“It is good.” Black Kettle spread out his arms, signaling an end to the council. “You each must send one of your young men to my lodge when the sun rises one hand out of the east. Some I will send to the other camps with news of a council tomorrow night. The rest will ride under the leadership of my wise and thoughtful friend, Medicine Elk Pipe.”
Through the doorway the leaders filed into the night. Small, frozen flakes lanced out of the sky. Black Kettle watched his wife shuffling along between the lodges, coming back home to their warm robes. She would have spent an evening with friends, singing at the dance and gabbing of woman matters.
It was good she did not have to worry about the concerns of men. Still, she alone was able to cheer his gloom when the burden of leadership grew too great. Black Kettle sucked at the cold air, wishing he had pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he waited for Medicine Woman Later.
Tomorrow the riders would find the soldiers and his tribe’s safety could be assured. After all, his old friend Red Cloud of the Sioux had recently touched the pen on another treaty with the white Grandfather. After a long and bloody conflict, the plains both north and south could be at peace.
Peace would burst across the prairie as surely as the spring grasses rose to flower after the hard, dark days of winter. Pony soldiers would come no more.
“You are tired, my husband?”
“Yes,” Black Kettle answered as his wife ducked back inside the warm lodge. “Tonight I can once again sleep the sleep of peace.”
And dream of the great birds flying south.
CHAPTER 5
IT was close to nine o’clock, long since dark, before the regiment finally rendezvoused with Elliott’s scouting detail.
Adjutant Moylan nudged his mount close to Custer. “Sir?”
“Pass the word. From here the troopers will take only what they need for battle. And Myles, that means only what a man can strap behind his saddle.”
“I’ll pass the word, General.”
Moylan loped back into the freezing darkness to give the details of the order: Every trooper was to carry a hundred rounds of carbine ammunition and twenty-four loads for his pistol. In addition, each soldier was to be rationed some coffee and hardtack, along with an equally scanty bit of forage for his mount.
From here on out their buffalo coats would have to do. Blankets and tents would be left behind with the wagons. Not knowing the exact location of the hostile village, the men must be ready for battle at any moment. Word had it that at least five hundred warriors awaited them on the Washita. Earlier that evening the scouts had run across a “small” war party of over a hundred braves moving south with the smell of home fires in their nostrils.
For a few minutes the men slid from their saddles after better than fourteen straight hours in leather. A short break to rub some semblance of life back into their numb, cold rumps. One hour and no longer to chew on the crackerlike hardtack, to sip at the scalding coffee Custer allowed them to brew over small fires built beneath the overhang of creek banks.
A good site had been chosen by Elliott’s chief scout. He had worn the same droopy sombrero for years, a bushy mustache and dirty beard spilling across his chest. Christened Moses Embree Milner, the scout came to call himself Joseph, and later took the nickname California Joe during his gold rush days. A Kentuckian by birth, Milner had escaped his farming home to end up scouting for Kearny’s forces during the Mexican War. After peace had been gained in the southwest, Joe had moseyed to the California gold fields. Until Nancy Emma Watts came along to temper some of his wanderlust. She was all of thirteen but every bit a woman when he met her; she would bear him four children before Joe figured out domestic life really was a scratchy suit. Milner owned up to what he was—a wanderer—taking Nancy Emma and their children north to the ranch of some friends in Oregon.
Once again on the plains enjoying a man’s freedom, Joe cut quite a figure atop his cantankerous mule Maude.
Learning of Milner’s qualifications, the Seventh Cavalry’s young commander had snatched up Milner to become his chief of scouts.
“One thing ’bout a prairie winter,” Milner growled to anyone who would listen, “it don’t stop reminding a man he can never wear enough clothes.”
He huddled with the rest of the scouts, both white and Indian, around a small fire. They warmed feet and hands, then turned for a moment while they pulled up the tails of their long coats, exposing some weary rumps to the welcome warmth of the flames. With a little rubbing, a rosy sensation of life began to seep back into this single most important part of a cavalry soldier’s anatomy.
Joe chuckled privately at the thought. He wasn’t all that different really from these numb-ass troopers. Just better paid. The dozen or so Osage trackers and the handful of white guides were all paid about $2.50 a day. In addition, they had Custer’s promise of a $100 bonus paid in gold to the man who led him to the hostile village.
Milner’s young partner Jack Corbin glanced at him over the lip of his tin cup as he sipped at the boiled coffee. Stiff, Milner eased himself down on his hams beside Corbin. He shared his joke on himself with the other scouts. The white men chuckled, frosty halos engulfing their heads. The Osages drank their coffee, not making a sound.
A few minutes before ten o’clock, Moylan brought orders to resaddle their mounts. Custer wasn’t taking any chances blowing “Boots and Saddles” on the tin trumpets. By now a milk-pale moon had broken through a thin overcast. What little heat the earth had held would quickly disappear now with no cloud cover to speak of.
“Damn,” one of the men grumbled, “this next haul could be the coldest stretch yet.”
Out here in the wilderness, a man had only his dreams or his fears to keep himself warm tonight.
* * *
“Found something, Ben?” Custer asked the scout who materialized out of the inky darkness up ahead. Custer and Moylan had left the rest of the column a quarter-mile back, hundreds of weary horses plodding along the frozen river.
“One of them Osages thinks he smells a fire,” Ben Clark said.
“Anyone else smell this fire?”
“No, General. Just the old tracker.”
“Lead on. Mr. Moylan and I are right behind you.”
Around the next loop of river the trio loped up on a cluster of forms looming dark against the snow. Overhead a brightening sliver of moonlight splayed across the land. Custer dismounted and handed his reins up to Moylan, motioning for Clark to follow him. A few steps across the crusted snow brought Custer to a circle of trackers squatting out of the wind. Corbin and Milner stood nearby.
“Clark tells me one of the trackers smelled a fire,” Custer said to the Osages.
“Me smell small fire.” One Indian rose stiffly, old joints crackling like rusty buggy springs, his heavy wool blanket capote slurring across the crust of snow where he had hunkered out of the keening wind.
“What’s your name?”
“Osage name, Paw-Husk. Second chief of my people.”
“Paw-Husk means what?”
“My moccasins are tired.” He grinned toothlessly. “You soldiers call me Little Beaver.”
“Well, Little Beaver, let’s pray your nose is not as tired as your moccasins.”
Custer judged Paw-Husk to be in his early sixties, skin the color of well-worn gloves, and just as wrinkled. Spare and thin, but with the sinewy muscles of a younger man. This Osage might prove a savvy tracker.
“So tell me what you found.”
“Small fire. This night.” He peered into the sky and pointed. “Moon was here.”
“Something like two hours old, Joe?” Custer asked Milner.
“Close enough, General.” Milner spit a brown curd of tobacco onto the snow.
“You smell this fire too?”
