Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876 tp-10

by Terry C. Johnston

  This time as he laid his finger on the back trigger, he held even higher and did not lead the buffalo-horned horseman as the warrior’s pony crossed from left to right along the front of the soldier line. Another inch higher, he calculated, as he set the back trigger. He felt his way to the front trigger with the same finger-pad and held his breath, squeezing.

  In the puff of smoke that drifted the way of the soft breeze there in that stand of evergreen, Seamus watched the warrior pitch sideways, his single-horn headdress spilling in the opposite direction.

  “Got him!” Pourier hollered at that exact moment.

  “I dropped White Antelope!” Grouard protested.

  “It was my damned bullet!” growled Bat.

  “That makes two of ’em—we got more saddles to empty, God-bless-it!” Seamus bellowed at them both.

  The soldiers flung their wool coats from their arms, shedding the heavy garments in the shafts of hot sunlight that streamed through the forest canopy overhead with a shimmering radiance. For the better part of a half hour the warriors kept up a hot fire, inching down the slope. Then with some yelling among them, the gunfire slackened. A voice called out from the trees up the hill.

  “What’s he saying?” Donegan asked.

  Pourier wagged his head, his shoulders sagging, then finally replied, “They know I’m here.”

  “Only a lucky guess,” Seamus replied. “What’d he tell You?”

  “Said, ‘Oh, Bat—come over here. I want to tell you something. Come over!’”

  “They was just guessing you was with the soldiers,” Grouard said, shifting uncomfortably on the hard ground, his face a canvas to his pain.

  “Maybe they see me,” Bat grumbled sadly. “They’re calling out for the trader’s son.”

  Donegan asked, “Trader’s son?”

  “That’s me,” Pourier responded. “Shahiyena know me. My papa was a trader to the Indians.”

  “Like Reshaw’s?”

  Bat nodded. “Yeah, like Louie.”

  The taunts and luring words that emerged from those midafternoon shadows in the woods continued. A while later Grouard straightened a bit, cocking his head, then declared, “Now they’re calling for me.”

  Pourier grinned haplessly. “Yeah, Irishman. They calling for the Grabber. That means there’s Lakota up there too. Next—they gonna holler out for you.”

  “You stupid idiot,” Seamus growled with a wide grin. “Ain’t none of them know me.”

  Scratching a dirty cheek, Bat said, “Maybeso they don’t before. But they will now.”

  As the sun fell on toward the cathedral peaks towering above them, the firing from the warriors rose and fell, fortunately to no effect but to frighten and wound the horses, and to make a lot of noise as the bullets slapped tree trunks and whistled through the snapping branches. At times there was so much lead flying over their heads that it reminded Donegan of hailstones rattling on a clapboard roof that summer he had spent at Fort McPherson, scouting for the Fifth Cavalry—a remembrance that made him think on Cody, made him wonder if Bill really did enjoy that life he had chosen, a career that had taken Donegan’s old friend far from the prairie, far from the freedom of a nomadic horseman.

  If they made it out of this, Seamus vowed, he’d learn of the showman’s whereabouts—perhaps even to take Samantha to see one of his plays back east. Sam deserved to visit the East. To be draped in fancy evening dresses and driven in a fancy carriage to the theater where Cody’s play would entertain the crowds of eastern greenhorns clamoring for some of that vicarious adventure on the high plains. Perhaps even to Boston Towne. He hadn’t been back since he had gone marching off to war. And that was an eternity ago.

  But he vowed Samantha would one day have her fancy gowns and her own goddamned carriage too.

  “How far you make us from Goose Creek, Bat?” Sibley asked, interrupting Donegan’s dreamy reverie.

  “Forty miles.”

  Grouard shook his head, saying, “Closer to fifty miles.”

  “No matter,” Pourier replied, turning back to the officer. “We sit here much longer, Lieutenant—them Lakota gonna have time to bring enough warriors here to rush in and wipe us out in one big charge.”

  The green-eyed Sibley chewed on an end of his long mustache. “I take it you’re suggesting we try to make a dash for it?”

