Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (12 page)

“Sir!”

It was his sergeant major. Gripping the bridle of Elliott’s horse.

“Yes, Kennedy! You’ll ride. If any man can make it—” Elliott laughed almost cheerfully. “I know you can!”

The troopers freed their horses now, squatting in the tall, frozen grass, taking their positions in a circle, guarding each other’s backside. Elliott shook Kennedy’s hand quickly, shoving him aboard his horse. The major slapped its flank, sending it on its way up the side of a snowy, tree-lined hill where two dozen warriors raced to head the pony soldier off.

“Ride, you sunuvabitch!” Elliott cried, fighting back the tears. “Ride!”

L
IEUTENANT
Edward S. Godfrey had crossed the Washita with Custer at daybreak, leading his K Company into the village. His orders dictated that he not stop for any reason. His men were to drive on through the hostile camp and capture the enemy’s most prized possessions—their herd.

Less than a mile from the village, where Custer’s scouts supposed they would be, Godfrey located the ponies scattered among the frosty meadows. After he had detailed a platoon to drive the herd toward the village, Godfrey loped to the top of a hill overlooking the timbered countryside. From there he saw a handful of escaping Cheyenne scampering across the north side of the valley.

“Damn!” he muttered. “Must be a trail of some kind after the bastards ford the river.”

Godfrey raced off the hill, gathering his command to pursue the fleeing Cheyenne. In the growing light of day Godfrey located the shallow river crossing. Without slowing
he plunged his force across the Washita and up the icy north bank.

“Trail sure as hell shows a lot of use, sir,” Sergeant Quinton O’Reilly commented.

“I aim to find out the reason,” Godfrey replied.

Minutes later, they understood the beating the narrow trail had taken. In a large, wooded draw they bumped into a second pony herd. A herd bigger than any a young soldier could imagine.

“Pony boys,” he muttered softly. Last night the Osage scouts had found a small fire on the north bank, a fire that pony herders used to warm themselves through a subfreezing night. Only hours ago he and a few officers had speculated why that herder fire was found on the north side of the river, while the village was found nestled on the south bank. Now it all made sense.

“Seems the hostiles figure their precious horseflesh might be that much safer if kept some distance from their village.”

O’Reilly pointed. “Lookee there, Lieutenant!”

Across the meadow the Indians he had spotted fleeing on foot were leaping atop ponies. One by one or in pairs they darted off into the broken timber leading toward a series of rolling hills. Two of the riders drew up at the top of that first hill while the rest of their party disappeared over the rise. The pair circled their ponies.

Godfrey reined up, more than surprise crawling the pit of his gut. “Halt! Dammit, halt!” he bellowed over the jangle of saddle gear, yelling soldiers and whinnying horses.

“What the hell you stopping us for, Lieutenant?” O’Reilly demanded. “You ain’t ’fraid of a lil’ bunch of—”

“Best have yourself a look up there!” Godfrey pointed
uphill. “Two will get you ten they’re signaling someone beyond that ridge yonder. Whoever’s over there is being told an enemy is down here in pursuit.”

“Why, who the Sam Hill’s gonna be on the other side of that ridge, sir?” the sergeant asked.

“Hell, I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got a suspicion.”

He twisted in his McClellan. “Reload if necessary! File out at a gallop—sergeant on the point! Forward, ho!”

Near the top of the ridge, Godfrey and O’Reilly signaled a halt for the men charging up the slope on their heels.

“You keep the men here. I’ll have a look over it myself,” Godfrey said.

“But sir!” O’Reilly protested. “Why the hell should you expose yourself?”

“I damn well won’t expose my command, Sergeant!”

“Yessir!”

Godfrey dug his heels into his mount, tearing up the rise. Peering over the crest, he stared at the winter landscape below. Across it raced the black, beetlelike forms of the Cheyenne escaping on horseback. As his eyes scanned the white plain below him, following the direction the escaping Cheyenne were taking—

What he saw would chill the blood of even the most fire-hardened veteran Indian fighter.

Below him the Washita oxbowed its way north for several miles through a heavily wooded river glen. Down in that valley stood a camp of several hundred lodges. Beyond that camp, another. Farther downstream, still another. Already more than a hundred warriors had spilled from those lodges, scurrying like maddened black ants across the snow.

