By now Collins was plainly hit, his mount whirling wildly. The rest of his outfit were breaking and racing for the north end of the bridge. The first army mount clattered onto the cottonwood planks.
“Prepare to fire!” Lybe shouted. “Make it good boys—empty some ponies now …. Fire!”
The fourteen rifles spurted orange, engulfing the Volunteers in stinging smoke as the single mounted soldier surged into their midst, burst through them to the safety of the fort. Another horseman clattered onto the bridge. And a third, pounding the hollow-sounding planks as Hook rammed the ball home onto the powder. He thumbed a cap onto the nipple and brought the big hammer back to full cock as the wide, smooth buttplate slipped into the groove of his shoulder.
By damn, this is what he was out here to do, if he was going to be out here at all—and that was to kill Injuns.
Lybe was barking now, his pistol busy. “Fire your weapons at will—reload and fire at will!”
Jonah squeezed back on the trigger. The gun roared. Through the smoke he thought he saw a warrior reel and grip his pony’s withers, loping out of the scramble of men and animals. But with all the confusion, Jonah could not be sure if it was his kill.
In a matter of ragged seconds, every one of Caspar Collins’s squad who was going to make it out of that horde of warriors had reached the bridge—frantic in their flight, tearing through Lybe’s Volunteers in panic.
“Where’s Collins?” demanded the captain as each one of the troopers shot past.
One slowed, then stopped, his horse prancing when Lybe snagged the bridle.
“Don’t know where the lieutenant is!” His face was ashen with fear. He turned back, pointing, the horse trying to rip itself from Lybe’s firm grip. “He went back to help one of the … one of the men what was down. Lemme go, Captain!”
Lybe freed his grip and slapped the mount, before he turned to see Captain Bretney emerge from the gate at the lead of another twenty foot soldiers, coming on at double time. They too were ordered to spread out in a wide skirmish line that halted at the riverbank, where they commenced firing.
Lybe shouted into the noise of the gunfire, “Reload and follow me.”
“We going on across, Cap’n?” Hook asked.
“By damn we’re going to find out what happened to Collins.”
Jonah read the determination turning the man’s jawline to stone, and admired the Yankee officer for it. He was on Lybe’s heels, glancing behind him once as some of the rest slammed home their ramrods and joined the captain.
Bretney signaled his men on the south bank to form again. The captain led his squad, following Lybe across as the first howitzer round whined overhead. It exploded just above the ground, spraying shot and ball into the air, kicking up dirt and brush.
With wild shrieks, the Indians retreated up the sides of the hills and atop the bluffs, leaving their victims lying stark and white as fish bellies against the summer-cured grass. Lybe stopped at the north end of the bridge, watching Bretney’s squad come up to join him as the warriors jeered and slapped their bare asses at the soldiers. Taunting, leering, luring the white men on.
“No chance to make it to that wagon train now, Captain,” Lybe shouted as Bretney came up with his patrol.
Bretney squinted to the northwest and pointed. “There’s the lieutenant’s horse.”
They all watched the big gray animal being led away, into the hills by a warrior using a buffalo-hair lariat.
“He might be … one of these,” Lybe said, visibly choking down the bile.
“Damn that Anderson!” Bretney roared, whirling to shake his fist at the Platte Bridge Station on the far side of the river. “I’ll have your oak leaves for this, Anderson!”
“He may have your bars for that—”
Bretney whipped around on Lybe. “Colonel Collins will likely think I’m responsible for his son’s death—because I didn’t get Anderson to countermand his own order sending the boy out. Goddamn you, Anderson!”
“The colonel can’t hold you responsible, Henry. Calm yourself before you’re up on court-martial before Anderson’s charges!”
Lybe ordered the regulars and his Volunteers to stay behind for the moment and cover the bodies of Collins’s men while he escorted Bretney back to the post. In minutes a squad of soldiers came through the gate, leading a double-hitch team pulling a wagon. Into its empty bed the mutilated and scalped corpses were unceremoniously thrown.
