Below Roman Nose the frightened, glassy eyes blinked clear, staring frozen up at his while the Cheyenne slowly dragged the knife blade across the soldier’s forehead. Agonizingly slow, hearing the gurgle in the man’s throat turn to a high-pitched bubbling wheeze. Down the side of the soldier’s face, across the top of the ear and on to the nape of the neck.
Only when he had begun to pull the full scalp from the soldier’s head did the white man quit moving. Roman Nose smelled the stench of voiding bowels. And knew his enemy died at last. He cursed the luck of it. The man had not lasted beneath the knife. Denying Roman Nose the joy of showing his victim his own scalp, shaking it in his face. The white man died too quickly.
He jerked up, recognizing the tone of the shouts and a quieting of the wingbone whistles. On the knoll to the north Crazy Horse waved his red blanket. The Sioux were breaking off the attack, dragging off their wounded. Their ponies splashed water and sandy grit into the sparkling red-orange sunshine of a new day. Across the Powder, up the sharp-lipped bank and into the sage.
Roman Nose cursed under his breath, flinging the limp body down into the yellow dust as more lead bullets kicked up spurts of dirt, whining into the ground around him like harmless buffalo gnats.
Come a day, he would no longer have to follow in the shadow of Crazy Horse. Come that day, Roman Nose promised himself as he sprinted off on foot, he would stand alone, his own prowess in war overshadowed by no man, Sioux or Cheyenne.
Out of the dust and powdersmoke, two young Cheyenne warriors swept up on either side of him protectively. Both grinned and shouted their greetings. One held out his bare leg and an arm. Roman Nose pulled himself behind the youth without breaking his stride. The ribby pony pranced around wildly in a circle as the heavy load settled on its back. Then its master kicked heels into its flanks and burst off, down the slope into the cool waters of the Powder, up the far side to join the rest of the Sioux and Cheyenne leaving this soldier fort.
Leaving the fight.
Come a day, Roman Nose promised himself, I will not leave a fight until all soldiers lay dead. That, or my spirit will be freed. It can be no other way.
He turned quarter-round to look over his shoulder at the small, squalid tent town beside the dirt walls of the soldier fort, raising his rifle and shrieking his oath.
A promise.
Come a day, I will give the last drop of blood in my body—to watch the last soldier die by my hand!
Chapter 14
“By God, young man—Providence indeed holds us in the palm of its hand once more!” freighting boss A. C. Leighton roared, slapping his young employee on the back.
“Yessir, A.C.,” the employee replied. “One of us was born under a good star, sir.”
A good star or not, twenty-three years before that day the Missouri homestead home of Sheriff Reed Burnett had listened to the hungry wails of their first-born son, Fincelius Gustavus. A mouthful of a name for anyone, much less poor, grub-hoe Ozark folk like the Burnetts. The parents called their firstborn Finn.
For eighteen years Finn grew whipcord lean and wise in the ways of the woods, tracking barefoot through the hardwood forests after gray squirrel, rabbit and an assortment of birds, targets all for his practiced marksmanship. Cardinals and jays haunted the shaded hollers of his youth for those eighteen years spent growing up among the slave-owning people of Missouri and knowing of no other world beyond Taney County. There was little cause to wonder on anything beyond the shady hills of his youth.
Until the day news of war came home to Taney County.
For the next three years young Finn Burnett continued to work the family ground, repairing rail fence every fall and turning the dark soil each spring while his father sheriffed the county. Never was much said about the war between them, except that it stayed far enough away. Even with that battle down at Pea Ridge and all. The Yankees were still far enough away, Sheriff Burnett told his growing son. The day come soon enough to learn of the world outside. To learn of blood and death in the twinkling of a Yankee’s eye.
But by late summer of 1864 the Union forces pressured the undermanned and underarmed Confederate home units something fierce. And what with Sherman turning Georgia to ruin and Sheridan burning his way up the Shenandoah, those of both political persuasions in Missouri saw it would be only a matter of time until the Union blue mopped up the eastern battlefields with the Rebel gray. Only a matter of time and who could throw enough manpower into the fray before the inevitable end for the once-hopeful and always-honorable Confederate States of America.
