Wind River

by Charles G. West

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

A man's two worlds are about to collide in this classic western from Charles G. West...

Robert Allred was born to a white family who abandoned him. Discovered by the Cheyenne, he was raised as one of their own, earning the name Little Wolf. When his tribe fights for survival against the U.S. Calvary, Little Wolf is torn between his adopted family and the ones who gave him life—especially when he discovers his long-lost white brother is one of the soldiers marching against him...

“Rarely has an author painted the great American West in strokes so bold, vivid, and true.”—Ralph Compton

Release date: July 1, 1999

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 320

Sample

AMBUSH

Little Wolf raised his arm and was about to signal Black Feather when, suddenly, a figure rose in front of him, directly between him and his Cheyenne friend. His whole nervous system suddenly went numb. The man had been kneeling between two small boulders no more than ten feet in front of him. Little Wolf realized that Black Feather did not see the man. He also realized that the man, an army scout by the look of his buckskin shirt and blue army-issue trousers, was not aware of Little Wolf’s presence behind him. As he watched, the scout slowly raised his carbine and drew down on the unsuspecting Cheyenne.

There was no time for thought. Little Wolf, without consciously thinking about what he was about to do, pulled his stone club from his belt and brought it down across the back of the man’s skull. . . .

Wind River

CHARLES G. WEST

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

“Now what the hell’s ailing you, Sadie?” Squint Peterson dug his heels into the belly of his balky old mule.

The mule had been cranky all morning, more so than usual. She was naturally bad-tempered anyway, so much so that Squint had named her after an ill-mannered prostitute who had accommodated him at the rendezvous in the summer of ’39. He grinned as the thought of that particular union came to mind. It was his first and last rendezvous. He wasn’t much more than a kid, fifteen years old. He had spent the winter trapping on the Yellowstone with his Uncle Bris. In fact, it was his Uncle Bris who introduced him to Sadie, giving her instructions to “Rub the peach fuzz offen him.” He laughed when he recalled his introduction to “the sins of the flesh.” She rubbed it off all right, but not without a gracious plenty moaning. The poor woman had whined and complained the whole time he was trying to satisfy his needs.

“You’da thought she was the Queen of Sheba,” he announced aloud. When he concentrated on it, he could still see her screwed-up expression when he removed his buckskin britches, revealing long underwear that had not seen the light of day for at least two months before that night. The abrupt physical release that followed cost him two prime beaver pelts. She wanted two more, since he hadn’t washed before coming to her tent, but he lied that two were all he had left. He might have been green as a willow switch and rutty as a springtime buck, but he wasn’t about to let go of his hard-earned plews for one go-round on a puffy-faced old whore. She reluctantly admitted him to what she referred to as her paradise, the memory of which lingered with him long after he had journeyed back down the south fork of the Powder. As a matter of fact, he had not been able to rid himself of the last of those memories until that winter’s first freeze when he submerged his buckskins, with him still in them, in an icy mountain stream. He almost froze himself to death but it got rid of the stubborn body lice.

“Matter of fact,” he told the mule, “that was about the last real rendezvous they had.” He shook his head in amazement when he thought about it. “Twenty-four . . . no, twenty-six years ago . . . Damn! Has it been that long?” It was hard to imagine he had spent that many years roaming around these mountains, still retaining his scalp. There had been a couple of times when the threat of Indian trouble had influenced him to head back to civilization for a while, but it never lasted. The longest was a period of two years when he tried his hand at being a lawman. Two years of that was enough to drive any man back to the mountains.

