Chapter 33

October 28, 1869

For three more weeks Duncan pushed his troops up and down the Republican, sending out scouting parties, hunting off the land, trying to catch one village after another as they scattered and disappeared from the country as if snatched off the face of the earth.

Winter was coming. The bands going south for the season were already on their way. Those planning to make the north country before the big snows came had already put Kansas Territory far behind them.

Winter’s cold hand of death was coming.

The first snow was wet and heavy, coming as it did in the middle of one night when most of the men were asleep beneath their blankets and gum ponchos. By the next afternoon everything was melted and muddy and bogged down in a quagmire of cursing wagonmasters and balky mules. It was the second storm that convinced Duncan he needed to turn back home.

It was one of those plains’ storms that had all the bluster of a spring blizzard, aggravated by winter’s cold bite of the arctic where it had been sired. Born of the mating of wet, warm air sweeping up out of the south, tumbling and roiling beneath the frigid storm system hurtling out of the north like a hungry woman thrusting herself back at her impassioned lover, this snow had all the ingredients of a killer.

On the second day the skies cleared and the men finally ventured out from under shelter-halves and tents and the bellies of wagons to greet the sun, see what stock was still alive and to count noses. That twenty-third day of October, Duncan decided they’d had enough.

“We’re close enough to McPherson—we can make it inside a week, we take our time and don’t stretch out the strength of men or animals.”

Five days later, as the sun heaved out of mid-sky, heading down the homeward side toward the far mountains, Cody’s advance guard came within sight of the far-off bastion. Angered by an insistent west wind, the big flag snapped and protested above the home station for the Fifth Cavalry. The Irishman admitted it was a sight almost as good as laying eyes on Fort Wallace after Carpenter’s brunettes dragged Forsyth’s survivors out of the wilderness.*

If it wasn’t Sioux, it was Cheyenne. And if it wasn’t the brutal cold of a trip heading north on foot along the Bozeman Trail, then it was a sudden prairie storm that could kill a man even more quickly than the sun and starvation and despair ever could. Maybe he’d had enough, Seamus told himself—enough of the plains and these Indians. Enough of working damned hard to keep her off his mind when Jenny had made it pretty plain she preferred moving on with her life to waiting for him.

Why, Seamus asked himself, was he staying on in these parts when he should be pushing ahead?

Quartermaster Sergeant John Young turned Pawnee Killer’s mother over to the post chaplain upon arrival.

“Likely he’ll see that she’s shipped up to Spotted Tail’s agency, north in Dakota,” Cody said after the civilians split off from the soldiers and dismounted on the parade.

Seamus nodded, gazing about at the pandemonium of homecoming. Officers’ wives and the enlisted man’s laundresses were out in force. Waving handkerchiefs and colorful bandannas, singing out the words of their favorite song: “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

“Full many a name our banners bore

Of former deeds of daring,

But they were of the days of yore

In which we had no sharing.

 

“But now our laurels freshly won

With the old ones shall entwin’d be;

Still worthy of our sires each son,

Sweet girl I left behind me.”

Youngsters wrapped against the blustery winds beat on tin pots with wooden spoons or blew on penny whistles to accompany the regimental band with every verse and chorus.

A happiness Seamus felt not a part of.

“Duncan declares Colonel Emory’s splitting the Fifth for the coming winter,” Cody said as they began walking slowly toward McDonald’s trading post at the outskirts of the fort buildings.

“Some to garrison here,” Seamus said, nodding, “the rest going where?”

“He’s keeping five companies here. Six going on to Wyoming. To garrison Fort D. A. Russell.”

“Damn these Indian wars,” Seamus whispered under his breath.

“You want me to meet you later for a drink—wash down some of the trail dust?” Cody asked.

That brought Seamus up suddenly. “Why, ain’t you coming to have one now? McDonald be expecting us come harroo—now we’re back, like old times.”

