“We better tell them something … and now,” Shad muttered. “Or our butts may be in the soup.”
He inched his horse forward a few yards, away from Hickok and Milner. Then he began signing.
The soldiers come for two reasons: they come to talk to the chiefs about making peace, so that the Lakota and Shahiyena make no more war on the white settlers.
Two of the delegates glanced at one another, then one moved his hands slowly.
You said the soldiers come for two reasons. You spoke of but one.
Shad straightened in the saddle, slowly moving his Spencer carbine across his lap before his hands went back to signing.
If the Lakota and Shahiyena do not want to talk of peace, then the soldiers come to make war.
The entire half dozen warriors stirred at that.
The white man finally talks straight. Perhaps you should prepare to die.
Shad knew he could not let his eyes betray him. Never that. Instead, he let his eyes continue resting on the dark-skinned speaker.
If it is war you want, then do not wait. Let us begin here … and now.
When his hands finished, they went to grip the carbine, quietly moving it off his lap, held over the horse’s head.
At that moment, a trio of warriors showed up from the east, appearing over the hills to Sweete’s right. They were shouting, waving pieces of blanket overhead. What they said Shad was not able to pick up, only that it was Cheyenne, and not Sioux. The half dozen delegates stirred uneasily. Pawnee Killer savagely wrenched his pony around and tore off toward the long line of warriors.
“Get ready to make your stand,” Milner hissed.
“Not yet, we don’t,” Sweete warned. “I think they’ve spotted the soldiers getting close.”
The big warrior glared at the white men a moment, then signed for Sweete.
You have succeeded in living this day through, Indian-talker. Your soldiers come before we can dare take your scalps.
“You are Shahiyena,” Shad spoke the words in Cheyenne.
“I am,” the big one answered. “You speak our tongue.”
“Your name is Roman Nose?”
The war chief did not answer at first, only staring at the white tracker with less disdain now.
“I am Roman Nose.”
“You are known as a great warrior, a brave leader of your men,” Sweete replied. “I cannot believe a warrior of your stature would find honor in wiping out three white men so outnumbered by your own.”
Roman Nose smiled, reluctantly at first, then broadly. “What is your name?”
“Shad Sweete.”
“Sh-h-a-a-d Sweet-t-t,” he mimicked the words with emphasis on the hard consonants. “I will remember you. As a brave man, and one who talks straight.”
“Let’s get,” Hickok was ordering in a low voice, as calm as he could make it.
Sweete glanced at the heaving, roiling line of warriors, every one of them in turmoil now that the soldiers drew near the villages.
“Tell your soldiers to stop where they are,” Roman Nose ordered.
“They will not,” Sweete replied above the clamor of snorting ponies and clattering weapons, the shouts and jeers of warriors surging, throbbing across the prairie. “They have come to talk with you of peace … or war.”
“The soldiers must not come any closer to our villages,” Roman Nose demanded. “They frighten the women and little ones. Frighten the old ones.”
“If it is peace your bands want—then they have no reason to be frightened.”
The war chief appeared to think on that, then said something quietly to the other four headmen. They reined about and rode back to their wide front of armed warriors. Only once did Roman Nose glance over his shoulder, his eyes finding Shad Sweete.
A rattle of bit chain and a clopping of hooves arrested his attention. Sweet turned in the saddle as more than a dozen soldiers galloped up under a flutter of snapping guidons. A lieutenant held his arm up as most stopped. Two rode on, halting only when they were among the three scouts.
“Do they want a f-fight of it?”
With that recognizable stutter, Sweete glanced at the flushed, excited features of the youngest general in American military history, now relegated to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the newly formed U.S. Seventh Cavalry.
“Don’t think so, General Custer,” he answered. “They’re blustering, but I don’t figure they’ll—”
“General Hancock,” Custer interrupted the scout and turned toward the expedition commander, “let me throw a cordon around their village.”
“Capital idea, Custer! Do it. I don’t want a one of these savages sneaking out on us now.”
Then Hancock turned to Sweete and the others. “You’ve done well, gentlemen. Well, indeed. In a matter of moments, Custer’s Seventh will have this bunch of thieves and murderers surrounded. Then we can get down to the business of punishing the guilty parties.”
26
Moon of First Eggs
HE EARNED HIS name early in life.
Pawnee Killer.
He hated them. Almost as much as he hated the white man.
And lately he had learned some of the Pawnee up north of the Republican River had not only scouted into the Powder River country two winters back, but were now hiring on to be the eyes and ears for the white man’s army.
Pawnee Killer smiled. It was meant to happen.
As much as what he had been telling his band of Brule and the bands of Shahiyena Dog Soldiers who traveled with his people—the soldiers were bound to come.
Make no mistake—these were fighting bands.
Down south, the Comanche and Kiowa and a few others were doing their best against a growing tide of white men: soldiers, settlers, those who laid the tracks for the great, smoking iron horses, the traders who brought bolts of cloth and the tinkling hawks-bells that made the Indian women lust for new things. They struggled on the southern plains, with hope still alive.
