Reap the Whirlwind (11 page)

That well-armed force hadn’t been on the trail long when Big Bat had come riding up from the tail of the long column that cool spring morning.

“General. Take a look there.” Pourier had pointed southeast to the horizon as Crook twisted in the saddle.

“What you make of it?” asked the general, his eyes flicking quickly to Grouard.

Bourke made a note that Grouard was for the moment watching Reshaw, more intent on his fellow scout’s reaction to the sighting than he was in studying the column of smoke in the distance.

“Signals. Telling someone we’re coming,” Pourier replied.

“You expect trouble?” Crook asked.

Pourier shrugged.

Crook turned to Grouard. “How about you, Frank? We have anything to worry about?”

The chief of scouts finally tore his eyes off Reshaw, their lids shading his contempt, anger, and undisguised suspicion of the other half-breed. “No, General. I figure we’re too strong for them to try something.”

“Then, let’s press on,” Crook said, resettling in the saddle.

“But,” Grouard interrupted the general as he raised an arm to signal the resumption of their march, “those Lakota likely figured you was riding out of the agency with only the few soldiers we rode in with. Not all these men. Ain’t that right, Reshaw?”

“What you mean by that, Grouard?” Reshaw snapped, his hand flying to the butt of the pistol in the gunbelt he had buckled on the outside of his coat.

“Hold it right there, Reshaw!” Crook’s words hammered the sudden, stunned stillness of the spring morning. “What in the hell are you talking about, Grouard?”

“I figure Reshaw knows something about those Lakota making smoke-talk to someone up the trail. Maybe up around the headwaters of the White Earth. That the right place for a ambush, Louie?”

“You’re crazy, you half-breed nigger!” Reshaw spat.

Grouard smiled that cold, mirthless smile of his. “Louie’s your man at the agency, General. He oughtta know what’s going on with them figuring to jump you.”

“I ain’t there no more,” Reshaw growled.

“Likely you know what they’re planning,” Grouard said quietly, coldly. “Or you ain’t as good a scout as the general figured you was.”

“I’m good—even better’n—you’ll ever be, nigger!”

“Hold on here,” Crook snapped, wagging a hand. “So you don’t think we ought to take another route north, Frank?”

Grouard finally shook his head. “No. They won’t attack us.”

“They want me that bad?” Crook inquired, some of it finally appearing to sink in.

“Maybe you—yes,” Grouard answered. “On the other hand, maybe me.”

“You?” Bourke asked. “Why they want to kill you? Just for leading us to Crazy Horse’s village last March?”

Grouard shrugged. “Maybe not just for that. Maybe ’cause Louie’s got friends and relations down there at Red Cloud. And Louie’s got real bad blood for me.”

“Reshaw, you stay back with Colonel Stanton’s men for the rest of our ride to Laramie.”

The half-breed nodded, reining his horse around and loping off without another word.

“Bat, you ride with Colonel Ludington’s group now—right behind Stanton and Reshaw. I want to know immediately if Reshaw does anything the slightest bit suspicious.”

“All right.” Pourier pulled his own pony out of column and urged it back down the trail on Reshaw’s heels.

“So, Frank. You feel better now?”

“I’ll feel better we get back to Fetterman and go hunt for Crazy Horse again.”

“You still have a score to settle with him, do you?” Bourke asked.

“Crazy Horse. Him and a warrior named He Dog.”

Later on, just before noon, Grouard had suggested a rest near the springs at the head of White Earth Creek. There the men loosened the cinches on their saddles and spread out in the shade of what few trees there were, eating a lunch of hard-bread and jerky pulled from their haversacks after watering the stock. As the soldiers and civilians were preparing to remount, a solitary figure rumbled down the trail from Laramie toward them, coming out of the north.

“Charles Clark, General,” the civilian introduced himself after stepping down from his small wagon.

“You’ve got the mail contract, I take it?” Crook inquired.

“I do. On my way to Red Cloud now,” he replied, throwing a thumb back to indicate a pair of small canvas bags.

“Any mail for me in there?” Crook asked.

Clark smiled. “No, sir. Not that I know of. Figure you always get your news on the wire—don’t you, General?”

Crook grinned too, holding out his hand to shake the civilian’s. “Yes. And not a fragment of it has been good of late, Mr. Clark. Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you on your expedition north, General. Here’s hoping your campaign can quiet things down and bring all the Injuns back to the reservation for once and for all.”

After the civilian had slid into the seat of his wagon and snapped leather down on the backs of his two-horse hitch, Crook ordered his column into the saddle, resuming their march.

Upon reaching Fort Laramie, the general received a terse telegram from Division Headquarters in Chicago:

As well, it wasn’t until they had settled in again at Laramie that Crook received a wire from James Hastings informing him that Charles Clark had been late in arriving at the reservation, so the agent had sent out a party to search the road to Laramie. Halfway to the spring at the head of White Earth Creek they found the civilian’s mutilated body, the charred remains of his overturned wagon, and the litter of mail caught in the stunted grass and sage, like flecks of icy snow left behind after a spring storm.

“The sons of bitches couldn’t get me,” Crook had growled at Bourke, wagging his head and stroking one of the two braids fashioned from his reddish beard. “So in their blood lust they had to kill someone.”

“But now you’ll have your chance to give them a bellyful of war, General.”

Crook’s steely eyes leveled on his aide-de-camp. “The Sioux will remember me after this campaign. By God, John—I swear those red bastards will remember me.”

21 May 1876

“Y
ou figger these grass dummies of ours gonna fool them
Sioux out there?”

Frank Grouard studied the worry scoring the soldier’s face. “This better work. Or my goose is cooked same as yours.”

