Reap the Whirlwind (18 page)

She had to have men with her—in droves, herds, and flocks, whether they knew her secret or not. There were so many out here where she had cast her lot in life. Fifty, even a hundred, for every woman here on the edge of the frontier. All those prissy women at the mercy of those slicktalking
men. Shit! Most men were nothing more than the lying devil himself!

Broke-down, skinflint merchants robbing the hardworking blind. Or they were flimflam scam artists a step or two away from their next killing, maybe only their next meal if they hadn’t been caught and strung up in the last town they had hurried to leave in the middle of the night. Then there were the out-and-out criminals. Janey always stayed away from their kind. No telling what might happen with one of them. But the worst yet—worser still than the robbers and murderers was the men what was married back east, or in the Kansas and Nebraska settlements. The low-down snake-bellies that come out to the frontier to make their fortune in one town or another and didn’t let a gal know he was really married and really wasn’t about to make good on all his promises to that gal until after he had diddled her and was pulling his pants back up.

How she’d wanted to use her skinner and shave a few of them bastards so close that they’d sing sopranner in the choir and have to squat to pee just like she did!

Side-tongued-talking bastards!

But here she was, one of the few out here in this saintforsaken part of Wyoming, by God. Not many respectable women ventured west past McPherson, north past Laramie either. And those cathouse girls that worked the settlements and army posts—why, they was lazy and made the men come to them. Especially those aging, ugly ones working their trade at Kid Slaymaker’s Hog Ranch. To hell and gone with making the men come to her! Martha Jane Cannary knew what she wanted, so she damned well took it to where the men were!

If that meant hauling her love equipment clean up to Injun country to have a thousand of them all to herself, then—by damned—she would do just that!

After time among the rough men and crude life of Green River and Rawlins, South Pass City and Piedmont too, she had plied her way toward Deadwood, where she first learned of Crook’s plans to march back north with a sizable army of soldiers and civilians. Men all! Hurrying south out of the Black Hills, she had forgone her longstanding whiskey revels at the McDaniels’s Theater there in
Cheyenne and instead promptly hired herself a horse, setting out on the road to Fort Laramie. But it was there she decided to wet her whistle at John Collins’s place and got herself pitched right off the military reservation.

Coming to the next morning, shivering and sick with the dry heaves, Janey licked at the cotton in her mouth and marveled that whoever had dragged her out here across the river and dumped her off had been kind enough to bring her horse along. She found the rented animal tied to a nearby cottonwood sapling, ogling her suspiciously as she stumbled its way. Unable even to think about food at that moment, much less look a square meal in the eye, Martha Jane dragged herself up into the saddle and headed northwest, weaving back and forth slightly as she set off, nonetheless fully intent on completing the ninety miles before she had to release her death grip on the saddle horn.

By some fortuitous stroke of fate she arrived, decked in mud-stained teamster attire and smelling as fragrant as any mule skinner ever had, just as wagon master Russell was rounding out his roster of bull-whackers. Martha Jane was hired, incognito, in disguise, in nothing short of heat for all that man-flesh and hanging-down love equipment!

Not that she didn’t ever think of anything else. Janey had a soft spot in her heart for animals what was hurt or abused, and a special place for the sick. Out here on the frontier, there wasn’t all that much disease—not in the way of anything other’n sniffles and a croup, or the tick-sick and the walking ague. But when something took hold of one of the labor or mining camps, it really took hold, and her help was sorely needed.

Like last year over at the work camps in South Pass City, where she had heard the news about the Robinson family’s littlest girl took to her pallet with the black diphtheria. No one come around, not even the tonsorial doctor with all his colored bottles of patent medicines. He didn’t want to catch the death that was surely waiting for the rest of the Robinsons, now that they all had been exposed.

But Janey came to their rescue. Like some angel. That’s what the Robinsons’d called her when she came to their door, moved in, and started her healing. Sure enough, one by one they all come down with the death sentence. And
one by one she had kept them away from death’s own door.

