Cheyenne Saturday - Empty-Grave Extended Edition (10 page)

The fight had been with an older, heavier and more experienced Cheyenne who had offered robes and other gifts to the father of Many Blossoms in exchange for the young girl. Soft-and-Running-Deer had promised as many robes and as many gifts—in time—and the father of Many Blossoms had accepted his promise, but the decision had to be fought out between the young growing buck and the seasoned brave.

They had met alone on the plains, both riding out to a deserted place and facing each other over knives and tomahawks. Their fight had lasted two hours and, in the end, Soft-and-Running-Deer returned with seventeen knife wounds and the hair of his enemy. At fourteen he had been made a full brave. He sat in the councils and respect was paid when the chief himself listened as he recounted his one coup before the tribe.

On advice from his father, the young brave had delayed taking Many Blossoms as his squaw until he had paid for her, fulfilling his debt of buffalo robes and other gifts to the maid's father.

As his eyes studied the distant fires of the railhead camp in the sinking afternoon sun, Goose Face remembered that he had just finished paying off his debt to Big Moon for the maid when the long knives had struck their village. He had seen his mother, his father, and Many Blossoms shot to death before he himself had been cut down by one of the soldiers.

The scene of horror filled the young renegade's eyes as if it were happening that instant.

He dropped the calf liver and jerked up straight. He screamed, throwing his head back, and let the fury of his hate escape from his throat. He began to dance. He writhed and jerked, brandishing his knife in one hand and his carbine in the other. Soon other members of his party began to dance, too, one brave beating out the deadening rhythm on a hollow log. They coursed around into a rough circle and screamed and shook their bodies, and let their hate for the white men take possession of them completely.

* * *

By four-thirty, when the shadows reached long across the plains, the Johnny-Jacks had laid nearly seven miles of track.

By four-thirty the detachment of soldiers sent out by Liam Kelly had formed up in the draw where Liza had performed her own personal massacre on the Cheyenne, and were cut down by the remaining braves. The soldiers fought back valiantly, but the Cheyenne were angry and their arrows were straight and heavily bowed. The soldiers died without killing one of the enemy.

At four-thirty Ellis and Liza Reeves stopped in the protection of overgrown prairie grass to attend to Liza's leg. It was beginning to pain badly, and had continued to bleed. Ellis started a fire with gunpowder taken from precious cartridges and heated the Green River knife. While Liza bit down hard on the lead of a cartridge, he cauterized the wound, fighting his own rising gorge as the stench of burning flesh reached his nostrils.

By four-thirty the sun had dropped into the place on the horizon named by Goose Face as the signal for the stampede of the herd into the rail camp. The remaining Cheyenne braves moved to the ponies recaptured after their dash from the draw.

And far to the east of the camp, Goose Face and his party of braves continued to dance their ceremonial prelude to death.

The dancing stopped at the commanding scream of Goose Face. The braves stood rooted in their tracks, listening. From the west rolled a great roar of thunder.

Goose Face dropped to the ground and put his ear against the earth. In the ground he could hear the pounding of thousands of hoofs; he thought he could hear the screams and cries of pain of the white men and their squaws and their little ones as the great herd advanced toward the tent community.

Goose Face jumped up. He raised his tomahawk and carbine over his head, and cried out the order. In a frenzy the braves raced for their horses and, at the heels of Goose Face, struck west across the great plains and toward the railhead.

Chapter 7

NATHAN ELLIS and Liza Reeves were within a mile of the tent city when they heard the thunder of the buffalo hoofs. They stopped still in the high grass and stared in fascination and wonder and more than a little fear at the herd pounding across the plains. The dust rose over the backs of the huge plains beasts in a thick cloud that nearly blotted out the sun. Her leg smarting and aching from the hot knife, but better now that the bleeding had stopped, Liza Reeves kicked her pony hard and rode for the camp alongside Ellis, both of them throwing backward glances at the herd and at the furious, swirling cloud of dust. 

Liam Kelly was the first to spot the advancing herd of buffalo. He thought at first the dust cloud was a sandstorm blowing up, or perhaps the advance of a cyclone. At first he mistook the beat of the hoofs for thunder from cloudheads. 

