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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Maps

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston

  Critical Praise for Terry C. Johnston’s Plainsmen Series

  About the Author

  Copyright

  this novel is dedicated to

  Ed Benz,

  Director of the Hutchinson County Museum, who time and again helped make sense of the greatest Indian War on the southern plains

  Cast of Characters

  Seamus Donegan

  Civilians

  Rebecca Grover*

  Louis Abragon*

  Henry Lease

  Orlando A. “Brick” Bond

  John Fairchild

  John Miles—Cheyenne Agent at Darlington Agency

  Charley Armitage

  Jim Cator

  Fred Singer

  Prairie Dog Dave

  Joe Plummer

  Robert M. Wright

  Cheyenne Jack

  George Bellfield

  Richard Coke—Governor of Texas

  James Haworth—Kiowa/Comanche Agent

  J. Connell—Acting Agent, Anadarko

  William Shirley—government trader at Anadarko

  Jacob Sandford—wagon-master, Lyman wagon train

  James O’Neal—wagon-master, Mackenzie campaign

  Dr. J. J. Sturm

  Samantha Pike*

  Frank Brown

  A. C. “Charlie” Myers

  Mike McCabe

  Charley Rath

  Bob Cator

  Emanuel Dubbs

  Dirty Face Ed Jones

  Ned Sewell

  Anderson Moore

  Blue Billy

  Henry Lease

  Participants at Adobe Walls Fight

  James Langton

  Andy “Swede” Johnson

  Tom O’Keefe

  Hannah Olds

  Billy Ogg

  William Barclay “Bat” Masterson

  Hiram Watson

  James “Bermuda” Carlisle

  Fred Leonard

  Edward Trevor

  Charley Armitage

  Billy Tyler

  Mike McCabe

  “Frenchy”

  Jacob (Shorty) Scheidler

  George Eddy

  Sam Smith

  William Olds

  Billy Dixon

  Oscar Sheppard

  Mike Welch

  James McKinley

  James Hanrahan

  James Campbell

  Seth Hathaway

  “Dutch” Henry Born

  Billy “Old Man” Keeler

  Fred Myers

  Issac (Ike) Scheidler

  Juan

  Texas Rangers at Lost Valley Fight

  Major John B. Jones, Commanding, Texas Frontier Battalion

  Captain G. W. Stephens

  Ed Carnal

  George Moore

  Billy Glass

  Walter Robertson

  David Bailey

  Lieutenant Hiram Wilson

  Lee Corn

  Richard Wheeler

  William Lewis

  Mel Porter

  John Holmes

  Army

  General William T. Sherman

  General C. C. Augur

  Colonel John W. Davidson

  Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Neill

  Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell

  Major T. M. Anderson

  Captain Eugene B. Beaumont

  Captain Tullis Tupper

  Captain Napoleon B. McLaughlin

  Captain Wyllys Lyman

  Captain Andrew Bennett

  Captain S. T. Norvell

  Lieutenant Frank West

  Lieutenant Granville Lewis

  Lieutenant William A. Thompson

  Lieutenant R. H. Pratt

  Sergeant Nicholas deArmond

  Sergeant Reuben Waller

  General Philip H. Sheridan

  Colonel Nelson A. Miles

  Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie

  Major William R. Price

  Captain Peter Boehm

  Captain Louis H. Carpenter

  Captain T. A. Baldwin

  Captain Sebastian Gunther

  Captain William A. Rafferty

  Captain A. S. Keyes

  Lieutenant Frank Baldwin

  Lieutenant Henry Kingsbury

  Lieutenant H. W. Lawton

  Sergeant John B. Charlton

  Lone Tree Valley Massacre Civilians

  killed:

  Captain Oliver Frances Short

  Captain Abram Cutler

  Daniel Short

  James Shaw

  Allen Shaw

  Harry Jones

  John Keuchler

  survivors:

  Captain Luther A. Thrasher

  Harry Short

  S. B. Crist

  German Family Massacre

  John German

  Rebecca German

  Catherine German

  Joanna German

  Julia German

  Lydia German

  Stephen German

  Sophia German

  Adelaide German

  Soldiers at Buffalo Wallow Fight

  Sergeant Z. T. Woodall

  Private John Harrington

  Private Peter Rath

  Private George W. Smith

  Scouts and Interpreters

  Sharp Grover

  Amos Chapman

  Horace Jones

  William Schmalsle

  Henry W. Strong—Fort Richardson post guide

  Johnson (Lipan)

  Job (Tonkawa)

  Ben Clark

  Ira Wing

  Lem Wilson

  James Butler Hickok

  Henry (Tonkawa)

