Winter Rain (32 page)

“Royall told me.”

“A good man, the major,” Sweete replied, staring down at his hands crossed over the big-dished saddle horn.

“Was it, Shad? You sure it was …”

He nodded. “It were my boy.”

Cody nudged his buckskin a little closer, coming up alongside the big scout on the strawberry roan. “You can’t blame yourself for it.”

“I ain’t, Bill. Really I ain’t. Leastways, I’m not blaming myself for him getting killed in that fight. He was his own man. Been so … for some time now too.” Sweete looked at Cody, his puffy eyes gone sad as a doe gone dry. “What’s that they say the good book tells us: them that lives by the sword gonna die by the sword?”

All Cody did was nod, his lips drawn into a straight line as if determined not to betray himself with emotion. He flicked a glance over his shoulder at the distant column pulling farther away to the north.

“You buried him proper, Shad?”

“He was a Cheyenne warrior, Bill,” Sweete said proudly, his eyes stinging and his lips trembling so slightly only he would know. “A Dog Soldier what died defending his people. His … his chosen people.”

“I’m … proud of you, Shad.”

Sweete snorted, trying a smile. “I made mistakes a’times—”

“Any man does.”

With a wag of his head, Sweete stilled the young scout. “His mother’s gonna be proud of him.”

“Shad—that bunch has been murdering and—”

“His people gonna be proud of him too.”

“They killed and raped and kidnapped from Nebraska down into Kansas, Shad. You can’t forget that.”

His eyes got a cold fire behind them as he glared at Cody. “I ain’t gonna forget none of it.”

Then Sweete thought on Bull, remembering times he had been driven to lash his willful son’s thumbs to the lodgepoles, just as a Cheyenne father would do, to let the boy hang there awhile and settle his high spirits.

Then he sighed with the sting of remembrance. “I did of a time forget something, Bill. Forgot that white is white and red is red. And ’cause I forgot and fell in love with a Cheyenne woman—my boy did everything in his power to wash away what he had of me inside him.”

“Goddammit, Shad—don’t blame yourself for what he turned out to be. You said yourself he was—”

“Bill, a man finds he made a mistake, he can do one of two things to right it. He can curse himself the rest of his days, reminding himself of what wrong he’s done. Or—” And Shad stared off at the wagon drag of the far, dark column of Carr’s march.

“Or?”

“Or he can do what he can to help another man keep from making a mistake, maybe the same mistake.”

“Another man?”

“A friend,” Sweete replied quietly.

“Somebody you’ve knowed for a long time?”

Sweete shook his head. “No. Not very long at all. Got to help him—so I can help myself in the bargain.”

“I don’t understand, Shad. You help this friend of yours—how are you gonna help yourself?”

“I help him, then I can forgive myself, Bill. That’s the hardest thing I have to do right now. To forgive myself.”

Cody glanced over his shoulder at the distant column. “If you’re headed north to Laramie, why not ride with us far as Sedgwick? It’s on the way.”

Shad wagged his head and tried a wan smile. “No, my friend. Gonna cross over the river down there. Head north by west. Ride up along the foothills toward the Laramie plain. Gonna be … all right to be alone for a while.”

“Will the woman be there?”

“Bull’s mother? She should be. If not, I’ll find out where. She deserves to know how he come to die. Where he’s buried.”

“I figured you took off from the springs to bury him.”

“The Cheyenne way: put back in the rocks where the ground and water spirits own his body now.”

“And after that? You’ll come on back to McPherson to work with me?”

Sweete held out his hand. Cody stared at it for a moment, then smiled and took it. When they finished shaking, Shad kept hold of the young scout’s. “After I tell Shell Woman about the boy, and she’s had time to grieve—a person needs someone there with ’em when they grieve … then I gotta ride off to find someone else.”

“Someone else should know about your boy?”

“No. Find the friend I want to help. The one I got to help now. Before it’s too late for the two of us.”

