Seize the Sky

CHAPTER 18

ADJUTANT Cooke watched Custer rise from the dust where Bouyer and his Crows had drawn their map. The general snatched up his reins and leapt atop Dandy.

“Cookey, c’mon over here. I want a private word with you.”

Off to the side out of earshot, Custer and Cooke discussed their plan for deployment of the command. After pulling some maps from his saddlebags and handing them over to Custer for his inspection, Cooke scrawled notes in the small notebook he carried.

“I’m glad you’re in agreement,” Custer sighed. “You remember the Washita, don’t you, Billy?”

Cooke smiled with those straight, pearly teeth of his. Years ago at the Washita, his special crack unit of forty handpicked sharpshooters had bottled up Black Kettle’s fleeing Cheyenne just as Custer had planned it. They had laid down a murderous fire across the river, so very few Cheyenne had made it downstream to the Kiowa and Arapaho camps on foot. Most who tried had ended up floating down the icy waters of the Washita, their bodies riddled by Spencer-rifle fire at the command of marksman W. W. Cooke.

“A glorious rout, General! And we’re about to pull another one out of your hat, aren’t we, sir?”

“That’s why I like you, Billy. Always thinking like a soldier.”

“I’ve learned from the best, General.”

Custer nodded. “We’ll use three wings to execute this attack again. And I’ll divide off the first wing at this time. It is—?”

Cooke yanked his watch out. “Twelve-oh-seven.”

“Very good. Let’s get this show on the road. Bring Benteen up.”

When Cooke had gathered the captain, along with Captain Thomas Weir and Lieutenant Edward Godfrey, he announced that Custer wanted to see them at the head of the march immediately. “The general’s compliments, Captain Benteen. We’re ready to deploy for the attack.”

Surrounded by the three officers and his adjutant a few yards from the column, Custer issued his orders. “For the purpose of our attack, Captain Weir’s D Company and Lieutenant Godfrey’s K Company are placed under your command, Captain Benteen.”

“Begging pardon, General.” Benteen cleared his dry throat, straightening himself in the saddle. “Don’t you think we’d better keep the regiment together? If it’s truly as big a camp as the scouts claim it is, you’re going to need the whole regiment standing together.”

Cooke watched a cloud pass over Custer’s face before he answered.

“Thank you for your consideration of my orders, Captain,” he replied acidly, eyes filled with icy fire. “Right now I can’t think of a reason why my battle plan would fail. Suppose you just remember that I give the commands, and you follow them.”

“Very good, General,” Benteen replied stiffly. “Where am I headed?”

Custer pointed to the southwest, toward the rolling hills, deep valleys, and endless bare ridges that rose to meet the pale, sun-bleached prairie sky.

“Take your battalion in that direction. Watch for an Indian village, and pitch into anything you run across.”

Benteen gulped, staring off into that nothingness of rugged draws and coulees. “Begging consideration, General—why there?”

Custer bit his lip. Cooke figured the general forced himself to keep from swearing at this white-headed pain in the ass.

“I want you to continuously feel to our left, if for no other reason than to assure myself that the hostiles—which we know have been warned already—won’t flee upriver to the south. That’s all I’m going to say, Captain Benteen. You, better than any man I command, ought to know I’m not in the habit of explaining myself.”

The captain must have understood that plain enough, Cooke figured, for Benteen saluted, spoke, “Very well, sir. Understood. As you ordered.”

Benteen nodded at Weir and Godfrey. They followed.

Ed Godfrey slipped his watch from his unbuttoned tunic pocket. Twelve-fifteen P.M.

How long will we have to ride through these bare, rocky hills before Benteen will figure out this is a fool’s errand Custer’s got him on? Is Custer paying Benteen back for his public criticism following the Elliott affair at the Washita? Or does Custer want to get Benteen’s hundred twenty men massacred?

Godfrey felt the cold trickle of water dripping all the way down to the base of his spine and hoped it was only sweat—not his first taste of outright fear. Hell, he hadn’t been afraid even when his small platoon had been practically surrounded at the Battle of the Washita. Not even then.

