Sudden Country (11 page)
"I like him." Mr. Knox turned to Wedlock. "You'd best keep him company. Brave men are fools oftener than cowards; and even honest men resent sermons so early on a working day."
"They are spirited," agreed the saloonkeeper, taking his leave.
To me Mr. Knox said, "Fetch your carbine and pistol, David. If we are to lead, it must be by example."
"It does not seem to me that we are leading at all," I said. He made no reply.
It may have been the Deacon's stern demeanor, or more likely it was the presence behind him of Ben Wedlock, but little more than grumbling accompanied the call for the surrender of weapons. Swiftly the bed of the wagon filled with all manner of devices, from ancient cap-and balls to scoped target rifles still gleaming with factory oil.
Bowies, stilettos, daggers, skinners, scalpers, and "Arkansas toothpicks" joined the pile, glittering like fangs. I contributed my firearms and Mr. Knox added a fine nickel-plated Colt's Lightning and an 1873 Winchester. Judge Blod handed me Joe Snake's notched Schofield to place on the stack, which Elder Sampson rearranged to avoid nicks and scrapes and covered with a canvas tarpaulin. I noticed that he smelled strongly of lavender Water.
"That's the kit," announced Wedlock finally.
"Except for the hideouts," Deacon Hecate said. "We shall gather those as they surface."
At last the wagons were drawn into line: Mr. Knox's first, followed by Ben Wedlock's and then the one containing the weapons with Judge Blod at the reins. The cavalry took its position in front with the Deacon sitting a great bony claybank beside Rudeen's gray and Elder Sampson straddling a bay mule behind the wagon con-taming the weapons. The Amarillo volunteers formed a snaggled formation at the rear. I had been assigned to ride with Mr. Knox, but begged his leave to join Ben Wedlock aboard the chuck wagon. The schoolmaster regarded me from the driver's seat.
"Smitten, are you?"
"He does not address me as a child," I said.
"You are not a man."
"I do not need reminding."
"Be wary, David. Men are seldom as they seem, and those that are may be the most dangerous of all."
"Am I forbidden?"
"Would your mother forbid you?"
I hesitated. "I think she would not."
"I think she would." He squinted into the rising sun. "However, I am not your mother."
"I may go?"
"Hadn't you better ask if you are welcome?"
I thanked him and did just that at the next wagon in line. Wedlock grinned, winked his good eye, and tossed a coil of rope and some other truck into the bed to make room for me on the seat.
There wasn't time for talk. Leaving Rudeen, the Deacon cantered to a rise, wheeled to face the party, and removed his hat. The sun came up red behind him. The wind stirred his hair, white as birch ashes.
" 'We have dealt very corruptly against thee,' " he began, in a voice that was not loud, but whose resonance swept like summer thunder over the flats, " 'and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou commandest thy servant Moses.
" 'Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandest thy servant Moses, saying, if you transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations;
" 'But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there.
" 'Now these are thy servants and thy people, whom thou hast redeemed by thy great power, and by thy strong hand.
" .'O Lord, I beseech thee, let now thine ear be attentive to the prayer of thy servant, and to the prayer of thy servants, who desire to fear thy name; and prosper, I pray thee, they servant this day, and grant him mercy.'
"Amen," he finished, and for the space of ten seconds there was silence except for the wind threading the grass, and behind us the inveterate splattering of tobacco juice from among the Amarillo irregulars. Then Hecate put his hat back on, stood in his saddle, and swept his long right arm forward. The procession started unevenly, like a chain tautening: first the Deacon, then Rudeen's cavalry, then Mr. Knox's wagon. Ben Wedlock picked up his reins.
"A thousand-mile journey begins with a single step, Davy," said he, flipping them. "Chief Red Cloud told me that himself." And as we started with a lurch, he broke into a song that was seized and borne along by the men at the rear:
Oh, I'm a good old rebel, now
that's just what I am!
THE BLAZE-FACE HORSE
O
h, it was a grand adventure! I have done many things in a life that I may with some modesty consider to have been eventful, and met men enough to fill any body of memoirs, but for richness and excitement the intervening years have yielded no crop to match that early harvest.
The reader has already met Blackwater, who fought with John Chivington of evil memory and told stories of Nelson Miles's thirteen-hundred-mile pursuit of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to the border of Canada; and Christopher Agnes, whom I saw catch a grandfather diamondback in mid-strike in his bare hands and, in almost the same motion, whirl it around by its tail and dash out its brains against the trunk of a cottonwood, then curse the reflexes that had cost him such a fine specimen. Add to them a Negro wrangler named Eli Freedman with a withered arm he claimed to have burned when General Sherman set Atlanta to the torch, and who seemed far more at ease with the horses in his charge than with his fellow men; a long-haired dandy named Mike McPhee, who had toured with Colonel Cody's show until the Colonel fired him for paying attention to a trick rider the Colonel admired himself, and boasted, in an Irish brogue as thick as turned earth, that he could pluck out a prairie dogs eye at forty paces with either hand, had he but access to the matched and specially balanced Americans that now resided in the wagon with the other weapons; and Bald Jim, whose surname was never known to me, whose benign aspect and prematurely nude scalp moved the younger members of the party to call him Dad, and who, Wedlock confided, had slain three Arapaho braves who broke into his cabin on the Powder River during the terrible winter of 1873, then eaten them. Any one of them had seen and done more than the five younger men that Mr. Knox had recruited in Cheyenne put together.
