“My belly,” Bouyer explained with a solid gulp of pain he swallowed down like it was some cod-liver oil to be taken, suffered, then gotten over. “That’s why I can’t come with you, my friend, my brother.”
Mitch placed a powder-grimed hand on Curley’s shoulder. “If you can get out of here, do it now. Do it quick. Get out of here before the Sioux have us fully surrounded. Go to the other soldiers up north. On the Bighorn. They are coming down the Bighorn to meet us in a few days. Go to No Hip Gibbon—tell him all of us are killed here.”
“You can go with me,” the young Crow begged with his eyes as well as his words. “I will carry you out of here. For my sister …”
“No!”
Bouyer clamped a dirty hand over the young man’s mouth. “I will not go. This is where I am to die, don’t you see? Old Man Above has brought me here—showing me this is where I am to die. I had many chances to leave Custer, but I came here with him. I can’t go and leave the rest of these men by themselves now. Their souls will remain here. Mine too, Curley. My soul must find its place here, or it will forever wander. You know that.”
“Yes, brother.” Curley nodded, choking on the emotion. “When a man is shown his place to die by the spirits, he must stay there and wait for death.”
Suddenly Mitch crimped with a spasm of pain at the gut wound, and more blood oozed from his mouth, dribbling into his barbed-wire whiskers. Curley lunged forward to help him as Bouyer toppled over to his side. The old scout pushed the youngster away. Always had been a tough little bantam rooster. Even ready to take General Custer on a time or two. And now the half-breed would go out on his own, with no help from any man.
Struggling to his knees, Mitch wrenched himself up and raised the carbine to his shoulder, teeth gritted against the hurt of it all. After he had fired two more shots at some Sioux down in a thicket of sage who were inching a mite too close for his comfort, Bouyer gazed into Curley’s eyes one last time.
“That man over there …”He pointed at the top of the hill where Custer sat propped up against the body of a dead horse, officers kneeling all round him as a horse was brought up for brother Tom. Custer was lifted, slung over the horse in preparation for some movement along the ridge.
Probably running north, Bouyer brooded darkly, cursing Custer.
“That man Custer will stop at nothing. We warned him. But he has no ears to hear his scouts. We came to help him. No Hip saw to that. But this Peoushi does not want our help. Instead, he wanted only to attack the villages, the biggest damned camp any of us have ever seen on the face of the Great Mother. And now those villages spread at our feet will be the last thing any of us sees in this life.”
His dark eyes studied the pained expression on Curley’s face. “Except your eyes, little brother! Go now while you can escape,” Bouyer ordered. “Go! Tell the world what happened at this place.”
Without a word of reply, nothing more than a grave, watery look in his eye to betray his unspoken love for this Mitch Bouyer, Curley leaned over and hugged the aging half-breed. With that embrace he turned to leave his brother-in-law.
In all the maddening, swirling confusion, Curley’s pony had been driven off by some Cheyenne scaring away the horses from Calhoun’s position. As the young scout twisted and turned, wondering how to flee without his pony, a Cheyenne warrior began a ride up the hill toward the troops breaking loose from the end of Calhoun’s hill. A sudden volley of carbine fire from the hilltop blew that young warrior into glory.
Curley was on his feet before the Cheyenne even smacked the ground.
Dashing through tall grass and around silver sage, the young Crow scout raced down the slope after that riderless Cheyenne pony. Bullets kicked up spouts of dirt near his heels. Arrows hissed past his bear-greased pompadour. With one desperate lupge Curley grabbed for the end of the rawhide lariat looped round the mustang’s neck and held on for all he was worth, jerking the animal around, stopping it from running off.
Curley lay in the tall grass, catching his breath. Just moments ago he had discarded his dirty carbine because it had jammed. Tearing the army cartridge belt from his waist, Curley belly-crawled back uphill toward the dead Cheyenne, poking his head up every now and then from the sage to check his bearings.
Making it to the crumpled warrior’s body, Curley took the old Winchester ’73 and the Cheyenne’s half-empty belt of cartridges. Better this than nothing, and those cavalry carbines were as close to nothing as a man could get.
He pulled in the rawhide lariat tied to the pony until the animal grazed almost directly above him. Lucky that the Sioux could not pick him out through the dust and smoke … probably thinking the pony was merely grazing on the field of battle.
Curley glanced to the south and east. Unless he moved now, the end of the ridge would be surrounded. Hundreds upon hundreds swept up the Medicine Tail like maddened ants. He had to go now!
With one swift, smooth leap, the young Crow scout sailed onto the animal’s back from the tall grass. He twisted the rawhide rein round one hand, urging the animal up and over the spine of the ridge while Cheyenne warriors howled in anger and utter dismay at the Sparrowhawk’s escape aboard one of their own ponies.
“White-Man-Runs-Him!” Bouyer shouted in Crow as many soldiers turned to watch Curley gallop over the top of Calhoun’s hill, through the soldiers and warriors and into the valley beyond.
“It is your turn, White-Man. Take one of the army horses that looks fresh enough to run. You have done all that you said you would do when No Hip hired you. I will tell your people in the land beyond how brave you are, but you must go back to the pack train now. Save yourself to tell this story. We are all dead men now.”
White-Man nodded, a trace of confusion on his young face. He began to rise and dart away but was back in the next instant, grabbing Bouyer’s collar, dragging him uphill toward the soldiers preparing to retreat north along the ridge.
“No!” Mitch barked, twisting painfully against the bullet hole gaping in his gut, a bubble of intestine protruding, puffy and purple. “I am done for. I go now to meet my people. Leave me to die here on this spot!”
Gently, almost as if Bouyer were a baby, White-Man lowered the half-breed Sioux down among the tall grass and touched Bouyer’s hand where it lay drenched in blood oozing from the belly wound.
“Your people are my people now, Uncle,” he told Bouyer. “I will see you again one day, in a valley not far from here. Remember this now, the journey you go on will not take long. The trail is easier than any trail you have ridden before. All your friends are there. Mother and father too. I will see you in that valley one day, brave one.”
Then White-Man was darting uphill in a rooster crouch, heading for some horses held together by a grim bunch of recruits hunkered near Tom Custer’s command. From what Bouyer could see over his shoulder through the swirling dust, the Crow scout fast-talked one of the recruits out of a horse and leapt aboard just as George Yates hollered out a warning.
Tom Custer whirled, yanking up his service revolver. Down the end of the muzzle he aimed at the scout’s broad back but never pulled the trigger as the rider disappeared into the smoke and dust, galloping east as fast as the army horse could carry him.
Tom slowly stuffed the pistol in its holster before he dashed back to his brother’s side.
Those high, clear notes sailing on the dry air, like cottonwood down lifting over the ridge and the villages below, brought most of the warriors to a staggering halt for a few precious moments.