“I want that sonuvabitch!” Al Colvin growled. “I’ll put him on the ground to stay this time!”
“He’s all yours,” Seamus replied. “You take that first one ’cross the creek … we’ll see to the rest, Cap’n.”
The headman led his warriors across the creek and up the bank in a headlong rush toward the wall. Coming close enough that Donegan could see the mud smeared on the war-chief’s forehead, in his flying, loosened hair.
“Fire with me, men!” Colvin ordered. “By volley! Hold your fire until I drop that bastard!”
Seamus watched them thunder closer and closer, swallowing the dust in his throat, wondering when the Confederate was going to shoot.
And when Colvin finally pulled the trigger, the southern wall exploded with fire and smoke. With a solid phalanx of flame spat at the charging horsemen.
Painted, feathered war ponies reared back and went down. Warriors toppled. Best of all, Captain Colvin watched his hated war-chief straighten back, wobble from side to side, then slide into the dust beneath the feet of a dozen stunned and wounded ponies.
The charge turned back on itself in wild, shrieking confusion. Back across the creek, beyond the willows, into the timber in disarray the warriors poured. Leaderless. Their spirit broken.
Still the guns continued to roar, spitting fire and deadly hailstones into the fleeing riders. Every bit as swiftly, a second charge was formed, riders sweeping in low to cover those who would attempt to recover the body of their war-chief.
“Shoot the sonsabitches!” Colvin screamed, his puffy lower lip leaking blood once more.
They turned the second charge before the warriors could reach the war-chief’s body. More warriors lay dead and dying in the meadow between the corral wall and the creekbank. But in the space of a half-dozen shallow breaths taken by those huddled waiting in the enclosure, a third charge appeared out of the dust and smoke of that shrieking, red-skinned hell.
“By God!” Colvin was screaming, possessed, spittle crusting at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t let them have that bastard’s body! No matter what—I’ll hold that chief if I gotta go out there and sit on him my own self!”
And with those forge-hardened riflemen firing point-blank into the face of that third red wave, the spirit of the warriors was broken at last.
“They’re running!” Zeke Colvin shrieked, dancing a mad jig through the center of the corral.
“By God, they are running!” piped up Pvt. Ed Holloran. He leaped on fellow soldier Thomas Riley. Both men hugged and swung each other round and round, laughing hysterically with the rest of the defenders.
“Jesus!” rasped Al Colvin, slamming Donegan on the back. “We done it, you goddamned mick! We run the red bastards off!”
Seamus wagged his head, dirt-reddened eyes narrowing down the neck of the valley where the horsemen had headed. “I don’t trust ’em, Cap’n. And best thing you don’t either.”
“Figure they’re up to something?”
“Smells bad. They’re leaving enough snipers in the hills yonder—take a look.”
“I see…” Al answered, the air gone out of his enthusiasm like steam from a leaky locomotive fitting.
“They leave a few around us … pen us down like this—no telling when they’ll come charging back.”
“I ain’t about to take the air outta the boys’ celebrating,” Al moaned. “By God, we been at it for over seven hours now, I reckon.”
Seamus consulted his pocket watch. “Damn … if we haven’t been at it that long—”
“Captain Colvin?”
Both Donegan and the Confederate turned, seeing a small, wiry, peach-faced private present himself to Colvin.
“What is it, boy?”
“I asked before,” he stammered, clearly nervous. “I’ll ask again now that them redskins is skeedaddling. I wanna go to the fort for help.”
Colvin glanced at Donegan. With the slightest of nods, Seamus agreed.
“I s’pose time’s come. What’s your name, son?”
“Bradley, sir. Charles Bradley.”
“Get yourself a animal, Private. And we’ll see you have a brace of pistols,” Seamus said.
Bradley swallowed anxiously. “Only … only one horse left what ain’t been hit on the picket line.”
“One?” Colvin’s voice rose two octaves.
“Yessir. And all but three of them mules is wounded or … worse.”
“Take the horse, sojur,” Seamus ordered.
