Prairie Fire, page 5
Few outlaws had the military experience or discipline to turn a stick-up into a clockwork raid the way the James boys did. Their robberies were really nothing more than extensions of the lightning strike assaults they executed during the war.
This Prairie Fire gang seemed to be operating on a similar level. Possibly border ruffians, like the Jameses and Youngers, former Cavalry troops, or at the very least Dragoons. He frowned, shuffling through the papers he’d pulled out of the morgue.
The raids started in Missouri, close to the Kansas border. They moved north to the corner of Iowa in the area where the state border converged with those of Nebraska and the Dakota Territory. Then they marched east to west across the southern part of the Territory.
From the Territory the pattern wound down into Nebraska proper. The latest raid had come across the Kansas border and penetrated as far as Carlton. Luke chewed his lip, thinking. He turned to ask the old man a question.
The codger had one ink-grubby finger up his beak of a nose to the second knuckle. As Luke watched, fascinated by the casually vulgar display, the man pulled his finger, gnarled as an old branch, revealing a glistening green lump. The globule was as big as a child’s marble. Casually, the newspaperman wiped it on the underside of his desk.
Luke imagined there were so many of the deposits under there that they looked like green stalactites hanging from the roof of a cave. He felt a little queasy. The old man looked up, eyebrows as bushy and matted as a rabbit tail. If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it.
“You been struck dumb, son?”
Luke cleared his throat to give him a moment to recover. He shook his head. “You got a map?” he asked.
Using his gold-digging finger, the codger pointed at a wall. Luke looked. Tacked to the wall was an official U.S. Census map. Luke hurried over and studied it carefully. The arsonist outlaws preferred smaller towns, but large enough to have a bank or primary business like a mine or mill with a steady payroll delivery.
In chronological order, he traced his finger from the first incident through to the last attack, the one here in Carlton. Then he noticed another town to the west, Hatchet Creek.
“Hey, old-timer,” he said over one shoulder. “How big is Hatchet Creek?”
“Not big. Of course, that’s depending on the time of year.”
“How so?”
“The Kansas Pacific put in a spike into Ellsworth. It’s a cowtown as wild as Dodge City ever was. Hell, so many herds converge on the area, little ol’ Hatchet Creek has two dance halls and a bank to handle the overflow.” He paused, then added, “It ain’t like the old days, mind you. It’s just the local ranches driving the beef in. But it still gets a mite rowdy.”
The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. Luke would have bet the Jensen family farm back in the Missouri Ozarks that the next place the outlaws would strike was Hatchet Creek. He thought about the fat payout he’d just gotten for Yellow Dog’s gang. This fire-happy bunch had looted even more banks and trains.
If he could bring this bunch down, he suspected the combined rewards would dwarf what he’d just gotten. He could take some time off, head down to New Orleans or maybe San Francisco. He’d play cards for a while maybe.
Glad to have a target firmly in his sights, Luke gave the old man his thanks and turned toward the door.
“Where you going?” the codger demanded.
“To make the news, old-timer,” Luke grinned.
“Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.”
CHAPTER 5
Luke outfitted himself before he set off for Hatchet Creek. He made sure he had enough ammunition to fight a small war if needed. Cheyenne war parties were raiding across the plains, up from the Indian Territories.
Many of the Northern Cheyenne who’d signed peace treaties when Crazy Horse surrendered had been put onto a reservation there near Fort Reno. The quiet barely lasted a year. Now Broken Wing, a warrior under the famous chief, Dull Knife, had taken bands north of the Arkansas river and into Kansas. Travelers and homesteaders, along with remote ranches, had felt their fury. If the army didn’t corner them soon, the depredations would likely go on until the snow fell.
It also didn’t help that it was the height of twister season. Early summer storms were brutal, unforgiving affairs on the plains. If Luke was lucky, he’d face nothing more than thunderstorms. He wasn’t about to let the weather interfere with his man-hunting, however.
