CHAPTER ONE
1
MOSES FRANKLIN STOPPED HIS BAY ATOP A SHORT RISE of ground along the upper edge of a deep arroyo, lifted his hat, and scratched his head as he surveyed the rolling carpet of grass that lay before him. The horizon was broken only by the odd mesa or widely spaced clump of juniper or scrub cedar in the shimmering distance. He was too far away to tell if one of the flat mesas supported a small copse of pecan trees that marked the crossing for which he searched. Under a seamless sky so blue that it appeared to be transparent, the tall grass waved beneath a gentle spring breeze. In places where the prairie rose a bit, bright blues, reds, and yellows of wildflowers broke the tan landscape in a dazzling display which would have delighted the human eye under ordinary circumstances. But to the experienced vision of the Negro scout, who now pulled a canteen from his tack and unscrewed the top for a brief sip, the flowers were foreboding. He knew they meant that spring—Comanche Spring—wasn’t yet over.
Replacing his canteen on its thong, he readjusted his .55-caliber Springfield “High Hammer” across his saddle and continued to study the terrain before him for familiar signs. There were none, and his forehead wrinkled. With a late spring he didn’t expect to see the usual great herds of buffalo traversing the southwestern prairies, but there should have been some deer and antelope, lots of antelope. He had seen no game at all for several days. In fact, he recalled as he stood up in his stirrups and strained to see as far as he could, he hadn’t spotted much game at all since leaving Saint Jo three weeks before. That worried him, for if he was confused, he knew the Comanche, who depended on the buffalo and antelope for life itself, were also. And if, as Moses suspected, white men were somehow at the bottom of the game’s—particularly the buffalo’s—disappearance, then the Comanche were going to be more than confused. They were going to be plenty angry.
He removed his hat once again and placed it on the saddle’s pommel while he untied a bandanna and wiped a blanket of sweat from his brow. It wasn’t hot, or anything like hot, but he had been sweating consistently all morning. His skin tingled in fear of what he knew lurked beyond—or perhaps in—the buffalo grass that caressed his horse’s belly. A quiet, hollow terror had taken up residence in his chest ever since the wagon train in the arroyo behind him had struggled across the Pease River two days ago. It had not eased any as he continued to guide them north and west toward the creek ford, where he knew fresh water and fish would be available to provision them for the next leg of their journey to Santa Fe.
This was his fifth excursion across the North Texas plains in as many years, his fifth attempt to guide a wagon train safely from East Texas to the next jumping-off place for points west. Normally, he tried to be across the Pease by the first of April, to be high up on the Canadian by the middle of May. But the vomiting sickness had hit this train on the banks of the Trinity, delaying them for a month, and it was late April before they even got past Saint Jo, the last real town between the cattle trails of East Texas and the Pease. Moses knew well that the tribes who ruled the hunting ground between the “Indian Line” that ran from the abandoned community of Henrietta on the Red River all the way down to Mexico would no longer be safely north in Kansas and Indian Territory. By now they would have ranged along their traditional paths south, after the herds and cattle and horses of white settlements just west of the safety of the Army’s forts. Unless he could move the wagons rapidly across the Southern Plains, he knew he stood to lose everything.
Ideally and with luck, he could still have made a relatively safe trip of it. By hugging the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River and camping in the arroyos and gullies that ran near the sandy river until they climbed up onto the treeless tabletop of the plains, he felt he could avoid all but small hunting parties. And if they could make the barren flatness of the eastern Llano Estacado and the banks of the Canadian by June, he believed, they could ease their way into the barren wastes of New Mexico north of Fort Sumner. Then the short run to Santa Fe could be done quickly and in relative safety.
But he had had no luck at all, and the search for fresh water and game had led them more and more south. They had moved in a kind of weird tacking motion from Saint Jo to abandoned Henrietta, across the forks of the Wichita to the Pease, a motion that ate up days and eventually placed the wagon train directly in the path of the migrating buffalo and the Comanche. Only there weren’t any buffalo, and Moses upbraided himself for even thinking of undertaking such a dangerous journey so late in the season.
In his previous expeditions, aside from the odd hunting party of Wichita or Cherokee and the skulking, hostile Kiowa, he had rarely seen any Indians at all. Even when he made his way back after delivering his trains safely to Santa Fe, he rarely saw any fresh signs. By late summer, they were way over to the southwest, along the border of southern New Mexico, where the alkali flats forbade enough water and game to sustain life for long. From those inhospitable climes, he knew, the Comanche would raid towns and individual ranches. Then they would disappear up onto the flat emptiness of a wasteland that was marked by so few recognizable landmarks that even veteran travelers often became confused and lost.
This year, however, the game’s disappearance was matched by the oddness of the weather. Almost every night, just as the sun dipped beyond the mesas on the horizon, great thunderheads swarmed out of the southwest and angrily bombarded the train with hail and quick, drenching rain. That made camping in depressions and arroyos dangerous, which meant that they had spent almost every night on the open prairie with the thirty wagons drawn up tight together and weary men sitting atop them with ‘73 Winchester .44s, Sharps .50s, and Henry sixteen-shooters across their laps, watching the dark and listening to coyote yowls in the wakes of the tremendous storms. But in spite of the rains, the land seemed to be in the grip of a terrible drought. Overall, the scout realized as he thought of the rocky creek beds they had crossed, it had been a dry spring compared to previous years, when the late-afternoon storms could leave the entire prairie awash with puddles and hidden bogs and sloughs that could mire wagons and break ox and mule legs. This year, in spite of the near-nightly storms, the prairie was tinder-dry, and the grass beneath his horse’s hooves covered ground that was often stone-hard and creased with the memories of previous years’ spring rains.
Now, finding the creek ford at the bottom of the mesa with the copse of pecan trees became even more important. Without it, Moses knew, they would have to veer southwest some thirty or forty miles, with no sweet water he knew of and with much rougher country between them and the high plains.
The people on the wagon train that labored up a gully behind where the scout sat on his bay had been plagued by problems other than the weather. The vomiting sickness had only been a preamble to other diseases, less serious perhaps but equally debilitating, that had stalled the trek continually since the setout from Jefferson, Texas. Strange fevers struck, ran their course, and then disappeared as suddenly as they had come. Days were lost while the sick were nursed and the season deepened.
