Medicine Road (24 page)

"Black Coyote is an idiot!" Tim's words burst angrily. "Where is the sense in such a plan? This
Tokeya has stolen my woman. He is a faithful friend
of Big Throat's. I have been well paid by the Mormon chief. I ..."

Watonga interrupted the interrupter. "Who can
make sense out of the ways of white men? We think
Big Face is a liar, and we no longer trust him. I think
we will kill him, too."

"How will we do it?" asked Skull happily.

"I'd like to burn his feet, first," suggested Yellow
Leg amicably. "Like the Utes did to this leg of
mine."

"No, no," Blood Face put in hurriedly. "Too simple. There is no art in burning like that."

"That's right," Dog Head agreed. "No art in that."

"How about just taking the tongue out?" asked
Elk Runner. "I mean before the other things, of
course. That always feels good."

"Yes," his friend, Gray Bear, sided in earnestly.
"And we could flay the tongue first. You remember
how that Kiowa showed us last summer. You heat
the hot grease until it is blue, and then...."

"Enough!" snapped Watonga. "We'll leave it to
my woman, Tall Elk. She'll know how to deal with a
white brother who gives our plans away and lets us
be trapped like wet-nosed children. Tall Elk has a
head for such things. That squaw's a real artist.
She'll know how to do it best."

"Yes, nobody like Tall Elk for fun. I'm thinking
that, too." Skull was trying to be helpful.

"No matter what you think," barked Black Coy ote. "Any of you. It will be as I say. We will leave
here tomorrow and go on after the buffalo. After we
have found a herd and made our winter meat, we'll
have a dance with this sunke. Nohetto, that's all."

Jesse didn't need Black Coyote's final word to tell
him that Tim was flayed closer than a newly skinned
skunk. When the Arapahoes got their buffalo hunting
done, they would set up a scalp dance, a real Pekocan
sunpi wacipi. It was the season for such affairs. And
when the last ceremony was over, Tim would have
tripped the light fantastic right on through the front
ballroom of Wanagi Yata, the Indian Land of the Final
Shadow. As for Tim, the former wagon guide for the
Kansas emigrants and sometime Mormon jack-of-alldirty-trades was thinking of how he had never
learned to dance, and of how he would hate like tarnal sin to take his first lesson from Watonga and his
Wind River Arapahoes.

All the next day, Jesse trailed the slow-moving village, the welcome shade of twilight bringing him and
his Indian quarry out onto the main Medicine Road.
As he watched the scattered caravan crowd out of the
rough country and line out on the broad, wheelrutted track of the Oregon Trail, the new direction of
the hostile line of march together with the leisurely
trail gait with which they headed into it brought a
grunt of satisfaction from the mountain man.

Scanning the dusty southward reach of the trail
behind the Arapaho cavalcade, he caught the distant
glimmer of the jagged Green River range that
marked the site of Fort Bridger. Wagh! Plenty good,
by damn. Gabe's peaks. Everything was smack-dab
on the schedule he had given Morgan Bates and his
Missouri muleskinners. It brought a good feeling in side a man to find his tricky Indian arithmetic come
toting up to a sure-fire sum. The red buzzards were
heading north, taking the wide-open Medicine
Road while they were about it, and traveling plumb
slow. And at this point they weren't three days'
mule drive above Gabe's fort!

Later that evening, Jesse, shivering in the night
cold of his fireless hiding place above the Indian
camp, had time for a little more frontier sum toting.
The answer came out that, if Andy Hobbs had hammered his mules from first light to late dark, every
day since Morgan and the boys had gotten back to
him with the emigrant survivors, he might now be
at Fort Bridger. That would put the arrival of the
powder wagon at Jesse's present position at about
four, probably five, days away. Cripes! A man would
need some luck now.

If Watonga headed up the Medicine Road by regular marches, even not hurrying his present pace
any, the powder wagon still could miss ever catching up to him. And if he headed west, into the goatwild tangle of the Wasatches, it sure never would. It
was a spot for some big luck and fast figuring. Depending on what action daylight brought from Black
Coyote, Jesse might have to move on in and make
his lone-hand stab at snatching Lacey's boy away
from him.

