Winter Rain (30 page)

“Sergeant Major: move out at a trot!”

Joseph H. Maynard turned in the saddle to bellow his command. “Center-guide! Column of fours—at a trot. For-rad!”

Prancing away with the rest, Sweete noticed that the dry, hot wind had picked up suddenly, blowing out of the west, born out of the front range of the Rockies far, far away. With a glance toward the high mountains, how he wished he were there among its beckoning blue spruce and quaky. Then he found his thoughts yanked brutally back as the clatter of those hooves and the squeak of leather, the rattle of bit chains, went unheard in that unsuspecting
village of Dog Soldiers. In a matter of heartbeats, the three flying lance points had closed to a thousand yards … and still no sign they had been discovered by the Cheyenne.

In the next moment there appeared ahead of Shad a young horseman atop a white pony, standing guard among the distant herd grazing lazily on the grassy bench. As if shot, the Indian reined about abruptly, racing headlong for the village, hair flying, down the long slope into the valley.

Sweete turned his head, trying to listen to the loud voices swirling around Carr and Cody at the point of the charge, hearing only shouts and curses—unable to understand anything for the noisy charge of the three hundred. One thing was certain as sun to the old plainsman: the soldiers intended to reach the village before that lone herder could warn those in camp.

Carr hollered out again, near standing in the stirrups, flinging his command behind him at his bugler.

John Uhlman jammed the scuffed and dented trumpet to his parched lips as the entire command loped onward toward the village. But no call came forth.

Up and down the front men began hollering, adding to the confusion, as bugler Uhlman tried again to blow his charge. Then Quartermaster Edward M. Hayes shot up beside Uhlman and yanked the horn from the bugler’s hand as their mounts jostled.

Hayes brought the bugle to his mouth and blew the soul-stirring notes of Carr’s charge.

Up and down the entire line throats burst enthusiastically, raising their raucous cheer as hundreds of Spencer carbines came up and the jaded horses were ordered to the gallop. Although they had been driven far beyond endurance and the call of duty across the last four days, those gallant animals answered the brass-mounted spurs for this one last dash.

Without thinking, Quartermaster Hayes flung the bugle to the ground and pulled his pistol free.

Shad watched a clearly dismayed John Uhlman glance behind him at that trampled tin horn lying discarded among the grass and cactus. Then he too was swept along by something now out of control.

Sweete felt no different: caught up in this, swept up and charging down on a camp of his wife’s own people. Snared in something that was no longer in his control. Something he no longer understood. Perhaps, he thought, he was every bit as bewildered and as frightened as the young bugler.

Not knowing where this day would find him. And at what cost.

“People are coming!”

At the distant warning cry, High-Backed Bull shaded his eyes with one hand against the sun risen now to its zenith. Others in the camp stood or came to stop what they were doing, right where they were standing. Children still played, a few dogs barked. No one seemed particularly alarmed.

Two nights before, they had camped beside the upper reaches of a stream the Shahiyena called Cherry Creek. Yesterday afternoon Tail Bull and White Horse had led them to this place of the springs that gurgled forth from beneath the White Butte.

Five summers gone Big Wolf and his family had been killed by soldiers a stone’s throw from this spot.

Bull turned and looked across White Butte Creek, which ran through camp in a southeasterly direction. He found Tall Bull and Two Crows standing beside the chief’s lodge, peering into the distance without apparent alarm. They wanted the village to wait and rest here for two days before crossing the river and heading north to the rock formation where years before, at the foot of what the white man called Court House Rock, they had starved the Shaved-Heads they met there in battle.

This was no cause for excitement—perhaps. Nearby, others were saying there should be no alarm. After all, hunters were out in the countryside looking for buffalo. Others had gone in search of antelope. Surely no enemy could surprise this village of proven warriors.

“There! On the hills!”

Many were the ones now bursting from their lodges in curiosity. Even the children were pointing at the distant figures loping back and forth on far slopes: horsemen with long hair waving on the hot, dry wind, brandishing rifles aloft. A sign of greeting.

Visitors?

“Perhaps these are Pawnee Killer’s Lakotas,” someone suggested.

