Stamping Ground (12 page)

“I might have made him work for it a little.”

“That is where our characters differ. I fight only for what is mine. It is enough that I lost a fine shirt. Besides, once he had us dangling over that fire he would not have bothered to have us cut down whether we talked or not. This way it was more of a burden for him to do it than to undo it.”

There was no arguing with logic like that, but I was in that kind of mood, so we hashed it out for another five minutes or so. We were so busy neither of us noticed when Hudspeth ceased snoring.

“Can't you bastards shut the hell up and let a man sleep?” He sat up, lifting his head and shoulders into the pale light. His face was a map of cuts, swellings and bruises. One half of his handlebar was cocked upward where his upper lip was puffed and crusted over with dark blood.

“Jesus, you're hard to look at,” I said.

“That's your problem.” Absent-mindedly he reached for his flask, grumbled when he came up with a handful of air. “One of them black-faced sons of bitches took the time to
lift my whiskey whilst the others was kicking me around.” He hawked and spat out a jet of what looked to be blood that had collected in his mouth. It splattered loudly on the stone floor.

“It is fortunate that they did not lift your scalp as well.” Jac blew the sludge out of his pipe with a sound that put me in mind of a boy blasting on a broken whistle.

“Wouldn't much matter if they had, since they're going to anyway. This ain't no weekend in St. Louis we been invited on.”

“They don't usually take the scalp of an enemy not killed in battle,” I said. “They might, however, hollow out your skull and use it for a bowl to grind meal in. That is, if it isn't solid bone.”

“You should talk. You took a look at that door you knocked on with your forehead?”

I had a snappy retort all ready, but I didn't get to use it. Pere Jac made a noise like steam escaping from a boiler and clutched our wrists in a vise grip, listening.

A short scraping sound, such as might have been made by a human foot wrapped in dead animal flesh scuffing hard earth, reached us from just outside the door. A heavy bolt was shot back and moonlight fanned out across the flagstones. Two Indians stood outside the doorway, one a little behind the other because there was not enough room for them to stand side by side in the narrow passage. Cold light painted silver stripes along the barrels of their rifles. The one in front signaled for us to stand up. When we obeyed, he covered us with his rifle while his companion slid in past him, carrying coils of what looked like buckskin thong. He stepped behind us.

I knew what was coming. I put my hands behind me so he'd have no excuse to yank, and in a few seconds he had the first cord wound tightly around my wrists. Tight as it was, though, he gave it an extra tug that almost pitched me forward onto my face, then secured it and spat on the knot. He did the same with Jac, but when he got to Hudspeth he surpassed himself, forcing the marshal to curse through his
teeth when the knot was set. That finished, the other Indian came in and joined his partner. Steel dug into my back and we started forward.

“I feel like a bride on her wedding night,” I whispered to Pere Jac as we approached the steps. “What do you say when you meet a god?” Then the gun punched me behind the ribs and I shut up.

Dakota nights being cool the year around, there was a snap in the air as we made our way across camp, our Indian escorts close behind. I shivered in my thin canvas coat and wondered how Pere Jac, naked to the waist, managed to keep from turning blue. But he was a native and accustomed to extremes of temperature. The fact that his breath, like mine and Hudspeth's, was visible in gray jets of vapor seemed to bother him not at all. He seemed equally unconcerned with the boiled strip of buffalo hide that swathed his injured right shoulder, which, now dry, must have chafed his skin at the edges like rusty barbed wire. The blood had dried into a yellow-brown stain on the hide. Around us, firelight glimmered cozily behind panes of oiled paper in the windows of the soddies and huts and behind the skin walls of the tipis. The smell of wood smoke teased my nostrils and caused my stomach to grind when I detected in it the sweet aroma of roasting meat. I hadn't eaten since I'd shared a piece of salt pork with the marshal that morning, a hundred years ago.

