Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (40 page)

“You going up today?” Seamus asked right behind him. “Or you fixing on staying right there—plugging the hole for the rest of us?”

Pulling himself on out through the hole, Jack brought his legs up and twisted his body around, loosing his grip and sliding down the six feet of icy, wind-sculpted drift that had been formed of driven snow alongside the freight wagon. He landed in a spray of loose snow piled at the bottom. Laughter greeted him as he picked his face out of the cold.

“It safe to come out, Jack?”

He gazed up the slope to find the Irishman half out, staring down at him.

“Just a little clumsy, I guess.”

“Is that it now? I was thinking you was just having yourself a little fun!”

By the time Donegan slid down the icy slope, Jack had found his legs and was rolling them around, kneading the kinks out of them so that he felt more confident in walking. The Irishman stood beside him, then gasped quietly as his eyes grew accustomed to the light, and his heart took in the pristine sight of a world made clean and new.

“It makes a man want to pray, don't it, Seamus?”

Donegan clamped an arm around Stillwell's shoulder, drawing the younger scout close. “It does at that, Jack. Makes a man want to get down on his knees and thank God he's alive. Almost like the bible story me mother told me back home when I was a wee one.”

“Which story was that?” asked the old sergeant as he poked his head out of the hole.

“The story of Lazarus, of course,” Seamus replied. “Returning from the dead.” He sighed. “Ain't this just like being a Lazarus?”

“I've never been one to mind getting down on my own prayer bones and taffying up to the Lord with you,” growled the sergeant as he heaved himself free of the hole and slid down the slope.

As he stood, the lieutenant, then the rest came out to greet the brightness of this new, white, brutally cold world.

“Any chance we have some of the stock left?” Stanton asked, pointing at five partially covered brown carcasses, stiffened in death and cold where the wind had kept much of the snow leed off the collapsed animals.

“The rest might be buried under the bigger drifts,” Donegan said.

“And then again—they might not,” Jack said. “If your men are up to it—we need to find out. They might have drifted on south, driven by the storm.”

“If they were—how far could they be by now?” asked the lieutenant.

Stillwell shook his head. “No telling. Might be no more than a mile … or maybe even on their way to Mexico by now.”

The lieutenant sighed and shrugged. “We've got to try, I suppose.” He turned back to the wagon. “We have a chance of pulling this free, if we get enough muscle behind it, then we can right it.”

“But we need stock to pull it,” one of the soldiers said.

The lieutenant nodded.

“We don't find any still alive,” Jack told them, “we'll be walking south out of here on our shanks.”

“Maybe we ought to try pulling the wagon south ourselves,” the lieutenant considered.

Donegan shook his head. “These men—wore down the way they are—they're in no shape to drag that bleeming wagon through these drifts. Better you have them carry what they can each one. That wagon shroud. What's left in the way of vittles. Assign a couple of them to drag that sowbelly with buffalo chips in it.”

Jack agreed. “We've got a lot of walking to do, Lieutenant. And there's many a fire we'll still be needing to make with those chips.”

“All right,” the officer sighed. “Sergeant, you stay here with another, and keep the fire tended inside. The rest of us, we'll try to run across some tracks … find some of the stock.”

Stillwell went with Donegan, the both of them choosing to strike out to the north, more so to see if they could find sign of what had become of Simon Pierce. The lieutenant divided the rest into three squads to work the other points of the compass. He himself would lead the detail going to the south, where the faintest of crusty, snow-filled hoofprints indicated the stock had indeed wandered before the wind, driven east by the storm.

As cold as it was, the sun felt good on Jack's cheeks as they plodded north, slowly picking their path between drifts of snow, trying their best to stay on ground blown clear by the blizzard's passing fury.

“You figure that's him?” Donegan asked hours later when Jack stopped, pointing at something he had spotted many yards ahead of them—something dark, contrasting with the snow.

Stillwell only nodded, then set out again, his feet growing colder with every yard they had tromped across the unforgiving winter plain.

A man's leg protruded from the edge of a snow-bank. His stocking had been worked through, the flesh of the exposed foot blackened with frostbite.

