In the Season of the Sun (4 page)

“You heard me. And that's the way of it,” Kilhenny retorted as his companions walked their mounts abreast of him, Pritchard to his right and Wallace to his left and the boy coming at a run, even closer. “Lower your gun or answer to me, Skintop.”

Pritchard stared at the larger man and finding no trace of weakness in the half-breed's iron gaze, lowered his rifle and eased the hammer forward.

“We'll take him with us,” Kilhenny repeated, turning toward Pike Wallace. The silver-haired man shook his head and sighed, staring past Kilhenny. “All right, you old bastard. Have your say. But it's a waste of breath.”

“I knew your father; I was close to him as a brother. I killed the grizz' that sent him under, dug his grave with my knife and hands,” Pike Wallace said, doffing his tam as he spoke. He slapped his leg with the hat. “So damn if I won't talk to you like your father would and say, ‘Mark my words, there is black luck in this, worse than any Irishman's.' You kill a man, then take his son for your own. Black luck, and you bring it on your own head.”

Kilhenny listened, then without a word rode at a canter up to the boy who emerged onto the trampled grass.

“Coyote! I seen 'em … Injuns! Must've been a hundred of 'em at least,” Tom exclaimed.

“Where's your brother?” Kilhenny said, studying the terrain.

“I don't know. We spied us a war party. Jacob run off to warn Pa. I heard gunshots, then the Injuns came back. What's it mean, Coyote, what's it mean? Was there a fight?”

Kilhenny scratched at his beard, speculating as to Jacob's fate. The boy never reached the camp. The Shoshoni probably intercepted and killed him.

“Who are they?” Tom asked, apprehensive. He pointed to Wallace and Pritchard who waited a few yards away.

“Friends of mine,” Kilhenny said. “They came to help but alas too late. Your ma and pa are dead. Jacob too, most likely, and the rest of the families either killed or taken captive to be raised as Injuns.”

Tom Milam's head sank forward onto his chest and his shoulders bunched together; a shudder passed through his small wiry frame, then another. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the rifle.

But he did not cry, and when he looked up, his red-rimmed eyes were free of tears.

“What'll I do?” he asked in a small voice.

“You can ride along with me if you've a mind to,” Kilhenny gruffly suggested.

Tom's features, though grief stricken, grew hard and shrewd beyond his years. “Depends on where you're bound,” the ten-year-old remarked, wiping a forearm across his eyes and nose.

Kilhenny threw back his head and loosed a bellowing laugh. The kid had more spunk than most men. He held his hand out, caught Tom's arm, and dragged the youth up behind him.

“Wherever the hell we want to.” Kilhenny took the rifle from Tom and pointing his horse south, rode like the wind, away from the river and smoke, the circling vultures, and the site of his treachery and black deed.

Jacob reached for the speck of light. He clawed his way out of darkness and the speck grew and grew, it widened and dispelled the darkness and shot through his skull and joined with a sudden searing pain.

Brighter and brighter.

A throbbing skull, pain searing his leg.

A backdrop of brilliance filled his eyes and delineated a patch of shadow, something large looming over him.

“Ahhh …” Jacob sat up and his right hand, still holding his Arkansas toothpick, slashed the air. The shadow screeched and flapped its wings and fluttered down the slope. A second shadow defined itself and Jacob looked up into the bare red face of a vulture. The carrion bird's hooked beak jabbed at the boy's eyes. Jacob raised an arm to defend himself, then swatted the persistent creature with the blade of his knife.

The vulture loosed a vengeful cry and headed down to the blackened ruins of the camp, where the scorched ground bore a less lively dinner, something a host of other vultures had already discovered.

Jacob sat upright, winced, and cradled his blood-caked forehead where the bullet had clipped his skull and plowed a furrow through his yellow hair back. He stared down at his pants leg where the nankeen cloth was torn to reveal a nasty wound. The turkey vulture had gouged a chunk of flesh out of his calf.

He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and managed to subdue the nausea sweeping over him. Then he stood, but his legs buckled and he fell on his hands and knees. He stood again, fell again, forced himself to try yet again, and this time the world ceased its spinning. His stomach cramped, but he resisted the sickness and took a halting step, then another, dry brush tugging at his legs, the earth beneath his feet giving way and threatening his balance.