He shifted in the saddle a little to ease the ache in his back. It caused him to ponder his chosen way of life and the future it offered. He liked it best in the mountains, but he wondered if he wasn’t approaching the age where his senses might start to lose their keen edge. And he knew that when you lost that edge, you usually lost your scalp along with it. The thought of his hair decorating the lance of some Sioux warrior didn’t serve to overly frighten him. He just didn’t like the idea of being bested by anyone when it came to surviving by one’s wits. There were a few gray hairs showing up in his beard already but he could still cut sign quick as most Indians and shoot better than any man he’d met so far. He had to admit, however, that it was getting easier to thread a needle if he held it at arm’s length, a fact that accounted for several briar rips in his buckskins that needed repair. Maybe he should give more thought to moving out of hostile country. Maybe it was time to move on to Oregon, a big territory. Squint needed a big country. He was a big man and he required room to stretch out. Well, he decided, I reckon I got a few years yet before I’m ready to turn toes-up.

“Sadie, git!” he admonished and stuck his heels in her again. She seemed reluctant to step across the narrow gully that had been formed by the recent snow and runoff. Had he not been thinking of a prostitute at rendezvous, he might have been more alert to the mule’s skittishness. As it was, he was taken completely by surprise.

He found himself in midair before he had time to realize what had happened. At first he thought he had been attacked by a mountain lion or a bear. He landed on his back, his assailant on top of him. The force of his contact with the hard ground knocked the wind out of him. By then he realized his attacker was a man and, in spite of the pain in his lungs, he struggled to defend himself from the thrust of the knife as it sought to evade his arms and find a vulnerable spot. There was no time for conscious thought. He fought totally by reflex, sparring with the arm that held the knife while pushing against the man’s neck with his other hand. He could hear the man grunt as he strained to gain advantage. Finally his assailant tore himself from Squint’s grasp and raised his knife hand for one desperate thrust. Squint managed to catch his wrist in his hand and block the assault. There was one final attempt to free himself and then the strength seemed to suddenly drain from the man’s arm like water from a busted water bag and Squint realized that he was in complete control. His assailant had given up the fight.

Squint quickly rolled over on top of the man, pinning him to the ground while he fought to regain his breath. His initial thought, as soon as he could breathe again, was to dispatch the red-skinned son of a bitch, for he could now identify him as an Indian, straight to hell. As furious as he was at having been attacked, he was almost equally angry for letting himself be taken like that, like a damned green tenderfoot.

There seemed to be little resistance from his adversary as he shook the knife loose from the Indian’s hand. When he stuck the point against his throat, the man made no effort to defend himself. This lack of resistance caused Squint to hesitate and, since the man no longer seemed an immediate threat, he paused to consider what manner of being he was about to send to the great beyond.

“Why, hell, you ain’t no more than a boy.” He sat back on his heels, still astraddle the Indian. “And a pretty damn scrawny one at that.”

There was no response from the boy. His eyes, dull and lifeless, appeared to focus on some faraway object. It was obvious to Squint that he was prepared to die. In fact, he looked like he was two-thirds gone already. It was evident that he had mustered all his strength for that one desperate attack and, when it failed, it had drained him. Moments before, when they had struggled for possession of the knife, Squint could have killed him without thinking twice about it. Now, as the boy lay helpless beneath him, he was reluctant to dispatch him.

“What the hell did you jump me for?” Squint demanded, not expecting an answer for he spoke in English, even though he could converse a little in several Indian dialects. It was a little late for caution, but he stood up and looked around to make sure the boy had acted alone. At the same time he kept an eye on his assailant, still lying there. Satisfied that he was in no danger of attack from another quarter, he turned his full attention to his captive. It occurred to him that the boy wasn’t dressed too well for the chilly weather that had descended upon the valley for the past few weeks, wearing only a buckskin shirt and leggings. It was then that he noticed the dark crusted spot in the shoulder of the shirt.

“Damn, boy, looks like you been shot or something.” This might explain the boy’s apparent weakness. “Better let me take a look at that.”

When he started to open the shirt over the wound, the boy recoiled in pain and made one feeble effort to resist.

“If I was gonna hurt you, I’da done kilt you,” Squint grunted as he brushed the boy’s hand aside.

The wound was bad. From the looks of it, Squint guessed it was caused by a bullet, and from the way it was all inflamed and swollen, the slug was probably still in it.

