Red Cloud's Revenge

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Sister?” Burnett asked, his mind wondering on it, tossing the thought from side to side the way a kitten would bat a ball of twine. “Don’t remember a woman named Morrison.”

  He laughed gently. “Finn, she changed her name when she married the settler fixing to homestead in Nebraska.”

  Burnett nodded. “Nebraska?” His mind suddenly came on it, the way a man would turn a corner onto a familiar street. “Your sister’s a widow?”

  “That’s right, Finn.”

  “Her husband named James Wheatley?”

  “Yes. I’m coming to bring my youngest sister home to Ohio. She needs to be among her own people … what with two young boys to care for now. All alone.”

  Finn Burnett shook his head and whistled, having put it together at last, the way he would fit stones at the edge of fields, building fences.

  “Jennie Wheatley,” he whispered, remembering the face now, the look of gloom and loneliness and need that freezing day they buried the Fetterman dead. “Poor woman. All alone, and surrounded by wilderness and murdering Injuns.”

  “Not for long, Mr. Burnett,” Webb Wood advised, smiling his crooked smile. “John and I have come to take Jennie home to her people.”

  “Webb himself has always had eyes on Jennie,” Morrison explained, his head bobbing toward his partner.

  “Perhaps I can give her and the boys a home and security,” Wood began. “Well, we’ll have to see how Jennie feels once the mourning is over.”

  Leighton stood and stretched. “For me, the evening is over. I hear my blankets calling. Tomorrow we turn our noses north, staring the future full in the face, gentlemen.”

  “Here, here!” Morrison said, rising as well, sloshing the cold dregs of his coffee into the dying fire. “I’m enthused that I’m so close to Jennie. Won’t be long now until she is back in the bosom of those who love and care for her in Ohio.”

  Finn Burnett watched Leighton turn in one direction, Morrison and Wood in the other, headed for their blankets and sleep. And he realized he would be hard-pressed to sleep this night. What with thoughts of the beautiful Jennie Wheatley pushing in the corners of his mind. Thoughts of her and the man who had laid claim to her early on, come that terrible winter at the foot of the Big Horns.

  No man with any common sense would seek to trample on those toes, especially the toes of a friend. And if any man besides Jim Bridger, Jack Stead, and Sam Marr could call the Irishman a friend, it was Finn Burnett.

  God almighty. Finn thought about it as he settled by the fire once more. Morrison come to fetch his sister—and Seamus Donegan stuck off up at Fort C.F. Smith … on orders of the U.S. goddamned Army itself … unable to do a frigging thing about Jennie Wheatley.

  Unable to do a goddamned thing about John Morrison snatching her back to Ohio …

  Chapter 15

  “I’ll not allow it!” Capt. Nathaniel C. Kinney bellowed, about ready to stomp his foot down like a schoolboy not getting his way at recess.

  “Appears you don’t have a thing to say about it,” half-breed Mitch Bouyer replied quietly.

  But Seamus Donegan read the twinkle in the scout’s eyes.

  “But … but—it’s inhuman!”

  “What they’re fixing to do ain’t inhuman at all, Captain,” Bouyer explained. “Indians been doing it to each other back in time … before the white man even thought of setting a foot in America.”

  Kinney wagged his head. “If I can’t stop the Crow from torturing that Sioux warrior … then I’ll not be party to any of it.” He wheeled on his staff and the guard detail that had accompanied the commanding officer of Fort C.F. Smith to the Crow village near the mouth of the canyon where the Bighorn River issued forth onto the plains in its flow north to the Yellowstone.

  “Mount the men, Lieutenant Sternberg. We’re returning to the fort.”

  “Yessir,” the young German officer replied.

  “You’re staying, Donegan?” Kinney asked, gazing down from horseback at the Irishman.

  Donegan glanced at Bouyer and Reshaw. Then he glanced at Eyes Talking. “Yeah, Cap’n. I’ll stay. Never know when I might get another chance to watch these Crow even the score on the Sioux a bit.”

  “I see,” Kinney huffed, his jaw jutting. “I’d taken you for a civilized man. Not like Bouyer and Reshaw here.”

