by John Jakes
Custer looked haggard when he called all the scouts and officers to the standard again. “We must prepare to get out of here. There are some problems. If we just retreat, those savages will chase us, and I don’t want a running fight in the dark. The men are spent. So we’ll try a feint. In an hour or so, we’ll form up with our prisoners and head in that direction.” His gauntlet hand pointed northeast. “In line of battle. Just as if we plan to take out the other villages one by one. We’ll give them band music and a big show of confidence. They’ve seen what we did to this nest of enemies. I think they’ll run to protect their own lodges. If I’m right, the moment we have full dark we’ll be able to countermarch and slip away north.”
No one objected to the plan, or even offered a comment; they were too worn out to raise frivolous questions, and what Custer said sounded reasonable.
The general had ashes in his hair and mustache. One of his high cheekbones was daubed with someone’s blood. His gleaming eyes reflected the bonfire still burning. He added, “Before we go we must cripple this village. Cripple it completely. Venable—”
“Sir?”
“Take what men you need and cut enough ponies from the herd to carry the prisoners. The rest of you gentlemen, officers and scouts, may then have your pick of any mount in the herd. Then I want Godfrey—where’s Godfrey?—ah. Godfrey, at that point you take charge.”
“Yes, sir?” Lieutenant Godfrey wiped grime from the corner of his mouth. Charles heard a high ringing in his ears as his dreadful premonition proved to be right.
“Kill the rest of the horses.”
“General—sir—that’ll be eight hundred at least.”
“So be it, Godfrey. We are not going to leave these damned red murderers any remounts. Kill them all.”
Now the gray day had sunk into firelit nightmare. Charles leaned against a cottonwood that had a broken arrow shaft embedded in it and twirled the choking cylinder of his Army Colt, feeding it loads.
Romero hurried by. “Eh, Señor Charlie, give a hand with the remuda. The quicker we kill them, the quicker we get out of here.”
“Leave him alone, Romeo,” California Joe called. He was busy brushing dirt from a scalp that had fallen from his belt. “Charlie ain’t himself right now.”
The ringing in his ears persisted. He walked unsteadily toward the huge fire. The heat brought sweat to his filthy face. He closed his eyes, remembering Sport’s last gallop in Virginia. The pristine snow stippled red after the gallant gray passed over it, his heart’s blood pumping out as he carried Charles back to the safety of the lines.
Eight hundred horses. Eight hundred. He couldn’t believe anyone would do that. Not after so much destruction already.
He staggered past the fire, his right cheek scorched by the heat. He stood watching Venable complete his job of cutting out fifty-five mounts for the captive women and children. He and his detail herded the animals to hastily rigged picket lines in the trees. Then they rejoined Godfrey and his four troops of men, who spread out and surrounded the nervous ponies.
On Godfrey’s order, men tied ropes into lariats and advanced, intending to catch the horses one at a time. Some of the ponies caught the scent of the soldiers, the white man’s scent, and didn’t like it. Eyes rolled with fright. Manes tossed.
Lariats sailed through the air. One soldier got a rope over a beautiful sorrel pony. He shouted for someone to come in with a knife and cut the pony’s throat. The pony reared and pawed the air. A hoof gashed the soldier’s forehead. Blood cascaded into his eyes. He fell on his back and would have been trampled if other troopers hadn’t dragged him away.
Godfrey’s men tried ropes and knives for fifteen minutes, but the horses hated the soldiers’ smell and kicked and bit and reared. “Fetch the general,” Godfrey shouted. Charles still stood apart, near the fire, watching.
General Custer came trotting through the trees on Dandy. “We can’t get close enough to slash their throats, General. What shall we do?”
Angered, Custer said, “We have plenty of ammunition now. Use it.” He pulled out one of his pistols and shot two ponies through the head. There was a terrible bellowing as they went down. “Do I always have to show you your jobs?” Custer yelled, nearly overrunning Godfrey as he galloped back into the trees.
“Rifles,” Godfrey ordered. Men broke away and ran for them. Handsome Harry Venable unbuttoned his dirty overcoat for freer movement, then unholstered his side arm.
