Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (19 page)

For a long moment Bouyer’s words stunned Custer and his officers into a granite silence. But as suddenly the general himself started to chuckle. It’s bitter sound filled the hot void surrounding them all.

“Well, Mitch …” He laughed louder and strolled up to Bouyer. There he amiably slapped a hand on the short half-breed’s shoulder, knocking some powdery alkali dust from the hair-on calfskin vest the interpreter wore. “The joke’s on you this time!”

Bouyer’s dark eyes flashed over the officers grouped behind Custer. Their faces showed the same sudden relief as their leader’s. They too started to laugh with the general.

“General, I’m going to say this simple as I can.” So quiet were Bouyer’s words that his voice shut them all up as quickly as he began to talk.

“Over yonder by the river, that drawing on the sandbar might be some other army, a real big one. Maybe the one you say Red Beard Crook is leading north. But this one,” and he pointed a gnarled finger down at the sweat-lodge scratchings, “the Sioux drew themselves as a huge force of warriors butchering a small bunch of soldiers. And that is just what
we
are, goddammit. Counting every last one of your men, we got less than half the strength of Crook.”

He let that sink in a moment. “You think on that,
General. We haven’t got Gibbon along—and you better believe the Sioux know that too. So you’ve got plans for us to prance right on in and flop headfirst into their camps, don’t you?”

“Balderdash!” Custer spat.

Angrily Custer kicked at the sand ridge, sending grains of sand skidding across the sweat lodge and into the air, scattering those soldiers who stood close to him.

“We’ve got some Sioux to find, gentlemen!” he announced sharply, ripping Vic’s reins from Burkman’s hand. “Let’s be about it. Sergeant Voss? You find trumpeter Martini. The two of you see that ‘Officers’ Call’ is given by voice to each company. I want to talk to my officers. Right over there. And right now.”

A
S
trumpeters Voss and Martini made their way through the command, Custer marched confidently toward a patch of willow and sage beside the gurgling Rosebud, where he drove the flagstaff for his personal standard into the dry, rocky soil.

Lieutenant Edward Godfrey had been close enough to hear the whole thing between Custer and Bouyer. Now Godfrey found himself one of the first waiting for Custer’s hastily called conference to get under way.

“Gentlemen, the Crows tell me that they’ve found some fresh sign ahead.”

It was as if he had dropped a sulfur-head Lucifer on a powder keg, waiting to see who would pounce first.

“I figure that’s the news we’ve been waiting to hear, General,” Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith rose to the bait.

He wheeled on Smith. “That’s right. Trouble is, there’s only three or four ponies. And one on foot.”

“Dammit, Autie. Sounds like the scouts ran across some beggar’s string-along outfit!” Tom said.

He stopped while many of the officers laughed at his comparison of forces. Godfrey knew that such laughter only goaded jokester Tom Custer on all the more.

“Autie, how can we get excited over some fresh sign after seeing where all these Indians camped—when that sign is just five poor Injuns?”

“If I may be so bold, General.” James Calhoun stepped forward. “It appears the Crows are getting desperate to have some fresh sign to show you.”

Custer held up his hand for quiet. “I for one find the news most cheering. Why, those of you who were with me will remember our winter down in Indian Territory chasing the Cheyenne.”

“By God, that’s right, General!” Godfrey piped up, watching Bouyer and Gerard join the officers’ conference. “California Joe and his Osages ran across an old trail. Better than a month old, it was. And only one lodge to boot. But we followed it.”

Custer beamed. “Did that trail pay off, Ed?”

“By damn, it did, General!” Godfrey answered on cue. “We caught old Medicine Arrow and all his Cheyennes napping!”

“By glory we did!” Tom echoed.

“Exactly,” Custer replied quietly. “I want you to realize what happened on the Sweetwater is about to happen here, fellas. The fresh trail we’ve run across may only be four or five Indians, but that handful will lead us to the mother lode.”

With a brutal, dry gust of wind at that exact moment, Custer’s personal standard blew down, falling so that it pointed toward the rear of the column’s march.

Back down the Rosebud.

For a moment not a single soldier, officer, or general alike realized the potent symbolism of that fallen flag. But Mitch Bouyer clamped his dark hand over his mouth, Indian fashion, to prevent his half-Sioux soul from flying out in awe and fear.

