The Holy Road

Chapter XXXIV

The buffalo-killer who lived the longest managed to get off one round before his head was split in half with an ax. The others barely had time to stir before they died.

But as warriors buzzed over the camp, firing everything but the body parts of the dead, Kicking Bird sat his pony with little sense of satisfaction. The scouts were certain they had counted eight white men, but only seven lay dead. The surrounding prairie was hastily searched for the missing enemy but no one was found, and Kicking Bird sensed they must move quickly in case the missing hunter had somehow escaped to spread an alarm.

Twenty minutes after they attacked, the thousand warriors were ploughing the darkness of the plains, hoping to catch more camps unaware of their presence. As they sped north they saw many more dead buffalo but little of the men who had killed them. By noon of the following day; they had encountered but one recently abandoned camp, and, certain that their presence had been announced, the great force hurried on, clinging to the prospect of overtaking isolated parties of fleeing hunters.

Judiciously alternating between all-out flight and periodic brief rest, the man with the toothache maintained an hour's lead over the huge war party. He had roused one camp of men, who spurned his advice and dashed east instead of following him to Adobe Walls. But he encountered no one else, and as he urged his weary horse on, the sore-jawed man assumed that by a miraculous stroke of luck all the other outfits must be out of the country or laying over at "the Walls."

His assumption was confirmed when, only a few miles from his goal, he happened upon three white men — two riding side by side on a buckboard, one mounted on a horse. Though he had never been introduced he knew the bearded, well-appointed men on the buckboard to be the brothers Rath, the wealthy, energetic financiers behind the frontier buffalo trade. The man on horseback was well known to him as the manager of the brothers' holdings at Adobe Walls.

The three men listened to the hunter's story of narrow escape and flight in shocked silence. All of them were unnerved to hear that what seemed to be a very large party of heathens was abroad and obviously bent on murdering whatever lay in their path.

For the Rath brothers, however, the Indian threat represented something other than mere bodily harm. Being inveterate creatures of commerce, the siblings' minds naturally leapt to the problem of how best to protect their investment.

They exchanged a few whispered words, then climbed down from the wagon. The manager dismounted and the three men held a brief conference out of earshot of the surviving hunter. In the tall grass of the prairie a number of quick decisions were reached. A lull in the buffalo slaughter had concentrated many hunters at the Adobe Walls installation. There were at least twenty-five guns there, maybe as many as thirty, but if they knew a large party of marauding savages were headed their way, many were likely to bolt. That would leave the saloon and hotel and processing sheds the Rath brothers owned vulnerable.

In the interest of preserving the empire they had labored so mightily to construct, an empire that produced a juggernaut of wealth to which there seemed no end, a conspiracy between the Rath brothers and their reliable manger was hatched.

Minutes later, assured that he would obtain proper care for his inflamed molar away from Adobe Walls, the hunter traded horses with the manager and struck east in the heady company of the Rath brothers.

The manager started back for the holdings at Adobe Walls, entrusted with executing a plan sure to guarantee that his masters' vastly lucrative industry would be maintained. None of the hunters at "the Walls" was to be informed of the impending threat to their lives. But that night, through a subterfuge of the manager's devising, the temporary settlement would be caused to prepare for an attack that was sure to come.

The manager was confident in the plan's simple brilliance. He was also certain that the presence of so many crack shots working behind the solid fortifications of the recently erected company town could blunt any hoard of screaming, arrow-shooting wild men.