Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (31 page)

He caught her staring at him. Monaseetah smiled and gazed into the fire. She sensed him moving around the others, stepping up behind her.

“Here, Autie!” Tom Custer leapt up, shoving his tin cup into Custer’s hand. “Take this!”

“I don’t drink!”

“Dear brother,” Tom replied, sweeping the ground in a grand bow, “I wish the honor of a dance with Sally Ann!”

“You’ve had quite enough to drink tonight, Tom.”

“Not near enough, Autie, ol’ boy!”

Tom wrapped one of Monaseetah’s hands gently in his. Her eyes searched Custer’s for approval.

“I ask only that you dance …” Custer paused.

“Civilized, Autie?” Tom brought Monaseetah from her perch. “I’d do anything for a dance with this dark-eyed beauty!”

In time to a tune played by the regimental musicians
seated beneath a canvas awning among the trees yonder at Sheridan’s camp, Tom swept Monaseetah side to side. A light, airy waltz, Tom slowly circling the Indian princess. Turning her ever so slowly as he swung, side to side, circling the fire. Eventually she swayed with him, absorbing his rythmn, gazing now and then at Custer, her smile childlike with the novelty of it.

All around them the others clapped in time. Yates stepped up, tapping Tom on the shoulder. Confused and scared, Monaseetah turned to dash back to her seat as Tom released her. But Yates swept her up in his arms, gliding gaily with her around the fire. Joining in the fun, Myers and Thompson cut in for their dances with the Cheyenne maiden. Then Godfrey and Benteen, a chorus of laughter when Monaseetah giggled at each change of partners. Tom cut in again.

“Sally Ann … Sally Ann!” He spun her a bit too wildly, frightening her as his toes caught, stumbling, almost falling.

“Tom.”

Custer was at Tom’s shoulder. A strong hand clamped on his shoulder, slowing his drunken waltz. “You’ve had enough … she’s had enough for now, little brother.”

“But I’m not done dancing with Sally Ann.”

“I think you’re quite done for the night, Tom,” Custer whispered, sensing the eyes of the others between his shoulders.

“Done … for the night? Whatever do you mean, dearest brother?”

“Let me take you to your tent.”

“Damn you, Autie!” he cried. “It’s New Year’s
Eve … I want my dance with the most beautiful woman in the world—to hell with George Armstrong Custer!”

“Please, Tom,” Custer soothed. “Don’t embarrass yourself. Come, let me get you tucked away so you sleep it off.”

“Dear, dear brother.” Tom tried to focus on Custer’s face, swaying, letting Monaseetah go. “Always was worried ’bout your little brother, weren’t you?”

Without struggling, Tom leaned into Custer, belching on the sour whiskey. “Back to the days we were boys in Ohio … Michigan. I was always the one raising hell. Always getting licks at school with those oak paddles. You know I even chewed back then? When the older boys dared not.”

Tom pushed himself to arm’s-length from his older brother. “But you, Autie? You never raised hell. Oh, you always played jokes on others, but never raised hundred-proof hell like me!”

“C’mon, Tom—”

“Why, can’t you see you got the only woman at the ball—and the most beautiful … oh, goddamn you, Autie! You always had the prettiest ones! You got Libbie and now you’re wenching with this girl.”

“Tom!”

The sudden slap of Custer’s voice silenced them all. “You’re drunk, but that gives you no right—”

“General,”—George Yates stepped in—“I don’t think he—”

“Don’t think what, Lieutenant?” Custer demanded.

“You’re right, Autie,” Tom said. “Always right, big brother. You’ve got a proper army wife back east. And here in the Territories you’ve got your army whore to keep you
warm. What gave you the right to all the whores in the world, big brother?”

Custer savagely wrenched his brother around. In that moment his right hand drew back, open and ready to strike the babbling, drunken mouth.

“General Custer!”

With that foreign voice, Custer turned, watching two figures approaching: one a picket guard, his rifle across his chest, the other, Romero.

“What is it?” Custer asked, his hand dropping as Yates and Moylan steadied Tom on his feet.

“Indians, sir. Lots of ’em.”

“Indians?”

“Just come in. Cheyenne. Arapaho. Congratulations, General! Down at Sheridan’s headquarters, they’re all saying you got the head men to come in without a goddamned shot fired!”

