A forgotten evil, p.12
A Forgotten Evil, page 12
“Them ponies weren’t shod, Jim, and there was a broke arrow still under the carcass right where it was felled.”
“You don’t say.”
“It’s a fact.”
Jim looked out over the garden again and said, “Maybe it’s time you went on back to Kentucky, Caleb.”
“I got no home left in Kentucky, Jim, just this here hole in the ground.”
“Why, I’d say that’s just a plumb crazy reason, if I wasn’t in the same situation myself. Say,” he said, turning, “why don’t you and me go cut a little wood?”
“It’s mighty deep snow out there, Jim.”
“Sissy girl scairt of a little snow?” he asked, pushing his hat back from his big face and grinning.
Even empty, the wagon was a considerable pull out of the draw, the mules lunging chest deep against the drifts. Jumping down, Jim put his back to the wagon, and they soon pulled atop the plain. There, the snow was more shallow, having been swept clean by the wind.
“Maybe I’ll just harness you up,” Caleb said, snapping the reins. “You got more heft than either one of these here ole army mules.”
“Why, it’s a tempting offer,” Jim said. “Better than blacksmithing for the cavalry, I figure, if it weren’t for eating oats and having some woodcutter cuss my danged ear off all the time.”
When they passed the prairie dog town, the population barked in alarm at the stranger in the wagon, dashing into their holes with indignation. Caleb pointed out the buffalo kill, little left now except a few polished bones and the faint pink of blood in the snow.
“It’s Cheyenne, all right,” Jim said, turning the broken shaft of the arrow between his fingers.
By noon they’d cut a good half load, all from a single old hackberry that twisted out of a rock outcrop not far from the stream. Even in the cold, sweat dripped from the ends of their noses as they worked. Cutting wood was a sight easier with someone to help, and Jim was a good hand. There was no doubting that as far as Caleb was concerned. What he lacked in skill with an axe he made up for in brute strength, perseverance, and a winning way.
At noon they built a fire from the hackberry limbs, and Caleb heated snow in the coffee pot, pitching in a handful of coffee grounds as it started to boil. Afterward, they ate leftover cornbread and jerked beef that Jim had brought with him from the fort.
The wagon groaned under the load as they worked their way back to camp that afternoon. The day cooled under the sunset, orange rays spraying into the icy sky.
As they approached the rise to the prairie dog town, the mules bore down against the load. Caleb stood, popping the reins. “Giddup,” he yelled. “Ho! Ho!” At just that moment, the wagon tipped into a prairie dog hole, and Caleb spilled over the side as if shot, carbine, axe, and all. The mules stopped, twisting their necks at the unending mystery of man, and from above, Jim laughed, a great roaring laugh, and slapped his knee with glee.
“Goddang it,” Caleb said, wiping the snow from his face and the front of his coat, but when he looked up, Jim stood in the seat of the wagon, waving his hand for Caleb to be quiet. Dropping down, Jim gathered up his rifle and slid off the wagon, placing a finger over his mouth and pointing up the hill with another.
“I heard something,” he said, whispering. “Get your carbine, and keep it quiet.”
They labored their way to the summit on their hands and knees and peered over the top. Snow clung to their beards and the brows of their eyes, and their breaths steamed in the frigid cold. In the basin below, three men gathered about a campfire, their horses tied to the limbs of a mesquite that poked from under a snowbank. Two of the men wore the blue coats of cavalry, the other, squatting next to the fire, a buckskin coat and hair long, but both britches and hat marked him as cavalry as well.
“Who are they?” Caleb asked.
“It’s them deserters, I figure, but that ain’t the half of it,” Jim said, pointing to the hill below them.
A dozen Indians just out of sight of the deserters gathered up like wasps preparing to attack. They were donned in buffalo robes and blankets against the cold. Their ponies were thin and gaunt from want of fodder, and their heads hung low with weariness.
The lead warrior gestured with his hand, and the others tied off their reins, stringing their bows, orchestrated and skilled and lethal.
