A Cold Day in Hell (57 page)

“Bill Rowland!”

That deep voice cried the name with Cheyenne inflection.

“Don’t let that fool you—he don’t speak no American,” Rowland declared. “He just knows how to say my name.”

“I’m here!” the frontiersman shouted in Cheyenne.

“The rest are with me, Bill Rowland.”

“Is that you, Morning Star?”

“Yes. At my side are Gray Head, Roman Nose—”

“Wait,” Seamus growled with a temper. “We killed Roman Nose in the fall of sixty-eight. September, it were.”

The older white man’s brow furrowed gravely as he studied the Irishman. “You … you were with Forsyth’s … his rangers at the fight on the fork of the Republican?”

“It’s where I buried my uncle … after Carpenter’s buffalo soldiers come in to raise the siege,” Seamus replied softly, feeling two of the others with Rowland devote their undivided attention to him. He felt the old pain well up within him. The empty hole inside—that nothingness which no one could fill—even now after all the years that Liam had been gone.

“Naw, Irishman. It ain’t the same Roman Nose what got hisself killed trying to run Forsyth’s men down.” Slapping his glove against his thigh, the frontiersman said, “Dang, if I’d knowed—why, up there in them rocks is Turkey Leg.”

“So? What’s that mean to me?” Donegan watched Rowland purse his lips with a crestfallen look over his face.

“Hell—that’s been too long,” Rowland considered. “He isn’t ’bout to remember you, is he?”

Donegan answered. “What’s so all-fired important about talking to this Turkey Leg anyway?”

“He and Little Wolf—another of the chiefs with ’em right up there—they’re the fighting chiefs of the hull bunch. They won’t be ones to talk peace. Turkey Leg was a war chief back to the time they tried to rub out Forsyth’s bunch.”

Seamus dragged the back of his glove across his cracked, oozy lips, squinting into the sunlight’s reflection off the snow. “Go ’head, Rowland. It don’t matter if them war chiefs are up there. They might just listen. G’won and give this parley a try for the general.”

Nodding in resignation, Rowland stood slowly, his arms high above his head. “I have no weapon in my hands. I stand
here before you, to talk with you about what the soldier chief wants from you.”

“He wants us all dead!”

Rowland whispered to Donegan, “That was Turkey Leg. He’s an old, old man—been around since dirt.”

“Got to be, by damned.”

“And he’s never met a white man he likes.”

“Including you?” Donegan asked.

With the faintest of grins, Rowland admitted, “Well, maybe not every white man he’s met. But that bugger’s hated the color of our skin long before the Dog Soldiers’ fight agin you’uns with Forsyth.”

Rowland spoke again, back and forth, with the disembodied voices from the rocks above them, as did one of the Cheyenne scouts nestled near the old frontiersman. From the tone of the enemy’s voices, Donegan could tell the chiefs were drawn tight as a cat-gut fiddle bow. Bone weary. Tested to the extreme. Cold and hungry. While that sort of deadly mix might well make most men all but give in to any talk of surrender, give in to talk of a warm fire and food for his belly … everything Seamus had ever heard about the Northern Cheyenne coupled with what he had himself learned at that Beecher Island
*
siege and from the Reynolds’s fight at Powder River last winter,
†
these weren’t the kind of men to count out, not by a long chalk.

“Little Wolf says their families are safe in the hills but they don’t have many cartridges to fight us,” Rowland struggled with some of the translation.

“But they ain’t about to come in and take Mackenzie’s offer to surrender, are they?”

With a doleful wag of his head, Rowland said, “He shouted to me, ‘Rowland! Go on home now with the Lakotas and all your
Tse-Tsehese
from the White River Agency—you have no business here! We can whip these white soldiers alone … but we can’t fight your Indians too!’”

Licking his oozy lower lip, Seamus said, “They’d likely give us a good fight of it without these Indian scouts—wouldn’t they?”

Rowland nodded, then shrugged a shoulder. “Damn if they already haven’t give us damn good fight, Irishman.”

Donegan shuddered as the wind kicked up, driving some icy
snow crust against his cheek. “Don’t look like you can talk ’em into sending down their women and children to go back to the reservation?”

“I’ll try again—if’n you want.”

“All you can do is try.”

For a few minutes Rowland and the Cheyenne scout parleyed with the voices of the chiefs, until the old frontiersman turned suddenly, a fresh smile on his lips.

“Morning Star says he’ll come down a ways and talk to me where I can see him.”

“By the saints! Do it! Do it! See what you can do to change his mind.”

The closest they ever came to laying eyes on that aging warrior was to see a man stand some twenty yards off near some rocks where he could quickly retreat if treachery threatened.

“Morning Star said he’s lost his three sons today,” Rowland explained as he whispered down to the Irishman.

A sudden pull seized Seamus’s heart—as he remembered how it felt to hold his own son in his arms, there near his heart. Remembering how it felt to look down at that tiny face. How Morning Star must have experienced it with all three of his boys. And what despair the old chief must now suffer in losing them. Yet—there he stood, amazingly, as solid as a rock. Talking with a white man … when the white soldiers had taken his children from him.

“Says he wants peace. Wants to surrender. He’ll bring in the women and children himself …” Then Rowland stopped. There were angry voices from above. “Wait … but … but the other chiefs won’t let him surrender for them. They want to keep on fighting. Shit—there’s Little Wolf with him now.”

