The Ferguson Rifle (3 page)

“Likely,” Heath agreed. He glanced at the antelope. “Two shots, two kills. That's prime!”

“Don't worry none about Chantry,” Shanagan told them. “His was a runnin' shot, two hundred yards if an inch, and right through the heart.”

We spread out to offer less of a target, yet you could have drawn a fifty-yard circle around the lot of us. Back east there was much talk of the red man and the wrongs that had been done him, but I found myself less concerned with those wrongs and more with my own scalp at this moment.

“You got to see it their way,” Davy said. “To an Injun our outfit would make him a mighty rich man. One ambush, and they ride home loaded with powder, shot, traps, blankets, rifles, and horses, to say nothing of our trifles.”

Ahead of us was a knoll where a fringe of woodland came up out of a stream bed and crested the knoll. There were a few granite boulders around.

We spread out into a skirmish line and rode up the slope. There was a spring flowing from under a boulder, several cottonwood trees, and one huge fallen one. There was a little brush.

Only the Otoe hung back. “No good,” he said. “Bad spirits here.”

“Looks all right to me,” Bob Sandy said.

We walked our horses into the little hollow atop the knoll. On our north side, the ground fell steeply away into a coulee where our spring's water trickled away to join a small stream.

A more perfect camping place could not be found, but no ashes of campfires existed. There were many evidences of antelope, buffalo, and even wild horses about, and no bones to indicate a poison spring. Such springs were rare, but I had heard of some with arsenic in the water, and others with numerous minerals in suspension that might upset the human organism.

Talley swung down and tasted the water. “Hell, there's nothing wrong with that. I never tasted better.”

“No good,” the Otoe insisted. He gestured sweepingly. “No like. Bad place for Indian.”

Deg Kemble prowled about while Ebitt rode out along the ridge above the stream. On all three sides but that of the stream we would have an excellent field of fire with protection from a natural mound of earth that banked the source of the spring on three sides. On the other the fallen log offered an equally fine breastwork. The space within was perhaps thirty yards by twenty, ample for ourselves and our horses.

The Otoe hung back. Obviously he wanted no part of the place.

Talley stopped by where I still sat my horse. “You are an educated man, Chantry. What do you make of him?”

“There seem to be two possibilities. One that he didn't intend to bring us here because the place is too good a position to defend, in case he's planned to ambush us, or else the place is taboo for some reason.”

“Taboo?”

“An Indian doesn't have our knowledge, and for what he cannot otherwise explain, he imagines evil spirits are the cause. For example, suppose some Indians got hold of the blankets or clothing of people who died by smallpox and rode to this place with them. As you know, such things have happened and the Indians died very quickly.

“Other Indians may have found the bodies, dead but with no marks upon them, and would immediately assume evil spirits had been at work. After all, Kemble, it's only a few years since we were doing the same thing.”

“Makes sense. Anyway, I'm for stayin'. You agree?”

“I do.”

Later I wondered if my advice was sound. No one among us was the leader. Each had his abilities, each contributed in his own way.

While I put together a small fire, Isaac Heath picketed the horses, Bob Sandy and the Otoe kept watch, Shanagan staked out our antelope hides and began scraping them of excess flesh. The others gathered fuel for the night and Cusbe Ebitt put on a kettle and began to prepare a stew.

Talley went off down the trickle to the stream, scouting the country.

My fire going, I went to the edge and looked out over the vastness of the prairie, the grass flame red with the setting sun. For the first time, I realized what a move I had made.

My wife and child were gone. Burned to death in the flames of a fire set by …
whom
?

Or was it purely accident, like so many others? Sudden fires were not uncommon.

But what had
I
done? I had cut all ties, abandoned the planning of a lifetime, and ridden off into a wild land. Only two months ago I had sat with distinguished men, men of letters, directors of affairs, leaders of men, and now here I was, far off in the wilderness headed toward what?

CHAPTER 3
______________

T
HE SKY WAS shot with flaming arrows that slowly faded, leaving a kiss of crimson on the edges of clouds, and the prairie itself turned a sullen red, darkening into shadows and the night. Somewhere down in the copse an owl hooted.

It was an empty land, but I knew my people, and it would not be empty long. I had seen them back there with their simple wagons. I had seen them afoot, with wife and child riding, sometimes driving a cow, crossing the mountains, clearing the roads.

Already they had cut paths into the dark forests of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Men had long been trapping west of the Mississippi as well as east of it, and the adventurous ones, such as this party, were pushing out into the plains.

Those families crossing the mountains carried their axes and shovels … they would not be stopped. Where there was land to be taken, they would go, and then they would grow restless and rise up and move westward again and again.

