Reap the Whirlwind (52 page)

Chambers seemed relieved to be taken off the hook.

Crook sighed. “Colonel—how I hope I can rectify my mistake. Before this enraged enemy, I’ve gone and committed the second major blunder of my career.”

“Blunder, sir?”

“The worst blunder a commander in the field can make: splitting up my forces and placing each of these components out of supporting distance of the others.” He turned to peer off into the north. “Where the devil can Mills and Noyes be?”

“Colonel Chambers? General Crook? You wanted to see us?”

They both wheeled at the call from Andrew Burt. At the captain’s side came Thomas Burrowes. “Gentlemen. Thank you for coming on the double. We have a dire situation here—”

“Royall’s detaching some of his men, General!” Captain Burt interrupted with a shriek.

“Do you know how many?” Crook asked.

Burt answered, “Maybe a troop—at the most.”

“It will be a miracle if they aren’t cut up,” the general replied. He reached out to take the field glasses from Chambers, squinting into the sunlight atop that crest as he adjusted the focus so he could watch the black, distant figures ascending the gentle rise to the rugged head of Kollmar Creek.

“You needed us in a hurry, General,” Burt prodded.

“Yes,” Crook answered, turning back to the infantry commanders. “Move your commands as far to the left as you can—”

“Begging the general’s pardon,” Burrowes broke in. “We’re stretched out there like Nettie’s pantaloons already, sir!”

Taking a deep breath, Crook continued, “Push your men as far to the left as you can, expeditiously. As daring a move as you can make it.”

“What are we to accomplish, General?” Burt inquired.

“I want you to lay down some covering fire for Royall’s men.”

“I’ve got Meinhold’s company with me,” Burrowes declared.

“Yes. Good. Take them with you, every man you can spare,” Crook said, wanting to watch that hill through the field glasses, but he dared not. “I don’t know why in hell it’s taken more than two hours for Royall to obey my order to rejoin the left of your line.”

“From what Captain Meinhold told us,” Burrowes replied, “it wasn’t the easiest retreat to make.”

“Dammit, Captain!” Crook snapped. “It hasn’t gotten any easier for the rest of Royall’s men because of his flat-footed shilly-shallying!”

Both infantry captains fell quiet as Crook fumed.

Then Burt asked his question, trying out a stiff upper lip, “General, some of my men say that they get so hardened to this sort of thing.”

Crook asked, “Hardened? To what sort of thing, Captain?”

“To this constant firing, the noise and commotion of battle, so that they don’t mind it.”

The general shook his head. “What’s your question, Burt? Do you have a point?”

“I suppose I wonder whether you feel like I do in a position of this kind, General,” Burt replied.

“Suppose you tell me how you feel, Major.” Crook used Burt’s brevet rank.

“Why, to be perfectly honest about it—”

“Speak frankly, Major.”

“Just that—if you were not in sight, I’d feel like running the hell away from those goddamned savages.”

Crook snorted explosively, a wry smile inside his reddish-blond whiskers. Then he started laughing, and could not stop when the other three men joined in. Finally, the general said, “Well, speaking frankly, gentlemen—sometimes I feel exactly that way myself.”

Then Crook turned to peer to the north beneath a hand he held to his brow.

Fidgeting, Burt finally inquired, “Is that all, General?”

“Yes, Major. I thought you and Burrowes would already be on your way! Be quick about it. And take those allies
with you. Every gun you can. Support Royall’s retreat in any way possible. Now, go—or all is lost!”

This time it was Burrowes who replied, “Yes, sir!”

Crook listened as the two captains trotted away, training the field glasses now to the west of north, resolved to look once more where that tiny company of soldiers had gone to protect the head of the deep ravine.

Where the brown-skinned horsemen were converging in greater and greater numbers, inching in on that little band that had circled up, their backs all to the center, every man of them slowly backing up … step by step by step as their circle shrank and shrank.

It would be a damned death-defying retreat, George Crook thought, if—

If any of them made it out at all.

“
C
aptain Vroom—you will lead your company and precede the rest. Take that crest,” William B. Royall ordered, pointing to the head of Kollmar Creek. “You must take that high ground and hold it against attack while the remaining companies begin their retreat behind the led horses.”

“I’m to fight a rear guard, Colonel?” Peter Vroom asked.

“Yes, you are.”

