Tie My Bones to Her Back (17 page)

“Tom, wipe that blood off your face.”

Tom didn’t look at her. He climbed to his feet, swaying, grabbed his hat, and then, still not looking at anyone, walked down to the campfire. He gathered up his war bag, his bedroll, and his rifle. He whistled once, off-key through broken teeth, and Wind Blows came at a canter, her ears pricked forward in question. Tom grabbed her mane and pulled himself onto her back. Kneed her into a gallop and headed north, toward the weather. He was still swaying as he rode off.

Jenny watched him go. Then Raleigh grabbed her from behind, wrenched the rifle from her hands, and threw her to the ground. He slung the rifle aside. He stood spraddle-legged over her as he undid his belt and trousers. His face paled beneath its tan, his hair was wild, and his eyes looked crazed.

“Hold her down, Sykes,” Raleigh said. “Pin her arms with your knees, that’s right, and sit on her head if you have to. We’re gonna show her a little Southern hospitality. Don’t worry, old son, you’ll get your turn.” He yanked down Jenny’s pants and placed the palm of his big, horn-calloused hand flat on her white belly, then looked at her with a vicious grin. “Goddamn Injun lover.”

“About time we taught her a lesson,” Sykes said.

A
N HOUR LATER
, in the dead, loud dark, Jenny slipped away from the camp. Once clear, she galloped north after Tom Shields, her mind awhirl with shame and anger. She had left Raleigh and Milo sitting around the whiskey barrel, getting drunk fast. They had both had their way with her, outraged her most vilely. Her mind skittered from the memory. She had to find Tom. Together they’d follow the hide wagon’s tracks to where the fight took place, see if Otto was really dead. If he was, at least they could give his bones a decent burial.

She had taken only Vixen and the Henry from camp. All she wore was what she’d been wearing that morning before Milo rode in—her boots, longjohns, makeshift trousers, a heavy wool shirt of Otto’s that was too big for her over the antelope-hide blouse, and a wool stocking cap she’d knitted for herself. It was getting quite cold out here, with this snuffling roundabout wind. One blast would blow warm as summer, from the south, then the next, straight out of the north, would be bone-chillingly icy. She pulled the cap down over her ears. Looking ahead as she topped a rise, she thought she could make out Tom in the distance. Then his horseback figure disappeared in a dirty yellow-white blur of dust and—was it snow? It was snow.

She urged Vixen into a gallop and headed as fast as she could into the building storm, toward where she’d last seen him.

13

O
TTO HAD BECOME
aware of the Indians the evening after they’d left camp. He couldn’t make out what tribe they were, but by the way they trailed the wagon, keeping low on the crests of the swells, he knew they were Hostiles. Jenny had kidded him about branding all Indians he saw as hostile, but in his experience they were. Even the tamest, most “civilized” of them, a lowly Ponca or Chickasaw or Choctaw, would shoot you in the back and loot your quivering body, then lift your hair for a trophy. He’d spotted this particular group of red devils yesterday afternoon as he and Milo crawled past Owl’s Head Butte. First just a glimpse of a buck peeking over a hilltop, eagle feather wagging in the wind. The eagle feather caught his eye. Otto kept guard that night.

The following morning as the oxen plodded northeast over a frosty plain toward the Cimarron, he had seen five of the murderous bastards for nearly half a minute, exposing themselves contemptuously to his sight, but just out of rifle range. Clearly they wanted a fight. Then they disappeared again into a swale. This time he saw them long enough to notice that their skulls were shaved bald on one side. The hair on the other side was braided into scalp locks. Red or blue fabric wraps, not otter skin, tied off the braids. That could make them “tame” Comanches or Kiowas or Kiowa Apaches, probably living off government beef at the Wichita Agency in Texas when they weren’t out raiding. “Tame” was hardly the word for these reservation bloods—they were as murderous on government beef as they’d ever been on buffalo. Ungrateful sons of bitches. We’re only trying to civilize them, can’t they see that?

Then he stopped himself. I’m sounding as bad as Milo, he thought, or Raleigh, for that matter. Actually, if I were a red devil like Tom, grown up on the wild roaming life of the plains, I’d bite the hand that fed me, too, if it insisted on keeping me in one place for the rest of my life.