“You get that lucky horse saddled, I’ll have a dispatch written to Bradley ready for you, son,” the captain said, waving the private off.
With a pair of pistols tucked in the waist of his dirty britches, and his kepi snugged down over his greasy hair, Pvt. Charles Bradley, 27th U.S. Infantry, was ready to ride once Colvin’s message had been stuffed down the front of his shirt. Trouble was, the foot soldier had neglected to tell anyone there was a reason he was serving in the infantry.
Only twice before in his young life had Bradley ever climbed atop a horse.
“Take ’er out slow, son,” Colvin instructed, pointing. “Slow till you reach the end of that ridge that hides us from the fort. I figure them Injuns try to jump you there. And you can kick hell out’n this horse then—running like the devil for the stockade. They’ll see you coming. Just get that message to Bradley. Good luck, boy.”
“Godspeed, son,” Seamus said, swinging his arm back.
A moment after Seamus slapped the horse’s rump to send the soldier on his way, he realized it would be solely by the grace of the saints or the Virgin Mary Herself if Private Bradley made it to Fort C.F. Smith with his message.
Unsteady, bouncing on his saddle like a wind-up toy, Private Bradley did make it to the end of the ridge before any of the hostile snipers made an appearance. And then it was in force. Better than two dozen of them roared down the slope of the hill, heading straight for the hapless horseman. So it was that fear does something to the innocent it will not do for the courageous.
Bradley rode as he had never ridden before, nor was likely to ride again. That is until he neared the post itself.
Some seven hundred yards from the stockade the fort road plunged into a deep gully. It was there the hostiles on their speedy, grass-fed ponies caught up with the untried cavalryman. So scared was Bradley that he watched the approach of the warriors over his shoulder and did not see the sudden drop-off. His horse lurched, pitching the private down the slope. Bradley rolled into the Bighorn River itself.
Surfacing, sputtering and scared within an inch of his wits, the soldier realized he had one chance to get his message to the fort. That was by hugging the willow along the bank for the next six hundred yards until he could climb out of the water directly below the fort walls.
After more than seven hours of fighting off wave after wave of screaming, blood-eyed warriors, it was all Private Bradley could do to keep from wetting his pants at the closeness of both the fort and those wild-eyed pursuers.
What with the soaking he took in the river, the young cavalryman finally figured no one would notice if he wet his pants now anyway.
* * *
“Rider coming in, Captain!”
Hartz turned, looking beyond the sentry pointing down the hayfield road. A crowd quickly gathered along the north wall, watching the horse race down to the river junction.
“He’s done for now,” one of the sentries moaned a moment later as the horseman tumbled off his mount, careening down the slope into the slow-moving waters of the Bighorn.
“Give him some cover, by Jesus!” Captain Hartz shrieked. “I don’t believe you men—that’s a soldier, by God! He’ll be eaten alive if you don’t … gimme that rifle—drive those red bastards back, dammit!”
The soldiers answered with their Springfields, shamed by the officer reminding them to shoot at hostiles threatening one of their own. The rifles barking over the top of the north wall along with whining lead kicking up dirt around the legs of their prancing p
onies was enough to convince the two-dozen brown-skinned horsemen in the wisdom of retreat.
“You’re one lucky soldier,” Hartz cheered the dispatch bearer at the fort gate as Bradley stumbled up from the river.
“Colonel Bradley, sir.”
“You come from the corral?”
He nodded nervously, eyes bouncing here and there. “Yes-sir—”
“You mean some of you still alive?” Hartz’s voice showed his amazement, if not downright disbelief.
Bradley gulped. “The colonel, sir—”
“How many left?”
He shook his head, “I … I think we got two, maybe three dead.”
“Jesus, son—somebody in heaven watching over you!”
“Got a message for the colonel,” and he dragged the wet, folded paper from his dripping shirt.
“C’mon, son,” Hartz grabbed the soldier’s arm. “I’ll take you there myself.”
