As the soldiers around him began to fire, Jenness pulled his service revolver free, his finger quickly finding that all six caps were snugly in place. In stunned and envious amazement he watched two young Sioux bravely wheel their ponies through the maze of bullets and scrambling warriors, both hanging off the side of their animals as they swept past their wounded comrade, dragging him from the field, over the knoll in retreat.
With a shrill cry, another warrior waved a long lance decorated with black tendrils of human hair over his head. As abruptly as it had begun, the attack was over. The small ponies swept over the hills like a spring thunderstorm disappearing across the prairie after it had pummeled you with everything it had.
Jenness stood, trembling. The last of the escort fired their weapons at the retreating warriors until there were no targets left but clumps of bunch grass and sage along the crest of the hill. In his sweaty hand the revolver grew heavy. Heavier than he had ever believed it could get. He stuffed the weapon into the mule-ear holster, snapping the ear down. It hung at his waist like an anvil.
For the first time in the last twenty minutes, Lieutenant Jenness recognized his own breathing and heartbeat. Snorting like the chugging steam locomotives that whistled past his rural Ohio home. Heart galloping like the hoofbeats of his horse along the sun-baked wood road racing to engage the Sioux horsemen. Then his belly reminded him of what he had just come through.
All about him the other men cheered or slapped each other on their backs self-consciously. Congratulating themselves. And their leader.
“By damned, you dropped one, Lieutenant!” An older, longtime private clamped him on the shoulder. “Gotcha his scalp, son!”
Smiling weakly, Jenness nodded. “One killed,” he gulped. “One wounded.”
“Not a bad day’s work on these naked bastards, is it, sir?”
“It…” He tried to explain the feeling to the old veteran before him, to say it with his eyes, but he figured the other man wouldn’t understand. “Not like the Confederates. Stand and fight. On our front. Soldier against … soldier.”
“You’re right, Lieutenant,” the private answered, suddenly subdued. “The goddamn Rebel graybacks never fighted us this a’way. ’Tween you and me, son—this lil’ fracas was downright terrifying. You got every right to be scared.”
Jenness sighed, his pulse slowing. “Scared? I’ll tell you what’s scary, Private—my gut tells me this was only the beginning for me. And it’s only gonna get more scary from here on out.”
* * *
“Them’s the guns beat the grand ol’ Confederacy.”
Sam Marr turned at the sound of the Carolina drawl, watching the wiry rail-thin twig of a man step forward, his thinning hair stuck out in wild, greasy sprigs when he removed his hat to run a dirty hand across his brow.
“S’pose they are,” Marr replied. He glanced at the long wooden boxes stacked near the front wall of quartermaster Obadiah Dandy’s storehouse. Then he eyed the other man closely. “Hear tell your name’s Heeley.”
Silas Heeley regarded the gray-headed, long-haired Missourian with a bit of hill-folk caution. “I am. From the sounds of your talk, you hail from the South as well.”
Marr chuckled lightly. “Missouri. About as far south as any man got and still fought for the Union.”
He watched that bring Heeley up short, the marblelike eyes narrowing. Then the Missourian stuck out his hand to the other.
“Sam Marr, late of the sovereign state of Missouri, our Union reunited. Pleased to make your acquaintance … Mister…?”
Heeley stared down at the offered hand for the longest time. “Heeley. Silas Heeley’s the name.” He finally grasped Marr’s in his. “Gawddamned … but I’m shaking more Yankees’ hands since I come west than I shaked in my whole life!”
Sam chuckled again, nodding at the nearby stacks of wooden crates. “How you know so much ’bout Yankee weapons?”
Heeley smiled, swelling up a bit with himself. “Quartermaster—Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The Yankees always throwed their best at us. We was always first to get hit with it. Ever’ now and then we got us a look at just what they was throwing at us. Like them Springfield rifles of your’n. Repeaters made near the end of the war.”
Marr grinned, nodding. “You know your stuff, Heeley.” He watched the southerner nod with his own importance. “You working for Porter?”
“Gilmore’s right-hand man hired me. Judd’s his name.”
“Same outfit. They got me running herd duty, on ’count of I know horses.”
“Hauling wood up from the woodcutters’ camp.”
