The Vigilante's Bride (23 page)

Luke and Tom Cosgrove stationed themselves high on the ridgeline, while Henry, John Cosgrove, and Will Brown spread out halfway down the cliff behind the rocks.

At a shout, Luke looked up. Nearly fifty braves lined the rim of the canyon, tall, grim-faced men with cheeks and foreheads streaked with circles and bars of mudlike war paint. A wave of red-skinned men washed down the hillside, digging in, blending in with the surrounding foliage.

Turning to the Crow beside him, Luke said, “Curly Bear, keep those men out of sight. Get them to the other side of the canyon and get them up high. Make sure they know those cows will run once the shooting starts.”

Curly Bear’s eyes gleamed. “Like buffalo?” he asked.

“I guess you know.” Luke grinned and squeezed the Indian’s shoulder. To Curly Bear, with three eagle feathers stuck rakishly over his ear, two hundred docile cows were nothing. He’d ridden bareback into buffalo herds of thousands.

Ahead of the herd, Clete Wade rode along, scouting the terrain, speculating why Axel was gone so long. From time to time he shifted around in the saddle and checked the horizon. Not a cloud in the sky, and yet an expectant heaviness hung in the air, as if a storm were coming.

From the time they pulled the herd out of the Little Bighorn the day before, he hadn’t liked it.

They were driving the herd due south from where the Little Bighorn and Bighorn Rivers came together. It was a rolling landscape, rough grassland parted by a few low hills and ravines, gouged through by the occasional deep canyon like the one he was riding in now.

He slowed the horse to a walk and rolled himself a smoke. It had taken him two days to swallow his anger at not going with Haldane to Parker. He’d wanted to be there when they took Sullivan out. Clete put a hand on his chin and worked his jaw from side to side, his eyes narrowing at the popping sounds it made. Luke Sullivan would pay for that if it was the last thing Clete did. He looked up, scanned the dark gray walls of the cliffs. There!

One minute, they weren’t there, and the next minute they were.
Give any white man the creeps
, he thought. When he spotted a tall figure in buckskin slipping behind a rock, Clete’s scalp rippled. And over there, another one. On the rocks above, three more hunched and moved into the trees. It seemed everywhere he looked, copper-skinned men clung like brown spiders to the cliffs on both sides of the canyon.

Images of Sullivan, bleeding and down on his knees, flashed in front of him, and arrows coming from nowhere. Riding a horse made him too easy a target. Clete kicked his feet free of the stirrups and slid off the horse. Running, he dove headfirst into a dry ditch carved out by the rains.

Axel and Chief Black Otter appeared on the ledge of the cliff above. Clete slid the barrel of his Winchester over the side of the ditch and lined up the Crow chief in his sights. He squeezed the trigger. A white scar blew out of the rock at the chief ’s feet, the slug ricocheting down the canyon.

Quickly, Clete cocked the rifle and fired again, trying to get the range right. This time, the bullet whined over the Indian’s head. Better. As Black Otter broke for the shelter of a boulder, Clete’s Winchester roared once more. The bullet’s impact sent the chief to the ground. He slid on his back halfway down the hillside. His leg useless, Black Otter elbowed his way behind a boulder and shouted in Crow.

His braves shot to their feet with yells of fury. Until that moment, not a bow had been drawn. Axel shouted down at Clete, gesturing wildly, pointing behind him. Clete lifted his head and peered over the edge of the ditch, saw what looked to him like a whole tribe of enraged Crows swarming down the hillside after him. He scrambled out of the ditch and made a frantic dash for his horse.

Luke aimed and fired. A geyser of mud and dirt blew out of the ground between Clete and the horse. Half a dozen archers drew.

Clete snatched the bridle and held the frightened horse still. He had his boot in the stirrup when the first arrow hooked in hard in his upper arm. Face twisted, Clete grabbed for the shaft and tried to pull it out. A red-hot poker drove into his hip, burying itself and a piece of his trousers deep into muscle, and slamming him against the horse. The animal snorted and ran away, holding its head at an odd angle to avoid the trailing reins.