The half-breed scout gazed at the nine other soldiers gathered at the creekbank. Fifty yards away the roaring fire they had made spewed fireflies into the spring night with tiny explosions. There was questioning, even doubt, in the eyes of some of those troopers, downright fear in the eyes of most. They were putting their lives in his hands at that moment. What with a Lakota war party of unknown strength lurking somewhere out there in the darkness, likely crawling ever closer to their camp at that very moment, Crook’s chief of scouts had had little choice but to disobey the general’s orders. Nothing else to do but take a different route on this reconnaissance to the Powder River crossing of the Montana Road.

That very morning Crook had called him into his cluttered office at Fort Fetterman, where officers came and went on one mission or another, as well as the repeated visits of Tom Moore, the civilian put in charge of the general’s mule train first made famous during the army’s
Apache campaign down in Arizona Territory. When the army reassigned Crook to take over the Department of the Platte, the general brought his head packer north to Omaha with him. Last March both veterans of Cochise’s war in the southwest had been initiated into the cruel brutality of winter on the northern Plains. After rejoining Reynolds on the Powder River, Crook had promised Frank Grouard that he was going to take his cavalry back to the hunting ground of the Sioux and Cheyenne to finish the job he had started.

And botched.

Now the warrior bands were gathering in strength and numbers heretofore unheard of on the plains. But that sort of thing made no matter to Crook, Frank understood.

“All that concerns me is that I get in my licks before Gibbon and Terry show up,” Crook had told Grouard earlier that morning while dispatching the half-breed north to scout the Powder River Crossing. “After Reynolds botched his attack—I’m going to see that the Second and Third get this chance to wipe the stain from their reputations.”

Crook ordered Frank to lead Sergeant John A. Carr, A Company, Second U.S. Cavalry, and a squad of nine handpicked men north along the route of the campaign’s impending march.

“The Powder will be running high, won’t it, Grouard?” Crook had asked.

“Yes. Just like the Platte out there,” and he threw a thumb out the open door. “Fast and wild—what with the runoff, General.”

“Find us the best crossing you can. For horse and mule. Remember I want to get these wagons over too. Drag them as far north as I can to establish a resupply base for my cavalry to work from.”

“A good crossing. All right, I’ll find you one.”

“When can you be back?” Crook asked. “I want to get under way as soon as I can.”

“You wanna push north behind me a day or so?”

Crook had shaken his head. “No, Frank. There’s still much to do. When will I see you again?”

He calculated, staring at the moccasins on his feet. “A
week at the most—depending on how long it takes for us to find a good crossing.”

“The twenty-eighth. Good. Then we can count on pushing north with this column on the twenty-ninth.”

Loading their saddles, weapons, and other supplies into the ferry boat shortly before noon, Grouard and Carr’s soldiers had stripped before swimming their horses and the two pack mules across the rain-swollen Platte. On the north bank they waited for the ferry to make its treacherous ride, straining and creaking both pulleys and cable to their limits as the high, raging waters shoved and battered the flat-bottomed craft lashed to the taut, humming cable overhead.

A half dozen miles north of the crossing, Frank had discovered they were being watched from the nearby hills. Likely scouts from the hostile villages were keeping a close eye on the army’s preparations at Fetterman and would now dog Grouard’s line of march to the Powder River country.

By the middle of the afternoon he had decided the bigger part of his assignment was getting this detail back to Fetterman alive. The farther north they pushed, the deeper into hostile territory they would plunge. Just past three o’clock, Grouard suggested an early camp some fifty yards past their crossing of a high-flowing creek.

“Why you want to call a halt so early?” Carr had asked as his horse stood shaking itself after the crossing.

Frank had shrugged. “Got water here. Good grass for the horses. Besides, Sergeant—we got plenty of cover for what we got to do after dark.”

“What you got for us to do after dark, Grouard?”

“Make it look like we’re all still plopped down in camp—while we slip out, one at a time.”

The sergeant’s eyes had narrowed, and he had motioned Grouard off to the side of the road so they could talk out of earshot of the rest of the detail. “We got trouble?”

“Big trouble.”

Carr straightened. “All right. What you need us to do?”

“Get the horses unsaddled,” Frank began. “After dark we’ll hide saddles and blankets down there by the river in
that timber. Back in the willows where it’s hid real good. For now, you drag up as much deadfall as you can for a fire.
Big
fire, Sergeant. Then get the horses picketed in that patch of grass down by the bank.”

“Out of sight?”

“Right.”

As dark had slithered into the valley with crooked fingers of lengthening shadows, Grouard issued more orders.

“Sergeant, I want you alone to go down into the timber and take all our rations from the packs on those two mules. Divide it between every saddle.”

“All of it?”

“Every bit of rations you can split up between every last man of us. We’ll need it.”

Carr shook his head. “Injuns out there ready to lift our hair, and you ain’t leading us back to Fetterman?”

Grouard watched a few of the others amble up, likely drawn to the sound of their sergeant’s anxious voice.

“No,” he answered. “We aren’t going back. General ordered us to find a crossing at the Platte.”

“Just how in hell you think—”

“You do what I tell you to do with the rations and the rest of it—by the time these Lakota scouts find out we’ve pushed on, and they cross our trail, we’ll be hours ahead of ’em.”

Carr had taken a deep breath, then nodded as he looked around the firelit circle at his platoon. “All right. So we make a night ride of it north. Then what?”

“Why—we just do everything to keep hold on to our hair best we can, Sergeant.”

With a big supper in their bellies and that glorious bonfire roaring in the middle of their camp, Grouard told the soldiers to prepare their beds with blankets and plenty of the new grass they could tear up down in the timber by the bank. With rocks and that grass they were to make their eleven blankets look as much as possible like soldiers sleeping near those leaping flames.