Ashes of Heaven (6 page)

“The same request?”

“I'll take some of the money, yes, sir. To buy my bride a new dress or two. Wrangle some whiskey out of the trader, and have ourselves a proper Irish christening for my boy. The rest, I want you to hang onto for safekeeping.”

“Hang onto your pay, is it?”

“Yes. I'd be in your debt if you'd hold most of it for me.”

“I'm no banker, Mr. Donegan.”

“And I'm no eleven-dollar-a-month soldier, Colonel.” He tried to make it come out as gently as he could. “But there's still unfinished business up north, and I figure that means there'll be some work for a man who's had him some experience guiding for General Miles's army.”

“Work up north, you say.”

“They say Sitting Bull's north of the Missouri—likely heading for Canada where he'll be out of reach,” the Irishman explained. “And Crazy Horse is somewhere south of the Yellowstone. Miles plans on going after him as soon as the rivers free up.”

“And you'll be going with Miles, I assume?”

“It's what I do, Colonel. Until this land is safe for my wife and boy, until I can find another way to put a roof over their heads and food in their bellies—I'll be an army scout. Yes, sir. When General Miles marches south from Tongue River Cantonment this spring, I plan on being with his column.”

Slowly a smile of admiration came across Evans's face. “So perhaps you can tell me, Mr. Donegan. How much are two women's dresses, along with enough whiskey to throw yourself a good Irish celebration, all going to cost you?”

He felt a flutter in his chest that he hadn't felt in so, so long. Rather than scraping by hard-scrabble, living with what he was given or could beg off others, Seamus Donegan could now afford the best of what he wanted.

“I s'pose I could have you give me fifty dollars of that scrip.”

“And I'll keep the rest here for you,” Evans said as he bent over the paper, pulled a pen from its holder, and dipped it in the inkwell.

“For me, or for my wife, sir.”

The major stayed his hand a moment, then straightened and looked squarely into Donegan's eyes. “You tell me a date I should expect you back from the north country, Mr. Donegan. A date you will want me to call your missus to my office.”

He cleared his throat, glanced at the two other soldiers, then stared out the frost-rimed window to the stone guardhouse in the distance. “I figure, Colonel … I should be back by autumn.”

“Shall we make it the end of summer then?”

“Yes, sir. The war should be over then.”

“All right,” Evans said and went back to writing. “We'll put it down here. By 1 September 1877.” When he had finished, he turned the paper around and held out the pen to the Irishman. “I need you to sign there at the bottom, Mr. Donegan. To show that I'm giving you fifty of your dollars.”

Taking the pen clumsily in his big hand, Seamus suddenly felt the hot flush of self-consciousness. He rolled it over and over between his fingers, staring at it. So odd. He couldn't remember the last time he had held a pen in his hand.

“You do know how to write, don't you, Mr. Donegan?”

“Yes, Colonel,” he replied, then bent over the page and thoughtfully, precisely, wrote his name. “It's just been a long, long time.”

Taking up the page, the major blew on the civilian's signature as he held out a small stack of the army scrip. “Your fifty dollars.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

“One more thing, Mr. Donegan,” the post commander said as the civilian was turning to leave. “Am I invited to this christening for your son?”

“Yes, Colonel! By all means. We've shared the battlefield. Come and celebrate with my family! Bring your wife.
Your
family, sir.” Then he quickly looked at the other officers behind Evans. “Your men as well. The more's the better to us Irish. Come and bring your families and celebrate with me and my wife.”

“It would be an honor, Mr. Donegan,” Evans said as he drew himself up and saluted the surprised civilian. “To attend the naming of a child born to an honorable man who sees so well to his family's needs, the same way he steps forward to play such a selfless role in his nation's business. I'll be there.”

Chapter 4

1 February 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

MISSOURI.

The Ice Breaking Up Again.

ST. LOUIS, January 31.—The Steamer Belle St. Louis was cut down by moving ice to-day at St. Genevieve, some sixty miles from here, and will probably be a total loss. She was owned by the Belle St. Louis Transportation company, and had run in the Missouri river until that river closed last fall, when she went into the Memphis trade and was
en route
to that city when she was forced to lay up on account of ice … Most of the steamers at the levee and along shore between here and the arsenal have steam up, so that they may be ready to move with the ice when it starts, and various other precautions have been taken to insure against the destruction of river craft and property.

