The seven hundred burst from the ravine in a wedge, the point of which was a large, barrel-chested warrior wearing a long, trailing bonnet of feathers fluttering in the hot breeze.
That determined leader of the Bad Face Oglallas had grown weary, angrier still at the progress his warriors made in rubbing out the white men in the corral. He wanted to move on to the fort itself. Red Cloud had designated his own nephew to lead the seven hundred down the ravine. To spearhead this attack that would swamp the corral defenders.
At the first volley from the soldiers, more than one bullet caught the attack leader in mid-stride. His feathered head snapped violently backward. The long-trailed bonnet tumbled to the side in a spray of brains and blood and gore. Crushed beneath the bullet-riddled body. Ermine and war-eagle feathers muddied among the dust and crimson and the trampled sage.
“Fire, goddammit!” Powell hollered behind them all, dashing up and down the corral. “This is it, men! Them or us—drop them! Kill them now!”
Volley after volley spat fire at the charge of enraged, yelling, wide-eyed warriors surging closer to the corral than ever before. The ponies had provided big targets, easier shots. But this charge on foot was something altogether different. The wagon-box defenders killing row upon row of naked warriors. With more coming, pushing behind them.
Again and again Sam Marr held out a left hand. A young soldier slapped a reloaded weapon into it, another of the trio taking the empty rifle from the civilian’s right. Rifles with little chance to cool. Under his breath, Sam prayed that none of the corral’s weapons would jam with the heat and the burnt powder in the breeches.
He suddenly smelled the stench of burning blood. A new fragrance to the old man.
It dripped from his head as he leaned over the trapdoor, working the breech block, slamming home the cartridges he hung between the fingers of his left hand like a row of glittering brass sausages. His head swam. The field before him shimmered and danced. Out of focus, the hostiles came on like flitting, cavorting blackbirds before his tired eyes. Sam swiped a hand across them quickly, smearing the blood. More blood than he could stop now. Two wounds, dripping blood into the heated breech of the Springfield. Blood sizzling. Bubbling in the breech. Cooked like blood-sausage back home in Missouri.
He liked the sound of that in his head. The cool, shady places of home. Missouri.
“C’mon in here, you blathering sonsabitches!” Marr shrieked, working the breech block, struggling with the cartridge stuck to his hand in congealing blood. The rifle hot to the touch. The sticky, crimson damp down his front now, matted in whiskers, spilling on his legs.
He blinked, his eyes clearing for a moment, able to see more of the human waves rushing down upon them. His old eyes sharp and intent. Like the redbone hound’s back home who always loped at his heels as he would seek out those cool places where the squirrels hid up in the forks of the blackjack oaks. Eyes like those hunting dogs watching him skin those squirrels, waiting … waiting …
“C’mon, you red bastards!” he hollered again. “We’ll lick the whole bunch of you!”
“We ain’t got a chance!” whined a soldier.
“Shuddup and load!” growled another of the scared recruits behind him.
“We can’t sit here—”
“You move and I’ll shoot you myself,” the second one warned, finding some courage perhaps never before tested.
Sam Marr’s gummy fingers fought the fat cartridges into and out of the breech, sticky with blood. His nose running now where a flying splinter of wood had ricocheted off the sidewall he knelt behind. Still the blood dripped slowly into a pool between his legs.
“Where’s my Henry?” he snarled, turning slightly toward the youngster behind his left shoulder. Sam wanted that seventeen-shot repeater in a bad way. The work was close at last. What he had been waiting for all morning.
He snatched the Henry up, rising, locking the butt into his right hip, pumping the lever. Again and again he pumped as he rose, until he stood full height. Screaming out in pain and frustration and fear of dying here. Pumping the lever again and again and …
Until the hot, hot blow spun him around. Throwing him backward with the shocking brute force of that old bull he kept in the pasture back home.
He sensed many hands on him, pulling him down. Strange, Missouri isn’t home anymore. The boys ain’t there. Sweet, sweet Abby—where are you? Dear God, where … just where the hell does a man go when he dies … and he doesn’t have a home where he can be buried?
