Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (19 page)

Earlier that evening he had fed the two women at his private table. Eating as though they hadn’t been fed for days, both had devoured every scrap of turkey and venison set before them. Afterward they had sipped steaming coffee while distant chants of the Osage scouts drifted up from the riverside victory dance.

Using a candle lantern, Custer had led the women back to the compound where the captives were kept under guard. Mahwissa disappeared toward the closest of those little fires surrounded day and night by women and children.
Instead of following, Monaseetah had turned, gazing fully into the very pit of him. She signed to him that she wanted to sleep in the lodge he had brought from the camp of Black Kettle. He asked her why she would prefer to sleep alone in that cold lodge when she could stay here to sleep warm among her people. Monaseetah let him know she couldn’t be warm in those tents of the white man. No fire pit. Better to sleep in the lodge, where she could build a fire that would warm the frost from the robes before she slipped between them to sleep.

“I have no blankets or robes in the lodge,” he signed.

Monaseetah had gone off toward the prisoner tents. In a few minutes she trudged back, dragging behind her a bulky pair of buffalo robes encircling four army blankets. These, she signed, along with the red wool blanket she had worn from the battlefield—they would keep her warm on the coldest winter night.

Dragging firewood to the lodge, Custer realized he felt about as nervous as he had that first day at Bull Run seven long years ago. Green—right out of the Academy. In that awkward silence, she intimidated him from across the first dancing flames with those sinful black-cherry eyes of hers.

He had struggled to his feet and hobbled stiff-legged to the doorway. She caught him before he could duck out.

For the first time she reached out to touch the back of his hand. A shudder coursed through him like a bolt of spring lightning flaring across the prairie. She slipped her fingers into his palm, nestling his hand gently between the two of hers, then brought it to her cheek. Monaseetah closed her eyes, kissing the soldier’s freckled, callused hand. Repeatedly she murmured the word in Cheyenne before realizing he didn’t understand her tongue.

She made the sign: “Husband.”

Custer gulped. He listened to dry limbs crackling in the fire pit. Above it all, he heard the labored racing of his eager heart pounding in his ears.

At last he signed that he could not be her husband. “I have a wife. Among the white men, one wife is all a man must have.”

“Why is your wife not here? Among the Cheyenne, a woman journeys with her husband.”

“When I fight, my wife does not travel at my side.” He refused to look into those dangerous eyes of hers again.

“Yellow Hair, I am your wife for here … for now.”

It was all he could do to shut his eyes and grope his way blindly out the door into the numbing, forgiving darkness. He had cursed himself—because George Armstrong Custer had never retreated.

Never had he confronted an enemy so powerful. An enemy who wielded such a magnetic hold on him. Except Libbie.

Sweet Libbie …

Lord! Why am I standing here again, staring at the dying red coals in her fire pit … their crimson carcasses writhing like coupling lovers in this warm, musky darkness. Why did I return?

Sweet love of heaven, how he had tossed in his blankets! the delicious, exquisite temptation of Monaseetah’s taunting him. Its fire smoldered along his limbs. He struggled to put her out of his mind, to escape into the numbing anesthesia of sleep.

But Custer had been unable to forget her. His mind conjured a vision of her with the gentle kiss of slumber caressing her copper face. So he arose and went to her lodge again.

In the aching silence of the lodge, he heard her rustle in her sleeping robes at the back of the lodge. Custer realized he wasn’t dreaming anymore.

Her coppery, fire-lit skin slid free of the black-brown fur. Custer’s nostrils flared involuntarily. He smelled her presence even before he saw the woman slipping toward him.

Now Monaseetah came into him, naked. Stripped of everything but her newfound desire for the soldier chief.

She tugged aside the flaps of his buffalo coat, slipping inside its warmth with him, snaking her arms around his waist. She buried her cheek against the warm, itchy wool of his blue tunic and sighed.

Custer shuddered involuntarily, more frightened than he had ever been—
scared of a seventeen-year-old captive Cheyenne girl!

Custer found his hands at her shoulders, his fingers moving along her soft, fragrant flesh burnished bright copper in the firelight. He pulled her to him hungrily. Monaseetah’s firmness met him, startling him, her breasts exciting him all the more.

