Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (24 page)

“You don’t see the herd?” Bouyer inquired, astounded. “The biggest herd there’s ever—”

“General,” Reynolds interrupted, seeing that Bouyer grew testier by the minute, “you can plainly see the dust of the herd slowly moving north—most likely.”

“Listen, fellas,” Custer replied, jamming the field glasses back into their case, “I’ve been on the prairie for a good number of years already. I’ll have you know my eyes are as clear and just as good as the next man’s, but—I can’t see what you claim to be a Sioux herd.”

“But, General … it’s right—”

“I told you, Reynolds! I can’t see a thing. Don’t you understand?”

Custer’s snap caused the soulful Charley to purse his lips tight, swallowing down his anger.

But the bull-faced Bouyer wasn’t about to give up without a fight. He had Sioux blood in his veins, which some would later say gave him a temperament hot enough to push for a scrap with Custer.

“Listen, you pompous ass!” Mitch spat, dark eyes flaring with bright anger. “If you don’t find more goddamned Sioux down in that valley of the Greasy Grass—more than you’ve ever seen in all your goddamned years on the plains—why, you get a rope and string me from the highest tree you can find down below!”

His unbridled fury shocked not only Reynolds and the scouts listening a few feet away, but it shocked Varnum and Custer as well.

“All right, Bouyer …” the general soothed. “It isn’t going to do anyone a bit of good for me to hang you. I’m after Sioux, and you’re not Sioux enough for me to hang!”

Charley couldn’t help it. He found himself chuckling along with Varnum at Custer’s joke.

“Now, let’s suppose there are Sioux down in that valley yonder,” Custer said as he dropped to his rump to slide toward the pocket below them. “I’m certain they haven’t seen us, Lieutenant Varnum.”

“What about those Indians I told you spotted us near daybreak, General?” Charles Varnum protested. “Along that ridge right over there.”

“I can’t believe you saw any warriors, Charlie,” Custer replied acidly. “Most likely, it was nothing more than the new light playing tricks on you.”

“Wasn’t only me who saw ’em, sir.” Varnum realized he was beaten before he got started. “Crow boys saw ’em too.”

Custer shrugged it off, not even looking at the young lieutenant only four summers out of West Point. “Light plays tricks on everyone, Lieutenant.”

“They had to spot our tracks, General,” Varnum fought on vainly. “From where we saw ’em, they had to cross our trail getting up to those rocks.”

“You haven’t told me a thing to convince—”

“Goddammit, Custer!” Bouyer roared, shoving himself up beside the soldier-chief, his shoulders trembling in rage. “You best listen to what Half-Yellow-Face has to tell you. He says you better attack now.”

“Why the blazes should I attack now when my plans are to wait through the day and hit them come dawn?”

“Because these Crow realize the Sioux scouts they saw are carrying word back to their villages at this very moment. In fact, those villages down there already know about you, most likely. We—the Crow scouts and me—were given to you to do a job. You best let us do our job. And remember, I’ve got Sioux blood running through my veins. I grew up in Sioux and Cheyenne camps. I know the people. So for a herd that size kicking up that much dust down below—it can mean only one thing.”

“What?”

“The great summer council,” Bouyer replied stiffly. “A time when all the tribes come together, whether they’re on the reservations or not. This year Sitting Bull called them to join him up here. That isn’t just a single village down there—one you can strike and be done with while you wash your hands in the waters of the Greasy Grass. Custer, that down there is the greatest gathering of Indians any white man will ever lay eyes on and live to tell the tale!”

“Utter … rubbish! My reports state there couldn’t be any such camp. Yet I’ll agree with you on one thing, Bouyer—you were sent along with my regiment to help me. And nothing more. Best you get back to your scouting now and leave the military operations to me!”

“There isn’t a man in your command who would know, Custer,” the feisty Bouyer protested, “but I’ve spent over thirty years among the Indians, either living or trading with them. If that ain’t the biggest camp there ever was anywhere, you can cut my heart out and feed it to your dogs.”

“We aren’t getting anywhere with this—”

“Sitting Bull himself has offered a hundred fine ponies for my head! You’d better understand that, Custer. I know what I’m talking about! Them Sioux’ll kill me if they ever
get their hands on me alive. And it won’t be a pretty thing to watch!”

“You’re saying that very same fate awaits my command, Bouyer?”

