Black Sun: The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 10

  Cody felt something sigh with relief inside him at that, and then watched the big Irishman’s shoulders tense as his right arm moved in a flash, like light in a mirror. Pop, crack, thud—three blows so fast that the biggest of the Mexicans fell back against his companions, his nose spurting blood, an eyelid instantly puffing. He was out as cold as a beaver dam in winter.

  Some of the others caught their leader while a handful poured around his crumbling body, swallowing the Irishman whole.

  “Seamus has gone and pulled the cork out of the jug for us!” Hickok howled. “Let’s help!”

  Cody and Hickok leaped into the fray, pulling aside a few of the Mexicans, flaying away with their practiced fists, quickly working their way into the midst of them all to reach the Irishman. Donegan was almost flattened by the weight of bodies bearing down atop him. With a heave here and a shove there, the two freed Seamus momentarily from the mob. Donegan’s face was slicked with blood, red as boiled jam. Cuts above his eyes and one on each cheek. His nose puffy and seeping.

  “Back to back!” Hickok shouted amid the cursing and grunting, the cries of pain and howls of frustration.

  The three of them backed against one another, continuing to lash out: jabbing with the lefts and swinging wide and powerfully with the rights. Giving the Mexicans an honest thrubbing. Twelve, then eleven stood against them. Eight then seven. And finally the remaining four decided they had all had enough and dragged their wounded away. Cursing, jabbering, swearing that there would come a new day of reckoning yet as they left the tent.

  Cody stood there, weak, his legs going out like wet burlap rags. He stumbled forward two steps then reclaimed his balance.

  “You all right, Bill?” Donegan asked, catching the young scout.

  Cody looked into the Irishman’s face. “You’re a sight, you are now.” He glanced at Hickok’s. Both had split, puffy lips, bloodied eyes, and were frothing blood from the corners of their mouths. Cuts oozed along the hairline. “You too, Hickok.”

  “Can’t be nowhere as beat as you, Cody,” Hickok replied.

  “I think this calls for a drink,” Donegan suggested quietly, volving a shoulder that made him wince with pain.

  “I damn well don’t believe it,” muttered the sutler himself as he came up from hiding. He stood behind the makeshift keg and plank bar, slapping a hewn timber across a palm.

  “You damn well saw it with your own eyes, didn’t you?” Donegan said as he collapsed against the bar, raking a dirty cup into his hand and presenting it to the sutler.

  “I know I saw it with my own damned eyes, Irishman—but I still can’t believe it. Fifteen of them blood-eyed greasers again’ the three of you. Jeezuz Keerist, that was some pounding you boys took before you run them off.”

  Cody felt the pain burn through his shoulder and into his neck, only now going numb at last. As if one of the Mexicans had used a club to work over his back in the middle of the melee. He looked down at Donegan’s leg, finding the faded blue cavalry britches slick with blood.

  “All of that ain’t the Mexicans’.”

  Donegan looked down a minute, prancing gingerly, afraid to put a lot of weight on the leg.

  “Damn, but you’re bleeding still, Irishman,” Hickok said, ripping the greasy bandanna from his neck and offering it to Seamus.

  “One of the bastirds must’ve stuck me right in the beginning—when I was a bit too busy to notice.”

  “Best we get someone to have a look at that.”

  “They just got the meat of me. If the Sioux and Cheyenne can’t put me under—it’s for sure that bunch can’t.”

  “C’mon—let’s round up the surgeon … let him have a look at that leg.”

  “I won’t let anyone sew on me.”

  “What’d they do on your back in the war when you were carved up so fierce?” Hickok asked.

  Donegan smiled, threw back his whiskey and then looped an arm each around the two men as they helped him away from the bar. “Let’s not talk about them plucky army surgeons who loved to wager which of them would make the biggest pile of arms and legs and mortified limbs even before the battle’s half done.”

  “That’d be something, wouldn’t it, Bill?” Cody asked Hickok as they pushed their way out through the tent flaps. “Piles of amputated limbs.”

  “Just where the hell are you three reprobates headed?” bellowed Eugene Carr as he hurried up, surrounded by some of his staff and the officer of the guard.

  “Funny thing, but I got an idea you already know what’s going on, General,” Cody replied.

