By evening, it was clear that the wakinyan were not listening to Red Fox Woman. The black clouds had moved east by the time night came, and the Blue Coats still waited below, keeping watch so that none of the people trapped on the rise would try to get away. Dancing Girl stretched out behind the rock, trying to sleep.
White Eagle slept while a few of the men kept watch. A hand gripped his shoulder, waking him. He opened his eyes and saw that it was still dark. The night was still; the silence pressed in around him. He sniffed at the air and looked up at the sky, but saw no stars.
“The Blue Coats are closer to us,” Gray Horse, one of the wire warriors, whispered to him. “They have dug trenches in the ground for themselves, and they have made a wall of the poles and hides they stole from us. They are close enough now for us to hit them with our firesticks, but they can duck down into their ditches, where it is hard to take aim at them from here.”
The men were already itching to fight; White Eagle could feel it. Some of them would want to rush the Blue Coats, draw their fire, and then retreat to the rise. If they were lucky, they might pick off a soldier or two, maybe more. If they were unlucky, White Eagle would have even fewer fighting men.
“A storm is coming,” he said.
“It is racing upon us,” Gray Horse said, and suddenly White Eagle felt the back of his neck prickle.
He flattened himself against the ground; Gray Horse threw himself down next to White Eagle. At that moment, the air was ablaze with light, the bolt of lightning so near that he could smell it. White Eagle was afraid that the lightning had struck somewhere on the rise, and then the sharp crack of thunder nearly deafened him.
The wind shrieked; hail suddenly pelted his back. He pressed closer to the rock, trying to shelter himself. The wind was rising. He had seen many storms in his life; the thunder spirits, like all spirits, were capricious and would often send storms against the land and the people on it with little or no warning. But the howling and power of the wind, and the painful pounding of the hail against his back, told him that this storm would be stronger than most.
He should not have humored Red Fox Woman, he thought. Having seen no sign that she possessed any medicine, he had not stopped her from trying to summon the wakinyan after hearing her cry out her chants from the rocks above him. I should have forbidden it, he thought. I should have sent a man up there to stop her, and if I live through this, she will never call on any spirits again. He dug his fingers into the ground. This was a wind that could blow a man from a mountain, or from the slope of a rise. That would give the thunder spirits a good laugh, seeing people being blown about like sagebrush and scattered across the land by the wind, and then he almost laughed aloud.
The Blue Coats below would have even less to shelter them than did the people on the rise, and their trenches would be filling with hailstones. White Eagle lay still. Icy needles were thick around him; the hail was turning into sleet. He clenched his teeth, feeling the air grow cold, and sent up a silent appeal to Wakan Tanka to let him and his people live.
The lightning was so bright that he could see it through closed eyes; the thunder clapped again. The wind shrieked and a long time passed before he felt the sleet become rain. The wind was dying, the darkness lifting. The rain was still falling steadily as White Eagle got to his feet and looked around himself.
His cloth shirt and leather leggings were soaked through, and his long hair dripped with water. He shivered violently. A baby wailed from the rocks above. Gray Horse and the other men near him were also dripping with water, but seemed unharmed.
White Eagle steadied himself, peered over the rock, and looked down. “Hie!” he called out.
The wind had scattered the poles and hides the Blue Coats had been using as shields. Through the gray sheets of rain, he could make out the shadowy forms of soldiers hunkered down in their ditches or stretched out on the ground. A few of the Blue Coats were standing, hanging on to the reins of their horses as the animals bucked and reared.
White Eagle saw his chance and picked up his Winchester. “Attack!” he shouted to the men. “Crooked Horn, you and your brothers cover us! It is a good day to die!” He pulled back the lever of his rifle, aimed the weapon, and fired as he ran down the narrow path that wound among the rocks.
Dancing Girl watched the men fight from her place behind the rock. A few of the men, led by her father, had run down the slope, darting from side to side while shooting at the Blue Coats. Three of the soldiers had taken up position, kneeling and firing at White Eagle’s men as they rushed to attack, but others had tried to flee on foot, having lost their horses.
When other men followed White Eagle down the hill with some of the horses, leaping onto their backs before riding at the Blue Coats, two of the Blue Coats who still had horses mounted them and began to gallop away. A few soldiers on foot were running after them, crying out to them, when they were cut down by gunfire. One soldier fired at Gray Horse and missed. Gray Horse flung himself at the man, struck him with a coup stick, then jammed his Colt against the Blue Coat’s chest and fired. Three warriors rode after the two Blue Coats who were trying to escape.
The soldiers had brought their deaths upon themselves. They would have shown her people no mercy; her father and his men would count many coup.
Young Spring Grass let out a high-pitched war cry, then ran down the slope with her rifle. By then, the rain had nearly stopped, and most of the soldiers were dead. Good, Dancing Girl thought; they came after us, they broke the treaty, they deserve to die.
By the time the rain stopped, the battle was over. The men took a few scalps, but most of the dead had hair too short to be worth taking as a trophy. Young Spring Grass and the other women began to strip the bodies of clothing.
