Dead Man’s Hand (37 page)

More and more debris fell from the comet, but the heart of it was still intact when
it suddenly vanished behind the eastern wall of red rock mountains. There was a huge
flash of white and green, and for a moment McCall fancied that he could see the bodies
sprawled on the plain. The Cheyenne dog soldiers with their breech clouts and war
bonnets, the rest of McCall’s team of riders, and the horses from both sides, all
torn and broken and splashed with light. But that was crazy. The battlefield was miles
to the west and all that light really showed was the lumpy terrain.

McCall waited for the sound of the impact to come rolling across the hardpan toward
him. He’d seen a lot of stars fall; you couldn’t help see them out here. Only twice
had they been this big, though, and each time they hit hard and hit loud.

He waited, his tin coffee cup an inch from his mouth, holding still to keep his own
sounds from hiding any that were trying to find him.

Nothing.

He cocked his head and listened harder.

Nothing at all.

“Must have burned itself all up,” he told Bob.

McCall felt vaguely disappointed. He was kind of looking forward to that sound, to
the rolling echo of it. It would have been like hearing thunder. It’d been a long
time since he’d heard thunder. It had been a long, hot summer, fraught with drought
and dust storms. Even on days when the clouds stacked up all the way to God’s front
porch and they turned black as shoe polish, it never rained. The hot wind always pushed
those storm clouds into someone else’s sky. They went west, like fleets of ships,
but none of them landed on the shores of the Wyoming desert. McCall and his boys had
been riding this land for sixteen weeks and hadn’t felt a drop of rain on their faces.
Not one.

He was a thin man. The last time he’d looked at himself in a mirror he saw a scarecrow
wearing his old cavalry trousers and a Pinkerton duster he’d bought secondhand after
its owner had been killed. The woman at the general store mended the bullet holes
in the back, but even with the fine stitching the fingers of the wind wriggled through
each hole.

He sipped his coffee and cradled the cup in his palms, taking its warmth.

Movement in the corner of his eye made him turn, but it was only the wind pushing
a piece of bloodstained rag along the ground. A sleeve, thought McCall. Torn, frayed,
slick with wetness that was as black as blood in this light. Most of the cloth was
dry and that part whipped and popped in the breeze; but the wet parts were heavier
and they kept slapping the ground. In the variable wind, the effect was like some
grotesque inchworm lumbering awkwardly across the landscape.
Whip
,
pop, slap.
Over and over again as it crawled toward the shadows and out of his line of sight.

“Damn,” he said, and the sound fled away to chase the tattered sleeve into forever.

McCall shivered.

The open range was always so damn cold at night. Hotter than Satan’s balls during
the day, though.

Something scuttled past him in the dark, a quick scratchety-scratch sound. Probably
a lizard chasing down a bug, or running from something bigger. Night was a lie out
here. During the day, under all that heat, it was easy to think about dying because
everything you saw looked like it was dying. Plants and trees dried to brown sticks;
bones bleaching themselves white. And all those endless miles of empty nothing. Under
the sun’s brutal gaze you expect things to die.

He thought of the fallen star as he sipped his coffee.

Out there behind the hills it had died. Died in its own way.

Died, as sixteen of his men had died.

Died, as thirty-four of the Cheyenne had died.

As this star now died.

McCall poured some hot into his cup and tried to chastise himself for that fanciful
notion, but it was hard to hang scorn on yourself for any strange thought when you’re
in the vast, cold night all alone. And it was easy to think of things dying, even
chunks of rock from outer space. Who knows how long it had been out there, flying
free in the big empty of the endless black. Then it took a wrong turn and came to
the desert sky, and that desert sky killed it as sure as McCall had killed Walking
Bear, the war chief of the Cheyenne dog soldiers.

It had come down to the two of them. Walking Bear on a chestnut gelding, a Winchester
’73 in his hands; McCall on his paint with a Colt he’d just reloaded.

McCall suddenly shivered.

