The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  Donegan nodded. “Fetterman’s dead. Lodge Trail Ridge. Just … just like this, Sharp.”

  “No hands and feet?” Shlesinger asked.

  This time Seamus wagged his head, once. “No hands and feet.”

  “They cut ’em off after the Confederate was dead?” Slinger asked, still innocent of man’s brutality after nine days on the island.

  Donegan glanced at the youth. “No. Likely this time the Cheyenne hacked his hands and feet off while the bastird was still breathing.”

  “And peeled the skin back on his chest?”

  “The whole flap of his hide,” Grover replied. “While he lived. It’s more fun for the Dog Soldiers and their squaws to do it when the victim is alive.”

  “What’d they do to him … there?” Shlesinger said, pointing. He stood over the remains, holding his nose.

  “Seems they built a little fire on top of his manhood parts.”

  “He live through that?” Donegan asked.

  “He’d pass out … if he was lucky,” Grover replied.

  “You figure his name was Smith? Like he told us?” Shlesinger asked innocently.

  Grover and Donegan glanced at each other. The old scout answered, “Doubt it, Slinger.”

  “We oughta bury him,” the youth suggested.

  “I don’t think this one deserves a decent burial,” Grover said, turning his back on the grisly remains.

  Seamus scratched a hairy cheek. “Leave him be, Slinger. Eventually feed those wolves what’ve been howling round us the last few nights.”

  Donegan had enough. Nothing more he could do but swallow down his unrequited rage. With Grover, he turned away from the circular rings of trampled grass that marked the many lodge-circles, each with its dark fire-hole. Slinger trotted up behind them as the trio walked back to join the others.

  “Shame of it is,” Seamus commented quietly, “I’ll never know his name. Never know now why he tried to kill me … when he was so friendly at the start of this goddamned bloody march.”

  Grover eventually gathered the rest of the souvenir hunters, scouts and soldiers alike, all scouring the campsites for moccasins, weapons, or clothing left behind in the Indians’ haste to leave. With the sun hugging the far mountains, it was time to start back to the tent-camp Carpenter had established that morning of his arrival, where the captain had been joined early on the twenty-sixth by two more relief columns.

  Just before noon on that day, Colonel Bankhead had rolled in, accompanied by I Troop of the 10th Negro Cavalry, in addition to detachments of the 5th and 38th Infantry. The long, dusty-blue columns trotted up behind guide Jack Stillwell. His return had created a real stir of excitement among the scouts, many of whom had feared Stillwell’s death on the prairie. A renewed celebration seemed in order as the survivors crowded round young Stillwell, each man pounding Forsyth’s youngest messenger in their happiness, welcoming him back to their motley fold. Having arrived with Bankhead, Dr. Turner joined surgeon Fitzgerald in preparing the wounded for transport.

  Less than an hour after Bankhead’s column had showed up, Maj. James S. Brisbin of the 2nd Cavalry rode in with an advance contingent of Colonel Luther Bradley’s command, also hurrying to Forsyth’s aid. Galloping down from Fort Sedgwick, Colorado Territory, Bradley had received the news of Forsyth’s siege in a wire telegraphed from General Sheridan.

  Less than an hour after Major Forsyth had refused amputation of his leg, Dr. Jenkins Fitzgerald had removed the decomposing leg of Louis Farley, badly wounded in that first charge of their first day on the island. Surgeon and patient alike shared hopes of saving the scout’s life. The old man had cussed his share, and when he wasn’t praying, the gruff curmudgeon Farley called for more whiskey during the surgery on his gangrenous leg. He had held on to consciousness as long as he could, talking with his son, Hutch, before he passed out midway through the amputation.

  Young Farley explained that the reason he and his father had both joined Forsyth was to even a score. Only the year before, the old man had seen his wife killed during an Indian raid.

  Wrapping the blackened, smelly limb in a blanket, Hutch buried his father’s leg in a small grave of its own.

  Sometime before dawn that next morning of the twenty-sixth, one of the buffalo soldiers had awakened surgeon Fitzgerald, with the news that the old man was no longer breathing.

