Tie My Bones to Her Back by Robert F. Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

You wouldn’t want to use it on buffalo except up close, it doesn’t pack much punch, but for antelope it’ll work just fine. Come on, we’ll go in and buy it. Then we’ve got to get packing for our rendezvous with McKay down toward the Cimarron.”
    Good, Jenny thought. He’s willing to let me hunt. She had worried that he would keep her campbound day and night, cooking and cleaning.
    Later, at Durgen’s Livery, she waited outside with the bags and the newly purchased rifles, humming happily to herself while Otto settled his bill. He led out a pair of mules and she helped him harness them to a light wagon parked in the corral. He tied his saddle horse, Vixen, to the tailgate.
    “So I may hunt?” she asked as they drove out of town. She wanted confirmation, his word on it, so that he couldn’t change his mind.
    “Ja sicker ,” he said, “certainly. Not buffalo, or at least not at first, but camp meat surely. There are always prongbucks or turkeys to be found in the country we’re headed for. They’ll make a welcome change from a steady diet of buffalo meat. And I want you to keep your rifle close at hand.” He turned to look at her. “My partner and I will be out all day, along with our skinner, scouting or shooting or working the hides, and there are dangers. Wolves or bears, you know, attracted to the smell of meat. And snakes. And always the chance of, well, Indians.”
    “Who’s the skinner?”
    “His name’s Tom Shields, a good worker. You’ll meet him tonight if McKay’s found buff.”
    Otto’s camp was a few miles west of Dodge. They saw the looming light of its fire in the dark hills along the Arkansas River and the mules pulled for it at an eager trot. Jenny was chilled and weary by the time they arrived. A man rose from beside the fire, a rifle in his hands, and stepped back into the shadows as they approached.
    “It’s all right, Tom,” her brother shouted. “I’m home at last.”
    The man stepped into the firelight, lowering his rifle. Jenny jolted wide awake, her shivering stopped. Tom Shields was a red Indian.
    “Any word from Captain McKay?” Otto asked.
    “He’s found ‘em, sure enough,” the Indian said. “He’s still out there with ‘em. And he wants us to come quick, while the killing’s good.”
    T HAT MORNING R ALEIGH McKay was standing on the bales of hides piled in the wagonbed, scanning the horizon with field glasses. No buffalo in sight. Not even a tree. There was no horizon. In the middle distance, sky and grassland blended to a pale tan monochrome. To the east, low, the morning sun glinted like the stud of a silver finishing nail tacked to the wooden sky. He lowered the glasses. They were excellent, long and heavy, made by B. H. Horn of Broadway, New York City. He had taken them from the body of a dead Yankee major, eleven years earlier, near White Oak Swamp on the way to Malvern Hill. The brass was scratched in places, the blacking rubbed through with use, but the lenses were still clear. McKay could never have afforded them himself back during the war, much less before it. Even now, when he found himself rich beyond counting, he would hesitate to lay out the gold eagle necessary to buy even these battered binoculars. Hell, and he had all of five thousand Yankee dollars in the bank back at Leavenworth.
    He raised the glasses again and swung them slowly in a full circle. Still nothing. Not a dot of movement, no dark wavering line wriggling like a worm through the far frost haze. Squinting from the lens-gathered glare, he decided that perhaps the haze was a bit thicker to the northwest. Maybe they were coming from that direction. Even here, standing on the thick bed of hides, he thought he could feel the tremor of their movement.
    It was that faint quivering of the ground which woke him before dawn, a subtle vibration, directionless, almost imperceptible, as if the atoms of earth and sky were shivering together ever so slightly, colliding like the shoulders of an