Winter of the Bone Wagon

• Chapter 1 The Prairie of White Ribs
• Chapter 2 Blood on the Iron Stove
• Chapter 3 The Disgraced Saddle
• Chapter 4 A Bargain Struck in Whiskey
• Chapter 5 Creaking Timber, Frozen Earth
• Chapter 6 The First Drift
• Chapter 7 Shadows on the Badlands
• Chapter 8 Hauling the Great Graveyard
• Chapter 9 The Howling Meridian
• Chapter 10 Wolves at the Trace
• Chapter 11 A Fire of Buffalo Chips
• Chapter 12 Ghost Town on the Cannonball
• Chapter 13 The Weight of Greed
• Chapter 14 Black Ice and Broken Axles
• Chapter 15 A Bullet for the Pack Horse
• Chapter 16 The Phantom Herd
• Chapter 17 Sins in the Frost
• Chapter 18 Mutiny in the Blizzard
• Chapter 19 Blood Across the Snow
• Chapter 20 The Dakota Iron Wind
• Chapter 21 Relics of the Massacre
• Chapter 22 The Half-Dug Grave
• Chapter 23 Crossing the Dead River
• Chapter 24 The Bone Wagon's Toll
• Chapter 25 Red Horizon at the Railhead
• Chapter 26 Ashes in the Thaw

The wind off the north did not merely blow across the Dakota Territory; it scraped it down to the raw stone. By late November of 1883, the grass had long since died back to a sullen, frozen grey, but the snow was still thin enough that the bones showed through everywhere. From the crest of a low, wind-scoured ridge five miles south of the Cannonball River, the landscape looked less like a prairie and more like the bottom of an drained ocean where whole fleets of ancient monsters had crawled out to die.

Silas Caine pulled his wool scarf up over his nose and reined in his bay gelding. The horse stood with its ears flat back against the wind, its breath coming in long, white plumes that froze instantly against the leather of its bridle. Beneath the horse’s hooves, the earth was hard as cold iron, and every step the animal took yielded a dry, porcelain clatter. It was not stone it was walking on, but the calcified remains of six thousand head of bison that had been stripped of their hides three summers back and left to rot under the Dakota sun.

Now, only the skeletons remained. They lay in great tangled windrows across the swales and coulees, bleached so clean by the sun and rain that they gleamed with a bluish, phosphorescent glare against the pale prairie dust. There were ribs curved like the hulls of forgotten skiffs, heavy pelvic bowls half-sunk into the sod, and massive, thick-browed skulls with black horn cores still pointing uselessly at the grey sky.

Silas reached down to adjust the flannel wrap around his knee. The old bullet wound from the Rosebud campaign always throbbed when the mercury dropped below zero, a dull, grinding ache that felt like gravel churning in the joint. He was thirty-eight years old, though his skin was so dried and cracked by fifteen years on the high plains that he could have passed for fifty. Under the brim of his greasy Stetson, his eyes were small, grey, and constantly moving, habituated to scanning horizons that offered very little comfort and even less mercy.

Down in the draw below the ridge, three men were working around a high-sided buckboard. They looked like tiny, ragged beetles against the vast white expanse. Each man carried a heavy iron hook or a short-handled mallet, moving from one pile of skeletal remains to another with the mindless, rhythmic efficiency of farmhands gathering potatoes.

The sound of their work carried sharply on the freezing air—the clack-clack-shhh of vertebrae being tossed over wooden sideboards, followed by the dull, heavy thud of a buffalo skull landing on the heap already stacked inside the wagon bed.

Silas watched them for ten minutes without moving. In the winter of '83, the Great Plains were full of men like them. The herds were gone—slaughtered by the hide hunters until the endless black seas of bison that once stopped trains and turned the rivers red had been reduced to scattered, panic-stricken remnants in the deep badlands. But where the hide hunters had left off, the bone pickers had taken over.

Back East, the factories in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Chicago could not get enough of them. The thick leg bones and skulls were ground into bone meal to fertilize the exhausted soil of Pennsylvania cornfields; the charcoal burnt from the rib cages was used to clarify yellow sugar into fine white crystals for Boston tea tables; and the heavy horns were carved into umbrella handles and knife grips for city clerks who had never seen a horizon wider than an alleyway. A ton of dry prairie bones brought six dollars at the railhead in Mandan, sometimes eight if the buyer was desperate and the freight cars were waiting. To a ruined homesteader whose wheat had dried up in July, or a hand kicked off a cattle outfit for the winter, a pair of mules and a bone hook were the only things standing between his family and a dirt-floored grave.

