Cries from the Earth (20 page)

“C'mon, Maggie!”

“Mamma!”

Maggie was trying to stand, wobbly and stumbling about, when an Indian dismounted nearby, walked over to where her father lay groaning and clutching at the bloody wound in his hip. The warrior shot Papa in the back of the neck with an arrow. Maggie's father quit moving, stopped moaning.

“For the love of God, Maggie—run!”

Wheeling about at the sound of her mamma's warning, Maggie found her mother lunging to the ground and diving into the brush beside the road, the young boy straddling her hip. Following her mother into the timber, the girl cried out each time a twig or limb reached out to snag the arrow stuck through her bloody scalp, tearing at the lacerated skin like cruel fingers ripping off her hair, making a sound each time like someone ripping a strip of coarse muslin.

But she blindly followed her mamma's waist-length blond hair … running faster and faster—picking herself up after every fall to run ever faster because Maggie could hear the Indians closing in behind them, hooves pounding, voices bellowing and screeching.

Her mamma shrieked as she zigged this way and zagged that through the branches and undergrowth. Maggie wondered why her mamma had forsaken the trail and headed into the woods when it would have been easier and faster to escape if they stuck to the trail.

Then just as their house came in view through the tall trees, she heard the horsemen come alongside her on their heaving ponies, two of them lunging past her, their horses wet with lather as they raced up along either side of her mother. One of them reached out with his arm, swinging a short club at Mamma's back.

With that blow across her shoulders, Jennet Manuel stumbled, her eleven-month-old boy spilling from her arms as she spun to the ground with a shrill yelp of pain when her knee struck a large, exposed rock. She had barely rolled over onto her back, clutching her injured leg in both hands and sobbing, when the warrior with the club reined back, wheeled his pony, and dismounted near Maggie's mamma.

From the woman's throat burst an unearthly shriek as the warrior stepped between the sprawl of her legs and dropped to his knees.

Jennet Manuel flung herself onto her side, attempting to crawl away, clawing for the little boy who sat sobbing just yards from her, swiping dirt and leaves from his face.

Maggie could see that her mother's cheeks were scratched, that her knee was badly cut and oozing, soaking through the dress the warrior flung aside as he shoved at his breechclout and dropped between her mamma's legs.

Two other Indians gathered to watch and pin her arms down as the white woman screamed and screamed beneath the first warrior. Maggie stood there, stunned—one of her tiny, bloody hands gripping the arrow shaft that pierced the other arm—mesmerized by how the warrior bounced up and down on her mother until Mamma quit screaming and began to sob, her mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, over and over again with no more sound than a pitiful squeak coming out as the Indian kept on bouncing atop her.

It wasn't until the warrior climbed back to his feet to stand there over Mamma that Maggie became aware of the loud voices coming from the direction of the house. Running to the edge of the trees where one of the two watchers seized her arm and spun her around, she looked up at the warrior and found his face painted, grinning down at her.

“Maggie!”

It was Gran'pa's voice. She called out to him at the house.

Then it seemed the edge of the timber came alive with more of the painted warriors. A whole line of them stepped out of the shadows there among the trees when two of them started yelling at the house in their Indian talk. Gran'pa talked Indian with them. Arguing, angry words. It must have pained him deeply to watch the Indian hurt his own daughter.

Maggie was wondering when Gran'pa was going to shoot the Indians and kill them all for what they had done to old man Baker, and her papa, and how they'd hurt Mamma too—when Gran'pa and the Irishman stepped from the doorway and stood stock-still on the porch for a moment. Then the two of them laid down their weapons, a rifle and a shotgun, at the edge of the steps, before turning to disappear into the house again.

Three of the warriors—a real old and wrinkled one, along with a young one and a man about as old as her own father—mounted up and rode their ponies to the house, where two of them leaned over and scooped up the firearms left at the edge of the porch.

With a whoop the pair raised the firearms in the air to show them to the others back at the line of trees as the three riders wheeled their horses and loped toward the timber. The warrior who had hurt her mamma let out a joyous yelp and leaped atop his pony to join the rest as they all rode off through the trees toward the Salmon with a clatter of hooves.

