A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

The white man died at Johnny’s feet, his thrashing stopped, rolling onto his back to stare up at Bruguier with those walking dead eyes. But now he would no longer walk. And the fire was gone from them as they gazed blankly at the half-breed who had killed a white man before so many witnesses.

How the trader had started hollering, reaching under a counter for his big two-shoot gun. How Johnny had looked at the others, both Lakota and half-breed there in the store, sensing instantly that they would not dare tell the truth about what had happened. Afraid. Cowed. So shamed by their need for the moldy flour and rancid pig meat that they would not tell the truth.

Johnny fled Standing Rock on a stolen horse. And had been running ever since.

First to Bear Butte to find solace and help for his troubled spirit among the religious places he had heard so much about. Not that he had never been religious—certainly not like his father’s Catholicism. Nor had he paid much attention to the beliefs of his mother’s people. But he had remembered enough to know about Bear Butte, enough to feel the place call out to him.

For most of that hard winter he had clung close to the slopes of Bear Butte, hunting, sleeping, keeping an eye out in those early days for any from Standing Rock who might follow him. Only with the waning of winter did he finally relent and allow himself to believe no one would come for him.

So he wandered south to the Black Hills, that country the white man’s government wanted back from the warrior bands so all white men could come and dig for the yellow rocks that made them hungry for whiskey and whores. It was no problem finding work in those settlements just beginning to dot the Black Hills: unloading wagons brought up from the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska; helping build sluice boxes; cleaning up after all the puking white men in those great saloons covered with tent canvas, closed-in places that smelled of urine, sweat, and the desecration of that sacred land. There was work enough for any man willing to work. Johnny worked.

Until that summer afternoon he was tapped on the shoulder by his white employer. Bruguier straightened over his mop and slop bucket.

“You know anythin ‘bout this?” With a crackle the man noisily unfolded a stiffened parchment with a likeness of Johnny printed on it in black ink. Words, too.

“What’s this?” Bruguier had asked.

“Says you’re wanted, mister.”

“For what?”

“Murder. You kill someone?”

His eyes must have given him up when he looked away, unable to look the white man in the face.

“Tell you what, mister,” the white man continued, “you best be on your way and now. These here posters is going up all over town. They’ll be up all over the hills afore the sun sets tomorrow. Likely you’ll be as easy for others to spot, just as easy to catch. Then some miner’s court decide to hang you.”

To this day Johnny remembered clear as sunrise how that white man with dirt caked down in those deep wrinkles on his face and the wattle of his neck had pantomimed a rope dropping over his head, tightened, then strangled at the end of that noose. As calmly as he could, Johnny had nodded and set his mop against the wall. Then turned away, not once looking over his shoulder.

He stole another horse that day, the biggest one of those tied at the side of the saloon. Not one of the horses out front at the rail, but back in the shadows, an animal with a blaze face and two front stockings. It looked strong enough to carry him fast and far. But the best thing that made Johnny decide on the horse was what was tied behind the saddle: a thick blanket roll, wrapped in an oiled slicker, along with those two saddlebags stuffed to their limit. Plain to see that horse and rigging were ready for the trail.

Bruguier kicked the animal into a gallop as soon as he put the last tent behind him, heading west toward the setting sun. East and north meant trouble. That’s where the white men were, with their pictures and their stories of murder, the nightmare of their hanging ropes that choked off the only chance his spirit could fly out of his mouth when he breathed his last. No man must die that way.

The only direction for him lay to the south and west. There was damned little of the white man north of the Platte or south of the Yellowstone, clear to the Big Horn Mountains. Especially that summer after the Lakota and Cheyenne had whipped the pony soldiers something fierce in two big fights. He set off to find sanctuary among his mother’s people—that, or this journey would be his suicide.

Beside his fire that first summer night after fleeing the white man’s settlements, Johnny unfurled the oiled rain poncho and rolled out the blankets inside their bedroll, a long canvas sack. Within he found a pair of well-worn batwing chaps.