Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1

by Terry C. Johnston

  Too late Elliott had his attention drawn to the timber looming before them. Only then did his men notice the trees to their left. And right. Of a sudden it seemed as if the trees belched warriors—each one brandishing a bow or rifle, lance or war ax.

  Frantic, the pony soldiers reined up, savagely haunch-sliding their lathered mounts into a snow-blinding halt. They wheeled, clattering, bumping against each other, their horses rearing in fright. The noise of warrior screams, the high-pitched death song of eagle-wingbone whistles drowned all sound. The tide of this nasty little battle had suddenly swung out of reach for Elliott’s desperate band of blue-coats.

  The narrow gap through which they had just confidently galloped suddenly closed like a puckered strip of sun-dried rawhide. No way out now; they found themselves surrounded by angry, blood-eyed Arapahos led by Powder Face and that battle-famous war chief, Left Hand.

  For most of the eighteen, it would be their first, and last, experience of bowel-puckering terror as hundreds of warriors rode in, surrounding them, tightening their deadly gauntlet like a feathered noose … no escape. A screeching horde swept around the frantic, wild-eyed army mounts. Everywhere! Firing their iron-tipped arrows into the horses, aiming their old rifles at the soldiers. Biting. Stinging. Whistling like a thousand wasps.

  “Kennedy!” Elliott barked, releasing the reins as his horse dropped, thrashing. “Ride, goddammit! We’re not far from the Cheyenne camp!”

  “Yessir!” Kennedy flew into a saddle with one fluid motion, laying low along the horse’s neck as he held his hand down to Elliott. “Good luck, sir!”

  “We’ll hold out till you get back!” Elliott gripped Kennedy’s bare hand, shoving a second pistol into it as he stepped back, watching the veteran savagely kick the mount into motion.

  “Godspeed, Sergeant, “ Elliott whispered the instant before the iron arrow point pierced his chest. He sank to his knees like a sack of wet oats, gasping. “God help us all.”

  A proven battlefield veteran during the war, Elliott fought the pain and ordered his men to dismount, to prepare for a skirmish. All of them were on the ground by then. Not a man could he spare to hold the frightened, rearing horses. He ordered the horses released. Hell, they weren’t of use to them now. No chance for escape on horseback anyway. Their only hope lay in the thought that Kennedy would make it through, back to the village, bringing reinforcements.

  With the screeching and blanket-waving of the Indians, the horses clattered off. Now the soldiers were alone. With not one chance in a thousand of pulling themselves from the dripping jaws of this ambush.

  “Down on your bellies, goddammit! Circle up!” Elliott yelled, snapping the arrow shaft off close to his bloody coat.

  With their feet toward the center, they each could cover another man’s backside.

  They made a hot time of it for the screeching warriors while it lasted. Each one still carried close to a hundred cartridges for his carbine. Again and again, Elliott reminded them of their duty through those final minutes.

  “Sell your lives dearly, boys! A hundred of ’em for every one of us!”

  They did indeed sell their lives dearly. One by one, for dying is a one-man job at best. From the start the fight could not have lasted very long at all. Ridges to the south and east afforded good positions where the Indians fired down into Elliott’s grim circle. A desperate scrap lasting less time than it takes for the winter sun to travel from one lodge pole to the next. Less than fifteen white man minutes.

  Perhaps long enough for a man to shave with a straight razor. Surely the fight lasted no longer than it took for the victorious warriors to perform their bloody work on the soldiers’ bodies afterward, before they pulled out to chase after those troopers Custer had left behind earlier that morning with the regiment’s coats and haversacks.

  That many warriors simply didn’t need much time to complete their butchery of Elliott’s lost command.

  * * *

  As his men drew closer, Tom Custer saw that more than frozen stalks of winter grass rose tall in the hallowed air around each corpse. The back of every soldier bristled with a score or more arrows.

  The search detail slid from their horses in grim, tight-lipped shock at what greeted their eyes. An unmasked revulsion was written plain as paint around every soldier’s eyes, in the set of every trooper’s jaw, as each man stumbled through the tangle of mutilated bodies, trying vainly to recognize a familiar face.

