Stamping Ground (25 page)

“Iron-butt Murdock,” he snarled finally. “Waltzing around with a dislocated shoulder like it's a stubbed toe. Here.” He thrust something in front of my face. After a beat I recognized it as the knife I had given Pere Jac after capturing it from the Cheyenne back at the Big Muddy.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“You'll figure it out. Open up.”

I did as directed. He jammed the hidebound handle into my mouth. I bit down on it. It tasted of leather and old sweat. He took my left hand in his own left, got himself
set amid a general rustle of clothing, and then I felt the weight of his boot against the lump of displaced bone behind my shoulder. Realization came to me in a rush of panic. I tried to get up, but the pain and his boot held me down. I was wobbling the knife handle around in my mouth to find voice enough to protest when he pulled the arm tight and threw all his weight forward onto his foot.

Multicolored lights danced and exploded behind my eyelids. My blood sang in my ears. I bit down hard. My teeth ground through the rock-hard leather and into the wood beneath, dislodging splinters into the pocket beneath my tongue. Hudspeth's grip tightened crushingly on my hand and he heaved every ounce of his two hundred-plus pounds against the stubborn knob. It fell into place with an audible pop.

He was still panting from the effort a moment later as I pushed myself to my knees with my good arm and then got up, swaying on willowy legs. It took me a while to spit out the last of the splinters. “You bastard!”

He snorted. “That's the thanks I get. Back in Bismarck you'd pay a doc two dollars to do the same thing and be grateful to him afterwards.”

“Where'd you learn to do that?”

“I didn't. Just thought I'd give it a whirl. It worked, didn't it?” he added, reading the expression on my face.

“Maybe I can do the same for you someday.”

“No thanks. You done enough to me this trip.” He accepted one of the sledges from Gus. “You won't be swinging no hammers for a spell. Which works out, us needing someone to look after the long guns just in case that injun's still around.”

The engineer set the other hammer down on its head and turned toward the cab. “Come on, Ep, let's fire her up and back her down onto the level.”

“No,” said Hudspeth.

Gus stopped, turned back. “You want her to flop over whilst we're working?”

“We'll need all the weight we can get on them rails to
hold 'em down. Think you can take her forward all the way to the end?”

“The end is right! Hell, all she needs right now is a stiff breeze to turn her into scrap. I ain't about to go back and tell James J. Hill—”

At this point the marshal interrupted with a suggestion as to what he could tell James J. Hill that I won't repeat. What he said next was more significant. “All right, if you won't do it I'll get someone who will. What about it, Ep?”

The engineer made a nasty sound in his nose. “He don't know the first thing about it! He's just a—”

“Sho' can, Marshal,” the fireman broke in. “Can and will. Mr. Gus, he been trainin' me to be an engineer.”

“You won't never make it now, boy!” He spat the words. “I'll sure as hell see to that !”

“Shut up.”

Hudspeth was mostly bluster, but when he said that, people generally obliged him. His gaze lashed from the engineer back to the fireman. “Get up steam and take her as far up on them bent irons as she'll go.”

Ephraim double-timed it back to the cab.

“Just don't forget that I didn't have nothing to do with it,” Gus insisted.

Hudspeth beat me to it. “Who the hell cares?” He hoisted his sledge over his shoulder—making the engineer duck—and strode off in the direction of the damaged rails.

Locke, hefting the other hammer, smiled at his retreating back. “Not bad for a man who doesn't drink.”

I kept my mouth shut.

At length Gus unbent enough to go back and release the private car and caboose from the rest of the train so that if it did go over it wouldn't take one of our more distinguished citizens with it. Meanwhile, Hudspeth and the colonel put the sledges and crowbar to work straightening out the worst kinks in the irons as Ep performed double duty as engineer and fireman, going back and forth between the box, the wood supply, and the throttle, all the time maintaining a vigil on the gauge to keep the boiler from doing
the Indians' job for them. All this time I stood over the rifles watching everything and feeling useless. My shoulder felt worse than it had before the marshal had put it right, but at least it was in a position where I could depend upon it in a pinch. When at last the engine was ready, Ep gave two blasts on the whistle to clear everyone out of the way, released the brake with a sigh of escaping steam, and gave the throttle a nudge that started the engine rolling forward.

