’Twas strategy; they didn’t fight our way.
Again it happened on the nineteenth day
The lookout saw the logging-train in grief;
And Captain Powell, leading the relief,
Returned without a single scratch to show.
The twentieth brought neither snow nor foe.
The morrow came—a peaceful, scarlet morn.
It seemed the homesick sun in Capricorn
Had found new courage for the homeward track
And, yearning out across the zodiac
To Cancer, brightened with the conjured scene
Of grateful hills and valleys flowing green,
Sweet incense rising from the rain-soaked sward,
And color-shouts of welcome to the Lord
And Savior.
Ninety took the logging-road
That morning, happy that the final load
Would trundle back that day, and all be well.
But hardly two miles out the foemen fell
Upon them, swarming three to one. And so
Once more the hilltop lookout signalled woe
And made the fort a wasp-nest buzzing ire.
The rip and drawl of running musket fire,
The muffled, rhythmic uproar of the Sioux
Made plain to all that what there was to do
Out yonder gave but little time to waste.
A band of horse and infantry soon faced
The Colonel’s quarters, waiting for the word.
Above the distant tumult many heard
His charge to Powell, leader of the band;
And twice ’twas said that all might understand
The need for caution: “Drive away the foe
And free the wagon-train; but do not go
Past Lodge Trail Ridge.”
A moment’s silence fell;
And many in the after-time would dwell
Upon that moment, little heeded then—
The ghostly horses and the ghostly men,
The white-faced wives, the gaping children’s eyes
Grown big with wonder and a dread surmise
To see their fathers waiting giant-tall;
That mumbling voice of doom beyond the wall;
The ghastly golden pleasance of the air;
And Fetterman, a spectre, striding there
Before the Colonel, while the portals yawn.
As vivid as a picture lightning-drawn
Upon the night, that memory would flash,
More vivid for the swooping backward crash
Of gloom. ’Twas but the hinges of the gates
That shrieked that moment, while the eager Fates
Told off the waiting band and gloated: Done!
He asked for eighty—give him eighty-one!
Then Fetterman, unwitting how the rim
Of endless outer silence pressed on him
And all his comrades, spoke: “With deference due
To Captain Powell, Colonel, and to you,
I claim command as senior captain here.”
So ever is the gipsy Danger dear
To Courage; so the lusty woo and wed
Their dooms, to father in a narrow bed
A song against the prosing after-years.
And now the restive horses prick their ears
And nicker to the bugle. Fours about,
They rear and wheel to line. The hillsides shout
Back to the party. Forward! Now it swings
High-hearted through the gate of common things
To where bright hazard, like a stormy moon,
Still gleams round Hector, Roland, Sigurd, Fionn;
And all the lost, horizon-hungry prows,
Eternal in contemporary nows,
Heave seaward yet.
The Colonel mounts the wall,
And once again is heard his warning call:
“Relieve the wagon-train, but do not go
Past Lodge Trail Ridge.” And Fetterman, below,
Turns back a shining face on him, and smiles
Across the gap that neither years nor miles
May compass now.
A little farther still
They watched him skirt a westward-lying hill
That hid him from the train, to disappear.
“He’ll swing about and strike them in the rear,”
The watchers said, “and have the logging crew
For anvil.”
Now a solitary Sioux
Was galloping in circles on a height
That looked on both the squadron and the fight—
The prairie sign for “many bison seen.”
A lucky case-shot swept the summit clean,
And presently the distant firing ceased;
Nor was there sound or sight of man or beast
Outside for age-long minutes after that.
At length a logger, spurring up the flat,
Arrived with words of doubtful cheer to say.
The Indians had vanished Peno way;
The train was moving on to Piney Isle.
He had no news of Fetterman.
V
Rubbed Out
Meanwhile
Where ran the Bozeman Road along the bleak
North slope of Lodge Trail Ridge to Peno Creek,
Big hopes were burning. Silence waited there.
The brown land, even as the high blue air,
Seemed empty. Yet the troubled crows that flew
Keen-eyed above the sunning valley knew
What made the windless slough-grass ripple so,
And how a multitude of eyes below
Were peering southward to the road-scarred rise
Where every covert was alive with eyes
That scanned the bare horizon to the south.
The white of dawn had seen the Peno’s mouth
A-swarm with men—Cheyennes, Arapahoes,
Dakotas. When the pale-faced sun arose—
A spectre fleeing from a bath of blood—
It saw them like a thunder-fathered flood
Surge upward through the sounding sloughs and draws—
Afoot and mounted, veterans and squaws,
Youths new to war, the lowly and the great—
A thousand-footed, single-hearted hate
Flung fortward. Now their chanted battle-songs
Dismayed the hills. Now silent with their wrongs
They strode, the sullen hum of hoofs and feet,
Through valleys where aforetime life was sweet,
More terrible than songs or battle cries.
The sun had traversed half the morning skies
When, entering the open flat, they poured
To where the roadway crossed the Peno ford
Below the Ridge. Above them wheeled and pried
The puzzled crows, to learn what thing had died,
What carcass, haply hidden from the ken
Of birds, had lured so large a flock of men
Thus chattering with lust. There, brooding doom,
They paused and made the brown December bloom
With mockeries of August—demon flowers
And lethal, thirsting for the sanguine showers
That soon should soak the unbegetting fields—
The trailing bonnets and the pictured shields,
The lances nodding in the warwind’s breath,
And faces brave with paint to outstare Death
In some swift hush of battle!
Briefly so
They parleyed. Then the spears began to flow
On either side the Ridge—a double stream
Of horsemen, winking out as in a dream
High up among the breaks that flanked the trail.
Amid the tall dry grasses of the vale
The footmen disappeared; and all the place
Was still and empty as a dead man’s face
That sees unmoved the wheeling birds of prey.
The anxious moments crawled. Then far away
Across the hills a muffled tumult grew,
As of a blanket being ripped in two
And many people shouting underground.
The valley grasses rippled to the sound
As though it were a gusty wind that passed.
Far off a bugle’s singing braved the vast
And perished in a wail.
The tall grass stirred.
The rumor of the distant fight was heard
A little longer. Suddenly it stopped;
And silence, like a sky-wide blanket, dropped
Upon the landscape empty as the moon.
The sun, now scarce a lance-length from the noon,
Seemed waiting for whatever might occur.
Across the far Northwest a purplish blur
Had gathered
