“Dismissed?” he sputtered.
“Unless you don’t understand the meaning of that order, Mr. Walker.”
The lieutenant sputtered furiously for a moment, then turned on his heel.
Lybe sighed deeply, his eyes squinting. “All right, the rest of you—Kansas, Ohio, and U.S. Volunteers—get back to digging those goddamned rifle pits. We must be ready when those red bastards come!”
“
Shad Sweete turned at the call from a picket above him along the banquette.
“That’s Custard, I’ll bet,” he said to Jonah Hook.
Jonah stood, wagging his head in amazement. “I would’ve figured he’d be buzzard bait by now.”
Shad shook his head. “Not with every Injun for a hundred miles gathered up here for this shivery. Likely Custard ain’t seen a war feather till now.”
“The major better send some men out to make sure that wagon train makes it in.”
“Anderson ain’t the sort can make that decision.”
“Bretney?”
Shad grinned. “The captain with real guts is under arrest.”
He looked around for Lybe and found the captain arguing with Anderson at the far side of the open compound pocked now with rifle pits, each one like a fresh scar on the pale, foot-hammered earth.
“Lybe won’t do no good with him either, Jonah.” Shad pointed at the hills across the river. “Likely it’s all over for the sergeant’s men anyway. They just been spotted by the warriors.”
On the far hills, hundreds of warriors were leaping atop their ponies, kicking them furiously downhill toward the river. They had spotted the tops of the wagons not long after the fort had seen the incoming train, inching along the road on the Indians’ side of the North Platte.
“How many’s with Custard?” Shad inquired.
“I remember him having ten soldiers and fourteen teamsters,” Hook answered.
“Say!” shouted a picket above them. “The Injuns just cut off five of our boys from the rest of the wagon.”
“How many warriors following those five?” Shad flung his voice up the wall.
“More’n a hundred, mister.”
Hook felt helpless, knowing some of those men out there by face, if not by name. Knowing they had families back home, waiting for a husband or father or brother to come marching home. “Ain’t nothing we can do to help ’em?”
“Ain’t a damned thing now, Jonah,” Shad whispered. “Not a damned thing.”
The warriors caught the wagons in a shallow ravine some five miles west of the post. Far out of range of his artillery, and much farther than the major desired to dispatch a relief escort from his stockade. To everyone who asked, demanding action, Anderson justified sitting on his thumbs by saying he needed every man he had for the coming assault he expected from the gathering warriors.
For close to four hours the men in Platte Station kept their eyes on the distant smoke rising above the shallow ravine where they had last seen the wagon tops disappear. Then the firing grew intense for several minutes and gradually tapered off as if someone were damming an irrigation slough.
It wasn’t long before puffs of dark, oily smoke billowed into the sky from the far ravine and the faint sound of wild screeching was heard carried on the incoming breeze from upriver.
Much later in the day as the sun eased over into the last quadrant of the sky, there came a flurry of activity along the banquettes as soldiers shouted that they had spotted three men running in from the west.
“What’s your name, soldier?” Anderson demanded as he met the first of the trio of grimy, smoke-blackened survivors at the middle of the rifle pits, near Jonah Hook. Others clustered around the three as well.
“Corporal James Shrader, sir. Company D.”
“You with Custard’s outfit?”
“Was,” he gasped, eyes wide and every bit disbelieving he had made it in. “He ordered me to take four men out in advance and probe the trail in. We heard the howitzer fire back yonder—and Custard sent us in to find out what was happening here.”
“I ordered the field piece fired to warn the sergeant.”
“Yessir,” Shrader said, self-consciously. “When the Injuns rode down on us, we got cut off from the rest.”
“What happened to those who remained with the sergeant?”
“Don’t rightly know. We was more downstream from Custard and the wagons. But we could hear. The men put up a fight of it for a long time. And another bunch was close on our tails—about to find where we’d taken cover. Then a big, ugly Injun come riding down the edge of the coulee we was hiding in. He waved his rifle and called out to the rest. And they followed him like a swarm of hornets for the wagons down the ravine. That was the last we heard of any firing from Custard’s bunch.”
“You three hid all afternoon?”
“Yessir—five of us in the brakes near the river bottom. Private Ballew was knocked out of the saddle, and they swarmed over him there in the ravine. Private Summers was coming up the bank with me when he was hit and fell. We three is all that’s left.”
“Lieutenant Walker, take these men and get them something to eat and drink. You’ve done well, Corporal.”
“We got out with our hair, Major. And right now—that’s good enough for me.”
7
AMONG THE SHAHIYENA of the North, he had long been known as Sauts, meaning the Bat.
That winged night animal swooping down on unsuspecting prey was his medicine helper.
But because of his huge beaklike nose, over the past few years more and more of his own people had taken to calling him what the few white men who came among the bands called him: Roman Nose.
So it was that this towering, muscular warrior became Woquini, or Hook Nose, to his own people. Above all, the most powerful war chief of the Northern Cheyenne.
Up and down the length of the hills overlooking the soldier fort on the south side of the river, Roman Nose passed by small groups of warriors, Lakota and Shahiyena both, sitting and talking, smoking their pipes and eating jerked meat, discussing the fight of yesterday when they had killed the soldier chief on the gray horse, perhaps talking of driving the soldiers back into the timber walls earlier today.
Warriors waving blankets on top of their lookout posts to the west caught his attention. More soldiers coming. Wagons.
This time the Shahiyena would show the Lakota how to kill all the white men. Roman Nose was still angry about the fighting yesterday. The Lakota had allowed too many soldiers to escape back across the bridge. Only eight scalps taken. It was not enough to pay for the horror suffered by Black Kettle’s people on the Little Dried River.
The white man’s bridge would have to run red with blood before Roman Nose had avenged the deaths of the many in that cold winter camp stinking with butchery.
By the time the Cheyenne war chief arrived at the scene, he found his warriors had already forced the five white-topped wagons to halt in the sandy bottom of a shallow ravine. The white men had circled the wagons in a crude oval, freeing the mules from their hitches about the time a hundred Lakota under Crazy Horse rode down on them.