But this is something different, he had to admit. The only reason he could figure that Custer had sent them on this fool’s errand chasing down the wind itself, was that Custer wanted Benteen out of the way.

Or killed …

As Benteen’s three companies splashed across the summer trickle of Ash Creek, then plodded away beneath a cloud of choking dust, Custer turned back upstream with Cooke at his side to find a suitable place for Dandy to drink. Soon enough they were joined by more of the thirsty command and their dry-mouthed animals.

Custer struggled to pull a reluctant Dandy back from the creek.

“Don’t let them get too much, men!” he called to soldiers nearby. “They’ll get loggy on you, if you’re not careful.”

In turn, each of the remaining companies were given a few minutes at the scummy pools along the mossy banks of Ash Creek. As Dandy rested, Custer stared into the luminous, bone yellow sky at that relentless, one-eyed demon spewing fire across a breathless, choking landscape. Giving in, he removed his buckskin coat, tying it behind the cantle of his saddle.

Once more he carefully tucked his pants into the tall, dusty boots. His light gray army fatigue shirt already bore the dark blotches beneath each arm, between his shoulder blades, and in a necklace beneath his strawberry chin in stubble. He wiped his blood red kerchief around the sweatband of the cream-colored hat, then rerolled the brim up on the right side in the event he would have to sight his Remington sporting rifle from horseback. When the kerchief was properly knotted round his neck once more, Custer ordered the columns to move out.

Behind him plodded those other hot, dusty, dry troops, their mouths caked and puckering with the alkali of Ash Creek. Most men had already lashed their blue tunics behind their saddles. A motley gypsy gang of good and ugly heading down, down, down into that valley of cool, sparkling waters and inviting green grass extending clear to the Bighorns. A valley beckoning Custer’s army onward. Down to the green and cool.

This unsettling mixture of veterans and raw, untried recruits followed him into the maw. Rogues and rascals … even innocents and children who had no conception of what war with the Sioux was all about. Sobering for the hard-files to brood on the men around them—some thirty to sixty percent of each company unseasoned and scared enough right now to worry about wetting their britches.

Yet any man present would have said he trusted Custer. The general’s reputation protected them all with a brassy aura of invincibility as they rode on and on, following that big cream-colored hat and that bright scarlet scarf fluttering on the hot breeze.

Custer had never lost a fight. So they followed.

Some sweated in those white shirts first used during the Civil War and still issued on the frontier posts eleven years later. Others dampened dark blue shirts simply because the white ones got all too dirty much too fast. These indigo shirts made it pleasantly convenient for a trooper: He got away with going longer between washings than did the simple-minded, who wore white and far too often had to pay a call on the post laundresses along Soapsuds Row.

Even a scattering of these soldiers sported the coarse gray pullover of the variety Custer himself wore this day. In addition, there appeared a lively mixture of the checkered hickory shirts some had purchased from trader Coleman at the Yellowstone. Such lightweight cloth made for a more comfortable ride in the summer heat of this hunt for the Sioux.

From time to time the troopers worked at some saddle rations, choking down hardtack or cooked pork with swallows of the warm, stinking creek water from their canteens. Their noses reddened and crusted with alkali dust, none could smell the earthy aromas of man and animal on the dust anyway. Those rank odors of lathered horses and played-out mules, along with the well-known and all-too-familiar pungent stench of men too long without a bath, mingled with the perfume of the tiny wildflowers trampled underfoot.

An army on the prowl.

Every man sweltered beneath a wide sky, accompanied down trail by the familiar thunk and clink of saddle leather and bridle chain. Not to mention the reassuring plap of their reliable weapons at their sides. While officers carried .45-caliber Colts, the troopers were issued .44-caliber Remington pistols, both of which could drop a man at seventy paces if a soldier could aim and fire without jerking the trigger. Those sidearms were usually worn butt forward on the right side of the body so the pistol could be withdrawn by the left hand, as the right normally wielded the nearobsolete saber.

