Cry of the Hawk (10 page)

“Neither of us got the chance to fight today, Lieutenant. You decided to run instead!” Lybe turned away. “You’re dismissed, Walker!”

“Dismissed?” he sputtered.

“Unless you don’t understand the meaning of that order, Mr. Walker.”

The lieutenant sputtered furiously for a moment, then turned on his heel.

Lybe sighed deeply, his eyes squinting. “All right, the rest of you—Kansas, Ohio, and U.S. Volunteers—get back to digging those goddamned rifle pits. We must be ready when those red bastards come!”

“
There comes the
train!”

Shad Sweete turned at the call from a picket above him along the banquette.

“That’s Custard, I’ll bet,” he said to Jonah Hook.

Jonah stood, wagging his head in amazement. “I would’ve figured he’d be buzzard bait by now.”

Shad shook his head. “Not with every Injun for a hundred miles gathered up here for this shivery. Likely Custard ain’t seen a war feather till now.”

“The major better send some men out to make sure that wagon train makes it in.”

“Anderson ain’t the sort can make that decision.”

“Bretney?”

Shad grinned. “The captain with real guts is under arrest.”

He looked around for Lybe and found the captain arguing with Anderson at the far side of the open compound pocked now with rifle pits, each one like a fresh scar on the pale, foot-hammered earth.

“Lybe won’t do no good with him either, Jonah.” Shad pointed at the hills across the river. “Likely it’s all over for the sergeant’s men anyway. They just been spotted by the warriors.”

On the far hills, hundreds of warriors were leaping atop their ponies, kicking them furiously downhill toward the river. They had spotted the tops of the wagons not long after the fort had seen the incoming train, inching along the road on the Indians’ side of the North Platte.

“How many’s with Custard?” Shad inquired.

“I remember him having ten soldiers and fourteen teamsters,” Hook answered.

“Say!” shouted a picket above them. “The Injuns just cut off five of our boys from the rest of the wagon.”

“How many warriors following those five?” Shad flung his voice up the wall.

“More’n a hundred, mister.”

Hook felt helpless, knowing some of those men out there by face, if not by name. Knowing they had families back home, waiting for a husband or father or brother to come marching home. “Ain’t nothing we can do to help ’em?”

“Ain’t a damned thing now, Jonah,” Shad whispered. “Not a damned thing.”

The best Major
Anderson could muster in the way of relief for Sergeant Custard’s wagon train was to fire the howitzers at the swarming horsemen heading west from the bridge.

The warriors caught the wagons in a shallow ravine some five miles west of the post. Far out of range of his artillery, and much farther than the major desired to dispatch a relief escort from his stockade. To everyone who asked, demanding action, Anderson justified sitting on his thumbs by saying he needed every man he had for the coming assault he expected from the gathering warriors.

For close to four hours the men in Platte Station kept their eyes on the distant smoke rising above the shallow ravine where they had last seen the wagon tops disappear. Then the firing grew intense for several minutes and gradually tapered off as if someone were damming an irrigation slough.

It wasn’t long before puffs of dark, oily smoke billowed into the sky from the far ravine and the faint sound of wild screeching was heard carried on the incoming breeze from upriver.

Much later in the day as the sun eased over into the last quadrant of the sky, there came a flurry of activity along the banquettes as soldiers shouted that they had spotted three men running in from the west.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Anderson demanded as he met the first of the trio of grimy, smoke-blackened survivors at the middle of the rifle pits, near Jonah Hook. Others clustered around the three as well.

“Corporal James Shrader, sir. Company D.”

“You with Custard’s outfit?”

“Was,” he gasped, eyes wide and every bit disbelieving he had made it in. “He ordered me to take four men out in advance and probe the trail in. We heard the howitzer fire back yonder—and Custard sent us in to find out what was happening here.”

“I ordered the field piece fired to warn the sergeant.”

“Yessir,” Shrader said, self-consciously. “When the Injuns rode down on us, we got cut off from the rest.”

“What happened to those who remained with the sergeant?”

“Don’t rightly know. We was more downstream from Custard and the wagons. But we could hear. The men put up a fight of it for a long time. And another bunch was close on our tails—about to find where we’d taken cover. Then a big, ugly Injun come riding down the edge of the coulee we was hiding in. He waved his rifle and called out to the rest. And they followed him like a swarm of hornets for the wagons down the ravine. That was the last we heard of any firing from Custard’s bunch.”

“You three hid all afternoon?”

“Yessir—five of us in the brakes near the river bottom. Private Ballew was knocked out of the saddle, and they swarmed over him there in the ravine. Private Summers was coming up the bank with me when he was hit and fell. We three is all that’s left.”

“Lieutenant Walker, take these men and get them something to eat and drink. You’ve done well, Corporal.”

“We got out with our hair, Major. And right now—that’s good enough for me.”

7

Moon of Cherries Blackening

A
MONG THE SHAHIYENA
of the North, he had long been known as Sauts, meaning the Bat.

That winged night animal swooping down on unsuspecting prey was his medicine helper.

But because of his huge beaklike nose, over the past few years more and more of his own people had taken to calling him what the few white men who came among the bands called him: Roman Nose.

So it was that this towering, muscular warrior became Woquini, or Hook Nose, to his own people. Above all, the most powerful war chief of the Northern Cheyenne.

Up and down the length of the hills overlooking the soldier fort on the south side of the river, Roman Nose passed by small groups of warriors, Lakota and Shahiyena both, sitting and talking, smoking their pipes and eating jerked meat, discussing the fight of yesterday when they had killed the soldier chief on the gray horse, perhaps talking of driving the soldiers back into the timber walls earlier today.

Warriors waving blankets on top of their lookout posts to the west caught his attention. More soldiers coming. Wagons.

