Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (15 page)

“Sure, Autie.” Tom never took his eyes from Benteen.

“We are family, gentlemen. We will support each other in what the future brings. We’re horse soldiers, after all.”

A man didn’t have to be standing right beside Custer to hear sentiment catch in his throat as the general rasped out the name of his beloved regiment: “We’re the
Seventh. We’ll succeed only by hanging together, above dissension … or we’ll die alone in miserable solitude because we failed each other.”

With those last words Custer flung the limb aside and brought his right hand up, saluting his subordinates in a rare gesture of fellowship. Nervously, as they glanced furtively at one another, one by one the men of this command brought their right arms up to answer the sudden, unexpected salute from their general. It was an odd, uncanny feeling that shot like a thunderbolt through that assembly on the banks of the Rosebud at twilight.

Never before had Custer saluted them first.

He brought his arm down snappily, forcing a grin to crease his sunburned face. “That will be all, gentlemen. We march at five.”

T
HE
officers shuffled off downstream, back to their companies and bedrolls.

Uneasy, Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey wasn’t really sure he had caught all of it right, as he was rather deaf in one ear, but he nonetheless sensed an unexplained anxiousness in his pit when he strolled away from Custer’s bivouac at that moment. He stopped and turned to glance one last time at the general he had served since the Seventh Cavalry’s earliest days at Fort Hays in Kansas Territory.

In Godfrey’s way of thinking, Custer had for the first time shown a genuine reliance on his officers. And with this unexplained openness, Godfrey was more than certain there was something inextricably
not
Custer at all. Even something more profound than the mere tone of his voice, which, while normally brusque and somewhat curt, was on this occasion conciliatory and subdued.

Almost like an appeal for help
, Godfrey considered.
As close as he can come to making an appeal for help … as if something’s eating away at him
.

Finding his unshakable commander shaken in this way touched Godfrey clear down to his roots.

Lieutenant George Wallace, the regimental recorder but four years out of West Point himself, strolled along with Godfrey and Lieutenant Donald McIntosh in silence until they reached their bivouac. Lavender light was only then sliding headlong from the western sky. Off in the east a sliver of moon was rising when Wallace tore his eyes from the horizon and studied his two companions.

“Godfrey, McIntosh,” he whispered, snagging their attention. “I believe General Custer is going to be killed.”

Godfrey’s eyes flicked to McIntosh apprehensively, finding him every bit as stunned as he. Then Godfrey found his voice. “Why?”

He was a veteran of the Seventh, after all. He ought to know everything about his commander. He had ridden with Custer at the Washita, down through the Yellowstone campaign and the Black Hills expedition. No, Godfrey himself didn’t like the nervous wings rumbling round inside him at this moment.

“What makes you think Custer’s going to be killed?”

Wallace waited while a group of soldiers strolled past on their way up from the river.

Already the nighthawks were out, swinging in low overhead, striking a moth or mayfly in the growing darkness. Death leaving no time for a cry for help or a yelp of pain. Swift and efficient. No warning. No sound until too late. Only the swift wings of death asail on the wind above the faint swish of cavalry boots plodding off through the tall grass growing here beside the gurgling Rosebud. Young soldiers returning to bedrolls and their dreams of home.

Finally Wallace answered in a harsh whisper, “Because I’ve never heard Custer talk that way before.”

That was all it took for the hairs to prickle at the back of Godfrey’s neck. He was deaf in one ear, but he had caught precisely every single one of Wallace’s words. He walked apart from his friends.

As he groped along beneath starry patches among the clouds overhead, Godfrey brooded, as a blind man in need
of answers sensing his way upstream, where he hoped he’d find the scouts’ camp.

Good God
, he told himself.
You’ve fought Indians with Custer before, Ed. Along the Platte River Road and the Washita and the Yellowstone itself. It’s not like you’re some ignorant shavetail quaking in your boots before your first fight
.

No
, he admitted.
This is something different. Something downright spooky
.

He found a few of the Crow scouts and a dozen or more of the Rees, all gathered round their little fire. They talked quietly through Bouyer and Fred Gerard, the Arikara interpreter, or conversed silently among themselves, their hands gesturing in quick, darting flight like those night-hawks swooping overhead.

