Red Cloud's Revenge

by Terry C. Johnston

  He had his soldiers saddled in the space it takes a man to take three breaths, ordering them to leave their tools behind.

  “Time enough to come back and finish our work another day,” he declared. “Time now to break the siege at the hayfield corral.”

  He flung an arm forward as he kicked his mount in the ribs. “Column of twos! On my lead … center guide—troops forward at the gallop! HO!”

  Pulling down the stiff brim of his felt hat, the veteran captain uttered the closest thing to a prayer he had uttered since that bloody day at Antietam.

  God help us—that we’re in time …

  So it shocked the captain when he listened to Lieutenant Colonel Bradley’s steadfast refusal to send out a relief column to rescue the corral defenders.

  “Colonel, I must protest—”

  “Protest registered, Captain!”

  “S-Sir … allow me to take four companies. We have seven posted here. Give me four of—”

  “I’ve said all I’m going to say on this, Captain,” Bradley interrupted brusquely, his lips drawing themselves into a thin line of angry determination.

  “Three, sir. I request three companies. I’ll lead the relief my—”

  “You’ve been here long enough to know, Hartz—the red bastards hit the mowing operations every day.”

  Captain Hartz shook his head, weary of the argument. “Not like this, sir. I’d estimate more than a thousand of them—”

  “You’re saying this isn’t their routine hit and run?”

  “Sir, we’re wasting time here. Please allow me three companies to ride—”

  “Captain Hartz, do you remember the tale of Captain William Judd Fetterman?”

  The captain nodded, swallowing once. Feeling the angry confusion rising in him like bile. “Yes. But I don’t know—”

  “Then you will pay heed to the lesson learned the hard way by Fetterman’s command.”

  “Sir?”

  “Goddammit, Hartz! The same bloody thing will happen to your command, you ride out of this post.”

  “I’ll not allow it to happen to me.”

  Bradley slammed both palms down on his desk, scattering some papers. “You won’t allow it! I won’t allow it! Permission denied.”

  Hartz watched his post commander sink back into his straight-backed chair. It scraped across the floor with the irritation of an out-of-tune fiddle. Bradley’s adjutant burst into the room.

  “Colonel—gates are locked and secured. As you ordered.”

  “Very good, Corporal. Now see to it the officer-of-the-day doubles the guard immediately … and that order will remain in effect until I countermand it.”

  “Yessir.”

  The adjutant was gone as quickly as he had come, dashing back onto the dry, dusty parade baking beneath the late summer’s heat.

  Hartz cleared his throat. “Colonel, you will recall who this fort is named for?”

  Bradley glowered at the captain. “I most certainly do. General Charles Ferguson Smith.” Bradley cocked his head slightly. “Why the history lesson, Hartz?”

  “To make one more appeal to you, sir,” the captain said, taking a long step forward that brought him to the front of Bradley’s small desk. “This post—our post—is named for a fighting man who won distinction during the Mexican War. I think … it’s only fitting that we carry on in that tradition.”

  Bradley rose slowly, eyes squinting as he shuffled to the one window across the cramped office. Outside, the parade bustled. Seven companies of soldiers put on the alert. Some 260 men at the ready.

  The colonel turned and sighed. “Hartz, I want this understood. Those men knew what chance they were taking when they signed on—”

  “Our military escort, Colonel?”

  “This is the army, Captain. Not some school outing. Every man must understand he might be called upon to die at any moment.”

  “And the civilians sacrificed as well?”

  Bradley glowered once more at Hartz. “That word is a bit harsh, don’t you think?” He waved a hand, showing he wanted no reply. “I have been given a fort to command … and protect, Captain. It is Fort C.F. Smith I will protect. With the overwhelming numbers of hostiles you say you counted in the valley … that skirmish fight in the hayfield will be over very shortly.

  Hartz bit his lip to prevent himself from crying out at the injustice, forced to sit on his hands while good men were butchered. He allowed Bradley to finish.

  “My only worry now is that I have sufficient forces within this stockade to stem the red tide those half-naked bastards will throw at us once they’ve wiped out the hayfield corral.”

  “May I be excused, sir?” Hartz asked, his stomach wrenching with nausea.

