overrun the Ree and Crow scouts. Not that any of the soldiers had noticed, but Bouyer took mark of it. Custer’s Indian trackers were inching ahead a bit more slowly than they had the first two days of their march up the Rosebud. To top it off, they weren’t ranging all that far afield on the flanks either. Seemed they stayed in sight of the dusty columns now.
No, Mitch decided, most soldiers too blind to recognize the face of fear anyway.
But Gerard saw it. Bouyer recognized it too. The Indians were tracking no longer. They simply followed that fresh trail working itself up toward the Wolf Mountains. On the other side of the divide spread that valley of the Greasy Grass, long a popular Cheyenne hunting ground for buffalo and antelope.
Throughout the beginning of their climb up the high, rugged land that erupted itself between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, the Indians kept a particular eye on that country off to their right—the drainage of Tullock’s Creek. It was this piece of country scout George Herendeen knew so well. It would be here he could pay for his keep when they reached the Forks sometime tomorrow. But for now the scouts kept a wary eye on that drainage. Some of the jumpier, younger Rees even thought they saw smoke signals off to the right, up the Tullock’s, far in the distance. But no older Arikara saw that smoke. They merely chuckled at the youngsters’ vivid war-trail imaginations. It was funny, watching the young ones hour by hour grow spookier and spookier.
Without any rainfall in this part of the country for the past three days, the ground lay parched again, crumbling beneath the ponies’ hoofs. Forced to follow a trail beaten by thousands upon thousands of horses and plowed up by uncountable travois only made the march worse for the dust-caked troopers. Custer ordered column- of-fours where he could, spreading the companies out as wide as practicable, attempting to keep the rising dust to a minimum.
Word was he didn’t want to be spotted—not just yet anyway.
Without a breeze the thick cloud persisted over the regiment. More and more the saddle galls and sweat- crusted underwear of the soldiers rubbed and chafed and burned at their weary, blistered rumps. Some of the oiled McClellans were beginning to dry and crack.
Faces burned and lips bled, oozing and stinging when a trooper repeatedly licked his tongue across the salty source of his misery for some momentary relief.
Bouyer listened to the soldiers grumble, complaining how bad Custer was making it on them.
By sundown on the twenty-fourth, Custer had given the order to camp, placing his entire command under a long, irregular bluff to minimize the chance of being spotted by Sioux scouts roaming the slopes above.
The regiment had marched some twenty-eight miles that day, and still the general told his adjutant, W. W. Cooke, he wasn’t satisfied with the pace. To Canadian Cooke, a tall, handsome, dead-shot woman’s man, it seemed Custer hungered like a wolf on a hot trail—the scent growing stronger and headier in his nose each time they had come across campsite after abandoned campsite.
“Cookey.” Custer turned suddenly as his adjutant dropped from his horse. “Don’t dismount. Carry my compliments to the commands. Inform them all supper fires will be extinguished as soon as they’re finished with their meals. Most important, they’re to be prepared to move out again at eleven-thirty P.M.”
Cooke jerked out his watch, the shimmering fob dangling from his palm. In the fading light of a summer’s evening, he stared at the hands. His eyes climbed to find Custer staring back at him. “Sir—eleven-thirty? That’s not but three hours from now, General.”
“I well understand that, Billy,” Custer rasped with a dust-scaled throat. His own lips burned and bled as much as the next man’s. The cheeks above his own three-day-old stubble felt much like winter rawhide, stiff and unforgiving when he tried to smile.
But smile he did. “We’ll find time to sleep, Billy. Make no mistake about that. We find that Sioux camp … we can lie in wait until time for our attack. The troops won’t lose much sleep, really they won’t. Now be off with you. Inform the men.”
Cooke turned and rode off, thinking back to the long winter gone down on the Washita. The Osage trackers led Custer to that Cheyenne village of Black Kettle’s the general had hoped to find, then lay his regiment in wait until the time was right for attack.
Although the columns had not covered as many miles as Custer had planned, it had been a long, difficult day nonetheless. In fact, three long and difficult days behind them now. And still the general prepared to march some more.
As quickly Myles figured there was no sense wasting what little time a man had by bellyaching about it. Use that precious time out of the saddle for all that couldn’t be done on the march—like boiling coffee, what old files like Keogh called their skalljaw. Or forcing down their pasty hardtack and some dried salt pork as they squatted around their smoky little fires.
Or simply finding enough flat ground that would allow a man to stretch out his tired frame, pull his slouch hat down over his scalded face, and close his eyes to the world for a few delicious hours of sleep.
Myles invited Benteen and others to his quarters, in reality nothing more than a small chunk of canvas Keogh tied to a bush, lean-to fashion. But the lack of spacious accommodations didn’t stop any of the guests from squatting in a circle to tell stories in that inky darkness slithering like a prairie wolf along the base of the bluff. Tom Custer even brought along a canteen full of whiskey he decided to crack open with his fellows. The whiskey scalded the parched throats and seared the cracked lips … but damn, if it wasn’t tasty after the day’s march.
While some shared their opinions of the Crow and Ree versions of the Sioux drawings, Lieutenant Calhoun worked at a huge blister at the back of a heel. His feet tended to sweat more than the normal man’s, and with damp stockings his boots invariably irritated his feet. Up and down, up and down—constant movement rubbed his boot-heel while the ball of his foot rested in the oxbow stirrup, working up a sizable blister that nearly wrapped itself around the back of his heel.
With one end of a woolen thread he had poked through the eye of a needle, Calhoun carefully evened the strand and began his surgery by lancing the blister. But instead of merely pricking the skin, Calhoun drove the needle on through and out the other side so that the woolen thread itself lay in the irritated fluid. In this way he could watch the thread absorb the moisture before pulling the wool strand from the blister.
Lieutenant Charles DeRudio finally piped up, wanting to tell a story about his days fighting under Garibaldi in the Italian army. His fellow officers passed Tom Custer’s whiskey canteen the rounds once more.
This was a time in the west when most men carried
There was a lot of whiskey in that starless camp this night. And somehow that trader’s whiskey made the idea of the coming night march seem not so bad after all.
I enlisted to sojur,
And I’m willing to fight—
Not to whack government mules
And stay out half the night!
In his thick, peaty brogue, Keogh sang the words from the popular soldiering ditty currently making the rounds of the western posts. Practically every line brought a chorus of hoots and jeers and guffaws from the rest of his fellows.
I’ve sojured for years,
