No Balm in Gilead

They followed the trail under lowering skies and came upon James Fremont’s bloated body late in the afternoon. He was near the river, propped up under a live oak as if taking a nap, except for the three arrows sticking out of his chest. A short distance away J.C. saw a saddle upside-down on the ground and surmised the horses had been picketed there. He dismounted and flipped the saddle over. It was an expensive one, built for comfort with intricately scrolled leather. A bedroll and saddle bags lay nearby in deep grass. The bedroll looked untouched but the saddle bags had been emptied. That saddle was an expensive piece of furniture for Indians to leave to the elements. J.C. stepped over to the body and squatted next it, examining the arrows, pulling at his shirt to look at the wounds, and talking to the corpse as if he were still alive. “Well, Jim, it appears you’re a mite late getting to the bone orchard. I’ll get you there as soon as I humanly can, my friend.” “It was Kiowas, all right,” said Empty, looking over J.C.’s shoulder. “Look over there for sign.” J.C. pointed toward the edge of the tree line. “And work your way to the river.” Empty shuffled off muttering something about the futility of their search and of their enterprise in general. “Ain’t nothin’ to see here,” he observed, but for the sake of appearances he made a show of examining the ground, slowly making his way back toward the river and the comfortable shade of a stand of oak trees. As Empty retreated, J.C. pulled Fremont’s clothes farther apart. A bullet hole with powder burns around it had torn his shirt and bored into his chest. The blood that soaked his shirt had obviously come from that wound. Looking closely, he noticed little blood emanating from the arrow wounds. He pulled Fremont’s body away from the tree but saw no exit wound out his back or elsewhere. J.C. looked from the body to the cold remains of the camp fire twenty yards out from where Fremont sat propped against his living tombstone. Drag marks, faint but still visible, scored the ground, the dead-plowed earth that would bear a bitter fruit. What possible purpose would Indians have for dragging Fremont to this tree? Mutilation was more their game when they made a statement. With keen and tender eye, he pored over the scarred, violent ground; with painstaking care he sought out its mysteries, its secrets, but he found little but a clotted pool of blood where Fremont had fallen. Oh, but he had fallen hard, as if dropped from a great height. No signs of movement marred the impression his body made on the hard ground. He must have been dead when he fell. Though he saw shallow prints of Fremont’s boots and what looked like another man’s moccasins nearby he could discern no evidence of a fight, no kicked up or scuffed earth where two men grappled in a death struggle. Was he taken by surprise or by someone he knew? A blackened tin cup and coffee pot slouched in the ashes of the camp fire, and Fremont’s vest and overcoat still lay across a log, beneath which he found an empty wallet. He circled the area slowly to find signs of frantic activity, shell casings, anything that signified a fight for life. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. “So, Begley shinned out,” he deduced. He turned yet further outward from the river and examined the ground in a fan. About thirty yards out he saw the evidence of a large group of horses, where they had apparently halted. For what? Why would they stop instead of ride over the camp in a wave? By the looks of it they had ridden out of the hills to the west. What kind of dumb Indians rode into the sun to make an attack? Then he found what he was looking for, the hoofprints of shod horses, and as he worked his way back to the dead fire something else. Though absorbed by the dirt, the clotted evidence of blood caught his eye. So, someone else had been shot. Back at the fire he searched more closely, and sure enough under a stone lining the fire pit he found a .40 caliber shell casing. Obviously, Fremont had gotten off one shot and killed or wounded one of his attackers. As he reached down to pick it up a glint of white under a branch on the ground caught his eye, it was a piece of hollowed out bone about four inches long and tapered at each end, and nearby he found another brass casing, this one shorter than the first. He stuck both shell casings and the bone in a vest pocket. Just then Empty, who had worked his way into the shade along the river bank, called out with surprise. “Well, looky here,” he drawled, “footprints.” J.C. hurried over and bent close to inspect the prints. They were deep in the soft earth near the bank, and the heel was nearly triangular. “That’s no footprint, that’s a boot,” he said. “Call it whatever you like, Jaycee, still looks like a foot to me.” “You’re all down but nine, Empty. When’s the last time you saw an Indian wearing boots?” “That your point? Maybe old Ed made it gettin’ away.” “No chance. Ed Begley could fit both his feet in those prints.” He picked up a stick, measured out the print and cut the stick to length with his pocket knife. “I’ll help you load Fremont in the wagon, then I reckon I’ll trail these renegades and see if I can’t divine where they have got off to. Don’t forget his saddle.” “That dog won’t hunt, Jaycee. You ain’t leavin’ me out here to haul a dead man back to town alone.” “You have been tellin’ me for two days I worry too much, now suddenly you got the heebie-jeebies?” “Well, two is twice as safe as one, especialmente when you’re weighed down with the dead.” Further argument and reasoning could not budge Empty from his sudden fear of being alone, so J.C. resigned himself to letting the trail of Fremont’s killers get colder still. He wondered if the whole set-up wasn’t intentional then passed it off as pure inefficiency, so they rolled Fremont’s body in a canvas tarp and loaded it into the wagon and headed back to town.