“I was afraid we wasn’t done with those devils,” Jacob Freeman said.
Hearing her husband’s comment, Ida looked up to see what had caused it. Ahead on the trail, sitting on his horse, awaiting them, was the ominous figure of Garth Leach. “I thought we were rid of him,” she said, her tone laced with worry.
Jacob called back to Jeb, who was walking beside the wagon with Cora, his horse tied to the tailgate of Jacob’s wagon. “We got company up ahead, Jeb.” Jeb followed Jacob’s pointing finger and immediately ran up even with the wagon seat when he saw Garth. “What do you suppose he’s got on his mind?” Jacob asked.
“Whatever it is, it’s bound to be somethin’ we ain’t interested in,” Jeb replied. “I wonder where the rest of that pack of rats is.” He glanced left and right, looking for signs of the other three Leaches, but there were no other riders in sight. For the last several minutes the wagons had been following the trail through a narrow ravine. The other three brothers could be behind either of the ridges that formed the ravine.
As the wagons made their way slowly toward the solitary rider in the middle of the trail, Garth raised his hand and waved it slowly back and forth. With no further sign, he continued to wait until Jacob’s mules came to a stop before him. Then he nudged his horse and guided it around to stop opposite the wagon seat.
“When you left camp ahead of us, we thought you and your brothers had decided to go on alone,” Jacob said.
Garth took note of Jeb standing on the opposite side of the wagon, then looked back at Jacob. “We decided to wait for you,” he said. The wry smile that creased his dark face did little to ease Jacob’s concern. “Afternoon, Cora,” Garth said, nodding to the frightened girl, who had dropped back by the rear of the wagon. “You ready to come back to your family?”
“What do you want, Garth Leach?” Ida demanded. “Where are your wagons?” By this time, all of the wagons behind them had caught up and were now standing motionless in a line, waiting for Jacob to start out again. She was about to scold Garth again, when she suddenly gasped, “Mercy!”
Her gasp was followed almost instantly by similar sounds of alarm from the wagons behind her. Jeb looked toward the ridge to see what had startled her. There, along the crest of the ridge, a long line of Indian ponies had suddenly appeared and now sat quietly watching the wagon train below them. The blood drained from Jacob’s face. Jeb, his rifle still in his saddle sling, dropped his hand to rest on his revolver.
Apparently amused by their sudden fright, Garth smiled. “No need to get scared,” he said. “Them’s Yellow Calf’s boys, Kiowas. They don’t mean you no harm. They just wanna say howdy, and maybe trade a few things. I told ’em to wait up there till I explained they was peaceful. We wouldn’t want somebody to take a shot at one of ’em and start a massacre.”
“They don’t look so damn peaceful to me,” Jeb interjected. “From here, it looks like they’re wearing war paint.”
Garth’s smile immediately turned to a scowl. “Ain’t nobody asked you for your two cents’ worth,” he snapped. Then just as quickly, the twisted smile returned to his face, and he turned back to Jacob. “Best tell them in the other wagons Yellow Calf is peaceful, and not to shoot off no guns.”
“I don’t know,” Jacob started, not sure what he should do.
“Well, let me put it this way,” Garth replied. “He’s peaceable enough right now, but if you insult him, he’s liable to turn mean.” His grin grew wider as he locked his eyes on Jacob’s.
Jacob glanced at Jeb for help, but Jeb could offer very little. He had already judged their odds as poor to middling, trapped at the bottom of a narrow ravine with no room to circle the wagons, even if there was time. Maybe what the black-hearted villain said was true, although he doubted it. If they told Yellow Calf to go to hell, they might be in for a fight, but at least they could make the savage pay with a few dead warriors. Of course, if the chief was peaceful, then no lives would be lost, white or red. Finally Jeb told Jacob, “I guess we ain’t got much chance one way or the other, but maybe we’d best gamble on the odds that that damn Injun ain’t as evil as Mr. Leach here.” He caught the sudden spark of anger in Garth’s eye, but the huge man made no comment. “I’ll go tell the others not to shoot if the Injuns come down to visit.”
