Cries from the Earth (60 page)

That trip crossing the broken ground where the soldiers and the Indians had fought was especially grueling, not only in terms of what it took out of them physically but more so in terms of what they endured emotionally.

“Look there, Mr. Brice,” Maggie announced at his ear, where he held her piggyback.

He followed the direction her little splinted arm pointed and saw the contorted body of a soldier, his outstretched arms and legs raised, frozen in death as if he were imploring the sky. Maybe begging God to take him far, far from here.

The Almighty had done just that, Patrick reflected.

“There's another one too,” Maggie said, pointing to the other side a few moments later. “See? There's lots of 'em now.”

That much was the Lord's truth. They were trudging through a garden of the dead scattered across the blood-drenched grass.

“We ain't in trouble no more now, Mr. Brice,” she said once as they neared the foot of a tall, rounded knoll.

“How you figure that, Maggie dear?” he asked as he set her down and they made themselves small against some low brush, so as to be out of sight should any warriors make an appearance.

“The Injuns are gone now. They left the dead soldiers be. Them Injuns ain't coming back now,” she explained in her quiet, tiny voice how it made perfect sense to her. “We're safe now.”

Oh, to have the innocence of this sweet, little child,
he thought.
To believe in the simplicity of events rather than the complexity and downright messiness of life.

Later, as they were approaching a figure dressed in soldier blue, a man standing beside a huge bush at the edge of a copse of black cottonwood saplings, Maggie said, “Maybe he can tell us the easiest way to get out of the canyon.”

Brice's heart leaped: to think that this soldier might help give them direction, if not be a companion to help carry Maggie up to the Camas Prairie.

But as they got closer, he could see that the figure was not standing straight up as a man would if that soldier realized they were coming. Instead, the figure was bent slightly over the bushes. And when they stopped within a few yards, Patrick saw how the sharp brambles snagged in the man's tunic and britches to hold the soldier upright. He was as dead as last winter's potatoes. Eyes wide open as if having just witnessed something of such horror, eyes possessed of that dull glaze of long-ago death.

“He's dead too,” Maggie said so matter-of-factly that it yanked Brice right out of his reverie.

He lunged ahead, his legs weary and in need of another stop, but he dared not. At least not anywhere near that dead man who was all but standing there, arms wrapped around that bramble bush, waiting for someone to come along and save him.

Too late now.

When Patrick set her down at last, his legs shuddered from fatigue and he collapsed back against the ground. He laid his arm over his eyes, thinking he would steal a few minutes of sleep and feel brand-new as they started off the battlefield and into the canyon itself.

“Mr. Brice,” she called, shaking him gently with her good hand.

He woke up, looked at her face, then down at the hand, and finally up that arm at the bloodstains on her sleeve where the arrow had pinned her.

“Maggie dear,” he said apologetically, knowing he had fallen asleep.

“There's another one right over there.” She pointed in the direction they were heading.

“Dead one?”

Nodding, Maggie said, “I ain't ever seen a man without the top of his head.”

Swallowing with apprehension, he clambered to his feet and held out his hand, hoping she would walk beside him for a while. Angling off, Brice didn't want to take her close to the body that sat partly propped up against a boulder. Only close enough for him to see that she was right. Maggie must have gone over to investigate while he was asleep, Brice decided.

The top of the soldier's head was cleaved off in a pulpy mess. His brain was exposed, torn; some of it oozed down the side of the crushed skull. The sight spurred him into the mouth of the canyon.

As that Sunday afternoon aged and evening came down, Brice struggled up the side of the grassy slope, following the soldiers' trail, staying with the imprints of all those boots and iron-shod hooves. After a while, he told himself he couldn't bear to look up at the top of the ridge anymore, since it made his heart faint to see just how long it was taking them. So he vowed to keep his eyes only on the trail just ahead of him. Step by step as twilight fell, when he didn't have to worry about seeing the faraway top of the prairie above them. It was too dark to see anything that far away.

