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  A Cheyenne Indian raised among pioneers on the Wyoming frontier, Matthew Hanchon had never known anything but fear and distrust. For the settlers branded him a savage—a beast to be gunned down. When Matthew realized that his adopted parents would suffer for his sake, he fled into the wilderness, seeking the people whose blood he shared. But he soon discovered that the Cheyenne hated him as much as the whites. Matthew would need the grit of a frontiersman and a warrior’s courage if he hoped to survive.

  ARROW KEEPER

  CHEYENNE 1

  By Judd Cole

  First published by Leisure Books in 1992

  Copyright © 1992, 2014 by Judd Cole

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: August 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2014 by Kirby Jonas

  Visit Kirby here

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Prologue

  In 1840, during the Moon When the Ponies Shed, Running Antelope of the Northern Cheyenne rode out alone into the Black Hills. There, in the sacred center of the world, the troubled Cheyenne chief unburdened his heart to the Great Spirit. For three days he danced and stared into the sun. Finally falling into a deep trance, he experienced the vision he was seeking. When he woke again, he returned to his people and called a council of all the headmen.

  East of the river called Great Waters, he told them, the five nations of the Iroquois—once the mightiest of the eastern tribes—had been whipped into submission on the reservations. Soon after, the white leader Sharp Knife, who was known to his people as Andrew Jackson, spoke the lie that all land west of the Great Waters would belong to the Indians forever. But the white man’s gold fever proved once again they had not spoken the straight word. The Cheyenne homeland was now swarming with Bluecoats and greedy whites. They had even begun to build a fort in the heart of the best hunting ground.

  Running Antelope knew that fighting white men was like trying to stamp out a prairie fire in a windstorm. First he must try the road of peace. So when the grass was well up that year, he and thirty warriors left their stronghold on the cold-water fork of the Powder River. Running Antelope had already sent word-bringers ahead to inform their kinsmen, the Southern Cheyennes living below the Platte River, that they were arriving for a council. Running Antelope’s wife, Lotus Petal, and their infant son accompanied him in order to visit her clan.

  Running Antelope was a peace chief, not a war leader. Nonetheless, ignoring the white truce flag he and the warriors carried, a company of Bluecoat pony soldiers ambushed his band in a pincers movement near the North Platte.

  At the first shots, Running Antelope folded his arms to show he was at peace. But the fierce pony soldiers were crazy and wild, like dogs in the Hot Moon. Cutting loose the travois to which his son was lashed, Running Antelope took the child up with him. Then he led his warriors and Lotus Petal on a desperate flight from their white attackers.

  It was the Cheyenne way to flee until their pursuers’ horses faltered, then to turn and attack. But a hard winter had left their ponies weak. The braves were armed only with bows, lances, clubs, and a few single-shot muzzle-loaders. They were no match for the Bluecoats’ thundering wagon guns and percussion-cap carbines.

  Still, the warriors fought bravely, singing the song of battle and shouting the shrill Cheyenne war cry, “Hiya hi-i-i-ya!” As their horses were cut down by double charges of canister shot, they used them for breastworks and fought on. But the Cheyennes were not painted for war or wearing their crow-feather medicine bonnets, which they believed made the white man’s bullets go wide. When the bloody massacre finally ended, Running Antelope, Lotus Petal, and all thirty braves lay dead or dying.

  The sole survivor was the squalling infant, still clutched in the fallen chief’s arms. Pawnee scouts were about to kill the child when the lieutenant in command interfered. He had the baby brought back to the river bend settlement of Bighorn Falls near Fort Bates.

  There the former fort sutler John Hanchon had opened his own mercantile store. His barren young wife Sarah instantly fell in love with the tiny orphan. Defying all warning that she would regret her decision, she insisted on raising the child as her own.

  The Hanchons named him Matthew. He grew into a tall, broad-shouldered youth with the pronounced cheekbones and even, pleasing features that had earned the Cheyenne the name of the Beautiful People among their red brothers. As soon as he was old enough to be useful, Matthew began working for his father, stocking shelves and delivering orders to the fort and the few settlers in the region.

