A Cold Day in Hell (40 page)

A
t long last the final company was “up,” closing the file, those last soldiers joining the rest in that gently sloping patch of ground before the entire command once more fell silent between the hulking shoulders of that canyon they would be plunging into momentarily.

They had covered more than twenty-five miles in darkness to stand here on the threshold of attack, listening to the distant voice of that war drum.

Then Mackenzie returned with Rowland and the Cheyenne scouts, coming alive, the colonel animated suddenly—officers old and young clustered around him. He raised himself in his stirrups as his staff came to a halt, fanning out in a crescent around their leader.

“From what our scouts tell us, the Cheyenne are having war dances in at least four locations in that village. Rowland’s men spotted at least three pony herds, and the lodges are pitched on both sides of the creek. Seems they tell me that with all the noise and activity going on, we can advance up the canyon some distance before we would be in danger of alerting the village,” the colonel told the hushed gathering in low tones. “We’ll get into position, conceal the column, and begin the attack at daylight.”

He then went on to order up the companies he believed were most ready to spearhead the first assault into the village, ordering the North brothers to lead their battle-eager Pawnee into the breech in advance of any soldiers—punching through the village
and on to secure the Cheyenne pony herd should there be the slightest chance of an enemy ambush.

Then he gave the order of the attack, company by company.

And concluded his terse, clipped instructions by saying, “Gentlemen, inform your battalions of their deployment. I hope to capture the village in a pincers: between one arm formed by the Shoshone and Pawnee, and the other arm by our troops. If all units do as I have ordered, we should surround the village completely, shutting off all chance for the hostiles to escape. With that in mind, remind your men of General Crook’s admonition—that we must do our best to assure the enemy’s capture, especially the lives of the women and children. Spare all noncombatants as we seal off the village.”

Mackenzie arose in the stirrups once more, tugging at the brim of his big black slouch hat, preparing to tear it from his head dramatically. “This is what we’ve prepared for. Let it be us who go and end this war, here and now.”

“It must ache like hell,” Seamus had been speaking in low tones to the lieutenant beside him.

John Bourke was roughly kneading one hand with the other, both of them securely wrapped inside their heavy wool mittens. “Damn, it does.”

“The cold will bother it for the rest of your life, aye?”

“Ever since last winter at the Powder.”

“When you stuffed you hand down through that hole in the ice and plunged it into the freezing water,” Donegan commented. “You gonna be all right to handle a gun with it?”

Bourke tried out a feeble grin in the gray light ballooning behind them as the walls ahead of them echoed the distant drum upvalley, where they watched Mackenzie, Rowland, and the Cheyenne scouts returning, emerging suddenly out of the mouth of the valley. “I can still hold a pistol as good as any man, Irishman. And pull the damned trigger when I have to.”

“Just promise you’ll stick close to me, Johnny,” Seamus suggested. “I’d like to have a man of your caliber at my back.”

The grin became a warm smile. “We have had our backsides hung over a few fires together, haven’t we, Seamus?”

He smiled back at the officer. “And a lot more to come too.”

“And now the Cheyenne.”

“This? Why this morning is just another day at the office for you desk-jockey sojurs!”

“Damn you,” Bourke replied with a grin, then said, “Look at that, will you?”

Seamus turned, finding the morning star brightening the sky behind them in the east. “It’s a good omen, Johnny.”

“Damn right, it—”

Then they both jerked up, finding Mackenzie standing frozen in the stirrups as the entire force of Indian allies fell mute—their medicine songs stopped in midphrase—a hush fallen over the whole of Mackenzie’s column. Stunned into silence as they began to realize that the big drum had been stilled. No longer did they hear any of the fragments of primal songs reverberating down the canyon.

Suddenly many of the weary troopers were coming off the icy ground, leaping to their feet, having lain down next to their horses to sleep, reins tied at their wrists, so exhausted they paid no heed to the deep snow and the subzero temperatures.

