“You see what it shied at?”
“No,” he replied, dropping from the saddle. Standing on the ground, he handed the reins to Donegan. “But I’m fixing to find out.”
As Seamus watched, the half-breed crouched forward, bent nearly on all fours. Grouard had barely gone ten feet when he jerked to an abrupt halt. In the darkness it appeared the scout inched sideways, his arms out, feeling something with both hands.
Swallowing, he quickly glanced around him at the darkness seeming to swell around him. Donegan asked nervously, “What’d you find?”
“Shit!” Grouard squealed, and fell backward on his rump.
“What the hell is it?” Seamus demanded, his raspy voice louder now as he forced the question from a throat constricted in fear. Maybe the gruff edge he could bring to his words would scare away the ancient demons haunting him ever since the fall of darkness.
“It’s a goddamned body.”
“A body?” Donegan asked, dropping immediately to the ground. His own horse caught the scent of the corpse, yanking at the reins. “Man?”
“Yeah.”
He joined the half-breed as Grouard knelt a second time over the dark shape. In what murky light the rind of moon and starlight could strain through the oilcloth covering of clouds, Seamus finally made out the unmistakable human form beneath them. Pale. Naked. White as the dust itself.
“His arms—” Grouard said.
“I see. They been cut off.”
“When I put my hand out first time, I found his head.”
“Ain’t much left of it, is there?”
“No,” the half-breed replied. “Scalped, and they smashed his face in.”
“War club does a pretty job of that, don’t it?” Donegan asked grimly. “A white man?”
“My bet’d be this fella was a soldier.”
“Yeah. One of them what made the trail we been following.” Seamus stood stiffly, feeling the pull in his legs after going so long in the saddle. Up and down the length of his thighs he rubbed with his palms in the way of a horseman gone afoot after hours of crossing rough country, working those leg and rump muscles in partnership with the animal below him.
Grouard stood slowly as well.
“Let’s go,” Donegan said hollowly, holding out Grouard’s rein.
The half-breed’s only answer was to take up the leather strap and fling himself into the saddle without using the stirrup from the off-hand side. With a sudden jerk he yanked the animal’s head about to the north and set off once more into the darkness, straight up the long slope at the end of that narrow ridge running parallel with the river.
Twenty feet from the crest of the ridge Grouard’s horse shied again, snorting, wheeling, once more fighting the bit. Frank brought it under control as Donegan came up, both scouts peering down at a second body, white as paste among the dust beneath that cloudy moonlight.
“We get up on top there,” Frank whispered, “we likely won’t run onto any more of ’em.”
As much death as he had seen—men torn limb from limb by canister and grapeshot during the war, men wounded not by bullets but struck by the flying pieces of bone from other bodies torn apart by concussion shot, as well as the finest in mutilation handiwork practiced by the native inhabitants of the high plains—Seamus nevertheless found his heart beginning to hammer more loudly with its every beat thundering in his ears. All too soon he began to realize that what they had stumbled across wasn’t a battlefield.
It was a slaughterhouse.
And when the cool breeze of the prairie night shifted to come out of the north, again carrying the promise of moisture on it as that breeze scurried beneath the thin clouds, Donegan caught the first whiff of decay. Mortifying flesh left to molder and rot, exposed to sun and time, left to bloat beneath the flight and crawl of countless insects already about their devilish work.
This … this was like Gettysburg.
“Frank, you smell that?”
“Yes,” Grouard said, struggling to keep his mount pointed to the north, moving a bit west as he kicked the animal’s coal-black flanks to leap up the last few yards to the very spine of that ridge.
As the two scouts reached the crest, those thin, ghostly clouds parted like the opening of a veil, casting a sudden, eerie light on the silvery ribbon of river below them.
“The Greasy Grass.”
“Yeah,” Seamus replied. “The Little Bighorn.”
And as the clouds scudded back from the quarter rind of moon even more, the jumble of ridge and coulee, the cut and slash of ravines that fingered up from the east bank of the river, all revealed themselves to the horsemen. Exposing the dark clumps of four-legged beasts left moidering against the pale hue of ground and trampled grass. Among those huge carcasses lay the stark, ghostly white of crumpled human forms. Unstirred at this interruption to their sleep, never again to move. Left here beneath this hallowed sky to await another day of searing heat, and more bloating, and perhaps the coming of all the more predators to finish the work of life’s great eternal circle.
Dust to bloody goddamned dust, Seamus thought, coughing with the sour taste at the back of his tongue as his nose came alive each time the breeze stiffened in his face. Just like rotting meat.
For as far as Seamus could see in the silvery light of what star and moonshine had been allowed through the wispy, inky shreds of clouds speeding over their heads, the four-legged carcasses dotted both sides of the long ridge. And clustered here and there, everywhere for as far as he could see to the north, lay those pale, fish-bellied bodies. Much more than a hundred of them. More than two hundred ghosts.
“W-white men,” Donegan muttered.
“They’re soldiers,” Grouard said.
“Blessed Virgin Mither of Christ,” the Irishman whispered, crossing himself suddenly. His skin crawled. His eyes darted here, then there. Knowing he could never fight something he could not see. “I got to get out of here.”
“I’m with you,” the half-breed agreed, heeling his horse north along the hogback ridge.
Side by side they walked their horses, casting their eyes at times down to the bright sheen of that river ribboned below them, clear to the far bank, where the thick stands of tall cottonwoods revealed abandoned wickiup frames among a few pale cones—lodges for some reason left behind in the great village’s departure.
Off to the left a coyote yipped in warning, snarled in anger, then snapped its jaws angrily at the riders and their horses before it tucked its tail and led a half-dozen others in loping long-legged down toward a deep ravine, where Donegan could hear the distant throat-gurgle, that distinctive canine growl of animals contesting one another over spoils. Some of the soldiers must have tried making it to the river.
And now the beasts were already working over the dead of this army.
For what seemed like hours they plodded their way north along the top of that ridge above the Greasy Grass, the oppressive, sickeningly sweetish stench of mortifying flesh mingled with the aroma of burned grass that was carried up from the valley floor and benchland west of the river by the breezes. This seemed to be a land laid to waste. Nothing left alive except the predators, both four-legged and hard-shelled, at work on the bloated, gassy flesh. Nothing else alive, except for two intruders who had stumbled onto this ridge where the two hundred would tomorrow again lie beneath a blistering canopy of high-plains summer heat.
Yet by the time Grouard and Donegan reached the northern end of the ridge where more than forty, perhaps as many as fifty, bodies lay bunched a few yards down the western slope, Seamus realized that even though their ride along that hogback had seemed to take endless hours, it had taken less than a dozen minutes as their horses nosed their way through the stiff-legged carcasses and fish-bellied corpses. Both horses had fought their bits, bobbing their heads in disgust at the smell of decay every step of that journey through this killing ground.
This had to be the same bunch that caught Crook’s army flat-footed on the Rosebud, Seamus thought. Had to be. The big village was camped on the Rosebud—that much they knew. Between then and now they crossed over the mountains. Which meant that the same bunch that came close to wiping out Crook a week later wiped out these soldiers.
