Commanche Vengeance Page 9

  That night they came into camp well after dark, their pack horses weighted down with skins. They didn’t stop to eat before they had put the skins in the racks, watered and fed the horses and washed some of the buffalo blood from their bodies.

  Slater ate with relish and was asleep the minute the meal was finished. Duke could not eat his full meal, leaning backwards with his plate in his hand, and he slept without moving until dawn the next morning.

  From the middle of August until the middle of September, when the first cold winds began to come out of the northwest, they shot and skinned and shot and skinned and shot and skinned.

  Sarah would spend her days hunting out berries and nuts and shooting small game to keep a variety in the meals, riding down into the valley with their noon meal and back again to the campsite.

  At the first sign of cold weather, Sarah began building a sod hut, cutting the poplar trees herself and digging the corner posts for the frames, lashing the beams and light tree trunks together with green buffalo hide that dried to steel-hard fastness.

  The first of November they counted up their hides as the buffalo began to leave the valley and drift toward the south.

  “I count close on to eighteen hundred,” Slater said.

  “That ought to be enough to keep us fair for a while. Now we got to start ’em into Cheyenne.” He glanced up at the skies. “We can pack some on the animals, but were going to have to get us some wagons for the rest of them.”

  Duke agreed that it would be best to pack as many on the horses as possible, get money to buy wagons and come back for the rest. But there was the element of beating the weather. In six weeks the country would be frozen solid.

  For three days they worked, packing camp, getting ready to leave, and finally loading the horses. On the fifth of November there was a light snow as they moved away from the valley and headed due west along the banks of the South Platte, toward Cheyenne.

  Sarah’s hair had grown back quite a bit and was clear over her neck, and her strong face had been burned deep brown by the sun. The clothes she bought in Dodge City had long since worn out and she had taken a buffalo calf skin and worked it and beaten it into softness, leaving an edging of fur at the collar of her jacket. Duke had also discarded his Dodge City clothes and wore leather now.

  Three days later they hit Lodgepole Creek and kept pushing west, fighting the cold one day, and burning up in the hot November sun the next. They covered the last hundred miles of their trek in three days, and pulled into Cheyenne.

  Duke and Slater sold the hides and bought wagons and pulled out the next day, leaving Sarah alone.

  The first hard snow came on Thanksgiving Day and she sat alone in the hotel room wearing a dress for the first time since she had left Texas. She stared out the window at the tracks the solitary riders up and down the Cheyenne streets made as they moved from one saloon to another.

  On December fifteenth, Slater and Duke returned with the remaining hides and they divided more than six thousand dollars after selling the extra horses and wagons.

  They celebrated with a big dinner, and Slater announced that he was going to remain in Cheyenne. “Miss Sarah, I have no bones about telling you and Duke here how I feel about you two. I wish you’d give up this idea of getting that Indian, and pool our stake into cattle and a place around here. You two could get married—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Slater,” Sarah said firmly, “but there is something you don’t understand—’”

  It didn’t take Duke long to add his own voice. He and Slater had seen fine lands in their movement through the country, and with the railroad in Cheyenne, there was a good chance of their succeeding.

  Sarah listened to both of them quietly and patiently. Then she turned to Duke. “Mr. Duke, I hesitate to remind you that until now I have not asked for your help or assistance. I intend leaving Cheyenne in the morning, heading south. Alone, if that proves necessary.”

  Slater shook his head. “Well, Miss Sarah, after being with you all these weeks and months. I know you for a strong-minded, fearless woman, with her own reasons for everything. I ain’t going to say no more.”

  “We might be back—” Duke said tentatively.

  “Yes, Mr. Slater, we might be back.”

  “I ain’t promising I’ll be here,” Slater said. He looked around the restaurant. “Might just head for California and see if some of that sunshine won’t help me a bit.”

  “Mr. Duke, I have to get an early start in the morning.”

  Duke nodded. They stood up. Slater shook hands with both of them, not trying to hide the tears in his eyes. “Damn it, I wished I was twenty years younger.” He glared at Duke. “I’d beat your head in to stand beside this woman like you’re doing.” He grabbed Sarah roughly and kissed her, then turned and stalked out of the room.

  Duke took a deep breath and turned away. Sarah walked out of the restaurant and back to her hotel. She got down on her knees. She began to pray, asking if she was doing a Christian thing to press her search for One Nest.

  She came to no decision. She looked out the window and saw Gibson Duke walking slowly toward a saloon. He stood there before the glass door looking inside, as if undecided, then pushed the doors open and entered. Just before the door closed, Sarah saw a painted and flashy blonde in a red dress take his arm.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They never saw Slater again. They left the next morning with the day bright and hard and clear. Sarah had bought new trousers and shirts and boots and wore the fleece-lined jacket bought in Dodge City. The horses snorted with energy in the crisp morning, their hoofs crunching through the crusted snow, and breaking the silence of the frozen Wyoming country.

  Duke was silent. His eyes were red and his hands trembled. Sarah had seen enough men drinking in her lifetime to know that Duke was not feeling quite right. She did not mind the drinking, but when she thought about the blonde, painted girl, she clenched her teeth.