  Fitzgerald found young Hutch Farley weeping silently, standing vigil beside his father’s body as he had for the past ten days of siege. At sunrise, Carpenter’s brunettes scratched a new grave out of the sandy ground, placing both body and leg together for that last trip far from this bloody riverbed, far beyond eternity itself.

  Above that newest grave of the island dead stood another small cross crudely fashioned from tent-pegs and swamp-willow by Sgt. William H. H. McCall. As was his duty, he had carefully printed the name of each man on a page torn from his roster book before the slip of paper was rolled and stuffed into an empty brass cartridge Carpenter’s soldiers hammered into the top of each crude cross.

  * * *

  By sheer grit, Major Forsyth survived without amputation of his leg, all to Fitzgerald’s amazement. It did not surprise Capt. Louis Carpenter that his friend had pulled through, however. Sandy Forsyth was known, above all things, for having some bottom, a soldier made of sand and fighting tallow.

  Just before dawn on the cloudy morning of the twenty-seventh of September, 1868, the major finished penning his official report of the island battle and nine-day siege. He wrote that although most of the scouts accounted for many more Indian dead, he himself could only claim counting thirty-five bodies.

  Forsyth laid down his pencil, drinking the last, luke-warm dregs of coffee from his tin cup before he reread the final lines he had just scratched across the pages in his memoranda book:

  A fitting close to the hardest-fought battle to date in the annals of Indian warfare would be to mark this place with a name befitting the type of man who here struggled against the mighty warriors of this great land.

  In honor of the finest young officer I have had the pleasure of serving with under fire of arms, I respectfully request the army to officially designate this hallowed ground as:

  Beecher’s Island.

  “Slinger, Major Forsyth and me wanted you to have these,” said Sergeant Billy McCall as he stopped near young Sigmund Shlesinger, a pair of army boots in hand.

  Slinger looked down at his civilian boots, the same pair he had worn out of New York City, holes worn in their soles and sides cracked so badly the youth’s thread-bare stockings poked through.

  “Who those, Sergeant?”

  “Lieutenant Beecher’s,” he replied, seeing Jack Stillwell come over.

  Slinger swallowed, not sure how he should feel at that moment. Nine days of growing. Nine long and bloody days that meant there was no going back.

  He looked again at his own old boots, then at the good army half-boots that had belonged to Forsyth’s courageous lieutenant. Finally he gazed up at Jack Stillwell. Together with young Hutch Farley, the trio had been the youngest scouts recruited by Forsyth. Nineteen years old when they left Fort Hays. Years older now.

  “You need ’em, Slinger,” Stillwell prodded.

  “Major and me thought they might be about your size,” McCall explained, trying once more to hand the boots to Shlesinger. “Lieutenant isn’t going to need them no more. And, we both figured … well, Beecher would want you to have ’em … seeing how you did more than your share to keep the rest of the men alive. Especially, how you kept the major going.”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant. ’Bout wearing a dead man’s——”

  “Just take the boots, Slinger,” McCall pleaded. “It’s right.”

  Shlesinger noticed the moisture gathering in the soldier’s imploring eyes.

  “Awright, Sergeant.” He took them from McCall, watching the sergeant walk off, snorting loudly to cover his tearfulness. “What I do about these I got on, Jack?”

  “Lea
ve ’em here,” Stillwell suggested, plopping to the ground beside Slinger. “Time was while I was walking out there on that prairie, I’d give my left arm for your pair of raggedy, old boots. Now that you got Beecher’s, I figure it’s fitting for you just to leave yours over there … in your pit … on that island.”

  Slinger gazed as the new day’s sun emerged off the prairie, spreading pink on the sandy riverbed this twenty-seventh day of September. He sighed, resolved.

  “That’s a fine notion, Jack. I’ll leave my old boots on the island. Where each man of us is leaving behind a lot more.”

  Stillwell nodded. “I figure some of us, you and me, are leaving a boy behind in this place.”

  Shlesinger smiled, feeling the warm glow of a camaraderie burn in his breast, something born together between men under fire.

  “Some ways, it feels good to leave that boy behind, Jack. Some ways I don’t feel so good about it. Sometimes, I get to thinking—that I want that boy back. But, I know I ain’t ever gonna be the fella I was when I rode out of Fort Hays behind Major George A. Forsyth.”

