Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (20 page)

Her eyes touched him gently with their promise. Ribbons of heat stung their way across his cheeks. Like being squeezed in a vice … tightening. Her eyes held him for an instant before she slipped past him into the tent.

Determined, she had decided she would go to him, to claim the soldier chief as her own.
Hiestzi
was her husband.

Tonight she would become his woman.

With one hand Monaseetah flung her red blanket to his bed, where that it lay atop a dark buffalo robe. Only then did her eyes reach out to capture his.

“You cannot stay here,” he pleaded in a small voice. He took two steps toward her, not daring to draw any closer. What sweet poison she had become.

She came to him as Custer swept toward her, enclosing her tiny shoulders. She sobbed—
Hiestzi
embraced her at last.

The smell of her readiness swept into his nostrils. Filling them. Tingling his every nerve ending with its fire.

The last moments before every battle had always aroused the same feelings in him, exciting the same sensations: anticipation, with a generous measure of apprehension. Drawn, knowing he would succumb—yet he was suddenly positive that he stood on the brink of something he would always regret … for the rest of his life. Still, despite that lifelong remorse and possible damnation, he must have her.

She was his mate.

Custer realized he had known of its certainty from that first night at Camp Supply when she had pressed herself to him by the fire’s glow in her lodge.

As his anxious fingers raked into the long, silken hair at the back of her neck, pulling her face up toward his, Custer felt her nipples grow rigid beneath the doeskin dress clinging to her firm breasts, demanding his touch.

As his dry lips crushed hers in Monaseetah’s first kiss, Custer realized his own readiness. It strained at his trousers, yearning for escape, surging for relief within her deepest
regions. With his tongue, Custer gently forced her lips apart, then her teeth, drinking in the animal taste of her.

She shuddered beneath the savagery of his desire for her. Frightened at first, remembering a brutal husband, she quickly realized Yellow Hair had become all she had ever wanted him to be. Certain now that the animal surging for release in
Hiestzi
would free the animal in her own being. There came a heated moistening between her legs where before she had experienced only revulsion and pain. For the first time in her young life she sensed her own readiness for a man.

Monaseetah gasped, drawing away from Custer’s mouth to reach for the buckle on his belt. His lips lay panting against her ear, his breath raspy, labored. To stand here now with her, after all the years looking for the woman who could stir within him exactly this fire she had put a sulphur-head match to.

His breath caught high in his throat as she pulled open the fly to his trousers and long-handles, reaching inside for his rigid, ready flesh. Custer was certain he’d never breathe again as she hungrily kneaded his burning, swollen flesh—sending him toward a passioned, woman-hungry fury like nothing he’d ever known.

Monaseetah stopped, moved toward his bed, glancing over her shoulder at him. He stared—hypnotized and immobile—while she slowly inched up the fringed, calf-length hem of her soft doeskin dress.

She dropped the dress at her feet, then climbed atop his low prairie bed. On her hands and knees, she gazed back over her shoulder at him with a toss of her long, raven-black hair. Taunting him with all that she had to offer, taunting him to come to her the way the ponies mate.

Custer understood immediately.

He tugged at his trousers, slipping suspenders off his shoulders, hopping across the warm buffalo robe that served as a tent rug. He yanked the blue wool tunic off his shoulders, tossing it all in a tangled pile at the edge of his bed.

His mind raced. Ever so slowly his fingers crept across the silky skin of her buttocks. Then crawled over the firm roundness of her hips. After exploring her back and shoulders, Custer cupped the full, firm melons of her young breasts.

Monaseetah threw her head back at the fire of his touch. Never before had anyone put his hands on her swollen, milky breasts. It was as if
Hiestzi
had branded her as his woman. Heated, eager for mating, she ground her buttocks back into him. Yearning for his flesh to mingle with hers. Still he continued to fondle her hanging breasts, torturing her deliciously.

The woman reached between her legs, taking hold of his rigid flesh, guiding it as quickly as a warrior’s lance toward her waiting passion. Animals, they moaned in unison as she ground her buttocks back against his belly. Firmly planting him inside the heat of her.

They coupled, mated, loved. At the moment of release Custer collapsed atop her. Monaseetah’s own quivering legs were no longer able to hold her. They tumbled together, the man clinging to his woman as if he would never let go.