  Donegan shrugged, the first to respond for them all. “We can sit here and wait for them to come in and chew us up. Or—we can do what we can to make a run for it.”

  Eventually the lieutenant said, “Take our chances, eh?”

  “We can take chances here—or on the run,” Pourier reminded.

  Grouard laughed with a throaty snort.

  “What’s so funny?” Sibley demanded, bristling.

  “Not you, Lieutenant,” Frank replied. “Just heard voice of an old friend of mine. Warrior named Standing Bear—hollered for me.”

  Seamus asked, “What’d he say?”

  “He saw me get off my horse, walking sore with my legs far apart.”

  “That’s just the way you been walking,” Seamus declared.

  With a nod Grouard continued. “Standing Bear said I moved like I had the bad-disease walk the pony soldiers get from lying with the white man’s pay-women.”

  Pourier added, “Then Standing Bear asked Frank, ‘Do you think there are no men hut yours in this country?’”

  Donegan wagged his head and said, “Goddamned country’s full of warriors, that’s what.”

  “Irishman, the bastard asked me if I could fly up into the air, or burrow like the badger into the ground,” Grouard replied acidly. “They figure they got us, and there’s no way out now except to fly or dig our way out under the mountain. He says they’ll have my scalp for Sitting Bull before sundown.”

  “We wait here much longer, Frank—they might even try to burn us out,” Pourier advised.

  “Before we burn—I vote for trying to break our way out,” Finerty finally spoke, his eyes darting among them, lit with nervousness.

  Donegan turned and said, “Thought you were busy collecting flowers, Johnny.”

  “Just a few—the ones I could reach—got them pressed between the pages of my book where I was making some notes on our … our predicament. Mountain crocus, and a forget-me-not growing within my reach. Somehow the beauty in life seems so, so very sweet this afternoon, Seamus.”

  “Always does seem all the sweeter when death looms close, my friend.” With a wry grin the Irishman turned to Sibley. “You need to get your men ready, Lieutenant.”

  The officer nodded, saying, “I’ll tell them to prepare to mount.”

  “No,” Seamus said, gripping the lieutenant’s arm. “Better to leave the horses.”

  “Leave the horses?” Finerty asked.

  “If we leave the animals here,” Donegan explained, “we might have enough of a lead to fool the sons of bitches and make it out on foot.”

  “Abandon our mounts?” the lieutenant asked, his face carved with disbelief.

  “Irishman’s right,” Grouard said. “Only chance is make those warriors believe we’re still here because our horses are.”

  Sibley shook his head emphatically. “I don’t like leaving those horses for the enemy to capture. If we abandon them—we must shoot them.”

  “We go and shoot all those mounts,” Donegan explained, “that war party will figure out what we’re trying to do. But if we leave the horses standing—that might be our only chance to reach Goose Creek alive.”

  “Besides,” Grouard instructed them, “I’ll lay odds them warriors are sitting on all the easy ways out of these hills. Horses wouldn’t make it under us where we need to go. Our only chance is to cover some real rugged ground … on foot.”

  “What about sending one of our men?” the lieutenant suggested. “The best rider we have—send him off to get reinforcements from Crook.”

  “We don’t have the time to wait for Crook,” Donegan argued.

  Pourier agreed.
“It’ll take the better part of two days for any help to reach us.”

  “And like Frank said,” Donegan added, “the h’athens could fire the forest around us and smoke us out right into their guns. No, we don’t have much time left, Lieutenant. If we’re gonna do it, we’ve got to do it now.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” the officer relented, finally yielding to the advice of his three scouts. He prepared to crab off on hands and knees, then turned back to say, “It’s plain we are looking death in the face here.”

  John Finerty snorted sourly, “And I can feel the grim reaper’s cold breath right here on my forehead, sense his icy grip round my heart.”

  “Never been in a fix like this before?”

  “No, Seamus. But often I have wondered how a man must feel when he was confronted by inevitable doom and there was no escaping it.”

  “Just remember to keep a bullet for yourself if things don’t work out for us,” Seamus said softly.

  “Don’t worry, you bloody Irishman—I’ll blow my own goddamned brains out rather than fall alive into the hands of those gore-hungry savages.”

