TWO DAYS LATER the American gunmen attacked the tiny métis settlement at Prud’homme. The tiny place was only a few miles inside métis territory, but it was isolated, the road that went there was very bad, and it was of no military importance. Somehow it had managed to survive. Even the militia didn’t bother with it; they had more important things to do. All that was before the renegade gunslingers swept into town and killed every man, woman, and child. They raped the women and girls as young as twelve, burned the town, and rode out with $216 in paper money and coins.
Gatling was in the cabin, cleaning and oiling his guns, when Dumont came raging in and made for the cupboard where he kept the whiskey. He was too agitated to sit down; instead, he paced the floor. After he told Gatling what had happened, he dragged a chair to the table and sat down.
“Dey kill’ ever’body, even de children,” he said. “We got to do something. Most of de time, Baptiste say, dey are quartered at de militia barracks at Warman. That’s where dey are when dey are not out killing and raping and stealing.”
“I know that. You told me,” Gatling said.
Dumont picked up his glass and drained it. “You tink your idea could work? I don’t like it, but could it work?”
“I’m not sure. How can I be sure? In the end, it’s all up to the priest. We haven’t even talked to him.”
“He’ll do it if he is asked,” Dumont said impatiently. “Pere Mulet is afraid of nothing. De man is a fighter. You saw him at North Battleford. Like a tiger.”
Pere Mulet was the priest who rode a big mule as fierce-tempered as himself. His church was in the village of Cudworth, about twenty five miles south of Batoche. Gatling’s idea was to get word to the gunslingers that Pere Mulet—Father Mule in English—had tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of solid-gold religious objects hidden under the flagstoned floor of his church. Chalices, crucifixes, monstrances, chasubles embroidered with gold thread. Dumont had asked him how he knew all these words since he was a godless man. Gatling said he’d shared a cell with a rebel priest in Mexico.
“Does it have to be Pere Mulet?” Dumont didn’t like the idea of using a priest as a decoy. “Can you not tink of somebody else?”
“There is nobody else,” Gatling said, pushing his weapons to one side. “We can’t go. Baptiste and Boulanger can’t go. You want to send some métis that’ll fall over his feet? These bastards—most of them—aren’t dumb. We send a métis that can’t pull it off and he’ll get shot.”
Dumont rolled his empty glass between thick fingers; his weather-beaten face was set in grim lines. “How would it work? Tell me again.”
“Here’s the way I see it,” Gatling said. “We’ve been over this before, but all right. Pere Mulet came with the métis from Manitoba, where he was as loved and respected as he is here. For years the métis have been bringing him gold from the diggings in the north. During the days of peace, Pere Mulet had this raw gold made into various sacred objects worth a huge amount of money. But with the coming of war, as war approached, he hid all this gold to keep it from being stolen or confiscated. Same difference. Recently the métis leaders, you included, have been putting pressure on him to tell where the gold is. Good Catholics though they are, they want to sell the gold and buy much-needed weapons. The métis leaders place a guard over the church so Pere Mulet can’t make off with the gold. They are certain the gold is somewhere in the church, but they stop short of tearing it apart. Pere Mulet is desperate. What can he do?”
“What? Don’t ask me question. Tell me.”
“You wanted it spelled out. I’m spelling it out.” Dumont could be an exasperating man when he put his mind to it. “Pere Mulet doesn’t want to lose these scared objects, but there is nobody he can turn to for help. He’s a métis and hates the militia. He thinks of the Americans who have been run out of Batoche. Pere Mulet is a good priest but a foolish man. He thinks he can make a deal with these men. You must remember he’s desperate. Pokes of gold dust are hidden with the sacred objects, he tells them. Thousands of dollars in raw gold. They can have it all if they will see him safely to the border. Naturally they plan to take everything.”
Dumont got up to get whiskey. Back at the table he said, “I don’t tink I would be fooled by a story like dat.”
“That’s because you’re not a greedy man. Money or gold doesn’t mean much to you, does it?”
