The people straggled untidily to the crest of the ridge and stopped, their attention taken by the distant stutter of rifle fire from the south. The old woman stopped beating McAllister to watch.
To McAllister, it was like watching a set-piece of a battle, like seeing animated toys go about the game of war. He reckoned the soldiers at about fifty, though he could not be certain at such a distance. The dark, slow-moving column slowly made its way north, worming a path between high ground, stopping every now and then when the snow became impossibly thick, searching for a new way through.
He saw the Indian riflemen dotted along a ridge in the snow, the mounted midgets who were the cavalry of the Cheyenne, the pitiful fifteen men, waiting to ride their starving and weak horses in against the heavy cavalry. There and then he decided it was suicide. They aroused his admiration, but he thought it crazy. Fighting without being pretty sure of winning was always crazy – that was something his old man had taught him. The only kind of war worth fighting was one you were pretty sure of winning.
The Indian rifles crackled.
The army column came slowly to a halt. Men were out of the saddle, down and shooting. But they wouldn’t be able to see many targets. The Indian cavalry started a skirmishing movement, went slowly in against the rear of the column, struggling through the deep snow.
* * *
Lieutenant Gorman felt the anger rising in him. He could see the mass of the fleeing Indians on the ridge a mile ahead of him and he wanted to get at them. One moment, he had been victorious, pursuing leader, now suddenly he was on the defensive, held down in the snow by a handful of half-starved savages.
Sergeant Dolan said: “Mounted men to the rear, sir.”
Gorman twisted in the saddle.
His trained eye at once took in the slow pace of the Indian ponies. Feed for his own mounts was low and they had been on half-rations for days, but there was still some go in the beasts. He made a rough count of them. Not much more than a dozen. He’d go after the bastards and swamp them. Those would be the only horses they had. And Cheyenne without mounted men were no good at all. From then on his task would be an easy one. He saw himself going back to the general and reporting that he had wiped out a large band of the hostiles.
“Mount up,” he yelled. “Carbines away. Revolvers out. By God, this is where we show ’em, boys.” The boys looked a little doubtful, for they had had enough of freezing to death in this wilderness and they were as hungry as the horses. But they sheathed their carbines smartly enough and drew their revolvers, checking them and settling themselves in the saddle. “Form line. Forward, yo. Trot. Goddam you there, trot that horse, man. Follow me. Come on, lads, we’ve got ’em.”
Slowly the line came around. Too slowly, something in Gorman’s brain told him, but he was intent on nailing that handful of mounted Indians. The Indians came on. They were yelling shrilly now, brandishing their weapons above their heads, as if eager to meet the troops face-to-face. By God, Gorman thought exultantly, they’re going to be swamped. He was going to finish the job he had started back there on Goose Creek. He’d ride this handful into the ground, ignore the men fighting on foot on the ridge to the east and go after the fleeing people. The remnant left of the mighty fighting Cheyenne would be pretty subdued in the spring.
The Indians rode straight at the troop.
Gorman roared: “Charge!” and drove home the spurs. His heavy cavalry mount struggled to increase the pace, but waded into a drift so that the snow was up to his belly. Gorman used the spurs frantically. Men from behind him ploughed into the drift; men cursed and horses whinnied. The shooting started. The Indians seemed to fade away from the front of the troopers and then suddenly, even though their horses were tired, they were on the flank, coming in close, firing point-blank. The men on the flank under Sergeant Dolan poured fire at them. Two Indians toppled from their mounts into the snow. Then the rest fled.
“After ’em, sergeant,” Gorman yelled, reining his horse around and floundering out of the drift.
The sergeant may not have made out the words, but he caught the tone of the urgent shout. He and the flank of the troop wheeled away after the fleeing Indians, firing and yelling. The horses made the turn fairly quickly and thundered after the Indians who made frantic and pathetic attempts to escape on their tired horses. They showed brilliant horsemanship, weaving this way and that to escape, yet always staying together as a body as though they obeyed a single brain, but it was plain that it was not good enough. Their horseflesh was worthless and the soldiers would ride them down.
The flank troops were a couple of hundred yards from the main body that had turned to follow them when it happened.
