Stamping Ground (17 page)

He sneezed, winced at the shock to his own injured head, and climbed unsteadily to his feet. I was surprised. It was the first time we had stood face to face, and even then we weren't, not exactly. I knew that most Indians only ran to about five and a half feet, but from his reputation I had expected this one to top off a lot taller. The crown of his head came to my nose. It didn't make me feel superior, though. Some of the hardest fights I've had have been with runts.

He was a fine specimen, at that. The shirt he wore sashed
about his waist, once red, now faded to a desert tan, barely contained his chest and shoulders, and his solid, heavy-muscled thighs strained the seams of his buckskin leggings. From there they swelled into powerful calves, then tapered to trim ankles and a pair of feet small and delicate-looking enough in their fringeless moccasins to arouse the envy of a beautiful woman. His reddish brown breechclout nearly swept the earth.

“Why'd you call him off?” I asked.

I got the hypnotic stare. “For his own safety. One more blow like the first would have killed him.”

“Is he going to behave himself now?”

“He always has. I said that he is trained.”

“Let me put it another way. Are you going to behave yourself?”

He smiled then, which took me aback. I hadn't seen him do that before. It didn't suit him. “I have not been unconscious all the time,” he said. “I have overheard your conversation. With what will you threaten me? I am worth nothing to you dead.”

Daring me. Just like a twenty-two-year-old boy. Aloud I said, “We'd rather keep you alive, sure, but we'd heaps rather stay alive ourselves. If you're the genius they say you are you'll try to fix it so we won't have to choose. Besides, there's a group of men in blue coats back there who don't care whether they bring you back sitting a saddle or draped over it. If you decide to pitch pennies you'd better be sure where they'll land.”

I'd expected that last statement to go over his head, but he understood. He hadn't spent all his time while out East inside the classroom. Anyway, the smile was gone.

Hudspeth mounted the mustang. In spite of the situation and the pain in my wrist I suppressed a grin. He looked like a fat padre on a scrawny burro. He scowled at the dog.

“If that mutt goes with us he eats grass,” he said. “We ain't got enough jerky we can afford to waste it on no mangy cur.”

“He is Cheyenne. He will hunt for his food,” said Ghost Shirt.

We straddled our horses, Jac favoring his wounded shoulder, me my wrist, the Indian his head. Only Hudspeth remained unimpaired, unless you counted the fact that he was deprived of his whiskey and that he was riding a horse that didn't fit him. Followed by a dog with a burst scalp, we must have looked like a hospital train returning from a battlefield as we steered single file down the narrow trail that led to the flatlands. I turned in my saddle for one final glance at our pursuers before we passed below the ridge. There was now no sign of a fire.

The haze burned off around five o'clock, when the air turned hot and dry as the inside of a brick chimney. The grass had gone from green to brittle brown. The harsh smell of baked earth stung our nostrils. Suddenly I missed the sultriness of the past several days. The back of my neck grew skillet-hot and water splashed into my mouth from the buckskin bag I carried seemed to evaporate before it reached my tongue. The landscape swam behind shimmering waves of heat.

Tyrone, it turned out, owned several sections on the western edge of the Drift Prairie, smack in the middle of which stood a tiny sod hut with a privy behind it and a corral roughly the size of Montana. Here and there horses grazed in groups or galloped off alone to kick up their heels in the open acreage. A windmill towered over the hut, its blades stock still. It was either tied down or the air was just as stagnant up there as it was at ground level.

To the northwest, beyond the fenced-in section, several hundred acres had been turned over quite recently. As a matter of fact, it was being turned as we approached it, by a pair of huge workhorses pulling a large plow with a scrawny old man at the handles. As he pushed, he kept up a steady rhythm of curses in a rich, bellowing cant that carried for miles. Since there was no one else around to receive them, it was evident that they were directed at the two grays straining at the traces. The horses didn't appear
to be paying any attention to the abuses he was hurling at them as they worked. They were probably used to it by now and couldn't function without it.

We had reached the west end of the plowed field when the farmer rounded the opposite corner. Maybe I was getting old, but I was sure he hadn't noticed us yet. The bullet that struck the ground in front of my gray's hoofs and kicked dirt up over its fetlocks told me different.

