Shadow Riders: The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (The Plainsmen Series) Read online

  Those two … yes, and keeping the discovery of the treasure a secret until he could find its exact location, return to Jacksboro where he would hire on an entire team of laborers who would be protected by a mercenary army Pierce would enlist and bring along to make sure none of the wealth slipped through his fingers.

  No, William Graves might have been many things … he might even have been raving mad there at the end—but there was surely one small piece of his sanity the man clung to with all his might right down to the bloody end.

  Graves realized he was slipping, like a man on a mud-soaked slope, with no place to dig in his toes, nowhere to claw with his hands. Graves realized it—felt compelled to tell Simon about the blood money he had paid to acquire a small piece of the treasure from a Mexican Comanchero, a bandit who had murdered a Tonkawa guide for it, who in turn had killed a Kiowa warrior for the small but heavy treasure that now rested in the dirty scrap of corduroy Graves said it was wrapped in when he had struck his bargain with the Comanchero.

  Only moments before Pierce had killed Graves, the cartographer had explained how, in his putting the pieces of the old Spanish puzzle together, he had spent more than two years sniffing around in Mexico, and finally came up with the band of Comancheros who knew something of the ancient legends about El Llano Estacado. With the wealth of the Graves family, William had promised one of the bandits a small fortune for that single piece of treasure two men had already died for.

  When Graves finally had the treasure in his hands, and the Mexican bandit had his money, the two marksmen and bodyguards William had hired killed the Comanchero. No mess. And no great expenditure of his family’s wealth. And William Graves had one of the last pieces needed in the great Castilian puzzle.

  But now Simon had to grin with the thought, four men had paid with blood for this piece of the unimaginable treasure to come this close to returning home. First the aging Kiowa warrior who had originally owned the sacred object, handed down to him through six generations of warriors. Then in turn the Tonkawa and the Comanchero bandit … and finally William Graves. Every last one of them had been killed for their silence. More men might need to be murdered perhaps—to assure their tongues would never wag.

  The Spanish had come halfway around the world to claim the riches of the New World as their own: Indian gold.

  Simon Pierce stuffed a cold hand inside the flaps of his wool coat, feeling beneath his fingers the reassuring firmness of the treasure he had taken from William’s effects—still wrapped in that scrap of gray-brown corduroy, and now safely ensconced under Simon’s shirt.

  A bar of it: not much bigger than the width of his palm. Smooth and hard, and heavy as a brick.

  Indian gold—said to be taken right from the tall, gleaming walls of Coronado’s fabled Seven Cities of Cibola.

  * * *

  Winter Man must be very angry with The People.

  There was no other explanation that Quanah Parker could think of as he struggled to keep his pony pointed in the right direction. It struggled against the rein, wanting to quarter to the wind, bringing its rump around. But that would mean he and the warriors would not find their village in the fading light here at midday with the dark clouds sodden with ice and snow looming over the nearby hills. Ever closer.

  Already it was the beginning of the Moon of Deer Shedding Horns. A season grown old with cold and stiff muscles.

  They had been moving in a slow, lazy arc ever since leaving the village more than a moon ago. Quanah led all those young warriors who wanted to make one last ride before winter squeezed down hard on the land. It was even more of a struggle now to control the pony than it had been when they had set the grassfires before the wind many suns ago.

  Oh, to have that warmth now as Winter Man’s angry breath howled out of the north.

  Quanah’s scouts had come back to the main party with word they had discovered a small band of soldiers and a handful of other white men riding northwest across the Staked Plain.

  “How many is small?” Quanah had asked.

  The young scout held up his five fingers, then struck that right hand across his left forearm three times.

  The Kwahadi chief had peered over his warriors, almost ten-times-ten of them, all wrapped in blankets or robes, their hair streaming in the wind. Each one of them anxious for coups. Many howled in disappointment when he told them there was no honor in wiping out the small band of yellowlegs.

  “But what of the white hide hunters we have killed, whenever we run across them in Kwahadi buffalo country?” asked one of the older warriors.