“Me? I don’t give a shit about gold. I know where gold is in de North Country. Never have I said a word about it. Talk like dat bring ever’ gold-crazy bastard in Canada. I dig and pan plenty gold before Louis start dis rebellion. I gave it to Louis. It was my gold dat paid for de guns you brought.”
“These hardcases would think you were crazy,” Gatling said. “You know why they’re gunmen? Because they’re lazy and don’t want to work. But mostly they’re greedy. Not a day they don’t think about striking it rich. They think of Jesse James and they drool. They can’t walk past a bank without getting a bone in their pants.”
Dumont had calmed down and Gatling went back to working on his guns. It was something he liked to do. At the moment, there wasn’t much else to do in Batoche.
“All right, you have convince me dey’re greedy. But what happen to Pere Mulet if dey decide to torture him? Try to make him tell where de gold is. Dey may not want to drag him all the way from dere barracks to de father’s church.”
“Why not? What could he do? Pere Mulet, if he agrees to go, must insist that he’s the only one who knows where the gold is. They can torture him to death, but they’ll be wasting their time. He won’t tell.”
“Dese are vicious men, Gatling. Dey could torture him because he’s so stubborn. What happen? What does he do?”
“Try to endure it,” Gatling said quietly.
“You can say dat. Is easy to say dat when you sit here cleaning your gun. You know what dey could do to de priest?”
“I know.”
“And it don’t bother you?”
“Sure it bothers me. But listen. I don’t think they’d torture the priest. It would be just plain dumb if they did. Warman is no distance from Cudworth. They’d have to ride into métis territory, but you admit yourself you’re not too strong down there. Who’s going to stop them? They won’t torture the priest. They’ll take him along.”
Dumont reached into his tangled beard and scratched. “It sound too easy, de way you tell it.”
“Not so. Pere Mulet will warn the gunmen about the métis guarding the church. Ten good men with new rifles. They’ll see some of the guards before they ride in. What they won’t see is you and me, the rapid-fire guns, and a hundred métis. They’ll ride in and we’ll blow them to bits.”
“And de priest?”
“He’ll fall off his horse and play dead.”
“And if he is killed by one side or de other?”
“Then he won’t have to pretend.”
“It still bothers me, dis plan,” Dumont said. “Maybe some of dese bastards know we call him de fighting priest of Batoche.”
“Could be,” Gatling said. “But not likely. From what I saw of them, the gunslingers kept pretty much to themselves. I never saw him dressed as a priest. I didn’t know he was a priest until you told me. If by chance they do know him as the fighting padre, all he can say is the Church comes before any cause. Now listen. We’ve been over this twice. I don’t want to go over it again. What do you say?”
“I say stay where you are. I find Pere Mulet and de tree of us talk.”
They had been waiting for more than a day. In spite of its name, Cudworth was a métis town, named after a hero of the first rebellion who had an English father. The big stone church dominated the town, which looked much like any métis town between Saskatoon and Prince Albert. Most of the houses were long cabins, though there were a few two-story frame houses built by métis merchants who had done well for themselves.
The doors of the church were closed; two métis riflemen guarded the entrance. Behind the doors the Heavy Maxim had been set up, with a gunner and a loader. The doors opened out. The two men standing guard would throw the doors open and take cover in the church as soon as the gunslingers rode into the town square. Then the man behind the Maxim would open fire, sweeping the town square with bullets. The gun and the gun crew were protected by sandbags.
Dumont had evacuated the town, sending everybody north to Batoche. They had strict orders to stay there, because from here on in, the town would become a target for the militia. Twenty of Dumont’s men were to replace the townspeople. The blacksmith had to be hammering away when the gunmen scouted the town; places of business had to be open, and they had to have people in them. There had to be a few people in the street.
The other métis riflemen were in position; Dumont had placed every man himself. If they moved from where they’d been put, they would answer to him. Men were on the roof of the church, and in the bell tower. The Light Maxim was set up in a stand of pine beside the road that came in from Warman. If anybody survived, the light gun would get them as they tried to escape.
