Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (11 page)

After all, Mackenzie had six hundred troopers with him this time out, even though the Fourth was on forbidden, foreign, enemy ground. Less a frontier, more so a true wilderness populated by wild game and the equally wild Comanche, the Staked Plain was a land of centipede, scorpion and hairy tarantula, as well as a land where under every rock might hide a diamondback rattler or a wolf spider. Neither the land nor its people were to be trifled with. Many of the water courses at this time of the year were dried up, and what creeks and streams and rivulets survived this late in the season played host to a multitude of carcasses—testament to those animals that had become bogged down in the mire of mud, those carcasses now attracting birds of prey.

As the cold wind with a clear taste of winter to it shouldered out of the north, Lieutenant Carter let sleep overtake him, happy for the rich, clean bite of the air, happy for the company of the other snoring horse soldiers here on these high plains of West Texas, happy to have as his commander the tenacious bulldog of the Fourth Cavalry. Sleep came so deliciously to him that night.

“Turn out! Turn out!”

Thrashing at his blankets, bolting upright into the shockingly cold air while grinding his fists into his sleep-matted eyes, Carter found his Spencer and then his feet.

Everything around him was pure pandemonium: noisy horses, gunshots, screaming men and animals, orders hurled here and there above the commotion. And behind it all was the gallop of pony hooves and the yip-yipping of brown-skinned raiders flapping their blankets and rattling pieces of rawhide to scare off the army's horses and mules.

How Carter's heart leapt with excitement, more so a relief from the tightly wound tension that had controlled him for months now.

We've found the hostiles at last!
he thought, racing for the sound of the shooting, where the regiment's herd was picketed.

He watched the backs of the last of the raiders disappear into the darkness after their ponies had kicked sparks from the dying fires with their slashing hooves as they tore through the regiment's encampment.

After those brief moments of sheer panic and confusion, the hammer of those pony hooves quickly faded north into the canyon, leaving the soldiers behind to ascertain the damage. Mackenzie called for report: no casualties … but some seventy animals were gone and unaccounted for.

“Colonel Mackenzie,” called out the colonel's guide and interpreter, Sharp Grover, “your Tonkawa trackers figure the Comanche content to run off the stock for the time being. They won't be back now that we're on the alert.”

“Damn them!” Mackenzie growled, pounding a fist into the bracing air heavy with the frost of men's voices. Then he suddenly whirled on his chief of scouts. “What do the Tonkawas believe the Comanche are going to do now? Shouldn't we trail them back to their village?”

Grover shook his head.

From the lines on that war-map of a face, the scout was a man of middle years, Carter figured, watching Mackenzie's chief of scouts scratching at his salt-flecked beard, perhaps digging for a louse hiding in that knot of coarse hair.

“You won't want your bunch of green recruits following them warriors anywhere in the dark,” Grover advised, “not when your outfit can't see where you're going … running into some blind ambush or what. No, Colonel—right now them warriors are out there in the dark rounding up what stock they run off from you.”

“If they're busy looking for the stolen horses, then we'll go round up those warriors ourselves, Mr. Grover.” Mackenzie turned on his officers, who had clustered nearby, shivering in the cold, murky darkness for orders. “Captain Heyl.”

“Here, Colonel,” replied E. M. Heyl.

“Take Mr. Carter and a dozen men on the first horses you can saddle and mount,” Mackenzie explained. “See if you can locate anything out there … perhaps a trail those red bastards took running off with our stock.”

With his own teeth chattering, Carter followed Heyl, and between them soon had a dozen more soldiers mounted on fourteen of the horses left to Mackenzie's command, all fourteen loping into the gray light of cold, predawn darkness.

“Captain Heyl, I suggest we find out if the Comanches overran any of the outer pickets,” said the lieutenant.

Heyl replied, “Very good, Mr. Carter.”

Gripping a pistol in his right hand, ready for any ambush that might surprise them, his reins in his left, Carter was relieved to find the farflung pickets still in place and alive. The horse-raiders had simply come upon the camp guards so suddenly, swept by them so quickly that the young soldiers hadn't had a chance to fire a shot into the starlit darkness.

