Ashes of Heaven (36 page)

As much as Miles wanted to put his outfit to the hunt, it would have been plain to a blind man that his soldiers would end up killing their stock if they hurried after the Sioux.

Then three days ago, on the twenty-eighth of April, pickets to the east began to holler shortly before noon. Not only were there riders approaching from downriver, but they were escorting the first wagon train of the season!

Donegan yanked on his mackinaw, swilled down the last of his coffee and dashed out with the rest to lunge through the trees on foot toward the Fort Buford Road. There at the edge of the clearing he stood watching Miles's hardy veterans. Twice in this damnable Montana winter these doughboys had caught Sitting Bull napping, and twice they had flushed that cagey old chief into the wilds with only what his people could carry. Then they had marched up the Tongue after Crazy Horse's camp, and given that strange man of the Lakota his last fight with the army.

Now the soldiers stood shuffle-footed, pounding one another on the back, hallooing and hurrawing until their throats were sore and their eyes were wet with joyous tears. By God, it was a supply train from civilization!

And who should be riding at the head of the column? Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin himself!

“What the blazes are you doing back up here, Irishman!” the lieutenant bellowed as he drew close enough to recognize Donegan while shaking hands and saluting old comrades.

“You say that like you didn't expect me back, Lieutenant!”

Baldwin smiled in that bushy two-week-old growth of his. “I didn't. I truly didn't. Thought you had more sense than to come north when you could be snuggled up with the missus.”

“What? And miss your abuse, Lieutenant!” he roared as he trotted beside the officer's horse, holding up his hand.

They shook, and Baldwin said, “We'll catch up tonight after mess.”

As that weary army horse trudged on past, Seamus slowed to a halt and sang out, “What'd you bring with you in them wagons?”

“Everything, Irishman! Everything precious to a soldier but the faces of loved ones. And forage too!”

That announcement elicited a deafening cheer from the men who were swarming around those wagons, working loose the knots in the ropes that secured the heavy, oiled tarpaulins covering every load, anxious enough to look inside at the new supplies that many trotted alongside the train, rumbling those last three hundred yards into Tongue River Cantonment.

Forage. Grain for their horses and mules, and those huge, horned, ribby brutes the teamsters were now backing into the single-trees with grunts and curses enough to turn the Montana air blue, harnessing the last of those bull oxen to yokes. By damn, now Miles could put to the trail, Seamus thought. Now he could be about ending what others weren't equipped to end. Miles and the Fifth Infantry were the only ones to bring this bloody Sioux war to a close.

So eager for the hunt had the colonel been that he gave his outfit no more than one day of unlimited grain for every last animal they would cajole south down the Tongue before climbing the divide for the Rosebud.

The braying cacophony of mules and men was deafening, sheer excitement slathered in every
hee-raw
and
goddammit
as this army was about to embark upon the unknown. Ah, these truly were the second sweetest sounds in the world to an old horse soldier. Next to Samantha's sigh of contentment each time he returned home to her, that is.

“Seamus!”

He turned now as Miles called his name.

The colonel stopped before him, feet spread apart, his fists balled on his hips in that manner of a man immensely proud of himself. “You'll take the supply train south, Irishman. I imagine we'll catch up to you by the second day out.”

“The way these oxen of yours love to lollygag, I don't doubt that we'll be seeing the rest of you fellas real soon!”

Miles nodded, grinning. “Don't lollygag yourselves. Keep them moving from first light till it's time to go into camp for the night. I'm sending you because you're the sort of man who can find those teamsters a safe camp in enemy country.”

“I'll mother 'em like they was me own kin, General!”

“Be off with you then!” Miles stuck out his bare hand even though the day was blustery and about as raw as a Montana spring day could be.

Miles and his officers had decided to send the slow-moving supply train off first, using the best of the mules and oxen that had come upriver with Baldwin, all the way west from Fort Abraham Lincoln and the depot at Bismarck. From what the arriving bands had explained, the enemy Miles sought wasn't that far away—no more than a matter of a few days. But to make a victory of this strike at the holdouts, the command would need this bull-train.

