monster, where he could rope it to slow it down. But his pony would not get close enough, fighting the reins, resisting, its head jerking away from the steaming, spitting, hissing monster.
On the smoking wagon pressed into the low hills, passing the three riders on their weary ponies without slowing. And the second wagon as well. Both of the monsters disappearing into the night about the time Spotted Wolf’s warriors began firing at the first smoking wagon.
Sparks flew up from the great, spinning wheels, lighting the whole of morning itself. With a wheezing sigh the sparks went out as two white men riding atop the monster shouted to one another and fired back at the warriors along both sides of the track, others racing after the monster on horseback.
The smoking wagon was slowing, gradually slowing when it hit the bent rails and burned ties. The wheels spun and screeched, trying to grab for a hold on the tracks as it heeled over onto its side. White men hollered, jumped clear at the last moment. One by one the smaller wagons behind the smoking wagon came crashing up the tracks, not slowing.
One by one they crunched into the smoking wagon and keeled over, falling, tumbling, careening off the iron tracks, spilling on one side then the other of the roadbed.
A white man burst from the smoky haze of the wreckage, waving a bright light at the end of his arm.
“Get that one!” Spotted Wolf called out. “He warns the other wagon!”
The white man was running back down the track, swearing and hollering, when the young warriors rode him down and brought him to his knees. He clawed at the arrows sprouting from his back. His bright light fell into the gravel of the roadbed as he sank slowly to his face, still clawing. The young ones were upon him as he breathed his last.
Yet the damage was done.
The second smoking monster wheezed to a halt. Loud voices from that far wagon. A shrill whistle sounded, startling Turkey Leg’s warriors. Every one of them stopped what he was doing, crawling over the smoky wreckage, butchering the two white men from the wagons—every one watching the second monster as it screeched into motion—backward up the iron tracks.
Four or five white men hollered at one another. They had jumped off the second wagon and had started for the wreckage when they saw Spotted Wolf’s warriors. Now they were screaming wildly, sprinting for all they were worth toward the retreating second wagon as it backed into the coming of day.
That was where the white men belonged, Turkey Leg thought to himself proudly, watching some of the young warriors race across the nearby prairie with bolts of cloth pulled from the wreckage, bright colorful streamers fluttering from their ponies.
In the land to the east. Where the white man should have stayed in the first place.
Out here—this land belonged to the Lakota and Shahiyena. Coming out here only meant death to the white man.
He should have stayed in the east, where the sun came up each day.
35
THIS WAS THE only time of the day when the air cooled this late in the summer. Here when the moon finally sank from the sky.
He had waited for better than two weeks for this phase of the moon. When there wasn’t so much of the moon’s light to shine on this thickly wooded land—part of the Choctaw Nation down in the Territories … or were they now in the Creek Nation?
Riley Fordham didn’t know for sure. Certain only that it really didn’t matter right now as he swallowed down his heart that was choking him. Afraid of being caught as he stood and listened into the night. Hearing the June bugs scritching at one another, listening for the swoop of owls at their nightly hunting, the croak of frogs and other creatures up here in the darkness when few men walked the earth.
Only he and a dozen others guarding the perimeter of Jubilee Usher’s camp.
Fordham was one of the trusted ones. That’s the only way this was going to work. Boothog Wiser had put Riley in charge of a detail of camp guards. Every man of them knew they had to be extra careful now, this deep in Injun territory, what with the way they were stealing horses and borrowing squaws from the villages where the Choctaws and Creeks and Cherokees squatted, living out their miserable existences here where the white man had moved them from the east.
Riley swallowed down his heart, hearing it thunder in his ears as he strained at the night-sounds. Hoping none of the others were up and wandering about. He had made sure the rest of his guards were spread thin that night. He untied the horse where it grazed nearby, leading it into the thick timber along the game trail he had chosen for his escape.
Riley had been planning this for weeks now. Waiting for moon-dark, as Usher called it. And waiting to figure out a good route of escape. Earlier in the first dark of the moon’s silvery rising, not long after returning here to his spot, having completed an entire circuit of the camp and finding his pickets in their places for the night, Fordham had taken the tools from his saddlebag and pried each of the four shoes loose from his horse’s hooves.
Moving silently, slowly down the game trail, he knew the horse’s tracks would in the morning appear to be nothing more than an unshod Indian’s pony—when Jubilee’s men came looking.
Usher and Wiser would mount a search to one degree or another. Simply because Riley was one of the best they had. The best marksman. Perhaps the smartest Usher had working for him now.
Smart enough to know he wanted out. The war was long over, and still Usher was not taking them back to Deseret. Instead, Jubilee had told them their God-granted work was here on the plains, not back with Brigham’s people in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. All was at peace there. It was here, Usher told them, here where the might of God’s hand was needed.
Here, where Jubilee Usher would baptize the land with the blood of the lamb.
Riley had followed Jubilee east with the others that last trip, part of the Mormon army protecting the wagon train when they were all commandeered to fight the Civil War. He had been willing to fight and kill and even die for the faith—his family’s faith in Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
But this had become something different altogether.
Jubilee Usher kept the fair-haired woman to himself. And the girl. She couldn’t be more than twelve now … and still Boothog lusted after her. It would not be much longer that Usher could keep Wiser off the girl. Riley strained to remember the girl’s name. Wishing for a moment that he had brought her along. Knowing if he had, the chances were good that neither of them would make it.
Hattie.
He felt sorry for her as he plunged deeper and deeper into the timber along the game trail, farther and farther from Usher and Wiser and their insanity.
The woman was lost. She belonged to Usher now, after all this time, body and soul. But the girl. She was starting to bud, her young breasts only lately beginning to press against the too-small cloth dress she was forced to wear like a blouse over the men’s britches they had given her. One of these days her beauty would drive Boothog Wiser to madness, and he would no longer deny himself her virgin flesh.
Riley Fordham had to desert—risking his life to escape north to Kansas. He knew that country, been up there scouting it with Hastings for Jubilee Usher. Up there with the westbound railroad. Up there with all the rumors of the tribes making trouble for settler and track crews alike—why, a man could lose himself among the many. And no one, not even Usher and Wiser, could track him down and make him bleed as he knew they would if they ever got their hands on him.
No man ever quit Usher’s outfit. No man ever just walked off the job. To Usher, this was God’s work. And God’s vengeance would be his if a man just up and rode off.
But that’s exactly what Riley Fordham was doing. Planning to ride until sunup. Lie low where he could just before the sun rose. Then ride again come nightfall. Day after each new day of freedom.
Fordham had to go, and now. Because he knew that come one day soon, Boothog Wiser would claim the girl for his and Usher would allow it. Them two so alike in their abuse of the women. Not that Riley didn’t like pinning a