  The major stopped right in their path, looked down at Donegan’s leg and wagged his head. “The three of you going to get yourselves gutted yet—if not hung.”

  “Not if we have any say about it, sir,” Donegan said in his most contrite of tones.

  “Been anyone else, Major Andrew Evans had you hung from a tree for pilfering his shipment of beer. And now they come running to me—saying the three of you’ve gone and picked a fight with Penrose’s Mexicans.”

  “I’m right behind you, General,” growled Captain Penrose as he came up on the gathering. “Hickok, I suppose you and these two with you can explain why I’ve got over a dozen bloodied, cursing Mexicans in my camp, swearing they won’t work another day for me?”

  “A dozen?” Carr asked of Penrose.

  “Yes, Major.”

  “More like fifteen of ’em,” Cody replied.

  Carr wagged his head, his grin growing bigger despite himself.

  Finally Penrose threw up his hands, exasperated. “You best stay out of our camp for a while, Hickok.” He turned to Carr. “Whatever you decide for punishment, General. They’re in your hands now.”

  Penrose turned on his heel and hurried off, muttering to himself.

  “For some time, seems to me the three of you haven’t had enough to do,” Carr began.

  “You’ve had us sitting on our hands here in camp—no scouting to be—”

  “And the three of you are always partaking too freely in the tanglefoot,” the major pressed ahead. “So, instead of scouting for the army —you three are going to turn over a new leaf starting at sunrise tomorrow. As for you, Hickok … you’ll be kept busy carrying dispatches between here and Fort Lyon.

  “Major—”

  Carr waved off his objection, immediately turning on Cody. “I’m making hunters out of you two—putting you both in charge of keeping my command supplied with game.”

  “But, General—”

  “Cody, you three listen and listen to me good: there’s plenty of antelope in this country, and you two will damn well do some hunting every day while we’re still sitting in this camp and Hickok’s away. The men of my command are suffering from scurvy—and the fresh meat will help. Now do it—or you can forget about ever riding back to Fort Lyon with me to collect your pay for this campaign.”

  Cody gazed at Hickok, then Donegan, and finally shrugged. “General, we was on the way to wrap up the Irishman’s leg. He’ll be needing it … especially come morning when Hickok leaves for Lyon, and the two of us go out hunting.”

  * * *

  The coffee-skinned mulatto brooded over his peppered whiskey, eyeing the motley gathering of dirty soldiers, buffalo hunters, teamsters and assorted prairie riffraff that had gathered in the low-roofed sutler’s hut here at Fort Lyon to weather out the late winter blizzard ravaging the central plains. He eyed them carefully just to be certain he hadn’t missed the man he was looking for.

  Jack O’Neill kept the wolf-hide cap pulled down to the bridge of his nose. Time would come his eyebrows would grow back. Right now they were more like stubby whiskers. Eyebrows plucked, every facial hair pulled from his skin with bone tweezers during those moons he spent with the Cheyenne of Two Crows and Roman Nose. But now he was back among the white man.

  From what he remembered the sutler telling him when he rolled in here two days ago, it was early February. O’Neill would have to get used to that once more—thinking like
a white man. A few times he had caught himself slipping into the singsong guttural talk of the Cheyenne tongue. Even asking what moon it was instead of month. He didn’t want to give anything away.

  From Fort Hays to Wallace, and now down to this mud-walled post on the Arkansas River. Tracking the killer of Roman Nose as he vowed he would that summer evening when the mighty Cheyenne chief died, with a shattered spine, legs useless forever more. Now O’Neill followed the faint trail of an unknown Irishman. The powerful vision that had visited Nibsi, the black Cheyenne warrior, clearly showed O’Neill that he would find reckoning with the gray-eyed one by still water. Yet as time passed, O’Neill found he would not be able to kill the tall, gray-eyed one at Hays beside Big Creek, at Wallace on the Smoky Hill River, or at Lyon on the Arkansas.

  Still water.

  Jack had followed the bits of news to Fort Wallace, asking the whereabouts of the scouts who had fought against the Cheyenne in September. But there at Wallace the trail went cold again. The sutler heard that a soldier named Pepoon had command of the outfit now, and they had been ordered last fall into The Territories with Custer’s regiment. Word had it the whole bunch of them were working out of a place called Camp Supply, due south from Fort Dodge.

