man’s scalp.
“Take it.” Tom gritted his words out between clenched teeth. “Show it to Autie.”
“Autie, sir?”
“The general, goddammit! My brother!” Tom snapped like a brittle twig, his eyes never straying from the brown hair.
After George Armstrong Custer had viewed the scalp in silence and showed it to his scouts, he asked Finley to pass it among the troops.
“Why you wanna do that, Autie?” Tom asked as Finley strode away.
“Don’t you understand, dear brother—just what kind of effect that scrap of bloody hair will have on the men?”
Though he would never be famous for being as smart as his older brother, Tom Custer could never be accused of being on the slow side. A smile crossed his sun-raw face.
“Good,” he whispered, approving. “Not a soul knows whose goddamned scalp that is … even when it was taken. But every one of the men will see that it was a white man’s head of hair.”
“You read sign savvy enough, Tom.”
Near the huge Sun Dance Lodge, Bear-in-Timber, another young Arikara scout, found a sandbar at the bank of the creek where the surface had been purposely smoothed so pictures could be drawn in the flat, sandy surface.
Figures heading south, up the Rosebud, unshod ponies all. Behind them a smaller group rode on shod horses—soldiers, it was plain to see. It didn’t take an experienced plainsman like Fred Gerard to understand that.
“They’re telling all the Sioux who are still coming to join up, that there’s a small bunch of soldiers dogging the main camp’s tail,” Gerard interpreted for Custer as Bloody Knife and Stabbed bent over the drawing, slowly tracing the lines with their scarred fingertips.
“You telling me the Sioux know we’re on their trail?” His voice rose a pitch.
“No, General,” he replied, shaking his head. “Funny thing of it, from what these Rees are saying, we aren’t the soldiers the Sioux know are following ’em. Maybe so—there are some other soldiers this far south, some of Gibbon’s boys, you suppose?”
“Crook!” he roared. “That’s got to be it. I’ll be horn-swoggled. Crook’s got thirteen hundred troops marching up from Laramie to join with Gibbon and Terry.” His look cut into Gerard’s red-rimmed, hung-over eyes. “Ask Bloody Knife—if the Sioux know about Crook, do they know about us?”
Gerard could tell Custer’s whole day depended on the answer to that solitary question.
“Stabbed says the Sioux haven’t got an idea one we’re on their back trail,” Fred answered.
“By God’s back teeth, that’s good news!” Custer leapt to his feet, clapping. His smile disappeared. “Except—if Crook gets there ahead of me to snatch my victory right out of my hands!”
Custer wheeled, his boots plowing through the sandbar pictures.
In the twinkling of an eye, Gerard had watched Custer go from whispering and worried to bellowing like a castrated calf.
“General!” Myles Keogh’s peat-moss brogue brought Custer up short of climbing in the saddle.
“What is it, Captain!” he barked.
“The Crows over there,” and Keogh threw a thumb back to indicate Bouyer and the Absarokas gathered round a framework of willow boughs. “They found something you should take a look at, sir.”
“Another wickiup, Myles? I’ve seen quite enough of them in the last couple days.” He leapt smoothly atop Vic. “Let’s be moving out, gentlemen.”
Keogh snagged Vic’s bridle, halting Custer. “Sir, I think you should take a wee peek at what them Crows wanna show you … now, sir.”
Gerard himself heard the anvil-hardened sound of the Irishman’s words. Custer must have heard it too, for he studied the big captain’s black eyes only briefly.
Whatever Myles Keogh might be accused of, he would never be accused of frivolity. As well as any man, Fred Gerard knew the Irishman’s reputation for being, a hard drinker and having a way with the ladies—but Keogh always meant what he said.
Custer followed the Irishman, Gerard not two steps behind them both.
“Another wickiup, Bouyer?”
The Crow interpreter wagged his head as he looked up at the general. “No. A sweat lodge. Pit in the center. Warriors heat up the rocks in this hole over that fire pit there. They carry ’em in here … dribble some water on ’em to make steam.”
“Don’t lecture me now, Bouyer!” he barked. “I know what a sweat lodge is. Get on with it and tell me why this one is worth my time.”
Mitch Bouyer squinted at Custer, a look narrowed as hard and as straight as his words had ever been spoken to a white man. Half his blood, after all, came from a white father. Trouble was, that Sioux half to his blood didn’t take kindly to any man dressing him down, especially if that man was an army officer.
Still he couldn’t quite escape the feeling that his own ass was about to be slung over the very same fire as Custer’s.
“General, what I do is for your soldiers. Not for you.”
Custer turned on Bouyer, a strange look in those sapphire eyes. Mitch figured he had struck some nerve someplace beneath that raw-boarded exterior.
“Just so you understand, I know you don’t like me, Custer. But that don’t bother me a damn. ’Cause I’m learning there’s not much to like about you either. But what I’m gonna do is put away that bad taste in my mouth while I tell you what the Crow found here. I’ll do what I promised No Hip Gibbon I’d do.”
“So why don’t you help me, Bouyer? I want this regiment moving again, and plenty fast. I’ve got Sioux to catch.”
That interruption brought Bouyer up short, like someone had grabbed hold of his testicles and yanked on them with a jerk.
“Sioux to catch, General? Well, why don’t you take a look over there? Step on up where them Crow boys are. Good. You take a look, and you’ll notice a ridge of sand those Sioux’ve piled up there to snag your attention.”
“Mine?”
“That’s right. Now on the other side of that hump of sand, you see some horses drawn with iron shoes.”
“Cavalry?” Custer asked, smiling.
“Ain’t Brigham Young’s Mormons chasing Sioux this far north, General,” Bouyer replied, his voice dripping with scorn.
When a few soldiers behind him snickered at Mitch’s joke, Custer whirled and glared flints. The troopers snapped silent, as startled as if the general had flung January ice water on them all.
“Now you see on the other side of that ridge there … the Sioux’ve scratched some pony tracks—Indians. This time you make no mistake of it.”
“What are those figures in the middle?” Custer bent over the bank, peering down at the drawings scratched in the sun-cured sand.
“Soldiers, General. Your soldiers.”
Custer straightened. “I see.”
“No, Custer,” Bouyer bit his words off. “You don’t see. Least, you don’t see with the eyes of these Sioux warriors you’re hell-bent on cornering.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look again there, and you’ll see the soldiers are all pointing headfirst into that Indian camp.”
The general reluctantly tore his eyes from Bouyer’s copper face to peer down at the sand drawing while the silent Crows rose, creeping off to their ponies as if some unspoken cue had been given.
“I understand their simple drawings, Bouyer. The Sioux show my soldiers charging their camp.”
