here falling right into their camp. To these Sioux falling headfirst means
For a long moment Bouyer’s words stunned Custer and his officers into a granite silence. But as suddenly the general himself started to chuckle. It’s bitter sound filled the hot void surrounding them all.
“Well, Mitch …” He laughed louder and strolled up to Bouyer. There he amiably slapped a hand on the short half-breed’s shoulder, knocking some powdery alkali dust from the hair-on calfskin vest the interpreter wore. “The joke’s on you this time!”
Bouyer’s dark eyes flashed over the officers grouped behind Custer. Their faces showed the same sudden relief as their leader’s. They too started to laugh with the general.
“General, I’m going to say this simple as I can.” So quiet were Bouyer’s words that his voice shut them all up as quickly as he began to talk.
“Over yonder by the river, that drawing on the sandbar might be some other army, a real big one. Maybe the one you say Red Beard Crook is leading north. But this one,” and he pointed a gnarled finger down at the sweat- lodge scratchings, “the Sioux drew themselves as a huge force of warriors butchering a small bunch of soldiers. And that is just what
He let that sink in a moment. “You think on that, General. We haven’t got Gibbon along—and you better believe the Sioux know that too. So you’ve got plans for us to prance right on in and flop headfirst into their camps, don’t you?”
“Balderdash!” Custer spat.
Angrily Custer kicked at the sand ridge, sending grains of sand skidding across the sweat lodge and into the air, scattering those soldiers who stood close to him.
“We’ve got some Sioux to find, gentlemen!” he announced sharply, ripping Vic’s reins from Burkman’s hand. “Let’s be about it. Sergeant Voss? You find trumpeter Martini. The two of you see that ‘Officers’ Call’ is given by voice to each company. I want to talk to my officers. Right over there. And right now.”
CHAPTER 12
AS trumpeters Voss and Martini made their way through the command, Custer marched confidently toward a patch of willow and sage beside the gurgling Rosebud, where he drove the flagstaff for his personal standard into the dry, rocky soil.
Lieutenant Edward Godfrey had been close enough to hear the whole thing between Custer and Bouyer. Now Godfrey found himself one of the first waiting for Custer’s hastily called conference to get under way.
“Gentlemen, the Crows tell me that they’ve found some fresh sign ahead.”
It was as if he had dropped a sulfur-head Lucifer on a powder keg, waiting to see who would pounce first.
“I figure that’s the news we’ve been waiting to hear, General,” Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith rose to the bait.
He wheeled on Smith. “That’s right. Trouble is, there’s only three or four ponies. And one on foot.”
“Dammit, Autie. Sounds like the scouts ran across some beggar’s string-along outfit!” Tom said.
He stopped while many of the officers laughed at his comparison of forces. Godfrey knew that such laughter only goaded jokester Tom Custer on all the more.
“Autie, how can we get excited over some fresh sign after seeing where all these Indians camped—when that sign is just five poor Injuns?”
“If I may be so bold, General.” James Calhoun stepped forward. “It appears the Crows are getting desperate to have some fresh sign to show you.”
Custer held up his hand for quiet. “I for one find the news most cheering. Why, those of you who were with me will remember our winter down in Indian Territory chasing the Cheyenne.”
“By God, that’s right, General!” Godfrey piped up, watching Bouyer and Gerard join the officers’ conference. “California Joe and his Osages ran across an old trail. Better than a month old, it was. And only one lodge to boot. But we followed it.”
Custer beamed. “Did that trail pay off, Ed?”
“By damn, it did, General!” Godfrey answered on cue. “We caught old Medicine Arrow and all his Cheyennes napping!”
“By glory we did!” Tom echoed.
“Exactly,” Custer replied quietly. “I want you to realize what happened on the Sweetwater is about to happen here, fellas. The fresh trail we’ve run across may only be four or five Indians, but that handful will lead us to the mother lode.”
With a brutal, dry gust of wind at that exact moment, Custer’s personal standard blew down, falling so that it pointed toward the rear of the column’s march.
Back down the Rosebud.
For a moment not a single soldier, officer, or general alike realized the potent symbolism of that fallen flag. But Mitch Bouyer clamped his dark hand over his mouth, Indian fashion, to prevent his half-Sioux soul from flying out in awe and fear.
Godfrey stood where he could watch both Gerard and Bouyer. The Ree interpreter knit his brow, staring at the fallen standard gravely. But what Ed Godfrey read on Bouyer’s face frightened him. The lieutenant swallowed hard, then knelt to retrieve Custer’s flag from the dirt.
He drove it in the dry ground once more.
No sooner than he let it go and turned back to the conference, another short gust of wind huffed out of nowhere, tearing through that officers’ assembly, toppling Custer’s standard a second time.
No longer was Ed Godfrey merely nervous. He was spooked as he plucked the flag from the ground and bored the shaft down into the summer-crusted, hard-packed surface the Indians had beaten with their moccasins. Only then did he lean the staff back against some sagebrush for additional support.
Godfrey raised his eyes and there met Lieutenant Wallace’s sad expression, a look filled with the tale of something grave and foreboding.
Anxiously Godfrey glanced down at the standard. He suddenly remembered Wallace’s warning on the evening of the twenty-second.
Swirling, swarming, and burning with fiery torment, tiny red buffalo gnats descended once again on the troopers as they plodded, forever plodded, through the dust and sweltering mirages of the Montana high-plains summer. A bright one-eyed sun glared down on the columns with unmerciful intensity, chapping raw the faces that weren’t already covered by a protective coating of talc-fine dust kicked up by the hooves of animals ahead in the long columns.
Biting, stinging, sucking until it nearly drove a man mad for want of relief. The gnats swelled his eyes half- shut to where he could barely see, forced to suck at the swirling, buzzing air through a silk bandanna tied round his face. Burning with the sting of mosquitoes and the bites of monster horseflies everywhere, a chunk of the half- breed’s flesh still lay exposed.
Never had he been able to bring himself to do what the old teamsters had done for years, up and down the Platte River Road and the Bozeman Trail. They dabbed a potion of coal oil on the corners of their bandannas and hung those neckerchiefs from their sweat-weary hats just below their eyes to cover the rest of the face. That coal oil smelled bad enough to drive all but the hardiest pest away from the eyes. Bad enough that most men like Mitch Bouyer wondered just what was worse: the heat and dust and buffalo gnats … or the heat and dust and coal oil under your nose.
There were too many halts through that long afternoon, each one signaled by Custer so his troops would not
