They leaped from the dark timber like liquid shadows. Hideous faces, smeared with earth paint and gaping grins. For a moment Private Ketcham froze. The Sioux screamed at him, laughing. And like a frightened doe, he turned to run.
He never really felt the last three arrows. It was the first that burned. Driven deep in his back.
Spilling forward clumsily, Ketcham’s face buried itself in the deep musk of a bed of pine needles. The sun grew hot, scorching the back of his neck. So quiet now. Henry listened to the scritch-scritch of the ants and beetles crawling through the needles and grass. Searching out the warm blood.
In the deafening quiet of that timbered slope, Private Ketcham dreamed of ants crossing his cheek. Then held his breath, listening to the footsteps on the hillside above him. Below him. Circling in. He ached to open his eyes. Ached to brush the ants from his face.
Thank God! he thought as someone yanked his head out of the pine needles, their fingers threading roughly through his strawberry hair.
Now they’ll brush the ants off. Say! Don’t hurt me like that … He wanted to scream at them. It’s only the ants need brushing off—
The gray cloud crossing Ketcham’s mind flared with sparks of red and yellow. They let go of his head as he heard something foreign, a new sound. A sickening, sucking pop, and a loud grunt.
Henry realized that grunt was his. Just before the red and yellow sparks began to cool and drip across his mind. Melting into blessed blue-black.
* * *
Private Gibson wondered what had ever happened to the child. What had ever happened to the child’s stunningly beautiful mother. Sam Gibson had loved that woman more than he had ever loved anything. Yet his family did not approve.
Chicago society was like that, Sam brooded.
What could he expect her to do? With all that money Sam’s father had given the woman. She had gone. Paid to go away to have their child. Exactly as his family had wanted it. Buy the woman off.
Money can do anything, he remembered. Anything … except buy my bartered soul back for me.
Disappearing into this frontier army as Pvt. Sam Gibson, there were times he almost forgot who he really was, who he had been and left behind in Chicago. So long ago. So many miles away.
Edgar L. O’Reilly, heir to a fortune of old money. Well, Edgar, you spineless bastard—you’re long dead now. One of these days, he knew he would have to reconcile himself to it. One of these days—
“Great Jesus Christ!”
Gibson whirled, startled. Hearing the voice of another picket who sat nearby. Four sentries in all atop Pilot Hill.
Only then did the screech of the sawmill whistle down on the Little Piney reach Gibson’s ears. The alarm.
“You see ’em, Gibby?”
Yes, Sam had to admit. He could see them. More than a dozen on their spry ponies, sprinting off the wood road, straight toward the smooth crossing of the Little Piney. Like demons possessed, their bearing on course for Pilot Hill.
“Signal, goddammit!”
Sam heard another soldier growl.
“He is, gol-dang-it! He is!” the third man shouted.
The trooper holding the fluttering flag over his head shouted. “They know! Look at the fort! They can see!”
Gibson wheeled, studying the fort. Streaking across the parade were handfuls of troopers like clusters of dark ants. Bigger splotches of shadow on the parade—the horses. Kept saddled.
Relief was coming. I pray to God they get here soon enough, Sam muttered under his breath.
And watched two of his detail clatter up tugging the four horses. He and the flagman leaped into the saddle. All four scurried down the west slope of Pilot Hill as the relief column splashed across the Little Piney. Up the slope screeched the Sioux warriors, blood still in their eye.
One among them bearing the sticky, still-warm scalp of Pvt. Henry Ketcham tucked beneath his belt. Next to the skinning knife he planned to use on at least one of these four soldiers escaping downhill, fleeing right into their arms.
With a lot of cursing and yanking on reins, Sam stood in the stirrups, bringing the other three skidding to a stop. “Dismount, boys!”
“You gotta be kid—”
“Every bit as serious as they are!” Gibson snapped, pointing at the feathered horsemen bearing down on them. “We’re gonna make a stand of it.”
No more argument was raised beyond grumbling curses as the three young soldiers dropped from their mounts and joined Sam in slapping the muscular rumps of their horses. All four animals clattered away. Downhill, toward the Sioux.
