Chapter 23

July 10, 1869

“You gonna get my goddamned wagon loaded or ain’t you?” hissed the fat mule-whacker with the rotten teeth and whiskey-stale breath.

Jack O’Neill ground his teeth, wishing it were another place, another time—and he could look down at the terror in the white man’s eyes as he plunged the tomahawk into his brain.

Instead, the mulatto forced down the bile and turned back to the grain stacked in sacks by hundred-weight. The bed of the huge freighter creaked under the load as O’Neill helped the teamster chain up the rear gate.

“’Bout time, goddammit,” the man muttered, glaring at O’Neill with impunity.

Jack knew the man realized he was safe saying anything to him here in broad daylight on the streets of Denver City. The mulatto and Indian were the outcast minorities here. A man could speak what trash he dared—and a nigger, no matter a freed nigger, kept his mouth shut, he knew what was good for him.

“I ain’t never gonna make Cripple Creek the way you dawdling on me, nigger.”

Jack stepped back out of the fleshy man’s way, marveling at the size of the pores in the whiskey-swollen nose, all scored with tiny burst veins that reminded Jack of the tracks the hens made down in the chicken yard after a summer thunderstorm back to home.

For a moment he yearned for Mama and home, then hefted the remembrance away like handling those hundred-weight sacks of feed. O’Neill watched the teamster settle with a groan from the plank seat.

“Better pick up the pace, boy!”

O’Neill turned to find the thin, bald, rail of a man with his sheaf of papers emerging from the cool shadows of the brick warehouse. He wore that look of practiced tolerance for the mulatto.

“Got three more of them wagons to load for Cripple Creek before noon. Now get your black ass moving, you want to have time for lunch.”

Four smaller black men and one Chinaman worked in relay to bring the feed sacks out of the cool darkness of the warehouse. Only Jack O’Neill stood beneath in the midsummer sun, naked to the waist, his skin the color of coffee softened with sweet milk—just the way his daddy used to take it right up to that morning he marched off to the war. Down on the dock the five dropped their sacks before disappearing into the darkness. Up he dragged a bag to his shoulder, slowly kneeling to wrench a second sack beneath his free arm. That was the only way he had figured to keep up with the five of them.

They was only mindful of their jobs and families. He couldn’t blame ’em. They done what the white men told ’em.

So many white men. Never had he seen so many in one place and at one time until coming here to Denver City. It had been good money at first when he hired on here down near Cherry Creek at Addison’s Grain & Feed. Fair money after that first day’s sore muscles. And it was only enough after the first week—he had himself a bed in a room with seven others, and two squares each day, along with some dried bread and meat broth for lunch to see him through to evening. And if he was lucky and watched his money the way he did when he first came to the plains, Jack had some left over by the end of the month to go calling on one of the powdered chippies at one of the dance halls.

Jack didn’t dance with the fleshy, sweating girls. Though a white man had tried goading him into dancing for them all one time. O’Neill never went back, and steered clear of the place. He wasn’t no sun-grinning, hymn-singing, foot-shuffling field nigger. Never had been. They wanted to see dancing, let ’em come out on the prairie to where Roman Nose and his earthy people roamed.

That hurt him—to suddenly have to think of Roman Nose as gone forever. All too painful and true—for he had seen the war-chief’s body laid out on the scaffold, lying there for the wind and the seasons to reclaim.

The best friend Jack O’Neill knew he would ever have was a red man. Copper-skinned. And celibate to the point Jack knew had to drive Roman Nose crazy. Still, the big Cheyenne just laughed when the mulatto told him of the delicious things white women would do for money and the Indian women did for fun.

The best of friends. Roman Nose had treated Jack more like a man than any other before, or since. They had fought together. Galloping down that creekbed, racing toward the island—a vision come now before his watering eyes as clear as if he were once more riding beside the war-chief, water and golden sand-grit spraying as high as their bronzed shoulders in that morning sun.

Jack found his pace quickening as his anger and pain swelled like an overworked blister, pouring from him like the sweat glistening his dusty torso.

Simply to find the man who had killed the only friend he ever had …

That helped the mulatto dull some of the pain, the way the rye whiskey dulled his craving for the powdered chippies who always smelled so strongly of the man come and gone before him. He hated the women almost as much as he hated the gray-eyed white man who had killed his best friend.* Hated the women he took ravenously—because none of them were Emmy.

His eyes moistened, recalling how Emmy felt that last time in his arms, their blood mingling, pooling beneath the white girl’s slashed and riven body.

He smiled, like a wolf watching a hamstrung old bull go down on the prairie.

Remembering how exquisite it was to extract so much pain from the white man who had killed Jack’s whore. He began to laugh right then and there beside the loading dock. Recalling how the renegade cried out for mercy—to be killed—to stop the torture that was such a delicious revenge.

As bloody and filled with gore as that torture had been for the white renegade, now Jack O’Neill realized the slow killing of Bob North was merely practice. The old man’s screams, his pleading to die—all of it would pale beside what the future held.

No terror, no blood, no begging could compare with that moment to come when he got his hands on the tall, dark-haired, gray-eyed civilian scout—the killer of Roman Nose.

*   *   *

At dawn the morning after Lieutenant Harvey’s scout had watched Tall Bull’s village going into camp, Major Eugene Carr ordered his cavalry to march upriver to locate the Cheyenne trail.

Wasn’t a man in that outfit didn’t know he’d be going to war soon enough. Spotting the whole damned village. Even Major Royall’s scout with ten Pawnee under Lieutenant Becher had run across a small war-party the day before and had a running fight with the warriors, killing three before the Cheyenne broke off and disappeared.

The gap was closing. It was only a matter of time before Carr’s cavalry caught up with them.

