The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  Billy lunged for O’Roarke, who was clawing at Donegan, vainly trying to drag his nephew down into Grover’s pit.

  In a spray of blood he saw Liam arch his back, his huge body flung backward like a sack of damp oats hurled from the bed of a freight-wagon.

  Donegan had watched it happen, surely must have felt his uncle’s hands ripped from him while he continued to fire into the willows on the bank where the wounded Cheyenne horseman had disappeared on his dying pony.

  Diving into the pit, kicking at the sand below him with both legs, Billy reached O’Roarke as Donegan was collapsing into the pit as well, his own body suddenly sheltering his uncle. Together they rolled Liam gently over as sniper bullets whined and whistled overhead, smacking into wounded Cheyenne ponies, legs akimbo and thrashing as they jumbled with the white man’s horses long dead now.

  “Ain’t no use, Irishman. The side of his damned head’s gone,” McCall whispered, swallowing hard and looking away at anything, even Donegan’s face. As long as he did not have to look at O’Roarke’s riven skull.

  Grit and sand clung to the bright, sticky crimson that oozed itself down the side of O’Roarke’s face and neck. Seamus swiped again and again at the sand, then ripped at the tail of his damp shirt. He pressed it against the awful wound.

  McCall knew there was no chance. Too much skull gone. The brain turned to sausage-meat by a big-caliber lead ball fired from an old muzzle-loader.

  He gripped Donegan’s shoulder, snagging one hand with his. Seamus ripped his hand away. Went back to swiping the grit from the gaping head-wound the size of his clenched fist.

  “Donegan … ain’t nothing you can do for ’im now,” Sharp Grover said quietly as he slid to the Irishman’s far side, glancing at McCall for a desperate moment.

  “Liam!” Seamus shouted. “Oh, sweet Mither of God … I have heartily offended thee——”

  “C’mon, lemme wrap his head.” Grover tried soothing, tried pulling Donegan’s hands away from his uncle’s head.

  “Don’t go on me, Liam! I promised,” Donegan whimpered, the front of his shirt smeared dark and moist.

  “I have to cover him, Seamus,” Grover said strongly now. “Or he’ll bleed to death before nightfall.”

  Suddenly Donegan stopped cradling his uncle’s head against him, and for a moment there came a lull in the shooting. A thick gurgle rattled at the back of O’Roarke’s throat as Seamus took his hands off the terrible wound. Grover was there as quickly with the rolled tail of his shirt. McCall’s hands worked with the scout’s, looping a dirty red bandanna around the bandage. Together they wiped blood and sand from Liam’s cheeks and eyes, vainly wiping their hands off on their britches before wiping more wet grit off the Irishman.

  McCall looked up at Seamus as he sank back against the side of the rifle-pit, staring still at his uncle’s ashen face. In Donegan’s eyes showed the first fear Sergeant McCall could admit to seeing.

  “Oh, dear God,” Seamus whispered, gnawing on his own bloody knuckle. “Looks now, Uncle—like you’ll be going home afore me.”

  Chapter 21

  “Kill that sonuvabitch!” one of the scouts shrieked. “Goddamn red bastard fornicator!”

  “I see’d him bleed,” a second voice rose, not far from Donegan. “I see’d it!”

  “You … you sure?” Donegan asked, inching up the back of a bloating mule.

  Eli Ziegler turned. His eyes hard and as red as ten-hour coals. “I see’d it with my own eyes, Irishman. Gut-shot. ’Nother’n in the lights.”

  “I hit ’im twice?”

  Ziegler nodded, tongue dabbing at his sun-chapped lips. “That blight on all the children of the Lord is done for this life. Cry, hallelujah!”

  “Hurrah!” another scout called out. A few more cheered raggedly.

  Seamus slid down from the bloated carcass.

  Grover smiled grimly. “No matter how many of them goddammed bucks we killed in that charge … no one can say we didn’t sure as hell put down a bunch of them ponies, Seamus.” He pointed. “Look at ’em out there.”

  Seamus nodded. “Them h’athens ain’t about to come dragging off their wounded now.”

  Sharp snorted, spitting tobacco-juice in a high arc, hitting the closest brown body with a dark splat. “Bastards can’t drag off their dead ponies neither. That’s what’s gotta hurt. We killed us a bunch of horseflesh out there.”

