Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (6 page)

But last night. After all those years.…

Libbie pulled away, running the back of her hand under her nose, and yanked on that scarlet hunting cap he liked
her to wear. When she had a bow in the ribbon beneath her chin, right near the ever-present cameo brooch, Elizabeth finally turned to her horse, allowing John Burkman to cup his hands and boost her to the saddle.

For a long, pensive moment, she peered down at the young striker, looking all the shorter against the massive backdrop of tall George Armstrong Custer and the mountainous James Calhoun.

“Good-bye, John.” She finally scratched the words out of her dry throat, wearing a sad smile. “You’ll look after the general for me, won’t you?”

“Why, yes ma’am. I surely will.…” He wrinkled his brow at her woeful expression and was fixing to ask her why she thought her husband needed someone to look after him, but Libbie suddenly whirled away, tapping her high-buttoned boots against the army mount to speed away. She was leaving Dandy behind with her husband. He would take both Vic and Dandy to the Yellowstone.

Margaret galloped off right behind Elizabeth with a wave and a final kiss blown to Calhoun. She trotted up beside Elizabeth before reining back, both women heading east up the bank of the Little Heart River, letting their horses lope frisky and playful in the cool morning air still heavy with the remnants of last night’s thunderstorm.

Libbie couldn’t look back.

She dared not.

Custer stood with his arms hanging useless at his sides, watching her go. Wondering what to do with his big hands, he finally stuffed them into his pockets, feeling like a schoolboy detained after everyone else had headed out to the schoolyard, caught someplace he shouldn’t be. For the first time in their lives together—he sensed something different between them, something sour tasting at the back of his throat.

John Burkman watched Custer staring after Libbie, remembering that sad, somber smile Mrs. Custer had on her lovely china-doll face. For as little a time as Private Burkman had known the general, he had come to love him. And Burkman’s heart more so than his head had sworn a
fierce allegiance to George Armstrong Custer. He didn’t mind all those other soldiers jealous of his cushy assignment. They called him dog-robber, the common, derisive term applied to orderlies who cared for their superior’s personal needs. Such abuse was a small price to pay to be allowed closeness to this great and noble being.

Custer turned to Burkman, hearing the young soldier step up behind him. Calhoun drew close on Custer’s left, all three intently watching the two women ride the breast of the flowing land beneath a climbing sun.

“You know, gentlemen”—Custer boyishly stuffed his hands deeper into his leather pants pockets and hunched his shoulders up—“a good soldier really has two mistresses. Exactly as Libbie told me.”

He stared at the ground, scuffing a boot-toe into the sodden grass and kicking up some wet soil. “While he’s loyal to one mistress, the other must suffer.” Of a sudden he looked up and said, “Gentlemen! It’s nearly eight-thirty. Let’s ride for the Yellowstone!”

Turning, Libbie gazed back at the two-mile-long columns winding their way up from the valley of the Little Heart in the cool, morning breezes that would have tugged at the women’s dresses had it not been for the buckshot sewn in the hems.

As their horses blew, only then did the faint, faraway strains of “Garry Owen” reach her ears. Off to the Yellowstone and the land of the mighty Sioux. Off to whip Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

In the next heartbeat a solitary figure raced out of the long, dark columns and stopped, wheeling round on his stockinged sorrel mare to peer back at that distant knoll to the east. He pulled away from the lines of blue-clad
troopers a few yards, rising to stand like a ramrod in his stirrups, gazing back at the women on top of their rise, silhouetted against the morning sky. He was waving his hat at the end of his long arm, back and forth in long sweeps before he slapped his big charger on the rump with that cream-colored hat and raced pell-mell for the head of the march like the Devil himself was larruping at Vic’s tail.

Almost like a prayer, Libbie whispered a few lines of poetry she once memorized while a school-girl in Monroe, waiting like school-girls always had for their one true beau to gallop into their life.

