“What?”
“The great summer council,” Bouyer replied stiffly. “A time when all the tribes come together, whether they’re on the reservations or not. This year Sitting Bull called them to join him up here. That isn’t just a single village down there—one you can strike and be done with while you wash your hands in the waters of the Greasy Grass. Custer, that down there is the greatest gathering of Indians any white man will ever lay eyes on and live to tell the tale!”
“Utter … rubbish! My reports state there couldn’t be any such camp. Yet I’ll agree with you on one thing, Bouyer—you were sent along with my regiment to help me. And nothing more. Best you get back to your scouting now and leave the military operations to me!”
“There isn’t a man in your command who would know, Custer,” the feisty Bouyer protested, “but I’ve spent over thirty years among the Indians, either living or trading with them. If that ain’t the biggest camp there ever was anywhere, you can cut my heart out and feed it to your dogs.”
“We aren’t getting anywhere with this—”
“Sitting Bull himself has offered a hundred fine ponies for my head! You’d better understand that, Custer. I know what I’m talking about! Them Sioux’ll kill me if they ever get their hands on me alive. And it won’t be a pretty thing to watch!”
“You’re saying that very same fate awaits my command, Bouyer?”
Bouyer grinned at Custer wolfishly. “You understand, don’t you? The Sioux know all about you soldier-chiefs. There’s Red Beard Crook and No Hip Gibbon … and you, Custer. They call you Peoushi. Among the Sioux you are called the Long Hair.”
“And years ago the Cheyenne called me Hiestzi—Yellow Hair.” Taking off his hat, Custer began to chuckle. “Pretty funny, don’t you think, Mr. Bouyer? The bloody joke’s on them! They won’t have an idea one who’s charging their camp. I don’t have long hair anymore!”
Reynolds found himself snickering with Custer’s sour joke at his own expense. Varnum laughed loud and easy, like a colicky bullfrog.
Bouyer was patient. He waited until the white men were through with their fun. “If you’re going to be so goddamned bull stupid—I’ve just got one last suggestion for you, Custer, then I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“If that’s a promise, Bouyer—to keep your mouth shut—I’ll hear your last suggestion,” the commander replied haughtily.
“Get your exhausted men and beat-down outfit out of here as fast as their wore-out horses can carry ’em. You go down there into that valley, Custer—you and too many others never coming out.”
They watched the half-breed stomp off toward the horses.
Custer muttered to Reynolds and Varnum, “Let ’im go where he damned well pleases.”
Then, to Reynolds’s surprise, the general bolted after the whiskered half-breed.
Behind them all Ree scout Spotted-Horn-Cloud sitting solemn as an owl, having watched the white men argue before Bouyer raced off in anger. Slowly he scooped up handful after handful of dirt, pouring it over his head like water, mournfully singing out to the climbing sun. “Old friend of many, many seasons … I shall not see you go down behind the hills this night.”
“Bouyer! Hold up there!” Custer shouted, reaching the picketed horses at the foot of the Nest.
Mitch whirled like he was shot. “You hold it, General!” He leapt aboard his Crow pony, taking up the slack in the reins.
“You needn’t—”
“You know, Custer, a lot of folks tried to tell me about you—how goddamned right you always think you are. Said you get right on a trail like a winter wolf with the smell of fresh blood in your nose, and you just can’t back off, can you?”
“I’ve never allowed myself to back off, Bouyer.”
“They say some people learn quickly. Others … well, I’ve found they learn more slowly than most. Like preachers and schoolteachers—army officers learn most slow of all.”
Custer and the others watched Bouyer tear downhill toward the waiting troops.
“If it were up to army scouts like you, Bouyer,” Custer hollered after the half-breed, “the army wouldn’t get a bloody thing done at all!”
After Custer left his troops behind to climb to the Crow’s Nest, his command prepared to march to the base of the rocky bluffs as ordered and await the general’s descent after he had personally studied the valley of the Little Bighorn.
