Stamping Ground (8 page)

“What the hell—”

“Three men don't stand a lot of chance against a garrison full of soldiers.” I handed Harms my revolver. He took it hesitantly. “Give him yours before somebody gets hurt,” I told the marshal. I was having trouble talking. I relaxed my face muscles and realized I'd been grinning all this time.

It took a few seconds, but finally Hudspeth sighed and turned his weapon over to the major.

“One underarmed deputy and two old has-beens, Major.” My resistance to temptation never was much to speak of.

Harms rattled the revolvers together, stared from one face to the other. Then:

“They're all yours, Sergeant. Put them up in Colonel Broderick's quarters and post a guard at the door. And try to resist the urge to give Murdock your rifle again.” He turned and strode out stiffly. The troopers who had crowded around the door at the sound of gunfire stood aside to let him through.

“Some fight, A.C.,” said Pere Jac on our way out.

“Sure you was close enough to see it?” snarled Hudspeth.

“It is the meek who shall inherit the earth. I fight only for what is mine.”

“At least you didn't try to break my neck.” Bright eyes slid murderously in my direction.

“Better a broken neck than a bullet in the belly,” I said.

Burdett told us to be quiet.

Broderick's late home, one of a row of officers' quarters housed in a single building near the north wall of the fort, was equipped with a sitting room and a bedchamber with two narrow beds. We were told he had shared it with his wife before the Indian troubles had forced her to return to their permanent home in Ohio. The furnishings were spartan and, except for the hand-sewn lace curtains beginning to yellow on the windows of the bedroom, masculine. The rooms smelled strongly of bootblack.

Hudspeth and I wrestled for a while with a supper of stringy long-horn beef and vegetables taken from what was left of the colonel's wife's garden, which was brought in to us by a seasoned-looking horse soldier, then we gave up and pushed our plates aside. Only Jac, his teeth and gums toughened by years of gnawing at leather-tough pemmican, went on eating. His chewing and the ticking of the clock on the mantel were the loudest sounds for some time. Outside, the boards on the porch creaked beneath the shifting weight of our restless guard.

“This is your stamping ground, Jac,” Hudspeth said finally. The sound of a human voice after all that silence made me jump. “Where's the best place around here for a bunch of injuns to hole up?”

“The possibilities are endless.” The old métis dipped a spoon in the gravy on his plate and began drawing lines on the bare surface of the table. “There are many buttes and sheltered washes, any one of which would serve Ghost Shirt's purpose. The best is here, just west of the James River.” He made a wet X on the other side of the line that represented the body of water. “An abandoned mission, once used by Mormons and built to withstand fierce attack. Twenty well-armed braves could stand off an army from its battlements for months.”

“You think that's it?”

He shrugged. “Who is to say? If he is the brilliant chief the stories claim he is, that is where he will be. But I have never met him, and so I have nothing else on which to base my judgment.”

“I've heard them same stories, so there must be something to 'em. I'll gamble on it. Murdock?”

“I'm in the pot.” I had gotten up from the table to listen for the guard. I laid my hand upon one of the rock-solid timbers that held up the wall of our prison. “Now all we have to do is figure out a way to get past the guard, fight our way through a hundred or so armed troopers, and scale a sixteen-foot wall. I hope one of you has something in mind, because I'm fresh out of suggestions.”

“ ‘The foolish despise wisdom and instruction,' ” quoted Pere Jac approvingly. Something in the way he said it made Hudspeth and me look at him. Smiling, he was tracing pagan symbols absent-mindedly on the table with the edge of his spoon.

They made quite a pile, the lighter items such as Mrs. Broderick's lace curtains and the sheets and ticking from the beds on the bottom with the colonel's heavy uniforms and whatever else we could find that would burn heaped on top. Hudspeth and I had done most of the work, gathering the stuff and throwing it into the middle of the sitting room floor while Jac supervised. All of this was done with a minimum of noise and with one ear cocked toward the door, where the squeaking and groaning of the porch boards beneath our guard's feet told us whether he was listening at the keyhole or just pacing back and forth. When the pile was four feet high Jac signaled us to stop, picked up the coal-oil lamp from the table where we had eaten, extinguished it, and saturated the linens and woolens on the floor with its contents. Then he struck a match on the edge of the table.

