A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  At the base of the slope Yellow Nose whirled and pranced atop that pony, shouting at the enemy, calling out instructions to his warriors until it came time to run back to safety.

  This time they had rescued the five. They had dared gamble with their lives for their friends.

  And they had won.

  * Trumpet on the Land, Vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series.

  * The Ute.

  Chapter 35

  Big Freezing Moon 1876

  Nearly naked, she had been standing resolutely with the other women, most of them older than her fifteen summers, among the rocks they had piled up along the top of the ridge at the upper end of camp.

  Above what was left of their village, now that the soldiers and their Indian scouts had begun to set fire to all that the People possessed in their lives.

  After singing so long in that terrible cold—here where none of them found any protection from the winter wind—her voice was all but gone. Her throat so raw, it gave her great pain just to draw in each breath, one after the other, much less to sing with all her might.

  But this was what she was called upon to do. And Buffalo Calf Woman would sing the strong-heart songs as long as it would take. Vowing she would sing as long as her younger brother kept singing.

  At dawn’s first cry, that first gunshot, those first hoofbeats that had startled everyone at the upper end of camp, she and some of her friends had been talking in those moments after the drum had fallen silent and the dancers had dispersed, everyone going off to their beds. When the dancing had started the night before, Buffalo Calf Woman had been knotted to five others by her mother with lengths of rawhide so none of Last Bull’s Kit Fox warriors could snatch them away.

  At dawn they were still tied one to the others.

  So with the coming of the soldiers and their terrifying scouts when the six of them had attempted to flee in six different directions—all of them had spilled onto the trampled snow as the hoofbeats and the war songs and the whistles and the snarling bullets drew closer and closer.

  From somewhere an old woman appeared with her long and worn butcher knife. She slashed it down on one rawhide strand, up through the next, on and on until all six girls were freed to scatter as the enemy reached the top of the ridge south of camp—firing their rifles into the lodges.

  To the door of her family’s home Buffalo Calf Woman flew, finding the interior dark and empty, a kettle filled with water beside the coals of last night’s fire, dried meat laid out, ready for boiling their breakfast.

  “Flying Man!” she had cried in panic, her heart in her throat as she’d turned away from that abandoned lodge, women and children dashing past her, screaming, screeching, keening, and crying.

  “Flying Man!” she hollered with fleeting hope through that upper end of camp until it was too late and two warriors had to drag her from the village before she was captured or killed by the enemy’s scouts. There at the far edge of the village she had found her mother’s body seeping a slush of blackening crimson onto the torn snow.

  Yet it was no time for tears.

  “I must find Flying Man!” she had tried to explain to the warriors who pulled her from the body. She was seeking her younger brother—the boy who was born with a dark blanket pulled over his eyes for all time.

  Had he gotten out of the village in time? Had her mother taken him just so far and no farther in their flight? With her mother killed—what had become of Flying Man?

  Reluctantly climbing the western ridge with the others, digging with her torn and bloody fingers at the rocks they pulled from the frozen ground, piling them one by one atop the other to erect breastworks—she kept looking for Flying Man. Kept asking each new arrival if they had seen her brother.

  He would be frightened. Blind to the danger—able only to hear the terror in that village put on the run.

  “Buffalo Calf Woman!”

  Only faintly at first she had heard the voice, looking here and there until she heard it call out again—a little stronger this time. Then she found him, struggling up the long slope of the ridge, an old bent woman clutching his arm. The ancient one’s back curved so far that she had to twist her head to the side to look at anything but the ground; nonetheless, the woman clung to the blind boy and helped his feet to see every step of their way together.

  He sang out again, “Buffalo Calf Woman!”

  “I am here, Flying Man!” she shrieked, pitching down the slope in a mad run, skidding to a stop on the icy snow, clutching him to her breast, her tears spilling as she next brought the old bent woman within her embrace.

  “I was so scared after mother’s hand was ripped from mine and then she would not answer me,” Flying Man said quietly, tears from his unseeing eyes spilling on his cheeks. “But the old one here found me and told me I must be strong for her—to take her to safety with me.”

