No matter the package, Jim Bridger figured. Whether it was one of Red Cloud’s warriors, or an army captain, or a pretty young widow-gal—Seamus Donegan attracted trouble like bees drawn to honey.
“You’re punishing that whiskey, Seamus,” young Jack Stead advised. He was Bridger’s young partner, a former English seaman who had become a competent scout in his own right, marrying a Cheyenne woman and settling into a life of working for the army as it sought to pacify the Far West this second year following the end of the Civil War. Stead himself admired the big, taciturn Irishman. Something about his twinkling eyes attracted friends.
Perhaps Seamus Donegan had been born that rare breed of soul who is blessed with as many good friends as he was cursed with mighty enemies.
“I haven’t a right to drink my whiskey, you’re saying?” Donegan growled over the lip of his tin cup. “Winter’s got this land locked down tighter’n a nun’s kneecaps … and not a nit-prick of us venturing out the stockade if he don’t have at least a company of sojurs behind him for fear of getting butchered like Fetterman’s boys—bless their souls. Jack, me boy—seems drinking the sutler’s red whiskey is all that’s left a man to do.”
“Then drink yourself silly again today, damn you!” Jack roared in laughter. “Can’t think of a reason why we shouldn’t get sacked together.”
Bridger watched them clang their cups together, sloshing some of the strong liquid onto one of the rough-hewn tables in the sutler’s cabin. He grinned behind his beard, despite the ache in his bones and the icy pain the rheumatiz stabbed at his every joint. And he remembered another cold day barely one month past.
A day Fetterman and Brown and Grummond rode out at the head of seventy-eight men to chase themselves some Sioux scalps, Jim brooded darkly to himself with the memory. Twenty-one December last, 1866—when Fetterman’s entire force disappeared over that goddamned Lodge Trail Ridge, not a man among the lot of them seen alive again.
Sighing, the old trapper become army-scout gazed at the hard cut of Donegan’s face. The finely chiseled nose set beneath the gray-green eyes. Those full, expressive lips buried within the dark beard. And Bridger recalled the look carved on the Irishman’s face that sub-zero night when Donegan returned with the somber rescue party—with word that not a soul among Fetterman’s command had survived. Bridger had never asked any more about it, for the look in Donegan’s eyes had told any half-smart man not to venture such a question.
Still, the old scout knew the young Irishman had seen far too much of the killing in his few years, what with four of those years spent fighting atop a horse down south against Confederate cavalry, not to mention all that Donegan had seen since he had arrived in Red Cloud’s Sioux country some seven months ago.
Seven months to some. A lifetime to most.
No way Jim Bridger would ever forget the look in the Irishman’s eyes that winter night. A haunted look that somehow, even with all the time that had since passed, remained a look every bit as haunted still.
“Sun’s going down behind the peaks,” Stead remarked absently, nodding toward the window where he watched the milk-pale orb settle on the Big Horns mantled in white.
“Matters little,” Donegan replied, never looking up from his whiskey cup. “Night or day—still cold enough to freeze the bullocks off a Boston snowman.”
“You spent time in Boston, did you?” Stead asked, eager to make conversation to ease some of the constant electric tension forever present around the Irishman like a frightening aura.
Seamus nodded. “It’s where I landed … come here from the land of me birth. An English ship, filled with dirt-poor Irish farmers … come to these foreign shores hoping for better. Too oft handed worse. And me but a young lad shipped off by me mither to this new land with her hopes and her tears.”
“She hoped you’d fare better here?”
“Aye,” he nodded again. “To look up her two brothers, I was. A lad of fifteen, carrying all I owned in her wee carpet satchel. Most everything I had then a hand-me-down at that.”
“Those uncles of yours help you find work there in Boston by the sea?”
Donegan shook his head, staring into the red of his whiskey. “Not a trace of ’em, either one.”
“You came to Boston on a cold trail?”
“Nawww,” and Seamus lifted the cup to his lips. “Last letter my sainted mither got from her brothers came posted from Boston … saying they’d both landed work as city constables.” He snorted without any humor. “That’s a bit of a laugh. Them two brothers of hers—constables! And in Irish Boston to boot!”
