Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (36 page)

Then the young bearer of the regimental standard spurred his animal. The horse struggled against the bit, then surged forward.

At the moment the trees ahead erupted with that single rifle shot, the standard-bearer’s mount leapt alongside Custer’s horse.

The big lead ball struck the young soldier in the side of the face. The exit wound left little of the back of his head. Blood and gray matter splattered the soldier-chief.

Tom watched his brother jerk his reins in. He wheeled crazily as Vic fought her bit, bringing the animal under control in the knee-deep water midstream. Custer gave Vic the business end of those gold spurs. The big animal lurched on across the middle of the cold, rushing stream.

Instinctively White-Cow-Bull pulled the trigger on his old Henry repeater.…

As his .44-caliber bullet smashed through George Armstrong Custer’s chest, the shock wave sent the pink-faced
soldier tumbling over the back of the big horse, into the turbulent water.

Almost by command his blaze-faced sorrel pranced once-round on the rocky bottom of the stream and loped back to where the soldiers skidded to a halt.

Their leader lay face down in the water. Some soldiers dropped from the saddle to fire their carbines at the Indians hidden behind their cottonwood fortress. At the same time, two other troopers stumbled along the rocky river bottom to retrieve the young soldier’s body when it began to drift off on the bobbing current.

Three more soldiers dropped to the cold, tumbling waters beside their fallen leader. One of these wore buckskins too. His gray hat fell into the river.

“Autie!”

Tom’s frantic cry bounced along the ragged river bluffs as he dashed forward, watching his brother pitch backward from his mount. As if it all happened in slow motion, Tom reached out—trying to check Custer’s fall.

But he got there too late. Autie already floated in the water. Some soldiers at the head of the column dropped to the river, forming a protective barrier around the general, while the rest of the command milled and jostled—suddenly numbed and dumbstruck.

Lieutenant Smith was there in the river after the next beat of Tom’s heart. George Yates right behind him.

The big blond captain from Monroe, Michigan, eased the general out of Tom’s arms, turning Custer over, bringing his face out of the bloody water.

Tom stared, lips trembling and unable to talk, unable to move, staring at that huge red stain spreading like soft flower petals across the left side of Custer’s gray shirt.

“Get his horse, goddammit!” Yates bellowed.

Tom didn’t know what to do. Autie had always given the orders. Except in that wild unthinking charge at Saylor’s Creek—when no one dared an assault on the Confederate artillery battery … no one, that is, until Tom cried out and led the charge himself.

“T-tom …”

He looked down into his brother’s face clouded with pain, with confusion and fear. And watched a gush of blood pool at the corner of Autie’s cracked lips, beneath that bushy, strawlike mustache.

“Autie!”
The word slid like an elegy past Tom’s lips. Never before had his older brother been seriously wounded in battle. So damned lucky, never suffering like the many, many others … “M-my God! You’re shot!”

“Hill …” Custer bubbled his one-word command at the face swimming before his glazing eyes. “Get us back up the hill.”

As his heavy head slowly drooped, the general fell silent.

“Is he dead?” Fresh Smith demanded coarsely, suddenly very afraid.

Those precious seconds at the ford became confusion. Then confusion gave itself to the beginnings of panic that spread through the ranks. Milling, shouting wildly, this headless army bottled itself at the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee. While above them on the hillside, Calhoun and Keogh watched in concern.

Custer’s own companies weren’t moving across the river. Stalemated. And that spelled anything but hope in the hearts of Keogh’s rear guard.

By now more warriors had slid behind the cottonwoods, returning the random soldier fire. Bullets pinged off the low bluffs directly behind the troopers or slashed into the river around them, sending up tiny eruptions.

Yates had been busy over the body, covering it while he felt at Custer’s neck for a pulse. Then he pulled back momentarily, cursing himself. No wonder he couldn’t sense a pulse beat … his gloves!

Instead, the captain bent to put an ear against Custer’s chest. Almost as if they stood enclosed in some foggy dream, the shooting and shouting around the small knot of officers stopped suddenly, the horses quit neighing or fighting their bits, and the warriors across the river mysteriously fell silent.