What daylight did bring was neither of the things
the mountain man feared-it was worse than both
of them. With sunup, the nerve-strung trapper saw
all the lodges, save one, come tumbling down. By
eight o'clock, the main village had departed, moving straight up the Medicine Road in long marching
order. Left behind were Watonga's starkly black
hunting teepee and his 100 hard-core warriors. These war-painted remainders made no move to
travel, lolling around the deserted camp until close
to high noon. Jesse had not been able to see Johnny
among the multi-ponied panoply of the departing
village but an hour ago he had spotted Tall Elk coming out of the chief's lodge and had guessed from
this, with a sense of vast relief, that the boy hadn't
left with the main tribe.

With the sun directly overhead, things picked up
down below, Watonga appearing in full hunting
garb to lead his restless pack through the yelling
ceremony of a short buffalo stomp. Jesse's interest
perked, at once. By damn, this was more like it. Evidently this was a picked group of hunters, hanging
back while the main bunch drifted to the Wind
River winter camp. He should have guessed as
much from the fact they kept no lodges, and from
the hefty size of the horse herd that stayed with
them. You needed plenty of ponies to run buffalo
and tote meat, happen you got into a good bunch of
young cows.

Now, if the sons would only lay around camp a
couple of days to give the powder wagon a chance to
get up from Fort Bridger.... They didn't.

The mountain man had no more than put the
wish that they would into his head, than he saw Watonga's black lodge coming down. Minutes later, the
whole passel of them was streaming off west, nearly
square away from the Medicine Road, into a country where a wagon could go easily-providing it
could fly

Jesse knew this country. The track led up toward
Portola Springs, through Carson's Canon by way of
Rockpile Meadow. It was the direct route to Coulter's Meadow (the hostiles' Cheyenne Mesa), the famed North Park of the Rockies, where buffalo
could be found when they weren't any place else in
the Indian world.

Riding hard, the mountain man got uptrail of the
savage column, tied Heyoka in an alder clump, bellied his way up over the trail where it squeezed
through a narrow granite defile leading into Carson's Canon. Here, he could all but spit on the
braves as they filed past beneath him. Plenty close,
anyway, to check for certain sure if they had Johnny
with them. He had to know that. He couldn't just
guess at it.

Ten minutes later, Watonga's lump-jawed face
came bobbing over a ridge top 100 yards away. The
chief topped out on the ridge, started haunchsliding his pony down into the declivity above
which Jesse lay. After him, piled the grim train of
his followers headed by Tall Elk and Johnny
O'Mara. When the woman and the boy passed below him, Jesse noted the youngster was drawnlooking, no longer chipper and whistling. Looking
at the brute faces of his Arapaho escort, the mountain man could understand the change. The kid
might be spunky enough, but the first excitement
was gone. No doubt he had expected his white folks
to catch the Indians and get him away from them
long before this. More specifically, he probably had
looked for Tokeya, the Minniconjou to come thundering out of the sunset and kill the hell out of these
mangy red dogs, releasing Red Eagle amid a withering hail of gunfire and high-pressure Sioux
screaming. Now three days of hard trailing through
a lonely wilderness, with no sign of a conquering
white hero any place, had silenced the boy. He was a
pinched-faced, scared-looking kid when he jogged past below Jesse on the little spotted pony. The
mountain man's heart turned over in him with a
heavy tug that lumped his throat proper. By God, if
he didn't get that boy away from Watonga and his
slate-faced wife, it wouldn't be for not trying!

Waiting for the Arapahoes to get on past, Jesse got
his second jolt. At the tail of the bunch, flanked by
Yellow Leg and Dog Head, followed by the grinning
Skull, came the bound and scowling Tim O'Mara.
The captive renegade, eyes red from spending his
nights laced, upright, against a tree, a long week's
trail dust blurring his slab face, buckskins dirtstinking from not having been off of him in six suns,
looked about as happy as a short-haired hound in a
bluestone hailstorm.

Raising his head and shifting his body to get a
better look, Jesse's hand moved a fraction. A walnutsized pebble rattled over the edge of the rimrock,
fell toward the passing Indians. At the first rattle,
Tim's nervous eyes snapped upward, the slit
glances of his red companions following swiftly.