Silas nudged the gelding down the slope. The loose gravel and broken ribs rattled beneath the horse’s hooves, signaling his approach long before he reached the bottom of the swale.

The three men stopped working instantly. One of them, a tall, rawboned youngster with a faded red scarf tied over his ears, reached into the bed of the buckboard and pulled out a rusty Winchester lever-action rifle. He didn't raise it, but he held it loosely across his stomach, his thumb hooked over the hammer.

"That's far enough, stranger," the kid called out. His voice was shrill, thin, and cracked with the cold.

Silas pulled the bay up twenty yards short of the wagon. He kept both hands visible on the high horn of his saddle, loose in his buckskin mittens.

"I ain't hunting bones, son," Silas said. His voice was low and rasping, thickened by cold air and cheap tobacco. "And if I was, I wouldn't start by taking what's already stacked."

The oldest of the three men—a round-shouldered fellow with a grey beard stained yellow around the mouth with tobacco juice—spat into the frozen dust. He lowered his bone hook and stepped forward, squinting through the gloom at Silas’s horse and outfit.

"You Caine?" the old man asked.

"I am."

"The scout? The one they had down at Fort Abraham Lincoln?"

"I was at Lincoln," Silas said plainly. He didn't offer to elaborate on why he wasn't there anymore. The story of how Silas Caine had lost his scout's commission, his horse herd, and his standing with the United States Army was well-known enough along the Missouri River that it didn't bear repeating to strangers in a freezing coulee.

The old man nodded slowly, his eyes lingering on the heavy Sharps carbine slung in a scabbard beside Silas’s right knee. "They said you knew the country south of the Heart. Said you knew where the big kills were."

"I know where the bones are," Silas said. "I ought to. I helped kill a good portion of what made 'em."

The kid with the rifle didn't lower his gun. "There ain't no bones left within twenty miles of the track. We been digging through two feet of old drift just to find these scraps. The country's picked clean."

Silas looked down at the wagon. It was half-full of grey, lichen-spotted bones. Some of them were so old and light they looked like dry driftwood, hollowed out by wind and mice. They were the cheap stuff—the kind of brittle garbage that wouldn't bring four dollars a ton at the siding because half of it turned to dust before it reached the freight car.

"You're gleaning behind five hundred other starvelings," Silas said, nodding toward the north. "Every wagon out of Bismarck has been over these flats ten times. If you want white iron, you have to go south into the Badlands. Down where the hunters made the last stands in eighty-one. The big bulls died in the pockets down there, four feet deep in the brush where the bone outfits were too lazy to drag 'em out."

"That's Sioux country," the kid said, his eyes darting toward the grey hills on the southern horizon.

"It was," Silas corrected him smoothly. "Now it's just cold country. The Sioux are down at Standing Rock eating Government beef that's mostly gristle and air. They ain't worrying about who takes the skulls."

"They're worrying if they're hungry enough," the old man grunted. He picked up a thick buffalo knee-joint and tossed it into the wagon. It hit the sideboards with a sharp clack. "We heard there's a big outfit gathering up at the river. A fella from St. Louis with six heavy freight rigs and a steam bone-crusher."

Silas didn't answer right away. He turned his head to the north, looking toward the distant smoke rising from the settlement near the railroad tracks. The clouds were lowering, turning from ash-grey to the

The settlement of Muddy Crossing sat three miles north of the Cannonball line, a crooked collection of pine-board shanties and sod-roofed dugouts slapped together along a creek that had frozen solid by the second week of October. It wasn't much of a town, but it had a railroad spur, two bone yards enclosed by rickety pole fences, and a long, low-slung roadhouse built of green cottonwood logs that leaked sap whenever the wind blew from the east.

Silas Caine swung down from his horse in front of the roadhouse, his boots making a hard, hollow crunch against the icy slush of the yard. The bay horse shuddered, steam pouring from its nostrils in thin white jets, its skin twitching where the wind caught its wet flanks. Silas tied the animal to a hitching rail already crowded with four skin-and-bone mules and a swaybacked draft horse whose coat was matted with frozen mud. He patted the bay's damp neck once, slipped a leather feed bag over its ears containing a handful of crushed oats he could scarcely afford, and shoved his way through the heavy canvas flap that served as the inner door.

