Do or Die

Chapter Six

The last thing Charley Pickett wanted was for the buffalo hunter to draw attention. Ubel Gunther hadn’t noticed Tony or him yet, and Charley wanted to keep it that way. Gunther must have descriptions of them both.

It might be sheer coincidence Gunther was here. Right before Howard stood up, Charley had seen the bartender slip a poke across the counter to Gunther, who’d slid it under his jacket.

The two men with Ubel were ready to tear into Enos. They moved toward him but stopped when Gunther barked a command in a language Charley thought was German. The owner of the general store in the town near his parents’ farm had been German, and a nicer man Charley had never met.

Now that Charley thought about it, he realized Walter Radtke must be of German extraction too. Maybe everyone who worked for Radtke was.

“My name is Ubel Gunther, not pretty boy.” Gunther addressed Enos. “Go spout your drivel elsewhere. Or better yet, go take a bath. You stink worse than swine.”

Enos was upending the bottle and sloshed some of the whiskey over his chin when he suddenly jerked it down. “Now, that there was an insult if ever I heard one. And in this country, when a man airs his tonsils the wrong way, he answers for it. So set the tumbleweed to rollin’.”

The gauntlet had been thrown. The men with Ubel were eagerly awaiting the word to pounce. But all Gunther did was stand there.

“Are you implying I am a foreigner, you drunken lout? I’ll have you know my grandparents came to America seventy years ago. I was born here. I am an American citizen, the same as you.”

“Too bad the midwife didn’t drop you on your noggin.” Enos wagged the bottle at him. “Do you have any grit, pretty boy? Or are you fixin’ to talk me to death?”

Ubel said one word, just one, and his associates, as he had called them at the stable, were on Enos before Enos could blink. One swung a right cross that, had it landed, would have dropped Howard like a rock. But much to Charley’s amazement, the buffalo hunter ducked, raised his right foot, and stomped on his attacker’s instep. The man yelped and hopped backwards, swearing in German.

The other tough assumed a boxer’s stance and waded into the buffalo hunter with his fists flying.

Enos Howard was a marvel. He dodged. He weaved. He sidestepped. Charley had a hard time keeping up with who was doing what, they moved so fast. But he had the impression not one of the tough’s blows landed. Suddenly Howard spun, grabbed a chair, and flung it at the German’s legs. The man went down in a tumble.

“If you want something done right,” Ubel Gunther said. Hefting his cane, he stalked forward.

Howard’s Bowie leaped from its sheath. “I’m goin’ to carve that walkin’ stick of yours into kindlin’ and then do the same to you.”

The metallic click of gun hammers being thumbed back brought the fight to an end. The bartender had taken a shotgun from under the counter and was aiming it squarely at Howard. “That’ll be enough. Enos, I’ve warned you before about actin’ up in my place. Put that pigsticker away, or I’ll splatter your innards all over this room.”

“Tom!” Enos sounded stricken. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are, you dunce, or you’d see I’m doin’ you a favor. These men work for Walter Ratdke, who doesn’t take kindly to having his men rousted. Remember that fella found hacked into fifty pieces last winter?”

Howard’s disappointment was no sham. “I ain’t scared of Radtke, and I ain’t scared of pretty boy or his cane. Bring ’em all on, and I’ll buck ’em out in gore.”

“You heard me,” Tom said.

It was back down or be shot. Enos backed down. Instead of returning to their table, though, he moved to another on the other side of the saloon. “There. Happy now?”

“Delirious.” Tom lowered the shotgun but didn’t put it away. To Gunther he said, “This was none of my doin’. Be sure to tell Mr. Radtke that.”

“You are not responsible for the antics of every cretin who enters your establishment.” Gunther bowed toward Enos Howard. “Another time, perhaps, schwein?”

“I can’t wait, pretty boy.”

With a twirl of his cane, Gunther departed. The two toughs limped at his heels, their hatred of Howard transparent.

