Red Cloud's Revenge

by Terry C. Johnston

  “How?”

  Seamus regarded Graham, then Grant. And finally the young private. “Him.” He nodded to the private. “He’ll take the animals back.”

  “I’ll what?” the young man squeaked.

  Graham paid no attention to him. “I’m listening.”

  “We’ll take everything from here on our backs. The lad here can make it back to Kearny well before dark.”

  “I ain’t going back!”

  “Shuddup!” Graham snapped, then stared at the tall civilian again. “You’re crazy, figuring us to make it ninety miles on foot, Irishman!”

  Seamus grinned, straining to hide his own chattering teeth. “If a Irishman can make that walk, boys—surely the two of you can as well.”

  Graham nodded to the private. “He ride your gray back?”

  Seamus studied the youth. Then finally nodded once. “He’ll do to ride him back. Lash the mules together. Tether ’em to the back of me saddle.”

  Then he turned to face the young private. “You get this horse to a man named Sam Marr. First thing you do when you get in that stockade. You find Sam Marr. Give him my horse.”

  “He’ll know what to do?” Graham asked.

  “Best horse man this side of Gettysburg,” Donegan replied.

  “He’s gonna have to be,” Grant moaned. “Stock there at Kearny running out of food. Can’t get down to the Pinery for cottonwood the way we should to feed the animals.”

  “Marr’ll see to the stallion.”

  “You won’t see that animal till spring.”

  Something stung Seamus a bit, something like the reality of parting from the stallion. First he had pulled himself away from the girl, knowing it was right not to bed her. Not this way. And now, it was every bit as right for him to send the gray back. Back to Sam Marr at Fort Phil Kearny, where the animal stood a chance of surviving the winter.

  Out here in this wilderness, the gray might not last out the struggle north to Fort C.F. Smith.

  He stroked the stallion’s neck. “C’mon over here, sojur.” Seamus waved. “Best we get these stirrups adjusted for you.”

  “You’re a damned sight taller’n me, mister.” The young trooper’s teeth chattered.

  “Damned sight taller most men,” Grant mumbled, his lips paling in color as he stammered.

  “Just means I’m gonna make a bigger hole, Sergeant,” Seamus said.

  “A bigger hole?” Noah Graham asked.

  “When I fall down dead-froze in the snow!”

  He and Graham had laughed about it, then lashed the mules together and bid farewell to the young trooper. Graham stood watching Donegan. Seamus watching the stallion disappear beyond the ridge.

  “Let’s march, Mr. Donegan.”

  He nodded to Graham, bringing up the rear of the little procession turning its nose into the north wind, busting through the snow climbing from their calves to well past their hips by mid-afternoon. Time and again Seamus pulled Grant out of the snowdrifts and icy banks. As the sun began to sink onto the spires of the Big Horns, Donegan had begun lugging Grant along under his arm, struggling to stay in the trail Graham busted ahead of him, one step at a time.

  When Noah Graham found it impossible to rise from his knees that last time, Donegan growled they had to cache for the night. Near the side of the trail the two of them spotted a likely place to camp, both struggling to drag the semiconscious Grant out of the wind and the snow. As many times as he had stumbled and fallen, breaking through the icy crust, Leonard Grant appeared in bad shape. Some time ago he had ceased mumbling incoherently. Now by the fire, Grant sat like a statue, staring into the leaping flames, dazed and half dead.

  Forcing small sips of warmed whiskey diluted by Donegan with melted snow, Graham eventually got his fellow sergeant responding by the time the wind picked up and a coal-cotton darkness descended on their little campsite.

  By the next morning, Leonard Grant had awakened to complain of his hunger and his frozen toes.

  “By the by, Irishman,” Grant gazed across the fire Donegan had spent a fitful night feeding with limbs, “you have any more of that whiskey you nursed me with?”

  Seamus snorted, patting the side of his mackinaw. “Not much, Sergeant. I’ll keep what I’ve got left for a real need. Not just your whiskey thirst.”

  He watched Graham wrap his shoes with wide strips of burlap sacking.

  Graham glanced up. “Army still don’t make a good pair of boots for a man.”

