The children did well through the night. Red Dust, no stranger to the hard trail and the cold, had borrowed a large woven grass pannier from the implements of Wolfbag’s squaw. Into this basket he had put a supply of the woman’s best dried buffalo fuel. Now he and his friends were glad for this northern foresight. It permitted them to find shelter and make a warming fire against the mid-blackness of the morning. They started on with renewed sureness, although Lamewolf had a few minutes’ seeming difficulty in finding the line of Samson’s trail after the halt. Soon enough, however, he quit whining and let out a “whoof!” that announced he was back on the scent again. Red Dust, peering down at the single line of tracks, nodded in relief. That old dog had worried him a little. But it was all right. The track line went on south as before. It lay as clearly in the snow as if it wanted itself to be followed without fail and by poor light. Red Dust could have stayed with that track line without Lamewolf. It was easy.
Easy, perhaps. With the first gray light of daylight, the hoof prints were wandering a little and the children, sleepy-eyed and long past the first flush of adventure, were continually falling into little catnaps in the saddle. Even Red Dust was having trouble keeping his eyes open and upon the veering trail. Then, suddenly, he was not having that trouble any more.
The tracks wavered up a long swell of the prairie to disappear over the snowy crest of the rise. When the Indian boy reached the top of the incline, the tracks ran only a few feet and stopped—stopped with the creature that had been making them—a very old and gray-bearded rogue bull buffalo that now had faced about to make his stand against his trailers.
The other Indian children came to the crest, their mounts halting. Delilah, the piebald jenny, snorted loudly.
The bull dropped its great head, pawed the snow in clouds over its neck hump. Mules liked buffalo for some strange reason and would run off and join the buffalo herds with great obstinacy. This endeared them little to the Indians, perhaps explaining the Cheyenne dubiety toward the breed. It endeared them still less to the buffalo, which were quite afraid of the mule smell and tended to stampede at the first hint of it. But this old bull had traveled far and he was tired.
He stood and pawed and stared and snorted back at the spotted jenny and the four Indian children and the two Kiowa mares. Lamewolf, that great tracker who had led them so far astray and so wrongly during the dark hours, was also old and tired and had traveled far. He showed no more interest in a battle than the ancient herd bull. He sat down in the snow with a weary grunt, eying the shaggy traitor who had caused him to get on its cross trail. It was Red Dust, finally, who decided what must be done.
“See,” he pointed out to the children, “Uncle Hotoa wants only to be left alone. He has come away from the herd to be alone and to die. The buffalo do that. It is a matter of pride with them. Come, we will not disturb this old man.”
“But what will we do?” demanded Sunflower with a darkly reproachful look at Lamewolf. “If the dog has lost us, how ever will we find ourselves again?”
Red Dust pondered the question. He was a boy who had been taught to think of his words before giving them. As he hesitated, Blackbird and Young Buzzard encouraged him.
“Yes,” said the first boy, “where are we? Are we going to wander on and die like the buffalo? In all of this land I see only blue sky and white snow.”
“That is so,” agreed his comrade quickly. “I can’t see anything but sky and snow, either.”
“Never mind,” said Sunflower, elevating her plump chin.
“Red Dust will see something else.”
“Hah!” said Blackbird. “Let him name it to me!”
“And me!” challenged Young Buzzard. “What do you see, northern boy? Magic signs in the snow?”
“Yes,” replied Red Dust, straightening. “And all we must do is follow them. Come on.”
“Where?” demanded Blackbird.
Red Dust kneed Delilah into a turn. He started her along the back trail of the buffalo’s track line, giving them his answer in that act. They were going to have to follow the tracks back to wherever they had crossed lines with the tracks of black Samson, probably at that place where they had built the fire and where Lamewolf had showed uncertainty. All of the children understood this fact in the moment of the northern boy’s turning of Delilah. It was an Indian thing. They could see it clearly when it was shown to them. Tired as they were, they picked up their spirits once again and started kicking the Kiowa mares and the little pinto jenny a lively tattoo of heel thumps in the ribs. As quickly as they had lost their Cheyenne hotoma,they now recovered its inner-warming courage.
“Nanehea, nanehea!Let us all follow Red Dust quickly.”
The three mounts began to canter. This was sight-tracking in bright, growing daylight. No need to trust an ancient dog’s wheezy old nose any more. No chance for trails being crossed here. This would be a sure thing. Only follow the northern boy and raise the good spirit yells all the way.
The children commenced to utter the high yipping noises of the Cheyenne “hurry up” call. This sound always served to stir the heart of the downcast, to lift up the will of the weary. But in the present case it stirred and lifted up something else, something that brought Delilah and the Kiowa Ladies to a snow-showering halt, their eyes walling with fear, their ears pointing. Those were timber wolves howling their hunting song back there! They were coming on the trail they had made following the old bull.
In the stillness, the hoarse baying of the gray brutes seemed only over the rise, only just beyond where the bull’s tracks disappeared across the snow crest. It was a moment of real terror for the children. They swung their widened eyes toward Red Dust, throats dry, voices locked in their clenched teeth. The northern boy was taking out his knife, spitting on its keen blade.
“Arapaho girl,” he said swiftly to Sunflower, “will that dog of yours bait a buffalo? Will he take hold of a bull and hold him for the hunter to get behind?”
“I don’t know!” cried Sunflower, very frightened, “I don’t know! Will you do that, Lamewolf?”
Red Dust was swinging the spotted jenny, motioning for Blackbird and Young Buzzard to turn the Kiowa mares.
“He had better do it,” said the northern boy grimly, and led them on the gallop back toward the lone shaggy figure of Uncle Hotoa.
When they came once more to where the old bull stood, they found him ready for the wolves. He had put his rump to the wall of a little dry wash just beyond the big rise. Here the pack could not come at him from behind. Here the magnificent old lord of the prairie was prepared to face his enemies to the last.
Red Dust slid from the back of the spotted jenny. Talking in an even tone, he told Sunflower to take the two half-blood boys and quickly ride on down the wash. The bed of the depression deepened to the south and made a hairpin turn to drain toward the small stream beside which they had made their night fire. Around that bend, they were to wait and watch. If Red Dust could do what he must to the old bull, he would run and join them. If he failed and the wolves then came up to surround him, they were to go at once down the deepening wash, and get away if they could. He would try to occupy the wolves.
Sunflower began to cry out against this, but the northern boy ordered her to go. Another burst of howling from the wolves, much nearer now, decided the girl. Shouting to Black bird and Young Buzzard, she drove Delilah off and around the bend, the half-blood boys following her on the Kiowa mares.
“Now hold hard to those ponies when you are hidden!” Red Dust called after them. “They will want to break away from you when they get the wolf smell!”
The Cheyenne boy had seized the rusted chain of Lame-wolf’s collar in the beginning, so that the brute would not desert him when Sunflower rode off. In the excitement of shouting after the departing children, Red Dust realized he had dropped the chain hold and freed the dog. But now his heart rose within him, rather than failed.
Lamewolf was making no sign to go after his Arapaho mistress. He was looking from Red Dust to the sound of the wolf howling to the snorting and snow-pawing of the cornered bull. This was no dog that was going to run away. Seeing this, the northern boy threw a glance upward toward Maheo.
“Thank thee, Allfather,” he said. Then, softly and with a quick pat on the dog’s broad skull: “Come on, old fighter, let us see what two Cheyennes can do together.”
The moment the boy moved forward, knife in hand, toward the buffalo, Lamewolf dropped to his furry belly in the snow and rushed in upon the bull. Attacking the bull’s head, he got the great animal to lower his horns and come out a step or two from the wall of the dry wash. Red Dust, circling to the rear of the huge beast, slid along the wall behind him. The straining muscles of the animal’s rear quarters, the twisting and thrusting of its tremendous body—all were within touch of Red Dust’s outstretched fingers. If the bull came backward, the boy would be crushed in the instant of the maneuver, spread like a bug upon the dry earth of the prairie cutbank by the scraping force of 2,000 pounds of bone and horn and shaggy black hide.
But the great beast did not turn. In the instant of the sliding behind him, Red Dust whistled to the dog with fingers between lips and made the seizing shout in Cheyenne. From some dim cranny of his Indian youth, Lamewolf called up the meaning of the whistle and the shout and hand signal of the northern boy. In he went to the left of the bull’s lowered head. The bull swung his gleaming horns to follow the movement. Instantly Lamewolf shifted to the right, and, when the brute’s head came back toward him, the dog’s jaws closed on its black nose and held there. With a thunderous bellow of anger and pain, the bull set itself on its haunches to raise its head and dash the old dog to the ground for stomping. And that was the moment of Red Dust’s prayer.
When the rear quarters bunched and set themselves, the boy dived in between the great bull’s planted hind hoofs and slashed, once, twice, with all his force to drive the knife through the hock tendon of each rear leg. The old bull never felt the knife.
He knew only that the dog had let go of his nose and that there was a small Indian boy running out from behind him and that there was blood on the snow and it was his blood. He tried to lunge after the boy and the dog, but something was wrong. His rear legs would not work. They buckled beneath him. He struggled up on the front legs, sitting like some enormous black-maned dog on the snow. It was thus the wolves found him, racing up but moments after Red Dust and the old dog had vanished around the bend, into the deeper course of the dry wash.
The pack was not fooled by the wounded bull. Three or four of its members split off and began to run the tracks of Red Dust and Lamewolf toward the bend. But the northern boy had won his gamble. They had no sooner veered off from the pack than the pack had gotten the sight and the scent of the freshly shed blood in the snow about the old bull and was raising a hideous yammer of snarls. The other wolves now whirled and turned back from the track line of Red Dust and the children, to be in at the kill of the buffalo.
As Red Dust had foreseen, the blood could not be resisted by the gray killers. As for Uncle Hotoa, the great old bull had died that four of his small Indian comrades might live. Maheo would understand that and would bring old Hotoa to see it likewise. Meanwhile, the courage of the northern boy had purchased the time for his companions and himself to escape—or so he urgently prayed as he led the other children in the flight.
His prayers were heard. By the time the paunches of the wolf pack were bulging with sweet buffalo beef, the matter of the human prey was completely forgotten. Moreover, that prey was far away. Hidden by the ever-deepening walls of the dry wash, Red Dust and the others had ridden their mounts many miles and were now nearing the end of the wash, where the walls of the depression vanished and its channel widened to join that of Ponoeohe, the Little Dried River, that south-running tributary of the great Arkansas that the white man called Sand Creek.
Preacher, traveling south through the night, made good time. He had brought his Ute snowshoes with him, and, when Samson gave sign of wearying, he donned the webs and trotted ahead of his mount. The Spanish jack followed him like a dog. In this sharing way they were far down the Indian trail to the Arkansas before daylight. Only one thing worried Preacher. He had been fooled by the bad snows up on the divide country near Smoky Hill River headwaters and the Cheyenne village.
The higher country up there had caught much heavier falls than the lower prairies toward the Arkansas. It was nearly open going, once they had struck the valley of Little Dried River and were on the main Indian trail to the big river and the rumored camp of Major Wynkoop below Fort Lyon. If those lighter snows and nearly bare earth conditions held also to the west, toward Bijou Basin and the field bivouac of Chivington’s 3rd Colorado, then only God would know how long ago Chiv-ington had reached his main troops, had reached those troops and sent the vengeance patrols looking for Preacher Bleek and his scattered brood of Indian orphans. But the Lord had been with Bleek so far, and the big Horse Creek man was not going to begin doubting Him now.
He and Samson went on, only hurrying more than they had before the snows thinned and the thoughts of Chivington returned. With the first faint streaks of dawn they were on the Arkansas. By sunrise they had found the white tents of Wynkoop’s temporary field headquarters and Bleek was breakfasting with the “good oak leaf soldier chief” from Fort Larned.
The meeting went well. Wynkoop listened with keen understanding to Preacher’s report of the school’s burning and of his abduction of Chivington as hostage for the escape of the visiting Indians and of his own orphans of Indian blood. Wynkoop was aware of Chivington’s standing order to the 3rd Colorado. He was not a soft man on Indians himself. In his day and when the depredations of the Cheyennes and the Arapahoes against the whites of Colorado had warranted it, he had issued his own “kill Indians on sight” orders. But these had been temporary actions designed to quell bloody outbreaks in local situations. They were never blanket conceptions of a method of warfare that amounted to extermination of the red man wherever encountered.