“What became of ’em?” Stead inquired.
Donegan froze the young scout with those gray-green eyes of his; he finally gazed out the frosted window while the last light slid from the sky. His brow knitted. “No telling, Jack.”
“You checked with the constable’s office?”
“Never worked as constables,” he answered with a wolf-slash of a grin. “But, the constables did know the both of ’em. One was quite the brawler, it seems. My dear mither oft shook her head and said I took after his blood. And me other uncle … well, now—the constables said he had a smooth way about him, talking folks out of their money.”
“Sounds a bit like sutler Kinney there,” Stead whispered, nodding toward the counter.
Jefferson T. Kinney leaned one pudgy elbow on the rough-hewn pine-plank bar, wiping a dirty towel across some spilled whiskey and laughing with two civilian workers who had bellied their way through the crowd to nurse their drinks. A former U.S. Judge out of Utah and an ardent pro-slaver, Kinney had lost his bench when President Lincoln had entered the White House. Kinney had been one of the many who had rejoiced when the Great Emancipator was cut down in Ford’s Theater not two years ago come April.
Bridger’s eyes joined the Irishman’s in glaring at the sutler. Kinney must have felt the heat, for he looked up from the bar, gazing across the noisy, smoky room with those black beads he had for eyes. They locked on Donegan.
“No love lost on that one,” Bridger whispered around the stub of the pipe that kept a constant wreath round his gray head.
“Aye,” Donegan agreed as he nodded, and went back to staring at his red whiskey. “That’s one bastard wishes Seamus Donegan’s body had been hauled back from the Ridge with Fetterman’s dead.”
“What makes a man like him hate a man like you, Seamus?” Stead asked, gazing at the sutler’s plump fingers pouring drinks for civilian workers pressing the bar.
“Man like Seamus Donegan here,” Bridger began, snagging the attention of the other two, “always brings out the fear in little men like the Judge over there. And in such men, fear is the worst thing you want. No telling what a fella like him might do you get him scared enough.”
“What’s a man like Kinney got to be afeared of from me?”
“Seamus Donegan, down inside where that fat little bastard lives, Kinney knows he don’t belong out here in these mountains like you do,” Bridger explained. “Somewhere in his gut he knows he’s bought his way out here—but he can’t ever earn what it is you already have for free.”
“What’s that, Jim?” Stead asked.
“The respect of other men. Strong men. Honest men. The kind of man it will take to tame this land. The kind of man Judge Kinney will never be, but will always try to buy, and failing that … will try to squash like a sow-bug.”
“Pour me more whiskey, Jack,” Seamus said as he slammed down his empty cup, “and I’ll drink a toast to the sowbug squashers in the world. Appears me uncles have much in common with our friend Judge Kinney over there.”
Stead poured from a thick glass bottle packed in straw all the way from Omaha. “What keeps Seamus Donegan from being a sowbug squasher himself?”
The Irishman stared at the red whiskey a moment before answering. “I suppose I’m not the kind content to die peacefully in bed with me eyes closed. Because some time back on a hot, bloody battlefield they called Gettysburg, Seamus Donegan realiz
ed he would never die an old man’s death. Now some cold and bony finger’s always tapping me shoulder, telling me every day’s borrowed time.”
“The reaper has us all, sometime,” Bridger added.
“To the reaper then!” Donegan cheered, lifting his cup. “To the reaper—the last friend a dying man will ever know!”
“To the reaper,” Stead joined in, sloshing his cup into the air.
“To the old bastard himself,” Donegan added after swilling down some of the burning whiskey. “This god-blessed, hell-forsaken country gonna keep the reaper plenty busy before this war with Red Cloud’s over.”
* * *
Seamus stood shuddering with the cold blast knifing his groin. Quickly as he could, he finished wetting the snowy ground at the corner of the latrine slip-trench behind Kinney’s cabin, and he was buttoning the fly on his faded cavalry britches when the voice startled him.
“Should have known, Seamus Donegan. If I don’t find you drinking whiskey in the bar, you’d be outside in cold pissing good whiskey away!”