Gibson pointed. “Follow me!”
They dropped into a natural wash scoured each year by spring erosion. Sam closed the file. Watching the first puffs of smoke blossom above the relief column.
“Hurraw!” the youngest soldier hollered, standing in the wash. They watched the warriors halt, mill about in a quick parley, then bolt away. Escaping down the northern slope of Pilot Hill, across the Big Piney toward Lodge Trail Ridge. With twenty mounted troopers hot on their shadows.
“By damned, boys.” Gibson stood, leaning on his rifle. “Looks like I owe you an apology.”
“How’s that, Gibby?”
“’Cause of me, we’ve gotta walk back to the fort. Deeply sorry about that.” He said it all with a big smile.
“You don’t owe me no apology, Gibby,” the flagman answered. “Gonna be one walk this foot slogger won’t mind taking a’tall!”
* * *
Pinpoint pricks of red and yellow light burst across his eyes. A drum throbbed monotonously in his ears. His head ached, raw and naked, like a split melon. Then he realized the drum was his heartbeat.
Private Henry Ketcham’s eyes fluttered open, finding his face partially buried in a pile of pine needles. Ants crawled across his cheek, clustered at his mouth. Slowly, he brought one arm up. Fingers brushed his face. Tracks of crusty, moist warmth … something all over his face. It hurt like hell to move the arm. His back. Dull pain exploding through his muscles. He’d have to plan the next move before he hurt himself like that again.
His fingers fell from his face. Glistening. You’re bleeding, he told himself. His head really hurt, throbbing, scratchy pain … when he touched it. Henry understood.
I’ve … they scalped me.
He clenched his eyes shut, choking down the sour knot his belly wanted to throw up. You best start moving, Henry. They’ll be back … figuring you for dead.
One leg, then another, he brought under his chest, rising shaky and unsteady on one elbow. Ketcham tumbled to his side, the muscles along his back shrieking in pain.
Won’t try that again! his mind cried out.
Choosing to crawl on his belly, Ketcham clawed one hand into the needles and dark soil, pulling himself ahead barely two feet. The other arm he dragged next to his body. Only in that way, he found, would the muscles in his back not cry out so much in torture.
Down the slope he dragged himself, yard by yard, hanging back in the shadows of the tall pines. Across the damp ground left beneath the humpbacked boughs after yesterday’s thunder squall. Around him the forest lay deathly quiet. Except for the magpie’s protest in the branches overhead. Or the curious cry of a robber jay that flitted about, tree to tree. Studying this strange no-legged creature worming its way across the forest floor below.
Ketcham stopped, laying still, panting. Catching his breath. And wondering where that strange sound had come from. Slowly realizing with his slowed, numb mind that the sound was his own grunt. His own pain.
So he bit his lip each time he inched himself forward. Rhythmic. Swallowing his pain over and over and—
Get to the blockhouse before the bastards find you. They come looking for you soon. Get help soon—
“Aaaiieee!” he squalled like a scalded cat. His back on fire.
Ketcham lay panting, waiting for the hot slivers of light to disappear from behind his eyes. For the pounding in his ears to ebb. Hoping the fog would roll back from
his mind so he could sort it all out.
The arrows! That was it. He had snagged the shafts on the low-hanging boughs of the trees.
No two ways about it, Henry, Ketcham argued with himself, swallowing down the last shards of pain. You either crawl out in the open … where the red bastards’ll catch you again … or you gotta break the goddamned arrows off so the things won’t snag on the branches.
With one hand twisted around and held close to his back, gripping a shaft, Ketcham used the other to fumble and fight until he could snap the first arrow off. He was a good half hour fumbling through it all, snorting, swallowing waves of pain between the ordeal of each shaft. Until all four lay among the bloody pine needles.
This time Private Ketcham crawled, using two hands to pull himself along. Numbing himself to the pain. Making each pull a little goal in itself. Congratulating himself when he had made it. Gathering strength for the next haul. Then stretching his arms out again. Over and over Henry Ketcham won his little battles with himself. Across that half mile of thickly forested slope. Groping his way through the shadows with something like a homing instinct … some homing instinct his foggy mind realized few men would ever have to rely upon.