  Jack slapped an arm around Shlesinger’s shoulder, hugging him as tightly as he dared, sitting there in the sandy grass of dawn. “Ain’t none of us ever gonna be the same, Slinger. As long as any of this bunch lives—no man who rode with Forsyth, Beecher, and McCall … can ever be the same again.”

  * * *

  Col. Bankhead and Capt. Carpenter bid their farewell to Maj. James S. Brisbin at dawn on that twenty-seventh day of September.

  The faces in Brisbin’s company of the 2nd Cavalry were all new, including Brisbin’s. Men recruited to fill the need of a post-war, frontier army. Sad that most of the major’s soldiers had just shaken their heads when Seamus Donegan mentioned names, hoping to find among the 2nd a face from those years of war on horseback.

  At last the Irishman was beginning to realize this was a different army. Sent out here to the West with a different task.

  Bankhead pointed his men south that morning sunrise. Back in the narrow-wheeled ambulance, the seriously wounded had earned themselves a jolting ride over the rocky, sandy, sage-dotted plains.

  That afternoon of the return trip, J. J. Peate led the columns past the hilltop scaffolds bearing dead warriors. Seething anger and frustration finally boiled over as scouts and soldiers alike knocked over the burial platforms, scattering across the ground those items buried with the Indians they did not claim as souvenirs or the spoils of war. Even the white lodge at the bottom of the ravine suffered the final indignity of their pent-up rage, plundered and cut apart for leggings, for any man a useful item of apparel on the high plains.

  When the weary scouts reached the limestone walls at Fort Wallace on the twenty-ninth, Bankhead ordered the seriously wounded bedded down in the post hospital, while the slightly wounded were given one last medical examination before reassignment. Those scouts who chose to remain in the service for which they were hired were sent by wagon to the railhead at Sheridan, Kansas, two days later. From there they would ride the Kansas Pacific back to where Forsyth’s march had all begun.

  There at Fort Hays, the proud brigade of scouts was undergoing reorganization under a new commanding officer, Lt. Silas Pepoon of the 10th Cavalry.

  Major Forsyth remained at Fort Wallace for several weeks, recovering from the effects of both his serious wounds and severe starvation. On October 1, Gen. Philip H. Sheridan sent a wire stating that he would visit the major later in the month, as he was accompanying George Armstrong Custer, who was preparing to lead a punitive winter expedition into The Territories, a massive campaign that would take Custer’s 7th Cavalry south to the Washita River.

  In the same wire, Sheridan informed Forsyth that he was recommending his friend from the Shenandoah campaign for the brevet rank of brigadier general. Awarded with Sheridan’s highest appreciation for the gallantry, energy, and bravery displayed not only by Forsyth himself, but by the men who had served under Forsyth’s command.

  * * *

  “Seems you’re always bound to go off and do something foolish … when you’ve got the high, the low, and the jack against you,” Sharp Grover commented, as he stood alongside the tall Irishman on the pre-dawn parade at Fort Hays, Kansas Territory.

  Seamus buckled the cinch, looped and tucked before he dropped the left stirrup on the Grimsley saddle. He gently patted the big mare the Fort Hays livery sergeant had given him to replace The General, without one word of squabble. Then Donegan turned to Grover with a faint trace of a smile. This morning he had labored at shaving for the first time in weeks. Scraping the whiskers from both cheeks, resolute in keeping his short Vandyke beard and curly mustache.

  A chill wind swept over the stockade, something with a bite that warned winter was not far behind to batter these Central Plains. And man be warned.

  “I best be going, Sharp,” he replied, not wanting to talk about his decision to leave the scouts and push north into Nebraska Territory. “Gonna try to cover some ground today, before the storm that’s coming shuts the land down.”

  Sharp tugged up the collar of his own coat, snugging it round his ears. His old eyes peered out beneath the brim of his well-worn felt hat. “No sense trying to talk you out of it, getting you to stay on here with the rest of us for the winter?”

  “God knows I wasted one winter already, waiting for Liam.” He sighed. “When I should have been holding a good woman who needs me.”

  “You figure to find her in Nebraska, you say?”

