“I know,” she got the two words out, realizing she would free nothing more because of the stinging ball suddenly clogging her throat.
“I was here to see our son born, Sam,” he reminded softly as he leaned forward, laying his lips barely against hers with a brush of his breath behind the words. Then he moved his mouth slightly, pressing it against her ear to whisper.
“And I’ll be back to name him—before a week is out.”
The soldiers were facing at least two-to-one odds. No one could figure for sure just how many fighting men there were in that village being dismantled below. There were too many of them, swirling about like an anthill you’d kick with your boot toe just to see them swarming.
Again and again Kelly’s mind kept returning to one fact: they were preparing to fight the warriors of Sitting Bull. And Gall. Crow King and the others. The ones who had crushed Custer’s Seventh.
Yellowstone Kelly hoped Miles had some plan to strike first, to strike hard—before those Lakota swept up this rising ground as they had at the Greasy Grass. But Miles did nothing of the kind. Instead, for the quarter of an hour he had given Sitting Bull, the colonel steadfastly held his men in readiness, every soldier watching the frantic village below as the lodge covers came down, the travois were packed. All the while along the high ridge to their left more and more horsemen gathered, milling about and in turn watching the motionless soldiers. On the far side of the ravine on their right more warriors came and went noisily, whipping their ponies for their second wind.
“Gentlemen!” Miles’s voice rang out, catching nearly everyone by surprise as he stuffed his turnip watch back into the pocket of his buffalo-hide coat. “Something more than talk is now required of us! The time has come to fight: battle front—forward!”
Half a hundred other voices were suddenly raised in staccato as the companies were ordered to quickly disperse into battle array across a wide front. As the colonel himself moved toward that clear, open ground, he ordered some of his units to the left, intent on gaining those treeless ridges and knolls—determined to refuse the enemy their advantage. To the right he threw out another company as his men in the center moved warily into the breech. Yard by yard. Now two hundred. Then five hundred. Up one gentle slope and down another. A thousand yards now as the warriors screamed and beckoned, whipping their horses around in wild circles, stirring dust into the chilling air.
“General!” Luther cried out, reining his horse up beside the officer in a tight crescent. “Near as I can figure, they’re drawing your men on and on.”
“For what purpose, Kelly?”
“Only thing I can think of is to get your boys down in them ravines yonder while they hold the high ground,” Kelly replied. “Maybe to tie your outfits up—”
“And make another massacre of it,” Miles interrupted grimly, regarding the distance. “Like they butchered Custer at the Little Bighorn.”
“Bailey!” The colonel waved over a courier and gave the soldier orders he wanted delivered to the units on each flank—to keep in sight of their center and immediately withdraw toward the rest of the command if threatened with overwhelming numbers—before it was too late.
“What do you suppose that half-blood son of a bitch wants?” John Johnston growled inside his graying red beard. He shifted the old Sharps across the horn of his saddle and pointed as the other scouts and some of the officers turned to watch that swale below the crest of the nearby knoll.
Down on the bottom ground loped Johnny Bruguier and two warriors, one of them carrying that dirty, tattered towel tormented in the cruel wind as they approached the soldier lines.
“Bear Coat Chief,” Bruguier shouted as he raised his right hand and came to a halt some yards from Miles. His eyes were nervous. “Sitting Bull wants to know why your soldiers are following his women and children.”
Miles tugged his heavy coat beneath his thighs as the wind carne up, then replied, “Since it doesn’t look as if the chief is going to accept my offer for terms of surrender—I must consider his fleeing to be an act of hostility.”
“General!”
They all turned to find an officer pointing.
“They’re massing on the ridge, General!” another officer cried out, pointing as well to the north.
“Clear the bastards off the brow of that ridge!” Miles shouted. “Give Major Casey’s A Company the order to clear it now!”
As they watched Casey’s soldiers trot off from the left flank at double time, shouts erupted from the right flank. Kelly turned with the rest, spotting the sixty to seventy warriors bristling along the high ground as if they had appeared out of nowhere.
