such a wound. Just take the goddamned arm or leg off and heave it aside, into the pile of arms and legs, feet and hands, outside the surgeons’ tent. Bloody butchers leaving all those poor men crippled.
But an arrow—how silent, how clean as it sank inside a man’s chest, his back, and all the worse yet: his soft gut. Blood and juices softening the sinew that held the long iron point to the painted shaft the warrior had grooved so that the victim bled internally. And once the sinew was soft enough, the shaft was easily yanked free of the deep wound, leaving the deadly chunk of iron deep inside. A man died slow, miserably, tortured.
Not the clean death of a bullet wound.
By the time he had stumbled and fallen, and somehow trudged another twenty yards toward a low clump of cedar, Donegan could almost begin to make out the painted faces above them. Close enough to see eyes, and the bright paints, close enough to tell feathers from hair as the wind came up and the thickening snow began to dance.
This suddenly had the makings of no ordinary snowfall. Now the heady gusts were whipping the falling flakes sideways, spinning devilishly every which way at a man, blinding him for a moment as the wind slipped past the eyeholes he had cut himself in a scrap of wool blanket. Snow crusted on his eyelashes, hardening with the frost of his breath suddenly freezing in the supercold air.
All around him Butler’s soldiers would kneel, aim, and fire up the slope at the blurring figures cavorting along the ridgetops. After a shot or two the soldiers reluctantly rose from the deepening snow, reloading and lunging forward another five yards until they would halt again, take aim, and fire at the enemy.
The bullets, the screeching curses, the arrows arcing down in wave after wave, were all coming thicker now. Just like the snow. Off to the far right McDonald was leading his men against the first of the sharp slopes at the base of the tall cone itself. That part of the hillside rose more than twenty feet, then flattened out onto a narrow shelf where there wasn’t a single cedar or oakbrush to conceal them from the enemy once they made it that far.
If any of them reached that shelf, Donegan thought, McDonald’s men would be in the open, right below the warriors.
Hell, Seamus thought as he watched Butler’s men huff and lunge coming up behind him, angling off to the left. None of them had any cover worth a shit anyway. And every last one of them stood out against the snow like a black-backed dung beetle scurrying away from an overturned buffalo chip.
Halting to blow like a winded packhorse, Donegan dropped to one knee and drank in the cold, dry air, watching the last of Butler’s men move off to the south in a scattered, ragged skirmish line as he yanked off his mitten and plunged his right hand through the slit in the side of his buffalo-hide coat. There, in the side pocket of his canvas mackinaw coat, he had stuffed the short brass cartridges. Bringing out a handful into the numbing cold, Seamus shook and shuddered as he fed the bullets one at a time into the cold receiver….
… Remembering the seventeen-shot Henry rifles he and Sam Marr had purchased at Fort Laramie ten winters gone. One chambered and sixteen down the loading tube. A rifle he first used against the Sioux that boiling hot July day beside the Crazy Woman Crossing.
Right now July seemed as if it would take forever to reach these rugged mountains and high plains. Right now … it seemed as if forever itself might well separate him from Fort Laramie, from the boy and Samantha.
Stuffing his stiff, frozen hand back into his mitten, Donegan found the tiny slit he had cut for his trigger finger so he could fire the Winchester without taking off the mitten and gauntlet. He rolled onto his other knee, then went to his belly, flattening the snow as he peered up the slope at the enemy. Three dozen or more stood up there right in front of him. And out before them all pranced a tall one wearing a long war shirt, a bright-red blanket tied at his waist to keep his legs warm, and on his head a beautiful full headdress, its long tail slurring the snow behind his heels.
“He must be some big medicine,” Seamus said under his breath. “Look at that bleeming bastard go to town —all that cock-struttin’.”
On either side of the war chief were arrayed more than three dozen others, all of them shouting, screeching, some singing along with the one in the showy warbonnet. Didn’t take much to figure out that was a war chief up there, doing his best to keep his men worked up into a fighting lather.
Nuzzling his left elbow down into the snow, Seamus slowly settled his chest onto the ground and spread his legs for a surer stance, bringing the Winchester into his shoulder.
Cocky son of a bitch, isn’t he? Wailing and dancing, preening, prancing, and strutting … just daring one of us to knock him down.
Uphill … aiming up that slope—Seamus realized he would have to hold high. How much? He calculated and cocked the hammer back … drawing a sight picture on the warrior’s head. If he had figured right, Donegan thought as he let half the air out of his lungs, then the .44-caliber bullet should smack the war chief right in the chest.
After all—he began to squeeze the trigger—someone had to get rid of that noisy bastard.
The wagon guns had been quiet for so long that the next belching roar from the knoll below Crazy Horse surprised him. The mouth of the big gun spewed a heavy cloud of smoke as it belched the big round ball into air with a hissing whistle.
Up, up, up into the air, over the first lines of warriors arrayed along the lower slopes.
It floated overhead long enough that the warriors assembled across the end of the ridge had time to scurry out of the way, scampering this way and that as the whistling, tumbling ball careened out of the sky in a lazy arc. When it finally crashed to earth in a spot where no warriors tarried, the ball exploded in a mighty gush of noise, snow, and splintered sandstone.
As the scattered puffs of dirty gray snow and red-rock shards and black clods of dirt began to rain down from the sky, the warriors immediately danced back into view of the
The sight caused Crazy Horse to recall the wagon gun Grattan’s soldiers had pulled out to Conquering Bear’s village the day after a visiting Miniconjou had killed that stray Mormon cow. The haughty soldier chief came demanding the warrior who had stolen and butchered that skinny old cow. It was a shame that so many soldiers had to die over one decrepit animal. A far greater shame that so many Lakota had to die on the Blue Water when soldier chief Harney had come marching on the revenge trail.
Crazy Horse had been just a youngster back then. Many, many winters long gone now. Summers of fighting, autumns of hunting, winters of waiting for spring when young men thought of little else but getting themselves nestled between the downy thighs of a pretty girl.
For Crazy Horse these noisy wagon guns aroused many memories of a lifetime spent fighting to hold the
Painfully he squeezed those hard thoughts out of his mind the way a man would chew the gristle loose from the good meat, swallowing the soft red loin and tossing the rest into the fire.
For a time it was amusing to watch the frantic activity around the wagon guns with those knots of soldiers looking very much like tiny black ants swarming around a prairie anthill—the creatures crawling over one another, then suddenly leaping back as one of the
It roared again.
The ball came whistling from the great throat in a belch of blackish smoke, sent ever higher, climbing into the snowy clouds, where it pierced the thick veils, disappearing for a moment as it reached the top of its arc to begin its fall back to earth.
Crazy Horse’s warriors scattered, some of them pulling their ponies out of the way now, for this ball had managed to sail right on over the top of the ridge. Men stumbled against one another and fell in the snow, getting out of the ball’s path, ponies rearing and whinnying.
The whistling was suddenly silenced as the black iron sphere splooshed into the crusty snow and all but disappeared against a drift trampled by many moccasins and hooves. For a moment every mouth was hushed—only the frightened ponies snorted and pranced, eyes still saucered with horror and fear. Men stared at the ball. Watching. Waiting. Expectant.
Then Spotted Blackbird slowly crawled to his knees, rose to his feet, and circled the fire where he had been
