Stamping Ground (10 page)

After four miles we came to a broad swath running from north to south where what grass that had not been trampled beneath many hoofs was grazed almost to the ground. The horses nickered when we stopped, and shifted their weight nervously from hoof to hoof. The métis dismounted, crouched, and spent some moments studying the turned earth. Then he rose with a grim expression on his weathered countenance.

“Unshod ponies,” he said. “Heading south. One, perhaps two hours ago.”

“Ghost Shirt?” I suggested.

He shook his head. “Not unless he has picked up many new braves.”

“How many?”

“More than I can count.”

He climbed back into the saddle and we continued for another hour. Jac reined in at the crown of a hill and thrust a long, wrinkled finger at arm's length before him. “There!”

I
followed his gesture. At first I couldn't see anything. Then I spotted it, an irregularity on the horizon, hardly more than a blur, but obvious enough against a skyline nearly devoid of trees.

“The mission?”

Jac nodded.

“I can't see a damn thing.” The marshal drew a battered army-issue telescope from his saddle bag, extended it to its full length, and screwed it into his left eye socket. He spent some time twisting it. “Yeah, I see it,” he said then. “It's—” He stiffened.

“What is it?” I demanded, after a couple of seconds had slithered past in silence.

“I think we're too late.” He handed me the glass.

I trained it toward the object atop the distant rise. It was a stone fortress, thirty years old if it was a day, with broken battlements along the top of the front wall and a ravaged bell tower rising from the middle, the bell intact and naked to the elements. I panned away from the structure, saw something belatedly, went back. I twisted the scope for sharper focus.

A mounted phalanx of perhaps three hundred Indians loaded down with full war regalia was on its way toward the mission's yawning entrance from the north. Even as they approached, a small group of similarly attired warriors galloped out to meet them. When they were a hundred yards apart they stopped, and the leader of each band peeled off for a private parley in the center of the clearing. The glass wasn't powerful enough for me to make out their features, but it didn't really matter. Never having seen Ghost Shirt, I wouldn't have recognized him anyway.

“ You're the injun expert,” Hudspeth informed me sourly. “What do we do now?”

I played for time, studying the doll-size figures on horseback in the center of the magnified circle. Short of a Great Southwestern desert after a brief rain, when everything is in blossom and the sagebrush looks like it's on fire, there's nothing more colorful than a large group of Plains Indians girded for war. Many of them half naked, the rest wearing fringed and beaded vests or jackets or the remnants of blue cavalry tunics with the sleeves cut off, the warriors had painted their skin red and black and yellow and white and decorated themselves with shells and beads and the claws and teeth of various predators. The braves from the mission were all armed with rifles, the others with only an occasional firearm among the lances, clubs, and bows and arrows, all of which were lowered as a gesture of peace and good faith.

They wore buckskin leggings and wolf pelts and summer moccasins with fringes that dangled below the bellies of
their mounts. Coup sticks trailing eagle feathers and the traditional Cheyenne and Sioux symbols of strength and virility, fashioned of leather and polished wood and rattling at the ends of buckhide thongs knotted to the buffalo bone cross-pieces, stuck up at crazy angles above the heads of the warriors holding them. Here and there the white bulb of a bleached human skull decorated the top of a pike.

One Indian—he who had ridden out alone to greet the leader of the newcomers—wore neither paint nor decoration. Naked to the waist, he was attired only in leggings, moccasins, and a breechclout of what looked like faded red burlap, dyed by a squaw's patient hand. It was the only splash of color on his person. He rode bareback astride a muscular roan with a white blaze and stockings, whose full sides suggested grain and not grass feeding—hardly an Indian pony. A couple of hundred yards closer and I might have been able to make out the army brand on its sleek rump. The rider was built thick about the chest and upper arms, and his nut-brown flesh glistened with grease or sweat or both. He wore his black hair long. That was as much as I could tell about him from my vantage point. He didn't look much like a god, but then I'm no authority.