Turning back toward the fire I was stopped by Heath's voice “… killed a man in a duel. The man said something about Chantry settin' the fire himself, an' Chantry challenged him. The fellow was a loudmouth, just blowing off with a lot of loose talk. He tried to back out, but Chantry wouldn't let him. Told him to make his fight or he'd shoot him like the dog he was. The man fought. Chantry let him shoot first, and the bullet burned Chantry's neck … drew blood. Then Chantry shot him.”

“Kill him?”

“That he did, and d' you know where the bullet hit him?”

“In the mouth,” Solomon Talley said. “He shot him in the mouth.”

Heath turned on him. “You've heard the story, then?”

“No,” Talley replied grimly, “but that's a hard man yonder. Besides,” he added, “that's what I'd o' done.”

For a few minutes I stood silent, letting the talk turn to other things, and then I started forward, making enough noise so they would know I was nearby.

They knew then, and I wished they did not. There are times when to be just nobody at all is the best thing. All that was past I wanted to forget.

For in a sense I was running away, not only from the scenes of love and happiness turned to grief, but from the whispered stories that implied I myself had started the fire that killed all I loved. Such a rumor starts easily, but how to put it down?

Nor did I wish to be pitied or to find doors closing in my face that had once been open to me.

My hands held the Ferguson rifle. In the months and years to come, it might be all there would ever be. It was mine. Not only that, but it reminded me of my mother, of our old cabin where we had been hungry yet rich in love, of my wife, who often rode to the hunt with me, and of my son whom I had taught to shoot with this very rifle.

Walking up to the fire, I squatted beside it, wiping my hatband with my fingers. “The sky says it will be windy tomorrow,” I said.

“Aye,” Ebitt agreed. “There's stew, man. You'd best finish it off so's we can clean the kettle. And you'll be needin' some coffee.”

There was talk then by the campfire, the good talk of frontiersmen, and I listened for I had much to learn. I had studied at the Sorbonne and at Heidelberg and I had taught history at Cambridge and William and Mary but what I had to learn from these men could be found in no book. They had been early upon the land, hunting and trapping for their living, and they knew well the land to which I had but lately come.

Firelight danced upon their faces. There was the good smell of a wood fire burning, of coffee freshly made, and the smell of meat broiling, and of the stew.

Something had happened during the day, for I had killed game, brought meat to the fire. They knew now that I was no drone, and that in whatever came I would carry my weight.

They were hard men living upon a hard land that demanded much, and the fact that I had killed an enemy in a face-to-face meeting meant something to them. It was a thing they understood. In the east, where duels occurred frequently, but were already looked upon with distaste in some quarters, this was not always the case.

Solomon Talley accepted the first watch, and Isaac Heath volunteered for the second. As for me, I requested the final watch, knowing Indians preferred attacks by daybreak.

Again I saw the Otoe's eyes upon my rifle, and I smiled at him. He did not respond, but looked away. Already I was tired. My body had not accustomed itself to the long hours of riding, and I wished to be fresh for my guard duty, so I opened my small blanket roll and went to sleep.

Hours later I was gently awakened. It was Heath. “Come, man, it's three by the clock, and a night with stars.”

Rolling out, I folded my bed, tugged on my boots, and slipped into my jacket. Heath looked at me and shook his head. “Those brass buttons now, they make a fair mark for shooting.”

“I know that. I'll risk it until I can make a shirt. Has it been quiet?”

Heath shrugged. “Yes, if you can call it that. Frogs down below, and the usual coyotes, but the light is deceitful. You'll have to keep a wary eye for trouble.”

Taking my rifle, I went out to the perimeter of the knoll and looked down over the prairie below. All seemed to be empty and still. In the darkness a good bit was yet visible, and I walked slowly, halfway around the camp, then quickly doubled back and came around from the opposite direction.

Heath added a few small chunks to the fire to keep the coals alive for morning, then turned in.

The camp was still. If an attack was to come, the obvious place was from out of the creek bed where nothing could be seen. One by one I checked off the sleeping positions of my friends. Talley, Ebitt, Sandy, Kemble, Shanagan, Heath, and the Otoe.

The time drew on, and my ears became attuned to the night. I moved off, never circling the same way twice, never completing a circle, for I wished to establish no pattern, no way I could be timed. In the far off east there seemed to be a lightening of the sky, but it was early for that.

For several minutes I was conscious of something wrong before it occurred to me that the frogs had ceased their endless croaking. The night was suddenly silent.

Near a boulder I squatted, one toe slightly behind the other, listening.

