Slowly Colonel Chivington obeyed Bleek’s order. The heavy cavalry revolver, with its belt and holster, thudded to the earthen floor. Preacher carefully kicked it aside. But in the moment that he did so, Sergeant Skemp dived for his carbine resting against the fireplace. Once more he was too late. Roman Nose instantly swung the barrel of his rifle, striking the sergeant across the shins just as his fingers clutched the carbine. The trooper’s feet were knocked out from under him and he fell heavily, hitting his head against the stone corner of the fireplace. He lay motionlessly on the floor, either dead or unconscious.
“Preacher,” said Chivington, white-lipped, “if Sergeant Skemp is dead, so are you. If he is only hurt and these Indians are known hostiles, which I assume they are, then I am going to put you in a federal prison for the rest of your natural life.” He paused, the seething fury of a proud and ruthless commander still paling his face. “Only,” he said, “you won’t find it a very natural life, Bleek. I will see to that. Now put that rusty horse pistol away and unbar that door for my men. You are under arrest.”
Nehemiah Bleek shook his head. “It’s been said, Colonel, that you don’t cherish the idea of taking prisoners. That being so, I don’t cherish the idea of being taken prisoner by you. Fur thermore, Mashane,” he said with meaningful emphasis, “let me advise you that, if you were to try to put in arrest those two Indians by the fire, you would be killed instanter. In fact, sir, I’m not even convinced I can hold them off of you in any event. Your only chance…and you’d better hold to it hard, Colonel…is to order off those men waiting outside. These Indians are northerns, as you have guessed. They don’t have a treaty with the government, and to them Mashane is a foul word.”
Chivington now was so beyond himself with anger that he whirled about on Bleek, ignoring the latter’s cocked pistol. At once, both Roman Nose and Picking Tooth leaped up from the hearth and came after him, closing on his rear like two red wolves. Their rush was as silent as it was deadly. Bleek saw them in time to cry out stridently in Cheyenne that they must not kill Mashane at any cost. It was a tribute to the profound friendship of the Cheyenne people for the proprietor of the Horse Creek school that the savage warriors obeyed him.
Shifting their rifles from firing to clubbing position, they swung them against the back and shoulders of Chivington, driving the giant cavalryman to his knees, dazed and shocked.
Bleek knew, however, that the killing blood was up in his dangerous guests. He had not been deceiving Chivington in his doubts of controlling the wild visitors from high Wyoming. The hated Mashane’s life was still within the crushing drive of either of their rifle butts.
“Maheo be thanked,” he told the warriors in Cheyenne. “You are true friends. Quickly, now, we must save the children and save ourselves. There is no time to think of Mashane or his sergeant. It is our own lives we must worry about.”
“What are we to do?” asked Roman Nose.
“Yes,” said Picking Tooth, “what? Those soldiers out there will kill us. There are too many of them. We can’t fight them. They will corner us in here and send for more soldiers and we are dead in the end, anyway.” He turned to Roman Nose. “I say kill Mashane, Maox. When will we have another such chance?”
“I agree with you,” said Roman Nose. “What is your idea, Preacher? You had better hurry with it.”
In a lull of the wind, they all heard the voices of the soldiers growing louder outside. Next instant the door was tried, and, when it did not yield, Sergeant Durant knocked sharply on it and called for Chivington’s further orders.
Chivington, head clearing now, stumbled to his feet. The Cheyennes turned wild. The excitement of Durant’s pounding on the door, the plain intent of Chivington to answer that pounding, to unbar the door—he was starting for it even then—proved too much for nervous systems conditioned to kill or escape at the hated cry of pony soldiers.
Roman Nose’s deep voice was a hoarse snarl. “Get out of the way, Preacher,” he raged. “We are going to kill Mashane. Get down, get down…!”
Bleek leaped in behind Chivington and struck him across the back of the head with the barrel of the horse pistol. The huge officer buckled and slid to the floor, but he was not unconscious. Like some great felled ox he began to stumble once more to his feet. Bleek was astride him instantly, jamming the pistol against his temple.
“Colonel, if you don’t stay down and you don’t do precisely what I say, those Indians will kill both of us.”
From somewhere, Chivington regained the clarity of mind to understand the danger he was in. Both Roman Nose and Picking Tooth were telling the Preacher to get away from Mashane, that they were going to shoot him. The Indians had a wild sound in their voices, a wild look in their glittering black eyes.
“All right, all right!” the officer cried out. “Durant!”
“Sir? What’s the matter?” the soldier answered from outside.
“Shut up, Durant!” Chivington shook his head, clearing away the remaining webs of confusion. “They’ve taken me hostage in here. Do whatever they say.”
“They, sir?”
“Preacher Bleek. Do what he tells you. If I come to harm, charge him. He incited these Indians in here. They jumped us.”
“Is Skemp…?”
“Skemp’s unconscious or dead, I don’t know. One of the Indians hit him. Talk to Bleek.”
But Preacher did not wait for Durant. He spoke first and rapidly to the Cheyennes. After a moment, the two warriors lowered their rifles and moved away from Chivington. The officer got to his feet. He weaved a little, but seemed to have recovered himself enough to understand his situation.
Roman Nose and Picking Tooth had him under guard. There was no doubt that they would fire into him at the first excuse. Yet, also, he could see that their killing urge had passed. He realized that this was the work of Preacher Bleek. The missionary had almost certainly saved his life twice within as many minutes. But it was the same Bleek who had put his life in jeopardy to begin with by permitting the Cheyennes to have their rifles under their blankets when admitting Chivington and his sergeant. In such a case, any white cavalry officer must proceed with extreme caution the rest of the way.
Accordingly Chivington asked Bleek for permission to sit down in the chair by the table where the missionary had his few work tools of teaching—two or three primary readers, an atlas, a picture-book geography, chalk, hand slate, erasers, his tattered old Bible—and, once seated, made no more resistance. “Sergeant Durant!” Bleek called to the soldier outside. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, sir, go ahead.”
“Where are your men?”
“I’ve stationed them around this building. You’re surrounded, Preacher. There had best no harm come to the colonel.”
“None will, if you do exactly as I tell you.”
“Is that so, Colonel?”
“Do as he says, damn you!” flared Chivington. “I’ve already given you that order.”
“Yes, sir. All right, Preacher.”
“Hold a moment,” said Bleek.
Turning to the Cheyennes guarding Chivington, he asked them if he could trust them to obey him now.
They looked at one another, thinking over the question. The truth of the matter was that, whether by courage or ignorance, by clever mind or simple one, the big white man had risked his life to save their lives. Any long-time fighters of the pony soldiers knew what penalty Preacher would pay for helping hostile Indians escape through holding Mashane hostage. When Roman Nose and Red Dust and Picking Tooth were all safely home in high Wyoming, Preacher would be hanging in the prairie wind by his neck from an Army scaffold outside the stockade at Fort Lyon.
“All right, Preacher,” said Roman Nose. “We will obey.”
Bleek at once turned to the door and told Sergeant Durant to come inside. The trooper hesitated and was ordered by Chivington to obey. Bleek admitted him and re-barred the door. He then pointed out concisely to the sergeant the position of his commander. Durant was an intelligent man. He nodded quickly, and Bleek continued.
Safe passage must be granted the two warriors and the boy. They were on a friendly visit and could not be surrendered to Colonel Chivington. The sergeant would understand this, of course. Again Durant nodded. Chivington said nothing, but the look he gave his sergeant was enough. Here was a man who very plainly, or at least properly, did not subscribe to the no prisoner philosophy of his commander. That understanding nod of Durant’s to the impossibility of giving over Indian captives to Colonel John Chivington was going to cost him his chevrons, and perhaps a great deal more. But the colonel wisely kept his anger to himself, and listened with Durant to Bleek’s proposal.
With the Cheyennes, the latter now said, must go Chivington himself. This was only to make ironclad the assurances to the Cheyennes that the soldiers would attempt no pursuit. To protect Chivington, Bleek would also go with the Indians. Durant would stay behind in command of the troops at the mission. Trusting Durant, Bleek would give him the exact destination of the retreating Cheyennes—the big southern camp on the Black Butte Fork of the Smoky Hill River—but would caution the sergeant at the same time to bear in mind that this confidence was not blind generosity. It was a calculated risk. Not only Colonel Chivington, but also the reputation of the 3rd Colorado was being held for ransom.
If the patrol stayed in the field until it had Chivington safely back, who need ever know of the affair? But what if the patrol, or some member thereof, should return to the base camp at Bijou Basin to report the incident, or to seek reinforcements toward its revenge? How would it benefit the 3rd Colorado to have it known that Colonel John Chivington and an entire scout patrol of his brand-new volunteer cavalry had been outwitted by a jackleg preacher, two visiting Cheyennes, and a small boy? How would such knowledge affect the 3rd’s relationships with such as Major Anthony, Agent Colley, Governor Evans, or General Curtis and the Department of the Platte? What would be the result for Skemp and Durant? For Colonel Chivington? For the men themselves?
As for Nehemiah Bleek, he realized the implications of his own part in the night’s work. He wanted only for Durant to know—for the record—that he had done what he had done solely to prevent the murder of Chivington by the Cheyenne hostiles he had surprised at The Cottonwoods. Beyond this statement, Bleek had no defense.
Skemp had been unconscious during the critical actions. He could bear witness neither for nor against Preacher’s story. Only Chivington himself knew the truth, and Bleek would never expect him to testify against his own cause in any military court that might try the Horse Creek missionary for what Chivington had already promised him would be a hanging offense. The simple fact was that Bleek could not trust his life to the mercy of Mashane, any more than he could the lives of his Cheyenne friends. Neither, and indeed above all, could he or would he entrust the lives of his children to this wicked man. He believed that Chivington was possessed. He understood now why the Cheyennes called him Mashane. Bleek paused, studying both Durant and Chivington.
The commander of the 3rd was breathing heavily. He looked at Bleek with sick fury. His massive face was the bad color of a fish belly. His eyes were fixed, staring. Durant was sweating profusely. He was also ill, but in another and normal way; he was sick with fear of his commanding officer.
Bleek knew that the matter had come down to the last question. “Well, Colonel?” he said.
Chivington, his mind on the quality of mercy to be expected from his Cheyenne guards, told Durant to proceed.
The sergeant called in the men from the outside, had them stack their arms, and stand away from them. Then Chivington informed them of the terms under which Bleek would attempt to leave the mission with the Cheyennes. There were threats and muttered hardnesses at this, but the huge officer said that he was briefing them and not soliciting support. He made the men see, far better than Preacher might have done, why it was to the advantage of all of them to accept the plan for the safe passage of the hostiles. The troopers were not dull-spirited regulars. Local men, they had seen much of the Cheyennes, could appreciate their colonel’s agreement to go along with the crazy Preacher’s hostage suggestion. Moreover, they read between the words of Chivington’s instructions to co-operate with Preacher Bleek, the message of hatred and vengeance that the 3rd would one day wreak on the Horse Creek schoolmaster and his red friends. Chivington was as well known to his men as he was to the Indian mothers who hid their children at the whisper of the name Mashane. The colonel was utterly without compassion. From the hour of his release near the Cheyenne village over on the Smoky Hill, the hunt for Preacher Ne-hemiah Bleek would begin. Nor would it end until the Horse Creek missionary had been tracked down and executed.
But the men, lacking a spokesman, still hesitated. They were not convinced how Chivington meant his orders to be obeyed. Sergeant Durant, who might have supplied the momentum for acceptance, refused the responsibility. Preacher Bleek had read him correctly. He was a decent man and no fanatic where Indians were concerned. His instinct here was to do exactly what his commanding officer ordered him to do, and volunteer nothing. Accordingly he stood rigidly facing the men, back to Chivington. If he were doing anything, it was praying that Ne-hemiah Bleek knew these fierce red people as well as local legend said he did. Chivington did not miss this deliberate obduracy on the part of his second sergeant. Noting it, however, was all that he could then do. The situation continued at stalemate and the hard-eyed hostiles with the rifles were becoming extremely nervous again.
Bleek barked something at the Indians in Cheyenne, then wheeled on Chivington. “Better make it an order to get this thing moving, Colonel, and make it quick.”
He spoke quietly, but the officer was not misled by that. He merely nodded and said: “All right, men, this is an order. Do exactly what Bleek tells you.”
The troopers eyed one another, shuffled their feet. Some saluted, others merely nodded, or waved awkwardly.
Chivington shifted his glance to the unhappy Durant.
“Sergeant,” he said, “you will be in charge here, as agreed, and will be responsible in my absence. Have you any questions?”
Durant turned and saluted. “No, sir,” he said.
Chivington nodded with evident satisfaction. When he spoke to Nehemiah Bleek, the disquieting chill of his original stalking entrance had returned. “Very well, Preacher,” he said evenly, “do your damnedest.”
The children, of course, were long since awake. To get them dressed and ready to depart took only a few minutes. While Sunflower, the seven-year-old “mother” of the group, supervised this phase of the abandonment, without anyone telling him Red Dust began to help the children. Rather, he began to help Sunflower help them.
The little Arapaho girl was not giggling now, and the Cheyenne boy appreciated this. It was a good kind of girl who could work hard and be serious when that was what had to be. Red Dust thought it was remarkable that a young child could laugh so easily one moment, and be so grown-up and efficient the next. But he had only started to learn about little Soxoenos, the Arapaho Sunflower.
