Cry of the Hawk (9 page)

“Don’t leave me!” shrieked a soldier as he fell to the ground. “Oh, God—”

Around and around in a tightened circle the big gray horse pranced while the soldier chief tried to shoot at the strangling noose of Shahiyena—then the hard-mouthed animal suddenly bolted off with its wounded rider, heading not across the bridge with the other fleeing soldiers—but galloping off toward the ridge, into the nearby hills, directly for the Shahiyena who were pouring down into the valley.

With a loud, throaty roar, a wagon-gun sent its load of canister shot across the river. The charge exploded just above the ground, raising a huge spout of dirt clods and dust, shredding the willow and alder on the north bank as the warriors scurried back. A second wagon-gun roared on the heels of the first. Its charge landed farther from the river, against the bluffs.

Crazy Horse joined the rest as the warriors slowly flowed back from the riverbank. Nowhere was his soldier friend in sight. Out of the mass of Shahiyena one warrior emerged, leading the nervous gray horse by a rawhide lariat, struggling with the frightened animal. The cold stone inside his belly grew taut, and never more cold.

He had little time to study the riverbank, wondering which body might be Cas-Par’s, for the soldiers at the fort walls set up a barrage with their far-shooting guns. Each time those rifles roared, brownskinned horsemen dropped from the backs of their ponies, then slid back atop them to jeer and call out, slapping their bare backsides at the soldiers so far across the river for missing them.

“Your mothers are bitch dogs!”

Crazy Horse stared along the hillside, finding George Bent, the old fur trader’s half-breed son. He was shouting in English at the white men in the fort.

“Shoot that loud-mouthed son of a bitch!” a soldier cried out.

Again and again the soldiers fired, trying to hit the bare-chested Bent, who kept on cursing the soldiers in every vile English word he had learned in his years among them. From time to time he rose from the back of his pony, pulling aside his breechclout, exposing his genitals to the white men.

During the whole time, those Shahiyena gathered around the half-breed shook eight fresh scalps—further inciting the frustrated white men clustered behind the walls of their log fort.

6

July 26, 1865

N
O
SOONER HAD
Jonah Hook and the fourteen soldiers reached the bridge than the Cheyenne and Sioux were sprouting from the far bank as if by magic.

“Skirmish formation!” Captain Lybe hollered. “Off left! Off right!”

Seven men swung out to the left. Hook turned with six other soldiers to the right. Shoulder to shoulder.

“Forward at a walk!”

As they started across the bridge to help Collins’s harried troops, Lybe’s men had to bunch together more than Hook liked it. This was not the way to have to come face-to-face with those screaming warriors less than a thousand yards away, across the river, at the other end of this long bridge.

By now Collins was plainly hit, his mount whirling wildly. The rest of his outfit were breaking and racing for the north end of the bridge. The first army mount clattered onto the cottonwood planks.

“Prepare to fire!” Lybe shouted. “Make it good boys—empty some ponies now ….
Fire!
”

The fourteen rifles spurted orange, engulfing the Volunteers in stinging smoke as the single mounted soldier surged into their midst, burst through them to the safety of the fort. Another horseman clattered onto the bridge. And a third, pounding the hollow-sounding planks as Hook rammed the ball home onto the powder. He thumbed a cap onto the nipple and brought the big hammer back to full cock as the wide, smooth buttplate slipped into the groove of his shoulder.

By damn, this is what he was out here to do, if he was going to be out here at all—and that was to kill Injuns.

Lybe was barking now, his pistol busy. “Fire your weapons at will—reload and fire at will!”

Jonah squeezed back on the trigger. The gun roared. Through the smoke he thought he saw a warrior reel and grip his pony’s withers, loping out of the scramble of men and animals. But with all the confusion, Jonah could not be sure if it was his kill.

In a matter of ragged seconds, every one of Caspar Collins’s squad who was going to make it out of that horde of warriors had reached the bridge—frantic in their flight, tearing through Lybe’s Volunteers in panic.

“Where’s Collins?” demanded the captain as each one of the troopers shot past.

One slowed, then stopped, his horse prancing when Lybe snagged the bridle.

“Don’t know where the lieutenant is!” His face was ashen with fear. He turned back, pointing, the horse trying to rip itself from Lybe’s firm grip. “He went back to help one of the … one of the men what was down. Lemme go, Captain!”