“You sure this will work?” whispered the marshal. “I always wanted a funeral with an open coffin.”

“I offer no guarantees.” The métis watched the sulphur
flare and waited for it to burn down to the wood. “This is not the sort of thing one can practice. Since there is no other way out of this fort, however, we must convince Major Harms that it is in his own best interests to release us.”

“Ghost Shirt made it out without all this.”

“Ghost Shirt lost three men doing it and killed that many soldiers. I assume that you wish to spill as little of your own countrymen's blood as possible.”

“Meanwhile,” I pointed out impatiently, “the smell of that coal oil is drifting toward our friend outside.”

“Quite right.” Pere Jac squatted and touched the match to the hem of a lace curtain.

The flame caught, burned slowly at first, then spread to engulf the pile with a hollow, sucking sound. A pillar of oily black smoke rose to the ceiling and sent greasy curls unwinding into all the corners of the room. The choking stench of burning rags followed. We got down on the floor where the air was sweeter and waited for results.

We didn't wait long. There was shouting outside the door and pounding, and then a key rattled in the lock and the trooper on guard, a grizzled old campaigner with leathern features and a great swelling belly solid as a sack of lead shot, burst into the room, coughing and digging his fists into his eyes as a wall of smoke hit him square in the face. He stumbled about, clawing at the air and calling for assistance between fits of hacking. In another moment the room was full of troopers in varying states of undress, but all of them armed. Finally buckets of water were produced and emptied in the general direction of the flames, which hissed and spat and sent up thicker and more fragrant columns of smoke than before. The firefighters' curses were colorful and, as a rule, had to do with someone's ancestry. A muck of water and soot darkened the muted colors in the Brodericks' carpet, which was the kind you bought out East and had shipped back here.

Quincy Harms came striding in just as the troopers were slapping out the last of the flames with coats and army blankets. He was in his shirtsleeves, and the scrubbed
cleanliness of his face and hands in contrast to the grimy cross-hatching on his neck and wrists indicated that he had been shaving, or more likely trimming his beard, when the alarm had sounded. His suspenders were twisted from having been hastily drawn up over his shoulders. He circled the room, taking in the smoking, charred debris on the floor, the soot on the walls and ceiling, the objects overturned and smashed in the commotion that had followed the troopers' arrival. Our guard, his face streaked black and glistening with sweat, saluted and began to tell his side of the story, but the major cut him off with a slashing motion.

By this time the air had cleared and the three of us were sitting around the table with innocent expressions pasted on our faces. Harms kicked aside a smoldering scrap of tunic and stalked up to us, fists clenched at his sides. He was livid.

“Something wrong, Major?” I was seated nearest him.

His left fist caught me on the corner of the jaw. I went over backwards, chair and all, and hit the floor hard. I bounced up quicker than he expected and cocked my own left.

“Page.”

Jac spoke warningly. I shifted my gaze, followed his, and got a spectacular view of the inside of the old trooper's Army Colt pointed at my breast. I lowered my arm.

At a nod from Harms the gun was returned to leather. Cutting loose had calmed him somewhat. His color was closer to normal, but the silver flecks in his eyes swam and glittered in the light of the one lamp left burning.

“What did you gain by that?” He addressed himself to Hudspeth.

“We're expensive pets to keep,” I replied, making him face me. “We just wanted to show you how expensive we can be.”

“Is that a threat? Because if it is I can throw you in the guardhouse and be done with it.”

“You did that with Ghost Shirt.”

“We've learned a bit since then.”

“Like what?” Hudspeth put in. “Doubling the guard? You can't spare that many men with things like they are. You said yourself you're short-handed.”

“The fact of it is, Major,” I went on, “we're more trouble than we're worth. You can take away our guns and our matches, tie us up and throw us in a deep hole, and we'll still make it hot for you and your men. You can weather it, but why should you have to? You've enough to worry about with all hell breaking loose outside.”

