“C
ompanyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
â¦
Ulp!”
The master sergeant who bawled the order had been in the military twenty years, minimum; a figure arrived at by assigning a year to each
y
in
company
and adding three for the total incomprehensibility of his pronunciation of
Halt.
When their commands could no longer be understood by anyone they were forced into retirement.
It was the same sergeant with black handlebars I'd seen on the Saskatchewan. He relayed the order as reluctantly as he'd put away his side arm when Inspector Urban Vivian identified me as an ally and not an enemy come to ambush four hundred Mounties with a force of two men, a woman, and a boy. The command was repeated a couple of times farther back, and with a racket of creaking saddles, jingling bit chains, snorting horses, and rattling rifle stocks, the column came to a stop. A warm vapor of perspiration and spent breath drifted forward and settled over Philippe, Fleurette, Claude, and me like a mist of rain. Then there was eardrum-battering silence.
Vivian broke it. Weeks of riding with the sun slamming off
the snow had burned his face as dark as the chestnut he rode and bleached his hair and brush moustache as white as his helmet and belt. His pale eyes stood out like newly minted coins.
“I gave you up for bear bait long ago,” he said.
He didn't know how close he'd come to guessing right, but I didn't give him the point. “In Montana we use bears to catch buffalo. I've been taking in the scenery.”
“Who is that with you?”
I introduced the du la Rochelles. Vivian surprised me by unstrapping and removing his helmet to nod at Fleurette. His hair, darker on top, had grown out at the temples. He put the helmet back on to address Philippe. “I know you, I think. We have you down as an insurgent.”
“Your information is out of date,
monsieur l'inspecteur.
I fight no one these days.”
“What brings you this far north?”
I said, “I hired him as my guide.”
“He must not be very good. I've been to Chipewyan and back, and this is as far as you've got.”
“We liked Shulamite too much to leave. Then a blizzard hit.”
One eye twitched. It was as much surprise as he would show in front of his command. “I don't believe you. Shulamite? You're a liar.”
“I'd throw down my glove, but I need it.” I let my gaze wander down the line of horsemen. “Every time I see you, you've got a bigger army. Another week or two of Bliss and Whitelaw on the loose and you'll strip the queen of her palace guard.”
“That Métis family they butchered up north had a house guest the night they visited. The guest was a priest. If we don't get them first the Metis will do it for us, and burn down every square mile they pass through on the way. This isn't your fight any longer, Murdock. Canada has the greater claim.”
I took another look at the column. It was as good a light-horse cavalry as the continent had, if you didn't count the Comanche and northern Cheyenne. In nearly ten years fighting renegades and settling disputes, the North-West Mounted had lost just four men, as opposed to Custer's two hundred during one day's fighting in southern Montana. If I ever wanted to turn over a manhunt to someone else, I wouldn't find a better candidate.
“I'll go home if you'll put it in writing that Judge Blackthorne's court gets Bliss and Whitelaw when you're through trying them.”
“I can give you my word to that, as an officer and a gentleman.”
“I believe you, Inspector, but if you take a bullet to the head, your word won't be worth one cent more than your brains. I'll need it on paper.”
He flushed beneath the sunburn. “Damn it, man, I haven't writing materials to hand.”
“Then I'll just ride along with you.”
“I can't offer you safe passage. You might think about that before you drag along a woman and a boy. We are on our way to parley with a band of Sioux.”
“Wolf Shirt. I got that much from Brother Hebron.”
Vivian recognized the names. His nose was running in the cold; he flicked a drop off the end with a white-gloved finger. No one before had ever made so elegant a gesture of it. “Perhaps you were telling the truth about Shulamite. I ask your pardon.”
That surprised and irritated me. Most of the fun I'd had in Canada so far, after the weather and renegade slaves and madwomen, was hating Inspector Vivian. “I've been called worse
than a liar, and earned some of it,” I said. “What's your plan? From what I've heard about Wolf Shirt, he won't give up Bliss and Whitelaw for a sack of beads.”
