“Then ask him why we found in their lodges the gloves of one of Custer’s men, why we found their horses among these ponies, why we recaptured the pony soldiers’ flag in this camp,” Crook snarled.
To Three Stars, Charging Bear repeated the assertion that visiting Oglalla of the Crazy Horse Hunkpatila band brought those spoils from the Greasy Grass fight into camp.
In the end Crook used his interpreters to drive home his point that the army intended to punish all who remained off their agencies, then concluded by telling the prisoners he would release them the following morning. They would be allowed to remain there in the midst of their destroyed village, where they could bury their dead in the manner of their people.
Late that night six more stragglers showed up. The soldiers had left Crook’s bivouac to hunt early that morning, before word had arrived of Mills’s attack and everyone had set out on the rescue. They had returned later that day to find nothing but the column’s tracks. Now the six greedily chewed on the dried meat offered them at the cheery fires as sheets of mist hissed around them, and told of being attacked by a dozen or more warriors who had held them under siege for some four hours before withdrawing. Nonetheless, they had waited until dark before pushing on in hopes of finding what had become of Crook’s command.
During the night the surgeons kept their stewards busy constructing additional litters from lodgepoles, to which they lashed shelter halves or pieces of captured blankets for the morning’s journey, when Crook would lead them south once more. Only three days before, the general had ordered Mills and Bubb to secure rations among the Black Hills settlements. But at that moment the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition was no closer to relief as the rain and gloom settled down on Slim Buttes.
With their amputations on Von Leuttwitz and Kennedy complete, Doctors Clements and McGillycuddy turned their attention to American Horse. As the surgeons knelt beside their patient, some of the friends of Private Wenzel nearby grumbled profanely.
“Why don’t you just put a knife through that son of a bitch, Doc?” suggested one of the dead private’s comrades.
“Yeah,” agreed a second bitter friend. “I’ll be happy to finish off that red bastard my own self.”
“You bastards!” another old file shouted. “Why, I ain’t got no use for a doctor that’d do anything for a goddamn Injun!”
Valentine McGillycuddy whirled on the troopers clustered nearby. “The next one of you who says a damned thing will answer personally to me! Are you men no better than animals? As for myself, I’ve taken an oath to relieve suffering—and I won’t see a man in pain without giving aid. No matter the color of his skin!”
Despite his great pain and the many appeals from the half-breed interpreters, the chief steadfastly refused any of the white man’s “powerful medicine” when the surgeons offered a hypodermic of morphine or an inhalation of chloroform. Instead American Horse had one of his wives cut a new bullberry branch to clamp between his teeth as he suffered his new agony in silence. While the doctors inspected and cleaned the terrible wound, removing part of the ruptured bowel, then closing the site with crude sutures, American Horse clenched both his eyes and teeth shut, nearly chewing through the stick before he passed out. Finally McGillycuddy had some soldiers hold the chief down so that he could administer an injection of morphine that would allow the chief to rest peacefully while death approached.
Fever’s sweat beaded the patient’s brow when he awoke later, as the painkiller seeping through his veins began to wear off. Through interpreters Clements explained that there was little else they could do in what time the chief had left. At his side remained his two wives and three of his children throughout that night, all of them chanting a mournful death dirge as a soaking rain steadily drummed on the canvas tent fly stretched above the dying warrior. Into each face he gazed as the hours passed his last night, each tear-tracked cheek he touched with trembling fingertips, removing the battered stick from his bloody lips to murmur soft words of endearment to those loved ones. Perhaps to tell them that with his death he had secured their freedom come the morrow.
In the cold darkness beyond that pitiful scene flickered the hundreds of tiny watch fires where huddled the weary soldiers who had eaten in one evening enough rations to feed them for three days. They curled up on the muddy ground beneath their sole blanket and gum poncho to reap the slumber of the victorious, their bellies stuffed with buffalo tongue and dried pony meat, along with the fruit of buffalo berries, wild plum, and chokecherry. Above them on the hilltops and chalky buttes the pines soughed a mournful song beneath the rush of a plaintive wind that from time to time drove the rain before it in sheets.
To the north along the army’s backtrail Seamus heard the call of the song-dogs as coyotes discovered another of the bony horse carcasses and called in the prairie wolves. There is no other sound on earth quite like that, Donegan decided as he tossed another limb on that fire long after midnight, unable to sleep, and thinking on loved ones far away.
It was long after the last shots had faded from the hills when Sergeant Von Moll’s men from A Troop finished their graves. By that time Von Moll found Lieutenant Joseph Lawson fast asleep, unable to read from his Common Book of Prayer over the departed. In the light of burning brands taken from the nearby fires and held high overhead, the spades had scraped the last bit of earth from the graves. With Private Wenzel’s body wrapped in his ragged blue overcoat, and Charlie White tied within a funeral shroud of thick gray army blanket, the soldiers slowly lowered each into their last resting places. In the absence of that devout lieutenant’s Irish Presbyterian reading of the burial service, Von Moll improvised and repeated what verse he could remember from childhood over those dark holes.
Beside White’s grave Seamus had crossed himself and murmured a prayer remembered from his early catechism, thinking of the young man’s friend, Bill Cody. And of the last time the friends had been together.
Nearby John Finerty repeated lines from an old poem.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud they wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest;
With his martial cloak around him.
Later when the burial detail sat huddled around a fire listening to the rain hiss as it fell into the flames, their damp blankets steaming in the chilled air, a figure approached out of the darkness.
“We’ll need another grave, Sergeant.”
Von Moll and the rest turned to find a somber Surgeon Clements halt inside the warm corona of firelight.
Anxiously, Finerty asked, “Von Leuttwitz, Doctor?”
“No. Private Kennedy. He didn’t survive the amputation,” Clements answered, gesturing into the darkness. “I waited to tell you until you were finished with the others.”
Into a third grave Von Moll’s men consigned the soldier’s body along with his severed limb, then scooped out a shallow hole in which to bury Von Leuttwitz’s leg. The soldiers were just beginning to turn spades of the damp soil into the graves when the eerie darkness erupted with wails.
A cold dash of ice water spilled down Donegan’s spine as he turned to gaze up the hill, looking through the sheets of rain at the dim, flickering firelight near the tent fly, where the women who were gathered at the side of American Horse keened and screeched and tore at their hair in bitter remorse. Nearby the children began their own high-pitched cry.
“What do you suppose that’s all about?” Finerty asked.
“The chief just died,” Donegan replied, quickly crossing himself again. “His spirit is free at last.”