Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (38 page)

Come spring he would have to return to that country to see what he could find of the blackened remnants of the wagon—or see if the yellowlegs had indeed escaped the rushing flames.

Now their great arching march was reaching its completion, the arc that had swept north toward the Canadian River, turning east and sweeping southward again into the land where they found the yellowlegs and started the fire. And now Winter Man was showing his unhappiness with The People. Why else would he roar down on them so early in the season?

Perhaps Winter Man, like the other spirits, were angry with the Kwahadi because the Comanche had not driven the hide hunters from their country. Perhaps.

Why else this terrible vengeance come on the back of the cruel wind that was the breath of Winter Man?

If that was so, Quanah did not understand the spirits. It was not a warrior's way to slaughter a small, outnumbered band of soldiers. But it was the way of the Kwahadi warrior to slaughter the small, outnumbered bands of hide hunters wherever his warriors could find them.

Yes, he told himself now, pushing the long hair from his face and tugging the furry buffalo robe more tightly against his cheek where the wind scoured and bullied his skin, giving it the feel of scraped rawhide worked with an antler fleshing tool.

Yes.

And the idea began forming itself in his mind as the brutal cold sought to numb every other part of his body. He had the beginning of a plan to stop the white man from crossing the dead line, a plan to drive the white man from the northern part of the Staked Plain for all time. Perhaps it would work—one concerted effort between the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Cheyenne as well. To attack in force those camps of buffalo hunters and make it too expensive in lives lost for any of the white men to again dare venturing south of the Cimarron River.

To rid the Kwahadi buffalo country of this spreading disease that was turning their land into a slaughter yard—a place of stinking, rotting carcasses, where only the huge-winged, black birds of prey would travel. This was becoming a place where the air was no longer sweet and where the water tasted foul on the tongue because of the carcasses lying rancid in the creeks and streams where the great buffalo had come only to drink—but found instead the white hunters waiting with their big rifles.

No more would Kwahadi land be a place where the white hunters could roam and slaughter with freedom. When Winter Man was done squeezing this land between his cold hands, when the short-grass time had come and their ponies were sleek and fat once more on the green shoots raising their heads from the brown breast of the earth all across the prairie—then Quanah would lead the three warrior bands against the hide hunters.

They would find the hide hunters where the hide hunters gathered.

And in one fell swoop, wipe them all off the face of the earth.

Chapter 29

Mid-November 1873

Autumn was gone in less time than it took a man to eat his breakfast.

Winter had arrived, battering the land with a snarling, wind-driven rage.

Seamus felt Stillwell tugging on his arm.

“Now I know why we didn't see any buffalo for the past two weeks!” Jack shouted into the fury of the wind that whipped icy flakes at them like tiny, painful arrowpoints.

“The buffalo knew this was on its way?” Donegan asked.

Stillwell only nodded.

Once more they both pulled the wool mufflers back over their faces so only their squinted eyes were visible below their hat brims.

A day ago there had been a little warning, Seamus recalled. The wind—quartering around out of the north. It presaged the dark, forbidding presence looming along the northern horizon ahead of them. But mostly it had been the change in the wind. Something to its smell. Not only the sudden cold this time.

More the smell of death carried on the wind's icy wings.

It was during the noon break yesterday, and then again when they had stopped to make camp last evening, that Jack had convinced the lieutenant to have his men scour the prairie in all four directions for buffalo chips. With orders for each man to take along a blanket to carry the chips in, the soldiers dispersed in a wide circle, returning near dark with their prairie firewood.

Seamus thought now how fortunate they had been that Jack had made that suggestion to the lieutenant and his soldiers. No sooner was the last trooper back in camp than the sky turned loose with a torrent of wind-driven rain. And once everything was good and soaked through and through—clothes, tents and bedrolls—the temperature started to drop dramatically, quickly changing what had only been a chilling rain into a freezing, life-robbing, man-killing sleet.

