Trumpet on the Land

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Where?” Donegan asked in a panic, gathering the old blanket across the saddle in front of him. “Which way?”

  Sawing his mount’s head around in a tight circle, Grouard answered, “Anywhere there ain’t Injuns, you idiot!”

  In the rosy hint of dawn together they kicked muscled flanks and dashed up Twin Creek, making for the western foothills lit with the first pale pink of the sun’s rising, foothills that promised about the only cover available for their escape south, back to the Tongue River.

  After two miles at a punishing gallop, Seamus finally asked, “What the hell you do to that old man?”

  Grouard shrugged. “Just asked him some questions.”

  “Looks like you asked him the wrong questions,” he growled.

  “Wasn’t that. Trouble started when he asked who I was and what camp I come from—then I told him my name.”

  “Jesus and Mary!” Seamus exclaimed, wagging his head. “You didn’t tell him you were the Grabber, did you?”

  Like a contrite, apologetic child, the half-breed answered, “Only thing I could think of was my Lakota name.”

  “By the saints! You’re an idiot, Grouard! The whole Lakota nation knows Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull both want the Grabber real bad because they figure you betrayed them—and you go and tell him just who the hell you are!”

  “Just ride, goddammit. No talk, Irishman. Just ride!”

  On they raced another half-dozen miles, twisting in the saddle from time to time to look over their backtrail, before Donegan spotted any pursuers. By then the sun had come up, splashing not only the grassy slopes with summer’s most golden radiance, but the lower valley as well. Hunters and hunted alike stood out on the rolling tumble of hill and coulee.

  With each rise and fall of the land, Seamus measured the gait of the hard-muscled animal beneath him, sensing what he could of its every weakness as the horse slid down a slope, every imperceptible falter as the animal clambered back up the far side, then rolled again into a ground-eating gallop. He had to know if the mount was going to weaken, or slow, or just plain give out. If that was going to be the way of things, then he needed to know soon enough to choose a good place to make his stand, some spot with plenty of trees and rocks around. Somewhere he would make it hard on his hunters. A piece of ground where he could take as many of them as he could before they got to him.

  But as the sun climbed higher into that cornflowerblue sky and he began to sweat like the heaving, lathered animal beneath him, Seamus began to allow himself the luxury of thinking they just might make it. As strong and well fed as those Sioux ponies were, they still weren’t making up for the jump the two scouts had on their pursuers. At long last the sun fell from midsky and began to tumble ever so slowly into the western quadrant. Then, near dusk, Donegan finally recognized the land that stretched for miles ahead of them. Familiar ground.

  He turned around in the saddle, finding that the hunters were still coming. They hadn’t given up after a long day’s chase over rugged, broken country.

  Up ahead now that familiar land was almost like seeing home, it was. Home to a man who had been away for too damned long. Up there—how he wanted to hope—but that sure as hell looked like the Tongue River.

  “There,” Grouard said, the evening wind whipping his long black hair across his face as he turned to speak to Donegan. He pointed up the valley, indicating the timber-and-brush border of a stream that meandered toward the faraway Tongue.

  “That creek bottom?”

  The half-breed nodded. “Soldier Creek.”

  Down the long, long slope they raced as the sun backlit the nearby Big Horns with a reddish-purple glow, washing away all but the heartiest of shadows. Time and again Seamus turned to peer at their backtrail. Not sure if he could allow himself to hope any more than he already did. Not sure if that would hex what he hoped for most.

  “They gave up,” Grouard finally said it.

  “I ain’t seen ’em either, not in a long time.”

  “Maybe saving their ponies is all. They’ll still hunt us,” the half-breed sighed. “But maybe the hard chase is over.”

  “These horses could stand some rest, Grouard.”

  “Maybe we can take the chance—come dark.”

  Down in the brushy bottom of Soldier Creek they unsaddled their horses. After watering them, both men yanked up tufts of the tall grass and rubbed down the damp, glossy coats as the animals ate their fill.

  “You sleep first, Irishman. I’ll wake you later and you keep watch.”