  “Grover?”

  It struck Seamus as he lay there in the rifle-pit, sensing his limbs finally tingling back to life after the flush of adrenaline from the charge had fired his veins, that Sandy Forsyth’s voice sounded weakened, yet still filled with resolve.

  All round him the scouts in their bloodied, trampled pits quickly yanked long Blakeslee tubes from their wooden ammunition boxes placed between each pair of men, ramming them home up the butts of their Spencers. His own weapon had never been so hot to the touch. The Henry scorched his palm as he laid it across his belly, letting his heart slow, staring at the bloodied form sprawled across his legs.

  Sharp Grover rolled on his elbow, rising slightly to look down-island at the fatigue-taut, smoke-blackened face peering over the lip of a nearby pit. “Yes, Major?”

  “C-can they do better than this, Sharp?”

  The scout considered a moment, never taking his eyes off the commander of those men huddled on the island.

  “Major, I been on my own, living on these here plains—as man and boy for more’n thirty years. I gotta tell you … all of you—I ain’t never seen anything like what we just saw before. Far as my thinking, they done their level best to ride us into the ground, Major. The bastards can’t do no better.”

  Seamus watched Forsyth and the two other soldiers relax almost imperceptibly, shoulders sagging.

  Donegan had been in uniform and fought enough battles to recognize when a soldier knew he had his enemy beaten. And clearly, Forsyth considered what they had just done a victory. No matter that it was a costly one; surviving that massed charge was nothing short of a decisive victory.

  “All right, men,” Forsyth said clearly, his voice a bit stronger now as he swallowed down his pain. “We’re good enough to beat ’em.”

  “Hear, hear!” Beecher shouted as the wails from the hilltops grew in volume and the creekbanks erupted with more sporadic gunfire.

  Any man who dared stick his head over the sandy lip of his burrow could see the masses of warriors regathering round them once more. Not only those horsemen downstream, but those on foot, scampering helter-skelter like sow-beetles from an overturned buffalo-chip. Once more the hills throbbed five-thousand-fold with the noise of squaws and old ones come to watch the great charge. Instead of cheering their men onto victory, their passionate wails of anger and rage and grief scraped against the summer-pale blue sky like the jarring sound of someone dragging a fingernail across the bottom of a rusty cast-iron kettle.

  “Like Beecher said—you saw history made, boys!” Grover hollered above their cheers. “No man I know of ever’s seen ’em charge like these warriors done.”

  “Massed-front cavalry charge!” Beecher echoed. “And we turned the bastards——”

  As soon as the words fell from the lieutenant’s lips, most men in the surrounding pits heard bullets striking home. A soft smacking thud like a wet hand slapping putty.

  Seamus turned, watching Beecher claw his way out of his pit, using a rifle as a crutch, one hand clutching his side, blood shiny between his fingers, blotting a dark circle on his sweat-stained shirt. He wobbled blindly, groping toward Forsyth’s rifle-pit. Eyes glazed, inching forward in a fog, acting under some instinct to survive.

  Staggering, he stopped at the edge of the major’s dugout, weaving, then tumbled slowly below the line of fire.

  Landing beside Forsyth, his face turned downward atop an arm, Beecher moaned quietly, “I have my death-wound, General.”

  “Oh, God … no!” Forsyth gritted the words as he fought to get to Beecher.

  “I’m shot in the s
ide … and—dammit”—he swallowed down his pain—“and … know I’m dying.”

  “No, no, no—Beecher!” Forsyth screamed in despair as he rolled his lieutenant over, gazing down into the young, bearded face, peering into those gentle, sad eyes. “Tell me, please tell me—it can’t be as bad as that!”

  “Y-yes, General. G-good night.”

  Beecher’s eyes rolled backward, the lids falling as the soldier slipped into unconsciousness.

  “M-McCall,” Forsyth said quietly to his fellow soldier. “Take the lieutenant’s boots off.”

  “Yessir. I’ll make ’im comfortable as I can.”

  “Here, Sergeant,” Grover said, handing McCall some torn cloth for bandages. “For Beecher’s wound.”

  As he bound up the two large holes in the lieutenant’s side, Beecher’s eyes fluttered, opened halfway. He mumbled something incoherent.