“I believe your story,” he said to Bleek, when the Horse Creek schoolmaster had concluded. “Moreover, I am going to issue you a written pass to go up to Pueblo and see Colley. I will put in that pass the order that you are to be given any of these children you may find along your way to Pueblo. Particularly any of them that may have been brought in to Fort Lyon. I will address this communication to Major Anthony at Lyon, requesting his co-operation. I expect, too, that he will furnish it.”
He made the last statement with something of a warm wrinkling of the crows-feet at his eye corners, and Bleek queried him on it.
“I am satisfied,” he answered, “that Anthony understands that I am not down here setting up this field camp for the pro tection of the peaceful Indians on my own. He will be forced to assume that I am acting under higher authority than his by the mere fact that he was not consulted or advised in any way on the matter. This fact alone must lead to his honoring of this pass and order I give you, the regular Army being what it is and Anthony being of the regular Army. Now, Bleek, there is no more I can do for you. I am going to assign two troopers to ride with you for your own protection. Anthony I do not fear, but Colonel Chivington is another matter. I suggest that you avoid him. As for your request in regard to a new school site near Fort Larned, the best I can offer is to say that I will be happy to entertain the idea if you will come and see me at the fort after this Indian matter is settled here. Meanwhile, your wisest move is to collect your children and report to Agent Colley at Pueblo. He will advise you from that point. He will also instruct Chiv-ington of my order, and no doubt of his agreement with it. Again, this will ensure that the children are to be brought in unharmed if found in the field. Now, sir, I hope that you have enjoyed your breakfast and that your opinion of the military and the Indian Bureau are, alike, somewhat improved.”
Bleek thanked him humbly. He did not like, he said, to press a matter when the major had been so kind, but it was going to be necessary that he be provided with some transportation to Pueblo. Might the major spare a good mount in a good cause? Bleek’s own black jackass had covered sixty miles in one long night, and was used up.
“We can do better than that,” answered Wynkoop. “The Pueblo stage is due past here within the hour. It stops at Fort Lyon and at Bent’s Ranch only. You will be with Major Colley this time tomorrow morning. You can’t beat that, Reverend.”
Bleek blushed at hearing the title, but Wynkoop was not insincere in using it.
“Yes, sir, I reckon that’s first-class, Major, sir,” he said. “I and my little ones won’t forget you. God willing, we’ll come and tell you so, too, down to Fort Larned like you said, Major.” He turned to peer off down the Arkansas, squinting against the early sun. “Begging your pardon, Major, but don’t you think you’d best write out those orders for me? Isn’t that the Pueblo stage coming yonder?”
It was the stage, and Wynkoop nodded quickly.
An orderly brought the materials and the officer made out the document. He sanded it and gave it to Bleek.
“Don’t show it except as needed,” he said, “and don’t surrender it to anyone save Agent Colley. Good luck, Bleek. These are bad times. We can only do what we think is right. You understand that you will face some sort of inquiry over this affair with Chivington. I am taking your word for what took place, but even so the circumstances warrant complete investigation.”
“Yes, sir, I know that, Major. What I did wasn’t right, I reckon. It was like you said, Major. I did it because I thought it was right at the time.”
“I’m satisfied that’s the case,” said Wynkoop.
The stage was swinging into the camp then, and Bleek was knuckling his bushy brows and making one parting request of his quiet-voiced benefactor.
“Major, sir, might I tie on that old jackass of mine to the back of the stage and tow him along to Bent’s Ranch? I can leave him there. Me and Colonel Bent, we’re old friends, sir. You know, on account of the Cheyenne Indians and like that.”
Wynkoop glanced at Samson. He had not previously studied the latter, and now his hand waved emphatically.
“Good Lord, yes, Bleek,” he agreed. “Take him along by all means. In fact, sir, that’s an order!”
Nehemiah Bleek grinned, did his ham-fisted best at a proper salute. Taking the black jack, he went to meet the halting Pueblo stage. Ten minutes later the stagecoach, with Preacher Nehemiah Bleek aboard, had cleared the camp and was rolling for Fort Lyon.
“Praise Jehovah,” murmured the man from Horse Creek, and with a sigh that blew dust from the tattered upholstery of the opposite seats, he lay back against the cushions of the old Concord and fell fast asleep.
When Red Dust and the mission school children rode out of the dry wash, into the open lands of upper Sand Creek, they revealed themselves to another group of prairie travelers brought out by the good weather. Coming up Sand Creek were Sergeant Skemp and a new search patrol on the prowl for “any Indians, so long as they were Cheyennes,” as ordered by the enraged Chivington.
There were eight troopers with Skemp, including exSergeant Durant, now reduced to buck private and put in Skemp’s patrol for punishment and penalty. Skemp and Red Dust saw each other’s group at the same time. Even as the northern boy turned the pinto jenny and fled with his companions for the high ground north of the wash, Skemp was shouting his troopers into hot pursuit. It was not a routine running down of fleeing children; it was a hard, gun-firing chase. If the troopers, taking separate decent actions, were firing into the ground or over the heads of the fugitives, Skemp was not. He was aiming to hit, as he had ordered his men to aim. Only the uneven ground and twisting course of the Indian mounts prevented him from wounding or killing the children or their saddle animals.
Riding up beside him, Durant called out for him to stop shooting. In the name of God, couldn’t he see that the kids were unarmed? That they were terrified? That they could not possibly get away from the better-mounted patrol? His answer was a snarl from Skemp and another round fired at the children. It came to Durant, then, that the sergeant meant to kill those poor wild orphans of Preacher Bleek’s, and to do it in the chase so that he could so enter it in his report—
Shot While Attempting to Escape:We couldn’t make out too clear that they was only kids, General sir. Our orders was to shoot any hostiles we saw, sir, and it all happened so quick like we didn’t hardly have no real chance to be certain if they was growed bucks, or whatever. You know how it is with them crazy devils, sir. You give any of them the benefit of thirty seconds’ doubt and they’ll shoot you from the back quicker’n a drunk Mexican.
Durant could see the words. He could hear their pious delivery before the court of inquiry that would look into the murders. It was as clear to him as though he were already there, as the witness he would undoubtedly be required to be. He knew, too, what the court would rule. Also, what would happen to witness Durant should he presently persist in any course of obstruction to Sergeant Skemp’s plain intent to kill Indians.
He pulled his horse back, reining him away from Skemp. But he would not touch his carbine’s trigger, not even to fire, as his fellow troopers were firing, to make the sergeant think that his order was being obeyed. Curse the court of inquiry! And curse that murdering Skemp. Private Durant had fired at his last fleeing Indian, tame or hostile, man, woman, or little child.
But now the chase was closing. The two Indian boys on the dirty gray mares, single-mounted and very light in weight, were going to make it safely away, Durant saw. The little spotted jenny, however, small anyway and carrying two children, was falling behind and would be caught. As he noted this, the trooper saw the little crippled Arapaho girl jump off of the pinto jenny and go rolling head over heels along the bare hard ground. Miraculously she got to her feet and began to limp toward the edge of the dry wash bluff. The northern Cheyenne boy was fighting the jenny, trying to get her turned about so that he could go back for the girl. But before he could control the animal, Skemp had drawn within fifty yards of the Arapaho child.
Sunflower was trying to get over the lip of the dry wash wall, to hide there and to lead the soldiers after her so that Red Dust might win free alone on Delilah. But the walls of the dry wash were too steep and too high. There was no place to climb down, no niche, even, to hold her slight body below the edge of the prairie, out of the gunfire. As she hesitated, Skemp’s last shot struck her. She spun three times around and fell sprawlingly over the bluff top, into the deep wash. The sergeant slid his horse to a stop, dismounted, and ran stumblingly toward the edge of the depression, levering the spent shell from his carbine. The dismounting gave Red Dust time to turn Delilah and spur her toward the cursing Skemp. The latter heard the drum of the jenny’s trim hoofs but thought it was one of his men coming up. He turned in the last second, but was too late. Knife bared, the northern boy leaped from the jenny’s back down upon him.
Skemp writhed violently, managing to keep the blade from burying itself between his shoulder blades, where Red Dust had aimed it. But he took a nasty ragged gash on his left arm before he could throw the Indian boy away from him and pick up the carbine he had dropped when the boy’s knife struck. With a foul oath, he started toward Red Dust.
Yet, as he raised the gun to fire at the boy, Lamewolf, having run like a coward at first rifle burst, came racing back to leap and bury his fangs in the wrist of Skemp’s right arm. Screaming with pain, Skemp literally lifted the wolf dog over head and flung him down the bluff. But he had dropped the rifle again and now, before he might recover it the second time, Red Dust had kicked it over the edge of the bluff and followed slidingly after it, to tumble and fall to the floor of the wash below.
He lit almost atop Lamewolf in a drift of soft snow two feet deep. To his joy, he saw there in the same drift, her fall also bro ken by the snowbank, the crumpled figure of Sunflower. The Arapaho girl was bleeding from the gunshot wound and could not walk, but she was alive, and Red Dust seized her and carried her back in under the overhang of the bluff. There he found some rocks and weathered ledges, with a dark hole that smelled and looked like a wolf’s denning place. Up above, he could hear the raving of the wounded Sergeant Skemp as the latter roared at his men to hurry up, to bring him another carbine, to get up there on the double and start shooting. The northern boy was desperate.
He saw Lamewolf totter up and out of the snowbank and look around. He whistled for him and the old dog heard him and limped into the rocks to join his small people. In the same glance Red Dust saw the pony soldier carbine sticking up in the snow, and ran out and brought it back in under the overhang. He patted the hand of Sunflower. He put his arms about the little girl and hugged her hard.
“Lie still, little sister,” he told her. “We have a gun now, and a place to fight. Don’t move. It makes the bleeding worse.”
Sunflower smiled, or tried to smile. But the pain was very bad where the bullet had struck her. Her best effort was to reach out and pat Red Dust’s hand in return. She was so weak, so shaken, that her voice would not come.
Lamewolf crept to her, whining deeply in his throat. She put an arm around the furry neck. The old dog crouched and laid his head by her side so that she could hold onto him, could feel his warmth and strength there beside her.
“Give her your life, old dog,” said Red Dust. “I will give mine to both of you. I am going to kill that pony soldier sergeant, if he comes down here.”
Skemp, meanwhile, was coming down. He seized a carbine from one of the men and ran along the wall of the wash until it lowered and he could jump down into its bottom. Then he raced back up toward the overhang and the rocks of the wolf denning place where Red Dust waited for him.
When the sergeant came, cursing and glaring, to a halt, looking around for the fallen children, Red Dust stood up from behind the rocks and pulled the trigger of his carbine. There was only a loud metallic clink. The carbine was empty.
Skemp laughed and raised his own weapon to shoot. In that instant, Lamewolf rushed past Red Dust and attacked the sergeant once more. This time, however, Skemp was ready for him and shot him in mid-air. The bullet seemed to take off the top of the old dog’s head, fur flying as if the lead had exploded upon contact. Lamewolf hurtled past Skemp into the snowbank, never twitching after he fell.
Mercifully Sunflower did not see her friend struck down. The Arapaho girl had fainted from pain and loss of blood. Red Dust could not say if she, too, were not gone like the brave old dog. He only knew that his own time was staring at him from the muzzle of the pony soldier’s gun, now looking point-blank into his dark face for the final breath.
The nephew of Roman Nose took that breath and stood up straight, waiting for Skemp to pull the trigger. But Skemp’s finger did not close. Another calvaryman’s carbine barked from atop the bluff. Skemp’s gun flew apart, stock shattered. Skemp looked at his empty, numbed hands. His face, dead white beneath its four-day filth of beard, turned upward. Red Dust heard the voice of one of the soldiers up on top. It was giving an order to the sergeant. And the northern boy saw the sergeant step back and slowly raise his hands in response to that order.
That was a real stillness. During it, Red Dust came out from beneath the overhang. He saw the soldier up there on the bluff. He saw the white smoke of the gunpowder still curling from the muzzle of the soldier’s carbine. And he saw something else. He knew that soldier. It was the quiet man, Durant. The one who had driven the wagon for Preacher.
