Near three-thirty a brief rattle of gunfire brought Smith and the rest out of their blankets. Shot after shot was fired into camp from a distant bluff. As the rounds whistled overhead or smacked into the earth around him, the lieutenant could make out the bright, flaring muzzle flashes of the enemy guns as all the men were formed up, put on alert, ready for action. Here and there in camp a spent bullet whacked against the side of a wagon or clanged against a cast-iron kettle. Because of the distance, Miner declined to engage the warriors in a long-range duel. Instead, he kept his men ready for any try the warriors might make for the herd. It wasn’t long before Smith realized the warriors did indeed have the herd in mind: most of the shots were landing in and among the corral, wounding some of the mules, scattering many others that pulled up their picket pins and broke their sidelines.
After no more than an hour the firing died off—without the soldiers firing a shot. Orders were passed along that a cold breakfast was scheduled for later that morning: no fires to be kindled that would backlight the soldiers and thereby provide easy targets for any of the skulking redskins. Only water from their canteens and hardtack. Nothing more than that as the men struck their tents and reloaded their wagons.
And with the first graying of the horizon that Wednesday morning, the wagon master brought the worst news.
“How many did you say?” Miner squealed in dismay.
“Fifty-seven mules, Cap’n,” the civilian repeated. “Likely run off by the Injuns when they went to shooting into camp last night.”
The nervous teamsters anxiously hitched up what mules they had left to pull the freight, down to five-mule hitches on more than half the wagons. The sun hadn’t yet put in its debut when Miner ordered the march, assigning Captain Malcom McArthur’s C Company of the Seventeenth Infantry to act as rearguard. Their column had no more than strung itself out, jangling little more than a mile, when McArthur’s men came under attack by a war party concealed in a ravine no more than two hundred yards to their left. From there, concealed by thick brush and stunted cedar, the warriors laid down a galling fire on the soldiers as the column ground to an immediate halt.
Within moments more than two hundred warriors broke over the brow of the nearby foothills rising between last night’s campsite and the Yellowstone River east of that bivouac.
McArthur and Second Lieutenant James D. Nickerson immediately formed up their little company and led them out bravely, making a countercharge on the attackers. Smith watched those foot soldiers go, all bellow and bluster, shouting their lungs out as they dashed across the uneven ground toward the hillside where the firing died off as the warriors scampered up the far slope, pursuing the enemy across a rising piece of ground until the Indians eventually disappeared over a nearby bluff.
“That should cool their heels!” Miner cheered, setting the column back to its march as Company H of the Twenty-second went up to support McArthur’s men in their countercharge.
But the wagons moved no more than eighty rods when the front of the column came under attack, this time from a brushy ravine on the right flank. Miner ordered another brief halt and across the next half hour the officers ordered out a squad here, or a squad there, engaging the enemy in long-range firing with their own infantry’s “Long Toms.” Yet Miner got the skittish civilian teamsters to move the train through it all—despite the fact that a gaggle of warriors swarmed in behind the column and darted back and forth over the campsite the soldiers had just abandoned.
“Looking for anything of value,” Miner surmised as they kept on pushing west toward the Tongue River.
By the time an hour had passed, those warriors on their backtrail were inching closer to put increasing pressure on their rear guard. All the while, more knots of warriors were making themselves known along both flanks of the march, firing at the wagons, the mules, and the long columns of infantry strung out on either side of the rutted trail. Here and there a mule was hit, calling out in its dying with an ear-splitting bray. The team was immediately ordered out of column as other wagons moved around and the procession continued while the teamsters and soldiers descended on the wagon to cut the dead and dying mules out of harness, then urged the remaining members of the team back into line during this slow-moving, deadly game of leapfrog. Despite the losses and their snail’s pace, as the morning waned and became afternoon, Miner refused to stop.
“That would mean us having to square the wagons and fort up, just for the sake of a short stop,” he grumbled. “No—we’ll keep pushing for Clear Creek, something on the order of eight miles. Go pass the word that the men have permission to eat while we’re on the march.”
The autumn sun hadn’t fallen far from midsky when three of the lieutenants loped to the head of the column and presented their case to an increasingly anxious Captain Miner.
“There’s more of ’em than we can handle come dark, Captain,” Lieutenant Nickerson said.
Miner growled, “How many do you figure we’re facing?”
After glancing at the others, Lieutenant William Conway replied, “Five, maybe as many as six hundred warriors, sir.”
The captain seemed to shudder at that, then stoically said, “Their numbers won’t make much difference come dark. I’m certain they’ll break off their attack by dusk.”
“Even so, Captain—we may not have enough of the mules left by morning to push on for Tongue River,” Smith observed.
“Then what?” Miner growled, turning on the lieutenant.
“I figure we’ll be forced to fort up and take ’em on till General Miles figures out we aren’t coming.”
“How long could that be, gentlemen?” Miner asked. “Worst case, that is.”
They muttered and chewed on it. Then Smith broke the stalemate.
“Longer than we have ammunition, sir.”
Miner was nettled, the crow’s-feet at his eyes deeper than normal. “What are you proposing, then?”
“Turn about and countermarch, sir,” Lieutenant Kell suggested.
“Back for Glendive?”
“Yes, Captain,” Smith agreed. “I suggest we do it while we’ve got ammunition to make that countermarch. We get bogged down by forting up—they’ll keep us holed up till we run out of ammunition. I say let’s get back to Glendive while we can.”
“But we’re expected at Tongue River with these supplies,” Miner grumbled within his five-day-old beard. “Those supplies don’t get there—”
“Sir, begging your pardon for the interruption,” Smith pressed on. “We fort up, run out of ammunition, and get overrun, we lose these supplies to them Sioux … meaning they’ll never get to the Tongue River troops anyway. But if we break off here and skedaddle back to our cantonment, I figure we can convince Colonel Otis to beef up our escort and make another go of it.”
“How much of the stock have we lost?” the captain demanded gruffly.
Benjamin Lockwood answered, “They’ve run off with more than sixty-some mules already … and wounded that many more, sir.”
Miner cogitated on that for some time as his officers stood in silence. All around them the noncoms kept the men firing by squads—for the most part able to keep the swarming warriors at a safe distance from the column. The Sioux were clearly showing a healthy respect for those Long Toms, darting in here and there, but scampering out of range just in time as a squad came forward, dropped to a knee to aim, and fired. On one side then the other, at their front then at their rear, the enemy horsemen were making things more than ticklish for Miner’s escort. The situation was growing downright scary.
“We get bogged down here, we’re pretty well cut off here, wouldn’t you say, gentlemen?” the captain asked.
“Yes, sir,” Smith agreed. “So what’s it to be, Captain?”
He slapped his glove against his dusty sky-blue pants and straightened. “Give the order, men—we’re turning about for Glendive. And, for God’s sake: let’s try not to let those red bastards kill any more of these blessed mules!”
Gazing into the face of her sleeping child, Samantha hadn’t believed anything could be quite so beautiful.
Four days old he was. Despite the sleeplessness, despite the tenderness and outright pain in her breasts, the hot shards of torment she felt down below where she had torn giving birth—no matter any of it now. She was completely in awe at the miracle of that baby.
What she and Seamus had created together. Truly a gift from God.
It was so hard to believe, still so much like a dream: the long, agonizing labor; the explosive delivery; the joy