  Jack O’Neill knew where Fort Dodge was. And he could wait there if he had to, until the white scouts under Lieutenant Pepoon returned from waging war on the Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne. But the unexpected blizzard roared in about the time he was fixing to light out.

  Which put him in a very sour humor. Another delay, having to suffer the curious, sharp-edged glares of the reeking white men who peopled this mud hovel, rubbing up against him and laughing at his expense. He would always be nothing more than a high yellow no matter where he went—except among his adopted people, the Shahiyena.

  Soon enough, he would find the scouts. And get his hands on the gray-eyed one. The Irishman, he was called. Jack didn’t know what an Irishman was just yet.

  But he figured he would come to know in time. And when he had returned to his adopted village of Dog Soldiers, now commanded by Tall Bull, Nibsi would be there, would revel in telling the copper-skinned women he laid with of how that gray-eyed Irishman died.

  * * *

  Carr led his Fifth Cavalry back to Fort Lyon on 19 February, the entire unit heroically surviving a seventy-five-mile march in twenty-six hours during a blinding snowstorm to do it. They had accomplished just what Phil Sheridan had wanted them to: prevented the hostiles from fleeing when the general’s favorite, George Armstrong Custer, came marching after them with his glory-shrouded Seventh Cavalry.

  With Hickok gone cross-country to Fort Lyon carrying dispatches, and Donegan forbidden by the surgeon to put weight on the bad leg, much less ride in an exhausting hunt, Cody had taken up the lonely task with relish. He was given command of twenty of Wilson’s wagons and teamsters, along with twenty of Penrose’s infantry to serve as butchers. For the first four days not so much as the white fluff of an antelope was sighted, and spirits in Cody’s small command grew dim.

  But on the fifth day, Cody struck the mother lode—a buffalo herd. Best thing about hunting at that time of year, the animals were not pursued much, so it proved easy to stampede them for a few miles until a portion of the herd spilled into a deep coulee filled with old snow. While the buffalo floundered and snorted, pawed and bellowed, Cody went to work with his powerful infantry “Long Tom” Springfield. Fifty-five were killed that day. The next morning he went out again to track down the herd and killed another forty-one buffalo, running two horses out from under him in the process.

  For the next two days the infantry soldiers labored skinning and butchering, sending wagons heaped with the rich meat back to Camp Carr. It was fortunate that they had trouble keeping up with Cody’s amazing marksmanship, for the young scout’s right shoulder and arm had become so bruised from the beating the rifle had given it that he needed help each morning to pull on his coat, each evening to pull it off him.

  Yet he managed to keep Carr’s cavalry fed on that long march back to Fort Lyon, while Donegan slowly healed. At the Arkansas River post they watched Hickok depart east with Penrose. Awarded leave by Major Carr two days later, Cody and the Irishman moved on north to Fort Wallace without the Fifth Cavalry.

  “I suppose this is farewell, Bill,” Seamus said, holding out his hand.

  The pair of them stood on the plank walk outside Walt Mason’s hotel and saloon establishment in Sheridan, Kansas, thirteen miles northeast from Fort Wallace. In giving the civilian scouts some leave back at Fort Lyon, Carr had warned them to keep their noses clean until spring. Cody promised he would, since he had no other choice, he joked. He was journeying east to visit his wife Lulu and young daughter Arta.

  “For but a short time, Irishman. I figure we’ll have our hands full spring green-up.”

  “When the Injin ponies grow full of sass and vinegar, eh?”

  Cody nodded, climbing the steps into the lone passenger railcar. “My mules I left with Mason. He’ll keep ’em here till I can get ’em back to Carr’s outfit.”

  The young scout stood there at the end of the car, tugging his hat down against a cruel wind. “You’ll be here to ride with me come green-up, Irishman?”

  Donegan grinned, smoothing his Vandyke beard as he stepped back from the edge of the depot landing. “I’ll be here. Chances are we’ll find us some more trouble to get ourselves into—Injins or whiskey one.”

