Come Sundown (11 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Come Sundown
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W
hile Kit convalesced from his accident, I stayed around William's stockade and helped him build fences of split pine rails lashed together with rawhide. We also surveyed the course of an irrigation ditch using a transit William had hauled west. The ditch would catch water from the Purgatoire and cast it out on a gently sloping field of about 230 acres. The Mexican laborers were busy clearing this field of rocks, which they used to build a rock fence around the field itself.
At night, I would entertain the Americans, the Mexicans, and the Indians with my violin, which I had previously left with William for safekeeping. I carried it now in a fringed and beaded deerskin case that a Comanche woman had made for me in trade for a hatchet. Between the classical concertos and the folk songs, I managed to find something everyone could appreciate, and when things got particularly dull, I could always fiddle behind my back, behind my head, or between my legs. Herr Buhler, my old violin instructor at the Saint-Cyr School for Boys in Paris, would have gone mad had he ever seen me playing between my legs on the left-handed Stradivarius that I had stolen from him. But I imagined that he had probably drunk himself to death by now anyway.
It felt good to play again. I hadn't made music in a while, and was rusty, though no one noticed but me. After a few nights of playing, the fluid strokes and sharp staccatos came back to me, though my fingertips hurt from lack of conditioning. One night, we even had a square dance, with Tom Boggs calling.
Freight wagons would come through on this, the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail, so we enjoyed newspapers and other things from back East. A few Americans decided to stay at Boggsville to tend flocks or herd cattle or clear fields for William. With every new arrival came more talk of the political excitement involving slavery and states' rights. At William's stockade, we had heard rumors that certain Southern states had entertained debates on the subject of secession in their houses of congress—this in response to a growing abolitionist sentiment in the North. The abolitionists believed the federal government should abolish slavery, while the Southern states maintained that the constitutional provision for states' rights, particularly in the Tenth Amendment, gave the states the authority to decide whether or not to allow slavery. There was talk in the North of ratifying another amendment to the Constitution—one that would outlaw slavery. Most agreed that the slave states would secede should such an amendment pass, or even come before Congress.
On the plains and in the mountains, we knew this business was serious and dangerous. Men of both loyalties—North and
South—now lived out West, including enough zealous abolitionists and secessionists to foment considerable violence. Opinions differed as to just how serious the trouble might get.
“If South Carolina secedes,” Tom Boggs said one night, “hell, the army and the navy will just march right in there and blow hell out of the place. How does one state expect to stand up against the whole federal government?”
But William grunted and shook his head. “I don't know. Could be they'll all secede at the same time, or one after another. The Union Army isn't big enough to stop them from Virginia all the way to Texas.”
“But the South couldn't win a war like that,” said R. M. Moore. “The North has all the manufacturing plants.”
“The only thing the rich men in the South think they can't do,” William said, “is let their slaves get taken away from them. They know that would crush their economy. They may be gentlemen of honor and intelligence, but they have acquired their wealth on the backs of people that are whipped like dogs, and they are not about to give up that wealth and go out in their own fields to pick their own cotton. They are just arrogant enough to drag the whole republic into a bloody war so that they can go on trading people like animals and living high on the hog because of it.”
This surprised me somewhat, coming from William, for he had owned a slave himself in the past, a manservant named Dick Green who had worked at Bent's Old Fort as a blacksmith. However, I had known Dick Green, and knew that William treated him like any other man. Dick had ridden and fought alongside white men, Mexicans, and Indians, and had drawn wages like anyone else at Bent's Old Fort. I could see now that William might have bought this man to thwart the institution of slavery rather than perpetuate it.
“If it comes to war,” I said, posing a question for discussion, “how will it affect us out here in the territories?”
William puffed on his pipe for a few seconds. “Colorado and New Mexico territories are mostly Union in sympathy. I don't think there will be much trouble this far west.”
“Maybe not,” Kit Carson said. “Except for the gold. Takes
money to make war. The South could go after the Colorado gold fields. Maybe even California.”
“You think so?” Tom Boggs said.
“Like William said, they're arrogant. They think they can do whatever they take a mind to do. Especially the Texans.”
“The worst trouble will come from the Indians,” William added. “We saw it during the Mexican War. When civilized men go to fightin' one another, the Indians always sieze the opportunity to make raids and take back land they've lost. Can you imagine what a time the Comanches will have in Texas if the Texans secede and go to fightin' the Union? I wouldn't want to be a farmer on the fringes of Comanche territory right now.”
And so the speculation rambled, day after day, night after night, no one really knowing what to expect. And so it goes on, year after year, war after war. We could never have understood at that time that the War Between the States would last so long, or that the frontier would pass so quickly. The Comanches who laughed at me as I sawed my fiddle in contorted poses could scarcely have grasped how quickly everything they knew and loved would vanish in flame and dust.
 
 
I'VE MENTIONED THE big bell at William's stockade, mounted on the top of an eight-foot pole set in the ground. I asked William about it one day. “Come from a school that burnt down in Missouri. I hauled it out here.”
The bell had three purposes, William said. If visitors were seen approaching the stockade, the bell was rung three times to alert everyone of a new arrival. I remembered having heard this bell sound thrice the first time I, myself, approached the stockade.
“Of course, you know by now that I use it to call the horses,” William continued. Every day, before hay or grain was fed to riding stock in the corrals, the bell was sounded five times. This trained the horses to expect feed at the sound of the bell. Often, riding stock was turned out to graze around the stockade. If William wanted the horses back inside the corrals in a hurry, all he had to do was ring that bell, and the horses would
come running for their feed. The signal for feeding time was five rings, as opposed to the signal for approaching riders—three rings. This number made no difference to the horses, of course, only to the men. The horses would come running at the mere sound of the bell, no matter how many times it tolled.
“There's one more use for that bell,” William said. “We haven't had to use it yet, but you ought to know. The guards are trained to ring hell out of that bell in case we're ever attacked. So if you ever hear three bells, you know somebody friendly's a-comin'. You hear five, you know the stable hands are feedin'. But if you hear more than that, grab your guns, Mr. Greenwood, and take your place on the wall.”
One night I decided to sleep under the stars inside the protective walls of the stockade. I preferred this to sleeping inside as long as the weather was neither too wet nor too cold. I found a place where the stockade wall blocked the cold north wind, and rolled myself into a buffalo robe. I kept a pistol under my rolled jacket, which I used for a pillow, and I placed a rifle at my feet. This way, whether I had time to roll to my feet or not, I would have a weapon at my disposal.
I spent most of the night reciting poems to myself, and thinking about the problems of the plains and the rest of the world. Finally, toward dawn, I fell asleep and began to dream of Mescalero Apaches crawling over the stockade walls to kill me, accompanied by ogres and carnivorous creatures of the most terrifying ilk. I remained thus tormented by the machinations of my own twisted mind until the bell began to ring. The first few tones frightened away my nightmarish attackers just before they scalped me alive.
Then my eyes opened, and I saw the pewter cast of a not-quite-dawn hanging heavy in the sky. The bell had rung four times. Now five … A pause. Then it rang again. And again! I reached under my coat and took my pistol in hand, glancing both ways along the pointed tops of the stockade timbers. I saw no attackers coming over the wall just yet. My mind was still trying to sort nightmares from reality.
The bell rang on, so I fought the buffalo robe until I kicked it aside, letting the cold air hit my body. I rolled to my feet, and
thought about picking up my rifle. Instead, I decided to jump up on a large oaken barrel so I could look over the stockade walls. I had slept in my clothes and boots, so I sprang immediately onto the cask, put there for that purpose, and risked a peek over the wall. In the dim light, I could see no attackers, but that bell was still clanging away—and in a most irregular cadence, as if the guard ringing the bell was quite agitated—or even wounded.
I jumped down from the keg and scooped up my rifle as I sprinted around stacks of wood, around a smokehouse, and past a hand-dug well. I darted among other outbuildings as I ran toward William's cabin at the center of the stockade. No shots yet fired, I thought. But over the sounds of my own footsteps and my own heavy breathing, I heard hoofbeats, voices shouting, and doors flying open as men woke and came alive to answer the call of the bell.
The attack was coming from the east, I surmised. From the timber along the river. But who? Pawnees? Apaches? Blackfeet? Outlaws? Texas warmongers? As I came around a dormant freight wagon, a horse lunged at me, shoving me down behind a wagon wheel, and scaring the liver out of me. I looked for a rider, but there was none. Were the attackers inside the walls already? Stealing horses? How had this mount escaped the corrals? Rolling out from under the wagon, I regained my feet and finally sprinted around the toolshed—the last obstacle between me and the bell.
I found a dozen men standing around with guns in their hands, shaking their heads as horses milled everywhere in confusion. And at the bell? Major. My horse. He held the rope to the bell between his teeth, and he was pulling down with his powerful neck, swinging the bell so hard that it almost flipped over in its cradle every time he yanked the rope. The relieved men began to chuckle, and they all looked at me as I slid to a stop upon the field of battle, for they all knew I owned that horse. Major saw me, too, and he finally turned the rope loose and looked at me as if to say, “Where the hell have you been?”
William was standing at his open cabin door, his shotgun in one hand. He scowled at me, though I could tell he was holding
back a grin. “Mr. Greenwood!” he shouted. “Your goddamn horse is hungry!”
The men burst into laughter at my expense. As they jeered me, I saw Major's lips groping comically again for the knot at the end of the rope. He managed to get in two more rings before I got to him, took the rope away from him, and pushed him toward the corrals. “Come on, Major,” I groaned, heading for the feed troughs. I knew I would have to pour some grain to get the horses all back into the corrals. Major followed, truly believing he had just ordered up his own breakfast. Now I saw where Major Pain-in-the-Ass had used his teeth to slide the poles aside at the corral openings, dropping one end of each pole so he and the other horses could step out of the corral enclosure. All this in order to get at that confounded bell.
As I trudged toward the corn crib, Major shoving me between the shoulder blades from behind, I heard William shout, “Who's trainin' who?”
The laughter roared. It got worse. Within minutes, a relief party from Boggsville had arrived, for the bell could be heard even that far away. So I had to hear it from Tom Boggs and his men, as well. William put me to work gathering eggs and firewood for his wife, Yellow Woman, so she could cook a hearty breakfast for everyone who had responded to Major's false alarm. I didn't hear the end of it for years.
 
 
WINTER CAME TO William's stockade, and with the frost and snow came my plans to ride back into Comancheria to begin the winter trading. Kills Something, Loud Shouter, and Fears-the-Ground were eager to go home. They would be returning to their camps and families with much to show. On their fleet Comanche ponies, they had won many a horse race against the Cheyennes and had gifts of deerskin and metal to show for it. The Cheyenne women produced some of the finest quill work and bead work on the plains, and the Comanche women coveted their wares. Also, I had paid my Comanche friends well with gunpowder, lead, bullet molds, hoop iron for making arrowheads, and fancy silver conchos pounded from Mexican coins. These they wore in their hair, around their necks, and
upon their deerskin shirts as we rode away from Boggsville and Bent's Stockade.
“Get us some horses,” William had told me. “More than usual.”

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