Together Running Horse and Chance kept moving, working their way step by step back toward the rear of the camp.
We might make it, thought Chance wildly, we might make it.
Some had escaped, Drum, Old Bear, others.
We can make it, coursed through Chance’s mind, we will make it.
A pistol jabbed into Chance’s ribs.
“Drop your gun,” said Lester Grawson.
It seemed in that instant to Edward Chance that he had died.
Numbly he dropped his weapon and Grawson, hatless and coatless, with his right boot, his eyes on Chance, not watching the ground, grinning, swept it a dozen feet away.
Grawson’s face was cut and his ear torn but Chance could see that he was pleased, mighty pleased. “God how I’ve waited,” said Grawson.
Chance lifted his hands.
“Totter should be here,” said Grawson, “but he’s having too much fun over there.” Grawson nodded to his right, toward the edge of camp where there were burning lodges. The screams of women carried through the smoky air.
Grawson and Chance looked at one another, in their own world, lost by light years from the burning worlds about them.
“I’m not waiting any longer,” said Grawson.
Chance saw Grawson’s thumb click the hammer back on his weapon.
Then Grawson’s hand seemed to tighten.
Running Horse, spinning around to look for Chance, saw Grawson covering him. Running Horse thrust his rifle into the back of Grawson’s neck and pulled the trigger, but the cartridge, shoved in crookedly, jammed. Grawson grunted, startled, went white, turned to fire, but as he did so, Chance’s hand caught his wrist. Running Horse smashed the stock of his rifle into the side of Grawson’s head. The big man slumped to the ground. The young Indian put the rifle to Grawson’s temple and pulled the trigger again, but the weapon still failed to fire.
Chance grabbed the rifle from Running Horse and with the palm of his hand slapped free the jammed cartridge.
A line of bullets, like a pattern of buttonholes, opened up the ground to the right of them. Somewhere some squaws and children were screaming. Near Chance’s feet, he almost stumbled over him, lay an old man, his eyes opened, praying, his hands cupped over a bleeding chest. In the confusion the significance of the line of bullets suddenly became, like a flash of lightning, evident to Chance. The guns were firing directly into the camp, trying to pick out individual targets. The soldiers nearby, as startled as Chance, started yelling and cursing, and moving back.
“Come on!” yelled Chance, and he, with Running Horse, turned and ran toward the back of the camp, where Drum and Old Bear and others had made good their escape.
Suddenly it seemed to Chance that hell exploded under his feet and a hedge of dirt jumped up around him, marking the tracery of a burst from one of the Hotchkiss guns. A little girl, running to the left of them, threw out her hands and fell forward, two red dots on her back, one near the right shoulder and another near the small of her back. Chance seized Running Horse by the arm and dragged him to the ground, both of them falling behind the bodies of some three women who had fallen earlier to the guns. The bodies behind which they lay shook like bags of sand with the impact of the bullets splattering into them.
Suddenly the firing of the guns stopped. “Soldiers in the line of fire!” yelled Chance. “Come on!”
As one man he and Running Horse fled.
A short burst of Hotchkiss fire ripped the ground behind them. They heard some startled shouts and curses.
Chance and Running Horse were not more than fifty yards from the perimeter of the camp when they saw Winona running towards them, rifle shots kicking up the dust at her feet, holding the reins of three horses, Chance’s, Running Horse’s, and a third animal, frightened and riderless, which she had captured for herself in the confusion. In an instant Chance and Running Horse and Winona had mounted and had kicked their animals into a terrified gallop.
Some shots followed them, sliding through the air over their heads with a distant crack and a sound like the passing of an insect.
Here and there they saw other riders fleeing, all heading as if by instinct toward the Bad Lands.
Most of the Indians who had fled on foot had run to Wounded Knee Creek, to hide in the brush and the icy water. They would be found there, most of them, and slain.
In the distance, Chance heard the bugle’s brave notes, sounding Boots and Saddles. The troopers were being recalled from the camp, to mount and follow. There was a sharp, in its way beautiful, sound in the notes of the bugle. It was a stirring call, thought Chance, that call Boots and Saddles, stirring.
