The Ferguson Rifle (2 page)

The lean dark man got to his feet. “I'm Davy Shanagan. Are you from the old country, then?”

“My mother was, and my great-grandfather, too.”

“Sit, then, Ronan Chantry, and we'll talk of the western lands and what we'll do there. A man with a rifle that can be shot eight to the minute is welcome at any fire in the west.”

The others agreed, but my eyes went to the Indian, whose eyes were on the rifle in my hands.

With a rifle like that, an Indian would be a big man among his own people.

It was something to remember.

CHAPTER 2
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D
AVY SHANAGAN GLANCED critically at my costume when I joined him at the morning fire. “You surely ain't dressed for the country.” He glanced up at me as I warmed my hands. “Chantry, d' you have any idea what you're up against? We're westward bound, after fur. No tellin' what we'll find yonder.”

“I trapped some, as a lad.”

“You heard tell of this Lewis and Clark outfit? We figured if they could go west, we could, too. We won't be crossin' trails with them. They'll be much farther north, but James Mackay crossed this country we're ridin' into, and he trapped fur there.”

“It won't be easy,” I admitted. “There was a Spanish army outfit marched north from Santa Fe to the Missouri, but Indians wiped them out when they got there.

“The Mallett brothers and six others went back the other way. It's said they named the Platte. It's rough country, but I've a notion we can make it.”

Shanagan poked sticks into the flames. “Just about anywhere a man goes, he'll find somebody has been there before him.” He glanced up at me again. “You up to that kind of travel?”

Squatting on my heels, I said, “I believe I am, Davy. I left nothing behind me, nothing at all.”

“Then you won't go to pinin'. A pinin', yearnin' man is no good on the trail. When there's Injuns about, a man keeps his eyes open or he dies … an' sometimes he dies, anyway.”

He impaled a chunk of meat on a sharpened stick and leaned it over the coals. “You'll need an outfit. Those clothes won't last no time.”

“When I shoot some game, I'll make a hunting shirt and leggings.”

Davy looked doubtful. “You can do that? Of your ownself?”

“Well, I haven't done it since I was a lad. There was a time when we were very poor. I often made moccasins and once a hunting shirt.”

Davy chuckled. “I never seen the time when I wasn't poor.” He indicated the sleepers. “They're good men. The long, tall one is Solomon Talley, from Kentuck. Bob Sandy lyin' yonder is from the same neck o' the woods. The stocky, square-shouldered one is Cusbe Ebitt. I never heard him say where he was from, but Degory Kemble is from Virginny, and Isaac Heath is a Boston man.”

“What about the Indian?”

“He's an Otoe.”

“Known him long?”

“I ain't known none of them long. Deg Kemble an' me, we rafted down to New Orleans, one time. I trapped a season in Winnebago country with Talley. The Otoe comes from the Platte River country … knows the river.”

One by one, the others drifted to the fire to roast chunks of meat and drink the strong, black coffee.

Heath's eyes kept straying to me, and knowing he was a Boston man, I was ready for the question when it came. “That's an uncommon name you have, my friend.”

I shrugged. “Chantry? There've been Chantrys on the frontier for years, Mr. Heath. An ancestor of mine was on the east coast as early as 1602.”

My reply was flat and short, spoken with a finality that left small room for questions, and I wanted none. The past was in the past and there I wanted it to remain. If he had been in Boston within the past few months, he might know that which I wished to forget.

We mounted and rode west with the Otoe scouting ahead, his pony knee-deep in the tall bluestem grasses. Occasionally flocks of prairie chickens flew up, then glided away across the grass to disappear like smoke. Far off we saw several moving black dots.

“Buffalo,” Talley said. “We'll be seeing them by the thousand, Chantry. This is their country we're coming to, and a grand, broad country it is.”

He leaned down from his saddle and pulled a handful of the bluestem. “Look at it, man! And this is the country some call the Great American Desert! They're fools, Chantry! Fools! Earth that will grow such grass will grow rye or barley or wheat. These plains could feed the world!”

