Cries from the Earth (21 page)

One by one the men got up and started to move about the store, retrieving their own and Mason's weapons.

“William,” Harry called to the youngest of his employees, “want you to go spread the word on down the creek from here.”

“The word?”

“See you get to all the places between here and the Salmon. Tell 'em what we heard: the redskins killed two Frenchmen upriver on John Day.”

George rode off and the other two men took to working over the weapons with Harry—unloading, cleaning and oiling, then reloading every one of the rifles and revolvers just in case the killing of those two Frenchmen was no isolated, random attack.

William George hadn't been gone for more than a few minutes when he came scurrying back, bringing an aged miner with him. “Bumped into Koon on the trail, Harry. G'won—tell Harry what you know.”

Clearing his throat, the tobacco-toothed Koon said, “They did their damnedest to kill Sam Benedict this morning.”

Harry shook his head, “Sam's a hard-ass on them Indians. Likely this is all over something Sam started with his shooting at 'em a while back.”

Koon licked his lips and protested, “Sounds to me like them Injuns is out killing folks.”

“Them Frenchmen, and now they shoot up Sam Benedict,” Harry pondered dolefully, rubbing the gritty eye. “William, I want you and Koon to head up to the Baker place. Tell that old fella to hurry on in here. I figure our buildings are easier to defend, sitting here in the middle of the wide open the way we are.”

William George nodded. “I'll take that fast horse of your'n.”

Then Harry concluded, “Tell everyone else you run across on the way there and back to bring their families here, too. Tell 'em we got the strongest place right here to hide their women and children, up on the mountain right behind our place. Now, go.”

*   *   *

“Jennie! Looks like we got company for the night!” hollered Benjamin B. Norton as he heaved himself out of the wicker chair on his front porch and stood, watching the two freight wagons approach, each pulled by a six-horse hitch as they rumbled heavily into the yard of his wayside road-ranch and stage-stop raised here at the foot of Craig's Mountain to serve travelers plying the road that pierced the pitch and heave of the Camas Prairie between Lewiston and Grangeville.

Jennie Norton stepped out the open front door, grinding the flour on her hands into the apron tied around her waist. Behind her came their nine-year-old son, Hill, and Jennie's sixteen-year-old sister, Lynn Bowers.

“It's Lew and Pete all right,” Norton called as he descended the four steps into the spacious yard of Cottonwood House, a combination hotel, saloon, general store, and horse-breeding ranch Norton ran some eighteen miles northwest of Grangeville, Idaho, near the headwaters of Shebang Creek.

Luther P. Wilmot waved to those on the porch as he pulled back on the reins, then leaned against the brake squealing in protest. He turned on the high spring seat to watch his partner, Pete Ready, bring his bright-green, high-walled Pittsburgh freighter to a halt directly behind his.

“Bound for Mount Idaho, are you, Lew?” Norton asked as he shook hands with Wilmot the moment the teamster dropped to the ground.

Jabbing a thumb at his wagon, Wilmot said, “Yep. Supplies for the Vollmer and Scott store.” He turned to Mrs. Norton and nodded politely. “Howdy, Jennie.”

She smiled. “Lew, you and Pete care to stay for supper?”

“Don't believe we will this evening,” Wilmot refused as he peered at the sky. “Still a lot of light left, so we'll get on down the trail a ways till we're forced to camp for the night.”

“Hill's gonna be disappointed,” Norton warned, gesturing to his son. “Way out here, why … the boy hankers for a new face and new stories. Sure we can't get you fellas to stay?”

“Nawww,” Wilmot repeated. “We'll take a cool drink from your spring, though.”

The three men started toward the corner of the house. Looking over his shoulder to find that his son had not followed them, Benjamin Norton asked in a whisper, “What you hear of Injun troubles?”

Ready and Wilmot stopped in their tracks. “Injun troubles?” Wilmot echoed. “Don't know nothing 'bout no Injun troubles.”

“You haven't seen any of the bucks out?”

Ready shook his head. “Ain't seen an Injun since we got past Lapwai, Ben.”

“Why you asking?” Wilmot inquired suspiciously.

