As the men in the circle talked these things through, it quickly became apparent to all that Kicking Bird's strategy was wise. A few men wondered aloud at the lack of honor in killing enemies as they slept, but they were quickly reminded that the whites were not so much an enemy as a scourge, and a scourge, as everyone knew, must be eradicated by any possible means.
Ever mindful of the niceties of diplomacy, Kicking Bird suggested that each tribe select fifteen warriors by lot to ride in the first wave, an approach embraced by every man in the circle. The timing of the attack was set for an hour before dawn, and as the sun dropped below the horizon, the warriors concluded their talk and returned to their followers, certain that by the time the sun returned, the prairie would be soaking up the hated blood of the buffalo-killers.
Around midnight a force of sixty-five warriors, augmented by Kicking Bird, Wind In His Hair, Young Dog, Touch The Clouds, Wolf Robe, and White Bear, who, by virtue of standing, had been exempted from the random draw, moved to within striking distance of the hunters, camp.
After an hour's wait, two scouts returned to report that there were eight white men in the squalid camp and that all of them, even the guard they had posted, were asleep. Two wagons were parked near the fire, but otherwise there was no visible impediment to the attack.
A few young men whooped with anticipation but their cries were quickly stifled by the reproaches of elders mounted next to them. Only a signal from the man who had created the war party could send it into action, and Kicking Bird was sitting calmly on his pony.
Like any good field commander who strives to leave nothing to chance when the lives of his fighters are in the balance, Kicking Bird decided to wait a few more minutes. It was possible that the scouts, maneuverings had caused a light sleeper to open his eyes, and the Comanche leader wanted to give the camp time to slip back into the deepest slumber possible.
But even the shrewdest commander cannot anticipate all of the infinite chance deviations of life, and it was no different with Kicking Bird. That one of the hunters might have a toothache never occurred to him, much less that the man who sat up in his blanket shortly after the scouts departed had done so at the instance of a throbbing jaw and not because some sixth sense had alerted him to danger. Nor could Kicking Bird have foreseen that the pain in one man's mouth would have such devastating consequences for himself, his warriors, and those whose prayers for success they carried. Had he been able to divine any of these things, Kicking Bird might have concluded that the fate of the Comanches and all other free people on the plains had turned cruel.
The man whose aching jaw was a key element in the destiny of an entire people had been suffering for several days. His fellow hunters had done all they could for him, trying that same afternoon to yank it out with a bullet mold, but their latest effort had only succeeded in breaking off a chunk of the afflicted molar.
The sufferer had tried to hasten sleep with a few long gulps of whiskey, but now; as he sat in the night, staring at the slovenly camp, which stank continually with the odor of rotting blood and skin; he decided impulsively to ride for Adobe Walls.
It pained him to do so because he was going to lose a lot of money, but the hurt in his head was too great. He grabbed up his Sharps rifle, scooped his bedding into his arms, and in minutes was riding north across the prairie.
Half a mile out he heard gunfire at his back and turned to look. The fire at camp was only a pinpoint of light far off in the darkness, and though he couldn't make out the action at that distance, he knew instantly from the volume of rounds being fired that the camp was under attack.
Then, as he sat listening, the gunfire suddenly diminished and a different sound rolled across the prairie. It carne to his ears and traveled into his brain with a creeping recognition that stood his hair on end. He was hearing the primal, horrifying screams of Indians. With the finality of a trip-hammer, the hunter whirled his horse around and, even after reaching a full gallop, didn't stop kicking.
Chapter XXXIV
The buffalo-killer who lived the longest managed to get off one round before his head was split in half with an ax. The others barely had time to stir before they died.
But as warriors buzzed over the camp, firing everything but the body parts of the dead, Kicking Bird sat his pony with little sense of satisfaction. The scouts were certain they had counted eight white men, but only seven lay dead. The surrounding prairie was hastily searched for the missing enemy but no one was found, and Kicking Bird sensed they must move quickly in case the missing hunter had somehow escaped to spread an alarm.
Twenty minutes after they attacked, the thousand warriors were ploughing the darkness of the plains, hoping to catch more camps unaware of their presence. As they sped north they saw many more dead buffalo but little of the men who had killed them. By noon of the following day; they had encountered but one recently abandoned camp, and, certain that their presence had been announced, the great force hurried on, clinging to the prospect of overtaking isolated parties of fleeing hunters.
Judiciously alternating between all-out flight and periodic brief rest, the man with the toothache maintained an hour's lead over the huge war party. He had roused one camp of men, who spurned his advice and dashed east instead of following him to Adobe Walls. But he encountered no one else, and as he urged his weary horse on, the sore-jawed man assumed that by a miraculous stroke of luck all the other outfits must be out of the country or laying over at "the Walls."
His assumption was confirmed when, only a few miles from his goal, he happened upon three white men – two riding side by side on a buckboard, one mounted on a horse. Though he had never been introduced he knew the bearded, well-appointed men on the buckboard to be the brothers Rath, the wealthy, energetic financiers behind the frontier buffalo trade. The man on horseback was well known to him as the manager of the brothers' holdings at Adobe Walls.
