Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (21 page)

Custer led Sheridan to the knoll just south of the village where he had watched most of the battle action that morning his Seventh Cavalry crossed the Washita. On their climb they passed more dead Cheyenne stuffed back in the thick brush to conceal them from predators until a more proper burial could be arranged.

“Moylan,” Custer said, “have Lieutenant Custer and Captain Keogh each take a squad to search south and east of here. Scour the area for any sign of Major Elliott’s command. I suggest they begin at a two-mile radius, where we had to leave off the day of the battle. Work out to a three-mile radius in a sweeping arc. If nothing’s found, proceed five miles out from camp, but no farther. I don’t want my men strung out from our support should the need arise.”

Moylan saluted, wheeling downhill toward the rest of the command.

“You have reason to fear the hostiles might still be in the area?” Sheridan asked.

“I’d be afraid to gamble. It’s certain the Indians have returned to care for their dead.”

“That’d be another stroke of Custer’s Luck, wouldn’t it?”

“I can’t imagine being lucky enough to catch another village napping.”

The wind shifted, carrying to the hilltop a heavy stench from southeast of camp. Sheridan requested his field glasses. With them he pinpointed the odor. Some two hundred yards beyond the camp perimenter lay the bloated, stiffened carcasses—better than eight hundred
Indian ponies Lieutenant Godfrey’s troopers had slaughtered. Among the remains of what had once been the pride of the Cheyenne now roamed a pack of fat, sated wolves and their coyote cousins, joined by some Indian dogs.

Each animal bristled, snarling its anger as Lieutenant Thomas W. Custer’s search detail skirted the deathly meadow, pushing a little south of east from the Indian camp.

Following a trail not difficult to read, the lieutenant’s men climbed a low wooded ridge, then descended toward a dry tributary of the Washita. Several yards west of that ravine, Tom Custer signaled a halt. On the ground ahead huddled a mass of crows, ravens, and turkey buzzards, all busy over something … or someone.

A foul, sweetish odor intensified as the soldiers warily approached on foot, leading their mounts. The solitary body had been left for the birds of prey to work over. Enough flesh still clung on the torso to show bullets fired into the carcass after the soldier had been killed.

“Turn him over,” Tom Custer ordered. “I wanna see who this was.”

One green recruit scuffed through the snow, holding a bandanna over his mouth and nose. His stomach revolted and the boy coughed away the sting of bile in his mouth.

“Grimes,” Tom Custer growled at his veteran sergeant. “Help the boy.”

Grimes yanked his collar up to his nose, scowling and mumbling a curse. Everyone understood, including Custer. There wasn’t a single man among them who relished getting any closer to the half-eaten corpse than he absolutely had to.

A few of the men gasped as Grimes rolled the mutilated
body onto its back. The soldier’s entire skull was black with old blood from the eyebrows clear back to the nape of the neck—completely scalped. No quick job here. Though his features had become distorted in mutilation and weeks of severe cold, no man could mistake the long, dark dundrearies bristling along the dead man’s cheeks—sideburns allowed to stretch down along the jawline, all the fashion rage in the East at the time.

“Sergeant Major Kennedy,” Tom Custer snarled. “Attached to Elliott, wasn’t he?”

The lieutenant knew the answer to his own question. Kennedy had been a seasoned veteran of the Civil War, riding with Major Joel Elliott’s company.

“Yes, he was,” answered Corporal Harper. “But why’d he be out here … alone, sir? You figure it?”

“Only a guess, Harper. Man like Kennedy had a real good reason to let himself get caught alone by the Indians way he was. This far from the village.”

“Bloody butchers! Wasn’t a damned thing Kennedy was afraid of, Lieutenant,” Grimes cursed.

At last Tom Custer’s eyes rose from the naked corpse to peer into those snowy meadows rolling away to the east in gentle swells. “Boys, I don’t like to think about what I figure we’re gonna find up ahead, across this wash here. Seems, though, we got the lieutenant colonel’s orders.” He stuffed a boot in his stirrup. “Let’s find out what happened to the rest of Elliott’s men.”

“Lieutenant?”

“You got something to say, Grimes?”

“I’d like have this stream named Sergeant Major Creek.” He wiped a mitten on the end of his dripping nose.

