Reap the Whirlwind (38 page)

At first they had plunged right into the enemy horsemen—even though outnumbered three to one. But those first gunshots exchanged between the swirling, taunting, chant-singing horsemen seemed to draw more and many more of the Lakota like flies to a buffalo carcass. After a short, hot fight, with far too many of the enemy rolling over the hill toward his scouts, Plenty Coups’s Crow were forced to retreat. Almost as one he got them to disengage the Lakota, turn, and flee.

The first of their scouting party passed him like the wind. A diminutive warrior with one leg deformed and shorter than the other. The only Shoshone who went with the Plenty Coups’s Crow to probe to the north—Limpy was already screeching his warning to the distant troops even before he had raced back the long eleven miles to
reach the top of that last ridge bordering the Rosebud valley.

One by one the others sailed by Plenty Coups in a blur, then came the last to fly past. Already dangerously wounded, the face of Alligator Stands Up was tormented with pain, bright blood falling to splatter the warrior’s bare leg and moccasin as he dashed past.

Still Plenty Coups stayed his ground, struggling to hold his pony steady, to control the animal despite its fright as he brought up his old Starr Carbine, long ago a present from the soldier chief of old Fort C. F. Smith. But that was before the Lakota drove the white man to abandon his posts near the country of the Apsaalooke. And Andrew Burt was now one of those serving under Lone Star.

Aiming carefully at the first oncoming rider, he told his heart to quiet itself, conscious of holding his breath as he squeezed the trigger—just as soldier Burt had taught him to do.

Slamming his shoulder, the carbine roared. Plenty Coups shifted the reins, swapping them with the carbine, and furiously kicked his pony in the ribs. The last thing he saw as he whirled about was that first Lakota falling into the grass, arms up as the horseman spun off his pony, tumbling through the air like cottonwood down on a summer breeze.

Flying over one crest after another, he kept his pony stretched out in the chase—hearing them coming, coming, coming behind him in a great angry mob. Sensing the air around him singing with death, now and then he caught the hateful hiss of Lakota bullets snarling past his ears. Over every new hill and down into each of the gently rolling valleys. One by one he raced back toward the valley where the others would ready Lone Star’s soldiers for the enemy’s charge.

As he reached the ridgetop and hammered his heels into his weary pony’s flanks even harder, hurtling down the gentle slope, Plenty Coups gazed wide-eyed from left to right at the white men still sprawled in the grass around their coffee fires or lying in the boggy meadows under their improvised awnings of blankets laid over willow branches. Here, there, and everywhere he looked, the horses and
mules remained unsaddled, up and down that entire mile of creekbank.

But suddenly a handful off to the right side were standing, shading their eyes, looking at him. They were not army, these white men.

A moment more and four of them were turning to sprint toward their grazing horses.

Plenty Coups knew who those men were.

“Sioux! Sioux!
Otoe
Sioux!”

The small Snake warrior with the short, crooked leg flew right past Donegan and Frank Grouard in a blur of color, his head down as he raced arrow-straight for his tribesmen, continuing to shout his warning in Shoshone, Crow, and English.

“Sioux! Sioux!
Many
Sioux!”

Still, it didn’t take a plains linguist to figure out that the enemy had to be hot on the scout’s tail. Already saddled up, the Irishman and Grouard reined up near the top of the slope as the rest of the scouts flooded over the crest and tumbled past them.

“Sioux!
Heap
Sioux!”

In heartbeats the Crow scouts were in among the soldiers now, white men and allies clambering up, bursting in all directions as they raced for their horses and mules, yelling and shouting, animals rearing and bucking, braying and snorting, breaking away—white men cursing, crying out in confusion. In fear. Even terror. A cacophony fit for the pits of hell itself.

“Sonsabitches caught us flat-footed!” Seamus screamed at Big Bat as they reached the creek bottom again.

“C’mon!” Pourier shouted. Flinging up the stirrup fender, he yanked on his cinch, dragging the saddle off his mount.

“Where you going?” Donegan demanded as he watched the saddle land with a thud in the grass.

Bat was already sailing onto the pony’s bare back, hauling back on the rawhide halter. He yelled, “The Crow!”

