Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (33 page)

“Fire? Did you say the fire was coming?” Graves asked.

Seamus pulled his head from the tent flaps as the civilians argued between themselves, snappish. Those two had secrets enough to eat a man up. He turned, drawn magnetically to the west where the whole horizon had gone from a faint, thin line of red reflected off the belly of the clouds overhead to a wild orange glow painting the whole sky as far as he could see in three directions. A sliver of moon was preceding the sun—a bright, crimson ball rising out of the icy cold sky in the east.

That fire was due to make things warm here shortly.

At the perimeter of camp the horses and mules had begun to protest their hobbles and picket pins, growing more wild-eyed with every passing minute, snorting, their nostrils flaring as they filled with the heavy stench of blackened death carried on the growing wind. Then everything fell quiet for the space of two, maybe three heartbeats—only long enough for a man who paid attention to such things to hear.

Seamus listened to the unmistakable sound rumbling in from the west. Almost like a distant freight train roaring along its tracks—drawing closer and closer still.

Then that distant sound of the all-consuming prairie fire was swamped over by the rustle of wings beating thunderously overhead, the whirring of tiny insects and the pounding hooves of a large herd of antelope that came racing for their camp, veering at the last moment. The wings of another flock of jays reverberated just over the treetops, while wrens and swallows and magpies swooped across the ground only long enough to peck at a mouthful of the insects driven before the fire before they took wing for a few more yards, then swooped down again on this hearty feast of retreating creatures. Everything that could escape was trying to, driven east in a headlong rush of noise and panic, galloping along the west bank of the stream, most taking the easy route: pointing their noses to the southeast along the bank instead of crossing the stream directly.

As he watched in utter amazement, the whole sky now seemed swallowed by some black monster—smoke clouds boiling overhead, their underbellies growing even brighter crimson as he watched in sheer wonder and fascination.

“Donegan!”

“Here!” Seamus answered Stillwell's sharply edged call.

“Get saddled! I need your help, dammit!”

The Irishman burst into action, tearing his eyes from the huge globe rising off the eastern horizon, first orange, then yellow, and finally becoming a bright red disk as it climbed into the fire's smoky remnants of the canopy overhead.

As he threw the hard, frost-stiffened blanket over the horse's back, more wild animals burst past the campsite. Deer bounded by, tongues lolling in exhaustion. More antelope, their doelike eyes filled with mortal fear, a few clearly scorched, blackened, oozy red wounds scorched on their legs where they had escaped only by bounding through the devastated grass itself. Rabbits hopped around the outskirts of the bustling camp. Skunks and badgers waddled past. Everything that could move was on its way.

“Let's just get this outfit across the stream!” hollered the lieutenant. “We'll be safe there, Mr. Stillwell.”

Jack grabbed the young soldier by his wool coat. “That goddamned stream is too narrow to protect us from a fire this size!”

Stanton swallowed, his eyes narrowing first on the scout, then widening at the oncoming fire. “Then what the hell do you suggest we do?”

Jack wagged his head. “All we can do is get out of here as fast as we can. Cross the stream and keep running till I can find us some place to put in till it passes over us.”

“P-Passes over us?” stammered Simon Pierce as he rushed up.

Stillwell whirled on them. “Are you two ready to ride?” he snapped.

“No. I came to—”

“Get your horse saddled or you aren't going to make it out of here!” Stillwell interrupted.

Seamus nearly tripped over the half-dozen cottontails that had sought some haven of safety between his legs as he stood working beside his nervous mount, setting the saddle atop the stiffened blanket. The hares bolted away, ears and noses twitching frantically, eyes roaming at both sides of their heads, sorting out a direction to take to safety.

There seemed to be none as the blackened ash began to sift down from the low-hanging smoke clouds. The air filled with debris and cinders, stinging the lungs, making him hunger for nothing more than a single clean breath.

“Get those canteens filled!” Stillwell shouted at the soldiers who turned from saddling horses. “The rest of you, get those two water barrels topped off. We're going to need all the water we can carry in a bad way—and real soon.”