Placing his hands on either side of her hips, Custer caressed their round, sensual fullness. With the appetite of an animal caged too long, Custer drank in the scent of her hair. His fingers traced the firm roundness of her belly.

Monaseetah moaned, whimpering with a primitive animal cry captive within her.

Suddenly, as if shot, Custer jerked back.

She … she’s with child!
He pushed her back and whirled away.
What the devil am I doing? Thank God I was able to stop myself in time.…
Before he had succumbed to the crazed animal he knew all too well prowled the nether
regions of his soul. He could yet sense the creature howling in the pit of his being, growing hungrier still.

She drew away, to her bed at the back of the lodge. Monaseetah drew the favored red blanket about her shoulders, covering her slim body.

She called his name.
“Hiestzi?”

He could not face her.

“Hiestzi?”

He took a step toward her and gazed down at her copper face. “I don’t know Cheyenne,” he replied helplessly. Then remembered to form the words in sign.

She chose her words carefully, hands dancing before her, symbols coming together that allowed her to talk with the man who had captured her heart.

“Hiestzi
is your Cheyenne name—Yellow Hair. I had hoped you came here tonight to become my husband in the way of the Cheyenne.”

“No!” he shouted, then used his hands. “I am not your husband. I have a wife waiting for me many miles away.”

“But you came here to sleep in my robes tonight—”

Custer shook his head, turned away. To look upon her was to cause madness, to invite a consuming passion that knew no satisfaction. He shuddered with the lie of it in his soul even as the words formed in his hands.

“I do not want another man’s wife. You carry another man’s child.”

Tears gathered in her eyes, tumbling uncontrollably, cascading down her cheeks.

“I have no husband, Soldier Chief. This one who forced his bitter seed into my belly—a cruel man.”

“Monaseetah, I told you—I have a wife.”

“This wife of yours, does she lie with you?” She pressed
her warmth against him. “Does she give you pleasure and happiness?”

The musk of her invaded every blood vessel within him. Custer turned away, staring at that black hole of the doorway. Then he looked again at the girl.

She sat up and the robe fell away from her dusky breasts. Her eyes as warm as coals, she signed to him. “I am a part of you now,
Hiestzi.
I am that wilderness you carry inside you now.”

As suddenly as she had signed her words, he was gone.

Custer ducked his head, savagely tearing aside the door flap, exploding from the lodge. He was several steps away from that dark cone punching a coal-black hole in the starry sky before he drew another frosty breath.

“Damn her!” he rasped.

Stomping off toward his Sibley tent, Custer paused a moment by that fire the headquarters guard fed through the night. The warmth worked at that icy knot clabbering in his belly.

“General.” The orderly snapped a salute as he slapped his Springfield carbine alongside his leg.

“Goodnight, Corporal.” Custer tore through his own tent flaps.

He lay upon his cot. No one to see the tears of shame on his face.

There’s something to the Indian girl I don’t yet understand. Hers is not the trick of some painted-wagon, side-show, snake-oil drummer. Something more to her than even that mystical cloak the Cheyenne use to explain everything unexplained—medicine.

That’s exactly what he needed, all right. Medicine. Something to quench the burning, put out this smoldering fire threatening to flare.

Custer nestled a warm place for his cheek, praying for sleep to overtake him quickly. Blessed, peaceful sleep. Just a little sleep—that would be medicine enough right now.

Since the Seventh’s return to Camp Supply four days ago, Sheridan had grown increasingly disappointed by the progress of his winter campaign. Where he had hoped to attack large concentrations of guilty hostiles, Custer had instead defeated a small village of Black Kettle’s Cheyennes. Instead of that blow putting an end to the nagging Indian problems on the southern plains, reality showed him Custer had dealt nothing more than the first blow in what could become a long, drawn-out, and very bloody conflict.

Winter wrapped the prairie in white and cold. If Sheridan were to deal with the tribes still at large, he would have to do it soon. In the space of a few weeks spring would begin its relentless creep out of the south. By then the tribes and their grass-fattened ponies would again have the strength to move about quickly. By then the warriors would be out and raiding once more.