  “Permission granted, Captain. But—I may need you soon, should the hostiles hit this post once they’ve mopped up those poor fellows in the hayfield.”

  Hartz saluted and turned to the door. The hot breeze hit him like a furnace as he stepped onto the parade, feeling the first sting of tears. Frustration. Anger. Utter melancholy.

  Those forced to remain behind, doing nothing while good men died bravely.

  May God have mercy on our souls, he thought.

  * * *

  “Gimme that Long-Tom there beside you,” Seamus demanded.

  Burnett slid it over. “You think you can hit that bastard?”

  Donegan nodded. Then he grinned and winked. “Worth a try, me friend. Always worth a try.”

  With the old muzzle-loading infantry weapon packed with an extra charge he knew would knock hell out of his shoulder, Seamus crawled to his feet slowly, inching the barrel over the uppermost log on the corral wall. He snapped up the last of the three leafs on the rear sight, and held his breath a minute as he studied the undulation of the tall grass between the corral and the solitary, brave warrior.

  A matter of heartbeats ago, the painted Indian had come to a stop at the bank of Warrior Creek, east of the corral. In plain sight, as if daring the white men to attempt their best shot. He sat there on his sorrel pony, watching the corral, a hand shading his eyes.

  “Can you do this, Yankee?”

  Seamus recognized the voice of Al Colvin behind him. He smiled at the stock of his Springfield once he felt he had his windage figured out. “It’s a far piece, Reb … but I’ll take a crack. That h’athen’s bold as brass. But what say you get that Enfield of your brother’s ready—just in case I’m shaky.”

  Colvin grinned, wagging his head. “A waste of time, mick—fella like you don’t miss very often, I’ll wager.”

  Through the muzzle smoke spat moments later from the double-charged Long-Tom, Donegan saw the sorrel rear back, tumbling to the side, pitching its rider into the creek. A cheer erupted from all sides of the corral as they watched the war-chief flounder in the water, struggling to rise.

  “By jabbers,” Finn gushed, “I think that red sonuvabitch is drowning out there, Seamus.”

  “Damn right he is!” Al Stevenson piped happily. “Hope the bastard takes all day doing it too!”

  “Good shot, Irishman!” Captain Colvin exclaimed, slapping Seamus on the back. “We’ll do all the damage we can to the frigging bastards … while we can.”

  “You don’t figure we’ll last, do you, Cap’n?”

  Colvin shook his head. “I figure we’ll be lucky to make sundown. Between now and then—I want all of you men to take as many of these Sioux with you as you can.”

  “What about our wounded—come a rush, Al?” Zeke Colvin asked his brother.

  “You … you take care of them … it comes down to it, Zeke.”

  Seamus watched little brother nod before scurrying back to his spot at the wall.

  Al Colvin’s eyes found Donegan’s locked on him. “You said yourself you seen what them Sioux done to those soldiers of Fetterman’s,” he explained quietly, simply. “I’ve already told everyone to keep the last bullet for hisself. Finn here knows what I’m talking about.”

  Burnett nodded. “Bu
t I ain’t blowing my brains out until the last minute, Colvin. I won’t shoot myself till they’re coming over the wall.”

  “None of us giving up till they’re in the corral,” Al replied even more morosely. “Won’t be a one of us or our wounded alive to torture.”

  “Cap’n! Here they come!”

  Colvin and the rest turned. Two groups formed two lines that poured off the slopes west of the corral. Both groups raced past the west wall, battering the logs and wagon-boxes, willow and tents, with their hissing arrows and whining lead sending splinters and dust and flying shrapnel raining on them all.

  A second charge came in to cover those who leaned from their ponies to drag wounded and dead from the open field. With each new body brought to rest on those western bluffs where the hostiles peered down into the corral, renewed howls of grief and despair arose from the women come to watch the victory of their men.

  Their high-pitched keening pricked the hair on Seamus’s neck. Recalling the high-pitched witches’ laughter as the Crow women set to deadly work over the Sioux prisoner.

  Hell to pay, you get a Injin woman in a fight, he brooded, glancing at the confusion on the hillside faraway. Then his numbed, weary brain remembered. With Indians, there was no fight that did not include the women. They were part and parcel of it. A way of life. A way of death for them all. Man. Woman. Child.