The troopers went with Durant down the bluff to where Skemp waited. They followed the private because men will al ways follow other men who seize command. But they were already commencing to suffer doubts.
Durant understood this, being a man who thought and felt things beyond his apparent simplicity. The sergeant had clearly gone berserk in the pursuit of the Indian children. These other men—most of them anyway—were decent enough. It took the leadership of such as Chivington and Skemp to bring out the cruelty that lurked in them, as in most men. They had sided instinctively with Durant’s rebellion in their first disgust with Skemp. But now, as they came up to Skemp outside the wolf den, Durant did not know whether he could hold them any longer.
Skemp, the old sneer back on his dirty face, was certain that the troopers would not stay with Durant. They all knew Colonel Chivington too well for that. But Durant still held the carbine on him, and the men were only wavering as they drew up and halted.
“Sergeant Skemp,” said Durant, “you’re under arrest.”
Skemp laughed. “Do you hear that, boys?” he asked of the silent men. “Old Skemp’s under arrest. Now, I wonder what the charges might be? I don’t mean against me, boys. I mean against you, when I tell the colonel about Private Durant shooting at his sergeant. Eh? How about that, Binford? You, Morissey? Heckert, you think the colonel’s going to forgive you?”
“Binford,” ordered Durant, “tie his hands behind him. Heckert, you and Morissey take him up above and get him on his horse. We’re taking him in to Fort Lyon.”
“Fort Lyon?” The troopers echoed the question as one.
“That’s right. I’m turning Skemp over to Major Anthony with my charges. Turning myself in, too. I’ll stand trial for what I’ve done, and those of you as want to can witness for or against me. But Skemp is going in. Now tie him up.”
None of the men moved.
Skemp laughed again. “Go ahead, boys,” he said, holding out his hands. “Do what General Durant tells you.”
Durant knew that this was the time. He knew, too, that he needed help from some source not evident among the weakening resolves of his fellow troopers. It was then that his glance fell on Red Dust. The Indian boy stood waiting. He stood as straight as a rifle rod. Something in his dark face, his dignity, tugged at those chords of human charity in Durant’s breast that had brought him to shoot the carbine out of Skemp’s hands.
“Binford,” he said, “I want you to go back in those rocks and bring that little girl out here.”
Binford looked at Skemp.
“Sure.” The sergeant grinned. “Why not? Poor little thing. That’s quite a tumble she took. I wouldn’t be surprised but what it had kilt her.”
Binford went up into the rocks. Presently he came back out from under the shadows of the overhang. He stood in the morning sunlight, the fragile Indian child in his arms. She looked as though she were asleep, a broken and tortured Arapaho doll, now at peace. Binford’s jaw muscles were shivering. His face was white with righteous anger. He looked at Skemp and this time there was no question of the trooper’s feelings, or his decision. Binford was a big man. He was rough and coarse, and he had killed an Indian in his time. But this was different. This was not an Indian. It was only a little baby girl.
“Sarge,” he said to Durant, not Skemp, “she don’t hardly weigh no more nor a broke-wing bird.”
“That’s what she is,” agreed Durant. He turned back to the other troopers, low-voiced. “Arrest Sergeant Skemp,” he said to them, and now the men went forward and took Skemp hard by the arms and shoved him away down the wash and toward the horses, and Skemp understood in his skulking way what had happened there in that moment of sunlight below the overhang, and he went with the men not saying anything, and in fear for his life.
Durant made a wide circle away from the Sand Creek trail, cutting overland to intercept the Arkansas stage road below Fort Lyon. He traveled with intentional slowness and great caution. He could take no chance of meeting other patrols of cavalry. He knew that his only course with Major Anthony lay in voluntary surrender. He must make it into the fort on his own, and tell his own story, before anyone else might tell it ahead of him.
When the early twilight came on, they were still some miles above the Arkansas. Camp was made in a small growth of brush beside a small tributary of Sand Creek. Durant did not recognize the little stream, nor did any of the men. They made a fire and ate a cheerless supper. After full darkness, it began to snow lightly. The leafless scrub did little to shield them from the rising wind. The men became surly. They sensed that Durant was leading them by the long route, that they ought to have been snug and warm in Army bunks at Fort Lyon by this time. Nothing was said, but bad feeling was in the air.
Skemp had not uttered a word since his capture. His wily brain had evidently told him that silence was his greatest menace to the worried men.
The troopers slept quickly enough after supper. The last one up was hulking Binford, who tarried to be sure that Sunflower was made as comfortable as could be beside the fire. Durant told Binford that he appreciated his help. The big soldier nodded, glanced uneasily toward Skemp, who was bound securely to a nearby sapling.
“Listen,” he whispered, “don’t let on I’m saying anything to you, Sarge. But the boys ain’t to be trusted tomorrow. Maybe not even for the rest of tonight. You’d best get out of here if you can. I’ll mind the baby girl for you.”
He trailed the words off and got up and went over to his blankets. Rolling up in them, he was snoring before Durant could fully absorb the several implications of his friendly attempt at warning him.
He looked at Skemp. The sergeant was wide-eyed, watching him. He had the wild shadows of the firelight glittering in his deep-set eyes. Even bound to the tree, he seemed crouched, ready to spring. It came to Durant that Binford was right. He had to get out of this camp, and quickly. But he must take the Indian boy Red Dust with him, and he must take the little girl Sunflower. To leave either with Skemp, Binford’s good-hearted assurances to the contrary, was unthinkable.
But how? How was he to do it with that devilish Skemp watching him without blinking the whole night through? Sleep was the answer. Skemp must somehow be put to sleep.
He poured a cup of coffee and took it over to the prisoner. Putting the cup on the ground, he unsheathed his knife. “I’m going to cut you loose, Skemp,” he said. “Just be quiet and don’t wake up the men, eh? This here coffee will go good on such a cold night. Have I got your word you won’t try nothing?”
“Sure, soldier,” Skemp answered. His narrowed eyes swept the sleeping camp. “You know me. I’m obliged for the coffee.”
Durant went behind the tree to which Skemp was tied. Without a sound, he drew his long-barreled Colt cavalry revolver and struck the sergeant across the back of the head with the weapon. Then, and only then, did he cut the ropes. Skemp’s unconscious body slid to the ground. Durant had brought him that sleep which was required for the escape.
Awakening the Indian children, he spoke to Sunflower, who translated the news of their flight to Red Dust. The Arapaho girl was weak from loss of blood, but her wound had proved to be less serious than feared. Her mind was bright and clear again, and she could be carried without harm. Red Dust was overjoyed at this and at the word of the good soldier, Durant, that they were going away into the night. In Indian silence he untied Delilah from the picket line, while the white trooper freed his own horse. Mounting up, they stole out of the camp, Private Durant in the lead, Sunflower cradled in his strong arms.
Durant had no certain hope that they might find the Fort Lyon trail by darkness and with snow falling, but he knew one thing beyond all question. If he could safely bring these Indian children of Preacher Bleek’s into the custody of the regular Army commander at Fort Lyon, he would be a far better man than he had been on the day he joined Colonel John Chiving-ton and the Volunteer 3rd Colorado Cavalry to “kill all Indians, little and big.” And this was the thought that kept him warm through the long and icy night.
Durant was looking for a place to halt and get down. He had not struck the Fort Lyon trail he was probing for and the little Indian girl needed to be warmed and rested. For the past hour the snow had increased. If a man were now to be honest about it, he was lost; he was as lost as Bo-peep’s pet sheep. He had better get in out of the wind, build a fire, and wait for daybreak.
A good idea. But the wind kept building and the snow changing directions. Shortly it occurred to Durant that this might be a delusion. Perhaps it was he who was changing directions. Watching the wind for the following few minutes, he was convinced. That snow wasn’t switching on him—he was riding in a circle.
The fear of this crawled up inside him. It wasn’t that he cared about himself. But he did want to bring that little girl through. Yes, and the brave boy, too. What then? Make a bivouac there in the wide open country with only their horses for windbreak and warmth? No, that wouldn’t do. There was no wood, no buffalo chips, not even any burnable grass for fire building where they were wandering. It was a barren part of the prairie and the wind kept sweeping it down to its hard flinty crust just to remind Durant of the poverty of the wilderness he had led these poor small Indian kids into. What a hero he was! And what a soldier!
He pulled his horse to a stop. Red Dust brought the pinto jenny up alongside of him and said something in Cheyenne to Sunflower. The girl told Durant that the boy wished to know if he were lost. Abjectly the trooper admitted it. The girl then said that the boy agreed. That he, too, was lost. However, he had a friend who was not. Surprised, Durant straightened.
Red Dust nodded and patted Delilah on the neck.
“He says the aevoham knows where to go,” translated Sunflower.
“The what?” said Durant.
“The little spotted mule,” answered the Arapaho girl. “She wants to lead. Red Dust thinks she has winded something.”
Durant tightened the blanket about the child, held her more closely in his tired arms.
“All right, sweetheart,” he said. “Tell the boy to turn the little jenny loose. Let’s all pray she’s smelling friends.”
Delilah started off through the whirling snow, going upwind. She kept sniffing and snuffling and never broke her quickening trot. In three or four minutes they all saw the dim star glow of a campfire haloing through the snowflakes. In another five minutes the jenny had led them down into a shallow wash and up that sheltered course to a sharp bend that hid the fire. When the spotted jenny brayed the next moment, she was answered from beyond the bend by twin shrill whinnies of glad welcome.
“The Kiowa Ladies!” cried Sunflower, and that was indeed the case. Around the bend of the wash, they found Blackbird and Young Buzzard cozily dug in under a dry bank with a good fire. The two Kiowa mares were munching at a fine pile of gathered prairie hay. The half-blood boys were in good condition and spirit, barring the belly hunger and sadness of heart that would now vanish with the return of their lost comrades.
Durant fed the boys what food he had brought from the trooper camp. While they wolfed the rations down, they explained what had become of their own food supply that Young Buzzard had been carrying on Salome.
Upon escaping Skemp’s patrol, they had crept back to the wolf den and rocks in the big wash when the soldiers had left with Sunflower and Red Dust. There they had found the old dog, Lamewolf, his head all bloody, lying still in the snowbank. They had not wished such a brave fighter to have to travel the Shadow Trail without anything to eat. So they had left him their entire saddlebag full of buffalo jerky and pemmican stolen—that was to say, borrowed—from the wife of Wolfbag in the village of the Smoky Hill people.
This story of typical Indian absurdity did not amuse Durant, but it delighted Sunflower. She had worried about this—that her old pet would not have food to eat on his journey up the Dead Man’s Road of the Milky Way. Now she was happy, she said. If the pony soldier wished it, she believed she could go on and ride all night through.
Through her, Durant consulted with Blackbird and Young Buzzard, seeking to learn if they knew where to find the Fort Lyon trail. They did not, he discovered, but did know the whereabouts of a better trail.
“Where?” was the soldier’s immediate plea.
Sunflower informed him that the half-blood boys said they were sitting on that trail. It ran right beside their fire, down the little dry wash. Blackbird, whose mother had been a servant at the place of the great white trader, William Bent, remembered this trail because his mother had traveled it with him many times in going to visit Cheyenne relatives at Sand Creek.
“Bent’s Ranch!” exclaimed Durant. “Blackbird, maybe you’ve struck it bigger than you know.”
Of a sudden, whether by desperation’s grasp or genuine chance, the weary soldier saw hope for all of them. Colonel William Bent was the lifetime friend of the Cheyennes. He had married their women and fathered several half-blood sons by these daughters of the wolf and the wind. He was more Cheyenne than white in his heart, yet at the same time he had the trust and respect of the frontier community, and even of the military. Bent’s Ranch, could they reach it, might be sanctuary even for Private Durant. The Bent influence spread south among the Comanches and the Kiowa-Apaches and even the true Apaches of New Mexico. If the old man wished, he could send Durant through that Indian country and into old Mexico and to safety from Colonel Chivington and Skemp’s charges of desertion and worse. It was a chance. All of the chance, likely, that was ever coming to Private Durant.
