Reap the Whirlwind (44 page)

It became more and more evident as the minutes rolled by, one by one adding up to a first hour of heated fighting, that the hostiles were quickly seizing every advantage offered by the broken ground.

“Don’t fire less’n you got yourself a target!” shouted First Sergeant John Henry, who, though not ordered to, had chosen to remain on horseback among his men of
I Troop. “Make every shot count, fellas—or save your cartridges till you can do some good!”

As the minutes crawled past, inching by into a second hour, the gunfire increased, the rattle and clamor of battle swelled as the growing pressure on Royall’s left flank began to tell on the battalion. The enemy concentrated at some point across the ravine, fought for a few minutes, then withdrew to pop up somewhere else along the colonel’s front. Time and again they confounded the troops until they made their first rush—in they came, the air filling with wild whoops and the crackle of the hostiles’ repeaters, accompanied by the whine of .44-caliber lead singing over the heads of the soldiers.

But the blue line held in those frantic seconds, pouring their fire into the enemy waves until the hostiles were forced to turn in frustration and retreat to their rocks and ravines just beyond the end of the sharp-sided slope. In their rush to regain cover, the warriors had abandoned one body—a brown-skinned rider who had made it within fifty yards of Donegan at the skirmish line. As the horsemen turned back, the Irishman quickly rolled onto his back and dug into the pocket of his breeches, dragging out a handful of the dull brass. One at a time he shoved them into the loading tube under the Henry’s barrel, and when he could load no more, he locked the barrel back in place, peering at the far slope.

As the naked horsemen made charge after charge on Royall’s battalion, the white men counted at least one of their number wounded with each new assault on the skirmish line. Not only did that mean another gun lost along their defensive front, but two more men were stolen from the firing line, needed to drag and carry a wounded comrade to the rear, where Surgeon Hartsuff had established his field hospital near the trees in the creek bottom. Seconds and heartbeats collided and tumbled, congealing into minutes, an agonizing gathering of time as the numbers of Sioux coming west from the heights swelled, and swelled again.

“There’s gotta be more’n five hunnert of them bastards trying to overrun us now,” a soldier said nearby.

Seamus nodded. “At least that.”

He glanced up from reloading the Henry repeater and peered across the canyon at the high ground to the west, where it seemed so long ago Lieutenant Foster’s patrol had nearly been eaten alive. Steadily, surely, the hundreds were working around to the south end of the ridge. Royall’s command was now all but encircled by the enemy.

“Look yonder,” and Donegan pointed to the southwest as the hostiles rolled closer, ever closer around their unprotected left flank. “Right now I’ll lay you three to one we’re facing at least seven hundred, what with that bunch circling round us to the west.”

“These men don’t need any of your gay Irish optimism, Mr. Donegan!” growled Guy Henry as he brought his mount to a halt near Seamus.

“I’m just like any man here, Colonel Henry—like to know what I’m up against.”

“Doesn’t make a damned bit of difference,” Henry snarled, reining about so that his back was to the Irishman as he moved off again down the skirmish line. “A hundred, five hundred, or a thousand—our job is still the same,
Mister
Donegan. Any old sergeant of cavalry would do well to remember that.”

“A sergeant of cavalry?” asked John McDonald, the corporal squatting on the far side of Donegan. Wagging his head, the soldier glanced left, then right, up and down the skirmish line quickly, every man kneeling or lying some three to five feet apart. “I don’t see no goddamned sergeant anywhere near us—”

“Colonel Henry’s talking to me, boys,” Seamus replied, feeling chastened.

“Talking to you, is he?” asked a soldier.

“Sergeant is it now?” responded the second with a peat-heavy brogue.

Donegan snorted. “I’m nothing more’n a bleeming chuckle-headed civilian now, fellas.”

“Not if a man like that Cap’n Henry calls you sergeant—means he must think you was some sergeant.”

A voice called out, “What’s he know of you, mister?”

With a shrug Donegan glanced at the sun and figured it must now be going on ten o’clock, maybe a little after; then he replied, “Got no idea what Henry knows of—”

“Here they come again!” came the shrill alarm from the far left side of that thin skirmish line as the warriors vaulted out of the coulees and from behind their boulders, kicking their ponies into a blur of color and motion for another charge on Royall’s position.

