Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

He felt alone the next moment, and reined up. Bullets whined past as he turned about in a tiny circle, the horse fighting the bit. He yanked back on the reins once more, trying to gain control of the huge animal. Then heard a smack of lead against flesh. The horse quivered, shuddering as a dog would shed water.

  A puff of smoke from the nearby rocks betrayed the warrior. Pointing the Henry out at the end of his one arm, Seamus fired, whirled the repeater around in that one hand as he struggled to hold the reins in the other. He fired a second time, watching the bullet strike the warrior as the Indian rose to fire a second shot.

  The air about him sang with lead as the great horse crumpled beneath him. Throwing himself out of the way, Donegan rolled in the grass, grunting with his fall as he came to a stop against some mesquite.

  The Henry spat free the empty brass as he chambered another .44-caliber cartridge and plopped to his belly. Behind him came the reassuring brassy call of Mackenzie’s bugles. Then he clearly heard the thunder of hooves beneath the horn’s fading echo. Hundreds of hooves.

  As quickly, he heard the nearby rumble rise down the canyon as well. Horses coming from the opposite direction.

  From their hiding places behind trees and rocks, the warriors disappeared, melting into the dawn mist hung gauzy over the creek like some broom-swatted cats as the first of the Indian ponies raced toward the Irishman from the camps on down the canyon. Yells and shouts, the snap of blankets and the slap of pieces of rawhide—the Seminole and Tonkawa scouts had raced in among the coveted herds, surrounded them and started the ponies back up the canyon toward the soldiers.

  Gazing over his shoulder, Donegan watched the charging troopers as they were forced to draw off to either side of the grassy defile to make way for the stampeding ponies.

  Mackenzie’s cavalry sat there, suspended temporarily in their assault, fighting to control their prancing army mounts as the ponies raced by. Most cheered the scouts, tearing their hats from their heads and hallooing as Thompson’s Indians tore past—having captured the pride of those war bands of the southern plains.

  Once again Mackenzie had put his enemy afoot.

  38

  September 28, 1874

  Donegan shook his head as he watched Captain Sebastian Gunther order the men of his H Company to the base of the canyon wall, directing them to scale the cliff in order to dislodge a few snipers firing down on the cavalry’s advance.

  “Clear those bastards out!” Gunther roared.

  As if in reply to the captain’s challenge, the warriors rained even more bullets down on both of Gunther’s platoons.

  “Captain!”

  Donegan jerked about, recognizing that voice. Mackenzie himself sat there atop his mount, waving his arm at Gunther.

  “General?”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Attempting to dislodge these snipers—”

  “Goddammit—I’m countermanding that order, Captain!” Mackenzie shrieked. “You force these men to obey you: not one man will live to reach the top of that bloody cliff! Now, call them off!”

  Gunther glared but a moment, then turned and trotted back among his men, shouting for them to retreat off the face of the cliff.

  The Irishman watched Mackenzie rein away, wagging his head. The colonel had covered but a few yards when he stopped beside a soldier whose horse had been shot. The private was struggling to pull his saddlebags from beneath the dead animal.

  “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “McGowan, sir!” the youth replied, his face blackened by frustration.

  “Get away from there or you’ll be hit!”

  The soldier nodded, starting to move away as Mackenzie reined about to go. McGowan sneaked back toward the dead horse as the colonel glanced over his shoulder, reined up and flushed with anger. Bullets splattered the rocks behind them both.

  “Soldier! I thought I ordered you to go before you were shot!”

  Private McGowan stammered a moment, digging for words. “I need the ammunition in these bags, Colonel.” A sheepish look crossed his face as he shrugged. “Got some chew in there too.”

  The colonel wagged his head. “If your tobacco is worth getting your head blown off, have at it, McGowan!”

  The soldier lunged at the carcass, yanking again on the saddlebags. “Thank you, Colonel. Thank you!”

  More bullets slapped the rocks behind Mackenzie as a squad of troopers galloped up. Cottonwood leaves rattled as lead stung through the branches.

  “Colonel, sir!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” Mackenzie answered as Donegan trotted up behind the soldiers on foot.