  Forsyth struggled to turn on his wounded legs. He rolled closer so he could put his ear over Beecher’s lips. A few moments later he sank back against the side of the rifle-pit.

  “What’d he say, Major?” McCall asked.

  “He said, ‘M-my … p-poor mother,’” Forsyth replied, his eyes misting.

  McCall turned back to his work, knotting the strips of cloth torn and cut from their clothing. Bullets sailed overhead in a loud volley, some of them kicking up spouts of drying sand from the bulwarks, others ricocheting, making a sound akin to the screams of the horses as they lay thrashing in the sand, crying out until they thrashed no more.

  In his own pit, gazing back upstream past the dead warriors and downed ponies at the two dozen horsemen who gathered by the trees near the far bend in the river, Donegan fought beads of stinging sweat from his eyes. He figured the bulk of the Cheyenne and Sioux had withdrawn to argue out another angle of attack, fearing a repeat of their disastrous charge that unhorsed at least thirty behind Roman Nose and Medicine Man.

  Until the hayfield last summer, he had never been forced to fight like infantry. Dug in and holed up.

  Always before he had been on the move, mobile, striking—then retreating to strike another flank before the Confederate infantry could organize its counter.

  But lying here, he was forcefully reminded of that steamy August hayfield. The smells here were the same, here among fighting men. The stench of hot gun-oil in the Spencers and his own Henry. The gamey fragrance of blood baking as it seeped into the sand or soured in the wounds of the men forced to wait beneath a high, relentless sun. Stinking men many long days in the saddle. And as before, the dead animals broiling, bloating, rotting in their own juices.

  Grinding tears from his eyes with a knuckle, Seamus glanced at his uncle. Although Liam’s face had gone pale, his chest still heaved. Donegan reached up. Using his knife, he hacked off two willow branches as big around as his thumb. He rammed both into the side of the pit, then stretched O’Roarke’s short-coat over them, making a little shade for his uncle.

  The rattle of gunfire from both banks slowed again. Curious but cautious, he peered over the lip of the rifle-pit. Close enough to touch with the muzzle of his Henry lay three dead warriors. Within another ten feet of his pit lay a dozen or more. And stretching as far as the bend upstream where the charge had burst into view, lay ponies and warriors. Alone. Or piled in bunches.

  Enough to show that the major’s seven volleys had eaten into the warrior ranks with devastating effect.

  Now he understood the reason twenty horsemen stood guard out of rifle-range upstream. Watching over the bodies of their tribesmen. Until they could work up the courage to gallop in to rescue their dead. Under the huge muzzles of the white man’s repeaters.

  Seamus knew all about the courage it took to recover your dead. He had been there on the far side of Lodge Trail Ridge minutes after the warriors of Crazy Horse and High Back-Bone had retreated from the Fetterman butchery.

  “The bastards fear we’ll mutilize their dead,” Seamus whispered to himself.

  “What’s that, Donegan?” Grover asked, his boots kicking sand as he slid back into the front rifle-pit.

  “You hear that?” Donegan himself asked.

  “What?”

  “Them bells?”

  Grover listened to the hot, steamy stillness of the south bank. “Yeah. Hawks’-bells. Traders sell ’em to the bands all the time. Injuns like the tinkling noise they make. Tie ’em to pony manes and tails.”

  “Some bastard riding up and down that bank. You listen.”

  After a few moments, Grover nodded. “You’re right. Sounds like one of ’em riding back and forth along the length of the island over yonder behind them willows.”

  “What say we give ’im a halloo, Sharp?”

  Grover smiled grimly, licking his thumb, rubbing it over his front blade-sight. “You’re a man after my own heart, Donegan.”

  Seamus rose with one knee jabbed into the sand at the side of the pit, levering the Henry. “I’ll pull when you fire.”

  Donegan brought the brass-mounted repeater to his shoulder, finding the wounded right arm aching as he held on the invisible horseman beyond the wall of swamp-willow.

  “Listen, me friend,” he advised Grover, “and we’ll tell which way he’s moving.”

  “Lead him just a bit, Seamus. Lead him——”

  Their guns roared almost simultaneously.

  From beyond the far rim of willow came a startled grunt, a whicker of a pony, then the rapid jingling of the hawks’-bells.

  “We hit something, Seamus.”

