Stamping Ground (22 page)

“You're entitled to the truth,” I told Locke in a voice too low to carry past him. “The Indian is Ghost Shirt, chief
of the northern Cheyenne. His medicine man is the leader of the braves who are out to bust him loose. I don't know how many he's got with him, but it can't be a lot or they would have rushed us in a body hours ago. That doesn't count for much, though, because they're used to being outnumbered. In any case I doubt that we've got any such edge. I thought you should know what you're letting yourself in for before we set out.”

He turned that over for a while, inspecting it from every angle. He didn't look alarmed, but then it was hard to say how he looked when he was. For him, the deadpan he showed me may have been the way he expressed fear.

“Tell me,” he said at length, “would it make any difference if I said no?”

“At most it might cost Hudspeth and me some ammunition. One way or another we're taking the train.”

“That's what I thought. So why tell me at all?”

“Maybe I was touched by that little speech you made about the democratic system.”

I don't know if he heard the answer. He was busy studying Ghost Shirt, who was busy studying him back, although not quite as clinically. It looked as if the Cheyenne was eyeing Locke's throat where the blood bubbled close to the surface. The links joining the manacles jingled ominously behind his back.

“Let's not tell the others,” the colonel advised. “Gus is too contrary and Ephraim, the black, is too smart. They're better off not knowing.”

“You're the colonel.”

“Go to hell.”

At last the locomotive was ready to go, snorting power and straining at its leash. Hudspeth stood guard over our prisoner while Locke and I loaded the saddles and paraphernalia into the baggage car (minus the rifles, which Hudspeth and I retained), then, after I had cut loose the bonds on the Indian's ankles and hoisted him to his feet, mounted the cab to keep temptation from Ephraim and Gus during the long journey west. That must have taken some heavy
soul-searching on his part, considering how much he hated train travel. The conductor, for whom the colonel vouched, was allowed to return to his caboose with a strongly worded admonition—mine—not to speak to Firestone about the Indian. Madmen make me nervous, because you never know how they're going to react. To preserve his ignorance we elected to escort Ghost Shirt to the empty coach through the baggage car. We were entering the latter, Locke in front, me in the rear, the Indian sandwiched between us, when the car rocked beneath a sudden weight and something the color of tobacco spit swept past us into the interior, whirled about, and stood in the middle of the darkened aisle, legs spread and showing its teeth in a grin of warning. A growl rippled from deep in its throat. The colonel slid a hand onto the butt of the gun beneath his arm. I reached past our prisoner and placed a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.

“Don't risk the shot. He belongs to the Indian. As long as you don't threaten his master he's sweet as a drugged rattlesnake.”

“You'd better be right.” He advanced a cautious step. The dog went for his leg with a bellowing snarl. He leaped back, tearing his pants leg on a fang.

“Good advice, Murdock,” he said acidly, drawing the Remington. The mongrel hunkered down growling, its hackles bristling.

“Call him off!” I rasped in Ghost Shirt's ear.

He shrugged. “I am not sure that I can. He hates soldiers.”

“How can he tell?” demanded Locke. “For that matter, how can you? I'm not wearing a uniform.”

“A snake is a snake, with or without his skin.”

“Call him off or you'll lose him,” I snapped.

The Indian spoke to the dog in soothing Cheyenne. The animal appeared to be listening. After a moment its hackles flattened and it lowered itself the rest of the way to the floor. Only the warning growl remained.

“Walk,” said Ghost Shirt.

Locke grunted and stepped forward reluctantly, gun in hand. The growling increased in pitch as he circled around the animal, but it kept its position, one eye peeling back, until Ghost Shirt and I had passed, when it got up and fell into step behind us. At the last moment I ducked through the connecting door on the Indian's heels and pushed it shut on the dog's snout. It yammered savagely, I caught a glimpse of bared yellow fangs in the space between the door and the jamb, and then, with a double thump, the dog was separated from us by a barrier an inch and a half thick. It whooped and the door bounced when the weight of its forepaws slammed against it, but held. Claws scraped frantically at the wood. I hoped for the colonel's sake that there were enough walls between his employer and the animal to muffle its angry yelps.

