Heaving the dead warrior off him, Donegan rose to one knee shakily. He swapped the pistol to his right hand, the whole left arm gone numb of a sudden, all but refusing to move. There on his knee he snapped the hammer back, aimed, and fired. Drew the hammer back again. Aimed at one of the warriors swarming over the nearby soldiers. Pulled the trigger. Watched the Cheyenne heave forward, clutching his armpit—as the Irishman yanked down on the hammer once more. Then fired as he pitched to his feet.
The screeching cries pulled him around as surely as if someone had him on a short length of rope. Up the bottom of the ravine bolted more warriors hurtling into the eye-to-eye combat, the first of them throwing themselves against the slick side of the coulee after firing a few shots at the soldiers, there to claw their way up through the icy snow to reach the heart of the battle itself.
In those few terrible minutes the ground lay littered with the refuse of that close and dirty fight: discarded weapons here and there among the bodies of the fallen warriors and the wounded soldiers.
Hamilton’s men began to fall back against Davis’s troopers beneath the ferocity of the warriors’ attack as the Cheyenne cut and slashed and hacked their way into the blue ranks. Muscle strained against muscle until a knife or club, tomahawk or bullet, found its mark.
Then Donegan realized there was something wrong about the sound of those bullets whining in among the skirmish, most of them landing in the midst of the Cheyenne reinforcements clambering out of the ravine. The shots hadn’t been fired from anywhere close—those bullets were instead fired from the far ridge … where Cosgrove and Schuyler had their Shoshone scouts positioned.
As the allies walked their rounds into the melee, the Cheyenne turned, one by one, suddenly aware that they were drawing fire from far away. Just as quickly as it seemed the weary, frightened soldiers were about to be overwhelmed and to die among the bodies of McKinney’s men, the tide of that skirmish shifted dramatically. Precipitously. In the time it would take a man to pass his hand over a candle.
Perhaps believing it to be something mysterious that bullets were falling among them from the sky—at the very least a bad omen—the warriors began shouting among themselves, falling back, most of them tumbling back down the icy side of the ravine, picking themselves out of the disturbed snow at the bottom and racing away from the soldiers.
Like the rest, Seamus fired the last shot in his revolver at the backs of those warriors, then pulled his second pistol and cocked it—aiming this time at the Cheyenne riflemen who still lay ensconced on the top of the nearby knoll, where they were doing their best to hold a long-range duel with the Shoshone and put short-range pressure on the soldiers arrayed all along the rim of that ravine of death.
How his shoulder ached when he dared move it, but move it he could. Only the cold made it hurt, he promised himself. It would get better once he got warm. He cocked and fired again at the distant targets as he recognized the approaching sound of hoofbeats. At least two more companies were hurrying to the rescue, a battalion made up of some Fifth and Third cavalry troopers under Major G. A. Gordon. Puffs of pistol smoke rose like gray tatters above the racing horsemen as they bore down on the fleeing warriors, yelling, urging on their mounts as the soldiers wheeled left, following that path the ravine slashed across the prairie. Perhaps to cut off the warriors’ retreat.
As the heat of that close and dirty fighting passed, the cold seemed to rush back in to take its place. Donegan turned, stepping back to join the others who knelt over the wounded.
Gazing to the northeast, Donegan realized Mackenzie had committed all his troops. The colonel had himself no more reserves to pitch into the fray. Which meant … if Hamilton and Davis and Wessels hadn’t got the job done by themselves—they too would have likely been overrun.
“How many you figure we got?”
Seamus looked up suddenly, finding the young soldier who had been with McKinney’s company when they were ambushed, the same young soldier who had been in full retreat before he agreed to return to the fight.
Gazing toward the ravine, Seamus quickly counted the bodies the fleeing warriors were carrying off. “Ten. Maybeso it looks like it could be a dozen.”