  “They are something different,” he had explained. “Something evil. I will always kill the hide hunters who come only to slaughter the buffalo and take food from the mouths of our families.”

  “How can you be sure these yellowlegs do not mean trouble?” asked one of the others.

  “Aiyeee! Let us kill them quickly, Quanah!” said a third.

  “Yes! We can always use more soldier guns,” said another.

  “No—whenever we attack the yellowlegs, they always send more,” Quanah had explained solidly. “Don’t you remember the lessons taught you yet? The soldiers always come, always. It is not they who are the problem now. It is the hide hunter who comes out of the north. Not the yellowlegs who come from the south and east.”

  “Then let us make sport with them!” a warrior demanded.

  Another howled, “Good—we can scare them and turn their pants to water!”

  Quanah had waited while they all had their laugh. “Perhaps we can scare them—but not by attacking them. The soldier guns shoot far and they can shoot straight. We might have fun, meaning only to give them a good scare … but the yellowlegs will not know that, and one of you might be killed—all for a little fun? No,” he told them. “We will only scare them away. Drive them back east, where they belong and are to stay.”

  “How do we do this?”

  Quanah had turned to the young warrior and said, “We will build a fire—between us and the soldiers. The wind at our backs will drive the flames toward them.”

  “A big fire?” asked another excitedly.

  “Yes—it is late in the season and the buffalo have gone south. Make this a big fire and let’s see how well the soldiers run from it. Perhaps a wild thing like a prairie fire will turn their bowels to water and make them cry for their mothers!”

  “Hi-yi! Hi-yi!” they yipped in excitement, worked into a lather to set the flames that eventually spread across countless miles as the horsemen carried firebrands both north and south, igniting the grassland sucked dry of moisture with autumn’s arid winds.

  Come spring he would have to return to that country to see what he could find of the blackened remnants of the wagon—or see if the yellowlegs had indeed escaped the rushing flames.

  Now their great arching march was reaching its completion, the arc that had swept north toward the Canadian River, turning east and sweeping southward again into the land where they found the yellowlegs and started the fire. And now Winter Man was showing his unhappiness with The People. Why else would he roar down on them so early in the season?

  Perhaps Winter Man, like the other spirits, were angry with the Kwahadi because the Comanche had not driven the hide hunters from their country. Perhaps.

  Why else this terrible vengeance come on the back of the cruel wind that was the breath of Winter Man?

  If that was so, Quanah did not understand the spirits. It was not a warrior’s way to slaughter a small, outnumbered band of soldiers. But it was the way of the Kwahadi warrior to slaughter the small, outnumbered bands of hide hunters wherever his warriors could find them.

  Yes, he told himself now, pushing the long hair from his face and tugging the furry buffalo robe more tightly against his cheek where the wind scoured and bullied his skin, giving it the feel of scraped rawhide worked with an antler fleshing tool.

  Yes.

  And the idea began forming itself in his mind as the brutal cold sought to n
umb every other part of his body. He had the beginning of a plan to stop the white man from crossing the dead line, a plan to drive the white man from the northern part of the Staked Plain for all time. Perhaps it would work—one concerted effort between the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Cheyenne as well. To attack in force those camps of buffalo hunters and make it too expensive in lives lost for any of the white men to again dare venturing south of the Cimarron River.

  To rid the Kwahadi buffalo country of this spreading disease that was turning their land into a slaughter yard—a place of stinking, rotting carcasses, where only the huge-winged, black birds of prey would travel. This was becoming a place where the air was no longer sweet and where the water tasted foul on the tongue because of the carcasses lying rancid in the creeks and streams where the great buffalo had come only to drink—but found instead the white hunters waiting with their big rifles.

  No more would Kwahadi land be a place where the white hunters could roam and slaughter with freedom. When Winter Man was done squeezing this land between his cold hands, when the short-grass time had come and their ponies were sleek and fat once more on the green shoots raising their heads from the brown breast of the earth all across the prairie—then Quanah would lead the three warrior bands against the hide hunters.

