Return of the Tall Man Read online

  Reaching the end of his grim reply, the huge army scout looked squintingly at Ben. Slowly extending his arm across the fire, he tapped him on the chest with a forefinger the size and authority of a rail-splitting wedge.

  “If you, mon ami,” he concluded, all trace of ribald banter gone from his bear’s growl voice, “or any other white man have the least idea to see this unfortunate Amy Johnston while she is yet a human being, it must be in the camp of the Comancheros. Once the Apaches have taken her, there is no more to be said of her in this life. She is worse than dead. I say it in God’s name; in twenty years I have not seen a woman come back from the Apaches. Voilà tout, that is all.”

  14

  The Escape from Sand Island

  “We are all from the north,” said Big Bat, “so which way will the Kiowas expect us to take away from this place? Exactement, north. So which way do we go? South, naturellement. Now then, consider this other matter also: how do they expect us to go; in what manner? But of course, you are right. They will think to find us leaving frightened and furtive as the small field mouse with the coyote waiting for him to squeak. And how shall we actually depart? That is easy: with all the noise and excitement—including the bonfire—of a Bastille Day. Have you followed me to this point, mes amis?”

  He looked around at them, swishing the dregs in his coffee tin, black eyes snapping in the firelight. When the others had no answers, Ben spoke slowly:

  “You suggesting we do just the opposite of what they expect us to do, Bat? Is that it?”

  “If you do what the Indian expects,” answered the other, “the Indian will do what you expect; he will take your hair. But if you do something he does not expect, especially the last thing he would dream of doing in your place, then you have him in the corner. The Indian has no intestines pour l’imprévu. Am I not correct, François?” He turned to Go-deen, and the latter nodded.

  “That’s right. If they think you’re up to something, they’ll hold off. They’re worse than a cat for curiosity, yet will shy off like a wild horse at a piece of paper blowing.” He scowled at Big Bat. “But I don’t trust you on a dark night either, canadien. What do you have in mind?”

  “We will make a big fire, burn up this whole pile of flood wood here. While we get ready our horses, we laugh and sing. The Nez Percé there, he can make a few war sounds in his own tongue. You and I will furnish some Oglala talk. When prepared to leave, we will fire the Sioux bad medicine signal into the air with all three of our repeating rifles. Then we will splash right out into the water, going for the south bank and chanting a Kiowa death song which I happen to know. Sacristi! It ought to scare the hell out of them.”

  “And if it don’t?” said Ben.

  Big Bat grinned, spread his post-oak arms.

  “If it don’t, mon ami, then we have no problems at all: and no scalps either. Non, c’est vrai?”

  “If you say so,” grudged Ben.

  “But of course. François? Any objection?”

  “I’m ready; how big do you want the fire?”

  “Jean, mon ami?” He turned to Lame John, putting his huge paw on the tall Nez Percé’s shoulder. “What do you say? Are you angry for what I have claimed of your people; that they will fight a grizzly bear and flee from a strange shadow on a windy night?”

  “What you say is true, brother. The truth should not anger a man. I’ll get the horses up.”

  “C’est très bien; brothers—” He turned to Ben and Go-deen, seizing up a cottonwood log as big as a man’s body in the action and throwing it atop the drift jam of their fort. “Let us labor in the name of Le Bon Dieu; or at least in the name of Baptiste Pourier. Come, help me burn the island down.” He scooped up another tree limb, tossing it after the first. “Now as we work,” he said, “we sing. Very softly at first, while you learn the words. Allons! Follow after me pianissimo in the key of middle C. Are you ready? So. To the death song of the Sarsi Kiowas:

  Iha hyo oya iya iya o iha yaya yoyo,

  Aheya aheya yaheyo ya eye heyo eheyo …”

  Ben, looking at Go-deen, said awkwardly, “Frank, I feel silly as hell.”

  The breed shrugged unsympathetically, suggesting that under the circumstances he could well afford to look or feel a little foolish. Ben could see the point.

