“I’ll give you this one, Irishman. Were it a game of cards, I’d gambled against you and lost. But you were right—them Injuns are firing the grass behind ’em as they go.”
Above the thick layer of roiling grass smoke the summer sky remained pale, almost translucent, for the longest time of that evening, and when the moon came out behind the scouts, and the stars finally winked wakefully in a scatter across that darkening sky, the entire canvas allowed just enough light for an experienced plainsman to continue down, down into the valley as they followed that great churned trail the thousands upon thousands had followed.
Some distance from the Greasy Grass they came upon the place where it appeared the soldiers had divided, some of the regiment moving off to the left, gone to the southwest. The rest continued on down toward the Little Bighorn. A short time later they found the trail divided again—this time more of the regiment crossed to the left side of the creek and continued toward the bluffs hiding the Greasy Grass. It was here that Frank chose to steer them north.
Seamus asked, “Why don’t we just follow this trail down to the river? Find out what come of this bunch?”
Grouard shook his head, peering into the darkness, as if divining something no more than a handful of miles away. “The river is bordered on this side by rough, high bluffs. This much I remember from this old camping spot of the Lakota. We will go north, moving around that bad stretch of country.”
Donegan watched the half-breed move his horse away silently in the coming cool of that summer night as darkness and silence swallowed them both. And he wondered if Frank Grouard was feeling like he was a Hunkpapa or Hunkpatila warrior again, sensing something unseen out there in the darkness, even miles away yet. Something mystical that pulled the half-breed on. Something that might have been pulling Frank Grouard onward ever since last winter when the scout performed the impossible in the middle of a high-plains snowstorm and brought Colonel John Reynolds’s cavalry across a rugged divide and right down on an enemy village nestled along the Powder River.
If Frank Grouard could do that, there was something uncanny about the man. Maybe something even unholy.
And that made Seamus Donegan shiver as he put his own horse in motion, following the half-breed into the deepening darkness of that summer night.
He had grown up Catholic, learned his catechism early at his mother’s knee, then later beneath the thick leather strop of a series of stern priests who ruled the village school with an iron Celtic hand. Growing up Catholic in Ireland had come to mean that he too was superstitious. There were the legends of the first nomadic Celts and the mystical druids and, of course, tales of the Little People. Damn right, Seamus grew up every bit as superstitious as these savage heathens he’d been fighting for a full bloody decade come this very summer.
Ten years ago. There at the Crazy Woman Crossing it had been—when he watched that first warrior racing in atop his pony, all painted up, hair and a cock’s comb of feathers all a’spray in the wind, the look on that dark, contorted face like no other he had seen since … why, since he saw the etching in the ancient book one of the old Irishmen in the village had shown all the interested young lads. It was the face of a banshee, the like of those what came to wail out of the dark places in the forests, to frighten off but lure at the same time—banshees that would suck the very life from a man’s body if ever they got their hands on you.
Donegan swallowed hard, remembering that very first warrior he had dropped with the Henry repeater. In the dust and sage and sunlight there on the top of a bluff near the Crazy Woman Crossing. For so long he hadn’t believed it had been an Indian at all. No. By the Blessed Virgin—in his sights Seamus had beheld an unholy banshee galloping right out from the bowels of the earth when he pulled the Henry’s trigger.
So was he a Christian? he asked himself now this night. And eventually, as darkness shrouded them while he followed Frank Grouard into the rugged badlands east of the Greasy Grass, in the footsteps of a doomed command riding to its death—Seamus admitted he was not a Christian. Instead, he was what his mother and the priests had made of him: a Catholic. And an Irish Catholic at that.
He had been ever since he had known enough to cross himself and mutter the prayers of his childhood catechism whenever evil lurked just out of reach, as it did throughout that dark ride north into the unknown.
Within an hour the breeze came up and thin veils of clouds wafted in from the west. A few drops fell, big ones the size of tobacco wads. Cold they were. But a few heavy drops were all the sky had in it while the temperature plunged, chilling Donegan as he followed the half-breed. Overhead the moon rose to midsky behind the graying pall of pewter-tinted clouds scurrying east. As if even they knew better than to tarry above this ground forever touched by death’s foul hand.
Then, as they were beginning to climb the dark foreground of a slope that appeared as if it would take them out of a wide saddle toward the top of a long ridge, Grouard’s horse suddenly snorted, jerking its head to the left as if to avoid bumping into something that had loomed right out of the darkness.
Seamus had his hand on the butt of a pistol, half out of its holster, when he demanded in a hush, “What is it?”
“Don’t know,” Grouard growled, fighting the blackcoated animal until it settled and came to a rest. “Never knowed this horse to act this way. To get scared at anything.”
“You see what it shied at?”
“No,” he replied, dropping from the saddle. Standing on the ground, he handed the reins to Donegan. “But I’m fixing to find out.”
As Seamus watched, the half-breed crouched forward, bent nearly on all fours. Grouard had barely gone ten feet when he jerked to an abrupt halt. In the darkness it appeared the scout inched sideways, his arms out, feeling something with both hands.
Swallowing, he quickly glanced around him at the darkness seeming to swell around him. Donegan asked nervously, “What’d you find?”
“Shit!” Grouard squealed, and fell backward on his rump.
“What the hell is it?” Seamus demanded, his raspy voice louder now as he forced the question from a throat constricted in fear. Maybe the gruff edge he could bring to his words would scare away the ancient demons haunting him ever since the fall of darkness.
“It’s a goddamned body.”
“A body?” Donegan asked, dropping immediately to the ground. His own horse caught the scent of the corpse, yanking at the reins. “Man?”
“Yeah.”
He joined the half-breed as Grouard knelt a second time over the dark shape. In what murky light the rind of moon and starlight could strain through the oilcloth covering of clouds, Seamus finally made out the unmistakable human form beneath them. Pale. Naked. White as the dust itself.
“His arms—” Grouard said.
“I see. They been cut off.”
“When I put my hand out first time, I found his head.”
“Ain’t much left of it, is there?”
“No,” the half-breed replied. “Scalped, and they smashed his face in.”
“War club does a pretty job of that, don’t it?” Donegan asked grimly. “A white man?”
“My bet’d be this fella was a soldier.”
“Yeah. One of them what made the trail we been following.” Seamus stood stiffly, feeling the pull in his legs after going so long in the saddle. Up and down the length of his thighs he rubbed with his palms in the way of a horseman gone afoot after hours of crossing rough country, working those leg and rump muscles in partnership with the animal below him.
Grouard stood slowly as well.
“Let’s go,” Donegan said hollowly, holding out Grouard’s rein.
The half-breed’s only answer was to take up the leather strap and fling himself into the saddle without using the stirrup from the off-hand side. With a sudden jerk he yanked the animal’s head about to the north and set off once more into the darkness, straight up the long slope at the end of that narrow ridge running parallel with the river.