stopping the horse with a jerk.
“Mr. Bailey, please convey to the general my immediate and crucial need for ammunition. My men are nearly out, and if we are to face the muzzles of those enemy guns … I’ll need resupply.”
“Ammunition, sir?”
“Yes”—and Butler pointed an arm right at the heights—“if the general asks us to do the impossible, at least give us more bullets.”
“Ammunition—yessir!”
Butler freed the lieutenant’s reins and slapped the mount at the same time, sending the young officer off toward the knoll where Miles would likely be standing among his gun crews, surveying the battlefield as a whole. Meanwhile, with the way the snow was beginning to come down in heavy, dancing sheets, Seamus realized Miles wouldn’t have a bloody idea what was really going on this far to the south. If anything, Butler’s men were no more than tiny, fuzzy specks of flotsam indistinct against the snowy hillside the general expected them to assault.
Calling his officers to the side of his mount, Butler told them in his thick brogue, “Gentlemen, you likely heard our orders.”
“We’re expected to take the summits,” grumbled one of the sergeants.
“Prepare the men,” Butler told them succinctly. “Get them up out of the snow and ready to move forward.”
A soldier asked, “We aren’t going to wait for the ammunition, sir?”
“We’ve been ordered to advance, Corporal,” Butler snapped. “Now, pass the order along and see that your men are instructed to be conservative with their shots. Any more questions?”
When there were no further questions, the others turned away, moving quickly among the half a hundred, ordering the soldiers off their bellies and their rumps, to stand in the freezing wind, nervously awaiting the next command from the man who sat on horseback.
“Advance!” Butler cried, yanking back on the reins so his horse jerked to a halt.
Seamus found himself admiring this Edmond Butler—not just because they both were Irish born and therefore brother Patlanders. But Donegan couldn’t help but admire the officer this Butler was turning out to be under fire. In this era of a clear class distinction between officers and their enlisted, Edmond Butler appeared to be one of the few who did not rub his company’s nose in it.
Glad was he to find himself among the men of C Company for the dirty little task that lay before them this stormy morning.
He moved off with Butler’s soldiers, turning once to look behind him at the disappearing form of that young rider on his way to the artillery knoll. The swirling snow swallowed Lieutenant Bailey in one gust, and he was gone.
Donegan prayed that Miles would send ammunition in time to save Butler’s men from disaster. That, or C Company might well have to dig down through the snow and find rocks to throw at Crazy Horse’s warriors arrayed shoulder to shoulder up there on the ridge. At least two hundred of them … waiting for Butler’s fifty-some.
Four-to-one odds along with struggling through three feet of snow into the teeth of a high-plains blizzard. It just didn’t get any more army than this.
Were they warm? he wondered. Was Samantha staying fed? And most of all—was she not worrying about him?
He had tried his best with that last letter almost a full month ago … to tell her she had nothing to worry about even though he was not coming home when he had promised. Coaxing her to stay warm and fed, and to be without worry—that again was his prayer as he stumbled over the sagebrush in a ragged forager’s charge with the rest of Butler’s men.
Now some of the soldiers on Casey’s left were rising, beginning to move out with Butler’s right flank, lunging through the snowdrifts like crippled cows in their bulky, wet winter clothing, some firing off a shot every five yards or so—and each time sternly reminded by their sergeants to conserve their ammunition.
Ahead of them on the slopes the warriors darted from side to side in that thick atmosphere of pasty snow falling down, flying sideways, in a fury all around at once. Every now and then a bullet struck near Donegan, ricocheting against a rock buried under the crusty snow with a sharp crack. Or a dull thud of a sound when they smacked into the frozen earth. A high-pitched whine when they just sailed on past his ear.
Damn this face mask, he cursed, tugging on it to be sure he could see through the eyeholes he himself had cut two days before they had marched south away from the Yellowstone.
Of a sudden those sounds coming from the high ridge changed. Blinking his frosted eyelashes, Seamus squinted, trying to focus on the distance ahead of them. The warriors had seen them coming—that much was for certain. Appeared the enemy was massing just about everything they had right in front of Butler’s outfit now. Warriors streamed along the top of the ridge, the noise growing as the Sioux and Cheyenne yelled and yelped. Their numbers swelled again and again. Multiplied—disappeared in the snowstorm. Then reappeared larger than ever.
Cavalry were always taught not to let the number of enemy concern them—after all, cavalry had the benefit of horse and saber.
But this wasn’t the War of Rebellion no more, Seamus brooded. And Butler’s outfit wasn’t mounted on no god-blessed horses. And, besides—the frontier cavalry didn’t use its bleeming sabers anymore, anyhow.
So he counted and counted those forms on the ridge, and he walked and walked, slipped and fell, and rose to walk again, estimating that there were more than 450 warriors waiting for the soldiers on the top of the ridge. And more were coming.
Maybe as many as a third of the warriors on that entire battlefield were now clustered in front of Butler’s outnumbered C Company.
But on and on the sixty-some of them marched, men grunting and grumbling as they slipped and slid on the icy snow. Picking themselves back up and cursing as they lunged back into line. Remaining undaunted in the face of the daunting task: scale the heights, even into the very jaws of the enemy guns.
Just as it had been when he had watched Captain Guy V. Henry among his men during that deadly retreat at the Rosebud,* Seamus was proud to watch this Edmond Butler urge his weary, stumbling horse through a wide gap that opened in the lines to make a big, conspicuous target of himself out in front of them all— the animal lunging forward until Butler reined up and turned about, there before the oncoming ranks of his men, his pistol clutched in his woolen mitten, his other hand tugging the blanket scrap over his face to the side once more so the men could hear his voice, so his men could see his own resolve.
“C’mon, you doughboys!” he cried, his arm waving high in the air. “We can do it! C Company can do it!”
Up and down that scattered line now other voices called out, sergeants and corporals and even privates rallying their fellows with cheers, hoots, and hollers. Working themselves up for the impossible.
“I ain’t got no more bullets, Cap’n!” a frantic soldier bawled somewhere to Donegan’s right.
“Give the bloke a shell or two!” a sergeant ordered.
Another man shouted, “I need some shells too!”
“Share what you got with your bunkies, goddammit!” an old soldier snapped at them as he pushed aside the wool mask that hung from the front of his muskrat cap.
Butler loped the horse in front of a trio of soldiers now as they were exchanging cartridges. He shouted down to them, “Make them last till the general sends more—”
As if it happened in a slow, watery blur—the captain’s horse began to spin round even before Donegan heard the smack of lead against solid flesh. A wet and sodden sound. The animal grunted as it came about, its hind legs going out from under it as surely as if it had been hamstrung by a pack of wolves. The sound of the horse’s wheeze accompanied its fall to the ground as Butler flew off into the deep snow, landing in a heap.
A half-dozen men were there in a matter of moments, some going to their company commander, pulling him out of the snow, others kneeling protectively between him and the heights to block any more enemy bullets, while two went to the horse that struggled to rise.
Butler came up to his knees there in the snowdrift, shoving the soldiers aside, then jerked to a stop, fixed and motionless as he stared at the animal’s fight to get its legs under it.
“Is … is there a chance?” the captain asked in a weak voice.
One of the soldiers kneeling at the animal’s side took his mitten away from the horse’s chest, holding it up, slick and glittering with blood. Huge ash-curl snowflakes instantly clung to the moist, dark blotch. “No, sir, Cap’n.