  His Henry reloaded, Seamus slid it back through the willow wall. And for the first time that day noticed a war-chief waving his Winchester rifle, directing another swarming two-wave attack on the corral.

  “Duncan!” he hollered. “You see that one with all the feathers down his back?”

  George Duncan studied the dusty field of fire down the muzzle of his new rifle. He grinned at Donegan. “Medicine man, you figure?”

  “That, or a chief. He’s got a lot to do with what this charge is all about. You take him, George.”

  Duncan grinned big enough to show the gaps in his teeth. “Gladly, Irishman!”

  In and out of the dust raised by hundreds of unshod pony hoofs the warriors screeched, racing past the west wall repeatedly. Firing under their ponies’ necks. Shrieking out war-songs. Crying out in surprise and pain when they were hit or their animals went down in a tumbling, roiling mass, heels over head each time the corral wall erupted with smoke and deadly hail.

  Volley after volley the defenders fired. George Duncan waiting his turn, patient on his shot until he had a clear view of the medicine man with the double-trailer bonnet that dragged the earth with its quaking eagle feathers.

  Duncan eased back from the wall, already assured of his success. “Bastard made it too easy, whooping and all!”

  “Blowed him right out’n the saddle, George!” Finn Burnett cheered.

  More hands pounded Duncan on the back to congratulate the teamster as the screeching rose from the meadow. A handful of warriors swept in on horseback, covering another pair who galloped behind the shield of their bodies to snatch the war-chief from the plain. The lifeless body was carried to the top of the grassy bench, where the rescuers laid it among the other wounded and dead watched and cried over by the women. In the midst of howls and herbs, burning sagebrush incense and boiling roots for bullet wounds, the women keened even louder at the death of this important man.

  * * *

  Roman Nose felt a cold sliver of ice stab at his belly, watching Black Shield’s body laid among the dead.

  Throughout the morning the Northern Cheyenne had watched the Miniconjou war-chief direct much of the battle from the hillside. Then, in despair, Black Shield rode down to the meadow itself. Drawing close to the deadly fire of the desperate white men huddled behind their wall of willow.

  Frustration had already set in, Roman Nose realized. Anger long since gone from his veins. Jealousy before that. Finding that Black Shield would lead this attack. His combined forces of Miniconjou and those Oglalla who had remained behind, plus some renegade Arapaho under the white chief One Thumb—all of those warriors far outnumbering the strength of the Northern Cheyenne under Roman Nose.

  Black Shield had taken the power of Roman Nose when he usurped command of this attack on the soldiers’ dirt-walled fort as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse rode south to attack the white men at the Pine Woods.

  The Cheyenne horsemen were bitter now, bitter that Black Shield’s attack had not swept right over the handful of defenders in the grass cutters’ camp so they could throw their savage weight against the dirt-walled fort.

  And now frustrated that Black Shield himself had been killed. Knocked from the saddle by a white man’s gun.

  The change of pitch in the wild shrieking snagged the Cheyenne war-chief’s attention. He turned in time to see the warriors and women stumble back, away from hovering over the Miniconjou’s prostrate body. A cold chill splashed down the spine of Roman Nose as he watched the Miniconjou sit upright with a jerk.

  Black Shield blinked, and blinked again. Touching his head, looking around. Slowly coming back to life. Dazed. All around him hands clamped on mouths in astonishment at his trip back from death.

  The bullet that had knocked him from his pony had grazed his head, stunning him as it traveled along the skull beneath the scalp before it tore through the skin in its exit. Two bloody wounds.

  And Roman Nose realized in that instant that wily old Sioux war-chief would know exactly how to extract the most dramatic effect from his injuries.

  Black Shield took his hand from his head slowly, raising both arms to the sky in thanksgiving to his Spirit Helpers. Then he spit into both palms, and rubbed the hands into the dirt. With the ocher mud he had made, the Miniconjou war-chief rubbed both head wounds with this potent medicine.

  “See, my children!” he shrieked at the astonished crowd of men and women. “The white man’s bullets cannot harm me!”

