Beyond Squaw Creek (9 page)

As Prairie Dog moved forward, Fargo touched the scout's arm. “I ain't gonna get any sleep, Dog. How 'bout you?”

Prairie Dog squinted an eye at him, his face partially concealed by shadows, light from the torches dancing dully in his deep-set eyes. His voice had a dread tone. “What's on your mind?”

“Let's get after them.”

“You're addlepated, child. Like I told the major, they'd swarm us, ambush us, scalp us, and boil up our privates for dog feed!”

“Not you an' me.” Fargo smiled grimly. “Remember the
Montana Rojo
in 'fifty-six?”

“We got lucky.”

“We rescued those girls from the Comanch by moving the way
they
moved—slowly, quietly, staying low, then swinging wide to creep up
in front
of 'em.”

Prairie Dog snickered as he scrubbed his beard with his sleeve. “Surprised the shit out of 'em, we did!” His snicker died suddenly and he stared off toward the dancing torchlight before turning back to Fargo, the light now bright in his eyes. “How's your head?”

“It needs air.”

“Well, it's liable to get plenty of air!” Prairie Dog cursed, ran his hand across his own scarred, hairless pate, then set his hat back on his head and began striding off between the hay barns. “I'll fetch Brunhilda and meet you back here in twenty minutes!”

He muttered darkly as he ambled off in the shadows.

Fargo fetched his gear from the sutler's store while the sutler and his half-breed wife hauled from their porch a dead warrior whom the woman had nearly blown in two with her husband's old blunderbuss.

In the stable, the Trailsman saddled the pinto, stuffed his saddlebags with the provisions Valeria had given him, then headed off to the stockade's north gate. He waited only five minutes for Prairie Dog Charley to pull up on a stout blue roan rigged with the old scout's fancy Schuetzen target rifle.

“The major was under the doc's knife, so I told Lieutenant Ryan we were headin' out.” Prairie Dog chuckled woefully. “The lieutenant's a might rattled, I fear. He told me he wasn't expectin' to see me, you, the girl, or
anyone outside the fort
ever again, but that he'd pray for our deliverance from those screaming heathens!”

Fargo turned the pinto straight north, intending to swing wide of the retreating Indians before heading west, paralleling their path. “A good man in a pinch, the lieutenant.”

He and Prairie Dog kept to the coulees and valleys as they headed straight north of the fort, spying no Indians or white men or even much wildlife except an occasional meadowlark or finch flitting about the chokecherry and juneberry scrub lining the creeks and streams.

What they did find were several burned out settlers' homesteads, charred bodies and stock animals strewn about the corrals, cabins, and mine diggings, as though they'd been flung by some angry god from outer space and pincushioned with feathered arrows. A couple of young prospectors had been decapitated, their rotting heads placed on their dugout cabin's rough-hewn table, facing the door—a grisly, blackly humorous welcome to visitors.

The two scouts continued north as the sun rose, then swung west along the intermittently dry watercourse of Tongue Creek, where Fargo had once hunted buffalo and nearly been scalped by Cree. At noon, they paused on the shoulder of a low butte and stared into a hollow in which a dugout cabin nestled with a weathered privy and a cottonwood corral.

The place looked abandoned, though no dead littered the tawny, dry grass. A weathered canoe was tipped against the side of the cabin, nearly buried in wild rye.

In the middle of the yard, a windmill turned lazily. Water trickled from a log pipe into the stone tank shaded by a gnarled box elder.

“They must've pulled out when they got wind of the Injun trouble,” remarked Prairie Dog.

Fargo didn't say anything. He stared at the windmill, listened to the tinny gurgle of the water dropping into the tank. Their horses hadn't had water since dawn, and his and Prairie Dog's canteens were half empty.

Prairie Dog read Fargo's mind. “Should we ride down?”

“Looks clear to me,” Fargo said, “but, then, those were the last words of many a dead man.”

Prairie Dog lifted his hat, ran a hand across his scarred pate. “And many a
hairless
man.” Rising in his saddle, he looked around, grunting. “Why don't I ride down from that east bluff, and you come in from the west? If there's anybody down there, one of us oughta savvy him. Though, like I done told you, a post can pick up more sound than my right ear.”

“Then listen hard with your left,” Fargo grumbled, reining the pinto right and walking out along the hill's sloping shoulder.

Keeping one eye on the cabin below and another on the grassy terrain before him—the water might have drawn any number and any breed of visitors—Fargo circled around to the west, then dropped down off the hill, angling into the yard.

