Cries from the Earth (33 page)

“You should try to come with me,” Isabella had begged Jennet more than once.

“I won't leave long as I know John's out there,” Mrs. Manuel whimpered like a wounded animal. “Don't know if he's dead or alive—so I'm not going off till I can see to his body.”

Isabella stood staring at the three adults in wonder, then gradually realized the men didn't have the nerve to venture far from the house and the brush to see if John Manuel truly was dead or if he somehow still clung to life.

Gazing at her own two daughters, Mrs. Benedict decided she didn't want to chance making that long walk over the divide to Mount Idaho by herself. After Brice and Popham once again ducked out of the house to stay hidden in the brush, Isabella and the girls stayed the night in the Manuel house.

All the children had fallen to sleep like logs, curling up right where they were on the plank floor, while Jennet and Isabella kept watch at the parlor window. Sometime shortly before midnight Isabella spotted a handful of riders moving slowly out of the inky darkness. She had tapped Jennet on the forearm, then pressed her finger against her lips before pointing at the starlit yard. Mrs. Manuel nodded that she had seen the horsemen.

But those six riders moved on past the house without venturing any closer. A half a dozen warriors, feathered up and each one carrying a rifle of some sort in his hands. They scared Isabella to her marrow. The next bunch of the bastards to happen along might not treat her and the young'uns near so kindly, might not let them go free as you please.

So as soon as the riders had passed, Isabella gently shook her two girls. “We've got to sleep in the woods tonight, little ones.”

Without a word of complaint, they both got to their feet, sleepily kneading some knuckles into their eyes as they followed Isabella out the back door and into the dark timber. When she found a likely spot where she could keep an eye on both the house and the wagon road going by, Mrs. Benedict settled back against a tree trunk and let her daughters drift off with their heads resting in her lap.

She herself slipped in and out that night, awakening at every little noise floating out of the blackness of the brushy hillside beyond the Manuel house. At times she felt like crying out—hoping it was a rescue party—but bit her lip instead to keep from alerting any of the roving war parties.

Once, she heard a voice calling out from beyond the yard, “Mrs. Benedict. Mrs. Benedict.”

But Isabella knew it had to be an Indian trick. A few of them knew enough English to sound white as that. And she realized the warriors knew exactly who she was: wife of the “store man” who had shot at several of them when they tried to steal from the store goods. She wasn't about to let the bastards know where she was hiding.

As soon as the sun came up the morning of the fifteenth, she heard a few faint sounds from the brush around them, thinking Popham and Brice must be moving around, checking for John Manuel. Maybe he wasn't dead, she considered. Isabella kept herself and the girls completely silent, not daring to make a sound if those noises weren't the white men.

Through that day Isabella huddled in the brush with her girls, watching as horsemen crossed and recrossed the hillside, descending to the road where Manuel had lain bleeding after the attack, leaking his life into the dirt of this land he had tried to put roots into, like her own Sam.

As the sun went down that Friday, she had no earthly idea where Sam could be. If he were still alive at all.

But Isabella did know one thing with rock-hard certainty: she had to get away from here, not spend one more night or another day. No matter the cost, she had to get the girls to Mount Idaho.

As soon as it was dark enough, here before the moon rose in the east and without worrying to tell another soul, Mrs. Benedict ushered the two little ones out of the brush and started up the steep, all-but-barren hillsides that would lead them over the White Bird Divide to Camas Prairie.

If she made it there with her daughters by the time the sun appeared … they just might have a chance to reach Grangeville or even Mount Idaho. No matter what the odds were against reaching the top without being captured or killed … she and her babies might just have a chance.

Chapter 26

June 15, 1877

John G. Rowton had nearly all forty of his men spread out in a long line, searching the tall grass and brushy thickets as the sun eased down that Friday afternoon … because there was still one more person to find somewhere near the carcasses of those wagon horses abandoned beside the Camas Prairie road. Perhaps one more body to bring in.

