Ashes of Heaven (5 page)

Big Leggings turned suddenly and gripped her thin, bony hands between his. Her coffee cup trembled, not from fear, but from a keen, ready anticipation. She saw the expectation firing the interpreter's eyes. Yes, Old Wool Woman did indeed tremble from her own mounting excitement.

“Will we go soon?” she asked.

“Four, perhaps five, days. And when we find the Shahiyela camp,” Big Leggings told her, his deep voice rising, “it is a matter of life or death that you help me find that Sacred Hat Lodge!”

*   *   *

The Lakota wolves had returned after many days of trailing the Bear Coat's soldiers back to their fort. Day after day the ten scouts, mounted on the strongest horses left among the warrior camps, had watched for a chance to slip in close enough to free the captives. Instead, the warriors could only watch the soldiers reach their fort at the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue River with their prisoners. They had little choice but to turn back for the village with empty hands and small hearts.

The
Mnikowoju
*
chief watched the ten slowly crossing an icy Prairie Dog Creek on their weary animals as small, icy flakes danced around them. They did not ride like victors. They looked every bit as whipped and weary as their ponies. There were only ten riders. No others. The Bear Coat still held the Shahiyela.

So much had taken place while those ten riders had been gone. Across four days Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the other Lakota chiefs sat in council with Shahiyela leaders, men like Morning Star and Little Wolf, Two Moon and Old Bear, the Sacred Hat Priest. Each day they smoked and passed the pipe and talked until the sun had run its winter race across the sky. And in the end two things grew certain.

Despite what Sitting Bull had managed to trade from the Red River Slotas after the Bear Coat's soldiers had twice attacked his people, there were not enough guns and bullets to wage war on the
wasicu
as they had the previous spring and summer.

Just as certain, no longer was there the same united resolve among the warrior bands, the resolve that Sitting Bull once had tapped within each fighting man, the resolve that once made them rise up and make a stand whereas before they had only raided, skirmished, and fought long enough for the villages to escape.

It disgusted Lame Deer the way his old friends dithered and deliberated over what, to him, was not worth argument. It angered him because there really was but one path to take. While Sitting Bull, No Neck, and others talked of fleeing north into the Land of the Grandmother, Crazy Horse and the rest discussed marching south when the weather broke, so they could slip back onto the reservations.

The Grandmother's soldiers would treat them squarely, Sitting Bull's allies said. There would be buffalo. The camps would be left in peace north across the Medicine Line.

But winter stays long in that far place, others protested. Even the summer days can be cool, and the nights wet. Besides, the Land of the Grandmother had never been our land. No matter how many Lakota go there, it never will be our land.

Why are you arguing this way? Lame Deer wanted to yell. Couldn't the other chiefs see that there was really only one choice?

In the end it deeply saddened him that none of the other leaders could see that there was a third path open to them. They did not have to flee to a faraway land where they were unwelcome strangers. And they did not have to slip back onto the agencies with their tails tucked between their legs just because the women were hungry and the children were sick.

A warrior did not give up!

“As for me,” Lame Deer announced after Sitting Bull had declared he would leave in the morning for the Land of the Grandmother, “neither path you have offered suits my
Mnikowoju
people. Any lodge, any warrior from any camp who wishes to join me may come with us. We are not giving up, no matter what the
wasicu
might promise us—because we all know his promises are like dust in a strong wind.”

“What will you do?” asked No Neck.

“We will hunt buffalo and elk, antelope and deer, as we always have,” Lame Deer explained as he rose to his feet. “And we will continue to wander these hunting grounds our peoples have been given by
Wakan Tanka.
Never will we hold out our hands to take what the white man offers us!”

Chapter 3

27 January 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

Army Re-organization.

WASHINGTON, January 27.—The commission appointed to prepare a plan for a re-organization of the army, report to the president that there has been a very general discussion and interchange of opinions, but other important matters have so occupied them that they have not been able to give the subject that attention and deliberation its importance demands, and cannot therefore make recommendations.