Both the Union blue and the Rebel butternut sent conscription units scouring the hill country of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, searching out the half-grown sons of the men they had collected back in ’sixty-one. Surely by now, went the reasoning, some of the young lads would be old enough to carry a gun.
Sheriff Reed Burnett was not the sort to take any such chance. Better that his son should live among the enemy, than wear the blue uniform of that enemy’s army.
Came time to go that misty, October morning in ’sixty-four, with the leaves turned pumpkin orange and sunset red, igniting his boyhood forest with a blaze of color. Finn turned once from the middle of the dusty road, his feet already pinched by the new brogans his daddy had bought him the day before.
Finn waved one last time. Then pointed his nose north. Not sure what the Nebraska frontier would bring. Only that his father had assured him the faraway place was far enough away for a twenty-year-old to disappear among settlers and sutlers, teamsters and buffalo hunters, faceless in the crowds of frontier army and railroad crews. To Finn Burnett it was not a cowardly thing to do, this running from conscription. Not cowardly to turn your back, to shuck it and leave it behind so that you didn’t have to end up fighting against everything you had ever known. Everything you had ever loved as well.
Many were the times those first few weeks that young Finn Burnett’s eyes stung with hot tears of remembrance and loneliness. Only those who have left home before they are ready to leave know just what memories do to a young man adrift in a foreign sea of strange faces and smells and fears.
At Omaha he stripped hide wagons of their rank buffalo furs brought in from the prairie beyond the tall-grass country of eastern Nebraska. When the hide men left, Finn nailed together board fence that would hold the growing hog population of the town’s stockyards. And each night he ate his biscuit and bowl of stew, thinking on home. Thinking on someplace where the snow never fell so deep. Someplace like the shady hollers where the wind never cut through his clothes as it did here on the Great Plains of the buffalo and the mighty Sioux.
By the middle of March in ’sixty-five, twenty-one-year-old Finn Burnett had himself a job that guaranteed a little warmth to it. If he stayed close enough to the forge where he assisted the blacksmith in all his labors. If he stayed busy enough moving horse and mule, wagon and dray in and out of the livery on the outskirts of a burgeoning Omaha.
It was there in that smoky, stinking, sweat-smelly, dung-reeking livery that a freighter from Ottumwa, Iowa, watched the energetic Burnett working over three days of readying the wagons that would carry A. C. Leighton’s goods west to Fort Laramie along with the contract to haul army supplies for General Patrick Conner’s Powder River expedition against Red Cloud’s haughty Sioux.
By God, Finn Burnett realized he had never seen a real Indian. Only the squash-eaters living along the Missouri River who wandered into Omaha, begging for coins and a drink or two of the white man’s whiskey. Never a real, by God, Indian like Sioux or Cheyenne.
“Why not come see some for yourself, son?” Leighton had asked him that third afternoon, convinced that the swelling arms and the good common sense of the youth would prove worthwhile on this contract to the army.
“You saying … go with you to Injun country?”
“By damned, Burnett—that’s what he’s asking you!” The blacksmith slung the hammer down with a resounding clang against the anvil, red sparks sprayin
g like fireflies. And he smiled. “You’re a bigger ass than that cantankerous Jack back there in stall two if you don’t go with this man.”
“By God,” Finn said, drawing himself up, “by God, Mr. Leighton. I will go with you!”
“Sixty-five dollars a month, Finn Burnett. I’ll provide bed and board while you’re in my employ. Do you have a rifle?”
He was still stunned, choking on the unholy sum as it worked around in his mouth like a chaw of fine Kentucky shag-leaf burley. “Sixty-five dollar a month, Mr. Leighton? Ah … no sir. Ain’t got a gun but this old pistol papa give me when I come up from home.”
“All right, then,” Leighton said with a smile. “Here,” and he threw the youth the rifle he had slung across his left arm for three days while watching the blacksmith repairing wagon and harness for the long trip west to that faraway land of the Sioux and Cheyenne.
“B-But, sir,” Burnett stammered, staring down at the rifle in his hands, twisting it this way and that in the murky red glow of the blacksmith’s forge.
