The Warriors (45 page)

“Because I had a fine teacher. Now we can take our time. You’ll have a nice feast tonight.”

Kola could practically taste the savory brain and small intestine that would be left after the work of slaughtering. His mouth watered, and he thanked the holy spirits for bringing him into the presence of this white man. With a merry glint in his eye, he fell into the routine of loading and passing the buffalo guns to Joseph, who simply stood in place and shot the stupefied buffalo one by one.

Shadows lengthened on the baking prairie. The wind soon stank of blood and the contents of emptied intestines—to Kola the sweetest aroma on earth. As the last cow dropped and the forlorn calves wandered around the corpses searching for their mothers, the Sioux reminded himself that before he and Joseph moved north to the fire road, he must cut out and scatter the hearts of the dead animals so the herd would regenerate itself.

The echoes of the last shot went rolling away into the sullen red haze along the western horizon. Joseph relaxed, squatted down, and exhaled loudly. He laid the second Ballard on the ground.

“Well, my friend, there’s the stake that’ll keep us alive come winter.”

Kola glanced at the dead buffalo. He was aware of the increasing slaughter of the herds upon which his people depended for food, clothing, shelter, horse gear, weaponry, religious objects—even the hair-stuffed calfskin balls and netted hoops the children used in their games. No useful portion of the animal was ignored. Yet for a dozen summers and more, white hunters had been slaying buffalo in enormous numbers, and wasting most of the precious parts. Now here he was, doing the same. He wouldn’t have done so except for the promptings of his inner voice which had told him he was destined to ride with Joseph. But as he eyed the dead animals, he couldn’t keep a touch a disapproval from his voice.

“We will sell all of them?”

“Yes. All.”

“Keep nothing for ourselves?”

“Kola, we can buy shirts cheaper than we can skin and sew them. We’ll sell off the hindquarters to the Union Pacific at a dime a pound, just the way that fellow Cody’s doing down south on the line’s other branch. Further east, we should net a dollar and a quarter for every hide, two bits for every tongue. The people back east want fine quality lap robes and delicacies for dinner. If we don’t supply them, others will. We’ll have a stake and some profit left over—wait.”

Kola saw Joseph’s eyes dart past his shoulder. Back toward the rim of the ravine. He knew it must have been a horse he’d heard, because Joseph’s eyes were wide as he grabbed for the Laidley-Whitney.

“No!” someone shouted in a loud, rough voice. “You’re covered.”

Joseph’s fingertips hovered an inch from the buffalo gun. Slowly he withdrew his hand. His lips barely moved. “Three of them. Where in the hell did they come from?”

“Nothing personal, y’know,” the harsh voice called. “We just want those buffalo. Touch the guns and we’ll blow you down.”

Joseph surrendered to the thieves without protest. Their leader announced his terms. They would relieve Joseph and Kola of the wagon, the dead buffalo, and the pony, leaving only the mules. Joseph accepted the statements with a resigned shrug. He even agreed to enjoy the hospitality of a cook fire laid at the rim of the ravine by the trio of tattered, foul-smelling white men. When Kola started to protest, Joseph laid a hand on his arm.

“Got to eat, don’t we? Might as well be their food as ours.”

Kola felt betrayed. He had never seen his friend so resigned—or so uncaring. By the time darkness fell, Joseph and the three other whites were seated around a chip fire in the cooling air—exactly as if they were longtime acquaintances.

To show his pique, Kola squatted several yards away. He was still astonished at the way Joseph had given up their guns and the animals whose sale would have kept them sheltered and fed when the snows drifted on the plains.

Sullen, Kola watched Joseph amiably accept a cup of coffee and a tin plate of beans from the leader of the thieves, a revolver-toting fellow with a cocked eye, a long, untrimmed gray beard, a gray military overcoat that reached below his knees, and a leaf-crowned hat with a five-pointed star cut out of the felt just above the greasy band.

“Thank you,” Joseph said as he took the plate. Down in the ravine, the horses belonging to the thieves stamped and fretted. “I’ll need something with which to eat.”

“Use your hands.” The leader smiled from directly across the fire. “I don’t think it would be prudent to lend you a knife.”

Kola frowned, trying to grasp an elusive thought hovering in his mind. He couldn’t.