Everyone was Irish today.

With the music and revelry of this celebration for young Colin Teig, everyone who came that afternoon had a touch of the Irish in them.

Both a sergeant from one of the infantry companies and a corporal from a cavalry outfit brought their scratched and scuffed violin cases. Another cavalryman brought his well-traveled banjo, while a fourth pulled a harmonica and Jew's harp from the pocket of his coat the moment he stepped inside the rooms where others had hurriedly pushed all the furniture back against the walls.

How just the sight of those musical instruments made Samantha's eyes sparkle with mischief! Why, not even in Denver or Cheyenne City had the two of them listened, much less danced, to lively music. Then he remembered—they hadn't danced since their wedding day on Sharp Grover's place back in the summer of 1875 when Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry and Miles's Fifth Infantry brought an end to the Great Buffalo War with the Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne.
*

“May I have this dance, madam?” he asked, slipping his arm around her waist.

Samantha turned, grinning as she rarely did, her pale, slightly freckled face flush with the cold, rosy with excitement. How those green eyes did reflect her love for him. “What of Colin?”

“Here,” Martha Luhn said, taking the infant from Sam's arms. “Give the li'l tyke to me and go dance with your mister!”

Seamus winked at the officer's wife. “Thank you, Martha.” Then he took a step back, laid his right arm across his waist and bowed gallantly. “Mrs. Donegan, would you do me the honor of this dance?”

How she made his heart flutter as she gazed at him beneath those long eyelashes, cocking her head to the side coyly, then curtsying elegantly. “If you'll watch out for my feet with those big hooves of yours—”

Before she could finish, he seized her left hand and flung his right arm around her. He whirled Samantha out among the few who were daring enough to venture into the center of the room with that first song the fiddlers and banjo player began to scratch out.

Round and round he whirled her with crazed abandon, sensing her finally relax as she gave herself over to him while he slipped into a clumsy rhythm—twirling her round and round, listening to the thumping of other feet, the clapping of all those hands, the twang-twang-twang of the jew's harp. And with every step he made sure not to raise one of his big feet off the ground far enough to catch one of hers beneath it.

“I didn't take you fellers for Irish!” he exclaimed breathlessly as he rolled up before the musicians after a second song, Samantha clasped against him beneath an arm.

“My grandpappy,” explained one who held a violin. “He taught me what I know of fiddling.”

“I ain't Irish,” the older infantryman admitted with a wag of his head and a big smile emerging beneath his shaggy horseshoe of a mustache. His sergeant's chevrons were well faded from many a washing, many a march beneath the western sun. “But I learned my Irish tunes during the war against the Johnnies.”

Everyone was Irish today! Every last woman and child, every last man jack of them. When those fiddles started crying and that banjo began plinking, when a few of those women got out there in the middle of it all and hiked up their layers of skirts and petticoats only high enough to allow them to kick up their heels and clog until they were breathless and beaded in sweat, then Seamus knew they couldn't have had a better christening celebration in County Kilkenny itself.

From time to time Seamus would wheel onto the floor with young Colin Teig wrapped securely in his arms, where father and son would bend and whirl and spin, eliciting wild giggles from the boy as he carried him round and round, and in among the other dancers. As the pair wheeled past, all of them reached out to pinch a cheek or pat the youngster's arm. At other times, Seamus would sit in one of the simple ladder-backed chairs, little Colin propped on his knee so the youngster faced the dancers, and there he bounced and waggled his firstborn in time to the music.

“Seamus,” Samantha said later. “Let me take him.”

“We're doing just fine here together, him and me!” Seamus protested as Sam held out her hands.

She leaned forward to whisper, “You've got to find something more to drink, husband.”

“More still?” he squeaked in disbelief. “It feels like I just got back from the trader's with that last armload!”

“Dancing works up a sweat, Mr. Donegan,” Nettie Capron said at Samantha's side. “And there's a heap o' dancing going on here for your son's day!”

