Ashes of Heaven (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I’ll take White Bull and Brave Wolf,” Seamus suggested, turning at the sound of some hooves clattering up the hillside toward them. It was Bruguier. ‘I’ll take Johnny too. Jackson here, and those two scouts. That should be enough to spy on them, bring you a count of the lodges so we can figure their fighting strength.”

  A clearly anxious Miles gazed through his field glasses a moment more, then said, “I can’t emphasize enough that you must not be spotted, that you cannot alert the village.”

  “We won’t, General,” Donegan promised.

  The colonel sighed and straightened. “Very well. I’ll continue on upstream a few miles with the column, closing some of the gap on the village before we go into camp by the middle of the afternoon to await your return.”

  Nodding at Bruguier, waving at the rest, Donegan sawed his reins to the left. “C’mon, fellas. Let’s go have ourselves a look at Lame Deer’s camp.”

  * * *

  Johnny Bruguier turned slightly in the saddle to listen to the squawman named Rowland talk with the Shahiyela holy man named White Bull, able to understand only some of what the two said as their words fell so fast about him.

  “White Bull says this here is called Fat Horse Creek,” Rowland explained. “What his people call it. Got its name because it’s a favorite camping spot in the spring. Grass grows tall, ponies grow fat.”

  “This creek flows into the Rosebud?” Donegan asked.

  “On down from the village a little ways,” Rowland stated.

  The seven of them lay on their bellies atop the lip of a ridge northeast of the camp, concealed in shadow and stunted cedar.

  Then the Irishman said, “Bill—have your Cheyenne split up and go get as close to the camp as they can. Have ’em find out where the ponies are put out to graze. And tell ’em to count the lodges.”

  As Rowland turned to the Shahiyela, Johnny bellied over beside Donegan. “You want me stay here with you?”

  “Yeah. We’ll wait till them others come back.”

  Laying there with the Irishman and the two young half-breeds, Bruguier found himself watching the sun fall off mid-sky and slip rapidly for the west, hoping the others would get back before dark.

  “I think the whites call this Big Muddy Creek,” he declared out of the clear blue.

  “Big Muddy?”

  “Some white folks call it just the Muddy. If this is the one I heard tell about when I was in the Hills,” Bruguier continued, “Goes into the Rosebud down there where the valley gets a little wider.”

  “But the Rosebud’s a clear stream,” Donegan said.

  Johnny nodded, grinning. “Soon we know if this is the Big Muddy, eh?”

  “Yeah, we’ll know soon enough.”

  For a long time none of them talked, not uttering another word while they waited for the Cheyenne to return. The sun had set by the time the warriors slipped back up the ridge through a brush-covered draw to slip in among the white men and half-breeds lying there in the tall grass. White Bull spoke in hushed tones to Rowland as the air cooled and the last of day’s light slanted off the chiseled, reddish sandstone bluffs.

  “White Bull says he only counted thirty-eight lodges,” the squawman explained.

  “There’s more than that in there,” Donegan whispered harshly.

  “Maybe he didn’t see ’em all,” Rowland defended. Then he turned to White Bull to talk again in the warrior’s tongue. “He allows that maybe he didn’t see ’em all—but what he did see, he counted.”

  “There’s gotta be nearly twice that many,” the Irishman said. “What with all them ponies too.”

  White Bull was talking to Rowland, motioning here and there with his arm, stabbing a palm with one finger on his other hand.

  “He says there’s two bands of horses,” the squawman translated. “Small herd on this side of the creek. But it must’ve been the bunch we seen this morning what’s on the other side. Farther away from the camp.”

  “East?” Donegan asked.

  After Rowland spoke quietly with White Bull, the white man confirmed, “East. Upstream a ways.” He started scooting backwards beside the holy man.

  “Where you going?” Donegan asked.

  The squawman said, “I think I’ll take White Bull and go have myself a real close look at that village.”

