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With a smile Bull answered, “My father will not be able to deny the smell of Indians in his nostrils. He will lead the pony soldiers after us.”

“Then you will find your father at last,” Porcupine said.

“No,” he replied. “I will kill him.”

16

Late June 1869

HIS OLD FRIENDS were going, one by one by one.

Compañeros and saddle-partners, trappers and frontiersmen, trackers and guides and scouts for the army like Shadrach Sweete—they were all dying off on Shad, one by one by one.

The end of the halcyon days of the fur trade had driven the first of them from this land. Some fled back east to what they could muster to live out their lives. Others like Meek and Newell pushed on to Oregon country. Shad tried that, and in the end came back to what he and Shell Woman knew best: living a nomadic life crossing the plains in the shadow of the cloud-scraping Rocky Mountains. A man did what a man must to provide for his Cheyenne wife and family. And for almost twenty years he had found work here and there, at times guiding for those long, snaking trains of emigrants bound for Oregon or California. Then too he had scouted for the dragoons in those pre-war days and built a reputation so that when the Army of the West came out here to stay. Shad Sweete had all the work a man needed.

Like Jim Bridger had done, like Kit Carson.

Times like these, riding out ahead of an army column, searching for some sign of a hostile village on the move, made Sweete draw in and think on all that he had done in those glory days in the West, brood on all that had been taken from him.

Of late there had been more and more taken from the old man.

The first real blow was Ol’ Gabe. Not until last winter did Shad hear that Bridger had give up and gone back east to Missouri, gone to live with a daughter back yonder, there somewhere. If it was so, that meant Jim had been gone from the plains almost a year now this summer. Going blind, some even claimed. Sawbones doctors didn’t rightly know how, but some ventured that too much high, bright sun made that happen to a man.

Ol’ Gabe going blind—after all the glory that them two eyes had seen?

“Wagh!” Shad had snorted the grappling roar of a grizzly boar. To think of the un-goddamned-fairness of it.

“Still, the army came to call on the legend,” Major Eugene Carr, commanding officer of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry, had informed Sweete before the whole shebang set out from Fort Lyon, marching south to drive the hostiles toward Custer’s Seventh Cavalry waiting east in the country of the Canadian River. “No less than General Philip H. Sheridan himself asked Bridger’s advice on waging a winter campaign against the Cheyenne and Kiowa riding out of Indian Territory to commit their depredations on the settlers in Kansas, Shad.”

“And what’d Ol’ Gabe tell that little pissant of an Irishman?” Sweete had asked.

“Word has it Bridger wanted an audience with Sheridan his own self, personally—to tell the general what a damned fool idea the winter campaign was.”

Shad had himself a good laugh at that, conjuring up that scene between the little banty-rooster of a general and that tall, rangy old trapper. “Had to come to Fort Hays his own self, did he? Just to tell Sheridan what the dad-blamed hell he was getting his soldiers into, I’ll bet.”

Later still that winter Shad had learned from army scout California Joe Milner that Joe had been at Hays to see it for himself when Bridger rode in from Missouri to have a palaver with Sheridan—been there to see the old eyes nearly gone a milky-white, to see how stooped Bridger had become with the crippling rheumatiz and joint aches, how all those years climbing cold mountains and wading through icy streams had made the man little more than a thinning caricature of the giant he used to be.

Joe said, “Gabe was most afraid of his claim to the fort.”

“Fort Bridger?”

Milner had nodded, balling a fist up and laying it alongside his own neck. “He weren’t the same man, Shad. Hardly could twist his head without causing hisself some pain from that knot of goiter eating away on his neck.”

“What’s this about the fort? Why, I helped him raise one of them buildings and a corral there myself. Ain’t his claim with the army settled yet?”

“That ten-year lease he said he give the army is up now, but he ain’t seen a dollar cross his hand in payment.”

“Government ain’t paid him for using that fort—all ten year worth?”

“No—and now even Sheridan hisself told Bridger the army’s went and declared his land what they call a military reservation.”

That bit of news had caused a cold knot to grow in Sweete’s belly. “So they took it all from him—same as the army’s gonna take anything else it wants.” He waved a hand in a wide, western arc. “Take everything it wants from the Injuns, Joe.”

“Blessed God, Shad. Should’ve seen how that old man longed for the olden days.”