Every hundred yards or so, he set Maggie down and they would rest a few minutes. But he did not allow himself to lie down anymore. He knew he would fall asleep and then he would awaken right there in the morning—if the Indians hadn't found him before sunup. Better to force himself to stay awake. On through the dark, up, up, up … until he realized his legs were no longer climbing. Now he was carrying little Maggie over ground more level than the ordeal of the last few hours.

The quarter-moon had risen late that night of the seventeenth, so late that Patrick wondered if it wasn't long past midnight when he realized a part of the starry sky ahead was blotted out by a black shape. Large, angular, squat against the horizon where the rest of the skyline was bright with a jumble of stars.

He wanted to hope. Even more, he wanted to tell Maggie. But more than anything he wanted to shout for joy, because that had to be a house. Black as it was, with nary a candle or a lamp lit in the window—by damn, it just had to be a house!

Stumbling into the yard, Brice recognized these buildings that stood near the head of Rocky Canyon. “It's the Harris place, Maggie dear,” he gasped with relief.

“We saved now?”

He dropped wearily to one knee, and she slipped off his back. “Not yet. Soon. C'mon with me.”

Patrick took the tiny hand in his and led her up to the house. Every door, every window, had been smashed. Plain as paint the warriors had been here to loot it of all worth carrying off. Cold as they were, with the way the wind had come up after dark, the place was welcome shelter from the ravages of the night. Chances were, he convinced himself, the warriors had already been here. Likely wouldn't return.

“We stay here, Mr. Brice?”

“Just the place for us tonight,” he answered.

After settling her on one of the small tick mattresses the Indians hadn't slashed too badly, Patrick searched in the dark for a candle or a lamp. He finally located a candle, and with it spreading a warm, flickering light he continued his search. Behind a pantry sideboard he located some foodstuffs the Nez Perce had ignored. A few loaves of bread and a small slab of bacon, along with some tea and a little sugar. It made for a right fine supper after he got a fire started and Maggie huddled up close to its warmth.

While water for the tea was heating and he had strips of the bacon sizzling on a cast-iron griddle over the flames, Brice took his candle on another search. When he came back to the fireplace he had an old dry-goods crate in one hand and some leather harness draped over his shoulder. After feeding himself and the girl, the Irishman knocked off one of the crate's four sides, then rigged the straps around this makeshift “chair” so that he could carry it on his back like a pack-basket, with little Maggie perched inside.

“Look what I made for you,” he said proudly as he turned it around to show the child, discovering that she had fallen asleep there beside the fire, her plate emptied, half of her warm tea gone.

Brice covered Maggie with a torn section of burlap sacking, since the Indians hadn't left a blanket in the place; then he banked the fire and curled up beside her.

By the time he awoke gritty-eyed and cotton-mouthed, Brice found the fire had burned itself out and the sky outside was renewing itself for another day.

“Come along now, Maggie,” he coaxed her gently after she had herself some breakfast and returned from the outhouse at the side of the yard. “Time for us to hit the trail again.”

“We gonna get to town today?”

“Yes, Maggie dear. We'll be there before another night.”

When he knelt, he had her sit down inside the crate, holding onto the two sides where her head and shoulders protruded from their tops; then he stood, clutching the harness straps over his shoulders.

Brice felt renewed, just like this day. What a wonder a little food and some sleep had done him. He felt as if he could walk with her strapped to him all day if he had to, which is just what they did. Mile after mile, they plodded around the edge of the hills, skirting the prairie and staying high enough on the timbered slopes, avoiding the road to the settlements for fear of the Indians. Stopping only for rest and water and to let Maggie slip off for some privacy in the bushes.

But he grew concerned as the sun quickly slipped off behind them that afternoon and the light began to fade. A little scared they would have to spend another night out in the cold after he had promised her—

Brice smelled woodsmoke. He stopped dead in his tracks, realizing it could be anyone's fire, even a war party's. Did he have the heart to beg for Maggie's life again and not beg for his own?

