Stamping Ground (26 page)

The blackout lasted less than a second, but by the time my senses came swimming back I found myself sprawled on the platform, my head humming and my right leg swinging over the edge where the wind of our passage set my pants cuff to flapping. The Deane-Adams was nowhere to be seen. My first thought was that Lame Horse got lucky, but then I realized that the blow had come from behind. I looked up to see a familiar figure crouching over me.

My handcuffs dangled glittering from the swollen wrist of the hand holding the engineer's Colt by its long barrel like a club. That meant that he had been inside the cab, which in turn meant that he had been hiding in the one place I had given only a cursory search, the wood car. He had sprung from beneath a layer of camouflage, dispatched Gus and likely Colonel Locke, and scrambled over the roof of the baggage car to do for me. All this came to me in the instant of awakening. The moment he saw me lying helpless at his feet, Ghost Shirt let out a whoop and, swinging the revolver over his head as if it were a tomahawk, leaped up to hail Lame Horse.

The medicine man was ready for him. Within arm's length of the platform now, he thrust the bore of his rifle into his chief's midsection and blew him into history.

The force of the bullet slammed him against the door of the adjacent car, where he sank down with surprise on his face and both hands buried in what remained of his stomach, his feet still on the platform of the coach so that he formed a human coupling between the cars. Behind the baggage door an animal throat let go with a howl that made my scalp crawl.

Lame Horse was losing ground now to the train, which although it had begun to lose momentum with no hand at the throttle was still traveling too fast for a horse to keep up, but he had time enough to turn the heavy rifle on me. Before he could pull the trigger I snatched up the Spencer that was lying beside Ep's corpse and slammed an ounce
of lead into the middle of his war paint. The yellow slash dissolved behind a cloud of red. He clutched at his face with one hand, but it was just his nerves reacting. I didn't see him topple. By then both horse and rider had slid out of sight behind the corner of the coach.

The train was moving perceptibly slower now. Hudspeth emerged from the coach carrying my Winchester in one hand and his own Smith & Wesson in the other. He helped me to my feet.

“What the hell happened?” he wanted to know. “I leave you alone for one minute—”

I ignored him. Ghost Shirt was still breathing. I stepped across to the other platform, where he lay with his mouth working soundlessly. Planting a finger in one ear to close out the noise of the train, I bent over him and placed the other ear so close to his lips that they almost touched. For a moment I froze in that position, straddling two cars and leaning against the door of baggage to maintain my balance. Then the Indian's neck muscles let go and his head rolled of its own weight to one side. The hypnotic light drained slowly from his half-open eyes. I straightened.

“What did he say?” The marshal's voice was so hushed I may only have guessed at his words.

“Something about Lame Horse,” I said. “It wasn't, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' ”

When the train had rolled almost to a stop we sprang down and made our way to the locomotive. There were no Indians in sight. In the cab we found the engineer slumped over the throttle, the back of his head a pulpy mass covered with matted hair. Locke was leaning against the wood supply busily tying his handkerchief around his right wrist. A dark stain was spreading over the fine silk.

“He hit Gus with a chunk of wood the size of a man's thigh,” he explained as we mounted the cab. “The damn fool was too busy replacing the one bullet he'd fired from that cap-and-ball to notice him. I had just put away my gun. Ghost Shirt searched me, but I guess he didn't know about shoulder holsters. I went for it while he was picking
up Gus's revolver. I wasn't fast enough. The Remington went over the side and I played dead. Did you see which way he went?”

I nodded. “He isn't playing.”

“This one's skull must be near as thick as yours, Murdock,” said Hudspeth, examining the engineer. “He's still breathing.”

“How bad is the wrist?” I asked Locke.

“Just a graze. I would've given anything for one like it when I was in the service. The wound pension would have served me in good stead.”

“Trouble.” The marshal hefted the Spencer, which I had exchanged for the return of my carbine. I turned in the direction of his gaze.