Not desiring to interrupt, Godfrey hunkered down on the grass near Mitch Bouyer, behind Bloody Knife, chief of the Ree scouts and a longtime tracker for Custer. He found himself seated beside Half-Yellow-Face, one of the older Crows assigned from Gibbon.

After Godfrey had attentively listened to the various conversations, studying what he could of the facial expressions and the signs used, he was surprised when he saw Half-Yellow-Face nudge the half-breed Sioux interpreter and point out the soldier among them.

Bouyer turned and grunted. Godfrey nodded and rose on his haunches a bit to show his interest in what the scouts were deliberating. Bouyer studied the two shiny bars on Godfrey’s collar for the first time, perhaps remembering that the Indian scouts were officially assigned to Godfrey’s K Company.

“You, pony soldier,” Bouyer began, his voice low, causing Godfrey to lean forward with his one good ear. “You fight Indians before, eh? Ever fight these Sioux?”

Godfrey swallowed at the coarse directness of the question.
Damn
, he thought,
these scouts have a way of cutting right through the underbrush and getting right down to the root of something, don’t they?

“Yes …” Ed admitted. “Several times down near Nebraska, but our hottest engagements were along the Yellowstone three summers ago now.”

“Hmmm,” Bouyer considered as he turned back round to the fire, dallying at the coals with a twig for a few minutes. Only then did he turn back to stare directly at the lieutenant. “Well, then, pony soldier—just how many of them Sioux do you expect to find up there?”

Godfrey watched Bouyer nod upstream and point with his twig toward the hulking Wolf Mountains—the direction Custer was leading them.

“The general briefed us on the reports the army’s received.”

“How many warriors the army tell you Custer’s going to find?”

“They figure we may find between a thousand to fifteen hundred warriors … if we find them.”

“Oh,” Bouyer laughed mirthlessly, “you’ll find them all right.” His teeth flashed beneath the pale thumbnail moon. “You’ll find them if you go riding with Custer.”

The half-breed seemed ready to let that settle a moment like a muddy puddle stirred. Then Bouyer continued. “So you tell me your own mind, pony soldier—you think we can whip that many Sioux?”

It was not lost on Godfrey that the half-breed Sioux interpreter had suddenly gone from saying
you
when referring to Custer’s command, to now saying
we
.

“Oh, yes,” Godfrey said quietly. “I guess so.”

At that moment Half-Yellow-Face and White-Man-Runs-Him interrupted, asking Bouyer what had been said between the interpreter and the soldier. Then Bloody Knife sounded his interest, asking Fred Gerard to translate the gist of the conversation for the Rees in the circle. A few minutes passed before the Indians fell silent once more, their somber eyes refusing to talk any longer.

Bouyer tossed the twig into the little fire at his feet, watching it flare, then die out. “Well, pony soldier. I do not know this Custer—but Bloody Knife tells me much of him. I do not know him myself, but it’s for sure I know the Sioux. Only thing I can tell you—we are going to have one damned big fight. One—damned—big—fight.”

With nothing more than a whisper on the grass, Mitch
Bouyer rose, turned on his heel, and disappeared into the purple twilight.

One damned big fight
.

Bouyer’s words clung to Godfrey like stale fire smoke, stinging eyes and lungs. Foul on the tongue. Eventually he got to his feet and trudged off, growing nervous and cold and out of place among Gerard and the Indians. An outsider who did not understand their mysticism. An outsider who did not even understand why he shuddered uncontrollably as if he were freezing.

On the way to his bedroll, Godfrey stopped at Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly’s D Company bivouac. A few officers had gathered beneath Edgerly’s company flag, quietly singing some of their favorites down by the lapping waters of the Rosebud. Not only “Bonny Jean” and “Over the Sea,” but also “Mollie Darling” and “Drill, Ye Tarriers” were all raised to the quiet evening stars amid complaints from Benteen of disturbing his sleep.

After “Dianah’s Wedding” and “Grandfather’s Clock” were sung, Godfrey himself led them in the “Doxology,” or the “Olde Hundredth” as it was popularly known.

