Epilogue

November 10, 1869

For better than a week he had stayed to bed.

First in the Fort McPherson infirmary, where his mind played every foggy, waking hour with the memory of Sam Marr.

The last few days had been suffered through in one of the three cramped, canvas-partitioned cubicles William McDonald could offer travelers passing through Nebraska Territory.

How much the smell of dried blood and sulfur and wash-water standing in the tin bowl at his bedside reminded him of the war and that hospital where he saw so many lose their arms and legs. From where he had laid, watching the surgeons and their bloodied aprons come and go, Seamus remembered the growing pile of limbs. Hospital stewards in masks and gloves, armed with gum ponchos, came once a day to drag the bloody, immobile refuse away. Perhaps those hospital soldiers buried all those arms and legs, hands and feet, in some unmarked grave left to grow over among the battlefields, a fitting memorial to commemorate those once whole who returned home after Appomattox something less than complete.

Day after day in that narrow rope bed, Seamus had stirred beneath his two wool blankets, sweating with a fever—reminded strangely that he was somehow still alive. Staring at the low-beamed ceiling, thankful that his body stretched upon the freshly-ironed sheets was still whole. Cody brought them each day, taking away the dirty linen. Louisa washed and ironed a clean set for the morrow.

Bill himself visited as much as three times a day. For the time being there was nothing much for him to do at McPherson. The cabin Colonel Emory was having built for the Codys was all but complete. Lulu busied herself with sewing curtains and furniture throws and talking the quartermaster out of one wooden crate or another so that she would have her new home furnished with planks and boxes that would make do here far from the civilized world of St. Louis.

For days on end his wounds seeped. Yet that was just what the army surgeon Francis Regen wanted. He kept them open to seep—both the leg and the long slash from armpit to hip. Day after day Regen came to change the bandages with Cody’s help, the little surgeon making that unconscious scolding tone with his tongue as he worked over the crusty wounds, pulling the cloth tenderly from every inch of oozy flesh.

Seamus didn’t need anyone to tell him how lucky he was to be alive. Each new day came to mean one more sunrise he did not have to face the gallows, a condemned man staring death in the face.

He had done everything he could to save his own life, and found himself wanting. It had not been enough, and in the end he needed Cody’s help.

Twisting now off the buttocks gone numb, he inched to the side of the bed and sat up slowly. Behind him now were the days of healing along the muscles in his back where the mulatto’s knife had opened him to the ribs. Cody told him they could see the purple-white of bone through the bunching pink of muscle as they had carried him into McDonald’s. Two soldiers, the saloonkeeper and Cody himself, that night more than a week gone when the young scout emptied his pistol into the mulatto.

Not leaving any chance of finding out why he had come to kill the Irishman.

Another mystery to prick at him for the rest of his life, he brooded in those hours spent alone and immobile. Healing enough to climb atop a horse so he could hurry down to Denver City for the winter. It was all he promised himself each new day.

Bill Cody had come to McDonald’s saloon as he had promised—just after sundown. To try talking the Irishman from leaving. He had asked McDonald for Donegan—was told Seamus had gone outside to do his business at the latrine. Him, and the new man.

“New man?” Cody had asked McDonald.

“A nigger. Not really—more like a high-yellow. Sounded like he knew of the Irishman,” the storekeeper had explained.

By the time Cody had cleared the corner of the saloon, he had heard the scuffle. Pulling his pistol, he had stepped into the darkness of the latrine, just as the mulatto pulled Donegan’s head back, ready to open his throat like a slaughtered hog.

Emptying his pistol amid the shouts of those who came running behind him, Cody had fired pointblank into the giant black man’s body, hoping to drive him and the huge butcher knife off Donegan, who lay beneath the collapsed side of the lean-to.

It made for good telling—each time Seamus had Cody tell it to him again. And again. As if Donegan wanted to be sure to get it right—every detail. Hoping to fill in the aching void of that moment in his life with the recollections of others.

He had no memory of his own.

The pain and the warm. The grunting of struggle and combat, then the falling against the timber support, a falling that came a heartbeat before the first crash of thunder and bolt of blinding light, like a prairie thunderstorm’s flare across the nearby bluffs.

That was all he had to hold on to—except what Cody told him.

The why was up to him to shake and leave behind.

Eventually he stood and tried out the leg again. The scabbing was taut, like the puckered, pinched and reddened skin around it, nearly encircling the outside of the left thigh. It would do to walk on the way he had been practicing the past three days, pacing up and down the ten feet in length of the tiny cubicle.

Whenever he tried to breathe deeply, the tug of the bandages wrapping his chest and belly reminded him they refused to budge. But he had healed.

And it was time to move on.

“You’re ready?”

Seamus looked up to find Cody’s face.