We were conducted to a large adobe building near the south wall, which had, I supposed, served as a place for the Mormons to meet and be preached at and marry their legions of wives. The door had long since been blown off or taken down and chopped up for firewood or used for lumber in a country where wood fetched higher prices than whiskey, and now a buffalo robe hung in its place over the opening. The barrel of a Spencer blocked my way as I was about to step inside. Its owner, one of our guards, held us at bay with the business end while his companion went in. Half a minute later he returned and pulled the robe aside for us to enter. The other brave resumed his position behind us as I stepped across a threshold worn hollow by foot traffic, followed closely by Jac and Hudspeth.

The room was long and narrow, the mud-and-timber walls unpaneled, the floor earthen. At the far end a fire of wood scraps and buffalo chips burned bluish and smokeless in the grate of a large stone fireplace, casting its buttery light over the floor and walls, where giant shadows licked and flickered against a dingy yellow background. The owner of one of them sat in a rickety wooden chair with his back to the fire, a colorful blanket draped shawl-like over his bare shoulders and my gun belt buckled around his waist, the Deane-Adams resting in its holster. That came as no surprise. The five-shot was a rare piece this side of the Atlantic. Any Indian, even a Messiah who had been educated at the hands of the white man, would find it enough of a novelty to prefer it over Hudspeth's Smith & Wesson or any of the other more common firearms seized over the past several weeks. There was no sign of my Winchester, but then it was dark in the room and I doubted that he'd let a weapon so obviously superior to the Spencers his tribe was using get very far out of his sight, even if it had already been claimed by someone else.

Seen up close, his features, which had once been described as “satanic” by a newspaper writer who had never been west of Manhattan, were rather ordinary, although even enough to be considered handsome by some mooneyed
schoolgirl with visions of being abducted by a virile savage to a tipi in some far-off prairie. His nose was strong but hooked only slightly, his lips full for an Indian and sculpted, his chin square. Somewhere along the line someone had told him his eyes were hypnotic, and he played them for all they were worth, glaring at each of us in turn from beneath drawn brows, like Napoleon in his portraits. He did his best to make the rough-hewn old chair look like a throne by sitting as erect as possible, and I have to admit that the effort wasn't altogether unsuccessful. He might even have pulled it off if he weren't suffering from a bad summer cold.

His eyelids were puffy and he wiped his nose from time to time with the edge of the blanket, but that only made his sniffles worse. The idea that he was prey to the same ills that plagued the rest of us plainly bothered him more than the cold. It showed in his expression. His face was more easily readable than the average Indian's, which irritated him no less. He would be that kind, I thought, growing more disgusted with himself each day for his inability to live up to his reputation. It was a weakness he shared with many another legend I had known. I filed the knowledge away in my memory for future reference.

All the same, he made me feel old. At the age of twenty-two I had been a penniless veteran with a game leg and no prospects. Thirteen years had healed my leg and improved my outlook, but that was about all. At twenty-two, Ghost Shirt was the undisputed chief of all the renegade tribes in the Northwest, with more braves flocking to his standard every day. Is it a white man's trait always to be comparing his lot with others? In any case, we did have one thing in common, and that was that in our respective occupations we both stood a better than even chance of being dead tomorrow. At the moment, however, the odds of it happening to me were much the stronger.

But there must have been something to the god theory, because it wasn't until I had exhausted myself on Ghost Shirt that I noticed the room's other three occupants. One,
a scruffy, grime-yellow dog of uncertain forebears, lay stretched across the hearth with its chin on its front paws, bright eyes resting on Ghost Shirt, whom I took to be its master. Its tail had been bobbed, from the look of the ragged stub, by a jack knife or some other instrument just as inadequate. It twitched whenever the chief's eyes flickered in that direction. The others in attendance were not seated—partly, I assumed, out of respect for the chief and partly because most Indians were uncomfortable sitting on chairs, and the floor was too hard and cold even for them. For some reason I knew that the Sioux standing near the farthest of the four windows was the Miniconjou whom Jac had identified earlier as Many Ponies, even though I had seen him before only at a distance and he had since doffed his paint and feathers. But he carried himself like a chief, and the strong, beak-nosed face, partially in shadow, was too old and seamed to belong to a warrior one would choose to take along on such an arduous campaign as this. He appeared to be more interested in the moonlight-drenched scenery beyond the window than anything inside the room. The third was a nervous sort with a sharp face and lean brown body set off by sun-bleached buckskins, who hadn't stopped pacing since we'd entered. He too had scraped off his paint, but I recognized him instantly as the streak-faced warrior who had commanded the party that had taken me prisoner. He had exchanged his necklace of human fingers for a more conventional one of copper and semiprecious stones. Apparently he felt no need for strong medicine in the presence of his chief. I hadn't noticed it before, but now that he was on foot I couldn't miss his withered left leg, which looked as if it had been shattered in his childhood and stunted, so that his foot dragged sibilantly across the floor as he paced up and down the length of the room.

