Chapter 4

The next month was a very sad time for all of us in the family, and I was as affected as was anyone else. It was a very melancholy time for all of us. However, the pressure of the necessities of life forced us out of that mood. I cannot say that we were any happier, but we did gradually lose our hangdog expressions.

White Buck continued to train me pretty much as he had been doing, except that he pushed me harder toward learning all of the aspects of war. I learned things like fighting with two knives, one in each hand. Actually, it turned out that my favorite form of hand-to-hand combat was with a war club in my left hand and a knife in my right hand. That way, the war club was used more for defense and the knife was used for offense.

I found the war club and knife combination especially useful in fighting a mounted Comanche warrior who was using a short lance as his weapon of choice, which most of them seemed to do. I was just short of my 12^th birthday when I had my first real combat with the knife/war club combination.

I was out on my first solo scouting mission on a trip into Comancheria. The Comanches were getting more and more aggressive, and White Buck wanted to know if they were preparing to attack in our direction. The Comanches were currently spending more time attacking the Whites than attacking us, but we could never be sure when the emphasis might change.

This was my second day in Comancheria, and I was just leaving a line of Cottonwood trees lining a stream. I had spent the night there, and was just leaving the last of the trees. I happened to be carrying my war club in my right hand, and my left hand was empty. I had walked about 70 feet from the last of the trees when I heard a war cry off to my left. I never used a war cry, and I never understood why anyone else would use one, and this was the perfect example of my objection to the foolish idea.

I might not have known that the lone Comanche warrior was there if he had not tipped me off with his shout. He might well have killed me easily if he had just kept his mouth shut. Of course, I berated myself for being caught like that, but I had no time to dwell on the issue. As soon as I identified my foe, I drew my knife with my left hand. The war cry had come from several hundred yards away, so I had time to get set with my weapons and to prepare to meet the challenge.

The horse was charging at me at full speed, and I was impressed at how the rider was able to stay on the horse’s back at that speed without having stirrups available. He was right handed, so he had to charge to my right side to be able to effectively use the short lance he was holding in his right hand. The lance shaft was too short to be used on the left side of the horse by a right-handed spearman. What this amounted to was a match of his skill with his horse and his lance against my skill with my club and knife.

Of course, since I was on a scouting mission for White Buck, I was not mounted. Actually, I thought that gave me a slight advantage in this kind of fight because my opponent had to reach down to spear me in the body, but I could work at my normal angle of attack if I concentrated on attacking the horse rather than the man.

Really, it was much too soon for him to do so, but he was still about 100 feet away when he aimed his lance at the point on my body where he intended to stab me. I was less than 5 feet tall at this time, so he was having to aim fairly low. He acted as if he wanted to stab me below my rib cage so that he would not wind up with his lance blade wedged between my ribs. That was going to put him at an awkward angle as he made contact with me.

I simply stood in one place when he charged at me, and I think that confused him a little bit. I am sure that he expected me to try to run from him, but I knew that there was no way that I could outrun his horse, especially if I tried to twist and turn. I was holding my war club in my right hand with my elbow bent at about 90°. When he extended his arm to poke me with his lance, I was going to hit it with the shaft of my war club and drive it away toward my right.

At the same time, I planned to pivot to my right and stab his horse in the belly. If I could work it right, I could make a long cut in the horse’s belly and cause its guts to spill out as it ran past me. Undoubtedly, the horse would fall and dump the rider to the ground. I expected to be knocked down by the horse, and I was probably going to lose control of my knife, but I was going to make what might be a superhuman effort to hang on to my war club.

I figured that I could win a fight with any man who had just fallen from a horse running at full speed, or close to it.

That was the way things worked out, except that the Comanche was killed by his fall from his horse. I dispatched the horse with a blow to the head with my war club. I did have to hunt for my knife that had been jerked from my hand as it hung up in the horse’s belly. That was no real problem. I cleaned my knife and returned it to my belt after scalping the Comanche. I hung the scalp by the hair through my belt and returned to my scouting trip.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Apparently, the Comanches had other things going on to amuse them; they showed no likelihood of attacking us. I arrived home in good condition except for being tired from my long walk.

Finally it arrived, my 12^th birthday. Today I was to be proclaimed as an adult and would receive my adult name. Oops, it appeared that Spring Flower had been hard at work behind my back. White Buck told me that my adult name would be Stalwart Defender, as approved by the mothers. Uh-oh, I had been outmaneuvered by Spring Flower. Oh, well, if I were teased about the name, I could say that the women had picked it out and I had to accept their choice. That was an answer that had no argument and might actually get me a little sympathy from the other men.