Not that many miles up Frenchman’s Fork of the Republican, Carr briefly halted his command at a site used by the Cheyenne three days before. In resuming their march, a few miles farther up the fork they came across the camp used by Tall Bull’s people two nights before. The soldiers were as enthused as they were nervous. They were on a hot trail—knowing from Lieutenant Harvey’s report exactly where the hostiles went into camp the night of the ninth. In a matter of a morning’s march, they had closed the lead of their quarry by three days.

The major ordered camp made and the entire outfit readied for any eventuality.

“No telling what those warriors will do they find out we’re breathing down their necks,” Bill Cody advised Carr as they went into camp.

“Just as well,” Carr replied. “I’m sending back a handful of the Pawnee and two of my men to hurry along the supply train that’s due in from McPherson.”

“I don’t recommend you sit here like an owl waiting for your prey to come to you,” Major Frank North said.

Carr considered it. “If I have no other choice—we’ll make a forced march with part of the column intact, the rest waiting for resupply.”

“That village finds out we’re back here, they’ll bolt,” Luther North said, adding his pessimism.

“It’s a chance I’ll have to take. We’re in no position to attack that village and scatter it—not knowing where our supply train is, gentlemen. I’m not going to gamble with the lives of those civilian teamsters if the Cheyenne suddenly turn about and scatter furiously. I would be signing the death warrants for our freighters.”

“You might be missing the chance of your career to capture the worst outlaw this part of the country’s seen in a generation,” Frank North said.

Carr squared his eyes at the leader of the Pawnee battalion. “I’ve considered that, Major. I’ll note your exception for the record. However, I’ll let others rush in for the glory. Custer and his like. As for me—I’ll protect my rearguard and the civilians in my employ before I’ll have their deaths on my conscience. There won’t be any Major Elliotts in the Fifth Cavalry, by Jupiter!”

Cody and the rest watched Carr stomp away with his adjutant, Lieutenant Montgomery.

“He’s still smoldering over last winter’s campaign, ain’t he?” Cody quietly asked of Donegan. “Us busting snow and our tails—coming up empty-handed while all the glory went to Custer.”

“Carr’s got every right to complain,” Seamus replied sourly. “You heard the reports—read it in all the papers back East. That business about Custer abandoning Major Joel Elliott and his eighteen men in the valley of the Washita as soon as Custer found out his gallant Seventh Cavalry was about to be surrounded by the might of the Arapaho and Kiowa nations.”

Cody nodded, watching Carr’s wide back disappear among the horses and men and small, smokeless fires where the soldiers boiled their coffee and chewed on their salt-pork.

“I don’t imagine Carr’s the same kind of soldier as Custer,” he replied, loosening the cinch on Buckskin Joe’s saddle. “He’s cautious, and Custer sounds full of bluff and bluster. Carr is cut of a different cloth.”

Donegan snorted. “You got that right, Bill Cody. By the saints—you got that right.”

Doubt nagged him as he pulled himself from her body, his breathing coming more regular, his pulse slowing.

It wasn’t anything to do with the white woman. Instead, it was a doubt rattling around inside Tall Bull the way stream-washed pebbles clattered around inside a stiffened buffalo-scrotum rattle. He wanted to move the village on—but the medicine men claimed they were safe here in the narrow valley by the springs the Dog Soldier band visited at least twice each year in their migrations.

Still, the confident vision of the medicine men did nothing to allay his fear as Tall Bull gazed at the bruised white woman beneath him. She rolled to her side, pulling the shreds of her dress and the corner of a blanket over nakedness. One eye was puffing where he had cuffed her. The woman’s dry, swollen lips were cracked, bloodied where he slapped her repeatedly during their coupling. Blue bruising stood out like his war-paint against the paleness of her skin.

Tall Bull cursed her—why could she not enjoy the rut as much as Cheyenne women? Before, she had fought back: crying, lashing out and kicking at him. It had been more exciting in those first days. Now, for many suns, the white woman had become a different animal—passive unlike anything he knew in the animal kingdom. It unsettled something inside him, and he resented her for it.

Not good to have this feeling about this place and the medicine men and the nearness of the soldiers … not good to have the woman lay beneath him, staring up at the circle of poles while he hit and bit, slapped and pinched and rutted with her.

She was not an eager partner like his wife. He cursed the white woman because she made him feel alone. Cold and eerie as he gyrated over her body, exacting his vengeance on her flesh.

He toyed with the fire smoking at his feet in the lodge lit with nothing more than the stars bursting forth at twilight through the narrow smoke-hole overhead.

Tall Bull stared at her a long time. She seemed to be gazing back at him in the dim light of the lodge. But he was sure she wasn’t looking at him. Instead, she must be looking somewhere in the distance at that place she went each time he came to possess her body.

He hated her for that. If she could not throw herself into the mating like a good woman should, then at least she should fight him, just as she did the first time he spread her white legs. But something inside him told Tall Bull this white woman would never do either.

Too quickly she had learned how to hurt him.

And when Tall Bull was hurt, he hurt back.

One day he might get angry enough to kill her. When most men tired of a female prisoner, they sold her to another warrior. But he would not sell this one. She had caused him too much pain and stabbed his pride. He would kill her someday.

And if the soldiers came to rescue her, Tall Bull would glean such pleasure in driving the tomahawk into her brain. Watching the horror on her face as he plunged the blade into her head … wondering now if that look of terror would be any different than the fear on her face that first time he plunged his flesh within her, there beside her burning cabin.

Those soldiers gave him pause. An unsettled brooding came over him as he stared at the white woman gazing with empty, lifeless eyes back at him.

If the soldiers came—he vowed she would be the first to die.