CHAPTER 6
AS Custer slipped back through the open flaps of his Sibley tent where striker John Burkman had three oil lamps glowing, their chimneys lightly smoking, Burkman rose anxiously. The three tufts of oily smudge were carried off on a strong, cool breeze as the general washed in, anxious. John watched the officers move off in pairs and small groups, crunching across what patches remained of the icy hail.
Custer sank on a canvas stool, studying the sounds of the camp whirling about him for the moment. The heer-haws of the mules. The whinnies and snorts of the horses. Among the tents there arose the sudden peal of some man’s high laughter followed by the loud blast of another soldier’s guttural guffaw. Above it all, here and there, Custer listened to the sweet sound of soft-sung melodies raised from one side of camp, while from the other direction came the faint strains of a banjo or some fiddle, perhaps even a squeezebox keening out a song popular to that particular breed of man who served his nation on the western plains.
“Doesn’t much sound like a camp of men marching out on campaign against the Sioux, does it, Mr. Burkman?”
John’s eyes darted to Custer, finding the general staring out the tent flaps into the night, apparently hypnotized by those night fires stretching endlessly west across the Yellowstone prairie.
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Of course,” Custer replied softly. He rose, turned to Burkman. “You’ve never been on campaign before, have you?”
“No, sir. This is my first time against … the enemy, sir.”
“Enemy,” Custer repeated, stepping to the tent flaps, mesmerized still by the twinkling of so many camp fires, together like so many stars dusted across the indigo velvet of the summer prairie. “The enemy, John. Tomorrow we’ll tramp down the trail of those Sioux that Reno let slip by.”
He turned, a strange and haunting look in those wintercold eyes of his. Eyes gone tired, like rumpled, worn baggage to Burkman. John glanced down at Custer’s hands, held out before him as if clutching something, gripping it for all it was worth. As if he would never let it go. Burkman’s eyes crawled back to Custer’s face, to those sapphire eyes, which now seemed to peer right through the striker.
“We’ll find them, John,” he whispered. “Once I find them, I’ll have myself a place in history.”
Burkman swallowed hard, trembling as he clutched the cream-colored hat he had been brushing clean of dust for Custer’s outfit in the morning. “Yes, General. A place in history—”
“Autie!”
With the sound of Tom’s voice hailing him from beyond the fire, Custer whirled on his heel. Three forms loomed into the light, all arm in arm, the trio eating ground in huge strides as they marched up to Custer’s tent.
“We’re headed over to take ol’ Terry up on that whiskey!” Tom held up one hand carrying five canteens.
“Those all yours, Tom?”
“Not all,” he answered with a snort. “One of ’em belongs to Lieutenant Harrington!”
“Four for you, brother?”
“’At’s right, General!” Keogh blared, holding aloft his own four canteens. “Thomas here’s a good lad—stout drinking bunkie, if ever there was one. He is, he is. We’d made good bunkies of it, in the old days of the war of rebellion, that is!”
“James,” Custer said as he stepped from the tent flaps, looking squarely at Calhoun, “you’ll see these two don’t get themselves into any serious trouble tonight, will you?”
“Aye, sir!” He saluted. “We don’t plan on drinking all that much tonight anyway.”
“Glad to hear that, fellas. Save it to drink a little at a time on the march.”
“Little at a time?” Tom snorted. “Autie, you’ve just never learned how to live. You’ll be dying a wretched old man—wondering what it was to have lived!”
“I’ve had my bout with whiskey, Tom—back to Monroe. Sworn off it completely.”
“How well we know of that. I’d be the last to blame a man for not holding his liquor!” Tom chuckled along with Keogh and Calhoun. His smile faded as he studied his brother’s face. “But you’ve not truly enjoyed yourself ever since … sixty-nine, wasn’t it? Sixty-nine when you had to send that Cheyenne gal away. I don’t remember her name, Autie.”
Keogh found Custer’s eyes on him, as if seeking confirmation. “That be the gospel, ’tis, General. You ain’t the same man since that Cheyenne girl. Whatever she done to you, it made you a happy soul.”
Burkman saw Custer swallow. “Well,” he said selfconsciously, “you boys take care this evening.” He worried a palm over the stubby bristles of his thinning hair a few times, as if he wanted out of a fix but didn’t reckon on getting his bearings. “Don’t get drunk and scalped while over there round Gibbon’s boys. I’ll need you three this time out, you know.”
“That barber Sipes isn’t getting anywhere near us!” Tom roared, slapping Calhoun on the back.
The scene was happy once more. Every bit as happy as it had been somber a brief moment ago. No more talk of the past. Only talk of a future borne up the Rosebud.
“Let’s be walking, laddies!” Keogh howled, prodding the other two from Custer’s tent. “That bleeming shoneen of a trader’s got whiskey … and Myles Keogh’s got him a thirst to match!”
“See you to the morning, General!” Tom’s voice came back from the thickening darkness swallowing the trio.
That stopped Custer dead in his tracks. He turned to stare after the men, certain it was Tom’s voice he had heard. Dead certain. But brother Tom had never addressed him by rank before. Tom had never called him General.…
As he and his friends were rowed over to the Far West, moored snugly against the north bank of the Yellowstone, Tom Custer studied the brightly lit steamboat gently rocking atop the river like a glittering tree ornament. From the sounds of the hurrahs and laughter, coupled with the sights of shadowy forms darting across the yellow splash of lights on deck, Tom figured Coleman’s whiskey kegs would do a hard business of it tonight.
Not all that unusual, he thought to himself as Keogh laughed with Calhoun.
There had been whiskey sellers dogging the trail of the Dakota Column once it marched away from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Seemed that out in this lonely part of the world, once anyone who had a way to transport cheap whiskey heard of an army unit marching into the field, a whiskey trader of one color or another would be attending each night’s stop. Tonight beneath an overcast Yellowstone moon, it appeared the government-licensed trader aboard the Far West would make himself a small fortune from army coffers at Terry’s behest, as well as taking out of each soldier’s pockets whatever the man had left in the way of loose pay after all this time on the trail.
True enough, Tom realized that trader James Coleman had made out quite well along the column’s way west.
Coleman and his partner Sipes stayed busy tonight minding their whiskey kegs. For all but the most hardened of drinkers, the traders’ whiskey seemed the best bargain offered beneath that canvas awning. The troopers believed they could get more mileage out of a dollar pint of cheap grain alcohol than they could out of damned near anything else Coleman had for sale. The trader rightfully worried of running out of whiskey this last night at the mouth of the Rosebud, what with so many men from the Seventh filling their canteens with his cheap corn mash.
Growling, Coleman constantly reminded that rowdy, shoving crowd beneath his awning that they had to leave him with something in his whiskey kegs for the party he’d throw after the regiment marched back down the Bighorn—the victorious Seventh Calvary once more.