“Yes, sir.” Vroom saluted and turned to leave, hurrying off at a crouch to form up his men.

All told, Royall reached his third position with something on the order of 200 men. By sending L Company’s 55 men to the crest, Royall had left himself with perhaps 150, less when one considered that one soldier of every 8 was struggling with the horses. Surrounding these men swarmed more than 500, perhaps as many as 700, horse-mounted warriors. Easily three-to-one odds. Maybe even greater.

Donegan always hated himself for thinking about the odds. But he would hate himself all the more if he didn’t get said what was suddenly eating away at his craw.

Seamus called out to Royall, “Colonel—you’re gonna have those men exposed up there.”

“Exactly what I want, Donegan,” Royall retorted. “I
want them to take a little heat until I get the rest of this outfit mounted and moving. Buy us some time—”

“You’ll have your wish before you know it,” the Irishman replied, watching Vroom’s company hoof it up the slope across the bare ground, naked of any cover but for the season’s first growth of grass. “See there, Colonel?” He pointed. “The Sioux been keeping their eye on us. And you’ve just gone and give ’em the sort of bait they like to swallow.”

Royall’s jaw clenched tightly as he whirled, calling out to his adjutant, “Lemly!”

“Colonel?”

“Ride, Lieutenant. Go to Crook and tell him we’re coming but we’re in desperate need of his support. Ask him for covering fire from the Chambers’s infantry. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Lemly was gone, catching up a mount among the horse-holders, reining away out of the dust and confusion, down the side of the narrowing ravine toward its bottom that would take him straight to the mouth of Kollmar Creek.

True enough was the Irishman’s prediction: the anxious, milling, blood-eyed horsemen had been watching Royall’s battalions, waiting for the white soldier chief to make just such a blunder as this.

Waiting for the soldiers to weaken themselves further by splitting up even more.

Donegan knew the Sioux and Cheyenne could hope for nothing better.

Wasting no time, and likely smelling victory in their nostrils, the screeching horsemen burst from their lines, scattering across the open ground like a bag of dried white beans, a hundred or more spilling toward Vroom’s company.

Seamus was up and rushing after Royall as the colonel prepared to remount his horse. “If you’re gonna move out with the rest of your men, you better start doing it!”

“We’ve fought together before, Mr. Donegan—but that does not give you the liberty—”

“We don’t have time to argue, Colonel!”

Royall glared down at the civilian. “You’ll do well to leave the commanding to me, Mr. Donegan!” he shouted, then stuffed a boot in the hoop of a stirrup. Once in the saddle, Royall wheeled, pointing east toward the wide ravine, his voice above them all now. “Company commanders—get the horses moving first! Horse-holders lead out! Andrews—take your I Company in the advance!”

Up the grassy slope near L Company the thunderous rattle of gunfire was growing, becoming a steady, pounding, mechanical thing that rumbled down over Donegan and the rest as they began to work their way east behind the van of led horses immediately followed by the cordon of Andrews’s I.

It was only a matter of moments before the horse-holders encountered their first resistance as a sizable stream of warriors flooded past Vroom’s company and succeeded in reaching the ground just east of the head of the ravine, where they started to direct some of their gunfire at the cavalry mounts and their horse-holders. As the bullets sang in and around them, the big animals bucked and reared, fighting their handlers. Men shouted, orders were flung up and down the side of the Kollmar drainage, while a few old soldiers who refused to listen to anyone else simply knelt calmly to aim at the enemy, fired, then ejected the empty casing from their Springfield, reloading and firing cartridge after cartridge. A few muttered under their breath, some more vocal than others, as they tore out pocket knives or yanked free the long-bladed skinning knives they carried at their belts, using anything with a point to it to pry the shiny brass cartridges stuck in a carbine breech grown hot with rapid, repeated use.

Suddenly Captain Guy V. Henry was bolting past the spot where Donegan knelt feeding cartridges down the loading tube of the repeater.

Five yards away the nervous captain brought his big dun mare to a halt, hollering at Royall above the din of battle, “Request permission to go to Vroom’s aid, Colonel!”

Royall sawed the reins about, his eyes darting up the slope where L Company was slowly backing in a smaller and smaller ring, the warriors converging on them from all
sides now. Many of the horsemen worked in close enough to swing at any stragglers with war clubs and knife-studded battle-axes. One of the patrol’s soldiers dropped to a knee, no longer fighting the onrushing swarm of red ants, but struggling instead to force open the trapdoor breech on his Springfield.