Custer slewed his eyes around the men. “Sergeant, don’t
think there’s a man here gonna kick about naming it in honor of Kennedy. Well done, Grimes. Let’s go find the rest of ’em.”

There was hardly a man following Tom Custer up the other side of that dry ravine into the snowy meadows who wouldn’t remember the bloody, precision handiwork someone had practiced on Sergeant Major Kennedy.

“Eyes front!” Tom Custer barked his sudden, raspy interruption.

They watched the great flocks of ravens and crows blacken the skies as the birds clattered into flight. That noise of their flapping wings rushed over the soldiers like a thunderous tide upon the sands, echoed in its ebbing by snarling wolves and coyotes scattering before the approaching horsemen.

Barely two hundred yards east of the dry tributary lay sixteen bodies, each frozen in death as solid as timberline granite. The chalk-white corpses lay in a ragged circle, face down, feet toward the center. Each man defending his piece of the perimeter.

Skirmish formation?

Hardly
, Tom Custer thought.
Perhaps they did the best they could, caught where they were.

He had fought enough during the final months of the war to know of its horrors. As the Union armies tightened their noose around Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Tom Custer himself had won first one, then a second Medal of Honor, dashing single-handedly against Confederate artillery, snatching the Rebel colors from a flag bearer before returning to the Union line. So it didn’t take a vivid imagination for the lieutenant to gaze across the meadow, watching the horror of it happening right before his eyes—Major Joel H.
Elliott wheeling that snorting, frightened mount of his. Finding his war-seasoned sergeant major. Orders given for a desperate ride … a plea for reinforcements …

Tom Custer spit dryly into the old snow near his feet. Kennedy never made it.

Knowing Kennedy
, Tom Custer brooded,
he must have taken some of the red bastards with him on his howling journey into death. No doubt he sold his life at a dear cost to his killers. Those goddamned Cheyenne can take pride in killing a mighty enemy.

What no man in the Seventh Cavalry had known back on that cold November day of the battle, what Elliott himself could not have known until it was too late, was simply that there were hundreds upon hundreds of warriors boiling out of other winter camps farther east down the Washita, as if someone had overturned a dried buffalo chip on the prairie to watch the grub beetles scurry this way and that.

By now the soldiers had some idea there had been other camps strung out along the icy river. Many warriors. Just how many, no soldier could have known for certain on that day Black Kettle sang his death song. Custer and his troops had simply been too eager to attack the solitary Cheyenne camp the Osage scouts had found for them, so eager that no one really saw need for further intelligence. No man realized some five thousand Indians lay sleeping in those other Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche villages downriver. Combined, they were one huge, snaking village spread some twelve to fifteen miles along the meandering Washita. On the morning of the battle those other camps had awakened to the endless rifle fire long before any of Black Kettle’s escapees had straggled to their villages
carrying the shocking news. Unbelievable, frightening news: Pony soldiers!

Elliott’s men pursued some of those very same Cheyenne fleeing from the slaughter of Black Kettle’s camp right after the old chief and his woman had been cut down by Lieutenant Cooke’s sharpshooters stationed in the trees across the river.

When the small band of Cheyenne escapees split into two groups, each heading in a different direction, Elliott divided his men. The old and very young Indians, sick or already wounded, all darted to the left, scurrying among the thick brush. Quickly surrounded, the soldiers herded this group back to the village.

At the same time, Elliott’s squad of some eighteen blue-coats mounted on gray horses continued after the warriors and young women dashing to the right, those stout of leg and able to lead the pony soldiers on a chase among the oak and cottonwood, through the hack berry brush.

It was but moments before the horsemen overtook the slowest warrior and brought him down. Then a second was left bleeding a slow death farther on. The rest sprinted ahead, scattering like jackrabbits before their pursuers. A third, then a fourth Indian fell beneath slashing army hooves.

Too late Elliott had his attention drawn to the timber looming before them. Only then did his men notice the trees to their left. And right. Of a sudden it seemed as if the trees belched warriors—each one brandishing a bow or rifle, lance or war ax.

