On their return to camp, Stedloe at once ordered the troops to dig in and prepare to stand where they were. With the men at work on a line of shallow rifle pits facing the river, Bell asked permission to take Jason and scout back along the line of approach Fanning must take, hoping thus to determine the proximity of the relief column and to ascertain whether any considerable hostile bands had gotten between that force and the forward patrol.
Permission granted, the big sergeant and the owl-sober Nez Percé swung up on their raunchy cayuses and departed. Half an hour later they were sitting their lathered mounts atop a three-mile rise and gazing southwest at as fine a sight as ever regular sergeant and native scout laid longing eyes to.
A mile beyond their ridge, moving at a brisk canter, the climbing sun flashing off musket barrel and harness metal, the maroon and white guidon of the 1st Dragoons snapping, color to color, with the Stars and Stripes, came 2nd Lieutenant Henry B. Fanning and the tight-ranked balance of Stedloe’s Colville column.
Dispatching Jason to bear the news to the river camp, Bell rode down and joined the column. After giving the brief details of Stedloe’s position to Fanning, he asked about the lieutenant’s trip up from the Snake. The young officer, a quartermaster of supply by experience and hence no very able informant, reported no signs of Indians on his advance along the patrol’s track. His advanced position was due to a warning a band of Nez Percés from Red Wolf Crossing had brought into his first night’s camp out of the Snake, a warning that the whole country beyond the Palouse was aswarm with Kamiak’s hostiles.
The night just previous, about 4:00a.m., the Nez Percé, Lucas, had found their camp with the news of the patrol’s grave situation. Camp had been broken at once and the march resumed through the morning darkness. An hour later the other Indian, Timothy, had found them.
At this point the Nez Percé chief had taken over the guiding of the column and the other Indian had dashed off down the back trail toward the Snake. Timothy had disappeared ahead of them with daylight, had been seen no more since.
This conversation was no more than concluded when the missing chief rode into sight. Bell at once rode to meet him, the two of them swinging back, north, to outride the relief column’s head. From the Nez Percé, Bell learned that Lucas had been dispatched to gather a force of Timothy’s Red Wolf Nez Percés, and to guide them forward with all speed “to aid the pony soldiers and make liars of those who whispered the Nez Percés sought to destroy their white friends.” He had also instructed Lucas to send three Nez Percé riders to Fort Wallowa with the news of Stedloe’s peril.
Bell grunted softly when the chief finished. “Lax-o’ita, my brother. We shall do to ride together, you and I. You have done well.”
The Nez Percé looked at him quickly, his slitted eyes flicking from Bell back to the column head with the slight gesture of his shoulder rearward. “I follow that flag, Ametsun. That’s all.
Now it’s in a very bad place but I am still with it.”
Riding a little way in silence, Bell turned to the Nez Percé chief. “I’ve never asked you, Tamason, but maybe I won’t get another chance. What do you see in that flag? You’ve spoken of it enough for me to know that, when you look at it, you see more there than your brothers.”
The chief didn’t answer immediately, letting his little pony pick its own way up the dusty track while his slant eyes moved ahead, up and away and far beyond the long-rolling ridges.
“Well, Ametsun, you can’t blame my brothers. When they look on that gay banner of the pony soldiers, they don’t see what I do. They have no eyes for that bright cloth on its round-topped lance haft. They can’t feel the blood and the snow of its stripes. They can’t touch the deep blue of its sky or reach the bright glitter of its stars. Well, wuska, let that be the end of it. If they can’t see the flag, how can they follow it? But I can see it. I have always seen it. From the day the old chief, Menitoose, my father who walked with Lewis and Clark, drew its design and color upon my first boyhood shield, I have seen it.
The old man bade me take the emblem and walk behind it with its image in my eyes for all the days of my life. I have done that bidding. Where that flag goes, Tamason will follow it.”
The white man, embarrassed by the Indian’s simple faith and by the childish statement of its context, tried to make his hard grin lighten the sudden, strange sense of inferiority he felt to this half-naked savage. “You’re a good Christian, Timothy. …”
“Aye, Choosuklee is my Lord.”
“Well”—Bell’s grin widened—“you’re going to have to follow that blessed bunting of yours farther than your Lord might like.”
“And where is that, Ametsun?”
“To hell, brother,” answered the tall sergeant softly. “Be cause that’s where it’s going to lead you. And before ever another sun sets on it, too.”
“Amen.” The Nez Percé nodded, kicking up his pony.
“Choosuklee will show me the way.”
An hour later, with the command rejoined at Palouse Crossing, a decision was hastily reached to attempt to push on to a more defensible position before Kamiak could argue his way past the peace efforts of the old Spokane medicine man. In this regard the objective was a small lake described by Timothy as being five miles up the main road of the Lapwai and a mile west of that broad trail. Beyond that point the Lapwai entered a rocky defile of some length, offering a perfect trap for a hostile ambush.
The column march was hence resumed, the first slow hour bringing the nervous troops to within sight of the defile named by Timothy as the point of turning toward the lake. And bringing them within sight of something else, too. Something that put the saddle sweat to streaming down every horse-clamping leg in the command. Bell, leading the column with Timothy and Jason, caught the warning metal flashings and feather sproutings only a breath behind his two red companions. His abrupt back wave was picked up by Stedloe and relayed to the close-following column. With the troops halted, the colonel and his staff rode forward to Bell’s position.
“What is it, Sergeant?” The C.O.’s edgy question followed his peering eyes. “I do wish the red devils would show themselves soon. This waiting is intolerable.”
“Keep your eyes peeled, Colonel,” the sergeant admonished, nodding toward the shouldering walls of the defile. “You’ll get your wish quick enough. They’re clotted up in those rocks thicker’n tick birds on a bull’s bottom.”
“Damn it, Bell, I can’t see a blessed thing!”
“You will.” The lanky non-com shrugged. “Timothy had them pegged. If we’d gone into that slot yonder, they’d have been as all over us as squaws on an issue beef. They’ll pour out of there in a minute heavier’n a winter rain in Portland.”
The sergeant had no more than predicted the red storm than it broke under a thunder of war screams and startled pony neighs that had the dirtiest face in the command looking whiter than a newly washed baby’s backside.
“Tell the troops to hold their fire, Colonel,” Bell’s low call went to Stedloe. “This is a bluff charge. Nerve stuff. They always pull at least one. Tell the men to hold off till they’re under a hundred yards. If they pass that, give them everything at once.”
“Relay that order, Baylor!” The C.O.’s command jumped instantly. “You go with him, Wilcey. Craig and Winston stay with us.”
By the time the two officers had reached the troops with the bellowed warning, the rocks around the defile’s mouth had spewed forth no less than 500 howling warriors, the van of which was now not over 200 yards from Bell and his advance group. It looked for the moment as though Stedloe and his 150 adventurers would be swallowed up in one vast, gulping bite. But Bell had gauged the Indian appetite for soldier meat almost to the foot. 125 yards from the waiting white troops, fifty from the advanced Stedloe, the front line of charging hostiles pulled their galloping cayuses to a rock-showering halt, the following hundreds piling up behind them like an angry red wave dashing headlong against the thin dike of feathered rocks in front of them. Behind these, moving their ponies out from the screen of the hillside rocks, sitting them in full and silent view, another 700 or 800 savages were now visible.
“Let them stew a minute,” advised Bell tersely. “They’re not set to fight just yet or the others wouldn’t have hung back there on the hill. They still want to palaver.”
Implementing the sergeant’s claim, a dozen gorgeously painted chiefs rode forward to within thirty yards of Stedloe and his group. “Spokanes,” asided Bell. “Now we’ll hear how loud that old medicine man talked.”
The ensuing parley followed the precise pattern of the earlier meeting with Kamiak, Stedloe replying to the same questions as to his presence with the exact straightforward answers he had given before. The Spokanes, either satisfied or feigning satisfaction, advised the commander that while his words were reassuring they could not at the same time allow his soldiers to proceed to the Spokane River, the boundary of their tribal lands. Stedloe replied he had no such intention, was only moving to better water for his many pack animals, and would turn back the next morning.
The Indians again seemed content and began waving back the results of their parley to the waiting hundreds on the hillside. The pony soldiers were turning back. They sought only friendship and a council, not a fight. They had come into this land only because they had lost their true way to Colville. It was even as the medicine man had said. The white chief’s words had a good sound. What had Kamiak to say?
Apparently Kamiak had more than a little. No sooner had the hopeful trend of the talk been hand-signed to them, than the Palouse chief and his Coeur D’Alene lieutenant, Malkapsi, began to gallop the front of the restless warrior line, haranguing the painted braves to cover their ears and not to listen. In response to their barking exhortations the packed ranks of their followers began the chant that had blossomed Bell’s spine with perspiration the night before.
“Staq! Staq! Staq! Staq!”
“Good Lord! What a beastly sound! What is it they’re yelling about now, Bell?”
“War, Colonel. They’re going to fight, sir. Staq is the last word on the subject, Timothy tells me. We’re wasting our time and risking our precious necks up here as from right now.”
Stedloe nodded, turning to the Spokane chiefs. “You talk of peace while your brothers shout for war. Go back and tell them we’ll fight. But tell them we still want peace. Tell them they’ll fire the first shot.”
The white truce party returned at once to the waiting troops, and Stedloe solemnly instructed his command that they would have to fight. Since the ground they were on was badly suited for a stand, every effort would now be made to reach and take a strong position on Timothy’s lake. Not a man was to return the hostile fire until given orders to do so.
The troops turned at once to the left and west, pushing up the rising, broken ground between them and the water. During this tedious and exposed advance, the whole, boiling mass of the hostiles foamed along the right flank a scant 100 yards out, taking the opportunity to dazzle the white soldiers with their superb horsemanship and to acquaint them with the fact they had ammunition to burn and first-class rifles to burn it through.
No fire was directed into the troops during this time, all of the considerable volume of the hostile fusillade being thrown over the command’s line of march, along with the bitter torrent of Indian invective and insult that Bell knew to be such a part of the red man’s mental buildup to the climactic charge.
And sneer as he might personally at such heathen yelling and screaming, the sergeant had only to look about him to see the effect it was having on Stedloe’s column. Having done most of his life’s reading from the open books of men’s faces, Bell didn’t need glasses to translate chapter and verse from the chalk-white pages hurrying past him as he outrode the flank of the retreating force. General Panic wasn’t in command here, yet, but he was taking a man a minute away from Lieutenant Colonel E.S. Stedloe—even before Surgeon Randall had swabbed his fuming nitric acid into the first bullet furrow.
Notwithstanding the gross and growing fear of the men, the lake was reached without further incident. Stedloe at once arranged his companies in defensive order with their backs to the water, the entire command remaining mounted and arms at the ready. The two howitzers were wheeled into position and stripped, the pack and ammunition mules, now crazed with the Indian pony smell, being herded close and hard-picketed behind the outer line of nostril-flaring dragoon horses.
At this point, the crowding, solid ring of the Indian lines parted to let the familiar, hatchet-headed form of Malkapsi through. The renegade Coeur D’Alene wanted to inform the white chief that his lies had failed. The Spokanes had lost their case. None of the others believed that the soldiers came in peace with two big guns and this far off the Colville Road.
Furthermore, far from being satisfied with the column’s turning back short of the Spokane River, large hostile forces were even now racing to cut it off from the Snake River. The white soldiers were penned up like pigs, and they were going to die that way. Slashed through their pale, hairy throats with clean Indian steel!
As the Coeur D’Alene’s flamboyant diatribe rose to its full pitch and flower of phrase, another figure rode up to join it from the hostile ranks.
Bell, sitting his mount alongside Timothy, muttered to the Nez Percé: “That’s the medicine man who talked peace with us earlier. I thought he talked straight then.”
“He probably did,” said Timothy. “That’s Qoe—lgoel, The Owl. A good Indian, Ametsun. But what’s one owl among a thousand fish hawks?”
“Damn it to hell, Tamason, what do you suppose is keeping them off of us? They could have cut us to pieces two hours ago!”
“Who can say? Perhaps it’s the day.”
“Where the hell’s the day figure into it?”
“You’ve forgotten, Ametsun.”
“The hell! It’s the Sixteenth. What’s that got to do with the price of pony soldier scalps?”
“Sunday.” The Nez Percé nodded soberly. “The Lord’s Day, Ametsun.”
“Thank God,” murmured the sergeant with fervent irony.
“I’d plumb forgotten. So help me, Timothy, I think you’re getting limp-witted in your old age!”
“Don’t thank our Lord like that, Ametsun. He’s still riding with us. You’ll see.”
