Lawless Prairie Page 8

  He really didn’t know what to say to her. He had compassion for her, but words of consolation did not come easily to him. “Well, you’re all right now. We’ll get outta this place and get you somethin’ to eat—fix up your cuts.” That was all he could come up with to ease her distress. “I’ll see what we can use as far as guns or cartridges go, and I’ll take a look at their horses.”

  “One of those horses is my father’s,” Joanna said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and left her standing there while he took an inventory of the Indians’ weapons. After a moment, she followed him as he examined an old Henry rifle. She stood gazing down at the cold features of the broad-shouldered Sioux warrior after Clint moved on to pick up the shotgun beside one of the other bodies. After a couple of moments, she looked around her and found a large rock the size of a loaf of bread. With tears gushing forward again, this time in unbridled fury, she held the rock up as high as she could, then slammed it down with all her strength in the warrior’s face.

  Hearing the solid thud of the stone as it crushed the face of the corpse, he turned to see the woman glaring down at it, her fists clenched, her face drawn in anger. Realizing that he was staring at her, she turned to him and simply said, “That shotgun belongs to my father.”

  “Right,” he replied, again at a loss for response. He paused briefly by the third body, and seeing nothing of value beyond an early model Remington single-shot rifle, moved on to get the horses.

  He thought about keeping all four of the horses, but decided that he didn’t want to herd the three extra. He did decide to take the opportunity to trade the prison horse for one of the Indian ponies, a paint, deeming it a definite upgrade. Taking one of the Indian saddles, he put it on Joanna’s horse.

  “It might not be the most comfortable saddle,” he told her, “but it’ll beat ridin’ bareback.” After witnessing her final farewell to the broad-shouldered warrior, he was a little reluctant to touch her, but she willingly accepted his hand in helping her up in the saddle. Then he led her horse back to retrieve Rowdy and upgrade his packhorse.

  Following the dark riverbank downstream, they rode for over an hour until Clint selected a deep gully leading down from the bluff. In a short time, he had a fire going and coffee was not long after. There was little he could do to fix her wounds, but she insisted that all she needed was to clean them and wash herself in the river. Once she had finished her bath and dried with a blanket Clint had taken from one of the warriors, she seemed content to warm herself by the fire.

  Clint handed her a cup of coffee. “Get you a little somethin’ to eat, and then we’ll catch a couple hours’ sleep before sunup.” She merely nodded in return. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Joanna Becker,” she said.

  “All right, Joanna. My name’s Clint Conner. Where’s home? Where did those Indians grab you?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she confessed. “We have a cabin on a stream back there in the hills. My husband and my father were working a claim, but I don’t know how to get back there from here.” She tried to be calm, but she could not hide her dismay. “They killed my mother.” She tried to continue, but could not keep from sobbing. He waited until she gathered herself once more and went on. “I know my husband’s looking for me, but I don’t know how to get back.”

  “Never mind,” he assured her. “We’ll get you back home,” knowing as he said it that it would not be such an easy task. He sliced two generous slabs of bacon from what was left of the side he had taken form Clell Ballenger’s supplies and dropped them in his frying pan. As he tended the sizzling meat, he glanced up at Joanna. With the firelight flickering upon her swollen face, he decided he might have been wrong about her.When he first found her, he thought she was a little older. But on closer inspection, he decided she was not much older than he. It was just the battered face that misled him. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’ll get you back to your husband safe and sound.” He hoped he wasn’t making a boast he couldn’t keep.

  By the time they had finished the coffee and bacon, there were not many hours of darkness left. Clint gave Joanna a blanket to wrap around herself and made her a bed with his saddle blanket and an oilskin slicker. Although it was still summer, the night was chilly enough to call for a blanket. She lay awake, watching him until the soft steady sounds of his breathing told her he was asleep. Only then could she relax and permit sleep to overtake her. He seemed an honest enough young man, but her recent ordeal at the hands of the Sioux warriors caused her to be wary of any strange man. When sleep finally came, it captured her completely, fueled by her total exhaustion.

