Far as the Eye Can See (20 page)

Finally I got the idea that we should all three get it burning really high, then go into the pine forest and stock up for the night. We filled one entire side of our shelter with piled wood. A pine branch burns really quick, so we had to have a whole lot of it. Around midnight the wind finally begun to calm down. The fire crackled and spit, and we could settle in a bit and commence to feel warm. The front edge of the stone itself begun to heat up a little, and that helped.

Daniel said, “I wish I had some tobacco.”

I poked the fire with a stick. “Me too.”

Nate was on the other side of Daniel, sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees. He shivered a lot, but he had nothing to say.

A breath of wind come back in on us and smoke swirled in our faces and all three of us commenced coughing and spitting. It ain’t nothing on earth like pine smoke and ash blowing right at you. I’d rather put my head in the smokestack of a damn train. Daniel covered his face with his hat, and when the wind died down again, he looked at me with watery eyes so it looked like he was crying. “Lordy, I’m hungry,” he said.

Nate looked pretty well done in too. “I could eat a living buffalo.”

“I got some sowbelly in my pack,” I said.

They both looked at me. Daniel said like he was sorry for it, “All we got is some hardtack and coffee.”

It took a while, but with some hard work back and forth from the horses to our shelter, we got some food in our bellies. The hardtack went well with the sowbelly. Even though I swore when I got out of the army I’d never eat that stuff again, I been eating it pretty regular ever since. The juice from the sowbelly softened it, and it almost took on the character of bread. I think Nate didn’t hate me so much after we’d eaten some and could sip hot coffee while we fed the fire. “Was you a Reb?” he asked me.

I told him which side I was on. I didn’t see the point of mentioning how many bonuses I collected before it was over.

“I was too young,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t missed it.”

Daniel seemed to nod in agreement.

“You know what you seen today?” I said.

Neither one could look me in the eye.

“That little skirmish today was nothing at all,” I said. “Not a blink of a gnat’s eye to even the smallest named engagement of the war.”

“I know that was no battle,” Daniel said.

“You seen all of two minutes of ordered drill. Then you all took off. The only gun fired was the captain’s pistol.”

“There was gunfire,” Nate said, and I could see he was beginning to dislike me all over again. “The Injuns had rifles.”

“Nary a one,” I said. “They did their fighting with lances and bow and arrow.”

“I heard their fire,” Nate said.

“Did you fire
your
rifle?”

He stared at me with real hatred for a second, then looked away.

Daniel shook his head. “Maybe we didn’t,” he said.

“There wasn’t no rifle fire,” I said. “Indians don’t have so many guns as everybody thinks. They ain’t allowed to have them at the fort. When they go out on their own to hunt without permission, you think the army gives them rifles? Where you think they got all them rifles you heard? There some kind of magazine or store out here we don’t know about?”

“Okay, they didn’t have guns,” Nate said, and his face was red as his hair and his eyes looked little and mean, like a bat’s eyes. “And we’re cowards.”

Daniel said, “I did run with the others. I couldn’t do anything else. It all happened so fast.”

“As it does in battle,” I said. I seen a hopeless look in Daniel’s eyes. He’d lost his best friend and he was trying damn hard not to let it get to him. It was beginning to hit him that if he’d of fought a little bit—if he’d fired his carbine in the direction of them Indians—it might of turned out differently. Jake took a arrow in the front, so he was facing the enemy. Daniel must of figured out that if a arrow had found him, it would most likely of hit him in the ass. That’s a real bad thing to realize about yourself, and I seen it take ahold of him. “It ain’t nothing but a mess of confusion when the fighting starts,” I told him. “Them Indians that come at you on horseback fight better with a bow and arrow than most men can with guns and pistols. They are great cavalrymen, and they got the best of your outfit today.”

“We’ll kill our share someday,” Nate said.

“You go ahead and plan for that,” I said.

We tried to sleep in shifts. It was almost impossible in that cold air. The fire would bank every twenty minutes or so and we’d feed it with snow-covered wood that hissed and steamed loud enough to wake a body that did fall asleep.

By morning it was clear and calm—but so cold even the fire struggled to give off heat. We was running out of fuel and I didn’t see the point of trying to build it back up. “We better be moving on,” I said.

We didn’t get far before we run into three more stragglers. None of them had wounds to speak of and none had fired their carbines, neither. I refrained from pointing that out, but we trekked fairly directly north and west back toward Bozeman. The ground rose and fell like a great white ocean. We trudged up and down those hills and along ravines and valleys, trying to stay warm and keep moving. It was hard for the horses to walk steady in the snow, but we kept on, our heads bowed to the cold air. The damn sun wasn’t no source of heat at all. It just hung up in the blue sky, with nary a cloud to block it, and the white snow reflecting the sun made it hard to keep your eyes open.

Even heading directly back, with no side diversions, we trudged through that rough country for six days. We shot a few groundhogs for something to eat and we finished all the rest of the rations the men had with them. The weather let up enough that it wasn’t bad camping at night the rest of the way back.

By the time we got back to Fort Ellis, the weather had broke loose again, only this time it started a freezing rain. You couldn’t stay dry for even a few seconds out in the open. Daniel, Nate, and the others was near dead with exhaustion. Jake’s body was soaked, and hung over the back of his horse with his head dripping water like a man just coming up out of a cool swim in a creek. He was a sight to see, with purple skin and bulging eyes. It was too cold for him to start to bloat, so I guess that was a good thing.

