Donegan turned, stepping back to join the others who knelt over the wounded.
Gazing to the northeast, Donegan realized Mackenzie had committed all his troops. The colonel had himself no more reserves to pitch into the fray. Which meant … if Hamilton and Davis and Wessels hadn’t got the job done by themselves—they too would have likely been overrun.
“How many you figure we got?”
Seamus looked up suddenly, finding the young soldier who had been with McKinney’s company when they were ambushed, the same young soldier who had been in full retreat before he agreed to return to the fight.
Gazing toward the ravine, Seamus quickly counted the bodies the fleeing warriors were carrying off. “Ten. Maybeso it looks like it could be a dozen.”
Around him a handful of the troopers were making sure what Cheyenne still lay on the battleground were dead. One, two shots or more as the blood lust flushed out of the young soldiers brought so close to death themselves.
“And at least eight up here they didn’t get off with,” Frank Grouard said as he came up to pound Donegan on the shoulder.
Shards of pain splintered up his neck and shot down his backbone. “Dammit, don’t do that!”
“You hit?” the half-breed asked with worry on his face as a bullet whispered over their heads.
“No. Leastways I ain’t been shot,” Seamus replied. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Up there with that captain’s outfit at the head of the ravine,” Frank replied, pointing his rifle toward the north side of the valley. “I hear his name is Wessels.”
Turning to the youngster, Donegan said, “Twenty of ’em—we got at least twenty of ’em, Private.”
“Yeah,” the soldier whispered with a shudder. “Twenty.”
Seamus studied his face a moment, then said, “You can bloody well be proud of that fight you just come through.”
The young soldier glanced around quickly as the officers formed up platoons to lay down covering fire while a few others gathered up the dead and wounded, dragging them back out of range of those Cheyenne riflemen on the knoll.
“Things still feel a little hot here,” Grouard said, cradling the Irishman’s left wrist. “Let’s go find you a surgeon—have him take a look at your shoulder.”
Donegan shrugged him off. “Leave it be, dammit. Look at them others they’re taking off—lot worse off’n me. There’s more here for them sawbones to worry about than my bleeming shoulder.”
* The Ute.
* Trumpet on the Land, Vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series
Chapter 29
25 November 1876
The cold in her belly was far icier than the cold in that tiny room at the top of Old Bedlam.
Gripped with its sudden, startling, frightening presence, she awoke with a start in the dark, blinking … and her arm habitually reached across that narrow bed for him. To assure herself of his presence, the warmth of his bulk—but that great abiding security of his nearness was not there.
Samantha sat up with a start. Her heart beat as if it would fly out of her chest, her breath catching in her throat like a ragged scrap of muslin snagged on a rusty strand of barbed wire. Streamers of frost gathered before her face. The small stove in the corner barely glowed at all.
Then she remembered the baby. Turned. Found him wrapped in his swaddling, beneath his old blanket so worn and soft with the years and washings beyond number. The blanket she had wrapped around herself as a child, then laid away in a cedar chest until it came time that she went to Texas to join sister Rebecca, knowing that in it one day she would wrap her own babies.
She touched his face gently. How warm he was, and at such peace when he slept. What with the colic and all, they both snatched nothing more than fevered bits of rest through these days and nights of waiting.
He was seven weeks old this morning.
Slowly laying her head down once more on the pillow, Samantha pulled the babe against her as he slept. Then drew him even closer to her breasts to feel the very warmth of him, his breath against the base of her neck in tiny puffs as the cold solidified in the pit of her the way the ice had formed along each bank of the creeks, each side straining day by day for the other as the cold deepened in these first weeks of winter.
Try as she might to shake that cold cake of river ice congealing within her, Samantha could not escape the feeling that she had awakened of a purpose: that something terrible had just happened to him, far to the north in Indian country.
Had he fallen in battle? Oh, God!
She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears, biting her lower lip so she would not cry out and wake the child. Seamus’s son.
Had he been wounded? Was he lying somewhere in the snow, the frozen white turning red and mushy beneath him? Was he still alive—and thinking of her right at this moment? Is that why she awoke, because his soul was calling out to hers across all the miles?
Yes, she decided, and with a tiny yelp stifled deep within her throat, Samantha began to sob quietly in that dark room where the gray of dawn had just begun to intrude.
There drifted to her the muffled sounds of footsteps and stove doors opening as coals were stirred and fires stoked for the morning, concerns with coffee and breakfast—a woman’s lot, this matter of waiting out another day while her man was off to war.
He was wounded. M-mortally, she convinced herself. That is why his spirit had reached out to her in these, his final minutes. There in the cold and the dark, upon the snow, perhaps fearing that the next footsteps he heard would be those of a painted warrior who would step over him—driving a war club down between his eyes, then slashing off his scalp.
At that moment in the dark and the cold, she felt his anguish as if it were her own—shuddering in the aloneness, she and the babe more alone at this moment than in all the days Seamus had been gone.
Colder now than she could ever remember being. Here her second winter at Laramie—knowing in the core of her that if he did not return whole to her … that she would never again be warm, not for the rest of her life.
Near the mouth of the gulch where Bull Hump and the others had ambushed the pony soldiers, Yellow Eagle fell back during the fighting, his attention drawn by a small group of women and children who were trapped between the soldier scouts in the village and the soldiers being reinforced along the edge of the deep ravine.
“Yellow Eagle!” cried one of the old women, her arms extended to him, imploring. “Help us!”
He burst into a sprint, turning his back on the fighting, his lungs searing with the dry, extremely cold air. Bullets smacked into the snow around the group as they scurried a few feet in one direction, then back in the other, snow kicked up as the lead landed around them. They reminded him of a covey of small, frightened sage hens. He had to find a way out for them.
“Hurry, Yellow Eagle!” another woman called out.
In her arms she held a small child, one of its tiny feet clearly gone, a bloody pulp from the ankle down where the mother clamped with a hand to stop the bleeding.
This way and that he looked as he ran, searching, not knowing where he could lead them. There—beyond them across a dry wash was the wide mouth of another ravine. Perhaps …
Then he knew it would not work. The Wolf People scouts on the southern slope among the lodges would have a clear shot into the ravine. These women and children would all be dead before the cold sun climbed much farther in that achingly blue sky.
As he reached them, the women grabbed him, the children clustered at his bare legs, young and old alike whimpering at him like wild; frightened animals caught in a snare. Then he saw a way. Perhaps the only way.
“I will go first,” he explained, laying his hand atop an old woman’s head. Her cheeks were smeared with