While packing the mules for the march of F Company, Sergeant William A. Curtis discovered that not only had a small bundle of clothing worked itself loose from his bedroll during last night’s blind climb up the dark and rugged trail from the Rosebud, but Corporal John Briody reported a box of hardtack missing from one of the company mules.
With a hand-picked detail ready and mounted behind him, Sergeant Curtis reported to Captain George Yates that he volunteered to retrieve both clothing and bread box.
“Very well, Sergeant,” Yates replied without enthusiasm. In fact, it seemed he didn’t relish sending his men along the back trail in the slightest. “Just be quick about it. I don’t want F Company strung out all over the divide if we run into some action.”
“Understood, sir!” Curtis saluted and vaulted aboard his mount, leading the detail downhill toward the Rosebud.
Pensive and anxious, his stomach churning the way it did whenever he faced combat, Yates stared after the squad of men disappearing through the trees. A Civil War veteran who was not only a Custer hometown boy, but one who had served on Custer’s staff during the war, Yates realized how important retrieving the clothing and bread box could be.
If any wandering hostiles discovered those items dropped along a fresh trail of iron-shod hoofs …
Curtis and Briody led their four green recruits down the back trail, sharing between them ribald jokes they had heard many a time before, occasionally whistling songs that pleased a soldier beneath the high, thin overcast foretelling of another sweltering day.
“Say, you boys know the words to—”
“Goddamn!” Curtis bellowed, reining back with one hand, throwing his right up to signal a halt.
“Jeeeesuuuus!” gulped one of the privates, yanking his mount’s bit so harshly that the animal stumbled and fell to the side, neck twisted around, spilling its rider into the grass and spiny cactus.
He rolled in the cactus as the other three troopers bumped their horses into one another, all trying to retreat at once while Curtis and Briody attempted to maintain some semblance of order in their disheveled ranks.
Down the trail less than forty yards away, another small group of young men had also been surprised. They darted for their nearby ponies. Four warriors, wearing nothing but breechclouts and moccasins in the midmorning heat, had been intent on chopping at the wooden box of hardtack with a camp ax when Curtis’s troops rounded the brow of the hill and discovered them.
The warriors didn’t know whether to mount and ride or stand and fight. But it appeared the soldiers were dismounting and going to make a fight of it. Without waiting for much more than a brave yelp or two to spring from their throats, the half-dozen warriors leapt aboard their small ponies and kicked dust across the shallow creek, fleeing up the hill.
All but one of the warriors disappeared over the top of the knoll, pushing on west for the Little Bighorn. That solitary rider sat silhouetted against the pale corn-flower blue summer sky and raised his arm defiantly in the air, yelling out his challenge and ridicule. At the end of that arm hung one of the new Henry repeaters the Sioux had traded for at Spotted Tail Agency.
With the hairs on the back of his neck bristling at attention, Curtis ordered the de-horsed private to climb back on his mount or run the risk of getting left behind. This was one sergeant who wouldn’t have his detail wiped out because a greenhorn shavetail had some cactus stuck in his ass.
“Cactus or lead, Private!” Curtis bellowed, swatting the soldier’s horse with the butt of his carbine. “You’ll have one or the other in your ass before this day’s done. Now, rid
e!”
The greenhorn’s animal bolted forward, its whiteknuckled rider clinging for his life, every bounce on that wild, mule-eyed ride a series of excruciating jolts as the cactus spines drove deeper into his ample buttocks.
By the time Curtis’s detail scampered back into the regiment’s camp, every man spurring his lathered mount as if the devil himself were right behind them, they had covered more ground than they had in their entire march last night.
After listening to Curtis’s story and ordering the suffering private to find himself a regimental surgeon, Captain Yates conferred with Major Marcus Reno and two other captains on a course of action. It was their considered opinion that they should recommence the march immediately, without waiting for the general’s return.
