The figure hunched over before the open door of the sheet-iron stove turned, his face familiar to the half-groggy Donegan. Thompson stopped beside the Irishman’s cot.
“Sleep in if you can, Mr. Donegan,” the private said. “You and me got dinner plans this night.”
His eyes grew from slits. “Dinner plans, eh?”
“Ever eat in a Indian lodge?”
He pulled the blanket down from his chin. “Can’t say as I have, Private.”
“Crow,” Thompson replied. “Warrior by the name of Iron Bull. Him and some others camped for the winter not far from the stockade. I wrangled an invite for you from him … seems Iron Bull wants to meet the big soldier who escaped the Sioux war party that’s been raising hell in the neighborhood.”
“Iron Bull, is it?”
“See you here to sundown, Mr. Donegan.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Private.”
* * *
Iron Bull was the sort who made much of this white-man habit of shaking hands. He performed the ritual with zest, and kept pumping Donegan’s arm until Seamus had to pull his hand free. The older Crow warrior had about him the scents of stale tobacco and tanned hides, pleasant smells if not pungent. Iron Bull’s woman squatted at the fire near their feet in the buffalo-hide lodge. Behind her sat two other swarthy guests, who measured Donegan closely before Iron Bull motioned for them to stand. They presented their hands to the Irishman as well.
“John Reshaw,” the first one said.
Seamus shook his hand. Thompson took Reshaw’s grip in turn.
“Mitch Bouyer,” the second, darker one introduced himself.
“Bouyer, you say?” Seamus asked.
The dark man slowly pulled his hand from the Irishman’s grip. “That’s right.”
“Jim Bridger spoke of you.”
“You know Bridger?”
“I do, Mr. Bouyer.”
“Call me Mitch. My friends call me Mitch. And any friend of Jim Bridger’s is a friend of mine.”
“Says he taught you everything you know about tracking.”
Bouyer laughed. “Ol’ Big Throat always telling folks that. He just forgets to tell ’em I grew up in Sioux camps.” Mitch watched the Irishman’s eyes narrow, studying his face. “That’s right, Seamus Donegan. I’m half-breed. Reshaw too. We both had Sioux mothers.”
Seamus smiled, easing himself down on a pallet of buffalo and wool blankets. “As you said, fellas—any friend of Bridger’s is a friend of mine as well. What brings Sioux blood to camp with the Crow this winter?”
Bouyer glanced at Reshaw for the flicker of a moment. “You are a direct man, Mr. Donegan.”
“Don’t mean to offend, Mitch.” He accepted a steaming tin of coffee handed him by James Thompson. “Just can’t figure you being here…”
“Unless we mean to spy on the fort? That it, Seamus Donegan? You figure we’re spies for Red Cloud?”
He gazed over the steamy lip of his cup. “I seen with my own eyes what the Sioux did to those soldiers at Kearny.” Seamus saw interest brighten Bouyer’s dark eyes. “Seems reasonable now that winter covers the land, Red Cloud’s got half-breeds like you out scouting things over … waiting for spring.”
“Come the short-grass time, Mr. Donegan, both John and I plan on being far from here. It’s not healthy for either of us in Sioux country. Sitting Bull, even Red Cloud himself, have both put prices on our heads.”
Seamus almost choked. “That don’t figure.”
Bouyer grinned, his teeth luminescent in the firelight as sparks popped up toward the indigo smokehole above them. “We no longer live with the Sioux. We have Crow wives. My wife is Iron Bull’s niece.”
“With the whole country choosing up sides,” John Reshaw said, joining the conversation for the first time, “Mitch and me stay with the Crow. Our scalps worth a lot to Red Cloud for it.”
“Turning your back on your people? Sioux can’t like that.”
Reshaw smiled. “They don’t. Hate it about as much as your soldiers plopping forts down in the middle of their prime hunting grounds. And they’ll do anything they can to drive you soldiers away.”
Seamus glanced over at Private Thompson, an eager listener. “I’m no sojur, fellas.” He said it quietly, as if he had thought it over first.
“You were at Kearny in the Moon of Deer Shedding Horns?”
“Meaning December?”
