“You are finished fighting the soldiers?” He stared at his mentor, disbelieving.
“Perhaps. The magic of the fight is gone from my heart. Red Cloud sends us here to the fort the white man calls La-Ramee, to trade our hides for powder and bullets.”
“The soldier traders will not sell us powder or bullets,” Crazy Horse agreed sourly. “They do not talk of trading with us. Their mouths are full only with the story of the soldiers who died near Piney Woods.”
“Some died bravely, taking many Sioux spirits with them.”
“Yes,” The Horse said and nodded, his eyes seeing once more the snowy, bare ridge. “Others took their own lives. Like cowards.”
Man-Afraid regarded his young warrior friend and protégé. “You would not call me a coward … were I to stay here in the south this season? Hunting the buffalo along the Shell River.”
“The waters of this river the white man calls the Platte grow warm in this place closer to the sun … this far south, Man-Afraid.”
He nodded in agreement, eyes fixed on the red coals near his feet. “Already Little Wound has taken his band of Oglalla from this place, and travels east toward the rising of the sun.”
“I have heard he left two suns ago. Pawnee Killer and his warriors go with them. They are angry with Red Cloud’s war on the white soldiers in the north. So now Pawnee Killer goes south to fight the soldiers who guard the iron tracks of the white man’s great horse that belches smoke as it travels farther and farther west across our hunting grounds.”
“Pawnee Killer will bring himself trouble,” Man-Afraid mused. “I am glad he is gone. And Little Wound with him.”
He fell quiet for a long time. Allowed his gathering of thoughts by Crazy Horse.
At long last Man-Afraid sighed. “I do not like all this quarreling among our peoples. The medicine is gone for now. The fight is not good.”
“I think Red Cloud is afraid the medicine has gone bad for him as well.”
He stared at Crazy Horse a moment. “Is that why Red Cloud speaks so loud, speaks so long—haranguing us all that we must wipe the country clean of the white man once the short-grass grows in the shadows of the Big Horn Mountains?”
Crazy Horse nodded sadly. “Red Cloud is worried. His power is as stake now. Among all the Lakota, his medicine becomes a question.”
“You will stay, Horse?”
Crazy Horse stared at the fire a long time too. And when his eyes rose to meet Man-Afraid’s shining across the lodge, he nodded once.
“I will stay with Red Cloud. He may grow desperate. He may flail wildly at the white soldiers come here to our last, best hunting grounds taken from the Sparrowhawks many winters ago. Red Cloud may thrash about loudly, reminding one of a war-eagle with a broken wing—but I believe in him still. More important, my old friend—I believe in the fight.”
“It will be hard to drive these white men from their forts, where they bury their heads like ticks in an old bull’s stinking summer hide.”
“Yes. These white men are like those ticks. But, like Red Cloud—I still believe we can rub our hides like the old bull rubs his … to scrape the land clean of the white man who sucks the blood from our bodies. The soldiers who draw our very life from our land.”
* * *
He wasn’t sure he had ever heard such silence before. Silence so all-encompassing that he could hear the slap of wet, fat flakes against the damp hides of the lodge.
He sighed, eventually opening his eyes. The glow of the coals in the small firepit brushed a crimson light up the poles as they gathered in a graceful spiral near the smokehole.
She snuggled more tightly against him, her black hair tangled across his chest, her copper skin burnished with the red glow like a sheet of rusted iron, still moist to his touch. His nostrils drank of the damp muskiness that was her secret perfume.
That had done it, he thought, remembering. The smell of her.
Seamus had gone, unwilling and not a little unsure, with Mitch Bouyer to this lodge of Eyes Talking.
As the sun sank off the peaks of the Big Horns. As the sky lowered like the muddy sole of a boot on the land. As the wind shifted out of the north, snarling with a bite like that of a ravenous wolf.
And with it came the wet spring snow.
“I’ll be back for you come morning, Seamus Donegan!” Bouyer had flung his voice over his shoulder, disappearing into the wild flurry as the Irishman stood dumbfounded at the doorway.
“Come morning?” Donegan had shrieked into the white buckshot snow.
