Absaroka Ambush

8

“Nora Simms, Betty Rutherford, and Phyllis Reed,” Eudora told the men, who had strung up a sheet of canvas and were crouched under it. “But they were in the center of the column. How could they just disappear?”

“Easy, in this weather,” Blackjack said. “I’ll wager it was during that real bad spell when couldn’t none of us see nothin’.”

“Eudora,” the soft southern voice came from the edge of the group. They all turned to face April Johnson, a slim and attractive young woman from Georgia.

“I overheard Nora and her group talkin’ the other night. I thought they were only funnin’. They were talkin’ about turnin’ back. Then they saw me and all of them laughed. I…should have reported it. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Eudora said, putting an arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders. She looked at Preacher and he jerked his head toward the wagons. Eudora led the young woman away, back to her wagon.

“We wasn’t a mile out when that bad storm hit,” Preacher said. “I figure we’ve come five miles. So if they kept on and didn’t stop, they’re a good eight to ten miles back.” He waved at a Missouri man. “Saddle us some fresh mounts, Felix. The best in the herd.” Felix took off at a run. “Snake, you and Charlie stay with the women. Let’s go, boys. We got to find them women ’fore Indians or that trash that’s followin’ us does.”

Lieutenant Worthington burst onto the scene. “Is it true about the women?”

“Yeah. It’s true,” Preacher told him. “Stay with the wagons and be sure to post extra guards this night. The goddamn Pawnee love to strike in this kind of weather. And in this part of the country, them goddamn Pawnee are liable to be right over the next rise.”

Preacher rarely spoke of the Pawnee without putting some sort of oath before them. Preacher and the Pawnee just did not like one another. Never had. But he never underestimated them. The Pawnee were sly, slick, and the best horse thieves on the plains. The story goes that a Crow warrior decided to rest during the heat of the day. He tied his horse’s reins to his wrist and stretched out and went to sleep in the shade of trees. A Pawnee came along, looked at the scene, and smiled. When the Crow awakened, the reins had been removed from his wrist and his horse was gone.

That’s why Preacher never underestimated the Pawnee.

“We’re gonna have to be ridin’ with lady luck beside us, Preacher,” Ned remarked. “You know we’ve had Injuns all around us for several days.”

“Yep,” Preacher said, swinging into the saddle of a tough-looking, long-limbed roan. “Keep your powder dry, boys. Let’s go.”

The women stood silently and watched the men ride out into the drenching rain, heading east. The men did not push their mounts, but left at a steady gait. They would alternately trot and walk their horses to save them.

About a mile from the wagon train, the men split up, left and right, staying about a hundred yards apart, to better spot where the errant wagon had left the train.

Ned had summed up the feelings of all the men on this ride. None of them expected to see the women again. At least not alive. If Indians had found them, anything might happen. They might be taken as slaves and treated reasonably well, after they were repeatedly raped. If it was a war party looking for scalps, they would be raped and then killed. If they were lucky. If the Indians were in a bad mood, the women might be tortured. There was simply no way of telling about Indians. Some would not harm them at all. They would just look at them and ride off, leaving the women be, to fend for themselves. But the plains Indians were warriors, fierce fighters; killing a woman meant no more to many of them than killing a poisonous snake, and no Indian held to the same moral code as the so-called civilized white people. The Indian was neither evil nor morally wrong—not to their way of thinking; to them it was the white people who were terribly cruel and unfeeling. Indians respected the land and most of the creatures who inhabited it with them. Not so the white man. The white man raped the land and cut down all the trees. He diverted the flow of water to suit his needs and to hell with what others thought. He killed off all the game, left nothing, and would not share. The Indian never killed more than he needed. White men would kill game for something they called sport and take only the best cuts, leaving the rest to rot. That was a sin to an Indian. And the white man lied. Every time he opened his mouth he told great lies. You just could not trust most white men to keep their promises. Many people believed the western Indian knew nothing of how the eastern Indians were treated by the whites. That was a ridiculous theory and showed the arrogance and ignorance of the whites. As the tribes were pushed west, they brought their tales with them, and they were told over and over again. It was no wonder the Indians distrusted the white man. And the Indians knew that many whites believed that the only good Indian was a dead one. It was no wonder that many Indians soon believed the same to be true about whites.

The Indians were not necessarily wrong in their beliefs and way of life. They were just different.

After a few miles, the men reined up in a ragged group of trees to rest their horses and talk.

“We got to be gettin’ close now,” Blackjack said. “And the hair on the back of my neck is standin’ up, boys.”

“They’re all around us,” Steals Pony said. “Pawnee. I sense them.” He shook his head and his eyes touched those looking at him. “And I think they are Bearmen.”

“Damn!” Ring said. “That would be our luck.”

The Bear Society was a very elite one among the Omaha and the Pawnee. And they were feared by all. They were fierce fighters, like bears, unpredictable and dangerous.

“If they took the women, we’ll not never get them back,” Ned said.

“No,” Preacher agreed. “We sure won’t. We’ll be lucky to stay alive. The Pawnee hate me worser than they do the Assiniboins. And that includes anyone who rides with me. Goddamn Pawnee,” he added, as all the men knew he would. Preacher stood up from his squat and gathered the reins. “Well, this ain’t doin’ nothing but gettin’ us wet. Let’s ride.”

The men mounted up and headed out, but riding much more slowly now. To a man they knew they were in trouble. They had spent all their adult lives in hostile country, and all could sense the danger that lay around them, lurking silently behind the silver shield of the hard-pouring rain.

