The Empire Page 15

Takoda explained Royer to Padma.

  “He is only dangerous if he spooks,” explained Takoda. “Though he is very spooky.”

  Royer’s buckboard rolled up to Padma’s entourage. Royer was instantly struck by the beautiful squaw, nearly half a foot taller than the others in her party. He eyed the warriors’ rifles with fear. Lewis looked at Royer, waiting for him to say something. Royer stood up from his seat, clutching his rifle.

  “We have come to teach you the game of baseball,” announced Royer.

  Takoda translated. The tribespeople looked at each other, confused. Padma burst out laughing. Heaping baseball atop the pile of surreality—time travel, starving Native Americans, the pending massacre at Wounded Knee—was simply insane. Padma gripped her stomach, laughing so hard that it hurt. Takoda and the others hadn’t the faintest idea what Padma found funny, though her laughing was infectious. In moments, the entire group was cackling. Lewis covered his mouth with his hand, fighting back a chuckle.

  Humiliated by the hysterically laughing squaw, Royer attempted to regain control.

  “Before we begin, you will all disarm. You will give your rifles to this man,” Royer commanded, pointing to Lewis.

  The laughter died down as Takoda translated. The tribesmen grumbled and pulled the hammers on their rifles.

  Panicked, Royer raised his rifle and pointed it frantically at the tribespeople, shifting his aim manically from warrior to warrior.

  Padma raised her hands and stepped forward. “No, wait!” she shouted.

  Royer fired, hitting Padma in the chest, knocking her flat on the ground. Takoda and the others were stunned. Royer had killed the Messiah! Through the clearing gun smoke, Takoda and the others looked at Padma’s still body on the ground, then instantly snapped up their rifles to kill Royer.

  “Stop!”

  They turned. To their astonishment, Padma was sitting up. Smoke wafted from the charred bullet hole in the heart of her doeskin dress.

  She stood up and walked defiantly to Royer. Royer’s rifle was pointed directly at her. The rifle barrel was shaking.

  “You may leave now, or you may die,” Padma told Royer grimly. “You have five seconds to decide which you prefer.”

  Royer was frozen in terror. He had shot the squaw through the heart, and yet she was now standing and speaking to him in perfect English. Were these people really bulletproof, as their Ghost Dance religion claimed? Was this their messiah?

  Lewis looked at the petrified Royer, then snatched the rifle out of his hands, grabbed the reins and cued the horses to gallop away. Unprepared for the jackrabbit departure, Royer flipped backwards over the wooden bench seat, face-planting on the buckboard bed. His derby hat bounced on the ground in the buckboard’s dusty wake.

  Takoda and the others stared at Padma, stunned. They dropped to their knees. Padma was truly the Messiah.

  “I want to return to the village now,” said Padma. “Please get up.”

  Royer’s derby hat rolled up to Padma’s feet. She reached down and picked it up, handing it to Takoda.

  “Do you want this?” she asked.

  Takoda took the hat with the reverence with which a nun would have received the Shroud of Turin. Had Padma handed him a buffalo turd at that moment, he would have treated it as a sacred relic.

  “Yes! Yes!” Takoda replied. “Thank you, Messiah!”

  Takoda pulled the hat on his head. The others envied the special treatment afforded Takoda by the Messiah.

  No one said a word during the walk back to the village. Takoda and the others stole glances at Padma. Her eyes never met theirs. Her forward stare and severe expression never budged.

  When they arrived, Padma immediately disappeared into her tipi as the others ran to tell their fellow tribespeople of the latest miracle they had witnessed.

  Inside her tipi, Padma clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her gasp of pain. The long walk back to the village had strained every last fiber of fortitude. Every breath she took fired shrieks of searing pain through her chest. She removed her dress, revealing her Kevlar vest beneath. The flattened remnant of a spent bullet was impacted in the center of the vest. Kyle had made Padma swear that she would wear the vest in his absence.

  Padma carefully removed the vest, examining the fresh purple welt on her sternum where the bullet had impacted. She touched the mark between her breasts. The pain from her cracked sternum was excruciating. Outside the tipi, she heard a growing chorus, crackling with excitement as word of the Messiah’s latest wonder spread through the camp like a prairie wildfire.