Every soldier carried the 1873 trapdoor Springfield chambered for .45–.70 ammunition. Some men toted what they fondly called their knitting bag, a wool-lined cartridge box worn on the belt, used to carry more of that carbine ammunition: a .45-caliber bullet backed with seventy grains of powder that could kill at better than three hundred yards, making a tight six-inch group at a hundred. With a hundred rounds of Springfield ammunition assigned to each man, most soldiers filled the loops in their cartridge belts and allowed the rest of the shells to rattle loose in their leather saddlebags.

In the hands of a cool veteran, the Springfield trapdoors could fire seven shots in twelve to fifteen seconds. Enough to keep any band of charging warriors at bay.

With a rattle and thunk, a plodding clop of iron-shod hooves, and the snapping pop of the striped regimental pennants, the troops followed Custer down to the Greasy Grass. Beneath an oppressive summer sky, every man suffered a knotting belly and that nauseating ache from bad water, not to mention the agony of eyes scalded from alkali dust and a face burned raw by sun and wind.

The gallant Seventh marched down into the maw of that valley as surely as if it had been the cool, shady, beckoning halls of Valhalla itself. Less like an army of avenging Norse gods commanded by the all-powerful Odin himself—more like a roving band of renegade gypsies—Custer’s Cavalry plodded down into the seductive valley of the Greasy Grass while Destiny herself opened her arms at last.

“The general’s compliments, Major,” Adjutant Cooke began with a smile, his long, flowing Dundrearies tousled by the hot breeze clinging to the Ash Creek drainage. “He wishes you to take command of Company A under Captain Moylan, G under Lieutenant McIntosh, and M under Captain French, sir. In addition, the general wishes to transfer to your command the services of Crow scouts White Swan and Half-Yellow-Face—also the Arikara interpreter, Gerard.”

“Then he wants me to keep the Ree scouts with my command?” Reno inquired suspiciously, scratching his beard.

“It’s my opinion that he does—yes, sir,” Cooke replied. “He’s keeping four of the Crows and Bouyer with him. The rest, I assume, are now to go with you.”

“Anything more? Something in the way of orders?”

“No, Major.” Billy Cooke glanced back at Custer, sitting loosely atop Dandy on the rise above them. Strange, now that I think about it—

“Custer just wants me in command of three companies … is that right?”

Cooke thought Reno sounded more than a bit anxious. But then the skin around the major’s eyes sagged again. The dastard’s relieved that he’s not ordered into battle immediately. If I had my way—

“Correct, Major,” Cooke answered. “He orders you to proceed down the left bank of the stream.”

“Very good, Lieutenant.” Reno turned toward his three companies.

By the time Cooke galloped back to the head of the columns to rejoin the general, Custer was sending the short, shy Charley Reynolds off to ride with Reno as well. The scout’s soulful blue eyes twinkled with a melancholy light as he waved farewell to the general and the swarthy Bouyer, kicking his mount back along the dark snake of cavalry waiting patiently for Custer to complete this division of the troops for what most officers realized was to become a three-winged attack.

“Captain Yates?”

“Yes, sir!” he replied in his best Michigan Yankee accent.

“You and Captain Keogh will be in charge of the five remaining companies under my aegis.”

“Sir?” Yates appeared startled.

“You’ll take command of C Company under Captain Custer, E under Lieutenant Smith, along with your own F Company, Captain Yates.”

The eyes of the officers studied Custer as he in turn studied the valley beyond.

Billy Cooke understood why he wanted George Yates to command the lion’s share of companies under Custer’s personal aegis. Besides being a hometown Monroe, Michigan boy, Yates had served on Custer’s staff during the war. He was a rock-steady hand, proven in battle. Yet, as Cooke thought on it now, there still remained the hint of stain. Guilt by association. George’s brother, Fred, was the head trader for the Sioux at the Red Cloud Agency down in Nebraska, a fact that had not escaped the attention of many in high places during the graft-and-corruption scandals still rocking the War Department since the past winter.

If George does well in the coming fight, Cooke thought, looking at the two men, then Custer’s faith in him will be vindicated—and all taint removed from Yate’s career. That’s the kind of soldier the old man is.

