“He Dog says Crazy Horse will hold to his word,” Grouard said. “He came to the agency to make peace. So he will keep the peace. He won’t break his word and run away.”
“Then why is Crazy Horse refusing to do what I ordered him?” Bradley demanded, his jaw muscles working.
The warrior spoke, and his words were translated, “‘Crazy Horse has a strong medicine. The most powerful medicine I ever knew among our people. Maybe … I think Crazy Horse’s medicine is telling him something. Warning him. Telling him to beware of coming across the river and living with Red Cloud’s Oglalas.’”
“What could be his suspicions?” Clark asked.
And instead of verbalizing an answer, He Dog only shrugged. Then he spoke almost in a whisper to Grouard.
The interpreter said, “He wants to go now. If your talk is done, he wants to go.”
“He won’t tell us his suspicions?” Clark demanded.
Grouard tried again, but He Dog just stared at a spot on the wall behind the officers and said nothing.
“I don’t think he’s going to tell you anything more, Mr. Clark,” Bradley observed.
“Damn him,” the lieutenant said. “I bloody well want to know what’s making Crazy Horse’s medicine so suspicious now!”
He Dog spoke again, clearly irritated; then Grouard translated. “He wants to go, General.”
“Yes,” Bradley said. “Tell him he can go.”
Seamus watched the warrior wheel about and leave the office. Outside he heard He Dog lead his pony away from the front of the log structure on the gravel.
“He didn’t like being here with me,” Grouard explained. “That’s why he wanted to go, why he wasn’t going to tell you any more. Maybe you better get yourselves another translator next time you wanna talk with that one.”
“You and he know each other?” Clark asked.
Grouard stepped over to the open doorway, staring out at the bright sunlight, watching the warrior walk his pony before He Dog leaped onto its back and started it east toward the White River, away from the grounds of Camp Robinson. “We go back some, yeah.”
Seamus came to stand beside the interpreter, watching the Indian ride away.
“Who are you?” Bradley demanded.
When Donegan and Grouard turned, the officer was just settling into his chair behind a desk, its top cleared but for two neat stacks of paper pushed to one side.
Donegan saw the colonel’s eyes on him. “Me?”
“Yes, you,” Bradley said. “I take it you’re a friend of my translator here.”
“Him and me, we go back a ways too,” Frank explained as he and the Irishman stepped back to the middle of the room.
While Clark settled on the edge of the commander’s desk, Bradley’s eyes burned into Donegan’s until he asked, “Do I know you?”
“I doubt you’d remember me.” Seamus steeled himself, feeling the flush of a ten-year-old anger.
“Then, we have met,” the officer said, laying one white hand atop the desk and spreading out the fingers.
“Yes.”
“And where was that?”
“Fort C. F. Smith, Montana Territory.”
For a moment that brought surprise to Bradley’s face. Then he asked, “You served under me at Fort Smith, did you?”
“I’m glad I never had to serve under you anywhere, General Bradley,” he said low and even, using the officer’s brevet, or ceremonial rank, a distinction awarded by the army for some act of meritorious service or bravery, perhaps courage under fire. But Seamus knew the army hadn’t awarded this brevet for courage in the face of the enemy.
The officer’s second hand suddenly shot to the top of the desk to lie beside the first as Clark pushed himself away from the desk and stood the instant Donegan’s slur had been uttered.
“I … I beg your pardon, civilian,” Bradley said with a stammer, his jaw jutting haughtily. “Did I understand that you were at Fort Smith, but are glad you never served under me?”
“I was a quartermaster’s employee for the better part of a year,” Donegan explained. “Worked around the fort: digging picket posts, raising walls, seeing to stock, and when spring came, I went to work with Al Colvin’s bunch … out in the hayfield.”
Bradley’s eyes narrowed. “Now I remember you. Your name eludes me, but I remember you and Colvin—that whole unruly civilian bunch.” The officer turned to explain to Clark. “We had some rebellious workers cutting hay several miles from our post during the summer of 1867.”
