Winter Rain (23 page)

He stayed his hands, the powder-streaked rag protruding from both ends of the pistol barrel. “Last winter I
hoped to find word of him, or my mother. The time of cold is a season when the soldiers do not march, when the army does not need its scouts—its eyes and ears to guide the soldiers to the sleeping Indian camps.”

“You believed you would find this father of yours in a lodge where you, would also find your mother?”

He nodded, then said, “But I found neither one of them,” as he dragged the oiled rag from the barrel. “So now I have greater faith in the journey we will make this summer. If we kill enough white men, capture enough women, steal enough of their spotted buffalo and bum enough of their dirt lodges—the pony soldiers will come after us.”

Porcupine snorted. “That is one certainty no man will gamble against, Bull. The white man always swats back at that which troubles him.”

Bull nodded. “Yes. But even more important—I know I will find my father this summer. If we kill and steal and rape and kidnap enough—then we will leave a wide and bloody trail for the army to follow.”

“And you believe your father will lead the soldiers on that trail we will leave them to follow?”

With a smile Bull answered, “My father will not be able to deny the smell of Indians in his nostrils. He will lead the pony soldiers after us.”

“Then you will find your father at last,” Porcupine said.

“No,” he replied. “I will kill him.”

H
IS OLD FRIENDS
were going, one by one by one.

Compañeros
and saddle-partners, trappers and frontiersmen, trackers and guides and scouts for the army like Shadrach Sweete—they were all dying off on Shad, one by one by one.

The end of the halcyon days of the fur trade had driven the first of them from this land. Some fled back east to what they could muster to live out their lives. Others like Meek and Newell pushed on to Oregon country. Shad tried that, and in the end came back to what he and Shell Woman knew best: living a nomadic life crossing the plains in the shadow of the cloud-scraping Rocky Mountains. A man did what a man must to provide for his Cheyenne wife and family. And for almost twenty years he had found work here and there, at times guiding for those long, snaking trains of emigrants bound for Oregon or California. Then too he had scouted for the dragoons in those pre-war days
and built a reputation so that when the Army of the West came out here to stay. Shad Sweete had all the work a man needed.

Like Jim Bridger had done, like Kit Carson.

Times like these, riding out ahead of an army column, searching for some sign of a hostile village on the move, made Sweete draw in and think on all that he had done in those glory days in the West, brood on all that had been taken from him.

Of late there had been more and more taken from the old man.

The first real blow was Ol’ Gabe. Not until last winter did Shad hear that Bridger had give up and gone back east to Missouri, gone to live with a daughter back yonder, there somewhere. If it was so, that meant Jim had been gone from the plains almost a year now this summer. Going blind, some even claimed. Sawbones doctors didn’t rightly know how, but some ventured that too much high, bright sun made that happen to a man.

Ol’ Gabe going blind—after all the glory that them two eyes had seen?

“Wagh!” Shad had snorted the grappling roar of a grizzly boar. To think of the un-goddamned-fairness of it.

“Still, the army came to call on the legend,” Major Eugene Carr, commanding officer of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry, had informed Sweete before the whole shebang set out from Fort Lyon, marching south to drive the hostiles toward Custer’s Seventh Cavalry waiting east in the country of the Canadian River. “No less than General Philip H. Sheridan himself asked Bridger’s advice on waging a winter campaign against the Cheyenne and Kiowa riding out of Indian Territory to commit their depredations on the settlers in Kansas, Shad.”

“And what’d Ol’ Gabe tell that little pissant of an Irishman?” Sweete had asked.

“Word has it Bridger wanted an audience with Sheridan
his own self, personally—to tell the general what a damned fool idea the winter campaign was.”

Shad had himself a good laugh at that, conjuring up that scene between the little banty-rooster of a general and that tall, rangy old trapper. “Had to come to Fort Hays his own self, did he? Just to tell Sheridan what the dad-blamed hell he was getting his soldiers into, I’ll bet.”