“Where are they?”

“At Sheridan’s party.”

“He hasn’t served them whiskey, has he?”

“None I know of.”

“Good. Can’t have them getting drunk … no hangovers while we parley.” He turned. “Moylan, see that Tom’s bedded down. I’ll look in on him in a bit.”

“Awww, Autie,” Tom murmured. “Be a lot warmer you get me a beautiful squaw to snuggle down with.”

“Goodnight, Tom. That whiskey in your belly is doing all your talking for you. Moylan, please.”

“Well, boys!” Custer turned back to the others at the fire. “Looks like this’ll be a grand new year for us all.”

“No mere bunghole tooting in the wind there!” Myers cheered.

“C’mon, Romero—smile!” Custer cried. “Why, for most of last year, they had me in exile. So this new year can be nothing but an improvement!”

An impressive delegation of Arapaho and Cheyenne leaders greeted Custer two days later when he held council at Sheridan’s camp. What amazed Tom Custer the most was that they had been frightened enough to come on foot to meet with the renowned Yellow Hair.

Looking at the poor shape of the chiefs, it was easy enough to believe their ponies were too weak to allow the villages to journey across the winter wilderness. The tribes hadn’t located buffalo for better than two moons. For a time they had survived on pemmican. Once that staple was gone, they were driven to eating their camp dogs. The chiefs admitted a man would be hard pressed to find a dog in any of their camps.

Tom Custer attended the council chaired by General Hazen. What had begun in the morning hours lasted past dusk, replete with the usual smoking and eating, the presentation of gifts before the negotiations could start. By midday, the younger Custer found himself liking the Cheyenne chief Little Robe. With a quick wit, the stocky leader often let himself bear the brunt of his humor. What appealed to Tom most was that Little Robe appeared to recognize that his people must find accommodation with the white soldiers and settlers crowding onto the southern plains.

Long after dark the army and tribes reached an agreement. In return for a resumption of their annuities and a guarantee the army would not destroy their villages, the Indians agreed to maintain peace with the government.
Custer insisted that this meant their villages must return to the reservations—immediately.

With the next sunrise the tribes dispatched runners carrying word of the new agreement, expressing the urgency of coming in to the reservation as soon as the camps could be put on the trail. Sheridan instructed the chiefs to bring their people to the new post he would construct in the shadow of the Wichita Mountains, a short ride to the south.

Over the next two days, wagon trains of badly needed provisions reached Fort Cobb. From those wagons Sheridan and Custer presented more gifts to the head men of each band in recognition of their new peace agreement.

Two days later, Custer pointed both his Seventh Cavalry and the Nineteenth Kansas volunteers south. By January 8 the entire command arrived at the juncture of Medicine Bluff and Cache creeks flowing at the base of the Wichita Mountains some forty miles south of Fort Cobb. Sheridan selected an ideal site offering enough grass, timber, and stone for construction of a permanent post, in addition to a good supply of water and game found in the surrounding hills. He announced he was naming the post in honor of his West Point classmate and Civil War comrade, Joshua W. Sill.

As the weary troops erected tents and teamsters removed stiffened harness from the mules, the wind swept out of the north, forewarning of yet another winter storm. Within an hour, that storm slashed down on the Medicine Bluff Creek camp with a vengeance, driving rain and sleet before it. Winds blew with such a fury that no man dared step out to seek firewood. Enough wind for every man to hunker in his tent, making the best of it.

Still, try as they might, two soldiers ordered by Surgeon
Lippincott to build a fire and boil some water failed in their every attempt to shelter the sputtering flames from the wind.

“Keep trying, boys,” Lippincott growled. “Gonna need that fire for heat if not for sterilizing.”

“Damned Injun squaw,” one of the soldiers grumped. His head was wrapped in a worn woolen scarf, and he blew on his frozen, cramped fingers.

Again the soldiers bent over the sparks nursed in the lee of Lippincott’s hospital tent. A raw wind drummed over the rattling canvas, sweeping all sides with a fury as it clapped like two huge hands, roaring in laughter at the feeble efforts of these men. Yet their perseverance paid off and flames licked along the firewood, sputtering beneath the icy sleet and tobacco-wad raindrops.

