Comanche Cowboy (The Durango Family) (19 page)

“Okay, then I won’t.” He sipped the coffee, running his finger thoughtfully down the knife scar on his cheek.

Maybe he was married! Of course that was it. It was her own fault, she supposed. “I guess I threw myself at you, not realizing—”

“No, it’s not that,” he hesitated, then said nothing as he drank the coffee and stared out at the pale rose glow of dawn on the eastern horizon.

She peered out the gun port. Indian braves were coming from every direction now, resplendent in feathered headdresses, beads, and paint. They were going to make one final charge. Almost a mile away, she saw the majestic figure of the half-breed Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, gathered with his leaders to direct the coming battle.

Maverick put his face close to hers, peered out, and cursed. “If I was only as good a shot with a rifle as I am with a pistol!”

The younger hunter, Billy Dixon, turned to look at him. “Mister, I’m one of the best with a buffalo gun and it’s got a lot of range. What do you have in mind?”

She saw the sudden flicker of hope in Maverick’s eyes, and he leaned over and kissed her quickly. “For luck,” he said.

A bugle blew a charge and Cayenne almost cheered. “Hear that? It’s the cavalry!”

Bat chuckled. “It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Take another look ma’am. Those damned Injuns have a black soldier riding with them and he blows their charges! Must be a buffalo soldier who’s deserted.”

“A buffalo soldier?” She had never felt so bereft as she did now when she stared out and saw the dark man in the blue uniform riding with the Indians.

Maverick cursed. “The braves call the black troops that because of their dark, wooly hair.”

Bat yelled, “They’re ready to rush us! I see Quanah raising his arm, getting ready send the charge!”

Maverick grabbed Billy by the shoulder. “We’ll talk after this charge, Billy. I got an idea that if we’re lucky might bring this whole thing to a halt!”

“Here they come!” Bat yelled.

Cayenne looked up into Maverick’s tense face. “If we don’t come out of this—” She started to tell him she loved him, then realized it wasn’t right if there were another woman waiting for him somewhere. Funny, up ’til now, that Annie was the only one she’d thought about, been jealous of.

“Get down, baby!” He snapped and pushed her head down as he stuck the rifle out the gun port. She looked out from her crouched position and saw the Indians gathering for a charge. She reached out and put her hand on Maverick’s arm. The look he gave her told her she had his heart, no matter whether there was another woman in his life.

From her place, she saw the tall half-breed chief as he directed the placement of the warriors. What was Quanah Parker thinking this morning? That it was a fine day to die? That it was a great day for victory? She watched him, so noble and majestic on that fine gray pacer. Even though his signal would probably bring the final charge that would overrun her refuge, kill them all, she could sympathize with the Indians. She could understand because she just now realized their struggle against hunger and the buffalo hunters invading their lands, against the white civilization pushing at them from all sides. The plains tribes were doing the only thing they could—fight.

She tried to remember that she hated the Comanche but it was hard because Quanah reminded her so much of Maverick. She glanced over at Maverick. Yes, the two gray-eyed half-breeds even looked a little alike.

In that split-second, Cayenne wondered what the great chief thought as he surveyed the scene? Was he, too, thinking about life and death and a love that had come too late? She didn’t want to die. But she saw the stern anger on Quanah’s face in the distance, knew that this morning she surely would.

Quanah Parker sat the gray horse he had stolen from “Three-Fingered” Colonel Mackenzie and studied the distant, crumbling walls of the buffalo hunters’ fortress in the first pink light of the coming dawn.

He glanced over at the war chiefs astride their ponies in a circle around him. All respectfully awaited his signal to begin the morning’s attack
. Could he, should he waste the lives of any more of his men?

“Isa-tai,” he grunted to the
Noconi
whose vision had launched this campaign. “I think your
puha
, your magic is weak. Your visions have availed us nothing.”

The man frowned, his face distorted by garish paint. Isa-tai was stripped for battle as were the others, although he had not participated in the fighting, which was his privilege as war leader. The
Noconi
Comanche wore a cap of sacred sage leaves, and both he and his pony were painted with bright yellow war paint. “When I predicted the comet, you were impressed. When the hot drought came this year as I predicted, you believed me. Now I tell you my power should protect us against the whites’ guns, make their bullets bound off us. . . . ”

“And yet I see my men dead and wounded everywhere!” Quanah snarled. “And we have lost even more trying to recover the bodies!”

The others muttered and nodded in agreement. So far, in the time the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa had besieged this place, they had lost dozens of men. But they were no closer to overrunning the fortress than they had been the first dawn when they had caught those two hunters asleep in their wagon, and had killed and scalped them.

Lone Wolf, the Kiowa chief, pointed toward the adobe buildings. “If we cannot win here against a handful of hunters, we cannot win anywhere on the plains.”

Isa-tai shook his head, shifting his weight on the magically painted pony. “It is not my fault,” he answered peevishly as the pony stamped its feet. “I told you I had powerful medicine, but all know the many taboos. A warrior killed a skunk on our way to this place. That is a bad omen.”

Some of the others nodded in agreement as Quanah studied them.