“Yes,” another agreed loudly. “So much shooting—they must have been successful in their hunt!”

Bull squinted into the bright light once more, attempting to make sense out of the throbbing forms on horseback coming out of the north.

Then his mouth went dry and his heart went cold. The first bullets whined into camp, striking meat racks, splintering lodgepoles, crying overhead in warning.

The Shaved-Heads had come—returned to savor the sweet taste of victory in their mouths!

As two wide phalanxes of dust-shrouded pony soldiers broke over the top of the hills, Bull whirled.

Porcupine was running toward him shouting,
“Aiyeee!
Pony soldiers come behind the Pawnee!”

Some of the Shahiyena already lay bleeding underfoot of the others who scattered in panic, sweeping up children, gathering an armload of possessions before fleeing in the wake of the white soldiers. Hearing the smack of lead against flesh like the slap of his hand against wet rawhide, Bull saw one woman’s lower jaw disappear in a blinding corona of crimson. She sank to the ground, gurgling for but a moment until her chest heaved no more.

Now they were surrounded on three sides, coming in from the east and west as well as the north, the hooves of their iron-shod horses hammering the baked, sere earth.

“There!” he shouted, pointing to the south, immediately joined by other young warriors who had also taken up their arms.

They yanked, pulled, prodded, dragged the old and young, growled at the rest to hurry them along. To the south! It was the only direction of escape left them.

In that frightening confusion a few ponies reared, and some went down screaming as bullets smacked into them. A few women struggled to control what animals were in camp. Because most horses were out grazing with the herd, those Shahiyena who fled the carnage did so on foot—clutching a young one beneath an arm, perhaps snatching up a weapon or a blanket before darting through the hellish smoke and dust, heading for places of safety and hiding in the sandy bluffs hard by the river.

The old shamans had spelled doom for the band! Trusting as they did to the blood congealing at the bottom of a badger carcass! Yet—in the end it was Tall Bull who had decided to believe the old medicine men.

Porcupine was already hollering for the warriors to follow him into the teeth of the charge, there to make a stand only as long as it would take to clear the camp. Then they would escape.

Until then, their weapons and their brown bodies were all that stood between the white pony soldiers and this camp of fleeing women, children, and old ones.

A streak of blond hair and a swirl of greasy, smoke-stained cloth swept past the young warrior. It meant one of the white women had escaped and was fleeing toward the soldiers.

Bull wanted to find Tall Bull—to see where he himself had run to escape this destruction he and the old ones had brought down on this warrior band. Angrily Bull
rubbed the grit from his eyes and strained into the yellow dust that stung his mouth and nose. Then he found the war chief beside his lodge, the white woman suspended at the end of his brown arm by her blond hair. Her hands gripped his wrist, her face turned upward, imploring Tall Bull. Raised in his other hand was a silver-bladed tomahawk.

Her mouth opened, a huge black hole in her face, as the woman screamed inhumanly.

“Kill her!” Bull screamed at the chief through the din of rifle fire and war cries. “Kill the white woman!”

Without hesitation Tall Bull hurled the tomahawk downward into the woman’s face.

“Yes! Yes!” cried the young warrior as he watched the blood and gore splatter the war chief.

Her body convulsed, falling to the side, where it trembled for a moment. Then Tall Bull was gone.

He left unaware that the young warrior came to stand over the woman’s splattered body. To sure down at her, stare at that crimson and gore, feeling the flush of overwhelming triumph wash through him.

S
HAD’S THROAT BURNED
in torment each time he hollered out his own death song.

In the thick of it, his hot-blooded fury drove him to carry death to the door of every lodge in this camp of kidnappers, thieves, and murderers. He swore that by himself he would cut a swath through the Dog Soldier camp until he found every last one of the warriors who had burned and maimed, mutilated, raped, and butchered white folk across the whole of Kansas and Nebraska.

And a part of him hoped, prayed fervently, that he would find his son before anyone else.

Shad knew the boy was here.

As a shadow burst from behind a lodge, he fired the Spencer on instinct.

Yet High-Backed Bull was no longer a boy. He was a full-grown man. But thinking that in his head had never helped Shad’s heart deal with what had become of his
shattered family. For this father, Bull would always, forever and always, be a boy. His boy. His father’s only son.

