Cries from the Earth (26 page)

“No!” she said fervently. “They killed my mamma and brother.”

“The Injuns?”

“Yes,” Maggie declared, taking a step back and pointing to the house. “Hit 'em both with a big stick and dragged 'em away.”

“How come they didn't get you?”

“I was in 'nother room, looking for the pee pot to use, when the Injuns come in the house,” she whispered, pressing herself against Brice again. “I sneaked up to see when I heard their funny talking. Saw what they did to my mother and little brother. And I saw when they come looking for me, but I hid out back against the pantry so they never found me in the dark.”

“Your mother?” He could not believe it. “She's killed?”

“When them Indians was gone, I went looking for Mamma—but I didn't find either of 'em. I s'pose the Indians dragged 'em off to cut 'em up, maybe chop off their arms and legs—”

He gently peeled the child away from him and held her out at arm's length there on his knees so he could stare directly in her eyes. “Don't go talking like that, Maggie dear.”

“It's true—”

That's when he noticed how she winced as he gripped the tops of her arms. “What is it, girl?”

“My arm,” she whimpered, gazing down at the left arm. “I'm feared something's broke it hurts so bad.”

Gently brushing his fingers down past the crusty arrow wound, on down to the lower arm, Brice felt the tight swelling, the hard knot that was surely the splintered end of a bone. He looked into her face for a long moment, trying to decide if she could take what was to come … Then he realized she had already endured far worse, seeing her family butchered.

“Maggie, I'm gonna have to set your arm,” he explained quietly at the same time he pulled his folding knife from the patch pocket on his coat.

She glanced down at the knife, but her eyes did not flinch. “It's gonna hurt, ain't it?”

“But the arm's gonna feel much better after we do it,” he confided. “'Sides, I don't think I can take you off anywhere till you're ready to travel.”

“We gonna go get away from those Injuns?”

“Yes, Maggie,” he promised.

He had her sit on the ground right where she was and wait for him while he crawled off into the timber a short distance, searching for some willow saplings he could hack through with the knife. With three pieces, each cut a little more than a foot long, Brice returned to her side, where he used his knife to trim two long strips from the bottom of her muddy dress. Maggie was able to help him hold one of the splints against her arm as he gripped the other two and tied them in place just above the elbow.

Then he started singing low, working hard at remembering the words of that ages-worn Irish lullaby his mother had sung to him so long ago. All the better to keep her mind on anything else while he seized the crook of her elbow in his left hand, snatched her tiny hand in his right.

Then he asked, “Maggie, what was that I heard?”

“What?” And she stiffened, starting to turn.

“Over there—”

And the moment she turned her head to see for herself, Patrick hauled back on the arm. The child released a shrill cry the instant the muscles went into spasm. When he slowly allowed the muscles to contract again, Brice felt how the bone ends slipped back into place against each other. No longer overriding crookedly.

She sobbed as he quickly bound up the wrist end of his splints with that second piece of her grimy dress. She could no longer bend the arm at the elbow, which minimized the movement of the broken ends of the bone and therefore lessened the pain. He'd only done this sort of thing once before, on a Chinaman who was crushed in a rock slide near his mining claim.

“There now, it will get better and better from here on out,” he promised, settling onto his rump and dragging her into his lap. He laid her head against the crook of his shoulder and wiped his fingertips down her wet cheeks. “It's bound to be better for us from here on out, Maggie dear.”

She was quiet for a long time there, tight against him in the cold darkness. “I ain't got no one now, Mr. Brice. The Injuns killed everybody else I had.”

“We'll find them, Maggie,” he vowed. “Come morning, we'll find the bodies and give 'em a decent Christian burying. Your grandpa will see to that, wee one.”

“Grandpa. I forgot my grandpa,” she said in a quiet voice. “'Cept for him and me … all the rest are dead now.”

Chapter 19

June 15, 1877

Lew Wilmot could sense the dampness stab him deep in his thirty-eight-year-old bones when he dragged himself out of his bedroll just past three o'clock that Friday morning, the fifteenth day of June.

“Pete,” he said quietly, awakening his freighting partner, “be light enough for us to move out soon.”