Cody finally took his hand from Sweete’s. “You … you need anything? Cartridges? Jerky? Some of the army’s goddamned rotten hard-bread? I got plenty of that.”

Shad grinned a little to show some measure of his appreciation, then the smile was gone. “Don’t need nothing else now but to be on my way, Bill.”

“You’re sure I can’t do nothing else for you, Shad?”

Sweete brought his old, gnarled hand up to his brow and saluted the young scout. “Well done, soldier. Well done.”

Cody choked a little, swallowing hard. His eyes seemed to brim as he forced a smile onto his lips and his own hand came up for a salute. “Well done yourself, old friend.”

Shad reined away abruptly, nudging his roan into a walk. “Watch your hair, Bill Cody. It’d look mighty fine on some buck’s coup-stick. Damn, but it’s awful pretty!”

Cody forced a quick laugh, watching the big plainsman’s back as Sweete moved away down the slope toward the wide silver band of river. “You … you watch your backtrail, Shad Sweete. By God, you watch your backtrail!”

It had been
many, many miles, this travel they had undertaken after the soldier attack on their village at White Bluff Creek. Porcupine’s heart weighed heavy as a stone in his chest.

So total a surprise, so terrible a disaster. So complete their loss of nearly everything—all of it burned by the soldiers, all that had not been looted by the Shaved-Heads before the lodges were put to the torch. Meat and flour, blankets and robes. Weapons and powder and the wealth they had collected from the white homesteads across many moons of raiding. All of it—gone in the time it took for the sun to cross half the sky above.

And those bodies mutilated by the Shaved-Heads and left for the predators that always came, drawn by the smell of blood on the winds. Porcupine and many of the other warriors had returned to that smoking camp when the soldiers withdrew. Come to bury their own: fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, friends.

The bodies were all there, most still recognizable despite the butchery of the Pawnee trackers—identified by
a fragment of clothing or quillwork, some body paint or a particular weapon, perhaps a necklace or hair ornament.

After the soldiers had gone, Porcupine had looked and looked, unable to find the body of his young friend who had stayed behind in the grassy ravine as the war chief and others clawed their way up the far side and escaped before the soldiers overran them. Bull’s body was not among those at the ravine near the village, nor among those who had taken refuge with Tall Bull in another deep ravine south of camp where the war chief and the rest had died bravely rather than run. Tall Bull had even killed his favorite war pony there at the mouth of the ravine—to show the Shaved-Heads that he would go no farther, that he would attempt no escape.

Like Bull, a handful of the Dog Soldiers had stayed behind to cover the retreat of the women and children and old ones. To give their lives for their people.

Inside his breast, Porcupine’s heart felt chilled and prickly, hollow as a buffalo horn, black as the far side of night. Having hoped against hope, praying as he waited until he could return to the devastated camp, unable to mount a counterattack, Porcupine and some of the others had angrily watched the Shaved-Heads mutilate the dead Shahiyena scattered throughout the village. From a nearby hill he had seen the tall white man approach the grassy ravine where Bull fell, saw the tall one guard the fallen warrior’s body with his own life—fighting off the Shaved-Heads until soldiers arrived.

Porcupine sensed in his heart what his thoughts had tried to tell him a long time ago—that the one Bull hunted now in fact grieved a great loss.

The white man wrapped the body in a blanket, then bound it in a buffalo robe. He took from one of the lodges soon to be torched those special possessions with which to bury a warrior: weapons and parfleches, food and finery. Binding it all inside the buffalo robe with the body, lashing
it tight with rawhide whangs he cut from the bottom of a seasoned lodge, he tied the body across the back of one of the handsomest of the captured Shahiyena ponies and moved slowly out of that camp as the destruction of Tall Bull’s village began.