  “True,” he admitted; “true as the bore of Old Betsy,” and with the agreement fell to singing and pitching on firewood as fervently as any fresh Christian. Directly, they had the pile large enough to suit Big Bat.

  “Enough,” announced the latter. “Who has the matches? I left mine with my saddle. I knew I would be lighting no fires before Fort Cobb. Now see how wrong I was!”

  Ben gave him the matches, just as Lame John shadowed up through the brush with their mounts. Big Bat lighted the pile, fanned it furiously with his wide, flat-crowned hat. In seconds the bone-dry driftwood was licking hungrily at itself, within a minute had caught deep and was beginning to explode showers of fat sparks. By the time Ben had the coffee tins stowed in Malachi’s packsaddle and Go-deen had scrambled up on his old white bareback, giving over his saddled Sioux pony to Big Bat, the fire was roaring in flames fifteen feet high.

  “Voilà tout,” said Big Bat, swinging aboard. “Let us sing once more. Everyone. After me. Fortissimo!”

  With the order, he sent the Sioux pony splashing into the south channel of the Washita, his companions strung behind him, his bull’s baritone leading the chorus in its dissonant rendition of the death chant. With the wild light of the burning island glaring behind them and the bellow of Big Bat’s voice guiding them from in front, Ben and his friends made a weirdly impressive exit. The five signal shots of the Sioux bad medicine sign fired in slow-tolled unison from the three repeaters they possessed, as their mounts walked under close rein through the waters of the flame-lit Washita, would have puzzled less simple minds than those of Satank’s rudely awakened braves. Satanta made a brief speech about the differences in men and squaws as to the iron in the heart, but he was heading for his own horse while he talked and when he got on him made no move to send him farther than the nearest rise from which he could get a good view of the strange exodus from Sand Island. Big Tree had already gone home to show Little Tree to his long-sorrowing mother. Moreover, it was clear to all or any reasonable Kiowa minds that the four northerners moving off through the night singing the Sarsi death song and walking—not running or loping—their mounts were all bereft as black loons. Accordingly, when old Ten Bears, seventy that past summer and secretly a friend of the white man, suggested that they had won enough in getting back the boy and that, further, the four fools yonder were bound right straight into Kwahadi country, the remaining braves were prone to agree and to go back to their blankets.

  By morning Big Bat, having found and retrieved his cached saddle en route, had brought his three companions to the agreed point of au revoir et bon voyage. This was the beginning of the Double Mountains buffalo trail, forty miles through rough Washita Hills from Sand Island. Here he was to take Go-deen’s Sioux pony in payment for his services and depart on his own way back to Fort Cobb. Ben and his comrades were to continue on to Double Mountains and the camp of Soledad Dominguin.

  Over their last coffee fire together, the giant French-Canadian took a stick and began to draw in the fireside earth the lay of the Double Mountains trail for the three “crazy ones.” Three times he cursed and threw away the stick, selecting a new one which possibly might better enable him to delineate the faint track they must follow to find the Comancheros. Midway through the fourth drawing, he growled, “Bois de vache!” the Canuck equivalent of “Cow dung!” and jammed the stick into the prairie loam with a helpless Gallic palming of his great hands.

  “I cannot do it,” he admitted unhappily. “Get on your damn horses; I am going with you.”

  15

  Beyond the Brazos

  Moving carefully as they must, looking ou
t to fore and aft and both sides all the while, it was a week’s tense work getting to the headwaters of the Clear Fork of the Brazos. This was Comanche Country. The dread Tshaoh, the Enemy People, as the Sioux called them, were to be avoided, warned Big Bat, as was syphilis or smallpox. The Comanches were swift, sure death to all alien Indians, a slower but not less certain end to all adult white males. The Kwahadi, and particularly this damned Quanah, were the elite of the Tshaoh killer pack. If their eternal vigilance against the empty space surrounding them were to be relaxed for the one hour, or one minute, which it took the Kwahadi to detect them marching through their buffalo pastures, then they all might far better have flung their guns in the Washita and pleaded Christian mercy of Satank.