Up north Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa were doing their best to stay away from the white man. Red Cloud’s Bad Face Oglalla were still reveling in their defeat of the soldiers last winter at the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, far up on what the white man called the Bozeman Road. But Red Cloud had not succeeded in driving the soldiers from their three forts in the heart of that Lakota hunting ground.
So for now, it seemed, the soldiers had turned their attention to these central plains.
Not that far north along the Buffalo Shit River, what the white man called the Platte, others were laying more iron tracks. And down here south of the Republican, what the Cheyenne called their Plum River, another band of white men labored to lay more tracks toward the far western mountains, where the sun went to sleep at the end of each day.
Pawnee Killer was sure that the white man had focused his attention on this great buffalo ground as surely as a warrior would aim the iron-tipped point of his arrow at the heart of a young bull.
And now he was sure. The army had come. With five other chiefs, he had gone to talk with the three white men who scouted for the soldiers. Quickly he had grown angry and turned about, not content to talk further with the three. Instead, he would remain with his fighting men. When the soldiers came, they would stand and fight until the women and old ones, the ones too small to fight themselves, all had escaped.
Then the great warrior bands would disappear across the mapless prairie, like spring snow before the snow-eating chinook.
Hancock did nothing to inspire the trust of those fighting bands.
He sent Custer’s cavalry to surround the great village at sunset on 15 April. The lodges were still there, as were the racks groaning beneath drying strips of buffalo meat. Surrounding every lodge were staked the bloody hides being fleshed by the women. From a few smoke holes appeared wisps of smoke.
But except for a few dogs that had remained behind to enjoy an easy feast on the drying meat, the great village was empty.
“They’ve f-fled, General,” Cus
ter stammered as he leapt to the ground beside Hancock’s luxuriously appointed army ambulance.
“By damn—tell me they haven’t!”
Shad Sweete edged up, hanging onto his reins. “They’re heading north and west, General.”
Hancock regarded the old scout a moment. “Where’s Hickok?”
“Him and some of the others stayed behind in the village.”
“They’re plundering it?”
“No, General. Stayed behind with some of the rest who found a little girl.”
“A white prisoner?”
Sweete shook his head. “Half-breed. She was left behind when the rest took off.”
“Savages used her pretty bad, General,” Custer broke in.
Hancock’s eyes narrowed as he brought the back of his hand to his mouth. “The disgusting—”
“You want her brought to our camp?” Sweete asked.
Custer turned to the scout, seeing that Hancock was not about to answer. “Have one of the surgeons see to her, Sweete. If not them, one of the hospital stewards.”
“Custer,” Hancock said as he settled back against the canvas campaign chair he had placed in the ambulance, “we’ll bloody well make these bastards pay one of these days.”
Jonah Hook wasn’t sure why he had stayed behind with the others when Shad had gone riding off with Custer to report to Hancock that the village was empty.
But now as the light was falling from the sky, he knew it had something to do with the little girl he had been the first to find among the empty, abandoned lodges. Something to do with thinking about his own daughter. Hattie would be twelve this spring, he thought. Not much older than this little thing.
He held the half-breed child in his arms, wishing it were Hattie he were rocking. As the light faded from the lodge, so did those scared eyes he hesitated to look into.
She had fought him like a frightened animal at first, until she gave up—perhaps her hope gone, perhaps all remaining strength. Then she had collapsed into his arms as he knelt atop a buffalo-robe bed, strewn with blankets not taken in the hasty retreat.
When the others had shown up, she had explained to Shad Sweete in her broken Cheyenne what the warriors had done after the women and old ones had abandoned her.
“When the others gone off, running with what they could carry,” Shad explained to Custer and the scouts who had gathered in that gloomy lodge, “a dozen or so of them young warriors rode back here to have their fun with her. She’s half-breed you know. And to them bucks—it makes her white.”
“You’re saying that while we were parleying with their chiefs,” Hickok growled, “some of those red bastards came back here?”
Shad had only nodded as Custer whirled, slapping his quirt against the top of his boot.
“You there, Sweete. Come with me—back to Hancock. The rest of you can eat what you can find here. Chances are I’ll talk Hancock into freeing me to pursue these vile heathens this very night. If not to punish them for escaping us—then to punish them for what crimes they have committed against this … this child.”
“Stay with her, Jonah,” Sweete had said in a whisper before he left the lodge. “Chances are you’re the only one she’ll let near her now. I’ll see about getting a surgeon to help her back with Hancock’s soldiers.”
That night there hadn’t been much they could do for the girl, with the exception of washing her wounds caused at the hands of those who had repeatedly raped her. It took hours before she would let one of the hospital stewards close to her. Near morning, Jonah laid the girl on some blankets at the back of an ambulance, where she slipped contentedly into sleep, her head in the lap of the steward.
As the eastern sky stretched into a bloody pink, Jonah wearily found the rest of the scouts just then beginning to move about their fires.
“You need some coffee, Jonah,” Sweete said, trudging about the low flames of his breakfast fire with his blanket draped from his shoulders, slurring the ground.
Hook settled nearby, where the old mountain man patted the ground. Jonah pulled a blanket around his own shoulders against the predawn chill. “What I need is sleep. Forget the coffee, old man.”
“You’ll want the coffee, Jonah. We’re riding out in a few minutes.”