As the last words fell from her trembling lips, the first rays of sunlight broke through that muslin-thin overcast, making for a strange light as fractured sunbeams spread over the long columns winding west.

With tiny, dewy particles of moisture drenching the morning air, a sudden and eerie mirage spun itself before her eyes as Libbie watched that long, blue snake poke its way toward the yawning land like a hungry abyss that opened itself to greet the Seventh. Reflected in those particles of moisture like a huge mirror stretched across the blue-gray canopy was the image of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry … marching … marching equidistant between earth and sky.

A stifled gasp caught in her throat. She put a trembling hand to her lips.

Oh, if she had only realized it before … all those years gone, years bitterly wasted. Years she had no idea would end so soon.

“What is it, Libbie?” Maggie whispered.

“Nothing,” she declared bravely, swiping at her eyes. Swallowing against the knot in her chest, Libbie watched the mirage riding half-way between earth and sky, and knew as certainly as she knew she loved Autie that it was a
premonition of some great catastrophe to befall those gallant men.

B
Y
the time the Seventh had rendezvoused on the Yellowstone with Colonel John Gibbon’s forces drawn from both Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw in Montana Territory, Custer’s troops felt as if they had marched through hell itself to arrive at the mouth of Rosebud Creek.

Besides the surprising snowstorm that kept them sitting for two days back in May, the men had also suffered through drenching spring rains and stinging hail, and more recently had blistered beneath a relentless sun interrupted each afternoon by a brief interlude of thunderstorms before sunset. It could be that way this time of year on the northern plains. Good reason for a man to keep his “rubber blanket” handy—what others called their “gum blanket”—a rubber poncho to turn the rain. Slipped over the head and measuring some four feet by six feet, it had already proved itself on this campaign.

Certain fragments of the regiment had marched off on one or the other of two long, tough scouts that convinced the expedition commanders they were narrowing the noose
around the hostiles. Now that General Alfred H. Terry’s Dakota column had joined up with Gibbon’s Montana column, everyone figured the Sioux were gathering to the south of them.

At three
P.M.
on 21 June, General Terry brought to order a conference of the high-echelon officers of his combined regiments aboard the
Far West
, the stern-wheeled river steamer anchored against the north bank of the Yellowstone River. Its pilothouse lined with thick iron boiler plate, the steamboat was fortified against a probable attack by hostiles along these western rivers. The boiler plate had been curved slightly to deflect enemy bullets, in addition to having a head-high opening in front so the wheelman would have a full view of the river ahead. The lower deck was protected by sacks of grain along with four-foot cordwood stacked on end all round the gunwales.

What had so far been a hot and sultry Wednesday appeared to offer some relief on the far horizon. Gray and purple thunderheads were building with a fury on the distant rim of the prairie as the officers crammed themselves into Captain Grant Marsh’s dining room for their war conference. Custer himself preferred standing by the door as many of Gibbon’s officers and most of Terry’s infantry commanders set fire to their cheroots, cigars, and pipes. Breathing deep of that freshening breeze slipping along the river, Terry himself eagerly awaited the afternoon’s cooling storm.

“The Commissioner of Indian Affairs claims we might see only some five hundred to eight hundred warriors, counting all of fighting age.” Terry plunged ahead with his introductory remarks as most every man settled back with a glass of trader Coleman’s whiskey.

“He’s wrong,” declared a new voice.

The room fell silent as the attention shifted toward Custer at the doorway.

“Care to tell us just how the commissioner’s figures could be so wrong, sir?”

Custer turned toward the speaker, Colonel John Gibbon. Above his bulbous nose the colonel’s dark eyes peered cold
like chips of iron. Gibbon had been Custer’s artillery instructor during his studies at West Point.

“Those agents, sir, with all due respect,” Custer began, pushing himself back into the close, smoky room from the narrow doorway, “either don’t know how to count, or they’re nothing more than liars.”

