Reap the Whirlwind (4 page)

“It seems the soldiers wish to make war on the Shahiyena,” one of the old Lakota had argued. Others nodded or grunted their agreement. “The soldiers attacked a Shahiyena camp. We know of no Miniconjou, no Sans Arc, no Blackfoot or Hunkpapa village attacked by soldiers. I think we should give the Shahiyena what we can: food, clothing, blankets, and lodges. Then let them go on their way.”

“Yes,” another voice assented. “The soldiers must be looking for the Shahiyena.”

So it had made the heart of Crazy Horse soar when He Dog had stood suddenly, glowering at all the small-hearted among them.

“I for one will not send the Shahiyena on their way!”
he had bellowed over their heads. “I for one will stand beside the warriors of the Shahiyena and fight the white man. When he sends his soldiers against any band wintering in these hunting grounds, he sends his soldiers against us all!”

There had come a great commotion of muttering and argument.

But then Crazy Horse had stood, to take his place alongside He Dog. To stand and be counted among the resistance.

“The Shahiyena came this far north only to hunt for meat and to visit us,” the Horse said, wanting to whip them with his words just the way a man would lash a pony with his rawhide quirt. “They are like cousins. Let any man among you tell me these Shahiyena are not like our own family.”

No one had dared speak. The war chief’s words had begun to shame them, to sting as they landed about that war council.

And in the end, that ring of warriors, old and young, had decided to march north to the Chalk Buttes where the Hunkpapa of Sitting Bull camped. These Hunkpapa numbered more than any of the other seven lodge fires of the Lakota nation. Surely the Hunkpatila should visit with the Hunkpapa and seek the wisdom of the great medicine man on so weighty a subject as forming an alliance with the Shahiyena.

“We will go north to counsel with Sitting Bull,” they decided.

“And remember,” Crazy Horse had told them with a smile on his face, “remember what Sitting Bull told our families and relations still on the reservations before last winter.”

The heads had nodded, and there had been much murmuring among that war council.

“He told them all to come join him,” the Horse continued. “Told them to come north because there would be good fighting, plenty of coups to be earned and guns to be taken from the soldiers we would defeat in battle. Plenty of big American horses. Come north, he told everyone. Come north for one last, big fight!”

The lodge had rocked with cheering and celebration as they remembered the words of the great Hunkpapa medicine man who had issued his call for the many bands to gather about him for the coming season of fighting and warfare and blood.

Then Crazy Horse had hushed them, and when the lodge had quieted once more, he continued.

“I for one am glad that Three Stars did not wait until the Season of Fat Horses to make war on any of us. I am glad that he struck early. Glad I am, for now we have the chance to see who is for giving in to the white man, and who is for fighting the soldiers. No more can any of you walk a thin line—you must plant your feet on one side or the other. The decision seems as clear to me as the waters rushing down from the mountain snowfields come spring runoff. There are but two paths to choose. Each of you must select the path your feet will take.”

“What path does Crazy Horse walk now?” He Dog had asked, his eyes misting with respect and courage as they gazed upon his Hunkpatila war chief.

“The path I have always taken,” he had responded in that hushed assembly. “Since the white man wants war … we will give him a fight he will never forget.”

Mid-May 1876

“I
’ll be wanting you to wash your pecker off with
something, dearie.”

For a fleeting moment John Finerty studied the faded rose blushing the cheeks of the painted whore standing in what was left of the dim, late-afternoon light sneaking through a smoky windowpane into the narrow crib where the older woman plied her trade of earthly pleasures here on the high plains. He gazed longingly at those big, fleshy breasts spilling like pale, rounded melons from the top of her faded bustiere, their flattened nipples a deep, purplish hue in the growing shadows.

“That what you expect of me, is it now? To wash myself off before you’ll jump in this bed to go a dance with me?” He looked down at the swelling flesh he held absently in his hand.

She stepped over to him with a scrap of rag she had wrung out in the cracked china bowl splattered with faded tulips that sat sublimely upon a pine box where the woman stored her working clothes: bloomers and camisoles, stockings and an extra garter hung on a crooked nail.

“You’ll want me to wash you off, you will,” she told him huskily. “Once I get started, you’ll wonder why no
other whore ever washed your sweet pecker before they humped you.”

Pushing Finerty’s hand aside, she took a firm hold of his penis, giggling when it jumped and swelled beneath her deft touch. Then she began to stroke it as gently as she could with the scrap of coarse cloth. Cool as the damp rag was, Finerty sensed heat rising in his cock, feeling it seep into his groin, creeping into his inner core—he groaned and lay back atop the musty comforter, his legs dangling off the side of her narrow rope-and-tick bed.

“You do much more of that, my love,” he told the chippie, “I won’t last long enough to get it inside you.”

Obediently she stopped her washing, bent over him, and kissed the swollen head of his penis. “No worry now, dearie. I know tricks that can make a man last a long night through if I’ve a mind to. Don’t you go fretting none—sweet Ellie here is going to make sure when you fire your cannon off that you’re firing it where it will do us both some good.”

And with that she straightened and flung the rag back toward the china bowl, where it splashed the murky water onto the pine box and some of her underthings, dislodging the garter hung on the crooked nail. Squirming quickly out of her bloomers, she came to stand between his legs, halfnaked.

Finerty’s eyes widened, finding himself staring at the dark triangle of curly, matted hair that stood out like a stark delta against her alabaster skin.

Letting him rake his eyes over her, the whore stood there wearing those tall stockings held up with faded, torn garters, as well as the bustiere she had laced around her ribs, the whalebone stays climbing in a strain of delight from her navel to support those fleshy melons that jiggled as she kneed her way onto the bed, looming over him like two pale, winking moons. Taking his flesh in one hand, the whore guided him center. At long last she eased down on the full length of him.

