“Damn!” Hale was the first to speak. “Where the hell did they come from?”
“Looks like we got some boys in trouble all right,” Andy observed. “Wonder what they’re doing out here in the first place.”
Tom, anxious to size up the scene taking place on the opposite riverbank, was trying to decide what the best course of action was. A small army patrol of five or six troopers had obviously been ambushed by a band of twenty or more hostiles. From the look of it, they had taken a defensive position on the riverbank. The hostiles were armed with rifles and had the troopers ringed on three sides with the river at their backs. Tom’s decision was not that hard to make. He had to come to their aid but he could see no way to get to them without crossing the river. And that would make his men sitting ducks. They would be picked off before they got halfway across. If he was to have a chance to rescue the soldiers, he would have to have more than the seven of them to charge across that stretch of open water.
“Whaddaya wanna do?” Andy asked calmly.
“You see any way to get to those men without crossing that open water?”
“Nope,” was Andy’s terse reply.
“Well then, we need more men.”
“Glad to hear you say that, son.”
Tom turned to Hale. “Sergeant, send one of the men back to the column. Tell Lieutenant Perry I need half of his detachment on the double.” He turned back to Andy. “Maybe if they see us coming in strength, they’ll run without a fight.”
Upon receiving Tom’s message, Lawson was inclined to lead the whole escort column to his aid, leaving the engineers and the workers to fend for themselves until he got back. He knew he would catch hell from Bluefield if he did, even if nothing happened while he was gone. So he did as Tom requested and sent approximately half of the escort, twenty-two troopers.
Tom anxiously awaited their arrival while watching the battle going on across the river. It was more than a quarter of an hour before his reinforcements pulled up at the base of the little hill, but the embattled soldiers on the opposite bank were still alive and apparently holding off their attackers.
“All right, men, we’ve got to move fast. Check your weapons.” Upon noticing a bugler in the detachment, he signaled to him. “All right, let’s let them know we’re coming. Don’t slow down until you reach the other side of the river!” He took one last look to see if everyone was ready then spurred his horse over the crest of the hill, leading his troops straight down the slope. With bugle blaring and rifles popping, they charged into the shallow river toward their beleaguered comrades.
His horse almost stumbled when its momentum was suddenly stopped by the chest-deep water and it began to struggle toward the opposite side. At once Tom was lost in the confusion of the fighting. Bullets were flying all around him and the almost constant roar of rifle fire was punctuated by the screams of horses and men. Something was wrong! In their confusion, the soldiers trapped by the hostiles were firing at his troopers as they attempted to come to their rescue. He began shouting, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” Then something heavy hit him in the back, knocking him from his horse. He remembered feeling the shock of the icy water, sucking the breath from his lungs, but he remembered nothing else after that.
* * *
It was dark when he finally came to. At first he thought he was drowning for he was up to his chin in the freezing water and, panic-stricken, he began to flail his arms in an effort to swim. He would have cried out but a hand immediately clamped over his mouth, choking off the sound.
“Easy, son . . . easy. I gotcha. You’re all right.” He recognized the familiar voice of Andy Coulter. “Be real quiet. Don’t worry, I got a’holt of you. We’ll be all right, long as you don’t make no noise.” Tom let himself relax and Andy removed his hand from over his mouth. “Well now,” he whispered, “glad to see you coming around. For a while there I thought you was a goner.”
“Andy, what happened?” Tom whispered. He was gradually coming back to reality and he became aware of the feeling of numbness from his neck on down throughout his entire body, right down to his toes, which had no feeling in them at all. His head felt as if it would split and there was a throbbing in his chest. He didn’t remember much about the events that caused him to be in the river so he repeated the question. “What happened?”