Cody tried out a limp smile. “I’m … it’s not like before, Seamus. Lulu and Arta—my family is here now.”

“Yes,” Donegan said finally, feeling the great tug of something inside that reminded him he was without any of that family or love. Adrift on this prairie sea as he was years gone a’coming to Amerikay on that stinking death ship.

“You’ll come meet them later,” the young scout said, anxious to go.

Donegan suddenly felt sorry as well that he had kept Cody. “G’won, me good man. I’ll share the warmth another time. Come ’round the saloon when you get the chance this evening and I’ll buy you a drink in farewell.”

“Farewell?”

“I’ve decided I’ll be leaving in the morning, soon’s the paymaster gets me mustered out.”

“You don’t have to muster out yet—I’ll see to you staying on the winter—”

“No, Bill. You’ve had me here long enough, and it’s high time the Irishman was moving on.”

“We’ll talk about it—”

“No, Cody. There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Damn you—we’ve a lot to talk about, Donegan. I’ll see you standing at McDonald’s shaky bar after sundown.”

Seamus glanced at the orange orb settling to the west. “That doesn’t give a man much time for saying his proper how-do to family and kin.”

“Plenty time for me. Besides, I don’t want you leaving, Seamus,” Cody said, holding out his hand. “Not, just yet.”

Donegan shook. “We’ll drink our fare-the-well this night, Billy, me boy. Maybe we’ll round up a few of the others to make it a merry send-off at McDonald’s place.”

“See you after sundown, Irishman.”

He watched the young scout go, Cody’s long, curly hair all the more golden beneath the afternoon sun this late autumn day. Seamus knew he’d miss the man dearly.

On instinct, he reached for the medicine pouch he kept hung out of sight inside his shirt. Before his eyes swam the face of the old mountain trapper turned army scout. In liquid remembrance of Jim Bridger.

The same two years gone since Donegan quit the Bozeman Road, bidding farewell to Sam Marr with the promise to meet him north to the gold fields one day.

“You’ll never make it back,” he whispered to himself as he trudged wearily toward Bill McDonald’s trading store standing like an orphan at the edge of the gathering of buildings the army called McPherson. “Too much water gone under your boots.”

Something more hauntingly precious than gold-fever drove him on now. Perhaps it was something that few men could really understand, never as much as they said they understood, no matter as they might try. Looking for a piece of his past, consumed with the nagging why of it all. Unable to find rest with anyone or anything until he completed the quest begun in County Kilkenny, Ireland, years before.

The familiar warmth washed over him as he closed the door behind him. All these places smelled the same: odors of men living out their days on the frontier, fragrances not all pleasant. But familiar. Stale sweat and unwashed longhandles. Tobacco smoke and whiskey spilled on bare wood. The sun’s late rays shot through the two small windows at an angle that illuminated only half the room in golden, shimmering light. The rest hung back in cold shadows. The bar stood there among the darkness.

“What’ll it be, Irishman?” McDonald asked as Donegan stepped up, arms burdened with gear.

“Rye, if you have it.”

Plopping his bedroll and rifles off in a corner, Seamus returned to the bar for his drink.

“You’ll be staying on now that the regiment’s busting?”

He shook his head and threw the first shot against the back of his throat. “No,” and he wiped his mustache. “Hope to put some ground between me and this infernal prairie before snow closes travel down.”

A familiar voice asked, “Where to this time, Donegan?”

He looked up, finding the old white scout, John Nelson, sliding up the bar. “Likely, Denver City holds the bait for me now.”

Nelson chuckled amiably. “Ah, to be young and footloose again,” he replied wistfully. “Yes, Denver City is the hive, and you young hotbloods are the drones who keep that place alive.”

“What’s the honey?” Seamus asked, smiling as he poured Nelson a drink from the brown bottle of rye.

“You’re asking me, Irishman? Why, it’s the lure of whiskey better’n you can get in a place like this stuck out here on the prairie. Maybeso—it’s the lure of white-skinned women.”

