“Where the hell you going with my horse, Donegan?” A. C. Leighton burst out of his quarters, pulling up britches and slapping suspenders over his shoulders. “Bring that goddamned horse back, you thieving mick!”
Donegan turned and stuffed a hand high into the dawn air. “Be right back, boss! Gotta ride nursemaid—pull your hay cutters’ arses out the fire!”
Sentries flung open Fort C.F. Smith’s gates. Wade’s relief party cantered past the stockade walls to the martial blare of the tin trumpet ringing brassy into the bright morning air. Down the slope the young corporal led his detachment of twenty-six armed infantrymen and one red-eyed civilian who cradled a Henry repeater in the crook of one arm.
Moments ago the day watch at the fort had sighted a large war party of Indians descending the ridge trail, down the road that would take them to the Bighorn crossing. Right where A. C. Leighton’s teamsters and hay cutters had camped on the north bank of Warrior Creek at the foot of a gentle slope. More than a hundred yelling, blanket-waving warriors galloped toward a rendezvous with those outnumbered civilians.
His head hurt again. Few mornings it didn’t, what with too much whiskey or too little sleep. Or just the heat of the coming day scorching these high plains. Seamus cursed the whiskey and the sleep and the new day’s sun.
Close to moonrise last night, Donegan had saddled up a mule and bid the hay cutters’ camp good-bye, promising to return at first light for the new day’s labors. He had better things to do with his night than sleep. There were soldiers at the fort two miles away. Soldiers who liked to play cards and hand their money over to the Irishman. Soldiers who had been paid just the day before.
Seamus Donegan wanted to be one of the first to have a go at all that army script. And if he had to lose a night of sleep to do it, so be that draw of the cards.
As the eastern sky turned gray with the first hint of light, Donegan had excused himself from the smoke-stale, whiskey-soaked room where the gamers had played all night. At the stinking slit-trench near the south wall, Donegan had wet the ground, and was busy stuffing himself back into his cavalry britches when the first alarm rang from the sentries.
Dressed and ready to ride, Seamus loped like a hungry mountain cat toward the hitching post in front of Lieutenant Colonel Bradley’s office. He had stopped, quickly measuring the droop-eared mule he had ridden to the fort. Beside the mule stood A. C. Leighton’s prize sorrel. Saddled and ready for the contractor’s trip to the meadows first thing this morning.
Seamus Donegan never regarded himself as a horse thief, really. Only borrowing the boss’s animal … to protect the boss’s hay-cutting crew and equipment down in the valley. It made one hell of a lot of sense to the Irishman as he clambered atop Leighton’s sorrel.
“We’ll have our work cut out for us, Cawpril!” Seamus roared as he brought that horse alongside the bay Ethan Wade rode.
“We’ll give back everything they give us!”
Donegan liked the grit this young soldier showed. Riding into odds stacked like a whorehouse deck against them. “In spades, sojur. Always give it back in spades … for you know not when you’ll get another crack at ’em!”
But like many a young soldier, Wade suffered a malady common among the new, untried army of the west. He let his buffalo bravado overload his better judgment. And pointed his detail up the ridge after exchanging some first shots with the Indians.
On some unseen or unheard signal among their number, the warriors split into two groups. The smallest bunch, numbering no more than thirty by the Irish cavalryman’s quick count, wheeled on down the road toward the hay cutters’ corral. The rest, he hated to admit, stayed their ground. In the middle of the road they stood, prancing and waiting bold as a general’s brass for Ethan Wade’s young and untried soldiers to come down for a two-step.
Without warning the sixty-and-more shrieked as one. Pounding their ponies’ ribby sides and galloping hell-bent-for-blood at the soldiers. Fixing to scare the troopers into confusion at worst. Surround the relief column at best.
Donegan shook his head and drove his heels into the sorrel’s flanks. Realizing the young corporal should have dismounted his command as soon as the warriors swept past on both flanks, intent on surrounding the uncertain soldiers. The Irishman’s worst nightmares took shape before his eyes as the formation fell apart, young soldiers jostling against one another wildly. Weapons flailing the air, curses turning the morning sky blue. And few shots aimed at the enemy more by luck than by design.