Garth waited until Jeb returned before signaling his Kiowa friends. Standing up in his stirrups, he waved his arm back and forth. “Come on down, Yellow Calf,” he roared. Then he backed his horse a couple of paces before halting again to fix his gaze directly upon Jeb.
Almost as if performing in a giant pageant, the line of Kiowa warriors moved slowly down the ridge, their ranks unbroken, feathers on their lances fluttering in the wind as they sat easily upon their ponies. There were so many that their line extended beyond both ends of the wagon train. A few paces behind the warriors, the other three Leach brothers followed. The warriors continued to slow-walk their horses as they came right up to the wagons. Jeb noticed that many of them carried Springfield rifles cradled in their arms. He realized at that moment that he had made a serious mistake. “Jacob! Get down!” he yelled, but it was too late.
On a silent signal, the Kiowa suddenly opened fire. The whole line fired as one, riddling the line of wagons with bullet holes. Those warriors without rifles attacked with bows. Two shots from Garth’s pistol knocked Jacob over backward, dead. When Ida tried to come to his aid, he shot her as well, casually taking aim as if shooting for sport. Many of the doomed tried to dodge the deadly rifle fire by running for their lives. None escaped.
As soon as he had shouted a warning to Jacob, Jeb dropped down behind the wagon wheel, his pistol in hand. On his hands and knees, he scrambled back to find Cora. The terrified girl was clinging to the back wheel, afraid to move. “Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her by the hand and pulling her to his horse, which was tied to the tailgate. Their only chance was to try to ride out of the ravine.
“That one!” Garth shouted when he saw Jeb and Cora trying to make a run for it. “She’s mine!”
In the midst of the horrifying sounds of the slaughter—gunfire, hysterical screaming of the women and horses, and blood-chilling war whoops of the Kiowa—Jeb tried to calm his terrified horse long enough to get his rifle from the saddle sling. With the weapon halfway out of the sling, he looked up to see Joe Leach charging through the milling mass of Indian ponies, straight for Cora. An instant later, Jeb was knocked back a step by the impact of a rifle slug in his chest. Grabbing the saddle horn to keep from falling, he managed to get off one shot with his pistol. The bullet caught Joe in the shoulder, causing him to howl in pain. He jerked on the reins, veering away to avoid a second shot from Jeb.
Fit to explode with anger upon seeing Joe wounded, Garth put another bullet into Jeb’s chest. “Damn you!” he roared as Jeb released the saddle horn and slid to the ground. Cora, screaming in terror, dropped to her knees beside him. Her actions further incensed Garth. He had promised Joe that he would get her back, but seeing the girl lamenting so over Jeb infuriated him. “Get her!” he commanded as his brother, Jesse, rode up. Laughing like a child at the county fair, the simpleminded Jesse dragged Cora from the mortally wounded man. “Is he still alive?” Garth demanded.
Jesse looked at Jeb, then reached down and pulled the pistol from his hand. When Jeb made a feeble attempt to resist, Jesse grinned back up at Garth. “He’s still alive,” he said gleefully, “but not that much.”
With the general roar of gunfire now tapering off to only random shots, Garth looked down the line of wagons, satisfied that the massacre was complete and no witnesses remained to tell the tale. “It’s time for Cora and her sweetheart to pay up,” he said. Spotting a gully cutting into the side of the ravine, he said, “Drag both of ’em over to that gully.” A moment later when brother Ike joined them, Garth said, “Better go see how bad Joe’s shoulder is.” He hesitated a moment when he saw the Kiowa scalping the dead and plundering the wagons. There were more important concerns than Joe’s shoulder at that time. Nodding toward Jeb’s horse, he said, “Best grab ahold of that sorrel there before them crazy Injuns get it. I fancy that saddle.”