“I tell you what,” Squint decided, “that thing looks like it’s festering and I’m gonna have to dig it out of there.”

If he had any objection, the boy didn’t register it. He didn’t have any fight left in him and offered no resistance when Squint took his arms and pulled him up so he could heft him up on his shoulder.

“Boy, you ain’t got no weight to you a’tall.” He marveled that the lad had been able to summon enough force to knock him off his mule. When he realized how light he was, Squint couldn’t help but feel a little sheepish that he had allowed himself to be taken so easily.

“Whoa, Sadie. Hold still.” He spoke softly in an effort to calm the mule. Sadie still seemed a mite skittish, what with the smell of Indian still in her nostrils. Rolling back her eye in an effort to keep the man and his burden in view, she attempted to sidestep her hindquarters away from him. He began to wish he had ridden one of his horses and left the mule back in his tiny corral. “Hold still!” Impatience crept into his tone as he grew tired of following the retreating beast around in a circle, the wounded Indian boy on his shoulder and the mule’s reins in his free hand. Finally he gave the reins a hard jerk to show the reluctant mule who was boss and she kicked her hind legs once in response. But, after registering that one complaint, she settled down and accepted the load Squint slid off his shoulder onto the saddle. She grunted once more in protest when Squint stepped up behind the boy. He gave her a couple of hard kicks with his heels and she broke into a trot for a few yards, then settled down to a slow walk. Squint knew he could kick her until her slats caved in and she would still give him no more than a few yards at a trot before falling back into a walk. She would run, but only when she was with his horses when they ran. So he resigned himself to a leisurely ride back to his camp. “I hope you don’t bleed to death before we git back.” The boy was drooped over Squint’s arm, unconscious or dead, Squint wasn’t sure.

As he settled his body into the rhythm of the mule’s walk, he wondered what manner of creature he was bringing home with him. He wasn’t accustomed to running into anyone this far up in the hills and he didn’t particularly care to have anyone know he was even there, let alone take them to his camp. This was not the first time he had decided to winter in the mountains, instead of going down to one of the settlements until spring. He knew it wasn’t a real good idea to winter in the same camp two years in a row. Somebody might discover it and lie in ambush for you the next year. But this one was so well hidden he figured the odds were good that he was still the only man who had set foot in the small ravine he had stumbled on while tracking a wounded deer, two years ago this spring.

His mind returned briefly to that chilly spring morning. He had jumped the deer accidentally while making his way down through a stand of lodgepole pine, on his way to the river to water his horses. When the buck suddenly sprang from a thicket, it took Squint completely by surprise. He reacted quickly enough to grab his rifle and get off a shot, even though the animal was running directly away from him and didn’t offer much of a target. Squint only had time for one shot. He hit him but he didn’t kill him. The shot caught him in the shoulder. The impact was enough to knock the deer down and roll him over but he was back on his feet immediately and off again. Squint hated it when he didn’t get a clean kill shot at an animal. That meant tracking him until he bled himself out and died.

He must have followed that deer for a mile or more before he lost the trail just on the other side of an outcropping of rock overlooking a stream, swollen with winter’s runoff. There was no sign of the wounded animal anywhere. Beyond the stream, a clearing stretched for a quarter of a mile. If the deer had crossed the stream, Squint would have been able to see him long before he reached the other side of the clearing. He was sure he had not lost the trail up until he reached the rock outcropping. There was no other place for the buck to go, unless he went straight up the side of a cliff. If it had been a bighorn, that would have been a possibility, but a deer? Squint didn’t think so. Still, there was no deer in sight.