  Donegan nodded. “A shame they march a man out West to fight Injins and the winter, and don’t give him something fit and decent to march in. Boots falling apart, are they?”

  “Stitching ain’t worth a red piss,” Leonard Grant said as he finished lashing the burlap around the split leather of his army shoes. That burlap was probably the only thing keeping the soldiers’ feet from freezing fully.

  “How come your boots ain’t fallen apart?” Graham asked.

  Donegan patted the calf-high Jefferson boots with their tall Cuban heel and squared toe. “These boots was the last pair give me before Appomattox. Drew ’em out hoping they’d make me through to the end of the war. They did that and better—all ’cause of a man named Sam Marr. Met him, and he showed me how to take care of leather—be it a boot or the saddle on that gray I sent back under that sojur of yours yesterday.”

  “Some secret?” Graham asked as he stood, shook his legs and hoisted a canvas satchel over both arms.

  “Not now, t’ain’t. Lampblack and grease. But you must start with good leather. Not the third-class cowhide the army buys from its suppliers because someone in the War Department’s getting paid off.”

  “Ain’t that the blessed truth,” groaned Leonard Grant.

  “Sam Marr had a fella he knew back in Independence, Missouri, rebuild my boots from the ground up, using prime leather. And, for more than a year now I’ve kept ’em oiled—not a crack to be seen for it.”

  Grant stood shouldering his load. Donegan stepped between the two soldiers. Graham stared off into the north, where dark clouds scudded along the ridges, forbidding and angry. The wind moaning off the Big Horns with the coming light sliced at the trio as surely as a saber swung at close quarters. Cutting. Brutal. Bloody as well.

  “C’mon, Irishman.” Graham tapped Seamus before he led off. “Let’s hope these shoes of mine will outlast each miserable mile we’ve got to put behind us today.”

  * * *

  The same insistent wind snaffled the single braid along the young war-chief’s cheek. Crazy Horse pulled the hairy buffalo robe more tightly about his shoulders and stared into the south.

  Whereas the Cheyenne stayed close to the Tongue River and the Arapahos under white renegade Bob North, who hunkered for the winter along the banks of the upper Bighorn, Red Cloud’s Oglalla Sioux had wandered north to the lower reaches of the Powder River after the great defeat they had dealt the soldiers near the Pine Woods fort, the place the white man called Phil Kearny.

  “My nephew is touched-by-the-moon?”

  Crazy Horse turned, finding his uncle Little Hawk approaching with Man-Afraid. Both huddled against the predawn winter wind, beneath buffalo robes and wool leggings.

  The young Oglalla chieftain smiled. “I am young. My blood runs hot. Tired old men like you both should not come to greet the morning.”

  The three laughed before all fell quiet once more as they listened to the pained keening of the wind slashing the ridges above the Powder.

  “You come to seek a winter vision, nephew?”

  Crazy Horse turned to Little Hawk. “No, uncle. I come to wish the winter away. So we may be at our war once more.”

  “The young are so anxious for blood,” Little Hawk said to Man-Afraid.

  “This one, I think he hasn’t had his fill of white blood for the winter,” Man-Afraid agreed.

  “Red Cloud, High Backbone … even the Cheyenne war-chief Roman Nose himself—all were certain that in the Moon of Deer Shedding Horns we would deliver one terrib
le blow to the soldiers at the Pine Woods fort … and the rest would flee to the south, beyond our hunting grounds.”

  Man-Afraid clucked, “The soldiers did not run.”

  “Even though we had a hundred in the hand that day on the ridge where blood muddied the snow and my moccasins grew slick with the gore of soldiers who fought bravely until there was but one.”

  “You left your robe behind to cover his body,” Little Hawk commented.

  “Yes,” Crazy Horse said, nodding. “He was the bravest among the rocks.” He spat on his fingers. “Some of the soldiers threw themselves away.”

  “Killed themselves?” Little Hawk asked.

  “Threw their spirits away rather than fight like men,” the young Oglalla chief spat again.

  Man-Afraid was quiet for a long time, feeling the moan of the wind in his soul as well as in his bones. Then he finally spoke. “We defeated those soldiers with bow and lance, my young friend. Now, after fighting these white men along the road since last summer’s sundance, more than half our warriors have rifles.”