“What we going to do?” Caleb asked, his heart thumping in his chest.
“There ain’t nothing to do,” Jim said, turning onto his back, “ ’cept pray they don’t come over this hill, ’cause we can’t kill them or outrun them neither one.”
The leader threw his blanket to the side and worked his way up the hill. At the top, he looked back at the waiting warriors and then stood, exposing himself to the soldiers below, daring them against the lowering light of sunset.
Just then the man in the buckskin stood.
“It’s a goddang Indian, boys!” he shouted, pointing to the warrior, who now limped across the rim of the hill like a bird wounded and unable to fly.
“It’s a trick,” Caleb said, his voice trembling at the prospect of what was about to happen.
“Let’s get him,” one of the deserters cried out, mounting his horse, the others following suit as they yelped up the hill in excitement at their luck and the odds before them.
By now the warrior had dropped below the rim, fatigued and disheartened, his leg dragging, a wounded and pitiful animal.
Whooping and hollering from behind, the deserters pursued their prey, their horses racing, wide-eyed and frenzied with spur-bloodied sides. As they topped the hill, the waiting warriors attacked, and the evening was seized with the whine of bowstrings and the thud of shanked and mortal arrows. Throughout the valley, the screams of the deserters rose as they clutched at their saddle horns, their bodies bristling with arrows. Stunned and dying, they rode like children at play, round and round, all fall down, their blue coats seeping with blood, their heads bobbing against the pitch and scream of their wounded horses.
And as their mounts tumbled, kicking and pitiful, on their sides, the soldiers crumpled like discarded ragdolls, but even then the warriors did not stop, circling again and again, casting spears attached to their wrists with leather thongs, to thrust and to retrieve from the lifeless bodies, over and over like some mindless and horrible refrain.
Others fired yet more arrows into the red smears across the snow as they circled on their ponies, now white-eyed with the smell of gore and death and blood. And when they were exhausted and could fire no more, they leaped from their ponies, stripping their victims of their clothes, their bodies shriveled and impotent in death, and with their knives they opened their bellies and cast out the entrails, and with bloodied hands carved great wounds in the thighs, and buttocks, and calves, and sawed away patches of scalp, lifting them high to bleed in the white innocence of the snow.
Caleb and Jim lay waiting, their hearts stilled and frozen, until there was no more, until at last the warriors rode away, satiated and victorious, their war calls lingering long after they’d disappeared beyond the white swell of the prairie.
Rising, Jim dusted away the snow from his front.
“Caleb,” he said, “there’s a lesson to be learned from this.”
“What’s that?” Caleb asked, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
“Don’t never chase a Cheyenne warrior over a hill,” he said, ’less you’re damn certain what’s on the other side.”
“It’s a point,” Caleb said, “and one I ain’t apt to forget.”
It was dark when they reached camp, and by the time the wood was unloaded, the stars had filled the cold blackness of the sky. After blowing into his hands to warm them, Jim untied his horse.
“I best be on my way, Caleb,” he said, swinging into the saddle.
“Ain’t you spending the night, Jim? It’s a far ride to the fort and a cold one to boot.”
“It’s those danged coyotes,’” Jim said, looking back the way they’d come. “By morning there won’t be enough left to know if them boys was deserters or kilt buffalo.”
“You ain’t going back there?”
“It’s a sure bet I am,” he said, reining his horse about. “There’re three months' pay out there, and I aim to have it.”
That night Caleb built his fire hot and high and sat with his back to the cellar door. From the night there came the yip and snarl of coyotes, Caleb’s scalp tightening in the certainty and horror of their feed. Tomorrow, as Jim had said, there would be little left, pieces of hair, bits of clothing, the trace of pink in the snow.
But it was not this alone that caused him to reach for the Spencer, to lay it across his lap, because when he and Jim had ridden from the bloody basin, he had still not been certain, had not told of what he’d seen.
