A Cold Day in Hell (52 page)

“I
never would’ve been a man to put no money on it, Irishman” Frank Grouard declared with a wag of his head. “I’d figured all along them Lakota and Cheyenne scouts of Mackenzie’s would’ve run off—had it figured they’d never stay put when the fighting got dirty. Just not the way of an Injun.”

Down below them along the stream, among the willow, and in the midst of the uppermost fringe of lodges those scouts enlisted from Red Cloud’s agency had taken their places: dutifully following the orders of the officers as they dug in for the long haul this fight was turning out to be.

“Ain’t no man here knows better’n you, Frank,” Seamus replied, “just what a warrior will do to earn himself a little coup and make off with a lot of plunder.”

“Heap ponies!” Grouard roared, pounding his chest once with a fist as he played the role. “Me want heap ponies!”

“Shit,” growled Baptiste Pourier with mock indignation, “if that’s all you ever wanted—why, we could’ve quit this goddamned soldiering business long ago and be living fat and sleek with our women right about now!”

Against the far northern rimrocks some renewed gunfire rattled across the valley.

“How ’bout you, Seamus?” Grouard asked. “Now you got a family started—you gonna get straight in your head and quit this soldiering business?”

For a moment the Irishman stared at the side of the knoll
where the Cheyenne warriors milled about upon what ponies they still possessed or had managed to recapture during the morning. “Can’t say for certain, fellas,” he admitted. “Don’t know how it is for you both. But looking back on my own life now—seems soldiering is about the only thing I ever done. Besides a good start on wenching and drinking as soon as I stood tail enough!”

All three snorted with laughter, then Donegan continued. “Soldiering is about all I’ve done … from the time I slick-talked myself into the Army of the Potomac because I wasn’t near old enough. Been fighting ever since, it seems.”

Donegan tried to cipher it, pulling number down from numbers—just the way the village priest had started to teach all the young boys to maul over their arithmetic—but none of it rightly made sense just then. For some reason he simply felt it was too damned long ago when he first took up fighting in the rebellion of the southern states. Could it really be closing on a quarter of a century of carrying arms?

“More’n … better’n twenty-some years now,” he answered softly, in awe himself at the passage of time.

He had been a fighting man of one description or another for more than half his life. And what had he to show for it? Nothing at all like other men who owned a piece of ground—opening its breast every spring and pulling sustenance from it every fall. Men like his uncle Ian. Still others preferred a more tidy existence tending a shop or mercantile, even as a licensed sutler.

Yet there always seemed to be a few … footloose they were ofttimes called by the more rooted around them. No tilled plot of ground nor four walls and a roof would ever hold them. Men like that merry leprechaun of an uncle, Liam O’Roarke.

“So, tell me, Seamus—what the hell you fix on doing when we get these Injuns back to their agencies and the soldiers all go home?” Big Bat asked.

“Maybe I’ll finally get to scratch around for a little gold, like I always intended,” Donegan answered. “Don’t think I’d make much of a farmer. Not no shopkeeper neither.”

Grouard shaved off a sliver of army chaw and slipped it inside his cheek on the tip of his knife’s blade, asking, “What if the damned gold’s already dug up and took out of them Montana mountains by the time you get around to it?”

“S’pose the only thing to do then is to become a gentleman horse breeder.”

“You don’t say,” Pourier marveled.

“If there’s no wars to fight. And no gold to dig up neither,” Seamus said with a casual shrug. “What else you ’spect a fella with my talents to find himself to d—”

“Well, I’ll be gol-danged,” Grouard suddenly grumbled, rolling onto his belly and jerking the field glasses to his eyes.

“Look at that, will you?” Donegan gazed onto the open plain with the rest, seeing the big warrior come prancing out of hiding atop the pretty gray horse.

For a moment something sour caught in his throat, just with that remembrance of the General—the beautiful animal he had taken from a Confederate officer in the Shenandoah Valley during those last battles of the war, the very same horse he brought west to Fort Phil Kearny in sixty-six, then made their last ride together on the plains of eastern Colorado in that scorching September of sixty-eight. Remembering now with a cold clutch at his heart how that big, gallant horse carried him to the sandy island in the middle of a nameless river with fifty other white scouts as more than seven hundred Cheyenne Dog Soldiers came charging down on them at dawn.
*

Except for the black blaze on that war pony’s face and a pair of white front stockings, this horse looked mighty similar.