“It is so,” grumbled another Kiowa leader, Woman’s Heart. “But sometimes very young braves act without thinking.”

But mature warriors should not.
Quanah sighed again, surveying the desolate landscape from the butte as the first rays of dawn chased the purple shadows, turning them pale pink. The soapweed that the whites called yucca or beargrass thrust its spiky white blooms into the pale sky, accentuated by the red wild flowers he knew
Tejanos
called Firewheel. Around him, hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne warriors awaited his signal to attack again.

Should he send them against the foe now that he had lost faith in Isa-tai’s vision, his medicine?
After Isa-tai’s other predictions, Quanah had been only too eager to believe the prophet and his urging to rise up against the invading whites. Isa-tai predicted that the “Big Fifty” rifles the Indians said “could shoot today and kill tomorrow” would not harm them. This place called Adobe Walls was a gathering place that must be destroyed; a symbol of the buffalo slaughter; the stronghold of the white hunters.

And yet Quanah resented sending men to their deaths for a hopeless cause. He sat his horse straight and taller than the others, his white heritage evident in his height and strength. From his father, Chief Peta Nocona, he had inherited bravery and the cunning of the Comanche. From his white captive mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, he had his Texas forbearers’ height and size, his gray eyes.

“My heart is heavy”—Quanah turned on the medicine man—“because there will already be much wailing in tepees on our return. Our people are fewer each year.”

Isa-tai persisted. “I had a vision that with only one more day, we would sweep the hated killers of our buffalo before us like flood waters sweep over the river sand.”

“And if we kill all these here?” Quanah argued. “You misread your vision! It is they who are the floods sweeping over the Indian! If we kill all these, there will only be more coming from the east with their big guns.” He wiped at the sweat on his bronzed, naked skin, smearing the scarlet paint. Although it was only dawn, already the heat of the first day of that month whites called July breathed its hot breath on man and beast alike.

The Cheyenne leader, Stone Calf, waved his lance for emphasis. “Your white blood makes you a coward,” he complained. “We must fight, must send a message to the great chief in that place called Washington that they must stop killing our buffalo. Otherwise, we die anyway from slow starvation. We cannot live on what the government agents give us.”

“Yes,” agreed the Comanche, Big Red Meat. “On the reservations early this year, food got so scarce we were eating our beloved ponies. The white men the government gives contracts to cheat us and give us little or nothing.”

Quanah grunted in agreement. “That white chief, Grant, sent preacher men called Quakers to try to tame us, make us learn to plow; tell us we must not fight old enemies such as the Utes, the Apache.”

There was a murmur of agreement, of scornful laughter. Each knew no proud plains warrior would till the earth like the gentle tribes these leaders scorned. And if a man could not take the war trail sometimes to count coup, do great deeds of bravery to tell later around the campfire, what was he supposed to do?

“All my ears hear from you is true,” Quanah admitted. He had brought his own men of the
Quahadi
band to join this great uprising that Isa-tai had predicted would sweep the hated white killers of the buffalo, yes, even all the whites from their lands so that things would be as they had been in the past.

And yet nothing could be returned to the way it had been. Trying to put the disintegrating pieces of the collapsing Indian civilization back to what it had been was like trying to restore a shattered mirror from the
Comanchero’s
trade goods.

The war ponies, all painted and decorated with feathers and scalps tied to their manes and bridles, stamped at the flies that bothered their legs. That was the only sound as the leaders awaited the decision that hung so heavy on his soul. Quanah looked around the silent circle of war chiefs, out at the hundreds of waiting warriors. His heart was heavy because early in the battle he had lost a good comrade and had ridden in right under the gun muzzles to recover the body. Quanah had been knocked from his horse by a spent bullet, had had to crouch behind a putrid, rotting buffalo carcass for a time until he could escape.

Now he surveyed the low-lying buildings from his sandy rise. They must be almost a mile away. And the rifles the whites called “Big Fifties” had been taking his men from their ponies with deadly accuracy.

“Oh, great chief,” said Wild Mustang, a Comanche war leader, “we have danced the sun dance for the very first time this year; perhaps that is an omen of good luck.”

“It is an omen that the
Nerm
, the Comanche have lost their way, no longer trust their own culture,” Quanah answered sadly. “Never before has the dancing of the Kiowa and the Cheyenne seemed important to us. We are like frightened children who have lost their way in the dark, trusting others’ customs because we no longer have confidence in our own.”

It was true. The Comanche had danced their very first sun dance in the month the whites called May, but Quanah had no confidence in this new thing.

The other Comanches lapsed into embarrassed silence as if they knew he spoke true.

Quanah shook his head. “If we take this place after losing so many men, what have we gained?”

Isa-tai answered eagerly. “But if we lose it after the deaths of so many brave warriors, we are shamed. We cannot paint our faces with the black paint of victory, dance the scalp dances with our proud women.”

“Besides,” the war leader, Little Fox, leered, “if we take this place, we can stake the captured out on the ground for the soldiers to find when they come. When the Bluecoats see how we have tortured them, how long it took the hunters to die, word will spread and there will be much fear. The white hunters will be afraid to venture onto our plains.”

