lodges. It wasn’t long before the Sioux marksmen were even walking bullets in close to the surgeons’ hospital. Mills wasted no time before he called off the looting of the lodges, deciding it could wait until the rest of the command came up.
For now they had only to keep the warriors back, to hold on to the village. For a day and a half at least.
Maybe by tomorrow morning at the earliest, help would arrive.
Crook was at least twenty-five miles behind them. It would take the rest of that day for Bubb’s courier to reach the general—if the trooper wasn’t picked off by a hunting party wandering out of the other camps in the area. By the time Crook could get a relief force saddled up and ready on what second-class horses they had left, then punished those animals to hurry here to the village—why, it would be morning at the earliest. If all went well.
Hell, Seamus brooded gloomily—if all went well, there might even be some of them still here to rescue when Crook’s relief rolled in.
A few minutes after the Sioux warriors began to heat things up once again, Mills ordered both Bubb and Crawford to take platoons of men to the south and west of camp, with instructions to prepare rifle pits where pickets could keep some of the pressure off the village itself. Just before he took his detail to the skirmish line, Bubb ordered one of his hardy veterans to a high and rocky butte less than a mile away to the north of the hostile camp, where the soldier was to watch for Crook’s relief party and signal when the reinforcements came in sight.
From his pack-mules Bubb handed out a dozen folding spades, really nothing more than collapsible entrenchment tools, to his fatigue detail. Across the creek to the southeast they found four or five shallow buffalo wallows the men immediately went to work on deepening. One wallow in particular faced the brush-covered mouth of a narrow ravine southwest of the village. There the soldiers could see glimpses of a hole the camp’s children had dug in the bank of the coulee, enough to excavate a shallow cave of sorts. To that cave burrowed back in the ravine, a group of warriors, women, and children had fled in the first minutes of the attack and were now beginning to take shots at Bubb’s riflemen as they dug themselves in.
“We can flush ’em, Sergeant!” declared Private John Wenzel, A Troop, Third Cavalry. “All we gotta do is make things a little hot on ’em with some lead flying in there, and they’ll come running out, begging for their lives.”
“We’ve got ’em trapped like rats,” agreed M Troop’s blacksmith, Albert Glavinski, “with nowhere to run.”
“Are you game, Sergeant Kirkwood?” asked E Troop’s sergeant, Edward Glass.
“I suppose we can’t go wrong if we rush ’em together,” replied M Troop’s John A. Kirkwood.
Yet as soon as the four crawled over the lip of their rifle pit, Private Wenzel was driven backward against Kirkwood with a sickening crunch of bone as a bullet from the ravine smashed into his head. Before they could react from the surprise, more lead whined among the soldiers.
A bullet entered Sergeant Glass’s right wrist, tearing out his elbow, shattering the arm and making it useless.
Nearby Kirkwood whirled, sensing the heat of a bullet’s path along his back. He spilled down the side of the pit and lay gasping at the bottom. Bringing his bloody hand away from the wound, he asked Glavinski, “How … how is it?”
The blacksmith shook his head in disbelief and replied, “Just a flesh wound, Sarge. Only grazed you. But another inch, and it’d cut your backbone in two.”
“Damn,” Kirkwood growled, peering at the pulpy mass at the back of Private Wenzel’s head. “Shame about him. He knew more about a horse than any other man of us.”
Within heartbeats Anson Mills dashed up to the pit as other soldiers pulled the casualties back among the lodges toward the surgeon’s hospital. “How many are in there?”
No one seemed to have an answer.
It was then and there the captain determined to send that third courier to press his point, to tell Crook that he was already taking casualties and running low on ammunition. Praying that Bubb’s couriers or that third rider— one of them—would get through and bring on their rescue.
“Forget the ravine for now,” Mills wisely told his men. “We’ll wait until the column gets here to smoke them out.”