Sioux and Cheyenne came on.
Glistening, sweating, bleeding copper bodies stumbling over the fallen, bloodied bodies of those gone before them. Never slowing. Coming on. Coming on resolutely through the golden haze of yellow dust hung like gauze in the slanting sunlight.
Coming on still through the clouds of stinging powder smoke.
Chapter 40
The screaming warriors got so close to the wagon boxes that Sam Gibson could see the whites of their eyes.
It was something he would never forget. Watching that attack come at them with no end. Wave after wave of glistening, sweating, paint-smeared, dust-covered, copper-skinned bodies hurling themselves forward without thought of death.
Mindlessly hurling themselves against the smoking muzzles at the corral walls.
By now most of the defenders had risen above their wagon-boxes, up on one knee to meet this nonstop onslaught. A lot of yelling. Swearing. Loud voices matching those shrill war cries thundering off the hills around them, echoing across the grassy plain littered with horse carcasses and bleeding, whimpering wounded.
In the box beside him, Gibson watched Sergeant McQuiery sweep up one of the big augers they had used to bore the holes in the sides of the wagons. McQuiery hurled it at the advancing horde, not taking the time to reload. Other men as well, each grabbing this tool or that sack of beans, flung them into the faceless, brown-skinned mass.
And for the first time Sam Gibson thought on dying. Wondering where the lanyard was that he had made from his shoelaces earlier that morning. Glancing quickly to the right as he saw the old civilian frontiersman knocked backward into the trio of reloaders Powell had assigned him. Closer and closer the charge surged from the dust and powder smoke. A haze so thick now that the warriors drew desperately close to the walls before they were discovered looming out of the sticky haze. Closer and closer still before the defenders shot each glistening body in desperation.
Gibson’s thoughts hung on dying. Wanting it to come struggling hand in hand with one of these sticky, sweating crimson bodies lurching out of the powder smoke toward the corral wall. He wanted to die fighting. Not with the muzzle of his rifle jammed under his chin at the last moment …
Three fluttering heartbeats later Sam Gibson found himself shooting the fleeing warriors in the back as the wave retreated. None of them took the time to drag any of the dead from the field. Just yards shy of the west wall the attack faltered in the face of determined men who had stood their ground, swearing to sell their lives dearly. Casualties too high. The field littered with the dead and dying. The rest just running.
“They’re turning tail, men!” Powell shouted, seeming to appear everywhere in the corral at once. His head bandaged. A brown smudge over one eye where his blood had dried.
“By jabbers! They running like jackrabbits!” Sergeant Hoover hollered, standing tall, shaking a triumphant arm in the air.
As the pell-mell rush swept from the prairie in a disorderly retreat, most of the soldiers quieted. Remembering their rifles. Intent now upon reloading the weapons still capable of firing. Those rifles not jammed, or caked with burnt powder, or seized with an oversized cartridge, or just plain overheated and gummed with blood.
“Shoot every one of the bastards that moves!” Sergeant Robertson ordered as he skidded on one knee along in the trampled dust behind each wagon-box, checking on the ammunition supply in the upturned hats beside each rifleman.
Guardedly, the defenders inched thei
r weapons over the sidewalls of their boxes once more. Eyes scanning the prairie carefully. Watching for movement among the bodies. Looking for puffs of powder smoke among the sage or thrashing pony carcasses or naked brown skin. Their sights methodically lined up on the warriors attempting a crawl to safety. Red-rimmed eyes sorting the dead Sioux and Cheyenne from those wounded who fired from the blood-soaked dust of their dying place, determined to take more of the white men with them to the other side on this good day of dying.
From time to time some of the old soldiers poured a bit of warm, precious water on the breeches of their rifles. Cooling them. Weapons allowed little rest from their killing work.