Jack tapped it with his gloved fingers. “Solid as ice, Seamus.”

Donegan said, “Let's see who it is.”

“We know already,” he replied as he knelt and began scooping snow from the upper body. “Poor bastard lost one of his shoes and his foot was so froze he didn't even know it. Kept right on going, instead of turning around and coming back to where he could have stayed warm till the weather blew on over.”

They had a struggle pulling the stiffened body over, frozen as it was to the ground at the edge of the snow-drift that had formed against it during the height of the storm.

“Simon Pierce.”

They could tell it was the government man, even as blackened as was the flesh on his face. The wool muffler Pierce had tied over his head, knotted beneath his whiskered chin, was so stiff there was no removing it. The frozen lips were drawn back in what looked like a grotesque smile. But it was more the freezing retraction of the skin than it was anything Simon Pierce wished to communicate from beyond the pale of death to the two scouts.

“He kept everything to the last, didn't he?” Donegan asked, pulling the long map tube from beneath the dead man's arm. Next came the valise.

“Pierce acted like he had something else with him, inside his coat,” Jack said.

Together they pulled apart the frozen, stiffened wool coat.

“Gives me the willies,” Seamus said quietly, “going through a dead man's clothes.”

“I heard a lot of the soldiers in the war did that with the enemy dead.”

Donegan nodded. “Not just the enemy dead, Jack—but their own too. An extra shirt or jacket. Maybe a new pair of shoes or boots. A dead man didn't need 'em no more.” He shrugged. “There's nothing here.”

Jack rocked back on his heels. “I was sure there was something … check that valise. Maybe he put it in—”

“What the divil is this? Weighs like a rock, it does,” Seamus declared as he pulled forth a heavy, brick-sized object wrapped crudely in a tattered, greasy piece of gray-brown corduroy.

“I didn't know better,” Jack said, sniffing at the smoke-scented cloth before he helped pull the frozen shards of cloth from the object, “I'd say this was in a Injun camp at one time.”

“Lord!”

They both just stared at it for the longest time, sitting there as it was across Donegan's palms, brilliant in the new sunlight of this midday in winter on the Staked Plain.

“It's got to be real,” Jack said finally.

“No doubt of it, Jack. Pierce was protecting it from the rest of us. Likely he killed Graves for it—or because of it. Here.” Donegan gave the crudely-cast gold bar to Stillwell and began digging around in the valise.

“You understand any of this writing?” Donegan asked, shoving some papers to the young scout.

He didn't. “Looks like it might be Spanish, Seamus. I don't know that tongue.”

“Who would—anyone you know?”

“Only one Mex I know. He's got a place up at Dodge City now. Runs him a whorehouse. Keeps Mexican girls, nigger girls too, for the buffalo hunters come in. They pay good to dip their stingers in a moist honey pot.”

“Shutup, Jack,” he said with a grin. “That's just what a man like me has to keep his mind off of way out here in the middle of nowhere.”

Jack chuckled. “I s'pose you're right. But he's the only one.”

Seamus went through the papers, page by page, until he came to a stack of telegram flimsies. “While I read these, why don't you see what's in that tube. Might explain what Pierce and Graves come looking for.”

“I don't know if we ever will know, Seamus. All Pierce told us was he had to get up to the Canadian.”

Donegan looked at him a moment before saying, “And up there is where you said the Comanche and Kiowa are thick as ticks on a bull's hide.”

“I suppose so—'cause that's where the warrior bands figure they'll have to stop the hide hunters from coming any farther south.”

With the two buckles freed, Jack pulled aside the top of the leather tube and shook out the stiffened map printed on a large sheet of ivory-colored stock. As he unrolled a map of the central and southern plains, an old parchment map, somewhat smaller, slid into his lap.

After a moment of studying the newer map, Jack said, “Looks to be government work, Seamus. Here's the surveyor's seal. And they have the railroads marked in, some of the reservation boundaries. A few of the forts. But look here—seems Graves or Pierce marked something of their own on the map.”