Following the Smoky Hill River and riding west, he kept up a brisk pace. There were storm clouds building in the north, and he wanted to cover as much ground as he could before he was forced to hunker down.
Using the Winchester, he shot a small pronghorn antelope on his third day and dressed it out. That night he made camp in a stand of cottonwoods a little ways from a small creek feeding into the Smoky Hill River. He ate the steaks with some wild onions he found growing along the water. He smoked several long strips of meat for travel.
Washing his knife down by the creek, he heard a rustling in the bushes and went still, hand on the Winchester next to him. The babbling of the water made sound uncertain, but whatever was snapping through the branches was big. It could just be a mule deer looking to drink, but it could just as easily be a man.
More branches snapped. Whatever was coming wasn’t trying to be particularly stealthy. Easing back from the water, Luke lifted the Winchester. With a final crash, the bushes on the other side of the creek parted in a rush.
Luke brought the rifle to his shoulder.
A horse plunged into view. A little sorrel mare, she was riderless and lathered up from a hard sprint, spittle forming clumps as it chomped at the bit. Jumping into the creek without hesitation, she barreled directly toward Luke. He saw her terrified, rolling eyes and realized the animal was running in a blind panic.
He dove out of the way and the horse thundered past.
A step slower and he’d have been trampled. As the animal scrambled up the grassy incline and out of the cottonwoods, he got a good look. The horse might have been riderless, but it had a good working saddle adorned with silver conchos the way prosperous Texas cowboys liked to dress them up.
It also had two arrows buried in the cantle.
He hurried back to his own camp to make sure the spooked animal hadn’t upset his own horse. He thought it prudent to put out his fire. He waited for a long while, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Hobbling the horse, he sat quietly, Winchester ready.
After a little bit, the wind from the north picked up, combing the tops of the prairie grass into rustling waves. A party of a dozen Cheyenne braves, or more, was not something he wanted to run into if he could avoid it. No matter how ornery these fire-happy outlaws turned out to be, Luke doubted they were the fighters the Cheyenne were. In his opinion, Cheyenne Dog Soldiers were some of the best warriors of the horse tribes. He felt they were more than a match for the typical Sioux, though he doubted the Comanche would fear them.
The Comanche feared no one. What was left of them anyway.
After a while the wind pushed in storm clouds. He watched a wall of thunderheads building to the north. Lightning jumped in brilliant flashes, but the storm was too far away for him to hear the thunder. When the sky to the east began to lighten and turn orange, he ate a cold breakfast of antelope steak, then mounted up and rode.
* * *
He came across the ambushed freighters at noon.
Two buckboards sat in the middle of the prairie, traces empty and the bodies of the draft horses drawing flies a little ways away. Indians counted wealth in horses, and stealing as many as possible was top priority in any raid. But, as he learned during the war, horses were big animals and when lead was flying had a tendency to catch bullets. When that happened out here, horseflesh was a favorite native food.
His mount didn’t like the smell of horse blood and wanted to shy. Keeping it from bolting, he let it dance sideways until it seemed unlikely to panic. His eyes scanned the undulating grass for danger. Once the animal was calmer, he dismounted and approached.
The buzzing of flies was a deafening drone. They rose off the horses in great black clouds. Disgusted, he gave the dead animals a wide berth as he went to inspect the wagons. One of the buckboards was overturned, maybe on purpose for use as a makeshift fort. Also maybe when a freighter had tried turning around in too-tight a radius while attempting to flee.
Whichever, nothing had done the men any good. They lay among the spilled dry goods like rag dolls. The attackers had ripped open sacks of flour and dumped them on the men so that it made a pinkish paste where it clung in clotted lumps to their wounds.
The men had been scalped, and flies were as thick on their heads as they were on the dead horses. Stepping over a consignment of spilled shovels likely too cumbersome for the Cheyenne to consider valuable, he forced himself to check the men. Sometimes folks survived. Rarely.
