But as warriors buzzed over the camp, firing everything but the body parts of the dead, Kicking Bird sat his pony with little sense of satisfaction. The scouts were certain they had counted eight white men, but only seven lay dead. The surrounding prairie was hastily searched for the missing enemy but no one was found, and Kicking Bird sensed they must move quickly in case the missing hunter had somehow escaped to spread an alarm.
Twenty minutes after they attacked, the thousand warriors were ploughing the darkness of the plains, hoping to catch more camps unaware of their presence. As they sped north they saw many more dead buffalo but little of the men who had killed them. By noon of the following day; they had encountered but one recently abandoned camp, and, certain that their presence had been announced, the great force hurried on, clinging to the prospect of overtaking isolated parties of fleeing hunters.
Judiciously alternating between all-out flight and periodic brief rest, the man with the toothache maintained an hour's lead over the huge war party. He had roused one camp of men, who spurned his advice and dashed east instead of following him to Adobe Walls. But he encountered no one else, and as he urged his weary horse on, the sore-jawed man assumed that by a miraculous stroke of luck all the other outfits must be out of the country or laying over at "the Walls."
His assumption was confirmed when, only a few miles from his goal, he happened upon three white men — two riding side by side on a buckboard, one mounted on a horse. Though he had never been introduced he knew the bearded, well-appointed men on the buckboard to be the brothers Rath, the wealthy, energetic financiers behind the frontier buffalo trade. The man on horseback was well known to him as the manager of the brothers' holdings at Adobe Walls.
The three men listened to the hunter's story of narrow escape and flight in shocked silence. All of them were unnerved to hear that what seemed to be a very large party of heathens was abroad and obviously bent on murdering whatever lay in their path.
For the Rath brothers, however, the Indian threat represented something other than mere bodily harm. Being inveterate creatures of commerce, the siblings' minds naturally leapt to the problem of how best to protect their investment.
They exchanged a few whispered words, then climbed down from the wagon. The manager dismounted and the three men held a brief conference out of earshot of the surviving hunter. In the tall grass of the prairie a number of quick decisions were reached. A lull in the buffalo slaughter had concentrated many hunters at the Adobe Walls installation. There were at least twenty-five guns there, maybe as many as thirty, but if they knew a large party of marauding savages were headed their way, many were likely to bolt. That would leave the saloon and hotel and processing sheds the Rath brothers owned vulnerable.
In the interest of preserving the empire they had labored so mightily to construct, an empire that produced a juggernaut of wealth to which there seemed no end, a conspiracy between the Rath brothers and their reliable manger was hatched.
Minutes later, assured that he would obtain proper care for his inflamed molar away from Adobe Walls, the hunter traded horses with the manager and struck east in the heady company of the Rath brothers.
The manager started back for the holdings at Adobe Walls, entrusted with executing a plan sure to guarantee that his masters' vastly lucrative industry would be maintained. None of the hunters at "the Walls" was to be informed of the impending threat to their lives. But that night, through a subterfuge of the manager's devising, the temporary settlement would be caused to prepare for an attack that was sure to come.
The manager was confident in the plan's simple brilliance. He was also certain that the presence of so many crack shots working behind the solid fortifications of the recently erected company town could blunt any hoard of screaming, arrow-shooting wild men.
Chapter XXXV
Kicking Bird and his army of warriors were about ten miles from the place called Adobe Walls when its presence was reported and, in the lengthy council that followed, the discouraging news brought by the scouts was discussed in detail. It seemed that the head of the monster had been located but almost every piece of information spoke against attacking it.
The buffalo-killers had congregated in alarming numbers. The scouts had counted twenty-eight white men with far-shooting guns, guns which could be fired from the cover of several large earthen houses which had risen on the plains. The settlement lay in a denuded bowl of land upon which there was nothing to shield an attack. Four white men seemed to be camped around a wagon perhaps a hundred yards from the shelter of the buildings. They would be an easy target, and that was the only attractive aspect of making an attack.
But a door had closed behind each of the thousand warriors and there was no going back. No one talked against going ahead, despite the fact that everyone knew men were bound to die in the face of guns that could tear holes in flesh as big as a gourd, and that the chances for victory could not be great. Since they had taken the war trail, the party's reason for being and its avowed mission had swelled to something larger than its parts. They could not now shrink from what had become a holy duty. The only question that needed to be decided was how they would assail the monster's head, and Kicking Bird's strategy was so simple and straightforward that it was adopted after a few minutes of perfunctory discussion.
They would attack as one body, slamming their full might against the objective in the hope it would collapse through the sheer weight of their assault. They would not attack in the dark but come out of the sun, using its first, blinding light as a screen. Kicking Bird and half a dozen handpicked warriors would overwhelm the men camped around the wagon in the open while the vast bulk of warriors threw themselves against the hunters' fortifications. They would wait until an hour before dawn to position themselves, thus giving each warrior ample time to smoke and recite prayers, prepare his accoutrements of battle, and sing his death song.
Whether these decisions might have altered the outcome could never be known, but one thing was certain: no warrior heard the shot, fired in the early hours of morning, that woke the entire population residing at Adobe Walls.
The manager had retired earlier than usual to ensure he would be wide awake at the precise time everyone else would be steeped in slumber. The round had come from his own pistol, which he reholstered immediately after firing. To the sleeping, disoriented hunters inquiring what was the matter, the manager explained that the sound had come from the prime supporting beam that spanned the "hotel" in which they were now standing.
Fearful of the roof's possible failure, the hunters compliantly set to work shoring up the beam under the manager's careful direction. Toward dawn, as the useless task neared completion, a number of workers, including the men who had been camped outside, returned to their beds, but, to the manager's satisfaction, the majority either continued to tinker with the refurbishments or loiter over coffee, watching and commenting on the labors of their fellows. He had hoped the men from the wagon would stay but felt no culpability when he saw them pass out into the dark. He had encouraged them to stay, and so, he decided, they were making their own funerals by disregarding his advice.
Shortly after the morning sun cleared the horizon, a strange sound, like that of a distant roaring crowd, momentarily froze all human activity at Adobe Walls. Seconds later all eyes had flown to any crack or crevice that afforded a view of the outside. What greeted them was a spectacle so incredible that it squeezed the breath from their lungs.