Reap the Whirlwind (55 page)

Something that shouted of victory. Bellowed deafeningly of a shared victory.

And Donegan realized they had indeed shared something men of different races rarely share: a common enemy and a common fight, the same hand-to-hand bone-and-muscle struggle for their own lives and the bodies of the fallen two still lying at their feet. He and the Shoshone had shared that singular and unspoken camaraderie experienced by few in the heat of pitched battle. Theirs, a bonding of strong, unwavering, and unbroken spirits.

In a blur of brown and blue, saffron light and red dust, two horses were there, wide-eyed and prancing with fright as the Sioux continued to retreat up the ridge. Before he realized it, three cavalrymen were with him and the Shoshone, picking up the wounded orderly and their dying captain. Hauling the bodies across the McClellan saddles, the soldiers turned and sprinted away, yanking the horses behind them, retreating down the slope toward the bottom of the Kollmar.

Seamus and the Indian scout found themselves alone again. And together began to make their retreat.

From his pockets Seamus desperately dug out a handful of the brass .44-caliber cartridges as he backed up, his eyes scanning the surging, throbbing movements of the enemy above him at the head of the ridge. When Seamus went to twist the receiver tube, he found it would not budge. Again and again he tried turning it, growing a bit more frantic
with each attempt, struggling to open the muzzle’s under-barrel receiver.

Only then did he fully realize what he had done to the stock. From the wrist on back, the cheekpiece hung by but a few stout splinters of pale wood, flecked with drying blood. For the moment he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t his.

And in swinging the empty repeater like a club, he had damaged its reloading tube. Nearly a decade was gone since purchasing a pair of these guns with old Sam Marr from that sutler at Fort Laramie before they had pushed north along the Bozeman Road to reach the gold diggings of Montana. A decade gone this very summer since he had first put the Henry repeater to a severe test at the Crazy Woman CROSSING.
^*
Ten long years—and Seamus had yet to reunite with Sam Marr.

Then for a heartbeat he stopped, taking his eyes off the Sioux and Cheyenne to lever open the action and stare into the breech. One cartridge remained. One only, as he set off again, catching up with the Shoshone scout who was yelling something at him, waving him on and pointing up the hill. As Seamus turned, he saw a half dozen or more of the Shoshone sprinting on angle in his direction, chased by a renewed assault from the Sioux. What seemed to anger the enemy most was that two of the allies shook and waved long-haired and bloody scalps behind them to taunt at the Sioux, flinging blood and gore in their pagan triumph merely to anger ancient foes, boasting of conquest in the face of enemies of old. Two fresh scalps—trophies taken from two of the dead who had fallen near Henry’s body, close enough to the edge of the ravine in that dirty hand-to-hand struggle.

Without a weapon that could fire more than one shot—the one bullet a plainsman always saved for himself—Donegan wheeled and set off on a dead run as the Sioux raised an even louder and bloodier cry. He had to find a rifle, a carbine, something—for the enemy was coming, countercharging again as they saw the survivors of Royall’s
battalion bolting, fleeing for their lives into the ravine now that the bodies were rescued.

Already reduced to little more than a hundred, perhaps a hundred twenty at the most—what with the absence of the horse-holders in the ravine and accounting for those who had already fled, in addition to the dead and wounded lost during the opening salvos of that frantic retreat from that third position—those who remained in Royall’s command turned to begin their wild break to rejoin Crook’s infantry the moment they saw the Sioux temporarily driven back by the allies’ furious countercharge. In confusion and disorder the lost battalion spilled down the slope of the ravine toward the frightened horses, a few of which already lay dead across the slope, more milling about wounded and soon to die.

Now fully in possession of the ridge recently vacated by the soldiers, the Sioux and Cheyenne proceeded to rake the coulee below them with a concentrated if not inaccurate rifle fire. If nothing else, it served to wound and frighten the horses even worse, to scare the retreating cavalry all the more.

Some six hundred yards across the ravine and northeast up the ridge, the infantry of Burt and Burrowes were brought to their feet and set in motion again, this time working south on the double in a foragers’ charge to relieve what had all the appearances of a massacre in the making. The two captains suddenly called a halt, ordering their men to kneel and begin pouring fire at will into the enemy, just about the time the first of Royall’s troops reached their frightened horses.

