Wolf Mountain Moon (45 page)

Sweet Virgin Mother of God! he prayed as he sawed the reins savagely to the right, bumping against James Parker's horse as their animals made the sharp cut on the icy ground the moment the Indian weapons cut loose.

Lead sang through the air with the fine whisper of death hissing past a man's ear.

A second volley from those fifty-plus rifles spewing orange muzzle blasts no more than fifty yards away cut through the half-dozen scouts as they wheeled left and right, jabbing spurs and kicking heels into their mounts to escape that deadly alley of lead.

Kelly was hollering … something … Donegan could see his mouth moving but couldn't hear a thing but for the shouts of the warriors, the pounding of his own blood in his ears, and the snorting of the roan suddenly goaded into a gallop.

He prayed again in the space of the next heartbeat, thankful that Indian marksmanship was a sometime and indifferent matter. It was all that saved their lives that afternoon in the valley of the Tongue River.

The roan gelding stumbled, almost went down, then lunged forward another half-dozen steps before Seamus was sure of it. The paunch-water sounds, the wheezing, the bloody phlegm clinging at the nostrils … and that unmistakable fear in its widening eyes. The look of an animal not knowing what was happening to it—but sensing something feral and deadly all the same.

He came out of the saddle as the horse sank to its knees with a raspy grunt, stepping off and collapsing to his own knees beside the animal on the icy ground. Then heard that familiar smack of lead against flesh, like a wet hand slapping putty. The same sound he had listened to as the General had carried him those last few yards to a narrow sandbar in the middle of a nameless river seconds before Roman Nose's Cheyenne rode down on Major George Forsyth's fifty scouts.
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The roan groaned a second time, raising its head and fighting to rise as voices cracked the cold, dry air all around him. Indian taunts as they lunged out of hiding. Kelly and the rest bellowing as they sought cover.

Seamus looked down at the valiant animal breathing its last in the cold and fought back the tears. After dragging the Winchester from its boot, he quickly patted the big, strong neck as the roan shuddered, that one eye rolling back to white.
How cold it made Donegan feel at that moment—to lose a horse soldier's best friend.

As the Irishman hunkered down behind the big animal, twenty yards away he watched Leforge struggling beneath his own horse, one leg caught. With the other leg the squaw man had cocked against the animal's backbone, he shoved and pushed until he got his leg free. Wrenching his pistol out, Leforge held the muzzle down on the beast's forehead and without hesitation fired a shot. Whirling to snap off another at the closest of the yelling warriors, he clumsily spun on his heel and limped toward the cover of some buckbrush, his injured leg nearly giving way under him in the deep snow and uneven ground.

As bullets kicked up spouts of earth and snow about him, Leforge hobbled into a narrow hollow behind some cedar and plopped to his belly, pressing himself into the ground to make as small a target as he could.

At that very moment Luther Kelly was heeling his horse about in a tight circle, spraying snow in a high rooster tail from its hooves, his mouth shouting something at Leforge. One side to the other, Kelly searched frantically for the man…. Then suddenly he whipped his horse around in another tight circle among all the buckbrush, spotting Leforge's trail through the snow, making for scrub undergrowth. As much lead as the Sioux and Cheyenne had sailing across that broken ground, Seamus was nothing short of amazed that Kelly escaped from that deadly piece of open ground back to where the others were gathering in a copse of some cedar and oakbrush and a few old fallen cottonwood.

When Donegan glanced down, the roan was staring up at him, that one eye clear again, but bloodshot in terror. Seamus bent over the animal—suddenly remembering their march together from Laramie to Camp Robinson to surround Red Cloud's camp with Mackenzie's men; their cold trip north from Fetterman into the frozen wastes of the Crazy Woman Fork, and that charge into the Red Fork Valley with Lieutenant John A. McKinney's gallant men at the moment the ravine erupted with the fires of hell; and as he laid a hand along its powerful foreflank, Seamus recalled how this brave animal had tackled a hostile country alone with him as they had pushed
over from the Little Powder and down to the Tongue, carrying dispatches for Nelson A. Miles.

