The Bannock nodded, then began to motion with his hands, speaking English words when he could remember how to put those words together in some understandable fashion.
“Cheyenne. Two,” he explained, patting his belt where the two fresh scalps hung—their flesh frozen hard. “Two follow you to soldier village.”
Kelly asked, “These two Cheyenne warriors—you say they were following us back here?”
“I wait by tree. Cheyenne no see Buffalo Horn,” he explained, nodding. “I see Cheyenne. I shoot two.”
“Some of them get away?” Donegan asked with his hands.
“One, maybeso,” Buffalo Horn answered, and accepted the cup of coffee the Irishman picked up and handed him.
Seamus turned to pour himself another cup, finding the eyes of the old woman burning like coals into Buffalo Horn. He held up the pot for her, and she nodded. He poured her more coffee. She took a sip, then nudged the young girl closer to her side beneath the old blanket and stared into the fire to show that she no longer wished to acknowledge the white man standing at her elbow.
“You can hate him,” Seamus said to her quietly in English. “But he is a warrior. Just like your husband and sons and nephews. They are warriors and they make war. They take scalps of their enemies who are brave. Those two scalps came from Cheyenne warriors brave enough to follow us back to camp.”
Only once did her eyes flash up to his, just for a fraction of a second as she brought the tin cup to her lips and drank.
“You are warm enough?” he asked her in sign after setting the coffeepot down.
She would not look at him anymore. Instead she began speaking softly to the child under her arm. Seamus went back to the far side of the fire and squatted down in his blankets, propping himself against a large downed cottonwood trunk. He stared and stared at the flames until he drifted off.
Late that night he heard the woman’s voice, then both of the other women calling out to the surrounding darkness. Rubbing his eyes, Seamus listened as Kelly and Buffalo Horn were aroused as well. Cheyenne voices drifted in from beyond the darkness.
“Bet they want to know if our captives are still alive,” Kelly explained.
Seamus asked, “You figure that’s what she’s telling them?”
Back and forth the women yelled into the night, the disembodied male voices floating in from the darkness that ringed the scouts’ fire there in Miles’s soldier camp. Frank Baldwin showed up first, then Miles came over, rubbing a bare finger in his gritty eye before he stuffed his hand back into a mitten.
“What you make of it, Kelly?”
“All this talk—they’re probably trying to figure out if there’s a way they can free our captives—get them to slip away—”
A shot rang out, quickly followed by another, both coming from the direction of the warrior voices.
“The red-bellies are firing into camp!”
Sergeants bellowed orders into the darkness, and pickets hollered in reply. A couple more shots rattled the night as Miles put the entire camp on alert. The soldiers had themselves convinced that these opening salvos just might mean an attack was imminent.
But Donegan knew better. No attack was coming—not with the way the old woman and the others peered into the darkness without taking cover. Instead they remained huddled together around the fire, shouting into the night until they no longer received an answer.
It became clear that the Cheyenne warriors had pulled back from the picket lines, while the night grew all the colder, all the quieter still. Seamus watched the women, the children too—sensing that Miles was about to have himself his long-awaited fight with Crazy Horse. If the Cheyenne and Lakota had tried this hard to free some women and youngsters as night fell, what might the morning bring?
He sat there in the cold, snow falling on the thick wool blankets, flakes like huge curls of ash as they drifted down through the fire’s light … thinking on Samantha and the boy. Remembering his own family. Knowing how cold must be the hearts of those Cheyenne who wanted nothing more than to rescue their kin. Knowing his own heart would hurt every bit as much if the tables were turned and this enemy had captured Sam and the babe from him.
How he would fight with the last fiber in his body, the last pump of his heart, to free them.
When, he asked himself, would the army ever realize that this whole war was about family, about how the brownskins were fighting to protect their families, their homes, the land where the bones of their ancestors had been buried?
Tomorrow the Bear Coat’s soldiers would be fighting an enemy with everything in their culture to lose, an enemy who found itself backed into a corner. An enemy who suddenly had nothing left to lose.
A half mile away a tall volcano-shaped butte punched a black pyramid out of the starry sky to the south. Behind that ridge the enemy village was no more than twenty miles away, perhaps closer than that.
Dawn would damn well get here soon enough.
Morning Star had been ready to go back in to the White Rock Agency* before the soldiers attacked his village in the Red Fork Valley. But now he had seen again what the
But he would not go back now.
“We must get our people back,” Morning Star told the great council that was convened as the snowflakes grew fat and thick.
Fires leaped into the cold night sky all around them.
Crazy Horse came to stand beside Morning Star. “This Old-Man Chief my Lakota people call Dull Knife will not be alone when he rides against the Bear Coat’s soldiers come morning. No more will he have a dull knife. He will have the strength of the Lakota joining with his warriors. And that makes for a very sharp weapon!”
The crowd roared with courage, warriors yelping like wolves, some pawing the earth, snorting, and throwing their heads about like buffalo bulls in the spring when heady juices flow.
“We can wait no longer!” Little Wolf cried. “Let every man among you prepare his family to leave this place. At first light the lodges must come down, all your possessions should be packed and loaded on travois. Ready to flee upriver.”
“Our fighting men must say farewell to their families tonight,” Morning Star reminded them, thinking of the sons he had lost in the Red Fork Valley fight. “None of us knows for sure who will return.”
How loudly they cheered and stomped, that multitude of men who would go fight, women and children who would stay behind to wait the outcome of the battle. That night in the cold and the snow no one said anything about how few rifles and pistols the warriors had; no one spoke about how they had but little ammunition. But the courage was strong in those arms that held aloft the bows and quivers bristling with iron-tipped arrows the likes of which had wiped out Long Hair’s soldiers beside the Little Sheep River.* Many shook war clubs made of smooth riverbed stone or broken knife blades. No one said anything about how few guns they would be carrying into battle … because it did not matter.
They had strong hearts and the prayers of their people—the most powerful weapon a warrior would take with him into the coming fight.
“We have courage!” Morning Star called out when the chiefs had decided to set off at once, move downriver into position, and be ready when the soldiers awakened at dawn.
Little Wolf cried, “And we have war chiefs among us who will never give up—leaders who commanded us at the Rose-berry River,* men who led us at the Little Sheep River when Sitting Bull’s vision of soldiers falling into camp came to be!”
Then Crazy Horse shouted to the war-fevered throng. “And we have what truly matters most: there are many among us who have been in battle with the soldiers many, many times—many warriors who are hardened like iron,