“Jesus Christ, Burnett!” the blacksmith himself wailed. “That’s a goddamned Ballard he’s give you!”
“A … a Ballard?” Finn echoed.
“One of the best needle-guns ever!” the blacksmith replied, snatching it from Burnett to admire.
“You just might need a Ballard out there,” Leighton had said quietly.
For a moment Finn Burnett studied the eyes of his new employer, and figured Leighton knew whereof he spoke. “Yessir.”
“Call me A.C.”
“Sure thing … A.C. I thankee for the Ballard rifle. I’ll take proper care of it, I will. Yes, by God—I’ll go with you to Laramie … and beyond. Wherever you want me to whip some goddamned mules, I’ll go. And I’ll see for myself those mighty Injuns of the plains!”
Fortunately for him, Finn Burnett did not see much of the mighty warriors of the far prairie on that trip out. But most of Conner’s troops did. That expedition of eighteen and sixty-five proved disastrous for man and beast alike. Except that General Conner built the fort he named for himself beside the Powder River. Less than a year later the army would want its collective memory cleansed of Conner, and would rename the post Fort Reno.
That fall of ’sixty-five, with the war having ended in a whimper down in Appomattox Wood and soldiers from both sides wandering west as they discovered they had no homes to wander home to, Finn Burnett bid another tearful good-bye to A. C. Leighton and turned his nose south for Taney County.
Funny thing of it, the going home wasn’t what Finn had made it out to be over all those lonely nights and long days of remembering. A few of the orange and red leaves still clung to the same high branches, refusing winter’s first icy blasts. The wagon ruts along the old road leading to home filled with the same slick of dirty ice as they always had at this time of year. But to Finn Burnett, southern Missouri was no longer home.
Time and again the young man ventured out of the cabin, to stand on the rough-hewn porch and stare off toward the hills that seemed to hem him in now. Making him uncomfortable, like the shirts and britches he outgrew all too quickly as a young’un. Outgrowing the home of his childhood. This place made him feel closed in after seeing all the expanse of prairie and plains where he had come to manhood. These Ozarks could not hold him after laying eyes on those towering peaks where the sun could never melt all the snow.
Finn Burnett finally owned up to what he was and what he was meant to do. And told his mama and the sheriff of Taney County where it was Finn Burnett intended to do it. So it came that on a second cold, frost-licked autumn morning fraught with restlessness and a tingle of fear, Finn Burnett turned in the dusty road to wave one last time to those he left behind. And would never see again.
For the West was bigger than any man. And the remembrance of that country made one young man’s heart swell to bursting.
Finding Leighton always in need of a right hand and a young man to trail-boss his freighting outfits, Finn Burnett once again pointed his nose west to the northern Rockies. This time in the summer of 1866. Following Col. Henry B. Carrington’s “Overland Circus” that would reoccupy Conner’s Powder River post, then construct two additional forts along the Montana Road to the gold diggings of Alder Gulch first blazed by John Bozeman.
Through that summer and into the fall, Finn Burnett watched Fort Phil Kearny rise from the plateau at the base of the Big Horns, a log at a time. While they buried soldier and civilian alike in the post cemetery, a body at a time.
By the time December snows had closed off all travel north and south along the Montana Road, Finn Burnett had seen his fill of Sioux and Cheyenne. Carrington’s forts were effectively under siege as the white men fought for their lives whenever they ventured beyond the stockade walls.
To those walls young Finn Burnett had hurried with the rest to watch as Capt. William Judd Fetterman led eighty men off the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge, following the luring decoys to their deaths.
He would never forget the memory of those frozen, grotesque, mutilated bodies he and the others dared go retrieve on the morning of December 22. Enough Sioux and Cheyenne on these high plains for any one man’s lifetime.
Come spring and the first thaw in that country of rarefied air, Finn Burnett was under instruction to take his wagons and teamsters south to Fort Laramie. From there on to North Platte, Nebraska, where he would meet Leighton once more. Into the empty high-walled freighters would go supplies for the starving posts along the Bozeman Road. And if all went well by the time Leighton showed up at Laramie, the horse-drawn mowers he had included in his lading would be put to use up the road ninety miles from Fort Phil Kearny at C.F. Smith.
