enemies,” North said, “I will do all in my power to have it obeyed.”
After a moment more of reflection, Crook replied, “No, I don’t wish to force them to be friendly against their will. Still, if they were friendly, I believe it would be better for all concerned, and this expedition.”
“Well, I’ll talk to my Pawnee about it and hear what they have to say,” Frank said. “We’ll head back to camp now and cut out those seventy head—the extra ponies the lieutenant here can turn over to the Sioux.”
The task was done before twilight. Yet, as predicted, the matter appeared far from over, at least from the word brought to the North’s camp that night by Todd Randall, the same white scout who was married to a Sioux woman at the Red Cloud Agency and had been instrumental in helping the Pawnee trackers locate Red Cloud’s village the night before the guns and ponies were captured.
“Just figured you ought to know to keep an eye locked on your horses, fellas,” Randall said. “Maybe best to keep ’em close to your beds.”
North asked, “Why’s that, friend?”
“The Sioux say they’re gonna get both them ponies you brothers picked outta their herd. Kill ’em somewhere up the trail.”
Sitting Bull’s Scalp in Danger
up North.
DAKOTA
The Fight with Sitting Bull
CHICAGO, November 1.—The official report of the battle between Sitting Bull, Pretty Deer, Bull Eagle, John Sausarie, Standing Bear, and White Bear, on Cedar Creek, the general results of which were given in a Bismarck dispatch last night, states that a number of Indians are known to have been killed and five wounded. The report concludes: “I believe this matter can be closed now by vigorous work, but some cavalry is indispensible.”
“Goddamn you, Soul!’ the big sergeant major bawled at the young private. “Be a little lively around here! We’re pulling out, by God!”
William Earl Smith swallowed, saluted, and stood stiffly until his superior had passed down that row of dog tents coming down like fluffs of goose down upon the dirty snow. It had been snowing off and on for two days now, and colder than anything Smith had experienced back east.
Once Stephen Walsh was on out of hearing range there in the cavalry camp below Fort Fetterman, Smith let out a gush of air he had been holding during the cruel tongue-lashing.
“Great, big, overgrown Irishman,” he muttered under his breath, wondering if he had done the wrong thing by accepting this assignment to become one of Mackenzie’s five orderlies for the Powder River Expedition.
He liked the general—why, Mackenzie had even offered Smith a drink from his own personal flask the colonel kept buried somewhere inside that big caped wool coat of his. But that sergeant major who ran roughshod over all of Mackenzie’s orderlies? Now, that was as close to genuine loathing as William Earl Smith had ever come.
Why, that damned mick made fun of the way Smith ate, the way he sat in the saddle, even how the private spoke. What with the way the orderlies were cursed and treated by the commissioned officers too, especially the tyrannical Captain Clarence Mauck, who more than once had threatened to make William Earl walk the whole campaign … how Earl dreamed of stepping right up to those arrogant stuffed shirts and poking one of them in the nose for good measure.
“Goddamn you, Soul—but it takes you longer to dress than a whole company!” Smith began to mimic the sergeant major’s gruff and peaty brogue. “Smith this … and Smith that,” he grumbled under his breath as he turned to finish packing his haversack. “Wished I was born with another name sometimes.”
A few days back, when Walsh was bawling for him, the sergeant’s abuse had finally got to the private and Smith had made the mistake of answering in kind, “What the hell do you want?”
Suddenly the sergeant had been towering there at Smith’s tent flaps, his big meaty paws jammed down on his hips, his eyes like twelve-hour coals, spitting mad. “If you ever talk to me that way again—I’ll tie you up by the thumbs!”
Earl had seen men tied up by their thumbs for hours at a time, their arms stretched high over their heads, their toes barely scraping the ground, held only by their thumbs to a stout wooden bar overhead.
Too, since joining the Fourth, he had heard reports of soldiers being placed in a big hole in the ground, so deep they had to climb down on a ladder. Or men lashed in a crouch around a stout piece of fence post then gagged for hours. Once Smith had seen that punishment—the soldiers who suffered it unable to move their cramped and tortured muscles once they were released.
On their march north to Fetterman a pair of soldiers had made the mistake of being slow to salute Mackenzie and addressing their commander too informally. That evening in bivouac the colonel promptly had Sergeant Walsh see that the two offenders stood in one place for an hour and a half, unable to move in that frigid weather except for saluting a tree stump for their transgression. A day later a few men in one company were late in relieving others on guard. Mackenzie sentenced those guilty to carry the hundredweight sacks of grain for their horses up and down across a mile of the rugged terrain as their punishment.
God must surely damn this army for putting some men over others, William Earl thought as he angrily jammed his supply of rations into the tiny haversack he would carry north.
Two days back, when the temperature had started to fall through the bottom of the surgeons’ thermometers, one of Mackenzie’s other orderlies—Private Edward Wilson—had gone up to the fort, invited to join Lieutenant Henry Lawton, quartermaster for the expedition’s cavalry wing, as the two of them intended to drain the better part of a whiskey bottle at the sutler’s saloon. As both were in no condition to walk back to their camp situated on the north side of the river, they climbed atop their horses and headed back in the dark and the blowing snow. Somewhere along the wagon road leading down the bluff to the ferry, Wilson’s horse got away from him, prompting Lawton’s horse to gallop off wildly too. As a furious lieutenant came up alongside the orderly, he yanked out his pistol and swung it across Wilson’s face, knocking the private off his horse and unconscious with one blow. Sometime during the night Wilson came to, finding himself half-frozen, wet, and bleeding in the icy mud beside the North Platte. With the help of camp guards, he struggled back to his tent, where he passed out again before the sky grew light.
Although Mackenzie gave Lawton a stern dressing-down for striking a soldier, the colonel did nothing more in the way of punishment. As much as Smith had admired Mackenzie before, to him it seemed the man was really no different from all the other officers who either abused their men, or allowed the abuse by other officers to go on without proper punishment.
“Don’t you see? The colonel can’t bust Lawton down and order him to stay at Fetterman,” said another of Mackenzie’s orderlies. “He needs the lieutenant too damned bad—”
“I don’t give a damn,” Smith argued in a hushed voice. “What Mackenzie needs is to show his soldiers that fair is fair.”
Far up the bluff on Fort Fetterman’s parade that Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of November, a trumpet blared its shrill cry of “Stable Call” on the cold, brittle air:
