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Trumpet on the Land

Page 14

by Terry C. Johnston


  By the sixth of July, the Fifth Cavalry had reassembled, establishing their camp no more than seventy-five miles north of Fort Laramie on Sage Creek at the stockade guarded by a single company of infantry who were assigned to watch over a section of the Cheyenne-Black Hills stage road. Merritt promptly sent a courier south with reports for Sheridan. The rider was back by ten o’clock the next morning while most were having a leisurely breakfast and some officers were enjoying a cool bath in one of the creek’s shallow pools.

  Cody himself escorted Major Townsend’s courier to Merritt’s tent, then watched the colonel open the flap on the thin leather dispatch envelope as the scout poured himself another cup of coffee … about the time he heard the colonel quietly exclaim, “Good Lord!”

  He looked at Merritt’s hands shaking, how the officer’s youthful face suddenly went gray with age and utter shock, carved with deep concern. It frightened Bill. “Colonel?”

  “They … the Seventh … Custer too …”

  “What about Custer and the Seventh?”

  Merritt wagged his head, choking as if on something sour, unable to speak. All he could manage to do was hand the dispatches over to Cody.

  We have partial confirmation of

  Custer’s disaster, which, from

  the papers, appears to have been

  complete. Custer and five

  companies entirely wiped out.

  Once he had read them, and reread them a second time, Bill gave the pages back and turned away, pushing himself through a cadre of officers all hurrying like ants atop an anthill to hear for themselves the unbelievable news.

  Bill had known Custer. Why, he had even ridden stirrup to stirrup with the golden-haired cavalry officer, hunting buffalo together on the plains of Kansas. Custer was the sort so vital, so alive! Hero in war. Conqueror of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne. Custer the Invincible!

  Charles King came bounding up, his hair still wet from his morning swim. He stopped Cody. “Bill! Bill—is what I hear true? Dear God—say it isn’t true!”

  Cody could only nod as more anxious men gathered around them in a knot of fierce disbelief.

  Silence fell over that camp beside Sage Creek like a suffocating blanket of doom. This was a gallant, romantic era when the officers of one cavalry unit had friends among other regiments. Most of those men serving with the Fifth lost comrades or classmates, soldiers who fell with the Seventh at the Little Bighorn.

  So in the awful stillness of that summer morning, Bill quietly confirmed the worst for those who pressed in close, “Custer and five companies of the Seventh are wiped out of existence. It’s no rumor—General Merritt’s got the official dispatch.”

  “Where?”

  “North of here—Little Bighorn.”

  “Official?”

  “Sheridan himself.”

  “Custer? Dead?”

  “Confirmed. Twelve days ago. On the twenty-fifth of June.”

  King grabbed Cody by the arm. “You’ll be all right, Bill?”

  “Yes,” the scout eventually answered, throwing his shoulders back somewhat, his long hair brushing his collar. “There can be no doubt now, Lieutenant, that before a fortnight has passed, we’ll march north to reinforce Crook.”

  “This is going to be bigger than any of us could have imagined,” King said. “Sheridan will throw everything he has at them after losing Custer.”

  “But, you know, Lieutenant—if we are just now finding out about the battle, one thing’s for damn sure: the Indians down at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail already know.”

  King snapped his fingers, saying grimly, “Which means if they weren’t preparing to jump the reservation and head north—they’ll be doing it damned soon.”

  With a nod Cody replied, “Hotter’n ever to join up with the war camps that wiped out Custer and half the Seventh Cavalry.”

  Sheridan himself would have even hotter plans for the Fighting Fifth.

  Later that evening Lieutenant William Hall, acting regimental quartermaster for the Fifth Cavalry, rode in from Laramie with fresh dispatches. A gravely disappointed Merritt learned that he was not to take his eight troops of cavalry and push toward the Powder River country to unite with Crook. Instead Sheridan told him he should either march on to the Red Cloud Agency to bolster the army’s force at Camp Robinson, or march back to Fort Laramie to await further orders.

  Whichever the colonel should decide was best.