Before answering, Andy shifted his body around to get a better hold on his young friend. Tom’s vision, which until that moment had been blurred, began to gradually focus and he could now see that they were up under a steep bank, behind a log. Softly, almost in a whisper, Andy told him what had taken place some two hours before when they had charged to the rescue of the embattled soldiers. “It was an ambush,” Andy said. “Them weren’t soldiers on the other bank. They was Cheyenne, dressed up in army uniforms. I seen you go down and, by the time I got to you, it was already too late. They was more of ’em dug in the riverbank behind us. They had us in a crossfire. There wasn’t no place to go. They cut us down like wheatstraw.”
Tom was stunned. “How many? How many wounded?”
Andy snorted in disgust. “Wounded? Hell, dead.” He had to restrain himself from allowing his voice to raise. “You and me, Tom, we’re the only ones left. And the only reason we ain’t dead is we washed downstream behind your horse. I reckon they couldn’t see us behind it. When we got ’round a little bend, I pulled us up under this bank. I weren’t sure but what I was holding on to a dead man up till just now. But I figured I’d hold on to you till it got good and dark and then I’d get my ass out of here.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Tom moaned softly, the extent of the massacre just now becoming clear to him. The realization that he had led those men to their death hammered home to him. “Oh my God, Andy, I led them right into it.”
“Hold on a minute, son,” Andy quickly admonished. “Don’t go putting thoughts like that in your head. It weren’t no more your fault than it were mine. Hell, I didn’t see it coming either and I sure as hell ain’t taking on the guilt for them soldier boys getting killed. We got out-smarted. That’s all there is to it.”
“Little Wolf?”
“Yeah,” Andy snorted, “Little Wolf all right. I heard his name called out a couple of times when we was floating downstream. I think I seen him. Leastways I seen a kinda tall buck that seemed to be giving the orders. I tell you, Tom, they just slickered us good on this one. They was dug in so good, I swear, we wouldn’t have seen ’em if we had been squatting right on top of ’em. And once we got out in the middle of the river, it was Katie bar the door. We were goners.”
They waited and listened for a while longer. Andy finally decided there were no hostiles left in the area and it was time to try to make their way back to the post. He knew Tom was wounded pretty badly even though the young lieutenant did not appear to be in serious pain. Andy knew that it was the icy water that numbed the pain. He figured Tom didn’t know how bad he was hurt. He had to get him out of the water pretty soon though. He was afraid that if he didn’t, Tom was going to freeze to death. Already his teeth were chattering uncontrollably. Much longer in the water and they would both be corpses.
“I’m gonna let you go for a few minutes. Hold on to the log. Can you hold on to it?”
“I think so.” Tom struggled to pull his arms over the log.
Andy waited a moment until he was satisfied Tom could manage to keep his head above water. Then he moved with the current out from under the bank and slowly pulled himself out of the water. The cold night air slapped his wet buckskins up against his skin, chilling him to the bone. Sopping wet, his boots squishing with every step, he quickly scouted the trees up and down the riverbank. There was no sign of anyone around. He was satisfied that the Indians were gone. He was afraid to leave Tom for too long but he knew he had to find a place to make a fire before he pulled the wounded man out of the water. If he could get Tom to a fire right away, he had a better chance of making it back alive. A quick search turned up a big cottonwood that was half hollowed
out, making an acceptable backdrop for a campfire. There was plenty of dried brush and small limbs around to start a fire so he stacked them inside the hollow of the tree. He would have ordinarily started the fire the easy way, by striking a spark over a pinch of gunpowder. But his gunpowder was ruined by the water. At least his flint and steel were still reasonably dry, wrapped securely in the oilskin pouch inside his shirt. He labored steadily over a handful of dried buffalo grass until finally a spark caught fire. In a matter of minutes after that, he had a blaze going inside the hollow of the tree. When he was sure it was a serious fire, he left it and went back for Tom.
Andy had been correct in his assumption that the icy water had numbed the pain of Tom’s wound because Tom’s toes were almost frozen by the time Andy carried him to the fire. The pain of his thawing extremities was as excruciating as the throbbing pain of the wound in his back. Andy stripped all of Tom’s clothes off and covered him with green branches pulled from the trees. He got him as close to the fire as he deemed prudent without setting him on fire. When he felt he had done all for Tom that he could, he saw to warming himself.