Feeling as though he had been totally bamboozled by a dumb animal, Squint dismounted, for his horse was having difficulty maintaining sure footing on the rock. As he led him back the way they had come, he stumbled and would have fallen had he not caught himself with one hand. As he was about to straighten up, he glanced to his side at what he had thought was a little stand of pines in front of a solid rock wall. From his position close to the ground, he was surprised to find that he could see daylight between the tree trunks. Instead of standing in front of a solid rock wall, the trees were in fact standing in an opening into the wall. The fact that there was a solid bridge of rock spanning the opening made it appear there was a solid wall behind them. Leading his horse through the trees, Squint found an opening through the rocks big enough for two horses to pass though side by side. Once through the opening, he had found himself in a clearing, maybe half of an acre in size. It was walled in by the mountain on three sides with a small stream trickling through the northernmost point. The floor was carpeted with grass and there, under a clump of low-growing laurel, the deer lay dying.

*   *   *

A sudden groan from the Indian boy, as Sadie almost stumbled, brought Squint’s mind back to the business at hand. Now, two years later, he was bringing a human being into his secret camp, although the wounded boy might be closer kin to the wounded deer he had originally followed here. He had to admit that he had some doubts about giving away the location of this place. If there ever was a perfect camp, this place had to be it. What with the trouble that was brewing all over between the army and the Indians, a man needed a good secure camp to hole up in.

To say he was overly worried about Indian trouble would not be accurate. He wasn’t as unconcerned as he used to be, however. It used to be that, if a man wanted to trap some beaver, take some meat when he needed it . . . even buffalo . . . as long as he stayed to himself . . . why, hell, the Indians wouldn’t bother him. As a matter of fact, he had quite a few friends among the Shoshone. Wounded Elk’s winter camp on the Wind River had been one of his favorite visits the year before. It was different now. This year, he wasn’t sure if he would be welcome or not. All the tribes seemed to be in a state of agitation. There had been some reports that the Cheyenne were getting stirred up south of here. The Blackfeet were getting set to start some real trouble up north. They never got along with many of the other tribes as it was and they sure didn’t have any love for the white man. Squint could readily see for himself that the Sioux were getting ready to give somebody some grief. For some time now, he occasionally observed Sioux, Lakota as they called themselves, in war parties coming through the passes that led down to the basin country. He only saw them from a distance but they were close enough to tell that they were not hunting or horse-raiding parties. They were wearing paint and feathers. The fact that his policy was to keep them at a distance, where he could see them but not vice versa, was the key to his survival in this hostile country.

A man with half a gourd full of seeds would probably pack up what skins he had and get the hell out of here before the real trouble starts, he thought. But what the hell would I do to make a living? The last job he had held down in civilization was sheriff of a two-horse town on the Missouri. “And I’m damned if I’m going back to that,” he muttered.

Another groan from the Indian boy caused him to wonder if he wasn’t just toting a body a hell of a long way to bury it. Probably should have just cut his throat back there and be done with it, he thought. It was a useless thought because Squint couldn’t bring himself to kill a defenseless boy, and that was what irritated him most. “Too damn softhearted for my own good,” he mumbled.

A low snort from one of the horses, probably Joe, told him that they smelled the mule approaching. He carefully guided Sadie over the rock and onto the thick floor of pine needles so as not to leave a track leading up to the entrance of his camp. As a matter of habit, he stopped at the opening in the rock and waited, listening. Joe snorted again and the mule answered. Joe seemed to feel a fondness for the mule, even favored her over Squint’s other horse, a little mare he called Britches. He named her that because of her markings. She was dappled all over except for her legs. They were black and it made her look like she was wearing britches on her front and hind legs. All seemed in order in his camp. Even so, he entered the clearing cautiously, looking first to the ledges over the opening and then toward the clump of laurel, behind which the horses were tethered. Long ago he inspected his little hideout from the perspective of someone who might have a notion to ambush him. He decided these two positions would be the most likely places to hide, so he always checked them first. Content that his camp was safe, he entered the clearing.

