And One Rode West (30 page)

Jeremy didn’t return to his tent until it had grown very late.

Sergeant Jaffe had seen to it that his buffalo stew made its way around the camp and so there was no reason for him to go hungry. He ate with Celia and Jimmy Preston, then made his escape because Celia couldn’t say enough about his prowess against the buffalo and Jimmy just couldn’t quit shaking his head with wonder at the magnificent way Christa could handle herself in any situation.

For a while he walked along the river, glad of the spot he had chosen for their camp. There were two things the army needed when they camped for a stay of any duration—water and grass. He’d found both here in abundance. The river ran strong and pure here, surrounded by endless plains where the grass was deep green, rich, and abundant.

It was beautiful out here. The air was dry and cool, the horizon seemed to stretch for miles while mountains rose in the distance. It was a rougher place than his home, perhaps. Maryland was so very green, shaded with blues and purples. Out here, the landscape was tinged with earth hues, golds and tans, deep burnt oranges and scorching reds.

This was Comanche land, he reminded himself. He was in Buffalo Run’s territory. It could be as wild and savage as the Comanche themselves, and as strangely beautiful.

He paused, listening to the run of the river at his side and looking back at the low burning fires of his camp. A sentry saluted him and he saluted in return. Fourteen men were on guard watching the perimeters of their camp. In four hours they would switch with others. They were spaced fairly tightly together, and they were wary.

Jeremy had been warned by his superiors at Little Rock that Buffalo Run was on the warpath.

But he knew Buffalo Run. He had met the Indian when they had both been quite a few years younger. Buffalo had not yet risen to become the great war chief that he was today. He had just been one of Gray Eagle’s many sons, a handsome Indian, sleek, lean, as cunning as a fox, as strong as a bear.

Jeremy would never forget the first occasion he had met the Comanche. Cavalry and Indians had met in a skirmish just north of the Texas borderline. The cavalry had been doing well enough, until their commander had realized that they were running out of ammunition.

They had made a break for it. Jeremy had been bringing up the rear. They’d raced long and hard, losing the majority of the Comanche following in their wake. But then Jeremy’s horse had suddenly and silently dropped beneath him and Jeremy had gone plunging into the dry dirt. Before he had much managed to catch his breath, he’d been attacked by a man like a five-armed creature out of hell.

He’d managed to dislodge the knife that nearly slit his throat from the Indian’s hand, but the fistfight that had followed between them had gone on endlessly. It had felt like hours.

They very nearly killed one another, but when the sun went down they were both still breathing. Jeremy looked over to see that the Indian had closed his eyes. He picked up a large jagged rock and came up on his knees, ready to strike the weapon against his enemy. For some reason he held still, unable to kill such an enemy in such a way.

He dropped the rock and began to walk away.

It was a good thing that mercy had tempered his decision. The Indian opened his eyes. The two of them stared at one another for a long while. Then Jeremy felt a creeping feeling at the nape of his neck. He turned.

Around them were grouped five Comanche braves who had come for Buffalo Run. Jeremy was certain that he had breathed his last. His scalp tingled.

But Buffalo Run called out to them and stood slowly and painfully. He spoke again and someone trotted up with a paint pony. The pony was offered to Jeremy. Hesitantly, Jeremy took the reins, still staring suspiciously at the Indian.

“You can go, white man,” the Indian said in well-enunciated English.

Jeremy frowned, surprised by his excellent English, and more surprised by the mercy he seemed to be receiving.

“Just like that, I can ride away?”

“I am Buffalo Run. Remember my name.”

“And if I mount this horse and turn my back to you, I will still live to remember your name?”

“You would be a dead man now if I chose it so. Maybe you will even choose to understand. We are raided, and so we raid. Our lands are ceded to us and then snatched away, so we seek to take them back. You fought a brave battle. You would not kill a man who could not see his death. You will not die by my hand, white man. Ever.” He suddenly extended his buckskinclad
arm, then pushed up the sleeve. Jeremy stared in fascination as one of the other young bucks brought up a sharply bladed hunting knife. Buffalo Run slashed his arm deeply and offered it up to Jeremy.

