“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, ride!”
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?”