There was powerful medicine made at this place.

“He’s alive!” The Michigan soldier rose dripping from
the water, bawling to the bone-pale sky above. “By God in heaven—the general’s alive!”

“Get his horse!” Tom cried out, instilled with hope, instilled with life himself now. And Vic was suddenly there. “Help me, dammit! Get Autie up! Up there on Vic. Get him on his horse!”

“It’ll be all right,” Lieutenant Smith droned over and over. “It’ll be all right now.”

Fresh Smith and George Yates helped sling the general over the saddle before Tom leapt atop Vic himself, squaring himself behind the cantle where he could cling onto his brother’s body, steadying it for the coming ride. Lieutenant and captain caught up their own mounts, swinging into the saddle and splashing out of the stream.

From across the river, in their cottonwood deadfall fortress, the screams and shouts grew louder. And beyond them the shrieks grew more in number. Above a pounding of pony hoofbeats.

“We’re in for a scrap of it now, Tommy!” Smith said it evenly, looking back over his shoulder.

“Sounds like the gates of hell have opened up, George!” Smith shouted to Yates.

“It’s up to you, Tommy!” Yates said coolly, old hand that he was, his eyes set more serious and deadly than Tom had ever seen them. “Turn ’em around. Pick up Keogh and Calhoun after we’re up the slope—”

“Slope?” Tom asked.

Yates swallowed, his eyes flicking up the slope past the point where companies L and I held off better than a hundred now. “Best you get us up that hill like the general wanted.”

Tom made no mistake in reading the urgency in that veteran’s no-nonsense declaration. He nodded automatically. Never had anything been so clear to him in his life. Autie had wanted him to get the men to the top of the hill. From where they stood right now down in the river, he wasn’t all that sure how far away that hill really was, but he figured his older brother wanted to get there to make a stand until the reinforcements arrived.

The only chance they had was Benteen, returning with
his men, bringing McDougall’s pack train. Tom figured they could hold out till then. Autie knew they could hold out.

That’s what he tried to tell me
, Tom thought.
Just get to the top of the hill. And whatever you do—hold on.

T
HE
Hunkpapa and Santee camps thundered with victory cries now that the soldiers who had attacked them were cornered in the timber, retreating across the river and into the hills beyond.

More and more warriors rode back into the camps, returning from the battle in the valley, carrying scalps they brandished on their rifle muzzles or waved aloft from lances and coup sticks. A few even carried complete heads they had hacked from their victims. These were Santee warriors mostly, for they were the last tribe to practice this ancient ritual of decapitating an enemy.

Everywhere the women raised their high, shrill tremolos and ululating cries, sounding the ages-old approval for bravery and success in battle. A high-pitched trilling of the tongue was about all war chief Gall could hear—that and the pounding of blood hot at his ears.

Pizi, as Gall was known among the Sioux, had discovered his two wives and three young children dead near the
southern edge of the Hunkpapa camp where they had gone to dig roots that morning.

Two women and three children dead. The first casualties of Major Marcus Reno’s assault on that far fringe of the great gathering along the Greasy Grass. An ignoble beginning to a bloody little battle that would rage but two hours from the time Reno’s soldiers fired their first shots, until there were no longer any alive on last-stand hill.

Trembling with primeval fury, Gall rose slowly from the bloody bodies of his family. He was alone. No wives now—no children to carry his line in their veins. His eyes afire with a blood-lust, the war chief finally heard that rifle fire coming from the northeast across the river.

He gazed up toward the hills, seeing the smoke from Indian and soldier guns alike near the top end of Lower Medicine Tail. Then to his wondering eyes came the most fantastic sight of all—frantic soldiers scattering in wild, disordered retreat up the hills leading away from the Miniconjou Ford, away from the Medicine Tail Coulee itself.

Soldiers in retreat, like a wolf spider trying to fight off the infuriating, overpowering charge of black ants. Their huge army mounts leapt and stumbled. Gall sensed what terror those
wasichus
must feel at this moment—easy enough for the soldiers to glance back over their shoulders and see what waited for the man who couldn’t drag himself out of the mouth of that coulee.