Back along the Platte River Road, Leighton himself had run on to a pair of wagonmasters out of Ohio who were bringing a load of supplies out to old Fort Kearney in Nebraska. From there both John Morrison and Webb Wood had planned on running empty all the way to Fort Phil Kearny in the Big Horns on a personal errand. Word of all the deaths along the trail had reached Ohio. Morrison was coming to bring family home from that dangerous place where life had proved itself cheap.
Leighton convinced the two wagon bosses to tie in with him and load their fourteen freighters with supplies in North Platte, joining their teams with his to better fight off attacks once past Bridger’s Ferry and into the undisputed hunting grounds of Red Cloud’s Sioux. At Laramie, A.C. happily learned he had been awarded the contract to cut hay at Fort C.F. Smith. And he learned as well that his wagon train of supplies could travel north under the protection of Capt. David Gordon’s troop of 2nd Cavalry accompanying John “Portugee” Phillips north with mail for the three Bozeman Road forts.
“Providence indeed,” Leighton repeated now, hoisting his coffee cup laced with the finest whiskey the Fort Laramie sutler could boast. “I not only have the contract at Smith to provide them with hay at fifty dollar the ton, but I have a military escort to accompany me and Morrison north!”
“Seems our timing was on the mark again, A.C.,” Burnett agreed, sharing in the whiskey which helped cut the chill that came each sundown to the high plains. No matter that it was early summer and the days could broil a man’s brains out. In this country the nights could turn just as mean, and every bit as cold as the days were hot.
“From what I watched loaded at North Platte, we’re carrying more than just food north to the posts, A.C.”
“That’s right, Burnett,” John Morrison remarked as he stepped up, clinking his china mug against Finn’s. “Bet those new rifles are sorely needed by the army north of here.”
“Rifles and bullets both,” Finn Burnett agreed, sipping on his whiskey as he sat down on a hard-tack box near the fire, warming his hands after turning up his collar. “By the way, Mr. Morrison … been meaning to ask you something, if’n you don’t mind.”
Morrison found a place to settle beside Burnett at the fire circled with teamsters and contract quartermaster employees who would head north into Red Cloud’s land come mor
ning. “Don’t mind at all, Mr. Burnett. Ask away.”
“Back some weeks ago, when we joined up in North Platte, A.C. told me you and Mr. Wood was heading to Fort Phil Kearny on your own … on ‘family’ business. I ain’t meaning to pry … not that at all. Knowing as well as any man what grief there’s been come visiting that place.”
“Understand you spent the winter at Kearny in the Big Horns.”
“That’s right, Mr. Morrison. I seen with my own eyes all that passed that place … so I ain’t one to ask this lightly. Just curious is all. You don’t gotta tell me, you don’t want to.”
Morrison chuckled within his dark beard, winking at both Webb Wood and Burnett’s employer. “Out with it, Finn. Will you ask me your question already?”
Burnett cleared his throat. “I don’t rightly remember running personal on to any soldier named Morrison. Don’t recall anyone of that name up there … or at Fort Reno, for that matter. My memory might be going … so that’s why I ask. You have a brother killed with Fetterman at the fort up yonder?”
Finn watched John Morrison blink, unspeaking for a long moment, his eyes glancing first at Leighton, then Wood, before he stared into the fire. At last he gazed back at Burnett, patiently waiting at his side for an answer.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Leighton … I had no busi—”
“Quite all right, Finn,” he answered, a hand on Burnett’s knee. “You have every right to know.” He wagged his head. “No, I didn’t have a brother killed with Fetterman.”
“I’m glad of that, sir,” Burnett sighed, relieved as well for his nosiness had not strayed on to delicate feelings.
“But I did have a relative killed with Colonel Fetterman.”
“A relative, sir?”
“Brother-in-law. Fella from Nebraska. My sister’s husband.”
“You’re going to Phil Kearny to claim his body?” Leighton inquired, sitting near Morrison’s knee.
The Ohioan shook his head. “No. He’ll rest where he’s buried. I’ve come instead to take my sister home.”
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