Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (17 page)

“I’m coming, Hinkle. Damned boots rubbed a blister on the back of my heel. Governor Crawford showed no mercy on us Kansas boys.”

“Lucky any of us survived that snowstorm. C’mon! I hear this General Custer puts on a show no man can forget! Pick up your feet. I don’t wanna miss a minute of his ride-through. Custer’s the man who not only whipped J.E.B. Stuart’s ‘Invincibles’ and turned the tide at Gettysburg—but he’s the one who forced ol’ Robert E. Lee himself to throw in the towel at Appomattox!”

Beneath a glorious winter sun warming this first day of December, the air more vibrant than it had been for weeks, General Philip H. Sheridan formed the men to review Custer’s regiment. Flanked by his officer staff and joined by every infantryman not otherwise on duty in camp, along with the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteers who had failed to march through the snows of Indian Territory in time to join with the Seventh Cavalry before the attack on Black Kettle’s camp, Sheridan awaited his dashing young protégé.

“Custer won’t dare disappoint any audience, Perkins,” Hinkle said. “Someday you’ll tell all your grandchildren
about this day—seeing the Boy General hisself marching home in victory after his Seventh Cavalry crushed the Cheyenne nation!”

First into view rode the Osage trackers, led by Little Beaver, the aging, stoic warrior who had painted himself for this grand march. Right behind him pranced Hard Rope and the younger trackers, each singing his personal war chant—songs of victory and glory, accompanied by frequent whoops of joy punctuated by firing their army-issued rifles into the air.

Up and down the column galloped a young warrior named Trotter who brandished aloft the long scalp of a Cheyenne he flaunted for all to see—a scalp he bragged belonged to none other than Chief Black Kettle himself. Other Osage trackers waved captured lances they had decorated with dangling, blood-encrusted Cheyenne scalps. Some beat on small hand drums while others shook their bows and rawhide shields, all astride their prancing mounts, every mane and tail resplendent with red and blue, green and white strips cut from captured Cheyenne blankets.

Directly behind these joyful warriors who had just secured a victory over a longtime enemy rode Lieutenant Silas Pepoon’s civilian scouts. Ben Clark and Jack Corbin rode in tandem, Moses Milner and courier Ed Guerrier on their heels. Only Milner had refused to clean up for Custer’s show. His well-matted beard still bore bits of fluff and lint, scraps of many a meal. On his head the long-tangled hair was in much the same disheveled condition, and everything about him remained coated with a well-cured patina of red dirt and mud.

Right behind the scouts marched the regimental band,
piping that airy, raucous theme song of the Seventh Cavalry, “GarryOwen”:

Let no man mistake that jaunty Irish quickstep now firmly identified with the gallant Seventh Cavalry and its dashing young commander. A hundred years before, this regimental march was named for “Garry Owen,” Gaelic for Owen’s Garden, a suburb of Limerick, Ireland, which throughout the eighteenth century was noted for its rowdy melees of drunken soldiers. While the merry tune had been associated with such groups as the Queen’s Fifth Royal Lancers, it was later adopted by some units of the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.

But by 1868 this rousing, heart-pounding Irish melody
firmly belonged to one regiment and one regiment only—the Seventh Cavalry.

To the stirring call of trumpets, Custer pranced into view astride Dandy, curried and gleaming for the triumphant entry. Custer’s buckskin leggings had been brushed clean for the occasion, their long fringe fluttering on the breeze, topped by a hip-length sack coat trimmed with fur collar and cuffs. He had combed his red-blond beard, letting his shoulder-length curls stream over his collar. Atop his head sat a pillbox otter cap.

“What a figure he cuts, Hinkle!”

“I’d say! See how firmly he’s in control of that sidestepping stallion, waving to spectators like they was paying him court!”

“That they are, Hinkle!”

Directly behind Custer plodded the captives. He had expressly wanted the Cheyenne to witness the grand spectacle first-hand, to experience how the soldiers revered their Boy General. Scores of widows and orphans trudged past Sheridan, their dark eyes averted, many hiding their faces. They feared torture and death now that they had come to the pony soldier camp. Some older women keened their death songs.

