Seize the Sky

CHAPTER 24

DOWN in the Cheyenne village, Monaseetah came back from the prairie. She had fled to safety in the hills with the others when news of the attack raced like wildfire through the villages. Now she joined those who warily returned to their camps.

Twice before in her life soldiers had ridden down on her tribe’s camp circle. Once she had escaped. The last time she’d been taken prisoner.

With the first shouts of warning that soldiers had attacked the Hunkpapa camp circle, Monaseetah remembered the terrifying image of the Little Dried River and how death had come charging into Black Kettle’s winter village. She remembered how women and children had died beneath the slashing sabers and smoking guns, trampled beneath the bloody hooves that knew no difference between warrior and woman, young or old, in that dim light of a gray-winter dawn.

Thirteen summers old, she had been.

And four robe seasons later, Black Kettle’s village on the Washita again awoke to the same horror of blood-numbing cold and death. Women and children and the old ones were trampled beneath the big horses of the soldiers once more. Another winter dawn long ago.

Suspiciously now the Cheyenne women and old ones came back to their villages in guarded joy. The warriors said they had whipped the soldiers in the valley and sent them fleeing in disorderly retreat up the bluffs far to the south. Now the big fight was pressed against the pony soldiers who had dared to cross into the Shahiyena village itself … to slash through the lodges, killing women and children once more.

But they too had been turned back!

Anxiously she reentered her village, dashing across the camp circle to those cottonwoods that lined the riverbank. A boy under each arm, she watched the pony soldiers spread out along the top of the grassy ridge, some on horseback, others kneeling or lying down to fire their rifles at the warriors who kept up their never-ending pressure.

Minutes later the bugles called out with notes familiar from that long-ago winter far to the south.

Stirred to her soul by the brass horns, Monaseetah remembered those trumpet calls.

She sang, mimicking the quick, staccato notes along with the trumpets, much to the wide-eyed wonder of her sons. Their chins dropped to hear the high, clear, crystalline notes lift from her throat. Sweeter compared to the brassy blare of the army bugles far up the noisy slope.

She remembered too the meaning of that war song. Officers coming together.

Another song—orders to mount. And another song calling the men to assemble so Yellow Hair could talk to all his pony soldiers. Mighty Yellow Hair.

She remembered.

Of a sudden her heart burned for him again … just to touch his pale face once more … to look into those eyes like a mountain pool of cold blue water. Water so cold it would set her teeth on edge to drink—

Then she saw the guidon.

It is his!

Yellow Hair’s personal flag—the flag he had allowed her to touch and hold so many, many times during their long winter together. She above all others should know that banner.

I slept with that flag pillowing my head through many stormy nights.

She lunged forward a step, stumbling as the boys clung to her.

“Hiestzi!” The word flew from her lips more strongly, more hopefully than she had sung the bugle notes.

At her side both boys grew tense with apprehension. Was this Yellow Hair? Is that not what their mother had shouted? Who was this Yellow Hair? The one she spoke of so often?

Suddenly Monaseetah whirled, her eyes searching the throng of spectators. They came to rest on an old woman, Northern Cheyenne, whose father’s relatives remained imprisoned on a reservation far to the south in the Territories.

“Talks-to-the-Moon!” Monaseetah shouted, dragging the two boys with her as she scuffed through the cotton-wood grove.

“Little mother!” the old woman gasped.

“Please—watch the children for me!” Her eyes pleaded. How could her old friend refuse?

“It is not safe yet,” the old one said. “The killing has only started. See? There are too many soldiers fighting still. It will not be long now. Wait here.”

“Watch the boys!” Monaseetah shouted, shaking her head sharply to shut the old woman off. “I must see these soldiers myself.”

As Monaseetah turned to study the hill, more of the army horses stampeded, frightened away from the soldiers by youths fluttering blankets and robes. More thirsty animals bolted and clattered off toward the river, carrying their precious loads of ammunition far from the jamming carbines.