  * * *

  Near the Painted Rocks* White Bull led Long Knife out of the brush and waded across the Roseberry, quickly disappearing again in the thick vegetation of a coulee that took them up the heights where the pines would hide them again. From twilight’s shadows, the holy man gazed back downstream at the tall spires of those sacred rocks where ancient ones had carved their history. This was a place of great power, great mystery to both the Ohmeseheso and Lakota who visited the valley every summer.

  While some would say in the winters to come that he had committed a great wrong by guiding for the Bear Coat’s soldiers, White Bull knew he was doing what was best for his Northern People. This war had to stop, and the killing must end. He had to do all he could to see that what these bad Lakota did would never be blamed upon White Bull’s people.

  Inside, this holy man of forty winters still stung at the shame heaped upon him by Lame Deer and all the others who called him a woman to surrender to the ve-ho-e soldiers at Tongue River. Oh, how he wanted to see Lame Deer’s face when he was captured and made a prisoner after many of his people were killed in the coming fight. Then he would ask the Lakota chief, Which of us has done the best for our people?

  On the breeze tickling his nostrils that afternoon, White Bull could smell the smoke rising from that camp. They were cooking meat.

  Earlier in their approach to the village, he and the squaw-man had come across a few gut-piles, along with the remains of elk and antelope carcasses Lakota hunters had butchered before returning to their camp. What slivers of meat had been left on the bones hadn’t had much chance to dry. Recent kills. The hunters were confident they would not be discovered. Or if they were, they were certain they would never be disturbed.

  “Look! There!” Long Knife whispered. He pointed into the mid-distance toward Fat Horse Creek.

  By then the sun had disappeared behind the ridge. The string of riders they spotted were making long shadows across the tall grass. The horsemen led many ponies laden with bloody quarters of meat.

  “Buffalo?”

  White Bull nodded. “I think so, yes. Big meat. Must be buffalo. They have been out hunting.”

  Long Knife dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. White Bull knew just that feeling in a man’s belly—that hunger for the rich, red meat when you had eaten nothing but the white man’s beans and bread, and the poor meat of his pig or cow, for so long you had almost forgotten just how good gnawing on a buffalo bone could be.

  “Their camp is near,” he told the squawman. Rowland nodded in agreement. “We see the smoke, over there. Where the riders are coming back with their meat.”

  “Should we see how close we can get to the camp?”

  Instead of speaking, White Bull gestured and they both moved out on foot, leading their horses through the trees along the back of the ridge to conceal themselves. Soon they crossed the trail of the buffalo hunters as they were returning to the village. And a ways beyond that, the two of them came to a narrow freshet spilling down the hillside. They drank their fill of the freezing water, then let their ponies nuzzle in the stream.

  When the muted light once again chilled the air around them, the two dismounted again.

  “We must crawl up there and look down,” Long Knife whispered there in the shadows of the trees. “The village has to be right below us.”

  “Both of us cannot leave our horses,” White Bull replied. “One of us must stay and hold them while the other climbs that rocky point to have a look. If we leave our horses, someone may take them away.”

  “All right,” Long Knife agreed with a sigh, reaching inside his coat. “You must go.”

  The squawman pulled out a
small tablet of paper and the stub of a wooden pencil.

  “What is this?” White Bull asked as he took the tablet and pencil.

  “Take these. And every time you see a lodge in the village, make a mark on a page. When you get back here to the horses, I will add them up for you.”

  Stuffing the small tablet under his belt, White Bull clamped the pencil between his teeth and set out up the hill in a crouch. Once he reached the top, the woodsmoke slapped him in the face, and the distant smells of cooking meat made his belly rumble with hunger. From there he could see only some of the lodges. Then the holy man spotted a rocky outcrop where he might have a better view without being seen by those below.

  Hunkering there on that high place among the scrub and boulders, White Bull began to count. When he had counted as many lodges as he had fingers, he took the pencil from his teeth and made a mark. Again he counted all his fingers and made a second, then a third mark. But the next time he had two fingers left over on one hand. So below the three marks he made eight smaller marks he would explain to Long Knife.

  “That makes thirty-eight,” the squawman said when White Bull had returned and handed over the tablet.