“Those with revolvers start using them,” Godfrey said. “Otherwise we’ll spend the night in this place.”
Venable strode right up to a well-built chestnut pony whose eyes shimmered, reflecting the bonfire. The little Kentuckian pressed his lips together like a man about to do a difficult sum. He put his service revolver to the chestnut’s eye and fired. Blood and tissue erupted behind the magnificent head.
The shot pealed and reverberated, louder than the loudest prairie thunderstorm. Something went off like a powder charge in Charles’s brain. A raw, low sound began in his throat, rising, gaining volume, a long wild cry. He had no memory of starting to move.
52
THE HORSES FELL WITH a strange untormented grace. They fell sideways, the first ones, one into the next. They fell away from the volleying handguns of boyish soldiers, some of whom laughed or shouted, “Well hit.” The soldiers knelt and fired round after round into shoulders and ribs, chests and bellies. Blood ran in strong streams, as from coarse sieves, while the horses fell away from their executioners, briefly creating a beautiful orderly pattern much like that of waves flowing outward, outward, on a changing sea tide. Then the pattern lost its beauty and order, because eighty horses had fallen, a hundred had fallen, and there was no more room to die, so some died kneeling. And there was nowhere to flee. Animals that tried to stampede on the far edge of the herd found other boys with carbines there, some with the dirty white pallor of exhaustion, some feebly joshing, some stoic, some patently sick with the loathing of their deed, and from that side, too, the killing began, and soon there was a circle of fire and smoke like a great round ribbon tying up dying animals. As the horses fell and kept falling, the noise grew unbearable, a regular choir of pain. To the smell of pumping blood, which had an appeal for some, there was added the stink of horse bowels emptying in great spasms, and soon the pattern was in complete disorder, full of clashing lines and elements, with here and there a beautiful mute head lifting, the lips peeling back, the long teeth shining, opening to let out a great hopeless cry for mercy that ended when one more good sport of a trooper picked that head to blow apart. In place of the pattern, there grew a mound of shiny, stinking, dying horseflesh; a landmark quite as distinctive as one of the Antelope Hills; a landmark not of nature but of man, there by the Washita.
Charles ran to the perimeter where the young soldiers knelt with revolvers and carbines. He grabbed a blue shoulder. “Put that down. Stop it. Don’t kill dumb animals.” It sounded perfectly reasoned to him; he had no sense that the words came out in screaming bursts, or that an unfamiliar strength was pumping in him, enabling him to hurl one of the shootists four feet to one side just by gripping his shoulders.
A soldier with eyes as damp and bright as those of the dying horses shied from Charles, warning others near him, “Look out, Cheyenne Charlie’s gone crazy.”
Charles wondered why the soldier said that. All he wanted was a halt to the killing of the animals, perfectly reasonable.
“Stand aside. I’ll deal with him.” Charles recognized the voice before he saw Harry Venable, Handsome Harry, small and dapper despite hunger and fatigue and the grime of a forced march.
‘Tell them to stop it, Venable.”
“You filthy, craven idiot, we are carrying out the general’s orders.”
Charles formed fists and beat the air and screamed then, really screamed, because it seemed the only way to get through Venable’s studied calm. “Let them go. Let them go free. Stop the killing!”
Venable raised his hand. His s
potless, lightly oiled Colt with the ivory grips gleamed a foot from Charles’s chest. Only a faint tremor of Venable’s chin showed he was wary of the threat presented by the screaming, scruffy man. The carbines and pistols volleyed with a sound like stones thrown on a tin roof. The smells ripened. More than one soldier turned away and puked on the churned-up ground, adding a thin pink slime to the brown, the white, the red.
A speck of vomit flew to Venable’s right boot, which was already filthy with mud. The speck seemed to excite him. He whipped the revolver across Charles’s face, pulling on it so that the sight cut into Charles’s cheek like a dull knife.
“Now, Main, leave the field.”
Charles stared at him—a mistake, because Venable was ready. “Hold him,” Venable yelled to the soldiers as his knee caught Charles between the legs, a clumsy blow but effective. Dizzy with pain, Charles tried to punch Venable. But he was slow. Two troopers seized his arms and jerked them out full length.
