Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (16 page)

“I can’t believe the Sioux’d treat their dogs this damned good,” Lieutenant Varnum chuckled as he trundled along behind Bloody Knife and a handful of Rees who scoured the deserted camp for sign.

Fred Gerard dragged to a halt, turning on Varnum with a death-cold look smeared across his old, weathered face. “Charlie, my boy—the Sioux didn’t put these wickiups here for their goddamned dogs,” he growled, raking his tongue around a dry mouth as he yanked a tin flask from a back pocket.

Varnum froze under Gerard’s glare, growing nervous as some of the Rees studied how their interpreter had confronted the pony soldier. The lieutenant scuffed his jackboots across the ground like an embarrassed schoolboy, kicking up tufts of dry grass with the square toe.

“Not for dogs, Fred? Then what the hell they put in them wickiups?” He tried to chuckle again. No one laughed along with him.

“Charlie, my boy,” the prairie-hardened Gerard replied, wagging his head sadly.
A damn shame
, he thought,
this here’s the man Custer’s put in charge of the regiment’s scouts
. “Those wickiups sheltered the older boys and young warriors—the males of the tribes who’re too old to live with their families now but too young to marry and have a wife and lodge of their own just yet.”

Gerard licked his sore, dry lips, anticipating the taste of the whiskey as he worried the cork from the hip flask. He drank hard at the burning liquid that years ago had ceased to scour his throat with fire. After he raked the back of a hand across his wind-chapped lips, the interpreter went on.

“I’m afraid a lot of them wickiups was used by warriors scampering off the reservations, Charlie. You tell Custer, won’t you? Tell him to think hard on all those warriors scampering off the reservations, come to join Sitting Bull.”

For a moment Gerard had himself worried, hearing the ring of something foreign in his own voice.

The lieutenant stood gaping as Gerard turned and
walked off, following Bloody Knife, Red Star, and the others.

At one of the wickiups Bull-in-the-Water and Gerard tested the leaves on those limbs that had formed the frame. They were dry. Easy enough to tell that as he rolled those leaves about in his dirty palms. But they weren’t crispy dry yet. Just wilted a shade.

“How long?” Mitch Bouyer stepped up beside Gerard with Half-Yellow-Face and Curley.

“Week maybe. From what Red Star figures.” Gerard, a former post trader and now the official Ree interpreter at Fort Abraham Lincoln, tore the corner off a tobacco plug with yellowed teeth. Looking over this abandoned campsite, his mouth went dry, and he spit the chaw out.

He and Bouyer watched Custer remount, signaling his soldiers to resume the march. Angrily Custer hollered for Varnum and Bouyer to get their scouts out and moving ahead of his blue columns once more.

“Custer’s got his hands plenty full right here, I think,” Bouyer whispered gravely from the side of his mouth as he crawled aboard his Crow pony.

Gerard nodded, flashing a yellowed smile. “He’s had his hands full ever since he decided to take these Sioux on. It’s like he’s got a bone stuck down in his throat and can’t get shet of it. Shame of it is, I’m afraid the general’s gonna choke on that goddamned bone.”

Throughout the rest of the morning and into the growing heat of the afternoon, the scouts and a few of the old-timers began to notice a scarcity of game in the area of their march. A rare thing in virgin country such as this. A cavalry column marching across the high plains of Montana Territory would surely kick up some antelope, deer, and elk, or scatter off some of the birds normally roosting in the trees or chattering in complaint from the bushes.

Yes, sir
, Gerard thought, shifting himself up on the cantle of his damp saddle.
Downright spooky to follow the Rosebud and not find a mess of wrens or a flock of sparrows swooping overhead out of the summer blue
.

Damned little life we’ve found dotting the thick marshes among the eddies near shore either
.

Gerard knew his scouts and the Crows understood. They and Bouyer alike understood what had driven the game out of the country for miles around. Only an immense village on the march could have scoured the countryside clean of almost every sign of life.

Almost—except the magpies and robber jays that squawked their irritating demands over the abandoned campsites in search of a free morsel here, a bit of fat there. Something left behind by the gathering bands. And always the turkey buzzards overhead, circling, circling Custer’s Seventh.

