Cry of the Hawk (6 page)

“Possible.”

“You been out here under the sun and straining at them mountains for too long, old man. We ain’t seen a feather one on this march from Laramie.”

“That’s when you best be watching for brownskins.”

“No, old man—that’s what you’re being paid to do. I’m just here ’cause I gotta put in my time till I can go home to my family.”

Sweete sighed and leaned back on his elbows, watching the dusting of stars overhead, counting two shooting stars before he spoke again to the young soldier.

“Why you come out here anyway, son?”

“You gotta be a fool, you know? I came here to get myself out of that stinking prison where men was dying every day.”

“Anything to get out, that it?”

“Closer to home.”

“Where’s that, son?”

“You’re sure a nosy old woman, ain’t you now?”

“Figure a man what sits alone by hisself out in the dark needs at least one good friend.”

Sweete watched the stranger regard him carefully, then went back to staring at the dark canopy overhead. In the east the big egg yolk of a yellow moon was rising off the horizon.

“Missouri.”

“What’s that?”

“I said—I come from Missouri.”

“Thought you said you was from Virginia.”

“Original. Moved few years back with my wife and oldest child to southern Missouri.”

“That where you got caught up in all this, I’ll bet.”

The soldier hung his head between his propped knees. “Yeah.”

“You wanna go home so bad you taste it, don’t you?”

“I don’t figure I’m any different from any of the rest of them back there in camp.”

“No, I bet you ain’t,” Sweete replied quietly. “But you’re here now. And if you don’t take a notion to watching out for your hair—you’ll never get home to see that family of yours again.”

“What’s it matter to you, old man?”

Shad sensed the chip suddenly back on the shoulder, as if the soldier had realized he was dropping all that veneer of bravado. “Matters only ’cause I’ve got family myself I’m worried about.”

“Back east?”

“Down in Indian Territory. Cheyenne.”

“You’re a squaw man, ain’t you?”

“Suppose you could say that. But there’s a war going on out here too. And it can be every bit as messy as what’s happening back across the wide Missouri.”

“Didn’t come here looking for a fight,” the soldier explained. “Just putting in my time till it’s over back there. And I can go home and pick up where I left off.”

“Sure hope you can pick up where you left off, son.” He held out some of his twist. “Care for a chew.”

The soldier regarded what the scout held in his hand. “Might taste pretty good about now. Yessir. I thankee.”

They chewed together for a while before Shad spoke again. “You keep your ears open—you’ll learn a lot more about this land than you will flapping your jaws.”

“You’re one to tell me,” he said. “I don’t need to learn about this wide-open desert, old man. I’m going back home when I’m done here.”

“Believe I’ll turn in,” Shad said minutes later. He got to his feet and was ready to stroll off the hilltop when the soldier stood.

“Figure I was a little hard on you, Mr. Sweete. Maybe you’ll forgive me—it’ll make me feel better.”

“No harm done.”

“We both got us family we’re worried about, don’t we?”

“I figure we got that in common, son.”

“It’s all I think about these days.”

“Weren’t no different in prison, was it?”

A shapeless grin moved across his wolfish face burled with a new beard. “Think about it all the time.”

“You watch yourself out here, son. You’ll make it back to that family of yours.”

Shad Sweete took two steps before the soldier tugged on the sleeve of the buckskin war shirt the scout wore on the chill of evening. Turning, he found the young man holding his hand out.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Sweete. Man needs a friend out here I suppose.”

He smiled, pine-chip teeth glimmering in the new moonlight splaying silver across the rising tableland stretching to the spine of the continent itself. “I can always use a friend, mister.”

“Name’s Jonah Hook.”

“Let’s go find our bedrolls, Jonah. These bones hollering for rest something fierce.”

“I sleep better out here, Mr. Sweete. Better’n I ever have—if it weren’t for the nightmares about my family.”

“Don’t you let ’em spook you. Don’t mean a thing.”

Shad wished he meant it. But as he walked down the slope into the soldier camp, the old scout shuddered with the chill in remembrance of his own recurring nightmare—that burned and gutted camp of Black Kettle’s on Sand Creek.

And how damned lucky his own wife and daughter were to escape the butchery of madness unleashed.

