Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (41 page)

The captain darted side to side, waving his huge Catholic medal for all the nearby warriors to see beneath the shimmering sun in that buttermilk sky, as if to say he too wore some strange, powerful medicine to ward off their bullets and arrows.

“You can’t kill
me!
” he called as a few more of his men
darted away into the smoke, intent on making it to Custer’s lines.

The rear guard is falling
. He fired his pistol at a warrior leaping after a soldier running north. Keogh nailed the warrior, really wanting to shoot the soldier in the back.

There’s just too many
, his mind raced clear and cool as any mountain stream surging out of the Bighorns. All round them howled ten times ten the number they had figured would be camped in this bloody valley.

Just too damned many for any of us to handle now. No way out—

With a snort the horse beside Keogh reared and in falling nearly knocked him over. Even the sure, gentle hands of the old files were failing to keep the horses from bolting now. They reared and fell back over the men, stumbling against each other in pure panic, breaking their hobbles, pinning and crushing soldiers beneath them, stomping on any unfortunate trooper who didn’t roll out of their way fast enough.

Near Keogh’s feet a young soldier knelt, sobbing, mumbling an incoherent prayer. As Myles watched, utterly mesmerized, unable to stop him, the young shavetail threw his rifle away and pulled out his service revolver. He handled the weapon as if it were some foreign, revered icon, juggling the heavy object into position alongside his head. The youngster pulled back the hammer, then calmly and without ceremony yanked on the trigger.

His brains splattered over three troopers nearby.

All three jerked round in fear and disgust, watching a comrade-in-arms fall into the yellow dust.

To Myles it was like watching one of Custer’s short vignettes back at Fort Abraham Lincoln.

The captain stood spellbound, dumbstruck while the evil asserted its control on his company. More soldiers suddenly sagged, giving up to pull pistols themselves. Pointing muzzles at their temples or breasts, triggers squeezed with eyes fiercely clenched. They dispatched their mortal souls into limbo rather than suffer the possibility of torture at the hands of the Indians.

Save the last goddamned bullet for yourself.

Stunned, baffled by the suicides rippling the hillside around him, Keogh watched pairs of men point guns at each other’s hearts in death pacts. Others died alone … no one to kill them … completing this last dirty little task for themselves. Slowly the staunch defense along Keogh’s ridge began unraveling. Strange that even as his perimeter fell apart, most of the Indian fire slacked off.

Keogh could tell that the gunfire from Calhoun’s Hill had faded.

Indeed, those warriors back along the ridge sat silently behind their tall clumps of sage and furry tufts of bunch-grass watching in frosty fascination as the pony soldiers fought among themselves, shooting each other until only a grim handful remained at the top of that dusty spine, a hardened knot gathered in a tight ring of corpses and horse carcasses.

Bitterly Keogh ordered a retreat with what was left of his Wild I Company. The first retreat he had ordered in his life.

Through the dust and smoke of this Sioux-made hell they crawled up on their knees and for a moment peered across the slopes toward the last hill less than a half mile away.

A few bolted away along the backbone, running hunched over like squat prairie cocks skittering through the sage ahead of a hungry coyote. First one, then another, darted off. Dust from hundreds of bullets kicked up funnels among their heels as they zigzagged their way through the sage. One was down, then another, now a third. And with those fallen soldiers sank the hope of Keogh’s last command.

One trooper sighed with a death rattle and calmly replaced his six empty shells in his revolver with live ammunition. He then crawled over to a tight knot of four quivering, whimpering recruits. Two of them gazed up at the veteran’s face, appealing to him with their tears and tortured expressions—imploring him with empty, quivering hands.

“This can’t be happening!” one shouted.

“Whadda we do? Whadda we do now?” cried another.

Methodically, one at a time, the old file placed his pistol
against the back of each head. The fourth young trooper went down without protest or struggle.

Then, without warning, Sergeant Frank E. Varden suddenly turned the weapon on himself before Keogh leapt to stay him. The pistol tumbled from Varden’s grip as his body twitched, then collapsed atop the bodies of the last four recruits left in his entire squad. Sergeant Varden had protected his men to the last.