Frantic, the pony soldiers reined up, savagely haunch-sliding their lathered mounts into a snow-blinding halt. They wheeled, clattering, bumping against each other, their horses rearing in fright. The noise of warrior screams, the high-pitched death song of eagle-wingbone whistles drowned all sound. The tide of this nasty
little battle had suddenly swung out of reach for Elliott’s desperate band of blue-coats.

The narrow gap through which they had just confidently galloped suddenly closed like a puckered strip of sun-dried rawhide. No way out now; they found themselves surrounded by angry, blood-eyed Arapahos led by Powder Face and that battle-famous war chief, Left Hand.

For most of the eighteen, it would be their first, and last, experience of bowel-puckering terror as hundreds of warriors rode in, surrounding them, tightening their deadly gauntlet like a feathered noose … no escape. A screeching horde swept around the frantic, wild-eyed army mounts. Everywhere! Firing their iron-tipped arrows into the horses, aiming their old rifles at the soldiers. Biting. Stinging. Whistling like a thousand wasps.

“Kennedy!” Elliott barked, releasing the reins as his horse dropped, thrashing. “Ride, goddammit! We’re not far from the Cheyenne camp!”

“Yessir!” Kennedy flew into a saddle with one fluid motion, laying low along the horse’s neck as he held his hand down to Elliott. “Good luck, sir!”

“We’ll hold out till you get back!” Elliott gripped Kennedy’s bare hand, shoving a second pistol into it as he stepped back, watching the veteran savagely kick the mount into motion.

“Godspeed, Sergeant, “ Elliott whispered the instant before the iron arrow point pierced his chest. He sank to his knees like a sack of wet oats, gasping. “God help us all.”

A proven battlefield veteran during the war, Elliott fought the pain and ordered his men to dismount, to prepare for a skirmish. All of them were on the ground by then. Not a man could he spare to hold the frightened, rearing horses. He ordered the horses released. Hell, they weren’t of use to them now. No chance for escape on horseback anyway. Their only hope lay in the thought
that Kennedy would make it through, back to the village, bringing reinforcements.

With the screeching and blanket-waving of the Indians, the horses clattered off. Now the soldiers were alone. With not one chance in a thousand of pulling themselves from the dripping jaws of this ambush.

“Down on your bellies, goddammit! Circle up!” Elliott yelled, snapping the arrow shaft off close to his bloody coat.

With their feet toward the center, they each could cover another man’s backside.

They made a hot time of it for the screeching warriors while it lasted. Each one still carried close to a hundred cartridges for his carbine. Again and again, Elliott reminded them of their duty through those final minutes.

“Sell your lives dearly, boys! A hundred of ’em for every one of us!”

They did indeed sell their lives dearly. One by one, for dying is a one-man job at best. From the start the fight could not have lasted very long at all. Ridges to the south and east afforded good positions where the Indians fired down into Elliott’s grim circle. A desperate scrap lasting less time than it takes for the winter sun to travel from one lodge pole to the next. Less than fifteen white man minutes.

Perhaps long enough for a man to shave with a straight razor. Surely the fight lasted no longer than it took for the victorious warriors to perform their bloody work on the soldiers’ bodies afterward, before they pulled out to chase after those troopers Custer had left behind earlier that morning with the regiment’s coats and haversacks.

That many warriors simply didn’t need much time to complete their butchery of Elliott’s lost command.

*    *    *

As his men drew closer, Tom Custer saw that more than frozen stalks of winter grass rose tall in the hallowed air around each corpse. The back of every soldier bristled with a score or more arrows.

The search detail slid from their horses in grim, tight-lipped shock at what greeted their eyes. An unmasked revulsion was written plain as paint around every soldier’s eyes, in the set of every trooper’s jaw, as each man stumbled through the tangle of mutilated bodies, trying vainly to recognize a familiar face.

Hoping he would not.

Major Joel H. Elliott and his fifteen men had all been butchered in the most gruesome manner possible. Every torso bullet-riddled. Pinned with arrows. Backs, buttocks, and legs gashed. The hostiles had slashed most every throat, and at least four heads lay beside their frozen bodies.

“There were eighteen men still unaccounted for when we left the Washita, boys.” The younger Custer swallowed deep against the gall rising in his throat. “With Sergeant Major Kennedy, Elliott, and his fifteen men here, that still leaves one man unaccounted for on the day of the battle. One soldier to find.”