Cries from the Earth (27 page)

“Jennie!”

It was Ben shouting. She looked up to find her husband barely staying atop the saddle, clutching the back of his left thigh, weaving now.

“John!” she yelled at the driver, twisting away from Lew Day for the tailgate. “Benjamin's hit!”

As Chamberlin began to pull back on the reins, another bullet smacked into the side of Norton's horse. When his animal pitched to the right, Ben started to dismount onto his injured leg. She watched that leg give way under him as Norton spilled into the middle of the road. Joe Moore had his horse beside the crumpled man in a heartbeat, leaning off to grab that hand Norton held up as he got to his knees. Snatching Moore's wrist in one hand, clutching the stirrup with the other, Ben managed to lurch toward the wagon as the screeching got louder than it had ever been.

Jennie peeled her legs from under the wounded man so that she could scramble to the back of the wagon to help pull her husband in.

“Damn,” Lew Day growled as he sat up and propped himself against the sidewall, “now they got Ben, too.”

Reaching the rear gate, Norton was barely able to start over the gate before Chamberlin slapped the horses into motion again. Jennie managed to reach out and snag her husband's hand, heaving backward with all she had to yank him over the gate and into the wagon box before he fell off.

Suddenly Chamberlin's horses were screeching with that shrill, eerie, humanlike cry that made the hair on her arms prickle. The wagon lurched to the side, tilting slightly on two wheels as one of those horses stumbled forward onto its front knees and promptly went down in a heap.

Thrashing in terror, the other horse attempted to hurtle around the fallen animal, lunging against the singletree and nearly tipping the wagon filled with screaming women and children as they collided with one another. Clattering back onto all four wheels, the wagon slammed to a halt against the dead horse.

Painfully rolling himself over the sidewall, Lew Day flopped to the ground with a grunt and crabbed behind the horse carcass just as Joe Moore's animal was hit, screamed, and flung its rider into the middle of the road. Another shot split the darkness. Disbelieving, Moore stared down at his left hand, finding that a bullet had clipped off two of his fingers—then he, too, dove for cover behind his own fallen horse. He and Day quickly began to return the warriors' fire, holding the Nez Perce off as Chamberlin helped the wounded Norton get the three women and all the children over the sidewall and under the wagon box as a bullet brought down the second of Chamberlin's noisy horses.

Jenny clutched young Hill against her as Lynn sobbed with a wheeze each time she dragged in a breath.

In a matter of seconds the Nez Perce had dropped every one of the animals. Three of the four men were badly wounded.

And these horrible, bloodthirsty savages likely had them surrounded already.

Chapter 20

June 15, 1877

Hill Norton gazed into his mother's pretty face, not believing the fear he found reflected there, refusing to believe what she was demanding of him.

“I ain't going without you!” he protested.

She seized her son's arm, yanked him close, and embraced Hill. Then Jennie Norton held him away from her and gazed squarely into the youth's eyes while she said, “You and Lynn, I want you both to run for it while you still can.”

Lynn Bowers started to argue, “Jennie, I can't—”

“You've got to do this for me, Sister,” Mrs. Norton pleaded in a husky whisper. “Get my son out of here before the end comes to us all.”

Hill could feel the tears welling up in his eyes, and he angrily swiped them away with the backs of both hands. He didn't know if they were tears of terror or sadness or if they were tears of fury that he felt for the Indians, for his family's plight, maybe even for his mother ordering him away into the black of night and the unknown.

How could she ask him to leave her and his father, both wounded the way they were? How could she expect that of him after what had happened to the Chamberlins when they had tried to slip away?

From that moment when he had crawled under the wagon with his parents and the others once the horses were dropped, Hill had listened to the steady crackle of the enemy weapons, hearing every bullet slam into the wagon box or ricochet off an iron wagon tire or moistly slap into one of the dead horses. He could tell the warriors were moving about, inching closer and closer out there in the dark—just from the telltale cracks of those carbines.

