Free Wolf Mountain Moon by Terry C. Johnston

Lieutenant Pope ordered. “You can’t abandon us!”
    â€œSteady, men! Steady! Pull yourselves in here!” Baldwin demanded. “Now, heave against that line. Hurry! Hurry!”
    Inside that rocking second wagon boat the frightened men scrambled for their spade paddles, dipping deep and sure into the river, trying their best to steady the craft as Private Richard Bellows of ? Company seized the rope securing them to the north bank and began to fight the waterlogged knot. Alone.
    â€œNo—cut the son of a bitch!” one of his companions cried.
    Instead, Bellows hunched over his work with numbed fingers, struggling.
    The others began to take up the chorus. “Cut it! Cut the line now!”
    The ice chunk rumbled closer and closer.
    With the danger no more than twenty-five yards away Bellows finally got the knot untied in the waterlogged rope, looped it around both his trembling hands, and hunkereddown in the bottom of the wagon box, where he braced his legs against the creaking gunwale just as the huge chunk hit them.
    As the box spun around, two other soldiers threw down their spades and leaped to Bellows’s aid, each of them grabbing hold of the rope to join the courageous private. They grunted as the ice groaned and banged against the side of the wagon box.
    â€œWe can’t hold it!”
    â€œLet go of the bastard!”
    Then Baldwin shouted above the noise of men onshore and the rumbling clatter of ice whacking and creaking against the raft and wagon boats, “Let go and save yourselves! For God’s sake—let go and make for shore before you’re swamped!”
    Just then the three soldiers on the line were jerked to their feet as another side of the tumbling ice chunk keeled around and slammed into the wagon box.
    â€œLet the damn thing go or we’ll be broken to splinters!”
    The two soldiers released their hold on the rope and instead locked their arms around Bellows, who struggled to maintain his grip. With an agonized cry of pain as the rope burned through the cold flesh of his hands he freed himself, and their raft, into the mercy of that merciless current.
    â€œRow, goddammit! Row for shore!” Miles shouted above the crash of ice against wood.
    As Private Bellows sank exhausted to the bottom of the wagon box, the rest of the men dived to take up their paddles, bending to their knees, rocking forward again and again as they forced their spades into the ice scum while the box swung slowly around and around, swept downstream in the midst of those growing chunks of ice. They were struck again by a huge lump of ice, then a patch of clear water appeared above them, upstream. That would be their one chance.
    All the chance brave men would ever need.
    Now the drenched soldiers sank their oars in deadly earnest, gradually turning the wagon box against the current that frothed over the sides of the gunwales as they brought it crosswise. Slowly, demanding the last bit of strength from their bodies, the last flicker of sheer grit from their will, the soldiersinched their wagon box toward the north shore as they were tossed downstream.
    More than a mile later those men of E Company reached the willow and some cottonwood saplings against the bank. Two of the soldiers, then a third, lunged over the sides of the box, into the freezing water that lapped at their waists, each one helping shove the box into the shallows, where they no longer were subject to the will of the powerful tug that was the Missouri’s current.
    A spontaneous roar erupted from their mates upstream as men jumped up and down in joy, slapping one another in celebration of what bravery they had just witnessed from the dozen men aboard that second wagon boat.
    â€œGeneral—it’s high time we get the hell out of here ourselves,” Baldwin suggested quietly at Miles’s shoulder.
    â€œI couldn’t agree with you more!” the colonel replied resolutely. “All right,