  They would find the hide hunters where the hide hunters gathered.

  And in one fell swoop, wipe them all off the face of the earth.

  Chapter 29

  Mid-November 1873

  Autumn was gone in less time than it took a man to eat his breakfast.

  Winter had arrived, battering the land with a snarling, wind-driven rage.

  Seamus felt Stillwell tugging on his arm.

  “Now I know why we didn’t see any buffalo for the past two weeks!” Jack shouted into the fury of the wind that whipped icy flakes at them like tiny, painful arrowpoints.

  “The buffalo knew this was on its way?” Donegan asked.

  Stillwell only nodded.

  Once more they both pulled the wool mufflers back over their faces so only their squinted eyes were visible below their hat brims.

  A day ago there had been a little warning, Seamus recalled. The wind—quartering around out of the north. It presaged the dark, forbidding presence looming along the northern horizon ahead of them. But mostly it had been the change in the wind. Something to its smell. Not only the sudden cold this time.

  More the smell of death carried on the wind’s icy wings.

  It was during the noon break yesterday, and then again when they had stopped to make camp last evening, that Jack had convinced the lieutenant to have his men scour the prairie in all four directions for buffalo chips. With orders for each man to take along a blanket to carry the chips in, the soldiers dispersed in a wide circle, returning near dark with their prairie firewood.

  Seamus thought now how fortunate they had been that Jack had made that suggestion to the lieutenant and his soldiers. No sooner was the last trooper back in camp than the sky turned loose with a torrent of wind-driven rain. And once everything was good and soaked through and through—clothes, tents and bedrolls—the temperature started to drop dramatically, quickly changing what had only been a chilling rain into a freezing, life-robbing, man-killing sleet.

  They had huddled together for warmth under the wagon cover stretched to the ground from the wagon’s high-wall, and somehow got through that night in their wet clothing. By the next morning not one of them wasn’t sniffling, runny-nosed and red-eyed from more than a sleepless night. A smoky fire brought them little cheer, and a cup of hot coffee only made a few complain of their gnawing bellies.

  At least at Fort Richardson, the soldiers grumped, they damned well knew what there was to eat. It was hot, and usually there was plenty of it to go the rounds. Here they had nothing.

  Shivering in his soaked clothing, Simon Pierce silently glared back at each of the complainers, from all appearances making note of those who proved less than enthusiastic about his unswerving dedication in pushing on to the Canadian River.

  “What’s up there, Jack?” Seamus had asked Stillwell that very morning while they saddled their two horses in the driving, freezing drizzle. A man crackled as he walked about, bent his elbows, worked his shoulders throwing blanket and saddle atop his uncooperative horse.

  “Up where?”

  “On the Canadian.”

  Jack shrugged, pulling his dripping hat down tighter on his curly hair with his gloves, which were soaked through. “Don’t know.”

  “You been there?”

  “Couple times. With buffalo outfits—first time was two years back, it was. Then last year.”

  “That’s out and out Injin country, ain’t it, Jack?”

  Stillwell swung his arms. “All of this is, dammit.” He looked up at the Irishman, his face softening. “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “It’s all right—I understand,” Seamus replied. “It’s that bleeming Pierce got us all in this bind. I’ve got to figure a way out before we all go the way Graves did—stark-raving mad.”

  “I’m not so sure you should try anything, Seamus. I don’t know what power a government man has on any of us in something like this.”

  “He don’t have the power to make us die for something,” Donegan whispered.

  Stillwell wagged his head. “What’s the difference, Irishman? We rode along with Major Forsyth—and he had the power to ask us to die for something … didn’t he?”