He never heard it coming.

As Seamus watched, the soldier’s head exploded in a crimson spray. A warrior swept past on horseback, screeching out in victory for the coup.

And now the white man’s body lay exposed on the field, the rest slowly retreating with Vroom into an ever-shrinking circle.

Another young soldier rose clumsily from a crouch with his useless carbine as he was rushed, looking every bit as if he were courteously handing over the Springfield to the oncoming warrior in his frightening war paint, who savagely knocked the white man’s rifle aside with a huge battle-axe, then swiftly whirled it overhead to bring the blade down on the trooper’s head, cleaving it to the man’s chin.

In the next breath it seemed the dirty blue of their uniforms disappeared behind a wall of Sioux horsemen, boots and hooves kicking up a veil of dust, a pall of gun-smoke swirling like the gauzy fingers of some curtain draped over the crest of the hill as the clamor grew and men cried out in terror and pain and the coming of certain death.

But as suddenly the warriors fell back slightly, and Seamus could again dimly make out the murky blue of the soldiers through the dust.

Somehow, only in God’s own name, L Company had repulsed that first concerted charge.

Yet it changed nothing. On that crest Vroom’s men stood all but back to back—those who remained of the doomed patrol now that one of every four were lost. The warriors swept along all sides of Vroom’s men, probing here and there, feinting, screeching—preparing to make another rush.

“If you’re going to save those men, Royall,” Seamus
growled, a sour ball choking his throat, “you better see Henry gets his outfit moving now!”

Royall whirled about and flung his arm up the hill toward Vroom as he bellowed, “Permission granted, Colonel!”

Seamus was off like a shot behind Henry as the cavalry officer spurred his mount into motion, sprinting back to the most exposed part of what remained of Royall’s battalion. By the time Henry reached his men and began to shout his terse orders, Donegan turned to see Vroom’s men disappear behind a second concerted charge by the Sioux horsemen.

At the same moment, more horsemen poured past Vroom, down into the head of Kollmar intent on cutting off Royall’s retreat, flooding through the confused and harried horse-holders. Bedlam ensued as the dark-skinned riders atop their small ponies darted among the rearing, bucking big American horses, flapping blankets and strips of rawhide.

“Form up!” Henry shouted. “Form up for a charge!”

A soldier rushed up to ask, “We going to the relief of those men on top, Colonel?”

“Damn right we are!” Henry cheered them.

“Lookee there!” an old soldier shouted near Donegan.

Another asked, “Is that Crook’s Injuns?”

Seamus recognized them as the allies. “That’s Crook’s Crows all right. God bless ’em!”

Now a dozen, then thirty and more, darted on foot across the top of the Kollmar, where they halted and began to lay down some enfilading fire into those warriors harassing the horse-holders.

“Gloree! Some of them foot-sloggers coming too!” bawled one of the old horse soldiers nearby. “Lookit them double-timing it!”

“’Bout time they did!” grumbled another trooper.

“Move out!” Henry growled, above them all on his horse, waving his arm and pointing up the slope toward Vroom’s men beset by a third deadly charge that all but made the solitary company disappear in a maddening swirl of smoke and dust and racing ponies. Behind the captain
rode his orderly atop a skittish, side-stepping mount, frightened at the clamor and gunfire.

“Move out, goddamn ye!” a raspy voice shouted among Henry’s men.

An equally angry voice bellowed in reply, “Awright, Sergeant. I’m moving fast I can!”

Up and down the throbbing line of blue hurrying toward the crest, voices rang out.

“Damn right, boys—I’d rather die on that hillside yonder than down in that goddamn ravine with Royall!”

“Royall’s had us fighting since breakfast, goddammit!”

“There’s never gonna be no let-up—”

“You’ll fight till the job’s done or I’ll have you drummed, bucked, and gagged when we get back to Fetterman!”

“Said I was hurrying, Sarge!”

Humping it up the hill, Donegan was nothing short of amazed that any of Vroom’s men were left standing when the warriors withdrew after their third charge on his detached company. Three times they had held against the red horsemen, dragging all but one of their eight dead and wounded with them as their little circle shrank smaller and smaller still.