Not far down the near side of the coulee stood many of the Crow and Shoshone scouts, firing over the heads of the retreating soldiers running pell-mell toward the allies, those arms with the red arm bands waving the troopers on as the white men stumbled and spilled across the rocky, uneven ground, picking themselves up out of the dust and grass, continuing to careen down the slope toward the long line of allies who steadfastly held their line, staunchly holding back the great onrushing tide of Sioux and Cheyenne.

F Company, led by Lieutenant Bainbridge Reynolds and the last troop down off the slope, bore the brunt of the
renewed attack on the rear guard of this, Royall’s last retreat.

In a matter of seconds after the rout began, enemy horsemen had a platoon of troopers under Sergeant David Marshall separated from the rest and fully encircled, sweeping in with clubs and knives, lances and tomahawks. Yet the soldiers returned blow for blow, swinging their trapdoor Springfields like stout hickory axe-handles. Wounded in the face, Marshall crumpled, going down as his men fell back and ever back from the body, knowing they were next.

Yet one returned.

Private Phineas Towne whirled about and lunged back into the melee and the dust. Kneeling to snag hold of his sergeant’s gunbelt, he hefted Marshall over his shoulder and started back downhill. Five yards, ten, then twenty—when Towne must have sensed the burning across his belly as he was shot by a hostile marksman. Collapsing in a heap, he spilled his sergeant.

Farrier Richard O’Grady was there in but a moment, as well as another second rescuer from Reynolds’s troop. As O’Grady began to drag Marshall’s body away, Towne struggled to rise in the arms of Henry Kett, his comrade from F Company.

Through that line of Crow and Shoshone, who continued to steadily fire their weapons, holding their ancient enemies at bay, the soldiers plunged toward what remained of their horses. And when Seamus saw that the last of Royall’s men were finally moving southeast down the Kollmar, he found himself amid the allies who had staunchly waited out the frantic retreat. Only when the last soldiers were on their way, hooves and boot heels thundering down the ravine, did the scouts turn to take up the tail of Royall’s fleeing troopers, wheeling and halting every now and then to fight a rear-guard action.

Across three hundred more yards the last of those beleaguered, wounded, weary cavalrymen and their brown-skinned allies fought their way through the red gauntlet. Sioux and Cheyenne lined the slopes of the ravine, raining bullets and arrows down on the retreating horsemen. Then as quickly as they could cut and slash their way free from
the ragged end of the enemy’s gauntlet, the horse soldiers were reining sharply to the left in an uneven procession, climbing back to the northeast in their maddening flight, ascending the slope that took them toward the waiting infantry.

Near the southwestern end of Crook’s ridge, William B. Royall halted as the rest of his battalion raced on past, Adjutant Lemly at his side. There the colonel waited until the last of his men had broken out of the ravine. Not until then did Royall again put spurs to his mount, bringing up the tail of that retreat, riding among the allies covering their escape. This valiant commander of cavalry, cut off and all but abandoned that morning, was now the last to leave that bloodiest ground across the whole of what was Crook’s Rosebud battlefield.

It was just after one P.M., Chicago time, as Royall led what was left of his whittled battalion past the mule brigade of Burt and Burrowes, proceeding on east where the horse soldiers dismounted and took up their position just west of the gap, this time on the far-right flank of George Crook’s ridge.

For more than five hours already, on that day of Indian Wars infamy, those men from the Third Cavalry had seen their fiercest fighting since the bloody days of the Civil War.

“
I
f you don’t hump it on in here, you’ll likely find yourself wearing some Injun lead in some painful part where you like to sit!” Richard Closter hollered at the Irishman, waving Donegan on.

Seamus ran the last fifty yards across the open ground to reach the stacks of sandstone rocks and deadfall, some of which nature had piled up, others erected by Tom Moore’s packers and those sixty-five Montana miners hunkered down on the north slope of the ridge, almost due east of the conical hill where the brown-skinned horsemen were beginning to congregate and concentrate their fire on the white civilians now that Royall’s battalion had slipped out of their trap.

Sliding in among these rocks that formed a spur nearly a hundred yards in length and jutting from the north side
of the bluff, Donegan sighed with relief. Here some four hundred yards from Crook’s hill, the Irishman hurriedly made a place for himself beside the old white-haired packer and lay panting on his back.

“You was with that bunch just got out?” Tom Moore asked, flicking a nod toward Royall’s battalion passing in a ragged stream below them, moving east.

“Yes.”

