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

The young soldier added, “Damn bullets flying over our heads all day—scaring the bejaysus outta every last one of these sawbone meat cutters, they have.”

“How’s it been for your cawpril over there?”

Forsyth turned slightly to glance at the big soldier who had stationed himself beside the blanket shroud laid out at the edge of the field hospital, both the corporal and the dead man slowly collecting ribbons of white as the snow began to fall more insistently. “He’s been quiet. Been there all day for what I know. Ain’t never left the cap’n’s side.”

“Good for him,” Seamus said.

“Yes,” agreed the young soldier as he shifted the blanket bower above him and Forsyth, “good for him. The lieutenant never had him a chance. The doc said he counted four bullets in him—any one of ’em s’posed to kill him right off.”

“F-four bullets you say?” Forsyth asked.

“One gone through his chest. ’Nother one gone through his lower arm and ended up in his belly. Third one done the worst: shattered his backbone. And the last one hit him in the head—stayed right there in his brains ’thout coming out.”

“Damn!” the sergeant whispered. “I’m sure thirsty, soldier.”

“Yes, sir. Here,” and he handed over a canteen.

Forsyth took himself a drink, then held it up for Donegan. “You thirsty, Irishman? Sure you are: ary a fighting man gets thirsty after doing his duty, don’t you think?”

He took the canteen, hesitating because he was not really all that thirsty—when the sweetish fragrance of the corn mash whiskey drifted up to his nostrils. Seamus sniffed at the canteen.

“Gloree be, Sergeant Forsyth!” he exclaimed with quiet wonder, then tilted the canteen up slightly to let a little wash across the end of his tongue. “That tastes good enough for me to stay here and kill my thirst with you, it does, it does. But—a man in your state needs your thirst killer much more’n I do.”

“You’re sure you don’t want none, are you?”

“Aye. I’m sure, and thankful too we had men like you on that line today.” Donegan watched the sergeant’s eyes soften. Wondering if it were the laudanum, or the whiskey, or maybe it was enduring all that pain that made them go soft and doelike right then.

“You won’t drink any more of my whiskey,” Forsyth said, “then you’ll have to give me your hand before you go.” They shook quickly. “Man like you, Irishman—you had no business coming on that charge with us. No reason on God’s green earth to be at the edge of that ravine.”

“I had every reason in the world,” Donegan replied. “But the two most important reasons are waiting for me back at Laramie.”

“Then see that you get yourself back to them whole,” the sergeant ordered as he sagged a bit, jamming the cork back in the top of his canteen, his eyelids drooping. “You don’t mind—think maybe I’ll grab me a bit of shut-eye now.”

“I’ll look you up tomorrow,” Donegan declared, patting the sergeant’s arm before he got to his feet and moved away into the firelit snowy night.

As he walked back toward the creek, his mind snagged on how McKinney had clutched at Dr. LaGarde, speaking of his mother so far, far away with his dying breath.

Natural that Donegan’s thoughts turned to his own mother now in heaven, still watching over her firstborn son come so far, far away to distant Amerikay.

Throughout the waning of the light that afternoon, Morning Star’s people had scrounged through the snow to gather wood to kindle the fires one of the old men started with the flint-and-steel fire-striker he had carried from his lodge at the upper end of camp that morning. These were not big fires like the ones the soldiers below fed with all that the Ohmeseheso had once owned. Instead these were small by comparison as the wind came up along the ridgetops and the snow began to fall around them.

It weighed down his heart to think that some of his people would not last this cold, cold night despite the small fires where the strong ones rubbed the hands and feet, legs and arms of those who were too small or too sick or too old to warm themselves. Not only had he lost family and friends to the soldier bullets this day, but with the coming night, Morning Star realized he would lose a few more to the winter giant.

As a Council Chief, it was his station in life to worry about such things—to concern himself more with the fate of his people than with his own family, his own fortune. So it saddened Morning Star that he thought again of Old Crow, a longtime friend who had elected to stay at the White River Agency* last summer when Morning Star and the others had decided to return to the north country. Especially after the soldiers had turned them back in the skirmish* with the soldiers near the Mini Pusa,† men like Old Crow had elected to stay behind.

So why was it, Morning Star asked, that Old Crow and other old friends of his then decided to join the soldiers in tracking down their own tribesmen? To side with the ve-ho-e in making war on their old friends, their own families?