Ashes of Heaven (52 page)

Turning to his adjutant, Miles declared, “Mr. Baird?”

“Yes, General?”

“Prepare me a pay voucher for Mr. Donegan,” he said. “Something this scout can present when he returns to Laramie.”

“How much should I make it for, sir?”

And as Baird stood waiting, Miles gazed at Donegan for a moment, before he said, so quietly it was almost a whisper, “I don't suppose we'll ever see one another again, will we, Irishman?”

“Don't seem likely, General—now that you've brought this country to rest.”

“What will you do now?”

“I plan to hug and kiss my wife, then hold my young son, Colin.”

Miles suddenly turned to Baird, “I hired Mr. Donegan at forty dollars a month and found, didn't I, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir. More than your other scouts—”

“Yes, well, I suppose I did that because Mr. Donegan has a family to support.”

“Then I should make the voucher for twenty dollars to cover him for the last two weeks of duty time?” asked Baird.

“Make it for fifty, Lieutenant.”

“Fifty?” both Donegan and Baird echoed at the same time.

“Yes,” and Miles stared at the Irishman. “He did just as he promised he would do. He came north to help me fight one more dirty little battle, to finish the job others had botched all along. I think Mr. Donegan's due just compensation for the time he spent on the trail coming north, and for the time he'll spend returning to his family—don't you, Mr. Baird?”

“Of course,” the adjutant replied, glancing quickly at the civilian before he turned away to kneel beside the colonel's oak field desk, raising the lid to remove a small sheet of paper and the ink bottle.

Seamus didn't know quite what to say. “That's very generous of you, General—”

“Would you, just for these last few minutes we'll have together, call me Nelson?”

“Of-of course … Nelson.”

“More coffee?” Donegan shook his head. The colonel stared at the fire a moment, then looked up at Seamus with studied concentration.

“You'll see your family before I see mine, Irishman,” Miles said wistfully. “In fact, you've seen them more in the last year than I've seen mine—not since I left Leavenworth last summer just after Custer … just before Terry and Crook bungled everything. Those two could have put the cork back into the bottle a lot sooner.”

“You're returning south soon, General?”

“No,” Miles grinned, his eyes crinkling, “I'm bringing my Mary north on the first steamboat next month. Cecilia, my little princess, will come too. And Elizabeth Sherman, Mary's sister—the general's other niece. They'll all be arriving on the first paddlewheel of the season.”

“Trust me, sir, I know how you must feel anticipating that reunion.”

Miles sighed, dragging a hand beneath his nose, a distant look in his eye. “Nothing but male voices for far too long. It will be like angels' harps to hear their sweet voices, Mr. Donegan.”

The Irishman looked away, a little embarrassed to hear that crack in the colonel's voice. “The life of a fighting man isn't the easiest road for a man to walk.”

Looking up, Miles grinned and blinked. “You know, I've been giving some thought to pursuing another line of work.”

“You? Leave the army, General Miles?”

The colonel snorted, “Silly of me, isn't it? To think of leaving after all these years, all the advancement, just to jump into a life of politics—”

“Right here is where men like you belong, sir,” Donegan pleaded. “That's a life of back-stabbers and double-tongued two-talkers back there. You're a real rarity in the army, a straight-shooting man who doesn't mince words and does just what he says he'll do.”

“That's one more thing we have in common, Mr. Donegan,” Miles declared. “You vowed you'd return for our spring campaign—and you kept your word.”

“I'll never let a friend down.”

The colonel's eyes narrowed as Baird got to his feet and started their way. “You do … consider me a friend?”

“I'm honored to call a straight-talking, steely-eyed, honest-to-bullets fighting man like you my friend, General.”

Miles reached out and grabbed the voucher Baird stepped up to present him. His eyes poured over it quickly, then he said, “Your back, Lieutenant?”

The adjutant handed the colonel a pen, then held up the glass inkwell as Miles dipped the quill into it. Baird turned so the commander could press the paper against the back of his shoulders to sign the pay voucher.

