Seize the Sky

blowflies, James Bustard leapt into the smoke and dust once again to fetch more of his wounded and dying comrades.

“Give ’im a hand, will you, boys?” Keogh shouted as he waved two other veterans to follow Bustard downhill.

Sergeant Caddie leapt up and dashed off into the smoke on Bustard’s tail. Mitch Caddie was the lucky one of the two.

As Sergeant George Gaffney jumped over the stiffening carcass of his horse, he was driven backwards into Keogh’s little compound. His body writhed on the dusty grass a moment, his jaw blown off, the side of his head gone in a pulpy mass. As his bowels voided into the hot air, Gaffney quit trembling forever.

“Damn them all!” Keogh shouted. “Let them ’ave a go at me! C’mon now—you pagan bastirds … ’ave a shot at the likes of Myles Keogh!”

The captain darted side to side, waving his huge Catholic medal for all the nearby warriors to see beneath the shimmering sun in that buttermilk sky, as if to say he too wore some strange, powerful medicine to ward off their bullets and arrows.

“You can’t kill me!” he called as a few more of his men darted away into the smoke, intent on making it to Custer’s lines.

The rear guard is falling. He fired his pistol at a warrior leaping after a soldier running north. Keogh nailed the warrior, really wanting to shoot the soldier in the back.

There’s just too many, his mind raced clear and cool as any mountain stream surging out of the Bighorns. All round them howled ten times ten the number they had figured would be camped in this bloody valley.

Just too damned many for any of us to handle now. No way out—

With a snort the horse beside Keogh reared and in falling nearly knocked him over. Even the sure, gentle hands of the old files were failing to keep the horses from bolting now. They reared and fell back over the men, stumbling against each other in pure panic, breaking their hobbles, pinning and crushing soldiers beneath them, stomping on any unfortunate trooper who didn’t roll out of their way fast enough.

Near Keogh’s feet a young soldier knelt, sobbing, mumbling an incoherent prayer. As Myles watched, utterly mesmerized, unable to stop him, the young shavetail threw his rifle away and pulled out his service revolver. He handled the weapon as if it were some foreign, revered icon, juggling the heavy object into position alongside his head. The youngster pulled back the hammer, then calmly and without ceremony yanked on the trigger.

His brains splattered over three troopers nearby.

All three jerked round in fear and disgust, watching a comrade-in-arms fall into the yellow dust.

To Myles it was like watching one of Custer’s short vignettes back at Fort Abraham Lincoln.

The captain stood spellbound, dumbstruck while the evil asserted its control on his company. More soldiers suddenly sagged, giving up to pull pistols themselves. Pointing muzzles at their temples or breasts, triggers squeezed with eyes fiercely clenched. They dispatched their mortal souls into limbo rather than suffer the possibility of torture at the hands of the Indians.

Save the last goddamned bullet for yourself.

Stunned, baffled by the suicides rippling the hillside around him, Keogh watched pairs of men point guns at each other’s hearts in death pacts. Others died alone … no one to kill them … completing this last dirty little task for themselves. Slowly the staunch defense along Keogh’s ridge began unraveling. Strange that even as his perimeter fell apart, most of the Indian fire slacked off.

Keogh could tell that the gunfire from Calhoun’s Hill had faded.

Indeed, those warriors back along the ridge sat silently behind their tall clumps of sage and furry tufts of bunch-grass watching in frosty fascination as the pony soldiers fought among themselves, shooting each other until only a grim handful remained at the top of that dusty spine, a hardened knot gathered in a tight ring of corpses and horse carcasses.

Bitterly Keogh ordered a retreat with what was left of his Wild I Company. The first retreat he had ordered in his life.

Through the dust and smoke of this Sioux-made hell they crawled up on their knees and for a moment peered across the slopes toward the last hill less than a half mile away.

A few bolted away along the backbone, running hunched over like squat prairie cocks skittering through the sage ahead of a hungry coyote. First one, then another, darted off. Dust from hundreds of bullets kicked up funnels among their heels as they zigzagged their way through the sage. One was down, then another, now a third. And with those fallen soldiers sank the hope of Keogh’s last command.

One trooper sighed with a death rattle and calmly replaced his six empty shells in his revolver with live ammunition. He then crawled over to a tight knot of four quivering, whimpering recruits. Two of them gazed up at the veteran’s face, appealing to him with their tears and tortured expressions—imploring him with empty, quivering hands.

“This can’t be happening!” one shouted.

“Whadda we do? Whadda we do now?” cried another.

Methodically, one at a time, the old file placed his pistol against the back of each head. The fourth young trooper went down without protest or struggle.

Then, without warning, Sergeant Frank E. Varden suddenly turned the weapon on himself before Keogh leapt to stay him. The pistol tumbled from Varden’s grip as his body twitched, then collapsed atop the bodies of the last four recruits left in his entire squad. Sergeant Varden had protected his men to the last.

Keogh knelt trembling in rage. Disbelief like a cold, hard stone clogged his throat. Revulsion soured his tongue, seeing his men blow their own brains out. Myles Keogh had seen enough wounds and battlefield action to numb him to blood and gore. This was something else entirely that twisted his stomach now and made him heave up what was left of the dry breakfast they had wolfed down before Custer had moved them up and over the divide. It all came out with a good dose of sour whiskey in gut-relieving lumps that lay in the dust and the grass, beside these men, joining their blood in the ocher soil on this lonely hillside in Montana.

And when his belly finished punishing him, Keogh took up Varden’s bloodied pistol. Finding the sergeant had left one last live round in the cylinder. Keogh put the revolver to his forehead and rammed the hammer back, feeling how cool the muzzle felt against his sweating brow.

“Good man, Varden,” he croaked, speaking to the dead man beside him. “You saved the last bullet for your ol cap’n Keogh.”

He couldn’t bring himself to pull that trigger. Life had always been too damned precious for him.

Keogh allowed the weapon to fall out of his hand, knowing his only course now lay along the ragged spine … a half mile, perhaps a bit more.

Hell, it don’t matter how far, Myles.

He’d join the others. He could rally them.

Tommy boy’ll be there. Might even have a sip or two of whiskey about him. Tommy’s always been that way. When it comes to whiskey and women—Tommy isn’t stiff like his big brother.

Myles yanked cartridges from Varden’s belt, loading one, then two, and finally four pistols with fresh rounds.

Then, with a war cry of his own, Captain Myles Keogh rose to his feet like a mighty oak. He stuffed two pistols in his belt, manhandling another pair. He emptied one as he bolted off, then flung it angrily at a charging warrior. With the first shot out of the second, Keogh brought another Sioux skidding to a stop to stare at the red hole in his chest before he crumpled to the sand like a wet sack of corn mash.

Lumbering with all the concealed grace of a draft horse, Myles was off on his big Irish feet, dashing as he had never run before, remembering the footraces he always lost to Billy Cooke.

This’s one day ye’d not win again’ me, Cookey!

Keogh fired left then right as warriors popped up, lunging for him with clubs and rifles. Each wanted to be the man to lay first coup on this mighty warrior who wore the metal bars on his shoulders and that shiny medicine disc round his bull neck.

Myles fired and ran, ran and fired, until the two pistols clicked and clicked again. He hurled them angrily at red targets, yanking the last one free and into action. He pulled the trigger again and again, his feet covering ground as if there were only wind beneath his boots.