Then all was a noisy blur as the men began knocking the white fluff from their coats with tiny billows while the captains and sergeants and corporals hurried through the litany of forming up their units.

In that next instant one of the Sioux scouts kicked his pony savagely, pounding his heels into its flanks, bumping into Donegan’s bay as the Indian shot past the stunned Irishman. Everyone else suddenly speechless with this bold and idiotic act.

“Who the hell is that?” someone cried from the headquarters group.

“Scraper!” Frank Grouard hollered angrily.

“Get that son of a bitch back!” Mackenzie ordered, pulling his revolver and yanking back on the hammer as if he were prepared to knock the brash Sioux out of the saddle himself.

In a flurry of feathers and greasy blankets, rifles held high, two more Sioux scouts dashed past, ordered by Three Bears to head off the young man’s daring solo assault on the village.

“Dumb son of a bitch,” Bourke murmured. “Eager to get in the first coup.”

“Or get himself a name for being the first one to die fighting in the village!” Donegan replied.

“He was just arguing with Three Bears,” Grouard explained as he moved up. “Mad he didn’t get his sergeant’s stripes. So I figure he wants first strike.”

Everything was close to pandemonium as the troops finished dressing their formation, every last man pitching himself into the saddle with great urgency of a sudden, horses sensing
what was to come. The allies pressed in upon the colonel and his headquarters bunch—eager to be off to join those three who had disappeared through the tall willows and around a sharp right-hand bend to the valley’s throat.

“Lieutenant Dorst—it’s time to order the charge!” Mackenzie bellowed above his group, again rising in the stirrups, finally ripping the floppy-brimmed hat from his head and waving it enthusiastically as his adjutant pranced up on his mount. Then the colonel turned to Crook’s aide. “Captain Bourke—would you care to take the order for our charge back to Major Gordon and his battalion?”

“I’d be honored, General!” Bourke replied, twisting his horse about in a tight circle and giving it his heel to race back across that patch of open ground.

Mackenzie was then waving his hat, emphatically signaling. “Major North! Now! In with your Pawnee battalion!”

Those forty-eight allies had stripped off coat and saddle, down to the barest battle dress, maintaining enough of their uniforms so that the soldiers would recognize them in the din, confusion and fear of the fight now about to open in all its color and splendor, the crushing weight of its blood and its terror.

“Major Cosgrove!” Mackenzie hollered as the North brothers galloped off, shouting their orders, the Pawnee sergeants twisting about on the bare backs of their ponies to pass on the commands to each troop of the battalion as an excited babble of many different tongues rose over the command. “You and Lieutenant Schuyler—in with the Shoshone! Take and hold that high ground on our left flank! In with you, now!”

Brave Wolf did not join in the dancing last night.

The Contrary warrior and a few of his friends successfully eluded the Fox Soldiers who were charged with preventing anyone from leaving camp … but slipping out was easy, for it seemed Last Bull’s warriors had celebration on their minds. Women and dancing. Women and laughter.
Women
.

It was easy for Brave Wolf and his friends to sneak from camp, thread their way through the leafless brush, and climb the plateau north of the village where one or more of them kept a vigil throughout those frigid hours among the rimrocks. Expecting the soldiers to approach the camp sometime during the night and attack once dawn had arrived.

In the cold light the flames from the huge bonfire were eventually allowed to fall, and at last the Fox soldiers allowed the
People to stumble off to their beds. So weary were they from dancing nonstop across the night.

An old man looked up from his bed and asked his son, “You have been up in the rocks?”

Brave Wolf nodded in answering his father as he ducked into his family’s lodge. “Yes. We saw nothing. Some of us heard a rumble, in the east. But … we saw nothing.”

“They are coming,” his father declared, his eyes wide with anxiety.

Brave Wolf glanced at his mother, looking at them both, a blanket pulled up to cover most of her well-seamed face, only her frightened eyes showing like radiant pools in the dim light. His two wives and his children were already soundly asleep in their robes and blankets.

“What do you want me to do, Father?”

