Tie My Bones to Her Back (30 page)

Oh yes, the guns were among them now, real sharpshooters making their stands, skinners ripping the hot thick two-dollar hides, oh sure, clawing at the vermin under their greasy shirts, cursing and spitting cotton in the heat of the morn, rotten teeth in hairy faces, bloodshot eyes, the stench of stale sweat and fresh gore, buffalo guts leaking a foul thin gruel from poorly thrown rifle shots, the ugly incessant whine and nip of the buffalo gnats . . .

But do I want to go back to that?

He thought for a long, sorry moment.

I don’t want to go back to that.

Raleigh put down the field glasses and fell into the old familiar hunker, butt back on one heel, which all Southerners worthy of the name can hold for hours—our natural posture, he thought, in the plowed red fields or under a tulip tree in the flourlike roadside dust, or whittling and spitting in the cool shade of storefront galleries from Richmond to Savannah to Natchez to Galveston. He felt a sudden pang of homesickness. Why sure, he missed those ugly paintless bare-boards cool shadowed galleries, the leather-faced men squatting there in the shade, straw hats tipped back on their bone-white foreheads, chewing plug, spewing neatly in long dark arcs an artillery of spit into the dust of the street, the long, soft, slow, drawling talk of crops and horseflesh and niggers and womenfolk, the easy circulation of a cool, beaded stoneware jug among the conversationalists, the sharp hot bite of clear corn . . .

He pulled a flat pint bottle from his hunting shirt, drew the cork with his teeth, and took the first grim slug of the morning. Sir Harry’s single-malt Scotch. He’d hated it at first, the medicinal odor and taste of it, but he’d grown used to it; indeed, he’d grown to like it. Many things in life were like that. At first he’d hated the scent and taste of his cowardice, woke up sweating the night after a skirmish from which he’d run, but soon he grew accustomed to the familiar feel of funk, it felt natural. Now perhaps he was growing fond of it, perversely so, but fond none-the-less. He took another swallow of whiskey, shuddered, and replaced the cork, pounding it down with the heel of his hand. Better to save some for the ride back.

As he slipped the bottle back in his shirt, a sudden certainty struck him.
Hostiles out there.
The hair on the back of his neck tingled. He knew they were there, somewhere, as surely as he knew the gripe of his own bowels at the prospect. Raleigh sniffed the air—a faint hot breeze wafted up the face of the butte from the prairie below. No, he couldn’t smell them. Maybe he’d seen something from the corner of his eye. He crouched and raised the glasses, remembering to shade the lenses from the high climbing sun with the cupped palms of his hands so they wouldn’t throw a giveaway flash.

Only on his third careful sweep of the prairie did he spy them, a dozen riders at least, just slow-moving specks at first, then more clearly; two dozen spotted ponies with skinny men aboard, snaking along the base of a low ridge to the northeast. His eye caught the glint of a weapon—gun barrel or lancehead—that’s what gave them away. That’s what I must have sensed before, that flash in the corner of my eye. Northeast. The Indians were between Sir Harry’s column and the North Canadian River, the safety of the establishment at Adobe Walls where Rath and old Myers had their stores now, and Jim Hanrahan his saloon. To the south lay only sagebrush tangles and alkali pans and prickly pear for a long, long way, until you came to Rio Grande del Norte and Mexico, which wasn’t much better than hell.

At this distance, even with the glasses, he couldn’t make out what tribe they were, but in this country they’d be Comanche or Kiowa, or possibly Apache, which wasn’t much better for the future of a man’s hair. He watched them a few minutes more, to make sure of the war party’s direction. It was on a collision course with Lord Malcontent’s baggage train. Raleigh went over the western end of the butte and scanned his backtrail. He could just make out the canvas of the first wagons emerging through the haze. He started for the edge, to begin the laborious climb back down. Then the worm bit him once more—the old familiar worm of his fear . . .

