Winter Rain

7

September 1868

BLOOD FROTHED AT the man’s lips, his red-flecked orbs gone walleyed in pain, as much as in fear of staring into the face of death.

The face of Jubilee Usher.

How Usher always relished this power, momentarily cradling a man’s life in his hands—in this case, feeling the slow, unmistakable crackle of cartilage in his victim’s windpipe as the trachea collapsed under the ever-tightening vise of the Danite leader’s clawlike grip.

“G-g-ghg-ghg …,” gurgled the victim, his fingers frantically, desperately raking at Usher’s hands as the colonel continued to squeeze all hope of breath reaching the lungs below the crushed windpipe.

Jubilee tore his eyes away from the pasty gray of his victim’s swollen face, the man held at arm’s length, legs dangling, boots barely skiffing the grassy sand of their camp on the west bank of Muddy Creek, putting Usher’s army west of the Green River and Fort Bridger, closing in on Zion.

“Look, ye of little faith—and remember!” Usher roared, finding again a fascination with his own voice at this decibel. “Mark it well on your memories and fail me not. For just such a fate awaits the next of you who would entertain even the faintest thought of trifling with the woman!”

“He didn’t … didn’t mean nothing by it—”

Usher whirled on the speaker, his present victim still dangling at the end of his huge arm, legs dragging behind like a clumsy, ill-stringed marionette out of control. The man had already wet himself, a dark stain down one leg.

“You dare tell me he meant nothing by his sordid transgression?” Usher spat into the speaker’s face as the man backed a hurried two steps, suddenly stopped by the solid cordon of his cohorts.

“I found him with her,” Jubilee continued, sensing his victim’s grip loosen at his wrist. The man was dying, if not already dead. “He had the woman’s dress up … well, let’s just say he had shamefully embarrassed the woman by near disrobing her when I discovered him … surprised him, those filthy britches of his opened. Ready to commit his nameless sin against this helpless woman. And you say he couldn’t help himself!”

“J-just that, Colonel …,” the man stammered, dragging his own hand across his throat as his eyes bounced between Usher’s and the bloated, ashen face of his friend, “none of us, we ain’t had no … no women since’t—”

“This is not the first time I’ve demanded chastity from you, men!”

He swallowed and nodded eagerly as a pup who wanted to please a master. “And the woman likely was looking … she was—”

“Looking?” Usher bent over to scream in the man’s face, spittle flung across the henchman’s unwashed, sun burned cheeks. “You mean to tell me you’ve been casting your eyes at her too?”

“N-no!”

With an audible crunch of the last of the trachea’s cartilage, Usher hurled his arm around, flinging the dead man at the end of it into the brash speaker. Screeching in sudden fear as he fell over backward, sprawling on the ground beneath the body, the Danite pushed and struggled to get out from under the corpse of his dead friend as it voided its bowels in a noisy, gaseous explosion. Jubilee stood over him as the man finally clambered to his knees, almost whimpering, staring up into the bright afternoon light until the sun’s own rays were eclipsed by the huge form.

“Just whose side are you on in this battle of God versus evil?” Usher inquired, this time so quietly that it caught every man of them by surprise. “This final battle at the end of the world, a battle between the faithful and the heathen? Between the clean”—then he pointed down at the dead man crumpled beneath his feet—“and the unclean. Where stand you?”

“Colonel Usher!”

Jubilee wheeled about at the call, the rest turning with him. A rider came skidding to a halt in a spray of dust that sent golden spires through the slanting afternoon sunlight. The dust settled in a cascading cock’s comb that Usher strode through to reach the horseman. Two more riders came to a halt on the heels of the first.

“Heber—what changes have the years wrought in our City of the Saints?”

As Heber Welch slid from the saddle, wind galled and dry as a high-plains buffalo wallow in late summer, Usher caught him up and gave the man an immense, intimate embrace. It was meant only for this sort of trusted friend—the one Jubilee had chosen weeks before to ride ahead without delay, reaching Salt Lake City to determine the condition of affairs for Usher’s return after these many years away from the real seat of Mormon power.

Welch’s eyes flicked over the rest quickly, then hung on Usher’s as Jubilee pulled back to arm’s length. “Your father, Colonel … he—”

“You saw my father? He was your namesake.”

“I am his godson. His namesake.”

“So you have been like a brother to me,” Jubilee said, studying the man’s face for the portent of the news brought him at a gallop.

“He is ill.”

Jubilee sensed the very real stab of remorse as the news pierced him through. “I have done my best over the years to correspond with him. To apprise him of my good works …” Then his eyes went half-lidded of a sudden, suspicious. “He is still a member of the Council of Twelve?”

“The others have … they’ve removed him, Colonel.”

Swallowing that news like something foul, fetid, and raw, Usher gazed into the distance, a bit south of due west. “The rest—they cower before Brigham Young, yes?”