“Who’s he?”

“The hard one—that’s who,” the old frontiersman answered. Then he listened to Little Wolf speak for a few minutes. “What’s he saying?”

He turned to tell Donegan, “Little Wolf says, ‘You have killed and hurt a heap of our people today! So you may as well stay now and kill the rest of us!”

The Irishman instructed, “Tell him—tell all of them—that if they surrender, Mackenzie might leave them their lodges, their belongings, if they surrender and start back to the agency under escort.”

Then Seamus watched the old man’s eyes look away, staring across the valley with great regret.

Finally Rowland shook his head with sadness. “Look” he said.

When he did look, Donegan saw the oily spires of black smoke curling into that pitifully cold blue sky across the white valley beyond the leafless timber bordering the stream. And with that sight, so much hope went out of him too.

“They can see it … can’t they?” Seamus asked.

“They seen it all along,” Rowland stated. “Likely ever since we been talking.”

Swallowing hard, Donegan said, “Ain’t no wonder Morning Star can’t talk ’em into surrendering. Not with their women and children, the old and sick ones, all of ’em watching their homes—everything—go up in smoke like that.” The wind gusted cruelly where he knelt in the thick brush. He sniffled, dragged a glove beneath one eye as he turned back to gaze at Rowland. “I suppose there’s nothing any of us can do now.”

The frontiersman nodded once. “I figger there’s nothing more for us to talk about.”

Rowland tapped his young Cheyenne companion on the shoulder, and they were both beginning to scoot backward toward the protection of some rocks when Little Wolf stepped in front of Morning Star and called out to Rowland again.

Donegan whispered, “What’s he say?”

The frontiersman listened until Little Wolf turned and disappeared. Morning Star slowly turning away into the rocks without another word, his shoulders sagging with a great weight.

“Little Wolf … he says some of his warriors—they gone for help. Gone for some Lakota up north. Big village, not far from here. Gone there for help.”

“So they mean to keep on fighting?” Seamus asked. “Even if the coming night don’t kill ’em?”

“Yeah,” Rowland said as he came alongside the Irishman. “Little Wolf said they was gonna bring them Lakota back here and clean us out.”

T
wo of Morning Star’s sons were dead. The other could not be found.

Four of his grandchildren lay dead.

In all his sixty-eight winters, he had never seen such devastation and despair visited upon the
Ohmeseheso
.

Perhaps there was hope for that third son. Morning Star wanted so to hope, because at the moment of attack one of his friends, Black White Man, had managed to save his son, Working Man.

In the recent fight with the Shoshone, Working Man had been badly wounded: a rifle ball striking him in the buttock and exiting from the meat of his right thigh. His father and others had constructed a travois to haul the young warrior back to the village of his people after wiping out the enemy.

So it was that Working Man lay helpless in their lodge earlier that morning when the soldiers attacked. Black White Man had herded his wife from their lodge, thrusting her atop his war pony he kept picketed by the door.

“Wait for me here!” he ordered as he ducked into their lodge.

Then, as the bullets fell about the village like hailstones upon the canvas-and-hide covers, the father returned for his son. After slashing a tall opening in the back of their lodge, Black
White Man lifted the young warrior into his arms and carried him to the pony, hoisting him behind his mother.

“Ride to the breastworks!” he was shouting when Morning Star ran through camp on his old legs—driving all the people before him. He told his wife and son, “Go before the bullets find you!”

“You are not coming?” his wife shrieked.

“No. I stay to fight. Take our son to safety, now!”

Then Morning Star watched as Black White Man turned away to join first one group, then another, fiercely protecting the flight of all women and children.

A little later Morning Star caught sight of his friend again. This time Black White Man had been joined by Elk River and others who were on their way down a shallow ravine, on their way to recapture some of the ponies run off by the soldiers’ Indian scouts. From time to time they disappeared from view among the winter-bare brush clogging the brow of the coulee … so Morning Star had turned away to help others escape the village.

When his attention was yanked back with the great noise: the shouting of the angry soldiers, the thunder of the hooves on the cold, solid ground, and the yelling of the brave warriors who had leaped atop the bare backs and were escaping with some of their prized animals. An enemy bullet struck one of the boys with Black White Man in the neck, and he nearly fell. But almost as soon as the blood began to stream down the boy’s chest, another warrior was there beside him so that he would not fall.

As the sun rose high that day, in that final desperate struggle before they lost their village to the enemy’s scouts, Morning Star watched with Black White Man from the low ridge where together they saw the Wolf People scouts fight their way through the scattered cluster of lodges.

“There,” Black White Man had said, gesturing to the side of the hill. “Those are some of my ponies the enemy will steal! I must get them!”

“You cannot—it is too dangerous!” Morning Star told his friend. “Those soldiers will see you—and train their guns on you.”

“Look there!” Black White Man had said suddenly, pointing into the dazzling light of that sunny morning.

“I see!” Morning Star exclaimed, his heart rising in hope.

Some of Little Wolf’s warriors were crawling up on their
bellies to the crest of the adjoining ridge. There they began to train their fire on the soldiers among the fringe of the village.

Black White Man got to his knees, slapping his friend on the back enthusiastically. “Because those
ve-ho-e
will be worried about the bullets—they will not worry about one lone warrior going in among the ponies!
Aiyeee!”