Inside, the heat hit him like a physical blow. It was a wet, heavy warmth, thick with the stench of boiling cabbage, wet dog fur, stale rye whiskey, and thirty unwashed men who had spent the last two months sleeping in their trousers.

At the center of the long room stood the source of the heat: a massive, belly-built cast-iron stove fashioned from a converted locomotive boiler. It sat on four heavy stone bricks, its sides glowing a dull, angry cherry-red along the lower draft seams. The air around it shimmered with convection, so dry and hot it turned a man’s throat to leather the moment he stepped within ten feet of it.

Silas took off his mittens, stuffed them into his coat pockets, and pushed through the outer ring of men clustered around the bar. Nobody moved out of his way with any great hurry, but when they turned to see who was crowding behind them and caught sight of his grey eyes and the worn horn of the Sharps carbine peeking over his shoulder, they shifted just enough to give him a clear path to the counter.

The barkeep was a thick-necked German named Gidley, who had lost three fingers on his left hand to a frostbitten winch during the construction of the Northern Pacific line. He was wiping down a scarred plank of ash with a grey rag that smelled of sour beer.

"Whiskey, Gidley," Silas said, placing a pair of silver quarters on the dark wood. "And whatever’s in the pot."

Gidley slid a smeary glass across the counter and filled it from a brown stoneware jug that had no label. He didn't bother to sweep up the silver; he just slid it into a tin cup beneath the counter with the stump of his thumb.

"Pot's mule-meat stew," Gidley grunted, his voice sounding like two millstones grinding together. "Turnips got frost-bit in the cellar, so they're sweet. Pay another dime if you want a crust of bread."

"Just the stew," Silas said. He took the whiskey, drained half of it in a single swallow, and felt the raw alcohol burn its way down into his belly. It didn't warm his fingers or his toes, but it dulled the rasping ache in his wounded knee just enough to keep his teeth from chattering.

The roadhouse was louder than usual for an early afternoon. Most of the men were bone pickers who had been driven off the open prairie by the rising gales that morning. They sat on upturned hardtack boxes and rough-hewn benches, their hands cupped around tin mugs, arguing in low, bitter voices about the weight scales down at the railroad siding.

"They're docking us ten percent for wet bone," a man with a crooked nose was saying near the stove. He was wearing a coat made from an old woolen blanket that had frayed into tatters along the hem. "I picked them ribs off a high ridge north of the creek! They was bone-dry, white as a church linen! The clerk took one look at 'em and said they had ground-moisture in 'em."

"Clerk's lying," another man muttered, leaning close to the red-hot iron of the stove to dry his boots. Steam rose from the muddy leather, smelling faintly of scorched tallow. "The buyer from Chicago got in on the four-o'clock freight yesterday. He’s squeezing the local outfitters so he can buy the whole yard out for four dollars a ton before the snow locks the rails."

"Four dollars?" the first man spat onto the dirt floor. "A man can't keep grain in his team for four dollars a ton. It takes two days to haul a cord of skulls out of the coulees, and another day just to pick the sod off 'em."

Silas ignored the talk and took the tin bowl Gidley shoved across the bar. The stew was thick, greased over with a yellowish skin of fat, and dark as river mud. He took a wooden spoon from a crock on the counter and began to eat, standing with his back against the rough pine wall near the door where the cold air leaked through the seams. He preferred the cold at his back to having his eyes off the room.

Near the great iron stove, the air was getting tighter.

A man was sitting on an overturned barrel directly against the stove's heat, his back so close to the glowing iron that the greasy canvas of his coat was nearly touching the metal. He was a large, heavy-set fellow named Miller, who had operated a bull-team out of Fort Benton until he lost his outfit in a poker game in Bismarck the previous spring. Beside him stood a smaller, wiry man named Harlan, whose face was so covered in dark grease and bone dust he looked like he’d been dragged out of a chimney.

Harlan was holding a heavy burlap sack by the neck. The sack was lumpy and stained with old grease, heavy enough that his hand was trembling under the strain.

"I'm telling you, Miller, move your ass off that crate," Harlan barked, his voice tight with an edge that hadn't been there ten minutes ago. "I been out in that wind since four in the morning getting these teeth out of the lower draws. I got a right to dry my feet same as you."