  Buffalo Calf Woman put out her hand and touched the wrinkled cheek of the old one, skin like the bark of a long-dead cottonwood. “You … you both were very brave.”

  “We must sing, young woman,” the old, toothless mouth said with a raspy croak, the watery eyes blinking in the severe cold.

  “Yes,” Buffalo Calf Woman agreed as she took her brother on one arm, the old one grasping her other. “We will go now to the top where we will sing for our men.”

  All morning the three of them had been there together. The young boy, who raised his sightless eyes upon that valley where his people were fighting for their very existence. The old woman so bent with age and troubles and her many winters that she had to turn her head to fling her voice down to the warriors below them on the valley floor.

  And Buffalo Calf Woman—not knowing where her father and older brothers were in the fierce struggle below.

  Yet knowing her mother’s spirit stood beside them now—her mother’s voice giving them all its magic to sing the strong-heart songs behind the tears.

  This old fur trapper reminded Seamus of Bridger. Ol’ Gabe. Big Throat. Jim Bridger.

  For any man’s purposes, Bill Rowland was indeed cut of the very same cloth. A simple frontiersman who, like Bridger, had married an Indian woman and taken up with her people.

  Donegan turned in the saddle and glanced over his shoulder at the high ridge behind them. Up there, south of the village, Tom Cosgrove and his friend, Yancy Eckles, both were squaw men among the Shoshone on the Wind River. But this Rowland had to be a hell of a lot older than those two Confederates. Been out here on the plains from the time of the buffalo-robe trade—when the tribes still dressed hides for the white man, before the time the hide men began to set about wiping out the herds.

  The man must surely have grandchildren by now, Donegan thought as the two of them moved their horses cautiously out of the tall willow and headed west at the foot of the long plateau bordering the north wall of the valley.

  “See what they’ve got on their minds, Rowland,” Mackenzie had ordered. “Take some of your relatives with you and see if you can’t convince these chiefs to call off their dogs.”

  “You want me to tell ’em you’re fixing to call it quits, General?” Rowland had asked before he’d moved out with Donegan.

  “No—I’m not calling off our attack. But you’re to find out if these Cheyenne want to surrender any of their women and children, the old people too—before we destroy everything they own.”

  Rowland only nodded and turned away. His eyes brushed Donegan, watery they were. With a look in them that told Seamus the old frontiersman knew why Mackenzie was sending the Irishman with him.

  That son of a bitch don’t trust me, those eyes said. So I don’t figure I got a damn reason in the world to trust you neither.

  The four men Rowland quickly selected to accompany him regarded Seamus with those same eyes filled with wary distrust. Donegan knew that, unlike Three Bears’s Sioux scouts, these men very well might have relatives among the people in this camp they had attacked at dawn. Such a thing naturally made a man suspicious, nervous, downright uneas
ylike when he had come to wreak destruction upon his kinfolk.

  Every now and then a high-powered rifle roared and its echo rocked back and back and back from the canyon walls. But for the most part the battle had reached an uneasy lull with the sun heading quickly for the southwest. Already the shadows of the rocks and brush were lengthening below their horses’ hooves.

  “I figure we better go on foot from here,” Rowland advised, then turned and spoke quickly to the others in Cheyenne.

  They all dismounted and the youngest among them gathered up the leads to the horses, taking the animals back a few yards to the mouth of a narrow coulee, where he would ground-hobble them with their single horsehair rein lashed around one fore hoof, which would allow the horses to graze under his watchful eye.

  As the old man moved out, Donegan signaled the others ahead. He preferred to have them all in front, where he could see them. If there was the slightest chance of monkeyshines, he didn’t want one of these sonsabitches at his back. Not that any of these Cheyenne might know of an ambush, but, for all he knew, they could get themselves into a fierce skirmish and decide to turn the lone white man over to their relatives in the rocks as a way to save their own hides.

