Savage Country Page 14

  “No, no, no,” the reverend doctor said, chopping the air with his hands. “That won’t do. You men are talking murder.”

  The Millers’ faces were red and they ducked their heads in shame.

  “Reverend Doctor Purefoy,” she said, “I would ask you to please leave us alone for the time being.”

  “It is the principle of the thing,” he insisted.

  “I will act for myself,” she said quietly. She could not hide behind innocence or outrage. She knew dissension would be ruinous.

  Pastor Starling and his people were coming into the clearing. There were only three of them today: Pastor Starling, Gideon, and Henry Ward Beecher. She watched as they stopped and lingered on the outskirts. Clearly they understood there was a tension in the camp. They backed away and dropped from sight.

  “My dear friend,” she said, “please, the less you say, the better.”

  “I only wish to help.”

  “I know that.”

  The reverend doctor stood and shook down his trouser legs. He opened his mouth as if to speak again, but then he left.

  Elizabeth waited. She’d not speak again until one of them did.

  “Ma’am?” Temple said.

  “Please,” she said, as if returning from an inner distraction, “what are your terms?”

  “They want more money per hide and they will not work with the colored women and the pickaninnies in the field,” Story said.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Why what?” Temple said.

  “Why no women and children?”

  “Mrs. Coughlin, it jes’ ain’t right,” Story said, “to have women and children out there with men.”

  “You’re embarrassed,” she said. “When you have to make water. Or void your excrement. There is no privacy.”

  “It ain’t right,” Story said, his face going from red to scarlet.

  “I understand,” she said. “I would be uncomfortable too.”

  She paused to look at her watch. She would offer the women employment in camp assisting with the butchering. She asked the Millers if they’d like tea or coffee, but they declined.

  “Do you have a figure in mind? It would be helpful.”

  When they said they hadn’t got that far she waited again. She commented on how fine the weather was running and offered them tea or coffee again, which they declined a second time.

  “Can you accept terms on everyone’s behalf, or must I present them to the other men myself?”

  “We were told to see what we could get,” Story said.

  “I see.”

  She took a sip of her tea and then offered them three cents more a hide. She told them that was a 12 percent increase and could mean another ten dollars a week.

  “I am sorry, but that is all I can do,” she said of the new terms.

  “We can do that,” Temple said, his relief apparent.

  “There is another matter of great concern,” she said. “We agreed to terms before leaving Meadowlark and by imposing new demands you have broken your word. How do I know it will not happen again?”

  “We promise,” Story said.

  “I will trust you and forgive you, but you must ask me to. That way, we can let bygones be bygones.”

  After asking her forgiveness, she insisted they have coffee and she spoke to them quietly for a long time until they felt forgiven.

  When Michael returned that afternoon he was summoned to her tent, where he found her at the desk. There were stacks of invoices filling the chairs and she seemed not yet finished. She explained to him what happened that morning.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “It does not concern you to know it.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, standing and reaching for his hat.

  “I made concessions.”

  “That’s very courageous of you.”

  “Are you sincere?” she said.

  “Men like them, there is not much you can threaten them with.”

  “Then I will leave the matter with you.”

  “What am I to do?”

  She held up a sheet of paper in each hand. She scrutinized them, as if reconciling the columns of figures and annotations. The ink was not yet dry. She set them down and picked up two more.

  “Maybe there are lessons yet to come,” she said, still studying the papers.

  “Such as?”

  “You will have to kill more buffalo,” she said. “To satisfy everyone.”

  He stood there for several seconds, motionless, watching her closely. There was something new and different about her, a growing strength, an optimism, and if there are moments when a life changes, this seemed to be one of them.

  “I have learned so much,” she said, and a smile appeared on her face.

  Feeling dismissed, Michael went to his tent for his shotgun. When Sabi saw the fowling piece, she dashed about, her joy unrestrained. He slung the gun, pocketed shells, and draped the setter across his shoulders. They rode north into the sunflowers and waited for the night flight of the migrating doves. He sat against a fallen log and the setter lay quietly beside him. She was panting, her tongue lolling from her mouth and she seemed to be grinning. All manner of birds began coming in. There were wild ducks as well and geese feeding among the sedges, skimming to invisible water and lifting off and continuing their journey south.

  He laced his fingers at the back of his neck and stretched out his legs. He was exhausted after his day in the field. He thought about Elizabeth’s imperative, her temperance and forbearance, her restraint in the face of provocation. He began to anticipate the morrow. When the dove came in they were following the creek and its laterals and there were vast numbers of them, and with every shot, six or eight or ten fell to the ground.

  The next day he killed 117 buffalo and the next day 98 and then 126, 130, and he told the boys they needed to load 200 a day.

  Chapter 22

  About the first of the month Darby piloted the freighters from Fort Worth into camp. The freighters brought hay and grain, sugar, molasses, shoes, powder, and dry goods. They brought firing pins, poison, tobacco, canvas, salt, and liquor. There were bundles of magazines, newspapers, and mail.

