Winter Rain (9 page)

“Keep ’em moving,” he told himself, remembering the words of Sweete and Bridger about sentries who had tired and fallen asleep because they had not kept their eyes moving. Staring at one thing too long proved deadly when
a man was weary. Such a fool woke up too late—finding himself out of the frying pan and into the fire—if he woke up at all.

There came a rustle of movement to his left, along the creek bank, on the far side. Then a half-dozen birds took to the wing noisily, startling Jonah as he whirled the repeater about.

In the deepening silence that followed their frightened departure, Hook reasoned that no white man was going to make a successful sneak on him. All he had to do was wait and watch his campsite. That was the place the backtracker was surely headed. Likely the man had come across the river where the birds had taken wing and was moving downstream on the near bank, making for Jonah Hook’s camp.

The wet ground made it hard to hear a thing, and the sodden air didn’t carry a sound well at all. Two marks against him, Jonah brooded.

“Damn,” he muttered as more of the cold rain spilled from the hat brim down his collar.

He was sitting in a cold puddle of it now, yet he dared not move. His stalker was likely drawing close. He held his breath a moment, listening, straining against the rain for sound. His eyes must be deceiving him. He’d be damned, but it sounded as if someone were already in his camp, rummaging through his packs.

Try as he might, Jonah could not see a soul. As well as he had chosen this spot, for some reason he still could not see anyone rustling the oiled canvas. But, plain as sun, Hook could hear the sound.

Slowly rising on one knee, Jonah inched forward, parting more of the leaves and branches with the rifle muzzle. Then he saw the top of a man’s head.

“A Injun,” he said under his breath, swiping a damp forearm across his lips.

Brushing his thumb across the Winchester’s hammer
to make sure it was cocked, he rose to a crouch and prepared to make his play—just as the Indian pulled free one of the glass bottles Jonah had purchased back at Laramie.

A loafer, by God. Nothing more’n a good-for-nothing, whiskey-bellied loafer!

Hook burst from the willow and alder, Winchester at his hip and leveled at its target.

“Goddamn you! Leave my whiskey alone, you drunken redskin!”

At the white man’s growl exploding from the rain-soaked undergrowth, Two Sleep scrambled awkwardly for his feet, moccasins slipping on the wet ground, and flew backward, tumbling headlong over more of Jonah’s packs. Yet he slowly raised one arm in the air, grinning sheepishly at the white man, almost apologetic, for certain triumphant. Somehow in his fall he had miraculously kept the whiskey bottle aloft, safe, and unbroken.

“Drop it, I say!” Jonah roared, half-ready to laugh at the Indian sprawled in the mud, intent on that bottle of whiskey.

But as he said it, the Indian’s empty hand came up filled with a pistol. That hammer cocked loud enough to be the clattering of an iron wagon tire rolling over granite.

Little did Hook like staring down the bore of any weapon, much less a pistol he figured was gripped in the shaky hand of a whiskey-sodden Indian. Unpredictable, that’s what their kind was. And this one might up and pull that trigger as soon as look at Jonah, just for the whiskey. Just another dead white man, more or less—

“Two Sleep,” the stranger blurted plain as paint.

Hook wagged his head, not sure he had heard what he thought he had. Plain-spoke English.

“What was that you said, you drunk devil?”

“Two Sleep. My name—Two Sleep. But not drunk.”

He looked sideways at the intruder, suspicious. “Speak English, do you?”

With a nod of his head, the Indian used the hand holding the bottle to scratch the side of his face where some brown mud clung, dripping onto his shoulder from his fall.

“You’re a sight to boot,” Jonah went on. “Put that belt gun away before one of us gets hurt.”

“You shoot Two Sleep?” the Indian asked.

“Sure. Always shoot whiskey thieves, I do,” Hook replied, the beginnings of a grin crawling across his lips.

He didn’t want to like the Indian, didn’t want to trust him. But Jonah couldn’t deny that he was already beginning to do both. “Still, I ain’t yet shot a man I was drinking whiskey with.”

The pony beneath
him answered every urging he gave it with the elk-handled rawhide quirt, whipped across the mustang’s rear flank to keep him first among the riders returning to the camps with such great, momentous news: white men were stalking their trail, coming on fast, greedily eating up the ground between them and the great gathering of lodge circles.