Clete had hardly hit the ground when Little Turtle and three Crow braves shinnied down the cliff and dangled from an overhanging ledge. They dropped, landed on their feet. Knives drawn, they ran to the downed white man.

Clete tried to get his gun up but with no success, as he was knocked flat on his back by a moccasined foot. Cursing, he grabbed the fist clenching his hair, and then his oath turned into a long, hoarse scream.

On the hillside across the ravine, Luke’s stomach roiled.

He’d heard those screams before. Swallowing, he turned away, and for the first time, Bart Axel got a look at the Indian in buckskins who’d shot at Clete.

“Sullivan!” he yelled.

Face twisting, Axel yanked the Schofield from its holster and fired. The impact of the slug tore into the fleshy part of Luke’s arm and knocked him to the ground. Red gushing from his sleeve, he slid in the dirt partway down the embankment.

Axel turned and jumped down the hillside, zigzagging, sliding, half falling in a race for the ravine and Clete’s excited little mare. Grabbing the saddle horn, he threw himself onto her back and kicked her into a run.

Luke struggled to a sitting position. Leaning into the steep incline, he braced his feet against a rock, lifted the butt of the rifle to his shoulder, and clenched his teeth into the fringed sleeve on his left arm, pulling it up like a sling. The buckskin was slimy with his blood, and pain stabbed down to his fingernails.

Supporting the barrel with his injured arm, he raced the sights ahead of Axel on the horse and fired. Missed.

Clumsily, he tried to cock the lever to shoot again, but his left hand had gone numb and shook uncontrollably. He couldn’t hold the gun up, couldn’t feel the weight of the barrel anymore. Feeling sick and shivery, he watched Axel ride away.

He felt it before he heard it – the ground vibrating under his hips. Like a distant avalanche, the rumble of hooves came from around the bend. Hemmed in by the high rock walls, the herd thundered around the curve.

Axel heard it too, and looked back over his shoulder, then flailed his legs into his horse. Lashing the reins back and forth in a stinging arc across its neck, he drove the animal faster, trying to get out of the way of the herd.

The lead bulls barreled alongside him, jostling the little mare and her rider, spooning up clods of dirt. The others followed right behind, overtaking them, surrounding them. Caught in the middle of a crushing mass of steers and clacking horns, Axel fired his revolver into the air and whipped the horse toward the outside of the herd. Encircled by crazed cattle on all sides, Axel galloped along in the suffocating din with no choice but to ride it out.

From the ledge above, Luke saw the horse’s shoulder dip as it broke stride. For a moment, she seemed to rise above the heaving backs of the herd around them, thrust upward by the surging momentum. Axel’s hat flew off, cartwheeled across a steer’s back, and disappeared. Then horse and rider sank together into a cloud of yellow dust and hooves. The last of the herd disappeared down the canyon.

The distant rumbling of the herd grew louder, and with it the bellowing racket of cattle approaching.

Luke slid down the hill to Black Otter, snatching, grabbing at brush with his good arm. Crows at the other end of the canyon had turned the herd. Confused, the cows were stampeding back this way.

Black Otter started to slide. Wide-eyed, he reached his hand up to Luke.

Luke grabbed it and crooked a leg around a small tree, praying it would hold them and keep them both from rolling into the herd below. The ground trembled with the pounding of hooves.

Lord, quick, I need some help down here!

Feet first, three braves dropped over the top led by Curly Bear, digging their heels in, skidding down to the two men.

Luke bent over the chief and tugged at his leggings, trying to get to the wound to stop the bleeding. Curly Bear shoved him aside and drew his knife. With a flick of his hand, he slashed the leather open from hip to ankle.

Luke tied a strip of the cut legging into a tourniquet.

