Cry of the Hawk (35 page)

“None of us like being played the fool, General.”

“Indian promises are like horse apples. There’s more than you know what to do with—and they aren’t worth a damn. I’ll tell you, Armstrong—these bands need to be taught a severe lesson and soon.”

Custer scowled. “Just what kind of lesson do you and General Sherman have in mind, sir?”

“Something that will last, Custer,” said the short Irishman. “This is your job, I’ll remind you. After all is said and done—you’re a soldier. This is the inevitable clashing of the races: what must occur when a stronger, more advanced race pushes aside the weaker.”

“I take it I’m to serve as the point man for that assault on a primitive culture, General?”

Sheridan smiled within his dark, well-trimmed beard. “Nothing so fancy as that. By god, Custer—I want you to sweep this country between the Platte and Republican—sweep it clean of hostiles and show the rest of the tribes how we’ll deal with them if they attempt trouble.”

He saluted smartly. “With your permission, General, I’ll pass the word to my officers that we’re back in the saddle at six tomorrow morning.”

From Fort McPherson
, Custer led his cavalry west along the Platte River for less than fifty miles before pointing their noses due south.

For the next three weeks, the Seventh crossed Frenchman’s Creek, then the Republican River itself, looping first southwest, following the South Fork of the Republican, then slowly turning to the northwest once more, where they crossed the Arikara Fork of the Republican. Nearing the cruel sand hills of the South Platte country, Custer turned his columns back on themselves and recrossed the Arikara, moving roughly east along its southern bank.

Twenty-three days of staring into a merciless white summer sky with eyes scoured by alkali dust. The flour-fine dust still seeped beneath the damp bandanna Jonah Hook had tied over his nose and mouth. He tasted dust. No matter what they had to eat each night—the food still tasted like the dust he had eaten on the march that day.

Everything smelled of stinging, cream-colored alkali. No matter how fragrant was Shad Sweete’s coffee a’brew over the greasewood fires, all Jonah smelled with his crusted nose was the stinging alkali.

“You’ll sleep tonight, Jonah,” said the old mountain man, offering the young Confederate a steaming cup.

He looked down at the tin of coffee. Then reluctantly took it in hand. “Oh, for the want of a cup of some water come out of the mountains.”

“This alkali water giving your bowels the tremors, eh?”

Hook shook his head. “Cold.”

Sweete said, “Cold is what you want, eh? Water born of the high country.”

“Yeah,” he replied, his eyes squinting on those distant but remembered places. “I remember the taste of that water up there on the Holy Road. The Sweetwater, it was.”

“Lord! And so cold it would set a man’s teeth on edge just to drink it.”

“For just a cup of that now. Just one cup.”

“We’ve turned about, Jonah,” Shad said in that confiding way of his. “I think Custer figures he’s not going to find any Injuns this trip out after all.”

He nodded, blowing steam from the surface of his coffee, not relishing the hot liquid here after another scorching and dust-filled fifteen-hour day in the saddle. Jonah scratched at a saddle gall, the inside of his thighs chafed and raw from the nonstop sweat and rubbing of the past three weeks in the saddle crossing the high plains.

“Some of the others, they’ve started to call Custer Old Iron-Ass.”

Sweete glanced at some of the other scouts gathered about the evening fire. Hickok settled, knocking dust from the short leather leggings he had tied over the tops of his boots, stretching from knee to ankle.

“I heard that name too, and another. Some of them boys in Custer’s outfit starting to call him Horse-Killer.”

“He keeps up this pace, chasing smoke on the wind, there soon won’t be many horses able to go on. And if it ain’t horses Custer will kill on this march through hell,” Jonah grumbled, “it just might be the rest of us.”

29

June 24, 1867

T
HE SKY ABOVE
Jonah Hook hung suspended in that moment when night is as yet undecided in giving itself to day ….

—a rifle cracked the still, cool air along the Arikara Fork.

Spencer carbine, he thought as he kicked his way from his sweat-dampened blankets.

“All out!
All out!”

Men were shouting at one another. Most ran for the horse herd as the screeching war cries suddenly on the horizon drew closer to the near edge of camp with the thunder of hundreds upon hundreds of hooves.

“They’re after the horses!” hollered Shad Sweete.

