Then suddenly, with wolfish battle-cries
And death-songs like the onset of a gale
And arrows pelting like a burst of hail,
The living tempest broke. There was no plain;
Just headgear bobbing in a toss of mane,
And horses, horses, horses plunging under.
Paunch-deep in dust and thousand-footed thunder,
That vertigo of terror swarmed and swirled
About the one still spot in all the world—
The hushed cyclonic heart. Then that was loud!
The boxes bellowed, and a spurting cloud
Made twilight where the flimsy fortress stood;
And flying splinters from the smitten wood
And criss-cross arrows pricked the drifting haze.
Not now, as in the recent musket days,
The foe might brave two volleys for a rush
Upon the soldiers, helpless in a hush
Of loading. Lo, like rifles in a dream
The breech-fed Springfields poured a steady stream
That withered men and horses roaring in!
And gut-shot ponies screamed above the din;
And many a wounded warrior, under-trod
But silent, wallowed on the bloody sod—
Man piled on man and horses on the men!
They broke and scattered. Would they come again?
Abruptly so the muted hail-storm leaves
Astonished silence, when the dripping eaves
Count seconds for the havoc yet to come.
Weird in the hush, a melancholy hum,
From where the watching women of the Sioux
Thronged black along the circling summits, grew
And fell and grew—the mourning for the dead.
One whispered hoarsely from a wagon-bed,
“Is anybody hit?” But none replied.
Awe-struck at what they did and hollow-eyed,
All watched and waited for the end of things.
Then even as the fleeing hail-cloud swings
Before some freakish veering of the gale,
Returning down its desolated trail
With doubled wrath, the howling horsemen came.
Right down upon the ring of spurting flame
The quirted ponies thundered; reared, afraid
Of that bad medicine the white men made,
And, screaming, bolted off with flattened ears.
So close the bolder pressed, that clubs and spears
Were hurled against the ring.
Again they broke,
To come again. Now flashing through the smoke,
Like lightning to the battle’s thunder-shocks,
Ignited arrows, streaming to the nocks,
Fell hissing where the fighting soldiers lay;
And flame went leaping through the scattered hay
To set the dry mule-litter smouldering.
Half suffocated, coughing with the sting
Of acrid air, like scythemen in a field
The soldiers mowed. And gaudy man-flower reeled
To wriggling swaths. And still the mad Sioux fought
To break this magic that the white men wrought—
Heroic flesh at grapple with a god.
Then noon was glaring on the bloody sod;
And broken clouds of horsemen down the plain
Went scudding; hundreds, heavy with the slain
And wounded, lagging in the panic rout.
Again the ridges murmured round about
Where wailed the wives and mothers of the Sioux.
Some soldier whispered, asking for a chew,
As though he feared dread sleepers might arise.
Young Tommy Doyle with blood upon his eyes
Gaped noonward and his fighting jaw sagged loose.
Hank Haggirty would never need a noose
To reach between a trigger and a toe.
Jenness would never hear a bugle blow
Again, so well he slept. Around the ring
Men passed the grisly gossip, whispering—
As though doomed flesh were putting on the ghost.
A sound grew up as of a moving host.
It seemed to issue from a deep ravine
To westward. There no enemy was seen.
A freak gust, gotten of a sultry hush,
May mumble thus among the distant brush
Some moments ere a dampened finger cools.
But still the smudgy litter of the mules
Plumed straight against the dazzle of the day.
Upon a hilltop half a mile away
To eastward. Red Cloud presently appeared
Among his chieftains, gazing where the weird
Susurrus swelled and deepened in the west;
And to and from him dashed along the crest
Fleet heralds of some new-begotten hope.
Once more the Piney spread along the slope
A dizzy ruck of charging horse. They broke
Before those stingers in a nest of smoke,
Fled back across the creek, and waited there.
For what?
The voice of it was everywhere—
A bruit of waters fretting at a weir.
The woman-peopled summits hushed to hear
That marching sound.
Then suddenly a roar,
As from the bursting open of a door,
Swept out across the plain; and hundreds, pressed
By hundreds crowding yonder from the west,
Afoot and naked, issued like a wedge,
With Red Cloud’s nephew for the splitting edge,
A tribe’s hot heart behind him for a maul.
Slow, ponderously slow, the V-shaped wall
Bore down upon the camp. The whirlwind pace
Of horsemen seemed less terrible to face
Than such a leisure. Brave men held their breath
Before that garish masquerade of Death
Aflaunt with scarlets, yellows, blues and greens.
Then Condon there behind his barrel of beans,
Foreseeing doom, afraid to be afraid,
Sprang up and waved his rifle and essayed
Homeric speech according to his lights.
“Come on!” he yelled, “ye dairty blatherskites,
Ye blitherin’ ijuts! We kin lick yez all,
Ye low-down naygurs!” Shafts began to fall
About him raging. Scattered muskets roared
Along the fraying fringes of the horde.
“Get down there, Jim!” men shouted. “Down!” But Jim
Told Death, the blackguard, what he thought of him
For once and all.
Again the Springfields crashed;
And where the heavy bullets raked and smashed
The solid front and bored the jostling mass,
Men withered down like flame-struck prairie grass;
But still the raging hundreds forged ahead
Pell mell across their wounded and their dead,
Like tumblebugs. The splitting edge went blunt.
A momentary eddy at the front
Sucked down the stricken chief. The heavy rear,
With rage more mighty than the vanward fear,
Thrust forward. Twenty paces more, and then—
’Twould be like drowning in a flood of men.
Already through the rifts one saw their eyes,
Teeth flashing in the yawn of battle-cries,
The sweat-sleek muscles straining at the bows.
Forgotten were the nooses for the toes.
Tomorrows died and yesterdays were naught.
Sleep-walkers in a foggy nowhere fought
With shadows. So forever from the first,
Forever so until this dream should burst
Its thin-blown bubble of a world. And then,
The shadows were a howling mass of men
Hurled, heavy with their losses, down the plain
Before that thunder-spew of death and pain
That followed till the last had disappeared.
The hush appalled; and when the smoke had cleared,
Men eyed each other with a sense of shock
At being still alive.
’Twas one o’clock!
One spoke of water. Impishly the word
Went round the oval, mocking those who heard.
The riddled barrel had bled from every stave;
And what the sun-stewed coffee-kettles gave
Seemed scarcely wet. Off yonder on the hill
Among his chieftains Red Cloud waited still—
A tomcat lusting for a nest of mice.
How often could these twenty-nine suffice
To check his thousands? Someone raised