Bell, readying another impious blast at his red comrade’s literal concept of Marcus Whitman’s prayer book hogwash, had the agnostic earth cut out from under his heathen feet before he could open his profane mouth. The cutting was being done in the voice of Malkapsi’s newly arrived fellow, the Spokane medicine man.
“Hear me, my brothers!” The old man’s words carried clearly in the sudden hush. “A few among us have done what we can.
I name Victor and Vincent of the Coeur D’Alenes among these. And Jacques and Zachary. We have failed, but this one thing we have done…just today there will be no fighting. Tomorrow they will give you battle. But they have promised not to defile this day by fighting. We could do no more. But today, this is Sunday.”
For the remaining five hours of afternoon daylight the command sat their saddles, muskets and carbines loaded and un-booted, expecting each minute of the entire time to produce the continuously threatened Indian charge. The dragoon horses, pushed unmercifully for five days and without a decent feed or water in three, were rapidly becoming unmanageable under the ceaseless screaming and firing of the galloping hostile horsemen. The pack mules, always more susceptible to the alien odor of both Indians and cayuses, were requiring the attention of the complete 9th Infantry company to keep them on picket and under their various loads.
With the whole column—mule, horse, and man—at the exact outside of the breaking point of ordered array, sunset brought an unexpected delay of execution. With the first shade of evening, the hostiles began pulling back into the hills and within ten min utes there was neither sight nor sound of an enemy horseman within five miles of the tiny lake.
After waiting another half hour in saddle, Stedloe ordered camp made and disposed his command for the night. Every mount—pack and cavalry—was picketed under load and saddle, and each trooper billeted with his charged carbine or musket for a blanket. Double sentry lines were run around the entire perimeter of the huddled camp, the men not on guard duty sleeping in company groups within hand’s reach of their ready horses.
Back of this thin bulwark, Colonel Stedloe and his staff sat the night away planning the retreat to the Snake. In this course there were now no demurrers. The low supply of ammunition, the overwhelming forces opposed to them, the absolute proof of their own eyes that the Spokanes and Coeur D’Alenes, tribes hitherto without a spot of white blood on their hands, had joined Kamiak’s rebellion held the discussion strictly to ways and means of extricating the command from its present trap.
In this regard it was proposed to send another express to Wallowa via Jason and Timothy asking for reinforcements.
The Nez Percé chief bluntly refused the mission, stating he had already sent a good man in the same direction and that, furthermore, that man had a twelve-hour start. The country behind them would be swarming with hostiles by this time and there was no sense of either him or Jason getting killed to prove it. If Lucas could not get through, Jason or Timothy would never do so.
This rebellion brought a momentary reflaring of the command’s original suspicion of the Nez Percés’ loyalty, Captain Baylor heatedly pointing out they had no assurance beyond Timothy’s own that Lucas had been instructed to carry such a message and, even granted he had, no real hope at all that the already discredited Lucas would fulfill his mission.
Stedloe, after a brief discussion with Bell, announced his readiness to stand behind Timothy and his statements, adding that the sergeant and the two Nez Percés constituted the column’s sole remaining scout and Indian-contact force and hence could not at the moment be spared. Under this agreement, the final marching orders were arranged with the departure hour scheduled for early, pre-dawn darkness of the following morning. The troops were to be in saddle and moving at four, the remaining short hours to be employed in rehearsing every man with his and his animal’s position in the line of the retreat.
Bell, long-legging his weary way among the ground-sleeping troopers, headed for H Company’s section and his own picketed bay. At the bony mount’s side, he felt along the stirrup leathers for the treasured rawhide thong. Seconds later the familiar silhouette of the battered canteen was topping the horse’s hip-shot rump, and the first of the corn of Old Kentucky in forty-eight hours was running the corroded gamut of Bell’s gullet. Following the long sigh and grateful smack saluting the canteen’s return to the saddle horn, the sergeant cocked a professional eye eastward to the low set of the stars over the ragged spine of the Bitter Roots.
It was hard onto 2:00a.m., Monday, May 17th.
“Damn the whole, lousy mess to hell,” grunted 1st Sergeant Emmett D. Bell, reposing his gaunt length in dust. “We’re all dead and we might as well lie down and admit it.”
The column was formed and moving toward the Palouse by 4:10a.m. On Timothy’s advice a route was taken diagonally through the hills and bearing directly for the crossing, this to avoid the obvious possibility of Kamiak’s having ambushed their previous day’s line of march up the main trail of the Lap wai. Due to the lack of any roadway through the cut-up brush and timber of the new route, progress was necessarily difficult and dangerously slow.
Since the issue was now apparently resolved, there could be little use for scouting, and Bell was reassigned to his regular place with H Company, his two Nez Percé scouts riding with him. The marching order was straight out of the regular field-command handbook, having been determined by Stedloe and his staff in final disregard of the pleadings of Bell and his Nez Percés for a closer grouping.
Looking back along its tenuous, broken length, the sergeant groaned audibly. Timothy, his quick glance tracing Bell’s, spoke softly.
“It’s about time for you to spit again, Ametsun. That’s a bad way to march back there.”
Bell grinned, shifted his cud of long leaf. As long as he’d known this red rascal, he hadn’t been able to figure him for certain sure. Either he was what he appeared to be, stick-straight and dull-serious, or the deadestpan Indian cynic in the business. In either event he seldom missed his point, and he didn’t miss it now. Bell spat, and spat hard.
“Plumb bad, Tamason. Look it over and get a prayer book express off to old Choosuklee.”
The Indian nodded, saying nothing, both men twisting anew in their saddles to regard the object of their disaffections.
Their own Company H Dragoons, under Lieutenant Craig, held the advance, as usual. Then Captain Baylor and his Company C Dragoons. Following these came the twenty-five men of Captain Winston’s Company E, 9th Infantry, with the two howitzers, next the pack and ammunition train, and finally Lieutenant Wilcey Gaxton’s Company E Dragoons. And then came the part to shift your cud and spit about: the dragoon companies were carefully holding an ordered separation of over a thousand yards! Blessing Stedloe’s faultless West Point form with another acid benediction of burley, Bell swung back around in his saddle, his humorless grin going to Timothy. “You in touch with your Lord yet, brother?”
“My hand is always in His,” responded the Nez Percé soberly.
“Well, squeeze it, then,” counseled the sergeant. “There’s room enough between those companies to hold a county fair with a half mile horse race on the side.”
As soon as daylight allowed (about half an hour from Timothy’s lake) the harassed column was aware its sneak departure had been a little too noisy. The distant hills lining both sides of the march were covered with thin stringers of moving Indian horsemen and, shortly after these were sighted, Sergeant Williams rode up from Gaxton’s rear guard company to report a very heavy hostile concentration off both flanks of the column’s rear.
Stedloe, taking Bell and the Nez Percés, at once rode back to check the giant Kentuckian’s report. Arrived at the rear, neither Bell nor Timothy could make sense of what they saw. Bull Williams’s hostile concentration was heavy enough, all right, but it was acting as queerly as a Tolouse goose, not a rifle shot or a war cry disturbing its rapidly growing ranks.
The excitement among the hostiles was evident but it was almost certainly not of the grade of full staq. It was more as though Kamiak had gathered his brightly clad hundreds to wave and bid the pony soldiers an extravagant, demonstrative farewell.
“I give up, Colonel. I’ve never seen the likes of it. Maybe Timothy can make something of it.”
The column commander’s questioning gaze joined Bell’s with the latter’s statement, both men waiting for Timothy to speak. The Nez Percé shrugged.
“I can only say this…something has happened. Something they didn’t plan on. The Indian is not like you. He makes a plan, and then if something unthought of occurs, he is de feated. He has to stop and make a new plan. They’re defeated over there right now. They’ll have to get a new plan. Choosuklee has given us a little more time.”
“We can use it,” said Stedloe, breaking out one of his rare, stiff little smiles.
“Heads up,” grunted Bell suddenly. “Here comes your something, Tamason. And by the flap of that crêpe hassock it looks like Sergeant Bell owes your Lord another apology.”
“Good heavens,” exclaimed Stedloe excitedly, “it’s Father Joset!”
“Choosuklee’s right-hand man,” said Bell acidly. “That is, if Timothy will settle for Marc Whitman being his left-hand one.”
“Amen,” echoed the Nez Percé, “the Black Robe is on the right today.”
The Coeur D’Alene mission priest slid his slobbered pony into the rear of Gaxton’s company, coming down off the wind-broken little beast in a leg-over step-down that would have done credit to the slickest Indian rider in the Northwest federation.
He delivered his information with a brevity and modesty that added up to everything of solid honor and Indian sense Bell had heard of the man. He had come in all haste from the mission, ninety miles to the north, in response to Chief Vincent’s dramatic appearance there following a twelve-hour night ride from Kamiak’s camp on the Ingosommen. The Coeur D’Alenes had felt the famous Jesuit’s presence in the war camp might stave off the upcoming slaughter of the trapped white troops.
Père Joset took respectful leave to hope the same, in the identical breath reminding Stedloe of his months’ earlier warning to him that the dispatching of any considerable military force to the north of the Nez Percé River would bring an Indian uprising, and further adding that despite his night-long efforts among Kamiak’s aroused hostiles an attack upon the white force was imminently certain.
He inquired further if Stedloe had had the report that he, Joset, was arming the hostiles and, upon Stedloe’s admission of the fact he had, denied the allegation bluntly, adding that from his own information he was certain the rumor of a Nez Percé plot to involve the white troops with the tribes of Kamiak’s Yakima federation was true. In this regard he had started early last month to ride to Wallowa and personally warn the colonel. At the last minute, Vincent had reported a Nez Percé plot to ambush the priest’s party and incite an intertribal war.
Colonel Stedloe expressed his gratitude for the priest’s amazing ride and, further, his astonishment at the hostile attitude of the Indians. After a few moments of continuing earnest discussion, Father Joset asked the officer if he would not consider one more parley with the hostile chiefs, informing him there was yet an outside possibility of a peaceful retreat, since some of the less inflamed chiefs felt Stedloe had broken off the preceding day’s talks with undue abruptness.
Glancing along the waiting line of the halted column, Bell grimaced bitterly. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell’s back furnace of holding the command up. Stopped not over five minutes, the crazed pack mules were already beginning to break line, the excited, nerve-shot dragoon horses being of little or no use in curbing them. The sergeant’s thoughts were quickly repeated in Stedloe’s unhappy refusal.
The colonel was sorry, but the priest could see for himself it would be impossible to hold his frightened pack animals. The column had got to move, and move at once. Father Joset, the steadiest man Bell had ever watched, now suggested the talks could be held in motion, without halting the column, and to this Stedloe gladly agreed. The priest rode back at once, promising to return with as many of the hostile leaders as would follow him.
He returned in half an hour, highly disturbed. He had been able to find only Vincent and Victor, the Coeur D’Alenes.
Their hopes would now have to be pinned on these two elder chiefs.
Colonel Stedloe repeated his promises of the previous talks to the Coeur D’Alenes, adding the further guarantee that the whole idea of the Colville council would be dropped until such a time as the Indians were convinced of its benefits. At this moment and for the first time in the entire series of cloudy parleys, Bell felt a last, half chance truce hanging in the delicate balance of the Coeur D’Alenes’ agreeing nods.
He had no sooner responded to this fleeting hope when even its slight string was brutally snapped. It was one of those weird, unreasonable by-plays that no one not deeply familiar with the real thinness of the mission veneer smeared over the basic uncertainty of the Indian character by the various Christian proselyters on the Washington frontier could understand. And even Bell, an Indian veneer peeler of five years—good standing, got hit by the flying chips of frontier varnish now exploding off the unpredictable Jason.
The Nez Percé subchief shoved his pony forward the moment Vincent’s handsome face broke in a smile of understanding toward Stedloe. The next instant, before the dumbfounded whites could intervene, the Army scout had laid his heavy, four-foot quirt squarely across the Coeur D’Alene’s mouth.
The force of the unwarned blow nearly unhorsed the visiting chief, but Bell, spurring forward, caught him and held him on his sidling pony. As he did, Jason’s angry accusation was snarling its way into the stricken Indian’s bleeding face.
“You talk with a forked tongue! I’ve struck you now, proud man! Why don’t you fire?”
Victor, moving his pony forward to come between the enraged Nez Percé and his fellow Coeur D’Alene, found himself included in the shouted charges.
“And you, too, you dog! I saw you lift your rifle just now to fire on the oak leaf chief!”
By this time, Bell and Timothy had the raging Jason’s pony pinned between their shouldering mounts and Stedloe was addressing his white-faced apologies to the visitors. The Coeur D’Alenes, under Father Joset’s rapid Chinook address to them, agreed to overlook the incident and to return to the hostile lines with their final peace effort.