Jesse jerked his head back down, lay, tense and
eartuned. A cat couldn't have been any more strung
up to jump. God damn it, why did a man have to get
careless just when his chances were nearly snowed
anyway? Tim had seen him, sure as hell was hot,
and likely the rest of the cussed slant eyes, too. The
guttural questions barked up from below did nothing to loosen the bite of the mountain man's nails in
the scaly granite of the rimrock.

"What was that?" Yellow Leg's challenge burst
growlingly.

"I heard nothing," said Skull. "Only a pebble rattling down. A lizard, maybe. Who would know?"

"I would!" snapped Dog Head. "I thought I saw something get back of that rock up there. It was
bright, like hair. I'm going up there."

Jesse's belly shrank and the slime dried in his
mouth. He gathered himself to leap and run for it.
Tim, bass voice sneering, spared him the jump.
"Sure it was hair. I saw it. An old boar marmot. Very
bright color, almost red. Big as a man's head. He
went right behind that rock, like Dog Head says.
That one you are pointing at, there, Dog Head.
Didn't you see it, cousin?"

"I don't know. It looked too red, not gray enough
for a whistle dog."

Dog Head was obdurate, inspiring Jesse to give
Tim's surprising co-operation a gentle boost. He
hadn't tried the trick since he was a boy with
Waniyetula, but there'd been a time not even Winter
Boy, that prairie magician of animal imitations,
could beat Tokeya at whistling-up marmots. Pouching his taut cheeks, he brought the breath high and
jerky through his clenched teeth.

"Ho, ho! You hear that, you dogface, you?" Yellow
Leg was laughing at his comrade. "It is even as Big
Face said. An old dog whistler, nothing more. Come
on, we fall too far back. Watonga wants to pitch his
lodge at those springs tonight. Hopo. Hookahey!"

"All right," Dog Head gave in grumblingly.
"Hopo. It was too red, though. Much too red."

When they had gone, Jesse rolled back off the
rimrock, legged it for Heyoka. Mounting up, he
raced the gray mare back toward the Medicine Road
and the previous night's Indian camp.

There, twenty minutes' work with his knife and
some cook fire charcoal on the back of his buckskin
shirt, and he had done all he could to steer Morgan
Bates and the hoped-for muleskinners. When he swung back up on Heyoka, kicking her around for
Carson's Canon again, the shirt stayed behind, flapping on a cottonwood stake jammed into the broad
trace of the main Medicine Road. Happen a stray
gang of Indians didn't wander along to tear it down,
meantime a pack of white teamsters from Fort
Bridger, providing they moseyed this way and
could read Sioux sign scratching, might get the idea
that at this point in the Medicine Road Tokeya the
Minniconjou had lit out toward Rockpile Meadow,
hot on the tracks of a big black coyote and a very
small red eagle.

Tim O'Mara, the renegade Mormon, was well born
into a bad trade. Strong as a buffalo, tough as a
range bull, tricky as a fox in a farmer's barnyard,
moral as a stray dog, Tim was bred to get fat grazing
trouble's lean pasture. You get yourself a bad lot like
that snubbed up to where his string is shorter than a
broken crotch-cloth lace, and you can dig your toes
in for some fast shuffles. In the case of the "old boar
marmot" diving behind that rock back there on the
canon rim, Tim had seen enough to know that Dog
Head had been right. That marmot had been way
too bright-colored. Too bright-colored and redhaired. Too narrow-eyed and sunburned. Too widemouthed and human-looking.

Tim's first impulse had been to yell out and put
Jesse Callahan out of business for good. His second
thought, plugging his big-lipped mouth tighter than
the bung in a powder barrel, had been that the hidden white man represented what might be his last
link with the world of safety, a world that was cur rently falling behind Tim's scalp-itch-inspired rehabilitation at a shuffling pony gait of thirty miles a
day. At the moment Tim had no idea how he was going to profit by his knowledge that Jim Bridger's
red-headed wagon guide was trailing Black Coyote's buffalo hunters, but the dry breast of necessity
always has a mouthful of milk for the nurser who
sucks hard enough. By the time the Arapahoes had
stopped to give their ponies a noon rest in Rockpile
Meadow, he had it figured pretty closely.