“Honey,” he said to Sunflower, “ask those boys if they are sure they can follow this trail to Bent’s place. Ask them if we can go tonight and not lose the way. Ask them if we can get across the Arkansas and into the ranch before daylight.” He paused, his arm tenderly about the injured child’s shoulders. “I think we all better go down there if we can. You’re going to get better, tended there, and likewise all three of these boys. See what they say.”
Sunflower asked the questions, returned the answers to Durant.
Blackbird said they could easily be at the ranch before the sun came up. He and Young Buzzard had been planning to go on anyway as soon as the mares finished their hay. Going to Bent’s Ranch was like going home for Blackbird. He could do it with his eyes shut tight. Nitaashema, what were they waiting for?
Durant got hopefully to his feet. “All right,” he said. “I surely do hope Preacher Bleek taught you kids to tell the truth up there at that school on Horse Creek. Yes, and to pray straight, too. I’ve a notion we’ll need a little of both before we make it to Bent’s Ranch.”
Sunflower smiled and reached her hands to him to be picked up.
“Preacher always told the truth,” she said. “That way he didn’t need to pray so much.”
It was a fine morning along the Arkansas. The passengers in the westbound stage chatted with the mindless fraternity of the wheeled traveler. Behind lay Fort Lyon, ahead Pueblo and Denver. The talk was mainly of the Indians and mainly confident. The Army, it seemed, had at last put the red rascals in their place.
One passenger, the bulky man in the redolent bear-skin coat, appeared not quite so convinced.
“I would say, miss,” answered Nehemiah Bleek, in reply to the possibility put by a handsome young lady passenger of seeing any “real”, meaning hostile, Cheyennes along the way, “that it isn’t likely. These here Indians are fairly gun-shy. They don’t admire being shot at by the soldiers and settlers.”
“No,” said one of the soldiers escorting Bleek. “What they admire is shooting at the soldiers and settlers.”
“Yeah,” said his companion. “From the back.”
“Oh, dear,” said the young lady from Leavenworth. “How terrible.”
“We won’t see any Cheyennes, miss,” said Bleek. “They’ve been promised a treaty now after all the trouble of the summer and they don’t hardly mean to see its chances ruined by any brushes with the troops. That’s gospel.”
“Gospel according to Saint Bleek,” said the acidulous trooper. Then, brightening: “Yonder’s Bent’s place. I hope they got a good noon dinner for a change.”
“How wonderful!” cried the young lady, craning to see the storied hostelry. “Bent’s Fort, think of that! Why, it’s like the history books come to life!”
“No, lady,” corrected the other soldier. “Not the fort, the ranch. Fort’s long gone. Old man Bent blew it up in ’Fifty-Two when the Army wouldn’t buy it off of him. He’s only freighting now. Trades with his relatives, the bloody Cheyennes, with his left hand, serves the white traffic along this here road with his right.”
“How very interesting. You said Cheyenne relatives? I didn’t know Mister Bent was part Cheyenne.”
“No, ma’am, not him…his wife, I mean his wives, uh….”
“The trooper means, miss, that Colonel Bent’s taken more’n one Cheyenne wife in his long years on the Arkansas,” suggested Bleek. “It isn’t like it is back East.”
“Not hardly,” said the soldier.
“My, my,” murmured the young lady, and subsided until the coach lurched and turned for the river crossing to the ranch.
“Oh, dear!” she squealed, as the iron rims bit into the river gravel of the sharp grade at the ford. “Will we get wet?”
Her plaint reached the hairy ears of Dirty-Face Watson, the driver. Dirty-Face hooked a bowed leg about the handle of the brake, leaned far out and down.
“Not,” he bellowed profanely into the window, “if you keep the blasted door shet, lady, and your mouth along with it!”
“Oh, dear.” The young woman blushed, and was not heard from again until noon dinner was on the table at Bent’s.
The stop went quickly and pleasantly, however. The food was passable, the young lady fair of skin and limb. There was no hint, anywhere around Bent’s Ranch, that history was about to ride into the lives of the ticket holders. Indeed, quite the opposite.
As the food was cleared away, the Cheyenne woman who had been serving the table whispered something to Bleek, who rose and followed her into the kitchen.
The reunion there was startling. In a far corner, and dark, a soldier and two small Indian children had just finished their meal. Bleek peered, not daring to believe what was hammering in his heart. But it was true. Trooper Durant and Red Dust and little Sunflower were there before him, safe in the house of William Bent. And more! From the darkest shadows of the al cove, white teeth flashed and two hitherto unseen “hostiles” stepped out into the lamplight, Blackbird and Young Buzzard.
Tears, laughs, giggles, and bear hugs were passed around briefly. Then Preacher called them all to attention. Showing them the paper from Major Wynkoop, he told them it was a “pony soldier order” permitting him to take them on the stage with him to Pueblo for a visit with Agent Colley, who would then get them all quickly away from Mashane’s country.
“Durant,” he said, “you, too. Colley will stand behind you even if Wynkoop das’n’t. You got to come along.”
The trooper, refreshed now and realizing that Mexico was long and risky miles away, decided to put it all on the big man’s word, and trust in the paper from Wynkoop to protect him from Chivington.
“It’s done, Preacher,” he said. “Here’s my hand on it.”
They shook hands, then herded the children out into the main sala, or big room, where the passengers were gathering their belongings to reboard the coach. Hurried introductions were made and there was some hesitation on the part of Bleek’s regular Army escorts as to taking on a 3rd Colorado man who looked to them to be a deserter. Bleek did not labor the point, saying only that Durant had become separated from his patrol in a snow squall and had found the children holed up in a dry wash and had brought them down to Bent’s as the best place he could think of.
There might have been more objection but for the fact that the handsome young Leavenworth lady was going out the door. Both troopers gaped after her. The young lady’s profile was easily the most compelling seen along the Arkansas Road that autumn. The soldiers gave Bleek’s odd new passenger list a hurried wave of acceptance and sprinted across the yard. The important thing was to be first to hand the lovely one up the treacherous step into the old Concord. Bleek and Durant exchanged a pair of relieved looks.
In the general movement to get the stage on its way, they were able to get the children marshaled and calmed into the idea of mounting the white man’s “inside wagon”. None of the Indian youngsters had been in a stagecoach, or dreamed to be in one. They were frightened, but greatly excited, too. In their high feelings, Bleek was able to see the hand of that God he did not overly preach about or pray to. When he thought no one was watching, he bowed his head and muttered something that ended with “Amen.”
But it was too late for prayers. The fresh teams were just being fastened into the tugs, the hangers-on at Bent’s gathering around to wave the usual farewells, when the ranch dogs commenced to bark and run out toward the river.
All eyes shifted to the three horsemen splashing over the shallows of the Arkansas. An old Cheyenne helper who aided Dirty-Face Watson in hooking on the teams shaded his failing eyesight. His peering squint centered upon the middle rider.
“Mashane…!” he cried, and turned and ran whimperingly for the rear of the ranch house.
Chivington rode up to the group by the stage. His cold face scanned the waiting passengers. If he took especial note of Ne-hemiah Bleek, Durant, and the Indian orphans, the fact did not reveal itself. “All of you people,” he said, “will please go back into the ranch house and stay there. This place is under military quarantine. No one leaves.”
Bleek marveled at the man’s control, his utter lack of surface emotion. But he was frightened by it, too. He held Sunflower, who he had carried from the house, still closer to his broad chest.
Chivington swung down from his horse. He towered half a head over the brawny missionary. “Well, Preacher”—he nodded—“we meet again.” As there was nothing to say to that, Bleek said nothing. In the silence the children crowded in under the tail of his bear-skin coat, like cubs to the mother.
“You and Durant are under arrest,” continued Chivington.
“You will accompany me on my march. Is that little girl sick?
No matter. She will stay here at Bent’s place with the others. That’s the little Arapaho girl who speaks English, is it not?” Without waiting for Bleek’s reply, he looked at Sunflower. “Child,” he said, “you talk for these other children. They must understand that my soldiers are all around this ranch and will shoot anyone, man, woman, or child, who tries to get away. If you keep them quiet, none of you will be harmed.”
Sunflower said nothing. She bobbed her head and blinked her brown eyes, however, to show that she had heard Mashane.
Bleek was breathing a silent thanks to the Lord at this point. If it were only Durant and himself who must be hostage to Chiv-ington, this was a blessing. But again his prayers were countermanded by the unpredictable Chivington.
“Beckwourth!” he called to one of his companions.
The man rode forward, halted his horse. He slouched in the saddle after the manner of the old mountain man that he was, and Bleek knew him instantly. This was the famed mulatto scout, Jim Beckwourth, now along in years and no longer the legend he had once been. But the old Negro still knew more about Indians than any man alive, saving only Bridger and perhaps Carson, and he rode with the 3rd Colorado for that reason.
“You recognize any of these children?” Chivington now asked him. “Stand away from them, Bleek.”
Preacher told the children in Cheyenne not to be afraid. Old Jim Beckwourth was a kindly man, and a friend to the Indian.
“Why, sure,” drawled the old scout, grinning and nodding at Red Dust. “Hau, nis’en.” He chuckled. “Now you ain’t fixing to say you don’t rekollect old Uncle Jim Beckwourth, be you, Mahesie?”
The mixture of pure Cheyenne and mountain man argot was troublesome to Chivington. “You know the boy, Beckwourth? Or are you just mumbling something to earn your supper?” he demanded.
“Oh, I reckon I know him, all right, Colonel. This here is a hostile child, sure enough. Name’s Mahesie, Red Dust. He’s the primest apple of his uncle’s eye, and I allow his uncle is somewhat of a big warrior.”
“What the devil are you saying, you old fool? Get it out, man.”
“Why, yes, sir, Colonel. This here skinny kid is the nephew of Roman Nose.”
At the name of the great Cheyenne, Chivington’s eyes leaped to Bleek. His voice remained low, but the set of his heavy features did not match the levelness of the words. “You should have told me that, Preacher,” was all that he said.
Bleek did not answer him. He put his arm about the slender shoulders of Red Dust and said quietly to him in Cheyenne: “Do not be afraid of Mashane, boy. Your uncle gave you into my care and I shall not let any harm come to you. Remember that, Mahesie. I give you the word of our Lord God Jehovah for it.”
The boy was watching Chivington. It was doubtful he even heard Bleek.
“What are you saying, there?” asked the officer sharply. “Beckwourth, what did he say to the boy?”
Before the mulatto scout could answer, Bleek stepped forward and brought out the Wynkoop order.
“What I said, Colonel, was that I have here a signed paper for the safe conduct of these here little ones of mine. It’s from Major Wynkoop and it says I can take my children on up to Agent Col-ley at Pueblo, and neither you nor Major Anthony or anybody else is going to harm them or to halt me on my way with them.”
Chivington stared at him a moment. He did not look at the paper. “May I see the order, please?” he asked, eyes never leaving Bleek’s face.
Bleek passed it over.
The giant officer took it in both hands, still not looking down at it. Slowly he tore it into shreds and threw it away.
“Was there anything else you had to say, Preacher?” he asked quietly.
Chivington rested his command at Bent’s Ranch all that afternoon. His pickets were ringed completely about the station with orders to shoot anything that moved outside the stockade yard. As darkness came on, he lit fires between each picket station and doubled the soldiers on guard.
It had been announced that the troops would move out under cover of night and march on down to Fort Lyon. Durant and Bleek would be taken along as military prisoners. So would the nephew of Roman Nose, to be held for his value in prisoner exchange with the Cheyennes or, as Bleek was convinced, some other more sinister use. Wynkoop’s two soldiers would also be returned to Fort Lyon and would serve as armed guards for the prisoners en route. To expedite the prisoner transportation problem, the Pueblo stage would be commandeered and turned about for Fort Lyon again. The remainder of the passengers, the young Eastern woman and the others of Bleek’s children—Sunflower, Blackbird, Young Buzzard—would remain at the ranch with Bent’s several Indian and mixed-blood employees and patrons in a house arrest situation policed by a strong guard of troops to be left behind. No further information as to Chivington’s plans was released. Pressed on this matter by the Leavenworth lady, whose loveliness had not gone unnoted by the commander of the 3rd Colorado, the huge officer would only bow and smile graciously.