  Standing Rock Reservation

  South Dakota

  September 15, 1890

  08:15 hours

  Timeline 003

  Sitting Bull opened his eyes to see the rough-hewn boards of the ceiling of his log cabin. His chest and arms were wrapped with torn cloth, stained with two tones of crimson from dried and fresh blood.

  He struggled to sit up in a bed made from several layers of old blankets piled on the floor. He raised his back against the wall and scanned the cabin. His wives, Seen By Her Nation and Four Robes, worked at the opposite side of the cabin preparing rations on a wooden table. When they saw that Sitting Bull was conscious, they came to him and knelt at his bed. Seen By Her Nation felt one of his wounds. He winced.

  “You’re a fool,” she said.

  “I had to know,” he said. “I needed proof.”

  “People appearing out of lightning isn’t proof enough for you?”

  “I didn’t see them appear.”

  They heard someone step into the doorway of the cabin. Sitting Bull’s wives turned to see a barrel-chested Lakota man, about 50 years old, dressed in a threadbare suit. The man had a wide face, high cheekbones, and a cleft chin. They recognized the man. His name was Gall—formerly Chief Gall.

  Gall had commanded the Lakota counter-attack on General Custer’s troops at the Battle of Little Big Horn, annihilating the general’s army. After years on the run pursued by federal troops, Gall eventually gave up and surrendered, renouncing Sitting Bull and his hatred of white people. Gall took up farming, curried favor with Daniel Royer’s predecessor, and was appointed as a judge of the Court of Indian Affairs. He enjoyed a rare prestige among the whites, along with double the rations his people received. Sitting Bull and Gall had not spoken in years.

  Sitting Bull noticed that Gall had gained weight since he had last seen him.

  Sitting Bull’s wives rose from the floor and exited the cabin, giving Gall a hard stare on their way out the door.

  “So it’s true,” Gall said, observing Sitting Bull’s bloodstained bandages. “You performed the Sun Dance.”

  Sitting Bull was silent. Gall walked to the table, picked up a rickety wooden chair and set it at the foot of Sitting Bull’s bed. He sat in the chair.

  “The Sun Dance is illegal,” said Gall. “I could have you arrested.”

  “Do what you need to do to serve your white masters,” replied Sitting Bull scornfully.

  “They are not my masters!” shouted Gall. “I am a judge! I have honor!”

  The two men stared at each other. Sitting Bull broke the silence.

  “What do you want?”

  Gall folded his arms. “Agent Royer says he shot a woman through the heart and she lived. The people say she appeared from lightning. They say she is the Messiah of the Ghost Dance prophecy. Are these stories true?”

  Sitting Bull was quiet. He felt growing fatigue as the pain of his wounds siphoned his strength.

  “If Young Man Afraid of Indians says he shot a woman through the heart and she lived, why do you need to ask me?” asked Sitting Bull. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it.”

  Sitting Bull could see that Gall was uneasy.

  “Why did you perform the Sun Dance?
” demanded Gall. “You know it’s illegal. You know you could go to prison. You could die. Why would you take such a risk?”

  “I did not witness the woman’s arrival,” answered Sitting Bull. “I had to know whether what my people said was true.”

  “Did you have a vision?” asked Gall anxiously.

  “Yes,” replied Sitting Bull.

  Gall waited for Sitting Bull to render a verdict. Sitting Bull enjoyed the moment, tormenting his former mentee.

  “And?” persisted Gall.

  “She is the Messiah,” answered Sitting Bull.

  “She is not the Messiah!” shouted Gall rising from his chair and kicking it over. “There is no messiah! The prophecy is false—it was concocted by a charlatan.”

  “I did not believe in the Ghost Dance,” Sitting Bull said. “I permitted the dance because it gave my tribe hope, but I did not believe in it. I was wrong. The woman is the Messiah.”

  Gall put his hands on his hips and paced, agitated, across the cabin floor.

