Free Lay the Mountains Low by Terry C. Johnston

awake, rolling out to join two civilians at the west wall where they had a low fire going, coffee warmed to see them through their watch.
    â€œWilliam Watson’s the name,” the older man introduced himself with a big hand.
    The sergeant replied, “I heard you’re the one knowed how to build this fort.”
    â€œThat’s right. Got all my learning during the war,” Watson explained.
    â€œYour education come in handy here,” McCarthy said, admiring the sturdiness of the timbers the men had sunk into three-foot-deep trenches, then back-filled. “Can’t see how the bloody h’athens could’ve broke in here on you.”
    Norman Gould said, “Bill here, he saw to it we’d get all the women and young’uns into the stone house back yonder if the bastards broke over the walls.”
    â€œWe made the house our powder magazine,” Watson explained, jabbing a thumb toward the structure. “Blow up everything—everyone, too—before the Nez Perce got their hands on ’em.”
    â€œDidn’t know how long we’d have to hold out,” George Greer said. “Word was that General Howard was somewhere in the field, but we didn’t know just where you soldiers was, or when you’d get here to us.”
    â€œWasn’t the general moved out first,” McCarthy explained dolefully. “Maybe it had been Howard what led us down into White Bird ’stead of Colonel Perry his cowardly self there’d be more of me friends alive to greet this very morning.”
    The coffee was good, but the sun that broke over the hills that morning felt even better. Trimble had McCarthy tell the men that H Company would be spending a day of rest at Slate Creek—recruiting their horses and gathering strength for the rest of their mission.
    Later that Tuesday morning, some of the women and children ventured from the stone house, stepping outside the safety of the stockade walls for the first time in more than a week of dread. While the rest of the women were grateful for, and the children excited about, the arrival of the soldiers, not one of Trimble’s cavalrymen got a peek at either Helen Walsh or Elizabeth Osborn.
    â€œRumor has it they was violated,” Parnell explained in a whisper as he and McCarthy walked up the slope to relieve two men of their watch along the Salmon.
    â€œRaped?”
    â€œShhh!” Parnell rasped angrily. “It’s talk like that made them two women fear to show their faces.”
    â€œThey was … shamed by the h’athens?”
    The lieutenant nodded as they neared the improvised rifle pits. “Both of ’em, over and over again by the red bastards. ’Cause of it, neither of them women gonna ever be the same again.”
    It made his blood boil, to think of those painted-up, blood-splattered, stink-smeared warriors humiliating, dishonoring, shaming those two women.
    The sergeant turned to stare a long moment down at the stone house, his heart breaking for both victims of such unspeakable horror. “No small wonder is it? Why them poor women can’t hardly face their friends no more.”
    â€œThey lost their husbands, too, I heard,” Parnell said. “Come out of it only with their wee ones.”
    â€œThem’s the ones we’re fighting the Nez Perce for, Lieutenant Parnell,” McCarthy growled. “Them women and children. They’re the reason I wanna kill me ever’ last Injun buck I can put in my sights, or get my hands around. They’re less’n human, ever’ last bloody one of ’em.”
    â€œW E should reach the scene before midmorning, General,” declared Captain David Perry after he had saluted the campaign’s commander in the misty damps of predawn that twenty-sixth day of June.
    â€œYou understand my purpose in going into that valley is not to engage the Nez Perce,” Howard reminded.
    â€œYou explained that to me