Maggie eventually turned at the sobs growing louder, finding Mamma dragging herself along the ground on one knee to reach Maggie's little brother still sitting there in the dirt, shrieking piteously, leaves stuck to his teary face and snotty, red nose.

“Oh God, oh God,” Jennet Manuel kept repeating as she scooped up the boy and cradled him across her arm, wiping dirt from the child's mouth.

Maggie tried to reach up to swipe some tears from her cheek with that wounded left arm, and for the first time since she and her father had fallen from the horse, young Maggie sensed something wrong with that left hand that wouldn't do as she commanded.

Slowly lowering the arm, she studied her wrist curiously, realizing how bent it was, how the sharp bones poked against the inside of her skin.

Finally beginning to cry quietly, Maggie thought about the old man, thinking on how the Indians had killed Papa, too, on how they had hurt Mamma by wrestling with her on the ground.

But Gran'pa had given the Indians the weapons … and that had made the scary warriors go away.

Maggie sat cradling her misshapen arm across her lap, crying not so much for the pain in her broken wrist but because she knew nothing would be the same for any of them ever again.

Chapter 14

June 15, 1877

“You mean you ain't gonna do a damn thing about this?” Samuel Benedict shrieked in disbelief.

Wagging his head, H. C. “Hurdy Gurdy” Brown looked down at the seriously wounded Benedict lying there in the shade of an overhanging tree. “Sam,” he began matter-of-factly, just the way a person always did when he was about to deliver unsettling news, “I figger them Injuns is only squaring accounts with you.”

“S-squaring accounts!” Benedict yelped, his dismay hurting more for the moment than the wounds in both legs.

Brown was kneeling beside him, where he now patted Benedict's arm. “You know damn well how you been so hard on them Nez Perce, Sam. Shot up a bunch of them bucks, even killed one, too.”

“The little pricks had it coming!” Sam growled as Brown stood beside him on creaky knees. “Shit, Brown—me getting shot don't mean all the rest of you ain't in big, big trouble, too!”

“I don't see no one else riding in here hollering that we got a war on, Sam,” Brown said benignly, staring down at Benedict.

Sam couldn't believe Brown was taking all of this so calmly. “So you're just gonna ride on back home, easy as you please?”

Brown glanced at Isabella Benedict, then said, “Looks to be them bullets went right on through his legs, Mrs. Brown. I suggest you just wash them holes up real good with cold water and let 'em bleed till they start to knit on their own.”

“N-nothing else?” Isabella asked.

“Less'n you got some sulphur to pour in them holes, ain't much else a body can do with bullets what gone on through.”

“Damn you, Brown,” Benedict grumbled as he watched his neighbor turn away and shuffle toward his horse.

“You brought this on yourself, Sam,” Brown said without turning around. He stopped as he reached his horse and flipped the reins over the animal's big head. “Better you thank your lucky stars them Injuns didn't get down off their ponies to finish the job they started on you, 'stead of riding off and leaving you for dead.”

“When they come for you—,” Samuel hollered as Brown swung up into the saddle and started from the yard, “don't 'spect me to come help you or yours!”

Benedict closed his eyes, his anger and disappointment still hurting more than his wounds … but those wounds were beginning to nag at him something fierce once more.

“You want I should get some cold water, Sam?” Isabella asked, kneeling at his elbow, pushing a sprig of red hair off the bridge of her nose.

“Yeah,” he answered, opening his eyes and finding his wife's face near his.

“All right—we'll do what Brown said and wash them bullet holes.”

“Damn his eyes anyway,” Sam groused as he watched Isabella and the children start for the house.

By the time his wife was finished cutting slits in his canvas britches and dabbing water on the painful wounds, Sam heard the sound of approaching voices and footsteps.

“Isabella, get the children in the house!” he ordered, shoving her away. “Get 'em inside and bring me a gun now!”

The woman and children were just reaching the door when five unarmed men burst into the yard on foot. And they weren't dressed like Indians.