I watched some clean, fresh troops take his body down off his horse and carry him off. The fellows I was with all got taken to warm quarters, but General Gibbon hisself wanted to talk to me about what happened. I sat in a wood chair across from a small desk in his office. There was a fireplace in the corner that kept the room warm. He leaned back in a high-backed leather chair. He was puffing on a long black cigar. He was a fairly slim fellow, with a short, clipped reddish-brown beard, a great handlebar mustache that hung down along the sides of his mouth, and fierce-looking blue eyes. He didn’t mind silence. He set there puffing that long cigar while icy water dripped off of me onto the floor and the chair. I had it in my hair and beard, which had got started growing again. I started to shiver a bit, even in that warm room, and I realized there was a competent odor dripping off me too. I think I smelled like rotted buffalo meat.

General Gibbon said he wanted to know everything that happened. I didn’t see no reason to get nobody in trouble, so I left out the fact none of them boys fired a single shot once the Indians started charging them, but I told him the truth for the most part. I described how Captain Bellows died a-charging right in amongst them, shooting his weapon, with his sword raised. “He had no fear,” I said.

“Well,” the general said, “he was a fool.”

“I thought he was brave.”

“What the hell was Bellows doing all the way down in Wyoming Territory?” he said.

“We was following a certain band.”

“I told him to go east to the Yellowstone River.”

“I took him where there was Indians. That was my job.”

“And six of you make it back.”

“There may be others,” I said.

“I’ve got five companies of infantry and four cavalry troops,” Gibbon said. “And come January I’m going east. We’re going to find and engage every single non-treaty Indian camp in the Yellowstone River region of Montana. Wyoming is not our problem.”

I said nothing.

“I wanted Bellows to find the Indian encampments, not go charging into them.”

“I mentioned it to him. He said it was a small group and he could do it hisself.”

He wanted to know how many Cheyenne was in Saw-set’s camp.

I really didn’t know. “Could of been thirty or forty or more,” I said. “Maybe less.”

“How many lodges?”

“I didn’t count them,” I said. “What I seen, maybe twenty.”

He nodded, smoke clouding around his head. I think there was steam coming off me.

I said, “A band of them come out of the timber on our left—away from the camp. I don’t think they was braves from Saw-set’s village alone.”

“You don’t.”

“They looked like Sioux.”

He twisted the cigar in his mouth. Behind him the fire had started to bank a little. I was shivering again. The kerosene lantern on his desk made the buttons on his uniform glisten like hot coals. All I wanted to do was get warm.

General Gibbon said, “I want you to go dry off and have something to eat. Get a good night’s sleep. Then come back here. I’ve got something in mind for you.”

I stood up. He seemed to be waiting there for me to say something, or do something. I hesitated, then I said, “I’ll be back in the morning, first thing.”

He nodded and saluted, so I did the same and then I backed out of his office.

Chapter 12

Both women looked pretty good when I got back to the wagon. I went to the bathhouse first and got cleaned up a bit. The hot water felt really good and it was only my empty belly that got me out of there. I had put Cricket up in the stable and when I was all cleaned up I considered a visit to the upper floors there, but was too hungry to give it a try. It would be untruthful of me not to admit that I wondered what might be in store for me in that wagon with them two women.

It had pretty much stopped raining, and the sun peeked through the gray clouds and made shadows on what snow was left. When I reached the wagon I stood just on the outside and called to Eveline. She thrown the flap back and both of them stood in the opening looking down at me.

“You have returned early,” Christine said.

“Not for long, I fear.”

“You look a little worn-out.”

“I’m okay.” We didn’t none of us speak for a moment, then I said, “You got that ’ere stove fired up in there?”

They welcomed me inside. They’d made biscuits and coffee that afternoon for supper and there was some left over for me. They watched me eat in silence. I might of gorged myself, but there was only three biscuits left and the coffee was at the bottom and full of grounds. It was wonderful to be dry and warm again.

“So,” Eveline said. “Tell of your adventures.”

I told them all that happened. When I talked about Jake, Christine needed to wipe her eyes. “He was just a boy,” I said. “Like a lot of them. He ain’t never seen a Indian come at him like that, firing arrows so quick you don’t have time to aim your gun and shoot. They just come at you.”

“Why couldn’t he shoot?” Eveline said.

“It ain’t easy against arrows a-flying through the air,” I said. “You can’t never see bullets in a battle. Hell, there’s always too much smoke to really see nothing at all in front of you. So you can face bullets and pretty much concentrate on what you’re doing until one of them hits into you. But a arrow’s a big thing flying through the clear air coming right for your eyes. It makes it a mite hard to concentrate.”

“It must be horrible,” Christine said.

“You don’t never get used to it,” I said, like I known what I was talking about.

They was pretty sad when I said that old General Gibbon ordered me to come back to his office in the morning. “He’s got something he wants me to do.”

“I hope you will stay here tonight,” Eveline said.

“Of course you are welcome,” her sister said. I could see she didn’t mean it.

Now, the truth is, I was interested in Christine. She was younger and had good teeth and was just plain better looking than Eveline. But it was Eveline that flirted with me and I known I’d have to deal with her first. In the lamplight, in front of that small stove, she didn’t look all that bad, to tell the truth.

Christine started moving folds of her dress around, and then she come up with this heavy-looking book.

“Is that a Bible?” I said.

“You might say so,” she said.

Eveline said, “Oh, not now, Christine.”

“What sort of Bible is it?” I wanted to know.

Christine opened it and run her fingers over some of the pages, real soft-like, like she was brushing some kind of sweet oil on it. “Do you know how to read, Mr. Hale?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever heard of Shakespeare?”

“I heard tell of him.”

“And have you ever heard of King Lear?”

“He was one of them English kings, right?”