  “Years ago, I told you of my vision of our victory at the Little Big Horn,” Sitting Bull said. “You know that vision was true. Since that time, I have had only two visions, this one about the Messiah…and another about my death.”

  Gall turned, surprised.

  “Your death? How?”

  “Later this year. I will be killed by Indian police.”

  Gall was distressed. The thought of his mentor’s death sliced through the years of bitterness that divided the two men. Gall did not take Sitting Bull’s visions lightly.

  “Have you met the Messiah?” asked Sitting Bull.

  “Stop calling her that,” replied Gall.

  “Have you met her?”

  “No,” Gall replied.

  “You should,” advised Sitting Bull.

  Gall turned and looked out one of the cabin windows.

  “Why did you come here?” asked Sitting Bull.

  “I came to ask about the woman,” replied Gall.

  “No,” said Sitting Bull. “You came for much more.”

  Gall was silent.

  “Your white clothes are at war with your Lakota blood,” said Sitting Bull, divining the conflict within Gall. “This story of the Messiah—it has awakened your Lakota heart. You thought it was dead. You wanted it to be dead.”

  “I have given up hope,” conceded Gall.

  “I have too,” said Sitting Bull. “My hope has not been restored. I am too old and tired for hope. I simply know what is true. I don’t know where the truth goes. I only know the truth carries me now, downstream, wherever it goes.”

  “I don’t dare to hope,” said Gall. “Hope holds too much pain.” Gall put his hand on the left side of his abdomen, over a scar where he had been bayonetted and left for dead by soldiers years earlier.

  “It is futile to fight the whites. We tried to avenge our Cheyenne brothers and sisters after the whites slaughtered them at Sand Creek. Our brothers and sisters asked for peace with the whites. They raised the white’s flag over their village at Sand Creek. The whites killed women and children. They took scalps. They cut babies out of the bellies of their mothers.

  “Chief Red Cloud tried to avenge them. We won many battles…but we lost the war. They starved us out of the Black Hills. We ended up here. This is where we wait to die. The armies of the whites are too powerful, and we are now too weak. We can refuse our circumstances and die now, or we accept our defeat and die later. Those are our only choices.”

  Sitting Bull raised his hands to his chest wounds. “It doesn’t matter whether you hope or not. What will happen will happen whether you have hope or you don’t.”

  “I wish she had not come,” Gall said bitterly. “I was resigned to this life. She tempts me to remember my old life—the life I have tried to forget.”

  Sitting Bull stared at Gall. “White clothes do not change the warrior’s color.”

  Gall turned to leave. “Whatever she is, she is dangerous,” he said as he exited the cabin.

  Mount Moriah Cemetery

  Deadwood, SD

  September 16, 1890

  08:50 hours

  Timeline 003

  Kyle sat astride Pegasus on a plateau overlooking the town of Deadwood, South Dakota. The sprawling town was cradled in the arms of hills that had been largely denuded of their evergreen trees by the town’s citizens. As Kyle beheld the nineteenth-century town below him, one thought was center in his mind.

  God, my ass hurts.

  Kyle had alternated between riding and walking the four days to Deadwood, carrying a heavy backpack the entire way. Pegasus had been a trooper on the journey—remarkably steady for a wild horse, particularly a stallion. In the course of their time together, Pegasus had accepted Kyle as a trustworthy companion, someone who would keep him out of danger. The trust was reciprocal—the more Kyle rode his horse, the greater his confidence that Pegasus would not spook or bolt with his bareback passenger. Over four days, the two had become a team.

  The plateau on which Kyle and Pegasus stood was Mount Moriah, home to Deadwood’s cemetery. Kyle walked his horse to the only gravesite he wanted to visit. A simple wooden marker stood behind a wrought iron fence. Black letters were painted on the tall, white, narrow wooden marker—a painful farewell from one dear friend to another.

  Kyle dismounted his horse and stood for a few moments before the monument. He had missed the murder of the legendary Wild Bill Hickok by 14 years. Jack McCall shot Hickok in the back of the head the day after Wild Bill won all of McCall’s money in a poker game at Deadwood’s Number 10 Saloon. Hickok was holding two pairs at the time, aces and eights, forever since known as the “dead man’s hand.”