  But hell, Rowland’s a white man. I can’t keep forgetting that.

  Up ahead the scouts suddenly went to their knees behind Rowland. The old man was calling out to the hillside.

  Then a voice cried down from the rocks above them and to the left.

  Back and forth Rowland and one of the Cheyenne scouts hollered to the unseen warriors. Then the old frontiersman turned slightly in his crouch, motioning Donegan forward.

  “They tell me their whole family’s hungry and cold,” Rowland explained as Seamus came to a rest beside him. “Those what ain’t dead anyways.”

  “What’s going on?” Donegan wondered after a long and uneasy silence.

  “’Pears to me they sent one of their bunch to fetch up one of the Old-Man Chiefs,” Rowland replied.

  “Old-Man Chiefs?”

  “The real rulers of the tribe.”

  “Not the war chiefs?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. One of them what decides how the rest of the band will fare.”

  A voice shouted down, echoing slightly from the snow-laced red boulders.

  Rowland announced, “They just told us they see Morning Star coming.”

  “Morning Star?”

  “White man calls him Dull Knife,” Rowland explained, then shrugged, saying, “You ought’n be glad he’s a better man than he is a fighter.”

  “Bill Rowland!”

  That deep voice cried the name with Cheyenne inflection.

  “Don’t let that fool you—he don’t speak no American,” Rowland declared. “He just knows how to say my name.”

  “I’m here!” the frontiersman shouted in Cheyenne.

  “The rest are with me, Bill Rowland.”

  “Is that you, Morning Star?”

  “Yes. At my side are Gray Head, Roman Nose—”

  “Wait,” Seamus growled with a temper. “We killed Roman Nose in the fall of sixty-eight. September, it were.”

  The older white man’s brow furrowed gravely as he studied the Irishman. “You … you were with Forsyth’s … his rangers at the fight on the fork of the Republican?”

  “It’s where I buried my uncle … after Carpenter’s buffalo soldiers come in to raise the siege,” Seamus replied softly, feeling two of the others with Rowland devote their undivided attention to him. He felt the old pain well up within him. The empty hole inside—that nothingness which no one could fill—even now after all the years that Liam had been gone.

  “Naw, Irishman. It ain’t the same Roman Nose what got hisself killed trying to run Forsyth’s men down.” Slapping his glove against his thigh, the frontiersman said, “Dang, if I’d knowed—why, up there in them rocks is Turkey Leg.”

  “So? What’s that mean to me?” Donegan watched Rowland purse his lips with a crestfallen look over his face.

  “Hell—that’s been too long,” Rowland considered. “He isn’t ’bout to remember you, is he?”

  Donegan answered. “What’s so all-fired important about talking to this Turkey Leg anyway?”

  “He and Little Wolf—another of the chiefs with ’em right up there—they’re the fighting chiefs of the hull bunch. They won’t be ones to talk peace. Turkey Leg was a war chief back to the time they tried to rub out Forsyth’s bunch.”

  Seamus dragged the back of his glove across his cracked, oozy lips, squinting into the sunlight’s reflection off the snow. “Go ’head, Rowland. It don’t matter if them war chiefs are up there. They might just listen. G’won and give this parley a try for the general.”

  Nodding in resignation, Rowland stood slowly, his arms high above his head. “I have no weapon in my hands. I stand here before you, to talk with you about what the soldier chief wants from you.”

  “He wants us all dead!”

  Rowland whispered to Donegan, “That was Turkey Leg. He’s an old, old man—been around since dirt.”

  “Got to be, by damned.”

  “And he’s never met a white man he likes.”

  “Including you?” Donegan asked.

  With the faintest of grins, Rowland admitted, “Well, maybe not every white man he’s met. But that bugger’s hated the color of our skin long before the Dog Soldiers’ fight agin you’uns with Forsyth.”

