He found himself counting them again, and a third time to be sure. Left to right and right to left. Wondering as he did why the hell they were just sitting there. He couldn’t hear them talking, but he was sure that was just what they were doing.
Indians just didn’t sit there like that and stare off across the night landscape, not without talking things over.
They began to peel off the horizon slowly, disappearing from the crest of the hill. Coming their way. He could hear the soft clop of their ponies’ hooves on the sodden ground and rain-soaked grass. Horsemen moving cautiously now … halfway to the scouts, still some fifty yards off … when they suddenly drew up. Startled snatches of guttural language reached Donegan’s ears.
Four or five of them immediately kicked their ponies into a lope, moving directly for the scouts and the coals of their tiny cookfire. One of the horsemen began hollering out in his tongue.
“By the saints—they’ve seen our fire, Grouard!”
“Shoot ’em!” Grouard bellowed as he got to his knees, bringing up the Springfield carbine with him, slamming it into his shoulder. “Shoot ’em all!”
Donegan pitched the big Sharps to his left hand and with his right pulled one of the pistols from its holster. To his far side and off to the rear Crawford was already firing his two belt revolvers in succession with a steady hammer as he fell back toward their horses. Those orange-and-yellow muzzle flashes flared into the darkness, hurting Donegan’s eyes, blinding him in those frantic moments that the three of them went about their ambush of the enemy.
From the warriors came cries of surprise and pain as the bullets whined among them, accompanied by the slap of lead connecting with flesh and bone, the grunt or whimper of wounded men, and the wolf cry of those who smelled this utter closeness of their white enemies. In seconds bullets began to whistle into the timber behind the scouts. Still he fired, hearing some of the trio’s shots thud with the smack of wet putty among the horsemen.
It had taken no more than a minute of their skirmishing before the war party whipped about and beat it for the crest, where Donegan watched the warriors flit over the horizon, retreating out of sight on the far side of the hill.
“We gotta ride,” Grouard whispered as he moved past Donegan at a crouch.
Seamus snorted. “So you think we’ve worn out our welcome, eh?”
“Where’s Crawford?” Frank asked suddenly.
Donegan peered into the darkness, trying to make his eyes discern something out of the night after the flare of those muzzle blasts. “Last I saw of him he was off to my left, moving back—like he was making for the horses.”
“C’mon—he’s probably gone down there ahead of us already.”
Sprinting into the timber-covered ravine where the trio had tied their mounts before building their cookfire— the first time they had dared stop all that day—Donegan called out in a loud whisper.
“Crawford!”
Grouard lumbered to a halt beside the Irishman among the horses. Both listened to the silence of the night.
The half-breed called, “Crawford—c’mon out!”
“We gotta ride,” Seamus called, watching that hillcrest.
Grouard grumbled, “Yeah. Let’s go.”
“But we can’t leave him here.”
The half-breed turned on Donegan, saying, “We got no idea what happened to him. Maybe he run off.”
“Or maybe he’s shot.”
“If he was shot,” Frank argued, “we’d found him on our way, wouldn’t we?”
“Maybeso,” Donegan agreed. “All right—let’s give a look for him. Then we can go.”
Grouard mounted up and took the lead, easing his horse on up the bottom of the coulee and calling out in his loud whisper.
“Shit!” Grouard suddenly hollered as he yanked back on his reins.
There in the middle of the coulee stood Crawford, suddenly appearing out of the brush and the darkness like a specter.
“You scared the piss out of me!” the half-breed snarled.
“Where’d you go?” Donegan asked as Crawford lunged past them to reach his own horse.
“Come down here to hide,” the poet scout replied. “Thought you boys would too. Looked like we was out numbered. Figured this’d be a good place for us to make a stand against all of them.”
“Follow me,” Grouard directed as he put his horse in motion following the upper coulee out of the creek valley and onto the prairie. “We got to find out where those warriors come from so we can take the general some good news.”
While the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition had waited out what remained of the twenty-ninth and through all of the thirtieth in bivouac above the headwaters of Beaver Creek, Grouard and what few scouts Crook had along pushed far to the east. Because of Crook’s fear that the hostiles would soon be angling toward the Black Hills settlements, the general had sent the Ree to work their way south of east while Grouard’s group eased down the Beaver for some forty miles before angling up toward the Little Missouri River, which would skirt around the east side of Lookout Butte. *
Nearing the river that afternoon of the thirtieth, Grouard had stumbled across a good-sized Indian trail that split itself on the west bank—half crossing over, clearly headed north by east for the headwaters of the Heart River.
“That could be Sitting Bull’s bunch,” Grouard had said as the three scouts had walked over the ground on the east bank of the Little Missouri.
“You’re likely right,” Donegan had agreed. “Heading around Terry and making for Canada, aren’t they?”
“So where’s this other bunch going?” Crawford had asked, pointing off south of east. “This trail that breaks off yonder?”
Donegan had gazed into the distance that dusk and said, “South, Jack. Headed right where Crook feared they would.”
At that point it had become abundantly clear they had discovered just what the general needed to know so he could plan the next leg of his chase. Turning about and pointing their noses back toward Beaver Creek, they had finally decided it safe enough to chance cooking some of the bacon from their skimpy rations, maybe even boiling some coffee in their tin cups before pushing on. After tying off their horses in the brush of a wide coulee, the trio had found a place where they figured they could build a tiny fire at the bottom of a pit they dug from the moist soil with their belt knives.
The three had no sooner wolfed down their half-fried salt pork and gulped at the muddy-tasting, alkaline- laced coffee than they were surprised by the war party’s approach.
Now as they retreated back across the rolling prairie, it wasn’t until the trio had gone more than three miles that Donegan discovered he had left his tin cup behind. Patting his saddlebag to be certain, he suffered his loss in silence. That pint cup was all Crook had allowed an individual for a mess kit. It served many purposes—and now he was without one. The Irishman hoped Quartermaster Bubb had a better supply of tinware than he did of tobacco.
Throughout that cold night they rode with the west wind hard in their faces, not approaching the headwaters of the Beaver until the light of predawn had grayed the horizon behind them. The sun itself was just about to emerge from the bowels of the earth as the trio reached Crook’s bivouac and wearily dismounted near the headquarters flag.
“The Rees came in last night at dark,” Crook declared as the trio was handed steaming cups of thick, sour- tasting coffee.
“They find anything south?” Grouard asked.
“No,” the general answered. “But for what you’ve told me, it looks like I’ll send them out this morning to work south of east.”
“Where we come from?” Crawford asked.
Crook wagged his head as he peered over a rumpled map. “No. I want them to work the country on south of the Heart. Toward the headwaters of the streams feeding the Cannonball. Those Rees are fresher, and their ponies
