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

How his shoulder ached when he dared move it, but move it he could. Only the cold made it hurt, he promised himself. It would get better once he got warm. He cocked and fired again at the distant targets as he recognized the approaching sound of hoofbeats. At least two more companies were hurrying to the rescue, a battalion made up of some Fifth and Third cavalry troopers under Major G. A. Gordon. Puffs of pistol smoke rose like gray tatters above the racing horsemen as they bore down on the fleeing warriors, yelling, urging on their mounts as the soldiers wheeled left, following that path the ravine slashed across the prairie. Perhaps to cut off the warriors’ retreat.

As the heat of that close and dirty fighting passed, the cold seemed to rush back in to take its place. Donegan turned, stepping back to join the others who knelt over the wounded.

Gazing to the northeast, Donegan realized Mackenzie had committed all his troops. The colonel had himself no more reserves to pitch into the fray. Which meant … if Hamilton and Davis and Wessels hadn’t got the job done by themselves—they too would have likely been overrun.

“How many you figure we got?”

Seamus looked up suddenly, finding the young soldier who had been with McKinney’s company when they were ambushed, the same young soldier who had been in full retreat before he agreed to return to the fight.

Gazing toward the ravine, Seamus quickly counted the bodies the fleeing warriors were carrying off. “Ten. Maybeso it looks like it could be a dozen.”

Around him a handful of the troopers were making sure what Cheyenne still lay on the battleground were dead. One, two shots or more as the blood lust flushed out of the young soldiers brought so close to death themselves.

“And at least eight up here they didn’t get off with,” Frank Grouard said as he came up to pound Donegan on the shoulder.

Shards of pain splintered up his neck and shot down his backbone. “Dammit, don’t do that!”

“You hit?” the half-breed asked with worry on his face as a bullet whispered over their heads.

“No. Leastways I ain’t been shot,” Seamus replied. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“Up there with that captain’s outfit at the head of the ravine,” Frank replied, pointing his rifle toward the north side of the valley. “I hear his name is Wessels.”

Turning to the youngster, Donegan said, “Twenty of ’em—we got at least twenty of ’em, Private.”

“Yeah,” the soldier whispered with a shudder. “Twenty.”

Seamus studied his face a moment, then said, “You can bloody well be proud of that fight you just come through.”

The young soldier glanced around quickly as the officers formed up platoons to lay down covering fire while a few others gathered up the dead and wounded, dragging them back out of range of those Cheyenne riflemen on the knoll.

“Things still feel a little hot here,” Grouard said, cradling the Irishman’s left wrist. “Let’s go find you a surgeon—have him take a look at your shoulder.”

Donegan shrugged him off. “Leave it be, dammit. Look at them others they’re taking off—lot worse off’n me. There’s more here for them sawbones to worry about than my bleeming shoulder.”

* The Ute.

* Trumpet on the Land, Vol. 10, The Plainsmen Series

Chapter 29

25 November 1876

The cold in her belly was far icier than the cold in that tiny room at the top of Old Bedlam.

Gripped with its sudden, startling, frightening presence, she awoke with a start in the dark, blinking … and her arm habitually reached across that narrow bed for him. To assure herself of his presence, the warmth of his bulk—but that great abiding security of his nearness was not there.

Samantha sat up with a start. Her heart beat as if it would fly out of her chest, her breath catching in her throat like a ragged scrap of muslin snagged on a rusty strand of barbed wire. Streamers of frost gathered before her face. The small stove in the corner barely glowed at all.

Then she remembered the baby. Turned. Found him wrapped in his swaddling, beneath his old blanket so worn and soft with the years and washings beyond number. The blanket she had wrapped around herself as a child, then laid away in a cedar chest until it came time that she went to Texas to join sister Rebecca, knowing that in it one day she would wrap her own babies.

She touched his face gently. How warm he was, and at such peace when he slept. What with the colic and all, they both snatched nothing more than fevered bits of rest through these days and nights of waiting.

He was seven weeks old this morning.

Slowly laying her head down once more on the pillow, Samantha pulled the babe against her as he slept. Then drew him even closer to her breasts to feel the very warmth of him, his breath against the base of her neck in tiny puffs as the cold solidified in the pit of her the way the ice had formed along each bank of the creeks, each side straining day by day for the other as the cold deepened in these first weeks of winter.