“Like I said, life’s too short for a man carrying ’round his own type of unhappiness.”
North was quiet for some moments. His silence eventually prompted Cody to speak. “Believe I’ll head back a ways, see if I can spot that advance guard of those bridge-building pioneers. Duncan will need ’em to come up for this crossing.”
North slid from the saddle. “All right. If you don’t mind, I’ll sit here, enjoying the quiet and the view.”
“Always was a pretty place,” Bill said as he turned Buckskin Joe about and loped northeast in search of the cavalry column probing the countryside for Sioux.
Beneath the climbing of the morning sun he saw the dark snake of their column piercing the grassy hills burnt golden with summer’s heat, in recent days kissed by the first frost come and gone like a schoolgirl sharing her first love with a wide-eyed boy.
“We’ll wait here, boy,” he whispered to the big buckskin, slipping from the saddle. He dropped the reins, letting the horse eat the grass that snapped and popped as the animal tore it up in grazing.
No sooner had he stuffed a slender shaft between his lips and settled back onto his elbows when three rapid shots rattled beyond the hills he had just left behind.
Without hesitation, Cody was on Buckskin Joe in a fluid leap. Leaning over, he snatched up the reins at the same moment he pounded heels against the mount’s flanks. As Cody reached the bottom of the long, grassy slope, Frank North leaped against the skyline of the far hills, coming hell-bent at a lather. A puff of smoke erupted from North’s pistol. A heartbeat later Cody heard the crack of the weapon.
At the top of that hill just abandoned by North appeared more than a handful of warriors.
Stuffing his reins between his teeth, Cody yanked the Spencer from its boot and levered a cartridge as it came to his cheek. One, two, then three quick shots before it was time to ride. He had spilled two riders. But in that time, at least forty more appeared on the hillside behind the six who closed on North.
Jamming the carbine back into the leather boot, he hammered the buckskin into a gallop, making a wide arc, as if he were attempting to flank the warriors; but at the last moment, in full gallop, he brought the horse in toward North on an angle. Cody wasn’t able to hear the major’s words. It all came out only as noise garbled among the shouts and taunts of the Sioux warriors close on their tails. North’s mouth moved up and down as he drew close. They joined at a full run.
Just as Cody snugged his hat down on his head, a faint whistle keened past. A telltale sound that at the same time tugged at the hat.
“They’re shooting close, boy!” Cody laid over to holler into Joe’s laid-back ear. “Don’t you dare let ’em close on us now.”
Cody brought back the elk-handled quirt he carried around his right wrist, a souvenir captured from a lodge in Tall Bull’s Summit Springs’ camp. It splintered, sending a sliver of antler deep into his palm.
The hand grew warm and wet, but without much pain as he looked down at the end of his arm. The quirt hung in fragments that flopped heedlessly on the wind as he struggled to free it from his wrist.
For more than two miles they raced ahead of the screeching warriors, bullets flying overhead like angry wasps.
“Don’t they look grand!” North shouted, his words gone as quickly in the breeze.
A half-mile off was the advance guard, complete with Luther North and a small company of his Pawnee scouts.
“It’s our turn now!” Cody replied.
They reined up together, which caused the unsuspecting warriors behind them to howl even louder, believing they had won the chase.
“Bastards think our horses are done in!” North shouted. He immediately reined his animal in a tight circle on that hilltop, long a signal on the plains meaning enemy in sight.
With a wild shout and a flourish, Luther North led the two-dozen Pawnee away from the engineering detachment at a gallop.
North and Cody spurred down to meet the scouts, further drawing the Sioux into their surprise encounter with the Pawnee and cavalry. It was downright amusing to watch, as the first Sioux on the fastest ponies, who had their blood running the hottest, reached the point where they first caught sight of the Pawnee, coming strong on a collision course with them. And behind the Pawnee stretched two companies of soldiers in dusty blue.
