A Tale Out of Luck (9 page)

The Wolf looped old Crazy Bear’s arm over his shoulders and dragged him away from the soldiers, ignoring the crossfire from the cowboys and a few soldiers who had gotten control of their mounts and begun to shoot without orders to do so.

“Hold your fire!” Polk shouted. He yanked at the arrow in his arm, but the point was stuck in the bone. Adrenaline shot through him and he pulled as hard as he could until the arrow came cleanly free. He took note of the hunting point before he threw it down on the ground.

“Dismount!” Polk ordered. He knew he had to get the men off of those gun-shy mustangs. “Every fourth man, hold the horses here! Wounded men stay here with the dead. The rest of you form up on me! Form a skirmish line!”

By now the cowboys had run all the Indians to the far end of the village, where they were scattering as fast as they could, most on foot, a few on horses they had managed to mount as the Indian boys arrived with the horse herd.

“Form a skirmish line on me!” Polk repeated.

In the middle of the camp, he saw a mounted Indian warrior riding toward the Wolf and Crazy Bear, leading a spare pony. With precision swiftness, Crazy Bear was lifted on behind the rider, and the Wolf mounted the spare horse. Then the Wolf turned his mount on the cowboys, who were firing on the fleeing Indian men, women, and children. As his mount galloped, the young warrior reached low to pluck a stick of firewood from the ground. With this, he attacked the cowboys, clubbing the nearest one as he attempted to reload.

“That’s a brave man,” Polk said.

He watched, amazed, as the Wolf, armed only with the stick, bludgeoned away at the cowboys, distracting them from their murderous work. He winced when he saw Jack Brennan’s Colt belch smoke, sending a bullet through the Wolf’s torso.

“Sons of bitches,” Polk muttered.

He watched the Wolf escape, badly wounded, into a stand of cattails along the creek, barely clinging to his mount.

A few shots came from the cover along the creek where most of the Indians had fled, driving the cowboys back toward the safety of the skirmish line Polk had established. They rode back, yelping idiotically, driving with them about two dozen mounts captured from the Indians’ herd. Gavilan Gutierrez returned with them, an arrow shaft protruding from his hip. He seemed to take little notice of it.

Jack Brennan galloped right up to the dead body of Major Ralph Quitman. “Now,
that’s
the way to handle Indians!” he said to the corpse. He looked up at First Sergeant Polk. “Lucky we’re not all dead. I told him we should have charged. If I hadn’t seen that warrior drawing a bead on me, we would have been completely surprised—ambushed and massacred.”

Polk looked back at the dead and wounded. “They were comin’ in to the fort until you started shootin’.”

“I defended myself! I had stock stolen from me.”

“Consider yourself under house arrest,” Polk said. “Go back to your ranch and stay there. The captured horses will go back to the fort with me as evidence.”

“Aren’t you going to mount your men and chase those red devils down?”

“I’ve got wounded soldiers to get back to the post hospital.”

“Kiss my ass,” Brennan growled. “Your damn translator has got more sand than you!” He spurred his horse and ran away with his men.

First Sergeant July Polk shot a glance at the translator. Gutierrez only shrugged, and pulled the arrow out of his hip without so much as a flinch.

The Wolf opened his eyes and saw the cattails rising above him to the sky. He placed his hand on his wound and felt blood coursing hot between his fingers. Thinking of his people, he summoned all his strength, rolled over, and began to crawl. One glance told him he was leaving a blood trail, but he hoped the white men would be too stupid to find it way down in the cattails.

Somehow, he knew his grandfather was already dead by now. Sorrow and worry consumed him. He scrambled on his hands and knees as fast as he could, and then he actually stumbled from weakness, though he was just crawling around like some lowly kind of four-legged. This was shameful. He decided to stand and reveal himself to his enemies and fight to the death with his bare hands. He was already good as dead anyway, judging from the way the blood ran from his belly wound.

He tried to stand and turn all at once, while drawing in a breath for his death song, but all this shocked his core with perfect agony, and Mother Earth lurched under his feet, sending him toppling, rolling down a mud bank, sliding into a cold pool of water like a snake. There was a dead willow tree here that had fallen into the creek from an undercut bank on the opposite side. The Wolf dragged himself in among the branches and pulled his head in like a mere turtle.

