Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (15 page)

So it was that the war-chief was securing iron arrow points to the rosewood shafts with long, thin strips of sinew Quanah held in his mouth to soften. Each shaft he had deeply and painstakingly grooved so that it would bleed its intended victim—buffalo bull, Tehan settler, or yellowleg soldier.

At the same time, he watched his young son play on the buffalo hide outside the lodge this warm autumn day when the first stirrings of alarm shot through camp.

“Soldiers!”

Quanah bolted to his feet, scattering the arrow shafts and iron tips and sinew and owl feathers he used as fletching because owl feathers kept their shape even dipped in blood. He pushed his infant son into his wife's hands, ordering her to flee. In one easy movement he lifted them both to the back of the war pony he always kept tethered at the side of their lodge, grazing close at hand. In an instant he was into the lodge, then back again, handing his woman a small rawhide satchel filled with dried meat for their trip.

She looked down at him, tears coming to her eyes. He did not want her to speak.

Quanah tried to smile. To make her brave. She must be brave, for she was the wife of a war-chief and the mother of his son.

“I will see you both again, very soon. It may be with the coming of the new sun. Maybe two suns. But we will be together again. You must believe … and now you must ride!”

He slapped the spotted pony's rump, causing it to jump to the side as the woman pulled hard on the buffalo-hair rein.

After seeing her disappear into the tangle of women and children fleeing from the far side of the village in a noisy cacophony of keening, crying, pony-neighing clamor, Quanah wheeled and snatched up his bow and quiver of arrows, then found a place in his hand for the brass-studded Winchester repeater he had stolen from a white man he scalped along the Pease River.

The distant gunfire was growing in volume now. And he could see that the white soldiers were led by the Tonkawas. Quanah Parker cursed them—these savages who ate the flesh of other people. Surely these Tonkawas were not human beings.

Were the white men who followed the Tonkawas not human beings as well?

Levering the first cartridge into the breech, Quanah squeezed the recurring thought out of his mind—much too painful, for he was half white himself.

Chapter 10

September 28, 1872

Sharp Grover felt too old for all this.

He waited as his heartbeat slowed, now that the gunfire had died off and the excitement passed in the prairie darkness, like the leave-taking of a prairie thunderstorm here seven miles from the north fork of the Red River. There hadn't been much fighting to speak of there beneath the starshine. Only a lot of shouting and noise and confusion when the Comanche came screeching in to reclaim their pony herd from the soldiers who had attacked the Kwahadi village.

His chest had burned with some mysterious fire, hurting him from the moment the Tonkawa trackers had returned with the news that they had located the village on McClellan Creek, near the mouth of Blanco Canyon, that autumn afternoon. Now there were stars twinkling brightly overhead and the sound of hoofbeats and gunfire fading into the distance.

Sweeping in out of the blackness, the Kwahadi Comanche had come back for their ponies.

During the short, furious battle earlier that afternoon, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie ordered three of his companies to bear the brunt of the attack. Grover knew the colonel was planning on holding his fourth company in reserve at the point of attack, but when the charge began and Sharp saw that the young Comanche herders were hurrying the ponies toward the village so the warriors could fight off the assault mounted, Grover advised Mackenzie to send that last company out to cut off the herd. They and the Tonkawas were directed to capture the enemy's greatest wealth—those ponies.

“Left front—oblique!” Mackenzie shouted into the arid, crackling prairie air astir with dust.

Up and down the line of rattling bit-chains and squeaking leather, clattering carbines and nervous, snorting horses, the order was echoed above the remaining three companies. Most of those troopers had only glanced at the company of soldiers riding after the pony herd, for their attention was captured by the screeching, enraged warriors preparing to cover the retreat of their families.

“We've gone and stuck a big stick in this hornets' nest, Colonel,” Grover had whispered.

“Now that they're stirred up, I've got no other choice but to swat them!” Mackenzie had replied grimly, then turned to his staff. “Order the charge!”

His adjutant twisted in the saddle, finding the color bearer and the bugler waiting expectantly. “Bugler—sound the advance … charge!”

