Chapter 6

Well, this was nice, an unexpected opportunity to spend a night sleeping with my wife. Now, that is the way to live.

It was not until late in the afternoon before my rifle was ready and I had checked and re-zeroed it. The gunsmith had done an excellent job. While he was working on it, I had him put in a peep-sight to replace the open "V" notch sight that the rifle came with. I much preferred the peep-sight over the notch sight as I felt that it gave me better accuracy in my aiming. I admit that it was personal preference, but it was my rifle, so—what the hell?

I was back on the road the next morning heading southwest. I wanted to get somewhere close to the place where I'd had the recent firefight and continue my westward swing from there. There was nothing very important about the place, except that it was simply a continuation of my former path.

The landscape around here was relatively unremarkable, mostly rolling plains with some hills of note. The biggest change in the topography was caused by the gullies that resulted from flash floods. Some of them were wide and deep, so that they were effective barriers to travel when one was in a hurry.

I was into my third day of travel when I spotted something of interest. There was a road visible from the top of the hill I was occupying. Yes, I know that was not a good place to be if I was expecting to be found by hostile Indians, but I had to be up where I could see the land if I was going to find out about it before it turned into a big surprise.

On that road was a dust cloud indicating something was traveling fast. Behind that first cloud was a second one, so I assumed that it was one group being chased by another. In this era, such a thing did not denote good will, so I decided to investigate. I urged my horse to move out as fast as my pack mule could handle, and I reached to top of the next hill in time to see what was really going on with the dust clouds.

I was now close enough that I could see that the lead dust cloud was raised by a stage coach, and the second dust cloud was a small group of chasing Indians. I could now hear gunfire, so I figured that it was some Comanches having fun by scaring the hell out of the hated Whites. The Indians were not likely to catch the stage coach, barring an accident to the coach or the team, but the chase was great fun for the Indians. They would quit when they or their horses got tired of the chase, but there was danger for the people in the coach until that happened.

Of course, I could have just sat to one side to let the little drama play itself out, but that did not fit my personality. I found it very difficult to mind my own business when somebody innocent might be hurt, so I released the lead rope to the mule and drew my Winchester. I sped up my horse to its maximum speed and tried to intercept the coach.

My plan was to stop beside the road and shoot at the Indians as they charged toward me. There were five Indians in the group, and I had a full magazine in my rifle. I should be able to do something with about three shoots per Indian.

I reached a good place near the road and waited for the coach to rush by. I could see that the driver still had the team under control, so I wasn't currently worried about a runaway situation. I stayed on my horse so that I could run easily if I had to, but I had a reasonable shooting platform with an unmoving horse.

I began shooting when the Indians were about 200 yards away, and I kept shooting as fast as I could lever in another cartridge. The peep sight was no better than the V-notch under these circumstances, but I didn't worry about that at this time. My first shot did wound a horse, but it didn't fall—the range was too great. Nevertheless, I now had only four adversaries. Every little bit helped.

I had downed the remainder of the horses and riders by the time I had fired six shots. They were coming right toward me and the targets were too damned big to keep missing at that range, so I stopped the charge before they could get to me. I didn't bother with checking on the downed Indians, the unwounded man could do that. Instead I directed my horse toward the retreating coach.

I gave that up after a few hundred yards because it became obvious by then that the driver had no intention of stopping, or even slowing down, until he had put a few more miles on his team. There was really no point in chasing them down, since I was not aching for any thanks that I might get. Instead, I returned to pick up my pack mule to continue my survey trip.

That was the last of the excitement on this trip, and I was back at the fort within a week. Sally was very happy to see me, and she showed me how much that night in bed.

Maj. Kreiker wanted me to go on patrol with a detail led by Lt. Andrew Simms. Lt. Simms was an experienced Indian fighter, and he should know what he was doing, so I was happy to go with him. There was a report of raiding by the Comanches (surprise?) on outlying farms, and we were going to try to "chase them away." Ha! The only way to chase a Comanche away was at the wrong end of a bullet, so we knew that we were actually headed for a serious fight.

There were 18 men in the detail, counting Lt. Simms, Sgt. Billy Brown, and me. I had my Winchester, but everybody else was armed with the single-shot Springfield cavalry carbine. That was a good rifle against another army, but the single-shot character was a problem when fighting Indians. Fortunately, everybody also had a Schofield .45 caliber revolver.

As usual, Sally was apprehensive, but she was resigned to seeing me off. We rode out with the usual jangle of confidence the US Cavalry always shows. We rode toward the nearest reported encounter with the Indians, and that took about half a day. When we got to the farmhouse, all we saw was a half-burned log cabin and four graves.

There were a lot of horse prints around, so I had some initial trouble in separating the marks left by the Indians. I finally found the route followed by the unshod hooves, and we followed that. We trailed the Indians as fast as we could travel, and we came to the place where they had camped for the night. We didn't want to camp right there for several reasons, one of which was that there was human waste littering the landscape—the Indians did not use latrines, but simply dumped wherever they felt the urge.

I found that there were 24 Indians in the war party, and it appeared that they had at least one White female slave with them. I determined that from the signs of a rape party in the camp. The dust was disturbed enough that I could not positively identify how many women they had captured.

Now we knew why the Indians were not making as fast a retreat as we expected. Common practice was that women walked while men rode, so the war party would be limited to the speed that an exhausted White woman could walk. She would be barefooted, so that would probably slow them even more.

About four miles farther along, we found the naked body of a White woman. We concluded that she had to have been one of the featured attractions at the rape party—her body had all of the signs. Anyway, we stopped long enough to bury her before moving on.

There had to be at least one more captive because the rate of travel by the Indians did not pick up. That was going to make it easier for us to catch them; we just hoped that it was before any more women died. On the other hand, if we did not find them soon, death might be the preferable fate for the women who were left.

It was the next day before we saw a cloud of dust that indicated the location of the Indians that we were chasing. The country was rather flat through here, so there was little chance of us sneaking up on them. Besides, they surely would have seen our dust cloud, so we were probably going to be involved in a battle which pitted strength on strength.