Free Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 by Terry C. Johnston Page A

Gettysburg?” Marr asked.
    Glover kept his eyes long on the flames at his feet before answering. “It was my first real … fight. Everything before that’d been just a skirmish. Gettysburg … changed everything for me—changed my whole life.”
    â€œWasn’t a man who walked away from that fight not changed,” Seamus Donegan said quietly. “God help the generals who would lead armies into something like that hell ever again.”
    â€œYou enjoyed cavalry, I take it,” White asked, pointing with the stem of his pipe at the yellow stripe along Donegan’s gray trousers.
    â€œAlways loved the feel of a good horse beneath me.”
    â€œYou’re quite a chunk of it,” White said with a smile. The skin on his face shifted merrily, like a linen sheet rumpled across old bedsprings. “It’d take a good horse to stay beneath you, Irishman!”
    Seamus chuckled lightly, eyes on the fire and his mind back East. “Had several good horses shot out from under me, Reverend. Each one I missed worst than the last. Most cavalry sojurs worth their salt know part of being a horse-sojur means a horse ofttimes will take a bullet meant for the rider. Lay down its life for its rider—like few friends I’ve known in my short time on this sweet earth. Can’t say there’s many men would trade places with Seamus Donegan when it came to facing the muzzles of Confederate artillery.”
    â€œYou were injured in the war?” White leaned forward, the bald spot atop his head gleaming in a hazy streamer of sunlight.
    â€œHorses, Reverend.” the Irishman didn’t rise to the bait. “Horses is how the cap’n here and me come to know one another. One trail after another I took when peace came and me being mustered out last winter. Found myself in Missouri. The idea of heading west struck me as the best devilment I could get myself into. Wandering as a man alone is apt to do. The cap’n was buying horses for the army in Kansas. He spotted mine and made an offer right there on the streets of Jefferson City.”
    â€œTop dollar too!” Marr added with a smile.
    â€œThis old man knows good horseflesh when he sees it.”
    â€œBut Donegan wouldn’t sell me his mount. Truth be, if I’d bought that horse from him, the animal never would’ve seen the inside of any army stable. Butchers, the army can be with their mounts. Ah, Donegan had himself a prize there.” Marr scratched at his short-cropped salt-and-pepper whiskers before he swept his long, shoulder-length gray hair from his collar.
    â€œYou bought the horse after the war, Seamus?” White inquired.
    â€œNo.” Donegan shook his head and glanced round at them all. “I won it—shall we say.”
    â€œA game of chance, perhaps. A race—winner take all?”
    â€œAye, Reverend. A game of chance. And the winner did take all,” Donegan spoke barely above a hoarse whisper, kneading his big hands on the greasy knees of his gray britches. He swallowed, not wanting to tell. Knowing he would. “A Confederate cavalry officer once rode that big gray of mine.”
    â€œThe spoils of war,” White offered, his hand waving expansively in the air, the long, thick-knuckled fingers working like ill-fitting sausages at the end of his hand. “Perfectly sensible. He turned over his sword and thoroughbred to the victor of the engagement.”
    Donegan shook his head. “Not as clean and tidy as all that, Reverend. But then, war never is, is it? No, sir. That fine Johnnie officer was a true swordsman. He drew first blood. I’ll wear his saber scar across my back for the rest of me days.”
    White slowly pulled the pipe from his thin lips, then raked a hand back through one side of his gray hair. His bald head reminded Seamus of the walk leading up from the road to his mother’s house in County Kilkenny. Worn smooth between the