“I go look for a soldier! To see his face!” she admitted to the old woman. “He comes for me at last. Like a prayer, he comes for me!”

Talks-to-the-Moon found her mouth hanging open in surprise as the young mother darted away, racing down the sharp bank into the river, where she splashed across the water, soaking her cloth dress above the waist. One plodding, slippery step after another, lumbering forward a foot at a time.

The ribbon of water separated her from him. This Goat River, slowing her desperate sprint toward the hill where Hiestzi waited for her.

She had seen his flag … that crimson, so like blood on winter’s snow … and sky blue, so like the winter in his eyes.

It was his flag. It fluttered in the hot breeze up there on the spine of the swaybacked pony ridge, as if it meant to signal to her and her alone. Hiestzi had wanted her to see it. Monaseetah knew that—as surely as the dust stung her eyes and the powder stank in her nostrils.

Hiestzi has come back for me as he promised seven summers ago! My husband comes for me a last! His promise fulfilled …

Myles Keogh had watched Calhoun take the first fatal shot, marveling from afar at the stamina of his friend—not seeing the last, for the young lieutenant was lost in a swirl of dust and burnt powder smoke as the crimson wave swept up and over the burnt-sienna brow of the hill.

For a moment Myles wondered absently if that lone rider would make it.

Some yellow-livered coward, Myles cursed. Running—rather than dying like a man …

But Keogh had his own problems now.

The warriors who had overrun Calhoun were inching their way in ever-increasing numbers toward I Company. The big Irishman watched but a moment more, mesmerized, while some of the Sioux began to beat and pummel the wounded clustered on the brow of Calhoun’s Hill. They shot the wounded and dying with their own weapons as the soldiers cried out for mercy. They fired arrow after arrow into the limp bodies, hacked at them with tomahawks and stone clubs. Close enough that Myles could see the enraged faces, painted and horrendous, every one distorted with blood-lust as they turned from the Calhoun dead to glare longingly up the spine toward Keogh’s Wild I Company.

It was a sight that would make many a lesser man worry about losing his lunch or wetting his pants.

Hundreds upon hundreds, and still hundreds more, warriors streamed out of the villages now that they had driven Reno back up the bluffs, now that they had taken time to put on their paint and say their war-medicine prayers. Smeared with grease and charcoal, painting their faces black for victory. Skin painted yellow with blue hailstones … red with green horns surrounding their eyes … blue with red stripes down the chins.

Devil paint fuzzed with yellow dust and sweat … and smeared with white men’s blood.

Some had charged up the hill totally naked, contraries mostly. They attacked the soldiers with little willow sticks hoping for a glorious death that would catapult their spirits into the other world of forever-happiness. Contraries ran naked through the tall grass, their cocks and scrotums bouncing as they leapt up the slope, offering their frail, naked copper bodies to Wakan Tanka after they had pledged their undying obedience in this personal vow of sacrifice.

Others rode up the hill with only a blanket or half robe lashed about their waists. Only a few wore feathers in their hair. Most simply did not have the time to ornament themselves at first for the valley fight. But by now many had stuffed hands into fire pits and dragged out charcoal to smear across their chests and shoulders. Perhaps mud at the riverbank. Anything to make themselves more hideous to those young, frightened soldiers laying eyes for the first time on battle-crazed warriors on this dusty Montana hillside.

There wasn’t a green recruit kneeling behind his overheated carbine on Keogh’s slope who didn’t imagine he had died already and been dragged kicking and screaming straight into the maw of hell.

While one warrior tied on his long headdress, its brim speckled with dragonflies and butterflies, another wore something much more primitive and provoking of fear in his enemy. Sun Bear strapped a single buffalo horn to the center of his forehead and dashed on foot up the hillside.

