The trumpeting delayed Venable's shot by about fifteen seconds. In that interval a horseman galloped by. It was Griffenstein.
He wheeled and dashed between Charles and Harry Venable.
"You drunk?" he yelled at Venable, knocking the officer's Colt from his hand. "The ones we're killin' got red skins, not white."
Another officer spurring for the trees shouted at Venable, telling him to haul his ass. Not fully understanding the confrontation, Dutch Henry recognized its seriousness. He kept an eye on the little Kentuckian as he dismounted, retrieved the Colt, and warily handed it back. Slowly, Charles lowered Black Kettle to the churned snow and mud. He laid him beside his wife.
Venable rammed the revolver in his holster, threw a look at Charles that promised it wasn't over between them, and quirted his horse with his rein. He went speeding among the knolls and the bodies to the village.
"What'n shit was that all about?" Griffenstein wanted to know. He seemed himself now, his face no longer flushed as it had been when Charles saw him with the scalping knife. The scalp was knotted to the scout's rawhide belt by a strand of bloody hair.
"Venable's got an old grudge," was all Charles would say.
"Well, he better hold his water. This is no place to settle scores." For Charles, the words had a meaning the other scout couldn't appreciate.
"I'm obliged to you, Henry," he said.
"Nothing," the other man said with a wave. "Can't stand by and see a friend taken out by some snotty shoulder-straps." By then, Charles had mounted, reluctantly leaving the chief and his wife where he'd put them. Dutch Henry was in high spirits as they turned their horses toward, the assembly point. "Wasn't this a hell of a fine git?"
Charles stared at him. Anger did away with gratitude.
"It was a massacre. Of the wrong people. It's a goddamn disgrace. Look at this." He showed the brass cross with the broken thong. "I took it off a young boy. His whole life ahead of him. I had to shoot him so he wouldn't kill me."
Griffenstein didn't catch on to the depth of Charles's feeling. He reached for the cross. "Got yourself a nice souvenir, anyway."
Charles closed his fist. "Do you think that's why I took it, you dumb ox? This isn't war. It's butchery. Sand Creek all over again."
The burly scout's surprise changed to resentment. "Grow up, Charlie. This here's the way things are."
"Fuck the way things are."
Griffenstein's face changed again. He regarded Charles with the same repugnance a man might show to a carrier of cholera. "I reckon this is where we split. By rights I oughta twist your head off for what you called me. I guess I won't because I guess you've gone crazy. You ride with somebody else from now on."
He moved away. Charles didn't care. Something inside him was dead. Killed here on the Washita.
There was a lot of activity inside the village. A great many soldiers were still riding or bustling around on foot, snatching souvenirs before someone forbade it. Charles saw shirts and trousers stained by scalps hacked from the dead. One young private proudly showed two of them to his friends.
The pony herd, numbering several hundred, had been rounded up by Godfrey's men near the trees on the far side of the village. About fifty women and children had been captured, along with a large quantity of goods. A number of fine saddles, including some Army ones; hatchets and buffalo robes; firearms, bullet molds, and lead; hundreds of pounds of tobacco and flour, and a large winter store of buffalo meat. As Charles jogged in, Custer was detailing Godfrey and his K Troop to gather and inventory the spoils.
Listening to the excited conversations around him, Charles heard claims that several hundred Indians were dead. He doubted it. If each tipi held its usual five or six, that figured to three hundred inhabitants of the village. There were plenty of Indian bodies scattered in the lanes and out on the open ground, but nothing like three hundred. Many of the braves must have escaped. Among the soldiers, only two were known dead: Louis Hamilton and Corporal Cuddy, of B Troop. But then there was Elliott's detachment. No one could say what had become of it.
There was renewed wailing and shrieking. Three of the Osage trackers were gleefully whipping some captive women with switches. "They try to run," an Osage explained. He and the others whipped the women harder, driving them toward a larger group already under guard. From his seasons with Black Kettle's people, Charles thought he recognized more than one of the women. A squaw with thick braids and a bleeding cheek seemed to recognize him, but she was the only one. She said nothing, but her stare was enough to twist knives in his middle.
"General." The sharp voice belonged to Romero, the interpreter. He pushed a bedraggled woman ahead of him. She clasped her hands and bowed her head in front of General Custer, who still looked fresh and energetic. Charles wondered how it was possible; he himself was spent and occasionally dizzy from tiredness and hunger.
"This woman, she say she Mahwissa, sister to Black Kettle," Romero said. Possible, although Charles had never seen the woman before, or heard of a sister during that winter he spent with Jackson. "She say this is not only village on the Washita."
"Where are the others?" Custer asked in the sudden stillness.
Romero found a broken lance shaft and, standing beside the general, drew an upside-down U in the mud. He flared both stems of the U outward, then poked a hole below the left-hand stem. "Here is the village of Black Kettle." Up toward the bend of the U he poked again. "Arapahoes here." Toward the bottom of the other stem of the U, another poke. "More Cheyennes here." Two more pokes near the flared end of that stem. "And more — and Kiowas too. All winter camps. Downstream."
General Custer's ruddiness was gone. He looked pale as the snow on the trees up on the bluffs. Among those trees, Charles thought he detected movement.
"How many in the camps?" Custer asked.
Romero spoke to the woman in Cheyenne. Charles understood enough of her answer to feel a renewed chill.
"To the number of five or six thousand."
The hush befitted a tomb. Somewhere a dog howled. The listening soldiers, so boisterous a little while ago, nervously fingered their side arms.
Somehow the disagreeable news didn't surprise Charles. Custer's impetuous nature was a kind of lightning rod for trouble. He's pushed the pursuit, and the attack, on the unfounded assumption that they were chasing one band of warriors to an isolated village in the valley of the Washita. The night's forced march had left little time for reflection on related questions: Was there only one village? Had the war party actually returned there, or to another village? Even now, they didn't know the answer to the second question. Charles supposed he couldn't score Custer too harshly. He hadn't thought of the questions himself, though they seemed embarrassingly obvious after Romero's revelation.
To his credit, Custer showed no sign of dismay. "We have won a decisive victory over the enemy —" Charles grimaced. He noticed Keim for the first time. The reporter was scribbling in his phonographic notebook. "We will proceed with destruction of this base. We must go about our duties without the slightest indication that we know of the other villages, or care about them. If there are more Indians close by, they won't know our strength.
Someone muttered, "They sure-God know we ain't five thousand."
"Let the coward who made that remark step forward."
No one moved. The general's face flushed again. Charles thought he was more agitated than he let on. Custer opened his mouth, probably to repeat his demand for a confession, but one of the Osages caught his attention with a sudden gesture toward the hoof-torn slopes beyond the river. Three braves with shields and lances rode out of the trees up there. They halted their ponies at the edge, watching. Nearby, other Indians slipped into sight.