A horse whinnied and emerged from the trees, and Jacob recognized one of Beaufort's breed mares, a brown horse brought all the way from Virginia. The animal favored its wounded right foreleg as it caught scent of Jacob and started toward him across the smoldering clearing. Several vultures eyed the mare as a future dinner.

Jacob stepped onto the blackened ground and glanced around him, the enormity of the massacre and the desperation of his predicament slowly sinking in.

“Mama … pa,” Jacob croaked. He stumbled forward and scattered a cluster of predatory birds. The vultures rose with great wingspans, six feet from tip to tip, in patient, lazy spirals.

In their wake the charred remains of Joseph and Ruth Milam were mercifully unrecognizable. Burned meat clinging to white bones, nothing more. But Jacob remembered where his parents had fallen. Seeing what fire and vultures had left, he doubled over and ran back toward the slope, and crawled hand over foot up the trail to the top of the bluff. Gravel stung his hands, slivers of shale nicked his flesh; but he reached the top of the bluff, fell to his knees, and losing all control, retched. Sobbing, he heaved until his gut was empty.

God God God God
, a prayer of one word repeated in his mind. He could form no other appeal, reduced as he was to utter simplicity by such a staggering loss. A shadow fell across him; he expected another damn buzzard and was surprised to find the mare had followed him up the slope.

Jacob straightened and clambered to his feet and walked, careening like a drunkard, to the animal. He caught hold of the mare's long brown mane and pulled himself up astride the horse. The nervous animal sidestepped and trotted onto the plain. Jacob, riding bareback, kept his legs in a tight grip on the animal's middle.

The boy guided the mare through the tall yellow grass and retraced the path to Tom. A quarter of an hour later Jacob brought the mare to a halt where Tom should have been. But all that remained of his younger brother's presence was the satchel with the butchered snake. Jacob shaded his eyes and scanned the terrain.

“Not little Tom, please, God, no,” Jacob said softly. “Tom! You hear me!”

“Tom!”

An echo was the only answer borne on a lonely breeze.

3

J
acob Milam ate raw snake and watched the campfires a quarter of a mile away gradually lose their luster as the cool evening hours wore on and the Shoshoni braves and their prisoners drifted into sleep, a frightened and fitful rest for one, a sleep of victory for the other. Jacob cut and skinned another morsel of meat and plopped it in his mouth, the bloody juices slaking what had been a terrible thirst. All day he had resisted the fresh-killed reptile, unable to countenance the idea of making it his dinner, but hunger had proved the best seasoning. In the darkness where he crouched below a hillock and made a cold camp, Jacob Milam dined on snake and was grateful for the meager sustenance.

He stared at the distant camp and imagined the braves raiding the supplies, gorging themselves on bacon and smoked ham and dried apples and jars of sweet preserves.

Jacob hoped Tom had gotten his share. Maybe Tom wouldn't want to be rescued and trade peach preserves for raw rattler. Jacob laughed at the notion. He had to bite down on his forearm to keep from making a sound that might carry to the Indian camp. His wounded head throbbed all the more and the laughter turned to weeping and tears rolled down his cheeks as the nightmarish morning replayed itself in his mind's eye, first, the treachery of Coyote Kilhenny, the murder of Jacob's father, the assault on the wagons, the trampling of his mother in the dust …

When Jacob could bear it no longer, he reached for the double-edged knife of his father, over a foot of steel flashing silver in the moonlight, and its lethal weight gave him courage. Anger replaced grief, and the tears ceased as his mind wrestled with a plan.

But nothing came of the effort. His world had totally changed in the course of a day. There was no going back. And his future was a matter of what might happen the next minute rather than in a lifetime of dreams and expectations. He fought his first battle then, waiting alone in the night, a boy struggling with his fears.

Jacob peered once again toward the distant fires. The camp was quiet now. Earlier there had been gunfire and wild savage cries. Now, a disturbing stillness. Perhaps Beaufort's corn liquor had been discovered, uncorked, and distributed among the braves. The boy hoped every red heathen had drunk himself into a stupor because the only plan he had was to walk into the Shoshoni camp and find his brother and run like hell.