With the tall grasses waving beneath a gentle breeze across the entire slope, Keogh’s men were able to watch those warriors still working over Calhoun’s dead. Down below they saw the thousands of spectators—many young boys and old men riding back and forth just out of rifle range at the river. Women splashing across the Greasy Grass to join the swelling crowds of those who sang the young warriors on to greater feats of daring. Women who shook their skinning knives aloft, urging the warriors on so they could be about their own bloody work over the bodies of the slain soldiers.

Along the slope and the spine of the ridge, Keogh’s soldiers heard the high, wailing cries of the women.

“Don’t let them catch you alive!” one of Keogh’s old files shouted to the frightened shavetails in his squads. “What I could tell you about Fetterman’s poor boys … but—just don’t let them bitches get their bloody hands on you!”

Slowly it sank in. A fate worse than a thousand deaths awaited the man who let the squaws get their hands on him.

Some of Gall’s warriors broke off from the slaughter on Calhoun’s hill and moved north along the ridge toward Keogh’s position. The air filled with their blood-chilling cries, joining the screams and shrieks from the women below, mingled with the high-pitched prayer-sounds of the eagle-wingbone whistles constant and droning on the hot breeze that stirred the yellow dust and maddened the eyes.

Now and again that same breeze blew flecks of stinging foam off the handful of lathered horses left to Keogh’s fear-riddled command. A man’s ass tightened all by itself whenever an army mount galloped by, its saddle empty, wet with blood.

As the wild, crazed horses went down, thrashing in their death-throes, the mood along the ridge became more desperate still. A horse made a perfect target while the soldiers always did not. Men hid down in the grass. The horses could not.

Slowly, methodically, the warriors concentrated on the big animals, whittling away at the horses, spilling their riders.

Funny how a soldier always stayed with his fallen horse, for protection from arrow and bullet alike, or simply because with his horse down and dying, there was no longer any means of escape. A few unhorsed troopers tried to run, out along that bumpy backbone of a ridge toward the last knoll far away—north, where the general had gone. The scared ones and the smart ones alike.

Most who had abandoned Company L hadn’t made it. Those who fled I Company didn’t make it either. They died like scattered kernels of corn on a threshing floor, shot and trampled and bludgeoned beneath the red onslaught before they had been up and running but a moment or more.

Riderless horses were allowed to break through the Indian lines, clattering down to the river where the young boys and old men captured them all. It was easy enough. Even though the big mounts did not like the smell of Indians, their intense thirst overpowered their instinctive sense of caution. Seized by young hands, these big, colorful horses were led across the river into the camps by proud new owners, their saddlebags jingling musically with ammunition to use in the army Springfields captured in the valley fight or on Calhoun’s Hill.

More Springfields overheated, jamming along that ridge-top position Keogh had scratched out for his company. The verdigris coating the shells worked like cement, hardening under the heat of rapid firing until at last a shell refused to break free with the ejector. Several soldiers threw their rifles away in disgust and frustration after breaking knife blades on frozen shell casings.

Many of the warriors gathering below Keogh’s ridge believed the soldiers were simply touched by the moon, gone crazy. There could be no other explanation for the troopers tossing aside their carbines.

All the while Keogh’s men retreated into a smaller and smaller force near the crest on the east slope of the ridge. Their numbers slowly dwindled, exactly as Calhoun’s position had before them. The handful of those left alive from Calhoun’s Hill had run up the slope toward that big monolith of a man, Myles Keogh, like a lighthouse in the fog of that yellow-dust madness. Keogh kept calling out above the battle din, letting them all know he was standing there, rallying them round him like a group of schoolboys rallied beneath the spreading arms of a huge oak, strong, sturdy to the last.

“Goddamn their black hearts to perdition!” the Irishman hollered, his eyes watching some of his men abandoning their squads to pierce the smoke and dust shrouding Custer’s companies farther north. On the last, very last, knoll.

“May the bastards spend their eternities quivering in hell’s own furnace!”

Sergeant Bustard himself dragged up two wounded, one beneath each of the huge ham hocks he called hands. After slinging the soldiers behind the protection of a dead horse carcass already attracting its share of blowflies, James Bustard leapt into the smoke and dust once again to fetch more of his wounded and dying comrades.

