Lay the Mountains Low (4 page)

How his heart had frozen when the fat one called over an old man—pointing to the clump of willow where McCarthy lay hidden. He had pulled out his service revolver and prepared to take as many of them with him as he could before he was killed. But … search as he did, the old man didn't spot him. He rode off with the woman.

In the quiet where he could hear his own heart surging in his ears, McCarthy quickly tore off his campaign hat, slipped out of his navy blue fatigue blouse with its telltale gold stripes. If he'd dared to tug off his light blue wool britches with their wide brassy stripe running down the outside … but he knew he would need them in his run for freedom. Wasn't no man going to make it to the settlements near naked!

Besides the gift of those knee-high boots, sutler Rudolph had presented the sergeant with a pair of leather gloves and a new felt hat—gray as the skies had been the last three days.

“You're a honest-to-God hero,” Rudolph had announced to the crowd when he presented his gifts to the newly arrived McCarthy. “All you soldiers are heroes to us!”

And then the gathering of some forty men, women, and children huddled behind an upright stockade, which they had erected right around Grange Hall, huzzahed as if they had just been delivered from the hoary grip of death itself. Just the way Michael McCarthy had been scooped up by some angel and carried out of that valley of death, deposited at the top of White Bird divide, where he made three wrong turns and ended up wandering the heights for far longer than he should have.

When those two soldiers brought the ravenous McCarthy to the barricades, his nose caught the whiff of an enticing perfume. Someone had beans on the boil. “White
dodgers!” he had exclaimed as he vaulted off the back end of that tired cavalry horse, lumbering across the breastworks for that seductive pot. First things first. He'd look for familiar faces from his H Company once his belly was full. Enough time to make reacquaintance with his weeds what made it out of that Injun fight with their hides intact.

“Sweet, sweet Joseph and Mary,” he murmured again, clenching his eyes as he rocked onto his knees, preparing to roll up his blankets. Would he never forget the sight of Corporal Roman D. Lee being dragged from his horse, the entire front of his blue britches turned black with blood gushing from that bullet to the groin? Would he ever be able to blot out the nightmare of watching Lee stumble away from his handlers like a drunken sailor newly arrived on dry land, wandering off into that milling, confusing, maddening maze of confused men and frightened horses? Would he never be rid of watching the corporal unknowingly weave and lunge on down that emerald grassy slope—right for the enemy's lines?

At sundown each of the last two nights, Second Lieutenant William Russell Parnell had come whistling up the company, calling out men to post a rotation for night guard. Too much darkness, too much quiet, too damned much time each night on watch … time alone to think and remember.

He took a deep breath and pushed an unruly lock of his dark auburn hair from his eyes, telling himself such haunting was the lot of a soldier. Be he an Irishman like McCarthy or one of those pig-swilling Germans, a soldier was bound to lose friends. Maybeso, it wasn't a good thing for a sergeant to have him any friends. Only officers above him and enlisted boyos below. Maybe there was a damned good reason officers never talked to their weeds—communicating only through the noncoms like McCarthy. That way an officer didn't have to care who was thrown into the fray, who would never ride back with the company.

When McCarthy gave orders to H Company, it was with a voice still very thick with that Newfoundland Irish heritage of his. As soon as he was old enough to leave home
and strike out on his own, McCarthy had wandered south from Canada, spending a short time in Vermont before migrating down to Boston. In that good Irish town he had knocked around a bit before he landed steady work as a printer's devil. A year later when the Civil War broke out, he was only fifteen—too young to enlist, having to content himself by following the war with every new edition or extra of the Boston paper.

By the time the Southern states had been defeated and herded back into the Union fold, McCarthy had wearied of the acrid stench of printer's ink etching every wrinkle and crevice of his hands, chuffing down the street to inscribe his mark on a five-year enlistment. Sending him west to Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, the army trained him to be a horseman, then promptly shipped him off to a First Cavalry outfit down near the Mexican border to fight Apaches. Wasn't long before they transferred McCarthy, now wearing a corporal's stripes, along with some of his mates, all hustled north to Oregon country, where they ended up chasing half a hundred poor Modocs around and through the Lava Beds for the better part of a year.

Fact was, McCarthy had been in on the chase and capture of the Modoc leader, Captain Jack. A heart-wrenching tragedy that was, McCarthy thought many times since—how the chief's friends, advisers, and headmen had all turned on him. Sad, too, that most of those back-stabbing traitors went free while Jack swung at the end of a short rope.

He smelled tobacco all of a sudden. McCarthy glanced at the knot of men gathered on their haunches around a small fire, most of their number smoking their first bowl of the day. His heart seized with the sudden recollection of their blind descent into the valley of the White Bird behind Perry, ordered to halt and wait until it was light enough to make their advance on the village. Up and down the ranks of those two companies, five officers, and more than a dozen Nez Perce friendlies conscripted as trackers the order was given that no pipes be lit.

Later, as the horses snuffled and the men grumbled every time they were nudged to keep them awake in the cold, damp darkness, McCarthy spotted the bright, minute flare of the sulphur-headed lucifer. The sergeant had bounded over, ready to throttle and choke the stupid weed who was trying to light his goddamned pipe.

The match had flared for but the space of three heartbeats before McCarthy got it extinguished. Then thought nothing more of it until they all heard the off-key, muffled call of a coyote. Its eerie, echoing cry had raised the reddish hair on the back of his neck. A few of the old files had known right then what was in store for them come first light.

That weren't no coyote. Some Nez Perce sentry had seen the bloody burning match … and the bastards knew the soldiers had come for them—

“Sergeant! Sergeant!” called Trumpeter Frank A. Marshall as the soldier came trotting up the end of Grangeville's one long street, breathless.