The gush of blood slowed. It wasn’t nearly good enough, but it was all he could do for now. “Let’s get him to New Hope and a doctor,” he said.

Wincing, Black Otter said something to the men that Luke didn’t understand, then closed his eyes. The four of them, lifting and crawling, got the chief up to the top and boosted him over the edge. Tom Cosgrove, lying on his stomach, hauled Luke up the last few feet.

Luke sagged against a tree trunk, panting and holding his arm. “Go get Doc Maxwell. Tell him to meet us at New Hope. Tell him to hurry.”

CHAPTER
20

As night settled in, the Indians began arriving at New Hope. Some walked, while others rode in on horseback, dragging loaded travois through the woods and setting up their tipis in the field beyond the barn. Members of the Dog Soldiers and Fox Warriors, solemn, straight-backed men with braids down to their waists, simply appeared a few hours after the stampede. In small groups of two or three they stood around the yard, talking quietly, waiting for word from inside about Black Otter.

On the back porch, three braves stepped aside, one of them holding the kitchen door as Emily came out with a bucket and headed for the well again.

Every window was ablaze with light. Inside, Doc Maxwell and Emily had turned the library into an infirmary, a makeshift operating room. He and Scully rolled the piano against the wall, while Emily padded the long oak reading table with newspapers and quilts and covered it with sheets. It took three men – Doc and Scully and a Crow medicine man – to move the big Indian onto the table. They worked on him for hours.

The chief ’s face was sunken, wrinkled with pain. From hip to ankle, his leg was splinted and wrapped in bandages. Maxwell squeezed his shoulder gently. It had been an ordeal for all of them. Twice, his patient had fainted on the table as Doc struggled to stop the hemorrhaging, set the bones, and stitch the gaping wound closed. Maxwell gave him another injection of morphine.

Black Otter’s gaze held on the shaman kneeling by the fireplace. At the chief ’s request, he’d remained in the room, occasionally bending over Black Otter’s injured body with Doc’s stethoscope plugged in his ears, listening, wide-eyed, to his chief ’s heartbeat as Maxwell removed chips of bone from the chief ’s leg.

The man’s presence reassured Black Otter, and for Maxwell that – and the relief in the chief ’s eyes as the painkiller took hold – was enough. However crude and rudimentary the shaman’s knowledge of medicine, the two men shared this patient.

“Your medicine puts him to sleep,” Maxwell’s barefoot assistant had said, shaking his head in disapproval.

Maxwell nodded. “Sleep is good.”

Daybreak brightened the windows at the end of the library before Doc Maxwell finished and they got Black Otter into a bed brought into the library. With a sigh, the doctor straightened up over the chief and rolled his sleeves down.

Maxwell snapped his bag shut and started for the door. As he did, the shaman slung a white buffalo robe over his shoulders and opened a leather pouch. He sorted through the sacred bundle, preparing for the prayers and rites with which he would heal his chief as soon as the white doctor was gone.

Doc Maxwell smiled and slipped out into the hall.

It seemed all wrong to Emily. The morning after the stampede had dawned with birds chittering and a sky so bright, so blue, it hurt her eyes to look at it. As if nothing had happened, she thought. Life went on.

For hours last night, she’d dozed in Luke’s arms on the sofa in the darkened parlor, listening to the serious voices in the hall, and waiting until Doc Maxwell could leave Black Otter and attend to Luke.

Early this morning, she slipped from his arms and stood up. She straightened her clothes and patted her hair, trying to put herself together. Still sleepy, she rubbed her face. Coffee – she needed some coffee to clear her head. Trying not to wake Luke, she left the room quietly and went off to the kitchen.

Alone in the big room, she poked sticks of kindling into the firebox of the stove to start breakfast. No one had slept much the night before, and from the looks of Luke when she left him, he was worn out. It had been a nightmare, beginning the afternoon before, when Luke, New Hope’s men, and a dozen Crow Indians rode up with an unconscious Black Otter in a litter.

