Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (46 page)

When he reached his assigned wagon, Fat Bear stopped,
turned, smiling his wrinkled, cherubic best, and waved to the men in blue. A new cheer erupted, punctuated by applause. No reason for sadness.

“Goodbye, Sally Ann!”

Custer recognized Tom’s joy-filled voice among the soldiers lining the gauntlet each prisoner walked through from stockade to wagons. Once inside the high-walled freighters, the captives thrust their heads around the canvas tops to wave and chatter at the soldiers like schoolchildren setting off on a spring outing. So unlike their solemn arrival at Fort Hays, this merry leave-taking.

“Cheer up, Sally Ann!”

Custer found her in the crowd, waving to Tom, bravely wearing that beautiful smile of hers. Again her eyes searched the shadows along porches or under the eaves of the buildings squaring the fort parade. Hoping, though her heart knew he would not show.

Her brave smile disappeared as she reached a wagon and passed her infant up to the waiting arms of an older squaw.

She couldn’t go. Not yet.

Monaseetah turned, shading her eyes to the new morning light streaming out of the eastern hills. One last time she searched for him among the others. To hear once more the vow he had made to her and their child.

“Aren’t you going to say farewell to the young one?”

Custer whirled, confronted by the bulk of Colonel Miles. “I hadn’t considered it.”

“Dammit, Armstrong. You haven’t much time left to consider it.”

Gazing back across the compound, Custer watched the young woman drop her hand from her brow, looking up into the wagon.

“Yes, Nelson.” Lord, did he want to go. But he was too damned scared.

“Not a man could blame you for saying goodbye to that woman.”

Miles stepped closer to Custer and whispered, “Hell’s fire, I’d be skinned alive by Mother Miles if she found out I’d suggested you say goodbye to an Indian girl when you’re married to Elizabeth. But Armstrong—Mother Miles has never been a man far from home fighting a no-win war for the chair polishers back east. Still—” he smiled beneath his shaggy mustache, “Mary isn’t awake yet, so I’m ordering you to say your farewells and pay your respects to that woman.”

With a shove of his bearlike paw, Miles nudged Custer down the wide steps, showing off a broad row of teeth beneath his Prussian mustache.

“But Nelson—”

“Get!”

“Yessir!”

Suddenly that famous grin flashed, almost as much a trademark as were those long, red-gold curls streaming across his shoulders.

As she slipped a foot on the iron helper, ready to swing herself up to the wagon bed, Monaseetah sighted him—a man in buckskin and blue, racing across the compound, stirring up the dry dust of the parade, loping her way with his arm beating the air.

She resisted her first impulse to dash toward him. Waiting instead, she dropped her eyes. For she was Cheyenne—her lover and husband came for her.

Yet in her heart, she knew she could wait no longer.

Flinging her body against him, Monaseetah clung to
Custer like ivy to an oak as he carried her the last few steps back to the wagon. By the time he set her down, she was weeping, birdlike sobs choked back in her chest.

Custer rubbed her cheeks, smearing tears across the copper-colored skin. Then he tugged her chin up so she would look into his eyes.

She blinked, then blinked again, not sure of what she saw. She had never seen him cry.

No man had ever shed tears for her … no man until Yellow Hair. Among her people, tears were a sign of weakness. Yet
Hiestzi
was strong enough to cry without being weak.

“I will not go,” she sobbed, fighting back the boiling knot of fear in her throat.

“You must go, little one.” He swiped angrily at his own tears, knowing no one must see his freckled cheeks moist. “It is the only way.”

“I cannot leave you,” she protested.

“For a short time, you must. I will see you … be with you again.”

She stared at the ground, feeling the babe kick in her belly. “I understand. I must have our child among my people.”

Custer gathered her against him once more, caressing the side of her cheek with his callused fingers. “The little one cannot be born here among the white men. I fear for the child’s safety. A life of suffering, forever roaming, looking for peace, searching for his own spirit. Lost on the winds, as my spirit roams.”

He embraced her, listening to the familiar sounds of the parade—teamsters adjusting harness and brake, soldiers
checking cinches and bits, stirrups and belts. Creaky leather, the way his own guts churned.

“Promise me the white man will never know of our child, Monaseetah!”

