Authors: Terry C. Johnston
“Turn out! The bastards are after our horses. Turn out! Get hold of the—”
For Bull the white war chief’s last few words were drowned under the onrush of the pony thieves. Bad Tongue and his Brule, along with Starving Elk and Little Hawk, all tore into the west side of the white man’s camp, every last throat of theirs shouting and shrieking. They flapped blankets and rattled dried buffalo hides, one of the Lakota beating on that small drum, the rest blowing on eagle wing-bone whistles they carried about their necks—making noise enough for twice their number.
A new voice bawled as Bull tore into the camp unheard for the deafening racket. “Get your asses up and moving, boys! Indians!”
“Turn out, men!” someone else ordered, a tall, thin one suddenly in the midst of the camp a heartbeat later.
It was he that Bull chose for his first ride-down on that sandy ground, as the figures ahead of him dropped to their knees, throwing rifles to their shoulders, spitting bright,
blinding orange flame from the muzzles, a noise no louder than the pounding of his own heart in his ears.
White men—and he had his pick of them as he leapt the pony over a mound of baggage.
“I dropped that bastard!” someone yelled far ahead across the camp.
Then of a sudden the first of the white men turned, finding the lone warrior among them, the stone club at the end of his arm swinging in a red-orange, dizzying blur out of the coming sunlight.
“Jesus-God! The Injuns behind us too!”
Ahead of him the white men dived this way and that, some struggling to control their rearing horses as he rode them down. Again and again he swung the iron-studded war club, driving it at any target: white enemy, his horses and mules.
Across camp, on the west, one of the red horsemen trembled, then toppled from his pony onto the gray, unforgiving plain, where he was lost in the darkness of the grassy sage.
“Less’n a dozen of the bastards!”
“Hold those horses! Hold those—”
Bull’s throat hurt with the cry he bellowed at the white men—unable to remember when he had started to holler, knowing he had never stopped once he had begun that charge into their camp.
“Goddammit—shoot when you got something to shoot at!”
Bad Tongue and the rest of the warriors were rushing toward Bull, having reached the far western edge of the fire-dotted camp itself, having spooked the big horses and the braying mules.
Screeching horsemen rattled their rawhide and blew their shrieking, frightening death whistles, joining the whinnying horses and brass-lunged pack animals, along with the sporadic gunshots from the pickets—that entire
camp thundered into instant pandemonium. Every white man had come to his feet and gone among the animals, furiously pulling at hobbles and reins. Likely some of the white enemy had lashed their horses to their belts through the night rather than trust to picket pins. As Bull charged among them screeching his war song, some of the white men waved pistols at him, seeming unsure of their shots as others stomped at the coals of their fires to kill the bloody backlight.
His pony collided against a big American horse, almost going down, High-Backed Bull nearly unhorsed as the pony careened sideways, then regained its legs. He whirled about, sawing the single rein.
“Get the sonofabitch!”
A bullet whistled past, close enough to call out his name with its high-pitched whisper. He sensed the heat of its passing flight. Surrounded for the moment by the animals yanked and prodded, rearing and snorting, High-Backed Bull pounded his heels against the pony’s flanks as more of the blurred shadows closed in on him.
Horses yanked their handlers about like grass-filled antelope-skin dolls, legs and arms flung akimbo. A white man scampered by, vainly clinging to the reins of his horse that succeeded in dragging its owner through a glowing fire pit. The ground around the yelping white man erupted into a shower of red-orange pricks of light.
In the sudden swirl of blinding motion as the cursing men closed in on Bull, one of their big horses bucked, knocking aside a white man holding another two of the animals … and into that sudden aperture the warrior shot as quickly as the owl snatches up a den mouse in its claw.
His leap through the breach blinded him momentarily. Gunfire roared in his ears, the bright, flaming blasts of the enemy’s guns both blinding him, then lighting his way through the camp as he raced to join the others. Rattling hides and crying out their yipping, brave war
songs, the eight swept off the western horizon between the river and those low, inky bluffs north of that camp—come ablaze in sunrise’s crimson-tinged whirl of noise and the clatter of hooves.