It had even been a soldier like these with Crook who had bestowed the most famous of names on her. Teddy Egan himself—of the fighting Second—by God—Cavalry. Egan, that scrappy Celt, that handsome horse soldier who pronounced his name with the accent on the second syllable.
Egan
! he would beller out when drinking.

It was on that road to Custer City in the Black Hills, she repeatedly told all who would listen, that she had been given a new name of her own. Seems that Captain Egan found her a real blessing to have along when it came to fighting Injuns, she would tell listeners who bellied up to the bar to hear her tale. It was a name befitting a woman who already had a reputation for attracting lots of trouble, especially for the men she chose to call her “husbands,” men most likely to die violent deaths.

Egan, so the story went, had said to her of a recent day, “Janey, you’re a misdeed ready to happen, a kink in the rope, a calamity coming down the pike!”

So
Calamity
it became—and
Calamity
it would always be!

“I’m Calamity Jane and this drink’s on the house!” she had roared more than one night in Cheyenne City at McDaniels’s dance house or up to Deadwood and the infamous Number 10. No matter the place—any room filled with man-flesh had always roared back at her in joyous reply. Even that last night as a woman in the Black Hills before setting off to join up with Crook’s army had been a memorable one.

“Calam’s here—so let ’er rip!” she had cried out, swinging from the lamplit wagon wheel in the center of the saloon’s ceiling.

Gunplay and smoke and all that drunken, weaving man-flesh all clawing after her to be the first to see her off to the Injun wars with one last diddle for the trail. Here at the edge of this land of prairie thunder and spring blizzards, whiskey that could kill you just as soon as Sitting Bull’s warriors would, a land of high-water drownings and sometimes too much blasting powder in the hole, guns too
quickly drawn on the wrong turn of too many cards scattered across a felt-topped table.

But, Lord—how Janey loved having so many men to herself!

“I’m Calamity Jane and you can go straight to hell right now!” she could shout if something didn’t suit her just right.

“I’m Calamity Jane and I’ll sleep where and with the man I wanna!”

She wanted that big Irishman now that they had reached Old Fort Reno by the Powder River. She hadn’t had a man hard and fast between her legs in so many days—and it was time tonight.

Just the way she had yearned for Allegheny Dick and that Lieutenant Somers. The first had been no more than one of those fast-talking card shufflers, and the other was nothing less than a handsome soldier stationed far, far from a wife left back at home, a wife he hadn’t cared to tell Janey about until he was off to a new duty station.

But both got their thrill and money’s worth poking Martha Jane Cannary.

And now there was about to be a third to whom she would give her heart.

That big handsome Irishman would be the next to taste the forbidden fruits, the next to knock at heaven’s door, the next to paw at her breasts and make hot, wet promises at her ear—if Calamity Jane had anything to say about getting him alone, getting him down in the willows along Powder River!

3 June 1876

“I
don’t see no Crow Injuns waiting for us, Seamus,” Dick Closter
grumbled.

The Irishman nodded, his eyes taking in the entire scene as they neared the south bank of the Powder River. “Bad sign.”

“General’s gonna be disappointed.”

“Disappointed?” Donegan understood. “Crook’s gonna be mad.”

For the third time in his life Seamus Donegan was approaching Fort Reno from the south, moving down the Dry Fork Canyon until the column reached the Powder itself.

The bottomlands were covered with leafy cottonwood just coming into its glory beneath the afternoon sun. Two rows of tents stood out on the nearest bluff, a herd of animals grazing on the new grass close by. But—there were no Indian allies encamped. No Shoshone scouts. Not one Crow warrior.

