Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (21 page)

The next morning Donegan's head ached some as he strode into the late summer sun of a new day. Not so much from the whiskey he had punished the night before, as much as it was the grappling he had done to force incomplete pieces of a puzzle to fit together. The worst part of it was he didn't know why it mattered, why it bothered him, this not knowing.

Another six days' ride through the rolling hills at the edge of these western plains brought them closer to the Kiowa-Comanche reservation. Traffic of all kinds picked up on the roads now, but mostly the freight-hauling business.

“They need a rail line in here bad,” Seamus commented one afternoon. “Can't be cheap for the government to haul everything in here by wagon.”

“It's coming, Irishman.”

Stillwell spoke the truth well enough. Soon the lines would be laid and supplies would come in from the north and up from the south into the Nations, bringing the white man's wealth to the varied tribes, both civilized and war-loving. Down in Texas it was the same thing: supplies too were freighted to the outlying posts in west Texas, until the Houston & Texas Central Railroad got its track laid west of Dallas.

Work was proceeding all too slowly on that account—but what was the railroad construction operation to do? It had to contend with cheap labor, provided by Texas prisons for the grueling dawn to dusk shovel and pick work of laying the white man's rails, tracks like an iron arrowpoint aimed to pierce the very heart of the Indian's buffalo ground.

Chapter 15

Early September 1873

With a day lost at the Cheyenne Agency, I.T., to reshoe a couple of the horses, Seamus Donegan followed Jack Stillwell and the rest away from the small settlement of buffalo-hide lodges, dugouts, lean-tos, tents and log shanties where a few hardy white men carried on a trade into the Indian Nations. The afternoon of the seventh day of travel brought the party to the hills surrounding Medicine Bluff and Cache Creek.

It was a country abounding in wild turkey and pheasant, deer and a few antelope who turned their tails like rounded, white flags and went bounding off without the slightest bit of curiosity in the short column of horsemen. Quail whirred up from the hack-berry brush, noisily taking to the wing, much of the time startling horse and rider both whenever the birds flushed from their hiding places in the tall, weathered grasses and the shade of yellow-leafed alder.

Seamus found himself surprised at the extent of Fort Sill, the log and stone buildings, the granary and sawmill, the neatly manicured lawns and graveled walks cared for by the Negro soldiers of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel John W. Davidson. Donegan knew well enough of the Tenth, of their rescue of some forty-five desperate white men hunkered down on a sandy piece of island amid the bodies of their dead comrades and the stinking carcasses of their horses, in the middle of the Arickaree Fork of the Republican River.
*
Indeed, Seamus Donegan knew something of the Tenth Cavalry and Captain Louis H. Carpenter's Company H. At least he had back five years ago, for nine long days in late September, '68.

Most of the faces, black, white and those numerous, curious red faces wherever a man would turn, watched the small procession as it crossed the creek after skirting the agency buildings themselves and climbed from the Cache Creek ford onto the military reservation. This was no small curiosity: a lieutenant and eleven soldiers escorting four civilians. And not a one of those civilians had irons around ankles or wrists or wore prison stripes. Not much reason for a white man to be coming down here to Fort Sill, Seamus imagined, unless he had business to conduct with the army, or the tribes, or was himself a contractor for the government.

“Seamus?”

Donegan turned at the sound of his name coming from a small knot of Negro soldiers who stood in the porch shade as the horsemen moved slowly by.

“Seamus Donegan?” the soldier repeated.

The Negro soldier stepped into the sunlight, shading his eyes with a hand. Donegan could not really be sure. It had been so long—

“Sweet Jesus! It is you!”

“Mother of God, is that you, Reuben Waller?”

His ebony face beamed, glistening with sweat, teeth gleaming as a smile seemed to fill the whole bottom half of it. “Why … I never thought I'd seen you again in what days I've got left!”

Seamus waved. “Jack!” he called out. “Goddammit, Jack—c'mon back here!” Then he was kicking his right leg over the saddle horn and dropping to the ground, taking all of three steps before he and the buffalo soldier collided on the graveled walk of Fort Sill, embracing, pounding, then hugging again as they blubbered their greetings of those too-long parted and not knowing quite what to say.

