Days ago Elizabeth Burt had come up with a crate from somewhere—likely due to her pull with the post quartermaster, Sam figured—and it was that crate she had padded with scraps of shawls and old blankets, fashioning a crude crib where the fitful newborn slept.
Elizabeth said it was colic. Nothing to worry one’s self about, Sam was assured. And then Martha Luhn showed her all she knew about ridding the little one’s gastric system of those awful bubbles that tied a newborn up in knots and made the babe cry out in such fitful pain. How to roll the child back and forth on his mother’s knee to work the fit out of his system.
But for now the babe was sleeping as Seamus held the boy, gazed down into that tiny face in the midst of all that wrap of swaddling. Her husband placed one callused finger along the boy’s cheek, stroking it softly, then nudged back that unruly lock of fine hair that swept down the child’s brow.
The bugle cried again from the parade. And it made Sam’s heart lurch with sudden fear.
He somehow seemed to know of her apprehension. Seamus always seemed to know.
This time he turned to her as the last notes floated off in the cold air of that morning. And came to sit on the side of the bed, nestling the babe down in her arms. Then he brushed her cheek as he had done the boy’s. Smearing her tears, pulling her chin up so that she had to look into his face.
“I’ll be back in a few days, sweet one,” he said softly as the racket of more than three dozen men about to march became all the louder outside. Downstairs, voices rose, boot heels clattered on the landing, the door banged open, and it seemed as if a regiment of men were stomping off the porch, having themselves a gay time of it as they bid farewell to those who were to be left behind.
“I know,” she got the two words out, realizing she would free nothing more because of the stinging ball suddenly clogging her throat.
“I was here to see our son born, Sam,” he reminded softly as he leaned forward, laying his lips barely against hers with a brush of his breath behind the words. Then he moved his mouth slightly, pressing it against her ear to whisper.
“And I’ll be back to name him—before a week is out.”
The soldiers were facing at least two-to-one odds. No one could figure for sure just how many fighting men there were in that village being dismantled below. There were too many of them, swirling about like an anthill you’d kick with your boot toe just to see them swarming.
Again and again Kelly’s mind kept returning to one fact: they were preparing to fight the warriors of Sitting Bull. And Gall. Crow King and the others. The ones who had crushed Custer’s Seventh.
Yellowstone Kelly hoped Miles had some plan to strike first, to strike hard—before those Lakota swept up this rising ground as they had at the Greasy Grass. But Miles did nothing of the kind. Instead, for the quarter of an hour he had given Sitting Bull, the colonel steadfastly held his men in readiness, every soldier watching the frantic village below as the lodge covers came down, the travois were packed. All the while along the high ridge to their left more and more horsemen gathered, milling about and in turn watching the motionless soldiers. On the far side of the ravine on their right more warriors came and went noisily, whipping their ponies for their second wind.
“Gentlemen!” Miles’s voice rang out, catching nearly everyone by surprise as he stuffed his turnip watch back into the pocket of his buffalo-hide coat. “Something more than talk is now required of us! The time has come to fight: battle front—forward!”
Half a hundred other voices were suddenly raised in staccato as the companies were ordered to quickly disperse into battle array across a wide front. As the colonel himself moved toward that clear, open ground, he ordered some of his units to the left, intent on gaining those treeless ridges and knolls—determined to refuse the enemy their advantage. To the right he threw out another company as his men in the center moved warily into the breech. Yard by yard. Now two hundred. Then five hundred. Up one gentle slope and down another. A thousand yards now as the warriors screamed and beckoned, whipping their horses around in wild circles, stirring dust into the chilling air.
“General!” Luther cried out, reining his horse up beside the officer in a tight crescent. “Near as I can figure, they’re drawing your men on and on.”
“For what purpose, Kelly?”
“Only thing I can think of is to get your boys down in them ravines yonder while they hold the high ground,” Kelly replied. “Maybe to tie your outfits up—”
“And make another massacre of it,” Miles interrupted grimly, regarding the distance. “Like they butchered Custer at the Little Bighorn.”
“Bailey!” The colonel waved over a courier and gave the soldier orders he wanted delivered to the units on each flank—to keep in sight of their center and immediately withdraw toward the rest of the command if threatened with overwhelming numbers—before it was too late.
“What do you suppose that half-blood son of a bitch wants?” John Johnston growled inside his graying red beard. He shifted the old Sharps across the horn of his saddle and pointed as the other scouts and some of the officers turned to watch that swale below the crest of the nearby knoll.
Down on the bottom ground loped Johnny Bruguier and two warriors, one of them carrying that dirty, tattered towel tormented in the cruel wind as they approached the soldier lines.
“Bear Coat Chief,” Bruguier shouted as he raised his right hand and came to a halt some yards from Miles. His eyes were nervous. “Sitting Bull wants to know why your soldiers are following his women and children.”
Miles tugged his heavy coat beneath his thighs as the wind carne up, then replied, “Since it doesn’t look as if the chief is going to accept my offer for terms of surrender—I must consider his fleeing to be an act of hostility.”
“General!”
They all turned to find an officer pointing.
“They’re massing on the ridge, General!” another officer cried out, pointing as well to the north.
“Clear the bastards off the brow of that ridge!” Miles shouted. “Give Major Casey’s A Company the order to clear it now!”
As they watched Casey’s soldiers trot off from the left flank at double time, shouts erupted from the right flank. Kelly turned with the rest, spotting the sixty to seventy warriors bristling along the high ground as if they had appeared out of nowhere.
“Send K Company to move those horsemen off our front!” Miles bellowed. “Mr. Carter will see to driving them away.”
The fast response of Lieutenant Mason Carter’s foot soldiers succeeded in preventing the warriors from sweeping around the flanks of the column now dressed left and right in battle-front and moving forward at a steady crawl. While horsemen remained on both left and right ends of Miles’s line, it was the center that most concerned Kelly. That’s where most of the warriors stood waiting—as if in anticipation of their comrades sweeping around the sides of the soldier formation, drawing the soldiers’ attention, when those in the center would plunge like a huge dagger right into the heart of the Bear Coat’s troops.
“How far can your gun reach, General?” Kelly asked, gesturing toward Captain Snyder’s company surrounding the knoll where the Rodman gun—an 1861 model artillery ordnance rifle—had been rolled into position and unlimbered for action.
“Not nearly the distance to the village,” Miles replied. “But we’ll scare hell out of ’em anyway once we unload on those horsemen covering the retreat.”
Down into the first ravine Miles followed his forward troops as the warriors boiled along their flanks and in their front, shouting, singing, brandishing their weapons. But as yet no shot had been fired.
The smell of something out of place on the cold wind caught Luther’s attention. There, at the far ends of the ravine, some warriors had slipped in among the treeless brush and were busy igniting it with firebrands.
He yelled, waving at Miles. “General!”
“I see ’em, goddammit!” Miles hollered, then cried out his orders for a detail from the center to break off, to clear the ends of the ravine where the Hunkpapa sought to fire the grass and brush—all the better to obscure their escape, but even more frightening, perhaps veiling the very real possibility of a counterattack.
As the Fifth Infantry pressed on to the east, slowly, yard by yard, the warriors in the center thinned out, most of them flowing left and right, bolstering the horsemen troubling the soldiers on either flank. Those left in the center pranced their ponies in tight circles, yelling and brandishing their weapons, some of the warriors dropping off this side or that of their mounts. A few turning to slap their bare rumps at the white men.
