Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 Read Online Free Page B

company rows allowed to burn themselves out in the blackness of night.
But, if the winter offensive proves even a moderate success there’ll be a hungry mob of army brass clamoring to claim paternity for Sheridan’s brainchild.
    He turned back into the chill of his tent. The smoky heat of two coal-oil lamps held some of the prairie cold at bay. Somewhere close a horse snorted and stomped. Custer smiled again. Things were going well. In the waning days of October he had instituted another innovation of his own: “coloring the horses” by troops, in which every man in a company rode a similarly colored animal. Each company would ride a different color horse into Indian country.
    A few hours later, with his long, sentimental letter to his wife finished, Custer blew out the smoky lamps. Only then did the silence around him grow suffocating. Almost as if he couldn’t breathe … then the weight of it disappeared, as quickly as it had smothered him. In the overpoweringsilence, he barely heard the first smattering of hard, icy flakes against the side of his canvas tent.
    The cold settled along the valley of the Washita like old ash settling under a persistent rain.
    Monaseetah, daughter of Cheyenne chief Little Rock, second only to Black Kettle himself, moved back to her father’s lodge, leaving her cruel and abusive husband.
    In the cold chill of her father’s lodge she awoke each night, staring at the dull red glow of the dying coals, feverish in the frosty air as the sweat of fear rolled from her copper flesh. The brute she had married had treated her no better than a camp dog. No better than some piece of property he could abuse and discard … until she shot him.
    His pride wounded more than his bleeding leg, the shamed husband had divorced this fiery girl of seventeen summers—in the Cheyenne way, sending her back to the lodge of her father.
    Trembling now as she remembered his shaming her, Monaseetah caught her breath, then slowly calmed, listening to the reassuring snore of her father. They were without others, alone. It had been four winters now since the terrible day of black cannon smoke in the air and red smearing the snow. In a place the Southern Cheyenne knew as Little Dry River—a terrible day along the white man’s Sand Creek where Monaseetah saw her mother fall beneath a slashing cavalry saber. No more than a cowering child, she watched young soldiers defile her mother’s bloody body.
    Monaseetah knew the remembering would always be with her, bringing the all-time pain. There would be nolosing of that pain the way she had rid herself of the beast-man.
    Her eyes stinging with tears, Monaseetah blinked and blinked again. There had been no blood-that-comes-with-the-moon since the shortgrass time. Now she could believe only one thing. She carried the beast-man’s child in her belly. Monaseetah clenched her eyes shut with fierce resolution. Though she carried his child, she knew she could not return to the cruel one who had bought her away from Little Rock.
    Eventually she lay back against her father’s curly buffalo robes once more.
Let him find another wife
, she consoled herself.
Another woman to rut and abuse. Perhaps a wife like that pale white woman they hold prisoner in the Kiowa camp downstream
.
    Why anyone would want such a pale-skinned creature, with hair so thin, and the color of winter-dead grass?
    General Hazen’s negotiations for the release of the captive white mother and her son dragged on through the fall, getting nowhere with the Kiowas down at Fort Cobb during the Moon of Leaves Falling and into the Deer Rutting Moon.
    Monaseetah herself was visiting the Kiowa camp that first day Hazen’s half-breed scout, Cheyenne Jack, rode into the center of camp to declare he came from Army Chief Hazen with a plea for the release of Clara and Willie Blinn.
    Cautiously, Jack dismounted and sidled over to the terrified, beaten prisoner. “Listen to me, lady,” he whispered harshly when the others