The shadow came over them both, causing Donegan to look up into the late afternoon sun. “Jack, get down here and say you halloo to Reuben Waller.”

“We met, Corporal,” Jack said as he dropped to one stirrup and down.

“That's right, we did, Mr. Stillwell,” Waller said, smiling, his kepi in his left hand as they shook.

“I asked you back then—call me Jack.”

“All right … Jack. I member when we met—it was the afternoon you come riding in, guiding Colonel Bankhead to the place where Seamus … him and the rest…”

Donegan could tell Waller was having trouble finding the words, his throat tightening with the memory of that stinking, Cheyenne-made hell.

“Where Major Forsyth decided he'd have us all hunker down and kill some Cheyenne for nine days,” Seamus said, putting his arm around the buffalo soldier.

Reuben grinned up at the taller man, his face shiny with the gratitude, his eyes misting with the remembrance of the time the hard-muscled Irishman had pulled a squad of white soldiers from the Seventh Cavalry off him at Fort Wallace. Long before the fight and rescue at Beecher Island on the high plains of Colorado Territory.

“C'mon over here, fellas!” Reuben called out, turning to the half dozen or so other brunettes who were gathered in the shade, watching with interest this reunion. Waller introduced the two white men all around with a general shaking of hands.

“I remember you, Mr. Stillwell,” one of the soldiers said quietly, almost reverently, as he stood before the young scout.

“Were you on the trail out of Wallace?” Jack asked. “Carrying dispatches to Carpenter?”

He nodded, grin growing into a full-blown smile. “You do remember me!”

Jack's eyes grew a little misty. “I'll never forget how good it was for this nineteen-year-old boy to find you on that road to Wallace—and to discover you could carry that map to Captain Carpenter himself for me.”

“Mr. Stillwell here—” and Reuben caught himself, “Jack here was the first to sneak off the island the first night.”

“I had someone else go with me, Reuben,” Stillwell replied, somewhat embarrassed by the admiration in the bright, eager eyes of the brunettes.

“I told 'em all about you, Jack. How you and the old man sneaked across the plains on foot, running onto that Injun village and hiding in the buffalo carcass when a war-party catched you out in the middle of nowhere,” Waller gushed. “Told 'em how you made it almost all the way in to Fort Wallace and bumped into Rufus, who was riding dispatches to the captain.”

“There a place around here where we can buy you men a drink?” Seamus asked.

Waller pointed. “Trader's place over yonder. He sells whiskey a'times to white men.”

“He won't sell to you fellas?” Jack asked.

Waller chuckled. “Oh, he will—if he wants to make money on his whiskey. What I mean is … he don't sell to the Injuns.”

“And a damned good thing he doesn't,” Donegan replied.

“Right, 'cause it'd just make 'em that much harder to deal with,” Waller agreed.

“No,” Seamus said, patting the soldier on the back, “because it would just mean that much less in the way of whiskey for you and me! C'mon, Reuben. We've old times to talk over and not much time to do it. Jack's driving us a mad pace to get down to Texas.”

“You're here just for the night?”

Stillwell nodded. “Head out in the morning. Government work.”

“But surely you'll be coming back through on your way north, won't you?”

“As sure as sun, Reuben,” Stillwell said. “Be back before you know it, once these two government stuffed shirts are dropped off at Richardson.”

“That's Mackenzie's outfit—the Fourth Cavalry,” Waller said with an envious glint to his eye. “He's had a chance to raise a sweat chasing after the Comanche and Kiowa.”

“I was wrong to think things were pretty quiet down here now?” Jack inquired.

“Have been, for the most part. Since the Kiowa got their war-chiefs locked up down in Texas and Mackenzie's holding over a hundred Comanche women and children hostage—everybody's behaving right smart. But there'll always be a few of them bucks who get to wearing the wild feather and get their tails up behind to go scalp a white man.”

“So you're stationed here at Fort Sill?” Seamus asked.

“Yes.”

“Captain Carpenter still your company commander?”

“Right on the second account—H Company wouldn't know what to do with itself if Carpenter weren't our captain.”

“He here at the post now?”