“Not until I get some sleep, I’m not.”
“Hancock’s asked that I stay with him and California Joe. He plans on heading down to Fort Dodge from here.”
“Good. Just as long as old Thunderass don’t climb into his ambulance till I get me a little shut-eye.”
Sweete dragged the coffeepot from the fire as he cleared his throat. “You ain’t going with Hancock.”
Hook opened one eye into the murky darkness and glared at the old trapper. “What you figure on me doing—I don’t go with you?”
“Custer asked for you go with him and Hickok.”
Hook closed the one eye and sighed. “He did, did he?”
“We’re riding out soon as you have a cup of coffee,” a new voice drew close from the darkness.
With the one eye opened again, he found the dusty, prairie-crusted long hair of normally dapper James Butler Hickok hanging disheveled about his face.
“I had my way about it—there’d been a few more of you goddamned Yankees I’d a’killed afore you put a end to the war,” he grumbled.
“Rise an’ shine, friend—there’s a trail of Injuns we’re bound to follow.” Hickok ran fingers through his hair.
“Likely it’s a war we’re off to start, Bill.”
Hickok straightened, allowing the Confederate room to kick his way out of the blanket. “You’re wrong there, Reb. Wasn’t us started this war.”
In their hasty flight, the bands left only small trails for Hickok’s scouts to mull over, deciding which to follow. But follow they did, heading north in the general direction of the many dim tracks, onto the open prairie, leading Custer and his eight companies of the Seventh Cavalry rapidly behind them.
North of Walnut Creek, Hickok left the guiding in the hands of others while he motioned Hook to join him in pulling away from Custer’s column. Without a word of explanation, Hickok set a bruising pace, the rising sun constantly on his right cheek as they loped across the rolling tableland of central Kansas Territory. It was late that day when the pair reined up at a stage ranch, embers smoking still.
Hook let his eyes run over the scene quickly, then glanced at Hickok.
“You ever see something like this, Jonah?”
“I fought that war, same as you,” he answered quietly.
“I know. But—you ever see anything like that?”
Hickok pointed his Spencer carbine at the blackened, bloated bodies of the two ranch hands, burned among the charred wreckage of this way station along the Smoky Hill Road.
“I’ve smelled this afore, Hickok—in Missouri.”
Hickok nodded. “Some of the worst of it happened on the borderlands. Let’s get.”
No one had to drag him from that place. Problem was, it was only the first of many the two ran across over the next two days.
“Looks like everything west of Hays been hit, General,” Hickok explained when he and Hook dismounted before Custer that third week of April, after they had returned from their far-ranging scout.
“All the same story?” Custer asked, his blue eyes narrowing.
“Every station … burned out. All the stock run off. Workers what didn’t make it out, we found butchered,” Hook answered.
At that moment they stood among the ruins of Lookout Station, only fifteen miles west of Fort Hays. The burned bodies of three men had just been found near the smoldering debris.
“They don’t even look like something once human,” Custer muttered in something close to a curse.
“Likely, they were tortured by the red bastards,” growled a handsome soldier standing at Custer’s elbow.
“Little doubt of that, Tom,” Custer said to his younger brother. Then he suddenly turned to his adjutant, animated once more. “Mr. Moy
lan, pass along the order for our command to move off two miles and make camp.”
Jonah stood dumbfounded as the long-haired lieutenant colonel and his staff strode off, their shadows lengthening beneath the all but gone western sun. How many could look at this scene and not have his stomach turned? And not grow angry? Not be changed?
For three days after Custer had marched off to continue the hunt, General Winfield Scott Hancock debated with himself on just what to do with the captured, empty Indian village on Pawnee Fork.
Agents for both the Cheyenne and the Brule Sioux gave it their best to convince Hancock to be a gracious victor.
“The bands fled only because of their fear of your amassed might, General,” declared Edward W. Wynkoop. “They’re mortally afraid of another Sand Creek massacre.” Shad Sweete had watched as Hancock’s eyes grew steely. “I am a professional soldier, Major Wynkoop. In no way similar to that minister-turned-butcher named Chivington!”
Colonel Jesse W. Leavenworth attempted his own appeal. “General, to put that village to the torch as you have been suggesting would only add to the flames already scorching the central plains. You will make war certain by not staying your hand and showing the tribes your benevolence.”
Hancock smiled, calling out to the old scout. “Mr. Sweete—that is a good one, isn’t it? Benevolence for these warrior bands?”
Shad watched both the agents turn to look in his direction in the steamy shade provided by the canvas awning strung from the top of Hancock’s ambulance. He cleared his throat. “Truth of it is, General—these bands understand only one thing. War.”
Wynkoop bolted up. “I protest, General—”
“Give my scout a chance to finish, Major Wynkoop!” growled Hancock.
“And,” Sweete continued, “the warrior bands fear only one thing. Death.”
“There,” Hancock sighed, sinking back into his canvas campaign chair. “This man’s spent his entire adult life out here in these far western regions. No one understands these Indians the way Mr. Sweete does, gentlemen.” He tapped a finger against his fleshy lower lip, then stroked it down his chin whiskers.
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