It would be a whole lot easier, a lot safer, to stay right here. The Indians would have scouts out. They’d surely see him hightailing it back to the wagons. Maybe they’d cut him off—Vixen was a smooth-riding pony but not a fast one, not as fast in a sprint as those quick wiry little war ponies of the Comanche. Surely they’ll cut me off, he thought. That’s what I’ll do, then. Stay put. Let Lord Malcontent have his grand and much desired Armageddon with the redskins, the one he’s so confident of winning. And maybe he will win. More power to him: let him win, pray for it. He certainly has men and rifles and powder and ball enough to handle a war party of only twenty or thirty savages. He has the Gatling. What could I do for him, anyway? Hungover like this I couldn’t hit my hinder with a hoe handle. Do I owe him anything? I’m no more than another servant to him. And what the hell, he’s just another greenhorn, a pampered, pompous foreigner, full of himself to overflowing. Let the Comanches have his hair.

Keeping low so as not to skylight himself, Raleigh went back to his first vantage point. The Indians were closer now, only a mile off. He saw that there were more than he’d counted before. Many more. Perhaps as many as a hundred in the war party. And it certainly was a war party—he could make out the paint now, reds and yellows and sky blues, blacks and bone whites, some of the warriors with blue-white hailstones painted on their chests, others with skulls and leg bones and severed hands in garish yellow. The ponies were painted, too, with spoked red suns and stars and comets and yellow-black lightning flashes. He scanned the column carefully. Mainly bows and arrows, lances, a few rifles. Most of them were Kiowa, he saw from the way they dressed their hair. But also some Cheyenne in there—taller, slimmer, paler-skinned men with long black braids, one carrying the wicked crook-handled lance they favored, and one . . .

Hellfire—it was Jenny Dousmann!

His heart hammered as if it were busting his rib cage. He fumbled the pint out of his shirt, uncorked it, and took a long pull—then another. Then he raised the glasses again.

He’d know that blond hair anywhere, that jounce of bosom beneath the doeskin shirt. And Tom of course, he saw Tom now, riding beside her on that pony of his. All savage now, white man begone, his leggings black along the seams with human hair, a pipe hatchet at his belt, the only thing modern about him the shiny blue-black rifle in the panther-skin boot under his leg—a brand-new Winchester, it looked like. Tom’s face was painted red and black, teeth flashing through black lips as he talked animatedly to Jenny.

Her face looked harder than Raleigh remembered, no paint but burned almost black as Tom’s from the sun of early summer, the winds of the prairie. She carried a bow case slung across her back and Otto’s Sharps across the pommel of her high-ridged Cheyenne saddletree.

And who was that riding just behind her, draped in a wolfskin? Then he recognized the face, the set of the rider’s shoulders. It was Otto, by God. With only one arm. Otto dressed as a buffalo wolf. Carrying a spear couched beneath his armpit like some ghostly reincarnation of the Visigoth, come back to purge the plains of Christians, rip raw meat from the bones of the godfearing, reduce the civilized world to ashes.

God help Sir Harry.

20

J
ENNY WAS IN
control. All the way south from the Big Horns she had felt the doubts falling away, felt the bonds of her upbringing burn away in the fire of a new-sparked passion. Death to the Pale Intruders. At first she tried to keep the attention of the Cheyenne soldiers on their primary mission—get down to the Yarner as quickly and quietly as possible, locate the Buffalo Butte and complete their quest, no fuss, no casualties, no side trips for any purpose, and particularly not for war or thievery. If only one of them was killed, even wounded, their strength would be diminished—certainly they could see that?

But they couldn’t. Surely if the mischief they worked was directed at whites, there would just as surely be pursuit and fierce retribution. Yet Tom merely smiled when she urged caution.

“That’s not how we play this game,” he said.

“Then how do we play it?”

“For fun,” he said, laughing.

“For keeps,” she said.

He thought about that for a moment. “You’re right. The spiders think death is a matter of choice. They all want to live forever.” He shook his head, still smiling. “No fun living like that.”

“War is fun?”

“Try it. You like to hunt. I’ve seen you happy with death. Hunt men for a while. They hunt back.”

