The Ferguson Rifle Read online

  “What about the Indian?”

  “He’s an Otoe.”

  “Known him long?”

  “I ain’t known none of them long. Deg Kemble an’ me, we rafted down to New Orleans, one time. I trapped a season in Winnebago country with Talley. The Otoe comes from the Platte River country … knows the river.”

  One by one, the others drifted to the fire to roast chunks of meat and drink the strong, black coffee.

  Heath’s eyes kept straying to me, and knowing he was a Boston man, I was ready for the question when it came. “That’s an uncommon name you have, my friend.”

  I shrugged. “Chantry? There’ve been Chantrys on the frontier for years, Mr. Heath. An ancestor of mine was on the east coast as early as 1602.”

  My reply was flat and short, spoken with a finality that left small room for questions, and I wanted none. The past was in the past and there I wanted it to remain. If he had been in Boston within the past few months, he might know that which I wished to forget.

  We mounted and rode west with the Otoe scouting ahead, his pony knee-deep in the tall bluestem grasses. Occasionally flocks of prairie chickens flew up, then glided away across the grass to disappear like smoke. Far off we saw several moving black dots.

  “Buffalo,” Talley said. “We’ll be seeing them by the thousand, Chantry. This is their country we’re coming to, and a grand, broad country it is.”

  He leaned down from his saddle and pulled a handful of the bluestem. “Look at it, man! And this is the country some call the Great American Desert! They’re fools, Chantry! Fools! Earth that will grow such grass will grow rye or barley or wheat. These plains could feed the world!”

  “If you could get men to live on them,” Ebitt said wryly. “It’s too big for them, too grand. They can’t abide the greatness of the sky, or the distances.” He pointed ahead. “Look! There’s no end yonder. No horizon. You ride on and on and on and all is emptiness. Only the buffalo, the antelope, and the grass bending before the wind. I’ve seen men frightened by it, Chantry! I’ve seen them turn tail and run back to their cities and their villages. Only in Russia or the Sahara is there anything like it.”

  “There’s the pampas, on the Argentine,” I suggested. “I’ve not been there, but it must be very like this.”

  “Maybe,” Ebitt said skeptically, “but I think there’s nothing like it, not anywhere. The Sahara’s desert. Well, Russia, maybe, like I said. I’ve talked with Russians and there seems to be a vastness to their land as well.”

  My mind was on other things, for by nature I am a cautious man. “How much does the Otoe understand?” I asked Talley.

  “Not much, I’m thinking, but you can’t tell about a redskin. They talk little when there’s a white man about, but they listen, and nobody in his right mind thinks an Indian is not quick.

  “He hasn’t our education, and his upbringing isn’t Christian, but there’s nothing wrong with his senses or his wits. He’s tuned to the land, Chantry, and don’t ever forget he’s lived in this country, in this same way, for a mighty long time.”

  “Not on the plains,” Deg Kemble objected. “Until the Indian got the horse from the white man, he never traveled far over the grassland. He followed streams, and followed the buffalo at times, but there’s nothing to live on out here. Once the redskin got the horse, there was no holding him.”

  Davy Shanagan rode up beside us. “Chantry, I’m cuttin’ out to shoot some meat. Want to ride along?”

  We turned away from our small column and trotted our horses over the prairie, then walked them to the summit of a small knoll. We found ourselves with a surprising view of the country around.

  Within sight, but some distance off, were two herds of antelope, but no buffalo. Far and away to the westward there seemed to be a fold in the hills with some treetops showing.

  “There’s game along the creeks,” Shanagan said. “The Otoe told us that. None of us ever been this far west before. There’s bear occasionally, some deer, and lots of prairie chickens.”

  We walked our horses toward the antelope but holding a course that, while bringing us nearer, seemed aimed at passing them by. At first they seemed unimpressed, but as we continued to advance one or two of them started to move. We decided to have a try at them although they were a good two hundred yards off.

