Stamping Ground (20 page)

We came together then, with an impact that tore the Indian off his feet and sent the Winchester flying from his hands. The horses, although picketed, had been milling around nervously as far as their tethers permitted ever since the first shot, and now were between us and the wallow We landed right under the feet of my gray. It whinnied and did a quick dance to avoid us. One of its hoofs stamped dust out of the ground a couple of inches shy of my right ear.

The jar had knocked the wind out of the Indian momentarily, but before I could press my advantage he squirmed out of my grip. Bound though he was, he fought like a sack full of badgers. Every time I tried to straddle him and pin him down he kicked at me with his lashed-together legs or arched his back and rolled out of my reach. I was just grateful that his dog was still off somewhere hunting and unable to join in. The second time he got away I reached for my gun and grabbed a handful of prairie air. I'd forgotten giving it to the marshal. Angry at myself, I flung an arm out longer than it was designed to go and snatched hold of something that tore when I pulled at it. Ghost Shirt's collar.

He tried to squirm away again, but I had a piece of his throat as well and held on. His windpipe throbbed in my hand, struggling for air. I pulled myself closer and got a
leg over him before he could put a knee where women and savages instinctively aim. Even then he pinned one of my ankles beneath his body and threw himself over on one hip, and I would have gone over had I not thrown out a hand to brace myself. My injured wrist all but buckled beneath the shock. By then, though, I'd felt something that sent new strength coursing through my strained muscles. I'd reached for the ground, but my fingers closed over something hard, cold and familiar. The Winchester. Holding him down between contracted thighs, I swung the carbine over my head by its barrel and braced myself for the downswing. He wouldn't live to see the train, let alone the scaffold in Bismarck.

I nearly wrenched my shoulder out of its socket when I swung and the carbine didn't move. Someone had clamped a hand around the stock. I blinked and looked back over my shoulder at Hudspeth's bulk standing over me.

His feet were planted apart the length of an axe handle, which made him about as flexible as an adobe wall. To hedge his bet, he had drawn my Deane-Adams and clamped it to my right temple when I turned my head. The barrel was still warm from firing. It struck me then that of late this particular firearm had not done me a whole lot of good.

“He's whipped, Page.” His voice was tired and hollow, the dull note of a gong muffled in rags.

“Jac,” I said.

“Jac's dead.”

I released my grip on the Winchester slowly. Beneath me Ghost Shirt's eyes gleamed dully in the starlight. I got up.

At the base of the hill, the woodpile blazed brightly, exposing a twenty-foot section of track. Here and there the upturned face of a dead Indian reflected the reddish glow. Closer now, the approaching locomotive's whistle took on added depth against a background of chuffs and clangs and humming rails. I went over to where the métis lay stretched out with the Spencer across his stomach.

“Match,” I said, holding out a hand toward Hudspeth.

He hesitated. “There ain't but three left. We might—”

“Match!” I barked it this time. He handed one over without another word. I struck it on the seat of my pants, bent, and held it over the still figure's face, cupping my other hand around the flame to shield it from the wind. In its glow I saw that Jac had retained his perennial half-smile even in death. His eyes glittered between half-open lids. The seams in his face looked deeper than ever now that there was nothing to distract my attention from them. I suddenly realized that he was a good five to ten years older than my extreme earlier estimate. On the edge of the illumination a neat round hole four inches down from his collarbone showed how lucky the Indian's shot had been. A couple of inches this way or that and in six months it would have been just another scar.

The flame was burning my fingers. I shook it out and dropped the charred remnant into the pocket of my jacket, Force of habit. Fires were as hazardous in my native Montana with all its forests as in the grassy plains of Dakota.

The engine was only a mile off now. In two minutes it would be on top of us.