  Seamus did not argue. He curled an arm under his head, pulled his lone blanket over his head, and didn’t think of a thing until he felt Grouard nudging him, whispering.

  “Your watch.”

  “For how long?”

  “Rest of the night. Wake me before dawn,” Grouard said wearily. “Now it’s my turn to snore enough to wake the dead, just like you was doing.”

  “Wake the dead, did I?” Seamus grumbled as he sat up to rub the grit from his eyes.

  Staying awake that night proved to be one of the hardest things he had ever had to do, what with having no sleep the night before when they stumbled onto that hallowed ground where so many good soldiers had given their greatest sacrifice. Throughout that long night and into the ashen, predawn gray of the twenty-eighth, the Irishman thought on those nameless ones, men unburied, left where they had fallen to a stronger foe.

  And he thought on that long slope of Lodge Trail Ridge ten years gone, littered with the grotesque, frozen dead finally returned to Fort Phil Kearny, where they were consigned everlasting to God’s hand and that Dakota soil.*

  There were more, those fallen near that narrow, brushy island in the middle of an unnamed riverbed after those nine hot summer days fighting off Cheyenne.•

  Then he thought on the soldiers who were killed in that desperate fight in the sulfurous no-man’s-land of Black Mesa by the Modoc, who wanted only to live on the ground where they had buried their ancestors. And he remembered how the warriors had pulled back and disappeared—when they could have come in to finish the wounded. It would have been no hard task, after all, for those who weren’t wounded and incapable of fighting were dead.†

  Back in seventy-four the buffalo hunters he had thrown in with had buried their own right there in the sod beside the Myers and Leonard hide yard, after Quanah Parker had given up the bloody fight at Adobe Walls after five days, after discovering that their medicine man’s power wasn’t strong enough to protect them when they charged into the maw of those big-bore buffalo guns.‡

  And he brooded on the bodies of the soldiers Colonel Reynolds ordered his Third Cavalry to leave behind after the subzero fight beside the thick ice crusted over Powder River.** More good men who would never know a grave. More families who would never be able to visit the final resting place of a fallen father, or husband, or son. The very same tragedy visited upon the loved ones of those brave men who had breathed their last beside Rosebud Creek a scant week before.†† Some child’s father, some woman’s husband, some parent’s son.

  So it was that he thought on Samantha, and how he missed her so terribly. Right down to the marrow of him. Sitting here in the darkness, in the middle of this last great hunting ground of the Sioux. Surrounded by thousands of warriors who had just finished off some army sent to defeat the roaming bands, sent to drive them back to their reservations. How he thought on her, and their child. The babe that Sam claimed would be Seamus’s firstborn son.

  “May he never know war,” Donegan whispered to the silent night wind. “Dear God—if you ever answer a prayer of mine, answer this one. That this son of mine may never know war.”

  In the first coming of day’s light Seamus shook Grouard awake, holding a finger to his lips. The half-breed’s eyes widened as he heard the voices; then he nodded.

  In the beginning Donegan had thought he caught himself dozing, dreaming, hearing voices as he slept. But no—he was awake, and those were men’s voices he heard in the gray c
oming of morning. Trouble was, they spoke Sioux.

  Leaving their horses in that clump of brush where they had spent the night, Grouard and Donegan crawled out on their bellies a few yards toward the voices—and discovered where their pursuers were camped. Not five hundred yards away.

  Already up and stirring, the two dozen or so warriors were completing their toilet, freshening war paint, retying braids, and bringing their ponies into camp as they prepared to set off as soon as enough light let them follow a pair of tracks once more.

  Grouard signaled with a thumb, indicating they should back up into the thick brush, where they savagely yanked their horses’ heads to the side at the same time they heaved their shoulders into the animals to throw the mounts onto the ground. With some strips of thick latigo, on each animal they lashed three legs together, which would prevent the horses from rising. That done, they tied strips of blanket over the wide nostrils so the animals would not scent the war ponies. Then the men backed off through the brush.