  “We go back and find the Bear Coat. Tell him the size of this village is smaller than the half-breed White said it was when he visited it,” White Bull explained.

  “Wait,” Long Knife said. “I must write a note to the Bear Coat about this.”

  When the squawman finished he stuffed the pencil and tablet away in his pocket and reached for the reins to his horse. “Let’s go.”

  “Yes,” White Bull said. “Night is coming fast.”

  Chapter 34

  6 May 1877

  “Them soldiers gotta come now,” Johnny grumbled suddenly, having watched the fall of the sun and growing more nervous as time ground past. “General wants to jump the camp come sunup, they gotta come now.”

  “Hush,” the Irishman told him. “They’ll be back soon.”

  “You see that?” Culbertson asked, pointing.

  “You mean them Lakota running races over there?” replied Robert Jackson.

  “If they’re having horse races over there, Johnny,” the Irishman said, “they sure as heaven ain’t worried about no sojurs coming.”

  Bruguier wagged his head. “But them soldiers won’t have time to get here by morning.”

  Culbertson sighed and smacked his lips, sniffing the wind that hinted at rain. “I can smell them cooking buffalo. My, my!”

  “Me too,” Jackson added, drinking in the chill evening breeze with his eyes closed.

  Hump jabbed an elbow in Bruguier’s rib and said in Lakota, “Every afternoon after the ponies are brought in close to camp, they run races. This village does not know the soldiers are near, Big Leggings.”

  “You aren’t worried about the soldiers getting here soon enough?”

  Half-closing his eyes, the Mnikowoju chief replied, “Right now all I’m worried about is my empty belly. How I would like to have some of that buffalo meat they have killed today: a few fat-back ribs, hot from the coals and dripping red juices. This soldier food we have been eating since surrendering on Elk River, I say it is no good for a fighting man. Why, I am growing weaker by the day!”

  Robert Jackson understood enough of that Lakota to laugh along with Hump, then said, “Tomorrow, maybe, we go down there with the Bear Coat and make peace with Lame Deer, and he will invite us to feast with him, eh?”

  With a grim chuckle, Hump replied, “Lame Deer has vowed to his spirits that he will never make peace with the wasicu! If you eat any of his food tomorrow, it will be over his dead body.”

  Growing more and more upset that none of the others were concerned about how long it was taking White Bull and the squawman to return, Johnny scrambled to one knee. “Them two been killed! I know it,” he snarled. “Now them Lakota come to kill us. They know we’re here.”

  “Just relax,” Donegan said, putting a hand on the half-breed’s shoulder. “That village don’t know we’re—”

  The snap of a limb nearly made Johnny jump out of his skin. The rest of them flung themselves to their bellies, their weapons out, cocked—everyone quiet as field mice and watching the twilit gloom for some movement.

  Suddenly a faint, shrill whistle came from the darkness around that tight grove of lodgepole beyond them.

  Donegan gestured to one of the Cheyenne and put his fingertips to his lips. The warrior understood, returning the whistle.

  Bruguier’s heart was pounding like it had only a few times before—when he had killed that man at Standing Rock, when he had stolen the horse in the Black Hills, and when he had gone riding into the Cheyenne’s village back in February.

  They waited, and watched … until the shapes and sounds took form out of the gloom. It was the Cheyenne holy man and the interpreter named Rowland.

  “You get close to the camp?” demanded the Irishman as he stood and brushed the front of his canvas britches.

  “We saw it. White Bull here counted lodges.”

  “We better get word back to Miles,” Donegan said.

  “I wrote out the number here,” Rowland explained. “The count.” He held it out for Donegan.

  “Good you done that,” Donegan declared. He looked over the rest of them, then suddenly dropped to one knee before one of the young half-breeds. “Jackson—I’ll wager you’re the smallest of us here.”

  “What’s that got to do with bringing them soldiers up?” Culbertson asked, rising onto an elbow on the far side of Jackson.