  Occasionally the boy encountered hostile glances from whites in the community—particularly from frontier hard cases passing through with Indian scalps dangling from their sashes. But his parents were good to him, and he felt accepted in his limited world.

  Then came his sixteenth year and a forbidden love that would leave him a homeless outcast,

  caught between the white man’s hatred and the red man’s mistrust.

  Chapter One

  “God-in-whirlwinds!” said Corey Robinson when his friend Matthew Hanchon emerged through the leather-hinged front door of Hanchon’s Mercantile Store. “Why, you’re ready for church!”

  Matthew grinned sheepishly and avoided Corey’s teasing stare. He wore clean homespun trousers and a new broadcloth shirt that still felt stiff against his skin. His thick black hair had been carefully slicked back with axle grease. He was lean and straight and tall for a sixteen year old, with a strong, hawk nose and keen black eyes.

  Corey’s face eased into a gap-toothed smile. The pale, freckle-faced redhead was a year younger than Matthew. “Now I see which way the wind sets! You’re takin’ a delivery out to Hiram Steele.”

  “That’s old news. Pa always sends me there the first of every month.”

  “That’s so. But you never slick down your hair when you’re takin’ blankets out to the fort. Course, there ain’t no pretty girls to kiss at the fort, neither.”

  Corey dogged his friend’s heels as Matthew crossed to a buckboard he had left out in the deep-rutted road just beyond the tie-rail. Behind them stood Hanchon’s Mercantile, a raw plank building with a green canvas canopy. The rains had been heavy for the past several days, and duckboards had been laid out in front of the boardwalk.

  Matthew checked the dry goods stacked neatly in the bed of the wagon—bolts of linsey cloth, coils of rope, a keg of nails, a drum of kerosene—against the invoice in his pocket, making sure he had loaded everything. Both boys had to squint in the bright Wyoming sunshine.

  “You remember flowers for Kristen?” Corey said, grinning. “Or do you just pick ’em along the way?”

  “You’re standing on your grave, Sprout,” Matthew warned him. He was imitating their friend Old Knobby, who worked at the feed stable. Both boys whooped with laughter and began scuffling until Sarah Hanchon’s voice rang out from the doorway and pulled them up short.

  “Sakes and saints, boys! Carrying on like common riffraff right out in broad daylight! You, Matthew! It’s already past noon, son. Come to the house and get the silk Mr. Steele’s daughter ordered special. Then you better hitch the team and get a move on. I want you back home before nightfall, hear?”
r />   “Yes’m,” Matthew said, ashamed to be scolded in front of his best friend.

  “I’d best make tracks, anyway,” Corey said. “Pa’s preaching out at the mining camp on Sweetwater Creek. He needs me to pass the hat.”

  “Watch your back trail,” Matthew said by way of farewell, again imitating Old Knobby.

  “And you keep your nose to the wind, Hoss!” After Corey left, Matthew stepped out of the midday glare into the dark, cluttered exterior of the store. Three walls were lined with shelves that held candles, playing cards, fishhooks, sulphur matches, needles, buttons, mirrors, jackknives, and other such merchandise. On the wall behind the broad deal counter hung several rifles: the new .54 caliber repeaters, breechloaders, Sam Colt’s long arms with their revolving cylinders, lever-action Henry rifles.

  A thickset man behind the counter was making entries in a ledger. His skin had turned pallid from working indoors since Matthew had taken over the deliveries.

  “You mind your manners around Hiram Steele,” John Hanchon reminded the boy without bothering to look up. “He’s our best customer besides the fort.”

  “I know, Pa, but I hardly never see him.”

  “Matthew!” Sarah Hanchon’s clarion voice called from within. “My lands, where are you?”

