Heaven and Hell (35 page)

222 * HEAVEN AND HELL

The storm clouds passed over like a lid closing on the world.

Thunder rolled. Lightning glittered. On the wind from the west, Charles smelled smoke. He saw Scar jabbing at Wooden Foot with his lance, from horseback.

The Cheyennes crowded their ponies in close, though with less zeal since a couple of their own had fallen. Wooden Foot dodged back; Scar's thrust missed. He thrust again. The trader gripped his rifle with both hands and used it like a staff to deflect the lance. His face was flushed.

Charles levered a round into the Spencer, aimed at Scar and pulled the trigger. The rifle jammed.

Another Cheyenne rode by and lanced Charles's right arm. A rush of blood followed the hot pain. He dropped the Spencer, yanked out his Bowie and drove the blade into the Indian's side. The Indian screamed and jerked forward over his pony's neck. The pony raced away, taking the Indian and the protruding steel too.

Determined to finish Wooden Foot, Scar worked his pony in again.

Wooden Foot blocked his thrusts expertly with his rifle. Scar's face showed his frustration. The struggle was taking a toll on Wooden Foot, though. His cheeks were dark as plums.

Charles found himself momentarily free of adversaries. Then he saw why. Three Cheyennes were riding down on the mules and Boy.

Weeping, the youngster struck at them feebly, as if swatting flies. One brave jumped down and grabbed Boy. Fen leaped from concealment in the grass as if sprung. The collie's jaws closed on the Cheyenne's forearm.

Another Indian beat at the dog with the butt of his trade rifle.

Amid the buffeting of the gale wind, the white flashing of the lightning, Wooden Foot uttered a strange choked cry. Drawing his Colt and dodging as a Cheyenne shot at him, Charles saw his partner lurch sideways in the high grass. Wooden Foot gasped, as if he couldn't get air. He plucked the front of his beaded shirt as if to tear something out.

Charles remembered seeing Wooden Foot's face flushed the same way before. "It ain't nothing--" But it was: a heart seizure, brought on by the enormous strain of the attack.

Scar had his hatchet in hand, raised high. Charles fired. The prancing of Scar's pony caused the bullet to miss the target and ping the hatchet blade. Charles jumped in front of Wooden Foot to shoot again.

Scar quickly trotted away down the rise, bent low over his pony.

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Blood leaked from Charles's wound. He yelled in frustration, a wordless raw cry of rage, because two things demanded attention at once: Wooden Foot, kneading his shirt with both hands and trying to get air in his lungs, and three dismounted Cheyennes who were dragging Boy out of sight beyond another part of the rise. Fen chased after A Winter Count 223

them, foam flying from his jaws. Wooden Foot's fingers clawed beads loose from his shirt. They sparkled and winked in the lightning glare.

Charles couldn't help both of them. He chose the one visibly near and in peril of instant death.

Wooden Foot swayed backward. Charles caught him with his left hand while firing at the nearest Cheyenne with his right. Because of his wound, his gun arm throbbed and shook. His bullet sped yards wide of the target.

The Cheyennes were going to finish them, so all Charles could do was go out fighting. He knelt and worked his knee under his partner's sagging back. The trader braced there, his eyes wide, his limp hands falling away from his shirt. Helpless, Charles watched the color leach from his face.

Wooden Foot recognized his partner. He tried to touch Charles but couldn't lift his hand. Beyond the rise, Fen abruptly stopped barking, then yelped once.

Charles put his ear near Wooden Foot's mouth. He thought he heard, "Thanks for all--" Bright lightning whited out everything. When he recovered his sight he almost cried. Wooden Foot's eyes were still open but nothing lived behind them.

From over the rise the three Cheyennes appeared and recaptured their ponies. They trotted down toward Scar, who was waiting at the spot where Charles had first seen the Indians.

Charles raced toward the place where Boy had disappeared. As he ran, the storm threw bits of grass and particles of dirt into his eyes.

When Scar saw Charles move away from Wooden Foot's body, he signaled his remaining cohorts to ride toward it.

Charles passed two fallen pack mules bleeding to death from bullet wounds. Lightning blazed.