Bouyer grinned at Custer wolfishly. “You understand, don’t you? The Sioux know all about you soldier-chiefs. There’s Red Beard Crook and No Hip Gibbon … and you, Custer. They call you Peoushi. Among the Sioux you are called the Long Hair.”

“And years ago the Cheyenne called me Hiestzi—Yellow Hair.” Taking off his hat, Custer began to chuckle. “Pretty funny, don’t you think, Mr. Bouyer? The bloody joke’s on them! They won’t have an idea one who’s charging their camp. I don’t have long hair anymore!”

Reynolds found himself snickering with Custer’s sour joke at his own expense. Varnum laughed loud and easy, like a colicky bullfrog.

Bouyer was patient. He waited until the white men were through with their fun. “If you’re going to be so goddamned bull stupid—I’ve just got one last suggestion for you, Custer, then I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“If that’s a promise, Bouyer—to keep your mouth shut—I’ll hear your last suggestion,” the commander replied haughtily.

“Get your exhausted men and beat-down outfit out of here as fast as their wore-out horses can carry ’em. You go down there into that valley, Custer—you and too many others never coming out.”

They watched the half-breed stomp off toward the horses.

Custer muttered to Reynolds and Varnum, “Let ’im go where he damned well pleases.”

Then, to Reynolds’s surprise, the general bolted after the whiskered half-breed.

Behind them all Ree scout Spotted-Horn-Cloud sitting solemn as an owl, having watched the white men argue before Bouyer raced off in anger. Slowly he scooped up handful after handful of dirt, pouring it over his head like water, mournfully singing out to the climbing sun. “Old
friend of many, many seasons … I shall not see you go down behind the hills this night.”

“Bouyer! Hold up there!” Custer shouted, reaching the picketed horses at the foot of the Nest.

Mitch whirled like he was shot. “You hold it, General!” He leapt aboard his Crow pony, taking up the slack in the reins.

“You needn’t—”

“You know, Custer, a lot of folks tried to tell me about you—how goddamned right you always think you are. Said you get right on a trail like a winter wolf with the smell of fresh blood in your nose, and you just can’t back off, can you?”

“I’ve never allowed myself to back off, Bouyer.”

“They say some people learn quickly. Others … well, I’ve found they learn more slowly than most. Like preachers and schoolteachers—army officers learn most slow of all.”

Custer and the others watched Bouyer tear downhill toward the waiting troops.

“If it were up to army scouts like you, Bouyer,” Custer hollered after the half-breed, “the army wouldn’t get a bloody thing done at all!”

After Custer left his troops behind to climb to the Crow’s Nest, his command prepared to march to the base of the rocky bluffs as ordered and await the general’s descent after he had personally studied the valley of the Little Bighorn.

While packing the mules for the march of F Company, Sergeant William A. Curtis discovered that not only had a small bundle of clothing worked itself loose from his bedroll during last night’s blind climb up the dark and rugged trail from the Rosebud, but Corporal John Briody reported a box of hardtack missing from one of the company mules.

With a hand-picked detail ready and mounted behind him, Sergeant Curtis reported to Captain George Yates that he volunteered to retrieve both clothing and bread box.

“Very well, Sergeant,” Yates replied without enthusiasm. In fact, it seemed he didn’t relish sending his men along the back trail in the slightest. “Just be quick about it.
I don’t want F Company strung out all over the divide if we run into some action.”

“Understood, sir!” Curtis saluted and vaulted aboard his mount, leading the detail downhill toward the Rosebud.

Pensive and anxious, his stomach churning the way it did whenever he faced combat, Yates stared after the squad of men disappearing through the trees. A Civil War veteran who was not only a Custer hometown boy, but one who had served on Custer’s staff during the war, Yates realized how important retrieving the clothing and bread box could be.

If any wandering hostiles discovered those items dropped along a fresh trail of iron-shod hoofs …

Curtis and Briody led their four green recruits down the back trail, sharing between them ribald jokes they had heard many a time before, occasionally whistling songs that pleased a soldier beneath the high, thin overcast foretelling of another sweltering day.

“Say, you boys know the words to—”

“
Goddamn!”
Curtis bellowed, reining back with one hand, throwing his right up to signal a halt.

