Far as the Eye Can See (19 page)

The other braves got up and went out. Saw-set, or War Eagle, remained where he was seated for a while, watching us with those sad eyes. “You may go in peace,” he said. “But if you come back, it will be for fighting and not peace.”

“I don’t want to fight nobody,” Bellows said. “We have many guns.”

“You offer peace, then talk of guns,” War Eagle said.

Bellows got to his feet. I looked up at him, then glanced back at War Eagle. He had no more to say. I known what was coming.

Chapter 10

It took us a while to get back to the men. We had to walk real slow, paying no attention to the warriors who was right behind us, watching everything we did. I felt sorry for Cricket, struggling to get up that snow-piled hill, with me a-pulling on her reins to hold her steady and at a walk. There was a huge commotion behind us, but we didn’t dare look back. The Indians had yipped and hollered all the way back down the hill. When we reached the men, Bellows commenced ordering them into position for a fight. He formed them up in a column of two, rifles held to the right shoulder with the leather sling strap around the arms and wrist. In less than fifteen minutes he had his troops ready to go down amongst them. He had his sword out glistening in the winter sun. He was a different man—like a boy made free of school.

“You was hoping for this,” I said.

“No,” he said, looking me sternly in the eyes. “I hoped we could avoid it. But I won’t sit around here wondering what to do. I have my orders.”

“We was just supposed to locate them. Ain’t this for General Gibbon?”

“Who knows where they’ll be when Gibbon comes this way? There ain’t that many of them. We’ll take care of this here and now.”

“And you think you can just ride down there and round them up like they was sheep or something?”

“Mr. Hale,” he said. “We may have to kill a few.”

“And that will save them,” I said. I got up on Cricket and turned her away.

“Where you going?”

“I ain’t going to be no part of this.” I pulled back a little on Cricket’s reins and she turned back some, her head bobbing up and down, steam blowing from her nostrils. “This ain’t nothing but murder, Captain.”

“You don’t respect them braves very much, do you?” he said. He sat atop his horse like a falcon on a fellow’s arm, ready to take flight. He held his sword up against his right shoulder. The blade gleamed. He turned the horse away from me and took his place in front of the men.

“You’re going down there without me,” I said.

“It ain’t no obligation on you,” he told me. Not one of his men even glanced my way. He smiled a bit. “You done what you had to do. You put us on them. Now I got to do what I been hired to do.”

I almost told him that if I’d of known it would lead to this, I wouldn’t of done it. But I known it wasn’t true. I thought it might end up in a fight, and I signed on anyway. I needed the pay, and a fellow would have to be a durn fool not to know what would happen when troops went out to collect Indians off their own land and bring them into a fort to be fed like pet animals.

“You just wait right here,” Bellows said. “We’ll be back directly.”

He hollered the command, and his men went behind him at a gallop down the hill toward the Indian camp.

I rode a little further down myself so I could see what happened. The women had already commenced taking down the lodges. A party of braves on horseback come out of the timber just to the left of where the camp was and started yipping and hollering as they galloped toward the column behind Bellows. I seen Bellows turn and fire his pistol, waving the sword now as he tried to get his men to turn and start firing. A few executed the right kind of cavalry move, I suppose, but once the arrows started flying, most of his men scattered and started running away from the charging Indians. Bellows run right at them, firing his pistol. He probably had no idea he was pretty much alone and there wasn’t nobody at all a-charging with him. He took a arrow in what looked like his neck and rolled back off his horse and landed on his side, the sword flying away from him. He must of been dead before he hit the ground because he didn’t move none once he settled. Another group of warriors come from the camp, riding across the stream in a single line, then scattering around the soldiers, who was still trying to figure out where to turn and what to do. It was a sorry thing to witness. The Indians chased after individuals, shooting arrows at them as they run, and when one fell, the other warriors circled him on their horses and shot arrow after arrow into the poor fellow. I think they got most of the men that rode down that hill. Without Bellows to lead them, they was as helpless as rats trapped in a dry well. A few got away. I seen them riding hard over the hills toward the Bighorn River. I figured they’d get lost and die if I didn’t go after them, so I turned Cricket toward the north to cut them off.

I rode her pretty hard for a spell, but then I could tell Cricket was winded, so I stopped and let her walk a bit. I was in tall grass, still pretty high on the ridge that looked down at the Indian camp, about two miles upriver from it. Below me I seen three of Bellows’s troops dragging along on foot, their horses trailing behind them. I could see they’d run the animals into a white, foaming sweat, and there was no run left in them. You can do that to a horse—you run him too hard and keep him on it too long, and he’ll finally quit. Then it’s hard to get him to run again for a long time. If you do, he’ll flat-out die. Oh, you can kick one into a good gallop for a short while, but even with a solid whip, you ain’t gonna get one to run long.

At first, when they seen me coming down the hill, they wasn’t sure what sort of foe I might be. I was in my leather jacket and buffalo robes, with only the hat on my head to tell them I was a white man. But then one of them recognized me.

“Jesus,” he said. “The captain’s dead.”

“I seen it,” I said.

“Jake here is wounded.”

Sure enough, the fellow behind him was sagging a little, and I could see he had a arrow sticking out of his side.

I said. “I guess they outnumbered you.”

“There was so many of them. And the arrows was everywhere.”

“I see. But they had no guns, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I got to report all this back at Fort Ellis.”

The third fellow, the youngest one there, said, “They had guns.”

“Well, I watched it from up yonder,” I said. “At the top of the ridge where we was before you rode down amongst them. I can’t say I seen a single gun fired except for the captain’s pistol.”

He hung his head down.

Jake said, “Can you help us?”