Already it had proved to be a memorable summer for High-Backed Bull, having sworn his allegiance to Porcupine, who in turn took his faithful warriors north to join with the great Shahiyena war chief, Sauts: the one known as the Bat. Among the white men, however, the muscular one was called Roman Nose.

This summer the Northern Cheyenne of Roman Nose and Tall Bull and Two Moon were joined by the great Brule Lakota village of Pawnee Killer. Their alliance had proved fruitful in recent moons: ever since the shortgrass time in late spring, the young warriors had been striking out, raiding into the land of the white settlers as far south as the Solomon, the Saline, even south to the river the white man called the Smoky Hill, where the pony soldiers built their string of forts and the iron road for their smoking horse.

As he reached the smooth, grass-covered brow of the last hill, High-Backed Bull saw the camp circles laid out in rings below him in the river valley, the River of Plums. The fighting bands had been following its course for the last three suns, slowly ambling to the north and west, in no hurry. It seemed they had come to dare the small party of white men to catch up with them.

Behind the young Shahiyena warrior now, he heard the yips and cries of the others, mostly Brule, a few Dog Soldiers like himself. They raced over the ridge and sprinted this last slope at a full gallop, urging their ponies ever faster, calling out to the camps below, feeling across every inch of their bare flesh the excitement of the news they brought.

Women at the river turned from bathing young children, washing clothing or cradleboards, or filling skin pouches with water. Still others rose from morning fires or scraping the skins pegged out across the prairie, hides surrounding the three great camp circles. Children began crying out in the contagious excitement, darting here and there with the news of approaching riders, while camp dogs set to the howl and yip. So much clamor was it all that the old men who sat in the shade of the lodges rose finally with wonder, shading their eyes from the late-morning sun.

Then High-Backed Bull saw him—the tall, muscular one, emerging at last from his lodge near one horn of the camp crescent farthest to the east—the direction where the white man marched, coming on at a hurry.

As High-Backed Bull yanked back on the single horsehair rein, bringing with it his pony’s jaw, the animal skidded to a lock-kneed stop, prancing in a wild circle around Roman Nose. The war chief grabbed for the rein and held on as he peered into the light of the high sun, and the face of the young scout.

“You bring me good news?”

Catching his breath, finding his tongue so dry from
the race that it stuck to the roof of his mouth, Bull asked, “I am first?”

Roman Nose nodded, impatient. “You are, High-Backed Bull. What do you, the first to ride in, have to tell me?”

The pony hurled flecks of foam as it threw its head from side to side—at a full gallop seconds before, then suddenly commanded to halt and stand obediently still by both rider and the man on the ground.

Bull gazed into the war chief’s dark eyes, wishing his own were as dark and truly Cheyenne as were those of Roman Nose. “The white men—”

“Yes, the half-a-hundred?”

Swallowing hard, Bull went on, “They are less than half a day behind now.”

“Do you think you know where they will camp tonight?”

Sensing pride that the war chief should ask such an important question of him, High-Backed Bull straightened on the pony’s back. “I cannot be sure, but I believe there is a place where they might find firewood along the shallow river, camp on the sandy bank.”

“How far?”

He thought a moment, rerunning the miles of race back through his mind. “Not far. I believe it would take us no longer than it would for a man to eat his supper.”

Roman Nose smiled, gazing off to the southeast, into the distance, as the Brule riders brought their ponies to a halt around him, kicking up dust in rooster tails, bringing the barking dogs and yammering, excited children as magnets would draw a scattering of iron filings.

“We must go tell Pawnee Killer!” shouted the war chief over the growing clamor. “Tell Tall Bull and Two Moon—get their ponies! We have a war council to attend.” He began to turn away into the crowd.

This time it was High-Backed Bull who reached
down and snagged the war chief’s upper arm. “A war council?”

“Yes, my friend. We will plan our attack on the half-a-hundred who have followed us for many days, stalking our backtrail.”

“Then … at last we will fight these white men?”

For a considered moment Roman Nose stared back into the young warrior’s eyes, perhaps seeing there what few others might. “You hunger deeply to fight these white men, yes?”

“Any white man.”

