Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 (52 page)

Now his side hurt more than ever thinking about that son of a bitch.
Gawddamn brazen file-closer … what he was. Covering the rest of them … coolly covering their retreat.

Again and again North had exhorted his warriors into charging the civilian. Each time he watched a warrior fall. Each time he swore in English. The big civilian had carried a brass-mounted repeater that day north of the Lodge Trail Ridge, using it to hold North's warriors at bay until the soldiers were on their way.

Until Bob North himself grew furious with defeat, growling ugly curses about cowardly Injuns, and charging the civilian on his own.

He remembered getting hit, with the slap of a painful claw around his belly. Tumbling to the ground like a sack of wet oats. Seconds later he remembered being yanked across the wet sage between two flying Arapaho ponies. Rescued. Dragged from the field.

The angry warriors had watched the big white man leap atop his horse and disappear. Then took Bob North to this camp on the upper Tongue to lick his wounds.

And remember that big, gray horse.

He would not easily forget the soldiers and civilians he had fought that snowy dawn. He would not forget the feel of white man's lead burning an icy track through his belly. And Bob North vowed never to forget the tall, bearded one who stood beside his big gray horse, firing that brass-mounted repeating Henry rifle of his … again and again and—

Until Bob North suffered the sting of that big man's bullet.

The renegade had stayed with the Arapaho to be left alone. To lay with the women now and again when it moved him.

But now them Yankee soldiers come to protect their gawddamned road. Bringing these civilian sonsabitches in their shadow … like camp-dogs.

His head hurt. Hangover, he figured. He was due for a whopper of a hangover, all right.

It's gonna be fine,
he told himself.
You're not a white man any longer, Captain North. You play by Injun rules now. You get hurt … you hurt back.

North closed his eyes, hungering for his whiskey, gritting his teeth as the old woman ground the root fibers into his mean, oozy wounds.

He grit his teeth … and brooded on the tall, bearded man sheltered beside his gray horse. Dreaming how good it would be to wear that tall bastard's scalp one day soon.

“I'd rather be in some dark holler,”
he growled out the song's words against the pain in his gut, a pain he was beginning to think would never be washed away with all the whiskey at Fort Peck. Or with all the time in the world.

“Where the sun refuse to shine,”
and he coughed again.

“Than to see you another man's darling,

And you know you'll never be mine.”

He shoved the old woman's hand away as she tried to feed him some slick, scummy meat.

Lordy, I wanna wear that tall bastard's scalp one day real soon!

One day real soon, he promised himself.

Chapter 1

The old scout gazed over his steaming cup of coffee at the big Irishman sitting across the table. Jim Bridger had to chuckle a bit inside with it. After better than forty-four winters in these Shining Mountains, Old Gabe had seen a few he-dogs come west. And this big strapping youngster had to be one of the few himself, Bridger figured.

But it seemed Seamus Donegan had himself a natural-born talent for attracting trouble.

No matter the package, Jim Bridger figured. Whether it was one of Red Cloud's warriors, or an army captain, or a pretty young widow-gal—Seamus Donegan attracted trouble like bees drawn to honey.

“You're punishing that whiskey, Seamus,” young Jack Stead advised. He was Bridger's young partner, a former English seaman who had become a competent scout in his own right, marrying a Cheyenne woman and settling into a life of working for the army as it sought to pacify the Far West this second year following the end of the Civil War. Stead himself admired the big, taciturn Irishman. Something about his twinkling eyes attracted friends.

Perhaps Seamus Donegan had been born that rare breed of soul who is blessed with as many good friends as he was cursed with mighty enemies.

“I haven't a right to drink my whiskey, you're saying?” Donegan growled over the lip of his tin cup. “Winter's got this land locked down tighter'n a nun's kneecaps … and not a nit-prick of us venturing out the stockade if he don't have at least a company of sojurs behind him for fear of getting butchered like Fetterman's boys—bless their souls. Jack, me boy—seems drinking the sutler's red whiskey is all that's left a man to do.”

“Then drink yourself silly again today, damn you!” Jack roared in laughter. “Can't think of a reason why we shouldn't get sacked together.”

