A Cold Day in Hell (29 page)

“Tell me what?”

“Gloree! But you got them Sioux on the warpath!” he spat,
breathing heavily. “They say they’re coming over here right now to clean out your Pawnee!”

“Goddamn their turncoat hides!” North snarled as he whipped about on his heel, shouting to this man and that, hurling orders for the entire battalion to take up their arms and make ready to defend their lives and their property against their ancient and mortal enemies.

“I knew better,” Donegan said, all but under his breath.

“Knew better about what?” Luther asked as he trotted up.

“Crook should’ve knowed better than to try mixing Pawnee and Sioux in the same scouting party.”

“The mortal truth, that is. Too much blood been spilled between ’em already,” Frank North added sourly. “I figured Crook would know.”

“It was bound to come to this,” Seamus said with a doleful wag of his head as he slipped one of his revolvers out of its holster and confirmed that the cylinder was fully loaded. “They been enemies too bleeming long.”

“You have our men wait here, Luther,” Frank instructed his brother. “We’ll head up to the fort.”

“On that pony?” Donegan asked.

“Damn right—on
my
pony,” Frank responded gruffly. “I’ll get this settled with the general, once and for all—or the Pawnee battalion are going home.”

“I’ll have the men stay here and keep watch over the herd and our camp,” Luther volunteered, waving one of his sergeants over. “I figure they can hold their own against the Sioux without us.”

“Even though those Lakota outnumber the Pawnee more’n two to one,” Donegan replied, “your boys ought to make a good stand of it.”

The three civilians leaped into the saddle and loped away, heading toward the ferry. Problem was, between the Pawnee bivouac and the riverbank lay the Sioux camp. As the three riders came in sight of the Sioux mercenaries, Seamus could see that most of them had gathered in a large knot around Three Bears as he harangued them.

“Damn, but that one’s a red preacher if he’s anything at all!” Donegan muttered. “If he ain’t sermonizing to Crook about this or about that, he’s preaching to his warriors about you and that pony!”

Just as the trio approached the group, the Sioux all fell silent, staring with undisguised anger at the white men. Frank
tapped the pony with a spur. Being a high-spirited animal, the pony began to dance and cavort as the three passed by the Sioux warriors. At the same time, Frank spontaneously began singing the Pawnee war song—well known to many of the older Lakota warriors.

Luther promptly joined in. At which time Seamus switched the reins to his left hand, positioning his right near the butt of the revolver he wore cocked over his left hip.

Not another word was spoken. Not one of the Sioux moved anything but their eyes as they watched the three white men pass by, two of them singing that song of their mortal enemy.

Atop the bluff at the fort, Frank spotted Clark and demanded the lieutenant accompany him to find Crook.

“I’m told the general’s over in the sutler’s store,” Clark said. “Purchasing the last of his personal items for the march.”

North said, “Suppose you go tell him we want to see him about this pony business.”

“Yes,” Clark seethed as he began to stomp off. “I’ll do just that.”

Donegan waited with Frank and Luther as Clark went into the sutler’s shack and returned with Crook.

“General—there stands the pony in question,” the lieutenant explained. “Per your instructions regarding the mounting of our auxiliaries—after your meeting with the Sioux scouts—I took Three Bears to the herd across the river and allowed him to select a new mount because his was played out.”

“So explain how this altercation with Major North came about.” Crook said, his eyes flicking from Frank to Luther, then back to the lieutenant.

Clark replied, “Major North refused to let Three Bears have the horse the chief picked out and took him back from the Indian.”

“I see,” Crook muttered, clearly nettled that he had to be dragged into what he saw as a trivial matter.

“Wait a minute, General,” Frank said, stepping forward. “I didn’t
refuse
that Sioux a horse. That’s where your lieutenant here is wrong.”

The lieutenant edged forward, saying, “I am not wrong!”

“Mr. Clark,” Crook snapped. “You will wait until I ask you to speak. Go ahead, Major.”

Frank said, “The horse the Sioux picked was the one you yourself allowed me to choose for myself back at Fort Laramie, General.”

