Black Sun, The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869 (11 page)

“St. Louis, Seamus. She and my daughter, Arta.”

Donegan remembered the boys. “It's good to know where your woman is, Bill.”

“You don't?”

He wagged his head. “Doubt I ever will now. She gave up on waiting for me. Went back to her folks and the life she lived before coming west.”

Bill shrugged. “What do you expect a woman to do?”

Seamus nodded. “Can't blame her.”

“She gets scared, Seamus—she runs back to those she remembers protecting her.”

“Like your Lulu.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “She doesn't belong out here—not yet. Not till I can build a decent home for her and the girl.”

“Where you want that to be?”

“Don't know. So for now, I ride across these plains, doing what a man has to do to make a living. And she lives with her family back East—where we both know it's safe.”

“Yet I wonder, Bill—is there truly any place safe?”

Cody thought on it, the way a bear would cock its head over the burrow of some animal it was hunting. Listening. Hoping for some sign to continue its pursuit.

“No place truly safe, Irishman. I only hope to find a place for those I love where they can be safer than the way of things out here.”

“Injins?”

“Them, and … others.”

“You don't fear for them as much from Injins as you do other white men, do you?”

“I know what to count on with an Indian, Seamus. It's the white man that keeps me wondering some—”

When Cody stopped talking mid-sentence, it snagged Donegan's attention as if it had been yanked hard with a rope knotted around his middle. The young scout ahead threw up an arm as he reined back. He pointed.

Both strained their eyes ahead, across San Francisco Creek. Finally seeing something to go with the faint noise that had been brought to their ears. The sound of hooves on old, icy snow. And the low, mumbling voices of man.

“Look at them, will you?” Cody said in a whisper, certain at last the two white men had not been spotted.

“Who are they? And what they doing out here?”

Bill snorted. “Don't you figure it, Irishman?”

He shook his head. “I see two men bundled on horses.”

“But them ain't Indian ponies, are they?”

“No, they aren't.” Then it struck him, with the way the two riders were bundled against the cold and hunkered down in the saddle, allowing their big horses to pick their way along the creekbank and snowdrifts. “Are they scouts from Penrose's column?”

He nodded, grinning. “I don't doubt it, Irishman! Damn, but won't the general be happy now?”

Cody turned back in the saddle, looking down the slope at the two riders as they drew nearer, unaware they were watched. Until the young scouts called out.

“Halloo!”

Both riders suddenly jerked back on their reins as they sat up straight in their saddles, heads turning like wind-up toys on a string, this way then that while Cody's greeting echoed off the hills. They were pulling up the rifles suspended from slings strapped over their shoulders.

“Don't shoot, boys!” Donegan hollered out this time.

“Over here!” Cody said, waving his big hat.

“Let's go talk,” Seamus suggested, nudging his horse past Cody's.

The creek gurgled under their horses' bellies in an icy flow as the animals carefully stepped across the rocky bottom. By the time they reached the other side, the two buffalo soldiers were coming down to the crossing.

“Buffalo Bill! I'll be damned, if this don't beat all!” exclaimed one of the black soldiers. “You riding with Ginnel Carr?”

“That's right!” Cody replied. “We're out looking for—”

“You got a nickname, Cody?” Donegan whispered, looking with wonder at his white companion.

“Seems I got one now. And, if you ask me—I take a fancy to it.”

“That's right, Buffalo Bill,” the first soldier said. “I see'd you shoot a bunch of buffalo up to Fort Hays last year. You was working for the railroad.”

“Damn if I wasn't.
Buffalo Bill
—got a nice ring to it, don't it, Seamus?”

The first buffalo soldier got wide-eyed of an instant, cranking his head to look at the Irishman. “Seamus—that what he called you?”

“Yeah,” Cody replied.

Donegan's eyes narrowed, studying the black soldier's face as he pulled down the wool muffler he had wrapped around his own. “By the saints! If it ain't Reuben Waller himself!”

“Gloreee!” Waller screeched, kicking a right leg over to leap from his saddle.

Donegan dropped to the ground in the next heartbeat, lunging for the buffalo soldier. They met with a thud, pounding each other and dancing about in a cascade of snow, heads reared back and laughing with a sound that spooked some robber jays from the branches overhead.

