The Powder River (12 page)

BOOK TWO

Chapter 1

Riding was doing for Smith what juggling normally did. Repetitive, wearying, relaxing, it lulled his head into the peace of thoughtlessness.

He told himself what he wasn’t thinking about was Twist. What he really wasn’t thinking about was Elaine.

Sings Wolf hadn’t said a word about Smith’s coming back. He merely asked whether Elaine was OK. Smith said only, “I think so.” Sings Wolf acted like he expected his grandson’s return, but seemed neither pleased nor displeased by it. He made no comment when Smith changed his white-man clothes for hide shirt, breechcloth, and moccasins, and no comment on the stitches on the outside of Smith’s eye.

Smith felt embarrassed to tell him about Twist and the episode in front of the porch. He’d reacted slowly and carelessly, he admitted, and in a flat, laconic way told about being pinned down and threatened and cut, not even hinting at his outrage. He even told the part about the horse turd between Elaine’s breasts dryly.

All Sings Wolf had to say was, “You are a Cheyenne.”

“I have to do something about him, Grandfather.” But Smith knew what Sings Wolf meant. The taboo against a Cheyenne killing another Cheyenne was inviolable. When it happened, the buffalo hat began to stink like rotting flesh, and the sacred arrows became speckled with blood. The powers would turn against the people in lots of ways until the rottenness among them was purged.

Of course, times were changing. The hat and arrows were left behind in the south, and they no longer seemed to have their old power. But Smith couldn’t afford to be the one to show the weakness of the hat and arrows.

And how fitting for a doctor, Smith mocked himself in his head, to seek to bring medicine to a people who shunned him, who would not let him live among them or even speak to him. If he killed Twist, he would be throwing away the life he’d worked for.

If he didn’t, Twist might kill him.

Sings Wolf had said, “You are a Cheyenne.” Clear enough. Smith knew it made no difference that his father was a white man—when the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio accepted you as one of the people, you were one forever.

Years ago the Cheyennes captured a bunch of Crows and took them into the tribe. Later, the Crow tribe attacked the Cheyennes and killed many. In their grief, the Cheyennes killed some of the former Crow captives. And the buffalo hat stank, and the sacred arrows got bloody. So the people knew that even a person adopted into the tribe was truly a Cheyenne.

Well, Smith told himself, you’re going to have to do something about Twist. He fingered the stitches around his eye. He damn well intended to take care of Twist. But he had no idea how.

Smith and Sings Wolf pushed their horses long but no harder than necessary for a night and a day and a night, keeping to a lope as much as they could, getting the most distance from man and beast. They rode generally northwest, hoping to catch the other Human Beings where the people would cross the Smoky Hill River, or at least pick up their trail there.

Sings Wolf knew the country, but it had changed plenty. Where buffalo plains had stretched only five winters ago, farms and ranches claimed the land everywhere. Though the two rode in silence, Sings Wolf made an occasional snort of disgust.

They had to keep an eye out. They were two Indians on the move through a territory crazy with Indian fever. The newspaper in Dodge said Colonel Lewis and his troops had taken the railroad west from Fort Dodge and would intercept the Cheyennes at the Dull Knife crossing of the Arkansas or pursue them north and punish them. Colonel Lewis, the paper said, considered this campaign against the Indians a travesty. Now he intended to annihilate them. He pledged to come back victorious or dead. The paper also said that if the Indians got as far as the Platte River, where the Union Pacific Railroad ran, thirteen thousand soldiers would be mobilized to corral them.

Thirteen thousand against three hundred! Actually thirteen thousand fighting men outfitted with Springfield rifles against fewer than a hundred men, old men, and boys mostly armed with spears, clubs, and bows and arrows.

It made Smith smile to himself when he told Sings Wolf about the thirteen thousand. There was something grand about making this foolish gesture, and Smith was exhilarated at being part of it.

But Smith and Sings Wolf didn’t want to fight with any of the settlers in this country, which might raise the thirteen thousand to thirty thousand. So they rode all night, kneeing the horses to a canter on the wagon roads and easy ground, walking through the more broken country. They rested themselves and the horses for a couple of hours at sunup, noon, sundown, and when the Big Dipper said midnight. Otherwise they stayed on the move, keeping their eyes out for trouble. Smith had no illusions about any white people sparing him. Not after he’d seen the hysteria in Dodge City.