“There,” Miles said, handing off the pen and blowing on the bottom of the voucher. “Fifty dollars. And I trust you'll take all the ammunition you can carry in your saddlepockets.”

“Only what's fair, sir,” he replied as he took the paper and folded it for the coat's inside pocket.

Miles held out his hand. “Let's just hope we don't bump into each other on another battlefield anytime in the next decade or two.”

“I don't plan to do no more Injin fighting, General,” Seamus declared as they shook hands, then he stepped back. “I want to find me a nice little vein of gold up there in the Montana hills, stake my claim, then take care of my family with my labors. Maybe have some more children, if God's willing.”

“No more fighting, eh?”

“Not if I can help it,” Donegan vowed. “I'm fixing to take my wife and boy up where we're nowhere close to Injin troubles.”

“God speed, Irishman.” Miles's voice cracked slightly again. Then he took a step back and saluted. “I trust you'll watch your back-trail, Sergeant Donegan.”

He felt the sour ball rising in his chest as he blinked away the sting of hot moisture. He saluted. “General, it's been an honor—”

Seamus immediately turned on his heel and stomped away before the two of them betrayed any more of that strong sentiment that since the beginning of time had bonded fighting men who shared the same battlefields, shared the danger, shared the nearness of death.

Men with that same sense of duty to country and to family. Men dutybound to honor above all.

Epilogue

Late May
1877

THE TOWN OF “MILES.”

General Miles has sent a communication to Governor Potts, of this Territory, advising his action upon Miles' proposition, some time since submitted to the War Department (but not yet acted upon) in favor of the permanent establishment of the town of Miles upon the Tongue River [military] reservation. The town is growing; stocks of goods are there, and the citizens now have a representative here who visits the Governor asking the organization of Custer County, in which the town is located. That a large population will this season locate upon the Tongue and Big Horn cannot be doubted, and with such settlement the construction and occupation of the posts and offensive movements against the Sioux, we cannot question that the end of the Sioux war is at hand. The new posts will be built of hewn logs, matched and lined with building paper, for the construction of which 600 carpenters are now on the way up the Yellowstone.

Army and Navy Journal

12 May 1877

After saddling up the claybank, Seamus had walked the mare over to present himself to Lieutenant Samuel R. Douglass, quartermaster for the campaign, packing up fifteen days' rations of coffee, hard-bread, and some salted beef in case he might run through a stretch of country bare of game, or might just have to avoid firing his rifle for fear of attracting attention. If he was lucky, he'd only have to aim his rifle at a mulie buck, maybe a curious antelope.

Shaking hands and slapping the backs of the officers and line soldiers who had been his comrades-in-arms for two cold, wet campaigns, the Irishman snorted back the dribble at the end of his nose and rose to the saddle. He yanked aside the reins and gave the claybank the business end of those spurs strapped around the heels of his stovepipe boots.

Half-a-hundred yards away he slowed to a halt, dismounting beside the ashy scars of what had been five fresh mounds the burial detail had scratched among the ruins of the Sioux village, there beside the banks of Big Muddy Creek. To protect the bodies from predators, and to prevent the camp's survivors from returning to dig up the bodies after Miles had pulled off to the north, late last night Jerome's detail had torched a large pile of blankets, robes, and dried meat over the graves.

Tensely gripping the reins in his left hand, Seamus dismounted to stare at the blackened ground, then brought his right hand up to the curled brim of his big hat, saluting those soldiers fallen in the line of duty in a stinking little war too often forgotten by the folks back east, ignored by their own government, overlooked even by those army leaders who sent the faceless ones off to fight an unknown enemy in a distant land.

As he stood there, his heart weeping, Donegan watched the ghostly faces of so many old friends parade past his memory in grand review—men fallen in battle, gone to their eternal reward having earned a hero's sleep.

These were men who had borne the ultimate price as their nation entered its second century. Men who would never again return to hearth and home, return to the kindred spirits of family, the kiss of a sweetheart, the warm embrace of wife and children. Men who would forever sleep beneath the green shroud of this great land they had come to fight over.