Donegan smiled at his old friend Samuel Marr, as he pulled on a buffalo-hide mitten and swiped at his drippy nose. “Hate the smell of these places. Remind me of sojurs, a latrine like this does.”
Marr chuckled. “Where the hell you think you are, boy? You spit in any direction … you’ll hit a soldier.”
“Curses be to ’em!” Seamus growled. Then he grinned and slapped the gray-headed Marr on the back. “Man tries to forget ever being a sojur and fighting that war—there’s always mitherless sons like you want to remind him of the bleeming army! C’mon in to Kinney’s place—I’ll buy you a drink if the bastard will take my treasury note.”
Marr stopped, pulling from the tall Irishman’s arm. “You can’t, Seamus.”
“And why can’t I?” he asked, both hands balled on his hips and a wide grin cutting his face. His teeth glimmered beneath the thumbnail moon lingering in the west.
“The girl,” Marr replied. “She wants to see you.”
“The Wheatley woman?” He felt his pulse quicken.
Marr nodded without a word.
Donegan’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, not wanting to hope. “What would the widow be wanting with me?”
“You told her to call when she needed anything.”
“Aye,” and he nodded, staring at the crusty snow beneath his tall, muddy boots. “The day we buried her husband. Brave man, that one.”
“A few who marched with Fetterman were every bit as brave as they had to be on that hellish day,” Marr whispered, taking a step closer to the tall man.
“She say what it was?”
Sam shook his head. “Not a word. Just asked me to fetch you to her place … small cabin outside the east wall of the quartermaster’s stockade.”
“I know where it is.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve kept me eye on her since.”
“I see.”
“It’s not what you’re thinking, Cap’n,” Donegan growled.
“Didn’t say it was. Just, I’ve got a fatherly feeling for the girl. Not yet out of her teens … and with two young boys to raise … her husband butchered with Fetterman’s command but a month ago this day. She’s alone in the world now.”
“No she’s not, Cap’n.” Then Donegan slapped a big paw on the older man’s shoulder. “She’s got you … and me both watching out for her and the boys.”
Marr winked in the pale light. “Best you get now. I told her I’d send you straight-away.”
“You’ll be at Kinney’s for the evening?”
Marr nodded. “Nowhere else to be, is there, Seamus. You’ll find me here.” He turned and scuffed off across the old snow, his boots squeaking over the icy crust as he stomped toward Kinney’s door.
Donegan watched after him while the old man’s form faded from the pale snow. He loved that old man, he did. Captain Samuel Marr, Missouri Union Volunteers.
When Seamus had mustered himself out in those months following Appomattox, he had wandered west with the big gray stallion, his yellow-striped cavalry britches now patched and worn, and the .44-caliber Navy pistol that had carved out a comfortable place for itself at his hip. Wandering into Missouri he had run into Sam Marr, busy buying horses for the newly-organized frontier army. After the canny horse-trader Marr discovered he couldn’t buy Donegan’s gray stallion, they had learned together of the wealth to be made in the Montana diggings along Alder Gulch. And from that moment had begun forming a fierce friendship frequently tested as they fought their way up the Bozeman Road through Sioux hunting ground.
Seamus Donegan would not do a thing to hurt Sam Marr. Nor would he ever do anything to harm the Widow Wheatley.
Purposefully he slid to the door as quietly as a winter-gaunt wolf and listened. Inside he made out the muffled voices of the two young boys. The oldest, Isaac, named for his father’s best friend. Isaac Fisher who had stood and stared cold-eyed into Red Cloud’s Sioux ambush at Wheatley’s side. Then Donegan made out the smaller boy’s voice. Little Peter. Taking after his mother. A beauty she was, that woman. With so much to bear at her young age. He heard her scolding the two, then listened as she laughed.
Never was one to get hard with those boys of hers, Seamus thought, bringing his big fist up to the rough-hewn door.
Two pairs of little feet hammered to the other side of the door, accompanied by excited voices. He listened as her feet scuffled up, her whisper shushing the boys as she drew back the huge iron bolt and cracked the door an inch.
Seamus gazed down at the single eye peering through the crack at him under the pale moonlight. He cleared his throat.