Taking an ax from Jacob Freeman’s wagon, Jesse busted a couple of boards from the wagon box and split them up for stakes. At Garth’s direction, he staked Jeb and Cora out on the ground. “That oughta hold ’em for a while,” Garth said. “Long enough for us to see if there’s anything in them wagons we can use.” Standing over Cora then, he said, “You be thinkin’ about what you throwed away when you thought you could run off with this piece of shit.”
In the saddle since well before daylight, Tanner figured he might have to ride a good distance to find buffalo, and he wanted to make it back to camp before dark. He was following a hunch that he would be successful in finding his prey south of the river. There had been obvious sign of buffalo in many areas that he had scouted north of the Arkansas, but no actual sighting of the massive animals. They were there, he concluded. He had just been looking in the wrong place.
The sun was already high overhead when he first saw the herd. Cresting a long ridge, he jerked Ashes to an abrupt halt, stunned by the scene below him in the shallow valley. All the tales he had heard about the sheer spectacle of a herd on the move failed to prepare him for the astonishing sight that met his eyes. The entire floor of the valley was filled with a black, bobbing stream of dusty grunting bodies, seeming to slowly flow like a mighty river toward the far end of the valley. There were so many that he laughed when he thought, If I can get alongside, I won’t even have to aim, just shoot in the general direction of the mob and I’m bound to hit one.
He continued to sit there watching for a few minutes before making his move. The flow of heaving, bouncing bodies seemed endless, but finally the last of the herd moved into the valley. Now he loped along the top of the ridge, leading his packhorse, keeping pace with the animals below him. After deciding where he was going to intersect the herd, he stopped long enough to tie the packhorse’s reins to a clump of sage, then jumped back into the saddle, drew his rifle from the sling, and gave Ashes a nudge. The big gray bounded down the slope toward the valley bottom.
The animals bringing up the rear of the herd started to run when Tanner pulled up beside them, causing a ripple in the dark stream of bodies as those ahead began to run in response. Tanner selected a medium-sized cow and, holding the reins in his teeth, leveled his rifle and took aim. Two shots behind the front leg brought the buffalo down and tumbled her, head over rump. It would have been easy to shoot five more with his remaining ammunition, but one buffalo was all he needed. He pulled Ashes aside, and headed back to butcher his kill.
Butchering his kill was not an easy task. It took him most of the afternoon to skin the animal and load as much of the meat as he could carry on the packhorse and Ashes. There’s gotta be a knack to this, he thought, one he would have to learn. He felt certain the Indians must surely know a faster method. In spite of this, however, he felt satisfied with himself and the hunt. There was a lot of meat packed away. It would be well received by Jacob’s company.
Taking a look at the sun, he set a course he figured to be a good bet to intersect the wagon train near the end of its day’s travel. It was a long ride back to the Arkansas and the Santa Fe Trail, a lot of time to consider the recent change of events that had taken place in camp. He still found it amazing that Jeb had apparently found true love at last. The thought almost brought a chuckle—Jeb Hawkins, finally tamed by a female. It was going to take some getting used to, having a woman along on the trail.
It was getting on toward dusk when he saw the smoke. It struck him as odd that there appeared to be more smoke than the campfires would ordinarily generate. Still at least a mile or two distant, he nudged Ashes to a comfortable lope, hoping to gain the camp with his fresh meat before the evening meals were prepared. Unable to see the camp after riding about a quarter of an hour, he realized that it was hidden from his view on the other side of a low ridge.
Driving Ashes straight up over the ridge, he pulled the horse to a sliding stop at the top, unprepared for the grim sight that met his eyes. Below him, in a narrow ravine, the wagons of Jacob Freeman’s company sat idle, not in a circle as customary but still in line of travel. Horses and mules lay slaughtered in their traces. The ravine was strewn with the bodies of the company at various distances from the wagons, testimony to unsuccessful attempts to escape by some, while most were slain right there in the wagons. The smoke that had led him to the scene of the massacre had come from the smoldering ruins of several of the wagons.