  “They are old rifles, Man-Afraid,” Crazy Horse replied. “You will need much ammunition to feed those soldier rifles when we resume our attacks on the forts come the short-grass.”

  “Red Cloud already speaks of going to Laramie to trade for powder and lead. We will load these soldier rifles taken on that icy day … and kill more soldiers with them come the short-grass time.”

  Little Hawk gazed at Crazy Horse. “My nephew is not satisfied with talk of war come the time our ponies grow sleek on the new grass?”

  “No uncle.” He shook his head, staring into the south, beyond the ridges and hills, the canyons and badlands, to where the two soldier forts still stood like fists shoved down the throat of the Lakota. “I cannot wait to crush the forts themselves this time.”

  “Your heart follows Red Cloud in this?”

  “Yes.” Crazy Horse nodded to his uncle. “Enough of attacking the wagons and those who journey on the white road to Crow land. Enough of burning the grass the white man cuts to feed his horses. Enough of killing a soldier here, a soldier there as he chops down the trees to burn in his wood lodges at the forts. Yes, my heart rests with Red Cloud. We make war until the white soldiers are no more.”

  “There are many among the bands who say the diseases our people suffered last robe season and this are the magic of the white man,” Man-Afraid barely whispered. “They say the white man will stay, because he knows this magic … and he knows he will prevail. All Wakan Tanka’s red children will be as the dust that blows from the face of the earth. Gone away before the white man’s magic sickness.”

  “I do not believe this.” Crazy Horse whirled on his mentor, the man who taught him not only war, but courage as well. And he wondered why the fight had gone out of Man-Afraid, like the juices dried from the prairie grasses come the cold winds of autumn. Grasses gone brittle before the onslaught of winter, like Man-Afraid’s hope gone brittle before the coming of the white man.

  “You tell me, Crazy Horse. I will listen.”

  “We grow sick when we touch the white man. If only he will stay away, our children will not cry in pain. Our women will not carry the oozing sickness between their legs. There is no magic to that. We drive the white man from our lands, there will be no more sickness. Our children will not cry from pinched, hungry bellies. Our women will not shame themselves. Nor will our young men hunger for the crazy water these white men bring to dull the fighting spirit of our warriors.”

  Man-Afraid brooded on it for a moment. His young protégé must surely be right. “There is no magic.”

  “Aiyee,” Crazy Horse whispered, his arm bare as it crept from his robe, pointing off to the south. “There is no magic … none strong enough to save the white men who huddle in their pitiful forts. Come the short-grass time, and after the strength that grows in our people from the sundance, we will follow Red Cloud.”

  “To the forts, nephew?”

  “Yes, Little Hawk,” he answered. “We will crush every last man, woman and child in those forts. That is the only way. Then the white man will send no more into our country. When we wipe the breast of our earth-mother clean of all traces of the white man at last.”

  Chapter 5

  “I already told you this morning, Leonard,” Sgt. Noah Graham growled wearily to the man plodding behind him. He stared once more at the back of the tall Irishman busting through the snow ahead of the two who followed, and shook his head. Leonard Grant was in bad shape and getting worse.

  “I don’t remember, Noah,” the soldier whined. “Tell me again. I promise I won’t ask no more.”

  “You’ve asked me twenty times this morning already!” Graham snapped. “I’m not going to tell you again, goddamn—”

  “Tell him!”

  Graham slid to a halt behind Seamus Donegan, who stood waist deep in the snow, his Henry rifle cradled across his chest, glowering like a monolithic beast with sunken, red-rimmed eyes.

  “The sonuvabitch keeps asking what day—”

  “Tell him, goddammit,” Donegan ordered. “You tell him, or come up here to break trail.”

  “Who’re you to order me, you goddamned mule-headed mick!”

  Donegan sighed. It was too cold to fight. Graham wanted to fight, but it would take too much out of the both of them. And poor Leonard Grant just needed to keep moving. Seamus decided he’d keep them moving, if he had to knock them unconscious and drag them along by himself.

