THE OFFICER CUTTER placed in charge of the relief column was a captain called Sutro. He was old for his rank, and not given to much conversation. He nodded when he met McLain and then busied himself checking the thirty men under his command. They were travelling light, each man carrying a side-arm and a carbine with a double issue of ammunition for both guns. Four pack mules carried their supplies and water, together with extra stocks of powder and ball and percussion caps.
They left at dawn, with rain clouds threatening to blow in from the east and Sutro making a fast pace. He followed the standard Cavalry procedure of riding hard for a spell, then walking the horses for a quarter of a mile or so, thus avoiding winding the animals whilst still covering a good deal of ground. During one of the walking periods he spoke for the first time to McLain.
‘You’re a Southerner, aren’t you?’
‘Missouri.’ McLain tugged on his greatcoat as lightning danced across the sky and the first heavy drops of rain fell. ‘Had a farm before the war.’
‘I don’t like Confederates,’ grunted Sutro. ‘I had people in the Shenandoah valley.’
‘Where’s that?’ McLain asked.
‘You don’t know?’ Sutro looked surprised.
McLain shook his head.
‘Where did you fight?’
‘Kansas. Missouri.’ McLain buttoned the coat and turned up the collar as the rain got harder. ‘Iowa once. Twice in Illinois.’
Sutro grunted and said nothing more for a while. Then: ‘I guess it’s over now.’
‘For me,’ replied McLain.
Sutro nodded. ‘The major said Donnely wanted to hang you.’
‘Yeah,’ said McLain. ‘That’s right.’
‘Damn fool.’ Sutro wiped rain from his mustache. ‘I’d have shot you.’
‘You might not have got the chance,’ said McLain.
The captain turned his head, tilting his hat over against the rain.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t matter now: you’re under the major’s orders. Protected.’ Surprisingly, he smiled. ‘I aim to make the Rio Verde inside the week. You think they can last that long?’
McLain shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘Water and ammunition, mostly. Donnely wasn’t planning on running, so he’d have the horses to eat. He’d need water, though, an’ the Comanches could’ve fouled the well.’
‘There’s the river,’ said Sutro.
‘He’d have to reach it,’ answered McLain. ‘The Indians could keep him off, easy.’
‘What would you have done?’ asked Sutro. ‘In Donnely’s position?’
‘Rested up,’ said McLain. ‘For a day, maybe. Then run south.'
‘Why?’
‘Be better than getting pinned down,’ said the ex-guerrilla. ‘Way that place looked there was only the saloon defensible. I’d have chanced a running fight.’
‘Guerrilla tactics,’ said Sutro.
‘Sure,’ nodded McLain. ‘They work.’
To his surprise, Sutro laughed. ‘McLain,’ he said, ‘I like you. We think the same way. What would you do now?’
‘Ride as hard as the horses can stand for the Rio Verde,’ grunted McLain. ‘Group south of the mission an’ then go in fast. Secure the place an’ chase the enemy.’
‘They’ll split up,’ said Sutro. ‘They’d not chance a full-scale battle with so large a force.’
‘Comes to the same,’ said McLain. ‘No reason to kill them if they stay clear of the post.’
Sutro nodded and shouted an order to mount up. The rain got harder, and they rode through a grey mist that blanked out most of the surrounding land, the horses’ hooves plopping wetly against the soggy ground, the men riding with down-faced heads and tight-buttoned coats that glistened slickly in the dim light.
Donnely wiped a sleeve over a pane of smoke-stained glass, cursing as the running water on the other side obscured his view.
‘They won’t try anything in this weather,’ said Docherty. ‘They’ll wait ’til it clears.’
Donnely nodded without speaking. He felt embarrassed, which made him feel angry; and because he had only himself to blame for the way he felt, he got more morose.
His command was now down to seven men. Probably six by morning, because Averson didn’t look like lasting out the night. The Nokoni had managed to turn some of the Army horses round and drop two of them over the well. They had lost a man shoving one animal into the pit, but now the water was fouled and the body of the second horse provided a barricade for the Comanche snipers clustered behind it. Docherty had managed to retrieve the body of the first horse to be shot, so they had meat. But horse flesh was salty, and all the survivors had to drink was the beer left by the Indians. Donnely had forbidden spirits – what little was left – on pain of a court-martial with guaranteed time in a stockade. Even so, he knew that most of the men were drinking hard liquor. And knew, too, with an awful finality, that they most likely wouldn’t ever get punished for disobeying his orders, because all they had left to do was die.
It was the sixteenth day of the siege.
He ran a finger over his growing beard, idly wondering if it made him look more commanding, and then found a second thought.
‘Comanches scalp, don’t they?’ he asked.
Docherty nodded. ‘Lift the skin right off, captain. Don’t necessarily kill you, though. Hell! I knew a man called Marvin walked around with half his skull bare from a scalping. O’ course, he was lucky.’
The captain winced at the thought and wondered why the manual of tactics and stratagems he had studied so carefully at West Point failed to cover situations like this.
‘We’d better collect water,’ he said.
Docherty laughed and pointed at three holes in the roof, where rain was dripping through, falling into buckets. ‘Got it organized, sir.’
‘Good.’ Donnely nodded. ‘Excellent. Gather as much as you can, Sergeant. When do you think they’ll attack again?’
‘Soon as the rain stops, I guess.’ Docherty added a sir as an after-thought. ‘I figger it’ll keep up ’til nightfall. Maybe they won’t start in again until dawn.’
‘Maybe we should try to break out,’ said Donnely. ‘When it gets dark.’