While the bodyguard went on to resume his duties in the private car, I pushed Ghost Shirt into a seat of the more conventional first coach with his back to the rear of the train so that I could sit opposite him and watch the connecting door, committed the Winchester to the overhead rack, and unlocked one of the cuffs. Then I brought the wrist that was still manacled around in front of him and secured the empty iron to the wooden arm of the seat. He bore it all without complaint. From the way he placed his free hand to his bandaged head I figured it had begun to ache again, but that could just have been a ploy to throw me off guard. With a prisoner as crafty as he was, having to watch him every minute was enough to give a man a headache of his own.

With the thought, I suddenly realized how desperately tired I was and dropped into the seat facing him as if my knees were operated by hydraulic pressure and all the water had suddenly drained out. I was getting old. I had lost count of the days I'd spent on the trail, but I knew I'd been out longer than this in the past, gone through at least as much, and still had enough sand left to rack up points in Purgatory by visiting certain establishments on Helena's east side. Now I didn't think I could stand the walk. The West had
sucked out my youth and left me a brittle shell. For the first time I understood how Hudspeth felt, and it scared me. Mine was no profession to age in.

The train started forward, taking up the slack between the cars with a lurch that rocked us in our seats. I sneaked a look at the Indian to see how he reacted, but from his stoic expression I gathered that a train ride was nothing new to him. I kept forgetting his eastern sabbatical. The scenery outside began to roll past, slowly at first, then picking up speed until my own reflection was all I could make out against the night-backed glass. But before it did, I saw the corpses of the slain Indians scattered beside the cinder bed, dim but unmistakable in the light of the smoldering fragments of wood the engineer had tossed off the track. I wondered how Locke was going to explain them away to the senator, or if he had contrived some way to keep him from the windows until the danger was past. Given his special talents, either was possible.

At twenty-five miles per hour the whistle sounded hoarsely, sending vibrations tingling through my boot soles. It was a hoot of derision for the pioneers whose wagons and oxen had crawled over the same ground at the rate of five miles per day only a few years back. In four hours we would cover more territory than Hudspeth, Jac and I had covered in as many days. Every minute we kept rolling was another half mile between us and the surviving Cheyenne. Still, I felt no relief. One of our number was dead, and one hundred miles separated the rest of us from absolute safety. I didn't think Lame Horse's medicine could resist odds like those.

I hadn't been sitting there ten minutes when the train's motion and my own exhaustion combined with the delayed effects of the senator's cognac and I fell asleep. How long I slept I couldn't begin to guess, but when I awoke with my forehead clammy against the window I had a stiff neck and the inside of my mouth tasted like the water in a buffalo wallow. It couldn't have been too long, because the first thing I saw when my eyes opened was my prisoner watching me with a predatory alertness. When I stirred, his eyes darted to the dusty floor and the stoic expression returned like a trained hawk recalled to its master's arm. I determined not to fall asleep again, but just to curb his ambition I slid over, trapping the gun in my holster between my hip and the wall, removed the key to the manacles from my left hip pocket, and transferred it out of his reach to my right. The Indian observed all this, but you wouldn't have known it from the bored look on his face. I watched him in silence for some time.

“Is there any special reason you hate the whites so much,
or is it just the usual?” I asked finally. A little salty conversation seemed like just the thing to clear away the fog.

There was another long silence during which I gathered that he wasn't in the mood to answer. That came as no surprise. He hadn't said ten words to me in English or any other language since we'd met. I had given up on him and was trying to make some tune out of the noise the wheels made as they chuckled over the rails when he spoke. The sound of his voice made me jump.