Rowton's day had begun just before dawn as he and the others were preparing to set out to warn families southwest in the direction of Henry C. Johnson's ranch that the warriors were more than just rambunctious and making trouble. The red sons of bitches were killing and looting something terrible—what with the way they'd done their devilment with the Nortons. His riders were barely settling onto their saddles when young James Adkison galloped into Grangeville with word that Frank Fenn's rescue party needed rescuing itself. They were just starting down the lane from old man Crooks's place when Adkison came larruping up on his lathered horse.

Sure and be damned, if that wasn't a sight when Rowton's men reached the Mount Idaho–Lapwai Road to see that wagon barely staying ahead of a pack of the red devils! No sooner did those forty-some horsemen fan out across the road than those cowardly Nez Perce decided to turn around and hightail it out of there, but quick.

Never could count on those spineless buggers to put up any sort of a fight when the odds were anywhere close to even!

The other two Adkison boys, who were perched aloft the horses hauling the wagon, pulled to a halt among Rowton's men, gratitude plain on their pasty faces as Frank Fenn and the other two riders reined to a halt behind the wagon.

“You gotta go get my husband!” demanded a scratched-up, disheveled woman the moment she sat up in the wagon bed.

What for all the blood and grime smeared on her face, not to mention all the mud caked in her hair, John didn't recognize the woman as he eased his horse along the sidewall. “Ma'am?”

“Mr. Rowton—please: you gotta go get my husband!” she implored, clasping her hands together prayerfully. “These men, they left him behind when more Injuns come along—”

“You know me?”

She tried to scoot closer to him across the wagon bed, but it was plain to see she was in agony as she shifted her bloody legs. “Can't you see? I'm Jennie Norton, Mr. Rowton.”

“Glory,” he whispered under his breath, startled at her appearance: blood crusted every bare patch of skin and stained her clothing; blackened grime was scrimshandered into every wrinkle, mud smeared on near everything else that wasn't bloody. “Mrs. Norton, you say Benjamin's back there?”

Joe Moore inched himself a little higher along the sidewall and spoke up to defend the others. “He's dead, John. We'd a brung him, but them bastards jumped us afore we could get him in the wagon.”

Rowton touched the brim at the front of his hat. “Mrs. Norton, we'll go get your Benjamin now.”

“There's others,” Moore declared before Rowton could start away.

That brought him up short. “How many?”

“A family. Chamberlins,” Moore said with a wag of his head. “Man, wife, and two young'uns. Li'l girls they are.”

Rowton felt his face blanch, his mouth drawn into a straight line. He struggled to keep his composure as his eyes were drawn back to Jennie Norton. “We'll get your husband, ma'am. We'll find 'em all.”

Because the wagon had reached the outskirts of Grangeville at that point, Frank Fenn, Charles Rice, and George Hashagen all turned their horses around and joined Rowton's search party, backtracking the road toward Cottonwood Butte. It surprised John when they actually found the body of Benjamin Norton lying right where Fenn's party had abandoned it alongside the road—still undisturbed, not mutilated, hair intact.

Dismounting, Rowton split up his men, leaving a few to stay with Norton's body and the horses, sending the rest into the tall grass and man-sized thickets of brush to see if they could find some trace of what direction the Chamberlins might have taken in their flight. Wasn't long before one of the men off to John's right called out that he'd found a body. It was Cash Day hollering for them all to come join him, waving them over.

By the time Rowton and the others crowded into the small copse of trees around John Chamberlin's bullet-ridden body at the bottom of a swale, they all fell silent at the heart-wrenching sight of the settler clutching his dead three-year-old daughter, Hattie, in his cold arms.

“Jesus,” someone whispered almost prayerfully in the stony silence.

Something under the dead man's legs caught John's attention as he stepped closer to the body. Rowton knelt, gently turning over the corpse, starting to tug at a long piece of bloody cloth that immediately came alive, shrieking with an inhuman sound.

“It's a young'un!” one of the men yelled as Rowton stumbled back, totally surprised.

It was a moment before he recognized the figure as a little toddler, small enough that she had been hiding beneath her dead father for … for what must have been a horrid eternity.

