aware of every new sound in the misty night. Sometime later he made out Grouard’s voice. Donegan went over to hear the half-breed’s report on the layout of the village.
“You went in by yourself and just walked back out with them two ponies?” Seamus asked after Mills had turned aside to organize his lieutenants for the attack. Grouard held the leads to a pair of Indian horses—one a beautiful pinto, the other a sleek black stallion.
“I told the colonel the village might be too big for us. Then he said he didn’t take me for a coward.”
Donegan asked, “Too big—how many lodges?”
Looking away, Grouard answered, “Maybe forty, forty-five lodges.”
Seamus studied the half-breed. “We can take ’em, can’t we, Frank?”
“I went in there, didn’t I?”
“That should prove to Mills you aren’t a coward.”
“Told him the both of us couldn’t go no closer together. He smells like a white man. And the dogs was likely to start barking.”
“But you didn’t answer me straight, Frank: we gonna be able to take that village?”
When the scout did not reply as he continued to stroke the muzzle of the black pony, Seamus said, “How’d you get your spoils of battle?”
Grouard shrugged. “I lived with the Lakota before. I can look Injun.”
“Good for you, Frank. Besides, the warrior those ponies belonged to won’t be needing them pretty soon anyway, right?”
“Injuns don’t need good horses like these—right.”
“But you’re a damn fool to take that chance of getting caught, and getting these sojurs killed with you.”
Grouard glared at Donegan. “Didn’t ever know you to get so worried about a little danger before, Irishman.”
“Maybe you’re right—just say I’m getting nervous in my old age,” Seamus replied. “This a bunch you know?”
Now he wagged his head. “Didn’t see a thing I recognized. Maybeso they’re Sans Arc. Maybe Miniconjou or Burnt Thigh—the Brule. Nobody I know in there.”
Donegan said, “You be sure to come get me when Mills is ready to go in.”
Grouard nodded and moved off with his two new Sioux ponies.
Trudging back to his clump of buffalo-berry brush he shared with Crawford, Donegan glanced at the clouds suspended low overhead. They seemed to hang just beyond the reach of his fingertips. Even in their grayness the clouds reflected the orange dance of the crimson-titted fires buried in their tiny pits. For a moment he stopped and peered off to the southwest, in the direction of that long ridge of buttes, wondering if the hostiles were paying attention to the night sky, hoping they would not notice the far-off glow reflected from so many soldier fires.
Then he tugged his hat brim down and set off again through the rain, hoping the foul weather would keep the Indians in their lodges. Praying.
When he reached the brush, Seamus pulled his collar up around his neck and sank back to the ground, leaning against the wet saddle and closing his eyes, tried for some sleep. Instead of peace he dreamed fitfully on Samantha. Finding her calling him out there in the fog, her voice edged with worry. He could not find her, no matter how hard he tried—going this way, then that, as he plunged madly through the soupy fog and driving rain.
She kept calling to him, never coming any closer. He suddenly shuddered in the cold, awakening himself.
In the darkness he crossed himself, thinking on these starving, worn-out men and animals. Their horses were covered with oozing sores, and what the men had left of their uniforms was now little more than wet rags that clung to their skeletal frames as they shivered in the cold. Some wiped their gun barrels to kill time, or polished their meager supply of cartridges to make the sleepless hours pass.
Sometime before midnight some of Moore’s mules tried to stampede but were kept from escaping by the horse guard. A while later at a clap of nearby thunder some of the cavalry mounts did make a break for freedom, but the troopers rounded them up and brought the horses back, once more driving the picket pins into the soggy ground that simply had no hope of holding those iron stakes secure.
They were a good bunch, Seamus decided. When these men should have been filled with nothing greater than fear at their own survival, nothing greater than despair—most had rallied at the prospect of getting in their blows, their spirits raised at this chance to even the score for the frustrating stalemate on the Rosebud, for Custer’s disaster on the Little Bighorn.
With nothing in their bellies they would be going into battle.
So it was the Irishman crossed himself and started mouthing the words that came back to him despite all the intervening years. Words taught him long, long ago by that village priest back in County Kilkenny. The sort of catechism one never forgot. Here on the brink of battle asking God to watch over and protect, to hold him in the Almighty’s hand.
After all these years wherein he had never darkened the door of a church—to discover that he was still steeped in that faith a fighting man never really lost.
Chapter 37
8-9 September 1876
If John Bourke had learned anything at all during his years with George Crook, it was that the general could surprise his men with a sudden change of his mind.
And he did just that at dawn on the morning of the eighth.
It was raining again, raining still. With every man in that bivouac expecting that they would be laying over for the day, just as Crook had promised, no one saw much sense in getting up and moving about. The news shot through their forlorn camp like a galvanic shock wave.
“Boots and saddles, boys!” the old sergeants bellowed.
One of those most surprised growled, “What the hell for?”
“What for, you ask?” sneered an old file. “Why, the general’s issued marching orders, me fine young fellers. So you’ll be dancing a merry tune soon enough, you will.”
Crook did indeed have them up and out of the mud, and marching off that Friday morning—the general’s very own forty-eighth birthday. It hadn’t taken long for the men to finish what crumbs of hard bread they could scrape from the bottom of their packs and haversacks, richer yet if they still possessed a sliver of the rancid bacon tucked away in one of their pockets. All most could do for themselves was to carve a stringy steak from one of the nearby carcasses. And if a half dozen of them could scrape together enough for a shared cup of coffee, they felt all the more royal for it—even close to human as the infantry set out on the flanks of the plodding cavalry, moving across that inland sea of mud and fog, wispy sheets of rain driven on the back of a biting wind.
No matter what was on the menu that morning, it had been more of the milky, bitter water for all, and a matter of tightening one’s belt another notch.
After no more than an hour the gaunt animals again began to falter, and the troopers went afoot. On either side of the straggling cavalry, foot soldiers plodded by in their gummy brogans, as cheerful as any man could be, calling out to their comrades in the cavalry.
“Say, yez boys! You want us give you a tow!”
“Yeah,” cried another footslogger, “for a small fee, why—we’ll be happy to tow you and your bag-of-bones horse there all the way to the Black Hills!”
For most of that morning the horse soldiers struggled to keep their animals going. But by noon the shooting began once more, and soon the backtrail was littered with carcasses, the bony dead over which the men clustered like predatory scarecrows, like flocks of robber jays, each with his own knife, hacking free a choice flank steak he would suck and chew on as he trudged forward in the wake of George Crook, doggedly making for the Black Hills.
