Trumpet on the Land (34 page)

For those last few days they had waited on the agency, deciding whether to go or not. Scouts brought word that soldiers were prowling the very same country the Shahiyena would have to cross if they hoped to reach the Powder River hunting grounds. Then scouts returned from the Mini Pusa,
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bringing news that the soldiers had turned
around and were marching back to the south, toward the Buffalo Dung River, and had abandoned that country between the reservation and the Paha Sapa. As if fleeing from the danger in those mighty villages to the north who had just crushed two armies.

The way was clear!

Yesterday Yellow Hair and the warriors had started them out. No soldiers from Camp Robinson came out to try stopping the People. They hadn't even seen a single white man all that day. Then this morning, as camp was coming to life and the women were loading their travois for the day's journey, scouts came in with a report of a train of white-topped wagons that was coming from the west. Coming from the white man's forts and cities, bound for his settlements in the Paha Sapa.

That would mean those wagons were loaded with supplies: boxes and cans of food, bolts of cloth for the women, whiskey for the warriors, brass and iron kettles, tin cups and butcher knives, maybe even bullets and guns. What a gift the Everywhere Spirit had delivered Yellow Hair's people as they began their journey to freedom!

They were fleeing the white man's oppression and the slow starvation of the reservation … and this was the Everywhere Spirit's reward—this train filled with supplies to take with them as they moved to the north country, never to be forced into returning to the agency again.

He was sitting behind the hill now, gazing at the small mirror he could hold in the palm of one hand, straightening his face paint, when one of the young scouts came tearing up on his pony.

“There are two of them,” the youngster said breathlessly. “They left the wagons and are now hurrying ahead of the rest.”

Yellow Hair asked, “Which way are they coming?”

The scout pantomimed, arching his arm west to east.

The war chiefs eyes narrowed gravely. “If they move their horses too fast, they will see our warriors behind these hills—and our surprise for the wagon train will be ruined.”

“We must kill the two riders,” growled Rain Maker.

“Yes,” Yellow Hair said to his good friend, the one who had seen him take the brave man's scalp many autumns before. “And we will lead them.”

Quickly he pointed to a handful of others who would come—men like Beaver Heart, Buffalo Road, and other old friends. Not a large party, but enough that they could easily swallow up the two riders and kill them behind one of these rolling hills without alerting the others. The wagon men would roll on down the white man's road toward the Paha Sapa, not knowing that death waited for them all this new day as the sun rose in the east.

“Come!” Yellow Hair shouted as he kicked heels into the ribs of his strong pony.

Behind him Rain Maker and the others yelped as they streamed out from the far side of that knoll and followed Yellow Hair into the shallow ravine. The sun was chasing shadows off the land, rising strong and confident this morning. The way his people were once more rising above the land.

This was to be their summer. The time of his people.

On they raced down the bottom of the ravine, listening to the fading shouts of encouragement from the warriors who would lie in waiting, hiding until the signal was given to attack the wagons.

Closer and closer they galloped toward the white man's road at the mouth of this ravine.

In the coldest hour of that morning Bill Cody had awakened himself as he used to do all the time, at least before he had gone east to begin performing on the boards. It was a good life, and it paid him well enough.

But it was nothing like this: rising before the sun and saddling up, walking his mount through row upon row of sleeping soldiers, and finally climbing into the saddle beyond the pickets. To ride alone below the waning stars, just he and these grassy hills, having put Warbonnet Creek at his back so he could look to the south and have his eyes
behold nothing but this great inland sea. Bill had enough time to circle west, ease on south, then angle over to the east, where the Cheyenne were sure to be somewhere on that road.

He wanted to know where they were, so he could tell Merritt how much time they had before the Cheyenne were up and moving. Before the Cheyenne bumped head on into the Fighting Fifth.

Sure enough, Bill found the village in the smudgy gray light of that dawn. But by the time he had wandered back to the west so he would not be discovered by any wandering scouts, and returned to the regiment's bivouac, Bill found the soldiers already up, finishing breakfast, some having saddled their mounts while others were busy oiling the trapdoors of the Springfields, packing themselves down with ammunition.

He caught up with Merritt as the colonel was climbing into the saddle.

“I just received good news, Bill,” Merritt said in that Gatling-gun, rapid-fire speech of his when he grew excited. “Messenger came in with word from our forward post. They've spotted Indians.”

“Probably the advance party of the village I found waking up this morning, General.”

“I'm going to see this for myself,” the colonel said with a smile.

They had gone to the high ground, waited—and were rewarded quickly enough. The Cheyenne thought they were about to swallow up those two couriers, then ambush a wagon train. Were they going to be surprised!

And now he sat atop his buckskin, his hat tugged down on his long brown curls, pulling down the bottom of that short-waisted Mexican coat of black velvet drenched with a blood-hued scarlet braid, resplendent with silver conchos and white lace adorning the cuffs. None of the oncoming warriors he would meet in a matter of minutes could outshine him. Too bad these dowdy, dusty, frumpy soldiers knew nothing of the importance of such things. A
man must look his best, wear his finest, when he rode into battle. Perhaps only a true warrior like himself understood these Cheyenne they would strike in a few heartbeats. A man always wore his finest when going against the enemy.