Gerard gazed up into the climbing sun.
It could give a right-thinking man the willies to watch those goddamned buzzards hanging up there over us
. High-flying wing slashes circling lazy on the warm updrafts in that pale, summer-burned sky.
Any right-thinking man damned well knew he ain’t dead yet
.

By the time Custer ordered his command into camp near four-thirty
P.M.
, the regiment had put nearly thirty-three miles behind them. At each of the three deserted camping places they had run across through the day, the general had ordered a short halt while the scouts inspected the sites.

Somber and silent, both Crow and Ree had walked the packed lodge circles. Put hands in the ashes of old fires. Broke open bones to inspect both condition and age of the marrow. And they did it all without a single word, shrouded in discomforting silence. Gerard watched them, silent as well, noticing that only Rees’ dark eyes talked bravely to one another. Only their eyes talking.

While stable sergeants cussed and fretted over the lack of graze, because every blade of grass for some distance on both sides of the trail and been chewed to the ground, other soldiers speculated on the number of Indians they were following now … where the bands were headed … and how long ago the hostiles had left the area. In the last camp they had run across, over three hundred fifty lodge rings had been counted.

It didn’t take an interpreter like Gerard to compute the simple plainsman arithmetic that added up to better than a thousand men of fighting age right on that one spot.

He could tell from the look on Bouyer’s face that the
half-breed understood well enough that the bands were coming together. Gerard himself paid more and more attention to the dark eyes and gloomy faces of his Rees than he did the wild ramblings of loose-lipped army speculators like Varnum.

With a healthy heave Gerard rared back and tossed the empty tin flask toward the west bank of the Rosebud.

“Almost made it!” Lieutenant Varnum cheered his effort. “’Nother few feet …”

“Nawww,” Gerard shrugged it off. “Not with a empty one, I wouldn’t. That’s a piece to throw a empty one.”

Varnum studied him closely. “You wouldn’t have any more of that, would you?”

Varnum’s question brought Gerard up short.
The man’s army, through and through. It just ain’t right for one of Custer’s solemn teetotaling churchboys to get his hands on any whiskey
.

He bent over his saddlebags anyway. “What the hell.” He pulled out another flask. “Yeah, I got some more. Just want you remember, Varnum—I’m a civilian, and I can carry this along with me if I choose. Just in case you’re figuring on showing the general the evidence—”

“I’m not,” Varnum interrupted, licking his own dry lips anxiously. “Please. I just want some for myself.”

“Yourself, Charlie?” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Why, I’ll be damned.”

“Just—with all the …” Varnum’s eyes flicked around nervously. “I was with the Rees, the Crows all day.” He wagged his head like someone watching the gallows go up a board and a nail at a time outside his own iron-barred window. “I may be green at this, Gerard. Handling Indians, that is. No old sawbuck like you. But even I could read their eyes. I ain’t the smartest man Custer’s got working for him—but I can sense we’re running right on up the backside of something here that even the general don’t know what he’s doing.”

“Here.” Gerard shoved the flask into Varnum’s fist. “You pay me when we get back to Lincoln.”

The lieutenant clutched it against his chest like an icon, reverently. “Thank you, Fred.”

As Varnum wheeled away, Gerard called, “Charlie. Just do me a favor, will you?”

“What’s that, Fred?”

“Don’t pour all that stuff down at one sitting. Save some for the ’morrow.”

Fred watched the chief of scouts lead his weary army mount off through the milling command as the regiment spread out to establish its camp for the night. Gerard dropped beside his horse at his saddlebags to pull out a flask for himself this time. With his mount picketed he settled his shoulders against the saddle and sighed.

Hell
, he thought.
You got plenty whiskey to spare
.

Why, between his spacious saddlebags and that generous army haversack, Gerard had brought along enough whiskey to see him through for a good month.

N
EARLY
an hour later the Crow scouts came plodding in, their little ponies nearly bottomed out from what had been required of them. Rule of thumb on the plains stated that a scout traveled twice the distance a cavalry column would march in a day, what with all the back-and-forth and the up-and-down. That meant those little grass-fed cayuses had done something over sixty miles beneath a cruel summer sun.