Then the Ambrose woman spent two days dying in the process of bearing twins that were too weak, and Moses had been summarily informed by the wagon master, Cleve Graham, to move. They sat by a stagnant water hole until the two babies followed their mother in death. The people ignored the black scout’s advice and drank and cooked with water from the rotten hole. Almost all of them came down with an epidemic of skitters so bad that they lost another three days while folks squatted in the bushes and lay about on rugs and bedding, too weak to do much more than crawl off whenever the belly cramps became too much for them. Some of them were suffering yet, and Moses suspected that more than half the casks on the train were still at least half full of the contaminated water.
And then there had been the Wichita. They were as fierce as their neighbor tribes, but they preferred to steal what they couldn’t trade for rather than try to take it by force. Years of experience in dealing with white men had taught them respect for Colt’s revolver and the Winchester rifle, especially when they were in the hands of able veterans of Grant’s and Lee’s armies.
But some threadbare blankets and a half-dozen scrawny beeves had bought the train safe passage through Wichita country for the most part, and except for some minor pilfering—horses were well guarded every night, rope-corralled, not merely staked out; Moses had insisted on that—the Wichita had proved only a minor nuisance and partial delay as their trading parties stopped the settlers from time to time to brandish their lances and feathers and look threatening.
But Wichita were Wichita. Comanche were Comanche. Moses replaced his broad-brimmed hat on top of the graying black velvet that covered his skull and felt again the uncomfortable itch that always came whenever Indians were nearby. No man he knew understood the Comanche. Unlike their rivals and sometimes allies, the Kiowa, they were nomadic warriors, loosely organized, secretive, and no tribe could match them when it came to feral warfare. They didn’t band together in large villages, and they seldom followed a main chief for long. Their medicine was primitive and followed no patterns anyone had been able to figure out. They shunned treaties and meetings with the whites, particularly the tejanos, whom they distinguished from the Americans with whom they had briefly and tentatively dealt before. They traditionally kept their own council and relied on no one but themselves. If they followed any code or cult, Moses thought, it was nothing more than pure evil, and if they worshiped a god, it was Satan himself. They were not “red niggers,” they were “red devils.” Their very name, he had learned years before, meant “enemy,” or “those against us,” and their sign-language symbol for themselves was a snake.
Moses rinsed his mouth carefully with the brackish water from his canteen once more and spat a glob of it onto the dusty cactus plants clinging to the edges of the arroyo. With a carelessness he didn’t actually feel, he pulled makings from his pocket and rolled a cigarette. He wondered dimly how many of the men in the wagons behind him had any idea how to use the rifles they kept so bravely across their knees and under their wagon seats. Some of them, he knew, were veterans of the war, and some of them were experienced woodsmen from the forests of the North and South. But many of them were farmers and city people, helpless babies by comparison, whose experience with firearms was limited if it existed at all.
He dragged a match across a brass rivet on his pommel and lit his smoke, careful to snuff the flame with his fingers before dropping it into the powder-dry grass beneath him. Over the hazy blue smoke of the cigarette, he gazed again into the sunwashed horizon, but he still saw nothing. That worried him more than if he saw a whole war party moving in the distance. Not to see them could mean that they saw him all too clearly, and this train of sick, tired settlers would probably look like easy coup for even the smallest band of Indians, particularly if they were Comanche.
He spurred his mare and rode back down to the lead wagon, where Cleve Graham rode uneasily on the rocking driver’s platform. Although he didn’t look it, Graham was a hard man. Moses had learned much about him by listening to Frank Herbert, Graham’s only real friend on the train. A former officer in the Union Army, Graham had lost a hand at Shiloh and a son at Gettysburg. Graham, Moses understood, blamed all colored men for causing the war that left him and the nation crippled and bitter. But the war had ended nearly ten years ago, and Moses’s reputation as a quality scout with enough savvy to guide over a hundred greenhorns across Texas was strong enough that Graham had temporarily put aside his prejudices and hired him. Of course, Moses realized, it was so late in the season by the time Graham organized his train that he had little choice in the matter of scouts. Only a handful would agree to cross Indian country in the first place, especially when the goal was distant Santa Fe, and probably none but Moses would have agreed to go so late in the year. It was a foolish thing to do, and Moses had wished for a chance to take back his commitment a thousand times since leaving Jefferson.
From Santa Fe they would go on to Oregon, Moses assumed, but it was none of his business, and he had never asked Graham about it. He was hired to take them to Santa Fe, and from there they were on their own. Moses had never had any interest beyond the Texas plains. It was what he knew, and he was wise enough never to try to do more than he knew he could do safely. This was to be his last wagon train to guide across anyhow. He was planning to return to these same prairies after he delivered the Graham party to Santa Fe and carry out a particular plan that might make life a bit more worthwhile for him and some of the Negroes back in Jefferson. The plan would be in motion soon, had, in fact, started already, and by the end of June or July at the latest, he hoped it would be a reality.
As he guided his bay up to Graham’s wagon, however, his dream was far from his mind. His dark eyes scanned the waving grass all around him. They had more than a few dangerous miles to cross before he could concentrate on what might be. He was worried, and the white man could see it.
“What’s wrong?” Graham shouted at him. The creaking, jangling noise of the tack almost covered his voice. The heavy oxen swayed through the rutted arroyo and pulled the buckboard wagon through the muddy trail that had crusted over only a few hours before. The wagon’s weight broke through the dusty cover and the wheels sank into the ruddy mire beneath. “Indians?” Graham shifted his Winchester across his lap, his finger feeling for the trigger guard.
“I didn’t see none,” Moses shouted back. “But I got a feelin’ they’s there.”
Graham snorted and cast a look behind his wagon to make sure no one could hear the scout, though the roar of the wagon noise made it unlikely that even a passenger in his own wagon could understand any of their conversation.
“If you didn’t see them, then I’m not goin’ to worry about it,” Graham shouted. He replaced the Winchester on the platform’s seat.
