Wolf Mountain Moon (39 page)

“Just … just think about it, Samantha,” Martha said, in her own way shushing the other women in the kitchen, all in flour-dusted aprons, as this was baking day for the week. “I'm sure it will all make sense to your mister when he comes riding back home to you.”

Sam pushed herself up from the chair, adjusted the tiny blanket around the sleeping baby in the crook of her arm, and
said, “Seems I better put Mr. Donegan's son down for a nap. I'll be back down to help later.”

She heard their voices as she slipped out to the landing and began her climb up the narrow stairs. Women talking about this and that of no real consequence to her, bits of news from the papers just come to the post late yesterday, perhaps the latest rumor to find circulation among the officers and their wives, or the most recent tremor in relations with the Sioux up at Red Cloud's agency. All of it meant nothing much at all to her.

She waited only for news of Crook's army and its return to Fetterman. Then heard that Mackenzie's Fourth was moving back to Camp Robinson. But neither of those meant Seamus was coming back.

What did she have to count on? she asked herself as she laid the boy in his nest of blankets. Was she really being selfish to want Seamus with her more than he had been around her for most of their married life?

Oh, Samantha! she chided herself, catching a glimpse of herself in a faded, scratched mirror she had nailed above the tiny bureau. You have as much of your husband as any army officer's wife. Yes—he could be a store clerk or a blacksmith, or he could be a farmer gone all day to the fields like Pa.

“No, he couldn't,” she whispered quietly.

And looked down at the child.

“You and I both know it, don't we, God? Seamus Donegan couldn't be any of those.”

But maybe it wouldn't hurt—she thought—to look downstairs for that old paper with the news story about the Silver City ore strike. Just to have it here and ready when he did return home soon.

Maybe the lure of silver and gold and riches beyond imagination would entice him once more. God knows there'd never be any money in army scouting.

They were gradually gaining in altitude the farther they marched up the valley of the Tongue. And for much of the time the wagons did not have too bad a time of it, what with the way the large Indian village had itself followed the trail made by some buffalo along the river. So many hooves, so many travois poles, so many moccasin prints in that snow gradually pounded down and hardened into a highway pointing south—toward the Wolf Mountains.

Just before dawn on Thursday morning, the fourth of January, Luther Kelly returned from his reconnaissance over to the valley of the Rosebud.

Seamus held out a cup of coffee in the gray light as Kelly stomped up to seize it eagerly. “You see anything worth making mention of?”

“Not a sign,” Kelly admitted, then blew on his coffee and drank. “No trails, no tracks, no sign of buffalo over there either.”

“What that tells me is that we're gonna stare the lot of them in the face here real soon, Luther.”

He looked up at Donegan and nodded once before going back to his coffee and staring at the fire. “They're all together, aren't they? All those warrior bands.”

“Used to be a man could figure they'd split up come winter.”

“Not this bunch,” Kelly said. “If it really is Crazy Horse, he'll hold 'em together because they know we're coming. Won't be any going this way or going that. They'll
all
be waiting for us.”

“By gor,” Seamus whispered harshly as he started kicking snow into the fire the moment the first orders were shouted around them to prepare to mount. “Looks plain as sun that Miles is going to get himself exactly what Crook his own self has been wanting for the better part of a year.”

“What's that?”

“To get a crack at Crazy Horse—and have the bastard stand and fight.”

“Just like he did at the Rosebud … right?” Kelly asked, then swilled down the last of the coffee in the tin.

“And nearly overran us three times, the bleeming bastard.”

“Yeah,” Kelly commented quietly. “Miles will get his own crack at them Sioux … just like Custer prayed Crazy Horse would stand and fight.”

“This could be it, Kelly,” Seamus said, dragging the reins off the ground and stabbing a buffalo moccasin into the stirrup.

“Could be what?”

“Maybe this will be the last battle Crazy Horse will ever fight.”

Just about the time the scouts pushed out of the bivouac to probe the valley ahead of the soldier column, a fine mist began to fall. Within the hour that chilling mist became a continuous and galling rain that tended to soak man and animal to the bone, turning the wide trail to a mucky slush, hard going for the foot soldiers and wagons both.

