Heaven and Hell (51 page)

He was equally satisfied with his men. He dropped back toward Gray Owl at the rear and inspected them. They all rode competently, and a few, such as Magee, had a real flair for it. Those who'd kept their regulation trousers had reinforced them with canvas patches on the seat and thigh. Brims of straw hats and bills of chasseur kepis shaded their eyes. A bedroll with extra clothing hung over the front of each man's McClellan saddle. The saddle also carried lariat, picket pin, canteen and a tin plate. A saddle sheath by the right knee held the rifle; at Charles's suggestion, his men had left their generally useless bayonets behind.

They passed him two by two, each with sheath knife on the left hip, holster with pistol butt forward on the right. Only one man had retained a regulation cartridge box on his belt. The rest kept their metal 322

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cartridges in bandoliers or belts they'd sewn themselves. For former city boys they were a fierce-looking lot; they really did resemble roving bandits ready for any eventuality.

Shem Wallis rode by. Charles heard him say to Corporal Magic Magee, "Lord, it's hot. I can't believe it's November. When we gonna noon?"

"Pretty soon," Magee said. "Here, watch this coin."

Charles called out to Wallis, "We'll stop there." He pointed to a grove of bare trees some distance ahead and to the left. Since trees usually grew in the damp bottom land, they might find a stream, and cottonwood bark for the horses to forage on.

Charles dropped all the way back beside Gray Owl. The men liked the tracker, but Magee had really taken to him because Gray Owl was always such a fine audience for his sleights. Charles still hadn't learned a thing about his past, especially why he'd abandoned his people. The
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tracker seemed to be relaxed and in a good mood, so Charles decided to try again.

"Gray Owl, if you're going to track for me, I'd like to know some things about you. Tell me about your family."

The Indian hunched inside his buffalo robe. Despite the heat, no perspiration showed on his lined face. He thought for a while before he answered. "My father was a great war chief named Crooked Back. My mother was a white woman he captured. They say she was fair and light-haired. She has been dead a long time."

This surprising information was a wedge. "Any other family?"

"No. Eight winters past, my sister traveled the Hanging Road.

Five winters past, my only brother followed. Both were carried off by the same sickness. The one your people brought to us that we had never suffered before."

"Smallpox?"

"Yes." Gray Owl gave Charles a long look, and he felt a stab of guilt. The Indian gazed ahead at the heat devils.

Charles cleared his throat. "What I'd really like to know is why you're willing to track for the Army."

"When I was a young man, I went to seek my vision in order to become a warrior and find the purpose of my life. In the sweat lodge I burned out the poisons of doubt and hate and headstrong selfishness. I Painted my face white to purify it and went apart, as seekers must, to a dangerous place. A lonely place, with grass so tall and dry, the smallest spark could ignite a great fire to consume me."

Charles held his breath. He was getting somewhere.

"Three days and nights I lay hidden in tall grass, crying out for i toy vision. I ate nothing. I drank nothing. I was rewarded. The Wise

324 * HEAVEN AND HELL

One Above, the holy spirit you white men call God, began to speak from the clouds, and from pebbles in a stream, and from a snake passing by. I saw myself hollow and smooth as a dry reed, ready to be filled.

"God moved then. All the grasses bent, each blade pointing north toward the ancient Sacred Mountain. In the empty sky, an eagle appeared.

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It swooped low over my head and flew west. Then, from the center of the sun, a great owl descended. The owl spoke a while. Then the sun blinded me."

"Did the owl become your helper bird?"

Gray Owl was startled; Charles knew more of the tribe's ways than he'd suspected. "Yes. I keep a great owl's claw with me always." He tapped his medicine bundle, a drawstring bag tied to his belt. "And always, if I ask, a great owl will appear and guide me when I am lost or confused. I learned my purpose from the owl and from the eagle."

"What is your purpose?"

"It was to help the People find the way. To lead them to winter camps and to ceremony grounds for the great summer festivals. To track the buffalo south with the snows and north with the green grass. When I returned from seeking my vision I donned a warrior's regalia, but thereafter always followed my purpose."

"To lead the People. But now you're leading us. Why?"