At nearly the same time, Crawford’s detail began having a hot session of it driving a fiery knot of warriors from some of the lowest rungs of the nearby bluffs. For those few minutes while the Sioux moved higher up the ridges, Crawford’s soldiers began to dig in for the long haul. From those and Bubb’s improvised pits, the cavalrymen could now hold the sniping warriors a bit more at bay, pushed back from the camp itself where the Sioux had been making things tough on the wounded and the horse-holders. Each time the warriors made an abortive attempt to charge the two hundred ponies that soldiers were guarding, Crawford’s men turned them back with cool and deliberate fire.
Most of the rest of his men Mills positioned on the low bluffs directly to the north and east of the camp, where they could command a good view of those warriors who had secured themselves on the rocky shelves that ascended the buttes from the prairie floor.
Not long after Mills had secured the village and drove the Sioux fleeing from the perimeter, Dr. Clements had requested that a lodge at the center of camp be saved for the hospital. In it he and Assistant Surgeon Stephens already had Von Leuttwitz and another seriously wounded soldier, Private Orlando H. Duren of E Troop, Third Cavalry, stretched out on the buffalo-hide bedding as the minor skirmishing continued unabated.
As soon as Sioux marksmen set up shop on the rocky terraces above the village and began to rain rifle fire down on the lodges, Clements asked Mills to help with moving his hospital. Dragging the agonized Von Leuttwitz, Duren, Kirkwood, and Glass from the lodge into the open on buffalo robes, a half-dozen soldiers then quickly dismantled the lodge and moved the poles to the gentle slope of a hillside north of the Indian camp. There the troopers did their best to rewrap the poles with the heavy, sodden buffalo-hide cover before Clements and Stephens helped their stewards drag the wounded back inside.
Before long the coming day’s light was brightly reflected from the chalk-colored buttes north and west of camp, helping to dissipate the wispy fog from all but the lowest places in that first half hour of fighting. Behind gaps in those castle-rampart-like ridges, Mills and the others had watched mounted warriors parading back and forth for some time.
“They’ve sent runners to the other villages,” was the rumor that too quickly became anxiety as morning began to grow around them with the sun’s rising. “They’re coming back with more warriors’n you can shake a stick at.”
Nothing Donegan could think of would counter the truth in that. Fact was, they knew there were other villages in the area. They had failed to surround the camp and seal up its occupants before nearly all the Sioux escaped.Chances were damned good that warriors from this camp were already speeding to other hostile bands in the area, spreading the alarm.
“Shoot only when you’ve got yourself a clear target!” A sergeant nearby passed on the order that was rapidly becoming general throughout the skirmish lines.
“Murph’s right,” another veteran sergeant agreed. “We gotta save every bullet and make it count.”
This was perhaps the greatest danger: Mills’s attack force being put under siege while they slowly, ran out of ammunition, and in the end were overrun by reinforcements coming in from other camps because they simply had no more bullets left and Crook was still miles away.
Maybe they were all fools to believe the column could get there in time. Perhaps it would be better, Seamus considered, for them to take care of themselves here and now.
“If we found the guidon, Colonel,” Donegan explained, “that means this bunch fought at the Little Bighorn.”
“We know that,” Mills replied, worry in his voice.
“And if this bunch fought the soldiers there, they likely picked up some of the weapons and some of the ammunition off Custer’s dead, stole out of the saddle pockets of the Seventh’s horses.”
“What are you driving at?” Mills growled. “Trying to cheer me up, Irishman?”
Seamus wagged his head. “No. Don’t you understand? That means we might find some cartridges—”
“Among the plunder from the lodges!” Mills exclaimed. “Brilliant!”
The captain immediately sent a dozen men to quickly scour through the lodges again—but not for food this time. For ammunition.
Nearby a soldier came out of a lodge jingling a small leather pouch filled with copper cartridges. With his other hand he greedily ate some cold meat. Not far off three women prisoners and an old man began to laugh,