“That's how you Americans handle it. That's how he and his people came to be up here in the first place.” Having thus reestablished our animosity, he said, “I intend to appeal to his common sense. Up until now the Sioux have enjoyed the hospitality of the authorities in Canada and sanctuary against prosecution for their differences with the United States of America. If he insists upon harboring fugitives from Canadian law, he sacrifices everything. We have warrants for the arrest of Bliss, Whitelaw, and their companions, and we shall serve them if it means war with the entire Sioux Nation.”
“Now you're beginning to sound like Phil Sheridan.”
He turned to the man with the black handlebars. “Sergeant Major. Walk-march-trot.”
“Wukmutchtut!”
bawled the other.
The column started forward. I turned the mustang's head and gave the lead line a flip to clear the path. Philippe backed King Henry out of the way.
“Indians are muleheaded,” I called out above the noise. “They can't count, or they won't. They'll go to war with the rest of the world rather than back off from a position.”
“Then they have something in common with Great Britain,” he called back over his shoulder.
Philippe and I watched the Mounties pass with our arms folded on our pommels. “What scares me is he thinks that's a good thing,” I said.
“It is the same with buffalo,” said the Métis. “That's why there are so few left.”
We watched the scarlet column trot past, their mounts'
hooves churning clouds of powdery snow. Rattling at the rear was a sight that never failed to chill my blood: A pair of men driving a reinforced wagon with the brass bunched barrels of a Gatling gun mounted on a tripod poking out the end of a canvas tarpaulin.
Philippe took in his breath sharply. “A machine for killing,” he said. “It is a great time in which we live.”
Fleurette, looking confused, leaned forward and said something to her husband, who responded briefly in French. She sat back, crossed herself, then looked around for Claude, who had slid down from behind her. When she spotted him she called his name shrilly. Startled, he scampered over and was caught in a maternal headlock.
I got out my leather pouch and placed two double eagles in Philippe's palm. “The extra is for Shulamite,” I said. “I'm pretty sure Brother Enoch was in favor of killing all three of you for riding with me. You didn't have to wait around to watch the fight after the committee said you could go.”
He didn't close his hand. “The job is not finished, Deputy Marshal Murdock.”
“I hired you to guide me. If I can't follow four hundred Mounties and their eggbeater on wheels from here, I'm no kind of a manhunter. Go home and shoot buffalo.”
Fleurette asked another question. When Philippe translated what I'd said, she shook her head, let go of Claude, scooped the gold coins out of her husband's hand, and thrust them toward me.
“She says you hired me to take you to Fort Chipewyan,” he said. “Since that is no longer necessary, we will accompany you the rest of the way to the stronghold.”
“She didn't say anything.”
He showed me his gold teeth. “We have been married a long time, Deputy Marshal Murdock. We do not always have to speak to say what we are thinking.”
I took back the eagles. There is no arguing with a woman in any language.
French blood leads to
exaggeration, and I was prepared to find the Sioux stronghold at Cree Lake a good deal less formidable than Philippe had described it. A half-day short of the lake, however, I saw the broken granite peak of the formation sticking up above the towering white pines that separated us, as straight and tall and imposing as any of the multi-story buildings that were going up in Chicago for the greater glory of the meat barons whose slaughterhouses butchered western beef for New York and London and Paris and a hundred other cities whose residents had never seen a cow any other way but cut up and packaged for sale:
Skyscrapers,
they called them; but the name had never seemed so appropriate as when one applied it to the present feature. When Wolf Shirt and his followers first set eyes upon it, they would have given thanks to the Wise One Above for his sacred gift to Custer's conquerors. I had to think there was something to that, or the Last Stand would have taken place somewhere more defensible than that pimple of a hill on the Little Big Horn.