  McCall was acquitted of the charge of murder, claiming revenge for his brother’s slaying by Hickok—a brother McCall never had. Commenting on the verdict, the town’s newspaper, the Black Hills Pioneer, reported, “Should it ever be our misfortune to kill a man, we would simply ask that our trial may take place in some of the mining camps of these hills.”

  Unbeknownst to McCall, his trial had no legal basis, as Deadwood was on Indian Territory in 1876. Fearing for his life in Deadwood, McCall fled to Wyoming, where his non-stop bragging about shooting Wild Bill Hickok earned him a second trial, followed by a swift hanging in 1877. He was buried with the noose around his neck.

  Hoover looked up at Kyle inquisitively.

  “OK, boy,” Kyle said. “Let’s go.”

  Kyle set his heavy backpack on a headstone, then remounted his horse. After remounting, he heaved the pack off the headstone and strapped it on his back.

  Kyle guided Pegasus down the hill along a narrow dirt path to Deadwood’s Main Street. Hoover followed Pegasus closely, just out of the horse’s kick range. Standing in the center of the thoroughfare, Kyle shook his head at the sight, unable to fully believe he was actually in nineteenth-century Deadwood.

  The Deadwood of 1890 was very different from the one where Wild Bill Hickok played his last poker hand. A fire in 1879 decimated the miners’ ramshackle wooden camp. What rose from those ashes was a Gilded Age city of stone and brick buildings bordering a wide central thoroughfare. Gold from George Hearst’s Homestead mine and other strikes had transformed Deadwood into a prosperous modern town that even included South Dakota’s first telephone exchange.

  As Kyle rode Pegasus down Main Street, he tried to avoid staring at the people walking along the thoroughfare. Though exhausted from the long journey, he was thrilled to step into a day in the historic town while its history was still being written.

  Filthy from the journey, Kyle expected to be inconspicuous in the legendary mining town. Instead, he found himself a ruffian compared to Deadwood’s well-heeled citizens. Though many of the Caucasian men still wore the rough-and-tumble frontier wear of cowboys or min
e laborers, many wore business suits, long frock coats with high-collared excelsior shirts, silk ties, and top hats or derbies. Women’s clothing left everything to the imagination, covering every inch of skin with the exception of the hands and face. Many women wore jersey bodices over long draped skirts with modest bustles. Chinese men wearing traditional long Changchun shirts walked to and from Chinatown in the northern part of Deadwood. Black Xiao Mao skullcaps covered their heads, which were shaved in the front and on the sides, with hair in the back braided into long queues. The hairstyle was mandated by the Manchus, and cutting one’s queue was an open act of rebellion, punishable by death. Their long queues tethered them to a homeland thousands of miles across the ocean.

  Kyle walked his horse up Main Street, past all the obvious stores where he could purchase essentials—food, clothing, and supplies. Instead, he drove Pegasus to the very first place Padma insisted that Kyle visit upon his arrival in Deadwood. He stopped his horse in front of a narrow three-story red brick building. The gold letters on the building’s windows read “First National Bank of Deadwood.”

  Kyle slid off Pegasus’ back, tied his reins to the hitching post in front of the bank, and walked in. Hoover followed him.

  Inside, he faced a carved wooden wall at the opposite side of a large room. Three small rectangular teller windows guarded with iron bars were inset to the wall. Wooden signs with gold paint letters reading “Teller” were mounted above each window. Only one of the three teller windows was open—the other two were shuttered. Kyle looked to his left. A man sat at a desk, scribbling into a ledger with a fountain pen. The man was in his thirties, with a mustache, long sideburns, and brown hair combed tightly across his head. He wore a high-collared white shirt, with a navy silk tie inserted into a charcoal vest. Daylight from the bank’s large front window lit the man’s ledger. An armed guard wearing a navy uniform stood to Kyle’s right.

  “Dogs are not permitted in this establishment,” said the guard.

  “They are today,” replied Kyle.

  Peering behind the teller window was another man in his early thirties, with wire-rim spectacles and brown hair in a tight combover. His clothing was virtually identical to the man behind the desk.