The Red Hills Page 12

  The battle was over.

  Nothing remained but the dead. The Indians had removed their own corpses. It had been a massacre. From the positions of the mutilated bodies of the Seventh Cavalry, Crow could see he had been right. There were small groups of dead all the way up towards the top of the hill. Custer had tried. By God, he had tried! But Crazy Horse had checked him. Within twenty paces of the rim of the bluff, where he could have made a stand, there was the largest gathering of bodies.

  Standing among the silent dead was a horse. A claybank gelding, its body streaming blood from bullet and arrow wounds. It whinnied as it saw Crow approaching, and tried to walk towards him. But it was too badly injured and stood still again.

  They were all there.

  Men Crow had known over many years.

  Autie and his brothers Tom and Boston Custer. Miles and Keogh. Calhoun and Cooke. Many of them so badly cut about as to be barely recognizable. Strangely, Custer's corpse was hardly touched. A bullet wound in the forehead and another in the chest. But his hair was shorter than when Crow had known him and he wondered if the Sioux had even recognized Yellow-hair.

  And there was another body. A single arrow protruding from between the shoulder-blades. The feathered end snapped off short. Hit in the back. Scalped, black blood crusted over the top of his raw skull and matting his face.

  Trooper Edward Simpson. Running from Crow's wrath.

  Running from one death, only to find another.

  So it was over.

  Crow didn't stay, swinging his long lean frame back into the saddle, his black shadow stretching out over the battlefield of the Little Big Horn, covering the bodies. The shadow etched deep by the morning sun-rise. Away down the valley he could just make out a cloud of dust that he guessed must be the relief column.

  Coming too late to save Custer, they would be in time to bury his command.

  Crow turned his horse's head to the west. The debts had been settled and all he had to do now was to carry on and find a way of living.

  Maybe bounty-hunting.

  Killing was easy — it was living that was hard.

  Table of Contents

  James W. Marvin The Red Hills

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen