Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (13 page)

His father was dead now. His mother …

For three more summers Quanah led his warriors off the Staked Plain and into the realm of the white man—looking, searching, stalking, praying for some clue that might tell him where the white man had taken his mother. Across all that time, he heard her spirit calling out to his heart, pleading with him to come find her, begging him to come take her home to her adopted people and their windswept homeland. It was not until the Moon of Leaves Falling, four winters behind him now, that Quanah learned of the tragic death of Cynthia Ann Parker.

“I must talk to you,” said Philip McCusker quietly, standing at Quanah's shoulder.

The Comanche chief, already disdainful of these talks with the white treaty-makers at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas Territory, looked into the face of the army interpreter.

“Now, Ma-cus-kuh?”

At the white man's insistence they had walked to a quiet spot away from the soldiers and teamsters, the treaty-talkers and chiefs and the warriors and onlookers. Down in the willow and creeper beside the creek itself, Ma-cus-kuh made him sit in the tall grass gone yellow with the passing of the season, foretelling the coming of winter.

McCusker's news was like winter ice on Quanah's heart.

“My spirit is not happy to tell you this,” explained the interpreter. “But you are a man I respect. I may lead the army against you, and my skin is white—as my own heart always will be. But I still respect you for the way you have loved your mother and have never given up your hunt for her.”

“I never will,” Quanah had told him. “Until I find her—I will continue—”

“Your mother is dead, Quanah.”

The words had stung like nothing before, or ever since. With a pain that had diminished little since that terrible moment beside Medicine Lodge Creek.

“My sister—Prairie Flower?”

The interpreter explained how the infant had contracted some illness after her mother was recaptured by the Texas Rangers led by Placidos and his Tonkawas. “She began the long journey to the Other Side before your mother.”

“How?” he had choked free of his lips.

Ma-cus-kuh had stared at the slow-moving stream near their feet. “Your mother died of a broken heart—yearning to return to her husband, Peta Nocona—and you. To the Staked Plain. Cynthia Ann Parker was never the same after she came back to her white family … always sitting, never speaking, staring into the west with those sad eyes of hers.”

Quanah had attempted the sounds of his mother's white name.

“Among our people,” Ma-cus-kuh had explained its significance to him, “we have a first and a last name.”

“My mother's last name was Pah-kuh?”

“Yes, Parker.”

Knowing his eyes were growing moist, already stinging at the deepening pain that even then he knew would have no end, Quanah had stood, shaking hands with the interpreter. It was something the white man put great importance on, this shaking hands.

“Ma-cus-kuh, I will take my mother's name. In memory of the life she gave to me, not only will I never live captive on a reservation … but from this day on, I will be called Quanah Pah-kuh.”

Looking behind him one last time now as he pushed his warriors before him, sheltering the women and children who were fleeing the oncoming soldiers of Three Finger Kinzie into the fury of the winter storm, Quanah Parker again swore he would never give up this free-roaming life as long as there was breath in his body, and his mother's blood in his veins.

*   *   *

When Lieutenant Peter M. Boehm led that rescue of Carter and his four surviving troopers, they were riding the advance of Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's assault on the Comanche.

The colonel had seen to it that every soldier he could mount was in the saddle within minutes of the Kwahadi attack. Leaving behind those who were without horses to protect their supply train, Mackenzie led some five hundred troopers north toward the sound of the gunfire—just as Lieutenant Robert G. Carter had hoped they would.

And just as he had prayed in those last moments before he was rescued. Now Carter joined Boehm's advance as they pursued the Comanche horsemen who moments before had been close to claiming the young officer's hair. With flankers out left and right, Mackenzie plunged his five hundred ahead, up the canyon and on a course for Mount Blanco where the Comanche village was fleeing. Northward—into the jaws of the first winter storm to attack the southern plains.

Little more than a mile ahead Carter began to see the first signs of the enemy in the dimming light as the rising sun was snuffed out beneath a blackening, winter sky. Women and children hurried to load ponies with their possessions and lodges. Those too young or too old to walk were hoisted onto the backs of ponies or settled on travois before the wild flight bolted for the slopes of Mount Blanco. It wasn't long before the sound of their screams and warnings came to his ears, carried on the cold wind out of the north, blowing so strong in Carter's face that it whipped tears from the corners of his eyes.