Godfrey stood where he could watch both Gerard and Bouyer. The Ree interpreter knit his brow, staring at the fallen standard gravely. But what Ed Godfrey read on
Bouyer’s face frightened him. The lieutenant swallowed hard, then knelt to retrieve Custer’s flag from the dirt.

He drove it in the dry ground once more.

No sooner than he let it go and turned back to the conference, another short gust of wind huffed out of nowhere, tearing through that officers’ assembly, toppling Custer’s standard a second time.

No longer was Ed Godfrey merely nervous. He was spooked as he plucked the flag from the ground and bored the shaft down into the summer-crusted, hard-packed surface the Indians had beaten with their moccasins. Only then did he lean the staff back against some sagebrush for additional support.

Godfrey raised his eyes and there met Lieutenant Wallace’s sad expression, a look filled with the tale of something grave and foreboding.

Anxiously Godfrey glanced down at the standard. He suddenly remembered Wallace’s warning on the evening of the twenty-second.

“I think General Custer is going to be killed.”

Swirling, swarming, and burning with fiery torment, tiny red buffalo gnats descended once again on the troopers as they plodded, forever plodded, through the dust and sweltering mirages of the Montana high-plains summer. A bright one-eyed sun glared down on the columns with unmerciful intensity, chapping raw the faces that weren’t already covered by a protective coating of talc-fine dust kicked up by the hooves of animals ahead in the long columns.

Damn gnats … mosquitoes
! grumbled Mitch Bouyer.

Biting, stinging, sucking until it nearly drove a man mad for want of relief. The gnats swelled his eyes half-shut to where he could barely see, forced to suck at the swirling, buzzing air through a silk bandanna tied round his face. Burning with the sting of mosquitoes and the bites of monster horseflies everywhere, a chunk of the half-breed’s flesh still lay exposed.

Never had he been able to bring himself to do what the old teamsters had done for years, up and down the Platte
River Road and the Bozeman Trail. They dabbed a potion of coal oil on the corners of their bandannas and hung those neckerchiefs from their sweat-weary hats just below their eyes to cover the rest of the face. That coal oil smelled bad enough to drive all but the hardiest pest away from the eyes. Bad enough that most men like Mitch Bouyer wondered just what was worse: the heat and dust and buffalo gnats … or the heat and dust and coal oil under your nose.

There were too many halts through that long afternoon, each one signaled by Custer so his troops would not overrun the Ree and Crow scouts. Not that any of the soldiers had noticed, but Bouyer took mark of it. Custer’s Indian trackers were inching ahead a bit more slowly than they had the first two days of their march up the Rosebud. To top it off, they weren’t ranging all that far afield on the flanks either. Seemed they stayed in sight of the dusty columns now.

No, Mitch decided, most soldiers too blind to recognize the face of fear anyway.

But Gerard saw it. Bouyer recognized it too. The Indians were tracking no longer. They simply followed that fresh trail working itself up toward the Wolf Mountains. On the other side of the divide spread that valley of the Greasy Grass, long a popular Cheyenne hunting ground for buffalo and antelope.

Throughout the beginning of their climb up the high, rugged land that erupted itself between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, the Indians kept a particular eye on that country off to their right—the drainage of Tullock’s Creek. It was this piece of country scout George Herendeen knew so well. It would be here he could pay for his keep when they reached the Forks sometime tomorrow. But for now the scouts kept a wary eye on that drainage. Some of the jumpier, younger Rees even thought they saw smoke signals off to the right, up the Tullock’s, far in the distance. But no older Arikara saw that smoke. They merely chuckled at the youngsters’ vivid war-trail imaginations. It was funny, watching the young ones hour by hour grow spookier and spookier.

Without any rainfall in this part of the country for the past three days, the ground lay parched again, crumbling beneath the ponies’ hoofs. Forced to follow a trail beaten by thousands upon thousands of horses and plowed up by uncountable travois only made the march worse for the dust-caked troopers. Custer ordered column-of-fours where he could, spreading the companies out as wide as practicable, attempting to keep the rising dust to a minimum.

Word was he didn’t want to be spotted—not just yet anyway.

