For a long time the old warrior stared into the low flames and glowing bed of crimson coals, his face shining like polished copper.
With a wag of his head Three Bears finally looked up into Donegan’s face.
Seamus pointed.
Three Bears nodded.
At that fire of theirs in the shadow of Inyan Kara† the Lakota instructed him to cross the Powder after they had parted company, to ascend the divide that would lead him over to Mizpah Creek, take him beyond that to Pumpkin Creek and eventually to the Tongue itself.
For three and a half days they pushed their ponies through the cold and the snow from dawn till dusk. But the White River Agency scouts would not travel after sundown. Nor could Seamus get them started before light. Which meant the four of them sat out the long winter nights around a tiny fire built back against the overhang of some washed-out bluff, or far up from the mouth of a deep ravine so the glow of the low flames would not reflect their reddish hue so readily against the low clouds and snowy landscape.
Those nights Donegan found he would doze in fits, remembering how it was to hold Samantha. How he had cradled his baby boy and paced that tiny room above the Fort Laramie parade. Other times he had nightmares of the terrible cold that never warmed during that long day in hell along the Red Fork Valley. Recalling the sounds of war, the inhuman cries of man and horse, the flitting shadows of a half-naked enemy: women, children, old ones fleeing into the hills. What Mackenzie’s Fourth had started … winter would surely end.
The destruction of the Northern Cheyenne.
Only those strong enough would make it, he knew. Where they were headed now in the trackless wilderness, no man could know for certain. But a safe bet would be that the Cheyenne were once more limping for the safety of the Crazy Horse people. Starving, bleeding, freezing—stripped of everything but their pride.
At least he had a small fire, Seamus consoled himself as he shivered through his lonely watch each night, arms tucked around his legs, chin resting on his knees while the others tried sleeping. And at least he had his heavy winter clothing, along with two thick blankets and that old wolf-hide hat of Uncle Dick’s. He had the clumsy buffalo hides wrapped around his boots while many of the fleeing survivors had no moccasins. He had warm wool gloves he kept stuffed inside the stiff horsehide cavalry gauntlets. He had so much, and Morning Star’s Cheyenne had so little…. How was it they always managed to survive?
Was it their hatred for him and his kind that kept them warm? Was it that fury smoldering down inside each one of them that allowed the Cheyenne to survive?
He wasn’t sure just how much the temperatures had moderated since leaving Crook’s command, but he was sure that during the last three days it had finally climbed above zero … before plummeting again as the sun fell each night.
That’s what he reminded himself now as he turned and glanced to the south one last time. Just keep the sun behind my left shoulder like they told me, he thought that afternoon. Don’t take the first creek flowing south. And he was not to turn off at the second either, Three Bears had reminded him more than once before they had parted.
Instead, he was to wait until reaching the third—that would be the Tongue River.
So he was alone again.
As spooky as they were, the Lakota didn’t like traveling at night. But tonight Seamus figured he would do just that, to make up some ground and time, at least until he and the horse grew too weary, or it became too dark to pick out good footing from something slick and icy.
If he pushed on tonight, and pushed hard come daylight, he might well reach the Tongue sometime around sundown tomorrow.
I’ll make it in three, Seamus had been promising himself. All told, that made it another day and a half cross- country to the Tongue, then something on the order of sixty or so miles down to the Yellowstone, where he would run onto the army’s cantonment, deliver his dispatches, fill himself with hot food more than once, and maybe even sleep for the better part of twenty-four hours beside a sheet-iron stove before he resaddled the freshly grained roan and pointed their noses south.
Each time he dwelled on it, Seamus was struck again with just how far south a journey he would be facing once he started for home. Not just to return all the way to the upper reaches of the Powder, or to the Crazy Woman Crossing, even farther to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte … but much, much farther still to reach Fort Laramie, a final ninety twisting miles beyond.
The wind seemed all the colder now as the sun continued to sink behind him. The country around Donegan seemed all the more desolate and foreboding, scarred by erosion, cut by coulee and ravine and mud slide—all of it buried now in a mantle of white beneath the leaden dome of never-ending sky. Colder still because he was beginning to realize he would not be home for Christmas, his son’s first. And chances were damned good he wouldn’t make it back to Samantha to celebrate the arrival of a new year either.
At least the two of them were safe. At least they were warm and had decent food for their bellies. Small comforts like those went a long way to cause him to straighten his back, to stiffen his resolve. He would push as hard as it was prudent to push. Then, tonight, when he finally dropped from the saddle, Seamus decided he would build himself a warming fire—something big enough to keep him from freezing. After all, he doubted there would be any warriors out and moving in this horrid cold, across this desolate stretch of country after sundown … not even Morning Star’s Cheyenne, or the Hunkpatila of Crazy Horse.
Chances were, they’d be keeping an eye on Crook’s column. They’d have no suspicion of a lone horseman slipping through this unforgiving winter wilderness on his lonesome.
Yet he told himself it could not be a fire big enough that it would warm him too much. He realized he must stay cold enough that deep sleep was impossible. A man who slept too deep in these temperatures never awoke again. Instead, Donegan realized he must stay just cold enough that it was impossible to sleep for long at a stretch: he must arouse himself early enough to move out before false dawn. Mounting up and pushing on beneath the light of the waxing moon, on through the day, past the next sundown until he knew they both could go no farther without some rest. How he would depend on this strong, wide-hipped roan gelding across the next few days.
They watered together, and they ate together twice a day—as the horse grazed on some ground blown clear by the incessant wind, or a patch of grass where Seamus had kicked aside most of the snow, and he tore at the stringy jerked meat—how it made his mouth water to watch the whitetail, the mule deer, the elk cross his path … knowing he didn’t dare take a shot in Indian country.
Best just not to think about his belly, or the cold. Or to let his mind slip too far south to Fort Laramie.
Tomorrow morning he vowed he would have them up and away again after that bright winter moon had slipped from the sky, riding into the darkness for those two hours or so before the sun ever began to make its brief appearance far to the east, climbing into the thick blanket of clouds that hovered over this endless aching land as far as the eye could see.
For now he pointed them toward the Mizpah in the fading light of that shrinking day. A lone horseman hurrying across a great white landscape like a hard-shelled dung beetle trudging across some cottonwood fluff. The yawning expanse around him swallowing all sound, he found it so eerily quiet the horse’s muted hoof falls were near