There were five bodies in all. The stink forced him to pull his bandana up over his nose like he was riding in a dust storm. Stripped naked, they had sizable wounds where the Cheyenne had yanked arrows free, though most victims had been shot with rifles, as well. The dead men’s guns were gone.
“Hell of a price to pay for thirty-five dollars a month in wages,” Luke muttered to himself.
The bodies lay stiff as wooden puppets. He’d seen enough death in his time to guess they’d been killed as recently as last night. Maybe right around twelve hours based on the rigor mortis. He stopped walking and muttered a curse that sounded more like a prayer.
The woman, like the men, had been stripped naked and covered in flour. She’d also been scalped. There were the remains of a small fire beside her body where the raiders broke up crates and casks for fuel. Judging by the burns on her body, the woman had lived longer than the men and had been tortured more. Luke turned away, feeling a murderous rage at the dead men.
“Why the hell you bring her along?” he demanded of the corpses.
They didn’t answer.
He felt less anger toward the Indians. Not because he forgave the cruelty, but because he saw the tribes as forces of nature like storms or grizzly bears. When you were in bear country, you took precautions and planned accordingly. When it rained, you dressed for the weather unless you were a fool. When braves were riding the warpath, you kept your womenfolk close to civilization.
If the army didn’t mobilize soon, he reflected, the Cheyenne would be lords of these plains once more and shut commerce down to nothing.
Using their own shovels, Luke buried the party. When he was finished, the grave mounds ran in a neat row of sorrow. In a year’s time there’d be no sign they had existed at all. He didn’t know any of their names but made crude markers out of boards from the wagons and carved epitaphs with his sheath knife.
After pounding the last one, the woman’s, into the ground, he tossed the shovel aside and stood in silence for a moment. When he lifted his head, he saw a cloud of smoke rising on the western horizon. It was shaping up to be a real bad day.
* * *
First the runaway horse, then the ambushed wagons, and now the homestead. From the order he’d found the depredations in, it seemed obvious the war party was pushing west. A little way from the wagons he cut sign of horses, unshod. They ran unfailingly in the direction of the smoke.
Dreading what he would find, Luke had no choice but to continue. Someone could need his help; it was as simple as that. Always had been. He was a Jensen. Jensens did good whenever and however they could.
As he followed the tracks toward the rising smoke, the front end of the storm moved in. The wind picked up, whipping the grass like ragged banners. It dispersed the smoke column to a large degree, but he wasn’t likely to lose course now anyway. He was too close.
He came up over the gentle undulation of a small hill and saw the prairie spreading out in a shallow slope before him. One of the numerous creeks feeding the Smoky Hill wound through the wide-open landscape, and a stand of Eastern Redbud and Bur Oak, shrubs more than trees like he’d known back in the Missouri Ozarks, stood in a cluster.
Smoke smeared the sky above the copse, and he just made out the collapsed structure of a sod house. The wind picked up and it began spitting a light rain. Pulling his horse up, Luke studied the trees and ruins. Could have been a hundred Dog Soldiers in there and he doubted he’d have seen any of them before it was too late.
He pulled the Winchester from its boot. Feeling his tension, his horse danced sideways.
“What?” he asked the animal. “Don’t you think you’d like to be an Indian pony? Why, they’d let a stud like you have his pick of Kiowa mares.”
Rain began falling harder, and the wind threatened to take his hat. He tugged it down tighter on his head. The horse knickered.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But who wants to live forever?”
He put his heels to the horse’s flanks and started toward the sod house at a canter.
* * *
The old joke was as rare as trees in Kansas.
It was true for as far as it went, but the state wasn’t totally without trees. What trees there were tended more toward shorter, brushy species, but you could find cottonwood and poplar among others, just not in large numbers.
It was at the edge of one of these uncommon stands that the people who owned the sod house had built their home. Luke made for it as he realized the weather had truly taken a turn for the worse. The wind picked up, and the rain turned to hail. That was never a good sign.
