he took up the single rein and shot off to the west. Glancing only once over his shoulder at the sun climbing toward a midday peak, Tsalante was off on a race which could mean the lives of two men. Perhaps more.
Crosby held open the tent flap as Sheridan turned to go.
Custer glanced at the two chiefs. “General?” he called out.
Sheridan turned. “What is it, Custer?”
“You haven’t left the Kiowa a hand to play.”
“Precisely!” Sheridan snapped. “I now hold the last two aces in the deck and I’m playing them. When you play with Indians, you don’t play by the rules. Never leave the enemy a hand to play. It’s winning that matters in war. Only winning. There are no parades for the losers.”
“Don’t miss your parade, Custer,” Crosby advised acidly. “Shall we go, General?”
Sheridan nodded and left. The flap slid back in place, throwing the tent into darkness. Custer pushed out, greeted by a brilliant winter’s day.
Behind him trudged Satanta, dragging along the section of clanking chain that bound his ankles together. Here in the gentle light of early morning the Indian’s eyes appeared sunken, dark, and rimmed with gloom. The once-proud Kiowa chief stood hunched and drawn.
Satanta stumbled across the red mud, slinging the heavy chain behind him with every step, clattering past Custer and Romero without a word. When a guard stepped forward to shove the chief back toward the tent with a nudge of his carbine, Custer waved the soldier off.
The Indian stopped, turned, and gazed at the soldier chief for a moment before he settled down on the trunk of a deadfallen oak like a tired old owl. He shuddered, drawing his thin blanket about his shoulders more tightly. Gazing into the blue, cloudless sky, his eyes sought the warmth of the early sun.
As Custer turned toward his own tent, Satanta’s mournful voice raised the hackles on the back of his neck. The Indian chief had begun his melancholy death song.
“Romero.”
“Yes, General?” The Mexican stepped to Custer’s side.
“I want you to find the worm
“Women, sir?”
“The Cheyenne women.”
“Yes.”
“Bring Monaseetah to my tent.”
“Yes.”
“I want to see her now.”
Custer slipped into the shadows of a huge overhanging oak towering like a monstrous sentinel above his tent.
He needed her.
Waiting for Monaseetah in the frosty stillness of his tent, Custer felt more brittle than he had ever imagined he could be. He stared down at the backs of his pale trembling, freckled hands, sensing something of his own mortality, his own humanness.
Cursing himself for selling his soul for a promotion. Cursing himself, because destiny demanded it of him.
Through that long afternoon Satanta had persisted in his lonely, melancholy vigil. At times he paced back and forth on the west side of Custer’s tent. Then he plopped cross-legged in the snow, quietly mumbling his incantations to the earth. At times he shaded his eyes with one hand, peering into the west for salvation, hoping for the approach of his tribesmen. With the falling of the sun and the dying of his hope, the great Kiowa chief scooped pinches of red dirt or cold ashes from the guards’ fire.
After chanting a few words of prayer, Satanta put the soil and ashes in his mouth.
Having accepted his death, Satanta said farewell to this land of his ancestors. His mud-smeared, trembling tongue would no more taste the lifeblood of his homeland.
Custer looked at the first tendrils of gray light through the narrow gap in the tent flaps. Dawn wasn’t far behind.
He sensed her beside him. The weight of her beneath the blankets. The warmth of her naked body, the firm pressure of her breasts against his side as she lay cupped into him.
He sighed, drinking in the fragrance that belonged to no other woman in the world. Without fail, her scent stirred a wildness in him, something never before touched until she came into his life. Even more, that part of her he carried within had become like a piece of sunshine glinting off frost-glazed tree branches beneath the morning sun. It shared the same place in his being as the heady fragrance that rose to a man’s brain as he stood over an open fire at twilight, sparks exploding into the purple sky above, wisps of gray dancing ghostly and haunting on the tickling breezes.
He snuggled against her.
Outside his tent the voices grew louder, tapping like insistent fingertips at the back of his consciousness. They came closer. One of them knifed through the thickness of the oiled canvas.
“Sir—General Sheridan has the prisoners out and he’s yelling for you. Says its time to hang the sonsabitches.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Please inform the general that I’ll join him shortly.”
The boots dashed off; the sound of hard-leather soles pounding across the snow faded from the tent flaps.
Custer was up on one elbow. Then quietly he slipped from bed and pulled his tunic over his arms, buttoning it over his long-handles when her child’s voice surprised him.
“Good morn-ning,” she spoke in her imitation of his Yankee English.
She was an apt pupil, he had to admit. Custer turned, smiling as he raked a lock of hair from his forehead, combing the curls with his fingers. “Good morning.”
He dressed, then pulled his buffalo coat and cap on before he bent over the bed. Monaseetah sat up, raising her lips to his. The blankets slid away, exposing the tops of her breasts.
With stoic resignation, Custer closed his eyes, bent his head, and kissed her.
“Custer!” Sheridan was calling to him from the instant Custer pushed through the flaps. “What’s the goddamned meaning of sending this man out to find the Indians?” Sheridan stomped up, livid with anger.
“I didn’t send him out to find the Indians, General.” Custer turned to Romero. “You have any luck?”
“Coming in at a good clip. Be here anytime.”
“Dammit, Custer! What’s this man doing out locating the hostiles?” Sheridan jumped between the two, mad enough to spit.
“I thought you’d want to know if they were sending a delegation here to talk with you, the great soldier chief.”
“Why would they send a delegation to speak with me?” Sheridan growled.
Crosby stepped up, wearing his smirk. “They aren’t to send a delegation, Custer. The Kiowa are supposed to have their villages here.”
Custer turned from Crosby, paying him no mind. He sensed he had Sheridan hooked. They hadn’t spent all those years together for him not to know Little Phil as well as he knew any man.
“Why, General—if the Kiowa are sending a delegation to see you, then you can use them to your advantage. You want to make an example out of these two chiefs here, don’t you?”
“You damn well know I do!”
“By waiting for the Kiowa delegation to arrive, you can hang the two chiefs right before their eyes. Seeing their chiefs kicking at the end of the rope will have a far better effect than riding in later to see the chiefs hanging limp from the branch of that tree over there.”
Sheridan regarded Custer suspiciously. “Damn, Custer, if I don’t get the feeling I’m swimming upstream with