“Routine patrol operations, ma’am…nothing else, I assure you. No need for concern. Won’t you join me for supper? My staff and I would be most flattered by your company.”
Bleek, of course, accepted not a word of this. For one thing, Chivington had far too many troops with him—nearly 600—for any routine patrol of the Arkansas stage road. For another thing, Colonel J.M. Chivington was not given to routine patrols. He was given to nothing routine. And so Nehemiah Bleek was not fooled and, in the end, his fears forced him to a desperate decision. Suddenly, sitting there on the long bench by the kitchen doorway watching Mashane and his officers over their after-supper cigars and their small talk sparring for the flutter of the Leavenworth lady’s thick lashes, Bleek knew that he must not let Red Dust be taken to Fort Lyon. The boy must escape Bent’s Ranch.
What foulness awaited him in Chivington’s custody no man could say. But Nehemiah Bleek had given his word to this boy’s uncle to shelter and cherish him as a son—and Nehemiah Bleek would never permit a son of his to go with Mashane to Fort Lyon.
There but minutes left before departure. How might it work? Who might he trust? On the wooden loafer’s bench with Bleek were Beckwourth, Durant, Red Dust, the two Wynkoop troopers, and Dirty-Face Watson, the stage driver. All had been fed in the kitchen, ordered subsequently to wait where Chivington could see them.
Fate, or Preacher’s canny foresight, had brought him to seat the boy between himself and Dirty-Face, on the end of the bench nearest the kitchen exit. Catching the driver’s eye now, Bleek nodded his head the least fraction. Dirty-Face scowled, looked across the room at Chivington, then returned the nod as carefully.
“Soldier,” said Bleek to the Wynkoop trooper beside him, “the boy wants to relieve himself. Is it all right if I take him outside?”
“Sure, I reckon.” The trooper started to rise, but the stage driver beat him to it.
“Hell, stay put, soldier. I’ll go with them. Got to check the teams, anyhow.”
The trooper hesitated, but it was warm in the room and that girl was pretty as sin and Dirty-Face Watson had been on the Pueblo run for years and, besides, the stockade yard was crawling with 3rd Colorado cavalrymen. The kid couldn’t possibly get away.
“Yeah, well, thanks,” he said, easing back down on the bench. “Make it quick, eh?”
The driver grinned, and old Jim Beckwourth drowsing at the far end of the bench opened one rheumy eye and closed it just as quickly. If he saw the Cheyenne boy get up and go out through the kitchen with Bleek and the stage driver, he reacted only with a movement to seek a position of greater comfort on the hard bench.
It was perhaps five minutes later that Dirty-Face Watson rushed back into the room to interrupt Chivington in a toast to Leavenworth’s most lovely daughter with the fearful admission: “Me and Preacher, sir, we just let that Injun kid give us the slip out in the yard!”
On the heels of the confession, Bleek entered from the kitchen to confirm the escape.
Chivington, never the same man twice, seemed almost pleased with the news. Calling in the commander of the guard detail to be left at the ranch, he informed him of Red Dust’s flight, assured the nervous officer that the boy could not possibly get far but that no risk of his escape to carry word of the Bent’s Ranch quarantine was to be assumed or tolerated. “Take care of him where you find him, Captain,” he said. And, calling his officers after him, he strode out into the ranch yard and ordered the waiting troops to mount up. Within minutes the long column of dusty cavalrymen fell into formation, forded the Arkansas, and were gone from the sight of the watchers at Bent’s Ranch. With them went the captured Pueblo stage and its silently fearful passengers.
Midway of the night march to Fort Lyon, driver Watson halted the Pueblo stage. The right brake shoe was dragging, he said. The coach’s 3rd Colorado escort, a boy lieutenant and eight volunteer troopers, had orders not to stop, not even to smoke in ranks, not even to talk more than necessary. But the lieutenant could recall no order about smoking out of ranks, or halting for stagecoach repairs. “Go ahead,” he told Watson. “Pry it loose. Take your time. We ain’t going no place that won’t wait.”
Dirty-Face climbed down, began fussing and cussing at the rear wheel.
“Preacher!” he called. “Can you lift up this here wheel whiles I knock the shoe out? I reckon them soldier boys can spare you. Less’n they wants to hoist it.”
The guards in the coach decided they would not labor after hours. Bleek got out complainingly, but quickly.
Off to the right, perhaps only ten yards on the river side of the road, the 3rd Colorado escorts smoked and talked unhurriedly. They did not seem concerned. It was going to be a long night any way they marched it.
It was also a notably dark night. And, the guard troopers inside the coach later swore, it was full of reassuring and familiar voices. Like that of driver Dirty-Face Watson inviting Preacher Bleek to ride the rest of the way with him up on the box of the coach. And like that of the Horse Creek missionary assuring driver Watson that he would be “mightily pleasured” to accept the invitation, “as the air in the coach was a little close for a man in a bear-skin coat.” Or at least so he was quoted by the two Wynkoop troopers in their subsequent courts-martial for dereliction of duty.
Had the guilty guards given thought to the matter at the time, they would have realized that it was a frost-cold midnight for even a man in a bear-skin coat to desert the passenger compartment of a Concord coach for the wind-whipped exposure of its driver’s seat. But the men did not give thought to it, and, if their other prisoner, Private Durant, did so, they did not recall Durant’s warning them. The loss was not discovered until, in the blackness of next dawn, the pickets that Chivington had set out around Major Anthony’s post at Fort Lyon checked the coach through their lines and found the Reverend Ne-hemiah Bleek to be among the missing.
For his part, Chivington took the news reasonably enough.
“Very well,” he told his reporting aide. “The crazy devil won’t bother anything. He has lived with the Indians so long he thinks like one of them. He simply got scared and ran off. We’ll find him sooner or later.” He paused, still seemingly calm. “Put the driver, Watson, and those two guards of Wynkoop’s under arrest with Durant,” he said. “If I can, I mean to hang the four of them when I get back.”
In the rocks and grasses of the brushy point where the stage had halted for brake shoe adjustment, and where Preacher Bleek had freed Red Dust from the luggage-boot of the Concord coach—in which Preacher and Dirty-Face Watson had hidden the boy back at Bent’s Ranch—the two fugitives hugged the earth like the parts of the night they prayed they would be taken for.
Past their hiding place, when the stage had gone on out of sight, clanked and crowded the seemingly endless ranks of 1st and 3rd Cavalry troops following Chivington toward Fort Lyon. The dust, the horse sweat, the laughter, curses, complaints, and crudities of the white riders struck at the noses and ears of Preacher and the Cheyenne boy, and clutched, too, at their hearts. But at last the rear guard of the column had passed along the road and all was quiet at Brush Point of the Arkansas.
Bleek stood up sighingly.
“All right, praise the Lord,” he said. “We’re saved.” He grinned his rare grin and added: “Now all we got to do is figure out what that means.”
But he knew what it meant, and he had planned in the beginning what he and the boy must do. From Wynkoop he had learned that a very large camp of southern Cheyennes under Black Kettle and White Antelope, with some few lodges of Ara-pahoes under Left Hand, was at the main forks of Little Dried River, variously called by the whites the Big Sandy or simply Sand Creek. Knowing of this camp, and of no other in the immediate vicinity that might be reached by reasonable swiftness on foot, he and the boy must cut across country and find these friendly people. They were at peace with the Army and had camped on Sand Creek at the express direction of Major Anthony with whom their chiefs had talked only that past week. Here Bleek could leave Red Dust secure in the belief the boy would be returned to his uncle, Roman Nose.
What happened to him did not matter. Bleek believed he could care for himself, but it was clear that he could no longer shelter the Cheyenne boy with any certain safety. He told Red Dust of this decision and the boy accepted it with the quiet fatality of his dark race.
“I heard my uncle tell you that you must bring me to the people of Black Kettle and White Antelope, if there was any trouble over me or over my care. Now I know there is great danger. Soldiers have tried to kill me. Mashane has made me a prisoner, and would take me to Fort Lyon. Whatever you say, Preacher, I will do. You are my father.”
Bleek nodded, humbled. “Sometimes, boy,” he said, “I wish I was an Indian.”
“Many times lately, Preacher,” answered Red Dust, “I have wished that I was a white boy.”
They set off northeasterly away from the river. The pace Preacher set was severe. They had far to travel and could move only during the dark hours for fear of being seen by a prowling cavalry patrol. They could not be sure, either, what Chiving-ton was about. Would he rest his troops again at Fort Lyon? Or would he keep them marching, and, if so, in what direction, toward what purpose, and how rapidly? They were certain of but one thing: with Mashane on the hunt, all things evil were possible—and the movement by forced march and in secret of the entire 3rd Colorado Cavalry regiment must be an evil thing.
They walked until dawn, then lay up in some rocks and slept like prairie wolves. It seemed to Red Dust but an hour before Preacher was touching his shoulder.
“Come on, wake up, boy. Dusk is gathering again.”
“Ai-eee!” shivered the youth. “It will be cold this night, Preacher. Where did the day go so fast? I only closed my eyes.”
“It’s a gift of the young,” said Preacher. “Come on.”
They went forward through the twilight, guided by stars that only Preacher knew and by landmarks in the prairie with which no other of its shy denizens save the coyote and the kit fox were familiar. With midnight they struck the lower, or south fork, of Sand Creek.
“Getting there,” murmured Preacher, and turned downstream.
It was now necessary to find the Indian Road crossing of this stream, so that they could pick up the Cheyenne trail to the Sand Creek camp and not blunder wide of the village in the darkness. But the way was not familiar now, and the pace slowed. Dawn was not far away when, on a rise just before the descent to the crossing, Bleek touched Red Dust’s arm and said: “Look down there toward the stream.”
The boy squinted downward, drew in his breath.
“Many ponies,” he whispered. “Many riders.”
“That’s Mashane,” said Bleek flatly. “I know it, but we can’t be certain without scouting in close. There is just time to beat them to the fording place, I think.”
Red Dust went forward with the big missionary, not arguing, not complaining. If Preacher said there was just time to scout the crossing, and they must do it, then it would be done. What else might Red Dust do? He was a lost boy in a strange and alien land. Very small boy. Very far from home boy. Very much afraid boy. But Maheo was watching over him. Maheo would protect him. And big Preacher would look after both of them. Ezhesso, thus be the way of it!
They were first to the south fork crossing, as Preacher had said they would be. Examining the trail by starlight, Bleek told the boy the sign was all old, all the hoof prints unshod. “Indian horses,” he said. “All from yesterday. Come on, hurry.”
The missionary chose their hiding place with all the cunning of an old wolf ambushing difficult prey. He bedded them on a point that rose above the ford and was rocky, hence would not be ridden through by horsemen. The point was also heavily grassed and downwind of the trail. Their scent would not carry to the cavalry mounts.
“Breathe into your cupped hands, boy,” said Preacher. “Then no cold air vapor will rise to give us away. Make yourself small in that grass. Quickly. Here they come.”
Red Dust felt every pore of his skin grow small and wart-hard. The beating of his heart against the frost-rimed dirt of their cover became smothering. He could hear the horses coming now. The thud of their shod hoofs. The musical tinkling and ringing of the iron shoes striking here a pebble, there an exposure of bedrock. Closer they came. Now it was the jingling of bit chains, spur chains, sword chains. The creak of saddle and girth and stirrup leathers. The very breathing of the horses. There! Look there!
Four horsemen—two officers and two scouts. But it was the near horseman, the one who loomed against the widened eye of Red Dust as a giant from some other, nether earth who struck panic into the boy. It was Mashane.
The horsemen halted at the ford. In the stillness the voices carried with the breaking cleanness of icicles.
“What do you think, Colonel?”
The questioner was the second officer, Major Scott Anthony. The man hand-picked by Chivington to replace Major Wynkoop, who sometimes treated Indians fairly. The man who but a few days gone had given tobacco and assurances of peace to Black Kettle and the other chiefs at Fort Lyon.
“I’m not sure, Major,” answered Chivington. “Beckwourth, get up here. You, too, Bent.”