  “By the saints, we did at that.” He slid down the side of the rifle-pit. Liam tossed his head, mumbling. A trickle of bright crimson cut the crease of his lips, dampening his beard.

  “He say anything, Seamus?” Grover asked as Donegan brought his ear away from the bloody lips.

  Donegan shook his head, frustrated. “Kiowa. It mean anything to you?”

  “Injuns,” Grover replied. “Mostly run with the Southern Cheyenne. Some of ’em been raising hell outta The Territories—raiding into Kansas past few months.”

  “Why you figure he told me?”

  Now it was Grover’s turn to study it, chewing on a chapped lip. “Haven’t a notion, Seamus. Don’t think Liam’s ever been down in Kiowa country. Santanta’s the big bull in that lick.”

  “Curse this outfit anyway!” Donegan growled. “You and Forsyth can both go to hell for getting me and the uncle roped up in this.”

  He nodded. “I only gave you a way to track your uncle down, Seamus. Don’t recall pointing my pistol at your head to do it, neither.”

  Donegan snorted. “What good’s it done me? Liam’s all but gone. And look at us,” he said, flinging an arm down the crude ellipse of rifle-pits. “Why, before that bleeming sun up there sets this day, the rest of us are good as dead.”

  * * *

  “What time is it?” a voice back of Sharp Grover yelled.

  “Three o’clock,” another answered.

  “Shit!” Grover hissed. “Time has a way of flying by, don’t it.”

  Donegan nodded. “Had it figured no later than ten o’clock, meself.”

  “Sonsabitches,” Chauncey Whitney cursed in his nearby pit. “We ever get outta this fix, boys—we gotta see to it the army does its share of some killing.”

  “What the hell you talking ’bout, Chance?” Thomas Ranahan asked.

  “I’m saying it’s ’bout time the army started killing more Injuns, by God!”

  “Chance is right,” Eli Ziegler joined in. “We kill enough of these frigging bastards … catch their sluts and mongrel offspring unawares in their villages—it’ll teach the rest to keep their asses plopped down on the reservations.”

  “Lord Gawd Almighty!” Chance Whitney hurrahed. “Brother Ziegler knows what it’s gonna take to win this land from these heathens. Put ’em on reservations where the mongrels can’t do no harm to decent white folk—and them that don’t wanna go, we kill and leave for the coyotes to fatten on.”

  “None us be her
e right now, hadn’t been for that goddamned Carrington tucking his tail up north on the Bozeman!” Thomas O’Donnell added.

  Seamus whirled on O’Donnell. “How the divil you figure Carrington’s to blame?”

  For a moment the older Irishman sat shocked into silence by the suddenness of Donegan’s response. He collected his thoughts. “If his soldiers had done what they was sent to do on the Bozeman Road, none of these’r Injuns would be stirred up the way they are. Thinking they can get away with——”

  “Tommy’s right,” Ziegler agreed. “Raiding and raping. If that yellow-backed coward Carrington and his bunch had busted down Red Cloud’s bunch up there, ’stead of buckling under way they did—these Injuns wouldn’t be acting so all-fired high and mighty.”

  “I was there meself,” Donegan growled loudly. “None of you got room to talk.”

  “Ain’t got room to talk?” George Oakes demanded. “I lost a brother, and my father as well, to these bastards. And this stupid mick tells me I ain’t got room to talk?”

  Seamus was crawling out of the rifle-pit before he even realized that McCall and Grover were yanking him back down into the sand.

  “That’s enough of that talk, Oakes!” McCall shouted.

  “Tell that mick bastard he don’t belong with this bunch, Sarge!” C. B. Nichols chimed in.

  “Right! Him and his kind, like Carrington, giving in to these red bastards—he’s the kind to blame for Culver and Wilson.”

  “Beecher too, by God!”

  “And the major. Him down with three wounds!”

  “Any more of that”—Forsyth’s voice finally rose above the heat-shimmering island—“and I’ll see you forfeit pay for disobeying my orders.”

  “That Irishman’s got him no room to talk!”

  “Next man speaks out of line, he’s my meat!” McCall roared.

  Grover listened while the grumbling died, wiping sweat from his hands where they grew sticky holding the Spencer stock. He gazed at Seamus again.

  “You got the right to talk, Donegan. Problem is—you always choose the wrong place to open your mouth.”