The rails, or perhaps it was the train itself, groaned ominously as the incline was scaled. The wheels found traction only every third revolution, spinning in between with an unearthly squeal, and the twisted steel rails bent downward beneath the creeping weight. Not enough, however, to keep the top-heavy engine from swaying like an Indian medicine man in a deep trance. I wiped that image out of my thoughts the instant it occurred. Indians and medicine men were on my mind too much of late.

A yard short of the irons' uprooted ends, the cab began to tip. I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable.

“Back up!” Hudspeth bellowed, drowning out the engine's snuffling wheeze.

The driving arm stopped, then began cranking backward even as the wheels on the far side were leaving the track. They fell back with a bang as the train lurched into reverse. As soon as the danger zone was past the marshal signaled stop by waving the lantern. The boiler exhaled its pent-up breath.

Ephraim alighted carefully, negotiating the extra couple of inches between the damaged rail and the ground in a smooth striding motion. He whooped his relief.

“You folks nearly had crushed nigger for dinner, and that's a fact,” he said.

Gus, more active now that his own moral crisis was over, used the crowbar as a lever to take the twist out of each rail, holding it taut while Locke and Hudspeth secured it by pounding home the spikes first in one, then the other. The engineer then resumed his place at the throttle and backed up the locomotive a step at a time to make room
for the repairs as they progressed. Ep spelled Locke to free him for crowbar duty, his great black muscles writhing with each swing of the sledge. The noise of steel on steel rang out over the prairie for the first time in five years.

It was back-breaking work, as the corkscrewed track had to be held straight while each spike was being driven, and the vibration of all that pounding made the hands holding the bar tingle until they grew numb and slipped off, and the end of the bar bounced up like a snake striking for the arm or skull that was not pulled out of the way fast enough. The second time that happened it caught Locke high on the right temple with a solid thump, stunning him. Hudspeth handed his sledge to Gus and took the colonel's place until he had recovered himself enough to resume his task. In this manner the labor went on into the early morning hours.

Standing out of the way watching them, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, I had grown so drowsy by about three o'clock that the first owl hoot didn't register. I perked up at the second one. Hollow and echoless, it sounded very far away. A pause, then a third. It would have been soothing but for my knowledge that it wasn't far away, and wasn't made by anything that remotely resembled an owl.

Nor did it stop at the owl. A moment later there was an answering hoot from another quarter, and then, farther off, the complicated scan of a mockingbird. Closer—too close—a mourning dove's sad refrain tooted like air passing through a pipe. We might have been in an aviary.

They weren't fooling anyone, not out there in the middle of a lonely prairie with no place for a bird to roost, and they knew it. They were just reporting their positions to each other in the only way they knew how, a highly efficient form of field communication that went back some two thousand years. More important, they were trying to scare us. Fright is the strongest medicine there is, and no one ever used it to greater advantage than the war-loving Cheyenne.

At the first calls Hudspeth and the others had stopped working and gone for their arms.

“Go on working.” I spoke loudly enough to be heard over the engine without shouting. “If they don't know how
many men we have, acting scared is the quickest way of telling them.”

“And if they knows?” said Ephraim.

“Then we'll die no matter what we do.”

“I'd heaps rather die fighting.” This from the marshal.

“Either way you end up a handful of bloody hair. Go back to work.”

There was a pause while they bounced glances around among themselves. Slowly they returned their guns to their proper places and took up their tools. Steel clanged.

Time crawled after that. I figured that if Lame Horse knew our strength he'd attack within half an hour of his arrival. I spent every minute tight as a coiled rattler. As the half hour drew to a close and minute piled laboriously upon minute without a bullet in my back, I began to relax by degrees. If they were planning to hit us before dawn we'd be five minutes dead.

A metallic glimmering over the eastern horizon foretold that event some three hours later. “Break it off,” I snapped, surprised at the sound of my own voice after all those hours of silence.

The others looked up from their labors. Aside from that nobody moved.