“Any coffee?”

She smiled, recognizing his voice. “Not yet.” She turned. Still in his bloodstained buckskins, Luke stood in the doorway, his left arm hanging useless in a sling. She glanced away, her eyes filling.

In three steps he was beside her. “Don’t do that,” he said, his voice husky. “I hate it when you cry.”

“I’m sorry. I keep thinking you could’ve been killed.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“Not this time.” She pulled away, filled the big percolator with water, its strainer with ground coffee, and set it on the stove to brew. She didn’t know if Indians drank coffee or not, but it would be there if they did.

Luke slid his hand around her waist and turned her to him. For several minutes he wrapped his good arm around her and watched the flames licking the kindling in the stove.

The air in the kitchen hung heavy with the familiar smell of woodsmoke.

She sighed and wondered why things happened the way they did. Axel and Clete both killed. “What an awful day,” she said, and leaned her face against his shoulder.

Luke nuzzled her ear. “Let’s go upstairs to your room. Or mine. I don’t care which. I want to be alone with you. We need to talk.”

She shook her head against his chest. “We can’t. It wouldn’t look right.”

“After yesterday, I don’t care what it looks like or what other people think. I care what you think.” The words came out harsh. He was angry and hurting, both inside and out. He paused, took a long breath, then said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Going upstairs together, I mean. No one would pay any attention to it if we were married.”

Emily didn’t answer right away, but instead let the words soak in, unsure if she’d heard him right. “But we’re not married,” she said softly.

A slow smile drifted across Luke’s face. “Why don’t we change that?” A big warm hand ran up and down her arm, his voice as quiet as hers. He held her away from him and looked down at her, she up at him. “Marry me, before something else goes wrong.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re saying,” she said.

“I’m saying I love you. What do I have to do – go down on one knee before you understand?”

Emily gave him a wobbly smile. “You’d never do that, not in a million years. Besides, the way you look right now, I don’t think you could.”

“I might just be able to manage it,” he said, backing up a step, as if to show her that he could do it if he had to.

“Don’t,” she said, alarmed. “You’ll never forgive me.”

“You’re too smart to marry me, but I’m asking, anyway. Will you?”

Emily started to throw her arms around him but remembered the arm in the sling across his chest just in time. She checked herself and hugged him gently instead. “Yes, I will.”

He swooped her up with his good arm and swung her feet off the floor. In a hoarse whisper he said, “Yahoo! Thank you, Lord. I must’ve done something right.”

An hour later Doc Maxwell said, “Hold still, Luke. Let me see what we got here.” He dug in his bag resting on the table in the kitchen and pulled out several sharp, shiny instruments. “Throw those in that pot of boiling water over there, will you?” he said to Emily, then slowly rotated Luke’s wrist and elbow, nodding, making noncommittal doctor sounds in his throat. “Like I said, it’s not broke. Just shot clean through. Real nice-looking hole, too.”

“Thanks,” Luke said dryly.

Emily leaned forward, watching everything Doc did, blanching at the run of fresh blood as Doc started probing around in the hole in Luke’s arm.

Across the room, Sheriff Tucker leaned against a cupboard, scribbling in a small notebook.

“What happened to Axel’s men?” Luke asked him.

Before Tucker could answer, Doc’s scissors snipped out a ragged shred of live flesh still attached somewhere inside.

Luke’s jaw clamped shut tight, and he set his teeth hard together and swallowed a groan. He scowled at Doc Maxwell. “That hurt.”

The sheriff looked up from his notebook. “I already had three of Axel’s men in jail,” he said, his voice curt and businesslike. “Then this morning I woke up to find six of the strangest cowpokes I’ve ever seen in my life standing inside my office. They had the rest of the drivers of the Parker herd with ’em, trussed up like turkeys. Said they wanted to swear out warrants against them.”

“Let them,” Luke said.

“No. Under the law, Haldane and those men ain’t done one single thing wrong.”

