the yard back home. Spraying bright hot blood just like this.
Men shouted as the arrows struck, or they cursed when the man next to them drew his last breath, yanking at that bloody shaft in his back or gut.
The soldiers who had leapt aboard their horses to escape the falling death from the sky didn’t stand any better chance. They were hit as surely as those men left behind when the arrows rained. Saddles emptied, horses reared and broke free, bolting downhill in a noisy clatter.
For the first time bedlam began working its evil on that end of the ridge as soldiers scurried this way and that like sow bugs from an overturned buffalo chip. A few savvy old files even pulled the bodies of dead bunkies over themselves. The only protection from the iron-tipped messengers of red death.
“Buglers!” Tom’s raspy rawhide voice carried over the melee.
“Sound the charge, buglers!” Tom ordered, waving his pistol in the yellow dust that clung to everything in a sticky film.
From the saddlebags of the two company buglers came those shiny brass bugles they had not blown for three days now. In a stuttering, discordant melody, the buglers raised their tune along the grassy spine.
“If it’s the last thing I’ll do, Finckle …” young Custer snarled, “I’ll organize this retreat, by God!”
“Cap’n?” Finckle gazed up through the dust and the powder smoke.
The general was conscious again when Tom slid up beside his brother in the tall grass.
“Blow for Benteen, Tom,” he sputtered. “Benteen must hear us …”
Tom didn’t answer. He leapt to his feet, dashing among Smith’s gray-horse troop to Find the buglers, whose brassy notes sailed over the slopes.
They weren’t hard to find, not with those shiny instruments gleaming like mirrors strapped to a man’s soul in the sun. Shiny and yellow beneath a bone-dry summer eye glaring down on their last hill.
Tom grabbed one cowering bugler hiding behind a horse carcass to blow his horn. Then Custer yanked the other trumpeter to his feet as well.
“Blow ‘Assembly’!” Tom ordered flatly. “Then try ‘Officers’ Call.’ Just keep blowing till I tell you to stop! Blow, goddammit—blow!”
CHAPTER 23
IN a seeping gash along his cheek, the raw wound ached and pinched like puckered rawhide drying under this blazing sun.
Mitch Bouyer had been clipped by a bullet or fragment of one ricocheting off some rock down below him on the long slope to the river. Funny, but the cheek hurt one hell of a lot more than the bullet hole low in his belly.
Bouyer laughed wildly, wickedly at that.
There couldn’t be any running. Not for most of them anyway. But he looked over at Curley and young White- Man-Runs-Him. They were both related to Mitch’s Crow wife. One was her younger brother, the other a cousin or something such.
Calhoun had had it. That much was plain to see from where Bouyer sat. The last few soldiers still up there at the end of this pony-back ridge where Calhoun’s big fight had started were going down, one at a time like canvasback ducks on a high-plains pond diving for their lunch.
Except, Mitch realized, these ducks weren’t coming back up for air … they weren’t coming up at all.
Bouyer knew that wild-man Keogh would just have to hold the screeching Sioux off from the ridge when the warriors came swarming over Calhoun’s position. That was the reality of it all. And that’s when Bouyer knew he had to send the two boys off before they were vulture bait with the rest of Custer’s soldiers.
In Absaroka, Bouyer shouted over his shoulder to get the youngest’s attention—Curley.
Obediently the youth crawled up to sit beside Bouyer as the interpreter casually fired shot after shot with a dead soldier’s carbine, and when it jammed, he crawled off in search of another. The soldiers he took the rifles from weren’t going to be using their Springfields any longer—and besides, their stiffening, stinking bodies served as a shield for him while he fired back at the advancing warriors.
“Curley,” Mitch coughed, clearing his throat of the dust that threatened to choke him, “this fight does not go well for us.” His Crow was spoken flat and hard, traveling with the speed of a carbine bullet itself. “The soldiers have lost this fight. We have lost this fight too, little brother.”
Bouyer glared right into the young Crow’s eyes. Curley did not flinch. He stared at the aging half-breed Sioux who was saying in his own way they all would be dead soon enough. Mitch, the old scout, his sister’s husband. Curley dipped his fingers in the puddle of blood pooling beneath the half-breed’s leg.
“My belly,” Bouyer explained with a solid gulp of pain he swallowed down like it was some cod-liver oil to be taken, suffered, then gotten over. “That’s why I can’t come with you, my friend, my brother.”
Mitch placed a powder-grimed hand on Curley’s shoulder. “If you can get out of here, do it now. Do it quick. Get out of here before the Sioux have us fully surrounded. Go to the other soldiers up north. On the Bighorn. They are coming down the Bighorn to meet us in a few days. Go to No Hip Gibbon—tell him all of us are killed here.”
“You can go with me,” the young Crow begged with his eyes as well as his words. “I will carry you out of here. For my sister …”
Bouyer clamped a dirty hand over the young man’s mouth. “I will not go. This is where I am to die, don’t you see? Old Man Above has brought me here—showing me this is where I am to die. I had many chances to leave Custer, but I came here with him. I can’t go and leave the rest of these men by themselves now. Their souls will remain here. Mine too, Curley. My soul must find its place here, or it will forever wander. You know that.”
“Yes, brother.” Curley nodded, choking on the emotion. “When a man is shown his place to die by the spirits, he must stay there and wait for death.”
Suddenly Mitch crimped with a spasm of pain at the gut wound, and more blood oozed from his mouth, dribbling into his barbed-wire whiskers. Curley lunged forward to help him as Bouyer toppled over to his side. The old scout pushed the youngster away. Always had been a tough little bantam rooster. Even ready to take General Custer on a time or two. And now the half-breed would go out on his own, with no help from any man.
Struggling to his knees, Mitch wrenched himself up and raised the carbine to his shoulder, teeth gritted against the hurt of it all. After he had fired two more shots at some Sioux down in a thicket of sage who were inching a mite too close for his comfort, Bouyer gazed into Curley’s eyes one last time.
“That man over there …”He pointed at the top of the hill where Custer sat propped up against the body of a dead horse, officers kneeling all round him as a horse was brought up for brother Tom. Custer was lifted, slung over the horse in preparation for some movement along the ridge.
“That man Custer will stop at nothing. We warned him. But he has no ears to hear his scouts. We came to help him. No Hip saw to that. But this Peoushi does not want our help. Instead, he wanted only to attack the villages, the biggest damned camp any of us have ever seen on the face of the Great Mother. And now those villages spread at our feet will be the last thing any of us sees in this life.”
His dark eyes studied the pained expression on Curley’s face. “Except your eyes, little brother! Go now while you can escape,” Bouyer ordered. “Go! Tell the world what happened at this place.”
