Margaret galloped off right behind Elizabeth with a wave and a final kiss blown to Calhoun. She trotted up beside Elizabeth before reining back, both women heading east up the bank of the Little Heart River, letting their horses lope frisky and playful in the cool morning air still heavy with the remnants of last night’s thunderstorm.
Libbie couldn’t look back.
She dared not.
Custer stood with his arms hanging useless at his sides, watching her go. Wondering what to do with his big hands, he finally stuffed them into his pockets, feeling like a schoolboy detained after everyone else had headed out to the schoolyard, caught someplace he shouldn’t be. For the first time in their lives together—he sensed something different between them, something sour tasting at the back of his throat.
John Burkman watched Custer staring after Libbie, remembering that sad, somber smile Mrs. Custer had on her lovely china-doll face. For as little a time as Private Burkman had known the general, he had come to love him. And Burkman’s heart more so than his head had sworn a fierce allegiance to George Armstrong Custer. He didn’t mind all those other soldiers jealous of his cushy assignment. They called him dog-robber, the common, derisive term applied to orderlies who cared for their superior’s personal needs. Such abuse was a small price to pay to be allowed closeness to this great and noble being.
Custer turned to Burkman, hearing the young soldier step up behind him. Calhoun drew close on Custer’s left, all three intently watching the two women ride the breast of the flowing land beneath a climbing sun.
“You know, gentlemen”—Custer boyishly stuffed his hands deeper into his leather pants pockets and hunched his shoulders up—“a good soldier really has two mistresses. Exactly as Libbie told me.”
He stared at the ground, scuffing a boot-toe into the sodden grass and kicking up some wet soil. “While he’s loyal to one mistress, the other must suffer.” Of a sudden he looked up and said, “Gentlemen! It’s nearly eight-thirty. Let’s ride for the Yellowstone!”
Turning, Libbie gazed back at the two-mile-long columns winding their way up from the valley of the Little Heart in the cool, morning breezes that would have tugged at the women’s dresses had it not been for the buckshot sewn in the hems.
As their horses blew, only then did the faint, faraway strains of “Garry Owen” reach her ears. Off to the Yellowstone and the land of the mighty Sioux. Off to whip Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Our hearts, so stout, have got us fame,
For soon ’tis known from whence we came;
Where’ere we go they dread the name
Of Garry Owen in glory!
In the next heartbeat a solitary figure raced out of the long, dark columns and stopped, wheeling round on his stockinged sorrel mare to peer back at that distant knoll to the east. He pulled away from the lines of blue-clad troopers a few yards, rising to stand like a ramrod in his stirrups, gazing back at the women on top of their rise, silhouetted against the morning sky. He was waving his hat at the end of his long arm, back and forth in long sweeps before he slapped his big charger on the rump with that cream-colored hat and raced pell-mell for the head of the march like the Devil himself was larruping at Vic’s tail.
Almost like a prayer, Libbie whispered a few lines of poetry she once memorized while a school-girl in Monroe, waiting like school-girls always had for their one true beau to gallop into their life.
He who leaves is happier still,
Than she who’s left behind.
As the last words fell from her trembling lips, the first rays of sunlight broke through that muslin-thin overcast, making for a strange light as fractured sunbeams spread over the long columns winding west.
With tiny, dewy particles of moisture drenching the morning air, a sudden and eerie mirage spun itself before her eyes as Libbie watched that long, blue snake poke its way toward the yawning land like a hungry abyss that opened itself to greet the Seventh. Reflected in those particles of moisture like a huge mirror stretched across the blue-gray canopy was the image of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry … marching … marching equidistant between earth and sky.
A stifled gasp caught in her throat. She put a trembling hand to her lips.
Oh, if she had only realized it before … all those years gone, years bitterly wasted. Years she had no idea would end so soon.
“What is it, Libbie?” Maggie whispered.
“Nothing,” she declared bravely, swiping at her eyes. Swallowing against the knot in her chest, Libbie watched the mirage riding half-way between earth and sky, and knew as certainly as she knew she loved Autie that it was a premonition of some great catastrophe to befall those gallant men.
Our hearts so stout, have got us fame,
For soon ’tis known from whence we came;
Where’ere we go they dread the name
Of Garry Owen in glory!
CHAPTER 4
BY the time the Seventh had rendezvoused on the Yellowstone with Colonel John Gibbon’s forces drawn from both Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw in Montana Territory, Custer’s troops felt as if they had marched through hell itself to arrive at the mouth of Rosebud Creek.
Besides the surprising snowstorm that kept them sitting for two days back in May, the men had also suffered through drenching spring rains and stinging hail, and more recently had blistered beneath a relentless sun interrupted each afternoon by a brief interlude of thunderstorms before sunset. It could be that way this time of year on the northern plains. Good reason for a man to keep his “rubber blanket” handy—what others called their “gum blanket”—a rubber poncho to turn the rain. Slipped over the head and measuring some four feet by six feet, it had already proved itself on this campaign.
Certain fragments of the regiment had marched off on one or the other of two long, tough scouts that convinced the expedition commanders they were narrowing the noose around the hostiles. Now that General Alfred H. Terry’s Dakota column had joined up with Gibbon’s Montana column, everyone figured the Sioux were gathering to the south of them.
At three P.M. on 21 June, General Terry brought to order a conference of the high-echelon officers of his combined regiments aboard the Far West, the stern-wheeled river steamer anchored against the north bank of the Yellowstone River. Its pilothouse lined with thick iron boiler plate, the steamboat was fortified against a probable attack by hostiles along these western rivers. The boiler plate had been curved slightly to deflect enemy bullets, in addition to having a head-high opening in front so the wheelman would have a full view of the river ahead. The lower deck was protected by sacks of grain along with four-foot cordwood stacked on end all round the gunwales.
What had so far been a hot and sultry Wednesday appeared to offer some relief on the far horizon. Gray and purple thunderheads were building with a fury on the distant rim of the prairie as the officers crammed themselves into Captain Grant Marsh’s dining room for their war conference. Custer himself preferred standing by the door as many of Gibbon’s officers and most of Terry’s infantry commanders set fire to their cheroots, cigars, and pipes. Breathing deep of that freshening breeze slipping along the river, Terry himself eagerly awaited the afternoon’s cooling storm.
“The Commissioner of Indian Affairs claims we might see only some five hundred to eight hundred warriors, counting all of fighting age.” Terry plunged ahead with his introductory remarks as most every man settled back with a glass of trader Coleman’s whiskey.