“I take it you boys know each other?”

Seamus stopped, one arm still clutched around Waller. “Bill, this man probably saw you shoot buffalo last year, before I ever ran onto him at Fort Wallace last fall. I kept some white sojurs from jobbing on him.”

Waller grinned, the teeth bright in his dark face. “He kept them white soldiers from kicking the shit outta ol' Reuben. Likely they would'a done more'n pound sand up my ass—this tall, ugly Irishman didn't come along to help me.”

Cody sat hunched over the saddlehorn, watching the reunion. “Don't that beat all? Out here in the middle of all this, and you bump into a old friend. I'm Bill Cody.” He pulled off a mitten and held down a hand.

Waller shook it enthusiastically. “Proud to make your 'quaintance, Buffalo Bill. This other'n's Silas. Private Rutt.”

The second soldier nodded and saluted the white men.

Seamus pounded Waller on the back again. “Reuben was in the bunch rescued Forsyth's scouts, Bill.”

“Captain Carpenter's orderly, I was.”

“Was?”

“I've been assigned to Ginnel Penrose for this winter campaign.”

“I knew it!” Cody cried. “Where's Penrose?”

Waller waved down San Francisco Creek.

“How far?”

“We been out since yesterday morning,” Waller answered.

“Penrose is staying in camp—not moving?”

“Just squatting,” Waller replied. “He's sent out patrols to comb the country every day, looking for Carr.”

Donegan turned to the buffalo soldier. “How you fared with Penrose, Reuben?”

“Two hundred head of horses froze on us. No, none of us done good at all.”

“Down to quarter rations,” added Silas Rutt.

“Mither of God!” Seamus exclaimed, twisting 'round and tearing at his saddlebags. “Get these sojurs some food.”

As Waller and Rutt lunged close, the two white scouts pulled hardtack and salt-pork from their own supplies.

“I suppose we can go without till we get back to Carr,” Cody added cheerfully.

Donegan grinned, watching the two hungry soldiers wolf down everything laid in their hands. “Damn right if we can, Buffalo Bill!”

*   *   *

After retracing their trail back to Carr's column, carrying word of Penrose's condition, Cody, Donegan, and the two buffalo soldiers prepared to move back down San Francisco Creek once more.

Carr dispatched Captain William H. Brown and two companies of the Fifth to push ahead, accompanied by fifty pack-mules swaybacked with provisions. The senior major would hurry the rest of the command and his wagons as fast as the snowbound countryside would allow.

But for the meantime, Cody would lead the relief column hurrying to lift the specter of starvation from Penrose's buffalo soldiers.

Two days after running across Waller and Rutt, Bill Cody located the bleak, cheerless camp on Paloduro Creek. Despair-filled, watery-eyed buffalo soldiers loped out to greet their saviors. They hollered with weak, hoarse voices at their deliverance.

“Makes me proud to return the favor I owed you,” Seamus whispered to Waller, who rode at the Irishman's side into camp. “After you and Carpenter's boys rescued those of us on that island with Forsyth.
*
Time I repaid—”

“Hell, you don't owe me a damned thing,” Waller replied. “I was never more proud to do anything in my life than I was riding with Cap'n Carpenter's company that day—fixin' to fight our way into some Cheyennes—then finding what bad shape you fellas was in on Beecher's Island.”

“We held out. Looks like your sojurs did the same here, Reuben.”

It was the best a man could say about Penrose's soldiers—that they held out. Skinny and growing more emaciated by the day, they had been on quarter rations for over two weeks, supplementing it with some stringy mule or horse from the few carcasses left in camp. It was plain to see the buffalo soldiers were hungry most for grease—the salt-pork and bacon would do nicely they said as they lunged at the crates of rations like packs of wolves. Mess sergeants stood on the backs of their wagons, tossing out the hard bread to tide both Negro soldiers and the hard-bitten Mexican trackers over until beans and bacon had been cooked.

And coffee. One of the soldiers hollered out in his weakened, husky voice for some hot coffee.

“I could go for a cup myself,” Cody said, sliding from his saddle at the fire Waller chose for their mess.

“You drink about as much coffee as I do, Cody.”