Groaning a bit louder now, Finerty closed his eyes and thrust his hips up at the woman, seeking to plant himself even deeper.

“Here, dearie—put your hands to work on these,” she
whispered, hot-breathed, at his ear, then took both his hands and brought them to cup her breasts. “I likes a man who licks and sucks on my breasts while he’s diddling me with his hot pecker.”

“Anything—” he muttered, knowing he wasn’t going to last much longer, couldn’t possibly last. “Anything you want.”

Then she was nuzzling his neck, chewing the long strap of muscle with those browned teeth of hers, biting all the way up to his ear. Finerty was enjoying this more than he could ever remember enjoying a poke before.

He swallowed hard. “How … how long you got with me today?”

“How long you want with me, dearie?”

“Again,” he replied low and husky, urgently. “Least one more time.”

“You close to shooting, ain’cha?”

“Re … real close,” he got the words out, struggling to talk while concentrating on tightening himself off so he would not climax at just that moment.

Then she had a hand behind her, reaching between his legs, wrapping some fingers about his scrotum, pulling on it gently, holding it, squeezed like that, long and sure—so sure that Finerty suddenly believed that he could actually relax a bit.

“We can take all night if you want to, love,” she purred at his ear, over his face, licking his eyelids, her breath heavily scented with the bitters she preferred to drink while they had been out front nuzzling at a smoky table near the bar.

Finerty, on the other hand, had taken his whiskey straight since they had no rye in this wilderness.

“Young, handsome lad like yourself,” she went on at his ear, nibbling and licking and whispering, “why—it could damn well take all night with my new, randy friend from … where’d you say you was from again, dearie?”

“Chi—Chicago,” John answered, thrusting himself up at her. He sensed her shudder for a moment, and for the second time since he had come back here to this chippie’s cramped crib at the back of the Hog Ranch, Finerty believed he would really enjoy this one he had picked.

By the time he had found his way across from the fort, she and another were all he had to choose from while the rest were occupied. Business was good now, good and busy, what with the infantry and cavalry units coming in across the past few days, soldiers and packers and wagon teamsters. They all had to be serviced. So he had looked over the two, then motioned her over to his table, peering at the deep, shadowy crevice of cleavage she hung before him, not much left to the imagination by that threadbare dressing gown she had tied about her. There was but a glimpse of the bustiere. And that had excited him all the more.

He should enjoy her, enjoy this, enjoy the sweating, grunting, heaving beast with two backs after all. He had all of the Irishman’s heart for the ladies—any lady, in fact, if his brief history of his coming to manhood and the few years hence was any testimony. And John Finerty surely had all the Hibernian’s fondness for getting himself into scrapes, be they scrapes due to his love of rye whiskey, or troubles come of the love for a woman. Still, it had been much too long since he had fit his pecker inside the anatomy of some warm wench. Hell, he hadn’t been planted inside any wench at all since departing that city of big shoulders by the lake.

Truth of the matter was, it had simply taken him too damned long getting west from Chicago to this godforsaken wilderness post the army called Fort Fetterman.

“You’re the young man Clint Snowden recommended for this trip to the Plains?” asked the tall, white-haired handsome man of some sixty years.

John Finerty scraped his hat from his head and nodded. “Yes. I am, Mr. Storey.”

“Come in, and sit,” Wilbur Storey replied, motioning to an empty chair beside his big desk here in the expansive office several stories up from the rainy streets of Chicago that morning in late April. The old man with expressive, granitelike wrinkles chiseled in a pair of rivulets down his cheeks stroked that white beard and smiled genuinely as he went around the desk to take a seat himself.

Finerty marveled that the old man was so tall. Not a bit of stoop. Damned well over the hill, and he still looked
spry enough to arm-wrestle with any of the boys down at the loading dock. And bloody handsome too, despite the march of years that told on Storey’s face.

“How soon can you be ready?” Storey said, striking right to the point without formalities.

John had heard of just this characteristic about his new employer. Also heard that Storey was a native of Vermont and an ardent, lifelong Democrat who had opposed Abraham Lincoln every step of the way in the President’s prosecution of the Civil War.

“I suppose I can be ready whenever you decide for me to be, sir,” the Irishman answered.

“You’ll need your outfit first,” Storey replied perfunctorily as he pulled a pad to the center of the desk and carefully extracted a pencil from a marble holder, where more than a dozen swirled like the radiating petals of a yellow daisy. He licked the point and began writing. “Better to get some of what you need here—perhaps all, come to think on it. Things get pretty pricey out there in the west, I’ll bet you.”

“Yes, sir,” John replied. Then cursed himself for the stupid, childlike sound of it here in the office of the owner of the Chicago
Times.
Still, Storey did not look up from his work over the pad, nor did the man’s face register any ridicule despite Finerty’s burning embarrassment.

“You’re going with Crook’s column, you know that, don’t you?”

When John did not answer, struck dumb with surprise at the question, Storey eventually looked up.

“General George Crook is his name. A real goddamned hero of the Apache campaigns. A good man to boot.” Storey went back to scratching across his pad. “A good man, George Crook is.”

“Sir?” It sounded a little weak and squeaky. Not at all like Finerty’s voice.

“Yes?”

“I … I had believed I was going to march with Custer, Mr. Storey.”

“Now, why would you think that?”

“Mr. Snowden, my … your city editor—”

“Snowden doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with
assigning war correspondents, Mr. Finerty.” He pointed the pencil between the reporter’s eyes. “That’s my job. Always has been. Long as I own this paper, it always will be my job.”