“You’ll never make it back,” he whispered to himself as he trudged wearily toward Bill McDonald’s trading store standing like an orphan at the edge of the gathering of buildings the army called McPherson. “Too much water gone under your boots.”
Something more hauntingly precious than gold-fever drove him on now. Perhaps it was something that few men could really understand, never as much as they said they understood, no matter as they might try. Looking for a piece of his past, consumed with the nagging why of it all. Unable to find rest with anyone or anything until he completed the quest begun in County Kilkenny, Ireland, years before.
The familiar warmth washed over him as he closed the door behind him. All these places smelled the same: odors of men living out their days on the frontier, fragrances not all pleasant. But familiar. Stale sweat and unwashed longhandles. Tobacco smoke and whiskey spilled on bare wood. The sun’s late rays shot through the two small windows at an angle that illuminated only half the room in golden, shimmering light. The rest hung back in cold shadows. The bar stood there among the darkness.
“What’ll it be, Irishman?” McDonald asked as Donegan stepped up, arms burdened with gear.
“Rye, if you have it.”
Plopping his bedroll and rifles off in a corner, Seamus returned to the bar for his drink.
“You’ll be staying on now that the regiment’s busting?”
He shook his head and threw the first shot against the back of his throat. “No,” and he wiped his mustache. “Hope to put some ground between me and this infernal prairie before snow closes travel down.”
A familiar voice asked, “Where to this time, Donegan?”
He looked up, finding the old white scout, John Nelson, sliding up the bar. “Likely, Denver City holds the bait for me now.”
Nelson chuckled amiably. “Ah, to be young and footloose again,” he replied wistfully. “Yes, Denver City is the hive, and you young hotbloods are the drones who keep that place alive.”
“What’s the honey?” Seamus asked, smiling as he poured Nelson a drink from the brown bottle of rye.
“You’re asking me, Irishman? Why, it’s the lure of whiskey better’n you can get in a place like this stuck out here on the prairie. Maybeso—it’s the lure of white-skinned women.”
“You get tired of your Sioux wife, Nelson?”
“Never grew tired of her, or her widowed sisters, Donegan,” and he laughed with Seamus. “They’re enough to keep any three men satisfied … especially an old plainsman like me.”
“Don’t need any of that white-skinned stuff, eh?”
“No, don’t need it at all,” Nelson replied as a tall stranger inched up out of the darkening gloom of the barroom. “But I sure do hanker after one of them fat, powdered, flower-smelling gals a’times, I do.”
“Nothing smells like a white woman,” Seamus replied as the coffee-skinned black man came to a stop on the far side of Nelson.
Seamus only glanced at the stranger, but enough to measure him quickly, feeling inside he might have seen him before. Not unusual to see Negroes here on the plains. Especially here in the central part, among the forts where the buffalo soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth cavalries were stationed out across the prairie.
But the way the man kept looking at him in the foggy mirror behind McDonald made Donegan unsettled. Perhaps the man served with Reuben Waller’s unit last winter and recognizes something about me, Seamus thought as he set his glass down on the bar.
“We know each other?” Donegan asked, craning his neck past Nelson.
The mulatto’s face brightened with a sudden smile filled with big teeth. Everything about the man was big. He inched around the old scout and stopped almost on Donegan’s toes.
“You’re the Irishman they call Seamus Donegan?”
“That’s right. We met before?”
He shook his head. “Never, I know of. Just, I’ve heard of you.”
Nelson snorted, hoisting his glass filled with Donegan’s rye. “Your rummy reputation is making the rounds, Irishman.”
His back prickled with icy heat as he sought to ignore Nelson. “What you hear of me?”
“With Forsyth’s bunch, wasn’t you?”
He saw the smile there on the black man’s face. Genuine enough, yellow eyes twinkling. “I was on the Arikaree Fork with Forsyth’s men.”
“That what the place is called? The river where we … where you got pinned down by the Shahiyena?”
For the first time Nelson turned to carefully study the mulatto. “Where a nigger boy like you learn a big word like that?”
