Keogh could tell that the gunfire from Calhoun’s Hill had faded.
Indeed, those warriors back along the ridge sat silently behind their tall clumps of sage and furry tufts of bunch-grass watching in frosty fascination as the pony soldiers fought among themselves, shooting each other until only a grim handful remained at the top of that dusty spine, a hardened knot gathered in a tight ring of corpses and horse carcasses.
Bitterly Keogh ordered a retreat with what was left of his Wild I Company. The first retreat he had ordered in his life.
Through the dust and smoke of this Sioux-made hell they crawled up on their knees and for a moment peered across the slopes toward the last hill less than a half mile away.
A few bolted away along the backbone, running hunched over like squat prairie cocks skittering through the sage ahead of a hungry coyote. First one, then another, darted off. Dust from hundreds of bullets kicked up funnels among their heels as they zigzagged their way through the sage. One was down, then another, now a third. And with those fallen soldiers sank the hope of Keogh’s last command.
One trooper sighed with a death rattle and calmly replaced his six empty shells in his revolver with live ammunition. He then crawled over to a tight knot of four quivering, whimpering recruits. Two of them gazed up at the veteran’s face, appealing to him with their tears and tortured expressions—imploring him with empty, quivering hands.
“This can’t be happening!” one shouted.
“Whadda we do? Whadda we do now?” cried another.
Methodically, one at a time, the old file placed his pistol against the back of each head. The fourth young trooper went down without protest or struggle.
Then, without warning, Sergeant Frank E. Varden suddenly turned the weapon on himself before Keogh leapt to stay him. The pistol tumbled from Varden’s grip as his body twitched, then collapsed atop the bodies of the last four recruits left in his entire squad. Sergeant Varden had protected his men to the last.
Keogh knelt trembling in rage. Disbelief like a cold, hard stone clogged his throat. Revulsion soured his tongue, seeing his men blow their own brains out. Myles Keogh had seen enough wounds and battlefield action to numb him to blood and gore. This was something else entirely that twisted his stomach now and made him heave up what was left of the dry breakfast they had wolfed down before Custer had moved them up and over the divide. It all came out with a good dose of sour whiskey in gut-relieving lumps that lay in the dust and the grass, beside these men, joining their blood in the ocher soil on this lonely hillside in Montana.
And when his belly finished punishing him, Keogh took up Varden’s bloodied pistol. Finding the sergeant had left one last live round in the cylinder. Keogh put the revolver to his forehead and rammed the hammer back, feeling how cool the muzzle felt against his sweating brow.
“Good man, Varden,” he croaked, speaking to the dead man beside him. “You saved the last bullet for your ol cap’n Keogh.”
He couldn’t bring himself to pull that trigger. Life had always been too damned precious for him.
Keogh allowed the weapon to fall out of his hand, knowing his only course now lay along the ragged spine … a half mile, perhaps a bit more.
Hell, it don’t matter how far, Myles.
He’d join the others. He could rally them.
Tommy boy’ll be there. Might even have a sip or two of whiskey about him. Tommy’s always been that way. When it comes to whiskey and women—Tommy isn’t stiff like his big brother.
Myles yanked cartridges from Varden’s belt, loading one, then two, and finally four pistols with fresh rounds.
Then, with a war cry of his own, Captain Myles Keogh rose to his feet like a mighty oak. He stuffed two pistols in his belt, manhandling another pair. He emptied one as he bolted off, then flung it angrily at a charging warrior. With the first shot out of the second, Keogh brought another Sioux skidding to a stop to stare at the red hole in his chest before he crumpled to the sand like a wet sack of corn mash.
Lumbering with all the concealed grace of a draft horse, Myles was off on his big Irish feet, dashing as he had never run before, remembering the footraces he always lost to Billy Cooke.
This’s one day ye’d not win again’ me, Cookey!
Keogh fired left then right as warriors popped up, lunging for him with clubs and rifles. Each wanted to be the man to lay first coup on this mighty warrior who wore the metal bars on his shoulders and that shiny medicine disc round his bull neck.
Myles fired and ran, ran and fired, until the two pistols clicked and clicked again. He hurled them angrily at red targets, yanking the last one free and into action. He pulled the trigger again and again, his feet covering ground as if there were only wind beneath his boots.
All the dark Irishman knew for sure was that he was thirsty and Tom Custer just might have a drink or two about him.
On and on he ran, the bullets kicking up spurts of dirt around his big plodding boots. Bullets split the air about his black head like mad mosquitoes whistling on the Rosebud. The only thing Myles Keogh knew for certain was that he was thirsty … so thirsty he would do damned near any bidding for a drink right about now.
Captain Myles Keogh had always been like that, though. He would do anything for a drink.
In fact, he would race right into hell itself.
CHAPTER 25
CALHOUN’S Hill had fallen.
Keogh’s ridge was no more.
One by one Custer’s officers had gathered round the mortally wounded commander on the west slope at the north end of this bony ridge a few yards below the bare, windswept crest.
Even Keogh himself had lumbered in at the end, nicked and slightly the worse for wear, dragging behind him some screaming Sioux and Cheyenne warriors out of the nightmare of yellow haze.
Now this favored inner circle drew round their leader like old herd bulls protectively guarding their patriarch against snarling wolves. Tom, Cooke, Keogh, Smith, and Yates. Around these officers clustered the survivors from each company, their shrinking command post ringed by a wall of horse carcasses.
What goes through a man’s mind when he feels the sweat pouring along his backbone, gazing down a dusty slope at the silvery river, and the village without end just beyond the cottonwoods?
Ringing in every soldier’s ears above the shriek of warriors and the high-pitched whine of wing-bone whistles were those orders barked over the command by one officer or another. The refuse of battle littered their hillside. Wounded men cried out for water, for help, for a friend to come pull them to the top.
Water!
That’s all the dying men needed as they gazed into a shapeless, shimmering sun suspended directly overhead, beating down unmercifully on their hilltop from a bone yellow sky. The sun stared back with one accusing eye at the soldiers who had come to raid camps of women and children and the old ones too weak to run.
There were other moans that afternoon on the hill. Cries of despair and utter hopelessness among the recruits of Smith’s company, Custer’s and Yates’s commands too. Young men who saw utter futility in fighting on. At first they had clung to the hope in what their officers promised them once they reached the end of this ridge. At first they had believed in Custer—hoping they could hold out until Gibbon and Terry marched upriver with their reinforcements.
Wasn’t a man on that bare hillside who didn’t realize what price Calhoun’s men had paid in buying some precious time for the remaining four companies under Custer’s command.
And on the heels of that murderous slaughter, they had watched stunned and increasingly numb as Keogh’s men put up the beginnings of a desperate fight. Gall pressing from the south. Lame-White-Man and Two Moons leading their Cheyennes from the west. And Crazy Horse’s Oglalla cavalry hitting, slashing, tearing at I Company from the east.