“Where is the body of Big Head?” Custer asked her.
“He is with Dull Knife,” Monaseetah said. “Come.”
She pulled aside the flaps of the weather-grayed canvas wall tent for him. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw women huddled on the floor, quietly sobbing. Blinking in the dust, Custer made out two chiefs laid upon blankets. Around each body was a cluster of old squaws.
Custer knelt beside Big Head—this tall, gray-headed warrior he had determined to hold at all costs beside the Sweetwater. A winter day, so long ago. Bringing Big Head here, far from his people’s land … and for what?
He cursed himself for the foolishness of others.
This was the irony of Big Head’s death.
Custer bent, touched Big Head’s brow where the women had painted his face with bear grease pigments. That touch was the closest thing to a Cheyenne prayer he could offer.
With a sigh, he turned to Dull Knife.
The old chief opened his thick-lidded, glazed eyes. Feebly, he waved, moving the old women back.
“I am not dead yet,” he whispered with a fluid rasp.
Custer recognized that unmistakable rattle in the old man’s chest, those flecks of pink foam dotting the Indian’s tongue. Death itself etched the old man’s weathered face.
“We only wanted to—” Dull Knife hacked up bits of lung and blood, spitting them into a smelly rag an old woman held beside his wet lips. “Yellow Hair … we wanted to be guarded by your pony soldiers.”
“Dull Knife must not work so hard,” Custer replied.
The old Indian’s strength faded with every breath. The war chief smiled weakly. “The walk-a-heap soldiers did not know the signs to talk with us. These who have killed us this day will never know the sadness I feel for them.”
Dull Knife hacked up more bits of lung into the red rag. “I feel more pity for the young soldiers who killed us than for my old friend Big Head. We were children together. We stole our first ponies together. Now these walk-a- heaps, mere children, have killed two old Dog Soldiers by accident.”
“I promise you will be guarded by pony soldiers now.”
“Yellow Hair promises this?” His glazed eyes narrowed.
“Yes. I promise.”
“Your word is worthless, Yellow Hair. You have cursed yourself. Medicine Arrow … all of us were there in his lodge when you cursed yourself.”
“There is no curse!”
Dull Knife tried to focus on those winter-blue eyes. Recalling a winter none of them had believed would ever end.….
“Remember, Yellow Hair—attack a village of women and children, then you and all your children will die.”
“We did not attack you today!” Custer argued.
“I do not speak of this day,” Dull Knife answered, his eyelids drooping. “Come a time, soldier folly will bring your end. Just as my time comes before the sun leaves the sky.”
“No, Dull Knife!” Custer shouted at the body sagging in his arms. “You cannot die. I will see you returned to the homeland of your people!”
The black-cherry eyes peered into an unseen distance. Down the long, last trail.
“I will never see my home again, Yellow Hair. Already I am on the road to the other side. I will not see my people again. Only the ones who have gone before. There I will be with Big Head, where he already rides a strong pony. Once more we will raid for sleek horses. And drink clear, sweet water so cold it makes my mouth hurt. Not this warm, bitter water your soldiers give us to drink in this stinking hole of death.”
Custer heard the rattle, saw it shake the Indian’s huge frame.
“This hole, Yellow Hair—where we Cheyenne cannot travel beneath the sky, across the breast of the Mother of Us All as Cheyenne were meant to journey. You make us live on reservations, and soon that place begins to stink with our being there too long, like this prison. Yellow Hair, I would rather die a free man than live in a stinking hole like you white men.
“Everywhere I look in that land where I go, my people are happy. They do not have to look upon the face of the white man, who breaks all promises. I no longer live with a sad heart.”
With the quickness of a swallow’s wings, Dull Knife’s eyelids fluttered and closed. Pink froth oozed from his lips.
An old woman bent her head to his chest. She brought her eyes to Custer, wrinkling them behind the smoky incense of burning sweetgrass braids the women offered in prayer. She raised her face and voice to the heavens. High and eerie, her melancholy song rose from the tent.
Grappling with his own rage, Custer scooped the dead chief into his arms. Clutching the limp frame to his breast as he rocked back and forth. Spitting his words while salty tears scorched his eyes.
“They were going home! With God’s next breath, these men were going home! Why …?”
Something inside Custer told him more than just an old Indian had died. Something more precious than any one man’s life.
“By all that’s holy—these Cheyenne will go home now!”
As he stared into Dull Knife’s face, peaceful now in death, Custer came to believe that a flickering hope had been extinguished. A hope he had long hidden.
Nine days later, on 11 June, fifty-four Cheyenne prisoners were herded together arid told they would leave for their homeland in the south at dawn the next day.
Speaking through an interpreter, Colonel Nelson A. Miles was disappointed to find less than celebration from the Cheyenne with his announcement—until he realized this journey to freedom had come a few days late.
Too late for Big Head and Dull Knife, too late for the others who would return south whole of body but weak in spirit. South to the reservations, where the bands of Medicine Arrow and Little Robe awaited them. Fifty-three had marched north from the Washita. Three more were captured on the Sweetwater.
Two bodies, bound in blankets and rawhide strips, lay putrefying in the steamy shade beneath the west wall of the stockade. Two old chiefs heading home for burial in the old way, in the homeland of ages past.
Romero had appealed to Custer, who sent him on to Miles with his blessings. The Fort Hays commandant had immediately agreed that the intepreter could take himself a Cheyenne wife who had fallen in love with him. To Miles’s way of thinking, the squaw would have a better life with Romero than she could ever have on that parched reservation of the Cheyenne.
That evening before the rest of the prisoners would start south, Romero waited, as anxious as a virgin on her wedding night, at the stockade gate for his bride. As a purple band of twilight streaked the warm land, she was freed. Romero tramped west and north with his woman, Fort Hays disappearing behind them. Neither one ever looked back.
Custer watched sadly from the guardhouse along the western wall of the stockade as the pair rode straight for the sinking, red sun. Like beetles scurrying from the light, they disappeared into the hills of gold and brown, brittle-red earth and creeks of lazy blue-green. A pair of riders reaching for that place where the great beckoning land touched the sky … out there far, far beyond.
Somewhere between earth and sky.
At last Custer realized the ache upon his own heart was for the coming loneliness. An ache in their parting. A cruel tearing of flesh from flesh as painful as any gaping, bleeding wound—an agony he had no way of healing.
CHAPTER 30
FOR days he vowed he wouldn’t make a fool of himself at her leaving.