  She was awakened by the gentle touch of sunlight upon her cheek. Opening her sleep-swollen eyes, she was at once alarmed. He was gone! Immediately a bevy of worrisome thoughts filled her head, causing her heart to beat with alarm as she stared at the empty space where he had made his bed. Concerned when going to sleep about the possible attempt for the stranger to seek relief of his lust, she had thought that he might simply choose to sneak off and leave her. He had told her that he was on his way to Montana. Evidently he didn’t care to have the bother of a woman.

  Almost in a panic at this point, she flung the blanket from her, frantic to see whether he had left her a horse to ride. In her haste, she tripped over a fold in her blanket, fell to her knees, and scrambled to her feet again only to discover the horses gone from the willows where they had been tied. She almost cried out in anguish, but stifled the cry in her throat when she saw Clint beyond the willows, leading the horses up from the river. Feeling awkward and foolish, she returned to fold her blanket, hoping he had not witnessed her panic.

  “Mornin’,” Clint called out when he saw that she was up.

  “Good morning,” she returned sheepishly. If he had seen her little show of fear, he did not let on.

  “You were sleepin’ so soundly, I didn’t have the heart to wake you,” he said. “You feelin’ strong enough to ride?” When she answered yes, he went on. “If you’re needin’ some privacy to do whatever you gotta do, there’s a pretty thick stand of fir trees beyond those willows. I’ll be makin’ us some coffee while you’re gone.” She nodded and immediately took her leave.

  When she returned, he could see that she had freshened her face and tried to comb her hair with her fingers. He stopped what he was doing to examine her face in the early-morning sunlight. “Worked you over pretty good, didn’t they? I believe a little bit of the swellin’s gone down, though.” He gave her a warm smile then. “You’re gonna have a black eye for a day or two.”

  She smiled, almost blushing in her embarrassment, knowing how she had mistrusted his motive for rescuing her, and then thinking he had deserted her. She knew then, looking into his rugged and honest face, that she could trust him with her life as well as her honor—an honor that she now deemed worthless. She felt compelled to apologize. “I owe you an apology, Clint.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For being so much trouble,” she lied, “and I want to thank you again, sincerely, for what you did.”

  “No trouble a’tall,” he replied cheerfully. “I’m on my way to Montana, and I ain’t on any time schedule to get there.” He gave her a reassuring smile, relieved to see that she had gained control of her crying fits. “If we’re gonna get you home again, I need to know how long you’ve been gone, and from what direction you came. When I first spotted you, you were headin’ straight west. Did they bring you most of the time in that direction?” She nodded. “How many days did you travel?”

  She almost had to stop to think about it. It had seemed an eternity. “Three nights before the night you came,” she said, shuddering inwardly when she recalled.

  “Can you tell me anythin’ more about it, flatland, hills, mountains, rivers?”

  “Our house is in the mountains. When they took me, we left the mountains, but we rode through some smaller mountains before we reached the prairie where you found us.” She remembered o
ne thing more then. “We crossed a river before we got into the smaller mountains.”

  That told Clint that it was going to be one hell of a challenge to find the stream she described, or even the area of the mountains her home was in. He had never been in the Black Hills, but he had heard tales about them from his father—tall, rugged mountains, covered with evergreen trees, meadowlike valleys of grass leading to rocky gulches. The Sioux called them Paha Sapa and considered them to be the center of the world. According to the treaties, white men weren’t even supposed to go there. “Tell me about the river,” he said.

  Details began to return to her mind as she tried to look back in her memory. “I remember that we crossed a river where it looked like it forked with another river. My hands and feet were tied to the horse, and I was afraid I was going to drown if the water got too deep.” She shook her head as if trying to rid it of the memory. “It wasn’t very deep, though,” she added softly.

  With no more information than that, he figured the only plan left to him was to head southeast to pick up the Indians’ trail where he had first encountered them. Anxious to reunite her with her husband and father as quickly as possible, he said, “We’ll start out to the east as soon as you eat somethin’. I know your family is worried about you.”

