Beyond Squaw Creek

Fargo felt his face heat with chagrin. He thought he saw Prairie Dog glance at him knowingly, but maybe it was only his imagination.

“Corporal!” the major barked toward one of the soldiers milling about the dead Indians beyond the stockade wall. “Form a contingent immediately! I want those savages run down before—!”

“Now, Major,” Prairie Dog broke in, still holding one of the Trailsman’s arms. “You’d only be sending those men to their graves. We’re badly outnumbered out here, and any contingent you sent out wouldn’t see midnight.”

“For the love of Christ, Robert, come to your senses!” the doctor added in a slight German accent. “That’s just what the Indians are hoping you’ll do, so they can slaughter some more of us. You’ll have to wait till morning. Now, let’s get you over to the infirmary so I can remove that arrow before you bleed to death!”

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, the major turned to Fargo, a helpless, confused, beseeching cast to his gaze.

“Prairie Dog and I’ll head out at first light,” Fargo said. “The smaller the pursuit party, the better. We’ll get her, bring her back, and then we’ll go after Lieutenant Duke.”

The major nodded dully. He let the doctor half turn him toward the fort, then stopped and glanced skeptically at the Trailsman. “Have you any idea what she was doing around the stables, Fargo? Not a very likely place to find my daughter at such a time…”

Fargo flicked his gaze toward Prairie Dog, then back to Howard, and hiked a shoulder. “I reckon she’s fond of horses, Major.”

Major Howard squinted one eye.

“Come on, Robert,” the doctor said, tugging on the man’s good arm.

Howard let the doctor lead him back through the open gate. The Trailsman turned to see Prairie Dog regarding him severely. “Child, you’re gonna get yourself shot one of these days, with that overused organ of yours up the wrong girl’s honeypot!”

More sporadic gunfire sounded from behind the stockade wall as Fargo and Prairie Dog tramped after the major, the Trailsman muttering, “We should all retire so nobly.”

Just inside the stockade, he and Prairie Dog stopped and looked around at the dead Indians and soldiers lying in the shadows behind the hay barns and remount stables. Small groups of living soldiers crouched around the wounded while others hauled men toward the infirmary on stretchers.

Torches cast a guttering radiance from the direction of the parade ground and officers’ quarters. Occasional horse whinnies broke the eerie quiet while coyotes yammered in the hills surrounding the fort, no doubt frenzied by the smell of blood.

“If they’d used fire arrows, this coulda been a whole lot worse,” Prairie Dog remarked. “I reckon I’ll help tend the wounded and haul off the dead savages. You best get to bed, Skye. We’ll get started at first light.”

As Prairie Dog moved forward, Fargo touched the scout’s arm. “I ain’t gonna get any sleep, Dog. How ’bout you?”

Prairie Dog squinted an eye at him, his face partially concealed by shadows, light from the torches dancing dully in his deep-set eyes. His voice had a dread tone. “What’s on your mind?”

“Let’s get after them.”

“You’re addlepated, child. Like I told the major, they’d swarm us, ambush us, scalp us, and boil up our privates for dog feed!”

“Not you an’ me.” Fargo smiled grimly. “Remember the Montana Rojo in ’fifty- six?”

“We got lucky.”

“We rescued those girls from the Comanch by moving the way they moved—slowly, quietly, staying low, then swinging wide to creep up in front of ’em.”

Prairie Dog snickered as he scrubbed his beard with his sleeve. “Surprised the shit out of ’em, we did!” His snicker died suddenly and he stared off toward the dancing torchlight before turning back to Fargo, the light now bright in his eyes. “How’s your head?”

“It needs air.”

“Well, it’s liable to get plenty of air!” Prairie Dog cursed, ran his hand across his own scarred, hairless pate, then set his hat back on his head and began striding off between the hay barns. “I’ll fetch Brunhilda and meet you back here in twenty minutes!”

He muttered darkly as he ambled off in the shadows.

10

Fargo fetched his gear from the sutler’s store while the sutler and his half-breed wife hauled from their porch a dead warrior whom the woman had nearly blown in two with her husband’s old blunderbuss.

In the stable, the Trailsman saddled the pinto, stuffed his saddlebags with the provisions Valeria had given him, then headed off to the stockade’s north gate. He waited only five minutes for Prairie Dog Charley to pull up on a stout blue roan rigged with the old scout’s fancy Schuetzen target rifle.

“The major was under the doc’s knife, so I told Lieutenant Ryan we were headin’ out.” Prairie Dog chuckled woefully. “The lieutenant’s a might rattled, I fear. He told me he wasn’t expectin’ to see me, you, the girl, or anyone outside the fort ever again, but that he’d pray for our deliverance from those screaming heathens!”

Fargo turned the pinto straight north, intending to swing wide of the retreating Indians before heading west, paralleling their path. “A good man in a pinch, the lieutenant.”

He and Prairie Dog kept to the coulees and valleys as they headed straight north of the fort, spying no Indians or white men or even much wildlife except an occasional meadowlark or finch flitting about the chokecherry and juneberry scrub lining the creeks and streams.

What they did find were several burned out settlers’ homesteads, charred bodies and stock animals strewn about the corrals, cabins, and mine diggings, as though they’d been flung by some angry god from outer space and pincushioned with feathered arrows. A couple of young prospectors had been decapitated, their rotting heads placed on their dugout cabin’s rough-hewn table, facing the door—a grisly, blackly humorous welcome to visitors.

The two scouts continued north as the sun rose, then swung west along the intermittently dry watercourse of Tongue Creek, where Fargo had once hunted buffalo and nearly been scalped by Cree. At noon, they paused on the shoulder of a low butte and stared into a hollow in which a dugout cabin nestled with a weathered privy and a cottonwood corral.

The place looked abandoned, though no dead littered the tawny, dry grass. A weathered canoe was tipped against the side of the cabin, nearly buried in wild rye.

In the middle of the yard, a windmill turned lazily. Water trickled from a log pipe into the stone tank shaded by a gnarled box elder.

“They must’ve pulled out when they got wind of the Injun trouble,” remarked Prairie Dog.

Fargo didn’t say anything. He stared at the windmill, listened to the tinny gurgle of the water dropping into the tank. Their horses hadn’t had water since dawn, and his and Prairie Dog’s canteens were half empty.

Prairie Dog read Fargo’s mind. “Should we ride down?”

“Looks clear to me,” Fargo said, “but, then, those were the last words of many a dead man.”

Prairie Dog lifted his hat, ran a hand across his scarred pate. “And many a hairless man.” Rising in his saddle, he looked around, grunting. “Why don’t I ride down from that east bluff, and you come in from the west? If there’s anybody down there, one of us oughta savvy him. Though, like I done told you, a post can pick up more sound than my right ear.”

“Then listen hard with your left,” Fargo grumbled, reining the pinto right and walking out along the hill’s sloping shoulder.