Without a breeze the thick cloud persisted over the regiment. More and more the saddle galls and sweat-crusted underwear of the soldiers rubbed and chafed and burned at their weary, blistered rumps. Some of the oiled McClellans were beginning to dry and crack.

Faces burned and lips bled, oozing and stinging when a trooper repeatedly licked his tongue across the salty source of his misery for some momentary relief.

Bouyer listened to the soldiers grumble, complaining how bad Custer was making it on them.

You ain’t see the worst of it yet
, Bouyer brooded in the privacy of his thoughts.
None of you seen just how bad Custer can make it for you yet
.

By sundown on the twenty-fourth, Custer had given the order to camp, placing his entire command under a long, irregular bluff to minimize the chance of being spotted by Sioux scouts roaming the slopes above.

The regiment had marched some twenty-eight miles that day, and still the general told his adjutant, W. W. Cooke, he wasn’t satisfied with the pace. To Canadian Cooke, a tall, handsome, dead-shot woman’s man, it seemed Custer hungered like a wolf on a hot trail—the scent growing stronger and headier in his nose each time they had come across campsite after abandoned campsite.

“Cookey.” Custer turned suddenly as his adjutant dropped from his horse. “Don’t dismount. Carry my compliments to the commands. Inform them all supper fires will be extinguished as soon as they’re finished with their
meals. Most important, they’re to be prepared to move out again at eleven-thirty
P.M.
”

Cooke jerked out his watch, the shimmering fob dangling from his palm. In the fading light of a summer’s evening, he stared at the hands. His eyes climbed to find Custer staring back at him. “Sir—eleven-thirty? That’s not but three hours from now, General.”

“I well understand that, Billy,” Custer rasped with a dust-scaled throat. His own lips burned and bled as much as the next man’s. The cheeks above his own three-day-old stubble felt much like winter rawhide, stiff and unforgiving when he tried to smile.

But smile he did. “We’ll find time to sleep, Billy. Make no mistake about that. We find that Sioux camp … we can lie in wait until time for our attack. The troops won’t lose much sleep, really they won’t. Now be off with you. Inform the men.”

Cooke turned and rode off, thinking back to the long winter gone down on the Washita. The Osage trackers led Custer to that Cheyenne village of Black Kettle’s the general had hoped to find, then lay his regiment in wait until the time was right for attack.

By damn, he’ll do the same bloody thing here
, Cooke ruminated as he rode back along the bluff.
Find the camp, then rest up the men before we ride in there and wipe them out … Just the way we destroyed of Black Kettle’s band of brigands!

Although the columns had not covered as many miles as Custer had planned, it had been a long, difficult day nonetheless. In fact, three long and difficult days behind them now. And still the general prepared to march some more.

Three bleeming hours from now
, Myles Keogh grumbled to himself, hearing word from Billy Cooke.

As quickly Myles figured there was no sense wasting what little time a man had by bellyaching about it. Use that precious time out of the saddle for all that couldn’t be done on the march—like boiling coffee, what old files like Keogh called their skalljaw. Or forcing down their pasty hardtack
and some dried salt pork as they squatted around their smoky little fires.

Or simply finding enough flat ground that would allow a man to stretch out his tired frame, pull his slouch hat down over his scalded face, and close his eyes to the world for a few delicious hours of sleep.

Myles invited Benteen and others to his quarters, in reality nothing more than a small chunk of canvas Keogh tied to a bush, lean-to fashion. But the lack of spacious accommodations didn’t stop any of the guests from squatting in a circle to tell stories in that inky darkness slithering like a prairie wolf along the base of the bluff. Tom Custer even brought along a canteen full of whiskey he decided to crack open with his fellows. The whiskey scalded the parched throats and seared the cracked lips … but damn, if it wasn’t tasty after the day’s march.

While some shared their opinions of the Crow and Ree versions of the Sioux drawings, Lieutenant Calhoun worked at a huge blister at the back of a heel. His feet tended to sweat more than the normal man’s, and with damp stockings his boots invariably irritated his feet. Up and down, up and down—constant movement rubbed his boot-heel while the ball of his foot rested in the oxbow stirrup, working up a sizable blister that nearly wrapped itself around the back of his heel.