They had huddled together for warmth under the wagon cover stretched to the ground from the wagon's high-wall, and somehow got through that night in their wet clothing. By the next morning not one of them wasn't sniffling, runny-nosed and red-eyed from more than a sleepless night. A smoky fire brought them little cheer, and a cup of hot coffee only made a few complain of their gnawing bellies.

At least at Fort Richardson, the soldiers grumped, they damned well knew what there was to eat. It was hot, and usually there was plenty of it to go the rounds. Here they had nothing.

Shivering in his soaked clothing, Simon Pierce silently glared back at each of the complainers, from all appearances making note of those who proved less than enthusiastic about his unswerving dedication in pushing on to the Canadian River.

“What's up there, Jack?” Seamus had asked Stillwell that very morning while they saddled their two horses in the driving, freezing drizzle. A man crackled as he walked about, bent his elbows, worked his shoulders throwing blanket and saddle atop his uncooperative horse.

“Up where?”

“On the Canadian.”

Jack shrugged, pulling his dripping hat down tighter on his curly hair with his gloves, which were soaked through. “Don't know.”

“You been there?”

“Couple times. With buffalo outfits—first time was two years back, it was. Then last year.”

“That's out and out Injin country, ain't it, Jack?”

Stillwell swung his arms. “All of this is, dammit.” He looked up at the Irishman, his face softening. “I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that.”

“It's all right—I understand,” Seamus replied. “It's that bleeming Pierce got us all in this bind. I've got to figure a way out before we all go the way Graves did—stark-raving mad.”

“I'm not so sure you should try anything, Seamus. I don't know what power a government man has on any of us in something like this.”

“He don't have the power to make us die for something,” Donegan whispered.

Stillwell wagged his head. “What's the difference, Irishman? We rode along with Major Forsyth—and he had the power to ask us to die for something … didn't he?”

Drawing a deep breath so cold that it burned its way into the dregs of his lungs, Donegan's thoughts swam with his uncle Liam O'Roarke and Sharp Grover and that hot, sandy, bloody island in the middle of the Arickaree, with Major George A. Forsyth down and suffering three festering bullet wounds while Lieutenant Fred Beecher lay dying in a hollowed-out riflepit surrounded by the bloated, stinking army horses they had shot for breastworks … the flies forever buzzing and laying their eggs in the untended wounds of those asked to fight and very likely die in this nameless, unmapped place on the high plains.
*

Seamus sighed, his face stinging with the crackling cold of the wind-driven sleet. “I suppose you're right, Jack Stillwell. When it comes to army matters—men like you and me just don't have much say in anything has to do with our living or dying.”

Completely saddled, only then had they untied their horses, lashed one to the other since nightfall. All the stock had been paired in that manner before twilight had arrived, bringing with it the driving sleet and the phosphorescent lightning that rendered the whitening, ghostly sky a pale, greenish color. It was an old plainsmen's rule to lash a pair of animals together, in addition to using the individual hobbles before each soldier drove an iron picket pin into the hard, crusty earth—in the hope that all their precautions would slow the horses and mules from wandering far from their miserable camp beneath the wagon shroud that slapped and cracked on the brutal wind.

They hadn't been up and on the march for more than three long and weary hours now, nosing almost straight on into the wind, when Jack grabbed Seamus's arm again, signaling the Irishman to rein up. Stillwell pulled down his faded muffler and hollered into the force of the gale, his eyes blinking with its cruel blast beneath his crusted hat brim. Every shotgun flurry of icy snow made a man's eyes smart with cold pain.

“This is fool's work, Seamus!” he hollered. “It's getting too deep … and bound to start drifting worse.”

“What do you fix on doing? Make camp here?” Donegan asked, his own stinging eyes moving quickly across the diminishing horizons for something that might beckon as a suitable place to hunker down for the brunt of the blizzard.

“Make camp here and hope for the best.”

“Here?” Donegan asked, disbelieving.

“You got any better ideas—best spit them out now, Irishman!”

“Here,” Seamus repeated. “Here is where we'll make camp and
pray
for the best, Jack.”

