Stamping Ground (9 page)

“They come at us from two sides, one half hitting us in the flank from the left, the other taking us at a angle near the front from the right, just like a pair of scissors. Neatest split cavalry charge I ever did see. They come out of nowhere, whooping it up to beat the band and pounding away with them Spencer repeaters they took from our armory. Broderick went first. Bullet tore clean through his left eye and knocked off the back of his head on its way out. Captain Francis took two in the chest and one in the thigh and bled to death before we could get him back to the fort. We lost our bugler whilst he was blowing recall. He went down with one in his back, wailing on that horn like a sick calf. Bullets was flying all over the place. Once I felt someone tugging at my sleeve, but when I turned to see who it was, there was nobody there. What was there was a hole in the
elbow where a hunk of lead kissed it. The injuns made one pass, then turned around and done it again, only backwards, and all the time they was pouring lead into us like grease through a tin horn. We'd of lost a hell of a lot more than twelve men if injuns was any kind of shots.”

“Did you hit any of them?” I asked.

He shook his head, working his store-bought teeth like a mouthful of chew. “Can't say for sure. There was a lot of metal buzzing back and forth, and the way them injuns shriek you don't know if they're hit or just mad. But if we didn't at least nick one or two of 'em it'd be a miracle.”

“Was Ghost Shirt with them?”

“Oh, he was with 'em all right. I seen too much of him when he was here in the stockade not to recognize him when I seen him again, and he wasn't wearing no war paint like the others. He rode point on the bunch that hit us from the front.”

“Why wasn't he wearing paint?”

“How the hell should I know? Them injuns don't think the same as people. All I know is that paint's supposed to turn away bullets. Maybe he figures he don't need it.”

“Whose dust were you following when they attacked?” Hudspeth asked. He peered into the buckskin sack of cartridges he carried in his saddle bag to see if they were all there.

“Likely that belonged to the womenfolk, dragging buffalo robes and bushes behind their horses to make it look like the whole party. It's the oldest trick in the book, but it works most every time. Hell, what can you do to fight it?”

“You can go back to the fort.” This from Pere Jac, without intonation. The comment drew a hostile glance from the horse soldier.

“I'd expect that from a breed,” he snarled. “We're the army. We're trained to fight.”

“And die,” said the other. “In the end, what have you gained?”

Hoxie's complexion turned a high copper. I stepped between him and the métis,.

“Steady, soldier. We're all on the same side.”

“I don't take to nobody with injun blood in his veins calling me a fool,” he said. But his violent mood had subsided.

“Nobody called anybody anything. Where was this fight?”

He grew furtive. “I said enough. If the major finds out I told you what I done already he'll bust me out of the service. I just didn't want nobody running off and getting kilt without knowing the score. What you do now is your business.” He tugged his hat down and took a step toward the stable door. I laid a hand on his shoulder. It felt like a chunk of the scrawny meat we'd had for supper. He stopped and glared up at me from his inferior height, eyes glittering beneath the shelf of his brows.

“If you tell us where Ghost Shirt is hiding, the major will never know you told us anything.”

He started as if slapped in the face. For a moment disbelief and consternation chased each other across his features in the greasy glow of the coal-oil lantern that hung on a rusty nail beside the door. His eyes searched mine for some sign that I was bluffing. He didn't find anything. I sit a good game of poker.

“That stinks,” he said.

“To high heaven,” I agreed.

“They give him a lot of slack out here. He could call it high treason in time of war and have me shot.”

“That's up to you.”

“Even if I get away, he'll send Sergeant Burdett after me. Broderick used to sic him on deserters like a trained hunting dog. He never brought any of them back alive.”

I said nothing. The forge had grown silent, and now there was only the liquid hiss of the lantern behind me to underscore the stillness. At last the trooper fixed me with an expression that made me feel the way I'd felt when I looked down the barrel of his gun in Broderick's quarters. I rested
a thumb on the butt of the Deane-Adams, just in case.