The feeling of disappointment, perhaps bordering on despair, ran as tangibly as a chill wind through that assembly of a thousand men angling down to the Powder River with its black and brittle banks. Make no mistake, this was, after all, a place that symbolized what the army used to be
in this high land. On the far bank above the column sat what was left of the abandoned post’s adobe walls, their charred timbers poking out like the ends of blackened, broken bones protruding from open coagulating wounds. Rusting shards of shapeless metal, iron stoves and wagon wheels, cannon caissons and other debris, all lay in disarray. It had been a disordered and hurried retreat eight long years ago.

Despite all that time, the ghosts still clung to the charred remains of this post meant to guard the argonauts who had the Montana gold fields as their final destination.

Grouard led the column on across the Powder, which for the time being was running low and lazy, and therefore easily forded. Climbing the far bluff, the entire command went into an early bivouac, welcomed by the troops who had gone forward under Captain Frederick Van Vliet and Lieutenant Emmet Crawford.

Prairie shadows had lengthened and supper fires were glowing in their pits when John Bourke came round to the packers’ camp.

“Ho, Johnny!” Closter called out.

Seamus turned to see the lieutenant approaching. Bourke had been a favorite of Uncle Dick’s ever since their days with Crook’s war on Cochise.

Bourke came to a halt by Closter’s fire, rubbing his hands over the warmth. “Evening, gents. Seamus—the general wants to see you in half an hour.”

Donegan looked up. “See me?”

Bourke looked at Closter and winked.

“So, Johnny—you figger Crook’s gonna let this dumb Irishman go back to his lily-soft ways?”

“Could be,” Bourke replied.

“Damn. And here Donegan was just getting used to actual’ working for a living!”

“That what this is about?” Donegan asked, allowing himself to begin to sense some excitement. “I ain’t gonna pack no more?”

The lieutenant shrugged, grinning. “Don’t know anything about it, Seamus. But we’ll find out in half an hour. You’ll be finished with your supper?”

“S’pose I’ll have to be.”

“Grouard, Bat, and Reshaw will be there too.”

“I’ll be round. You can count on that, Johnny.”

“Find the headquarters flag.”

“Crook ain’t never been hard to find, John,” Donegan replied as the lieutenant waved and started away.

After wolfing down some half-boiled beans and a greasy slab of beef loin well salted, as well as several cups of steaming coffee, Donegan joined the discussion already in progress at Crook’s headquarters tent.

“Good of you to come, Mr. Donegan,” Crook called out as the Irishman strode up.

“From the sounds of that, I take it I’m late, General.”

“Not at all. Come, join us,” Crook replied.

Heads nodded all round that fire glowing on the faces tinted red beneath the deepening twilight, firefly sparks curling upward into the cool air from time to time as those soldiers, newspaper correspondents, and Crook’s three scouts each paid the Irishman some sort of recognition.

“We were just talking about our mutual disappointment before we began the purpose of this meeting, Mr. Donegan.”

Seamus asked, “Disappointment that the Crows aren’t here?”

“Yes,” and Crook nodded, staring back into the flames. “They were to be the largest contingent of auxiliaries. I had counted on them being at Reno when we arrived.”

It grew quiet a few moments as the others allowed the general his time, allowed him to sulk in sullen disappointment once more. When next he spoke, it was only after he had let his eyes touch on every officer and civilian in that double-ringed hub of campaign manpower.

“One reason I did not rehire thirty quartermaster scouts for this march was that I had assured myself we would be joined by the Shoshone and Crow. And now I suppose I have no one else but myself to blame for all my high hopes.”

Azor Nickerson, Crook’s other aide, cleared his throat in preparation of saying, “General, you had been guaranteed both tribes wanted to get in their licks before we drove the enemy Sioux and Cheyenne back to their proper reservations.”

“Even if I was—the truth is that I can’t consider moving against the enemy without some auxiliaries to help us. In light of that, I am presented with a dilemma. One I have grappled with ever since arriving here this afternoon. My solution? Well, if the Crow aren’t coming to me—I have no choice but to go out after the Crow and convince them to join me in this fight.”