Cries from the Earth (23 page)

When the Frenchman and Isabella got him inside and onto the small bed near the parlor that connected the house with the store, Benedict tried to sleep. He had been awakened by Isabella's sudden cry of alarm, opening his eyes to find that the sun had fallen and twilight was imminent. He ordered her to flee with the children, and as soon as they were on their way he grabbed for his pistol on the bedside table, finding it wasn't loaded.

Just as he was going to shout at Bacon to bring him some cartridges, Benedict heard the Frenchman yelling that the Indians had reached the front yard. Stuffing the pistol under the mattress, Sam twisted painfully off the bed and onto the floor, crabbing to the nearby window, where he pushed up the sash, then hoisted himself over the sill and dropped to the damp ground. From there he started to crawl, somehow got to his feet—

—just as he heard the big breechloader boom. His heart exulted for the Frenchman … when Sam heard the crack of those lighter carbines. It sounded like a dozen or more shots. Then he waited for Bacon to answer back with the breechloader a second time.

But he never heard the big gun fire again.

By the time he reached the brush thirty or more yards from the house on his way down to the river, Benedict owned up that the brave Frenchman was likely dead.

As he lay there in the grass, Sam wondered what the little pricks were doing in the house. Every now and then he could hear something breaking, but he could not be sure what the devil was going on because he was hiding way back here, far from the front of the place. Probably for the best.

Yet, as the minutes crawled past, Samuel Benedict came to realize that those red niggers weren't going to wait for darkness to continue their rampage. Some of them came around the corner of the house, inspecting the ground. They pointed off in his general direction, then disappeared again. He figured the sons of bitches were bound to come looking for him soon.

But if he could reach the footbridge across White Bird Creek … he might be a lot safer on the other side. Cover himself with leaves and hide till morning.

Though it hurt him to pull himself to his feet against a sturdy birch sapling, Benedict started forward, the twig still clenched between his teeth. If he could make it across the creek …

Step by agonizing step he teetered toward the footbridge through the fading light of that afternoon—inching along so slowly that he had time to select his steps so that he wouldn't make a lot of noise busting through the brush. Then no more than fifteen yards of open ground was all that lay between him and the creek bank. He'd make a fine target of himself as he stumbled for the end of the bridge—

Almost there, Sam heard them coming. Thinking if he could just lie flat on the bridge they might not see him.

But from the way the red bastards suddenly began to yelp he knew they had spotted him.

There at the edge of the water he reached out and grabbed for the two rope spanners, dragging himself forward with that first clumsy lunge onto the bridge. Benedict looked over his shoulder, his attention drawn to the crowd of warriors. One of them stepped away from the others, slowly bringing a rifle to his shoulder.

It was the little red prick who had shot him that morning!

The muzzle spat a long tongue of flame before he could duck. An unseen fist slammed him in the chest and hurtled him into the air, tumbling, spinning. A moment later Samuel Benedict sensed the sudden, surprising cold of White Bird Creek swallow him whole.

*   *   *

“Look there, Brother!” Shore Crossing cried to his cousin as he burst out of the brush not far behind the wounded Shadow.

The light was fading, but he was certain it was the same white man they had confronted on the trail early that morning.

“I see! It's the whiskey man!” Red Moccasin Tops roared as he stepped from the edge of the group.

The rest who had joined Shore Crossing in following the blood spots and tracks halted immediately and let Sun Necklace's son continue alone.

“I thought you killed him this morning, Nephew!” Big Morning chided.

Red Moccasin Tops whirled, fury on his face, the new rifle before him. “I shot him, yes. Both of us saw him. He was dead, Uncle.”

“Then who is that?” Bare Feet demanded as the Shadow stumbled onto the rope-and-plank footbridge crossing White Bird Creek.

Growling, Red Moccasin Tops whirled back to face the whiskey trader. He started marching toward the Shadow. “This one? Why—he is a dead man!”