“Was you in that bunch hit the other day, Heeley?”
He smiled, like he had found a sudden claim to some fleeting fame. “Not only in that bunch the Sioux hit the t’other day—I was lead wagon!”
“Don’t say?”
He nodded, lips pursed, then spit a long, thin stream of brown juice into the gravel of the Fort Phil Kearny parade. “I do. First time I see’d scalping Injuns up that close. Never wanna get that close again.”
Marr laughed easily along with Heeley while the new District Commander, Col. Jonathan Smith, joined Captain Dandy and Captain Ten Eyck in positioning a wobbly table near the stacks of rifle crates, at that moment under the watchful eyes of a covey of guards. Dandy seated himself at the dusty table, a sheaf of papers beneath his pistol paperweight, and without ceremony called forward the first company from formation on the parade. Behind the quartermaster a half-dozen enlisted men who had been cracking off the tops of the rifle crates with iron pry bars pulled the spanking new Springfield repeaters from their nest in the shipping straw.
Marr smelled the familiar gun-oil smeared liberally on the rifles and the soap-oil lathered into the shoulder-straps as each of Dandy’s workers hefted two rifles apiece to the table. The quartermaster issued each soldier a new weapon, checking his name off on a muster roll.
Some twenty feet away, a soldier backed out of the plank door of the storehouse, lugging one end of a long box. At the other end hung another trooper. They set the first of the crates assigned to Fort C.F. Smith into the back of a wagon bound for the northern post come morning. When the first wagon had been filled by a steady procession of soldiers struggling under the weight of the wooden boxes, a second freighter was brought up to the doorway. Muted grunts and moans of labor on the periphery of Captain Dandy’s issuance of new arms to the garrison at Fort Phil Kearny.
“Hear t’other post’s getting a new commander as well as these’r rifles,” Heeley whispered loudly at Marr’s side as he snapped the blade back into his folding knife. He stuffed the quid of burley he had cut into the side of his cheek.
Marr nodded, smelling the sweetish odor of the shag-leaf tobacco the Carolinian chewed. Black as molasses and as potent as mule dung.
“Bradley. Lieutenant Colonel. Same rank as Wessells. And believe me, I think that fella Wessells is about fit to be tied … not getting neither one of these new assignments. The brass back East relieved Carrington and brought Wessells up to watch over things till they could assign Colonel Smith to command.”
Marr clucked, as if he could almost sense the disappointment and bitterness of another man. “And then to top it all off, when Kinney retires his command up at Smith, they appoint another goddamned lieutenant colonel to that spot—not Wessells.”
“Yankees got a handsome way of screwing each other, so’t seems.”
Marr studied Heeley from the side a moment. “Shame is, lotta fighting going on for what few commands there are these days. What with the war being over. Most of the Union officers forced to take a drop in rank and cut in pay to boot. Ain’t no love lost in this man’s army now.”
Heeley looked the older man up, then down again. “That why you didn’t stay in?”
“That,” he answered, “and other things. Plan on going north to Alder Gulch.”
“When you going, Marr?” Heeley asked excitedly. “I been heading that way myself. Run outta money
back to Laramie, so I hired on to work for Gilmore when he was freighting up here. You take me with you, I’ll make it worth your while we get to Virginia City.”
Marr studied the thin man. “Don’t get your britches warm, Silas Heeley. I ain’t going for some time. Got a summer of work yet. Way I got it figured, I can work the summer through for J. R. Porter minding his woodcutting herd. Still have me plenty of time to get on to Alder Gulch before winter settles down hard on this land.”
“You going this fall?”
He wagged his head. “Ain’t made up my mind yet. Damn thing of it—I’m waiting for two other folks to make up my mind for me.”
Sam Marr gazed over the top of Heeley’s head, watching a third wagon pull away from the quartermaster’s door with a load of rifles. He asked Silas absently, “You hear when Bradley’s heading north with his rifles … to take over command at Smith?”
Heeley shook his head. “Don’t hear much of any use, ’cept in the sutler’s. And I ain’t had money to go into the sutler’s for couple days now.”
“Thought you might know, s’all.”
“I’d bet Bradley’s going north to the morning, how’s’ever.”