  Scrambling farther up the hillside, Grouard discovered an outcrop of sandstone that made for a narrow cave, where the two of them were forced to slide in feet first. From their rocky fortress that reminded a gloomy Donegan of an early grave, the pair kept an anxious watch on the valley floor as well as on that long slope below them, all the way down to the timber where they had cached the horses, throughout that summer’s morning and into the hot afternoon, long after the war party finally departed, riding off to the southeast, away from the foothills.

  It wasn’t until after the sun had set behind them that the two dragged themselves from their narrow hole and rubbed sore, stiff muscles. Down in the timber they untied their horses, resaddled, and set off at moonrise. Angling away from the valley where the warriors had headed, Grouard and Donegan decided their only choice was to hug the foothills, making for a longer trail back to Crook’s Camp Cloud Peak.

  “Still say that was a damned-fool stunt you pulled back there at the Injin village,” Donegan grumbled late that night after the stars came out.

  “What stunt?”

  “Going down to talk to that old Injin,” Seamus replied. “Why didn’t we just ride around that village?”

  “You know how big that son of a bitch was?”

  With a shrug Donegan complained, “So—I’m still waiting for you to tell me why you went and told that old man what your Injin name was.”

  Grinning, Grouard replied, “I only claimed I was one of the best scouts on the northern plains, Irishman. Never said I could think fast on my feet.”

  With the return of Frank Grouard and the Irishman, rumors began to run as deep and swift as runoff in spring through the army’s camp. Most doubted the pair’s claim concerning their nighttime journey through the battlefield littered with dead soldiers—the very same skeptics who doubted both the size of the enemy village as well as the number of hostile warriors the two scouts were estimating for the general.

  As the object of so much jovial banter, if not downright derision, Grouard and Donegan kept to themselves after reaching the Goose Creek camp, refusing even to say anything about their adventures to John Finerty.

  “Not even to tell your story to a fellow Patlander?” the reporter prodded Donegan.

  “Go away, Finerty,” the scout growled, pulling his hat back over his face.

  For a moment more John stared down at Donegan, the tall scout stretched out in a respectable piece of shade that Saturday morning, his ankles crossed and flicking a finger now and then at an annoying deerfly.

  One last time the newsman asked, “Maybe you’ll want to tell me by the time I get back, eh?”

  “Good-bye, Finerty.”

  “Only gonna be gone just a few days with Crook.”

  “You already told me,” Donegan said, his words muffled beneath the crown of the wide-brimmed hat pulled fully over his face. “So be off with you.”

  “Hunting’s said to be good up there. Sure you don’t want to join us and enjoy yourself after your harrowing experiences?”

  “I’ll skin you myself if you don’t leave me be,” Seamus grumped.

  “Suit yourself, Seamus.”

  When the Irishman did not reply, Finerty turned and strode back through the cavalry camp toward Crook’s headquarters, leading his mount, all packed and ready for the general’s hunt into the recesses of the Big Horn Mountains. He wasn’t the only correspondent making the sojourn: Joe Wasson, correspondent not only for the New York Tribune but for the Philadelphia Press and the San Francisco Alta California, along with Robert Strahorn of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, and Reuben Davenport of the New York Herald were going along as well, all four of them invited by Crook to join him and a party of officers on their leisurely excursion. As curious as any man could be, but cursed because he was more prone to boredom than most, the restive reporter for the Chicago Times jumped at the chance to flee the army’s camp and do something, anything.

  Anything after a week and a half of lounging about in a place with so many men and not a single woman—not even that dish-faced Calamity Jane Cannary—not to mention that out of a thousand soldiers there was very, very little money to be won at cards. Why, the officers were down to wagering tins of peaches or tomatoes on horse-and footraces, perhaps even placing bets on who would catch the most or the biggest fish each day. Fishing was a pleasant enough sport, as long as a man could practice its fine arts from a patch of shade. While the evenings were delightfully cool, the days had a stifling sameness to them: by eleven o’clock the heat had become unbearable, lasting until well past five. In those same hours of torment, horseflies, deerflies, all sorts of biting, buzzing, winged torture— including the omnipresent mosquitoes—drove the men and animals mad with their incessant cruelty.