And of course there was Ben Wedlock himself, he of the quiet speech and terrible countenance, who served as trail cook and was never heard to issue an order, but who moved among the civilian volunteers with an air of command unchallenged. For all that he stressed a sedentary attitude, affecting discomfort with the chuck wagon's bumpy motion and an old man's groan of relief when at the end of the day he lowered himself to the ground with the others around the fire. I, who had seen him leap into his seat of a morning like a boy one third his age, and who had hung on while he whipped the team forward to keep the road when a wheel dropped into a hole that would have upset a lesser man's wagon, was not taken in by this artifice, although others were. It is a curious habit of some older men to exaggerate their infirmities. -
From the start, however, I was in his trust. Sometimes during the day he would pass the reins to me, sit back, charge a blackened lump of pipe, and tell of the bad times while mountains rolled past under tall sky.
"The chief had a niece he was fixed to marry onto me," he said one afternoon. "Her name was Spring Shower or somesuch; they don't always translate, injun names. Anyway she was pretty as they go, but you got to look at the older squaws to know how they'll wind up. Well, I got out before anything come of it. I don't know, though. There's lots worse ways to live. Lots worse."
"How did you escape?"
"My guard went to sleep. Guard duty bores an injun. I parted his hair with a rock just to make sure and cut out one of the chief's horses. I seen Red Cloud at the agency years later, after the peace. He didn't hold it against me about his niece nor the brave I split open; but he did want to know what become of the horse."
"Did you ever marry?"
"Married a storekeeper's daughter in Council Bluffs. They was the only fambly for miles wasn't Mormon. It didn't take. I moved flour sacks and sold sardines for a year and left when snow was on the ground. I never looked back on it. I guess the old man's dead by now. I'd be a storekeeper with ten kids. But I never could make tracks on them Mormons."
Judge Blod suffered mightily with his gout and took to the back of his wagon nights, where he had cleared a space among the confiscated weapons and lay moaning with his foot propped on a stack of revolvers. One night Ben Wedlock persuaded him to let him wrap the foot in a poultice he had made from sage and cottonwood bark and rock mold, dried and then boiled and wrapped in damp ticking. The Judge was instructed to keep it on when he slept and to leave his boot off in the morning. The procedure was repeated the next two nights, at the end of which the Judge began to feel better, and by the time we drew within sight of South Dakota, his pain had ceased. His earlier reservations about the one-eyed man's character forgotten, he pronounced Wedlock a wizard and proposed to write a book about his past adventures to show gratitude. Genially Wedlock declined. When we were alone I asked him if the poultice was an Indian remedy.
"Made it up on the spot," he said with a wink. "Tell a man you'll cure what ails him and if he's in enough misery he'll cure himself."
The Bad Lands had intrigued me since I first heard the name. Encountered at first hand, the country was planed flat by wind and glaciers and cluttered, as by a great diffident hand, with granite towers and sandstone cliffs butting into blue sky, their surfaces tapped and fluted like refugee parts from a machine shop. This was the Red Valley, scarped incongruously with gray Dakota sandstone fanning out from a charcoal-colored blister that Ben Wedlock informed me constituted the storied Black Hills. There for the first time I understood the Indians' insistence that the region was sacred. How to explain those jarring features, if they were not placed there as part of some divine perverted plan? The wind razored their square edges with a half-human chant.
"This is good-bye," said Major Rudeen one dawn, when the shadows of the buttes and needles clawed the ground. He had ridden out to reach down and shake the Judge's hand from his seat aboard the gray. "Any farther and I will be in violation of the treaty. Again I must implore you to abandon this quest."
"Thank you, Major. The thing is in motion." Judge Blod's mood was jovial, His foot was booted once more and planted in a normal position on the board.
"It would grieve me to see that fine white scalp decorating some buck's lodgepole."
"No more than it would me, I assure you. The Deacon will see us through."
The patrol left us in column-of-twos, pulling a shadow as long as the major's face as we last saw it. Shivering a littleâthe morning air was briskâI took my leave of the Judge and mounted the seat beside Wedlock. He was staring at the hills.
"I never lay eyes on them without my gut draws up," he said. "More hair's been lifted over them than flies in a pasture."
"Are Indians as bad as everyone says?"
"No good nor bad to it out here, Davy. Just dying and living and trying to do the one without the other." He drew into line behind Mr. Knox's wagon and tied off to wait. The air still smelled of woodsmoke and grease from breakfast.
"Judge Blod calls them savages in his books. But I guess you don't have to be an Indian to be a savage."
"You're wise beyond your years, Davy. I've ridden with men twice your age didn't have half your brains."
I glowed at these words. "What makes a man come to this country, Ben?"
"Depends on the man. Some come running ahead of the law. Some pack it in with them. Some bring God, like the Deacon there. I reckon the rest just come looking for a place to be born all over again."
"Why did you come?"
He smoked his pipe. "Well, Davy, I done my share of running, no use denying it. I was a wild'un when I was a yonker, though I don't reckon there's innocent blood on these hands. I wore a star myself a time or two, if you can feature it. Everyplace I went, God was there first if you looked for him. The getting born all over, now; that never lost its shine. There ain't that many places left a man can do that. I'll miss it when it's gone."
Just then the procession started, crossing the invisible line into the country of the Siouxâand of Quantrill' s buried gold. He untied the reins and took them between his fingers. "Yes, sir," said he, releasing the brake, "I'll sure miss it."
