Trumpet on the Land (69 page)

Unlike the miserable bivouacs of the last two weeks, tonight one heard songs, jokes, and laughter. Once more men were eager about their prospects. Many of those who days before had been grumbling that the general ought to be hanged were this night heard to boast, “Crook was right, after all!”

They ate their fill in the rain, gathered at their hissing fires, caring not about the morrow.

“C'mere and try some of this, Seamus,” John Finerty called out.

“What's on the menu there, newsman?” Donegan asked.

“Pony.”

“Had me some already,” and he squatted near the reporter.

“Not cooked fresh you haven't,” Finerty replied. “See?
I've become quite a connoisseur, Seamus. Cavalry meat, played out, sore-backed, and fried without salt is stringy. Leathery, and tasting just like a wet wool saddle blanket too. Downright nauseating.”

“I've tasted my fill of that too, thank you.”

Again Finerty offered the Irishman a piece, saying, “Now, a full-grown Indian pony has the flavor and appearance of the flesh of elk.”

“And you're an expert on elk, are you, now?”

“I've been hunting many a time with Crook, haven't I?” Finerty protested. “But perhaps best of all—a young Indian colt tastes like antelope, Seamus. Or mountain sheep.”

“So what of mule meat?” asked Robert Strahorn from across the fire with a full mouth.

The reporter from Chicago shuddered. “Mule, eh? Fat and rank, perhaps best described as a combination of all the foregoing—with a wee taste of pork thrown in.”

“There's some that think a mule loin is just about the best thing in the way of prairie victuals,” .Seamus told them, “second only to buffalo.”

Finerty sneered, “And what sort of dunderhead would that be?”

“They're called Kwahadi Comanche, Johnny boy,” Donegan replied, standing to stretch out his cold, cramping muscles. “And pray you don't ever have to campaign down on the Staked Plain of west Texas against those devils incarnate.”

Chapter 43
9-10 September 1876

N
ot long after the last echoes of gunfire faded from the nearby bluffs, a pair of sore-footed troopers from the Fifth Cavalry limped out of the darkness, hailing the pickets surrounding infantry camp. They had been some of the first forced to abandon their played-out horses that morning when the entire column followed in the wake of Crook's rescue, which placed the pair as the last stragglers on the trail.

As they approached the northern end of Slim Buttes, the weariness of the muddy trail overwhelmed them, and they decided to lie down and nap among the shelter of some rocks they found in a ravine. At the moment the Sioux chose to launch their attack, the two hapless soldiers were awakened rudely. It didn't take them long to figure out they would be a lot safer staying right where they were than attempting to thread their way through the hostile horsemen in hopes of reaching the army's lines. They hadn't dared to raise their heads from their ravine until long after dark.

The steady, eerie throb of death chants and wails of
mourning women floated down from the shelter half where the surgeons had done what they could to make American Horse comfortable. Out there in the night, evil spirits lurked, ruling that dominion just beyond the fire's light.

Seamus shuddered and crossed himself superstitiously, sitting at a fire with John Finerty, Lieutenant Bourke, and others, staring mesmerized at the sputtering flames—then turned suddenly, tearing his revolver from its holster as a dark figure crouched from a gash in a nearby lodge.

With the audible double click of so many pistol hammers, the ghostly form stopped immediately, one leg in, one leg out of that slash in the buffalo hides, slowly standing erect in his long calf-length blanket coat of many colors, staring at the three barrels glinting with a dull light beneath the fire's dancing aura.

A pair of black eyes twinkled as the dark-skinned Indian tried out a lame smile, lifting his hands into the air and stammering, “T-there ain't a thing w-worth having in the hull damned outfit.”

“Who in the thunder are you?” Donegan demanded.

“Ute John,” he answered sheepishly as he inched into the light, his hands shaking as the Irishman advanced on him. “Some call me Cap'n Jack.”

“Bejesus—you gave me a start!” Finerty exclaimed.

Donegan got close enough to press the revolver's muzzle against the tracker's head. With his empty hand he grabbed the Indian's chin and turned the brown face from side to side in the firelight. “Damn—it is you. The squaw scalper. Should've killed you right off.” In disgust he turned away, stuffing his pistol into the holster on his hip.

“What are you doing there?” Bourke asked.

The Indian replied, “Looking for plunder.”

“You're lucky to have a few lodges still standing, you sick bastard,” Seamus added. “Cap'n Powell's gonna finish putting 'em all to the torch come morning.”

Ute John's head bobbed, and he said, “I see what I find before the fires.”

“G'won!” Bourke demanded. “Get out of here before I have you put under guard myself.”

Early that rainy evening the general ordered that the four corpses Ute John had scalped and mutilated be given to the captives so they could perform a proper burial. With Grouard and Pourier, Crook then wrung what information he could from his reticent prisoners. From them the general learned that not only was Crazy Horse in the neighborhood, but Sitting Bull was as well—with plans to take his Hunkpapa north to the Antelope Buttes to trade. What came as the most discouraging news, however, was hearing that the bands had indeed split and scattered, most making for the reservations, and already far ahead of his column.

“Charging Bear keeps saying this bunch wasn't on the Greasy Grass, General,” Big Bat reported. “Says they didn't fight the soldiers on the Little Bighorn.”