Pete Ready sat up, rubbing his gritty eyes, watching Wilmot lay some more wood on the coals of last night's fire.

After setting what remained of last night's coffee on the flames to reheat, Wilmot led the twenty-eight-year-old Ready out to the good grass where they brought in the horses they had hobbled at sundown. As an additional precaution, the wary Wilmot had side-lined the twelve animals for the night. What with all that talk of the Nez Perce bucks getting frisky, it simply didn't make any sense for the two of them to make it easy for any youngsters who wanted to steal some white men's horses.

“Don't think I got any decent sleep last night,” Wilmot admitted as they started leading the first of the teams back to the wagons.

“You neither?” Ready asked. “I must've kept one eye open all night, Lew.”

“I could swear that was gunfire I heard 'bout the time we was stretching out in our bedrolls,” Wilmot reflected.

Ready was quiet a moment more as they started backing the first pair of horses into their traces on Wilmot's wagon. “You figger Ben and them other folks run into some trouble on down the road after they left us?”

He sighed deeply, thinking back on the faint rattle of gunfire they had heard about an hour after the Nortons and Chamberlins passed on by their camp. “Hope not.” Then he tried to shake off the cold gloom by proclaiming, “Hell, I can't even swear what we heard was guns at all.”

By the time they had hitched up the animals, drunk some coffee, and smothered their fire, the sky was starting to lighten just enough that a man could read the trail ahead of him. The teamsters rolled into the coming of that day.

About the time the first of the sun's rays were streaming on the Camas Prairie, they had put some three miles behind them—when the first shriek reverberated from the rolling hills that descended off Cottonwood Butte. Suddenly the air was filled with the yips and cries of festooned warriors erupting from the timber lining a dip in the trail ahead.

Vaulting off their high seats onto the muddy, misty ground, Wilmot and Ready sprinted for the head of their teams, fumbling to unhitch those twelve horses. Dragging the trace lines back out of the iron rings, the teamsters bellowed at the animals, slapping and goading the horses into motion, driving them away from the wagons before the men leaped onto the bare backs of their faithful, steady lead horses.

When Wilmot and Ready got started back down the trail for Cottonwood House, Lew glanced over his shoulder, finding the warriors less than a quarter-mile behind and closing fast atop their buffalo ponies. As he lay low over the neck of the tall, muscular animal, Wilmot began thinking of Louisa—how his heart burned with his deep love for her. Images of their four young children darted through his mind. A moment later as he chanced a look back at their pursuers, Lew Wilmot tried to conjure up an image of that child due any day now. Would it be a boy or a girl? Would this one look more like Louisa or like him?

Wilmot had come here from Illinois when he was but a lad himself—his father moving the family to Oregon on that great Emigrant Road. Having grown up all those years in this country, he had never done a goddamned thing against these Cayuse or Palouse or the Nez Perce … so why the hell were they screaming for his blood?

Wilmot had no idea how far they had been running after abandoning their wagons. A mile now, maybe a little more, on past the place where the two of them had camped last night. That would make it.… More than four miles they had run these sure-footed wagon horses as if they were long-limbed racing stallions.

When Lew looked back now he found no more than two warriors still following them.

A damned good thing too, because the animal beneath him wasn't cut out for this sort of buffalo chase. It was built for slow-paced hauling power. He could feel the faint shudder in its lights as the critter heaved for air, every one of its massive muscles straining to carry the huge, big-boned body up and down the pitch and heave of the trail faster than those lean, grass-fed Indian ponies.

“Lew!” Ready called from right behind his left knee.

Wilmot turned, afraid the warriors were on them.

But the moment Lew twisted around, Ready shouted, “I can't see 'em no more!”

Sure enough—as they continued that gentle climb up the Cottonwood Divide to the Norton place, the trail disappearing back through the trees was bare of horsemen.

Starting to slow his exhausted animal, Wilmot prayed, “Maybe we outrun 'em, Pete.”

Ready swallowed hard. “A good thing, Lew,” he admitted sheepishly. “I forgot to grab for my pistol when I come down off my wagon back there.”

“Y-you don't have a gun?”

The younger partner shook his head.