Lybe freed his grip and slapped the mount, before he turned to see Captain Bretney emerge from the gate at the lead of another twenty foot soldiers, coming on at double time. They too were ordered to spread out in a wide skirmish line that halted at the riverbank, where they commenced firing.

Lybe shouted into the noise of the gunfire, “Reload and follow me.”

“We going on across, Cap’n?” Hook asked.

“By damn we’re going to find out what happened to Collins.”

Jonah read the determination turning the man’s jawline to stone, and admired the Yankee officer for it. He was on Lybe’s heels, glancing behind him once as some of the rest slammed home their ramrods and joined the captain.

Bretney signaled his men on the south bank to form again. The captain led his squad, following Lybe across as the first howitzer round whined overhead. It exploded just above the ground, spraying shot and ball into the air, kicking up dirt and brush.

With wild shrieks, the Indians retreated up the sides of the hills and atop the bluffs, leaving their victims lying stark and white as fish bellies against the summer-cured grass. Lybe stopped at the north end of the bridge, watching Bretney’s squad come up to join him as the warriors jeered and slapped their bare asses at the soldiers. Taunting, leering, luring the white men on.

“No chance to make it to that wagon train now, Captain,” Lybe shouted as Bretney came up with his patrol.

Bretney squinted to the northwest and pointed. “There’s the lieutenant’s horse.”

They all watched the big gray animal being led away, into the hills by a warrior using a buffalo-hair lariat.

“He might be … one of these,” Lybe said, visibly choking down the bile.

“Damn that Anderson!” Bretney roared, whirling to shake his fist at the Platte Bridge Station on the far side of the river. “I’ll have your oak leaves for this, Anderson!”

“He may have your bars for that—”

Bretney whipped around on Lybe. “Colonel Collins will likely think I’m responsible for his son’s death—because I didn’t get Anderson to countermand his own order sending the boy out. God
damn
you, Anderson!”

“The colonel can’t hold you responsible, Henry. Calm yourself before you’re up on court-martial before Anderson’s charges!”

Lybe ordered the regulars and his Volunteers to stay behind for the moment and cover the bodies of Collins’s men while he escorted Bretney back to the post. In minutes a squad of soldiers came through the gate, leading a double-hitch team pulling a wagon. Into its empty bed the mutilated and scalped corpses were unceremoniously thrown.

Jonah stood, transfixed over one body. He had seen the bodies of his dead comrades, torn by grapeshot or dismembered by exploding canister. But nothing like this. He suddenly thanked God that there was nothing left in his stomach to heave up.

Both hands were hacked off. The large, white thigh muscles were cleaved open like hams from hip to kneecap, pink and rippling in glistening crimson. Four deep lacerations marked each upper arm. The belly lay open, the purple pink snake of intestine wriggling out into the summer heat, already attracting the buzzing of green-backed flies. The head lay darkened from eyebrows back, completely scalped, ears missing.

But it was the castration, along with seeing the scrotum and penis hung pendant over the young trooper’s chin that caused Jonah to gag on nothing more than his revulsion of fighting this sort of enemy who would desecrate its victims with such complete and utter abandon.

“Get that body over here, soldier!” shouted a sergeant, stomping toward Hook. “We ain’t got all day to lollygag here while them Injuns come down to stuff your cock in your mouth, Reb!”

“Sir?” he asked weakly.

“Grab his arms,” the sergeant ordered, hoisting his weapon sling over his shoulder. “What’s left of ’em anyway. I’ll get the poor bastard’s legs, boy. You know him?”

Jonah shook his head. About all he could do.

The wrists were sticky with blood, blotted with sand. That grit was about the only thing that kept Hook from losing his grip on the severed wrists until he reached the back of the wagon where the rest of the soldiers huddled, watching the taunting, jeering warriors shaking the bloody, still-warm scalps at the white men.

“About face!” shouted the sergeant. “Let’s keep it together, men. Easy … easy now. Don’t run off. Stay together, and we’ll all make it back!”

Jonah felt no relief back within the walls of Platte Bridge Station.

“You’re past the worst of it, Jonah Hook,” said Shad Sweete as he came alongside, placing his big ham of a hand on the Southerner’s shoulder. “Ain’t nothing ever gonna be as bad as seeing your first.”