He smiled, eyes flicking at the old man. “I worked hard in these parts ever since the end of the war. Picked up a few Injun words along the way.”
The old scout wagged his head, as if doubtful. “No. ’Cause you say it real good,” Nelson replied. “Not like no white man—and surely not like no nigger.”
The yellowed eyes stayed on Donegan as if he would not be deterred, even when Seamus turned around to pour himself another glass. The whiskey was having the desired effect. His sore muscles and recently-healed wounds were numbing nicely. The empty belly hollering for supper had settled to a whimper. Across his head the troublesome apprehension was all but gone.
“It true you men killed Roman Nose there?”
Donegan nodded, watching the mulatto swim in some mist he tried to blink away. Perhaps only the remembrance of that place and Liam’s death, he told himself.
“Yeah. Brave sonuvabitch that Roman Nose was,” Seamus replied. “I doubt any can come close to touching the power of that bastird’s medicine.”
A strange look crossed the mulatto’s face, something tinged with confusion. “You … you saw how brave he was that day?”
Seamus looked squarely at the yellow eyes, struck with how much like a wolf’s they appeared. “Yes, I saw for meself how he rode down into our guns. Don’t know of another man who’s got that much grit.” He hoisted his glass into the air and bellowed, “Here’s to Roman Nose.”
“Glad that murdering bastard’s dead!” shouted someone from the gloom.
“Here! Here!” others hollered across the room.
Seamus continued his toast, “They don’t make ’em any braver, boys.”
“You saw him ride down on you?” asked the mulatto.
“I figure I got the best look at him any white man’s ever gonna get,” Donegan answered, then killed his glass and banged it on the bar. “Excuse me, fellas,” he said, pushing himself away between Nelson and the mulatto. “Got to go use McDonald’s trench out back.”
“Don’t spill nothing on your boots, Irishman!” sang out Nelson.
“It don’t matter,” Seamus replied with a grin, holding the door open a moment. “Just washes off the dust of this goddamned prairie.”
He heard some chuckling trickle away as he strode off the boardwalk onto the hard, hammered earth and headed down the side of the saloon. The evening air hit him like a jolt of strong coffee. A tonic that revived most of his dulled senses.
As he stood there over the reeking slip-trench dug beneath a crude lean-to behind McDonald’s store, Seamus told himself he would soon have to quit this hammering at the bottle. Unbuttoning the fly to his britches, he straddled the trench and sighed with relief. What a hammering his kidneys took in the saddle, aggravated by the whiskey he soaked them in whenever he found himself at these squalid posts strung across the central plains.
Whiskey and wandering. As he finished, Donegan looked up. The wind had picked up some, rattling along the painted canvas McDonald had tacked up over the latrine. Not far off, Seamus could make out the corner room the storekeeper had let to Bill Cody for Louisa and little Arta until their cabin was completed.
When the arm shot around his neck, clamping off the windpipe, instead of tensing up, his first instinct was to go limp against the attacker.
It was the only thing that saved the Irishman’s life.
He cried out as the cold steel laid him open a
long the ribs as he fell against the canvas side of the lean-to. The blade tore him nearly from armpit to hip. The sudden warmth surprised him as much as the absence of real pain. He felt the blood seep instantly along his shirt, its warmth quickly going cold in the wind that slashed through the gaping tear in his clothing.
In falling, he collapsed against one of the wooden supports. Banging his head soundly, Seamus had a sudden realization that the sun must have settled far to the west, for the light was all but gone from the sky. Purple-blue twilight would hang suspended over the prairie for the next few moments, then the world would go black.
No more sun.
Only that shining black face crossing the latrine toward him, the huge blade of the scalping knife catching a glint of faint saffron light from the distant window of Cody’s room. It was then that Seamus saw the knife-sheath. Fringed and covered with quillwork beneath the man’s open coat.