“Meanwhile,” Custer continued, bringing his eyes back to the big Irishman, who sat sweltering in his own coarse gray-woolen pullover, “immediate command to fall under Captain Keogh will be his own and Lieutenant Calhoun’s companies.”

James Calhoun grinned as he reached over swinging a fist, slugging Keogh on the shoulder. They had long been the best of friends and drinking partners. Together they repeatedly boasted that their two companies alone could whip thrice their weight in Sioux.

“I want your command to be prepared for a rearguard action, gentlemen,” Custer went on. “No telling what the sneaking hostiles might do in coming up our backsides. They know we’re coming.” His eyes scanned the far hills to the north, then moved back up the divide behind them. “I can’t think of any better commanders to protect this regiment’s backsides.”

Keogh snorted that rollicking bray of his that characterized his lust for life. He never shied from anything thrown his way. “Jimmy and me—we’re ready and able to watch over anyone’s arses, we are, sir!”

“Splendid,” Custer said with a smile. “Now that Reno’s moving across the creek, you’ll see that I’ve kept my family with me. Just as I’ve long envisioned it on such a day of glory. You’ll all ride with me today. What say you, friends?”

“I’m one bastard fotching to spill some Sioux blood first, General!” Keogh rattled. “Washington City can wait till I get that outta my gawdamned system. Gimme more whiskey and bring on Crazy Horse!”

Custer said, “You’ll have your wish shortly, Myles. Let’s see if the Sioux are going to cooperate with us or not. I can’t shake this worry that they’re going to run on me.”

“How can we assure that they don’t, sir?” Calhoun piped in.

“Jimbo, I have a plan that might just work when we come in sight of the village,” Custer whispered, lending a mysterious air to his answer. “But for the time being—ah, good. Here comes Vic now!”

Minutes ago he had dispatched Saddler Sergeant John Tritten from his personal headquarters command to ride back to the pack train with Dandy and fetch Vic, Custer’s favorite chestnut sorrel, from Private Burkman. Back in the days of his Civil War battles Custer had learned the advantage in taking a fresh animal into a fight. Such a tactic had worked well for him in past campaigns, so he was not one about to break a string of good fortune now that he stood on the precipice of glory.

On Sergeant Tritten’s tail loped angel-faced Boston Custer and young Autie Reed, the eighteen-year-old bullyboy who had come to watch his uncles butcher some Sioux. Beside them rode Mark Kellogg, still raking his worn-out army-issue mule with Herendeen’s spurs. Taking their cue from the general’s stern face, the three civilians fell silent, not anxious to interrupt the proceedings. They reined to a halt. Tritten switched Custer’s saddle to Vic’s back atop a dry blanket. At the same time, other officers and enlisted tightened cinches, patted their horses’ sweaty necks, or adjusted their own damp clothing. Belts were wrenched up a notch, yellow-striped britches restuffed into scuffed boots.

Then Custer was up in the saddle once more, looking bigger than life atop Vic, the blaze-faced sorrel standing better than sixteen hands high. After tugging his hat down over his hogged strawberry haircut, Custer waved his officers and their commands to follow him downstream.

“Billy, you’ll see the troops are put to the march, then rejoin me?” Set deep within that sun-rawed, wind-scalded face were a pair of eyes burned red with alkali dust, hollowed and black-rimmed with characteristic lack of sleep.

“Will do, General,” Cooke answered. “We’ll follow your lead!”

And as Custer turned from his officers’ conference, he pointed Vic’s nose to the right—to every man’s surprise. For now he no longer led his men down that wide, well-marked Indian road scoured by thousands upon thousands of hooves across the dusty, dry breast of the Ash Creek trail.

Custer ducked behind some low hills, hills that for a time put him out of Major Reno’s sight.

With every bend and twist of the trail down into the valley, Marcus Reno grew a bit more apprehensive.

What if Custer’s taken off, and I suddenly confront the Sioux on my own? Reno’s mind raced, burdened by all the dreadful possibilities.