“Jeeeesuuuus!” gulped one of the privates, yanking his mount’s bit so harshly that the animal stumbled and fell to the side, neck twisted around, spilling its rider into the grass and spiny cactus.

He rolled in the cactus as the other three troopers bumped their horses into one another, all trying to retreat at once while Curtis and Briody attempted to maintain some semblance of order in their disheveled ranks.

Down the trail less than forty yards away, another small group of young men had also been surprised. They darted for their nearby ponies. Four warriors, wearing nothing but breechclouts and moccasins in the midmorning heat, had been intent on chopping at the wooden box of hardtack with a camp ax when Curtis’s troops rounded the brow of the hill and discovered them.

The warriors didn’t know whether to mount and ride or stand and fight. But it appeared the soldiers were dismounting and going to make a fight of it. Without waiting for much more than a brave yelp or two to spring from their throats, the half-dozen warriors leapt aboard their small
ponies and kicked dust across the shallow creek, fleeing up the hill.

All but one of the warriors disappeared over the top of the knoll, pushing on west for the Little Bighorn. That solitary rider sat silhouetted against the pale corn-flower blue summer sky and raised his arm defiantly in the air, yelling out his challenge and ridicule. At the end of that arm hung one of the new Henry repeaters the Sioux had traded for at Spotted Tail Agency.

With the hairs on the back of his neck bristling at attention, Curtis ordered the de-horsed private to climb back on his mount or run the risk of getting left behind. This was one sergeant who wouldn’t have his detail wiped out because a greenhorn shavetail had some cactus stuck in his ass.

“Cactus or lead, Private!” Curtis bellowed, swatting the soldier’s horse with the butt of his carbine. “You’ll have one or the other in your ass before this day’s done. Now,
ride!
”

The greenhorn’s animal bolted forward, its whiteknuckled rider clinging for his life, every bounce on that wild, mule-eyed ride a series of excruciating jolts as the cactus spines drove deeper into his ample buttocks.

By the time Curtis’s detail scampered back into the regiment’s camp, every man spurring his lathered mount as if the devil himself were right behind them, they had covered more ground than they had in their entire march last night.

After listening to Curtis’s story and ordering the suffering private to find himself a regimental surgeon, Captain Yates conferred with Major Marcus Reno and two other captains on a course of action. It was their considered opinion that they should recommence the march immediately, without waiting for the general’s return.

They had been discovered by the hostiles, they figured. And with those fleeing warriors scampering now to warn the village, Custer’s Sioux would slip from his noose. The general was going to be mad enough as it was. Best not to waste time getting over the divide and down into that valley.

As Custer himself descended the long slope from the
Crow’s Nest, he could see the twisting, snaking columns climbing up from Davis Creek toward the spine of the divide. A hundred eighty degrees from what he had ordered.

“Major!” Custer called as he came racing into sight of the columns. “Reno! What’s the meaning of this?”

“Begging pardon, General,” Yates interrupted with an apologetic grin. Lord, how he hated admitting this to Custer. “We thought it best to ride on up to meet you. We got us some sticky news to tell you, sir.”

As Yates explained the Indians’ discovery of the box and clothing along their back trail, the color slowly drained from Custer’s face. Then, as Yates watched, a sudden light began to flicker behind his azure eyes once more.

“Good,” Custer replied when Yates finished explaining his orders for the regiment to mount up and march instead of waiting on their commanding officer. “You did right.”

If that don’t beat all
, Yates considered.
We’ve just been handed the biggest problem spoiling our opportunity for surprise, and here Custer’s smiling like the cat what ate the canary
.

Tom Custer dropped from his horse nearby. He strode up, wiping his glove around the sweatband of his gray slouch hat. “What you figure to do now, Autie? Lay out on this side till dark?”

“What I figure to do, Tom—is talk to my officers right now. This regiment needs to be ready for a fight!” He wheeled, hollering back along the columns. “Sergeant Voss! Find trumpeter Martini. Bring ’im here—he’s scheduled for duty with me today.”

“Sir?”

“The both of you—sound ‘Officers’ Call.’”

“Sir?” the veteran Henry Voss gulped. “The Indians, they’ll hear the trumpets!”

“Dammit all, Voss! The red buggers already know where we are! So blow it!” Custer snapped, wrenching the bugle from Voss’s saddlebags and practically stuffing it in the man’s mouth.