A Cold Day in Hell (66 page)

“You mean … them surgeons say he’s gonna die anyway?”

“That’s no concern of yours,” Wheeler snapped impatiently. “You have a job to do for Private McFarland while he’s still alive. So you go do it.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted and turned away.

Already Homer could hear the chanting as the Indian scouts were the first to pull away from last night’s bivouac. Throughout most of the last two days’ march they sang over the few scalps Mackenzie had allowed them to take from the Cheyenne, holding the hair aloft at the end of long wands where the bloody trophies tossed in the fitful, icy wind.

Not long after they set off that morning, Wheeler spotted three Shoshone horsemen sitting motionless atop their ponies at the side of the trail. As he drew closer, the lieutenant recognized the greasy blanket coat the middle warrior wore. Homer halted before them. “Anzi,” he said, not surprised to see the pain written across the Indian’s face.

“Melican medicine man,” the wounded warrior said, the mere sound of his words echoing the agony of his wound as he stoically remained hunched over in the saddle.

“Want to ride,” said one of the other two riders in his broken English. He and his companion supported a wobbly Anzi between them.

“Ride?”

“There, Melican medicine man.” Anzi pointed at the travois just then going past them.

“On one of the litters?” Wheeler asked in consternation. “You want to lay down in a travois?”

“Yes, yes, medicine man,” Anzi gasped, seized with pain. “No whiskey—Anzi do no good.”

“No whiskey, Anzi,” Wheeler replied sourly. “And I’m afraid I don’t have a litter for you either.”

“No?” asked one of Anzi’s companions.

“No,” Wheeler repeated. “The one you got out of two days back is now carrying a sick soldier.”

“Soldier sick as me?”

“No,” the lieutenant admitted. “But you gave up your travois when you found out we had no more whiskey.”

“Yes, whiskey. Whiskey good for Anzi.”

“No travois, Anzi,” Wheeler replied, beginning to feel his patience draining. “You’ll make it.”

“To Cluke wagon camp?”

“Yes. Hang on. You’ll make it there. And—you’ll find more whiskey there too.”

“Whiskey. Anzi not die he got whiskey in belly with bullet.”

With the remnants of a grin, Wheeler reined away and rejoined his hospital group as they plodded east away from the mountains.

An occasional snowflake lanced down from the intermittent clouds rolling off the Bighorns and onto the plains as Wheeler’s men and mules plodded on in a ragged column, surrounded by their escort of two troops of cavalry. It wasn’t long before they heard the dim reports echo back along the trail as soldiers began to shoot their played-out horses—daring not to leave them for the Cheyenne to capture. While the country was nowhere near as rugged as the mountain trail had been, that day’s journey nonetheless required the skill and hard work of Wheeler’s crew in crossing every steep-sided ravine and ice-banked stream, easing their way down and back up every snowy slope.

“Lieutenant Wheeler, sir!”

Homer turned in the saddle, recognizing the young soldier riding up from that morning. The lieutenant halted and reined about, awaiting the man.

“Sir, it’s McFarland,” he said as he came to a stop before Wheeler.

“Is he dead?”

“All but, Lieutenant.”

“C’mon,” Wheeler said as he put heels to his weary, ill-fed horse, moving back along the column.

Private Alexander McFarland’s attendants had pulled their patient, mule, and travois out of column and halted. Two of them had even removed their hats, holding them clutched at their chest as they stood over the soldier’s body suspended in its blankets. The wind repeatedly tousled their hair into their red-rimmed eyes that bespoke of grief silently endured.

Leaping down from his saddle, Wheeler bent over the private, placing his ear over McFarland’s nose and mouth. He heard nothing at first, but waited for something, anything. Then came a long, low death rattle deep within the dying man’s chest.

“Sir?”

Without looking up at the soldier near his shoulder, Wheeler kept his ear over McFarland’s face a moment more, then straightened. “We’ll wait here a little longer, men.”

“He ain’t dead yet, sir?”

“Not … just yet.”

It wasn’t long before McFarland’s heart finally beat its last. No breath wisping from his nostrils.

“All right,” Wheeler said with resignation as he straightened his fur cap on his head. “Let’s get the private wrapped up in a blanket and lashed with rope like the other dead men.”

“Beg pardon, Lieutenant,” grumped one of the escort, who stepped up to rest a gloved hand on the dead soldier’s body. “Alexander … Private McFarland, he was a friend of mine, sir. What you got in mind for him, you go tying him up in a blanket like the other dead, sir?”

