Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 by Terry C. Johnston Page A

the shoulder. “Why, fellas, we’re going to kill us some Sioux just like we done to Johnny Reb down at Saylor’s Creek!”
    Tom had won his second of two Congressional Medals of Honor during the Civil War at Saylor’s Creek, charging a Confederate artillery position and single-handedly bringing back the rebel flag to Union lines. He also brought back a serious wound—a hole in his cheek where a Confederate ball had entered, smashing an exit wound behind the ear. More than eleven years later, Thomas Ward Custer still wore that rosy scar on his cheek. Wore it as proudly as he wore his medals.
    “Hear! Hear!” shouted Captain George W. Yates, a hometown Monroe boy like the Custers. “Go, you wolverines!”
    “That’s the spirit, men!” Tom hollered enthusiastically as he watched friends backslapping.
    His was the sort of contagious enthusiasm that his older brother liked to see run through his officer corps. Here on the precipice of their march up the Rosebud, here with the men keyed up tight as a cat-gut fiddle string, brother Tom could work his singular magic on his fellow officers.
    Irishman Myles W. Keogh pounded big James Calhoun on the back. Both members of the Custer inner circle cheered lustily with Tom.
    “Nothing short of death stands in the way of the Wild I Company!” Captain Keogh growled in his peat-moss brogue.
    “Appears nothing will stand in our way now, Myles,” Custer said as the huzzahs quieted. “Terry’s giving us all the help he can. I believe the old boy knows we’ll be the ones to save his hide on this campaign—not Gibbon, not even Crook.”
    “Custer and the Seventh!” Tom shouted, amid cheers.
    “All right!” Custer himself shouted. “Let’s get down to business so we can get you back to your units. There’s much to do and little time to do it. We are leaving tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow?” Captain Frederick W. Benteen croaked.
    “Damn! Old Sitting Bull himself better watch out for that mangy scalp of his now!” adjutant Cooke hollered.
    “In the morning?”
    “Dang-it-all—but I’m itchy for a good scrap a’ready!”
    Waving a hand for silence, Custer began, “We’ll leave somewhere between late morning to early afternoon.”
    “How long we expect to be out, General?” Major Marcus Reno shuffled a step forward to inquire. He would be second only to Custer himself on the scout.
    “Just as long as it takes, Major. To put it in terms of something you can tell your men, I want to be ready for fifteen days of march.”
    “Fifteen, sir?” Captain Yates asked.
    “That’s correct, George. We’re being provisioned for fifteen days. For the first few days the marches won’t be all that long, but later on I figure the length of each march will be increased as need and circumstance arise.”
    “Ol’ Iron Butt won’t go hard to wear us out—eh, Autie?” Tom joked.
    “No,” he grinned. “It wouldn’t do to wear out a single man of you and run you into the ground trying to keep up with me! But on the lighter side, if more of you had doneas I have, you would not have to brood on dying and leaving someone behind with nothing but your memory.”
    “If you’re talking about that life-insurance policy you took out in your name for Libbie, I got myself one for Maggie as beneficiary,” Lieutenant James Calhoun boasted.
    “Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Jim?”
    “That’s right, General. Same as you.” Calhoun winked to those round him. “While I don’t expect to use it—you never know when old Iron Butt here will ride us all to our deaths chasing Sioux up and down some bloody river again!”
    As the laughter subsided, Keogh stepped forward, slapping his chest. Many were the times Myles Keogh was not the most-liked man in the regiment. Too often a drunken braggart, strict to a fault with his men and most times prone to violence. There remained an electrifying aura about the man, especially in that effect he had over the fairer sex—and it all carried over