The Mounties reformed into column of twos to slice
through the girdle of forest that surrounded the lake, sending a cloud of gray squirrels scampering to the tops of the pines to chatter at them from the safe distance of a hundred feet. The du la Rochelles and I got the worst of that; they came down to perch on the branches just above our heads and harangue our tiny group with jabbers and bombardments of pinecones. Claude, riding behind his mother, shocked them into temporary silence when he stood up on the back of the saddle, snatched one off a bough by its tail, and hurled it to the ground, all in one motion. Helena had a baseball team that could have used him at first base.
A rifle cracked when we were still in the woods. No shots followed it, and I concluded that the report was a warning signal fired by a lookout atop the rocks to alert the others to the presence of Mounties. A few minutes later we were clear of the trees and in full view of the lake, broad and flat and painfully blue with white all around, dotted with green scrub and with the red uniforms spreading out to form a straight line between the shore and the forest like a bloody finger drawn across the bottom of a sketch done in colored chalk. Directly across the lake stood the stronghold, a vertical gray cliff thrust like a spear into the level ground, waiting for its gigantic owner to pull it back out and shake loose the trees and shrubbery that clung like moss to the irregularities on its face. It looked twice as tall as it was because nothing separated the base from its reflection on the surface of the water.
The machinery of the cavalry formation was still in motion, the horsemen riding into position to right and left of the center where the inspector and his sergeant major sat as still as the rock itself, the topkick now with his saber unsheathed and resting on his right shoulder after the fashion of a standard. The men in charge of the wagon had drawn it up behind them, and now
one was unhitching the team while his partner mounted the bed to remove the tarp from the Gatling. I knew the maneuver that would follow, if reason failed; whether the Indians knew it as well and acted upon that knowledge would make the difference between just a lot of impressive noise and a slaughter.
I handed Philippe the packhorse's lead, told him and the others to stay where they were, and cantered up to join Vivian. He looked at me out of the corner of one pale eye without turning his head. “Sergeant Major, divest this civilian of his rifles.”
“Suh!” said the other, gripped his pommel to swing down. I clapped the muzzle of the Deane-Adams to the bridge of his nose. The front sight barely cleared the lip of his helmet. His eyes crossed comically.
Something triple-clicked in my left ear. I didn't turn my head Vivian's way.
“Murdock,” he said.
I said, “I don't want to go to war with Canada, but if I'm going to die anyway I'd just as soon be written about as the man who started it.”
A light wind combed the surface of the lake. The inspector let down his hammer gently and holstered his side arm.
“Cancel that order,” he said.
I pointed the Deane-Adams skyward and seated the hammer. The sergeant settled back into his saddle and breathed.
Vivian said, “The last time I allowed a civilian to retain his weapons during a parley, he winged a tree-cutter over a boundary dispute. Another lumberman shot back and my French interpreter lost a leg.”
“I haven't been a civilian since First Manassas.” I leathered the five-shot. “I'll promise not to pot an Indian or a desperado if you'll put the canvas back on that chattergun. I've got sensitive ears.
His face was unreadable beneath the helmet. With the visor covering his brow and the strap buckled at the point of his chin he showed all the individuality of a lead soldier. Finally his gaze shifted toward the sergeant.
“Tell those men to recover the Gatling.”
While that was being done I asked Vivian his plan.
“Wolf Shirt affects an ignorance of English, though I suspect he could hold his own in conversation with an Oxford don. However, Indians are muleheaded, as you say, and humoring them takes less time than argument. Corporal Barrymore here is an adept at sign language.” He tilted his head an eighth of an inch toward a mass of freckles and sparse red side whiskers mounted at his left. “He will interpret while I determine whether Bliss and Whitelaw and their companions are with the Sioux. If that's the case I have every hope he'll agree with the very good reasons I'll propose for giving them up.”
“What makes you think he'll even agree to talk to you?”
“I have four hundred men and he has sixty.”
“And a rock,” I said. “Don't forget the rock. He can take target practice on your four hundred redcoats all day while you kick up stone dust.”
“I doubt he has the ammunition to withstand a long siege. When he runs out we'll go in and arrest him and hang him in Ottawa if he's killed one trooper or one hundred.”