“Mrs. Wheatley. It’s Seamus. Seamus Donegan.”
Then he suddenly remembered his hat. Quickly he raked the big, stiff, quarter-crowned brown-felt hat from his long, curly hair and nodded.
“Pardon me, m’am. A man out in this country doesn’t get much of a chance to be a gentleman.”
By this time the door had opened and the shy, liquid eyes were blinking their welcome as she waved him inside. “Please … Mr. Donegan. Come in.”
He stooped through the door-frame and stopped two steps inside as the woman urged the heavy door back into its jamb and slid home the iron bolt. She came ’round him, shyly reaching for his hat.
“I’ll take that, Mr. Donegan,” she offered, taking the hat from his mittened hands. “Your coat. Please. Make yourself to home.”
Beyond her the two boys stood huddled as one, staring at the tall man who had to hunch his shoulders beneath the exposed, peeled beams of the low-roofed cabin. Their eyes wide with wonder, Isaac finally whispered to his young brother.
“We see’d him afore, Peter. Day we put Papa to rest.”
“It was cold, Isaac,” the little one whispered. “I don’t remember him.”
“I do,” Isaac replied protectively of his mother, never taking his eyes off Donegan. “I remember that one.”
Jennifer Wheatley slid an old cane-backed chair across the plank floor toward the Irishman. Donegan slipped the heavy mackinaw coat from his shoulders and shook it free of frost before handing it to the woman. He settled carefully on the chair many-times repaired with nails and wire.
Things had to last folks out in this country, he brooded as he watched her pull up the only other chair in the one-room cabin.
He saw a wooden box turned on its end that served as a third chair at the tiny table where the family took its meals.
“You’d like coffee, Mr. Donegan?” she asked, pointing to the fireplace of creek-bottom stone and mortar.
“If it’s no trouble, ma’am.”
“Have some made. But you must stop calling me ‘ma’am,’ Mr. Donegan,” she said as she knelt by the iron trivet where the blackened and battered coffee pot sat warming over the coals.
“You’re a married woman, ma’am,” he started, then ground his hands over his knees, growing angry with himself for his careless words. Words that caused her to stop pouring the c
offee. “You’ve got two fine boys here,” Seamus tried again, hoping it would ease the pain of his thoughtlessness.
Jennifer rose slowly, two cups in hand. She passed one to Donegan. “My name’s Jennifer. Family and friends back in Ohio called me Jennie. I … I want you to be my friend.” For a moment she glanced at the two boys. “We … we all need a friend. So, please—call me Jennie.”
He sipped at the hot liquid. The coffee tasted as if it had been setting in the kettle, re-heating for most of the afternoon. Seamus nodded. “Make you a deal … m’am. I’ll call you Jennie—if you and the boys here call me Seamus.”
Jennie looked over her shoulder at the boys huddled by the fireplace with wooden horses in hand. They had stopped play to stare once more at the big man sprawled over the tiny chair.
“Boys, I want you come over here now,” the woman directed. “Want you meet a kind man who knew your papa.”
Isaac nudged Peter across the floor until both stood at their mother’s side. “You knowed my papa?” Isaac demanded gruffly.
Donegan nodded and smiled. “As fine a man as any I’ve met, Mr. Wheatley was.” He stuck out his hand to the boy. “My name’s Seamus Donegan. Who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
Isaac wiped his hand across his patched denims and stuffed it into the Irishman’s paw. “Isaac Wheatley, sir. Pleased to meet a friend of my papa’s.”
Seamus gazed at the youngest when Isaac stepped back. Peter glanced up at his mother. She nodded before he inched forward.
“Peter, sir. I’m pleased.”
“Not as pleased as me, Peter.” Seamus felt the small hand sweating in his grip. “Your papa would be proud to know how his boys help their mother.”
Seamus tried to blink away the stinging tears, glancing ’round the little cabin split in half by wool blankets suspended from a rope lanyard. In the back was barely enough room for the one small bed he supposed the boys shared. Here in the front half of the cabin, another small prairie bed joined the table and chairs, along with a battered old hutch where Jennie kept what dishes had not been broken in her travels west.
Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 Page 40
