hollow Olga went and wiped his forehead which despite the cold was welling sweat, and then he says God bless you, missus, and goes to sleep directly like a child.
I mean to say she was a good woman and a useful one. And little Gus, when the guns popped the first time, delighting him marvelous, he wanted to fire one himself and towards that end crawled up the embankment but Olga caught him. Then he lost interest in the conflict and played by himself in the hollow, making cunning little scratches in the sand. I was right proud of them two and also concerned for them, and decided if I was to save their lives I must take a chance.
I aimed to go for Larned, a trip of maybe forty mile, but within the next ten of it there was a stage station where, unless the Cheyenne had wiped it out, I could get me a horse. I had ought to be back with the Army by nightfall the following day. Our people could hold out that long, for sure.
The others agreed with this, though that plucky little drummer wanted to go instead, for he claimed to be useless as a fighter, and the driver wanted the guard to go, on the same ground, but I knew I had the best experience for it and held out.
I shook hands all around and then kissed Olga. Little Gus was sleeping in her arms, and I didn’t want to wake him up, so just pressed my lips to his chubby cheek, then pulled the wool cap closer around it though he felt warm as a glowing coal in the chill night, sturdy lad that he was.
“You’ll be all right, my girl,” I says to Olga.
“Ay vait here,” says she, patting the sand, and I believed her for she was right substantial, so it was in nothing like a hopeless mood that I give my weapons to the drummer and set forth through the utter dark, wading to the north shore down about a mile, then pulling on my boots and hiking it to the stage station. Where all was well, except that coming in the middle of the night like that I nearly got myself shot. There was only three fellows there, not enough to take back and drive off fifty Cheyenne and anyway one was dead drunk and the others so yellow when they heard hostiles was near, they run into a dugout in the ground and pulled sod over themselves, but I obtained a horse, nearly killed it riding to the fort, presented my story to the commanding officer, he mounted a column without too much delay, I took a fresh animal, and back we rode. Made good time, too, for the Army.
It was an hour before sunset when we topped a swell of ground that, with borrowed field glasses, give me a view on our abandoned stagecoach. The Cheyenne was gone from around it. Nor could I see anyone across on the sand hills, but they would be lying low over there, for at our distance we could not have been distinguished by them from more Indians.
That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway, as we trotted nearer, and then I broke for the far shore, lashing the tired cavalry mount through the soft bottomland that had thawed in the day’s sun, and into the water, and as he floundered with exhaustion gaining the opposite bank, I leaped from him and run, hallooing, up the bluff.
The first I come upon was the drummer. A procession of ants had already reached his eyes though he couldn’t have been dead above a few hours. Three arrows was in him, and his head naked and raw. Nearby lay the driver in a similar situation, his right hand also gone; for he was a good shot, and the Cheyenne had so acknowledged that fact.
The guard was badly sliced, but Perch not at all, he with the bandaged shoulder and frozen foot being spoiled, so to speak, for trophy-taking, and bald besides.
They had somehow been overrun. The driver might have got rubbed out, and then the rest of them went to pieces. I don’t know. I was fair numb as I descended into the hollow, but no Olga and no little Gus did I find there. Nor any place else in that region. The Cheyenne had carried off my family.
CHAPTER 15 Union Pacific
I AIN’T GOING into the details of the hopeless trailing we did next day, for after their fashion the Cheyenne broke into many little elements and there was no way of knowing which included Olga and Gus. It was just as well, for had we got close with the troops, them Indians would likely have killed my wife and child out of pure spite.
As it stood, they might offer them for ransom sometime later on. If the Cheyenne hadn’t killed them at the Arkansas, they weren’t about to do it after they had gone to the trouble of kidnaping. I was fairly sure of that, though you can’t count on a savage to have his practical interest constantly in mind. If they got beat in some encounter with the whites, or if some brave got drunk-Well, there wasn’t any future in speculations of that type, which left me with nothing to do.
At the time, I only thought: Them bastards have my wife and kid. I reckon I might even have held a grudge against Old Lodge Skins, were he not up on the Powder River.
Of course, now I realize that him and his band would have been my best means of tracing the location of my family and buying them back. Provided I could have found that chief without being killed while looking for him-you couldn’t telegraph an Indian or write him a letter. Well, the point is I never tried. I went on back to Fort Larned with the troops and hired on as a scout for a while, but there wasn’t any more trouble along the Arkansas. The attack on our stage had been an isolated circumstance. The real action took place up along the Platte, where the Cheyenne had smoked the pipe of war with the Sioux and Arapaho, and together in a force of a thousand warriors raided the town of Julesburg in early January, plundering the stores there. For a month they terrorized the South Platte, destroying ranches and stage stations, ripping the telegraph lines, and capturing wagon trains. Then in February they hit Julesburg again, and having sacked it once more, burned it to the ground.
In the spring the hostiles moved north into the Black Hills, and then on to the Powder. The Army went up there in summer and got more or less whipped in a series of engagements and then was caught in an early-autumn storm that killed most of their animals and come back, ragged and barefoot, making it only because Frank North and his Pawnee Scouts found them and led them in. The following year the Sioux and Cheyenne run Colonel Carrington out of the north country and made the Army vacate the forts he had built to protect the route to the gold mines of Montana.
I am working my stomach up to admitting here that instead of looking seriously for Olga and little Gus, I become a drunk. That’s a hard confession to make about yourself, and I have never done it before, but it is true. I lost my guts. I had got whipped at everything so far, and a habit of that kind can mark a man. When we patrolled the Arkansas the next few months and never found no hostiles, I was relieved, for I had got to thinking my family would be safer if the Indians they was with kept eluding or beating the Army. Maybe when things settled down, I could get me some negotiable items, blankets, beads, and such, wander among the tribes as a trader, and find Olga in that fashion.
Meanwhile I was drinking, and the more I drank, the less I saw about Indians in general and the Cheyenne in particular that I approved of. I won’t go into that, which was an elaboration of the feelings I had commenced to get in Denver. I’ll just say that now it no longer seemed stupid for me to hear somebody say what we ought to do was exterminate every one of them. For all I know, I may even have been the fellow who shouted that sentiment at the top of his voice, for I always heard it after I had got towards the bottom of the jug, and sometimes I’d be sitting all by myself along the stockade wall.
I had almost rather do it over again than to recount my ensuing wanders during the summer of ’65, for when I wasn’t drunk I was suffering the aftereffects, which is worse. I wended eastwards, and Kansas was building up now with the War over, and there was ranches and even towns where it was buffalo range before, and one wagon train had its nose at the arse of the next, and wherever you’ll find white men, you’ll find whiskey.
Now I didn’t have no money to use in a saloon, and I wasn’t in no condition to render service around a camp, like hunting, say, for I hadn’t a gun and couldn’t have steadied my hand if I had. I might have got me a drink or two out of sheer hospitality, but could hardly have consumed the volume of liquor I nowadays needed without some form of recompense to them who poured it.
So that accounts for how and why I become a buffoon. I mean, I would come into a wagon train at their evening stop, or up to a ranch house, or into a saloon if in town, and say: “How’d you fellers like some entertainment? You buy, and I’ll provide.”
There was a lot of curiosity in them days, and somebody’d always agree to the deal and set ’em up, and I would pack in enough rotgut to stop the tremor that got to running through my frame whenever I was empty, and
