Come Sundown (54 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Come Sundown
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I thought about this for a moment. This was a revenge mission. Westerly had warned me against this in her letter. “I want revenge on only one man—Chivington.”
George shook his head. “You didn't see them. The men that followed Chivington were as bad as him. Worse, even. They scalped wounded children who were not yet dead. They hacked the bodies of women and warriors to pieces. Any soldier who rode with that devil should pay the price with his own life and his own blood.”
I considered George's talk, and felt my lust for revenge swell. Yet I knew I had to find some limitations to my anger, lest I end up like Charles Bent—or even like John Chivington himself. “On this warpath, will you hold to the code of a Cheyenne warrior?”
“Of course,” George said.
“Charles?”
The younger brother rose. “I
am
a Cheyenne warrior, goddamn you. You dare to question me, white man?”
George stood, grabbed Charles by the shoulder of his deerskin shirt, and shook him hard. “That's enough, Charles! Don't be a fool. Can't you tell a friend from an enemy anymore?”
Charles slapped George's hand away. “I won't answer to any white man. Or any goddamn Comanche, either. I am a Cheyenne warrior, and I answer to no one but my own spirits.” Having said this, he stalked to a bedroll he had spread on the ground and, throwing himself down upon it, turned his back to us and covered himself with a buffalo robe.
George gave me an apologetic look and sat back down. We sat in silence for a long time as the tiny cook fire the brothers had built burned down to orange coals.
“Why this trail?” I asked George.
“Chivington's men went to Denver after the massacre. They displayed their scalps in a theater one night, to the cheers of the people there who treated them like war heroes. No one yet knows what cowards they were that day. I am going to try to have a talk with Governor Evans, to tell him what really happened. And if we happen to catch any of Chivington's men mustered out on the plains, we are going to kill them.”
“How will you know them?”
“They will be riding Cheyenne ponies.”
“Ponies get traded. You have to be sure. Now, if you found someone wearing one of those scalps from the People, then there would be little doubt.”
George frowned and shrugged off my concerns. “We will know. Our hearts will tell us. If you had been there, you would understand.” He stood and ambled over to his own bedroll and crawled into it. Though I didn't feel sleepy, my body was tired and I thought I should try to get some rest. I signed to Quanah that we should get our bedrolls down from our horses, and he agreed. Soon, everyone in camp was snoring softly but me. I lay in my robe and thought about Westerly—the days and nights we had spent together. I strained to see her smile and her sparkling eyes until I felt my head would burst. I thought about how she had died, and I felt my anger boil. I did not sleep that night.
W
e rode north, up Black Squirrel Creek, until we came to the high divide where the creeks headed and the timber came spilling down from the mountains. On the other side of this wooded divide, new creeks began, these flowing northward. It was good country, owing to the timber that provided wood for fires and shelter for elk, deer, and smaller game. This peninsula of timber that swept out of the foothills and onto the plains along this high divide was known as “the Pinery” to white settlers. We rode through it watchfully, passing some places where men had cut down trees to use in building log cabins and barns. The big timbers had gouged the ground where teams of mules or oxen had dragged them away.
There are places along that divide where the timber ends abruptly, and a man can see for miles across treeless plains. We came to one of these places on the north side of the Pinery toward twilight. As we approached the edge of the timber, we rode cautiously, staying far enough back in the shadows so that we could reconnoiter the country without showing ourselves. In this way, we spotted a camp of hunters as we peered through the last line of trees. The plain smoke trail from their fire was the first sign that we saw of them, like a gray ribbon rising above the headwaters of Kiowa Creek. The party was less than five hundred yards from the timber, plainly visible down the slope below us. The hunters had two horses and three mules hobbled near their campfire. The two horses were fine-looking spotted ponies—Appaloosas from Nez Perce country. Two of the mules were bays, the other a sorrel. Two men and a boy stood around the fire. They seemed to be warming themselves as they roasted meat on a spit suspended over the fire. On the ground near them, I saw a dark mound that had to be the carcass of an elk.
The peculiar thing about this party was the way it
sounded.
One of the hunters was playing a harmonica, and the longer I
watched, it became obvious that the boy was the one playing, for he held his hands to his face and danced next to the fire as he played. One of the men wore a big sombrero. The other man took his hat off for a second or two to scratch his head, and I recognized him as a black man. I knew who these men were. They did not know me, for I had never ridden up to their ranch to introduce myself, but I had seen them from afar for the past four years as I rode through this country. And I knew them by stories.
“That mule,” Charles said. “The red one. That is Cut-Lip-Bear's mule. That mule was stolen from Sand Creek.”
“Are you sure?” George asked. “That looks like the black man who works for Ab Holcomb over on the Monument.”
“Yes, that's him,” I agreed. “His name is Buster Thompson. The other man is Javier Maldonado, the vaquero that Holcomb brought back from Pigeon's Ranch. Those are not soldiers.”
“That is Cut-Lip-Bear's mule,” Charles insisted. “And now he is dead and someone should pay.”
“Now, wait a minute,” I argued. “That black man is called Buffalo Head by the Arapahos. He is a friend of Long Fingers, the Arapaho chief. That boy was a captive of the Comanches last winter. Buffalo Head went to get him back. Those are not enemies to the Cheyenne. They're not even white, except for the boy.”
“The light is dying,” Charles said, ignoring my every argument. “We don't have much time. We can ride east through the timber, and sneak up on them over that spur.”
“They will have guns,” George warned. “They've been hunting.”
“You can't be serious about attacking
them,
” I complained. “The black man's a farmer. The Mexican is just a hired ranch hand. And that boy. He's only ten years old. He and the black one play the violin. You kill them and you're just asking for trouble. They haven't harmed anyone.”