“By God, boys!” hollered a soldier to Donegan’s right. “Let’s show these red devils what the Third is made of!”

In the next breath the Springfield carbines began to boom above the more distinct cracks of the warrior guns as the horsemen came on, sweeping out of the southwest.

“That’s right! Here’s to reclaiming the good and gallant name of the Third Cavalry, by Jesus!”

Some of the men crouched in the open, using their .45 Colt’s revolvers as the warriors drew closer and ever closer.

“Drop these sonsabitches—and seize the day!”

“By damn—this’ll take the stain from the honor of our regiment!”

The air hung heavy with gunsmoke by the time they had turned another charge.

“Hold your fire!” reverberated the order up and down the line.

“Don’t waste ammunition!” was its echo.

“Kill all them red devils, I say!”

“For the glory of the Third, by Jupiter!”

“To the glory of our Third!”

It was nearing mid-morning when Lieutenant Henry R. Lemly rode right through the red gauntlet and reined up, dismounting on the run even before his horse had skidded to a halt near Anson Mills.

“Colonel!” the lieutenant called, using Mills’s Civil War brevet rank.

“Mr. Lemly—what word do you bring me from the regimental commander?”

“I come from General Crook, sir. He sends his compliments. Requests that you respectfully remount your battalion, face about to the west, and take that hill.”

Mills peered off into the distance where Lemly pointed. “That tall one, eh?”

Lemly nodded and said no more.

“Lieutenant Schwatka!” Mills called out to his own adjutant.
“Inform the company commanders we are about to make another charge.”

“Mounted?” asked Fred Schwatka.

“We are,” Mills answered. “Order the companies to cease fire and bring up their horse-holders.”

As Schwatka hurried off, the captain turned back to Lemly. “You want to go with us?”

“I was given no instructions not to return to the general.”

“Then, by all means—I suggest you get while the getting is good, Mr. Lemly. This hillside is going to come alive with the enemy in a very few minutes.”

“Thank you for the suggestion, sir,” the lieutenant replied quickly as he yanked on the reins, bringing his horse around so that he could leap into the saddle. He tore off at a gallop to the southwest, down the slope of the hill that took him back toward the infantry under the personal command of Crook himself.

A moment later Lieutenant Schwatka sprinted up, chest heaving. “Company commanders have been informed of the charge, sir.”

Mills stood, peering momentarily through the small field glasses he had carried with him since the final days of the Southern Rebellion. A present from his beloved Nannie. From what he could see in the mid-distance, the slope was far from suited to any sort of charge—on foot or mounted. But if they began by angling to their own left and moved southwest for a couple hundred yards, then they just might be able to cross that tongue of ground and race almost due west into the face of the enemy guns.

The trick would be angling across that full front of those guns before they turned back into the teeth of the Sioux and Cheyenne. If his men could stay in the saddle, running the gauntlet across that rough ground until he could finally wheel them west—they stood a ghost of a chance.

As his battalion began to taper off their fire in preparation for the charge, the enemy took it as a sign of weakness and immediately put renewed pressure on his men. Nothing could possibly be gained by waiting a moment longer.

“Prepare to mount!” Mills flung his voice left, then right. “Prepare to mount!”

The call was immediately taken up by the three companies left him. Horsemen hurried among their mounts, unlatching the link-straps, dragging the animals into one wide front, four men deep. He had already placed E Company under Captain Alexander Sutorious in the center of their skirmish line. Ordering Lieutenant Joseph Lawson’s Company A to the left, Mills now placed his own M Company on the right flank, where he figured the fire might just be the hottest as they plunged across that tongue of deadly ground.

“Mount!” he bawled. The order rang off the nearby ridges, making it sound as if there were far more than three companies leaping into the saddle at that moment.

The squeak of leather, accompanied by the rattle of bit-chains and the snaps on those carbine slings the troopers used to carry their Springfields, sent a shiver up the veteran horse soldier’s spine.