“See,” Young Spring Grass called out as Dancing Girl went to her side to help her undress one of the dead. Young Spring Grass held up a chain from which dangled a golden cross. “His personal war medicine. Take it.” She handed the chain to Dancing Girl. “Maybe it will bring you luck.”
Dancing Girl gazed at the dead soldier. “It didn’t bring him much luck.”
“The wakan spirits listened to me,” Red Fox Woman was saying as she pulled the boots off of one dead soldier. “No one will ever accuse me of being crazy and having no medicine again.”
Some of the men were singing kill songs. “Our enemy cut the singing wire,” one man chanted, “so the spirits of the wire could no longer sing to us and warn us, but now we will sing over the bodies of our enemies.”
Dancing Girl’s gorge rose in her throat. She had dreamed of going to war, but the sight of all this death suddenly sickened her. Her people had been at peace too long; she was not used to the sight of killing. But she would grow harder when they were fighting once more, she would grow up to be like Walking Blanket Woman and Young Spring Grass. War was coming now; that was certain.
She stood up and went to her father. He sat with Denis Laforte, watching the women at their work and listening to the kill songs. He looked up at her.
“Father,” she said, “are we going back to where we had our camp?”
“No. We have no talking wire now. We cannot know what is going on in Bismarck. When these men don’t return to their fort, others may come after us.” He took her by the arms. “We will go to the camp of Touch-the- Clouds. We will tell him that the Blue Coats broke the treaty. And then we will go to war.”
Some more men had crossed the river from the Missouri side to help with burying the dead. The few survivors of the massacre in Elysium were taking a bit of solace from that. They would not have to fear that other people living near them would now turn against them.
Lemuel and Dives Backward had come to the burned tepees of a Lakota camp circle first. The raiders had killed everyone there, even the children, throwing the bodies into a heap. Dives Backward let out a cry and galloped west toward a Cheyenne circle that had also, from the looks of it, been wiped out as savagely.
The fires in the town itself had nearly burned o
ut by the time Lemuel reached the road that led to the main street. Four survivors had gathered together in front of one house that was little more than blackened timbers. One was a Negro man, one a white man, and two young girls with long blond braids were with them, staring past Lemuel with haunted eyes.
The black man spoke of what had happened, although Lemuel could read some of the events in the ruins of the town and in the ways that the bodies of the dead were strewn over the ground. The raiders had sneaked up in the night. Because they were in the blue uniforms of soldiers of the United States Army, the men acting as sentries might have taken them as friends, or perhaps had not seen them in time to sound an alarm. Some of the raiders had managed to get into the center of town to start the fires, and by then others were attacking the Indian encampments. The raiders had come into town killing everyone in their way, white, black, or red, man or woman, old woman or child. Some of the women had been raped as they lay dying of their wounds.
“Don’t know why they didn’t kill us all,” the Negro said. “Must of been ‘cause they saw those folks crossin’ over on a ferry.” The man gestured toward a group of men loading bodies onto a buckboard. “That’s when they finally run off. Musta been two hundred of ‘em.”
“We should go after them,” Lemuel said, knowing that it would be useless, that he did not have enough men to pursue them. The raiders would have scattered by now.
He rode down the main road. Another wagon loaded with bodies lay ahead; the dead would have to be buried quickly, before they began to rot in the heat. The men near the wagon looked up as he approached. They had done their best to lay the bodies out carefully, not to throw them into the buckboard carelessly. A body near the back end of the buckboard, a woman’s body in a torn white nightshirt and deerskin boots, had been propped up against the side. Long black hair hid the dead woman’s face.
“Katia,” he said softly, recognizing the boots, thinking of the times he had run his fingers through her thick black hair. “Katia.” He reined in his horse, struggling for breath. He had already known that she was dead, he had felt it when he first caught sight of the burned tepees outside the town. He had always known how precarious the existence of this place was, what a miracle it was that it had existed at all.
He had brought Katia here, to her death.
“What is it, son?” one of the men by the wagon said.
He could not speak. He did not want to look at her body, to read how she had died and what had been done to her through the marks and wounds on her corpse. Katia was not there, in that wagon. Her spirit would not be trapped in that body, to lie with so many others in one grave. Her spirit had been freed, to climb the wind to the Creator, Wakan Tanka.
He tightened his legs around his horse and rode away from that place, thinking of justice and revenge and what he would have to do to get it.
EIGHTEEN
Grigory Rubalev had acquired false papers for Finerty and smuggled him out of Washington in a carriage on a sweltering July evening, taking him to a house in Silver Spring, Maryland. From there, another carriage carried Finerty to Philadelphia. Rubalev had left him in Silver Spring and gone on to another city, perhaps Cincinnati, perhaps someplace farther west, maybe even back to Washington. Finerty’s instincts had told him that he did not want to know too much about that gentleman’s intentions, or about how he had managed to secure a carriage with a trustworthy driver for them.
Washington might still be the capital of the United States, but it had begun to look like a city under siege, as it had been during the War Between the States. Forts and batteries of heavy and light artillery were again being set up around the city; garrisons of soldiers were living on Capitol Hill, now that sessions of Congress had been suspended for the foreseeable future. There had been fireworks for the traditional Fourth of July celebration, but few celebrants to view them. Acting President McClellan might call himself the Constitution’s protector, but Finerty knew of few who would grant him that much legitimacy.