By nightfall, he knew these five graves would lie alone in this valley as a mournful silence swallowed the land. A land abandoned by both the army and the Sioux. Those unmarked graves would be left to the ages and the endless wind that came to whisper with the turn of the seasons.

Recrossing the creek Seamus started away south by west toward the far side of the valley where Jerome's burial detail was lowering the last of the fourteen Indian dead into a long mass grave dug there against the bottom of the ridge some two hundred yards southwest of the streambank. Here, on another part of yesterday's battlefield, the soldiers had lashed the bodies in blankets then laid them side by side in that shallow hole where Donegan stopped and peered down.

“You here to get you a scalp,” one of the cavalrymen said, “them Cheyenne took 'em all.”

Wagging his head, Seamus looked at the corporal who had his sleeves rolled up, reddish dirt caked all the way up his sweat-stained forearms and replied, “No. I'm not here for no scalps.”

He waited as two young soldiers looped the ropes beneath the last faceless, blanket-wrapped shroud and dragged the body over the yawning hole, lowering it inch by inch to join the rest.

“Which one of 'em was Lame Deer?” he asked the soldiers as the ropes were pulled up and three more cavalrymen started to rise from their perches on the rocks, dragging their shovels behind them.

“Don't rightly remember,” the corporal answered.

“It don't really matter anyway,” Seamus said, reaching down inside the deep pocket of his canvas mackinaw. As one of the men stabbed his shovel into the fresh dirt beside the grave, the Irishman asked, “If you fellas don't mind, gimme a minute here before you throw that dirt back in.”

Not a one of them spoke, curious were they all, as he pulled out his small waxed pouch of army tobacco. From the corner of the plug he bit off a large chunk and with his fingertips began to grind the tobacco into flakes. Just as he would do if he were lighting his pipe. Maybe the way a warrior might fill his own pipe and offer a prayer over a fallen comrade.

Slowly, as he inched down the long side of that mass grave, Seamus Donegan sprinkled the tobacco over the blanket shrouds. Then he bit off a second hunk and sprinkled it too as he moved back along the other long side of the grave.

“Now what you do that for?” one of the young soldiers asked as Seamus stuffed the rest of his tobacco away in a pocket.

“Yeah,” said another. “I figured the general was crazy to ask us to bury these goddamned bodies—but you gone and wasted good tobacca in that buryin' hole!”

A third man snorted, “Should'a just left 'em for the coyotes, what we should'a done!”

Then they all fell silent, expectant, as the tall man with the long hair tormented by the chill breeze now touched each one of them with his gaze.

“I just figured these folks don't have 'em no one to say some words over their graves, like folks said when you buried your friends back there in the village.”

The corporal swiped his forearm across the bottom of his face, smearing the red dirt over his mouth and chin. “Never thought 'bout it that way, mister.”

“Man what fought and died for what he loved most,” Seamus explained, “he ought to have folks say a simple prayer over his resting place. Man died protecting his land, his family—should have someone say a prayer.”

The soldiers stood motionless as Donegan swept up the reins to the horse and climbed up to the saddle.

The corporal loped over and came to a stop beside the horse. His brow knitted in consternation, the soldier asked, “Wasn't you gonna say a prayer before we throwed the dirt in on them bodies?”

“I already did say the prayer, Cawpril.”

“You-you did?”

“With that tobacco,” Seamus said, tapped heels against ribs, and turned the animal, moving off at a lope.

Putting the battlefield at Big Muddy Creek behind him.

Putting the Sioux War behind him too.

Pointing the mare up the valley, south by west for the Tongue, then the Powder. Heading home to loved ones waiting back at Laramie.

Now the three of them could set out immediately for the gold diggings of Montana Territory, for Last Chance Gulch where the future beckoned him, where after a delay of more than ten years an old soldier could at last get on with his interrupted life.

Praying that he would die an old man. That he would die in bed. That as he closed his eyes for the last time, he would be holding Samantha's hand while he took that final breath and crossed over.