“All ready, General?” King asked above him at the top of the hill.

Merritt rose slightly in a crouch just down the slope from the lieutenant, gazing over Cody and the rest, then peering back to the line of troopers gathered in the middistance. “All ready, King. Give the word when you like.”

No matter what Bill did to prepare his weapons, to straighten his clothing in these anxious minutes, he never took his eyes off that lieutenant up there. A good soldier, King was going to give them the signal so he and the rest could get the jump on those warriors riding down to ambush the two couriers.

The hardest part was this waiting.

As it had been all these years. The hardest thing he had ever done—making a new life for Lulu and the children. Doing that for them, when all he really wanted was to be right here, right now. Waiting to lead the Fifth into battle. Suffering that exquisite burn of hot adrenaline pumping into his blood—there was nothing finer.

God, but life was sweet!

As much as he loved Lulu, as much as he loved the children and the applause and the hundreds of women swarming and swooning around him … it was here that he knew his heart was at rest. Here where there was still adventure enough for any man. Even a man who loved danger as much as William F. Cody.

King was turning … by God—he was turning!

Bill looped up another six inches of rein. The buckskin beneath him sensed it, sidestepped suddenly before Cody brought the big horse under control.

“Easy. Easy boy.”

The lieutenant was reaching to the side where he had laid his hat. Reaching for it at the same time he was starting to turn at the top of that knoll above Cody.

Sliding his tall boots back into the stirrups a wee bit, pressing down with the balls of his feet …

Then the lieutenant swept his hat off the ground, waving it as he clambered to his feet, his mouth opening in the new day's light, hollering with a roar.

“Now, lads—in with you!”

Bill Cody didn't need to be told twice.

Chapter 21
17 July 1876

R
ight from the first jump Bill was ten lengths ahead of the rest. And the way his long-legged horse was eating up the ground as it charged around the foot of the hill, there was no way any of them were going to catch him.

Cody pulled the pistol from his belt and thumbed the hammer back.

By Jove! He was going to be the first there to surprise the enemy. The first to wade into them. How he prayed he would be the first to raise a scalp. Yes, by glory: to take a scalp … a scalp for Custer!

“This is for you, Armstrong,” he whispered into that summer wind whipping at his eyes as he laid low along the neck of the big buckskin surging forward with dilated nostrils. “May you rest in peace after this day—avenged at last!”

No theater had ever offered him a finer stage than this. Bill could never remember playing before such an enthusiastic audience as the soldiers he knew were now watching him at this moment. If the fates did indeed deem that a man's life must—in the great totality of all things—be summed up in one supremely delicious moment … then this was his. To win or lose in the coming combat
mattered not. Only the game of it all. To playact before the perfumed and starched set back east, that simply was not living.

Laying one's last breath on the line, pitting his life against these foes—gambling it all in the adventure and lust of the chase … now this was living. This was his moment!

In the far distance the sharp-edged, grassy southern ridges boiled with movement as two hundred warriors bolted from hiding, hungry for taking Hall's wagon train at last. They hadn't yet seen Cody and his rescue party.

Those Cheyenne have no idea the Fifth lies in wait to ambush them!

But what was the prettiest of all was how that small war party suddenly turned atop their racing ponies as they burst out of the ravine onto the Black Hills Road, the wind whipping their hair, surprised to find Cody and that handful of soldiers hot on the braid-bound tails of those war ponies.

Cody aimed—fired his pistol at their wide, glistening backs.

Suddenly like a boulder parting a mountain stream, the warriors reined left and right in a savage maneuver, most of the them slipping to the sides of their animals as the hooves kicked up great, glimmering, golden cascades of dust into the new sunlight. Stunned with surprise, they nonetheless turned to confront their attackers.

Two of the war party fired off shots at the hilltop behind the onrushing Cody, one shooting from under the neck of his pony.

In an instant Bill looked them over, deciding on the one he wanted more than the rest: he rode a gorgeous gray horse, larger than the smaller ponies. Wearing that splendid feathered bonnet, he must surely be a chief—and if not a chief, then at least a mighty warrior. A worthy opponent.

With the gunfire the Cheyenne ponies pranced and reared, frightened as the white men closed on them. Under the necks of their animals the warriors fired a volley. Most
had only a foot locked over a rear flank, only a hand visible clasped into a braided loop of mane. Bill heard a bullet whine past. Another so close he made out the snarling hiss. Surely close enough now—he pulled back on the hammer again, deciding to try a shot at that warrior in the magnificent headdress, the warrior who was shouting, the breeze whipping the long tail of his warbonnet.

At the very moment he leveled the pistol over his buckskin's head and squeezed off the shot, the war chiefs pony reared in fright, its eyes grown as big and white as Lulu's china saucers, its nostrils flaring. Cody was close enough that he saw the lathered moistness gathered at the crude, rawhide hackamore the warrior used for a rein.