The ghastly sight was almost too much for him to comprehend, and it took a few moments before he could realize the full meaning of it. When his mind began to function rationally again, his first thought was of Jeb. Kicking Ashes hard, he dropped the packhorse’s rope and descended into the ravine at a gallop. At the bottom, the grisly scene only became worse. The dead were strewn everywhere, hacked and mutilated—men, women, and children. None had been spared.
Dismounting, he hurried to a wagon he recognized as Jacob Freeman’s. Climbing up on the wheel, he was stopped abruptly by the sight of Jacob lying behind the seat, his bloody face sagging from the loss of his scalp. Behind him, at the back of the wagon, was Ida’s body, a bloody clump of torn clothing. He felt a sick churning in the pit of his stomach when he thought of the horror the gentle woman had endured in her final moments. He looked around him, searching for Jeb, puzzled that the wagons showed no signs of bolting out of line. Wagon sheets were riddled with bullet holes and an occasional arrow shaft lay broken beside a wagon box. It was as if they had simply sat there to be massacred. He stepped down from the wheel and began a wagon-by-wagon search of the train.
It was a carnage he had not seen since Waynesboro, and it was magnified in horror by the inhuman mutilation, for the evidence pointed to an Indian massacre. Still, there was no sign of Jeb. Had he managed to escape? he wondered. He did not see the sorrel Jeb rode among the slaughtered horses, so there was some hope. As he searched the wagons for sign of survivors, he realized that he had not found Cora either. This fact served to encourage his hopes, for if Jeb had had a chance to escape, he would have taken Cora with him.
His hopes were destroyed a short time later when he came upon a gully near the head of the train. There he found Jeb and Cora. Both were staked out flat on the ground, Jeb with a dozen or more bullet holes in his body, Cora with her throat gaping crazily from the slash of a knife. From the slashes on Jeb’s face and arms, it appeared that he had been subjected to a great deal of torture before his execution. The same could be said for the hapless girl.
Staggered by the brutal slaying, Tanner took a few steps backward and sat down on the side of the gully. “Damn, Jeb…” he moaned. “Damn. I wasn’t here to watch your back this time. I’m sorry, partner.” He sat there for a long time, until the fading light of evening stirred him to move. Trying to understand the reasoning God employed when allowing such things to happen, he was at a loss as to what to do. Revenge? That was his thought. But against whom? The Indians? Which Indians? Kiowa? Comanche? Cheyenne? He shook his head in sorrow. He couldn’t seek revenge against a band of Indians.
With darkness coming on, he cut Jeb and Cora loose from the stakes. Finding a shovel in one of the wagons, he went to work digging a grave, determined to at least give his friend a decent burial. He dug it big enough to put Jeb and Cora in together. When it was finished, he tried to say a prayer over the grave, but ended it rather abruptly when he began to choke over the words.
With his friend in the ground, he paused to consider what he should do about the rest of the wagon train company. He wasn’t prepared to dig graves for that many people, so he decided to gather all he could find, lay them in rows in the wagons, and set them ablaze. He decided it was the best he could do, better than simply leaving them to be eaten by scavengers. With a full moon ascending over the ridge, he set about his grim chore.
It was a sorrowful task. He couldn’t be sure he had accounted for all the members of the train, and he wasn’t familiar enough to know who was married to whom, or which children belonged to which adults. So he laid them all in the wagons, and set one wagon after another on fire. It was close to sunup when he lifted the last body he could find into the one wagon left to burn. Shaking the can of coal oil he had taken from one of the wagons, he was wondering if there was enough left to start a proper fire when he heard a faint murmur.