Around him a handful of the troopers were making sure what Cheyenne still lay on the battleground were dead. One, two shots or more as the blood lust flushed out of the young soldiers brought so close to death themselves.
“And at least eight up here they didn’t get off with,” Frank Grouard said as he came up to pound Donegan on the shoulder.
Shards of pain splintered up his neck and shot down his backbone. “Dammit, don’t do that!”
“You hit?” the half-breed asked with worry on his face as a bullet whispered over their heads.
“No. Leastways I ain’t been shot,” Seamus replied. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Up there with that captain’s outfit at the head of the ravine,” Frank replied, pointing his rifle toward the north side of the valley. “I hear his name is Wessels.”
Turning to the youngster, Donegan said, “Twenty of ’em—we got at least twenty of ’em, Private.”
“Yeah,” the soldier whispered with a shudder. “Twenty.”
Seamus studied his face a moment, then said, “You can bloody well be proud of that fight you just come through.”
The young soldier glanced around quickly as the officers formed up platoons to lay down covering fire while a few others gathered up the dead and wounded, dragging them back out of range of those Cheyenne riflemen on the knoll.
“Things still feel a little hot here,” Grouard said, cradling the Irishman’s left wrist. “Let’s go find you a surgeon—have him take a look at your shoulder.”
Donegan shrugged him off. “Leave it be, dammit. Look at them others they’re taking off—lot worse off’n me. There’s more here for them sawbones to worry about than my bleeming shoulder.”
* The Ute.
* Trumpet on the Land, Vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series
Chapter 29
25 November 1876
The cold in her belly was far icier than the cold in that tiny room at the top of Old Bedlam.
Gripped with its sudden, startling, frightening presence, she awoke with a start in the dark, blinking … and her arm habitually reached across that narrow bed for him. To assure herself of his presence, the warmth of his bulk—but that great abiding security of his nearness was not there.
Samantha sat up with a start. Her heart beat as if it would fly out of her chest, her breath catching in her throat like a ragged scrap of muslin snagged on a rusty strand of barbed wire. Streamers of frost gathered before her face. The small stove in the corner barely glowed at all.
Then she remembered the baby. Turned. Found him wrapped in his swaddling, beneath his old blanket so worn and soft with the years and washings beyond number. The blanket she had wrapped around herself as a child, then laid away in a cedar chest until it came time that she went to Texas to join sister Rebecca, knowing that in it one day she would wrap her own babies.
She touched his face gently. How warm he was, and at such peace when he slept. What with the colic and all, they both snatched nothing more than fevered bits of rest through these days and nights of waiting.
He was seven weeks old this morning.
Slowly laying her head down once more on the pillow, Samantha pulled the babe against her as he slept. Then drew him even closer to her breasts to feel the very warmth of him, his breath against the base of her neck in tiny puffs as the cold solidified in the pit of her the way the ice had formed along each bank of the creeks, each side straining day by day for the other as the cold deepened in these first weeks of winter.
Try as she might to shake that cold cake of river ice congealing within her, Samantha could not escape the feeling that she had awakened of a purpose: that something terrible had just happened to him, far to the north in Indian country.
Had he fallen in battle? Oh, God!
She squeezed h
er eyes shut to stop the tears, biting her lower lip so she would not cry out and wake the child. Seamus’s son.
Had he been wounded? Was he lying somewhere in the snow, the frozen white turning red and mushy beneath him? Was he still alive—and thinking of her right at this moment? Is that why she awoke, because his soul was calling out to hers across all the miles?
Yes, she decided, and with a tiny yelp stifled deep within her throat, Samantha began to sob quietly in that dark room where the gray of dawn had just begun to intrude.
There drifted to her the muffled sounds of footsteps and stove doors opening as coals were stirred and fires stoked for the morning, concerns with coffee and breakfast—a woman’s lot, this matter of waiting out another day while her man was off to war.
