Trumpet on the Land (13 page)

American Horse would accept.

For days the nomadic camps had known about the soldiers to the north camped along the Elk River.
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Scouts rode out from the villages daily to shoot at the soldiers, and to steal ponies from the Sparrowhawk People,
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the scouts working for the Limping Soldier.
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Some of the Lakota scouts even brought back word that white men traveled in smoking houses that walked on water!
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Then in those first days following their great fight on the Rosebud, when the camps were ever watchful of the soldiers to the north, Crow King arrived with his many lodges. The following day the mighty Gall rode in with his people, welcomed by the shouts of the thousands. Yes! Every warrior, from the youngest and untried, to the oldest scarred veteran of Harney's fight on the Blue Water—they vowed they would all be ready when the Great Mystery delivered them the soldiers of Sitting Bull's vision.

Then came that sleepy morning after so much singing and dancing, courting and feasting—that warm sunny morning when the first reports came that soldiers had been spotted far away near the crest of the Chetish Mountains. Sitting Bull, Gall, and the rest promptly doubled their
akicitay
the camp police, in a fierce attempt to keep all the eager, fire-blooded young men from racing out for glory.

“No man must make contact with the white man away from this camp,” demanded Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa mystic.

Gall spoke even more fiercely. “The coming fight must
not be started anywhere but here among this great gathering!”

How important it was to all Wakan Tanka's people that the prophecy be ordained on this day!

What glory the fight had been for them all, American Horse thought now as he moved south with the great cavalcade, astride his pony moving slowly down the west side of the immense procession that stretched for miles, spread up to a mile in width, as they plodded toward the White Mountains
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to harvest lodgepoles. He, like most of the other warriors, rode the flanks of the colorful parade, ever watchful for signs of the enemy—whether that proved to be those soldiers said to be hurrying down from the north, or perhaps some of the Sparrowhawk People or more Corn Indians,
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like those who had scouted for the soldiers who fell into their camp the day before. American Horse wanted to believe—really believe—that there would no longer be any danger from soldiers hunting for Lakota and Shahiyena villages. How he wanted to believe they would live and hunt, laugh and love in peace from now on.

The way his father, Smoke, had said it was for a long time before the white man began pushing west along the Holy Road that took him to the land where the sun went to bed each night. The way it was before then … the way it could be again now.

How American Horse prayed it to be so.

Chapter 7
26 June 1876

D
usk was falling as they stumbled across that wide, wellbeaten trail crossing the divide between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. Even in the lengthening shadows, Donegan and Grouard could read the story of the encampment's passing many days before, the earth tracked and chewed by thousands of lodgepoles dragged behind more ponies than any man could possibly imagine.

Yet … atop that trail of unshod hooves and moccasin prints lay another of iron-shoed horses and peg-booted men. An army on the move.

The pair found the column's first campsite not that far west of the Rosebud on the trail up the divide, then ran across a second some distance down from the crest—where the troops had stopped and started coffee fires, smoked their pipes and slept, curled up in the trampled grass and dust.

“Didn't they have any idea what they were marching into?” Seamus asked.

“Only a blind man would fail to see what waited for them down there,” Grouard answered just past sunset as
they reached the top of the divide and gazed upon the valley of the Greasy Grass.

There in the west, shoved clear up against the deep indigo and purple of the foothills and benchlands on the far side of the distant river, lay a pall of smoke, its belly underlit in orange-tinted hues from the tongues of miles upon miles of grass fires.

“That ain't lodge smoke,” Donegan grumbled quietly as they moved down from that high place, down the banks of Ash Creek toward the valley of the Greasy Grass.

“I'll give you this one, Irishman. Were it a game of cards, I'd gambled against you and lost. But you were right—them Injuns are firing the grass behind 'em as they go.”

Above the thick layer of roiling grass smoke the summer sky remained pale, almost translucent, for the longest time of that evening, and when the moon came out behind the scouts, and the stars finally winked wakefully in a scatter across that darkening sky, the entire canvas allowed just enough light for an experienced plainsman to continue down, down into the valley as they followed that great churned trail the thousands upon thousands had followed.

Some distance from the Greasy Grass they came upon the place where it appeared the soldiers had divided, some of the regiment moving off to the left, gone to the southwest. The rest continued on down toward the Little Bighorn. A short time later they found the trail divided again—this time more of the regiment crossed to the left side of the creek and continued toward the bluffs hiding the Greasy Grass. It was here that Frank chose to steer them north.

Seamus asked, “Why don't we just follow this trail down to the river? Find out what come of this bunch?”

Grouard shook his head, peering into the darkness, as if divining something no more than a handful of miles away. “The river is bordered on this side by rough, high bluffs. This much I remember from this old camping spot of the Lakota. We will go north, moving around that bad stretch of country.”

