More than two weeks ago they had marched out of Fort McPherson on the Platte in Nebraska. Carr’s orders were to clear the country south as they searched for the bands of marauding Cheyenne wreaking havoc among the settlements of Kansas. It was easy to see even from this distance that Cody rode right past the Pawnee without giving sign of how-do or saying a thing one. Bill didn’t care a lick for them—cared even less for Frank and Luther North. Shad had to agree with Cody’s feeling for those North brothers earning their handsome reputation at the expense of the Pawnee. Ever since the Connor expedition back to sixty-five, Shad wasn’t shy in admitting that those bald-headed Pawnee trackers worked hard at their job—this hunting for their old tribal enemies.
He talked with them in sign when he had to, and they gave the old mountain man their grudging respect. With their hands they called him “rawhide man,” because, they explained, he was like an old piece of leather chewed on and spat out, and still none the worse for wear after all his years.
With a smile Shad had accepted the handle hung on him by the trackers, and with respect for their abilities his hand had gone up to crook a finger at his brow: plains sign talk for Pawnee—the Wolf People.
For those past two weeks the Pawnee were always the first to rise in the morning and the first to go to saddle. Under Luther North, the younger of the brothers, the Pawnee kept ahead of the Fifth Cavalry a distance of two to three miles throughout the day, as well as dispatching outriders to cover a wide piece of country on both flanks. Down from the Platte River, Carr had driven them. They saw no sign of hostiles as they pushed across Medicine Lake, then Red Willow and Stinking Water creeks, Black Wood and Frenchman’s Fork, until the Fifth Cavalry struck the Republican River.
It was there on the fifteenth they had been hit by a small raiding party for the first time one evening. The seven Cheyenne warriors had disappeared over the nearby hills with more than half of the wagon master’s mules, leaving behind one of the civilian herders on the slope of a hill, scalped and stripped. A second herder wore three arrows in his back for all his trouble, and clung to life tenaciously across the next few days.
Immediately pursued by the Pawnee, the Cheyenne quickly abandoned their mules, hopeful of making good their escape into the rolling hill country south of the Republican. In the end Captain Lute North’s trackers dropped two of the horse thieves from their ponies, while five escaped. But Carr was fuming when North got back with his Pawnee. Angry at the trackers for charging out like an undisciplined mob without any orders, the major discharged Luther North from command until his older brother rejoined the column two days later when the entire outfit reached the Solomon River.
Where the Pawnee promptly found some recent sign of the hostile village.
After a fruitless search for the Cheyenne up and down the Solomon, Carr moved his column northwest to the Prairie Dog. From time to time across the next week, the trackers had come across sign of a small war party here and there. But, no travois trails scouring the earth.
Angrily growing desperate to find the enemy, Carr-pressed on to the northwest, crossing the Little Beaver, then Beaver Creek itself, and back to the Driftwood. As summer matured, the sun hung higher, it seemed—hotter too. June grew old as they plodded across each small drainage, creek, and stream, climbing north by west, each new day stretching longer and longer still like a rawhide whang.
How Shad hungered for some of Toote’s cooking. All too quick the army fare had grown tasteless: salt pork and hard-bread, beans and biscuits. Even the coffee tasted as if it had been boiled in the wagon master’s axle grease and stirred with one of the engineer’s rusty nails. The country hereabout lay alkaline, cursed with natural salt licks.
Hardly buffalo country.
Yet just yesterday the Pawnee had run across a small herd of buffalo and succeeded in dropping more than thirty in a surround. Then Cody did just what had earned him a reputation in supplying the army and the railroad with meat: on his new buckskin pony the young scout dashed off on a half-mile run, dropping thirty-six bulls and cows all by his lonesome. From that moment on, Cody was big medicine with North’s trackers.
“Why you figure we haven’t found any travois sign yet, Shad?” asked the young scout as he settled down beside the older plainsman at their evening fire.
Sweete stared into his cup of coffee and finished chewing the mouthful of buffalo loin contemplatively. “Could be there ain’t no villages on the move. Only war parties.”
“What’s the chance of that?” Cody asked, sweeping some of his long blond hair back from his bare cheek. “Pretty damned slim, you ask me.”