“Our scout recommends
you ride on in with us.” Captain A. Smith Lybe dragged a dusty hand across his cracked lips. He had just ridden up to Willow Spring Creek with his platoon of I Company, along with six horsemen from the Eleventh Ohio, to find the wagon train and its Kansas escort making an early camp of it.

“I figure we’re safe enough here,” answered Sergeant Amos Custard of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, swinging an arm around their camp. “That scout of yours is a nervous old woman, you want to know what I think.”

Lybe glanced at Shadrach Sweete perched atop his Morgan mare. “When you left Sweetwater Station ahead of us this morning, I was hoping you’d get more ground under you before you stopped for the night.”

“You take care of your own galvanized Johnnies, Captain,” Custard replied. “We’re going home, and we’ll mosey if we wanna.”

Jonah Hook pulled his head back from the cool water of the spring where the rest of Lybe’s small detail had been guzzling, in time to watch the old scout nudge his mare forward until he stood above the sergeant.

“The Sioux been hitting this line regular, Sergeant. But I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”

“That’s right,” Custard said. “If you’re so damned nervous, go on and take the rest of these Confederates with you to Platte Bridge.”

“The farther we come since this morning,” Lybe explained, “the more I feel like I want to make a night march of it into the stockade at Platte Bridge.”

Custard gazed at Sweete a moment more. Then he turned to Lybe. “He suggest you make a night march of it?”

“He did. And I agree. Something’s up, Sergeant.”

“You put in your time out here—like I have, Captain—you won’t be so damned nervous about every shadow or flap of an owl’s wing. And you won’t be so ready to take the word of a squaw-man scout either.”

Hook watched Shad Sweete gently rein his mare away.

“Let’s be going, Captain,” said the scout.

“See you at the station tomorrow, Sergeant Custard.” Lybe put heels to his horse and brought it around. “Let’s mount up and move out, men!”

Jonah wanted one last drink of that water as he corked his canteen and caught up the reins to his mount. He had to admit, his butt was growing accustomed to the riding when for so long he had either been languishing in prison or walking across the plains. Far better to ride.

And ride they had. Ever since arriving at the Sweetwater Station near South Pass, Lybe’s I Company had been busy almost daily, inspecting the emigrant road for telegraph line needing repair, replacing sections at times a mile or more in length dragged down by the hostiles.

Wire pulled down. Poles burned in blackened scars along the road, the scene blotted with tracks of Indian ponies and moccasined warriors. Yet Jonah Hook had yet to see a warrior. Some of the others in I Company had been blooded in skirmishes. One killed and one dead with First Sergeant William R. Moody. But for all of the excitement, Jonah had never been in the right place at the wrong time.

He kept counting the days until he would be shet of this land and back in the bosom of family in Missouri.

This short trip back down the road to Fort Laramie was just the sort of diversion to keep his mind off so much of the yearning. Captain Lybe needed supplies the Eleventh Ohio and Eleventh Kansas had used up prior to being replaced by the galvanized Yankees of the Third U.S. And the Confederates were owed a payday as well. Lybe said he would accompany some of the Kansas and Ohio troops east to Laramie where he could pick up rations, forage, and pay vouchers.

“Watch yourself, Sergeant Custard,” said the Captain as Sergeant Moody led out the mounted Confederates. “Reports of heavy activity between this spring and the bridge.”

“We’ll take care of ourselves, Captain. We’re strong enough to hold off anything these red bastards can throw at us.”

4

July, 1865

B
LOOD
WOULD FILL
every boot track the white man made as he fled this sacred hunting ground of the Lakota and Shahiyena.

Crazy Horse lay in wait behind the low hills with the others gathered beneath the dark sky as the moon eased down into the west. And with the rising of the sun, the Horse would lead nineteen others to entice the soldiers from their fort walls, pulling them seductively into the trap set beyond the sand hills where the many others would spring from hiding to swallow the white men like nighthawks swooping down to gobble up moths on the wing.

They had been preparing for this attack for some time—ranging out in small parties and large, probing up and down the Holy Road. Once the Lakota had even lured out the soldiers from Fort Laramie under their soldier chief the Loafers called Moonlight. Instead of turning back with his horsemen when he failed to find any warriors to fight, Moonlight kept on marching west, right to the bank of Wind River—while the Lakota and Shahiyena joyously plundered the road behind the soldiers.