“No,” Moses said. He reined his horse up to ride parallel with Graham, then he silently added, You probably won’t.
He removed his hat again and scratched furiously at his head. The itch was now chronic. He had learned long ago that what he couldn’t see could very well kill him.
2
MOSES FRANKLIN WAS BORN A SLAVE IN VIRGINIA ON the plantation of Dominique Franklin, a tobacco grower who also had the special distinction to Moses of being his natural father. When the boy was sixteen, Franklin’s plantation began to fail, and he tried to overcome the devastation of bad management by selling off his slaves. Moses was, therefore, sold away from his mother and two siblings to Joseph Grierson, a large, kindly man who was taking his family and his newly purchased slaves to the new community of Jefferson, which had been built along Trammel’s Trace and Big Cypress Bayou in Cass County, Texas.
Moses went along with the slave’s bewildered resignation. He was put to work, not farming cotton and cane in the iron-rich soil around Jefferson as he had expected, but rather as a kind of combination gun bearer and tracker and, to his surprise, companion to Mr. Grierson. The master was more interested in hunting deer and small bear than in seeing his plantation prosper, which it did anyway under the supervision of a competent overseer, Evan Carpenter.
When Texas followed South Carolina and the first six states of the Confederacy of the South into secession, Mr. Grierson’s interest turned away from the game around Jefferson toward the blue-coated Yankees who made such easy targets at Manassas and Fredericksburg, but Moses was well past twenty by then, and he had learned to use the variety of hunting weapons his master owned.
Left at home while his white master fought alongside John Bell Hood, Moses worked on his art as best he could in spite of the hostile and cruel surveillance of Henry Thomas, a one-eyed, gimpy-legged overseer Mr. Grierson had left in charge of his plantation and black property when Carpenter followed Grierson and enlisted in the Confederate Army.
Thomas’s attitude toward Moses was a combination of envy and distrust. No Negro was allowed to touch firearms on most plantations, let alone go hunting. But times were hard for everyone as the Union blockade tightened and New Orleans fell to Federal troops, and Moses’s provision of fresh meat for everyone—even though he was now forced to go into the forest shackled with a heavy chain and guarded by a white man, a moronic giant who had the mind of a child and whom the slaves called Slobberin’ Jimmy—overrode Thomas’s judgment.
Henry Thomas was a cruel man. Even after laboring on the docks or unloading the big Rebel river crafts in the East Texas humidity and heat, the Negroes were often set to work in the Grierson fields until late at night, sometimes doing their planting and hoeing under lanternlight. Moses often found himself wandering out at twilight with a rifle in his hand and the knowledge in his heart that if he came back without meat, he would be beaten.
When the Union general Nathaniel P. Banks led an army up the Red River from New Orleans in an attempt to take Jefferson and seal the rest of the Confederacy off from Texas, Thomas enlisted. In spite of his infirmities, he was welcomed by the volunteers, who were gathering to meet and fight the large numbers of seasoned Union troops, who were marching up a narrow Louisiana trace toward Caddo Lake.
Moses was taken along as Thomas’s personal servant—although the crippled overseer was given only the rank of sergeant—since the young slave knew more about guns than the overseer did and could make sure that Thomas had a loaded rifle handy. When the two armies clashed at Mansfield, Louisiana, Thomas was one of the first Rebel soldiers to fall. He died before he ever saw a single Union trooper, and Moses suddenly found himself scurrying to the rear, cradling Mr. Grierson’s precious weapons in his arms, anxious to get them back to their comfortable racks in the Grierson plantation home before someone took them away from him.
It took him two days to make the journey back to Jefferson. There he and the other slaves continued to work in town on the docks and in the factories and industries. Slobberin’ Jimmy, who was totally incapable of filling Thomas’s job in every department except personal cruelty and, perhaps, greed, continued to work them hard and to skim money off their rental fees for his own filthy pockets.
Mr. Grierson returned from the war in May of with a shattered kneecap and the conviction that the Cause was lost. He never asked anyone in Moses’s hearing about Thomas’s fate, but he fired Slobberin’ Jimmy when he learned that the boy had been making his fortune by renting out the plantation’s Negroes and keeping more than half the fees for himself.
When the news of Kirby-Smith’s surrender of the Trans-Mississippi Department reached the county, Grier-son called all the slaves together in the plantation’s door-yard and announced that they were freed and could go where they pleased. The Grierson slaves weren’t sure if they should be jubilant or grieving. None of them had ever beheld such a bewildering concept as an independent future, and to find themselves suddenly thrown out into the world was more frightening than inviting.
Grierson waited a few moments for the murmuring to die down, and then he offered to let them stay on the plantation and work for him as freedmen, for pay. Initially all of them agreed to do so. But by the end of the week, many had left. By the end of the year, most of them were living in abject poverty or had wandered off from Jefferson, never to be heard from again.
Moses, however, stayed and continued to hunt with his invalided former master. He drew fair wages from Joseph Grierson, and from time to time he actually thought the old man showed him more than the polite respect he offered to the several whites who now worked for him. Sometimes, he thought, there was genuine affection between them. Although Grierson never presented him with any of the guns as his own, Moses came to feel that they shared the weapons in a kind of joint ownership. Grierson bought them and paid for them, but Moses cared for them, often fired them more than Grierson did. By the time almost two years separated the end of the war and his freedom from their regular trips, now expanded to the west, out beyond the Indian Line to hunt buffalo, antelope, bear, cougar, and other wild game, Moses’s marksmanship bad been complimented so much by his former master that he believed the rifles were as much his as the old man’s.
When Grierson died in 1867, he left nothing to his former possession: not a pistol or even a shotgun. He did leave a good pension to the crabbed and antique elder sister of the cruel Thomas, because, Grierson had often said, Thomas “gave his life in a great victory for the preservation of Texas, Jefferson, and the Cause against the mean aggression of Federal tyranny.” And he also left a nice sum to the idiot Jimmy, whom, Moses heard, he regretted turning out so abruptly, given the “boy’s”—Jimmy was well over thirty when Grierson returned—“mental incapacities and unfortunate lack of common sense.”
