“Anyway, in June of ’65 the Forty-Fives went on a rampage, heading down the criks south of the Canadian and Cimarron and into the Oklahoma panhandle. These were Civil War veterans who knew all about fighting a mounted enemy. They were hardened men, tough, survivors of the very worst sort. They’d been through the fires of hell, Mr. Pendergast. But they were also cowards. If you want to survive a war, nothing helps like being a chicken-livered, yellow-bellied poltroon. They waited until the warriors had gone off on the hunt and then attacked Indian settlements at night, killing mostly women and children. They showed no mercy, Mr. Pendergast. They had a saying: nits make lice. They even killed the babies. Bayoneted them to save ammunition.”
Another sip. His low gravelly voice in the dark cool room was hypnotic. It almost seemed to Corrie that he was describing something he himself had seen. Maybe he had, in a way . . . She averted her eyes.
“My great-grandfather was sickened by what he saw. Raping and killing women and cutting up babies wasn’t his idea of becoming a man. He wanted to leave the group, but with the Indians all riled up it would’ve been certain death to peel off and try to get home alone. So he had to go along. One night they got drunk and beat the hell out of him ’cause he wouldn’t join in the fun. Busted a few ribs. That’s what saved his life in the end—those broken ribs.
“Toward the middle of August they’d rampaged through a half dozen Cheyenne camps and driven the rest of them north and west out of Kansas. Or so they thought, anyways. They were returning to the Hickson ranch when they came through here. Medicine Creek. It was the night of August fourteenth they camped up at the Mounds—you been to the Mounds, Mr. Pendergast?”
Pendergast nodded.
“Then you’ll know it’s the highest point of land. There weren’t any trees back then, just a bare rise with three scrub-covered mounds on top. You could see for miles around. They posted pickets, like always. Four sentries at the compass points, posted a quarter mile from camp. Sun was setting and the wind had kicked up. A front was coming in and the dust was a-blowing.
“My great-grandfather had those broken ribs and they’d laid him down in a little holler right there behind the Mounds, maybe a hundred yards away. With the broken ribs he couldn’t sit up, see, and the dust at ground level was just about driving him crazy. So they put him in this little brush shelter out of the wind. I guess they felt sorry for what they’d done to him.
“Just as the sun was setting and the men were getting ready to eat dinner, it happened.”
He tilted his head back, took a long swig.
“There was a sound of beating hooves right on top of them. Thirty warriors on white horses, painted with red ochre, came out of the dust. The Indians were all duded up with painted faces and feathers and rattles—and they came howling, arrows flying. Right out of nowhere. Surprised the hell out of the Forty-Fives. Made a couple of passes and killed them all, every last man. The sentries saw nothing. They hadn’t seen any sign of riders approaching, hadn’t heard a sound. The sentries, Mr. Pendergast, were among the
“It weren’t no cakewalk for the Cheyennes, though. The Forty-Fives were tough men and fought back hard and killed at least a third of the attackers and a bunch of their horses. My great-grandfather saw the whole thing from where he was lying. After . . . after killing their last man, the Indians
“A patrol of the Fourth Cavalry picked up my great-grandfather two days later near the Santa Fe Trail. He took ’em back to the site of the massacre. They found the blood and piles of rotting guts from the Indian horses, but no bodies or fresh graves. There were hoofprints all around the hilltop but nowhere else. No tracks went beyond where the sentries had been killed. There were some Arapaho scouts with the Fourth, and they were so terrified at the lack of tracks coming and going that they began wailing that these were ghost warriors and refused to follow the trail. There was a big uproar and several more Cheyenne villages were burned by the cavalry for good measure, but most folks were glad the Forty-Fives were gone. They were a bad bunch.
“That was the end of the Cheyenne in western Kansas. Dodge City was settled in 1871 and the Santa Fe Railroad came through in 1872, and pretty soon Dodge became the cowboy capital of the West, the end of the Texas Trail, shootouts, Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, and all that. Medicine Creek was settled in 1877 by the cattleman H. H. Keyser, cattle brand bar H high on the left shoulder, horse brand flying H on the right. The blizzard of ’86 wiped out eleven thousand head and the next day Keyser leaned his head against the barrels of his shotgun and pulled both triggers. They said it was the curse. Then sodbusters and nesters came and the days of the cattle barons were over. First it was wheat and sorghum, then the dust bowl, and after that they replanted in feed corn and now gasohol corn. But in all that time no one ever solved the mystery of the Ghost Warriors and the Medicine Creek Massacre.”
He took one final sip and dramatically clunked down his can.
Corrie looked at Pendergast. It was a good story, and Brushy Jim told it well. Pendergast was so still he might have been asleep. His eyes were half closed, his fingers tented, his body sunken into the sofa.
“And your great-grandfather, Mr. Draper?” he murmured.
“He settled down in Deeper, married and buried three wives. He wrote up the whole thing in a private journal, with a lot more detail than what I just gave you, but the journal got sold off with a lot of his other valuables in the Great Depression and now sits in some library vault back east. Never could figure out where. I heard the story from my dad.”
“And how did he manage to see everything, in the middle of a dust storm?”
“Well, all I know is what my dad said. When you get a dust storm in these parts, sometimes it blows on and off, like.”
“And the Cheyenne, Mr. Draper, weren’t they already known to the U.S. Cavalry as the ‘Red Specters’ because of the way they could sneak up on even the most vigilant sentry and cut his throat before he even realized it?”
“For an FBI agent, you seem to know quite a lot, Mr. Pendergast. But you got to remember this happened at sunset, not at night, and those Forty-Fives had just fought as Confederates and lost a war. You know what it’s like to lose a war? You can damn well be sure they were keeping their eyes open.”
“How was it that the Indians didn’t discover your great-grandfather?”
“Like I said, the men felt bad about whomping him and had erected a little windbreak for him. He pulled that brush over himself to hide.”