“When the hundred in the hand were killed.”
“Weren’t a hundred,” Donegan protested a little too strongly. “Eighty of ’em is all.”
“The Sioux call it their ‘Battle of the Hundred in the Hand.’”
Donegan stared at the fire for a long moment, sipping at his coffee, the dancing flames giving way to remembrance of the butchered bodies. “They had those soldiers in their hands, all right. Crushed ’em, like a man crushes a handful of dried stalks of grass.”
He watched Reshaw glance at the other half-breed a moment across the fire. Bouyer eventually nodded.
Reshaw looked back at Donegan before he spoke. “The Sioux, Cheyenne, and their Arapaho cousins did not kill all the soldiers in that fight.”
Donegan scratched his beard, grinning. “I know. I saw the two who shot themselves with my own eyes.”
This time Reshaw glanced at Thompson and Iron Bull, finding their attention riveted on him. “No, Seamus Donegan. More than two threw themselves away.”
Seamus sputtered some coffee down his shirt. “More’n two? You saying more’n two killed themselves on that hill?”
Reshaw nodded. “It is the word of those who watched it happen.”
Seamus gazed at Bouyer. “This true? More of them soldiers shot themselves?”
Bouyer nodded. “Except for those at the foot of the ridge, where a handful did much damage in a small circle of horses and rocks … the rest near the top of the ridge fell too easy.”
“Fell too easy?” Thompson squeaked this time.
Seamus nodded. “Near the boulders.”
Bouyer nodded as well. “Near the boulders. Yes. We have heard from those who were there. Some gave up. Throwing their guns away. Many more turned their guns on themselves.”
Seamus gazed at Thompson. “Always wondered how that fight was over so damned fast. Now it all makes sense.”
Thompson gazed through the Irishman. “Shot themselves?”
Bouyer nodded again. “A few kept up the fight as long as they could, so I’m told. While around them one after another of the soldiers shot himself.”
“Those bastards,” Seamus growled.
“Who?”
“Fetterman and his friend Brown,” Seamus answered. “They likely started it—killing themselves. With their officers committing suicide … the rest of those poor boys saw all hope disappear on the wind like a puff of old smoke. Damn their souls to hell!”
After a moment Bouyer sipped at his coffee, then spoke again. “Not all killed themselves.”
“I know. You said the group at the bottom of the hill fought. I had … friends die there.”
“They were brave. But not the only brave ones,” Reshaw added.
“Yes,” Bouyer replied. “At the rocks, the Sioux covered the bravest with a buffalo robe, and did not mutilate his body as they did the others.”
The Irishman’s gray eyes snapped onto Bouyer’s face. “I knew him too. An old friend.” He swallowed hard. “Adolph Metzger. Good soldier. A brave man.”
“At the end, he had only his brass horn for a weapon,” Bouyer explained.
“I found it beside him.”
“We are told he fought like a warrior to the end,” Bouyer added.
Seamus sighed, sipping at the stinging coffee to keep from sobbing. “Not enough goddamned warriors wearing army blue that cold day on Lodge Trail Ridge. Too damned many sojurs led to the slaughter by their officers. Not enough warriors to give the Sioux a fight of it.”
“You figure to give the Sioux some taste of their own, Mr. Donegan?”
He studied Bouyer’s face a moment. “No, Mitch. I figure to stay as far away from trouble as I can.”
But as he said it, Seamus Donegan knew the lie of his words. Try as he might, Seamus knew he was the sort who just naturally attracted trouble the way a frontier post’s slit-trench attracted flies.
Chapter 7
“Sure you don’t wanna come along now, Seamus Donegan?” Sgt. Noah Graham asked with a smile on his face, lips trembling and teeth chattering as he stuffed hands into his wool-lined buffalo-fur mittens.
Donegan slapped a big hand on the man’s shoulder. “Believe I’ll stay put, Sergeant. You and Grant tried your damnedest to kill me on the trip here. I’ll stay put and watch your backsides disappear over the hills.”
“No you’re not,” Sergeant Leonard Grant growled. “Too goddamned dark for any man to watch us after we slip out the stockade.”