Moses, of course, was not present for the reading of the will, but Daniel, a house servant, told Moses about the phrases he overheard while he carried in sweetmeats and tea to the bereaved widow and Grierson daughters as they heard the lawyer read the old man’s final testament.
The hunter and provider for the Grierson table and companion to the old master had not expected Grierson to leave him anything, at least not money. But the idea of Thomas’s sister—of whom, prior to the bequeathal, no one but Grierson was aware—receiving a pension struck him as cruel and wrong, even more wrong than his leaving any sum whatsoever to the drooling monster Jimmy. Moses could name ten black families in Marion County which had at least one member who possessed a permanent reminder of the cowardly overseer’s whips, brands, canes, and knives. Moses’s own back was not without marks to remind him of Thomas’s and Jimmy’s cruelty.
He went directly from Daniel’s ironic giggle as he related what he had overheard to the large French windows that opened into Grierson’s study. There he waited until the family rose and went to show the lawyer out. Then he removed a Henry rifle from its mount over the fireplace and took a brace of Colt’s Army revolvers from the glass case where they were stored. Thus endowed with the unintentional legacy of his former master, he slipped out through a window and left the Grierson plantation forever.
He made but one stop before he departed Marion County on his way west. In the dooryard of Slobberin’ Jimmy’s cabin, deep in the pine and cypress woods some five miles from the Grierson house, the former slave called out the drooling white man and used the Henry he had removed from Grierson’s house to put a bullet into the cruel overseer’s belly. He then stole Jimmy’s horse and saddle and three dollars in paper money before setting out to find his own particular freedom.
3
MOSES WANDERED OUT TO THE INDIAN LINE FOR A while. He found that his life as a man of color among hard-handed white trackers and traders wasn’t much better than his life as a slave or hired man had been until he managed to persuade a Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Sturgis to hire him as a civilian scout for the Sixth Cavalry out of Fort Griffin. There he applied what he had already learned from Grierson about the plains and added knowledge of the Indians who continued to threaten white settlements from San Antonio north to the border of the Indian Territory.
He rode with experienced Indian fighters and plainsmen who had lived with various tribes, and he met Texas Rangers, who sat around the campfires and bunkhouses and told stories about their experiences riding with Rip Ford and Ben McCullouch, about fighting with John Bell Hood and Albert Sidney Johnston, about fights with Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and other tribes of the Southern Plains. Moses found that the Rangers and white scouts hated him for being black as much as they hated the Indians they fought. But he also found that by hunkering down in his blankets and remaining quiet and as invisible as possible, he could eavesdrop on their campfire stories and learn what they knew. By carefully separating the brag from the balance of fact that each story contained, Moses soon learned the necessary basics of dealing with Indians, whether fighting with them or parlaying with them, and, more important, he learned how to avoid them.
After almost three years with the Army, during which he scouted for elements of the U.S. Cavalry operating out of Forts Concho and Richardson, Moses guided his first group of settlers from Jacksboro, the ramshackle town that had grown up on Lost Creek near Fort Richardson, to Santa Fe. The wagon master didn’t want to hire him, but Moses was the only experienced plainsman available when their previously engaged scout managed fatally to lose a knife fight.
Moses was apprehensive about the job. But he learned enough on the first expedition to decide to try it again. For a man who was both smart and careful, he told himself, the risk was minimal.
This time, he knew he needed to go to a place where trains were being organized for western expeditions, and the best place he knew of was Jefferson. It had been three years since his murder of Jimmy, but he still worried that if he returned to Marion County, his appearance might remind someone that Moses’s disappearance and the theft of Grierson’s guns had all taken place at the same time that Jimmy was shot down in his doorway. No one he had met from Jefferson had so much as mentioned any search for a Negro. If the sheriff or anyone else wanted to track him down, it wouldn’t have been hard, for he had made no attempt to conceal his name. He slipped back into the city one night and presented himself quietly to old friends. All welcomed him back enthusiastically, and none mentioned anything at all about the stolen guns or the idiot overseer. After a week or so, he made bolder inquiries about Jimmy and learned that the prevailing theory was that he was killed by one of the several prostitutes he kept—and sometimes beat—and that the whole matter was history.
Each trip out to the plains gave him confidence. When he returned to the civilization of Jefferson, he felt something called him back to the loneliness of the West, a place where his color seemed to matter less than his ability to use the Winchester ‘66 and Sharps “Big .50” he had purchased out of his earnings. He also bought a fine set of Colt’s .44s, which he wore proudly around Frog Town, Jefferson’s Negro community, attracting admiring looks from groups of young black women who marveled at the success and demeanor of a former slave who now called himself a “frontier scout.”
He passed around the word that he would guide a train of settlers west for a reasonable fee, and he set up shop in Millie’s Saloon, one of the few such Negro establishments in Jefferson. Even though he was colored, Moses found that his image, especially when enhanced with buckskins, chaps, and the new Springfield .55-caliber “High Hammer” rifle he had gotten in trade for the Sharps .50, appealed to some wagon masters. Most soon found how hard it was to locate a talented and experienced man who would work for only about half what white scouts wanted and who wouldn’t steal from them and leave them lost on the Texas plains.
Moses found that the wagon masters who engaged him would be so surprised with his honesty and efficiency that they would reward him with a nice bonus when he delivered them safely and with a minimum of discomfort.
Moses didn’t figure Cleve Graham for a man who would give bonuses, however. Graham had hired him only after desperate attempts to find a reliable white scout. He had approached Moses in Millie’s, and had barely looked at him as he talked, glancing instead at the black faces that studied him from the saloon’s shadows.
Graham was a short man in his late forties. His auburn hair was thinning and cut close. His missing left hand had been replaced by a brass-studded purse of worn leather that covered his wrist. He was obviously uncomfortable facing Moses’s six feet of height, and he eyed the slender figure in buckskins who stood before him with something akin to envy. Graham made his proposition after letting Moses know that he had asked around about him and determined that he was a fair scout, but he was quick to add that he wanted no nonsense. He had people in thirty wagons ready to go, and he wanted to leave soon.