He waited for the murmurs to quiet themselves before continuing. “I prefer to think they are simply lying through their teeth to their superiors.”

“Can you substantiate that, General?” Another officer rose to confront Custer. “And why in blazes would they lie to the army about those goddamned figures?” Major James S. Brisbin, commander of Gibbon’s Second Cavalry out of Fort Ellis, was known among his army friends as Grasshopper Jim because of his oft-quick and erratic marches. He stepped near Custer. “What reason would those agents have to give us bad intelligence?”

Custer measured him a moment. “For exactly the same reason those traders become rich men on their meager salaries—sutlering for the government on hardscrabble reservations.”

“Explain yourself, Custer,” Terry demanded.

“Of course.” He stepped into the room that extended the full width of the steamboat. “If those venal traders inform their bosses in the Indian Department how few Indians they really have left on their reservations, they won’t get their normal allotments. And when that happens, the traders won’t have all those government goods they can continue to sell privately for exorbitant profits at the expense of the Indians living on those godforsaken refuges some call reservations.”

“You’re claiming those agents have been lying to us, sir?” Brisbin turned to Gibbon as he asked his question. “For the sake of padding their own pockets?”

“Nothing more complicated than that.”

The silence grew as thick as the blue smoke in the room until a slight breeze slipped through the open windows and deck doors to stir Terry’s papers on the oak table before him.

Terry rose slowly and ground the chair away from him
across the plank flooring. “Appears Custer has presented us with quite a salient dilemma here, gentlemen. A real doozy, in fact. For the moment let’s assume he’s correct—that there are more Indians flowing from the reservations than anyone really understands, in addition to those noncompliers who were already off the reservations to begin with when any counts were made.”

Stuffing the moist stub of a cigar in his mouth, Terry scooped up a handful of coffee-stained papers from the table before him. “Here is my telegram to Division HQ in Chicago last Christmas.

“Yet those orders weren’t issued until the eighteenth of January,” Gibbon noted sourly.

“That’s correct, John,” Terry replied somberly. “Plenty of time for the hostiles to acquire all the Henry repeaters they’ve wanted for ‘hunting purposes.’ But allow me to continue the progression of Custer’s point. On sixteen February I again wrote Division HQ with my own intelligence, requesting that the three companies of the Seventh Cavalry serving in the Department of the Gulf rejoin their regiment in this department.”

Terry looked up from his sheaf of papers, allowing his eyes to touch most of the officers in the room. “I believe every one among you will realize exactly why I was requesting to have every available man, horse, company, and gun made ready for this campaign. Simply because, gentlemen—we weren’t all that damned sure just what we’d be facing.”

He let that sink in for a moment before continuing. “For if the Indians who passed the winter in the Yellowstone and Powder rivers country should be found gathered in one camp, or in continuous camps, as they usually are so
gathered, they could not be attacked without great risk of defeat.”

After the embittered mumbling had passed through the assembled officers, Terry emphasized, “Fellas, I want to repeat. Such a great force of Indians could not be attacked by a flimsy force of troops without great risk.”

As the last words fell from the general’s lips, Custer noticed his commander’s eyes were on him. “The Seventh has never let you or General Sheridan down before, sir,” Custer stated. “With our full compliment of troops, we aren’t about to fail you now.”

“Exactly, Custer,” Terry said. The smile within the general’s dark beard was not lost on a man in the room.

Terry could be quite charming and amiable among his peers—looking more like a professional scholar than a military strategist. Beneath the kind blue eyes and a gently lined face, bronzed by the outdoor life to a hue of old saddle leather, resided a heart brimming with sentiment.

“I merely want all your fellow officers gathered here to understand just what I had to go through to get the Seventh Cavalry put back together for this fight. On twenty-four March I telegraphed Sheridan, asking for the three troops of the Seventh he had stationed down in Louisiana, simply because the most trustworthy scout I had on the Missouri reported not less than two thousand lodges and that the Indians were loaded down with ammunition.”