Tragedy of it was, a moment more and it would be every man for himself as the warriors poured their whistling torment into the confused mass of horseflesh and soldier blue.
Out of the midst of the heavy fire and the milling soldiers, Donegan watched Ethan Wade gallop up, his army revolver in hand.
“Got any ideas getting us out of what I got us into, mister … I’ll be glad to hear ’em—and quick too!”
“I’ll just bet you would, Cawpril,” Seamus gritted, studying the prancing warriors very much close at hand. “First off, those red bastards don’t look like any Sioux I’ve ever seen before.”
Wade glared at him a moment. “What you figure them to be, Irishman? Mormons?”
Donegan chuckled. “Bless the Pope, and save your sainted soul, boy! I figure them to be Cheyenne.”
Ethan Wade nodded. “It’s said there’s some Cheyenne in this neck of the woods. Arapaho too.”
“Their land … after they robbed the Crow of it.” Donegan wiped the back of a hand across his dry lips. “No matter who those red divils are—we got ourselves pinned down and scattered where they’ll start carving away at us. Worse thing for cavalry is get pinned down where they can’t move. Look there, Cawpril. We can’t ride for the high ground up yonder.” He flung an arm up to the east. “No man’d be left in his saddle. Only thing I suggest is that you charge your men straight for the creek. Maybe we can make a stand of it down in the trees. Hold out till—”
Corporal Wade slapped boot heels against his snorting, wide-eyed mount. Gone into the smoke and confusion. Yelling over the shrieks of the warriors and the curses of his frightened men.
Around to the right Donegan tore, shouting for the young soldiers to retreat at a charge, pointing the way with his Henry. His eyes swept the slope. In the space of three more heartbeats, Seamus found himself and Wade acting as file closers. The last men out on the retreat. Nothing new to Seamus Donegan.
“Ride, Cawpril!” he yelled, urging the soldier down the dusty road toward the beckoning cottonwoods at Warrior Creek. “Ride low!”
For your life depends upon it!
A half-dozen warriors drove their ponies down the slope, pursuing the two of them, swinging clubs and axes, not content to use their bows or old rifles at the retreating white men. Two of the six quickly tumbled off their ponies as Wade’s soldiers opened fire from the shelter of the leafy cottonwoods along the creek. Another pair pulled up, thinking twice about riding directly into the teeth of those soldier guns.
Despite the narrowing of the odds, Seamus still found himself with a double handful of trouble thundering down the slope after him.
A wildly-painted warrior chose Corporal Wade, drawing an arrow back, firing and missing. Then aiming again. This time the iron point sank deep into the mount’s flanks. Stumbling crazily, the animal cantered sideways, pitching its rider into the sage and scrub brush. Without slowing a step, the warrior raced toward the thrown soldier, nocking another arrow in his short, elkhorn bow.
Seamus swung the Henry, aimed instinctively and fired without thought. The warrior catapulted off the side of his straining animal. He had lashed himself to his war pony with a long, buffalo-hide lariat. To the shouts and jeers of the soldiers pinned down in the trees, the pony dragged its master’s body back up the dusty slope where the charge had begun.
A burning river of fire suddenly coursed through Donegan’s left calf—a pain so intense, he had felt nothing like it since the war.
Seamus stuf
fed the reins between his teeth, flicking his left hand along the calf the way a man would swat at a troubling wasp. His fingers bounced off the shaft. Sending hot slivers of pain shooting through his leg and hip. His stomach grew queazy. Donegan had been slashed with sabers and shot with minié balls. Never had he worn a warrior’s iron-tipped arrow.
A shriek brought him around. He yanked Leighton’s sorrel to the left. Protecting that bleeding leg. Up top of the slope he thought he saw a white man among a few warriors. Lighter-skinned than the rest. Waving his arms wildly and directing the charge.
A hand with no fingers? he asked himself.
Then Donegan had more pressing matters to attend to. Another shriek and Seamus whirled to find a young, muscular warrior galloping down upon him, his long lance pointed at the Irishman’s chest.
Donegan cocked his Henry. Empty.
Reaching for his pistol, he realized he was out of time.
Just as the warrior swept by, Seamus leaned off his saddle, forced to jam all his 230 pounds onto that left leg. He winced in a flood of pain, swallowing the bile his stomach heaved against his tonsils. A dizzying, mind-numbing pain that sent hot sparks of light exploding through his brain. At the same time he sensed the lance whistling overhead.