It was true that Preacher had only told the children they were going on a surprise visit to the big Cheyenne camp on the Smoky Hill. As a result, the mood of the youngsters, while sleepyeyed—until they saw all the pony soldiers in the big room—was nevertheless the usual mood of children going on any kind of journey. There was a lot of chattering and tussling and failure to pay attention to the work at hand. How many times in such a young life would one be awakened in the middle of the night and told to get ready to go and see one’s Indian kinfolk far away on the great Smoky Hill River? But Red Dust took charge of this nonsense and the mission tots, all of less years than he, and most impressed with this slim wild cousin from the north country they obeyed him and got all of their things piled on the floor and ready to be loaded.
While Red Dust and Sunflower did this work, troopers under Sergeant Durant were hooking up the mission wagon and bringing it around in front for loading. This vehicle, canvas topped and gaunt-ribbed as some bleaching buffalo skeleton, had been suffering the pangs of age when the Santa Fé trade was still flourishing. From whence Preacher Bleek had rescued and restored the old prairie schooner, no man could say. How it continued to roll over the plains without accident was another unanswered mystery. “A matter of faith,” was Bleek’s explanation, and scarcely arguable at that. Certain it was that its shabby age would have discouraged even a wolf hunter or hide hauler. Its wheels were bowed in the front, cow-hocked in the rear. Its hickory running gear and bed frame, yellow pine bed and siding, ironwood tongue and whiffletrees all were warped and shrunken and bleached and blasted by the snows and sands of a thousand journeys over rock and river and desert. It was not a real wagon but the ghost of a hundred Conestogas broken or burned or abandoned along the Arkansas Road since William Bent had built his fort and opened the country to the white man some thirty-five winters gone.
But if the Argonaut, as Bleek had named the old wagon, was ancient and questionable of pedigree, the teams that towed it through the seas of buffalo grass surrounding Horse Creek would, by comparison, make the Argonaut a thing of grace and loveliness. The wheelers were called the Kiowa Ladies. A set of twin Indian foals, they had been travois animals among the Kiowas when acquired by Bleek. Smoky white in color, freckled and speckled, rat-tailed and -maned, they had been together since being dropped on the prairie by their wild dam, and to attempt to separate them for any reason was tantamount to war. They would bite, kick, fall down, roll over, squeal, attack any adult on foot and within reach—save for Preacher Bleek—and were guilty of but one softness toward humanity, an abiding love for small Indian children. Bleek had named them Salome and Sheba.
The leaders were Samson and Delilah, the former a giant black Spanish jack, the latter a diminutive piebald Comanche jenny with one sky-blue and one canary-yellow eye. Samson wore his mane unroached because Bleek believed that cutting it might sap the jack’s enormous strength. The bristles of this fearful crest stood straight on end and were no less than an arrow length in height. So black and so vast was Samson that all who saw him vowed he was no male jackass but a Percheron mule sired out of some settlement plow mare by Satan’s own Spanish jack. In temper toward mankind, the Spanish jack and the Comanche jenny were the equals of Salome and Sheba.
Trusting no man beyond Nehemiah Bleek, they were like affectionate camp dogs with the mission children.
This, then, was the caravan of Preacher Bleek and his unwanted orphans of the Argonaut, the ark in which they would now set sail through the stormy dark toward the Smoky Hill River and whatever of God’s will awaited them in that distant place. Bleek understood that he would never see his school again—or had to guess, at least, that he would not.
In the final moment of his arrangements with Durant and Chivington, something had happened to guarantee this unhappy likelihood. Skemp had regained consciousness.
With Skemp recovered, Durant was detailed to accompany Chivington as a fellow hostage, “to provide added security against Indian treachery.” Bleek felt that he could not argue this change except at the price of losing his tenuous control over Roman Nose and Picking Tooth. But he had known in the moment of Skemp’s leering acknowledgment of Chivington’s parting advice to “take care of things” at the mission, that all he had counted on of decency from Durant was doomed. The hope for a realistic delivery of the captive officer, with no senseless deviltry thrown in, had vanished.
Skemp was of the vigilante breed. Like Chivington. He had no stake in the land. He felt no love of hearth. No need to build and defend a home. Skemp and his kind were freebooters, soldiers of fortune. They were on the Arkansas to find a fortune or to thieve one from someone else. They sought to adventure merely for the sake of helling and hard riding. They warred against a nomad people who had no modern firearms, a people of no military organization, no common leadership, no tribal bond save blood, no mutual creed beyond love of freedom and native heath. But Skemp’s kind, as Chivington’s, would leave the land when they had violated it; they never stayed on to rebuild, to pay back, to belong. Knowing this, Ne-hemiah Bleek made the preparations for departing The Cottonwoods guided by his assessment of 1st Sergeant Skemp.
Into the Argonaut went all of the school’s robes and blankets, and a hay mattress for each child. What supplies Bleek had on hand of foodstuffs were also stowed aboard. Into the buffalo-hide ’possum belly slung under the wagon went the mission’s tools, all of the shovels, axes, saws, adzes—everything of use that Bleek had made or traded for in his lonely years on Horse Creek. In the side box by the water barrel were packed the few books and other meager trappings of his teaching, barring only his dog-eared Bible, which he put in the bosom of his bear-skin winter coat. The children were the last of the cargo, and to judge from the good cheer and the Cheyenne banter with which the brawny missionary helped them over the tailgate and into the tumbled mountain of robes and hay pallets within the canvased cavern of the old wagon’s bed, it could be assumed that the Smoky Hill visit was as innocent as the prairie orphans had been told.
A closer look at the broad, bearded face, when the last child was loaded and the tailgate tarp drawn closed against the lashing rain, would have shown the harsher truth. It was not an easy thing for Nehemiah Bleek to say good bye to The Cottonwoods. A part of his life had gone into this crossroads of the wilderness. That part would stay here when he now turned away; it would be buried there at The Cottonwoods, unmarked and unmourned, but it would be a part of the crazy preacher from Horse Creek, and it would be dead.
“Preacher,” called the strained voice of Sergeant Durant, “we had best be going! Your Indians look to be getting edgy again.”
Bleek went around to the front of the wagon. All seemed in readiness. Astride Samson sat Colonel Chivington. The black Spanish jack was Bleek’s own saddle mount, and a fit brute to bear such a burden as Mashane. Flanking Chivington were Roman Nose and Picking Tooth, astride borrowed cavalry horses. The hostage’s hands were free, but his booted feet were tied beneath Samson’s hairy belly. The Cheyennes rode with their rifles held across the pommels of their saddles. The range between them and the commander of the 3rd Colorado was powder burn close. Any desperation move by the captive to free himself, or by his troopers to do so, would carry the certainty of blasting gunfire into the colonel’s back.
As though to remind of this guarantee, Roman Nose kept cocking and uncocking his rifle in cadence with a prayer chant monotone that Chivington found more chilling than the November rain. On the passenger side of the wagon seat, Sergeant Durant waited with vast unease. He was not restrained in any way except as he might be sobered by the 238-pound presence of Nehemiah Bleek on the driver’s seat beside him. Yet he found this bond as effective as his commander did the cocking click of Roman Nose’s rifle hammer.
Making a last examination of these preparations now, Bleek nodded and commenced to climb up to take the lines. As he did so, Sunflower’s small voice called urgently to him in Cheyenne. Bleek stopped and smote himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand, despairing of his stupidity. He had forgotten the dog.
Going back to the brute’s kennel by the mission door, he released the animal but kept his chain firmly in hand. Only when he had returned to the wagon and re-chained the Cheyenne wolf dog to the tailgate, did he feel easy. The dog had an Indian name and deserved it. It was Hokomenònika, Lamewolf.
Lamewolf had been crippled in a white man’s spring-jaw trap when young. Since that time, he had hated the scent and the sight of the veho, the pale-eyed men. It was not safe to release him in the presence of white men. Bleek he would tolerate, even partially trust. But his major love was reserved for the little Arapaho girl, Sunflower. For her, his savagery turned to total servitude. His wildness became that of a lap puppy, his ugly temper no fiercer than a dove’s. Bleek believed that this was because both Sunflower and Lamewolf had been injured by the white man. “Made to limp,” as the bearded Preacher put it, “in the same hard track of life.” For whatever reason, the wolf dog was the slave of Sunflower. “Watch after him,” he told the little girl. “See he doesn’t jump in the wagon and get everything all wet.”
He spoke in English now. He did that with Sunflower, who was his pet and pride, and a fast learner who could understand and speak the white man’s tongue in only three years with scarcely a trace of Indian gutturals. That is, she could if she wished. But Sunflower was a very independent little person. Right then she answered Preacher in a chatter of thickvoweled Cheyenne that sounded as though she had never been a day away from the cowhide lodges of her northern nomad kinfolk.
“Heathen!” growled the big missionary, and turned and went back up to the front of the wagon.
Again he had one foot on the hub of the wheel. And again he struck himself on the forehead with exasperation. “Hold a moment, friend,” he signed to Sergeant Durant, who was holding the lines for him. “I must be getting old. Be patient, and don’t try anything with those Cheyennes. I’ve forgot the medical supplies.”
Returning to the school, he entered the main room. It was by agreement deserted, the troopers of the patrol being con fined by barred door to the dormitory. Bleek had given them a small axe and said not to start chopping their way out until the caravan was clear of Horse Creek. This was, of course, to assure the Argonaut sufficient start to disappear in the rainy darkness before any immediate pursuit might be mounted by Skemp. Such, anyway, was the faith of Preacher Bleek.
Crossing the darkened room now, he approached what he had taught his Indian children to call his “padlocked Holy Medicine cabinet”. In reality, this was an old cast-iron stage depot safe locked with a combination. Where Bleek had come upon it was one of his several state secrets. The safe’s contents, however, were well known.
Spinning the numbered dial, Preacher swung open the safe door, reached in, and brought forth the nearly forgotten treasure of medicinal spirits. He raised the bottle for a fond moment to the firelight, so that the dying glow could show him the beatitude of the soul-restoring legend blazoned on its side—Old Crow. Then he put it to his lips and took a single unpausing and prodigious draft. He stood a moment permitting the great jolt of the whiskey to invade his toes, his fingertips, the last grateful vacuoles of his weary brain.
“Ahhhh!” He smiled, and put the bottle inside the bear-skin coat with his Bible. Blowing out the smoky oil lamp on the schoolmaster’s table, he went out into the raw bluster of the night cheerfully whistling a march-step chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
The rain had slowed to a tinny drumming on the wagon’s canvas top. Its steady sound soon lulled the last child—but one—to an untroubled sleep. Red Dust could not shut his eyes. He sat by the tailgate, peering out through the pucker hole, thinking of a hundred ways in which he might escape. It must be, he thought, fully three wagon rides to the Smoky Hill River. Three entire days and nights imprisoned in that little rolling lodge? With those seven little children giggling and roughing around? And that foolish small Arapaho girl grinning at him and blinking those great black eyelashes of hers and sliding her fingers into his and patting him on the knee and advising him—him, Red Dust, the nephew of Roman Nose!—not to worry, that she would see that no harm came to him? Eotohesso; it was amazing.
But Red Dust’s wonderment over Sunflower was only in its most innocent stage. He had no more than thought of the little Arapaho girl when he felt her hand touch his and heard the suppressed sound of her contagious giggle. She put a finger to her lips, warning him to make no noise. Then she slid past him and wriggled out the pucker hole of the wagon. Popping his head out of the pucker hole, he saw the girl lying half over the shelf-like box Preacher had built onto the Argonaut’s rear as a sort of baggage boot similar to the ones on the stagecoaches that plied the Arkansas Road. Red Dust thought that surely she would fall and be hurt, and could not imagine what she was doing. As he hesitated, he saw her begin to slip, and without thinking he leaned out and seized her ankles to hold her up. This brought another giggle and in a moment she had twisted back up atop the baggage box and was holding up the harness snap and the pinion end of the dog chain that fastened Lame-wolf to the wagon’s rear.
In the next breath the great shaggy brute had leaped up on the box, joining Sunflower. From here, the Arapaho girl ordered him to jump in through the pucker hole and he obeyed, landing very nearly in Red Dust’s lap. Once inside, the freed wolf dog shook his burden of mud and rain all over the rear compartment of the Argonaut. Sunflower now followed him in through the pucker hole, while Red Dust was still spitting muddy water out of his mouth and saying things in Cheyenne that no nice boy should ever say in front of a little girl.
Sunflower, a creature of impartial good heart, patted Lame-wolf on the head with one hand and Red Dust on the head with the other hand.
“You are both good boys,” she said. “Now we can all go to sleep. My friend, Lamewolf, won’t be wet and muddy any more.
Thank you, Cheyenne boy, for holding onto my feet. We always bring Lamewolf into the wagon when Preacher isn’t looking. Happy sleep to you.”
Red Dust said nothing. Perhaps it was as well. If Sunflower’s friend, Lamewolf, was no longer wet and muddy, her friend, Red Dust, was very much so.
Now, in truth, Preacher Bleek did not know what lay ahead. They had come four miles through the night with no mishap and that was a thing for which to be thankful. The rain had stopped and the stars were out. On the seat beside him Sergeant Durant sat like a man of wood. He had spoken no word, nor had Bleek, since the outset. Preacher knew that the soldier was thinking very hard about something, and would talk when he was ready to do so.
But presently the clouds returned, blotting out the stars. The temperature fell ten degrees in as many minutes. It began to snow. The flakes were hard and small and stung the skin like needles. Durant glanced nervously ahead, where Chiving-ton rode on black Samson. Then he leaned close to Bleek.
“I want to talk, Preacher,” he said, “but I don’t know how to commence.”
Bleek nodded quietly. “It will come to you…just continue to think on it.”
