Cavanaugh quickly caught up his three-inch leather belt with the holster attached which held his regulation revolver, and hurried out the office door. He trotted across the parade grounds to the medical office and sick bay.
Upon his arrival, he found Major Owensby questioning a civilian who had an arrow in his thigh and a bullet wound in his shoulder.
“You say they jumped you just at dawn. About a dozen warriors. What tribe?”
“Don’t know, Major. They was all over us. I played dead after the first charge, then got behind the barn and ran into the trees along the creek. Martha, my wife, had been out that way on her little mare looking for some wild onions to transplant into our garden. I found her and we hid until the heathens left. They burned the house, barn, and shed to the ground and busted up the corral. My three range hands are dead and the Indians ran off with about forty head of horses and a herd of forty or fifty steers. I’m wiped out.”
“What direction did they go when they left?” Captain Cavanaugh asked.
“Direction?” The rancher winced as doctor began to work on the arrow. “North.”
“Major Owensby,” Marcus Cavanaugh said sharply. “I request permission to take Able Troop in pursuit. Four days’ rations. We can ride in forty-five minutes.”
“Granted. You’ve got a good chance to run them down. They can’t move fast with all that livestock.” The captain ran out of the medical office and directly to the Able Troop orderly room. Lieutenant O’Hara was there, and he took the order and barked it to his first sergeant.
It was exactly an hour later when Able Troop, with four Crow Indian scouts and Captain Cavanaugh, formed up on the parade ground and rode out past the Thirteenth Regimental headquarters building to the north.
Lieutenant Winchester led the unit, with Captain Cavanaugh and Lieutenant O’Hara behind him. As they assembled, the captain gave command over to Winchester, charging him to pursue, catch, and punish the attackers and recover the stolen livestock if possible. He would ride along as an observer.
They moved out of the fort at a six-mile-an-hour canter, and following the map drawn by the rancher found the burned-out buildings eight miles north and west of the fort. Two of the Crow scouts had ridden ahead to the ranch when they spotted the still-smoking timbers on the barn and circled the place to pick up the tracks of the raiders.
Eagle Feather, the best Crow tracker on the post, came back and reported in broken English that there was a broad trail heading northwest, many horses, many beef, and twelve to fifteen Indian ponies.
It was just before midday when they headed along the Indian trail.
“Let’s lift the pace,” Captain Cavanaugh suggested to Lieutenant Winchester. “If we don’t, we won’t catch them before dark and they’ll be gone for good.”
Winchester agreed and gave the order. They moved the mounted line of cavalry into a lope that would eat up the distance between them and the savages while being as easy a gait for the horses as walking. The troopers were stretched out four abreast behind their officers, with the top sergeant bringing up the rear.
The scouts rode out ahead in a leapfrogging system. One galloped out a quarter of a mile to make sure of the trail and waited. The scout behind him rode to the lead scout, then a quarter of a mile beyond him, checking the trail. Then he stopped, and the first scout caught up and rode ahead. They could ride hard and still follow the trail using this system.
In this prairie terrain the hostiles left an easy trail to follow. There were eighty to ninety animals making tracks across the high prairie of western Kansas, and it looked like a highway had ripped through the virgin country.
“Horse droppings fresher,” Eagle Feather said to Winchester. “They get close. Four-hour ride ahead.” Winchester nodded. “We started out five hours behind, so we’ve cut their lead down an hour. We still might catch them before dark.”
By two o’clock they had cut another hour off the lead of the Indians. Winchester called a halt and rested the horses for fifteen minutes at a small creek to let them drink. The men chewed jerky and some hardtack from their rations, then they were riding again.
Captain Cavanaugh moved up beside Lieutenant Winchester at the head of the column. “Lieutenant, you might want to send one of the Indian scouts ahead three or four miles following the tracks to see if he can find any signs of a dust trail. A herd that big is going to lift a ribbon of dust into the sky, and there isn’t much wind today.”
“Good idea. If they’re still three hours ahead, at four miles an hour, that’s twelve miles.”
