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

“Let that be a lesson to any of you!” Left-handed Wolf shouted. “We have enough enemies to fight out there, and there, and over there too. We must not make enemies of our strong-hearted people!” Then he turned to Beaver Dam. “Go yonder to the high ridge west of the village. You will find the women and our children there. Among our families you will be safe from soft-headed fools like Gypsum.”

For a moment Beaver Dam glanced at Young Two Moon, as if seeking permission.

Young Two Moon nodded, telling the youngster, “Yes. Go ahead. You will be fine there. Help the women pile up rocks at the breastworks.”

Without another word the young man leaped atop his cream-colored pony and hurried away to the west. In his wake Gypsum stood shakily, his angry eyes filled with tears of rage and loss.

“This day two sons have been taken from me, and I do not know where I can find my wife!” Then he shook off the two warriors holding his arms. “Tell me, Left-handed Wolf: how is it you find it so easy to know your friends from your enemies when they are both Tse-Tsehese?”

“No matter the color of his skin or how he wears his hair,” the other warrior replied, “it is always easy to tell a friend from an enemy.”

“No,” Young Two Moon said sadly. “I do not think it is so easy anymore, Uncle. Even if they are Tse-Tsehese, I do not think it will ever again be easy to tell a friend from an enemy.”

* Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota leader.

Chapter 32

25 November 1876

“I never would’ve been a man to put no money on it, Irishman” Frank Grouard declared with a wag of his head. “I’d figured all along them Lakota and Cheyenne scouts of Mackenzie’s would’ve run off—had it figured they’d never stay put when the fighting got dirty. Just not the way of an Injun.”

Down below them along the stream, among the willow, and in the midst of the uppermost fringe of lodges those scouts enlisted from Red Cloud’s agency had taken their places: dutifully following the orders of the officers as they dug in for the long haul this fight was turning out to be.

“Ain’t no man here knows better’n you, Frank,” Seamus replied, “just what a warrior will do to earn himself a little coup and make off with a lot of plunder.”

“Heap ponies!” Grouard roared, pounding his chest once with a fist as he played the role. “Me want heap ponies!”

“Shit,” growled Baptiste Pourier with mock indignation, “if that’s all you ever wanted—why, we could’ve quit this goddamned soldiering business long ago and be living fat and sleek with our women right about now!”

Against the far northern rimrocks some renewed gunfire rattled across the valley.

“How ’bout you, Seamus?” Grouard asked. “Now you got a family started—you gonna get straight in your head and quit this soldiering business?”

For a moment the Irishman stared at the side of the knoll where the Cheyenne warriors milled about upon what ponies they still possessed or had managed to recapture during the morning. “Can’t say for certain, fellas,” he admitted. “Don’t know how it is for you both. But looking back on my own life now—seems soldiering is about the only thing I ever done. Besides a good start on wenching and drinking as soon as I stood tail enough!”

All three snorted with laughter, then Donegan continued. “Soldiering is about all I’ve done … from the time I slick-talked myself into the Army of the Potomac because I wasn’t near old enough. Been fighting ever since, it seems.”

Donegan tried to cipher it, pulling number down from numbers—just the way the village priest had started to teach all the young boys to maul over their arithmetic—but none of it rightly made sense just then. For some reason he simply felt it was too damned long ago when he first took up fighting in the rebellion of the southern states. Could it really be closing on a quarter of a century of carrying arms?

“More’n … better’n twenty-some years now,” he answered softly, in awe himself at the passage of time.

He had been a fighting man of one description or another for more than half his life. And what had he to show for it? Nothing at all like other men who owned a piece of ground—opening its breast every spring and pulling sustenance from it every fall. Men like his uncle Ian. Still others preferred a more tidy existence tending a shop or mercantile, even as a licensed sutler.

Yet there always seemed to be a few … footloose they were ofttimes called by the more rooted around them. No tilled plot of ground nor four walls and a roof would ever hold them. Men like that merry leprechaun of an uncle, Liam O’Roarke.

“So, tell me, Seamus—what the hell you fix on doing when we get these Injuns back to their agencies and the soldiers all go home?” Big Bat asked.

“Maybe I’ll finally get to scratch around for a little gold, like I always intended,” Donegan answered. “Don’t think I’d make much of a farmer. Not no shopkeeper neither.”