They crammed as much as they could into the half-caved-in supply house and stacked the rest in Cargill’s former quarters.
CHAPTER IV
Saying the moon would be up and that he wanted to make time, Timmons pulled out at twilight.
Lieutenant Dunbar sat on the ground, made himself a smoke, and watched the wagon grow smaller in the distance. The sun left about the same time the wagon disappeared, and he sat in the dark a long time, glad for the company of silence. After an hour he started to stiffen, so he got up and plodded to Captain Cargill’s hut.
Suddenly tired, he flopped fully clothed on the little bed he’d made amidst the supplies and laid his head down.
His ears were very big that night. Sleep was hard in coming. Every little noise in the darkness asked for an explanation that Dunbar could not provide. There was a strangeness in this place at night that he hadn’t felt during the day.
Just as he would begin to slip off, the snap of a twig or a tiny, far-off splash in the stream would bring him wide-awake again. This went on for a long time, and gradually it wore Lieutenant Dunbar down. He was tired and he was restless as he was tired, and this combination opened the door wide to an unwelcome visitor. In through the door of Lieutenant Dunbar’s sleepless sleep marched doubt. Doubt challenged him hard that night. It whispered awful things into his ear. He had been a fool. He was wrong about everything. He was worthless. He might as well be dead. Doubt that night brought him to the verge of tears. Lieutenant Dunbar fought back, quieting himself with kind thoughts. He fought far into the morning, and in the wee hours close to dawn, he finally kicked doubt out and fell asleep.
They had stopped.
There were six of them.
They were Pawnee, the most terrible of all the tribes. Roached hair and early wrinkles and a collective set of mind something like the machine Lieutenant Dunbar could occasionally become. But there was nothing occasional about the way the Pawnee saw things. They saw with unsophisticated but ruthlessly efficient eyes, eyes that, once fixed on an object, decided in a twinkling whether it should live or die. And if it was determined that the object should cease to live, the Pawnee saw to its death with psychotic precision. When it came to dealing death, the Pawnee were automatic, and all of the Plains Indians feared them as they did no one else.
What had caused these six Pawnee to stop was something they had seen. And now they sat atop their scrawny horses, looking down on a series of rolling gullies. A tiny wisp of smoke was curling into the early morning air about half a mile away.
From their vantage point on a low rise they could see the smoke clearly. But they could not see the source. The source was hidden in the last of the gullies. And because they could not see all that they wanted, the men had begun to talk it over, chattering in low, guttural tones about the smoke and what it might be. Had they felt stronger, they might have ridden down at once, but they had already been away from home for a long time, and the time away had been a disaster.
They had begun with a small party of eleven men, making the trek south to steal from the horse-rich Comanches. After riding for almost a week they had been surprised at a river crossing by a large force of Kiowas. It was a lucky thing that they escaped with only one man dead and one wounded.
The wounded man held on for a week with a badly punctured lung, and the burden of him slowed the party greatly. When at last he died and the nine marauding Pawnee could resume their search unencumbered, they had nothing but bad luck. The Comanche bands were always a step or two ahead of the hapless Pawnee, and for two more weeks they found nothing but cold trails.
Finally they located a large encampment with many fine horses and rejoiced in the lifting of the bad cloud that had followed them for so long. But what the Pawnee didn’t know was that their luck hadn’t changed at all. In fact, it was only the worst kind of luck that had brought them to this village, for this band of Comanches had been hit hard only a few days before by a strong party of Utes, who had killed several good warriors and made off with thirty horses.
The whole Comanche band was on the alert, and they were in a vengeful mood as well. The Pawnee were discovered the moment they began to creep into the village, and with half the camp breathing down their necks, they fled, stumbling through the alien darkness on their worn-out ponies. It was only in retreat that luck finally found them. All of them should have died that night. In the end, however, they lost only three more warriors.
So now these six disheartened men, sitting on this lonely rise, their ribbed-out ponies too tired to move underneath them, wondered what to do about a single feathery stream of smoke half a mile away.
To debate the merits of whether to make an attack was very Indian. But to debate a single wisp of smoke for half an hour was a much different matter, and it showed just how far the confidence of these Pawnee had sunk. The six were split, one cell for withdrawing, the other for investigating. As they dallied back and forth, only one man, the fiercest among them, remained steadfast from the first. He wanted to swoop down on the smoke immediately, and as the jawboning dragged on, he grew more and more sullen.
After thirty minutes he drew away from his brethren and started silently down the slope. The other five came alongside, inquiring as to what his action might be.
The sullen warrior replied caustically that they were not Pawnee and that he could no longer ride with women. He said they should stick their tails between their legs and go home. He said they were not Pawnee, and he said that he would rather die than haggle with men who were not men.
He rode toward the smoke.
The others followed.
As much as he disliked Indians, Timmons knew virtually nothing of their ways. The territory had been relatively safe for a long time. But he was only one man with no real way to defend himself, and he should have known enough to make a smokeless fire.
But that morning he had rolled out of his stinking blankets with a powerful hunger. The idea of bacon and coffee had been the only thing on his mind and he had hastily built a nice little fire with green wood.
It was Timmons’s fire that had attracted the hurting little band of Pawnee.
He was squatting at the fire, his fingers wrapped around the skillet handle, drinking in the bacon fumes, when the arrow hit him. It drove deep into his right buttock, and the force of it knocked him clear across the fire. He heard the whoops before he saw anyone, and the cries sent him into a panic. He crow-hopped into the gully and, without breaking stride, clambered up the incline, a brightly feathered Pawnee arrow jutting from his ass.
Seeing that it was just one man, the Pawnee took their time. While the others looted the wagon, the fierce warrior who had shamed them into action galloped lazily after Timmons.
He caught the teamster just as he was about to clear the slope leading out of the gully. Here Timmons suddenly stumbled to one knee, and when he rose he turned his head to the sound of hoofbeats.
But he never saw the horse or its rider. For a split second he saw the stone war club. Then it slammed into the side of his skull with such force that Timmons’s head literally popped open.