Rosebud.
Pensive and anxious, his stomach churning the way it did whenever he faced combat, Yates stared after the squad of men disappearing through the trees. A Civil War veteran who was not only a Custer hometown boy, but one who had served on Custer’s staff during the war, Yates realized how important retrieving the clothing and bread box could be.
Curtis and Briody led their four green recruits down the back trail, sharing between them ribald jokes they had heard many a time before, occasionally whistling songs that pleased a soldier beneath the high, thin overcast foretelling of another sweltering day.
“Say, you boys know the words to—”
“
“Jeeeesuuuus!” gulped one of the privates, yanking his mount’s bit so harshly that the animal stumbled and fell to the side, neck twisted around, spilling its rider into the grass and spiny cactus.
He rolled in the cactus as the other three troopers bumped their horses into one another, all trying to retreat at once while Curtis and Briody attempted to maintain some semblance of order in their disheveled ranks.
Down the trail less than forty yards away, another small group of young men had also been surprised. They darted for their nearby ponies. Four warriors, wearing nothing but breechclouts and moccasins in the midmorning heat, had been intent on chopping at the wooden box of hardtack with a camp ax when Curtis’s troops rounded the brow of the hill and discovered them.
The warriors didn’t know whether to mount and ride or stand and fight. But it appeared the soldiers were dismounting and going to make a fight of it. Without waiting for much more than a brave yelp or two to spring from their throats, the half-dozen warriors leapt aboard their small ponies and kicked dust across the shallow creek, fleeing up the hill.
All but one of the warriors disappeared over the top of the knoll, pushing on west for the Little Bighorn. That solitary rider sat silhouetted against the pale corn-flower blue summer sky and raised his arm defiantly in the air, yelling out his challenge and ridicule. At the end of that arm hung one of the new Henry repeaters the Sioux had traded for at Spotted Tail Agency.
With the hairs on the back of his neck bristling at attention, Curtis ordered the de-horsed private to climb back on his mount or run the risk of getting left behind. This was one sergeant who wouldn’t have his detail wiped out because a greenhorn shavetail had some cactus stuck in his ass.
“Cactus or lead, Private!” Curtis bellowed, swatting the soldier’s horse with the butt of his carbine. “You’ll have one or the other in your ass before this day’s done. Now,
The greenhorn’s animal bolted forward, its whiteknuckled rider clinging for his life, every bounce on that wild, mule-eyed ride a series of excruciating jolts as the cactus spines drove deeper into his ample buttocks.
By the time Curtis’s detail scampered back into the regiment’s camp, every man spurring his lathered mount as if the devil himself were right behind them, they had covered more ground than they had in their entire march last night.
After listening to Curtis’s story and ordering the suffering private to find himself a regimental surgeon, Captain Yates conferred with Major Marcus Reno and two other captains on a course of action. It was their considered opinion that they should recommence the march immediately, without waiting for the general’s return.
They had been discovered by the hostiles, they figured. And with those fleeing warriors scampering now to warn the village, Custer’s Sioux would slip from his noose. The general was going to be mad enough as it was. Best not to waste time getting over the divide and down into that valley.
As Custer himself descended the long slope from the Crow’s Nest, he could see the twisting, snaking columns climbing up from Davis Creek toward the spine of the divide. A hundred eighty degrees from what he had ordered.
“Major!” Custer called as he came racing into sight of the columns. “Reno! What’s the meaning of this?”
“Begging pardon, General,” Yates interrupted with an apologetic grin. Lord, how he hated admitting this to Custer. “We thought it best to ride on up to meet you. We got us some sticky news to tell you, sir.”
As Yates explained the Indians’ discovery of the box and clothing along their back trail, the color slowly drained from Custer’s face. Then, as Yates watched, a sudden light began to flicker behind his azure eyes once more.
“Good,” Custer replied when Yates finished explaining his orders for the regiment to mount up and march instead of waiting on their commanding officer. “You did right.”
Tom Custer dropped from his horse nearby. He strode up, wiping his glove around the sweatband of his gray slouch hat. “What you figure to do now, Autie? Lay out on this side till dark?”
“What I figure to do, Tom—is talk to my officers right now. This regiment needs to be ready for a fight!” He wheeled, hollering back along the columns. “Sergeant Voss! Find trumpeter Martini. Bring ’im here—he’s scheduled for duty with me today.”
“Sir?”
“The both of you—sound ‘Officers’ Call.’”
“Sir?” the veteran Henry Voss gulped. “The Indians, they’ll hear the trumpets!”
“Dammit all, Voss! The red buggers already know where we are! So blow it!” Custer snapped, wrenching the bugle from Voss’s saddlebags and practically stuffing it in the man’s mouth.
Up and down the columns many of the men glanced at one another with those first few notes out of the tin horns. The first such trumpet call in over two days now. Trotting forward along the excited columns, there wasn’t a one of Custer’s officers who didn’t fully understand the time for secrecy and silence had come and gone. The blowing of that one, solitary bugle call meant the time for battle had arrived.
Custer gripped Dandy’s reins tightly as he paced on foot in one direction three steps, then retraced those steps in another direction.
“Gentlemen, you recall the Crows reported seeing the village from the Crow’s Nest. They claim to see smoke and dust, a big village. I, on the other hand, was unable to see a bloody thing. I really doubted the Indians were down there along the Little Horn, so I kept looking up north, in the direction of Tullock’s Forks.
“At least in those valleys we could bottle the tribe up, and they couldn’t escape me so easily. However, the scouts tell me I’ll find them in the valley of the Little Horn. And down there the Indians can run and scatter two ways of Sunday without us having a ghost of a chance to run them down.”
For a moment the only sounds filling the hot, dry air came from the general’s boots scuffing at the dry ground, or his horse munching on the brittle grass, even the scratchy cough of some man’s trail-raw throat.
“All along I meant to surprise that hostile camp,” Custer went on. “We’ve got a command riddled with green recruits of the rawest order. Our mounts are about as weary as any could get, while the warriors we’ll soon face are going to ride fresh ponies. Yet do any of you see sense in my original plan to wait out a day and attack at dawn tomorrow?”
“Yes, General. I do,” James Calhoun finally gave a cautious response.
“But we can’t now, Lieutenant!” Custer snapped.
Like only a handful of the rest, Yates realized the general had addressed his brother-in-law by rank. Custer was angry, disappointed, and now veering close to fury.
“Gentlemen, despite the fact that we’re not fully prepared for battle, and that we surely are not going to have the advantage of surprise on those warriors, we nonetheless have one advantage. We are the Seventh, a proven fighting machine—and never before has our grand republic really seen what we can do when asked to perform above and beyond the call of duty.”
“General Custer?”
“Who are you?” Custer asked, squinting at the tall, thin civilian looking out of place in dusty frontier clothes.