While I had been speaking, patches of color had appeared on his cheeks, glowing as if from fever, and I braced myself to meet another blow. But he held himself in check. When he spoke, the strain showed in his voice, raising it from its normal moderate level to a quivering tenor.

“ ‘Just whose side are you on, Murdock?”

“That's easy. Mine.”

This time I was sure he was going to make a move, but he fooled me again. For an hour, or maybe it was just ten seconds, he stood there staring at me without seeing me. Then, without turning, he spoke to the old trooper.

“See that their mounts are saddled and their pack horse loaded and ready to go. They're leaving tonight.”

“Tomorrow morning's soon enough,” I said magnanimously. “We promise not to burn down any buildings before then.”

“I wasn't offering you a choice. It's tonight or never.” The glint in his cow eyes was as steely as it got. “I'll read Scripture over your grave, Murdock.”

Half the stars in the sky were blotted out behind a black overcast as we saddled up (never trust that job to anyone else, least of all a trooper who hates your guts), and by the time we were ready to move out they were all gone and thunder was belching faintly in the distance.

Our guns were returned to us in the livery by the old trooper who had been our guard. I slid my Winchester into its scabbard, inspected the Deane-Adams to make sure it was still loaded, and caught the horse soldier's eye over the cylinder. He avoided my gaze.

He was old enough to be a general, but his faded blue sleeves bore a single stripe. Most likely he'd risen in rank and been busted back down more than once, probably for brawling. The scar tissue over his eyes and fistlike, many-times-broken nose gave me that much. Those eyes were deep in their sockets and shadowed beneath shaggy white brows. They wouldn't blacken noticeably no matter how many times they were hit, nor how hard. He wore his handlebar a third longer than Hudspeth's. Also white, it was stained yellow at the fringe—chewing tobacco—and at the moment its ends were being gnawed by a set of mail-order teeth that buzzed when he spoke, which he hadn't done for some time. Unlike Blackthorne, he appeared not to mind wearing them. His complexion was breadcrust-brown and cracked all over like a riverbed gone dry. The sagging flesh beneath his chin was gathered together at the buttoned collar of his field-stained tunic. Crisp white stubble showed where his razor had missed that morning, a circle of sticking-plaster where it hadn't. We played tag with the eye contact for a while and then I lost my patience.

“All right, disgorge.” I holstered the five-shot. “You look like you swallowed a powder keg.”

“I can't do it,” he said. His voice fell somewhere between a whisper and the sound you get when you try to rack a shell into the chamber of a repeater with sand in the action. “I don't care if they bust me again, I can't watch you three go out there without telling you what's waiting.”

Hudspeth gave his cinch a yank and then all was silence. The ticking of the blacksmith's forge as it cooled grew loud. Somewhere a horse snored.

“Well?” The word exploded from the marshal.

The trooper lurched ahead without further preamble. His eyes were black hollows beneath the heavy brows. “I'm Hoxie, Jed Hoxie. Twenty years in the service, not counting the two I spent with Stonewall Jackson. I was with that patrol that got hit last night. Cap'n Francis—he was one of them got kilt—he headed it up till one of the injun scouts found the trail of a couple dozen unshod ponies this side
of the James. It could of been friendlies, maybe even métis, but nobody believed that for a minute. None of them has budged a inch from their camps and reservations since this whole thing started, except to hunt, and there ain't no hunting along the Jim this time of year. No, we knowed who it was all right. When you been out here as long as some of us you get so you can smell 'em. Francis ordered halt and sent a messenger back to the fort for orders from Colonel Broderick. But instead of sending 'em, the old man rode back hisself and took charge of the patrol. He said it was time the job got done right, and he wasn't going to trust it to no one else. There was forty of us—more than enough, I guess he figured, to deal with Ghost Shirt.

“Their trail crossed the river a couple of miles south of Jamestown. It was so fresh there was puddles of water in the tracks on the other side. We caught sight of dust clouds a hour or so later. There wasn't much, what with all the grass, but you can always count on twenty horses kicking up a little when they're rid hard. This was the hilly country in the Drift Prairie, and the dust was all we seen of 'em. Broderick called column of twos and we give chase at a canter. We was still following the dust cloud when they hit us.