He pulled among the horsemen with his next ragged breath—his throat hurting from the strain of his cries. Bad Tongue had turned them all at the bank of the shallow river, leaping their ponies into the water, sand erupting in billowing cascades, droplet diamonds splaying from every flying hoof like scarlet mica chips in their crossing at the west end of a narrow sandbar. At its far end stood a lone cottonwood, perhaps no taller than a man.
Yet the eight young warriors urged no herd ahead of them as they clambered up the south bank of the river and plunged through the plum brush and swamp willow, where the shouts of the white men and the crackle of their guns faded on the far shore behind them.
Two only could they claim: a pair of the enemy’s ribby mules noisily dragged their picket lines through the brush, frightened and braying, with the warriors close on their tail roots.
Two only. Bad Tongue’s stampede had proved a failure.
Angrily Bull reined up, bringing his pony around. He watched the backs of the other young warriors disappear to the west, heading upstream with their two hard-won prizes. They had really won nothing at all—save for alerting the enemy.
“What’d they get?” a voice bellowed across the river.
“Two of the damn mules!”
“Ammunition?”
“No, sir.”
A new voice warned, “They’ll come now that it’s light, Major!”
“Saddle up, men!” the high-pitched voice shouted above the clamor of cursing men, their frightened animals
still being quieted. “Sergeant, have these men stand to horse!”
As the white men sorted themselves out on the far side of the river, Bull turned slowly, letting his ears guide the position and pitch of his head, sensing something coming. Then, there it was. He listened to the distant coming of thunder: a sound to stir a warrior’s heart.
On the far bank it appeared very few of the enemy heard it too—its faint presage given birth out of the western horizon. Now his young heart leapt, soaring with its day-coming song of death.
“Lookee here, Major!” a ragged baritone voice rang out across the shallow river.
“Damn you, Trudeau!” sang the high-pitched white war chief. “No one gave you the right to scalp that—”
“No one tell Pierre not to take scalp! Sioux, it is—”
“Get that damned thing out of my face!”
“At least it means I kil’t one of the red bastards!”
“Stand to horse!”
“Listen! You hear that?” someone asked at last. “Listen, goddammit!”
“I do. Goddamn!”
“Major!
Best be moving your boys now!” one of them bawled loudly, already yanking his horse behind him.
Then Bull felt the hair rise on his arms as the rumble grew closer, like distant thunder rolling toward them out of the west. As he took his eyes off the far bank to gaze quickly to the east, the far end of the sandbar grew pale in the coming light, where the lone cottonwood stood.
“They’re coming!”
“To the island!”
“Cross to the island!” arose the chorus from more of the white throats.
Its urgent call was immediately echoed by the rest of the half-a-hundred in tatters of voices and the hammering of white men clambering to their saddles.
“Make the island!”
The heart-stopping thunder of more than a thousand hooves hammered the sun-cured prairie.
Bull thought he could see them now, at long last after the breathrobbing seconds of waiting, able only to hear their coming. The pulsing horde emerged from the dark like some swelling, ghostly apparition Bull couldn’t quite see yet—not really. More so did he sense its coming.
As the white men bolted from their camp beside the river, plunging their horses into the shallow water, fighting their way toward the narrow sandbar, others stood hollering orders, waving the rest into the river as the first phalanx of mounted warriors erupted with star-flung muzzle flashes, diamond light pricking the horizon of that crimson dawn.
Bullets whistled overhead, splattering in the water. The nearby river bluffs echoed the war cries from hundreds of throats.
“There they are! They’re on us now!”
“God—will you look at ’em!”
Then there arose yelps right across the river from Bull. Some of Roman Nose’s or Pawnee Killer’s warriors had chosen not to join in the general charge on the island, but instead had swarmed down across the flat near the river where the white men had been camped around their fire pits only moments before. These daring, willing-to-die warriors plopped to their bellies among the willow and plum brush only yards from that sandbar, there to begin their sniping at the white men milling about the narrow sandbar, confused and leaderless for the moment, their horses stumbling on the uneven, river-washed sand.
“Shoot the goddamned horses!” one of the enemy yelled.
“Bring ’em down!” came the echo again and again.