The horse neighed as ice chips the size of quarters pelted them. He gigged the animal into a trot and they made for the dubious shelter of the trees. The hail stung as they rode, slapping into him with increasing force. The sound of it falling was a deafening cacophony. In the time it took for six strides of the horse, the ground was littered with the ice pebbles.
The horse was galloping now. A flash of motion on the horizon caught Luke’s attention. He turned to look and what he saw filled him with dread. The clouds swirled tightly like a whirlpool in the sky. The bottom of the formation dropped toward the earth in a tightening spiral.
Twister.
CHAPTER 6
He was almost to the trees when he looked to the plain on the left of him and saw two more tornadoes touch down, trapping him in a triangle of howling death. The hail stopped as if someone had thrown a switch, and the rising, screaming wind pushed so hard against his chest he thought it’d pluck him from his horse.
Branches whipped Luke’s body as the horse made the thicket and plunged in. He put an arm up to protect his face and hauled back on the reins with his other. The horse stopped but whinnied in fear. The sound was picked up and thrown into the sky by the wind. Swinging out of his saddle, he tried to find the sod house.
If it hadn’t been totally destroyed, it most likely offered the best shelter. His hat was ripped from his head and when he turned to snatch at it, a fruitless gesture if ever there was one, he saw the dark black funnel of the twister barreling toward him.
He turned and saw the sod house through the cluster of tree trunks. He hauled on the reins to get his horse to follow, and grudgingly it stepped after him. Someone had tried burning the structure and there were large swaths of blackened grass, but it obviously hadn’t caught fire very well. The house was caved in on one side, the door collapsed, leaving only a window left to show into the darkness of the ruin.
He couldn’t get his horse inside. For better or worse the animal would have to remain in the thicket for what protection it could offer. Wind bent the trees double and he heard them snap like gunshots as they broke in two or were yanked from the earth. The twister sounded like a locomotive engine bearing down on him, and the thicket had gone dark as twilight.
Yanking his Winchester from its saddle boot, he let the horse go and ran toward the partially collapsed sod house.
Gunshots crashed close by. Three in a row, .44 caliber, one after the other. It was answered by the unmistakable bangs of a Sharps rifle. These weren’t breaking trees and popping branches, this was the sound of battle.
The Cheyenne.
He didn’t see any muzzle flashes coming from the sod house. The wind pummeled his back, shoving him forward. As he scrambled into the dark hole of the window, it fairly picked him up and tossed him through.
He came down in a tumble, the barrel of his Winchester slamming into his mouth, and he tasted blood. There was a flurry of gunshots outside but they sounded muted, nearly drowned out by the tornado wind.
Scooting back to face the window, he felt around for his rifle. The interior of the house smelled like earth and reeked of smoke. Hard wind pushed in through the window carved out of the sod, throwing dirt like shotgun pellets into his face.
Suddenly a figure blocked out the light of the window. Giving up on his Winchester, Luke drew his Remington, thumbing back the hammer. But the figure was screaming in a male voice, screaming in English, no less.
“White man!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot! Please!”
Luke tried diving out of the way, but he’d hesitated when the man had screamed. The figure’s momentum sent him crashing into the bounty hunter. Luke fell backward, holding on to his pistol. His head slammed into something hard and he saw stars for a moment.
Furious, he shoved hard against the man with his free hand. The man grunted at the impact and half rolled across Luke’s legs. The weak, gray bar of illumination coming in from the eroding window flickered. Luke looked up in time to see a second and then a third figure dive through the opening.
One of the figures lifted off the ground and his silhouette revealed a feather sticking from his hair. Luke fired. The head disappeared, but he didn’t think he’d hit his target.
“They’re in here!” he shouted.
The man trying to untangle himself from Luke’s legs threw himself to the side and Luke was free. The twister was directly over them now. Swirling clouds filled the window, plunging the interior of the sod house even further into darkness.