“Holy!”
Ketcham jerked as the first voice crackled above him and not far away. Then the thunder of running feet. Inside his spirit shrank like salted meat. He remembered the painted, shrieking faces pouncing up on him before.
“He’s been—”
“Shaddup!” another voice growled.
Ketcham thought he recognized it. Wanting so badly to look into the face. A fellow trooper? Perhaps one of the civilians? But he couldn’t. His blinking eyes were filled with pine dust and dirt, ants, and tears.
“Gimme a hand here, dammit! It’s Ketcham! Glory—good glory! It’s the boy! You’re all right now, Henry.”
Then Ketcham sensed the hands on him. Many hands. Tugging at him gently. Lifting him from the dirt. Brushing ants and dirt and hot moisture from his eyes.
“Jesus! Will you look at them broke—”
“I told you shaddup!” the old man’s voice barked.
They hurried him into the blockhouse, laid him on his belly on a soft, tick mattress stuffed with pine needles. The gruff voice that had commanded the others into silence now commanded one of their number to dash back to the fort. To bring a wagon and a surgeon.
“He ain’t gonna make it. Not stuck and cut like—”
“I’ll cut you, I hear another word,” the gruff voice thundered. “He’ll make it. This boy’s ’bout like dog salmon fighting fast water, this one is. He’ll make it, won’t you, Henry?”
One of the civilians, Ketcham decided as his mind sank into the cool blue-black once more. That old herder … the friendly old herder. He was Henry’s friend.
“He’ll make it,” the gruff voice whispered. “He’ll make it … or my name ain’t Sam Marr.”
Chapter 25
“You’ve got nothing better to do than lallygag around all day watching mounted drill?”
From his lips Seamus took the pine splinter he had been using to pick his teeth and gazed up at the mounted officer who had asked the question. “Aye, Cap’n. It’s the Sunday sabbath, after all.”
“You’re Donegan, aren’t you?” Capt. Edward S. Hartz inquired.
“No denying.”
“You’ve stirred quite a bit of trouble down to Kearny, so I’ve heard,” Hartz declared, adjusting himself on the sweaty saddle. “Understand that Carrington liked you, though.” He smiled for the first time.
“From the sounds of that, I take it you don’t think I’m all that bad a fellow?” Seamus stood, letting the chair settle on its four legs. He stepped to the edge of the shade and squinted up into the July sun at the captain. Hartz’s blue tunic was sweated with a dark necklace around the collar and beneath both arms.
“I don’t come begging, you understand,” Hartz admitted after a long sigh. He snagged Donegan’s attention. “Just, we’ve no cavalry here at Smith now. Since he arrived at Kearny, colonel down there never sent us any.”
Donegan had to admit he felt intrigued by the direction Hartz was taking. “You’re Eighteenth?”
“Right. Infantry. But they renamed us the Twenty-Seventh last January. Truth of it, none of us foot sloggers fathom much of this horse soldiering.”
“Not all that different than foot drill, Cap’n. Just got to get the horse to understand, s’all.”
“I’ll take any help you’ll give. We’ve got but six officers here to mind the whole post. When there should be at least three for each troop. Damn weather isn’t cooperating either. Mercury rising above ninety every day for a fortnight now.”
“These men’ll do, Cap’n,” Seamus reassured. “We’ll get busy and show ’em some basics afore the light goes bad and they blow retreat. Work on getting your new horse sojurs to mount on call. Dismount on command. Ride column of twos and fours. Most important thing—get it through their thick noggins to fire carbine or pistol only when ordered.”
“Save ammunition in our new Springfields, eh?”
Donegan nodded. “That, and teach ’em to wait for a proper target.”
“By Jove, I think you’re just the man Carrington himself said you were.” Then he whispered, “Colonel Bradley’s got us all toeing the line of late. When can we start, Mr. Donegan? Captain Price’s drilling his infantry in loading and firing by file and number.”