  * * *

  That hour’s halt for coffee and hardtack proved itself a deadly delay for Sibley’s patrol.

  As the soldiers relaxed around their tiny fires there in that grassy glade, Seamus heard more and more of them boast that the Indians would not dare follow them into the mountains. Despite how the scouts appealed, there was simply no convincing the lieutenant’s men that danger lay ahead.

  Grouard had long ago given up in disgust and joined the soldiers on the ground, dropping on the grass painfully to curl an arm under his head and close his eyes.

  “You gonna be all right, Frank?” Seamus asked.

  The half-breed whispered low, his eyes flicking down to his belly, “Just this damned woman’s weeping sickness.”

  “It’s gotta hurt.”

  He lay on his side, breathing shallow as he made himself more comfortable, knees drawn up. “Worse’n anything I ever had.”

  It was early afternoon when Pourier and Donegan decided the soldiers had enjoyed a long enough halt.

  Bat went over and nudged Grouard. “Time to go,” he told the other half-breed.

  Clearly in pain, Grouard moved stiffly to rise, struggling to climb back onto his horse as the soldiers resaddled. He walked his horse over by Sibley to say, “You just keep your men close together behind me,” as he rose in the stirrups to rub his groin with a grimace. “Tell ’em to ride fast and keep up with me. They gotta keep up and—be ready to fight.”

  The patrol moved out behind their scouts in single file, following Pourier, Donegan, and an ailing Grouard, pushing up through the forests thick with lodgepole, dotted with open parks carpeted in tall grass and wildflowers, winding their way through a tumble of boulders as big as railroad cars.

  They hadn’t gone all that far when Pourier signaled a halt and slid from his horse. In the middle of the trail lay a pair of crossed coup-sticks.

  “Bad medicine,” Big Bat grumbled, picking one up and cracking it over a knee.

  As Pourier tossed the pieces aside, Grouard and Donegan twisted this way and that, the hair on the back of their necks fuzzing like a fighting dog’s.

  “Heap bad medicine,” Bat repeated as he snapped the second coup-stick over his thigh and tossed it to the side of the trail.

  “Let’s get off this road,” Donegan suggested. “They know we’re coming.”

  Grouard agreed. “Damn betcha, Irishman.”

  Seamus wagged his head, eyes searching the shadow and light of the timber ahead. “Now we know for sure they’re up there—somewhere.”

  Grouard led off this time, passing Pourier as Big Bat swung into the saddle. For the next half hour Frank did the best he could to keep them to the right of the well-used trail, hanging as much to the trees as possible. With thickening timber standing to the left and in front, and a jumble of high boulders and trees off to the right, a tangle of deadfall lay directly in their path.

  With a jerk Donegan turned in the saddle at the hammer of hooves and the snapping of tree branches on their backtrail.

  “The Indians! The Indians!” squawked the packer, “Trailer Jack.”

  Both Becker and one of the soldiers who had been lagging behind came whipping their mounts into those who formed the end of the file. At that moment the boulders to their right erupted in gunfire. Warriors appeared behind the rocks, beginning to shout while they fired their weapons, closing the trap.

  “To the left—by the saints!” Donegan shouted. “Ride to the left!”

  In among the trees and some low-lying rocks Sibley’s men flooded in a panic, the three
scouts closing the file as every last one of them leaped from his horse, scrambling to whatever cover he could find, and turned to fight.

  “Finerty?”

  Seamus knelt over the newsman lying flat on his back among the legs of his mare that stumbled to the side, out of the way, as Donegan came up. Finerty fluttered his eyes open. While the tree branches above them snapped and rattled with bullets, the air whining with lead, Donegan laid a hand on the fallen man’s chest and pleaded, “Say you’re not hit, Johnny!”

  The reporter slowly propped himself up on an elbow, swiping dust and pine needles from his face and hair. “Son of a bitch! That goddamned bastard threw me!”

  “Your horse?”

  “Gloree, that hurt!” Finerty exclaimed as he rolled onto his knees.

  With his first glance Seamus plainly saw the blood slicking the lathered chest, saw the oozing hole. That next moment the animal crumpled onto its forelegs, settled, then kneeled onto its side, big chest heaving.