Every time they saw a fence, Sings Wolf turned sour-looking. Even the white ranchers didn’t like fences. The farmers were staking out the land. Fences turned the circle of the world into square-mile parcels. Fences spoiled both the life of Indians who followed the buffalo and the lives of the cowboys who herded cattle. Worse, Smith doubted that this dry country would ever work out for farming. Dumb, the whole business.

From time to time they saw buildings at a distance, but stayed behind the hills where they wouldn’t likely be seen. And in any case they pushed the horses along hard enough to make any pursuers work like hell to catch them.

At first light on the second day, well away from farms, ranches, roads, or even paths, they cantered toward some cottonwoods along a little creek a mile off in the bottom, eyeballing them carefully. They didn’t see the damned preacher until they topped the rise and practically rode over him.

The Reverend Ecclesiastes Bountiful Ratz, an itinerant man of God, endowed with beard and belly of apocalyptic dimensions but only one usable eye, heard the hoof beats coming. He reached for his side-by-side, eager to do battle with evil. When he saw a pair of the Lord’s vermin loping up, he cut loose with a blast of hot and holy buckshot and hollered, “Praise the Lord!”

His daughter Hindy, scrunched into the bottom of the wagon, figured she and her father were finally dead. And Hindy no longer had any hope of heaven. If her pa preached it, she knew it was a figment of a demented imagination.

Dead. What a relief.

But through the cracks between the wagon boards she saw the big horse in the lead go down hard, and the Indian went rolling like a wheel knocked off.

The Indian behind swung to the outside of his horse, and the shot from Pa’s other barrel gutted the space above an empty saddle.

The Indian rose and let go an arrow toward Pa. The way Hindy saw it, that arrow sailed slow as a feather falling. It lofted over one side of the wagon, sang its way through the air above Pa’s supplies, and aimed straight for Pa’s head behind the other wagon side.

The Ratzes’ vehicle was a platform spring wagon, bought as only a tongue, frame, axles, and wheels for a restoration project. The Reverend Ratz repaired it with the haphazard attention that he gave to all earthly things. He had tacked on some warped outhouse boards to give the wagon a pretense at sides and didn’t care that they came together all jangly, like in-laws.

Ecclesiastes at this moment had his one good eye fixed on the action through one of the gaps in the warped boards. He thought it was a handy gap, too, until that arrow by rarest chance hit the lower board and splintered it.

The arrow would have missed, but the board deflected it into Ecclesiastes’s ear, where it plowed a rip-roaring furrow.

Unfortunately, the splinter, thick as a man’s thumb and twice as long, pivoted and poked straight into Ecclesiastes’ nose next to his good eye. Blood issued forth abundantly, rendering the good reverend entirely blind.

With the world gone out, and his life’s blood gushing down his face and neck and chest, and those two unholy vermin no doubt taking aim to dispatch him, Ecclesiastes Ratz felt a single imperative. It erupted inside him like the fateful lightning where the grapes of wrath are stored: he wanted to run like hell.

And run the reverend did. First he howled like a steam whistle. Then, still howling, he lit out like an engine run off the track. He was about the size of a railroad engine, and could see about as well as one, and looked about as graceful going cross-country on the Kansas plains. He spun his wheels. He rolled over sideways and teetered upright again. He plunged into a gully and careened back out. He slithered and spun and churned up dust across another fifty yards of prairie, dived into a bigger gully, and stayed put.

Smith swore later that he emitted a last gasp of steam.

The two Indians and the teenage girl watched engine Ecclesiastes go amuck in awed silence.

Then Smith walked the hundred yards to see if the poor devil was all right. But Ecclesiastes Ratz, who hadn’t been all right for years, had taken leave of this world. Strained to support his three hundred pounds even standing still, his boiler had burst.

Smith found no pulse and no heartbeat and no breath. He folded the man’s arms over his chest.

He walked back to the wagon where the girl squatted. Before he could get a word out, the girl declared, “I’m yourn now.” When the Indians looked puzzled, she made signs: Me. You.

Oh, darn it, Hindy realized, the signs didn’t make any sense. “I’m yourn!” she said loudly. She thought about it for a moment. “Squaw belong to braves!”

Hindy Ratz wasn’t afraid. The Indians would either kill her or they wouldn’t. Would rape her or they wouldn’t. Would take her home as a squaw, or they wouldn’t. There was no place to run and no place to hide. Hindy was what life had made her, a fourteen-year-old fatalist.

Why not a fatalist? Hindy had lived for more than a year now, ever since her ma died in Topeka, with a crazy man. Ecclesiastes Ratz kept hearing call after call from the Lord, and he followed the calls across the vast and empty plains like vagrant winds that sometimes blow here and sometimes blow yonder but always blow.