The horse did not deserve to be left to die alone and in pain.

He drew his pistol with a trembling hand.

Such a magnificent creature.

Then dragged back the hammer with his thumb.

Like saying a painful farewell to another friend.

And placed the muzzle behind the ear as the horse struggled to rise.

So many friends … all those he had buried and left behind in this wilderness.

Squeezed back on the trigger.

Donegan was up and running in a crouch before he had to look again at the eye.

A horse soldier's dearest friend is usually the first to fall, he remembered an old master sergeant telling him before they'd ridden into the Shenandoah behind little Phil Sheridan. Don't ever get close to no man you ride with, the soldier had warned young Donegan. And never, no never—should you give a damn about no horse … cause they're always the first to die in battle.

Kelly was waving him in, standing there at the edge of that clump of cedar brush, down in a little hollow that reminded him of a buffalo wallow out on the Staked Plain. The rest were still up and on foot, yanking their horses over a rocky ledge some five to six feet high, dragging the reluctant animals down into the pocket. Lead smacked the sandstone rocks all around them, kicking up skiffs of snow, whining past but hitting nothing at all, or ricocheting with a zing that dusted them all with rock fragments.

“Damn, I thought you could run faster than that!” Kelly chided as Donegan planted one arm at the side of the hollow and cartwheeled his legs over the edge.

Collapsing to the ground, huffing to catch his breath, Seamus said, “Any race where I end up alive at the finish is a race I damn well figure I won!” He looked around—counting faces.

“We're all here,” James Parker announced with great self-satisfaction. “ 'Cept for the squaw man.”

Wagging his head, Kelly said with amazement, “I can't
believe it myself, Irishman. Should have been more of us left out there, the way these redskins were throwing lead at us.”

Seamus peered out at that open ground Kelly had just covered with the horse. “Didn't you see what become of Leforge?”

With a shrug the chief of scouts replied, “Truth be, I'm amazed any of us made it in here by the skin of our teeth at all.”

“Don't never count your mediciné before the sun goes down,” John Johnston advised.

“They're moving in on us, Kelly!” George Johnson called out abruptly.

In the middistance they could make out a little movement behind the tall sage, a flurry here and there at the edges of the oakbrush.

“Sure as hell not giving us a damned thing to shoot at!” grumbled John Johnston as he rubbed the stock of his old Spencer with a horsehide mitten.

Suddenly the ground on their right opened up. A handful of warriors popped into sight, fired a ragged volley, then promptly disappeared. As the smoke from their guns drifted off on the harsh wind, a few warriors leaped up on the left, firing before they disappeared again among the sage and snowdrifts.

“You boys ever been pinned down afore?” Johnston asked, then spit a brown jet into the nearby snow. He dragged a sleeve down the yellowed gray of his chin whiskers where the tobacco had permanently stained his beard.

“I have, a time or two,” Donegan admitted. “My first time north into this Injin country: with some soldiers on the Crazy Woman back to sixty-six.
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Next time it happened, I was sitting with some good civilian marksmen in the middle of a corral at the hay field near Fort C. F. Smith.
^†
Then I ate dead mule and waited for Roman Nose's bunch to ride down on us at Beecher Island—”
^#

“Injuns hunkered you down all them places?” James Parker interrupted.

Donegan looked quickly at the eyes gazing into his. “Ain't nothing to being pinned down—is there, Johnston?”

The old trapper nodded, smiling, a little tobacco juice dribbling down the deep crease wrinkling the corner of his mouth. “That's right, you gol-danged Irishman. Nothing to it. Why, the last time I was holed up by a bunch of Sioux, ain't none of us had a blasted chance of getting out with our hair….”

When the old trapper paused a moment to pull out two more cartridges for his old Spencer carbine, an impatient George Johnson asked, “Yeah, so what happened, ol' man?”

“What happened?” Johnston replied, a grin creeping across his face before he winked. “Why—them gol-danged Sioux bastards charged on in an' they kill't us all!”

There was an uneasy rattle of laughter from those not as old and leathery as Johnston, men who could not quite yet laugh in the face of certain death.

