Ashes of Heaven (45 page)

That gunshot came from downstream!

Another. And then a loud volley rumbled their way through the quiet, wet dawn.

Below him she jerked, having heard the shots too.

Now they could hear the distant screaming, and many, many more gunshots.

Outside the lodge, some of his people were shouting.

“The soldiers!”

Yanking himself from his wife, White Hawk lunged across the lodge for his belt and breechclout, tying them around himself as he stumbled for the lodgedoor and flung back the covering.

Outside all was pandemonium. Men were running about, catching up their horses. Children cried and the dogs ran round and round, growling while the women heaved their belongings out of the doorways. Young children climbed onto the shoulders of older youth to begin dragging lacing pins from the tops of the lodgecovers, while other children hunched over tall stakes, heaving this way and that to free them.

“The soldiers!” a woman yelled, her face looming in front of his suddenly. Then she was gone, dragging the long poles of her travois toward her lodge.

Something soured in his belly, telling White Hawk this was the end of his little clan. Perhaps the end of the last free Elkhorn Scraper warriors. The very end of the
Ohmeseheso
who had sought to live free, away from the agencies.

In the distance came more, louder cries of frightened women and the angry shouts of men, the cacophony broken by the rapid staccato of soldier gunfire.

The soldiers. Just as he had promised, the Bear Coat had come for Lame Deer.

Now all White Hawk's people could do was be gone before the
ve-ho-e
discovered they were here. Before they too would be forced to abandon everything they owned just to save their lives.

When he turned, White Hawk found his wife had pulled on her dress. She and their two children were stuffing a few belongings into rawhide bags.

The soldiers would always come.

They always had.

“We must run!” she sobbed, sinking to her knees in futility among their few possessions after all these seasons of destruction.

“Take only what you need,” he chided her. “I don't care about those things. I want you and the little ones to live. Go now—to the Roseberry! On the horses and go!”

He watched them scurry toward the ponies like a small covey of flushed quail, then leaped back inside the lodge. Snatching up his rifle and gunbelt, stuffing the soldier pistol inside his waistband, White Hawk whirled back outside.

“Do not stay to take down the lodges!” he ordered the other women. “Run downstream to the Roseberry! The soldiers will come and kill us all if you do not hurry!”

“Our lodges—it's all that we have!” a father and husband stumbled up to protest.

“No!” White Hawk said, grabbing the man's shoulders and shaking him brutally. “Get into the hills! There with your family, you will have all that is truly important!”

Chapter 37

7 May 1877

Heads poked from lodgedoors and disappeared; then half-naked warriors dashed into the dim light.

Spurts of flame jetted from the muzzle of each rifle, every pistol aimed at those Cheyenne scouts and Casey's mounted infantry as they galloped past the northern reaches of the village.

The village was fully awake by the time Tyler's F Company charged toward the lodges, Wheelan's G on their heels. In the graying light, more bright orange flamed from the muzzles of enemy weapons in the camp.

Among the first to reach the shallow coulee west of the village, Seamus watched three warriors emerge from the prairie itself—bravely racing toward the cavalry line as they shouted to one another, buoying their courage. He figured more would appear, but only those three came to fight. They dropped to one knee, aiming their rifles.

They look like cavalry carbines, he thought as Captain Tyler hollered his order.

Most of the troopers didn't wait to hear the dismount command echo from their sergeant. They were already swinging a right leg up and over the backs of their ass-numbing McClellans, leaping to the ground, huddling in fours as one among them snatched up the reins to the other three mounts. Only then did each trio hurry forward as the fourth man wheeled to the rear, tightly clutching the throatlatches securing his quartet of nervous horses.

A soldier went down noisily in the grass off to Donegan's left. He could hear him thrashing. Some men fell quietly, even without a sound, only to be discovered later by their comrades. But this one was not going to die without bellowing at the devil for his fate.