  Cody waved as he turned through the open car doorway. “Like I said when we first met: I knew I’d like you, Seamus Donegan. Knew I’d like you a lot.”

  Chapter 10

  Late March 1869

  Before Bill Cody had departed Fort Lyon on 26 February, traveling back east by way of Fort Wallace and Sheridan, Kansas, Major Eugene Carr gave written orders to his quartermaster, Lieutenant Alfred B. Taylor, to employ William F. Cody as scout at the rate of $125 per month, dating back to 5 October 1868. The effect of this order was plain. Not only was Carr allowing his scout some leave from service at a time when the general army practice was to dismiss scouts at the termination of a campaign, but the major was giving young Cody a fifty dollar per month raise as well.

  Carr plainly wanted Cody back.

  Problem was, Cody’s return to the plains would not be without its knotty problems.

  His curly blond hair had grown so long by the time he arrived in St. Louis that his young wife, Lulu, did not recognize him at first. Eager for the homecoming, he had bolted through the door of her parents’ home. Upstairs, she had recognized the commanding stomp of his gait on the entry floor. But when she swept into the parlor where he awaited her, she found a tall, deeply tanned young plainsman she could not at first claim to know. The hair falling past his shoulders, the blond Vandyke beard, those leather britches and fringed coat—it all took some getting used to for Lulu.

  But now, weeks later, as Bill Cody stepped off the Kansas-Pacific Railroad at its terminus in Sheridan, the young scout remembered how little daughter Arta had instantly recognized her papa. During his brief return from the plains, she bounced each day on his knee as he sang bawdy cavalry songs. Or, she giggled gaily as he lumbered about the house on all fours, carrying her on his back pony-fashion, bucking and snorting. Dear little Arta, the pride of Bill Cody’s heart.

  “Ho, Mason!” he called out, shoving through the door to Walt Mason’s saloon in Sheridan. Much as he missed his wife and child, it was good to be back in the places he knew best.

  “Cody? That really you?”

  He threw down the carpet valise and held out his hand. “First a shake—then fill my hand with some whiskey. I’ve been dry a month!”

  “You don’t drink in front of your wife?”

  He shook his head as he took the glass from Mason. “Never have. Doubt I ever will.” Cody tossed it back, then brought the glass down. “Another—I’m dry as a prairie wind.”

  “That first one is on me, Cody.” Mason sighed, his face screwing up. “You’ll n
eed it—with what I’ve got to tell you.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Dust it off, Mason.”

  “You know the quartermaster at Fort Wallace keeps a civilian agent on employ here in town—to watch over shipments coming in at the railhead, supplies and larder and such.”

  “I know, I know,” he said impatiently, pushing his glass forward for a third tall shot. “What’s this got to do with me, Walt?”

  “Not long after you left town for St. Louis, the quartermaster’s agent came snooping around my yard and found that army horse and mule you left with me—to care for while you were gone.”

  “What of it?”

  “The son of a bitch claimed you was supposed to leave them animals with him at the quartermaster’s corral down at the end of town.”

  Cody scratched at his beard. “Was I supposed to do that?”

  Mason straightened, growing red from the neck up. “You messed this up something good, Cody—and got that agent stirred up enough to go running off to Wallace, telling the army that you sold me them animals!”

  “Sold ’em to you?”

  “That’s right. I told the agent he was all wrong, but he didn’t want to listen, so he run off down there and told the quartermaster—fella named Lauffer—and Colonel Bankhead too—that you gone off to St. Louis after stealing army property and selling it for a profit.”

  “Goddamn, that bastard!” Cody roared, wiping droplets from his mustache with a sleeve. “So what happened—the animals still here?”

  “No, dammit! Bankhead sent some of his boys up here to seize the horse and mule from me—they come in here all full of bluster.”

  “This all on account of that weasel-eyed agent squatting down the street in his army office, right?”

  Mason nodded. “You got the picture.”

  “Pour me ’nother, Walt. And don’t be shy on keeping the bottle handy.” He picked up his valise and slung it to the top of the bar. He reached inside his vest and slapped down a single-eagle. “Here, while you’re at it—go store my things in one of your best rooms. I’ll be back shortly, and I’ll want a bed with clean sheets on it for the night. Maybe longer.”