  Donegan winked at the half-breeds. “What the army does to its own is what I’d call uncivilized. Not what these Crow squaws are about to do to a prisoner of theirs. We’re the visitors here, Cap’n. These Injins are the ones belong out here. It’s their rules we’ll play by.”

  Kinney drew in a deep breath of the deepening twilight descending upon the Big Horn country. Already the June sun had dipped behind the peaks as day slid headlong into evening. When he spoke, looking down at Donegan once more, it was with quiet resignation.

  “That, perhaps more than any other, is the reason I am retiring from the army, Mr. Donegan. Out here, we are forced to play by Red Cloud’s rules. Perhaps the rules of Iron Bull over there. But Indian rules just the same. And Department Command back East refuses to recognize that what we’re up against is something they haven’t the foggiest idea how to cope with. So soldiers like me and Henry Carrington are sent out here to do only God knows what … without enough men and guns and bullets—”

  “You miss Carrington, don’t you, Cap’n?” Donegan interrupted.

  He nodded and sighed. “More than I would like to admit.”

  “You’re both good sojurs, Cap’n Kinney,” Donegan said, taking a step backward to salute smartly. “Proud to have known you, sir.”

  Kinney saluted. “I suppose it’d be all right to salute a civilian, wouldn’t it, Mr. Donegan?”

  “I won’t tell, Cap’n,” he replied with a wide grin.

  Kinney glanced over at his lieutenant. “Lead off, Mr. Sternberg. I figure the missus has dinner waiting on me. And she’s even more anxious than me to get shet of this goddamned privy hole they named Fort C.F. Smith. I’m counting days until I’m relieved, and that poor woman’s counting the hours.”

  “Yessir,” Sternberg replied. He twisted in the saddle. “By twos—forward at a walk.”

  Seamus watched them disappear from the fringes of the Crow village that sat less than a mile and a half from the walls of Fort C.F. Smith on a level plain of land where an abrupt, sheer cliff bordered the lodges on two sides.

  “Seamus Donegan?”

  He looked back at Bouyer. “I’m ready. Let’s go see how these Crow deal with the bastards what stole their hunting ground.”

  At the far side of the village the women were just then beginning to practice their ancient art of amusement for the menfolk of the camp. Children of all ages and states of undress sat atop the ridge, watching. Other youngsters gathered among the warriors and old ones who stood in a semicircle about the women. And the squaws themselves completely surrounded the lone Sioux prisoner.

  Earlier that morning a small war party of Miniconjou had made the mistake of envying the Crow pony herd. They had ridden back to the Bighorn River country to learn something of the goings-on at Fort C.F. Smith. Their mission was to have been entirely secret, and they were to report back to Red Cloud’s war council without engaging the soldiers.

  Still, it would not matter if they returned to the camps on the Powder with a few Crow ponies, the young warriors had reasoned as they gazed down on the herd from the hills above.

  No casualties taken by either side in the running battle that played itself over many miles of the Big Horn valley, ponies laboring beneath their warriors in the chase that took them up Warrior Creek. No casualties, except for one Sioux prisoner taken by the Crow after his pony was shot from under him.

  Iron Bull, the Crow mailman Captain Kinney used from time to time, had proudly presented the prisoner to the post commander. And announced through interpreter Bouyer what was planned for their captive that evening. It would be an honor if the commander were present in the Crow village during the torture of t
he Sioux warrior. Kinney had ridden down to the camp instead to talk the Crow out of their grisly practice. He rode back to Fort C.F. Smith now, his shoulders slumped under the weight of his last days of command, having failed.

  The Sioux prisoner, nude but for his tattered breechclout, stood immobile beside a small fire tended by an old woman. Around his neck the squaws had tied a long rawhide rope, the sort used by Crow warriors round their war ponies’ necks. At the other end of the lariat stood a giggling assortment of young Crow women. Among them in the deepening twilight, Donegan recognized Eyes Talking.

  Every few moments the girls jerked the Sioux off his feet. He struggled to rise again from the dust, his hands bound at his back. Each time, he stared into the night without uttering a word of protest or pain, waiting for the next step in what he knew would be the painstaking process of his own death.