All smiles, Enos came back across the room. “Still think I’m not worth my weight in spit?” he demanded. “I swatted that pair like they were bed-bugs.” He swilled some whiskey, then patted the bottle. “I trust I’ve proven myself.”

Tony had faced his chair around now that Gunther was gone. “All you’ve proven is you have mush for brains. Baiting them served no purpose.”

“Didn’t it?” Howard sneered. “I kept their attention on me, didn’t I, so they wouldn’t spot you and the farm boy here? I did you a good turn, but you’re not man enough to admit it.”

“You didn’t do it just for us,” Tony responded.

“True. There’s nothin’ more fun than a good brawl. Last one I was in, up Wyoming way, we broke every piece of furniture in the saloon. Cost every coin I had to my name, but it was worth it.”

“I thought you were wonderful, Enos,” Melissa gushed. “But I’m still waiting to hear why you gave up buffalo hunting.”

Howard’s exuberant mood evaporated like dew under a hot sun. “Maybe another time, Missy. Right now we’ve got somethin’ more important to jaw about.”

“We do?” Charley said.

“As sure as I live and breathe.” Howard polished off another finger of coffin varnish and belched. “When are we headin’ out after the Hoodoos?”

Nebraska Panhandle

Agent William Shores of the newly created United States Department of Justice had made camp out on the plain. O. T. Quarrel had offered him the use of a bunk, but Shores had declined. His superiors were counting on him to wrap things up in short order, and he had no intention of letting them down. He prided himself on his ability to perform his job effectively and expeditiously, and he would treat this case as he had every other throughout his career.

Shores rode until close to midnight, then made a cold camp. He considered making a fire but opted not to. He was in flat, open country, and a fire would be seen from a long way off. Supposedly, there weren’t any Sioux in the area, but why tempt fate?

His saddle for a pillow, Shores wrapped himself in a blanket and lay on his side. His rifle was close at hand. He heard a coyote yip. Not far distant, another answered. Much closer, something snorted, and there was the thud of receding hooves. It was the same every night. Constant animal sounds, often sounds Shores couldn’t identify. Grunts and snarls and roars that made sleep next to impossible.

William Shores was not fond of the West. He would rather be sleeping in his four-poster bed under his own roof than on the ground in the middle of the godforsaken prairie. He wasn’t a country boy. Far from it. His childhood in Texas had been spent mostly in town, and his later years in Chicago had ingrained into him the belief that city life was the only life.

It was a question of what a person was comfortable with. Shores liked the convenience of walking into a restaurant and ordering a meal rather than having to hunt it, shoot it, butcher it, and cook it. He would rather deal with heavy traffic than a war party. And given his druthers, he would rather have to contend with a stray dog rummaging in his garbage than a stray grizzly interested in devouring him.

Shores rolled onto his back and stared at the stars. He had only himself to blame for his current assignment. When the assistant director had called him in and asked if he had much experience with horses, he’d bragged that as a kid he had ridden nearly every day and was as at home in the saddle as he was in a trolley. Now here he was, chasing his own tail all over the wilds, trying to find five of the worst killers alive.

On that cheerful note, Shores dozed off. He slept fitfully, awakening at the slightest noises, until about four in the morning, when he gave in to fatigue and slept the sleep of the dead. A feeling of warmth on his face roused him. The sun was half an hour high. He had wanted to head out before dawn.

“Damn,” Shores said and sat up. The first thing he saw was his hobbled claybank, munching grass. The second thing he saw was an Indian.

Shores came up out of his blanket as if fired from a catapult. His hand automatically rose to his Smith & Wesson, but he didn’t draw.

The Indian made no threatening moves. Hunkered on his haunches, his thin arms folded across his knees, he grinned and said, “How do, Brother John.” He was naked except for a breechclout and moccasins and had long grey hair that hung down to his waist. His oval face was ridged with lines, the stamp of seventy- or eighty-plus years. A quiver hung across his back. At his feet lay an unslung bow and a tomahawk. “How do, Brother John,” he said again as Shores stood gaping.