It was so abrupt and so deep that it rattled his teeth and caused some coffee to slop
onto the ground. His whole body shuddered worse than when he’d had the ague down in
Louisiana after the war. The shiver was so violent that it felt like cold hands had
grabbed him and were actually shaking him back and forth.

Then just as suddenly it was gone. McCall stared at the night as if there should be
something at hand to explain what just happened.

“The hell was that?”

But his voice came out all wrong. It startled him because…

He listened to the night.

And heard absolutely nothing.

No insect sounds.

No scuttle of animals or lizards across the ground.

Not a single cry from a night bird.

There was nothing.

Nothing.

And there was never nothing.

McCall shifted the coffee cup to one hand and with the other he touched the handle
of his Colt. He could actually hear the rasp of his callused palm against the hardwood
grips. Like sandpaper.

He closed his hand around the gun, as much to stop the sound as to seek comfort from
the weapon’s deadly potential. That gun had killed at least nine of the Indians today.
Nine, including that big son of a bitch Walking Bear. It had taken five rounds to
put the Indian down, and the bastard fought all the way, working the lever of his
Winchester. The rifle rounds burned the air around McCall, and one hit the big steel
buckle of his belt and knocked him right out of the saddle. McCall had landed hard
and for a wild few moments the world spun around him in a kaleidoscope of red and
black. Then the world went away.

It was Bob who woke him up. The big paint stood over him, legs trembling, sides splashed
with blood, licking the beard stubble on McCall’s face.

The pain in his belly was white hot, and when McCall examined the buckle he saw that
it had been folded nearly in half by the impact. He rolled over and slowly, painfully
climbed to his feet.

Everything and everyone was still and silent. Walking Bear lay there, five red holes
in his chest, eyes wide, mouth open. The big Cheyenne did not move. Could not move.
The Indian was dead and so was everyone else. McCall’s men and the dog soldiers and
all of their horses.

Only McCall and Bob were left.

That moment had been as still and silent as the darkened desert was now, hours later,
with the night holding its breath all around him. His stomach still hurt from where
the bullet had struck the belt buckle. The skin felt pulped and there was a burning
feeling deep inside, like maybe the impact had busted something. Sitting there, listening
to the silence, he felt that bruise throb and throb.

McCall snugged his hand down around the handle of the Colt, but the gun withheld its
comfort. Even so, McCall clutched at it and tried not to be afraid of the dark even
though he knew for certain that there was no living soul anywhere around here.

Gradually, gradually… the night sounds returned.

The tension in McCall’s body faded into occasional shivers that were inspired by nothing
more sinister than the chilly wind.

McCall sipped his coffee and thought about Walking Bear. He was a strange man. A full-blood
Cheyenne who’d been taught his letters by Quaker missionaries. The Indian could read
and write better than half the white men McCall knew, and that book-learning had helped
him rise to power within the Cheyenne community. Walking Bear had even once gone all
the way to Washington D.C., along with a dozen other chiefs, to talk to President
Grant. Not that it did much good, because treaties weren’t worth the paper they were
printed on and everybody knew it. A treaty was another tactic. Not of war, but of
business. A treaty was honored only as long—and until—the land the Indians lived on
was needed by someone with white skin. Ranch land, gold mines, whatever. Protected
Indian land was as much a myth as a man telling a woman that he won’t never go no
farther than touching her knee. It all amounted to the same.

McCall figured that Walking Bear knew all this, and he had to give the big Indian
credit for trying to make the white man stick to his word. Then Walking Bear had apparently
decided that guns and scalping knives were more useful than writs and lawsuits.

The territorial governor put a bounty on Walking Bear’s head, and a coalition of cattle
barons had quadrupled it. Two hundred dollars for Walking Bear and fifty for any dog
soldier who rode with him. The most McCall ever made in a single year was one-fifty,
and most years it was closer to one hundred dollars. Two hundred for a single bullet
was a king’s fortune to a man who lived in the saddle.