“You sure I can't talk you into staying for the spring campaign?”

Luther S. Kelly turned to find Colonel Nelson A. Miles approaching. “No, General,” he replied, respectfully using the officer's brevet rank. “Pretty much made up my mind. I haven't been east since the Civil War.”

Kelly continued to stand at the edge of the trees, watching the small detail of mounted infantry wrangle a half-dozen hardy pack mules away from Tongue River Cantonment. Two civilian riders were leading the soldiers south that cold, gray, snowy morning.

“I can understand your homesickness,” Miles sympathized.

“Not so much that, General,” Luther attempted to explain as he watched the riders angle up a snowy hillside in single file. “I just figure right now is about the best time for me to get back there to see what friends and family I have left.”

“They won't all come in, Luther,” Miles admitted glumly after a moment of silence. “No matter how sweet the plum I hold out to them.”

“I don't figure they all will, either.”

“And those who remain out will be the hardest of the lot, don't you know,” the soldier sighed in resignation. “Those who refuse to surrender will be the toughest bastards to drive back to their agencies.”

“You've been chivvying the toughest of the bastards all winter, General. Sitting Bull's holdouts up there on the Missouri. And the Crazy Horse village on up the Tongue. They don't get any more wild than them two.”

“Trouble is, Luther—about all that's left are the wildest of the wild ones. The sort who won't even consider surrender and a new way of life on the reservations. I'm coming to believe we really are going to have to rub out the last of these sons of bitches.”

“Yellowstone” Kelly stood in silence for a few moments, watching until the last of the pack-mules disappeared from sight around the river bluff. Only then did he say, “But I will admit that you and Bruguier are giving it one hell of a shot, General. Sending that Cheyenne woman was a real stroke of genius on your part.”

“I'll say,” Miles agreed proudly. “More than pale hope, I have a good feeling this operation of mine will bear fruit by spring. If that detail of soldiers can find the hostile Cheyenne camp, and if that woman can slip the half-breed into camp without getting themselves killed, then they just might have a chance of convincing their leaders that I am a fair man.”

“No better way of showing them just how fair you can be than to send the woman to tell firsthand how well the Bear Coat's treated his prisoners,” Kelly replied. “They've been kept warm and dry, fed all they could possibly eat. A damn sight better those captives have had it here with your soldiers than those Cheyenne and Sioux have it in their camps right now.”

“But that's what keeps nagging me, Luther,” Miles confided to the twenty-eight-year-old scout. “I don't know if this terrible cold and a hungry belly will cause a war chief to surrender … or make him want to fight on all the harder.”

*   *   *

Before Sitting Bull departed for the north country with his hundred lodges of Hunkpapa, he left fifty-four cases of fixed ammunition for the Crazy Horse people, bullets for hunting and for continuing the war.

No Neck and Sitting Bull planned to use those pack-mules they had taken from the soldiers and hunt buffalo come spring. Sitting Bull declared that once they had made meat and the women had robes, they would wander up to Fort Peck to trade with the Yanktonnais before marching across the Medicine Line. They were giving up. There were too many Americans pouring into Lakota land.

Their abandoning the war only served to make Crazy Horse angry. He had been arguing with himself on the best course to take, but now that the others were turning to flee to the Land of the Grandmother, did nothing but stiffen his resolve as winter continued to assault the land. Upon their arrival, the Hunkpapa had found the Crazy Horse people and Shahiyela terribly divided on whether to continue the war or sue for peace. Back and forth the headmen argued.

Back in the Mid-Winter Moon most of the chiefs had become convinced they should talk peace with the Bear Coat. But when the treaty-makers had gone to the mouth of the Buffalo Tongue River, the
Psa
*
had brazenly burst out of the trees and murdered five of the Lakota peace-talkers.
*

After those killings, Crazy Horse, Little Big Man, and others whipped the people into a war fury once again. As the Bear Coat's soldiers marched upriver toward the village, the warriors harassed and skirmished with the column time and again until they suffered their humiliating stalemate at Belly Butte.

