For a moment those obsidian eyes looked at Cody and Donegan. “Old trails, General.”
Terry wheeled on Crook. “If that trail is as old as your scouts are saying it is—then one thing is certain, General: you weren’t correct in your beliefs as to when the hostiles took flight in your front.”
Crook immediately bristled, as did some of his staff standing nearby in the cold chill of early afternoon. “General Terry—I stand by my assertions, and my actions. Do you have a complaint to lodge against me, sir?”
The affable Terry, suddenly confronted by the bulldog Crook, waved a hand and his blue eyes softened. “No, General. No complaint against you. Forget it.”
“With the general’s permission,” Gibbon spoke up, “if General Crook’s column had only informed us of the hostiles’ flight, we could have put ourselves across their trail and caught them.”
Lieutenant Colonel Royall harrumphed, “I seriously doubt that your force would have been of sufficient numbers or experience to capture that village.”
At that moment more of the subalterns from both camps weighed in, sniping at the other column now that the long march, the cold, the rain, all of it was plainly showing in the raw edge that was every man’s nerves.
“Are our scouts in agreement on anything?” Terry inquired.
“Yes, General,” Crook answered. “Seems most of them say the biggest trail is heading downstream.”
“Toward the Yellowstone?” Terry replied, worry in his voice. When Crook nodded, Terry added, “Let’s get these men moving down the Tongue.”
At a snail’s pace the united columns dragged themselves through the mud and rain for all of a torturous thirteen miles before making camp at twilight on the twelfth. When they could, the men chose a slope for a place to settle and curl up. That way the water could not gather in depressions around them as they sat out the storm beneath their soaked blankets, eating soggy hardtack and chewing on their raw bacon. The storm lessened near dark, but within an hour it roared back over them with renewed fury. There was little sleep in that bivouac for those four thousand men for a second night in a row.
Dawn of the thirteenth came gray and colder yet to those soldiers whose clothing and blankets hadn’t dried for more than two days. Men stamped about, blue-lipped, with their teeth chattering like boxes of dominoes, until afternoon when the rain tapered off to a misty drizzle. That day Merritt’s cavalry shot the first of its played-out, ill- fed horses. Those cavalrymen who could not bear to kill their mounts simply abandoned the animals right where the bony beasts had crumpled into the mud and refused to go on.
By the time the command went into bivouac another twenty-four grueling miles down the Tongue, it was becoming ever clearer to even the dullest recruit that they weren’t going to catch the Sioux. But maybe the horses would begin to fare better, for by now much of the grass remained unburned, and there was more of it.
If anyone had taken notice, that grass was one more solid argument that proved the hostile village was scattering to the winds.
Tom Cosgrove showed up at Donegan’s fire that Sunday night, in search of more than coffee or tobacco for his pipe. “I remember you telling me you fought for the Army of the Potomac. And with Sheridan in the Shenandoah.”
With a nod Seamus replied, “You figure we ever looked across a battlefield at one another?”
Cosgrove shrugged, grinning a little, then sighed and went somber. “This fight’s already over.”
“Naw. We haven’t begun to look, Tom.”
Wagging his head, the old Confederate said, “Crook might keep looking, but he’s not going to find them. And he sure won’t be finding the Sioux with the Shoshone along.”
“Why? Washakie thinking of rolling his blankets and heading home?”
“Yeah. And I can’t blame ’em none, neither. The Snake never been this far north—this far away from home.”
“You leaving tomorrow?”
“I don’t rightly know right now. Only sure thing is it’s just a matter of time before we pull out.”
Daybreak on the fourteenth brought with it more gray, sodden skies and no letup in the rain. At seven the columns got under way: Terry’s led by the Seventh Cavalry, Crook’s by the Fifth. Against the stronger, grain-fed mounts of the Seventh, Carr’s gaunt horses looked ready for the boneyard. That morning the wind hurried the rain before it once more as the men were forced to cross and recross the Tongue thirteen times in less than ten miles before the Indian trail turned away again to the east, following the narrow banks of Pumpkin Creek.
Many a man gazed downstream wistfully. Barely fifteen miles away flowed the Yellowstone itself, with its sup ply depots and rations and tents and dry, warm blankets— all of it a most inviting proposition to the men ordered to keep up, back in ranks, don’t straggle—keep up!
After a climb of more than six miles out of the valley of the Tongue, the order was given to halt and go into camp just past noon. Here the cavalry unsaddled and put the stock out to graze in the slashing torrents of bone- chilling rain while the infantry simply sat down and curled up right where they had stopped.
Minutes later Lieutenant Colonel Royall galloped his horse down past Chambers’s foot soldiers to the bank of the Pumpkin and halted in front of Major Andrew Evans’s still-mounted battalion of the Third Cavalry.
Royall, a hard-bitten veteran of Summit Springs and the Battle of the Rosebud, growled, “Didn’t I order you to put your battalion in camp along the river, facing east?”
Evans, widely known as a man who could split a hair as fine as fuzz on a hog, immediately came to attention and retorted, “Yes, sir. You did. But this ain’t a river. It’s only a creek.”
For a moment Royall’s cold face flushed as he seethed in anger, then shouted,
“Yes, sir!” Evans answered, and hurried off to get his companies into bivouac across the Tongue.
For the rest of that rainy day and on into a stormy night, the command lay in along the bank of Pumpkin Creek, where the best that could be said of the land was that the enemy hadn’t put it to the torch. Here the animals grazed on what skimpy grass grew in that naked country.
“Muggins Taylor rode in with messages for Terry,” Frank Grouard said as he came up to Donegan picketing his big horse on a patch of old grass.
“What’s the news?”
“Miles been up and down the river on the steamboat. He reports no sign of Sitting Bull’s people crossing the Yellowstone.”
“That means they’ve got to still be east of us.”
Grouard nodded and did not say anything more for the longest time until he commented, “Two-day grass.”
“This? Why you call it that?”
“We camped in this country many times, when I lived with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa. Lakota say a bellyful of this grass will do a pony good for a two-day ride.”
Seamus stroked the withers of his exhausted, played-out animal. “Frank, right now I’ll settle for just one day’s ride on a bellyful.”
On the morning of the fifteenth the bone-weary command followed the Indian trail of pony hooves and travois poles scouring the ground as the fleeing hostiles headed eastward up the bank of the Pumpkin.
A small puppy was found by one of the first infantrymen passing through an abandoned campsite. He knelt, finding the dog as eager for companionship as he was when it raced over and leaped into his arms. Unbuttoning his tunic, the foot soldier carried his new friend along as they got acquainted.
At the top of the divide the trail left the creek and entered the badlands, which filled the men not only with more despair, but also with an overwhelming sense of lonely desolation. For as far as they could see to the north and east that fifteenth day of August … nothing moved but the heavy, sodden gray clouds scudding low over their heads. As ugly as was that scorched valley of the Tongue they had left behind, it was beautiful compared to the country they now faced.
That morning more than a dozen of Terry’s infantry could not go on and were placed by stewards in horsedrawn travois that bobbed, bounced, and jostled across the broken, muddy ground. Mile by mile the route had begun to tell on the animals. Here and there the first of the Second, Third, and Fifth cavalries’ horses were either abandoned by their riders, who switched saddle, blanket, and poncho to one of the led horses when they left a mount behind, or the worn-down horse was simply shot where it had dropped, unable to limp on behind its pleading master.