The Johnny-Jacks stopped their work, ignored the bawling buckos and turned to stare at the western sky. And when they heard the roar of the hoofs, work stopped altogether at the railhead. 

Liam Kelly whipped his pony around and rode out beyond the railhead some hundred yards, away from the jabbering men so that he could listen. His big face paled. He jerked his pony around and flailed the animal at top speed back to the railhead. 

“Buffalo stampede!” he roared above the din. “Get back! Get back!” 

The men did not have to be warned twice. They dropped their tools and scurried for the work train and the three flatcars. The engineers and firemen worked together pouring wood into the firebox, building the steam up even as the men were climbing aboard. Ties, rails, horses and mules were abandoned in the mad flight.

The cars began to roll before the last of the men were aboard and these were helped onto the flatcars by others who jerked them clear of the ground.

The balloon stack belched smoke and tongues of raw flame as the train began to back up toward the camp, the men shouting at each other above the roar of the locomotive.

Kelly pounded alongside the train as it backed toward the camp.

Further to the south, Liza Reeves and Ellis saw excited men, women and children gathering at the outer edges of the community to stare in wonder at the hurtling supply train.

With a sigh of relief, Kelly spotted Ellis and Liza and spurred his pounding animal at an angle to meet them. The three riders drew up to a stop within a few yards of the outermost tent.

“It’s a stampede!” Kelly roared.

“I know it’s a stampede,” Ellis replied. “It’s Goose Face and his men doing it.”

“Where’s Jake?”

“Dead, with a Cheyenne arrow in his head,” Liza said, and then groaned as the pain in her leg stabbed viciously.

“You hurt?”

“Nothin’ to holler about, Mr. Kelly. But you going’ to have a hell of a mess if you don’t get these women and chillun outa this camp before them bluffers come streakin’ in.”

“Is there a chance to turn them?”

Ellis shook his head. “I don’t know, but there’s a party makin' up that's goin' to try.” He pointed toward the camp, where Johnny-Jacks, soldiers, Jehus and anyone that could find a horse and a gun of some sort had begun to form a rough group.

“Let's go,” Liza Reeves said and started to spur her pony around.

Ellis grabbed at the head rope and hung on tight. “No, you don't!”

“Leggo of that, you meat-headed idiot!”

“You're going over to the doctorin' tent and get that leg and shoulder fixed up properly.”

“Who you think you're orderin' around!” Liza Reeves exploded, trying to tear her pony away from Ellis's grip.

Ellis roared. He opened his mouth and bellowed, “I'm orderin' you, God damn it! Even if I have to get off this hoss and whip you and hog-tie you to a tent pole, you're gonna stay back here with the others!”

Liza Reeves blinked, stunned at the sudden ferocity in a man who had shown himself to be brave enough, but not spectacularly strong. “Now git!” Ellis snapped. “If them bluffer do get through us and we can't turn 'em away from the camp, there's goin' to be hell to pay—and clear-headed folks needed to care of the women and kids!”

Liam Kelly had remained silent, but now he nodded in agreement. “He's right, miss. You'll be more help back here if we can't turn that herd.”

“Let's go!” Ellis shouted and jerked his pony around and looked straight west after the nearly two hundred riders picking up speed in a headlong rush to meet the buffalo. Kelly turned his mount and raced after the others.

Liza Reeves, in spite of her leg wound and the imminent danger of the buffalo herd, could not help but blink and grin at the departing Nathan Ellis. He sure was a hell of a lot of man, she thought. Just about nigh perfect.

She trotted her pony into the edge of the tents, flushing even now at the way Nathan Ellis had looked at her naked body while she was pulling on the dead Indian's breeches and vest.

* * *

The railroad men pounded at full gallop directly into the path of the onrushing buffalo, now no more than seven or eight miles ahead of them. Like a black tide, the beasts swarmed in an ever-widening front until they stretched for nearly two miles across the plains. The riders held their breath as they saw the black wave engulf the railhead, tearing the carts and wagons left behind into splinters. Hundreds, thousands of buffalo, many of them weighing almost a full ton, pounded at express-train speed in a wide swath across the grass, without sign that they would ever be stopped until their hearts burst or their spindly legs broke beneath their weight.

