Trial at Fort Keogh

by Charles G. West

  That’s gonna cost you, he thought, and pushed back away from the ridge to return to his horse.

  Rodgers was properly excited to receive the news that Clint had found the Sioux party. As quickly as possible, he urged his men forward, following Clint.

  When they reached the back side of the ridge Clint had watched the Indians from before, he took Rodgers and Lieutenant Sawyer up to the top to look over the situation. Clint told them that the raiders had not posted any lookouts while they busied themselves butchering their kill. They appeared unconcerned about anyone following them. It was an ideal setup for a surprise attack. The ridge was low enough, and close enough to the edge of the river where the butchering was going on, so the soldiers could sweep down upon them before the Indians knew they were under attack.

  Rodgers gathered his troopers below the ridge, forming a straight line. When all were in position, he gave the signal and the line moved up over the top of the ridge, their carbines ready, but holding their fire. They were already riding down the face of the ridge before they were spotted by the unsuspecting hostiles. Upon the captain’s signal, the line of soldiers erupted in a barrage of deadly fire.

  The Sioux warriors were caught totally by surprise. The first volley struck them with devastating results, and the continuous firing that followed dropped many more as they ran for their weapons. Suffering heavy losses almost immediately, those who could ran to their ponies and scattered; some drove their horses into the river, trying to escape to the other side. About half of them failed to make it across before being picked off, their bodies floating downstream like so many logs.

  The battle lasted for less than half an hour, and was a resounding victory for B Troop, accounting for twenty-eight dead on the ground, and an unknown number in the river. Obviously pleased with his successful attack, Captain Rodgers rode back and forth along the line of troopers, praising their efforts.

  “That’s a blow for General Custer,” he exclaimed over and over. When Lieutenant Sawyer asked about pursuit of the survivors, Rodgers told him there would be none. “It’s not a workable endeavor,” he said. “They’ve scattered all over hell and back. I don’t want to split my command up in that many pieces. No, I think we can say without fear of contradiction that the enemy is vanquished from our region, so our objective has been accomplished. We’ll see to our wounded and prepare to return to Fort Keogh.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Sawyer said. Then before going to get a tally of the wounded men, he grinned wide and said, “Ol’ Justin’s gonna be sick about missing all the action.”

  Rodgers paused a moment. “Where the hell is Lieutenant Landry?” he asked. “I would have thought he’d catch up by now.”

  Hearing the question, Clint found it struck him odd as well. In the heat of the assault, he had not had time to think about Justin Landry. Rodgers was right. It shouldn’t have taken this long for a squad of eight men with shovels to dig half a dozen shallow graves. “I’ll ride on back and see if he’s on the way,” he volunteered. “He mighta got lost, but I don’t see how.”

  “Very well,” Rodgers said. “We’ll be along as soon as we finish up here.” He turned to Sergeant Cox, who happened by at that moment. “Sergeant, make sure we pick up any weapons they were using. We don’t want to leave any behind.”

  Leaving them to police the battlefield, Clint rode back over the ridge, the sharp popping of carbines behind him as the soldiers finished off the wounded hostiles.

  * * *

  Riding along, chewing on a strip of beef jerky, he let his mind go back to the battle they’d just fought and pictured the scene as he had first looked down on the Indians as they skinned and butchered the antelope. He remembered thinking that he had underestimated the number of warriors when he found their camp at Mizpah Creek. Today there seemed to have been fewer in number than he remembered that night when he, Ben, Justin, and the six troopers had to run for their lives—not by many, but enough to make him question his thoroughness in scouting the camp.

  “Doesn’t make a helluva lot of difference,” he muttered to his horse. “There were still enough to call for a full troop of cavalry.” It was only a few moments later when he heard the shots.

  Pulling up hard on the bay’s reins, he stopped to listen. There were more shots, and from the sound, he guessed they were from at least one Springfield rifle—and maybe a Sharps or Spencer carbine.

  What the hell, he wondered, another bunch behind us?

  More than likely it was some of the survivors who had scattered from the attack at the river. Whoever it was had evidently run into Justin and the squad of grave diggers. The shots were sporadic, instead of a steady barrage. But they didn’t seem to be very far away, so he nudged Sam and continued more cautiously than before.

  A quarter of a mile farther brought him to a series of high bluffs, cut with draws and gullies. He remembered thinking when he had passed them riding in the opposite direction that they looked ideal for staging an ambush.

  I reckon I ain’t the only one thinking that, he told himself, for had he not stopped, he would have ridden right into one. He pulled the bay’s reins hard to his left and rode up a narrow gully to the top of the bluff, where he left the horse and proceeded on foot. With his Winchester in one hand and a cartridge belt in the other, he made his way along the bluff until he reached a point where he could see the fight below him.

  About halfway down the bluff he spotted them. He counted six warriors behind an outcropping of rock. He had a clear shot at only one of them, even though he could see enough of the others to be sure of the count. He didn’t see who they were shooting at until an answering shot came from a washed-out pocket beneath the riverbank. He had let his gaze travel along the rim of the bank for several yards beyond the pocket when he detected movement along that line. For a moment, he saw a horse’s head before it disappeared again, hidden by the high bank. He brought his gaze back to the pocket when one lone shot came from it, followed by a period of silence.