Jerking the sorrel around with the reins still in his teeth, Seamus kicked his right heel against the animal’s flanks. The horse bolted off. Heading for the attack its rider planned.
Donegan narrowed the distance on the young warrior. He readied himself as the big Indian haunch-slid his pony around in a cloud of dust, just in time to watch the bearded white man swing the brass-mounted Henry like a double-bladed axe singing into ponderosa pine.
That collision of iron and wood against bone and muscle shook Donegan to his roots. But it knocked the big youth from his pony.
Time to be moving, me boy! The Irishman’s mind raced as he drove the lathered sorrel down the slope toward the trees.
His last glimpse at the brow of the hill showed him the white man waving atop the slope. His mouth open like a black hole in his face. Past the white man burst more than a hundred of the warriors screaming down on Donegan’s tail, hungry for scalps, charging on a collision course for that gallant little stand Corporal Wade and his soldiers were about to make.
Down the windswept slope the shrieking red tide roared—when the cottonwoods before them suddenly erupted, belching smoke from half a hundred guns. The low boom of the Springfield muzzle loaders coupled with the sharp crack of carbines and repeaters.
By bloody damned! It’s them hay cutters, i’tis!
A loud cheer burst from the line of trees along the creek-bank as Seamus darted through the skirmish line, his bridle snagged by Ethan Wade.
“You saved my life, mister!” Wade shouted up at the Irishman.
“Aye, Cawpril. Now, you’ll be one to return the favor.” He swallowed hard. The taste of nausea and last night’s stale whiskey choked him. “Me … me left leg.”
When Ethan Wade dashed to the far side of Leighton’s lather-flecked sorrel, his eyes narrowed on the arrow fluttering from the bloody hogleg boot.
“C’mon, Mister…”
“Donegan,” he gritted in pain.
“C’mon, Mr. Donegan. Step down. I’ll help get it pulled—”
“’Fraid I can’t be stepping down, sojur. Here.” He handed his Henry down as more heavy fire rattled from the trees.
Glancing up the slope, Seamus saw another handful of warriors tumble, even more of the ribby ponies shying beneath the rain of flying lead. He smiled grimly, watching his fellow teamsters lay down a hot fire into the shrieking Indian horde.
“Can’t dismount?”
“Appears I’m a bit stuck … now if you’d be kind enough…”
The moment Wade wiggled the crimson arrow, Seamus again sensed that peculiar queazy nausea flutter through his belly with heavy wings once more. And Wade himself discovered why the Irishman couldn’t pull himself from the saddle. The arrow shaft had Donegan’s leg pinned to the stirrup fender.
Swiftly Wade braced one hand back of the bloody leg. With the other he yanked the skewered boot free, watching Donegan wobble a moment as the pain roiled over him.
“Dear Mither of God!” Seamus growled between clenched teeth, regaining his senses and dragging a hand across his damp brow.
Off the far side of his horse he slid, landing on the right leg. Teetering like an aspen in a strong wind.
As Donegan sank among the willow and creepers, up the slope arose shrieks of terror and pain mixed with the wild cries of injured ponies. One of the teamsters roared his approval.
“’Bout damned time they knock down some of them bleeming Injin ponies!” Donegan laughed. “’Bout goddamned time, i’tis. We nearly lose our hair! And,” Seamus sucked a long draught of air, “’bout bleeming time you yanked this sonabitch outta me, Cawpril. Nice and gentle, like me tender Jennie-Colleen would do…”
He looked away as Ethan Wade grabbed the arrow. Donegan gazed over his shoulder as the confused warriors straggled back up the slope, retreating from the fight and the hay cutters’ guns. Enough blood for one day.
Sojur guns are one thing, Seamus brooded as the waves of red pain washed over him.
Inch by horrid inch Corporal Wade pulled the smooth shaft free from Donegan’s calf—raking through the Irishman’s muscle just like a glowing poker dipped in a hot rum drink, back in that dear little Boston pub so long a favorite of his.