Clark tore his eyes off the Irishman to ask, “You were post commander at Fort Smith on the Bozeman Trail, sir?”
With a nod, the officer continued, “Early in August, as I remember, the Indians gathered for a mass attack on Fort Phil Kearny, and another mass gathered to attack us.”
“But the Injins hit our hayfield corral first,” Donegan explained, turning to Clark, having seen the expression of keen and unequivocal interest cross Grouard’s face. “Even when we managed to send a rider racing them four miles back to the fort after more’n three hours of fighting, he found the fort gates locked!”
“I had perfect reason to believe that my post might come under attack,” Bradley said coolly to Clark.
“Because Cap’n Hartz come down from the side of the mountain—where he could see the Injins riding round and round our corral,” Seamus growled, glancing at Grouard. “But after he told you what he’d seen, you locked the gate and didn’t send out any relief to us! Not even a patrol to come find out what become of us!”
“I had a supply of ammunition to protect,” Bradley protested, turning to Clark. “If those Sioux had gotten that ammunition—”
“Turns out,” Donegan interrupted, turning to Clark himself, “that it took us civilians to hold off them hundreds of Injins … till Bradley screwed up enough courage to act like a real soldier—”
“I resent that remark!” the colonel roared, bolting to his feet so fast that his chair went spinning, clattering into the log wall behind him.
“Maybe we’d better go,” Grouard recommended as he took a couple steps toward the door.
Clark glared at the tall civilian, saying, “Do you know that General Bradley could have you thrown in the guardhouse for your slur against his character?”
“I damn well know the army’s covered up his cowardice,” Donegan said, then saw the red rise to the cheeks of the infuriated colonel. “So there ain’t no way to prove it to you. Just his word against mine.”
“The word of a … a mule-skinner?” Bradley snarled.
“’Cept if you ever run onto Captain Hartz, or maybe Major Burt,” Seamus said to Clark. “I fought with Burt at the Rosebud.”
“You’re dismissed!” Clark said suddenly as Bradley started around the side of his desk, hunched over in fury. The lieutenant coyly stepped in front of his commanding officer. “I suggest you make yourself scarce on this military post, or you might find yourself thrown off.”
“No, wait,” Bradley ordered, his eyes become serpentine, his voice calm and cold. “I remember Donegan now. After Carrington was demoted and removed from command at Fort Phil Kearny, you were shipped up to Fort C. F. Smith. We learned you spent quite a bit of your time in the guardhouse down there at Fort Kearny. I remember it now: drunk and disorderly, insubordination to officers, unruly and unbecoming conduct—”
“Only with puffed-up braggarts like them who went against Colonel Carrington,” Donegan said. “I worked hard for you, General Bradley. I gave you more’n a day’s work for a day’s wage while I served at Fort Smith. But you … how can a man like you sleep at night?”
Bradley whirled on his heel and leaped behind his desk, jerking open a drawer.
“I’m not armed, General,” Seamus warned, holding his arms out from his side.
“But if you do not leave this very minute,” Bradley vowed as he pulled out a long, slim cheroot from that drawer, rolling it between his white fingers, “you may well be spending the remainder of the summe
r behind the bars in my guardhouse.”
“C’mon, Frank,” Seamus said as he turned, laying a hand on the back of Grouard’s shoulders. “Let’s go finish that drink we was having when this soldier business came up.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wasutun Wi
MOON WHEN ALL THINGS RIPEN, 1877
BY TELEGRAPH
News from the Indian War.
WASHINGTON.
General Sherman’s Report: Pittsburgh Wants a Garrison.