  Donegan said, “He’s done for, Johnny.”

  “Goddamn good and well too,” he grumbled. “Cursed animal—throwing me the way it did.”

  “You dumb shit!” Seamus growled, shoving Finerty backward into the dirt and needles. “The poor thing threw you when it was hit.”

  In amazement the reporter just stared at the man standing over him. “I … I didn’t—”

  “He took that bullet for you!” Seamus bellowed, turning on his heel and flinging himself behind a tumble of deadfall. It hurt something deep within him when a big, beautiful animal gave its life for its master.

  Other horses whickered and whinnied, crying out in pain as stray bullets connected, falling among the army’s frightened mounts and Trailer Jack’s braying mules milling behind them in the timber.

  “We gotta get back into the woods, Frank!” Pourier hollered.

  “You’re right, Bat. Get some cover,” Grouard replied anxiously, and began waving his pistol. “Lieutenant! Take your men into the timber! Back into the timber!”

  “Bat!” Seamus bellowed. “Stay with me here and cover the retreat! We gotta make enough lead fly to force them red h’athens to keep their heads down in them rocks. Just long enough.”

  For a moment Pourier looked longingly at the retreating soldiers, then flung himself back up the slope to join Grouard and Donegan at a small cluster of boulders.

  Seamus slapped the half-breed on the shoulder. “Thanks, Bat. I owe you.”

  Pourier winked and shoved his cheek onto the stock of his Springfield carbine, looking for a target.

  In no time Sibley got his detail up and moving without having to prod a single man. Latching on to their horses, the soldiers zigzagged down to their left with the mounts, Becker bellowing at the mules, all of them racing through a few trees for some thicker stands of pine and fir a few hundred yards farther down the slope. There among some deadfall the men tied off the animals and turned about, flopping onto the ground behind nature’s own breastworks.

  “Look on up the trail, Frank,” Seamus huffed after his run as he finally slid in between Grouard and Pourier near the soldiers, pointing the long, octagonal barrel of his Sharps up the slope where the trail wound itself between two high bluffs.

  The half-breeds nodded.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “If they got us in there—none of us wouldn’t come out with our hair.”

  Pushing the Sharps lever down, Donegan ejected the empty cartridge, then replanted a live round in the breech. “Seems those warriors dogging our tails was just a little too anxious to close the trap, don’t it?”

  “Lucky us,” grumbled Finerty as he crabbed up to join the three, whining lead following the white men into the timber.

  Grouard rolled onto his back and found Sibley, then instructed, “Lieutenant, tell your boys not to fire a shot until they got a good target.”

  “These men have fought before,” Sibley snapped testily.

  “Just remind ’em!” Donegan added. “We’re going to need every last bullet we have before this day’s done. Maybe by the time we try to get back to Crook.”

  Nodding, a grim Sibley responded, “All right.”

  “And … Lieutenant,” Seamus said, causing the officer to halt in a crouch, “tell your men it’s a good idea to keep one last round in their pistols for themselves.”

  Chapter 12

  7 July 1876

  It wasn’t as if Seamus had to tell Sibley’s soldiers that they might not make it out of that fix alive. They all knew the odds they were facing.

  “Men,” the lieutenant raised his strong voice above that clutter of deadfall and low rocks where he had his detail ringed in a ragged crescent, “you can all see that the Indians have discovered us. If we can make an honorable escape from this trap—all together, I might add—we will attempt it. If retreat should prove impossible, let no man among you surrender.”

  Seamus looked over a few of the grim faces of those soldiers listening while they peered over fallen trees at the enemy’s ground upslope. It looked as if the troopers truly understood.

  “You must hear me,” Sibley continued. “There is no surrender. If we can’t escape—we must die in our tracks. Those savages will show us no mercy if we’re captured. Make every shot kill, men. Make every shot kill.”

  Sibley crabbed back toward the scouts and settled in near Seamus.

  “You did good, Lieutenant,” Donegan said quietly. “If they know how bad things are and listen to you—we still might have a chance of getting out of this.”