He held to one hope: that he would not die here without weapons in his hands, that he would not enter the Shadow Land without so much as a flint knife, that he might survive this awful wound and live to fight another day, that he, the Original Wolf, would one day stand again to avenge this injustice.

He remembered his vision quest, when the great wolf had spoken to him. The Original Wolf. The spirit-warrior who had fathered the Noomah nation, then turned into an immortal four-legged. He remembered what the Original Wolf had told him in his vision.

Now, you are as I was. You are the Wolf. The Original Wolf. Your time will come to howl.

He felt his conscious thoughts slipping away, and wondered in which world he might awake next.

14

A
SPONTANEOUS PEAL
of laughter shook the saloon as Flora served up Hank’s fourth beer and slid a shot of whiskey into place beside the full mug.

“. . . and I don’t think this kid had ever been five miles outside of San Antone in his whole life, but he wanted to cowboy,” Hank said, continuing his yarn.

Several of Flora’s best customers had drifted in as word spread throughout Luck that Captain Tomlinson was feeling talkative down at the tavern.

“We had about two thousand head of cattle we were drivin’ to Kansas,” Hank recalled, “and for the first few hundred miles, the kid learned fast and made a pretty good hand. The boys started callin’ him the San Antone Kid. He turned stampedes and swam flooded rivers. Nothin’ much spooked him. But, then, we crossed the Red River into Indian Territory and a bunch of howlin’ renegade Kiowas attacked our camp at dawn, stampeded the cattle, and shot an arrow through the crown of the San Antone Kid’s hat. Parted his hair! We rallied and chased the Indians off, but we spent all day roundin’ up the cattle . . .”

Hank held up a finger and paused to gulp his beer, clearly relishing the silent anticipation of the men around him. “Well, we started the herd north again, all except for the San Antone Kid, who I saw headin’ south. So I rode up on him and said, ‘Kid, where the hell are you goin’?’ He said, ‘I’m goin’ to get my pistol.’ I said, ‘Well, where did you leave your pistol?’ He said, ‘San Antone!’”

The men burst into laughter again, and Hank threw back his shot of whiskey.

“Another?” Flora asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, Flora. I mean, not unless these gents want to have one with me and drink a toast to Texas!”

A cheer rattled the windowpanes, coins hit the bar, and Flora began looking forward to turning a better-than-average afternoon profit. She was wishing Jane might show up a little early for work to help her and Harry deal with the drink orders, and just then, she heard Jane’s voice.

“Flora! Captain Tomlinson! Y’all better come look!”

Flora turned and found Jane holding one of the double swinging doors open. Through the open doorway, Flora saw a buckboard wagon pass down the street. She couldn’t see what was in the wagon bed, but above the sideboards, she clearly saw the feathered ends of several arrow shafts shaking like rattlesnake tails as the buckboard clattered down the rutted street. It stopped in front of Sam Collins’s store.

Flora and Hank went to the door, followed by half the men in the saloon. The other half crowded the windows for a better view.

“Did you see inside the wagon bed?” Hank asked.

“No, sir,” Jane answered.

Could be anyone lying back there, Flora thought. She remembered that Jay Blue and Skeeter were out there somewhere, and she knew Hank must be worried half to death right now, though a glance at his face showed no emotion.

She walked with Hank across the street, followed by the entire population of the saloon. Poli and Tonk fell into place right behind Hank. The driver of the buckboard had stepped from the wagon to the boardwalk to beat on the door of the general store, for Sam Collins served as the coroner in Luck. Flora recognized the wagon driver as Eddie Milliken, the Double Horn Ranch foreman who had started all the trouble with Jane the night before.

Though she dreaded it, she resolved to walk right up to the wagon with Hank. If one of those boys was in there, she didn’t want him to see it alone. Fearing the worst, she peeked over the edge and saw the body of a more mature man, and felt a moment of something like relief, though the corpse full of arrows hardly set her mind at ease. She didn’t look at the face long, for the top of the poor man’s head was a horrible sight, and one of his eyes was missing. She turned and rested her cheek on the back of Hank’s shoulder, half hiding from the dead body until she could get hold of herself.

Jane had not had the stomach to even look. “Is it?” she asked.

Flora shook her head. “Some stranger.”