Roman Nose nodded. “Perhaps for now any white man’s scalp will do, young one. Yet come a day, we both know you covet but one man’s scalp.”

“Come a day very, very soon, Roman Nose.”

“We will make quick work of these who follow us, like the meadowlarks follow the hawk … until the hawk finally tires of the game and turns—to strike!”

Around them the entire camp became pandemonium with the news on every lip. Young boys brought up ponies for the Northern Cheyenne chiefs, who mounted amid the wild cries for revenge, cries to punish the white stalkers. The Shahiyena sent their leaders off to hold a war council with Pawnee Killer and the headmen of the Brule camped upstream no farther than ten arrow-flights.

“May I come with you, Roman Nose?” Bull shouted above the commotion.

Turning his pony about, the war chief smiled. “You will not be allowed to attend the council, but—yes. Come. You will hold my pony while I sit with the others.”

“It will be an honor to care for your pony while you decide how the white men are to die.”

The emissaries from the Shahiyena camp reined their animals from the camp circle and loped upstream where moments before the excited Brule scouts had arrived carrying the news. Already the Killer’s headmen were hurrying
to the chief’s lodge, where the buffalo-hide cover was being rolled up on one side to allow the breeze to cool the shady interior.

Just beyond the lodge stood a hide awning stretched across a framework of lodgepoles, providing shade for a half-dozen Lakota women scurrying about to start a fire to boil meat and fry bread for those attending the war council. First the men would fill their bellies, then smoke with prayers that the truth be spoken—and only then would there be talk of making a fight of it against the white men.

High-Backed Bull ground his teeth at that—impatient to whirl about and confront the half-a-hundred by himself if he had to—just to fight them was everything now. To take a scalp or two for his own honor. To see the fear well up in the eyes of the enemy, to know the white man’s heart had turned to water and he had likely soiled his pants at the mere sight of the Hotamitanyo—the mighty Dog Soldiers of the Shahiyena.

Roman Nose dismounted and handed the rein over to Bull. “Paint yourself, my friend. Make your medicine and that for your pony here. We ride as soon as this council is over!”

“To kill the white men? Kill all of them?”

“Does not the badger kill the field mouse when it tires of the chase?”

“Keee-aiyeee!
” Bull yipped. “None left standing! None left to tell the tale.”

As Roman Nose disappeared into the council lodge, High-Backed Bull dropped from the back of his pony, taking it and the war chief’s toward the shade of the awning where the women chattered and brought their kettles to a boil. From a fringed pouch he carried over a shoulder, he took out three small skin bags, along with a fragment of mirror he had taken from a looking glass broken during a recent raid on a white settlement. Propping the shard of mirror in the fork of a nearby plum brush, Bull
mixed the first of his dried pigments, earth colors all, with grease from the nearby Lakota kitchen.

Black. The color of victory.

From his hairline down to the middle of his nose, the young Shahiyena painted the entire top half of his face with black, from ear to ear. Next came yellow, color of the Life-giver in the sky above. He applied the yellow in long vertical stripes, each a fingertip wide, that ran down the lower half of his face until they reached his jawline.

Last to be applied was the brick-red ocher earth-paint, its crimson smeared between the yellow lines until the lower half of his face was striped with both the power of the sun and the provocative color of war. The color of blood.

For a moment more he admired his reflection there in the midday sun, the bright, greasy patterns smeared against his earth-colored skin there in that fragment of a mirror stolen from a smoking sod house a white family had raised along the Saline River, where for many generations the Shahiyena had hunted their buffalo.

Yes, Bull thought, smiling, approving of the work he had done on his paint. He strode over to paint potent, powerful symbols on his pony.

This face of mine will be the last sight many of those white men see this day! he told himself as he painted red circles around his pony’s nostrils, to give it the power of breathing wind this day.

Then I will open their bellies, rip out their hearts, and smear myself with their warm blood. I will revel, dancing on their steaming entrails, then smash their heads to jelly after I have torn their hair from their heads! How I will celebrate in the spilling of their white blood!

Of a sudden Bull’s hand stopped above its painting of the hailstones on the pony’s rear flanks, coldly remembering his own white blood. Half of his heart was white. Half of his blood. It made the sheer exultant happiness of this
moment instantly turn to gall in his mouth, a taste so sour that he choked on it.