Donegan glanced at the starless sky, dark as the inside of a tin-lined army coffin. “You got two, maybe three hours till moonrise, boys. You’ll make good time this night. Just keep your mouths shut and follow Bouyer. Do as he says, and you’ll make out.”
“I just wanna make it back to Kearny wearing my hair,” Grant grumbled, sour as usual.
“Do as the scout says, we’ll both keep our hair,” Graham suggested.
“’Fore you slip out, Mitch,” Donegan began, pulling the half-breed off to the side where fewer ears might overhear, “I got a letter I’ll trust you to take back to Phil Kearny with you. Got reason not to trust them two sojurs to do it.”
Bouyer chuckled. “You got every right for suspicion there, Seamus Donegan. I’ll take your letter.”
The Irishman handed it over, watching Bouyer pull up the flap of the rawhide packet in which the army’s mail would be carried back to Fort Phil Kearny some ninety miles away. Seamus stopped the half-breed’s hand.
“No, Mitch,” he whispered with a hiss. “This ain’t official mail. I want you should deliver it for me … personal.”
“Personal, eh?” He smiled again. “Who would you want to get this personal letter?”
Seamus glanced over his shoulder at the small crowd clustered around the two sergeants preparing to leave, shaking hands, slapping backs, everyone shivering in the moonless cold of the tiny stockade built in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains.
“You’ll find her place right outside the quartermaster’s stockade, Mitch. Small place. Cabin made of logs. Give her my letter.”
“Her?”
“Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley.”
“Missus, huh? I see why you want it delivered personal.”
“You got it figured all wrong. She’s … she’s a widow. Her man was one of the handful in the rocks at the bottom of the ridge, that black day back to December.”
Bouyer fell quiet a moment, but Donegan thought he had heard a gasp from the half-breed. “They put up the fight, those few,” Mitch replied. Inside his coat, he stuffed Donegan’s envelope down in his shirt. “I’ll see this letter gets to Mrs. Wheatley.”
“You can’t find her—see it gets to Sam Marr.”
“Marr?”
“You’ll find him there. A friend. Civilian camp. Thanks, Mitch. I owe you one.”
Bouyer grinned in the pale starlight. “Seamus Donegan, I’ll be back to collect.”
The Irishman slapped the half-breed on the shoulder again. “I’ll count on it. Whiskey?”
“Never made a habit of turning down an offer of whiskey.”
“Knew I was going to like you, Bouyer,” Donegan replied. “We’ll drain the pond water off the lily when you get back.”
“Don’t know when that’ll be.”
“Don’t matter, does it?”
“I suppose not.”
“I figure you’ll bring back a thirst, whenever you come.”
Bouyer grinned wider, sticking out his bare hand. “I’ll miss you, Seamus Donegan.”
“Likewise, you Sioux runt!” He pumped Bouyer’s arm for all it was worth. “Give that old man Bridger an Irish kick in the arse for me, would you?”
“Be a pleasure!”
Seamus watched Bouyer signal the sergeants. The trio creaked across the frozen snow to the small water gate where some guards waited. They opened the gate. All three crawled out on their knees. The gate closed. And the night fell silent once more. For a moment, the snow outside the compound was disturbed by footsteps. Then all sound faded like water into thirsty earth.
In small groups, the soldiers turned away, headed for their barracks and warm bunks.
Donegan stopped near the center of the small parade. Watching the smears of dark shadows disappear from the white background. He stood alone. Sensing the winter night. In his own way praying to that three-in-one God of his mother’s church that Mitch Bouyer would find Jennie Wheatley. Praying that his words would convince the woman to wait. It was the ninth of February. She should hold his letter in her hands before the middle of the month.
More than anything he had ever wanted in his young life, Seamus Donegan wanted Jennie Wheatley to wait for an Irishman to return to Fort Phil Kearny.
* * *
The fifteenth of February dawned cold and clear as rinsed crystal.
Seamus joined Thompson’s company in mess for the hardtack and moldy salt-pork every man grumbled over, but ate nonetheless. The pasty combination softened by several cups of strong coffee, Donegan strolled onto the muddy parade as the sun rose full above the stockade wall. Seeing in that fiery red ball the glint of red in Jennie Wheatley’s hair beneath a summer sun reflecting off the water of the Little Piney, where she went daily to bathe.
