Stamping Ground by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page A

something in response and sat down on the ground to a breakfast of dried buffalo meat and herbs fresh from the soil. That finished, Hudspeth mounted his buckskin and took off to fetch supplies and the pack horse we had left in Fargo, and to make arrangements for the delivery of Pere Jac’s eight cases of whiskey, while I stayed behind to get to know our guide. This was more important than it sounds. Armed men forced to travel in each other’s company for an indefinite period are well advised to get acquainted before they set out, or the first argument on the trail could well be the last.
    I had nothing to worry about in Jac. He packed no side arm but carried a Sharps carbine and rode an unprepossessing paint pony, and the confident but careful way he handled both as he made ready for the trip reflected a familiarity with the rugged life that earned my approval. One of his few concessions to the white man’s way was a weatherbeaten McClellan saddle complete with a pair of army issue bags. Into these he packed a leatherbound copy of the Scriptures and enough pemmican to last three weeks on the trail—roughly an ounce and a half of dried buffalo, berries and sugar pounded into a hard cake the size of a cowboy’s brass buckle. These were his only provisions.
    His woman’s name was Arabella. Save for the dusky brown of her features and a thoroughly Algonquin mode of dress, from the polished snail shells strung around her neck to her elkskin moccasins, there was very little about her that said she was part Indian. Her hair was chestnut and hung in braids to her breasts. Her eyes, more oriental than native, rode at a slight tilt atop high cheekbones. Her mouth was wide but handsomely sculpted, the line of her jaw strong but not stubborn. She seldom spoke in Jac’s presence. In that respect at least she was all squaw.
    The children took after their father in looks, with Lucien,the oldest at ten, already beginning to show in the girth of his chest the beginnings of Jac’s warrior build, and Jerome, six, and little, black-haired Paulette, three, watching every step of the preparations for departure with identical pairs of the old man’s pale blue eyes staring out of their chocolate faces.
    This, I had been told over breakfast, was Pere Jac’s second family. His first wife had been killed fifteen years before when a herd of buffalo spooked prematurely during a hunt near Pembina and trampled the camp. His first son, now grown, left shortly before Jac’s second mating along with his own squaw to start a new métis settlement below the Nebraska line. The old chief had taken Arabella as his bride after her first husband, his brother, succumbed to smallpox in the epidemic of ’67. Jac remarked with pride that two of his five grandchildren were older than Lucien, and that Arabella was expecting another child in November.
    Once the paint and my bay were saddled and ready to go, we sat down in the shade of the only tree for miles, a cottonwood beginning to die out at the top, and swapped a lie or two about past manhunts while he charged a stubby clay pipe from a pouch he carried on his belt and lit it with a sulphur match. Then we sat and listened to a faint breeze too high to reach us stir the branches twenty feet above our heads.
    â€œGhost Shirt,” I said then. “What do you know about him?”
    â€œOnly what I have heard.” He was having trouble keeping the tobacco burning. He struck a fresh match, puffed at the anemic glow in the bowl, got it going, shook out the match. Bluish smoke curled before his bruised and weathered features. “There is nothing haughtier than a full-blooded Cheyenne in his prime. Tell him that he is Christ reborn, as they have done with Ghost Shirt since he was old enough to understand, and he becomes impossible. Ten days before his birth, it is said, Ghost Shirt’s father, Paints His Lodge, dreamed that he saw the sun rising from his