Rubbing his nose thoughtfully for a brief moment, Crook cleared his throat and turned on his aide. “Mr. Clark, it is clear to me that you should have gone to the Norths’ camp before you took the Sioux chief to the herd to select a replacement mount. That way the major could have shown you which horses we were holding to remount the Sioux for the campaign.”

“With the general’s permission,” the lieutenant protested, “I think the matter of this pony being returned to Three Bears should be given more weight—”

“Permission denied, Mr. Clark,” Crook snapped angrily. “This is a horse I gave to Major North. None of the horses given out to the Pawnee will be returned to the Sioux. Is that understood?”

Clark nodded, abjectly humiliated. “Perfectly, sir.”

“I will not have it said that George Crook gave … then took away. Is that understood as well, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir. Absolutely understood.”

Donegan almost felt sorry for Clark, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the lieutenant had thrown in with the wrong side in a dispute over right and wrong.

North graciously suggested, “General—I have an idea, with your approval, of course.”

“I’m listening.”

“I have forty extra horses that you gave to my men after the roundup and capture. They will probably be all the extras we shall need on this campaign—so I’ll be glad to turn all the others over to the Sioux scouts. Why not have them take all the rest of the horses that were kept out as extras?”

Crook’s eyes brightened once more. “A splendid proposal, Major.” He turned to Clark. “You’ll see that you pass word on to our Sioux auxiliaries, Lieutenant?”

Clark grumbled, “Yes, General.”

“Perhaps that will soothe their ruffled feathers.”

“War feathers, General,” Seamus corrected.

“Quite so, Irishman. Quite so,” Crook replied.

“General, if I may,” Frank North said, “while we’re here, I’d like to address this matter of something the lieutenant said to me: that he was planning on having command of all the Indian scouts.”

Clark hurriedly added, “That is what you told me, General—”

But Crook interrupted the officer by raising his hand, saying,

“I get the feeling you have a problem with that, Major North.”

Frank explained. “Not really me, General. My men won’t go for it. They’ve fought under me and Luther for so long, and now you’d put them under the command of a soldier who rode boldly into our herd beside an old enemy, the one called Three Bears, to take one of our horses? I don’t think your plan’s going to work.”

“I believe I see,” Crook brooded, tugging at one of the two long braids in his beard. Then quickly he looked up, pointing at Frank, “You go tell your battalion that they remain under your command and will take their orders from no one else but the commander of this expedition.”

“Understood, General,” Frank replied.

Crook wagged his head as he looked at a sullen Lieutenant Clark, then turned back to Frank North. “Still, my heart wishes the Sioux and your Pawnee could get along better. To be friends now that we’re all soldiers together.”

Frank rubbed a boot toe on the frozen ground, in the manner of a man looking for the right words to put on a difficult subject. “General—if I may—to force the Sioux and the Pawnee to become friends will be very difficult, for they have been bitterest enemies for many generations.” North went on to briefly relate how long ago the Pawnee felt the pressure of the Lakota bands when the Sioux first moved onto the plains.

Crook said, “I see. So it would be fair to say the Pawnee and the Sioux have had themselves a blood feud for a long, long time.”

“Now, General—if you wish to issue an order commanding the Pawnee to make up with their bitterest enemies,” North said, “I will do all in my power to have it obeyed.”

After a moment more of reflection, Crook replied, “No, I don’t wish to force them to be friendly against their will. Still, if they were friendly, I believe it would be better for all concerned, and this expedition.”

“Well, I’ll talk to my Pawnee about it and hear what they have to say,” Frank said. “We’ll head back to camp now and cut out those seventy head—the extra ponies the lieutenant here can turn over to the Sioux.”

The task was done before twilight. Yet, as predicted, the matter appeared far from over, at least from the word brought to the North’s camp that night by Todd Randall, the same white scout who was married to a Sioux woman at the Red Cloud
Agency and had been instrumental in helping the Pawnee trackers locate Red Cloud’s village the night before the guns and ponies were captured.

“Just figured you ought to know to keep an eye locked on your horses, fellas,” Randall said. “Maybe best to keep ’em close to your beds.”

North asked, “Why’s that, friend?”

“The Sioux say they’re gonna get both them ponies you brothers picked outta their herd. Kill ’em somewhere up the trail.”