But now, alone in the solitude of this star-filled night, he could see him, clear now in his mind, the warrior with his limp, with his cunning at the rim of the hill, with the red bits of cloth turned into the braid of his hair.
Chapter 11
Within a few days the snow passed, as it is wont to do on the prairie, the winds shifting warm and dry from the desert. Caleb took advantage by working long hours laying in wood next to his cellar.
But as the weeks passed, the best cutting grew scarce, forcing him ever farther from camp. Even though these were long and lonely times, his love for the prairie germinated from the tiniest seed, grew from the smallest capitulation to its serenity, to a full-blown celebration of its expanse and mystery. In the prairie’s isolation, he found peace; in its bleakness, a determination and will to survive; and in its cruelty, courage beyond all that he’d known.
Trips to the fort were infrequent, driven in part by the scarcity of wood, in the other part by his disdain for Sergeant Wins, who without fail managed to rob him of his due. “Might as well burn prairie grass," he’d say, "as this here tender,” or “green as buffalo shit, ain’t it, boy,” or “wet to the core,” or “the load’s short,” or “too much dirt,” or “burns in a stink.” Whatever it was, Caleb knew with the certainty of sunrise that he would ride away with less than what he'd had coming.
On the other hand, Jim Ferric was forever the bright spot on those trips, bringing him the news, news that settled and pooled in such a place as Fort Harker, an important juncture for the never-ending stream of strangers rumbling down the Santa Fe Trail.
It never failed that Jim had something or other to give him, a loaf of bread from the bakery, a knife he’d forged from a mule shoe, a jar of strawberry jam traded out of the sutler’s store. “It ain’t but fair,” he’d say, “what with you helping out capturing them deserters and all.” Then he’d laugh, that big belly laugh that came from down deep in his humanity.
Caleb put together a fine load of walnut and loaded it for a trip to the rail camp. Not since Joan Monnet had loaned him the book had he been able to see her. Once, she was sick with the fever, they said, and could not be disturbed. Another time, the private car was gone, having been pulled back to Leavenworth for inspection and supplies, and Caleb was left to unload the wood at the siding. Each time the camp was farther away and the trail more difficult. Soon he would no longer be able to follow in the wagon, to keep pace across the rugged terrain. In any case, with the coming of spring, his livelihood was bound to dry up.
As he rode past the prairie dog town, the prairie dogs bobbed their heads in recognition and flitted their tails like Chinese fans. The smell of spring was in the air, and the south wind was laden with moisture and warmth. Every chance, Mule One and Mule Two worked at the tiny shoots of grass in anticipation of better times.
Fitz sat on a pile of ties and examined his carbine, now strung about his feet in a dozen pieces. When he looked up and saw Caleb, he waved his hat for him to approach.
“It’s been a while, Woodcutter,” he said, holding his carbine against the sun to peer down its barrel.
“Hello, Fitz. Thought I’d bring this load of walnut before you boys get all the way to Mexico.”
Fitz snapped the parts of his carbine back together one by one and squinted up into the sun.
“I’m afeared you’re a tad late, Woodcutter.”
“What do you mean?” Caleb asked, slipping down from the wagon.
“Monnet’s gone back to Saint Louis, ain’t he, and left that pretty daughter of his at Fort Harker.”
“Fort Harker?”
“Yup, that’s the one. Left her with the commander’s wife, living in splendor, or as near to it as you can come at Fort Harker. Guess she’s going to wait there for her intended hisself.”
Snubbing his mules up to a tie, Caleb sat down next to Fitz.
“What am I supposed to do with all this wood, Fitz? It’s a hell of a climb through them hills.”
“Well, sir, I figure the paymaster would take it off your hands this time, if he was here, but he ain’t, so I figure you’ll just have to carry it on back or dump it best you can. It’s coming up spring, Woodcutter. How long you aim on selling wood where wood ain’t needed no more?”
“Long as they buy it,” Caleb said.
Fitz set his carbine to the side and looked at him from under his hat. “Yes, sir, that’s what I thought, and as long as that pretty girl was around.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Caleb said, “except in passing.”