And Seamus Donegan was the man to see that the teamsters and Lieutenant Cornelius Cusick's F Company, Twenty-second Infantry, escorted the balky oxen and mules upriver as far as they could before Miles and the rest could catch up to them. Once they rejoined, it would be an overland chase, cross-country after the last of the hostiles refusing to surrender, refusing to be driven in to their agencies, celebrating this last season of freedom.

Swinging into the saddle, he adjusted the reins in his left glove, then saluted Miles, Baldwin, and the others who took off their hats and hollered as the Irishman gave his mount the heel and set off at a prance. Behind him the civilian teamsters growled their own princely commands and cracked the air with their twenty-foot black silk whips, each one snapping like a cottonwood popping in the depths of a winter night.

South. Up the Tongue. Alone with but one company of soldiers and these hardy teamsters, going in search of the very same Sioux warriors who had stymied Crook at the Rosebud, butchered Custer on the Little Bighorn, then disappeared like smoke on the wind as autumn descended upon the Little Missouri country.
*

He had no idea why, but something stuck down in his craw told Seamus that these holdouts the army was stalking were likely to be the toughest of them all.

BY TELEGRAPH

ILLINOIS.

Crook on the Indians.

CHICAGO, May 2.—The Post has an interview with General Crook concerning the Indian question, the substance of which is that General Crook considers the Indians are like white men in respect to acquisitiveness; that if they are given a start in the way of lands, cattle and agricultural implements, they will keep adding to their wealth and settle down into respectable, staid citizens.

“You should have let me kill him, Uncle!”

Lame Deer saw the fury in his nephew's eyes, the flush it brought to Iron Star's cheeks. “Perhaps.”

“I could have gone after him,” Iron Star snarled, “if you didn't want me to shed his blood in our camp.”

The
Mnikowoju
chief gazed at the army revolver clutched in his nephew's hand. If he had the half-breed here right now, he wouldn't mind spilling that turncoat's blood himself. But regrettably, the one called Big Leggings was gone. Many days ago the half-breed had turned to the north, leaving their camp of Lakota and Shahiyela, returning to the soldier post on Elk River.

Big Leggings had shown himself at the crest of a nearby hill, bearing a white cloth knotted to the end of a long, bare limb. There the half-breed stayed atop his horse close enough to be seen and perhaps to make sign, but far enough that he had a good lead on any young warrior who might attempt to run him down for a coup, a scalp, and the half-breed's army weapons. Big Leggings remained watchful and nervous until Lame Deer and some of the other headmen walked out under their own white flag and invited him off the hill.

The Lakota were a people of honor—and the half-breed knew that If they accepted the courier into their camp under the white flag, no harm must come to the man. There were times Lame Deer stood aghast at the complete insanity of an honorable people fighting this terrible war against an enemy who had no honor. An enemy who reaped destruction upon the villages of women and children. An enemy who refused to live up to his own promises.

Who would be rash enough to fault Lame Deer if he had indeed slaughtered Big Leggings while they parleyed in his lodge? Especially since this half-breed enemy was himself a man without honor …

This war with the
wasicu
had stirred up so many questions in Lame Deer's heart, questions truly without answers, matters that troubled and vexed this leader who wanted only to be left alone to hunt and live free on that land given to Red Cloud and the other chiefs almost ten summers ago, when Lame Deer was still only a warrior. Now the soldiers were taking back their word, brutally driving the Indians off that land, butchering all who resisted. Perhaps there really was no honorable war with such an enemy.

Iron Star might be right, Lame Deer thought.

To fight such an evil enemy a man had to make use of every ploy at his disposal. Every trick and ruse he had learned in all those years of raiding the
Psatoka,
those People of the Big-Beaked Bird,
*
the
Susuni,
†
and others. To survive in this life and death struggle against an enemy without conscience, Lame Deer figured he might well have to set aside this matter of honor unto death.

If he were going to protect the many who had flocked to him once Spotted Tail tried to convince the Crazy Horse people to come south with him, in all those days since the big village broke, clan torn from clan, Lakota drifting off to the four winds to unite no more as they had in that summer of their greatness … he might have to put survival before honor.