*   *   *

Squint didn’t know a hell of a lot about doctoring, but he knew enough to recognize an infected bullet wound when he saw one. And he had seen more than a few of them when he had been a sheriff, what with all the drunken cowboys and half crazy mountain men that had stumbled through his town, fighting over just about everything from cards to women. For most of the years he was the law there, there wasn’t any doctor as such. Most of the bullet wounds that were treated at all were tended to by one old woman, who was really a midwife. Usually, if the victim didn’t die right away, and the wound bled freely, it healed well enough if left alone. More gunshot cases were walking around with the lead still in them than those that had the bullet removed. Sometimes, however, the bullet would be close to the surface and the wound would fester if it hadn’t bled clean, like this Indian boy’s, and it would be necessary to dig the lead out and cauterize the wound. It wasn’t much fun for the person with the wound but Squint didn’t know any other way to stop the festering. He had seen it go untreated before and the result was usually the loss of a limb, or worse.

After he had checked on the horses and unsaddled the mule, he went about building a fire and readying himself to take care of the boy. His patient didn’t appear to be faring any too well and Squint wondered anew if he was just wasting his time. Maybe it would be more humane to simply leave the poor kid in peace and not complicate his dying. Still, he thought, the boy was obviously unconscious. The only sign of life was an occasional babble of some kind that Squint was unable to make out. It sounded like Cheyenne, but he couldn’t say for sure. At any rate, the boy was out of his head so it didn’t figure to make much difference whether Squint dug the bullet out or not. The boy wouldn’t feel it anyway, so he might just as well operate on him.

He took his skinning knife and cut the boy’s shirt away, leaving the wound exposed for him to work on. It looked bad, swollen to the point that it looked like it was ready to bust open on its own accord, like a huge boil. He could see a dark blue spot in the center that had to be the bullet. It appeared to be just beneath the surface. Squint’s experience with bullet wounds told him that it would be a lot deeper than it looked. He watched the boy’s face as he stoned a keen edge on the already sharp skinning knife. There was still no sign of consciousness.

“Let’s get it done,” he sighed and wiped the blade of the knife on his leggings. “You’re damned lucky you ain’t awake for this.”

Once resigned to the task, Squint didn’t waste any time on gentleness. Human hide was tough and he sank the knife deep into the boy’s shoulder at the top of the wound and then cut straight down across the entire swollen area. The boy stiffened perceptibly but made no sound. Almost at once, thick, yellow pus oozed from the incision and Squint recoiled when the acrid smell of rotting flesh assaulted his nostrils.

“Damn!” he exclaimed and backed away for a moment before continuing. He cleaned the wound as best he could with a square of cloth, the remains of a shirt he had brought with him when he first came to the mountains. Squeezing the cloth out in a pan of water he had placed near the fire to warm, he wiped away the rest of the pus. The wound was still weeping, but now it was mostly blood. He probed in the wound for the bullet but found that he had to cut deeper to expose it. The problem now was the wound was becoming a bloody, pulpy mess and it was difficult to see the piece of lead he was groping for. Still, he was determined to dig it out. After inflicting this amount of damage on the boy’s shoulder, he couldn’t quit without retrieving the bullet. Finally he felt the blade tick the piece of metal and, with the knifepoint, he worked at it until he had gotten it free of the surrounding flesh. After rinsing it with water, he held it up to examine it.

“That shore ain’t no musket ball,” he announced. It was a slug from a breech-loading rifle. “Army Spencer, more likely.” Squint’s interest was one of idle speculation. He wasn’t really concerned with how the boy had come to get himself shot. Now that he had extracted the bullet, he concerned himself with the wound.

From the look of it, and certainly from the smell of it, there was a great deal of rotten flesh around the edges of the wound. Little wonder the boy’s so sick, he thought. It can’t do him much good to have all that rot around that open wound. He pondered his next move for a moment or two before deciding to proceed with the cauterization. He remembered seeing a medicine man in Wounded Elk’s camp treat a lance wound that had festered about as bad as this one. He had stuck a handful of maggots right on the wound and let them eat away the rotten flesh. Squint didn’t have any maggots. Even if he did, he figured that burning it away with a hot knife was better than maggots anyway.