Donegan wheeled his piebald about, glancing at the black-hatted general riding up the long slope to the bluffs, where he would likely assess the situation. At that moment
the Irishman had to agree with Pourier. Bat’s impulse seemed the only thing to do as the soldier camp sprang to life—but only a confused, stuttering, maddened life.

Grouard stayed beside him.

“Back up there—c’mon!”

Shaking his head, Donegan said, “No! This bunch doesn’t have a chance we get hit by all them Lakota at once!”

“What you figure to do?”

“Bat’s right!” Donegan shouted. “We got to get the Crow and Shoshone moving—it’s Crook’s only chance, Frank: hold the Sioux at bay until he can rally his men, form them up, and counterattack.”

“Let’s go!” Grouard said, kicking his horse into motion.

As they neared the allies, Pourier began pointing, shouting, “Look at that!”

Atop nearly every rocky ridge and grassy bluff now, Donegan suddenly saw. The skyline to the north was black with them. Every last one of them screaming and flying toward the valley on those straining ponies. Feathers streaming, hooves kicking up tufts of the new emerald-green grass and clods of damp earth from the high ground. Nostrils flared and eyes bugged as the little animals carried the Sioux and Cheyenne over the ridgetops like a spring torrent flowing over a beaver’s winter dam, tumbling ever down toward Crook’s troops scattering, rushing, cursing—desperately trying to ready themselves for the enemy charge. Only three of the infantry companies were moving in something resembling good order. Officers had them formed up and were getting them spread out into skirmish formation. Making sure the green soldiers did not bunch up as the enemy came on.

That hundred or so would be the first to feel the heavy blow of the charge, their officers bellowing among them, ordering them not to buckle. To stand and face the enemy.

“Three to five yards,” Donegan whispered to himself, remembering just how Confederate infantry would disperse its men with intervals in the ranks, ready to receive a Union cavalry charge. Depending upon how many men and how much ground a regiment, a battalion, or even a
company, had to cover. How much ground those toot soldiers had to hold. It looked like Burt’s men. Luhn’s too—their infantry spreading out in a clatter of shrill, barked orders, noisy haversacks slapping against gunbelts and Long Toms, bayonets jabbing the summer-blue sky like stalks of brittle buffalo grass.

By the Mother of God—those youngsters were going to get their baptism of fire!

But, he thought … wasn’t it always that way?

Up on the slopes a hundred yards or more beyond the allies, the first of the Sioux had already reached Crook’s outflung pickets. In a blur of color and sound, warriors screeching and soldiers screaming for help as they fired and reloaded—the enemy horsemen washed over the sentries in a great, darkening red wave. Most of those soldiers bravely held their tiny patches of ground. Using their Springfields as effectively as they could, firing, then swinging the rifles like clubs or lunging, jabbing with the long bayonets as the painted, bellowing demons from hell swept past, around, and even right over them.

Bedlam! Satan had torn open the gates of hell. That fallen angel freeing his banshees on mankind!

“What’s that son of a bitch doing up there now?” Donegan growled, seeing George Crook bring his black stallion to a halt atop a rise to the north of the troops, almost due east of where the hostiles were sweeping over the slopes in greater and greater numbers.

For those few opening minutes amid the first shots and numbing confusion, the general left his command to fend for itself, sort out a rally, form on its own, while he went to look things over. Still, he must have said something to his officers before he dashed away, Seamus decided.

Turning, the Irishman found Anson Mills in among his Third Cavalry battalion as they struggled to get resaddled and formed up. The captain kept motioning to the south, his bellow indistinct at this distance, with this much ear-numbing noise.

Whirling at the frightening nearness of the war cries, the hair standing at his neck, Donegan found his heart suddenly choking his throat as the Crow and Shoshone swarmed past him to meet the oncoming enemy tearing
down from the high ground to the northwest. As a scattering of shots from the enemy whined overhead, the Irishman gazed one last time behind him, across the creek. Guy Henry’s battalion struggled among their horses to catch and get the mounts resaddled. Already the first of Van Vliet’s two companies to get mounted on the far bank were streaming to the bluffs south of their position.

Good, Seamus thought. High ground what needs covering.

