Seize the Sky

A sad smile graced Custer’s sunburned face as his sapphire eyes took on a distant glow. “I know I can rely on each and every one of you from here on out. I always have. Whether you knew it or not. I’ve relied on my officer corps like they were my own family. Sure, there’ll be bickering in a family—just like the Custer household back in Monroe. Right, Tom?”

“Sure, Autie.” Tom never took his eyes from Benteen.

“We are family, gentlemen. We will support each other in what the future brings. We’re horse soldiers, after all.”

A man didn’t have to be standing right beside Custer to hear sentiment catch in his throat as the general rasped out the name of his beloved regiment: “We’re the Seventh. We’ll succeed only by hanging together, above dissension … or we’ll die alone in miserable solitude because we failed each other.”

With those last words Custer flung the limb aside and brought his right hand up, saluting his subordinates in a rare gesture of fellowship. Nervously, as they glanced furtively at one another, one by one the men of this command brought their right arms up to answer the sudden, unexpected salute from their general. It was an odd, uncanny feeling that shot like a thunderbolt through that assembly on the banks of the Rosebud at twilight.

Never before had Custer saluted them first.

He brought his arm down snappily, forcing a grin to crease his sunburned face. “That will be all, gentlemen. We march at five.”

CHAPTER 9

THE officers shuffled off downstream, back to their companies and bedrolls.

Uneasy, Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey wasn’t really sure he had caught all of it right, as he was rather deaf in one ear, but he nonetheless sensed an unexplained anxiousness in his pit when he strolled away from Custer’s bivouac at that moment. He stopped and turned to glance one last time at the general he had served since the Seventh Cavalry’s earliest days at Fort Hays in Kansas Territory.

In Godfrey’s way of thinking, Custer had for the first time shown a genuine reliance on his officers. And with this unexplained openness, Godfrey was more than certain there was something inextricably not Custer at all. Even something more profound than the mere tone of his voice, which, while normally brusque and somewhat curt, was on this occasion conciliatory and subdued.

Almost like an appeal for help, Godfrey considered. As close as he can come to making an appeal for help … as if something’s eating away at him.

Finding his unshakable commander shaken in this way touched Godfrey clear down to his roots.

Lieutenant George Wallace, the regimental recorder but four years out of West Point himself, strolled along with Godfrey and Lieutenant Donald McIntosh in silence until they reached their bivouac. Lavender light was only then sliding headlong from the western sky. Off in the east a sliver of moon was rising when Wallace tore his eyes from the horizon and studied his two companions.

“Godfrey, McIntosh,” he whispered, snagging their attention. “I believe General Custer is going to be killed.”

Godfrey’s eyes flicked to McIntosh apprehensively, finding him every bit as stunned as he. Then Godfrey found his voice. “Why?”

He was a veteran of the Seventh, after all. He ought to know everything about his commander. He had ridden with Custer at the Washita, down through the Yellowstone campaign and the Black Hills expedition. No, Godfrey himself didn’t like the nervous wings rumbling round inside him at this moment.

“What makes you think Custer’s going to be killed?”

Wallace waited while a group of soldiers strolled past on their way up from the river.

Already the nighthawks were out, swinging in low overhead, striking a moth or mayfly in the growing darkness. Death leaving no time for a cry for help or a yelp of pain. Swift and efficient. No warning. No sound until too late. Only the swift wings of death asail on the wind above the faint swish of cavalry boots plodding off through the tall grass growing here beside the gurgling Rosebud. Young soldiers returning to bedrolls and their dreams of home.

Finally Wallace answered in a harsh whisper, “Because I’ve never heard Custer talk that way before.”

That was all it took for the hairs to prickle at the back of Godfrey’s neck. He was deaf in one ear, but he had caught precisely every single one of Wallace’s words. He walked apart from his friends.

As he groped along beneath starry patches among the clouds overhead, Godfrey brooded, as a blind man in need of answers sensing his way upstream, where he hoped he’d find the scouts’ camp.

Good God, he told himself. You’ve fought Indians with Custer before, Ed. Along the Platte River Road and the Washita and the Yellowstone itself. It’s not like you’re some ignorant shavetail quaking in your boots before your first fight.

No, he admitted. This is something different. Something downright spooky.

He found a few of the Crow scouts and a dozen or more of the Rees, all gathered round their little fire. They talked quietly through Bouyer and Fred Gerard, the Arikara interpreter, or conversed silently among themselves, their hands gesturing in quick, darting flight like those night-hawks swooping overhead.

Not desiring to interrupt, Godfrey hunkered down on the grass near Mitch Bouyer, behind Bloody Knife, chief of the Ree scouts and a longtime tracker for Custer. He found himself seated beside Half-Yellow-Face, one of the older Crows assigned from Gibbon.

After Godfrey had attentively listened to the various conversations, studying what he could of the facial expressions and the signs used, he was surprised when he saw Half-Yellow-Face nudge the half-breed Sioux interpreter and point out the soldier among them.

Bouyer turned and grunted. Godfrey nodded and rose on his haunches a bit to show his interest in what the scouts were deliberating. Bouyer studied the two shiny bars on Godfrey’s collar for the first time, perhaps remembering that the Indian scouts were officially assigned to Godfrey’s K Company.

“You, pony soldier,” Bouyer began, his voice low, causing Godfrey to lean forward with his one good ear. “You fight Indians before, eh? Ever fight these Sioux?”

Godfrey swallowed at the coarse directness of the question. Damn, he thought, these scouts have a way of cutting right through the underbrush and getting right down to the root of something, don’t they?

“Yes …” Ed admitted. “Several times down near Nebraska, but our hottest engagements were along the Yellowstone three summers ago now.”

“Hmmm,” Bouyer considered as he turned back round to the fire, dallying at the coals with a twig for a few minutes. Only then did he turn back to stare directly at the lieutenant. “Well, then, pony soldier—just how many of them Sioux do you expect to find up there?”

Godfrey watched Bouyer nod upstream and point with his twig toward the hulking Wolf Mountains—the direction Custer was leading them.

“The general briefed us on the reports the army’s received.”

“How many warriors the army tell you Custer’s going to find?”

“They figure we may find between a thousand to fifteen hundred warriors … if we find them.”

“Oh,” Bouyer laughed mirthlessly, “you’ll find them all right.” His teeth flashed beneath the pale thumbnail moon. “You’ll find them if you go riding with Custer.”

The half-breed seemed ready to let that settle a moment like a muddy puddle stirred. Then Bouyer continued. “So you tell me your own mind, pony soldier—you think we can whip that many Sioux?”

It was not lost on Godfrey that the half-breed Sioux interpreter had suddenly gone from saying you when referring to Custer’s command, to now saying we.

“Oh, yes,” Godfrey said quietly. “I guess so.”

At that moment Half-Yellow-Face and White-Man-Runs-Him interrupted, asking Bouyer what had been said between the interpreter and the soldier. Then Bloody Knife sounded his interest, asking Fred Gerard to translate the