  “It’s the seventh, Sergeant.” Donegan flung his voice over Graham’s shoulder to the weary soldier bringing up the tail of their sad procession.

  “The seventh.” Grant chewed on that as he chewed on his chapped lips, seemingly trying to make sense of it. “How many—”

  “This is our fourth day, goddammit!” Graham shouted, snatching his fellow sergeant by the collar and shaking him.

  “Four days?”

  “Let’s march,” Donegan said, turning. “You foot sloggers know how to do that, don’t you?”

  “Your goddamned idea to leave the mules and that gray brute of yours behind,” Graham snarled. “We’d be riding now you hadn’t—”

  “Your turn to bust trail, Graham.” Seamus said it softly as he turned.

  The sergeant ground to a halt, his legs buried in Donegan’s tracks, snow up to his crotch and more swirling like white buckshot that stung his cheeks. “I … I don’t figure I’ve got the strength left—”

  “Then you best find the strength to shut up and keep marching behind me. You won’t break trail for me … you bloody well shut your bleeming mouth. Leonard?”

  “Yeah, Seamus?” the other sergeant answered.

  “Sing me some more.”

  “Anything in particular.”

  “Just sing. I figure I gotta walk like a goddamned foot-sloggin’ infantry sojur … I best have me some marching songs to go ’long with this little walk. Sing, Leonard.”

  “Come unto me, ye heroes—”

  “Louder, Leonard! Louder!” Donegan ordered. “This wind carries your voice away.”

  “Come unto me, ye heroes,

  Whose hearts are true and bold,

  Who value more your honor,

  Than others do their gold.”

  “Than others do their gold!” Donegan repeated lustily, his deep voice rocking the branches of the trees, all the time reminding himself to keep putting one boot before the other. Just sing and walk. Sing and walk.

  “Give ear unto my story,” Sergeant Grant continued, feeling some warmth in the singing, the march, the swinging of his arms beneath the heavy Springfield rifle he clutched like a lover.

  “Give ear unto my story,

  And the truth to you I’ll tell,

  Concerning many a soldier,

  Who for his country fell.”

  Through the shank of that icy morning and into midday Seamus Donegan kept Leonard Grant singing. And Noah Graham grumbling angrily between them both. A man does what a man must, Sea
mus reminded himself. And thought on other things.

  The shriek of shells and the whistle of minié balls. The jets of earth erupting and the showers of shrapnel from the throat of the artillery he rode hellbent to capture. And always stray bullets hissing, tearing at his jacket sleeves as he hacked and carved his way in red through the Confederate positions at Gettysburg.

  His beloved 2nd Cavalry. With the war over, his own Company C dispatched to return to Fort Laramie under Capt. James Peale, on orders of Lieutenant Colonel Wessells to save the horses at Fort Phil Kearny from starvation that late January of 1867. It would be weeks before word came up from Laramie that Peale and every man along had arrived safely. But not until spring would Wessells learn that Peale’s command had reached Laramie without a single horse. One hundred fifty carcasses strewn south along that stretch of the Montana Road, bones bleaching to mark every mile for years to come.

  “One small loaf of bread is all issued to us each day.”

  Seamus recalled what Graham had talked about last night, huddled at their little fire after the last of the jerky and hardtack had been swallowed.

  “Nary a strip of fresh meat, nor vegetables!” Graham had laughed. “We ain’t seen a potato in better’n four months at Kearny.”

  “Time was when we finished our bread each day,” Leonard Grant had continued explaining, filling his mouth with words when no food was left between them, “a man had to fall back on the wormy hardtack left the army after the war. That, and the frowzy bacon or salt-pork. A’times all we had for days was white-bean soup and coffee.”

  “You’ve lived,” Donegan had reminded them this morning as they all awoke to growling bellies and short dispositions. “We’ll find something to eat today.”

  “What you figure we’ll run into—”

  “Something,” Seamus had snapped, then quickly turned his nose into the wind slashing out of the north.

  “Least we was warm last night, Noah,” Grant tried cheering his fellow soldier. “Not like back at Phil Kearny where we had to stay up bucking wood past nine o’clock, just to keep the stoves fired till break o’day.”