Miller didn't move. He had a flask of dark liquor between his knees and a toothpick wedged in the corner of his mouth. He looked up at Harlan with slow, heavy eyes that were clouded with liquor and malice.

"You got a right to stand in the corner and shut your mouth," Miller said smoothly. "You ain't bought no timber in this stove, little man. And your stink is high enough to turn the milk in Mandan."

A few of the surrounding men shifted away, scenting trouble the way horses scent smoke. Silas stopped his spoon halfway to his mouth, his eyes narrowing as he watched the two men.

"I spent six hours digging these jawbones out of a drift," Harlan said, his voice rising, cracking with a dry, desperate fury. "My fingers are so numb I can't feel the reins. Move over, or I'll move you."

Miller laughed—a low, wet rumble in his broad chest. He didn't stand up, but he reached down and lazily adjusted the heavy Colt revolver tucked into his belt under his coat. "Try it, bone-picker. See if you don't end up stacked in the yard with the rest of the cattle."

The room went quiet, save for the crackle of the green pine logs inside the stove and the heavy hum of the wind draft through the stovepipe.

Harlan's face went from dark red to an ash-grey. He didn't reach for a gun; he didn't have one. Instead, in a fit of sudden, unreasoning rage born of frostbite and exhaustion, he swung the heavy burlap sack full of dried buffalo jawbones like a sledgehammer.

The heavy sack caught Miller square in the side of the head.

The wet thwack of dried bone hitting temple echoed through the room. Miller’s tooth-pick flew out of his mouth, and his head snapped violently to the left. The blow knocked him clean off the wooden barrel, sending him crashing into the side of the red-hot iron stove.

A terrible, sharp hiss filled the room—the sound of hot grease and damp wool instantly vaporizing against glowing metal.

Miller roared—a sound less like a man and more like a gut-shot bear. He scrambled backward off the hot iron, but his right coat sleeve had caught on the draft latch. For two agonizing seconds, he was pinned against the side of the stove, the red-hot iron searing straight through the canvas of his coat and the wool shirt beneath, burning down into the meat of his upper arm.

When he finally yanked himself free with a frantic, tearing wrench, the smell of burnt fabric and scorched flesh hit the room so thick that three men near the bar backed toward the door, gagging into their sleeves.

"You little bastard!" Miller screamed. His face was twisted with agony, his right eye wide and bloodshot, his sleeve smoking and charring into black cinders along his arm.

He ripped the heavy Colt from his belt with his left hand, his right arm dangling uselessly at his side, dripping clear blister-fluid through the scorched hole in his sleeve.

Harlan turned to run, but the floor was slick with spilled beer and melted snow. He skidded, his heel catching on an iron boot-scraper near the door, and fell hard on his hip. He raised the empty burlap sack like a shield as Miller took two heavy steps forward, his revolver raised, his face slick with sweat and black soot from the stove.

Silas didn't think about the Army, or the court-martial, or the six months he’d spent in the guardhouse at Fort Abraham Lincoln. He didn't think about whether Harlan was worth saving, or whether Miller was in his rights. He just knew that if a gun went off in a room this tight, three other men would catch lead before the barrel was clear.

Silas set his tin stew bowl on the bar, stepped forward, and drove the heavy wooden stock of his Sharps carbine straight into the side of Miller's wounded arm.

The wooden butt made solid contact with the freshly burned, raw flesh of Miller's bicep.

Miller shrieked—a high, wet screech that died in his throat as his knees buckled. The Colt dropped from his useless left hand, clattering against the bare floorboards and sliding under the iron stove.

Miller hit the floor on his knees, clutching his ruined right arm to his chest, his forehead pressed against the filth of the dirt floor as he gasped for air, his whole body shaking in violent, uncontrollable spasms.

The room was dead silent. Nobody moved. The only sound was the howling of the wind outside and the rhythmic, dry tick-tick-tick of the red-hot iron stove cooling down where Miller’s shoulder had scorched it.

Silas stepped over Miller’s sprawling legs, his thumb holding the hammer of the Sharps at half-cock. He reached down with his left boot, kicked the fallen Colt away from the stove and into the corner near the whiskey barrels, and then looked down at Harlan, who was still flat on his back near the door, panting like a winded hound.

"Get up," Silas said, his voice flat, dry, and cold as the prairie wind outside.