Right behind the last frightened, white-knuckled trooper, the Cheyenne and Sioux were streaming across the shallow ford like maddened, vengeful wasps.

Surely many of Custer’s soldiers must have blinked, and blinked again, after rubbing their eyes clear of dust and tears.

Could it be they really saw what galloped toward them?

Right in the middle of that horde of warriors splashing across the river rode a handful—no more than a dozen at most—screaming, riding their ponies backwards!

Completely naked, this dozen carried nothing more in their hands than long sticks aflutter with feathers and scalps. Hideously painted, they smacked the rumps of their
ponies repeatedly to spur them after the retreating soldiers. Riding backwards, courting death, shrieking like a pack of banshees straight out of hell itself. The contraries’ suicidal bravery pricked every other warrior into a wild charge across the ford and up the hillside.

Like a flock of wrens and sparrows suddenly wheeling about and chasing a troublesome, predatory hawk, the first warriors flung themselves after the screaming, crying, frightened soldiers, who kicked and whipped and beat their weary, lathered horses. No bottom left in those army mounts. It was too late—nowhere near enough time for grazing on their march up the Rosebud, and too little sleep crossing over the Wolf Mountains, not to mention no water to speak of in the last few hours. The horses were done in.

Gall rallied his warriors and led the hundreds of determined, blood-crazed Sioux, already hot from their battle in the timber, across the ford and up the slopes, dogging the cavalry’s heels.

His blood aboil, the war chief knew his task was to push the pony soldiers back from the village, so no more women and children would have to die by soldier bullets. Then Gall would kill them … slowly, methodically … each and every one of them. Right down to the last soldier who had defiled their great camp and ridden down into this valley to attack a camp of the small and helpless ones.

Gall promised himself no
wasichu
soldier would remain alive to torture. He understood that for these frightened white men to see there was no chance for escape, for them to realize that the end was near and not know when that last bullet would come—all that was torture enough.

Pizi, the Sioux war chief, wanted to wallow in white blood the way a buffalo bull wallows in mud to rid himself of fleas and ticks. Already his nostrils filled with the stench of death …
wasichu
death.

“No one left standing!” he shouted now as his followers burst from the top of the lower Medicine Tail Coulee. “No soldier left alive!”

Many of the warriors glanced at their war chief for that fraction of a moment. Most knew he had lost his entire family to these soldiers he hungered to wipe from the earth.
It was right what Gall asked. The pony soldiers deserved to die.

“For our women and children!” Gall shrieked as the troopers above him stumbled, wheeled, and turned, dropping to the ground to set up a ragged skirmish line around some screaming officers.

“Wipe every last soldier from the breast of our Mother! KILL THEM ALL!”

Some two hundred twenty-five men had followed George Armstrong Custer in his march down the Medicine Tail Coulee.

Of that number only a handful of Crow scouts would live to tell of the horror on that ridge to disbelieving white ears in the decades to come.

In those first moments after Custer had been blown out of his saddle, the Sioux had shrieked down to the river crossing, bolstering the four brave Cheyenne warriors who had turned Custer’s gallant charge into a harried retreat to certain death. With the smell of blood and victory fresh in their nostrils, the Sioux warriors had turned from the Reno fight in the valley and spurred their little ponies north toward the other soldiers who were reported ready to attack the villages.

So many hands were already bloody from the battle with the soldiers in the valley. Dark, wet scalps hung dripping from their belts. That paint they had quickly applied when the attack was sounded had now become smeared and furry with valley dust. Many were already drunk with victory. Most probably carried army carbines in their hands and wore those bloody blue-and-gray army shirts they had taken off the bodies of soldiers slaughtered down in the timber in the wake of Reno’s mad retreat.

To wear a dead soldier’s bloody tunic into battle with these others—such would work powerful medicine on these soldiers clustering in fear atop the hill.

While the young warriors charged up the slope, the women and old men scurried up to the high points of land east of the river to watch the battle take form.

This would truly be a fight. The soldiers in the valley
had turned and run away. These on the hill had nowhere to run. They had to turn and fight.