Chance, Running Horse and Winona urged their mounts from Wounded Knee, racing for the Bad Lands.
The troopers of the Seventh Cavalry, hot with the blood of massacre, methodically burned the camp and hunted survivors. Some of the troopers turned to pillaging, hiding souvenirs of the battle inside their jackets or boots. These they could sell later as mementos of the battle which they now realized had occurred, somewhat after the shooting was over, a battle to be known by the place where it had taken place, Wounded Knee, called for the creek nearby. Several of the soldiers jerked the clothing from fallen Indians, in particular the Ghost Shirts which would bring the highest prices. Some of these would eventually be purchased by museums. There seemed no point in leaving the loot to civilians who would most assuredly, sooner or later, like vultures, come to pick over the field. The spoils, such as they were, belonged, if to anyone, to the victors.
As Chance, Winona and Running Horse urged their mounts over the prairie, they could look back and see columns of smoke ascending from the burning camp. The cold air kept the smoke pretty much together so it seemed the sky was stained with dark parallel bars. In the clear air they could hear the occasional gunshots that marked places and times where wounded Indians were found in the brush or among the bodies. There were no prisoners taken at Wounded Knee. It would take some time before complete discipline could be restored. By the time the troopers could be gathered from the massacre, reunited with their mounts and organized to follow up their victory, those Indians fortunate enough to be mounted would be scattered for miles over the prairie. Those on foot were less fortunate, of course, and several were killed; some as much as three miles from Wounded Knee.
“We are safe now,” said Running Horse, reining in his pony.
The three riders slowed their mounts and turned to look back at the bars of smoke rising in the sky.
“My people will not forget this place,” said Running Horse.
Chance saw that there were tears in the eyes of Winona.
After a time Running Horse turned his pony north again, and Chance and Winona followed him.
That night the first snow of the year fell, cutting off, for a time, any threat of pursuit. In the afternoon, as Chance, Running Horse and Winona made their way north toward the Bad Lands, the wind had gathered its strength and rushed to meet them, howling, cutting their faces, hurling itself like a lonely, whistling saber across the brown prairie. By dusk the wind carried in its train sleet, that forced the horses and their riders to shut their eyes, and when dark came, the white shrapnel of a blizzard pitted the night, screaming from the north, blurring the air with ice, numbing their hands and stiffening the leather of Chance’s reins, the nose ropes of the Indian ponies. Chance had lost somewhere the blanket he had had at Wounded Knee; similarly neither Running Horse nor Winona had covering from the storm other than what they had worn that morning. Chance tried to consider how long they might live thus exposed in the storm. He could not consider the matter rationally for the buzzing of the white hornets about his ears, the jabbing of thousands of delicate snowflakes, each a frozen architecture of icy crystal, driven at high speed against his face and hands, pelting his body. The horses put down their heads, continually shifting to the left, trying to face away from the storm. The riders dismounted and, in single file, pulled the stumbling animals behind them, wading through snow already drifting high enough to cover the tops of Chance’s boots.
For an hour they continued to move north, into the blizzard, fighting it.
“We’ll freeze!” yelled Chance at the top of his voice, hoping Running Horse could hear him.
“No,” shouted Running Horse. “Keep moving! Do not stop!”
Chance felt as though his boots were filled with frozen wood.
They trudged on, dragging the ponies, Running Horse first, then Chance, then Winona.
It was maybe an hour or so later when Chance looked back, perhaps because he suddenly became aware that he no longer heard the noises of Winona’s pony, indistinct in the whipping snow, behind him.
He could not see the girl.
“Running Horse!” he yelled. “Winona!”
Running Horse turned and squinted back through the snow, and then, together, dragging their horses, the two men began to retrace their steps. The trough they had cut with their feet and the hoofs of the horses was already invisible. They had gone about a hundred yards when, some twenty yards to their left, they heard the snort of a pony, and, a minute or two later, they found the animal, and Winona slumped in the snow beside it, her fist still holding the nose rope.
Thank God, thought Chance.
Running Horse gave Chance the nose rope of his pony and bent to the slumped figure of the girl.
The two horses and Chance stood together for warmth.