“Imagine you’re right, Silas Heeley. His wagons loading today. He’ll leave first light in the morning for Smith.” Marr clamped a thick hand on the thin man’s shoulder. “I gotta go now. Figure I got someone to see, and a letter to write.”
“You write?”
“I do.”
“You write me a letter home sometime?”
He smiled, “My pleasure, Silas Heeley. But right now—I got a letter what’s needed up to Fort C.F. Smith.”
“You got friends up at Smith?”
“Far as I know … I still got a friend up there. I ain’t heard from him in months. Far as I know, he’s still alive. What with a woman waiting on him. But with no word a’tall from him—the man might’a gone under.”
“Injuns?”
“Can’t be as thick there as they are here, Silas. Likely as not, this fella gone under to a poker player with no sense of humor.”
“Your friend fancy at dealing cards?”
“Just … lucky, you might say. So, I gotta find out if my friend’s luck has run out or not.”
Chapter 21
The mosquitoes rose with the falling of the sun in this country of the Piney creeks. Like the cooling winds come to succor the day, the buzzing torment came to trouble man and beast alike.
He slapped at his cheek, feeling the smear of blood above his gray whiskers. “Can’t say I blame you, Jennie.” Sam Marr said it without conviction.
He sat with her on the rawhide stools before her front door while the two boys played in the twilight, a musty splash of yellow spread on the ground from the coal-oil lamp hung on a peg overhead, beside the doorframe.
“Johnny’s going soon.” As if it needed repeating.
“I know,” and he nodded, watching the boys gallop and cavort with their play horses and stick figures in the dust and grass worn thin and sunburnt yellow in the yard. “Time’s coming he’s been wanting to take you back to Ohio with him.”
“Leaving soon as Webb gets back from up north.” She sighed, wringing her hands in the rumpled folds of her patched dress.
He stared at the hands a moment, once soft and the color of the pale cream they skimmed from the butter churns. Hands now grown hard and callused over years of homesteading on the Nebraska prairie. Birthing two boys, washing clothes in lye soap, plucking chicken and shucking corn. On and on, that lot of the woman who followed her husband onto the plains. Hands familiar to Sam Marr. His own dear Abigail followed him to Missouri to bear their children, raise a family and stand beside him through it all, decades ago.
Might as well been a lifetime ago now, for the way he felt.
“You give thought to marrying that Wood fella, then, Jennie?”
Her eyes came to his, hurt and moist in the yellow light. They implored him more than her words ever would now, Sam figured.
She’s steeled herself for what must be. She’ll never own up to what’s killing her inside—one husband dead and seven months gone. Another man she put her trust in what ain’t come back for her when she needs him … that goddamned Seamus Donegan ain’t even writ her from that blamed Fort Smith.
Her eyes eventually fell to her own roughened hands once more, fingers rumpling the soft folds of the worn prairie dress. Then she stared at the boys a moment before finding words.
“I ain’t decided on marrying Webb Wood, Sam.” And there was something strong in the way she told him.
He felt a small flicker of something live clutch in his chest, like a small moth, fluttering around inside him.
“Not him … nor Seamus Donegan as well. Assuming he’d ever wanna ask me. Which he ain’t … and not likely to.”
“Might’n be trouble up to Smith, Jennie.” He turned toward her some as he spoke the words. “Some reason we ain’t heard from him.”
Her chin eventually jutted forward. Strong along the jaw-line. And he was reminded once more of a younger Abigail Hooper.
“Ain’t Seamus Donegan’s fault in any of this,” she went on, braver with the saying of it. “Jennie Wheatley’s got to go on and do what’s right for her and her boys, Sam. Get them outta here—like my brother says. Take ’em back East where they can be schooled right. Better’n their papa was. Have ’em a chance at something.”
He nodded, thinking of his own two boys. Buried somewhere in nameless, shallow graves in the South. On some nameless, overgrown battlefields. Like the thousands and thousands of others. His own boys …
“Them two are what you oughta be thinking of now, Jennie. Much as Seamus is a friend of mine … you gotta be thinking of the boys first.”
The youngest, Peter, scooted up in the lamplit dust, stopping in a shower of golden flakes a’swirl about his bare ankles to put his head against his mother’s shoulder a moment. She clutched his cheek against her breast, running her fingers through his long hair.
