“What will we name him?” Samantha had asked him that first morning while they gave their son his very first bath.
“I thought that was best left up to the women in the family,” Seamus had replied, lifting the wriggling child from the water as she draped a towel around its rosy body.
“Not in my family, we’re not,” Sam had declared. “In this family, boys will be named by their fathers.”
“Then I will have to give it some thought.”
“You do that, Seamus Donegan,” she told him as she pressed against him, the child held between them in that embrace. “You give good thought to this matter of naming your firstborn son. For this may well be one of the most important things you 11 ever do in life.”
He had bent to kiss the top of the babe’s head, then bent to brush his lips against hers. Then he said, “Yes, one of the most important things I’ll ever do in this young fellow’s life.”
She heard him on the stairs now. There was no other sound like his boots clattering up those steps, what with their high, two-inch leather heels so they would not slip through a stirrup, a bit of a shelf on the back of the heel to support a spur, and with stovepipes almost tall enough to reach his knees—yes, he had explained the usefulness of it all to her many times. But right now those boot heels announced his return from that conference he and a few others were called to have with Mackenzie and Crook.
It was not until late that night as they lay in the darkness, with the babe nestled snuggly in the hand-me-down cradle set right against Sam’s side of the bed, that she lay against Seamus’s chest and knew he was not sleeping.
In the blackness of their tiny room, she asked him in a whisper, “What’s keeping you from sleep?”
Moments passed before he spoke. “I don’t know what to do. Before … before the babe arrived, I was damned sure that I wouldn’t ever go marching off to make war again.”
She felt him shudder, not knowing if it was from fear, or from a sob. Then Sam suggested, “Mackenzie asked you to ride with him again.”
“Yes. He’s kept after me, he has.”
“And this time you didn’t tell him no.”
“Not exactly, Sam. But—I said I’d tell him in the morning.”
“Seamus, my love: it took me some time before I came to really understand who you were as a man. The sort of husband you’d make. And now the sort of father you will be to our son. I know you will have no peace in yourself if you don’t go off to do what it is that you need to do.”
“Peace,” he repeated that word in a whisper in the dark. “I look at our son. I hold him in my arms. I gaze into his little face as he lies in my lap. And I grow scared.”
“Why are you scared?” she asked, nestling her head in his neck.
“Because I’m afraid that unless I go with Mackenzie, unless I keep going until this terrible matter is done, once and for all—there will be no peace for our son.”
“You do have a job to do, Seamus,” she eventually said, feeling the sting of tears come to her eyes. “Part of that job is being here with me when you can to be a husband. Part of that job will be helping me to raise our new son. And a very important part of your job right now is finishing what you have begun.”
For a long, long time he did not answer her. And when he did, Seamus quietly said, “Thank you for understanding my fear, Sam. And for understanding that I’m the sort of man who must go and look my fear in the eye.”
“Go do this for us, Seamus. Go do this for your son.”
“Yes,” he answered with a long, rattling sigh. “It’s about time that we finished what we started ten long years ago.”
* Present-day Sand Creek.
Chapter 4
14–15 October 1876
Telegraphic
Gen. Merritt Marching
Into Indian Land
THE INDIANS
Merritt on a scout—Bad Indians Still Raiding.
CHEYENNE, October 13.—General Merritt left Custer City with 500 men on a scout to-day. Their destination is not positively known but it is surmised to be the Bell Fourche Fork of the Cheyenne river. The remainder of the command is still at Custer. The party of Indians who killed Monroe near Fort Laramie a few days since also raided the ranch of Nick Jones on the old Red Cloud road, stealing twenty-five horses. Monroe’s body was pierced by eight bullets.
Captain Miner’s wagon train limped back to the Glendive supply depot after nine P.M. on the evening of 11 October, having hacked their way through the massing warriors, fighting for nearly every foot until the Sioux were certain the train was retreating to the east along Clear Creek. The warriors broke off their attack as the soldiers rumbled along a trail crossing higher ground, thereby giving the soldiers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside as darkness approached.
After allowing the mules and those four infantry companies two days to recoup their strength, Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis of the Twenty-second Infantry determined this time to set out himself to deliver those much-needed supplies to the Tongue River cantonment. On the afternoon of the thirteenth he informed his troops that with the addition of one more company to bolster their strength, they would be moving out come morning—at which point forty-one of the civilian teamsters buckled under and stated flatly that they were not about to ride back into the breech.
Like many of the other officers, Second Lieutenant Alfred C. Sharpe figured Otis’s soldiers would be all the better for not having those mule-whackers along.
“So be it,” Otis declared, nonplussed, when the civilians bowed their backs and refused to go. “We’ll do with what we have for teamsters and fill the rest of the wagon seats with soldiers. I’m determined to go through to Tongue River this time … even if fighting takes us there.”
Not only did they have the addition of G Company, Seventeenth Infantry, under Major Louis H. Sanger, this time they would haul three Gatling guns along with the wagon train.
That afternoon Otis dispatched a courier to ride off with news of the attack on Miner’s train as well as the renewed attempt to reach Tongue River, that report bound for Colonel William B. Hazen, commanding the Sixth U.S. Infantry at Fort Buford.
At midmorning on the fourteenth Otis’s eleven officers and 185 men departed Glendive cantonment, putting a scant ten miles behind them before going into bivouac for the night. Dusk had deepened, and many of the soldiers were preparing to turn in, when just past eight P.M. a shot was fired from one of the pickets, alarming the camp.
“I’ll lay you odds we had a man blast away at another Injun ghost,” growled Lieutenant Oskaloosa Smith as he trotted up beside Sharpe as they headed toward the disturbance.
“Like it was on your trip out, eh?” Sharpe replied.
Damn near a repeat, it turned out to be. Except for the fact that this time the picket reported spotting two horsemen when he offered his challenge—swearing to the officers on his mother’s grave he had hit one of them—although a hastily formed search party found nothing in the dark. Camp settled down and the rest of the night passed uneventfully. It wasn’t until first light when one of the outlying pickets brought within the lines a crippled pony he had spotted hobbling among some stunted cedar along the creek bottom.