But where the hearts of the two old Coeur D’Alenes were good, they were no better than the eyes of the watching hostile hundreds. The Palouse warriors had seen the Nez Percé scout attack their emissary, and translated the action literally. Even as Vincent and Victor were touching their foreheads to Sted-loe, a young Coeur D’Alene warrior broke from the waiting hostile ranks and whipped his pony forward. His black eyes snapping, the youth hauled his mount to a leg-stiff halt, shouting his warning to Vincent.
“Depart, uncle! Come away now! The Palouses are all through waiting! Kamiak has said for them to fire!”
With the two chiefs turning to follow the excited boy, Victor sent a last hand wave to Colonel Stedloe. “We are sorry, my brother. But we don’t want to die here in the middle, and it is too late now.”
“It’s never too late to die, brother.” Bell held his soft curse under breath, his smoky-gray eyes following the dust of the departing ponies. “And right here is where me and a hundred and fifty other enlisted heroes drop dead to prove it.”
The first, long-range shots from Kamiak’s hostiles were splattering the rocks around Gaxton’s rear company before the dust of Vincent’s and Victor’s ponies was halfway back to the Indian lines. With typical and even (Sergeant Bell grudging the fact) admirable methodicalness, Colonel Stedloe ignored the opening fire to pull his fat, brass stem-winder from inside his campaign jacket. 1,200 hostiles or no, it was of primary importance that the hour of the onset of the Battle of the Tohotonimme be duly noted for future and precise inclusion in his field report to Headquarters Operations.
“Eight three, Sergeant”—the watch was being carefully restored to its particular pocket—“please ride up the column to your company and tell Craig to resume march and hold all fire.
Pass that word to Baylor and Winston on your way up. I’ll see Gaxton. Remember, Bell…not a shot in return until the order is changed.”
“Yes, sir”—Bell was wheeling his bay—“anything else, sir?”
“No, I’ll be up directly. I want to watch this back here a bit.”
Saluting, Bell sent his mount galloping up the left flank of the slow-moving column, shouting Stedloe’s orders to Baylor and Winston.
“Colonel Stedloe’s orders, sir! Resume regular march…
hold all fire!”
The two captains flicked their yellow gauntlets in understanding, relaying the shouted command in quick turn to Sergeants Demoix and Harrigan. Looking back, Bell could see the noncoms wheeling down the flanks of their companies, could hear their hoarse yells bouncing back and forth across the narrow gully in which the column presently found itself.
“Close up! Closed company! Column speed. Hold your horses down. No fire! Repeat. Hold your fire!”
By 8:30 the hostile fire had built up to a continuous roll, the entire weight of it directed at Gaxton’s rear company. Glancing back from the occasional slight rises in the gully’s floor, Bell could see the Indian riders galloping back and forth from hillside to hillside across the lieutenant’s rear, their range still too long to result in anything save accidental casualties. The ugly grimace this maneuver brought to the sergeant’s bearded face was turned with his hard words to Lieutenant Craig at his side.
“The colonel’s making a hell of a mistake holding his fire, Lieutenant. Those red buzzards’ll think we’re bluffed clean down to our boot socks. In five minutes they’ll be seeping up our flanks and in ten they’ll have us headed.”
“I’m right with you, Sergeant,” the youthful officer receipted the grimace along with the sentiment. “And I don’t like the looks of that big hill ahead. If they pass up and get on that, we’re trapped. We can’t go any place but right under it.”
“Yeah”—Bell’s grim retort dropped all thought of rank—“and, if they try it, guess who’ll get the fun of running them for it!”
“Company H, for sure.”
“Company H for hell.” The big sergeant grinned. “Take a look back there, Lieutenant. Here they come!”
As Bell spoke, the main force of Indians to the column’s rear closed up and launched a full-scale charge into Gaxton’s company. At the same time, two lesser forces split off and came bombarding up the flanks of the column. The distinctive hollow booming of the issue muskets began immediately, letting the forward column know that Stedloe had released Gaxton’s company to fire. Seconds later, Bell could make out the colonel’s slight figure galloping up from the rear.
Stedloe brought the news that Gaxton had had his horse shot from under him and taken a rifle ball through the arm. He was now remounted and his company in good order but suffering casualties by the minute. Baylor and Winston had as yet taken no casualties but the Indians were massing on their companies and they’d been given orders to make short countercharges out of column line to keep the foe off balance and to attempt to prevent them from gaining any elevation along the route—their now obvious intent and purpose.
Further orders had been given to close up the company gaps, there still remaining several hundred yards between companies. It was to be hoped that Baylor’s and Winston’s side charges would keep the hostiles from heading the column in any force. The no-fire order had been changed to fire permitted only on the counter-charging necessary to clear the Indians from the line of march. Even as the order and the hope were released from the colonel’s compressed lips, Bell knew both were futile, and for the next two brutal miles through the trackless brush his knowledge was bloodily born out. Encouraged by the light fire from the troops, the hostiles were constantly charging, using their favorite prairie-wolf tactic—whirling in to point-blank range to draw a counter-charge, fleeing before the charge until they had it pulled way out of line, then turning on it with savage fury to drive it back in.
The engagement was now entirely general along the line, with Baylor’s and Gaxton’s companies having sustained five murderous charges and with Winston’s group of mounted infantry, howitzer, and pack string rapidly beginning to lose all semblance of an ordered command.
During all this wild time, Bell had had occasional glimpses of Calla in her borrowed corporal’s uniform—hastily donned that morning at Timothy’s suggestion that it would serve to give her anonymity among the crowding troops—being moved up as the battle progressed, from Gaxton’s company to Baylor’s to Winston’s, in rapid succession. Now, in a brief lull as Stedloe and Craig studied a large force gathering off their left flank, he looked anxiously around for the Southern girl.
Sharp as his hurried glance was, it swept over the girl twice before flicking back to spot her on the third pass. Well, by God, that was good, anyway. Bouncing along back there as the ninth man in H Company’s third squad, she was about as safe as she could get in this crazy hour and place. If he could miss her at fifty yards, it was a good bet the hostiles could do likewise at 200.
At that moment, she caught his eye upon her and waved, following the wave with a mock salute and a summer-lightning flash of a smile that would have lifted the powder smoke of any man’s Indian battle. Before Bell could wave back, her horse was rearing in terror at the sudden lash of Indian lead that announced the attack from the new force on H Company’s left, and in the hot work of repulsing the hostile slash he lost sight of her.
That he ever saw her again was more a tribute to the guts and gallantry of Lieutenant Davis Craig than to any military right Company H had to survive the following Palouse maneuver, a maneuver that, ironically, the young lieutenant had himself predicted an hour and a half before. In seconds, now, it became apparent that the charge of the left-flank group had been a feint, for no sooner had it broken than a much larger group of hostiles bucketed out of the hills to the right, wheeled sharply south, and raced for the high hill at the column’s head that Craig had marked for Bell in the beginning.
Stedloe, measuring up fully to the sergeant’s unaltered estimation of his basic coolness, at once ordered Company H for-ward: “…to beat the Indians to that hill and, failing that, to beat them off of it!”
Bell, picking the order up from Craig, threw it down the ranks as he slammed his spurs into the bay and drove him after the jumping flag of the lieutenant’s horse, his eyes sweeping the right-hand hills as he went—and opening wide with the tail end of the sweep! Aii-eee, brother! Trust Kamiak not to send a boy on a man’s errand.
That six-foot buck in the lead of the racing hostile warriors—cartwheel war bonnet, three-point blanket and all—was nobody but Kenuokin himself! The headlong dash for the hill, although closer than a straight-razor shave, was won by the dragoons, a victory that proved as short-lived as Gaxton’s first horse. Kamiak, abandoning the race the moment it was apparent he had lost it, swept on around the base of the hill and disappeared beyond its far side. Topping the elevation a few moments later, Bell cursed at length and wickedly.
No wonder the red son hadn’t held up to bicker about the hill they were on! Facing them now, for the first time revealed by their new elevation, stood a second and higher hill, its brushy crest not over 150 yards from their uncovered position!
And the van of Kamiak’s whooping henchmen were already piling off their scrambling ponies to dive into the rocks and scrub of its commanding top.
Craig, realizing he must take this new position, left Bell and one squad to hold the present ridge and, with the remaining three squads deployed in open skirmish line, at once went after Kamiak. The assault, probably due to its quickness, was successful. With lethal reservations. The hostiles, no longer fearful of the dragoon charges, fell back only from the hill’s apex, setting up their new lines just below and completely ringing Craig’s troops. The lieutenant and his men were as flat-pinned as so many blue and gold butterflies on the exposed roundness of their granite and scrub-brush exhibition case.
With H Company split and isolated, the savages turned the full fury of their attentions on the remainder of the column.
Winston, to whose company Stedloe had escorted Calla when Craig went forward, was the nearest to the lieutenant’s beleaguered troops—about 800 yards north and still trapped on the gully’s floor. Baylor and Gaxton, both of whom had succeeded in closing some ground, were still cut off from each other and from Winston’s group.
The chain of command being thus shattered, the fighting now became completely broken and independent, the inevitable, deadly result entirely clear to all concerned—if the several sections of the command could not be speedily reunited the Battle of the Tohotonimme would go into the history books as of 10:15a.m., Monday, May 17th, 1858.
Into this next-to-last extremis of the Colville column, as indeed it had since the first, fateful camp at the main Snake Crossing, now stepped the reed-slender, mahogany-dark figure of the Red Wolf Nez Percé, Tamason.
Shortly after 11:00a.m. the first slight break in the deadly situation occurred, setting the stage for Timothy’s remarkable ride: Captain Winston and Colonel Stedloe succeeded at that time in fighting their way with the howitzers and packs to Craig’s hilltop position. The howitzers were at once stripped and brought into action. Their effect, contrary to Bell’s earlier hard-bitten cynicism, and supporting the colonel’s laughed-at pride in them, was little short of electric. While even Stedloe would have admitted that perhaps not a solitary Indian was injured by the noisy bursts, the fear and confusion temporarily occasioned by them among the crowded ranks of Kamiak’s hostiles were obvious and instant.
It remained for the slow-drawling Winston to see the true and momentary nature of the diversion. “Colonel, those devils breaking and running like that mustn’t fool us. Both Kamiak and Malkapsi were present at Wallowa last summer when you held that demonstration.” At the mention of the demonstration’due to the fort gunners’ faulty marksmanship, a well-touted exhibition of the howitzers’ deadliness had fallen flat—the colonel’s face reddened, but Winston continued: “They’ll rally their people quick enough, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, sir”—Craig’s earnest voice joined the discussion—“Harry’s right, Colonel. The reservation bucks in that bunch will have them back on us in ten minutes. It’s the wild Indians that have broken. I don’t mean to sell your cannon short, sir.”
While this conversation was going forward among the officers atop Craig’s hill, Bell, who had brought his squad over from the other hill when the howitzers first opened the way for the maneuver, was lying off to one side of the anxious group, belly-flopped amidst a jumble of granite boulders. By his side the ever-present Timothy was letting his slant gaze join the sergeant’s in scanning the still broken ranks of the hostiles below.
Suddenly Bell’s gray eyes narrowed. Another moment of careful searching and his words were snapping at the Nez Percé chief. “Tamason! Do you see what I see down there?”
“Aye, the field is almost clear between us and Captain Bay-lor. And Lieutenant Gaxton has fought nearly up to the cap tain. It’s too bad they cannot see it from down there where they are. Is that what you mean, Ametsun?”
“You’re damn’ right that’s what I mean! Go get Stedloe, brother. And jump it!”
Seconds later, the colonel, along with Winston and Craig, had joined Bell in his rocky look-out, the big sergeant’s rapped-out greeting at once widening the eyes of all three.
“Look down there, sir! Your damn’ howitzers have opened them up clean down to Baylor’s boys. And Wilse is damn’ near up to the captain!”
“We were just discussing it, Bell.” Stedloe’s voice was held down with its customary calm. “But Captain Winston and Lieutenant Craig feel they’ll close up again in a few minutes.
I’m afraid we haven’t any reason for a celebration yet, Sergeant. Perhaps if Baylor could see the opening….”
“That’s the hell of it,” interrupted Craig bitterly. “They can’t see a thing for the base of this damn hill we’re on!”
“That’s just what I mean, Lieutenant!” Bell broke in excitedly. “If they can’t see, neither can the Indians that’re pinning them down. We’ve got a thousand-yard slot right up this hill as open as the devil’s front door. If the colonel can keep his howitzers blasting for another ten minutes, we can get a rider through to Baylor!”
“By God, Colonel, Bell’s right!” Craig was on his feet.
“They’ve got a chance to get up here if we can get word to them.”