“So much like his papa, this one. Looks so much like his papa.”
Sam felt the clutch at his throat, this reminder of all that he had behind him in Missouri now. A wife gone the way of her two sons. The little farm he had walked away from when she had died soon after the war, wasting away, not seeing her boys come home. Jennie reminded him of all that was sucked from his life now like fruit left too long on the vine.
“Want you to know, Sam,” she said quietly a few minutes later, after her youngest returned to his play in the lamplit yard. “I may have Johnny and Webb drop us off in Nebraska.”
“Oh?”
“May not go all the way on back to Ohio with them.”
“Change your mind?”
She wagged her head. “No. Just ain’t made it up yet.”
“Time enough to make it up, Jennie.”
She was silent for several minutes more. “Their daddy’s people are back there. In Nebraska. They all come from around Osceola. On the Big Blue River.” She turned on her stool toward the old man, their knees barely touching, the toes of her dusty brogans rubbing against his boots. “That’s east and north some from Grand Island, Sam.”
He nodded, and swallowed the lump in his throat. Marr figured that she wanted him to know exactly where, where he could tell Seamus Donegan to begin his search. “I’ll remember, Jennie. And he’ll know where to fetch you.”
Sam watched her shoulders sag, as if finally shed of the worry on it. Loose threads tied up neatly in a knot. Sure in her own unsure way of things that nothing was left to chance now.
“I may be there, Sam. And the boys … back there among their daddy’s people. It might be a place for me to start. Johnny and Webb say I should go on east with them to Ohio. Too much chance of Indian trouble still in Nebraska, they claim. The Sioux roaming around here, keeping things stirred up. But I figure it’s finally up to me to make up my own mind, Sam. And I think Nebraska’s the place for me and the boys to start over.”
> Then Marr did something totally out of character for him. He gently took one of her rough hands into both of his wrinkled, well-worn ones, patting it paternally.
“By damned, Jennie,” he whispered, staring into her eyes, gleaming and brimming with moisture beneath the yellow lamplight, “Nebraska is the place for you and the boys to start over. A fine place for you to wait, girl. Wait for the man you want to come after you.”
* * *
“Where the hell did those bastards come from?” Capt. Obadiah Dandy demanded as he huffed up.
Lt. John Jenness pointed northeast. “They must’ve sneaked back of Lodge Trail Ridge, clear ’round to the badlands. Come down the end of the Peno Head on the herd.”
“C’mon!”
“Begging pardon—can’t, sir. Waiting for my detail to form up. We’ll ride down to help the herd pickets.”
“Dammit! We won’t have a herd, we wait to form up a relief party. Twice now you’ve taken details out. But right now you and Powell don’t have time to wait … no time to gallop off down there! I’ll tell you what, Lieutenant—you and Powell both can be damned while the red bastards ride off with what’s left of our herd!”
“Got my orders, sir!” Jenness threw his hands up in frustration.
“You and Powell can gallop straight to hell for all I care!”
Obadiah wheeled, dashing to the edge of the plateau, leaving Jenness muttering and frustrated, not certain which officer he should obey. Dandy didn’t give a damn. It just didn’t matter whose toes he stepped on or whose feelings he hurt. He was out to wring that brevet from the promotion board or else.
Job is, scatter those warriors down there before they make it across the creek with my cattle in tow.
Barely minutes ago the alarm had rung out across the parade, disturbing the tranquility of this July Sunday morning. Down in the narrow meadow formed by the junction of the Big and Little Piney creeks, the young soldiers who had been guarding what was left of Fort Phil Kearny’s beef herd watched in frustration as Sioux warriors burst from the trees like angry, screeching hornets. Bolting at those first wild shrieks, the spotted cattle lumbered off at a run, scattering before the small ponies carrying naked brown bodies through the herd. Shaken from their lazy, sunrise daydreams, the young troopers seemed confused about what to do. Under orders to hold their fire and conserve ammunition, since each of the pickets was given but ten rounds for his Springfield. Only the warriors’ newness in wrangling cattle delayed the Sioux in making their way back across the creek, driving the beef herd before them. Time and again the cattle balked and broke apart, refusing the warriors’ primitive efforts.
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