  They knew each other well enough and had been on the trail long enough now to do their camp chores and ride trail for days without speaking.

  They worked their way down from South Platte and then headed to the east to escape the Ute they had heard were making trouble. The cold became intense and they had a daily grind of fighting to keep warm. The fires at night were hard to get going and there was little for the horses to eat.

  They camped for several days along the mouth of the Republican River, holed up in a small cave they had lucidly found, while a blizzard blew itself out. Neither of them had mentioned Slater or the last night in Cheyenne since leaving, but the enforced confinement in the cave brought things to a head.

  “You got something on your mind, Miss Sarah?” Duke said finally.

  “I sure have, Mr. Duke.” she replied.

  “All right, out with it.”

  “I have it on my mind and not on my tongue, sir,” she said curtly.

  “That’s a hell of a way to behave,” he said. “Damn it, this has gotten to be the craziest situation anyone ever heard of.”

  Sarah remained silent.

  “I suppose you thinking about that last night in Cheyenne?”

  “I have no obligation to you, Mr. Duke,” she replied, “and you are mistaken if you think you have one toward me.”

  “If you call loving somebody an obligation, then I got one.”

  “Me?” Sarah asked and Duke looked up, surprised at the strange manner and the surprising annoyance he heard in her voice.

  “Who the hell else?” Duke demanded.

  “I thought it might be—” Sarah paused—“a yellowhaired girl with paint on her face.”

  Duke’s mouth fell open. He stared at her. “Well, I’ll be God-damned!”

  He got up and stomped out of the cave and into the snow and did not return until it was dark. He came in and sat down beside the fire and nodded his head toward the mouth of their cave. “It’s still pretty cold.”

  Sarah turned to him. “Mr. Duke,” she said, her voice steady,
“I guess it’s time we had an understanding.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Duke said.

  “I won’t sleep with you until I’ve married you. And I won’t marry you until I’ve come to some conclusion about this Injun.”

  Sarah’s bluntness shocked the cowman into wide-eyed amazement

  “Furthermore,” she continued, “I want you to know that I have no right whatsoever to question your behavior, or your actions, or your friends. And I apologize for—” she stopped.

  She grabbed her coffee cup and took a long drink and stared into the fire.

  “Yes ma’am,” Duke said. He grinned. He rolled back into the blanket and looked at her. “I told that black horse of mine that you was something, Miss Sarah, and damned if you ain’t.” He grinned at her again and rolled over, putting his back to the fire, and went to sleep.

  Sarah got up and began brushing the roan furiously. The pony stamped around and pulled away. “Stand still, damnit!” Sarah said with exasperation.

  Duke began to snore. “Shut up!” Sarah veiled and threw the thick bunch of pine needles at Duke’s head.

  He jerked up, and looked at her. “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, go to sleep!”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, and rolled over to his blanket again.

  “Ohhhh!” Sarah’s fury made her stalk out of the cave into the darkness.

  It took them two weeks to get down into the Texas Panhandle, and in the whole time they did not see another living thing. It seemed that the thick carpet of snow had swooped down out of the north and washed everything but themselves before it, and covered what would not move. When they came to the end of the snow as they continued their move to the south, the hard, biting winds that swept across the flats bit into them relentlessly. Sarah’s hands chapped so badly they cracked open and began to bleed. Duke had torn a hole in his hat and now wore a strip of his blanket around his head and under his chin to cover his ears. They rode very little, not moving on until the sun came up—if it came up at all—and bedding down early in the afternoon if they found good cover for themselves and the animals. Their food consisted of any meat they could shoot. Their coffee ran out and once they rode three days without hitting water and then it took Duke three hours to chop through the thick ice covering the stream, to find that the creek had frozen solid and finally ended up melting down ice in the coffee pot.

  Several times they had to sleep snuggled up to their horses, out in the raw open when they passed over a big dry that offered not so much cover as a blade of grass or a thick brush.

  It was January when they began to drift toward the southwest, moving into the great open plains of west Texas. There they saw their first Indian.

  They moved on, hardly able to keep their eyes into the biting wind to watch the movements of the man, seeing that it was an Apache. The further south they got, the less the sun hid behind gray skies and slowly, little by little, they began to see the character of the land change before them. It wasn’t green, but there were things growing, and even this little bit of life seemed to give them renewed hope.

  They continued on south and west across the Plains seeing cattle grazing now and then, moving away from the solitary riders, catching sight of a deer now and then, scrawny and hungry, but with the exception of the single Apache, they saw no Indians, or signs of them.

  They were nearly to the Pecos when they broke camp one morning and heard the distant thunder of hooves pounding the frozen ground. They mounted quickly and worked their way deeper into the chaparral they had stopped in and waited.

  To the east and out of the sun, across one of the sandy frozen outcropping hills of southern bluffs along the New Mexico line, they saw at least fifty Comanche braves in paint and feathers. They were riding hard.

  “It’s some kind of a fight,” Duke said. “With who and where is anybody’s guess.”

  “What’s closer than Little Ben?”

  Duke nodded, his lips were pressed tightly together. “That’s it,” he said. “This is a hard winter. They’re probably going after cattle around Little Ben.”

