“Hiestzi! I am here! Husband—I wait for you!”
A young Cheyenne warrior leapt to his feet nearby, dragging her down among the tall grasses as random carbine shots from the knoll lobbed her way, kicking up spouts of yellow dirt.
“He is my husband!” she protested at the warrior, who pinned her down in the grass.
He was sweaty and smelled of rancid bear grease in his braids, in the paint smeared across his cheeks and under his mouth. All of it furred now with the dust everywhere. He stank.
“Hiestzi returns for me at last,” she pleaded with the young warrior to understand, smelling his foul breath in her face, suffocating her. “He promised to come back for me. I must go to him!”
“Hiestzi is not here. The Red-Beard sent his soldiers against us again. Yellow Hair is far, far away.” He tried to calm her, clamping a dirty, sweaty hand over her screaming mouth. But try as he might, Monaseetah remained hysterical, biting and kicking now. Shrieking at the top of her lungs when he yanked his hand back in pain.
“Hiestzi! I wait for you!”
She suddenly lay still, panting beneath the warrior’s weight. “Don’t you see? He has returned for me exactly as promised! He has come for me now in the Moon of Fat Horses!”
Right after propping himself up to watch Smith’s charge down the hill, Custer thought he heard something out of place among the chants and curses, something not belonging with the wing-bone whistles and drums, or the cries and grunts of dying men. Something high-pitched, like an arrow in flight, yet sweet to his long-ago memory. A voice he recalled from the past … a long winter gone.
It can’t be true, Custer decided, wrestling down the pain threatening to overwhelm him and drive him into blessed unconsciousness.
You’re suffering too much, Autie … this wound … the blood spilled—that’s all it is, he told himself. It’s just pain. You can fight it now the same way you’ve fought everything else all your life … scratched your way up from nothing to Boy General. Just fight the pain—
“Yellow Hair!” There it came again.
That voice! Where? Ohhh, God … a man can only do so much! I tried to reach you. No! It’s not true … not here … most certainly not now!
“Yellow Hair!”
The voice climbed again above the din of battle and the cries of the dying—scratching at his ears without stop. He strained his dust-reddened eyes and licked at the blood-crusted, alkali-cracked lips, hungering suddenly for the taste of her mouth as if it had been yesterday’s hot summer sun rising when last he saw her … waving from that wagon as he waved back—promising he would return for her.
Knowing now that he had never really stopped wanting her.
It cannot be, Custer’s fevered mind burned. But Lord! This hunger for her is like something solid I can’t escape … aching across all these years.
He struggled to prop himself up higher, ears pricking to locate the voice.
Downhill! Monaseetah’s coming to take this all from me … ohhh, God!
The pain caused him to double up as he pushed himself to rise. He spit out a little stomach bile. All that was left in his stomach now.
Yes, Autie—you want her perhaps even more than life itself right now.
He wanted her to touch him one last time—now that everything was slowly fading out behind his eyelids, looking more and more like a gray pool of sleet on the northern plains that struggled to capture winter’s light.
He could not have the presidency now … he could not reach out and touch Libbie. For so long Libbie had kept herself from him.
This Montana hillside held him prisoner as surely as his restless soul would wander no more. This is where he would die.
Yet … before he closed his eyes, Custer wanted her to hold him one last time.
Hold him just long enough to last into forever.
After charging downhill only five hundred yards, the first of Smith’s men yanked on their reins, drawing to a halt after effectively scattering the Sioux and Cheyenne before them.
They had driven the warriors out of the ravine itself, flushing them down the slope before their wild charge—but the soldiers suddenly did something most unexpected by white or red alike. They stopped dead in their tracks for no apparent reason. At least no reason any man on that hill could figure out.
No reason at all—for they hadn’t counted on Lame-White-Man and his Cheyenne Crazy Dog soldiers.
A Southern Cheyenne war chief, visiting relatives up north for that summer gathering of the great camp circles, Lame-White-Man had led a strong contingent of warriors from the upper camps across the river at the mouth of the deep ravine, throwing his force against the pony soldiers entrenched on the hill under Tom Custer. He was himself a many-scarred veteran and not likely to frighten easily, buckling as did the youngsters under the charge of Smith’s forty.
“Brothers!” the Lame One shouted, rising to his feet. “We must stand our ground. Do not quail before these pony soldiers. They are but dust in the wind. We are many. We are mighty. Hold your ground! This is your day!”
Many of the warriors retreating in panic before the troopers halted, looking back over their shoulders. Now they saw for themselves. Exactly as Lame-White-Man declared—the soldiers were not many. And they were not following.
Perhaps by magic, some thought, the Lame One has turned back the soldiers!
With renewed courage the Cheyennes wheeled about, starting back up the slope to where the lone war chief stood his ground, exhorting his young men to join him in this battle against the forty.
The Lame One hobbled a bit, but despite his limp he marched steadily upward, closing on the place where the soldiers reined back, drawing their snorting horses together in a confused mob.
By the time the soldiers had dismounted near the side of the long ravine, Lame’s warriors had edged closer under continued fire. The smell of Indians on the wind drove the big horses mad with fear. They reared and bucked and pulled at their holders.
Suddenly a few older Cheyenne boys leapt from the sage, waving blankets and shouting at the frightened horses, scaring the encircled soldiers into full-scale panic.
First the horses bolted away, careening downhill toward the river, their stirrups and saddlebags of ammunition clattering through the tall grass and past screeching warriors. Thirsty far too long. It was easy work for the young boys and old men at the river to round these last horses up, head them downstream. The white man’s animals wanted nothing more than to be near the water.
With dry throats of their own, Smith’s soldiers gazed longingly downhill. Their mounts gone … any means of escape gone as well. Hope disappeared like a puff of yellow dust in the dry breeze.
Everywhere the air filled with sound, crushing at their ears. Burnt powder stung nostrils, clinging to the hillside like dirty coal-cotton gauze. Dust burnt eyes into dark, reddened sockets. And still more warriors splashed across the shining ribbon of the river, swarming over the hillside like red ants from a nest Custer had stirred with a big stick.
“Here!” Sergeant John Ogden’s voice rose above the shrieks of the enemy and cries of panic among the young soldiers. “Follow me to the ravine!”
No one needed to suggest the ravine more than once to those men. Up here on the slope, they were helpless and exposed, naked to the painted enemy. Nearly all of them dashed off on Ogden’s heels, scrambling downhill and sliding into the ravine they had intended to secure and hold until Gibbon’s boys arrived.
As soon as the soldiers scrambled over the edge, Lame-White-Man exhorted his warriors into the mouth of the coulee itself, charging up toward the milling, frightened, trapped soldiers.