Hickok was among them, both guns out, swirling darkly in the gray light. “Look lively, boys!”

Behind the handful of civilian scouts, soldiers came running from their bivouac like maddened ants driven from their hill. Yelling, confused, frightened. It was Pea Ridge and Corinth again—and Jonah remembered how the yelling gave a man a sense of courage, even if he didn’t feel particularly brave right at the moment. At least with all the hollering, a man wasn’t all that aware of fear boiling up inside him.

Then he was back on the high plains, blinking away the foggy mist of the hardwood forests. Here … damn!

More rifle shots. A bullet sang over his head. A second past his ear as Hook followed the rest into the murky darkness along the riverbank, flanking the horse herd.

“They’re in the river!” someone shouted.

To the man, the civilian scouts all stopped on the grassy sand of the riverbank and shouldered their weapons, firing at random, aiming for the inky forms looming out of the murky predawn darkness. The carbines punctuated that gray, ghostly light with orange spurts of muzzle flame. Behind him rattled more carbine fire as half a hundred soldiers appeared at the top of the bank.

In the span of less time than it would take Jonah to tell the story across those years still in the womb, the coming morning was smudged with gun smoke and noise, men crying out to one another as they fired into the hundreds of warriors like disembodied shadows, splashing out of the river, up the far bank, and into the skimpy brush and timber. In a matter of heartbeats, they were gone, become part of the plum brush and swamp-willow and the few stunted cotton-woods across the fork.

“They get anything?” Hickok sang out, easing off in the direction of camp.

“Half a dozen!” a voice came back from the dark. “No more’n that.”

“Hickok!”

The scouts whirled, each one recognizing that high-pitched call from the expedition commander.

“General Custer—over here!”

The soldier came out of the darkness, dressed only in stockings and a red flannel night robe. His long, shoulder-length curls were yet to be brushed for the day, rumpled from sleep. “I hear you say the hostiles got some of our horses?”

Hickok threw a finger over his shoulder. “One of your pickets said they ran off with half a dozen.”

“Blast it!” He whirled, calling out into the darkness. “Elliott—you, Yates, and Tom—double-time!”

The officers came among the civilian scouts in a matter of seconds, every one of them breathing heavily, while Custer had already purchased his second wind.

“Hickok, you and Sweete find out who that bunch is—who they belong to.”

Sweete glanced at Hickok in the growing gray light. “I’ll put my money on them being Lakota … er, Sioux, General.”

Custer wagged his head. “Your gambling spirit is admirable, Mr. Sweete. But I want to know for certain. Now—find out!”

“Let’s go see if we can get them to talk with us, Shad,” Hickok said, waving his arm.

“You stay put, Jonah,” Sweete said, a hand on Hook’s shoulder. “And keep your head down.”

In a matter of moments the pair returned to the spot, this time on horseback, inching past the soldiers and urging their mounts into the shallow river. They crossed, slowly—stopping on the far side, their horses standing at the edge of the sluggish river. Jonah could hear muted talk, not sure if the two riders were talking between themselves, or with one of the would-be horse thieves concealed on the far bank. Then, ever so slowly, the two scouts reined about and made their way back across the water.

“You t-talked with them?” Custer asked, excited.

“I told you they was Sioux, General,” Shad said.

“Whose Sioux?”

“I figure we’ll find out when you got your britches on,” Sweete replied.

Custer glanced down at his red robe.

“You make a fine red target of yourself, General.” Hook joined the group. “Parading up and down, here on this side of the river. All them Sioux over there know you as Long Hair. Any one of them bucks would love to place a bullet somewhere between your gullet and your gizzard.”

“Major Elliott,” Custer rasped, still glaring at the scout who spoke with the drawl, “you’re in charge until I return in uniform. See that nothing changes here until I get back.”

The general was fingering the top button into the hole in his blouse as he strode back minutes later.

“Now tell me what these Sioux plan on doing, Sweete. Do they want a fight of it?”

Hickok shook his head and took a step forward. “Appears they wanna talk—for now.”

“A parley, is it?” Custer replied. “They’ve seen they can’t whip us, can’t run off our stock.”

“They want the soldier chief and only six of his men,” Sweete explained.

