Trumpet on the Land (40 page)

“We ought to be getting near Crook's camp, aren't we, Bill?” Merritt asked after they had stuffed themselves on buffalo tenderloin.

“Real close, General. I could take a ride out tomorrow and likely reach the forks of Goose Creek by afternoon.”

Merritt shook his head. “I want to keep you with me, so we'll choose someone else.” He looked over at White. “How about him, Bül?”

“Chips?” and he grinned. “Sure. He'll find Crook's camp with no problem.”

White stood, eager to please. “You want me to carry a message, maybeso a dispatch to Crook, General?”

“Yes. I'll write it first thing in the morning and send it
with you right after you've had breakfast. We're going to let General Crook know to expect the Fifth for supper day after tomorrow.”

The general had been so excited when White had delivered Merritt's note, absolutely buoyant to learn that the Fifth was only hours away, that on the following morning of August 3 he had his Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition strike camp and countermarch eighteen miles to the south along the foothills of the Big Horns so that they might unite with Merritt's 535 officers and men that much sooner.

So it was that something on the order of a mile off Cody spotted horsemen, perhaps a dozen, no more. They weren't Indians, that much was for sure, not the way they rode in a column of twos, with a couple of spare fellows off to the side. Scouts, he thought to himself. Behind them, as far as the eye could see, the horizon lay smudged with smoke. At times the smudge to the air was enough to sting the back of his tongue.

Halting at the top of the next rise, Bill turned in the saddle and took his hat from his head to wave to Merritt and Carr still a quarter mile behind him at the head of the column. Then he sat and waited. This would be as good a place as any, he decided. He stretched his back, pulling at some stiff muscles, and watched the riders move out of a walk into a ragged lope. They had spotted him. Some pointed in his direction.

God, is this ever pretty country, he thought to himself. Look at them peaks up there. Bet they never lose their snow, either. He felt thirsty immediately, hungering for a cup of that water straight out of those glacier fields, water so cold he remembered how it could set his teeth on edge.

Looking back at the riders, he could make out Charlie White now, riding off to the left of that bunch of soldiers with another civilian. A big man. A fella who rode his horse damned fine. One of Crook's half-breeds, no doubt. Most white men simply couldn't ride a horse that good. A few Bill had known in the past could, men like himself, born to
the saddle. Friends like White and Texas Jack, like Bill Hickok and that Irishman he and Wild Bill had scouted with for Carr back in the winter of sixty-eight and sixtynine.

The remembrance made him think of Samantha and her letter, then made him squint his eyes and study the distant figures. Maybeso.

The officer up front tore the hat from his head and waved it at Cody. It was Royall. By damn, that was Royall! Smiling, Bill sat up straighter in the saddle. The major who had been with the Fifth when it defeated Tall Bull at Summit Springs was now a lieutenant colonel with the Third. How grand it would be to see him again in a few more minutes.

One last time he turned in the saddle and saw the headquarters group coming on at a gallop, Merritt and Carr beneath the snapping of their regimental standard and the general's own flag. They had seen the riders coming out to greet them.

By the time Cody turned back around, he saw the two civilians suddenly kick their horses in the flanks, watched as White put his quirt to work front and back to squeeze more speed out of his dapple. Both of the horsemen leaned forward like men accustomed to wrenching every last drop of effort out of those magnificent animals.

Yes, that man racing White up the slope was one of a kind. The tall boots and loose, grimy, collarless shirt, with long hair spilling over his shoulders, hair streaming out with the wind beneath his wide-brimmed hat. White's was blond, every bit as light as Custer's before he lost his on the Little Bighorn. But that stranger's—now that was brown, pretty much like Cody's. But the way it caught the light, maybeso it had some blond in it. That, or the man was starting to gray.

From here he simply couldn't tell for sure, not the way the two riders sprinted up that last long grassy slope toward him, closing on the last fifty yards. Not the way the horse
men laid so low along the lunging necks of their animals, hunkered down on the withers and whipping manes.

They both shot past Cody, swooping by on either side of him with a rush of wind and hammer of hooves, yelling out to him, to one another, to their horses, laughing as they sawed their mounts around in that belly-high grass. In that grand circle the stranger whipped his hat off his head and slapped White on the back with it.

“By the blood of the Virgin Mary!” the big man bellowed with a voice that made Cody's heart seize in his throat. “It sure is good to see you've fared well,
Buffalo Bill!”

“Seamus,” he whispered, able to get nothing more past his tongue for the moment.

Then Cody kicked his right leg over his saddle and dropped to the ground, bolting off at a dead run to meet the tall gray-eyed Irishman there on that hilltop as the sun began its fall toward the purple bulk of the Big Horns.

“Seamus Donegan! Damn, it is you!”

He dropped to the ground, yelling, “Come here and give your old partner a big hug, Bill Cody!”

They embraced and jumped, slapped and cried, then hugged some more, both of them babbling like schoolgirls on the annual spring picnic.

“Charlie, you know that Buffalo Bill here,” Seamus said, his arm looped over Cody's shoulders as he turned to speak to White, who held the reins to their three horses, “he saved my life once.”

“In a goddamned shitter, it was!” Cody choked, laughing so hard.

“In a sh-shitter?” White asked, wagging his head in disbelief.

“Damn right,” Donegan said, nearly lifting Cody off the ground with that arm he had locked around Bill's shoulder like a singletree.