“Lieutenant!” Seamus called. “Help me get the wagon cover tied down.”

“The hell with that—let's get out of here!” Stanton growled, clearly filled with panic.

Stillwell snagged the young lieutenant's coat again. “Do as the Irishman says. Tie the goddamned cover down over everything. If we plan on saving the wagon and supplies, we'll need that cover.”

“C'mon, Irishman,” the lieutenant growled as he bolted toward the wagon. “I don't know why we can't just leave this wagon here and make a run for it with the mules.”

“I figure Jack will try to save everything he can save before he gives up.”

“So he wants to die becoming a hero?” asked Stanton as he lashed down the last loop on his side of the wagon.

“Jack Stillwell was a honest-to-goodness hero five years ago—when he was a pup of nineteen.”

“He kill some Indians?”

“He saved the lives of over forty men, Lieutenant. Walking across a hundred miles of prairie wilderness just like this to take word that Major George A. Forsyth and the rest of us was pinned down by more than five hundred Cheyenne and Sioux on the Arickaree.”
*

The lieutenant's face blanched. “Sounds like you both were there?”

Donegan nodded. “But it was Stillwell who was the hero at the end of those nine bloody days. He carried word and Forsyth's map that eventually brought in the Tenth Cavalry to raise the siege.”

For a moment the lieutenant turned to look at the young scout who was then directing the filling of the two water barrels strapped to the sides of the high-walled wagon. “I suppose he doesn't have to prove a damned thing to any man now,” Stanton said, with some genuine approval in his voice. “I see he already was a hero.”

“And he will be again,” Donegan said as he yanked hard on the half-hitch he tied in the last loop over the wagon cover.

“Soldier! You there!” Stillwell called out, patting one of the blanket-wrapped water barrels. “Fill that coffeepot and bring it over to splash on these kegs.”

“Water 'em down?”

“Yeah,” answered Stillwell. “Soak the blankets real good. I'm afeared we're going to need everything as wet as we can get it pretty soon.”

Donegan turned to find the lieutenant staring at the flames just now breaking over the near horizon to the west. No longer did the underbellies of the low winter clouds and blackened, stifling smoke overhead appear painted with a crimson brush. Now the whole world had gone brighter as more ash and soot fell from the thickening air. Their whole world had become a bright orange-yellow as the hungry, consuming tongues of flame licked at the sky from horizon to horizon. Lapping at the dry, brittle grass that until now had been awaiting only the snows of winter.

Without satiation this monster was greedily consuming the prairie and all the life it had held season after season. A roaring, snarling freight train of a sound that assaulted the Irishman's ears.

“Into the creek!” Stillwell shouted, still on foot, waving his arm.

“You heard him!” Seamus hollered as the commissary sergeant clamored aboard his wagon and slapped leather down on the rumps of the six mules lurching into motion. “Cross the bleeming creek!”

Donegan watched the two government men ride behind the wagon among the extra mules. Those valises and that map tube remained with them as always while they prodded their anxious mounts down to the bank and into the water.

Now only Jack and Seamus remained on the west side of the creek. He saw Stillwell vault into the saddle, his young face already smudged with smoke and blackened cinders. More and more sparks drifted past them now, carried before the stiff wind that had grown much, much warmer in the past few moments.

“Into the creek, Irishman!”

Seamus closed his eyes and made the sign of the cross. “Hail Mary, full of grace—”

Chapter 25

Early November 1873

“I can't find it!” William Graves shrieked, arousing the attention of every one of the soldiers.

“Find what?” asked Simon Pierce.

Seamus turned in the saddle, finding the two civilians halting their horses, allowing Stanton and his ten horsemen to pass as the wagon rumbled out of the narrow creek and onto the prairie, driven east, away from the prairie fire.

Graves patted his coat pocket, his eyes filled with panic. “I always carry it here.”

“What?” Pierce repeated.

“The … the—” and Graves skidded to a verbal halt when his eyes caught the Irishman staring at the two of them. “I've got to go back, Simon!”