“Take me, Autie!” Tom Custer addressed his brother by the family’s intimate name for the eldest brother.

“No, you and Elliott and Yates will wait here. If there’s treachery afoot—I won’t have us all wiped out.”

“Dammit, when will you gimme a chance—”

“Tom, you are a soldier above all, and you will learn to do as I order. Like every other man in this regiment must do.” Custer turned to the gathering of soldiers on that streamside slope, quickly finding his bugler and selecting three other enlisted. “You men will follow me.”

“You want us come along to translate for you, General?” Sweete asked, with a thumb indicating Jonah Hook.

“He know Sioux as well as you?” Custer asked, eyeing the ex-Confederate.

“I don’t know it all that good, General—but I do know the only way he will learn is by hearing it spoke and talking it himself.”

“All right. We’ll take pistols,” Custer advised the group. “But unbelt them, and stuff the weapon beneath your tunics, men. Have them ready in the event of something underhanded.”

He turned to his officers. “Major Elliott, you and Captain Yates will see that the men are deployed in the willows, up and down the streambank. If there is any treachery, we’ll blow the bugle from the far side.”

“And we come riding!” Tom Custer answered enthusiastically.

“You understand that, soldier?” the lieutenant colonel asked of his bugler. “At the first sign of trouble, turn and blow your trumpet.”

“Yessir.”

“If you and Mr. Hook are ready, Sweete—let’s go parley with this bunch.”

By the time Custer’s delegation was at the edge of the water to welcome a half dozen warriors wading across the stream, the sun had burst full and yellow as an egg yolk at the edge of the eastern plain. The air stirred with sudden new life as insects took to the wing, and the water beneath their horses’ hooves shimmered like liquid gold in the breaking light of jeweled morn.

“Pawnee Killer,” Sweete whispered to the officer beside him.

Custer said, “I recognize him. Back at McPherson—he told me what good friends he was to the white man.”

“He tell you how honest he was—and how he never lied to a soldier?”

“I believe I remember him saying something like that.”

“Then he was lying to you,” Sweete replied. “Watch his oily tongue, General. The sonofabitch opens his mouth, he’s lying. White or red—his kind of snake will cheat their own mother.”

“Hau!”
came the greeting from the warrior at the center of the six bare-chested Brule when they entered the stream astride their multicolored ponies.

“How!” Custer replied.

“C’mon, General.” Sweete nudged his horse into motion. “Let’s go be sociable in the middle of the river.”

As the soldiers came up and halted, the warriors raised their arms in greeting, then presented their hands.

“They wanna shake, General—but I suggest you don’t go any closer than where you sit now.”

“All right,” Custer answered, making it plain to the warriors that his right hand was going to remain on the butt of his pistol. “Let’s see what Pawnee Killer has to say for himself—coming to steal my horses when he said he was my friend back at McPherson.”

Sweete flicked his eyes at Hook. “Get your hands limbered up, Jonah. You need to practice your sign as much as I need practice on my Lakota.”

When he had the chief’s answer, he told Custer, “Pawnee Killer says he’ll forgive you for getting lost and crossing his hunting ground, General. Forgive you for spoiling his pony raid.”

“He will …” Custer cleared his throat, drew himself up. “Tell Pawnee Killer that among my people we punish thieves and murderers. If any live among his people—they are the ones should be afraid for their lives.”

“He says his people are not thieves and they don’t murder white men. And he takes shame that you think with his warriors there are some with bad hearts for the white man.”

Custer snorted quickly. “What’s he take us for, Sweete? The snake just about ran off with half our herd an hour ago.”

“Claims he didn’t know it was you, Long Hair. Says his band will mosey on now—no hard feelings.”

“They want to pull out? Just like that?” Custer asked.

As Sweete started to reply, a young warrior brandishing a war club in his left hand and an old rifle in his right appeared on the far bank from the plum brush. Without hesitation, the warrior urged his pony into the stream, sending diamond drops into the golden air as he splashed noisily toward the conference.

“Hau!”
shouted the newcomer as he came to a halt, shaking his weapons at the white men.

“Tell Pawnee Killer I’m growing angry!” Custer demanded, watching the far bank, hearing the brush rustle. “Now more warriors are coming when he guaranteed six only.”