“Your father …,” Welch started to say, paused, then finished, “it seems—he doesn’t want you to come back to the City.”

Usher turned back to Welch slowly, his face gone almost expressionless below the smooth skin of his bald head, its long fringe of coal-black, curly hair hung from ear level to drape far past his shoulders like a silken shawl. He pushed a perfumed ringlet behind an ear. “Not back to the City. Why in God’s name would my father tell me not to come back?”

Welch gulped slightly. “Your father …”

“What does this have to do with my father any longer?”

“Only that your father says the Prophet has … has—”

“Has what?”

“Declared you without the grace of the Church.”

That seized Usher cold, low in the pit of him. “He has cast me out?”

“Your father told me—”

Jubilee clamped his hands on Welch’s shoulders as a man would seize a brother in crisis. “Is he bedridden?”

Welch nodded, his thin lips pursed in resignation. “There is little fight left in him now, Colonel.”

Releasing Welch, Usher turned away, staring into the west once more. “Brigham Young waits only for me to return—so that he can excommunicate me. Is that it, friend Heber?”

“Yes,” he sighed, as if admitting something reluctantly. “Yes, Colonel.”

Usher was a long time in replying. Behind him the men stood quietly for the most part, taking this sudden turn of their communal affairs in stunned silence.

When Jubilee finally did utter a sound, it came behind a long sigh. “The Prophet has become concerned for his own private power, men. Any fool could see that. Brigham Young is casting out all those who pose any threat to his godless usurpation of the Church’s power. My father knows this—that’s why Young saw him removed from the ruling Council.” He whirled on Welch. “Isn’t this what my father told you, friend Heber?”

“Y-yes, Colonel.”

Usher turned on the rest, some three dozen of his most faithful. “The time will come to test the Prophet’s power against my own.” Jubilee liked the effect those words had on that band of brigands he had nourished over the years. The eyes of a handful showed some recognition of that power held by Brigham Young. Usher vowed to remember those who showed such outright fear of the man who was of a time the best friend Jubilee had in this world.

But the rest of the faces showed instead the intense glee he himself felt at the thought of pitting his power against the dynasty of Brigham Young. These he would remember as well, and reward them once he had ripped the mantle of the Church from the hands of the false Prophet.

“Young’s hands are tired, men. We have no choice but to remove the Church from his control one day soon. Not now—but soon.”

“Colonel,” Welch reminded. “Your father.”

He gazed at Welch. “We will make sure my father, my family, is safe before moving against Young. You can return with word from me that he will be safe.”

Heber shook his head. “No. Not that he is in danger. Just that—he worries for you, Colonel. Wants you to stay away, ride far around the City. He wants me to remind you of Brigham Young’s power to send gunmen.”

“Gunmen? Heber—I was always one of those gunmen. The blood I shed in those early days for the sanctity of the Church. The lives I took in the name of Brigham Young!”

“Your father wants you to stay far from the City.”

Usher’s stomach leapt with bitter shock. “Ride far around? Just where should we be bound now, if not back to the seat of Zion itself?”

Welch pointed. “South. To the far lands. Where your father suggests you stay and recruit yourself. Until he can regain his health and send word for you to return at last. In triumph.”

“South,” Jubilee said the word almost reverently. “What in God’s name is south of the City of Zion, except … desolate waste?”

“Your father told me your family has an old friend there. A man you will remember. A friend who will remember you.”

“Yes?”

“You are to stay with his people. Your father said them folks don’t get along with Brigham Young neither. Not much anymore.”

“Who is this my father suggests we stay with until our appointed hour, friend Heber?”

“Name of Lee.”

Usher nodded, a grin forming that lighted his face. His dark eyes crawled across some of his faithful. “Do any of you remember brother Lee?”

He saw a few heads nod in recognition. “Yes. Then you will remember the Mountain Meadows. And how brother Lee led an army of our faithful against a wagon train of vagabond Gentiles come out of Missouri to invade our sacred State of Zion.”

“The righteous killed ’em all!” a voice called out.

“Lee took up the sword and killed them all!”

There came a sudden explosion of cheering, a roaring of blood lust remembered.

“Men, women, and children! Yes—all!” Jubilee shouted above the melee. Then as suddenly he shushed the crowd into silence. With a long, mighty arm he dragged Welch beneath his shoulder, clutching him there fraternally.

“Yes, my faithful. For the time being we must wait, forcing us to ride south … and there we will stay within the bosom of our own kind. At dawn we ride for the land of John Doyle Lee.”

By the time Tall Bull, White Horse, and Pawnee Killer had led their blood-hot warriors south to the Dog Soldier camp beside the shallow flow of the Plum River, the sun was nestling into its western sleep. High-Backed Bull sensed they would not be marching down on the white men this day.

