one side, troop quarters on the other. In addition, there were rooms for the few officers, a modest stable, a blacksmith shop, and a small mess hall behind the fourteen-foot-high pine walls and iron-mounted gates.
“Look at that, will you?” a fellow soldier asked as he nudged Hook. “Something, ain’t it?”
The morning mist was steaming off the river as the air began to warm, showing for the first time the full thousand-foot span of the magnificent bridge crossing the North Platte. Huge peeled cottonwood stanchions sat atop monstrous handmade cribs of stone.
“I hear there’s nothing like it this side of the Mississippi River.”
“Wish we was on that old muddy river now,” Jonah said. “And not out here waiting for Injuns to cut our nuts off.”
What early light there was showed a few hundred warriors bristling the tops of the far hills across the Platte, some on foot, others mounted. None moving. All of them waiting.
Less than a half hour later, the twenty-year-old Caspar Collins reappeared. He started to put the cap back on his head, then stopped at the edge of the open compound. For a moment he stared down at the hat. Collins turned and handed it to a friend of his serving with the Eleventh Ohio.
“Came up here with a mail escort. And now I don’t like what I’ve been ordered to do, Captain Lybe,” Collins explained to the fellow officer.
“Can’t Captain Bretney countermand the order? You’re not part of Major Anderson’s command here.”
“Bretney tried, sir. Anderson won’t hear of it—wants me to go bring that wagon train in. Something says I won’t be coming back. So there’s no need for those warriors out there to get this new hat I just bought at Laramie.”
“You’ll be coming back, Lieutenant. Just going out to bring that wagon train of Custard’s in, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Collins sighed.
“Keep the hat, Caspar. They won’t get it from you,” Lybe said.
“Something’s out there—got a bad feeling. You keep the hat for me, Captain. Bretney gave me his pistols.” Collins pointed to the two weapons he had stuffed into the tops of his boots.
Lybe shuddered. “Gives me the creeps, Caspar—you doing this.”
“Keep it.”
Collins turned away, resplendent in his new full-dress uniform recently purchased at Laramie. He strode over to his platoon, where he quietly ordered the twenty-five men to saddle up for their ride.
“I don’t like the idea of that boy riding out into them warriors on that skittish gelding the lieutenant’s got him,” Shad said quietly.
“Spooky gray animal, ain’t it?”
Shouts came from a handful of the pickets along the walls, announcing that a dozen or more warriors on ponies had splashed across the river downstream from the bridge.
Hook immediately joined Sweete at the banquette along the top of the wall, watching the warriors lope up the south bank no more than a mile from the fort, where they threw several lariats over the telegraph wire, turned their stout ponies about, and succeeded in pulling down the link to Fort Laramie.
“We’re cut off from all reinforcements now,” moaned Major Martin Anderson.
“God bless us,” whispered Lieutenant Caspar Collins as he turned away toward his waiting platoon.
“
“Yes, Captain Lybe?”
“Respectfully request permission to cover Lieutenant Collins’s rear, Major.”
Anderson regarded the officer dressed in dusty blue a moment. “Your men got in here in the middle of the night, Captain. How many do you have to take with you?”
Lybe blinked. “Fourteen, sir.”
“I understand they’re all volunteers—galvanized Rebs, aren’t they?”
Lybe stared straight ahead without blinking this time. “They are, sir. And fighters too—every one.”
The major cleared his throat and scratched his chin. “Permission granted. Cover the lieutenant’s rear.”
“Thank you, sir.” Lybe turned and galloped off to gather his Confederates at the wall.
“C’mon boys! We’ve got us some skirmishing to do.”
“We going to fight those Injuns?” one of the Southerners asked as the fourteen formed up into two columns of dusty, bearded men dressed in blue wool.
“Men, we’re going to protect the rear of that troop leaving with Lieutenant Collins.”
They did not have long to wait.
With a rustle of movement, tongues buzzing up and down the riverbank, attention was drawn to the noisy yawning of the fort gates. Counting almost three times all the fingers on both of the Oglalla war chief’s hands—the soldiers galloped free of the wooden stockade in two columns. Without slowing, the soldier horses approached the south end of the long bridge, then clattered across, iron shoes thundering over the cottonwood planks, echoing loudly up and down the valley.
The soldier chief leading the horsemen turned left coming off the bridge, heading upstream.
As the last bluecoat thundered off the north end of the cottonwood planks, Roman Nose stood within the brush and raised a lance to which he had tied a colorful pennon, signaling his Shahiyena warriors, who were now downstream of the soldiers. With a loud cheering shriek, the Shahiyena rose as one, as if sprouting from the ground itself, exploding from the brush and timber in a mighty phalanx that sealed off the bridge as an escape route for those white men trapped on the north bank.
The soldier chief waved his arm—ordering his men forward sternly. For a beat of his heart, Crazy Horse admired this soldier who courageously led his men away from the bridge and safety.
A moment later, as the soldiers turned in their saddles, shouting among themselves with a clanging of hardware and weapons, Hump and Red Cloud gave their own signal. The Oglalla burst from the riverbank, adding their voices to the war songs reverberating from the nearby bluffs.
Crazy Horse kept his eye on the soldier chief leading his men. Long ago he had learned that the white man fought very differently from a warrior. While Lakota and Shahiyena went into battle as individuals, taking orders from no man once the fighting began—the white soldiers took their commands from one or two of their number, acting in concert.
The Oglalla warrior was not disappointed this morning. The soldier chief signaled, shouting into the noisy confusion of his own men while the warriors shrieked up and down the riverbanks on both sides of the bridge. Waving with one arm that held a pistol, the soldier struggled with his horse—a tall, beautiful gray animal that pranced, spun, and reared repeatedly.
It is good, Crazy Horse thought. The soldier’s horse is wide-eyed and frightened, smelling death come so near.
With no real form to their charge, the soldiers bolted into a gallop, heading up the road, toward the hills and away from the Lakota breaking from riverbank.
But more Sioux warriors appeared at their front. The horsemen skidded to a ragged halt, then began firing their guns.
The Lakota swept forward, shouting, “Coup! Coup!” and shooting what few rifles they had, no more than one for every hundred warriors. Most released arrows in a short arc toward the cluster of white soldiers.
There came a momentary lull in the flight of the arrows as the Lakota surged closer still, more warriors sweeping down the slope on horseback. The soldiers seized that break in the assault, whirling their mounts and surging back toward the bridge in ragtag fashion.
A soldier grabbed the rein of a warrior who drew close enough, pounding the Lakota in the face with the barrel of his pistol as they struggled, racing along beside one another in a rising dust cloud.
Lakota warrior, White Bull, drove his pony into the fray, waving a soldier saber captured in a recent battle. With it he took off the top of a white man’s head as they neared the north end of the bridge. The spray of bright crimson in the dawn light drove him blood crazy.
