horses toward the hulking mass of the Wolf Mountains. A swinging pinpoint of light became a candle lantern looming out of the night.
“Lieutenant?”
It was Custer’s voice. Mitch Bouyer would recognize that high-pitched, excited call anywhere.
“Over here, General,” Varnum responded.
“Charlie, I just thought of something. Glad I caught you before you were gone. I wanted to ask something of the Crows. Where’s Bouyer? Is he here?”
“I’m here,” Mitch answered, stepping out of the pony shadows. He didn’t even want to get near the general, still itching from their argument earlier in the day.
Custer gazed past the half-breed to the nearest Absaroka scout. “You, what’s your name?”
“White-Man-Runs-Him,” Mitch replied.
“Bouyer, ask this one where does his tribe stay. I mean … where’s his home?”
Bouyer was confused at the reason for the question, studying Custer’s face for some explanation and reading there a strange light aglow behind the blue candlelit eyes.
“We live along the Bighorn River. Up to the lodge-grass country—down to the valley of the Greasy Grass, what the white man called the Little Horn.”
“Ahhh,” Custer replied. “Exactly as I supposed. This regiment’s approaching your ancestral homeland, aren’t we, White-Man-Runs-Him?”
The Crow nodded with Bouyer’s translation, his eyes flicking up to the Wolf Mountains. “On the other side lies the Greasy Grass. I am close to the land of those gone before. Yes.”
“Then understand this.” Custer spoke slowly, purposefully, so that Bouyer could translate as he went along. “I want you Crows to believe me. If I have to die to do it, you will get this land back from your longtime enemies, the Sioux. If you die in the coming battle, at least you will be buried on the land of your own people.”
To Mitch’s surprise Custer waited for no reply from the Indians or from Bouyer. He turned on his heel instead and was gone into the night. The scouts remained speechless a few moments until White-Man-Runs-Him muttered something. His exact words were chorused by the other five Absarokas. All six moved out toward the edge of camp.
Lonesome Charley Reynolds, who rarely talked to anyone at all, hung back to walk beside Bouyer, who had to keep tugging at his small Crow pony to keep it moving. After more than twelve hours of scouting up and down ridges already today, the animal wasn’t in the least eager for a night ride up the rocky slopes of these mountains.
“What that Injun say back there?” Reynolds whispered to Bouyer.
Mitch stared at the white scout a moment, deciding he could talk to Charley.
“White-Man-Runs-Him said something about Custer.”
“Yeah? What’d he say about the general?”
“He said Custer’s wearing some mighty bad medicine hung like a buffalo robe over his shoulders.”
CHAPTER 14
SINCE the march would be resumed shortly after eleven P.M., so the command could inch as close to the Sioux as possible before daylight and thereby choose the best concealment for the day, many of the men didn’t see any sense in trying to get back to sleep.
From Custer’s meeting, some of the officers headed off in small groups, groping their way through the dark back to their companies. A larger group stayed the shank of the evening with reporter Mark Kellogg, who enthusiastically led a political discussion on the questionable future of the frontier army should a nonarmy president be elected come fall.
Nearby, a lonely soldier licked the nub of his pencil, then scratched in his journal beneath the pale light of a candle:
The political discussions are still going on. Kellogg gets in a real sweat, as do some others. There’s a lot hangs on what’s done at the conventions. St. Louis will tell whether the army is cut, rumors report.
Captain Myles Moylan, one of the few original officers with the Seventh, invited his friends to his bivouac to sing some songs before they would have to be off rousting their units for the night march. After “Little Footsteps Slow and Gentle,” and the ever-popular “Annie Laurie” were given voice, the young officers ended with “The Good- bye at the Door” and the “Olde Hundredth.” Then, to the surprise of most, a few began to belt out “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” dedicated to Custer.
Back in the shadows a few of the old-timers solemnly discussed what scout Charley Reynolds had done to surprise them earlier in the evening before riding off with Varnum’s scouts to ascend the Crow’s Nest. While the lieutenant’s Indians huddled in wait nearby, Lonesome Charley, as he was widely known, committed himself to a path of far-reaching consequence.
Reynolds distributed the contents of his personal haversack among his best friends.
“I damn well don’t want your shirt, Charley! How many times I’m gonna tell you?” an old line-sergeant friend had ranted. He was angry simply because Charley’s actions made him feel mighty uneasy. “You going and giving away everything you own in the goddamn world like this—I just don’t know!”
“You and me been down some roads together, Rufus,” Charley quietly pleaded with Sergeant Hutchinson of B Company. “Please, I want you to have the shirt.”
It had been just like touching the cold hand of death itself to take that shirt from his quiet friend, but Hutchinson eventually tore it out of Reynolds’s paw and raced off for his own unit, not knowing what else to say to an old friend who in his heart believed he was to die in the coming battle.
“You, Riley—you’ve always admired this, ain’t you?” Charley asked, pulling a denim shirt from his war bag and holding it beneath a lantern.
Sergeant Riley had tried sneaking off when it became plain why Reynolds had invited some of his old friends to visit him this evening. The sergeant had to admit he had always liked the shirt—its preacher pleats running down the front to surround the buttons like neat rows of farmer’s crops laid out in a plowed field. But he had never wanted the shirt that bad.
For an experienced plainsman like Reynolds to believe he was staring his last fight in the face was enough to shake even a veteran old file down to his sweaty boots.
Most of the troopers left their stock under saddle that night. Not much sense in removing the McClellans for the short time those saddles would stay empty. Only a few of the old hands thought enough of their animals to remove the saddles and sweated indigo blankets before they ripped up handfuls of twisted grass to scour the horses’ sweaty backs. All round those sleepless, cold-gutted old-timers the rest of the camp snored and rumbled, grabbing what relief sleep could give them.
Over at Tom Custer’s C Company, Private Peter Thompson had fallen asleep not long after the officers’ meeting ended and the serenade concluded. Sometime later he awakened in total darkness from a dream about riding with a detachment of cavalry attacked by warriors.
Thompson bolted upright from his saddle blanket, dripping cold and with a dry mouth. He blinked, then blinked again—surprised to find his friends still asleep on the ground. He splashed some cool water on his face from a canteen while he calmed down. Then laid his head on an arm and closed his eyes. As Thompson drifted off to sleep, the horrifying dream picked up where it had left off.
The only difference now was that Thompson watched his fellow soldiers chased over the hill. Suddenly the private was left alone, surrounded by a horde of warriors. A blood-chilling scream shattered his ears. He whirled around to find a Sioux charging up, war-ax brandished as he raced toward the lone trooper. Just as the wildly painted Sioux drew close enough to strike—Thompson awoke, stunned and muttering his prayers for deliverance from death, sweating like a whiskey cooler on a humid summer’s day.
When he could finally rise on his trembling legs, shaken and unable to speak, Thompson knew he’d never fall asleep again in his life, afraid of what he’d see when he closed his eyes.