  Comanches

  Quanah Parker

  Tonarcy

  Paracoom (Bull Bear)

  Wild Horse

  Tabananica (Hears the Sunrise)

  He Bear

  Esa-Que (Wolf Tongue)

  Old Man Black Beard

  Horse Chief

  Sai-Yan (Rag Full of Holes)

  Cobay (Wild Mustang)

  Big Red Meatr />
  Cheevers

  Mow-way

  Isatai

  White Horse

  Ten Bears

  Timbo

  Horseback

  Quirts Quip

  Kiowas

  Lone Wolf

  Tauankia

  Mamay-day-te

  Mamanti (Swan)

  White Shield

  Dangerous Eagle

  Stumbling Bear

  Napawat

  Tsentonkee

  Loud Talker

  Yellow Wolf

  Poor Buffalo

  Red Otter

  Guitain

  Long Horn

  Big Bow

  Howling Wolf

  Big Tree

  Sun Boy

  White Cowbird

  Hunting Horse

  Lone Young Man

  Tehan—white captive

  Botalye

  Satanta

  Cheyenne

  Little Robe

  Sitting Medicine

  Whirlwind

  Red Moon

  Medicine Water

  Stone Eagle

  Old Man Otter Belt

  White Shield

  Hippy

  Buffalo Calf Woman (Mochi)

  Gray Eyes

  Cedar

  Long Back

  Black Horse

  Stone Calf

  White Shield

  Gray Beard

  White Horse

  Iron Shirt

  White Wolf

  Whirlwind

  Spots on the Feathers

  Elk Shoulder

  Yellow Horse

  Mad Wolf

  Red Eagle

  Wolf Robe

  Minimic

  Arapaho

  Yellow Horse

  Delaware

  Black Beaver

  * indicates a fictional character

  Prologue

  Moon of Deer Shedding Horns, 1873

  “There are only six of them, Quanah.”

  Quanah Parker nodded, still staring into the distance at the austere ocher and snow-covered ridges. The winter wind nuzzled his long, braided hair this way and that, gently clinking the silver conchos he had woven into that single, glossy queue that hung almost long enough to brush to the back of his war pony. The air was racy with the smell of late autumn’s decay.

  “You waited long enough to be sure there were no more inside?” Quanah asked the scout who had ridden back across the snow from the valley scooped out of the landscape southeast of where his Kwahadi warriors waited anxiously this bright, cold winter mid-morning.

  “Six.”

  “How many of the white man’s log lodges?”

  “Two. One in front, the other in back—beside it, a wood pen for his horses and two of the spotted buffalo.”

  Quanah turned his nose up at that. Spotted buffalo. The white man’s cattle. Docile and spineless. With less courage than even a buffalo cow. Good only for milking. And he wondered what the white man saw in milk anyway. If the Grandfather Above gave the milk to the spotted buffalo, why then did the white man drink it?

  If he was so fond of milk, why didn’t the white man suckle at the breasts of his wife?

  It was not as if Quanah had never tasted human milk. He had. Many times. For a moment now, here in the cold of this open land, with the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon the Llano Estacado, it was good to remember. At times he had thought about taking a second wife, but his first filled his life with all that he needed.

  Tonarcy satisfied him even more now than ever before. Mother to their three children, he recalled how her belly had grown swollen with that first child. Thought about how he still made love to her when she grew as big as an antelope doe. How she had never been shy about expressing her hunger for him … the warm softness of her fingers as they encircled his excited flesh, kneading him into a frenzy. How he would roll her over, bringing her up on her hands and knees, that ripe belly of hers and those swollen breasts suspended beneath her as he drove his hard flesh into the moistness of her own warm readiness.

  Quanah always answered her rising whimpers with his own growl of enthusiasm in the coupling, for none had ever satisfied him like she.

  And after he had exploded inside her, Quanah would suckle at first one, then the other of her warm breasts. It seemed Tonarcy was never without milk from the time of the birth of their first child. And it had always been a warm, sweet treat for Quanah—after making warm, sweet love to his wife. This drinking of her milk from her small, swollen breasts—something that often made him ready to mount her again. And her more than ready to receive him as well.

  He had never fully understood her appetite growing when it was he who suckled … yet had never questioned it either.

  Quanah shook his head, aware of the cold blast of winter air once more. Something that reminded him that he was not in his warm lodge, wrapped in the furry robes with her.

  Perhaps he needed her badly.

  He acknowledged that he had been away from their winter village for too long, perhaps. He was thinking on his wife and that sweet, warm and moist rutting he shared with Tonarcy when he should be thinking about those six white men down there in that valley less than two miles away.