The war party showed itself again an hour before sunset, at least a dozen strong this time, and all of them wearing paint. Now they were truly redskins. Mister Lo always painted before battle. They must have waited for reinforcements to make sure of their attack. Nearsighted Milo hadn’t spotted them yet, and Otto hadn’t told him. He didn’t want to get into a futile debate over what they should do. Now he had no other choice.

“We’ve got company, Sykes,” he finally said. “You see ‘em out there, just over the top of that ridge to the right?”

Milo squinted and turned white.

“Let’s leave the hides and ride for it, back to camp,” he said. They had Otto’s horse, Edgar, and Zeke, the old riding mule, tethered and bridled behind the Murphy wagon. “Let the red fuckers burn the wagon and eat the damn oxen. It’ll give us a good lead on ‘em. An Injun can’t pass up a chance at fresh meat and a nice warm fire.”

Goddamn quitter, Otto thought.

“No,” he said. “There’s only a few of them, probably just young bucks off the reservation for a little sport. Next time we spot ‘em, I’ll give ‘em a shot across the bows with the Sharps. If they see we’re willing to fight, they might think better of it and go away. You know what Mister Lo calls the Sharps. The gun that shoots today and kills tomorrow.’ I can drop ‘em at half a mile, and they damn well know it.”

The Georgian steadied down. I should have told him sooner, Otto thought, let him get used to the idea.

“If it does come to a fight, we’ll get in among the hide bales,” he said. They had compressed the bales tightly, wrapping each bundle of hides with a rope and using a wagon wheel for a winch, but leaving a hidey-hole in the center. A man could shoot safely from the hole even if Mister Lo got within bow range. It was a leather fort.

“We probably ought to go watch-and-watch tonight,” Otto said. “One of us sleep in the wagon while the other keeps a lookout.”

Milo made a face.

Herr Gott,
I shouldn’t have mentioned it, Otto thought.

“All right,” he said, trying to regain lost ground, “let’s stop now while we’ve still got good light and I’ll go out with the Sharps and see if I can’t knock over a couple of ‘em.”

“You gonna take the horse?”

“No, I’ll leave him here, I’m better off on foot. They’re less likely to see me.”

Otto crouched as he neared the top of the rise. There was always this anticipation on the plains, sometimes eager, wanting to see what lay beyond, but just as often reluctant. It could be the death of a man. He got down on his belly and snaked to the top, the Sharps nestled in the crooks of his elbows. Its weight reassured him. He peered through the grass stems.

Yes, there they were. Ten, twelve, no—fifteen of them now. Seated on their scrawny ponies in conference. Not more than five hundred yards away.

He studied them for a moment, then eased the Sharps forward, elevating the tang sight to “500” as he did so.

How fast could their ponies cover the intervening ground?

Very fast.

He looked for the leader of the group. It was an older man, of course. His face was painted black on one side, red on the other. Otto saw gray in the leader’s scalp lock. Three eagle feathers. He swung the Sharps to cover the man, hanging him on the crosshairs of the peep sight just in the middle of his naked red-and-black chest. He cocked the hammer . . .

A ratcheting clack, but the forgiving prairie wind obliterated it before it reached the savages.

He squeezed the set trigger to arm the hair trigger that nested just ahead of it. A sweet, quiet, oily click. He nestled his shoulder snugly into the rifle’s curved butt, his cheek tight on the smooth, oiled comb. Refined his sight alignment. Moved his forefinger up to the hair trigger, barely grazing its familiar, cold, smooth arc. Took a deep breath and then released it in a sibilant hiss, slowly, slowly. Just like killing buffalo.

I’ll roll the bastard
. . .

The smoke spurt nearly obscured the leader as the bullet took him, but Otto saw him launched miraculously, horrified, off his pony’s back. Before the leader hit ground, Otto had twisted sideways, downhill. He ran for the next ridge. He levered the spent case out of the breech as he ran, took a loaded cartridge from between his left thumb and forefinger, and fed it into the breech, closed the lever but kept his right thumb on the cocked hammer of the Sharps in case he had to dive for cover in the grass. He didn’t want the rifle going off without him aiming it. He had run this way before, many times, during the war, but then he was pulling a paper cartridge from his flapping leather bullet pouch, biting off the bitter end of the case, inserting it with difficulty into the muzzle of the Springfield, ramming it home and trying as he ran to jam a copper cap onto the nipple of the rifle without dropping it. This was certainly simpler. Hurrah for progress.