Injins figured on the sojurs having to reload. Whoever that white bastard was up with them savages on the hill, he didn’t count on the repeaters. I’m one happy lad to make our repeaters that white renegade’s undoing …
Seamus leaned back, wearing a smile, as Leighton’s hay cutters and Wade’s troopers jostled and cheered and backslapped one another in the cottonwood grove. Donegan closed his eyes, welcoming the cool black pouring over him—dreaming of a cold winter’s day and steamy rum drink, back in that dear little Boston pub.
* * *
Finn Burnett scratched the bantam tuft of hair he had sprouting just below his lower lip. He wore no mustache. No beard. Just the long, mousy-brown hair he let grow in a stylish tuft down the center of his chin. Scratching at that tuft, he hoped he hadn’t caught any lice from one of the other teamsters here in the hay cutters’ corral on Warrior Creek.
The sporty tuft made him feel older. At least no longer a youngster. Perhaps more accepted among the older teamsters, some of whom Leighton had brought with him all the way from Omaha and North Platte. And the tall Irishman Leighton had hired on here, despite Captain Kinney’s warnings of trouble back in June when the work in these fields began. Finn could laugh at the soldier’s assertion of troublemaking Irish. The only trouble the hay cutters had seen came in spades from the naked warriors rushing off the hills more and more often with each new day. Small bands who shouted and waved blankets, frightening stock and the hay cutters alike, forcing the civilians back to their corral until the meadow quieted once more and work could resume.
The Irishman. Finn smiled at the thought of him now as he looked over at Seamus Donegan. He’s the only one. The only one younger than me. And a grand fellow Irishman to boot.
Twilight glistened summer-radiant overhead. He sighed. Nowhere else in the world was there a sky like this. Nowhere but the high plains, with the Big Horn Mountains hulking behind you like an old friend with his hand warm upon your shoulder. Fires twinkled cheery light as the blue sank into purple beyond the corral and antelope steaks sizzled over the flames, grease popping and spitting while coffeepots steamed their fragrant seduction.
Contractor A. C. Leighton had been going at it in a big way down in the meadows since the last week in June. It made sense to him to establish his teamsters’ camp close to his mowing operation. Here along Warrior Creek, with the Bighorn River some three hundred yards away, Leighton’s men had completed their first task a month ago—to build a corral for the nightly protection of the mules that pulled the mowers, and a
place to which the teamsters could retreat in case of attack. Fort C.F. Smith, some three miles away by a rough road, assigned a rotating compliment of troopers to guard the civilian workers. They too slept near the corral these warm, late-summer nights.
“Coffee ready, Finn?”
Burnett looked up from his work over supper, though he recognized the peaty brogue. No other spoke so thick with the fragrant, green breath of the motherland.
“It is, Seamus. Have a seat and grab yourself a tin. These steaks be a bit longer. Coffee’s on.”
Seamus held the cup before him as Burnett poured. “You’ll not burn my steak now, Finn. A kiss or two of flame, like a Colleen’s warm embrace … and the inside of my steak as pink as … well—an old fella like yourself knows what’s most pink and tender.”
Burnett and Donegan laughed, joined by a handful of civilians and the three soldiers gathered at their fire. Behind them snorted a few mules tethered at the long picket line run from one end of the corral to the other. Down at the far end stood the army’s horses. Nearby rose the fragrant smell of steamy mule droppings. Earthy, mingling with the rising scents of antelope and sourdough biscuits. Charlie White performed his peculiar magic in a Dutch oven again tonight.
Warrior Creek gurgled nearby, just to the south of the corral, dancing over its graveled bed between deep willow thickets as it hurried out of some rough, hilly country that rimmed the wide, grassy meadows Leighton had chosen for his summer’s operation.
The teamsters’ camp itself was a corral of about a hundred feet on a side. When they first arrived in the meadow, the civilians had chosen this spot a little more than two hundred yards from the plateau rising at their backs. Here midway between the ridges and the Bighorn itself, the civilians had placed logs upright in pairs, spacing them about six feet apart around the hundred-foot square. Then three logs were fastened between each pair of stringers: one laid on the ground, one halfway up the stringer, and the last secured at the top. Between all these stringers, green willow branches from the creek were interwoven. While the leafy boughs would not stop a bullet or arrow, they did provide an effective curtain.
Red Cloud's Revenge Page 24