In the Season of the Sun (9 page)

The alcalde had turned livid with rage as he listened to his wife and he believed every word, so blind was the man by his passion for the woman. Well, she was his problem, Tom thought to himself, and good riddance. Her pleasure was nothing but trouble.

Tom finished with the stove and closed the grate. He warmed himself for a moment. He sauntered across to the door and pressed his ear to the wood. He thought he heard snoring. He studied the edge of the door and the hard leather hinges.

“What is it?” Pritchard muttered.

“If I had a knife, I could saw through these hinges,” Tom said.

“Well, you don't have a goddamn knife.” Pritchard swung his legs to the floor, stood, and walked toward the stove. He was a head taller than Tom and a roll of fat girded his middle. But his shoulders were hard and he carried enough muscle in his arms and thighs to make up for his thickening paunch. He was still a man to be reckoned with.

Tom ignored the man and walked to the shuttered window and peered through a crack in the wood at the pre-dawn sky. He knew Coyote would come for him as soon as he heard of Tom's predicament. The only question was when.

Pritchard squatted down by the stove and glared at the firebox as if it were to blame for his incarceration. Things definitely hadn't turned out the way he had planned. Rodrigo had betrayed him. Elizarro too. The captain had remembered seeing Pritchard ride into Santa Fe with Tom Milam, Pike Wallace, and Coyote Kilhenny. The captain, suspecting some sort of mischief, had ordered Skintop Pritchard jailed until his tale of Senora Rodrigo's liaison with the young gringo had been verified. However, since the senora stated she had been held against her will, then perhaps Pritchard was implicated in the distressing occurrence. At least that was Elizarro's excuse for not releasing Pritchard.

“I ought to have known better,” Pritchard growled to himself. “Never trust an Injun or a greaser.” He glanced up, realizing he had spoken his thoughts aloud. “What the devil you starin' at?” the trapper asked as he met Tom's unwavering gaze.

“I was thinking.”

It was hard to look at Tom Milam, a man's stare sort of tended to slide off. It gave Pritchard an eerie feeling and he began to tense. He wouldn't admit to fearing the younger man. Skintop Pritchard simply identified wariness as a sense of caution. He'd seen Tom fight. Tom Milam had more than held his own in skirmishes with war parties of Navajo and Paiute and Sioux.

“So?” Pritchard retorted.

“Thinking about you, Skintop. I don't like you, and you haven't any use for me either. You used to let me know it too, every chance you got when I was a boy. You were always bullying me. Maybe I ought to thank you for that.” Tom leaned against the wall, fished in a pocket of his black
vaquero
-style jacket, and found a cigarillo. He walked up to the stove, forcing Skintop to retreat a few steps. Tom poked one end of the cigarillo into the flames, lit it, and then popped the other end between clenched teeth.

“Your bullying made me determined to learn to shoot and use a knife. I figured the day would come I'd have to put you under. But you're the kind of smart man who knows when to quit hating public and start hating private.”

Pritchard's hairless skull began to glisten with sweat.

“You always were given to jabber,” Pritchard sneered. But his eyes shifted nervously as he searched the room for a possible weapon.

“I had a funny dream,” Tom continued in a soft voice. “And in my dream, the nag I tied below the hotel window didn't pull free and wander off. No, it was led away; taken by someone with not enough guts to put me under himself. It'd be a cowardly thing to let the alcalde's justice settle accounts, wouldn't it, Skintop?”

Tom advanced on the larger man, who gave ground and backed toward the front door until his heels clapped sharply against the wood.

“You're crazy,” Pritchard said. “I didn't do a damn thing.”

“I never said you did, Skintop. Just ‘someone.' Of course, now that you've mentioned it …”

“Back off, Milam,” Pritchard warned, fists clenched. “You back off, hear? You ain't got Kilhenny here to stick up for you.”

“I don't need him,” Tom replied icily. “Give me your best shot, Skintop, and I'll still have enough left to cut you down to size.”

“You asked for it!” Pritchard threw a roundhouse punch as he lunged at Tom, who moved to block it. Suddenly there came a terrible roar, a deafening explosion that rattled the roof and blew both men off their feet. The wall opposite the prisoners crumbled into the room in a shower of adobe chunks and shattered timber and a choking cloud of dust.