  Drawing rein, I lifted the Ferguson to my shoulder, took a careful sight, then squeezed off my shot. The antelope stumbled, then broke into a run. From childhood I had learned to think my bullet to the target, for given a chance the eye is accurate, and I knew a deer would sometimes run a quarter of a mile with a bullet through its heart.

  The antelope raced on, running swiftly, until suddenly it crumpled, kicked, and lay still.

  Davy shot at the instant I did, and his long Kentucky rifle held true. As we rode up to our game, he got out his ramrod and prepared to reload. “Better load up, Chantry. You don’t want to be ketched with an empty rifle.”

  “I am loaded.”

  He glanced at me, then at the Ferguson, but made no comment. He was a better skinner than I, so while he skinned out both our kills and selected the best cuts of the meat, I kept watch from a nearby knoll.

  He was working only a few yards from me and he said, “Can’t take nothing for granted. Looks like open country but there’s hollows and coulees out yonder where you could hide an army. Just when you figure there ain’t anybody within miles, a dozen Injuns come foggin’ it out of a coulee and you’ve lost your hair.”

  My eyes were getting accustomed to the country. It is remarkable how one’s vision becomes limited to nearby objects and what we expect to see. Out here the distance was enormous, a vast sky and an endless rolling plain of grass to which the eye must adjust.

  First the mind must accept the clouds, the grass bending before the wind, the changes in the light on the grass, and the shadows left by clouds. Soon the mind has sorted the usual sights and the eye becomes quick to pick up the unusual, the smallest wrong movement in the bend of grass, a deepening of a shadow at the wrong place. The land where I had spent my earliest years was forest and foothills, with frequent streams. Here the only trees were along the watercourses. Later, in New England, I had hunted in farming country, occasionally taking trips into the mountains of Vermont or to Maine. The open plains were new to me, and I was wary of them.

  “Known many Indians?”

  “Here and there,” Davy acknowledged. “Shawnees, mostly. Some Ponca Sioux, Cherokee, and Delaware. I’ve no bad thought for them. They have their ways and we ours, but when it comes to livin’ in this country, their way is best.

  “Bob Sandy now, he figures the only good Injun is a dead one. He come home from the mill one time with his pa to find his family butchered, their cabin burned. Even the pigs were shot full of arrows.

  “So Bob, he’s got a full-sized grudge against Injuns. That’s why we put him up to watchin’ the Otoe.”

  “You’re watching him? You don’t trust him?”

  “Chantry, that Injun is ridin’ toward his own people. What we got may seem mighty small to a gent from back east, but to an Injun, it’s treasure. If he could murder us all, or set a trap with his own folks to kill us, they’d have all we got and he’d be a big man among his own folks.

  “They got no Christian upbringin’. Nobody ever told them to forgive their enemies, or told them that stealin’ was bad, except in their own village, from their own people. With most Injuns the word stranger is the same as that for enemy.

  “A lot of white men think the Injun is dead set against them because they’re white. Nothing to it. An Injun will kill another Injun as quick as he will a white man, except that the white man may have more loot on him.”

  “They’ve had it pretty good, Davy. The best hunting in the world, no taxes to pay, and a lot of country to move around in.”

  “Uh-huh”—Shanagan chuckled—“that’s your Boston showin’. What you don’t figure on is that you folks yonder in civilization have yourselves nicely protected by the law and custom. Out here you’ve got no protection but a quick eye, a fast horse, and the ability to shoot straight.

  “That free savage that folks talk about, he never leaves his camp but what somebody is likely to take his hair.”

  After that neither of us spoke for some time. My own thoughts strayed far afield. These broad plains must resemble those from which the wild riding Scythians migrated when they moved west and south from Central Asia. They took scalps as well, although they worked with metal and were in many ways further advanced than the American Indian.

  Out of Central Asia our own people had come … or perhaps from the lands east of the Danube or Don. The question is disputed, but my own inclination is toward Central Asia. Among those migrating tribes were the Celts and we who moved farthest to the west, we Irish, Welsh, and Bretons still kept some of the old beliefs, the old customs.