Jonah stood, transfixed over one body. He had seen the bodies of his dead comrades, torn by grapeshot or dismembered by exploding canister. But nothing like this. He suddenly thanked God that there was nothing left in his stomach to heave up.
Both hands were hacked off. The large, white thigh muscles were cleaved open like hams from hip to kneecap, pink and rippling in glistening crimson. Four deep lacerations marked each upper arm. The belly lay open, the purple pink snake of intestine wriggling out into the summer heat, already attracting the buzzing of green-backed flies. The head lay darkened from eyebrows back, completely scalped, ears missing.
But it was the castration, along with seeing the scrotum and penis hung pendant over the young trooper’s chin that caused Jonah to gag on nothing more than his revulsion of fighting this sort of enemy who would desecrate its victims with such complete and utter abandon.
“Get that body over here, soldier!” shouted a sergeant, stomping toward Hook. “We ain’t got all day to lollygag here while them Injuns come down to stuff your cock in your mouth, Reb!”
“Sir?” he asked weakly.
“Grab his arms,” the sergeant ordered, hoisting his weapon sling over his shoulder. “What’s left of ’em anyway. I’ll get the poor bastard’s legs, boy. You know him?”
Jonah shook his head. About all he could do.
The wrists were sticky with blood, blotted with sand. That grit was about the only thing that kept Hook from losing his grip on the severed wrists until he reached the back of the wagon where the rest of the soldiers huddled, watching the taunting, jeering warriors shaking the bloody, still-warm scalps at the white men.
“About face!” shouted the sergeant. “Let’s keep it together, men. Easy … easy now. Don’t run off. Stay together, and we’ll all make it back!”
Jonah felt no relief back within the walls of Platte Bridge Station.
“You’re past the worst of it, Jonah Hook,” said Shad Sweete as he came alongside, placing his big ham of a hand on the Southerner’s shoulder. “Ain’t nothing ever gonna be as bad as seeing your first.”
Hook continued to stare into the icy blue of the scout’s eyes, unable to find any words to say. They were all choked down below that ball of bile and foul-tasting phlegm he could not hack up.
The shrill call of “Assembly” on the bugle yanked him back, hard. Captain Lybe waited for the last Kansas regular to shuffle into formation.
“Major Anderson has put me in charge of the defense of this post. I want details assigned to dig rifle pits. Another detail to pile up an embrasure of earth in front of our howitzers. Any questions?”
When there weren’t any, the captain went on. “Be at your assignments, men. We don’t know how long we have until they make a full assault on us. Dis-missed!”
“Captain Lybe,” called Major Anderson. “I’ve just been informed by our telegraph operator that we’re now completely cut off.”
“The Indians have dragged down the wire going east?”
“We’ve sent the last word of our desperate situation to Laramie.” Anderson turned to his adjutant. “Lieutenant Walker, I want you to mount twenty men, well-armed. I want the east line repaired. Take what supplies you need and depart in ten minutes.”
“Yes, Major.” George Walker saluted and was gone. To his dismay, instead of twenty, the lieutenant found only sixteen horses still fit for duty, what with exhaustion and battle wounds.
As the adjutant’s small repair detail cleared the post gates, Lybe climbed down the ladder from the banquette, signaling his V
olunteers to form up.
“You men stay ready. Check your weapons. See that you have ball and caps in your kit.”
“We gonna be ready for them Injuns when they come?” asked a Georgia man.
“No, Private. We’re going out to cover that repair detail.”
“We ain’t been ordered out by the major,” grumbled an Alabaman sourly.
“I’m going to fix that right now,” Lybe snapped.
The captain was back in less than three minutes, a grim smile on his face. “Major wants us to proceed to that sandy mound overlooking the ford where the repair detail will be working. Let’s march, double time to catch up with those horses.”
The fifteen-man squad trotted in ragtag fashion from the post gate, moving down the Laramie Road to the east about the time the dust from the sixteen horses was settling.