Nothing … no sound.

I turned my head. Should I awaken them? I did not want to make them lose their sleep because of my own foolishness. I could awaken one of them … Talley, perhaps.

Talley … Ebitt … Sandy … Kemble … Davy Shanagan, Isaac Heath, and the—

The Otoe was gone!

Horses … first they would stampede the horses. That much I had learned. Swiftly, I ran to them. They were nervous, heads up, nostrils distended.

“Shanagan,” I said.

And a shadow moved … a horse snorted, and I sidestepped as a darker shadow lunged toward me. There was the gleam of firelight on a knifeblade, and I chopped, short and hard, with the butt of my rifle.

He was coming low and fast and the butt
thunked
against his skull and he went down hard. Turning swiftly as another came in over the low mound, I fired.

My shot was from the hip, for there was no chance to aim. It caught the Indian and turned him but my hands went automatically for bullet and powder.

All was suddenly still. Unused to combat, I had expected the clash of arms, the scream of wounded, the stabbing flames of shooting … and there was nothing.

Stepping back among the horses, I went from one to the other, whispering to quiet them down. From where I stood, I could see the beds of the others, all empty.

Something stirred near me and I turned swiftly. Davy's voice was scarcely breathed. “You all right?”

“The Otoe was gone. I went to the horses, thinking they might try to stampede them.”

“You done right.” He could see the body on the ground about a dozen feet away. “You got one?”

“Two, I think. I shot one over there.”

I started forward and Shanagan caught my arm. “Uhuh. They'll still be out there.”

There was a faint lemon tinge to the far-off sky now. We stood waiting, listening.

An owl hooted … inquiringly. After a bit, the same owl.

Davy's lips at my ear whispered, “Wonderin' where this one is.”

The sky lightened, red streaks shot up, and high in the heavens a cloud blushed faintly at the earth below.

We waited, not moving, not knowing what might come. The Indians might press the attack, might draw away to wait for a better moment. The red man is under no compulsion to continue a fight. He does not insist upon victory at any cost, and he has time. He is under no compulsion to win
now
.

Now the sky brightened quickly. We moved to the perimeter, seeking firing positions. The plain below was innocent of life.

Degory Kemble moved over to us. “There's nobody in sight,” he said. “My guess is they've pulled out.” He saw the Indian lying in the dust and moved over to him. With his toe he turned him over, holding his rifle ready for a shot if the warrior proved to be playing possum.

He was quite dead. One side of his head was bloody, crushed by my blow. I turned away, and looked out over the prairie.

“You want his hair?” Davy asked. “He's yours.”

“No,” I said. “It's a barbaric custom.”

“This here is a barbaric land. You get yourself a few scalps and the Injuns will respect you more.”

“Take it if you wish.”

“No. By rights it's yours.”

Kemble carefully broke the dead warrior's arrows, then his bow. His knife he tossed to me and that I kept. “Trade it for something,” Kemble said. “It's worth a good beaver pelt.”

“I thought I shot one,” I said. “He came in right over there.”

“They're like prairie dogs,” Talley commented. “If you don't kill them right dead, they're gone into some hole.”

We walked over to where I'd seen the Indian, and suddenly Talley pointed. “Hit him, all right. See yonder?”

There was a spot of blood, very red, splashed upon a leaf. Just beyond we found two more.

We followed no farther for the trail of blood vanished into thick brush, and he might be lying down there, waiting for us.

“Lung shot, I'd say,” Kemble said. “You nailed him proper.” He looked at me. “For a pilgrim, you sure take hold. That's as good shootin' as a man can do.”

“I didn't want to kill him,” I said. Then I paused. That was not quite true, because I certainly had not wanted him to kill me, and it was one or the other.

“If you'd not shot him, he'd have thought you a coward or a poor warrior. He'd despise you for it. You better think this through because there ain't no two ways about it. You got to be ready to shoot to kill or you better go back home.”

He was right, of course, and had not men always fought? We walked back to the fire where coffee was on. Bob Sandy came in. He had gone stalking and found nothing.

“They pulled out,” he said regretfully. “They're no fools. The Otoe probably figured with a tenderfoot on watch it would be easy.” He grinned at me. “You fooled 'em, you surely did.”

“I was fortunate,” I said, “and scared.”

“You bet you was,” Sandy said, “an' you better stay scared. Time comes you stop bein' scared, you better go back east, because you won't last long after.”

We sat around the fire and ate, and looking around at their faces, I thought of Homer and the Greeks camped on the shore waiting to advance on Troy.

These were men of the same kind, men of action, fighting men, no better and no worse than those.