The lieutenant was relieved as well to find the night dark enough that no one could really see the concern etched on his young face. Carter was beginning to wonder now about this enemy who hit and ran, appearing like ghosts out of the darkness. He was being shaken to his core as a young officer in this frontier army—for it seemed the army was being proved wrong about a few things regarding this new bareback enemy.

One of those things the white soldiers had wrong was some unfounded belief that these Indians would never attack at night.

That kind of superstitious thinking had probably lulled far too many outfits like this into a false yet suicidal sense of security, he thought as they pressed into the darkness, riding the circuit of picket posts.

And got some soldiers killed as well.

*   *   *

Four risings of the sun ago, his young scouts had first reported seeing the dust rising above a large column of invaders coming out of the southeast.

Soldiers—a long parade of blue-clad soldiers the young wolves had discovered beneath that spreading dust cloud.

Quanah Parker knew these yellowleg soldiers were coming after his three villages—the bands of Comanche who normally came together and camped as one great village here in the Moon of Leaves Falling so they could hunt the great antelope herds together. They were, after all, the “Antelope Eaters”—the Kwahadi: those who had never signed a treaty with the white man as far back as elder's memory could recall.

Instead, for the most part they stayed out here crisscrossing the mapless expanse of their ancient homeland where they had been driven many decades before, here to hunt the buffalo and other game abounding on the Staked Plain. From here the young men occasionally raided to the east where the white man built his settlements.

It was there many, many summers before that his father, Peta Nocona, had been on one such raid. It was then that his father captured the young white girl who would nine years later marry Peta Nocona—the Comanche chief called “Wanderer”—the woman with hair like summer-cured grass who would bear her first child, a boy she had named Quanah, meaning “Fragrant.”

Twenty-six winters had come and gone since his mother had first suckled him at her breast.

But now the son of Wanderer had no father, and no mother.

In the short-grass spring seven winters gone—1864, in the reckoning the white man gave to time—Tonkawa trackers had led a large band of Tehannas to the Kwahadi village nestled in a tree-shrouded canyon, standing beside a narrow creek of cool water. And there they recaptured Quanah's mother.

With most of the other warriors, Wanderer and his son had been away from the village that day—already gone for many suns on a hunt for buffalo and antelope. When the providers returned, there were many dead to mourn: women and children and old ones among them.

But there was also the undead to mourn.

A hard thing for Wanderer to accept. Harder still for the young warrior son. For years Quanah had struggled to find his own way to mourn the undead—his missing mother.

To bury this hurt … to salve this awful, open wound of her capture, Quanah began raiding the settlements and soldier camps with a vengeance. If he could not find her among the white man's buildings, then he would wreak a terrible revenge upon them.

So it was when the young wolves he had sent out to scout their village's backtrail had returned late one afternoon with the report of soldiers marching from the south. Into the land of the buffalo and the Staked Plain—the land of the Kwahadi Comanche.

“Young men—gather your weapons!” he had told them as the autumn shadows grew long out of the west above their Blanco Canyon campsite. “We will strike these soldiers … drive off their horses! They will have to walk back to their forts when the Kwahadi are finished with them!”

Above Quanah the twinkling stars went out one by one by one as storm clouds scudded out of the north across the dark sky, driven on by a stiff wind from the prairies far to the north. It was good—this cold and the coming storm would keep the white man close by his fires this night.

Quanah, the Fragrant One, led his barebacked horsemen down on the camp of Three-Finger Kinzie—leader of the yellowlegs.

Chapter 7

October 1871

Beneath the dimmest of cold moonshine in that bone-numbing air of predawn, Carter and Heyl made out what was clearly the hammered trail of the retreating warriors driving off the army's seventy stolen horses and mules, a faint scar on the seared earth of the Staked Plain.

“They're headed up the canyon, Captain.”

Heyl nodded. “Looks that way.”