When the only answer for him was the soft sprat of fat flakes against the brim of his hat, Donegan reluctantly turned back to the lodge, finding Eyes Talking there, pulling back the elkhide doorflap for him.
For the longest time Seamus had been sure his nervousness showed. So many times he wanted to leap up and bolt from the lodge. But what kept him there was Eyes Talking, and the fact that she seemed more anxious than he. They spilled the blood soup on one another and eventually laughed together over it. After that, Donegan relaxed enough to swallow the elk stew she had simmered most of the day in a battered iron kettle steaming by the edge of the coals.
Dinner over, Eyes Talking pulled a blackened coffeepot from the fire. Into two small white china cups she poured her thick brew, then added heaping teaspoons of sugar Bouyer had supplied her. Donegan was beginning to realize how the Indian loved the white man’s sugar. Coffee and tobacco, powder and lead, were all one thing. But when it came down to it, Sioux squaw or Crow, the women wanted sugar most of all in trade for those hides they had toiled over all season long, scraping … chewing … and softening.
It wasn’t until after the third cup that Donegan pulled off his muddy boots. Or, more truthfully, Eyes Talking pulled them off for him. Then his damp stockings. Only looking at the white man from behind her long eyelashes, the Crow woman smiled shyly, keeping her distance. Once his feet had dried and warmed there, cozied up to the fire, Eyes Talking took one foot into her lap and began working her magic.
By the time she had talked him out of his undershirt so she could knead the muscles of his back, Seamus Donegan would gladly have traded twenty fine ponies for the girl. The lodge grew warmer as the fire fell to worming red coals. The Irishman hadn’t felt like this since … well, he hadn’t felt like this in too long.
Feeling the insistent pressure of her hip against him as she worked all those secret places along knotted ribbons on his shoulders, Seamus slowly rolled over, luxuriating in the furry warmth of the buffalo-robe bed. For a moment he stared into her black-cherry eyes, liquid with rust-flecks in the red light.
Not knowing if it were right, he pulled her close, brushing his lips against her full, moist mouth. And then realized he did not care if it were right or wrong.
After their kiss, Seamus cradled her against his bare chest, excited by the fragrant tickle of her long, perfumed hair spread across his flesh. Only then did he sense her tremble in his embrace. And realized he too shook with anticipation.
When at last she stood above him, slowly pulling the fringed leggings from each long, brown limb, then raised the hem of the long deerskin dress over her head, Donegan gasped at the supple, firm beauty of her young body. Almost more than he could take, the fragrance of her heated body as she sank beside him on the buffalo robe drove him near mad.
Too long he had been without a woman. Too long wanting others he could not have. Now at last given this girl, this night. Here in this wilderness.
For some reason, dear God—you have blessed me tonight … with this warm island in a cold, snowy land haunted with ghosts.
Seamus Donegan realized he had done nothing to deserve what Eyes Talking offered him. But he had never been one to turn down red whiskey. Nor would any Irishman admit to turning down the warmth of loving flesh.
Her fingers found all those places too long untouched. Surprising him with her softness, she had pulled him to her. For a moment Seamus felt like a great bear lowering himself over her glisten
ing, copper body. So small was she compared to his great size, yet Eyes Talking urged him down, down upon her.
When Donegan pressed himself inside her moist warmth, Eyes Talking gasped at first. Then sighed when he began to move atop her, the sound in her throat like a raw, growing hunger that frightened him.
Of a sudden she was gasping again, raking her fingers along the great muscles of his back, clawing again and again at the long, white snake of a scar left there by Confederate cavalry steel.
Himself like a saber, slashing back at her fury with that of his own … until both lay spent upon the damp robes, their moist bodies glistening forms of shadow and diamond.
After his heart had slowed and his breathing softened, Seamus felt the young woman stir. Eyes Talking raised her face above his, raking her hot lips across his. Then, with another sigh caught deep in her throat, she sank her head into the crook of the Irishman’s shoulder.
He listened while her breathing became rhythmic. Knowing she slept against him. Watching the glowing, wriggling, writhing worms of red coals in the firepit, shadows dancing against the lodgepoles spiraling with sparks to the smokehole above them.
