Far as the Eye Can See (7 page)

But events conspired against me.

The ground next to the river got to be marshy and too soft for horses, much less wagons. We had to veer south for what I hoped would be just a little while, until we could find solid ground. The marshland stretched a long way and it was almost dark by the time I figured we could turn the wagons back west. But now there was a different problem. The ground started rising, and the trees seemed to grow denser. We had the marsh on our right, and the angle of it seemed to bend more and more south, and further from the river.

General Cooney said, “There’s no trail? Are you looking for a trail?”

“We just have to stay west,” I said.

He looked over his right shoulder at the sun. “We seem to be going away from the river.”

“Right. We can’t take the wagons through that.” I pointed at the green, waterlogged marsh.

He started to say something, but he stopped. His eyes fixed on something ahead of us. “Indians,” he said. He fairly gulped out the word. I turned and seen a party of braves on horses coming toward us. I halted the train and set there watching them. It was about twenty braves. Women and children walked behind them. There were lodgepoles strapped to mules and they even had a wagon with them. I wondered where they got the wagon.

“What do we do?” General Cooney said.

“I believe we’ll just wait a bit. But go back and tell each driver to be ready to put the wagons in a circle. Tell them to circle to the left,
away
from the marsh.” As I said this, I noticed the Indians was not really moving along with that wagon. It was stuck and they had been trying to get it out when we come on them. I watched as they finally managed to get it moving and now they was turning it away from the marsh.

We was probably a full day’s ride from Fort Hays, and maybe a third of the way to Fort Wallace. While General Cooney went around to each of the wagons and give my instructions, two of the braves broke off from the group and started toward me at a gallop. They carried lances with black and white feathers tied to the tips, and again I was amazed at how each of them looked on a horse, like horse and rider was one.

General Cooney come back next to me. His horse let out this loud shudder and shook its head. The bridle clinked. We watched the Indians coming at a slow walk now, their horses nodding their heads like they was saying yes to the world.

The Indians wore yellow leggings, and leather vests all draped with beads. They wasn’t painted. One was a little bigger than the other, but both of them was tall. The only Crow brave I ever seen was Big Tree, and with that name I thought he was unusual. But both of these fellows was almost as high as Big Tree. One was pretty old but held himself erect and proud. He raised his arm when he stopped his horse in front of us. General Cooney did the same. The older brave pointed at himself and said, “Chíischipaaliash.”

I said, “Hello.”

The younger one started speaking, “Hinnay cheesh eepaul eeash kook. Bineesh bach eetuah kook. Deelapaache beeluuk.” I didn’t understand a word he was saying and neither did Cooney. The older one smiled a bit, nodded his head as the other talked.

“You speak English?” I said. “American?”

The older one smiled broadly.

“Baamniawaawalakuk?” the young one said.

I shook my head to let him know I didn’t get it.

“Hinnay baaniiummauak?”

“No understand,” Cooney said.

The older one started trying to communicate through sign. He gestured with his arms, made circles, and pointed to invisible things in the air. Then he made a sweeping motion with his hand and pointed at us. “Baaniiummauak.”

Then the smaller one reached into a scabbard at his side and pulled out a great hunting knife. It gleamed in the bright sun. I looked at the knife, but I had no time to think about what it meant. Cooney jerked his pistol out of his belt and shot the fellow in the breastbone. He fell over backward off his horse. “Jesus!” I screamed. The other Indian held on while his horse rose up, then turned and careened the other way. Cooney and me turned our horses and run back to the wagons. I could hear the Indians shouting behind us. We galloped up to the lead wagon that was already beginning to turn to make the circle, and I hollered, “Keep going! No circle! Just head back fast!”

The guy on the wagon slapped the reins hard on the backs of his horses and started yelling at them: “Heyaaa, heeyaaa!”

“Go, go, go!” I screamed, turning Cricket to face the wagons as they teetered and leaned, the horses and mules struggling in the traces; finally the whole train straightened out and got to running. I waited until the last wagon was headed in the right direction, told Cooney to stay at the rear, then raced to get on the lead. I didn’t hear no other shots.

We raced over that terrain a long time. Didn’t lose a wagon. Nobody got hurt. When it was dark, I halted the train and galloped back to Cooney. He was still on his horse, watching the trail behind us. Two boys in the last wagon was crouched down in the back of it, looking down the barrels of their muskets, at the ready.

“See anything, General?” I said.

“Nary a thing.”

“Nothing at all?”

He shook his head, still staring back down the way we’d come.

“We could probably make it back to Fort Hays before dawn,” I said. “You think we should try?”

He looked up at the sky. “Moon’s pretty low right now. Why don’t we give the horses a breather and then see if we can make it. I don’t want to just sit here and wait for them.”

So we let the horses calm down and get to breathing naturally and then we started off again, this time at a slower pace. I rode out front by myself and kept us going due east once we got back to the river. We got to Fort Hays just after sunrise, crossed back to the north side of the river and joined Theo’s circle of wagons.

He was not happy to see us. And the Swedes we was leading wasn’t too happy, neither, but they was glad to be alive. For a while there I was a kind of hero because I had led them out of the danger of them wild Indians.