Gray Owl's face turned stony. "The People strayed so far from the right way that not even God could lead them back. It is time to rest.

Shall I search those trees ahead?"

It was as if a curtain had fallen in Trump's theater. Frustrated, Charles nodded. The Cheyenne dug in his moccasins and raced his pony away toward the distant grove.

Ten miles east, a westbound passenger train left the hamlet of Solomon and crossed the line into Saline County. In the freight car, two men polished their guns while two others played cards.

In the second-class passenger car, a young woman on her way to join her husband at Fort Harker gazed through the window at the stark landscape. She'd never been west of the Mississippi before. Her husband was a sergeant recently transferred to the Seventh Cavalry.

In the seat ahead of her, a cavalry officer wearing a silver oak leaf intently studied a book on tactics. At the end of the car the conductor counted ticket stubs. The other passengers talked or dozed, and no one happened to glance toward the south side of the train. There, about a mile from the right-of-way, a line of twenty mounted men started down a low hill and, at the bottom, began to ride rapidly toward the train.

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While they waited for Gray Owl, Magee pulled out his piece of practice rope. He handed the rope to another trooper, Private George Jubilee, then crossed his wrists and asked Jubilee to tie him. Jubilee's father, a fugitive slave, had chosen the last name after he found sanctuary in Boston.

"Good and tight," Magee said. Sidling his horse closer, Jubilee concentrated on looping the rope around Magee's wrists several times.

He didn't notice the momentary stiffening of Magee's spine, the slight shudder of his forearms, the sudden appearance of veins on the dark brown backs of his fisted hands. Charles saw it from his vantage point, though; he'd seen Magee's escapes and was alert to the trick. Magee was almost undetectably putting tension on the rope while Jubilee finished his loops and tied two knots.

Jubilee sat back on his saddle, smug about his handiwork. Magee began to twist his hands in opposite directions, his nostrils flaring. He grunted once and suddenly, faster than Charles could follow, his hands were apart. The rope was still knotted around his left wrist. He'd created just enough slack to allow him to work a hand free.

Magee smiled lazily and picked at the knots while Private Jubilee stared, dumbfounded. He was relatively new to the troop and to Magee's tricks.

Gray Owl returned in ten minutes. He was paler than Charles had ever seen him.

"Whites have passed here," he said with suppressed fury. "There are dead men and dead horses among the trees. The bodies have been despoiled."

Charles took the head of the column, ordered his buffalo soldiers to the trot and led them toward the grove. Well before they reached it, he saw the meandering stream he expected, a narrow ribbon of yellow water along the grove's north perimeter.

A rank smell floated from the leafless trees. Charles recognized it.

He'd smelled the same stench at Sharpsburg and Brandy Station and other places where the dead lay a long time after the firing stopped. One of his younger men leaned to the right and shuddered with the dry heaves.

Charles unsheathed his saber and raised it to signal a halt. The saber was a useless weapon in the field, except where it could serve as a standard, something bright and visible to rally around. "I'll go in first.

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The rest of you water your horses."

He dismounted, shifted the saber to his left hand and drew his

*-°lt. He approached the grove with caution. Gray Owl followed with- Out permission; Charles was conscious of him as a shadow flicking over

the sere grass to his left.

From the edge of the grove he saw a dead horse, then two more.

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Warriors' horses, usually left alive so that their owners would have fine mounts in paradise. This probably meant that someone other than Indians had shot them.

He swallowed, took a few more steps and spied the three decomposing bodies. Stripped of raiment, they lay amid broken sections of wooden platforms. Upright timbers that had supported the platforms still stood in the center of the grove. Forcing himself, Charles moved closer to inspect the naked corpses. Near them he found the splintered shafts of several brightly painted arrows. Everything else had been looted.

He heard the anger in Gray Owl's voice. "Do you know what has happened?"

"I do. It's the custom of your people to put their dead on these burial platforms if the winter ground is too hard to dig. These were special men--war chiefs, camp chiefs, maybe society leaders--because they were buried this way when the ground isn't frozen."