One Hotchkiss Cannon was behind the gate of a lumber yard; the other was set up in the skeleton of a half-finished frame house. After the men and guns were in position, Dumont walked around to make sure they couldn’t be seen.
He came back to where Gatling sat on a sack of grain twenty feet back from the door of a feed and grain merchant. Sacks of grain were piled up in the doorway and the modified Light Maxim stood behind them with its bipod extended. Two belts of ammunition were coiled in the feed box.
“Dey should be here by now,” Dumont said. It was getting close to noon. No rain or snow had fallen since the day before. “Dey should have been here early dis morning. We timed it. If—”
“They’re just being careful,” Gatling said. “They’re probably glassing the town right this minute. Sure they want the gold, but they don’t want to die for it.”
Dumont lit his pipe and smoked in silence. “Dey’re coming,” he said. “Some of dem are.” Moving fast, he put out the fire in his pipe by dipping it in a bucket of water. He unslung his rifle and threw himself down behind the grain sacks. Gatling lay on the floor, ready to put the light gun in place and start blasting.
The only sounds came from the blacksmith’s shop at the far end of town. Then the hammering stopped and it was very quiet. “Two men,” Dumont whispered.
Gatling took a look. Two men were coming in from the Warman road. They wore settler clothes and rode burly farm horses. One was young, the other was middle-aged, and they sure as hell looked like what they were pretending to be. They reined in and let their horses drink at a water trough. Then, taking their time, they rode out the other end of town.
Gatling looked at his watch; fifteen minutes had passed. Fifteen minutes should do it, he thought. He lifted the light gun and set the bipod on the sack of grain, pushing the bipod down hard so it would have a firm hold.
A wild Rebel yell split the air and they swept into town, filling the square with men and horses, and then the church doors banged open and the Heavy Maxim opened fire. Shells from the Hotchkiss began to land in the square, tearing men and horses apart. Riflemen aimed and fired, aimed and fired. Behind the light gun, raking the square with bullets, Gatling saw Pere Mulet throw up his hands and fall to the ground. Horses jumped over him. He didn’t move. Gatling swung the light gun and knocked down men and horses. Hemmed in by guns, the gunslingers tried to make a fight of it, but it was no use. Some had their horses shot out from under them, and they tried to use the dead animals as cover. Horses ran wild, kicking and screaming in terror, trying to get away from the slaughter. Forty or fifty men were killed or wounded in the first three or four minutes. The wounded crawled in the mud; the dead lay still. The killing went on and on until the puddles in the street began to turn red with blood. There was blood everywhere. A runty gunslinger Gatling had seen in Batoche had his horse killed, but he managed to land on his feet when the animal went down. He swung up onto a riderless horse and started for the Warman road. He let out a scream when he spotted Pere Mulet running toward a wagon. He turned his horse and rode down on the priest with a lariat swinging from his hand. The loop dropped down over the priest’s head and tightened around his neck. He was jerked off his feet and dragged over rocks that stuck up through the mud. Still screaming, the gunslinger turned his horse again and rode around the square, daring the métis to kill him. He wound the end of the lariat around the saddle horn with a few expert twists, then raised his hat like a rodeo cowboy and screamed his defiance. He wasn’t hit, he wasn’t even wounded. He reached for the rope and flipped the priest over on his back. Gatling got a quick look at the priest’s face. A bloody mess of broken bones and torn flesh. Gatling grabbed his Mauser and shot the crazy man out of the saddle. The horse made a break for the road, still dragging the priest. The priest hit a rock so hard he was thrown into the air. Gatling killed him with a single shot. The horse ran on with the dead priest at the end of the rope.
Outside town the Light Maxim was firing steadily; in the square there was nothing more to shoot at. The métis held their positions until Dumont told Baptiste to get them out of there. “Get dis town cleaned up,” Dumont ordered. “It look like a slaughterhouse.” What Dumont meant was, kill the wounded, get rid of the bodies.