He wondered why the mulatto from the bar was trying to kill him as he struggled to rise, his head too heavy for his shoulders of a sudden. With a pair of fingertips he touched the forehead where the skin was torn open against the timber supports as he fell. Legs going to horse-glue, stringy and without substance.
Seamus wondered why—then remembered seeing knife-sheaths like the mulatto’s on the Cheyenne dead they stripped in the dry sand of the Arikaree Fork not far from the place Forsyth named Beecher Island.
He felt himself being pulled up.
Seamus twisted for all the strength he had left, his head ringing, somehow sensing that the blade was coming again.
Dragging one of the sop-rag legs, getting it in the way, he stopped the blade as it jabbed for his gut.
Not so much the meat of his leg as from the blade slicing along the big bone—he cried out in pain as he collapsed.
The mulatto’s hand was in his hair, pulling, yanking back savagely—laughing about the still water being the piss and shit of white men.
Still water filled with piss and shit and a fitting place for Seamus Donegan to die.
The Irishman wanted only to know why he was about to die as the mulatto turned him over, popping his bloody head to the side.
With a gasp of shock he sucked for air when the loud report filled the canvas-shrouded latrine. The sudden light stung Donegan’s eyes, blinding him.
A second gunshot, then a third.
He kept his eyes closed now, unable to take the bright, painful light—his hammered brain unable to make sense of it. The noises of scuffling feet, the grunting, the falling throb of a body against the collapsing lean-to.
Four, five and finally a sixth gunshot.
By then they did not hurt his ears.
Seamus realized his ears were muffled from the echoing noise as some garbled voices pierced the inky veil all about him. He wanted to take his hands off his ears but his hands weren’t clamped over them. Something else was atop him.
They pulled it back.
“Seamus! You alive in there?”
“C-Cody?”
“By damned!” Cody shouted, flinging his voice over his shoulder at the others. “Donegan’s alive!”
Epilogue
November 10, 1869
For better than a week he had stayed to bed.
First in the Fort McPherson infirmary, where his mind played every foggy, waking hour with the memory of Sam Marr.
The last few days had been suffered through in one of the three cramped, canvas-partitioned cubicles William McDonald could offer travelers passing through Nebraska Territory.
How much the smell of dried blood and sulfur and wash-water standing in the tin bowl at his bedside reminded him of the war and that hospital where he saw so many lose their arms and legs. From where he had laid, watching the surgeons and their bloodied aprons come and go, Seamus remembered the growing pile of limbs. Hospital stewards in masks and gloves, armed with gum ponchos, came once a day to drag the bloody, immobile refuse away. Perhaps those hospital soldiers buried all those arms and legs, hands and feet, in some unmarked grave left to grow over among the battlefields, a fitting memorial to commemorate those once whole who returned home after Appomattox something less than complete.
Day after day in that narrow rope bed, Seamus had stirred beneath his two wool blankets, sweating with a fever—reminded strangely that he was somehow still alive. Staring at the low-beamed ceiling, thankful that his body stretched upon the freshly-ironed sheets was still whole. Cody brought them each day, taking away the dirty linen. Louisa washed and ironed a clean set for the morrow.
Bill himself visited as much as three times a day. For the time being there was nothing much for him to do at McPherson. The cabin Colonel Emory was having built for the Codys was all but complete. Lulu busied herself with sewing curtains and furniture throws and talking the quartermaster out of one wooden crate or another so that she would have her new home furnished with planks and boxes that would make do here far from the civilized world of St. Louis.
For days on end his wounds seeped. Yet that was just what the army surgeon Francis Regen wanted. He kept them open to seep—both the leg and the long slash from armpit to hip. Day after day Regen came to change the bandages with Cody’s help, the little surgeon making that unconscious scolding tone with his tongue as he worked over the crusty wounds, pulling the cloth tenderly from every inch of oozy flesh.
Seamus didn’t need anyone to tell him how lucky he was to be alive. Each new day came to mean one more sunrise he did not have to face the gallows, a condemned man staring death in the face.
He had done everything he could to save his own life, and found himself wanting. It had not been enough, and in the end he needed Cody’s help.
