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

“There—that’s the bunch that worries me,” Mackenzie said, pointing his gauntleted arm to the southwest.

“Along the brow of that hill?” Seamus asked, squinting into the growing light reflected off the bright and crusty snow.

“They’re covering the retreat of their women, and harassing our men already in among the lodges, securing the village.”

“But from the looks of things,” Donegan replied, seeing the troopers formed up and beginning to move out, “you’ll have that under control in short time.”

“That’s McKinney’s troop—they’re going to have a field day of it!” the colonel said enthusiastically.

“May I join them?”

“By all means, Irishman,” Mackenzie answered. “Get your licks in before there’s nothing more than some mopping up—by all means!”

“General!” Seamus whooped, his adrenaline bubbling as he saluted before wheeling away at a gallop.

He had covered most of that gently rolling, level ground, easing the bay into a full-out gallop to reach the tail roots of the last of McKinney’s men racing forward in a tight column of fours, pistols drawn up, elbows bent, at the ready—when he saw the lieutenant suddenly rise in his stirrups, waving, reining to the side at the sudden appearance of that lip of a dark scar slashed across the white prairie.

At the next moment those first four troopers behind McKinney immediately sawed to the right, two dozen—maybe as many as thirty—Cheyenne warriors sprang out of the ground directly in front of the soldiers.

Right out of the bloody ground!

For that instant Donegan’s mind grappled with it, knowing the enemy must have hidden themselves down in that twenty-foot-deep ravine so well that the soldiers were powerless to see the enemy until they were right upon them.

As the second group of four struggled to wheel right, they jammed into McKinney’s first four as the shots exploded into them, point-blank.

His breath frozen in his chest, Donegan watched the muzzles of those Cheyenne rifles spit bright-orange jets of flame, illuminating the dawn mist, gray gun smoke wisping up from the lip of that ravine to congeal over the warriors’ heads as they fired more shots into the confused ranks.

Then the rest of McKinney’s troopers were all thrust together: many of M Troop’s horses suddenly reared at the gunshots and the Cheyenne’s cries, fighting their riders who twisted on their reins. The mounts corkscrewed about on their hind legs, pitching backward wildly with forelegs slashing the air, hurtling their riders off to the side as the sound of those deadly volleys rumbled across the flat ground toward the north slope.

As Seamus leaped off his horse, dragging the Winchester over the saddle with him, he watched McKinney’s horse go down in a twisted heap, flinging its rider off toward the edge of the ravine. While the Irishman crouched forward on his knees, he fired, then chambered another cartridge.

Beyond him the young captain struggled valiantly to one elbow atop that snow quickly turning crimson beneath him, spitting blood as he stared for a moment down at the glove he slowly took away from one of his half-dozen wounds, finding it slicked with red, then collapsed beside the animal wheezing its last.

The muzzles from those countless Indian rifles puffed with red flames again as most of the other horses struggled up on their legs, tearing off in panic and terror to the four winds, their hooves throwing up clods of frozen snow behind them. One by one McKinney’s fallen got to hands and knees, some able to do no more than claw themselves away on their bellies.

Then Seamus became aware of the distant roar of more gunfire coming from that nearby knoll, where more warriors lay now, all those guns trained down at these fallen soldiers like ducks in a tiny backwoods pond. Beneath the rattle and echo of near and distant gunfire, on the cold wind floated the cries of the wounded and the dying.

He chambered and fired into the teeth of those screaming Cheyenne bristling along the rim of the ravine.

Five of McKinney’s troopers moved, some better than the others, as most of those not hit circled and milled. In their midst Second Lieutenant Harrison G. Otis attempted to regain control and order over M Troop. Most had all they could handle struggling against their balky horses, at the same time attempting to fire their pistols down at the side of that ravine where the Cheyenne had waited, and waited … until the last moment—then burst up to shoot point-blank, all but under the bellies of the big American horses.

Two of the soldiers did not move, sprawled on the snow like some dark insects squashed there, their legs and arms akimbo. Just a few yards back from them the first of the mortally wounded horses were collapsing at last, one already flopping down, and the second going to its knees, then keeling over to its side, where all four legs thrashed until there was no movement in that air so quickly stinking of death, and blood, and the acrid smell of burned black powder.