Novel 1966 - Kilrone (v5.0) (12 page)

The post, which was usually stirring with soldiers and military activity by this time, was all dark and still. The Indians would have seen or smelled the smoke from the stoves, but nothing moved about the post buildings. They had waited and watched, planning their attack, but nothing happened. Now they had come to see.

One by one they appeared, disappeared, then appeared again. They walked a few steps, paused to listen and to look, then impelled by a curiosity that robbed them of caution, they came out further on the parade ground. Undoubtedly this was the culmination of several hours of waiting and listening, for it was a certain thing that the Indians had been out there for some time.

“Teale,” Kilrone said, “you and Ryan keep a sharp watch. When that explosion goes off, somebody is going to jump and run. I don’t want them to get away.”

“What explosion?”

“Don’t worry, Teale. There’ll be one. Right out there in front of you.” He explained quickly what he had done, and Teale grinned at him.

Kilrone knelt at the window. His mouth was dry and he kept wiping his palms on his pants. It was very still out there in the growing light. Two of the Indians had turned and were walking up the parade ground toward Headquarters. Another one was trying the door of a barracks, but the door had been locked. He went to the window, put his face against the glass, and peered in.

Every moment of delay, Kilrone was thinking, was a moment won, for it was a moment closer to the return of the troops. He could hear his own heart beating. Within the room, nobody stirred, or even seemed to breathe.

“Just wait,” he said aloud, “let them look around.”

There were several Indians around the corral, picking up what they could use. The horses had been gone before daylight. Including his own. A man didn’t have to have much in this country, but without a horse he had nothing at all.

The sky remained gray and sullen, and over the mountains the overcast had shrouded the peaks. The color of the trees was beginning to be clear now, a deeper green, more somber somehow.

How did a man feel when he was about to die, Kilrone wondered. And it might come to just that. Any Indians out there at all, meant that there would be several hundred.

“They’ll burn me out,” Hopkins remarked gloomily.

“You’ll be alive,” Kells said. “How about that?”

But would he? At least, he would have a fighting chance here, and so would his wife.

Betty was suddenly beside Kilrone. “Barney, where’s Mary?”

“The Indian girl? I haven’t seen her.”

“They’ll kill her, Barney.”

Would they? One never knew about Indians. She had been one of them, but was no longer. Or had she gone back to them? Many an Indian had, returning to her own or his own people even after every opportunity to stay among the whites. And wild Indians had been known to treat such Indians as they would a white man…or worse.

“She’s out, Barney. We’ve got to help her.”

“How? We haven’t seen her. And where would a man look?”

“She’d go to the sutler’s store. She lived there, you know. She’d feel responsible, I am sure.”

He looked down the length of the parade ground. It was about 500 feet to the sutler’s store, and the parade ground measured slightly over half of that. He felt something grow cold within him. To walk down there under the guns of the Indians, and then to return with Mary Tall Singer—if, indeed, she was there.…

“Do you have any idea how much chance a man would have to make it?” he said.

“Not much,” she admitted. “Maybe I should go.”

“You’d have no chance at all,” he said. “You wouldn’t get halfway.”

They stood silent, and he looked down the field and measured it in his mind with his strides. How many strides before a bullet struck? How long would they wait before striking? The Indian is a warrior, and a warrior respects the brave…would they wait to see if a man could walk that distance disdaining the danger? Would they be curious enough to test his courage? And did he have the courage to make that walk?

How far was it? How many steps?

A slow lift of smoke came from the store’s chimney. “She’s there, then,” Hopkins said. “She stayed to watch my goods.”

“Or for some other reason,” Kells said. “You’re forgettin’ she’s an Injun.”

Denise had come from the back of the building. “She is an Indian, but she is loyal to us, too. I would not want her to turn against her own people, but I would never doubt her loyalty to us.”

“You don’t know Injuns, ma’am. They have no loyalty for a white man…or woman.”

Kilrone continued to look down the parade ground and felt the devil rising in him. He knew it was a wild and crazy feeling, but the urge was there. It was a challenge.…Could he make it? Could any man? If he started and then showed the least hesitation, the least sign of fear…Hell, they’d shoot him anyway. He wouldn’t get ten feet. It was a fool idea, the sort of idea that could get a man killed. But there was a girl down there in that store, a girl the Indians might be likely to kill.

If he started, how long would he have before somebody got trigger-happy and started blasting? How long before somebody back in the ditch behind the building decided to light a fuse? Or would they check that fuse and find out what he had done?

Nobody said anything, but they were looking down the same stretch that he was, and every one of them was thinking of Mary Tall Singer, a girl who had tried to go the white man’s way, and whom they had deserted. It would look that way, wouldn’t it?

Kilrone got to his feet. He stood his rifle beside the window. “I’ll go get her,” he said.

“Don’t be a fool!” Kells said, getting up.

“You boys stand pat,” Kilrone said. “Don’t start any shooting unless you have to.” His hand was on the door-knob.

“Barney…Mr. Kilrone,” Betty said, “don’t.”

He opened the door and stepped outside and began walking toward the sutler’s store. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and as he walked he ran through his mind the words and tune of an old marching song. He knew the Indians were all around him, that they might at any moment decide to shoot, and that at any sign of hesitation they certainly would.

He knew they were moving out from the buildings onto the parade ground. One dashed his horse across in front of Kilrone, but he kept marching. Not far ahead of him now was the sutler’s store, and when he was about fifty steps away, the door suddenly opened and Mary Tall Singer stood there, waiting for him.

He walked up to her. “I have come to take you with me,” he said. “Will you come?”