Custer cupped her silky chin in his rough hand, turning her head to look at her face. Wiping a few hot tears from Monaseetah’s cheek, he let his own eyes say what his trembling tongue could not.

“Love,” was all she breathed—her very first English word.

Moments later she heard him snore softly against the back of her neck, his rhythmic breathing tickling the long, damp hair pasted against her flesh. He had collapsed into a deep, peaceful sleep with his arms locked about her.

Outside a hard, icy snow flung itself against the stiff, oiled canvas. A harsh rattle of the wind reminded her of horses’ hooves racing along the crust of ice at the edge of a winter river. She sensed the night as if it were stampeding over her, trampling her beneath its thousand sharp, slashing hooves.

The sob in her heart echoed the eerie howl of a solitary wolf, crying out in loneliness for its mate, lost in the winter-wilderness storm.

Blinded and cold and alone.

Clear, sharp notes signaled reveille through Camp Supply, Indian Territory, before dawn. Yet it wasn’t until ten that the call for “Boots and Saddles” sounded through the river camp, ordering each trooper to ready his horse for the coming march.

On this trip into the heart of the Indian wilderness, ten companies of the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteers would bolster Custer’s regiment, men recruited and organized solely to punish the hostiles responsible for kidnapping and murdering their way across the Kansas frontier during the previous summer and autumn raiding seasons. In addition, Custer welcomed journalist De Benneville Randolph Keim along. The twenty-seven-year-old reporter for the New York
Herald
joined Custer’s headquarters command to record for posterity
this Custer campaign to “polish off Sheridan’s red menace” terrorizing the southern plains.

Just past midmorning the long-awaited order for the advance blared through the valley, echoing down the columns of two. A dark snake of cavalry bundled in buffalo coats and mittens uncoiled itself, stretching across the dazzling snow, slowly worming its way southward once more. In two hundred wagons cloaked in winter’s frost creaking atop cold hubs, the army freighted its forage for the horses and mules, in addition to rations sufficient to last Custer’s troopers a full thirty days.

Just ahead of the eleven companies of Custer’s pride rode Lieutenant Silas Pepoon’s civilian scouts, including some fifteen Osage and Kaw trackers who had proven themselves during the recent Washita campaign. The Osages had led Custer to the winter village of their old enemy, the Southern Cheyenne of Black Kettle, nestled like a sow bug in the valley of the Washita River. Now the trackers hungered for more Cheyenne scalps.

Behind Custer rode better than seventeen hundred men thrusting once again into the heart of Indian Territory on this bloody mission.

His dark bay kicking up sprays of new snow, Custer tore back to the head of the columns to join his commander, Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, new Commander of the Department of the Missouri, who brought along his entire staff for this winter foray south into hostile country.

“General!” Custer saluted smartly. “If you’d have a look behind you, I think you’ll find the most glorious sight to greet an old warrior’s eyes!”

Twisting in his cold saddle, Sheridan gazed back at the long lines of mounted cavalry and quartermaster wagons,
scouts, trackers, and interpreters. As grand a sight as the hero of the Shenandoah campaign had ever laid his eyes on, stretched out as they were across the snow beneath this low-bellied sky gathering cold and angry overhead. He couldn’t help but smile. “Does an old horse soldier’s heart good.”

“I know just how you feel, sir. Once a man’s ridden at the head of a cavalry column, it’s not an easy task for him to slide from his saddle—forced to ride nothing more than an overstuffed horsehair chair stuck behind some desk.”

“Goddamn right!” Sheridan growled. “I’ll see to things personally now. Why, if we can get in one or two more good licks, we’ll put an end to the Indian troubles in my department!”

“I’d stake my commission on it, sir. What’s more, you’ll be in on those very strikes yourself. You can watch my Seventh humble the pride of the southern tribes, bringing peace to this wilderness.”

The dark little Irishman flashed a smile. “Glad we see things my way, Custer.”

Not knowing why, Custer turned, looking for her back in the long, winding columns behind him. Circled by Pepoon’s scouts, she rode beside her two older companions, Mahwissa, the old sister of Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, and Mahwissa’s favorite friend, the ancient Sioux Stingy Woman.