‘On foot?’ Now the sergeant sounded openly contemptuous. ‘We’d not make a mile before they ran us down, sir.’
‘Yes.’ Donnely didn’t know what else to say. ‘I suppose you’re right, sergeant. Well,’ he tried hard to resume some grasp of command, ‘we’ll have to last it out, then. Fort Davis will probably send a relief column.’
Probably? thought Docherty. Maybe. If. Perhaps. Words, not actions.
If McLain got Alice away from the Indians. And if she thought to head him for Fort Davis; and if she was alive. Then maybe the Missouri guerrilla could make it through around a hundred miles of hostile country to the fort. And then perhaps the commander would send a relief force. If he thought it worthwhile. And maybe the force would arrive in time to save what was left of the Rio Verde garrison. If there was anyone left to be saved.
He watched his commanding officer crawl away and curl up on one of the makeshift beds, waiting until Donnely was snoring before he stood up and went over to the bar. He lowered his carbine on to the wooden planks and poured himself a mug of beer from the big barrel behind the counter.
Here’s to you, Moses, he thought. I love your wife and I’m drinking your beer while you rot in the ground. I got hopes when I saw you dead. God forgive me, but I did think about the future. And Jesus! what’s the future now? Not that rosy one I saw. Not running this place with Alice. Sharing her bed. Making money from poor soldier boys like me. No! Alice is most likely sold down to Mexico, and McLain’s hair is on some Nokoni coup stick. And pretty soon what I got left will go on another. So here’s to you, Moses. You’re dead and can’t feel the want anymore. Just the worms. Christ! Moses, I don’t want to die, but I don’t have anything else left to do.
He drained the mug as Averson began to moan again.
The man had taken a lance all the way through his belly and a blow from a tomahawk that had sliced a chunk of his face away, exposing the outer edges of his left eye and mouth. By all accounts he should have been dead, but somehow he was hanging on. Docherty had pulled the broken lance through the hole and tried to fasten the dangling curtain of flesh back in place. Averson had most of his head swathed in bandages, and more around his stomach.
The latter were constantly thick with blood, and those about his head kept filling with yellow pus. The lance that had ruptured his belly had torn up whatever organs controlled his bowels, so that he lay in a pool of ordure that filled the hot room with the acrid, sickening stench of shit. The men had kept him supplied with whisky, tipping the liquor into his mouth every time he screamed or began to moan again. Now Docherty tilted the bottle, emptying it down the man’s throat. Knowing that it was wrong to give a gut-wounded man a drink. But what the hell?
‘Sarge?’ Averson’s breath was foul from the pus. It bubbled between his teeth, making yellow foam on his tongue and lips. ‘It hurts.’
‘I know that.’ Docherty’s boots slipped on the sticky pourings of the dying man’s body. He ignored the smell and said, ‘You want another drink?’
‘No, Sarge.’
Averson’s voice was faint, bubbling up from some pit of pain located deep down at the core of his being.
‘Take me away. Please.’
Docherty looked at the ravaged face. Averson wasn’t more than twenty: a kid: a boy fighting to do a man’s work: dying for it.
He nodded and said, ‘Yes.’’
Then he took his Colt from the holster and cocked the big pistol. Averson smiled at him as best he could, and closed his eyes. Docherty set the pistol against the boy’s head. Squeezed the trigger.
Donnely woke up at the sound:
‘What? What the hell’s going on?’
Docherty cleaned the chamber and dropped fresh powder in. Rammed a slug into place. Capped the nipple. And then said, ‘Trooper Averson is dead, sir. Mercifully.’
‘Jesus!’ Donnely went over to the corpse. ‘You shot him.’
‘Yessir! He asked me to, sir. He was in pain, sir.’
‘I’ll see you on a charge for this.’ Donnely braced his legs as he stared down at the sergeant still kneeling in the shit around the corpse. ‘You’re broken, Sergeant. No! Trooper! I’ll see you ruined for this.’
The soldiers at the windows turned inwards, grumbling their disapproval. Docherty waved them to silence as he stood up. The knees of his blue pants were stained brown, and there were flecks of blood on his shirt where Averson’s skull had splattered back against him.
‘Your privilege, sir,’ he said. ‘If we all live that long. But I think that if we do, you’re the one who’s ruined. Sir.’
The relief column made the best time it could through the downpour. Sutro pushed the horses to their limits before making camp, and started early the next day, when the rain had cleared. He held to a fast pace, cutting down the walking periods and lifting the horses and the mules to their limits as he rode north towards the Rio Verde.
Walking Bear saw the dream die as the survivors hung on and his warriors left him.
He cursed them, but they still drifted away, some shamefaced, and others laughing, as they told him there were buffalo to hunt in other places, and the white men in the cabin on the Rio Verde must soon starve.
Only fifteen warriors stayed with him. Fifteen braves who still shared his dream, and were willing to listen to his final plan.
It was a simple plan: like most of Walking Bear’s. Direct and effective. And hadn’t he proved the effectiveness before?
So: the white men had no water, and they had been living off the remains of the horse the Nemenna had killed for at least seven suns. They were probably weak, because no white man could live so long as a Nokoni on so little food, and the white men didn’t like to eat horse, anyway. They had no water: their well was poisoned. And by now, their ammunition must be running low.
It was easy: attack now, from two sides. Fight the stripe-legs in their own way. Surprise them with that. Hit from east and west, and kill them all.
The warriors agreed, and as soon as the rain stopped and the sun rose, they attacked.