It wasn't long before the messenger from Mount Idaho was hit again—then hit a fourth and fifth time too. After they had been forted up here for better than two hours, Lew Day started begging for some water. Hill's father whispered to his son, explaining that was what happened to a man who was bleeding out: he got real thirsty. So it came as no surprise later when Lew Day began whimpering, pleading for someone to bring him anything to drink from the wagon, anything at all, because he couldn't move for all his wounds.

“I can't stand him moaning over there no more,” grumbled Ben Norton as he started to scoot backward from beneath the wagon box. “He keeps on crying like that, he's gonna draw more of their fire.”

“Don't leave us, Ben!” Jennie Norton begged.

Nonetheless, Hill's wounded father crouched at the side-wall for a moment, then stood suddenly, hurriedly peering into the wagon box for one of their canteens.

The boy heard the two sharp cracks of the Indian carbines, saw the muzzles spit fire in the black of that night. The first bullet clanged against a piece of the iron furniture somewhere on the wagon. But the second smacked into his father's good leg.

Ben Norton collapsed, spinning to the ground in a heap as the canteen flew from his grasp and he gripped his right thigh with both hands. Hill stared transfixed at the gleaming patch of blood appearing on his father's leg as Mr. Chamberlin dragged Norton beneath the wagon box once more. Not hard to see that black ooze seeping up between his father's fingers, even in the dark.

“They got you bad,” Chamberlin whispered.

“May—maybe you oughtta take Jennie and the rest and get the hell outta here while you can, John,” Norton advised grittily.

Even in the shadows beneath the wagon box, Hill could still see how white his father's face had become. More than anything else, the boy was afraid he was going to have to lie here and watch his father die.

“I'll go and ask them to let us go, Ben,” Jennie Norton offered.

“Don't be stupid,” Norton snapped at his wife.

“I can't let you bleed to death here,” she argued. “We gotta get you to some help.”

“No!” Ben Norton growled, clenching his eyes and gritting his teeth for the pain. “You go out there, you're good as dead, Jennie … that, or worse—when they grab you and drag you off. I ain't watching that happen to you—”

“All right, Ben,” she relented softly. “I thought it would be worth a try. Maybe they won't hurt women and children.”

For a moment Norton looked at Chamberlin, then into his son's face. And finally he said, “Awright, Jennie. S'pose you give it a try. Ask 'em to let you go, but don't go out there far enough for 'em to grab you. If they do anything funny, I want you close so you can get back in here quick.”

Hill wanted to cry out at that moment, to scream that they hadn't asked for his arguments against sending his mother out there in the open to beg for their lives. As he watched his mother crab her way around the side of the wagon in a crouch, the boy figured they could have stayed right there for the rest of the night, holding the warriors off just the way they had been—

—when the bullet struck his mother, slicing through both her calves. As she collapsed in a ball, screeching in pain, Jennie Norton slammed the side of her leg against a wagon wheel, dislocating her ankle.

It wasn't very long after John Chamberlin dragged her back under the wagon that the neighbor told the others he was leaving, going to make a run for it with his family. Scooping up both of the sobbing children, the parents shushed their daughters, then slipped away into the brush at a crouch.

For some time after that Hill did what he could to help his father and mother with their wounds. When his father's hands began to cramp more than the man could bear, Hill interlaced his own fingers over the wound that continued to ooze no matter how much pressure any of them applied to it.

Then off in the distance, the boy heard some screaming, at least two different voices shrieking out there in all that black—followed by several gunshots … when everything went quiet in that direction and for a long time the night fell silent. Except for a final crack from one of the guns that surrounded them.

As the following minutes snailed past, Hill came to understand just how critical their situation was if no one could slip away to bring help back. None of the five adults uttered a thing for the longest time, but the boy figured that was because they were all brooding over the screams and the gunshots, too.
Like me, the grown-ups must figure the Injuns got the Chamberlins,
he thought.

It grew so unearthly quiet, with nothing else to do but think.

Just about the time Hill was beginning to figure Lew Day must have finally bled to death, thinking that his own father must have lost so much blood that he was no longer conscious, Benjamin Norton's eyes fluttered open and he spoke to his son.