“Ain't finished yet,” Gus protested. “Next train comes down this track, without no warning—”

“That's their lookout. If you're really worried about it you can leave behind that red lantern on the caboose as a signal. Don't forget to couple those last two cars. Locke, Hudspeth, put the tools away and join me in the coach. No hurrying. We don't want them to know we're leaving just yet. Start stoking, Ep.”

“Just who made you ramrod of this here outfit?” demanded the marshal.

“A sore shoulder. Get moving.” I picked up the Winchester and threw the Spencer to the fireman, who caught it in one hand. The first bullet found him in that position. He spun and fell, spread-eagled with the rifle flung out to the side. Another one clanged against the boiler, then another
and another, whistling off the base of the stack. More kicked up dirt all around us. At that moment, a line of shadowy riders spilled up out of a cleft between the rolling swells to the south like ants from a kicked hill. They were snapping off wild shots and yammering at the top of their lungs.

“Get on board!” I shouted, backing up and firing the Winchester from my hip as I went. I nearly tripped over Ep, who was still kicking with a hole the size of a man's fist over his left breast. Tossing the carbine to Hudspeth, I called for him to cover me as I gathered up the Spencer and a handful of the fireman's belt and dragged him to the coach. My shoulder was forgotten.

“I need a fireman!” Gus shouted from the cab.

“Locke!”

The colonel waved his understanding and ran a zigzag pattern between flying bullets toward the engine. His Remington bucked twice in his hand, its muzzle flashing. An Indian who had been galloping up on him shrieked and back-flipped over his horse's rump. Whinnying, the animal lost its momentum, executed a wide, clawing turn to the right, and took off bucking for the open prairie, narrowly missing Hudspeth as it brushed between us.

A Cheyenne slug splattered the corner of the coach an inch above my hat as I hoisted Ep's limp, heavy body onto the platform and bounded up behind him. Either their marksmanship was improving or God was on their side. Hudspeth, hammering away with the Winchester at every target that presented itself, swung aboard directly behind me.

Indians were clattering all over the place now. Crouched on the platform, I fired the Deane-Adams at an occasional flash of horse and rider in the light of the lamps still burning inside, without visible result. I heard the snapping of a light gun in the direction of the engine, and once the deeper roar of the Walker, and hoped Gus wouldn't forget to pick us up. Ghost Shirt's dog was going wild in the baggage car, which was no longer connected to ours.

The grayness to the east had given way to dirty pink. I had enough light to shoot by, but if there had been a friend among the riders harassing the train I wouldn't have known him from the others. I figured there was little chance of that and kept popping away at the fleeting forms.

Over everything, the panting of the engine grew loud and rapid. I was relieved to see for the first time that the rear of the baggage car was looming near, and threw out a hand to brace myself against the railing just as we made contact with a smashing jolt that threw me sideways into the marshal, pinning him between my shoulder and the wall. The couplings caught and held. We began rolling forward at a painfully slow pace, but picking up speed as we went.

I placed a hand over the gaping mass of gore that was the fireman's breast to see if his heart was still beating. Warm blood squirted between my fingers. At that moment his great chest swelled with air and expelled it in a long, drawn-out sigh. I waited, but it didn't fill again and no more blood came. Gus was right. He would never be an engineer.

Hudspeth had ducked inside the coach to see to the other side of the tracks. After a space I felt the platform rock beneath me and figured it was him returning. At the same time, a solitary rider sitting a black and white pony drew abreast of the coach and swung the muzzle of a Spencer in my direction. It was Lame Horse.

Hudspeth had extinguished the lights inside the car, but there was enough natural illumination now for me to recognize the shiny, ebony-painted face with the jagged streak of yellow lightning slashing from his right temple to the left corner of his jaw. The necklace of shrunken human fingers bounced on his breast as he galloped to keep up with the accelerating train, slapping his reins one-handed back and forth across the animal's withers. You had to hand it to him for spunk. Hitting a moving target from the back of a horse in full gallop is next door to impossible, yet here he was fixing to do just that. He set a lot of store by the medicine in that necklace. Using it as a guide, I was steadying the foresight of my revolver on the top of the vulnerable
arch below his breastbone when something burst behind my eyes and the lights went out.