“If you could get men to live on them,” Ebitt said wryly. “It's too big for them, too grand. They can't abide the greatness of the sky, or the distances.” He pointed ahead. “Look! There's no end yonder. No horizon. You ride on and on and on and all is emptiness. Only the buffalo, the antelope, and the grass bending before the wind. I've seen men frightened by it, Chantry! I've seen them turn tail and run back to their cities and their villages. Only in Russia or the Sahara is there anything like it.”

“There's the pampas, on the Argentine,” I suggested. “I've not been there, but it must be very like this.”

“Maybe,” Ebitt said skeptically, “but I think there's nothing like it, not anywhere. The Sahara's desert. Well, Russia, maybe, like I said. I've talked with Russians and there seems to be a vastness to their land as well.”

My mind was on other things, for by nature I am a cautious man. “How much does the Otoe understand?” I asked Talley.

“Not much, I'm thinking, but you can't tell about a redskin. They talk little when there's a white man about, but they listen, and nobody in his right mind thinks an Indian is not quick.

“He hasn't our education, and his upbringing isn't Christian, but there's nothing wrong with his senses or his wits. He's tuned to the land, Chantry, and don't ever forget he's lived in this country, in this same way, for a mighty long time.”

“Not on the plains,” Deg Kemble objected. “Until the Indian got the horse from the white man, he never traveled far over the grassland. He followed streams, and followed the buffalo at times, but there's nothing to live on out here. Once the redskin got the horse, there was no holding him.”

Davy Shanagan rode up beside us. “Chantry, I'm cuttin' out to shoot some meat. Want to ride along?”

We turned away from our small column and trotted our horses over the prairie, then walked them to the summit of a small knoll. We found ourselves with a surprising view of the country around.

Within sight, but some distance off, were two herds of antelope, but no buffalo. Far and away to the westward there seemed to be a fold in the hills with some treetops showing.

“There's game along the creeks,” Shanagan said. “The Otoe told us that. None of us ever been this far west before. There's bear occasionally, some deer, and lots of prairie chickens.”

We walked our horses toward the antelope but holding a course that, while bringing us nearer, seemed aimed at passing them by. At first they seemed unimpressed, but as we continued to advance one or two of them started to move. We decided to have a try at them although they were a good two hundred yards off.

Drawing rein, I lifted the Ferguson to my shoulder, took a careful sight, then squeezed off my shot. The antelope stumbled, then broke into a run. From childhood I had learned to
think
my bullet to the target, for given a chance the eye is accurate, and I knew a deer would sometimes run a quarter of a mile with a bullet through its heart.

The antelope raced on, running swiftly, until suddenly it crumpled, kicked, and lay still.

Davy shot at the instant I did, and his long Kentucky rifle held true. As we rode up to our game, he got out his ramrod and prepared to reload. “Better load up, Chantry. You don't want to be ketched with an empty rifle.”

“I am loaded.”

He glanced at me, then at the Ferguson, but made no comment. He was a better skinner than I, so while he skinned out both our kills and selected the best cuts of the meat, I kept watch from a nearby knoll.

He was working only a few yards from me and he said, “Can't take nothing for granted. Looks like open country but there's hollows and coulees out yonder where you could hide an army. Just when you figure there ain't anybody within miles, a dozen Injuns come foggin' it out of a coulee and you've lost your hair.”

My eyes were getting accustomed to the country. It is remarkable how one's vision becomes limited to nearby objects and what we expect to see. Out here the distance was enormous, a vast sky and an endless rolling plain of grass to which the eye must adjust.

First the mind must accept the clouds, the grass bending before the wind, the changes in the light on the grass, and the shadows left by clouds. Soon the mind has sorted the usual sights and the eye becomes quick to pick up the unusual, the smallest wrong movement in the bend of grass, a deepening of a shadow at the wrong place. The land where I had spent my earliest years was forest and foothills, with frequent streams. Here the only trees were along the water-courses. Later, in New England, I had hunted in farming country, occasionally taking trips into the mountains of Vermont or to Maine. The open plains were new to me, and I was wary of them.

“Known many Indians?”

“Here and there,” Davy acknowledged. “Shawnees, mostly. Some Ponca Sioux, Cherokee, and Delaware. I've no bad thought for them. They have their ways and we ours, but when it comes to livin' in this country, their way is best.

