Cries from the Earth (13 page)

The stars were out and the moon had nearly risen to mid-sky by the time the trio worked their way on up the east bank of the Salmon. Near the mouth of Carver Creek, they halted the two horses back in the trees and the shadows looming at the edge of the clearing where a small cabin stood, its black windows like the eye sockets of a grinning buffalo skull.

“Get down,” Shore Crossing ordered.

Swan Necklace gulped apprehensively and obediently slipped off the back of the pony. Shore Crossing hit the ground at the same time Red Moccasin Tops dismounted.

“Here,” and Shore Crossing dropped the weary pony's reins into his nephew's hand.

Swan Necklace took the rope to the second pony, too.

The leader instructed, “You stay here until we return.”

“Y-you going in there?” the youth asked, his eyes flicking back to the log house.

Shore Crossing turned to stare at the cabin, too. He nodded, then turned to Red Moccasin Tops. “Elfers had some good horses, didn't he, brother?”

“Fine horses, yes.”

“Are y-you thinking of going back to steal some horses f-from Elfers?” Swan Necklace stammered.

“When we finish here,” Shore Crossing declared in a raspy whisper, “in that cabin is a man who needs killing. And I want his gun.”

Red Moccasin Tops turned to Swan Necklace, using that expression harkening back to those early days of first contact between the tribe and white traders: “This Boston Man, he came here from far away across the big ocean. Ever since he arrived, he has been very cruel to our people. I am going to help Shore Crossing kill this Shadow tonight.”

After creeping stealthily to the door, Shore Crossing had no trouble finding the latchstring. He pulled it slowly. When Red Moccasin Tops nodded that he was ready, they threw their weight against the planks, bursting into the moonlit interior. Across that darkened room Richard Devine kicked savagely at his blankets, half-rising from his bed as he lunged for a rifle standing against a wall. The three of them reached the carbine at the same time, but the old sailor was no match for the two youngsters.

Wrestling the repeater from the Shadow's hands, Shore Crossing leaped back, worked the lever, and growled a warning to his cousin.

In that breathless heartbeat as Red Moccasin Tops released the white man, Devine spun around in the dark to stare boldly into Shore Crossing's eyes. Cursing his attackers, the Shadow was leaping for the rifle holder when the bullet from his own weapon caught him squarely in the face.

Standing there in those moments that followed, Shore Crossing waited while the echo of the gun's blast faded from his ears, until he felt his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness after the blinding muzzle-flash. Listening, watching for some movement from the white man sprawled on the floor, he finally spoke to his cousin.

“Look for a belt gun. And bullets, too. Anything good we can trade.”

They ransacked the tiny cabin, stuffing a few poor items into a carpet satchel; then Shore Crossing knelt over the dead man.

“I like his shirt,” he said, rolling the red felt between a thumb and forefinger.

But he did not steal it to wear. Instead, they cut long strips from the shirt and used the red flannel to wrap up their braids.

“It is the color of the blood,” Shore Crossing exulted, holding one of his braids out before his eyes to admire what he had done. “The first blood we've taken from the Shadows!”

They crossed the starlit yard to reach the frightened Swan Necklace.

“Is … is he…”

“Dead?” Shore Crossing finished the question. “Yes. I killed him. With his own gun.” And he held it up for the youth's inspection.

Red Moccasin Tops clambered atop his pony, clutching the carpet satchel. “That Boston Man Elfers talks very funny, doesn't he?”

“Yes, he does,” Shore Crossing replied. “And he has those fine horses I would like to take back to camp with me.”

The younger cousin smiled as Shore Crossing climbed atop his pony and pulled Swan Necklace up behind him. Then Red Moccasin Tops said, “We are going past his place on our way back to
Tepahlewam,
you know.”

“Our two old horses are very tired,” Shore Crossing observed as he nudged his heels into the weary pony and patted the carbine's gleaming barrel in the moonlight. “I think we should get us some new horses now.”

Chapter 8

June 14, 1877

 

 

BY TELEGRAPH

WYOMING.

An Indian Canard Contradicted.