“We have one last outpost to check on,” Carter said, pointing. “On that hilltop—there, sir.”

“But that's in the opposite direction the savages took, Mr. Carter. That outpost was never in any danger. It would only be a waste of time.”

“The colonel wanted to know if every outpost was still intact.”

“Very well then. Let's find out what we can see from up there,” Heyl replied, disgruntled, “even though that hill is in a different theater.”

The rounded crest did indeed overlook Mackenzie's bivouac, a scene now of activity throbbing below them as the rest of the regiment broke camp, others heading out to round up what remained of the frightened stock. The far slope of this hill faded into the gray light of early dawn where murky, smeared shadows still betrayed the landscape for as far as the eye was able to see.

Heyl's patrol had no sooner reached the lone picket atop the hill than a single pistol shot split the cold, gray darkness. A sound immediately answered by a yelp of pain.

Hooves hammered out of the distance—another squad of mounted soldiers also on the prowl for the raiders. A sergeant hollered his order, halting his men. They rattled to a stop near Carter and Heyl.

“You see anything down there, Sergeant?” Heyl demanded.

“Injuns, Captain. I shot one,” he answered, breathless and clearly excited. “At least—one of 'em yelped real good after I fired.”

“Where were they headed?” Carter asked, his breath making heavy hoarfrost like a wreath at his face.

“Away from us—that's for sure, sir,” another soldier answered. “Down there.”

Every soldier on the crest of that hill could now make out the faintest of shadows smearing themselves across the gray of the prairie: a dozen or more not-too-distant horsemen, driving before them at least that many horses—the stock they had frightened from Mackenzie's herd and were now rounding up from the nearby country.

“There's our quarry, Captain!” shouted Carter. “What say we get our horses back—and some scalps too!”

Heyl led his fourteen men off the hill, streaming down the slope onto the flat plain after the Comanche raiders. As the race stretched farther across the prairie, the more rested army mounts were able to close much of the distance on the weary Indian ponies. From every nostril, white, red and animal alike, streamed long, gauzy strips of breath-smoke that quickly disappeared into the cold, winter darkness before the coming storm. Ahead of Carter the warriors shouted among themselves, then suddenly rode off at an angle, abandoning the army horses.

The lieutenant looked behind him, finding the sergeant and his squad galloping on their tails, turning off to recapture the army mounts. Now it remained up to him and Heyl and their men to pursue the dozen raiders as they galloped with manes and tails flying down into a coulee and up the far side without breaking stride. It had become a test of horsemanship and wills—a wild race across the prairie which with almost every beat of Carter's hammering heart grew brighter with the coming of day, revealing with each surge of blood pounding in his ears a butte looming ahead in the mid-distance. Its gentle slopes had to be the warriors' destination.

And between the horsemen and that butte—a deep, sharp-sided ravine.

Down into it the warriors plunged, disappearing. Seconds later their ponies reappeared, clawing their way up the far slope, racing ever onward toward the butte.

Without hesitation, Carter and Heyl led their dozen troopers down into the ravine and across its sandy bottom, where the lieutenant and his men found the Comanche horsemen out of sight for a few seconds before they pushed their heaving horses up the far side. If the warriors could ride hell-bent for election across this broken landscape, Carter believed his men could do it every bit as well.

As the first to break the lip of the ravine on the far side, his mount growing more weary with every yard in the pursuit, Carter was the first to discover the grand surprise waiting for the fourteen soldiers.

At the foot of that nearby butte milled a whirling mass of Comanche horsemen who burst into a gallop as soon as the soldiers clambered out of the ravine. There were more warriors racing on a collision course for the soldiers than the lieutenant had ever seen in his life.

Hundreds—against Heyl's fourteen.

In confusion and fear, the soldiers reined up, shouting, their horses prancing and almost done in. Carter checked his mount with a tight rein, gazing at the oncoming warriors in astonishment.

“Just look at those goddamned Indians!” Heyl muttered, his face gone as white as the breath-smoke issuing from his lips.