Charles took the head of the column, ordered his buffalo soldiers to the trot, and led them toward the grove. Well before they reached it, he saw the meandering stream he expected, a narrow ribbon of yellow water along the grove's north perimeter.
A rank smell floated from the leafless trees. Charles recognized it. He's smelled the same stench at Sharpsburg and Brandy Station and other places where the dead lay a long time after the firing stopped. One of his younger men leaned to the right and shuddered with the dry heaves.
Charles unsheathed his saber and raised it to signal a halt. The saber was a useless weapon in the field, except where it would serve as a standard, something bright and visible to rally around. "I'll go in first. The rest of you water your horses."
He dismounted, shifted the saber to his left hand, and drew his Colt. He approached the grove with caution. Gray Owl followed without permission; Charles was conscious of him as a shadow flicking over the sere grass to his left.
From the edge of the grove he saw a dead horse, then two more. Warriors' horses, usually left alive so that their owners would have fine mounts in paradise. This probably meant that someone other than Indians had shot them.
He swallowed, took a few more steps, and spied the three decomposing bodies. Stripped of raiment, they lay amid broken sections of wooden platforms. Upright timbers that had supported the platforms still stood in the center of the grove. Forcing himself, Charles moved closer to inspect the naked corpses. Near them he found the splintered shafts of several brightly painted arrows. Everything else had been looted.
He heard the anger in Gray Owl's voice. "Do you know what has happened?"
"I do. It's the custom of your people to put their dead on these burial platforms if the winter ground is too hard to dig. These were special men — war chiefs, camp chiefs, maybe society leaders — because they were buried this way when the ground isn't frozen."
Nearer to the sky on the platforms, the dead thus passed more quickly along the Hanging Road to paradise. It was also customary for the Cheyennes to deposit personal treasures, weapons, and a favorite mount, so the dead man wouldn't lack for anything in the afterlife. Oddly, despite his hatred of the Cheyennes, Charles found himself sickened by the desecration.
"Look more closely," Gray Owl said to him. The tracker was almost stammering with rage. "Go. Look!"
Charles stepped forward but soon halted again, pale. Not only were the funeral garments gone, but also chunks of flesh, hacked from arms, legs, and torsos. In the fist-sized cavities, maggots swarmed.
"Jesus Christ. What for?" This was something entirely new.
Gray Owl shouted, "Bait." He waved wildly at the stream. "Fishing bait. I saw this once before. A soldier of the Seventh bragged that he had done it." Tears ran from Gray Owl's eyes. For a moment Charles thought the Cheyenne might pull his knife and stab him. "The white man is filth. He counts coup on the dead."
"Your own people sometimes —" he began, thinking of Wooden Foot and Boy, the violet-eyed girl in the sod house. He stopped, because those atrocities couldn't cancel this one.
A long wail in the east broke the silence. A westbound train.
Gray Owl turned and left the grove. At that moment he clearly hated Charles and every other white man. Then why in hell did he track for them?
Distantly, again from the east, he heard faint crackling. He dashed out of the grove, glad to do so. He waved his saber and his revolver. "Mount. There's gunfire."
Three troopers at the stream raised dripping faces as he shouted again, "Mount!" He wigwagged the saber over his head and ran toward Satan, the horror in the grove and the complexity of the resulting emotions mercifully banished by the sudden, urgent need to act.
The twenty Indians divided, half of them charging around the rear of the chugging U.P.E.D. passenger local. The parallel columns dashed ahead, to attack the train from both sides.
In the second-class coach, the sergeant's wife looked through a window across the aisle and saw brown horsemen riding bareback, their black hair streaming. Some brandished guns, some their hunting bows. At the head of the coach an older woman jumped up, then fainted. "My God, Lester, Cheyennes," a man cried to his traveling companion.
"Arapahoes," said the cavalry officer in the seat ahead of the woman. "You can tell by the unbound hair." He snatched out his service revolver, broke the window with three blows of his elbow, and fired a round. He missed.
The sergeant's wife stared with disbelief at a fierce painted face hovering not three feet from her. It wasn't a man, she realized, but a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen. He jammed a trade musket to his cheek while he gripped his racing pony with his knees. The boy and the white woman stared at each other for a protracted moment, nothing save the glass and the shining barrel between them.
"Down," the russet-bearded officer yelled at her. He stood and took aim at the Indian. The young brave saw him and shot first. The colonel's body jerked, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he sank to the floor.
A man screamed, "We're all gonna die here!"
"The hell we are," the conductor shouted. "There's railroad men hiding aboard this train."
Concealed in the freight car, J. O. Hartree smiled at his three companions when he heard the hoofbeats, the shrill yells, the first shots. He was a plump, relatively young man, with soft good looks, wavy hair, and a long drooping mustache waxed to points. He had a piously insincere smile and mean eyes.
"Turk, you stand beside me," he said, quickly pulling on shiny leather gloves. He rolled up the sleeves of his white silk shirt and flexed his knees to be sure he had the feel of the moving train. He couldn't use his hands for support once they went into action.
Hartree and his hired shootists had been riding the line for weeks, hoping for this sort of opportunity. All summer the tribes had raided the line's construction sites, terrorized the workers, and butchered a few who foolishly strayed off by themselves. Hartree was under orders to convince the damned red men that they couldn't strike the line with impunity. It was a mission he enjoyed.
He smoothed the front of his green satin waistcoat embroidered with two rearing antelope, majestic pronghorns. "Red, when I give the word, slide the door open. Then help Wingo load the guns." On the floor lay eight powerful .45-caliber Sharps buffalo rifles, four for each shooter. J. O. Hartree planned carefully.
Two bullets thumped outside of the car. Over other noise,
Hartree heard windows breaking. The passengers were under attack. Well, he'd give this red filth a real surprise.
"Let's have the first two rifles, Red. Cock the hammers and rear triggers. Turk, if you fire before I say so, I'll put the first bullet in you."
Charles and his detachment came over the nearby rise in line formation, charging. Billowy smoke streamed out above the train. Howling Indians with unbound hair galloped alongside. The Indians saw the troopers and reacted with surprise and confusion.
The train was about a quarter mile to the soldiers' left, chugging along with many of its coach windows blown out. Charles gripped Satan with his knees and steadied his Spencer, knowing he had only a small chance of a hit with the piebald bouncing under him.
An Indian swung his bow up and aimed at Magic Magee, riding on Charles's left. Charles leaned that way and struck Magee's shoulder with his palm. Magee lurched over and for a moment hung down close to his horse's neck. That was the moment the arrow hissed through the space where his throat had been a few seconds earlier.
Magee dragged himself upright and flung Charles a look of appreciation. Shem Wallis took aim and blew the bowman off his pony. The Indians were slowing their pace now, outnumbering the soldiers but inferior in fire power. Charles yelled orders and half the troopers peeled away to circle the end of the train and go after the Indians glimpsed on the other side.