Yet right now it wasn’t only fatigue that Mitch Bouyer could read on his Crows’ faces. Something more, in fact altogether primal, that strained and pinched the normally happy faces he knew as well as he knew any friend.

Bouyer understood as few others would, for he had stood at the center of those deserted camps with his scouts. He had walked across the worn earth of the central council lodge, visually ticking off that distance to the farthest of the brush arbors and wickiups used by the youthful warriors. Mitch knew his Crow had read such sign as easily as any
white man back east picks up and reads his daily newspaper.

The half-breed knew there wasn’t a bit of good news to be found on the front page today.

Custer sought out the Crows while striker Burkman busied himself brushing down both Vic and Dandy with tufts of grass. Bouyer nodded to the general without a word while Custer squatted in his characteristic manner, one knee on the ground as he leaned an elbow on the other.

“This is the main point I want you to tell them, Bouyer,” Custer began after Mitch had fed him the intelligence from the scouts’ travels. “These Sioux have been killing lots of white people. You explain to your boys here—I’ve been sent here by the Great Father in Washington City. I’m told either to bring the Sioux back to their reservation or to defeat them in battle. Keep in mind, I’m called Charge-the-Camp. I’m a great war chief, greater than this Sitting Bull or his general, this Crazy Horse they speak of. But—I’ll tell you a secret that no soldier who rides with me knows.”

Custer slowly eased himself to the ground with Bouyer and his Crows. The significance of that posture wasn’t lost on the scouts.

“My friends, I do not know whether I’ll get through this summer alive. There’ll be nothing more of any good in store for the Sioux from this time on, however. If the Sioux kill me, they will still suffer, for many more soldiers will come in my place and fill my empty boots. Ask your boys if they understand that.”

He waited for Bouyer to translate. Some of the Crow nodded in agreement before Custer continued. “And if the Sioux don’t kill me, why—I’m going to whip them soundly, right back to their reservations, where they belong. They’ve disobeyed the orders of the Great Father back east … and they will pay. Besides, you’ll take home many fine Sioux horses, won’t you, boys?”

Custer smiled widely, his sunburned face wrinkling as he waited while Bouyer translated. Young Curley spoke up, and when he was done, Mitch talked in a morose tone.

“These boys don’t like you talking this way, not one bit,
Custer,” Bouyer whispered with a powder-crack voice. “They figure there’s strong medicine on a man who talks about his own death. You’ve spooked ’em now.”

“Now, Mitch. I know some about Indians, mostly Cheyenne. But you tell these Crow not to worry. I’m not going to run, nor will I let my spirit fly away easily in battle.”

“This is good,” Bouyer answered in English before he translated.

“You tell these boys they’re my favorite scouts,” Custer continued. “I want them beside me when I go in for the kill. You tell them the strength of my words, Bouyer.”

Custer stood and smiled down at the Crow trackers.

“You tell them, Bouyer—tell them I’ll recommend them to their people, and they will all be leaders among the Crow.”

Custer turned on his heel, strode off at a lively pace. Mitch thought the way the general moved wasn’t the plodding of a man seriously contemplating his own mortality.

Swinging his cream hat against one powdery leg to knock dust off the brim, Custer waved to some troopers and officers bathing in the cool waters of the Rosebud beneath a purple orange glow of sunset. On the opposite bank upstream a ways, Captain Benteen grumbled sourly under his breath. He had set a seine hoping to snare some trout for supper. But with all the naked swimmers splashing and setting up a playful howl in the rippling waters, the captain’s cutthroat had been scared off.

Custer chuckled over Benteen’s predicament, at the same time hoping the Sioux would not be scared away from his own trap the way the trout in the Rosebud were fleeing Benteen’s seine.

But then, with “Custer’s Luck” you always caught the Cheyenne. Old Black Kettle and Medicine Arrow both
.

The more Custer thought on it, the more certain he became that his only problem would be one of surprise. The Sioux would run like jackrabbits once they got wind of him on their trail. And that simply wouldn’t do.

You need Sitting Bull and the rest to play too important a role
in what you’ve got planned for the rest of your life, Armstrong. Whether it’s a big village like those we ran across today or nothing more than five or six lodges. You must have that victory … and you must have it now
.