  * * *

  “That was my last round,” Justin announced.

  “What the hell are we gonna do?” Private Oscar Willis asked. “Ain’t none of us got any more cartridges.” Like the other men, he looked to the lieutenant to come up with an answer, while not really expecting him to have one.

  Justin was as perplexed as the six enlisted men holed up with him in the pocket. They were all out of ammunition now, having shot it all up after taking cover in this hole beneath the bank. He should have ordered the men to conserve their cartridges, but they had all fired at the hostiles as rapidly as they could, himself included, thinking to discourage their attackers.

  But the warriors had found protection in the rocks in the bluff, where they could keep the soldiers pinned down indefinitely. He had lost two men, both hit when the Indians sprang the ambush. The hole they now found themselves in had been the closest cover they could find, and it was not large enough to hold them and their horses, too. So they had had to let the horses go.

  “Lieutenant,” Willis pressed when Justin failed to answer his question. All of the six were suddenly aware of the hopelessness of their situation.

  Groping for an answer, Justin tried to maintain some semblance of command, a task nearly impossible owing to the panic gripping him. He didn’t know what to do. It would not be long, without return fire from the pocket, before their attackers concluded that the soldiers were out of ammunition.

  “We’re gonna hold our position,” he finally said. “They don’t know we’re out of cartridges, and maybe they won’t think it’s worth the risk to charge us.” He prayed with all his heart that it was true.

  “Hold our position?” Willis replied incredulously. “Hold our position?” he repeated. “Not me. We don’t shoot no more and they’ll know damn well we ain’t got no cartridges, and when they swarm all over us, we’re dead men. And they’ll take their own sweet time killin’ us, jus
t like those folks we just got through burying. No, sir, I ain’t waitin’ around for that.”

  Before anyone could stop him, he scrambled up over the side of the pocket and ran down the bank toward the horses, tumbling head over heels when struck almost simultaneously by two bullets from the rocks.

  One of the other men had crawled to the edge of the pocket, intending to follow Willis. He sank back in fright when he saw Willis’ fate. Not a word was spoken for a long moment, every man there terrified, aware of the horrific ending awaiting them.

  The minutes ticked by agonizingly deliberate with no shots fired from above them. Justin crept up to the rim of the hole and peeked up at the bluff. His heart was seized by the frightful image that met his eyes. Standing above them defiantly, his feet planted solidly on the flat open surface of a rock shelf, a fierce warrior boldly challenged the soldiers to shoot him. Justin slid back down from the edge, knowing that Willis’ attempt to escape had told the Indians what they wanted to know: that the soldiers had no cartridges! It would only be a matter of minutes now.

  A windstorm of thoughts dashed through Justin’s mind—his brief career as an officer and his father’s disappointment when it would not come to pass, his home, his family, Hope Valentine. Most of all, he prayed he would face his death honorably. He didn’t have to peek over the top again to know that now, one by one, the savages who had ambushed them were slipping out into the open, preparing to descend upon them.

  He jumped, startled, when he heard the shot, followed by a cry of pain. The first shot was followed by more, in rapid succession, with more cries of anguish and pain. He and the five men with him would swear, when recalling this day, that the sound of that Winchester rifle was as sweet as the singing of angels.

  Kneeling at the very top of the high bluff, Clint had been unable to get a clear shot at the warriors who shot Willis. But when he saw the soldier attempt to run, he knew, as did the warriors, that Justin and his squad were out of ammunition. He also knew that his chances of saving them would depend on how patient he could be. So he held his fire when the lone warrior stepped out in the open, daring the soldiers to shoot at him. Such an easy target was hard to resist, but he waited, and soon another hostile stepped out beside the first—then another and another, until all six were standing boldly on the ledge. Clint braced himself and drew a bead on the first warrior, knowing there would be no time to take such careful aim after the first shot. His effectiveness would then depend on how rapidly he could pull the trigger, eject the empty cartridge, and fire again.

  When the first warrior dropped, the second bullet was already on its way toward the next target. Instinct and reactions took complete charge of the mass execution. For a brief timeless moment, there were no conscious thoughts, only the automatic cocking of the lever and the squeezing of the trigger, as the Winchester walked down the line of warriors until four bodies dropped and slid down to the foot of the bluff. Although deadly, the rifleman was not swift enough to hit all six before two were able to dive for cover. They wanted no more of the killing machine, however, and fled. Clint sprang to his feet and worked his way down the steep bluff as quickly as he could, but he was not fast enough to get another shot off before the two survivors reached their horses and galloped away.

  Confident that the two would not return, Clint went back to the foot of the bluff to make sure the other four hostiles were dead. Now that he had time to think, he realized that it had required a hell of a lot of luck for him to kill four of them. The element of surprise coupled with the confusion over where the shots were coming from had worked in his favor. But it could just as easily have resulted in a shoot-out with him outnumbered four or five to one.

  I reckon it was my day to have all the luck, he told himself.