“What?” Disbelieving, Luke looked up.

“Under the law, I said. After all, they were driving their own cattle, wearing their own brand.” The sheriff shook his head. “Six Injuns with tomahawks and guns, dressed like white men – sort of – every one of ’em madder than I’ve ever seen an Injun. Speaking of which, Doc, how’s Black Otter doing?”

Maxwell dusted a powder that stung like a hive of bees into the raw hole in Luke’s arm.

“Ye-ow!” His patient leaped off the stool, doubled over, his arm cradled protectively against his chest.

“Sit down, Luke. I’m not done yet.” Doc turned back to the sheriff. “The shot busted the chief ’s leg and messed up an artery. He’s in bed in the other room. I expect he’ll be all right in a couple months. His people are all riled up, though, and don’t know as I blame ’em, either. His medicine man’s back there with him now, burning pine needles and rattling bones.”

“At least that doesn’t hurt,” Luke muttered, glaring at Maxwell.

“You’re right there.” Doc smiled blandly. “Don’t work, neither. Sit down, I said.”

Sheriff Tucker ignored the exchange and continued. “Well, I wasn’t about to argue with six Crows. So I locked Axel’s men up for rustling their own cattle. Probably kept them alive, though.”

“How’s that?”

“The Crows said Haldane got away, escaped when they were bringing him in. Don’t know as I believe ’em, though. There was no way to prove he killed Jupiter, and they knew it. I just figure we won’t be seeing him again. And if they’d brought him in, I’da had to turn him loose for lack of evidence. At least, that’s what the boss says.”

Luke’s snapped his head up. “What boss?”

Tucker’s lips thinned, and his voice went frosty. “The whole Department of Justice, the Attorney General, and the President of these United States, Mr. Sullivan. They are my bosses. And I was wrong when I figured you couldn’t do much more in Repton. Before I came out here today, I got a telegram from Washington. Seems a whole lot of folks are upset down there.

They say I got a federal treaty violation against the Crow Nation, a shootout between – if you can believe it – two groups of white men on a Indian reservation, and every man-jack of you swearing the Crows weren’t involved.”

“They weren’t,” Luke said firmly.

“Then how come I got a Indian chief with a bullet in his leg and a scalping to explain?” He sighed. “I just may have to go to Washington on this myself.”

“Sheriff,” Luke said slowly, “if you do go to Washington, would you mind taking New Hope’s deed with you?”

Tucker’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because it’s wrong. Part of New Hope land belongs to Black Otter and his people. The government made a mistake when they drew up the treaty.”

Unblinking, Sheriff Tucker stared at Luke for a full minute, his face hardening. Pushing himself away from the table, he gave a disgusted snort. “The U.S. government made a mistake on a treaty, you say? In the middle of all this mess I got, you really expect me to tell Washington that?”

“Please, Sheriff,” Emily broke in. “The Crow are good people. They don’t deserve this.”

Sheriff Tucker started for the door. Hand on the knob, he turned around, as if he’d just remembered something. “By the way, I heard outside in the hall that you and Mr. Sullivan are getting married. Is that a fact?”

“Yes,” she said. “Next month. We just decided.”

Luke went to Emily and with his good arm pulled her close to him. “In Repton. A big church wedding next month when Molly gets back. You’re invited. The whole town’s invited.”

“Well, well, well. Congratulations! That’s mighty nice, Mr. Sullivan. Tell me,” he said, smiling, “you plan on having a large family by any chance?”

“Half a dozen,” Luke said, beaming at Emily.

Tucker’s eyebrows shot up. “Six?”

“At least,” Emily said.

Tucker’s smile faded. He went out the door and shut it quietly behind him. Outside, he untied his horse and swung himself into the saddle. Halfway back to Repton, he looked at the mass of black clouds piling up on the horizon and churning toward him across the sky. A sobering thought flickered through his mind like the distant lightning.