As she stuffed the last crumbs into her mouth, the girl crawled right over to Bourke’s knee and squatted as if completely unafraid, looking up at the lieutenant with imploring eyes, her hand held out.
“Looks like you’ve made you a friend at last, Johnny!”
“It does, at that,” Bourke replied. “Have you any more tacks?”
“This is my last,” Donegan replied, pulling the cracker from his mackinaw pocket.
“We don’t have to take your last.”
“Go ahead. I’ll rustle up some more of that pony meat for supper tonight. Hate to admit it, but I’m beginning to grow quite fond of four-legged riding stock.”
Fitting that a crimson sunset flared for but an astonishingly beautiful moment over those pale-gray buttes dotted with emerald evergreens: an appropriate requiem, perhaps, for a people who had already witnessed the zenith of their greatness.
Below the chalky terraces glowed the remains of some three dozen bonfires, each one what had once been a Sioux lodge. Across the hillsides flickered much smaller dots of reddish embers where gathered the battle-weary soldiers once more wolfing down the dried meat and berries they had captured and held on to as victors. On the heights as well as down across the eastern flats Crook posted a strong line of pickets while silence crept in once more to rule this wilderness. As a soft rain returned to patter on blankets, coats, and gum ponchos, some of the camp guards heard strange noises and cried out their challenges, only to find they had captured a riderless enemy pony abandoned in the Sioux retreat and now wandering in to the sound of humans.
Unlike the miserable bivouacs of the last two weeks, tonight one heard songs, jokes, and laughter. Once more men were eager about their prospects. Many of those who days before had been grumbling that the general ought to be hanged were this night heard to boast, “Crook was right, after all!”
They ate their fill in the rain, gathered at their hissing fires, caring not about the morrow.
“C’mere and try some of this, Seamus,” John Finerty called out.
“What’s on the menu there, newsman?” Donegan asked.
“Pony.”
“Had me some already,” and he squatted near the reporter.
“Not cooked fresh you haven’t,” Finerty replied. “See? I’ve become quite a connoisseur, Seamus. Cavalry meat, played out, sore-backed, and fried without salt is stringy. Leathery, and tasting just like a wet wool saddle blanket too. Downright nauseating.”
“I’ve tasted my fill of that too, thank you.”
Again Finerty offered the Irishman a piece, saying, “Now, a full-grown Indian pony has the flavor and appearance of the flesh of elk.”
“And you’re an expert on elk, are you, now?”
“I’ve been hunting many a time with Crook, haven’t I?” Finerty protested. “But perhaps best of all—a young Indian colt tastes like antelope, Seamus. Or mountain sheep.”
“So what of mule meat?” asked Robert Strahorn from across the fire with a full mouth.
The reporter from Chicago shuddered. “Mule, eh? Fat and rank, perhaps best described as a combination of all the foregoing—with a wee taste of pork thrown in.”
“There’s some that think a mule loin is just about the best thing in the way of prairie victuals,” .Seamus told them, “second only to buffalo.”
Finerty sneered, “And what sort of dunderhead would that be?”
“They’re called Kwahadi Comanche, Johnny boy,” Donegan replied, standing to stretch out his cold, cramping muscles. “And pray you don’t ever have to campaign down on the Staked Plain of west Texas against those devils incarnate.”
Chapter 43
9-10 September 1876
Not long after the last echoes of gunfire faded from the nearby bluffs, a pair of sore-footed troopers from the Fifth Cavalry limped out of the darkness, hailing the pickets surrounding infantry camp. They had been some of the first forced to abandon their played-out horses that morning when the entire column followed in the wake of Crook’s rescue, which placed the pair as the last stragglers on the trail.
As they approached the northern end of Slim Buttes, the weariness of the muddy trail overwhelmed them, and they decided to lie down and nap among the shelter of some rocks they found in a ravine. At the moment the Sioux chose to launch their attack, the two hapless soldiers were awakened rudely. It didn’t take them long to figure out they would be a lot safer staying right where they were than attempting to thread their way through the hostile horsemen in hopes of reaching the army’s lines. They hadn’t dared to raise their heads from their ravine until long after dark.
The steady, eerie throb of death chants and wails of mourning women floated down from the shelter half where the surgeons had done what they could to make American Horse comfortable. Out there in the night, evil spirits lurked, ruling that dominion just beyond the fire’s light.
Seamus shuddered and crossed himself superstitiously, sitting at a fire with John Finerty, Lieutenant Bourke, and others, staring mesmerized at the sputtering flames—then turned suddenly, tearing his revolver from its holster as a dark figure crouched from a gash in a nearby lodge.
With the audible double click of so many pistol hammers, the ghostly form stopped immediately, one leg in, one leg out of that slash in the buffalo hides, slowly standing erect in his long calf-length blanket coat of many colors, staring at the three barrels glinting with a dull light beneath the fire’s dancing aura.
A pair of black eyes twinkled as the dark-skinned Indian tried out a lame smile, lifting his hands into the air and stammering, “T-there ain’t a thing w-worth having in the hull damned outfit.”
“Who in the thunder are you?” Donegan demanded.
“Ute John,” he answered sheepishly as he inched into the light, his hands shaking as the Irishman advanced on him. “Some call me Cap’n Jack.”
“Bejesus—you gave me a start!” Finerty exclaimed.
Donegan got close enough to press the revolver’s muzzle against the tracker’s head. With his empty hand he grabbed the Indian’s chin and turned the brown face from side to side in the firelight. “Damn—it is you. The squaw scalper. Should’ve killed you right off.” In disgust he turned away, stuffing his pistol into the holster on his hip.
“What are you doing there?” Bourke asked.
The Indian replied, “Looking for plunder.”
“You’re lucky to have a few lodges still standing, you sick bastard,” Seamus added. “Cap’n Powell’s gonna finish putting ’em all to the torch come morning.”
Ute John’s head bobbed, and he said, “I see what I find before the fires.”
“G’won!” Bourke demanded. “Get out of here before I have you put under guard myself.”
Early that rainy evening the general ordered that the four corpses Ute John had scalped and mutilated be given to the captives so they could perform a proper burial. With Grouard and Pourier, Crook then wrung what information he could from his reticent prisoners. From them the general learned that not only was Crazy Horse in the neighborhood, but Sitting Bull was as well—with plans to take his Hunkpapa north to the Antelope Buttes to trade. What came as the most discouraging news, however, was hearing that the bands had indeed split and scattered, most making for the reservations, and already far ahead of his column.
“Charging Bear keeps saying this bunch wasn’t on the Greasy Grass, General,” Big Bat reported. “Says they didn’t fight the soldiers on the Little Bighorn.”