“Hill … you gotta try to get away.”

“I won't let him go!” Jennie Norton disagreed, trembling like a dried cottonwood leaf in an autumn gale while she clutched Hill to her as if he were still a babe.

“Woman,” Norton whispered, “the boy's gonna be killed here with the rest of us if he stays. Let him and your sister go. Least they'll have some chance of living.”

For several minutes Hill's mother didn't speak, staring at the ground, making no sound but her labored breathing. Then she relented, tears glistening on her cheeks as she turned to her sister and told her to take off her heavy wool skirt, shimmy right down to her petticoat and bloomers so she could run faster and maneuver through the brush and timber.

That's the moment it finally struck Hill that they were going to make him leave them behind. His protests did no good. And when they made him see that someone had to go for help or they'd all perish right there … then Hill took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes to shut off the tears.

More scared than he had ever been, Hill leaned over and hugged his father before he wrapped his arms around his mother and pressed his head against her breast for what he knew was going to be the last time he would ever hold his parents.

Reluctantly he pulled away from her, quickly turning to slip his hand inside his aunt's trembling fingers, and together they stole into the night.

*   *   *

When her boy and sister left, the night seemed to close in all the tighter around Jennie Norton.

Her husband was the first to lapse into a deep and merciful sleep. Only once did she think about how much blood Ben had lost from that second terrible leg wound, only once did she wonder if he would ever awaken again … and then she thought no more about it.

It was much later when she realized that Lew Day wasn't begging for water anymore.

When Jennie worked up nerve enough to call out to the hired man, she asked, “Is … is Lew still alive, Joe?”

There was nothing but silence for a moment, long enough that Jennie began to worry that Moore had himself been killed during one of the intermittent exchanges of gunfire. Then just as she was about to give up and figure she was alone—

“I heard him breathing, Mrs. Norton,” Moore replied with a hush that nonetheless seemed to split the stillness of the night.

“The Indians…,” she wondered out loud, “you suppose they're still out there?”

“I reckon they are—”

When their question was answered as more than a dozen shots rang out, bullets hissing past, clanging against iron fittings on the wagon, or splintering the box timbers.

“You got any bullets left you over there, ma'am?” Moore asked her a while later when the Nez Perce stopped shooting again.

Jennie dragged herself over to her husband's body and collected what cartridges she could scrounge from his pockets. Then she pulled herself back around the other side of Ben Norton's legs. “I got some, Mr. Moore. But I don't think I can get 'em to you—”

More gunfire shattered the rest of her explanation.

“I'll come for 'em, Mrs. Norton,” Moore offered when the noise died away. “You're hurt worse'n me. Stay put where you are.”

Before Moore returned to his shelter between the two big carcasses of the Chamberlin team, he scrounged through every pocket for cartridges, even dared to take a peek in the wagon box for another weapon. That's where he found an old hunting pouch filled with a horn of powder and some wadding. And in the dark, the nimble fingers on his good hand touched the trigger guard and stock of a weapon.

“It's a shotgun, by damn!” he said in a joyous whisper.

“Ben's,” she explained. “He brung it along in the wagon.”

Digging through the pouch, Moore stopped to look into Jennie's pretty face and said, “But your mister didn't bring no shells. Just powder and wads.”

Her short-lived hope was all but dashed. Looking away, she admitted, “It doesn't matter, Mr. Moore. Those Injuns gonna figure out soon that there's only one of us still shooting back.”

The hired man affectionately cupped her chin in the hand missing those two fingers and said, “Ma'am, long as there's a few bullets for my carbine and some powder for Ben's ol' shotgun … Joe Moore's gonna keep the sonsabitches off the rest of us. You trust to that, Mrs. Norton.”

The Indians must have heard him crawling off, because they fired a few more shots their way. But Jenny stretched out flat on her belly, draping her arm over Benjamin as if the two of them were at home in the bed they had shared for some thirteen years. She clenched her eyes shut and listened as the hired man fired his rifle.