Donegan looked around at them, face by face, as he squatted down in the snow behind a small shelf of sandstone and made himself a gun prop. These were trained riflemen—not a one of them a green youngster straight out of Jefferson Barracks, he thought. It cheered him some to think that as good as Kelly's bunch was with their guns, why—they were worth at least ten to one against those warriors who had them surrounded on the better part of three sides.

Ten-to-one odds, hell. From the looks of what horsemen were coming over the far ridge, more like twenty to one, or worse.

God-blame-it! Don't ever, ever talk about the odds, he scolded himself as he levered another cartridge through the Winchester.

The others saw them too, and more than one man in that hollow groaned in fear and resignation as those enemy horsemen bristled across the far ridgeline, pausing only a moment before riding down the slope into the cedar and sage, where they vaulted from their ponies and joined the rest in tightening the cordon around the white scouts.

“They flank us, we might as well be boot-heel soup,” growled George Johnson.

“Just make sure they don't flank us, goddammit!” Parker snapped.

“Ain't a'gonna on my side, leastways,” Johnson replied.

It appeared the warriors were intent on doing just that, creeping in here and there on the left and right flanks, inching into the horns of a great curved crescent.

Minutes later James Parker stuttered, “There's m-more of 'em than we c-can handle.”

“You're right, son,” grumbled the aging Johnston. “Got our peckers in a trap for sure now.”

“They only have us on three sides,” Kelly argued.

George Johnson said, “We can still make a run for it out the back door.”

“If'n you think you can live through mounting up to make that ride,” Johnston declared sourly.

“Why, lookee there, fellas!” Donegan declared to shush them all. “Our Injin friends set themselves up a little skirmish line back there.”

The rest turned to look back in the direction of the soldier camp, finding that Buffalo Horn, along with the Jackson brothers and the pair of Crow scouts, had all just slid in behind some oakbrush taken root along the edge of a rocky outcrop better than two hundred yards to their rear.

“You think we can make it back to them in the saddle if they give us some cover?” George Johnson asked.

Donegan wagged his head, wheeling now to peer across the far ground as the enemy moved up on foot, dodging across the snow from bush to bush, narrowing the distance with every minute. “No. We'd never make it to 'em before most of us get dropped with a bullet in the back.”

As more and more of the warriors appeared on top of the ridge, spurring their mounts right on down the slope into the bottom, where they had the small party of white men pinned down, the scouts concentrated on killing those who ventured too close. When a warrior would poke his head up to fire, the scouts readied themselves and tried to snap off their shots as quickly as they could when the warrior heads suddenly appeared. From time to time one of the six men would swear, cursing his bad luck to miss a shot, grumbling about his fate to be held down by more than a hundred warriors the way they were.

With more warriors on the way.

Still, in the midst of that tightening red noose, the men
began to cheer one another and themselves as they hit a target out there in the scrub oak and sage.

“Just hold 'em back a little longer,” Donegan kept reminding them. “Them sojurs is sure to hear our racket soon enough.”

Kelly agreed. “I'll bet the general's got an outfit on its way here already.”

They all wheeled apprehensively at the sound of hoofbeats clattering up behind them, most ready to fire on the approaching horseman galloping in, looking about as calm and deliberate in his mission as he could be.

“I'll be God-bleeming-damned!” Seamus roared as he watched the Bannock scout rein to a halt, snow flitting from every hoof.

Out beyond them in the cedars the Sioux howled in dismay, wildly hurling bullets at the Indian scout as he dismounted in no seeming hurry, ground-hobbled his horse with the others, and then crouched near Kelly, where Buffalo Horn began adding his rifle to the fight.

Within minutes the uneasy feeling began to seep into the forefront of Donegan's thinking. Fewer and fewer warriors were popping up to take their shots at the scouts. In fact—the gunfire from the Sioux was tapering off altogether.

“Ain't this a strange thing to behold?” he asked the others.

“Yeah—what the hell you think they're up to now?” James Parker said.

“Think they're giving it up?” George Johnson asked.

“I think I smell a polecat,” Johnston said, sniffing the air for emphasis.