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars in gold,” Graham drawled in his southern Ohioan’s accent. “Fifty now, and—”
“I want a hundred now,” Moses said evenly. He concealed his shock at the man’s brazen manner. No scout, white or black, would do it for twice as much—and they usually wanted it all up front. “An’ a hundred when we get there. You write it out, sign it, an’ give it to me.”
Graham’s mouth fell wide open and his eyes bulged out as he listened to the black man, and his anger grew. “Now, listen here, boy . . .” he started.
“An’ I ‘spect you to buy me a extra horse,” Moses went on in a polite, businesslike tone he knew was infuriating.
“A horse!”
“I normally ask for two,” Moses continued. “But you said it’s a short train, so I guess you got to make your profit.” He waited a moment for that to sink in. “‘Sides, I got a good bay, an’ if things go good, you can buy the spare back when we get there.”
“Now, look.” Graham was working himself up and casting his eyes around the saloon, where faces lit up with amusement. “I ain’t lettin’ some colored boy tell me I have to buy him a horse!”
Moses nodded silently and then went on as if he hadn’t heard him, “An’ I want two hundred rounds of .55s—stored in your wagon—an’ some .44s too. ‘Nother two hundred’ll do.” He turned to his beer and sipped it, but he kept himself erect and in a position of polite deference to the white man.
“No deal!” Graham blurted out. He stood as tall as he could, resting his stumped arm on the bar’s counter. He was dressed in a clawhammer coat and a bright brocade vest over a white shirt with a paisley cravat: the attire of a gambler, or a dude.
Moses wasn’t certain yet how to judge Graham. There was something behind the fancy clothes that suggested that he had more experience than his wardrobe implied. Clearly, he wasn’t a fool, and he required respect, but he was not going to get it just because he was white. Moses had spent too many years on the frontier to give respect where it wasn’t earned.
“I hunt and get the game,” Moses concluded, “but if they’s no game, then I eat what you eat, an’ ”—he paused and leveled his eyes with the white man’s—“I eat with you. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
Graham studied his stump for a few moments. “I got a hundred and twenty folks ready to leave Sunday mornin’.” His tone softened and the anger washed backward from his eyes. He sounded more weary and resigned than anything else. “An’ you’re the only scout available.” He paused and rubbed his beard with his stump. “I don’t like you, and I don’t trust you. But I’ll hire you. I’ll have your money this evenin’.”
“An’ the contract for the rest,” Moses added.
“An’ the contract for the rest.”
“Bring it to Zachariah here.” Moses indicated the wizened bartender, who couldn’t conceal his grin behind his white whiskers. “He reads an’ writes, an’ he’ll keep it till I get back.”
Graham turned away and started out the door, muttering under his breath. Moses stopped him.
“One more thing,” the black scout said quietly but with just a tinge of menace in his voice to let Graham know he was serious. “My name’s Moses. You can call me that.”
Graham lowered his bullet-shaped head and accepted the final condition. The white man, Moses sensed, was not a coward, and he understood a threat when he heard one, even when it came from a Negro, and he evened his voice.
“I’ll watch my mouth,” he said. “I can’t account for the others, though.” He waited as Moses nodded, then he added, “But you’ll call me ‘Mister,’ an’ you’ll stay away from the women. There’s no coloreds in the train.”
Moses nodded and walked over to where Graham stood with his feet slightly parted and his coat open to reveal his own revolver and stuck out a gloved hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Graham took it briefly. Then he was gone.
That had been months ago, Moses mused as his horse picked its way up the buffalo path which led out of the arroyo up onto the rise. He and Graham had more or less gotten along, but there existed a tension between them that seemed to grow with every mile they rode.
4
MOSES FRANKLIN WAS USED TO THE CONTEMPT OF WHITE employers and white men in general. Most of them wouldn’t take any advice from him until he had proved himself somehow, by bringing in game or avoiding disaster. But he rarely had serious trouble with them. After they put the civilization of East Texas behind them, they soon became dependent on what the black scout knew, and he tried to make it easy on them by staying to himself and dealing only with the wagon master and any colored mule skinners they employed.
He had taken this train, like so many others, by Saint Jo, Texas, a crossroads for the cattle trails from the southern part of the state, well away from the Comanche. He sat on the ground and watched Graham and his apparent sidekicks, Jack Sterling and the semi-idiot Frank Herbert, Graham’s loquacious friend, go inside the Stonewall Jackson Saloon along with others, all under the hostile glare of Virgil Hollister and a handful of the settlers who apparently disapproved of such establishments.
Moses knew that ordinarily a train’s scout would accompany the wagon master inside a saloon or store they might encounter along the way. He knew from things he had heard and observed that a relationship often developed between the settlers and the scout that was sometimes like a congregation and its minister or a family and its father. But he was aware that to the folks of this tiny nomadic community on the rolling prairie, he was just another nigger boy for hire. He felt lucky that they let him water his horse at the well in the center of town and sit on the grass on the square across from the saloon. He probably wouldn’t have tried even that except that one of the settlers, old Anthem, had walked along with him, admiring his bay and rambling on about quality horseflesh. Then Anthem had joined Graham, and Moses was alone once more. Such exclusion should hurt, but he had felt it before and so often that he hardly thought of it as he sucked on a stem of Johnsongrass and contemplated the trail ahead.
He saw Jack Sterling stalk out of the saloon and slam his son up alongside his head as he passed him for no apparent reason other than he wanted to hit someone. As the boy reeled backward from his father’s blow, Sterling headed out toward where his cattle had been left to graze. Thinking that the white man might come back and cause trouble for anyone he found, Moses raised himself, mounted up, and rode down to the river, where he bathed himself. It was best, he learned, to stay out of the way of white men like Jack Sterling when they were in a rage.
Moses had no ambitions to gain the respect of all or even some of the white men on the frontier. But he was pleased when the wagon masters for whom he had worked the past several years finally came around to giving him his fair due, some even praising him in front of other white men who had scouted or who fashioned themselves to be experienced plainsmen.