The men carried their pistols under their buckskin shirts and in covered holsters on their saddles; the rifles were carried in hardened skin cases that could be discarded in a second. And a second might be all the time they would have if the Bearmen of the Pawnee attacked out of the storm. Long-bladed knives and war-axes were readily at hand.

Steals Pony reined up and, with a wave of his hand, signaled to the others. He had found where the women’s wagon had left the train. The men gathered around and looked. The rutted tracks were still clear.

“Headin’ straight back, following the trail,” Ned remarked. “Foolish, foolish ladies.”

A few hundred yards later, the fears of the men were silently confirmed. The tracks left by a dozen unshod ponies were clearly visible. And the Pawnee were closing on the wagon very quickly.

“How many you make it, Steals Pony?” Blackjack asked, staring at the churned-up earth.

“At least twelve,” the Delaware said. “Maybe as many as fifteen.”

The rain continued to come down in torrents. But the men knew it could not last much longer. It would slacken as the storm moved on.

The mountain men rode for another hour, following the wagon tracks. The rain began to abate, finally dwindling down to no more than a drizzle. Preacher stood up in his stirrups and pointed.

“There it is,” he said, his voice flat.

Ned took a spyglass from his saddlebags and opened it full. He peered through the lenses for a moment, then silently handed the spyglass to Preacher. The hard look in his eyes told the entire story.

Blackjack, Steals Pony, and Ring had turned their horses, to cover the other directions. All had a hunch the war party had not gone far, knowing that someone from the train would come looking for the women.

Preacher’s face hardened as he viewed the scene. Two of the three women were clearly visible through the magnification. They were naked, of course. And they were dead. Both had been scalped. The Indians had taken the mules, although many Indians disliked the fractious animals. Preacher handed the spyglass to Ned without a word.

The men cautiously walked their horses up to the savage scene. Nora Simms had been the youngest and the prettiest of the three women. She was gone. They had taken her.

Betty Rutherford had been used badly and the back of her head bashed in by a stone war-axe. She had then been scalped. Phyllis Reed probably had broken free sometime during the struggle and tried to run away. She had gotten only a few yards before an arrow in her back brought her down. She lay facedown and naked on the wet prairie grass, her inner thighs bruised.

Steals Pony dismounted, covered the lower part of Phyllis’s body with a discarded blanket, then broke off the arrow and looked at it. “Pawnee,” he said, then threw the arrow to the ground in disgust.

“Yonder’s two of the mules,” Ned said, pointing toward the southeast. “Draggin’ their harness.”

“Stay where you are,” Steals Pony said. “I will look to see if it is a trap while you bury the women. If it is safe, do you want the mules, Preacher?”

“Yeah,” Preacher said, rummaging around in the clothing-strewn bed of the wagon for a shovel. “We’ll take the wagon back and tear it down for spare parts. You watch your butt out yonder, Steals Pony. It ain’t like them goddamn Pawnee to go off very far. With them knowin’ somebody would come lookin’.”

It was easy digging in the soaked earth, and the men worked swiftly, digging down as far as they dared, constantly looking over their shoulders. The women were wrapped in blankets and buried. Then the men went looking for stones to cover the mounds, to keep animals from digging up the bodies and eating them.

Blackjack found a Bible in a trunk and handed it to Preacher. Preacher opened it at random and read a few verses while they stood over the lonely graves. Two small fresh mounds of earth on the vastness of an untamed land.

“That sounded strange, Preacher,” Blackjack said. “What did you just read?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at the page. “It’s from Romans. I thought it sounded pretty good.”

“What do intercession mean?” Ring asked. “That sounds kinda vulgar to me.”

“I ain’t got no idea,” Preacher replied, closing the Good Book. “I ain’t no student of the gospel. But it’s in the damn Bible. So it can’t be bad, can it?”

“I reckon not,” Blackjack conceded.

“’Sides,” Preacher said, “I thought that part about ‘groanings which cannot be uttered’ sounded about right.”

“Amen,” Ned said, looking around him. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

Steals Pony had found all four mules and brought them back to the wagon. “The Pawnee are gone. They left in a big hurry for some reason. One horse is carrying double, so they took Nora with them for sure.”

“She’ll soon wish she had died with these others,” Preacher said ominously.

“For a fact,” Steals Pony said. “I do not envy her existence from this moment on.”

The men stood around the graves and looked at one another for a few seconds.

“Well, hell!” Blackjack said.

“Now what do we do?” Ned asked.

Preacher kicked at a clump of dirt. Then he sighed heavily. “What say you boys?” he asked, looking around him. “Do we go after her?”

“By the Lord, I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t at least try to fetch her back,” Ring said. “I think we got to at least try.”

“I say we go after her,” Steals Pony said.

“Count me in,” Blackjack and Ned said together.

“All right. Let’s do it,” Preacher said. “We’ll brush-corral the mules over yonder by that thicket and come back for them. If we don’t, well, they’ll bust out of it when they get hungry. Somebody take that shovel yonder with them. If Nora kicked up too much of a fuss, they’ll just knock her in the head and dump her. Personal, I hope they do. We’ve all seen what a war party can do to a woman.”

“I’ll bring along that Bible I found,” Blackjack said. “Just in case.”

“If we need it, let me read the passages,” Steals Pony said, looking over at Preacher. “I know a more appropriate verse or two.”

“Which one?” Preacher demanded.

“The Twenty-third Psalm,” the Delaware said gently.

“How do that go?” Ring asked.

“It starts: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’”

“Give him the Good Book, Blackjack. He’s got me bested, this time.”