Savage Cry (20 page)

“This here’s a friend of mine,” Badger told MacGruder. “We sorta found ourselves out in the middle of the prairie when the winter come in kind of sudden-like. So I says to Clay, let’s ride on down to Fort Benton and visit my old friend Johnny MacGruder.”

Johnny grinned, a twinkle in his eye, as he looked from Badger to Clay, then back at Badger. “You lyin’ ol’ buzzard—you didn’t have no idea I was here.”

Badger laughed. “You’re right about that. Hell, I thought you was dead. The last I heard of you, you was hightailin’ it outta that camp above Horse Creek on the Green River with some little Snake gal’s papa on your trail.” Badger laughed again as he thought about it. “I see you got away, though.”

Johnny scratched his head thoughtfully, a wry grin still in place. “Well, I reckon you could say that. Ol’
Many Horses caught up with me before I could clear the valley. Reckon it was the best thing coulda happened to me. I’d probably still be with that little gal if she hadn’t run off with another feller.” He winked at Clay and added, “I didn’t learn my lesson, though. I hitched up with another one right after I come here—a Blackfoot woman.”

“Well, I’ll be . . .” Badger exclaimed, shaking his head. “So you’re a squaw man, too.”

Johnny looked surprised. “Don’t tell me you took a wife.”

“Sure did—a little Lakota gal—and she’s a dandy. Ain’t she, Clay?”

Clay smiled and nodded. “She sure is. She’s a fine woman.”

Clay stood by while the two old friends relived some past times spent in the mountains and brought each other up to date on the present. Badger explained why he and Clay came to be looking for a place to hole up until spring, instead of sitting by the fire with Gray Bird in Little Hawk’s camp.

“Stole your sister, huh?” Johnny sympathized. “Well, I reckon Badger’s told you the straight of it. You’d not likely find Bloody Axe now that the snows have come.” He raised his eyebrows slightly as he fixed Clay with an unblinking stare. “It ain’t gonna be easy to find that renegade come spring. I can’t say that I know much about that particular band of Blackfoot—only what I hear from some of the Injuns that come in here to trade. But from what I hear, his people keep pretty much to theirselves and don’t have much to do with white folks if they can help it. He ain’t one to take to the reservation. Bloody Axe stays pretty far to the north, especially since the army sent soldiers to set up a camp on the Judith this past summer. My woman might be able to find out a little more
for you, but I don’t know if I’d git my hopes up too much, young fellow.”

Like Badger, Johnny soon discovered that Clay Culver was not a man easily discouraged. So he offered to help in any way he could. “You’ll be needin’ a place to stay till spring. I’m pretty sure I can fix it up with the
booshway
so’s you can bunk in the Engages’ Quarters.” Clay was about to protest that he had no money to pay for his keep when Johnny anticipated his concern. “Won’t cost you nothin’ to stay. You can hunt to pay for your keep—maybe help cut firewood, tend the livestock. There’s plenty of room since most of the upstairs is empty now, what with the furs and hides mostly played out.”

So Clay and Badger took care of their horses, then moved their possessions into the Engages’ Quarters where they shared living quarters with the half-dozen French-Canadians who remained to do the hard labor required to maintain the fort. It was a warm place to wait out the coming of spring, what with a large fireplace at the end of the building—and the blacksmith shop located directly beneath them.

Charley Vinings bolted upright in his bed. In a fit of panic, his heart beating wildly, he looked around him in the darkness. “Robert?” he called, searching the darkened tent.

“What?” a groggy response came back from the cot at the other end.

Realizing he had been dreaming, Charley replied gruffly, “Nothing. Go on back to sleep.” The voice grunted once more then was quiet again. It had been another one of those dreams.
Damn you, Robert,
he thought,
why don’t you stay in hell and leave me alone?
This was the second time in the past week Charley had seen his dead brother in his dreams, and the second time he had awakened in a cold sweat. He thought he was done with those dreams, the ones where he would see Robert walking toward him, the side of his skull crushed, his bloody hand outstretched as if pleading for help—and that damned eye bulging out of the socket. But the dream had come back to haunt him in the last few weeks. Charley didn’t believe in ghosts, especially when it was broad daylight. But those damnable dreams tormented his sleep so that sometimes he wondered if Robert really was trying to reach him from the grave.
Well, it ain’t gonna do you
no good. You’re dead and you’re gonna stay dead. You might as well leave me be.

Too awake now to go back to sleep—and reluctant to return to that veiled realm where Robert might still await him—Charley threw his legs over the side of the cot and slipped his feet into his boots. He didn’t have to glance at the little stove in the center of the tent to know that it had gone out during the night. The chill of the new day about to dawn told him that Marlowe had not banked the fire sufficiently the night before.