Several miles down the creek, both commands passed through a swampy morass. Here lay a steamy bog that over the centuries filled with stagnant seepage trapped as the spring rain and winter runoff trickled down from the Wolf Mountains. At this stage of the year, the morass by and large had already gone dry, its surface cracking beneath summer’s retribution upon the land.

Over the damp belly of the bog hung a stifling stench. Unmistakable—some poor animal had blundered into the marsh, seeking relief from the heat, instead found no way out. Even the wary predators of these high plains had left the old buffalo bull to rot beneath the hot sun. The stench of its decaying flesh clung to the place as the soldiers hurried past, choking down their stomach’s revolt at not only the smell, but the sight of maggots and blowflies busy at the blackened meat.

Shortly before two o’clock, Reno decided he would move his companies back to the north bank to ride in concert with Custer. Both the terrain itself and the major’s own nervousness dictated his change of heart. Even the veterans tensed up on their reins, wary and alert when a few minutes later arose the frightened cries of the scouts.

They were pointing ahead. Shouting.

Reno’s eyes shot up and down his columns. Every soldier had ears alert. Sour tongues raked dry lips. Sweaty hands yanked carbines into readiness.

Yet for all the tension and excitement, what the scouts had discovered was not a buffalo or antelope—much less a Sioux warrior.

All that stood astride the wide, well-plowed Indian trail pointing itself down the dry, cracked bottomland of Ash Creek was a solitary painted Indian lodge.

At first the Arikara scouts milled about nervously, bumping their mounts against one another, unsure of what to make of this startling discovery, more so afraid of what the existence of this lone tepee foretold. They shouted to scare off any evil spirits from the place. Then one of their number finally realized there were no Sioux here.

Only then did that solitary young warrior rattle heels against his pony’s flanks.

With a whoop and a high-throated cry, Strikes Two charged down on the solitary lodge, swinging by it at a full gallop, slapping his quirt across the dry buffalo hides. He whirled about in a dust spray, bringing his snorting pony up sharply. He smiled, quite proud of himself as the first man of this campaign, white or red, brave enough to count coup on an enemy’s lodge.

His strutting turn ended in time for him to watch his childhood friend, Young Hawk, leap from his pony at a full run and race on foot to the lodge, yanking his huge scalping knife from his belt. With one swift slash he had the lodge skins opened from the smoke flaps down to the stakes that were pounded into the dry, crumbly earth. Suddenly freed through that new wound in the old lodge, the stench of death and rotting flesh escaped, surrounding the tepee as Young Hawk stumbled back, his hand covering his nose.

More brown-skinned riders dashed up, striking the lodge with quirts as Young Hawk and Red Bear tore aside the lodge entrance. Inside on a low scaffold lay the body of a dead warrior, his heat-bloated carcass wrapped in a beaded ceremonial buffalo robe.

With both hips shattered by a soldier bullet, Old-She-Bear, a renowned Sans Arc Sioux, had been dragged from the Rosebud battlefield as Crook’s troops struggled to hold their ground against the maddening horsemen under Crazy Horse barely eight suns ago. Because he had clung tenaciously to life at the time, Old-She-Bear had been loaded on a travois and pulled from the scene of the fight to the Rosebud camps. From there over the divide when the bands moved toward the Greasy Grass. The dying warrior slung behind a pony beneath the sun for each day’s journey, until his family and friends decided the old warrior was in fact looking out at them from eyes filled with shadows.

Here along this boggy creek the Sans Arc warrior had clung to life for several days, nursed by family who patiently waited out the old man’s slow death walk to the Other Side.

After his final breath had escaped the old man’s lungs, the relatives painted Old-She-Bear’s face with red clay and dressed him in his finest ceremonial elk-skin war shirt and leggings. Alongside the scaffold on which they laid his body, the family placed his feather-draped shield, bow, and quiver. Before leaving this death lodge for the last time, his relatives had placed some cooked meat and blood soup for Old-She-Bear’s trip to see his grandfathers.

As a final tribute the warrior’s favorite pipe, tobacco, and tender bag were laid beside him. When at last his journey to the Other Side was complete, the old man would enjoy having a smoke and talking with friends gone before.