Durant returned the nod, but his mind remained troubled and his tongue mute. He was a soldier, and had joined up to ride against these hostiles that Preacher befriended. He was a family man, with three young ones and a fine wife. These Indians, some of them like these very Cheyennes of Bleek’s, were killers. They did attack homes like his and Durant had no sympathy for them. Neither did he think that Preacher was right in shielding them, or in harboring their young ones. The Indian kids were in fact red nits, just like the colonel said, and they would grow up to make hostile lice the same as Chivington vowed they would. At least they would, unless the daft Preacher actually could redeem them with his far-fetched idea of educating them to behave like white folks, or to get by with the white folks. And Sergeant Durant had no more real illusions on this latter score than did his grim commander, or than Sergeant Skemp, or any of the wet and cold troopers locked in Bleek’s dormitory room back at the schoolhouse. But it was not Bleek and his orphans that bothered Durant, and that prevented him from talking to the big missionary.
What bothered him was Colonel J.M. Chivington. He knew the man. He had known him for a considerable time. There was little about Chivington, an ordained minister of the Methodist Church, that deceived the quiet 2nd sergeant of the scout patrol. The fact that the cavalry officer could be called preacher by rights, whereas Nehemiah Bleek was only a self-declared man of God, did not change a thing. When Chiving-ton put on that uniform and that long sword, he was no man of any god. And when he grew silent and abandoned his usual angry way, he was thinking of just one thing—revenge. In the present case, it was Preacher Bleek who had humbled him, and, unless Providence intervened, Durant knew what had to happen to Preacher Bleek; Chivington would kill him.
One thing might save Nehemiah Bleek. That would be if Durant could talk to him and convince him to let Chivington go, and to flee for his own life, then and there, never returning to Colorado Territory. But the miles fell away; the snow deepened. Preacher Bleek was forced to halt and make camp in the shelter of some scrub timber, and the opportunity was lost.
Once in camp, with the cold eyes of Colonel Chivington on him, the simple-hearted soldier could not bring himself to speak to the Horse Creek missionary. Durant knew the price of being caught at such merciful work by his commander. Chivington would destroy him as quickly as he would destroy Ne-hemiah Bleek, or any man alive who might stand in the way of Mashane’s vengeance.
Next morning, the skies had blown clear. The air was sharp and winey. Only an additional light blanket of snow, enough to make a fairyland for the children of the prairie’s ordinary dreariness, had fallen during the night. The start from the shelter camp was made in as good spirit as was possible under the onus of Mashane’s continuing refusal to talk to anyone save Sergeant Durant, and only to the trooper privately.
Some changes were made by Bleek in the march order soon after setting out. He had been watching the skyline to the rear, toward Horse Creek. Reaching an elevation above the creek’s drainage a mile to the east, he was given a better view. At once he stopped the teams.
The greasy tumor of smoke growing against the raw blue of the morning sky to the west ballooned and burst higher even as he was swinging down from the driver’s box. He said nothing but trudged up to where Chivington sat watching the smoke from Samson’s back. The giant cavalryman had an expression on his face that would have maddened a saint. And Nehemiah Bleek was not canonized. Nevertheless, he kept his own voice and attitude as quiet and controlled as Chivington’s had been.
“Colonel,” he said, “is that Skemp’s work, or yours?”
“A good man, Skemp.” Chivington licked his thin lips. “He knows what to do.”
“Is that your answer, Colonel? Is that why you left Skemp behind, rather than Durant? To burn my school?”
Chivington looked down at him. His features were contorted but the voice was calm. “Damn you, Bleek,” he said. “Get on with it.”
By this time Roman Nose and Picking Tooth were crowding their ponies in more closely. In Cheyenne they inquired of Preacher if something were wrong. Bleek told them that it was a thing between Mashane and himself.
The Indians nodded and touched their fingers to their foreheads, respecting their good friend’s answer. Roman Nose said in his wonderfully deep voice: “We are sorry about your school, Preacher. We know what it is to see the black smoke of a man’s lodge rolling against the sky. If you wish it, Preacher, we will kill him for you right here.”
Bleek thanked him, saying that such a thing could not be done in front of the children. To this, Picking Tooth observed that the pony soldiers did it all the time in front of the Cheyenne children. He suggested that Preacher reconsider his charity toward Mashane.
“Let us shoot him for you, Preacher,” he urged. “I would like to have that wolf-skin coat of his. It’s going to be colder very soon, and Maox and I did not come south with warm enough things to wear. Move to one side just a bit more, eh?”
Again Bleek declined, explaining that Mashane’s whole value was as a living pawn in their risky game against the rest of the pony soldiers. He was all, really, that could get them safely across the plain to the Smoky Hill. As warriors, how could they argue this matter?
They could not, Roman Nose admitted. “Go ahead,” he told Bleek. “Do it in your own way.”
Bleek ordered Durant to drive the wagon. He himself would go on foot ahead of the caravan, scouting the way. Picking Tooth would ride back on the trail to watch for Skemp and the patrol. To be sure that the troopers would see that Chivington was alive and in good condition, the officer would be taken off Samson and made to walk out ahead of the wagon teams. This time his feet would be freed and his hands bound, with a rope running from his hands to the horn of Roman Nose’s saddle. And across that saddle horn would still be the rifle of the Cheyenne warrior. In all of this, of course, the white names of the two braves were not used, all talk being in Cheyenne and using the northern names Maox and Kovohe. Bleek well understood the excitement the legendary Cheyenne warrior’s name would have created in Chivington and the troopers of the 3rd Colorado—knowledge that might easily have altered the entire complexion of the 3rd’s conduct. It might still do so, if carelessly disclosed. It was God’s own grace, the Horse Creek man thought, that neither Roman Nose nor Picking Tooth spoke a word of English. Their comprehension of Bleek’s Cheyenne, however, was perfect. Instantly they obeyed his new orders, if not exactly. The big missionary had said nothing of pulling Chivington off Samson so suddenly and so hard that the huge officer would fall under the Spanish jack and get himself stepped on by 1,200 pounds of black jackass. Nor had he specified where Picking Tooth should jab Mashane with his rifle muzzle in encouraging that officer to rise up out of the snow and present his hands for binding. Neither was it in Preacher’s instructions that the henchman of Roman Nose should peel Chivington’s fine wolfskin winter coat from his back and don it himself before remounting to ride off on his rear scout. But Preacher did not intervene.
The Indians were being Indians now. They were working at their own trade—war—and for Bleek or any white man to halt them at its rough interplay would be more than foolish. Bleek would have said nothing had they wanted to strip Colonel Chivington to his long-handled underdrawers. Just so they did not harm him, or inflame their mercurial tempers, or decide in the impetuously direct manner of their nomad kind simply to knock in the head of the hated pony soldier chief and be done with the entire business. This was all that Ne-hemiah Bleek could pray for—that he could continue to protect the life of John Chivington—and it was all that he was thinking of right then.
When, at last, Picking Tooth was gone and Roman Nose had the rope on Chivington, Bleek went to the rear of the wagon. There he unfastened Lamewolf from his chain.
Seeing Sunflower and Red Dust watching him from the tailgate, he grinned and reached inside the pocket of his coat. Sunflower understood what the gesture meant, and sent up a signal squeal that brought Blackbird, Young Buzzard, and the others all tumbling to hang and shout over the tailgate. Preacher knew the mystery of making rock candy. From his white sugar and certain other veho magic, he fashioned these gleaming crystals of pure happiness and, on such rare occasions, out would come the ancient gold poke in which he carried the treasure.
Now, giving each child a portion, he told them to be good and not to stray from the wagon. He was going to take Lame-wolf and go out hunting. If he did not tell them for what he would hunt, perhaps it was wisdom, perhaps only oversight. In any event, the gift of candy crystals was sufficient to cover his retreat back to the head of the wagon. There, he told Durant to kick off the brake and go forward, following the same buffalo trail they had been taking on the previous night. Moving on up to the lead team, he smuggled a lump of the rock candy to black Samson without his mate Delilah seeing the reward.
As the Spanish jack rolled his wicked eyes and puckered his ape-like lips in pleasure, Bleek reached up and bent down one of the ragged hairy ears.
“That’s for stepping on Mashane,” he whispered, and, before Samson could even grunt in reply, he was gone on past Roman Nose and Chivington in a swinging dog trot, Lamewolf loping by his side.
On the wagon seat of the Argonaut, Sergeant Durant watched the big man and the wolf dog dwindle against the snow-bright swell of the prairie. Behind him, in the wagon’s covered bed, the Indian and half-blood children laughed and tussled among the buffalo robes. But, behind them, the smoke from the burning mission school on Horse Creek still rolled, black and ugly, against the lovely stillness of the morning sky. And somewhere between that smoke and those children Sergeant Skemp would be riding with his Indian-hating scout force of 3rd Colorado Cavalry.
Suddenly Sergeant Durant wished very much that he had found the will to warn Preacher Bleek. But maybe there was yet time. Maybe he could find the way and the will at the next stopping place, the next camp spot. Maybe he could, if Skemp did not find that place or that spot before they did.
They continued toward the Smoky Hill, watching for Skemp and the patrol. By noon halt, when no pursuit had developed and there was no news of Picking Tooth, Bleek was growing increasingly aware that something had gone wrong. He was forced to curtail his forward scouting because of his fears that Roman Nose might kill Chivington, or that the officer and Durant might make some try to get the big Cheyenne. As Roman Nose spoke and understood no English, the two white men could easily converse over his head to set a concerted effort of some kind.
When Picking Tooth still had not appeared after an hour’s uneasy wait, the march order had to be changed once more. Chivington was bound hand and foot and placed in the bed of the wagon. Durant was manacled to the wagon seat with a set of rusted old Spanish leg irons that Bleek dug out of his toolbox. He could not move more than three feet in any direction. Preacher took the reins once more. The boy, Red Dust, and the little Arapaho girl, Sunflower, were told to take Lamewolf and go ahead of the wagon, letting the savage Cheyenne wolf dog smell out the way.
“I will have to tell you what it is we are hunting now,” Bleek advised them. “We are hunting pony soldiers.” He stepped to Red Dust and put his big freckled hand on the slender youth’s shoulder. “The girl goes along only to handle the dog,” he explained. “You are the warrior.”
“Haho, thank you,” said the boy, the first words he had spoken directly to Nehemiah Bleek.
The Horse Creek man further admonished the lad that he was to watch the dog constantly. At the first hint of the brute’s smelling soldiers, Red Dust and Sunflower were to turn about and race for the wagon. Preacher would decide what next to do at that time.
“In no circumstance,” he repeated, “are you to go forward once the dog has growled. Do you understand?”
“Hehe,” replied the boy. “Yes.”
It was then time for Roman Nose to depart. He was going back to look for his friend, Picking Tooth. In parting, he and Bleek could not know whether they would meet again, or whether either of them would ever see the other in that hard life, or if either one, for that matter, would see Picking Tooth alive and well again. Roman Nose rode his horse up to the wagon and sat him a moment, looking at Bleek. He was plainly framing words, but he was never the orator. He was a simple fighting man. He found words poor weapons. Finally he scowled and put out his hand as a white man would. Surprised, Bleek took the dark hand and shook it with great strength. He could feel the Indian returning his grip with equal emotion.
“Nataemhon,” said the burly red-bearded Preacher. “Good hunting.”
“Haho,” said the tall warrior. “Good hunting to you, also, Preacher.” He swung his horse to depart but held the mount in at the last moment, watching his nephew and the small Arapaho girl march away through the snow with Lamewolf on the chain. His fierce dark eyes moved back to study the homely broad features of Nehemiah Bleek.
“Preacher,” he said, “if I do not return, take the boy as your own son. Tell him that I said it.”
Without words, Bleek touched the fingers of his left hand to his forehead. The gesture was the Cheyenne bond. Nothing could break it.
Roman Nose nodded and turned his horse away.
In the nature of the country there was no hiding the passage of a tall-wheeled old prairie schooner. The swells of the land lay across their route. Each stream crossing meant two skyline etchings of the caravan, once going down to the water, once coming up away from it. And between Horse Creek and the Smoky Hill River were no less than nine such crossings.
Bleek’s only consolation was that these same conditions of unlimited visibility protected him from any trick by Skemp. There was no way in which the troops could get around the slow crawl of the Argonaut by daylight. What would happen during the darkness of the coming night was another matter, and one that Nehemiah Bleek was content to deal with when tomorrow’s sun came up. God, or Maheo, would take care of Preacher Bleek and his brood.
But the afternoon wore along with still no word from Picking Tooth or Roman Nose. The way now stretched unbrokenly toward their night’s camp spot, the fringe of timber on the middle fork of Rush Creek. Halting the teams, Bleek called in the children and Lamewolf. Both Red Dust and Sunflower were glad enough for the signal. They had walked nearly twenty miles, with no food and no fire to warm by, and the afternoon wind was beginning to rise.
“Turn the dog free,” Preacher told them, “and get in the wagon and rest. The road is clear now, and all downhill to wood and water. Not a pony soldier in sight all day.”
Too weary to ask questions, the children went to the tailgate and climbed over it. Even Red Dust, worried and afraid over the long absences of his fierce uncles, could not avoid the embrace of the wagon’s warmth. He was fast asleep in a dozen turns of the wheels. Sunflower slept beside him, and as soundly. Their hands were still clasped.
Preacher Bleek looked back at them from the driver’s seat. He nodded to himself, feeling strong and good in his heart. But then his eyes fell on the cold, impassive face of Colonel John Chivington regarding him from his prison place behind the wagon seat, and the good feeling vanished.