“Now you're talking like an American.”
He said nothing, although the muscles of his jaw stood out like doorknobs.
The sergeant major returned then. Vivian tugged a square yard of white handkerchief out of his left sleeve and passed it across the neck of my horse for the other man to take. The sergeant tied it to the end of his saber and trotted up to the edge
of the lake with the hilt propped on one thigh, the wind snapping the banner.
A ball of gray smoke appeared in a cleft in the tower of rock near the crest and tore apart in the wind. I heard the crack just as something plopped into the water two feet in front of the sergeant's horse. It wasn't a frog. Man and mount remained motionless, an impressive feat on both counts.
“A warning, I should think,” the inspector said.
I said, “Maybe not. I never saw an Indian who was as good with a rifle as he was with a bow.”
There were no more shots from the summit, but neither was there anything else for what seemed an hour. Then something white showed in the cleft. It waggled back and forth.
“Right. Sergeant Major, Corporal Barrymore, come with me. Lieutenant Ponsoby, you're in charge. If we're not back by sundown, open fire. Use the Gatling.”
“Yes, sir!” This from a youth with a hooked nose and an undershot jaw like a monkey wrench. When his teeth went, the one would touch the other. He'd be a general by then, if one of his own men didn't shoot him first.
I spurred the mustang into line behind the others. Vivian glared back once over his shoulder but said nothing. Evidently he'd decided that humoring me took less time than arguing.
Philippe's information about the configuration of the rock proved correct. The north face bore little resemblance to the south, having collapsed into a pile of broken shards, boulders the size of the courthouse in Helena, and round stones no larger than a man's fist. It had all happened long enough ago for scrub pine and thistles to have grown from the soil deposited in the cracks. The way was not fit for horses, and so we tethered ours and began scaling on foot, the sergeant leading the way with the flag of truce.
It was warm climbing. The wind had sculpted a horseshoeshaped concavity in the snow east of the lake, and the sun coming off that white dish had made the rocks hot to the touch; at high noon a man could have fried bacon on one of them. Grasping stones and twisted tree trunks for leverage, I kept an eye on the cracks for rattlesnakes. I had no idea if they grew them this far north, but it was an old habit in that kind of landscape. I was sweating and wanted to ditch the bearskin; the wind whistling up near the crest warned me to hold onto it. The mountain country back home was scattered with the bones of trappers and Indian traders who had abandoned their winter gear to avoid heat stroke and frozen to death a few hours later.
Twenty yards from the top the route became almost vertical. The sergeant tore loose his white handkerchief and scabbarded his saber to free both hands for climbing. Corporal Barrymore, following him, put his foot on a ledge of rock that turned out to be rotten and saved himself from falling by grabbing a handful of dense moss. Meanwhile Vivian and I flattened out against the cliff while a bucketful of rubble, twigs, and coarse earth bounced off our hats and shoulders and went down inside our collars. Then we resumed climbing with the grit rubbing our joints.
When we stood on the crest at last I was rewarded for hanging onto the bearskin. The wind was stiff and steel-cold and made my face numb. I had removed my gloves for climbing. Now I got them out of a pocket and wriggled into them. My fingers were already stiffening. The Mounties retrieved their white gauntlets from their belts and put them on.
I caught a glimpse of the lake below and the red tunics of the North-West Mounted, strung out like bright ribbons on white linen.
“Well, Charlie, look what we have here. Three red kings and a black jack. I'd call it a misdeal.”
The man who spoke was short and thick and held a rifle braced against his right hip. He was standing against bright sky, which made his face a purple blur. His companion, with a spire of rock behind him, was easier to make out: slender, almost frail looking, with a round face that appeared to have been nailed to the wrong body. His skin was the color of raw iron ore, against which the whites of his eyes stood out and his long canine teeth when he smiled, as he did now. I recognized him from wire descriptions as Charlie Whitelaw, the Cherokee killer from the Indian Nations. That made his friend with the rifle Lorenzo Bliss.