Tom, his ears ringing from the blast, pushed himself up out of the debris. “That's a hell of a right,” he sputtered. Both men were roughly dragged from the rubble and hastily jerked upright by Coyote Kilhenny.

“You lads better come a-runnin' or we'll all be dancing in front of a greaser firing squad.” Pike Wallace's voice carried through the settling dust.

Kilhenny stepped around the overturned stove and the burning timbers that littered the floor, and grabbing each man by the scruff of his neck shoved them stumbling and choking out the gap in what remained of the jail's north wall.

Pike Wallace, looking as skittish as the horse he fought, held the reins of three other mounts as Kilhenny brought Tom and Pritchard staggering out of the ruined jail.

“Alto!”
a uniformed guard shouted as he rounded the corner of the jail. The dragoon skidded to a halt, his boyish countenance frozen in a look of astonishment at the shattered wall.

Kilhenny rose up in front of the young guard. The half-breed's hair and beard were uncombed and gave him the appearance of a wild beast. He growled and drew a double-barreled percussion pistol from the belt draped across his chest and pointed it at the guard, who shrank from the gun sights, dropped his musket, and beat a hasty retreat toward the front of the jail.

Tom found a pair of pistols holstered and draped across his saddle horse. A Hawken rifle also hung by a leather thong looped around the pommel. Tom Milam stripped off the tattered ruins of his coat, freed the Hawken, and instead of following Pike Wallace down the alley, galloped around the jail and headed straight for the barracks.

“Tom!” Kilhenny called, then cursed as Tom raced past. Dawn's gray light illuminated the street as the dragoons stumbled out of their barracks. Several of the men had forgotten their muskets as they emerged, half dressed and bleary eyed. Another of the sentries from the jail shouted up to the officer on the balcony, who stood with a gun in hand, nightshirt flapping in the early-morning breeze.

“Elizarro!” Tom shouted. His cheek still hurt where Elizarro had laid it open. Tom Milam's voice echoed through the street as he bore down on the barracks. Muskets blossomed petals of flame; lead slugs cut the air around him like the whir of angry insects.

Gunfire from the jail sent the bewildered soldiers scurrying toward the safety of the barracks as Kilhenny and Pike Wallace, their smoking shotguns still in hand, reached for their pistols.

On the balcony, Elizarro stood his ground. He fired one pistol and narrowly missed his target as Tom lurched to one side, then brought his horse to a jarring halt. Raised in the stirrups, Tom fired the Hawken, aiming low and crushing the captain's knee with a .50-caliber slug.

Elizarro cried out, spinning on his left leg as his right buckled. He fell against the wall and slid over on his side as he tried to cradle his broken leg.

“Now you have something to remember me by,” Tom called out. He wheeled his mount and rode at a gallop away from the barracks as muskets appeared in the windows and doorway. A rattle of gunfire and a storm of musket balls hounded Tom back the way he had come.

Kilhenny and Pike Wallace just barely managed to clear way for him as Tom reached the safety of the adobe walls of the jail. Skintop Pritchard, who had made no move to hinder or help, waited farther down the alley.

“Are you daft, boy?” Kilhenny said as he reloaded a pistol and returned it to his belt.

“You taught me never to owe a man,” Tom said as he bit open a paper cartridge, held the round lead ball in his cheek, and tamped powder and cartridge wadding down the barrel of the Hawken. He repeated the process with the lead ball, primed the gun with a metallic cap, and eased the hammer down. “Elizarro owed and I collected.”

Kilhenny noticed the crusted blood on the younger man's cheek. Tom wouldn't look so pretty now, but there were worse things.

“You're lucky Rodrigo didn't slice off your
conjónes
,” Kilhenny said.

“Are we gonna be gabbin' or gittin'?” Pike Wallace said. “'cause if it's the latter, we better see to it before those soldiers realize there's but the four of us.” Pike turned to Tom. “That is, if you're finished a-courtin' the alcalde's wife, your lordship,” he added sarcastically.

“She wore me to the nubbins,” Tom said.

“Tell him about it some other time,” Kilhenny snapped. “Let's ride!” The half-breed brushed past Tom and whipped his animal to a gallop as he cleared the alley and entered a narrow street that wound toward the outskirts of Santa Fe. Skintop Pritchard, Pike Wallace, and Tom Milam fell in behind the half-breed.

Men, women, and children alerted by such commotion emerged from their houses to watch the four ride past. No one made a move to stop them. No one wanted any trouble from such men as these.