The scouts came forward, Beckwourth leading. But Jim Beckwourth, the legend, was too old now. The comrade of the days of Bill Williams, Big Throat Bridger, Broken Hand Fitzpatrick, and Uncle Dick Wooten had ridden too many dark trails, shivered through too many cold nights. The mulatto hunched himself in the saddle. What teeth remained to him were clenched against the freezing wind that cut along the creekbank and rattled the dry brush of its winter bed.
“I cain’t he’p you no more, Colonel,” he said. “I’m that blue I cain’t get outen the saddle. Eyes gone to watering on me something fierce. Cain’t hardly make out my own tracks no more. I’m done, I’m done.”
Chivington ignored him instantly; he had ceased to exist, to have ever lived.
“Well, Bent?”
Robert “Jack” Bent was one of old Bent’s boys, the son of the Cheyenne squaw, Owl Woman. He raised his hand for silence now, stood in his stirrups, listening intently.
“Wolf, him howl,” he said in his half-breed’s English. “Injun dog, he hear wolf, him howl, too. Injun, he hear dog and listen, then him hear something and run off.”
Chivington made nothing of the half-breed’s broken language. He was angered at the Indian talk, which he considered spurious in style as well as content. He pulled his revolver and put it under young Bent’s nose.
“Jack,” he said, “I haven’t had an Indian to eat for a long time. If you fool with me, and don’t lead us to that Sand Creek camp, I’ll have you for breakfast.”
The half-breed did not look at him. He merely nodded, pointed ahead toward the ford, grunted that they should go on quickly’daylight was coming.
Chivington at once told Anthony and Beckwourth to go back and bring on the troops, which had halted down the trail. He and Bent would scout ahead and locate the camp. Anthony swung about and was gone. Chivington and the half-breed splashed over the stream, disappeared on the far side. After a moment, Preacher rose up from the grasses.
“Boy,” he said, “they are going to attack Black Kettle’s village up on the north fork. We will try to beat them there and warn the People. There is little time.”
“Wagh!” said Red Dust. “I am ready.”
“Let us go, then,” urged Nehemiah Bleek. “Stay closely by me and run with no noise. If you fall, I shall go on without you.”
Bleek had made a serious miscalculation. While he delayed at the crossing of the south fork to scout Chivington and Anthony, columns of the latter’s dismounted troops were already going over the fork lower down. These troops the missionary now found were positioned between him and Red Dust and the Cheyenne camp on the north bank of Sand Creek proper. Moreover, the boy and the Horse Creek schoolmaster could actually hear the sounds of the Indian pony herd and knew that they were very near the village. Desperate now, they raced to the west, trying to get around the dismounted troops, poised and waiting for daylight to attack. Here, they encountered even more dangerous blockage—Chivington’s mounted forward patrols had gone over the fork above the crossing. And while they lay panting in the prairie grass hiding from these horsemen, the main forces of 3rd Colorado and 1st Colorado Cavalry moved into place behind them. They were trapped, outside of the Indian camp.
“Boy,” whispered Bleek, “uncover your ears. Listen to Preacher. I say these words with a sad heart, but hear them well.”
He quickly told Red Dust that they were too late to save the village. There were only minutes left before daylight. All that might be done now was to risk everything on a rush through the foot soldiers at the lower camp. If Preacher could break past them and get into the camp, the Cheyennes would at least have warning enough to seize a rifle, perhaps even catch up a pony. But to make the best of that slim hope, Preacher must run unburdened with the problem of Red Dust—he must run alone. It was a thing to decide between the lives of all those people, or the fears of one small boy. Preacher knew that Red Dust would be brave, would hide and wait outside the village in the thick brush of the stream, would stay where Preacher put him and not move until Preacher returned for him.
“Will you do this, now?” he concluded. “Will you obey me?”
For a long moment the northern Cheyenne boy appeared to be stunned. He was not able, Bleek thought, to absorb the meaning of being deserted, or the reason. But Bleek was wrong. Red Dust understood. He simply looked one more lingering second at the big white man, then before Bleek could stop him he turned and slipped away through the tall grasses and was gone into the predawn blackness. That was the whole of his farewell. Just that one long Indian look and he was gone.
Preacher knew his mistake. It had been that word “unburdened”. Red Dust was a northern. The nephew of Roman Nose. That was the proudest blood in the prairie world. The boy might live, he might die, they might never see one another again. But one thing he would not be, that boy, he would not be a burden. If he reached the village, he would bear his share of the battle. If he fell on the way, he would fall alone. It was the Cheyenne way.
“Maheo,” said Bleek, peering up at the paling night sky, “I just give you back one of your children. Take care of him for me.”
With that, the big man was up and running for the lower village, and the chance to save at least some of the sleeping Cheyenne people.
But Preacher Bleek did not reach the Cheyenne camp; he was struck in the head by the ricochet of a rifle bullet. He fell unconscious and lay as dead beneath a brush clump not twenty strides from where Red Dust and he had parted. For his part, the boy did succeed in crossing the sandy channel and reaching the beleaguered camp, never realizing that Preacher had fallen. Yet the lad had time only to arouse two or three lodges and to try and alert a group of old squaws who were out with the predawn grayness gathering firewood for the morning cooking.
The village grannies, however, with true Indian delay, set to debating the identity of the enemy, rather than running for their lives. To the old women the mass of moving figures across the streambed appeared more like a herd of buffalo than a regiment of mounted troopers. The squaws commenced to wave their blankets and throw rocks and sticks at the advancing buffalo. They were still shouting—“Go away!”—at the supposed beasts when the firing upon the village was begun by Wilson’s battalion of the 1st, which had been detailed to cut off and drive away the Indian pony herds.
The terrified Cheyenne mounts the next moment broke and ran directly down upon Red Dust. The boy was saved from certain death by trampling when an ancient white mare, with an aversion for running over small Indian lads, slowed to avoid striking him. Instantly Red Dust seized her mane and swung himself up onto her back. As he did, the old pony wheeled and galloped instinctively away from the village, back toward the channel of Sand Creek. Red Dust lay flat upon her back, shouting her on in Cheyenne, and praying.
The Indian camp was now a scene of incredible disorder. The white troops were breaking into it from both upper and lower ends. The dust and gunsmoke billowed like a pall of hell, half hiding the naked fleeing red men from the cursing cavalry soldiers, giving the stunned Cheyennes their only brief chance for escape and life thereafter. It was into and through the very wildest of this maddened clot of humanity and exploding rifle fire that Red Dust’s bony mount bore him. But the old mare ran with the cunning of a coyote. This was not the first murderous trap of pony soldier crossfire from which she had been forced to flee. And, like her human owners, the panic-stricken Cheyennes, she knew where lay the only possible exit—the streambed of Sand Creek. Unlike pitiful scores of the Indians, however, the old white mare made good her race for the river. Striking the sandy channel, she leaped over its low bank, down into its bed, raced away from the screams of the dying village.
Upstream she went, then back down, ducking and dodging and scrambling all the while into and out of cover of boulder and brush clump, now atop the bank, now below its lip, wheeling all the time with the driven keen mind of the hunt-scarred stag or crafty doe bent on eluding the seemingly solid hail of enemy rifle bullets sent to kill her and all of her people.
For his part, Red Dust displayed equal intelligence and native wile. He remained with the old horse past a score of opportunities to slide off her back into what looked like better hiding places by far, than the peril of her hunching withers. So it was that he survived with her, rather than remaining behind to be stomped out of whatever covert he chose by the vicious troopers. In surviving through rifle burst and striken Indian cries of agony and death, he witnessed some of the testament of insanity that flamed within the camp.
He saw Anthony’s battalion of mounted troops come into the village from the southeast. He saw a familiar white squaw-man, Uncle John Smith, an interpreter for Agent Colley and the father of a half-blood Cheyenne brood of his own, run out of his lodge and toward the advancing soldiers. He heard clearly the old man pleading with the troopers to stop firing. That the Cheyennes were at peace in this village. That they did not want to fight. That the hot soldier fire was murdering women and little children and old ones without any selection of target. That all of the troops knew him, Uncle John Smith, and they should believe him and stop the terrible slaughter of innocent people at once.
So appealed to, one of the officers bellowed to his sergeant—“Shoot the old fool!”—and Uncle John ran sobbingly, stumblingly back toward the lodges, trying a last hopeless time to help the Cheyennes get away alive, and to stay alive himself in that swirling madness of soldiers who were shooting at anything that moved and looked like an Indian.
Horrified, Red Dust then saw the main force of the fleeing Cheyennes start up the dry streambed of Sand Creek, the mounted troops of Anthony driving behind them and driving them thus directly into the waiting, dismounted riflemen of Chivington who had blocked the upper streambed, bank to bank, in anticipation of precisely this dreadful moment. When the Indians drew near the waiting ranks of the 3rd Colorado, they called out plaintively that most of their number, as the soldiers could see, were women and children. To this, Chiving-ton roared his infamous epitaph: “Kill all, kill little and big!” To which blasphemy Red Dust heard a nameless soldier laugh out loud and add a cheering shout of equal infamy: “Yee-hahh! You tell ‘em, Colonel! That’s a fact. Nits make lice!”
Red Dust witnessed, too, as the old mare carried him back and forth across the firing lines, Black Kettle standing in front of his lodge pointing to the American flag fluttering from its pole to mark the teepee of the main chief, and pleading with the soldiers to see that beneath the Stars and Stripes a white cloth had been run up to say that the camp was friendly and wanted only to surrender.
Some of the soldiers laughed at him; some of them did not. All of them kept up their heavy firing.
Red Dust saw White Antelope, seventy-five years old, the most honored of the old-time Cheyenne fighting men among the southern people. He saw White Antelope proudly refuse to run when Black Kettle came limping past with his wife and urged his old friend to come with them, to try to make the streambed and get away. He saw White Antelope fold his arms across his breast and stand before the flaps of his lodge, and he heard the croaking of his feeble voice intoning the ancient Cheyenne prayer of those about to die:
Nothing lives long, nothing stays here,
Except the earth and the mountains….
And he saw the hail of soldier bullets that cut through the fringes of the old chief’s doeskin shirt, saw the noble old man buckle downward, and slide into a sitting position, dead and staring-eyed in the doorway of his teepee.
Mercifully that was the last the boy saw to remember as a separate image of the nightmare kind. He did see one more thing in the village, a strange thing, not of the nightmare kind but which left him with a bad memory all the same. It seemed wrong to him. Something an Indian would not do. Something only a white man—even a white man with an Indian wife and red children—would do. It worried Red Dust then; it worried him still when he was an old man with children and grandchildren of his own. But he never spoke of it. It would have dishonored him, made him unworthy. And perhaps, also, it was not as it seemed.
What he saw, as the old mare bore him away, was Uncle John Smith. The old squawman was alone. He had abandoned his Indian friends. Uncle John was looking for someone else, someone of his own skin color. A command of troops was driving toward him under an officer he clearly knew—Chivington. The giant cavalryman had just left his streambed slaughter pen and come to find livelier killing in the village streets. He saw Uncle John Smith in the same moment Red Dust saw Chivington. He flung up a gauntleted fist and shouted to the old white man: “Ho, Uncle John, run here!” The squawman heard and saw him. He scuttled over to him across the dead bodies of the people among whom he had lived. He seized the huge officer’s stirrup and clung to it and ran along, in that way protected by Chivington.
When the gunsmoke hid them from Red Dust’s view, the old man was still clutching Chivington’s boot, still running by the side of his horse to save his own life. That was the boy’s last memory of the Cheyenne village at Ponoeohe, the Little Dried River. After that came the rifle pits.
The old mare angled across the open streambed toward some willow scrub choking a side branch wash. Red Dust clung to her mane, riding flat to her churning withers. Ricochets screamed in every direction. Stricken Indians screamed back. There was no time, no reason for the Cheyenne boy to look at the camp again.
The people, all of them who would ever get out of the village, were already out of it. The main body had fled into Chivington’s dismounted riflemen, then split around that bloody place in the streambed. These small bands had burst like scattered quail in wild flight. They went, some of them, into the nearby sandhills. Others, most of the larger groups, still tried to get upstream beyond the 3rd Colorado’s blockade. But the old mare bore Red Dust away from the streambed and after those fugitives, running like wolves and coyotes for the shelter of the sandhills. So it was with the luck of the innocent that the white mare won through the carnage at camp’s edge, broke past the windrows of women and children sprawled silently before the guns of the 3rd Colorado, and brought the Cheyenne boy to the momentary sanctuary of the willow brush.