A big deal was made about the celebration of my birthday. This was because I was now the only son left to White Buck since the death of Squirrel. I received two very nice presents from White Buck. One was a new bow which required a lot more strength to pull it. It was a wonderful present and very appropriate for a father to son gift. I nearly cried when I received it, but I managed to hold back the tears. After all, I did not want to embarrass White Buck.

The other gift was something totally unexpected. It was a Colt 0.36 caliber revolver of the type later called the Navy Colt. It was the full package with the bullet mold and all of the other accessories needed to maintain and use the new pistol. I did not know where he had gotten it, and I was certainly not going to ask. It was certainly more powerful than the 0.31 caliber Pocket Pistol that I currently carried, but it was not nearly as heavy as the 0.44 caliber Colt Dragoon, so I would be able to carry in on my belt.

As soon as we could get away from the celebration, White Buck and I took the bow and the new pistol out for a trial. Spring Flower and Honey Bee came along to see what all of the to-do was about with the new pistol.

Of course, I tested the bow first, since it had been made by White Buck himself, so it carried a lot more sentimental value. It took me six shots before I had made the necessary adjustments to the added power of the new bow. This bow was going to be deadly to at least 250 yards, and maybe more, as I got more used to it.

The revolver was amazing. It was so nearly the same as the Pocket Pistol that I was already familiar with that I quickly mastered it as I used two hands to hold it when I fired. By now, I could easily handle the recoil and the weight of the larger revolver, and I now had a true man-stopper compared to the 0.31 caliber Pocket Pistol. These two weapons were surely going to be life savers for me when I had to face hostile Injuns.

Spring Flower and Honey Bee worked together, starting that day, making me a leather holster for my new revolver. This holster was a first class affair with a flap over the top of the holster to keep rain away from the pistol and to make sure that it did not fall from the holster as I did the other things that required me to move around. I wore the holster on my left side. I chose that position because I had noticed that the Dragoons wore a pistol that way, and I was a great admirer of the US Army Dragoons. Once I had my new holster, I always wore my new revolver whenever I went outside.

By the way, I noticed that I always hit high on a target whenever I used either pistol at close range. Therefore, I had learned to aim at a man’s bellybutton if he was relatively close when I fired. That almost insured that I was going to hit him somewhere in the chest. I suspected that this was because the rear sight on either pistol was a V-notch cut into the tang of the hammer. At first, I had considered making an adjustment in the rear sight, but I finally decided to leave well enough alone. I had learned how to adjust for that peculiarity in the sights so I decided to quit while I was ahead.

Spring Flower was older than her sister Honey Bee, so after getting permission from our mothers, I decided to teach Spring Flower how to use the 0.31 caliber Pocket Pistol. At first, with the loss of Squirrel, we no longer had two bodyguards for the girls, so we needed to find a solution. The whole family worked on that, but I was the one to come up with the solution by arming Spring Flower with the lighter gun.

Though she was slightly older than me, I was still larger than Spring Flower. The result was that my hand had really gotten too big for the Pocket Pistol, but hers was still a nice fit. That 0.31 caliber ball did not have much stopping power unless the hit was in the head, preferably in the brain. Well, Spring Flower was not going to be shooting at any but very short ranges, so she would have an excellent opportunity to hit her target where it would do the most good.

As it happened by what was becoming my reputation for outstanding good luck, I was out on a one-day scouting mission when I ran across a victim of a Comanche attack. This was a White man who had been driving a small enclosed wagon. He was literally a traveling salesman, and I found that the contents of his wagon were undisturbed. Fortunately, I had learned to drive a horse and wagon while we still lived on the farm in Indiana, so all I needed was a suitable draft animal.

The draft animal for the wagon was nowhere in sight, so I was willing to wager that it had been a mule. If so, it was undoubtedly what the Comanches had really wanted from the peddler, and they must of taken it with them. Well, as part of my unusually strong good luck, I was riding a horse that day. The horse had previously been used on occasion to pull a large travois, so I was able to get it to pull the wagon. I found the necessary rig inside the wagon.

This was simply too good an opportunity to let get away from me, so I immediately drove the wagon home. Fortunately, White Buck agreed that I had made the correct decision, so I did not get fussed at for aborting my scouting mission.

This wagon turned out to be a massive windfall for us and for the whole village. White Buck gave a lot of the stuff we did not need to other members of the community, and he made sure that everyone knew that I was the one who had brought in all of those wonderful things.

Of course, the main things that I was glad to see were a generous supply of lead, caps, and powder that could be used to recharge the ammunition for the revolvers. Also, there were several bottles of whiskey thar our mothers were very glad to see because they could be used to disinfect wounds. The shaman was not all that happy about the whiskey showing up, but he was ignored.