Laughing together as they reined up, Cody and the major turned about to watch the Sioux skid to a halt and beat a hasty retreat. Luther and the Pawnee sped on past the two horsemen, hot on the trail of the warriors.
“You wanna follow along and see what happens?” Cody asked.
Frank North shook his head. “Naw, let Lute have his fun.”
“Got ’em on the run now.”
“They’ve gotta be camped nearby, Cody.”
“I know—out hunting and bumped into us, likely.”
“Let’s go on down there and report in to Volkmar. Get his column on the alert tonight when we bed down.”
Just past sunset, Luther North and his Pawnee reached camp. They had scattered the warriors, besides capturing two ponies and a mule. One new scalp dangled from a scout’s belt.
* * *
Pulling out early the following morning, the column ran across the Sioux campsite beside a tributary of the Prairie Dog. Luther North and the Pawnee eagerly charged down on the lodges standing against the willows. But no gunfire erupted from the camp and no hostiles burst from the abandoned lodges.
“Looks like our Injuns scared Pawnee Killer’s Injuns right on out of the country,” commented scout John Y. Nelson as he came to a halt beside Major North, Cody and Seamus Donegan.
“Left in a hurry, didn’t they?” asked the Irishman.
“Sonsabitches are scattering again,” North growled. “Like this every time we get on a scent. Few days, the trail will all but disappear. Poof,” and he gestured angrily. “They’re gone like snow in a chinook.”
To a degree, North was right. It was five days before any of them next saw a Sioux. And this time, it was a hunchbacked old woman.
She sat in the scanty shade of some swamp willow near Beaver Creek, either deaf or very much unconcerned at the clatter of approaching horsemen.
“I don’t speak any Sioux,” Cody said, reining up near the woman and turning in his saddle to signal behind. “Seamus—bring Nelson up here. His woman’s Brule.”
“The old one’s in bad shape,” Donegan said quietly as he knelt at the woman’s side, looking over the well-seamed face and the lidded eyes. “They just leave her here like this?”
Nelson nodded as he went to his knees beside Cody and the Irishman. “The old ones get so old. Look at her. Doubt she’s had a thing to eat in days.”
“We make ’em do this—pushing the village the way we are?”
Nelson nodded. “That’s likely, Irishman. A band of ’em gets on the run, they’ll leave the old and the sick behind because they can’t keep up. The young ones know the soldiers won’t kill an old one like this—if we can keep the Pawnee off’n her.”
“Pawnee’d kill her?”
“Damn right they would. Sioux scalp is a Sioux scalp to them Pawnee. Don’t matter if that scalp’s gray and got a couple of dry teats hanging empty below it.”
“Damn but this country out here gets crazier the more I learn.” Seamus dragged the canteen up and pulled the cork. She fought the hand he tried to put under her chin.
“Let her drink for herself,” Nelson suggested. He spoke a few words in Lakota.
She reached out clumsily and took the canteen in both hands, really opening her eyes for the first time. It was then Seamus saw the thick clouding of cataracts over both opaque eyes.
“She blind, Nelson?”
“Yep. No doubt that’s why she’s here, and starving. Waiting for her time to be called up yonder.”
“See what you can get out of her,” Cody said. “Anything on the village.”
Nelson pulled two thick slabs of jerky from his belt-pouch and laid them in the
old woman’s hand. She said something to him and he chuckled.
“Says she smells tobacco on me. Wants our tobacco more than our poor meat. Says white man has poor meat, but good tobacco.”
“Tell her she can have some to smoke or chew when she answers your questions,” Cody suggested.
With the browned stumps she had left for teeth after a lifetime of chewing hides, the old woman gnawed and sucked on the tough jerky while she conversed with the white scout. At last Nelson turned to Donegan.
“Give me some of your chew for the woman. I just found out she’s a relative of my wife. More’n that, fellas—we’re in the presence of Sioux royalty.”
“Somebody special?” Frank North asked.
“This is Pawnee Killer’s mother,” Nelson replied, slicing off a thin strip of the fragrant, coal-dark plug. She promptly stuffed the tobacco in her mouth and began gumming it noisily into a moist cud.