As the hours and miles creaked by, grave doubt came to Ne-hemiah Bleek. Perhaps he had made a bad mistake at the mission school. He thought he had acted to save the Indians from Chivington, and to save Chivington from the Indians. But now it seemed that what he had done might have been precisely the wrong thing. Might not Roman Nose and Picking Tooth and Red Dust have survived Chivington’s questioning and been permitted to stay at the school, to depart next day and in peace? No, Preacher knew better than that. Chivington had been as good as a dead man in that moment. But Roman Nose and Picking Tooth would have been dead men had they fired on Mashane.
In the end, it was Nehemiah Bleek who had taken the burden of decision from all three men, and placed it on his own broad shoulders. Now he was guiding the Argonaut down the long plane of the prairie to the middle fork of Rush Creek, and he was all alone. Picking Tooth was gone. Roman Nose was gone. Preacher Bleek was a dead man, unless some miracle should save him.
“Ho-shuh, ho-shuh!” he called to his teams. “Do not hurry, be easy as you go. Steady, steady!”
The Kiowa Ladies looked back at him. Samson and Delilah stared resentfully in their turns. Bleek, sensitive to all things four-footed, chuckled at the mixed looks of censure flung back at him. “Forgive it,” he told them, still in Cheyenne. “You are absolutely right, my friends. Take your own pace. You know what to do. I’m talking to the wind.”
The sound of his voice brought Lamewolf circling back in to the wagon. The big wolf dog ran alongside the wheelers, looking up at his master above. He growled in a way like that of no civilized dog. Bleek waved at him and answered, not with words but with a growl very like the brute’s own. Satisfied, Lamewolf barked and ran off. Bleek barked after him, the imitation so perfect yet so eerie in its animal sound that Chiving-ton, watching him uneasily, shook his massive head.
“Crazy,” he said aloud. “Bleek, you’re crazy.” Bleek glanced around. He appeared surprised rather than offended.
“Crazy, Colonel?” he said. “Me?”
He looked down at himself, puzzled, as though wondering what Chivington could be thinking. He still wore his long white nightshirt over his clothes, having had no time to remove it since pulling it on to make the cavalry patrol imagine it had roused him from his bed. Over the nightshirt, of course, he wore his bear-skin winter coat. Why not? It was cold.
As for that garment itself, fashioned for him by a Cheyenne squaw in gratitude for his extraction of a soldier bullet from her small son’s back, making the boy to walk again, it was certainly nothing to call a man crazy over. As a matter of fact, Bleek rather liked the way in which the woman had designed the sleeves with the bear’s forelegs and paws intact, and with the hind legs and stumpy tail dangling down in the back. How many winter coats along the Arkansas had rear legs and a tail? Was a man to be called crazy because, viewed in haste or ignorance, he might be taken for a two-legged grizzly bear in nightgown and cap with a War of 1812 flintlock pistol stuck in one pocket, a bag of rock candy and a bottle of bourbon whiskey in the other, a Bible snug at bosom, and smoking a foot-long Arapaho ceremonial pipe? Fair was fair.
“Colonel,” said Nehemiah Bleek, shaking his head in mild reproof, “I just don’t rightly see how you can call a man of my everyday, ordinary qualifications crazy!”
Roman Nose rode his borrowed cavalry horse very hard. Something was making the tall warrior apprehensive in his heart. Always a religious man, even a mystic among his people, the famed fighter was now feeling premonitions of naevhan, of death. The bad visions were of his old friend, Picking Tooth, and of the pony soldiers. Had Mashane’s men caught Kovohe? Was the dear companion of his youth already stiffening in the alien snows of the Arkansas, ten long sleeps from Wyoming and from home? Had he ridden into a soldier trap on the back trail of Preacher Bleek and the ancient prairie wagon? Why was everything so still now, as Roman Nose loped westward along the wagon’s tracks? Why had he not long ago seen the troopers following those same wagon tracks eastward? Where were those troopers? Had they not left the mission school of Preacher? Had they lied about following Mashane to Smoky Hill River? Were they rather fled back to the Bijou Basin main camp of the Colorado Cavalry? Who might say?
Roman Nose only knew that his heart was bad for the safety of his friend. He knew, as well, that something was quite wrong about the emptiness of Preacher’s back trail. Those men of Mashane’s were up to something. Roman Nose cursed himself for not shooting the narrow-eyed sergeant who had sought to put hands on Red Dust. His instinct had told him to do it, but his respect for Preacher had delayed his hand. Well, it was the last time Roman Nose would ever listen to a plea from a white man—even from Preacher.
The sad thing was that Indians and white men, no matter the goodness of their hearts toward one another, did not think of things in the same ways. What was good to an Indian, was evil to a white man. What a white man would accept with a smile, an Indian might greet with a gunshot or the slash of his knife. The white man kept talking about loving all brothers, the Indian and the white, the black and the Mexican, and sharing the good things of his wealth with his poorer neighbor. But when the Indians said “yes” to this, they could find no white man who would give up anything of his wealth to the Indian in return for the Indian’s generosity. The only time brotherhood was practiced by the white man was when the white man had nothing to give in exchange for the goods he expected the other man to give him. Preacher was a wise man who understood this failing of his fellows. But what the Horse Creek missionary did not seem to understand was that the Cheyennes had quite a different idea of brotherhood than Preacher had. The Indians believed that only the weak loved their enemies. Only the mad ones felt that their enemies could be changed into their friends by sweet words. The fighters ruled, and the Cheyennes were fighters. Yet where had war brought Roman Nose’s people? Had it led the white man to deal with honor with the Indian? It had not. When the red man at last came to him seeking that peace so widely offered by the white man, the white man raised his gun and shot the Indian dead. That was simply the way that things were: the white man hated all Indians, the red man hated all whites. It came in the end to the friendship of one man for another man of his own kind. Like the friendship of Kovohe and Roman Nose. Cheyenne to Cheyenne. Red brother to red brother. Same blood to same blood. There was no other defense against the white man’s wickedness in the names of peace and brotherhood.
Roman Nose raised his fierce head. His eyes stared ahead toward the distant embers of Preacher’s burned-out school. He thumped his heels into the ribs of the cavalry horse he was riding.
“Ensevao,” he said to the animal in Cheyenne. “Move faster. If we find my friend Kovohe dead, we will leave a white man dead in his place.”
Private Obie Jenks was not ordinarily an ambitious soldier. But that was beginning to change. Obie Jenks had finally carried out an important order on his own. He had burned down the Horse Creek school and he had done a fine job of it. It gave him his first feelings of the power of command.
Of course, in leaving him behind, Sergeant Skemp had told him exactly what to do. Skemp and the patrol had lit out the previous night, right after chopping free from the dormitory. The sergeant’s idea was to get around Preacher Bleek in the darkness. Then, when Preacher saw the smoke starting up next morning, he would think that the whole troop was just leaving to set out after him, after putting the torch to his place. At least that was Skemp’s plan to throw the big missionary off guard. And Skemp was smart. He was meaner than a badger, too. It made him the ideal sergeant for Colonel John Chiving-ton and that last part of it is what was getting to Obie Jenks as the forenoon wore on. Maybe now, blast it, Chivington would notice how bright Obie Jenks was, and give him a sergeant’s stripes and pay. This whole plot had depended on Jenks and he had surely burned down that orphans’ schoolhouse exactly on schedule. If Skemp caught up to and ambushed Preacher Bleek, the credit ought really to go to Private Obie Jenks—no, make that Sergeant Obie Jenks.
Presently the forenoon was gone and the fire was settled down to where the sills and the lintels of the little building were all that remained. The charred roof timbers had come down with a grand crash twenty minutes ago. It was time for Obie Jenks to get his horse out of Preacher’s barn and ride hard after Skemp and the patrol, as ordered.
But on entering the barn, he received a bad start when he thought he saw a human figure scuttle away into the cottonwood trees beyond the structure. Yet when he ran out to investigate, he saw nothing. Suddenly afraid, he hurried with the saddling. Maybe he should go for help rather than following the patrol. It would be a lot safer and it might be smarter, too. Obie Jenks was not quick of mind like his sergeant, but he was tricky and mean in the same manner. The opportunity for promotion waiting for the man who might be first to report Chivington’s capture to the Bijou encampment kept gnawing at Jenks’s imagination. Finally, when he swung up on his mount, it was the ominous stillness that hung with the smoke over the burned-out school that decided him. He had better run for his life. To follow Skemp was to risk running into hostile Cheyennes. For a lone soldier that would be certain death. Moreover, suppose they caught him here at the school? How would the Cheyennes feel about the cavalryman who had burned Preacher’s Indian orphanage? No, it was no good—Obie Jenks would ride for Bijou Basin.
And why not? The Cheyennes wouldn’t be thick in that direction and for a story for the officers he could say that the dirty redskins had set upon him at the mission—that he had been forced to retreat the one way that was open, toward Bijou Basin. He could then report the danger in which Chivington and his patrol stood—the danger from the huge band of hostiles that had jumped brave Obie Jenks all alone at the burned-out school—and Obie would get rated a hero, or at least get some sergeant’s stripes, or anyway $5 extra pay.
It was when he turned his gelding away from the school that Obie Jenks saw the Indian slide out of the cottonwoods beyond Bleek’s horse barn, and go skulking into that building. His first thought was one of intense fear, almost panic. But after he realized that the Indian had not seen him, Jenks’s newly discovered ambition overcame his natural cowardice. There was a much shorter ride he could make to earn those sergeant’s stripes. It was only back to that horse barn of Preacher’s. One Cheyenne scalp for three cavalry chevrons. It ought to make a fair exchange.
When the soldier disappeared beyond the trees, Picking Tooth came out of his hiding place in the brush near Bleek’s horse barn. The Cheyenne was glad that the trooper had left. He had certainly not wanted to harm the fellow. But he had wanted to get in close to the burned school so that he might study the tracks of the cavalry patrol leading away from the mission.
Right now all was fine. There were still enough hard tracks around the building to tell him that the main patrol had gone many hours before—long before that morning’s sun. He was able to see, also, in which direction the patrol had gone. It had turned down Horse Creek, south and east, rather than crossing the creek to take the old buffalo trail followed by Bleek and his orphans with the ancient Santa Fé wagon. This meant that Sergeant Skemp was cutting around the wagon, circling like a wolf. He was swinging wide to come back in again far ahead of Preacher and there to lie in wait for him when, all unwary, he came to that night’s camp. The only blessing in the matter was the fact that Picking Tooth was in time to return to Preacher with the warning. Or was he? The brave had forgotten the quick passage of the November daylight.
Now, reconsidering, he realized that there was no blessing in the situation. His pony was not fresh. It would never last for a hard-driving ride back to the wagon. Preacher would have to depend on the eyes and instincts of Roman Nose to protect him and the Indian children from the ambush by Sergeant Skemp and the pony soldiers. Well, that was another blessing in its way. To have Maox out in front of any caravan was protection only to be exceeded by the eyes and ears of Maheo himself.
It made no difference for that day. Picking Tooth could do nothing now but return to the wagon and to his friend Roman Nose with the information he had found at the school. That was why he had been sent out, to scout back and see what he could find, and he had done this job well.
Oh, he could easily have killed the solitary soldier. Roman Nose would have done so. But Picking Tooth was another man than Maox. Taken in the Cheyenne view, he was what Maox called “a good brave coward”. So he had let the soldier go, and was happy he had. Now he himself would depart and no one harmed in the business of doing his duty. Let’s see. Where had he put down that rifle of his while getting down on all fours to inspect and sniff at the old pony soldier tracks? Ah, yes. It had been back there by the fireplace. He had leaned it against the stark column of sooted chimney stones. Nodding to himself, the good-natured brave turned about and went toward the gutted chimney. He was humming a little Cheyenne “stout heart” tune, to ward off the loneliness of the ruins of Preacher’s burned school at The Cottonwoods.
He was still humming it when he rounded the chimney’s corner and Private Obie Jenks, waiting there for him, shot him three times in the stomach from a distance no greater than the reach of a rifle’s barrel.
Obie Jenks whacked and hacked and cursed the time he was losing. His sheath knife was not sharp and was not designed, either, for this sort of work. The blade wasn’t the right shape and the lack of a proper guard made his hand keep slipping up over the blade when it would hit the hard skull bone under the Indian’s hair. Taking a scalp was not as easy as it looked. But one thing was for certain: there wasn’t going to be any officer or man of the 3rd Colorado that wouldn’t know Obie Jenks had killed and scalped himself a full-grown Cheyenne buck.
The trooper cleaned his knife and his hands in the snow. The blood would not come off his coat sleeves, but it would dry there and look impressive back at Bijou Basin. He tried to tie the scalp lock at his belt, but could not manage it. It didn’t seem to hang just right. Glancing around the school clearing, he hurriedly stuffed the long black braid into his saddlebag. He was self-conscious about it, as though someone might see him and ask him what it was. Then he seemed to realize how foolish this was, standing there by a burned-out rock chimney in the Arkansas wilderness, half a hundred miles up Horse Creek. Throwing back his head, he laughed aloud. It was a wonderful joke. There wasn’t another white man within a five-hour ride, one way, and a long day in the saddle, the other way. As for Indians, the same thing went. There had been one, but old Obie had taken care of him. If there were any more of the red devils around who wanted a dose of the same medicine, all they had to do was let old Obie know about it.
