She nodded her head. “You think it will work?”
“You never know with Injuns. They’re notional.”
“You convinced me of your ghostly abilities,” Rupert called softly.
“You lie,” the Kiowa spokesman said. “You are not a ghost. You do not have magic guns.”
“Faith, you, Eudora, and Gayle get you double handfuls of dirt. Just as soon as I finish actin’ the fool, you hurl that dirt high into the air and keep pickin’ up dirt and tossin’ it. Whilst you’re doin’ that, each of you start squallin’ like a bunch of pumas. You got it?”
They smiled through the grime on their faces and filled their hands with earth.
“I will summon friends from the dark side of life!” Preacher shouted. “You will be able to see their evil coming like a whirlwind. Listen and watch! But if you stay here, you will die!” Preacher cut loose with another ghostly sound, the women tossed the dirt into the air, and then screamed like a pack of wounded animals. Preacher moaned long and loud and fired his pistols faster than he ever had.
He tossed his pistols to Eudora and began jumping around, throwing dirt into the air and whirling around, darting in and out of the open space between the wagons. The women began hurling more dirt into the air until it looked like a sandstorm.
“Your guns are empty now, White Wolf,” the Kiowa called. “They boom no more.”
Eudora tossed the recharged pistols to Preacher and he cut loose with another barrage.
There was a moment of shocked silence from the other side, then the sounds of galloping horses.
“They fell for it,” Preacher said, and looked over at the ladies and started laughing. All of them were covered with dirt. Soon the entire contingent of the wagon train was howling with laughter.
A lone Kiowa brave who had hung back, albeit with much fear in his heart, listened to the wild howling coming from the circled wagons. He rolled his eyes and looked toward the heavens. Then he drummed his heels against his horse and got the hell gone from there.
After the group had settled down, Preacher ordered the teams hooked up. “Let’s get gone from here whilst we got the chance to do it.”
The ladies didn’t need a second urging.
Preacher picked the most easily defended place he could find for that evening’s camp.
“Will we see those Indians again, Preacher?” Agnes asked, handing him a cup of coffee.
“Doubtful. That bunch was some ways from home. We might not see another Indian on the warpath for the rest of the journey. But don’t count on that. In their own way, ladies, the Indian is a good person. Now, that sounds funny, seein’ as how we just killed a few back up the trail, but if you stop and think about it, their way of life makes sense. For them at least, if not for us. They respect the land and use it well. Can’t say that for the white man. And how would you like it if somebody was to come driving a bunch of wagons across your yard back home? Indian feels the same way. This is his yard.” He waved a hand at the prairie. “It’s been his for centuries. I don’t feel hard toward the Indian. I’ve lived with ’em. Now the Pawnee just flat out don’t like me and I don’t like them. Never have and never will. They been tryin’ to kill me since the first day out here when I was just a boy. Ever’ time they try they lose one or two or three more. Seems like they’d learn after a time, don’t it?”
“Do you know why they dislike you so?” Faith asked.
“Nope. And neither do they. If either of us ever did, it’s been lost durin’ the years. I’m the type of man who would get along with ever’ one of God’s children and creatures if they’d just let me. Bears, snakes, scorpions, and all. Even a buzzard, and the Good Lord knows I can’t hardly abide a buzzard. But they’ve a place in things. They’re nature’s garbage collectors, I reckon. But I still don’t like ’em.”
“Why don’t the savages stop fighting the whites?” Maude asked. “If they would do that, then we could all get along.”
Preacher smiled. “Listenin’ ’tween your words, lady, I hear: ‘If they’d just be like us!’ But they ain’t like us. You’re you, I’m me, and they’s them. I couldn’t survive back east. And it ain’t that I wouldn’t survive, I couldn’t. I been free too long. Really free. The only law I have to worry about is the laws I set on myself. I’m like the Indian, I reckon. I don’t like people tellin’ me what to do and where to go and where I can’t go and what I have to do oncest I’m there.”
“But any productive society has to have laws, Captain,” Eudora said.
“Sure. I know that. And the Indian tribes all have their own laws. It’s just that they ain’t like the white man’s laws, that’s all. And the laws them fancy-pants lawyers and swelled-up judges and goofy-actin’ politicians force people to live under ain’t my laws, neither. I don’t want any part of it.”
“There is a great hue and cry back east for people to move west, Preacher,” Faith said. “Soon this part of America will be abounding with humanity. Considering how you feel about that, what will happen to you?”
Preacher’s smile was a slow and sad one. “I reckon I’ll suffer pretty much like the Injuns is gonna suffer. Not as much, ’cause I ain’t got no thousand-year-old way of life behind me that’s gonna have to be pitted agin another thousand-year-old way of life. White man says his way is the only way, Injuns say their way is the only way. And pretty soon, if I’m readin’ the newspapers right, the black folks all over the country is gonna have freedom. And when that happens that’ll mean another way of life will be challenged. I figure the next twenty to thirty years is gonna be right interestin’. With the white man always endin’ up havin’ his way, of course.”
“All the savages have to do is to adopt Christian ethics and we can all get along,” Bertha Macklin opined. “Everything is spelled out quite clearly in the Bible.”
“Is that right?” Preacher said. “I read the Good Book from time to time. It’s contradictory to me. One line reads an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, another line says don’t kill nobody. Some of them folks in there took all sorts of wives to bed down with, begettin’ sons and daughters all over the place. But now it’s agin the law to have more than one wife. Certain parts of the Good Book is right comfortin’. Other parts just don’t make no sense to me. Now if it don’t make no sense to me, who was raised up readin’ the Bible and goin’ to church on Sundays and prayin’ over grub, how in the hell do you expect an Injun to understand it?”
“After all the times the savages have tried to kill you,” April Johnson said, “I find it hard to believe that you are defending them.”
“Well, Missy, I reckon it’s because like can be said about the white people, they’s a hell of a lot more good Injuns than there is bad ones. Injuns got their own code they live by, and it ain’t like ours. Now I don’t agree with all the codes the Injun lives by, but then, I don’t agree with all the laws the whites live by, neither. So I reckon I’m closer to the Injuns than I am to the whites.”
“But you know right from wrong!” Lisette protested.
“I know the white man’s definition of right and wrong, Missy. The Injun’s version is different. And it ain’t up to me to say which one is the correct one. ’Sides, it don’t make no difference. It won’t be many more years—in our lifetime, probably—when the Injuns will be killed off or herded onto reservations like animals in a cage. And then the white man will say, ‘There now, we’ve done it. We’ve destroyed a way of life so’s ours can thrive. Let’s all be right proud of what we done.’ Well, you be proud. I ain’t so damn sure it’ll be anything to boast about.”