Reap the Whirlwind (46 page)

“No picnic, eh?” Seamus snorted.

“I’ll say,” and he finished fishing out the thin German silver flask. “Want a taste?”

“Surprised to see you carry liquor on you. Never knew.”

“Never had a real reason to want a taste until after supper. Until now.”

“Just pass it here and don’t think of asking a second time.” Donegan took the flask, biting down on the cork to pull it from the neck.

“How quickly I’ve learned that to go on an Indian campaign, I must go ready to ride forty or fifty miles a day, go sometimes on half rations, sleep on the ground with little or no covering, roast, sweat, freeze, and make the acquaintance of every sort of vermin or reptiles that may flourish in the vicinity of my sleeping couch.”

“Here—and thank you,” Donegan said, licking the last drops from his shaggy mustache as he handed the flask back to Davenport. “A hard lesson that—to learn that a soldier on an Indian campaign must have the heart of a lion and the stomach of a mouse, eh?”

Davenport upended the flask, swallowed heartily before he spoke. “And finally, I must be prepared to personally fight Sitting Bull or Satan himself when the shooting begins—for God and the United States hates noncombatants. So thus is it that I, who am peaceably disposed, am now placed in the position of an eyewitness to the bloodiest fighting in the history of the Third Cavalry.”

“Peaceably disposed, are you?”

He laid a hand on his chest and said, “Me? Truth is I’d rather be wrapped legs entwined with a soft-skinned, lilac-smelling wench along the Bowery right now, Seamus, me boy! Make love and not war, I always say.”

“But here you are, right in the thick of it.”

He took another drink, then brought the flask away from his shiny lips, his eyes gone misty as he asked, quietly, “You’ll see that I live to tell my story, Seamus?”

Seamus had watched even the grim edge of humor disappear from the newsman’s face. Saw that for all the bravado and the facade his words might give him in civilian life—this dirty fight just might prove to be one of the crossroads in Reuben Davenport’s character. It was one thing to rant and rail against the hostiles in print, back in civilization. It was quite another to lay your body and possibly your life on the line in these little-known wars against the wild tribes, out here in the wilderness.

“Yes,” Donegan said finally as he reached again for the flask from Davenport, for one more swallow of that elixir. “I’ll do all that’s in my power to see that we both make it out of this alive. You to tell your story to the folks back
east. And me, once more to hold someone very, very dear in my arms.”

Now that Captain William Andrews’s men had vacated the two forward positions before they could be overrun, the hostiles had taken up the abandoned high ground. All attempts Royall made to pursue them met only with frustration as the Sioux and Cheyenne confounded the colonel’s cavalry. When the horse soldiers charged, the warriors fell back to the next ridge. As the cavalry turned to rejoin the main command, the red horsemen wheeled about and surged back on their rear guard, counterattacking.

As aggravating as their seesaw contest was, what was causing even greater despair among Royall’s troopers was the increasing failure of the infantry on their right to keep a concerted pressure against the hostiles. In fact, to many it seemed that Crook’s center was slowly, inexorably, giving ground—permitting the enemy to concentrate their firepower in turn on the western end of the ridge. Chambers’s skirmish line had ground to a halt, and burrowed down.

And the warriors knew it.

Almost as if ordered out in some disciplined wave of red horror, the horsemen burst from cover, warriors on foot in their midst, pouring from southwest, west, and north, spilling down on Royall’s line from nearly all points of the compass. Into that growing cloud of dust and gunfire the ponies raced, circling at the last minute, warriors dropping to the far side of their animals, firing beneath the ponys’ necks as those on foot worked their way from rock to rock to gain a sniper’s vantage point, from which they set up a fire hot enough to keep many of the frightened soldiers down behind their rocks where they could not fire on the warriors on horseback.

“Why doesn’t Crook move his infantry to help us out?” Davenport gasped in exasperation as he plopped down on an elbow and began shoving cartridges into his pistol.