Over the front blade of his Winchester, the Irishman leveled the carbine high on a warrior's chest. Pulling the trigger, he felt the reassuring nudge against the socket of his right shoulder as the .44-caliber sphere hurtled on its way. Lead slammed into the Lakota, spinning him off the one leg he was kneeling on, back into the tall grass where he disappeared from view.

Now there were only two defenders who somehow held back the whole of Tyler's company as the captain rode among them on horseback, waving his service revolver in the air and crying out orders to advance toward the coulee.

“Forward! Forward, goddammit!” he was screaming at those Second Cavalry troopers as Donegan started for the depression in the bottomground that stretched up from the creekbank. “You don't go forward—they'll pin you down! When they pin you down, they'll cut you up! Forward, men!”

Seamus wanted to yell at them too, but instead he levered another round into the chamber of his carbine and turned to wave them on behind him. Perhaps they would see him and it would encourage them to scurry through the grass; now that they were dismounted skirmishers, now that they were no longer mounted cavalry.

He waved, watching the determined and the scared coming his way, each soldier's face carved deep with the terror of the battle just enjoined. Remembering the faces of another Second Cavalry.
Union
Second Cavalry. Men who were no longer. Comrades flinging their bodies at the cream of the Confederacy with wild cries and glittering sabers decorated with blood-red braided knots. Oh, for the glory of it those youths had offered up their flesh, bone, and blood—riding into the mutilating spray of grapeshot and the whine of a thousand minié balls.

How they had sacrificed to preserve the Union.

And in the end how they had fought to save their own lives, praying God above would spare them just one last time, vowing to go back home to wife or sweetheart, to mother and father. Some would live through the battle, live through that day ultimately to break that vow and fight on with their comrades of the Second in the charges and bloodletting to come. Others would lie in the fallow grass, their bright, glistening blood daubing the emerald green until it dried to black and the bodies bloated in the sun.

“Come on, you horse sojurs!” Seamus bellowed at these youngsters, unable to contain a tangible swelling of pride within him.

These were the Second Cavalry—no matter what the political changes or how their superiors had tinkered with it over the years. These were the same fresh-faced soldiers who had always ridden for the Second—whether stymieing the Confederacy outside of Gettysburg, or riding into the gates of Fort Phil Kearny behind William Judd Fetterman in those last weeks before they all charged into hell together—this was the Second-by God-Cavalry.

Always the first into battle. And always the last to ride back out.

Already the women and children were spilling across the deep creek, clambering up the south bank, soaked and lumbering in their blankets, racing toward the slopes in ragged lines, these refugees screaming at the children, herding the little ones through the freezing water, dragging the old ones up the steep bank so they could keep up, keep up as they headed for the timbered southern hillsides where snow still clung in dirty, icy patches.

It was clear that the village hadn't been sealed off.

No matter, the Irishman figured. It would be like the Red Fork when they had captured the ponies and driven the enemy into the hills. Then Miles would burn all that could burn, destroy the rest, and butcher the horses. The survivors would have nothing, left only with the choice of starving or coming in to surrender.

He prayed this fight would not turn out like Reynolds's on the Powder—the battle that started this Sioux War. The enemy had regrouped on the heights when part of Reynolds's cavalry refused to advance in support of the rest and Egan got himself pinned down beneath the warriors' crossfire. If it hadn't been for Donegan leading Anson Mills's company down the hill against orders, why, Reynolds would have had himself more than four dead soldiers. And then the officers had ordered their men to pull back so suddenly, abandoning the bodies of their dead and dying to the enemy … Seamus vowed he would never again look down into the face of a young soldier who knew he was going to die, forced to listen to that soldier plead, “Finish me.”

It was too much to ask a man to kill his brother-in-arms, to finish him off before he fell into the hands of a brutal enemy warrior who would torture and mutilate before killing.

“Forward!” Tyler was growling at them all over again as he came up behind the soldiers on his horse. “Toward the village! We got 'em on the run, boys!”