“They have Cut-Lip-Bear's mule!” Charles insisted.
“Charles, there is no way you can tell from here which mule that is. There could be a hundred mules that look like that one from a quarter mile away.”
“Enough talk. Daylight is slipping away. George and I are going to ride down there and kill them, and you can stay behind like a woman if you want to—you and this half-breed Comanche.” He gestured toward Quanah with his tomahawk, reined his pony east.
“George, you're not going to let him …” I said.
George looked indecisive. “Somebody
should
pay,” he said. “We'll have a closer look at that mule.” He turned away to follow his brother.
“Charles has already made up his mind,” I warned.
Quanah had not understood the conversation, but he could readily see the conflict. “Those are fine ponies,” he said to me in Comanche, glancing down to the Appaloosas at the hunting camp. “This is a raid, yes?” He reined east to follow the Bent brothers.
I sat stupidly on my pony, uncertain what to do. Kit's advice rang in my head.
Is this right?
I knew it was not. These were the wrong men to punish for Sand Creek. By all accounts I had ever heard, the black man and the Mexican were just good, hardworking men. Yet I could not stop Charles from leading the others away. I could not stop him, but …
I drew my revolver and made a leap out of the timber and into the open. Angling the muzzle of the weapon slightly off to one side of the hunters, I jerked the trigger six times, shattering the good sounds of the distant mouth-harp music and the gentle hiss of the breeze through the pines. I holstered my pistol and released my best Comanche yell as I reached for my Henry rifle in its saddle scabbard. I smelled gun smoke as I watched the two men and the boy scramble for their mounts below. Now Charles was cursing me furiously as his pony's hooves beat the ridge toward me. I fired a rifle round from the Henry and slid the weapon back into the scabbard to deal with Charles.
Wheeling my mount, I found Charles charging me with his tomahawk over his head, his eyes blazing with anger at me for having spoiled his raid. I caught Charles's axe blade with my shield, which I had whipped around from my back just in time. The impact of his charge knocked me from my pony. He was
falling over me and I grabbed him by the throat about the time I hit the ground on my back. Our ponies danced aside, and though the fall had fairly knocked my wind from me, I knew I'd better fight like hell because Charles seemed bent on killing me. I rolled, still holding his throat, and got on top of him. George was shouting at us both to stop. Charles made a wild swing with his tomahawk and it glanced off my skull, drawing blood. All I could think to do was to batter my forehead down onto the bridge of the young half-blood's nose, and the blow stunned him so that he dropped his weapon.
Quickly, I jumped to my feet and kicked the war axe aside. My lungs managed to suck in a little air, and I stumbled aside and fell to my knees to find George holding a gun on me. Behind him, Quanah had an arrow notched, prepared to send it through George's heart. Their eyes blazed with confusion and panic. I raised my hand to try to calm them, but just then, my pony trotted in front of me and something happened to him. He made a loud thudding sound and his head and neck just whipped toward me and sent him slamming to the ground, almost on top of Charles, where he lay groaning, half-conscious, on the ground. I looked down the slope and saw a white cloud of gun smoke streaming away from the black man called Buffalo Head. The boy who had been playing the harmonica was now holding the reins of two horses and a mule. Another smoke cloud appeared like a magician's bouquet and a blink later a rifle ball split bark from a tree behind me as it sang into the forest.
Those men may not have been very cautious about where they camped, but they were damn good shots, for they were coming much too close from a quarter mile off. I sucked in my first good breath of air since hitting the ground, glared at George, and pointed downhill. He swung his muzzle around and fired down at the camp as I grabbed Charles's wrist to drag him behind the first tree I came to. Quanah came to my aid, reaching low from his mount and using the power of his pony to haul Charles to safety. My pony had not fallen on my rifle, so I slipped it from the scabbard and stepped behind a tree. I used the lever to work a live round into the breech. George dismounted. He and I began returning fire from the cover of the
trees, and the men below, enjoying no cover, decided to mount and flee rather than stand and fight. They left behind their elk carcass and the hobbled red mule that had caused all the confusion in the first place.
I had caught some wind in my lungs now, and I turned to George, angry over the loss of my pony and the painful axe wound to my scalp. “Now you can have a closer look at that damned red mule! If it is not the mule that belonged to Cut-Lip-Bear, then your brother should go home and stop looking for the wrong people to punish!”
George looked down at his brother, who was now regaining his senses and touching his broken nose. “He can't go home, Plenty Man. He doesn't know where it is. Maybe
you
are the one who should go home. Your heart is not in this fight we have taken on.”
“You are right, George. My heart is not in it. I won't ride with you boys anymore and watch you destroy what your father has spent decades holding together. You could be helping him, but you're working against him, now. You're on a bad warpath. You should smoke and think and seek some wisdom over this before you destroy everything.”
Just then, my pony, which I thought had been shot to death, began to lunge on the ground. We all turned to watch—even Charles, though still somewhat dazed. Quanah looked fearfully at the animal as he lifted his head and struggled to get his front hooves under him. Another effort, and the pony found his feet, wobbling a little as he rose. Blood ran from the off side of the mount's neck where a bullet had torn through the flesh above the spine. It was obvious to me that horse had simply been “creased” and rendered temporarily paralyzed, but George and Quanah looked at the beast as if it had risen from the dead. I was not above taking advantage of it.
“Now you see that my medicine is strong,” I said in Spanish, so that both Quanah and the Bents could understand. “I was right to warn those men, and you all were wrong to wish them harm.” I jutted my rifle triumphantly toward the sky and went to catch my wounded pony by the reins, hoping that he would not collapse under me, once I got mounted upon him.

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