And for a moment, a gust of wind dissipated the swirling dust, parting the horsemen so Crazy Horse could catch a glimpse of that brave soldier chief who had reached the bridge, just as the Shahiyena came up to swallow the soldiers whole.
The soldier wavered in the saddle—an arrow fluttering just above his eyes, deeply embedded in his skull.
He was shouting at the warriors in Lakota—saying he was a friend.
Like a cold stone, the shrill sound of that voice struck the heart of Crazy Horse. He knew that soldier. Caspar. His friend.
Already many of the Lakota were drawing back as the soldier hollered at them atop his frightened mount.
“Go back, Cas-Par! Go back now!”
“It is our friend—Cas-Par!” hollered an Oglalla.
“Let him pass! Let the soldier chief onto the bridge!” yelled another.
Hump and Crazy Horse and several other war chiefs were shouting now, ordering their warriors back once they recognized their friend. Through that widening gauntlet, even as the Shahiyena bore down on the soldiers, the white horsemen began to retreat in panic, clattering across the bridge.
Seven white men lay dead or dying on the north bank, each one surrounded by a growing knot of enraged Shahiyena warriors, each warrior with blood hot at yesterday’s killing of High-Back Wolf.
The fighting with the rest of the soldiers grew so close that few of the Shahiyena used the guns they had captured in the southern country. Instead, they were like a pack of water moccasins, in among the soldiers with their long lances: jabbing, pulling the weapon free, bright with blood in the growing sunlight, then plunging the weapon into horse and soldier alike in a screaming, screeching nightmare of dust and death.
“Don’t leave me!” shrieked a soldier as he fell to the ground. “Oh, God—”
Around and around in a tightened circle the big gray horse pranced while the soldier chief tried to shoot at the strangling noose of Shahiyena—then the hard-mouthed animal suddenly bolted off with its wounded rider, heading not across the bridge with the other fleeing soldiers—but galloping off toward the ridge, into the nearby hills, directly for the Shahiyena who were pouring down into the valley.
With a loud, throaty roar, a wagon-gun sent its load of canister shot across the river. The charge exploded just above the ground, raising a huge spout of dirt clods and dust, shredding the willow and alder on the north bank as the warriors scurried back. A second wagon-gun roared on the heels of the first. Its charge landed farther from the river, against the bluffs.
Crazy Horse joined the rest as the warriors slowly flowed back from the riverbank. Nowhere was his soldier friend in sight. Out of the mass of Shahiyena one warrior emerged, leading the nervous gray horse by a rawhide lariat, struggling with the frightened animal. The cold stone inside his belly grew taut, and never more cold.
He had little time to study the riverbank, wondering which body might be Cas-Par’s, for the soldiers at the fort walls set up a barrage with their far-shooting guns. Each time those rifles roared, brownskinned horsemen dropped from the backs of their ponies, then slid back atop them to jeer and call out, slapping their bare backsides at the soldiers so far across the river for missing them.
“Your mothers are bitch dogs!”
Crazy Horse stared along the hillside, finding George Bent, the old fur trader’s half-breed son. He was shouting in English at the white men in the fort.
“Shoot that loud-mouthed son of a bitch!” a soldier cried out.
Again and again the soldiers fired, trying to hit the bare-chested Bent, who kept on cursing the soldiers in every vile English word he had learned in his years among them. From time to time he rose from the back of his pony, pulling aside his breechclout, exposing his genitals to the white men.
During the whole time, those Shahiyena gathered around the half-breed shook eight fresh scalps—further inciting the frustrated white men clustered behind the walls of their log fort.
6
NO SOONER HAD Jonah Hook and the fourteen soldiers reached the bridge than the Cheyenne and Sioux were sprouting from the far bank as if by magic.
“Skirmish formation!” Captain Lybe hollered. “Off left! Off right!”
Seven men swung out to the left. Hook turned with six other soldiers to the right. Shoulder to shoulder.
“Forward at a walk!”
As they started across the bridge to help Collins’s harried troops, Lybe’s men had to bunch together more than Hook liked it. This was not the way to have to come face-to-face with those screaming warriors less than a thousand yards away, across the river, at the other end of this long bridge.
By now Collins was plainly hit, his mount whirling wildly. The rest of his outfit were breaking and racing for the north end of the bridge. The first army mount clattered onto the cottonwood planks.
“Prepare to fire!” Lybe shouted. “Make it good boys—empty some ponies now ….
The fourteen rifles spurted orange, engulfing the Volunteers in stinging smoke as the single mounted soldier surged into their midst, burst through them to the safety of the fort. Another horseman clattered onto the bridge. And a third, pounding the hollow-sounding planks as Hook rammed the ball home onto the powder. He thumbed a cap onto the nipple and brought the big hammer back to full cock as the wide, smooth buttplate slipped into the groove of his shoulder.
By damn, this is what he was out here to do, if he was going to be out here at all—and that was to kill Injuns.
Lybe was barking now, his pistol busy. “Fire your weapons at will—reload and fire at will!”
Jonah squeezed back on the trigger. The gun roared. Through the smoke he thought he saw a warrior reel and grip his pony’s withers, loping out of the scramble of men and animals. But with all the confusion, Jonah could not be sure if it was his kill.
In a matter of ragged seconds, every one of Caspar Collins’s squad who was going to make it out of that horde of warriors had reached the bridge—frantic in their flight, tearing through Lybe’s Volunteers in panic.
“Where’s Collins?” demanded the captain as each one of the troopers shot past.
One slowed, then stopped, his horse prancing when Lybe snagged the bridle.
“Don’t know where the lieutenant is!” His face was ashen with fear. He turned back, pointing, the horse trying to rip itself from Lybe’s firm grip. “He went back to help one of the … one of the men what was down. Lemme go, Captain!”
Lybe freed his grip and slapped the mount, before he turned to see Captain Bretney emerge from the gate at the lead of another twenty foot soldiers, coming on at double time. They too were ordered to spread out in a wide skirmish line that halted at the riverbank, where they commenced firing.
Lybe shouted into the noise of the gunfire, “Reload and follow me.”
“We going on across, Cap’n?” Hook asked.
“By damn we’re going to find out what happened to Collins.”
Jonah read the determination turning the man’s jawline to stone, and admired the Yankee officer for it. He was on Lybe’s heels, glancing behind him once as some of the rest slammed home their ramrods and joined the captain.
Bretney signaled his men on the south bank to form again. The captain led his squad, following Lybe across as the first howitzer round whined overhead. It exploded just above the ground, spraying shot and ball into the air, kicking up dirt and brush.
With wild shrieks, the Indians retreated up the sides of the hills and atop the bluffs, leaving their victims lying stark and white as fish bellies against the summer-cured grass. Lybe stopped at the north end of the bridge, watching Bretney’s squad come up to join him as the warriors jeered and slapped their bare asses at the soldiers. Taunting, leering, luring the white men on.