“What you figure he’s fixing to do?” a soldier hollered nearby.

“He’s come to ask you to dance,” Seamus answered even more loudly.

More than two dozen scouts and soldiers laughed. A few went about adjusting sights, screwing elbows down into the snow for a firmer rest, lying there over their rifle barrels calculating distance and wind and just how much lead to give that daring rider.

“You don’t reckon he’s fixing to lead the rest of ’em on a charge, do you?”

Donegan turned to the young soldier who had asked the question, saying, “No. That one’s on his own. My money says he’s out to prove he’s got balls all by hisself.”

“Five dollars to the man who empties that saddle!” a lieutenant yelled to the Irishman’s left.

“Five dollars!” several men echoed in unison.

“And I’ll put up another five dollars!” piped in another officer on the right.

“Ten dollars, boys!”

“Did you hear that? Ten do—”

The rest of the chatter was drowned out as the whole line unloaded with a deafening racket, boom and whistle. In amazement Seamus watched the contest lying there between Grouard and Pourier as army bullets sailed across the flat, kicking up spouts of snow around and beyond the horse’s hooves. Despite the closeness of the rounds, the warrior kept his animal under control as it pranced first to one side, then back to the other. In the wind the Cheyenne’s buffalo-horned warbonnet danced, each feather fluttering all the way down the long trailer that draped along one of his bare legs, ending just past his moccasins.

At his right elbow the warrior had strapped a large war shield painted with a starburst and adorned with scalp locks. In his left hand he clutched some sort of a club, at the end of which were two long elk-antler tines which he held over his head, waving the weapon as he yelled out to his enemy.

“You figure he’s calling out a challenge—have one of us come out and fight him?” Donegan asked.

“If he’s fool enough,” Big Bat replied.

“Damn, but he’s pretty,” Seamus replied, enjoying the sheer spectacle of it—

—and in the next heartbeat watched the buffalo-horn headdress tip forward as the warrior pitched backward onto the flanks of the big horse. No longer under strict control, the animal suddenly reared and the warrior tumbled off, the club and shield still in his grip as he spilled into the snow.

Off tore the horse, making for the safety of the hill—its single rein flapping in the cold wind. The long, thick buffalo-hair lariat knotted around its neck played out in spastic jerks across the icy ground yard by yard until the warrior’s body suddenly tumbled sideways, quickly straightened out, yanked across the ground as the pony dragged its owner bouncing back behind the Cheyenne lines.

“Shoot the horse!” an officer cried. “Shoot that goddamned sonofabitching horse!”

The entire line unloaded again almost as one, a great, ear-shattering volley. A few more considered shots followed.

No matter. The pony completed this last mission for its master. Horse and warrior gone from sight.

“I’m almost glad that horse got away with that Injin,” Seamus said with no little admiration.

Nearby some of the soldiers turned and gave him the hardest looks before they went back to reloading.

“Looks to me there can’t be no more real fighting,” Grouard stated. “Not up close, no ways.”

“That’s right,” Big Bat agreed. “Scary thing now is them warriors that’s left are gonna do all they can to prove their bravery one way or t’other.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before a pair of half-naked Cheyenne warriors emerged from behind the rocks not more than fifty paces away, carrying no weapons to speak of. Instead, the two held buffalo skulls high over their heads as they advanced on the soldier lines, chanting, singing, crying out their medicine songs in discordant notes as the soldiers tried their best to drop the two.

Daring to get as close as twenty paces from the white man’s position, the pair split apart, one wheeling left, the other right, both riders moving parallel to the side of the bluff where the soldiers continued to curse and reload and fire again and again at the two daring horsemen. Then the pair turned around slowly, moving back to rejoin one another and eventually retreating toward the knoll where the Cheyenne hung on with stoic desperation.

“Looks like we’ve just been cursed by them two, don’t you think, Frank?” Bat asked.

“Wouldn’t put it past ’em,” Grouard replied. “Not one bit.”

“Wait a minute!” Donegan cried. “Curse? What sort of curse you figure they put on us?”

“Don’t know Cheyenne very good,” Pourier said, shaking his head.

“Too far to hear good anyway,” Grouard added.

Then Big Bat continued, “Way I seen Injuns do before—them two likely prayed for their spirits to take away our homes and families from us. Same as we done to them.”