From time to time that day Donegan and the other scouts came across recent sign of the retreating bands. Here and there among the cottonwood groves they found the crude frames
for wickiups and the cold, lifeless black rings of dead fires. Clearly, all indications showed how bands of warriors were staying behind the villages, between their people and the soldiers, monitoring the Bear Coat's advance up the Tongue, falling back slowly, ever so slowly.

It was enough to worry any battle veteran. By any calculation Crazy Horse had more than enough warriors to take on Miles's infantry. So why didn't the Sioux stand and fight?

And another thing was just as galling: the soldier column was being watched, constantly. The two recent attacks had proved that. That could only mean that Crazy Horse was falling back for a specific purpose.

It made Seamus shudder. Maybe, after all, this was like what John Buford had done when he'd been the first to arrive on the outskirts of that tiny Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. Buford knew Lee's Army of Virginia was coming—perhaps no more than hours away. So while he could, Buford chose the ground.

If a man could seize one advantage above all others, he must choose the ground where he would engage the enemy.

Crazy Horse was falling back, falling back … and when he stopped—that would be the ground where he would stake himself and go no farther. There Colonel Nelson A. Miles and his Fifth U.S. Infantry would have their hands full.

During the incessant rain throughout that day most of the snow melted. Only patches remained beneath the scrub cedar and stunted pine. Out where the army marched, the ground had become a quagmire. Late that afternoon the halt was called on the west side of the Tongue across from the mouth of Otter Creek.
^*
After Miles set up his rotation of pickets, the weary men did their best to scratch around to find some dry wood for their smoky fires, then curled up in their wet blankets and fell fast asleep.

By first light on the fifth the column was off and marching again, plodding through a steady, driving rain that gusted at their backs and turned the trail into a sticky gumbo yearning to pull a man's boots off his frozen feet if he wasn't careful. Back and forth they were forced to cross the softening ice of the Tongue as the sandstone bluffs crowded in first on one
side, then on the other, narrowing the valley once more as the river snaked and twisted much more than it did farther north. Animals and wagons became mired in the mud or broke through the spongy ice, requiring the men to plunge in themselves to yank, and haul, and tow everything free.

From time to time men fell out of line to drag off their soaked and shapeless bootees and socks, scooping up a handful of snow and rubbing it on the stark-white foot—hoping to startle circulation back into their frozen, plodding extremities. Lips turned blue and teeth chattered, that dull gray day as the rain continued to fall. There was no drying off; there could be no changes of clothes, no stopping for fires. Only more miles of march, more rain, more watching the horizon for mounted warriors, more waiting.

Off to the southwest beneath the low-slung gray drizzle the men began to make out the gradually ascending heights of the Wolf Mountains. Back along the column more and more men began to talk quietly among themselves, wondering if the Sioux were drawing them farther and farther downriver, eventually to draw the army into the rugged fastness of those mountains in the distance. There finally to make their play—finally to stand and fight among the heights.

Seamus brooded on it too. With all the sign they were beginning to run across, it was of a sudden causing the Irishman to recall the dogs he had so often noticed around the forts and outposts and frontier towns in the last ten years he had been in this western country. Crazy Horse's village of winter roamers was the bitch in heat luring Crook's, or Terry's, or Miles's armies to follow … follow, as the softheaded, hard-dicked town dogs would always follow, fighting among themselves for the chance to be the first to crawl atop and hump the seductive, alluring bitch.

The farther they pushed that Friday, the more such a devilish plot on the part of Crazy Horse made sense to him. It seemed that with every hour, if not with every mile, they were marching past more and more recent Indian sign. More of the abandoned wickiups and war lodges. Here and there the trampled earth of lodge circles and fire rings. Meat-drying racks. Scattered and half-used piles of cottonwood bark stripped and peeled for their war ponies. More carcasses of cattle and oxen slaughtered in those migrating camps. Even a few live cattle
contentedly grazing among the mud and boggy, grassy bottoms alongside the river, animals abandoned by the retreating village. A very large village that by necessity had spread itself for some distance along the riverbank.