The other chief was decked out in fine buckskins and a feathered headdress whose tail descended below his waist and rested on the back of one of those hide-stripping wooden saddles with which some savages insisted upon torturing their mounts. Strips of ermine dangled in front of his ears, and when he turned once to gesture with a long, fringed arm over the Indians at his back the sunlight shone on a row of polished stones in the headband. It was a sight that kings and Russian grand dukes came halfway around the world to see, only to return home in disappointment when they didn't. Somehow, though, in the presence of the other's unadorned simplicity, the visitor's splendor came off as pompous and a shade ludicrous. I passed the telescope to Pere Jac.

“The one in the headdress. Recognize him?”

The métis was unfamiliar with the instrument. Carefully
he placed it against his right eye, waved it back and forth a little, settled down finally, and sat motionless for about a minute. Then he returned the glass to me.

“His name is Many Ponies,” he said. “He used to trade with the métis before the wars. Some of the Miniconjou Sioux elected to follow him at the time of the breakup following Custer's death. The last I heard of him he was in Canada.”

“He's back.”

Jac went on. “Tall Dog, also a Miniconjou, is there as well. I was told he had retired to the Standing Rock reservation. Also Broken Jaw, a Cheyenne warrior, and Blood on His Lance, who was a sub-chief under the great Oglala Crazy Horse. The others I do not know.”

“That's all right. That's enough.”

“So what do we do?” repeated the marshal.

“Why ask me?” I swung the glass back to him. The movement startled him. He jumped, then grabbed the instrument with both hands. “You're the ramrod in this outfit.”

“You've fought injuns. I never been closer to one than a cigar store.”

“I shot at a few. That's not the same as fighting them.”

“It's close enough for me.”

“While we are arguing,” Pere Jac put in, “I suggest that we get down behind this hill before they see us against the horizon.”

“Congratulations,” I told him. “You just became our new Indian expert.”

We wheeled our horses and withdrew below the crest of the rise. There we dismounted and squatted to confer, holding onto the animals' reins in the absence of a place to tether them. We kept our voices low, which was ridiculous, considering the distance that separated us from the Indians at the mission. Fear does strange things to people.

“It is obvious that one of us must go back for the soldiers while the rest remain here to keep an eye on the Indians.” Jac took out his stubby pipe and sucked air through
it noisily. “The question is, which of us shall it be?”

We exchanged glances for a while, but no one seemed inclined to volunteer. There was no telling what kind of reception awaited the one who returned to the fort alone. Ghost Shirt, however, was something on which we could count. At length the métis shrugged and plucked a handful of stiff new grass from the ground at his feet. He spent some time sorting through the blades, decided on three, discarded the others, then made a show of clearing his throat, like the foreman of a jury milking his moment in the sun before delivering the verdict.

“We will draw straws. The holder of the short straw will go.”

I shook my head. “I don't like it.”

“Why not?” Hudspeth demanded. “It seems fair enough.”

“That's why I don't like it.”

Jac shuffled the bits of stubble in such a way that we couldn't see what he was doing, and held out a fist from the top of which the ends barely protruded.

Hudspeth selected the first one and held it up. It was about two inches long. His breath came out in a sigh.

I stared at the two remaining until the breed began to show signs of impatience—which, taking into account his natural stoic disposition, should give some idea of how long I stalled. I took a deep breath and plucked out the one on the right. It fell just short of an inch.

We looked at Jac. He was enjoying his role. He kept us in suspense for as long as was prudent, and when Hudspeth's nose began to flush he opened his fist. A straw an inch and a half long lay in the hollow of his palm.

“I told you I didn't like it.” I threw down the evidence and got up to remount. “I'll be back when I can.” The bay grunted in protest when I swung a leg over its back, as if it knew where we were going.

“Just a minute.” Hudspeth took hold of the bit chain. “If you bring the army and they help us catch Ghost Shirt,
how are we going to get him away from them to hang in Bismarck?”

I leaned forward and, taking his wrist between thumb and forefinger, removed his hand from the bit. “You worry too much,” I said. “We'll never live to see Bismarck again anyway.”

