Reap the Whirlwind (13 page)

“Don’t you ever think Terry’s got Custer in tow,” Donegan said.

Finerty snorted and replied, “Bet you’re right: I figure Custer’s likely got his superiors whipped into line by now!”

“No recent news of either column?” Strahorn asked.

Bourke shook his head. “That is going to be the major handicap Crook must now face: he’s simply not able to communicate with the other two columns, what with the hostiles between us.”

“But I’ve heard the major obstacle will be the hostiles themselves,” Finerty intoned. “Seems all three columns are worried about getting the wild tribes to stand and fight. So Crook’s got to be concerned that he won’t catch the villages long enough to defeat them or drive them back to their reservations.”

“The general wants them bad,” Bourke reminded his friends. “He’s angry enough to spit horseshoe nails over the fizzle on Powder River. And now he’s already received a warning from Crazy Horse through some friendlies.”

“That’s the stuff of headlines, John!” Strahorn growled. “The general is warned by Crazy Horse—and you don’t tell us so we can get a column or two of print on the front page out of it before we push off?”

Seamus went serious as the newsmen chuckled. He asked, “What’s Crazy Horse warning?”

Bourke answered, “He’s sent word to Crook—telling the soldier chief not to cross the Tongue.”

“Why not warn the general not to cross the Powder?” asked Strahorn in jest. “Or better yet—warn Crook not to cross the goddamned Platte out there! Save us all a long march driving the bastards back to their agencies!”

Finerty slapped Strahorn on the back. “And we could just stay right here near the Hog Ranch!”

“Seamus, why do you think Crazy Horse warned Crook about the Tongue?” Bourke asked, ignoring the exuberant newsman.

Donegan shrugged slightly, gazing at the far horizon. “I figure it can only mean we’ll find the hostile villages north of the Tongue. We go across—from there on out, we’ll be deep in it.”

22-26 May 1876

“Y
ou can’t be serious!” growled Sergeant John Carr.

Frank Grouard glanced over the faces of the others. Nine young soldiers. Likely none of them ever had to stand up to a charge by a Lakota war party. If he played this next hand dealt him with some savvy, Frank hoped they never would have to face such a daunting task.

“I got my orders. And you got the same,” the half-breed replied. “We were sent to the Powder to find a place for Crook to cross his soldiers.”

Carr’s face was brightening to a rose as his widening eyes bounced over his men. He sputtered, “Let’s just get our asses back to Fetterman while we still have our hair.”

Grouard thought on it a moment, the breeze nuzzling the hair down in his eyes as he took off his wide-brimmed hat. The wind would likely come up now that dawn was fast approaching. And the sun always rose early this time of the year. They had stopped to wind the horses they had punished throughout that long night escaping from the Cheyenne River crossing where they had heard the war party shooting at the blanket-wrapped dummies as they rode into the dark.

Here they halted, stopping only when Frank figured they had enough of a lead on the Lakota warriors to give
his scouting party the luxury of climbing out of the saddle for those precious few minutes. Frank knew he had little time to do what he needed to do: to find the enemy before the Lakota found them.

Grouard sighed and turned away from Carr, stuffing a moccasin into the off-hand stirrup and rising to the saddle. He adjusted the reins in his left palm. “All right, Sergeant. You win.”

“That sounds more like it, Grouard,” Carr cheered, turning to his soldiers. “Boys, let’s get mounted up for home.”

“Go on back if you’re going to,” Grouard continued, bringing his mount alongside Carr’s. “I’m pushing on to the Powder.”

“You … you mean we’ll go back without you?”

He nodded. “Just tell the general that I went on without the escort he decided to send with me. Besides, he oughtta remember I told him I didn’t need no soldiers with me in the first place.”

“Wait! Wait a minute here,” Carr called out, clipped and anxious, reaching for Grouard’s bridle to stay the half-breed. “We can’t go back if you don’t!”

“I ain’t going back, Sergeant. General pays me for doing a job. I’m gonna give the man his money’s worth.”

