In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree Page 16

  “Yes, sir.”

  “John, please inform the men they have one hour.”

  John nodded and kicked his horse into motion.

  2

  Two days later they came to the top of a rise. It was midmorning and the day was shaping up to be unseasonably hot for the end of May. Below, grazing in the new spring grass, was a large herd of buffalo. John, who’d been silent and brooding since the massacre at the Indian camp, was momentarily awestruck. He smiled in spite of everything and looked to the man beside him. “How many do you think there are?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant. Biggest herd I ever seen. Ten thousand if there’s one.”

  “Ten thousand,” John mused.

  “This is an opportunity for the men to hone their shooting skills while eliminating some of the savages’ sustenance,” Picton said, coming up alongside John. “Mister Taylor, take twenty-five men a half-mile along this crest, then string them out in a line. Take men with repeaters—that’ll be Union men, mostly—and make sure they’re fully loaded. John, here’s an opportunity to show your fortitude. Take fifteen men—I understand some of those southerners can ride and shoot—and circle around the herd. Come up as slow as you can. When we start shooting they’ll spook; you go at them hard; hoot and holler and keep on their flank so they have to run parallel with this hill. I’ll stage the rest of the men right here. Mister Taylor, tell your men to shoot as many of those beasts as they can as they pass.”

  John canvassed the men looking for the ones who could ride and shoot well. “Don’t come forward if you’re not certain you can do it,” he said. “I don’t want to find any of you lying in the prairie grass with a broken neck.”

  He found eleven who seemed confident in their abilities, and picked four more who were vouched for as good riders. He told the four to leave their rifles with men who were staying on the hillside with Picton.

  “Why are we going to shoot the buffalo, Lieutenant?” one man asked. “The whole lot of us couldn’t eat but one or two of them.”

  “We’re not going to eat them. Buffalo are the Indians’ main food supply, and we’re going to eliminate some of them, although I don’t think we can kill enough of them to make much of a difference.”

  “Ohhhh, so it’s kind of like when we’d cut off a supply shipment during the war.”

  “Yes, kind of like that.”

  John led the men well around the herd. They were downwind, and he hoped to get reasonably close. He didn’t know anything about hunting buffalo, and neither did Picton or anyone else among them as far as he knew. Downwind or not, the buffalo proved wary and began to move more deliberately when John and the men were still closing the distance. He motioned for the flanking men to move in closer to keep the animals to the edge of the shallow hillside. When he felt they were in as good of a position as possible for so large of a herd, he signaled Picton.

  The men opened fire.

  Things began as planned then quickly fell into chaos. The buffalo began running roughly northeast along the base of the hills and Picton’s men easily shot them from above. After less than a minute, however, the herd abruptly turned northwest for no reason John could discern. He supposed afterward that the buffalo were more afraid of the rifle shots than they were of the men on horseback, although for him, the shots were utterly buried by the thundering of hoofs.

  The buffalo stampeded straight at the formerly flanking horsemen as if they didn’t even see them. Three of the lead riders never stood a chance and were trampled to death, horse and man. The rest were able to turn and a make run for it. One of the fleeing horses tripped. The rider, who had survived three major civil war battles, was trampled attempting to crawl out of the path of the herd.

  The herd finally disappeared into the distance, leaving behind a swath of crushed and beaten prairie as wide as the Mississippi. Over one hundred fifty buffalo, along with three men and their horses, lay dead or dying.

  “You allowed your men to get too close,” Picton said, approaching John. “Learn from this. Hopefully you’ll not make the same mistake a second time.”

  John was standing over the broken and bloody remains of one of the trampled riders.

  “He was a southerner,” Picton said. “Have his own tend to him. Gather the men. Tell them to butcher one of these animals. We’re going to stay here for awhile. I’m sending the scouts out to follow that herd’s back-trail. There’s a good chance a herd of that size had Indians following it.”

  John turned away without a word.

  3

  Picton ended up being right. The scouts discovered a band of around eighty Arapahos less than five miles out the buffalo herd’s back-trail.

  “Let’s prepare to move; quickly now,” Picton said after the scouts returned with the news. “John, make haste. Those men have had ample time to bury the dead. Tell them to mount up.”

  They dropped down the opposite side of the hills and followed the base of them southeast. By late afternoon they were in position with only the low hills separating them from the Arapaho camp. One of the scouts led Picton, John, and five men to the crest where they could lay on their bellies and look down on the camp.

  The camp was by a watershed where three streams joined together. John thought them to be tributaries to the south fork of the Platte River, but he wasn’t certain. He’d looked over Picton’s maps, but only briefly, two days before departing Fort Laramie. It appeared the Arapaho had either just arrived or were preparing to leave. There were several travois piled high with lodge poles and skins. He counted thirty-six men. The rest were women and children. Many of them were busy with a pair of skinned buffalo carcasses, and others were gathered together by the convergence of the streams.

  About twenty children were carrying sticks and chasing around a man covered in a buffalo hide. He ran around hunched over while the children pretended to stab him with the sticks. John imagined he could hear their laughter. He thought of the infant spilling from the arms of the woman he’d shot. The child who would never play buffalo hunter.