Twisting now off the buttocks gone numb, he inched to the side of the bed and sat up slowly. Behind him now were the days of healing along the muscles in his back where the mulatto’s knife had opened him to the ribs. Cody told him they could see the purple-white of bone through the bunching pink of muscle as they had carried him into McDonald’s. Two soldiers, the saloonkeeper and Cody himself, that night more than a week gone when the young scout emptied his pistol into the mulatto.
Not leaving any chance of finding out why he had come to kill the Irishman.
Another mystery to prick at him for the rest of his life, he brooded in those hours spent alone and immobile. Healing enough to climb atop a horse so he could hurry down to Denver City for the winter. It was all he promised himself each new day.
Bill Cody had come to McDonald’s saloon as he had promised—just after sundown. To try talking the Irishman from leaving. He had asked McDonald for Donegan—was told Seamus had gone outside to do his business at the latrine. Him, and the new man.
“New man?” Cody had asked McDonald.
“A nigger. Not really—more like a high-yellow. Sounded like he knew of the Irishman,” the storekeeper had explained.
By the time Cody had cleared the corner of the saloon, he had heard the scuffle. Pulling his pistol, he had stepped into the darkness of the latrine, just as the mulatto pulled Donegan’s head back, ready to open his throat like a slaughtered hog.
Emptying his pistol amid the shouts of those who came running behind him, Cody had fired pointblank into the giant black man’s body, hoping to drive him and the huge butcher knife off Donegan, who lay beneath the collapsed side of the lean-to.
It made for good telling—each time Seamus had Cody tell it to him again. And again. As if Donegan wanted to be sure to get it right—every detail. Hoping to fill in the aching void of that moment in his life with the recollections of others.
He had no memory of his own.
The pain and the warm. The grunting of struggle and combat, then the falling against the timber support, a falling that came a heartbeat before the first crash of thunder and bolt of blinding light, like a prairie thunderstorm’s flare across the nearby bluffs.
That was all he had to hold on to—except what Cody told him.
The why was up to him to shake and leave be
hind.
Eventually he stood and tried out the leg again. The scabbing was taut, like the puckered, pinched and reddened skin around it, nearly encircling the outside of the left thigh. It would do to walk on the way he had been practicing the past three days, pacing up and down the ten feet in length of the tiny cubicle.
Whenever he tried to breathe deeply, the tug of the bandages wrapping his chest and belly reminded him they refused to budge. But he had healed.
And it was time to move on.
“You’re ready?”
Seamus looked up to find Cody’s face.
“Is the horse—”
“Saddled and watered. Packhorse too. Tied out front. McDonald and the others are out there. Waiting.”
Behind Cody a throat cleared and the young scout turned, stepped aside to allow Major Eugene A. Carr into the tiny space.
“Mr. Donegan, I wanted to bid you farewell myself,” he began, taking his hat from his head. He held out his hand. “You proved yourself of great service to the Fifth.”
“Thank you, General Carr,” he said as they shook.
He put his hat back on his head then fussed with his mustache a moment. “I’ll be on my way, Irishman. Just wanted to let you know of my appreciation. And, for some reason I can’t shake—I feel certain we’ll see one another again.”
“I don’t figure on being back here for a long time, General.”
Carr smiled. “Be that as it may, the plains aren’t all that big, Mr. Donegan. So, till we meet again on another trail.”
“General,” he replied, watching the officer go.
Cody came up to the cot. “This all you have?”
Seamus looked down at the bedroll and the saddlebags beneath his heavy mackinaw coat. It wasn’t much, he had to admit that. “Man don’t need much where I’m going.”
Cody scooped them up then moved slowly behind Donegan as the Irishman inched his way to the door. “Where’s that, Seamus?”
“Hell, in the end, Cody. Hell.”
They laughed all the way down the canvas-walled hallway and out the back-door hung on leather hinges. A cold November breeze greeted him among the shadows of morning.
Black Sun: The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 30