He pulled his blanket close around him and stood up. Pausing for a moment to consider the steady snoring of the huge man in the other cot, he entertained a notion to douse him with a cup of cold water for letting the fire go out.
I would, too,
Charley thought,
if you weren’t such a big son of a bitch.
Marlowe
was
big, and was possessed of an especially nasty disposition—qualities that Charley found useful in his particular brand of the freighting business.

He had seen the value in the hulking Marlowe as soon as he showed up at Pea Vine Gulch, looking for work. It didn’t take but one bottle of raw frontier whiskey to reveal Marlowe to be a man of opportunity, the same as Charley. All Charley was able to learn about the man’s recent past was that he had spent some time working at Fort Union. Charley suspected there had been some trouble there, enough to warrant his leaving. Just what the trouble was, Charley didn’t really care. The fact that the man was willing to crack a few skulls for ill-gained profit was all Charley needed to know.

Outside the tent, Charley stood shivering against the early spring chill, despite the heavy blanket draped around his shoulders. He looked out over the dingy collection of tents and shacks that comprised the little
community of Pea Vine Diggings—half of them now unoccupied, their former tenants having given up and moved on to another gulch in their search for the elusive fortune. The green lumber used to hurriedly fashion the shacks had already weathered to gray. And here and there a broken screendoor banged open and shut at the will of the raw spring breeze as it whistled through the deserted windows.

This place is dead as hell
, he thought, as he casually unbuttoned the fly in his long underwear and urinated.
Piss on this town,
he thought, smiling at the pun. He made up his mind right then that it was time to move on to riper pickings.

Charley had established himself as a freighter in German Gulch, and had done quite well until some of the leading citizens began to wonder about the coincidental prospering of his business paralleling several tragic accidents that had taken the lives of several miners. In spite of the suspicions, nobody had any proof that he had anything to do with it. Still, when the local citizens committee started asking too many questions, Charley decided to move on to new pickings. Now Pea Vine had petered out as far as the gold was concerned, but not before he had acquired a sizable portion of the profits from the hard labor of the honest men who worked the mines.

Charley was determined not to make the same mistake he had made at German Gulch and overstay his welcome. He couldn’t help but laugh when he thought about it.
I’ll be leaving Pea Vine before anybody has time to ask questions.
For a moment, his dream of the night just past came back to mind. It did not trouble his mind so much now, for now there was a low band of light inching its way up the mountains to the east. It would soon be dawn, and Charley didn’t worry about his dead brother in the light of day. He had
never feared Robert when he was alive. Why, he wondered, did he fear him since he was dead?
Robert be damned!
he thought.
He’s better off dead. He’d just be in my way.
“Yessir,” he mumbled, “it’s time to move on. The snow’s mostly gone from the mountain passes. I best git while the gitting’s good.”

Marlowe bragged a great deal about his dealings with some of the wilder Blackfoot bands north of the Milk. So Charley decided that was the best place to be until the stench of some of his past dealings had time to die away in the goldfields. He paused to consider the ill-tempered man still snoring inside the tent.
Marlowe will be useful, especially if he knows the Blackfeet like he says he does. But I expect, when we get done with this trip, it’ll be time to put a bullet in the back of his head before he gets the notion to do the job on me.
With that thought in mind, he turned and went back inside to rebuild the fire in the stove.

The weather on this morning looked even better than the day before, leaving no doubt that winter’s long frigid grip had been broken. Charley and Marlowe spent most of the morning loading the two big freight wagons with the trinkets and supplies that Charley had accumulated while at the short-lived diggings. One wagon was loaded with twenty-two gallon-sized jugs of whiskey, originally meant for a saloon in Alder Gulch, but had somehow gotten sidetracked on the way from Virginia City, the driver’s body lying at the bottom of a gully with a bullet in his back. Charley figured the whiskey, once it was watered down sufficiently, could bring a nice profit in hides and furs from the Indians. When they had cooled down enough, the stove and stovepipe were the last things loaded, and the two unlikely partners were ready to hitch the teams.

“Reckon that’s it,” Marlowe declared.

“All right, then,” Charley acknowledged. “You lead out, since you say you know the way.”

“Oh, I know the way all right,” Marlowe was quick to reply. “I’ve knowed a bunch of them Blackfoot—traded with ’em for years.” So they started out, leaving the small settlement of Pea Vine behind them, setting a course toward Three Forks and the Missouri country beyond.

Spring could not come soon enough for Clay Culver. There had been times during the long hard winter when he had again entertained thoughts of setting out to find Martha before waiting for the thaw. Only his common sense—and Badger’s constant assurance that he would wind up frozen to death in some snowbound canyon—enabled him to control his impatience.