With her cheek still on Hank’s shoulder, Flora felt his arm reach forward, and wondered why on earth he would want to get any closer to touching that ghastly corpse. She looked around his shoulder toward the wagon and saw Hank’s gnarled fingers stroking the red markings painted on one of the arrow shafts. Her eyes swept up his arm, to his face. She had never seen such a look in the Ranger’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was stunned disbelief, or fear, or a combination of the two. She had never known Hank to fear anything before.

The door to the general store burst open as Sam came out to stand beside Eddie Milliken on the boardwalk across the wagon from the saloon crowd. He grimaced as he took in the sight of the one-eyed cadaver, then looked at Milliken. “Well?”

Milliken had pushed his hat back on his head and was standing hip-cocked on the boardwalk as if he was showing off some prize buck deer he had killed and hauled to town. “The boss found him on top of Shovel Mountain this morning.”

Sam looked down at the body, the revulsion plain on his face. “Anybody know who it is?”

Milliken spoke up again. “Jack says just some drifter he recognized from the saloon.”

“Did you ever see him before?” Hank asked Flora.

She set her jaw and took another look at the man’s face. She nodded and looked away. “He said his name was Wes. Wes James. He rode a tall claybank horse. He fancied himself a mavericker.”

“You’re sure about all this?” Sam said.

Flora nodded. “I remember him well. He made Dottie mad because she went to sit on his lap and he told her she was too fat.”

A group of men let out a whiskey chuckle, until Hank’s disapproving gaze silenced them.

“What were you boys doing on Shovel Mountain?” Hank asked.

“We were huntin’ strays we might have missed, and noticed the buzzards circlin’. Jack rode up on top of the mountain to see what was dead, but he was a little too late to save that eye.”

Flora had noticed the bedrolls and skillets under the buckboard seat and judged the claim of a late-fall cow hunt logical enough.

Hank continued his interview. “Where’s Jack and the rest of the outfit now?”

“We drove the dead body over to Fort Jennings. Major Quitman took some buffalo soldiers over to that Indian camp on Flat Rock Creek. Jack and the rest of the boys went with the cavalry.” Milliken spit a brown stream of tobacco juice on the boardwalk. “Your boy, Jay Blue, was there. And that kid, Skeeter.”

Hank’s eyes flashed up from the arrows sticking out of the dead man. “Did they ride with the soldiers, too?”

Milliken smirked and shook his head. “The major wouldn’t let ’em. He told ’em to go home.”

Hank breathed a sigh of relief, but then set his glare on Milliken. “Were you one of the boys that ganged up on my son last night?”

The cowboy almost swallowed his quid as Hank’s eyes drilled him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”

“He was the one who grabbed Jane and started all the trouble in the first place,” Flora said.

The cowboy took a step back. He looked nervous under the glare of half the leading men in town.

“It’s a lot different when you stand alone, ain’t it? No rowdy ranch hands to back you up when you insult the virtue of a lady.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Milliken argued.

Hank took a step back to stand beside Jane. “Take your hat off and apologize to this young lady.”

“It’s not necessary,” Jane said in a quiet voice.

“It’s necessary to me. Do it, son, or I’ll shoot that hat off your head myself.”

Sam Collins leaned away from Milliken and took a slow step aside.

Milliken faltered for a moment, but then jutted his chin. “The Texas Rangers have been outlawed by the Reconstruction government, and replaced by the new State Police. You ain’t the law here no more, old man.”

“This isn’t between you and the law. This is between you and me. I’m giving you one last chance to take your hat in your hand and apologize.”

Milliken sneered. “I don’t believe I will.”

Hank’s Colt came out of the holster with a hiss and flashed fire and smoke before Milliken could flinch. The bullet caught both the upturned brim and the crown of the cowboy’s hat, blasting it from his head. It also pierced the window front of Sam’s store, creating a hole that sprouted an instant spider web of cracks.

Sam groaned.

“Now that I’ve tipped your hat for you, you might as well go ahead an apologize,” Hank said. His hammer was cocked behind the next round in the cylinder, the sights set between Millken’s eyes.

Milliken’s hand was shaking near the grip of his revolver—as close as he had gotten to using it. He moved the hand away from the weapon. “I apologize,” he said.