  There were six yoke of oxen to the team and each pulled a big Murphy wagon with wheels seven feet in diameter and a smaller wagon trailing behind. The wagons had racks built onto their beds and could hold five hundred hides. The freighters were mostly Mexican and were well armed and spoke little English if they were inclined to speak at all.

  The men broke work that day to load the hides. Pastor Starling’s people came from the woods and pitched in. One at a time they brought the wagons off the bluff and filled them with hides, boomed them down, and cinched them tight with a haymaker’s hitch. They doubled the yoke to twelve, ran the wagon back onto the plain and brought down another one. There were six such wagons to load and four more they filled with barrels of pickled tongues, smoked buffalo hams sewed in canvas, humps, loins, sausage, jerky.

  That day they would ship twenty-­eight hundred hides and three tons of meat and could have shipped half as much again if they’d had the wagons. The freighters ate their food and climbed the bluff, where the men helped them yoke their teams and then began the slow march to join up with twenty other teams on the rough trail back to Fort Worth with near ten thousand hides. The hides were bound for auction, where every day or two they moved a hundred thousand hides destined to become the drive belts connected to steam engines that drove the mills, factories, and farms as they wove from line shafts to pulleys and turned at tremendous rates with superior grip and tensile strength. Industry wanted every buffalo hide it could get.

  The next morning Darby went out with Michael to the buffalo fields.

  It was October and the buffalo wore their full new coats, their pelage at its finest and their hides warranting the highest price. Darby brought Michael a letter from Fort Worth, another one from Mr. Salt. Michael had never met Mr. Salt but knew him to be a rich and succ
essful businessman of Scottish descent. He was a member of the House of Commons and a senior partner of a banking house and a commercial house in London and Bombay. Michael knew that he owned a forty-­three-­thousand-­acre estate, set in the midst of a park with lakes, forest, and a distant view of the sea. Mr. Salt theorized men are not that removed in time from the savage and that’s why men of vast fortune go to live in desolate places, surround themselves with animals, and hunt and fish every day.

  Their transactions were confined to contracts, bills of lading, invoices, and letters. Michael collected birds and animals to fill Mr. Salt’s private menagerie and Mr. Salt paid him handsomely. The letter informed Michael that his associates, the Métis and the Lord, would soon arrive in Galveston Bay on his steam yacht and from there would mount an expedition into the interior, and he hoped Michael would still be their guide. He was interested in buffalo, antelope, deer, wolves, coyotes, rattlesnakes. He wanted two of each, a breeding pair. He’d collected India and Africa and now he was interested in collecting the Americas. Based on his success with Eskimos, Nubians, Lapps, and Hottentots, he wanted a Comanche family for an ethnographic study. Michael would receive as usual a very generous commission, and if in the meantime he received any counter offers, these he would match.

  “Your man, Mr. Salt,” Darby said.

  “Does everybody know?” Michael said.

  “People talk. How many more days before you leave?”

  “A while yet.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Not precisely. I just found out my own self.”

  “We will make do,” Darby said. “It’s easy hard work.”

  “I believe that,” Michael said, but both men knew the hardship yet to come. They were in a place where violence ran free. There would be winter cold and darkness, accident, fever, snakebite, pestilence, infection. A man could lose his mind.

  “We will miss you,” Darby said.

  “I am glad to be so needed,” Michael said.

  The day turned hot, dusty, almost hallucinatory. Three miles out and Michael and Darby came suddenly upon a buffalo road traversing the prairie. Four miles to the west and south they found them again. They rode on and soon they were in the midst of a sea of buffalo.

  Michael felt a hunter’s joy to have found them and then a sorrow at the prospect of killing every one of them that he possibly could.

  That day in the field there were two bulls squared off with each other, their anger mounting. They bellowed and tossed their heads and neither would give ground.

  “That’ll stir your blood,” Darby said, his eye at the telescopic scope.

  They pawed the earth with their hoofs throwing the sod high in the sky. When they crashed into each they heard them as far away as they were, and shivers went through the men for how violent the collision. Once more and finally it was decided. Not today would they kill each other. They turned from each other and as they slowly walked away Michael shot one and Darby shot the other.

  The skinners were crossing the creek, humping onto the bluff, and beginning their drifting in the direction of the rifle fire. They had spent time with the oxen, worked with the oxen, lived with the oxen, and had become more like the oxen than the oxen like them. They strode forward with their heads thrust downward. Beside them the great beasts toed in toward each other and toed away, shrugging themselves forward against their oxbows and empty wagons.

  “Harrup!” one of the men called, exploding the air with the whip’s tightly braided leather. The greased axles turned smoothly, the chains taut and letting as they took and gave. The men and the oxen followed the miles the sound of the big rifles. As they neared, one after another took out their knives and steel and they made with their grimy hands the sound that went with them: snick, snick, snick . . . snick, snick, snick, the white men going first and the black men following.

  Chapter 23

  As night darkened Michael sat with the men, his legs crossed beneath him, gazing into the smoldering embers. There were beans and skewers of meat spitting and popping on the hot grill. He looked into the fire and warned himself against it. The light candled the eyes and he would have to turn away if he was to see in the darkness.

