from the time of the buffalo-robe trade—when the tribes still dressed hides for the white man, before the time the hide men began to set about wiping out the herds.
The man must surely have grandchildren by now, Donegan thought as the two of them moved their horses cautiously out of the tall willow and headed west at the foot of the long plateau bordering the north wall of the valley.
“See what they’ve got on their minds, Rowland,” Mackenzie had ordered. “Take some of your relatives with you and see if you can’t convince these chiefs to call off their dogs.”
“You want me to tell ’em you’re fixing to call it quits, General?” Rowland had asked before he’d moved out with Donegan.
“No—I’m not calling off our attack. But you’re to find out if these Cheyenne want to surrender any of their women and children, the old people too—before we destroy everything they own.”
Rowland only nodded and turned away. His eyes brushed Donegan, watery they were. With a look in them that told Seamus the old frontiersman knew why Mackenzie was sending the Irishman with him.
That son of a bitch don’t trust me, those eyes said. So I don’t figure I got a damn reason in the world to trust you neither.
The four men Rowland quickly selected to accompany him regarded Seamus with those same eyes filled with wary distrust. Donegan knew that, unlike Three Bears’s Sioux scouts, these men very well might have relatives among the people in this camp they had attacked at dawn. Such a thing naturally made a man suspicious, nervous, downright uneasylike when he had come to wreak destruction upon his kinfolk.
Every now and then a high-powered rifle roared and its echo rocked back and back and back from the canyon walls. But for the most part the battle had reached an uneasy lull with the sun heading quickly for the southwest. Already the shadows of the rocks and brush were lengthening below their horses’ hooves.
“I figure we better go on foot from here,” Rowland advised, then turned and spoke quickly to the others in Cheyenne.
They all dismounted and the youngest among them gathered up the leads to the horses, taking the animals back a few yards to the mouth of a narrow coulee, where he would ground-hobble them with their single horsehair rein lashed around one fore hoof, which would allow the horses to graze under his watchful eye.
As the old man moved out, Donegan signaled the others ahead. He preferred to have them all in front, where he could see them. If there was the slightest chance of monkeyshines, he didn’t want one of these sonsabitches at his back. Not that any of these Cheyenne might know of an ambush, but, for all he knew, they could get themselves into a fierce skirmish and decide to turn the lone white man over to their relatives in the rocks as a way to save their own hides.
But hell, Rowland’s a white man. I can’t keep forgetting that.
Up ahead the scouts suddenly went to their knees behind Rowland. The old man was calling out to the hillside.
Then a voice cried down from the rocks above them and to the left.
Back and forth Rowland and one of the Cheyenne scouts hollered to the unseen warriors. Then the old frontiersman turned slightly in his crouch, motioning Donegan forward.
“They tell me their whole family’s hungry and cold,” Rowland explained as Seamus came to a rest beside him. “Those what ain’t dead anyways.”
“What’s going on?” Donegan wondered after a long and uneasy silence.
“’Pears to me they sent one of their bunch to fetch up one of the Old-Man Chiefs,” Rowland replied.
“Old-Man Chiefs?”
“The real rulers of the tribe.”
“Not the war chiefs?”
He shook his head. “Nope. One of them what decides how the rest of the band will fare.”
A voice shouted down, echoing slightly from the snow-laced red boulders.
Rowland announced, “They just told us they see Morning Star coming.”
“Morning Star?”
“White man calls him Dull Knife,” Rowland explained, then shrugged, saying, “You ought’n be glad he’s a better man than he is a fighter.”
“Bill Rowland!”
That deep voice cried the name with Cheyenne inflection.
“Don’t let that fool you—he don’t speak no American,” Rowland declared. “He just knows how to say my name.”
“I’m here!” the frontiersman shouted in Cheyenne.
“The rest are with me, Bill Rowland.”
“Is that you, Morning Star?”
“Yes. At my side are Gray Head, Roman Nose—”
“Wait,” Seamus growled with a temper. “We killed Roman Nose in the fall of sixty-eight. September, it were.”
The older white man’s brow furrowed gravely as he studied the Irishman. “You … you were with Forsyth’s … his rangers at the fight on the fork of the Republican?”
“It’s where I buried my uncle … after Carpenter’s buffalo soldiers come in to raise the siege,” Seamus replied softly, feeling two of the others with Rowland devote their undivided attention to him. He felt the old pain well up within him. The empty hole inside—that nothingness which no one could fill—even now after all the years that Liam had been gone.
“Naw, Irishman. It ain’t the same Roman Nose what got hisself killed trying to run Forsyth’s men down.” Slapping his glove against his thigh, the frontiersman said, “Dang, if I’d knowed—why, up there in them rocks is Turkey Leg.”
“So? What’s that mean to me?” Donegan watched Rowland purse his lips with a crestfallen look over his face.
“Hell—that’s been too long,” Rowland considered. “He isn’t ’bout to remember you, is he?”
Donegan answered. “What’s so all-fired important about talking to this Turkey Leg anyway?”
“He and Little Wolf—another of the chiefs with ’em right up there—they’re the fighting chiefs of the hull bunch. They won’t be ones to talk peace. Turkey Leg was a war chief back to the time they tried to rub out Forsyth’s bunch.”
Seamus dragged the back of his glove across his cracked, oozy lips, squinting into the sunlight’s reflection off the snow. “Go ’head, Rowland. It don’t matter if them war chiefs are up there. They might just listen. G’won and give this parley a try for the general.”
Nodding in resignation, Rowland stood slowly, his arms high above his head. “I have no weapon in my hands. I stand here before you, to talk with you about what the soldier chief wants from you.”
“He wants us all dead!”
Rowland whispered to Donegan, “That was Turkey Leg. He’s an old, old man—been around since dirt.”
“Got to be, by damned.”
“And he’s never met a white man he likes.”
“Including you?” Donegan asked.
With the faintest of grins, Rowland admitted, “Well, maybe not every white man he’s met. But that bugger’s hated the color of our skin long before the Dog Soldiers’ fight agin you’uns with Forsyth.”
Rowland spoke again, back and forth, with the disembodied voices from the rocks above them, as did one of the Cheyenne scouts nestled near the old frontiersman. From the tone of the enemy’s voices, Donegan could tell the chiefs were drawn tight as a cat-gut fiddle bow. Bone weary. Tested to the extreme. Cold and hungry. While that sort of deadly mix might well make most men all but give in to any talk of surrender, give in to talk of a warm fire and food for his belly … everything Seamus had ever heard about the Northern Cheyenne coupled with what he had himself learned at that Beecher Island* siege and from the Reynolds’s fight at Powder River last winter, † these weren’t the kind of men to count out, not by a long chalk.
“Little Wolf says their families are safe in the hills but they don’t have many cartridges to fight us,” Rowland struggled with some of the translation.
“But they ain’t about to come in and take Mackenzie’s offer to surrender, are they?”