“Goddamn you, Soul!’ the big sergeant major bawled at the young private. “Be a little lively around here! We’re pulling out, by God!”

William Earl Smith swallowed, saluted, and stood stiffly until his superior had passed down that row of dog tents coming down like fluffs of goose down upon the dirty snow. It had been snowing off and on for two days now, and colder than anything Smith had experienced back east.

Once Stephen Walsh was on out of hearing range there in the cavalry camp below Fort Fetterman, Smith let out a gush of air he had been holding during the cruel tongue-lashing.

“Great, big, overgrown Irishman,” he muttered under his breath, wondering if he had done the wrong thing by accepting this assignment to become one of Mackenzie’s five orderlies for the Powder River Expedition.

He liked the general—why, Mackenzie had even offered
Smith a drink from his own personal flask the colonel kept buried somewhere inside that big caped wool coat of his. But that sergeant major who ran roughshod over all of Mackenzie’s orderlies? Now, that was as close to genuine loathing as William Earl Smith had ever come.

Why, that damned mick made fun of the way Smith ate, the way he sat in the saddle, even how the private spoke. What with the way the orderlies were cursed and treated by the commissioned officers too, especially the tyrannical Captain Clarence Mauck, who more than once had threatened to make William Earl walk the whole campaign … how Earl dreamed of stepping right up to those arrogant stuffed shirts and poking one of them in the nose for good measure.

“Goddamn you, Soul—but it takes you longer to dress than a whole company!” Smith began to mimic the sergeant major’s gruff and peaty brogue. “Smith this … and Smith that,” he grumbled under his breath as he turned to finish packing his haversack. “Wished I was born with another name sometimes.”

A few days back, when Walsh was bawling for him, the sergeant’s abuse had finally got to the private and Smith had made the mistake of answering in kind, “What the hell do you want?”

Suddenly the sergeant had been towering there at Smith’s tent flaps, his big meaty paws jammed down on his hips, his eyes like twelve-hour coals, spitting mad. “If you ever talk to me that way again—I’ll tie you up by the thumbs!”

Earl had seen men tied up by their thumbs for hours at a time, their arms stretched high over their heads, their toes barely scraping the ground, held only by their thumbs to a stout wooden bar overhead.

Too, since joining the Fourth, he had heard reports of soldiers being placed in a big hole in the ground, so deep they had to climb down on a ladder. Or men lashed in a crouch around a stout piece of fence post then gagged for hours. Once Smith had seen that punishment—the soldiers who suffered it unable to move their cramped and tortured muscles once they were released.

On their march north to Fetterman a pair of soldiers had made the mistake of being slow to salute Mackenzie and addressing their commander too informally. That evening in bivouac the colonel promptly had Sergeant Walsh see that the two offenders stood in one place for an hour and a half, unable to move in that frigid weather except for saluting a tree stump for their transgression. A day later a few men in one company were late in relieving
others on guard. Mackenzie sentenced those guilty to carry the hundredweight sacks of grain for their horses up and down across a mile of the rugged terrain as their punishment.

God must surely damn this army for putting some men over others, William Earl thought as he angrily jammed his supply of rations into the tiny haversack he would carry north.

Two days back, when the temperature had started to fall through the bottom of the surgeons’ thermometers, one of Mackenzie’s other orderlies—Private Edward Wilson—had gone up to the fort, invited to join Lieutenant Henry Lawton, quartermaster for the expedition’s cavalry wing, as the two of them intended to drain the better part of a whiskey bottle at the sutler’s saloon. As both were in no condition to walk back to their camp situated on the north side of the river, they climbed atop their horses and headed back in the dark and the blowing snow. Somewhere along the wagon road leading down the bluff to the ferry, Wilson’s horse got away from him, prompting Lawton’s horse to gallop off wildly too. As a furious lieutenant came up alongside the orderly, he yanked out his pistol and swung it across Wilson’s face, knocking the private off his horse and unconscious with one blow. Sometime during the night Wilson came to, finding himself half-frozen, wet, and bleeding in the icy mud beside the North Platte. With the help of camp guards, he struggled back to his tent, where he passed out again before the sky grew light.