Only then did Seamus realize he was crying himself to sleep.
* * *
“Just thinking ’bout what Red Cloud done to Fetterman’s men is enough to pucker any man’s asshole,” the settler grumbled at Mitch Bouyer and John Reshaw that first night’s camp out from John Bozeman’s Missouri City.
“I ain’t so all-fired sure this is such a good idea anymore,” moaned another civilian recruited from the Montana settlements.
It was early May. Just four days after Bouyer and Reshaw rode into Missouri City with the body of John Bozeman. And from the sign they had crossed along the way, the two half-breeds figured what Sioux had been in the area were now gone east. If only temporarily.
“It’s safe,” Bouyer answered over the lip of his tin cup. “Me and Reshaw the closest thing you’ll see to an Indian.”
“I ain’t so sure this ain’t a trap,” grumbled the first settler again. “You two lead us out here … what, with all these goods—we’d be sitting pretty for Red Cloud to jump us.”
Reshaw eyed those in the group gathered around his fire. There were other fires nearby, but to this fire more of the forty-two settlers were drawn by the shrill tone of the less-than-courageous settlers among them.
“Mr. Martin,” Reshaw began politely, a sense of danger pricking him, feeling his place as a half-breed among these men new to Montana Territory, “you never did like me none. Mitch either, did you? Even though we was with your train when Jim Bridger himself brought you up here. Don’t trust us, do you?”
“I’m for heading back to town come morning,” another shouted as he stood, rallying support.
There was a smattering of cheers and huzzahs. Then silence as a tall, thin, pockmarked man stepped into the firelight behind Bouyer and Reshaw.
“I’m staying,” he said quietly, then sipped his coffee.
More of the white settlers drew close to the flames. When Harrison McNeal talked, most of them had learned to listen. Not given to loud brag the way of other men, McNeal had come to this country years before with John Bozeman himself. Enough said.
“I smell something that stinks ’bout all this, Harrison,” a gray-headed sutler from Missouri City declared.
McNeal emptied his coffee cup. “Nothing but foul air from the beans we et for dinner, boys.” He waited for some of the nervous laughter to quiet itself. “I’m going on. And the wagons stay with me and those who’ll push on. Rest of you fixing to go back, you make your own way, best you know how.”
“We can’t walk all the way!”
“Maybe you’d like to ride on to Fort Smith with us then,” McNeal replied calmly. “Them soldiers done the best they know how to protect the road. They deserve the help we got in those wagons to bring ’em.”
He flung an arm behind him at half a dozen long freight wagons, filled to the sidewalls with foodstuffs for the beleaguered army post so long cut off from the outside world. Four days ago Bouyer and Reshaw had brought the body to Missouri City, it and word that Fort C.F. Smith was in a bad way, with no supplies coming up from the south. Something had to be done, so the half-breeds had marched off to see John Bozeman’s best friend. Harrison McNeal.
McNeal enlisted forty-one other settlers and sutlers to donate what they could, load it into borrowed wagons and point themselves east to the Yellowstone, from there to the mouth of the Bighorn canyon where the squat, adobe-walled fort stood, waiting in desperation for some word from Wessells at Fort Phil Kearny.
“Besides,” McNeal continued, “any man been out in this country more’n one winter knows the Sioux are moving east … just like Bouyer says.”
“Why you so sure it’s east?”
“Now, Asa—you oughtta know better’n most the Sioux move east this time of year. Sundance time. By next month all the bands be gathered up on the Powder or the Rosebud somewhere. Red Cloud will hold his big sundance and his warriors will hang themselves from that tall pole … working themselves up for another summer of bloody work along the road.”
“By God,” Asa replied with a wag of his head, “I’m glad mother and me already here in the Montana settlements. Red Cloud gets his boys all het up with another sundance, there’s no telling what hell will be paid along the road this summer.”
“And those soldiers at Smith the only ones stand between you and Red Cloud’s thievin’ bastards marching into Missouri City to lift your hair,” McNeal stated.
Bouyer waited a moment more, studying the faces of the white men, lit copper by the red firelight. He stood and stretched, glancing quickly at McNeal.