He had followed the old gray-head toward the river and beyond, heading south by southwest toward the tall, chalky river bluffs in that wild, austere wilderness that had long been the hunting ground of the Shahiyena. Each time Porcupine had turned around to look behind him at the site of destruction, it had sickened him to watch another tall spiral of greasy black smoke rising in the distance beyond the hills, where once the camp of Tall Bull’s people had waited beside the spring.

Into the second day the old one had pushed on with the two extra ponies strung out behind him on picket ropes, riding below the river bluffs slowly, looking carefully before he finally stopped—having selected the right crevice below the shade of both juniper and cedar, there above the quiet murmur of the great river fed by distant mountain snows.

In a struggle up the sharp, sandy slope, the old one had dragged the buffalo-hide bundle to its final resting place, taken one last look around, then placed the body of High-Backed Bull within the darkness of eternity. It took the rest of that second day and into the fading twilight for the old man to lumber up that slope with enough rocks gathered along the riverbank, enough to seal up the crevice forever and all time to come.

As the sun had sunk like a bloody benediction over those faraway mountains, Porcupine watched the white man bring the reluctant war pony up that loose and shifting slope, right to the base of the bluff, to the very foot of the rock-enclosed crevice where High-Backed Bull lay. There the old man raised his hand to the sky and began singing. Not the words of the white man’s prayer
medicine—but the words of the Shahiyena air-spirits song.

The song over, its last notes falling away from the bluffs to echo across the river below, the old man pulled free his pistol, rubbing the neck of one of Bull’s favorite ponies.

That single shot reverberated for the longest time, carried back and forth along the river.

Just before dark the old gray-headed one finally rose and made his way down the slope, leaving behind the carcass of the war pony to guard the entrance to the rock cairn.

That rainy night icy hail lashed the white man’s cheerless camp as he softly sang over and over the traditional song that wished the departed one a safe and quick journey across the Star Road, into the far, far land of Seyan. With no drum, he beat a hand on the bottom of a much-used copper kettle.

When the hail was done with them, passing on to the east with its white fury, the white man stripped himself naked to the chilling night. At his deep fire pit the man lit some white sage and smudged his body in the sacred and healing smoke. All the while he mumbled prayers that Porcupine could not make sense of from his hiding place in the willows.

Prayers spoken not in the white man’s foreign tongue—but in the language of High-Backed Bull.

In the gray of sun-coming that next morning, Porcupine awoke cold and stiff in his rain-soaked blanket beside the river, blinking against the sleep-grit matting his eyes, rubbing them quickly before he peered through the willow to find the old one gone, disappeared some time in the night.

He wished the gray one a safe journey now that the white man rode all the more alone, rode without his son. Feeling sorry, Porcupine himself felt empty still, realizing
the old one had journeyed far too many miles already without having the love of his son. The one born of his flesh, blood of his blood.

Yet Porcupine’s spirit sang as he rode below that river bluff one last time that glorious dawn, stopping to gaze above at the carcass of the war pony, at the vertical scar in the bluff, a dark slash filled with river stones of every size.

High-Backed Bull had gone where he had wanted to be.

And the one who had fathered him was now traveling a road to seek his own redemption.

For knowing them both, Porcupine felt stronger still as he moved away from the river. Resolved more now than before to help White Horse once again gather the Dog Soldiers and their families into a fighting force that High-Backed Bull would be proud of.

Porcupine sensed his own spirit renewed, knowing the struggle continued.

T
HE TRAIL HAD
gone cold.

Two winters came and passed; each day they hoped against hope that some clue would turn up, some slip of a tongue, some word of Jubilee Usher’s Danites passing through the country. But, nothing.

Back that October of sixty-eight, Two Sleep had taken Jonah on west from the land of the red desert beside the Sandy, crossing Green River, then pushing on to Fort Bridger. Like the back of his leathery, walnut-colored hand, the Shoshone knew the lay of that land and the caliber of those men in army blue. Jonah stayed quiet for the most part, letting the Indian ask the questions needing answers.