Skull Moon by Tim Curran Read Free Book Online

weren't a bad lot. Not really. Just fiercely territorial and unrelentingly proud.
    Longtree held no prejudices against them.
    In his line of work, he couldn't afford to. Such things blinded a man's judgment. And the last thing he ever wanted was to arrest a man and see him brought to trial (and possibly the gallows) simply because of his skin color.
    Longtree accepted long ago, that although he might've been a lot of things, no one would ever accuse him of not being fair or honest.
     
    20
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    Joseph Smith Longtree was born in 1836, the son of William "Bearclaw" Smith, a mountain man, and Piney River, a Crow Indian. His father had died fighting Commanches in 1842. Longtree had barely known him. In 1845, a Sioux raiding party attacked Longtree's village on the Powder River, killing everyone but himself and a few others that had scattered. His mother was among the dead. Longtree was taken away by a local missionary priest to a mission school in Nebraska. After seven years of strict Catholic upbringing and schooling, Longtree left.
    He ran away, making his way west.
    He fell in with a reformed gunman named Rawlings who was canvassing the Wyoming and Montana Territories in his new profession as a Baptist preacher in search of a congregation. Rawlings still carried a gun; only a fool didn't in the Territories. During their months together, Rawlings, very impressed with Longtree's knowledge of the Bible and other matters spiritual, taught him how to shoot. Getting the boy an old .44 Colt Dragoon, he drilled him every day for hours until Longtree could knock an apple out of a tree from forty feet with one swift, decisive movement.
    In southeastern Montana, Rawlings and Longtree went their separate ways. Longtree sought out his Uncle Lone Hawk, who'd been away on the day the Sioux raided their village and hadn't returned until long after Longtree had been carted away by the missionary. Lone Hawk and his family had a cabin on the Little Powder River and it was here that Longtree spent the next five years.
    His mother's brother was a practical man.
    He knew the old ways were dying fast and a new world was beginning for the Indian. He himself lived more like a white manthan a red one. He knew a young man needed a trade, a skill with which to eke out a living. But he also believed one should be acquainted with and be proud of one's ancestral heritage. He found a way in which he could bestow both upon young Joe Longtree--he would train him in the time-honored ways of the Indian, he would school him as a scout.
    For the next five years, under Lone Hawk's tutelage, Longtree learned how to "read sign": tracking animal and man, learning a wealth of information from such subtle clues as footprints, hoof marks, and bent blades of grass. He learned the fine art of pathfinding. He learned how to doctor wounds with expertise. He learned how to live off the land--what plants and roots could be eaten, which could not, and which could be used as medicines; how to locate and stalk game; how to find water and dozens of other tricks. He learned how to hunt and fight with a knife, a hatchet, the bow and arrow, the lance. He received advanced instruction in shooting and navigation by the sun and stars. He was taught the arts of stealth and concealment.
    All in all, everything the Crow had learned in thousands of years of survival were taught Longtree in a few years.
    After five years, Longtree left and signed on as an Indian scout to the army. For the next six years he fought with the whites against the Commanche and Cheyenne.
    Afterwards, his belly full of blood and death and atrocities committed by Indian and white alike, he drifted to San Francisco. Where, among other things, he made a name for himself (Kid Crow) as a barefisted boxer. Made a good run of it until an Irish hothead named Jimmy Elliot gave him a thrashing he wouldn't forget this side of the grave. Restless, tired of hitting and being hit, Longtree headed into the Arizona Territory