Donegan watched the half-breed move his horse away silently in the coming cool of that summer night as darkness and silence swallowed them both. And he wondered if Frank Grouard was feeling like he was a Hunkpapa or Hunkpatila warrior again, sensing something unseen out there in the darkness, even miles away yet. Something mystical that pulled the half-breed on. Something that might have been pulling Frank Grouard onward ever since last winter when the scout performed the impossible in the middle of a high-plains snowstorm and brought Colonel John Reynolds's cavalry across a rugged divide and right down on an enemy village nestled along the Powder River.

If Frank Grouard could do that, there was something uncanny about the man. Maybe something even unholy.

And that made Seamus Donegan shiver as he put his own horse in motion, following the half-breed into the deepening darkness of that summer night.

He had grown up Catholic, learned his catechism early at his mother's knee, then later beneath the thick leather strop of a series of stern priests who ruled the village school with an iron Celtic hand. Growing up Catholic in Ireland had come to mean that he too was superstitious. There were the legends of the first nomadic Celts and the mystical druids and, of course, tales of the Little People. Damn right, Seamus grew up every bit as superstitious as these savage heathens he'd been fighting for a full bloody decade come this very summer.

Ten years ago. There at the Crazy Woman Crossing it had been—when he watched that first warrior racing in atop his pony, all painted up, hair and a cock's comb of feathers all a'spray in the wind, the look on that dark, contorted face like no other he had seen since … why, since he saw the etching in the ancient book one of the old Irishmen in the village had shown all the interested young lads. It was the face of a banshee, the like of those what came to wail out of the dark places in the forests, to frighten off but lure at the same time—banshees that
would suck the very life from a man's body if ever they got their hands on you.

Donegan swallowed hard, remembering that very first warrior he had dropped with the Henry repeater. In the dust and sage and sunlight there on the top of a bluff near the Crazy Woman Crossing. For so long he hadn't believed it had been an Indian at all. No. By the Blessed Virgin—in his sights Seamus had beheld an unholy banshee galloping right out from the bowels of the earth when he pulled the Henry's trigger.

So was he a Christian? he asked himself now this night. And eventually, as darkness shrouded them while he followed Frank Grouard into the rugged badlands east of the Greasy Grass, in the footsteps of a doomed command riding to its death—Seamus admitted he was not a Christian. Instead, he was what his mother and the priests had made of him: a Catholic. And an Irish Catholic at that.

He had been ever since he had known enough to cross himself and mutter the prayers of his childhood catechism whenever evil lurked just out of reach, as it did throughout that dark ride north into the unknown.

Within an hour the breeze came up and thin veils of clouds wafted in from the west. A few drops fell, big ones the size of tobacco wads. Cold they were. But a few heavy drops were all the sky had in it while the temperature plunged, chilling Donegan as he followed the half-breed. Overhead the moon rose to midsky behind the graying pall of pewter-tinted clouds scurrying east. As if even they knew better than to tarry above this ground forever touched by death's foul hand.

Then, as they were beginning to climb the dark foreground of a slope that appeared as if it would take them out of a wide saddle toward the top of a long ridge, Grouard's horse suddenly snorted, jerking its head to the left as if to avoid bumping into something that had loomed right out of the darkness.

Seamus had his hand on the butt of a pistol, half out of its holster, when he demanded in a hush, “What is it?”

“Don't know,” Grouard growled, fighting the blackcoated animal until it settled and came to a rest. “Never knowed this horse to act this way. To get scared at anything.”

“You see what it shied at?”

“No,” he replied, dropping from the saddle. Standing on the ground, he handed the reins to Donegan. “But I'm fixing to find out.”

As Seamus watched, the half-breed crouched forward, bent nearly on all fours. Grouard had barely gone ten feet when he jerked to an abrupt halt. In the darkness it appeared the scout inched sideways, his arms out, feeling something with both hands.

Swallowing, he quickly glanced around him at the darkness seeming to swell around him. Donegan asked nervously, “What'd you find?”

“Shit!” Grouard squealed, and fell backward on his rump.

“What the hell is it?” Seamus demanded, his raspy voice louder now as he forced the question from a throat constricted in fear. Maybe the gruff edge he could bring to his words would scare away the ancient demons haunting him ever since the fall of darkness.

“It's a goddamned body.”

“A body?” Donegan asked, dropping immediately to the ground. His own horse caught the scent of the corpse, yanking at the reins. “Man?”

“Yeah.”

He joined the half-breed as Grouard knelt a second time over the dark shape. In what murky light the rind of moon and starlight could strain through the oilcloth covering of clouds, Seamus finally made out the unmistakable human form beneath them. Pale. Naked. White as the dust itself.

“His arms—” Grouard said.

“I see. They been cut off.”

“When I put my hand out first time, I found his head.”

“Ain't much left of it, is there?”

“No,” the half-breed replied. “Scalped, and they smashed his face in.”

“War club does a pretty job of that, don't it?” Donegan asked grimly. “A white man?”