This time the Shahiyena would show the Lakota how to kill all the white men. Roman Nose was still angry about the fighting yesterday. The Lakota had allowed too many soldiers to escape back across the bridge. Only eight scalps taken. It was not enough to pay for the horror suffered by Black Kettle’s people on the Little Dried River.

The white man’s bridge would have to run red with blood before Roman Nose had avenged the deaths of the many in that cold winter camp stinking with butchery.

By the time the Cheyenne war chief arrived at the scene, he found his warriors had already forced the five white-topped wagons to halt in the sandy bottom of a shallow ravine. The white men had circled the wagons in a crude oval, freeing the mules from their hitches about the time a hundred Lakota under Crazy Horse rode down on them.

It made Roman Nose laugh to watch the frightened white men release their mules and go bounding back across the sand to the shelter of the wagons. Some of the Lakota drove the mules off to camp while others chased after five horsemen who raced for the soldier fort.

On the hillside above the timbered ravine, Roman Nose dismounted, spread his small blanket and took out his short medicine pipe. Filling the bowl with tobacco taken in the raids of last winter, he smoked, watching his warriors begin firing at the soldiers and civilians trapped in the circle of their wagons. Time enough to watch and enjoy.

But the white men poked loopholes through the sides of the wagons, and killed a few of the more daring warriors who attempted to ride close enough to hit a soldier or count coup.

So as the afternoon dragged on, and the sun grew hotter, like a white eye in the sky that seemed to be scolding him, Roman Nose grew restive, watching the lack of progress while the Cheyenne dead mounted.

Knocking out the burnt tobacco into his palm, the war chief tossed four pinches into the winds, another toward the sky, and one dropped on the earth. A last pinch he smeared across his forehead before he tied on a special headdress made for him by a feather shaman named Ice.

It was time the powerful medicine of Roman Nose ended this fight with the handful of white men burrowed in their wagon corral.

Riding slowly down the slope, he called his main lieutenants to his side and told them his plan. They left to order others to crawl in close and keep the soldiers occupied and hunkered down behind cover while Roman Nose himself prepared the grand charge.

When all was in ready, the war chief shouted his signal. The snipers who had crawled close to the wagons opened up a deadly barrage with their white-man guns taken last winter along the Platte and yesterday at the bridge. The Shahiyena had many more rifles than did the Lakota of Young Man Afraid of His Horses.

Then Roman Nose turned atop his pony, waving both his arms for the charge to begin. The others raced behind him, like swallows following a hawk. As they neared the snipers, the Shahiyena riflemen ceased firing.

With the quickness of a striking snake, the red horsemen were among the wagons in a slashing, noisy blow, leaping over wagon tongues, shooting down at the white men who hid behind saddles and barrels and kegs. Without their chief saying a word, the warriors leapt from their ponies at a dead run, clubs or tomahawks in their hands, killing those who rose to fight to the last. Hacking at the wounded who could no longer raise themselves in defense.

In a matter of six heartbeats—their fury was spent.

With a wild screech from his powerful chest, Roman Nose announced to the white men in the fort and to the Lakota in the hills that he had been victorious. While some of his warriors stripped, scalped, and mutilated the dead soldiers, he ordered others to plunder the goods in the wagons, then set fire to the wagons themselves once everything they could carry on their ponies had been carried off into the hills north of the river.

Along with fourteen more rifles taken from the bloody, frozen clutches of their white victims.

The following afternoon
Shad Sweete and two Shoshoni half-breeds led some reinforcements back to the Platte Bridge from Deer Creek Station. It had been quite a ride.

After the Cheyenne had swarmed over Sergeant Custard’s wagon train, Major Anderson called for volunteers to carry a message eighteen miles east to the soldiers stationed at Deer Creek. Anderson selected three men, paying them fifty dollars each for their dangerous ride. Under cover of darkness the three slipped out separately and took different routes down the North Platte.

Anderson needed men badly: he had nine men seriously wounded, and twenty-five had been killed.

Among the mutilated dead retrieved at the far side of the river from the previous day’s fierce fighting, a note was found attached to one of the bodies—more like a scrap of paper torn from a soldier’s personal diary. Word of that note spread quickly among the men of Platte Bridge Station, most choosing to believe that it was in fact written by a former Confederate serving with the Eleventh Ohio for the past year.

“It says he was captured down on the Platte some time back,” Jonah Hook said.

“Note don’t say a damn thing about a
he
,” Shad grumbled.

“It says the Injuns don’t want peace, and they’re expecting another thousand warriors to join up to fight us. And you don’t believe it was writ by the soldier?”

Sweete shook his head, then whispered. “The Injuns don’t keep a soldier alive, Jonah. That’s pure addle-headed thinking.”

“If it ain’t a soldier, who then?”

“A woman.”

“Woman?”

“Lot’s of ’em got took in those raids down on the South Platte. What I saw of it—”

“You seen the note?”

“Anderson wanted me to look at it,” Shad admitted. “It don’t look like the hand of a man. More like a scared woman’s hand wrote that note.”

“Damn their black hearts!” Hook cursed not quite under his breath, his chest heaving. “Nothing more evil than these savages dragging off women and children into the wilderness—for God knows what outrage.”

“Injuns ain’t the only ones. White or red—we all done our share of evil to one another out here across this big land.”

Sweete found Hook staring at him, eyes narrowing.

“Old man—it sounds to me like it don’t bother you to think of that woman being alone with all them savages—raping her.”

“It bothers me, Jonah!” he snapped. “But, goddammit—I’m telling you the Sioux and Cheyenne ain’t the only sonsabitches out here. Evil bastards come wearing all color of skin. I saw for myself how Colorado Volunteers showed off the private parts of Cheyenne women they killed and raped and cut up down on the Little Dried River.”