Latigo 2, p.2
Latigo 2, page 2
“The white men are the same, Wolf That Walks. Except there are more of them.”
“There seems no end to the white man’s number. And the Crow people are few, Two Trails. You must stay with us. Because it is known that there is no place to equal Crow country.”
“I know.” They spoke in Crow.
“And although many have tried, no one can take our land from us. For it has always been Crow land.”
“Always?” Cole said with a tight smile.
“Ever since we took it from the Shoshoni people,” Wolf That Walks added slyly, but Cole had lost his smile.
“I go back to the white man’s camps to hunt down murderers. And to clear my name.” Cole spoke of the impostor. “So today I go on the buffalo hunt to prove to myself that I am ready for the trail.”
Wolf That Walks said, “I think it is dangerous for you to hunt today.”
“I need the test. And I must donate meat to the lodges of those who have helped me.”
“There is another reason you should not go. Aside from weakness.”
“My mind is made up.”
“You remember Red Knife?” the Indian said. “From your youth?”
“What I remember about Red Knife is not pleasant.”
“He is back with us.”
Cole’s gaze settled on the coppery features of Wolf That Walks. “I thought he was an army scout.”
“No longer with the pony soldiers. He does not speak well of you, Two Trails. And you know why.” The Indian glanced significantly at the lodge where Cole had emerged only minutes before. It was purposely set apart from other lodges. It was the residence of Dark Star, a medicine woman who demanded and received her privacy.
“Do not go on the hunt,” Wolf That Walks advised. “Give yourself a chance to recover from your wound.”
“I am recovered.”
“But your mind is bound to be slow. And you must be alert and quick to smell danger, if Red Knife gets at your back. Which he will.”
“I’ll have one eye on him. One eye on buffalo.”
Dark Star called to him, and Cole entered the lodge. In the dimness he could see the whites of her eyes. She stood by the small fire where she had prepared their morning meal. A faint breeze blew down through the smoke hole where lodgepoles were lashed together.
“I will give you a reason not to go on the hunt,” she said softly. She lifted the dress of deerskin over her head. She came to him, wearing only a shift that failed to hide small but perfectly shaped breasts. “Let them hunt. You stay with me.” She gestured at the bed of furs.
“Wait until the hunt is over.” He smiled and stroked her soft chin.
“I overheard what Wolf That Walks told you. Red Knife has come back from the whites. He knows you’ve been staying here with me, of course.”
“He was in love with you once.”
“Red Knife will go on the hunt. And it will mean danger for you.”
“I must bring in my share of buffalo.”
She tried to argue.
“I have to prove to myself that I can still shoot. That my eye is sharp and that I can face danger. Above all, prove that I am a man.”
“Last night in our bed you proved that.” But when she failed to sway him, her lovely mouth tightened. “A buffalo hunt is madness ... for you. You are not ready.”
“All these weeks the Crow provided me with food. Now I must repay.”
“There will always be buffalo to hunt ...”
He shook his head. “You and I know better. You see the future in your medicine fire. But all I have to do is look and listen and know that one day soon the great herds will vanish.”
He kissed her and stepped outside, thinking of the problem the Indians faced. Even a grand duke had come across the ocean to participate in the sport of the bison hunt. The duke’s party, so Cole had heard, was a small mobile city in itself, providing as much luxury as possible in the high country for the royal presence. Over a thousand head of buffalo had been slaughtered, so it was claimed. All that excited the grand duke was the thrill of the shoot. That he was helping keep the Indian belly empty probably did not occur to him. And the army officers who accompanied him on the hunt, so it was said, were only carrying out government policy. And this was to reduce the food supply of the enemy and eventually bring him to his knees.
A method much safer than to meet him in combat. At first the army had scoffed when experts proclaimed that the finest light cavalry in the world was the Cheyenne in the north, the Comanche in the south. Now there were believers. Hence the new policy to eliminate the Indian’s main food source, the buffalo.
Dark Star, tall and graceful in deerskin dress, black hair shining in the morning light, came to stand beside Cole.