WASHINGTON, August 4.—General Sherman, in a letter to the secretary of war, says: “With the new post at the fork of Big and Little Horn rivers and that at the mouth of the Tongue river, occupied by enterprising garrisons, the Sioux Indians can never regain that country, and they can be forced to remain at their agency or take refuge in the British possessions. The country west of the new post has good country and will rapidly fill up with emigrants, who will, in the next ten years, build up a country as strong and as capable of self defense as Colorado…”
“What are those two fat wasicus calling me?” Crazy Horse asked his second wife, as he gazed at the two big-bellied white men waving to him from behind a half-dozen young warriors who stood barring the visitors’ way.
There weren’t so many of the Hunkpatila who had remained with him in this village anymore. So many had followed He Dog, moving their lodges across the river to camp near Red Cloud’s people, just as the White Hat had ordered them to. Like He Dog, he thought, they must fear that trouble is coming soon … and they don’t want to be near me when trouble shows up.
“These men are calling you a name used for important soldier chiefs,” Nellie Laravie explained.
“What is that word? Say it in the tongue of the white man.”
“General,” she said and he began to silently try out the term. “They’re calling you General Crazy Horse. One of them just called you Mister,” and she said that last word in the white man’s language as well.
“Are both of those words good talk?”
She flashed him her dark, liquid eyes while Black Shawl came up to stand near them in the morning shade beside the lodge. “Yes,” Nellie said. “You are the only leader they want to have sit for them and take your … your—”
“These are more of the men who bring the shadow boxes?” he demanded, flushing with irritation.
“Yes,” she answered, refusing to look at Black Shawl’s face. “You see those two horses they brought with them? They have their shadow boxes tied on the horses. These white men are ready to capture your image.”
“No!” he growled. “The white man takes everything from me. He has taken my country. And he’s taken my freedom—”
“It is just a picture of you,” Nellie cooed. “So you can see how others see you.”
He fingered the long scar on the left side of his face and said, “I can peek into a woman’s looking glass to see my face. I do not need these wasicus to make a picture of me. No. They have taken almost everything from me. Their sickness took my daughter.… Then their bullets took my brother too.”
“Let me go explain it to them,” Nellie suggested, taking hold of her husband’s hand. “Someone should tell them why you don’t want this.”
“Because I don’t want them to take my spirit away and hold it in their little shadow boxes,” he hissed, muscles growing tense along his shoulders. “Isn’t it enough that they hold my body prisoner here on this tiny patch of ground, that these fat-bellied white men shouldn’t try to capture my spirit too?”
“I will go tell them,” she said softly, taking a step away.
“Yes. Go tell these wasicus never to come back with their shadow boxes again.”
He watched her move away, her hips swaying beneath the cloth trader’s dress, its colorful fabric shifting from side to side over her rounded buttocks. He liked watching the half-blood woman walking, for it stirred something inside him, causing him to remember how the skin of those buttocks felt in his hands whenever they coupled.
Turning his back on the white men, Crazy Horse said to Black Shawl, “I thought these shadow catchers had stopped coming.”
“It has been a long time since they have troubled you, yes.”
“At first, after we came to this place, it seemed they came to beg and plead with me almost every day,” Crazy Horse muttered, glancing over his shoulder at the young woman, watching her talk with the two white men. “But she will know what to say to them. She knows their tongue as well as we know ours.”
“She is half-wife, husband,” Black Shawl reminded, an edge of jealousy in her voice. “So too is her heart.”
He watched Black Shawl whirl around and flee to the shadows of their lodge that late morning. Then he raised a hand to shade his eyes and watched Nellie as she waved farewell to the pair of white men and they turned their horses away. She wasn’t long in returning to him, both of her hands clenched in front of her like fighting fists.
“I have something for you, husband!” she squealed in delight, her eyes searching for Black Shawl. “Where did she go?”
“Inside,” he said, not caring that Black Shawl was angry with him or jealous of the trader’s daughter. “What did they give you? Something to bribe me into letting them capture my spirit in their little boxes?”
Nellie stepped close, so close she brushed her hip and thigh against him. He felt the surge of desire that always came with being next to her.
