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

Only then, from the Heights overlooking the battle, could Black Hairy Dog rain the terrible unseen power of the Arrows down upon the enemy … and those Tse-Tsehese scouts who had come to help the soldiers against their own people.

“Dammit!” Ranald S. Mackenzie hollered, shrill as could be above the tumult as he slowed the orderlies and aides around him.

From what he could now see off to his left front, the Pawnee hadn’t got into the village quick enough to shut the back door on the damned Cheyenne. They were streaming out of the far end of the lodges, fanning across that flat ground taking them toward the deep gulch and the rocky slopes at the western end of the valley.

That had been the whole purpose of sending those damned North brothers in at the head of the charge with their Pawnee! That, and making sure he didn’t get his soldiers snared in a trap.

With the way the first of his troops had failed to form up into position during their charge, he had ordered the Norths to recross to the north side of the stream. In that way Ranald felt he had those additional horsemen close by—

Suddenly the air around him erupted with pistol fire. He spun in the saddle at the crack. Nearly every one of his orderlies had their revolvers barking, smoke curling up from the muzzles of the long-barrels, smoke whipped away on the brutally cold breeze. He spun to the other side in the saddle—spotting the Cheyenne warrior who had popped up nearly under their horses’ bellies as they had passed by. The near naked body flopped back into the thick brush, quivered a moment, then lay still.

Now we’re in the thick of it.

To the right his eyes quickly bounced over the slopes above him along that low plateau stretching a mile or so against the north side of the valley.

They could be anywhere in those rocks and brush. They’ll fight us like that—one at a time from behind a tree, a clump of willow, down at the edge of a ravine. Dammit, it’s going to be a dirty job to clean them out and mop this thing up now that the whole goddamned village is scattering.

“Smith!”

He watched the young orderly nudge his horse closer.

“Yessir, General?”

“Get back there as fast as you can ride.” Mackenzie spat his words out with Gatling-gun speed. “Tell those company commanders to hurry their outfits through that neck and get across the creek! Got that?”

“Yessir!”

“Wait, Smith—I want those troops here and into the fight faster than on the double! Can you get that across to them!”

“Yessir!”

“Dismissed—now go!”

Smith hunched forward as his legs pummeled the ribs of his mount, all the while savagely sawing the reins of his horse to the side—nearly twisting the animal back on itself before it bolted away like the spring in a child’s jack-in-the-box toy when the lid came flying back.

“General!” hollered Edward Wilson.

Mackenzie turned again, expecting to find another sniper along the hillside, but instead found some of his orderlies pointing in the same direction Private Wilson indicated.

“Bastards are making for that herd, aren’t they?” the colonel growled.

Damn! For starters they hadn’t sealed off the village, so now they would have to make a long and messy fight of it. And now it looked as if those damned Pawnee had got themselves bogged down in the village with those scouts from the Red Cloud Agency—which meant none of them were rounding up the enemy’s herds.

Which just might mean some of the Cheyenne would be free to scurry after the herds themselves and drive them off before Mackenzie’s force could capture them.

If the Cheyenne got those ponies into that broken ground at the far end of the valley, there was little his men could do to get them back, short of suicide. He had to keep those warriors—maybe two dozen or more from what he could count through his field glasses before the eyepieces fogged up against his face—had to keep every last one of them from reaching that big herd grazing up toward the bench to the west.

“Lieutenant McKinney!”

“General!” The handsome twenty-nine-year-old officer came up and skidded his horse to a halt, swapping his pistol to his left hand and saluted.

“My compliments,” Mackenzie said, once more proud of this young officer he had taken under his wing since his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy in seventy-one. “You see those reds yonder?” the colonel continued. “The ones hurrying to get their hands on that pony herd?”

The Tennessee-born McKinney squinted in the misty gray of that dawn. “Yes, I see them, General.”

“Can you see more of the enemy has taken up position behind that far hill down to the left of the herd?”

“Yes—I can make them out too.”

“I want you to take your men—”

“K Troop, yessir!” McKinney interrupted enthusiastically.