The same thoughts must have been going through the marshal's head, because he said, “No time to bury him.” I ignored him and strode past him to the horses. I had my cinch undone when he realized what I was up to and stepped in to give me a hand. In a few seconds we had all four of them unrigged. As they wandered off to graze we gathered up our saddles and bridles, leaving behind Jac's McClellan, and started back down. I took the time to spread the métis' saddle blanket over his corpse, not that it would afford any protection against the coyotes and magpies once they scented fresh meat. I then took charge of Hudspeth's gear while he loosened the cord that bound Ghost Shirt's ankles, heaved him to his feet, and pushed him stumbling ahead of him down the slope. At the bottom the marshal gave him a brutal shove that sent him pitching headlong into the grass. Then his ankles were drawn together once again.

By now the engineer had spotted the flames, slowed down, and was hanging on the whistle as if he thought the escaping steam might blow the obstruction off the tracks. I saw him in the glow of the flames belching out of the broad black stack, a smear of crimson face beneath a tall hat made of striped pillow ticking leaning out the window of the cab over an arm crooked at the elbow, sparks from the stack swirling about him like fireflies on their way to the cinder bed. Below him the steel driving arm flashed as it cranked at the wheels, at times seeming to come within two or three inches of his sleeve at the top of its cycle. Behind the engine, oily black in the darkness, rumbled the wood car, baggage carrier, and two passenger coaches followed by the caboose, the windows of all three illumined in yellow. The smoke pouring from the stack was a gray streamer trailing a mile behind the red lantern that swung from the railing of the caboose.

At any time that speeding behemoth could have rammed our flimsy barricade and sent it flying in blazing fragments all over the prairie, but the engineer didn't know that. When it became apparent that the offending substance would not go away, he hauled on the brakes. A jet of white steam erupted from beneath the boiler. Sparks sprayed from the shrieking wheels. Wood groaned, steel screamed against steel in a grotesque parody of human anguish. The driving arm reversed itself without pausing and the entire mass of metal ground to a shuddering halt three feet short of the pile of burning logs.

While all this was going on I had left our gear with Hudspeth and crossed over to stroll among the bodies scattered south of the tracks. I had my revolver, which the marshal had returned to me, fully loaded now from the cartridges in my saddle bags, in my hand in case any of the corpses should still be breathing. But none of them was, nor was any of them Lame Horse, which was what I had come to determine. All were Cheyenne. I left them and approached the engine, which was snorting and blowing like a stallion impatient to be on its way.

“Mister, you better start explaining.” The engineer's demand was delivered over the breech of a pre-Civil War Walker Colt, for God's sake, a cap-and-ball six-shooter as long as a man's arm from elbow to fingertips. I smiled respectfully.

“You wouldn't want to use that,” I assured him. “I'm law.”

He thought that over. He was a wasted strip of leather with a wind-burned face cracked at the corners of his eyes and mouth and a perpetual squint. His side-whiskers were gray tipped with white and the hairs were long enough to curl in upon themselves. A smudge of soot stained his moist right cheek. He was sweating, but not from the tension of the moment. The heat inside the cab from the open firebox was withering. I kept my eyes on him and on the fireman standing behind his shoulder, a big man whose short-cropped black hair reminded me of greasy wool. At first I'd thought his face was blackened from his exertions before the flames, but now I realized he was a Negro. He was naked to the waist, and his slabbed chest glistened like new iron beneath a sheen of sweat and a sparse covering of coiled hair that ran in a thin line down his stomach into the damp waistband of his pinstriped pants. At the moment he was trying without success to get the engineer's attention by tugging at his sleeve and calling him “Boss” in a voice as deep and clear as the echo from the bottom of a barrel.

“So you're law.” It wasn't the most clever thing the engineer could have said, especially after he'd had all that time to think up a good retort. But a friend of mine was dead and I was in no mood to render him senseless with my wit, so I let him go on to the obvious. “Let's see some proof.”

“This proof enough?”

Hudspeth's growl, coming from the other side of the cab, took all the sand out of the man with the Walker. He didn't even bother to turn around and confirm the fact that the marshal was standing on the step plate with his freshly loaded Smith & Wesson pointed at his back. He just sighed
and laid the relic in the palm of my free hand, the one that wasn't holding the five-shot.

“That's what I was atryin' to tell you before,” the Negro informed him.