“For the love of the Virgin Mary,” he exclaimed as he stood, handing the boy to his mother. “I'll go see what I can haggle out of Collins now.”

Samantha kissed the boy's cheek as the child twisted himself in her arms so he could watch all the action. “Where are you getting the money for all this … this celebration in a bottle you're buying everyone, Seamus?”

“Not yours to worry about, my bride,” and he smiled down at her, squeezing her against him.

“I can only imagine you had some pay built up for all that time you were away,” she said, standing on her toes and speaking into his ear. “But, I can't imagine how you'd have anything left after the two dresses and that pair of new blankets, along with that cloth you bought for me to make Colin some clothes. This army must pay you much better to scout for it than it pays its own officers!”

He kissed Sam lightly, squarely on the mouth, something he rarely did in public. Then looked down into those green eyes filled with surprise. “Yes, my beautiful bride, mother of my son. The army pays its scouts well enough that I can provide for my family without worry. I'll be back from the trader's straightaway.”

Bundled in their coats and mufflers and hats against the horrid cold, the men stepped out on the front porch from time to time to puff on their pipes or smoke their cheroots away from the women and children who frolicked and laughed inside. Now for a third time Seamus himself pulled on his coat and went outside, trudging quickly through the snow to trader Collins's saloon where he purchased another armload of brown and green bottles—more whiskey for the hard drinkers, as well as brandy for the ladies and those who preferred to sip their libations.

“You'll give me a fair price now?” he had prodded the trader the day before when working out their arrangement.

Collins had licked his lower lip. “You said you were paying in cash? No I.O.U. drawn against future payroll?”

Seamus had grinned and patted the lower right pocket of his worn vest. “Army scrip, trader. I'll pay you now for what we'll drink tomorrow. Now tell me, just how fair you going to make your prices for a father what has a naming to celebrate?”

Donegan did indeed have money. For the first time in his life he had no worry in buying his friends their drinks. Nor did he have any fear he would end up drinking away everything and have nothing left for Samantha and Colin Teig. General George Crook had seen to that.

The morning after he had returned to Fort Laramie, right after untangling himself from his wife's leggy warmth, Seamus had reported to the post commander's office.

“There's no doubt what you've come for, Mr. Donegan,” Major Andrew E. Evans said as he shuffled through some papers atop a desk littered with duty rosters and daily reports from Camp Robinson.

Standing stiffly on the other side of the desk, Seamus glanced at the post's commanding officer. The two of them had shared the battlefield at the Rosebud, shared Crook's horse-meat march to the Black Hills. “If you mean the money that's to be waiting for me, Colonel,” he replied, using Evans's brevet rank, “that's what I've come for.”

“Here it is,” Laramie's commander sighed, pulling out a brown envelope. Folding back its flap, the major in the Third U.S. Cavalry pulled out a bundle of scrip enclosed within a sheet of paper. Dropping the stack of army pay on the desk, Evans quickly reread the page. “Yes, I remember this now.” He looked up at Donegan. “General Crook left orders that I was to hold this until your return … or, until the first of May.”

“The first of May, Colonel?”

Setting the paper down, the major cleared his throat and said, “At that time I was to call in your missus. With orders to explain what might have happened to you. And to give her this money at that time.”

“Just what Crook and Mackenzie said they'd do.”

“Are you surprised,” asked the officer of the day, an infantryman, as he stepped up to Evans's elbow, “that either of them would be men of honor?”

“Colonel Evans here can tell you just how much stock I put in the word of another man.”

“So, Mr. Donegan,” Evans began, picking up the bundle of scrip, “here you are. As guaranteed by General Crook himself. All I need you to do is to sign this voucher that you've received—”

“I don't want it all, sir,” he interrupted, watching his words bring Evans up short.

“Not all?”

“Those orders left by General Crook, sir? If I could make the same request of you personally, Colonel, I'd be in your debt.”