The ground between the cabin and the windmill, still soft from a recent rain, indicated no recent traffic. Still, he held the pinto to a shambling walk as, hand on his .44, he approached the clattering windmill and the gnarled box elder whose leaves whispered in the slight breeze.

There was the smell of old manure from the corral on the other side of the windmill, damp earth, and the green, salty reek of the water.

When Fargo was fifteen feet from the box elder, something moved in the corner of his right eye. He sawed back sharply on the pinto's reins and whipped his head around.

Three white-tailed does angled up a grassy bluff about two hundred yards south, beyond a stand of cottonwoods and the rocky bed of Tongue Creek. Their hooves thumped softly, crackling the dry grass. A spotted fawn followed from a distance, bleeting like a worried rabbit.

The Trailsman grabbed his rifle, threw himself out of his saddle, and hit the ground flat-footed. At the same time, Prairie Dog's voice rose in the west, “Pull out, Fargo!”

Sensing it was too late to gallop out of the yard without getting blown out of his saddle, Fargo slapped the pinto's butt with his rifle stock and bolted toward the stone stock tank. A bullet clipped the lip of the tank with a whining spang, flinging rock shards, then slapped the water.

From the direction of the cottonwoods, a rifle cracked.

Fargo hit the ground beneath the tank, swiped his hat from his head, and edged a look around the tank. More guns barked, black powder smoke puffing up around the cottonwood trunks. Another bullet plunked into the stock tank, and then another chewed a dogget from a corral slat.

Fargo lifted his Henry and fired two quick rounds through the corral slats into the cottonwoods, one round tearing bark from a bole while another spanged off a rock in the riverbank beyond. He fired two more rounds at the smoke puffing amongst the branches, then bolted up and ran west along the corral, crouching and squeezing the Henry in both hands, wincing as several rifle shots tore more wood from the slats to his left.

He dove behind a springhouse, fired three rounds from the west side of the house, hearing a clipped yell from the trees, then continued running southwest, dodging sporadic bullets and tracing a weaving course amongst brush-sheathed boulders. He turned around another dilapidated springhouse nestled between low bluffs, and headed directly toward the cottonwoods in the east from which the gunfire was picking up, most shots apparently directed at someone other than Fargo.

Hooves thundered in the brush before him. Fargo crouched behind a rock pile at the edge of a small irrigated garden. Prairie Dog's blue roan bounded up out of the riverbed, shaking its head, trailing its reins, and snorting frantically. It galloped over a hummock and disappeared into the thick brush behind and to Fargo's right, stirrups flapping like wings.

Fargo cursed and rammed a fresh shell into his Henry's breech. He'd run two steps toward the cottonwoods when a couple more shots crackled. Behind the broadest cottonwood, a man screamed horrifically. Brush thrashed under running feet, and labored breaths rose.

A man bounded out of the trees, angling southwest along the riverbed—a slender young Indian, long hair and trade beads flapping down his back. Grasping a rifle in one hand, he wore a long deerskin shirt and knee-high moccasins. He stopped, wheeled suddenly, and, holding the rifle by its barrel, slung it back into the cottonwoods with an enraged epithet which, roughly translated from the Assiniboine, meant “Fuck you!”

He wheeled again, grunting painfully as he continued running southwest, limping on his right leg.

In the cottonwoods, a pistol popped. The slug barked off a rock a few yards in front of the fleeing brave.

The pistol popped again, and the brave's head snapped to one side. He cursed again but continued running.

Footfalls sounded from the cottonwoods. Fargo shuttled his gaze from the fleeing brave to the trees just as Prairie Dog emerged from the grove.

Fargo blinked as the stocky, paunchy man in buckskins and knee-high, stovepipe boots bounded over the rocks and sage clumps like a man half his age. Prairie Dog leaped a boulder, losing his leather hat, then stopped and extended the bulky Colt Patterson in his right hand.

“Dry-gulchin' red bastard!” Prairie Dog shouted, canting his head to stare down the revolver's barrel.

The Patterson roared, black smoke puffing around the barrel. Climbing the ridge on the other side of the creek bed, grabbing at the shrubs for purchase, the brave stopped suddenly.

He lifted his head and grabbed his back while clutching an ironwood branch with his left hand. Slowly, he released the branch, fell straight back down the hill, and rolled through the shrubs before piling up, unmoving, at the base.