Carr was wagging his head in exasperation. “Even we get ourselves killed?”

“Maybe so,” Grouard replied. “But I figured ’cause you was soldiers—fighting Injuns, getting chased and shot at, was all part of your job.”

“All right—all right.” Carr snarled, wheeling on his confused detail. “Single file, men. Keep it quiet in the ranks. We’re following this black-assed half-breed son of a bitch to the Powder River. And maybe even into hell if he ain’t careful.”

Grouard let it pass as he heeled his mount into motion. He’d been forced to rub up against folks who didn’t care for his color or his breeding nearly all his life. This wasn’t the first time Frank had been asked to ride with stupid soldiers. He just prayed it wouldn’t be the last.

“What you got in you? Nigger blood?” Louie Reshaw
had asked him last winter when they were signing up to scout for Crook’s march to the Powder.

“I’ll kill him,” Grouard had said quietly to the chief of scouts, Ben Clark. “You tell him he ever talks about nigger blood to my face, behind my back—I’ll kill him and take his scalp straight to his father.”

Frank’s own father had been black-skinned, an escaped slave with a flair for talk and knack for weapons in the early part of the century. A fur trapper in those first days in the far west. One of the handful of dark-skinned ones who came west as freedmen—men like James P. Beckworth and Edward Rose. His mother was a Gros Ventre captured as a child and raised among the Shoshone, where the coffeeskinned trapper eventually made her his wife. As beaver began to sink in value, he took his family south toward the land of Brigham Young’s Saints. It wasn’t long before Frank took a different trail from his family, and set about inventing his own family tree—enough of a tall tale to convince an upstanding Mormon family to take him in as a helpless orphan.

After educating him with the finest of books and the strictest of their spiritual teachings, the Pratts tearfully let Grouard go when it came time for the fifteen-year-old to make his own way in the world. He hauled freight north into the gold camps of Idaho and Montana territories—a fitting occupation for a youngster already six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds. Not only could he handle animals and a gun with equal skill, but he could read and write as well.

It wasn’t until six years later, however—in January of 1870—that Frank’s adventure of a lifetime began.

He was carrying contract mail from Fort Hawley to Fort Peck up Montana way that hellishly cold winter, forced to point his nose into the brutal wind, when he was knocked from his horse—finding himself face-to-face with a small war party. What tribe they were, he had no way of knowing right then. But what they wanted wasn’t near so hard to figure out. They had taken his rifle and pistol, and they were leading his horse away. They began yanking on his big, heavy buffalo coat. That was the last straw. He’d die out here in the blizzard without that coat of his. So if
they killed him for fighting to keep it—it didn’t seem to make that much difference.

As a brash warrior was lowering his rifle muzzle to press it against Grouard’s chest, another warrior rode up in a swirl of snow to knock Frank’s attacker aside. After a stiff argument, then due deliberation between all thirteen of the war party, Frank’s rescuer strode up and handed Frank the reins to his horse, motioning for the prisoner to follow the war party.

All the time they were riding to the Milk River, Frank had had no idea just how important his captor was among his people. All he knew was the Lakota’s name was Sitting Bull.

For those next two years he traveled the high plains with the Hunkpapa, learning everything it took to become a Lakota warrior, learning the language, sign, and customs. Sitting Bull even bestowed a special name on his adopted son: “Grabber,” as the Hunkpapa chief recalled how Grouard had looked when they first met—like a huge bear in that buffalo-hide coat, reaching out to embrace its victim.

Little more than a year later, Frank’s idyll with the Hunkpapa was destined to take an evil turn when Grouard agreed to help the soldiers and civilian trader at Fort Peck put an end to the illegal trading going on between the warrior bands and the Red River Metis, who slipped south across the Canadian border with their contraband of weapons and whiskey.