“That’s what I run down here for.”

“I’m not doing so good here.” Jake tugged on the arrow a bit and gritted his teeth. “I got to get this thing out of me.”

“Yes, you surely do,” I said. The youngest fellow was called Nate. He was from Illinois and he had red hair, and teeth that bent outward in the front like the cowcatcher on a train engine. His face was hairless, and from the way he was always looking at me, I’d say he did not like me very much at all. I probably wounded his dignity when I made that comment about the guns that didn’t get fired in his first great Indian battle.

The first fellow, a tall, kind of craggy hillbilly from Georgia—too young to fight in the big war, but now glad to be in any kind of army—was called Daniel. He was Jake’s best friend, as they come to let me know. Jake, who had the arrow deep in his side, told me that Daniel would one day be a officer. “He can already speak some of them Indian languages.”

I set Jake down against a small embankment. Nate and Daniel was watching back from where they come just in case the Indians was still following them. They had their carbines out now and aimed at the horizon behind us. I thought,
God help the poor soul that comes over that hill.
But nobody come. Those Indians was a long way gone in the other direction.

Jake’s wound was worse than I thought it would be. At first glance, it looked like the arrow had passed through the side of his body where there ain’t that much in the way of internals, but it went in at more of a angle and pierced his lung. I could hear blood gurgling behind the wound. He didn’t know it yet, but once we pulled the thing out of there, he’d probably bleed to death pretty quick. I seen this kind of wound in the war. Even pouring a gallon of whiskey into it wouldn’t help it none.

When I seen how bad it was, he was watching my face. “What?” he said. “Tell me.”

“It ain’t good,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“You’re shot through the lower part of your lung.”

“I thought it might be such.”

“It just went in at the wrong angle.”

“I was hoping it would be low so it missed.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think so.”

“Well, shit,” he said.

“You want me to go ahead and pull it out of you?”

“I guess so. There ain’t nothing else for it.”

“Turn over a bit and let me break it off the other end.”

He rolled a little to the side, and I reached that part of the arrow that went through and broke it off so when I pulled it out I’d be pulling the shaft and not the point back through the path of the wound. The whole time he didn’t let out a sound. He was shivering, though. It was freezing cold on that hard, icy ground. I started to turn him back over and he said, “Thank you kindly.”

When I settled him back again and got ready to pull the arrow out, he looked at me with the fiercest eyes I think I ever seen. Like a mountain lion’s eyes. “Go ahead.”

“This is gonna hurt like hellfire,” I said.

“I know it.”

“You want some whiskey first? I got some.”

“I would like that very much,” he said.

I went to my pack and got a bottle. A gust of wind come up behind me and sliced through me like a broad knife. I hunched up and stood there for a spell until it slowed down again. Then I took the bottle back to Jake. “It’s probably a good thing it’s so cold,” I said. “You ain’t lost much blood.”

He was a-setting there, looking right at me, but his eyes didn’t see nothing at all. He was dead. It wasn’t no wind that hit me, it was his soul. I got down next to him and jerked the damn arrow out anyway. Then I sipped the whiskey, looking directly in his eyes. They was clear as marbles, not glazed over nor nothing, but you could tell there wasn’t no life behind them; they wasn’t eyes no more. They was only two green, polished stones. He was just a young boy, no older than twenty, and he didn’t get to see very much of this earth. I took another sip of the whiskey, trying to settle my mind a little. “I’ll be damned to hell,” I said. It shocked me that the suddenness and surprise of this fellow’s passing bothered me more than just a little bit.

I called Daniel over, and when he seen what happened to his friend, he couldn’t take it. He fell to his knees and started praying over him, tears running down his face.

“He was bleeding real bad inside,” I said.

Nate looked at me like I done it—like I killed him. I stood up in the wind that commenced to howling around us. The sky was low and gray, moving over us like thick smoke. “It’s gonna snow again, fellows,” I said. “We better get him situated and head back to Fort Ellis.”

“What about the others?” Daniel said.

“What others?”

“The captain, the other troops.”

“They’re two or three miles back that away,” I said, pointing to where they had come from. “You want to go looking for them, be my guest. I’m heading back.” I took another sip of the whiskey—it warmed me all the way down—then I handed the bottle to Daniel. “You can have the rest of this. You’re going to need it.”

“You can’t leave us here,” he said.

“I’m going back. Right now. I hope to keep ahead of this here snowstorm heading our way. Why don’t you strap that poor fellow to his horse and you two can follow along.”

They seen it was the only thing to do. Before long we was all heading north and west, with the wind at our backs. By the time it begun to snow, we’d covered some ground, but not far enough that we wasn’t soon buried in it. We was crossing some pretty big hills, west of the Bighorn River, when we finally had to stop and carve out some kind of shelter. We found a place where a rock jutted out over a ravine, and so we tethered the horses to a small tree and crawled under the stone, where it was mainly dry. There was a stand of pine trees nearby, so we dug up under them and found some branches and sticks and such. Daniel collected handfuls of pine needles and leaves and piled some of the sticks on top of it. It took a while with that wind, but I finally got a fire going. Every now and then the wind would shift a bit and the smoke would blow right into our faces, but mostly the fire burned in front of us under the stone, and it kept us warm. We left Jake draped over his horse out in the blowing snow. I watched him turning white, a-laying over the saddle, his legs sticking out like he was trying to get comfortable.

It was going to be one hell of a long night.

Chapter 11

The wind just wouldn’t quit. We was scrunched up under that stone, trying to keep the fire going. We took turns going back across to the timber to gather up and collect branches and tree limbs to burn. Sometimes that took a long time, and with the blowing wind the fire almost banked.