Suddenly Jenks realized that he had not been merely thinking these thoughts, but actually talking them out loud. The echo of his own voice frightened him. It bounded around among the fallen roof timbers. It played into and out of the charred fireplace. The rising wind picked it up and flung it about. It came back in the weirdest way. As though it had been changed into an Indian voice. Into the guttural accents of Cheyenne, in fact. And of Cheyenne spoken in a voice so deep and rare as never to be forgotten, once heard. And Obie Jenks had heard that voice before.
He whirled. In his desperate mind was but one thought—to reach the chimney rocks where he had leaned his repeating carbine to begin the scalping of Picking Tooth. But another was there before him. It was an Indian, a Cheyenne.
In the whirling of the ground snow he had come up behind the trooper like a ghost. One moment no one was there and Private Obie Jenks was laughing wildly and talking to himself. The next moment the ghost was there, and it was not talking to itself. It was talking to Obie Jenks.
“Naestoz, it is death,” said Roman Nose, and struck his ten-inch skinning knife into the stomach of the soldier and ripped upward to the breast bone.
Obie Jenks stared stupidly down at himself. He was a dead man, and he knew it. He shook his head at Roman Nose and slid slowly into the snow.
The Cheyenne stood above him, no sign of mercy on his dark face.
“Nahoxemo,” he said to Obie Jenks. “Farewell.”
The short day of the early winter was nearly over. Preacher Bleek was glad. The last of the fifteen-mile slope down which he had been lagging all afternoon now lay ahead. It could not be more than a mile to the fringe timber of Rush Creek. Soon they would have a good fire going. The children could get warm, hot food could be prepared, the good Cheyenne hotoma returned to the weary company. It was well enough. The weather was changing again. The wind, on the rise all afternoon, was now spitting sleet between its teeth. It would be a bad night. Bleek raised his face to the gray skies and thanked his Lord out loud for the fine campsite ahead.
In that moment Rush Creek, usually the most forlorn and desolate of prairie outposts, looked like an oasis in the land of Canaan to Nehemiah Bleek. Yet the fact that there could be a serpent in that prairie paradise was not lost on Preacher. Bleek had been searching the grove through his brass-bound telescope for the past hour. Neither in the timber nor on the open plains about it had he been able to discern a sign of the missing cavalry patrol. He was now certain that Skemp and the troopers had deserted Chivington. Most likely they had cut and run for home. It would be a natural thing for volunteer troops to do. Such men weren’t like regular Army troops. Once their officers were removed, they tended to drift like sheep, or to huddle, but not to act together. If they had gone back to Bijou Basin to get help, it was no blessing to Preacher Bleek, however. It would only mean that he would have to get his cargo to Smoky Hill even more quickly.
By now, of course, he had despaired of seeing Roman Nose and Picking Tooth again. Either they had been ambushed and killed by Skemp, or they had decided to work some independent war plan of their own. If they were dead or had deserted and did not return, Bleek would be faced with the problem of holding Chivington hostage without any Indian pressure to make the situation real. This he knew he could not do. If Roman Nose and Picking Tooth were still missing the next dawn, and had Skemp and the patrol not put in their appearance, then Bleek would have to set Chivington free. He would have to give him a horse or leave him in the Rush Creek timber on foot, but with gun, ammunition, food, and matches. As for taking him on to the Indian camp, this was completely impossible. That was why Bleek had tried to be so careful in setting up the plan whereby the patrol would follow in sight of the Argonaut and thus be ready to receive the hostage when the Cheyenne encampment came into far view, and Bleek and the children would thereby be guaranteed their decent chance to reach the Indians and temporary safety.
Without the patrol to take Chivington’s release, and to guard that release from Cheyenne attack in the retreat to either Bijou Basin or Fort Lyon, nothing would work. All of Bleek’s risks, taken to help his children and Roman Nose and Picking Tooth and Red Dust, would have been gambled in vain. It was a bitter thing for Preacher to dwell on, and with his customary good spirits he now refused to do so. That was why he had just lifted his face to his Lord and spoken out his thanks, aloud. And it was why he now waved upward in friendly acknowledgment of the nearness of heaven.
“Amen, amen!” he called after the wave, which was made left-handedly and much like an absent-minded salute.
Then in a sober aside to his seat companion, Durant, he added thoughtfully: “How about you, Sergeant? You much of a praying man?”
Durant started to reply, interested enough. But he looked around and saw that Chivington was watching him. Bleek, sensing the silence, glanced about. His blue eyes caught the cold stare of the captive officer.
Chivington nodded to him with no change of expression. “How about you, Bleek?” he said. “You much of a praying man?”
Nehemiah Bleek did not consider that he was afraid of Chiv-ington. But no man could be indifferent to the menace of that vast body and strange mind. When such a troop commander had behind him the full authority of the state, there were no definable limits to the hell he could create. Bleek understood this—understood that beneath the controlled quiet of the question a devil’s broth was brewing in the sleepless brain of Colonel John Chivington. But Bleek was Bleek, too. He would not lie down and roll over to any implied threat of dead dog.
“No sir, Colonel,” he said, “I don’t rightly reckon I practice the Word near hard nor frequent enough to be called a praying man.”
The huge officer studied him a long, uneasy moment. Then he nodded slowly. “Well, Preacher,” he said, “you had better start rehearsing. You are going to need the practice.”
Roman Nose built a “skunk”, a Cheyenne funeral pyre, for his friend Picking Tooth. He used Preacher’s winter woodpile to lay the cross-locked frame of the skunk on the hearth of the school’s fireplace. Preacher would not care. He would never need the wood for his own burning. Not that winter. He would be happy, Roman Nose knew, to supply the cut wood for the last journey of a good man like Kovohe.
Arranging the dead brave’s body in the proper manner, the tall Cheyenne placed it atop the stacked cordwood of the pyre. The wood was beautifully split by Preacher’s powerful axe, and it was dried by the long hot Arkansas summer. Roman Nose knew that it would burn fast, and he was glad. His friend would have a quick journey.
Ordinarily a pony would have been left—the pony most beloved by its departed master—at the foot of the burial scaffold. This was to provide transportation for the sleeping one up the steep pathway of Seameo, the Road of the Dead, the Milky Way. But in this case there was no Indian pony to leave with Kovohe. There were only the three cavalry horses, that of the dead soldier and the two Roman Nose and Picking Tooth had borrowed. Or at least he hoped that the mounts of his friend and of the soldier were tethered in the timber somewhere near at hand. He had an urgent use for those three strong pony soldier horses. Lives other than his own depended on those big cavalry mounts. How might he spare one of them to tie at the foot of Kovohe’s scaffold?
Roman Nose raised his head to seek guidance of Maheo in the matter. As he did so, his dark eye fell on the snow-mounded forms of the three Cheyenne ponies shot by Mashane’s order just outside the school’s doorway.
“Haho, Maheo,” muttered the big warrior. “It is a miracle. I ask for one pony and you send me three!”
Now quickly he knelt in the snow. Scraping away the flakes, more of which were falling with each moment, he made a small patch of bared earth. This he dug at with his knife until he had loosened a handful of dirt. Going to the scaffold, he placed Picking Tooth’s shield on the dead brave’s breast, then mounded the handful of hesec, the mother earth, on the shield. Taking from the mound four tiny pinches of the soil, he tossed one pinch in each of the four cardinal points, north, south, east, west.
All the while, he was chanting and grunting the ritual prayers that, as a holy man of his people, he knew in all their pagan complication. At the last words of the prayer, he broke off to glance quickly about the deserted ruins. Reassured that he had no audience save the soft fall of the snow, he bent quickly to the ear of the silent warrior and whispered: “Listen, Kovohe, I hope you understand about the ponies. I’m not certain it’s a right thing to do, but let us both trust in Maheo, eh? After all, it was He who sent me the sign, wasn’t it? Haho!”
As quickly as he had bent down, he straightened and sped on with the work of lighting the fire. There was no difficulty here. Embers and coals of Preacher’s log and plank building were hissing out beneath the new blanket of white flakes all about him. Seizing up a smoldering brand, he whipped it about his head until it burst into bright flame. Plunging the torch into the dried kindling of the pyre, he stepped back ten slow paces. Here he stood, arms upraised to his friend’s rising spirit, until the pyre’s building flames had reached and engulfed the homely “good brave coward” who had been the heart companion of his Wyoming boyhood and the staunch comrade of the grown years on the war trail.
When he could see the body no more, when he knew that the bursting flames had wafted its inner spirit upward, Roman Nose said softly: “Good bye, old friend. One more of us is gone.”
Then he turned swiftly for the winter-gray trunks of the cottonwood trees behind Preacher’s horse barn. When he had found the hidden mounts of Picking Tooth and the pony soldier, he led them on the trot back to his own mount, waiting at the school ruins. Roping the spare horses together, he swung up on the freshest of the three—the mount of Private Obie Jenks—and kicked the animal hard in the ribs. “Vovehe!” he shouted. “Run!”
Bleek halted the teams, set the brakes, wrapped the lines. They were still on the slope, still a quarter mile from the Rush Creek timber. Nothing had been seen or heard from that timber, but Preacher was not satisfied. Too long on the prairie to trust an absolute stillness like this one, he had to make one more probe, try one more test.
“Listen,” he said to Sunflower and Red Dust in Cheyenne, “I am going to take the dog and go forward. I don’t like to leave you alone with the wagon, but this white man”—he indicated Durant by tapping him on the shoulder—“is a decent man and I will have to trust him. I trust you and the Cheyenne boy to keep the children quiet and out of trouble until I get back. I am going to scout the timber with Lamewolf. Now keep the children in the wagon, and do not be afraid of the three-stripe soldier.”
Sunflower, by the eloquent roll of her big dark eyes toward Chivington’s place behind the wagon seat, indicated that the Indian’s concern was not for Sergeant Durant. Bleek did not miss the unconscious flick of the glance.
“Mashane is bound like a dead buck to a carrying pole. His feet and hands are held with rawhide I tied myself. You have seen me tie a deer, Sunflower. You tell the boy that Preacher’s knots yield only to the knife.”
“Yes, Preacher,” agreed the little girl. “If you say I am not afraid of Mashane, then I am not afraid of him.”
“Good,” said Bleek. “Now be alert, both of you. I shall return in moments only.”
Taking his rifle, he whistled up the dog and started down the slope. The sleet of the earlier afternoon had now become a light whirling fall of snow. In the gray darkness of the nearing twilight, the burly form of the Horse Creek missionary was soon shrouded from view.
The moment that it was, Chivington strained forward in his bonds, eyes glaring, voice shrill. “Durant, this Cheyenne boy has a knife. Jump him and cut me loose!”
“By heaven, Colonel, I can’t do it. He’s clean to the back of the wagon. These here Spanish leg chains won’t reach more’n three, four feet.”
Chivington was furious. He never used profanity but helpless anger was glazing his features. “Durant,” he hissed, “do something! Call the Indian boy up to you. Smile at him. Offer him something!”
“Colonel, sir,” pleaded the trooper, “look back there at him.
He’s watching you wilder than a wolf whelp right now. He ain’t about to do nothing we tell him, sir.”
“Durant, you’re refusing an order. You’ll face a court-martial! I’ll see you swung alongside Bleek at Fort Lyon. I’ll see. …”
“Colonel, sir, please…if you don’t slack off, you’ll see that Cheyenne kid going out over the tailgate and off down the hill after Preacher.”
Chivington swung the blaze of his eyes to the slope beyond Durant.
“That’s it!” he cried. “We’ll go down the hill after Preacher! Grab the lines, Sergeant. Kick off the brakes. Whip up those teams, man!”
Durant, not a quick-minded fellow, hesitated. Instantly Chivington was snarling at him. “That’s an order, do you hear me? Get this filthy wagon rolling!”
He was literally screaming now. Durant knew that one more refusal, one further word of doubt, and the raging threat of the gallows at Fort Lyon would no longer be a wild man’s fancy but a military fact.
“Yes, sir,” he said between clenched teeth.
He sent the surprised teams and the overloaded wagon into a lumbering downhill plunge. Behind him, Chivington laughed and yelled unsteadily.
“Good man, good man!” he shouted. “Don’t you see, Durant, don’t you see? Skemp will be down there waiting. He’s in that timber. He’s got to be, he’s got to be!”
The trooper nodded, fighting to stay upright on the pitching seat of the Argonaut. He was pale and sweaty, appearing ill. Durant knew well enough that Skemp might be waiting in that timber. Back at the mission it had been Durant himself who passed Chivington’s secret orders to Skemp. It had been Durant, too, who ever since had yearned to confess the possible trap to the simple-minded Preacher. To warn him and his forlorn brood of orphaned Indian kids of the likely ambush at Rush Creek. But in the end it was—it had to be’durant’s own fear of Chivington that overwhelmed his compassion for Bleek and the Indian children. No man hung himself.
“Hee-yah, hee-yah!” the sergeant yelled at black Samson and china-eyed Delilah. And drove them and the Kiowa Ladies with all his skill headlong toward Rush Creek and the last crossing of the Argonaut.
Bleek slowed when he reached the low bluffs above the creek’s channel. The nearest trees in the bottom growth were less than fifty yards distant. To the Preacher’s right, the trough of the buffalo road went down and over the dry bed of the stream. At this time of the year, so far up its course, Rush Creek had no flow. There was a big pool and spring at the crossing, which was why the buffalo and Indian trail ran that way in the beginning. This water lay out of Bleek’s view, below the crossing. He could not approach it from the downstream side, as the bluffs failed there, permitting anyone in the grove to see up the incline of the long slope he had just come down. Hence, he would have to depend on the dog to go on in from where he was, scouting the grove for him.
