Wolf Mountain Moon by Terry C. Johnston Read Free Book Online

long-haired civilian shouted in English, “Bruguier! Is that you, half-breed?”
    Beneath the folds of his blanket, Johnny pulled the long barrel free of the belt and began to click back the hammer.
    â€œBy Jupiter—it is him, isn’t it, Kelly!” exclaimed the Bear Coat.
    And he was smiling. The soldier chief was smiling!
    â€œBruguier!” the Bear Coat bellowed, yanking off a mitten and holding out his hand as he came up. “You’re just the man I could hope to see!”
    *
A Cold Day in Hell,
vol. 11, The Plainsmen Series.

Chapter 3
Waniyetu Wi
1876

    A ll the good that Bear Coat Miles had done at Cedar Creek was gone—evaporated like a puff of smoke in this Winter Moon.
    First Hazen’s soldiers had scattered the Sioux bands right at the very moment they had decided to abandon Sitting Bull and surrender. And now Miles himself had shown up in that Fort Peck country—convincing the chiefs that the government spoke with two tongues: agent Mitchell with one voice, promising blankets and bacon … while the soldiers crept up to speak with the throats of their weapons.
    So just about the time Sitting Bull was feeling the most isolated and disconsolate with his thirty paltry lodges of loyal followers, suddenly there were more than four times that number camped with him in the valley of the Big Dry as the Fifth Infantry reached Fort Peck. Once again Gall of the Hunkpapa, Lame Red Skirt, Small Bear, and Bull Eagle of the Miniconjou were convinced that instead of surrendering, their only hope lay in running, their only salvation lay in fighting.
    â€œWe will never give up,” Sitting Bull told them solemnly when the chiefs informed him of the soldiers’ arrival at the agency. “Even if it means that we keep running all the way north to the Land of the Grandmother. No matter that it maymean I will have to live on the scrawny flesh of prairie dogs—I will never surrender!”
    The shouts, war cries, and death songs grew deafening in the valley of the Big Dry that night as the sun went down and the wind came up.
    Those who had been fortunate enough to tear their lodges down before the Bear Coat’s soldiers invaded their camp at Cedar Creek had been taking in all of the very old and the very young they could shelter, while the rest simply made do under bowers of blankets and robes—anything at all that would turn the hoarfrost and even the light snow of another night of winter-coming.
    These were a wounded people. They had been robbed of all the greatness that had been theirs for so long. But we will survive, Sitting Bull vowed in private. As long as we do not allow the
wasicu
to divide Lakota against Lakota.
    â€œThe people, they are hungry,” Gall tried to explain, a man who had lost wives, whose children had been killed by soldiers. “So many little ones with their empty bellies.”
    The Bull looked at the muscular war chief who had lost so much to the pony soldiers at the Greasy Grass, and felt a sharp pang of sadness for his old friend. “From the very same moment of my vision of those soldiers falling into camp—I warned our people not to take anything from the dead. I told all who could hear my voice that we must not take any of the spoils from that battle.”
    Lame Red Skirt bent his head, and his eyes did not meet Sitting Bull’s when he admitted, “I remember.”
    â€œI told all who could hear that
Wakan Tanka
instructed me not to plunder those dead soldiers. That we had defeated them, that we had killed them all, was gift enough.”
    â€œWhat happens now?” asked Bull Eagle. “What’s done is done! What happens now that so many of our people did take the soldier spoils from the Greasy Grass?”
    For some time Sitting Bull thought and thought, staring at the fire while he heard the sounds of dogs and children at play in the cold, women at their work with supper fires and boiling kettles, the