At a nearby fire a gaunt figure turned around to stare back at them, his wide-eyed, skinny face filled with wonder. His mouth yawed a moment before any words came out.

“Cody? That you?”

Bill Cody stopped punching up the coals at his own fire and stared back at the wolfish figure standing not twenty feet away. A white man he was—dressed in a long buffalo coat that nearly reached the ground, atop it all a cap fashioned from the hide of a wolf snugged clear down to his eyebrows. From the bottom of the cap poured the man's long, dark hair, spilling over his shoulders.

“Bill?”

“Yeah—it's me, Cody.”

They rushed each other, hugging and pounding on one another as much as the weakened white man could take before he drew himself back.

“Let me take a good look at you, Cody.”

“Ain't been all that long, Bill.”

He wagged his head. “Didn't know … if we'd make it.”

“How you get mixed up with these brunettes?”

The dark-haired man smiled, his teeth big in his shrunken face. “I'm scouting again. Like I done for Hancock and Custer last summer. Sheridan put me to work for Penrose, working out of Fort Lyon. And you're scouting for Carr.”

“Damn, if this ain't good news. Say, I've got an Irishman you've got to meet. C'mon over here, Seamus.”

Donegan strode over, holding out his big paw.

“Seamus—want you to meet a fella smells almost as bad as you. Seamus Donegan, recent of Beecher Island, like you to meet an old friend of mine—James Butler Hickok.”

“Cody called you Bill?”

“That's what folks call me mostly: Bill Hickok.”

Cody smiled, inching between them to slap both men on the shoulder.

Chapter 8

January 1869

“Keep your eyes open for any sign of Evans,” said Major Eugene Carr to his chief of scouts when Cody settled to his saddle. “He's bound to be operating anywhere here on the Canadian.”

Back on 30 December, when Carr reached Penrose's camp on the Paloduro, he had immediately unloaded his wagons to establish a supply base. The following day the major turned Wilson's civilians and their wagons back to Fort Lyon for more supplies. Through the next week, Carr and Penrose recuperated their outfits, readying them to continue the winter campaign. From both wings they chose five hundred of the strongest men, in addition to selecting the best of the surviving horses. Without the wagons, the soldiers outfitted a train of pack-mules to accompany the expedition. Those soldiers remaining behind would garrison the supply camp on Paloduro Creek.

On the seventh of January a dispatch rider came in with news from Fort Lyon that the main column under George Armstrong Custer had struck the Cheyenne of Black Kettle in their Washita River camp back at the end of November. Other dispatches from Kansas stated that Custer's regiment was at that point driving the Kiowa, along with more bands of hostile Cheyenne, back to their reservation at Fort Cobb.

The day after those dispatches arrived, Carr led his handpicked five hundred away from Camp Carr, heading south toward the Canadian River in Texas, only forty miles away, hoping to find some sign of Major Andrew W. Evans, who was reportedly working his way east out of Fort Bascomb in New Mexico as the second arm of Sheridan's pincer movement to aid Custer's attack on the Cheyenne. Rumor out of Kansas had it that back on Christmas Day the Evans column had struck a large band of Comanches camped at Soldier Springs on the North Fork of the Red River.

The Fifth Cavalry was drawing close to the center of the action.

For three days now Carr had relentlessly pushed his men south under clear, cold skies of the new year. Nearing their goal, Cody and his advance scout reined up, awaiting Major Carr.

“To a Mexican, that's the Rio Colorado down there, General,” the scout explained.

“The Canadian to us, Cody?”

“Right. Not far downstream, you'll find a place called Adobe Walls.”

“A town? Out here?” Donegan asked.

Cody laughed lightly. “Hell no. Nothing more than a group of low-roofed, mud buildings that leak when it rains or snows. Sometimes used by buffalo hunters.”

“I take it you've been there, Cody?” Carr inquired.

“I hunt buffalo, General.”

“Right now, how about hunting us a campsite. Sun's fixing to go down.”

“Have your advance follow my trail down into the valley. C'mon, Irishman.”

Donegan nudged the big mare into an easy lope behind Cody as they broke off the top of that hill. Down into the cottonwood and scrub timber they pushed, searching for suitable grazing for the many animals, enough open ground for so many men.