Bridger watched them clang their cups together, sloshing some of the strong liquid onto one of the rough-hewn tables in the sutler's cabin. He grinned behind his beard, despite the ache in his bones and the icy pain the rheumatiz stabbed at his every joint. And he remembered another cold day barely one month past.

A day Fetterman and Brown and Grummond rode out at the head of seventy-eight men to chase themselves some Sioux scalps,
Jim brooded darkly to himself with the memory.
Twenty-one December last, 1866—when Fetterman's entire force disappeared over that goddamned Lodge Trail Ridge, not a man among the lot of them seen alive again.

Sighing, the old trapper become army-scout gazed at the hard cut of Donegan's face. The finely chiseled nose set beneath the gray-green eyes. Those full, expressive lips buried within the dark beard. And Bridger recalled the look carved on the Irishman's face that sub-zero night when Donegan returned with the somber rescue party—with word that not a soul among Fetterman's command had survived. Bridger had never asked any more about it, for the look in Donegan's eyes had told any half-smart man not to venture such a question.

Still, the old scout knew the young Irishman had seen far too much of the killing in his few years, what with four of those years spent fighting atop a horse down south against Confederate cavalry, not to mention all that Donegan had seen since he had arrived in Red Cloud's Sioux country some seven months ago.

Seven months to some. A lifetime to most.

No way Jim Bridger would ever forget the look in the Irishman's eyes that winter night. A haunted look that somehow, even with all the time that had since passed, remained a look every bit as haunted still.

“Sun's going down behind the peaks,” Stead remarked absently, nodding toward the window where he watched the milk-pale orb settle on the Big Horns mantled in white.

“Matters little,” Donegan replied, never looking up from his whiskey cup. “Night or day—still cold enough to freeze the bullocks off a Boston snowman.”

“You spent time in Boston, did you?” Stead asked, eager to make conversation to ease some of the constant electric tension forever present around the Irishman like a frightening aura.

Seamus nodded. “It's where I landed … come here from the land of me birth. An English ship, filled with dirt-poor Irish farmers … come to these foreign shores hoping for better. Too oft handed worse. And me but a young lad shipped off by me mither to this new land with her hopes and her tears.”

“She hoped you'd fare better here?”

“Aye,” he nodded again. “To look up her two brothers, I was. A lad of fifteen, carrying all I owned in her wee carpet satchel. Most everything I had then a hand-me-down at that.”

“Those uncles of yours help you find work there in Boston by the sea?”

Donegan shook his head, staring into the red of his whiskey. “Not a trace of 'em, either one.”

“You came to Boston on a cold trail?”

“Nawww,” and Seamus lifted the cup to his lips. “Last letter my sainted mither got from her brothers came posted from Boston … saying they'd both landed work as city constables.” He snorted without any humor. “That's a bit of a laugh. Them two brothers of hers—constables! And in Irish Boston to boot!”

“What became of 'em?” Stead inquired.

Donegan froze the young scout with those gray-green eyes of his; he finally gazed out the frosted window while the last light slid from the sky. His brow knitted. “No telling, Jack.”

“You checked with the constable's office?”

“Never worked as constables,” he answered with a wolf-slash of a grin. “But, the constables did know the both of 'em. One was quite the brawler, it seems. My dear mither oft shook her head and said I took after his blood. And me other uncle … well, now—the constables said he had a smooth way about him, talking folks out of their money.”

“Sounds a bit like sutler Kinney there,” Stead whispered, nodding toward the counter.

Jefferson T. Kinney leaned one pudgy elbow on the rough-hewn pine-plank bar, wiping a dirty towel across some spilled whiskey and laughing with two civilian workers who had bellied their way through the crowd to nurse their drinks. A former U.S. Judge out of Utah and an ardent pro-slaver, Kinney had lost his bench when President Lincoln had entered the White House. Kinney had been one of the many who had rejoiced when the Great Emancipator was cut down in Ford's Theater not two years ago come April.

Bridger's eyes joined the Irishman's in glaring at the sutler. Kinney must have felt the heat, for he looked up from the bar, gazing across the noisy, smoky room with those black beads he had for eyes. They locked on Donegan.