Now with the torment of hunger and a gnawing despair gripping their hearts, the people again began to think more and more of making peace.

In those first few days after Sitting Bull's people departed for the north, a few lodges had attempted to slip away from the Crazy Horse encampment, desiring to sneak south to the agencies.

But his camp police, the
akicita,
saw that no one limped back to the reservations. The warriors went after those who disobeyed Crazy Horse's orders, chopping up their lodgepoles, slashing their poor lodgeskins, even confiscating weapons and horses so that those who wanted to flee now had no choice but to return to the camp in shame and humiliation. The Horse was determined that the white man would not succeed in dividing his people against one another … against him. They would stand united.

If the white man were truly as strong as some said, if there were truly as many soldiers as some had reported, then Crazy Horse knew he had to hold his people together at all costs. Even if his people did not want to stand and fight to the end.

He let them grumble and talk behind his back. The Sans Arcs wanted to go. So did all the
Mnikowoju
—except for Lame Deer's band. But at least the Shahiyela of Little Wolf and Morning Star, Black Moccasin and Old Bear all remained strong. They, along with the Oglalla, understood what surrendering would mean.

What good was a fighting man who had given up his pony, who had turned over his weapons to the soldiers? What good was a man to his people then?

These cold days slid past slowly as the people plodded through the endless snows, the sun as pale as frozen mare's milk in a pewter sky. Beneath the new snow lay a layer of icy crust. Under that lay the breast of the earth blackened with the fires of the previous summer.
*
There was little grass for the ponies. Little feed for any game they might hope to find. Without enough new hides, the women did what they could to patch the lodgeskins and keep out the wolfish winds. Men wore holes in their moccasins, then boiled them with bones for a soup that made Crazy Horse's belly revolt.

Perhaps things would get better if they left the valley of the Buffalo Tongue. Little Big Man had suggested they take the village west over the divide to the upper Greasy Grass. If not buffalo, at least they might find antelope.

Should they fail to find game there, Crazy Horse knew, they could always push on downriver. If the hunting wasn't very good there they would keep searching. His people needed meat to keep up their strength. If they had no strength, they could not fight. And if they could not fight, then the white men would overrun this country.

But how could a man expect to find game to eat when he could not find a single track among the endless snows? Not a buffalo hoofprint. No sign of elk or antelope.

Not so much as the tiny tracks of a snowshoe hare.

*   *   *

“You deserve this, General!” Frank Baldwin exclaimed. “To have your department enlarged to encompass the hunting ground of the hostile Sioux, and to have Lieutenant General Sheridan provide you with the men and supplies you're due!”

Colonel Nelson A. Miles nodded, his eyes crinkling in proud agreement. “That's just the reason I'm sending you to see Terry in Minneapolis, Lieutenant.”

The commanding officer of the Fifth U.S. Infantry was just getting underway his campaign to wheedle and pry what he most desired out of Philip H. Sheridan in Chicago and Sheridan's superior, William Tecumseh Sherman, in Washington City. After all, Sherman was his wife's uncle.

“With the success you had against Sitting Bull last December,
†
twice driving his village into the wilderness with only what they could carry on their backs,” Miles slammed a fist into the palm of his other hand, “and our similar victory over Crazy Horse up Tongue River—why is it taking so long for my superiors to act?”

“They've dealt with Hazen and Gibbon, Terry and Crook too long, sir,” Baldwin groaned as he pulled his pipe from his blouse pocket.

The strikingly handsome Miles shuddered as if struck with a blast of cold. But this was a wave of genuine physical revulsion held for Crook and Terry. Plain as paint, General Alfred H. Terry back in St. Paul failed to support Miles throughout the previous autumn and winter campaigns. Why, Nelson had even gone so far as to write to Sherman accusing Terry and his Department of Dakota offices of making a determined effort to see that Miles accomplished nothing in his campaigns at best, and of criminal neglect of duty at worst.