Fargo felt his lip lift a smile as he dragged his gaze back to Prairie Dog. Staring at the dead brave, the stocky scout dropped the smoking Colt to his side and started forward.

“That all of 'em?” Fargo yelled.

Prairie Dog stopped and turned. “Sure as shit.” Then he continued toward the dead brave.

Fargo whistled for his stallion as he walked over to where Prairie Dog stood at the base of the ridge, kicking the brave over to make sure he was dead. “Those three whelps musta been headin' for the water when they seen us with our hats aimed in the same direction,” said the old scout. “The other two are about his age, maybe a little older.”

“Nice shootin',” Fargo said, pulling the loading tube out of the Henry's breech to replace the spent cartridges. “Here I was startin' to think you were too damn deaf and stove-up to fight Injuns.”

Prairie Dog grinned proudly, squinting one eye. “Shit, what the hell I need you for? I done took out them first two from the hill with my sweet Brunhilda.” He laughed. “Got one through an ear, the other through his brisket while you was dodgin' their bullets in the yard.”

Prairie Dog looked around. “You seen my horse? Brunhilda's burp always spooks him.”

“Went thataway,” Fargo said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Where's Brunhilda?”

“Left her coolin' back in the trees.”

Fargo turned to his own stallion glaring at the dead Indian from several yards behind the Trailsman. Fargo looked around cautiously as he shoved his Henry into the saddle boot. “Let's fill our canteens and get the hell out of here. Where there's three wolves…”

“Yeah, I know,” Prairie Dog said, starting back toward the cottonwoods. “The pack ain't far away.”

 

Apparently, the pack was farther away than they'd thought. After filling their canteens and continuing southwest, Fargo and Prairie Dog had no more Indian contact for the rest of the day.

That night, camping in a dry creek bed with no fire, and washing biscuits, venison, and cold beans down with water, they heard nothing but occasional bats and nighthawks, a lone wolf in the northern buttes.

Around three o'clock, Fargo heard the keening mutter and the light tread of a mountain lion passing through the ravine. After his skirmishes with the Blackfeet and Assiniboine, he gave the panther little more concern than he would a garden snake. He merely recrossed his ankles, pulled his hat brim lower, and rejoined the raucously snoring Prairie Dog in slumber land.

They came upon fresh Indian tracks about an hour after sunup the next morning—a good twenty or thirty unshod horses moving west at a ground-chewing clip. Two hours later, they crossed the far westward curve of Squaw Creek, and halted their horses. They stared northwest along the ancient, curving riverbed they'd been following since early morning.

Ahead, a great deciduous forest sprawled for a good two or three miles in the north and south, stretching before them like a lumpy, jade quilt to the far western horizon. Above the quilt, the black smoke of a dozen fires lofted skyward.

“Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle,” Prairie Dog said, his voice hushed and nervous. He hipped around in his saddle to rake his cautious gaze in a complete circle around them. “I think we might've just found what we're lookin' for, Mr. Trailsman, sir.”

Fargo had fished his spyglass out of his saddlebags, and directed it toward the trees, lips stretched back from his teeth as he adjusted the focus. “The Box Elder buttes,” he muttered. “Twenty square miles of woods and buttes, and right in the center, Cottonwood Creek meets up with the north fork of the Squaw in a deep ravine.”

He turned to spit a weed seed from his lips, then returned his eyes to the glass. “With all those buttes and trees, it's a right good place for warring Injuns to hole up unseen.”

“Yeah, they got 'em a natural buffer against interlopers, that's for damn sure.”

“It's too hard a place to get into twice. Let's try to find the girl and follow through with our original assignment.”

Prairie Dog looked around again, scrubbed sweat from his bearded jaw. “How you wanna wrestle this hog? Them woods and buttes are probably peppered with pickets. And Miss Valeria—if she's here—ain't gonna be unattended.”

Fargo scanned the woods for another minute, then reduced the glass and slipped it back into his saddlebags. “Let's mosey a half mile back the way we came, picket our horses where they won't be found. We'll wait for sunset, then move through the woods on foot.”

Prairie Dog snorted. “You mean, just walk into their camp, say, ‘Pardon me, boys, but I'm here to shoot the crazy fuckin' white man poundin' the drum for this here powwow. Oh, yeah, and could you tell me what ya done with the white girl you nabbed?'”

“Well, shit,” Fargo said with feigned exasperation, reining the pinto around. “Why ask if you already know the answer?”