Venable’s blue eyes danced. In his finest, softest Kentucky voice, he complimented the soldiers. “Very good, sirs. Now hold him fast.”
He holstered his side arm and stepped in near Charles. He threw a hard punch into his stomach. For a small man, he was very strong. Charles’s head came up slowly. Wild-eyed, he spit at Venable, who wiped it off and punched him low in his groin. Then he pounded Charles’s head once from the right. Blood and mucus spewed from Charles’s nose. He was going down and he couldn’t help it.
A great sense of failure enveloped him. He ought to get up. Fight back. He was unable to. It was Jefferson Barracks again.
Venable stood beside Charles’s head, his drawn revolver pointed down. Despite the noise of guns and horses, Charles heard the revolver cock. Venable aimed it at the canal of his ear.
“Sir,” a soldier said, “sir, he’s out of it. Griffenstein told me he has a thing about seeing horses hurt. That oughtn’t to merit killing—” Charles couldn’t see which young soldier had spoken, but he saw Venable glare, and heard the boy’s assertive tone fade away as he added one more gulping, “Sir.”
Charles knew he was going to be murdered right there. He watched Venable glance around at witnesses Charles couldn’t see except as pairs of blood-spattered boots. Venable hesitated. He couldn’t get away with it.
“Pick up the son of a bitch,” he said, jamming the Colt in his holster again. “You—and you. Get him on his feet, the damn traitor. We’ll let the general settle this.”
53
THE TWO SOLDIERS QUICKSTEPPED him toward the cottonwoods, where a new fire had been built near the general’s standard to provide light and warmth as the afternoon darkened. Almost as fast as it had come, the rage diffused, leaving Charles with pains in his body and a vague awareness of having tried to stop the horse slaughter. A sad finality settled on him; he knew at last what he wanted to do. No, stronger than that. Had to do, at all hazards.
General Custer, youthful and somehow rakish and spruce despite his filthy uniform, looked annoyed by Venable’s interruption. He had been talking to California Joe, who was saying, “No, sir, I can’t find Sergeant Major Kennedy’s body no place as yet.”
Custer turned from the blazing fire, his right leg slightly bent at the knee, his left hand resting on the hilt of his saber. He always seemed aware of his posture.
“What is it, Captain Venable? Quickly. I intend to march in less than an hour.”
“Sir, this man, this damn reb, tried to stop your men from performance of duty.” Venable sounded very proper and sententious, although Charles, whose head was clearing and giving him a sense of the enormous trouble he was in, could hear Venable’s wrath bubbling underneath. “He attempted to prevent our work with the pony herd.”
“Your butchery,” Charles said.
“Your tender sensibilities object to that, Mr. Main?” Custer strode over to Charles, addressing him as though Charles did not have an eye swelling shut, a cheek dripping blood, and snot hanging from his nose. “You prefer that we leave healthy horses so the savages can ride them in the spring to commit more atrocities? General Sheridan charged me with the duty of punishing the Cheyennes and Arapahoes—”
“Black Kettle was a peace chief.”
“That’s of no consequence. My responsibility is to eradicate the threat to white people—” Why was he talking so much, Charles wondered. To whom was he justifying his actions? He didn’t have to do it to a shabby scout of questionable background. Despite his pain, Charles had a sharp sense that Custer was aware that today had damaged him; a sense that he was already on the run. “A duty which I have this day carried out. Only total war will bring peace to these plains.”
“May be, but I don’t want any more of it.”
“What? What’s that?” Custer was caught off guard, his blue eyes confused, then angry again.
“I said I don’t want any more of your kind of war. I shouldn’t have signed on.”
“We should not have engaged you,” Custer retorted. California Joe looked ready to sink into the ground.
Charles threw everything into the pot and made his last bet. “I’m leaving. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to shoot me. Or order someone to do it.”
