The Powder River (18 page)

He looked back at the horse on lead. He’d picked a critter that was so docile it acted half-dead to lead to Ogallala and back. If the damn Injun tried to make a break for it, he’d feel like he was trying to gallop underwater.

Brock had tapped his flask regularly all day, ignoring the sidelong looks of the lime-juicer kid, but all day was too long for a little flask like that, and he was naked, ugly sober. He pulled the flask out of his jacket where he kept it tied on the pommel, drained the last of the whiskey in one long swig, and wiped his huge mustaches on his forearm pointlessly.

Rawl Cooke kept his eyes front. The big old bastard didn’t pass the bottle, and Rawl did resent it. He didn’t care about a drink—he didn’t need the juice—but he resented the moat the sergeant kept around himself. Pull your head in and hide like a turtle, you old bugger, and sink into the mud of your own sourness.

Rawl wasn’t sharing his elixir either. Rawl was in love—in love with life, with youth, with soldiering, with adventuring, and with Cotton. He rocked in the saddle all this day long lulled by memories of the lullaby of Cotton’s voice, the warmth of her arms, the teasing roll of her bed.

Rawl was her name for him. His given name was Raleigh. He loved the way Cotton said Rawl, drawling it on her soft, Southern tongue. Like the way she said “gawd,” and “dawg.” She’d got the other chaps to calling him Rawl, too, smiling teasingly when they did it but making him one of the fellows.

He didn’t care for that thought much. Other chaps. He knew she had plenty of those, plying her trade there in the bawdy house at Sidney. God—or rather, Gawd—he wanted to get her to quit. He had fantasies of setting her up in a home, the mistress of his life. Home to East Anglia, and Mum, and the kindliness of a settled country, gently green. Or any civilized place. Certainly it would have to be a good way from Sidney.

Of course, he couldn’t blame her for what she did to keep body and soul together. Everybody had to do whatever he had to do. And he knew she did like it sometimes—the two of them had grand romps together. He couldn’t help wondering whether she
always
liked her job.

The chaps liked her. They called her, as she asked, Cotton Tail. That was because her hair was so fair, almost white. And the color was, well, it was her true color. Bit of bawdy humor there.

Rawl Cooke drifted back into a fantasy of the naughty things Cotton Tail did with him, and to him, and sometimes all over him. His bottom rocked gently in his saddle and in his mind he rocked raucously between her thighs.

Probably the whore who called herself Cotton Tail would have been pleased, fleetingly, to know that the last fantasy that cute limey soldier ever had was of her own white tail.

“Stop. Stop right there!” came the voice. The sergeant turned toward the rocks. Shit, a slug! Seemed to whine by just in front of the sergeant’s hand holding the reins.

Aw, shit! The sergeant’s horse shied. Crow-hopped clear off the road. Gawddammit! Lost his feet and went over sideways!

Thumped there onto the ground, the breath knocked out of him and his boot pinned under the damn horse, Sergeant Brock made a field command decision. He was pissed off, and he intended to fight.

Before he got the carbine all the way out of the scabbard, a .44 slug entered Sergeant Brock’s chest cavity and pierced all the way to his guts, destroying vital organs and life willy-nilly.

Private Cooke might well have survived. He exercised control of his horse. But he hesitated, coming out of a reverie. When he saw the sergeant go for his rifle, Cooke reached for his sidearm. It was the last movement he made alive. The slug blew out his heart. He stayed in the saddle for several long seconds, dead, swaying, before his boots levered out of the stirrups and his thoughtless body thumped to the earth.

The horses, well trained, stood still.

Smith stood over the sergeant, angry. Goddammit, why had they gone for their guns? He’d made up his mind not to kill anybody. Looking at two slaughtered human beings, he felt sick. Nauseated.

He got onto his knees, slipped an arm under the sergeant at the waist. Then he had to back away and wait to see if he would retch. He didn’t.

He made up his mind to it and lifted the sergeant off the ground at the waist. The big man was amazingly heavy and cumbersome. But he had to get them away from the road, where no one would find their bodies for a while.

Fifteen minutes later he was changing clothes. He took the written orders from Sidney Barracks. Then he collected their weapons. He felt like a thief, and he hated it. All right, yes, he would take the sergeant’s field glasses. And naturally the horses.

Goddammit. God
dam
mit.