The mare, panting heavily, started up the thicketed wash. Stumbling her way through the stones and débris of the narrow course, she quickly reached its upper end. Here the brush ended abruptly; the grass began again. They were out into the open before Red Dust saw the soldiers.
There were perhaps a dozen troopers. They were of 1st Cavalry, no officer with them. They had captured some Indians, three women, two older children, three small children. The soldiers appeared to be returning their captives to the village, guarding them, even protecting them.
Then an officer came up on the gallop. His uniform was of 3rd Colorado. He was a lieutenant.
When this officer saw that the men were taking prisoners to the rear, he shouted that Colonel Chivington had ordered no prisoners. From his horse, with his pistol, he shot two of the Indian women. The third woman broke from her captors and ran. The lieutenant killed her with his carbine. He then dismounted and went among the soldiers. They shrank away from him, and from the five children huddled over the first-killed women. One by one, the officer shot the children in the head. But he had only four pistol bullets remaining. He broke the skull of the fifth child with the butt of his pistol. Red Dust was sick, but he could not move to flee.
The lieutenant stopped cursing and shouting. He took a wooden-handled butcher knife from the body of one of the squaws and cut the hair from the head of the little child he had struck with the pistol butt. He reached for the hair of the second child. Now Red Dust began to cry. It was a strangled sound, half tears, half terror. It burst from him into the silence of the scalping. The soldiers, watching the grisly thing as gray-faced as the Cheyenne boy, turned their eyes toward him. So did the officer, pausing with the butcher knife in one hand, a child’s hair in the other. “Kill him,” he ordered the men.
But the men did not move. Not toward the Cheyenne boy. They started walking away from the officer. They began to run, not looking back. The officer cursed them, then turned to Red Dust, levering a fresh shell into his carbine.
The boy was still frozen with terror, but the old mare was not. She had seen many Indian women and children murdered. With a snort she whirled and ran back into the brush of the wash.
A crashing of branches warned that the officer’s horse was but a few jumps behind. The boy believed he would die now, that the lieutenant would shoot and scalp him. But he was wrong. In the final leap before the officer’s mount came up to the old mare, dark red arms reached up from the thick growth beside the trail and swept the boy from the old horse’s back.
The mare ran on and the officer, not having seen the boy taken from her back, drove his horse on after her. He was raging like a madman.
In the thick growth were ten Cheyenne warriors of middle-aged years. They were hard, desperate fighters. It was their leader who had reached out and pulled Red Dust from the mare’s back. He was a half-breed and the boy was quickly told who he was: George Bent, another of old William Bent’s dark sons by Cheyenne mothers.
“Did you see any more soldiers up there beyond the head of the wash?” Bent asked the boy. “I mean other than the ones who ran away from the officer?”
“Yes,” answered Red Dust. “Many more were on the slopes of the sandhills past where I was. I could see them, and they were half a hundred anyway.”
“Too many,” grunted Bent. “Come on, we will have to turn back and go up the creek after the others.”
The Indians got up out of the brush and ran like red shadows down the dry wash toward Sand Creek. Red Dust did what he could to keep up with them. It was that or be left to the soldiers. The Indian men could not wait for him.
It was bad going up the creekbed. Patrols and gangs of soldiers without their officers roved the field everywhere. Commanded units also moved up and down the stream hunting Indians. Through this welter of regular and vigilante troops, Bent’s ten warriors, Red Dust still panting beside them, sneaked and fought their way. As they went, the boy saw more of the nightmare things he had seen in the village.
There was a major of 3rd Colorado Cavalry pursuing a Cheyenne girl, a little girl, younger than Sunflower. The officer was mounted, the child afoot. The girl fell. The major leaned down from the saddle, shot her through the head, rode on. He did not even glance back to see that the girl staggered up again and wandered off, holding the side of her face with her two hands, so that it would not fall away from the other part of her head.
An old woman had struggled as far up the stream as her strength would take her. She had fallen to her knees, her heart failing her. Four or five soldiers came up to her. They closed about her, and, when they moved away, Red Dust saw that the old woman no longer had any hair. It was dangling in the hands of one of the soldiers. The old squaw tottered to her feet. The bald skin of her head flapped down over her eyes. She could not understand why she could not see. She walked about with hands outstretched and asking: “Where are the People, where have they all gone?” She was still walking, still asking, as long as Red Dust could see her.
An elderly chief, excitedly recognized by George Bent as Black Kettle, thought his wife was dead. They saw him bending over her body in the streambed, then he left her, going on alone. Some soldiers came and shot down into her body. George Bent counted nine shots fired at her in this way. The half-breed flinched with each shot, as though the lead were going into his own flesh.
Everywhere were prowling soldiers, scalping or mutilating or shooting into the Indian dead. And the Indian dead were everywhere. They lay in the level wide bed of the stream’s dry sand. They lay drowned with their own blood in the random pools of standing water that were the creek’s entire volume at the time of year. Here and there a white soldier was also seen lying still, but only a very few, less even than the fingers of two hands.
Time, in the agonizing eye of battle, suspended itself. Red Dust thought the journey up the streambed lasted the full morning. It actually required but half an hour. The only halts were to drop on panting bellies to imitate their slain fellows in the creek sand, the only cover to be taken when a soldier patrol went by. One of these times a pack of scalpers from the 3rd Colorado slid from their horses to take hair among the very fallen where Red Dust lay beside George Bent in frozen-limbed imitation of the dead.
Face down in the sand, the boy heard the actual ripping away of the scalps. He heard the talk and hard breathing of the scalpers and the sound of their feet moving toward him. In the moment of ultimate terror, a hand took hold of his own hair and raised his slight body from the sand.
But the northern boy did not twist about and begin to plead for his life. He hung dead in the soldier’s hand and was saved by that and by the fact that Preacher Bleek had shorn his hair during the wagon journey to make him recognizable as a tame Indian. Another of the Colorado men laughed at the one gripping Red Dust’s cropped braids.
“Hey, Bill,” he said, “you down to taking them bobtail kind? Here’s one a good two-foot long, with double braids and all. You can have it. I’ll find me another.”
The soldier dropped Red Dust back into the sand. As he did so, a very heavy rifle fire began upstream. “Listen to that!” shouted one of the men. “Colonel must have struck the main hive of them yonder past the bend. Let’s get up there ’fore all the good hair’s took!”
Booted feet thudded away. Bent raised his head.
“Nitaashema!” he said in Cheyenne. “Let’s go!”
Swiftly they reached the bend. Beyond it, the banks of Sand Creek narrowed and became pocked with wind and water-gouged holes. It was this refuge that the Cheyennes called Voxse, The Place Where the Pits Are. It was here that the main flow of fugitives had fought to reach, and here that Chiv-ington had followed them along the blood trail of their wounding by the 3rd Colorado.
“Three hundred soldiers,” said George Bent to his panting warriors. “All Mashane’s men. Can we do it?”
Red Dust knew what he meant. It was to break through the soldiers surrounding the Cheyennes who had dug in at Voxse and were prepared to die there in the rifle pits. It was to reach the brave ones and to die with them.
“We must do it,” answered one of Bent’s band. “Those are the last of our people.”
“Nitaashema,” George Bent said again, and the men rose up and howled their war cry of the wolf and fell on the rear of Mashane’s startled troops.
By the surprise of it, the warrior band, Red Dust running with them like an orphan colt, made it into the rifle pits of their people, unharmed. But in the pits it was like a cattle-killing pen. The sand and soft stone of the bank were slippery with blood. The Indian quick lay in the same slime with the dead. After the first hour that saw Red Dust reach the Cheyenne redoubt, the stench of the dead and wounded became a separate terror in itself. The boy became ill. He retched and could not stop retching, even when nothing came from his tortured stomach save the yellow-green venom of bile. Still he would not look away from the slaughter, would not lower his head. He crouched where George Bent crouched, watching the fight, watching their people die.
It was in this time that Chivington killed the last of whatever understanding the white man may ever have made with the Cheyennes.
The soldiers would not charge the Cheyenne rifle pits to end the cruel execution. From time to time, as their officers through field glasses determined that the male fighters in a certain pit were all dead, an assault on that separate pit would be mounted. The remaining Cheyennes could not defend these separate pit takings because they had so few guns, so little ammunition. Each round must be hoarded against the last moment. They were thus forced to huddle and watch as the soldiers went into the fighter-less pits and clubbed the women, children, and old persons left defenseless by the death of their men. As with the murdering of White Antelope and the scalping of the captive children, the final action at the pits was a thing that stunned the mind.
The Cheyenne women in the central pit, perhaps a score of them, despaired of life. Seeing their sisters and the children of their sisters clubbed to death robbed them of reason. They declared that the soldiers had committed these brainings because, in the excitement of rushing each pit, the troopers did not have time to distinguish among old man, woman, or little child. They cried out: “Come, now, if the soldiers are shown plainly that we are women, they will not shoot us or strike us with their rifles. Has the white man not always told us that his people do not kill or harm women and children?”
The men in the central pit were aghast at this insanity.
“Shame, shame! You know better than that. Can you not see what the soldiers have already done?”
But the women would not be held back.
“Care for the children,” they begged the men, and leaped from the pits and ran toward the white riflemen of Mashane, crying out—“Look, we are women!”—and lifting their dresses to show their forms to prove it for the soldiers as they ran.
The men of the 3rd Colorado did not recall in their memories if this were a true report, or not. But those men knew the truth of the story in one way, the way in which Red Dust and all the horrified Cheyenne people saw that high noon of the massacre at Sand Creek: the way in which the troops of Colonel John Chivington shot down on the pleading run those women made coming toward their rifle lines, and then how those troops, by clubbed rifle and close-held pistol, finished up the gruesome work even as the squaws ran into their ranks still crying: “We are women!”
After that, Red Dust’s eyes were locked wide. He saw but he did not see.
When it was that the soldiers quit the fight at the rifle pits and went away downstream to loot and fight among themselves amid the spoils of the village, the northern boy could not remember. Neither would any of the Cheyennes who were there, or any of the soldiers, later agree on the hour of the retreat. Some said it was shortly after midday. Some insisted it was nearly sundown. Black Kettle himself may have been the most accurate.
“The fight lasted five hours,” said the old chief. “The soldiers went away about noontime or a little later, but we stayed in the pits until the sun was low, fearing to leave because we thought the soldiers might still be waiting for us, that it was a trick. But it was not. When the dusk was not far off, we went away from there. The soldiers did not come after us. It was very cold. We all remembered that.”
Red Dust stayed with George Bent. The half-breed had taken a bad hip wound. His dark eyes were glazed with pain. Each step was an individual torture. But he walked. All the wounded walked. Or crawled. Or were dragged on foot by the unwounded. There were no horses. It was only many miles and hours later in the retreat that a joyous sight was seen through the settling gloom of the winter twilight.
Men, Cheyenne young men, were coming in from the prairie to join the survivors marching up Sand Creek. The young men were the first brave ones who had run for the pony herd to secure mounts under the soldier fire from Captain Wilson’s hard-fighting 1st Cavalry.
These warriors had caught up a few precious mounts, just a single horse to each man, because each man had taken but one catching rope in the suddenness of the flight from the sleeping robes in the village. But these mounts were the true gifts of Maheo, and were given over to the worst wounded and to the dying. Red Dust saw a young pure-blood cousin of George Bent’s give the half-breed an old pack mare, then walk beside his half-white kinsman holding him on the horse and guiding the horse, as well, for another five miles and until the Cheyennes had made camp under full darkness ten miles up Sand Creek from the rifle pits at Voxse.
The night was freezing cold. A raw wind whipped down the channel of the stream, howled through the brushless ravine that was the only shelter for the people on that black prairie. Ice formed about the moist muzzles of the ponies. The wind kept switching farther north. By midnight the temperature had fallen deeply below freezing.