“I’m sorry, gentlemen.” The C.O.’s refusal fell softly. “There isn’t a man in the command who’d have a chance in a thousand of getting down this hill alive.”
“Not a white man, maybe….” Bell dropped the statement slowly, his eyes holding Stedloe’s.
“What the devil do you mean, Bell?”
“He means me, Colonel Stedloe.” The deep bass of the Nez Percé’s voice came from behind them, pivoting their combined glances in time to see the scout swinging up on his roan gelding. “I see the flag down there and I’m going to it.”
“Get off that horse, you fool Indian!” Stedloe’s angry command trailed the wheeling pony. “That’s an order, Timothy!
Bell! Stop the idiot…!”
The colonel’s order and entreaty were lost alike in the shower of rotten granite chips churned up by the plunging descent of the Nez Percé’s scrambling pony, and in Sergeant Bell’s soft-muttered benediction.
“There’s nothing in all hell will stop that Indian, Colonel.
Nothing short of half a pound of Palouse lead, anyway. God help him, I wish I had his guts.”
Stedloe broke his eyes from the lunging slide of Timothy’s gelding, turned their earnest brownness with sudden warmth on Bell, his thin hand finding the big sergeant’s shoulder with the look.
“Yours will do until they issue a better set of intestines,” he said softly.
While the anxious eyes of Craig’s and Winston’s hilltop commands watched helplessly, Timothy completed his suicidal dash to Baylor’s company, apparently without a scratch. An instant later the watchers on the hill saw another tiny figure dart across the 400 yards that still separated Baylor’s and Gaxton’s companies. Even at the distance Bell could make out the rider wasn’t Timothy, but knew from his side-swinging, crazy way of hanging to a horse that it was an Indian, and concluded with a wry grin that Timothy had dispatched Jason to do his bit for the Nez Percé chief’s precious flag.
Following the contacts of the Nez Percé riders with the separated companies, Baylor and Gaxton began to drive at once for the base of Craig’s hill, their lines of attack approaching one another diagonally. The Indian pressure on their flanks was unrelenting but Kamiak saw too late the purpose of the pincers.
He was able to rally about 200 braves and throw them onto the base of the hill just as the two companies, in full dragoon charge, arrived at the same point.
Caught between the desperate tongs, the hostiles took their first considerable casualties of the day. A round dozen were killed and two score wounded—among the former, disastrously, Jacques, Zachary, and old Victor, three of the five friendlies among the chiefs of the hostile command.
Baylor and Gaxton, scarcely breaking the momentum of their conjunction, turned their troops up the hill and, assisted by a counter charge down the slope by Craig and H Company, succeeded in reaching the top. With this achievement, the several sections of the command were unified for the first time since leaving the lakeside camp seven and a half hours earlier.
For the first time, also, a pause was gained to look to medical attention and to check battle casualties and issue rations. The time was 11:25a.m.
The medical inspection and casualty survey revealed unexpected good news: thirteen troopers slightly wounded, four moderately, none seriously, one missing and presumed killed.
This slight lift was immediately let down by Lieutenant Fanning’s report that the last of the water had just been issued to the wounded. On top of this Captain Winston turned in his figures on the pack string—twenty-four animals and their packs lost, half of the remaining forty head suffering bullet wounds and well near out of service.
All these facts waited silently before Fanning’s fateful revelation. Without water the command was as dead as though its scalps were already cut and dried. It was quickly brought out that the only hope in this direction must be placed upon Timothy’s information that the main Ingosommen lay only three miles to the south and west in its looping course from Kamiak’s war camp to the north. With utterly no alternative, Stedloe ordered his command regrouped and the advance toward the Ingosommen begun.
The start down the far flank of the hill was made at 11:55, Baylor and Gaxton holding the flanks as before, Stedloe leading with Craig’s H Company, Winston, with the precious packs and howitzers, in between. Included among the “precious nesses” was the almost forgotten, white-faced figure of “Corporal” Calla Lee Rainsford.
Immediately the course of the past morning’s struggle assumed the innocent-fun aspect of a Sunday school picnic.
Where Bell thought he and his comrades had been bucking the heat of hell’s front yard in the earlier advance, he was now made to realize they’d hardly been up to the devil’s mailbox.
With Kamiak and Malkapsi screaming them on and with the holding counsel of the Coeur D’Alene chiefs dead and gone, the hostiles swarmed in on the white soldiers like bottle flies at a bull gutting.
At five minutes of twelve, E Company was sliced clean away from the rear of the column and minutes later Lieutenant Wilcey Gaxton was vomiting his life out, with three Palouse slug holes gaping where his belt buckle should have been. Inflamed by the death of a “soldier chief”, the hostiles tore into the leaderless company. After eight hours of absorbing the main enemy pressure, Company E broke as wide open as a rotten melon. The bulk of its men succeeded in reaching Winston’s section but as an organized command E Company was off the books. And in meeting the wild charge that had driven its survivors into his rear, Winston lost twenty-five of his remaining pack animals.
Baylor’s troop, which had been sheared off by the same onslaught that broke E Company, was now in equally desperate straits in trying to regain the main column as a unit. Captain Oliver Baylor, for all his rash temper and dramatic flare, was a fighting officer of the first bloody water. He proved it now by taking his company straight through 500 enraged hostiles to make contact once again with Winston’s forces. And he proved it, too, by taking a .50-caliber, smooth-bore ball through the base of his throat sixty seconds before his inspired riding had brought his men through.
The column was now dead-halted in open, undefendable terrain, still two and a half miles from water. One company was broken, and two leaderless, Lieutenant Gaxton was dead, Captain Baylor dying. At least thirty-five troops were heavily wounded, several of these beyond any doubt mortally. The packs and ninety percent of the rations were strewn over the crimsoned granite talus of Craig’s abandoned hillside and the ammunition count was down to six rounds a man. It was time for Sergeant Bell to spit again.
With the perverse red military logic that had saved many a white command before them, the hostiles, their disorganized foe surrounded, waterless, nearly out of ammunition, and literally shot to pieces, now broke off the engagement and pulled away from Stedloe’s bleeding column.
Watching them go, Bell was as nonplussed as the greenest dogface in the company, but Timothy, his lean form as usual shadowing that of the big sergeant, had his customary grasp of the glass-simple Indian psychology wrapped firmly around the peculiar antics of his fellow redmen.
“It’s the packs, Ametsun.” He shrugged. “Pretty soon you’ll see them now. Fighting among themselves back there on that hillside.”
Even as the Nez Percé spoke, Bell could see the first of the racing red warriors putting their lathered mounts up the broad incline down which the white column had just fought its bloody way, and along the grassy slopes of which were scattered the bulk of Captain Winston’s cut-off pack animals and their precious loads of equipment and supplies. And in his mind the thought was forming just as Timothy was putting his soft words to it.
“If the colonel will move quickly now, we may be able to reach that last big hill, there”—here a slight shoulder hunch ahead of the low-voiced conclusion—“and up there we can at least die like men.”
Almost before the echo of the Nez Percé’s final phrase was lost among the groans of the wounded and the ceaseless neighings of the terrified cavalry mounts, Bell was saluting Stedloe with the terse hope of the Indian scout’s discovery.
“Begging your pardon, Colonel, but Timothy says, if we hump our backsides, we might just make it up that butte yonder, while the Palouses are scrapping over our packs. You see them clotting up on that hill we just left? That’s why they pulled off of us. To divvy up Captain Winston’s supplies. We’ve got maybe twenty minutes, sir.”
Stedloe, who with his remaining officers had just reached a decision to abandon the drive for water and move the command to an adjacent small hill for its final stand, at once grasped at Timothy’s straw.
“Craig, you were with Mullins and his map survey in here last fall. Do you recall that butte? It’s big enough to be on the charts.”
“I believe that’s Pyramid Peak, Colonel. I can’t be sure, but if it is, there’s half an acre of level ground on top with a fifteen-foot vertical drop-off of basalt and granite around the north and east perimeters. The south slope is fairly steep as you can see from here, but you could drive a wagon up that long west ridge. I really can’t say it’s Pyramid, though. All these damn’ buttes look alike to me now.”
“Beg Colonel’s pardon,” Bell broke in abruptly, “but Timothy’ll know all that and he’s already said we might make it if we jump fast and long.”
“Bell’s right!” Winston’s ordinarily quiet voice barked harshly. “We’ve no time to review Mullins’s survey. And we’d best stick with this damn’ Indian. He’s led us straight so far.”
“Agreed, Craig?” Stedloe turned the low question to H Company’s commander.
“Agreed.”
“Fanning?” Even a lowly supply officer rated his equal vote under the colonel’s calm thoroughness.
“Yes, sir, as fast as I can, sir!” The white-lipped youngster managed a pale grin.
“That’s it, then,” said Stedloe. “Let’s go, gentlemen. H Company first. Fanning and Baylor’s C Company next. I’ll go third with what’s left of Wilcey’s troop, and Winston and the Ninth last. All clear?”
The “all clears” moved hurriedly with their respective givers to their waiting horses, and within five minutes of Bell’s first advising of the god-given respite, the ragged column was galloping for the base of the long western approach of Pyramid Peak. And within another, lung-bursting fifteen was pushing the last of the panting horses onto the desolate, billiard-smooth top of the lonely butte. Taken off their greedy guard by the surprise dash, Kamiak’s war-whooping Palouses went streaming after it minutes too late, the command reaching their barren objective without further casualties.
But to Kamiak, Malkapsi, and company, collectors of Army materiel and pony soldier scalps, the temporary loss of revenue was scarcely serious. There were still very much in business and proceeded now to prove it by the enthusiastic recklessness with which they invested their considerable resources completely around all four approaches to Stedloe’s waterless tableland.
Kamiak had lead money to burn. He was out to paint the newly established little Army town of Pyramid Peak a bright, Indian red. With fresh, white blood, of course.
The 3,600-foot cone of Stedloe’s butte lay, hot and naked, athwart the slanting rays of the five-o’clock sun, its treeless, deep-grassed shoulders thrusting 1,200 feet above the crowding neighborhood of lesser hills that hemmed it on every side. On its hard-won summit the surviving troops of the Colville column lay on their gnawing bellies among the rank grass ringing the perimeter of the tiny mesa, their red and fearful eyes straining to catch the first signs of Kamiak’s third assault against their granite bastion.
Twice now, once at 2:00p.m. and once at 4:00, the hostiles had come swarming up at them on foot, being each time driven back with heavy losses, but each time throwing the flood tide of their attacking wave higher up the basalt walls of the command’s barren prison. The third attempt, now clearly readying below, might mark the last white shots.
The ammunition ration, by Fanning’s last careful count at 4:30, stood at four rounds per man, and Bell, peering through his weedy cover at the red force massing the south slope, grimly concluded the young supply officer had made his last inventory—for that or any other day. Nor was the tall sergeant’s optimism fattened any by the fact that he and fifteen H Company troopers were stationed along the exact quadrant of the mesa that must bear the brunt of any hostile assault mounted up the south slope.
Not only must bear it, but were not over thirty seconds from so doing. Kamiak was ready and he was coming.
The red lines seemed to grow out of the slope rocks by a literal magic that had even Timothy blinking his slant eyes.
Where dozens had been visible seconds before, hundreds now sprang war whooping up the sunbathed incline. And this time Kamiak was putting his bottom dollar on the red line, he and Malkapsi leading it with a picked group of 100 mounted warriors, the first employment of horsemen in the past several hours.
“There’s their first little mistake,” Bell grunted to Timothy, indicating the advanced group of galloping ponies. “If we can down a dozen of those cayuses right at the top of that rock slide….” He pointed out the steep pitch of the spot, fifty yards below them, and the Nez Percé nodded.
“Aye, Ametsun, that’s the place. Tell the men.”
“Hold your fire, boys!” The sergeant’s shout caught the nervous troopers shouldering their carbines. “Wait’ll those lead bucks hit the top of that slide right below us, then give it to them in the horses’ guts. Don’t sight on a man. Hold low and let drive square into the ponies. And let drive when I holler.
All of you.”
The other sections of the white line were already lobbing long musket fire down into the mass of the charging Indians, wasting powder and lead as though they had a fort full of both to burn, completely ignoring the pleading curses of their officers and non-coms to hold down and pick their shots. But Bell’s men, steadied with the picture of the burly sergeant and his slim Nez Percé companion kneeling, fully exposed now, on the mesa’s rim and cradling their carbines as casually as though they were waiting for the trap master to throw up the tame pigeons, clamped their gritting teeth and waited.
“You take Kamiak,” said Bell to the slit-eyed Timothy. “I’m shooting Coeur D’Alenes this afternoon.”