Jeremy had heard of the custom. Blood brothers. It meant they would fight no more. He took the knife and ripped up his cavalry sleeve. Buffalo Run’s slash had been deep. He made his equally so, looking at the Indian, taking great care not to flinch even as he felt the pain. He melded his arm to Buffalo Run’s.

“Go back. Tell them to leave me in peace.”

“They will not believe that a Comanche seeks peace.”

“Tell them anyway.”

“I will try.”

“We will meet again.”

Jeremy didn’t think so. The rumble of war was already growing deeper back home—he knew that the government would start sending troops eastward very soon. He’d already determined that he’d do his best not to fight in Maryland or Virginia, but he knew he’d soon be sent back to a battle line.

He mounted bareback the paint pony he had been given. He didn’t turn around. He knew that no arrow would pierce his back, no shot would be fired, no knife would fly.

As it happened, he did see Buffalo Run again. He was sent with a commission to visit Buffalo Run’s father. Jeremy sat in the Comanche village, fascinated. He had come to know the people of many Indian tribes, especially the Cherokee, members of the “Five Civilized” Tribes! Their manners were gracious, their desire for learning was a deep thirst.

The Comanche were different. They were a warlike tribe, and the chief’s tent was decorated with many war drums, across which stretched animal sinews that held any number of human scalps. Many were Indian scalps.
The Comanche went to war against the Apache and other Indian tribes, as well as the white man.

Tonight, they were invited guests. No one commented on the scalps—few of them could. White men in the West were sometimes as quick to take them as Indian braves. There was also a rumor that the taking of scalps had spread west from the East—that the first white settlers had started the custom by scalping Pamunkey Indians. Jeremy found such a thought difficult to stomach, but in his heart he knew that he had met both white men and Indians capable of taking scalps, and so he could not discount the rumor completely.

Buffalo Run greeted him with a nod. He spent a day in the sweat lodge with Buffalo Run and his father and brothers and other cavalry, and he sat for hours around a fire listening to the singsong of the shaman’s chants. The medicine man threw powders from his bag upon the fire, causing it to flare up. They drank some concoction the Indians had brewed, and Jeremy saw—as the Indians had suggested that he would—many things in the flames.

It was an interesting occasion for Jeremy. He knew that many white men felt the only good Indians were dead ones, but he had seen many commendable things even among the savage Comanche. They were a fiercely loyal people, protective of their own and fearless when they were threatened.

He inadvertently received a valuable lesson that night too. When the cool night breeze soothed his flesh after the hours of the sweat lodge, Buffalo Run told him that the Comanche had been watching. They had watched the tribes come west of the Mississippi. They had watched Andrew Jackson try to strip Florida of the Seminole, they had seen the Cree taken from Georgia. Then they had seen the white man lick his lips and try to shove the Indians ever farther west.

“None can be believed,” Buffalo Run told him.
When a white man sees an Indian village and destroys it, he tries hard to murder the children for they will grow to be braves. And he tries harder to murder the women, for they will carry the future generations.”

“Not all white men!” Jeremy protested. He pointed out that Indians were known for equal cruelty. In fact, part of the reason they had come was for the return of a young Texan girl.

Buffalo Run told him that neither did all Comanche choose to kill young people. Young white boys could grow to be fine braves, and young women the mothers of fierce warriors.

His mother had been one. The white man had come to rescue her, and she had refused to leave Buffalo Run’s father. “The choice was hers. She saw the two worlds, and she knew.”

“I find your tribe admirable,” Jeremy told him.

They parted that night, intrigued with one another. They met up one more time on the plain, right before Jeremy came home. Buffalo Run was amused. “They mock us that we are all alike, and that Indians make war upon Indians. Now you will go home and fight your brothers.” He pointed to Steven Terry, a friend of Jeremy’s from Alabama. “You will fight one another. Shoot one another. Take your swords and bleed one another.”

“It doesn’t give us any pleasure,” Jeremy said. He felt forced to explain. “We are fighting for ideals. For the whole of our nation.”

