“Take your battalion in that direction. Watch for an Indian village, and pitch into anything you run across.”
Benteen gulped, staring off into that nothingness of rugged draws and coulees. “Begging consideration, General—why there?”
Custer bit his lip. Cooke figured the general forced himself to keep from swearing at this white-headed pain in the ass.
“I want you to continuously feel to our left, if for no other reason than to assure myself that the hostiles—which we know have been warned already—won’t flee upriver to the south. That’s all I’m going to say, Captain Benteen. You, better than any man I command, ought to know I’m not in the habit of explaining myself.”
The captain must have understood that plain enough, Cooke figured, for Benteen saluted, spoke, “Very well, sir. Understood. As you ordered.”
Benteen nodded at Weir and Godfrey. They followed.
Ed Godfrey slipped his watch from his unbuttoned tunic pocket. Twelve-fifteen P.M.
How long will we have to ride through these bare, rocky hills before Benteen will figure out this is a fool’s errand Custer’s got him on? Is Custer paying Benteen back for his public criticism following the Elliott affair at the Washita? Or does Custer want to get Benteen’s hundred twenty men massacred?
Godfrey felt the cold trickle of water dripping all the way down to the base of his spine and hoped it was only sweat—not his first taste of outright fear. Hell, he hadn’t been afraid even when his small platoon had been practically surrounded at the Battle of the Washita. Not even then.
But this is something different, he had to admit. The only reason he could figure that Custer had sent them on this fool’s errand chasing down the wind itself, was that Custer wanted Benteen out of the way.
Or killed …
As Benteen’s three companies splashed across the summer trickle of Ash Creek, then plodded away beneath a cloud of choking dust, Custer turned back upstream with Cooke at his side to find a suitable place for Dandy to drink. Soon enough they were joined by more of the thirsty command and their dry-mouthed animals.
Custer struggled to pull a reluctant Dandy back from the creek.
“Don’t let them get too much, men!” he called to soldiers nearby. “They’ll get loggy on you, if you’re not careful.”
In turn, each of the remaining companies were given a few minutes at the scummy pools along the mossy banks of Ash Creek. As Dandy rested, Custer stared into the luminous, bone yellow sky at that relentless, one-eyed demon spewing fire across a breathless, choking landscape. Giving in, he removed his buckskin coat, tying it behind the cantle of his saddle.
Once more he carefully tucked his pants into the tall, dusty boots. His light gray army fatigue shirt already bore the dark blotches beneath each arm, between his shoulder blades, and in a necklace beneath his strawberry chin in stubble. He wiped his blood red kerchief around the sweatband of the cream-colored hat, then rerolled the brim up on the right side in the event he would have to sight his Remington sporting rifle from horseback. When the kerchief was properly knotted round his neck once more, Custer ordered the columns to move out.
Behind him plodded those other hot, dusty, dry troops, their mouths caked and puckering with the alkali of Ash Creek. Most men had already lashed their blue tunics behind their saddles. A motley gypsy gang of good and ugly heading down, down, down into that valley of cool, sparkling waters and inviting green grass extending clear to the Bighorns. A valley beckoning Custer’s army onward. Down to the green and cool.
This unsettling mixture of veterans and raw, untried recruits followed him into the maw. Rogues and rascals … even innocents and children who had no conception of what war with the Sioux was all about. Sobering for the hard-files to brood on the men around them—some thirty to sixty percent of each company unseasoned and scared enough right now to worry about wetting their britches.
Yet any man present would have said he trusted Custer. The general’s reputation protected them all with a brassy aura of invincibility as they rode on and on, following that big cream-colored hat and that bright scarlet scarf fluttering on the hot breeze.
Custer had never lost a fight. So they followed.
Some sweated in those white shirts first used during the Civil War and still issued on the frontier posts eleven years later. Others dampened dark blue shirts simply because the white ones got all too dirty much too fast. These indigo shirts made it pleasantly convenient for a trooper: He got away with going longer between washings than did the simple-minded, who wore white and far too often had to pay a call on the post laundresses along Soapsuds Row.
Even a scattering of these soldiers sported the coarse gray pullover of the variety Custer himself wore this day. In addition, there appeared a lively mixture of the checkered hickory shirts some had purchased from trader Coleman at the Yellowstone. Such lightweight cloth made for a more comfortable ride in the summer heat of this hunt for the Sioux.
From time to time the troopers worked at some saddle rations, choking down hardtack or cooked pork with swallows of the warm, stinking creek water from their canteens. Their noses reddened and crusted with alkali dust, none could smell the earthy aromas of man and animal on the dust anyway. Those rank odors of lathered horses and played-out mules, along with the well-known and all-too-familiar pungent stench of men too long without a bath, mingled with the perfume of the tiny wildflowers trampled underfoot.
An army on the prowl.
Every man sweltered beneath a wide sky, accompanied down trail by the familiar thunk and clink of saddle leather and bridle chain. Not to mention the reassuring plap of their reliable weapons at their sides. While officers carried .45-caliber Colts, the troopers were issued .44-caliber Remington pistols, both of which could drop a man at seventy paces if a soldier could aim and fire without jerking the trigger. Those sidearms were usually worn butt forward on the right side of the body so the pistol could be withdrawn by the left hand, as the right normally wielded the nearobsolete saber.
Every soldier carried the 1873 trapdoor Springfield chambered for .45–.70 ammunition. Some men toted what they fondly called their knitting bag, a wool-lined cartridge box worn on the belt, used to carry more of that carbine ammunition: a .45-caliber bullet backed with seventy grains of powder that could kill at better than three hundred yards, making a tight six-inch group at a hundred. With a hundred rounds of Springfield ammunition assigned to each man, most soldiers filled the loops in their cartridge belts and allowed the rest of the shells to rattle loose in their leather saddlebags.
In the hands of a cool veteran, the Springfield trapdoors could fire seven shots in twelve to fifteen seconds. Enough to keep any band of charging warriors at bay.
With a rattle and thunk, a plodding clop of iron-shod hooves, and the snapping pop of the striped regimental pennants, the troops followed Custer down to the Greasy Grass. Beneath an oppressive summer sky, every man suffered a knotting belly and that nauseating ache from bad water, not to mention the agony of eyes scalded from alkali dust and a face burned raw by sun and wind.
The gallant Seventh marched down into the maw of that valley as surely as if it had been the cool, shady, beckoning halls of Valhalla itself. Less like an army of avenging Norse gods commanded by the all-powerful Odin himself—more like a roving band of renegade gypsies—Custer’s Cavalry plodded down into the seductive valley of the Greasy Grass while Destiny herself opened her arms at last.
“The general’s compliments, Major,” Adjutant Cooke began with a smile, his long, flowing Dundrearies tousled by the hot breeze clinging to the Ash Creek drainage. “He wishes you to take command of Company A under Captain Moylan, G under Lieutenant McIntosh, and M under Captain French, sir. In addition, the general wishes to transfer to your command the services of Crow scouts White Swan and Half-Yellow-Face—also the Arikara interpreter, Gerard.”