To further desecrate this enemy’s lodge, Red Feather chewed the dried meat and swilled down the cold, scummy blood soup before he pulled his breechclout aside. He urinated on the body of Old-She-Bear and those sacred articles left behind by family and friends in celebration of a brave warrior.

Custer reined up as Red Feather stooped from the torn lodge, gripping his penis and spraying the side of the buffalo hides.

“Gerard!”

From all the way back with Reno and Reynolds, the Arikara interpreter heard his name screamed as if it were some black curse. By the time Fred rode up to the lone tepee, Custer trembled with an uncontrollable rage.

“You tell these poor excuses for men, these Rees, that I’ve ordered them to ride on! By God, they were told not to stop for anything! They’ve disobeyed me once too often! Long Hair has been shamed by a bunch of ragged Arikarees, and I won’t have it!”

Custer was nearly shrieking, the color of his cheeks redder than a high-plains sunburn. Flecks of spittle dotted his rosy chapped lips. When Gerard started to speak, Custer plunged ahead, his fury still unspent.

“Gerard, you inform them they belong to you now.” Custer spit so the Rees would make no mistake understanding that he symbolically rid himself of them. “I do not want them. Tell these red bastards to step aside and let my soldiers through. My troops will take the lead if the Rees won’t. Tell your Arikaras I think they are women if they won’t fight the Sioux. And if they are a bunch of cowardly squaws, I’ll take their guns from them and send them back to their lodges, where their children can make fun of them for all the rest of their days. To laugh at them because they didn’t fight beside Long Hair when he destroyed the mighty Sioux!”

Instead of answering the general’s challenge, translated on Gerard lips, Bloody Knife and Stabbed both pulled their ponies out of the column and plodded off some distance from the soldiers. But Bear-in-Timber had long had a powder-keg temper. As the interpreter finished, the young warrior stood and shouted back at Custer, his own copper face flushed with anger.

“Long Hair, hear me! You take our weapons and send us home as cowards because we fear too many Sioux. You yourself told us we did not have to fight these Sioux, but that we owned their horses. Did you speak to us with two tongues, Long Hair? Do you now change your heart again and call us squaws? If you would tell your own young soldiers of the Sioux beyond count waiting for them in the valley below … they would surely act the same as we. You keep that from your men. If the soldier-chief spoke the truth to your own soldiers, you would be many days taking their rifles from them and beating them back to your fort.”

Many of the Rees laughed behind their hands as Gerard translated that portion of the harangue.

Custer squinted his hollow, sleepless eyes, fuming. Gerard had seen the general angry before, but never this furious.

Gerard was afraid Custer might make an example of Bear-in-Timber for the others, to maintain discipline among his scouts. To let both Indian and trooper alike know that he wasn’t about to take any of their guff.

“Just tell them this, Gerard,” Custer growled like a hound with its guard hair up. He swallowed once, throttling some of his anger. “Tell them they can stay with us if they will fight. I don’t want them otherwise.”

At the moment Fred Gerard opened his mouth to speak, a young Ree scout called Good Face, along with an older warrior named Boychief, hollered out, signaling from a nearby knoll not far up the trail. Gerard leapt atop his horse and tore up the hill. He got to the top of the knoll, his own horse prancing barely under his control as he peered down the far slope for a moment, then kicked the horse back down the slope. The two Rees rode right on his heels.

“Indians, General!” Fred shouted.

“What? Where?”

“Maybe forty of them … could be more!” Gerard rasped breathlessly as he yanked on the reins, his mount sliding to a dusty halt.

Reno galloped up from his position. He had spotted the same hostile warriors. “They’re sitting just out of our rifle range, General!” he shouted, genuine fear constricting his throat.

“Funny thing, Custer,” Gerard added, wiping his hand across a parched mouth, thirsting for the liquid treasure in his saddlebags. “They just sat there, looking at us, like they expected us to be here.”

Custer studied Gerard carefully as the interpreter stuck his hand into his three-strap saddlebag to pull out another tin flask. Custer couldn’t help but smell the sweetish odor of the sour-mash whiskey as Gerard drew long and hard on the fiery elixir.