“Send K Company to move those horsemen off our front!” Miles bellowed. “Mr. Carter will see to driving them away.”
The fast response of Lieutenant Mason Carter’s foot soldiers succeeded in preventing the warriors from sweeping around the flanks of the column now dressed left and right in battle-front and moving forward at a steady crawl. While horsemen remained on both left and right ends of Miles’s line, it was the center that most concerned Kelly. That’s where most of the warriors stood waiting—as if in anticipation of their comrades sweeping around the sides of the soldier formation, drawing the soldiers’ attention, when those in the center would plunge like a huge dagger right into the heart of the Bear Coat’s troops.
“How far can your gun reach, General?” Kelly asked, gesturing toward Captain Snyder’s company surrounding the knoll where the Rodman gun—an 1861 model artillery ordnance rifle—had been rolled into position and unlimbered for action.
“Not nearly the distance to the village,” Miles replied. “But we’ll scare hell out of ’em anyway once we unload on those horsemen covering the retreat.”
Down into the first ravine Miles followed his forward troops as the warriors boiled along their flanks and in their front, shouting, singing, brandishing their weapons. But as yet no shot had been fired.
The smell of something out of place on the cold wind caught Luther’s attention. There, at the far ends of the ravine, some warriors had slipped in among the treeless brush and were busy igniting it with firebrands.
He yelled, waving at Miles. “General!”
“I see ’em, goddammit!” Miles hollered, then cried out his orders for a detail from the center to break off, to clear the ends of the ravine where the Hunkpapa sought to fire the grass and brush—all the better to obscure their escape, but even more frightening, perhaps veiling the very real possibility of a counterattack.
As the Fifth Infantry pressed on to the east, slowly, yard by yard, the warriors in the center thinned out, most of them flowing left and right, bolstering the horsemen troubling the soldiers on either flank. Those left in the center pranced their ponies in tight circles, yelling and brandishing their weapons, some of the warriors dropping off this side or that of their mounts. A few turning to slap their bare rumps at the white men.
“What you make of it, Kelly?” Miles asked anxiously as the wind cut up the draw onto the high ground, blowing dust against their cold faces with a gritty anger.
“Those who aren’t busy saying we’re women are giving those ponies their second wind. Looks to me they’re going to make a fight of it.”
The colonel gestured his arm across three points of the compass, asking, “How many you figure we’re facing?”
“As many as a thousand, General,” Kelly replied. “Depending on who they leave behind to fight with that village moving off. But it ain’t just the men. Some of the women every bit as bad as the warriors.”
“What’s the best you make of it?” Miles hissed.
“Eight hundred,” Kelly confessed.
Miles’s eyes narrowed into a furrow of concern. “At least two to one.”
Luther warned, “Just be mindful they don’t flank us, one side or the other.”
“Two to one, is it? Sounds like it’s time to even up the odds,” Miles said. He turned on his heel and stomped away, sending a courier up to
Snyder on the high knoll. In a matter of seconds the captain’s men set off the first round, both the belch of the Rodman and its booming impact on the far slope echoing and reechoing across the narrow valley.
From all sides the soldiers cheered that small volcanic spurt of dust raised in the distance. Now they were going to get in their licks! No more would they take what the Hunkpapa were dishing out without returning blow for blow.
On the right flank three dozen or more horsemen kicked their ponies into action as the Rodman spewed a second shell whistling through the icy blue air. Racing around the far right end of the line, the warriors were clearly intent on circling back of the knoll, where they could surprise Snyder’s men and put the big two-shoot gun out of commission.
“Damn them anyway,” Miles grumbled, seeing the horsemen start their flanking maneuver. He grabbed his aide’s arm, ordering, “Bailey—get Pope’s E Company over there on the double and keep those bastards turned in. Make sure he understands he can’t let those Sioux flank the end of our line—whatever Pope does!”
“Pope’s a good man?” Kelly asked.
Miles nodded. “Came west in sixty-nine. Made a fine marker of himself in our seventy-four, seventy-five campaign on the southern plains. He’s the man for this job, I tell you.”