“Who are you, Indian? What in heaven’s name are you up to?”

The old Indian went on grinning. “In Red Fox tongue him be Ainga-bite-waahni-a. In white tongue him be Red Fox.” His English was heavily accented. “I come far find you, Brother John.”

Shores scanned the prairie. He saw no other Indians. A paint horse was thirty yards out, grazing. “Why were you looking for me? And why do you keep calling me Brother John? My name is Bill. Bill Shores.”

“As you say, Brother John.” Red Fox slowly unfurled, the bow in his left hand, the tomahawk in his right. He stuck the handle of the tomahawk under the top of his breechclout. “Red Fox hunt you. Know you hunt badmen, Brother John.”

“Didn’t you hear me? My name is Bill. Not John.” Shores had a hunch the old Indian wasn’t in full control of his faculties. “What badmen are you talking about?”

“Hoodoos, Brother John.”

“Will you quit calling me that?” Shores couldn’t get over how the old Indian had snuck up on him as slick as could be. Had it been a Sioux, his throat would be slit and his scalp would be hanging from a coup stick. Which reminded him. “What tribe are you from? And what’s your interest in the Hoodoos?”

Red Fox touched his scrawny chest. “Red Fox be Sho-sho-ne. Uncle to White Dove. Brother to Mat-ta-vish.”

Shores understood now. “You’re after the men who killed him.”

“White Dove say Great Father send Brother John. Say you hunt gizhaa men. I help. We hunt. We kill.”

“How old are you?”

Red Fox looked at Shores as if to say “why do you ask?” But he answered, “Red Fox be seventy-eight winters. I born winter ice break on river, four children drown.”

Shores recalled hearing somewhere that Indian tribes measured years in “winters,” with each winter known for a notable event. “I don’t know how to tell you this without hurting your feelings, so I’ll come right out with it. You’ve come all this way for nothing. Go back to the reservation. I don’t need your help, Red Fox. You’ll only get yourself killed, and the Great Father would be mad at me for letting you come along.” He smiled to show he had only the old Indian’s best interests at heart and bent to pick up his saddle blanket.

Red Fox didn’t move.

Shores threw the blanket on the claybank. He was conscious of the Indian’s eyes boring into his back as he saddled up, tied on his saddlebags, and stepped into the stirrups. “Give my regards to White Dove.” He applied his spurs, traveling west.

Presently hooves drummed, and the paint came up alongside. “Brother John go wrong way.”

Sighing, Shores reined up. “Pay attention. I’m not in the habit of repeating myself. You cannot come with me. Return to the reservation where you belong. I’ll deal with the Hoodoos in my own time and my own way.”

“Hoodoos that way.” Red Fox pointed southwest.

“And how would you know that?” Shores was trying hard not to lose his temper. He never had liked Indians all that much. Comanches had tortured and killed his grandparents when he was seven, and he would take the horrid images of their butchered bodies to his grave.

Red Fox spoke each word slowly, trying to be as precise as he could. “Gizhaa daiboo-a steal many horses from Mat-ta-vish. Take horses wooden lodge of White-Who-Likes-Lakotas. Then gizhaa daiboo-a go that way.” Again Red Fox pointed southwest.

The full import of what the old Indian was saying hit Shores with the jolt of a sledgehammer. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you can track the Hoodoos from the point where they left the ranch?”

Red Fox grunted. “Come get Brother John first. Make Great Father happy.”

Gazing heavenward, Shores silently mouthed “Thank you.” To the Shoshone he said, “I’m willing to let you join me on two conditions. One, you must do as I say at all times. Two, you will not take revenge on any of the Hoodoos without my permission. Do we have a deal?”

“Brother John not want Red Fox kill gizhaa daiboo-a?”