The fleeing Indians turned their horses along a narrow way of escape between two steep-sided ridges, the leading soldier no more than a dozen yards behind the rearmost Indian. This soldier suddenly threw up his hands and fell out of the saddle a thrown lance protruding head through his back and haft through his chest. Missiles rained down on the soldiers from either side, spears, axes, arrows, anything the Indians had to throw at them. Men tumbled from the saddle, horses fell screaming and kicking and, in a second, Indians on foot seemed to swarm into view, leaping down from the ridges in a terrible haste to get to the helpless soldiers below. Men were dragged howling from the saddle and hacked to pieces under the horrified eyes of the main part of the troop which was hurrying as fast as it could go through the snow. Men fell brained by primitive war-clubs, skulls were smashed by stone hatchets, arms broke under savage blows, men fled in terror from death and ran into death. The snow was red with blood. Irishmen, Polaks, Northerners, Southerners, Englishmen, Dutchmen, they died shoulder to shoulder, violently and quickly.
Gorman, spurring desperately, was sure in that terrible moment that he had something like a couple of dozen Cheyenne suddenly under his hand. The horror of what he was watching didn’t deter him. Here was victory.
He was close now. Some of the murderers turned to face the oncoming troops as they thundered up. Blood splattered them, the blood of the men they had butchered. Gorman fired and fired. An Indian pitched over dead. His men were all around him, firing, killing. This was a terrible victory, but it was victory just the same. He rode a man into the ground and found a ferocious joy in the fact.
Then suddenly it was all different.
Suddenly there was the smashing and deafening sound of rifle fire almost on top of them. The man next to Gorman fell across Gorman’s saddlebow. The officer pitched him free. The horse staggered sideways abruptly and Gorman nearly came out of the saddle. He looked up and saw the riflemen on the ridge tops, firing down into the mass of soldiers. Something dealt his leg a smashing blow and he knew that it was broken. He clutched at the mane of his horse to stay in the saddle and shouted for the men to carry on forward. The only thing that could save any of them now was to keep on going. His gun was empty and he hurled it into the face of an Indian who clutched at him. Dazed and deafened by the din of firing and shouting around him, tortured by the excruciating agony of his leg, he went on forward.
The rider in front of him pitched out of the saddle, the horse went down, rolling and kicking. Gorman’s mount jumped it and nearly unseated its rider. Then he was clear, riding between the high ridges into the open snow-covered country, a scattering of men with him, lying along their horses’ necks, running for their lives. The firing continued. Sergeant Dolan galloped past him, his face distraught, blood streaming down it.
They had made it. They were alive. Somehow they had gotten out of the shambles back there.
He looked back. There were a dozen men riding hard after him. No more than that left out of fifty.
Then something struck him hard on the back and knocked him forward on to the neck of his horse. He clung there for a moment, but his strength was going rapidly and the motion of the horse was too much for him. He felt himself sliding from the saddle and he hit the ground.
He must have passed out for a second, for a moment later there was Sergeant Dolan looking down at him, his face screwed up with concern. Behind him was the head of his horse.
“Quick, sor,” the Irishman said. “Get up. On your feet, for the luva God.”
In that moment, the young lieutenant was calm.
“They’ve killed me, Dolan,” he said simply. “Ride for your life.”
He laid back and died.
The sergeant didn’t wait. The howling of the Indians was in his ears, lead sang around him. He vaulted into the saddle, whirled his horse and spurred after his men.
He caught them in a matter of minutes and they ploughed on through the snow as fast as they could go for a mile before they stopped because they’d knocked the stuffing out of their animals.
Dolan looked them over and counted them. Eleven men out of fifty. A bunch of starving savages had cut them to ribbons. But he was a professional soldier. In the spring, the army would come back and knock seven different kinds of hell out of the Cheyenne and he’d be there. Good enough that he was alive. He’d survived yet another fight and he had lived through more than he cared to remember. He felt his face with his cold fingertips and found that the blood had frozen there.
A man asked: “What happens now, sarge?”
Dolan smiled grimly and without humor.
“We soldier,” he said, “an’ I’m in command, my fine buckos. We rejoin the command an’ we go lookin’ for Indians.”
“If we find the command,” another man said.
“That’s right, me darlin’,” Dolan told him gently. “Get smart with me an’ I’ll knock your teeth down your throat. Now ride.”
They looked back, fearing that the Indians, though their ponies were weak, would come after them. But the snow was without movement. They went slowly on their way, battered, bloody and in deep shock from their terrible experience.
Dolan was thinking: The general’s goin’ to be fit to be tied. God damn him.