about, turned them into the wind. Instead of pointing their noses south for Fort Griffin and the earthy recreation offered by St. Angela, the fleshpot across the river from the post, the Rangers were coming about to the north.
Deacon Johns had grumbled his praise as they went to saddle in the dark. “Praise God you boys are forced to go a while longer before you lie fornicating with some likely, oily-tongued slattern what has her seven kinds of pox!”
Lockhart had them backtracking for the White River portal, on a fresh trail that just might mean a payday come at last for Company C.
In the gray of dawn’s first awakening that next morning, Jonah and Two Sleep led Lockhart and Coffee in a wide swing to the south for insurance’s sake while the rest of the Rangers waited in a cold camp for their return. In little more than an hour, it looked like they had their answer.
Jonah reined them up and dropped once more to the new tracks they had just come across.
“I don’t think this bunch is scouts for a village on the move, Cap’n,” he said, rising and slapping his glove against his britches silvered with dust. Jonah pulled the glove on, saying, “We should’ve found something by now, sweeping around like we done. No outriders would be pushing this far out from the village moving to new ground.”
“Like I said, it’s a scalping party,” Coffee replied, assuredly.
“Sorry, Sergeant,” Jonah said. “This bunch ain’t on the lope—it’s moving too slow to be making a war trail. They might just be hunters. But that ain’t the who of it.”
“What else, Jonah?” Lockhart asked.
“They’ve run onto friends out here.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed sharply, a deep furrow dug between his bushy black eyebrows. “Friends?”
“Another bunch,” Jonah replied, his arm motioning over the new tracks, then pointing north.
“These are the prints of the war party we found last night?”
With a shake of his head, Jonah said, “No. Different. One of these bucks riding a pony got a hoof I ain’t see before. A mustang with a split hoof. Back a ways you can see where they stopped while one of the riders changed mounts. Took the weight off the pony with the split hoof.”
“I’ll be go to hell,” admired Lockhart, smiling in his black mustache. “What else you tell me about this bunch? How many now?”
“Probably a couple dozen by now—what with this second outfit joined up.”
“What’s all that tell you, Jonah?”
“Says this ain’t a hunting party. Probably not a real scalp raid neither.”
“What then?”
“Likely the village split up to move across a big piece of ground, coming out of that Cedar Lake country you say is down there. Split up because of what you fellas told me—with the soldiers patrolling out of Fort Concho and all.”
Lockhart worked his hands anxiously over the saddle horn. “Which means they’re re-forming ranks?”
“If you mean they’re coming back together—you can bet the bank of Texas on it, Cap’n.”
“By damned!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got a fresh trail—and it will lead us right to their village.”
“Cap’n Lockhart,” Jonah said soberingly, “remember this bunch of Comanche is on the move.”
Coffee leaned forward, his face suddenly gone serious in that red beard of his. Concerned, he asked, “They don’t know we’re behind them, do they?”
“No,” Hook said. “They don’t know we’re back here—yet. But that’s only a matter of time.”
40
THEIR ESCAPE FROM the yellow-leg soldiers at Palo Duro Canyon seemed like an eternity ago. More than four moons had come and gone since the Shahiyena and Kiowa, and the Comanche themselves, had torn themselves apart into smaller bands, scattering before the winds and Three-Finger Kinzie’s pony soldiers.
It had worked. Once more the Kwahadi had survived the winter undiscovered. As brutal as the weather had been, as hard as it was to find the buffalo that would prolong the life of the band, as often as they had been compelled to uproot and move to a new camp, they had survived.
The fight in the canyon had shown Tall One what few others were ready to admit. The white man and his army were not about to rest until they had driven the red man into the squalor of the agencies, until all the rest who remained out on the free prairie were ground under the heels of the
What a fight it had been. Something that lived on in the bitter recollections of the warriors who recounted their bravery in covering the retreat of their people against the overwhelming numbers and the total surprise of the yellow-leg attack. From their hiding places behind trees and boulders, the Kwahadi men disappeared, melting into the chill dawn mist strung in a gauzy veil over the narrow creek, flitting away like cave bats come the rising of the sun. With their women and children climbing out of the canyon, with the Tonkawa and Seminole trackers in full possession of most of the Kwahadi pony herd—there was nothing left to do but flee. To escape so they could fight another day.
So the gall of their defeat kept gnawing away at the men through that fall and into the time of cold. There in the canyon that morning they had been given no time for the women to gather up the travois ponies, to drag down lodges, to pack clothing and utensils, dried meat and robes, to ward off the coming winds of winter. Most everything had been lost to Three-Finger Kinzie.
Doing what they had done time and again against this same soldier chief. Tall One and Antelope had joined the Kwahadi men in falling back slowly, firing, holding the soldiers at bay while they could. From every crevice in the canyon walls, behind every rock and tree big enough to give them cover, the warriors dogged and deviled that solid blue phalanx.
Through the heated minutes of that fight the gray-eyed war chief was among them—Kiowa and Shahiyena as well as his own Kwahadi. He had exhorted them, rallied them, bolstered them as they fell back—urging them to hold the line a little longer. Many times during that hard winter Tall One recalled with great pride how he had stood with the war chief, he and Antelope some of the last to retreat.
“For our women and children!” the gray-eyed one cheered first in one tongue, then in another. “For our families! For them we leave our bodies here to protect the ones who flee!”
Back, back across the yucca and tiny prickly pear, across the white quartz studded in the red earth, the last holdouts had retreated, slowly scaling the upvaulted rock formations as red-tailed and swainson’s hawks drifted overhead on the morning’s warming air currents. For more than four twisted, tortured miles of that snaking canyon they had held the soldiers back. From afar Tall One had recognized the low, grumbling charge of the cavalry washing their way, so much like the sound of an old mare with her paunch filled with bad water. In the end it came time for the last of the warriors to disappear into the narrow washes and bent-finger arroyos like so many eye- corner wrinkles off the main canyon.
“Flee!” the war chief hollered at them there at the last, waving his warriors away with his rifle. “We will regroup at the top.”
It was there at the top of the canyon walls as that autumn day’s sun grew weary and desirous of seeking its rest beyond the far mountains that Tall One watched the gray-eyed war chief confront the headmen of the Kiowa and Shahiyena who said their people had suffered enough, who said they were turning away from the struggle. Would at last the Kwahadi join them on their road back to the agencies?
“No, I will not join you in turning my back on my country. I will never join you in giving up the life of my father on the free prairie,” he told them. “How can you presume to ask that of me—the one who had never taken a mouthful of the white man’s food! How could I ever consider the reservation my last option? When I am the lone chief here who has never set my foot on the white man’s agencies—never held out my hand to accept one of his thin blankets, or his rotten pig meat, or his bug-infested flour.”
The end had come there on the lip of that great crevasse as the Kwahadi war chief asked of those who were going in, “In your wisdom, tell me what my people are to do now. Is it better for me to lead them into the reservations now? Or better for us to continue this fight?”