Norton glanced again at the porch guardedly, then said, “There's been talk the past couple days, 'bout them Non-Treaty bands gathered down at the lake near the Split Rocks. Time for 'em to go on in like the army ordered 'em to.”

“What sort of talk?” Ready asked.

Norton wagged his head. “Just that … folks around here feel there's something afoot.”

This time it was Wilmot who asked, “Been any trouble?”

Ben shrugged. “Dunno for sure, fellas. Hell, with us being stuck way out here so far a piece from Mount Idaho and Grangeville too, why … I was hoping the two of you might tell me what's up with the Injuns.”

“Ever'thing I've heard says the Nez Perce are being peaceable,” Wilmot explained. “Last I knowed before we rode up to Lewiston, they had their women and children with 'em over on Camas Prairie, which means they ain't fixing up no war parties. If they was planning on making some raids, them bucks would first see to getting their families away somewhere safe, put the women and kids where the soldiers couldn't get to 'em. I wouldn't pay no mind to any rumors you hear from some of them scared ones, Ben.”

Norton pursed his lips thoughtfully a moment, then admitted, “S'pose you better call me a nervous Nellie, Lew.”

At the sound of footsteps the three men turned to find Jennie Norton appearing around the corner of the house.

She grinned apologetically and asked, “What you men up to here?”

“We come over here so the children couldn't hear us, dear,” Ben explained. “Lew and Pete haven't heard a thing of trouble.”

She told the freight men, “I think you ought to stay.”

Wilmot glanced at Ready and said, “Figger to push on, Jennie.”

Mrs. Norton faced the teamsters. “You may say nothing's going to happen, but too many folks been talking over at Mount Idaho, and Grangeville too.”

“That's only talk,” Ready tried to reassure the woman.

“There's enough omens, fellas,” she argued. “But even if you're right, sure would make me feel a lot safer if the two of you could stay for the night.”

Wilmot flicked a glance at his freighting partner, then told her, “I'm sorry, Jennie. We gotta make good time. Need to be in to Mount Idaho afore noon tomorrow with these supplies or we get docked by Vollmer for getting in late. Listen, if them bucks was out doing their devilmost, we'd seen something of 'em, wouldn't we?”

“So you won't stay?” she repeated.

“No, we can't,” Wilmot apologized. “Sorry that you're feeling less'n safe. But I'd sure like to get home to my own family.”

She drew her lips into a straight, grim line, then said, “You two fellas have a safe trip.”

The three of them watched Jennie turn and head for the house, disappointment in her walk.

“Didn't mean to upset your missus, Ben,” Wilmot said.

“We're all a little jumpy past few days,” Norton expressed as all three heard the sound of hoofbeats and turned toward the spur that connected the road-ranch with the nearby Mount Idaho–Lewiston Road.

As the lone rider slowed out front, the trio stepped around the corner of the house and into the yard to greet the horseman.

“By damn, thought it looked like you, Lew!” Wilmot cried out.

Swinging down from the saddle, Lewis Day held out his hand. “Luther P. Wilmot! You going or coming with your wagons?”

“Bound for Mount Idaho,” Wilmot said.

Day shook hands with Ready and Norton, then said, “On my way to the commander at Fort Lapwai with a message from L. P. Brown.”

It was almost as if a drop of January ice water suddenly spilled down Norton's backbone. “Message?”

Day nodded. “Too many of them Injuns acting too unfriendly last few days. Loyal figgers their war chiefs is working 'em up for one last hurrah now that they gotta be on the reservation tomorrow.”

“How you know that?” Wilmot demanded.

“Couple fellas seen 'em practicing war manuevers out there at the Rocky Canyon lake,” Day explained. “So all the folks for miles around are streaming into Mount Idaho for protection.”

“Can you stay the night?” Norton asked, glancing over his shoulder at the house. “I know it'd make Jennie feel safer.”

Day turned to Wilmot and Ready, then to Norton. “I really can't—gotta push on soon as I can borrow a fresh horse off Ben here—but these two fellas might stay.”

“They're pushing on too,” Ben said in resignation.