Keogh knelt trembling in rage. Disbelief like a cold, hard stone clogged his throat. Revulsion soured his tongue, seeing his men blow their own brains out. Myles Keogh had seen enough wounds and battlefield action to numb him to blood and gore. This was something else entirely that twisted his stomach now and made him heave up what was left of the dry breakfast they had wolfed down before Custer had moved them up and over the divide. It all came out with a good dose of sour whiskey in gut-relieving lumps that lay in the dust and the grass, beside these men, joining their blood in the ocher soil on this lonely hillside in Montana.

And when his belly finished punishing him, Keogh took up Varden’s bloodied pistol. Finding the sergeant had left one last live round in the cylinder. Keogh put the revolver to his forehead and rammed the hammer back, feeling how cool the muzzle felt against his sweating brow.

“Good man, Varden,” he croaked, speaking to the dead man beside him. “You saved the last bullet for your ol cap’n Keogh.”

He couldn’t bring himself to pull that trigger. Life had always been too damned precious for him.

Keogh allowed the weapon to fall out of his hand, knowing his only course now lay along the ragged spine … a half mile, perhaps a bit more.

Hell, it don’t matter how far, Myles.

He’d join the others. He could rally them.

Tommy boy’ll be there. Might even have a sip or two of whiskey about him. Tommy’s always been that way. When it comes to whiskey and women—Tommy isn’t stiff like his big brother.

Myles yanked cartridges from Varden’s belt, loading one, then two, and finally four pistols with fresh rounds.

Then, with a war cry of his own, Captain Myles Keogh rose to his feet like a mighty oak. He stuffed two pistols in his belt, manhandling another pair. He emptied one as he bolted off, then flung it angrily at a charging warrior. With the first shot out of the second, Keogh brought another Sioux skidding to a stop to stare at the red hole in his chest before he crumpled to the sand like a wet sack of corn mash.

Lumbering with all the concealed grace of a draft horse, Myles was off on his big Irish feet, dashing as he had never run before, remembering the footraces he always lost to Billy Cooke.

This’s one day ye’d not win again’ me, Cookey!

Keogh fired left then right as warriors popped up, lunging for him with clubs and rifles. Each wanted to be the man to lay first coup on this mighty warrior who wore the metal bars on his shoulders and that shiny medicine disc round his bull neck.

Myles fired and ran, ran and fired, until the two pistols clicked and clicked again. He hurled them angrily at red targets, yanking the last one free and into action. He pulled the trigger again and again, his feet covering ground as if there were only wind beneath his boots.

All the dark Irishman knew for sure was that he was thirsty and Tom Custer just might have a drink or two about him.

On and on he ran, the bullets kicking up spurts of dirt around his big plodding boots. Bullets split the air about his black head like mad mosquitoes whistling on the Rosebud. The only thing Myles Keogh knew for certain was that he was thirsty … so thirsty he would do damned near any bidding for a drink right about now.

Captain Myles Keogh had always been like that, though. He would do anything for a drink.

In fact, he would race right into hell itself.

C
ALHOUN’S
Hill had fallen.

Keogh’s ridge was no more.

One by one Custer’s officers had gathered round the mortally wounded commander on the west slope at the north end of this bony ridge a few yards below the bare, windswept crest.

Even Keogh himself had lumbered in at the end, nicked and slightly the worse for wear, dragging behind him some screaming Sioux and Cheyenne warriors out of the nightmare of yellow haze.

Now this favored inner circle drew round their leader like old herd bulls protectively guarding their patriarch against snarling wolves. Tom, Cooke, Keogh, Smith, and Yates. Around these officers clustered the survivors from each company, their shrinking command post ringed by a wall of horse carcasses.

What goes through a man’s mind when he feels the sweat pouring along his backbone, gazing down a dusty slope at
the silvery river, and the village without end just beyond the cottonwoods?

Ringing in every soldier’s ears above the shriek of warriors and the high-pitched whine of wing-bone whistles were those orders barked over the command by one officer or another. The refuse of battle littered their hillside. Wounded men cried out for water, for help, for a friend to come pull them to the top.

Water!