The carriage carrying Finerty had been stopped at the edge of the city on the Seventh Street Road by soldiers. Rubalev left the carriage to speak with them, and within a few moments they had been on their way. Perhaps Rubalev had bribed the soldiers; Finerty knew by then how difficult it was to get out of the city without the proper papers. There had been reports of a few desperate men, a couple of Congressman among them, who had tried to swim the Potomac. The bodies of two such men had been found; the others had simply disappeared.
Why Rubalev had decided to help him, Finerty did not know. Rubalev had refused to take any money from Finerty for the forged papers and had hinted that he was helping others to escape. The man clearly had an interest in flattering and cultivating associates and acquaintances of all kinds, and—although Finerty doubted it—perhaps Rubalev, deep down, was so deeply revulsed by the cabal now calling itself the Council of the United States that he would do anything to help those who might oppose it.
The papers Rubalev had secured for him, identifying him as John Flaherty, a draper from Chicago, were enough to help him secure a train ticket to New York. From there, he would board a train that would take him to Chicago. To try sending a telegraph to his editor Clinton Snowden from Washington would be to risk arrest and incarceration. He would get to Chicago and see what the situation was there, then leave for Omaha and the headquarters of the army’s Department of the Platte. He was already certain that Snowden would approve of his change of venue.
He had to go west. War was coming, as General Crook had prophesied. The only question was what kind of war it would be. The army against the Sioux? The United States against any settlers who might want to set up their own autonomous republics, as Texas and California had already done and as Utah was threatening to do? The settlers against one another, ranchers pitted against farmers, or Southern sympathizers against Union supporters? Perhaps some more unlikely coalition would form, united against the usurpers in Washington.
The Chicago Times would need a correspondent in the West, and Finerty was curious to see which way General Crook would jump.
Finerty stayed in New York for one day, enough time to purchase some clothes and other necessities, before buying a ticket that would take him to Chicago. He would have to conserve his dwindling funds, but that was not the only reason for deciding to travel to Chicago sitting up on a wooden seat instead of in a Pullman Palace. Being a newspaper correspondent was a very dangerous business these days, and he wanted to remain inconspicuous.
The car in which he found himself was a rebuilt Lincoln car with wooden seats. There were not many passengers, presumably because of the restrictions on travel and the need for papers, genuine or forged. His shabbily-dressed fellow sojourners included a broad-faced man and woman with two young children, five young men who were probably hoping to evade conscription by losing themselves elsewhere, two heavily-painted young women, and three men of indeterminate age who had already begun a game of cards in their seats.
Finerty stowed his bag under an empty seat and sat down by the window. He had bought a clandestinely printed copy of the New York Recorder’s latest edition from a newsboy before boarding the train. On the front page was a report from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch correspondent, who had been interviewing survivors of a massacre in a Kansas town called Elysium.
He quickly scanned the story. The raiders had worn Union uniforms. They had gone after everyone, murdering white, black, and red people alike, but their greatest animosity was seemingly reserved for the Cheyenne and the other Indians who had been camped on the town’s outskirts, whom they had butchered without mercy. A few survivors had heard the blue-coated raiders talking of redskins who did not belong there and who deserved extermination.
Finerty had heard rumors about that incident, and others, before leaving Washington. There could be only one reason for such raids, and that was to demonstrate that the present modus vivendi on the Plains would no longer be tolerated. The army was, in this brutal way, announcing its intention to
open up the West again and showing what fate might lie in store for any who had developed sympathies for the redskins.
All of which reminded him more than a little of Ireland, the land he had fled.
In Ohio, a band of armed men commandeered Finerty’s train, announced that they were members of the Free United States forces, and rode with the passengers the rest of the way to Chicago. When he stepped off the train, Finerty found himself in what might as well have been a foreign country. Groups of men in makeshift uniforms calling themselves the United States Militia or the Free U.S. Irregulars were patrolling the streets. Broadsides were posted on the walls of buildings accusing the Council in Washington of President Blaine’s murder. And most welcome of all, the Chicago newspapers, in spite of the restrictions on the press, were being sold openly on the streets.
Out of habit, knowing that what he set down might never see the light of day, Finerty had passed his time on the train writing out a long letter to his editor about his experiences in Washington and his escape from the capital city. Now he was gratified that he had done so. Finding a way to get to Omaha could wait for a little. He rode a streetcar to the offices of the Times and went directly to Snowden’s desk.
Snowden greeted him as warmly as if he were the Prodigal Son, sent a boy out for coffee and food, then read his pages quickly. Finerty had omitted any mention of Rubalev’s name and any revealing details about the other anonymous men who had helped them escape from Washington.
“Good work, John,” the editor said when he was finished, “and now I have another assignment for you. Seems the army’s command structure is shot all to hell now. The damned Council of the United States is claiming that Sheridan is in command now and that all orders will come from him, but a lot of officers out here don’t believe it. They say Sheridan wouldn’t have thrown in with that crowd.”
Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Page 36