“We've got ground to cover afore bedding down for the night,” Ready explained to Lew Day.

“C'mon then,” Norton said as he started them toward the barn where he kept many of his prized horses. “'Cept for my stallion, you can have your pick of the three best runners, Lew.”

Chapter 15

June 14, 1877

She was hunched over in her garden, pulling up spring onions and a small head of big-leafed lettuce to add to the supper she had heating over the fire in the house, when Isabella Benedict noticed that it had grown cooler.

Straightening, with the basket suspended from one forearm, she looked to find the sun just then slipping out of sight beyond the hills across the Salmon just down White Bird Creek. Amazing, she thought, just how quickly it became cool once the sun had abandoned the sky in this country, even of an early summer night.

Taking only two steps toward the house, Isabella stopped, brushed a long sprig of red hair out of her eyes, then suddenly spotted them on the hillside above the house. The heathens were just sitting there, watching her. Sure enough planning what they would do to her if they got their hands on a white woman.

But rather than running, rather than showing them she even knew they were there, Isabella turned slowly and continued to the house. Once inside, she flung her basket down beside the fireplace where she had started supper and went to the tiny room just off the parlor where Samuel lay on a small, low bed.

“They've come, Husband,” she announced as the girl carried her little brother across her hip into the room.

Benedict was raising himself up on an elbow when the Frenchman stopped at the doorway to the small room. Samuel looked at the miner, “You got shells in your pocket?”

August Bacon patted both pockets. “They won't get in your house.”

“Go to the door and keep watch for 'em while I send my family away.”

“Away?” Isabella repeated two octaves higher with shrill despair.

“Take the children and get into the woods,” Sam ordered.

“And you?”

“I'll hide here, Isabella,” he snapped. “Now go.”

She bent to kiss him on the mouth, then ran her fingers down his cheek, saying only, “Sam. Sam.”

Then she turned, sweeping the children before her, herding them toward the back door and into the side yard, where she headed straight for the gate that would lead them to a path winding back into the hills.

But Isabella had no more than reached the gate and swung it open when she spotted the three horsemen approaching from that last stand of trees up the path. She and the children didn't stand a chance getting to the timber.

“Get back!” she hissed at her four-year-old daughter, reaching out to snatch the baby from Emmy's hip.

Together they wheeled and sprinted back to the house, diving in through the back door as she heard the horses, even heard the savages' voices behind her as the Indians reached the gate. She heard it clatter open when one of them swung the gate so hard it struck the garden fence with a violent, noisy crack.

Sprinting through the parlor, Isabella reached the small room. “Sam!” Frightened to find her husband gone from his bed.

At the loud, booming roar of a nearby gunshot, she wheeled in a swirl of her skirt, knocking down the small toddler. “Get behind me!” she shouted at the children.

Then came a smattering of rifle fire from the Indians, their bullets smacking against the house, one of them shattering something made of pottery on a shelf in the pantry, another bullet clanging against a cast-iron kettle or skillet. She was turning back into the parlor just as she heard the wind slammed out of the Frenchman's lungs in one loud gust, watching Bacon being driven backward in the air, landing on the floor right at her feet.

Isabella saw the smear of shiny crimson where the miner had slid across the floorboards before he came to a stop. Bacon looked up at her, gurgling, his lips moving as his fingers patted the dark, damp petals of the blood blooming on his chest. The fingers stopped moving as she watched, his lips, too. Then his eyes no longer blinked and she could smell how he had soiled himself at the moment he died.

Emmy screamed, lunging against her mother, as Isabella watched the warriors break through the front door. Clutching both her children against her when the Indians stepped close, she steeled herself—ready for them to kill her, even to dishonor her, which men like her husband had always called “a fate worse than death itself.”

But at least she would live, able to go in search of Samuel. As the ugly warrior with the twisted grin stepped up before her, Isabella swore she would never tell Sam how they had shamed her. And she would make the children promise never to tell their father what they had watched.

“You go nah,” the warrior said in nearly understandable English.

“Wh-what?” she stuttered in utter surprise, not comprehending that this painted, blood-splattered warrior could speak her tongue.