  As it proved out, Big Bat brought them in off the endless ocean of prairie with sundown of the seventh day, barely two miles downstream of the target landmarks of Double Mountain. They had not seen a Kiowa or Comanche feather in the whole distance, not even at the heavily Indian-traveled Cashe Creek crossing of Red River—a remarkable feat of plains navigation on the part of Baptiste Pourier.

  Ben was not slow with his praise for this seemingly impossible feat, but Big Bat waved him down frowningly.

  “Mon petit,” he explained, “any child of the prairie can play a week of Kwahadi hide-and-seek. Until we have back the woman, we have accomplished nothing. I suggest you save the flattery for Soledad Dominguin. His Mexican side may be lulled by it long enough for us to put a gun in his belly and strike a bargain.”

  Ben studied him a moment, looked around then at the others. They said nothing. He turned back to Big Bat, sunburned squint deepening.

  “It’s your fandango.” He nodded. “We’ll dance it your way.”

  Big Bat’s white teeth flashed.

  “That way will be across the river here at this point, then up the other side, très attentivement, to the fires of the market hunters. When we have arrived there, you will do exactly as I say. Otherwise, I can wait here and allow you to make you own moves. The Comancheros ordinarily are a timid people, smiling out of both sides of the face, the one to the Indians, the other to the Americans. But this Dominguin carries bad blood on his red side. He is little more popular with the other Comancheros than with the Americans and even the Mexicans who call themselves Spanish-Americans in self-defense. Soledad is more a bandit than a buffalo hunter. The army tells me they have a price on his head, so you see we are not dealing with simple native people here.”

  “This Soledad is a killer, eh?” said Ben. “A real hombre duro.” He did not know from whence the Spanish phrase had popped into his mind but said it as naturally as the English words before it.

  “Worse than that, mon ami. He is a trader in the human flesh, standing between the settlements and the wild tribes which make use of white women, either as slaves or concubines or, in the general case, both. This is why the army wants him, but of course they will never capture him.” Big Bat palmed his hands. “Does one catch a pull of smoke with a cavalry patrol? Or execute a shadow with a company of riflemen? Ah, no, mes amis”—he included the others with the second palm lift—“Soledad Dominguin is in no danger, but très dangerous. So I will do the talking. Etes-vous d’accord?”

  Frank Go-deen entered the discussion with a twist of his lance scar and a return of the hand gesture.

  “Having come this far, the choice is about as attractive as a Mandan squaw. We agree.”

  Big Bat nodded, looked at Ben. He pointed to the .44 Colt on the latter’s thigh.

  “You wear that gun where it can be used promptement. Is that the fact?”

  Ben was standing three-quarters facing the giant French-Canadian when asked the question. He didn’t seem to move, but Big Bat grunted and pulled in his belly, looking down toward it in amazement. It was nothing less than natural that he should do so, for there is something compelling about the rifle-sized bore of a .44 Colt. Particularly when it is buried to the front sight blade in a man’s navel. Big Bat’s beard split once more to the gleam of his beautiful teeth.

  “It is the fact,” he said. “Now please to put it away, until I give you the sign in the camp of the Comancheros.”

  “What?” said Ben, holstering the Colt with a puzzled look. “What sign?”

  “The one I will give you when it appears we are not going to proceed around Soledad’s Mexican side. That is to say, when we have run out of time, and I have run out of talk.”

  “If it’s a matter of talk,” broke in Go-deen, “let Brother Ben handle it. I am thinking to make a match with him and this Satanta to see who is the real Orator of the Plains. The Tall Brother is a tall talker, Bat. You can’t hope to beat him. I recall one time when he and I were scouting the village of old Crowheart up in the Wind River country. It was late afternoon and—”

  His recounting of the adventure was shut off by the fact of Big Bat reaching over and picking him up bodily and clamping a hand the size of a haunch of venison over his mouth.