Joseph’s eyes lingered on the leader’s weather-beaten face. The leader was the only one of the trio who exhibited any sign of strength or character. The thief seated on Joseph’s left was a shivering boy of seventeen or eighteen. He wore a forage cap, a sweat-stained shirt, a blue neck bandana, and a holstered revolver that looked much too large for his frail, nervous hands.

The thief guarding Joseph’s right was a stubby man in a ripped blue coat. A gold ring shone in the pierced lobe of his left ear. Quietly, he began singing to himself:

“Oh bury me not in the deep, deep sea,

Where the dark blue waves

Will roll over me—”

“No chanteys, Darlington,” the leader said. “If you’re going to sing that song, use the prairie words. You keep forgetting you’re a landsman now.”

“Not by choice, mate.” Darlington concentrated on his beans.

The leader shook his head. “Sorry excuses for hands, aren’t they?”

Joseph didn’t reply. The man with the earring seemed irritated. He limited his protest to a glance. The leader added, “A man takes what he must.”

“Including another man’s kill,” Joseph remarked with a frosty smile. “I’m sorry to say I don’t consider than an honorable action, mister—?”

“Major,” the older man broke in. “Major T. T. Cutright.”

“Southern, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I judge the same from your voice. Were you in the war?”

Joseph’s lids screened his eyes a moment. Kola thought he saw something secretive glimmer there. But he immediately lost interest. He was still outraged by Joseph’s cowardly acquiescence to the demands of the thieves who had ridden up behind them at precisely the wrong moment. As soon as the men were gone, he would separate from his companion. He thought he’d gotten to know him since the spring grass greened. Now he was discovering he hadn’t. And Joseph’s inner voice had abruptly turned him in a new, unacceptable direction.

“Last with General Hood.” Joseph nodded in reply. “You?”

Cutright wiped bean juice from his beard with the sleeve of his gray overcoat. “I saw service, but I’d prefer not to say where. There was an unfortunate incident.”

“What happened?”

“My commander was yellow. When he ordered a retreat, he took a ball in the back of his head. I was accused.”

Joseph said nothing. Outright laid his plate aside, reached for his coffee. “You haven’t told me your name, sir.”

“Kingston. Joseph Kingston.”

Cutright sat up straight. “Kingston?”

“That’s right. Something wrong?”

“Not exactly wrong, but—” Cutright looked a bit more wary. “I come from near Fort Worth. I heard of a Joseph Kingston who shot a crooked monte dealer there last winter, then murdered a peace officer who came to arrest him. That Mr. Kingston fled before he could be apprehended. There’s a bounty on his head. Two hundred dollars.”

Joseph’s face took on a curious, stony quality. “I’ve never been in Fort Worth. Coincidence, undoubtedly.”

Cutright uttered a short, wry laugh. “Undoubtedly.”

Kola stared at his companion, suddenly struck by something he’d forgotten. It had been stirring in his mind ever since Cutright’s reference to a knife. The thieves had taken the three buffalo rifles to add to their own stock of two. But they’d only subjected Joseph to a cursory visual search. They’d completely overlooked the hidden skinning knife.

All at once Kola grew warm. Could the undiscovered knife be the reason for Joseph’s apparent cooperation? He fervently hoped so. Despite his bare flesh—he hadn’t been permitted to go to the wagon for his shirt and leggings—his entire body felt hot.

Let Joseph be tricking them, he prayed. The meeting when he found me was
wakan,
and the dream afterward told me I would be his
kola,
and he mine, till the end of our lives.

“The wagon down in the wash belongs to you?” Cutright inquired.

“I’m the present owner, yes.”

Cutright’s cocked eye glowed as he inclined his head in a skeptical way. “Not quite the same thing.”

Once more Joseph didn’t answer.

“Your friend there. The Indian—”

“Call him what he is, please,” Joseph asked quietly. “An Oglala Sioux. His name is Kola. It means special friend.”

“Peculiar traveling companion for a white man.”

Joseph shrugged again. “I found him on the prairie up north of the Platte. He’d fancied the wife of one of the leaders of an
akicita
society in his tribe. I’ve learned Sioux don’t normally take offense when their wives crawl into the blankets with another man. They just throw the woman out of the tipi and cut off her braids—oh, and once in a while her nose—and that’s the divorce. To do much more would give the woman more importance than she deserves. Apparently women don’t count for much among the Sioux. Did you know they’re even sent to live in special lodges when they bleed once a month? According to Kola, the men believe a woman in her cycle poisons a man’s medicine and weapons.”

