wailing, sobbing, and crying for those wives who had lost their men far to the north on a dusty summer hillside. Army wives understood loss.
And the shocking news that was that day careening across the nation like a black cloud of evil portent brought worse than worry to the women waiting at Fort Laramie.
They had husbands with Crook. Men like those who had marched off to war with Custer.
Putting out a hand, Sam kept from falling, lightheaded, bracing herself against a pole supporting the porch awning.
A few women sobbed into their aprons or hands, but a few cursed as saltily as any veteran teamster, reviling against the Indians who had butchered the Seventh. Against the Indians who might be closing in on Crook at that very moment.
She leaned her head against the post and closed her eyes, attempting to conjure an image of Seamus … so far away.
“I suppose you’re here to plead your case too, Mr. Donegan,” George Crook said with a wry grin inside his strawberry beard tied up with red braid that Thursday morning, 6 July.
“Yes, I am, General.” For a moment Seamus flicked his eyes at the newspaperman from Chicago.
“Well—I’ve just approved of Mr. Finerty here going along with Lieutenant Sibley’s escort.”
Donegan replied, “He’s the sort does like adventure, sir.”
With that Finerty snorted. “Adventure’s much better than dry-rotting around camp, Seamus.”
John Bourke stepped over to slap the newsman on the back, saying cheerfully, “What sort of epitaph do you want me to have put on your gravestone, John?”
Crook nodded, his lips pursing briefly. “I’m not sure Mr. Finerty realizes he may get more adventure than he bargained for. Haven’t you told him what happened to you and Frank on your scout north?”
“He told me, General,” Finerty answered. “But I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to get out of camp every chance I can. What better way to inform my readers on just what an army campaign is but by sharing in every facet of an army campaign?”
“All right,” Crook replied, turning to the commander of E Company, Second Cavalry. “Captain Wells, you’ll see that our correspondent here is provisioned from your stores.”
“Very well, General,” said Elijah R. Wells, Second Cavalry, turning to his company’s lieutenant. “Mr. Sibley— you’ll see that you bring Mr. Finerty a hundred rounds of Troop E ammunition?”
At the same time, Crook turned again to his Irish scout, scratching that red-hued beard flecked with the iron of his many winters, and of all his many campaigns. “Very well, Mr. Donegan. You’ll accompany the escort and pack-mules I’m sending with Frank and Big Bat. I have no fear you’ll make yourself more than useful.”
“Good to have you along, Irishman,” Grouard said, stepping forward to stand within that circle. “But I’ll say it again, General—I don’t need no soldiers along. I’ll take the Irishman here—but you can keep your escort. They’ll just make for trouble. Me and the other two can move quicker, keep out of sight better than a whole bunch of your soldiers can.”
“Request denied, Grouard,” Crook responded gruffly. “Lieutenant Sibley and his men will accompany you—and that’s the last I want to hear of it. When can you be ready to depart, Lieutenant?”
Sibley stiffened, saying, “We’ll pull out at noon, General.”
So it was that Seamus volunteered to probe north with two of the army’s most experienced scouts, the three of them to be escorted by Lieutenant Frederick W. Sibley, E Troop, Second Cavalry, who went on to handpick twentyfive men and mounts from the regiment for Crook’s reconnaissance.
After Grouard and Donegan escaped from the Lakota camps somewhere to the north of Goose Creek and returned from their journey north, the expedition’s commander wanted to know not only exactly where that enemy village was but some idea where it might be headed. In addition, Crook was hoping Grouard and Pourier could slip around the Sioux once again to make contact with the Crow and, as the pair of half-breeds had done before the Battle of the Rosebud, convince the tribe to send a good number of their warriors to fight alongside the soldiers when the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition resumed its campaign against the Lakota and Cheyenne.
With four days’ rations Sibley’s patrol got away just past noon, crossing Big Goose Creek to head northwest along the stream’s bank for more than a dozen miles before Grouard told the lieutenant they were going into camp.
“Why are we stopping here?” Sibley asked as the scouts slid from their horses, his soldiers obediently remaining in their saddles.
“This is about as far as we’re gonna go before dark,” Frank explained, tossing up a stirrup so he could loosen the cinch.
“We’ll go on after the sun goes down,” Big Bat added from the far side of his mount.
Sibley clearly was not understanding. “But the general wants us to push north with all possible speed.”
Donegan was slipping the curb bit from his horse’s mouth after loosening the cinch. “And we will push on,” Seamus confided. “But we won’t go anywhere but to hell itself if we get spotted by one of those wandering war parties Bat and Frank saw a couple days back. Better for us to move on after dark.”
While the soldiers had celebrated the Centennial Fourth of July, Grouard and Pourier had ventured north on the line of march Crook intended to take when he resumed the campaign. For the better part of two days they had probed north, angling over along the Tongue to the country where the enemy village appeared to be heading that last week in June when Frank and Seamus had made their miraculous escape. In the space of twenty miles the half-breeds had spotted several wandering war parties daringly close to the Goose Creek camp, intent on keeping an eye trained on whatever Three Stars would have up his sleeve.
It didn’t take much more convincing than Donegan’s reminder of just how the Sioux were running all over the territory for Sibley to grudgingly agree to wait out the sun’s falling behind the Big Horns before they pushed on.
After boiling themselves some coffee while they sat out the coming of darkness, the thirty-one riders were preparing to move out in dusk’s dim light when Pourier cried out, “Look, Grouard!”
In the deepening shadows Seamus made out the murky form of a lone horseman lurking at the mouth of a nearby ravine. Without hesitation he and Grouard flung themselves into the saddle and kicked their horses into a furious pursuit. At the same instant the mysterious rider turned tail and disappeared over the crest of a hill. For the better part of a half hour they searched for the horseman without success in the deepening gloom. Back at the mouth of the ravine where the rider was first spotted, Grouard dropped to the ground beside Donegan.
Handing his reins to the half-breed, Seamus pulled a wooden lucifer from his vest pocket. With a scratch of his thumbnail the yellow flame leaped into the darkness with a flash. Kneeling, Donegan spotted what he had suspected. Tracks that confirmed his fear.
“Look’s like they’re gonna know we’re coming.”
“Damn,” muttered Grouard. He glared across the hillside at the Sibley escort. “Damn them soldiers. Should’ve been just us three.”
“Chances are, that red son of a bitch would have seen just us, Frank. Whether there was three or thirty of us—we would’ve still been spotted.” He wagged the match out as soon as it scorched his fingers. Donegan pulled on his glove again.
“Think we ought to go back?” Grouard asked.
“If it were up to me—I’d say we try,” Seamus admitted. “We could turn back now. Or we could turn back tomorrow, or the next day. I’m for making a try of it: seeing what we can find out, for as long as we can.”
The half-breed smiled. “But just as long as I don’t run us onto that village again, right?” Grouard asked as he rose to his feet with Donegan.
“Damn right. Just as long as you don’t go down to talk with any of them red h’athens and tell ’em your bleeming name!”
He wagged his dark head. “No more talking to them Lakota.”
“Frank,” Seamus said confidentially, grabbing the half-breed’s arm, “let’s don’t tell what we saw here.”
“Why?”
He said in hushed tones, “Let’s just tell ’em what we saw was an elk.”
“Why not level with Sibley?”