As quickly he decided to ask a few others to join him on a black-night raid on the white man’s horses. If no others would join him, he had decided he would ride alone. No matter what, the young Shahiyena warrior was not about to wait out the night before spilling white blood.

As the war chiefs gazed over the combined forces of Shahiyena, Lakota, and Arapaho warriors, numbering more than ten-times-ten, and ten times over again, a thousand horsemen in all, they reluctantly gave in to the failing, red-earth light of that summer day. No man in fear of his own soul would consider fighting at night. If a warrior were killed during a battle after the sun had disappeared from the sky, his spirit would forever roam this earth, unable to walk the Seamon, the sacred road of the dead. He would not spend his forever days beyond the stars in Seyan. No man dared tempt such a fate.

That is, no man but High-Backed Bull.

“The rest won’t ride until the sun climbs out of its bed,” Bull told the first friend he felt he could trust with the horse raid.

Wrinkled Wolf’s eyes grew big. “You aren’t waiting?”

“We will go as soon as it grows dark enough,” the Bull answered. “There won’t be but a fragment of moon tonight—”

“We will get caught!”

“I won’t!” Bull whispered harshly, slapping his chest. “There are white men wearing scalps this night, scalps that I want to carry on my belt. I want to take that hair before the others have the chance. Are you with me?”

Wrinkled Wolf nodded reluctantly. “Yes. You said I would get the American horses we take.”

“You, and your brother, Four Bulls Moon. Get him to come along with us too. You will share the white man’s horses. I don’t want any—only the scalps. Only to cut out tongues and eyes. To hack off hands and feet, to slash off the manhood parts and stuff them in the lying mouths. That is all I want this night. Go. Get your brother. See if he has friends who still have courage to ride against the white man in darkness.”

As High-Backed Bull waited in a plum thicket at the edge of the Dog Soldier camp, his pony picketed nearby in readiness, tearing noisily at the summer-cured grass, the warrior listened as the great Shahiyena village assumed a festive atmosphere. With news of the white riders drawing close behind them, every man sixteen summers and older had prepared for battle, readying his medicine, caring for his weapons. Most of the firearms now possessed by these warriors had been spoils of the Fetterman Massacre two winters before: single-shot muzzle-loading Springfield muskets. Only a handful owned repeaters captured in recent raids on the white man’s roads.

In this merry village of Dog Soldiers the Shahiyena hosted Pawnee Killer’s Brule as everyone—men and women, children as well—reveled the coming night before they would resume their march to wipe out the half-a-hundred. Word spread from fire to fire this evening that the fighting force stalking the villages had camped no more than ten miles downriver, within easy reach before the sun rose to heat the ground where the mighty horsemen would spill white blood in one swift charge come morning.

The thunderous horde of horsemen would surround and attack the half-a-hundred, the camps cheered. No more to it than squashing a tick grown plump and lazy between your fingers, watching the blood trickle and ooze over your hand. A momentary distraction only, thought High-Backed Bull—then the warrior bands would continue as planned on their sweep of their ancient buffalo country.

Along with Roman Nose, chiefs Tall Bull and White Horse had sworn to stop the smoke-belching medicine horse that rode on the iron tracks. The Shahiyena bands had joined Pawnee Killer’s Lakota for the greatest of all raids against the white man’s settlements as summer began to abandon this high land. With the coming of autumn on that full moon following the first frosts licking the prairie ponds with ice, there would come the planned sweep through the white man’s villages. Enough of them now to drive the white man back from the buffalo ground for a long, long time to come.

Porcupine had told his young friend what the war chiefs had decided on for the coming time of war. No more hit-and-miss raids along the roads nor striking an outlying settlement. Instead, the Lakota and Shahiyena had decided to ride toward the east in bands of fifty to a hundred warriors at most, scattering out to do their killing, leaving no white man alive, carrying his women and children away into captivity. Leaving the white man’s lodges in smoking ruin. Driving off all his horses and slow-buffalo for their own.

For but a short time would they raid and kill and burn, while that full moon shrank to half its size. Then all warrior bands were to turn from their destruction and point the noses of their ponies north, to journey toward the land where Red Cloud himself defended the ancient hunting grounds west of the sacred Bear Butte. No more could the soldiers bother them there, for word had it on the moccasin telegraph that the white man was abandoning that country, leaving his forts behind, from the dirt fort on the Powder River, to the one high on the Sheep River.^* The red man had won!

But High-Backed Bull had sternly refused to ride with them when the time came. He had decided his destiny could not lie in a land where the white man would not be found. Instead, with narrow, hate-slitted eyes, the young warrior had vowed to stay close to the land of the whites— there the better to kill them, one at a time … spilling their blood until he once more ran across the one white man he wanted more than all the others.

Until at last Bull could gaze into the fear-glazed eyes of the one who had fathered him.

^*Bighorn River