Later still that winter Shad had learned from army scout California Joe Milner that Joe had been at Hays to see it for himself when Bridger rode in from Missouri to have a palaver with Sheridan—been there to see the old eyes nearly gone a milky-white, to see how stooped Bridger had become with the crippling rheumatiz and joint aches, how all those years climbing cold mountains and wading through icy streams had made the man little more than a thinning caricature of the giant he used to be.

Joe said, “Gabe was most afraid of his claim to the fort.”

“Fort Bridger?”

Milner had nodded, balling a fist up and laying it alongside his own neck. “He weren’t the same man, Shad. Hardly could twist his head without causing hisself some pain from that knot of goiter eating away on his neck.”

“What’s this about the fort? Why, I helped him raise one of them buildings and a corral there myself. Ain’t his claim with the army settled yet?”

“That ten-year lease he said he give the army is up now, but he ain’t seen a dollar cross his hand in payment.”

“Government ain’t paid him for using that fort—all ten year worth?”

“No—and now even Sheridan hisself told Bridger the army’s went and declared his land what they call a military reservation.”

That bit of news had caused a cold knot to grow in Sweete’s belly. “So they took it all from him—same as the army’s gonna take anything else it wants.” He waved a
hand in a wide, western arc. “Take everything it wants from the Injuns, Joe.”

“Blessed God, Shad. Should’ve seen how that old man longed for the olden days.”

So it hurt now to think of Jim Bridger, gone blind, gone sad and melancholy tucked away there on his daughter’s farm back to Missouri, tricked out of the deed to his fort by the army he said could use it. A sad, sad man who had made many fortunes over in his lifetime, forced now to spend his last days penniless, what with the money the government had stole from him.

Then Shad found out about Carson.

Already a year dead. Sweete didn’t get word of it off the army grapevine until Kit was long gone. Buried a year last May.

Why, it seemed like only yesterday that Carson himself had lost his beloved Josefa, his Mexican wife.

Could it be true? So much time gone?

From the tales around Fort Lyon, Kit’s last year was one that saw the old trapper’s own ailments increase in number, especially the severity of the pains in his neck and chest.

“I come to be troubled with this great affliction because of that footrace I had with the Blackfoot, you know,” Carson had explained to Shad many a winter ago—five, maybe six. “Staying alive back then just may be what’s gonna kill me now.”

“Always better to wear your hair and die a old man, Kit,” Shad told him.

Carson had said he wasn’t so sure.

An old man.

Damn, but Carson was no older than Shad himself was. And that realization shook Sweete to his roots now as he gazed down into the wide river valley covered with rolling swales of belly-high grass, the watercourse clearly marked by the leafy cottonwood and scrub plum brush.

Losing his Josefa likely had just about meant the end of Carson’s string, Shad thought, staring west into the brilliant golden rays of crimson light as the sun sank out there on Colorado Territory where a year ago that old friend had taken his last breath.

“Damned shame too, Little Kit,” he spoke to the hot summer breeze, squinting his eyes to make a vision of the short trapper swim before him in the shimmering waves of heat rising from the plains. “Damned shame any of us grow old afore our time.”

More than anything Shad felt a sense of being lost, more that than he felt any sense of loss upon learning that Kit had gone ahead and crossed the great divide that one last time. Seemed he felt lost a little more every year, feeling as if he were being left with fewer and fewer of the fragments of his memories of those seasons spent with the old ones. What were Meek and Doc Newell and some of the rest doing out to Oregon now? How about Scratch—was he still lodged up with that Crow gal and their young’uns, high up on the Yellowstone? There were a few who hung on by their fingernails, refusing to give in to the women and the canting preachers and the whining barristers come to curse this great, open, free land.

But now even Jim Bridger had give up and gone east to die. And Christopher Carson more than a year buried in Taos.

Kit was no older than Shad.

Fact was, the army was hiring younger and younger scouts all the time. All Shad had to do was look around him every morning when the scouts rode out ahead of the column, every evening when they came in to report on the day’s foray. This was a young man’s business—this making war on the Indians of the high plains.

For the better part of the last year Carr’s Fifth Cavalry had employed the services of two youngsters who knew their business—both William F. Cody and James Butler
Hickok. At first a sullen Shad Sweete had no choice but to figure the army was intent on driving him out—what with the way it was bringing in all these young, snot-nosed kids.