  Their living quarters were connected to the store by a short dogtrot with a slab door at the house end. Matthew lifted the latchstring and entered a tidy room dominated by a fieldstone fireplace. The plank floor was covered with a rose-patterned carpet. A gaudy 1856 calendar over the fireplace advertised O. F. Winchester’s armaments factory.

  “There you are,” said Sarah, handing him a bolt of smooth blue silk. “Now you be careful with this, hear? Give it to the girl yourself, not to one of the hands. They’ll get it filthy.”

  Matthew had to make an effort not to smile at her words. He planned to deliver it in person, all right. For a moment he felt the smooth silk, thinking of Kristen’s skin and the pure bottomless blue of her eyes.

  Sarah saw something in the boy’s manner that made her pretty, careworn face crease in a frown. She felt a familiar gnawing of suspicion and worry.

  “Matthew? You aren’t being foolish about Kristen Steele, are you. Sometimes young men get silly notions about courting the wrong girls.”

  Matthew felt warm blood creep up the back of his neck. He loved his mother, but sometimes she said things he couldn’t understand. It was as if she spoke in riddles.

  “What’s so foolish about me courting Kristen Steele? She don’t laugh.”

  His words seemed to answer some unspoken question in Sarah’s eyes. Still angry—and embarrassed to be talking to his mother about such private matters—Matthew said good-bye and hurried outside before she could reply.

  He left the silk on the seat of the buckboard and crossed the street to a sprawling frame building with oiled paper for windows. This building was the Bighorn Falls Feed Stable, where John Hanchon boarded his two big blood bays. Matthew found Knobby in one of the empty stalls, swatting at flies with a quirt. A former mountain man, the hostler still dressed in buckskin shirt and trousers and a slouch beaver hat.

  “Well, cuss my coup if it ain’t young Matthew! Rest your hinder a spell, lad!”

  “Can’t today. Got a delivery.”

  Matthew led the gentle bloods out of their stalls. He paused to scratch the withers of a handsome pony that was contentedly chewing on a nosebag full of oats.

  “Good little Injun pony,” said Old Knobby, digging at a tick in his grizzled beard. “Broke by a Sioux. That-air hoss’ll gallop from hell to breakfast ’n’ back, or I’ll be et fir a tater!”

  As he did at least a dozen times a day, Old Knobby proudly lifted his slouch hat to expose the hideless bone at the top of his skull. “A Cheyenne warrior damn near raised my hair and never onc’t clumb off his hoss! But I reckon I let daylight into that Injun’s soul!”

  Knobby chuckled as he clapped his hat back on. “I’ll say this much for your people, tadpole. A good brave fights meaner ’n’ a she-grizz with cubs.”

  Matthew always felt confused and uncomfortable when Knobby started that talking as if he didn’t live here in town with civilized people. But, as usual, he let Knobby’s remarks pass without comment.

  “Keep your powder dry, pup!” Knobby called behind him as the boy led the team outside.

  Matthew crossed the street and harnessed the team to the traces of the buckboard. By the time his shadow began to lengthen in the warm June sun, Matthew had left the town well behind him and was crossing the flat tableland near the Tongue River valley.

  To the west, the Bighorn Mountains nosed their spires into the soft blue belly of the sky. Sunlight glinted off flakes of mica high up in the rim rock. Closer at hand, he could see the lush green grama-grass meadows that strengthened Hiram Steele’s mustangs into cavalry remounts. Seeing the vast Wyoming Territory spread out all around him like a grand painting made him quit fretting about Knobby’s remark. Instead, Kristen Steele’s image filled his mind’s eye.

  He felt butterflies stirring in his belly as he reminded himself this trip was even more special than the other visits since he and Kristen had first seen each other and fallen in love. This time he planned to ask her to marry him—not right away, of course, but in two or three years when his father’s military contracts increased and he made Matthew a full partner in the store. Matthew had been raised to be practical, he knew that a man had to put by against the future if he wanted a wife and family.

  Familiar with the route to the Steele’s spread the team veered right when the wagon road forked near Fort Bates. And as a matter of routine, Matthew always stopped by to visit with the fort’s sutler and to see if he needed anything from town. Today, he would not linger in his duties.