  Picton nodded, then inched back down the hill until he could stand up and still be out of sight. John and the others followed. They’d almost reached the bottom of the hill when Picton turned to John and said: “I see no reason to wait. We’ll have Taylor take the ten best sharpshooters and lay atop the hill. Then we’ll divide the men: mine south, your’s north. Taylor and his men open fire and we charge down the hill. They’ll never—”

  “No,” John said. He stared at Picton levelly. “I don’t know what it is you think you’re doing, but this is neither just nor justice. We’re not protecting anyone, and we’re not at war with these people. This is murder and I’ll have no further part in it.” He turned and started away, but Picton reached out, grabbed his arm, and yanked him back.

  “Of course it’s murder, you pampered little pup,” Picton hissed, his face only inches from John’s. “You’re even more naive than I first thought you to be. Did you really believe the seventy of us were going to roam the countryside engaging Indian war parties? Frank Picton’s seventy defeats five thousand bloodthirsty braves! How poetic. You are right about one thing: we’re not fighting a war, we are inciting one. Tell me something; do you have the slightest notion of how many Washington fortunes are invested in the western expansion? In railroads and gold mines, and telegraphs, and cattle, and other ventures beyond counting?…No? Of course you don’t. We are going to finish what Colonel Chivington so ungracefully began. After we resupply we’re riding north into Sioux country to inflame the filthy savages even further. Then, soon, perhaps by this fall, when the heathens have lashed out sufficiently against more innocents, the public outrage will be such that they will be unable to decry the army for finally crushing the red vermin once and for all.”

  He sighed and released John’s arm.

  “The Indian and the white man will never be able to coexist. It’s been proven, time and again. Treaties fail and only delay the inevitable outcome. This land is ours now. I
t was ordained by God. Mark my words, John, ten years from now the Indian warrior will be nothing more than a fireside story told to frighten disobedient children.”

  John started away and then turned back. “I’ll expose this.”

  “To whom, John? You and I are only small players in a grander design.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that the murder of innocents has been sanctioned by our government because you showed me a scribbled note on a crumpled sheet of paper? We’ll see.”

  He turned and walked through the men who’d gathered to listen. “This is nothing short of murder, and any man who wants no part of it may join me,” he said.

  “Afraid you’ll lose your horse again, Lieutenant?” one man asked. There was muffled laughter.

  Picton followed John to his horse. “Who do you think will listen to you?” he said, his voice not much more than a whisper. “Colonel Black? This has been out of that simpering bureaucrat’s hands since the very day Jonathon Hanfield learned of you and his daughter. Oh, yes. I know all about you. You go ahead. You’ll discover there are few ears to listen to a disgraced cadet who was so unfit for duty that he was discharged mere weeks after receiving a generously given commission. You are a coward, John. A coward attempting to conceal his yellow by self-righteously sighting high ideals as a pretext for fleeing in the face of danger.”

  John rummaged in his saddlebag and pulled out a wad of bills. He dropped them at Picton’s feet and climbed onto his horse. “I may be a coward. But I’m not a mercenary.”

  4

  John wished he’d studied Picton’s maps more thoroughly. He was left with no choice but to return to Fort Laramie by the same route he’d travelled with Picton and the men. It was the long way around, but at least he was confident he could find his way. The alternative would have been to strike out blindly northward. Fort Laramie was only four days ride from where they killed the buffalo, according to Picton. However, with no maps and in unfamiliar country, finding the fort would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  Eleven

  1

  The sun was just rising over the horizon when Henry coaxed Harriet down into the rapidly drying wash. Only a small amount of water left over from spring rains still ran lazily down its center. He was taking a roundabout route to Fort Laramie in an attempt to make tracking him difficult. The Dog Men would not be happy about losing their chief.

  Guilt gnawed at him. Over the years he’d often found himself thinking of the man by the river—A. Hoyt was the name engraved on the man’s saddle. He wondered if Hoyt only pulled the gun because he was afraid; afraid of Henry; afraid of the ragged nigger stalking into his camp brandishing a tree branch and demanding food. Had he killed him? Was he a murderer? Now there was no question. He’d taken another man’s life.

  “Do you have some water?” Clara asked from behind him. It was the first words either of them had spoken since leaving the warrior camp.

  “Yes, ma’am. I should’ve offered.”

  Henry stopped Harriet and climbed down by awkwardly swinging his leg over the mare’s head. “Not used to riding this way,” he muttered as he turned to help Clara dismount.

  He paused with his arm half extended. There was dried blood on her face, and it was matting her hair. Her dress, once white but now a filthy no-color, was cut off just below the waist, revealing a pair of tattered drawers that were even dirtier than the dress.

  “That blood from him?”

  Clara nodded.

  He extended his hand and Clara took it. A muffled cry of pain escaped her as she dismounted. Once down, she put her hands protectively over her exposed vagina. Henry saw that the drawers were completely open on the inseam—to make it easy to do the necessaries when you’re in a dress, he figured.

  He also saw the reason it pained her getting on and off the horse: the inside of her thighs were chafed to the point of bleeding.