That’s all the dying men needed as they gazed into a shapeless, shimmering sun suspended directly overhead, beating down unmercifully on their hilltop from a bone yellow sky. The sun stared back with one accusing eye at the soldiers who had come to raid camps of women and children and the old ones too weak to run.

There were other moans that afternoon on the hill. Cries of despair and utter hopelessness among the recruits of Smith’s company, Custer’s and Yates’s commands too. Young men who saw utter futility in fighting on. At first they had clung to the hope in what their officers promised them once they reached the end of this ridge. At first they had believed in Custer—hoping they could hold out until Gibbon and Terry marched upriver with their reinforcements.

Wasn’t a man on that bare hillside who didn’t realize what price Calhoun’s men had paid in buying some precious time for the remaining four companies under Custer’s command.

And on the heels of that murderous slaughter, they had watched stunned and increasingly numb as Keogh’s men put up the beginnings of a desperate fight. Gall pressing from the south. Lame-White-Man and Two Moons leading their Cheyennes from the west. And Crazy Horse’s Oglalla cavalry hitting, slashing, tearing at I Company from the east.

On hot breezes came the death chants and songs of victory, drifting up the hill. The warriors had only to wait for the sun and time itself to do its evil on these last hold-outs near the top of the ridge. Songs the warriors sang to make themselves brave.

But those last few gathering round Custer near the crest didn’t seem to remember any songs of their own to make them courageous that afternoon. They just couldn’t remember the words anymore. Hard enough to keep breathing, or keep from soiling your army britches, much less try to remember some damned words to a song.

Tom Custer shot a soldier in the back of the head, stunning all those but the officers huddling nearby.

Try as he might, Fresh Smith trembled, watching the soldier’s brains and blood soak into the parched earth.

“I told him!” young Custer roared, wagging the pistol at the dead man twitching at his feet in the last throes of death.

The young soldier lurched convulsively, his bowels voiding, then lay still in the stench and heat of that yellow hill.

Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith gulped. For years now he had it drummed into his head that an officer could kill a coward who refused to fight. He had never before seen any officer do it.

“Gave him a direct order!” Custer shrieked. “There’ll be no cowardice on
this
hill, men! We’re—not—going—to—fall!”

“By glory, we’ll hang on!” George Yates shouted to show his support.

“Damned right!” Tom explained to the dumbfounded soldiers staring at him with different eyes now. “Just like the general says … we’ll make it. I’ll shoot the next one that talks of surrender to these savages!”

“Gimme a carbine and a belt, Tommy boy!”

Tom Custer scooped up a dead trooper’s carbine and ammunition belt, flinging them both at Keogh.

Keogh spoke softly. “Ain’t much better here, it ’pears. We’re weakest back ’long the ridge. But, gimme a dozen men or so, I’ll go shore up that south flank. They’re pressing us that way and in a hard ditch of it too.”

“Keogh?”

It was George Custer’s croak, emerging from the dry, wounded pit of him.

Myles knelt beside his commander in the dust. “Right here, General. Too evil a bastard to die just yet, I am.”

His Irish smile buoyed many a man struck silent on the side of that yellow hill as his big head shaded the general’s dirty red-bristled face. Custer opened his eyes and, swallowed against the pain in his chest. Beneath that cat’s-whisker brush of a mustache of his, Custer tried a grin, showing a little of his teeth before blood trickled across his cracked lips.

“Thank you, Myles,” he sputtered softly. “See what you can do for us, will you?”

“Aye, General!” Keogh smiled, rising, casting his full shadow across Custer. “Told you before what it meant to have your trust and your friendship, Armstrong.” He sighed as he called the general by name, something he had never done before.

Custer tried to salute but gave up. He couldn’t get his right arm up that far.

“Sorry, Myles,” he rasped. “Going a bit numb.”

“That’s all right, sir, you can salute me later. When we’re all done here. But for now—I’ve got to send some of these bleeming h’athen savages straight back to the pits of hell for you!”

The recruits and officers alike watched the big brawler leap over a dead horse as if it were but a clump of sage. Keogh hunkered down the skirmish line, tapping a man here, another there, handpicking his defense force. When he had his dozen, Keogh led his squad south along the knotted spine, spacing them out in pockets here and there.