“Good luck, Page.” Pere Jac's expression was blank.

I could see he really meant it, so I choked back the response I had all set, nodded curtly, and laid down tracks east.

The rain in Dakota, I learned, doesn't stop during the wet season. It just moves on, leaving the places where it's been to dry and cake and the crops to wither while it washes away what's left of the green that's already given up waiting for it elsewhere. The storm that had hit us after leaving Fort Ransom was in the north now, a black crescent on the skyline looking like the charred fringe of a towel left too close to the fire, dumping water over the higher country up around Fargo. The prehistoric lake bed that stretched from the Drift Prairie to the Red River took the runoff and channeled it into the James River. At that point the lazy stream we had crossed a couple of hours earlier became a snarling torrent forty feet wide at its narrowest point and swift enough to sweep downriver a horse and rider faster than a man can curse. I no longer recognized it.

I wasted half a day riding up and down in search of a place to cross. A mile north of the spot where we'd come over, the river broadened into a lake, which was no good at all, and the farther south I rode the swifter grew the current. It was late afternoon when I gave up and turned back toward the mission, and damned near sundown before I galloped up the rise where I'd left my companions.

At least I thought it was where I'd left them. Those swells all looked alike when there was no one there. I called their names a couple of times, being careful to keep my voice from carrying as far as the mission. When after two or three minutes there was no answer, I rode to the top of the hill and looked around. There was the mission on the
sky-line, looking to be about the same distance away as it had been that morning. There was no sign of life on any of the other hills in the area. I turned and cantered back below the crest for a second look.

It was the spot, all right. Dismounting, I saw that the ground was chewed up where our horses had stood fidgeting and pawing the earth while we squatted talking, and in a bare spot I saw the pointed toe of a footprint that could only have been made by one of Hudspeth's fancy Mexican boots. As I bent over to study it, something cold and slimy slithered up my spine. I mounted again and spurred the bay back to the crest. What I saw there made me reach back automatically to grip the butt of my revolver.

On the ridge about three hundred yards away, a solitary rider sat facing me astride a roan horse with no saddle. The figure's hair hung down in plaits on either side of its naked chest. It was holding a rifle upright with the butt resting upon one thigh; a cloth of some sort drooping from its barrel and stirring ever so slightly in the minimal breeze. I was only dimly aware that this was Pere Jac's beloved calico shirt. The Indian looked as if he had been there for hours, which was impossible, since I'd just looked in that direction a few minutes before and seen nothing. The slimy thing crawled back down my backbone.

“Page Murdock.” Warped and distorted by distance, the unfamiliar voice was felt rather than heard, stroking my eardrums in such a way that it set my teeth on edge. “You have the choice of dying in the mission with your friends or dying out here alone. I await your answer.”

I waited until the words died away before, slowly, as if a sudden movement might spook my game, I squeaked my Winchester from its scabbard and raised it to my shoulder. Ghost Shirt didn't stir. I wondered if he thought his flag of truce might save him, or if he really believed-he was indestructible. If so, his brilliance was overrated. Allowing for distance and the updraft from the hills that rolled between us, I drew a bead on a point just above his left shoulder and took a deep breath, half of which I planned to let out before I squeezed the trigger. Still he didn't move.

But something did.

Thirty feet in front of my nose, the ground heaved and spewed up a dozen black-faced braves on horseback. They exploded over the crest of the next ridge, teeth bared white—or as close to white as Indians' teeth got—against the ebony goo they had smeared over themselves from hairline to breechclout, Spencer repeaters braced one-armed against their biceps in that impossible-to-hit-anything way they had. At that range, however, they couldn't
all
miss.
They were all over me in two blinks, stabbing the bay's bit before it could rear, snatching the carbine out of my hands, jerking my Deane-Adams from its holster. I was overpowered by the stench of hot sweat and bad grease, of lathered horseflesh and paint. No hands reached for me. They didn't have to. I was ringed in.