“You want to be escorted by a bunch of sojurs any more edgy than that bunch with the lieutenant already is?”
“You got a point, Irishman. All right—a elk it was.”
Donegan watched the half-breed raise his left leg painfully, almost like a man suffering an attack of severe rheumatism. “Something wrong, Frank?”
Grouard struggled twice before he got his boot stuffed into the stirrup, then raised himself slowly, settling into his saddle very gently. “Got me the white man’s sleeping sickness.”
“Sleeping sickness?”
“What a white man gets from sleeping with the wrong woman.”
“You mean your pecker’s weeping.”
“Sore as anything I ever had,” Grouard complained. “Can’t even walk right … and sitting in this saddle’s about to kill me.”
“Maybe we get back to Crook’s camp, you’ll get one of those army surgeons to see what he can do for you.”
“I know what they can do for me,” Grouard grumbled with a shudder as Donegan climbed into the saddle. “They can cut my pecker off here and now. I don’t ever plan on using it again.”
“Leastways not with one of Kid Slaymaker’s girls at the Hog Ranch.”
The half-breed wagged his head dolefully. “Way I feel, I ever get well—this is one fella ain’t never going in Slay-maker’s doorway again.”
That night the patrol made another twenty-five miles, marching northwest along the base of the Big Horns, moving through the tall grass and startling one covey of sage hens after another into sudden flight.
“We’re riding part of the old Fort Smith trail,” Seamus said to Finerty just past eight o’clock when the moon rose.
“Fort C. F. Smith? On the Big Horn?”
“That’s right.”
“How you know about that?”
“I spent a cold winter and a wet spring there—many a year ago now. Hoping a friend down at Fort Phil Kearny would join me and we’d make it on to the Montana goldfields over to Bannack and Alder Gulch.”
“Jesus and Mary, Seamus!” Finerty gushed in the silvery light of that moonrise. “I’ll bet you knew some of them fellas who got trapped in the hayfield that August.”
“Knew ’em, Johnny boy? I was with ’em.”
“At … you were at the Hayfield Fight?”
“I was a civilian hay cutter.” He shook his head with the remembrance. “Aye, that summer’s day we cut down a lot more’n hay, John. Them red h’athens threw the best they had at us nigh onto that whole day—before they give up when the sojurs finally come marching out to relieve the siege.”
Sibley’s voice came down the column, “Quiet in the ranks!”
Finerty leaned over to whisper, “You’ll tell me more tomorrow? All about that fight?”
Seamus only nodded as they rode on, the moon continuing its rise behind them, illuminating the ground ahead of the Sibley patrol. For the next few hours the only sound was an occasional snort of a horse, the squeak of a McClellan saddle, or the click of iron shoes on streamside pebbles, heady silence broken only by the occasional whispers of the half-breed scouts as they conferred on the best trail to take.
Just past three A.M. as the first gray line of the sun’s rising leaked along the horizon to the east, Grouard turned in his saddle to say, “Lieutenant—we oughtta think about finding a place to camp.”
“Daylight coming. Yes. By all means, Grouard.”
“We’ll rest here for a few hours before we see about going on,” the half-breed said. “Pick some men to watch the horses, and wake us come sunup.”
“Where you think we are now, Irishman?” Finerty asked after they had loosened cinches and picketed their animals in a sheltered ravine back among the foothills above the upper waters of the Tongue River.
“Not far from the Greasy Grass … the Little Bighorn.”
The packer known as “Trailer Jack” Becker slid down into the grass nearby, dusting his britches off.
Donegan asked, “How’s your mules, Jack?”
“They’ll hold up better’n these’r army horses, that’s for certain.”
Donegan pulled his hat down over his face and laid his head back into the thick pillow of tall grass. “I don’t doubt you’re right about that at all.”
It seemed as if he had no more than closed his eyes when Grouard was kicking the worn sole of Seamus’s boot. He squinted and blinked, rubbing the grit from his eyes as he hacked up some night-gather and spit. The sun was making its daily debut out there on the plains.
“Come with me, Irishman.”
They picked up Pourier on their way through the crowded bivouac. All three mounted and led out as the soldiers jostled into a column of twos, coming behind while Sibley himself clung to the scouts. After riding no more than a half mile, they were confronted with a tall, steepsided bluff squarely on the trail they were taking.
“Lieutenant,” Grouard declared, “take Bat and the Irishman with you into that ravine, yonder. I’ll go up top on foot and glass what’s below.”
Sibley nodded and said, “Very well.”
Grouard next turned to Bat and Donegan. “If you see me take my hat off, you boys come on up, pronto.”
Seamus watched the half-breed move off less than a hundred yards before he dismounted and led his horse into the ravine with the rest of the party. From there he watched Grouard slip down on his belly just shy of the crest of the ridge, pull his field glasses from the pocket of his canvas mackinaw, and peer over. It wasn’t but a heartbeat before Grouard tore off his floppy sombrero and waved it.
“C’mon,” Pourier grumbled to Donegan as they leaped to the saddle and rode to the tree where Grouard had tied his big black.
“Looks like bad news,” Donegan whispered as he slid down onto his belly beside Grouard.
“Here, Bat—take this glass and look and see if those are Injuns or just rocks over on that hill.”
“My God—we are gone!” Pourier complained once he had himself a look. “Shit, Frank. The whole damn country’s nasty with the red bastards!”
“Of course it is,” Grouard replied, then added optimistically, “but—maybe they’re Crows.”
As quickly, Big Bat grumbled, “Remember last month? I’m the son of a bitch what knows the Crows. And them are Sioux.”
“How you know for sure?” Seamus asked.
“When a war party of Crow are on the warpath, no man ever goes ahead of the leader,” Bat explained. “But with the Sioux—it don’t matter. Look yonder. See? That bunch closest down there ain’t riding in no order. That’s Sioux, I tell you.”
“Lemme have a look,” Donegan demanded, reaching for the field glasses.
Indeed, it did appear the whole valley of the Tongue far to the north of their ridge was blanketed with Indians already on the march—heading south toward the main channel of the river. But closer still was that war party of half a hundred, pushing south in advance of the main village.
Donegan gave the field glasses back to Grouard. “You remember the elk we saw last night, Frank?”
The half-breed nodded.
Pourier looked at them both, back and forth, then said, “Wasn’t no elk, was it, fellas?”
“We been found out,” Donegan said.
“That bunch right down there is heading this way to rub us out right now,” Grouard declared.
“They won’t find us on the river,” Donegan said, his mind working fast. “The way they’re headed right now.”
“But they’re bound to pick up our tracks easy enough,” Pourier added.
“You go get those soldiers moving,” Grouard said. “I’ll stay up here and watch those Injuns—see when they come on our tracks. Take the lieutenant’s men up the ravine into the hills.”
With Big Bat, Donegan whirled about and slid back down the steep slope to reach their horses. Not long after they returned to Sibley’s patrol and got the soldiers started up the narrowing ravine, he saw Grouard wave his hat again.