Nearer to the sky on the platforms, the dead thus passed more quickly along the Hanging Road to paradise. It was also customary for the Cheyennes to deposit personal treasures, weapons and a favorite mount, so the dead man wouldn't lack for anything in the afterlife.

Oddly, despite his hatred of the Cheyennes, Charles found himself sickened by the desecration.

"Look more closely," Gray Owl said to him. The tracker was almost stammering with rage. "Go. Look!"

Charles stepped forward but soon halted again, pale. Not only were the funeral garments gone, but also chunks of flesh, hacked from arms, legs and torsos. In the fist-sized cavities, maggots swarmed.

"Jesus Christ. What for?" This was something entirely new.

Gray Owl shouted, "Bait." He waved wildly at the stream. "Fishing bait. I saw this once before. A soldier of the Seventh bragged that he had done it." Tears ran from Gray Owl's eyes. For a moment Charles
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thought the Cheyenne might pull his knife and stab him. "The white man is filth. He counts coup on the dead."

"Your own people sometimes--" he began, thinking of Wooden Foot and Boy, the violet-eyed girl in the sod house. He stopped, because those atrocities couldn't cancel this one.

A long wail in the east broke the silence. A westbound train.

Gray Owl turned and left the grove. At that moment he clearly hated Charles and every other white man. Then why in hell did he track for them?

Distantly, again from the east, he heard faint crackling. He dashed out of the grove, glad to do so. He waved his saber and his revolver.

"Mount. There's gunfire."

Three troopers at the stream raised dripping faces as he shouted Banditti 327

again. "Mount!" He wigwagged the saber over his head and ran toward Satan, the horror in the grove and the complexity of the resulting emotions mercifully banished by the sudden, urgent need to act.

The twenty Indians divided, half of them charging around the rear of the chugging U.P.E.D. passenger local. The parallel columns dashed ahead, to attack the train from both sides.

In the second-class coach, the sergeant's wife looked through a window across the aisle and saw" brown horsemen riding bareback, their black hair streaming. Some brandished guns, some their hunting bows.

At the head of the coach an older woman jumped up, then fainted. "My God, Lester, Cheyennes," a man cried to his traveling companion.

"Arapahoes," said the cavalry officer in the seat ahead of the woman. "You can tell by the unbound hair." He snatched out his service revolver, broke the window with three blows of his elbow and fired a round. He missed.

The sergeant's wife stared with disbelief at a fierce painted face hovering not three feet from her. It wasn't a man, she realized, but a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen. He jammed a trade musket to his cheek while he gripped his racing pony with his knees. The boy and the white woman stared at each other for a protracted moment, nothing save the glass and the shining barrel between them.

"Down," the russet-bearded officer yelled at her. He stood and
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took aim at the Indian. The young brave saw him and shot first. The colonel's body jerked, his eyes rolled up in his head and he sank to the floor.

A man screamed, "We're all gonna die here!"

"The hell we are," the conductor shouted. "There's railroad men hiding aboard this train."

Concealed in the freight car, J. O. Hartree smiled at his three companions when he heard the hoofbeats, the shrill yells, the first shots.

He was a plump, relatively young man, with soft good looks, wavy hair, and a long drooping mustache waxed to points. He had a piously insincere smile and mean eyes.

"Turk, you stand beside me," he said, quickly pulling on shiny leather gloves. He rolled up the sleeves of his white silk shirt and flexed his knees to be sure he had the feel of the moving train. He couldn't Use his hands for support once they went into action.

Hartree and his hired shootists had been riding the line for weeks, hoping for this sort of opportunity. All summer the tribes had raided the

.'¦¦¦toe's construction sites, terrorized the workers and butchered a few who

^lishly strayed off by themselves. Hartree was under orders to con 328 HEAVEN AND HELL

vince the damned red men that they couldn't strike the line with impunity.

It was a mission he enjoyed.

He smoothed the front of his green satin waistcoat embroidered with two rearing antelope, majestic pronghorns. "Red, when I give the word, slide the door open. Then help Wingo load the guns." On the floor lay eight powerful 45-caliber Sharps buffalo rifles, four for each shooter. J. O. Hartree planned carefully.