“Uncle Tom suggested I come ask you if I can ride at the front of the columns with you!” exclaimed ruddy-cheeked Harry Reed.
“Oh, he did—did he? Well, your uncle Tom is nothing more than a lady-humping rascal and a trouble-making rounder!” Custer smiled widely, teeth gleaming. “Of course, I can’t grant you permission to ride at the front of the columns.”
“Can’t?” Autie stammered as if slapped.
“That’s right,” he answered, his face going as grave as a church warden’s. “You’ll ride right behind me with my personal staff!”
“Thank you, Uncle! Damn—did you hear that, Boston?”
“Don’t you think it’d be a lot safer if you stay back in the pack train with me, Autie?” Burkman interrupted, stepping up to the young Reed boy, who looked quite the out-of-place innocent in his dirty and prairie-worn eastern clothing.
Pulling a foot out of a stirrup so he could swing his boot at the striker, Autie Reed chided, “You’re just mad ’cause you can’t go along with the general yourself!”
Burkman turned to Custer, finding sense in the youngster’s words. “General, surely I oughtta be going along, you know.”
For a long moment Custer did not answer. Instead, he straightened himself and gazed down at his striker. At last he leaned over, placing a gloved hand on Burkman’s shoulder. When he spoke, the words came out quiet, as if what he had to say was something shared only between the two of them.
“Your place really is with Captain McDougall and his pack train, John. Safer there by a long shot. I need someone to stay behind to watch over Dandy and the dogs, after all. What you do best—looking after my animals for me. But”—he flashed that peg-toothed grin again—“if we should have to send back for some more ammunition during the fight, you can come in with the pack train for the home stretch. What say to that?”
“If that’s what your orders are, sir.” Burkman bowed his head, crushed.
The man John adored, the man he had centered the last six years of his life on, was abandoning him as he rode into battle. And Burkman knew, somewhere deep inside the tar black melancholy pit of him, that he would never see the general alive again.
“That’s a good solider.” Custer snapped a salute, waiting for Burkman’s response. “A good soldier always follows orders.”
“Yes, … sir,” John croaked, then turned to trudge off, heading back to the pack train. The tears were coming again. God! how he wanted to turn around and beg the general not to ride into that valley.
But if the general’s of one mind to ride down into that place of evil—then at least he should take me. Burkman brooded darkly. Then at least I can die beside him.…
“Private?”
Burkman turned to find Custer coming up on horseback.
“You’ll take proper care to see that Vic is ready when it comes time to ride down upon the village, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Burkman found his voice strained, dry as the dust beneath his feet. His eyes moistened in gazing upon Custer’s haggard face. Damn! The tears stung his eyes as he stared up into the sunlight at the general.
“Those dogs of mine, you’ll always see they’re cared for, won’t you. Private?”
Something in the way the general said it, something on Custer’s face told Burkman that Custer knew.
He wants Missus Custer’s favorite horse out of it come the fight. Come the finish, he wants Dandy safe.
And perhaps most of all, Custer wanted his staghounds protected. General always had a special thing for those dogs, nothing ever closer than he had with them two, Bluech and Tuck. He said farewell to both of ’em back at Lincoln before marching out … and they surprised him by loping up to the column hours later, tongues lolling and tails wagging like schoolchildren playing hooky. Custer just didn’t have the heart to refuse ’em their romp west at his side. They were so much like … like his own dear children.
So now Burkman was assigned the task of holding the dogs’ thick latigo collars while they whined and whimpered piteously, watching their glorious master gallop out of sight, down into the valley of the everlasting sun.
“Front into line, gentlemen! Center at a walk—let’s ride!” Custer shouted, turning from Burkman to gallop back to the front of the columns.
He stood in the stirrups, waving an arm and signaling the start down off the divide, as if it were no more than a march across Lincoln’s parade.
Most of the officers who waited nearby found themselves staring after their flamboyant commander with his fringe flying and gold spurs flashing. Time to move now.
Quickly they gulped at canteens of stale alkali water or pulled long at some trail-warm whiskey before swiping dirty fingers round the sticky sweatbands of their hats.
The Seventh Cavalry was moving into the valley.
CHAPTER 17
AGAIN and again across the short-grass time The Bull had taunted the agency Indians at Red Cloud or Spotted Tail, daring them to jump their reservations and join him in their old way of life.
“See, I am rich while you are poor … having to beg for the white man’s coffee and sugar. I need none of that. I need none of the wasichu’s flour. I need only the buffalo and the old ways. Come join us!”
Like the mighty gathering of the shaggy buffalo itself into herds with numbers beyond count, all the more Sioux came to the Rosebud those first cool days of early June. The tribes gathered on the prairie uplands, marching but a few miles each day toward that ages-blessed crescent of the Mountains of the Wolves.
There this year the cool waters of the Rosebud had trickled beside the great Sun Dance ceremony and given The Bull his electrifying vision.
Here the people celebrated anew at each camp among the hills and bluffs, mesas and bottomlands strewn with conifers and aspen, birch and alder, all lifting their heady perfumes to the summer blue above. Here the people joined in races and wrestling, the dancing and singing, the drumming and always the courting by the young ones.
As was custom the head men hosted great councils of war, welcoming in each new band as it arrived, opening their arms to the visiting cousins: more Northern Cheyenne and even some Arapaho who had wandered north to remain free of the white invasion of their ancient tribal lands.
This last great council of war, declaring the People’s adherence to the old ways.
They would follow the buffalo.
At the age of twenty-eight summers, Oglalla warrior White-Cow-Bull had yet to marry. But of late he had set his roving eye on a very pretty Cheyenne woman living this summer with her relatives among the Shahiyena, or Northern Cheyenne, camp circle. Ever since Old Bear’s people had escaped Red Beard Crook’s soldiers during the Black Night March of the Sore-Eye Moon, White-Cow-Bull had hungered to make young Monaseetah his wife.
Cheyenne chiefs Ice Bear and Two Moons had many times told the brave Oglalla warrior that the woman had once belonged to the white man all Sioux called the Long Hair. The story the chiefs told said this soldier-chief had wanted to keep the young Cheyenne maiden as his second wife, but that his first wife had grown angry, commanding him to throw the Indian girl away.
Monaseetah had two boys, each by a different husband. One Indian, a full-blood Cheyenne through and through, and Yellow Bird, the son of Hiestzi, the Yellow Hair.
None of that really mattered to White-Cow-Bull. Undaunted, he persisted in courting the young mother now in her twenty-fifth summer. Yet it was difficult for him to spend time alone with Monaseetah. Never far from her side was young Yellow Bird with his hypnotically pale eyes and his light-colored curly hair. Only at night after her sons had fallen asleep would Monaseetah speak at all with the Oglalla warrior, talking through the lodge skins, for she refused to come out, afraid to come to his blanket.