“Not unless I expressly say you can,” Shores stressed. “What do those Shoshone words mean? You’ve used them several times now.”

“Gizhaa daiboo-a mean not-good-white men.” Red Fox lapsed into deep thought for all of a minute. “We have deal, Brother John. But Red Fox say this. If gizhaa daiboo-a try kill us, Red Fox kill gizhaa daiboo-a.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Shores said. Especially since he would scrupulously avoid placing the old Shoshone in a life-or-death situation. “Let’s shake on it.” He thrust out his hand.

Red Fox stared at the proffered hand, then at Shores. “Brother John speak with straight tongue?”

“I am not Brother—” Shores began but stopped. What was the use? he asked himself. The old Indian would go on calling him that stupid name no matter what he said. “I always speak with a straight tongue.”

“Then no need shake.” Red Fox jabbed his heels against the pinto, and their trackdown commenced.

William Shores had never spent more than five minutes in the company of an Indian his whole life, and for a while he felt distinctly uncomfortable. It helped that the Shoshone was a tame treaty Indian, but even so, he couldn’t stop thinking about his grandparents and the legion of other incidents he had read or heard about.

The other’s silence eventually got to him. “Were you and your brother close?” Shores asked to break the monotony.

“We brothers,” Red Fox responded, his tone implying it was all the answer needed.

Shores didn’t give up. “How did Mat-ta-vish get so good with horses?” The general consensus was that Red Fox’s sibling raised some of the best horseflesh anywhere. Quarrel rated the paints so high, he had mentioned to Shores that he would gladly keep them for himself if it weren’t for his pact with the Sioux.

“Horses children,” Red Fox said.

“Sorry?”

“Mat-ta-vish raise children, raise horses, all same. Mat-ta-vish love children, Mat-ta-vish love horses. Mat-ta-vish love all but daiboo-a.”

“All but white men.” Until that moment, Shores had felt sorry for Mat-ta-vish. “And here I am, risking life and limb to bring your brother’s murderers to bay. Life is one irony after another.”

Red Fox looked at him. “Why you do this, Brother John? You not know Mat-ta-vish.”

“It’s my job. It’s what the Great Father pays me to do.” But there was a lot more to it, Shores ruefully reflected.

The Department of Justice was the newest kid on the government block. And as with most new kids, it had to prove itself before the other kids would accept it. So Attorney General Akerman had devised a strategy to prove the department was worthy of respect. His plan involved sending agents across the country to locales infested by various criminal elements. Elements, be it noted, which had garnered a lot of attention in the press. In Missouri it was a gang of bank robbers. In Georgia it was a small band of Southerners who refused to accept the South’s defeat. In New Jersey it was a corporate ring swindling millions of dollars with sham raffles. In Wyoming and adjacent territories, it was the Hoodoos.

A lot was riding on Shores’s shoulders. As the attorney general had put it at their last meeting, “I couldn’t care less about a bunch of stolen horses. But there’s more at stake here than stopping the thieves. We’re building up the department’s reputation. We’re showing we’ve got what it takes, as common parlance would have it. By the end of the year, there won’t be a person in the country who hasn’t heard of us. And when they think of us, William, I want them to think of us with pride.”

There were moments when Shores had the impression he had been set adrift in a rowboat without oars and expected to make his way upstream against the rapids. But he was nothing if not tenacious, and he wouldn’t give up until the Hoodoos were in custody or dead.

For hours Shores and his newfound ally pressed steadily on. The sun was directly overhead when Shores mentioned they should stop to rest the horses.

“Paint fine,” Red Fox said.

And it was, Shores had to admit. But the claybank was a stable rental, and he must not wear it down if he could help it. Then there was the little fact that Shores had gone without breakfast, and his stomach wouldn’t stop growling. “We’ll rest awhile anyway.” He went to draw rein.

“Not here, Brother John. There.”