  “Bob here’s got him a strong horse too,” the Irishman continued. “Because of that, I figure he’s the one what’s got the best chance to get back to Miles on the double, bring up them sojurs quick as they can in the dark and get set for the attack by first light.”

  Jackson pushed himself up to a sitting position, straightened his pistol belt, and dragged his revolver out so he could spin the cylinder, seeing that every chamber carried a live round. “I’m on my way, Irishman.”

  “Ride low, friend,” Donegan warned as he passed the piece of paper to the half-breed, who tucked it away in a pocket. “And bring up them sojurs quick.”

  Johnny watched Jackson scrunch back through the grass and brush in a labored crouch. Together the group listened after the young half-breed disappeared over the top of the timbered slope, hearing the faint snort of a horse, then the pad of hoofbeats as the animal headed off into the distance, carrying its rider north for the waiting soldier chief and his troops.

  Brave Wolf whispered something, then Rowland interpreted. “He wondered if the half-blood was a good one to ride all that way back to the soldiers alone.”

  “He don’t think Jackson’s gonna make it?” Donegan inquired.

  “Maybeso he’s worried the half-blood won’t make it back to bring them soldiers up,” the squawman clarified.

  For a long moment the Irishman stared at the top of that hill where Jackson had disappeared. Then he turned to gaze at the shadows of the enemy village in the valley. “What you think, Johnny?”

  Quietly, Bruguier said, “He’ll make it.”

  “Me too, Johnny,” Donegan affirmed. “And so will Miles’s boys. They’ll be here by morning.”

  Now all they had to do was wait, Bruguier figured. Wait here in the dark, almost within pissing distance of all those Sioux who wanted Johnny’s scalp.

  * * *

  Not long after dispatching his scouts to reconnoiter the enemy village, the infantry trudged up to rejoin the rest of Nelson A. Miles’s command. After a brief rest for those foot-weary doughboys, the colonel put them all on the trail once more. For the next four hours they labored nonstop through an extremely rugged stretch of territory, battling steep slopes that dropped precipitously to the banks of the Rosebud on one side or the other, forcing frequent crossings of the snow-swollen creek. That battle against the terrain was clearly taking its toll on both man and animal alike.

  Just past 2:00 p.m. that Sunday, Miles admit
ted he had to halt the march to recoup his forces. Having reached the top of a high, pine-covered ridge where he had himself a panoramic view of more than a hundred square miles of countryside, the colonel ordered the men into bivouac for four hours. They put their stock out to graze on the tall grass, then fell out on both sides of a narrow creek that spilled down the north side of the ridge where it wasn’t very likely that roving hunters from the village would spot his command.

  He had heard tales of Custer’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, under any conditions, even when approaching the enemy. But for the life of him, Nelson Miles couldn’t even sit still that long afternoon. Try as he might, the colonel wasn’t able to make himself as comfortable as those who fell asleep where they landed, snoring away in the sleep of the innocent. Instead, Miles lumbered back and forth, walking up and down the stream, sometimes clambering back up to the high ground to have himself another look at the country to the south. Hoping to sight the returning scouts as the sun fell.

  At six o’clock, he figured they had waited long enough. Four hours of grazing for the animals. Four hours of rations and rest for the men. From here on out, there might well be no halts until the battle was enjoined and victory was theirs.

  “Mr. Baird!” he called out, lunging up the gentle slope toward his staff.

  “General?”

  “Officers’ call, Mr. Baird!”

  Edward Ball, cavalry battalion commander, trotted up at that moment. “We’re moving out, General?”

  “We’ve got an appointment at sunrise, Captain.”

  As soon as the rest of his cavalry and infantry officers had joined him that dusk, while the last rays of the sun faded from the slope, the colonel announced that he was taking both Ball’s Second Cavalry and Lieutenant Casey’s mounted infantry ahead with him to cover more of the intervening ground while awaiting the return of the scouts. They were to strip their commands down to only one pack-mule for each company, that animal burdened with two thousand rounds of carbine ammunition. In addition, company sergeants were to see that each soldier was supplied two days’ rations carried in their saddlebags or haversacks.