Winter Rain

19

Moon of Cherries Blackening 1869

BULL SWORE HE saw him. Saw the man who had fathered him among the Shaved-Heads.

As he rode away with the rest, more than a hundred in all, High-Backed Bull twisted to look over his shoulder at the disappearing figures behind him among the sandy hills. The Shaved-Heads were standing now, still in their three bands. Others hurriedly led their big American horses to those who had held the Shahiyena at bay during the heat of the battle. And near the center were clearly two white men.

He could tell by the hair hiding their faces.

That bigger one—how many men of his size could there be on these plains? How many wore what appeared to be greasy buckskins? That low-crowned hat with its wide, floppy brim slightly upturned in the front …

“Leave them be,” Porcupine said as he came alongside Bull, the whole of the raiding party urging their ponies into an easy lope upon seeing the Shaved-Heads were not going to pursue. Though he did not ask it, Porcupine’s face registered some question. “We will fight them another day, my friend.”

“When?” Bull asked, glancing one last time over his shoulder, hoping for another glimpse of the tall white man across the shimmering, misshapen distance.

“Three families will mourn tonight,” Porcupine said. “Think first of the sadness that will visit our village. Only when the men have cut their braids, when the women have bloodied themselves and wailed can we take up the path of these soldiers and their Shaved-Head wolves come sniffing on our backtrail.”

“When!” Bull snapped angrily, turning on Porcupine so suddenly, he flung sweat from his painted brow. “How long?”

Porcupine’s eyes narrowed as he measured the young warrior riding beside him. “You are Shahiyena. And you ask me that question? Control the fire in your heart and think of your people. You are a Dog Soldier. Do not let me find you fighting this battle by yourself.”

Sensing the sting of something heating its way through him with the war chief’s words, Bull finally nodded. “Two days. Yes?”

He nodded at the younger warrior. “Two days, Bull.”

“Then we can ride to attack again?”

“Two days and we will ride to avenge the death of three of our own. We are Hotamitanyo.”

“We know the yellow-leg soldiers are coming—why won’t Tall Bull or White Horse fight them in force?”

“If the day is right—we will attack the soldier column. Until then—we will be content to steal their horses, to harass the Shaved-Heads who guide the soldiers and watch for our chance to frighten the ones who drive their supply wagons.”

“We can make the day right here and now, Porcupine. We can—”

“Wait two days, Bull. Those who have lost must have their grief, shed their blood.”

“And what of us who carry a vow? What of us who have sworn to drench ourselves in another’s blood?”

July was already eight days old.

For two marches following Becher’s scrap with the war party, Major Carr kept his cavalry doggedly plodding north by west along the Republican River, without deviation. Then yesterday a platoon of North’s Pawnee had come upon a scatter of footprints near the edge of an abandoned enemy encampment. They had called Major North and Shad Sweete over.

“We can’t be sure, can we, Mr. Sweete?” Frank North asked.

Shad had shrugged. “S’pose not, Major.”

“I’m for waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“To tell the general. Wait till we have more proof. Till we got more of something solid to show him. Just from this”—and North’s hand had pointed down to the windblown scatter of running tracks— “I don’t think any of us can say for sure.”

That was the indecision of yesterday. But this morning, they found their proof.

Telltale footprints that North showed to Carr.

Sweete had watched the effect those tiny impressions in the hardened sand had on the major. What he and the Pawnee had come across were not moccasin tracks—but instead the prints of a woman’s slim boot. Carr had knelt over them, reaching out with a fingertip as if to measure the depth the tiny heel had made in the soil. Maybe even to measure the terror the woman must have experienced as the village hastily packed up to flee his oncoming troops.

“It raised the hair on the back of my neck too, Shad.”

Sweete turned from staring hypnotically at the fire to find Bill Cody settling beside him. “What got your hackles up?”

“Thinking about them white women held captive by that bunch.”

“Does Carr know there’s two sets of them tracks?”

Cody nodded once. Staring into the fire, he answered, “I suppose he does know.”

“I saw for myself the look on the man’s face. He wants that village bad, Bill.”

“How can you blame him, Shad? Them bloody Cheyenne. No telling what them bucks been doing to them Christian women—” Cody broke it off, realizing his mistake with the old plainsman. “I’m sorry, Shad. Just running off at the mouth like I do a’times. You and your family … didn’t mean nothing by it—”

“No offense taken, Bill.”

