Free A Cold Day in Hell by Terry C. Johnston Page B

wagon tongues groaned as teamsters and green soldiers fought to control the unruly, frightened animals hitched to those ninety-four wagons. Immediately in their front the two point men, half-breed scout Robert Jackson and Sergeant Patrick Kelly, werewhipping their horses back to the column, laying low in the saddle, bullets sailing over their heads as a band of horsemen suddenly appeared behind them, racing in hot pursuit. The hat flew from Sergeant Kelly’s head in the mad chase. Immediately a warrior reined around and dismounted, picking up the spoils and planting the hat atop his braided scalp lock and feathers while the rest of the horsemen drew up and halted just inside rifle range, taunting Sharpe’s soldiers as hundreds more made their show along the nearby bluffs, hollering and screaming like devils incarnate.
    “Sergeant!” Alfred Sharpe bellowed.
    “Sir!”
    “Left front into line!” he called out the order.
    “All right, you young sappies!” the sergeant growled as he whirled on his heel. “You heard the good lieutenant yer own selves now! Left front into
line!”
    Jackson and Kelly dusted to a halt among Sharpe’s company and dismounted hurriedly. The swarthy half-breed scout collapsed to the round, ripped off one of his moccasins and held it to the sky for all to see, poking a finger through a new bullet hole. Sergeant Kelly inspected the track of a bullet that had ripped the thick shoulder of his dark-blue wool coat, the torn cloth now fluttering in the breeze.
    Otis reined up on horseback immediately behind his forward company. “Mr. Sharpe—detach with ten men and deploy to that hill on your right! The rest of your company will move forward under Mr. Conway, putting pressure on those bastards holding that bluff. Drive them from it, Mr. Conway—is that understood?”
    William Conway saluted anxiously. “Yes, sir!”
    As Conway formed up the rest of H Company, Sharpe counted off his ten and jogged to the right, slowed by the steepness of the slope of that hill where they would have a commanding field of fire against the bluff where the enemy horsemen swarmed. While Otis kept the train moving and the rest of the foot soldiers came up double-time to bring their Long Toms to bear on the Sioux, the warriors began to fall back as bullets landed among them. Still they persisted, swarming on this flank or that, moving like a stream of quicksilver where they thought the soldiers weakest. As soon as that position along the rumbling wagon train was bolstered, the horsemen would dart off to put pressure on a new position while the wagons slowly punchedsafely through the defile and made the gradual climb up to the top of the rolling prairie.
    “This is Sitting Bull’s bunch, men!” the lieutenant colonel reminded them from horseback, first here, then there, above his men—making one fine target of himself. “These are the devils who butchered Custer! We have them! By Jehovah—we have them now!”
    For more than an hour the long-range skirmishing dragged on as Otis kept his civilian and soldier teamsters urging their mules with every crack of the whip, hauling those wagons along the road as they inched closer and closer to the Yellowstone River. Behind them and in front, more and more Sioux boiled like an anthill before the coming of a thunderstorm.
    “Lookee yonder, Colonel! We got some folks coming in!”
    At the cry from one of Sharpe’s men, the lieutenant and Otis whirled, spotting the three men sprinting on foot, headed directly for the soldier line from the nearby timber that bordered the north bank of the Yellowstone.
    “Hold your men at ready, Mr. Sharpe,” Otis ordered.
    “Why—them’s soldiers!” someone shouted.
    “Bluecoats—sure enough,” Sharpe replied with a wag of his head. “But look there at the rest of them Indians riding lickety-split to cut ’em off, Colonel.”
    Right behind the sprinting trio came a mass of warriors spurring their little ponies like angry