  He realized he was staring, and averted his eyes. He walked past Clara and removed the canteen—the one given to him by a man named James “Red” Macklin one day on a dusty roadside in Missouri—from its place on his saddle. He handed it to Clara without looking at her, then began rummaging in his bulging saddlebags. “I have this salve, it’s made from the roots of a gold colored flower. I put in on my hands sometimes in the winter and use it on the sores Harriet here gets on her hocks. I couldn’t help noticing you could use some on your legs. It’ll help heal them. If you don’t squeeze so much with your legs when you’re riding that won’t happen—the chafing, I mean. Horses don’t usually like it much anyway.”

  He handed her a tin which had originally held percussion caps but now carried the salve Standing Elk had taught him how to make. He reached back in the saddlebags and removed a pair of buckskin trousers similar to the ones he was wearing, a length of leather strap, and a small square of muslin cloth. “You can wear these, they’ll be a sight too big for you but you can roll up the bottoms and cinch ‘em up with this piece of bridle. I use this cloth for washing. I’ll walk up here a ways and take a look at things if you want to clean up a little and put on the trousers.”

  “Why did you help me?”

  “Seemed the right thing to do. We need to hurry up and get a move on.”

  “Will they find us?”

  “I reckon not, if we’re careful.”

  Clara began to weep. “Thank you…I don’t know your name.”

  “Henry.”

  2

  Clara washed her hair and face in the slowly running creek. Seeing the bloody tinted water running over the rocks made her stomach lurch. She thought of the gurgling sound Short Bull had made as he lay dying. Then she thought of the grunting sounds he made when he’d forced himself into her.

  Her body began to shake uncontrollably, and she sat down hard on the stony bed of the wash, her teeth clacking together painfully. Weeping again, she leaned to one side and vomited once. She waited that way to see if there would be more, but there wasn’t. Soon both the shaking and the tears subsided. She told herself she wouldn’t cry anymore. Her mother had once told her that she’d inherited her father’s mettle—his hardness. She straightened herself up and searched for that hardness. She looked after Henry, who was further down the wash but still within earshot. He had his back turned. She wiped her mouth, then stood and walked several feet upstream where she finished washing the blood from her hair. She removed her ruined drawers and cleaned herself, then gingerly applied some of the pasty salve to the abraded skin of her thighs. It turned her skin a yellow-orange, but reduced some of the sting almost immediately. She put on Henry’s trousers thinking she could easily have fit herself into one leg. I must be a sight, she thought, as she cinched the trousers up with the leather strap Henry had given her.

  Seeming to sense she was finished, Henry started back up the wash. Clara watched him for a moment. She didn’t know many colored people. Her father never hired them; he claimed they weren’t trustworthy. The stableman who took care of their horses in Cornwall was colored. Lilith Davenport’s head maid was also colored, and Clara thought she was wonderful. Thoughts of Lilith and the farmhouse in Cornwall brought on a wave of homesickness. She walked up and waited by the big mare.

  “I’ve always loved horses,” she said softly as Henry approached.

  “Her name’s Harriet. Are you hungry?” Clara shook her head. Henry nodded, and reached into his saddlebags and pulled out his only other shirt. Clara turned away and he quickly changed out of the bloody one; this he rolled up and stuffed back in the saddlebags. He untied Harriet and led her out of the wash. Then he climbed up and lowered a hand to Clara. This time she took it without hesitation.

  “Where are you taking me?” Clara asked over Henry’s shoulder.

  “To Fort Laramie. We can arrange to get you back where you belong from there.”

  “That’s where we were going when…when the Indians came.”

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  “I’d rather not talk right now.”


  “Fair enough.”

  3

  They rode in silence for most of the day, each lost in their own thoughts. Henry stopped to let Harriet rest for awhile in the early afternoon. Clara reluctantly accepted some dried elk when he offered it. She ate the salty meat because she knew she should. She had no appetite.

  There was about an hour of daylight left when Henry stopped at a place he called Horse Creek. The stretch of perennial stream was thickly treed on one side, with a low bluff on the other. He chose a spot against the bluff under a huge cottonwood that would provide decent concealment. Helplessly, his mind kept going back to another time when he’d searched for safe places to hole up.

  “We should be at the fort, day after tomorrow. Could be mid-morning, but more likely late afternoon or evening: I’m not rightly sure which. I’ve never come this way before,” Henry said, removing Harriet’s saddle and setting it against the base of the bluff. “It’ll be safer if we don’t light a fire; the smoke can be seen a long way off. I hope you don’t mind more dried elk—here, you can sit on this.” He laid out his bedroll for Clara.

  “Thank you…for everything.”

  Henry nodded and began rubbing down Harriet.

  Clara sat on the bedroll and watched Henry as he carefully groomed the mare. Her shock was beginning to wear off, and she was curious about her rescuer.

  “How did you get that scar on your face?” She regretted the question immediately. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Henry was silent for a moment. Then: “From a whipping, when I was a boy.”

  “Oh, that’s horrible. You were a slave?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “How was it that you came to rescue me? You weren’t sent after me, were you? You couldn’t have been hired by my father.”