She looked at him with dark, enigmatic eyes, then she walked down the steps. Coolly, he offered her his arm, and they started back up the parade ground. The distance seemed twice as far now. Suddenly half a dozen Indians on ponies raced across the field toward them. Kilrone walked straight on, looking neither to right nor left, and the Indians, whipped by within inches of them. Yet he went on, unflinching, the dark-haired girl at his side keeping pace. Again and again the Indians raced their horses at them, wheeling not a foot away.

Then all of a sudden an armed Indian stepped directly in front of Kilrone, lance drawn back, and Kilrone walked right straight at him, looking into the cold black eyes. The point of the lance touched his breast, and he moved it lightly aside with his left hand, brushing it away as he might have brushed a cobweb or a leaf in the forest.

Ahead of him Kilrone saw the door open a crack, the merest crack. It would not be long now. He felt cold and the hair on the back of his neck prickled; the muscles between his shoulder blades seemed to tighten with the expectation of a shot or an arrow. But still he kept on.

Suddenly, from behind the Headquarters building there came a tremendous explosion, an explosion followed by three quick, barking shots.

Kilrone turned sharply on the Indians behind him. “Inside!” he hissed to Mary Tall Singer. “Get in…
quick!
”

An Indian threw a rifle to his shoulder and instantly Kilrone palmed his pistol and fired from the hip. The bullet smashed the Indian in the chest a split second before his own shot went off, but the rifle tilted with the bullet’s impact and the Indian’s shot sailed off into the air.

Kilrone backed to the door, holding his fire, and then all the Indians seemed to be shooting at once. From the time of the explosion until now was no more than a few seconds, but time had seemed to lag. Kilrone fired, saw an Indian stagger, and then he leaped backward. Stumbling over the step, he went through the door and it was slammed and barred behind him.

He went quickly through the room to the back. Teale looked at him, his eyes glinting with hard humor. “Well, well That’s more’n I’d have done for an Injun gal!”

Kilrone glanced at him. “Teale, you don’t fool me a bit. You’d have done it, and to hell with the price. I know your kind.”

He gestured toward the ditch where he had planted the explosive. “What happened?”

“Plenty…that explosion scared ’em more’n it hurt, but I reckon it did for one, maybe two of the Injuns…and a white man tried to get away. He didn’t make it.”

“Good.”

The shooting was general now. There were no Indians in sight, however. All were skillful fighters, and would not waste themselves in any useless effort. They wanted victory, but they meant to win it without too great a cost.

Kilrone made the rounds, looking out of the windows. The parade ground was empty. The Indian he had killed and at least one other killed or wounded had been carried away. So had any others who had been hurt. A shot came from a window of the nearest barracks, another from the corner of a building.

Beyond the parade ground and barracks clouds hung low around the mountain shoulders, and within the buildings was the smell of powder smoke. Now there was silence…no targets, no Indians only stillness.

Kilrone could see the corral, and the horses were gone. Had he noticed that before? He had, he was sure, but he could not remember when. He knelt by the window, waiting, rifle in hand, but nothing stirred. Once a bird flew down and lighted on the parade ground, pecking at something in the dust. After a moment or two, taking alarm at something, it flew away.

They waited…and waited…

Half an hour went by…an hour. The Indians were looting the barracks. Somewhere they heard the crash of glass, a window breaking.

Betty came with coffee and Kilrone sat down with his back to the wall and cupped it in his hands. Never had coffee tasted so good.

“That was wonderful,” Betty said. “I mean, to go and get Mary.”

“She had nerve. You know her hand on my arm never so much as trembled.”

He had been doing some calculating. Unless Rybolt was shrewd, or shot with luck, he and his payroll escort were gone. Caught out in the open they wouldn’t have a chance…and the Indians would know they were coming.

What he was thinking about, however, was not so much Rybolt as Major Paddock, Captain Mellett, and the cavalry. They could not very well get back in less than two days, and more likely it would be three…could they hold out that long here at the post?

But supposing they, too, had been attacked? Suppose they had been wiped out? It would be weeks before help could come from elsewhere, even if their predicament was realized.

For the first time Kilrone began to think seriously of escaping from the post.

Chapter 11

T
HROUGHOUT THE MORNING the firing was sporadic, with little result on either side. Fire from the three buildings kept the Indians out of range most of the time, but not without cost. One child was cut, not badly, by flying glass, and in the warehouse Mendel was wounded.

He was standing at a broken window trying to get a shot, when an Indian hidden nearby put a bullet into his hip, turning him for the second shot, which entered near his spine and emerged near the belt buckle.

Early in the afternoon there was a sudden explosion on the hospital side…a mine that Kilrone had not found, or one hidden since his exploration. The explosion knocked a hole in the wall of the building and killed Olson. For several minutes the Indians concentrated a hot fire on the hole and then tried a rush.

Two Indians fell from shots by Lahey and Ryerson, and the attack broke. One of the Indians dropped near the wall, and with a sudden rush got close enough to be out of range.

“We’ve got to get him,” Ryerson said. “He’s right alongside that hole. Any time we stop watching he can shoot right into us.”

“You mean stick your head outside?” Lahey said. “You try it, Sarge. Not me.”

Barney Kilrone crouched by the window. Somebody was moving around in one of the barracks about a hundred and fifty feet away. He could occasionally see a swift shadow against the window, and from time to time he heard a yell from Indians who were looting there.

He waited, biding his time. Then he saw the shadow again and lifted his rifle, taking a careful sight. He took up slack on the trigger, and felt the rifle leap in his hands as the shot went off. There was a crash of glass and the Indian fell backward through the window, one arm flailing wildly as he tried to catch the corner to break his fall.

Kilrone worked the lever on his gun and as the Indian hit the ground he fired into him. The Indian half rose, and then fell back.