As Marshall skidded to a halt right at McCarthy's toes, out of the trees to their left stepped the big German sergeant, Isidor Schneider. McCarthy liked the man—no matter that it was hard for McCarthy to understand his thick accent at times. Michael counted on the thick-hammed German to help him run H Company smoothly.

“Suck a breath, Private,” the short, slim McCarthy reminded the trumpeter. “And tell me what orders you've got for us this fine morning.”

McCarthy steeled himself, not sure he was ready for another of those assignments the officers always handed him alone—like picking a squad of steady men and holding off the screaming red heathens from that outcropping of rocks while the rest of Perry's command skeedaddled from the battlefield like banshees were nipping at their heels. Another god-blame-it suicide run—

“We're g-going b-back, Sergeant.”

As a dozen or more of H Company's green-broke shave-tail recruits inched closer, Farrier John Drugan lunged to a
stop at Marshall's elbow. “Back? Whooo-eee! We're going back to our post?”

Marshall shook his head and swallowed, still struggling to catch his breath from his sprint over with the latest from Perry's headquarters.

“We're not going back to the fort?” McCarthy asked, sweeping one of the droopy, unkempt ends of his shaggy reddish-brown mustache away from his lips suddenly gone dry.

“No, Sergeant,” the trumpeter confirmed steadily.

Michael was afraid to ask. He thought of friends and fellow soldiers already waiting for him at Fiddler's Green—the place in the great beyond where every good horse soldier went when his duty roster was up.

A drop of cold sweat slowly spilled down the course of McCarthy's spine, oozing into the crack of his ass. “Back where, Private?”

Pasty-faced, Marshall turned, pointed off to the southwest, toward the White Bird divide. “Going back … to the b-battlefield.”

J
UNE
21, 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

—

An Indian War in Idaho.

—

Twenty-Nine Settlers Killed—
The Troops Pursuing.

—

IDAHO.

—

Still Another Indian War.

WASHINGTON, June 20.—The following dispatch has been received by the commissioner of Indian affairs from the Nez Perces agency, Idaho: The non-treaty Indians commenced hostilities on the 14th inst. Up to date, the 16th, twenty-nine settlers are reported murdered, and four Indians killed. Gen. Howard is here in command. The hostiles are about one hundred strong. They are reported to have gone to the Solomon river country and are making for the Weiser Geysers, in southern Idaho. Troops are in pursuit twelve hours behind. The reservation Indians are true to the government. A company is formed under the head chief, and is protecting the settlement of Kamarah and employees.

[Signed] WATKINS, Inspector, and
Monteith, Indian Agent

H
E HAD FOUGHT AGAINST THE CREAM OF THE CONFEDER
acy and chased, then hung, the leaders of the Modoc insurrection in southern Oregon years ago. So why did he find himself dreading this ride down into the canyon of White Bird Creek the way a frightened schoolboy would fear a midnight trek to a cemetery?

Deep in the marrow of him, Captain David Perry knew that what awaited him on that abandoned battlefield was far worse than anything a schoolboy might encounter in some haunted graveyard. Not only would he be forced to view the bloated, contorted bodies of those men he had led into the valley at dawn on the seventeenth of June, but he was coming to believe that he just might confront the restless, disembodied spirits of those soldiers who would forever walk that bloody ground.

If Brigadier General Howard, even that damnable, selfserving coward Trimble, didn't utter a public charge about his debacle in the valley of the White Bird, then Perry was afraid his greatest fear would come to pass: The ghosts of those men sacrificed to the Nez Perce would shriek aloud their charges of incompetence and timidity … if not outright cowardice.

Oh, the hours and days he had brooded over every deployment of his forces, every action of his company commanders, each tiny reaction of his own during the short, fierce fight since that damp morning when he had been tested and somehow found wanting. Had he committed his one-hundred-man force to battle without trustworthy intelligence, taking only the word of the civilian volunteers that the Nez Perce wouldn't dare stand and fight?

David Perry, post commander at nearby Fort Lapwai, simply could not shake the unrelenting sleeplessness his doubts awakened within his most private soul, nor rid himself of the constant horror he saw behind his eyelids every time he shut his eyes and attempted to squeeze out the respite of a little rest from each endless night. He wondered if he would ever find a way to rid himself of this haunting.

Like an arrow a man would release into the air, aimed directly overhead—an arrow that might well fall back toward earth to wound or even kill that bowman—Perry understood his hasty, ill-considered journey into the White Bird Canyon would one day return to be his undoing. But the captain fervently prayed this would not be that day.

Before he led his men south from Grangeville that
Thursday morning, the twenty-first of June, Perry confided in those fellow officers who, with him, had survived their humiliating defeat on the White Bird.

“We'll make a reconnaissance as far as the top of the divide,” he instructed them. “And stop where we began to descend into the valley on the seventeenth … halting where we can view the battlefield at a distance.”

“We best keep our eyes skinned for them redskins,” injected Arthur Chapman, a local rancher who was better known as Ad, bastardized from “Admiral,” a name bestowed upon him for his uncanny ability to handle small craft on the region's swollen, raging rivers.

Perry turned to peer at that volunteer scout coming to a stop within the ring of officers. “You volunteering to lead us back across the ridge, Mr. Chapman?”

The tall civilian appeared to weigh that briefly, his eyes darting among the other soldiers who stood at Perry's elbows. Pushing some black hair out of his eyes, Chapman sighed. “I figger it's the decent thing to do, Colonel,” he explained, using Perry's brevet, or honorary, rank earned during the Civil War. “But mind you, if them Injuns whupped us and drove your soldiers off once, they sure as hell can wipe you out now—they catch us in the open again.”