The dog was a good dog. But the children had spoiled him a great deal. As a tracker and trailer, particularly as a scout dog, he had had little work the past four winters. Now Bleek had no real idea how well the animal might respond to the order to “go ahead,” to “scout out,” the common commands of a hunting dog reared by the Cheyennes. Well, the time to find out was right then.
“Lamewolf.”
He murmured the name, unleashing the chain. He made the “go ahead” sign. The wolf-like brute crouched and growled. Bleek made the cut-off sign.
“Be still, be still,” he whispered, and the dog quit his chest rumblings.
“Naasenenàno,” he commanded. “Go on, leave. I order it.”
Lamewolf regarded him steadily, his yellow eyes burning in the dusk. Then he whined and turned away. Sliding over the edge of the bluff, he leaped to the smooth sand of the channel bed, started slinking down it toward the crossing and the grove near Big Spring. When he was midway in the buffalo trail, he flattened to the ground behind a hummock of snowy grass. Bleek could see his busy tail sweeping snow dust. But he was not wagging the tail in friendship. He was jerking it in nervousness, the way a stalking wolf or coyote will do.
“Dear Lord,” muttered Bleek, “there is something in there.”
Before his fear could mount higher, Lamewolf had left the snowy hummock and was returning upstream, ghosting along the white-blanketed sand. When he scrambled back up the bluff and dropped at Preacher’s side, his roach was standing on end from skull base to tail root and his deep growl was vibrating in anxiety.
“Come on,” said Nehemiah Bleek, “we’re getting shut of here, old dog.”
He started quickly back up the slope, Lamewolf slinking at heel. Fortunately there would be time to turn the teams and cross at Soda Springs, a salt lick about ten miles upstream. There was no timber there, but plenty of buffalo chips for fuel and the cutbanks of the streambed for wind shelter. They would be all right even in a bad storm.
It was as this comforting thought took shape in his mind that Nehemiah Bleek heard the rumble of wagon wheels and, glancing in dread up the slope, saw the dim shape of the Argonaut bounding down upon him in runaway wildness. So close was he that he could also see Durant driving the teams and the white face of Colonel Chivington crying him on from within the wagon.
Bleek quit thinking, then, and began to run. Not away from the wagon. Not out of the way, but directly at the madly careening teams and the swaying freighter. As Samson and Delilah burst upon him, he wheeled in the last fraction of time and reversed his speed to run with them. In this way he was able to seize the collar of the black Spanish jack and swing himself up on the hairy withers. In the same motion he grasped the cheek straps of both animals and virtually lifted their forehoofs off the ground.
Delilah squealed and planted her rear hoofs. Samson did the same. Behind them, the Kiowa Ladies sat back on their haunches to obey the bracing of the lead team. The Argonaut rode up on their rumps, teetered, leaned, slewed around, and crashed over on its left side into a gully full of fresh snow. The impact spat Chivington out into the slush and mud of the gully. Durant, being leg-ironed to the seat, stayed with the wagon, escaping serious injury. The Kiowa Ladies were down and thrashing to free themselves. Bleek leaped in with his knife and slashed their tugs. The Indian mares scrambled up, little the worse for the hard use. There was no time to inspect for wounds among the children. The best that could be done was to take all of them that could move and try to escape on foot with them up the streambed and into the snow flurries before the troopers in the timber could mount up and rush the slope to see what had happened.
It was in the process of hauling the children out of the rear of the wagon that the red-bearded missionary realized that the troopers were not going to rush that slope—not on horseback, anyway.
“Zetoxz!” cried Red Dust who, with Sunflower, had escaped unharmed. “Look there, Preacher!”
Following the boy’s excited point, Bleek saw a sight that could be nothing less than a visitation of the mysterious ways of the Lord. From out of the grove, up the buffalo trail with a burst of snorting and neighing that would raise the hackles on a dead wolf, came the horses of the scout patrol of Chiving-ton’s 3rd Colorado Cavalry. They were running in a gob, all still strung on the rope line of their camp picket. It was beautiful. No scattering, no confusion, no loss of precious time, no herding required. It was a work of pony stealing that only an Indian could have engineered, and very few Indians at that. This Indian, however, was of the few.
Behind the stolen cavalry mounts he came, standing in the stirrups of the cavalry saddle of his borrowed horse. He was raw-boned, tall, fierce of face and eye, dark-skinned as any buffalo soldier. But he was no buffalo soldier. He was a Dog Soldier. A Cheyenne of the north.
“Heseo, Heseo!” cried Red Dust. “Uncle, Uncle!” Leaping past the gaping Bleek, he raced toward the great towering form of Roman Nose, charging up the snow-blown slope, driving before him the seventeen stolen cavalry horses of Sergeant Skemp’s patrol.
The capture of the horses changed everything. The first thing was to gentle down the run-off cavalry mounts. This was speedily accomplished by Preacher, Red Dust, Roman Nose, and all the children working at the same time. It was only minutes before the horses were quieted and the cut picket line retied, this time to the overturned Argonaut.
Chivington was then retrieved from his muddy resting place, very nearly strangled in the cold slime and snow where he had alighted. Durant was unlocked from the front of the wagon, relocked to the tailgate. All that Preacher ever said to either of them was: “Well, Colonel, I don’t rightly know how to tell you this, but we’re going to have to leave you and go along,” and then sadly to Durant: “I reckon we all make mistakes, Sergeant. You were one of mine. I figured you for decent.” Then he was busied with what he must do before Skemp recovered nerve enough to send his troopers looking for horse tracks. But even though Bleek labored hard and drove the children without stint, there was that in the twinkle of his small blue eyes, the tilt and bloom of his big red beard that said clearly that old Preacher was returned to his flock and no one need be afraid to go to sleep that night.
The plan was simple enough; with plenty of horses for everyone, they would all mount up and run for it. As for the Argonaut, she was done for, her running gear not repairable in the time left to them at Rush Creek Grove. The teams were unharnessed. The Kiowa Ladies were turned loose. Samson was saddled for Bleek. Blankets and food were packed on the two Indian mares and the pinto jenny Delilah. The other cargo of the Argonaut was left beneath the canvas cover of the top and in the overturned bed. Likely when the spring melt set in and the new grass came, the Smoky Hill Cheyennes would wander this way and help themselves to what had wintered through. They were welcome and more than welcome to anything of Preacher’s.
It was not important. The important thing was that Maheo had answered the prayers of Roman Nose. He had let the tall warrior ride the three-horse relay from Horse Creek to the Rush Creek camp of the ambushed patrol of 3rd Colorado Cavalry in the very nick of time. Haho, thank Maheo! It was a sad thing that Picking Tooth was dead, and a grim thing that RomanNose had returned with not only his friend’s hair, but also that of Private Obie Jenks dangling at his belt. But this was the way of things, red man against white, in the Arkansas valley of 1864. The thing to remember was that Roman Nose had saved them all from the pony soldier guns, and brought them the wonderful tall strong horses of the cavalry to ride on the rest of the journey to Smoky Hill River.
Vovehe! It was time to ride. Chivington and Durant were set free, leg-ironed together at the ankle. Preacher gave them a maul and a cold chisel and said no word to them as he did. But it was a small maul and a dull chisel. They would be until daylight freeing themselves.
When Preacher turned away from giving the tools to the colonel and the sergeant, he went up to Roman Nose and announced in a deliberately loud voice that he would be the last one to advise a famous colonel of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry on how to conduct himself in the field, but that, if he were such an eagle chief, he did believe that he would take his scout patrol and his two sergeants and march for Fort Lyon the fastest way he knew how.
Roman Nose nodded soberly. For a moment there in the growing darkness, Bleek saw the grim Cheyenne smile. Speaking and understanding no word of English, he had translated Bleek’s harangue perfectly. It was an old Indian trick, used when haughty chiefs wanted no word with each other, yet knew also the need to communicate with one another.
Roman Nose knew that Preacher was advising Mashane, through him, what he wanted the eagle chief to know.
“Tell me,” he rumbled, when Bleek had concluded and while Chivington was still answering his suggestion with raging promises of being hanged or shot down on sight, “what was it you advised the pony soldier chief to do?”
“A very simple thing.” Nehemiah Bleek grinned. “I told him to take his men and run hard all the way to Fort Lyon. Is that all right with you?”
The trace of a smile, if that was what it had been, vanished from the dark face of the Cheyenne. “Mashane should be killed,” he said.
“No,” said Bleek. “That would be murder.”
“You will be sorry, I will be sorry, we will all be sorry,” complained Roman Nose. “This man should die.”
“He will die,” answered Bleek, “but we will not kill him. Come, my friend. We have our own lives. We have these children to look after. I ask you to help me.”
Roman Nose looked beyond Preacher Bleek at Colonel John Chivington. He stared in silence. There was death in the glance, and the giant officer could feel its cold hand upon him. He stood back against the fallen wagon, crowding close to Sergeant Durant. His heavy breathing and the soft hiss of the falling flakes were the only sounds.
“In God’s name, Bleek,” pleaded Chivington, “call him off of us. He means to kill us…or me.”
Bleek moved forward, touched the tall Cheyenne on the arm. “My friend,” he said, “it is time to go.”
Slowly Roman Nose nodded. His fierce gaze, so intent on murder but the moment before, seemed shifted far away. He was looking to the north, toward his home, and he was seeing that land. “Yes,” he agreed, “it is time. Kovohe is dead. My heart has gone with him. I want to go home.”
He turned away from Chivington and went and took his horse from the boy, Red Dust. Swinging to the saddle, he told Bleek that he was ready to go on to Smoky Hill River. “All right, Preacher,” he said. “You are the chief of this party. Go ahead and lead the way.”
“With the Lord’s will,” answered Bleek, “I will do it.”
He got up on Samson. The black brute turned at once for the buffalo trail. Behind him came Delilah and the Kiowa Ladies, unroped, moving freely, following like dogs. The cavalry horses carrying the Horse Creek orphans came after them obediently. The children scarcely had to guide them at all.
Once down into the streambed by the easy way of the old buffalo road, Samson turned sharply left and bore away up the dry bed to the north. Fifty yards away, their shaken nerves just calming enough for them to have gathered some small driftwood and started a blaze to warm and recover by, the troopers of the 3rd Colorado, never by sight or sound were the least bit aware of the passage of their stolen stock. Sergeant Skemp, in fact, had only begun to exhort them to “rally up and foller me” in some delayed pursuit of the lost horses when Chivington and Durant staggered up to the fireside in their chains.
“It’s him,” breathed the sergeant. “It’s the colonel.”
Chivington did not answer him. He held out the maul and the chisel, and pointed to the Spanish leg irons. “Start cutting,” was all he said.
Bleek was certain that there would be no immediate pursuit. A scant three miles upstream a feeding halt was called. The place was where an overhang of bluff provided a scoop for the wind to hurl the snow up and over the channel and make a tiny haven from the storm beneath the bank. Here the horses were given a good ration of rolled oats while their riders chewed handfuls of buffalo jerky and drank scalding tea that Preacher brewed with melted snow.
Directly the blankets were unfurled. Dead grass was gathered from the beneath the snows, shaken dry, and piled in a Cheyenne nest, a big ball of grasses looking like a giant tumbleweed. Now, well fed and full of hot tea, the children were piled into the center of the grass ball and sealed there with the blankets. For the hardy waifs this was a king’s couch. Preacher had the happy light back in his blue eyes. His red beard was bristling like a chestnut burr, as it should be, when he was sure of their safety. And there was the great tall warrior, Roman Nose, also to guard them and to guard, too, the fine stolen horses of the pony soldiers. Thanks be to Maheo. A small thank you, likewise, for Preacher’s Lord God Jehovah. The spirit of hotoma was back among them and Mashane was far, far away. Sleep came fast, and it was deep.
Some, however, did not sleep. Bedded under the bank between picket line and grass nest was Lamewolf. His yellow eyes were open. They moved, with his sharp ears, to every scent or sound penetrating the curtain of snow that closed them off from the plain about them. Perhaps pursuit by the pony soldiers was not to be, but there were still seventeen cavalry horses to watch over, and still plans for the remainder of the flight to be drawn by the two men at the buffalo-chip fire. The old dog was not new to this game. Not any more so than were his master, Preacher Bleek, or the Cheyenne warrior, Roman Nose. When the enemy’s horse herd has been run off and the retreat only beginning, vigilance was the price of pony flesh. And not only of pony flesh, but also of human flesh. Yes, and of dog meat, too. Lamewolf growled deeply in his throat.
By the fire, Bleek noted the sound of the growl and nodded to Roman Nose.
“He says all is well. But for us not to count the horses until we are home.”
“A smart dog,” said the tall warrior. “But then he’s an Indian dog.”
Bleek spread his hands and shrugged, as if to say: “Of course.” Then he said aloud: “Well, brother, we had better do some talking. God has been good to us, but I think we should give Him a little help, too.”
Roman Nose bobbed his head in agreement. He and Preacher spoke a common tongue. They came quickly to their decisions.
The single bag of oats brought from the Argonaut had been consumed in the one feeding of the cavalry horses. The wind was dropping, the cloud cover thickening. This meant heavier snowfall. Drifts could be formed that would block the prairie trails to horse travel. Where they huddled now was midway of their journey. It was forty miles back to the school, forty miles on to the Smoky Hill. South lay the Arkansas, half a hundred miles. North, three times that far, was the South Platte. No wonder the wind sounded lonesome and the old dog growled deeply in his throat. They were stranded in the empty stomach of emhäto, of nowhere at all.
“In about two hours,” said Roman Nose, “I think we had better wake up the children and leave this place.”