Then those same wild Indians come riding up to the fort right behind us. They still had the wagon with them, the mules hauling lodgepoles and tepee skins, and the women and children. Colonel Harding, who spoke the language, rode out to meet them. He had Theo with him. They talked for a bit while the rest of us watched, our guns and rifles ready to fire. I stood next to one of the wagons with my carbine resting on the top of a wagon wheel, and I was aiming at the center of the big Indian who did all the talking. It was so quiet, all you could hear was a dog barking somewhere in the camp, and the wind whipping through the tops of the trees. Then Harding and Theo come back to where we was all waiting. Theo got off his horse and walked up to me, shaking his head. Harding stayed on his horse but he come over in front of me, too, right next to Theo. The Indians turned their horses and trotted a few hundred feet to our left, near the river, and started dismounting and unpacking the mules.

“They’re going to camp here for a while,” Theo said.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Who did the shooting?” Harding wanted to know.

“General Cooney,” I said, at the same time that he said, “I did.”

“You killed a innocent man,” Theo said.

“He pulled a knife,” I said.

“He wanted to show it to you—he was offering it to you as a gesture of goodwill.”

“It didn’t look like goodwill to me,” General Cooney said.

“He was just going to show it to you,” Theo said. “He was proud of it. He wanted to trade it for something.”

I wasn’t feeling like a hero no more. It was damn hard to look Theo and Harding in the face. All I could say was “You really believe that?”

“I don’t know many Indians that lie,” Theo said. “That’s the one thing you can count on. They don’t bother to lie.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Just about everybody lies about something.”

“That older gentleman over there is Chiischipaalia. That means ‘Twines His Horse’s Tail.’ One of the great Crow medicine men.”

“He didn’t look like no chief,” Cooney said.

“They all look like chiefs,” Harding said. “These are Crow Indians. We ain’t never had to fight them. They’re on our side.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Well,” Cooney said, “I sure am sorry about it.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Harding said. “You got to give them something.”

“What?”

“You own more than one horse?” Harding said.

“No.”

“They want something from you. You ought to make it pretty valuable.”

“Can I buy another horse from you?”

Harding rubbed his white-gloved hand under his chin. “I’ll sell you one, but you give them Indians that one you’re riding. That’s what the young fellow you killed wanted to trade the knife for.”

I shook my head. “The devil take me.”

The two Swedish gentlemen, again with hats off, come over and seemed like they wanted to ask something. “You may as well settle in here for a while,” Theo said to them. “We’ll all start out again soon.” Then he turned and looked at me. “That okay with you?”

“Certainly,” I said. My face felt hot and swollen. “I didn’t want to lead no train anyway.”

“You did all right getting them back here,” Theo said.

It was later the next say that he found out I’d led them on the south side of the river. He didn’t think much of that. “You would not of even run into Twines His Horse’s Tail’s bunch if you’d done what I said to do.”

“Where’d they get that wagon?” I said.

“I don’t know. They hunt all along this river and camp where they please,” he said. “Sometimes for sociability and to be where they can trade for a few things, they camp near one of the forts. They’re good neighbors.”

I shook my head in shame. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize to me.”

“I mean I’m sorry I took the train on the wrong side of the river.”

“That won’t be the only mistake you make out here,” he said.

He was sure right about that. I was still powerful curious to know what happened to Preston. What kind of mistake led to his death.

I felt so sorry for that poor Indian that Cooney shot. I thought I should at least apologize to them folks if I could.

I asked Theo if he and Big Tree would come with me and Cooney to apologize to Twines His Horse’s Tail. It took a while to convince Big Tree, but he come along. “That your business,” he said.

“We need you to translate.”

“You need me to guard.”

“It ain’t nothing I thought of,” I said. “But you’re right.”

It was a bright morning. We approached the village with a bit of caution. Cooney and me was walking out front. Theo told us to go at a steady pace, but not too fast.

“They’ll kill me,” Cooney whispered to me. He was sweating terribly, and although it was already pretty warm, and promised to be a very hot and humid day, there was a cool breeze drifting in and out of the trees around the fort. “I know they’ll want to torture and kill me.”

“No they won’t, General,” I said.

“Won’t what?” Theo asked.

“Kill the general.”

“They might want to. But if we walk in there and ask to speak to the old man, they won’t. Indians tend to honor folks that ain’t afraid.”

When we got to the camp, a young brave come out to meet us. Big Tree went ahead and translated for us because the brave walked right up to him and begun speaking. All Crow Indians are pretty tall and stately; they have very nearly perfect bodies, every one of them. But Big Tree was aptly named. Even on foot, he towered over most folks, even the other Crow braves.

The young brave and Big Tree spoke very stiffly to each other, then the brave gestured with his arm that we should come into the camp. There was huge lodges all in a big kind of circle, with some inside the circle at various placements, but all around the center of the camp where the wagon stood. A few dogs barked. Children run about, circling us and hollering to beat the band. Like they was on a raid. When we got to the center of the camp, the brave stopped and turned around.

He said something sounded like “Hinnay, hay.”

“He says we should wait here,” Big Tree said.

Then Twines His Horse’s Tail come out of the big tepee next to the wagon. He was dressed with a breastplate of colorful reeds of some kind, and bright beads around his neck. He wore yellow leggings and a black loincloth, and his moccasins was decorated on the top with beads. On his head was a huge skullcap of a buffalo, with the black horns arching toward each other over his dark eyes. He had a old man’s craggy face, with lines that run from next to his deep-set eyes and down both sides of his mouth from his nose. His jet-black hair, twined with gray strands, draped his shoulders and hung way down his back. He was tall as well, and carried himself with absolute dignity. I felt like I was in the presence of a personage as great as Lincoln. Four other younger, tall, decorated braves stood next to him.

He spoke in a deeply resonant voice.

Big Tree said, “He wants to smoke a pipe with us, then he will talk.”