Up ahead now that familiar land was almost like seeing home, it was. Home to a man who had been away for too damned long. Up there—how he wanted to hope—but that sure as hell looked like the Tongue River.
“There,” Grouard said, the evening wind whipping his long black hair across his face as he turned to speak to Donegan. He pointed up the valley, indicating the timber-and-brush border of a stream that meandered toward the faraway Tongue.
“That creek bottom?”
The half-breed nodded. “Soldier Creek.”
Down the long, long slope they raced as the sun backlit the nearby Big Horns with a reddish-purple glow, washing away all but the heartiest of shadows. Time and again Seamus turned to peer at their backtrail. Not sure if he could allow himself to hope any more than he already did. Not sure if that would hex what he hoped for most.
“They gave up,” Grouard finally said it.
“I ain’t seen ’em either, not in a long time.”
“Maybe saving their ponies is all. They’ll still hunt us,” the half-breed sighed. “But maybe the hard chase is over.”
“These horses could stand some rest, Grouard.”
“Maybe we can take the chance—come dark.”
Down in the brushy bottom of Soldier Creek they unsaddled their horses. After watering them, both men yanked up tufts of the tall grass and rubbed down the damp, glossy coats as the animals ate their fill.
“You sleep first, Irishman. I’ll wake you later and you keep watch.”
Seamus did not argue. He curled an arm under his head, pulled his lone blanket over his head, and didn’t think of a thing until he felt Grouard nudging him, whispering.
“Your watch.”
“For how long?”
“Rest of the night. Wake me before dawn,” Grouard said wearily. “Now it’s my turn to snore enough to wake the dead, just like you was doing.”
“Wake the dead, did I?” Seamus grumbled as he sat up to rub the grit from his eyes.
Staying awake that night proved to be one of the hardest things he had ever had to do, what with having no sleep the night before when they stumbled onto that hallowed ground where so many good soldiers had given their greatest sacrifice. Throughout that long night and into the ashen, predawn gray of the twenty-eighth, the Irishman thought on those nameless ones, men unburied, left where they had fallen to a stronger foe.
And he thought on that long slope of Lodge Trail Ridge ten years gone, littered with the grotesque, frozen dead finally returned to Fort Phil Kearny, where they were consigned everlasting to God’s hand and that Dakota soil.*
There were more, those fallen near that narrow, brushy island in the middle of an unnamed riverbed after those nine hot summer days fighting off Cheyenne.•
Then he thought on the soldiers who were killed in that desperate fight in the sulfurous no-man’s-land of Black Mesa by the Modoc, who wanted only to live on the ground where they had buried their ancestors. And he remembered how the warriors had pulled back and disappeared—when they could have come in to finish the wounded. It would have been no hard task, after all, for those who weren’t wounded and incapable of fighting were dead.†
Back in seventy-four the buffalo hunters he had thrown in with had buried their own right there in the sod beside the Myers and Leonard hide yard, after Quanah Parker had given up the bloody fight at Adobe Walls after five days, after discovering that their medicine man’s power wasn’t strong enough to protect them when they charged into the maw of those big-bore buffalo guns.‡
And he brooded on the bodies of the soldiers Colonel Reynolds ordered his Third Cavalry to leave behind after the subzero fight beside the thick ice crusted over Powder River.** More good men who would never know a grave. More families who would never be able to visit the final resting place of a fallen father, or husband, or son. The very same tragedy visited upon the loved ones of those brave men who had breathed their last beside Rosebud Creek a scant week before.†† Some child’s father, some woman’s husband, some parent’s son.
So it was that he thought on Samantha, and how he missed her so terribly. Right down to the marrow of him. Sitting here in the darkness, in the middle of this last great hunting ground of the Sioux. Surrounded by thousands of warriors who had just finished off some army sent to defeat the roaming bands, sent to drive them back to their reservations. How he thought on her, and their child. The babe that Sam claimed would be Seamus’s firstborn son.
“May he never know war,” Donegan whispered to the silent night wind. “Dear God—if you ever answer a prayer of mine, answer this one. That this son of mine may never know war.”
In the first coming of day’s light Seamus shook Grouard awake, holding a finger to his lips. The half-breed’s eyes widened as he heard the voices; then he nodded.
In the beginning Donegan had thought he caught himself dozing, dreaming, hearing voices as he slept. But no—he was awake, and those were men’s voices he heard in the gray coming of morning. Trouble was, they spoke Sioux.
Leaving their horses in that clump of brush where they had spent the night, Grouard and Donegan crawled out on their bellies a few yards toward the voices—and discovered where their pursuers were camped. Not five hundred yards away.
Already up and stirring, the two dozen or so warriors were completing their toilet, freshening war paint, retying braids, and bringing their ponies into camp as they prepared to set off as soon as enough light let them follow a pair of tracks once more.
Grouard signaled with a thumb, indicating they should back up into the thick brush, where they savagely yanked their horses’ heads to the side at the same time they heaved their shoulders into the animals to throw the mounts onto the ground. With some strips of thick latigo, on each animal they lashed three legs together, which would prevent the horses from rising. That done, they tied strips of blanket over the wide nostrils so the animals would not scent the war ponies. Then the men backed off through the brush.
Scrambling farther up the hillside, Grouard discovered an outcrop of sandstone that made for a narrow cave, where the two of them were forced to slide in feet first. From their rocky fortress that reminded a gloomy Donegan of an early grave, the pair kept an anxious watch on the valley floor as well as on that long slope below them, all the way down to the timber where they had cached the horses, throughout that summer’s morning and into the hot afternoon, long after the war party finally departed, riding off to the southeast, away from the foothills.
It wasn’t until after the sun had set behind them that the two dragged themselves from their narrow hole and rubbed sore, stiff muscles. Down in the timber they untied their horses, resaddled, and set off at moonrise. Angling away from the valley where the warriors had headed, Grouard and Donegan decided their only choice was to hug the foothills, making for a longer trail back to Crook’s Camp Cloud Peak.
“Still say that was a damned-fool stunt you pulled back there at the Injin village,” Donegan grumbled late that night after the stars came out.
“What stunt?”
“Going down to talk to that old Injin,” Seamus replied. “Why didn’t we just ride around that village?”
“You know how big that son of a bitch was?”
With a shrug Donegan complained, “So—I’m still waiting for you to tell me why you went and told that old man what your Injin name was.”
Grinning, Grouard replied, “I only claimed I was one of the best scouts on the northern plains, Irishman. Never said I could think fast on my feet.”
With the return of Frank Grouard and the Irishman, rumors began to run as deep and swift as runoff in spring through the army’s camp. Most doubted the pair’s claim concerning their nighttime journey through the battlefield littered with dead soldiers—the very same skeptics who doubted both the size of the enemy village as well as the number of hostile warriors the two scouts were estimating for the general.