Yet here Custer stood like some moonstruck young warrior, watching for a last glimpse of Monaseetah among the prisoners milling anxiously about in the stockade.
Beneath that dawn-pale light of a thumbnail moon hung limp in the western sky, the Cheyenne had taken Colonel Miles at his word. They were ready to leave at sunrise.
Custer had killed time in the officers’ mess, drinking coffee, waiting on something he wanted to be gone and done with, something he had hoped would never come to pass.
Saturday. A working day, 12 June. The sun spread its first crimson tendrils across those dark, eastern hills through which the Smoky Hill had cut its way for ages long, long gone. That haze already lingering over the trees at the river’s banks testified to a hot and muggy day a’birthing. Summer had come to the southern plains at last, with as much vengeance as the past winter had come: a long winter gone.
Custer moseyed outside to watch the comings and goings of Captain Myers and his K Troop, cavalry escort for Pepoon’s civilian scouts on this journey south to Camp Supply. There the Cheyenne would be turned out and the army would roll back to Fort Hays, their mission complete—the Cheyennes home at last.
By the time the Cheyenne reached Camp Supply, seven months would have passed since any of the women had enjoyed freedom. Any, except for Monaseetah. For much of her captivity at the hands of the Seventh Cavalry, she had come and gone as she pleased, belonging more to the Yellow Hair than she had ever belonged to her people.
With the rising of a cold, winter-pale sun, she had come into his life. Now, with the coming of a festering bone-yellow summer sun, he sent her away.
Custer swallowed against the painful knot in his throat. Not since that awful moment of drunkenness played out in front of the Bacon house in Monroe a decade ago had he suffered such anguish. Never this sort of fear.
That’s what it was, after all—fear. He had to admit he was scared … frightened he would never see her again. Knowing already he had to.
With the groan of axles, a train of sidewalled freighters wheeled free of the wagon yard, some already loaded with supplies and foodstuffs for the prisoners and escort. The remaining empty wagons would haul copper people: big and small, wide and thin, young and old; even the dead. Copper people transferred, from the Department of the Platte to the Indian Bureau, Fort Cobb, Indian Territory.
While Myers’s company stood rigidly by their horses and off-duty soldiers looked on with passing interest, Fifth Infantry guards opened the stockade gates one last time. A faceless interpreter barked orders for the Cheyenne to march through the gate in single file, one prisoner at a time. Each prisoner was checked off on some clerk’s official list.
Custer shook his head. A pitiful farewell for a proud people taken prisoner in winter battle, freighted home while ink dried on a meaningless scrap of paper that would find rest in someone’s useless file in Washington City. Given a final Indian Department burial by someone to whom the Cheyenne had never been human beings—only prisoners, names, numbers … requisitions, blankets, tents … bullets and bayonets.
“At goddamn last, the sonsabitches are going home and out of our hair!” an infantryman blared down on the parade.
“Farewell, old Cardigan!”
Surprised, Custer glanced at the stockade. Some of the soldiers shouted farewell to Fat Bear, the last surviving Sweetwater prisoner. The old chief ambled through the gate, nodding here, smiling there.
“Happy hunting, Cardigan!”
The soldiers cheered Fat Bear using the name they had given him for the worsted mackinaw coat he had taken to wearing. A gift from the army.
When he reached his assigned wagon, Fat Bear stopped,turned, smiling his wrinkled, cherubic best, and waved to the men in blue. A new cheer erupted, punctuated by applause. No reason for sadness.
“Goodbye, Sally Ann!”
Custer recognized Tom’s joy-filled voice among the soldiers lining the gauntlet each prisoner walked through from stockade to wagons. Once inside the high-walled freighters, the captives thrust their heads around the canvas tops to wave and chatter at the soldiers like schoolchildren setting off on a spring outing. So unlike their solemn arrival at Fort Hays, this merry leave-taking.
“Cheer up, Sally Ann!”
Custer found her in the crowd, waving to Tom, bravely wearing that beautiful smile of hers. Again her eyes searched the shadows along porches or under the eaves of the buildings squaring the fort parade. Hoping, though her heart knew he would not show.
Her brave smile disappeared as she reached a wagon and passed her infant up to the waiting arms of an older squaw.
She couldn’t go. Not yet.
Monaseetah turned, shading her eyes to the new morning light streaming out of the eastern hills. One last time she searched for him among the others. To hear once more the vow he had made to her and their child.
“Aren’t you going to say farewell to the young one?”
Custer whirled, confronted by the bulk of Colonel Miles. “I hadn’t considered it.”
“Dammit, Armstrong. You haven’t much time left to consider it.”
Gazing back across the compound, Custer watched the young woman drop her hand from her brow, looking up into the wagon.
“Yes, Nelson.” Lord, did he want to go. But he was too damned scared.
“Not a man could blame you for saying goodbye to that woman.”
Miles stepped closer to Custer and whispered, “Hell’s fire, I’d be skinned alive by Mother Miles if she found out I’d suggested you say goodbye to an Indian girl when you’re married to Elizabeth. But Armstrong—Mother Miles has never been a man far from home fighting a no-win war for the chair polishers back east. Still—” he smiled beneath his shaggy mustache, “Mary isn’t awake yet, so I’m ordering you to say your farewells and pay your respects to that woman.”
With a shove of his bearlike paw, Miles nudged Custer down the wide steps, showing off a broad row of teeth beneath his Prussian mustache.
“But Nelson—”
“Get!”
“Yessir!”
Suddenly that famous grin flashed, almost as much a trademark as were those long, red-gold curls streaming across his shoulders.
As she slipped a foot on the iron helper, ready to swing herself up to the wagon bed, Monaseetah sighted him—a man in buckskin and blue, racing across the compound, stirring up the dry dust of the parade, loping her way with his arm beating the air.
She resisted her first impulse to dash toward him. Waiting instead, she dropped her eyes. For she was Cheyenne—her lover and husband came for her.
Yet in her heart, she knew she could wait no longer.
Flinging her body against him, Monaseetah clung to Custer like ivy to an oak as he carried her the last few steps back to the wagon. By the time he set her down, she was weeping, birdlike sobs choked back in her chest.
Custer rubbed her cheeks, smearing tears across the copper-colored skin. Then he tugged her chin up so she would look into his eyes.
She blinked, then blinked again, not sure of what she saw. She had never seen him cry.
No man had ever shed tears for her … no man until Yellow Hair. Among her people, tears were a sign of weakness. Yet
“I will not go,” she sobbed, fighting back the boiling knot of fear in her throat.
“You must go, little one.” He swiped angrily at his own tears, knowing no one must see his freckled cheeks moist. “It is the only way.”