“Best I turn in for the night, Mr. McNeal. Reshaw’s gonna pick a handful for the first guard. No sense in me losing any more sleep. We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow—get these wagons a little closer to Fort Smith and them soldiers.”
Chapter 11
A dewy, May moon had stolen out over the Big Horns, giving a silver luster to the spring night. Shadows of four-legged animals slithered along the unlit fringes of this place at the foot of the Big Horns where man gathered. Shadows drawn here by the fragrance of the offal left in the army’s slaughter yard down by the Little Piney.
All winter long wolves had visited this place where Capt. Obadiah Dandy’s quartermasters butchered game and what few beef remained in the herd for the post mess. Concealed in the shadows, the wolves snarled and fought over their bloody feast after a long and hard winter, a winter spent as near to starvation as had any of the two-legged animals who inhabited this place.
When the wolves made their first appearance, boldly slinking into the twilight shadows near the fort walls, post sentries repeatedly shot at the unwelcome visitors throughout the cold spring nights to drive the wolves away. Wasn’t long before enough soldiers complained about the gun fire that Commander Wessells changed procedure. His troops were jumpy enough already, waiting for Red Cloud’s renewed attacks on Fort Phil Kearny. No need for the pickets to needlessly interrupt the sleep of the rest just to frighten four-legged beggars away.
Quickly learning there would be no threat from the soldiers now, the wolves ventured to the foot of the stockade itself. As a solution, Captain Dandy himself offered the idea of sprinkling poison on the meat.
“If enough of their kind die,” Dandy had explained to Wessells and staff a week before, “the rest will get the message. They’ll avoid the slaughter-yard like death. And you know—that’s just what I want to do with Red Cloud’s scheming bastards. Kill enough of them to start with … the rest’ll get the message and steer clear of Kearny and the road. Hell, they might even abandon the country!”
A marvelous plan, Dandy reminded himself now as he strolled back to his quarters from the slaughter-yard. The damned Sioux were no better than uncivilized predators themselves. Animals.
Without a doubt, Dandy most enjoyed this part of his evenings. His work complete for
the day. The evening mess behind him. Time now his own to enjoy, what with a little help from his bottle of spirits. And a new friend.
“Got to tell you, Lieutenant,” Dandy poured more of the amber liquid into John Jenness’s cup, “how greatly I admire your war record!”
They clinked cups and sipped at the burning liquid.
“I figure we both did our share of damage, sir.”
“No, no,” Dandy replied quickly. Then in a whisper, “You are among friends when you’re with me. Please, let’s not be so formal, John. Call me Obadiah. I feel we have much in common.”
Lt. John C. Jenness, recently transferred to Fort Phil Kearny from the East, studied the strong jaw of the officer seated opposite him on the only other camp stool in Dandy’s small quarters.
Careful with this one, Jenness told himself. “What sort of things do we have in common … Obadiah?”
Dandy rose, cup in hand. It went to his lips as he reflected. “Matters most important to men like us. Having to do with honor and duty to our regiment. A sacred way of life that must not be polluted with those who would give in to the Quaker apologists and weak-kneed peacemakers who want to be friends to the Indian. It’s up to strong, resolute men like us to preserve what the army always has been: an iron glove in pursuit of our grand Republic’s destiny!”
Jenness had to admit, the captain did have a way about him. Dandy caused something to stir within the young lieutenant. “Yes. I think I know just how you feel about the army … and our assignment here to oversee the settlement of the West.”
“Exactly!” Dandy grinned, pouring Jenness more of the whiskey. “I was certain we two would find ourselves kindred souls. Tell me, John—don’t you feel at times a surge of deep anger at some of the priggish dolts who run this army? Some of those mindless pricks making their foolish decisions? Or, perhaps the other spineless cowards making no move at all until circumstances or Congress force them to play a hand?”
As the evening wore on, the young lieutenant grew increasingly amazed at what whiskey Dandy could swill and not be stretched out on the floor. Jenness had been called to the captain’s doorstep immediately following supper. What with a long evening of guzzling and talk behind them—Dandy was still standing.
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