  Hoping he would not.

  Major Joel H. Elliott and his fifteen men had all been butchered in the most gruesome manner possible. Every torso bullet-riddled. Pinned with arrows. Backs, buttocks, and legs gashed. The hostiles had slashed most every throat, and at least four heads lay beside their frozen bodies.

  “There were eighteen men still unaccounted for when we left the Washita, boys.” The younger Custer swallowed deep against the gall rising in his throat. “With Sergeant Major Kennedy, Elliott, and his fifteen men here, that still leaves one man unaccounted for on the day of the battle. One soldier to find.”

  “Never gonna find that boy, sir,” Grimes growled.

  “My detail ain’t leaving until we find a body, Grimes.”

  “Better yet, Lieutenant—I say we find the Injuns did this to our boys!” said one of the sour-faced troopers.

  “Time enough for that!” Tom Custer snapped. “Time now to see these men get a fitting burial.”

  He turned, searching the whitened, bitter faces for a man to count on. “Schmidt?”

  “Yessir?”

  “Head back to General Custer.” he ordered. “Tell him what we found. Request a wagon—no, make that two. Bring the wagons here to recover the bodies of these poor soldiers.”

  “Understood, sir.” Schmidt leapt to the saddle, wheeled his prancing horse in a circle, galloped off toward the destroyed camp of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne.

  “Damn them all!” Tom Custer drove one gloved fist down into the open palm of his other hand.

  “There’ll come a time when Autie and I will make these goddamned bastards pay for what they’ve done here!”

  CHAPTER 15

  LIKE any morsel of gossip, the discovery of Elliott’s command spread through the regiment like wildfire. Barely controlling his own rage, Custer ordered three of Bell’s wagons emptied and dispatched with another squad to follow Sergeant Nels Schmidt, with orders to bring in the bodies of Elliott’s men. At the same time, Sheridan and Custer determined to take two companies of troops with them as they marched downstream toward the nearby camps deserted following Black Kettle’s defeat.

  “From the lay of the land, Custer, I get an idea why you didn’t learn of the other villages until it was almost too late.”

  “Not just the rolling countryside, sir. Bloody poor scouting on our part. Should’ve known more of what I was going into before I attacked that Cheyenne village.”

  “You feel lucky you rode out of this valley with your hair?”

  “It’d never come to that, General! Not like poor Elliott.”

  “Perhaps it was fortuitous that you retreated from the Washita when you did. Appears you would’ve had your hands full finding time to scratch your ass with thousands of hostiles breathing down your neck.”

  “I’ve learned my lesson. Too late for Major Elliott to learn his. Have to rely more on my scouts. Pay a bit more attention to their advice.”

  “Haven’t learned it all yet, eh, Custer?”

  Custer flashed a nervous slash of a grin at Sheridan. “No. Seems life has a way of dealing me a surprising card every now and then.”

  Both chuckled at Custer’s easy joke on himself, until a small group of civilian and Osage scouts, clustered in a loose knot up the trail, drew their attention. The guides sat sullen and silent atop their horses, waiting for Custer to ride up.

  Corbin spoke first. “Joe’s downstream, searching a village. This’un here appears to be where the Arapaho pitched camp.”

  “Very well. Lead on, Jack. Show me what you�
�ve learned.”

  By late afternoon, Custer had scoured every camp. The best estimates by trackers and scouts alike put the number of Indians who had been camped in the valley of the Washita the morning the Seventh Cavalry thundered into Black Kettle’s camp as somewhere between five thousand and sixty-five hundred. What could quickly raise the hackles on the back of any trooper’s neck was that of this number, at least a third could be counted as warriors of fighting age, each one of them carrying government-issue weapons, each warrior spoiling for a good scrap with the U.S. Cavalry.

  The Osages informed Custer they believed the small camp had been Arapaho under Little Raven; the largest, Cheyennes under Medicine Arrow; and in addition, two bands of Kiowas under Satanta and Lone Wolf. They had found enough signs in the abandoned camps to know the Washita had been visited at the time of the battle by some small bands of Apache and Comanche.