“Malkapsi?” asked the Nez Percé, raising his gun.
“With a capital M,” grunted Bell, his gaunt cheek sliding into the stock. “I made him a little promise back at the Palouse.”
“May your word be as good as usual,” murmured the Indian.
“Now, Ametsun?”
“Now,” snapped Bell. “Let them have it, boys! Low down and reload lively!”
Kamiak and Malkapsi, with perhaps thirty of their wildest riders, were just heel-hammering their foam-flecked ponies across the top of the rock slide when H Company’s long delayed volley cut into them. The effects were as gratifying as Timothy might have arranged through an entire month’s negotiations with Choosuklee and the powers of faith other than that associated with the short barrel of a Sharps carbine.
At least fourteen horses dropped in the first murderous blast, those of both Kamiak and Malkapsi among the number. But the dropping was the least of it. As they went down, kicking and screaming, the loose surface of the incline beneath them sent them bounding and hoof-thrashingly down among the crowded ranks of the following horsemen, knocking down fifteen or twenty more unwounded mounts and adding the falling, bouncing figures of their own and their riders’ bodies to the cascading, bloody mêlée.
The spectacular breaking up of their spearhead of ponies slowed the following dismounted braves enough to allow the timed-fire shots of H Company’s reloaded carbines to begin to arrive among them—and aimed fire with a Sharps at sixty yards, nervous troopers or no, is convincing. Additionally some of the backing musket fire from the other companies was getting home at the pistol-blank range. Shortly—about eight or nine belly-drilled braves later, to be exact—Kamiak’s faithful decided (with notable lack of formal conference) to call it an afternoon.
Twenty minutes later there wasn’t a painted face within Sharps shot of Colonel Stedloe’s arid retreat, and the only Indians to be seen were those whose bones would bleach the bare cone of Pyramid Peak till hell cooled down and died out.
Among these, unfortunately, was neither Kamiak nor Malkapsi.
The main body of the Indians was shortly afterward noted to be reassembling along the banks of the main river south and west of the butte, where it was soon evident a major council was in progress. A considerable number of the hostiles, however, remained stationed among the scrub of the lower slopes and continued to lob a long and steady fire onto the mesa top.
With dusk, a number of mounted riders were seen to leave the creek camp and go among the braves still on the firing line.
The loud calls and barking signal cries of these presently informed the anxious white command, via the running translations of Timothy, that the fighting was to cease for the night and be saved for a better day. No man among the watching whites had the least doubt as to the identity of that better day.
It would be tomorrow.
On Stedloe’s butte, the unnatural hush of the early darkness was broken only by the groans of the severely wounded and the low-pitched commands of the officers and non-coms. Here and there little clots of frightened, huddled troopers squatted together and whispered in the fireless dark.
Sergeant Bell, his own wounded accounted and cared for, found himself with his first spare time since snaking Calla out of Kamiak’s gaudy red lodge. His thoughts, naturally, turned to the Southern girl and to the weird warp of circumstances that had brought her to this Washington mountain top 3,000 miles from her genteel Virginia home. She was presently assisting Surgeon Randall with the wounded, he knew. As indeed she had been the whole of the long march from Timothy’s lake. Knowing too well what the sight and sound and touch of a beautiful woman meant to these lonely men, even in the bloom of health, Bell knew that Calla Lee Rainsford had repaid her debt to the officers and men of the Colville column many times over in these past bloody hours.
Hers had been the soft lap and gentle hand that had cradled the mortally wounded Baylor’s head as sunset had brought the last, ugly rattle into his torn throat. Hers the slow touch and lingering smile to ease the wrenching pain of Demoix’s lung-shot strangle. And of Bull Williams’s gaping belly wound. And the picture of her lovely face, clear and high-colored in the afternoon sun, or white and faint in the gathering night gloom, had been the last vision to close the tortured eyes of more than one agonized enlisted man on that bare and stony butte.
“Timothy.”
“Aye, Ametsun,” came the Nez Percé’s answer out of the darkness at Bell’s side.
“Go tell the girl I want to see her when she’s done. I’ll be here.”
“Aye, Ametsun, I’ll bring her back.”
“Just tell her where I am. She’ll find me. I want to see her alone.”
“I knew that, brother.” The soft reproach of the Indian’s answer faded with his departing shadow, leaving Bell to face the further loneliness of his darkening thoughts.
Five troopers were dead. Two more, dying. BullWilliams and Frenchy Demoix, hopelessly wounded. Thirteen other troopers clean down with bad bullet holes. Another two dozen cut up with flesh wounds and out of effective action. Gaxton and Bay-lor, whose rash courage had held the column together all morning, gone. The men had been without food for sixteen hours, without water for eight. Company E Dragoons without a leader, C, little better off under the beardless, battle-shy Fanning.
Two first sergeants, a brave but green dragoon lieutenant, a slow-thinking infantry captain, and a barracks-bred, overcautious artillery colonel were all that remained of leadership to the nerve-broken men huddled in the crawling dark of Stedloe’s butte.
Bell hunched his shoulders, the shiver of raw fatigue shaking him with its sudden chill. Damn. It was a hot night, but a man’s fingers and feet felt like they’d been half frozen. Funny about that cold. Damned funny. He’d seen his share of men shake to it before now. Plenty of them. But damned if he’d ever expected to live to see Emmett Bell frostbitten by it.
That was fear cold, mister. And it would freeze a man to death quicker than a snowdrift.
Bell came up off his haunches, his eyes swinging through the gloom to the half sound that had startled him. “Who’s there?
That you, Cal? Answer fast, girl!”
“It’s me, Emm. Oh, Emm! Emm!” She was up to him then, her tears coming with her breaking voice, hard against his sweated shirt.
“All right, Cal baby. It’s all right. Don’t cry, honey. Don’t let down now, baby girl.” His voice, thick and deep with the huskiness of his own emotions, stroked the sobbing girl like a great, awkward hand. “It’s over for tonight, honey. All over now.
You’re going to stay right here with me….”
“Emm, just hold onto me. Hard. I can’t stay with it, Emm. I just can’t.”
He took her in his arms, gingerly and overly careful, as he might with a month-old child, carrying her as easily as a feather pillow.
“Here’s my pack, Cal. And blankets.” With the words he placed her gently down, his old grin coming through the darkness. “Not much of a boudoir for the prettiest girl in Lynchburg, but there’s plenty of fresh air and it’s awful quiet.”
She didn’t answer and he sank down beside her, easing his aching neck against the support of the pack, letting his long body go limp with the first relaxation in forty-eight hours. As he did, he felt the slim nakedness of the reaching arm slide over him, the soft, sighing nestle of the dark head as it sought and found the hollow of his shoulder.
“Let’s don’t talk, Emm”—the whisper came to his ear just ahead of the searching lips—“we’ve said it all before. That very first night on the plain, at the Point. A million years ago….”
“We’ve said it, Cal”—his face was turning with the promise—“all of it. Let’s both remember it now, from here out.”
“From here out, Emm boy. From here….”
The soft, full lips came into the wide, hard ones, shutting off the sigh and its vow. His heavy arms tightened slowly and relentlessly across the yielding curve of her back. Not eagerly and passionately like a man who has seized tonight and means to have it now, but reverently and protectively and finally. Like a man who has grasped tomorrow, and means never to let it go.
Bell had not meant to sleep but his next memory was of Harrigan’s broad paw on his arm.
“Psst, Sarge.” The Irishman’s whisper was held down so as not to awaken the sleeping girl. “Where the hell have yez bin? I’ve crawled twicet around this blasted mountain feelin’ for yez.”
“What’s up, Mick?” Bell demanded. “I must’ve dozed. What the hell time is it?”
“Eight o’clock,” came the grim reply, “but all ain’t well, Emmett bye.”
“How’s that?”
“Hell to pay, lad. And the divil holdin’ all the due bills.” By this time Bell was moving away with his fellow non-com. “First off, right after yer Injun come to git the gal for yez, we caught the other red scut hollerin’ down to them slimy Palouses.”
“You mean Jason? What the hell was he hollering about?”
“I don’t mean Kimiak, bye. We didn’t think nothin’ of this red bird’s yellin’ until yer Injun comes up and hears him. He was jabberin’ in that heathin Chinook and we wasn’t payin’ him no mind.”
“For God’s sake, Mick, get on with it.”
“Take it easy, Sarge.” Harrigan was pushing Bell’s fierce grip from his arm. “Ye’re gettin’ jumpier’n a pet ‘coon. I’m tellin’ yez, jest listen. Yer Injun grabs this Jason the minute he hears him, hands him a cut acrost the kisser with his backhand, and tells us the buzzard has been eggin’ the enemy on. Hollerin’…—Courage, brothers! Ye’ve already killed two chiefs and seven pony soldiers!—…and stuff like that.”
“The hell!”
“Percisely.” Harrigan’s thick voice rose in pitch. “And when yer Injun braced him, he jest shrugs and says what the hell?
The white men up here are all dead come tomorrow, anyway, and he’s jest tryin’ to build up a little social good will with Kimiak’s lads so’s maybe they’ll remember he’s a fellow countryman come tommyhawk time tomorrow.”
Bell shrugged. “Oh, hell, that doesn’t mean anything.
Sounds pure Indian to me. Typical of them, Mick. What’d you do? Tie him up?”
“Yeah, and stuffed his yap. Timothy’s idee.”
“Well, then, that’s that. What the hell did you come to roust me out for?”
“Well, no, that ain’t quite it, Sarge. Just half of it. When we git this bird trussed up and stuffed, lo and behold, the other one’s clean flown,”
“Good Lord! Not Timothy!”
“Gone as a goslin’ down a fox’s gullet.”
“By God, I don’t believe it!”
“Believe it or else, lad. It’s why Lootenant Craig sent me to locate yez. He’s up to Surgeon Randall’s spot, with Capt’n Winston. Wants yez over there right away. They were powwowin’ about some bug the lootenant’s got up his bottom about gettin’ offen this bloody mountain, when this Injun trouble broke.”
“Well, c’mon, Mick. Lead the way. How’s Bull and Frenchy?”
“Both spittin’ blood. Frenchy kin still move but Bull’s sittin’ ag’in’ a rock grabbin’ his belly and holdin’ his breath. Surgeon says if he lets go to scratch his head, he’s dead.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah. You’d best see him. He’s got some crazy notion yez were killed. It’d break an Orangeman’s heart to see the big ox sittin’ there grievin’ about it. Not a sound, mind yez, jest sittin’ there mutterin’…—Old Sarge, old Sarge—…and the tears run-nin’ off his jaw like water.”
“All right, Mick”—Bell’s voice tightened—“let’s get done with Craig, first. Bull’ll wait, I reckon.”
“He will for yez,” agreed Harrigan. “There’s Randall and them, jest ahead. I’ll be tellin’ Bull yez’ll be along.”
Craig wasted no time in bringing Bell up to date. He and Winston and Randall had been to see Stedloe earlier on Craig’s idea of leaving the butte. The colonel had refused, outright. As he saw it, any descent, even though initially successful, would bring an immediately following pursuit and running fight with the hostiles and in this resolution their ammunition supply—now just over two rounds per man—would be utterly squandered. To further argument he had proved adamant, insisting the command would stand on the butte where at least it could make its last shots effective, and even might, possibly, arrange some sort of surrender truce with Kamiak’s besiegers.
Returning from this refusal, the three officers had run headlong into Jason’s treachery and Timothy’s apparent disaffection. They now wanted Sergeant Bell to evaluate Timothy’s disappearance and to furnish his opinion, based on his knowledge of the red men, as to the possibility of getting off the butte and out through the Indian lines. And they intended returning to Stedloe with that evaluation and opinion for a final try at convincing the commanding officer of the soundness of Craig’s projected retreat. It was acknowledged, naturally although a bit wry-facedly, that 1st Sergeant Bell had more influence with Colonel Stedloe than any commissioned man on his staff.
Abruptly returning Craig’s frankness and confidence, the big sergeant stated that he still had faith in Timothy and believed he must have dropped down to scout the enemy lines, that the column could expect no quarter from the hostiles, and that Stedloe’s implied hope for a survival truce was impossible of fulfillment, and that Craig’s insistence on a forced night flight was the command’s final 500 to one chance.
Three minutes later he was expounding the same views to Stedloe while Craig and the other officers waited in hard-faced silence. Unexpectedly the C.O. broke down.
Fanning had just come in to report that the men had broken into the liquor commissary, had been drinking for the past hour, and were getting out of hand. In view of this, some activity seemed imperative. If Sergeant Bell would now go out with Lieutenant Fanning to commandeer the liquor supply and destroy it, Stedloe and the remaining officers would begin at once to map plans for the descent. Bell was to come back immediately to lend his scouting experience to the mapping.