By the time the captain dragged the half-drowned trooper through the post commander’s door, Hartz had gleaned a good idea of what was going on down at the corral.
“I have dead and wounded,” Colonel Bradley read slowly, repeatedly blotting the paper with a kerchief so as not to smear the carefully penciled letters.
“… dead and wounded what must have help. The living will have to leave this corral after dark. Most of the Injins has gone down the valley. Have no idea how many is left. Snipers on the hill and some at the creek below us. We cannot stay no longer. If you are a man, Colonel Bradley—you will send relief to our rescue. If you are not a man, then you will surely go to hell where cowards like you belong.”
Bradley looked up from the note, his flintlike eyes glaring into the captain’s.
“Damn him! Calling me a coward. Why I’ll show that—”
“Permission to lead the relief, Colonel.”
He watched Bradley snap like a dry twig at the request. Crumpling the soggy paper into a ball he flung against a far wall, the colonel whirled on Hartz.
“Permission denied, Captain,” he snarled.
“Denied—”
“Captain Burrowes.” Bradley turned to Thomas B. Burrowes, who had served as post commander for a brief stint following Captain Kinney’s departure in June. “You will lead the relief.”
“By all means, sir!”
He glowered a minute at the angry Hartz. Then spoke his last order to Burrowes softly. “Go pull their civilian asses out of the fire.”
“Yessir,” Burrowes answered before saluting and lunging out the door, shouting orders.
Without so much as a glance in the direction of Capt. Edward S. Hartz.
Chapter 34
“Don’t count on those yellow-tailed blue-bellies ever reaching us,” Zeke Colvin growled.
Seamus Donegan and the rest watched anxiously as dark-shirted horsemen took shape beneath a dust cloud—Capt. Thomas B. Burrowes’s two companies hammering down the hayfield road. At the tail end of his column of twos bounced the mountain howitzer Burrowes had lugged up from Fort Phil Kearney a year ago. Colonel Henry B. Carrington, past commander of this Mountain District, Dakota Territory, had issued Burrowes and Captain Kinney that field piece in August of ’sixty-six when the two had led their companies here to the Big Horn country to build their post, charged with protecting the northern reaches of the Montana Road.
“Those stretchers ready?” Seamus flung his voice back at the tent where the wounded had laid out the duration of the attack.
“Will be, soon enough!” Bill Haynes called back. He and Finn Burnett had lashed together four crude stretchers.
J. C. Hollister was already delirious with pain. His gut wound never bled much from the bullet hole. But the man was slowly drowning in his own juices.
Sgt. James Horton struggled to help the others as much as he could, what with one wing out of commission. Throughout the fight he had repeatedly stumbled from the ragged, bullet-shredded tent when he heard each renewed charge bearing down on the corral. While his wound prevented him from holding a rifle, Horton nonetheless had done his share of damage, keeping his service revolver busy. It had been, after all, a day for close and dirty work.
Pvt. Francis M. Law lay dazed and unconscious. The bullet that had slammed into his eye had exited the temple area, taking some skull bone with it. He would lose his sight, but live to recount this day again and again for his grandchildren.
The last of the wounded, Pvt. Henry C. Vinson, had long since quit whimpering about his leg wounds. The holes made through his calves burned like hell. But watching the stoic bravery of the other three had shut the whining, frightened soldier right up. Time and again Vinson’s britches were soaked with urine throughout the daylong fight. But young Henry had grown, as few men would ever have to grow, that hot first day of August in the hayfield.
“I’ll be go to hell!” Zeke Colvin shouted.
“Damn them!” Private Holloran yelled.
“They’re stopping, goddammit! The yeller sonsabitches are stopping,” Al Colvin groaned, turning to Donegan.
As Burrowes’s relief column reached that point along the trail where the hayfield road passed beneath the ridge west of the corral, the hidden hostile snipers began to place their whining lead among the horsemen. In horror, the men waiting in the battered enclosure watched the drama on the dusty road strewn with the afternoon gold dust of sunset rays. With the first shots, the column leader threw up an arm, halting his command. There they milled for desperate moments while the snipers played havoc among them.