  After a ride of five or six miles, Clint recognized the low line of hills from which he had watched the raiding party, but it was the middle of the day before he found their tracks. Kneeling beside the trail, he looked back toward the east and the blue-black silhouette of the hills in the distance. Glancing at Joanna then, he said, “I reckon home’s that way.” He stepped up in the saddle and started backtracking. “We’ll be lucky to reach those hills before dark.”

  Forced to circle back when he lost the trail at the head of a wide ravine, he had to slow down to make sure he didn’t repeat the mistake. Knowing the horses would have to rest soon, he looked ahead, hoping to see a line of trees or shrubs that would indicate the presence of a stream. Seeing no sign, he pushed the horses on. It was then he heard Joanna call his name.

  “Clint,” she uttered almost in a whisper.

  When he turned toward her, he saw her looking off to her right. Following the line of sight, he spotted half a dozen Indians on a mesa some seven or eight hundred yards distant, their ponies in a single line, motionless as they watched the white man and woman passing toward the mountains. Oh, shit, he thought. It was at least three miles to the foothills they had been riding toward, and it appeared the warriors had the angle and could easily cut them off before they reached those hills. To make matters worse, the horses were tired and in no shape for an extended gallop. “Just keep ridin’,” he said to Joanna. “We’ll get as far as we can before they decide to jump us.”

  “Maybe they haven’t seen us,” Joanna said fearfully, her face drawn in a concerned frown.

  “Maybe,” Clint answered, knowing they’d have to be blind not to. He held Rowdy to a slow, leisurely pace, hoping the Indians would hold off long enough for him to find some form of cover. He saw very little, as he scanned the treeless terrain before them. The line of warriors on the ridge turned and, keeping pace with him, paralleled his path. Like him, they were still deciding where best to engage the enemy. You just keep riding, he thought. The longer they waited, the more time he had to find a place to make his stand. Holding steady to the trail he had been backtracking all morning, he finally decided that he wasn’t going to find any better place to defend than the shallow ravine he was approaching. He figured the six warriors weren’t going to let him reach the foothills now less than two and a half miles away, so he decided to take his stand in the ravine.

  “This is as good a place as any,” he said to Joanna. “We’ll lead the horses down to the bottom, and I can get up behind those rocks on the rim with my rifle.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to reach the hills?” she replied, worried.

  “They’re not gonna let us reach those hills, and this is the best place between here and the hills.”

  “Maybe they’re friendly,” she said, unconvincingly. “They haven’t done anything but follow us.”

  “If they were friendly,” he answered patiently, “they would most likely have rode on down to meet us.” He guided Rowdy down into the ravine. It seemed to be a signal for the Sioux, for they stopped and appeared to be discussing a plan of attack. After a few minutes, they turned their ponies down the slope, and spread out in a fanlike formation, gradually picking up speed as they descended the ridge. I’d hoped they’d stay more bunched up, he thought.

  Dismounting, he led the horses to the bottom of the ravine. “There ain’t nothin’ to tie the horses to,” he said. “We don’t want ’em to get scared by the shootin’ and run off. Can you hold ’em?” She nodded, but did not show a great deal of confidence. “You can do it,” he assured her. “Just sit down here on the ground and hold on to the buckskin and the paint’s reins. I’m gonna be busy up on the side, but I’ll keep an eye on you.” When he saw the worried look in her eyes, he said, “I’m gonna get you home safe.”

  Figuring he had five or ten minutes before they were in rifle range, he used the time to fill his pockets with extra cartridges and load the Henry as well as his Winchester. Taking another look at Joanna, he felt reasonably sure that she was out of harm’s way, provided he could hold the warriors at bay. As an extra precaution, however, he pulled her father’s shotgun from the pack and loaded it. Handing it to her, along with his pistol, he said, “If somethin’ happens to me, use the shotgun first, then the pistol, but I don’t plan on you havin’ to use ’em a’tall.” With time running short, he scrambled up the side of the ravine to take his place behind a waist-high rock.