Venable said, “I would be pleased—”
“Be quiet!” Custer shouted. He was breathing fast, his face ruddier than Charles had ever seen it. “You’re rash to suggest that, Mr. Main. I can very easily order you shot. Witnesses to your rebellious behavior will testify to the necessity—”
“You’ve got enough trouble on your hands.” Blood in Charles’s beard formed a drop that fell and struck a patch of snow between his boots. He tried to shut out the sounds of the steady small-arms fire, the horses dying. “I saw Mrs. Blinn shot. I saw her son shot.”
“I have it on reliable authority that the Cheyennes slew the woman.”
“Your men shot her, I saw it. So did others.”
“We have no evidence the white woman was the Mrs. Blinn who was abducted from—”
“I heard her name and others did, too.” Bleeding, glowering, Charles pushed Custer. The Boy General was momentarily panicked; Charles saw that in the bright blue eyes. “They’re not going to call this a battle, they’re going to call it a massacre. Babies with bullets in their heads. Women scalped by United States soldiers. A white captive and a peace chief, an old man, murdered. Not a very pretty episode to include in a campaign biography, would you say, General?”
George Custer took one half-step backward; it said everything.
Venable was almost spitting with frustration. “General Custer, no one will believe anything from a man who lied twice to get in the Army.”
Charles nodded. “You’re right. And I’m really not interested in talking to newspapermen, Mr. Keim or any other. I’m not interested in getting even with anybody. I followed that trail a long time and look where it got me.” No one understood what he meant.
His stinging eyes moved over the ruined village, the ashes of the great bonfire, out to the hideous quivering mound of dead and dying horses. “I had to kill a boy this morning. Not a man. A boy. I’ll see him in nightmares till I die. I’ll see this obscene place, too. I’m sick of this army. I’m sick of soldiers like you who work out their ambitions with human lives. I’m sick of the whole goddamn mess. Now either let me go or shoot me, you miserable excuse for a human being.”
Venable stepped in, arm flying back to give Charles a roundhouse blow to the head. “Leave him alone,” Custer said. Venable fairly jerked at the sharp order. Custer wiped his mouth. “Let him go. We have enough to explain already.”
“General, you can’t permit—”
“Damn you to hell, Captain Venable, close your mouth. Mr. Main—” Custer shook a finger under Charles’s nose, his teeth gritted together as if he couldn’t trust himself to keep control. “I will give you five minutes to cross the Washita. If you are not north of the river in five minutes, I will order a detachment to pursue and shoot you. You are a disgrace to the Army and a disgrace to
manhood. Dismissed, sir.”
“Yes, sir”—Charles weighted the words, strung them out—“General—Custer.”
There was a long, dangerous moment when they stared at one another. Then, like two bears that had clawed and bloodied each other to exhaustion, they simply turned away, both of them, and gave up the fight.
Little Harry Venable wouldn’t give up. He followed Charles through the trees, and Charles took some satisfaction from that. Custer’s decision had reduced the Kentuckian to something like a small boy who didn’t dare use his fists, only taunts:
“It’s a long way to Fort Dodge. I hope the hostiles catch you.” They probably will, Charles thought. “I hope they carve your heart out.”
Charles stopped. Venable inhaled loudly. Charles stared at him with a twisted smile. “You hopeless little pile of shit. My war’s over.”
“What?”
He turned and walked on. He knew Venable would never pull his gun.
He found Satan, untied him, patted him, and mounted. He judged the time to be around four, but the November afternoon was exceptionally cloudy and dark. He rode out of the Cheyenne village at a trot, every movement of the piebald painful to him. The flesh around his left eye was puffy, his vision squeezed to a slit. He could do nothing about the gash on his face except let it bleed until it clotted. He could wash at the stream where the Seventh had found Elliott—if he got that far.
An Indian was approaching on the open ground. Charles reined in, reaching for the Spencer in its scabbard. He saw that the hobbling Indian was one of the Osage trackers. The Indian’s leggings were soaked. He proudly showed something in his hand.
“Scalp of Black Kettle. Put him in the deep water. He will be bad meat soon.”
“You bastard,” Charles said, and rode on.
He crossed the Washita. The water rose to his thighs. Satan strained to keep his head out. Charles was shivering and his teeth were chattering when they emerged. A distant trumpet sounded boots and saddles. Without looking, he could picture the various units of Custer’s command forming up to march.