  The fort’s pine-log gun turrets soon rose into view on the horizon. A bored sentry at the main gate recognized the youth and waved him through without bothering to stop him. Matthew had just cleared the main gate when a sudden thundering of hooves erupted on his right. He reined in his team and glanced toward the parade ground in front of the enlisted barracks.

  Fear instantly iced his blood and froze him motionless. For several mounted Pawnee scouts were bearing right down on him, their faces contorted as they shrieked hideously. They wore a ragtag assortment of blue Army uniforms and beaded buckskins. Their heads were shaved front and back, leaving only a knot at the crown. Those were so stiff with grease and grime, they stood straight up.

  Usually the Pawnee mercenaries would stop to stare at Matthew with a hatred and cold contempt that made him avert his eyes. But that day they ignored the astonished boy. They divided and swept around the buckboard like a raging river, racing out the gate.

  Slowly Matthew’s heart climbed down out of his throat. Then, dumb with surprise, he realized that many of the soldiers were laughing. One of them pointed toward a fat man in tattered civilian clothes. He was wandering in aimless circles around the fort flagpole, tearing at his hair, and shouting oaths.

  “It was that half-wit mule skinner what set ’em off!” a sergeant explained to his squad of gaping recruits. “We found the poor devil wandering like that out on the plains after redskins robbed and burned his freight wagon. Stow this, lads: a Pawnee figgers that a crazy-by-thunder white man is the worst bad medicine on God’s green earth!”

  Hoping to avoid the returning Pawnees, Matthew hurried across to the sutler’s store and finished his business. An hour’s ride due west of the fort brought him to the bluff overlooking Hiram Steele’s bottom spread near the river. Several large pole corrals ringed the house, men working green mustangs in each. Between the notched-log house and the plank outbuildings was a long stone watering trough.

  But Matthew ignored all of it. He glanced instead toward a lone stand of scrub pine that rose beyond the house where the road disappeared behind a series of grassy hummocks. His heart suddenly pounding in his ears, he urged the horses to a trot. His good mood soured, however, when he pulled into t
he yard and recognized the hands who were digging postholes for a new corral.

  “Know what I hear, boys?” one of the hands called out, making sure Matthew could hear him. “I hear Injun bucks rut on their own mothers!”

  The speaker, Boone Wilson, was long jawed and rangy, with several days’ beard stubble turning his cheeks a scratchy blue black. He stared at Matthew, his eyes like pale ice. “That true, red boy? You poke your own mama?”

  Matthew ignored him and started carrying the supplies into a storage lean-to off the kitchen of the main house.

  “Hell, I reckon he ain’t no Injun,” Wilson said as Matthew swung back onto the seat. “He’s what you call a red Arab of the plains!”

  Derisive laughter exploding behind him, Matthew swung out onto the wagon road again. He felt Wilson’s suspicious eyes on his back as he headed toward the stand of scrub pine. Some instinct warned him to look back, but he didn’t. So he missed seeing Wilson head quickly up toward the house.

  Matthew reined in beside a small pond and slipped the team’s bits so they could drink. He found Kristen leaning against her favorite tree, her eyelids swollen and red from crying.

  “What is it?” Matthew said, alarm tightening his voice.

  Kristen stepped up into his arms when he opened them. She wore a pretty pink gingham dress, and her hair tumbled in a golden cascade over her shoulders. She couldn’t answer him right away. For a long moment they stood silent, filled with each other. There was only the song of the lark and the whistle of the willow thrush, the distant bawling of calves. Finally Kristen could speak.

  “Oh, Matthew, it’s father! He’s terribly angry at me. I’m frightened.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  Kristen sniffled, drawing comfort from the firm strength of Matthew’s embrace. “Last week, out of the blue, he brought home a young officer from the fort, Lieutenant Carlson. The officer asked me to a dance at the fort, and father wants me to go.”