“Why, I’m fixing to put him on one of the mules,” Wheeler explained, growing annoyed after so many days bare of sleep and warm food, filled only with bone-numbing work and spirit-robbing cold. “Like those others—”

“I beg you, Lieutenant,” a second attendant pleaded as he came up. “McFarland don’t deserve to be hunched over no goddamned mule’s back to freeze like a croquet hoop, sir! Let us leave him be on the litter till we get back to—”

“But I need that litter, Private.”

“Who you need it for?” demanded the first soldier suspiciously.

“For one of the scouts.”

The second soldier prodded, “You mean one of the civilians was wounded?”

“No,” Wheeler explained, growing more nettled as more and more of the column inched past them in the snow. “I mean one of the Shoshone.”

“Take his litter away for a goddamned Injun?” a soldier cried.

Another shrieked, “Not even no white man?”

“As you were, soldiers!” Wheeler ordered. “I’ve made my decision. While I understand your friendship for McFarland, we also owe what we can to the scouts who put their lives on the line too.”

“But you can’t put my bunkie on no god-blamed mule!”

“Why not?”

“’Cause he’s … he’s dead, sir!”

“Exactly, Private,” Wheeler answered. “Don’t take this wrong, but McFarland doesn’t know the difference any longer. And I’ll damn well do what I can to make one of our allies comfortable.”

How he hated feeling their eyes between his shoulder blades as he turned, waving one of his noncoms over. “Sergeant, go up to the Shoshone detachment and locate the one called Anzi.”

“Anzi, sir?”

“You’ll remember him,” Wheeler sighed. “He was the one drank most of the whiskey we had us the night after the battle.”

“Yes, sir. I remember that one. For sure I do.”

As the sergeant reined off into a lope, it started to snow again right overhead. Wheeler looked to the east where the sky was a patchwork of clouds and sunlight, blue and gray. But above the column it was beginning to snow again to beat the band. Big, thick, soft flakes that seemed to hiss through the brittle air as they tumbled from the lowering sky.

Behind Wheeler a voice grumbled, “That son of a bitch—”

Turning, throwing his shoulders back wearily, so tired he did not want a fight, the lieutenant declared, “I hope whoever spoke out of turn will be a man and own up to calling his superior a son of a bitch behind his back.”

The eyes shot here and there until an older private admitted, “It was me, sir.”

“You?”

“B-but I didn’t mean you, Lieutenant,” the older man apologized. “I was saying that Shoshone scout you call Anzi is the red-bellied son of a bitch. Him, sir: for taking McFarland’s—”

“I see,” Wheeler interrupted with a sigh, telling himself to be patient with these weary, half-frozen men. “Well, now—we all know that red-bellied Shoshone son of a bitch has lasted two days longer than our army surgeons said he would. So if he’s what you say he is, soldier … at least he’s one goddamned tough red-bellied son of a bitch.”

George Crook had pushed Colonel Richard I. Dodge’s doughboys to their limit, driving them some thirty-six miles in twelve hours that first day—a march of astonishing speed and endurance considering the temperature, the wind-driven snow, and the difficult terrain.

Just before ten
A.M
. yesterday, 27 November, five Indian couriers had reached Crook’s bivouac as the infantry was preparing to continue its march west. From the scouts the general learned that Mackenzie had departed the battlefield and was headed his way, bearing his dead and wounded out of the mountains.

“It appears General Mackenzie no longer requires your services,” Crook informed Dodge.

The glum infantry commander asked, “What now, General?”

Crook regarded the fuss-budget Dodge a moment longer, then replied, “Why, we countermarch to our wagons.”

“Do you plan on reaching the crossing tonight, sir?”

“I most certainly do, Colonel. I most certainly do.”

Late that Tuesday morning, the twenty-eighth, another trio of couriers rode into the Crazy Woman camp. They bore Mackenzie’s official written report of the engagement. Barely able to contain his excitement, George Crook read and reread the first word the outside world knew of that dramatic and tragic confrontation in the valley of the Red Fork:

Immediately calling for Dodge, Crook showed the colonel Mackenzie’s report.

“He’s done all that you asked of him, General,” Dodge replied, returning the dispatch to Crook.

“Yes,” the general said. “From the sounds of things, I think the fighting is finally over.”

“I certainly hope so, General.”

Crook nodded, peering down at the maps littering his field desk. “Perhaps now Crazy Horse will either surrender, or decamp and go off to hide himself in the badlands.”

“You seem much pleased with your success.”

Crook’s eyes narrowed as he regarded the prim Dodge, as if the colonel were passing judgment on him. “I have every reason to be pleased. I have marched hundreds of miles and fired hundreds of thousands of rounds, killing and wounding soldiers as well as wasting an entire regiment of horses … to be able to stand here today—finally able to state that we have had a success!”

“Then, here’s to Mackenzie, General!”

“By all means,” Crook responded with gusto. “Here’s to Mackenzie!”