On the dry, autumn wind their red, white and blue guidons snapped furiously as the entire line bolted into motion like a surging ocean tide racing headlong for the shore. And by the time the troopers reached the outskirts of the village, the warriors were pulling back. Mackenzie ordered one of his companies sharply to the right flank to cut off any escape through a narrow cut in the grass-covered hills, the maneuver coming quickly enough to entrap 124 women and children. For the rest of the Kwahadis, the back door had slammed shut after the quarry had flown.

Their women and children either captured or already racing into the hills, the Comanche fought only long enough to cover the retreat of the rest, then dissipated onto the prairie like ground fog warmed by a spring sun.

In thirty minutes of furious action, twenty-three Comanche were dead, most of them warriors who had turned back to fight. As the first of the regiment's supper fires began to glow at twilight, the colonel had his report: three troopers killed, another seven wounded, two seriously enough that in all likelihood the surgeon figured they would not make it through till morning.

And just before moonrise, in the blackest part of night, the Comanche warriors swept down upon the weary, overconfident bivouac, driving off the regiment's horses and those of the Tonkawas.

“I'd always been told Indians didn't attack at night,” the handsome Mackenzie said grumpily, looming out of the darkness toward Grover's cook-fire. He settled on a cottonwood stump.

“I never told you that, Colonel. Better you never gamble on what Injuns will do. Soon as you think you got a Injun figured out, he'll prove you wrong.”

The soldier regarded his chief of scouts for this expedition. “No, you didn't, Grover.”

After several minutes of silence between them, Mackenzie asked, “You really didn't want to come on this campaign, did you?”

“Not from the start. I've had enough of scouting to fill my craw.”

“You're the best I've got for now, Grover. The others are just buffalo hunters—nothing like the experience you have. And besides, the money is good, isn't it?”

“I'm just a settler now.”

Mackenzie smiled. “What, you? Raising some corn, maybe a few cows? Waiting for the Comanche to ride down on your place? C'mon, Grover—save your breath and try to convince someone else.”

“I'm serious. That's why I came down here, to get away from the army and Injuns up in Kansas. All I figured to do was make a place for myself just across the Red River from I.T.”

“You made the mistake of choosing to settle down in Jacksboro, Mr. Grover.”

Sharp studied the handsome officer's smile beneath that droopy mustache. He liked Mackenzie. “I suppose you're right, Colonel. Jacksboro is a might close to Fort Richardson, ain't it now?”

“And a man with your reputation can't stay hidden for long, can he?”

“So, what you figure to do now, since this outfit hasn't got a single animal left for your cavalry to ride after the Kwahadi run off their ponies, and your horses to boot?”

Mackenzie slung the dregs of his coffee into the grass at his feet. “We do have one left, a damned burro—twelve years old and sore-backed as well. That bloody Quanah Parker and his Comanche didn't get everything!”

They laughed together, a sudden, furious joy shared between them beneath the starshine. There wasn't anything else men like them could do but laugh, here in the middle of this grassland kingdom of the enemy, set afoot of a sudden. At first the other officers and nearby soldiers did not know what to make of it—how their regimental commander and chief of scouts could be laughing in the face of such adversity. But then, one by one, the rest joined in.

Lord, did the laughter help that night.

Mackenzie assigned two of his companies to escort the Comanche captives all the way due south to Fort Concho. That seemed to be the best idea—getting the prisoners that far from their menfolk.

On their own long walk back to Fort Richardson, Sharp Grover had a lot of time to think on things again, just as he'd had those nine hot, September days to brood on that sandy scut of island in the middle of the Arickaree Fork of the Republican back in '68.
*
Never again, he had promised himself, would he go riding out with civilians just looking to stir up some trouble. Major Sandy Forsyth had stalked the Cheyenne of Roman Nose until they found him. And then it had come down to the nut-cutting.

Things were a lot different now with the Kiowas, who by and large had settled down. There were reports here and there of bands of the young men and their war-chiefs slipping off the reservation and crossing the Red River into Texas. In fact, last summer down at Howard's Wells in nearby Crockett Country some wild-eyed Kiowas had found an unescorted government contractor's wagon train camped and swarmed over the Mexican and gringo teamsters. Every man jack of them was killed. And the one woman along, a teamster's wife, the Kiowas had allowed to live—Marcella Sera.

