repeated the next night. Mornings I released him from the cuffs to eat and undid the thong around his ankles, then after breakfast manacled him again, this time with his hands in front so he could ride, and kept him ahead of us on the trail to remove temptation. It was late in the morning of the second day since the fire that we came upon the rails of the Northern Pacific some five or six miles west of the James. We crossed them and set up camp just out of sight but not out of earshot of the next train.

Nearby was an ancient buffalo wallow, low on water but high on wallow, with a stand of half a dozen spindly cottonwoods growing on its north shore. That was an unexpected stroke of luck. More than half certain that we wouldn't survive to see the railroad, I hadn't given much thought to how we were going to stop the train once we got there. You don't just stand in the middle of the tracks and wave one down in the midst of hostile Indian territory, not and expect to spend the rest of eternity as anything but a grease slick along the cinder bed. The sight of those trees in the middle of a barren land was enough to make me a believer in manna from heaven if I hadn't known that a water-loving cottonwood sprang up wherever a man spat. Fortunately,
Hudspeth had seized a hatchet along with the other provisions he took from the Indian camp, and by the time I had Ghost Shirt trussed up to make sure he behaved, the marshal was three quarters of the way through the first trunk. When that was on the ground I spelled him on the hatchet while he and Jac lugged the tree down to the rails. When they were all lying beside the tracks we went to work cutting them into six-foot lengths. Within a couple of hours of our arrival we had a respectable pile stacked four feet high across the irons.

I was depositing the last spindly chunks atop the heap when something buzzed past my right ear and struck the end of one of the logs, splintering the bark. Then I heard the shot. I tossed away my burden and dived behind the woodpile as more firearms opened up from the same general direction, their bullets pelting the ground and spanging off the rails. One of them struck the heel of my left boot while I was in flight. I came down hard on the ties, rolled, and ended up in a crouch next to Hudspeth, who had been standing behind the pile when the commotion began and now was down on one knee in the same spot, his Smith & Wesson in hand. His moustache was bristling. A lot of things annoyed him, but none so much as being shot at. I drew my Deane-Adams.

Jac, who had been on his way back from checking on our prisoner, charging his pipe as he went, lay motionless on his stomach in the tall grass twenty feet away. At first I thought he'd been hit, but then I saw his ear twitch and I realized he was just lying low. His Spencer was leaning against the woodpile on the other side where he'd left it, the end of its barrel taunting me over the top of the barrier. My Winchester was still in its scabbard with the horses in camp. Two bad mistakes when you come to think of it, the métis going unarmed to inspect a dangerous captive and me leaving a firearm near that same captive, who was trussed up but still had a brain. Worse, we both knew better. Reaching the railroad against all those odds had made us all cockier than we had any right to be under the circumstances.

Beyond the stack of wood, where the shots had originated, yawned open prairie, unbroken except for an occasional brown bush, too low and spindly to conceal a man, let alone several. For several there were, unless that was a Gatling gun out there, which still meant more than one because you don't exactly carry that kind of firepower on the back of a horse. To look out there, though, you would have sworn we were all alone. Which meant only one thing.

“Burdett?” whispered Hudspeth at that point, as if he'd been reading my mind. I shook my head.

“Indians. Only they can hide like that in the middle of open grassland. And only they can use up that much ammunition without hitting anything worthwhile.”

“You mean Lame Horse?”

“Who else? He probably saw us leave camp with Ghost Shirt at the Missouri and guessed where we were heading. He's been paralleling the tracks ever since or he would have been caught in the same fire that pushed back Burdett. How much lead have you got on you?”

“Just what's in my gun. The belt's back in my saddle bags. How about you?”

“Five in the cylinder and another ten in my belt. The rest is in my bags. If you carried a forty-five Peacemaker like almost everyone else I might risk giving you some. At least it wouldn't blow up in your face.”

“Look who's talking, you and that little toy you pack.”

I stoked up my courage and raised myself just enough to snatch hold of the barrel of Jac's rifle and hook it back over the woodpile. Three guns opened up as I did so. One bullet actually struck the wood four feet to the left of my exposed hand, their marksmanship had improved that much. A log thicker than most was dislodged from the top and landed with a crash across the rails. That let daylight in. I removed my hat to reduce the target and crawled on my knees to the end of the stack to take aim at a likely-looking movement in the grass thirty yards south of the tracks and squeezed off a shot. A jackrabbit barreled out heading east.

Hudspeth had better luck. Crouched peering through a chink where the uneven surfaces of two logs failed to meet, he spotted the white plume of a single eagle feather protruding above a patch of brush too far away for a revolver to reach with any accuracy at the same time I did, aimed high, and sent a lean, black-painted brave reeling over backward with a scarlet smear where his collarbone met his throat. That's why I said luck. It had to have been an incredibly bad shot to hit anything at that distance.

That lessened the odds somewhat, although I couldn't say by how much since there was no way of knowing how many Indians had slipped past the army besides those few we had seen with Lame Horse back on the plateau. But I was heartened by the evidence that the enemy was flesh and blood after all. No sooner had this one hit the ground than a comrade lost his head and snapped off a shot that whizzed two yards over Hudspeth's hat. I fired at the puff of gunsmoke. Nothing spectacular happened as a result, but there was no answering shot from that quarter, which may have meant something or nothing.

For a long spell nothing happened, unless you count being eaten alive by mosquitoes as the afternoon wore on and we were enveloped in shadow. Drought killed off everything but them, which figured. Nevertheless we were better off than Jac, who was forced to lie out there baking in the sun with the shade of the woodpile only a scamper away. The temptation must have been staggering. There wasn't enough Indian in him to keep his naked back from turning as red as Hudspeth's nose, but he was old-man stubborn enough not to move a hair. As for the full-bloods, they burned too, but more slowly, and since they were used to such hardship we couldn't claim much advantage.