“Right on the Canadian,” Seamus replied. He looked down at the old drawings. “What's that?”

Setting the new map aside, Jack picked up the old parchment. “By Jesus, this is old, Seamus! And writ in Spanish too. You think this has something to do with the gold bar?”

Donegan wagged his head. “Pierce was crazy. I know that. But maybe not all he said was crazy.”

Jack remembered the mad talk, those final, almost unheard ramblings, that crazed babbling carried to them on the ghostly wind about gold walls and the seven cities and the Spanish conquistadors.

“And you remember Pierce saying he was going north to find the entrance to the road that would take him to the Seven Cities?” Seamus asked.

“Cibola?”

“Yeah, that's it.”

“Shit—now that's just some old talk, what some call a legend, Seamus.”

Donegan shook his head, pulling free one of the telegrams. “Maybe … maybe not, Jack.” He looked into Stillwell's eyes. “You ever hear of an old trading post on the Canadian River?”

Jack nodded. “I heard tell of it. Goes back a long ways. Bents had a operation there. Kit Carson fought a battle with Injuns there back to 'sixty-four.”

Seamus studied the telegram a moment more, then looked at Stillwell. “Is the place called … Adobe Walls?”

“Damn, if it ain't.”

Chapter 31

Early December 1873

“Then it's decided. That's where we're going—up to the Canadian,” Seamus declared, stuffing the official documents, correspondence and telegrams back in the ice-stiffened canvas valise.

Jack Stillwell shook his head. “Whoa—hold on now. Not till we get some answers from the Mexican fella in Dodge City.”

“One runs the whorehouse?”

“Louie Abragon.” Jack rolled the small parchment map inside the larger U.S. survey map, both against his coat. He slid them into the leather map tube as he said, “Abragon will translate this map for me.”

“You don't plan on telling him about the gold, do you?”

Stillwell replied, “I wasn't planning on it.”

Seamus looked down at the frozen corpse. “What you figure we should do with Pierce?”

“Nothing. If we can get the wagon righted, and round up some stock—I suppose Stanton will want us to fetch Pierce's body.”

“Good—because I'm not dragging this frozen bastard back across those drifts for no one, Jack.”

“And if they haven't found any horses, we'll just have to leave him here.”

Donegan nodded. “That means the lieutenant will have to report him dead when we get back to Fort Richardson. And he'll have to explain why he didn't bring in the body.”

“You were in the army too damned long,” Stillwell said. “All that fuss, all that paperwork. The lieutenant damned well has a good reason for leaving that bastard out here. Pierce killed two men: one of his own, and one of Colonel Mackenzie's soldiers too.”

The sun was in the last quadrant of the sky by the time the two came within sight of the wagon camp, following their deep bootprints hammered into the wind-scoured snow. The closer they got, the more it appeared there were too many men moving around the wagon. Seamus's eyes swam with the bright light. He blinked, trying harder to focus—concerned that the Comanche, who were not known to move about in the deep snow and bad weather, much less a blizzard, had raided the camp in their absence.

But as they drew closer, inching from snowdrift to snowdrift, both Seamus and Jack discovered why there were too many men in that camp. And animals to boot.

The old sergeant was regaling with a squad of buffalo soldiers laughing and joking around a smoky fire. The crusty soldier was the first to notice the two civilians coming back across the snowy plain.

“Donegan!” he called out. “Stillwell—both you come on in. We got us company!”

“Seamus Donegan, you say. As I live and breathe!”

That call brought the Irishman up short. “Reuben? That really you, Sergeant?”

“In the flesh. You half froze for a hug?”

He watched the tall brunette soldier hurrying toward him. “From you, anytime!”

They back-slapped and pounded heartily between the three of them until each was breathless.

“By the saints, is it really you? What you doing out here in the middle of the blizzard?”

“Mama Waller's boy knows better than to get hisself caught in a blizzard, Seamus,” Waller explained with a smile. “We stayed behind it, moseying slow out of eastern New Mexico as it pushed on ahead of us.”

“Why were you out there in New Mexico?” Jack asked.