  “When I said you’d struck a nest of yellow jackets, General”—Moses Milner paused to spit a stream of brown juice into the trampled snow, “was I far wrong?”

  “No, you weren’t, Joe,” Custer admitted. “Appears there was plenty enough of ’em to fight that day.”

  “Them Cheyenne can give a fella all the fight you want—if’n you plan on running onto ’em again sometime down the line.”

  “Soon, Joe,” Custer growled. “I want to find out what these Kiowa and Cheyenne are made of.”

  In every camp lay signs of a hasty retreat. Stuffed in the forks of the winter-bare trees stood hundreds of peeled lodge poles the tribes planned to use as replacements come spring and breakup of the Washita camps. As the cavalry officers rode into the last abandoned village, identified by the Osages as a Kiowa camp, they noticed hundreds of buffalo robes and old, vermin-infested blankets scattered across the grounds. Kettles and other cast-iron cooking utensils had been abandoned in a hurried and disorderly flight, along with adzes, knives, even an ancient coffee mill.

  “Near as the scouts can determine it, General,” Custer said to Sheridan, “this was Satanta’s crowd—camped right here.”

  “General Custer!”

  They wheeled at the sound of the familiar voice. Ben Clark jogged up to the cluster of officers.

  “Begging pardon, General Sheridan. Should be calling the lieutenant colonel by his proper rank.”

  “That’s quite all right, son.” Sheridan smiled genuinely.

  “You act as if you’ve got the jitters bad, Ben. Seen a ghost?” Custer inquired.

  “Kiowas—the ones raiding Kansas, sir.”

  “How’re you so sure of that?” Sheridan demanded.

  “We finally have some evidence, General. No mistaking it now.”

  “Show me!” Sheridan flagged his arm impatiently.

  Clark led the officers past snowy circles clearly showing where the lodges had been pinned to the earth, each complete with a blackened, rock ring signifying a fire pit. Milner, Corbin, and a handful of Pepoon’s army scouts waited with Hard Rope and other Osage scouts in a mute circle.

  As Custer and the others approached, the scouts shuffled out of the way. On the ground lay two stiffened, snow-dusted bodies. They were not Indians.

  The smaller of the two was a boy about two years of age. While he appeared malnourished, with sunken cheeks and ribby flanks, along with several bruises coloring his death-pale face, no man was certain just how the boy had died.

  Beside the youngster lay a larger corpse, more pitiful to look at. Despite the blood, decay, and predators, any man could tell she had been a beauty—blond, in her early twenties. Her skull crushed. Two bullets fired point-blank into her forehead from such close range that powder burns smudged the edges of the tiny, puckered holes.

  “They ain’t been captive here long, General,” Milner said, breaking the tense silence.

  “Why do you say that?” Custer inquired.

  “She’s still got her civilian clothes on. That dress, them gaiters on her legs to hold up them torn stockings, all of it. She been here very long at all, them clothes’d be worn out. Be wearing Injun dresses an’ leggings.”

  “I see …” Custer’s voice trailed off.

  “You might want to see this too, General.” Jack Corbin stepped up, opening his hand. In it lay a small piece of cornmeal cake.

  “What’s that, pray tell?” Sheridan demanded.

  “Food for the road, sir,” Corbin answered sourly.

  “Found it when we turned the body over. Gal had it stuffed down between her breasts. Near as we can figure, she was fixing to light out,” Milner said, his teeth tearing at a new hunk of black tobacco.

  His eyes slewed around the group of high-ranking officers for a few breathless moments more before he continued. “When Custer’s soldiers rode down on Black Kettle’s camp, the news traveled downriver damned quick. Wasn’t long before news hit this village and all hell broke loose, most like. Warriors hustling out for the fight, getting weapons and ponies ready to ride out to do battle. Women and kids screeching to beat the band, tearing down lodges so the camp’d hit the trail running.”

  “Goddammit! What of the woman?” Sheridan griped, perturbed at the long-winded way of scout Milner.

  “General—” Milner spat a stream of tobacco juice, letting Sheridan suffer a bit more of a wait, “we figure this poor woman got wind of what was going on in all the excitement. Somehow she figured out the army was attacking the villages and she sure didn’t want to be dragged along by the squaws when they broke camp. Seems she figured to tear off and make good her escape, get downstream some-ways to soldiers. But that’s probably when she was found out.”