“Please, Cole, don’t go ...”
There was a splashing of hooves in the stream that flashed through the trees as the horse herd was being driven to the flats north of camp. Soon braves would mount up for the hunt. One day soon it would all be gone. Cole’s eyes were bitter. The free life of the Indian, the hunting.
When he mentioned this, she said, “That is why you must stay with us and not return to the white world. We need your knowledge to help us deal with the pale skins.”
“You know I have other work!”
“It could be your death,” she said quickly. “Stay with us.”
It was an old argument. When he had first been brought to camp, half dead from the bullet wound in his chest, he had been too weak to respond. But as he began to recover, he tried to explain. There was still the vengeance trail ahead of him, the trackdown.
She reached up to his buckskin shirt and touched the area of the fresh scar, as if to remind him of his mortality. A bullet fired by a man he had finally tracked down. One of those five who had coldly murdered his parents. He had pursued them relentlessly for over a year. Two of them had died by his hand.
The third one, Bill Cutter, he had been about to capture.
But a pioneering family named Kinsacker, moving westward, had become involved. Rather than risk a shot that might have struck the wife and mother of Kinsacker’s children, Cole deliberately fired over her head.
Directly behind the woman, using her as a shield, was Bill Cutter, one of the five murderers. Cutter then had a clear shot at Cole.
His bullet knocked Cole to the narrow mountain roadway. Cutter had been about to blow out Cole’s brains, but at that moment Cole was dimly aware of the whir of an arrow, the crunching sound of razor-sharp flint arrowhead against bone. Cutter collapsed. The arrow had come from the bow of a Cheyenne chief. Earlier in the day, Cutter had made the mistake of shooting the chief’s ten-year-old son in order to steal the boy’s pony. Cutter’s own horse had gone lame.
The Cheyenne chief had trailed Cutter and exacted full vengeance. And at the same time had saved Cole from taking Cutter’s bullet in the head.
No one else was left on the road but the chief and the seriously wounded Cole Cantrell. The family in the covered wagon that had been briefly involved in the tragedy had fled in terror. Only a faint wheel rattle and bray of the hard-pushed mule team marked their flight.
So great was the Cheyenne chief’s hatred of all whites that Cole might have been left in the road to bleed to death.
Cole in his delirium uttered a death chant learned from the Crow. This, in fact, had saved his life. For the chief then considered him to be one of them, not a hated white such as the one who had left his young son for dead.
The chief took Cole to the Cheyenne encampment. Then, as had happened before, Dark Star involved herself in Cole’s life. She took him home with her.
It was some weeks before Cole realized that in the white man’s world he was considered dead. Kinsacker of the pioneering family had seen him shot. Had seen Cutter standing over him with a cocked pistol. That was when Kinsacker had fled.
Cole’s body had never been found.
The Indian art of herbal healing and the vibrant touch of Dark Star’s hands had eventually restored his health. That and his own determination to live. Because he still had his parents to avenge.
And today, dressed in buckskins, wearing moccasins, Cole looked more Indian than white. At times his dark aquiline features seemed to show more of the Crow blood of his mother than the white of his father, who had been a mountain man turned rancher.
Dark Star moved to stand in front of him, her necklace swaying. “If you must go on the hunt, then I will use my powers as medicine woman to protect you.”
He smiled down into her troubled eyes. “You have not failed me yet.” There were times when he questioned her mystical powers. But he had to admit that his survival had at times verged on the uncanny. Bucking almost overwhelming odds against killers who had been hired to throw his parents off their land or kill them.
Killers hired by one of the most powerful men in America, Claudius Max of Python, which owned Centurion-Pacific Railroad. It had been the Cantrell land that the railroad coveted for a right-of-way.
Dark Star tried to sway him. “When the hunt is over, let us announce to the chiefs that a wedding feast should be planned.”
Cole hated to hurt her. He explained as before why he could not take a wife.