“There's a old stone building six, eight miles west of the river, a fort of some kind. Sergeant Burdett told me that Harms's patrol got within a couple of hundred yards of it this morning when a bunch of bucks on the wall opened fire and the major called retreat. It'd take a force three times what we got a month to blast its way in there. A twelve-pounder wouldn't knock the mortar out from between the rocks in the wall.”

“The Mormon mission,” said Jac.

I nodded. “Thanks, Private. You're clear with us.”

He muttered something indelicate and stamped out.

The first drop banged my hat while I was mounting up outside the door. It was the last individual drop I heard. The rest came down in a roar so sudden Hudspeth and I were thoroughly soaked by the time we got our black slickers out and on. Pere Jac merely removed his nice calico shirt and stored it safely in a saddle bag, facing the elements half naked.

“Couldn't wait till tomorrow to get kicked out, could you?” grumbled the marshal.

Jac smiled and quoted something from Mark, or maybe it was Matthew.

The water was streaming from the brims of our hats—those of us who had hats—as we rode out through the open gate. It glistened on the old breed's broad back, magnifying the scars of battles old and new. There was a light in the window of Major Harms's office, and I knew he was bidding us good riddance. I considered tipping my hat, thought better of it, and kicked the bay into a canter just in time to splatter mud over the uniforms of the troopers waiting to close the gates behind us. Whatever they called me was drowned out by the downpour.

The wind rose and lightning stabbed at the ground, throwing the landscape into dazzling negative, as we stopped to camp on the high ground west of Fort Ransom. But the hard rain was over, and that which hissed down around us now was the kind that could go on for days, flooding the lowlands and washing away farmers' crops as it fed rivers still swollen from the spring thaw. Hudspeth and I used our rifles to make tents of our oilcloth slickers and crawled under them while Pere Jac wrapped himself up from head to foot in his saddle blanket and began snoring almost immediately. If I slept at all I never realized it, shivering in my wet clothes and listening to the drops drumming the surface of my temporary shelter as I thought about how nice it would be to hear them tapping the roof of the officers' quarters back at the fort from the depths of a warm featherbed.

It was still raining when I arose at sunup to find the marshal already at work over a small fire, frying bacon in the cast-iron skillet he carried in one of his saddle bags.
The smell of sweet grease clawed at my stomach, reminding me that I hadn't eaten anything to speak of since breakfast the day before. The longhom beef at Fort Ransom didn't count. I swigged water from my canteen, sloshed it around and spat it out to clear away some of the fuzz, and stepped closer just to smell.

“Where in hell did you find dry wood?” I asked him.

“Not wood, buffalo chips.” His voice was hoarse and thick with phlegm, the way it was every morning. After several days with him I knew that it didn't begin to clear until he'd been up half an hour. “Best damn fuel there is, and it never gets so soaked you can't start it burning with a little work.”

“I'm surprised the métis have left buffalo in Dakota to make enough to get a fire started.” I glowered at Pere Jac, who sat on his wet blanket gnawing at his pemmican. I resented the ease with which he had fallen asleep the night before. He went on chewing as if he hadn't heard.

The bacon was a little too crisp for my taste, but after nearly starving to death I wasn't complaining. Jac preferred the saddle leather he was eating, but he did accept a tin cup of coffee when it was offered. I did too, but only to wash the grease from the roof of my mouth. The stuff tasted like burnt grain. We crouched around the fire sipping in moody silence.

“What are we doing out here?” growled Hudspeth. “Bouncing around all over the territory, getting saddle sores and wet asses, and for what? A hunk of lead between the eyes and six feet of Dakota on our faces.”

“Flood's your boss, not mine. You tell me.” I swallowed the dregs in the cup carefully, having already scalded my tongue and throat with the first gulp. I hooked the pot out of the fire with my kerchief wrapped around my hand and poured a second cupful. Glutton for punishment, that's me.

“Me I can answer for.” He produced his flask and poured a ration of whiskey into his coffee. “I'm out of a job if I don't. Jac's got whiskey coming, if the rest of his
tribe don't drink it all up before he gets back. You're the one I can't figure. What's in this for you?”