Second Lieutenant David Q. Rousseau trotted up, breathless. He saluted. “General, sir—request permission to assist Major Casey in clearing that ridge for good.” He pointed to the far left flank, where ever more warriors boiled, shouting, firing down on Casey’s position.
“If you do gain that high ground,” Miles responded, his eyes afire, “you’ll have the key to the battle.”
“Exactly, sir.”
Miles stepped back and saluted. “Very good, Mr. Rousseau. Flank left of Major Casey and pitch into them. Have at them! We’ll be watching to see if you need support. Have at them, I say!”
Minutes later, as the lieutenant led his H Company single file up the precipitous slopes of that sharp ridge on the left in the midst of stinging clouds of smoke from all the burning brush and grass, Miles finally reacted to the continued annoyance of the warriors on their right flank. At this time he dispatched Lieutenant Carter’s K Company in support of Captain Lyman’s I Company in driving off the horsemen once and for all from the slope leading out of the brush-clogged ravine where most of his soldiers were beginning to cross beneath the pall of gray-and-brown smoke boiling up from the autumn-cured buffalo grass set to smoldering by the screeching hordes.
“You’ll have their village in no time now, General!” shouted the colonel’s aide, Hobart Bailey.
“What’s bloody left of it,” Miles grumbled, his eyes narrowing on the all but abandoned Sioux camp. The only occupants now were knots of warriors covering the retreat of the last women and ponies they sent scurrying over the hillsides out of harm’s way.
“I figured Sitting Bull was bound to put up a hell of a fight this day” Miles observed minutes later as he came to a stop beside Kelly. By now most of the battlefield lay shrouded with dense, roiling clumps of acrid smoke. “The way they’re running—it’s hard to imagine this is the same bunch that mauled Custer’s Seventh.”
Luther shook his head. “Sitting Bull ain’t a fighting chief, General. My money says it’s Gall leading this fight. He’s the one lost a couple of wives and his children in Reno’s charge at the Little Bighorn.”
“Which means Gall will fight like the devil to protect that village now,” Miles replied.
“I figure Gall thirsts to spill some more soldier blood to atone for the death of his family.”
Miles turned slowly to regard his chief of scouts. For a moment the colonel’s eyes slitted; then he asked, “Sounds like you agree with that red bastard.”
Kelly shrugged. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. You’re the family man, General.” And he reined his horse away without another word.
It didn’t take a plainsman like Luther Kelly to see how the Lakota warriors were maneuvering across the broken landscape in hopes of tying up the soldiers. This was perfect ground for a thousand horsemen to gain tactical superiority against the attacking walk-a-heaps. The main body of the hostiles held the prominent high ground on the north, east, and south. To get to the enemy, Miles would have to commit his forces to plunging into the deep, sharp-sided ravines that now lay between them.
As the infantry struggled forward through the pall of choking smoke, the center of the Hunkpapa line fell back, pulling the soldiers ever onward … hoping to entangle their disordered formations in the brushy, turkey-track coulees where the warriors massing along either side and to the rear of the line of march would pour in on the confused and frightened troops.
With every yard marched, Miles’s formation began to string itself out, began to grow more ragged as his men crossed the rugged, uneven ground beneath and through the thick curtains of wind-tortured smoke and flame. No longer was it a solid, straight formation—but instead became a dark, wavy line snaking up and down across the tortured plain like a writhing serpent until the troops dropped down into the East Fork of Cedar Creek.
Here, for a feverish quarter of an hour, the Sioux struggled valiantly to hold back Miles’s troops. It was here that a warrior swept in, screaming at the top of his lungs and firing his repeater. One of the shots dropped Private John Geyer of I Company, wounding him severely. But in the end the powerful and long-reaching Springfield rifles seized the day against the lighter Henrys, Winchesters, and what Springfield carbines the Hunkpapa had captured at the Little Bighorn.
Gall’s warriors began to fall back.