On the long, low table that stood before Ghost Shirt, chunks of lean red meat, the remains of a meal, floated in a pool of bloody juice in a pottery bowl. My stomach began to work all over again at the sight of it. I tried to devour it with my eyes, but that was less than satisfying. But since
it was the next best thing to eating I kept my eyes on it from then on. I even imagined that I could smell it, although there was no steam rising from it and it was probably cold as ice. As far as I was concerned it was tender sirloin hot off the griddle.

The warrior with the game leg was holding forth in a harsh guttural I took to be Cheyenne. His voice was a nasty bleat and he spoke with a pronounced, buzzing lisp. He was angry as hell about something and his tone reflected it as he continued to pace rapidly in spite of the dead limb, gesturing agitatedly with his long, bony arms. Although he pointedly avoided looking in our direction, it was plain enough who were the subjects of his tirade. Ghost Shirt waited until he had finished, then blew his nose on the edge of the blanket and said something over his shoulder to Many Ponies. His voice was moderate but high strung. It's unfair to pass judgment on a man's tones when he's speaking in a foreign tongue, and more so when his adenoids are swollen, but I blamed the tension on the pressure of command. You'll hear the same quality in the calmest of voices at an officers' cotillion if you've an ear for it.

He didn't say much, but whatever it was it had a question mark on the end of it. Reluctantly, as if afraid he'd miss something outside, Many Ponies turned his face from the window long enough to flick his eyes over us, then returned them to the landscape beyond the empty pane. His lids were bald where he plucked his lashes, and deep crow's feet pulled them down at the corners, giving his elderly face—he might have been forty-eight, far past prime for an Indian—a sad expression. His reply, in Sioux, was brief and without inflection.

Gimpy launched a fresh tantrum—or maybe it was the same one—as if he'd been holding it back during the others' exchange only with great effort. But he pulled up short when Ghost Shirt held up a callused palm. Annoyance glittered in the lame brave's eye. He'd had more to say.

Unlike his fellow tribesman, the Cheyenne chief kept his attention fixed on one or the other of us all the while he
spoke, and he spoke at length. He was calm for the most part, but certain words brought out his emotions from time to time, twisting his face into a mask of hatred and rasping harshly off his tongue like the buzz from a snake's rattle. Once I caught the Sioux word for the Arapaho nation—uttered, no doubt, for the Miniconjou's benefit—when it came lashing out in this manner. I wondered about that, since the Cheyenne and the Arapaho were supposed to be like brothers, but perhaps this was a matter of personal preference. From there he dovetailed deliberately into more placid speech. Broken occasionally by interruptions from the gimp, which were themselves cut off when Ghost Shirt resumed as if unchecked, the monologue went on for about five minutes, at the end of which stretched a silence complete enough to reveal that the warriors in the compound had returned for a fresh go at the bugle. I could have sworn once that I heard the opening bars of “The Campbells Are Coming,” but it was probably just coincidence.

We had not been addressed, nor had we heard a word of English since we'd been ushered into the room. It wasn't ignorance, because Ghost Shirt had spent enough time in the East to have picked up at least the rudiments of the language. I saw his strategy. As long as he refused to acknowledge our intelligence by speaking to us, we were less than human. He had nothing to gain by it other than revenge, but then that must have been one of the things that ate at him when he was locked up at Fort Ransom. It meant something else as well, although I dared not put it into anything so dangerous as a hope: As long as he preferred to play this kind of game with us, we were going to live.