The closer he got, the stronger became that sweet fragrance in his nostrils. Then he heard voices … and a familiar song bursting from some man's melodious throat, a heartfelt melody sung with such fondness and warmth that Patrick knew this had to be a place farthest from the Nez Perce War there ever could be.

Out of the twilight he thought he recognized some of the storefronts, then made out the barricade of logs, rocks, and hundredweight flour sacks down at the end of the town's long street.

“Who goes there?” a voice demanded out of the inky dark.

“P-Patrick … Patrick Brice!” he cried, tears pooling in his eyes, starting to stream down his dirty cheeks.

“By God … he says he's Patrick Brice!” The voice was flung at others noisily shuffling up to the barricades.

“Who was that, Mr. Brice?” Maggie asked in her tiny voice near his ear.

“I don't know his name.” He choked on a sob as a half-dozen men pushed through the wall of wagons and barrels erected across Mount Idaho's narrow street and continued toward the barricade lit with flickering lamps. “All I know for sure is that we're back among friends, Maggie dear. We're back among friends.”

Chapter 48

June 19, 1877

 

 

BY TELEGRAPH

An Indian War.

WASHINGTON, June 19.—General Sherman has received from General McDowell at San Francisco, the following dispatch from General Howard at Fort Lapwai, Washington territory, of the 16th instant: The Indians began by murdering a white man in revenge for a murder of his, killing three others at the same time. They have begun a war upon the people near Mount Idaho. Captain Perry has started with two companies for them. Other troops are being brought forward as fast as possible. Give me authority for twenty-five Indian scouts. Think we shall make short work of it.

Signed, HOWARD.

General McDowell adds: I had already informed Howard of your direction that the division has all the Indian scouts that can be allowed.

These rubber miner's boots flopped and flapped with every step as he trudged over the broken, brushy country, but First Sergeant Michael McCarthy was grateful to God that he had found them when he did.

When they had set out from Fort Lapwai, the soles of his cavalry boots were already scraped thin as parchment, hardly worth riding in, much less when he had been forced to go afoot like an infantry doughboy the way he was. After lying so long in that stream, the stitching had come apart, and he left the all-but-useless boots behind to continue his escape. Mile after painful, tender-footed mile, the first sergeant had trudged up the canyon and over to Camas Prairie in nothing more than a pair of grimy stockings that eventually became nothing more than tatters flopping around his ankles.

Then he had stumbled across an abandoned cache of supplies, which included these rubber boots. No weapons, no bullets, and no food … but damn if these boots weren't just about the sweetest discovery he had ever made!

His journey to the settlements had taken McCarthy a lot longer than he had planned for the simple reason that he got himself lost more than once. By avoiding the wagon road and staying far off that trail left by Perry's retreating survivors, McCarthy hoped to avoid any unexpected encounters with Nez Perce war parties. Three times he had gotten himself turned about and covered a lot of miles headed in the wrong direction.

Then he would notice something about the sun and the path it was taking—rising of a morning or sinking of an afternoon—realizing that he had eaten up valuable time and strength pushing away from the settlements instead of pressing on for the bivouac Colonel Perry was sure to make once the Indians let off the pressure on their rear guard.

And now with the bright sun rising this Tuesday, the nineteenth of June, McCarthy trudged on in his noisy boots, skirting along the timbered hillsides, his eyes scanning the vast, rolling sweep that was the Camas Prairie. That's when he spotted the few small buildings on the horizon.

It ended up taking him more than two hours to reach the place, what with those clumsy boots and the weary state of his legs. He hadn't much strength left to go on—nothing more than water for better than a day now—but still figured he was bound to reach the settlements before he dropped from hunger. At the edge of the tree line he stopped, licking his lips unconsciously as he looked the place over, wondering if he should take a chance since the ranch seemed deserted.

Just as he was emerging from the timber, the sergeant spotted two horsemen loping toward the place from beyond the ranch. He ducked back into the shadows and watched until he recognized them for white men.