Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (38 page)

Something over an hour had crawled past since the Sioux and Cheyenne had driven the cavalry back from the river’s edge and up that dusty slope. Gall was growing impatient. Along with Crow King, Iron Dog, and Big Road, he decided this popping their heads up to shoot at the soldiers was no smarter than suicide.

There is a better way, a safer way to fire into these soldiers clustered in tiny groups near the hill.

As word spread through the entrenched Sioux positions, the warriors brought out their bows in force at long last—and a storm of iron-tipped arrows began to rain death upon the troopers. While a warrior had to expose himself to fire his gun simply because a bullet travels in a straight path, an arrow could be sent into the sky in a graceful arc, whistling down to pierce horse or man alike.

Sergeant George Finckle lay his body over Custer’s once more, protecting it from the shafts of darkness flittering down across the sun, falling from the sky in waves of iron-tipped hail. He watched others mount up behind Smith and Yates, fighting their horses, sprinting north if they had control.

“Get him loaded fast!” Tom Custer bellowed, dodging the red hail.

Arrows clattered into saddle gear and dead horses. Battering gear and piercing horses.
God, they make a racket!
Finckle thought as he knelt over the general.
Damn, he’s out again.

George looked around. Dr. Lord worked on a soldier
with a shaft all the way through the back of his neck. The man was drowning in his own blood, legs thrashing just the way Finckle remembered the chickens thrashing about the yard back home. Spraying bright hot blood just like this.

Jeezuz! A horse sounds just like a man screaming when it goes down, dying.

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.

He must want to be the last to ride outta here
, Finckle considered.
He’s staying till we get the general up on his horse. He’d not dare leave his brother’s side.

“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!”

I
N
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.

It’s just a little pain
, he told himself.
Hurts only when I try to run.

Bouyer laughed wildly, wickedly at that.
Only when I try to run! That’s funny for a man to think of—now—isn’t it?

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.

Perhaps these two boys can make it out … spread the word of what happened in this place.

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.

Smack, smack
. The dull, wet thud of lead slamming into the lifeless white-soldier flesh—

“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 …”

“No!”

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.

Probably running north
, Bouyer brooded darkly, cursing Custer.

“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.”

Without a word of reply, nothing more than a grave, watery look in his eye to betray his unspoken love for this Mitch Bouyer, Curley leaned over and hugged the aging half-breed. With that embrace he turned to leave his brother-in-law.

In all the maddening, swirling confusion, Curley’s pony had been driven off by some Cheyenne scaring away the horses from Calhoun’s position. As the young scout twisted and turned, wondering how to flee without his pony, a Cheyenne warrior began a ride up the hill toward the troops breaking loose from the end of Calhoun’s hill. A sudden volley of carbine fire from the hilltop blew that young warrior into glory.

Curley was on his feet before the Cheyenne even smacked the ground.

Dashing through tall grass and around silver sage, the young Crow scout raced down the slope after that riderless Cheyenne pony. Bullets kicked up spouts of dirt near his heels. Arrows hissed past his bear-greased pompadour. With one desperate lupge Curley grabbed for the end of the rawhide lariat looped round the mustang’s neck and held on for all he was worth, jerking the animal around, stopping it from running off.

Curley lay in the tall grass, catching his breath. Just moments ago he had discarded his dirty carbine because it had jammed. Tearing the army cartridge belt from his waist, Curley belly-crawled back uphill toward the dead
Cheyenne, poking his head up every now and then from the sage to check his bearings.

Making it to the crumpled warrior’s body, Curley took the old Winchester ’73 and the Cheyenne’s half-empty belt of cartridges. Better this than nothing, and those cavalry carbines were as close to nothing as a man could get.

He pulled in the rawhide lariat tied to the pony until the animal grazed almost directly above him. Lucky that the Sioux could not pick him out through the dust and smoke … probably thinking the pony was merely grazing on the field of battle.

Curley glanced to the south and east. Unless he moved now, the end of the ridge would be surrounded. Hundreds upon hundreds swept up the Medicine Tail like maddened ants. He had to go now!

With one swift, smooth leap, the young Crow scout sailed onto the animal’s back from the tall grass. He twisted the rawhide rein round one hand, urging the animal up and over the spine of the ridge while Cheyenne warriors howled in anger and utter dismay at the Sparrowhawk’s escape aboard one of their own ponies.

“White-Man-Runs-Him!” Bouyer shouted in Crow as many soldiers turned to watch Curley gallop over the top of Calhoun’s hill, through the soldiers and warriors and into the valley beyond.

“It is your turn, White-Man. Take one of the army horses that looks fresh enough to run. You have done all that you said you would do when No Hip hired you. I will tell your people in the land beyond how brave you are, but you must go back to the pack train now. Save yourself to tell this story. We are all dead men now.”

White-Man nodded, a trace of confusion on his young face. He began to rise and dart away but was back in the next instant, grabbing Bouyer’s collar, dragging him uphill toward the soldiers preparing to retreat north along the ridge.

“No!” Mitch barked, twisting painfully against the bullet hole gaping in his gut, a bubble of intestine protruding, puffy and purple. “I am done for. I go now to meet my people. Leave me to die here on this spot!”

Gently, almost as if Bouyer were a baby, White-Man lowered the half-breed Sioux down among the tall grass and touched Bouyer’s hand where it lay drenched in blood oozing from the belly wound.

“Your people are my people now, Uncle,” he told Bouyer. “I will see you again one day, in a valley not far from here. Remember this now, the journey you go on will not take long. The trail is easier than any trail you have ridden before. All your friends are there. Mother and father too. I will see you in that valley one day, brave one.”

Then White-Man was darting uphill in a rooster crouch, heading for some horses held together by a grim bunch of recruits hunkered near Tom Custer’s command. From what Bouyer could see over his shoulder through the swirling dust, the Crow scout fast-talked one of the recruits out of a horse and leapt aboard just as George Yates hollered out a warning.

Tom Custer whirled, yanking up his service revolver. Down the end of the muzzle he aimed at the scout’s broad back but never pulled the trigger as the rider disappeared into the smoke and dust, galloping east as fast as the army horse could carry him.