But this train was another matter, start to finish. Graham thought he knew more than Moses did about everything. He was more experienced than the average boss Moses had worked for, but he still was no plainsman, no veteran wagon master. He had discarded his fancy clothes in favor of rougher garments, had replaced his plug hat with a big, floppy head cover that kept the sun from his eyes, and he handled his team with the same rough determination with which he handled most of the people on the train. He argued with the scout about every decision, no matter how small, and when Moses was wrong, Graham brayed like a jackass. When Moses was right, Graham sulked and usually took the credit. Still, as the last white settlements on the Indian Line faded behind them and the possibility of hostile Indians steadily grew, Graham came more and more to rely on Moses’s expertise, and he grudgingly admitted, even in Moses’s hearing, that he was giving himself and the security of the whole train over to a colored scout whom he wouldn’t even have spoken to under other circumstances.
Moses turned his mare around and leaned back in his saddle. Behind him, Graham’s wagon struggled up the path to the level ground. It was a buckboard, one of several in the train, and in spite of its lighter weight, it had difficulty negotiating rougher parts of the trail. So far, so good, Moses thought. He again searched the horizon for any sign of life, animal or human, and contemplated what the best plan would be for the night ahead. Off to the south, just beyond the horizon, he knew lay what the white man called Medicine Mountain, a triangular pile of rocks that improbably rose out of the rolling prairie and was held sacred by the Comanche. It was infested with rattlesnakes, scorpions, wolves, and the occasional cougar, but the Comanche medicine men liked to go there in the spring and make magic, obtain their puha, which would guarantee a good hunting season or—Moses shuddered again with the old fear and a reminder of his itch—success in war.
In the past few years, the Comanche had been relatively docile. There had been the usual number of attacks on wagon trains, and some raiding parties had ventured deep into East Texas, well inside the Indian Line, to steal livestock and other goods. But the Comanche had signed no treaties, or at least the Quahidi hadn’t. Moses hoped that the train was still early enough in the season to sneak across the high Texas plains and make New Mexico before the Comanche came so far south.
He had good reason to cling to such hopes. He had run across the remnants of wagon trains that had met with Indian disaster. The cherished goods so carefully packed in the backs of the big, clumsy wagons were strewn across the grass and scrub cedar, and the blackened skeletons of the forlorn settlers who defended the possessions with their lives offered a hideous account of the tortures they had suffered before they died. Some of the naked rib cages would boast a withering arrow shaft or lance, or perhaps here and there a skull would be crushed or smashed by a stone ax or flint-edged tomahawk—those were the lucky ones, the ones who had died fighting and whose worst fate was to have their hair lifted as a memorial to their courage. But others, often mere children’s bones, would be cruelly tied to the wagons’ sides and wheels, the burned-out carcasses of the Conestogas telling the tale of how they died in flames, with their private parts cut off and stuffed in their still-living mouths, their eyelids sliced away so gnats and mosquitoes could feed directly on the exposed eyeballs, their throats cut and abdomens eviscerated in the unique way the Comanche knew which could keep a victim alive for hours—days, even—while he slowly bled to death and watched helplessly as his friends were skinned alive, his women repeatedly raped before being killed or taken off and wived to their captors.
It was no wonder at all to Moses why the white man could mutilate an Indian corpse after viewing such devastation to his own people. Nothing a white man could do to a dead Indian could ever match what the Comanche could do to a live human being.
MOSES WATCHED YOUNG JASON Sterling driving his father’s cattle up the trail behind his wagon. He strongly suspected that unlike the handful of scrawny beeves which others had tethered to their wagons when the train left Jefferson, these cattle were stolen, particularly since Sterling hadn’t shown up with them until the train was well away from Jefferson and the reach of the Marion County law. But he had no proof of that. So completely did Sterling hold Moses in contempt that the white man never spoke to him at all, even indirectly, and when Moses caught Sterling eyeing him it was through steel-gray hatred. Moses’s only consolation was that the wagon master seemed to hate Jack Sterling as much as Sterling hated Moses.
Stolen or not, the cattle were important. They were all that was left of the entire train’s beef, and they were left mainly because Sterling had followed Moses’s advice not to water them from the stagnant hole. Sterling boldly announced his plans of starting a herd with them. He had no intention of allowing them to be butchered for food, even if he and the rest of the train were starving. Experience had taught Moses that a man guarded stolen goods with greater care than he would things he had come by honestly. The last four wagons, including the one with the hogs and another that was loaded with chickens in homemade wire crates, followed Sterling’s small herd.
Moses put his bay into a canter to catch up with Graham’s wagon, now almost over the rim and out of sight.
5
MOSES CAUGHT UP TO GRAHAM’S WAGON AND RODE awhile beside him in silence. At this point, the prairie rolled gently, but the driver and the teams had to work constantly, holding the wagons back as they went down and straining to jerk them forward as they went up, everyone sweating and cursing all the while.
Even so, the way was much easier than it had been. Often the train would come to a gully only five or six feet across. The sides would descend sharply to a loamy bottom some ten or twelve feet below the level of the prairie. For a man on a good horse, it would have been only a short jump. Even a man on foot could leap over some of these odd gaps in the earth. But for a wagon and team they might as well have been twenty feet across and a hundred feet deep.
The result was side trips. From Saint Jo on, Moses never could remember the exact routes he had taken before. He couldn’t read or write and had no idea of how to make a map that he or anyone else could follow. He relied on landmarks, and as the traceless prairie rolled on to the horizon, there were fewer and fewer of those to count on.
The rocks, in fact, seemed to get worse with each trip and worse yet with each mile this particular train traveled. Already, five of the wagons had broken down and delays caused by their repair had slowed progress. And it was because of Graham’s insistence that one particular crossing was too dangerous that they had tacked north for five miles and been forced to make camp near the bad water.
They had received little relief at the falls on the Big Wichita, where a strange tarpaulin-clad family named Buntin traded a few needed articles and wagon parts while the old man sat with a shotgun on his lap atop a stinking pile of buffalo hides and eyed Moses and the train sharply. The falls themselves were running mud down their short cascade, testimony to the effects of the short, lightning quick thunderstorms that blew violently, boomed and crashed with fury but hardly refreshed the droughty prairies to the West, and no sweet water was to be had there or much of anywhere since they put the tiny settlement behind them a week ago.