  It continued that way for some time, until a few of the older women moved to the center of the circle where they kicked at shins, slammed their knees into the prisoner’s groin or stomped down on his bare feet. And the first time their prisoner did not immediately rise from the ground, the old squaw at the fire was ready.

  With a movement as quick as a hawk swooping over a nest of field mice, she swept a firebrand from the flames and slapped it against the Sioux’s back. The blow sprayed tiny fireflies of sparks into the purple twilight, bringing with it an eruption of cheers from the ring of spectators. Struggling to rise in the midst of an ever-tightening noose of tormentors, the Sioux clambered to his feet, gasping in pain.

  Again and again the process repeated itself. The women pummeling the prisoner to the ground. The old woman jabbing the flaming limb at his bare flesh, burning his face, setting his hair to smoldering, jabbing at his genitals with obscene taunts. It wasn’t that long before another woman took up a flaming branch and began jabbing it at the prisoner as well. Then a third, and finally a fourth.

  Then no longer were the squaws merely touching him with the fiery sticks, they were slapping, then jabbing the hot ends into his flesh, pounding him with all the fierceness they could muster. Repeatedly he tried to rise now, much of his strength and resolve gone the way of smoke from those fiery branches. He remained on his knees, unable to rise. What shred of his breechclout had not burned away was ripped from his waist. His pubic hair smoldered, as did what had once been the long hair over his shoulders.

  Donegan smelled the faint stench of burned flesh and hair. He looked away a moment, sucking deep at the cooling night air.

  “Remember those soldiers and friends of yours who died beyond the Lodge Trail, Seamus Donegan,” Mitch Bouyer instructed quietly at his side, watching the Irishman quail as the torture turned from sport to pleasure in another man’s pain.

  Seamus gulped audibly. He did remember. A field littered with severed limbs. Disemboweled bodies frozen in grotesque shapes. Headless bodies stuffed with arrows.

  “Does their savagery merit our own?” he asked quietly, not knowing if the half-breeds heard his question.

  “It’s the only thing a warrior truly understands, Seamus,” Reshaw explained. “War is the only thing they respect. This dying as a brave man they respect as well.”

  “I had no idea it would … would turn out like this,” Seamus muttered, watching the hunchbacked woman bend over the prisoner.

  From her waist she pulled a knife held for a moment aloft in the firelight, joined in a wild shriek of growing passion from the circle of her friends. The knife swept down like a fractured bolt of lightning, then was held aloft again. Bloodied this time. And from her other hand the old one brandished the prisoner’s genitals. Penis and scrotum. At her feet the Sioux writhed in agony. No strength to rise. Unable to fight off his torturers. Unable to do anything but to die as quietly as his courage allowed.

  Bouyer nodded, his eyes studying Donegan’s face. “You find it hard—but you must understand the Sioux dog expects nothing less than this from our women. You must understand this before you can understand the Indian. If the Crow warriors had killed him outright, perhaps using him for target practice … the prisoner would believe his captors considered him a coward. A mongrel worth only a coward’s quick death.”

  “Understand this, Seamus Donegan,” Reshaw added. “By turning the prisoner over to their women, the Crow men show their prisoner they regard him as a worthy enemy … one worthy of a brave man’s death. Any man allowed to suffer such torture before death is a worthy opponent. Cowards die quickly. Only a brave man can die slowly.”

  “Only a brave man,” Seamus repeated, pausing to suck deeply at a breath of air before continuing, “can die slowly.”

  First fingers and toes. Then one squaw or another hacked off the hands and feet with camp-axes. And in the flurry of blood and firelight, shadow and blurred lust, Donegan wondered if Eyes Talking was impassioned as well … in that circle … her own knife or axe at work on the prisoner.

  Each new appendage severed and thrown into the crowd brought a renewed shriek of fiendish joy from the assembly.

  He had heard cries like that before, Seamus realized. Gettysburg.

  A tiny place on the map of Pennsylvania where men proved their courage, or lack of it. He shuddered with the memory of it. Union cavalry and infantry marching into the valley. Confederate forces marching up as well. And in the center of that growing throb of insanity stood the little village of Gettysburg itself.

  Every bleeming bastird cleared out of that town. Every man, no matter what his age. Leaving their women cold, leaving their women behind to suffer the onslaught of two converging armies.

