“Indians, General!” Fred shouted.
“What? Where?”
“Maybe forty of them … could be more!” Gerard rasped breathlessly as he yanked on the reins, his mount sliding to a dusty halt.
Reno galloped up from his position. He had spotted the same hostile warriors. “They’re sitting just out of our rifle range, General!” he shouted, genuine fear constricting his throat.
“Funny thing, Custer,” Gerard added, wiping his hand across a parched mouth, thirsting for the liquid treasure in his saddlebags. “They just sat there, looking at us, like they expected us to be here.”
Custer studied Gerard carefully as the interpreter stuck his hand into his three-strap saddlebag to pull out another tin flask. Custer couldn’t help but smell the sweetish odor of the sour-mash whiskey as Gerard drew long and hard on the fiery elixir.
From the look on the general’s face at that moment, Gerard was certain Custer—a notorious teetotaler—wanted a drink.
From behind them arose that sudden shrill cry Custer had known as a boy growing up in Ohio and Michigan, then again when he attacked Confederate cavalry and artillery positions during the war. This shrill and famous Custer shout leapt from Tom Custer’s lips as he tore up on his charger.
Little brother had caught sight of the quarry himself.
Without invitation Tom held out his hand to Gerard, yanking the flask away from him. He drank every bit as long on the potent whiskey as had Gerard. When he handed the canteen back, Tom rattled the sagebrush hills once again with his wild war cry, a screech that would scour any white man’s throat. Any but Custer’s.
“Thirty days furlough for the first goddamned soldier who raises a scalp!” Tom shouted.
Down the waiting columns those who could hear young Custer’s promise raised their own cries of battle lust. It was part of the fever they must each experience, working themselves into a lather for the coming battle.
Custer said, “Good, Tom! Work some fight up in ’em!”
Tom took the flask again and threw some more whiskey down his throat, peering up the knoll … then down the dry coulee that Ash Creek followed in the rainy season.
A small bunch of Indians, eh? he thought.
Tom gave the flask back to Gerard. They would share. Tom had never been selfish when it came to drinking. Whiskey was, after all, for sharing. For friends.
And he thought on those forty Sioux he had watched disappear over the knoll, riding out of reach.
Perhaps those Indians who had darted over the hill were nothing more than enticing decoys. After all, Tom knew as well as the next man how Crazy Horse had lured Fetterman and eighty men over Lodge Trail Ridge ten winters ago. It was the oldest Indian trick in the book.
Tom glanced up, feeling the whiskey warm his hot, knotted belly. The Rees mounted their horses.
“Gerard!” Custer shouted. “Why aren’t your lazy Arikarees going after those Sioux? There are horses to be taken! Scalps and honors to be won!”
Tom climbed back into the saddle as Fred Gerard cursed his scouts prancing atop their skittish horses. Perhaps the horses themselves sensed the visceral fear of their riders. Gerard got no response from the younger members of his detail. On the ground nearby hunkered some of the older Rees, Bloody Knife and Stabbed among them. They tore up handfuls of the dry grass, tossing the blades into the hot breeze.
“Otoe Sioux! Otoe Sioux!”
“They claim there’s too many Sioux again, General. More than there are blades of grass.”
“You take them—take them all and ride with Reno!” Custer bellowed in disgust. “I don’t want the Rees with me. Nowhere near me!”
“They don’t want to fight so many,” Gerard explained weakly, whispering so that only Custer and Tom could hear his plea. “Not with you or Reno. There’s more Sioux than we can handle, General.”
“Bullshit!” Tom shouted.
Gerard almost said something to young Custer but turned instead to the general. “None of the Rees want to go any—”
“Take their guns, boys!” Custer suddenly spat in the direction of the Arikara scouts. “Take their horses too! Give them their old ponies back. I have no more use for these whining squaws! We’ve found the Sioux, yet these miserable wretches don’t want to fight. So be it, Tom. I’ll send them home to their lodges, where they can die toothless old men.”
Minutes later after a detail from Tom’s C Troop loped up with the Rees’ ponies, and the exchange of animals had taken place, the scouts still refused to ride the back trail. Instead, they clustered in a knot, afraid to leave the protection of the soldiers. Many wailed their death songs against a background of horse snorts and blue-tongued curses from the stable sergeant retrieving the army mounts.
An eerie, wailing, profane chorus—fitting background itself for Custer’s descent into the valley.
Somewhere behind Custer’s own standard and the regimental guidons, back down the columns in those faceless rows of soldiers, a single voice rose strongly, clear in its baritone plea. A trooper, singing the words to “Out of the Wilderness”:
If you want to smell hell,
Just join the cavalry,
Just join the cavalry.
If you want to smell hell,
Then join the cavalry,
’Cause we’re not going home.
CHAPTER 19
“CAPTAIN Keogh! Take Cookey with you to Reno’s command,” Custer ordered, now fully in sight of the Little Bighorn.
About time he started stirring things up, Keogh thought. Time to get this bleeming attack under way.
“And when I get there, General?”
“Inform the major I want him to take his men across the river below and attack the village as fast as he deems prudent, he’s to charge the village. Tell him he will be supported by the whole unit.”
Turning from the wide-eyed major minutes later after delivering Custer’s message, Keogh and Cooke watched Reno lead his men down the dry bluffs of Ash Creek toward the Little Bighorn for about half a mile before the pair wheeled and kicked their mounts back to Custer’s outfit waiting some three-quarters of a mile up the Ash Creek trail. They hadn’t ridden far when the sound of clattering hooves made them turn and rein up.
Its nostrils flaring in the staggering heat, Gerard’s mount lagged wearily, already lathered from its valiant charge up the back trail. All the two officers could now see of Reno’s men was a heavy dust cloud over the red-eyed bluffs hugging the river below. It appeared the major had made his crossing of the Little Bighorn.
“Cooke!” Gerard croaked, licking his lips as he reined up between the two soldiers.
“What t’is it, Gerard?” Keogh’s brogue peeled off the rolling R’s.
“Major Reno sent me with his compliments—”
“What’s the news?” Cooke bit his words off impatiently.
“He’s already met the Indians.” Gerard offered his whiskey canteen to Cooke.
Cooke shook his head, but Keogh greedily scooped it from the interpreter’s hand with his own big paw.
“I pass up no man’s whiskey!” he bawled with a sour grin.
Cooke watched the Irishman swallow, then went back to studying Gerard. “Reno’s spotted the Indians, you say?”
“We crossed the river. Spotted the bastards then. Lots of the red bastards. You can see their naked bodies as they ride to and fro down in the river bottom, down in the trees and marsh as we was crossing. We also seen the tips of their lodges downriver a throw or two.”