Red Cloud's Revenge

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I’d rather be in some dark holler,

  Where the sun refuse to shine,

  Than to see you another man’s darling

  And know you’ll never be mine.”

  His nose filled with the smell of this winter place. The lodge reeked of smoked hides, sweetgrass and pungent roots a’boil.

  That old harpy better not spit into my bullet hole no more, he thought, yanking the blanket over his bare skin and singing more.

  “I don’t want your greenback dollars,

  I don’t want your diamond ring,

  All I want is your love, darling,

  Won’t you take me back again?”

  All that remained of his left hand were stumps of fingers an exploding pistol had left behind many years ago. With them North scratched at a week’s worth of whiskers. Wondering how long it had taken his Arapahos to drag him back to this winter camp on the upper Tongue River. Their village sat upstream from Red Cloud’s Oglalla Bad Face band. Opposite Black Eagle’s Miniconjous. Within hailing distance of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas.

  Where the hell’s that stick?

  His fingers felt through his war-bag at the side of his bed by the fire. Finally he found the peeled willow stick. He counted the notches he carved in it every sundown. The only calendar a white man like North had to keep track of the days and weeks and months with these savages. Down from the twelfth ring carved clear around the stick he counted twenty-nine notches.

  December … gawddamn … thirtieth today.

  He struggled, fire through his belly and pain in his head, trying to remember how long ago he had been shot.

  Seventh … no—the sixth, gawddammit.

  He and his Arapahos had joined Red Leaf’s Miniconjous, Crazy Horse’s Oglallas and the rest when they ambushed the soldiers on the sixth of December, 1866. If his count was right, he’d been lying here more than three weeks, mending. His belly full of puggle and his wounds oozing poison. Worst of it was he’d even missed the big fight. The Sioux and Cheyenne called it their “Battle of the Hundred in the Hand.” With their leader wounded and unable to move, North’s Arapahos had followed Red Leaf and got in a few licks too.

  For three days after that big fight, the bands had danced over soldier scalps and feasted.

  “Just as sure as the dew falls

  Upon the green corn,

  Last night she was with me,

  Tonight she is gone.”

  He closed his eyes. They burned with gritty lodge-smoke, tearing like he’d bitten into a raw prairie onion.

  Yesterday he heard talk of the tribes breaking up for the rest of the winter. Going their separate ways. They were due, North figured.

  By gawd, they killed every last one of those sonsabitches!

  Ambushed. Trapped at the foot of Lodge Trail Ridge. And butchered to the last man. Every last army horse killed. Not one thing left living on that bare-bone, snow-crusted ridge.

  Shit! How I wished I’d been there to see that!

  He twisted to the side, his arm cradling his gut. The fire had come back, in a bad way. He fumed, wondering when that handful of Arapahos would get back from Fort Peck with his whiskey. Two hundred miles. Almost due north—cross the Yellowstone, then ride for the Missouri. He’d sent them there with some hides to trade for the white man’s whiskey.

  Bob North had always needed whiskey more than anything else. With it, he’d kill the pain in his belly. And then he wouldn’t care that those two holes in his gut still oozed. Then he wouldn’t care how their festering stank up this winter-lodge. Whiskey … and a woman now and then. Bob North could be happy with the simple things.

  His thirst for whiskey had led to his capture by Union forces back in ’sixty-three. A tall, muscular Confederate cavalry officer—knocked from his horse by the concussion of artillery exploding around him … knocked senseless and captured. Ending up in irons and shipped to one hellhole after another. Time and again they shoved a paper under his nose … telling him to sign it … swear allegiance to the Union and they’d make him a soldier … wearing Union blue this time … and stationed on the frontier to fight Injuns.

  The iron locked on his wrists and ankles grew heavier, and one day Bob North signed—just so he could get something to eat. And maybe a little whiskey, if he was good.

  Gawddamn ’em!

