Gerard watched Custer prance away. He sucked again at the hot whiskey, not minding what dribbled onto his chin, into his beard. The whiskey no longer helped Fred Gerard.
Now he was as afraid as the next man.
The army surgeon’s belly ached and his rectum burned. Raw, red, on fire.
You’ve got dysentery, Dr. Lord, he told himself. Pure and simple dysentery.
Dr. George Edward Lord, a strikingly handsome young physician who had accepted a short-term army surgeon’s commission so he could revel in the glory of army blue on the frontier, diagnosed his own infirmity exactly. Every jolting step his mule took sent a wave of nausea through him. With insistent taps of his heels, Lord urged the reluctant animal toward the front of the columns, where he would find Custer.
“Cooke!” Custer hollered as Lord drew close. “I want every troop to call out six men and a noncom. They’re to join B Company under Captain McDougall in guarding the pack-train mules carrying our ammunition at the rear of the march.”
“Understood, General!”
“Get them cracking, Billy!”
“General Custer?” Lord’s voice broke as he reined up.
Custer wheeled. “Doctor! Good day! How can I be of service to you?”
“I—I’m merely reporting—”
“Great God, man!” Custer interrupted, studying the doctor’s peaked appearance. “You look about as green as high meat.”
“Yes … quite. I—”
Custer laid his bare palm against the physician’s forehead. “You’re burning up, Doctor! I want you back with the supply mules. B Company. Immediately.”
“Please, General,” Lord protested lamely. “Had I any idea you’d send me back, I wouldn’t have come to you. Today is what I accepted commission for, after all. To ride into battle with this regiment. All the excitement from here on out will surely take my mind off my infirmities.”
“Hmmm,” Custer thought on it, tapping a finger against his lips. “Perhaps it will at that. Very well, you’ll stay with my command throughout this day, Doctor.”
“I was hoping I could, sir!” Lord cheered slightly with a brave attempt at his own smile. “I believe it’s only a touch of this prairie dysentery catching up with me. Bad water the past few days. Can’t keep anything down, or in me.”
Custer slapped the physician fraternally on the shoulder. “You stay close, Doctor. I’ll divide DeWolf and Porter to the other commands when the time comes. But you—you’ll go with me this day, and I’ll show you enough bloody action to pucker up any bunghole!”
“Thank you, General.” Lord offered a weak smile. “I’d be forever in your debt … if you could only pucker this problem hole I’ve been sitting on!”
During the short break that Custer called, the troops had laughed, joked, and kidded one another. Some even laid odds, betting future pay on who among them would come out of the fight with the most scalps hanging from his belt.
They were a rugged, Falstaffian group by now—some five weeks out of Lincoln, marching that trail west through spring snows, rain, and hail, not to mention the scorching heat of the past few days.
Round sunburned, cracked lips new beards sprouted on every face. Those floppy straw hats on their heads provided the only shade for the red dust-raw eyes that ofttimes now looked vacantly toward the wide valley yawning far below them.
Uniforms were worn and dusty if not ragged now, along with boots scuffed and cracked and far from black. Back at the mouth of the Rosebud, most soldiers had shed their blue tunics in favor of a civilian shirt. To watch them cross that fateful divide, an observer would think this regiment looked more like a band of vagabond gypsies than the legendary Seventh. Had it not been for the majority still wearing their yellow-striped cavalry britches and the company horses matched by color, not to mention those crimson-striped guidons snapping in the warm breeze, this might have been any group of ragtag riders.
Custer took a moment to reach inside his saddlebags, pulling out his pair of gold spurs. He straightened after strapping them over his dusty knee-high boots. He smoothed his jacket and admired the spurs privately before he met John Burkman’s pinched expression.
Custer grinned. “What’s the problem, dog-robber? Don’t you agree these are a splendid and fitting addition to my battle outfit?”
“The spurs, General?” Burkman squeaked.
“Certainly,” Custer replied cheerfully, still admiring how they added a martial note to his buckskin outfit. “They are my good luck charm, you see, Nutriment,” he explained, calling his orderly by the nickname given Burkman for his love of eating. “You see, I wore them on the Washita. And you’ll remember I wore them next with Stanley on the Yellowstone and down with Calamity Jane herself in the Black Hills. They’re quite the item—don’t you agree?”
“You said ‘good luck,’ General?” Burkman stammered with a serious case of the willies. “But you don’t seriously wanna … you told me General Santa Anna lost them to a U.S. officer as spoils of war at the end of the fight down in Mexico … then that same officer sided with the Rebs, and you whipped him in the war.”
“Correct in every respect, John.”
“Then them spurs ain’t really all that lucky, seems to me, General. Every respect intended. Looks like every man that’s worn them spurs lost a battle they fought with ’em on.”
“Silly superstition—just more willy-nilly claptrap!” he scoffed, peering down at his spurs beneath the high overcast of this late-June morning. “And to think of it, John—I’ll proudly wear them as I parade down the streets of Philadelphia on my triumphant journey to the nation’s centennial birthday party … even gallop once more down the streets of Washington City amid the cheers of millions of adoring citizens!”
Burkman glanced at the officers gathered near, as mute as he.
“Then, Striker—I suppose I’ve got no other choice but to break Medicine Arrow’s silly Indian curse with Custer’s Luck!”
Without another word Custer tore the reins from Burkman’s hand and leapt aboard Dandy.
Poor, simple Burkman realized he was close to crying. He hid his face, welcoming the hot stinging release of tears.
As Custer loped off, Lieutenant James Calhoun turned to Ed Godfrey, a gnawing knot tightening in his gut. He whispered, “What the devil’s Custer talking about? What have his gold spurs got to do with some Injun curse?”
Godfrey wagged his head. His own eyes clouded with the remembrance of that winter campaign down in Cheyenne country. “Goes back to the winter of sixty-nine, down in the Territories, Jim.”
“What the hell is it, Ed?” Calhoun gazed anxiously at Godfrey. “Tell me, dammit!”
“A goddamned chief put a curse on the General—”
“Curse?” Calhoun shrieked in a hoarse whisper.
“Chief claimed Custer and all his men would get wiped out.”
Calhoun gulped and tried a grin. “A curse. Shit! Silly pagan superstition, what it is. Right, Ed?”
Godfrey didn’t return Calhoun’s tin-plated smile. “Right, Jim. Nothing but silly superstition.”
Jim was a big man, the kind any plainsman or hard case might think twice about taking on.
Calhoun watched Ed Godfrey turn and ride off. “Say, Ed … so how come you don’t think it’s just superstition, eh? So how come?”
Moments later Custer whirled back up to Burkman. “Remember, dog-robber, we’ll be back by dinner for a good feed. These men’ll be hungry, and I more than they! A good scrap does wonders for my appetite!”
Burkman watched the general wink as Autie Reed and Boston Custer loped up at that moment, followed into the intimate gathering by Custer’s brother.