  At long last came the respite of each evening, times when Finerty repeatedly pressed John Bourke to regale them all with tales of his adventures with Crook in the Arizona campaigns, at least when the newsman couldn’t lay his hands on one of those well-traveled paperback books so many were borrowing from the small personal library of Captain Peter D. Vroom or Lieutenant Augustus C. Paul, both of the Third Cavalry. Oh, to have even a dime novel to read! A poem by Walt Whitman! Even a reading tract of a temperance lecture delivered by Deacon Bross or one of Brother Moody’s uplifting speeches on his spiritual hope for mankind!

  Driven to collecting gossip and what bits of news he could glean from those thirty Montana miners who had wandered into camp from over on the Tongue River before the Rosebud fight—none of it kept Finerty interested for all that long. It damned well all had a way of wearing pretty thin on a young, outgoing fellow from the sociable streets of Chicago. Why, in that lazy camp there wasn’t so much as a glass of warm beer to be had, much less the numbing taste of strong whiskey—not so much as a cigar! A man had to content himself with government tobacco, sold by the plug or pouch.

  Even Sundays no longer held their special significance for him: his one day off back in Chicago. Here by the Big Horns, Sunday was just one of the seven every one of them had to endure, one after another until Crook decided they would march again. Deep in the cold of last winter he figured he would be home by spring—the Sioux campaign over and the hostiles driven back to their agencies. After Reynolds’s debacle on the Powder, Finerty revised his thinking and figured that it might take one more campaign—this time with more killing and less driving. But after their fight on the Rosebud, Crook limped back here to lick his wounds.

  And now, by God—it looked like this was going to be a summer campaign. If not longer!

  Came the times when John wished he had packed it in with the cough-racked MacMillan, who’d gone south with the wagons for resupply at Fetterman. If nothing else, Finerty figured he could fight boredom by spending a few hours at Kid Slaymaker’s Hog Ranch across the river from the post before the teamsters would have everything loaded and be turning about for a return trip to the camp at Goose Creek. Ah, just a little heady potheen to drink and the sweet fragrance of a moist, fleshy wo
man.

  So it would be a trip to the mountains for him and the general. After the excitement of getting his story of the Crazy Horse fight written with a dateline of 17 June, “Banks of the Rosebud,” then finding a suitable courier who would accept pay to carry John’s dispatch down to Fetterman so that it could be telegraphed back to Chicago, things all too quickly had become ho-hum. Now after a week and a half of waiting to learn if his story had made it back to his editor, Finerty was growing more and more convinced no courier could be trusted. They were vermin, nothing more than an annoyance to a war correspondent.

  But what ate at Finerty the most was that he had come to the conclusion that Crook was now intending to make an entire summer’s campaign out of this—something no man, officer, soldier, or civilian had expected back in May when they’d put Fort Fetterman at their backs.

  With the Big Horns scraping the clouds south and west of the camp, a grouping of wall tents pitched on the flats along the north bank of Goose Creek indicated the headquarters of Crook’s Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. For hundreds of yards on either side of the general’s camp stretched row upon row upon row of the small A-tents pitched by the infantry. Across the creek the horse soldiers had raised their neat rows of identical dog tents.

  As pleasing as the scene was to his newsman’s eye, John Finerty was more than ready to flee to the mountains. Why, the way he was feeling, he might even accept something a bit more strenuous than a mere hunt in the Big Horns—he might even welcome another chance to pit himself against the hostiles.

  Just as long as it ended as the Rosebud fight had— with Crazy Horse turning tail and running at the end of the day.

  Sure enough, Finerty thought as he halted his loaded horses near John Bourke, William B. Royall, and the rest who would accompany Crook into the mountains—he might just welcome another good fight of it.

  Even that, simply to fend off the boredom.

  *The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 1, Sioux Dawn.

  •The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 3, The Stalkers.

  †The Plainsmen Series, Vol. 5, Devil’s Backbone.