Cody stared contritely at the ground. “Just that when I looked at them boot prints—made me think on my own Lulu. Thank God she’s safe back in St. Lou. Glad as hell she ain’t out here to get caught up in this war.”

Shad poked at the fire a moment before saying, “You know damned well who those women are, Bill. We all do. Know who their husbands are. Ain’t a man can move his white woman out here to this country that he don’t know what chance he’s taking with ’em. Go ahead and tell me that ain’t why you keep your woman safe back to St. Louie.”

Nodding, Cody replied, “I know it’s gotta be Tom Alderdice’s wife. And the other—Weichel—the German woman. Yes. Safer for Lulu back there.”

Shad emptied his cup of lukewarm coffee. “Carr’s not bound to stop this column for much of anything now that he’s got a scent in his nose to follow. Damn well that he should too—’cause if we don’t catch this bunch of outlaw renegades now, we likely never will.”

“Naw. We can follow ’em wherever they go, Shad. Look: we come upon sign of ’em after all this time—we can do it again.”

With an emphatic shake of his head. “You listen, Bill Cody—that bunch of red renegades gone and wheeled off to the north now!” He pointed into the deepening gloom of night. “Making for the Laramie Plains. From there, it’s only a frog jump over to the Black Hills. That’s sacred ground to them Cheyenne. For the Lakota too, for that matter. This bunch gets up there to say their prayers near the big medicine of their Bear Butte—why, we’ll likely never see trace of them two women again.”

Cody contemplated that for a moment before saying, “You figure we ought to tell the general he’s gonna have to hump up and get his outfit high behind—or he ain’t got a chance at catching that village?”

“If Carr don’t push this bunch of worn-out men and broke-down horses even harder than he’s been doing already … yes, we ain’t got the chance of a horse fart in a winter wind to find them—”

Keening yips and howls abruptly resonated in the middistance of that summer night. Cheyenne war cries.

Shad’s hand was filled with the Spencer, and he sprang to his feet with Cody, both of them sprinting toward the hammer of oncoming hoofbeats, that staccato drumbeat flooding off the hills beyond the dull, starlit splotches of tents in North’s Pawnee camp.

They both had taken no more than a matter of steps when the Pawnee camp exploded with noise and the glare of gunfire in the night. Yellow flashes streaked the great indigo blackness as the muzzles of the trackers’ pistols erupted. He could make out the voices of the North brothers shouting orders, hear the curses of other white officers, among them Becher’s distinctive German—then it was all smothered under the racket of more gunfire and thundering hooves. Sleeping scouts and sleep-deprived pickets were suddenly jarred into a battle for their lives.

Frank North emerged from the shadowy flit of light and darkness as some of the trackers doused fires and pulled down tents. As a backdrop the tents and fires made a perfect target of a man. One of the Pawnee lumbered past, away from the fight and muttering angrily.

“Was that Mad Bear?” Cody asked the major.

North nodded, staring after the Pawnee.

Shad asked, “Where’s he bound for?”

“The horses hobbled back there on the line. Likely he’s going to mount up,” North replied with a shrug.

“Better stop that one from going out there on his own, Major,” Shad advised.

“I’d sooner try to stop a Cheyenne charge with a buffalo-tail flyswatter, Mr. Sweete!”

“Not that much firing from the Cheyenne,” Cody said. “Can’t be that many of ’em rushing camp.”

“Shit—you know better’n that, Bill: could be a whole passel of ’em waiting out there in the dark for any of us to follow,” Shad replied. “Draw a few of the cocky ones right out there and swallow them up like nighthawks.”

Without needing any more advice, North flung his voice into the dark, shouting in Pawnee at Mad Bear, ordering the tracker back from his pursuit.

“Anyone hit in your camp, Major?” Cody asked.

North shook his head. “My tent got shot up. Looks to be all the damage right now. Those bastards came right past my tent, slinging lead into it. Lute’s tent too. Then the sonsabitches were gone. Raced right out of camp and headed for the remuda to chivy our horses.”

“Doesn’t sound like they got a one of your animals—for all their trouble,” Cody said.

“We had every one hobbled and cross-lined on my order,” North said proudly.

Luther North suddenly took form out of the confusion, grumbling. “Frank—this shit is beginning to sour my milk.”

