before darting back out of sight as man and horse passed on by.
Then late one night he spotted the dim outlines of the buttes far away to the southeast, limned there against the skyline as a distant blood-tinged sunrise awoke a world far east of the Great Plains. That pale-orange strata of Pumpkin Buttes … oh, how the sight of them made his eyes strain to make out something to the south of him— where Reno Cantonment should lay.
Seamus dared push on past sunrise that morning, so eager was he to see another’s face, so hungry to hear a voice other than his own. After all, Reno Crossing meant that he had returned to far more familiar country, perhaps even to a land where a man might travel in far less danger than when he plunged through the heart of Lakota hunting ground.
Early that afternoon, after more than 130 miles as a crow would fly, Donegan came in sight of those mud- and-log huts that Captain Edwin Pollock’s Ninth U.S. Infantry had garrisoned in this northern country, an outpost at the precipice of a deadly land—this last supply depot for Crook’s last campaign. As he set the claybank mare into a lope, drawing closer and closer, he saw that men were moving about, more coming out of the sod-and-frame barracks as he became more than a speck on the horizon. As he became a horseman. A man emerging from a deadly, bloody ground. A lone plainsman.
“Just where in the hell did you come from?”
“The Belle Fourche,” Donegan answered, his voice cracking a little from disuse, “by way of Tongue River Cantonment.”
“T-tongue River?” stammered a middle-aged soldier. “Miles’s infantry?”
“Yes,” he replied, eyeing a man who approached drinking a steamy cup of coffee.
“You civilian? Ain’t no deserter, are you?”
Donegan snorted. “Was I to desert, I’d be off to the diggings in the Black Hills, or up to Last Chance in Montana Territory. Last thing I’d want to do would be to put myself around sojurs.”
“See how stupid your god-blame-ed question was, Stacy?” another one declared peevishly.
One of them peered up beneath a hand shading his eyes and asked, “But you did come riding down from the Yaller-stone?”
Seamus’s eyes danced over the faces that came out to gaze up at his in wonder and speculation, enjoying the music of the voices, the feast for his eyes.
“I did, that. Marching more’n a hundred miles with the Fifth Infantry,” Seamus explained as he laid his wrists across the saddle horn and let out a sigh. “Chasing Crazy Horse’s village.”
“Crazy Horse!”
“He said the Fifth chased Crazy Horse!”
“Caught him too, we did,” Donegan said. “Had us a good scrap of it till a blizzard blowed in.”
The middle-aged soldier stepped forward. “My name’s Pollock. Edwin Pollock. Commandant of this here fine post.”
“I remember you, sir,” Seamus replied, taking off a mitten and holding a hand down to the captain. “Name’s Donegan, late of General Crook’s Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition.”
“You’re a mite late catching up with them, Donegan,” Pollock said. “Crook’s bunch passed through here before Christmas.”
“I know,” he said sadly, thinking back on that special holiday endured away from loved ones. “Crook himself sent me north to learn where Crazy Horse was.”
One of the soldiers gleefully declared, “And from the sounds of it you sure as the devil found out where Crazy Horse was, by God!”
“Come on down from that horse,” Pollock suggested. “We’ll get some side meat frying for you, and I’m sure we can root out some beans and hard bread too.”
“Always beans and hard bread wherever the army goes!” a soldier retorted.
Seamus drank three cups of coffee right off, swilling them down as soon as they were cool enough to drink while his first hot meal in a week was still cooking. Those men of the Ninth Infantry sat and stood around him as he wolfed down the beans and soaked his tacks in a new cup of coffee sweetened with heaping spoons of sugar. Seamus couldn’t remember when army food had tasted so good.
Maybe it was only that he was almost halfway home. Maybe that’s what made something so simple as a hot meal of pasty white beans, crusty hard bread, and a greasy slab of fatty pork such a king’s feast late that afternoon among soldiers who asked him everything imaginable about the war going on to the north with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Why, they acted just the way schoolboys out to recess or old men gathered at the mercantile to whittle and gossip would act, wanting to hear every detail, every last facet of commonplace events like marching up the Tongue, crossing on the ice, burying soldiers, capturing Cheyenne prisoners, and storming an icy ridge when the whole damned outfit was down to its last few bullets. They fed him and coffee’d him and kept him talking until his throat was sore and it had been long dark for hours.
“We best let the man be now,” Pollock finally said.
He turned to peer out at the night. “My horse?”
“We’ve watered and grained him,” a soldier said. “Even rubbed some liniment on a sore on his right flank, just under the pad.”
“I’m obliged,” Seamus said thankfully. “Truly obliged to you men.”
“You can bunk right in here,” Pollock offered.
But the old soldier told Seamus, “Or spread your bedroll with the rest of us. When I cared for your horse, I brung your saddle and gear inside our humble barrack.”
“Yes,” Seamus decided suddenly, a tug at his heart deciding it. “I’ll bunk in with you fellas if it won’t put no one out.”
Yes—to stay a while longer among these men who had cared for him and the horse … feeling so weary.
Captain Pollock said, “From the sounds of all your riding, bet you ain’t had yourself a proper night’s sleep in a month of Sundays.”
Another man added, “I’ll wager you could do with getting some shut-eye in out of the cold.”
“I’ll push on come morning,” Seamus agreed as he stood, feeling the stiffness in near every muscle from being so long in sitting atop the half-log bench.
“After coffee and breakfast at reveille,” Pollock said.
Using the officer’s brevet rank, Donegan asked, “Could you have me up two hours before sunrise, Major?”
“I’ll be sure one of the pickets on the last watch comes in to roust you,” a sergeant offered.
He looked round at them again, slowly, some faces sinfully handsome and some downright mud ugly, the old and the young among them, sallow-eyed veteran and peach-cheeked shavetail too. Soldiers all … every bit like those soldiers he had ridden beside as they’d galloped into the face of Confederate cavalry and the pounding of Rebel artillery; like Captain Butler’s brave men clambering for a foothold on the slopes of an icy hell. Soldiers paid so damned little by an unappreciative country that had scant idea of just what it asked of its fighting men.
Seamus rolled the wolf-hide hat in his hands nervously and told them, “Thank you fellas—for being here when I come riding in. For being here where likely no one else knows you’re here. God bless each and every one of you … for leaving your families to come to this lonely place on the Powder River.”
For a moment they all sat and stood there stunned into silence by his sudden words. One of them coughed selfconsciously. Another turned aside and silently dragged a hand under his nose. And most of the rest found somewhere else for their eyes as they looked away, their own thoughts suddenly far, far from here. Away to loved ones.
Then he cursed himself inside, feeling sorry of that moment, having caused these soldiers to think of home, to think on others so far from this cold, winter wilderness.
“Most of all,” Donegan concluded, his throat clotted, “I wanna thank you fellas for helping me on my way home to my family.”
“W-where are they?” Pollock asked. “Laramie.”
“Laramie,” a soldier repeated almost wistfully as he nodded, then looked away at the flames in the crude fireplace constructed along the outer wall of the hut.
“Y’ ain’t got far to go now,” another declared.