Before he realized it, Shad was hurtling through the air, heels over head, landing on his belly, sliding across the grass and sand, then slamming the side of a lodge. Behind him his horse struggled to rise, one leg broken, flopping wildly, where the animal had stumbled in a hole. Perhaps a fire pit.

A scream aroused his blood as he came slowly to his senses, making him whirl around to pull the Spencer’s trigger, finding he had not chambered a fresh cartridge. He took the warrior’s charge there, where he lay sprawled on the ground, raising the rifle in two hands to blunt the blow from the youngster’s war club.

Driving his big foot into the warrior’s groin, sending the Cheyenne reeling backward in pain, Shad clumsily levered another round into the Spencer’s action and fired.

For a moment he stared at the warrior collapsing before his eyes, studying the face, the war paint, the way he wore his hair. He sickened for an instant—believing he had killed his son.

In grief he careened over to kneel beside the body. Sweete used some of the Cheyenne’s loose hair to smear a patch of the greasy earth-paint from the young warrior’s face. This dead one’s skin was too dark to be Bull. Still, he was nearly the same age as his boy, if that old. So young to die—

The terror-filled screams were not those of a man. Not those even of a Cheyenne woman. Such blood-chilling cries for help came only from one of the white women.

Out of the swirling dust and gun smoke curling serpentine on the dry breezes among the lodges emerged a white woman, babbling incoherently in a foreign tongue. She hurled herself toward him for a moment, then skidded to a stop, bringing a hand up to her mouth when she gazed at his buckskinned frame up and down. Eyes wide as
saucers, she shot away from him—careening toward some mounted soldiers.

The Pawnee darted through the thick of it, screaming at the top of their lungs, sating themselves with long-awaited blood lust. Exacting revenge on their old enemies. Hacking, butchering men and women who had fallen with the soldier onslaught.

Fifty yards away a small group of warriors held out from a ravine, drawing the white man’s fire away from their families fleeing into the sandhills. Small platoons of soldiers raced after other knots of resolute warriors who steadfastly continued to fight from horseback, but most fought their struggle on foot. These small bands would retreat for some distance before suddenly wheeling to fire at their white pursuers while the women and children doggedly made for the tall grass in the marsh, some for the sandy bluffs nearby.

It was but a moment before Sweete and an old sergeant gathered enough soldiers to lay down some blistering fire on that ravine running through the Cheyenne camp. Without thought, nothing but courage and foolhardy bravado to power their legs, the sergeant led his squad in an infantry charge on the ravine, pouring enough lead into the enemy to drive the warriors who could still move clawing up the far side of the sandy defile.

One by one the defenders went down—those brave enough to stay behind and cover the retreat of the others. Now the soldiers and Shad were among the sweat-slicked brown bodies, both dead and wounded, kneeling quickly to rechamber another cartridge spat from the spring-loaded butt-mounted tube, firing at the retreating brown backs.

“Lookee here, Sergeant Dickson!”

Shad watched a young, thin soldier come up to the old sergeant, opening his palm. In it lay the shiny crimson-and-gold badge of distinction worn by a Royal Arch Mason. On the white enamel of the banner stretched across the
bottom of the badge were emblazoned the words:
West Springfield, Illinois.

“Where in hell you get that, Lorrett?” demanded the sergeant.

“Yonder,” and he threw a thumb up the ravine at the copper-skinned bodies of the enemy.

“Some white settler gave his life for that goddamned badge,” grumbled another soldier come up to join the group as he shoved more cartridges into his Blakeslee loading tube.

“Lookit there,” Private Lorrett said, pointing into the village.

At least a dozen of the Pawnee trackers herded some captured ponies ahead of them, making quickly for the north and away from the fiercest of the action.

“Goddamned Pawnee every bit as bloody bad as these here Cheyenne,” grumbled a middle-aged corporal sporting greasy, smoke-stained stripes sewn at the sleeves of his sweat-soaked blouse.

“Damn right, Walsh,” replied Dickson. “I ain’t seen a one of them Pawnee scouts down here mixing it up with the Cheyenne bucks like us.”