Shad turned his head slightly, seeking the one who talked something he could understand from this bunch. “You speak English. So I’ll say this in English. Get this worthless sonofabitch off that Cheyenne—or I’m gonna kill him. Here and now.”
“You shoot him, you won’t—”
Shad roared, “Listen—I’m gonna splatter his goddamned face all over the ground!”
His eyes went immediately to the tracker on the ground over the body when the Pawnee shifted a bit, then bent over to resume his taking of the scalp.
Uncorking his fury, Sweete swung the muzzle of his Spencer against the side of the tracker’s head to send him sprawling backward and clawing for his own belt weapon. In a whirl of motion the old plainsman brought up his big moccasin, connecting below the chin, hurling the tracker backward again, watching the blood squirt from the Pawnee’s mouth.
He had begun to whirl back on the rest, but not before he felt the searing slash of the blade along his ribs. The pain came white-hot as the knife tip entered, then skittered along a rib with a sound like someone drawing rusty iron across a flat sheet of granite. That turn he had started likely saved the old man’s life, that act of bringing the elbow up, making contact with the slasher. Like the solid ring of an iron ladle brought down hard on an oak table, his arm sent the Pawnee into the air. The rest were coming now.
Too close to fire the Spencer, he slapped it into his left hand, gripping the barrel midlength to continue his swing in one unstoppable arc. It cracked against a skull, splattering some blood as the Pawnee went down in a heap, as heavily as a burlap hundredweight of wet oats.
Shad took a long step toward the others. Now he stood over the body, ready to defend it—flailing away with the Spencer in the left hand as he yanked the big knife from his belt with his right, ready to fling it as the rest suddenly drew back, their eyes as wide as frightened coyotes suddenly interrupted at a feeding frenzy.
They jabbered among themselves quickly. Shad wished Hook were here: he knew enough of the Pawnee tongue. Then one spoke.
“We shoot you—or you kill us,” the Pawnee said.
From the tremulous edge to the tracker’s voice, Sweete somehow did not quite believe it. “If you’re to be about killing me—let’s have at it, you red niggers.”
Tossing the Spencer with a spin into the air a few inches, Sweete caught it, thumbing back the hammer. Not knowing if there was a loaded cartridge under that hammer or not.
“No bullet in gun,” the Pawnee sneered. “We shoot you—”
“Just what the shit is going on here?”
At the corner of his eye Shad watched an officer appear, coming to a halt with more than a dozen soldiers.
“Likely I can get a couple more of you before I can’t pull the trigger on this here rifle no more. Maybeso gut a bunch of you niggers before I go under,” Sweete growled.
The soldier plunged down the side of the ravine, landing in front of Sweete that next moment. Major Royall.
“Mr. Sweete, isn’t it?”
“Out of my way, Major. Don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hurt?” William B. Royall asked. “Looks to me like you’re the one about to be hurt by this bunch of North’s trackers.” The officer’s eyes fell to the two groggy Pawnee on the ground, then quickly narrowed on the dark, wet slash along Sweete’s ribs. “Tell me what started this bloodletting.”
“Told this bunch of niggers to leave the body alone.”
“We’ve got Cheyenne to fight, Mr. Sweete. We’re not supposed to be drawing down on our own Pawnee.”
“I’ll kill them—I’ll even kill any soldier of your’n what touches this body.”
For a moment the major studied the scout’s face. Then Royall glanced down at the dead warrior. Slowly he wiped his dusty, gloved hand across the back of his mouth. “Never will get used to using Indians against Indians. It’s something I think makes us just as savage as—”
“You gonna get these sonsabitches away from me, Major? Or am I going to have to spill a little more blood here?”
With a wag of his head the officer asked, “What in blue blazes makes this one so damned special to you, Mr. Sweete?”
The salty sting at his eyes made it hard to look down into the face of this dark-headed officer. Not really such a bad sort, this Royall.
“Put your guns away!” the major suddenly turned and snapped at the Pawnee.
Their leader grumbled, then passed the order along in their tongue. The trackers angrily stuffed weapons away, but refused to move off. Instead, they clustered around the one of their number Sweete had hammered with his Spencer.
“Now,” Royall said as he turned back to the plainsman, “are you going to tell me?”
“You get these goddamned turkey buzzards away from here!” Sweete bellowed with all the rage of a wounded bear. “Far away from me!” The rifle in his hands shook, still pointed at the chest of the English-speaking tracker.
“Mr. Sweete—these guides are allies of ours—”
Shad spat his words. “Pawnee no better’n vultures feeding on dead meat.”
The soldier sighed, then cleared his throat. “Lieutenant—go ahead and get these trackers out of here.”
“Major?”
“Now!” Royall snapped like a man gone too long without sleep. “We’ll sort the damned thing out later.”
It took some threats from the lieutenant’s soldiers before Royall got the trackers herded on their way out of the ravine. Reluctantly the sullen Pawnee left with their escort, yet not without some nasty grumbling that Major North would have a lot to say about the soldiers interfering with his Pawnee having their revenge on the enemy dead. As tense as it was for a few minutes, in the end Royall’s soldiers did get them on their way toward the ravine to the south where a withering gunfire still rattled above the last of the Cheyenne holdouts.
Royall sighed as he watched them leave, hands balled on his hips. When he turned, he strode back to confront the tall gray-head. For a few wordless moments, the major studied Sweete’s face, as if searching there for some clue.
Choking on his grief, Shad didn’t trust himself to move, not just yet. Then as he blinked, the first tear spilled in a streak through the dust caked on his cheek.
“It’s all right. It’s gonna be all right, Mr. Sweete,” he said quietly, clearly bewildered by the big man’s violent actions. “Now, please—just tell me what the devil was going on here? Why were you so all-fired ready to get yourself killed over some dead buck—over this dead particular Cheyenne bastard here?”
Royall waited for what seemed like a hot, endless moment, watching the tall plainsman’s face.
“Mr. Sweete?” he asked again. “Just what in blazes is one dead Dog Soldier over another to you?”
“My … my boy.”
23
HE SAW THE figure in the distance. On that big buckskin, it had to be Cody.
The far-off rider reined the pale horse in Shad Sweete’s direction and brought the buckskin into an easy lope. He watched the young blond-haired scout eat through that shimmering summer countryside. When Cody was ten yards out, he slowed the animal to a walk, then brought the buckskin to a halt where the old plainsman had waited with his two extra ponies atop the low hill that looked down on the South Platte.
“Been worried about you, Shad.”
Sweete’s eyes found the distant serpent of blue crawling over the tan carpet of rolling, sandy plains, following the riverbank north.
He looked at Cody, smiled. “Where away you bound, Bill?”
“Carr’s got us headed in to Fort Sedgwick,” Cody replied. “We got one of the women out of that camp alive.