“With that many steers and horses, they’ll be lucky to make two or three miles an hour,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re probably a lot closer than we think.”
Winchester sent out a scout and they lifted the march back to a lope and followed the trail their scouts pointed out.
By four o’clock that afternoon the troops and the horses were tired, but they were only an hour behind the hostiles. The scouts reported dust ahead, and on a slight rise they saw the herd moving across the grasslands..
Captain Cavanaugh drew up beside Lieutenant Winchester again on his horse. “What’s your strategy when we catch them, Winchester?”
“Depends on the situation, Captain. If they leave the livestock and make a run for it, we chase them and leave the stock be. If they try something else, I’ll make a tactical decision at that time.”
Cavanaugh nodded and returned to his spot beside Lieutenant O’Hara.
Half of the company had been equipped with Spencer carbines, the .52-caliber , repeating rifles. The rest of the men had Sharps single-shot .50-caliber carbines. Eventually Captain Cavanaugh wanted every man in the Quick Ride unit to have a Spencer. They could put out a greater volume of fire, and with each man using the same weapon, one supply of ammunition would work for the entire company.
Suddenly, they heard a rifle shot ahead, and galloped for a quarter of a mile, then eased up as an Indian scout met them.
“Cheyenne send back trail scout. Fire at us. The Cheyenne and livestock all stopped ahead one mile.”
“Good. They’ve decided to stand and fight,” Winchester said. “Do they have a good defensive position?”
The scout frowned.
“Never mind, we’ll be there in a few minutes.” They rode at a lope again, and as they came up to the hostiles, they saw the Indians had massed the steers and horses into a barricade in front of them in a small gully that a stream had cut through the rich soil. It had left a wash four feet deep with steep sides that were now almost dry. The Indians could not be seen. Captain Cavanaugh lifted his field glasses and focused on the spot. “The warriors are mixed in with the cattle and horses,” he reported. “Looks like they’re going to stand and fight and use the cattle and stolen horses as a shield.”
The column kept moving forward until they were 300 yards away from the herd. Lieutenant Winchester faced the knot of men, horses, and cattle. His eyes seemed to be staring blankly.
“Lieutenant Winchester, what’s our strategy?” Captain Cavanaugh asked when he rode up beside the troop commander.
He looked at Cavanaugh with a puzzled expression. “Company front, dismount and attack cautiously?”
“No, Lieutenant. Troop front, then charge shooting into the cattle and horses, trying to stampede the animals. They won’t like the gunfire and should spook easily.”
“Yes, yes, good idea.” Winchester called out the order for a troop front and Lieutenant O’Hara repeated the order, then each sergeant behind him repeated the order and the men swung out in a practiced move to form a line of troopers and officers fifty-three men wide. The horses were almost shoulder to shoulder and walking forward.
“Trumpeter, sound the charge,” Winchester barked. With the second note of the trumpeter’s call, the men knew the order and the horses moved out from a walk to a gallop, firing at will into the herd. Discharge of weapons on a charge, while not a usual tactic, would remove the shield around the hostiles by stampeding the livestock
to either side.
By the time the troopers were within a hundred yards of the herd, fifteen bawling, wild-eyed steers and a few cows had bolted from one side of the circle, and the hostiles quickly mounted their ponies, ready to fight.
As the cavalry charge came closer, more of the cattle raced off to the side. At the last minute, before the troopers would have plunged into the milling, bawling confusion at the center of the herd, the mounted army men broke around the target, slowed to drop down into the four-foot-deep gully, and then raced up the other side and drove another dozen cattle out of the herd with them.
The riders in blue continued fifty yards beyond the hostiles, then on a trumpet command turned and raced back toward the confused mass of horses, a few cattle and the twelve to fifteen hostiles in the center. This time the trumpeter blew the attack. The men rode in to engage the enemy wherever he was found.
Captain Cavanaugh quickly reloaded with a fresh tube of rounds for his Spencer repeating rifle. He spurred back toward the knot of milling animals and Indians. As he rode, he lifted the carbine and caught sight of a warrior suddenly uncovered by three nervous rider less horses.