Drawing her bright red blanket across her cold cheeks, Monaseetah’s beautiful eyes were all there was left for him to see. All he needed to see to feel touched once more by her animal warmth.

Custer kicked Dandy into a lope, speeding to the head of the columns. Headed into history.

N
EVER
before had De Benneville Keim laid eyes on such a wild and desolate sight as the winter valley of the Washita into which Custer’s troops had descended yesterday afternoon. Pale, milky light slanted eastward, nudging skeletons of winter-robed hackberry and blackjack oaks in an area known as “the shinnery.” It was as if all the bare and lifeless vegetation foreshadowed this as a valley of death, beckoning and luring the soldiers down the trail. Keim shuddered, trying to convince himself a corpse couldn’t be any colder six feet under the icy crust of the wind-scoured snow. At twilight Moylan’s thermometer stood at eighteen degrees below zero.

The fires had helped little this morning as the shivering troops rolled out of their tents and robes into the bitter winter dawn. To defrost his limbs and working parts, a soldier was forced to broil one side while freezing the other. Most gathered hunchbacked around the roaring fires, slowly turning themselves as if they were themselves
dripping hump roasts browning before the dancing yellow-blue flames.

As the sun broke a frosty saffron over the hills to the east, brass trumpets sounded “The General,” a call requiring the grumbling soldiers to break from their warm fires and strike their tents. When the wagons were loaded, Custer lost no time in ordering “Boots and Saddles” sounded. Kicking snow and pouring the remains of coffee from the battered pots over the coals, the last details clambered aboard their wagons.

“Advance! Column of twos!”

Lieutenant Myles Moylan, Custer’s adjutant, passed the command down the columns, his shouts startling flock after flock of black-feathered scavengers from their communal roosts in the bare-boned trees. Across the snow those last few miles due east to the site of what once had been the winter camp of Black Kettle’s Cheyenne, last November’s trail lay plain enough for any shavetail recruit to read.

Wide and deep—like a saber slashing into the still beating heart of Indian Territory.

South across the icy river Custer led Sheridan and his staff into the devastated village, followed by the scouts, Osage and civilian alike, before the troops themselves were allowed to cross the Washita. All around them erupted the ear-splitting clatter of a thousand crows and wrinkled-neck buzzards taking to the wing, scavengers protesting this disturbance of their free meals. Some of the birds were so gorged with flesh they had difficulty taking flight to escape the men and horses.

Within the ruins of the village, snarling, howling, barking wolves and coyotes confronted the soldiers, four-legged predators drawn to this place by the potent stench of death.
Some of the men pulled bandannas over their noses or hid their faces behind tall coat collars. A handful grew sick enough to throw up what remained of the hardtack and salt pork they had wolfed down hours ago.

The charred lodge poles Custer’s men had burned the day of the battle lay like black monuments poking from the new snow.

As far as the eye could see, the ground was littered with grotesque, frozen corpses. But as plain as the cold nipping any soldier’s cheeks, a man could see moccasined feet had visited the village after Custer had pulled out. While some of the bloodied bodies had been wrapped in blankets and bound up with rawhide cords by now, very few had actually been hoisted into the forks of the skeletal trees, as was the Indians’ custom. Plainly, Black Kettle’s village had not camped alone along the Washita this winter.

Once man had abandoned the valley, gangs of buzzards, crows, wolves, and coyotes had begun their grisly work. Every corpse was partially eaten.

“General—” Custer turned to address Sheridan, “if you’d come with mc, I’ll show you a vantage point where you can see the entire battlefield. From there I can describe the process of our fight for you, Lieutenant Colonel Crosby, and your staff.”

“Very good, Custer.” Sheridan coughed, gagging on the stench. “Lead on.”

“You’ll come with us, Mr. Keim?” Custer asked.

Keim nodded eagerly. “Wouldn’t miss it, General Custer.” During the war, Keim had become a favorite of U. S. Grant, extolling Union victories as a field correspondent. Sherman had grown to hate reporters during the war, and they returned his hatred in kind. Sheridan stood
somewhere in the middle, wary of the press, yet recognizing their political importance.