Red Cloud ordered his skirmishers forward again. Yet this time the soldiers saw something different. The medicine had gone out of their charge. Instead, most warriors galloped across the plain only to lean from their ponies and snatch up a raised hand from the field. Others cautiously inched forward on their bellies, covering those who worked among the dead and dying behind large buffalo-hide shields, dragging limp bodies back to safety. On three sides of the corral the soldiers watched as rescuers slipped rawhide pony lariats around an kles or wrists, dragging friends or brothers or uncles back into the sage and willow, out of range from the white man’s big guns that barked again and again and again …
Already the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne were speaking among themselves of this day when the soldier guns talked without stopping. Already Red Cloud’s bewildered legions were calling this the Battle of the Bad Medicine Rifles.
Yet what this fight was to be called when painted on the winter-count robes did not matter to the women and children and old ones gathered on the hilltops, watching the pride of their bands thrown against the tiny corral of white man’s wagons, watching that pitiful handful of defenders repeatedly repulse the screaming charges. From those hilltops their voices now rose in eerie cries and wailing laments, a melancholy keening as many of them hacked off locks of their own hair or dragged knife blades across arms and calves to bleed themselves or chopped off fingertips in mourning. A great, red wake on the hills overlooking the Big Piney meadow.
“Captain Powell says he wants you on the east wall, Gibby.”
Sam scurried across the compound to where Powell knelt among seven other soldiers.
“I don’t know what this gathering of their dead means, fellas,” the captain began in a hoarse whisper, “but I’ll have the rest of the men keep the red bastards honest. In the meantime, I wanted my best marksmen—each of you—to take ten rounds, and ten shots only, at that hilltop.”
Gibson’s eyes joined the rest, studying the slope to the east. From that moment of the first attack on the corral, that slope had appeared to be the hostiles’ command center. Couriers rode back and forth to the site. Blankets flagged messages and mirrors flashed replies across the valley from its slopes.
“Red Cloud, Captain?” Hoover asked.
“As sure as I’m born, Sergeant.”
“Take your time, boys,” Powell concluded. “If they throw more weight against us, hurry back to your assigned boxes. Until then … see what you can do to bag yourself a Sioux chief. Good luck.”
One by one the soldiers dispersed along the east wall of the corral, making their rests, counting out their ten rounds to conserve dwindling ammunition. Adjusting leaf sights up for the farthest range, murmuring amongst themselves on just how far away the hill really was from their compound.
Sam waited, watching a few of the others firing, walking their rounds up the slope of that hill. To figure range. Once those three had used up their allotment, the rest hunkered down to do their best in flushing the Sioux commanders from their nest.
“Damn if I wouldn’t give a month’s wages to make that Red Cloud a good Injun,” Max Littman whispered to Gibson.
As the lead hail rained down around their ponies, the enemy horsemen once again waved blankets, flashed mirrors, shouted orders over the valley. Some of their animals reared uncontrollably, spilling riders, frightened by the incoming rounds.
Then over his front sight Sam Gibson worked his last four bullets down the slope into the faraway meadow. Following the attack leaders as they retreated. Some of the marksmen growled their complaints of having to hit long-range moving targets. Others silently calculated windage and distance. Attempting to walk their bullets into the mass of warriors the way an artilleryman would walk his case shot over an entrenched infantry position.
“HURRAW!” a sudden cry erupted along that east wall.
Gibson jerked up. A second soldier leaped to his feet, arms in the air to join the first in a wild jig.
“What was that?” Hoover asked, turning to watch the commotion behind him in the corral.
“Did you hear that?”
“By God, I did! Was that—”
“They’re coming! Sweet, sweet Jesus—they’re coming!”
“Who’s coming?”
Then Sam Gibson saw the next puff of faraway smoke rising on the hot valley air. A few seconds of air flight later, another eruption of smoke was visible, even more smoke this time, filling the neck of the Little Piney valley to the east.
“It’s canister!”
“—dropping howitzer pills around their damned heads!”
“We’re saved!”
“They’re firing cased shot at the bastards!”
“—’bout damned time!”
“—saved now!’
“—running ’em off!”