“Shoot the horses!”
As bullets whined over the willow where he hid, Bull
watched the white men put their pistols to work, dropping their big American horses.
“This will turn Bad Tongue’s heart to fire,” he whispered to himself as he led his pony upstream quickly. “These white men kill what Bad Tongue wanted so badly.”
Behind him the hundreds of brown horsemen reached the upstream end of the sandbar, where they dropped to the far side of their ponies in a spray of grit and watery jewels, firing beneath the animals’ necks at the enemy trapped on the island. Here and there the white men began to return some fire poorly, but most started to dig in behind the heaving bodies of their dying horses, clawing frantically at the sand with their hands to form rifle pits.
In the red light’s dance across the valley that dawn, the full coming day reverberating off the ridges to the west, echoing with the curses and pain-filled yammer of the white men, the war cries and high-pitched victory calls of the eagle wing-bone whistles, the angry bellow of the horses and mules going down in a bloody spray of gore and bowel-ruptured, urine-soaked sand—Bull decided this had to be the most beautiful dance he had ever witnessed.
Now he had only to take his scalps from the dead when this day’s crimson dance was done.
H
E GNAWED ON
the bone, the same bone the big staghound clamped its jaws around, growling, hissing at him menacingly. Jealously wanting the bone for itself.
Jubilee Usher laughed, stroking the crown of the animal’s head. That only provoked an even angrier growl for its keeper, a growl drenched with all the more threat.
Glaring into the yellowed eyes of the vise-jawed staghound from his end of the bone, Usher met the dog’s gaze unflinchingly, knowing as he did that there were others gathering at the periphery of his vision to watch the standoff. They were interrupting their breakfast this morning as the colonel’s army went about striking camp, loading the four wagons and ambulance for the next leg of their journey back into the land of Zion. Those who had been with him from the start already knew they weren’t bound for family and friends among the Saints in the City of Deseret.
At last night’s firelit meeting—half church service for the faithful, half an occasion to study his flock for the weaker of his avenging angels—Jubilee had begged understanding and obedience.
Without fail, without stop did Usher complete this chore of leadership: studying his ranks for those who might buckle at the knees this close to home, this close to all that they might remember
Now more than ever Jubilee needed to be sure of those closest to him. Now that word from the center of the faith said that Brigham Young drew his own faithful to him—as if the Prophet himself sensed the coming danger in those who flocked to the Usher clan.
So it was that Jubilee had moved this band of gun-toting, iron-hardened men last night beneath the stars, made this rough lot of scarred, unsentimental men get down on their knees as he strode among them, lightly touching their heads with his anointed hand, dipping that hand empowered by God Himself in water he told them had come from the river Jordan in far-off Palestine. From the land of Christ, he instructed, the land where the Gentiles of old had crucified the one and only Lord—hung him upon a cross to die in sweet, redeeming agony—before that Christ arose three days later so that he might appear to the ancients in America, their very own ancestors: the chosen Saints of this Latter Day.
“When a man moves his hand with the will of God—then he of rights will be called the Prophet of our beloved Church!” Jubilee had told them. “But … when that man fails time and time again to raise his hand against the Gentiles who caused to suffer the Christ our Lord—the very Gentiles who persecuted and hanged Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum—then that man no longer carries the will of God mantled about his shoulders!”
“Brigham Young has failed, Colonel!”
He had smiled when that voice raised itself out of the
firelit darkness, row upon row of the tight crescent of his faithful gathered at the flaps of his tent. He moved again among them, touching, anointing their heads from the carved clay bottle, blessing them every one, praising them for their good, godly works of terror and bloodletting among the Gentiles, telling each of the place carved out for him in the land of immortal spirits as reward for his defense of the Kingdom against the heathens in this wicked, temporal land of America.
To a man they had willingly pledged themselves to him anew. Impassioned, pledging their service, they would give their lives up for his, so that he might one day right the path of the one true Church for all time and the glory of God’s plan on earth. Their flesh was all any one of them had to offer now that they vowed to abandon the circle of family and friends they would leave behind in the land of Deseret controlled by the crazed and jealous, power-hungry Brigham Young.