The bullet from his carbine struck the Shadow so hard it spilled the whiskey peddler backward over the thick rope that served as one of the bridge's handrails. After somersaulting twice, the Shadow hit the noisy, snow-swollen water and started floating downstream, past the warriors, who hurried to the creek bank to see what became of him for themselves.

Face-down, arms and legs spread, the body cartwheeled slowly around in the current as it was washed into the middle of the stream. For a moment the dead man's foot caught an overhanging branch, but the body soon tilted and was freed to float on out of sight for the Salmon.

“Now he will stay dead!” Red Moccasin Tops bellowed in triumph. “Back to the whiskey trader's house! I have grown as thirsty as my father!”

*   *   *

Once allowed to flee the house with her daughters, Isabella Benedict reached the thick timber and tall brush sheltering the bank along White Bird Creek. Here within earshot of the gurgling, rushing stream, she settled down within the bushes with her two children to watch the warriors moving about in her house as the afternoon light continued to ripen.

A handful or more warriors suddenly streamed out of the house, knelt in the yard, and one of them pointed at the ground—before immediately taking off for the creek.

They swept right on by her, entering the trees not far from where Isabella cowered with her babies. The heathens were off on some deadly errand.

She was still choking on something sour, something hard to swallow, thinking it must be her thundering heart that had risen into the back of her throat. Still not quite able to believe they had let her go, telling her to hightail it for the Manuel place. Telling her they had allowed another woman her freedom … wondering again if it was Jennet. Could it be that these savages weren't really killing every white man, woman, and child in sight—not really raping every female old enough to give the smelly bucks their horrid pleasures?

It had to be a trick, a terrible trick, she convinced herself as she huddled there, clutching her children close, feeling her oldest girl sobbing silently, no sound, only the unsteady quaking as Emmy shook against her mother's rib cage beneath the shelter of that arm.

A single gunshot startled her. That wasn't a weapon fired from the house, but from the bunch that had rushed past her hiding place not too long ago. She waited and waited for more gunfire, then figured the warriors must be getting spooked themselves, shooting at ghosts.

Agonizing minutes later, the same bunch emerged from the trees and returned to the house.

She waited them out. A long time. Listening as they ransacked the place, breaking and clattering, busting and shattering. Roaring with laughter and shrieking their war whoops.
Damn it all—they must have found the cache of whiskey,
she thought.

It was getting cool here in twilight's shadows by the time she saw them mounting up in front of the store and streaming off. But instead of heading upstream along White Bird Creek where she had figured they would return to the Camas Prairie, the bastards were riding down for the Salmon.

Bound for H. C. Brown's homestead.

*   *   *

The summer breeze coming off the nearby Salmon rustled the week-old
Lewiston Teller,
the newspaper H. C. Brown sat reading on his front porch late that Thursday afternoon, the fourteenth of June.

“Brown! Brown!”

Lowering the paper past his eyes, H.C. peered about, looking for the source of the faint voice that had called out his name.

“The Indians, they are coming! Indians are on their way!”

He spotted them—four men on the opposite bank of the river, waving to him and jumping about as they hollered across the Salmon, pointing downstream.

“Indians are coming!” they repeated.

Flinging his newspaper aside, Brown didn't need any more prompting. Not after what had happened to Sam Benedict that morning. Dammit if Benedict wasn't right after all!

“Albert!” he bellowed for his brother-in-law as he shot to his feet. “Get my sister down to the boat! Injuns coming to butcher us all!”

Albert Benson and his wife brushed past Brown as he dove inside the house. He could hear his sister shrieking in terror as her husband dragged her toward the riverbank, where they kept a large rowboat tied to a narrow floating dock. H.C. went to the corner of the front room and took up the old needle gun. Opening the action, he saw there was a copper cartridge seated in the action. He snapped the breech closed and took the hunting pouch from the peg near the door. Raising the flap, he found the pouch filled with more than two dozen cartridges.

Enough to get them out of danger, across the Salmon, maybe downriver in the rowboat they often used rather than going horseback to one of the stores for supplies.