  The red dog stood with a forepaw on Michael’s knee and leaned forward until his chin rested on Michael’s shoulder. He made a sound in his throat as if whispering a secret. When the red dog lay back down, Sabi, fluidlike, found her place in Michael’s lap.

  The men were tired, glassy-­eyed, red-­faced, and quietly drinking.

  “Looks as if a storm is coming,” someone said.

  Lightning cracked on the bluff, and the whole camp was illuminated in its white light. The red dog gave a threatening growl and was awake in an instant.

  Suddenly both dogs bristled, having scented something in the night.

  “What is it,” Michael whispered.

  Sabi danced from his lap, making low sounds in her throat. Then the red dog sprang up, a mass of bristles and growled softly.

  Amid the ragged mist of the crossing was the outline of a horse and rider followed by another. The setter barked and swirled and came to him shivering in her whole body while the red dog, surly and aggressive, advanced on the riders.

  “How the hell?” Ike Gough yelled, and suddenly the night was alive with the men laboring to their feet, snatching up the revolvers and rifles at hand, bullets being chambered, triggers cocked back. There came lightning and the thunder was as if artillery fire and rumbled on every side.

  The rider wore a white shirt, breechcloth and buckskin leggings, the seams fringed with long locks of hair. His moccasins were embroidered with beads and the dyed quills of the porcupine. In his belt in a leather sheath he carried a butcher’s knife, the handle ornamented with round-­headed brass trunk tacks. Over his shoulders he wore a fine robe of jaguar skins, and his black hair was plaited into a long braid ornamented with eagle feathers and silver buckles and pieced out with hair from humans and the tails of horses until it was lengthened enough to reach the ground. His horse was cream-­colored, painted with eagles and serpents.

  Story Miller came off the bluff with his rifle. He tripped and fell and his rifle discharged into the air. At that moment anything could have happened.

  “Don’t shoot,” the second rider cried, surging past the first rider. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Get off that horse or I’ll blow your heart out,” Ike Gough cried, his rifle pointed at the second rider’s chest.

  The second rider dismounted and led the horse forward. It was a woman in the middle of age. She held a long official-­looking envelope out in front of her. Michael walked forward and took the envelope.

  Temple Miller brought a light from the fire. It was written permission for an Indian called Iron Pony to visit his family on the Canadian River. It stipulated he must follow the Canadian coming and going and he must not be gone from the agency more than thirty days. The document had expired two years ago.

  “You see,” she said, pointing to the document. “You see.”

  Michael stepped back to scrutinize Iron Pony, the man on horseback.

  The blonde scalps of three women hung from the headstall. In his belt along with the sheath knife, he carried a long ice pick. Two pairs of dead hands were tied behind his saddle. All about him was the smell of death.

  Michael pulled John aside and quietly told him to fetch the wolfer and then asked Darby to warn Starling’s people. “Take rifles and cartridges,” he said, “and stay with them.”

  Iron Pony handed down his lance, a straight piece of steel, two feet and a half long, tapering to a sharpened point and fixed into a slender handle of bois d’arc four feet and a half long. As he tried to dismount he collapsed to the ground. He’d been shot from the rear by a large-­caliber bullet. On one side his hip, pelvis, and thighbone were shattered. The wound was days old and the source of the fetid odor that attended him. He would die soon. There was nothing to do.

  Elizabeth heard the shouts from her desk. She
leaned back in her chair to listen more intently. Throwing her robe over her shoulders, she went to the tent door.

  “What is it,” the reverend doctor said, coming to the door of his tent.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  She brought out her little brass hurricane lantern and went up the path with the reverend doctor following behind, buttoning his suspenders.

  She held the light that she might see Iron Pony’s face. She drew in her breath. His right eye was shaded with scar tissue knotting his brow. He wore three brass rings in the upper cartilage of each ear and from each hung separate works of bead, shell, stone, and bone, the longest a foot in length. On each finger he wore a brass or silver ring and on his biceps above his elbows eight and ten hoops of brass. His face was marked with pox scars.

  “Help me,” Elizabeth said, and they lifted his shirt.

  The bullet had gone through his bowels and there was also buckshot in his back. She sent for her medical kit, but aside from stanching the blood and washing and binding up the wounds, there was little else she could do.

  The wolfer stepped into the light, took his look, and then stepped back into darkness. He spoke to Iron Pony from the darkness and there seemed a moment of recognition. He then turned his attention to the woman and scrutinized her. The woman was spare and tall and unadorned. She wore an old blue military coat with tarnished buttons. Her hair was thick and black and tied in braids she wore down her back.

  “You know him?” Michael said.

  “I know him,” the wolfer said.

  “He is Iron Pony?”

  “He is.”

  The wolfer had known Iron Pony since he was a boy. Before the war Iron Pony ranged from the Sabine to the Rockies. He’d had a great many slaves and many horses from raids into Mexico. During the Civil War he’d fought with Stand Watie at Pea Ridge, Old Fort Wayne, Cabin Creek, and Wagoner, where the surrendered were butchered.