CHICAGO, May 31.—A dispatch received this morning at General Sheridan's headquarters from Lieutenant Clark, dated Red Cloud agency, May 29, states that after a careful investigation he considers the part of the Cheyennes' story, relating to Sitting Bull, absolutely false, this chief being north of the Yellowstone and probably north of the Missouri. The rest of the Cheyennes' report appears to be founded on fact, though there is no certainty about it. Probably Lame Deer's village was captured and the version of the affair given correct.

After failing at two careers already, he had come to the new world from Hanover, Germany, eighteen years ago. From the moment Jurden Henry Elfers reached Idaho in 1861, life had begun to turn around for him.

At first Elfers had worked hard for others, trying his hand at the sluice boxes up near the mining town of Lewiston, then grunting and sweating as he plowed fields owned by others. But by the latter part of 1862 he had joined in partnership with Harry Mason and John Wessell, staking out his own claim on John Day Creek.

He paused a moment this cool morning to gaze back at the buildings he had raised with his own hands. Sighing with contentment, Elfers continued toward the high pasture he intended to have mowed before noon. Henry believed his good fortune had really begun the day he met Catherine back in the spring of '71. She was German too, come to America with her parents. Catherine and Henry were married by October that year. And by the next summer Elfers felt confident enough to buy out his two partners.

Henry and Catherine owned the whole place, a good thing when they started having children. In addition to the horses they bred, the Elfers raised milk cows for their dairy business, as well as renting out some tiny rooms nailed against the side of their house to travelers along the Salmon River Road. That, along with the general store Catherine ran and Henry's part-time prospecting, the two of them counted up a handful of blessings here in this young country barely a hundred years old.

It appeared as if their life was destined to get better and better, especially now that the army was herding the Non-Treaty bands onto the reservation and quieting things down. It wasn't as if Henry had ever done a thing to harm any of the Nez Perce. Although he could be a hard-headed businessman, Elfers had never hurt a soul. Only that time last year when he came back to the house to find the dogs barking and Catherine confronted with at least a half-dozen warriors who had come boldly into the yard. Holding no weapon in his hands, Elfers had yelled at the Nez Perce to leave—wishing the hired men weren't so far away in the hay field.

But when those young warriors got haughty and two of them started toward Catherine and the house, Henry got angry enough to step over to the gate and fling it open, freeing his hounds. Out raced the four dogs, snarling and yapping, compelling the two warriors to remount and gallop from the yard. For the rest of that day he and Catherine kept a careful eye trained for any strangers, fearing that the warriors would return—if for nothing else than to kill the dogs.

Weeks and months passed, until Elfers figured all the hard feelings had healed. He eventually felt at ease when this past spring the Non-Treaty Nez Perce permitted Henry to sit on the council of arbitration convened to look into the matter of that whipping Harry Mason gave a couple of warriors at his store. The Indians certainly knew that he and Harry had been partners years ago, so Elfers figured it spoke well of his relations with the tribe that they allowed him to sit in judgment of Mason despite their past business dealings.

Especially since there had never been a peep out of any of the Nez Perce after that council decided Harry Mason was justified in using martial force to drive the unruly warriors from his store. If the tribe was sore about Henry's role in that judgment, then the wounds must surely have healed. Besides, each day could only find things getting better and better now that the Non-Treaty bands were within a few days and miles of settling upon the reservation.

Here at forty-two, Jurden Henry Elfers had fathered three offspring over the last five years, and Catherine was heavy with child again. He stopped on the hillside trail and breathed deep of the cool air pregnant with the damp, heady aromas of fertile earth and those piles of cow dung dotting this narrow path leading to the far pasture that lay on an elevated plateau behind the ranch.

His twenty-one-year-old nephew, “Harry” Burn Beckrodge, had gone ahead with more than a half-dozen cows and their young calves from that spring's drop, driving them up the brushy hillside to spend the day in the high pasture. Hired man Robert Bland was the next to leave the barn, following a half-mile or more behind Beckrodge with the rest of the barren milkers.