  “Sir,” and the officer licked his lips, his eyes glazed with fear and fatigue, “the bastards are opening up a new front on us—over there!” He pointed to the far canyon wall, where gray puffs of smoke dotted the red and pink and white striations. “How’re we ever gonna get out of here, Colonel?”

  “Get hold of yourself, soldier,” Mackenzie said sharply, motioning the Irishman over. “I brought you men in here. By God, I’ll take you out.”

  Seamus cleared his throat. “Colonel?”

  “Donegan—take a dozen of the lieutenant’s men here and clear out that nest of vipers up there.” Mackenzie pointed at the far canyon wall.

  “Only a dozen, Colonel?” asked the lieutenant.

  Mackenzie looked at Seamus. “Do you need any more than that, Sergeant Donegan?”

  The Irishman’s back went rigid. “How’d you—”

  “It’s not that hard for one soldier to recognize another when it comes to a close fight of it. Besides, I’ve asked about you.”

  “Grover?”

  Mackenzie nodded. “Now, tell me if you’ll need more than a dozen of the lieutenant’s men.”

  Donegan shook his head, smiling broadly. “We’ll make short work of it, Colonel.”

  “Twelve of you!” Mackenzie called out, waving his pistol. “Count off and follow Donegan. Do as he says and you’ll all be eating beans and hard bread for dinner tonight!”

  Twelve of them, mostly privates, peeled off, trotting past Mackenzie, then dismounting as they called out their number. Each man lashed their mounts in the brush. Wasn’t a one of them wouldn’t do what Mackenzie asked at a drop of a kepi, even though the colonel had ridden their bottoms raw through the last month.

  Donegan looked over them quickly, seeing their faces gone liver-colored with fatigue, then led the twelve forward through the litter of abandoned blankets and clothing, cooking utensils and collapsed frames the women used to dry meat. An Indian mule tore past, heading down the canyon, its hastily tied bundle come loose and slung below its belly.

  By the time they made it to the jumble of sandstone boulders at the foot of the cliff wall, there were but two, perhaps three warriors remaining. The rest had scrambled down from their perches, escaping away up the canyon, or had chosen to disappear up the wall itself.

  Donegan spread the dozen out, pointing out where he wanted fire concentrated from three directions on each of the warriors. With the deep-hued shadows, he could not be sure as the minutes crawled past—but one by one by one, each of the warrior guns was silenced. The soldiers did not see the enemy fall. There were no bodies to count. Only the relative silence come back at them from the canyon wall.

  “Good job, sojurs. Time you reported back to your lieutenant,” he ordered them.

  As the rest passed by him, a young sergeant with three stripes on his arm stopped and turned, his red hair shining in the morning sun like Mexican copper. He saluted Donegan, saying, “I wasn’t old enough to fight in the war, Sergeant. But I imagine I damn well would’ve learned something from you if I had.”

  Then the fire-haired sergeant turned and was gone with his men.

  Those few words, along with the confidence of Mackenzie himself, sent a surge of pride coursing through the marrow of him as Donegan loped away from the cliff wall.

  McLaughlin had led three of his four companies down the canyon trail to aid B
eaumont’s battalion in mopping up what resistance the warriors attempted. In less than an hour and a half, the bulk of the fighting was over. While an occasional gunshot echoed far down the canyon where the warriors were retreating before the pressure, Mackenzie already had his victory. He ordered the destruction of the captured lodges and everything in them.

  “Colonel,” a young lieutenant said as he reined up near Mackenzie. “Hord’s been shot.”

  “My bugler?”

  “He was riding beside you in the charge, Colonel.”

  “Hit bad?”

  “In the gut, sir.”

  “Damn! Get him to the surgeon.”

  “Surgeon Choate is already with him,” and then the lieutenant wagged his head. “He says Hord will likely make it.”

  Mackenzie grinned, turning to find Donegan coming up on foot. “By Lord, that is good news. Do you know of any other casualties?”

  “No others reported at this time, Colonel.”

  “Very well. Tell Hord I’ll be along to see him once we get these lodges put to the torch.”

  Donegan halted near Mackenzie, watching the troops from E Company assigned to pulling down the lodges into great piles and setting them on fire.