Randall Halstead was a little drunk. Not drunk enough to be happy, nor to be falling down. Just enough to be mean. More important, to be cunning.

Also drunk enough for his scar to itch. Whenever his face got flushed, the white scar alongside his nose itched like the devil. He rubbed it.

“Let’s whip the tiger!” he rasped loudly. Diphtheria had left his voice a permanent rasp. He put a Chinese coin on seven to lose. He’d bet every card to lose tonight, and had talked his newfound companeros into going against the tiger on losing numbers. In faro you could bet any card to come up winning or losing. They called the game the tiger because of the fancy tigers painted on the faro boxes.

Tonight was a night to bet on all cards on the losing side, Randall told his gambling buddies. Losing was in the air. The damn soldiers who came for the Injun were going to lose that nigger, and the Injun was going to lose his wretched life. Randall had been from soda to hock a half-dozen times now, and he was consistently losing. His fellow gamblers felt a little irked at losing at faro, but that was fine and dandy—irked was what Randall needed them.

He just wished those soldiers would show up while everybody was primed. Where the hell were they, anyway? He’d given that towheaded kid four bits to watch and let him know when they came for the prisoner. It was already dark now.

Randall figured his drunkenness was just about right. If he was normally half horse, half alligator, right now he was all alligator, and he meant to bite somebody’s ass off. Anybody who got between him and his new companeros and that Injun.

He’d fixed his mind on the Injun yesterday while he and Ned, his brother, were burying Ben on the bench above the house. Ben, the last of Randall’s family. Killed dead by that sneaking, slinking, knife-wielding Injun bastard.

All day yesterday Randall felt numb. He moped around the place and stared at the cattle and didn’t give a cow pie and even got into a Texas-sized argument with Ned. He wondered whether he wanted to raise cattle anyway. He and Ned could do it, but when you didn’t have a son, what was the point? He sat on his bed and looked at the picture of his wife Moira, his daughter Amy, and Ben in front of the Texas house—all of them gone now—and asked aloud, mournfully, “What’s the point?” He was so numb his lips would hardly shape the words.

The truth was, everywhere he looked that day Randall Halstead saw Ben, seventeen years old, lying there in the barnyard, his guts splayed out into the dust. He didn’t want to see it, he hated seeing it, but he couldn’t stop.

So he decided, this morning, to scourge his mind of that picture. He decided that the way to get rid of the picture forever was simple: he would kill the little Injun with the knife. And the little Indian was in the Ogallala jail, where Eric Sunvold took him. That idiot Sunvold.

Now Randall knew that the little one had got away. He would deal with Sunvold about that later. He thought maybe Sunvold deserved a horsewhipping. The big ass thought he was a hell of a hand, but he couldn’t hit the ground with his hat in three throws. But right now the old Injun was in the jailhouse down the street, and the goddamn army was coming after him, and half the town was riled about it, and Randall Halstead knew how to take advantage. Unless the army boys sent half an army. And this fine edge of drunk would only help.

Randall walked to the bar, not even having to navigate carefully, got another bottle, and brought it to the faro table. “Come on, boys,” he growled, “let’s enjoy ourselves before the tiger eats all our money.”

He scratched the scar alongside his nose.

It went slick as an eel on ice for Smith. The sheriff’s office was closed, but a towheaded boy lounging around in front told Smith he knew where the deputy’d gone for a drink. The boy disappeared into one saloon, came out with a little man who must be the deputy, and ran across the street into another saloon.

Smith thought he looked fine for the white folks. The uniform jacket he’d taken from the big sergeant covered the .44-caliber hole in the blouse. No part of the uniform fit, but none would have if Smith had really been in the army either. The government just didn’t accommodate men six and a half feet tall. Smith’s stolen orders looked fine, too—they just said to turn the prisoner over to Sergeant Brock. They didn’t even mention a second soldier.

The deputy was a small, bent fellow with an oversized head and a sweetly misshapen smile. He might have been eighteen or thirty, and Smith wondered if he was retarded. He offered Smith his hand and introduced himself in a light, girls voice, “I’m Ramsel, the deputy.” His handshake was squishy. Smith wondered if Ramsel was the fellow’s first name or his last. He took the orders from Smith, looked at them, and moved his lips as though reading them, then unlocked the jailhouse door. Though Smith was prepared with a story about a soldier back there twenty miles so drunk he couldn’t sit a horse, sleeping it off, Ramsel didn’t ask why the sergeant was alone.