  He walked back toward the water then and called out to the soldiers in the sandy pocket below the bank. “Landry, you can come out now.” It was not until then that he spotted the bodies of two dead troopers lying in the path some twenty or thirty yards back.

  “Mister, I’m damn glad to see you!” one of the soldiers exclaimed as they climbed up the bank. His statement was echoed by the other troopers as they abandoned their rude fortress, relieved that this was not to be their day of reckoning after all.

  “That certainly goes for me, too, Cooper,” Justin said. He never called Clint by his first name. “Our prospects were looking pretty slim before you showed up.” Rapidly recovering his composure, he told the men to round up the horses. Turning back to Clint then, he asked, “Did Captain Rodgers send you back to find us?”

  “Yeah,” Clint replied. He didn’t tell him that it was his idea to come back to look for him. And that the sole reason he was still alive was that Clint had promised Hope he would look after her lieutenant. He nodded toward the bodies of the two troopers. “I see you lost a couple of your men.”

  “That’s right,” Justin said, “Johnson and Martini. They caught us by surprise. We never suspected there were any hostiles around, especially since the column rode through here before.” Then he looked toward the bank where the horses had gathered. “And Willis,” he said, “three in all.”

  “It’s a surprise to me, too,” Clint said. He wondered if the notion he had had when seeing the main bunch, that there were not as many as before, was because this half dozen had split off. Perhaps they were not survivors of the larger fight at the river. Their conversation was interrupted by one of the soldiers, a private named Goldstein, who joined them, leading two horses. One of them was the lieutenant’s. He handed the reins to Justin and paused to remark over the bodies of the hostiles.

  “Mister, that was one helluva show you put on with that rifle of yours. That was some fancy shootin’. We were done for.”

  “I was lucky,” Clint said.

  “I’d say we were the ones who were lucky,” Goldstein insisted. “And on behalf of my mother, I wanna thank you for saving her son.”

  Clint couldn’t help laughing. “You’re welcome, and so’s your mother.” Turning back to Justin then, he advised, “I expect we’d best get your men in the saddle and head back to meet the column. I don’t know if there are any more Sioux parties runnin’ around here or not. But it ain’t a good idea to meet up with ’em with just one workin’ rifle.”

  “I agree,” Justin replied.

  He instructed the men to pick up the bodies of the three dead troopers and load them across their saddles. Then they rode east along the river to join Captain Rodgers and the rest of the troop.

  Chapter 5

  After deciding that the raiding party had been severely damaged, and by all indications were retreating from the general area, Captain Rodgers deemed his expedition a resounding success and ordered the column back to Fort Keogh. At the captain’s request, Clint went back to the fort with them to serve as a witness when Rodgers made his report to his superiors.

  Although Clint felt an obligation to return to the Double-V-Bar to resume his responsibilities as Valentine’s top hand, he reasoned that it would not be out of the question to stay over one night at the army post. He figured he had at least earned a drink at Ernie’s saloon for his part in saving Hope Valentine’s precious lieutenant.

  He turned Sam out with the army’s horses after the bay was served a full ration of oats. Then he was given a bedroll and shown an empty bunk he could use for the night. Since they had arrived at the post in early afternoon, the captain’s report was submitted to the second-in-command, Major John Kinsey, well before mess call. Clint’s part in the report was little more than corroboration of the captain’s version of what had taken place on the bank of the Yellowstone.

  When it was over, he saw no reason why his appearance had been necessary, but at least it gave him an opportunity to visit his friends at the saloon. As he was leaving the headquarters building, he was intercepted by Captain Rodgers. The captain extended his hand and said, “I would be remiss if I did not thank you for your
service on this patrol. You did a damn good job, and the part you played in rescuing Lieutenant Landry’s grave-digging detail was outstanding. Thanks to you, most of that unfortunate detail made it home.”

  “I’m just glad I got to those boys in time,” Clint replied modestly. “I ’preciate the kind words.”

  He and the captain parted then, Rodgers to his quarters and Clint to the cavalry barracks, thinking Hope Valentine might be grateful as well. He was tempted to go straight to Ernie’s. But knowing it would be wise to hit the saloon with some food in his belly, he waited until the mess hall was open for supper.

  * * *

  “Well, howdy, Clint,” Ernie Thigpen called out cheerfully when Clint walked in the door of his saloon. “Didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”

  “You know me, Ernie,” Clint returned. “I get downright homesick if I stay away from you and Darcy too long.”

  His remark brought forth a chuckle from Ernie. “Well, I think I’ve got some medicine that’ll fix that right up.” He placed a shot glass on the counter and filled it. “This is guaranteed to cure homesickness.” He paused while Clint threw the shot back and suffered the burn. “Darcy will be glad to see you. She’s upstairs with one of the soldiers that just got back from fightin’ those Injuns.” He lowered his voice to a whisper then and said, “We’re honored to have a Miles City law officer in the house tonight,” he announced facetiously.

  When Clint raised his eyebrows as if confused, Ernie explained, “One of those sorry gunmen that took over Miles City that I told you about—settin’ back there with two of those drifters that’s took to hangin’ around town.”