“What’s bothering you, little brother?”

“Twice now we been hit by these bastards—at night.”

Cody nodded. “The army doesn’t figure Injuns are supposed to attack at night.”

Luther wagged his head, angry. “And now Mad Bear’s gone after ’em.”

“Sonofabitch,” Frank growled. “I tried to stop him.”

“Me too,” Luther replied. “Didn’t do no good, though. He just rode off shouting at me how he was worth a half-dozen flea-bitten Cheyenne on the worst day of his life—”

A trio of shots from the west side of camp interrupted the younger North. All four white men turned and dashed onto the prairie lit with no more than dim starshine here a matter of hours before moonrise. It was but a few yards before they bumped into ten of the trackers, who were talking excitedly.

“What they say?” Shad asked.

Luther North answered, “Mad Bear took off after one of the horsemen come running through camp. This bunch says they saw Mad Bear hit the bastard’s pony, spilling the buck. So Mad Bear took off to claim him. Out there in the dark—and that’s when they heard some more shots out there.”

“Figure any more of them Cheyenne out there?” Cody inquired.

“Just shadows is all,” the elder North said.

Moving into the darkness with the rest for about fifty yards, Shad watched a shadow loom against the starry sky. A smattering of the Pawnee tongue came out of the night at them. A moment more and they came upon one of the trackers hunched over a near-naked body sprawled on the ground.

As the tracker rolled the body over, Luther North asked, “We get one?”

“Dammit!” roared Frank North.

Shad recognized the dull sheen to the brass buttons on the bloodstained army issue the dead man wore.

“Shot in the back,” Cody declared as the rest of the Pawnee began wailing, collapsing to their knees in grief around their fallen kinsman. “Went right through the heart.”

“Then he weren’t killed by the Cheyenne, Major,” Shad explained to Frank North quietly.

“Ain’t that a goddamned pity.” The major wagged his head. “The others say they saw Mad Bear out there chasing them sonsabitches. But in all the confusion, they opened fire thinking he was one of them thieving murderers. Damn, if that don’t fry my—”

“I want the Cheyenne too, Frank,” Luther declared against the backdrop of the Pawnees’ wailing death songs. “Want ’em bad as Carr does.”

“They’ve got to be close, fellas,” Cody said.

Shad agreed. “Damn straight they’re close. Hitting us twice in three days. That village of theirs ain’t far.”

“We better go report in to Carr before he gets his belly in an uproar, Frank,” Luther said.

“Won’t he want to get his hands on this bunch soon now?” Cody said. “I’ll suggest to-him we lay in camp a day and send out some of your scouts to backtrack on this bunch, Major North.”

“Sounds like a damned good idea to me, Cody. We’ll be ready to ride out at first-light.”

“Yeah,” Shad agreed as he stared into the night-drenched distance. “Time we finally come up with something more than track soup to feed the general on.”

Carr went along with Bill Cody’s suggestion and ordered a day’s layover for his troopers on the ninth of July while sending out several parties of Major North’s Pawnee battalion to scour the area for sign of where the Cheyenne raiders had disappeared.

At the request of Captain Luther North, Shad Sweete had joined young Lieutenant Billy Harvey and five of the Pawnee to scout a sizable piece of country south and west of where Frenchman’s Fork dumped itself into the Republican River. For more than fourteen hours beneath a mercilessly brutal sun they had punished themselves in the saddle, halting here and there only for brief watering of the animals, eating what they had in their saddlebags as they rode. In their wide sweep of the undulating plains of eastern Colorado Territory, early that evening the eight finally struck the Republican, still some twenty-five miles above the camp of Carr’s Fifth Cavalry.

It was there that Lute North called for a brief rest to discuss their options with this much ground still to cover before nightfall. “If your asses are as sore as mine, I figure we could treat ourselves with some time out of the saddle. Ride in to meet up with the column come dawn.”

“Just what this old man was thinking!” Shad replied as he climbed down and began rubbing his thighs in the way of a horseman long on the trail.

“Wait a minute, Mr. Sweete—don’t you figure it best for us to ride to that hill yonder to the north? Just to take a look around before we settle down for the night?”

“You expecting company, Captain?” asked Billy Harvey.

“The Cap’n’s right,” Shad said, dragging himself back into the saddle and moving away with Luther North toward the top of the tallest hill in the area.