“What tribe is this buck?” asked Smith, deliberately using an offensive word.

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a Sioux from a Comanche,” the deputy answered in his high, soft voice.

They strode through the sheriff’s office—Smith didn’t glance sideways at the wanted notices—and into the back. Here was a room with some tack and weapons, off to one side a room that was probably where the deputy slept, and off to the other the lockup. The deputy looked through the little window in the heavy, wooden door, then turned the key and opened it.

Sings Wolf was stretched out on the bunk, perhaps asleep. He looked across the room when the door opened, but showed no particular interest in Smith. He was wrapped in his blue blanket coat for a cover and wore the look of tranquillity Smith supposed came with age and wisdom. The young man felt a pang of love for his grandfather.

In the Crow language, not Cheyenne, Smith said, “Pretend you don’t understand me.” He barked the words to make them sound harsh.

Sings Wolf didn’t move.

“From his moccasins, he’s a Cheyenne,” Smith told the deputy, “and this child don’t have no Cheyenne words.” Maybe if he left a few false trails, it would take the army a little longer to catch up with him. “Ramsel, why don’t you keep a weapon on him while I get him mounted and headed out?”

The child-man gave Smith a big smile and what may have been a lopsided wink. Evidently he thought a gun was an unnecessary precaution. But he reached for a side-by-side without complaint and broke it at the breech to make sure both barrels were loaded.

Smith got Sings Wolf’s hands tied in front of him, for show. Then he pushed his grandfather ahead of him toward the street roughly, like the worst sort of malefactor.

Smith stepped out the door and saw his mistake.

A crowd of men circled the horses with the brand of the army, which were tied at the hitching bar. Several men in front had rifles or shotguns, which meant they were serious. They were half lit by the lamps of the hotel next door. A dark-faced bastard with a very white scar alongside his nose stood in front, rubbing the scar and smiling the most malicious smile Smith had ever seen.

Smith’s mistake was that he’d pushed Sings Wolf out ahead. Now Smith and his grandfather were vulnerable, and the deputy was in back of them with the shotgun. Smith reached for the sergeant’s revolver. The scar bastard raised a shotgun to his shoulder. Smith eased the pistol out anyway, keeping it at his side. The man behind the scar bastard flipped a heavy knife, maybe an Arkansas toothpick, in his hand, playing with it. That seemed peculiar.

“Back off,
Sergeant
,” the scar bastard said in a loud rasp. “We don’t have any quarrel with you.”

Just then Ramsel came pushing out between Smith and Sings Wolf with the shotgun leveled. Good fellow, thought Smith.

“Sammy, get the sheriff,” yelled Ramsel.

The towheaded kid took off down the street running hard as he could go.

“That boy’s right handy, ain’t he?” growled the scar bastard. So that was how they knew Smith was here for the prisoner. Damned kid. “But that sheriff is surely going to be too late.” He smirked at the deputy. “You cain’t stop us, Ramsel. Even a defect likes to live, don’t he?”

“Men,” hollered Smith, “taking a prisoner from the U.S. Army is a crime for the firing squad.” He didn’t know whether it was or not. “Back off and let us head to Sidney Barracks. This Injun will get a fair trial.”

“He will,” rasped the scar bastard. “Just like my boy Ben got.”

Then Smith understood. And just as he understood, he saw the glint of the knife blade in the half-light. He saw it just as the knife hit him in the head. Falling, he heard a shotgun blast. Losing consciousness, he almost had time to think that it wasn’t blasting in his ear, so the shotgun wasn’t Ramsel’s.

Sings Wolf hung from the hay hook attached to the loading beam jutting out from the livery. He was still tied in his blue blanket coat, and the edges and belt whipped in the gusty wind. Sings Wolf’s body rocked in the wind and twisted on the long, thick hemp, rocked and twisted back and forth restlessly.

Smith took the wet rag on his forehead and wiped his whole face. His head felt like it had been stepped on by a horse. He was still stretched out on the boardwalk.

“Got a sad one here, we do now.” Irish pranced in the voice. Smith looked at the speaker haunched down beside him. A stalwart man of maybe fifty with gray hair, a mustache of indecently bright red, and eyes that looked like they saw a lifetime’s worth of grief right then.