“No love lost on that one,” Bridger whispered around the stub of the pipe that kept a constant wreath round his gray head.

“Aye,” Donegan agreed as he nodded, and went back to staring at his red whiskey. “That's one bastard wishes Seamus Donegan's body had been hauled back from the Ridge with Fetterman's dead.”

“What makes a man like him hate a man like you, Seamus?” Stead asked, gazing at the sutler's plump fingers pouring drinks for civilian workers pressing the bar.

“Man like Seamus Donegan here,” Bridger began, snagging the attention of the other two, “always brings out the fear in little men like the Judge over there. And in such men, fear is the worst thing you want. No telling what a fella like him might do you get him scared enough.”

“What's a man like Kinney got to be afeared of from me?”

“Seamus Donegan, down inside where that fat little bastard lives, Kinney knows he don't belong out here in these mountains like you do,” Bridger explained. “Somewhere in his gut he knows he's bought his way out here—but he can't ever earn what it is you already have for free.”

“What's that, Jim?” Stead asked.

“The respect of other men. Strong men. Honest men. The kind of man it will take to tame this land. The kind of man Judge Kinney will never be, but will always try to buy, and failing that … will try to squash like a sow-bug.”

“Pour me more whiskey, Jack,” Seamus said as he slammed down his empty cup, “and I'll drink a toast to the sowbug squashers in the world. Appears me uncles have much in common with our friend Judge Kinney over there.”

Stead poured from a thick glass bottle packed in straw all the way from Omaha. “What keeps Seamus Donegan from being a sowbug squasher himself?”

The Irishman stared at the red whiskey a moment before answering. “I suppose I'm not the kind content to die peacefully in bed with me eyes closed. Because some time back on a hot, bloody battlefield they called Gettysburg, Seamus Donegan realized he would never die an old man's death. Now some cold and bony finger's always tapping me shoulder, telling me every day's borrowed time.”

“The reaper has us all, sometime,” Bridger added.

“To the reaper then!” Donegan cheered, lifting his cup. “To the reaper—the last friend a dying man will ever know!”

“To the reaper,” Stead joined in, sloshing his cup into the air.

“To the old bastard himself,” Donegan added after swilling down some of the burning whiskey. “This god-blessed, hell-forsaken country gonna keep the reaper plenty busy before this war with Red Cloud's over.”

*   *   *

Seamus stood shuddering with the cold blast knifing his groin. Quickly as he could, he finished wetting the snowy ground at the corner of the latrine slip-trench behind Kinney's cabin, and he was buttoning the fly on his faded cavalry britches when the voice startled him.

“Should have known, Seamus Donegan. If I don't find you drinking whiskey in the bar, you'd be outside in cold pissing good whiskey away!”

Donegan smiled at his old friend Samuel Marr, as he pulled on a buffalo-hide mitten and swiped at his drippy nose. “Hate the smell of these places. Remind me of sojurs, a latrine like this does.”

Marr chuckled. “Where the hell you think you are, boy? You spit in any direction … you'll hit a soldier.”

“Curses be to 'em!” Seamus growled. Then he grinned and slapped the gray-headed Marr on the back. “Man tries to forget ever being a sojur and fighting that war—there's always mitherless sons like you want to remind him of the bleeming army! C'mon in to Kinney's place—I'll buy you a drink if the bastard will take my treasury note.”

Marr stopped, pulling from the tall Irishman's arm. “You can't, Seamus.”

“And why can't I?” he asked, both hands balled on his hips and a wide grin cutting his face. His teeth glimmered beneath the thumbnail moon lingering in the west.

“The girl,” Marr replied. “She wants to see you.”

“The Wheatley woman?” He felt his pulse quicken.

Marr nodded without a word.

Donegan's eyes narrowed suspiciously, not wanting to hope. “What would the widow be wanting with me?”

“You told her to call when she needed anything.”

“Aye,” and he nodded, staring at the crusty snow beneath his tall, muddy boots. “The day we buried her husband. Brave man, that one.”