  “Galvanized Yankees” is what they called those former Confederates, officers and soldiers both, who had sworn allegiance to the Union, sent west to fight Indians instead of wasting away in a federal prison. At least until this last sixth of December, things had been working out a whole hell of a lot better for Bob North.

  He’d deserted, escaping from his detachment up on the Powder River. Country the Union officers were calling hostile territory at that time. But to Bob North, freedom itself beckoned, and he didn’t much give a damn about where he tried to run. Lady Luck was at his side two days later when he ran onto a small hunting party of Arapaho. Had they been Sioux … well, Bob North tried not to dwell on that.

  A few days later in the Arapaho camp he was taken to, North began carving on his willow sticks, making his calendars. And riding out with the Arapaho on raids into Absaroka to bring back Crow ponies. Scalp raids against the Crow and Ute and Snake and Flathead. With each new success, Bob North grew more daring. Until he started leading his own war-parties out. If he couldn’t find an enemy village, Bob North always knew where the soldier forts were. The Arapahos liked that in their renegade leader.

  They said he had big bull’s eggs.

  Damn right, I’ve got balls! Who the hell else is gonna let himself get seen time and again by them white sonsabitches?

  But after three summers of daring and killing and living with the Arapaho, the army moved their posts farther north … right to the foot of the Big Horns … into the heart of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting grounds. To protect their Bozeman Road which took settlers and miners to Bozeman, farther still to Virginia City—Alder Gulch and gold.

  From July of this year, ’sixty-six, through the twenty-first of December, when the tribes had wiped out eighty-one soldiers in a spare forty minutes, Red Cloud’s confederation had harassed the forts, killing civilians along the trail and civilians working in the hayfields or timber. Last summer Bob North made sure Red Cloud and the other chiefs understood what the word “siege” meant. Bob North made sure the tribes never let up their pressure on those forts hunkered defensively along the white man’s Montana Road.

  And then he took that bullet in the belly. Bob North had missed the finest day of fighting any of the tribes had ever seen. Forced that day to lay here on these robes, drinking the last of his whiskey … waiting for someone to return to camp with news of the success of the ambush and battle.

  Damn, did he hate white men.

  Bob North chuckled. “You’re getting half crazy, ol’ coon,” he whispered to himself. “You got white skin yourself, gawddammit.”

  He recalled that during the last full moon he had led this small band of his adopted Arapahos to the upper Tongue. To join in struggle against other white men. But those white men weren’t his kind. Where Bob North wanted to be left alone, those soldiers down at the new fort wanted to stir shit up. Where soldiers went, he knew, the shit always got stirred.

  Bob North had learned that much by following Stephen Watts Kearny in and out of Mexico back to ’forty-six.

  Suspiciously, he eyed the old woman who hobbled through the door flap and scooted around the fire in his direction. She bent over the kettle simmering at the edge of the fire and nodded, smiling toothlessly at him.

  Gawd-damn! My belly hurts. This bitch goes sticking roots and other shit in them holes … could do with more whiskey … these brutes ever come drag this old harpy away … they ever show up with more whiskey like I told ’em. How many days ago now … I got knocked outta the saddle?

  Back on that murky dawn in the first week of a white man’s December, renegade Bob North had led his Arapahos to join the Sioux attacking the so
ldiers stationed in that new fort on the plateau. Dawn—and time for North to prove himself to Red Cloud’s boys.

  The sky had never really snowed. It just oozed icy, lancing flakes once the gray of predawn streamed along the hills to the east. Everything made slick and wet. Their short bows not worth much in such damp weather, the Arapaho would have to rely on their numbers. Their speed. And the incompetence of the fort’s officers.

  North could always count on that. Incompetence. Few officers like Capt. Robert L. North in either army anymore—those not raving lunatics by now had become roaring drunks.