  Satisfied that he had a field of fire covering a hundred and eighty degrees, he laid the Henry on top of the rock where it would be handy if he got caught with not enough time to reload his Winchester. Ready for the assault, he waited.

  After glancing briefly at the woman sitting at the bottom of the ravine to make sure she was all right, he shifted his gaze quickly back to the warriors bearing down on him. He was confident in his accuracy with his rifle, but he waited for the Sioux warriors to advance to within one hundred yards, knowing that he could not miss at that distance, even with a moving target. The warriors were not as patient and opened fire when still a good way beyond that distance.

  At the bottom of the ravine, Joanna flinched when she heard the zip of a rifle slug pass overhead, and the cracks of the rifles. Frightened, she looked up above her at the man who had promised to take her home. Only moments before, he had been scurrying around, hastily loading his weapons, securing the horses, then scrambling up the slope. Now he seemed almost serene, patiently watching the approaching danger as rifle slugs teased the air around him. She could not help but find reassurance in the calm confidence of the man, and she somehow knew that, six or six hundred savages, he would find a way to protect her. With a new sense of confidence, she banished her feelings of fear and concerned herself with holding the horses.

  Still holding his fire, Clint watched the progress of the charging warriors, anticipating their plan of assault. It was obvious to him that the four near the center of their arc were intent upon laying down a blistering rain of fire to keep him pinned down—while the two at each end hoped to flank him, or even circle behind him. With that in mind, the first targets he selected were the flanking riders. He would be in serious trouble if they got behind him. While bullets ricocheted off the rock and ripped up the dirt around it, he continued to hold his fire.

  When the Indians reached a spot on the prairie he had mentally selected, he rose slightly and unhurriedly took careful aim. The Winchester spoke with solid certainty, and the warrior on the left flank tumbled from the saddle. Without hesitation, but with no haste, he turned and sighted on the rider on the opposite flank with the same results. The sudden deadly response stopped the warriors’ charge, causing the four remaining to scatter for safety. Acting quickly now, Clint knocked two
more of the raiders out of their saddles before they were able to retreat. The last two galloped away to safety.

  He figured the Sioux warriors would not try that again, but he knew you could never be sure about Indians. So while there was time, he hurried down the slope to Joanna. “Get mounted,” he said. “We’ve got some time now to reach those hills.” As soon as he secured the extra weapons, he led her out of the ravine and headed toward the hills to the east at a gentle lope. The horses still needed rest, but he figured he would take care of that as soon as they reached the security of the foothills.

  Having been unable to see what was taking place above her, Joanna was startled to see the bodies scattered about in the sage and short grass prairie. She had only heard four shots from his rifle, and she counted four bodies. Two of the riderless horses stood watching them while the other two galloped off in the general direction the retreating Sioux had taken. When Clint led them out again, the two Indian ponies that had remained followed along behind them for a few hundred yards before stopping to watch the two riders. Clint pulled up and turned back to look at the Indian ponies. Though he hadn’t wished to be burdened with extra horses before, it now occurred to him that it would be worth the trouble for a start in Montana.

  “Wait here,” he told Joanna, and rode back to the standing horses. He had a hunch that if he led one of them, a mare, that the other would follow, so using the reins as a rope, he slipped them around the mare’s neck and tied the other end to his packhorse. The mare went along obediently, and after hesitating to make up its mind, the other horse followed the mare. When he caught up with Joanna again, he said, “Might as well start buildin’ a herd.”

  Ahead of her, sitting tall in the saddle, his lean body riding easy with the motion of the buckskin gelding, the miracle she had prayed for while a captive led his horses toward a line of wooded ridges. She thought of her husband and couldn’t help but compare. She could not imagine Robert under similar circumstances. She promptly reproached herself for comparing them. It wasn’t fair to Robert. Her thoughts went then to her father and her husband, her father grieving over the loss of her mother. They must both be sick with worry about me, she thought. What if we find our way back to the cabin? They may be off looking for me.