“Two of those men are still alive. The souls of my parents will never rest. And neither will I until they are dead. It’s something I have to do.”
She looked anxious. “There might come a time when my medicine will fail you,” Dark Star reminded as she had many times. A rarity among the tribes, a medicine woman who believed strongly in her own power. But when the life of someone she held dear was dependent upon those powers, her burden was all the greater.
Cole was aware of this. But he was not sure as to what was mystical and what could be considered pure chance. His father, who had been among Indians most of his life, always spoke in hushed tones when telling of things he had seen done by medicine men. Things that could not be explained in ordinary terms.
Word that Cole was to join the buffalo hunt had spread through the camp. A young Crow led up the pony Cole was to ride that day. It was an honor for the boy to serve Cole Latigo Cantrell, known among the Crow as Two Trails.
Cole had already decided on three weapons for that day, his Henry rifle, a bow and arrow, and a war lance. He was proficient in each and intended to test his skills under fire in the dangerous hunt.
He rigged a scabbard for his rifle. Then, with the other weapons, he mounted up. “A-ho, holy woman.” Cole saluted Dark Star and rode away, leaving her to stand alone in the new sun, a look of fear on the beautiful face.
Just before the creek was reached, a brave swung in beside Cole’s pony. Cole saw Red Knife’s cold sidelong glance.
“Weeks you have been in the lodge of Dark Star, so I hear,” said Red Knife, anger thinning his voice.
“She nursed me back to health,” Cole snapped. Sunlight glittered on the creek ahead.
Red Knife swore. He was a stocky man with a missing right ear, lost in a knife fight. Until recently he had been scout under Colonel Timberlake. He was in his late twenties, Cole’s age.
When Cole as a boy had visited the Crow camp with his mother, Red Knife was one of those who resented his presence. Red Knife’s white blood came from a renegade, Cole’s from a famous trapper, revered by the Indians. A chief had reprimanded Red Knife and his cronies for their treatment of Cole. After that, Cole was accepted. Grudgingly by Red Knife.
“Soon you will leave for the world of whites,” Red Knife said in his familiar snarl, “for all time.”
Cole met the challenge. “I will be back from time to time.”
“One day soon the lodge of Dark Star will be closed to you, Two Trails!”
“That will be her decision,” Cole said sharply.
In addition to his war lance, Red Knife was also armed with a throwing ax. Sight of it at Red Knife’s belt reminded Cole that he had once bested the man in a contest of accuracy and distance with the throwing ax.
Red Knife said, “I will marry Dark Star. That is my decision!”
He spurred past the mounted braves on the grassy flats. They looked at him as he roared past them, raising dust. The actions of an angry, thoughtless man to wind his mount before the hunt.
Tall Tree, a subchief, angrily shook his war lance. “That fool Red Knife will stampede the buffalo before we are ready!”
And he had already. Cole was aware of a sound that reminded him of muted thunder. He felt vibration from the ground through the body of his mount.
Cole and the others raced to intercept the herd, which was now in full flight. Thundering hooves slammed the ground as hundreds of bison, shaggy heads lowered, roared southward in a great tidal wave of flesh. It was a sight that never failed to send Cole’s heart racing. Even as he looked on, urging his pony to top speed, he experienced a twinge of sadness, that it might soon end, never to be seen again by the eye of man.
Wolf That Walks came pounding up on a paint pony, the dark face concerned. “Remember my warning about Red Knife!” he shouted above the thunder. “Do not let him at your back!”
Cole nodded and waved a hand to show that he understood.
Already he was at full gallop with the others. Spring sunlight bathed naked torsos of braves whose ponies matched the stride of the stampeding herd. Speeding ponies closed in. The air was filled with whoops of triumph, with rifle shots. Bison crashed, rolling, hooves flashing in the air. Bow strings twanged.
To test the strength of his right arm after the long convalescence, Cole quickly moved in on a lumbering bull. Thrusting out with the war lance, Cole felt it sink deep under the right foreleg. The bull floundered, bellowing, the head of the lance still embedded in its flesh. It took an arrow from the quiver slung over his shoulder before the great animal was still. Cole was disappointed in himself. He was rusty. That initial thrust with the war lance should have been sufficient. After retrieving his lance, he pushed on.