From the look on the general’s face at that moment, Gerard was certain Custer—a notorious teetotaler—wanted a drink.

From behind them arose that sudden shrill cry Custer had known as a boy growing up in Ohio and Michigan, then again when he attacked Confederate cavalry and artillery positions during the war. This shrill and famous Custer shout leapt from Tom Custer’s lips as he tore up on his charger.

Little brother had caught sight of the quarry himself.

Without invitation Tom held out his hand to Gerard, yanking the flask away from him. He drank every bit as long on the potent whiskey as had Gerard. When he handed the canteen back, Tom rattled the sagebrush hills once again with his wild war cry, a screech that would scour any white man’s throat. Any but Custer’s.

“Thirty days furlough for the first goddamned soldier who raises a scalp!” Tom shouted.

Down the waiting columns those who could hear young Custer’s promise raised their own cries of battle lust. It was part of the fever they must each experience, working themselves into a lather for the coming battle.

Custer said, “Good, Tom! Work some fight up in ’em!”

Tom took the flask again and threw some more whiskey down his throat, peering up the knoll … then down the dry coulee that Ash Creek followed in the rainy season.

A small bunch of Indians, eh? he thought.

Tom gave the flask back to Gerard. They would share. Tom had never been selfish when it came to drinking. Whiskey was, after all, for sharing. For friends.

And he thought on those forty Sioux he had watched disappear over the knoll, riding out of reach.

Perhaps those Indians who had darted over the hill were nothing more than enticing decoys. After all, Tom knew as well as the next man how Crazy Horse had lured Fetterman and eighty men over Lodge Trail Ridge ten winters ago. It was the oldest Indian trick in the book.

Tom glanced up, feeling the whiskey warm his hot, knotted belly. The Rees mounted their horses.

“Gerard!” Custer shouted. “Why aren’t your lazy Arikarees going after those Sioux? There are horses to be taken! Scalps and honors to be won!”

Tom climbed back into the saddle as Fred Gerard cursed his scouts prancing atop their skittish horses. Perhaps the horses themselves sensed the visceral fear of their riders. Gerard got no response from the younger members of his detail. On the ground nearby hunkered some of the older Rees, Bloody Knife and Stabbed among them. They tore up handfuls of the dry grass, tossing the blades into the hot breeze.

“Otoe Sioux! Otoe Sioux!”

“They claim there’s too many Sioux again, General. More than there are blades of grass.”

“You take them—take them all and ride with Reno!” Custer bellowed in disgust. “I don’t want the Rees with me. Nowhere near me!”

“They don’t want to fight so many,” Gerard explained weakly, whispering so that only Custer and Tom could hear his plea. “Not with you or Reno. There’s more Sioux than we can handle, General.”

“Bullshit!” Tom shouted.

Gerard almost said something to young Custer but turned instead to the general. “None of the Rees want to go any—”

“Take their guns, boys!” Custer suddenly spat in the direction of the Arikara scouts. “Take their horses too! Give them their old ponies back. I have no more use for these whining squaws! We’ve found the Sioux, yet these miserable wretches don’t want to fight. So be it, Tom. I’ll send them home to their lodges, where they can die toothless old men.”

Minutes later after a detail from Tom’s C Troop loped up with the Rees’ ponies, and the exchange of animals had taken place, the scouts still refused to ride the back trail. Instead, they clustered in a knot, afraid to leave the protection of the soldiers. Many wailed their death songs against a background of horse snorts and blue-tongued curses from the stable sergeant retrieving the army mounts.

An eerie, wailing, profane chorus—fitting background itself for Custer’s descent into the valley.

Somewhere behind Custer’s own standard and the regimental guidons, back down the columns in those faceless rows of soldiers, a single voice rose strongly, clear in its baritone plea. A trooper, singing the words to “Out of the Wilderness”:

If you want to smell hell,

Just join the cavalry,

Just join the cavalry.

If you want to smell hell,

Then join the cavalry,

’Cause we’re not going home.