Between Mackenzie's advance and those women and children milled the angry wasps, shouting their war songs, working one another up for the coming fight, daring the soldiers to come on and fight them on equal footing. For the moment, they would cover the retreat of their families into the first, icy flakes of the storm and the darkening shadows of that tall ridge called Mount Blanco. Near the bottom where the women were now pushing the ponies and mules, the slope was gentle, covered with some waving, yellowed grass and scrub. But farther up, the climb grew much steeper.

And what the Comanche were going to climb—Mackenzie's five hundred would have to climb as well.

Yard by yard the warriors dropped back as the blue wave came on. With their families safely climbing the slopes above them, the Comanche melted into the rocks and fissures of the ridge, most dismounting to turn and fire back at the approaching yellowlegs.

Bullets whined overhead, smacking into the rocks around the soldiers, kicking up spouts of dirt all around them. Unlike many of the plains tribes, among the Comanche were many marksmen. They had long had the white man's weapons. Among Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry that winter day were more than his share of green recruits asked now to fire back into the jaws of those screaming, painted hellions protecting their families climbing higher still the slopes above the prairie floor.

“Carter!”

The lieutenant turned to find Boehm skidding to a halt behind the rock Carter was using for a shield. “Peter!”

“We'll have the whole advance pinned down here if we don't knock out the sharpshooters up there,” Boehm said, pointing up the slope with his pistol.

“Let's get some volunteers who'll make the ride with us,” Carter replied. “We can clear that nest ourselves!”

With seven soldiers, the two lieutenants remounted, reined about and with a shout burst from the rocks, kicking their horses into a fury up the slope. Yard by yard at first, then foot by foot as the pace slowed, the Comanche rained down a furious hail on the nine yellowlegs following a narrow, winding trail up the stony ridge.

So intent was he on watching up the slope for the puffs of rifle smoke he aimed his own shots at, that Carter did not see a sharp rock jutting out into the trail before it was too late. He sawed the reins hard to the right as his horse tore by the stony outcrop with a sound like the crack of a pistol shot.

The collision nearly lifted the lieutenant out of the saddle as the icy shards of pain made him grow woozy instantly. In panic he clutched the saddle pommel, afraid of losing consciousness and falling where the Comanche could finish him off. Blinking rapidly as the darkness seeped down over his fevered eyes, Carter swallowed repeatedly to hold down the bile at the back of his throat—afraid he would throw up what was left in his empty belly.

As the thick blackness enveloped him, Carter sank forward, grasping with his last bit of resolve to clutch his arms around the horse's neck. He was now nothing more than dead weight on an animal he had required so much of in the last few hours.

On the foggy periphery of his awareness, the lieutenant heard the wild yelps of the Comanche quickly fading from his ears, as the wild yells of his white compatriots grew stronger. Surely, he thought in some part of himself still struggling to maintain consciousness, Mackenzie's men must be coming now.

“Get him down from there, dammit!”

“Here—let him fall into our arms.”

Voices prodded him, but still Carter could not open his eyes. The insistent cold wind and a few icy snow-flakes stung his cheek as he felt himself gently pulled from the staggering horse.

“Pull his damned arms loose, soldier!”

Then he felt himself on the rocky ground, someone attempting to cradle his left leg as best they could.

“Gimme your canteen. There—off that horse.”

He was trying to place the voice when a cold splash of water slapped his face. Carter came to with a start, fighting those who held him. The movement brought a sharp stab of overwhelming pain to the left leg.

“That's it,” said an old sergeant, his breath thick with fragrant chew, “just settle down till the surgeon gets here, son. Er, sorry, Lieutenant. That ol' sawbones look at your leg and fix 'er up for you.”

With trepidation Carter looked down at the leg. Just above the top of his boot his britches gaped open, torn crudely, blood still seeping from the wound into a bandanna a second soldier, a young private, held against the leg.