At the top of the next rise, the ground leveled off, and Moses galloped up a few yards and sent his dark eyes across the golden grass of the landscape, looking for the bright feathers of a war party gathering to attack. But he really knew better. They wouldn’t come at them like that, not across a naked plain in the bright morning light. They would wait until the train stopped for the night, forted up the wagons, and posted sentries. Then, maybe at sunset or dawn, they would come. They liked to wait until the whites felt secure, then hit them hard, conquer them, and maybe take several days torturing and looting and raping. It was better coup that way, bigger puha, more powerful medicine.
If the braves were lucky, and they often were, they would sometimes discover some whiskey in a train, and then the party could really start. In this train, the black scout knew, they would find more than some whiskey. It was more of a rolling saloon than a wagon train full of settlers, he told himself, even though he had not seen one man take a drink from one of the kegs strapped to almost every wagon’s side. Aside from the liquor they had purchased and heartily consumed in Saint Jo, the only open drinks taken since they left Jefferson had come from bottles of rotgut they kept secreted beneath their wagon seats. It was odd, he mused, to have so many kegs of whiskey—heavy kegs too—and not to break one out, even when people were sick and in need of it. But Graham acted as if the whole train were as dry as a powder house, and given the nasty effects that so much whiskey could have on men, white or red, Moses was just as glad.
Moses wet his lips. The horizon was free of clouds. A lone hawk, or maybe an eagle, circled off in the distance against a sky so blue it hurt him to look at it, but he knew as well as he knew anything that the afternoon would bring another thunderstorm, maybe a cyclone—they had seen several in the past few days, raggedly dancing and weaving across the vast distances—and they would have to pull up for the night in the open once again.
He rode back to Graham, who was loudly cursing his oxen and still using his whip, although the team was having no real trouble pulling the wagon over the suddenly flat ground. He’s nervous, too, Moses thought, but he won’t admit it. He doesn’t trust me worth a pile of mule shit.
“We’ll keep headin’ north by nor’west,” he shouted to Graham, who looked at him in the middle of cursing his team. “We might make the crossin’ by nightfall, if we’re lucky.”
He hoped to spot the mesa with the copse of trees very soon, which would mean that Blind Man’s Creek was within reach. Unlike most runs and creeks in the area, it was deep enough for fish to be plentiful, and because of a spring in the mesa’s base, it also provided potable water and a chance to refit and rest before reaching the high plains. It was one of the few landmarks Moses counted on completely.
He brought each of the trains he guided to it without fail and always looked forward to it as a sort of halfway point. The mesa was high but unique—no more than a mile long—and easy to spot. The copse of pecan trees just as easy. The Comanche paid little attention for the water ran too fast to attract deer, buffalo, or antelope; and Comanche, like many other Indians, wouldn’t eat a fish or a frog if the alternative was starvation.
Moses looked on the creek as a blessing. The promise of fresh catfish and perch was inviting to a train that had survived on dried or salted beef for two weeks, since the game had mysteriously disappeared, and if they pushed hard, Moses believed, they could make the crossing before dark. Because of the combination of almost nightly violent storms and the especially dry season, he had no way of knowing whether the stream would be moderately full, flowing fast, or easy to traverse.
Moses pulled his left foot from his stirrup and vaulted deftly onto the wagon seat next to Graham, trailing his reins and loosely lashing them to the wagon’s brake handle. The wagon master wrinkled his nose and turned his head slightly away. Moses ignored him and tried to explain his plan without having to shout over the creaking and groaning of the wagon and team that pulled it.
“Then we ain’t stoppin’ for dinner?” Graham asked without looking at Moses.
“If we do, we’ll likely not make it ‘fore dark. An’ I ain’t too anxious to get caught out here in the open right now.”
Graham turned his bearded face toward Moses and searched for a motive other than the one stated. “Folks need to eat. Need a hot meal,” he said. “This is hard work, an’ they’re not feelin’ too good anyhow with all the sickness they’ve had.”
Moses wanted to tell him that the most recent “sickness” was their own damned fault, but he kept his mouth shut. He and Graham had been over this all before, and the wagon master had convinced everyone on the train as well as himself that the fault of the bad water was Moses’s alone. He shrugged.
“I reckon it’s ‘nother five miles or so ‘fore we spot the mesa,” he said, “an’ we ain’t makin’ good time with these beasts. We’d be doin’ better if ever’body had mules.”
He had tried to tell Graham that mules made better draft animals on the rolling, arid plains of Texas, but the wagon master was too hardheaded to listen to Moses’s advice. So only about half the wagons were pulled with teams of the stubborn, long-eared animals, while the others labored behind the clumsy, perpetually thirsty oxen. Graham had provided the oxen through a private contract that had, Moses figured, paid for his wagon and team as well as Moses’s salary without dipping too much into the fee he likely charged each family for joining the expedition back in Jefferson.
“So you keep tellin’ me,” Graham said sarcastically, but then he scratched his bearded chin with his stump and thought a moment. “I suppose we could divvy up. Let them with mules stop if they’re a mind to, an’ the rest of us could just keep goin’.”
Moses shook his head, and his eyes swept the horizon again. Gooseflesh rose on his neck at the prospect of what he felt was there but couldn’t see.
“I don’t think we ought to split up.”
Graham braced the reins between his stump and his side while he fished a cigar out of his coat and bit off the end. Spitting the piece over the side, he watched Moses’s study of the landscape. “You still worried about Indians?”
There was no reply from the scout, and Graham found a match in his shirt, struck it on the wagon seat, and applied it to the cigar. “I swear to God, boy,” he said through puffs, “you see Indians behind every blade of grass.” He blew out the match and tossed it overboard and pulled the rifle up closer to him. “I never was afraid of what I couldn’t see. I learned that at Pea Ridge, Shiloh too. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”
Moses didn’t reply, and Graham grabbed up the reins again. Moses wanted to tell him that he would be all right if he could see the Comanche, but he had damned well better learn to be afraid of what he couldn’t see, if he wanted to keep his hair.
“There wasn’t no Indians at Pea Ridge,” he said quietly.