Standing, Fitz slid his carbine into the scabbard on his saddle before mounting up. “Woodcutter, my boy,” he said, “there ain’t nothing what endures more than a season and a quick spit in this here hell hole, that includes winter, Monnet, and this here railroad camp.”
“Yes, sir,” Caleb said, waiting for his point.
“Just something I noticed in passing,” he said, reining about his mount.
It was nigh on midnight by the time Caleb left to go back to his camp, the wagon still loaded with walnut, and it was high noon by the time he’d pulled out once more for Fort Harker with the same walnut load.
Leaning over the loading dock, Sergeant Wins cleared his jaw onto Mule Two’s rump.
“It’s a bit wormy, ain’t it,” he said.
“No, sir, it ain’t.”
“You can’t sell wormy wood to the army, boy, and expect a full load trade; ’sides, it’s coming up spring, and we ain’t going to need much more sorry wood, one way or the other.” He wet the end of his stub pencil and made his entry into his book. “Now, I got your tally right here. You just sign off and pick up your goods on the way out.”
“It’s short a quarter load, Sergeant, and this here’s prime walnut.”
“It’s wormy,” he said, “and ought go in the river, hadn’t I such a charitable heart.”
Gritting his teeth, Caleb turned into the wind to cool the heat from his face.
“Is that all?” he asked.
“Take this over to the commander’s quarters and make sure these here mules don’t leave no plops behind. The commander hates plops on his yard and would have me humping the rogue’s march for it.”
It was a fine load of walnut, and Caleb stacked it with care, watching the back door the whole time for a glimpse of Joan Monnet. Stalling, he cleaned up the bark and then cleaned again in the hope that she might appear. He turned to leave just as she stepped from the door.
“Hello,” she said, wisps of her hair feathering in the wind, catching for a moment in the corner of her mouth, as if in a caress.
“Miss,” he said, tipping his hat. “I heard you’d moved to Fort Harker. I was hoping I might catch you.”
“Oh?”
“To return the book you lent me out at the rail camp.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, her eyes like melted puddles of jade, “I’d forgotten altogether.”
“Here it is, Miss,” he said, taking the flour sack from under the seat. “I kept it best I could.”
“Did you enjoy it, Mr. . . .”
“Caleb Justin, Miss.”
“Now I remember, Mr. Justin. Did you find it to your liking?”
“Didn’t sleep for three days, Miss, and near froze in the process.”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes smiling, “that’s the way of it. I’m afraid I have no more books to offer, they having gone the way of my papa’s library.”
“It’s all right, Miss. With no more wood to cut, I’ll likely need be moving on anyway.”
She sat on the steps and pulled her knees into her arms, the alabaster turn of her ankles, and she studied him with a steady and genuine gaze.
“But where will you go?”
“I don’t know just yet, Miss, but it’s a big country for sure.”
“Yes,” she said, “it is a big country. It turns out I’ll not be going to Leavenworth as I had planned either.”
“Oh, Miss?”
“Lieutenant Gillian, my fiancé, is being assigned to Fort Dodge. The army is expanding the Quartermaster Division to take on additional supplies out of Fort Larned. It seems that they can’t do without him there.”
“Well, Miss, it’s the way of the army to change things up.”
“We’re to be married in Fort Dodge in the fall,” she said, pausing, “and without my papa’s attendance.” Looking into the prairie, she pushed the hair from her face and sighed. “Oh, well, I do hope Fort Dodge is better than Fort Harker.”
“It’s bound to be, Miss.”
She laughed, and her laugh lit him up, warmed him from the inside out, and he thought for just a moment how lucky a man was Lieutenant Gillian.
“Well, Mr. Justin, best of luck to you, and do be careful. The commander says it’s more dangerous with each passing day and that soon something must be done.”
“Yes, Miss,” he said, climbing onto his wagon, “and thanks for the book. It was a wonder and world far from my own.”
