“A damned sad place to be at this hour.”
Seamus turned at the voice, finding old Bill Rowland stopped a few yards behind him in the cold black seep of predawn. “A sad place to be any time of the day.”
The scout waited a moment more, then moved up quietly to stand beside the Irishman. Married to a Cheyenne woman back at the Red Cloud Agency, Rowland already had proved his worth by translating for the auxiliaries Crook brought along to hunt down the hostile winter roamers. Now that the general was no longer chasing after Crazy Horse, but had instead heard tell of a large Cheyenne village somewhere close in the mountains, the Powder River Expedition might well find a man with Bill Rowland’s talents highly valuable in very short order.
It wasn’t snowing again, cold as it was, but every molecule of moisture in the air had frozen, making it hurt to breathe, the very air around him like icy grit against Donegan’s skin as he slipped his hat back on his head.
“You know any of ’em?” Rowland asked, gesturing across the collection of grave sites at the outskirts of the old fort—now no more than a collection of charred stumps of construction timbers protruding like blackened, splintered bones poking from a gaping, rotted wound.
The Irishman shook his head, tugging his soft-crowned felt hat down upon his long hair that tossed in the harsh wind. “No. Not really, I didn’t.”
“Thought you might have,” Rowland said. “The way you come up here … when none of them others could give a damn if—”
“Sojurs like them don’t need reminding of dying when they’re fixing to set off to fight,” Seamus interrupted, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to snap your head off, Bill.”
The older frontiersman shrugged it off. “Don’t make no nevermind to me.”
“You come to fetch me?” Seamus asked, refastening the top collar button on his blanket-lined canvas mackinaw.
“They’re setting off. General wants us now.”
For a few moments more Donegan continued to gaze reverently over the dozen busted, dry-split headboards, each one bearing a wind-scoured and unreadable name, a good share fallen beneath the deep snow but more leaning precariously at their last stations there in the flaky soil above the gallant roll call of those who had given their all to this high and forbidding land.
“Tell me—the Injins leave this place alone, don’t they, Bill?”
“Yes,” Rowland answered quietly as he reached his horse and rose off the ground. “Place like this is powerful big medicine to the Cheyenne. They’ll go half a day around to keep out of the way of such a place.”
“Smart,” Seamus said as he took up the reins and stuffed a foot in a stirrup, rising to the saddle.
“For the Cheyenne?”
“For any man,” Donegan replied. “Any man what does his best to keep out of death’s way.”
He nudged the big bay into motion beside Rowland, putting behind them the crumbling adobe walls that would not hide the rusting debris of iron stoves and broken wagon wheels, a solitary broken-down wagon box, and a half-burned artillery carriage for a mountain howitzer.
He was venturing back into this hostile wilderness, crossing the milk-pale Powder River as he had times before, again to put his body into the maw of this ten-year-old fight … come here again to this tiny plot of ground to think and pray alone, remembering many faces, knowing very few names of all those who had dreams and hopes and families. For those who had fallen on this consecrated ground, Donegan would always say his prayers as his mother had taught him—to go down upon one knee and to bow his head before the presence of something he could not begin to comprehend, but knew existed just the same.
Although he knew not how God ever allowed one man to set himself against another.
It warmed him this morning, as he and Rowland caught up to the head of the column, to think on his mother again, now especially because he was a parent. Not really having known his father, knowing instead his uncles, who stepped into the breach to try helping raise their sister’s boys. Would Seamus’s own son come to know the feel of his father’s hand at his back when something frightened the youngster, that reassuring touch to let the child know his father was there? Would the boy come to love stroking, pulling, yanking on his father’s beard in loving play? Oh, how he prayed he would have many, many more hours of holding that soft-skinned, sweet-breathed infant against his shoulder, singing the child to sleep with the low, vibrant words of ancient Gaelic melodies and the lowing rhythm of his heartbeat. How he wanted his son to know these things, and pass them on to his own children.
From a huge patch pocket in the mackinaw, Seamus pulled the small amber jar Ben Clark had given him last winter. With his teeth Donegan dragged off his thick mitten and stuffed it under an arm before putting the cork stopper between his teeth and taking it from the jar. Inside he always kept a good supply of bacon tallow. Dipping some on a finger, he lathered it all around his cracked, oozing lips and the inside of his cracked and inflamed nostrils. How it stung! His flesh cried out as he laid on a thick coating of the sticky fat, then licked the fingertip clean, put the jar away in that big pocket, and quickly pulled on his wool mitten.
All the while wondering if any man knew where his grave was going to be. Deciding the not knowing didn’t matter when a man’s time finally arrived.
After an hour on the trail north from the Powder the order came, “Dismount!”
They were going to save what they could of the horses’ strength—especially now that Crook had some idea of where a village was and Mackenzie’s cavalry must be ready.
The soldiers in those eleven troops made no attempt to come out of the saddle as one. This was not parade drill, nor retiring the colors. A few hundred cold, bone-weary men who were anxious for action, ordered to walk beside their mounts for the next half hour until they would be ordered back into the saddle. Such walking by the troopers saved some reservoir of strength in the animals, besides helping the men stay warmer with the exertion as they trudged through the ankle-deep snow beneath the scummy clouds that lowered off the Big Horns.
Away to the northeast herds of buffalo dotted the prairie in black patches against the bleak white landscape, grazing in sight for the rest of the afternoon. Up and down throughout the remainder of the march they cut a swath through the stretch of monochrome and desolate country that took them ever nearer the foot of the Big Horn Mountains. That bitterly cold twenty-second day of November Crook had them cover all of twenty-eight miles of tortuous, bleak prairie travel before making camp on the banks of the Crazy Woman Fork. Common legend held that the creek earned its name from a crazed woman who had lived by herself on its banks for many years before dying about 1850. However, the English equivalent of “crazy” never had translated to mean true madness as much as it signified sexual promiscuity. It was likely the woman had been cast out of her village for her lascivious activity—a theory much more fitting the Cheyenne belief in the value of a woman’s virtue.
Cloud Peak rose in the distance, just under a hundred miles off, its helmet at times peeking from the top of the wispy white clouds that brushed across the painfully blue sky … before it began to snow again.
Through sandy ravines and across cactus-covered hillsides the expedition plodded on until late afternoon. As the last of Wagon Master John B. Sharpe’s teamsters were jangling in, the pickets to the northwest spotted a solitary rider appear atop a knoll carrying a white flag. Crook sent out a party to bring in the horseman.
Seamus joined the small crowd who gathered to listen as Frank Grouard interpreted.
“Says his name is Sitting Bear. From what I can tell, he’s come up from the Red Cloud Agency—sent by the soldier chief down there to talk the warrior bands into surrendering and coming back to the reservation,” Frank explained. “Not far north of here he says he ran into those five lodges the Cheyenne boy come from.”
“Are they running?” Crook asked.
“Going north, just like that Cheyenne boy figured they would.”
Crook mumbled his great disappointment under his breath.
Grouard continued. “Sitting Bear talked to ’em but they wasn’t about to turn around and head into the agency now. They’re scared—and hightailing it for Crazy Horse’s bunch.”
“To warn them?” Crook squeaked.
“You can count on it,” Frank replied. “That pretty much ruins your surprise on Crazy Horse, don’t it?”
Crook’s eyes narrowed as he gazed at the broad smile on Grouard’s face. “What the hell’s so funny to you, half-breed? I thought you wanted Crazy Horse as much as me.”
“Oh, I guess I do, General,” Grouard said. “But there ain’t a chance of us catching him now, is there?”
“Not if those Cheyenne are going to warn his Oglalla.” Crook stood pulling at one end of his beard, then another.