Elfers was at least a half-hour behind the two of them, most of that time consumed with pulling his new mowing machine from the barn, laying out the newly oiled harness, and backing the two draft horses into their traces. Now the mower clattered beneath him as the big, powerful haunches of those Belgians dragged the mower up the last steep part of the climb and topped out on the plateau just east of the homestead.

Something caught his attention less than a hundred yards ahead. Something out of place among the trees fully leafed with the green of early summer. Then the Belgians caught wind of the two horses. A pair of them, poor and ill-kept: an easy thing for a sharp-eyed horse breeder like Elfers to tell even at this distance. But they hadn't wandered here, for it appeared they were ground-staked at the side of the trail skirting the edge of Henry's upper pasture, grazing there in that patch of wild oats.
Gott
-damn, if someone had planted their horses in the good feed, for free!

It made Henry's neck burn that anyone would try to steal when all he had come by he had been earned with the sweat of his brow and the muscles in his back. Besides, if someone wanted a little feed for their horses, all he had to do was ask.

Slapping the four long, thick straps down on the backs and yard-wide haunches of the matched Belgians, Elfers picked up their pace a little, finding himself irritated at the freeloaders, especially nettled that neither his nephew nor the hired man had done a thing to run off the impudent squatters.

In a matter of seconds and a few more yards Elfers spotted something else out of place. For the life of him, it looked like a man's knee sticking up above the short grass some twenty-five yards from the two poorly kept horses. A man's knee poking up, just the way a fellow would if he was lying down in the grass, taking himself a nap.

Perhaps this was one of the freeloaders, Henry decided. And it made him all the more angry. He'd wake that fellow up but good and give him a good chunk of his mind.

The off-hand Belgian whickered and tossed its massive head as the freeloader's body came in sight the moment Henry reined the draft horses off the trail at the edge of the high pasture.

“
Gott
-damn!” he growled as he hauled back on the reins with all his might the instant he realized it was the hired man.

A shiny smear blackened Bland's upper chest as if the man had spilled Catherine's molasses syrup all over himself at breakfast.

“Robert! Get up—no time to take a nap,
Gott
-dammit!”

From the corner of his eye Elfers spotted the figure stepping away from the brush, a heartbeat later realizing the man was leveling a rifle at him.

Starting to dive, he felt his boot get entangled in the mower's footboard.

The bullet caught him high in the arm, continuing on to pierce his chest. With a grunt, Elfers pitched headlong off the mower, dragging his foot from that boot still wedged between the newly varnished boards. With but one good arm now, he couldn't drag himself very well, nor very far, before he felt all his strength was drained from him. Perhaps with every beat of his heart, the way all that blood had seeped from him into this ground he had plowed the last few seasons.

He lay there, trying to catch his breath, deciding at last to look down at the wound. Surprised to find that there was little blood on his upper arm, Henry realized he was bleeding out inside and unless he got help quick—

A moccasin jammed down on the wounded shoulder and shoved Jurden Henry Elfers against the ground with a roaring flame that shot through his whole body.

He blinked through the tears of pain, trying to focus on the figure that stepped over him. His eyes cleared and he saw two of them. His ears heard the
clack-clack
of a carbine's lever and receiver as he glanced at the repeater one of the Indians held against his hip.

Then Henry looked up at the warrior's face, recognizing the young man who had come looking for stray horses yesterday. He and the other one were grinning down at Henry apishly.

Elfers slowly closed his eyes and said good-bye to each of his three children. Struggling to take a breath, Henry uttered one last word as he heard that carbine bark, as he heard his head explode.

“Catherine—”

*   *   *

Shore Crossing had led them up the ridge in the pre-dawn darkness, circling far around the homestead and the buildings, far from the outbuildings and the corral, to eventually reach this overlook where they could gaze down on the ranch as the sky grew pale in the east.

It wasn't long after it got light enough for objects to cast a dim shadow that the first of the white men emerged from the large building, hitching up his suspenders. A second went directly to a tiny board house nearby as he pulled down his suspenders and worked at the flaps on the front of his britches.