“Left front into line! Right flank guide and pivot on me!” Mills raised himself in the stirrups and found his bugler right behind him in the first of the four rows.

“Mr. Snow, let’s have you give us the charge!”

The notes of that first stirring stanza were barely freed of the horn’s brassy bell as Mills and others shouted that soul-stirring call and those three companies shot away, brass spurs digging in and horses heaving, on this—their third charge of what had already been a long and bloody morning.

From the start of the battle Crazy Horse had kept moving, here … then there. Constantly separating his warriors when they first tended to bunch up in fighting the Snakes and the People of the Raven. He ordered some west to circle around the broken ground near a deep ravine in hopes of striking the soldiers from behind, maybe drive off their horses from the creek bottom.

With none of their big American horses left them, the soldiers would then be at the complete mercy of his splintering tactics.

Many of the rest he had sent to the east, to sweep down
on the soldier camp through an opening gap in the bluffs. It was there that the fighting had quickly grown every bit as hot and dangerous as the first eye-to-eye combat they had with the scouts on the slope of the ridge.

Failing to drive off the cavalry horses, he next intended—having caught the soldiers unawares in the creek bottom—to herd the confused white men toward the boxed end of the Rosebud Canyon where the valley walls rose more sharply. There the Three Stars would not have room to maneuver his horses. In that place Crazy Horse’s warriors would hold the white men penned in that corral just like the enemy’s stupid spotted buffalo. To slaughter them slowly, and surely—by firing down from the heights.

But by the time Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa warriors arrived that morning, the battle with the soldiers had already become three distinct fights: the continuing skirmish with the walk-a-heaps in the center; the ebb and flow of the running battle with the soldiers near the gap to the east; and far to the west where the Shahiyena had gone as well as a growing number of his Lakota who were pouring south, down from the high ground, working hard to encircle gradually a large number of pony soldiers.

Now he heard a subtle change in the battle sounds from his left—to the east near the gap. The heavy booming of the soldier guns was tapering off. He would not let himself believe the warriors had destroyed all those white horsemen.

No, for some other reason the enemy had ceased firing.

By the time he reached the ground near the end of the ridge, the pony soldiers were already mounted and moving. Their soldier chief had them charging toward the southwest across the wide front of his warriors ensconced among the rocks and brush. It appeared the horsemen intended on retreating back to join the walk-a-heaps at the base of the ridge.

Because of this, many of the Lakota and the few Shahiyena left among them all raised a cry of victory, believing as Crazy Horse wanted to believe that they had indeed driven the enemy from that portion of the battlefield.

“It is good!” White Cow Bull said to the war chief.

“Why is this good?” Crazy Horse asked, watching the pony soldiers gallop along the wide front across that tongue of broken ground.

“We drive the white man away from this ground—I think that is very good!”

Crazy Horse shook his head. “It is not a good thing, White Cow Bull. More than anything, I wanted to divide the pony soldiers from the walk-a-heaps. I wanted to carve each band up into smaller and smaller bunches.”

“We can still defeat them, even if they are together,” White Cow Bull said, bristling.

“Can you eat the whole hump of a buffalo cow in one bite?”

Reluctantly White Cow Bull shook his head. “No. It would take me many bites.”

“That is what I am trying to tell you. We must cut these white men into smaller and smaller bites. That is the only way we are going to swallow them.”

At that instant the cheering all around him sharply changed tone and became cries of dismay and surprise. The soldiers had suddenly turned, riding right into the face of their guns. They were not fleeing to rejoin the walk-a-heaps down the hillside at all.

The pony soldiers were charging directly into the maw of the Lakota guns.

In a trickle at first, like the beginning of a soft summer rain, the first warriors far down the slope began to rise and retreat, hurrying back among the rocks. Then the trickle became an ever-increasing flow as the pony soldiers heaved closer and closer, racing across the broken ground. A few of their big horses stumbled, fell, pitching riders into the grass beneath the wholesale fury of their charge.

Still, on they came.

“To the hill that is shaped like the tip of a bull’s horn!” Crazy Horse rallied his warriors, guiding his pony in among them.

Then he turned and halted, watching the soldiers coming until the last of the warriors had fled past him.