Grabbing his rifle, he dropped to one knee and listened. After a moment, he heard it again, but this time he identified it as a human voice, a woman’s. Straining to see through the darkness outside the glow of the fires, he called out, “Where are you? It’s me, Tanner Bland.”
“Here,” came the weak reply.
He quickly followed the sound to a gully grown up with sage. There, lying against the side of the trench, he found Janie Reece. Bloodied and battered, she had been partially scalped, and when Tanner tried to pick her up, she screamed in pain. More dead than alive, she protested, begging to be left where she was. Tanner saw no choice but to do his best to comfort her final passing, for it was apparent that her moments were short.
“Floyd,” she forced painfully. “The others, anybody alive?”
“No ma’am,” Tanner replied gently. “You’re the only one alive.”
“It was the Leaches,” she gasped, each word seeming to require all her strength.
“What?” Tanner blurted in shocked surprise. “The Leaches? You mean they did this?”
“Them and their Injun friends,” she answered in between labored breaths. “We thought they wanted to trade, but they just started shooting. We didn’t have time to defend ourselves. They just started killing everything in sight.” Exhausted with the effort to talk, she sank back against the side of the gully.
Burning with the merciless image of the massacre in his mind, he fought to remain calm. “You just lay still now. I’ll go fetch some water and we’ll see if we can’t tend to your wounds.” She said nothing in response, but her eyes opened wide, seeming to stare at him. He left her then and went down to the river to soak his bandanna in water. When he returned to the stricken woman, he found her still staring up at him with eyes no longer seeing. She was dead.
Janie Reece’s body was the last one he laid in the wagon. When it finally caught fire after several attempts to start it, Tanner sat down wearily to consider what had taken place on that day. The early-morning light was eerily enhanced by the glow of the burning funeral wagons. He supposed it could be seen for miles, but he was too tired to care. He continued to sit there for a while, thinking about his carefree partner, lying with his newfound love in a shallow grave some thirty yards away. Then he turned his concentration toward the murderous creatures who were responsible for this massacre of innocent people. The thought of Garth Leach and his brothers turned his blood to molten lava in his veins, flowing hot for revenge. Montana goldfields would have to wait. He knew where his trail had to lead.
The incessant whinny of his horse reminded him then that he had left the gelding to stand saddled all night. Forgotten until that moment also was his packhorse, laden with fresh-killed meat. With his mind clear now, he got up to take care of his horses. After pulling the saddle off Ashes, he untied the buffalo meat, letting all but a portion of it drop to the ground. The buzzards can feed off this, he thought. He cooked some of the meat for his breakfast before closing his eyes for a few hours’ sleep.
He awakened with the sun high in the morning sky. Irritated that he had slept so long, he saddled Ashes and hitched the lead rope for the packhorse to the saddle. After watering them, he left the horses to graze while he searched the ravine for tracks. It was not difficult to see that the raiders had descended into the ravine from the same ridge as he had the night before. He had not been looking for tracks, or he might have noticed. Now he was more intent upon seeing which direction the raiders had taken. The trail was easy enough, once he found which end of the narrow defile they had exited.
Judging by the multitude of tracks, it had been a sizable raiding party, and they had left the scene of the massacre to head north. On foot, leading his horses, he started out after the war party, closely scouting the trail until he found the confirmation he sought. Scattered among the many unshod prints were tracks left by shod horses. How many horses had been stolen was hard to tell, but he felt secure in speculating that some of the shod tracks were left by the four men he hunted.
He followed the trail for most of the morning before reaching a stream where the war party had obviously paused for a short time before changing directions and starting out again back to the east. Tanner started to follow, but then noticed that a small number of shod horses had split out a short distance from the main body. He interpreted that to mean the four white men had a tendency to ride together, apart from the Indians. In his mind, he pictured the four Leach brothers, the three youngest trailing Garth, a pack of wolves that even the Indians had best beware. With now only one purpose in life, to kill this pack of wolves, he followed the wide trail over the grass-covered hills.