Gazing east, Donegan saw there was no movement along the rest of the ridge. No offensive taking place on what little he could see of the rest of the battlefield. “I got no other choice but to pray Crook’s got a damned good reason he’s not throwing his support over to Royall.”

Closer and closer the horsemen were able to cross that
broken terrain, gaining ground on the left and rear of the cavalry lines strung out dangerously thin in places, soldiers concentrated in fevered knots of spastic firing in others. From the west the hostiles swept around to gain the south, running unopposed for the first time. Yipping and screeching now that they held that ground, uncontested.

The soldiers had drawn back, on the defensive. Fighting for their very lives. Surrounded.

“We’re going to get overrun soon—I can feel it,” Davenport said quietly, then licked some of the brandy from his lower lip.

It wasn’t that his words dripped with fright. To Donegan it sounded no more than resignation to an incontrovertible reality. “We’ll get out. Royall’s bound to withdraw soon. He has to.”

“If he doesn’t?”

Seamus didn’t want to say it. Saying it would somehow be like admitting it.

Looking down in the creek bottom now, he watched the enemy horsemen sweep across that ground where Crook’s army had rested early that morning, where the infantry itself had only recently come to retrieve their mules. The copper-skinned riders galloped right over a lone Shoshone youth left to guard a small herd of ponies. Shooting the boy, they drove the Snake horses south across the Rosebud, splashing back to the west and around to the north again beyond the far ridge, where they disappeared in a fading cacophony of victory.

Quietly, he admitted only, “I’ve been in worse fixes than this, Davenport.”

“Pray tell where, Irishman?”

“On the Crazy Woman Fork.”

“Place we crossed? Between Reno and Fort Phil Kearny?”

Seamus nodded. “The next year in a corral beyond all help, near Fort C. F. Smith.”

“Surrounded?”

“Yes. And a third time on a little sandbar island in the middle of a nameless river a year after that. Then out to Oregon country—where the Modocs could have butchered us all at a place we came to call Black Ledge.”

“Jesus Christ,” Davenport whispered in a hushed tone of reverence, his eyes wide as tea saucers. “Tell me of those, Seamus. For God’s own sake—tell me that you’ve been in tighter places than this.”

“Aye—I have been, Davenport. If you’ll look closely now—and squint your eyes just so … you’ll see me own guardian angel resting on this shoulder.”

The reporter finally smiled, a little less grim. “All right, Seamus. Now you can tell me about those times things were worse than this. And I’ll just scoot a wee bit closer to you here, if you don’t mind. Figure I might as well share that angel you’ve got perched on your shoulder.”

“Hang close to me, Reuben Davenport. No guarantees, you understand—but me sainted mither in heaven knows just how bleeming busy I’ve kept this good angel working in the past.”

A few minutes later Davenport asked again, “We’ll make it out?”

Grinning, Seamus patted the newsman’s shoulder, much as one would gently embrace the hand another man would lay there for reassurance. Sensing the presence of his sainted mother at his side, Donegan answered, “Aye, we’re going to be fine now.”

17 June 1876

W
hen Crazy Horse sprang his unexpected surprise on
Crook, the general found his soldiers totally unprepared for the ferocity of the Sioux charge. For the second time that morning, it fell to the Crow and Shoshone to repulse the attack and prevent what might become a ringing defeat, if not a total massacre.

“Damn these gutless sonsabitches!” Tom Cosgrove grumbled to Ulah Clair, a Shoshone half-breed at his side, cursing the nearby infantry. The two had been fighting elbow to elbow all morning, the half-breed interpreter helping the former Confederate relay his orders to Luishaw’s warriors.

“Ain’t that general ever gonna get his soldiers up and pushing these red bastards back?” Nelson Yarnell snarled nearby.

Cosgrove shrugged. “Don’t look like it, boys. For the life of me I can’t understand how these blue-bellies ever beat the South with soldiers like these.”

Yancy Eckles spat a stream of tobacco and growled, “Shit—with a general like this’un!”

“How did they win the war agin’ us, Tom?” Yarnell asked. “With officers what won’t lead … and soldiers what won’t follow?”

