“Less than two hours, Autie.”
He gazed up at Tom, wonder mixed with fear in his eyes.
“We’ve been whipped in less than two hours?”
Tom nodded. “Yes. And Benteen hasn’t come yet. Maybe we can hold out till that white-headed bastard does get his ass up here with ammo and more men. If …”
“If what, Tom?”
“If Benteen can break through the goddamned Sioux to get to us.” His eyes held Autie’s for a long, long moment.
“I understand,” Custer replied gravely, lips spreading in a chin red line of determination. “Help me sit up a bit more, will you, brother?”
Everywhere around their dusty command post, men were methodically butchered by arrow and bullet alike. Custer’s own private desperation and long-hidden fear of failure finally overwhelmed him as he watched his men, beloved troopers of his Seventh dying all round him like dry leaves tumbling from a mighty oak at autumn’s first slashing wind.
“Get the field glasses.”
Through them Custer peered hopefully to the south and west, where he had left Reno and Benteen to their fates.
“By God, I need his ammunition,” he finally exclaimed with a wet, gushing sound. “Benteen’s gotta make it through to us.”
“Gotta be soon, Autie.”
“General?”
“George?” Custer was genuinely happy to see Yates, buoyed by a hometown face here beside him in the final minutes, when a lot of the pain subsided. He swallowed hard, releasing silent, salty tears as he peered into the grim, blackened face swimming before his.
“General, there’s thirty-four of us left on the hill,” Yates reported. “No telling how many Reno’s got left now after he got cut up in the valley.”
“I was planning to batter the head,” Custer rambled, staring into the bone yellow sky. “If Reno had only held their feet down while I—”
“General? General Custer?” Yates grabbed Custer’s chin, pulling his sunburned face so he could look Custer in the eye. “It’s not Reno, it’s not Benteen I’m worried about.”
“Benteen?” Custer snapped alive with a spark ignited from some place deep within him. “Benteen’s coming, you say?”
“No, sir,” Yates answered. “I can’t believe he’s coming, not now.”
With no small agony Custer pulled himself upright against the carcass, lifting DeRudio’s Austrian field glasses to his eyes. For long, anxious moments he trained the glasses on the hills to the south and east. Suddenly the commander noticed shapes and color shimmering through the thick dust and haze rising off the landscape. Through the waves of heat he saw a mass of shimmery blue … then the mirage separated into column-of-twos.
“By the love of God!” he gasped, blood oozing from his lips. “It’s Benteen! He’s coming, boys! By all that’s—Benteen’s coming!”
Tom yanked the binoculars from his brother, disbelieving, knowing Autie was close to a rambling fool by now.
But he wanted to believe so badly himself. With everything he had in him, Tom wanted to believe. He strained his eyes on those hills far away and squinted through the haze. Sure enough, he found blue columns loping north, a motley mixture of companies on different colored mounts. The rescue columns galloped past a high point some few miles south of Custer’s hill, marching north.
“Damn, if you aren’t right, Autie!” he shouted.
Then Yates took up the cheer, scurrying here, then hunkering in a crab walk to carry the word elsewhere. With the captain’s good news, each knot of hold-outs immediately raised tired voices and carbines in the air at the prospect of rescue. Even Keogh and his crew of old-files hollered along the spine with gritty joy.
“How long, sir?” Lieutenant Cooke asked, his dark, handsome eyes boring into Tom’s.
Young Custer studied Cooke’s face, remembering the times they had courted the Wadsworth sisters together—summer picnics and winter sleigh rides. Wondering now if Cookey had been as lucky as he to get his hand inside so many perfumed blouses, feel the soft coolness of so many naked alabaster thighs in the shadows of a shaded bower—
Tom brought the field glasses to his eyes, staring into the shimmering southlands. He could not believe what he was forced to watch now, refusing to accept what he saw happening on that faraway high-point. For the longest time he stared, numbed, his mouth hung half open, like a voyeur caught peeking at something obscene.
When he finally brought the glasses from his face, Tom swallowed down his own despair, gathering strength for what needed saying. Laying the glasses on Autie’s chest, he told them. “Looks like Benteen won’t be coming after all.”
“Not coming?” Cooke growled.
“He’s been overwhelmed,” Tom explained, gazing now at his brother’s gaping chest wound, wet and bright beneath the high light. “Turned around … a goddamned rout.”
“Tom?”
He looked into Autie’s questioning eyes, glazing and sunken ever more now. “Yes, brother. They’re retreating. Trapped and surrounded. Just like us.”
Within that stinking compound made of some seventy dead horses littering the hillside, just below its crest, the air went deathly silent while it all sank in.
The only sound for the longest time was the random Indian bullet smacking into those huge, bloating carcasses. With every hit noxious gas escaped with a moist hiss, adding to the despair creeping over that yellow slope.
Lieutenant W. W. Cooke—Canadian adventurer who came south to fight in the Civil War and afterwards joined Custer’s newly formed Seventh U.S. Cavalry at Fort Riley to fight Indians rather than return home—rose awkwardly to one knee.
“Well, gentlemen,” he began in that soft, winning way of his that had won the friendship of many a man and the heart of many a pretty lady. “General, sir. I’ve a job to do. And I’m still of one body and soul so, I’ll be about it.”
Cooke stood, a fairly large man for the time and exceedingly fleet of foot. He more than any other man had won regimental footraces held at forts Riley, Hays, and Abraham Lincoln. “Just this last month we celebrated my thirtieth birthday, boys.”
“I remember it well, my friend,” Tom said, placing a hand on Cooke’s shoulder. “What a celebration that was. We truly drank the day away!”
“Aye.” Cooke licked his burning lips. “Wish I had some of that whiskey right about now.” He sounded sorry there wasn’t any left after caring for the wounded with what whiskey had been carried to the hillside in some saddlebags. “But there’s been many a time in the past that I knew for sure the way my life was going, I’d never make thirty. And look at me!” He chuckled with dark humor. “I’m thirty now and stuck on some goddamned hillside in—who knows where? Going to buy myself a small piece of this goddamned barren ground! Made it to thirty—only to die a month later!” He started to cackle wildly.
Tom Custer lunged at Cooke, gripping his shoulders in a close, fierce embrace. When Tom pulled back, he said “Billy, why don’t you go right over there?” He pointed out a position on the perimeter that needed some bolstering. “Looks like we could use a top shot covering that slope.”
Behind his tears, Cooke swallowed hard. “I am a good shot, you know.”
“The best, Billy.” Custer himself struggled to raise a hand to his adjutant. “I ought to know … choosing you to lead our sharpshooters at the Washita.” He winced with a swell of pain. The gray veil passed over his eyes. “You remember the Washita, don’t you fellas? The high point for the Seventh Cavalry. You remember, don’t you?”
Cooke knelt again beside Custer, wrapping one of the bloody freckled hands in both of his.