Cody gazed at his old friend, saying, “Never have I regretted a minute of the time we had together, Seamus.”

“Listen,” Donegan said to White, his voice thick with
emotion, “we'll have to tell Chips here about the time we tracked some horse thieves all the way to the Elephant Corral in Denver City for Major Carr.”

“Major Carr?” Cody snorted. “I'll have you know he's our lieutenant colonel now!”

Donegan turned to face Cody, securing Bill's shoulders in both his hands. “And just look at you, Bill—damn, but there's nothing like seeing old friends again.”

The Irishman drew him into a sudden and fierce embrace that Bill was sure was going to crush his ribs, and when Donegan let him go, he remembered.

“Damn you! Don't go and squash my surprise! Here I brought something for you all the way from Laramie—”

“Laramie?”

“—carrying it careful as a fudge pie so I could hand it over to you just like it was handed to me,” Bill said, reaching inside the flap of his shirt, where he had carried that perfumed letter between it and his longhandle underwear for the last dozen days.

“For me?” Donegan asked in a whisper as Cody brought out the folded pages.

“You know someone at Fort Laramie, don't you?”

“Sam? Samantha?”

Bill nodded as White leaned forward to get a look for himself. Cody handed the letter over to the misty-eyed Irishman.

“You met … Sam?”

“Ah, a lovely one you've got there, Seamus! And she's carrying your first, she tells me.”

He watched Donegan swallow hard and swipe at a tear that just began to track down his dusty cheek. “Yes,” he said so quietly Bill knew it was really a sob. “Our f-firstborn.”

“She says it's going to be a boy, Seamus.”

Donegan nodded. “Sam told me the same thing.”

Bill leaned in as if confiding a secret. “Listen, I've had experience with these things, you know—what with Lulu and me having three of our own … and, well—you just
better learn to trust them women when it comes to such things.”

“Ah, damn!” Donegan said after dragging the letter under his nose. “I was hoping she had perfumed it with some of that lilac water she uses.”

Confused, Bill's brow crinkled. “She did. Don't it smell like her good perfume now?”

“The bloody hell it doesn't!” Donegan roared. “Smells just like Bill Cody smeared his mule sweat all over my wife's love letter to me!”

Chapter 25
4-5 August 1876

“S
o I take it that you've made a life for yourself in the army over the past seven years since we saw you last,” declared Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Carr.

Seamus snorted. “Not by my own hand, I haven't, General!”

Cody pounded Donegan on the shoulder, saying, “Seems more times than not he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, General.”

“No matter that it was the wrong place and damn sure the wrong morning,” William B. Royall added, “I couldn't have been happier to have any one man with me at the Rosebud than I was to have this irreverent, shaggy-haired Irishman!”

They were having a time of it that evening after supper around their fire, these old comrades in arms. Royall had long served in the Fifth before coming to a field command in the Third, so tonight he and Seamus made welcome their old friends from that cold, empty-handed campaign of the winter of sixty-eight, those battle-tested veterans of the Cheyenne summer of eighteen and sixty-nine. In addition,
many of these reunited officers of both the Third and the Fifth had served under Crook during the Apache campaign in Arizona.

Here and there in that circle of laughter, warmth, and camaraderie sat the newsmen hungry for any kernel of a story, along with John Bourke and those officers new to the West eager to hear a retelling of the war stories by Cody and the officers. Eager to hear Buffalo Bill's own gut-grabbing rendition of his hilarious robbery of a beer wagon, aided and abetted by fellow scouts Wild Bill Hickok and Seamus Donegan in the panhandle country of west Texas that terrible winter campaign when they had served as beaters to drive the hostile Cheyenne toward Custer's Seventh Cavalry, which ended up catching Black Kettle's village on the Washita.

What a joyful, heart-brimming reunion this was, Seamus thought as he gazed round at those faces illuminated with the flicker of the fire's merry light while the stars came out over that Big Horn country. This was one of the few rewards a fighting man could claim after years of service to his country, after one campaign and battle and fight after another—to gather with old friends and swap stories and yarns, tell windies and lies and poke fun at one another here in these last few hours before they once more picked up the yoke and stepped back into harness, getting on with the deadly business of this frontier army and what every last one of them prayed would be the final war with the Sioux.

Before supper that evening Merritt and Carr had joined Crook in the tent the general had turned into a war room. No one else had been allowed into their discussions, not even aides and adjutants. Just the three old warhorses, intent on deciding just what to do and where to go now. Surely they talked about Terry's two columns sitting things out up there at the Rosebud Landing on the Yellowstone.

Upon finding Carr still leading the Fifth, Seamus once again allowed himself to feel eager instead of anxious. If anyone knew how to chase and fight these wandering nomadic
warrior bands, it was the “war eagle,” Eugene A. Carr. Time and again the old soldier had proved that he understood how to take the starch right out of such guerrilla forces. So at that meeting, Donegan felt assured, Carr must certainly have convinced his superiors that the only way to catch up to, much less capture and defeat, the fleeing Sioux and Cheyenne, was to break the cavalry off into smaller, highly mobile battalions, ration those strike forces for many days, and send them off to take up the trail of the slower-moving villages. Surely Carr had argued that in keeping together these two thousand men of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, even if Crook abandoned his wagons and relied on his mule train, they could never hope to find anything more in their hunt than track soup.