At a signal from an old line sergeant riding at the point of the mob of men, they unlimbered their guns and prepared to fire.

“Keep together!” the old sergeant roared above the din, and wiggled his arms. “Spread out and you're done for!”

Somehow the galloping men understood and closed ranks.

Ellis and Kelly rode side by side, the Texan wishing he had a solid Texas saddle beneath him rather than having to depend on his legs to keep him on the pony. Kelly had gripped his reins in one hand, while with his free hand he brandished the heavy old Colt. Ellis still had the carbine and had reloaded long before. His Colt was slapping his legs and he cursed himself for having forgotten to tie the holster down. Afraid that the piece would fall out, the Texan shoved the gun into his waistband and closed ranks with the determined, frightened railroad party.

They would rather have been anyplace else this side of hell than riding into a buffalo stampede. There was the promise of a sure death of some, and injury and pain for many. But they went on anyway; hard and fast, straight for the sea of maddened beasts packed so tightly together it was barely possible to distinguish one animal from another.

They were a scant three miles from the herd now. The line sergeant held up a hand and the band of men ground to a stop. Ellis knew what the old soldier had in mind and he agreed. The buffalo still had a good run before they would hit the camp and if the horses were to be expected to run much more they had to have a rest, however short.

Ellis scanned the surging buffalo for some signs of a leader—an old bull, or a group of bulls—but he could see none. The dust was beginning to reach them now. The wind had shifted and swung the cloud before the onrushing animals.

The men held their ponies in tightly, checking and rechecking their guns as they waited for the sergeant, who was conferring loudly with Kelly, to give them instructions.

“They still got a run before they reach the camp,” the sergeant said, keeping his eyes on the beasts all the while, “and if we could turn 'em just a bit—it looks to me like they're favoring the north—we might get 'em to go past the main body of the camp.”

“Do we ride into 'em, Sergeant?” a young Jehu asked.

“You do, boy, and you'll never ride out!” the sergeant bawled.

“You ride in front of them, son,” Ellis said. “And you keep in front of them, shooting behind you, trying to kill the leaders.” 

“They're getting close, Sarge!” a voice bellowed from the crowd.

“All right, men! Let's go to hell for supper! Eeeoooyoooow!”

The buffalo were a scant thousand yards away from them now, and the red eyes of the animals were easily distinguishable by the time the riders had whipped their horses around and begun to ease along, looking over their shoulders to watch the buffalo gain on them. Gradually they picked up speed as the buffalo came closer, and then some of the men began to fire into the herd. Ellis saw a buffalo drop and saw several others stumble over the fallen beast, but the tide merely swarmed around them, stamping them to death. The noise was deafening. More shots rang out, then more and more, and Ellis saw one, then three, then ten, then twenty of the buffalo fall. Still those behind came pushing on.

A Jehu's horse stumbled in a gopher hole and threw the boy to the grass. The rider got up and raced for his horse, gained it and was in the saddle when the herd reached him, the leading bulls goring the horse and throwing the Jehu into the air. The boy disappeared beneath the hoofs.

Another rider went down and was trampled beneath the hoofs. More and more buffalo were killed as lead from nearly two hundred guns poured into the outer edge of the herd.

Ellis had been riding hard, his legs locked on the ribs and shoulders of his pony, firing coolly and carefully into the herd, when he noticed he was being overtaken on his right. He grabbed the head rope of his pony, urged it on and then dared a glance to his right. They had made an effective hole in the center of the line, but the buffalo were filling it from the sides. Though dozens dropped before the wall of fire, the gigantic herd did not hesitate in its rush forward.

Their mounts were tiring now and Ellis saw one and then another of the railroad men thrown to the ground as a horse's heart burst or a gopher hole or sand pit trapped a hoof. Ellis's own pony faltered and he thought he would go down, but the sturdy little animal picked up its gallop and was soon back in stride racing before the oncoming buffalo.

They were riding hard on the camp now. Ellis could see the frenzy of activity around the tents as women and children scurried back out of the way. There was a sharp, shrill noise and Ellis could not identify it for a moment. Then he realized that it was the steam whistle of the engine. He could see the train pulling out. Every spare car on the temporary siding had been coupled and it now swarmed with women, children and men.