There would be times, Grover supposed, that the woman would wish she had not lived, having now to go through each day a prisoner of that memory of what she had witnessed. Remembering the screams of her husband and infant son, the agonized terror given voice by the other eight teamsters as they were tied to the wheels of their freight wagons and consumed by leaping flames.

By the fall of 1872 most of the Kwahadis came into the reservation at Fort Sill, bringing with them a few white captives to exchange for their women and children who had been held ever since the Fourth Cavalry's attack on their Blanco Canyon camp.

Now there sprang some new hope eternal among most on the Texas frontier that Mackenzie had indeed struck the Kwahadi a harsh blow. The early part of the summer had been unusually wet, with the prairie grasses growing taller and richer than ever before, feeding the Indian ponies and buffalo and the white man's cattle at the same time. Then the dry winds of August had come to sear the prairie and turn the land golden before Mackenzie's raid on Mowi's Comanche village.

But autumn always came, and with it the touch of gold to the cottonwood and the red-tinged alder like crimson fire in the draws and down in the watercourses. Swamp willow turned with the season, bloodlike arrowpoint leaves tangled in a mat of blazing color. Indian summer arrived like a peaceful benediction for the land and Sharp Grover both. And still he wondered if ever he would see Jack Stillwell, ever lay eyes again on the tall Irishman.

A life full of memories made his old eyes sting at this moment as the wind shifted out of the north—what with this thinking back to how close he had been to Seamus Donegan's uncle, Liam O'Roarke. How both he and Seamus had been forced to watch Liam lay there at the bottom of a sandy riflepit, the side of his head turned to maggot fodder on some nameless river on the high plains. And in his own way, Sharp Grover prayed his letter and the other would get to Seamus through Jack Stillwell, no longer a young nineteen-year-old scout, as he had been when he heroically crossed a hundred miles of prairie wilderness back in '68 to carry Major Forsyth's desperate plea for rescue—but now an able and proven frontiersman carrying on where Sharp had cashed in his cards.

The air smelled of cold, Sharp thought as he poked the top button of his coat through its hole and turned up the collar.

“Why don't you come in, Sharp?”

He turned, smiling the way that crinkled the corners of his farseeing, plainsmen eyes, and blew his wife a kiss. “I'll be in. Just a little while longer now.”

Sharp felt it in his bones, in his blood, that change in the wind. Knowing the old buffalo did as well, how they read the seasons with their noses if nothing else, turning south when the wind shifted out of the north. Natural that the old buffalo hunters so readily became like their prey, he figured. Practiced in their habits after so many years of following the herds, coming in the wake of those nomadic bands that followed the herds as well.

Sharp turned back to the little cabin he had built her. Got halfway there, then stopped as the gale picked up intensity in the yard. Dry leaves scattered before him, whispering with names and faces and times gone before and never to hold again in his hands. Sweet Jesus and Mary, he hoped he was doing the right thing in sending word out for Seamus Donegan.

The whispers of that very winter Sharp Grover was the first to hear turned into the killing blizzard of '72. In west Texas, with nothing to stop the snow and wind roaring out of the west and tumbling the cold straight down from the arctic north, the drifts rose hour by hour, day by day. At forty below zero a man could not stay long outside in the wind. There wasn't much a fella found need of doing outside anyway, as long as the wood box was filled and he kept a pathway tromped down to the tall lean-to he used as a barn for their horses.

Up north along the Kansas Pacific and the Smoky Hill, a train had tried to plow its way west into the brunt of the blizzard and impaled itself in a monstrous drift, unable to grind its way backward to free itself. Inside, the crew and passengers settled in to get through the storm, then send word out once the blizzard had passed.

But then a faint, rumbling roar was heard coming across the rolling, white tableland aswirl with icy buckshot. The thunder grew louder and louder out of the north when suddenly the first loud thump collided with the side of a passenger car. Then another, and another. Until up and down the entire length of that train, the ice-shrouded black beasts were hammering against the cars, more thousands upon thousands coming behind, pushing against the first, migrating south blindly through the blizzard. Most of the animals ended up crossing the tracks in front of and behind the train. But those buffalo that could not move merely waited with the patience taught their kind across the ages, huddling here out of the lee of the wind that drove the icy snow in brutal, horizontal gusts.