past, issuing his oath with each lunging step.
Others plodded past without raising their heads to look at King, murmuring only to themselves, their lungs heaving with weary fatigue, vowing death at the end of a rope to Crook and all his officers, cursing the Sioux and their army as a whole.
Charles felt the sob begin to flutter in his own chest and fought it down, swallowing hard. Turning, blinking into the dancing swirl of sheeting rain, King found an infantryman collapsing to his knees into the mud some yards off to the right.
Slowly the soldier crumpled forward, crying out to God. “Take mercy on us, Lord! Deliver us from hell!”
“C’mon,” King said quietly as he bent over the soldier. Helping the man struggle to his feet, the lieutenant found he was able to stifle his own growing despair and hopelessness. “Let’s walk together awhile, you and me.”
With an arm around one another they lumbered forward unevenly, the ground sucking at their feet so that they careened first this way, then that.
And the rain continued to fall.
More and more horses gave out.
One by one the men collapsed by the side of the trail among the cactus and the stunted grass throughout that long, terrible day in the history of the Army of the West.
Yet they somehow struggled on.
At the crossing of the next swollen stream the mules carrying Von Leuttwitz’s litter floundered, stumbled, and pitched their sputtering passenger into the muddy, foaming water. The lieutenant struggled to keep his head above the surging current as three of Captain Andrews’s men reached him and pulled him out, lifting the man gently into their arms and carrying him up the slippery bank on the far side. While they wiped what they could of the mud from the lieutenant’s face, others hurried to repair the loosened surcingle. Then as Von Leuttwitz continued cursing the troopers as if they were his torturers, the soldiers gently laid him into his litter once more and moved on.
Into the rain.
Through the mud.
Past the men who crumpled to their knees and beat the soggy ground with their fists in utter despair. Whimpering like children.
This hunger. This utter bone-weary fatigue. This cold with no hope of warmth. This twelfth day of nonstop rain, without prayer of deliverance.
These were enemies even the strongest among them simply could not defeat.
Give them a band of warriors. Show them an enemy village. Ask them to stand and face charge after charge after charge of screeching, wild-eyed red horsemen. They could do that. After all, they were soldiers.
But this! No man, no matter how strong of body, no matter how unshakable of will, no … no man was prepared for something like this. If endurance, if life itself, were a candle that glowed inside each and every one of those soldiers—then the wick was all but gone, and the weakened flame flickered, sputtering, just short of snuffing itself out.
A few of those who would somehow be strong enough this day would eventually pay in the years to come from the deprivation. A few became crazed even that day, were bound and tied by their friends, carried along by their bunkies—raving, wild-eyed, foaming, lunatic men whose crippled minds were never to recover.
Not long after noon King trudged up to a pair of men hunkered in the sticky mud among the cactus. One of them proved to be the surgeon McGillycuddy, who more than two hours before had stopped at that spot to help a young soldier.
“Huntington, Henry Dustan, sir,” the officer identified himself to the lieutenant as King squatted to his side. “Second Lieutenant, sir.”
Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy explained, “I came upon Mr. Huntington here some time back. Found him doubled up with cramps.”
In sympathy King looked down at the officer hunched in a fetal position, his legs crimped against his belly. “Have you given him anything for the pain?”
“Very first thing,” McGillycuddy replied, “I administered some quinine to relieve the severe cramping. But his pain only worsened as time wore on. I’ve now resorted to an injection of morphine, afraid it might be a bowel obstruction of some sort.”
For a moment King glanced up at the two horses standing nearby, then asked, “Is he ready to mount up?”
“Oh, God … dear God, no!” Huntington groaned, his eyes clenched with a rising spasm of pain, his legs trembling.
“Hundreds of men have passed by me,” the doctor declared, “but no one has been able to help.”
“We’re the last,” King explained. “You’ve got to come in with me.”
Huntington bellowed, “I can’t ride!”
“I simply can’t make the man suffer,” McGillycuddy explained. “Even the two of us won’t be able to get him into the saddle.”
“We’ve got to move out,” Charles told the two. “See? There goes the last of the file. And there’s a damned good chance a war party could be along anytime to sweep down on defenseless stragglers just like you.”
“If you’ve got an idea,” McGillycuddy said, “now’s the time to tell us.”
“Both of you,” Huntington gasped in the middle of a wave of pain, “both … just go. Leave me. Don’t sacrifice your own … own lives.”
“Be quiet,” the doctor ordered. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight knowing I left you out here.”
“Me neither,” King agreed.
The ill soldier grumbled, “No sense the red bastards getting all of us. G’won and leave me.”
“No.” Rising from the gummy mud, King stared southwest, south, then southeast across the grassland dotted with spiny cactus. “Maybe there.”
“What? Where?” the surgeon asked.
“We can make him a travois. Stay with him, Doctor. I’ll be back soon.”
Lumbering off toward a wide vee in the low, rolling hills, King made for the dark vegetation that promised what he needed most. With his belt knife the lieutenant cut down some thick saplings, then turned and dragged them back to McGillycuddy. Next he slogged north on their backtrail more than half a mile until he found several of the abandoned saddles and gathered four of the lariats the troopers had left behind. With the ropes King and the surgeon quickly fashioned a crude travois after knocking the branches from the young saplings. With more of the rope they wove a bed, and across that net of ropes the two men laid their blankets.
At first Huntington’s thoroughbred objected to having the travois lashed to its saddle. McGillycuddy had to steady the animal while King completed the harnessing, then together they gently lifted Huntington into place. With the young second lieutenant’s own gum poncho thrown over him, McGillycuddy held out his hand to Charles.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I don’t believe I caught your name.”
“King. Charles King.” He glanced into the roiling gray of the western sky. “Now, it’s best you get that horse moving with your patient, Doctor. Night’s gonna come all too quick.”
Twilight was advancing, far faster than any of them cared to realize.
All day long the infantry at the head of the march had been on the alert for one of two things: either the Belle Fourche River, or some game for their supper fires. As the hours crawled by, it seemed neither would come to pass.No river, and not one wild animal had been seen. Late in the afternoon one of the men on the left flank suddenly yelled.
“Antelope!”
Soldiers along that side of the ragged column turned dully, their reaction time retarded, and stared off into the low hills as if it might be nothing more than a delusion brought on by their hunger, their weakness, and the cold. But no, there in the rain stood four of the white-rumped animals. A buck and his small harem.
They did not wait for permission to fire. Instead the whole left flank began to pop at the quartet of targets, and quickly all four lay in the short, muddy grass. Over the cactus and through the gumbo the ecstatic soldiers bounded with sudden rejuvenation, pouncing on the warm animals, a dozen or more men working their slashing knives on each small carcass, slicing warm strips from the hindquarters, claiming parts of the liver or heart, chewing on sections of the rich, fatty gut while stuffing choice morsels inside the pockets of their mud-crusted tunics and