“How does one describe a snake to a man who has never seen one?” He spoke low for an Indian, eschewing the high-pitched oratory by which his people set such store. “If you say that he slithers, that he speaks with a sibilant, and that he spits venom, do you convey his worst qualities adequately? Or is it better that you show the wounds where his fangs have struck?”

On “struck,” he tore open his faded shirt with his free hand and yanked it down over his shoulders, twisting as he did so to show me his back. I winced. In the coal-oil light the scars stood out like long white worms against his burnished skin. One of them curled up over his left shoulder to the base of his neck. I could picture the man who wielded the whip letting the tasseled end slide of its own weight down across the torn flesh after the blow had landed.

“Who did that?” I fought to keep the grimace from my tone.

“My white schoolmaster in Iowa.” He sat back, shrugging the shirt back over his shoulders. The muscles in his chest rippled with the movement. “I made the mistake of letting him see me talking to a white girl before class. He was a big man, and I was not yet grown. He lashed me to a tree in front of the school with his belt and horsewhipped me in front of my classmates. All the time he was beating me he quoted passages from an article he'd read that compared the American Indian to the Negro and said that each was incapable of learning anything but the most rudimentary rules of survival. A month later his house burned down.”

“What took you so long?”

“He had a strong arm. It was three weeks before I stopped passing blood.”

“What happened after the fire?”

“Nothing. I stole a horse and left that night to return to my people.”

“And you base your hatred for an entire race on that one incident?”

He shook his head. He had the bearing of a proud animal, despite the irons. “That was only the climax. You are not Cheyenne. How can you know what it is like to be told all of your life that your people are the finest that has ever lived, and then find yourself surrounded by strangers to whom you are lower than a maggot in a buffalo chip? Strangers who lack the courage to tell you so to your face but whisper among themselves when they think you cannot hear? Among the People, if one brave is angered by another he does not gossip like a squaw behind the other's back, but calls him out to settle the matter by contest of arms. I have more respect for the man who whipped me than for these others, for he at least was man enough to make his feelings known. You can fight an insult, strike back after a blow, but what can you do against a thought? An Indian is nothing if not direct.”

“Is that how you felt when you sneaked back and fired his house?”

That one caught him off guard. For all his reputation, he was still a spoiled boy, unaccustomed to having his word questioned. I pressed on before he could reply.

“Everywhere I go I keep hearing about the Noble Red Man who neither lies nor cheats,” I said. “I haven't caught up with him yet, but when I do I'm going to tell him he's spreading a false impression. The greatest liar I ever knew is summering in the Bitterroot Mountains right now, along with five or six hundred of his Flathead followers. He'll pass you the pipe with one hand and lift your scalp with the other. Yet not a drop of white blood flows in his veins. Explain that.”

“If he shows two faces it is the white man who taught him how.”

“Then he learned his lesson well. Don't put me down as an Indian hater. I think you have a legitimate beef. But why can't you face the fact that you're no better than anyone else? That you're just different?”

“Does it not shame you to think that you are stealing our land?”

“I never stole an acre.”

“But you did not try to stop those who did?”

“For the simple reason that it was none of my business. I believe in letting a man fight his own battles. Who spoke for the Comanche when your own people drove them out of the Black Hills into the desert? Or for the peaceful tribes they forced out generations earlier? Or for the Cheyenne when the Sioux pushed their way in from Canada? You're not complaining because we're not as good as you are but because we're not better. You're a hard man to please.”

“You use words like a weapon, white skin.”

I sighed. “I didn't expect to win you over. After twenty-two years, though, I thought it was time you heard the other side.” I paused. “You know that Lame Horse is after your job.”

If I'd expected that to surprise him, I was disappointed. He went on studying the floor between his feet as if his future could be read in the patterns his moccasins had made in the dust. “Some of my warriors have told me this. They are wrong. He knows his place.”

“The problem is you don't agree on where it is. I saw that argument you had with him back at the mission. I didn't have to understand Cheyenne to know he's got ambitions.”