Harlan scrambled to his feet, his hands shaking so badly he could barely grip the neck of his bone sack. He didn't say thank you. He didn't even look Silas in the eye. He just grabbed his sack, yanked open the canvas flap of the door, and vanished out into the white grey of the afternoon drift.

Silas looked down at the iron stove.

On the side of the boiler, right along the seam where the metal was glowing dull orange, a thick smear of dark, cooked blood and scorched wool was smoking quietly. It sizzled as the grease ran down toward the stone pedestal, turning into a black, sticky crust that filled the room with a sickening, sweetish stench.

Gidley came out from behind the bar holding a heavy wooden bung-starter in his left hand. He looked down at Miller, who was still groaning on the floor, then looked at Silas, his small, hard eyes completely devoid of surprise or pity.

"He's going to lose that arm," Gidley said plainly, kicking Miller's boot out of the way so he could reach the stove. "Once the rot gets into a burn that big, it turns black in three days."

"That's his business," Silas said, easing the hammer of his carbine back down. "He ought to have stayed away from the iron."

Gidley picked up an old iron scraper from the woodbox, stepped up to the stove, and began working at the charred mess on the boiler's flank. The metal shrieked under the scraper as he peeled away the burnt canvas and dried blood, dropping the black cinders onto the hearth where they crumbled into grey powder.

"You're a rough man, Caine," Gidley said without looking around. "Army said you lacked discipline. Looking at you now, I'd say you got plenty of it. Just the wrong kind."

"I got enough discipline to keep from getting shot in a saloon," Silas said. He turned back to the bar, retrieved his tin bowl, and took another mouthful of the lukewarm stew. The fat had hardened into a white ring around the edge of the tin, but he chewed the grey mule-meat down anyway.

The rest of the men in the roadhouse slowly returned to their spots, though they kept their distance from Silas now. The space around him at the end of the ash-plank bar remained wide and empty, a six-foot buffer of cold air that nobody seemed inclined to cross.

Even Miller was eventually dragged into a back room by two of his old bull-driver companions, his groans muffled behind a hanging horse-blanket as they poured raw whiskey over the raw, glistening meat of his arm.

Silas finished his stew, set the tin down on the counter, and wiped his mouth with the back of his buckskin glove. He looked out the small, grease-paper window beside the door.

The light was already failing. The prairie winter didn't fade into twilight; it simply snapped shut like an iron trap at three in the afternoon. The sky was no longer grey; it was a dark, bruised purple, heavy with the weight of a fresh storm coming down from the Canadian border.

He needed shelter for the horse, a fresh supply of salt pork, and forty pounds of oats if he was going to make the ride south toward the Heart River in the morning. But looking at the men in this room—the half-starved, desperate wretches willing to crush a man’s skull for a sack of rotting buffalo teeth—he knew the prairie was going to get very crowded, very fast, before the big thaw came in April.

Gidley came back down the bar, wiping his iron scraper on a greasy rag.

"There's a man looking for you," the German said, keeping his voice low enough that it didn't travel past the nearest liquor barrel. "Came in on the noon train out of Mandan. Got two gents in broadcloth coats with him and a pair of heavy iron-axle wagons sitting down at the siding."

Silas turned his grey gaze back to the barkeep. "What's his name?"

"Calls himself Van Horne," Gidley said. "Says he represents an outfit out of St. Louis. He’s looking for a scout who isn't afraid of the deep coulees down by the Badlands, and who don't care much about who owned the land before the snow fell."

Silas looked down at the empty tin bowl, then at the faint, dark stain remaining on the side of the iron stove. The heat in the room was already starting to drop as the green wood inside burned down to grey ash.

"Where is he?" Silas asked.

"Down at the station master's office," Gidley said, pointing his stump thumb toward the rail line. "Sitting by a coal fire, drinking coffee with sugar in it. He said if I saw Silas Caine, I should tell him there’s fifty dollars in gold for a man who knows where the big skeletons are buried."

Silas pulled his scarf back up over his chin, reached down to check the scabbard latch on his carbine, and pulled his mittens back on.

"Tell him I'm coming," Silas said. "And tell him to save the sugar."

He pushed his way out through the canvas flap, stepping out of the thick, greasy heat of the roadhouse and back into the clean, biting knife of the northern gale. Outside, the night was coming on fast, and the wind off the prairie sounded less like a breeze and more like the creaking of an old, heavy wagon carrying a load it was never meant to bear.