frame. They were dry. Easy enough to tell that as he rolled those leaves about in his dirty palms. But they weren’t crispy dry yet. Just wilted a shade.
“How long?” Mitch Bouyer stepped up beside Gerard with Half-Yellow-Face and Curley.
“Week maybe. From what Red Star figures.” Gerard, a former post trader and now the official Ree interpreter at Fort Abraham Lincoln, tore the corner off a tobacco plug with yellowed teeth. Looking over this abandoned campsite, his mouth went dry, and he spit the chaw out.
He and Bouyer watched Custer remount, signaling his soldiers to resume the march. Angrily Custer hollered for Varnum and Bouyer to get their scouts out and moving ahead of his blue columns once more.
“Custer’s got his hands plenty full right here, I think,” Bouyer whispered gravely from the side of his mouth as he crawled aboard his Crow pony.
Gerard nodded, flashing a yellowed smile. “He’s had his hands full ever since he decided to take these Sioux on. It’s like he’s got a bone stuck down in his throat and can’t get shet of it. Shame of it is, I’m afraid the general’s gonna choke on that goddamned bone.”
Throughout the rest of the morning and into the growing heat of the afternoon, the scouts and a few of the old-timers began to notice a scarcity of game in the area of their march. A rare thing in virgin country such as this. A cavalry column marching across the high plains of Montana Territory would surely kick up some antelope, deer, and elk, or scatter off some of the birds normally roosting in the trees or chattering in complaint from the bushes.
Gerard knew his scouts and the Crows understood. They and Bouyer alike understood what had driven the game out of the country for miles around. Only an immense village on the march could have scoured the countryside clean of almost every sign of life.
Almost—except the magpies and robber jays that squawked their irritating demands over the abandoned campsites in search of a free morsel here, a bit of fat there. Something left behind by the gathering bands. And always the turkey buzzards overhead, circling, circling Custer’s Seventh.
Gerard gazed up into the climbing sun.
By the time Custer ordered his command into camp near four-thirty P.M., the regiment had put nearly thirty- three miles behind them. At each of the three deserted camping places they had run across through the day, the general had ordered a short halt while the scouts inspected the sites.
Somber and silent, both Crow and Ree had walked the packed lodge circles. Put hands in the ashes of old fires. Broke open bones to inspect both condition and age of the marrow. And they did it all without a single word, shrouded in discomforting silence. Gerard watched them, silent as well, noticing that only Rees’ dark eyes talked bravely to one another. Only their eyes talking.
While stable sergeants cussed and fretted over the lack of graze, because every blade of grass for some distance on both sides of the trail and been chewed to the ground, other soldiers speculated on the number of Indians they were following now … where the bands were headed … and how long ago the hostiles had left the area. In the last camp they had run across, over three hundred fifty lodge rings had been counted.
It didn’t take an interpreter like Gerard to compute the simple plainsman arithmetic that added up to better than a thousand men of fighting age right on that one spot.
He could tell from the look on Bouyer’s face that the half-breed understood well enough that the bands were coming together. Gerard himself paid more and more attention to the dark eyes and gloomy faces of his Rees than he did the wild ramblings of loose-lipped army speculators like Varnum.
With a healthy heave Gerard rared back and tossed the empty tin flask toward the west bank of the Rosebud.
“Almost made it!” Lieutenant Varnum cheered his effort. “’Nother few feet …”
“Nawww,” Gerard shrugged it off. “Not with a empty one, I wouldn’t. That’s a piece to throw a empty one.”
Varnum studied him closely. “You wouldn’t have any more of that, would you?”
Varnum’s question brought Gerard up short.
He bent over his saddlebags anyway. “What the hell.” He pulled out another flask. “Yeah, I got some more. Just want you remember, Varnum—I’m a civilian, and I can carry this along with me if I choose. Just in case you’re figuring on showing the general the evidence—”
“I’m not,” Varnum interrupted, licking his own dry lips anxiously. “Please. I just want some for myself.”
“Yourself, Charlie?” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Why, I’ll be damned.”
“Just—with all the …” Varnum’s eyes flicked around nervously. “I was with the Rees, the Crows all day.” He wagged his head like someone watching the gallows go up a board and a nail at a time outside his own iron-barred window. “I may be green at this, Gerard. Handling Indians, that is. No old sawbuck like you. But even I could read their eyes. I ain’t the smartest man Custer’s got working for him—but I can sense we’re running right on up the backside of something here that even the general don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Here.” Gerard shoved the flask into Varnum’s fist. “You pay me when we get back to Lincoln.”
The lieutenant clutched it against his chest like an icon, reverently. “Thank you, Fred.”
As Varnum wheeled away, Gerard called, “Charlie. Just do me a favor, will you?”
“What’s that, Fred?”
“Don’t pour all that stuff down at one sitting. Save some for the ’morrow.”
Fred watched the chief of scouts lead his weary army mount off through the milling command as the regiment spread out to establish its camp for the night. Gerard dropped beside his horse at his saddlebags to pull out a flask for himself this time. With his mount picketed he settled his shoulders against the saddle and sighed.
Why, between his spacious saddlebags and that generous army haversack, Gerard had brought along enough whiskey to see him through for a good month.
CHAPTER 10
NEARLY an hour later the Crow scouts came plodding in, their little ponies nearly bottomed out from what had been required of them. Rule of thumb on the plains stated that a scout traveled twice the distance a cavalry column would march in a day, what with all the back-and-forth and the up-and-down. That meant those little grass-fed cayuses had done something over sixty miles beneath a cruel summer sun.
Yet right now it wasn’t only fatigue that Mitch Bouyer could read on his Crows’ faces. Something more, in fact altogether primal, that strained and pinched the normally happy faces he knew as well as he knew any friend.
Bouyer understood as few others would, for he had stood at the center of those deserted camps with his scouts. He had walked across the worn earth of the central council lodge, visually ticking off that distance to the farthest of the brush arbors and wickiups used by the youthful warriors. Mitch knew his Crow had read such sign as easily as any white man back east picks up and reads his daily newspaper.
The half-breed knew there wasn’t a bit of good news to be found on the front page today.
Custer sought out the Crows while striker Burkman busied himself brushing down both Vic and Dandy with tufts of grass. Bouyer nodded to the general without a word while Custer squatted in his characteristic manner, one knee on the ground as he leaned an elbow on the other.
“This is the main point I want you to tell them, Bouyer,” Custer began after Mitch had fed him the intelligence