A dozen Indians were approaching slowly on horseback from the east. Some of them led other horses, across the backs of which were slung their dead. The brave mounted at the point, powerfully built like Ghost Shirt but several years his senior, wore his hair in a pair of plaits that hung almost to his belt, the ends tied with bright red ribbon, and had his face painted black on one side, red on the other, with a white line the width of a finger separating them down the middle. Across his chest he sported a breastplate made of bones fitted together by a squaw's patient hands. The Cheyenne at his left carried a rifle upright with its butt resting upon his thigh. A scrap of white cloth swung from its bore.

“It's a trick,” said Hudspeth.

“If it is they're taking an awful chance. We'll let them come.”

They stopped a few yards away. The silence that ensued was broken only by the occasional shuddering snort of an exhausted mount. Finally the man holding the flag of truce spoke. A young brave with a pouting expression beneath his dead black paint, he had the high, thin voice of a born Indian orator.

“This man is Broken Jaw, of the Cheyenne nation.” He indicated the breastplated warrior, whose hard eyes remained
fixed on a point somewhere above our heads. “He wishes to say that the white men fought bravely and well this day, and that he is not angry with them because of this.”

I said nothing. Indians take a long time to get to the point.

“He wishes also to say that while there was one among the Cheyenne who did not behave this day as a Cheyenne should, and whose soul will wander forever the Place of the Dead in disgrace because of this, the black white man who died this day will take his place beside Heammawihio, the Wise One Above.”

I perked up at that. Broken Jaw had witnessed the medicine man's treachery as well as Ephraim's death. In that tribe, the worst thing you can say about a fellow warrior is to accuse him of not behaving “as a Cheyenne should.” I wanted to hurry the spokesman along, to find out what he was getting at, but if I tried I'd only be butting my head against twenty centuries of tradition.

“But there was a great sadness this day as well. Tomorrow the heavens will weep and the sun will hide its head.”

At last we were making some progress.

“Broken Jaw has come to claim the pod in which dwelled the soul of Ghost Shirt so that he may prepare it for its final great journey in a manner befitting a great warrior of the Cheyenne.”

“Tell him his wish is granted,” I said, after I had translated that into plain English.

The spokesman told him nothing, but then he didn't have to. It was obvious Broken Jaw understood most of what had been said. I told Locke and Hudspeth to wait there and turned my back on their protests as I led the party back to the baggage car. There, the head warrior dismounted to gather up the body.

“One moment,” I said. He watched in silence as I produced the key to Ghost Shirt's handcuffs and removed them from his lifeless wrist. “So his soul will not wander in chains.”

There is no word for thanks in the Indian languages, because none is needed. I saw the gratitude in Broken Jaw's eyes as he nodded at me.

The renegades had come away from the fight at the Missouri with no lodge poles with which to construct a travois, and so the pod in which Ghost Shirt's soul had dwelled was committed to the indignity of being draped over the back of an empty horse. Then Broken Jaw and the Indians who had helped him mounted up and left without a word. They didn't break into their death chant until they were almost out of sight on the eastern horizon. By then it was hard to distinguish the toneless dirge from the morning breeze that had just begun to stir the grasses on the prairie. Sometimes, when I'm alone and the wind comes humming beneath the cornices outside the window in gusts that rise and fall with no recognizable pattern, I hear it still.

Gus sat on the floor of the cab with his turbaned head in his hands, his legs dangling over the side. When he spoke he lisped wetly through the space where his bottom two front teeth had been before the train's sudden stop had rammed a healthy share of the ironwork into his mouth. That stop seemed a week old now. It was midmorning. Taking turns with a shovel they had found in the cab, Locke and Hudspeth had just finished burying Ephraim and the conductor deep enough to keep the wolves and coyotes from scratching them up for a day or two.

“Can you run the train?” I slipped my arms into the sleeves of my jacket, which I had taken off to clean the wound, apply the bandage and a liberal dose of cognac from the community flask. The left one went on carefully. My shoulder was beginning to set up.

“I need me another fireman. Lately I been going through 'em like cigars.”

