around them. A half hour later the coyotes were still in good voice as the lieutenant picked his way through the bivouac to find Merritt rolled in his blanket beneath a tall cottonwood.
“Colonel?”
The veteran of Beverly Ford and the Rappahannock came awake immediately, sitting up and tapping Forbush beside him. “Thank you, Mr. King. You may now return to your company.”
“It’s time for me to move to our forward observation post, Colonel.”
“Lieutenant London, who I’ve put in charge of A Troop, is ready for you to relay word to me,” Merritt explained. “Send news the moment you see anything. Anything at all.”
King would relay word back to a low ridge immediately behind him, where sat Private Christian Madsen, Company A, as his horse cropped grass in a shallow swale below him. Although a recent immigrant from Denmark, Madsen was far from being wet behind the ears, nor was he a young shavetail recruit. Instead this solid, older soldier Lieutenant Robert London had chosen from his company to carry word to Merritt himself was a cast-iron, double-riveted veteran of both the Danish-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian wars on the European Continent, as well as having served a hitch in Algeria with the French Foreign Legion before coming to America, wandering farther west still to this opening frontier.
After sliding in between Schreiber and Wilkinson atop a commanding knoll, King swept his eyes over the landscape becoming an ashen gray before him. Some two miles away against the southern sky lay a long ridge that extended around to their left, where it eventually lost itself to the rise and fall of the rolling countryside. Farther yet to the northeast stood the sharp outlines of the Black Hills themselves, at that moment brushed with hues of the faintest pastel-rose. As the minutes continued to grind by, both the Hills and that ridge to the south grew all the more distinct as night seeped from the belly of the sky.
In that predawn light King could now make out the shape of an even better observation post, a taller hill rising another four hundred yards off. “Come with me, fellas.”
Minutes later, as all three of them hid just beneath the crest of that small conical mound, the lieutenant found he commanded a full view of everything moving on the land between their post and the distant ridges. Behind them the trees bordering the Warbonnet could be made out in the middistance, the cottonwood and brush laced with a wispy fog rising off the creek as it poured sluggishly toward its meeting with the South Fork of the Cheyenne. Back there waited 330 enlisted men as well as 16 officers, in addition to their surgeon, along with Bill Cody and his 4 other scouts.
Grinding his teeth on nothing for the moment, King thought how just about now the others were pumping life into the small fires they buried in the sand, starting to heat up some coffee. What he’d give for a hot, strong cup of army brew right now. And he brooded that they’d be laying out slabs of that pungent salt pork in their frying pans as the coffee water heated to boiling.
As if it had overheard his thoughts, his own stomach grumbled, protesting. Man just wasn’t meant to fight on an empty stomach.
Due south he could begin to make out the outline of the fabled Pine Ridge that stretched all the way from western Wyoming Territory, on through Nebraska, then angled north toward Dakota. Time and again King swept the whole country with his field glasses, scouring the horizon from east to west in a 180-degree arc. Off to the west in the growing light he could begin to see the deeply chewed trail the Fifth made reaching this point last night. But off to the east—nothing moved.
By 4:30 A.M. all seven companies had saddled their horses and were awaiting action in the cold stillness of the sun’s emergence. The chilled air refused to stir. The silence was almost crushing. Behind the observation knoll, King, Schreiber, and Wilkinson had left their horses with two pickets in a shallow depression. At times the lieutenant could even hear the animals tearing at the abundant prairie grass. King swore he could even hear the thump-thump of his own heart beat as he peered into the distance coming alive with the new day’s ever-changing light. For a moment he studied the faces of the men on either side of him, finding them drawn and haggard with nonstop fatigue, their eyes sunken and draped with liver-colored bags.
“Lieutenant!” Wilkinson called out in a harsh whisper, suddenly coming to life—tapping King on the upper arm.
Immediately he trained his glasses in the direction the corporal was looking. “You see something?”
“Saw something move.”
Schreiber crawled back to the crest of the mound on his belly, shading his eyes against the brightening sky.
“Look, Lieutenant!” Wilkinson gushed. “There … there are Indians!”
“Where?” Schreiber demanded.
Slowly the corporal rose on his hands and knees, bringing one arm up to point to the southeast. “That ridge … can’t you see them?”
It took a few moments, maybe as much as a minute, not any more than that—as King strained his eyes, squinted, twirling the adjustment knob this way with painstaking precision, then back the other direction just as slowly.
“I see ’em, Lieutenant!” Schreiber said.
“Yes,” King replied, the hair rising at the back of his neck. “There’s a second group now.”
A third small knot of five or six horsemen appeared on the distant ridge, then dropped back out of sight. For the time being none of those warriors seemed to be in a great hurry to advance, but instead seemed intent solely on something off to the southwest of where King lay observing the entire panorama with the sun’s rising. Over the next few minutes he counted a half-dozen small parties popping up to the crest of the distant ridges, then turning about and disappearing from sight.
Finally King turned to Schreiber. “Sergeant—send word back to the signalman from A Troop. He’ll alert the command.”
“Tell ’em the Injuns are coming?”
“Yes,” King replied.
Down the backside of the slope the sergeant slid until out of sight. Then he trotted on down to the horse- holders, gesturing as he whispered his message. One of the troopers flung himself into the saddle and tore off toward the lone trooper from A Company waiting on a knoll halfway back to the Warbonnet bivouac.
“Way they’re acting, you think they’ve seen us?” Wilkinson asked as Schreiber crawled back in beside them.
“Don’t think so,” King replied. “They keep popping over, watching something. If they knew we were here, they’d be gone already.”
“That’s right. If they knew we was here,” the sergeant agreed, “we’d never knowed they was there.”
For the next thirty minutes the trio didn’t take their eyes from the southeast as the sun continued its climb. Then King turned at the snort from one of the held horses in the depression below them. Coming up on his resplendent buckskin, Bill Cody led seven soldiers: Merritt and Carr, along with Major John J. Upham and aide-de- camp Lieutenant J. Hayden Pardee of the Twenty-third Infantry as well as three from the colonel’s staff. All of them came to a halt and leaped from their saddles, hurrying up the slope at a crouch behind the scout. Without a word the colonel and his lieutenant colonel trained their own glasses on the distance, watching the dark specks appear and disappear in the distance, now narrowed to less than two miles. From the rear hurried three more of Cody’s scouts—White, Tait, and Garnier—along with several more curious officers loping in from bivouac to have a look for themselves.
Merritt turned to Forbush, his regimental adjutant, asking, “Have the men had their coffee?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then return to the company commanders with my instructions to mount the regiment and have them formed into line.”
“Yes, sir.” Forbush slid down the slope and trotted to his horse.
“What do you think they’re after?” the colonel asked as he turned around to train his eye on the distance.
“Don’t know for sure, General,” Cody answered. “But they’re sure acting like they’re watching something.”
The knoll was growing crowded with soldiers and scouts when King asked, “The Black Hills Road?”
“Could be,” Merritt replied. “It lies somewhere out there.”