He hoped the young bucks would be delayed by the death of their chieftain, but as he reached the top of the rise he saw a painted rider galloping toward him, bow in hand and an arrow nocked. Otto knelt at the ridge top, watching down the octagon barrel of the Sharps as the Indian neared. He looked no older than a drummer boy. Braid flapping to the gallop, eyes hot and close-set, his jaw working in rage. A lightning flash of yellow ocher zigzagged down his blue-painted face from brow to chin. Lather blew from the corners of his pony’s mouth. A bold horse and rider. Otto blew him off the pony with a bullet through the chest at a range of no more than fifty yards.

Then he stood and ran for his life.

When Otto topped the ridge, rifle reloaded, sprinting back to the safety of the wagon, he saw immediately that his horse was gone. Milo had run for it. The oxen milled and plunged where they stood on the trail. Two of them were down with arrows in their sides. Another arrow protruded from old Zeke’s shoulder. He was worrying it with his long yellow teeth. Zeke saw Otto and brayed once, like a jackass. His eyes rolled wildly in his long, knobby head.

Otto grabbed the last belt of cartridges out of the wagonbed. Each belt held forty-two rounds. He’d shot away two from the belt he’d carried up the hill. That left him more than eighty shots. He pressed his fingers hard against the sides of the mouthshaped wound the arrow had kissed in Zeke’s shoulder. The shaft looked as if it was buried three inches deep.

“Easy, old boy,” he whispered in Zeke’s gyrating ear. “You’re the best mule in the world.”

Pressing hard, he yanked the arrowhead loose from the muscle. Zeke shuddered and raised his hammer head. He shuddered again and brayed. Otto untied the reins.

No time for the saddle. He jumped once to get on Zeke’s tall back. He failed. An arrow whipped past. On the next leap he succeeded. Zeke needed no urging. They galloped off toward the southwest, toward Owl’s Head Butte, which reared black and crooked against the fading red glow of the sunset.

They reached it in the last of the daylight. He urged the mule partway up its steep slope and looked to the north. Behind them he could see the dull, flickering, red-and-yellow glare of the burning wagon. Vagrant gusts of a cold, fresh wind carried the stench of burning hides to their nostrils. Zeke snorted repeatedly at the smell. The wind had swung around to the northwest and Otto thought he could smell snow on it when the gusts weren’t clotted with hide fumes. Weather coming on.

He dismounted and led Zeke in a scrambling climb to a tall, pointed boulder near the top of the butte. From a distance the butte resembled the head of a great horned owl, and this would be one of its ears. Old Zeke had outrun the Indian ponies. Otto led the mule behind the boulder, out of the way of future arrows, and knotted the reins to the bole of an oak sapling growing from a crevice. He could hear hoofbeats approaching and turned to lay the rifle over the sloping side of the owl’s ear. Three horsemen galloped toward him, well ahead of the other Indians. He took a quick sight and dropped one of their ponies. Reloaded. Knocked an Indian from the back of his horse. Reloaded. Killed the third devil with a lucky head shot as he whirled his pony and tried to race out of range. Then he searched the grass for the man whose pony he’d dropped. Spotted him crawling away. Killed him. That’s five of them down, he thought. Only ten to go.

But the remaining Indians reined in at extreme rifle range. Knotted up to confer. He elevated the tang sight to 1,000 yards, added a bit more by raising the muzzle, and fired into the group. A pony whirled and dropped. An Indian howled. The rest then galloped away.

They’ll be back, Otto thought. Where the hell do I go from here?

During the night he made up his mind.

He crept down to one of the dead ponies before dawn, removed the apishamore from its back, and, bending low, hurried back to Zeke. He cut the buffalo-hide saddle blanket into four pieces and, with thongs sliced from one of them, bound them tight to Zeke’s hoofs. That way the mule’s iron shoes wouldn’t ring on the rocks as they sneaked away.