“I spent too much time plowing these furrows to mess them up with a bunch of graves. But I'll make the sacrifice if I don't start hearing some names I trust damn soon.”

However many years it had taken Tyrone to pick up the American way of speech west of the Mississippi, they hadn't been enough to eradicate his Scottish burr, which showed itself most prominently in the acrobatics his
r
's went through before they left his tongue. His voice was deep and rich, the way it had been when he was cursing at the horses earlier. He was standing behind the giant grays holding a Remington rolling-block he had hooked from a special scabbard on the plow handle as he was coming around the end of his last furrow, so smoothly that I hadn't realized what he was doing until the shot rang out.

The breed spoke up. “Tyrone, do you not remember me?”

“Jacques!” It was strange hearing Jac called by his right name. I found myself resenting it without knowing why.
For all his obvious delight, however, the Scot maintained his grip on the rifle. “Where have you been these twenty years? I thought you were dead.”

Several items of gossip were exchanged, none of which is crucial to this narrative. We did learn that the rancher was breaking ground for late oats after an argument with his feed supplier had resulted in their terminating their working agreement. Then Jac introduced us—all except Ghost Shirt, to whom he referred simply as our prisoner. Only then did Tyrone step out from behind the horses and approach us, still holding the rifle. His figure beneath the shapeless work clothes was small and wiry and he walked with a definite bounce. A worn tweed hat with a slouched, finger-marked brim was crushed on top of his head. The lower half of his face was completely hidden behind a reddish beard, streaked with white and cut square at the bottom. Over this swooped a moustache that must have dressed out at a pound and a half, the waxed ends of which dipped down to the corners of his jaw before jutting back up to tickle his ears. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles glittered astride a bulb of flesh in the middle of his face. I placed his age at about sixty, but it could have fallen ten years either side of that. He got to within a few yards of us when he stopped short, his face reddened, and he raised the Remington to his stringy shoulder.

“Ghost Shirt!” He made it sound like one of the names he had been calling the horses. The dog, which had just caught up with us, hunkered down and growled threateningly at him through bared teeth.

“You know him?” I asked.

“I saw him in the stockade at Fort Ransom last March when I went there to raise hell about the Crows stealing my horses. What are you doing with him?”

“Judge Flood plans to decorate a pole with him in Bismarck if we can keep ahead of the army.” I made a quick decision based on what Jac had told me of the Scot's character on the way there and gave him a rundown. He listened in silence.

“How far are they behind you?” he asked, when I had finished.

“Not more than a couple of hours.”

“So why are you stopping?”

For an answer, Pere Jac stepped down and held up his pony's damaged hoof for him to see. Tyrone nodded.

“I can give you a good price on a three-year-old I broke last fall. What've you got to spend?”

“
You
broke him?” Hudspeth cut in. He had all the discretion of a heckler at a church service.

“Somebody had to.” Tyrone glared up at him defiantly. “Every last hand I had lit out when Ghost Shirt broke jail. I was busting broncos before you were born.”

“Did they have horses then?”

I decided to steer the conversation back onto the main track before bullets flew. “What can you give us for sixty-five dollars?”

The Scot discovered he had a mouthful of worms. There is no other way to describe that expression.

“You've guts, I'll give you that. Not that they'll do you any good now or in the long run. In your situation I could soak you a thousand dollars.”

“Not when sixty-five is all we have.” I sighed. All right, so maybe that was overdoing it a little. I was tired. “I guess you've got us figured out. I was saving some for emergencies. Sixty-eight dollars.”

Worms again. “Get off my land.”

“Seems to me it would be worth the difference to keep three of your fellow citizens from becoming criminals and robbing you.” I didn't draw my gun. That would have been too obvious, and fatal under the circumstances. But I shifted my weight in the saddle to bring the butt of the Deane-Adams within easy reach.

“Is that how it is?”

“You certainly have a way with words,” I said.

I'll give him credit for one thing: He didn't say, “You're sworn to uphold the law” or anything like that, although I could see that he was considering it. I had a whole speech
made out for that one. But what he did say was just as predictable.

