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As two men began lashing her to the rough-hewn posts of the prairie bed, she heard George begin to whim per, begging Usher to stay his hand. In the utter stillness of that morning George begged for his master to grant him mercy—

Then came the first crack and the Negro’s shrill cry. Almost inhuman. Like the soul-grating screams of the women Usher’s men used up before they were killed.

Again and again the whip snarled against flesh, until George’s cries softened into the blubbering whimpers of an infant, sobbing incoherently.

“Pull him down!” Usher ordered beyond the tent flaps. “Throw him in one of the wagons and let’s be moving—I want to put forty miles behind us today—put this piece of country far behind me!”

Gritta listened as the men who had tied her stood at the flaps, holding them aside and staring out.

“He opened that nigger up like a gutted hog,” one of them whispered.

“Never’d want him to take a whip to me, not that one.”

Her sundered wrist was bound with a thick strip of her dressing gown, around which they had looped the rope. Her scalp burned where the hair had been torn loose, her eyes grown as puffy as her lips, the blood’s ooze slowing.

Gritta cried bitter, slow tears, cursing herself as she listened to George’s blubbering fading in the distance as they dragged him down, hauling him off to a wagon.

She cursed the voice that had driven her to this. Not that she regretted the pain she had brought upon herself. Instead, the woman cursed herself for the selfishness that had brought such evil down upon the Negro.

She vowed when she next tried to kill herself that she would not put another living soul in the path of Jubilee Usher’s wrath.

18

Early July 1869

SHAD FELT SORRY for the young soldiers that Monday morning as the column was breaking camp. The day before had been the Fourth of July—and because of it Carr had kept a tight rein on his troops. He ordered all guns kept silent, with no wastage of ammunition. It hadn’t been much of an Independence Day, most grumbled that morning as orders came down to saddle up: not much fun singing songs of flag and country, without firing off a round or two in celebration.

Flag and country—these sentiments seemed about as far away for these youngsters at this moment as the Oriental silk trade would seem to an old Rocky Mountain beaver trapper.

As he finished saddling and dropped the stirrup over the cinch, Shad Sweete heard his name called out and turned to find Cody reining his big buckskin to a halt.

“Where we riding off to today, Bill?” he asked, gazing up at the young scout.

“Ain’t we, not this morning, Shad,” Cody answered, crossing his wrists over the saddle horn. “You’re riding out with Lieutenant Becher’s Pawnee patrol.”

“The German?”

Cody nodded.

“Sounds like Carr’s got different work lined out for you.”

“Wants me to keep this column’s nose pointed north. Figures that’s where the Cheyenne are.” Cody gazed off into the distance. “They’re out there somewhere.”

Shad stuffed a moccasin in a stirrup and lifted his immense frame into the saddle. “We’ll find them, Bill. That, or them Injuns find us first.”

“Either way—Carr will get his fight.”

“I see it through the same keyhole as you, Bill,” Shad agreed. “Carr wants a fight of it—to show what this outfit’s made of.”

“Can’t blame the man—especially after Custer’s had him all the opportunity to write his own name in glory.”

“Keep your eyes on the skyline today, Cody,” Shad said, nudging heels into his mount and easing away. “I smell Injuns on the wind.”

A Nebraska resident like the North brothers, Gustavus W. Becher had come to America from Germany less than nine years before. He had immediately joined the Union Army and proved himself a capable leader. In his late thirties, Becher was now one of Major Frank North’s white officers, commissioned as a lieutenant and assigned immediate command over fifty of the Pawnee battalion. He and the gray-headed plainsman in greasy buckskins would be the only white men riding along with the Pawnee on this important probe into the country west of Carr’s line of march.

“Goot mornin’, Mr. Sweete,” Becher called out in his thick accent. “Glad to have you along.” He turned to the Pawnee sergeant nearby, telling him in his inimitable German-clipped Pawnee tongue to mount the troops.

Becher turned back to the plainsman. “You care to ride vit’ me, Mr. Sweete?”

“Be a pleasure. Lieutenant.”

The German’s smile formed little more than a straight line at his lips. “Let’s go find some Injians for General Carr, vat say?”

It wasn’t long before the rising sun made its full and glorious presence known at the horizon. As it climbed higher into the heavens, the heat bubbled around them and the ground radiated like a glowing skillet beneath the riders feeling their way up Rock Creek from the Republican River, probing north by west through that morning as the distance shimmered in mirage.

“Man can boil in his own juices out here, Lieutenant,” Shad said.

“This country is like a frying pan, yes.”