In recent days Lame Deer's wandering village had more than doubled in size. Encompassing sixty lodges now, with some brush arbors for those unattached young warriors who no longer lived with their families, even some whose families had decided they would go south to the agencies, while they themselves would stay on in the north country and fight to the end.

When the Crazy Horse village broke up, the
Mnikowoju
and Sans Arc bands set off for the familiar country between the Little Missouri and the sacred Bear Butte. It was there Spotted Tail reached them, convincing most to start south. From there Spotted Tail and his entourage marched west, determined to find the camp of his nephew, Crazy Horse. So while the rest of the chiefs and their bands reluctantly set off for the reservation, Lame Deer made for the Powder with fewer than thirty lodges.

From the Powder they journeyed on to the upper waters of the Buffalo Tongue where a few more warriors brought in their families along with some young men eager to continue to live the old life. Near the mouth of Hanging Woman Creek here in the
Pehingnunipi Wi,
the Moon of Shedding Ponies, the Shahiyela had reached them—White Hawk and his fifteen lodges.

“We won't be going south with Little Wolf and Morning Star,” the Shahiyela chief had declared to Lame Deer's village.

“We hear some of your people are giving up the fight, going north to turn themselves over to the Bear Coat,” Lame Deer chided.

“And the rest are going south,” White Hawk said bitterly with a wag of his head. “But I came here to your camp, hoping to find those who would have the heart to keep fighting. I cannot give my pony and weapons away to the soldiers we fought at Belly Butte.”

Lame Deer had smiled at these good friends of his, these Shahiyela, then Lame Deer cried, “
Was-te
! This is good! Like me, you are a man who would rather die with your weapon in your hand!”

Chapter 30

3 May 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

INDIANS.

Red Cloud's Party Coming In.

CAMP ROBINSON, NEB., May 4.—A courier just in brings a letter from the Red Cloud party, which will reach this point early on Sunday morning. It's camp to-night is only twenty miles north of here. Forty-seven lodges have gone into the cantonment on the Yellowstone to surrender to General Miles.

Sitting here beneath a large scrap of oiled canvas that served to protect him from last night's rain, now two days out from Tongue River Cantonment, Nelson Miles clutched the small cabinet photo of his Mary, no bigger than the palm of his hand. She and the wives of a few officers would be arriving at Tongue River with the first steamboat of the season. Oh, how he wished she were there to fling his arms around at this moment!

Mary always teased him about his longing for her, saying that he must surely have so much to occupy his time, what with his regiment and the campaigning, that he simply didn't have a spare moment to find himself missing her. But she was wrong. All of that activity crushing in on him for some eighteen or twenty hours a day only made those few hours he had alone with his thoughts all the harder to endure.

Male faces, male voices, the sharp taste of coffee and salt-pork, the bitter tang to the spring wind—they made him miss the sound of her voice, the smell of her smooth neck, the taste of her warm, wet mouth, all the more.

“One day soon, my dear wife, I promise you I will no longer be separated from you,” he whispered as he gazed down on that much-handled tintype. “We will be in Washington City together, and this will all be but a memory to us both. But for now, I learn from Phil Sheridan that I may have a larger command. You know I would prefer a small command with the means of placing supplies where I know I will want them rather than having a large command, forced to have it supplied by the incompetency or indifference of others.”

Not only had General Terry, his department quartermaster in St. Paul, along with Hazen at Fort Buford, seen to it that no supplies reached Tongue River all winter, but Terry even refused to grant permission to Miles to acquire the critically needed beef and other provisions from civilian suppliers upriver, like the Diamond R Ranch.

Sherman and Sheridan had to do something about Miles and the war before this brief window of opportunity slammed shut. There wasn't another man out here who could accomplish what needed doing. No one else now that Custer lay under a couple of spades of prairie earth somewhere on the Little Bighorn. Certainly not Terry or Colonel John Gibbon, those venal bastards who had delayed long enough to allow the enemy to wipe out Nelson's old friend, along with 260 of his men.