All the dark Irishman knew for sure was that he was thirsty and Tom Custer just might have a drink or two about him.
On and on he ran, the bullets kicking up spurts of dirt around his big plodding boots. Bullets split the air about his black head like mad mosquitoes whistling on the Rosebud. The only thing Myles Keogh knew for certain was that he was thirsty … so thirsty he would do damned near any bidding for a drink right about now.
Captain Myles Keogh had always been like that, though. He would do anything for a drink.
In fact, he would race right into hell itself.
CHAPTER 25
CALHOUN’S Hill had fallen.
Keogh’s ridge was no more.
One by one Custer’s officers had gathered round the mortally wounded commander on the west slope at the north end of this bony ridge a few yards below the bare, windswept crest.
Even Keogh himself had lumbered in at the end, nicked and slightly the worse for wear, dragging behind him some screaming Sioux and Cheyenne warriors out of the nightmare of yellow haze.
Now this favored inner circle drew round their leader like old herd bulls protectively guarding their patriarch against snarling wolves. Tom, Cooke, Keogh, Smith, and Yates. Around these officers clustered the survivors from each company, their shrinking command post ringed by a wall of horse carcasses.
What goes through a man’s mind when he feels the sweat pouring along his backbone, gazing down a dusty slope at the silvery river, and the village without end just beyond the cottonwoods?
Ringing in every soldier’s ears above the shriek of warriors and the high-pitched whine of wing-bone whistles were those orders barked over the command by one officer or another. The refuse of battle littered their hillside. Wounded men cried out for water, for help, for a friend to come pull them to the top.
That’s all the dying men needed as they gazed into a shapeless, shimmering sun suspended directly overhead, beating down unmercifully on their hilltop from a bone yellow sky. The sun stared back with one accusing eye at the soldiers who had come to raid camps of women and children and the old ones too weak to run.
There were other moans that afternoon on the hill. Cries of despair and utter hopelessness among the recruits of Smith’s company, Custer’s and Yates’s commands too. Young men who saw utter futility in fighting on. At first they had clung to the hope in what their officers promised them once they reached the end of this ridge. At first they had believed in Custer—hoping they could hold out until Gibbon and Terry marched upriver with their reinforcements.
Wasn’t a man on that bare hillside who didn’t realize what price Calhoun’s men had paid in buying some precious time for the remaining four companies under Custer’s command.
And on the heels of that murderous slaughter, they had watched stunned and increasingly numb as Keogh’s men put up the beginnings of a desperate fight. Gall pressing from the south. Lame-White-Man and Two Moons leading their Cheyennes from the west. And Crazy Horse’s Oglalla cavalry hitting, slashing, tearing at I Company from the east.
On hot breezes came the death chants and songs of victory, drifting up the hill. The warriors had only to wait for the sun and time itself to do its evil on these last hold-outs near the top of the ridge. Songs the warriors sang to make themselves brave.
But those last few gathering round Custer near the crest didn’t seem to remember any songs of their own to make them courageous that afternoon. They just couldn’t remember the words anymore. Hard enough to keep breathing, or keep from soiling your army britches, much less try to remember some damned words to a song.
Tom Custer shot a soldier in the back of the head, stunning all those but the officers huddling nearby.
Try as he might, Fresh Smith trembled, watching the soldier’s brains and blood soak into the parched earth.
“I told him!” young Custer roared, wagging the pistol at the dead man twitching at his feet in the last throes of death.
The young soldier lurched convulsively, his bowels voiding, then lay still in the stench and heat of that yellow hill.
Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith gulped. For years now he had it drummed into his head that an officer could kill a coward who refused to fight. He had never before seen any officer do it.
“Gave him a direct order!” Custer shrieked. “There’ll be no cowardice on
“By glory, we’ll hang on!” George Yates shouted to show his support.
“Damned right!” Tom explained to the dumbfounded soldiers staring at him with different eyes now. “Just like the general says … we’ll make it. I’ll shoot the next one that talks of surrender to these savages!”
“Gimme a carbine and a belt, Tommy boy!”
Tom Custer scooped up a dead trooper’s carbine and ammunition belt, flinging them both at Keogh.
Keogh spoke softly. “Ain’t much better here, it ’pears. We’re weakest back ’long the ridge. But, gimme a dozen men or so, I’ll go shore up that south flank. They’re pressing us that way and in a hard ditch of it too.”
“Keogh?”
It was George Custer’s croak, emerging from the dry, wounded pit of him.
Myles knelt beside his commander in the dust. “Right here, General. Too evil a bastard to die just yet, I am.”
His Irish smile buoyed many a man struck silent on the side of that yellow hill as his big head shaded the general’s dirty red-bristled face. Custer opened his eyes and, swallowed against the pain in his chest. Beneath that cat’s-whisker brush of a mustache of his, Custer tried a grin, showing a little of his teeth before blood trickled across his cracked lips.
“Thank you, Myles,” he sputtered softly. “See what you can do for us, will you?”
“Aye, General!” Keogh smiled, rising, casting his full shadow across Custer. “Told you before what it meant to have your trust and your friendship, Armstrong.” He sighed as he called the general by name, something he had never done before.
Custer tried to salute but gave up. He couldn’t get his right arm up that far.
“Sorry, Myles,” he rasped. “Going a bit numb.”
“That’s all right, sir, you can salute me later. When we’re all done here. But for now—I’ve got to send some of these bleeming h’athen savages straight back to the pits of hell for you!”
The recruits and officers alike watched the big brawler leap over a dead horse as if it were but a clump of sage. Keogh hunkered down the skirmish line, tapping a man here, another there, handpicking his defense force. When he had his dozen, Keogh led his squad south along the knotted spine, spacing them out in pockets here and there.
The southern flank would not fall if Myles Keogh and his hard-files had anything to say about it. Grim-eyed, sunburned, saddle-galled veterans every one, they fired slow and sure and steady at the advancing Sioux just the way they had worked over Confederates at Bull Run, Shiloh, Gettysburg.
One target at a time. One shot at a time. These men with Myles Keogh knew how to fight.
Myles Keogh would show the lot of them how to die.
“The canteens are dry, Autie,” Tom whispered in a crackle near his brother’s ear. “Too many wounded, can’t keep ’em quiet. Hollering for water. It’s beginning to drive the men mad.” He knew Autie must be desperate for water himself.
“The river … just—get to the river,” Custer sputtered, coughing. “Open a route down to the river … now. …”
Custer struggled again to rise, pulling on Tom until he sat upright, gritting those pearly teeth against the excruciating pain of that seeping hole in his chest.
He pointed. “Down there,” indicating the deep scar of the ravine. “Send a detail down there to secure … the coulee … we get water … there—”