Bleek nodded. “I will watch first,” he offered. “You sleep.”
Roman Nose watched him a moment, then agreed. He immediately pulled his blanket about him and lay down nearly in the ashes of the fire. He seemed unconscious at once.
Bleek eyed him carefully, almost craftily. When his breathing became deep and regular, Preacher smiled with compassion for the weary and the worn. He even reached across the fire and pulled a corner of the blanket over the warrior’s face, then quickly lifted the corner and peered closely at the dark features. He lowered the blanket again, assured that all was well.
Into the bosom of the bear-skin winter coat went the big gnarled hand. Out came the bottle of Old Crow. Up went the hand to hold it to the fire’s light for the tantalizing view of the sainted label, before the quaffing.
In the moment of this delighted anticipation, a lean and muscular red arm shot out of the blanket across the fire and speared the bottle from Preacher’s startled grasp. Roman Nose did not even bother to sit up, but took his drink from the bottle without moving from the flat of his back. As ungraciously, the red arm extended back across the smoky buffalo chips and returned the bottle to the hand of Nehemiah Bleek.
Preacher looked at the badly damaged storage level. He studied the motionless Roman Nose.
“Ahhh,” he said, “true brothers….”
And raising the bottle to a juggler’s tilt with head thrown back and blue eyes lidded blissfully, he drained the remaining contents.
Chivington was a hard man who lived in a hard land during a hard time. What he was doing in Colorado Territory was no more than what he considered his natural and legitimate duty. The pursuit of the Indians he believed to be the first order of state business in the due process of frontier law. As always in a raw land, the Army arrived before the settlers. In Colorado Territory, between the South Platte and the Arkansas, Colonel John Chiv-ington was the law. Or divined that he was.
General Curtis, of course, stood ahead of him in actual military command. Officers such as Major Scott Anthony at Fort Lyon were his peers in the field. Governor Evans and Agent Colley for the United States were his superiors in the matter of local and national authority in civil affairs affecting Indians. Yet Chivington saw beyond these restraints. He understood his fated rôle more clearly than those above him. Curtis, Anthony, Evans, Colley, and before them Wynkoop, that stout champion of the Cheyennes—all were hamstrung by the legal responsibilities of their appointments. It was Chivington who acted for them. It was Chivington who not only was the law, but also was beyond the law. It was he who served silently the purposes of the state, and without warrant. He who went in the night and suddenly on his missions of enforcement. He who held no paper that said he might do the things he did, but who held in his Spartan mind the unwritten permission—some said explicit encouragement—of superiors and peers alike, to pursue the enemy in accordance with the dictates of his own relentless conscience, and those dictates were plainly known to all: kill Indians. Kill all, little and big. Nits make lice.
And Colonel J.M. Chivington, called “Butcher” Chivington by some and Mashane or Sick Mind by others, was a man who did not falter in his duty. Neither did he fail his conscience. Of the many things he was, or might stand accused of being, coward was not one or liar another.
With the first gray of daylight he was marching from Rush Creek Grove. But he was not marching, as Bleek had warned him to, toward Fort Lyon and the aid of the regular Army troops of Major Scott Anthony. He was marching due west back over the ancient buffalo road to Horse Creek. He was going straight to Bijou Basin to get his own troops. He was risking his life and the lives of his dismounted patrol to do it. The stakes disturbed him not in the least. He knew his business, and his business was not getting killed by Indians.
He was going to get the 3rd Colorado Cavalry and go and kill himself some Indians of his own. Any Indians. The first ones who got in his way. Just so long as they were Cheyennes. And it was a dark night.
Preacher roused Roman Nose about 10:00p.m. They made some more tea and awakened the children. Another shred of jerky was shared.
As foreseen, the temperature had moderated. Great fat flakes had replaced the small and dry ones of the earlier fall. The snow was piling up.
A little after 10:00, all were mounted and moving out once more. The direction taken by Preacher in the lead was due east. Behind him came the twin Kiowa pack mares. They were faithfully followed by the line of cavalry horses carrying the children. Bringing up the line was Roman Nose.
About midline, where Red Dust and Sunflower had been told to ride and police the behavior of the other children, Lamewolf trotted at the heels of the Arapaho girl’s mount. Now and again he would range out a bit on the flanks of the column to scout the night. But for the most part he held close to the horses where the snow was packed and the going made easier. Lamewolf had come to that time of life where wisdom was replacing ardor, and the old brute knew from instinct that they had a far trail to follow before the next sleep.
He was right. With but one stop to boil the last of the tea and inspect all of the stock, there was no halt in the march to Smoky Hill River. Three quarters of the distance was covered by break of day. Then the wind rose, the skies cleared, and the early sun shown on a prairie world of glittering frost-white beauty. The children were delighted, but Roman Nose and Preacher exchanged anxious glances and increased the gait of their wearying mounts. Old Lamewolf growled in his chest, complaining at the forced pace. It required him to lope rather than to trot. Moreover, like Roman Nose and Preacher, he was commencing to read the wind.
They were going to need luck and good leadership to make those last miles to the Cheyenne camp. The wind was east, northeast, and northwest by freakish turn. It made the prairie seem like an ocean of snow. Combers, breakers, swells, and great mountains of the white surface uplifted in minutes. A spot that appeared to be thinly covered as the party would dip to a low place in the buffalo road would be waist-deep when they arrived. Again, a bad place might be blown free for them just as whimsically. But the deep drifts were more in number than the thin spots.
It was now that the canniness of Nehemiah Bleek was tested. The column was stalled, the animals all panting from the fight to breast the deepening snows. There was still a long rise of prairie between them and the valley of the Smoky Hill’s north fork. If they could make the crest of the rise, they should find the north slope of the elevation clear of deeper snows. But the way to that rise lay up the south slope, already drifted high and piling higher by the moment.
Now it was made plain why Preacher’s blanket roll behind Samson’s saddle looked so bulky. The burly white man unslung the blankets and extracted from there a pair of beautifully made Indian snowshoes. Putting on the rawhide webs, Bleek waved and called to the worried children to lay aside their concerns and watch Preacher break the trail for old Samson and the rest of them.
“Nahetotaneseve!” he cried cheerfully. “Come, let us all attack that hill in a happy way. Up we go. Hai!”
In thirty minutes Preacher Bleek stomped a trail up the south slope of the divide. It was through deep and heavy snows, but such were the weight of the Horse Creek man and the brute quality of his strength that he drove the webbings of the snowshoes hard enough to pack the going for Samson which followed him and which weighed 1,200 pounds.
Roman Nose had never seen a man of any skin color do such a powerful thing. The Cheyenne was an extremely large man himself, yet he could not have broken the way up that snowy slope. Not if given the whole of the remaining day. The strange schoolmaster from The Cottonwoods had something to his medicine besides hotoma.
Roman Nose, as they all rested at the crest, was so curious as to the source of such strength that he went up to Preacher and sniffed his breath. Having done so, he scowled and shook his head. Wrong again. It wasn’t véhoemáp, the white man’s water, the whiskey. Was it, then, the strength of a madman? Was Preacher truly a crazy one, as the whites said of him? Roman Nose knew that crazy people sometimes had enormous strength’did amazing things, wild things, unexplainable things and fearsome. But by the way Preacher returned his look when he drew back from the breath-sniffing and by the way the small blue eyes sparkled and from the rare sound of the big white man’s laughter as it boomed out on the morning’s stillness, the Cheyenne warrior knew that this huge red-headed preacher was not crazy. He was, in fact, just what the southern Cheyennes said he was: touched by God.
Roman Nose acknowledged his respect with Indian dignity. To show him there was an equal return of the feeling, Bleek waved graciously for him to take the lead. It was only fitting that a Cheyenne of such fame should have the honor of heading the column into the village of his kinsmen. Especially when such a Cheyenne had just stolen seventeen horses and put Mashane and a whole patrol of his best pony soldiers on foot out in the middle of the Rush Creek buffalo pasture. Ih hai! Go ahead, warrior. Ride out!
Roman Nose drew himself to his full height. He shook the snow from the eagle feathers in his long braids. He glanced around and gave the forward sign to the Indian children. The company moved off, all of its members doing as the great Maox was doing, sitting tall for the entrance into the Cheyenne village down there on the north fork of Smoky Hill River.
Watching them go past him, Bleek was touched. Something, a tear or a snowflake, melted a drop of moisture down his cheek. He brushed it away and, as the last child filed past him, he spurred black Samson and rode on down the north slope as tall in his saddle as any of them.
In the Cheyenne village on Smoky Hill River, the news of Mashane’s return was received with alarm. The band quickly agreed to take the orphan children from Preacher and pass them along to Indian camps in Kansas, where they would be out of Chivington’s reach. After a suitable time, Preacher could gather them up once more and start another school. As for Preacher himself, he must move on with equal swiftness. The reason was Mashane’s nearness in Bijou Basin. It was a certainty that such a man as Sick Mind would never forgive Preacher for what the Horse Creek schoolmaster had done to him. Nor would he forgive any people who gave Preacher shelter. Both Bleek and his Smoky Hill friends understood this hard fact of their lives. No time was wasted in false sentiment. But when it came the turn of Roman Nose to speak his views of the situation, it was another matter.
“My brothers,” he said, “you are wrong to talk of peace and of running away. You cannot hide from Mashane’s kind. Now I want you to think about that, and I want to tell you something else.” He paused, letting his fierce gaze wander over them. “Before I came down here, I saw an Army paper up north. It was shown to some of us by Guerrier, who you all know. Guerrier would not lie to us. He is one-half our blood. That paper said that the Army chiefs should befriend the Indians. They should begin this by stopping the roaming pony soldier troops that do not know one tribe from another and that go about killing everything in the shape of an Indian. This Army paper ended by warning the soldier chiefs that it would take only a few more murders by these roving troops to unite all the tribes in war, and it would be a bloody war.” Again the northern warrior paused, then concluded, voice rising with passion. “My brothers, hear me. I say to you that there do not have to be a few more murders to start this war. There have already been far too many murders. I do not lie. Over at Preacher’s schoolhouse at The Cottonwoods my own friend, Kovohe, lies dead, shot three times in the stomach by a soldier of Mashane’s roving troops. Kovohe had no gun in his hand. It was murder. Now I am going home and I am going to bring my people back down here when the new grass comes, and we will find Mashane and those soldiers of his and kill them all. Maybe if we do that, the Army will let us alone and will stop killing our women and children. I ask you southern people to be ready to join us when we return. War is the only tongue the white man understands.”
When Roman Nose had quieted down from his excitement, Bleek tried to reason with him. Neither Roman Nose nor all the northern and southern Cheyennes together were going to kill Mashane and all his pony soldiers. Roman Nose himself had said that there were too many soldiers to destroy—that was precisely why he had brought Red Dust to Preacher Bleek, so that the boy might learn the white man’s way and not die fighting pony soldiers who had more numbers than the blades of the buffalo grass. But to this sober plea the famed Cheyenne fighter had a warrior’s reply.
“Kovohe is dead,” he said, “and Roman Nose wants to die.”
“What about the boy?” demanded Bleek accusingly.
“Treat him as your son,” replied the other. “You have already told me that you are going now to find your old friend, Major Wynkoop, over in Kansas. You say that Wynkoop is at Fort Larned. You say, if you find him there, you know that he will help you start a new school for the children, and that he will not permit Mashane to harm them no matter what happens. Have you then lied to Roman Nose?”
Preacher at once protested the question. There was no doubt, he said, that Wynkoop would help the children. The good major was the enemy of Colonel Chivington. Their feud was over Chivington’s underhanded part in taking away Wynkoop’s power to protect the Indians in Colorado Territory. It was Chivington who had caused Wynkoop to be sent away to Kansas. It was Chivington who had put Major Anthony in command at Fort Lyon. No, Preacher had not lied about Wynkoop. If the brave officer could be reached—if he was, as the Smoky Hill people said, at Fort Larned—then there was indeed a last desperate chance to re-gather the orphan children and bring them to final safety in far Kansas.
“So then,” promised Bleek, “you have my word on it, Maox.
If it can be done, it will be done.”
“And the boy, Preacher?”
“It will be as you say. If you do not return with the new grass, he will be as my own son. Here is my hand on it.”
Their grips met, held firm for a long moment, fell apart.
Roman Nose touched his fingertips to his forehead, saluting Preacher Bleek. The latter returned the gesture of simple human respect, one man for another. And that was the whole of their parting.
After that camp, they never saw one another again.
The seven children of the Horse Creek mission school to reach the Smoky Hill winter camp of the southern Cheyennes in late November of 1864 were the following: Ohes, Young Buzzard, the bald-headed boy, of Kiowa-Comanche blood; Hehen, Blackbird, the Negro-Cheyenne youth; Mocenimoe, Little Braid; Kamax, Wooden Stick; Ookat, Bareskin, and Esxovevemàp, Sugarlump, all pure-blooded Cheyennes, and, of course, Soxoenos, Sunflower, the little crippled Arapaho girl.
Although the Indians loved children—indeed, made the love of their children the center of their culture—they never made the white man’s mistake of confusing love with law and order. In the Indian society the child was not consulted about its past, its present, or its future. It was told what to do and it did it, until such an age where it was told it was old enough to act for itself. In no other way than this total discipline could the children be expected to survive the dangers of their nomad life. Incredibly spoiled in many ways, in the matter of obedience to elders and respect the Indian child never hesitated. He was not confounded by kindness and affection, not made either a brat or a simpleton by doting over. He knew his time to command would come. He bided that time in obedience to parental rule as naturally as the bear cub to the mother bear, the fawn to the doe, or the wild foal to the mustang mare.