Stillwell nodded. “C'mon, let's go give Pierce the bad news.”

They reined around and backtracked through the eight new inches of snow resting atop at least a half dozen of old crusty snow, all of it becoming wind-scoured in the short time they had been on the march that morning. Fifty yards behind the two horsemen, in the blinding swirl of icy, stinging white buckshot, loomed the dark shapes of the wagon and the four mounted troopers.

“Lieutenant! We best make camp!” Stillwell shouted.

“Where?” asked Stanton.

“Right here!”

The lieutenant glanced at Donegan as if he thought Stillwell might be crazy.

“There's no place any better than this we can find,” Seamus said. “And the sooner we get at making ourselves comfortable for what's coming, the better off we're going to be.”

Stanton appeared to chew on that a moment. “What makes you an expert on prairie blizzards, Mr. Donegan?”

“I've been through my share, Lieutenant. The first I got through was a killer—and I doubt I'll ever forget what winter can do up on the Bozeman Road.”

“Bozeman Road? When were you up in that country?” he demanded in a doubtful tone.

“Fort Phil Kearny,” Seamus answered, his voice almost stolen by the howling wind. “December, 1866.”
*

“You knew Fetterman?”

“A good soldier, so I was told,” Seamus replied. “A might lacking in good sense on that bleeming, bloody day.”

The lieutenant's face went taut. “Was it … was it true what the rumors said ever since?”

“What rumors?”

“That a lot of Fetterman's men killed themselves on Lodge Trail Ridge?”

Seamus shrugged, dragging his wool glove beneath his tearing eyes, both of them stinging with the icy snow. “I imagine they fought as long as it looked like they had a chance. But from what I saw of the place just after, those sojurs didn't have a chance at all. The few of us who saw the bodies scattered up and down that ridge know why the fight was over so bloody quick. But that bit of news isn't something the army wants being spread around among its sojurs, Lieutenant.”

“All right, gentlemen,” Stanton sighed. “We'll camp and pray we make it through this. Let's go tell the others what you need them to do.”

In the swirl of snow some twenty feet behind them waited the rest of the soldiers and Simon Pierce, all huddled in the wagon. Like two dark coals positioned atop his muffler, the civilian's feral eyes glared with suspicion when Stillwell and Donegan appeared out of the white swirl on either side of the lieutenant.

“We're stopping here, Pierce,” Stanton announced.

The coal eyes flared. “Why?”

“The storm's worsening.”

“The horses and mules are getting us through it for now, Lieutenant.”

Jack nudged his horse closer to the wagon so he could be heard in the howling wind that stole voices across the endless prairie. “Yes—for now they can make it—”

“Then we'll keep on until we can't go any longer,” Pierce snapped matter-of-factly, declaring an end to the discussion.

“No, Pierce,” Donegan said.

Pierce shot the Irishman a look of unconcealed hatred. “Lieutenant, I want this man placed under arrest for insubordination.”

Stanton tore his eyes from the government official and looked first at Stillwell, then at Donegan. Finally he gazed again at the shivering Simon Pierce.

“No. Like I said, we're stopping here. I have the lives of my men to consider.” He turned to the three others on horseback, waving his arm to bring them in.

“Goddamn you, Lieutenant—I'll have your bars!”

“You may have my bars, Mr. Pierce. But, by damn, I'll save the lives of every one of these men I can … and maybe yours as well.”

“You arrogant prig!” Pierce vaulted to his knees and swung around in the middle of the wagon, shrieking at the rest of the soldiers to obey his orders. “Place your commander under arrest! It's treason! High treason!”

“All of you—get out of the wagons and start moving—now!” shouted the lieutenant. “Put your backs into it like you've never done before. Some of you, pair up the stock. The rest of you, lash up the wagon cover like we did last night. Erect the tents if you can, double-staking against the wind.”

Stillwell and Donegan were on the ground, tying their horses off to a wagon wheel as the old commissary sergeant clambered down from his seat stiffly, banging his arms on his sides and dancing to get some circulation back in his legs.