It was not a time of idle waiting, however, for there was plenty of work to do to keep the fort supplied with firewood, as well as livestock to look after. Clay more than earned his keep. When there was time, he would sometimes venture out to hunt. Although there was very little game to find that winter on the frozen plains, still Clay managed to find the occasional elk or buffalo. On one such hunting trip, he was fortunate to discover a small herd of buffalo more than twenty miles west of the fort. There were only about thirty of the shaggy beasts, and they were all following along behind one lead bull in a single file as he broke trail through the waist-high snow. It was a simple matter to cut down the last four buffalo in the line. The real work came when they had to be butchered and packed all the way back to Fort Benton.

The long winter nights were the hardest for Clay, since this was when his imagination would torment him with thoughts of his sister’s suffering. To occupy his mind with other tasks, he decided to learn the
Blackfoot language. He had willing teachers in Johnny MacGruder and his Blackfoot wife Silent Woman, and they soon discovered that he was an exceptional student. By the time the first signs of spring began to appear, Clay conversed quite competently with Johnny’s wife, sometimes speaking in nothing but the Blackfoot language. His diligence in learning her native tongue delighted Silent Woman and she would nod approvingly as he recited the day’s lesson.

As each day brought them closer to spring, Clay’s mind was filled more and more with thoughts of Martha, and he wondered if she had given up hope of rescue,
if she were even still alive.
He tried not to imagine what it must be like for her. He found it impossible to avoid forming a mental image of the face of her captor.
Black Elk
, they had said he was called. Often, when Clay was sitting alone before the fire, listening to Badger’s steady snoring behind him, he would picture that face. It was the cruel unforgiving face of a savage, and he promised himself that he would rid the world of the heathen devil.

On the rare occasion when he would give voice to his anxiety over the inhumane treatment surely being suffered by his sister, Badger would remind him that Johnny’s wife Silent Woman was a Blackfoot Indian. “And she ain’t so damned savage, is she?” he would insist. “There’s mean Injuns, and savage ones, but for the most part, I expect they’s just about like most folks.” Clay found Badger’s counsel pretty strange for one who so suspected the Blackfoot people of treachery. But he appreciated his partner’s efforts to ease his mind.

When it appeared that spring was finally going to come, Clay wondered if Badger might be thinking about how long it had been since he had seen his own wife, and he feared the old mountain man might
decide to head back to the Powder River country looking for her. But Badger assured him that he had promised him he would help him find his sister, and he was a man of his word.

With the change in the seasons, spring also brought a trickle of Indian visitors to the trading post. Among these were several families from Silent Woman’s tribe who brought a message from her father. The old man was not up to making the journey himself, but he wanted her to know that he and her mother hoped she would come to visit them.

“I reckon I’m gonna have to take Silent Woman to see her folks this summer.” Johnny MacGruder winced as he said it, causing Badger to laugh.

“Hell, you’re lucky her relatives ain’t come to live with you,” Badger snorted. “That’s the trouble with hitchin’ up with a woman so much younger than you are: All their dang folks are still livin’.” He cocked a mischievous eye at Clay, and added, “That’s the main reason I set out with Clay—just to git away from Gray Bird’s relatives for a spell.”

Clay raised an eyebrow at that remark. “When I first talked to you at Laramie, you were complaining about being away from your wife too long, and you wanted to spend some time with your family.”

“Oh, I warn’t lying. I wanted to see my wife right enough, but at my age, son, it don’t take long to git caught up, even less time to git caught up visitin’ her relatives.”

Johnny shook his head and grinned knowingly. “It’s hell, ain’t it? You take a shine to some little gal. You ain’t interested in takin’ on no new relatives; you just want a wife. Then you wake up one mornin’ and find out she didn’t just spring up from the earth like a stalk of corn. She come with a mammy and pap, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts—and they all expect you
to be part of the family. And all you wanted was a wife. Hell, you already had enough damn relatives of your own.”

Silent Woman’s visitors unknowingly brought some additional news, however, news that was of the utmost concern to Clay. Prompted by Johnny, Silent Woman asked her guests if they had any information as to the whereabouts of Bloody Axe’s village. One of them, a man called Little Bear, told her that his brother had encountered a hunting party from Bloody Axe’s camp no more than a week before. They told him that Bloody Axe was moving his camp to Willow Creek above the Teton River. Upon hearing the news from Silent Woman, Badger glanced at Clay. The look in Clay’s eye told him not to waste his breath asking. Clay was already preparing to leave. They bid farewell to Johnny and Silent Woman the following morning, heading for Willow Creek.