They were convinced, of course, that they were being held up. I couldn't blame them. I hadn't seen a mirror for some time, but looking at Hudspeth—dirty, unshaven, his clothes wrinkled and torn—I got a fair idea about how much I looked like a lawman after all this time on the trail. I don't suppose I smelled like one either, but whether that made any difference amid the occupational scents of wood smoke and oiled steel and their own perspiration was open to debate. Whatever the case, I was climbing aboard to display the badge and lay their fears to rest when the fireman released the brake.

The locomotive jolted forward, throwing me off balance and wrenching the handrail on the other side out of Hudspeth's grasp. His gun went off into the ceiling and he dropped out of sight. As I threw my arm out to catch myself, the Deane-Adams struck the wall of the cab, jarred loose from my grip, and clattered to the steel floor. I fell four feet and landed on my back on the ground, the Walker bouncing from my left hand as if propelled by a spring. When my wind returned I found myself staring down, or rather up, the bore of my own weapon in the black man's hand. I spent more time on the wrong end of that piece. There was no doubt about what he had in mind. The cylinder was already turning when I clawed my badge out of my pocket and thrust it at him.

For an agonizing moment I wondered if it would mean anything to him at all. Everything depended upon how he had been treated by lawmen in the past. Then the cylinder rolled back to its original position and he backed off without lowering the gun.

“What's going on, Gus? Why aren't we moving?”

The newcomer had appeared from the darkness at the rear of the train. Round and cherubic, he carried a lantern and wore a baggy blue uniform with brass buttons and a
black-visored cap set square on his shaggy head. With him was a taller man whose erect carriage and squared shoulders made me think he was more accustomed to a uniform than the well-tailored suit and vest he was wearing, but a uniform far different from his companion's. His reddish hair was graying at the temples and had a windblown look. Like myself when in civilization, he was clean-shaven, a rare enough thing in that bewhiskered era, his spare cheeks and firm jaw shadowed in blue where the razor had scraped them without missing a stubble. While the conductor appeared to have eyes only for the railroad personnel present, the tall man took everything in with cool eyes under brows so pale they were visible only because of their contrast to his deep tan, which had only recently begun to fade. I figured him for cavalry.

Gus, it seemed, was the engineer. He had alighted from the cab to reclaim his ancient revolver. When it was safely in his belt he rattled off his version of the events, gesticulating at the flaming woodpile, now past its peak and burning spottily where the logs were not already charred, at the marshal, who had recovered himself and was standing on the top step of the cab, his gun trained on the Negro's back and his badge gleaming ostentatiously on his lapel, and finally at me where I sat on the ground eyeing the muzzle of the Deane-Adams in the fireman's hand.

“Well, what more proof do you want?” This from the tall man, addressing my guard. He had a raspy voice—roughened, I supposed, from years of barking orders under fire-—but with an undercurrent of smoothness that suggested breeding beyond that offered by the manual of protocol.

Still the Negro hesitated. A glance passed from the tall man to the conductor, from the conductor to the engineer, and finally from him to the fireman, whereupon the last sighed and returned the gun to me. I holstered it and got to my feet with a helping hand from the tall man. A ridge of calluses ran across his palm and between his thumb and forefinger where the reins are held.

“Cavalry?” I asked, just to confirm what I already knew.

He laughed, white teeth gleaming against his burned skin. “Lord, no! Horses are for racing and drawing buggies. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Locke, 16th Engineers, retired.”

I grinned in spite of myself. “You're the first ex-military man I've met since the war who didn't claim to be a full colonel.”

“There aren't many of us left. I wish you'd introduce yourself. Old soldiers are always being pumped for colorful stories, and I'll need a name to go with this one.” He indicated the bodies of the slain Indians, almost invisible now that the fire was dying. He seemed to be the first to notice them, judging by the way the others suddenly forgot all about us and stared at the carnage. At first glance the corpses did look like discarded railroad ties scattered over the right-of-way.

I gave him our names and told him that we had fought the Indians over a prisoner trussed up on the other side of the tracks. “We're commandeering this train to take him to Bismarck,” I finished.