When looking back on that night, Andy would always marvel at the dumb luck and the good Lord for watching over the two of them. Tom was in considerable pain and, when he did fall into a fitful sleep, he moaned constantly and cried out at regular intervals. Andy was afraid to let the fire die down too low, afraid they would both freeze, so they spent the night in hostile territory as obvious as a beacon in the darkness of the prairie. He would be forever grateful that there couldn’t have been an Indian within ten miles, else their scalps would have been drying on Little Wolf’s lodge pole by morning. One thought that kept coming back to trouble him was, where was Lieutenant Perry? When Tom did not return with his men, why didn’t Lawson send a detail to find them? Andy didn’t sleep at all that night, waiting for the sudden attack that, mercifully, never came.
Morning came with a heavy frost that coated the cottonwoods like a silver blanket. Andy greeted the new day with bleary eyes and a sense of relief and gratitude. He was reasonably sure they were alone in that part of the wilderness by the simple fact that they were still alive. Tom was feverish but lucid, enough so that he and Andy were able to talk their situation over. It was obvious that Andy would have to leave Tom there and go for help. There was nothing else they could do. They had lost horses, weapons, food, everything but their clothes. At least they were dry now. Tom understood that his only chance was if Andy could make his way back to the troop and get back to him with help. On foot, he should be able to make it in half a day if he didn’t run into any hostile scouting parties. Since there was no sign of Indians during the night or again that morning, they felt reasonably sure that the Indians had not seen their escape downstream. As the sun began to paint gold tips on the uppermost branches of the trees, Andy carried Tom to a hiding place some one hundred yards further downstream. Tom was unarmed so Andy felt it safer to hide him away from the smoldering hollow tree that had served as their campfire during the night.
After Tom assured him that he would be all right, Andy took his leave, promising to be back for him come hell or high water. Before setting out straight toward the rising sun, he decided to scout upstream where the battle with the Cheyenne had taken place the day before. His hope was that the hostiles might have left something that could be of some use to him, a weapon or, better yet, possibly a frightened horse that might have returned after the noise of battle had subsided.
They had drifted further downstream than he had remembered for it took him almost half an hour to make his way back along the bank to a clump of juniper overlooking the spot where the troopers had made their ill-fated charge. He felt his stomach twitch with a sudden feeling of nausea when he cautiously peered through the branches at the scene on the riverbank. There were over a dozen bodies scattered across the sandy shore in various grotesque postures of death. All had been scalped. Other bodies must have floated down past them during the night for there were more soldiers to be accounted for than what he saw before him. He could see the pits, dug in the sand, that hid the ambush from them as they had galloped past in their haste to meet death in the middle of the river. Andy shuddered at the scene, though not because of the carnage. He had seen death before, as well as the aftermath of an Indian massacre. He shuddered because they had charged so blindly into that river and he might have been responsible. He sure as hell didn’t see it coming. Little Wolf staged a perfect ambush. Andy decided that no one would have seen it coming and, consequently, there was no blame to be shouldered. Having acquitted himself of any act of carelessness, he put the matter behind him. Back to the business at hand, he decided there was nothing there that would be of use to him so he set out toward the post.
He was accustomed to long hours in the saddle but he wasn’t much for walking, his legs being short, his body barrel-shaped. For that reason he was mighty thankful to sight the column of cavalry topping a rise in the prairie after he had walked for the better part of three hours. At first, he dove for cover until he was sure they were soldiers, having been fooled the day before by Little Wolf’s braves. Once they were close enough for positive identification, he climbed up on top of a knoll and yelled until he got their attention. As they approached, he recognized the slender, unmistakable features of Lieutenant Lawson Perry.
“Where the hell have you been?” Lawson demanded, reining his mount to a halt in front of the squat figure now awaiting him on the knoll.
“Where the hell have you been?” Andy returned.