Still, as time went on, two of those youngsters had proved themselves up to muster during Sheridan’s grueling winter campaign. Cody and Hickok would do to ride the river with. Sweete figured he could trust them both to cover his backside in any tough scrape of it.

Shad gazed off to the right, finding the distant rider on the big buckskin horse he had traded from one of the Indian trackers. Bill Cody, chief of scouts for Major Carr and the Fifth. Between them rode a half-dozen trackers from Frank North’s Pawnee battalion. Behind those Pawnee came Can’s cavalry and the rumbling wagons of their supply train. Cody was signaling to Sweete, waving his big slouch hat at the end of his arm, reining his horse around and heading back to the head of the column. Likely they’d make camp down on the good grass there in the valley beside the creek. The Driftwood.

More than two weeks ago they had marched out of Fort McPherson on the Platte in Nebraska. Carr’s orders were to clear the country south as they searched for the bands of marauding Cheyenne wreaking havoc among the settlements of Kansas. It was easy to see even from this distance that Cody rode right past the Pawnee without giving sign of how-do or saying a thing one. Bill didn’t care a lick for them—cared even less for Frank and Luther North. Shad had to agree with Cody’s feeling for those North brothers earning their handsome reputation at the expense of the Pawnee. Ever since the Connor expedition back to sixty-five, Shad wasn’t shy in admitting that those bald-headed Pawnee trackers worked hard at their job—this hunting for their old tribal enemies.

He talked with them in sign when he had to, and they gave the old mountain man their grudging respect. With their hands they called him “rawhide man,” because, they
explained, he was like an old piece of leather chewed on and spat out, and still none the worse for wear after all his years.

With a smile Shad had accepted the handle hung on him by the trackers, and with respect for their abilities his hand had gone up to crook a finger at his brow: plains sign talk for Pawnee—the Wolf People.

For those past two weeks the Pawnee were always the first to rise in the morning and the first to go to saddle. Under Luther North, the younger of the brothers, the Pawnee kept ahead of the Fifth Cavalry a distance of two to three miles throughout the day, as well as dispatching outriders to cover a wide piece of country on both flanks. Down from the Platte River, Carr had driven them. They saw no sign of hostiles as they pushed across Medicine Lake, then Red Willow and Stinking Water creeks, Black Wood and Frenchman’s Fork, until the Fifth Cavalry struck the Republican River.

It was there on the fifteenth they had been hit by a small raiding party for the first time one evening. The seven Cheyenne warriors had disappeared over the nearby hills with more than half of the wagon master’s mules, leaving behind one of the civilian herders on the slope of a hill, scalped and stripped. A second herder wore three arrows in his back for all his trouble, and clung to life tenaciously across the next few days.

Immediately pursued by the Pawnee, the Cheyenne quickly abandoned their mules, hopeful of making good their escape into the rolling hill country south of the Republican. In the end Captain Lute North’s trackers dropped two of the horse thieves from their ponies, while five escaped. But Carr was fuming when North got back with his Pawnee. Angry at the trackers for charging out like an undisciplined mob without any orders, the major discharged Luther North from command until his older brother rejoined the column two days later when the entire outfit reached the Solomon River.

Where the Pawnee promptly found some recent sign of the hostile village.

After a fruitless search for the Cheyenne up and down the Solomon, Carr moved his column northwest to the Prairie Dog. From time to time across the next week, the trackers had come across sign of a small war party here and there. But, no travois trails scouring the earth.

Angrily growing desperate to find the enemy, Carr-pressed on to the northwest, crossing the Little Beaver, then Beaver Creek itself, and back to the Driftwood. As summer matured, the sun hung higher, it seemed—hotter too. June grew old as they plodded across each small drainage, creek, and stream, climbing north by west, each new day stretching longer and longer still like a rawhide whang.

How Shad hungered for some of Toote’s cooking. All too quick the army fare had grown tasteless: salt pork and hard-bread, beans and biscuits. Even the coffee tasted as if it had been boiled in the wagon master’s axle grease and stirred with one of the engineer’s rusty nails. The country hereabout lay alkaline, cursed with natural salt licks.