Red Dust, with the women and older children who could still walk, went out into the blackness and gathered grass to burn for fires, and to heap upon the wounded and the old and the sick, and the very young babies, to keep them from dying in the cold. None of the People had any decent or warm clothing. Most were half naked, driven from their beds that morning with no time to seize even a shawl. All had been caught in some state of undress, except the old squaws who had been out gathering wood and who had seen the “buffalo across the stream”, and those old squaws were all sleeping back along the trail that night—sleeping forever.
All of the night hours the Cheyennes cried and called into the darkness so that any passing survivor might know that they were there, might come in and be with them, might not die alone on the naked prairie with no Indian hand to comfort him. But no one came in out of the darkness.
By 3:00a.m. the warriors knew that the People could not live there in that icy ravine. All were ordered up. The ponies were loaded with the sick and injured. The strongest men carried the little children. There were not many women left with the People. Of all the drifts and moundings of silent red bodies left behind in the Sand Creek bottoms at the main village, two out of three were women and children, and more women than children. In the terrible pits at Voxse alone, seventy dead were counted when the soldiers left and the survivors tottered away.
No Cheyenne knew how many other dead were left that day, how many had died in the village, how many in the fight to reach the rifle pits, how many were frozen, never to be found or counted, lost and alone on the plains and in the sandhills of Ponoeohe, the Little Dried River. The Cheyennes knew only that somewhere across that freezing blackness lay the Smoky Hill River and the camp of their relatives who had not trusted Major Anthony and gone with Black Kettle to camp in peace.
So it was that the warriors roused them out of the ravine and led them on through the blind darkness, praying to see with daylight the sight of their friends on the Smoky Hill. And this time Maheo was listening to them and leading them.
When the day broke eastward across the frost rime of the buffalo grass, they saw their friends and relatives coming through the sunrise toward them. Some young men with ponies had reached the Smoky Hill camp with news of the Sand Creek massacre. Now the friends and kinsmen were rejoined. Cooked meat and warm blankets and riding horses and medicines for the wounded were given to the refugees, and all were carried swiftly back to the camp on Smoky Hill River.
There the farewell prayers and the keening of the women for their dead made a sound in the prairie morning that Red Dust would remember until Maheo gathered him to the Land of the Shadows.
The Smoky Hill people made preparations to break their camp should Chivington turn his attention to them. Scouts were sent out to the south to watch for Mashane, while other scouts rode at once for the north to carry word of the massacre to the fighting bands above the Platte, to the Sioux, Arapahoes of the north, and Cheyennes of the north. It was a tense time, and fearful.
But when the scouts returned from the south, they brought only good news. In the seven days of their traveling, no pony soldiers had been seen near Sand Creek, or Rush Creek, or any place above the Arkansas. And more. It was positively told them by some of Little Raven’s Arapahoes from Camp Wynkoop below Fort Lyon, that Mashane and all his men had marched on down the big river, down toward Major Wynkoop. He was now said to be fifty miles from Fort Lyon. He had with drawn all of his guards about the fort and from about Bent’s Ranch, and taken them with him.
The Arapahoes of Little Raven said that Mashane was out looking for more Indians to kill, but that, when he had gotten as far as Major Wynkoop’s field camp, he was not talking that way any more. His own men were camped and very quiet. The Arapahoes thought that Mashane had been told something by Major Wynkoop that changed his mind very fast.
Robert “Jack” Bent, who was still with those soldiers of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, had told the Arapahoes that Mashane was going back up the Arkansas right away, but not looking for any Indians any more, but only for a place to think over what he had done. Bent had heard some of the soldiers saying that Mashane was in very bad trouble with the big soldier chiefs of the Grandfather in Washington, D.C., about destroying Black Kettle’s village. And that Major Wynkoop had told Mashane to his face that he would never command another body of troops along the Arkansas, or any other place that the regular Army kept soldiers in all of that country. There was even talk of arresting Mashane, but that was foolish. Who would do it? Mashane was the commander of all of the military district of Colorado. Well, ih hai, good hunting, that was all of the news that the Arapahoes of Little Raven had given the Cheyenne scouts from Smoky Hill. It was better at that than any of them might have hoped.
But what of the strange-minded schoolteacher from Horse Creek? Was there any news of him down there on the Arkansas? No? Not one report? No one had seen him, or seen anyone who had seen him? Since the big fight he had disappeared, eh? And his orphans? The ones left at Bent’s Ranch? Did Robert “Jack” Bent know anything of them, of the two little half-blood boys and the crippled Arapaho girl? No again. Jack Bent had not been near his father’s ranch.
Well, too bad. The red-bearded schoolmaster with the grizzly-bear winter coat had been a true friend to all the Cheyennes. He had saved Red Dust, the nephew of Roman Nose. He had made a home for unwanted Indian waifs at his lonely school at The Cottonwoods. If he had been a little odd in his head, in his heart he had been truly touched by the Allfather.
As for the children, they were probably gone never to be seen again in that life. What chance was there that Mashane’s guards had withdrawn without doing something bad to them? It was too bad, all of it, but the Cheyennes could have told Preacher that his mission school at The Cottonwoods never would be there very long. What white man had ever lasted very long being kind and fair to the Indians?
On that final day when the scouts returned from the Arkansas, a council was held to decide on more messages to be sent north telling the news that the Colorado troops were going back to Denver and that Mashane was said to be through fighting on the Arkansas, perhaps forever. In this same council Wolfbag and his wife, who was the aunt of Red Dust, asked also that the elders make a ruling on what to do with the northern boy. He seemed homesick, they said, or sick in some way that was hurting him, and they believed he should be sent home to his uncle, Roman Nose.
The boy was called in, after the Indian fairness in such matters, and asked if he wished to go home, to ride north with the new messengers even then readying their ponies for the long journey to the Powder and the Tongue Rivers in far Wyoming. Strangely Red Dust seemed to hesitate. Faced with the thing he had thought he wanted most, some inner doubt weighed upon him, nor could he say what it was. But even as he stood there, trying to answer the elders, a great shout went up outside the lodge and everyone got up and hurried out to see what was happening.
There, coming in toward the camp of the Smoky Hill people, was a horseman—and a horse that Red Dust knew in the instant of the first sighting. In his breast the heaviness was gone. The doubts and inner weighings disappeared. He laughed—the first laugh anyone in that country had heard from him—and he ran past the elders and all of the people, waving and crying out: “Preacher, Preacher, it is I, Mahesie, your son!”
But the miracle of Preacher Bleek’s return on the old white mare, the same old speckled and bony white mare that had saved Red Dust at Sand Creek, was not complete. The remainder of it was now groaning and creaking into view behind the great square man in the bear-skin winter coat. It was the resurrected old prairie schooner, the Argonaut. The Argonaut with the Kiowa Ladies and Samson and Delilah whinnying and braying their welcomes to the pony herds of the Smoky Hill people. And the Argonaut with Blackbird driving the teams, proud as any pure-blood. The Argonaut with Sunflower and Young Buzzard perched on the seat beside Blackbird, waving to Red Dust and calling to him: “Hai! Look at us, Mahesie. We are going to Kansas and build a new schoolhouse! You can go with us, if you don’t mind riding in the back with a shaggy old friend who doesn’t smell too good when he gets wet!” And that was the last part of the miracle. As the children laughed, old Lamewolf poked his head out of the pucker hole of the canvas wagon cover behind the driver’s seat and began to bark and growl and bare his teeth and move his tail in Indian circles to show that even he was glad to see the northern boy again.
That night, at a feast of fresh buffalo tenderloins and lump sugar from the Argonaut, Preacher held forth at much length in the big lodge of Wolfbag. The Smoky Hill people gathered inside and outside to hear the wonderful story of his escape from Sand Creek. How he had been struck in the head by the rifle bullet of a soldier and left for dead. But how he had regained consciousness to find he had only been creased by the bullet and began urgently to search for some way to escape Mashane’s prowling troops. And then how the old white Cheyenne mare had found him when all appeared hopeless, and had carried him away safely through the sandhills to free dom. Then how he had ridden the old mare down to the Arkansas across from Bent’s Ranch, just in time to see the soldier guard leave the ranch and hurry away. And how he had then found his little strangers all still safely there. How they told him that the good soldier, Durant, had been helped by two of Bent’s half-breed sons to get away from the troop guard of Mashane’s men one stormy night, and was now safely surrendered to Major Wynkoop’s men far down the big river at Fort Larned, whence some friendly Kiowa Indians had taken him. And how the children and Preacher had then left the ranch riding the Kiowa Ladies and old black Samson and little spotted Delilah, heading for the Smoky Hill camp of their good friend Wolfbag.
But, tòa noxa! Wait! Now came the really remarkable part. When they left the ranch, Sunflower begged Preacher to ride by way of the wolf rocks where brave Lamewolf had died fighting the pony soldier, Sergeant, Skemp. Sunflower wanted to give the old dog a decent Indian burial, with a scaffold and burning and some appropriately long prayers. But when they reached the place, there was Lamewolf, thin as a baby crane with no feathers, but alive on the offering of food left for him by Blackbird and Young Buzzard—and alive because Skemp’s bullet had only made a bloody wound in his scalp, just like Preacher’s wound! And he had only been unconscious in that snowbank and not dead when the soldiers took Sunflower and Red Dust away.
Now Preacher had taken out his Bible and read from it to them all, and vowed that finding the old dog alive was a sign from above. He said his Lord God Jehovah had sent that sign to give back his courage to him, Preacher, to show him that where hope does not die, nothing dies.
“Haho, Maheo!” Preacher had added quickly. They were all going over on Rush Creek and dig that old wagon out of the snow hole into which it had fallen. They were going to fix it up and patch the harness and put the Ladies and Samson and Delilah into the traces and start out all over again to finish their journey to Smoky Hill River. For Preacher’s God had also told him that, if old Lamewolf could be alive, then the boy, Red Dust, might also have lived. And, had he done so, he would be in the village of the Smoky Hill people with the other Cheyenne survivors from the terrible fight along Little Dried River.
That was the story. Between them, the Cheyenne’s Great Spirit Maheo and the white man’s Lord God Jehovah had done it all. Those old gods sent powerful signs. Nahaôn. Amen.
Early next morning, the Argonaut and her orphans departed the camp of the southern Cheyenne on Smoky Hill River. It was December 8th, 1864.
A day of serene clear-skied beauty, it was as though Maheo had said to old Maxhekonene, old Strong-Faced Hard Frost Moon: “Forget your blusters and your big snows for a little while. Let these people pass.”
In the wagon, yet a little weak for long walking, Lamewolf rested like a chief. On the driver’s seat sat Preacher. In the rising sun his beard bristled red and golden as a chestnut burr. His bear-skin coat bulged with good treasure recovered from the Argonaut: lump sugar and rock candy for the children, dried liver bits and pemmican balls for the old dog, shag leaf Burley tobacco for Preacher—and something else for Preacher, too, corked tightly in a medicine bottle that held no medicine.
On the seat with the big white man from Horse Creek, whose inner spirit knew the meaning of Cheyenne hotoma, sat Blackbird and Young Buzzard. Out in front of the Kiowa Ladies and of black Samson and spotted Delilah went Sweet Medicine, the old long-maned white mare. She went as proudly as a best buffalo horse or even a first-picked war pony. And why should she not? How many aged pack ponies of the southern Cheyennes lived to carry a nephew of Roman Nose, the greatest fighting northern Indian of them all? And more. To carry with Red Dust the Arapaho crippled girl, Sunflower, both as light and kind as a burden of gray goose down to an old mare’s misused, much-curved back.
Sweet Medicine lifted up her speckled snout, blew out through her hairy nostrils, rolled a soft brown eye back at her two small riders, kicked up her ancient heels. For a little while, at least until she had led the Argonaut over the first rise and out of sight of the Cheyenne camp, she knew again the feeling to be young.
So it was that Red Dust went home, not to high Wyoming but to western Kansas. And so it was that Preacher Nehemiah Bleek, who seldom prayed and never preached, set forth once more with his little strangers, his orphans of the Argonaut. Perhaps his only epitaph was that one slowly spoken by Wolf-bag, watching with his woman from the village edge until the last snow patch turned blue with distance and the gray haze of the buffalo grass blotted out the Argonaut.
“A good man,” said the dark-faced brave. “I think Maheo made him with the wrong-colored skin. He should have been a Cheyenne. …”