The enlisted men of the Seventh Cavalry followed the prisoners, while behind them rumbled the wagons of Lieutenant Bell’s quartermaster corps. In some of the slat-beds rode the wide-eyed and fearful wounded captives. In another lay Custer’s resplendent Cheyenne lodge. As the last wagons rattled into view, Custer pranced around in a tight circle, then nudged Dandy forward with his golden spurs.

“General Sheridan!” Custer called out, saluting.

“Custer, my friend!” Sheridan saluted, then presented a bare hand to the young officer. “How glad I am to see you.”

“No more happy than I!”

“You’ve done it, by damn! Showed ’em all, haven’t you?”

“I hope now to get on with my career—what needs doing here on the plains.”

“There’s not a goddamned thing to stop us now, Custer. You’ve seen to that with this stunning victory. Like the Shenandoah, you haven’t let me down!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Come, Armstrong. We’ll have some refreshments at my headquarters. You can tell me all there is to tell of routing these bloodthirsty savages!”

“It’d be my honor. I’ll return in a moment after I’ve passed the orders for encampment.”

“Dismissed!” Sheridan saluted again, that Irish smile bright within his dark beard.

Custer answered the salute, then brought Dandy around smartly with the gold spurs.

“I won’t dare miss our victory celebration, sir!”

“C
LARK!
Glad I found you!”

Ben Clark turned to see Captain Frederick W. Benteen headed his way. “Benteen, isn’t it?”

“Right!” The young, bearded officer presented his hand. “Didn’t know you’d remember me from the Washita.”

“Yeah, I remember,” he replied, suspicions aroused. He went back to sharpening the knife on a whetstone. “What can I do for you?”

Benteen settled on a stump near the scout. “I figured you’d be the man for what I had in mind. Got a good head on your shoulders—a memory as sharp as that blade you’re honing.”

“Sounds like I’m the family turkey getting fattened for the holiday feast, Captain. You said you’d found me a’purpose for something. Care to spit it out and stop knocking ’round in the brush so much?”

“I’ve something of great import to ask of you, Ben,” the young captain began with a rush. His eyes slid this way,
then that. “I really think it best we talk somewhere a little more private. This spot’s a bit too public.”

Clark measured the man. “So tell me, why something private?”

“Too many ears in an army camp. How quickly I learned that during the Rebellion down south.”

“You were regular army?”

“Breveted a lieutenant colonel. Proud of every battle and the action of those men assigned to me.” Benteen hunched forward to whisper. “That’s precisely the reason I find myself talking with you.”

“I was a Jayhawker myself. Odd to think a Missouri boy like you’d go over to the Union cause. Me, I had a Cheyenne wife at the time. Did what I could for the Union army, what was a decent employer—but I get the feeling none of that’s what you’ve come to hear.”

Benteen warily cast his eyes around. “I’ve watched you and have come to believe you’re a man to trust. I want you to keep what we say here in confidence. Can I trust you, Ben?”

For the first time Clark really studied Benteen. “I suppose if it’s all that serious, Captain—” he spit a brown stream from the side of his cheek, “then it’s something worth the telling, ain’t it?”

“More of a question, Ben.” Benteen slid a little closer. “What do you know about Major Joel Elliott’s men in Black Kettle’s camp on the morning of the battle? Where they were, what they were doing, any of it.”

“Suppose I’d know about as much as the next man.” Clark knit his brow, scowling at Benteen.

“Did you know of Custer’s refusal to send Elliott any aid when he first learned of the major’s predicament?”

“Whoa! Hold on a goddamned minute! Just what the Katy hell are you after here, Captain?”

“Looking for corroboration for the many reports concerning Custer’s refusal to offer Elliott assistance. Not only that, but Custer failed to determine what became of Elliott’s squad later in the day.” He began counting off on his rough, callused fingers. “Before it got too dark. Before leaving the battlefield. Before leaving the damned Washita Valley itself. Who in hell’s creation knows right now what happened to Elliott’s men except—”

“All wiped out,” Clark said calmly. “Down to the last man.”