Hook swallowed hard, his nose caked with the alkali silt stirred up by hooves, his stockings hot and itchy inside his boots. Then he chuckled to himself quickly. Glad to have a pair of boots after all. For the last few months of the war, he had fought barefooted, never lucky enough to be the first to come across the Yankee dead. Stripping what he needed from the blue-belly’s carcass.
Better hot, sticky feet than cracked, cold, bleeding feet.
The Indians stayed on the north bank, most remaining on the slopes of the nearby hills. Watching. A few loped their ponies up and down on the flat near the river timber, gesturing obscenely, shouting their oaths at both the horsemen and the foot soldiers. While Walker led half his men on east to the far end of the break in the wire, Lybe led his small platoon up on the rise that overlooked the ford and the hills across the North Platte.
The Kansan Walker had just ordered out three pickets of his own and reached the end of the thousand-foot break of wire flopping in the breeze when the roar of a howitzer echoed over the river valley.
“That’s the major’s signal the Indians are coming, boys!” Lybe shouted to his Confederates on the knoll.
Down below, Walker’s soldiers remounted so quickly they neglected to leave behind horses for the three pickets the lieutenant had put out. The squad retreated in wild disorder.
“We can’t stay here, Cap’n!” shouted one of the fourteen Volunteers.
“Look at ’em comin’ now—we’ll get eaten alive for sure!”
“Form up! Column of twos, men—double time, march!”
At a brisk trot, Lybe led his galvanized Rebels off the hill for the fort. As he was closer to the stockade, he hoped he would reach the walls about the time Walker made it with his horsemen. As it turned out, Hook and a young Alabama boy dragged in the body of one of Walker’s wounded horsemen. Another of the lieutenant’s men slumped in his saddle, severely wounded as they poured back through the gates, the screeching of a thousand warriors loud in their ears.
“Captain!” Walker turned, his neck swollen, face red. “Respectfully, sir—you almost got our nuts cut off out there!”
Lybe shook a finger at the lieutenant. “You damned addle-brained jayhawker! Wasn’t for me—you’d been on your own out there. I volunteered these men to come cover you.”
“Why the hell didn’t you cover us then? I’ve got one dead and one dying right now.”
“Neither of us got the chance to fight today, Lieutenant. You decided to run instead!” Lybe turned away. “You’re dismissed, Walker!”
“Dismissed?” he sputtered.
“Unless you don’t understand the meaning of that order, Mr. Walker.”
The lieutenant sputtered furiously for a moment, then turned on his heel.
Lybe sighed deeply, his eyes squinting. “All right, the rest of you—Kansas, Ohio, and U.S. Volunteers—get back to digging those goddamned rifle pits. We must be ready when those red bastards come!”
“There comes the train!”
Shad Sweete turned at the call from a picket above him along the banquette.
“That’s Custard, I’ll bet,” he said to Jonah Hook.
Jonah stood, wagging his head in amazement. “I would’ve figured he’d be buzzard bait by now.”
Shad shook his head. “Not with every Injun for a hundred miles gathered up here for this shivery. Likely Custard ain’t seen a war feather till now.”
“The major better send some men out to make sure that wagon train makes it in.”
“Anderson ain’t the sort can make that decision.”
“Bretney?”
Shad grinned. “The captain with real guts is under arrest.”
He looked around for Lybe and found the captain arguing with Anderson at the far side of the open compound pocked now with rifle pits, each one like a fresh scar on the pale, foot-hammered earth.
“Lybe won’t do no good with him either, Jonah.” Shad pointed at the hills across the river. “Likely it’s all over for the sergeant’s men anyway. They just been spotted by the warriors.”
On the far hills, hundreds of warriors were leaping atop their ponies, kicking them furiously downhill toward the river. They had spotted the tops of the wagons not long after the fort had seen the incoming train, inching along the road on the Indians’ side of the North Platte.
“How many’s with Custard?” Shad inquired.
“I remember him having ten soldiers and fourteen teamsters,” Hook answered.
