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.* 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.
“I’ll lay odds they’re working their way in on us,” Parker declared.
“Yep,” Kelly agreed. “Soon as they get some redskins worked into position, I figure the rest will open a real warm fire on us again, to hold us down while the others snake on up close enough to finish us off with one good rush.”
Wringing his hands around his carbine, George Johnson cried, “Jesus! We can’t just sit here till they come in to—”
“Shuddup!” John Johnston bellowed. “Your crying don’t make a man’s dying no easier!”
“Ain’t none of us gonna die,” Donegan snapped. “Now, sit there, Johnson—and keep up the work with your rifle.”
“I figure they’ll make their rush at us over that ledge,” Kelly said a moment later, pointing with the long barrel of his carbine.
“It’s your call, Kelly—but looks to me that you and the Bannock are the ones to flush ’em out,” Donegan stated.
“Let’s just hope it is a flush, Irishman,” Kelly replied. “And not a full house.”
Then Kelly bent close and whispered to Buffalo Horn before the two of them slid on their knees to the rocky bulwark of the sandstone ledge. There the white scout counted to three when they both rolled into view. As soon as they landed on their bellies, rifles ready, a trio of Sioux exploded from the rocks and sage, sprinting away. The moment Kelly and Buffalo Horn began firing, the three warriors dived onto their bellies and continued their escape by crawling, snaking their way through the sagebrush.
In that moment it seemed that half a hundred guns or more opened up on the two scouts, causing them both to flatten against the icy snow behind no more cover than some stunted oakbrush.
“Get your arses back in here and quick!” Donegan cried.
Bullets kicked up snow and bits of sandstone rock as the pair shoved their way into a retreat. Then Buffalo Horn stopped behind a low pile of rock and fired back at his tormentors.
“A flying exit of feathers, legs, and arms, boys!” Kelly called out when he started his slide back into the rocky hollow.
Bullets banged and zinged off the layers of nearby stone, splattering lead and sharp rock fragments as the Sioux continued to do their damndest to hold down the scouts until they could figure out how to flush their prey from its burrow.
“Goddamn!” the old trapper muttered, turning slowly, putting some fingers to the side of his head.
“You’re hit?” Parker asked, immediately crawling to Johnston’s side.
Johnston pulled the fingers away from the side of his scalp above the ear and peered at them carefully. The smear of blood was already freezing. “Take a look at it for me,” he ordered the younger man.
Parker pushed the fur cap up, parted some of the old man’s long, greasy hair, and studied the wound. “Damn if you ain’t lucky.”
“It ain’t luck saved this scalp all these gol-danged years,” Johnston replied with a snort, tugging the side of his fur cap back down over the oozy wound. “I’ve had slim escapes afore … but that there was a close’un.”
Suddenly Kelly hollered, “Buffalo Horn! Get in here!”
They all turned from Johnston, seeing that the Bannock had not retreated all the way back with Kelly. Instead, Buffalo Horn had slid into a narrow crevice where spring runoff had eroded away enough of the sandstone that he could lie down within the gap. There he could fire his rifle while remaining hidden from the Sioux until they were all but on top of him.
“Goddamn, if that Injun don’t have some huevos!” James Parker said with no little admiration.
“Give ’em hell, Buffalo Horn!” cheered John Johnston. “Give them bastards bloody hell!”
They had been pinned down for the better part of two hours, Luther Kelly calculated, noticing the fall of the dim globe behind the thick clouds. For better than half of that time they could only hear what must have been a stiff fight of it taking place across the river, on the west bank of the Tongue.
From the looks of things, Miles had eventually ordered up some troops to rescue the white scouts. Captain James S. Casey had crossed the frozen river with his A Company and the Rodman gun that Casey’s men had used with such success against Sitting Bull’s village of Hunkpapa during the Battle of Cedar Creek back in October.*
In addition, through the bare skeletal cottonwoods, Kelly could make out what he believed was Lieutenant Charles E. Hargous’s detachment of mounted infantry coming up to support Casey’s men as dismounted skirmishers. They had been in the process of advancing toward a point opposite where the white scouts were pinned down on the east bank when Casey’s relief was suddenly confronted with a bold show of force from more than 150 mounted warriors charging up the west bank of the river.
Kelly watched as Casey ordered a halt. Then Hargous’s men rolled out of the saddle and deployed in a long skirmish line among Casey’s men as the captain’s tried-and-tested gun crew rolled the field piece into position and prepared to fire rounds of deadly solid shot into the hard-charging horsemen.
The sun sank from the twilit sky by the time the first round belched out of the muzzle of the Rodman, spewing jets of fire and a thousand sparks that lit up the snow with an eerie orange glow. The charge landed among the horsemen—scattering some, pushing most back in confusion.
Kelly, Donegan, and the rest immediately joined Casey’s men in a cheer as the gun crew reloaded and quickly adjusted the altitude on the Rodman’s carriage. A second charge whistled into the darkening mist forming off the frozen river. It too exploded in a great burst of noise as earth and snow erupted where it exploded in the midst of the enemy horsemen.
More ponies cried and warriors yelled, scattering in three directions.
Again the skirmish line of soldiers cheered as Casey advanced them another twenty yards toward the enemy.
Back and forth the two sides skirmished for the better part of another half hour: the stalwart warriors gathering themselves up and charging in after each shell from the Rodman had exploded, taking advantage of the lull it took to reload. Against each screaming flurry from the Sioux, Casey’s and Hargous’s men valiantly held their line—firing back into the teeth of each charge, giving the gun crew time to adjust the limber, reposition the altitude, draw the windage, and ignite each round of shot they sent whistling, whining, spewing fire into the dusk of that coming night.
“Damn, if that ain’t a fine sight!” James Parker observed within that rocky hollow.
Kelly and the rest roared their approval each time Casey inched his skirmishers forward another few yards.
Then suddenly the white scouts and Buffalo Horn turtled their necks into their shoulders as a round whistled low right over their heads and slammed into the open ground just beyond their position.
Warriors who had been creeping up through the shrinking light and oakbrush shrieked in surprise and pain as the icy snow and earth came showering down around them in hard clumps. Those not hurt began to gather up the wounded and the dead, pulling them away in retreat.
A second round whined low over the scouts’ heads, exploding a little farther away from the rocky hollow, once again scattering the warriors and sending shards of sandstone and red earth into the deepening purple hues of twilight.
Now the Indians were moving back in full force on the east side of the river, yelling out to one another, carrying those who could not retreat on their own, some mounting horses but most trudging away from the battlefield on foot—retreating from the persistent and accurate shooting of the white scouts. As far away as possible from the soldiers’ big gun that fired its shells from across the river.
Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877 tp-12 Page 29