George Fraser - Flashman and the Redskins

Whether that thought travelled through the air, I don’t know, but suddenly one of the riders wheeled away from the others and put his pony to the gentle slope running up to our position. He came at a trot, straight for us, and we watched, frozen. Then Grattan’s hand came out from under his body, and I saw he had his Bowie turned in his fist; I clapped a hand over it, and he turned to stare at me: his eyes were wild, and I thought, by gum, Flashy, you ain’t the only nervous one on the Plains this day. I shook my head; if the savage saw us, we must try to talk our way out – not that there’d be much hope of that, from what we’d seen.

The Indian came breasting up the hill, checked, and looked back the way they had come, towards the camp-ground, and I realised he was taking a last look-see. He wasn’t twenty yards away, close enough to make out every hideous detail of the buffalo-horn headdress, embroidered breech-clout, beaded garters wound round his legs above the moccasins, the oiled and muscular limbs. He had a lance, a little round shield on his arm, and a war-club hung from his belt. He sat at gaze a full minute, and then rode slowly along just beneath our hide, with never an upward glance; he paused, leaning down to clear a tangle of weed from his foot – and in the hollow behind us some fool dropped a vessel with a resounding clatter.

The Indian’s head lifted, the painted face staring directly at our bush; he straightened in his seat, head turning from side to side like a questing dog’s. He looked after his party, then back towards us. Go away, you awful red bastard, go away, I was screaming inwardly, it’s only a kettle or a piss-pot dropped by those infernal hypochondriacs; Christ, it’s a wonder you can’t hear the buggers wheezing … and then he trotted down the hill after the retreating column.

We waited until the last of them were well out on the plain and vanishing into the haze before we even stirred – and then I made the terrifying discovery that while Grattan and I had been lying too scared to breathe, and Susie had been sitting tight-lipped in her coach with her eyes shut, three of the sluts – Cleonie, black Aphrodite, and another – had crawled up to a point on the crest to watch the passing show! Giggling and sizing up the bucks, I don’t doubt; how they hadn’t been spotted …

We moved out in some haste. You ain’t seen galloping oxen? Within the hour we had passed through the appalling filth and litter of the deserted Indian camp, and it seemed reasonable to hope that a band of such size would be the only one in the vicinity. I asked Grattan who they were; he thought, from the bright-coloured blankets and the buffalo-scalp cap, that they might be Cumanches, but wasn’t sure – I may tell you now, from a fairish experience of Indians, that they’re a sight harder to identify by appearance than, say, Zulu regiments or civilised soldiers; they ain’t consistent in their dress or ornament. I remember Charley Reynolds, who was as good a scout as ever lived, telling me how he’d marked down a band as Arapaho by an arrow they’d fired at him – he found out later they’d been Oglala Sioux, and the arrow had been pinched from a Crow. That by the way; Grattan didn’t cheer me up much by remarking that the Cumanche are cannibals.

We pushed on, and towards evening I smelled smoke. We went to ground at once, and camped without fires, and in the morning moved ahead cautiously until we caught the scent of charred wood. Sure enough, there it was, a little way off the trail – the blackened shell of a wagon, with little drifts of smoke still coming from it. There were three white corpses sprawled among the wreck, two men and a woman; all had been shot with arrows, scalped, and foully mutilated. Grattan went round the wagon, and cursed; I went to look and wished I hadn’t. On the other side were two more bodies, a man’s and a young girl’s, though it wasn’t easy to tell; they had been spreadeagled and fires lit on top of them. If that Indian in the buffalo cap had ridden a few yards farther, we would have been served the same way.

We buried them in a cold sweat, and pressed on quickly; oddly enough, though, the knowledge of our escape raised our spirits, and it was with cries and hurrahs that afternoon that we passed the mouth of the Picketwire, 24which joins the Arkansas about fifteen miles below Bent’s. One or two of the savaneros were uneasy that there was still no sign of civilised life so close to the fort; there were normally bands of trappers and traders to be seen, and friendly Indians camped on the Picketwire, they said. But Grattan pointed out that with so large a band of hostiles on the prowl, the normal traffic wasn’t to be expected; they’d be staying snug behind the wall at Bent’s.

We were all eager to see this famous citadel of the plains, and in camp that night Grattan entertained Susie with a recital of its wonders; to hear him it was like finding Piccadilly in the middle of the Sahara.

‘You’ll be wonderstruck, ma’am,’ laughs he. ‘You haven’t seen a building worth the name since we left Westport, have you? Well, tomorrow, after a thousand miles of desolation, you’ll see a veritable castle on the prairie, with towers and ramparts – oh, and shops, too! It’s a fact, and all as busy as Stephen’s Green. This time tomorrow you’ll be watching the captain here playing skittle pool in the billiard-room, with a wee man in a white coat skipping in with refreshment, and you’ll sleep on a down mattress after a hot bath and the best dinner west of St Louis, so you will.’

We were off at dawn of a brisk, bright day with the breeze fluttering the cottonwoods as we rolled along by the river at our best pace. We nooned without incident; just an hour or two, thinks I, and we’ll be through this horror and can lie up until other trains appear, and then head for Santa Fe in safety, with some other idiot riding wagon-boss. We were all in spirits; Susie was laughing and listening to Grattan as he rode by the carriage, the tarts had their wagon-covers up and were chattering like magpies in the sunshine, and even the invalids had perked up and were telling each other that this was more bracing than Maine, by George; I caught Cleonie’s demure glance as I rode by her wagon, and reflected that Bent’s must be big enough to find a more comfortable private nook than a prairie tent. And then I saw the smoke.

It was a single puff, above the gentle crest to our right, floating up into the clear sky, and while I was still gaping in consternation, there they were – four mounted Indians on the skyline, trotting down the slope towards us. Grattan swore softly and shaded his eyes, and then swung to the coach driver.

‘Keep going – brisk, but not too fast! Easy, now, captain – that smoke means there’ll be others coming lickety-split; you’ll note we’re only worth a single puff, bad cess to ’em! 25So we must keep ’em at a distance till we get within cry of Bent’s; it can’t be above a couple of miles now!’

My instinct was to turn and ride for it, but he was right. The four Indians were coming on at a brisk canter now, so with Grattan leading we rode out to head them away, me with my sweat flowing freely – the sight of those oily copper forms, the painted faces, the feathers, and the practised ease with which they managed ponies and lances, would have turned your stomach. They rode along easily, edging only gradually closer.

‘They won’t show fight till the regiment arrives,’ says Grattan. ‘Watch in case they try to side-slip us and scare the wagon-beasts – ah, you bastard, that’s the trick! See, captain!’

Sure enough, they had their blankets ready in their hands; their leader, riding parallel with us about twenty yards off, raised his and shouted ‘Tread!’, which I took to mean ‘trade’ – a likely story.