ADJUTANT Cooke watched Custer rise from the dust where Bouyer and his Crows had drawn their map. The general snatched up his reins and leapt atop Dandy.
“Cookey, c’mon over here. I want a private word with you.”
Off to the side out of earshot, Custer and Cooke discussed their plan for deployment of the command. After pulling some maps from his saddlebags and handing them over to Custer for his inspection, Cooke scrawled notes in the small notebook he carried.
“I’m glad you’re in agreement,” Custer sighed. “You remember the Washita, don’t you, Billy?”
Cooke smiled with those straight, pearly teeth of his. Years ago at the Washita, his special crack unit of forty handpicked sharpshooters had bottled up Black Kettle’s fleeing Cheyenne just as Custer had planned it. They had laid down a murderous fire across the river, so very few Cheyenne had made it downstream to the Kiowa and Arapaho camps on foot. Most who tried had ended up floating down the icy waters of the Washita, their bodies riddled by Spencer-rifle fire at the command of marksman W. W. Cooke.
“A glorious rout, General! And we’re about to pull another one out of your hat, aren’t we, sir?”
“That’s why I like you, Billy. Always thinking like a soldier.”
“I’ve learned from the best, General.”
Custer nodded. “We’ll use three wings to execute this attack again. And I’ll divide off the first wing at this time. It is—?”
Cooke yanked his watch out. “Twelve-oh-seven.”
“Very good. Let’s get this show on the road. Bring Benteen up.”
When Cooke had gathered the captain, along with Captain Thomas Weir and Lieutenant Edward Godfrey, he announced that Custer wanted to see them at the head of the march immediately. “The general’s compliments, Captain Benteen. We’re ready to deploy for the attack.”
Surrounded by the three officers and his adjutant a few yards from the column, Custer issued his orders. “For the purpose of our attack, Captain Weir’s D Company and Lieutenant Godfrey’s K Company are placed under your command, Captain Benteen.”
“Begging pardon, General.” Benteen cleared his dry throat, straightening himself in the saddle. “Don’t you think we’d better keep the regiment together? If it’s truly as big a camp as the scouts claim it is, you’re going to need the whole regiment standing together.”
Cooke watched a cloud pass over Custer’s face before he answered.
“Thank you for your consideration of my orders, Captain,” he replied acidly, eyes filled with icy fire. “Right now I can’t think of a reason why my battle plan would fail. Suppose you just remember that I give the commands, and you follow them.”
“Very good, General,” Benteen replied stiffly. “Where am I headed?”
Custer pointed to the southwest, toward the rolling hills, deep valleys, and endless bare ridges that rose to meet the pale, sun-bleached prairie sky.
“Take your battalion in that direction. Watch for an Indian village, and pitch into anything you run across.”
Benteen gulped, staring off into that nothingness of rugged draws and coulees. “Begging consideration, General—why there?”
Custer bit his lip. Cooke figured the general forced himself to keep from swearing at this white-headed pain in the ass.
“I want you to continuously feel to our left, if for no other reason than to assure myself that the hostiles— which we know have been warned already—won’t flee upriver to the south. That’s all I’m going to say, Captain Benteen. You, better than any man I command, ought to know I’m not in the habit of explaining myself.”
The captain must have understood that plain enough, Cooke figured, for Benteen saluted, spoke, “Very well, sir. Understood. As you ordered.”
Benteen nodded at Weir and Godfrey. They followed.
Ed Godfrey slipped his watch from his unbuttoned tunic pocket. Twelve-fifteen P.M.
Godfrey felt the cold trickle of water dripping all the way down to the base of his spine and hoped it was only sweat—not his first taste of outright fear. Hell, he hadn’t been afraid even when his small platoon had been practically surrounded at the Battle of the Washita. Not even then.
Or killed …
As Benteen’s three companies splashed across the summer trickle of Ash Creek, then plodded away beneath a cloud of choking dust, Custer turned back upstream with Cooke at his side to find a suitable place for Dandy to drink. Soon enough they were joined by more of the thirsty command and their dry-mouthed animals.
Custer struggled to pull a reluctant Dandy back from the creek.
“Don’t let them get too much, men!” he called to soldiers nearby. “They’ll get loggy on you, if you’re not careful.”
In turn, each of the remaining companies were given a few minutes at the scummy pools along the mossy banks of Ash Creek. As Dandy rested, Custer stared into the luminous, bone yellow sky at that relentless, one-eyed demon spewing fire across a breathless, choking landscape. Giving in, he removed his buckskin coat, tying it behind the cantle of his saddle.
Once more he carefully tucked his pants into the tall, dusty boots. His light gray army fatigue shirt already bore the dark blotches beneath each arm, between his shoulder blades, and in a necklace beneath his strawberry chin in stubble. He wiped his blood red kerchief around the sweatband of the cream-colored hat, then rerolled the brim up on the right side in the event he would have to sight his Remington sporting rifle from horseback. When the kerchief was properly knotted round his neck once more, Custer ordered the columns to move out.
Behind him plodded those other hot, dusty, dry troops, their mouths caked and puckering with the alkali of Ash Creek. Most men had already lashed their blue tunics behind their saddles. A motley gypsy gang of good and ugly heading down, down, down into that valley of cool, sparkling waters and inviting green grass extending clear to the Bighorns. A valley beckoning Custer’s army onward. Down to the green and cool.
This unsettling mixture of veterans and raw, untried recruits followed him into the maw. Rogues and rascals … even innocents and children who had no conception of what war with the Sioux was all about. Sobering for the hard-files to brood on the men around them—some thirty to sixty percent of each company unseasoned and scared enough right now to worry about wetting their britches.
Yet any man present would have said he trusted Custer. The general’s reputation protected them all with a brassy aura of invincibility as they rode on and on, following that big cream-colored hat and that bright scarlet scarf fluttering on the hot breeze.
Custer had never lost a fight. So they followed.
Some sweated in those white shirts first used during the Civil War and still issued on the frontier posts eleven years later. Others dampened dark blue shirts simply because the white ones got all too dirty much too fast. These indigo shirts made it pleasantly convenient for a trooper: He got away with going longer between washings than did the simple-minded, who wore white and far too often had to pay a call on the post laundresses along Soapsuds Row.
Even a scattering of these soldiers sported the coarse gray pullover of the variety Custer himself wore this day. In addition, there appeared a lively mixture of the checkered hickory shirts some had purchased from trader Coleman at the Yellowstone. Such lightweight cloth made for a more comfortable ride in the summer heat of this hunt for the Sioux.
From time to time the troopers worked at some saddle rations, choking down hardtack or cooked pork with swallows of the warm, stinking creek water from their canteens. Their noses reddened and crusted with alkali dust, none could smell the earthy aromas of man and animal on the dust anyway. Those rank odors of lathered horses and played-out mules, along with the well-known and all-too-familiar pungent stench of men too long without a bath, mingled with the perfume of the tiny wildflowers trampled underfoot.