“Looks to be you’ve but a handful of horses left you now.”
“At stable call this morning we counted twenty-two serviceable mounts.”
“Keep ’em saddled from dawn to dusk?”
“We tell the boys to sleep on their rifles … in reach of their reins. What with all the trouble the Indians’ve been. That poor Wood fella from Ohio—found in the middle of the road like he was. We wanna be ready to ride when the alarm goes out.”
“That’s the whole idea behind cavalry, Cap’n. Strike fast and strike hard.”
Hartz nodded. “I figure it’s one order Carrington made sense on.”
“Cap’n.” Donegan ran a dirty hand beneath a whiskey-red nose. “Ever since the army came to this country, a bleeming lot of you been wanting to ride out to try thrashing a thousand Sioux—so you claimed Carrington, or even Lieutenant Colonel Bradley, are cowards, simply because he won’t let you run straight into a Injin trap. But to Seamus Donegan, staying put and not charging after any Sioux decoys makes a whale of a lot of sense.”
“You aim to help me train these men?”
“That, and I aim to keep my hair locked on this hungover head of mine as well, Cap’n!”
* * *
North saddled his warriors in the stillness of predawn light. Awaking some with an insistent toe, sending them off to roust out the rest—his Arapaho, along with some stray Sioux and Cheyenne who wanted to join in the fun had come along. Even some Blood and Piegan from up north beyond the Milk and Judith, come south for a summer full of raiding and horse stealing.
The white renegade smiled as the big camp came to life. The word was spreading, wasn’t it now? Bringing ’em in from far and wide to drive the soldiers from this country for good.
Then it can be my little kingdom at last, North cheered himself by the fire. King of these thieves and cutthroats and poxy sluts I have to bed.
He grinned, his dirty teeth glimmering in the dawn fire’s light. Them ’rapaho sluts ain’t bad when it comes to bedding. Do all a man wants … and more.
He had brought his hundred here the day before. Camping no closer than four miles from the adobe-walled fort, North went with Sings The Moon and his personal bunch to sniff around from the ridges. First the fort. Then the grass cutters’ corral.
Bob North didn’t spend much time worrying about the fort. If some of the red bastards with him wanted to beat their heads against that stone wall, it was all right with him. But he had squared his jaw and licked his lips when he looked down on the black-ant activity around the corral yesterday aft
ernoon as the civilians and their soldier escort came in from the meadows. Brushing down their mules and horses. Gathering water for the night. Lighting cookfires. Settling in for the summer evening.
One tall, bearded one among them.
Sings The Moon had nodded, pointing eagerly.
North had smiled, slapping the gap-toothed warrior on the back. “Good work, you gut-stinking bastard!” the renegade had said in English to his brown-skinned right-hand man. “Just mind you,” he repeated, slapping his own chest and pointing at the corral, “that’un’s mine. Hear?”
The gap-tooth grin widened, and the head nodded.
Some honor among thieves, North figured. Whatever the rest of ’em wanted from the soldiers and civilians, they would damn well leave North’s chosen man alone.
He forced them out now without breakfast. Nothing but a little dried meat for the trail and a bellyful of creek water. More time spent on a quick painting of cheeks and chins and chest, after each warrior wet down the bushes surrounding their campsite.
Once atop his nervous, peak-eared Indian pony, North sang quietly.
“And now I’m going southward,
For my heart is full of woe,
I’m going back to Georgia
And find my Uncle Joe.
“You may sing about your dearest maid,
And sing of Rosalee.
But the gallant Hood of Texas
Raised hell in Tennessee!”
The off-key notes drifting into the gray of morning-come, Confederate captain Bob North led his swelling band of bad-hearts across the Bighorn River and down the four-mile trail that would bring him face to face with the tall one.
Chapter 26
“I’ll ride with you, Cawpril!” Donegan announced as he swung atop Leighton’s own mount.
“Thank you, mister. Make it a habit never refusing an offer of help.” Cpl. Ethan Wade turned in the saddle. “Troops, forward at a walk—ho!”
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