Then, through the leafy green branches of the trees lining the wood road along the Sullivant Hills, young Sam thought he spotted movement. This time a swelling, blue movement. And only when that column of troopers had cleared the trees where hours before another frantic group of soldiers had retreated from the wood train did Private Gibson sense the sting of hot, salty tears at his eyes. He wheeled on Sergeant Hoover, his mouth moving, no sound coming forth.
Hoover nodded, landing his big, swollen and bloody hand on Gibson’s shoulder. Smiling that crooked-tooth smile he rarely gave any man. “Likely we’ll get back to the fort in time for dinner, Gibby.”
Gibson fell against the old soldier, shaking, trying to control his tears, his shoulders quaking. Afraid he might never stop sobbing. And the old sergeant held him there with that one good arm he had left now. Clinging onto the young soldier, for if he didn’t, Hoover might fall himself, his legs gone weak and watery.
All round the corral the men danced and hugged and slapped and cheered, throwing their hats into the air. The strain taken from their shoulders at last. Every one of them watching that long column of a hundred men and the big, brass-mounted, mule-drawn howitzer bouncing hurriedly into the valley. And behind them all rumbled the six wagons and four ambulances rocking in the sun-baked ruts of that dusty wood road, spinning iron tires kicking up tall cascades of golden haze. Hurrying to the rescue.
* * *
In the middle of the smoky compound stood their commander.
Powell’s eyes did not tarry on the relief column long at all. He alone among those in that corral knew how the Sioux and Cheyenne could circle back on a unit. Two days before these very warriors had wiped out Fetterman’s men, the captain led his own command to the crest of that same Lodge Trail Ridge, on the heels of those same enticing decoys. But Powell had followed Colonel Carrington’s orders not to pursue that seductive lure into the valley of the Peno.
To the disappointed groans of his men that cold December day, Powell turned his troops about and retreated to the fort. Leaving the angry two thousand warriors waiting in ambush to wait another two suns.
Two suns had come and gone when many of those same soldiers trotted off behind Fetterman over the crest of the Lodge Trail, onto the spur ridge where this time they would give their lives in the successful closing of the redman’s bloody trap.
These men here in the corral groaned and complained every bit as loudly when Powell ordered them to break off their celebration.
“Back to your wagon-boxes … now!”
Powell wheeled on the rest. “That goes for all of you!”
“Ahhh, Captain … can’t you see—”
“I’ll drag you back there myself, McQuiery!” Powell barked, starting for the sergeant’s box.
“I’m going, Captain! I’m going, goddammit!”
“We’ll wait for the column to draw closer, men.” He said it quietly this time, as the air hissed out of their premature celebration.
“The bastards are running, Cap’n!”
“The day you trust an Indian, Robertson—day you’ll be a dead man.”
“They’ve turned tail!” McQuiery argued.
“As many as we’ve killed,” Powell hollered above the protests of his men, his hands trembling to control his rage and remembrance, “Red Cloud’s still got more than enough with him to descend on that relief party … and wipe those men out.”
“They didn’t overrun us!”
Powell whirled on a young soldier, one of those who cradled Sam Marr across his lap. “By damned—we weren’t caught in the open like they are, soldier! You pray to your God this moment—and thank the almighty for these wagon-boxes and ammunition.”
Sam Gibson watched the contrite soldier nod, pursing his lips as if ashamed of his blasphemy.
As the relief party descended from the Sullivant Hills into the meadow, the men in the corral could contain themselves no longer. First one, then two more, and finally more than half of them leaped from their boxes, racing the last two hundred yards across the prairie grass littered with the carcasses of dead and dying ponies. Strewn among the painted, feathered, copper-skinned bodies fallen too close to the corral for rescue.
Major Smith’s rescuers broke formation as well, rushing forward at double-time now. Many amazed to find so many from the corral still alive. Truly awed to look upon those hardy, sunburnt defenders, their faces smudged with blood and blackened with powder soot, eyes reddened by flying dust and smoking dung piles and tears of joy.
“Cap—Captain Powell, C Company, reporting, Major.”
Smith returned the salute, wagging his head in pure wonderment before he found words. He swallowed hard. “Your casualties, Captain?”
Red Cloud's Revenge Page 37
