“We can flush ’em, Sergeant!” declared Private John Wenzel, A Troop, Third Cavalry. “All we gotta do is make things a little hot on ’em with some lead flying in there, and they’ll come running out, begging for their lives.”
“We’ve got ’em trapped like rats,” agreed M Troop’s blacksmith, Albert Glavinski, “with nowhere to run.”
“Are you game, Sergeant Kirkwood?” asked E Troop’s sergeant, Edward Glass.
“I suppose we can’t go wrong if we rush ’em together,” replied M Troop’s John A. Kirkwood.
Yet as soon as the four crawled over the lip of their rifle pit, Private Wenzel was driven backward against Kirkwood with a sickening crunch of bone as a bullet from the ravine smashed into his head. Before they could react from the surprise, more lead whined among the soldiers.
A bullet entered Sergeant Glass’s right wrist, tearing out his elbow, shattering the arm and making it useless.
Nearby Kirkwood whirled, sensing the heat of a bullet’s path along his back. He spilled down the side of the pit and lay gasping at the bottom. Bringing his bloody hand away from the wound, he asked Glavinski, “How … how is it?”
The blacksmith shook his head in disbelief and replied, “Just a flesh wound, Sarge. Only grazed you. But another inch, and it’d cut your backbone in two.”
“Damn,” Kirkwood growled, peering at the pulpy mass at the back of Private Wenzel’s head. “Shame about him. He knew more about a horse than any other man of us.”
Within heartbeats Anson Mills dashed up to the pit as other soldiers pulled the casualties back among the lodges toward the surgeon’s hospital. “How many are in there?”
No one seemed to have an answer.
It was then and there the captain determined to send that third courier to press his point, to tell Crook that he was already taking casualties and running low on ammunition. Praying that Bubb’s couriers or that third rider—one of them—would get through and bring on their rescue.
“Forget the ravine for now,” Mills wisely told his men. “We’ll wait until the column gets here to smoke them out.”
At nearly the same time, Crawford’s detail began having a hot session of it driving a fiery knot of warriors from some of the lowest rungs of the nearby bluffs. For those few minutes while the Sioux moved higher up the ridges, Crawford’s soldiers began to dig in for the long haul. From those and Bubb’s improvised pits, the cavalrymen could now hold the sniping warriors a bit more at bay, pushed back from the camp itself where the Sioux had been making things tough on the wounded and the horse-holders. Each time the warriors made an abortive attempt to charge the two hundred ponies that soldiers were guarding, Crawford’s men turned them back with cool and deliberate fire.
Most of the rest of his men Mills positioned on the low bluffs directly to the north and east of the camp, where they could command a good view of those warriors who had secured themselves on the rocky shelves that ascended the buttes from the prairie floor.
Not long after Mills had secured the village and drove the Sioux fleeing from the perimeter, Dr. Clements had requested that a lodge at the center of camp be saved for the hospital. In it he and Assistant Surgeon Stephens already had Von Leuttwitz and another seriously wounded soldier, Private Orlando H. Duren of E Troop, Third Cavalry, stretched out on the buffalo-hide bedding as the minor skirmishing continued unabated.
As soon as Sioux marksmen set up shop on the rocky terraces above the village and began to rain rifle fire down on the lodges, Clements asked Mills to help with moving his hospital. Dragging the agonized Von Leuttwitz, Duren, Kirkwood, and Glass from the lodge into the open on buffalo robes, a half-dozen soldiers then quickly dismantled the lodge and moved the poles to the gentle slope of a hillside north of the Indian camp. There the troopers did their best to rewrap the poles with the heavy, sodden buffalo-hide cover before Clements and Stephens helped their stewards drag the wounded back inside.
Before long the coming day’s light was brightly reflected from the chalk-colored buttes north and west of camp, helping to dissipate the wispy fog from all but the lowest places in that first half hour of fighting. Behind gaps in those castle-rampart-like ridges, Mills and the others had watched mounted warriors parading back and forth for some time.
“They’ve sent runners to the other villages,” was the rumor that too quickly became anxiety as morning began to grow around them with the sun’s rising. “They’re coming back with more warriors’n you can shake a stick at.”
Nothing Donegan could think of would counter the truth in that. Fact was, they knew there were other villages in the area. They had failed to surround the camp and seal up its occupants before nearly all the Sioux escaped.Chances were damned good that warriors from this camp were already speeding to other hostile bands in the area, spreading the alarm.
“Shoot only when you’ve got yourself a clear target!” À sergeant nearby passed on the order that was rapidly becoming general throughout the skirmish lines.
“Murph’s right,” another veteran sergeant agreed. “We gotta save every bullet and make it count.”
This was perhaps the greatest danger: Mills’s attack force being put under siege while they slowly, ran out of ammunition, and in the end were overrun by reinforcements coming in from other camps because they simply had no more bullets left and Crook was still miles away.
Maybe they were all fools to believe the column could get there in time. Perhaps it would be better, Seamus considered, for them to take care of themselves here and now.
“If we found the guidon, Colonel,” Donegan explained, “that means this bunch fought at the Little Bighorn.”
“We know that,” Mills replied, worry in his voice.
“And if this bunch fought the soldiers there, they likely picked up some of the weapons and some of the ammunition off Custer’s dead, stole out of the saddle pockets of the Seventh’s horses.”
“What are you driving at?” Mills growled. “Trying to cheer me up, Irishman?”
Seamus wagged his head. “No. Don’t you understand? That means we might find some cartridges—”
“Among the plunder from the lodges!” Mills exclaimed. “Brilliant!”
The captain immediately sent a dozen men to quickly scour through the lodges again—but not for food this time. For ammunition.
Nearby a soldier came out of a lodge jingling a small leather pouch filled with copper cartridges. With his other hand he greedily ate some cold meat. Not far off three women prisoners and an old man began to laugh, pointing at the soldier.
Seamus said, “Frank—ask them why they’re laughing at that soldier.”
After a few moments of talk back and forth, Grouard turned and said, “They asked me if I knew what kind of meat they had in their lodges. Said I figured it was buffalo, maybe antelope. So they laughed at me and said the soldiers ain’t give ’em enough time to be hunting buffalo, and the antelope hunting has been poor.”
His eyes narrowing, Donegan asked, “So what kind of meat is it?”
“Nothing we ain’t been used to lately,” Grouard answered with a wry grin. “Seems everybody in this country took to eating horse and pony.”
“What the hell you think Captain Jack’s up to?” Grouard asked a minute later.
Not far away the white scout Crawford hurried down the slope of a hill standing to the north of the village, pulling one of the packers’ mules behind him. At Crawford’s shoulder ran newsman Robert Strahorn. They stopped at the first crude rack of poles erected outside a lodge and began to tear the strips of drying meat from the rack, stuffing them into the canvas panniers lashed to either side of the mule’s sawbuck. In a momentary lull of fighting a shot suddenly echoed in that creek bottom. The mule sank on its forelegs, rolling onto its side as Crawford and Strahorn dived for cover behind a lodge.