  Many suns ago he had led a large hunting party away from their village to hunt buffalo. The Comanche were running low on dried meat. With a disappointing fall hunt, Quanah’s Kwahadi band were forced to venture out on the hunt much earlier this winter than they normally would have. More than a moon before, he and the warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they found south of the “dead line,” that place where the government’s treaty-talkers said the white buffalo hunters were not to cross.

  But more and more the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne were discovering sign that the white man was venturing farther and farther south of the Arkansas River, come to the hunting ground guaranteed to the Indian as his own. A meaningless waste of time, this talking treaty with the white man, Quanah thought.

  Ever since the autumn when the old chiefs had signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek six winters before, it seemed the white hunters were crossing south of the Arkansas in greater numbers, crossing south of the Cimarron too. And Quanah feared they would one day soon come to the Canadian River—what he rightly believed was the last stand for his people: that northern boundary of the great Staked Plain, the Llano Estacado of the ancient ones who had marched out of the land far away to the south with their gleaming metal heads, the ones who first brought the horse to the People of the plains.

  Besides those few hide hunters they found and killed more than a moon gone now, his scouts had also returned with news of a small group of soldiers marching northwest onto the Staked Plain. Quanah knew that killing the soldiers boded no good for his people. The army would only send more next time. Yet the yellowlegs never found the roaming warriors—instead the army’s Tonkawa guides sought out the Kwahadi villages filled with women and children and the old ones.

  Rarely were the young warriors punished by the white soldiers. It was their families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons when they ran quickly to flee the white man and the Tonkawa trackers who led the soldiers to the valleys and canyons where the Kwahadi always camped to escape the cold winter winds or to find shade come the first days of the short-grass time.

  No, he had told his warriors. We are not going to kill these soldiers. Which had made them howl in angry disappointment.

  “But,” he had instructed them, “we will drive them out of Kwahadi land—by burning the prairie!”

  For miles in either direction along a north-south line, the horsemen set their firebrands to the tall prairie grass sapped dry by the arid autumn winds. The winter wind did the rest: whipping the sparks into a fury that forced the yellowlegs to turn about and flee to the east for their lives.*

  However, in the days that followed, his scouts solemnly reported finding no sign of the sold
ier party. No charred wagon nor burned carcasses.

  From time to time this mystery had made Quanah shudder: to think that those white men had merely vanished into the cold air of the Staked Plain. But if they had, he argued with himself, where still would they find food for their animals?

  And besides, that great storm that had thundered down upon the plains, riding in on the bone-numbing breath of Winter Man, leaving behind tall snowdrifts and many hungry bellies, would surely have killed the white men so unprepared for such a blizzard.

  While he was certain that storm had killed the retreating soldiers, it had also driven the buffalo even farther south. The little ones in Quanah’s village cried with empty bellies. The women and old ones wailed as well. It was only the warriors who could not cry out in the pain of their gnawing hunger—for it remained up to them alone to go in search of meat to lift the specter of starvation from the Kwahadi.

  After many days of endless riding to the south, Quanah and his hunters found themselves near the southernmost reaches of the Staked Plain, without having seen any buffalo or antelope. It was as if Winter Man had wiped all before him with his great cleansing, cold breath.

  As the days of searching grew into many, they had come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge there—no longer strong enough to march on with the rest. They were the few left to rot by the passing of the winter storm … like the white hide hunters left the thousands upon thousands to rot in the sun.

  Where had the rest of the herds gone? Farther and farther south still—to the land of the summer winds?

  If they had, they would likely not return until the short-grass time on the prairies, when the winds blew soft and the Grandfather Above once more told the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their great seasonal migrations.

  “You wish to attack these white men today?” asked the young warrior sitting beside the Kwahadi chief.

  He blinked, his reverie broken and brought back to the now. “Yes.” Quanah turned to his scout. “You tell me there is a hill looking down on the place where the white man built his log lodges?”

  The scout dropped quickly to the ground, his buffalo-hide winter moccasins scraping snow aside from a small circle. In the middle he formed up two frozen snowballs. Circling the snowballs on three sides, he mounded up some of the snow he had scraped aside.

  “Yes, Quanah,” he said, gazing up into the bright winter sun hung against a winter-pale sky behind his chief. “These are the white man’s two lodges. And these, are the hills.”

  “Where are we?”

  The scout pointed with the butt of his rifle.

  “It is good,” Quanah declared. “We will have the wind in our faces and the sun at our backs as we ride to the top of the hills.”

  After dividing his force of more than ten-times-ten warriors into four groups and instructing each in its role, Quanah led them away in silence, moving swiftly across the hard, frozen ground.