“Then ask him why we found in their lodges the gloves of one of Custer's men, why we found their horses among these ponies, why we recaptured the pony soldiers' flag in this camp,” Crook snarled.

To Three Stars, Charging Bear repeated the assertion that visiting Oglalla of the Crazy Horse Hunkpatila band brought those spoils from the Greasy Grass fight into camp.

In the end Crook used his interpreters to drive home his point that the army intended to punish all who remained off their agencies, then concluded by telling the prisoners he would release them the following morning. They would be allowed to remain there in the midst of their destroyed village, where they could bury their dead in the manner of their people.

Late that night six more stragglers showed up. The soldiers had left Crook's bivouac to hunt early that morning, before word had arrived of Mills's attack and everyone had set out on the rescue. They had returned later that day to find nothing but the column's tracks. Now the six greedily chewed on the dried meat offered them at the cheery fires as sheets of mist hissed around them, and told of being attacked by a dozen or more warriors who had held
them under siege for some four hours before withdrawing. Nonetheless, they had waited until dark before pushing on in hopes of finding what had become of Crook's command.

During the night the surgeons kept their stewards busy constructing additional litters from lodgepoles, to which they lashed shelter halves or pieces of captured blankets for the morning's journey, when Crook would lead them south once more. Only three days before, the general had ordered Mills and Bubb to secure rations among the Black Hills settlements. But at that moment the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition was no closer to relief as the rain and gloom settled down on Slim Buttes.

With their amputations on Von Leuttwitz and Kennedy complete, Doctors Clements and McGillycuddy turned their attention to American Horse. As the surgeons knelt beside their patient, some of the friends of Private Wenzel nearby grumbled profanely.

“Why don't you just put a knife through that son of a bitch, Doc?” suggested one of the dead private's comrades.

“Yeah,” agreed a second bitter friend. “I'll be happy to finish off that red bastard my own self.”

“You bastards!” another old file shouted. “Why, I ain't got no use for a doctor that'd do anything for a goddamn Injun!”

Valentine McGillycuddy whirled on the troopers clustered nearby. “The next one of you who says a damned thing will answer personally to me! Are you men no better than animals? As for myself, I've taken an oath to relieve suffering—and I won't see a man in pain without giving aid. No matter the color of his skin!”

Despite his great pain and the many appeals from the half-breed interpreters, the chief steadfastly refused any of the white man's “powerful medicine” when the surgeons offered a hypodermic of morphine or an inhalation of chloroform. Instead American Horse had one of his wives cut a new bullberry branch to clamp between his teeth as he suffered his new agony in silence. While the doctors inspected and cleaned the terrible wound, removing part of
the ruptured bowel, then closing the site with crude sutures, American Horse clenched both his eyes and teeth shut, nearly chewing through the stick before he passed out. Finally McGillycuddy had some soldiers hold the chief down so that he could administer an injection of morphine that would allow the chief to rest peacefully while death approached.

Fever's sweat beaded the patient's brow when he awoke later, as the painkiller seeping through his veins began to wear off. Through interpreters Clements explained that there was little else they could do in what time the chief had left. At his side remained his two wives and three of his children throughout that night, all of them chanting a mournful death dirge as a soaking rain steadily drummed on the canvas tent fly stretched above the dying warrior. Into each face he gazed as the hours passed his last night, each tear-tracked cheek he touched with trembling fingertips, removing the battered stick from his bloody lips to murmur soft words of endearment to those loved ones. Perhaps to tell them that with his death he had secured their freedom come the morrow.

In the cold darkness beyond that pitiful scene flickered the hundreds of tiny watch fires where huddled the weary soldiers who had eaten in one evening enough rations to feed them for three days. They curled up on the muddy ground beneath their sole blanket and gum poncho to reap the slumber of the victorious, their bellies stuffed with buffalo tongue and dried pony meat, along with the fruit of buffalo berries, wild plum, and chokecherry. Above them on the hilltops and chalky buttes the pines soughed a mournful song beneath the rush of a plaintive wind that from time to time drove the rain before it in sheets.

To the north along the army's backtrail Seamus heard the call of the song-dogs as coyotes discovered another of the bony horse carcasses and called in the prairie wolves. There is no other sound on earth quite like that, Donegan decided as he tossed another limb on that fire long after
midnight, unable to sleep, and thinking on loved ones far away.

It was long after the last shots had faded from the hills when Sergeant Von Moll's men from A Troop finished their graves. By that time Von Moll found Lieutenant Joseph Lawson fast asleep, unable to read from his Common Book of Prayer over the departed. In the light of burning brands taken from the nearby fires and held high overhead, the spades had scraped the last bit of earth from the graves. With Private Wenzel's body wrapped in his ragged blue overcoat, and Charlie White tied within a funeral shroud of thick gray army blanket, the soldiers slowly lowered each into their last resting places. In the absence of that devout lieutenant's Irish Presbyterian reading of the burial service, Von Moll improvised and repeated what verse he could remember from childhood over those dark holes.

Beside White's grave Seamus had crossed himself and murmured a prayer remembered from his early catechism, thinking of the young man's friend, Bill Cody. And of the last time the friends had been together.