Almost—except the magpies and robber jays that squawked their irritating demands over the abandoned campsites in search of a free morsel here, a bit of fat there. Something left behind by the gathering bands. And always the turkey buzzards overhead, circling, circling Custer’s Seventh.
Gerard gazed up into the climbing sun. It could give a right-thinking man the willies to watch those goddamned buzzards hanging up there over us. High-flying wing slashes circling lazy on the warm updrafts in that pale, summer-burned sky. Any right-thinking man damned well knew he ain’t dead yet.
By the time Custer ordered his command into camp near four-thirty P.M., the regiment had put nearly thirty-three miles behind them. At each of the three deserted camping places they had run across through the day, the general had ordered a short halt while the scouts inspected the sites.
Somber and silent, both Crow and Ree had walked the packed lodge circles. Put hands in the ashes of old fires. Broke open bones to inspect both condition and age of the marrow. And they did it all without a single word, shrouded in discomforting silence. Gerard watched them, silent as well, noticing that only Rees’ dark eyes talked bravely to one another. Only their eyes talking.
While stable sergeants cussed and fretted over the lack of graze, because every blade of grass for some distance on both sides of the trail and been chewed to the ground, other soldiers speculated on the number of Indians they were following now … where the bands were headed … and how long ago the hostiles had left the area. In the last camp they had run across, over three hundred fifty lodge rings had been counted.
It didn’t take an interpreter like Gerard to compute the simple plainsman arithmetic that added up to better than a thousand men of fighting age right on that one spot.
He could tell from the look on Bouyer’s face that the half-breed understood well enough that the bands were coming together. Gerard himself paid more and more attention to the dark eyes and gloomy faces of his Rees than he did the wild ramblings of loose-lipped army speculators like Varnum.
With a healthy heave Gerard rared back and tossed the empty tin flask toward the west bank of the Rosebud.
“Almost made it!” Lieutenant Varnum cheered his effort. “’Nother few feet …”
“Nawww,” Gerard shrugged it off. “Not with a empty one, I wouldn’t. That’s a piece to throw a empty one.”
Varnum studied him closely. “You wouldn’t have any more of that, would you?”
Varnum’s question brought Gerard up short. The man’s army, through and through. It just ain’t right for one of Custer’s solemn teetotaling churchboys to get his hands on any whiskey.
He bent over his saddlebags anyway. “What the hell.” He pulled out another flask. “Yeah, I got some more. Just want you remember, Varnum—I’m a civilian, and I can carry this along with me if I choose. Just in case you’re figuring on showing the general the evidence—”
“I’m not,” Varnum interrupted, licking his own dry lips anxiously. “Please. I just want some for myself.”
“Yourself, Charlie?” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Why, I’ll be damned.”
“Just—with all the …” Varnum’s eyes flicked around nervously. “I was with the Rees, the Crows all day.” He wagged his head like someone watching the gallows go up a board and a nail at a time outside his own iron-barred window. “I may be green at this, Gerard. Handling Indians, that is. No old sawbuck like you. But even I could read their eyes. I ain’t the smartest man Custer’s got working for him—but I can sense we’re running right on up the backside of something here that even the general don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Here.” Gerard shoved the flask into Varnum’s fist. “You pay me when we get back to Lincoln.”
The lieutenant clutched it against his chest like an icon, reverently. “Thank you, Fred.”
As Varnum wheeled away, Gerard called, “Charlie. Just do me a favor, will you?”
“What’s that, Fred?”
“Don’t pour all that stuff down at one sitting. Save some for the ’morrow.”
Fred watched the chief of scouts lead his weary army mount off through the milling command as the regiment spread out to establish its camp for the night. Gerard dropped beside his horse at his saddlebags to pull out a flask for himself this time. With his mount picketed he settled his shoulders against the saddle and sighed.
Hell, he thought. You got plenty whiskey to spare.
Why, between his spacious saddlebags and that generous army haversack, Gerard had brought along enough whiskey to see him through for a good month.
CHAPTER 10
NEARLY an hour later the Crow scouts came plodding in, their little ponies nearly bottomed out from what had been required of them. Rule of thumb on the plains stated that a scout traveled twice the distance a cavalry column would march in a day, what with all the back-and-forth and the up-and-down. That meant those little grass-fed cayuses had done something over sixty miles beneath a cruel summer sun.
Yet right now it wasn’t only fatigue that Mitch Bouyer could read on his Crows’ faces. Something more, in fact altogether primal, that strained and pinched the normally happy faces he knew as well as he knew any friend.
Bouyer understood as few others would, for he had stood at the center of those deserted camps with his scouts. He had walked across the worn earth of the central council lodge, visually ticking off that distance to the farthest of the brush arbors and wickiups used by the youthful warriors. Mitch knew his Crow had read such sign as easily as any white man back east picks up and reads his daily newspaper.
The half-breed knew there wasn’t a bit of good news to be found on the front page today.
Custer sought out the Crows while striker Burkman busied himself brushing down both Vic and Dandy with tufts of grass. Bouyer nodded to the general without a word while Custer squatted in his characteristic manner, one knee on the ground as he leaned an elbow on the other.
“This is the main point I want you to tell them, Bouyer,” Custer began after Mitch had fed him the intelligence from the scouts’ travels. “These Sioux have been killing lots of white people. You explain to your boys here—I’ve been sent here by the Great Father in Washington City. I’m told either to bring the Sioux back to their reservation or to defeat them in battle. Keep in mind, I’m called Charge-the-Camp. I’m a great war chief, greater than this Sitting Bull or his general, this Crazy Horse they speak of. But—I’ll tell you a secret that no soldier who rides with me knows.”
Custer slowly eased himself to the ground with Bouyer and his Crows. The significance of that posture wasn’t lost on the scouts.
“My friends, I do not know whether I’ll get through this summer alive. There’ll be nothing more of any good in store for the Sioux from this time on, however. If the Sioux kill me, they will still suffer, for many more soldiers will come in my place and fill my empty boots. Ask your boys if they understand that.”
He waited for Bouyer to translate. Some of the Crow nodded in agreement before Custer continued. “And if the Sioux don’t kill me, why—I’m going to whip them soundly, right back to their reservations, where they belong. They’ve disobeyed the orders of the Great Father back east … and they will pay. Besides, you’ll take home many fine Sioux horses, won’t you, boys?”
Custer smiled widely, his sunburned face wrinkling as he waited while Bouyer translated. Young Curley spoke up, and when he was done, Mitch talked in a morose tone.
“These boys don’t like you talking this way, not one bit, Custer,” Bouyer whispered with a powder-crack voice. “They figure there’s strong medicine on a man who talks about his own death. You’ve spooked ’em now.”