The moment one of the group called out to Isabella, Sam recognized the man: August Bacon, a Frenchman working a mining claim over on the west side of the Salmon.

“Bacon!”

Benedict watched the five wheel around to gaze at the tree line, where they eventually spotted him lying in the shadows, then started his way.

After listening to Sam's story, the French miners decided they'd best return to their camp so they could retrieve their rifles and some ammunition.

“But I will stay,” Bacon said. “Your woman will need someone to help you.”

“Thank you,” Sam whispered, glancing up as Isabella stepped over with a rifle in one hand while the four miners turned away for the Salmon in a hurry. He said to Bacon, “While them others is gone for your guns, maybe you can help my wife get me into the house.”

“What is this one?” Bacon asked as Mrs. Benedict handed the Frenchman her husband's rifle. He turned it over and over in admiration.

“That there's the finest breechloader I own, Bacon,” Sam declared as he painfully dragged his feet under him, ready to pull himself up against the tree trunk. “It'll knock down a horse anywhere from here clear to the river, and make a hole big enough you can shove your fist through one of the red pricks.”

“Good.”

“Believe me,” Benedict vowed with a grunt as the Frenchman knelt, shoving his shoulder beneath Sam's armpit and rising with him, “you'll want that rifle when those sons of bitches come for us.”

*   *   *

Harry Mason wasn't the sort to get scared at the first frantic alarm given by any of his skittish neighbors, but then … he wasn't the sort not to be ready for trouble either. He was smart enough to know that men like him and Sam Benedict shared the worst reputations among the Nez Perce, neither of them missing an opportunity to skin any of the Injuns on a trade, cheat them here and there when they could, and generally be hard on the red-bellies.

So any news of Indian trouble just naturally got Harry Mason's attention.

Along about two o'clock when William Osborn rushed into Mason's store to sound off about the Indians killing a couple of Frenchmen over on John Day Creek, Harry was napping on a cot in the corner of his store beside the White Bird. Two days before, while driving some cattle down the road into some new pasture, he had injured his right eye when he snapped himself with the frayed end of the bullwhip he was using to herd the cows. Bright light brought a fierce pain to the eye, gave it a sandy, gritty feel, just the way it had back in Massachusetts when he went snow-blind as a youngster.

Turns out, Harry hurt himself with the same whip he had used earlier that very spring to drive off a pair of young Nez Perce warriors, lashing them from his store and right on out of the yard.

So for the better part of two days now he had been lying here, while his sister, Helen, and her husband, Edward Walsh, ran the place for him till that eye no longer troubled him. Just now, Harry was beginning to think he might make do with some sort of eye patch, maybe even a dark bandanna tied around his head so that it lay across that right eye and he could keep the left one open, when his brother-in-law came flying in with the news.

Mason and William Osborn had ended up marrying sisters back in '67, a few years after both men came west in search of Idaho gold. There never had been an abundance of women out here. But a couple years ago Harry's Anna took sick and died after a grueling struggle that quickly sucked everything out of her. That left him alone to work the store and the rest of it until he finally convinced his sister, Helen, that she and her husband needed to come west, where Edward Walsh could make a living for himself. Without that arm Ed lost to the war against the Confederacy, Walsh wasn't doing well. Harry Mason always had been the sort to take in family, put a roof over their heads, and give his kin some gainful work to do.

When Osborn left to warn his wife about the Indians killing those Frenchmen, Mason sat on the edge of his cot and with that one good eye studied those three employees of his who had gathered around the small checker table in his store to smoke their pipes and tell their outlandish stories as they whiled away the afternoon, seeing as how Harry didn't have anything better for them to do until the cows needed to be brought in from the upper pasture that evening. Those three hands—William George, Frank “Frenchie” Chodoze, and old man Shoemaker—just sat there dumbly looking at one another, then at Harry, as if they were waiting for Mason to decide for them what they should do about the Indian scare.

“Get me that needle gun down from behind the counter, Frenchie,” he instructed François Chodoze. “And grab that cleaning rod, them rags, too, under the counter for me.”