Shores looked where the Shoshone pointed but saw nothing to recommend the spot. It was just another grassy tract in an unending sea of grassland. But he humored the old man and in a few moments drew rein at a buffalo wallow.

“Less chance Lakotas, Blackfeet, whites see us.” Red Fox rode into the wallow and dismounted by sliding off the right side of his paint.

Shores climbed down and walked the claybank to relieve some of the soreness in his leg muscles from all the time he had spent in the saddle recently. He frankly couldn’t wait to wrap this assignment up and return to Washington, D.C. He missed being shuttled everywhere in a carriage, missed the private club he went to each evening for a cigar and a glass or two of brandy.

Red Fox squatted. “Brother John like Red Fox?”

The query was unforeseen. To stall, Shores loosened the claybank’s cinch. As a Pinkerton, he had learned the best way to fend off unwanted questions was to answer a question with another, so he responded, “Why ask me a thing like that?”

“Many whites not like Indians. Say only good Indians, dead Indians. Brother John think same?”

“If I did, would we be having this ridiculous conversation?” Shores hedged. “My people have another saying. Judge a man by his actions, not by his words.” He moved to the rim so he could keep watch, although he didn’t really need to; the wallow was only about a foot and a half deep. But hopefully it would keep the old man from being a nuisance.

Shores gazed to the northeast and saw no sign of anyone on their back trail. To the east were specks that might be antelope. He shifted to gaze to the west and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Red Fox was a yard away, hunkered on his heels.

“Is there something you want?” Shores snapped, embarrassed at being caught off guard.

“Tell Red Fox about Great Father. Washakie say Great Father friend. Say Great Father help Shoshone. But Great Father make Shoshone stay reservation.”

Washakie, as Shores had learned on his arrival at the Wind River Reservation, was a Shoshone chief of immense influence who always did all in his power to maintain peaceful relations with whites. “You’re living on the land Washakie said your people want to live on. I should think you would be grateful.”

“Reservation like fence. Keep Shoshone in. We told where go, when can hunt. Not like before white man. Shoshone go anywhere, do anything.” A wistful smile spread across the old warrior’s face. “Red Fox happy then.”

“Those days are gone. More and more whites will come. More and more towns and settlements will spring up. There will be more ranches, more farms. But the Great Father will protect your tribe and not let anyone take the land he has given to you.” Or so the official line went. As a dinner guest of the Indian Agent at the Wind River Agency, Shores had been dished an earful about the Indian problem and its solution.

Red Fox abruptly stood up. “Brother John hear?”

“Hear what?” Shores pivoted in a circle. The specks that might be antelope were still there. He saw nothing else.

“Buffalo.”

It was Shores’s understanding the big herds were a lot farther south at this time of year. “Are you sure?” He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the great shaggy beasts since leaving Cheyenne.

“Sure.” Red Fox extended an arm.

They were specks at first, no larger than the antelope, and partially hidden by the immense dust cloud they were raising. But as they rapidly drew near, they swelled in size.

So, too, swelled the accompanying thunder of hundreds, possibly thousands, of hooves.

Shores grinned. He was ten the first time he ever set eyes on a buffalo, at the time, and still living in Texas. A farmer had come into town and mentioned seeing an old, decrepit bull out near his cornfield. Shores and several other boys had rushed to the spot and found the buffalo on its side, wheezing like a bellows. Shores would never forget how huge it was: six feet at the shoulder and twice that in length, with curved horns that could shear through a person like a hot knife through butter.

“Brother John?” Red Fox said.

Shores recalled how one of the boys had beaned the buffalo with a rock. He and the others had joined in, as boys that age were wont to do, and spent the next half an hour stoning the buffalo to death. When it finally stopped breathing, they congratulated one another on their mighty feat and ran off to tell their parents. That weekend there was a church social. Buffalo meat was the main dish.

“Brother John!”

Shores looked up. The herd was a lot closer and moving a lot faster than a herd normally did. It dawned on him they were stampeding—straight toward the wallow.