If he was to continue his fight, Sheridan understood, it must be now, deep in the heart of winter. And he must continue the fight—whirling, whirling as he had done in the Shenandoah valley, using Custer as his firebrand—until the hostiles cry “surrender” and turn back to their reservations.

“General?”

Sheridan turned on his camp stool, finding the young lieutenant colonel at the open door of his Sibley.

“Custer! Please, come in! Here—sit there on the bed. Best seat in the house.”

Custer settled as Sheridan stuffed more wood into the sheet-iron stove at the rear of his personal quarters.

“Do you know what day this is, Custer?”

“Why, it’s Saturday.”

Sheridan’s dark, brooding, Irish eyes lit up as he smiled. “I know that, Armstrong. What’s the date?”

“December fifth.”

“Damned straight, it is!” he roared as he slapped a knee. “It’s your birthday, for God’s sake! So I have a birthday present for you.”

“I didn’t know you knew … remembered my birthday.”

“Damn it, Armstrong, I’ve always known when your birthday is—and this time, I have something very special to give you.”

“Yessir?”

“While there’s nothing to wrap and place in your hand, my gift to you is something nonetheless very tangible.”

“I don’t follow you …”

“And I hadn’t expected you to understand me.” Sheridan turned fully around to face his friend with a smile. “Simple. We’re going after the rest of the hostiles. Happy birthday, Custer!”

“Thank you,” Custer replied, a little hollowly. “When are
we
leaving?”

“Monday, day after tomorrow.” Sheridan shuffled through some papers and maps on his field desk. “Your Lieutenant Bell, his quartermaster corps, and teamsters are about done preparing the wagons and supplies. I’ve planned to be out thirty days. That should be enough time to locate and crush the hostiles.”

“Thirty days?”

“That’s right,” Sheridan replied, searching Custer’s eyes carefully. “What’s on your mind?”

“Just the weather, sir. Dead of winter. The certainty of much more snow. What may seem like it could take only thirty days … well, might last more than sixty.”

“I see,” Sheridan replied quietly, a little steam slowly whistling out of his enthusiasm.

Scratching at his beard, the bantam Irishman rose stiffly and paced to the tent flaps, peering out at the bustling camp.

“Grant and Sherman want me back behind that goddamned desk again. So, like other battles we’ve fought together, we’ll just have to see what we can accomplish in those thirty days.”

Sheridan turned, seeing concern cross Custer’s face.

“You let me go, I’ll get the job done for you with—”

“I covered your ass in the Shenandoah with Merritt and others, Armstrong,” Sheridan confided, leaning forward. “And I did it again last month with Sully before you marched on the Washita. We make a good team, so don’t fight the bit on me now.”

Custer flinched at the scolding. He nodded. “What instructions do you have for me, General?”

“Come back tonight, and we’ll discuss how we’ll mop this up.”

“General?”

“Yes, Armstrong?”

“What would you have done—personally—following the Washita engagement?”

Sheridan glanced into those ice blue eyes and found he could not hold Custer’s hard gaze for long at all. “I suppose most would have done exactly as you did. Protect your victory, protect your men. Give priority to your wounded
and the captives. You did the best you could under the circumstances.”

“Thank you, sir.” That helped a little.

“It’s not my place to second guess you. You did only what you believed was right at the time.”

After a full evening of final planning with Sheridan, Custer hurried back to the warmth of his Sibley late Sunday. At dawn his troops would be miles south, marching on the Washita Valley once more. He banked the fire in his stove for the night, trying to push Monaseetah from his mind. Try as he might, still she troubled someplace deep in the core of him.

Custer stood by the sheet-iron stove unbuttoning his tunic, letting it hang open a moment while he plopped down on his bed to struggle with his cold, wet boots. When the boots relented, he slipped his feet inside a pair of buffalo-hide moccasins she had made for him.

A quiet, unsure rattle at his front flap startled him. Custer flared, angry that he had not tied the flaps earlier so he could tell the soldier to go on his way, at this late hour.

Custer angrily stomped to the door. Ready to tear some soldier’s head off, he flung wide the two flaps.

“Monaseetah.”

Her name was all he could say. In a whispered rush of wild surprise caught high in his throat.