They had been discovered by the hostiles, they figured. And with those fleeing warriors scampering now to warn the village, Custer’s Sioux would slip from his noose. The general was going to be mad enough as it was. Best not to waste time getting over the divide and down into that valley.
As Custer himself descended the long slope from the Crow’s Nest, he could see the twisting, snaking columns climbing up from Davis Creek toward the spine of the divide. A hundred eighty degrees from what he had ordered.
“Major!” Custer called as he came racing into sight of the columns. “Reno! What’s the meaning of this?”
“Begging pardon, General,” Yates interrupted with an apologetic grin. Lord, how he hated admitting this to Custer. “We thought it best to ride on up to meet you. We got us some sticky news to tell you, sir.”
As Yates explained the Indians’ discovery of the box and clothing along their back trail, the color slowly drained from Custer’s face. Then, as Yates watched, a sudden light began to flicker behind his azure eyes once more.
“Good,” Custer replied when Yates finished explaining his orders for the regiment to mount up and march instead of waiting on their commanding officer. “You did right.”
If that don’t beat all, Yates considered. We’ve just been handed the biggest problem spoiling our opportunity for surprise, and here Custer’s smiling like the cat what ate the canary.
Tom Custer dropped from his horse nearby. He strode up, wiping his glove around the sweatband of his gray slouch hat. “What you figure to do now, Autie? Lay out on this side till dark?”
“What I figure to do, Tom—is talk to my officers right now. This regiment needs to be ready for a fight!” He wheeled, hollering back along the columns. “Sergeant Voss! Find trumpeter Martini. Bring ’im here—he’s scheduled for duty with me today.”
“Sir?”
“The both of you—sound ‘Officers’ Call.’”
“Sir?” the veteran Henry Voss gulped. “The Indians, they’ll hear the trumpets!”
“Dammit all, Voss! The red buggers already know where we are! So blow it!” Custer snapped, wrenching the bugle from Voss’s saddlebags and practically stuffing it in the man’s mouth.
Up and down the columns many of the men glanced at one another with those first few notes out of the tin horns. The first such trumpet call in over two days now. Trotting forward along the excited columns, there wasn’t a one of Custer’s officers who didn’t fully understand the time for secrecy and silence had come and gone. The blowing of that one, solitary bugle call meant the time for battle had arrived.
Custer gripped Dandy’s reins tightly as he paced on foot in one direction three steps, then retraced those steps in another direction.
“Gentlemen, you recall the Crows reported seeing the village from the Crow’s Nest. They claim to see smoke and dust, a big village. I, on the other hand, was unable to see a bloody thing. I really doubted the Indians were down there along the Little Horn, so I kept looking up north, in the direction of Tullock’s Forks.
“At least in those valleys we could bottle the tribe up, and they couldn’t escape me so easily. However, the scouts tell me I’ll find them in the valley of the Little Horn. And down there the Indians can run and scatter two ways of Sunday without us having a ghost of a chance to run them down.”
For a moment the only sounds filling the hot, dry air came from the general’s boots scuffing at the dry ground, or his horse munching on the brittle grass, even the scratchy cough of some man’s trail-raw throat.
“All along I meant to surprise that hostile camp,” Custer went on. “We’ve got a command riddled with green recruits of the rawest order. Our mounts are about as weary as any could get, while the warriors we’ll soon face are going to ride fresh ponies. Yet do any of you see sense in my original plan to wait out a day and attack at dawn tomorrow?”
“Yes, General. I do,” James Calhoun finally gave a cautious response.
“But we can’t now, Lieutenant!” Custer snapped.
Like only a handful of the rest, Yates realized the general had addressed his brother-in-law by rank. Custer was angry, disappointed, and now veering close to fury.
“Gentlemen, despite the fact that we’re not fully prepared for battle, and that we surely are not going to have the advantage of surprise on those warriors, we nonetheless have one advantage. We are the Seventh, a proven fighting machine—and never before has our grand republic really seen what we can do when asked to perform above and beyond the call of duty.”