The three men listened to the hunter's story of narrow escape and flight in shocked silence. All of them were unnerved to hear that what seemed to be a very large party of heathens was abroad and obviously bent on murdering whatever lay in their path.
For the Rath brothers, however, the Indian threat represented something other than mere bodily harm. Being inveterate creatures of commerce, the siblings' minds naturally leapt to the problem of how best to protect their investment.
They exchanged a few whispered words, then climbed down from the wagon. The manager dismounted and the three men held a brief conference out of earshot of the surviving hunter. In the tall grass of the prairie a number of quick decisions were reached. A lull in the buffalo slaughter had concentrated many hunters at the Adobe Walls installation. There were at least twenty-five guns there, maybe as many as thirty, but if they knew a large party of marauding savages were headed their way, many were likely to bolt. That would leave the saloon and hotel and processing sheds the Rath brothers owned vulnerable.
In the interest of preserving the empire they had labored so mightily to construct, an empire that produced a juggernaut of wealth to which there seemed no end, a conspiracy between the Rath brothers and their reliable manger was hatched.
Minutes later, assured that he would obtain proper care for his inflamed molar away from Adobe Walls, the hunter traded horses with the manager and struck east in the heady company of the Rath brothers.
The manager started back for the holdings at Adobe Walls, entrusted with executing a plan sure to guarantee that his masters' vastly lucrative industry would be maintained. None of the hunters at "the Walls" was to be informed of the impending threat to their lives. But that night, through a subterfuge of the manager's devising, the temporary settlement would be caused to prepare for an attack that was sure to come.
The manager was confident in the plan's simple brilliance. He was also certain that the presence of so many crack shots working behind the solid fortifications of the recently erected company town could blunt any hoard of screaming, arrow-shooting wild men
.
Chapter XXXV
Kicking Bird and his army of warriors were about ten miles from the place called Adobe Walls when its presence was reported and, in the lengthy council that followed, the discouraging news brought by the scouts was discussed in detail. It seemed that the head of the monster had been located but almost every piece of information spoke against attacking it.
The buffalo-killers had congregated in alarming numbers. The scouts had counted twenty-eight white men with far-shooting guns, guns which could be fired from the cover of several large earthen houses which had risen on the plains. The settlement lay in a denuded bowl of land upon which there was nothing to shield an attack. Four white men seemed to be camped around a wagon perhaps a hundred yards from the shelter of the buildings. They would be an easy target, and that was the only attractive aspect of making an attack.
But a door had closed behind each of the thousand warriors and there was no going back. No one talked against going ahead, despite the fact that everyone knew men were bound to die in the face of guns that could tear holes in flesh as big as a gourd, and that the chances for victory could not be great. Since they had taken the war trail, the party's reason for being and its avowed mission had swelled to something larger than its parts. They could not now shrink from what had become a holy duty. The only question that needed to be decided was how they would assail the monster's head, and Kicking Bird's strategy was so simple and straightforward that it was adopted after a few minutes of perfunctory discussion.
They would attack as one body, slamming their full might against the objective in the hope it would collapse through the sheer weight of their assault. They would not attack in the dark but come out of the sun, using its first, blinding light as a screen. Kicking Bird and half a dozen handpicked warriors would overwhelm the men camped around the wagon in the open while the vast bulk of warriors threw themselves against the hunters' fortifications. They would wait until an hour before dawn to position themselves, thus giving each warrior ample time to smoke and recite prayers, prepare his accoutrements of battle, and sing his death song.
Whether these decisions might have altered the outcome could never be known, but one thing was certain: no warrior heard the shot, fired in the early hours of morning, that woke the entire population residing at Adobe Walls.
The manager had retired earlier than usual to ensure he would be wide awake at the precise time everyone else would be steeped in slumber. The round had come from his own pistol, which he reholstered immediately after firing. To the sleeping, disoriented hunters inquiring what was the matter, the manager explained that the sound had come from the prime supporting beam that spanned the "hotel" in which they were now standing.
Fearful of the roof's possible failure, the hunters compliantly set to work shoring up the beam under the manager's careful direction. Toward dawn, as the useless task neared completion, a number of workers, including the men who had been camped outside, returned to their beds, but, to the manager's satisfaction, the majority either continued to tinker with the refurbishments or loiter over coffee, watching and commenting on the labors of their fellows. He had hoped the men from the wagon would stay but felt no culpability when he saw them pass out into the dark. He had encouraged them to stay, and so, he decided, they were making their own funerals by disregarding his advice.
Shortly after the morning sun cleared the horizon, a strange sound, like that of a distant roaring crowd, momentarily froze all human activity at Adobe Walls. Seconds later all eyes had flown to any crack or crevice that afforded a view of the outside. What greeted them was a spectacle so incredible that it squeezed the breath from their lungs.
A sea of mounted warriors was streaming in their direction, surging down a long gentle slope several hundred yards away in a movement so massive as to resemble the graceful, inexorable sweep of an ocean wave. So stunning was the image that at first sight the men inside Adobe Walls could not understand what their own connection to the rushing tide of warriors might be. Time stopped as their brains tumbled incredulously, trying to make sense of the unbelievable message from their eyes.