He was wounded. M-mortally, she convinced herself. That is why his spirit had reached out to her in these, his final minutes. There in the cold and the dark, upon the snow, perhaps fearing that the next footsteps he heard would be those of a painted warrior who would step over him—driving a war club down between his eyes, then slashing off his scalp.
At that moment in the dark and the cold, she felt his anguish as if it were her own—shuddering in the aloneness, she and the babe more alone at this moment than in all the days Seamus had been gone.
Colder now than she could ever remember being. Here her second winter at Laramie—knowing in the core of her that if he did not return whole to her … that she would never again be warm, not for the rest of her life.
Near the mouth of the gulch where Bull Hump and the others had ambushed the pony soldiers, Yellow Eagle fell back during the fighting, his attention drawn by a small group of women and children who were trapped between the soldier scouts in the village and the soldiers being reinforced along the edge of the deep ravine.
“Yellow Eagle!” cried one of the old women, her arms extended to him, imploring. “Help us!”
He burst into a sprint, turning his back on the fighting, his lungs searing with the dry, extremely cold air. Bullets smacked into the snow around the group as they scurried a few feet in one direction, then back in the other, snow kicked up as the lead landed around them. They reminded him of a covey of small, frightened sage hens. He had to find a way out for them.
“Hurry, Yellow Eagle!” another woman called out.
In her arms she held a small child, one of its tiny feet clearly gone, a bloody pulp from the ankle down where the mother clamped with a hand to stop the bleeding.
This way and that he looked as he ran, searching, not knowing where he could lead them. There—beyond them across a dry wash was the wide mouth of another ravine. Perhaps …
Then he knew it would not work. The Wolf People scouts on the southern slope among the lodges would have a clear shot into the ravine. These women and children would all be dead before the cold sun climbed much farther in that achingly blue sky.
As he reached them, the women grabbed him, the children clustered at his bare legs, young and old alike whimpering at him like wild; frightened animals caught in a snare. Then he saw a way. Perhaps the only way.
“I will go first,” he explained, laying his hand atop an old woman’s head. Her cheeks were smeared with blood and frozen tears. “That way I can show you the way. Come with me now.”
Without a word of protest the women herded the children before them, following the young warrior as he slipped back into the mouth of the ravine and quickly retraced a few of his steps.
It was there he stopped at the narrow entrance of another coulee.
“You will go in there,” he instructed, his voice terse. “The head of the ravine runs out in the distance of an arrow shot away from here.”
“Then where do we go?” one of the women pleaded, clutching at his bare arm.
“You will climb right up to the prairie,” he told her, looking the woman straight in the eye. “And run the rest of the way to another coulee you will find at the back of that hill, where our warriors are firing down on the soldiers over by the deep ravine.”
“But … but we will be running right out in the open!” an old woman cried.
“Yes! And right under those soldiers guns at the deep ravine!” another protested.
“If you do as I tell you,” Yellow Eagle tried to calm them, “go one at a time—even the children—then the soldiers are not likely to see you. You will not draw their attention in that way. But you must go one at a time. Do you understand me?”
One of the old women nodded, then answered for all of them. “Yes.”
“The second of you must not leave the head of this shallow ravine until the first has made it all the way to the back of that hill—where you will all be safe. From there you can make it into the canyon and up to the breastworks, where the others are singing the strong-heart songs to our warriors.”
A small, frail woman pushed herself up between two younger women and clutched at the warrior’s hand, gazing up into his face with watery, rheumy eyes. “I have no husband, and now my son is dead this day. But I will be the first to run as you say, Yellow Eagle. And when I reach the breastworks—I will sing the strong-heart songs for you!”
So it was that he took her bony hand and led her to the head of the ravine, and there helped her to the top.
“Now—run! Run like the rabbit!” he hollered at her as she took off in a lumbering gait, all too slow. “Run like the wolf was after you!”