“Bob Sandy now, he figures the only good Injun is a dead one. He come home from the mill one time with his pa to find his family butchered, their cabin burned. Even the pigs were shot full of arrows.

“So Bob, he's got a full-sized grudge against Injuns. That's why we put him up to watchin' the Otoe.”

“You're watching him? You don't trust him?”

“Chantry, that Injun is ridin' toward his own people. What we got may seem mighty small to a gent from back east, but to an Injun, it's treasure. If he could murder us all, or set a trap with his own folks to kill us, they'd have all we got and he'd be a big man among his own folks.

“They got no Christian upbringin'. Nobody ever told them to forgive their enemies, or told them that stealin' was bad, except in their own village, from their own people. With most Injuns the word stranger is the same as that for enemy.

“A lot of white men think the Injun is dead set against them because they're white. Nothing to it. An Injun will kill another Injun as quick as he will a white man, except that the white man may have more loot on him.”

“They've had it pretty good, Davy. The best hunting in the world, no taxes to pay, and a lot of country to move around in.”

“Uh-huh”—Shanagan chuckled—“that's your Boston showin'. What you don't figure on is that you folks yonder in civilization have yourselves nicely protected by the law and custom. Out here you've got no protection but a quick eye, a fast horse, and the ability to shoot straight.

“That free savage that folks talk about, he never leaves his camp but what somebody is likely to take his hair.”

After that neither of us spoke for some time. My own thoughts strayed far afield. These broad plains must resemble those from which the wild riding Scythians migrated when they moved west and south from Central Asia. They took scalps as well, although they worked with metal and were in many ways further advanced than the American Indian.

Out of Central Asia our own people had come … or perhaps from the lands east of the Danube or Don. The question is disputed, but my own inclination is toward Central Asia. Among those migrating tribes were the Celts and we who moved farthest to the west, we Irish, Welsh, and Bretons still kept some of the old beliefs, the old customs.

Since the beginning of time, men had been migrating, with the movement usually to the south or west. Perhaps this of which I was now a part would be the last great migration. Yet this was different. This was no organized movement of tribes, nations, or conquering armies; it was a migration of individuals, each making his own decision, gathering his own supplies and equipment. From a thousand villages and cities they came, strangers to each other, yet with a common goal.

Over the mountains from the coastal provinces, filtering down the slopes, floating down the rivers, some dying, some living, many killed by savages, but the dead were always replaced by others. There was no end to them.

I had seen them on the Monongahela and the Ohio, floating their rafts down stream, finding homes in Illinois, Missouri, or going on to Texas.

Here and there I heard talk of Oregon, and of California. Once a man has made that first move, once he has cast off his moorings, his associations, broken with his school, his church, his village store, and his relatives, it is easy to continue on. It is always easier to travel than to stop.

As long as one travels toward a promised land, the dream is there, to stop means to face the reality, and it is easier to dream than to realize the dream.

“You spoke of the Injuns awhile back, their hunting, and all. Hunting is all right when there's game, but the game drifts when the climate changes, and during the winter there's no berries or nuts or seeds to be had, so grub can be mighty hard to come by.”

“You're right, of course. But they did smoke meat, and some of the Indians planted corn and squash.”

“You bet they did, but Injuns aren't much hand to put by. I lived among 'em a time or two when their bellies were empty and the papooses cried themselves to sleep. It took a lot of grub to get them through the winter, and I reckon no tribe ever had enough.”

Remembering my own early years, I could only agree. Many a time before I had the Ferguson rifle, we had gone hungry, and there'd been a few times after. More than once I'd hiked miles through the wet woods hunting something when all the animals had laid up to wait out the storm.

Suddenly, Shanagan pulled up, pointing. The tracks of several riders of unshod ponies had passed diagonally across our route, and not long since. They had drawn up here, watching our party go by.

“We'd better be gettin' back.” Davy took a look around, then we raced our horses across the flat to get back to the others. Solomon Talley rode to meet us.

“They heard our shootin',” Davy said. “They could never have missed it, but they didn't attack even when they knew our guns were empty.”

Cusbe Ebitt spat. “They want us all together, and at the right time.”