“You get tired of your Sioux wife, Nelson?”

“Never grew tired of her, or her widowed sisters, Donegan,” and he laughed with Seamus. “They’re enough to keep any three men satisfied … especially an old plainsman like me.”

“Don’t need any of that white-skinned stuff, eh?”

“No, don’t need it at all,” Nelson replied as a tall stranger inched up out of the darkening gloom of the barroom. “But I sure do hanker after one of them fat, powdered, flower-smelling gals a’times, I do.”

“Nothing smells like a white woman,” Seamus replied as the coffee-skinned black man came to a stop on the far side of Nelson.

Seamus only glanced at the stranger, but enough to measure him quickly, feeling inside he might have seen him before. Not unusual to see Negroes here on the plains. Especially here in the central part, among the forts where the buffalo soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth cavalries were stationed out across the prairie.

But the way the man kept looking at him in the foggy mirror behind McDonald made Donegan unsettled. Perhaps the man served with Reuben Waller’s unit last winter and recognizes something about me, Seamus thought as he set his glass down on the bar.

“We know each other?” Donegan asked, craning his neck past Nelson.

The mulatto’s face brightened with a sudden smile filled with big teeth. Everything about the man was big. He inched around the old scout and stopped almost on Donegan’s toes.

“You’re the Irishman they call Seamus Donegan?”

“That’s right. We met before?”

He shook his head. “Never, I know of. Just, I’ve heard of you.”

Nelson snorted, hoisting his glass filled with Donegan’s rye. “Your rummy reputation is making the rounds, Irishman.”

His back prickled with icy heat as he sought to ignore Nelson. “What you hear of me?”

“With Forsyth’s bunch, wasn’t you?”

He saw the smile there on the black man’s face. Genuine enough, yellow eyes twinkling. “I was on the Arikaree Fork with Forsyth’s men.”

“That what the place is called? The river where we … where you got pinned down by the Shahiyena?”

For the first time Nelson turned to carefully study the mulatto. “Where a nigger boy like you learn a big word like that?”

He smiled, eyes flicking at the old man. “I worked hard in these parts ever since the end of the war. Picked up a few Injun words along the way.”

The old scout wagged his head, as if doubtful. “No. ’Cause you say it real good,” Nelson replied. “Not like no white man—and surely not like no nigger.”

The yellowed eyes stayed on Donegan as if he would not be deterred, even when Seamus turned around to pour himself another glass. The whiskey was having the desired effect. His sore muscles and recently-healed wounds were numbing nicely. The empty belly hollering for supper had settled to a whimper. Across his head the troublesome apprehension was all but gone.

“It true you men killed Roman Nose there?”

Donegan nodded, watching the mulatto swim in some mist he tried to blink away. Perhaps only the remembrance of that place and Liam’s death, he told himself.

“Yeah. Brave sonuvabitch that Roman Nose was,” Seamus replied. “I doubt any can come close to touching the power of that bastird’s medicine.”

A strange look crossed the mulatto’s face, something tinged with confusion. “You … you saw how brave he was that day?”

Seamus looked squarely at the yellow eyes, struck with how much like a wolf’s they appeared. “Yes, I saw for meself how he rode down into our guns. Don’t know of another man who’s got that much grit.” He hoisted his glass into the air and bellowed, “Here’s to Roman Nose.”

“Glad that murdering bastard’s dead!” shouted someone from the gloom.

“Here! Here!” others hollered across the room.

Seamus continued his toast, “They don’t make ’em any braver, boys.”

“You saw him ride down on you?” asked the mulatto.

“I figure I got the best look at him any white man’s ever gonna get,” Donegan answered, then killed his glass and banged it on the bar. “Excuse me, fellas,” he said, pushing himself away between Nelson and the mulatto. “Got to go use McDonald’s trench out back.”

“Don’t spill nothing on your boots, Irishman!” sang out Nelson.