With the nervous stammering of
amens
, most of the men bid good night to their fellow officers and slipped off into the darkness to locate their companies and bedrolls while the chorus of coyotes and wolves took up the nightly serenade where the soldiers left off. Beautiful in its own feral way, though eerie to the uninitiated ear—that blending of high-pitched yips from the younger coyote pups, echoed by the deeper howl of a prairie wolf, was a chorus that thrilled a man accustomed to the high plains.

All round the regiment that summer night sang a lullaby meant only for the innocent.

Past those few lonely sentries on picket duty, a man
here … then another there slipped out to find himself some privacy for nature’s call. One by one the solitary soldiers crept in among the horses and led an animal over the first hills to the east. Across the Rosebud. Climbed into the saddle—nosing for the Black Hills. Or off to the northwest and the Bozeman Road. Wherever—some men just wanted across those first low hills and away from this place.

It would be easy for their fellow soldiers to accuse them of cowardice. Too damned easy to figure these green recruits and a few fire-hardened old files to boot were all struck with a bad case of the “yellow flu.”

Better yet, a clear-thinking man had to figure those soldiers had their eyes trained on the diggings located up in Alder Gulch or meant to head down to Deadwood with gold in mind. Sure enough easy for any man with half his wits who kept his eyes and ears open to understand he was finally within striking distance of the Dakota gold fields or the rich veins near Virginia City, Montana. Easy enough for any man who could keep his mouth shut to get lost among those miners and drummers and traders and gamblers who peopled those places men always went when they wanted to stake it all on one turn of the spade, or a single play of the cards. Such soldiers could always trade in a sturdy army mount branded
US
for a new set of duds, shucking himself of that yellow stripe down the outside of his britches … maybe even earn himself a grubstake up in the hills somewhere on some nameless stream.

Damned sure better than dying on some nameless little creek with Custer and his crazy band of zealots
, one deserter thought as he slipped off into the noiseless night.

Damned sure better than dying with Custer
.

Just as Custer had ordered, no reveille sounded for the Seventh on the morning of the twenty-third.

Entrusted to awaken the camp, the horse guard checked
their watches beneath the pale, lonesome starlight before groping their way through the sleeping camp, nudging their relief. Each was charged to see that his bunkies were rousted into the predawn darkness to relieve their bladders and start their tiny coffee fires.

By the time the columns moved out as scheduled at five
A.M.
, with the newborn sun peeking red as blood over the eastern rim of the prairie, Lieutenant Charles Varnum and his scouts had been gone the better part of an hour, their own cold breakfast and boiled coffee laying as heavy as wet sand in their bellies.

As the Montana sun streaked like a stalking coyote out of the draws and coulees to the east, Custer leapt aboard Vic, waved farewell to striker Burkman, and set off for the day’s scout. Directly behind him rode Sergeant Major William H. Sharrow, charged with carrying the maroon-and-white regimental standard in the company of Sergeant Henry Voss, the regiment’s chief trumpeter, who carried the general’s crimson-and-blue personal standard, the very same flag Custer had ridden with while commanding his Union cavalry during the Civil War.

The sight of the general heading upriver was the signal for the command to move out.

By the time that sore-eyed red sun climbed a hand high above the horizon, the regiment had crawled better than eight miles. Already the troopers had unbuttoned their shell jackets, leaving them open to catch the breezes from down the valley. Waist length, topped with a short, stiff collar, these shell jackets were the first item of apparel a man shed and tied behind the saddle as the morning warmed.

Custer joined his scouts at the first deserted Indian campsite the trackers ran across.

Tepee rings and fire pits pocked a large area of bottomland along the Rosebud. As the troops rode up, many of the veterans looked over the trampled ground in awe-struck wonder. More Indians had camped here than those hard-files could ever hope to boast of seeing before in one place. In addition, there was a sobering number of wickiups still present, those willow limbs stuck in the ground, their tips tied together to form a dome over which the warriors had
thrown a canvas fly, buffalo robe, or wool blanket for shelter at night.