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

Try as she might to shake that cold cake of river ice congealing within her, Samantha could not escape the feeling that she had awakened of a purpose: that something terrible had just happened to him, far to the north in Indian country.

Had he fallen in battle? Oh, God!

She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears, biting her lower lip so she would not cry out and wake the child. Seamus’s son.

Had he been wounded? Was he lying somewhere in the snow, the frozen white turning red and mushy beneath him? Was he still alive—and thinking of her right at this moment? Is that why she awoke, because his soul was calling out to hers across all the miles?

Yes, she decided, and with a tiny yelp stifled deep within her throat, Samantha began to sob quietly in that dark room where the gray of dawn had just begun to intrude.

There drifted to her the muffled sounds of footsteps and stove doors opening as coals were stirred and fires stoked for the morning, concerns with coffee and breakfast—a woman’s lot, this matter of waiting out another day while her man was off to war.

He was wounded. M-mortally, she convinced herself. That is why his spirit had reached out to her in these, his final minutes. There in the cold and the dark, upon the snow, perhaps fearing that the next footsteps he heard would be those of a painted warrior who would step over him—driving a war club down between his eyes, then slashing off his scalp.

At that moment in the dark and the cold, she felt his anguish as if it were her own—shuddering in the aloneness, she and the babe more alone at this moment than in all the days Seamus had been gone.

Colder now than she could ever remember being. Here her second winter at Laramie—knowing in the core of her that if he did not return whole to her … that she would never again be warm, not for the rest of her life.

Near the mouth of the gulch where Bull Hump and the others had ambushed the pony soldiers, Yellow Eagle fell back during the fighting, his attention drawn by a small group of women and children who were trapped between the soldier scouts in the village and the soldiers being reinforced along the edge of the deep ravine.

“Yellow Eagle!” cried one of the old women, her arms extended to him, imploring. “Help us!”

He burst into a sprint, turning his back on the fighting, his lungs searing with the dry, extremely cold air. Bullets smacked into the snow around the group as they scurried a few feet in one direction, then back in the other, snow kicked up as the lead landed around them. They reminded him of a covey of small, frightened sage hens. He had to find a way out for them.

“Hurry, Yellow Eagle!” another woman called out.

In her arms she held a small child, one of its tiny feet clearly gone, a bloody pulp from the ankle down where the mother clamped with a hand to stop the bleeding.

This way and that he looked as he ran, searching, not knowing where he could lead them. There—beyond them across a dry wash was the wide mouth of another ravine. Perhaps …

Then he knew it would not work. The Wolf People scouts on the southern slope among the lodges would have a clear shot into the ravine. These women and children would all be dead before the cold sun climbed much farther in that achingly blue sky.

As he reached them, the women grabbed him, the children clustered at his bare legs, young and old alike whimpering at him like wild; frightened animals caught in a snare. Then he saw a way. Perhaps the only way.

“I will go first,” he explained, laying his hand atop an old woman’s head. Her cheeks were smeared with blood and frozen tears. “That way I can show you the way. Come with me now.”

Without a word of protest the women herded the children before them, following the young warrior as he slipped back into the mouth of the ravine and quickly retraced a few of his steps.

It was there he stopped at the narrow entrance of another coulee.

“You will go in there,” he instructed, his voice terse. “The head of the ravine runs out in the distance of an arrow shot away from here.”

“Then where do we go?” one of the women pleaded, clutching at his bare arm.

“You will climb right up to the prairie,” he told her, looking the woman straight in the eye. “And run the rest of the way to another coulee you will find at the back of that hill, where our warriors are firing down on the soldiers over by the deep ravine.”

“But … but we will be running right out in the open!” an old woman cried.

“Yes! And right under those soldiers guns at the deep ravine!” another protested.

“If you do as I tell you,” Yellow Eagle tried to calm them, “go one at a time—even the children—then the soldiers are not likely to see you. You will not draw their attention in that way. But you must go one at a time. Do you understand me?”

One of the old women nodded, then answered for all of them. “Yes.”