For a few cold moments he watched the advance force
spur straight for him. Half-naked warriors ready for battle and screeching for blood.

Savagely he kicked his lathered mount downhill, hollering at O’Reilly. “We’ve stirred up a damned hornet’s nest!”

Godfrey got his men headed back down the slope toward the meadow in a ragged retreat about the time the first warriors howled over the top of the rise on their heels. The sight of those screeching demons was all his men needed to understand what all the yelling was about as their lieutenant tore pell-mell down the hill toward them.

It was a footrace to the river.

Lieutenant Godfrey could not know that these warriors were Arapaho, Little Raven’s band, several thousand strong. Riding fresh ponies, the Arapaho under War Chief Left Hand began to overtake the rear of Godfrey’s disorderly retreat, intent on making things hot for that squad of soldiers forked atop played-out army mounts.

Godfrey realized his men didn’t stand a prayer in a footrace. They’d have to turn and fight.

Yelling, he ordered his men to form a skirmish line. With pride the West Point graduate watched his men perform the drill by the book. As they dropped from the saddle, three troopers threw themselves down behind cover after handing their reins to a fourth soldier retreating to the rear with four horses.

“Make damned sure of a target before you fire!”

That command sent a return of solid, deadly fire smashing into the face of the attacking Arapaho. Though the first blast spilled only three warriors, it drove the rest retreating to a stand of oak, dragging their wounded. From that thick
cover the Indians began to pour their heavy fire into the troopers.

More Arapaho poured over the top of the ridge. With every passing moment Godfrey’s squad grew more outnumbered.

“Sergeant! If we’re not careful, these goddamned savages will pin us down.”

“By Gor, Lieutenant, not enough ammo left to make a fight of it.”

“Pull back—in skirmish formation!”

“Damned right, sir!”

“Keep the men together. Hold your defensive perimeter as we retreat. Make it orderly!”

“We’ll give ’em hell on the way!” O’Reilly dashed off, spreading the word among the troopers pinned down in the brush and timber.

Step by step they began their retreat. Those with the horses pulled back first. The others, low on ammunition, fired only enough to keep the warriors at bay. Close on the sunrise shadow of every trooper darted ghostly forms—Arapaho who continued to advance, made bolder as the soldiers retreated. Tree line by tree line, ridge by ridge, Godfrey urged his men back toward the Washita, fighting for every foot of ground they could hold until it came time to fall back a few more yards. At last they reached the heavy timber at the river’s edge. With hoarse shouts of relief the soldiers plunged into the icy water, leading their horses with them.

And with their relief, something even more miraculous happened. The Arapaho fire slackened, faded, then died off. As quickly as they had been attacked, Godfrey’s men found themselves alone.

From the moment the soldiers had reached the thick timber at the river’s edge, they had heard heavy rifle fire coming from the rolling meadows across the Washita, southeast of the crossing. Godfrey couldn’t be that sure, but from the sound of things he thought it could only be one outfit—Major Elliott’s. The Arapaho had discovered Elliott while forcing Godfrey’s retreat to the river.

“Into the came, men. Now!”

Out of the icy Washita, into the captured village. Godfrey felt he must find Custer, make his report on Elliott’s predicament with the Arapaho. The major needed help in the worst way.

Custer held the village. Thompson’s and Myers’s troops held the ground to the south.

For those Cheyenne still alive in the village there existed little chance for escape from the blue-coated terror—only the riverbed of the icy Washita itself.

“When we reach the river,” Clown whispered to the warriors at his side in the brush, “we can fight our way down to the high banks of frozen red clay. Protection there.”

“We must chance it,” Roll Down agreed.

Scabby said, “Pray we make it downstream to our Arapaho and Kiowa cousins.”

Unknown to these retreating Cheyenne warriors was that Custer had figured the hostiles would seek just this avenue of escape. He had positioned Lieutenant Cooke’s sharpshooters among the bone-bare trees atop the northern bank. When the first of the women and children and old people burst from the lodges into the trees at the water’s edge, Cooke ordered his hidden platoon of forty marksmen to open with a deadly fire.

Their first volleys left many dying and wounded in the icy water or scattered across the frozen bank. Down they crumpled, their blood seeping into the crusty red mud. A few riddled bodies washed into the main channel, to be carried downstream toward those camps the fleeing Cheyenne had sought to reach alive.