  Talk about cowards. The civilized farmers and cow-milkers of Gettysburg … running away to save their hides … while thousands and thousands more gave their lives to save those farms.

  And when it was all over … the spineless bastirds came limping back, creeping back … like moles peeking outta some hole in the ground to see if things were safe. Goddamn them! Not one man, young or old … not one of them women we fought to protect … not a one of those who had no courage to take a musket in hand to protect the homes they considered most dear … not a goddamned one would dirty their hands with a shovel to bury our dead in the dirt of their beloved fields … fields run red with good men’s blood.

  Seamus realized only then that the choked, gurgling, unintelligible sounds that had been pouring from the prisoner’s throat had ceased. The warrior long past the point of pain.

  The rain came that sundown. To settle the stinging dust. To soften a bit the stench of gunpowder like a black carpet over the land. And, by twilight, a rain enough to sprinkle itself on the rotting, bloating corpses of Gettysburg. Rain enough to wash the rocks free of blood and gore and splattered brain.

  He thought of Captain Kinney suddenly, wondering if the soldier hadn’t been right in the first place to refuse witnessing this savage, hypnotizing spectacle. And was quickly struck with a funny thought. Funny, that he think it while watching another man die before his eyes.

  Ah, Cap’n … hadn’t been for what we Union horse did that day, riding under Custer and Gregg—cavalry the finest that ever climbed onto saddles—like as not the army in this Injin country would be wearing the butternut gray of the Confederate army.

  Had we not swallowed our fear like a cold stone and shut our eyes and ears to the mayhem around us … like as not the Union army would not even be here in this place … trying to steal this goddamned land from these bleeming savages.

  With the prisoner’s head hacked off and brandished aloft at the end of a thick branch, another old woman bent over the prisoner’s torso. She tied the rawhide rope beneath the Sioux’s arms, looping and knotting the lariat securely before she threw the other end up to a horseman emerging at the edge of the firelight. He was instantly joined by other warriors.

  Iron Bull and his friends. Come to drag the headless, armless, legless thing down the valley to Fort C.F. Smith where they would parade around the post compound beneath torchlight to show off their prisoner to the soldie
rs. Like strutting cocks having driven challengers away from their private harem.

  Donegan watched the horsemen disappear into the deepening night. Of a sudden not at all sure where he would stay the night now. Not wanting to return to the fort. To show his face to Kinney and the others after choosing to stay and watch.

  And not sure now if he would slip beneath the buffalo robes in her lodge. Did he have the stomach to lay with Eyes Talking this night?

  Did he have as well the … courage to last this foreign land and its people?

  And then he remembered the half-breed’s words.

  Only a brave man can die slowly.

  Chapter 16

  “Captain Dandy, our new munitions are placed in your care,” Col. Henry Wessells ordered, a rare look of approval on his face.

  “Yessir!” Obadiah Dandy replied, saluting before he turned to Max Littman. “Sergeant, see these wagons are unloaded—rifles and ammunition both stored and secured under lock.”

  Sergeant Littman, a square-jawed German immigrant, snapped his heels together. “Sir.” He turned away, waving for the civilian teamsters to steer their wagon teams across the parade to Dandy’s quartermaster stores.

  “I believe a drink would be in order, gentlemen,” Wessells suggested, swinging his arms out expansively and gesturing toward his office doors. “Mr. Gilmore? Mr. Porter? Please, come in. Captain Dandy, you will join us?”

  “Of course, Colonel. About time we received the arms necessary to prosecute this war on the bloody heathens Red Cloud claims are his sovereign nation.”

  Wessells was at the pine-plank sideboard in his office, pouring the whiskey as red as a blooded bay horse when sutler Kinney clomped through the door left open to admit more of the cooling June breezes here below the Big Horns at Fort Phil Kearny.

  “Colonel?” Kinney puffed, then ground to a stop, finding the office filled with the civilian freighters and Wessells’s staff.

  “Come in, Judge. Come in,” the colonel invited, motioning gingerly with his arm as he handed the first two servings of whiskey to contractors Gilmore and Porter. “I believe you’ve met our guests?”