roar.”
Custer ignored his captain, turning to the scout. “Spit it out for me, Clark.”
“This time I’m afraid you’ve jammed your saber into a real hornet’s nest.”
“Come now. We’ve secured the camp. It belongs to us!”
“The camp may belong to us, General. But we don’t control these hills. Those warriors who chased your lieutenant here back to camp? I’m worried where those warriors came from.”
“Escaped Cheyenne, I’d imagine.”
“Begging pardon, General.” Godfrey shouldered up between Custer and Clark. “What’ll we do about Elliott’s command?”
“I’m unconvinced the major is in any serious danger.”
Godfrey said, “Sir, permission requested to lead a detachment and reconnoiter for the major.”
“Request denied. You and your men will assist the clean-up of the enemy camp.”
“General, I must protest—”
“Protest registered! Now, you’d best be moving your men into the center of camp where I need your help, or you’ll be placed on report!”
“General?” Benteen said.
“Same goes for you, Captain!”
Godfrey saluted and remounted, signaling his men to follow him into the village.
“I know just how he feels,” Benteen whispered to Clark. “Ordered not to go to the aide of a fellow soldier.”
They wheeled at the screeching war cry. A warrior dashed toward Custer. Feathers tied from his scalp lock fluttered in the cold breeze as he yanked back on his pony’s halter, sliding to a stop beside the startled soldier chief. Custer was unable to recognize the Indian’s face. But he recalled the clothing.
An Osage warrior whose face was smeared with savage stripes of yellow, black, and bright vermilion.
He held up a dripping souvenir of battle for the cavalry commander to admire. Custer gulped. From the warrior’s hand hung an entire Cheyenne scalp, still heavy with blood and gore.
Custer turned as Romero, the Mexican scout, trotted up on horseback. The swarthy scout herded better than a hundred head of Cheyenne ponies before him, assisted by two captive squaws.
“Romero!”
“Looking for me, General?”
To the trained ear, Romero’s accent sounded more like a Cheyenne speaking English than a Mexican speaking the gringo’s tongue. He had grown to manhood with the Southern Cheyenne.
“What’s all this?” Custer asked, irritated.
“Found these war ponies hidden off a ways.” Romero winked, nodded toward the two women. “Spotted this pair about to hotfoot downriver. Never hurts having some help running ponies into camp.”
“Good! I’m putting you in charge of the captives, Romero.”
“You don’t say?” He eyed one of the squaws.
“I’m doing this because you speak their language, know their culture,” Custer continued. “Moylan will assign you a squad of men. See they have every woman and child rounded up and brought to the center of camp.”
“’Bout time I get a job to my liking.” Romero looked at one of the young squaws. She smiled, turning away.
“Be off with you, then,” Custer said.
CHAPTER 9
BY now the Osages had herded most of the shivering captives into the center of camp, using switches to whip slow-moving Cheyenne women and children toward the holding area. The trackers used this ages-old form of humiliation in order to show their prisoners no better treatment than they would give a camp dog.
Seeing the cruelty etched on the Osage trackers’ faces, the women wailed quiet, discordant death songs. Their fear set the captive children screaming for their own lives. A chilling chorus slashed through the devastated camp.
Custer rode up. Romero figured the commander’s curiosity had been aroused with the noisy keening of the women and children. The Mexican felt Custer’s eyes on him as Romero moved among the captives, interrogating them. From time to time, he glanced over his shoulder at Custer. The soldier chief appeared to savor his triumph. Every trooper who approached saluted him. Even the blood-eyed Osage scouts had shown great respect for the soldier chief. Romero watched the prisoners’ dark eyes. None of this royal treatment of the soldier chief was lost on the captives.
“Romero!” Custer called out.
The stocky scout trotted up to the buckskin-clad soldier chief astride his dark horse, leaving behind the gray- haired woman he had been questioning.
As the younger sister of Black Kettle, Mahwissa had been one of the first to recognize how the soldiers and Osages alike treated this soldier chief who had devastated her sleeping village. Mahwissa whispered woman-talk to the young woman next to her.
“General?” Romero stared up into that light of new day behind Custer’s curl-draped collar.
“I want you to tell me who that young woman is.”
Romero scanned the prisoners. “Which one, General?” There was no mistaking that gleam in Custer’s eyes.
“The young one, there with the red blanket. A smudge on her cheek.”
“The real pretty one, eh? Not at all like them older, fatter ones, is she?”
“Just find out who she is for me.”
“Aye, General.”
Romero obediently approached the young girl. The other women near her fell back. Only Mahwissa stood her ground beside the girl.
“What is your name, little one?” the scout asked politely. She didn’t reply. Then his tone grew cruel and insistent. “I asked your name!”
From the earliest days of his captivity among the Cheyenne, Romero had learned that a woman must not refuse to answer a man. Yet this haughty young one wouldn’t speak.
Angered by her insolence, Romero grabbed the girl’s chin, lifting her face to look directly into his fiery eyes. She jerked her face from his hand. The scout brought his arm back to strike.
Mahwissa lunged to grab the scout’s arm as Custer’s voice split the air.
The interpreter turned slowly, his squinted eyes flashing contempt.
“Only her name,” Custer said.
“Monaseetah.”
Custer and Romero both turned jerked in surprise. Mahwissa’s old voice had cracked the brittle tension between the two men.
The scout turned back to Custer. “Says the girl’s name is Monaseetah.”
Custer slid from Dandy’s back. His eyes never left the girl. “What does that mean in Cheyenne?”
Romero chewed on that a moment the way he might chew on some gristle. “Close as I can figure, means. ‘The Young Grass That Shoots Up in Spring.’”
“A mouthful. I like Monaseetah better. And the old woman?”
Romero inquired. The old woman responded happily this time. She had read the pony chief like spring clouds.