Again, there was little response from the wounded boy when Squint applied the red-hot skinning knife, just a mild, convulsive tremor before falling limp again. Since the response was so slight, Squint took his time and thoroughly seared the flesh over the entire wound, the smell of the infection now masked by the odor of burning flesh. The surgery complete, he sat back on his haunches to examine his work. The boy was breathing steadily. The thought crossed Squint’s mind that the boy might fool him and pull through. It was, after all, a shoulder wound. If he had been gut shot, his chances wouldn’t be worth much. It would probably depend on the boy’s constitution, on how bad he wanted to live. Time would tell—Squint had done all he knew to do for him.

He decided it best to leave the wound open to the air that night. He could put some grease on it and bandage it in the morning. The night air would probably do it some good and, this time of year, there wasn’t any problem with flies getting into it. He rigged up a bed for the boy and covered him with a deer hide. Night was settling in over the mountains by then. If his patient woke up in the morning, he would see about feeding him. If he didn’t, he would bury him.

*   *   *

The boy was strong. He was still among the living when the sun rose high enough for the first rays to filter over the mountain and illuminate the delicate crystals of frost that had formed on the grass floor of Squint’s camp. Squint yawned and shivered involuntarily as he stood at the edge of the clearing and emptied his bladder, absentmindedly watching the steam formed by his warm urine on the frost.

Cold, I hate being cold, he thought.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the still form of the Indian boy. He had checked on him as soon as he was awake and, although the boy still seemed to be asleep, he appeared to be breathing easily. His fever might even be broken. Squint couldn’t tell for sure. “I reckon I better put some wood on the fire and see about getting us something to eat.”

As he picked a few sticks of wood from his pile, he pondered his options now that he had taken on an invalid. He was still not sure the boy was going to make it. If he did, then Squint would have some decisions to make as to what he should do with him. He wasn’t even sure the boy wouldn’t attack him again when he got strong enough. “Hell,” he muttered as he balanced a stick of firewood across the load already on his arm, “I might have to nurse him back to health just so I can cut his throat.”

He stirred up the coals, all that was left of the fire, until he worked up a flame. Then he laid some small sticks on it until they caught well enough to start up the larger pieces. He had a pretty good-size woodpile and, if the winter was not too severe, it should probably last him through. He didn’t like to go out looking for firewood in the deep snow. As he stared into the growing flame, feeling its warmth on his face, he couldn’t help but remember how he had sweated when he had cut the wood last summer. It had been quite a chore, and Squint was not one to appreciate chores. “But when you got yourself a year-round camp,” he muttered, “you have to do things like cutting firewood and drying jerky.” It was almost like homesteading. And the wood had to be hauled in by mule from the other side of the mountain because Squint was afraid he might give away the location of his camp by cutting wood close by.

A groan from the boy pulled his attention from the fire and he turned to look at his patient. The boy, still asleep apparently, muttered several words that Squint couldn’t make out. They were words though, not just grunts, Squint was sure of that. He still thought it sounded like Cheyenne. He bent low over the boy in an effort to hear what he was mumbling about. As he did, the boy opened his eyes and he and Squint stared at each other for a long second. There was a strangeness in the boy’s gaze that confounded Squint. Finally he sat back and announced, “Dang if you ain’t the first blue-eyed Cheyenne I ever saw.”

The boy answered, his voice weak but clear, “I ain’t Cheyenne. I’m Arapaho.”

This served to startle Squint more than a little, not because of the boy’s apparent lucidness, but because he had answered in English.

“Well, I’ll be . . .” Squint gazed at the wounded boy in disbelief, never finishing the statement. He simply stared at the boy for a long while. Finally he blurted, “Well, what the hell did you try to bushwhack me for?”

There followed a long pause, during which the boy gazed intently at the grizzled mountain man hovering over him like some great bear about to devour him. There had been a moment of alarm when he first opened his eyes to find the huge man staring down at him, a moment when he wasn’t sure what was in store for him. But he quickly decided this bear intended no harm and he answered, “I thought you was a soldier.&