The killing started; it took a while to get it done. They shot wounded horses that couldn’t be saved. Dumont sent Boulanger out to look for the body of the priest. He came back an hour later with the body roped to the back of a horse.
“The horse wasn’t hit by the machine gun,” Boulanger said in French. “Father Mulet was dragged for miles. A terrible way to die.”
Boulanger went away and Dumont turned to Gatling. “What made you kill de priest?”
“The way he was suffering, I had to do it. Maybe I shouldn’t have. He might have lived. A few of them got away. I thought, what will they do if they get their hands on him and he’s still alive?”
“You did de right ting.” Dumont took the soggy pipe out of his pocket and started to clean out the bowl. It was something to keep him occupied. Gatling folded the bipod and put the light gun in its case. Dumont said, “Dere was nothing else you could do.”
“That’s how I figure it.” Gatling snapped the catches on the gun case. “Only I didn’t figure it. I just did it.”
Dumont decided to bury Pere Mulet in his own graveyard, along with the five métis who had been killed in the fight. “Louis will be angry I don’t bring de body back so it can lie in state, some kind of bullshit like dat. Pere Mulet would hate dat. De man would come back and haunt me. I don’t want to be haunt by a ghost with a terrible temper. Pere Mulet don’t give a shit for fancy words or brass bands. Métis got no brass band. But if dey have a brass band he would laugh at it. Here he live and here he die and here he be buried, you bet.”
Dumont left no garrison behind when they rode out of Cudworth. The gunslingers that got away would bring the militia. They would come in force; no use trying to defend the town. The militia would burn it to the ground; burning métis towns was what they liked best. Maybe it could be rebuilt someday, Dumont said. But even as he said it, he didn’t sound too hopeful.
They got back to Batoche late that evening. Dumont told Baptiste to report to Riel. “I don’t feel like talking,” he said to Gatling. “I will argue with Louis in de morning. All I want right now is a big drink of whiskey. Maybe I drink de whole bottle.”
Dumont got very drunk and talked to himself half the night, but he was up and around before Gatling. After looking at his watch, Gatling said, “What’re you going to do at five in the morning?”
Dumont drank the last of his hot, sugary tea. “First I will make sure de sentries are awake. Den I will walk along by de river and try to tink what I would do if I was a regular army commander. De ice is breaking up and where it remain solid dey can force a passage with dynamite and ramming. Tomorrow—I mean today—we must start to stretch de logging chains across de river. Dat will be one son of a bitch job, I can tell you.”
Working night and day for more than a month, a team of blacksmiths had been linking logging chains together. The river was wide at Batoche and the linked chains had to be long enough to stretch from one bank to the other. Pilings had to be driven deep into the mud so they wouldn’t tear loose when the gunboats hit. The chains had to be stretched at just the right height. Too high, the gunboats would pass underneath. Too low, the brute force of the boats’ steam engines would snap the chains like string. The chains had to be stretched across the river about three feet above deck level. When the gunboats hit, everything on deck would be wrecked. It all depended on how fast the gunboats were traveling. Dumont said he hoped they’d come at night when they were less likely to spot the chains. But he didn’t think that was going to happen.
After Dumont went out Gatling got dressed and boiled up a pot of coffee with the beans he had brought back from North Battleford. He built up the fire and after he finished the coffee he went out. It was a clear, starry morning; the only movement was the sentries pacing the firing platforms. The fort had been built not dead center but sideways so the men on the front wall had a good view of the river and the country to the south. The Maxims and the Hotchkiss Cannons had been set up where they could do the most damage. Everything within a half mile of the fort—rocks, bushes, humps in the ground—had been removed. Below the fort, along the water’s edge, the landings had been ripped up and the timber used to reinforce the walls.