The ground rocked under him. He sensed

rather than saw a fence of fire spring up behind him, where lightning had struck again. "Boy?" he shouted, struggling up the rise on legs shaking with weakness. "Boy, answer me."

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The lightning answered, a scorching sizzling swordstroke straight down into the hollow between rises, the place the three dismounted Cheyennes had just quitted. Grass smoked, glowed orange, then burst into flame. Godamighty, the end of the world, Charles thought as he stumbled down the slope toward a dry stream bed. On the near side, trampled grass glistened wet and black. Amidst that blood lay something as shapeless as a potato sack.

Over the rise behind him, flames six feet high burned in a rampart

°f scarlet, orange, white. The rampart spread forward and backward and sideways simultaneously. Once in Texas he'd seen a similar prairie fire.

& destroyed forty square miles.

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224 " HEAVEN AND HELL

He reached the shapeless thing and gazed down, driven past feeling by shock. Boy lay with his sadly swollen head resting in the .dry stream bed. A blade had split him open from throat to groin. From the chest cavity already swarming with flies protruded the remains of Fen.

A leg, the bone visible in bloody fur; part of the collie's snout and skull, including an eye. Other pieces were strewn on the glistening grass.

Charles stared at the butchery no more than five seconds, but it might as well have been a century. Finally he turned and started back up the rise and the fire rampart behind it. Wooden Foot's dead, Boy's dead, he thought. I'll go next but I've got to take that scarred bastard with me.

From the rise he saw Scar and five others sitting their ponies some distance away, appearing and disappearing behind the blowing smoke.

The Cheyennes had shifted slightly to the south of their original position and despite the smoke, Charles recognized something new on their faces: apprehension; or at least doubt. The fire had advanced nearly halfway up the rise where the Jackson Trading Company had made its futile stand.

Sweat dripping from his face, he stumbled back to the place he'd left Wooden Foot. It's Sharpsburg all over again, he thought. It's Northern Virginia all over again.

Behind fuming smoke, Scar smiled. Charles wondered about that as he staggered to Wooden Foot's corpse. Looking down, he choked.

His partner's pale body lay denuded of clothing. A red hole between the legs crawled with flies. Bloody genitals had been forced into
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Wooden Foot's mouth. On his eyes the Cheyennes had poured little mounds of diamond and triangle pony beads. The fire made them sparkle.

Scar had a fine touch when it came to barbarity.

"You bastards," Charles screamed. "You filthy, inhuman bastards."

Scar

stopped smiling. Charles pointed his Colt at the Cheyenne leader, steadying it with bloody hands. Smoke thickened, hiding Scar and the others. Charles squeezed off a round. Another. Another. Until the cylinder emptied.

By then the wall of smoke and fire completely hid the Cheyennes.

To reach Charles they'd have to ride through or very wide around one of the ends that kept extending north and south. Gusty wind blew his hair. The fire roaring on the slope lit his wild face as if it were noonday.

The smoke parted again. The Cheyennes were still there. Every one of Charles's shots had missed. Scar signaled the others to advance.

One Cheyenne shook his head, then another. They had no more stomach for the shouting madman on the rise protected by a wall of fire and smoke. Though they didn't understand his words, they understood A Winter Count 225

the meaning of his yelling. "Come on, show me how brave you are!

You killed an old man and a boy and a dog. Let's see what you can do with me!"

One of the reluctant Cheyennes shook his head again, emphatically That displeased Scar. He grabbed the last man to shake his head.

The Cheyenne knocked Scar's hand away, turned his mount and rode off into the storm darkness.

Four others followed in single file. Left alone, Scar gave Charles a scornful look before he joined-the retreat.

"Come back, goddamn it. You yellow sons of bitches!"

The starch went out of him as the fire once more leaped high and hid them. Charles kept yelling at Scar. "You deserve to be wiped off the earth, you and your whole tribe. I'll find a way, you can count on that."

Count on that . . . count on that . . .