Sawing the gelding’s reins, he brought the piebald around and drove the small brass spurs into its flanks. It leapt away, head bobbing low as it raced for the slope where Burt and Luhn had their infantry already climbing, huffing and heaving up the hillside to reinforce the pickets already overrun—where three, now four, and quickly five separate bands of warriors poured over that high ground, swirling around and around the helpless guards.

As the foot soldiers spread out in an ever-wider skirmish line, surging forward in a foragers’ charge with their officers hollering above the onrushing din of shouts and war cries, gunfire and noisy mules braying behind them at the creek, the infantry began to turn the first of the warriors, forcing the red horsemen to seek out weak, vulnerable gaps in the blue line hurrying to hold back the massed charges pouring into the valley.

On the far right war cries grew in a frightening crescendo as an even more massive wave of hostiles swept through the wide gap at the end of the ridge, riding some ten abreast and heading for Noyes’s battalion of the Second Cavalry. The big mounts still reared, fighting the horse-holders, the troopers battling to get blankets and saddles on, to shove bits back into the mouths of chivvied horses as the warriors swept down on them—blowing the high-pitched, eerie whine of their eagle wing-bone whistles, flapping pieces of red, blue, and green blanket, snap-snap-snapping shawl-sized pieces of stiff rawhide. Firing pistol, carbines, and rifles into the cavalry herds to frighten and stampede them.

It surprised Seamus as he reached the bottom of the steep slope that Noyes’s dismounted cavalry got off a concerted volley into the massed charge pouring through that
gap. Noyes had formed some of his troopers at the last moment and ordered the first volley when the enemy had come to less than 150 yards of their disciplined ranks. Already on their knees, the first squads now threw open the trap-doors to the Springfield carbines as the second squads hurried up three steps through the gaps, kneeling in turn, and aimed. They fired a second volley directly into the teeth of that wide, red, screaming front. It was not until a third burst of concerted gunfire that the Sioux and Cheyenne finally turned, the first ranks of those horsemen making it as close as fifty yards to the Second Cavalry position.

Then the enemy was sweeping past the outnumbered Crow and Shoshone, countercharging to blunt the enemy’s attack. Flooding past the allies like spring runoff tumbling past a boulder in the middle of a stream, Sioux and Cheyenne horsemen were making for the creekbank west of the bivouac, left of the position where the packers and miners had been relaxing in the morning sun. Pushing toward the creek with every intention of rolling on across the Rosebud toward the bluffs to the south, where the first of Van Vliet’s men were soon to be outnumbered and overrun. Hearing the oncoming charge, they turned to their right as the screeching, whistles, hammering hooves, and gunfire rumbled their way across the stream. Strung out as thin as spider’s silk, those two desperate companies didn’t even have the time to form up to receive the charge. They began to return the enemy fire without so much as an order from Van Vliet. But it worked.

First one, then another of the warriors reined up in a fury, shooting back into the teeth of the soldiers still scrambling to gain control of the slope, to hold on to those bluffs south of the Rosebud.

Seamus watched breathless for a moment, his heart hammering in his ears. Afraid of what he might see happen before his eyes as the hordes converged on Van Vliet’s battalion.

But in the space of another half-dozen heartbeats, those few stalwart Third cavalrymen turned the enemy horsemen back, denying the brown-skinned horsemen that high ground.

Honor regained! he cheered them.

Dignity and honor earned now in this battle for glory on that few acres of high ground—the honor of the Third redeemed once again after that enemy village beside the ice-bound Powder River. Three months to the day—and these soldiers long vilified for the disaster of Reynolds’s battle were here and now redeeming their good name, and that of the Third Cavalry.

“There must be two thousand or more of ’em!” Pourier shouted as he brought his snorting horse to a halt beside the Irishman.

“No need trying to count how many there are, Bat!” Seamus replied. “We’ll never know, anyway: they swarm over us here, then disappear to flow back over another part of the line. We’ll likely never know how many we’re fighting. The way they’re jabbing at us here then there, it makes it look like there’s thousands coming at us.”

“Coming at the weakest part of the line!” Bat replied, pointing at the allies mixing in among the hundreds of Sioux.

“Blessed Mother in Heaven—Crook owes the lives of his men to these Crow and Shoshone.”

“They’re circling us!” Pourier growled, then was gone, firing his pistol at the long line of horsemen pouring down the creek drainage for Van Vliet’s battalion.