“Give ’im a hand, will you, boys?” Keogh shouted as he waved two other veterans to follow Bustard downhill.

Sergeant Caddie leapt up and dashed off into the smoke on Bustard’s tail. Mitch Caddie was the lucky one of the two.

As Sergeant George Gaffney jumped over the stiffening carcass of his horse, he was driven backwards into Keogh’s little compound. His body writhed on the dusty grass a moment, his jaw blown off, the side of his head gone in a pulpy mass. As his bowels voided into the hot air, Gaffney quit trembling forever.

“Damn them all!” Keogh shouted. “Let them ’ave a go at me! C’mon now—you pagan bastirds … ’ave a shot at the likes of Myles Keogh!”

The captain darted side to side, waving his huge Catholic medal for all the nearby warriors to see beneath the shimmering sun in that buttermilk sky, as if to say he too wore some strange, powerful medicine to ward off their bullets and arrows.

“You can’t kill me!” he called as a few more of his men darted away into the smoke, intent on making it to Custer’s lines.

The rear guard is falling. He fired his pistol at a warrior leaping after a soldier running north. Keogh nailed the warrior, really wanting to shoot the soldier in the back.

There’s just too many, his mind raced clear and cool as any mountain stream surging out of the Bighorns. All round them howled ten times ten the number they had figured would be camped in this bloody valley.

Just too damned many for any of us to handle now. No way out—

With a snort the horse beside Keogh reared and in falling nearly knocked him over. Even the sure, gentle hands of the old files were failing to keep the horses from bolting now. They reared and fell back over the men, stumbling against each other in pure panic, breaking their hobbles, pinning and crushing soldiers beneath them, stomping on any unfortunate trooper who didn’t roll out of their way fast enough.

Near Keogh’s feet a young soldier knelt, sobbing, mumbling an incoherent prayer. As Myles watched, utterly mesmerized, unable to stop him, the young shavetail threw his rifle away and pulled out his service revolver. He handled the weapon as if it were some foreign, revered icon, juggling the heavy object into position alongside his head. The youngster pulled back the hammer, then calmly and without ceremony yanked on the trigger.

His brains splattered over three troopers nearby.

All three jerked round in fear and disgust, watching a comrade-in-arms fall into the yellow dust.

To Myles it was like watching one of Custer’s short vignettes back at Fort Abraham Lincoln.

The captain stood spellbound, dumbstruck while the evil asserted its control on his company. More soldiers suddenly sagged, giving up to pull pistols themselves. Pointing muzzles at their temples or breasts, triggers squeezed with eyes fiercely clenched. They dispatched their mortal souls into limbo rather than suffer the possibility of torture at the hands of the Indians.

Save the last goddamned bullet for yourself.

Stunned, baffled by the suicides rippling the hillside around him, Keogh watched pairs of men point guns at each other’s hearts in death pacts. Others died alone … no one to kill them … completing this last dirty little task for themselves. Slowly the staunch defense along Keogh’s ridge began unraveling. Strange that even as his perimeter fell apart, most of the Indian fire slacked off.

Keogh could tell that the gunfire from Calhoun’s Hill had faded.

Indeed, those warriors back along the ridge sat silently behind their tall clumps of sage and furry tufts of bunch-grass watching in frosty fascination as the pony soldiers fought among themselves, shooting each other until only a grim handful remained at the top of that dusty spine, a hardened knot gathered in a tight ring of corpses and horse carcasses.

Bitterly Keogh ordered a retreat with what was left of his Wild I Company. The first retreat he had ordered in his life.

Through the dust and smoke of this Sioux-made hell they crawled up on their knees and for a moment peered across the slopes toward the last hill less than a half mile away.

A few bolted away along the backbone, running hunched over like squat prairie cocks skittering through the sage ahead of a hungry coyote. First one, then another, darted off. Dust from hundreds of bullets kicked up funnels among their heels as they zigzagged their way through the sage. One was down, then another, now a third. And with those fallen soldiers sank the hope of Keogh’s last command.

