Even at this distance it was clearly visible: a broad, beaten trail leading down to the riverbed—pony hooves and travois scouring the fragile earth in a track as broad as anything the young lieutenant could ever hope to see.
“It’s a goddamned highway,” Stanton cursed behind his field glasses.
“And with no sign of ’em anywhere,” Keyes added, slowly swinging his glasses to all points from the north of east, clear down to the south of east—where the warriors would be found fleeing from the reservations.
“Silent and still,” King observed with disappointment, sensing the eerie emptiness of that landscape. “Maybe we’re too late.”
“We better not be,” Stanton growled. “If we are—then maybe Crook, or even Custer himself, will have more on their hands than they bargained for.”
“I can’t help but wonder how Sheridan knew we’d find this big trail right here, right where he said it would be,” King said with no little amazement.
Stanton looked at him. “You mean you don’t know how he figured it out?”
King wagged his head. “Not sitting back there in his office in Chicago, no. Only the Sioux and Cheyenne could know this ground very well.”
“You’re right there, Lieutenant,” Stanton agreed. “But here—watch.”
And with a twig he snapped off some dry sage, the major drew some quick landmarks in the dust.
“This here’s the Big Horns. Where Crook put his base camp, and he’s marching north of there as we speak— going to strike the enemy villages. Now, down here to the southeast”—and he drew a couple of circles—“is Red Cloud and Camp Robinson. Here’s Spotted Tail and Camp Sheridan, you see. So if you draw the Beaver and the Cheyenne and its South Fork on the map like so”—and Stanton scratched in those east-west flowing rivers there in the middle of his map—“where do you think those red-bellies are going to go if they’re of a mind to jump the reservation?”
“I suppose they’d go north toward the Rosebud and the Big Horns, where the rest of the hostiles are, right?” asked Keyes.
“Right, Lieutenant. Now draw me a line from the agencies to that hostile hunting ground Crook and Custer are closing in on.”
King watched Keyes take the twig and draw a straight line heading northwest from reservations.
“That’s right, fellas. That’s how Sheridan knew. On any map you can do the same goddamned thing. Whether it’s a map in Chicago, or a map at Fort Laramie. That line the lieutenant here drew in the dirt crosses right there, by doggy! You look right over there and you’ll see that very same spot—where Little Bat here found us that big trail.” Again he jabbed with the point of his twig as he emphasized, “Simple enough: you want to get from there to there, you got to cross right
The small band with Garnier kept their horses under cover as they pushed on one ridge more, reaching a crest where they were greeted with an even wider panorama, able to make out the great sweep of the valley of the South Cheyenne for more than fifty miles as it flowed toward the north by east into the dim, timbered rise of tumbled ground that indicated just how close they were to the Black Hüls.
“I’ll stay here with Mr. King,” Stanton told Keyes. “I figure you should return to the rest of the company and retrace your steps back to the timber along the Mini Pusa. Loosen cinches, but don’t unsaddle, Lieutenant.”
“You’re going to keep an eye on the trail, Major?” Keyes inquired.
“And you can post a man with a looking glass to keep an eye on us,” Stanton replied. “If we see anything, we can signal and he can alert you. The company can be on its way here in a matter of seconds.”
“Very good, sir,” Keyes said, saluted, and turned down the slope to take two soldiers on the backtrail with him.
The sun stalled there in the sky, seeming to refuse to move at all as the minutes crawled by, every one of them more torture than the last as the growing heat seemed to rise with fiery intensity right out of the ground. Here at midday the air refused to stir, waves of heat shimmering in the middistance. Sometime past one o’clock King was rubbing the kinks out of his leg and watching to the south and west when he noticed a far-off column of dust spiraling high into the air—another sign that this land was without any breeze today.
“Slow but steady, Carr’s bringing ’em on,” King observed dryly. “I’m sure glad I’m not riding with that bunch.”
Stanton turned, training his glasses on the distant dust cloud. “They’re eating their forty acres today.”
Looking into the sky, the lieutenant said, “What I wouldn’t give for a little rain, Major.”
Licking his cracked lips as he turned back to watch the Indian trail, Stanton said, “Me too, Lieutenant. A little rain would do this ground and this army some real good.”