“How can you be so—”

“If they wasn’t dead when the general pulled out of that valley, they sure as hell are now.”

Benteen straightened. “Precisely the information I want to hear from someone who’d know—”

“Why the hell you want me to tell you anything? What good’s it going to do you? Or the general himself? Most of all, I can’t help but wonder what the hell good’s it going to do Elliott and his soldiers.”

“Precisely, Clark! If we see that something’s done about Custer, we can prevent this sort of sad affair from repeating itself. We want to be sure Custer never orders another field officer into battle, then abandons the man.”

Clark eyed Benteen for a long moment, sizing the captain up as a cranky man who carried around every bit as big an ego as Custer. “So, tell me what you plan on doing to make things any different for the boys in blue.”

“If the requisite testimony’s there, we can bring Custer up on charges on this Elliott matter. Beginning with the
abandonment of his men under fire, all the way to his failure to properly search the area for survivors.”

“You want to file charges against the general?”

“Yes. If the investigation leads to charges. We’ll need affidavits from witnesses like you.”

“Me! Who else you got to testify?”

“Right now we have a few soldiers from Godfrey’s company who heard some of the scattered rifle fire from across the river and were present when Godfrey told Custer about—”

“All right. You got Godfrey. Who else?”

“Uh … no, Ben. You got the wrong impression there. I can’t convince Godfrey to testify against Custer, nor prefer any charges.”

“Who else? You’ve got some other officers.”

Benteen swallowed hard. He felt his one chance slipping through his fingers, fluttering just out of reach. Hoping Clark would help him cement together a case. “Since we can’t get an officer to prefer charges against Custer, we were hoping to find one of you civilian scouts—”

“Can’t find an officer to prefer charges!” Clark squeaked. “Captain, it sure sounds like you’ve got yourself a real bitch of a problem here—and Ben Clark ain’t the man to help you out of it.”

“But Custer could’ve ordered—”

“My God, Benteen! Haven’t you realized this Injun fighting ain’t at all like chasing Rebs? Rebs fought you like white men. They didn’t butcher and maim—hack off your head and arms, legs, even worse. The sun was going down on your regiment. Custer sat in the middle of a thousand warriors, all madder’n a bunch of riled-up hornets with what they saw done to Black Kettle’s camp—not to mention the
pony herd. Ain’t a damned thing more that man could’ve done one way or another would’ve changed things for Elliott’s men.”

The young captain sighed deeply, then swiped at his dripping nose, reddened with the cold of twilight. “I take it you won’t reconsider.”

“Not a thing I got to say is going to help those men now.”

“Really figure they’re dead, don’t you?”

Clark glared flints at Benteen for a long moment. “I said it before. Doesn’t matter much anymore. Not even to Elliott and his men. If they weren’t dead before we pulled outta the Washita …”

Benteen filled in the scout’s pause. “They are now.”

“Nothing I can do help ’em now.”

“What about all the Major Elliotts or the brave troopers to come who’ll serve under Custer in the years ahead? What about them?”

Clark shook his head. “The future, Captain? Seems like that always takes care of itself—or it’ll take care of George Armstrong Custer.”

Clark dropped to his knees and threw some chunks of kindling on the fire. “I damn well won’t be around, if you want to know what I think. You boys play soldier long enough, hard enough, maybe you won’t be around long either.”

Clark plopped back down on his stump. “Truth is, I don’t like Custer any better’n you. But the way I figure it, I’ve got a job scouting for the man. If Custer doesn’t choose to listen to me, that’s his business. But I know damned well someday it’ll be his neck, providing he doesn’t start paying heed to his scouts.”

Benteen creaked to his feet, realizing the scout wasn’t about to change his mind.

“That’s just the difference between me and your soldiers, Captain. I got enough good sense to know when I should disappear over the next hill. I know Injuns. I know the country. That’s why I’m a scout—and a civilian. And I’m learning a lot about army officers, too, this goddamned winter.”