“General Custer?”
“Who are you?” Custer asked, squinting at the tall, thin civilian looking out of place in dusty frontier clothes.
“George Herendeen. Assigned you from Colonel Gibbon and General Terry.”
“Ahhh, yes … I remember now,” he replied absently, an eye twitching as he appraised the man. “You came along to communicate with the other column, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Too late for that now, Herendeen.” Custer crossed his arms emphatically, eyes filling with the icy fire of a zealot, waiting for the scout’s response.
“Too late, General?” the startled Herendeen protested with the rolling bass of his voice. “The head of Tullock’s Creek is right over the hills yonder. We can have your men down that valley in no time and meet up with Gibbon’s men. If you aren’t going to send me with word as you promised General Terry, best you get all these men heading north that way right now—north where you’ll have Gibbon’s support.”
“Gibbon’s support!” Custer bristled. “What the devil do I need his help for? Tullock’s Fork may very well be up north, but there are no Indians in that direction, Herendeen! They’re in our front—and they’ve discovered us. It would serve no purpose dispatching you down the Tullock’s now.”
Custer wheeled to face his men once more. “The way I see it, fellas—the only thing to do is push ahead and attack the camp as soon as possible.”
There it was, Yates figured. Custer had finally put into words what every officer had been fearing the general would decide on his own.
“General.” Herendeen stepped closer, a lean, hard wisp of a man, his wrinkled face like well-soaped leather. “Haven’t your scouts been telling you for days that you’re bound to run onto more than you can handle?”
“I’ve listened to all their ghosty stories. What of it?”
“Those scouts told you how many Sioux there are. The Crow even showed you how big the village is down there in that valley where you’re dragging these men. Right?”
“You’re forgetting that I didn’t see a blessed thing that could be taken for a huge Indian camp—and I had the field glasses!”
“Dammit, General!” Herendeen’s sudden anger silenced them all like a slap across the mouth. “If you wanna play dumb to everything your scouts tell you, then there’ll be a helluva lot of blood on your hands. If you’re going to let your hot-blooded stupidity and eagerness to attack that summer gathering of the whole goddamned Sioux nation—with nothing more than a handful of worn-out men and trail-busted stock—then you might well be damned by that decision for all of eternity.”
“Why, Mr. Herendeen,” Custer drew back, strangely calm at the moment. “Wh
at would you know about military strategy?”
“Not a god … damned … thing … General Custer.” Herendeen allowed Custer his smirk. “But I can count. As good as the next man. And I can see your ragtag outfit ain’t ready for any kind of scrap, much less a fight against the best warriors these northern plains can throw at you.”
“Are you quite done, Herendeen? Because if you are, you can ride with us to attack the village in that valley below. Or you can skedaddle up to the Tullock’s Fork. You see, we’re going to attack the Sioux before they scatter, and all those warriors you talk about can’t be found.”
“For these past three days, I was beginning to think all they’d said about you couldn’t be true, that you weren’t really such a goddamned arrogant asshole when it comes to following orders.
“Exactly what General Terry didn’t want done, you’re doing up in fine style. Instead of continuing south up the Rosebud, you’ve followed the Indian trail straight to their village. You’ve dogged this trail with your nose to the ground, and it’s hard for me to believe you didn’t intend to attack this village on your own from the start. So you see, General Custer—I, for one, don’t buy your claim that you ever intended to obey Terry’s orders, and you’ve never given a god-bloody-damn where Gibbon’s forces are because you want the whole pie for yourself!”
Every man there stood in stunned silence. After a long, brutally painful moment, Custer allowed a smile to crease his face.
“Perhaps you aren’t as dumb as I thought you were, Mr. Herendeen.” Custer turned, slipping a boot into his stirrup. “One thing you are right about. I want the coming action for myself. For the Seventh—these men. Right, fellas?”
Seize the Sky sotp-2 Page 19