As the sun was settling in a fiery show of midsummer crimson, North called for a halt twenty yards from the crest and ordered one of the Pawnee to belly up to the skyline for a look around before the rest betrayed themselves.

The tracker began his walk upright, slowly crouching lower and lower until he was on all fours at the crest. Then suddenly he dropped to his belly amid the tall grass. Shad was dropping from the saddle by the time the Pawnee had pushed himself backward and was signaling in plains sign talk for the rest to dismount and join him. North ordered one of the trackers to stay behind with the horses.

When they arrived back of the crest, the sun was just then easing out of sight beyond the far mountains that from here appeared to be nothing more than a ragged hemline of horizon. Yet it was not the sight of those faraway and seductive high places, North Park and the rest of the central Rockies, that seized Sweete’s attention.

It was what awaited his eyes down in the valley of Frenchman’s Fork that made the blood pound at the old trapper’s temples.

About a mile on west of where they lay, the creek flowed in gently from the north. Between that wide river bend and the bottom of the slope where the seven sprawled on their bellies was cut the gash of a deep ravine that every spring would fill with runoff to feed Frenchman’s Fork. But this was summer, and the rainy season was long behind them. Instead of runoff, what filled the wide, sandy path of that ravine seemed to be the whole of the Cheyenne nation on the march between the willow and alder, plum brush and cottonwood. Ahead and on both sides of the column rode the painted, resplendent warriors atop their prancing ponies, old men and women trundling along on foot among the travois ponies, children and dogs darting here and there and everywhere noisily among the entire procession. On the nearby east bank of the fork, pony boys worked the huge herd.

Shad could see the lust for that herd in the Pawnee’s eyes as he glanced at the others, could see the lust for all that finery of blankets and robes, kettles and clothing. Although they wore pieces of the army uniform and dressed by and large in the white man’s clothing, riding army horses and carrying army weapons, the Pawnee were still Indians who coveted the spoils of war that could be wrenched from their ancient enemy.

“That Tall Bull’s bunch?” whispered Lieutenant Harvey.

Luther North nodded, a finger to his lips for quiet. “Can’t be no one else, can it, Mr. Sweete?”

“I figure the lieutenant here guessed right.”

“What a stroke of good fortune, fellas,” North continued. “For some time now the army’s figured it was Tall Bull’s band of Dog Soldiers that’s been causing all the trouble after Sandy Forsyth’s bunch made Roman Nose a good Indian at Beecher Island.”

“That bunch is Cheyenne, all right,” Shad replied. “Damn—but that’s one big shitteree of ’em too, boys.”

Less than two hundred yards away, the entire procession wound past the hilltop unawares, many of the ponies burdened with fresh, bloodied buffalo meat shot and butchered that very day. The seven observers fell quiet for long minutes as they peered down on the colorful, noisy cavalcade, until they saw the vanguard move out of sight among the brush as the village neared the mouth of the fork.

“Look at ’em, Mr. Sweete, and tell me if that bunch don’t look about as done in as Carr’s outfit is.”

“You ain’t far from the mark, Cap’n. Tall Bull’s village ain’t had it any easier than Carr’s cavalry—not with women and young’uns to tote along, what with all their lodges and truck.”

North turned with a grim smile crossing his crusted face. “I’ve swallowed enough dust to last a lifetime, but—we’ve got some news to carry to General Carr. Let’s get.”

“While the getting is good, fellas,” Sweete agreed. “I got a bad feeling that some of those bucks down there might just want to ride on up here and take a look-see around the country … like we done.”

North signed his Pawnee back from the top of the hill, and together the seven trotted downhill to the grazing horses. Taking up their reins, the outriders walked their animals downstream more than fifty yards before mounting.

“You care to lead out, Mr. Sweete?” The tension and excitement of the evening’s momentous discovery was clearly etched on the soldier’s face as his eyes burned into the old trapper’s.

As much as he didn’t care for Lute North, Shad had to admit the major’s younger brother was acting downright civil about things. “Don’t mind if I do,” Sweete replied, turning to the five trackers and making some quick hand talk.

“What was that he told them, Cap’n?” asked Lieutenant Harvey.

North snorted as Sweete swung his horse around and put it into a quick lope that had worked itself into a hard gallop within ten yards. “That old scout just told them Pawnee they’d better lock themselves down on their ponies—because they were in for one fast ride!”