He turned and moved from the heat and glare. Using his wounded arm, he tried to jam his Colt into the holster. He kept missing. The gunsight ripped his pants and dug his leg so that it bled. He neither
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saw nor felt it. From his left hand dangled Wooden Foot's personal parfleche, which he didn't remember snatching off his partner's dead horse.

The storm front flew on eastward, miles away now. A light rain started, not strong enough to put out the fire. Charles staggered among the dead mules to see what else he might salvage from the disaster.

Two mules were still alive, unhurt. With their reins gathered in his left hand he started back toward the rise.

The fire stopped him. The great white-and-scarlet wall now curved across the main rise and around to his right, behind the continuation of the rise shielding the creek bed where Boy and Fen had died. As he watched, the fire completely engulfed the rise where Wooden Foot's body lay.

/ can't even bury them.

At that, he wept tears of wrath.

By a lucky chance--his only luck of the day--Charles found his piebald about two miles northeast of the fire site. He was riding one of the two mules and leading the other. A wide strip of cloth torn from his trousers and twisted with a stick had stopped the bleeding of his right ann. The wound hurt and needed attention, but it was far from fatal.

When he came on Satan, standing head down, still as marble except for the movement of his eye, Charles changed mounts and headed

°n into the north, his emotions a raw mass of sorrow and outrage. At dusk he stopped to rest and camp. He built a buffalo-chip fire, then 226 HEAVEN AND HELL

chewed some pemmican from his own parfleche. Two bites and hjs belly ached. Four bites, it all came up.

After the storm the sky cleared, leaving him huddled in a cold breeze under brilliant stars. Shivering, he opened Wooden Foot's parfleche.

He found the paint pots and the rolled-up winter count. He untied the thong and spread it at his feet.

Although he couldn't explain the reason, something compelled him to try to finish it. He opened the pot of black, moistened the brush, dipped it in and poised it over the pictograph history of the Jackson Trading Company's final year.

He studied the various figures Wooden Foot had painted, including
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the three of them in the sanctuary of the Buffalo Hat tipi. How he had misunderstood that incident. It had fooled him into believing the Cheycnnes were capable of compassion. They weren't. Only the sanctity of the object, the hat, had saved the traders. The Cheyennes hated all whites, and never mind if they had reasons. They had no reasons good enough to justify the barbarity he had seen. They simply hated whites. The same way he now hated every last one of them.

His bleak face reflecting the campfire, he laboriously painted three exceedingly crude stick figures, a dog and two men. The second figure was to the right and slightly above the first, and the third similarly elevated above the second, as though all stood on an invisible stair.

Trying to conceive a way to picture the Hanging Road above the figures, he faltered. Should he paint wavy lines for the Milky Way? No.

Five-pointed stars. He did one, corrected two of the points, then two others, and found himself with a solid blob instead of an open star figure.

He flung the brush into the fire, then the paints. He held the edges of the pictograph and studied each image in turn, finally purged of any impulse to cry. He still grieved, but the grief had hardened. His own life, which he'd tried so hard to reconstruct over the past winter, had been destroyed as quickly and surely as the grass in the path of the prairie fire.

Sharpsburg all over again--

Northern Virginia all over again--

Nothing changes.

Christ!

He laid the winter count on the fire and watched it burn. They want killing, I'll give them killing, he thought. I know more about it than they do. I had five hundred thousand expert teachers.

The figures on the pictograph blackened and burned while he watched, seeking to remember every fiery image.

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/ have just returned from Fort

Wallace, over the line of the Union

Pacific Railway, E.D. The Indians

along the whole line are engaged in

their savage warfare. On Saturday

three of our men were killed and

scalped within twenty miles of Fort

Marker . . . What can be done to end

these atrocities?

john D. perry. President of the II.P.E.D.,

to the Governor of Kansas, 1867

The Chiefs have signed it merely as a

matter of form. Not one word of the

treaty was read to them ...//' war is

. . . thus commenced, who are to

blame? The commissioners.

henry m. Stanley, New York Tribune, after Medicine Lodge Creek, 1867

The people of the frontier universally

declare the Indians to be at war, and

the Indian commissioners and agents

pronounce them at peace, leaving us

in the gap to be abused by both