at them dumbly over his shoulder but kept on shuffling down the trail that disappeared into the pines. “No man I know of ever died of what you got.”
“I just wanna rest. No more walking—”
“Up you go,” Donegan huffed, struggling to pull the half-breed to his feet. “Now, walk.”
“Leave me here.”
“Walk, goddammit.”
Grouard’s dark eyes narrowed, and for a moment his hand gripped the pistol he had belted at his waist. Donegan looked at the hand, then at the scout’s eyes, then back to the dark hand, tensing and relaxing on the pistol butt.
“I ain’t going without you, Frank. So—if you mean to stay and get yourself killed, then it’s two of us gonna die here when those Injins find us.”
“Damn you, Irishman!” he swore without opening his teeth.
“Go on, curse me—you black-hearted sore-peckered half-breed,” Seamus said, shoving Grouard off toward the path the others had taken. “Call me every name you can think of, just as long as you keep walking.”
When the bright orb finally did poke its head above the eastern prairie, the sun found them stopped at the edge of a steep precipice, looking down on a southern fork of the Tongue River.
“Ain’t none of us gonna make it out of there alive,” growled Sergeant Oscar Cornwall.
“Can you find us another way around this canyon?” Sibley asked, turning to Grouard.
The half-breed rubbed at his crotch, then straightened. He appeared somewhat strengthened by the walk. Better moving than soaking the cold out of the wet ground. “That’s the way we got to go. South. Ain’t no other way.”
“I can’t ask my men to risk their lives—”
“You don’t have to ask them,” Grouard spat. “You order them.”
“Maybe we can find a way down,” Seamus said suddenly, stepping between the two men as Sibley began to lunge forward. “A way that won’t be so bloody dangerous.”
“All right,” Sibley said quietly, taking a step back.
“C’mon, Frank. Let’s see what we can scare up.”
Within a half hour the pair was back, getting the soldiers on their feet once more, leading the patrol down a little-used game trail they stumbled across. Back and forth it slowly descended through the forest in an undulating switchback that finally reached the left bank of the river far below from the precipice where they started. For the better part of the morning the men had stubbed toes on hidden rocks and stumbled over deadfall, the thin soles of their boots giving little protection from the mountain wilderness. Hour by hour they each grew more tenderfooted until they reached a small meadow on the streambank, where the country opened up to view. Grouard halted, leaning over at the waist, gasping for air in his pain. The rest came down to the meadow one at a time, their chests heaving.
Sibley asked, “How far do we have left to go?”
Peering off to the south, Frank said, “We come halfway.”
“Hear that, fellas?” the lieutenant cheered. “We’re halfway home.”
“And we come through the hardest part,” Donegan added. “The rest can’t be anywhere as bad as what you come through already.”
Downstream the hills rolled gently away toward the eastern plain. To the sore-footed soldiers that direction beckoned like a willing woman with her arms opening to a man.
“We can make good time now that we’re out of these hills and timber,” Sibley declared.
Grouard shook his head and pointed upstream. “No, we got to go there.”
John Finerty stepped forward, asking, “Why, in heaven’s name?”
“Out there,” Pourier responded, “where the soldiers wanna go is some of the best hunting country there is. That means the chances are good we’ll run right into a hunting party.”
“Maybe even some of those red bastards ambushed us yesterday,” Seamus added his voice to the argument. “No, Lieutenant. We can’t dare chance the easy way. If you wanna get back to Crook’s camp, we got no choice but to stay with the country too tough for an Indian to follow us on foot.”
Chapter 14
8 July 1876
“Let them half-breeds go where they wanna go, Lieutenant.”
Grumbled another soldier, “To hell, for all I care—I’m for heading out for the easy country.”
All around Donegan the ragged, ravenous troopers mumbled and murmured their protests.
Turning to his dejected patrol, Sibley declared, “You heard the scouts, men. We’ve no choice but to take their advice and count on them to get us free of this danger.” Then he turned to the half-breeds and said, “Let’s go.”
The lieutenant followed the scouts. Without looking back, the trackers led Sibley’s men more than half a mile upstream before they found a place where the cascading Tongue flowed through a widened channel. Here the river did not froth and foam, compressed into a narrow trough, forced to run wild and high. Pourier led the way for them, raising his carbine over his head as he placed one boot carefully in front of the other across the stony streambed, step by step sinking deeper and deeper into the cold current.
Seamus turned to find Private Patrick Hasson limping down to the bank. The soldier stopped thirty feet away from the water, wobbly and unsteady on his bloody feet, his stockings in shreds that exposed the swollen, bruised flesh.
“C’mon, Hasson,” Sibley called out from the edge of the water. “We must cross without delay.”
Sinking slowly to the ground, Hasson never looked at the lieutenant. “Not going. Can’t go on.”
Sibley trudged back up the bank and knelt beside the soldier, trying his best to coerce him into moving. Then the lieutenant threatened Hasson with punishment if he didn’t get to his feet. And in the end, when he finally took a good, long look at the soldier’s battered, swollen feet, Sibley admitted nothing was going to convince Hasson to move.
“You want to stay here?” the lieutenant asked.
“Ain’t going on, sir. Not another step.”
“You know what might happen to you out here?”
“I got my pistol,” Hasson explained wearily. He looked around him a minute. “Figure I’ll crawl over there in them bushes and wait.”
“We’ll send a horse back for you. Be a couple days, way I see it, Private.”
“I’ll wait.”
Sibley nodded. “You want some more cartridges for your revolver?”
“That’d be nice of you. Thanks, Lieutenant. If them red sonsabitches show up, I’ll take as many with me as I can before they get to me.”
Donegan watched Sibley rise from Hasson’s side and move down the bank to stand a moment with the rest before the lieutenant ordered them into the water. The Irishman was followed by Grouard and the packer. But unlike Pourier had done, Seamus and the others plopped to the ground and quickly pulled off boots, socks, britches, and shirt, binding it all together in a bundle they wrapped around their carbines and held high over their heads.
Some of Sibley’s men elected to keep their clothing on to make the cold crossing. Others stripped themselves so that they would have warm, dry clothing to pull on once they emerged on the far side of the bone-chilling tumble of snow-melt. One after another they inched down into the stream, with the naked lieutenant bringing up the rear. For the tallest of the men that mountain runoff swirled below their armpits. For the shortest among them, the cold water splashed at their chins.
Then, in the middle of the stream, one of the last handful to brave the deceptively strong current slipped.
