“What’d you see, soldier?” Keyes demanded.
“Something … something was crawling right up out of that holler over there, Lieutenant,” the soldier answered his company commander. “So I challenged—and he didn’t answer—that’s when I fired.”
“Did you hit him, by damned?” the sergeant asked.
“I think so … ah, hell! I don’t know, Sarge.”
“There!” King said suddenly, rising off his knees.
The others studied the moonlit nearness of the hollow the hapless picket had been watching. There for one and all to see a four-legged intruder loped up the side of the coulee to the top of the plain, where he halted to survey the men below him with no little disdain. After a moment the night visitor turned away in indignation and disappeared over the hill, rump, tail, and all.
Climbing out of the dirt, the sergeant bawled at his picket, “You walleyed guttersnipe! Your own grandmother would have known that was nothing but a goddamned coyote!”
With that loud and definitive declaration, the bivouac erupted with laughter and good-natured backslapping that accompanied the crude jokes at picket Sullivan’s expense.
“Hey, Sully,” bawled a voice out of the darkness, “if it was
On and on, back and forth the joking went for close to half an hour before the troopers settled back in for their night beside the Cheyenne River.
No more coyotes were to visit the company’s bivouac as the sky lights whirled overhead.
Then just past moonset—three o’clock, as King noted on his turnip pocket watch when the alarm went up— pickets on the lieutenant’s side of camp heard the distant passing of many hoofbeats as they faded into the distance.
That eerie echo of unshod pony hooves galloping north in the dark—headed safely around C Troop and making for the last great hunting ground of the Sioux and the Cheyenne.
*Near present-day Lusk, Wyoming.
Chapter 5
Sunday 25 June 1876
Two hours later the Cheyenne River patrol arose in the cold darkness that greeted those who crossed the high plains even at the height of summer. There would be no breakfast this fateful Sunday morning for Company C, Fifth Cavalry.
Without much said the troopers saddled their mounts, formed up in a column of twos, and set off behind Baptiste Garnier, bearing north up a broadening valley before the horizon to the east even hinted at turning gray.
A half mile from camp the half-breed scout had discovered a flood of pony tracks. In sweeping around the edge of C Troop’s bivouac, the enemy had ventured closer than he had ever come before. This was to be a day that would live on and on in history.
Come the arrival of that same false dawn, some two hundred miles farther to the north as the far-seeing golden eagle might fly, Crow scouts were singing their death songs among some tall rocks on the crest of the Wolf Mountains called the Crow’s Nest. They peered down into the faraway valley of the Greasy Grass and saw the smoke of many, many lodge fires, the dust raised by thousands upon thousands of pony hooves.
But here in Wyoming Territory, Little Bat was making for the Dry Fork of the Cheyenne.
After a march of some six miles they reached the stream that had disappeared beneath its dry bed. Its sandy, rippled course wound lazily through stands of old cottonwood and willow, their roots forced to reach deep for that underground water. Yet deadfall lay matted against the trunks and among the brush, testament to the force and fury of mountain runoff that past spring.
“First of May, I figure we could barely ford this valley,” Stanton said.
“And look at it now,” King replied. “Dry as a bone.”
“Got to find some water, fellas,” Keyes ordered, sending a small detachment upstream, Stanton and a handful choosing to ride downstream.
It was the old crusty major’s call that rallied Company C as well as any bugle could. They found Stanton squatting underneath a steep, overhanging bank shaded by stunted cottonwood and a profusion of willows.
“Better’n nothing at all,” the major cheered, submerging his canteen.
Stanton’s mount stood up to its fetlocks in what clearly had once been a big pool. But at this late season the water was warm and decidedly alkaline, even a bit soapy to the taste. Nonetheless, their thirsty horses did not balk when they were led to the pool two or three at a time to drink their fill.
“We find better by night come,” Little Bat reassured them in his broken English as he mounted up and set out so that he could ride some distance ahead of the company column.
King didn’t see much of the half-breed for the rest of that morning, only glimpses of the horse and rider caught briefly on the crest of a hill as Garnier watched the soldiers coming on, then disappeared again from view, remaining far in the front. One after another, hill after valley then on again, until they finally clambered into the rugged country northeast of the Mini Pusa. This was the land where Sheridan’s intelligence said they would find the great Indian trail—here, where it would cross the valley of the South Cheyenne some distance west of the Beaver River, very near its confluence with the Mini Pusa itself.
Then at noon, as the sun hung hot and sultry, sulled like a wild mule’s eyeball in that great pale sky of summer’s best, King spotted him again. Garnier was coming back across a ridgetop. Once in plain sight of Keyes’s column, he stopped and circled his horse again, ripping his hat from his head and waving it wildly.
“He’s bringing us on, boys,” Stanton observed.
“What you think he’s found?” King asked.
The old major snorted. “If it were Injuns—that halfbreed son of a red-belly would be hightailing it back here instead of signaling us on.”
Keyes turned in the saddle and issued orders for the rest of the column to proceed at its pace, then turned to go on up the trail at a lope with Stanton, King, and two others. Garnier led them down into a wide swale, where he quickly leaped from his mount.
“Every man get off,” Little Bat said. “Leave horses with holder. Him.” He pointed to one of their number.
Keyes nodded to the soldier Garnier had indicated. “You can rest here.”
The half-breed said, “Come with me and see.”
King followed the others trailing out behind the scout, who was clambering on foot up the side of the ridge, making the best purchase he could with his boots in the flaky soil and loose rock gone too long without rain. Time and again they slid, grabbed hold with their hands, and kept on up the slope. Just short of the crest Little Bat signaled for the rest to wait while he peered over.
Taking a few minutes to satisfy himself while the others caught their breath, Garnier finally signaled them on up. At the top the others blew just like horses after a climb, huffing in the midday heat of another scorcher on the plains.
“Take your glasses,” Garnier directed. “Look there. Right over there.”
Keyes and Stanton were slow in getting their looking glasses out. King was the first to peer off to the southeast.
“You see?”
“By damn, I do!” King replied.
Even at this distance it was clearly visible: a broad, beaten trail leading down to the riverbed—pony hooves and travois scouring the fragile earth in a track as broad as anything the young lieutenant could ever hope to see.