That much was true, Seamus thought, as he bolted out of the shallow coulee ahead of the rest, yanking down the lever and ejecting that hot copper case. They did have the village on the run. Very few warriors remained among the lodges. It appeared most had already scampered across the rain-swollen stream toward the hillsides where they were taking cover behind trees, firing at the soldiers lumbering through the scrub and sage, darting this way and that around the stands of trees toward the empty lodges where breakfast fires still raised their wispy fingers at the dawn sky.

One by one the warriors fled the village, darting from lodge to lodge until they reached the creekbank, leaped into the deep water, and struggled across the stiff flow to clamber up the far side, before sprinting for the nearby slopes. On those hillsides stood the women and children, crying out to their men, exhorting them with their brave-heart songs, encouraging the fighters as they raced across the open ground.

“We have the village!” hollered battalion commander Ball, wheeling his mount. As Captain Wheelan's company came up, the captain ordered them to make a careful search of the tipis to assure there weren't any snipers left within the camp. Then he stood in the stirrups to call, “Captain Tyler!”

The cavalry officer loped his horse over to Ball. “Sir?”

“Take your men across the creek and continue to drive the escapees into the hills. I don't want any of those warriors left close enough to the village to cause problems for the men searching the tipis. It appears the general is bringing his staff this way. Let's clear the slopes, Captain.”

“Snipers. Very good, sir!” Tyler roared and spun his mount away.

When Donegan looked back to the west, he spotted Miles and his headquarters group headed toward the camp at a lope. Now that the village had been cleared of those last stragglers, it was safe to bring in the Bear Coat.

“Bring up the led horses!” Tyler sang out.

Nearly every one of the men in F Company took up that call. “Horse holders to the front!”

In moments the throatlatches were being passed off to the riders and snapped free before the men climbed into the saddle.

When most were ready, Tyler shouted, “Across the stream! Column of twos. It doesn't have to be pretty—just get there in one piece!”

They came off the bank into the Big Muddy with cockscombs of spray that drenched them all as the horses landed, found their legs, then began to hurtle their riders to the far bank where the animals lunged onto the grass. All of it was accompanied by the first sporadic rifle fire returned by the enemy who were just then reaching the nearby slopes.

The landing the claybank made almost jarred Donegan's teeth loose as a surge of bile flung itself against his tonsils. Swallowing down the pain in his groin and rising in the stirrups, Seamus urged the mare on across the stream in the midst of those shouting, clamoring troopers.

“Dismount!” came the cry from a sergeant with some faded chevrons on his blouse, the first officer to make it across among Tyler's men.

A soldier reached the south bank, clumsily spurring his mount onto the grassy slope on all fours, only to be struck by a bullet which toppled him to the ground. More bullets hissed past the Irishman.

“Dismount, goddammit!” the sergeant was hollering. “Horse-holders to the front!”

In the maddening confusion of men and animals whirling in all directions like a Kentucky reel, Seamus spun to the ground, dragging the horse behind him as he lunged for some tall willow. Hidden here where the warriors couldn't easily spot him, the Irishman knotted the reins to the brush then sprinted to a nearby stand of trees to begin firing at the hillside.

“There's Injuns behind us!”

At the cry, Donegan whirled around in a crouch. But there were only two Indians, then two more—all four of them bursting from the west side of the village, plunging off the steep bank into the creek.

“Sweet mother in heaven!” Seamus whispered, seeing how Miles and his staff were already across the creek behind Tyler's and Wheelan's men … headed at an angle directly toward those warriors.

From the sound of it, Miles was having Bruguier and Hump yell a message to the escapees. As Donegan started toward the bunch, his carbine hammer cocked, he heard Robert Jackson calling to Miles.

“General, that's Lame Deer!”

“The chief?” Miles asked, reining up suddenly, his chestnut raring slightly.

“Lame Deer!” Jackson repeated, pointing at the one wearing a long, double-trailer warbonnet, clutching a broken tree limb in his free hand. To the end of that stick hung a dirty white rag.

Hump was next to recognize the leader and shouted in Lakota at the four armed men angling away from Miles's group toward the closest hillside where their people continued to holler and bellow.