Settling back on his knees, Rowton gathered the child in his arms and had begun to soothe her when he noticed the strange way the tot was whimpering through her bloodied lips. Studying her closely, John could see how the tip of the youngster's tongue had nearly been severed. The blackening tip lolled around the front of her mouth, held only by a thin strand of flesh. His first guess was that the baby had so annoyed the warriors with her crying that the savages had tried to hack off her tongue, but the more he looked at the ragged cut, the more John was convinced that it couldn't be the work of a knife.

Rowton figured the toddler must have fallen in making their escape in the dark, perhaps when the father had stumbled carrying the child in his arms. And that must have surely been when this little one nearly bit her own tongue off with her tiny, sharp teeth. But in looking over the youngster now, he saw there was simply too much blood smeared across the girl's chin and down her neck to account for that nearly severed tongue. Gently pulling the collar away from the crusted skin where blood had dried, Rowton discovered a deep, oozy wound low on the toddler's neck.

“Gimme your kerchief,” he asked Frank Fenn. “Wrap it round her neck.”

“Looks to be the godless devils tried killing this li'l'un, too,” Fenn grumbled as he gently wrapped his greasy bandanna around the tot's neck, bandaging the jagged wound as the child winced, howling in pain.

“She's lucky they didn't make sure of it after they stabbed her in the goddamned neck,” Rowton cursed, feeling his face burn with anger at warriors who made war on women and little children. The youngster resumed wailing, thrashing her arms and legs not only at the pain being caused her neck with the bandanna but also for terror of these strangers.

“Here, give her to me, John,” Fenn offered, holding out his arms.

When he had handed the child over and Fenn began cooing at the tot, Rowton stood and said to the others, “That's the three of 'em, fellas. Which means there's only one person left to find. Mrs. Chamberlin.”

“I'll lay odds they took her with 'em,” one of the men observed.

“Nawww, not likely,” another countered. “Kill't her for sure.”

“Why you say that?” someone asked.

“She was … with child,” the man declared, somewhat self-conscious about speaking of a pregnant woman.

“That's right,” George Hashagen agreed. “Red niggers wouldn't want nothing to do with a woman carrying a child in her belly.”

Off to his side, another man growled, “Then she's a dead woman, for sure.”

Rowton himself shook his head sadly. “Don't think they'd drag her off with 'em, fellas. Leastways, I never heard of the Nez Perce ever taking women prisoners to make 'em their wives like other tribes over the mountains.” He sighed. “I figger we'll find her body out there, somewhere.”

“Dragged her off for sure,” a man muttered as the forty spread out again and started combing through the brush and timber once more.

More of the men were grumbling among themselves now too. Rowton couldn't blame them, nor hold them at fault for all their bravado and brave talk about what they would do when they got their hands on the red bastards who could do such a thing as kill one child with a rock to her head, stab another in her neck—a tot no more'n a babe.

“Rowton!”

He started toward that cry at a sprint. The closer he got, the more noisy the commotion became—men shouting, their voices cursing as they tumbled through the brush and shoulder-high grass, other voices pleading.

“Stop, ma'am! It's us! It's us!”

Then Rowton heard the woman's cries, more like the wails of a wounded, frightened animal, as a half-dozen men surrounded her and got Mrs. Chamberlin stopped there at an opening in the tall brush. She was hunched over in a crouch, her clothes torn, muddied, her dress barely clinging to one shoulder, the other crusted with blood darkening her pale skin. The way the woman thrashed this way, then that, John Rowton thought he spotted an ugly, oozy wound above her right breast. Not a neat, round hole—no, more a jagged wound. Just the sort of ragged laceration that led him to believe she had yanked out an iron arrow-tip herself, ripping the flesh of her own breast when she did.

More dried crimson streaked her cheek where she had been struck repeatedly beneath one eye so puffy it was all but completely shut. She continued to growl like a cornered animal as John inched up with the others, closing the ring on her. She held her hands out in front of her, fingers like claws, slashing them at Rowton when he dared to step near her.