She nodded, tears streaming.

“If any of my people learn that Yellow Hair has a child,” he continued, “there will never be peace in that child’s life. Like a curse I had passed onto the blood of my body. Promise me.”

“I do, on all that my heart feels for you.”

“See he grows straight and true.”

“As his father.”

“A warrior of power and honor, Monaseetah. With mighty medicine no man can dim or shame.”

She had waited long enough and could wait no longer to ask the question. “When will I see you again?”

Behind her the old women called out, shouted for her to board quickly.

Custer glanced up nervously. Myers’s company clambered into their black McClellans, settling their rumps for a sweaty ride into the land of summer.

“I promise I will come when I can.”

“Tell me! Give me some dream to hold, though I cannot hold you!” She caressed the back of his freckled hand.

The squaws yelled for her to join them before the wagons rolled.

Custer jerked his head in sudden desperation. He wanted to say he would come soon—yet he could not lie to her.

“I don’t know, Monaseetah. If I am not there before our child is born, then I may come while the child still suckles
at your breast. If not then, when the child walks. With the help of the Cheyenne, he will become a mighty warrior.”

Monaseetah’s full lips trembled. She grew afraid to speak again. The tears flowed as if some river long dammed had burst. She reached for his hand, bringing it to her lips, holding it there. Knowing no hands had caressed her as these hands had … as no man would ever touch her again.

“Monaseetah—” he licked his dry lips, “you are the woman I have waited for—like waiting for the breath of spring after too long a winter on the land. You are the spring for my heart. I will come for you.”

She pulled away as the wagons creaked into motion, the shouts for her growing insistent, hands reaching for her. Imploring her to hurry.

Yells and curses reached the sky as horses and mules were jabbed and kicked and prodded into motion. Saddle gear jangle and brassy braying, shouts and curses and whinnying. No one could overhear his final words to her.

Custer shouted it here at the last. “I will come to you, Monaseetah. To be with you for all time. When I come, I will never leave you again.”

She scrambled frantically to pull herself aboard the wagon, yanked up with the help of three old squaws who waved to the soldiers as Monaseetah leaned out the back of the wagon. From between her swollen breasts she took that red bandanna he had given her a long time ago, when she had been crying over something of little consequence. Yet, instead of drying her eyes with it now, she waved the bright bandanna to him as the wagons circled the parade, then pointed west and south toward Indian Territory.

Custer stood frozen in the center of the emptying
parade, dust settling on his shiny boots, smudging his fresh blue tunic with its gold braid shimmering in the new-orange light of summer morn. He held his hand high and still, as if in prayer to what spirits there might be to watch over the future. What gods might guard that future and bring things to pass.

From her place in the wagon she gazed at that solitary figure standing tall as a mighty, wind-battered oak in the middle of that empty parade, his hand outstretched as if in prayer to her Everywhere Spirit.

“Yes, Yellow Hair,” she murmured, knowing he heard her with only his heart now, “I know of your promise—to come for me one day in the Moon of Fat Horses.”

She laid a hand across her swollen belly, the other held aloft waving that bright red bandanna for him to see as the wagons lurched past the last dull-gray cluster of Fort Hays buildings.

“Your son will know of your coming,” she promised. “In that Moon of Fat Horses when Yellow Hair comes, the son of Yellow Hair will finally know his father.”

Her black-cherry eyes glazed and she could no longer see him for the dust, for her tears.

I
was born on the first day of 1947 in a small town on the plains of Kansas. That great rolling homeland of the nomadic buffalo has remained in my marrow across the years of my wandering.

From Nebraska to Kansas and on to Oklahoma, I’ve spent a full third of my life on those Great Plains. Another third growing up in the desert Southwest an arrow’s shot from the wild Apache domain of Cochise and Victorio. The most recent third of my life has passed among the majestic splendor of the Rocky Mountains—from Colorado and on to Washington state. In less than a year, I am back in Montana, here in the valley of the great Yellowstone River, in the veritable heart of the historic West. The plains and prairies at my feet, the great Rockies as my backrest.

The Great Plains and all its history run in my blood. I suppose they always will. More than merely growing up there, my roots go deep in the land that over the last hundred-odd years soaked up about as much blood and sweat as it did rain.