“Say!” shouted a picket above them. “The Injuns just cut off five of our boys from the rest of the wagon.”
“How many warriors following those five?” Shad flung his voice up the wall.
“More’n a hundred, mister.”
Hook felt helpless, knowing some of those men out there by face, if not by name. Knowing they had families back home, waiting for a husband or father or brother to come marching home. “Ain’t nothing we can do to help ’em?”
“Ain’t a damned thing now, Jonah,” Shad whispered. “Not a damned thing.”
The best Major Anderson could muster in the way of relief for Sergeant Custard’s wagon train was to fire the howitzers at the swarming horsemen heading west from the bridge.
The warriors caught the wagons in a shallow ravine some five miles west of the post. Far out of range of his artillery, and much farther than the major desired to dispatch a relief escort from his stockade. To everyone who asked, demanding action, Anderson justified sitting on his thumbs by saying he needed every man he had for the coming assault he expected from the gathering warriors.
For close to four hours the men in Platte Station kept their eyes on the distant smoke rising above the shallow ravine where they had last seen the wagon tops disappear. Then the firing grew intense for several minutes and gradually tapered off as if someone were damming an irrigation slough.
It wasn’t long before puffs of dark, oily smoke billowed into the sky from the far ravine and the faint sound of wild screeching was heard carried on the incoming breeze from upriver.
Much later in the day as the sun eased over into the last quadrant of the sky, there came a flurry of activity along the banquettes as soldiers shouted that they had spotted three men running in from the west.
“What’s your name, soldier?” Anderson demanded as he met the first of the trio of grimy, smoke-blackened survivors at the middle of the rifle pits, near Jonah Hook. Others clustered around the three as well.
“Corporal James Shrader, sir. Company D.”
“You with Custard’s outfit?”
“Was,” he gasped, eyes wide and every bit disbelieving he had made it in. “He ordered me to take four men out in advance and probe the trail in. We heard the howitzer fire back yonder—and Custard sent us in to find out what was happening here.”
“I ordered the field piece fired to warn the sergeant.”
“Yessir,” Shrader said, self-consciously. “When the Injuns rode down on us, we got cut off from the rest.”
“What happened to those who remained with the sergeant?”
“Don’t rightly know. We was more downstream from Custard and the wagons. But we could hear. The me
n put up a fight of it for a long time. And another bunch was close on our tails—about to find where we’d taken cover. Then a big, ugly Injun come riding down the edge of the coulee we was hiding in. He waved his rifle and called out to the rest. And they followed him like a swarm of hornets for the wagons down the ravine. That was the last we heard of any firing from Custard’s bunch.”
“You three hid all afternoon?”
“Yessir—five of us in the brakes near the river bottom. Private Ballew was knocked out of the saddle, and they swarmed over him there in the ravine. Private Summers was coming up the bank with me when he was hit and fell. We three is all that’s left.”
“Lieutenant Walker, take these men and get them something to eat and drink. You’ve done well, Corporal.”
“We got out with our hair, Major. And right now—that’s good enough for me.”
7
Moon of Cherries Blackening
AMONG THE SHAHIYENA of the North, he had long been known as Sauts, meaning the Bat.
That winged night animal swooping down on unsuspecting prey was his medicine helper.
But because of his huge beaklike nose, over the past few years more and more of his own people had taken to calling him what the few white men who came among the bands called him: Roman Nose.
So it was that this towering, muscular warrior became Woquini, or Hook Nose, to his own people. Above all, the most powerful war chief of the Northern Cheyenne.
Up and down the length of the hills overlooking the soldier fort on the south side of the river, Roman Nose passed by small groups of warriors, Lakota and Shahiyena both, sitting and talking, smoking their pipes and eating jerked meat, discussing the fight of yesterday when they had killed the soldier chief on the gray horse, perhaps talking of driving the soldiers back into the timber walls earlier today.
Warriors waving blankets on top of their lookout posts to the west caught his attention. More soldiers coming. Wagons.
Cry of the Hawk Page 7