Tom could hear the gunfire as the soldiers continued to battle a phantom enemy holed up behind the jail. It gradually died out as the road widened and then disappeared entirely as Kilhenny led them out onto the desert plain. The sun, like a single molten ruby, rose to greet them.

East, Tom thought, and wondered at the reason. But he followed Kilhenny's lead and pointed his horse toward an ever-widening gap in the barren broken hills.

“Where are we bound?” he shouted, pulling alongside Pike Wallace, who rode stiffly in the saddle.

“St. Louis,” the older man called back.

“Good. I hear it's full of beautiful women.”

“Saints preserve us,” Pike Wallace wailed aloud.

Tom only laughed, his voice rippling wild and free. He rode on with the wind in his face and his eyes on the red dawn of a sparkling new day.

PART III

Jacob Milam's Story

10

T
he land of Ever Shadow was dotted with glacier-carved valleys and lakes seemingly strung together like glistening jewels. Mountains loomed here, great cloud-covered peaks gnawing at the sky and slate-gray cliffs patched with glacial ice and snow shimmering in the sun. Below the cliffs stretched lonesome meadows strewn with stands of aspen and spruce up on the hillsides, fir and lodgepole pines on the flatlands. The hard-packed earth was covered with buffalo grass, luxuriant and nourishing to the bison, mule deer, elk, and bighorn sheep ranging the landscape in abundance.

Beaver, wolf, and bear thrived here as did the otter and red squirrel, the snow rabbit, dark-furred marten, and mountain lion. White men with their maps called this country Nebraska Territory, the northern reaches of the Rockies. One day it would be called Montana Territory and in the years to come, Montana.

But to the Blackfoot, now and forever, this was their land, their country … Ever Shadow.

The buffalo burst through a stand of aspen and before the Blackfoot hunters could react, the animal had brought down two of their pack animals. A riderless horse raced away among the shimmering golden-leafed trees as its former owner, quick as a cat, darted for a white-barked trunk and shinnied up toward the safety of the aspen's foliage. The buffalo bull, standing six feet high at the shoulders and eleven feet from snout to tail, shook its furred shoulders and attacked the remaining brave.

Otter Tail, a chunky, good-natured young man in his early twenties, hauled hard on the reins of his horse and loosed a couple of arrows in rapid succession at the enraged bull. The buffalo shook the arrows from its hump, bellowed, and then charged. Otter Tail rode at a gallop for the timber while in the branches above him, the second brave, Yellow Eagle, looked helplessly at the Hawken rifle he had left by the campfire in his scramble to safety. Otter Tail turned and gravely fitted another obsidian-tipped arrow to his bowstring. But the angle was bad and he didn't have an open shot at the ribcage just behind the bull's shaggy shoulders.

Suddenly a shadow fell across him and another horseman joined the fray. The third hunter was dressed like his companions, in buckskins and capote, a hooded calf-length coat made from a heavy woolen blanket and sewn with coarse thread. He was taller by a head than his “red brothers” and his hair, though adorned with an eagle feather and worn long down the back and braided on the sides, was straw colored, not black, and streaked with white at his left temple. He rode a feisty mountain-bred stallion and narrowly missed knocking Otter Tail right off his horse as he charged past and headed for clear ground.

“Jacob Sun Gift!” Otter Tail exclaimed, trying to warn his friend to ride clear. “You cannot face
Iniskim
alone.”

This particular bull was a maverick and followed no herd. Now and then one appeared among the valleys of the divide. For one reason or another, such bulls were loners and roamed the far reaches of Ever Shadow fighting any animal that crossed their path. Here was the first maverick Jacob had ever encountered and Lone Walker's adopted son was not about to turn tail and run. He shouted and challenged the bull and when the animal changed course, led it out into the meadow and away from the trees. The bull gave chase, its lumbering gait churning a trail of dust in its wake. Jacob's horse was fleet of foot and easily outdistanced the bison.

Here in the meadow, at five thousand feet above sea level, the air in November was clear and cold. Jacob's breath, like gossamer streamers, clouded about his nostrils and mouth as he taunted his pursuer. The bull needed no such enticement. It lowered its cruel-looking horns and forged ahead. Jacob reined to a halt and waited, his mount obedient to the man on his back. The stallion had played this game before; still it nervously eyed the oncoming bull and tossed its mane in alarm.