  His eyes narrowing on the Irishman, Sibley asked, “You really think so, or are we just putting off the inevitable?”

  “Man can’t ever lose hope,” Seamus said. “Man’s always gotta try.”

  “’Specially when it comes to his own scalp,” Pourier added.

  Over the following minutes the screech of war cries and death songs grew as the warriors emerged from the boulders and began to work their way down the hillside toward the soldiers, firing as they came through the timber. Working to the left and right through the standing trees to close in on the white men lying among their breastworks, the Indians eased into rifle range, starting to pour a concerted fire upon their enemy.

  “See that fancy son of a bitch?” Seamus asked the two half-breeds, indicating a warrior who appeared to be directing the others: a chief dressed in moon-white buckskins and wearing a long, flowing war bonnet. “Either one of you ever see him before?”

  When Pourier shrugged, Grouard said, “Reminds me of a fella called White Antelope.”

  Big Bat squinted, looking closer, then replied, “But he’s Shahiyena.”

  “And a mean one to boot,” Grouard added.

  “Cheyenne, eh?” Donegan asked. “So they’re mixed in with them Lakota what wiped those soldiers out on the Greasy Grass?”

  Frank nodded. “Likely are. All blood cousins.”

  “Blood is right,” Seamus murmured.

  A soldier yelled off to their left, “Here they come!.”

  Twisting about behind the bulwark of the deadfall, Seamus saw the big warrior in the white buckskins waving the rest to follow behind him.

  “They’re charging!” Sibley shouted.

  “Make every shot count!” bellowed Sergeant Oscar Cornwall.

  Sergeant Charles W. Day reminded them, “Shoot low! Shoot low!”

  “Aim for White Antelope!” Grouard instructed his two companions.

  “Damn right,” Pourier replied. “I’ll do everything I can to drop that bastard!”

  On came the first concerted charge of the afternoon, led by that war chief in the showy buckskins bright with quillwork sewn down the leggings. Beside White Antelope rode another warrior, bare-chested and wearing a buffalo-fur headdress, one horn protruding from the center of the warrior’s forehead.

  Seamus held high, leading that horseman beside White Antelope with too much of the big buffalo gun’s front blade. The gun shoved backward into his shoulder violently, once again reminding the Irish
man of the weapon’s great power. Quickly he jerked down on the lever, dropping the rifle’s breech as it flung empty brass out of the smoking chamber. Gun smoke curled up in a gray wisp—a reassuring fragrance to a veteran frontiersman, as sweet smelling as would be water to a thirsty mule.

  As Donegan stuffed the hot, empty cartridge into his left pocket, the war cries crashed on his ears, louder still in a growing crescendo. The pounding of two hundred or more hooves thundered through the trees, reverberated from the boulders beyond them. From the right pocket of his canvas mackinaw, Seamus pulled another long golden bullet and shoved it into the rifle, ripping back the lever to close the breech, and resighted on the charging warrior.

  This time as he laid his finger on the back trigger, he held even higher and did not lead the buffalo-horned horseman as the warrior’s pony crossed from left to right along the front of the soldier line. Another inch higher, he calculated, as he set the back trigger. He felt his way to the front trigger with the same finger-pad and held his breath, squeezing.

  In the puff of smoke that drifted the way of the soft breeze there in that stand of evergreen, Seamus watched the warrior pitch sideways, his single-horn headdress spilling in the opposite direction.

  “Got him!” Pourier hollered at that exact moment.

  “I dropped White Antelope!” Grouard protested.

  “It was my damned bullet!” growled Bat.

  “That makes two of ’em—we got more saddles to empty, God-bless-it!” Seamus bellowed at them both.

  The soldiers flung their wool coats from their arms, shedding the heavy garments in the shafts of hot sunlight that streamed through the forest canopy overhead with a shimmering radiance. For the better part of a half hour the warriors kept up a hot fire, inching down the slope. Then with some yelling among them, the gunfire slackened. A voice called out from the trees up the hill.

  “What’s he saying?” Donegan asked.

 

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