  “What you worried about, Finerty?” Bat said, his eyes bright with sudden devilment. “Now you’re gonna have lots of good stories to send your paper when we get you back to Crook’s camp!”

  The newsman snarled, “Damn you, Bat—you’re always making fun at my expense!”

  Valentine Rufus crawled up to Finerty. His weather-beaten face was prickled with stubby gray hair. “Lieutenant says for us to sneak back to the horses. Get all our ammunition from the saddlebags. We’re taking all of it we can carry when we leave the horses.”

  “All right, Private,” Finerty said. “But my horse is up the hill, and I ain’t going back there to get a damn thing out of those saddlebags.”

  “You stick with me, then,” Rufus said. “We’ll share ammunition and see this through together.”

  “Are you Irish?” Finerty asked.

  “No.” The old soldier shook his head. “Don’t rightly know what I am anymore.”

  The newsman winked at Donegan as he said to Rufus, “Well, from the sounds of your pluck, Private—you damn well should have been Irish.”

  “Go on with the private now,” Seamus instructed. “Me and Bat are going to make sure they think we’re still in here while the rest of you slip away.”

  Finerty knelt at the Irishman’s side to whisper, “What are you going to do?”

  “Just keep up some firing, make ’em keep their heads down. Between the two of us you should get a good jump.”

  Finerty laid his hand on Donegan’s shoulder. “And you’ll catch up soon?”

  “Don’t you worry, Johnny boy. I’ll be running right up your backside in a damned fine fashion before you know it.”

  After quickly shaking hands, Seamus watched Finerty follow Private Rufus, both of them crawling off to join those who moved among the eight horses still standing, other soldiers laboring over the saddles of the animals fallen to the warrior fire, every man frantic to retrieve what he could before Sibley ordered his soldiers on into the timber beyond. Swallowed by the shadows.

  “Let’s go to work,” Seamus said grimly, turning his shaggy face up the slope.

  Without a word of reply Pourier nodded and rolled onto his belly behind some deadfall to fire his Springfield. Yanking open the trapdoor, the half-breed rammed home another shell and aimed in a different direction. Between the two of them they placed a scattering of shots all round the half crescent where the warriors hollered and kept up a desultory fire on the white men’s position.

  After a few minutes Seamus turned to Pourier. “Why don’t you head on out?”

  “You coming?”

  “Gimme a minute or two more,” Donegan explained. “Wouldn’t do for us both to stop firing at the same time.”

  Bat’s face showed how he measured the weight of that. “All right. But I’m going to wait for you a ways down in the timber, just past the horses.”

  “Go on. I’ll be along straightaway.”

  By the time he fired a half dozen more shots and looked back over his shoulder, Seamus could no longer hear or even see Pourier. The breech on the Sharps hissed and stank when the sweat from his forehead dropped into the action, sizzling, bubbling as it vaporized on the superheated metal. It had worked, by God. The warriors hadn’t tried anything more than shouting and shooting from afar.

  Looking left and right, he could see no good route for him to take but straight back. On his belly Seamus slid, pushing himself, dragging the Sharps through the dead needles, clumps of grass and dust that stived into the air, capturing fragments of golden light among the sunbeams streaming through the thick canopy of emerald-green tree branches.

  His horse was dead.

  Gently he rubbed its muzzle, for a moment remembering the big gray. Remembering how the General had carried him to that sandy island before it fell, more than one bullet in its great and powerful chest.

  Fighting back the smarting of tears, he quickly yanked loose the latigo tie lashing the twin bags to the back of the saddle and threw his weight against the dead animal to free the off-side pouch. In the bags were rolled the two long shoulder belts of Sharps ammunition, along with his reloading tools. As he flopped them over his shoulder, Seamus heard the reassuring clatter of a few boxes of cartridges for the pair of army .45s he wore belted over his hips. It took but a few seconds more for him to tear loose the rawhide tie holding the coil of rope to the saddle, quickly lashing it round and round his waist above the pistol belts.