  “And murdered!” Sheridan roared into the silence around him.

  “Two bullets in the head, close range. That’s murder in my tally,” Milner said.

  Custer knitted his bushy blond eyebrows to tell Milner he disapproved of openly baiting his superior. “Before or after her skull was crushed?”

  “She’s shot after. Dead a’ready.”

  “My Lord!” Sheridan whispered angrily.

  “First time a man sees such savagery, General, it leaves its scar,” Custer said.

  “Granted, I witnessed my share during the recent rebellion—yet I saw nothing as inhumane as this.”

  “I wouldn’t call an Indian human by any stretch of the imagination, General,” said Schuyler Crosby, Sheridan’s aide-de-camp.

  “Spoken like a truly ignorant soldier boy!” Milner spat at the well-scrubbed officer.

  Crosby puffed like a challenged prairie rooster. “Why, I’ll not be lectured by some half-savage, unkempt wild man smelling no better than an Indian of bear grease.”

  “Ain’t no different than any stupid pencil-pushing desk soldier smelling of lilac water yourself!” Milner barked back into the trembling officer’s crimson face.

  “Gentlemen! Please!” Custer barked.

  For the moment it appeared the young Lieutenant Colonel Schuyler Crosby would draw his pistol on Milner. Custer was certain that should Crosby break leather with that revolver of his, Crosby would be the dead man.

  Custer clamped Crosby’s wrist. “I recommend you think twice about it, Colonel, then take your hand from your belt and scratch your nose with it.”

  Crosby stared into the cold, icy blue of Custer’s eyes. Instead of scratching his nose, Sheridan’s aide jerked his arm free as he wheeled about and stomped off.

  “You were a bit hard on him, Joe,” Custer chided.

  “Nowhere near as hard as I’d been had the dumb bastard cleared leather with that popgun of his.” Milner brought his left hand out from under his coat where he gripped his own Walker Colt. “Never got the goat of a man so quick before.”

  “You egged the man on!” Sheridan moved closer, his eyes flaring with accusation.

  “Begging pardon, sir!” Custer stuck an arm out, stopping Milner from starting a ruckus with Sheridan. “I think Crosby there was provoked by nothing more than his own impetuous nature. Besides, I agree with Joe.”

  “Ag
ree?” Sheridan snapped.

  “We really aren’t all that different from the savages we’re chasing, General.”

  “Explain yourself, Custer.”

  “Simple, General. Only difference between us and the Indians is that these hostiles live more closely to nature and the wilderness than white men do. We have in all of us that selfsame capacity for brutality. Since the red man’s that much closer to the wild side of a man’s soul, it doesn’t take all that long for him to get from peaceful happiness to the savage murder of a woman when she’s seen as nothing more than an enemy who’s trying to escape.”

  Sheridan fumed. “Explain why—”

  “Ironic thing about it was that Crosby was just about to prove the very point Joe was making.”

  Sheridan huffed at last. “I suppose you do have a point there.”

  “I’ll send Moylan with some men back to remove the bodies to our camp for the night. Given a decent burial.”

  “Very well,” Sheridan growled, still shaken by the fiery exchange that had nearly ended in bloodshed.

  A winter sun had begun to settle among the western hills when Sheridan jabbed a finger into Custer’s chest. “Custer, we must stop them now. There’s no other course.” The iron was in Sheridan’s voice.

  “Believe me—we’ll stop them. If the General pleases, a moment in private?” Custer turned away from the cluster of officers with Sheridan at his side and stepped off a few yards.

  “General, we can’t afford to get bogged down here on the southern plains. We must remember not to put a match to the situation here … or we won’t be free to see to problems north of here.”

  “You concentrate on this damned department,” Sheridan growled. “It’s your job—and your career. If you don’t stop these wild savages from murdering and stealing and Lord knows what right here and now, by God, you never will make command!”

  Custer held his pride in check. “Your plans for this operation show we can stop them here, this winter.”