Cavanaugh fired from instinct, a snap shot, and saw the savage slam off his mount. He was trampled immediately under dozens of sharp hooves. The blue shirts cut through the mass of horses and steers, pistols out now in the close quarters.
An Indian rose up from behind the trooper’s horse and thrust a fourteen-foot-long lance through the man’s chest. The private pawed at it a moment, then died and fell off his mount.
Two Indians charged out of the fray and kicked their war ponies up the dry streambed. Four cavalrymen spurred after them, pistols cracking. One of the redskins jolted off his mount and the detail raced around a small turn in the draw after the last hostile.
It was every man for himself. Cattle bawled and charged in every direction. An enormous steer slammed into the side of a cavalry mount. One of the horns gored the corporal riding the horse, the other ripped into the mount’s ribs, penetrated her lung, and sent the animal plunging to the ground.
Lieutenant O’Hara jolted into the very center of the melee, held out his pistol, and blew one savage out of his saddle with a .44 round through his forehead. He whirled, sensing something behind him, and barely avoided an arrow launched by another Indian standing beside his war pony. Snapping off a second shot, he saw the redman’s throat blossom with a spurting crimson flow as the bullet severed the right carotid artery, sending a geyser of blood into the air.
A piercing war cry cut through the Kansas afternoon, and the remaining warriors rushed to the upstream side of the creek bed and raced away.
Winchester spurred his horse that way and led a charge with ten troopers after the fleeing hostiles.
As the firing quieted down, Lieutenant O’Hara called on the troops to check the Indians and be sure they were dead so there would be no surprises. They heard two pistol shots and then all was quiet.
“Casualty report,” Lieutenant O’Hara called, and the ranking sergeant began checking the men.
Captain Cavanaugh trotted down the gully the way the Indians had fled. He saw Lieutenant Winchester leading his men back. When Winchester passed the captain, he looked up.
“They had too much of a start on us and our horses are about played out.” He rode past without stopping.
By sundown, the troopers had rounded up the cattle they could find nearby and herded them back into the dry wash, where they could bed them down for the night. They found only fifteen of the forty horses the rancher said had been stolen. They were put in a small rope corral near the cattle.
“What’s the casualty report?” Lieutenant Winchester asked O’Hara as they stood beside their horses.
“We have two dead, sir, and six wounded. The wounded can ride.”
“Enemy dead?”
“We’ve found eight so far, sir. We may find others in the morning. We rounded up fifteen horses and about twenty head of cattle.”
“Very well, Lieutenant. We’ll camp here tonight. Fires are authorized. See that the wounded are patched up the best we can.”
Captain Cavanaugh listened with approval, then went over to a small fire where Corporal Jake Foland wrapped a bandage around a man’s arm. Foland had been apprenticed to Major Lassiter while he was at the fort. He and five other men were assigned to learn all they could about doctoring, taking out arrowheads, splinting bones, and wrapping up gunshot wounds.
They were not doctors, but Captain Cavanaugh thought that each company should have one medical corpsman along on every patrol. At times like this, the medical apprentice could do the bandaging; usually it was left up to the wounded man himself or a buddy who could help him. Each of the medics, as they were called for short, had a small medical pack on his mount that contained bandages, scissors, a knife for cutting out bullets, and some rawhide thongs for tying makeshift splints in place, plus whatever else the medic could get from the doctor for his own kit.
Captain Cavanaugh nodded. This was the first time he had seen his medic plan in action, but he was pleased to see it working so well. It should make things a lot easier for the wounded and save lives. “How’s it going, Foland?”
“Good, sir. I’ve got three more men to go. I do the worst-hit ones first to stop the bleeding. Would it be possible to double the size of my medic kit? There are a lot of items we have lots of back at the medical ward that I could really use about now.”
“I don’t see why not, Foland. Talk with Dr. Lassiter about the supplies, then come see me and I’ll authorize a new medic bag of some kind.”
