But those soldiers leaving to dash north along the spine—they were the frightened ones. Gall realized they were scared only because they had been given a chance to live now. Hope can be a terrible burden for a man with nothing else to cling to.
Those left behind—those men gathering about Calhoun and Keogh like cottonwood saplings round two tall, powerful oaks—they knew what their odds were. Perhaps best to take your bullet or arrow here and now rather than drag the damned thing out.
That’s why such an eerie calm descended among those hardened veterans and green recruits that long afternoon on Calhoun Hill. Few men had ever experienced that singular feeling and lived to tell another soul of it. A peaceful, purposeful calm that passes over a man when he is finally reconciled to his own passing. Especially a soldier, young or old, when called upon by duty and friendship to cover the retreat of his brothers-in-arms. To give up his life so that others might have a better chance of holding onto theirs.
Something over an hour had crawled past since the Sioux and Cheyenne had driven the cavalry back from the river’s edge and up that dusty slope. Gall was growing impatient. Along with Crow King, Iron Dog, and Big Road, he decided this popping their heads up to shoot at the soldiers was no smarter than suicide.
There is a better way, a safer way to fire into these soldiers clustered in tiny groups near the hill.
As word spread through the entrenched Sioux positions, the warriors brought out their bows in force at long last—and a storm of iron-tipped arrows began to rain death upon the troopers. While a warrior had to expose himself to fire his gun simply because a bullet travels in a straight path, an arrow could be sent into the sky in a graceful arc, whistling down to pierce horse or man alike.
Sergeant George Finckle lay his body over Custer’s once more, protecting it from the shafts of darkness flittering down across the sun, falling from the sky in waves of iron-tipped hail. He watched others mount up behind Smith and Yates, fighting their horses, sprinting north if they had control.
“Get him loaded fast!” Tom Custer bellowed, dodging the red hail.
Arrows clattered into saddle gear and dead horses. Battering gear and piercing horses. God, they make a racket! Finckle thought as he knelt over the general. Damn, he’s out again.
George looked around. Dr. Lord worked on a soldier with a shaft all the way through the back of his neck. The man was drowning in his own blood, legs thrashing just the way Finckle remembered the chickens thrashing about the yard back home. Spraying bright hot blood just like this.
Jeezuz! A horse sounds just like a man screaming when it goes down, dying.
Men shouted as the arrows struck, or they cursed when the man next to them drew his last breath, yanking at that bloody shaft in his back or gut.
The soldiers who had leapt aboard their horses to escape the falling death from the sky didn’t stand any better chance. They were hit as surely as those men left behind when the arrows rained. Saddles emptied, horses reared and broke free, bolting downhill in a noisy clatter.
For the first time bedlam began working its evil on that end of the ridge as soldiers scurried this way and that like sow bugs from an overturned buffalo chip. A few savvy old files even pulled the bodies of dead bunkies over themselves. The only protection from the iron-tipped messengers of red death.
“Buglers!” Tom’s raspy rawhide voice carried over the melee.
He must want to be the last to ride outta here, Finckle considered. He’s staying till we get the general up on his horse. He’d not dare leave his brother’s side.
“Sound the charge, buglers!” Tom ordered, waving his pistol in the yellow dust that clung to everything in a sticky film.
From the saddlebags of the two company buglers came those shiny brass bugles they had not blown for three days now. In a stuttering, discordant melody, the buglers raised their tune along the grassy spine.
“If it’s the last thing I’ll do, Finckle …” young Custer snarled, “I’ll organize this retreat, by God!”
“Cap’n?” Finckle gazed up through the dust and the powder smoke.
The general was conscious again when Tom slid up beside his brother in the tall grass.
“Blow for Benteen, Tom,” he sputtered. “Benteen must hear us …”
Tom didn’t answer. He leapt to his feet, dashing among Smith’s gray-horse troop to Find the buglers, whose brassy notes sailed over the slopes.
They weren’t hard to find, not with those shiny instruments gleaming like mirrors strapped to a man’s soul in the sun. Shiny and yellow beneath a bone-dry summer eye glaring down on their last hill.
Tom grabbed one cowering bugler hiding behind a horse carcass to blow his horn. Then Custer yanked the other trumpeter to his feet as well.
“Blow ‘Assembly’!” Tom ordered flatly. “Then try ‘Officers’ Call.’ Just keep blowing till I tell you to stop! Blow, goddammit—blow!”
CHAPTER 23
IN a seeping gash along his cheek, the raw wound ached and pinched like puckered rawhide drying under this blazing sun.
Mitch Bouyer had been clipped by a bullet or fragment of one ricocheting off some rock down below him on the long slope to the river. Funny, but the cheek hurt one hell of a lot more than the bullet hole low in his belly.
It’s just a little pain, he told himself. Hurts only when I try to run.
Bouyer laughed wildly, wickedly at that. Only when I try to run! That’s funny for a man to think of—now—isn’t it?
There couldn’t be any running. Not for most of them anyway. But he looked over at Curley and young White-Man-Runs-Him. They were both related to Mitch’s Crow wife. One was her younger brother, the other a cousin or something such.
Perhaps these two boys can make it out … spread the word of what happened in this place.
Calhoun had had it. That much was plain to see from where Bouyer sat. The last few soldiers still up there at the end of this pony-back ridge where Calhoun’s big fight had started were going down, one at a time like canvasback ducks on a high-plains pond diving for their lunch.
Except, Mitch realized, these ducks weren’t coming back up for air … they weren’t coming up at all.
Bouyer knew that wild-man Keogh would just have to hold the screeching Sioux off from the ridge when the warriors came swarming over Calhoun’s position. That was the reality of it all. And that’s when Bouyer knew he had to send the two boys off before they were vulture bait with the rest of Custer’s soldiers.
In Absaroka, Bouyer shouted over his shoulder to get the youngest’s attention—Curley.
Obediently the youth crawled up to sit beside Bouyer as the interpreter casually fired shot after shot with a dead soldier’s carbine, and when it jammed, he crawled off in search of another. The soldiers he took the rifles from weren’t going to be using their Springfields any longer—and besides, their stiffening, stinking bodies served as a shield for him while he fired back at the advancing warriors.
Smack, smack. The dull, wet thud of lead slamming into the lifeless white-soldier flesh—
“Curley,” Mitch coughed, clearing his throat of the dust that threatened to choke him, “this fight does not go well for us.” His Crow was spoken flat and hard, traveling with the speed of a carbine bullet itself. “The soldiers have lost this fight. We have lost this fight too, little brother.”
Bouyer glared right into the young Crow’s eyes. Curley did not flinch. He stared at the aging half-breed Sioux who was saying in his own way they all would be dead soon enough. Mitch, the old scout, his sister’s husband. Curley dipped his fingers in the puddle of blood pooling beneath the half-breed’s leg.