With the liquor gathered up and cached, the men temporarily buoyed up with the orders to ready for departure, and a hasty visit to the dying Sergeant Williams under his drawn-up belt, Bell returned to the command council.
Under his belt, also, was something else. Something that at once attracted the refined nostrils of the teetotaling Stedloe.
“Sergeant Bell!”
“Yes, sir. Mission accomplished, sir.”
“Bell, I told you to destroy that whiskey, not surround it!”
“It’s destroyed, Colonel. Leastways hidden, sir…uh, what’s left of it.”
“Bell, you’re not drunk?” The colonel’s soft question speared the sergeant’s grin in mid-spread. “I want your word on it. I’m depending on you in this. We all are. You’ll not fail me now, man?”
“No, Colonel…both times,” said Bell, setting his long jaw on the denial before letting a shade of the grin return. “I must’ve spilled some of the nasty stuff on me, pouring it out.
I’m as ready as a ripe banana, sir. What’re the orders?”
Stedloe shook his good, grave head hopelessly. This boy was one for the books—but not the Academy books. Half inebriated all the time, all inebriated half the time, and rebelliously insubordinate, drunk or sober, he was a shame and a disgrace to his uniform. And if he only had a hundred like him right now, a column commander could walk down and spit in Kamiak’s Palouse face!
“Craig will give you the details, Sergeant. You can go along with him now. But before you leave, there’s a little something I want you to hear. And you other gentlemen, as well.”
With the words, Stedloe was turning to his staff, the three officers watching him closely as he concluded: “This is the order of the retreat. Remember it. C Company to take the advance, with Lieutenant Fanning. Ninth Infantry next, with Captain Winston. Then H Company, with Lieutenant Craig.”
Stedloe broke his orders to swing his quiet brown eyes on Bell, his three staffers following the look and the suspended statement with puzzlement. Catching Bell’s frowning glance, the colonel held it for a long three seconds. “Then E Company,”
he said at last. “With Lieutenant Bellew!”
With Bell’s tall shadow dogging his hurried movements, Lieutenant Craig made his way from one company to the next, calling each outfit together and repeating the general orders.
The column was moving out. No equipment was to be taken save musket or carbine, and ammunition. All metal harness was to be wrapped with torn cloth and all loose, metal-buckled tack—canteens, scabbards, trenching shovels, axes, anything that might possibly make a noise in traveling—was to be left behind, right down to spurs and spur chains. Every trooper was to ride with his right hand on his mount’s nose. The horses bearing the wounded were to be muzzle-wrapped.
Thus briefed, the squad corporals began at once to check their men and mounts and to fall them into rough company order. Craig and Bell, with a picked squad of regulars chosen by the latter, went on about the grim business of the main issue—faking the camp to look normal after their departure. This project was one upon which the dour sergeant had insisted as the minimum guarantee of a successful getaway, and Craig gave him no question on it. As a matter of fact, neither the young officer nor any of the rest of the staff had called the obvious question on Stedloe’s peculiar reference to Bell as Lieutenant Bellew, all accepting the sergeant’s new rank along with his running fire of suggested orders without a murmur.
Thirty-three of the command’s horses had been killed and it was now necessary to Bell’s strategy to eliminate another dozen. These were all the gray and other light-colored animals that were quickly cut out and picketed around the perimeter of the mesa—where prying Palouse eyes might note them even in the present darkness.
While Craig and the sergeant went about their labors, other work squads were busy with equally grim chores: the knocking down and caching of the howitzers, the collecting and burying, in a shallow common trench, of the trooper dead, the tight lashing of the severely wounded on the few remaining pack mules, and the hurried movement of strings of led horses over the burial sites of the colonel’s beloved artillery and of his honored dead.
When a similar treatment was proposed for the considerable pile of packs and supplies being abandoned, Bell objected at once. The idea was to stack these as neatly and obviously as possible to charm the well-known red cupidity. The Indians’ fighting over the division of these spoils might easily mean an hour of vital pursuit delay.
Shortly before 9:00, Craig and Bell returned to Stedloe to report the column in readiness. Winston and Fanning, already there, nodded their silent agreement. Surgeon Randall announced the wounded ready to move, with the exception of 1st Sergeant Williams.
Questioned at once on this exception—Stedloe’s orders had been explicit: no wounded left behind—the surgeon explained the non-com was all but cut in two with four hopeless abdominal wounds and that to move him a foot would be to kill him.
“I can’t bring myself to give that order, Edson. You’ll have to do it, if it’s done. The man can’t possibly live an hour, and he wants to stay. I’m sorry.”
“Gentlemen?” The C.O. turned the soft question on the others.
“Let the poor devil alone,” said Craig slowly. “Randall knows best. A dead man can’t help us down that mountain.”
“I talked to him just now,” Bell’s deep voice added. “He wants to help by staying here. I’d let him, Colonel. He’s cold clear up to his kidneys.”
“How about Demoix?” Stedloe turned again to the surgeon.
“Demoix might make it. I’ve got him ready, in any event.”
“All right.” There was no hesitation now in the commander’s agreement. “Let’s get on with it. So you still want to scout that western slope before we start, Bell?”
“We’ve got to. That west slope looks too good to me. The easiest way down and the only damn’ one they haven’t got watch fires burning behind. I think it’s a trap. Kamiak was born a lot of yesterdays ago, Colonel.”
“All right, Bell, get to it. The rest of you look to your men and ease the wounded as well as you can.”
Bell left at once, declining any company. He was gone ten minutes. Then fifteen. And finally, twenty.
The only sounds from below were those of the night winds in the serviceberry bushes, the occasional sleepy twitter of a bullbat, and the distant mutter of the drums from the river camp of the Palouses, pitched along the Tohotonimme at the south base of the butte.
On the mesa top 140-odd hopeless whites cocked their straining ears and waited. Waited for the first triumphant war whoop that would announce their scout had found his trap.
Found it, and stepped squarely on its trigger-light, Indian-set bait pan. Stepped on it and snapped its ringing jaws hard shut on their last, thin chance of escape. Twenty minutes stretched endlessly to thirty. And then to forty-five.
To the nerve-torn watchers on the hill, Bell’s soundless reappearance, minutes before 10:00, came as a distinct jolt. A jolt occasioned by a most unnatural phenomenon. Tall white men very seldom throw thin red shadows on moon-dark nights. But Bell was throwing one now. A reed-slender, wordless shadow that stepped quickly past him to touch its sober forehead toward the dumbfounded Stedloe and his staff.
“Timothy! God bless my soul!” gasped the colonel, his simple candor riding ahead of the dark suspicion due to follow the first surprise.
“Never mind your soul, Colonel.” Bell’s cynical reminder spiked the little pause. “You’d better bless this Indian’s!”
“And you never mind your insubordinate tongue!” snapped Lieutenant Craig, his temper breaking under the sergeant’s acid coolness. “Where the hell did you get this Indian, and why in God’s name did you let him follow you back here?”
“And you, Lieutenant Craig”—Bell’s hard advice broke in a perfect imitation of the young officer’s outburst—“never mind your little silver bar. I’m talking to Colonel Stedloe.”
“Go ahead, Bell. Answer Craig’s question.” The C.O.’s voice showed a touch of West Point spine. “After all, Timothy’s been gone for two hours and the Lord alone knows what doing.”
“Me, and the Lord,” amended the big sergeant softly. “As for Craig’s questions, Tamason speaks better English than I do, Colonel. I’ll let him talk.”
And the Nez Percé chief talked. Low. Deep. Simply. The throaty gutturals of his mission-school English falling, swift and short, their soft delivery slowly lifting the nape-hairs of Stedloe’s dry-mouthed staff.
At the bottom of that long west slope down which the colonel intended taking his troops, Timothy had encountered Sergeant Bell, advising him to go no farther providing he still held his short red scalp in some esteem. Beyond the base of that slope the Palouses had driven their horse herd, hiding at least 800 of the nervous, uncertain little mounts among the scrub pine bordering the Tohotonimme at that point. And beyond the horse herd, waiting to respond to its first alarm of inquiring neighs, Kamiak and Malkapsi lay with a big force of picked warriors. Any of the white officers, the Nez Percé stressed quietly, could thus see what their advance down that slope would have brought them into.
Now. Beyond that. Would the officers look carefully at the way in which the enemy had his signal fires burning. To the north, just a few. To the east, just a few. Look out for those places. They looked thin, and were swarming with warriors.
Then see that darkness to the west. No fires there, at all. And as Ametsun Bell had warned—Timothy himself had trained him, had he not?—that was the worst spot of all.
So. Where were the fires brightest? Where were the drums beating? Where was the last place the pony soldiers would think of going down? To the south naturally. Down there where the lodges lay. Down there where even Sergeant Bell would never have looked. And what was down there? Nothing.
Nothing save a dozen squaws feeding the big fires and a few old chiefs pounding the buffalo hides….
At the end of the Nez Percé’s tooth-setting disclosures Sted-loe and his staff occupied themselves with the most pressing necessity of the moment—letting their held breaths go in sibilant unison.
Before they could gulp a fresh lungful, Sergeant Bell was putting his brief valedictory to the suspected scout’s address.
“I’ll save you all the time of hashing over Tamason’s chewed-up loyalty. This Indian’s been wading in ambushed hostiles up to his crotch cloth for two hours. Nobody asked him to and he knew full well nobody’d believe he’d done it. Not even me.”
Bell paused, letting the silence grow a little before concluding.
“So he took me on two little trips…one, just across the creek, due west…one, a half mile down it, straight south.
Gentlemen, I can smell horse sweat and road apples when they’re blown at me eight hundred deep. And I can see an empty village when I’m looking at one in bright firelight. Any questions?”
At 10:00p.m., Colonel Stedloe with Fanning’s company of dragoons and Winston’s 9th Infantry moved in orderly silence over the rim of the mesa. There was a muffled shifting of loose rock as their mounts struck the steep slide where Bell’s carbines had broken the back of Kamiak’s last charge, and then pin-drop stillness. The first companies were successfully away.
Lieutenant Craig, collecting the last of his outposts and enjoining Bell to follow him in unbroken order, went next. When the settling of the rock trickle below told the sergeant H Company was safely past the slide, he turned abruptly to the lean trooper at his side.
“Get going, Clay. Take the lead and hang your horse’s nose onto H Company’s cruppers. Jump it, now.”
“Hold on, Sarge”—the bearded soldier pulled his mount back—“I thought you was supposed to lead this here quadrille.”
“I said get going, Corporal.” Bell’s command leaped through the gloom with ugly shortness. “I’m aiming to be the last man off this hill. Now, move.”
Corporal Sam Clay was a Carolina man and a six-year regular. And four of those six years had been spent as a buck private under the untender tuition of 1st Sergeant Emmett D. Bell. He went. And after him went the sixteen survivors of Gaxton’s company, E Dragoons, Bell counting them carefully over the rim and giving each mount a slap on the haunch and each anxious rider a soft reminder: “Watch the man in front of you, soldier. Don’t let your horse hang back, and keep your hand on his nose when you go by that village down there.”
With the last man and mount over the edge, Bell waited a tense two minutes until the final, faint movement of the granite below told him Corporal Clay had gotten E Company past the slide. Then he turned noiselessly away from the rim. As he went, a less moon-dark night would have limned the slight, frosty grin that turned with him.
Below the slide, Corporal Clay picked up the gait of his troop, soon overhauling the ghostly rumps of Craig’s H Company. Another five minutes of slow-walking progress along the sharp-falling face of the south slope and the column was unaccountably halted, word at once relaying back from the head of the line that Colonel Stedloe wanted Sergeant Bell up front. The hostile village lay just ahead and the C.O. wanted the sergeant alongside the guiding Timothy when the passage was made.
The message, passed back along the muffled line of E Company, was shortly returned with an ugly postscript. Sergeant Bell was not among those present and accounted for.
This intelligence had no more than been passed back up to Stedloe than a shifting night breeze brought the answer to the question already framing the column commander’s grim lips.
From the north, that breeze came. From the north and across the abandoned mesa top. Dropping softly down the darkened south slope. And bearing on its mountain-scented breath a sound known to every last member of the Colville column, and to not a few of the reservation hangers-on among Kamiak’s swart-skinned followers: the soulful and ardent, if not artistic, harmonica playing of 1st Sergeant Bell.
“Faith and be Jazus!” The muttered expletive broke from Sergeant Harrigan, who had ridden forward with Captain Winston to check the reason for the delay. “The crazy, blessed idjut has stayed up there with old Bull. And listen to thet bloody tyune he’s playin’, will yez, Colonel? Thet’ll be Sarge’s idea of somethin’ funny.”