  “She wrote me before she left the Bozeman Road,” he said, yanking on the thick, leather gloves. “Said she was going to a place near a town called Osceola. On the Blue River, near the Platte. I’ll find her, Sharp. No matter what or how long it takes … I’ll find her.”

  He swung into his saddle as a pale, buttermilk sun crept over the horizon, its light struggling against the icy, gray overcast just then threatening to spill its undergut on the land.

  Seamus held down his big hand. “You meant a lot to me Uncle Liam, Grover. And … in them nine days on that bloody island, you come to mean even more to me. I’m going to miss you, old man.”

  “Till we see your dust again, Irishman,” Grover replied as he stepped back, watching Donegan until the horseman’s back disappeared in the murky light.

  “I’ll find her,” Seamus whispered as he put the horse into an easy lope beyond the stockade of Fort Hays. He stroked the mare’s neck, pointing her nose north. Thinking on Jennie.

  “Pray to God … I find her.”

  HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM BLACK SUN—THE NEXT VOLUME IN TERRY C. JOHNSTON’S BOLD NEW WESTERN SERIES—THE PLAINSMEN:

  Prologue

  As bad as the whiskey was, it proved the cure.

  By the fourth splash of its liquid fire he had thrown against the back of his throat, Seamus Donegan sensed the tension easing long the cords in his neck. Not to mention tension seeping from those great muscles in his back which bore the scar carved there by Confederate steel. He was loosening like a worn-out buggy spring after a long haul of it over a wash-board road.

  It had been some ride for the Irishman whose great bulk now sat hulking over the small glass all but hidden within the big hands. Returned from the dead he was again, and working steadily to pickle himself even more than the last.

  Back from the grave that had tried hard to swallow him at Beecher Island.

  In the space of the past three weeks, Donegan had returned with Major George A. Forsyth’s band of civilian scouts to Fort Hays where the survivors of the bloody, nine-day island siege were promptly reorganized under Lt. Silas Pepoon. Yet without a look back, the Irishman decided he had himself enough of the plains and Indians, enough of blood and sweat and death to last him for some time to come. Seamus pointed his nose north, aiming for Nebraska. He had started there once before—a year gone now.

  Nebraska. There in the Platte River country near Osceola, the widow Wheatley had promised she would be waiting for him to fetch her.

  But Donegan�
�s quest for Uncle Liam O’Roarke had pulled him for a time off that trail to Osceola and Jennie. That, and the Cheyenne of Roman Nose.

  Seamus was too late getting out to the Wheatley place.

  He angrily threw another splash of hot liquid against the back of his throat, remembering the old woman’s eyes as she glared up at him in the late afternoon light from beneath her withered, bony hand.

  “No, mister. Jenny took herself and the boys back east. Dead set on getting back to her own folk, she was.”

  “Ohio?” he had asked, numbly, staring at James Wheatley’s mother.

  She had nodded, her eyes softening, perhaps recognizing something cross the tall Irishman’s face. “Ohio.”

  He had thanked her, crawled into the saddle without feeling much and reined toward the south. Kansas and Fort Hays.

  Nursing his grief and anger like a private badge of passion he alone could wear.

  For some time he had looked forward to this moment. Promising himself all down that long trail from Osceola he would sit here and drink the night through if he had to, until he decided where next to go and what next to do. Having no clue worth a tinker’s damn where he could find his second uncle, Liam’s brother, Ian O’Roarke—was he cursed now to wander aimlessly searching the west coast where Liam had hinted Ian would be found?

  Now that Jennie Wheatley had moved on after a year of waiting for a restless man.

  “Maybe t’is better, after all,” he murmured, bringing the chipped glass to his lips once more. “Better a woman like that has her a man who can work the land and stay in one place. I could never give her kind something like that.”

  Over and over in his mind on that long ride south a scrap of Irish poetry had hung in his mind like a piece of dirty linen. John Boyle O’Reilley’s words reminded him most of her.

  The red rose whispers of passion,

  And the white rose breathes of love;

  Oh, the red rose is a falcon,

  And the white rose is a dove.

  But I send you a cream-white rosebud

  With a flush on its petal tips;

  For the love that is purest and sweetest