Along the slope and the spine of the ridge, Keogh’s soldiers heard the high, wailing cries of the women.
“Don’t let them catch you alive!” one of Keogh’s old files shouted to the frightened shavetails in his squads. “What I could tell you about Fetterman’s poor boys … but—just don’t let them bitches get their bloody hands on you!”
Slowly it sank in. A fate worse than a thousand deaths awaited the man who let the squaws get their hands on him.
Some of Gall’s warriors broke off from the slaughter on Calhoun’s hill and moved north along the ridge toward Keogh’s position. The air filled with their blood-chilling cries, joining the screams and shrieks from the women below, mingled with the high-pitched prayer-sounds of the eagle-wingbone whistles constant and droning on the hot breeze that stirred the yellow dust and maddened the eyes.
Now and again that same breeze blew flecks of stinging foam off the handful of lathered horses left to Keogh’s fear-riddled command. A man’s ass tightened all by itself whenever an army mount galloped by, its saddle empty, wet with blood.
As the wild, crazed horses went down, thrashing in their death-throes, the mood along the ridge became more desperate still. A horse made a perfect target while the soldiers always did not. Men hid down in the grass. The horses could not.
Slowly, methodically, the warriors concentrated on the big animals, whittling away at the horses, spilling their riders.
Funny how a soldier always stayed with his fallen horse, for protection from arrow and bullet alike, or simply because with his horse down and dying, there was no longer any means of escape. A few unhorsed troopers tried to run, out along that bumpy backbone of a ridge toward the last knoll far away—north, where the general had gone. The scared ones and the smart ones alike.
Most who had abandoned Company L hadn’t made it. Those who fled I Company didn’t make it either. They died like scattered kernels of corn on a threshing floor, shot and trampled and bludgeoned beneath the red onslaught before they had been up and running but a moment or more.
Riderless horses were allowed to break through the Indian lines, clattering down to the river where the young boys and old men captured them all. It was easy enough. Even though the big mounts did not like the smell of Indians, their intense thirst overpowered their instinctive sense of caution. Seized by young hands, these big, colorful horses were led across the river into the camps by proud new owners, their saddlebags jingling musically with ammunition to use in the army Springfields captured in the valley fight or on Calhoun’s Hill.
More Springfields overheated, jamming along that ridge-top position Keogh had scratched out for his company. The verdigris coating the shells worked like cement, hardening under the heat of rapid firing until at last a shell refused to break free with the ejector. Several soldiers threw their rifles away in disgust and frustration after breaking knife blades on frozen shell casings.
Many of the warriors gathering below Keogh’s ridge believed the soldiers were simply touched by the moon, gone crazy. There could be no other explanation for the troopers tossing aside their carbines.
All the while Keogh’s men retreated into a smaller and smaller force near the crest on the east slope of the ridge. Their numbers slowly dwindled, exactly as Calhoun’s position had before them. The handful of those left alive from Calhoun’s Hill had run up the slope toward that big monolith of a man, Myles Keogh, like a lighthouse in the fog of that yellow-dust madness. Keogh kept calling out above the battle din, letting them all know he was standing there, rallying them round him like a group of schoolboys rallied beneath the spreading arms of a huge oak, strong, sturdy to the last.
“Goddamn their black hearts to perdition!” the Irishman hollered, his eyes watching some of his men abandoning their squads to pierce the smoke and dust shrouding Custer’s companies farther north. On the last, very last, knoll.
“May the bastards spend their eternities quivering in hell’s own furnace!”
Sergeant Bustard himself dragged up two wounded, one beneath each of the huge ham hocks he called hands. After slinging the soldiers behind the protection of a dead horse carcass already attracting its share of blowflies, James Bustard leapt into the smoke and dust once again to fetch more of his wounded and dying comrades.
“Give ’im a hand, will you, boys?” Keogh shouted as he waved two other veterans to follow Bustard downhill.
Sergeant Caddie leapt up and dashed off into the smoke on Bustard’s tail. Mitch Caddie was the lucky one of the two.
As Sergeant George Gaffney jumped over the stiffening carcass of his horse, he was driven backwards into Keogh’s little compound. His body writhed on the dusty grass a moment, his jaw blown off, the side of his head gone in a pulpy mass. As his bowels voided into the hot air, Gaffney quit trembling forever.
“Damn them all!” Keogh shouted. “Let them ’ave a go at me! C’mon now—you pagan bastirds … ’ave a shot at the likes of Myles Keogh!”
The captain darted side to side, waving his huge Catholic medal for all the nearby warriors to see beneath the shimmering sun in that buttermilk sky, as if to say he too wore some strange, powerful medicine to ward off their bullets and arrows.
“You can’t kill me!” he called as a few more of his men darted away into the smoke, intent on making it to Custer’s lines.
The rear guard is falling. He fired his pistol at a warrior leaping after a soldier running north. Keogh nailed the warrior, really wanting to shoot the soldier in the back.
There’s just too many, his mind raced clear and cool as any mountain stream surging out of the Bighorns. All round them howled ten times ten the number they had figured would be camped in this bloody valley.
Just too damned many for any of us to handle now. No way out—
With a snort the horse beside Keogh reared and in falling nearly knocked him over. Even the sure, gentle hands of the old files were failing to keep the horses from bolting now. They reared and fell back over the men, stumbling against each other in pure panic, breaking their hobbles, pinning and crushing soldiers beneath them, stomping on any unfortunate trooper who didn’t roll out of their way fast enough.
Near Keogh’s feet a young soldier knelt, sobbing, mumbling an incoherent prayer. As Myles watched, utterly mesmerized, unable to stop him, the young shavetail threw his rifle away and pulled out his service revolver. He handled the weapon as if it were some foreign, revered icon, juggling the heavy object into position alongside his head. The youngster pulled back the hammer, then calmly and without ceremony yanked on the trigger.
His brains splattered over three troopers nearby.
All three jerked round in fear and disgust, watching a comrade-in-arms fall into the yellow dust.
To Myles it was like watching one of Custer’s short vignettes back at Fort Abraham Lincoln.
The captain stood spellbound, dumbstruck while the evil asserted its control on his company. More soldiers suddenly sagged, giving up to pull pistols themselves. Pointing muzzles at their temples or breasts, triggers squeezed with eyes fiercely clenched. They dispatched their mortal souls into limbo rather than suffer the possibility of torture at the hands of the Indians.
Save the last goddamned bullet for yourself.
Stunned, baffled by the suicides rippling the hillside around him, Keogh watched pairs of men point guns at each other’s hearts in death pacts. Others died alone … no one to kill them … completing this last dirty little task for themselves. Slowly the staunch defense along Keogh’s ridge began unraveling. Strange that even as his perimeter fell apart, most of the Indian fire slacked off.