“Where’s her son gone?”
“She doesn’t know for sure. Only that when he left her here three nights back, she listened to the village move off. Upstream.”
“I doubt they’re moving southwest,” Cody said.
“I agree,” said Frank North. “If anything, they’ll turn north and make their run for Red Cloud’s country.”
“How can a man just leave his mother here?” Donegan asked, wagging his head in disbelief. He looked about, finding nothing left with the woman for her well-being.
“Says she had a little meat, what Pawnee Killer could spare when he rode off. And he left her a little gourd of water she finished yesterday.”
“Just her and this greasy blanket?”
“That’s right, Irishman,” Nelson replied, “Seems hard-hearted to us, but it’s the Indian way. Got a soft spot in your heart for the old Sioux witch, do you?”
“No,” he snapped, testy as a wet goat. “Just … just that she’s someone’s mother and … and that red h’athen run off on her, s’all. That’s what sticks in me craw like a chicken-bone.”
“Column’s coming up,” Luther North announced, coming up easy on his horse. “Who’s this?”
“Pawnee Killer’s mother,” Nelson replied. “You want me leave her where we found her, Cody?”
“What? And let them bloodsucking Pawnee stick a knife in her belly?” Seamus growled. “I’ll have no part of that, you heartless bastirds.”
Cody rose to his feet. “The Irishman’s right. Let’s get her packed on one of the wagons.”
“To do what, for God’s sake?” Luther North asked.
“Taking her back to her reservation,” Cody answered.
“No better place for her now that she’s bound to die out here,” Nelson said.
“She don’t have to die.” Seamus scooted forward on his knees, scooping up the tiny, frail frame in his arms. He rose with her steadily. “I’ll go down and meet the wagons coming up.”
Cody and the rest watched in wonder as Donegan walked down the rise into the flat meadow filled with grass beaten down by lodges and moccasined feet. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Duncan’s troops were arriving.
“Look at the way she clings to him,” Nelson said quietly. “Maybe she thinks the Irishman’s her boy.”
Cody wagged his head, adjusting his pistol-belt. “No. But I’ve a notion Seamus is treating her as good as he wishes he could treat his own mother right about now.”
Chapter 33
October 28, 1869
For three more weeks Duncan pushed his troops up and down the Republican, sending out scouting parties, hunting off the land, trying to catch one village after another as they scattered and disappeared from the country as if snatched off the face of the earth.
Winter was coming. The bands going south for the season were already on their way. Those planning to make the north country before the big snows came had already put Kansas Territory far behind them.
Winter’s cold hand of death was coming.
The first snow was wet and heavy, coming as it did in the middle of one night when most of the men were asleep beneath their blankets and gum ponchos. By the next afternoon everything was melted and muddy and bogged down in a quagmire of cursing wagonmasters and balky mules. It was the second storm that convinced Duncan he needed to turn back home.
It was one of those plains’ storms that had all the bluster of a spring blizzard, aggravated by winter’s cold bite of the arctic where it had been sired. Born of the mating of wet, warm air sweeping up out of the south, tumbling and roiling beneath the frigid storm system hurtling out of the north like a hungry woman thrusting herself back at her impassioned lover, this snow had all the ingredients of a killer.
On the second day the skies cleared and the men finally ventured out from under shelter-halves and tents and the bellies of wagons to greet the sun, see what stock was still alive and to count noses. That twenty-third day of October, Duncan decided they’d had enough.
“We’re close enough to McPherson—we can make it inside a week, we take our time and don’t stretch out the strength of men or animals.”