  Roman Nose found the Miniconjou’s eyes locked on his, a taunting, haughty light behind them as Black Shield continued to whip his faithful into a fury.

  “Follow me now! All who are brave enough to fly into the face of the bullets that do not sting! Follow me—and we will overrun these white fiends together!”

  Angrily, Roman Nose glared at the half-groggy Sioux who led his warriors down the slope for another try at the corral.

  Come a day soon, The Nose promised himself and his own medicine-helpers. Come a day soon—I will have the fight of my powerful vision … the tall, bearded one with the gray eyes … rising up to greet his death in the middle of that little dried river … as I ride down on him, my pony’s hoofs ripping his body apart.

  Chapter 33

  As the sun tilted into the western quadrant of the sky, Seamus Donegan realized much of the fight had slowly hissed out of their attackers.

  Fewer and fewer runs were made past the corral walls. Fewer and fewer warriors joined in those sporadic attacks. Had not those brown horsemen worked diligently at removing their wounded and dead from the field of battle, the bloody, naked bodies would have littered the meadow surrounding the corral, covered the willow thickets along Warrior Creek. Dotted the grassy bench above the meadow where more and more of the attackers gathered in sullen knots to vent their angry bile over this unsuccessful attack.

  Likewise, they never took their baleful, vengeful eyes from the determined defenders hunkered within the walls of their pitiful corral. Forcing the white men to watch their heads by firing just enough bullets through the walls to keep those defenders at bay.

  “Seamus,” Burnett whispered. “Need your help.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look at my britches.”

  Donegan saw what Finn pointed out. “Your pants full of bullet holes!” He chuckled.

  “Yeah.” Burnett ground his teeth. “One of the red bastards out there shooting holes in my britches—”

  “Lucky he hasn’t shot holes in your arse, me friend!”

  “Only reason is these britches was four sizes too big for me.”

  “Look like two of you could slip in and wal
k ’round in ’em, for sure!”

  “They was brand new down to Fort Phil Kearny a month back. Paid a handsome two dollars for ’em from Judge Kinney.”

  “’Tis a shame, Finn. A little big—but a nice pair all the same.”

  “Big enough I had to tie the extra gather of cloth up at my waist back there.”

  “I see. That’s where you’re getting shot, Finn!”

  “What I want you to do is watch for muzzle-smoke when I raise up, Seamus.”

  “Raise up?”

  “Every time I move to take aim, I feel a tug at my britches, you see? He shooting at me … but I can’t see where the shot’s coming from.”

  Seamus grinned. “Go ’head, me friend. I’ll spot your bleeming arse-shooter … and we’ll make a fine kidney pie of the red bastard!”

  Finn raised himself ever so carefully, aimed and fired. Almost as quickly, Seamus saw a bullet whistle through the excess cloth bunched over Burnett’s ample rear.

  “There!” he whispered harshly, pointing out the spot for Burnett.

  “The stump?”

  “Aye, Finn. Forty yards, and not a foot more. Like falling off a log. He’s yours to pepper now!”

  “Watch me send this’un to the hunting grounds where all good Injuns go!”

  Taking careful aim on the cottonwood stump gnawed by beaver over the years, Burnett fired.

  Seamus watched an immediate thrashing behind the creek-side stump. Then all was still once more.

  “You got ’im, lad.”

  “Had your doubts, eh, Irishman?”

  Seamus grinned. “Me? Not the way you handle your gun, Finn Burnett.”

  “They’re mounting up, Irishman!”

  Seamus heeded Al Colvin’s warning, turning to see the hundreds of warriors leaping atop their ponies, streaming off the slope.

  “Cap’n, my belly tells me they’re ’bout to throw us a ringer.”

  Colvin nodded. “Something tells me you’re right.” He turned to fling his voice around the corral. “Zeke, you and Haynes stay on the north wall … all the rest of you—skeedaddle down here!”

  In the space of a moment Colvin had the bulk of his defense gathered at the southern end of the corral. And right on cue, the chief they had knocked off his pony once before led his horsemen off the slope in a wide arc, up Warrior Creek, then swiftly arced left. Heading straight for the south wall of the fort where it might prove weakest at the only entrance to the corral.