  Wish they’d get here with that whiskey of mine! he fumed, watching the old woman guardedly and grinding his hip down into the elk robes. Could use me some drink. He remembered the good red whiskey aged in those Tennessee kegs. Not at all like this amber-colored, tobacco-laced grain the traders sold to the Indians along the upper Missouri.

  Just ’nother drink … help me sleep.

  As directed, his warriors had raced down on some soldiers, then turned and darted away while the soldiers followed obediently behind them. After a ten-mile chase took North’s Arapahos into the badlands northeast of the fort, North had suddenly turned his warriors as the Sioux closed the trap behind their hapless pursuers.

  Rather than shooting at the white men, the Arapahos and Sioux had tried to pull the soldiers from their horses. Two soldiers died along that trail. But the rest escaped. Soldiers retreating, their withdrawal covered by a lone civilian.

  Bob North would never forget that solitary civilian standing behind his big horse while the soldiers scampered past him, dashing over the hill to safety.

  Now his side hurt more than ever thinking about that son of a bitch. Gawddamn brazen file-closer … what he was. Covering the rest of them … coolly covering their retreat.

  Again and again North had exhorted his warriors into charging the civilian. Each time he watched a warrior fall. Each time he swore in English. The big civilian had carried a brass-mounted repeater that day north of the Lodge Trail Ridge, using it to hold North’s warriors at bay until the soldiers were on their way.

  Until Bob North himself grew furious with defeat, growling ugly curses about cowardly Injuns and charged the civilian on his own.

  He remembered getting hit, with the slap of a painful claw around his belly. Tumbling to the ground like a sack of wet oats. Seconds later he remembered being yanked across the wet sage between two flying Arapaho ponies. Rescued. Dragged from the field.

  The angry warriors had watched the big white man leap atop his horse and disappear. Then took Bob North to this camp on the upper Tongue to lick his wounds.

  And remember that big, gray horse.

  He would not easily forget the soldiers and civilians he had fought that snowy dawn. He would not forget the feel of white man’s lead burning an icy track through his belly. And Bob North vowed never to forget the tall, bearded one who stood beside his big gray horse, firing that brass-mounted repeating Henry rifle of his … again and again and—

  Until Bob North suffered the sting of that big man’s bullet.

  The renegade had stayed with the Arapaho to be left alone. To lay with the women now and again when it moved him.

  But now them Yankee soldiers come to protect their gawddamned road. Bringing these civilian sonsabitches in their shadow … like camp dogs.

  His head hurt. Hangover, he figured. He was due for a whopper of a hangover all right.

  It’s gonna be fine, he told himself. You’re not a white man any longer, Captain North. You play by Injun rules now. You get hurt … you hurt back.

  North closed his eyes, hungering for his whiskey, gritting his teeth as the old woman ground the root fibers into his mean, oozy wounds.

  He grit his teeth … and brooded on the tall, bearded man sheltered beside his gray horse. Dreaming how good it would be to wear that tall bastard’s scalp one day soon.

  “I’d rather be in some dark holler,” he growled out the song’s words against the pain in his gut, a pain he was beginning to think would never be washed away with all the whiskey at Fort Peck. Or with all the time in the world.

  “Where the sun refuse to shine,” and he coughed again.

  “Than to see you another man’s darling,

  “And know you’ll never be mine.”

  He shoved the old woman’s hand away as she tried to feed him some slick, scummy meat.

  Lordy, I wanna wear that tall bastard’s scalp one day real soon!

  One day real soon, he promised himself.

  Chapter 1

  The old scout gazed over his steaming cup of coffee at the big Irishman sitting across the table. Jim Bridger had to chuckle a bit inside with it. After better than forty-four winters in these Shining Mountains, Old Gabe had seen a few he-dogs come west. And this big strapping youngster had to be one of the few himself, Bridger figured.

  But it seemed Seamus Donegan had himself a natural-born talent for attracting trouble.

  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 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 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 dow
n 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 electrical 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, then 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 constables’ 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.”