One trooper sighed with a death rattle and calmly replaced his six empty shells in his revolver with live ammunition. He then crawled over to a tight knot of four quivering, whimpering recruits. Two of them gazed up at the veteran’s face, appealing to him with their tears and tortured expressions—imploring him with empty, quivering hands.

“This can’t be happening!” one shouted.

“Whadda we do? Whadda we do now?” cried another.

Methodically, one at a time, the old file placed his pistol against the back of each head. The fourth young trooper went down without protest or struggle.

Then, without warning, Sergeant Frank E. Varden suddenly turned the weapon on himself before Keogh leapt to stay him. The pistol tumbled from Varden’s grip as his body twitched, then collapsed atop the bodies of the last four recruits left in his entire squad. Sergeant Varden had protected his men to the last.

Keogh knelt trembling in rage. Disbelief like a cold, hard stone clogged his throat. Revulsion soured his tongue, seeing his men blow their own brains out. Myles Keogh had seen enough wounds and battlefield action to numb him to blood and gore. This was something else entirely that twisted his stomach now and made him heave up what was left of the dry breakfast they had wolfed down before Custer had moved them up and over the divide. It all came out with a good dose of sour whiskey in gut-relieving lumps that lay in the dust and the grass, beside these men, joining their blood in the ocher soil on this lonely hillside in Montana.

And when his belly finished punishing him, Keogh took up Varden’s bloodied pistol. Finding the sergeant had left one last live round in the cylinder. Keogh put the revolver to his forehead and rammed the hammer back, feeling how cool the muzzle felt against his sweating brow.

“Good man, Varden,” he croaked, speaking to the dead man beside him. “You saved the last bullet for your ol cap’n Keogh.”

He couldn’t bring himself to pull that trigger. Life had always been too damned precious for him.

Keogh allowed the weapon to fall out of his hand, knowing his only course now lay along the ragged spine … a half mile, perhaps a bit more.

Hell, it don’t matter how far, Myles.

He’d join the others. He could rally them.

Tommy boy’ll be there. Might even have a sip or two of whiskey about him. Tommy’s always been that way. When it comes to whiskey and women—Tommy isn’t stiff like his big brother.

Myles yanked cartridges from Varden’s belt, loading one, then two, and finally four pistols with fresh rounds.

Then, with a war cry of his own, Captain Myles Keogh rose to his feet like a mighty oak. He stuffed two pistols in his belt, manhandling another pair. He emptied one as he bolted off, then flung it angrily at a charging warrior. With the first shot out of the second, Keogh brought another Sioux skidding to a stop to stare at the red hole in his chest before he crumpled to the sand like a wet sack of corn mash.

Lumbering with all the concealed grace of a draft horse, Myles was off on his big Irish feet, dashing as he had never run before, remembering the footraces he always lost to Billy Cooke.

This’s one day ye’d not win again’ me, Cookey!

Keogh fired left then right as warriors popped up, lunging for him with clubs and rifles. Each wanted to be the man to lay first coup on this mighty warrior who wore the metal bars on his shoulders and that shiny medicine disc round his bull neck.

Myles fired and ran, ran and fired, until the two pistols clicked and clicked again. He hurled them angrily at red targets, yanking the last one free and into action. He pulled the trigger again and again, his feet covering ground as if there were only wind beneath his boots.

All the dark Irishman knew for sure was that he was thirsty and Tom Custer just might have a drink or two about him.

On and on he ran, the bullets kicking up spurts of dirt around his big plodding boots. Bullets split the air about his black head like mad mosquitoes whistling on the Rosebud. The only thing Myles Keogh knew for certain was that he was thirsty … so thirsty he would do damned near any bidding for a drink right about now.

Captain Myles Keogh had always been like that, though. He would do anything for a drink.

In fact, he would race right into hell itself.