Five days later, as the sun heaved out of mid-sky, heading down the homeward side toward the far mountains, Cody’s advance guard came within sight of the far-off bastion. Angered by an insistent west wind, the big flag snapped and protested above the home station for the Fifth Cavalry. The Irishman admitted it was a sight almost as good as laying eyes on Fort Wallace after Carpenter’s brunettes dragged Forsyth’s survivors out of the wilderness.*
If it wasn’t Sioux, it was Cheyenne. And if it wasn’t the brutal cold of a trip heading north on foot along the Bozeman Trail, then it was a sudden prairie storm that could kill a man even more quickly than the sun and starvation and despair ever could. Maybe he’d had enough, Seamus told himself—enough of the plains and these Indians. Enough of working damned hard to keep her off his mind when Jenny had made it pretty plain she preferred moving on with her life to waiting for him.
Why, Seamus asked himself, was he staying on in these parts when he should be pushing ahead?
Quartermaster Sergeant John Young turned Pawnee Killer’s mother over to the post chaplain upon arrival.
“Likely he’ll see that she’s shipped up to Spotted Tail’s agency, north in Dakota,” Cody said after the civilians split off from the soldiers and dismounted on the parade.
Seamus nodded, gazing about at the pandemonium of homecoming. Officers’ wives and the enlisted man’s laundresses were out in force. Waving handkerchiefs and colorful bandannas, singing out the words of their favorite song: “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
“Full many a name our banners bore
Of former deeds of daring,
But they were of the days of yore
In which we had no sharing.
“But now our laurels freshly won
With the old ones shall entwin’d be;
Still worthy of our sires each son,
Sweet girl I left behind me.”
Youngsters wrapped against the blustery winds beat on tin pots with wooden spoons or blew on penny whistles to accompany the regimental band with every verse and chorus.
A happiness Seamus felt not a part of.
“Duncan declares Colonel Emory’s splitting the Fifth for the coming winter,” Cody said as they began walking slowly toward McDonald’s trading post at the outskirts of the fort buildings.
“Some to garrison here,” Seamus said, nodding, “the rest going where?”
“He’s keeping five companies here. Six going on to Wyoming. To garrison Fort D. A. Russell.”
“Damn these Indian wars,” Seamus whispered under his breath.
“You want me to meet you later for a drink—wash down some of the trail dust?” Cody asked.
That brought Seamus up suddenly. “Why, ain’t you coming to have one now? McDonald be expecting us come harroo—now we’re back, like old times.”
Cody tried out a limp smile. “I’m … it’s not like before, Seamus. Lulu and Arta—my family is here now.”
“You’ll come meet them later,” the young scout said, anxious to go.
Donegan suddenly felt sorry as well that he had kept Cody. “G’won, me good man. I’ll share the warmth another time. Come ’round the saloon when you get the chance this evening and I’ll buy you a drink in farewell.”
“Farewell?”
“I’ve decided I’ll be leaving in the morning, soon’s the paymaster gets me mustered out.”
“You don’t have to muster out yet—I’ll see to you staying on the winter—”
“No, Bill. You’ve had me here long enough, and it’s high time the Irishman was moving on.”
“We’ll talk about it—”
“No, Cody. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Damn you—we’ve a lot to talk about, Donegan. I’ll see you standing at McDonald’s shaky bar after sundown.”
Seamus glanced at the orange orb settling to the west. “That doesn’t give a man much time for saying his proper how-do to family and kin.”
“Plenty time for me. Besides, I don’t want you leaving, Seamus,” Cody said, holding out his hand. “Not, just yet.”
Donegan shook. “We’ll drink our fare-the-well this night, Billy, me boy. Maybe we’ll round up a few of the others to make it a merry send-off at McDonald’s place.”
“See you after sundown, Irishman.”
He watched the young scout go, Cody’s long, curly hair all the more golden beneath the afternoon sun this late autumn day. Seamus knew he’d miss the man dearly.
On instinct, he reached for the medicine pouch he kept hung out of sight inside his shirt. Before his eyes swam the face of the old mountain trapper turned army scout. In liquid remembrance of Jim Bridger.
The same two years gone since Donegan quit the Bozeman Road, bidding farewell to Sam Marr with the promise to meet him north to the gold fields one day.
Black Sun, The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869 Page 29