  Rowland spoke again, back and forth, with the disembodied voices from the rocks above them, as did one of the Cheyenne scouts nestled near the old frontiersman. From the tone of the enemy’s voices, Donegan could tell the chiefs were drawn tight as a cat-gut fiddle bow. Bone weary. Tested to the extreme. Cold and hungry. While that sort of deadly mix might well make most men all but give in to any talk of surrender, give in to talk of a warm fire and food for his belly … everything Seamus had ever heard about the Northern Cheyenne coupled with what he had himself learned at that Beecher Island* siege and from the Reynolds’s fight at Powder River last winter, † these weren’t the kind of men to count out, not by a long chalk.

  “Little Wolf says their families are safe in the hills but they don’t have many cartridges to fight us,” Rowland struggled with some of the translation.

  “But they ain’t about to come in and take Mackenzie’s offer to surrender, are they?”

  With a doleful wag of his head, Rowland said, “He shouted to me, ‘Rowland! Go on home now with the Lakotas and all your Tse-Tsehese from the White River Agency—you have no business here! We can whip these white soldiers alone … but we can’t fight your Indians too!’”

  Licking his oozy lower lip, Seamus said, “They’d likely give us a good fight of it without these Indian scouts—wouldn’t they?”

  Rowland nodded, then shrugged a shoulder. “Damn if they already haven’t give us damn good fight, Irishman.”

  Donegan shuddered as the wind kicked up, driving some icy snow crust against his cheek. “Don’t look like you can talk ’em into sending down their women and children to go back to the reservation?”

  “I’ll try again—if’n you want.”

  “All you can do is try.”

  For a few minutes Rowland and the Cheyenne scout parleyed with the voices of the chiefs, until the old frontiersman turned suddenly, a fresh smile on his lips.

  “Morning Star says he’ll come down a ways and talk to me where I can see him.”

  “By the saints! Do it! Do it! See what you can do to change his mind.”

  The closest they ever came to laying eyes on that aging warrior was to see a man stand some twenty yards off near some rocks where he could quickly retreat if treachery threatened.

  “Morning Star said he’s lost his three sons today,” Rowland explained as he whispered down to the Irishman.

  A sudden pull seized Seamus’s heart—as he remembered how it felt to hold his own son in his arms, there near his heart. Remembering how it felt to look down at that tiny face. How Morning St
ar must have experienced it with all three of his boys. And what despair the old chief must now suffer in losing them. Yet—there he stood, amazingly, as solid as a rock. Talking with a white man … when the white soldiers had taken his children from him.

  “Says he wants peace. Wants to surrender. He’ll bring in the women and children himself …” Then Rowland stopped. There were angry voices from above. “Wait … but … but the other chiefs won’t let him surrender for them. They want to keep on fighting. Shit—there’s Little Wolf with him now.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The hard one—that’s who,” the old frontiersman answered. Then he listened to Little Wolf speak for a few minutes. “What’s he saying?”

  He turned to tell Donegan, “Little Wolf says, ‘You have killed and hurt a heap of our people today! So you may as well stay now and kill the rest of us!”

  The Irishman instructed, “Tell him—tell all of them—that if they surrender, Mackenzie might leave them their lodges, their belongings, if they surrender and start back to the agency under escort.”

  Then Seamus watched the old man’s eyes look away, staring across the valley with great regret.

  Finally Rowland shook his head with sadness. “Look” he said.

  When he did look, Donegan saw the oily spires of black smoke curling into that pitifully cold blue sky across the white valley beyond the leafless timber bordering the stream. And with that sight, so much hope went out of him too.

  “They can see it … can’t they?” Seamus asked.

  “They seen it all along,” Rowland stated. “Likely ever since we been talking.”

  Swallowing hard, Donegan said, “Ain’t no wonder Morning Star can’t talk ’em into surrendering. Not with their women and children, the old and sick ones, all of ’em watching their homes—everything—go up in smoke like that.” The wind gusted cruelly where he knelt in the thick brush. He sniffled, dragged a glove beneath one eye as he turned back to gaze at Rowland. “I suppose there’s nothing any of us can do now.”