A trio of shots from the west side of camp interrupted the younger North. All four white men turned and dashed onto the prairie lit with no more than dim starshine here a matter of hours before moonrise. It was but a few yards before they bumped into ten of the trackers, who were talking excitedly.
“What they say?” Shad asked.
Luther North answered, “Mad Bear took off after one of the horsemen come running through camp. This bunch says they saw Mad Bear hit the bastard’s pony, spilling the buck. So Mad Bear took off to claim him. Out there in the dark—and that’s when they heard some more shots out there.”
“Figure any more of them Cheyenne out there?” Cody inquired.
“Just shadows is all,” the elder North said.
Moving into the darkness with the rest for about fifty yards, Shad watched a shadow loom against the starry sky. A smattering of the Pawnee tongue came out of the night at them. A moment more and they came upon one of the trackers hunched over a near-naked body sprawled on the ground.
As the tracker rolled the body over, Luther North asked, “We get one?”
“Dammit!” roared Frank North.
Shad recognized the dull sheen to the brass buttons on the bloodstained army issue the dead man wore.
“Shot in the back,” Cody declared as the rest of the Pawnee began wailing, collapsing to their knees in grief around their fallen kinsman. “Went right through the heart.”
“Then he weren’t killed by the Cheyenne, Major,” Shad explained to Frank North quietly.
“Ain’t that a goddamned pity.” The major wagged his head. “The others say they saw Mad Bear out there chasing them sonsabitches. But in all the confusion, they opened fire thinking he was one of them thieving murderers. Damn, if that don’t fry my—”
“I want the Cheyenne too, Frank,” Luther declared against the backdrop of the Pawnees’ wailing death songs. “Want ’em bad as Carr does.”
“They’ve got to be close, fellas,” Cody said.
Shad agreed. “Damn straight they’re close. Hitting us twice in three days. That village of theirs ain’t far.”
“We better go report in to Carr before he gets his belly in an uproar, Frank,” Luther said.
“Won’t he want to get his hands on this bunch soon now?” Cody said. “I’ll suggest to-him we lay in camp a day and send out some of your scouts to backtrack on this bunch, Major North.”
“Sounds like a damned good idea to me, Cody. We’ll be ready to ride out at first-light.”
“Yeah,” Shad agreed as he stared into the night-drenched distance. “Time we finally come up with something more than track soup to feed the general on.”
Carr went along with Bill Cody’s suggestion and ordered a day’s layover for his troopers on the ninth of July while sending out several parties of Major North’s Pawnee battalion to scour the area for sign of where the Cheyenne raiders had disappeared.
At the request of Captain Luther North, Shad Sweete had joined young Lieutenant Billy Harvey and five of the Pawnee to scout a sizable piece of country south and west of where Frenchman’s Fork dumped itself into the Republican River. For more than fourteen hours beneath a mercilessly brutal sun they had punished themselves in the saddle, halting here and there only for brief watering of the animals, eating what they had in their saddlebags as they rode. In their wide sweep of the undulating plains of eastern Colorado Territory, early that evening the eight finally struck the Republican, still some twenty-five miles above the camp of Carr’s Fifth Cavalry.
It was there that Lute North called for a brief rest to discuss their options with this much ground still to cover before nightfall. “If your asses are as sore as mine, I figure we could treat ourselves with some time out of the saddle. Ride in to meet up with the column come dawn.”
“Just what this old man was thinking!” Shad replied as he climbed down and began rubbing his thighs in the way of a horseman long on the trail.
“Wait a minute, Mr. Sweete—don’t you figure it best for us to ride to that hill yonder to the north? Just to take a look around before we settle down for the night?”
“You expecting company, Captain?” asked Billy Harvey.
“The Cap’n’s right,” Shad said, dragging himself back into the saddle and moving away with Luther North toward the top of the tallest hill in the area.
As the sun was settling in a fiery show of midsummer crimson, North called for a halt twenty yards from the crest and ordered one of the Pawnee to belly up to the skyline for a look around before the rest betrayed themselves.
The tracker began his walk upright, slowly crouching lower and lower until he was on all fours at the crest. Then suddenly he dropped to his belly amid the tall grass. Shad was dropping from the saddle by the time the Pawnee had pushed himself backward and was signaling in plains sign talk for the rest to dismount and join him. North ordered one of the trackers to stay behind with the horses.
When they arrived back of the crest, the sun was just then easing out of sight beyond the far mountains that from here appeared to be nothing more than a ragged hemline of horizon. Yet it was not the sight of those faraway and seductive high places, North Park and the rest of the central Rockies, that seized Sweete’s attention.
It was what awaited his eyes down in the valley of Frenchman’s Fork that made the blood pound at the old trapper’s temples.
About a mile on west of where they lay, the creek flowed in gently from the north. Between that wide river bend and the bottom of the slope where the seven sprawled on their bellies was cut the gash of a deep ravine that every spring would fill with runoff to feed Frenchman’s Fork. But this was summer, and the rainy season was long behind them. Instead of runoff, what filled the wide, sandy path of that ravine seemed to be the whole of the Cheyenne nation on the march between the willow and alder, plum brush and cottonwood. Ahead and on both sides of the column rode the painted, resplendent warriors atop their prancing ponies, old men and women trundling along on foot among the travois ponies, children and dogs darting here and there and everywhere noisily among the entire procession. On the nearby east bank of the fork, pony boys worked the huge herd.
Shad could see the lust for that herd in the Pawnee’s eyes as he glanced at the others, could see the lust for all that finery of blankets and robes, kettles and clothing. Although they wore pieces of the army uniform and dressed by and large in the white man’s clothing, riding army horses and carrying army weapons, the Pawnee were still Indians who coveted the spoils of war that could be wrenched from their ancient enemy.
“That Tall Bull’s bunch?” whispered Lieutenant Harvey.
Luther North nodded, a finger to his lips for quiet. “Can’t be no one else, can it, Mr. Sweete?”
“I figure the lieutenant here guessed right.”
“What a stroke of good fortune, fellas,” North continued. “For some time now the army’s figured it was Tall Bull’s band of Dog Soldiers that’s been causing all the trouble after Sandy Forsyth’s bunch made Roman Nose a good Indian at Beecher Island.”
“That bunch is Cheyenne, all right,” Shad replied. “Damn—but that’s one big shitteree of ’em too, boys.”
Less than two hundred yards away, the entire procession wound past the hilltop unawares, many of the ponies burdened with fresh, bloodied buffalo meat shot and butchered that very day. The seven observers fell quiet for long minutes as they peered down on the colorful, noisy cavalcade, until they saw the vanguard move out of sight among the brush as the village neared the mouth of the fork.
“Look at ’em, Mr. Sweete, and tell me if that bunch don’t look about as done in as Carr’s outfit is.”