Closter clucked his tongue. “My, my. You don’t value your hide much—do you, boy?”

“Things getting hot here now for us too,” Moore declared as the racket of Sioux rifles grew in volume, more and more lead slapping against the rocks, singing in ricochet, smacking the nearby ground and hissing overhead as each moment went by.

“Better get to using that Henry of your’n,” Closter growled as he rolled back onto his belly behind his pile of sandstone and gazed across the open ground between the packers’ rocks and the conical hill, where the warriors were beginning to work their way toward the white men.

“Can’t.”

“Why the hell can’t you?” Moore demanded. “Out of ammunition?” He turned away a moment, not seeming to wait for an answer to peer over some of the nearby men who made their living working for the mule-train master as the Sioux appeared to gather for a renewed charge. “Stands to reason, I suppose—as much shooting as you boys did over there. But I’ll bet someone here has some cartridges oughtta fit.”

“Not out of cartridges, Tom,” Seamus explained, holding up the busted rifle.

Moore turned back to look at the Irishman’s repeater. “Damn, will you look at what you done to your gun.”

“He can damn well see himself, Tom!” Closter snorted.

Moaning, Seamus said, “Even with the busted wrist, I could still use her to shoot—but I can’t reload the son of a bitch.”

“Got a breech jam?” Closter asked. “Loading tube.”

Moore wagged his head. “A stock is one thing, wrap it
up stronger than new with wet rawhide. But that loading tube ain’t something a man can fix in the field, Seamus.”

Donegan shrugged. “Least I got a couple of pistols to work with, if them Injins ride in here close enough.”

“They will now that they don’t have you boys to play with over yonder,” Closter warned. “Don’t doubt that.”

“That’s right,” Moore agreed. “Now that they haven’t got Royall to cut up, they’ll go to work on us right here, ’cause we’re the closest to ’em.”

Closter spat a stream of tobacco juice in a pretty arc over the rocks and said, “Besides, we been the ones giving ’em the most hell today anyway.”

“That’s a fact,” Moore replied. “Ain’t a man here don’t have him a good piece. Most of these fellas here are pretty good with their guns too.”

“Say, now, Seamus—I got me a extra rifle you could use. If you’re of a mind to,” Closter said.

“With you?”

“Not far. Over yonder, with the mules. I’ll fetch it up for you.”

“I’ll go for you, Uncle Dick,” Donegan volunteered. “No sense in you—”

The aging packer started to rise, putting a hand firmly on the Irishman’s shoulder to hold Donegan down. “You wouldn’t know what the hell to look for anyway, you young jack-assed idjit.”

“You tell me what it is, I’ll find it among your baggage and truck.”

“Ever seen my Sharps?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Ever seen one at all?”

Donegan nodded. “Several of ’em. Down to the buffalo country south of Dodge, down to Adobe Walls.”

“Then you know one when you see it,” Closter said, settling back down beside the Irishman.

Moore said, “I heard Sharps was the guns what held off Quanah Parker’s Comanche couple years back at the Walls.”

“Them, and this Henry of mine.” “That gun of yours is a busted flush now,” Closter said. “But you use mine, you care to. Even let you fetch it so I
can just stay right here and jaw with Tom and the rest while we wait for Crazy Horse to decide what fancy notion he’s gonna pull on us next.”

“What about the Sharps? So I know it.”

Closter grinned in that tobacco-stained white beard of his and replied, “Oh, you’ll know it. A fifty-ninety, she be.”

“I saw some fifty-seventies down to Texas.”

“What they call the big fifties. Heard ’em called the ‘Poison Slingers’ too. But like a lot of fellas, I load my own cartridges,” Closter explained. “So I’ve come to like a little smaller bullet—still fifty caliber, mind you—but I stuff a full hunnert and ten grains of powder behind it just so’s I can push that lead out there faster.”

“Sweet Mither of God—that’s gotta be a long chunk of brass to be filling with black powder,” Donegan replied. “Likely it makes a hell of a buffalo load, I’ll bet.”

“Likely? Why, it’ll
likely
bring down her share of drabbed redskins too, you idjit Irishman!” Closter growled. But the old packer grinned big as he said, “She does pack one hell of a punch. Ain’t many like her. That’s a big load to punch through a Sharps, or any gun. Look to my pannier, you’ll find two belts of ammunition rolled up. A hunnert rounds. Best bring ’em both with you—”