“I can still stoke wood.” Locke returned from the rear of the train, where he had gone to check on the senator. A
fresh shine in his eyes told me he'd made a stop at the bar, where burgundy was still available. “I'm learning to enjoy physical labor all over again.”

“We'll cure that soon enough,” said Gus.

“How's His Lordship?” I asked the colonel.

“Happily ignorant. I gave him a drop more laudanum. He'll sleep the rest of the trip.”

“Is that how you usually handle him?”

He shrugged. “It can't do him any harm. His doctors say he has a stomach cancer. He won't see winter.”

“Does he know?”

“If he didn't, do you think he'd be in such a hurry to make a name for himself in history?”

“All right, then, get her up.” I turned toward the passenger coach, where Hudspeth was waiting.

“What time is it?” the engineer demanded.

I hauled out my watch. “Quarter of nine.”

He swore, scrambled to his feet, got dizzy, grabbed the side of the cab for support, swore again. “There's a freighter due in Bismarck at noon. If it's nine she's an hour late now. We got to get moving.”

The rest of us had managed to keep up a head of steam without a crash course in locomotive operation. Gus released the brake and the train was churning at a stiff clip by the time I reached the coach. I grabbed hold of the platform railing with my good arm and swung aboard.

“Figure on keeping a pet?” Hudspeth was sitting in the first seat facing the door on the right, Locke's flask in hand. His nose was flushed and all was right with the world.

When I raised my eyebrows he gestured with the flask in the direction of the baggage car, where Custer was barking up a storm.

“Damn!” I plunked into the vacant space beside the marshal. “I got so used to his racket I forgot to turn him loose when the Indians left. Gus won't stop now, not with several hundred tons of freight breathing down his neck.”

“Shoot him when we get to Bismarck.”

“I suppose we'll have to.” I sighed.

“What do you mean, we? I ain't no dog killer!”

We stared at each other. For no reason at all we burst out laughing. We hadn't forgotten Pere Jac or Ep the fireman or Ghost Shirt and all our wasted efforts. It was just that after everything that had happened to us since we'd made this trip in the other direction, we had either to laugh or shoot each other, and we'd both done enough shooting to last us for a while. We roared until our sides ached, and for the next four hours we didn't dare look at each other for fear of starting it all over again.

The usual curiosity seekers were gathered on the platform in Bismarck as we eased into the station. I felt a pang, not of remorse at the end of a mission that should never have been undertaken in the first place, but for the trouble ahead. Curiously, my chief concern was for my partner. I wondered what would happen to him when Judge Flood learned we had failed to deliver his stepping-stone to the Congress. I got up, took down my carbine, and handed him the Spencer—his by inheritance.

“We'll let the local law take charge of the mongrel,” I told him. “Pick up our gear afterwards.”

“Suits me.” He heaved himself to his feet. He really was a big man, six foot one and solid as two hundred and fifty pounds of salt pork. I let him go ahead of me down the aisle.

I was behind him on the coach platform when something exploded and his chest was enveloped in smoke. I was forced to let go of the Winchester as he fell backward into my arms, losing his own rifle. Mine clattered on the railing and dropped through the slot between the cars before I could catch it.

“You son of a bitch, this is for the fire.”

I scarcely recognized the voice rising above the hubbub of panic-stricken spectators, because I'd heard it only once before. Dry and whispery, like sand sifting through a screen, it went with the man it belonged to, whom I placed right away. Sergeant Burdett, his shiny rain cape thrown open to expose his gun belt, stood alone in what was now
a cleared space on the station platform, a heavy Army Colt smoking in his gloved right hand, its muzzle pointing at me. His good eye was cocked in my direction, its dead mate and the powder-burned cheek in shadow beneath the shiny black visor of his Yankee cap. He gave everything time to sink in before his finger tensed on the trigger.

Senator Firestone chose that moment to come waddling along the station platform from the direction of his private car, leaning backward to balance the forward pull of his enormous belly. He'd just awakened. Pink scalp showed in patches where his hair stuck up in tousled spikes and his eyes were still puffed from sleep. He walked right up to Burdett as if he were approaching the Senate podium.