“The thrill of the hunt, the glory of the kill.”

“No, really.”

I warmed my hands around the tin cup. “I've never walked away from anything once it's started. I suppose this was as good a place to start as any, and I probably would have if I hadn't risked my scalp fighting the Flatheads in the Bitterroots last year. If I didn't turn my back on that, why should I do it now? Besides, I'd kind of like to see if we can get away with it. So do you, but you won't admit it.”

“Maybe so, but it's a damn poor reason to get killed.”

“I've yet to hear a good one.”

He threw the dregs of his coffee into the fire and got up. That was another of his quirks. He never drank the last of anything, not even whiskey. “Well, if we got to die, it might as well be sooner as later. Saddle up.” He kicked mud and clumps of wet grass into the fire. It went out grudgingly.

Pere Jac drained his cup and rose with none of the complaints you expect from an old man climbing to his feet after a long interval. He shook out his blanket, wrung it out thoroughly, used it to rub down his shivering paint, wrung it out again, tossed it over the pony's back, and saddled it. I did the same, using the bay's blanket for rubdown, then wringing out my bedroll and strapping it behind the cantle of my saddle. We fed the horses two handfuls of grain apiece and were on our way by the time sunlight turned the sky from black to charcoal gray.

It was twenty-five miles from where we'd camped to the James River, with mud the color of rust squirting up around the horses' hoofs at every step. There's nothing exciting about a trek across the flat country east of the Drift Prairie, especially with rain bleeding down and turning everything a mildewy gray. Suffice it to say that one Dakota river basin looks pretty much like all the others.

By the same token, there was nothing spectacular about
the James, even at high water. Sodden, grassy banks dotted sparsely with scrawny cottonwoods and box elders sunk to their lower branches in muddy, liver-colored water do not inspire great poetry. The current was swift but hardly torrential, so the damned thing didn't even have danger going for it. It was just another river in a territory chock full of just anothers. Nevertheless we had made pretty good time in reaching it, as there was still an hour of daylight sitting somewhere beyond the overcast when we got off to water the horses and fill our canteens.

“We'll camp here tonight,” I said. “Cross in the morning.”

“What for? It's early yet.” Hudspeth wiped his running nose on the sleeve of his coat and removed a clot of floating grass from the mouth of his canteen between thumb and forefinger.

“I don't know about you, but I'll sleep better with a river between me and Ghost Shirt.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes.”

There were no fires that night, nor the next morning. Even if there had been buffalo chips available, the chance of an Indian spotting the smoke was too great. We ate some of the salt pork Hudspeth and I had bought in Fargo—Jac stuck to his pemmican—and washed it down with water from our canteens. That night we took turns standing watch, me first. I kept awake slapping at the mosquitoes that descended over me in swarms.

The rain had stopped by the time we were ready to pull out, not that it made much difference with the sun still hidden by clouds and the wet grass cloying around our knees and a strip of water thirty feet wide waiting to be crossed. I dreaded that. Horses hate to cross the stuff at the best of times, but when it's over chest-high they forget who their masters are and make for the nearest dry land regardless of what happens to the weight on their backs. I felt the bay gasp when the bottom fell out from under it. Before it could spook, I grabbed a double armload of its neck and
raked its flanks with my spurs. It screamed and swam for dear life. I closed my eyes and held on until there was solid ground beneath me once again. Hudspeth was there waiting for me, the pack horse in tow. Pere Jac crossed over a moment later.

“How far?” I asked the latter.

“Seven miles.” He pointed toward the southwest. “It is the only building around still standing.”

“What's the best way to approach it?” asked Hudspeth.

“With the cavalry.”

We decided to risk a frontal approach rather than lose another day by circling around, and headed southwest. Half an hour later the sun broke through the overcast. Droplets of moisture sparkled on the blades of tall grass like broken glass after a barroom fight. Gradually the flat plain gave way to rolling prairie. The landscape was deceptive. From a distance it looked as if you could see everything for miles, but you could miss half the Cheyenne nation hiding in the hollows between the hills. We slowed our pace accordingly.