While Yarnell was a heap of a talker from the word scat, Eckles on the other hand rarely said much at all. Cosgrove figured his old friend from Texas must indeed be worked up something fierce for him to put that many words together at one time.

“Yancy, you and Nelson just be glad we got these Snakes with us what wanna fight, boys.”

Eckles tapped Cosgrove’s arm. “Lookee there now, Tom. Maybe we misjudged these blue-bellies.”

“Could be,” Tom replied thoughtfully as he watched the action on the nearby slope. “Looks like a few of ’em got some balls anyway.”

Cosgrove noticed how two officers in dusty, sweaty blue were in and among the Crow at that moment. Randall was the only one Tom recognized and knew by name. A major, he thought. The other, why—Cosgrove had seen him mostly hanging close by Crook’s headquarters for the past three days since the Shoshone come in to join up with the general’s campaign. So what was a white-handed, soft-bellied general’s aide doing with “Black Jack” Randall, rallying the Crow, getting them to their feet?

Yarnell asked, “What they up to, Tom?”

“I don’t know,” Cosgrove answered, slowly coming to his feet too as the enemy came closer and closer, bullets singing overhead. “But I’m fixing to find out. Ulah—get me the chiefs.”

The half-breed Clair rose to a crouch, crabbing away as he sang out, “Luishaw!”

Cosgrove saw the war chief turn when he was called. His eyes went to the white man’s, then back to Clair as the interpreter reached the Shoshone chiefs. Like most of the others, Luishaw was naked to the waist, wearing only a breechclout and moccasins, and that headdress: eagle feathers standing straight up, fully encircling his head from brow to crown, a long trailer draping from the rear flank of the spotted war pony he sat upon, cheering the marksmanship of his tribesmen.

“Ulah! Bring Norkuk and Tigee. Get the word passed to the rest. We’re throwing in with the Crow!”

“Whoooeee, Tom!” Nelson Yarnell exclaimed. “Just like a real rebel countercharge!”

“You goddamned betcha!” cheered the taciturn Eckles.

Cosgrove whirled, waving his arm, impatient and not waiting for the interpreter to translate his order, realizing most of the Shoshone could plainly see the Crow getting to their feet and beginning to rush back to the rear among the rocks where they started to remount their ponies. Behind the squaw man came the first dozen. Then twice that number, and finally the rest were up out of their rifle pits, following the three white men, Ulah Clair, and Luishaw. Catching up their ponies, it seemed every one of them was shouting, singing, chanting—working each other up with war cries and bravery talk.

A man married to a Shoshone knew enough of the tongue to catch some of it. Stuff about the spilled blood of mothers and fathers. Another cried out about the blood of their own—invoking the spirit of that boy killed minutes ago down in the valley. Come here on this journey for his first fight, the youth had asked Luishaw for permission to join in the battle—wanting no longer to be treated as only a herder. The chief had allowed the youth to go down to the spring at the creek bottom, where he could paint himself as a warrior, say his medicine song, then return to fight with the men of the tribe.

It was there beside the Rosebud that he had been overrun by the Sioux when Crazy Horse’s warriors started eating ground in their charges off the slopes of that conical hill.

Talk of the young boy, talk of their families and loved ones left behind—all of that was enough to get these Snakes ready to ride bravely into four, maybe five times their number.

That, and Tom Cosgrove standing in the stirrups leading them out to join the Crow and the young aide to General Crook what was boldly coming up to ride the point alongside the old Confederate.

Lord, those Shoshone were yelling like there were two or three hundred of them.

As Captain George M. Randall set the Crow in motion, John Bourke galloped off to join the Snakes in this countercharge meant to blunt what Crazy Horse was throwing
at Crook’s infantry. Reining his mount in beside the squaw man called Cosgrove, the young lieutenant realized there was likely nothing that would now stop any of these warriors, Crow or Shoshone, every last one of them galloping hot on the heels of the white men leading the allies back into the teeth of the oncoming Sioux.