So it was that when the children were divided, this one to go to that tribe, this one to the other tribe, they did not contend the decisions, but accepted them. Preacher did his best to assure them that the danger would pass and they would all be united again when Mashane was gone and a kinder man had come to take his place. For Bleek this was a lie. He did not believe Chiv-ington would be replaced, but rather that the warfare along the Arkansas would grow worse. In fact, he knew that it would. Bleek had met several of the important people in the Arkansas region, either by way of soliciting their aid for his wilderness school or by virtue of their own curiosity that had led them to visit the mission on distant Horse Creek to see for themselves the “daft and odd bear of a man” who neither preached nor prayed but called himself Preacher, and whose schooling was said to “defy the law and endanger the peace” of the entire frontier.
Some of these visitors went away dismissing the proprietor of The Cottonwoods as a harmless crackpot. Some others felt, but did not reveal the fact, that he was doing a good and charitable deed but was of course quite mad. Still others sided with the military view that held the school should be closed and its head given a one-way stage ticket out of his Arkansas parish. Occasionally, though, a man would meet Nehemiah Bleek and see something in him that solicited neither laughter nor pity or censure, but demanded admiration.
Two such men were the Indian agent, Colley, and Wynkoop, both majors in rank, yet both reasonable and good men of the kind all too often found in the military but scarcely ever exalted by it. As in most professions, including the “praying practice”, as Bleek called the ministry, goodness and light were seldom the heralds of success, the frontier Army being no exception. It was the “hellers” and the “devils” by Bleek’s description who “garnered the main gravy.” The “wheel horses,” on the other hand—the Colleys and the Wynkoops—were given only the “teepee scraps and weed chaff ” for their labors. Universally labeled “Indian lovers”, their unfailing reward, in Bleek’s opinion, was to have the tobacco juice of public ire aimed constantly at their reputations. “Splattered,” in the more precise translation, “all over their hard-working backsides.” It was the Chivingtons and the Anthonys who were the darlings of the Arkansas.
Understanding this, Bleek was prepared to lie to his children in telling them good bye. He thought that it would be kinder than telling the truth. Moreover, there was still that small hope of finding Wynkoop and then, with that hope gone, there was always the eternal star of faith. “Remember Maheo,” he intended to tell the children, “and never forget the Lord God Jehovah.”
Bleek, however, did not say farewell to the children that day, or the next. It was five days later that he managed to get away from the big camp on the Smoky Hill. Delaying him had been a second heavy snowfall setting in even as he planned his route to Fort Larned. Realizing that any weather that would challenge Samson’s vast power to plow a track line would also inhibit a cavalry horse, he had not worried about being caught in the village by any troops that might be alerted by Chivington’s return from his Horse Creek scout. What was it the Bible said about the rain falling the same way for everybody? Well, if it went for rain, it would go double for snow. Preacher surely could count on having a good jump on any new scout patrols coming up to reconnoiter the Smoky Hill Cheyennes. He could depart in confidence. It was just the Spanish jack and himself against the ordinary hardships of a winter trail. Of course, it was a long trail, and time was an unknown menace to his plans for seeing Wynkoop. It was 200 miles to Fort Larned—likely a little more, allowing for bad trail detours. But Preacher believed that Providence had sent that extra snowfall to slow the enemy, or perhaps it was that Maheo had struck a blow against Mashane.
Thus armed in spirit, Bleek prepared to set out. He chose to depart the camp after darkness. If by some outside chance the cavalry had found the village and were watching it, they would not see him leave. Hence, the Indians would not be punished for harboring a man wanted by Colonel Chivington and the 3rd Colorado. The children were to leave later that night and for the same reasons of secrecy and fear of Mashane’s return.
What could be done had been done. No man knew better than Bleek the odds faced in the 200-mile ride to find an officer who might or might not be where Cheyenne rumor had located him. This doubt weighed mightily in the big man’s mind as he sought out the children to say his farewells.
The latter were staying in the lodge of Preacher’s old friend, Honeheonoz, Wolfbag. The wife of Wolfbag was a northern woman, a half-sister of Red Dust’s mother. She and Wolfbag had no children of their own. They had been pleased to shelter the little ones of Preacher Bleek until they might be sent along to the other tribes for safer keeping. Now Bleek was pausing outside the lodge of these good friends, composing himself for an entrance that would hide any of his doubts from the children who trusted him in all things. He stood with head down. Whether praying, or gritting his teeth, might have been a difficult decision to make for one who knew him well.
However, Hotamemaes, the chief scout of the Smoky Hill camp, was not familiar with the Horse Creek missionary. Thus he came trotting up to the head-bowed Bleek with a sharp command for the white man to step aside and unblock the way into the lodge of Wolfbag. Hotamemaes bore important news.
“Hotamemaes?” inquired Bleek, raising his head. “Dog Chips? What a fine name for a respectable man. May I ask what important news it is that brings you through the night at such speed?”
“Of course,” said the brave. “As war chief of our camp, Wolf-bag must tell us our plans for avoiding the troops, or for fighting them. I have just come up from the Arkansas and I saw something big down there…that good oak leaf chief has come out of Fort Larned over there in Kansas and set up a camp down be low Fort Lyon. He has not many soldiers with him, but the Arapahoes tell me that he has sent them word that he will protect them. Little Raven and most of the Arapaho lodges have gone down there from Fort Lyon and camped near the good chief. Ihhai! Wouldn’t you say that was something big?”
“Praise God!” cried Nehemiah Bleek. “Do you mean Major Wynkoop? Is that the good oak leaf chief you mean?”
“That’s the one,” answered Dog Chips. “Now will you stand aside and permit me to go in?”
“Hallelujah!” breathed Bleek, voice lifted with happiness. “Major Wynkoop only sixty miles away, rather than two hundred? The Allfather is certainly working for his red children tonight!”
“Haho, thanks be,” muttered Dog Chips, and ducked in through the entrance flap of Wolfbag’s lodge convinced that the strange-minded schoolmaster from Horse Creek was indeed, as his people said, touched by Maheo.
As for Bleek, he stood a moment motionlessly. Then he made the Sign of the Cross on his broad chest and raised his face to the clearing starlight overhead.
“Thanks be for me, too, Lord,” he said softly. “I reckon me and Samson will give that devil Chivington a real race now.”
Outside the lodge the wind moaned restlessly. The wife of Wolfbag, who had been instructed to mind the matter of preparing the children of Preacher for traveling before daylight, was restless. She wanted to go to the next lodge where she knew her sisters were gathered to discuss the news from the Arkansas. Their husbands, of course, had gone to the meeting of the Dog Soldiers over at the medicine lodge. Finally the woman decided that she would risk her husband’s wrath. The men would be talking war until all hours, anyway. The little ones, bless them, were all sound asleep.
The squaw took a final close look at the slumbering children, wrapped her blanket against the cut of the wind, and slipped out through the entry flaps. Brrrr! It was cold! That simpleton of a preacher had selected a fine frosty night to start out for the Arkansas. Ih, these white people were all crazy!
It was as well for the woman’s peace of mind that her thoughts had already dismissed the sleeping children. No sooner had the entry flaps fallen behind her than Sunflower was sitting upright in her blanket and whispering to ask of Red Dust if he, too, were awake.
He was, he admitted. What did his Arapaho sister wish?
It developed that Sunflower wished to escape the lodge of Wolfbag and his woman and go and try to find Preacher. Preacher was her father, she said, and her heart was not easy away from him. She was afraid without Preacher near. Would Red Dust help her to go and find him? Could not the nephew of the great Roman Nose follow any trail and fight any bears or wolves that might come upon them?
Red Dust was not a shrewd boy, but he was gallant. He asked some hard questions. How would they catch up to Preacher—fly? How could they track him in the dark—by crying out for him to wait for them? What would they tell him when they came up with him—that they were surprised to see him, and very glad?
Sunflower’s mind was as quick as the trap that had twisted her leg. To catch up with Preacher they would take the spotted Delilah. This beast would trot all night to be up again with her black mate, Samson. As for following the trail in the dark, Lamewolf could do that for them. As for a story for Preacher when they came up to him, leave that to Sunflower. She knew where the soft spots were under the schoolmaster’s great muscles and his grizzly-bear winter coat.
Red Dust wanted to go badly enough, but it was taking the little Arapaho girl with him that worried his Cheyenne mind. Women were never taken on the war trail. Also, this little girl was voxkatae, a crippled one. Not, indeed, that this was a criticism. Never that. But a leader had to look to all his party, to the good of the group. No, he finally said, he would not do it. But Sunflower said that he would. She said it with two big tears and a trusting patting of his hand, and the boy was beaten.
“Don’t cry,” he pleaded. “We will go.”
But then, as they started up from their beds, Hehen, the Blackbird, awoke and wanted to know where they were going.
Sunflower told him the truth, promising that they would find Preacher and come back for Blackbird and the others. But the Negro half-blood depended on Sunflower. She had been his small mother at the mission school, as she had been to the others. He could not see her go.
While Sunflower hesitated, trying to think of a good argument, the other half-blood boy, Young Buzzard, sat up, blinking sleepily. So they had to tell him also of the plan.
Now both boys insisted on going and Red Dust was growing very nervous. Sunflower could see that in a moment the northern boy was going to quit the scheme, or else run out of the flaps and make his separate escape.
“Listen,” she said, eyes gleaming, voice held to the lowest of tense whispers, “I have thought of something to keep us all together. You and I, Red Dust, will ride the spotted jenny, as we said, but these two here can then take the Kiowa Ladies and away we will all go on mounts anxious in their own hearts to rejoin Preacher and the black Spanish jack. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?”
Red Dust doubted that it was. But by this time the thought of running away was getting into his wild blood. He agreed to the suggestion. Taking what they needed of food and blankets from the lodge, they gathered up the bridles and saddle pads of Bleek’s animals and set out toward the pony herd. Their luck ran good and they found Sheba, Salome, and Delilah within minutes. Sunflower merely pursed her lips and made a peculiar sound like a rabbit being stepped on by a grazing buffalo. It seemed that the Kiowa Ladies and the calico jenny material ized out of the dim mass of the horse herd like three ghost ponies. Even Red Dust was impressed.
“Very good for a girl,” he said. “Come on, let’s get on them and ride far away from here.”
The children climbed up on the two old Indian mares and the little pinto jenny. Red Dust led the way to the camp’s edge whence Preacher had departed that dusk. After a little searching they found Samson’s hoof prints. The huge jack’s track line stretched away and away into the murk of the starlight. Back near the Cheyenne village a dog barked and was answered by the yammering of coyotes from the outer prairie. Far over toward Rush Creek a timber wolf took up the refrain. A second howl and a third replied to the lobo, but these howls were nearer and were to the south, down where Samson’s track line led.
“I don’t like wolves.” Blackbird shivered. “They’re bad friends.”
“Yes,” said Young Buzzard, “why don’t we go back to the lodge of Wolfbag and his woman and talk some more about this journey?”
“Be still,” ordered Sunflower. “Do you want this northern boy to think we have no spirit?”
“I don’t care what the northern boy thinks,” answered Young Buzzard honestly. “It’s those wolves that concern me. What are they thinking?”
“Of something to eat,” interrupted Red Dust grimly.
“Exactly!” cried Blackbird. “That’s a smart boy, that northern boy. Let’s go back! I don’t want to be wolf food, do you?”
“Listen, you southern people,” warned Red Dust somberly, “if you want to go back, it’s too late. We have set out to find Preacher and we will find him. Nobody turns back.”
“That’s right,” said Sunflower. “Let’s go, Lamewolf!” she called to the Indian dog that sat on his haunches, panting and yellow-eyed, pluming the snow with his tail. “Take the trail, here. Hai!” She slid off Delilah’s rump, over the jenny’s tail, and seized the savage dog by the scruff of the neck and dragged him whimperingly over to the track line. There, she shoved his nose into the snow, giving him the scent of Samson’s rear hoof prints, where the odor was strongest. “Ai-hai!” she said excitedly. “That’s it…go now, find Preacher!”
Lamewolf growled uncertainly. The look he shot at the little girl was one of pure doubt. But she shook an impatient finger at him and stomped her twisted foot in the snow, and he dropped his hackles and his tail and put his black nose to the track line and slinked off along it like a puff of prairie smoke. Sunflower ran to the spotted jenny and took Red Dust’s hand. The Cheyenne boy swung her up behind him. She put both arms about him and gave him a happy squeeze. “Hai!” she said. “Let’s go, warrior!”
Red Dust looked around at her as questioningly as had Lamewolf. But in the end he was no more the match for those big brown eyes than was the vicious old wolf dog. Sunflower merely giggled and gave him another squeeze and kicked Delilah in the flanks, and away they went.
The two half-blood boys were sharing looks of gravest question, too, of course. But the Kiowa Ladies, waiting for no approval from them, shot after Delilah. All at once the fears of the night and the wolf howls vanished. The air was cold and the Ladies and Delilah were fresh by five days of rest with the Cheyenne herd. No boy could sit to a rocking lope along a mysterious track line leading toward runaway adventure for long without responding to the spirit of such things. Within a mile everyone was happy and chattering together, telling of the great times they would again have with Preacher when the morning’s light should come to show them where he was—right there over the next rise, not far at all—and let them ride up to him crying out the good news to him that it was they, his own dear children, caught up with him and come to help him look for Major Wynkoop and all those good new pony soldiers down there where Little Dried River ran into the Arkansas, below Fort Lyon.