“It don’t matter,” Seamus replied with a grin, holding the door open a moment. “Just washes off the dust of this goddamned prairie.”

He heard some chuckling trickle away as he strode off the boardwalk onto the hard, hammered earth and headed down the side of the saloon. The evening air hit him like a jolt of strong coffee. A tonic that revived most of his dulled senses.

As he stood there over the reeking slip-trench dug beneath a crude lean-to behind McDonald’s store, Seamus told himself he would soon have to quit this hammering at the bottle. Unbuttoning the fly to his britches, he straddled the trench and sighed with relief. What a hammering his kidneys took in the saddle, aggravated by the whiskey he soaked them in whenever he found himself at these squalid posts strung across the central plains.

Whiskey and wandering. As he finished, Donegan looked up. The wind had picked up some, rattling along the painted canvas McDonald had tacked up over the latrine. Not far off, Seamus could make out the corner room the storekeeper had let to Bill Cody for Louisa and little Arta until their cabin was completed.

When the arm shot around his neck, clamping off the windpipe, instead of tensing up, his first instinct was to go limp against the attacker.

It was the only thing that saved the Irishman’s life.

He cried out as the cold steel laid him open along the ribs as he fell against the canvas side of the lean-to. The blade tore him nearly from armpit to hip. The sudden warmth surprised him as much as the absence of real pain. He felt the blood seep instantly along his shirt, its warmth quickly going cold in the wind that slashed through the gaping tear in his clothing.

In falling, he collapsed against one of the wooden supports. Banging his head soundly, Seamus had a sudden realization that the sun must have settled far to the west, for the light was all but gone from the sky. Purple-blue twilight would hang suspended over the prairie for the next few moments, then the world would go black.

No more sun.

Only that shining black face crossing the latrine toward him, the huge blade of the scalping knife catching a glint of faint saffron light from the distant window of Cody’s room. It was then that Seamus saw the knife-sheath. Fringed and covered with quillwork beneath the man’s open coat.

He wondered why the mulatto from the bar was trying to kill him as he struggled to rise, his head too heavy for his shoulders of a sudden. With a pair of fingertips he touched the forehead where the skin was torn open against the timber supports as he fell. Legs going to horse-glue, stringy and without substance.

Seamus wondered why—then remembered seeing knife-sheaths like the mulatto’s on the Cheyenne dead they stripped in the dry sand of the Arikaree Fork not far from the place Forsyth named Beecher Island.

He felt himself being pulled up.

Seamus twisted for all the strength he had left, his head ringing, somehow sensing that the blade was coming again.

Dragging one of the sop-rag legs, getting it in the way, he stopped the blade as it jabbed for his gut.

Not so much the meat of his leg as from the blade slicing along the big bone—he cried out in pain as he collapsed.

The mulatto’s hand was in his hair, pulling, yanking back savagely—laughing about the still water being the piss and shit of white men.

Still water filled with piss and shit and a fitting place for Seamus Donegan to die.

The Irishman wanted only to know why he was about to die as the mulatto turned him over, popping his bloody head to the side.

With a gasp of shock he sucked for air when the loud report filled the canvas-shrouded latrine. The sudden light stung Donegan’s eyes, blinding him.

A second gunshot, then a third.

He kept his eyes closed now, unable to take the bright, painful light—his hammered brain unable to make sense of it. The noises of scuffling feet, the grunting, the falling throb of a body against the collapsing lean-to.

Four, five and finally a sixth gunshot.

By then they did not hurt his ears.

Seamus realized his ears were muffled from the echoing noise as some garbled voices pierced the inky veil all about him. He wanted to take his hands off his ears but his hands weren’t clamped over them. Something else was atop him.

They pulled it back.

“Seamus! You alive in there?”

“C-Cody?”

“By damned!” Cody shouted, flinging his voice over his shoulder at the others. “Donegan’s alive!”