Hook continued to stare into the icy blue of the scout’s eyes, unable to find any words to say. They were all choked down below that ball of bile and foul-tasting phlegm he could not hack up.

The shrill call of “Assembly” on the bugle yanked him back, hard. Captain Lybe waited for the last Kansas regular to shuffle into formation.

“Major Anderson has put me in charge of the defense of this post. I want details assigned to dig rifle pits. Another detail to pile up an embrasure of earth in front of our howitzers. Any questions?”

When there weren’t any, the captain went on. “Be at your assignments, men. We don’t know how long we have until they make a full assault on us. Dis-missed!”

“Captain Lybe,” called Major Anderson. “I’ve just been informed by our telegraph operator that we’re now completely cut off.”

“The Indians have dragged down the wire going east?”

“We’ve sent the last word of our desperate situation to Laramie.” Anderson turned to his adjutant. “Lieutenant Walker, I want you to mount twenty men, well-armed. I want the east line repaired. Take what supplies you need and depart in ten minutes.”

“Yes, Major.” George Walker saluted and was gone. To his dismay, instead of twenty, the lieutenant found only sixteen horses still fit for duty, what with exhaustion and battle wounds.

As the adjutant’s small repair detail cleared the post gates, Lybe climbed down the ladder from the banquette, signaling his Volunteers to form up.

“You men stay ready. Check your weapons. See that you have ball and caps in your kit.”

“We gonna be ready for them Injuns when they come?” asked a Georgia man.

“No, Private. We’re going out to cover that repair detail.”

“We ain’t been ordered out by the major,” grumbled an Alabaman sourly.

“I’m going to fix that right now,” Lybe snapped.

The captain was back in less than three minutes, a grim smile on his face. “Major wants us to proceed to that sandy mound overlooking the ford where the repair detail will be working. Let’s march, double time to catch up with those horses.”

The fifteen-man squad trotted in ragtag fashion from the post gate, moving down the Laramie Road to the east about the time the dust from the sixteen horses was settling.

Hook swallowed hard, his nose caked with the alkali silt stirred up by hooves, his stockings hot and itchy inside his boots. Then he chuckled to himself quickly. Glad to have a pair of boots after all. For the last few months of the war, he had fought barefooted, never lucky enough to be the first to come across the Yankee dead. Stripping what he needed from the blue-belly’s carcass.

Better hot, sticky feet than cracked, cold, bleeding feet.

The Indians stayed on the north bank, most remaining on the slopes of the nearby hills. Watching. A few loped their ponies up and down on the flat near the river timber, gesturing obscenely, shouting their oaths at both the horsemen and the foot soldiers. While Walker led half his men on east to the far end of the break in the wire, Lybe led his small platoon up on the rise that overlooked the ford and the hills across the North Platte.

The Kansan Walker had just ordered out three pickets of his own and reached the end of the thousand-foot break of wire flopping in the breeze when the roar of a howitzer echoed over the river valley.

“That’s the major’s signal the Indians are coming, boys!” Lybe shouted to his Confederates on the knoll.

Down below, Walker’s soldiers remounted so quickly they neglected to leave behind horses for the three pickets the lieutenant had put out. The squad retreated in wild disorder.

“We can’t stay here, Cap’n!” shouted one of the fourteen Volunteers.

“Look at ’em comin’ now—we’ll get eaten alive for sure!”

“Form up! Column of twos, men—double time, march!”

At a brisk trot, Lybe led his galvanized Rebels off the hill for the fort. As he was closer to the stockade, he hoped he would reach the walls about the time Walker made it with his horsemen. As it turned out, Hook and a young Alabama boy dragged in the body of one of Walker’s wounded horsemen. Another of the lieutenant’s men slumped in his saddle, severely wounded as they poured back through the gates, the screeching of a thousand warriors loud in their ears.

“Captain!” Walker turned, his neck swollen, face red. “Respectfully, sir—you almost got our nuts cut off out there!”

Lybe shook a finger at the lieutenant. “You damned addle-brained jayhawker! Wasn’t for me—you’d been on your own out there. I volunteered these men to come cover you.”

“Why the hell didn’t you cover us then? I’ve got one dead and one dying right now.”