“Dammit,” he muttered, realizing that with the Cheyennes’ flight, this was bound to turn into a long struggle of it. The warriors would quit fighting only if Mackenzie’s men were able to capture the women and children.
As Seamus reined up at the downstream fringe of the lodge circle, he turned the bay around, then wheeled the horse around again, searching out a target for the long-barreled .45-caliber Colt’s revolver. North of him across the flat ground he saw Mackenzie and those outfits at the head of the charge slow—
A bullet hissed by.
Then a second snarled past his left ear, splitting it painfully.
“God-damn!” he bellowed between clenched teeth. As many times as he had been seriously wounded, still, nothing he had experienced had ever hurt with so much raw-edged torment as that wound to his ear as the cold breeze made every nerve come alive in the ragged laceration.
Jamming his pistol back into its holster over his left hip, Seamus tore off his gloves and yanked at the knot in the greasy bandanna tied at his neck. Ripping off his hat, Donegan quickly whirled the bandanna around several times to make a long bandage he quickly lashed around his head. When it was tied, he pulled on his hat and again hauled out the pistol just as his horse snorted and sidestepped.
Losing his balance with the animal’s sudden move, Donegan spotted the approaching warrior from the corner of his eye as he was pitched from the saddle into the snow.
The lone Cheyenne skidded to a stop, kicking up a slow-rising rooster tail of fine snow with his feet as he brought a repeating carbine to his bare shoulder.
Rolling onto his belly as he landed with a cascade of snow, Seamus stretched out his arm, turned on his side, and squeezed the trigger. Sensing the jolt of the pistol in his paw, he continued his tumble sideways while drawing the hammer back with his thumb a second time.
He felt a bullet whine past him. Too damn close.
Rolling up onto his knees, Seamus brought the pistol’s front blade to that spot where his instinct told him Indian had been … and pulled the trigger again. He watched the slug slam into the warrior’s chest, knocking the Cheyenne off his feet. Spilling backward into the half foot of trampled snow, he skidded on his back a few feet before coming to a stop, arms and legs crooked and unmoving.
The amphitheater around Seamus thundered with the deafening rattle of hooves, shouts of men close at hand, and distant screams of the women bursting out of the far end of the village.
He dragged his legs under him and rose to his feet, dusted some of the snow off his front with that seven-and-a-half-inch pistol barrel, then turned at the hammer of hoofbeats bearing down upon him.
Past him on both sides burst more of the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts, led by Three Bears, streaming into the heart of the village.
Turning, Donegan whistled to the bay, then swept his hat out of snow, shoving it down so hard on the bandanna and flesh wound that it made him wince. Snagging the saddle horn in both gloved hands with the pistol between them, he vaulted atop the horse without using the stirrup and slammed the small rowels of his spurs into the animal’s muscular flanks, it bolted off, straining to catch the scouts plunging into the mass of hide-and-canvas lodges.
Ahead of him the Sioux and Cheyenne advance was slowing, some men dismounting in a noisy, shouting whirl as the fighting became hotter. Less than a hundred yards away Cheyenne warriors were retreating one lodge at a time, fighting hard even in the face of the enemy horsemen.
Off to Donegan’s left the pony ridden by the Sioux chief Three Bears reared, wheeled, and shuddered, becoming unmanageable in the midst of all those singing bullets and shrill voices, wing-bone whistles and lead slapping into the frozen lodge covers. After a great leap while it bowed its back, the pony suddenly tore from side to side crazily, then bolted straight for a cluster of lodges where the rifle fire from a knot of Cheyenne was the hottest.
Almost as fast as the pony bolted away, another Sioux named Feathers on the Head recognized the trouble Three Bears faced. Slamming his quirt down on his own pony’s flanks, he bent low along the withers to avoid the enemy’s bullets. He was all of thirty feet behind Three Bears when the war chief’s horse wheeled to the left, leaped down the creekbank and up the far side, into the other part of the village still firmly held by the Cheyenne—only to halt suddenly in a spray of snow, go stiff-legged, and keel over, spilling its rider against a drying rack loaded with meat, and into the side of a canvas lodge.
Feathers on the Head was across the embankment and among the enemy lodges before a dazed Three Bears even had his legs under him. The horseman held out a foot and extending a hand as he wheeled his pony about, putting himself and his animal between the Cheyenne and his war chief, grunting as he pulled Three Bears up behind him.
It was a pretty, pretty show, Seamus decided, watching the two of them spin about in the next heartbeat, all four of their legs kicking the pony into a gallop to speed them out of that devil’s den of whining lead.
Something warned him, something so airy and ethereal—yet with enough substance that he thought he recognized it as Sam’s voice in his ear, crying out. Seamus jerked around, certain he would find her there, the voice had been that real. Instead, at seventy yards he saw them coming, ten, perhaps a dozen of them: bare-breasted warriors yelling as they raced toward him.
In that next breath Donegan realized he was alone.
With the whine of a bullet passing by his cheek, the Irishman collapsed along the neck of the bay and slapped the long end of the reins down its front shoulder, feeling it explode into motion beneath him. The animal leaped back out of the brush, across the icy stream, where it slipped twice before clawing its way up the cutbank to the north side of the Red Fork, hooves cutting into the crusty snow as lead followed man and horse across the flat toward Mackenzie and his bunch now that the other companies were just emerging along the north side of the canyon.
The cold, icy fingers of frozen mist were only then beginning to lift from the willow-clogged bottom ground.
Why everyone believed Hades was hot, Seamus figured he would never understand. As far as he was concerned, this morning had all the makings of hell itself.
* The Sacred Buffalo Hat.
† The Sacred Turner.
* Sosone-eo-o.
† Mo-ohtavaha-taneo, “Black People.”
* Darlington Agency for the Southern Cheyenne, Indian Territory.
Chapter 27
Big Freezing Moon 1876
The power of Maahotse must protect the People!
As he raced back to his Sacred Arrow Lodge from the hillside, raising the alarm, Black Hairy Dog found his woman already taking the Maahotse bundle from its tripod where the Arrows hung at that singular place of honor in the lodge. When he burst into the lodge, his woman turned toward him with a start, carefully cradling the Arrows in their kit-fox quiver. Around it she had wrapped a layer of thick buffalo rawhide.
“I will follow you,” she said to her husband as she laid the bundle across his arms.
“Together we will protect them,” he said as her fingers brushed the back of his hand lovingly. “Just as these Arrows have protected our people far back into the time beyond memory.”
Outside the lodge a group of men and boys had already gathered by the time Black Hairy Dog ducked through the door into the swirling, freezing mist that clung about their ankles. Most wore a shirt, or a vest of wool or buffalo hide, yet none wore leggings. On every face was the grim mask of determination. They had come there to protect the second of those two sacred objects of the Ohmeseheso.