My maternal grandfather came from working-class stock in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he first became a carriage-riding sawbones doctor who as a young man moved to Oklahoma Territory, finding it necessary to pack two small thirty-six-caliber pistols for his own protection while practicing his medical arts from his horse-drawn buggy. In later years he would be proud to say he never stepped foot in a motorized vehicle.

It wasn’t long before Dr. David Yates met and fell in love with the schoolmarm teaching there in Osage country, Pearl Hinkle. My grandmother had bounced into The Strip, formerly called “Indian Territory” or “The Nations,” in her parents’ wagon in June of 1889 during the great land rush that settled what is now the state of Oklahoma. With immense pride I tell you I go back five generations homesteading on the plains of Kansas—Hinkles, simple folk with rigid backbones and a belief in the Almighty, folk who witnessed the coming of the Kansas Pacific Railroad along with the terrifying raids of Cheyenne and Kiowa as the Plains tribes found themselves shoved south and west by the slow-moving tide of white migration.

My father’s father wandered over to the territory from the vicinity of Batesville, Arkansas, when he first learned of the riches to be found in what would one day become south-central Oklahoma. It was an era of the “boomers”—when oil money ran local governments and bought law-enforcement officers both. Yet in that violent and lawless epoch, Oklahoma history notes a few brave men who stood the test of that time. I’m very proud to have coursing in my veins the blood of a grandfather who had the itchy feet of a homesteader turned justice of the peace in that of times rowdy, violent, and unsettled frontier.

Still, it was more than what Scotch-Irish heritage ran in
their veins that both my parents passed on to me—more so the character of those sturdy, austere folk who settled the Great Plains. From my father I believe I inherited the virtue of hard work and perseverance. And from my mother, besides her abiding love and reverence for the land, I have inherited a stamina to endure all the travesties that life can throw at simple folk. Those traits she has given me, along with a belief in the Almighty—the selfsame belief that helped those hardy settlers endure through hailstorms and locust plagues, drought and barrel-bottom crop prices.

Brought up in the fifties during the era of Saturday matinees and some twenty hours of prime-time westerns on these small boxes we fondly called TV, early on I found myself bitten by the seductive lure of the West. Yet it was not until 1965, during my freshman year in college in Oklahoma, where I was studying to become a history teacher, that I was finally able to separate the history of the West from the
Myth of the West.
Over the intervening twenty-five years I have happily found the historic West every bit as fascinating as the mythic frontier.

You would be hard pressed to find a man happier than I—still teaching as I am thousands of readers outside the confines of the classroom about a magical epoch of expansion that roared rowdy and rambunctious across the plains and mountains of our Western frontier. A man is a success when he can put food on his family’s table doing what he loves most to do.

Over the years I’ve been cursed with the itchiest of feet, moving on frequently as did the rounders and roamers of this mountain West more than a hundred-odd years before me. In the last three years we have been nomads, moving
from Colorado to Montana to Washington, and now to these windswept foothills of the Prescott valley. My wife, Rhonda, hopes we can stay put for awhile, here in Billings along the Yellowstone, under the sun hung in that Big Sky, while we raise our two children, son Noah and daughter Erinn.

There’ll be time enough to move on, time enough for me to see what’s over the next hill. Time enough still to follow the seductive lure of tomorrow and the next valley across the years to come …

The legend of George A. Custer continues in this novel filled with Indian lore—a fascinating and authoritative look at the frontier military at the time of Little Big Horn.

SEIZE THE SKY
by Terry C. Johnston
Volume 2 in the Son of the Plains Trilogy

Turn the page for the tale of George A. Custer and his son, Yellow Bird, as told by a master frontier storyteller, Terry C. Johnston. SEIZE THE SKY is available wherever Bantam Books are sold.

Clouds of black powder smudged the late-afternoon ridges like yesterday’s coal-oil smoke. Yellow dust stived up into the broiling air beneath the countless unshod pony hoofs and moccasined feet scurrying through the gray sage and stunted grasses beneath a relentless summer sun. There weren’t many of the big, weary, iron-shod army horses left on the hillside now. A few carcasses lay stiffening, their four-legs rigid and bloated. But most of the big, iron-shod horses had clattered down to water.