Then the soldier guns exploded. He jerked around to look at the distant ravine, seeing the gray powder smoke lifting above the blue-clad soldiers. They had fired in volley—with a roar so loud, it made a sound like a riverbank caving in come the torrent of a spring runoff.
Holding his breath, he watched her reach the other shallow ravine behind the knoll, where she disappeared over the side. For a heartbeat he worried, ready to send the second person—this time a child, but keeping the youngster until …
There! He saw the ancient one wave back at them. And knew she was safe.
One by one by one he lifted them up the slick, icy side of the ravine, raising their frozen, bare feet as he heaved them onto the snowy prairie, where they began their dash to safety. Time and again the soldier guns exploded as a woman or a child zigzagged the way he told them, all the way to the shallow ravine where the ancient woman stood waving them on. Calling out for them to be brave in her frail, reedy voice.
Four of them fell, wounded by soldier bullets. But every one of them rose again as quickly, dragging a bleeding leg, or clutching a bloody arm that dripped a telltale path on the snow. Three times ten he helped out of that ravine. Three times ten would now live on.
The last one had reached the distant coulee, and Yellow Eagle had turned to find Little Wolf and one of the other Old-Man Chiefs … when he heard a high, wispy voice lift itself over that corner of their battlefield.
She had reached the breastworks. The ancient one with no men to sing for that day. No man, except for Yellow Eagle.
It was for him that now she sang the strong-heart songs.
Hoka hey! If this was to be Yellow Eagle’s day … then it was a fine day to die!
With Medicine Top on one arm and Spotted Blackbird clutching the other, Box Elder made it to the slope of the low hill.
“Take me up, almost to the top, then both of you must turn back,” the shaman instructed them.
“You will climb the rest of the way by yourself?”
“I must,” Box Elder told them.
The last struggle was his alone in his darkness, knowing he had reached the top only when he felt the wind on his face once more and the ground falling away from beneath his moccasins on the far side.
Setting his feet, Box Elder spread his arms out for a moment—so good was it to feel the sun’s coming warmth as it bathed the valley. Then he sat and pulled his small pipe and some tobacco from the pouch that he had carried away from his lodge and fit the bowl to stem. Packing pinches of tobacco into the bowl, he sang loud enough that his voice encircled the knoll for all th
e others to hear above the noise of the battle.
When he had the pipe ready, Box Elder got to his knees, raising the pipe overhead while he bowed—offering the pipe to Ma-heo-O, the All Spirit, and to the Sacred Persons … asking for their blessing on his people this terrible, bloody day.
Startled, he felt the pipe bowl grow warm in his hand, and he smelled pipe smoke on the wind.
Bringing the stem to his lips, the old man sucked—surprised to find that it was burning.
“Blessings, Ma-heo-?!” he sang out in a high, thin voice. “You have lit the pipe for me! Thank you!”
As he completed his fourth puff from the pipe, the first soldier bullet landed near his knee, striking one of the red sandstone rocks with a splatter of lead.
Box Elder next blew smoke toward the heavens.
Several more bullets whined past his head or collided with the ground at his knees.
The old shaman calmly blew his last puff at the earth—the mother of them all.
Now the soldier bullets were coming so close and with such frequency that he knew the white man must have spotted him atop this knoll.
Yet again he held the pipe up to the heavens at the end of his arms and prayed for his people’s safety, not thinking about the soldier bullets at all.
Even though he had left the Sacred Wheel Lance below with his son and was no longer invisible, Box Elder knew no bullets would touch a holy man.
He kept on praying.
Already some of the soldier scouts were pounding victoriously on that big drum in the center of camp.
Little Wolf’s heart bled a little more. It felt as cold as his bare legs, and surely laid upon the ground.
The enemy was in possession of their village … beating that drum in victory even as the battle raged around the perimeter of the valley, the Wolf People scouts playing their flutes and whistles, the Shoshone firing from the ridge above him, and those Lakota who came to guide the soldiers—how it sickened his belly.
A Cold Day in Hell Page 34