But when time moved again, barely a split second later, the watchers reacted with a mechanical swiftness. They could not dread or even fear what was bearing down upon them. They only had time to reach for the most obvious instruments of deliverance from certain death. In a mad, strangely silent scramble, each man jumped for the salvation that dwelt in the long barrel of his buffalo gun.
Kicking Bird was charging down the slope at the crest of the human wave, the long, feathered lance he had chosen for the close-in fighting around the wagon leveled against his hip. He pressed a knee against his pony's shoulder and, without breaking stride, the little horse swerved in the direction of the wagon. The metal ribbing bent over its top was only half-covered and, as he closed on the vehicle, Kicking Bird could see the forms of the enemy stirring beneath and above the wagon bed.
Over the last yards of his rush, time began to slow and, picking out a single foe, Kicking Bird raised his lance. A second later the air in front of him was obscured with white smoke and his ears rang painfully as a volley of concentrated fire coming from the wagon seemed to blow it apart.
Most animals might have jumped or twisted away but the pony Kicking Bird rode in war had never been headed. The pony shivered momentarily as the concussive shock buffeted his face and neck and chest. But he never strayed from his course, and an instant later, almost at full speed, he crashed against the wagon. Then Kicking Bird felt his lance point penetrate the soft flesh of a man's body as his own lifted into space. The moment he collided with the earth he was shot in the face from a range of inches.
The pistol slug tore off one of his earlobes, but, like his war pony, Kicking Bird was so used to the primal intensity of battle that he was unfazed and, before the white man could fire another round, his gun hand was in the grip of his attacker's. A split second later Kicking Bird's sharply honed knife drove into the hunter,s midsection and ripped upward, opening his belly. As the enemy jerked spasmodically, Kicking Bird mounted his chest, grabbed a hank of long hair, pulled his head off the ground, sliced into the skin at his hairline, and tore off his scalp.
He tucked the bloody hair in his belt as he scrambled from under the wagon and dashed for his pony, which, though pirouetting with excitement at the steady boom of the big buffalo guns being fired from inside Adobe Walls, was waiting obediently. Kicking Bird caught him, swung onto his back, and galloped on into the furious fight ahead.
Mounted warriors were circling the settlement like living rope, trying to draw fire away from the masses of warriors who were clamoring about the doors of the two main buildings. Kicking Bird galloped from one building front to the other and found the same situation at each. Though they were lunging in against the big doors with all their might, the warriors could not break through and the big guns were bringing people down.
Two enterprising warriors, having found a way to separate the tongue from the wagon Kicking Bird had attacked, rode into the melee dragging it behind them. Grabbing it up as a battering ram, the frantic warriors began to hurl it against the door but by now the whites inside had found good holes to shoot through and men in front of the entrance began to fall.
Kicking Bird glanced over his shoulder and saw that some of those among the ranks of the circling riders were falling, too. Men were lying dead or wounded on the ground and riders were breaking off in pairs to perform the sacred duty of carrying their brothers off the battlefield.
When Kicking Bird saw one of these saviors shot from his horse, only to tumble onto the man he was endeavoring to rescue, he knew he must call for a retreat. with an eagle bone whistle between his lips, he desperately signaled his men, and after a few minutes of charging within earshot of every fighter, he managed to effect a pullback.
Once the withdrawal was under way, Kicking Bird kicked his heaving pony back up the long slope to the attackers, original staging area, where man
y of the dead and wounded were being gathered. Pausing beyond the shade of the only tree in the area, Kicking Bird tried to tally his dead as other warriors rode in and stood beside him. But when he had counted to twenty he stopped: There were too many more to count, maybe three times as many.
"We can burn those houses," White Bear signed.
"No fire," pronounced Owl Prophet.
He was sitting on his pony with arms folded across his chest, and the sight of him piqued Kicking Bird's ire. He pushed his pony roughly through the men immediately around and sidled next to Owl Prophet.
"Your power is false," he snapped.
"My power comes from the Mystery!" Owl Prophet snapped back.
"Look at our dead," Kicking Bird shouted. "Who will take their places? You said we would kill all the white men. We have four scalps."
"Some Cheyenne killed a skunk," the prophet retorted. "I heard it.”
"Your power is useless,” Kicking Bird roared. "You are useless. You should be thrown away!"
He was about to strike Owl Prophet with his quirt when one of the big guns far below boomed, and at the same instant Kicking Bird saw the smoke he heard a slug's distinctive whistle rend the air.
The bullet struck a nearby tree and the lead ricocheted into Owl Prophet's chest, the force of it sending him tumbling straight over his pony's hindquarters. What would have been a killing shot, at a shorter distance merely stunned the prophet. He lay on his back for a moment, then pulled himself to a sitting position and groggily gained his feet.
Everyone was thunderstruck. Agitated warriors milled around their leader and Touch The Clouds said the words everyone was thinking.
"The hunters have a rifle that can shoot around object!"
Touch The Clouds had barely made the words when another gun boomed and the prophet's pony sank onto its knees with a hole in its forehead.