  “Are you afoot, Donegan?”

  “Yes, Colonel. Lost my horse in the fight.”

  He nodded, looking over the Irishman’s great bulk. “We’ve captured what I figure to be over twelve hundred Indian ponies. I hope you can find something to ride among the enemy’s herds. Go find Thompson’s scouts and inform the lieutenant you have first choice among the captured ponies.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  Mackenzie smiled genuinely, presenting his hand down to the Irishman. “No, thank you, Sergeant. That was awfully pretty how you cleaned out that nest on the cliffs for me. Triangulation of fire—very, very good, soldier.”

  Seamus shook the colonel’s hand then backed a step from Mackenzie’s horse, saluting. “Congratulations to you too, Colonel. For a while there I figured you had gone and spelled the end of the Fourth Cavalry, I had.”

  Mackenzie’s brow knitted. “How’s that?”

  “Spreading your regiment out along that canyon trail. If these warriors had been up early, if they had pickets out—why, they could have wiped out half your regiment, picking them off the wall where there was nowhere to go but down. It turned out a damned fine gamble.”

  Mackenzie gazed for a moment up at the line of sunlight crawling down the red face of the Palo Duro. “Fighting Indians is just that, Donegan: a gamble. Some fights I’ve lost. Some big ones too.” He grinned. “I just figured, what with as much of a gambler as I am—I was about due to win one of the big pots.”

  “Your daring paid off, Mackenzie. My hat’s off to you.”

  “Go fetch you a horse, Sergeant Donegan. And make it a fine one at that.”

  Seamus turned to go, his voice loud in the canyon. “No doubt, Colonel—if it’s courtesy the U.S. Army, it will be a very fine horse!”

  * * *

  There had been no time for the women to gather up the travois ponies, to tear down lodges, to pack clothing and utensils, dried meat and robes to ward off the coming winds of winter. With those first sinewy, warning yaps of the camp dogs, they had been forced to leave behind the ponies and the mules for the white man and the hated Tonkawa trackers.

  Everything but their lives had been lost to Three-Finger Kinzie.

  Doing what they had done time and again, the warriors fell back slowly, firing, holding the soldiers at bay while they could. From every crevice in the canyon walls, from every rock and tree big enough, the warriors held while they could against the solid blue phalanx.

  And through it all, Quanah was among them—Kiowa and Cheyenne as well as his own Kwahadi. He exhorted them, rallied them, bolstered them as they fell back—urging them to hold the line a little longer.

  “For our women and children!” he shouted first in one tongue, then in another. “For our families! We leave our bodies here to protect the ones who flee!”

  Back, back across the yucca and tiny prickly pear, across the white quartz studded in the red earth they retreated slowly along the upvaulted rock formations as hawks drifted overhead on the warming air currents.

  Yellow-striped lizards scampered out of the way of his feet as his moccasins felt their way for him as he pushed back, fired, then pushed back a little farther, darting away like a puff of wood smoke. Birds chirked in protest against the constant, booming cacophony of the gunfire.

  But for all the gunfire and noise and fear, for all the rage the warriors felt for this attack, they had seriously wounded only one soldier that Quanah was sure of—the bugler himself, his shiny horn pressed to his lips, riding beside the bearer of the flag. On the far side of the bugler rode the one who caught Quanah’s eye. He was sure who the soldier was. It could only be Three-Finger himself.

  To his shoulder Quanah had thrown his Winchester carbine, aimed and squeezed just as the bugler’s mount stumbled. The horse pitched forward two halting steps, placing the horn-blower’s body in front of Kenzie’s.

  The bugler spun out of the saddle and the soldier chief raced on, never knowing how close he himself had come to Quanah Parker’s bullet.

  The others were falling back along the north side of the canyon now. A half-dozen Kiowas struggled past him, bearing the body of Red Warbonnet.

  “He opened the fight with the yellowlegs,” a young warrior said proudly of the dead man slung across their arms.

  “We will sing his name in praises for many generations to come,” Quanah promised, motioning them to pass quickly.