Another bull caught his eye. This time the thrust with the war lance was lethal. The animal crashed. Cole spurred after another. An arrow into the throat caused this one to stumble on a few steps, then go down as if the sky itself had fallen. To Cole, nothing equaled the thrill of the hunt. A true test of courage to cope with such a wall of living flesh. Always the threat of a sharp horn to disembowel horse or rider. A heavy hoof to smash a skull if you were unlucky enough to be hurled into the path of the onrushing herd.
Only supreme horsemanship and cool nerve enabled a man to survive the many twists and turns into and out of the stampeding animals, to roar in and then spin away in safety after the kill had been made. All maneuvers with the pony were at top speed, the eyes of the pony round, nostrils flared, mane streaming in the wind, and everywhere was bedlam, gunshots, screams of triumph.
Should a pony step into a badger hole at such speed a leg would snap like a dried stick and catapult its rider under the crushing weight of plunging animals. Cole had witnessed the results of such a spill.
But you could not consider risks. This was more than a game, it was survival. Only the buffalo could provide in sufficient quantity meat needed so desperately.
And on this spring day Cole felt a return of his youth, of his first buffalo hunt, his parents proud when they learned how many animals he had downed for the good of the camp. Even as it crossed his mind, as he swung again toward the close-packed mass of thundering bison, he felt a clutch of sadness. When this hunt was ended there would be no White Elk to commend a son, no Badger Cantrell with the stoicism of a mountain man acknowledging with the eyes his pride in the accomplishment of his offspring.
With memory came the rest of it: his homecoming. The horror of his long-delayed return from the war after Appomattox. How he had anticipated sight of his parents after four long years. Finding instead of his mother’s embrace, instead of a hearty back slap from his father, their bodies in the yard. They had been savaged by arrow and knife and bullet. The house and barn lay in smoking ruin. Everywhere were moccasin tracks. But he was too experienced in reading such things to be fooled. The killings had been done by white men, not renegade Indians.
When he had brought the bodies of his parents to the Crow camp, as both had requested long before should death overtake them, Dark Star had told of seeing the faces of the five white men in her medicine fire. Although she had been unable to name them, each had been described in detail. At first he was skeptical. Later he had to admit that descriptions of the two he had killed, Stark and Lewt, and the third one he had been about to capture, Bill Cutter, had been uncannily accurate. One of the two men left for him to track down, Al Dain, was pockmarked. The fifth man, Doak Lancer, was a redhead, the most dangerous one of the five, Dark Star had warned him.
And in that flurry of memory he found he had drifted too close to the thundering buffalo. Only a few seconds had passed, but it was enough. A bull lunged with sharp horn and missed his pony’s breastbone by the length of a finger. Cole hauled the pony back. It reared, forefeet pawing the air.
“My drifting mind almost got us killed!” he shouted in Crow to the pony.
The vast sea of rampaging animals with their humped backs and gleaming horns nearly filled the broad valley. Dust rose in great clouds. The incessant roar hammered eardrums as if a hundred loaded ore wagons rumbled out of control down a mountainside.
Cole used his last arrow on a fat young cow. Then he drew his Henry rifle. He spotted a young bull in the avalanche. It would offer more camp meat than the cow. He pounded after it. Cole squeezed trigger. Crack of the Henry could barely be heard above the tumult.
But instead of collapsing, the bull wavered for an instant. Then with a bellow of pain and rage it wheeled out of the pack. Droplets of blood flashed redly in the sunlight from the furrow that the bullet had cut in the neck hair. A saber horn tip brushed Cole’s left thigh. Somehow he was able to rein the speeding pony out of the bull’s reach. He was about to congratulate himself when something flashed past the side of his face. And in the next instant the rampaging bull went down, the blade of a throwing ax embedded in its skull.