“S'all right,” Wilmot reassured him as they slowed the horses to a walk, both men constantly twisting around on those bare, damp backs to peer behind them as if they didn't really believe they were getting this reprieve from certain death. “Better we get off this road now and go across country.”

“Where to, you figger?”

“Grangeville. It's still the closest.”

Ready glanced at the lone pistol Wilmot had stuck like the hoof of a goat in his belt, then said, “Them Injuns gone back for the wagons, ain't they, Lew?”

Wilmot nodded.

“We lost all them supplies Vollmer paid us for—”

“But you got your hair, Pete,” Lew grumbled as he started his horse off the trail, reining into -the timber to begin their climb up the slope that would lead them over Cottonwood Divide and down to Threemile Creek. “Just remember that. You still got your goddamn hair.”

*   *   *

Jennie Norton sat clutching her nine-year-old son, Hill, against her, the other hand gripping the sidewall of the Chamberlin wagon. She was sure that she was digging her fingernails into the wood so fiercely that they must be bleeding. The wagon bounced and weaved down the rutted, rain-sodden road, racing to stay ahead of that pack of shrieking heathens who had suddenly appeared out of the black of night not very long after they passed by the teamsters' camp.

Beside Jennie sat her eighteen-year-old sister, Lynn Bowers, who wrapped an arm around the three-year-old Chamberlin girl. The pregnant Mrs. Chamberlin was pressed against the opposite sidewall, one arm holding her little toddler, another daughter. Behind the wagon galloped Jennie's husband, Ben, their hired man, Joe Moore, and the wounded courier from Mount Idaho, Lew Day, the three of them atop straining, wide-eyed horses that dutifully followed the springless wagon as it shuddered and slid its way through every twist and turn in the dark ribbon that was taking them toward the Cottonwood Divide.

For some time now—she didn't have any idea how many miles—John Chamberlin had somehow managed to keep the light wagon ahead of the yelping savages. But gradually, the heathens drew near enough that they began to fire random shots at Ben and the other two horsemen.

“Don't you ladies fret none yet!” Chamberlin hurled his voice over his shoulder in the cold air. “Those Injuns aren't near enough that you should worry! We keep ahead of 'em like we are … we'll make it! We'll make—”

“Chamberlin, stop!”

It was Ben who called out from the rear.

Jennie watched her husband and Moore reining up. The saddle on that third horse was empty.

“Stop, John! Stop!” Jennie hollered frantically, afraid they were going to leave the three men behind.

Chamberlin jolted the wagon to a halt, then vaulted off the seat to run back toward Norton and Moore, who already had Lew Day suspended between them, his head sagging from his shoulders.

“They hit him again!” Ben shouted as they reached the back of the wagon.

Together with Chamberlin's help, the two of them heaved Day over the back gate, where Jennie went to her knees. With some help from Hill, she managed to drag Lew toward the front of the bed while John Chamberlin clambered back atop the seat and slapped reins down on the backs of his two horses as he threw off the brake. Behind them, Norton and Moore lunged back into their saddles and were kicking furiously as the warriors appeared at that last bend in the road.

Closer than ever before.

“Stopping for him may have just cost us our lives!” Mrs. Chamberlin scolded her husband and Jennie, pinning her daughter against her belly, swollen with another child.

“You could run off and leave a man—a friend—to those devils?” Jennie demanded as she peered down at Lew Day with those eyes everyone said were soft and large, like an antelope's.

Jennie found Day's eyes staring up at her, gratitude welling deep within them—at least when he didn't clench his eyes shut with every rise and fall of pain as the wagon rumbled into a gallop. Then she noticed a fresh smear of blood about the size of her small hand. It glistened high on his belly.

A gut wound,
she thought. Painful as hell, and it would take an unmercifully long time for him to die.

“Lookit 'em!” the Chamberlin woman shrieked. “They're almost on top of us!”

By then her two young girls were screaming, goaded to a frenzy by their mother as John Chamberlin repeatedly shouted for his daughters to be quiet. No matter that the woman was right, Jennie thought—they had indeed put their lives in danger to stop for Lew Day when he was knocked from his horse. Every jolt made the wounded man grunt where he lay groaning in her lap.