From town to town they went, sleeping in the back of the wagon, eating whenever someone would stake them to a meal, talking about the dark meanings of the riper passages in the Book of Revelation. The Reverend Ratz knew the King James Version of the Bible the way the actors of his time and place knew Shakespeare, which is to say in bits and speeches quite unrelated to the larger whole, such as the book the words might have come from or the prophet who might have spoken them. But the reverend had a fecund imagination and could hold forth for hours on the meaning of a single phrase.

Some people cottoned to the Reverend Ratz’s style of exegesis and would put something in the hat he passed. An occasional widow was moved to supply him with an entire sack of flour, or similar bounty. But most of the Reverend Ratz’s admirers were only the poor, the disenfranchised, the people society had no place for. So Hindy was as likely to find kernels of corn in the hat as small coins. She was grateful for the corn, as a supplement to her irregular meals.

During their year on the road the Reverend Ratz had become more and more spiritual. That meant he forgot to pass the hat half the time. Forgot to clean himself. Forgot to eat—even at three hundred pounds, he’d lost fifty since Hindy’s ma died. Forgot, literally, to come in out of the rain. And kept hearing those winds that sent them on cross-country gallivants through territory unspoiled by roads. The reverend didn’t believe in taking the roundabout route to do the Lord’s will. As a result he and Hindy pushed their wagon up the steep sides of many a gully and out of lots of axle-deep sand.

Hindy didn’t know how they’d survived a whole year. She’d long since, without telling Pa, taken to begging for food, and even stealing. She would have done anything she could think of to get a little less miserable in this world. In particular, Pa always warned her to beware of lustful men, who only wanted to take her to bed. That became her heart-of-hearts hope—a bed sounded warm and dry. Compared to the back of the wagon, it would surely be soft. She took to letting her bottom sashay a little extra when a man might be looking. But she never got so much as a lecherous whistle.

So, even looking at these verminous Indians, the girl figured her lot couldn’t get much lower. In one way it would probably be better. The Indians might be vermin, as Pa said, but they probably weren’t crazy.

“Me yourn!” she hollered, as though volume would clear the language hurdle. “Take squaw!” If she thought it would have helped, she would have dropped her drawers.

So she was flabbergasted when the young Indian, the one who’d gone rolling like a wheel, said politely, “Don’t be afraid. We’ll help you.”

His English sure didn’t sound broken—it sounded right proper.

“Is that man your father?” the young Indian asked, nodding toward the fallen Reverend Ratz.

“That’s Pa,” Hindy said meekly.

“I’m sorry,” the Indian said. “He’s dead. His wounds were nothing, but his heart gave out.”

“Could you let me have something to eat?” Hindy asked.

Chapter 2

Smith just reined in his big, clumsy horse and sat and looked disgustedly at Sings Wolf. Now, he said to himself, we’re ass-deep in manure.

The three scouts also sat their horses still, there on the rock outcropping, their carbines held steady on Smith, Sings Wolf, and Hindy. Two white men and a breed, from their hands. Since they were silhouetted against the late-afternoon sun, Smith couldn’t see their faces.

How had the soldiers seen them and they not seen the soldiers? How had Smith and Sings Wolf gotten so sloppy? Smith felt old and not up to the game.

“Throw your weapons on the ground and dismount,” said a metallic voice. “Now!”

Another voice barked the same words in broken Cheyenne. So, thought Smith, one of them knows something. He looked hard at the man on the right, the one who spoke the Cheyenne words. He didn’t recognize him. Jesus, but the bastard had an arrogant face.

Smith leaned over and set the butt of his .44 on the ground and let the rifle fall as softly as he could.

So now they would get arrested for kidnapping Hindy and killing her dad. They’d likely be shot.

Sings Wolf didn’t make a move to drop his rifle, but Smith went ahead and slid off the horse. At last Sings Wolf did the same.

They had rested for two hours, but in the cottonwoods, not in Ratz’s crazy campsite in the open with no water and no shelter from the wind. Hindy had eaten all they’d let her have and begged for more. Smith gathered that she was relieved to be with someone other than her father, anyone else, redskin or white. From what she said about her pa, he understood why. She was a lively little critter, and Smith couldn’t help liking her.

But Smith was considerably irked. The reverend had killed Smith’s horse. The wagon was useless—where they were headed, it would only slow them up. The reverend’s supplies were barely worth taking, some sugar and half a sack of cornmeal. The shotgun would come in handy. So they put Smith’s saddle on one of the draft animals for Hindy and Smith rode the other bareback. He wasn’t as comfortable on the clumsy beast without stirrups, and Hindy probably couldn’t keep up, so they were slowed down.