  Under the weight of it all, Seamus turned downhill at a crouch, racing for the Tongue River somewhere below them a mile or more. But suddenly he stopped and gazed once more at the carcasses of more than twenty-five dead horses, gripped with the remembrance of the animals Forsyth’s fifty scouts shot to make bulwarks against Roman Nose’s charging, screaming, wailing Cheyenne.

  He closed his misting eyes a moment, seeing the laughing face of Liam O’Roarke.

  Recalling the pain that sank clear to his marrow, here on this timbered hillside, feeling once again the aching, empty hole that had torn through the middle of him with the dying of a beloved uncle on that sandy island turned bloody in the middle of an unnamed river.

  Chapter 13

  7-8 July 1876

  That Friday afternoon the Sibley patrol was fifty miles from rescue.

  Their only hope was to help themselves.

  It seemed the soldiers understood that—every last yard they bounded down that hill, across a small, open glade before they entered thicker timber where old, leaning trees interlocked with those younger lodgepole pine still standing and an extensive patch of burned trunks testifying to an ancient forest fire, the whole maze conspiring to slow their flight. From that point on the men began to stumble over deadfall, tripping on rocks hidden in the grass, their soles slipping as they tried to clamber over fallen trees. Yet not a single murmur rose from the lieutenant’s soldiers as they scrambled back to their feet and kept on running down, down, on down through the timber. The air filled only with the rasps of their burning, swollen lungs as the Tongue River came in sight below them at last.

  Sweating beneath his heavy coat that he had refused to take off, Seamus caught up with Pourier. Beside Bat he kept on pushing to reach the soldiers who were gradually passing Grouard. The half-breed moved in great pain—but he lumbered quickly enough in his wobbling gait, cursing behind teeth he kept gritted all the way down that rugged mile of descent to the river. Racing ahead of Grouard, the first of the soldiers plunged off the bank of the Tongue, into the icy water, without the slightest thought of taking the time to locate a ford.

  “Step on the goddamned rocks!” Pourier huffed as he lunged to a halt at the grassy bank. “Can’t leave a trail for them to follow!”

  Hurrying a few yards downstream, Sibley himself started to cross the river atop a fallen tree while still more of his patrol waded right into the Tongue, not heeding the half-breed scout’s
warning. Halfway to the far bank the lieutenant’s boots slipped on the loose bark of the rotting trunk, and he pitched headlong into the soul-chilling current. Sergeant G. P. Harrington and Corporal Thomas C. Warren leaped in right behind Sibley, pulling the sputtering lieutenant from the swift current and hauling him to the far bank between them as they struggled against the bobbing froth of mountain snow-melt.

  “N-never was much of a swimmer,” Sibley gasped on the far side.

  “The river’s running high and wild,” Donegan said. “So much runoff at this season. Ain’t many a man can swim against that current.”

  Directly above them stood the foothills, slopes that lay rumpled in one rise and fall after another all the way into the Big Horns themselves. At that moment the forest far above them echoed with a half-dozen volleys of renewed gunfire.

  “Won’t be long before they find out we’re gone,” Big Bat moaned as he bent at the waist, catching his breath, his soggy clothes muddying a puddle at his feet.

  Seamus gazed back across the Tongue, his eyes searching the far slope they had just scampered down. A sudden, wild cry of half-a-hundred voices raised a furious, shrill call.

  He said, “I think they found out, Bat.”

  A few of the soldiers began to chuckle behind their hands. More of them joined in until the entire bunch was laughing, slapping one another on the back, congratulating themselves on their escape downhill—roaring at the disappointment the warriors must be feeling. It was good to laugh, Seamus decided. A good, long laugh, for they had escaped from one peril, yet still faced another, if not greater, danger. Between them and Crook lay fifty-odd miles of mountainside, granite spire, timber, raging river, and narrow canyon precipice.

  At a time like this a man surely deserved to laugh in the face of danger, even spit in death’s eye.

  “Let’s get moving,” Sibley ordered, firmly back in control. He pointed at the slope above them. “We’re going up, Frank?”

  Grouard nodded there in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon. “We got to go where no Indian on horseback can go. Go where even no Indian on foot will want to go. It’s going to be tough.”