“Coming light, Lieutenant!” some trooper said down to Donegan’s right.
“Steady now! Steady!”
He watched Schwatka look to the east. Von Leuttwitz was in position somewhere over there, somewhere still out of sight in the murky light. Over where the dawn was just beginning to balloon around them. Then the lieutenant glanced to the west, as if he expected to catch a glimpse of Crawford’s men.
Minutes ago all three units of Mills’s attack had come to a halt after using up more than an hour to grope their way out of the deep ravine and quietly inch forward together across the sticky, muddy prairie beginning at the foot of Slim Buttes, a long, craggy ridge that dominated and towered over the entire landscape. Frank Grouard led them through the frosty darkness toward the village he had scouted, where he had stolen two ponies. When the half-breed had Lieutenant Schwatka halt his twenty-five, the scout disappeared for a few minutes before he reappeared with another half-dozen Sioux ponies.
“More of ’em up there,” Frank said in a low hush as he drove the six ponies to the rear right through the midst of Schwatka’s mounted troopers. “You go on, Lieutenant. I’ll be back soon as I hide these away in a coulee for safekeeping.”
With the coming light Seamus recognized the outlines of more ponies grazing here and there in their front. Still some distance off, the bulk of the herd cropped the wet grass, completely indifferent to the soldiers. Raising his face into the cold breeze that tortured his nose, he found the wind was still in their favor.
They moved up a bit more, halted again, nearing the fringe of the herd now. Beyond, farther still, rose the tops of the first lodges. Silent. Hulking. Only the barest wisps of firesmoke stealing from the upper swirl of lodgepoles. Schwatka deployed his twenty-five about the time Grouard reappeared. He rode up and stopped somewhere on the far left flank. From where Donegan sat atop his horse at the right end of the formation, he wasn’t sure he could pick out the half-breed in the dim light.
Up ahead, no more than a matter of yards, really, a horse snorted. One of the Sioux ponies.
Then another one whickered, and one of the cavalry horses answered with a whinny of its own.
“Dear Mither of God,” Seamus swore under his breath, “get your hands on his nostrils.” He prayed the other outfits were in position.
Of a sudden the grassy rise before them erupted in a swirling movement and deafening noise: the cries of ponies, the surprising hammer of more than fifteen hundred hooves. Just as they would if a bolt of lightning had cracked its fiery tongue into their midst, the pony herd exploded into action.
“Stampede!”
At Donegan’s shrill warning, Schwatka yanked his horse about and stood in the stirrups.
Another soldier hollered, “G’won, Lieutenant! Give the order!”
“Charge!” Schwatka yelled, his mouth a black hole within his neatly trimmed mustache and pointed goatee, waving the pistol in his hand as he kicked heels into his horse, which bolted off beneath him with a shocking burst of energy.
Raggedly the twenty-five tore themselves from motionlessness to a furious gallop in the space of two heartbeats, strung out as they were across some sixty yards. Over the unknown ground they raced, sweeping the frantic herd before them across the brow of the hill and down into the narrow, three-fingered depression.
Out of the gray light of false dawn loomed the hide lodges.
With a shudder Donegan remembered their attack on Powder River. Many of these men had been there. He wondered if they remembered, as he remembered it.
He saw the first lodge as he shot past it—the door flap securely lashed down against the wind and rain. At the rear a long gash suddenly erupted in the wet hide. From it bubbled three children, then a woman with a babe in her arms. She stopped, looked at him as he rode past.
Then Seamus was among the rest of the village.
All around him the Sioux were hacking their way out of their lodges. Warriors fell to one knee, firing rifles and pistols, then rose to run again, stopping after a few yards to fire another round. On either side of the Irishman the troopers’ pistols popped in a steady rattle. All about him the bullets slapped against the taut, wet buffalo hides, sounding like the arrhythmic fall of icy hailstones. The air stung his cold cheeks, and he knew his nose must be dribbling in his mustache again. Swiping at it with his left arm as he sighted a warrior, Seamus immediately wished he hadn’t touched the nose. The tender tissues screamed in pain.
Angry at himself, he brought the pistol out at the end of his arm and snapped off the shot by instinct, without really aiming. The warrior pitched backward, arms and legs akimbo, falling behind a lodge.
Within seconds the Sioux were streaming from the village, the first of them beginning to reach the pony herd. Children screeched and women cried out, hurrying the little ones along. At the rear tottered the old and the lame, the sick and the wounded lumbering behind in their midst. On the far side of the village stood a line of low bluffs. Racing across the creek to the southwest, most of the Sioux were escaping around the end of those bluffs, fleeing onto the rolling prairie. The rest of those in the village splashed across the narrow creek, up the south bank, and turned right at the ridgeline, scurrying like quail into the darkness and brush.
He knew there would be coulees and ravines up there, scars upon the face of this land where rain and snow had scratched their fingers of erosion over the millennia as the waters tumbled off the prairie to the creek. Creek flowing on to the stream. And stream into the river. Just the way the Indians flowed right and left at the base of the low bluff. Like a boulder parting the waters.
Suddenly he was alone. Reining up, Seamus watched another handful of the Sioux flit past him in the gray light, disappearing upstream in the brush along the creek pouring out of those chalk-colored buttes that stood immediately above them in the coming light of day.
With all the echo reverberating from those heights, it seemed the whole prairie was alive with a steady rattle of gunfire.
Seamus wheeled his horse about, and the animal fought the bit for a moment as he patted its wet hide along the big neck, straining his eyes into the dim gray light of dawn to find something familiar—anything—out there through the fog and mist dancing among the lodges. Schwatka had his mounted troopers turning just then, there at the end of that bluff across the creek from the village. They had done what Mills had ordered, but they hadn’t stopped the escape. The pony stampede had seen to that, flushing the quarry ahead of the charging soldiers. Now instead of closing the door on the south end of the village, Schwatka’s men could only watch in frustration as the Sioux scampered across the hills, scattering like hulls of grain flung across a hardwood floor.
Where was Crawford’s detachment? They should have been down to the creek by now—
Then Donegan saw them. Clear across the village on the far hillside, already united with Von Leuttwitz’s men. Instead of pushing east from their right flank to prevent most of the escape toward the buttes, Crawford had led his men right into the northern end of the village to quickly join the other dismounted skirmishers fighting under Von Leuttwitz’s command. Together those hundred-plus men worked in concert, pushing west into the village.
As Donegan rode slowly along the edge of the low bluff, his pistol sweeping over the brush in the event he scared up anything on two legs, he noticed Schwatka’s men corralling more than two hundred ponies at the bottom of a wide, grassy swale. Most of the animals quieted and went back to a restless grazing, while a few continued to leap and dart along the circumference of the circle.