“Do not take off your moccasins,” the old man instructed. “Take nothing off … so you will be ready when the soldiers come here.”

“My mother is ready?” Brave Wolf asked.

“We did not take off our clothes,” his father replied. “None of us—not your wives and children—so we will be ready to run to the cliffs when the shooting starts.”

Swallowing with growing apprehension, Brave Wolf settled on his haunches before the dead fire his father was beginning to rekindle with shaking hands. “I told you, Father: we saw nothing. No sign of the soldiers—”

“You remember Box Elder’s vision?”

Brave Wolf nodded.

His father continued, “I believe the power of that man’s medicine. All the times Box Elder told our people some event was about to occur, it came true. I believe he is right when he told the village he saw soldiers attacking us here.”

“All right, Father,” Brave Wolf said as he crawled over to his blankets and robes. “I too will sleep with my clothes on—so I will be ready when the soldiers come.”

Around Seamus and Bourke crowded the Sioux, Arapaho, and the Cheyenne scouts under Lieutenant William Philo Clark and Second Lieutenant Hayden Delaney, their ponies prancing, sidestepping smartly—every man wound as tight as the mainspring in a two-dollar watch.

Mackenzie’s big chestnut was among them in the next moment. “Mr. Clark! Mr. Delaney—as ordered, you will lead your
battalion up the center and into the village!” The colonel’s eyes fell on Donegan as men yelled and horses grunted. “You—Irishman! Watch that pretty head of hair!”

“Aye, Colonel! Hep-haw!” And they were all off like the rush of a wave crashing upon the shore, him and his bay carried away at the front of those Indians, who suddenly freed their wildest screams and screeches all around him.

He was part of it, this rising of his gorge, this swelling of the animal within him. And then Seamus was bellowing along with the Indians, his throat raw with the cold, the muscles in his neck bulging as his horse tore down into the willow with the rest thundering all about him.

The cold along his cheeks stung every bit as much as the whiplash of those eight-foot-tall bare willow branches slapping, clawing, snatching at him and the others as they threaded their way across a little feeder stream, up the other side, the horses slipping on the icy ground, slashing the far bank with their hooves, a few of the ponies going down—the cries of their riders swallowed over with the rest of the clamor. Men left to climb back out of the frozen mud and boggy marsh, to remount and follow in the wake of those who clung to their wide-eyed, frost-snorting mounts like hellions thrust right out of the maw of Hades and flung headlong into this new dawn.

Right through the narrowing neck of the canyon where the riders could race four abreast now and on into the widening valley where the lieutenants shouted and Cosgrove bellowed—leading their Shoshone to the left, their ponies scratching for a hold on the red-rocked side of the slope they began to ascend, one horse at a time, climbing, climbing to reach that high ground where they could seize a commanding field of fire over the village.

Now the Pawnee were beginning to cross to the far side of the creek to the south of the canyon. Slowed, their ponies cautious, as they slipped and fought for footing again on the ice-rimed banks, most of the animals hurtling into the water—legs flailing in the air as they came down into the shockingly cold creek—rising with a struggle to leap across the stream with their riders and vault to the far side, sprays like cock’s combs roostering into the gray light of that bloody dawn, the first crimson light of day smeared recklessly on the tops of the high red bluffs above them all. The Pawnee screeched and cried out, exhorting one another, brandishing their carbines, many of them clamping the reins in their teeth as they splashed one another in that mad
race to be the first in among the lodges … to be the first in to claim the finest of those Cheyenne ponies.

Among them one lone Pawnee shaman blew on a wooden pipe, its high-pitched notes rising with a waver above the hammer of hooves and the grunts of the horses, the cracking of ice and the snapping of bare willow limbs against legs and saddles and muscled pony flanks. A sound not unlike the wet, steamy whistle of the boats in Boston Towne’s harbor, these notes the man blew as they raced along—a strange, eerie war song that lifted the guard hairs on the back of the Irishman’s neck. Made that huge scar across the great width of his back tingle once more with alarm.