“This Remington is trained on your belly. Are you betting that your hand is quicker than my finger on this trigger?”

Another gambler. The West was full of them. I said nothing. There's a time to raise and a time to stand pat.

“Maybe you didn't hear his name before.” Hudspeth was backing my play. “This here's Page Murdock. He's the one brought in that scalp hunter Bear Anderson last year in Montana, right under the noses of Chief Two Sisters and the
en
-tire Flathead nation.”

I thought he was laying it on a little thick, but it appeared that Tyrone was not a man to be subtle with. His murky green eyes did things behind the spectacles. He was a strong man, and a brave one, but sustained tension is a hard thing for anyone to take. I knew, because I was on the other end of the same taut string. Five or six seconds shuffled by. My shoulder began to ache from holding my arm in the same position. I supposed the rifle was growing heavy in the old Scot's hands, although you wouldn't have guessed it by the way he held it. Finally he lowered the piece about the width of a butterfly's eyelash.

“You throwing in the pinto?”

Jac said he was.

“You're getting a good pony damned cheap.”

I had handed the treasury over to Pere Jac on the trail. He reached into his poke, withdrew the crumpled bills and the gold tooth, and turned them over to Tyrone, who took them in one hand while he balanced the Remington in the other. I could have taken him then had I wanted to, but there was no longer any reason and anyway I liked him. Maybe I was looking at myself in thirty years.

He held up the tooth. “What's this?”

“What's it look like?”

“How do I know it's real?”

“Bite it.”

“I'm not going to bite anything that was in somebody else's mouth.”

“Then you'll have to trust us. Where's the animal?”

“In the corral next to the house.” He pointed. “That's it, the piebald grazing at the fence. Watch him. He's spirited.”

Jac mounted and said, “We will leave the paint as agreed. That and sixty-eight dollars should buy us the best horse in the West.”

“That's the only kind I raise.”

“Burdett and his men will be around before noon,” I told the Scot. “When they come—”

“I know. Tell them you went the other way.”

I shook my head. “They know better. Tell them the truth, but lie first. They won't expect you to level with them the first time around. Wait until they press you, then give it to them straight. It will save you a lot of pain. Real pain. These aren't your run-of-the-mill horse soldiers. They play for keeps.”

“Who doesn't, out here?”

The piebald was a good pony, broke to saddle but not in spirit, as Pere Jac discovered when he went to mount after cinching up, and found himself swinging a leg over empty air. The pony was on the other side of the corral, tossing its triangular head and champing at the bit, by the time its would-be rider hit the ground amid a swirl of yellow dust.

“Maybe he doesn't like Indians,” I suggested, helping the métis to his feet. “Next time try mounting from the left.”

Getting near it was a problem this time, but at length Jac got a foot planted in the left stirrup and his hindquarters in the saddle. His unfamiliar weight threw the animal into a panic, but after a couple of wild gallops around the corral the two were inseparable. The old man may have been half and half, but when it came to riding he was all Indian. I could tell he was satisfied, because when it came time to leave he ignored the gate standing open and bounded over
the fence. It was a four-railer, and the stallion cleared it with room to spare.

By noon we had come upon the trail the war party had left coming out. Small wonder the army had found no difficulty in locating us. A grass fire left a harder path to follow. All those hoofs and moccasins and travois had churned the grass into a band of red dust a quarter-mile wide and eight inches deep, meandering drunkenly to the horizon. At that point we veered straight north. None of us felt any need to eat more earth, and there was no sense in making things easy for Sergeant Burden.

A wind had come up from the northeast. It rippled across the tall grass so that the writhing blades resembled not so much the waves of the ocean (a favorite comparison among visiting Easterners) as the bristling hackles of a great angry beast. The first gust came out of nowhere as we topped a rise, lifting my hat from my sweat-greased brow with a sucking sound that reminded me uncomfortably of the noise made when a scalp is pulled away from the skull. I caught it just in time—the hat, not my scalp—and jammed it down to my ears. The air hitting my face was hot and stale, like an expelled breath. Then it died, but before the ground swell retreated over the last hill in the southwest it came up again, and from then on the intervals between gusts grew shorter and shorter until we were bucking a constant gale.