Scabby, Clown, and Roll Down witnessed every moment of the horror at the river. Their only choice was to retreat so they might battle these soldiers another day. This last fistful of warriors decided the time had come to fight their way to the river crossing.

Clown was the first to spot his old friend at the water’s edge. Black Kettle’s body lapped against the frozen shoreline, a captive now only of the river. Medicine Woman Later lay at arm’s length from him.

Scabby and Roll Down crabbed along the muddy bank, firing behind them, holding some of Thompson’s troopers at bay. Afraid of Beaver slipped over the edge of the frozen bank to join them. Only then did they notice Clown kneeling over the bodies sprawled in the water.

“You will see to them,” Scabby ordered Clown. “We will protect you.”

The three wheeled as one to provide cover for Clown while he tore the blue blanket from his back. Over the bank clambered more warriors retreating to the river crossing. Time to bid farewell to this battle. They would fight another.

Most knelt beside their dead chief for a heartbeat as they crawled by, touching Black Kettle before they plunged into the water, dodging a lead hail from the north bank.

Clown called out. Afraid of Beaver crabbed over to help pull the two old people from the river onto the frozen bank.
Bullets slapped the water around them, smacked the trees overhead.

Tears of anger coursed down Clown’s cheeks. Wrapping the bodies in his blue blanket was the least he could do for the dead ones.

“No more will Black Kettle mourn the passing of the golden days of the
Tsistsistas.”
Clown cried out. “The sun has begun to set on our people.”

The fighting had taken less than twenty minutes.

In less time than it takes a Cheyenne to eat his breakfast, the Seventh Cavalry controlled the village, despite several pockets of heated resistance. Custer had his long-needed victory. He wasn’t about to let it slip through his fingers. He ordered all resistance crushed, no matter the price.

While Clown and his companions fought their way yard by bloody yard from the river crossing, upstream another small group of warriors, women, and children was nowhere near as lucky. When they sought to escape north across the Washita, they found themselves instead trapped in a deep gully. Behind a lip of that narrow coulee eaten away by erosion each spring, the little band of Cheyenne took their final refuge, there to fight like cornered animals.

Cooke’s platoon directed a brief but murderous fire into the gully.

Within minutes every warrior, woman, and child lay dead … save one Cheyenne mother and her tiny, light-skinned infant. Her nostrils stung with the stench of the offal of dead friends. She watched the warm steam puff from wounds riddling her family’s bodies on the muddy embankment all about her.

A terrible fate waited her and the child should they be captured alive by the soldiers.

Walks Last struggled to her feet when the trooper fire died. By the back of the infant’s doeskin gown she held the last of her children aloft.

“We go the way of our ancestors!” she screamed in defiance.

“Sarge! She’s got a white baby!”

“White?”

“That ain’t no white child. It’s a Injun nit!”

“A
white
baby, I say!”

“She’s gonna kill it! A knife! Watch that knife!”

With one swift motion, the Cheyenne mother yanked a knife from her belt and raked it across her child’s belly. The infant jerked spastically as its entrails spilled onto the reddened snow.

Before her next breath, Walks Last vaulted backward, driven into the ravine by a hail of cavalry bullets.

“That was a
white
baby, I say,” the trooper claimed, still shaken. “One of them captive babies.”

“She ain’t shoutin’ no more.” The sergeant felt last night’s hardtack in the back of his throat. When he had gulped a few cold swallows of air, he ran in a crouch to the snowy ravine and cautiously stuck his rifle barrel over the edge. He placed the muzzle against the woman’s head and fired one last, needless bullet into her brain.

Accompanied by Ben Clark and Little Beaver, young Jack Corbin wandered through camp.

He watched as the old Osage tracker grew more angry. With a private rage Little Beaver inspected every slashed, bullet-torn enemy body. Able to control his fury no longer,
Little Beaver fell upon one dead warrior, yanking the body over so that it lay face down in order to take the scalp. His skinning knife ready, Little Beaver found the scalp gone. Not taken by an Osage. Not taken by one of the white scouts. Jack could tell this kind of crude butchery could be done only by some young soldier hankering for a trophy of his first battle.