“Sure is, Seamus. Fact is, I'd be pleased to be the one to tell the captain there's two veterans of Beecher Island come in to see him. You want me give him word you'll be over to the trader's place?”

“If that's where a man can find the whiskey,” Donegan answered, “that's where I'll be pointing my nose.”

“And that's where Captain Carpenter will find you two fellas,” Waller said. “Damn, but ain't this a fine day? A fine, fine day indeed! You both looking so good to my eyes.”

“You need go and tell these gentlemen about your stripes, Reuben,” said the dispatch courier.

“What?” Seamus asked with a growing grin. “You going to get another stripe and didn't tell us?”

Waller smiled in the bright sunlight. “It ain't official yet. Lieutenant Colonel Davidson gonna approve it or not—only question is if I can stay with the captain. I don't wanna serve in no other company but with Captain Carpenter.”

“Well, now—congratulations are in order, I'd say,” Seamus cheered, shaking Waller's hand again. “And you're due a drink on me and one on Jack Stillwell. Fact is, we both owe you more than one … so plan on drinking your fill tonight.”

“I don't take to whiskey all that much,” Reuben replied. “But I won't mind having me one or two, especially if Captain Carpenter comes 'round to talk old memories with you gentlemen.”

“Then go fetch that soldier,” Donegan said. “I've got a thirst that won't wait!”

*   *   *

As far as he knew, it was the Moon of Plums Ripening. This time of late summer, early fall.

But for Satanta it was difficult to be certain, still a prisoner here in Tehas among the white Tehannas.

He was number 2107. One of the others had explained the marks on his striped shirt to him more than a year ago when Satanta and Big Tree were first taken to Huntsville Prison far to the south of Kiowa country. With practice he could say his number as well as any Tehanna. And he was getting better at understanding English as well. For years already the chief had understood a good deal of the white man's tongue—refusing still to speak it, for his own reasons. Nonetheless, he did understand it, and now he knew more than the other hundred prisoners who had been freighted west from Huntsville to Houston to work for the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, grading roadbed, laying track from dawn to dusk.

This had to be the most bitter of punishments to the two Kiowa chiefs: forced to aid and abet in bringing the railroad to Kiowa country. More times than he cared to, Satanta remembered in the years past how he had sworn with his own blood he would prevent the coming of the white man's smoking wagon to the buffalo country ruled by Kiowa and Comanche horsemen.

Building a railroad that would split the heart of his homeland. Pick and shovel work, hard on an old man of more than sixty winters. Still, the work kept his body firm, and not a fleck of snow betrayed his black hair. Satanta swore he would keep up with the young chief, Big Tree, and the rest of the construction crew of a hundred murderers and thieves who dragged their ankle irons and chains up and down the roadbed, laying track for the white man, pointing their noses north to Dall-ass.

There were all kinds who sweated and groaned under the watchful eyes of the white guards loaded down with guns, some on horseback, some with evil-tempered dogs on short leather leashes. On either side of Satanta worked men guilty of all kinds of crime: white and Mexican and Negro, accused and found guilty of everything from stealing a melon from a field to raping a white woman to killing an old girlfriend and her new lover. To Satanta that was always amusing—to see how the two other races thought most about its stomach and its groin.

If indeed it were the first days of the Moon of Plums Ripening, then almost a year had passed since he and Big Tree had been taken east by the white man to see the other chiefs.

Without explanation last autumn, they were told a messenger had arrived, and they had been ordered to go with the guards. From the roadbed work they were walked four miles back down the track to where an army ambulance awaited them. From there they were taken north for five days until they arrived at the place called Dall-ass.

Without speaking a word, he and Big Tree had looked at one another during those five days, wondering if at last the white man had decided to kill them and was taking them to the place of their death. He had himself decided it did not matter. He had lived a long life, a good life filled with juicy buffalo fat and moist, warm-skinned women. But lately, with these heavy iron shackles he wore on his ankles and wrists, with the white man's bad food so filled with weevils and dust, and the warm water dipped from mossy kegs, along with the beatings he had to endure at the hand of the white Tehannas guards, Satanta didn't really want to live any longer. If the white man chose to hang him now, so be it.