  “I wonder,” Sarah said, watching the Indians move across their path, “if that heathen One Nest is in that bunch.”

  “There ain’t but one way to find out, Miss Sarah.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “If we cut straight across the flats to the south, we might be able to outrun them into town. But they’ll see us.”

  “Well, there ain’t much else we can do, is there, Mr. Duke?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t guess there is.”

  Both the black and the roan were tired and thinned down after the long hard trailing down from the Wyoming country, but both animals put on their best speed. Duke and Sarah stayed with the cover of the chaparral as long as they could, but after a few minutes they broke clear of it and were exposed to the Indians on their flank. Duke kept a lookout for them to swerve away from their line of direction and head for them. He and Sarah needed only a few minutes’ break on their course to be ahead of the Indians. They broke over a rise just as the Indians were topping another some distance away. Over his shoulder Duke saw the line of their ride falter slightly and then turn in their direction. But he breathed easier. If the black and the roan would stand it, they could beat the onrushing party by a mile into the town of Little Ben.

  They slaked out now, Sarah and Duke a good two miles ahead of the Indian party, riding low and forward in the saddle, the bright sun beating down on them, cold wind whipping in their faces.

  Sarah glanced over her shoulder. The party seemed to be gaining. Duke saw it too, and pointed to their left, toward a low, crusty butte with a sheer wall of red frozen earth a quarter of a mile ahead and several miles long. They changed their line of ride slightly and made for the butte.

  The two horses were nearly winded now. The black was stronger than the roan and began to pull ahead. Duke slowed his horse slightly to stay at Sarah’s side. Then they were at the wall of the butte and the animals were digging into the hard sides with their forelegs, lacking hard with their back quarters slipping and sliding, but gaining height. The Indians were gaining on them now, and Sarah could hear their shouts and the drumming of their ponies’ hooves on the frozen ground.

  They made the top of the butte at last and just as Duke had figured, the ground leveled off for several miles straight ahead of them.

  Something moved in the distance. It was too big to be a horse and rider, yet it had moved. Sarah and Duke saw it at the same time, wondering, and then as they drew nearer they saw that it was cattle.

  They drew nearer and saw the chuckwagon then, and began to make out figures on horseback. Duke drew his Colt and fired into the air, rapidly, watching the riders and the cattle.

  The riders ahead of them stopped and looked, then began to lope out to meet them. Duke glanced around. The Indians had not been heading for Little Ben—they were going to make a raid on the cattle. And the height of the butte would keep them hidden until they were right on top of the cattle.

  Duke and Sarah flew past the outriders. “Indians!” Duke yelled and swept past the cowboys, who wheeled their ponies around and began to ride after them.

  Duke made straight for the chuckwagon and the collection of buffalo-hide tents. Men began to appear out of their shelters and from in back of the wagon. The cattle parted before them, bellowing and stumbling awkwardly in the cold.

  Sarah and Duke slammed to a stop before the wagon. A tall man in a red undershirt ran toward them. “What the hell’s going on!”

  “Indians, mister! Down off the butte. They’re going to come up over that wall any minute if you don’t get over there and keep ’em off!” Duke pointed to the drop that would lead to the lower plains.

  Half a dozen men came running up buckling on guns and pulling on fleece jackets. There was a lot of noise from the cattle and the men began to shout among themselves. The big man in the red undershirt bellowed in a voice louder than Duke had ever heard on a human being before. “Ne
ver mind the horses, get to that wall yonder!” he roared.

  The men turned and ran across the frozen ground in their Texas boots, jackets and coats flapping in the cold wind, loading their guns, pulling at ammunition belts and pulling their hats down against the bite of the cold.

  Sarah and Duke wheeled their horses around and pounded up to the edge of the drop and were followed by the outriders they had met coming in. A quarter of a mile away the Indian party had spread out into a point and were driving to get up the wall.

  Sarah and Duke dismounted and slapped their animals away from the line of fire. The others in the cattle camp came running up then and began taking up positions along the rim of the butte.

  For a thousand yards the cowboys spread out and steeled themselves against the cold and watched the Comanches driving in.

  “Hold your fire until I give the word!” the big man in the red shirt bellowed. He was pulling at his hat and at a fleece coat and trying to buckle on a gunbelt all at once. “Give ’em a good taste of lead before they know what hit ’em, and they’ll think a second time before they try again!”

  The Indians came pounding in, straight for the slight rise the cattle had used to gain the top of the butte. They were only five hundred yards away now, and the whites could see the faces and the streaming eyes of the braves as the cold winds bit into them. They were hungry and wanted food. The buffalo had been scarce that year, and the Indians were starving to death in their villages. The whites had food, and they were going to take it.

  The Indians were three hundred yards away now. Sarah and Duke were side by side, and Sarah leveled the carbine. “I sure hope that heathen devil is in this bunch,” she said quietly.

  “One Comanche is just as good as another, Miss Sarah,” Duke replied, “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” she said.

  Red Shirt had settled himself close to Sarah and Duke now and had a carbine resting on the edge of the rim. He watched the Indians swerve a little to come in line with the slope to the top. They were not going to stop, but would try to force themselves through on a hard run.