When Sitting Bull learned of Grouard’s duplicity, the chief grew angry enough to kill the one who had betrayed his Hunkpapa. Grouard saved his hide only by seeking the safety of the great medicine man’s mother before moving on, this time going to live with Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatila just before the Long Hair’s Seventh Cavalry was protecting a party of surveyors along the Elk River
^*
in 1873. With Crazy Horse and his brother Little Hawk, Grouard roamed and hunted, raided for ponies and courted women. Then Frank fell desperately in love with He Dog’s sister.

It was at times like these, heading back into that great hunting ground he had roamed with the Lakota for six winters, that Grouard again felt that cold, empty hole ache inside him. Forced again to remember that woman—the feel and smell and taste of her skin as she grew damp each time they mated. Here again to remember the hate-filled eyes of her brother, the warrior friend of Crazy Horse … the one called He Dog.

In the end Grouard chose to leave the Lakota rather than face the coming showdown with his brother-in-law. Telling everyone he was going on a hunt by himself, Frank slipped away to the south, where he had shown up at the White Rock Reservation—the place the white man called the Red Cloud Agency. It hadn’t been long before word of this Frank Grouard and what he knew spread; last February, General George Crook had called the half-breed in for a talk.

“How long were you with the Sioux, Frank?”

“Six winters, this one, General.”

“Well—now, why don’t you tell me just why in the goddamned blazes you ended up leaving the blanket and coming back among civilized folk.”

“You’re suspicious of me?”

“No. Never was suspicious of a man I can look in the eye and he can look right back at me when I asked him a troubling question.”

Frank had never taken his eyes off Crook’s as he began to tell the general why he left the Hunkpatila. About a woman and her crazed brother named He Dog. To tell Crook that he would do anything to guide the general’s soldiers north to hunt down the warrior band of Crazy Horse.

Moving out of that copse of trees now with Carr and his platoon behind him just before daybreak, Grouard figured he had pushed them far enough west to trust in reining north once more. They rode out at a lope against the rising sun, ten soldiers following the half-breed scout who was angling back toward the east in a great arc. Heading for the Powder River.

He had a job to do for the general. Even more—Frank had something he had to do for himself. At the Reynolds’s
fight on the Powder River in the Sore-Eye Moon he had called out to Crazy Horse and He Dog, challenging them to come forth from the captured village and fight him like warriors. They had not appeared. So now it was once more up to The Grabber to lead the soldiers back into Lakota country. Back to the land of the Hunkpatila. Where he prayed he would at least be granted his chance to put his hands around the throat of the woman’s brother—He Dog.

Yes, Frank vowed. He would take untold chances to reach the Powder River crossing once more. To find a way for Crook’s soldiers to get across and plunge into that last hunting ground where the wild tribes roamed. He would do all that he had to do just so he could once more come face-to-face with the Hunkpatila warrior who had vowed to take his life.

By the time the rising sun caused the prairie light to balloon around them, Grouard led the ten soldiers across some rocky ground where their big American horses would not make tracks on the rain-softened earth, guided them down into a narrow, dry ravine, and ordered Carr to wait.

“Where you going now?” the sergeant demanded.

“I’ll be back. Soon.”

To the side of a hill, just below the crest, Frank crawled on his belly and peered between the new grass, damp and heady with the richness of the new season. After a long time he saw them. The Lakota scouts had run across the iron-shod hoofprints where he had led the soldiers out of the creekbed. In the distance he could see them moving along slowly, watching the trail the eleven had left behind in making their escape.

He hoped this rocky ground the soldiers had just crossed would be enough to throw the war party off. And prayed the iron horseshoes had not scraped the rocks, leaving behind the telltale scar of a white man’s passing.

He held them in that ravine for the rest of the day, the weary soldiers at the ready should their trail be discovered. Twilight brought a cool breeze that nuzzled its way down the low places, past the soldiers who were dozing, unable to fight sleep any longer. Frank kept himself awake thinking on the woman, wondering about her—had she remarried?
What of the child she said she carried in her belly just before he left? His child? He might well be a father by now.