Pierce glanced at the advancing wall of flame. “You can't. What can be so damned important that you—”

Graves grabbed Pierce's arm, almost pulling the smaller man out of the saddle, whispering huskily. “It's what this whole damned expedition is about, Simon!”

Pierce flung off the arm. “You're insane, William. Always feared you would be. But be that as it may—you can't go back. See for yourself.”

Graves studied the far side of the creek as the fire roared closer, the air become heavy, stifling with live cinder and ash. He turned back to study the wagons and horsemen continuing away from the creek, onto the open prairie at a rapid clip.

“Go with me, Simon!” he begged. “I'll show you something that will knock you back on your heels. Just go with me to find it.”

“I don't know what
it
is. Forget it—and come on.”

Graves shook his head. “Donegan. Come back with me—I beg you.”

Seamus almost felt sorry for the man. “If you left it—it's gone for now, Graves. We don't have much time—”

Donegan watched Graves hammer his heels into his horse's flanks and saw the reins about, galloping the animal back to the creek.

“Goddamn you,” he muttered as he kicked his own horse into motion and plunged past a darkly amused Simon Pierce.

Graves had his mount out of the stream and up the west bank before Seamus got to him. When the Irishman reached out for the civilian's elbow, Graves yanked his arm back, his eyes gone wild.

“Help me!” he screamed, dropping to the ground, his fear-filled eyes scanning the campsite.

“I will help you! Get on your horse and we'll get out of here.”

It was hard to hear much of anything now, even a man's loud voice. The roar of the all-consuming fire bore down on them, blotting out most of the light with clouds of suffocating smoke, the air alive with cinders like fireflies on a summer night.

“Yes! This is where our tent stood!” Graves shouted, falling to his knees and crawling about through the dusklike darkness, muttering, his hands feeling along the ground as he inched forward, not stopping even as the ground around him began to smoke, the dry grass catching fire from the meteor shower of flaming cinders.

He winced in pain, slapping out the smoldering flames on his wool coat, his wool britches. His bare hands blackened as he groped through the brittle, dry grass, his face a smear of sweat and smoke, wide, fear-tinged eyes white in his darkened face.

“What can be so bloody important to you, Graves?”

The man looked over his shoulder at Donegan for only a moment then said, “It's what I've worked years for—something my family just didn't hand to me. Mine, all mine. But I don't expect you to understand that. Besides … it's something that's already cost a lot of people their lives—I must find it!”

“Tell me what it is … what I'm looking for, so we can find it and get the hell out of here!” Donegan flung his voice into the roar of the onrushing prairie fire.

“The damned things's wrapped in a bit of corduroy fabric,” Graves explained breathlessly, eyes wide in his blackened face.

“What color?”

“Brown … no—gray-brown.”

“How big?”

“Does it make any—” Graves snarled. “This big,” he said, holding out his two palms less than six inches apart. “It's small.”

“You'll never find it,” Donegan said, beginning to climb down.

“I must find—” he started, then his hands filled with something he held up before his eyes. As if suddenly aware of the Irishman's presence, Graves turned his back on Donegan and unwrapped his prize only enough to be sure it was actually back in his possession.

“You found it?”

“Damn right I did!” He rose clumsily, for the moment unaware of the danger.

Donegan saw the danger first, how the fire suddenly leaped from the ground a few yards off, cinders flying all around Graves, enveloping him in smoke and ash. And when the civilian emerged coughing, sputtering from the dense wall of smoke, he was on fire, the back of his wool coat fully aflame. Shrieking like a madman—

“Drop it, dammit!” Seamus ordered

But the frightened man refused to drop his prize. Instead he clutched it to his breast and took off running, screaming, his whole back being whipped into furious flames.

Seamus hammered his heels into the horse, taking off after Graves. As they both reached the creek, Donegan surged past the civilian and kicked the man in the back of the shoulders with the heel of his boot. Crying out in panic, in surprise, in pain, Graves went spilling into the shallow stream. The Irishman was off the right side of his horse into the cold water, kicking Graves over, again and again, scooping handful after handful on the back of the man's head, across his legs, everywhere that still smoldered after the soaking in the icy water.