“Is … is it broke?” Carter asked as a wave of pain passed over him.

“You get that whiskey I sent you for, Corporal?” asked the old sergeant before he looked back down at Carter. “Most likely it is broke, Lieutenant.”

“Here, Sarge,” the young corporal replied. “Found it in your bags, like you said it'd be.”

“You won't tell the old man, will you, Lieutenant?” asked the sergeant with a wry grin.

“The whiskey?” was all Carter could force out between his clenched teeth as a wave of pain washed over him.

Beyond them, fading down the far slope of Mount Blanco, were the assorted sounds of the chase: gunfire and war-cries, the screams of women and children and horses and ponies, the pounding of hooves and the tumbling of rocks spilled loose.

“Yeah,” the old sergeant replied as he worried the fragrant cork from the bottle's neck. “I keep it for just such occasions as this. You need some, Lieutenant—in the worst way. Here,” he said as he and another propped Carter's head up, “drink some while we wait on the surgeon.”

It didn't take as long as he thought it would until the surgeon got to his side, grumbling and cursing about the climb.

“I'm too goddamned old for this, you know—being a contract surgeon out here in this wilderness,” he growled as he tromped to a halt and knelt beside Carter.

“Broke leg, Doc,” explained the sergeant.

“Since when did you go to medical school, soldier?” snapped the surgeon.

“Since I seen it with my own goddamned eyes, that's what,” growled the other old man.

The surgeon chuckled, nodding at the graying sergeant, then peered down at Carter's face. “At least you're making a better patient of yourself than Mackenzie himself is.”

“The general's shot?” asked one of the younger soldiers gathered in a tight, shivering knot as the snow began to lance down with a whining fury out of the lowering, gray underbelly of the sky.

“Take 'er easy, son,” coaxed the surgeon. “Just had to pull a arrow out of his leg is all. He don't take to sitting still much, you know. And he sure made the job a hard one on me—pulling that barbed son of a bitch out of that bloody meat … my hands shaking to beat the band. Damn, but it's cold!” He sighed and sank back on his haunches.

“Bad news, Doc?” asked the sergeant.

With a shake of his head the surgeon reached for the whiskey bottle the old soldier held. “Gimme some of that. Damn, I ain't been this cold in … no—it ain't bad news at all. In fact, the lieutenant's leg ain't broke. But we're gonna have to splint it up and splint it good to get him down off this goddamned mountainside.”

“You boys there,” the sergeant called. “Cut me some stout limbs off that mesquite bush yonder. Gimme four long ones for the lieutenant's leg.”

Between gasping, throat-numbing draws on the sergeant's whiskey bottle, the surgeon dressed the gaping, bloody wound and splinted the leg so Carter could not bend it, between promises to repay the old sergeant for the whiskey the old surgeon was greedily lapping up as the first storm of the winter bore down on Blanco Canyon with a vengeance.

“You'll pay me back soon's we get back to Richardson, won't you, Doc?”

“I will—but the way Mackenzie's going at it, growling like a bear with the mange—we won't see Richardson for some time.”

The old sergeant chuckled heartily. “You ain't no soldier, Doc. Won't be long before we head on the backtrail to home and you can repay me my whiskey. Winter's come,” he said, scooping up a little of the icy snow from Carter's chest. “And that means Mackenzie will be forced to give up the chase and let the Comanche go until spring.”

“That too tight, son?” asked the surgeon as he cinched a knot in the bandage.

“Yes, dammit. It's real tight,” Carter complained.

“Good,” replied the surgeon curtly. “Then it's on just right. Here, let me have the last of that whiskey. Mackenzie's turning this outfit back out of this storm. Damn, but ain't it cold?”

It was, and a lot of that cold was seeping down into the young lieutenant's bones. But not where the thoughts of Mary rested. There it was warm.

Carter knew he would soon be turning around and heading back to Mary at Fort Richardson. And for a moment he looked north into the swirling fury of that snowstorm come to batter these southern plains, a snowstorm the army itself would not buck—wondering on the wild people they had been tracking and fought, marveling that without a word of complaint, that band of wild people was marching into the jaws of a prairie blizzard.