  For more than four miles now they had held the soldiers back. From afar he heard the low, grumbling charge of the cavalry coming their way, so much like the sound of a mule with a bellyful of bad water. Now came time for the last of the warriors to disappear into the narrow washes and bent-finger arroyos wrinkled off the main canyon.

  “Go!” Quanah hollered at them, waving them away with his rifle. “Disappear until we can regroup at the top.”

  It was there at the top of the canyon walls as the day’s sun grew old and weary, seeking its rest beyond the far mountains, that the warriors parted when Quanah walked through their midst, stepping up to the powerful and well-known Mamanti and Lone Wolf of the Kiowa, Iron Shirt and Stone Calf of the Cheyenne.

  “Why are you standing here?” he demanded of them angrily. How he wanted most to put his hands around Mamanti’s throat. “You have families to protect. They are scattered like the cottonwood down across this prairie. Winter comes!”

  “Go take care of your own, Quanah Parker!” snapped Lone Wolf, his old, yellowed eyes filled with fire. “Do not presume to tell us what to do.”

  “No, I would never attempt something so foolish as that!” His eyes raked them all, provoking them. “How can I presume to do that? I, Quanah Parker—the one among you who has never had a mouthful of the white man’s food! The one among you who has never put his hand out and accepted one of the white man’s blankets. The one among all of you great ones who has never put his mark on the white man’s talking paper that gives our enemy the right to come take everything from us!”

  Some of the Kiowa warriors crowded up, ready to protect their chiefs. A dozen and more of the haughty Kwahadi moved up as well, glaring at the others standing behind their chiefs.

  “So tell us, you who know the white man so well,” Quanah sneered, “tell us what my people are to do now. Is it better to go in to the reservations now? Or better to continue the fight? What say you?”

  He looked over their faces. Their eyes unable to hold his there in the late afternoon light. For a moment there was a rustle through the great assembly. Some were pointing across the great chasm. More than two miles away on the south rim they could see the soldiers were beginning to climb out of the canyon once more. Quanah turned back to the Kiowa and Cheyenne chiefs.

  “We are leaving, Quanah Parker,” Lone Wolf finally admitted. “Hardest hi
t this day were our villages. Our warriors fell under the white man’s guns. We have been robbed of—”

  “Everything that belonged to my people lies down there!” Quanah roared, pointing into the Palo Duro. “We lost as much as the Kiowa, as much as any of you! Think on this as you return to your reservations where the Kwahadi have never gone—remember that more than blankets and robes, more than lodges and dried meat was left behind or burned by the yellowleg soldiers. What could hurt more than the loss of your ponies?”

  Reluctantly, they nodded.

  “More than half our herds,” Iron Shirt replied.

  “What are my people to do now?” Quanah asked rhetorically, for he raised his voice to the sky, knowing these mere mortals could not answer him. The answer to such a question had to come from elsewhere. “Am I now forced to take the road these Cheyenne and Kiowa take? To walk the road to the reservation where I have never once retreated, forced to shrink in cowardice just so my starving women and children have something to eat for their empty bellies when the winter winds come slashing across the cold breast of the land? How can I expect the little ones, the old ones, the ones who are sick—to face the coming winter without lodges and blankets and robes, even moccasins?”

  “Soon you will have your answer,” declared Stone Calf, the oldest of the Cheyenne chiefs.

  His eyes turned to the Cheyenne elder. “Perhaps I will become a white man’s Indian like you, Stone Calf.” He glared at the Kiowa. “Like you, Lone Wolf. Like the great Satanta who gave himself up to the white man’s iron chains. For what is a man to do when he cannot find food for his family—the buffalo are gone! Is a man’s family to survive on his pride? Can they eat that warrior’s honor?”

  Stone Calf nodded sadly. “Times have changed us, Quanah Parker. This one day has changed our peoples more than most. How long can you and your Kwahadi resist traveling the white man’s road when the reservation offers the only peace and safety in this land? How long, Quanah Parker?”

  From their dark, questioning eyes, to the far rim of the canyon where the tiny figures of the yellowleg soldiers crawled across the prairie driving the pony herds before them, the Kwahadi war chief looked. Then eventually Quanah gazed at the setting sun in the west before he spoke.