On the far right side of the disjointed skirmishers companies K and I were the first to reach the outskirts of what had been Sitting Bull’s village. Here and there in the midafternoon light still stood the bare skeletons of dismantled lodges, stripped and robbed of their buffalo-hide and canvas covers, yet within each circle of poles sat piles of robes and blankets, parfleches and scattered clothing dropped in haste. The Lakota had not taken all that much in their precipitous flight. Kettles, saddles, and untanned hides lay clustered about still-smoldering breakfast fires. All of that, and the tons of dried meat, back fat and newly ripened buffaloberries the women had been making into pemmican, storing this precious commodity against the cold of the coming winter.
Once Lieutenant Pope’s E Company had driven the horsemen from the high ground on the right flank, Miles sent Kelly with word for them to press on and continue their sweep around to the rear, thereby reinforcing the train guard since the enemy horsemen were swelling in numbers as they continued to sweep the horns of both flanks, still threatening to encircle the command.
The noise was deafening: what with the bawling officers, the shouts of men thrust into battle in the midst of the stinging smoke and cinders, the screeching, crying warriors, the high-pitched protests of the wounded animals, and the continuous throaty thump of the Rodman from the lone knoll. All that cacophony of hell swirling and eddying around them as the wind rose and fell, rose and fell, rawhiding their cold faces.
On his feet and rallying his men of E Company to turn and face a rush of horsemen suddenly bursting out of hidden coulee, Sergeant Robert W. McPhelan was spun around, collapsing to his knees with an audible grunt. Pulling his hand away from his chest, he stared at the glistening red syrup, his eyes blinking dumbly as three of his men slowly eased him on his back.
McPhelan fought them, struggling to stay upright, protesting, “Don’t … don’t put me down—”
“We ain’t gonna leave you, Sarge,” one of his men snapped, heaving his weight against the officer. “You gotta let us plug that hole in you, goddammit!”
Suddenly Pope was above them. “Form a hollow square!” he bawled against the din of those booming Springfields, the crack of the Winchester repeaters from the encircling warriors. “Goddammit—form a square and hold those bastards off!”
Then Pope was kneeling over McPhelan in the next moment, his hand on the old sergeant’s shoulder. “You gonna
be all right, gunny?”
The red-rimmed, smoke-ravaged eyes were tearing in gratitude. “Ain’t nothing but a flesh wound, sir.”
Pope’s eyes glistened too. “That’s good, ’cause I’d hate to lose you, I would. We still got work to finish here.”
“L-looks like we can hold ’em off, Lieutenant,” McPhelan whispered. “Just keep the boys in their square—and we’ll make the devil dance a different tune.”
Gesturing with a nod up at Yellowstone Kelly, the lieutenant said, “The scout here brought word from the general: Miles wants us to drive off the last of the warriors around those watering holes right over yonder and hold on to ’em for the night.”
McPhelan coughed, then said with a rasp, “We get the sons of bitches drove off—have some of the boys drag me over to them water holes and bring me my rifle. I can still shoot with the best of ’em if they come at us again, sir.” He coughed a loose, fluid-filled rasp. “I’d like me a drink, in a real bad way.”
Patting the sergeant’s shoulder, Pope replied quietly, “Damn right you can have that drink of water.” He signaled to have a canteen brought to him. “And your rifle too. God, am I proud to have you fighting on my side, Sergeant.”
With E Company holding its own and the water holes securely in their grasp at the rear of the column, Miles continued to pursue the hostiles until sundown, then turned about and led the rest of the command back to the ridge Lieutenant Rousseau’s H Company had cleared of hostiles. Here on the high ground that commanded a view of the entire countryside the order was given to bivouac for the coming night.
During the day the tenor of battle had constantly reminded the soldiers that these were the warriors who had mutilated the Custer dead. But the gallant Fifth had fought hard since first light, scratching their way after the fleeing Sioux across more than eighteen miles of uneven, rugged ground, through smoke and flames. Now, as night came down, the weary, blackened, cinder-smudged men found their spirits raised.
They had held off odds of two, perhaps three, to one … and survived against the best Sitting Bull and Gall could throw at them. No longer would anyone boast that the Sioux were invincible.
A Cold Day in Hell Page 15