In the accounting of the previous day’s events Andy learned that Lawson’s body of men had been ambushed themselves shortly after Tom had left the column. This explained why Lawson had not ridden to Tom’s rescue. The bunch that attacked Lawson were Sioux but, after discussing it, it seemed obvious that they were fighting in collusion with the band of Cheyenne that Little Wolf led. It was obvious that the two-pronged attack was not only premeditated, but well planned and executed. Lawson, however, was more fortunate than Andy and Tom. He was able to fight his way through after a running battle that consumed the entire afternoon, finally gaining the safety of the fort after losing half a dozen men. He figured Tom was dug in somewhere, in a defensive position, waiting for relief. That was the mission he was leading when he found Andy. He was shocked by the devastating news that of the detail that rode into the river ambush, only Andy and Tom survived and Tom was still a question mark.
Lawson’s patrol turned out to be a burial party that day but Tom was still alive when Andy led them back down the river. He was out of his head with fever for the most part and probably didn’t even know what was going on but his constitution proved strong, and after a few days, he was well on the way toward recovery. The doctor said the freezing water probably was the only thing that kept him from bleeding to death.
Having lost a great number of his men in one day’s fighting, Captain Bluefield decided that he would be forced to cancel all work parties on the road to Montana. His men would be stretched thin enough just escorting the woodcutters and water details from the fort. These were vital to their survival and he refused to reduce the number of troops necessary to guard the fort while the other details were away. To make matters worse, he received word a week later that his unit was not the only one to suffer defeat at the hands of the Indians. More than eighty troopers, led by Captain William J. Fetterman, had been massacred at another post. Bluefield had served with Fetterman and knew him to be an officer disposed to being somewhat cocksure. The word was he had allowed himself to be lured into ambush by a band of Sioux, led by Chief High Backbone on the same day Perry and Allred’s men were attacked. It was not a very joyous holiday season for the army.
CHAPTER 13
While it was not a proud time for the U.S. Army, it was a time of honor and glory for the Red Man. The Indians were fighting for their very existence, fighting to retain their lands and their freedom from the steady stream of white men from the East. The army, as well as im
migrants, were killing off the Indian’s source of food and constantly threatening to push him from his sacred hunting grounds. Red Cloud called upon the Cheyenne and the Arapaho to join him in his fight to resist the invaders. Many of them answered his call. Some, like the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, still hoped for a peaceful solution to the problem and declined to take the warpath. But the fierce Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, led by Chief Bull Bear, joined with their Dakota brothers in the fight.
Little Wolf and his band of Cheyenne warriors were being sung about around the campfires of not only their own tribesmen, but also of their allies, the Sioux. There was little argument among the tribes that the Sioux, principally the Teton Dakota, were the main force that stood between the Indian way of life and the reservation and it was a great honor for the young warrior chief to be held in such high regard. Although still very young when he led his warriors in the raid on Fort Reno, Little Wolf’s name was being mentioned in the same breath with Crazy Horse and High Backbone, both of whom had participated in the annihilation of Fetterman’s troop.
Little Wolf had little sympathy for the white man. The Sioux had been guaranteed their hunting grounds in the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. The white man had not honored that treaty. What could he expect? Did he really think that Red Cloud would turn tail and run? Instead, Red Cloud had taught the army a lesson about the fighting heart of the Dakota. And still the lesson was not learned. Still the army violated Sioux hunting grounds and still they lost battle after battle.
When the mighty chiefs sat in council, the one name that held more power than Red Cloud, Crazy Horse or Bull Bear was that of Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull. Little Wolf had heard many stories about the great chief. He was a Hunkpapa Sioux and had been a leader of the powerful Strong Heart Warrior Society, a society much like the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers of his own tribe. During that winter, the chiefs decided to unite under his leadership. Sitting Bull had led his warriors in many battles with the army and now he was to command the entire Sioux nation. Black Feather said Sitting Bull’s medicine was even more powerful than Red Cloud’s. It would be a great honor to fight beside this great chief.
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