Graham’s gray eyes went hard, and he stared at the black scout. “The hell there wasn’t!” Graham said too loudly. Then he seemed to realize who he was arguing with and only muttered, “How the hell would you know?”
The wagon master jerked a watch loose from his vest and snapped it open. “I reckon we’ll stop for an hour or so. Boil some coffee, eat somethin’, and then get goin’ quick as we can.” He stuffed the watch back into his pocket.
“It’s your scalp,” Moses said as he rose and leaped back into the mare’s saddle. She shied and bucked a bit from the sudden weight, but he reined her back in time to hear Graham’s final word.
“That’s right,” he shouted. “An’ it’s your ass if we get waylaid before we get to that crossin’. You do your job, an’ I’ll do mine, an’ mine’s to boss these wagons an’ kick your black butt if you get out of line. Understand?”
Moses nodded and spurred his horse out ahead of Graham’s wagon.
Just as he reached a point about fifty yards in front of the lumbering oxen, he thought he spotted a flurry of movement in the distance, but he blinked his eyes and it was gone. He removed his hat and rubbed his forehead and face and stared hard at the invisible spot in the grass where he thought he had seen something move.
There was nothing. He looked up. High in the deep blue of the sky a circle of buzzards hovered over something freshly killed, but there was nothing else but the breeze and the ubiquitous grass with its frequent sparkle of wildflowers. Buzzards, sky, grass. He suddenly felt slightly dizzy and wondered if maybe Graham wasn’t right. Maybe a good meal would help. He knew he could use some coffee. He scanned the distance once more and tuned his ears for any sound. Except for the noisy wagons behind him there were no sounds above the hissing of the grass. Out in front of the train, it was as quiet as a graveyard and no less spooky.
After a bit, Graham whistled and the wagons began to pull up. Women descended and boys began gathering dead grass for kindling to make small fires for coffee. Soon the smells of frying bacon and beans drifted across the noonday plains, and the settlers stretched their cramped muscles jolted from the morning’s trek and squatted near the fires to sip their coffee and exchange thoughts.
Graham moved through their small groups, talking quietly about the promise of fresh water and catfish up ahead, and they all showed signs of feeling better. Only a few made quick, shuffling runs into the high grass to relieve themselves, and even these returned mostly with smiles instead of the pale, sick expressions that had haunted the train these past several days. Within a half hour they were all stretched out under the wagons, smoking pipes, catching short naps, and wiping up bacon grease with stumps of unleavened campfire bread.
Moses sat in the shade of his horse about fifty yards away from the wagons and pulled at a piece of jerky he had found in his saddlebag. The smell of food was delicious, but he didn’t want to ask Graham for any of his, not after protesting the stop, and except for official train business, he had yet to venture into the settlers’ midst. The agreement that he would eat what Graham ate and would eat it in his company had been forgotten as soon as the train rolled out of the city limits of Jefferson, and Moses saw no profit in pressing the issue. There were a number of young girls in the party, including Frank Herbert’s wild and strange daughter, who frequently stared at Moses curiously from behind a wagon canvas or pile of crates, and the last thing he needed was a confrontation with an angry father, particularly one who was apparently simple.
Almost as if his thoughts were coming to life, he suddenly heard a young female voice speak behind him.
“Mr. Franklin?”
He turned suddenly, forgetting the horizon that had been the unconscious object of intense study the whole time he chewed the jerked beef, and confronted a pretty girl who stood in her calico dress and offered him a tin cup of coffee.
“My daddy said you might want this,” she said, lowering her eyes away from his intense gaze and reminding him thereby to stand up in the presence of a white woman. He did so, removing his hat and reaching out slowly for the steaming cup.
“Thankee, Ma’am,” he said. “An’ jus’ who might your daddy be?” His drawl lengthened into pure Plantation Niggerese, and he winced with the pain of trying not to speak that way. He knew better, he told himself. Mr. Grierson had seen to that.
“Jack Sterlin’,” she replied. “He said you saved his cattle by warnin’ him ‘bout the bad water, an’ ”—she hesitated—“an’ we’re beholden.” She smiled at him, and Moses felt a warm sexual attraction. He fought it back.
This is a white woman, you fool! What was he thinking of? God, he couldn’t fight back the thought. She was beautiful, nearly perfect. She looked like the girls in some of the paintings he had observed on the Grierson walls, young women who sat around on alabaster benches and were attended by naked winged children while their gossamer-thin garments hung open and revealed milky-white breasts and round inviting buttocks. He flushed deeply.
“That’s my job, Ma’am.”
She wore no bonnet, and her hair was the color of ripe corn. Her eyes seemed to reflect the dark blue purity of the sky behind her. Her hands were folded across her waist, and he found himself studying her graceful fingers as they tapered into squared-off nails that were as clean and white as rain. When she smiled at him again, her mouth creased her cheeks just slightly, not creating dimples really, but attractive vertical lines of happiness that accentuated her beauty.
“Well,” Moses said. “You tell him I thank him. I’m ‘bliged.”
She had started to say something when a fearful voice from the wagons shouted, “Aggie! You get on back here now! I told you not to bother that man.”
She started to turn away. There was something hard behind her eyes, not negative, just firm and determined. She was tall, and she looked older than she was. In spite of her age, this was a woman of experience, he acknowledged, and not all the experience had been good. That was there as well.
He suddenly doubted that Jack Sterling or his strange, ugly, quiet wife had suggested that the girl bring him out a cup of coffee at all. If there ever was a man who hated colored people—or just people in general—it was Sterling. Sterling regarded Graham’s hiring a colored scout as about the most outrageous thing he ever heard of, and he wasn’t shy about saying so anytime Moses came anywhere near where he might be speaking.
“Say, Miss, uh, Ma’am,” Moses said as she started away, “better take this back.” He handed her the nearly empty tin cup and made every effort to keep from touching her. “An’ I’m truly obliged . . . to your daddy.”
She blushed, took the cup in a slender hand, and then raised her skirts slightly and moved through the grass back to the wagons. Moses watched her go. His breath was short, and he was surprised to find his heart pounding in his ears.