“Here,” she whispered, holding up her left hand and opening the fingers slowly, like they were being peeled back. In her palm lay a shiny red folding knife.
“They gave you this for me?”
“It is red,” she declared, “for the Indian that you are.”
He glanced at the other hand. “And that one. Is it a gift for you?”
“No,” and Nellie brought up her left hand, opening the fingers slowly again. Inside lay a blue folding knife.
“Blue,” he said with dismay. “But these fat wasicus aren’t blue!”
“No, but the clothing of their soldiers is. And part of their war flag too.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “The white stars are sewn on the blue.”
She sighed and laid her head against his upper arm. “The colors are why they wanted you to have these two knives together.”
“I cannot take them,” he said, stepping back. “They give them so I will be seduced into making a picture for their shadow boxes.”
“No,” she said, slipping the knives into his hands. “They just want you to know how much they admire you. They think you are a great, great chief. Like I think of you.”
“I am not a chief,” he grumbled. “I am not even an important man. Not anymore.”
“But they think so—and I do too,” Nellie said. “I am going to ride over to the agency now.”
“To see some friends?”
“Perhaps. I would like to visit my family too.”
“You saw them yesterday, didn’t you?” he asked.
She bent to untie the pony’s long rein from a tent stake. “Those two wasicus—they promised if I came to the agency right now, they would take my picture with their shadow boxes.”
“T-take your—”
“It is all right, husband,” she assured as she hurried by him in a rush, wheeled, and flung herself atop her pony. “You don’t have to worry about me!”
“Yes,” he groaned in panic, “I do have to worry that they will capture your soul in their black boxes!”
She turned around on the bare back of her pony and called out to him as the horse carried her away for the agency. “You must never worry about something like that … because”—and she giggled in that young woman way of hers—“I have no soul for them to capture!”
He heard the tinkle of her laughter fade as she turned around and slammed her heels into the ribs of her horse. For some moments after she had disappeared through the trees along the river, he stared down at the two knives in his hands; then he went inside to show them to Black Shawl.
He watched her face as she inspected the shiny knives, turning them over in her hands. Her own color was so much better lately, and she was finally putting on some weight again, despite the fact that they had nothing more to eat than the white man’s poor flour and his stringy beef. She had grown so thin and pale before the soldier healer had saved her life for Crazy Horse. Now there was more meat on her bones, and she had become more eager to please him whenever the trader’s daughter rode off to the fort as she often did and they were alone.
Two wives was not such a bad thing, he brooded, looking at her with desire now, wanting her to pull off her dress so that he might couple with her. The white man looked very stern at the Lakota who had more than one wife … yet they had approved him taking the trader’s daughter into his lodge. So be it. She was an amusement that had quickly become an addiction. And in some small way, the half-breed had reached inside him and touched that hidden part no one had touched since he gave his heart to Black Buffalo Woman. When he admitted it to himself, Crazy Horse knew that his heart could never be the captive of one woman. Instead, he fondly remembered lying with his manhood inside No Water’s wife … and how good it felt when Nellie grabbed him and hurried him inside her moistness. Even Black Shawl continued to satisfy him.
He looked at his first wife, thinking on those shadow catchers—how much in a hurry Nellie was about everything. To have him climb atop her, or to hurry back to the agency to have her picture captured by them. Perhaps it was her white blood that made her in such a hurry.
Why was it that the wasicus would not let him be? Why was it so important to the white man that the Lakota became like them? What was it about the wasicu that made him work so hard to make everyone else over in his own image?
Was that why rumors had it the soldiers were going to offer Crazy Horse a chieftainship over all the Lakota if he would only lead both agencies to those new homes the white men were making for them on the Mnisose? Did they really think they could bribe him with material things, even the promise of the sort of power that was all-important to the wasicus?
Did these white people think that Crazy Horse was so simple? Or was it that the wasicus were just stupid themselves?
Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse Page 22