Then, at the moment the column commander turned his horse and flung his arm back toward the post, a second figure galloped to the head of the march, riding up from the second company in formation. With wild gestures the two men argued, until the second figure reined away, signaled and proceeded with his company. As the other company passed, it appeared the column commander had no choice but to follow on to the corral.
“Gentlemen!” the young officer who had dared pass up his commander shouted as his troopers neared the west wall.
A lusty wild thrashing and hugging swelled over the corral. Huzzahs and cheers rang in the air while the second company halted and ordered to dismount.
“I want to shake your hand, Lieutenant.” Seamus was the first to reach the young officer, Al Colvin and Finn Burnett on his heels.
The lieutenant held his hand out before him, accepting the Irishman’s in a crushing embrace. “Didn’t quite know what we’d find here…” He wagged his head in disbelief. “This … this is nothing more than a miracle.”
Seamus beamed at Captain Colvin. “You might say that, Lieutenant. Always heard the good Lord helps those who help themselves.”
“What’s your name?”
“Donegan. This is Al Colvin and Finn Burnett. The wounded are ready to transport.”
The young officer wagged his head still, looking over the compound. “It’s unbelievable the damage the hostiles did here. Every wagon-box … every one of those tents along the west wall—they’re riddled, turned to splinters or rags.” His eyes swept past the crippled wagon that had been rolled across the corral entrance, not much more now than a bullet-splattered pile of firewood.
“How many animals wounded?” he asked.
“All but two. A horse that went to the fort with the courier … and one lucky old mule,” Al Colvin announced, grinning.
“Look at the arrows the men are picking up,” the young officer said. “And the ground is covered with your cartridge shells … like acorns littering a forest floor.” He stared at the three civilians a long time before working up the words. “You fellas had a helluva fight here. I haven’t seen anything like this since Cold Harbor.”
Seamus pursed his lips a moment. “Man does what a man has to do, Lieutenant.”
“Name’s Houg.” He flung a thumb over his shoulder at Burrowes accepting the congratulations of the soldiers who had survived the hayfield fight. “This relief should’ve belonged to Captain Hartz. He’s the one spotted the fighting go
ing on this morning from up there along—”
“This morning?” Colvin squeaked. “You mean the post knowed about our fight this morning?”
Houg nodded, embarrassed. “Colonel Bradley figured—”
“I know just how that pompous popinjay figured,” Colvin growled. “Get my hands on him—he’ll feel worse than those wounded men do.”
“How many dead, sir?”
“Two. Soldiers both. Sternberg and a private. We have ’em in a tent … away from the others.”
“Lieutenant … Sternberg’s dead?”
“He fought bravely,” Seamus explained. “No one dare not call him a hero after—”
“We’re leaving now, Lieutenant,” Burrowes ordered, barging up.
Seamus whirled on the captain. “Leaving?”
“For your information, sir—I’m not about to sit around here all evening while you civilians lallygag. My soldiers are prepared to march back to the post at this moment. We’ll take your wounded if they are ready—”
“Why, you horse’s ass!” Seamus lunged for Burrowes.
Fortunately for both of them, Colvin, Burnett and Houg grabbed the Irishman as Burrowes leaped back.
“I’ll have you in irons you lay a hand on me!” Burrowes shrieked like a scalded cat.
“Bet you would at that,” Seamus snapped. “A simpering coward like you would talk that other yellow-spined she-dog of a colonel into slapping me in irons.”
“I won’t take any more of your abuse,” Burrowes turned away, slapping dust from his wide-brimmed hat. “Sergeant! Prepare the men to mount.”
“You’re not going to give us time to get Leighton’s property together for the march?” Burnett said, dashing in front of the retreating Burrowes.
The captain jerked to a halt, suddenly surrounded by a few more of the civilians. A grimy, powder-blackened lot they were. His anxious eyes darted over the group.
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