“Thank you, sir. Could you hold this pad on this gunshot wound until I can find some more bandages?”
“Glad to, Foland. I like the way you do things.” The captain applied pressure to the thick pad.
“Thank you, sir. I figured saving a lot of blood for Willy here was more important than standing on ceremony.”
On quick ride patrols and other patrols where hostile action was expected, officers could not take along their orderlies. That meant they had to fix their own food and tend to their own horses. Captain Cavanaugh had instituted the order and found it worked well.
Now he opened his rations from his saddlebag and scowled at the supply: hardtack and salt pork. The salt pork had to be cooked to be safe to eat. Captain Cavanaugh built a small fire and called to Lieutenant O’Hara to come cook with him. First they scraped off the thick layer of green mold, parboiled their salt pork, then fried it in their skillets.
The hardtack was comparatively soft this time, and could be broken by hand, softened up in the mouth, and at last chewed. Captain Cavanaugh had brought along a personal sack of roasted and ground coffee which he boiled for himself and O’Hara. It made rich, strong coffee — if you didn’t get a mouthful of the bitter, crunchy grounds at the bottom of the big tin cup. The cup held almost a quart and was handy for most of the cooking chores each soldier had to do in the field.
The two officers talked as they cooked and then ate.
“Was there any way that we could have attacked the savages and not lost any men?” Lieutenant O’Hara asked.
Captain Cavanaugh sipped at the almost boiling coffee, then, gently blew on it to let it cool. “We could have laid off and sent rifle fire into them until their shield was down or they were spooked. But by then it would have been dark and all of the hostiles would have escaped. No, I think the attack was handled in an acceptable manner.”
“How would you have done it if you were in command?” Lieutenant O’Hara asked.
Captain Cavanaugh laughed. “Hindsight, Lieutenant, is the simplest game of all. How would you have led the attack?”
“I had it worked out as we rode in. I’d have sent six men in blocking positions up and down the draw, then I’d have sent seven rounds per man into the mass of men and animals. If that didn’t stampede the steers, then I would have charged them.”
“Good, O’Hara, I like that plan. But you still would have lost t
wo men in the charge or in the exchange at your blocking positions. Two men dead on a fight like this is cheap. It could have been six. It could have been you or me. In a battle like this, the luck of the draw plays a big part. Never think that you’re bulletproof. Out here, nobody is. Every man can die.”
“Amen to that.”
Cavanaugh looked out over the scattered troop fires. “How many perimeter guards do we have out?”
“Six. I placed them on three-hour watches, three shifts. That way, we all get some sleep.”
“Good work, Lieutenant.” The captain put his cup down and stood. “I think I’ll check on the men before I turn in. Good night, O’Hara.”
“Good night, sir.”
Captain Cavanaugh walked through the men as they sat in small groups talking about the battle or singing trail songs. He stopped when he found First Lieutenant Winchester finishing up a supper of a half loaf of hard baked bread and a tin of cheese. “My private stock,” Winchester said quickly.
“And a good one, at that,” the captain said, crouching down next to the fire. “Winchester, it’s come to my attention that you haven’t been giving your second-in-command the respect due him as an officer in the United States Army.” Winchester started to protest but Cavanaugh held up his hand. “I won’t have any dissention on this post, especially not in Able Troop. The man’s a fine soldier and a fellow graduate of the Point. If I hear of any more belittling of Lieutenant O’Hara, you’ll no longer be in command of Able Troop. Is this all perfectly clear, Lieutenant?”
The tall officer straightened, a look of shock drifting over his eyes, and he shook his head slightly. “I have to maintain discipline in the troop.”
“True, but you find a better way of doing it with your fellow officer. There is no room for argument or compromise here, Lieutenant. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Winchester slumped as Captain Cavanaugh stood and turned away. His brown eyes were dull and he shook his head slightly. He threw the rest of the tin of cheese as far as he could and swore silently. He’d brook no interference in his command, especially from a man he should be outranking by now in his career. Captain Cavanaugh still bad some lessons to learn about this man’s army, and he’d be just the man to teach him.
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