The duty of an Old-Man Chief was to protect his people, at all costs.

So Little Wolf would have stood against the soldiers and their Indian scouts alone if he’d had to. But that cold day other brave men had chosen to stand at his shoulder against the enemy. Together they suffered. But together they held back those who had come to harm their families hiding in the narrow ravine.

Were it not for the rifles and cartridges they had captured
from the soldiers at the Little Sheep River,
*
Little Wolf’s courageous band likely would have been crushed. Instead, time and again they humiliated the soldiers and their scouts with their daring—fighting out in the open against the enemy, who took cover behind every tree and rock, bush and boulder. With every advance attempted by the enemy, Little Wolf and his men drove back those who would make war on women and children.

Throughout that long morning, Bull Hump, one of Morning Star’s sons, remained beside with the Sweet Medicine Chief.

Also steadfast was Walking Whirlwind, Little Wolf’s own son-in-law … until the warrior was hit by a soldier bullet and never regained consciousness, dying at Little Wolf’s feet while the sun continued its climb to midsky.

High Bull—a hero of the fighting at the Little Sheep River, who had captured one of the pony-soldier chief’s roster books during that great fight—also died defending the mouth of the narrow canyon.

Burns Red in the Sun. Walking Calf. Hawk’s Visit. Four Sacred Spirits. Old Bull. Antelope. All gave their lives that morning, falling around their Sweet Medicine Chief like the brave men that they were. With the death of each old friend, Little Wolf’s eyes clouded all the more with tears—still, he shot straight that day, and not once did he cower from the fight despite the desperate odds against them.

Instead he fought and sang—reloading his rifle as he prayed. Each time he asked for the Everywhere Spirit to make every one of his bullets find a target, asked
Ma-heo-o
to use Little Wolf’s simple body to save the helpless ones he had vowed to protect.

Nearly every one of those who were not killed at the ravine mouth that terrible morning were wounded. Scabby, one of Little Wolf’s old friends from the Southern Country, fell as several bullets pierced his body, and he had to be dragged back to where the women could care for him. So too was Curly wounded. Bald-Faced Bull, although he was hit with three bullets, continued to fight as long as he could hold a rifle. Buffalo Chief was hit twice, and—although he spat up blood from his chest wound—refused to retreat as long as his eyes could see and he could point his gun at the enemy.

Two Bulls and White Frog were both wounded more than twice. Wooden Nose was shot through the neck and could not
speak, for his throat filled up with blood—yet all three remained steadfast with their Sweet Medicine Chief.

Among their numbers only Charging Bear and Tall Sioux were not wounded in that desperate struggle at the mouth of the ravine as the shadows shifted and the sun crawled relentlessly toward midsky.

When the last of the women and old ones had clawed and scrambled their way to the breastworks, and their village was deserted of all but the dead, the wounded Little Wolf finally turned to his comrades.

“We can go now. Up the canyon to the ridge where our families wait.”

“They have our village!” Bull Hump protested, his face smeared with blood and tears.

Little Wolf laid a hand on the shoulder of Morning Star’s son. “Pay heed—for you are like a nephew to me, Bull Hump. Our fight is far from over—but we have many dead and many who will die from their wounds if we do not care for them now. It is time we disappear and choose another place and time to fight this enemy.”

Try as the soldiers did to drive the Cheyenne warriors back into the recesses of the snowy, rocky heights surrounding the valley that morning, the enemy doggedly remained in range of the village.

Mackenzie could have inflicted more casualties among the warriors by pushing his advantage, ordering his men into the hills after the troublesome snipers. Which was sure to mean many, many more soldiers brought back to lie beneath blankets upon the cold ground there at the hospital knoll.

Instead the colonel chose to consolidate his grip on the village and inflict his punishment on the Cheyenne in a more dramatic and possibly far-reaching way. At the same time, he had to assure that his men did not waste their precious ammunition as the day wore on and the battle became a long-range duel. Using a dozen orderlies along with his aides Dorst and Lawton, as well as William P. Clark and even John G. Bourke, as couriers who raced back and forth alone across that dangerous half mile of no-man’s-land where the Cheyenne marksmen did their best to kill rider or horse, Mackenzie sent strict orders to his units deployed in every corner of the valley that they were to conserve their resources at all costs.