  Since the beginning of time, men had been migrating, with the movement usually to the south or west. Perhaps this of which I was now a part would be the last great migration. Yet this was different. This was no organized movement of tribes, nations, or conquering armies; it was a migration of individuals, each making his own decision, gathering his own supplies and equipment. From a thousand villages and cities they came, strangers to each other, yet with a common goal.

  Over the mountains from the coastal provinces, filtering down the slopes, floating down the rivers, some dying, some living, many killed by savages, but the dead were always replaced by others. There was no end to them.

  I had seen them on the Monongahela and the Ohio, floating their rafts down stream, finding homes in Illinois, Missouri, or going on to Texas.

  Here and there I heard talk of Oregon, and of California. Once a man has made that first move
, once he has cast off his moorings, his associations, broken with his school, his church, his village store, and his relatives, it is easy to continue on. It is always easier to travel than to stop.

  As long as one travels toward a promised land, the dream is there, to stop means to face the reality, and it is easier to dream than to realize the dream.

  “You spoke of the Injuns awhile back, their hunting, and all. Hunting is all right when there’s game, but the game drifts when the climate changes, and during the winter there’s no berries or nuts or seeds to be had, so grub can be mighty hard to come by.”

  “You’re right, of course. But they did smoke meat, and some of the Indians planted corn and squash.”

  “You bet they did, but Injuns aren’t much hand to put by. I lived among ’em a time or two when their bellies were empty and the papooses cried themselves to sleep. It took a lot of grub to get them through the winter, and I reckon no tribe ever had enough.”

  Remembering my own early years, I could only agree. Many a time before I had the Ferguson rifle, we had gone hungry, and there’d been a few times after. More than once I’d hiked miles through the wet woods hunting something when all the animals had laid up to wait out the storm.

  Suddenly, Shanagan pulled up, pointing. The tracks of several riders of unshod ponies had passed diagonally across our route, and not long since. They had drawn up here, watching our party go by.

  “We’d better be gettin’ back.” Davy took a look around, then we raced our horses across the flat to get back to the others. Solomon Talley rode to meet us.

  “They heard our shootin’,” Davy said. “They could never have missed it, but they didn’t attack even when they knew our guns were empty.”

  Cusbe Ebitt spat. “They want us all together, and at the right time.”

  “Likely,” Heath agreed. He glanced at the antelope. “Two shots, two kills. That’s prime!”

  “Don’t worry none about Chantry,” Shanagan told them. “His was a runnin’ shot, two hundred yards if an inch, and right through the heart.”

  We spread out to offer less of a target, yet you could have drawn a fifty-yard circle around the lot of us. Back east there was much talk of the red man and the wrongs that had been done him, but I found myself less concerned with those wrongs and more with my own scalp at this moment.

  “You got to see it their way,” Davy said. “To an Injun our outfit would make him a mighty rich man. One ambush, and they ride home loaded with powder, shot, traps, blankets, rifles, and horses, to say nothing of our trifles.”

  Ahead of us was a knoll where a fringe of woodland came up out of a stream bed and crested the knoll. There were a few granite boulders around.

  We spread out into a skirmish line and rode up the slope. There was a spring flowing from under a boulder, several cottonwood trees, and one huge fallen one. There was a little brush.

  Only the Otoe hung back. “No good,” he said. “Bad spirits here.”

  “Looks all right to me,” Bob Sandy said.

  We walked our horses into the little hollow atop the knoll. On our north side, the ground fell steeply away into a coulee where our spring’s water trickled away to join a small stream.

  A more perfect camping place could not be found, but no ashes of campfires existed. There were many evidences of antelope, buffalo, and even wild horses about, and no bones to indicate a poison spring. Such springs were rare, but I had heard of some with arsenic in the water, and others with numerous minerals in suspension that might upset the human organism.

  Talley swung down and tasted the water. “Hell, there’s nothing wrong with that. I never tasted better.”

  “No good,” the Otoe insisted. He gestured sweepingly. “No like. Bad place for Indian.”