  “François,” he was reminded gently, “in your advancing years, you grow forgetful. It is I, Baptiste Pourier, remember? I know you like a brother. If there is to be any contest with Satanta to determine who blows the longest wind, then it will not be Petit Ben that we enter. N’est-ce pas, mon frère?”

  Furious, but not feebleminded enough to mention it, Go-deen was set back upon his feet. Big Bat turned again to Ben.

  “The sign in the camp of the Comancheros will be when I shrug and say to Soledad, ‘Well, mon ami, if you will not listen to reason, we may as well say no more.’ I will then turn away from him, and in that instant of the turning, when his attention is upon my back, you will place the pistol in his estomac precisely as you have just done for me. François,” he put a mollifying arm about the injured half-breed’s shoulders, “when Petit Ben places the pistol, you are to be in the rear of Soledad. As he pulls in from the bite of the gun barrel in front, you are to greet him with the touch of the knife blade in the kidneys. Is it not simple?”

  Ben and Go-deen looked at him, the former the first to recover.

  “There is just one question which comes to mind somewhat naturally,” he said. “What are Soledad’s friends going to be doing all this time?”

  Big Bat pulled from his saddle scabbard the little brass-framed Henry carbine with which he had greeted the Kiowas back on the Washita. He patted the yellow metal of its receiver lovingly.

  “You remember this small one?” he asked. “She talks faster than François. Sixteen times, as quick as one can work the lever. She will be looking at Soledad’s friends while you and François have flanked their leader. Those Comancheros know this gun. They say the same thing of it as the Sioux; that you load it upon Sunday and shoot it all week. Enough? You are satisfied?”

  “Oh, completely,” said Ben with a wry grimace. “What more could a man ask.”

  “Joli! Let us then proceed with the business.”

  They had been standing, afoot, at the ford, letting the horses drink and stretching their own weary limbs. Now they climbed back into their saddles, Big Bat leading the way over the crossing, Go-deen next, Ben, Lame John, and old Malachi bringing up the rear. As they came out the far side and swung to the right upriver, Ben turned to Lame John.

  “Well, brother,” he asked, “you still want to find Amy Johnston as bad as you did back of those rocks up by Judith Gap?”

  “Worse, Brother Ben,” replied the tall Nez Percé. “The thought of her has ridden with me like war medicine, growing stronger with each mile that we draw nearer to her. I told you she was in my heart.”

  “How about her?” said Ben. “You think you’re in her heart?”

  “I don’t know. We never talked.”

  Ben looked at him, startled.

  “You mean to tell me,” he said incredulously, “that you two never said a thing to each other?”

  “Not a word, brother.”

 
“And you mean to tell me you come all this way, run all this risk, for a woman you never even talked to?”

  “I saw her, brother.”

  “She’s that much to look at?”

  “We all see with different eyes.”

  “Could be; seems to me, though, that you’ve come a powerful long ways on just one look.”

  Lame John shook his head, that hint of almost sadness Ben knew so well by this time invading his dark features. He reached out through the gathering dusk and placed his hand gently on Ben’s shoulder.

  “If the first shaft pierce the heart,” he asked, “how many more arrows are required to kill?”

  Ben, not able to say anything, said nothing. Both men rode on into the night. Perhaps they rode a little closer together than before, though. It was hard to say in the deepening shadows of first starlight.

  16

  Soledad Dominguin

  They came into the camp of the Comancheros as the fat hump ribs, juicy tenderloins, rich tongues, and tasty livers of the nomads’ evening meal were being pulled from the broiling spits. After only a fleeting moment of uncertainty, during which their surprised host exchanged his discovery snarl for a bowing grin as white-toothed and overwhelming as Big Bat Pourier’s, Dominguin bade them dismount and be welcome to a share in the feast. Ben, his eyes sweeping the camp behind those of Big Bat, saw nothing of the white woman. Wondering if they were once more too late, he watched Big Bat to see how he should play his own reaction to the invitation.

  The French-Canadian appeared no whit concerned over the patent absence of Amy Johnston. Stepping down off his Sioux pony, he returned the Comanchero’s smile tooth for tooth.