Chevaux-de-frise barrel-shaped sections of wood with projecting spikes, ringed the fort. Originally used in Europe as a defense against cavalry attack, they were just as effective against infantrymen, especially when the sections were connected and strung with barbed wire. Twenty feet in front of the chevaux-de-frise a deep, wide trench with wooden spikes imbedded in the bottom also circled the fort. It had been literally hacked from the frozen earth by hundreds of métis, working with little rest and little sleep. Here and there, small gunpowder charges had been used to crack the frozen subsoil, but for the most part it had been a backbreaking pick-and-shovel job.
This circular trench was covered by canvas stretched tight and securely pegged. A thin coat of dirt covered the canvas. Long before it was completed, rain and melting snow had filled it with water. The man or horse that plunged into it had little chance of surviving.
Looking down from the front wall of the fort, Gatling thought that all this would stop them for a while. But only for a while. He guessed the Canadian and British force of regulars would count on gunboats to reduce the fort to rubble. As far as he knew, there were no gunboats in Western Canada, but there were armored vessels on the Great Lakes and on both coasts. They could send them to Saskatchewan on flatcars or they could convert ordinary riverboats into fighting machines. They had the resources—the money—to do anything they decided to do. Backed by the might and the money of Great Britain, the Canadian Government would hit the métis the way Sherman hit Georgia. At least that would be their intention; they didn’t know it yet, but they were in for one hell of a fight.
Gatling knew he should get out. It wasn’t his war. Just the same, he had to see it through to the end.
Late that afternoon, Gatling and Dumont were in the smithy watching the blacksmiths at work. The smiths were working as fast as they could; still, Dumont was impatient. “You’ll have to work faster,” he said in métis French. “We’ve got to get those chains in place.”
Gatling didn’t know what Dumont said, but he got the meaning.
“We can work faster, but it won’t be done right,” the head blacksmith told him. “What good are chains if they break? You want to get the job done faster, then do it yourself. Now get the hell out of my forge. You’re in the way.”
A young man Gatling hadn’t seen before came into the smithy and started to say something to Dumont. Dumont waved him outside. They walked away from Gatling and stood talking as night closed in. The young, light-skinned métis did most of the talking. He talked and Dumont listened. After he got through talking, Dumont asked a few questions, and the young métis went away.
Walking back to the cabin, Dumont told Gatling the young métis was one of his spies just back from the south. Dumont said he had spies in many places, men whose light skin and accents allowed them to pass as ordinary French Canadians.
“De news is not good,” Dumont said. The first troop train had arrived in Saskatoon and the regulars were camped on the north end of town. More troop trains were due to arrive within a week. Canadian flags and Union Jacks were flying from practically every building in Saskatoon. Fire-eating politicians, local and national, were demanding that the “rebellious half-breed rabble” be crushed without delay. It looked like all of white Canada was up in arms.
“What about rapid-fires and artillery?” Gatling asked.
“My man say dey got plenty,” Dumont answered. “He watch when dey unload dem from de train. He know de rifle but not de heavy gun. He describe dem pret’ good. Dey got dem all right. He don’t get to make count ’cause army policeman chase him away.”
“Any activity on the river?”
“Not yet. Is quiet on de river. But I guess de gunboats are on dere way. Son of a bitch, it look like we got to fight de whole British Empire. Why do dey take such trouble to beat down a few thousand métis?”
Gatling knew Dumont was talking to himself; the questions he asked didn’t require an answer.
Unable to get at the Government, Dumont turned his anger on the hard-working blacksmiths. “Fuckeen lazy idiots, dey don’t get de job done real quick, I break dere balls. I wrap de chain around dere neck and throw dem in de fuckeen river.”
“They’re nearly finished,” Gatling said, trying to calm him down.
“I guess you are right,” Dumont said gloomily. “Goddamn chains! Getting dem across de river got to be de worst part of dis whole ting. Is a lousy, dangerous job, but it have to be done. We don’t get de chains up in time, de gunboats can just sail right up close to Batoche and blow it to bits.”
Gatling said nothing; there was nothing to say. But he knew that unless the gunboats were stopped, that was exactly what they would do.