thundering hooves. Sleeping scouts and sleep-deprived pickets were suddenly jarred into a battle for their lives.
Frank North emerged from the shadowy flit of light and darkness as some of the trackers doused fires and pulled down tents. As a backdrop the tents and fires made a perfect target of a man. One of the Pawnee lumbered past, away from the fight and muttering angrily.
“Was that Mad Bear?” Cody asked the major.
North nodded, staring after the Pawnee.
Shad asked, “Where’s he bound for?”
“The horses hobbled back there on the line. Likely he’s going to mount up,” North replied with a shrug.
“Better stop that one from going out there on his own, Major,” Shad advised.
“I’d sooner try to stop a Cheyenne charge with a buffalo-tail flyswatter, Mr. Sweete!”
“Not that much firing from the Cheyenne,” Cody said. “Can’t be that many of ’em rushing camp.”
“Shit—you know better’n that, Bill: could be a whole passel of ’em waiting out there in the dark for any of us to follow,” Shad replied. “Draw a few of the cocky ones right out there and swallow them up like nighthawks.”
Without needing any more advice, North flung his voice into the dark, shouting in Pawnee at Mad Bear, ordering the tracker back from his pursuit.
“Anyone hit in your camp, Major?” Cody asked.
North shook his head. “My tent got shot up. Looks to be all the damage right now. Those bastards came right past my tent, slinging lead into it. Lute’s tent too. Then the sonsabitches were gone. Raced right out of camp and headed for the remuda to chivy our horses.”
“Doesn’t sound like they got a one of your animals—for all their trouble,” Cody said.
“We had every one hobbled and cross-lined on my order,” North said proudly.
Luther North suddenly took form out of the confusion, grumbling. “Frank—this shit is beginning to sour my milk.”
“What’s bothering you, little brother?”
“Twice now we been hit by these bastards—at night.”
Cody nodded. “The army doesn’t figure Injuns are supposed to attack at night.”
Luther wagged his head, angry. “And now Mad Bear’s gone after ’em.”
“Sonofabitch,” Frank growled. “I tried to stop him.”
“Me too,” Luther replied. “Didn’t do no good, though. He just rode off shouting at me how he was worth a half-dozen flea-bitten Cheyenne on the worst day of his life—”
A trio of shots from the west side of camp interrupted the younger North. All four white men turned and dashed onto the prairie lit with no more than dim starshine here a matter of hours before moonrise. It was but a few yards before they bumped into ten of the trackers, who were talking excitedly.
“What they say?” Shad asked.
Luther North answered, “Mad Bear took off after one of the horsemen come running through camp. This bunch says they saw Mad Bear hit the bastard’s pony, spilling the buck. So Mad Bear took off to claim him. Out there in the dark—and that’s when they heard some more shots out there.”
“Figure any more of them Cheyenne out there?” Cody inquired.
“Just shadows is all,” the elder North said.
Moving into the darkness with the rest for about fifty yards, Shad watched a shadow loom against the starry sky. A smattering of the Pawnee tongue came out of the night at them. A moment more and they came upon one of the trackers hunched over a near-naked body sprawled on the ground.
As the tracker rolled the body over, Luther North asked, “We get one?”
“Dammit!” roared Frank North.
Shad recognized the dull sheen to the brass buttons on the bloodstained army issue the dead man wore.
“Shot in the back,” Cody declared as the rest of the Pawnee began wailing, collapsing to their knees in grief around their fallen kinsman. “Went right through the heart.”
“Then he weren’t killed by the Cheyenne, Major,” Shad explained to Frank North quietly.
“Ain’t that a goddamned pity.” The major wagged his head. “The others say they saw Mad Bear out there chasing them sonsabitches. But in all the confusion, they opened fire thinking he was one of them thieving murderers. Damn, if that don’t fry my—”
“I want the Cheyenne too, Frank,” Luther declared against the backdrop of the Pawnees’ wailing death songs. “Want ’em bad as Carr does.”
“They’ve got to be close, fellas,” Cody said.
Shad agreed. “Damn straight they’re close. Hitting us twice in three days. That village of theirs ain’t far.”
“We better go report in to Carr before he gets his belly in an uproar, Frank,” Luther said.
“Won’t he want to get his hands on this bunch soon now?” Cody said. “I’ll suggest to-him we lay in camp a day and send out some of your scouts to backtrack on this bunch, Major North.”
“Sounds like a damned good idea to me, Cody. We’ll be ready to ride out at first-light.”
“Yeah,” Shad agreed as he stared into the night-drenched distance. “Time we finally come up with something more than track soup to feed the general on.”
At the request of Captain Luther North, Shad Sweete had joined young Lieutenant Billy Harvey and five of the Pawnee to scout a sizable piece of country south and west of where Frenchman’s Fork dumped itself into the Republican River. For more than fourteen hours beneath a mercilessly brutal sun they had punished themselves in the saddle, halting here and there only for brief watering of the animals, eating what they had in their saddlebags as they rode. In their wide sweep of the undulating plains of eastern Colorado Territory, early that evening the eight finally struck the Republican, still some twenty-five miles above the camp of Carr’s Fifth Cavalry.
It was there that Lute North called for a brief rest to discuss their options with this much ground still to cover before nightfall. “If your asses are as sore as mine, I figure we could treat ourselves with some time out of the saddle. Ride in to meet up with the column come dawn.”
“Just what this old man was thinking!” Shad replied as he climbed down and began rubbing his thighs in the way of a horseman long on the trail.
“Wait a minute, Mr. Sweete—don’t you figure it best for us to ride to that hill yonder to the north? Just to take a look around before we settle down for the night?”
“You expecting company, Captain?” asked Billy Harvey.
“The Cap’n’s right,” Shad said, dragging himself back into the saddle and moving away with Luther North toward the top of the tallest hill in the area.
As the sun was settling in a fiery show of midsummer crimson, North called for a halt twenty yards from the crest and ordered one of the Pawnee to belly up to the skyline for a look around before the rest betrayed themselves.
The tracker began his walk upright, slowly crouching lower and lower until he was on all fours at the crest. Then suddenly he dropped to his belly amid the tall grass. Shad was dropping from the saddle by the time the Pawnee had pushed himself backward and was signaling in plains sign talk for the rest to dismount and join him. North ordered one of the trackers to stay behind with the horses.
When they arrived back of the crest, the sun was just then easing out of sight beyond the far mountains that from here appeared to be nothing more than a ragged hemline of horizon. Yet it was not the sight of those faraway and seductive high places, North Park and the rest of the central Rockies, that seized Sweete’s attention.
It was what awaited his eyes down in the valley of Frenchman’s Fork that made the blood pound at the old trapper’s temples.
About a mile on west of where they lay, the creek flowed in gently from the north. Between that wide river bend and the bottom of the slope where the seven sprawled on their bellies was cut the gash of a deep ravine that every spring would fill with runoff to feed Frenchman’s Fork. But this was summer, and the rainy season was long