“ ‘Lock of Ages.’ ” Stedloe murmured the words like a man talking in his sleep and not hearing his own voice.
“The drunken devil.” The clipped phrase fell in Captain Winston’s flat monotone and was followed with the softly qualifying afterthought: “But God, what a bellyful of guts.”
“Not drunk, Harry. Not this time.” The thought came, surprisingly enough, in Stedloe’s patient voice. “I know the man.
He’s playing to cover our withdrawal. And to make up for his own memories. There’s a story, there. I’ll tell it to you if we get out of this.”
“Emm, oh, my God, it’s Emm.”
The muffled delay of the cry burst from the stunned Calla.
Riding with Fanning and Stedloe, she had been the first to leave the butte, had not seen Bell since he left her sleeping at eight o’clock, had only now realized the tense discussion concerned him.
“Don’t worry, Miss Rainsford”—the gallant lie came from young Fanning—“he’ll make out. He’s got more lives than a three-toed cat.”
“He’ll need them,” grunted the unimaginative Winston.
“We can’t wait for him.”
“I’m going back.” The suppressed cry sprang from Calla. “It’s just a little way. Colonel, I’m going….”
“No, miss.” It was Timothy’s iron hand that found the distraught girl’s bridle with the low-voiced denial. “Ametsun Bell planned it this way. I was to tell you when we were past the village. He knew we had no chance unless the Palouses were made to think all was well on the hilltop. Many of those Indians waiting back there know Ametsun Bell. They know his music on that mouth reed. They will hear it and nod. And go on waiting.”
“Oh, Emm….”
“Timothy’s right, ma’am.” Stedloe’s hand found her arm with the gentle insistence. “We’ll go along now.”
“And quickly,” added the Nez Percé, before the girl could answer. “While Kamiak and Malkapsi are still grinning about that music up there.”
“Column resume,” said Stedloe to the waiting officers. “On the double once we’re past the village. Single file and slow walk until we are. Right, Timothy?”
“Aye,” said the Nez Percé, turning his roan pony. “Kela’i, Ametsun.” The low farewell, with the quick touch of the red hand to the forehead, went to the now brooding silence of Stedloe’s butte. “We shall meet again along that other trail.”
Bell laid aside the mouth harp, reached in the dark for the hallowed canteen. “How do you feel, Bull? Easier, now?”
“I couldn’t pin a grizzly, Sarge”—the huge man’s words brought a groan of pain, deep and soft, like a wounded animal’s’“but I allow that theah last drink helped summat.”
“Want another?”
“Yeah, maybe. Hold mah cussed head for me. I cain’t seem to get it offen this rock no more.”
Bell passed his thick arm behind the massive head, held the canteen steadily.
“That’s enough, you dumb ox! You’ll have it pouring out that hole in your belly. This isn’t issue rotgut, you know.”
“Mah Gawd, I know that. That’s sourmash whiskey, Sarge.”
The brutish non-com’s voice seemed to gain from the fiery draft. “Wheah’d we get it?”
“Surgeon Randall’s best. That’s officer whiskey, boy. Can’t you feel it in your dumb belly?”
“Sarge….” There was fear in the heavy voice now. The unreasoning, nameless fear of a four-year-old, alone and lost in the dark. Childish. Pathetic. Turning Bell’s stomach with its perfect faith. “I cain’t feel nothin’ in mah belly. I’m cold up to mah elbows. Lemme feel your hand again, Sarge. Jest this oncet more….”
Silently Bell felt forward, bringing his hand to rest in the huge sergeant’s. Feeling the clammy weakness of the great, groping fingers, he shuddered.
“You cold, too, Sarge?”
“Naw, just nerves, Bull.”
“Not you, Sarge. You jest ain’t had yer quart today.”
“Nor yesterday,” said Bell aimlessly. “I’m about caught up, though, I reckon.”
“How many left, Sarge?”
“A couple.”
“I’ll split you.”
“You’re split, Bull….”
Bell held his head again, tipping the canteen. Feeling the liquor splash his steadying hand, he pulled the container away from the slack mouth, eased the burly head back on the boulder.
“You never could hold your whiskey, you big dummy. That’s all for you.”
Draining the canteen with steady gulps, he shied the empty container toward the nearest of the picketed horses. At its muffled bounce, the animals headed up and nickered.
“And that’s for Kenuokin,” he grunted. “Just to remind the red buzzard he’s got a bunch of ragged-bottom dragoons cornered up here.”
“Sarge…?”
“Yeah, Bull?”
“How long the boys bin gone?”
“Couple hours. You been dozing off and on.”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you sleepy again?”
“Naw, jest cold….”
Bell slid his hand out of the Kentuckian’s rigid fingers, moved it up to the huge shoulder, recoiled quickly at the marble coldness. “I’ll get you another blanket, boy.”
“Naw, listen, Sarge. You got to go. You was only goin’ to stay a few minutes.”
Bell nodded, without replying. He’d said that, all right. Hours ago. When he’d thought the big ox couldn’t last ten minutes.
Now it was crowding midnight, the column clean away and long gone. And still the tremendous brute hung on.
“Yeah, Bull. I’ll be going pretty sudden….”
Bull was dead. Maybe another five minutes. Maybe another five hours. But dead, anyway. Just as dead as though God had already reached down and gathered him up. Time was wasting for both Bell and Bull Williams.
“Sarge…?”
“Yeah.”
“What you doin’? Thet’s yer Remin’ton, ain’t it? Why you wrappin’ it?
Bell looked down at the heavy, rolling-block Dragoon pistol.
Folded the torn blanketing over it again.
“It’s my Remington, Bull. I’m fixing you a gun to leave with you, boy.”
“The old last shot, huh, Sarge?”
“The old last shot, Bull.”
“I ain’t goin’ to need it.”
“I reckon not.”
“Sarge, play us a tune ’fore you go.”
“Sure, Bull, what’ll it be?” The left hand was feeling in the linted I jacket pocket. The right, easing the wrapped pistol into the cross-legged lap.
“You know….”
“Yeah, boy. I know.”
“And slow, Sarge”—there was that old touch of child-bright eagerness in the sudden plea, wrenching Bell’s chest, hardening his wide mouth—“so’s I can do the words.”
“Sure, Bull.” The left hand was placing the harmonica to the dry lips, the right, dropping to the motionless lap. “Second chorus, boy.”
“Yeah, second chorus.”
The reedy thinness of the opening bars echoed with eerie lonesomeness across the deserted dust of the mesa top, startling the drooping horses. On the second, mournful chorus the big Kentuckian began to sing.
On top of Old Smoky, all covered with snow
I lost my true lover from a-courtin’ too slow
Now come all young ladies and listen to me
Don’t hang your affections on a green willow tree
For the leaves they will wither
And the roots they will die And leave you….
The blanket-muffled shot reverberated dully, its flat tones not even disturbing the horses. Pulling the smoking weapon from its folded cover, Bell placed it gently near the slack hand alongside the granite boulder.
Like you said, Bull—he nodded silently—you won’t be needing it.
With the raw powder burns of the shrouded shot still blister ing his pistol hand, Bell set himself one last duty before leaving the mesa.
In this direction he was guided by his knowledge of Indian pychology and not, as some later detractors were to claim, by his sardonic sense of humor, or by his well-known agnosticism.
His self-imposed labor cost him twenty priceless minutes, and Sergeant Bell wasn’t the one to squander time like that for a laugh, or to prove his doubts of a living deity.
With an abandoned shovel, two canteen straps, and an unearthed pair of the oaken howitzer shafts, he worked in driving silence, pausing frequently to cock a straining ear to the stillness of the slopes below. There was a limit to the illusion a dozen cast-off dragoon horses and a harmonica-playing first sergeant could create. Sooner or later Kamiak and company were going to start wondering about the astonishingly good behavior of 140 frightened men and a like number of nervous horses on that mesa top!
When he had done, stepping back to drop the shovel and survey his handiwork, he had a reasonable facsimile of what he wanted—a crude mission cross planted squarely in the middle of Stedloe’s deserted butte.
Grunting his satisfaction, Bell turned away. If he knew the child-simple Indian mind, that cross would do its work. The fear reserved for the symbol of the crucifixion by the Northwestern savages was complete. There would be no scalping among the stark bodies of the colonel’s abandoned dead.
At the western mesa rim, the sergeant pulled up his gelding, stood forward in the stirrups, ears tuned to the night sounds along the slope. A moment later he was sliding off the bay and flopping, belly down, in the welcome cover of the rank rim grasses.
There were no night sounds coming from that slope. At any rate, not the right ones. His stomach drawing in like drying rawhide, Bell peered through the parted grasses, gray eyes scanning the unnatural quiet of the western decline.
Then of a sudden, pupils expanding under the severity of the lower darknesses, he was seeing it. Seeing it and understanding the stillness of the night hawks and of the serviceberry birds. Seeing it lapping slowly up the west slope and, as he turned quickly, along the south as well. There was no mistaking the ragged, extended lines of that creeping shadow.
The red night crawlers were out and moving. Kamiak was coming up!
Rolling back from the rim, Bell bent double and raced for his pack. There it was but the work of a moment to shuck out of his heavy dragoon boots and bulky service shirt. Another moment and his fingers were easing the trim tightness of the Nez Percé moccasins around the outsize bareness of his feet. After that it took only seconds to belt on the skinning knife, sling the short Sharps carbine over his shoulder, slip across the mesa top, and over the precipitous drop of the north wall.
Ten minutes of leaping, brush-torn descent and he was standing 800 feet below the mesa rim on the deserted north side of the butte. And seconds after that he was hearing the war whoops and belly screams that announced the Palouse assault over the west and south rims.
With the disappointed howls and barking signal cries from above telling him Kamiak’s faithful had discovered their empty trap, he reslung his carbine and set off around the north slope—heading west. He traveled now at a long-swinging dogtrot, finding the open grasslands of the lower inclines fairly level and free of gully washes.
Shortly he sighted the dark line of scrub pine marking the course of the Tohotonimme ahead. Slowing his pace, he speeded up his mind, the wild gamble forming in it beginning to fall into hurried place as his figure entered the screening gloom of the trees.
Just ahead, its position marked by the drowsy tinkling of the bell mare’s musical neck piece, lay the main hostile horse herd. 800 or 900 half-wild, white-hating Indian cayuses. There were your odds, brother, and they were long enough to satisfy even 1st Sergeant Bell. Still, maybe not too long. If a man could get to that bell mare—but, cripes, that was a little daisy that would take some careful picking! And a big piece of luck.
He ran into his needed chunk of fortune almost as its necessity was forming in his mind. And it was a bigger chunk than he could have asked for. As he melted into the fringe of the pines, a low voice hailed him in Chinook. Turning, he was in time to see the silhouetted cartwheel of a Coeur D’Alene war bonnet following him.
“Hold up, brother!” the guttural order foreran the chief’s gliding approach. “Name your name and follow along with me.
The white dogs have gotten away and Kamiak has sent me to gather up those down here!”
“Omatchen!” hissed Bell, picking a known Coeur D’Alene’s name out of the thin night air. “Who calls me?”
“Malkapsi, you fool. Didn’t I just leave you up on top there?
Why have you come down?” With the questions the Coeur D’Alene was up to Bell, his ugly, axe-blade jaw poking forward through the dark.
“To run the horse herd off, naturally, you fool!”
Bell threw the growling retort into the renegade’s hand-filed teeth a shaving of a second ahead of the clubbed, steel butt of the carbine. Malkapsi’s tiny eyes had time to jump wide open, and that was all. The next instant the gunstock was splintering his gaping jaw and the spreading eyes were glazing closed.
Bell caught the swaying figure, easing it to the ground. A hasty ear pressed to the hostile’s deerskin shirt picked up no discernible heartbeat. Ametsun Bell figured he had kept his promise to Malkapsi.
The sergeant now had what he needed to approach the Indian horse herd safely’deerskin and eagle feathers reeking of the familiar and friendly Coeur D’Alene body odor. Seconds after downing Malkapsi he had donned the chief’s shirt and bonnet, was rapidly circling the close-packed herd, south toward the tinkling of the bell mare’s luring ornament.
The shirt and bonnet were a plenty tight squeeze for the towering Bell but with them and Kamiak’s bell mare that horse herd could be scattered till hell wouldn’t have it. Not hell, or the pursuing Palouses, either. Those bell-broke hostile ponies would follow that lead mare wherever Bell might boot her.
And where Bell was going to boot her was far away and long departed from Kamiak’s Tohotonimme war camp!