With twenty-four winters behind him now, Crazy Horse remained thin and sinewy, slightly below average height for a white man of the time and hardly 140 pounds in weight. So what was most remarkable about him was not only his lighter skin color, but a hair color much fairer than most Oglalla warriors. Behind his ear now he wore the pebble medicine made for him by a medicine man named Chips. The stone dreamer had made his young warrior friend a charm that had already proved itself potent, protecting the warrior through the many skirmishes of these past spring moons.

Crazy Horse shivered slightly beneath his blanket, wishing now for the warmth just the sight of Black Buffalo Woman gave his loins. The short summer nights in this high, flat country nonetheless grew cold when all heat seemed drawn from the land. Yet he shivered every bit as much from the remembrance of the horror suffered by the two Lakota men whose bodies still hung from chains lashed over a scaffold at the edge of Fort Laramie.

Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, two minor Oglalla chiefs had purchased a white prisoner the Shahiyena had captured in their winter raids along the Holy Road. Although two of the woman’s older children had been taken from her, she was allowed to keep a suckling infant by her Cheyenne captor. In an attempt to win themselves some presents from the soldiers, the Lakota chiefs named Two Face and Blackfoot bought Mrs. Eubanks and her infant from the Shahiyena, and delivered their white prizes to the acting commander at Fort Laramie.

But instead of rewarding the two Lakota chiefs, the drunken soldier had ordered the pair shackled with heavy ball and chain, then strung up on a scaffold with more chain about their necks.

Even now the Horse winced at the horror—this terrible death for a warrior, chained and strangled, with no way for his spirit to escape through his mouth.

The bodies of the two chiefs had swung in the spring wind, guarded by a soldier with a knife on the end of his rifle, until the weight of the heavy balls pulled a leg from each of the rotting corpses. Legs too heavy for snarling, hungry dogs to drag off into the brush by the river.

With sad eyes, Spotted Tail’s Loafers at the fort related the story to the Oglalla who came and went among them until the army finally determined that no Indians should be camping next to the fort during an Indian war.

“Instead of making wolf-scouts of our warriors,” Spotted Tail had explained to the Oglalla, “the stupid white soldiers decided to send us east to the fort they call Kearney. Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, the soldiers will make us begin that march.”

It was not long before word of the terrible journey spread among the bands living in freedom. Time and again small parties of Oglalla scouts dogged the trail of those two thousand Brule, guarded by more than one hundred soldiers led by a soldier chief named Fouts. With their own eyes, these scouts saw the soldiers tie up young boys to wagon wheels, where the children would be whipped for disobedience. Other, smaller children were thrown into the spring-swollen Platte River, where they would struggle and thrash in the water to make it back to shore while their parents screamed and cried out, held helpless at gunpoint on the bank.

Crawling near each night’s camp, the young warrior scouts with Crazy Horse could hear the cries and sobbing of young women repeatedly taken from their families and forced into the unspeakable by the arrogant soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry.

“You must help us,” Spotted Tail had begged at that camp near the mouth of Horse Creek, whispering to Crazy Horse and his warriors, who had crept into the Loafers’ camp after darkness had taken the land whole.

“There are many of us to help you now,” the Horse had replied there beside the Platte. “We are just across the river, on the north bank. Tonight we will mark the crossing place with tall sticks, for the women and children to follow. Make your run for freedom in the morning—leaving lodges and belongings behind.”

“It will be hard to leave everything behind,” Spotted Tail said sadly.

“What if the soldiers attacked our camps—you would leave everything.” Crazy Horse replied. “Better to have your lives and freedom than those lodges and blankets and iron kettles the white man sold you.”

The next morning when the Brule women failed to pack up quickly enough and instead moved slowly away toward a crossing of the Platte in a retreat that was covered by some of their warriors, the soldier chief rode up with a dozen men, cursing and shouting. The soldiers began shoving among the warriors with their knife-guns when Crazy Horse suddenly appeared from behind a lodge, leveled his old cap-and-ball revolver, and shot the soldier chief in the head.