would not scent the war ponies. Then the men backed off through the brush.
Scrambling farther up the hillside, Grouard discovered an outcrop of sandstone that made for a narrow cave, where the two of them were forced to slide in feet first. From their rocky fortress that reminded a gloomy Donegan of an early grave, the pair kept an anxious watch on the valley floor as well as on that long slope below them, all the way down to the timber where they had cached the horses, throughout that summer’s morning and into the hot afternoon, long after the war party finally departed, riding off to the southeast, away from the foothills.
It wasn’t until after the sun had set behind them that the two dragged themselves from their narrow hole and rubbed sore, stiff muscles. Down in the timber they untied their horses, resaddled, and set off at moonrise. Angling away from the valley where the warriors had headed, Grouard and Donegan decided their only choice was to hug the foothills, making for a longer trail back to Crook’s Camp Cloud Peak.
“Still say that was a damned-fool stunt you pulled back there at the Injin village,” Donegan grumbled late that night after the stars came out.
“What stunt?”
“Going down to talk to that old Injin,” Seamus replied. “Why didn’t we just ride around that village?”
“You know how big that son of a bitch was?”
With a shrug Donegan complained, “So—I’m still waiting for you to tell me why you went and told that old man what your Injin name was.”
Grinning, Grouard replied, “I only claimed I was one of the best scouts on the northern plains, Irishman. Never said I could think fast on my feet.”
With the return of Frank Grouard and the Irishman, rumors began to run as deep and swift as runoff in spring through the army’s camp. Most doubted the pair’s claim concerning their nighttime journey through the battlefield littered with dead soldiers—the very same skeptics who doubted both the size of the enemy village as well as the number of hostile warriors the two scouts were estimating for the general.
As the object of so much jovial banter, if not downright derision, Grouard and Donegan kept to themselves after reaching the Goose Creek camp, refusing even to say anything about their adventures to John Finerty.
“Not even to tell your story to a fellow Patlander?” the reporter prodded Donegan.
“Go away, Finerty,” the scout growled, pulling his hat back over his face.
For a moment more John stared down at Donegan, the tall scout stretched out in a respectable piece of shade that Saturday morning, his ankles crossed and flicking a finger now and then at an annoying deerfly.
One last time the newsman asked, “Maybe you’ll want to tell me by the time I get back, eh?”
“Good-bye, Finerty.”
“Only gonna be gone just a few days with Crook.”
“You already told me,” Donegan said, his words muffled beneath the crown of the wide-brimmed hat pulled fully over his face. “So be off with you.”
“Hunting’s said to be good up there. Sure you don’t want to join us and enjoy yourself after your harrowing experiences?”
“I’ll skin you myself if you don’t leave me be,” Seamus grumped.
“Suit yourself, Seamus.”
When the Irishman did not reply, Finerty turned and strode back through the cavalry camp toward Crook’s headquarters, leading his mount, all packed and ready for the general’s hunt into the recesses of the Big Horn Mountains. He wasn’t the only correspondent making the sojourn: Joe Wasson, correspondent not only for the New York
Anything after a week and a half of lounging about in a place with so many men and not a single woman—not even that dish-faced Calamity Jane Cannary—not to mention that out of a thousand soldiers there was very, very little money to be won at cards. Why, the officers were down to wagering tins of peaches or tomatoes on horse-and footraces, perhaps even placing bets on who would catch the most or the biggest fish each day. Fishing was a pleasant enough sport, as long as a man could practice its fine arts from a patch of shade. While the evenings were delightfully cool, the days had a stifling sameness to them: by eleven o’clock the heat had become unbearable, lasting until well past five. In those same hours of torment, horseflies, deerflies, all sorts of biting, buzzing, winged torture— including the omnipresent mosquitoes—drove the men and animals mad with their incessant cruelty.
At long last came the respite of each evening, times when Finerty repeatedly pressed John Bourke to regale them all with tales of his adventures with Crook in the Arizona campaigns, at least when the newsman couldn’t lay his hands on one of those well-traveled paperback books so many were borrowing from the small personal library of Captain Peter D. Vroom or Lieutenant Augustus C. Paul, both of the Third Cavalry. Oh, to have even a dime novel to read! A poem by Walt Whitman! Even a reading tract of a temperance lecture delivered by Deacon Bross or one of Brother Moody’s uplifting speeches on his spiritual hope for mankind!
Driven to collecting gossip and what bits of news he could glean from those thirty Montana miners who had wandered into camp from over on the Tongue River before the Rosebud fight—none of it kept Finerty interested for all that long. It damned well all had a way of wearing pretty thin on a young, outgoing fellow from the sociable streets of Chicago. Why, in that lazy camp there wasn’t so much as a glass of warm beer to be had, much less the numbing taste of strong whiskey—not so much as a cigar! A man had to content himself with government tobacco, sold by the plug or pouch.
Even Sundays no longer held their special significance for him: his one day off back in Chicago. Here by the Big Horns, Sunday was just one of the seven every one of them had to endure, one after another until Crook decided they would march again. Deep in the cold of last winter he figured he would be home by spring—the Sioux campaign over and the hostiles driven back to their agencies. After Reynolds’s debacle on the Powder, Finerty revised his thinking and figured that it might take one more campaign—this time with more killing and less driving. But after their fight on the Rosebud, Crook limped back here to lick his wounds.
And now, by God—it looked like this was going to be a summer campaign. If not longer!
Came the times when John wished he had packed it in with the cough-racked MacMillan, who’d gone south with the wagons for resupply at Fetterman. If nothing else, Finerty figured he could fight boredom by spending a few hours at Kid Slaymaker’s Hog Ranch across the river from the post before the teamsters would have everything loaded and be turning about for a return trip to the camp at Goose Creek. Ah, just a little heady potheen to drink and the sweet fragrance of a moist, fleshy woman.
So it would be a trip to the mountains for him and the general. After the excitement of getting his story of the Crazy Horse fight written with a dateline of 17 June, “Banks of the Rosebud,” then finding a suitable courier who would accept pay to carry John’s dispatch down to Fetterman so that it could be telegraphed back to Chicago, things all too quickly had become ho-hum. Now after a week and a half of waiting to learn if his story had made it back to his editor, Finerty was growing more and more convinced no courier could be trusted. They were vermin, nothing more than an annoyance to a war correspondent.
But what ate at Finerty the most was that he had come to the conclusion that Crook was now intending to make an entire summer’s campaign out of this—something no man, officer, soldier, or civilian had expected back in May when they’d put Fort Fetterman at their backs.
With the Big Horns scraping the clouds south and west of the camp, a grouping of wall tents pitched on the flats along the north bank of Goose Creek indicated the headquarters of Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. For hundreds of yards on either side of the general’s camp stretched row upon row upon row of the small A-tents pitched by the infantry. Across the creek the horse soldiers had raised their neat rows of identical dog tents.
As pleasing as the scene was to his newsman’s eye, John Finerty was more than ready to flee to the mountains. Why, the way he was feeling, he might even accept something a bit more strenuous than a mere hunt in the Big Horns—he might even welcome another chance to pit himself against the hostiles.
Just as long as it ended as the Rosebud fight had— with Crazy Horse turning tail and running at the end of the day.