Sings Wolf said in Cheyenne that they’d get in trouble for taking the girl along.

But what else could they do?

Just to the nearest farm or ranch, Smith said.

And now they would keep breath and body together only if Hindy Ratz vouched for them. Smith felt a little edgy about having his life in the hands of a kid he didn’t really know—a white kid who had a crazy father and might have crazy fears about Indians. He felt very, very edgy about having his life in the hands of United States soldiers, any United States soldiers. It wouldn’t do to admit that he especially mistrusted the half-breed.

“
Gut
evening, Mrs. Maclean,” said Dieter Richtarsch. He strode from the house onto the porch with the air of a confident man, intending to lift the spirits of his patient. And he was confident, but not about this patient.

Elaine Maclean put down her book. “Good evening, Dr. Richtarsch,” she replied. “It’s good to see you.” She’d seen him both days since Adam left, in fact. Though he came from the fort to check on her, she had the impression that the good doctor also liked the nightlife in Dodge City. Well, she told herself, an army mess wasn’t much, and Dodge City was said to provide fancy meals. It also provided women. Fran Wockerly—Elaine had finally found out her first name—said Dr. Richtarsch was fond of the fleshpots.

Richtarsch looked at his mechanism for traction, which seemed to be in perfect order, the weight pulling properly. He drew her nightgown up and removed the splint. Something in the demeanor of this particular woman made him aware of the routine act of compromising her modesty. She had style, this particular New Englander—that was good.

He removed the dressing and palpated the area of the break delicately, trying not to hurt the patient or to reopen her wound. The bones seemed to be in good order. A nasty-looking wound, though, all jagged. Human flesh was really not a very durable commodity. Rut the wound looked OK. He applied more yeast with elm bark and charcoal and put on a new dressing.

The wound was beginning to hint that it might give trouble. He sniffed at it. He couldn’t detect bacteria in this one by sniffing—sometimes he could, but not this time. He noted to himself that the area was inflamed and warm to the touch. He thought it was infected. The question was whether the woman could throw off the infection.

He counted. Six days since she got injured. That was a little long, but possible for infection still to show itself. He felt curious about the infection—how did she get the bacteria? Rut there was no way to know. Especially when she was handled by savages. Maclean might have gone through medical training, but in Richtarsch’s professional opinion you never knew about a savage. Not his fault, of course. Savages were genetically different, as proven by phrenology

“Well, you’re coming along nicely,” the doctor assured Mrs. Maclean. “Some question of infection in your calf, but you are a strong young woman—you can throw it off.”

“I intend to,” she said.

“What are you reading?” He spoke to her with deliberate cheerfulness.

“Moore,” she said. The Irish poet Thomas Moore was in vogue in the United States those days. “I’m so lucky that Mrs. Wockerly had this book.”

“Yes,” said Richtarsch sagely. It didn’t do to let the Americans think you were a dummkopf, which they usually did if you spoke with an accent. So he sang one line: “Believe me if all those endearing young charms.” Everyone knew the song based on Moore’s verse.

That seemed to please the patient. She said, “My favorite is,

“At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly

To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye;

And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air

To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,

And tell me our love is remember’d even in the sky.”

Richtarsch looked at her approvingly, shaking his head. He noticed the lines had something to do with a lost love, and wondered if she was thinking of her husband. Long gone, that one, Richtarsch thought. A barbarian—what can you expect? Richtarsch was worried about the effect Maclean’s abandonment might have on his patient.

She’s a whipcracker, though. He’d come across them before, these New England women with determination in their blood. Tough. Unstoppable. Admirable. Too bad they didn’t realize this aggressiveness was so unappealing in a woman. And this one was so
schön
. She’ll make some man a fine—he chuckled to himself—boss.

He stood up to go. “You’re a strong, healthy, and spirited young woman,” he said. “You’ll do well. I shall return to see you tomorrow. We’re keeping a close eye on that little infection.” He went to die outside door, apparently done with his visit to Dr. and Mrs. Wockerly.

“Thank you, Dr. Richtarsch. You’re good to sit with me. I miss having company.”

The German doctor smiled, executed a short, tight bow, and went out.

And when, Elaine thought, will my juggler come to me? She didn’t blame him—she understood. She just missed him. It was terrible how much she missed him. And maybe she didn’t really understand. She just wanted Adam.