With the fog-sopping dawn of the 18th, Stedloe halted his fleeing column safely across its fateful, former fording of the Palouse. There had been no sign of pursuit to that gray hour. However, there was as yet only a scant handful of miles between the fatigue-drunk troopers and their heaving, hollow-flanked horses, and the wind-swept emptiness of Stedloe’s deserted butte. No time could be taken to graze the wind-broken mounts, and very little to water them. Nonetheless, their first drink in twenty-four hours had a heartening effect on both man and mount.
While the last of the lathered horses were still standing hock deep in the shallows of the stream, Timothy rode in to report a high dust cloud rolling down the Lapwai Trail from the Ingosommen. He didn’t like to arouse false hopes in his fellow soldiers, said the Nez Percé, but he would think from the size of that cloud that no more than 200 or 300 could be riding under it! At the same time he could not be sure. It was a damp morning and many ponies might make only the dust of a few. It was no time to be squatting on the exposed banks of the Palouse, waiting to find out.
As if to put the lie to the Nez Percé’s cautiously hopeful re port, and the truth to his stern warning to move on, a veritable rash of smoke signals began to top the bare hills to the north and east. This hostile hint was more than enough for the haggard survivors of the Colville column. It was still sixty-eight miles to the Snake.
To the hoarse calls of the officers and the dispirited echoes of their non-coms, the straggling column was reformed, and for the next four hours the failing mounts were forced to a laboring gallop straightaway down the brush-girt track of the Lap-wai Trail. With the advance of midday, the climbing sun drove into the backs of the fleeing men with the deadening power of a giant sledge, sapping their little remaining strength and pulling the Palouse water out of the dehydrating troopers as from so many saddle-jolted sponges.
By 1:00p.m. and the branching of the Lapwai toward the distant Snake, men and horses had reached their limit. In the spotty shelter of a jack-pine-fringed creek, crossing in from the east, Stedloe called the halt.
And it was in this haven of sweltering shade and brackish branch water that the disorganized column got its first uplift in forty-eight hours of hell. Shortly after the halt Timothy spurred his pony down from a neighboring ridge to announce a lone Coeur D’Alene chief galloping the Lapwai a mile to the north. The distance was too long for positive identification but the solitary rider was astride a white pony and there was something familiar to the Nez Percé in his swinging, upright seat.
Timothy couldn’t say who the hard-riding stranger was, but he could say he had seen him before.
Lieutenant Craig at once took a squad of skirmishers out to cut off the newcomer’s approach. This party was scarcely gone from sight over the first ridge than it reappeared, the tall Coeur D’Alene riding in its jubilant midst. As the returning riders broke into view, the watching Timothy’s stolid face split wide in an expression never before noted thereon by any of Stedloe’s command—a flashing, lightning-brief, purely dazzling smile!
“Ametsun! Ho-hoho! It’s Ametsun Bell!”
And Bell indeed it was. Cartwheel war bonnet, Coeur D’Alene deerskins, Palouse bell mare, and all!
No Cæsar returned triumphantly from Gaul ever received a comparable salute. Private, squad corporal, company officer, and column commander, all joined in the rousing cheer that greeted the dour non-com’s return from the dead. Alone among the company failing to aid the vocal reception, Calla sat her artillery mule in silence, letting the tears cascading her dirty cheeks splash their own grateful word of welcome. Looking over the heads of Harrigan and the rest of the intervening backslappers, Bell waved his understanding to the girl, sending the bright rareness of his quick smile to receipt the unspoken message in her tear-stained grimace. A man could understand, at a moment like this, that it’s pretty hard to talk through a soft mouth full of salt water!
But Bell had brought other news than good. And longing as his arms might to be around that slim waist, they’d have to ache a spell yet. Keeping to the ravines paralleling the main trail, he had been able to avoid the hostiles while at the same time scouting their pursuit. About an hour ago the Indian force had swung west to angle toward the Snake. Their present course would bring them back into the Lapwai eight miles short of Red Wolf Crossing. And right into the rocks of the Smokle Creek headlands. As pretty a spot for an ambush as any tired scout would care to think about.
There were some 350 warriors in the pursuit party, all Palouses and personally led by Kamiak. It was Bell’s guess the chief’s Spokane, Coeur D’Alene, Yakima, and other allies had suffered a temporary loss of their appetite for white meat following Stedloe’s astonishing escape from the mesa trap, and the division of the spoils abandoned in that escape. Also contributing, no doubt, was the thoughtful delay occasioned by Bell’s running off of their horse herd.
Under the terms of the sergeant’s blunt report no option re mained save to race the hostiles for the Smokle Creek headlands. If the troops could beat the Palouses to that dangerous point, the day would be long spent and the precious safety of the Snake River but an hour’s short ride away. It was a long, long chance, and the battered column took it at a floundering gallop.
With four o’clock and the hulking landmarks of the Tah-To Uah Hills behind them, the troops were slowed to a stumbling, rank-breaking trot. But the headlands of the Smokle were in sight. Another eight miles and they would know. Hope, that cat-lived spur that was as much a part of the dragoon’s equipment as his clumsy boots, began once more to straighten the seats of the sagging soldiers.
And then, rolling ominously up from the unexpected direction of the low hills to the south, came a moving dust cloud that could denote no less than 100 fast-traveling riders.
Timothy and Bell, pushing their mounts to the nearest hilltop, were back in ten minutes with the stark news.
Whoever those riders were, they were Indians. And their line of gallop was going to cut them into the Lapwai a good way short of the Smokle headlands.
Again there was no course but to push on. To retreat was unthinkable. To leave the marked trail, northward or southward, was out of the question. It was now quite clear the wily Kamiak had split his forces, sending half of them to the south, holding half of them to the north, aiming, obviously, to bring the two jaws of his running trap hard together somewhere short of the Smokle rocks. And aiming to have the last of the desperate pony soldiers between those jaws when they closed.
White-faced and raw-shot with fatigue, Colonel Stedloe put his hoarse orders to his hollow-eyed officers. The column fell raggedly in and stumbled forward.
Ten minutes and two miles later they pulled their foam-caked mounts to a halt and prepared to deploy for the firing of their remaining two rounds per man. The upcoming Indian attackers had shifted their course to bear straight for the stalled column. The Colville force had come a long way from Stedloe’s dreary butte, and had almost come all the way. But this would be as far as they were going. This would be the end of it.
The next instant, with the flat-galloping Indian ponies nearing 400 yards and extreme range, Timothy gave a great shout and dashed his rat-tailed roan straight for the onrushing horde of painted braves. And the next second Bell was standing in his stirrups and yelling like a schoolboy at his first stake race.
The swinging gestures of his wildly pointing arm, along with the bass bellowing of his cracked voice, were aimed at a memorably squat and ugly figure quirting a lunging Nez Percé cayuse out of the foremost line of warriors and down upon Timothy.
“Lord A’mighty, Colonel, that’s Lucas!” Bell’s triumphant shout went to Stedloe. “God bless the ugly idiot, he’s done it!
Those are our Nez Percés!”
“Good Lord, there must be two hundred of them!” Craig’s boyishly exultant voice joined Bell’s. “Would you look at them, sir? I never thought I’d be so god-damn’ glad to see Indians again in my life!”
“Thank God,” muttered the colonel, his voice dead flat, the reins falling loosely from his slack hands with the words.
“Thank God…and our Nez Percés.”
With the appearance of Timothy’s tribesmen the issue of the passage of the Smokle headlands was as dead as last year’s dog salmon. Kamiak, no more than any other Indian Napoléon, before or since, would ever risk openly engaging a forewarned enemy of nearly equal numbers. What matter, now, that he had won the race for the Smokle rocks? What matter that his followers had spent the past hour arguing the manner in which the wonderful Sharps carbines of the pony soldiers were to be divided? In truth, no matter now.
Sitting his Appaloosa stallion among the granite boulders from which he had expected to lead his warriors down upon the last of the white troopers, the big hostile shrugged, hunching his scarlet blanket higher against the chill of the rising wind, the resilient shift of his thoughts demonstrating that Indian elasticity of adjustment that Bell had so often marked and admired among them.
Yonder came his long-chased prey, to be sure. Worn down.
Beaten. Ready for the kill. But, alas. With them also came the cursed Nez Percés. Those fools. Those damned fools. Riding up like heroes at the last minute. Robbing the Palouses of their victory. Spoiling the carefully spread hostile tales of a planned Nez Percé treachery to the soldiers. And the real pity, the real Big Pity, was that he, Kamiak, war chief of the Yakima Federation, had been within minutes of achieving the greatest Indian victory of them all over white soldiers! But now? Iki! E’sa? Was it bitter as gall? Should a chief feel that way now?
No. There was more to it than that. He had inflicted on the soldiers their most humiliating defeat. The name Kamiak would put the cold sweat down their pale backs for a long time to come. Kape’t. It was enough. Wuska. Let that be the end of it. It was time to go home.
Turning to his waiting subchiefs, Kamiak gave the word and the sign. There were no dissents, the subchiefs in turn grunting the low order back into the packed ranks of charcoal and ochre-blazoned faces. Kape’t. Wuska. It was time to go home.
Kamiak had said it.
When, with the lowering gray of the eight-o’clock northern dusk, the tattered Colville survivors filed past the Smokle rocks to enter the broad, granite track that marked the final fall of the Lapwai Trail toward the Snake, the Palouses were gone.
The Palouses were gone and in their place three solitary Nez Percé warriors sat their hunching cayuses on the skyline of the Smokle ridge, their slant eyes studying the march of the blue-and-gray-clad troops below. Timothy, and Jason, and Lucas.
Hesitating now that their work was done. Wondering which way to point their ponies. Watching in stony-faced silence the fading of the flag toward the west and Red Wolf Crossing.
In the minds of two of the watchers there was nothing but what their cherty eyes were seeing: the rag-tag, broken passage of the ill-fated Colville column. But in the mind of the third were many things not seen with the eye alone. Timothy was seeing the empty places in that column. Captain Baylor dying with the dusk on Stedloe’s butte. Lieutenant Gaxton dead in the hot sun of the Tohotonimme gorge. Sergeant Williams holding his belly and bleeding to death while Ametsun Bell played his reed pipe in the lonely blackness. And Sergeant Demoix left with his mortal wounds and a loaded pistol somewhere along the morning darkness of the Lapwai Trail.
He was seeing, and hearing again, the brave but empty words of Colonel Stedloe in congratulating his troops on their survival, and in predicting (only Timothy knew how foolishly!)
that their stand against Kamiak’s rebellion would pave the way for the warless dissolution of the hostiles’ Yakima federation.
He was hearing, too, those final words of the good, quiet Ametsun Bell. Telling him, Timothy, that his alone was the honor and reward for the saving of Stedloe’s men. But telling him, too, that he must not expect this honor ever to come to him. It was not in the ways of the white soldiers to say that an Indian had led them out of the Palouse wilderness!
Timothy had nodded, then, knowing the gray-eyed chevron soldier spoke the truth. And he had nodded again when Ametsun had told him he was going to his home to the East, beyond the Shining Mountains. Going there with the girl, to make his peace with the Army that he had served so well. And going with Colonel Stedloe’s promise of complete official backing, and the patient-eyed commander’s hopeful prediction of full military pardon in the end.
But rehearing and seeing all these fleeting things, the Nez Percé was seeing something else above them all. Something whose image had never left his narrow eyes. Something whose identity was even now being put to him in the guttural acrimony of Jason’s dry words.
“Well, Tamason, there goes your pretty flag. Do we sit here all night chilling our buttocks with this Bitter Root breeze, or do we go after it?” The sun-blackened leather of the chief’s face held its chronic mask of blankness a long three breaths.
Then its wind-carved wrinkles were breaking to the deliberate fall of his words. There was nothing of bitterness or of contempt in his quiet speech, but only the bare honesty of reality.
“It’s a fools’ flag, my brothers. And those who follow it with them are fools. The red you see upon it is Indian blood. The blue is the empty sky they trade us for our lands. Those white stars are their promises, high as the heavens, bright as moonlight, cold and empty as the belly of a dead fish.”
“Aye, maybe so, cousin.” Jason’s lead-faced seriousness acknowledged the accuracy of his chief’s analysis, while at the same time challenging it. “But my belly, too, is cold and empty as a dead fish’s. And the food is there. Where that flag is.”
“Aye! That’s a true thing!” Lucas, the irrepressible, was adding his bright penny’s worth. “Let us go after that food. Let us follow that flag.”
Timothy was quiet then, his gaze looking not at his waiting companions, but out across the desolate thickening gloom of the Snake River highlands. After a moment he waved his slender hand turning his slat-ribbed roan with the gesture.
“All right, my brothers,” was all he said, the deep bass of the agreement as soft as the night wind stirring the young May grass. “Let us follow the flag.”