For the ancient Hebrews crossing the wilderness who had their prayers answered when the stones turned to manna—it could be no greater an expectation than this!
So it was that many of the soldiers moved up the slopes of the surrounding hills, where they would keep watch to the south and speculate on what Lieutenant Bubb might bring them to break their horse-meat fast.
“There!”
A hundred men turned, followed in an instant by five hundred more leaping to their feet along the riverbank below. Then another thousand. Those who could wearily trudged up the slopes as fast as their played-out legs could carry them, their sunken, skeletal eyes wide with expectation as they strained to peer into the distance.
Yes! There! Coming out of the mouth of that canyon!
Cattle?
Dear God! Fifty head of them!
Lumbering down the slopes of the grassy hills, urged on by Mills’s wranglers. Charles could almost hear those far-off cavalrymen whistle and shout as they drove the beeves down to that camp beside the Belle Fourche.
And—look there! What’s that coming no more than a mile behind them?
Wagons!
Clean white canvas stretched taut over the swell of those wrought-iron bows.
Merciful Lord in heaven—wagons!
“Rations coming!” someone shouted.
Then they were all shouting, throwing their hats into the air with abandon. Embracing and dancing, around and around and around, arm in arm. Hugging and crying, laughing and pounding one another on the back like schoolboys at Mayday recess.
Charles rubbed that old Arizona arrow wound, wondering if Bubb might just have some horse liniment or a drawing salve. Knowing once more the power of prayer. Sensing again the presence of his God.
A God who hadn’t lifted him from the jaws of death in Apache country only to let him die in the rain, and the cold, and the mud of this Sioux wilderness.
Then, as if to give a benediction to all their most fervent prayers, patches of blue suddenly appeared overhead as the rain clouds rumbled on past, leaving the sun behind to shine for those last two hours of a grand, grand day.
They had been delivered.
Since leaving Camp Cloud Peak on Goose Creek, Crook’s army had suffered twenty-two days of rain, storms of great severity. In the three weeks since leaving General Alfred Terry on the Yellowstone, they had suffered seven days of a “horse-meat march.”
But now Seamus was riding down that last long, grassy slope toward the Belle Fourche beside the lead wagon. Twelve more followed, all double-teamed because of the immense weight Lieutenant Bubb had packed in each one, provisions piled right up past the sidewalls, straining against the tailgates.
He had never seen anything like it: the way these men rushed up the slopes toward the beef herd, scattering the cattle. Every trooper yanked out his pistol, every foot soldier pulled free his belt knife, ready to do in those fifty frightened cows right there and then. For a moment Donegan thought a half-dozen soldiers were going to tackle one of the beeves, hamstring the animal, and butcher it right there on the hillside what with the way they all clung to its horns and back and tail, dragging it on down, as it snorted and protested, toward the flashing blue waters of that pretty, pretty river while the sun fell out of the clouds at long, long last.
“Hurrah for old Crook!” they raised the cheer.
Days before—even as little as hours, so it seemed— these soldiers had been clamoring to hang the general. A mutinous rabble ready to string up the man who had brought them such ruin.
But now these same men exalted some two thousand strong as they poured out of that bivouac like a mighty throng, suddenly rejuvenated—willing once more to follow their leader into the jaws of hell.
Seamus couldn’t have scraped the grin off his face if he’d wanted to. Especially when the soldiers clambered onto the first wagon even before it could come to a halt. Then the second and all the rest, men leaping beneath the canvas covers, cheering and drowning out the shouts of warning and orders from their officers. Against the sturdy sidewalls of all thirteen of those wagons the men shoved and jostled, nearly tipping over a few of the freighters in the melee while those soldiers inside began tossing out crates of hard bread, cookies and crackers, chests of salt pork along with tins of vegetables and fruits the men stabbed open with their field knives, drinking the juices before bending back the metal lids to spear out the precious fruit or sweet tomatoes.
“Huzzah for Colonel Mills! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
But Captain Anson Mills wasn’t there to take his bow.
Instead of returning with the wagons, he had elected to stay behind in Crook City, begging off from making the return trip due to his severe fatigue and the privations suffered in one long battle with the Sioux, and in both punishing journeys to the Black Hills settlements. This afternoon Lieutenant Bubb led the rescue back from Deadwood.
From wagon to wagon the quartermaster pushed his weary horse through the shoving, elbowing, senseless crowd, hollering out his orders on how he wanted the food dispersed. Seamus had to laugh—for not one of them was listening to any courteous order from their commissary officer now. No longer were they forced to take only what he dispersed among them in the way of the butchered horses, mules, or ponies.
Now they were only eating. Eating everything in sight.
Near the tailgate of the third wagon he saw Charles King shoved side to side in the melee as soldiers hurled boxes and cases and tins of food high into the air, where the crowd lunged and scrambled for it all. Fistfights broke out as men struggled over every morsel.
Then suddenly King dropped into the mud, and when Seamus saw him come up, the lieutenant had three muddy ginger snaps he hurriedly brushed off with his dirty hands, then stuffed right into his mouth. He chewed that dirty treat with no less relish than James Gordon Bennett of the New York
Every last one of those men were eating as if there were no tomorrow, as if they might not see another meal. After what they had been through, Seamus thought, who could blame them for not giving a damn about that next meal, that next day, that next march and campaign!
“Tobacco!” a soldier announced from a wagon back down the line.
For a moment it appeared all two thousand of the men were going to swamp that single freighter.
“Lordee! We got tobacco at last!”
Already half of the beeves were down in the grass, their throats slit, the precious, thick crimson pouring out in glistening puddles over that lush carpet of green as the men put their knives to work in quickly butchering before they would waddle over to the roaring bonfires laden with great gobs of warm meat spilling across their bloody arms.
Damn, even the worst cut of beefsteak had to taste better than the very best scab-backed, worn-down, bone-rack, and worm-bait horse!
Within minutes some of the men who had snatched eighty-pound sacks of flour had begun mixing up sugar and eggs into batter when they realized they had no skillets. In a heartbeat an enterprising soldier cried out that they could melt the solder joints securing the two halves of their canteens and use them both for small skillets. It was quickly done by hundreds, and soon they brought their roasting pans to a sizzle and were turning flapjacks to a golden brown as men crowded and shoved, snatching the fluffy cakes from the iron spatulas as soon as they were pulled from the coals.
At every fire sat a ring of huge gallon coffeepots, and around them sat an ever bigger ring of expectant men, soldiers and civilians alike waiting for their first cup of real coffee in more long, cold days and nights than any man should have to remember.
Only the surgeons ate sparingly, advising all within hearing distance to do the same—but no one listened. So Clements and Patzki and McGillycuddy just shook their heads, knowing that come morning they would be crushed beneath the weight of a thousand gastric complaints.
And when the hundreds had eaten their fill and were drinking what had to be the best cup of coffee in their lives, the pipes were lit and cigarettes rolled, maybe even an extra quid or two stuffed back into their cheeks, once more given the luxury of wrapping themselves in warm