Joseph drank a little coffee. “But as I say, most times a husband takes small notice of infidelity. To do otherwise would be like making a fuss over a dog pissing on the tipi. But there are exceptions to everything. Sweet Summer’s husband was an exception. He not only divorced her—he waylaid Kola and thrashed him half to death. I came across him and nursed him back to good health. A dream told him we should ride and hunt together. Kola says the Sioux put great stock in dreams.”

“Well,” the man with the earring growled, “hope he ain’t had too many dreams about sellin’ off the buffla to the railroad. Those dreams are at five fathoms now, and don’t you forget it.”

Cutright frowned. “You needn’t act so sour, Darlington. Mr. Kingston’s being sensible about his state of affairs.” To Joseph: “He ran the engine room on a Federal cruiser during the war. He’s accustomed to bossing men around. But he isn’t accustomed to the courtesies of the plains. Nor is Timmy there. Timmy’s my wife’s nephew. These days a man running cattle only gets the kind of help he can afford.”

Joseph perked up. “Cattle?” He reached down to scratch his right calf. The bearded Cutright shifted his hand toward his bolstered revolver, but Joseph’s smile reassured him. “Just a louse.”

He kept on scratching the right side of his calf. “Damn, they’re pesky! You were running cattle?”

“Fifty head.” Cutright nodded, relaxing again. “The most I could lay my hands on. Seems everyone in Texas is scrambling for longhorns to drive north. The restaurants and butcher shops back east want all the beef they can get.”

“I don’t see any sign of a herd—”

“No, you don’t.” Cutright looked glum. “I lost them about fifty miles south. They’d gone too long without drinking, and we came across some damn alkali water. I got my leader, an expensive steer named Crump, started exactly right. If my luck had held, he’d have stampeded them all right past the stuff. But he broke a leg and they went for the water before we could stop them.”

“The alkali water poisoned them?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Kingston, all but one. We’ve butchered and eaten it since. I should have brought more men with me, but times are hard. Rather than go home empty-handed, I’ll now be able to make a little money selling the buffalo to the railroad. It’s better than nothing.”

“But it’s also stealing.”

Both Darlington and Cutright scowled. “You’re not going to get contentious, are you, Mr. Kingston?” the latter asked. “I’ve a wife and brood of six back home. They’re depending on me. A moment ago, you seemed sensible about the realities of the situation.”

“I recognize the realities,” Joseph agreed. “I’m just disappointed in a former Confederate officer’s doing such a thing.”

“Told you.” The indifferent blinking of Cutright’s good eye put a furrow on Joseph’s forehead. “Hard times.”

Joseph finally appeared to agree. One more weary shrug only heightened Kola’s confusion. Had he been wrong about the skinning knife? If so, he was more determined than ever to abandon his cowardly companion the moment the gray-coated fellow and the others moved on.

Just then—unexpectedly—Joseph turned to glance at him. In the guttering light of the fire his dark eyes were oddly intense.

Kola pursed his lips, frowned, trying to signify he didn’t understand whatever Joseph wanted to communicate. Joseph gave up. He turned to Cutright again. “Wonder if I might have leave to stand?”

Cutright chuckled. “Lice still troubling you?”

“Too much coffee’s troubling me.” He poked a finger into his trousers above his groin. “I’ll just step over there.” He bobbed his head toward Kola and the starry dark behind him.

“All right,” Cutright said “Slowly, though.”

He edged back the overcoat so he could reach the butt of his revolver. Six inches to the right of his knee lay the confiscated Laidley-Whitney. Loaded, as Kola recalled.

Smiling, Joseph rose, faced left, took a step, winced, and stopped directly behind the shivering boy wearing the bandana. “Damn!” Joseph cried again, crouching, and slapping his right calf as if another louse had attacked.

Cutright reached for his revolver but checked his hand when he heard the whack of Joseph’s palm. He understood why Joseph had moved suddenly.

Seated directly between Joseph and Cutright, the boy started to turn. Joseph didn’t straighten. His right hand dropped to his boot.

Cutright shouted, “Damn you, what—? Timmy, your gun!”

The Texas boy juggled the coffee cup from which he’d been sipping and made an ineffectual grab at his holster. Joseph moved with astonishing speed, slipping the skinning knife out of his boot and slashing a six-inch gash in the boy’s gun arm with a single continuous stroke.