“By damn, boys!” Lippincott cheered. “Soon enough two lives may depend on your fire.”

Well enough did Tom Custer understand that Lippincott held those two lives in the palm of his hand at this very hour. Through the stormy evening he had followed his older brother as Custer made his rounds of camp. Checking on everything like a mother hen ready to nest. Fighting one of his frequent bouts of insomnia. Perhaps only Tom knew why.

Late that night, a few of the Custer circle lay sleeping in the headquarters tent, driven to their blankets by the potent combination of their long winter trail, the incessant storm, and Tom’s patent whiskey.

Tom had sat up with his older brother into the wee hours, sipping his whiskey as Custer nursed his coffee, still unable to admit he was afraid to be alone. Then, while Tom dozed, Custer penned a long and sentimental letter home
to Libbie. Almost three and a half months had passed since kissing her goodbye on that railroad platform in Monroe. Yet, in listening now to a brutal wind hurling itself against his tent, Custer sensed that more than mere time and miles had come between them. In some way he hoped his words would reassure her across that gap of days and distance, touch her.

There it came again. That sound like no other.

At first Custer believed it was the keening wind. Slashed through the trees, circled around the humps of the Wichita. Yet the cry refused to rise and fall like the wind. If anything, it grew stronger.

Shaky, Tom rose to one elbow, his eyes reddened and gummy from whiskey and lack of sleep.

Moylan stirred next. One by one they each poked their heads from their blankets like hibernating bears, hoary breath like ghostly halos dancing in the pale lamplight.

“What the Sam Hill is that?” Cooke asked, half-corked still.

“If I didn’t know better. I’d call it a baby’s cry,” Moylan replied, the sober one in the lot.

“Sally Ann’s baby!” Tom cried.

“She ain’t Sally Ann!” Cooke growled, flinging a limp arm at Tom.

“Both of you hush!” Moylan barked, watching Custer push up from his stool, stepping over the bodies strewn across the tent floor, and stop at the door.

“Monaseetah’s baby,” he whispered.

As the wind sighed, the unmistakable wail of a newborn rang clear as a prairie starburst.

Custer flung back the flaps, letting the night and wind and sleet batter him.

The water stung his face, the ice slashing at his eyes.

Another cry raised the hairs at the back of his neck.

Tom gazed at his brother’s face, realizing Autie was weeping. For one of the few times in his life, Custer shed tears.

“Monaseetah’s baby is here at last!”

C
USTER
made certain every last man of them fidgeted, cold and anxious as they waited in his tent.

He had had Moylan summon his officers to an unexpected conference. His flair for the dramatic coupled with his trembling rage dictated he wait until they had gathered before making his grand entrance.

Tearing the flaps apart, Custer yanked their attention to him as surely as if he had slapped them with the back of his hand. Pausing, he let each man suffer the silent, icy impact of his eyes. Fred Benteen stared at the rawhide quirt Custer slapped monotonously against a muddy boot.

“Gentle-men.” Custer made it sound profane, something he was loath to speak. “As most of you are aware, yesterday, the twenty-third of January, a post express arrived from Camp Supply with mail from Fort Dodge, letters from home.”

Custer paused. “Including some traitorous news for me!” he roared.

From his tunic Custer wrenched a crumpled newspaper page. He shook it before their faces.

“An old friend from my Michigan days sent me a copy of the St. Louis
Democrat.
Most of you get clippings and news items from your hometown papers, but my friend thought I should read an article written about me by a St. Louis man: a most scandalous story about our recent campaign against the Washita village of Black Kettle.”

Custer’s eyes, now steel blue, sliced toward the officers, accusing every man. Some shifted from boot to boot. Others cleared throats or wiped hands across lips gone dry.

Benteen swallowed hard. He watched Custer tense his jaws, struggling to control his anger.

“This St. Louis journalist couldn’t know a bloody thing of our campaign! But the language he used says that it was written by someone who knew what went on—an officer of this regiment! That wording, the detail, these veiled implications—all of it means some officer of this regiment wrote this filth to ruin me!”

“Read ’em some of it, Autie!” Tom Custer prodded, his own eyes scolding the others.

Amused in a way, Benteen watched as the Custer family closed ranks.

“Listen to these words a traitor uses,” Custer said. “Reviling me before the American public!”