Quanah shook his head. “The hunters all carry ’bites’—cartridges full of poison in case they are taken alive.”

Little Fox’s small, foxlike features smiled cruelly. “There is at least one woman inside those walls, a white woman.”

Isa-tai nodded. “Yes, and Little Fox deserves to revenge himself on her after what white buffalo hunters did to his sister.”

Quanah grimaced at the thought of what the half-crazed Little Fox would do to a captive woman. His own mother had been a captive taken from Texas in 1836. And she had loved his father so that she had fought the whites when the Texas Rangers had recaptured her in 1860, but they returned her to her white family anyway. “You won’t get that woman to rape and torture as they did your sister,” he said to the fox-faced one. “A white man will put a bullet in her brain or she will kill herself rather than be taken.”

Little Fox’s sharp features wrinkled with disdain. “You do not want me to seek vengeance on a woman because of your mother’s blood. Maybe you have a white heart in a red body when we thought you were your father’s son.”

Quanah straightened his tall frame and glared at him with his cold, gray eyes. “Choose your words well when you speak of my mother. Word has come she has died among the whites, and my baby sister,
Topsanah
, too. I am Comanche; let none deny my father’s blood. If the Indians go down to defeat in this great Uprising over who shall control the plains, I swear that I, Quanah, will be the last one to surrender, to bring my people in to be trod on by the white man’s boots.”

The others muttered in agreement. “None doubt your courage,” White Shield said. “We know Little Fox’s problems. We only await your orders.”

Quanah sighed. Sometimes the weight of leadership felt like iron manacles and chains from the white man’s stockade on his shoulders. “Then ready your men for the attack,” he said grudgingly.

The leaders dispersed to ride with their own warriors. Even Isa-tai rode over to a nearby butte for a better view. But the minor chief, Little Fox, stayed at Quanah’s side. As leader of this attack, Quanah must stay out of range, out here where he could oversee everything that happened. Besides, it was very bad medicine for a chief to fall in a fight. That had happened to the Comanche, Little Buffalo, in the Great Uprising ten years ago. After he fell in battle, the fight had broken off, the Indians giving up and returning to their reservations. When a chief or a war leader fell, it was a sign of bad medicine and the Indians would usually give up the attack.

Little Fox scratched himself with his unusually long arms. “You have no stomach for today’s fight?”

Quanah shook his head. “Yesterday I saw a man on a gray horse, very much like my own, who almost gave up his life to save a young boy whom we chased. I find no pleasure that we may spill that brave one’s blood today.”

Little Fox smiled evilly. “Yet I look forward to it!”

Quanah eyed the brave with distaste. “Besides, I have no stomach for all these hundreds of people. My warriors and I seldom mix with the other Comanche for good reason. We stay with our own
Quahadis
isolated in the area the whites called the Staked Plains and scorn to sign the white man’s worthless treaties.”

“Your band mixes so seldom with other Comanche, we know little about your clan and their great gray-eyed chief. Do you not have kin among the other bands?”

Quanah shook his head sadly. “I am alone now. My father, Peta Nocona, never took another wife after the Rangers forced my mother to return to her white family. He has died of an old battle wound that troubled him much. My brother, Poco, has caught one of the whites many diseases and died. Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing, choosing to walk the Indian road instead of taking the path of my white heritage.”

Little Fox snorted. “The whites would not accept you.”

“They have evidently accepted that half-breed on the gray stallion who got past us in the dash for the walls yesterday!”

Little Fox grinned. “But did he come by his fine horse in the brave manner you did, oh, Great Chief?”

Quanah smiled with memory. His own gray pacer had been stolen from that great chief of the whites, the one called Mackenzie. It was said that “Three-Fingered” Mackenzie had been in a fury ever since, determined to recover his prized horse. “A Comanche is skilled at stealing horses. It was not that brave a thing.”

Little Fox ran his tongue over his lips. “I hunger for a white woman ! If there is one inside this place, I will enjoy her, humiliate and rape her. Then I will hang her scalp from my war lance so that every time I see it blowing in the wind, I will remember my sister!”

Quanah didn’t answer, watching the braves fan out for the charge on the adobe buildings. All knew that Little Fox’s mind had become twisted since some moons ago when white hunters had raped and strangled his beloved younger sister with her own beaded necklace that he had given her. Only the wildest and most reckless of the braves would follow Little Fox now, because he lacked caution and judgment.

“Little Fox, you brought our people much trouble when your war party raided that white gathering in the land of the
Tejanos.”

Little Fox frowned. “Holding white captives for ransom is an old custom.”

“But you broke your word and took prisoner that brave red-haired white man who brought the ransom.” He felt scorn for Little Fox. Quanah had arrived at the last minute, in time to keep the warrior from killing the man, and made him set the Texan free. But Quanah hadn’t arrived before Little Fox had tortured the white man most cruelly with fire. Little Fox had taken a burning stick and. . .

“Why should I keep my word to whites?” Little Fox snorted, his animal-like features contorted with scorn. “Trickery is good enough for them after what they did to my sister! Every white who crosses my path will pay because she died such a cruel death!”