  Deg Kemble prowled about while Ebitt rode out along the ridge above the stream. On all three sides but that of the stream we would have an excellent field of fire with protection from a natural mound of earth that banked the source of the spring on three sides. On the other the fallen log offered an equally fine breastwork. The space within was perhaps thirty yards by twenty, ample for ourselves and our horses.

  The Otoe hung back. Obviously he wanted no part of the place.

  Talley stopped by where I still sat my horse. “You are an educated man, Chantry. What do you make of him?”

  “There seem to be two possibilities. One that he didn’t intend to bring us here because the place is too good a position to defend, in case he’s planned to ambush us, or else the place is taboo for some reason.”

  “Taboo?”

  “An Indian doesn’t have our knowledge, and for what he cannot otherwise explain, he imagines evil spirits are the cause. For example, suppose some Indians got hold of the blankets or clothing of people who died by smallpox and rode to this place with them. As you know, such things have happened and the Indians died very quickly.

  “Other Indians may have found the bodies, dead but with no marks upon them, and would immediately assume evil spirits had been at work. After all, Kemble, it’s only a few years since we were doing the same thing.”

  “Makes sense. Anyway, I’m for stayin’. You agree?”

  “I do.”

  Later I wondered if my advice was sound. No one among us was the leader. Each had his abilities, each contributed in his own way.

  While I put together a small fire, Isaac Heath picketed the horses, Bob Sandy and the Otoe kept watch, Shanagan staked out our antelope hides and began scraping them of excess flesh. The others gathered fuel for the night and Cusbe Ebitt put on a kettle and began to prepare a stew.

  Talley went off down the trickle to the stream, scouting the country.

  My fire going, I went to the edge and looked out over the vastness of the prairie, the grass flame red with the setting sun. For the first time, I realized what a move I had made.

  My wife and child were gone. Burned to death in the flames of a fire set by … whom?

  Or was it purely accident, like so many others? Sudden fires were not uncommon.

  But what had I done? I had cut all ties, abandoned the planning of a lifetime, and ridden off into a wild land. Only two months ago I had sat with distinguished men, men of letters, directors of affairs, leaders of men, and now here I was, far off in the wilderness headed toward what?

  CHAPTER 3

  ______________

  THE SKY WAS shot with flaming arrows that slowly faded, leaving a kiss of crimson on the edges of clouds, and the prairie itself turned a sullen red, darkening into shadows and the night. Somewhere down in the copse an owl hooted.

  It was an empty land, but I knew my people, and it would not be empty long. I had seen them back there with their simple wagons. I had seen them afoot, with wife and child riding, sometimes driving a cow, crossing the mountains, clearing the roads.

  Already they had cut paths into the dark forests of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Men had long been trapping west of the Mississippi as well as east of it, and the adventurous ones, such as this party, were pushing out into the plains.

  Those families crossing the mountains carried their axes and shovels … they would not be stopped. Where there was land to be taken, they would go, and then they would grow restless and rise up and move westward again and again.

  Turning back toward the fire I was stopped by Heath’s voice “… killed a man in a duel. The man said something about Chantry settin’ the fire himself, an’ Chantry challenged him. The fellow was a loudmouth, just blowing off with a lot of loose talk. He tried to back out, but Chantry wouldn’t let him. Told him to make his fight or he’d shoot him like the dog he was. The man fought. Chantry let him shoot first, and the bullet burned Chantry’s neck … drew blood. Then Chantry shot him.”

  “Kill him?”

  “That he did, and d’ you know where the bullet hit him?”

  “In the mouth,” Solomon Talley said. “He shot him in the mouth.”

  Heath turned on him. “You’ve heard the story, then?”

  “No,” Talley replied grimly, “but that’s a hard man yonder. Besides,” he added, “that’s what I’d o’ done.”

  For a few minutes I stood silent, letting the talk turn to other things, and then I started forward, making enough noise so they would know I was nearby.

  They knew then, and I wished they did not. There are times when to be just nobody at all is the best thing. All that was past I wanted to forget.