Dashing out of the house, Brown took a few steps toward the dock, where Benson was just then helping his wife totter into the boat.

“Wait there for me, Albert!” H.C. hollered, then wheeled toward the rocky outcrop that jutted from the side of the hill behind the house.

Reaching the top of the jagged granite a few minutes later, Brown huffed to a halt. From here he could peer up and down a good piece of the Salmon River Road, as well as look across much of that ground lying off toward White Bird Creek too, over where the Benedict place lay. That's where he saw them—at least a handful at first, then a lot more made their appearance through the trees on the wooded trail leading to Sam's store.

Leaping off the rock, Brown skidded, bounding down the slope two or three yards at a time, nearly falling twice, but somehow keeping himself upright as he skidded onto the bottom behind the house, where he immediately started sprinting for the riverbank.

“Goddamn rope!” Albert Benson was grumbling in frustration as he struggled with the knot mooring their rowboat to a fence post embedded in the bank.

“Cut it!” Brown yelled as he sprinted up.

Benson raised his head, his eyes imploring—like a trapped animal's. “I ain't got a knife!”

Bending, H.C. pulled his folding knife from a pocket, snapped open the blade, and slashed the rope. “They're right over yonder by them trees! We gotta get!”

Scrambling into the boat, Benson made it rock so much that his wife screamed in fear that he would swamp them. The moment Albert got seated, Brown passed his brother-in-law the rifle, then heaved against the floating dock to cast off the boat. Once it was easing into the current, H.C. leaped in and went to his knees at the bow.

“Row, goddammit!” he ordered, taking up one of the oars himself.

Together the two men used the oars like canoe paddles, digging deep in the Salmon as they heard the cries of the warriors.

His sister shrieked in horror. Brown looked over his shoulder, finding more than a handful of the red bastards emerging from the trees on their ponies, halting right at the floating dock. Some of them brandished firearms.

“Row for it!” Brown screamed. “They got guns!”

The first bullet whined harmlessly past Brown's head as he ducked, feeling lucky. Then more of a ragged volley erupted from that shoreline behind them.

“Dig with that paddle, Albert!”

“Can't—”

“I said
row,
goddammit!”

Then H.C. suddenly spotted the blood oozing between Benson's fingers where he gripped his upper arm. “Paddle for him, Sister!”

Just as she rocked forward to take the oar from her husband, H.C. felt his own shoulder burn.

Brown looked down, finding the bloody furrow a bullet had carved across the top of his upper arm. Flexing his fingers in that hand, he figured he could still grip the oar.

“Dig, Sister—dig with all your might!”

As they pulled at the snow-swollen Salmon, the boat slowly turned sideways in the current and was swiftly carried away downstream. Brown listened as the gunfire slowly faded behind them. Eventually no more angry bullets hissed past their heads the way wasps did when he knocked down their muddy nests from under the eaves of the porch.

Eventually he and his sister managed to get the boat over to the west bank, where he jumped into the shallows, seizing the bow with his good arm so he could lunge toward the grassy shore. Only then did H. C. Brown realize his sister was quietly sobbing, her eyes clenched shut as she continued to stab her oar into the water, blindly rowing, still fighting the river as if it were the embodiment of those savages who had come to murder them all.

“We're safe,” Benson cooed at his wife the moment the rowboat lurched against the riverbank.

“That's right, Sister,” Brown said, his own voice cracking as he reached out and took hold of her wrist, stilling her frantic oar sweeps, each one biting more at the air than she bit into the river. “We're safe for now.”

Chapter 17

June I4, 1877

“Sounds to me like all the rest of 'em figger Baker's place is closer,” William Osborn declared after listening to what messenger William George had to say when he returned from spreading the alarm to the neighbors.

Harry Mason nodded, turning all of it over in his mind. He dragged the big turnip watch out of the pocket in his canvas britches, snapped open the case with his dear, departed Anna's photo inside to protect it from fading, and found it to be just past six o'clock that Thursday evening. “So everyone you saw said they were heading up to the old man's place?”