A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

Donegan answered. “What’s so all-fired important about talking to this Turkey Leg anyway?”

“He and Little Wolf—another of the chiefs with ’em right up there—they’re the fighting chiefs of the hull bunch. They won’t be ones to talk peace. Turkey Leg was a war chief back to the time they tried to rub out Forsyth’s bunch.”

Seamus dragged the back of his glove across his cracked, oozy lips, squinting into the sunlight’s reflection off the snow. “Go ’head, Rowland. It don’t matter if them war chiefs are up there. They might just listen. G’won and give this parley a try for the general.”

Nodding in resignation, Rowland stood slowly, his arms high above his head. “I have no weapon in my hands. I stand here before you, to talk with you about what the soldier chief wants from you.”

“He wants us all dead!”

Rowland whispered to Donegan, “That was Turkey Leg. He’s an old, old man—been around since dirt.”

“Got to be, by damned.”

“And he’s never met a white man he likes.”

“Including you?” Donegan asked.

With the faintest of grins, Rowland admitted, “Well, maybe not every white man he’s met. But that bugger’s hated the color of our skin long before the Dog Soldiers’ fight agin you’uns with Forsyth.”

Rowland spoke again, back and forth, with the disembodied voices from the rocks above them, as did one of the Cheyenne scouts nestled near the old frontiersman. From the tone of the enemy’s voices, Donegan could tell the chiefs were drawn tight as a cat-gut fiddle bow. Bone weary. Tested to the extreme. Cold and hungry. While that sort of deadly mix might well make most men all but give in to any talk of surrender, give in to talk of a warm fire and food for his belly … everything Seamus had ever heard about the Northern Cheyenne coupled with what he had himself learned at that Beecher Island* siege and from the Reynolds’s fight at Powder River last winter, † these weren’t the kind of men to count out, not by a long chalk.

“Little Wolf says their families are safe in the hills but they don’t have many cartridges to fight us,” Rowland struggled with some of the translation.

“But they ain’t about to come in and take Mackenzie’s offer to surrender, are they?”

With a doleful wag of his head, Rowland said, “He shouted to me, ‘Rowland! Go on home now with the Lakotas and all your Tse-Tsehese from the White River Agency—you have no business here! We can whip these white soldiers alone … but we can’t fight your Indians too!’”

Licking his oozy lower lip, Seamus said, “They’d likely give us a good fight of it without these Indian scouts—wouldn’t they?”

Rowland nodded, then shrugged a shoulder. “Damn if they already haven’t give us damn good fight, Irishman.”

Donegan shuddered as the wind kicked up, driving some icy snow crust against his cheek. “Don’t look like you can talk ’em into sending down their women and children to go back to the reservation?”

“I’ll try again—if’n you want.”

“All you can do is try.”

For a few minutes Rowland and the Cheyenne scout parleyed with the voices of the chiefs, until the old frontiersman turned suddenly, a fresh smile on his lips.

“Morning Star says he’ll come down a ways and talk to me where I can see him.”

“By the saints! Do it! Do it! See what you can do to change his mind.”

The closest they ever came to laying eyes on that aging warrior was to see a man stand some twenty yards off near some rocks where he could quickly retreat if treachery threatened.

“Morning Star said he’s lost his three sons today,” Rowland explained as he whispered down to the Irishman.

A sudden pull seized Seamus’s heart—as he remembered how it felt to hold his own son in his arms, there near his heart. Remembering how it felt to look down at that tiny face. How Morning Star must have experienced it with all three of his boys. And what despair the old chief must now suffer in losing them. Yet—there he stood, amazingly, as solid as a rock. Talking with a white man … when the white soldiers had taken his children from him.

“Says he wants peace. Wants to surrender. He’ll bring in the women and children himself …” Then Rowland stopped. There were angry voices from above. “Wait … but … but the other chiefs won’t let him surrender for them. They want to keep on fighting. Shit—there’s Little Wolf with him now.”

“Who’s he?”

“The hard one—that’s who,” the old frontiersman answered. Then he listened to Little Wolf speak for a few minutes. “What’s he saying?”

He turned to tell Donegan, “Little Wolf says, ‘You have killed and hurt a heap of our people today! So you may as well stay now and kill the rest of us!”

The Irishman instructed, “Tell him—tell all of them—that if they surrender, Mackenzie might leave them their lodges, their belongings, if they surrender and start back to the agency under escort.”

Then Seamus watched the old man’s eyes look away, staring across the valley with great regret.

Finally Rowland shook his head with sadness. “Look” he said.