  Drawing a deep breath so cold that it burned its way into the dregs of his lungs, Donegan’s thoughts swam with his uncle Liam O’Roarke and Sharp Grover and that hot, sandy, bloody island in the middle of the Arickaree, with Major George A. Forsyth down and suffering three festering bullet wounds while Lieutenant Fred Beecher lay dying in a hollowed-out riflepit surrounded by the bloated, stinking army horses they had shot for breastworks … the flies forever buzzing and laying their eggs in the untended wounds of those asked to fight and very likely die in this nameless, unmapped place on the high plains.*

  Seamus sighed, his face stinging with the crackling cold of the wind-driven sleet. “I suppose you’re right, Jack Stillwell. When it comes to army matters—men like you and me just don’t have much say in anything has to do with our living or dying.”

  Completely saddled, only then had they untied their horses, lashed one to the other since nightfall. All the stock had been paired in that manner before twilight had arrived, bringing with it the driving sleet and the phosphorescent lightning that rendered the whitening, ghostly sky a pale, greenish color. It was an old plainsmen’s rule to lash a pair of animals together, in addition to using the individual hobbles before each soldier drove an iron picket pin into the hard, crusty earth—in the hope that all their precautions would slow the horses and mules from wandering far from their miserable camp beneath the wagon shroud that slapped and cracked on the brutal wind.

  They hadn’t been up and on the march for more than three long and weary hours now, nosing almost straight on into the wind, when Jack grabbed Seamus’s arm again, signaling the Irishman to rein up. Stillwell pulled down his faded muffler and hollered into the force of the gale, his eyes blinking with its cruel blast beneath his crusted hat brim. Every shotgun flurry of icy snow made a man’s eyes smart with cold pain.

  “This is fool’s work, Seamus!” he hollered. “It’s getting too deep … and bound to start drifting worse.”

  “What do you fix on doing? Make camp here?” Donegan asked, his own stinging eyes moving quickly across the diminishing horizons for something that might beckon as a suitable place to hunker down for the brunt of the blizzard.

  “Make camp here and hope for the best.”

  “Here?” Donegan asked, disbelieving.

  “You got any better ideas—best spit them out now, Irishman!”

  “Here,” Seamus repeated. “Here is where we’ll make camp and pray for the best, Jack.”

  Stillwell nodded. “C’mon, let’s go give Pierce
the bad news.”

  They reined around and backtracked through the eight new inches of snow resting atop at least a half dozen of old crusty snow, all of it becoming wind-scoured in the short time they had been on the march that morning. Fifty yards behind the two horsemen, in the blinding swirl of icy, stinging white buckshot, loomed the dark shapes of the wagon and the four mounted troopers.

  “Lieutenant! We best make camp!” Stillwell shouted.

  “Where?” asked Stanton.

  “Right here!”

  The lieutenant glanced at Donegan as if he thought Stillwell might be crazy.

  “There’s no place any better than this we can find,” Seamus said. “And the sooner we get at making ourselves comfortable for what’s coming, the better off we’re going to be.”

  Stanton appeared to chew on that a moment. “What makes you an expert on prairie blizzards, Mr. Donegan?”

  “I’ve been through my share, Lieutenant. The first I got through was a killer—and I doubt I’ll ever forget what winter can do up on the Bozeman Road.”

  “Bozeman Road? When were you up in that country?” he demanded in a doubtful tone.

  “Fort Phil Kearny,” Seamus answered, his voice almost stolen by the howling wind. “December, 1866.”*

  “You knew Fetterman?”

  “A good soldier, so I was told,” Seamus replied. “A might lacking in good sense on that bleeming, bloody day.”

  The lieutenant’s face went taut. “Was it … was it true what the rumors said ever since?”

  “What rumors?”

  “That a lot of Fetterman’s men killed themselves on Lodge Trail Ridge?”

  Seamus shrugged, dragging his wool glove beneath his tearing eyes, both of them stinging with the icy snow. “I imagine they fought as long as it looked like they had a chance. But from what I saw of the place just after, those sojurs didn’t have a chance at all. The few of us who saw the bodies scattered up and down that ridge know why the fight was over so bloody quick. But that bit of news isn’t something the army wants being spread around among its sojurs, Lieutenant.”