“We want to follow the buffalo herds as in days of old!” the chiefs bellowed.
“We wish to stay a strong people, needing nothing from the white man!” cried others.
Isatai had harangued the chiefs, bellowing, “The strong of heart will prevail in the coming war. If we take to the warpath and wipe our land clear of the white man-only then will the buffalo return to blanket our hunting ground.”
“Unless we drive the white man out now, the buffalo will disappear!” shouted one.
“The white man must go!” agreed another in the same fervor.
“No!” Isatai barked at them, worked into his own blood frenzy. “The white man must die! All of them. Man. Woman. Child!”
Tall One sensed what the rest felt: that magnetic charisma of the shaman, able to think of nothing else at that moment but slaughtering all whites where the warriors would find them. Amid the great noise of celebration and the fury of the war council, he paid little heed to the quiet voice inside that reminded Tall One he had of a time been white.
In the end it was the old and proven chiefs of the Shahiyena Nation who decided what would be their first objective.
“We think the Kwahadi need first to wipe out the buffalo hunters gathered on the Canadian River,” White Wolf told the gathering. “Kwahadi go accomplish that first. Then I think your hearts will be ready for war. You kill all the buffalo hunters—then we follow you to make war on Texas.”
Another Shahiyena, Otter Belt, agreed. “The real threat to the survival of our peoples remains the buffalo hunters. If we stop them—we stop the white man.”
“Those hunters have guns that shoot a long, long way,” came a voice from the council ring, filled with doubt.
Isatai whipped round on the doubter, banging a fist against his own chest. “Let them empty their guns shooting at me!” the shaman shrieked, scuffling around the center of the gathering, spitting his words into the faces of the gathered war chiefs. “Do any of you doubt that I can make medicine so powerful that it will protect our warriors as they charge down on the white man’s earth lodges? Do you doubt the power of my medicine to turn their bullets into water?”
In the end not one of them doubted Isatai’s power. Not even the tall, handsome, gray-eyed Kwahadi war chief.
“When the white man wanted to put us all on a reservation six winters ago—he wanted us to live in one place as he does,” he had told the hushed assembly. “I was born of the prairie, where the wind blows free. Where there is nothing to bend the light of the sun. I was born where every living thing draws a free breath. I want to die in my own country—free—and not within the walls of the white man.”
That night as many of the Kwahadi were rolling into their blankets, anticipating an early departure at dawn, Tall One and Antelope hung close to the gray-eyed chief, hanging on his every word as he continued to exhort his faithful.
To Tall One it seemed the war chief was even more a mystic than Isatai. Even more perhaps a man who believed in the power of the human spirit over the powers of magic.
“No Comanche will ever again die a captive of the white man,” he promised his warriors at that late-night fire. “A warrior dies riding the prairie. A Kwahadi dies charging into the face of his enemy. We will take the power of our people to the buffalo hunters’ settlement. The white man’s days on this prairie are numbered.”
The war chief had made a tight fist he held up before them all as he concluded, “I hold the last days of the white man in my hand!”
34
THINGS WOULD HAVE been hot in Comanche country even if it had been down in the deep days of January.
It wasn’t only the weather.
The southern plains had exploded in full-scale war.
First came the rumors of some of the bands moving off from the agencies, heading southwest to Elk Creek to attend a big war-talk. But by the time any of the army got around to checking out what sounded like the wildest of stories—the Comanche holding a sun dance and crazy whispers of a powerful shaman whipping the tribes into a blood lust against the white man—the whole affair was yesterday’s news. Why, just about the time the army was getting set to check out the rumors, word out of the Territories was that some of the Cheyenne were even coming back to their agency after the big medicine stomp of the war bands.
Still, that left the Kiowa and Comanche out there roaming about, adding their numbers to the Kwahadi, who had never come in to their assigned reservation.
“Kwahadis led by one of Satan’s own,” Deacon Johns told Jonah. “The devil’s own whelp, that one.”
The old fellow with iron-crusted hair wore a set of dentures that gave Johns a pretty smile but were not too good for talking, what with all the clacking. He got in the habit of slipping them from his mouth behind his hand when he had a big piece to say. Which was most of the time with the deacon, his slack jaws at work like a well- used, wrinkled blacksmith’s bellows.
“Quanah Parker’s his name,” explained Lamar Lockhart.
“Got a English name, does he?” Hook inquired. “So the bastard’s a renegade, eh? Back to sixty-five, I rubbed up against my first half-breed renegade. North to the Platte Bridge fight. A Cheyenne name of Charlie Bent.”
“This one’s a half-breed too,” Lockhart replied. “His mother was took by the Comanch’ almost twenty-eight- some years ago, just a girl as I remember the story of it. Her seed’s turned out about as bad as they come, with a reputation as smelly as his breechclout.”
“He’s spilled blood from down on the Pecos all the way past the Prairie Dog Town Fork,” offered Niles Coffee, sergeant of Company C, his tanned, wind-seamed face a java color beneath a crop of red whiskers that gave the Ranger an air of raffish gaiety.
“We’ll get him,” Lockhart said sternly at the fire. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Wanna see him swing,” murmured John Com, one of Hook’s messmates. His nose seemed oversized, it and his cheeks perpetually red, scored over with little chicken-track blood vessels. He was a walking barrel of a man, with toothpicks for legs.
“Shooting’s too good for that heathen fornicator,” Johns grumbled.
“Rest assured, he doesn’t have long to roam free,” Lockhart repeated.
Over the past months he had been riding with this company of Rangers, Jonah had come to have a real respect for the quiet captain of Company C. A year younger than Hook, Lockhart had been born late in the autumn of 1838.
“My parents came to Texas from Georgia when all this still belonged to Mexico,” Lockhart had explained one of those quiet prairie nights when men gathered at their cook fires just like this, watching the embers die slow at their feet, the stars dusting the dark canopy like coal water flecked with diamonds.
“My father came west to Texas like many of the rest in those days, intent on finding the length of his own stride. He fought in the revolution that drove out Santa Anna. When Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was first elected president of the Republic of Texas in thirty-eight, my folks named me after him—a man they both admired. He come from Georgia too, matter of fact. A dreamer, a poet—besides hating Injuns to the bottom of his craw. Probably why my father liked Lamar so much.”
“You hate Injuns as much as your father?”
“No. Not anymore,” the captain admitted thoughtfully. “Last couple of years I’ve been trying real hard to understand Injuns more than hate ’em. Hate will eat you up until you got nothing to feed on but it, Jonah. Still, I do understand men like my father. Men like Mirabeau Lamar. Neither one of them give a inch.”
“Tough on the Injuns?”
“President Lamar tough on Injuns!” Coffee hooted.
“These Comanche bands, yes,” Lockhart replied. “Lamar wasn’t in office a little over a year when three Comanche chiefs come riding into the village of San Antonio, saying they were sent by the rest of the chiefs to make