Seamus Donegan hoped by now the widow held his letter in her hands. Hoped she kept his promise to return for her in her heart.
Named in honor of General Charles Ferguson Smith, who had served with distinction during the Mexican War, this northernmost fort along the Montana Road was raised on a high plateau some hundred fifty yards east of the Bighorn River. A scant two miles west of the post the river itself issued from the mountains. The Bighorn turned to flow eastward past the post, but soon twisted slightly toward the northeast, not far from the stockade. The plateau gave a commanding view of most of the surrounding countryside, running as it did along the river for better than a mile before a spur extended northward for a quarter mile. There the valley of the Big Horn opened into wide hayfields that come spring would guarantee the stock of Fort C.F. Smith all the pasturage and lush fodder they could want.
The former commander of this Mountain District, Col. Henry B. Carrington, had dispatched Capt. Nathaniel C. Kinney here the previous August to establish a post where the Bozeman Trail crossed the Bighorn. Two walls of the stockade were constructed of logs buried in trenches. The other two walls were of baked adobe. One of those mud walls, the north, contained the only gate to the compound.
At the south and west sides of the parade squatted the barracks, mud hovels that had a tendency to leak mud on days such as this, when the sun made an appearance and the temperature climbed above zero. On the east side of the stockade stood the quartermaster stores and a ramshackle stable affair. On the north at either side of the main gate stood the post offices along with the one-roomed, low-roofed structure that served as Smith’s jail.
In coming to this place, Captain Kinney’s soldiers had struggled to lower their burdened wagons down the face of the rugged bluffs into the valley of the Bighorn River at the end of ropes. Through that summer and into the fall, some three hundred soldiers slept in tents until completing the stockade and its buildings.
Far from the magnificence of Fort Phil Kearny, Fort C.F. Smith nonetheless had a homier feel to it. Small, and nowhere near as pretentious as Kearny, this farflung post made Seamus Donegan a bit more comfortable than had Col. Henry B. Carrington’s spectacular post at the junction of the Pineys. What Fort C.F. Smith lacked in grand appointments, it made up for in plenty of whiskey, red as a bay horse and with twice the kick.
Seamus Donegan felt rig
ht at home here.
Most of these soldiers hungered for talk with a new face. There came a constant string of questions for the Irishman, asking for news of the outside world. Having no word from Kearny since last November, old newspapers had been tacked onto the bulletin board adorning one end of the small parade. The newsprint weathered and yellowed, read again and again by those starved for word of the world outside the Big Horn valley.
Again and again Seamus was asked to repeat the story of Fetterman’s disappearance over Lodge Trail Ridge contrary to Colonel Carrington’s orders. Asked to tell the gruesome details of Captain Ten Eyck’s relief party discovering the mutilated bodies of eighty-one men. Still, Donegan only confirmed what had been rumors from the friendly Crows like Iron Bull, camped in the valley for the winter. From those Indians the garrison at Fort C.F. Smith had learned of a big fight ninety miles away at Kearny. The Crow told of a detail of soldiers ambushed, wiped out to the last man.
Most had refused to believe the gruesome news brought to the stockade walls by the moccasin telegraph of the Crow, Sioux and Cheyenne. Who could consider such a massacre possible?
Until Seamus Donegan described how the carcasses of the horses lay frozen on the slope of Lodge Trail Ridge, their noses pointed back to Fort Phil Kearny in retreat. He told the soldiers how three groups fought alone and out of sight of one another against the overwhelming numbers of warriors who had waited in ambush. How those warriors had torn the soldier bodies apart, limb from limb, in a fury. All but one. The little German bugler with streaks of gray in his hair.
Seamus Donegan did not tell these soldiers that many of their friends had died at their own hand. He did not have to. It was a rare soldier who did not lose a friend on Lodge Trail Ridge.
* * *
“Tomorrow is the first of March, Captain.” Henry Wessells’s eyes locked on the papers strewn across his desktop.
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