“Is the horse—”

“Saddled and watered. Packhorse too. Tied out front. McDonald and the others are out there. Waiting.”

Behind Cody a throat cleared and the young scout turned, stepped aside to allow Major Eugene A. Carr into the tiny space.

“Mr. Donegan, I wanted to bid you farewell myself,” he began, taking his hat from his head. He held out his hand. “You proved yourself of great service to the Fifth.”

“Thank you, General Carr,” he said as they shook.

He put his hat back on his head then fussed with his mustache a moment. “I’ll be on my way, Irishman. Just wanted to let you know of my appreciation. And, for some reason I can’t shake—I feel certain we’ll see one another again.”

“I don’t figure on being back here for a long time, General.”

Carr smiled. “Be that as it may, the plains aren’t all that big, Mr. Donegan. So, till we meet again on another trail.”

“General,” he replied, watching the officer go.

Cody came up to the cot. “This all you have?”

Seamus looked down at the bedroll and the saddlebags beneath his heavy mackinaw coat. It wasn’t much, he had to admit that. “Man don’t need much where I’m going.”

Cody scooped them up then moved slowly behind Donegan as the Irishman inched his way to the door. “Where’s that, Seamus?”

“Hell, in the end, Cody. Hell.”

They laughed all the way down the canvas-walled hallway and out the back-door hung on leather hinges. A cold November breeze greeted him among the shadows of morning.

“I can smell Louisa’s perfume on you, Bill.”

Cody smiled as they shuffled slowly down the side of the saloon. “She’s waiting to see you off. Little Arta too.”

That made him feel sad and happy at the same time. Thinking about Jenny of a sudden—sensing the completeness Cody had in his own life.

There beside the horse and pack-animal, Seamus said farewell to the civilians and the soldiers alike. Louisa Cody pecked him on the cheek and stepped back while Cody hoisted up his daughter for a quick hug with the Irishman. Then it was time to pull himself into the saddle.

At first Bill stepped in to help, but with a stern look of admonition from Donegan, the young scout backed off.

Seamus did it himself.

Cody handed him the rope leading back to the packhorse. “You write me when you get down to Denver,” he said, his hand on the stirrup fender next to Donegan’s wounded leg.

“I ain’t much at writing.”

“Damn you—I know good and well you’ve written your mother every time you were back here at McPherson or Sedgwick, Fort Lyons or Wallace.”

“Didn’t think you paid much attention to that.”

“It don’t have to be much in the way of a letter—just let me … let us know how you’re faring, Irishman. We’ll run across one another sometime soon.”

Donegan smiled, something reassured inside him. “I know we will, Bill Cody.” He reached down and shook hands with the scout. “You take care of that family of yours.”

“You take care of yourself, Seamus.”

“God bless you, Seamus Donegan,” Louisa Cody sang out, waving.

“God bless you too, Louisa. See that you take care of Bill for me.”

He sawed the reins aside and tapped heels. The packhorse came along smartly. There was little for it to carry—but the animal might bring a price in Denver if the need arose. And come spring, there was still that trip over the mountains into the unknown—all the way to the western sea. Looking for …

Seamus turned once in the saddle and looked back as he left behind the squat buildings of Fort McPherson beneath the rose of a rising sun of that November morning. Heading south by southeast along the Platte for Colorado Territory and the ten-year-old settlement sprung up alongside Cherry Creek.

Waving, he choked down the remorse of a sudden he felt for leaving. Not in leaving so soon, but in leaving people behind at all. He was always pulling away from what he knew and understood. Forging ahead into what he knew least but what drew him most, like iron fillings to a lodestone.

Liam’s clue might take him far enough come spring. Eighteen and seventy it would be, he thought as his leg adjusted to the sway of the horse, and the taut muscles of his back grew accustomed to the rhythm of the saddle. He knew of nothing north of California—only Oregon country. Perhaps that alone was the pull west to find Uncle Ian O’Roarke.

But first he would winter in Denver City, working as need be to pay for room and board. The men down at the Elephant Corral might have work, even Marshall Dave Cook might prove in need of help.

There in the shadow of the Rockies he would be close to Cripple Creek and the miners who might have heard or know of the O’Roarkes. It was there in the mountains south of Denver City that the brothers had their falling out before Ian fled west and Liam began haunting the plains.

The last known whereabouts of Ian O’Roarke was the place to start—Cripple Creek.

And the only way to get there was to put one mile at a time behind him, one sunset at a time.

He looked back on the little gathering once more, feeling the pull like working the new, taut skin on his leg as he stretched it each day. The group stood there still, watching him reach that first rise in the landscape behind which he would disappear from them, they from him.

Tonight’s sunset would be the hardest, he realized. It never got easier saying good-bye to friends.

But tonight’s sunset would be the hardest of all.