The party had ridden steadily to the south-southwest, crossed the Pawnee Fork, where a large party of Crazy Knives—Kiowas—was camped as if expecting their arrival. An older warrior called Big Face was leading the party. With the Kiowas were a few young Southern Cheyennes. Tom and his Elk brothers knew them from past adventures. One was the son of the famous Peace Chief Stone Calf. The son’s name was Red Arm, a handsome young man, though sullen, a look of death in his eyes. He was so ashamed of his father’s pleas for peace, Tom said, that he had taken the war trail and vowed not to return alive—a “suicide soldier,” Tom called him.

“They’re headed to the Yarner to kill spider hide men. Red Arm knows this country, he’s been many times to the Buffalo Butte and can take us there. It’s as Little Wolf told us—the place where the buffalo come from. We’ll travel with them then.”

“Don’t go haring off on any raids, Tom. We can’t afford a costly fight, not until we’ve completed the task Little Wolf assigned us.”

She might as well have cautioned the wind, and she knew it. The Elk Soldiers merely smiled and nodded assent, and raided anyway. She went with them.

Somehow they knew, perhaps by some extrasensory means, when there were people in remote places. She’d seen Tom do the same with animals. Once, while hunting sheep high in the Big Horns, she had spent the better part of an hour scanning a barren cirque for signs of life. Nothing but boulders. Then Tom came up, put a finger to his lips, motioned her to sit, and disappeared over the lip. She heard a shot. Half an hour later he returned with blood beneath his fingernails and the head and hide of a freshly skinned big horn draped over his shoulders.

“How did you know it was there?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he said, puzzled for a moment. Then he smiled. “Well, I did, really. I just felt it. Wouldn’t you know where your food was in your house, or your money? Wouldn’t you know if a thief was in your home?”

The Cheyennes had done the same on the trip south, often sneaking off at night to return in the morning with scalps or ponies or meat. Sometimes all three. The meat was beef from the many herds of cattle being driven up from Texas. She had seen the dust from a few of these herds and thought at first they were buffalo. But there were no buffalo left in that country—not in Nebraska, or Kansas, or even in eastern Colorado. The hide men had done a thorough job.

T
OWARD MOONSET ONE
evening Jenny rode with the band toward yet another cattle herd. It was full dark when they neared it, riding quietly up a deep coulee. Gnarled mesquite lined the banks, black against the night like hanging trees. Leaving the horses in the care of Yellow Eyes, they crept through the sagebrush toward muttering cattle. A single young cowhand rode watch on the longhorns, singing to them in a sweet choirboy tenor to calm their night fears as he circled the herd.

Tom sent his Elk Soldiers creeping upwind of the herd, signing them to await his cry. Otto disappeared into the sagebrush, down a meandering dry wash.

The cowboy was riding toward Tom and Jenny, slouched in his saddle, swaying rhythmically as he sang, backlit by the dim glow of the drovers’ campfire half a mile away. As he approached, Jenny could see his face in the starshine, young and guileless, unsuspecting, dreamy-eyed, half asleep as he rode his round. Tom nocked an arrow to his bowstring, raised the bow, and began his draw. The cowhand was close now, serene in his innocence. Jenny laid a hand on Tom’s bow arm—
Wait
. Tom looked at her in puzzlement. He shrugged her off and shot. The cowboy shrieked once, loud, and toppled backward over his pony’s rump. Tom yipped. In the near-distance the Elk Soldiers began to howl like wolves, running their ponies forward into the herd, waving their blankets. The longhorns leaped instantly to their deerlike feet, whirled, and pelted away from the threat—back toward the drovers’ campfire in full stampede. Tom’s bow twanged again and a steer fell, skidding forward on its far shoulder. Then another arrow, and another fell. The Elks ran up and began to butcher the still-quivering cows as Yellow Eyes approached with the pack ponies.

Jenny walked over to where the cowboy lay staring up at the stars in sightless amazement. She wrenched the arrow from his chest and threw it into the darkness.