“You will band together, all you different tribes, on either side of a line. One day, white man, you should take care. The Indians might well band together too.”

When he had headed back east, he had spent much of the journey thinking about Buffalo Run. He understood many of the things that the Indian had said to him. For one, the whites were always overestimating the number of Indians. Some chronicler had written
down that there were twenty thousand Comanche in Buffalo Run’s territory. There were, perhaps, four hundred.

But Buffalo Run had given him fair warning too. The Indians could band together. The Comanche could band with the Kiowa and the Apache and others, and then they would indeed be a powerful force. Perhaps the alliance could spread north and farther west. Navaho and Hopi could join in, and Cheyenne and Black Feet and Oglala Sioux.

Someday, if the Indians were pushed too far, it could happen.

But then Jeremy had come home. He’d had a long leave to be with his family. They’d all been home, he, Josh, Josiah, and Callie. There had been long sweet days when he had gone back to an earlier time, tilling fields with his brothers, listening to his father read into the night, even indulging in a food fight when they put together a picnic on the lawn, laughing when they’d all managed to miss one another completely and catch Callie right on the nose with a blancmange. She’d managed to pay back the lot of them with a meringue pie, and then they’d all been sorry that they lost out on dessert. Their father had indulged them, smoking his pipe, watching with knowing eyes.

They’d all been there to see Callie wed to Michaelson, beautiful in her white, and then they’d all been together one last time to say good-bye and then leave Callie all alone as they traveled off to join their companies in distant fields.

Their father had been the first to fall. Then Michaelson, then Josiah. Their losses had been great. Yet all that was behind them now. The war was over. Callie had found Daniel—or Daniel had found Callie. Men and women struggled to understand, to come to grips with the war.

Admittedly, some men struggled still to see the
South pay for all that had happened. It was said that Sherman’s men had gone into South Carolina with an especial vengeance.

Some Yanks, like Christa’s carpetbaggers, would take advantage of the South’s defeat. Those in high political places would take their revenge against the men they held captive, like Jefferson Davis. Some Rebels would never surrender, like those he had heard were heading for South America to form a new Confederacy there. Like Christa herself.

He sighed, ready to kick himself again. He’d had her right where he wanted her. In so many things she was the dutiful wife, not because she gave a damn about being dutiful to him, but because she was determined to prove that a Cameron could do anything. She was an extraordinary cavalry wife. Hell, tarantulas hadn’t sent her screaming, they had intrigued her. Buffalo hadn’t brought about the first flicker of fear in her eyes.

She had faced Yankees. Nothing else compared to that ordeal.

She slept with him every night because she was his wife. She never protested his touch. But night after night he felt the passion simmering there, felt that she could be magnificent, that he had only to coax her surrender.

And that was it, of course, in a nutshell. Christa was not about to surrender.

Yet he had come so close. There had been a languorous look in her crystal-blue eyes. She had leaned against him so softly, she had sighed, moved so sweetly. The slightest smile had curved her lips, and even the promise that she might return the least of his desire had sent a near-maddened longing to his senses. He must have been insane. He had said the hated name. Sherman.

Dammit, he mentioned Grant’s name all the time. He had served almost directly under Grant during
most of the war, having been his aide-de-camp for a few months before he had been ordered directly to logistics. He talked about Sheridan. They talked about battles around the campfires sometimes, and Christa had never reacted so violently.

Maybe because his men were gentlemen for the most part, he thought, especially his officers. In all this time, there had never been a negative comment made about the Rebs. The North had won. His men were willing to speak the truth. The Rebs had been damned fine fighters and their leadership had been extraordinary. Jackson and Lee would go down in the history of military annals, just like Stuart with his magnificent, lightning cavalry raids. So many men were dead, blue and gray. It seemed the kindest thing was to offer them up a salute for their honor and let them rest. In her way, he thought, even Christa saw this.

Damn. He just couldn’t wait until later to mention Sherman’s name.

The fires were burning lower. The air was beautiful, but growing colder. He stared back at the camp. All was well. A horse whinnied from somewhere. The scene was peaceful.