No, ride like hell. He glanced at the brown mare cropping the grass nearby. The poor wounded animal had carried Jacob this far. But young Milam had not forced the crippled animal to anything more than a steady walk as he followed the trail left by the wagons. The Shoshoni war party was westward bound and unconcerned with haste. The attack on the wagons had been thorough, every adult man and woman killed; there was no one left to pursue them.

“No one but me,” Jacob muttered. He groaned and untied the makeshift bandage around his head and decided against replacing it with another strip of cloth torn from his shirt.

“Well, I'll never outrun those murderers on foot,” Jacob continued aloud, “so I'll just have to steal one.”
No, two
, he mentally corrected.
One for me, one for Tom
. Free Tom and then? Run. Hide. Try to stay alive. Return to St. Louis? Maybe. But Jacob wasn't sure he could find St. Louis. The immensity of his predicament was overwhelming. Better not to think.

First things first, Jacob told himself. Finding Tom and stealing a couple of horses out from under the noses of a Shoshoni war party was enough worry for one night. He took a deep breath, stood, sheathed his knife, and patted the mare good-bye.

A night draped with a thousand shadows, a lonely landscape of rolling hills and coulees sharp cut and opening with stark abruptness beneath the feet of the unwary traveler …

Jacob learned caution by experience; he almost broke his neck as he stepped over the edge of a narrow draw and landed half-way down the incline, legs splayed wide and one hand caught in a thicket of scrub brush. After the first wave of pain subsided, he allowed himself to slide the rest of the way down the gulley. He rested for a few moments. He was dizzy. That worried him. And he suffered nausea. He wished he could lie somewhere and not stir for a week.

Jacob allowed himself a few moments rest, then clambered out of the gulley and limped toward the Shoshoni camp. The boy could count the horses grazing on the plain about twenty yards from the clearing and campsite. He closed on them, choosing his steps wisely as he moved in toward the stolen wagons. The red glow of embers guided him; fitful tendrils of a firelight were a beacon as the boy crept nearer, rounded the circle of horses, and approached the camp on all fours.

The buffalo grass was trampled here and he made his way almost noiselessly to the edge of the camp. He fought his aching skull, his painful leg. He hardly dared to breath and came to a halt just beyond the light of the campfires.

The children were clustered in a single wagon and the sound of their whimpering moans as the little ones tried to rest all but broke his heart. Was Tom there? Jacob searched the huddled forms asleep on blankets or bare ground and eventually made a count of nine braves. Their faces were still painted, but the markings were faded and streaked from sweat. These braves looked to be a formidable lot, even in repose, short, lithe, muscular men clad in buckskins and armed to the teeth, unconscious, yet they seemed to be listening and aware of their surroundings. Jacob frowned, realizing Kilhenny wasn't among them. He would like to have plunged his knife into the ruffian's heart. Suddenly a form materialized right in front of him, and Jacob gave a start and clawed for his knife before recognizing the person crawling out from beneath a horse blanket that had helped to conceal her.

She was fifteen years old and her name was Nadine Beaufort and she froze, catching sight of Jacob staring at her from the shadows. Then she recognized him. Clutching the blanket and the remnants of her dress about her half-naked torso, she crawled toward Jacob Milam.

She started to speak, but Jacob motioned for her to be quiet and led her back into the darkness. A horse whickered behind them on the prairie and the faint call of a coyote lingered on the night air. Nadine paused, listening to the coyote, her gaze as distant as the fading cry and as mournful. Her pace was weak, her steps unsure, and from time to time she bent double as if in extreme pain.

“Jacob … I thought you were dead,” Nadine whispered. Jacob didn't answer; he was too busy staring at the poor girl. One eye was swollen shut. Her lips were puffy and bruised. Dry grass clung to her tangled brown hair. Her ripped dress hardly covered the girl at all. Once they reached the tall grass, Nadine sobbed and buried her face in her hands. “I've been used so, Jacob. They've had their way with me. All of them.”

The boy, though two years younger, stood as tall as the girl and he stepped forward to take her in his arms. His cheeks grew red at her revelation and he tried to ignore her nakedness.

“Don't cry, Nadine, please. We've got to be strong,” he said softly and stroked her hair. “Is Tom in the wagon with the other children?”