So, McCall hunted Walking Bear and his party for months, occasionally catching up
long enough for someone or another on either side to take a bullet or get his throat
cut. Early on the Cheyenne, along with some rogue Arapaho, held the upper hand with
more men, more horses and a better knowledge of the terrain here in Wyoming and down
in Colorado. But the Indians had only one rifle for every two of them, and the men
in McCall’s party each had a hand gun and a long gun. And all of them hungered for
that bounty, which was paid out in gold coins. The tide turned slowly, but it turned.

The funny thing was that McCall rather liked Walking Bear. The big Indian had been
the last surviving son of Chief Lean Bear, who had been shot by soldiers under the
command of Colonel John M. Chivington, the same maniac who attacked a Cheyenne village
at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory. That had been a bad business. Most of the
village’s fighters had been out hunting during the attack, but Chivington ordered
his men to kill everyone in the camp. Every elder, every woman, every child. Even
little babies. Seven hundred riders of the Colorado Territory Militia had gone thundering
in and hacked the Indians to red ruin and pissed on the bodies as they lay spoiling
under the stark November sun. Seven hundred armed soldiers against a couple of hundred
Cheyenne. Maybe twenty of the Indians had been fighters. A few people escaped. One
hundred and sixty-three Indians died.

McCall had been one of the colonel’s men. He’d been right there when Colonel Chivington
had made the statement that defined his view of the “Indian problem” as people called
it. Chivington had said, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians. I have come to
kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven
to kill Indians.”

Chivington was one of those men who glowed with holy purpose. Blue light seemed to
shine from his eyes. And McCall, so much younger then, had yelled as loud as anyone
as Chivington’s speeches whipped them into a frenzy. By the time the colonel aimed
his militia at the Cheyenne he didn’t have to use much energy to pull the trigger.

A lot of what happened there at Sand Creek seemed to take place inside a dream. It
never felt real to McCall. Maybe not to most of the men. The colors were too bright.
The blood was the color of circus flags. The white of bone was like snow. The screams
rose like the cries of birds. And the things they all did…

Did men ever do that kind of stuff except in dreams?

McCall could not actually remember what he did that day. He couldn’t remember what
his guns did, or his skinning knife, or his hands. None of it. As soon as it happened
it all started to fade into pieces of memory, like the way you remembered a play after
it was over. You knew the story, but you can’t remember every scene, every line. Why?
Because it wasn’t real.

It was just a dream. Chivington’s dream, in fact. McCall and everyone else was an
actor, a supporting character, in the colonel’s fantasy.

That was back in 1864. Nearly a dozen years ago.

A lot had happened since then.

Cattlemen from Colorado had gone crazy cutting Wyoming up into private plots that
were bigger than some countries in Europe. They moved herds up into the grasslands
and let them breed like there was no tomorrow.

Of course… that was true enough for the Cheyenne. There was no tomorrow.

Chivington was court-martialed and left for Nebraska in disgrace—but without remorse.
His men were scattered to other jobs. McCall went north into Wyoming to work security
for the cattle barons and eventually put together his own team. They were not as bad
a lot as Chivington’s militia—they didn’t take scalps or ears or fetuses as trophies,
and they didn’t make tobacco pouches out of scrotums. But they were all killers, McCall
could not say otherwise. The barons wanted the Indian problem solved, and McCall was
one of a dozen such men who formed teams to solve it.

Today wasn’t the only day that ended in slaughter.

Not the second, not even the tenth.

He stared down into his cup, but it was a black well that looked too far down into
the truth. So he leaned back and studied the night sky. The stars were all nailed
to the ceiling of the world. Nothing else fell.

McCall got up, wincing at the pain in his gut, and collected some fresh wood for his
meager fire. He built it up so that its glow drew his focus, tricking his eye and
his mind away from the night and all that it held.

And that was good. That worked.

* * *

Until the screaming started.

* * *

McCall jerked upright, yanked out of a doze by the terrible sound that tore through
the darkness.

He fell forward onto his knees, pivoted, drew his gun, thumbed the hammer back, brought
it up, one hand clutched around the grips and the other closed like a talon around
the gun hand, head and barrel turning as one. All of that done in a heartbeat, done
without thought. His horse cried in fear and reared, hurling its weight against the
line that was made fast to a bristlecone tree.