Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 Read Online Free Page B

it to himself.
    Each fall Libbie would join him on a trip back east, perhaps going on to Chicago or New York for some of the bright lights and bustling activity of those teeming cities. Yet the sophisticated veneer wore thin all too quickly, and he found himself suffering that gnawing emptiness once more … needing to replenish the well of his own soul with those desolate prairies and high plains of the far west. Only there on the wild land did he feel himself near whole again—as near to being whole as he had been for the seven years since that long winter gone.
    Only then did Custer feel somewhat closer to the Cheyenne woman’s wildness once more.
    “Your mount is ready, Mr. Burkman?”
    “It is, General.” The private shoved the stub of the pencil back in his pocket and stuffed his notebook in his blue tunic. “I saddled Vic for you, sir. And the troop farrier has Dandy ready for Mrs. Custer—just as you requested, sir.”
    “Splendid! I want both those fine animals to get their fill of clean prairie air on this campaign.”
    Burkman watched the general remove his hat and swipe his forearm across his brow. In the short time he had known Custer, the young private had watched the general’s hairline recede at a steady pace. Burkman declared cheerily, “Gonna be a hot one for sure today, General.”
    He winked at his orderly. “Not even summer yet, John. I’ll just bet you can’t wait.”
    Custer stood in Dakota Territory after all, where every scorching summer the land lay blistered like steamy rawhide beneath a merciless one-eyed sun. Winters were just as deadly if not even more brutal, with nothing to slow the arctic wind but the grasslands of Canada.
    Still, winter or summer, one of the biggest problems remained that the fort had no well, not even a cistern. Every day water wagons made that bumpy ride down to the river to draw the day’s rations. By late December or early January, those on the water detail would have to chop through as much as five feet of ice before they could haul water up from the Missouri.
    If it wasn’t the snow swirling like white buckshot in an eye-stinging winter blizzard, then the soldiers of the Seventh found the summer sky turned black with grasshoppers. If the grasshoppers clinging to everything and everybody wasn’t enough, all a man had to do was wait until the cool of the evening for relief from the excruciating temperatures, when the hordes of mosquitoes would rise up above the Big Muddy like a biting, bloody curse suffered upon the land. Some of the soldiers who had to be outdoors at that time of day had even taken to wearing a balloonlike helmet made with wire and draped with a special netting for protection from the bloodsucking monsters.
    After a while a lot of those old-timers with the Seventh Cavalry cursed their lot, wondering what they had done to deserve their imprisonment in this hellhole on the Upper Missouri. Many of them joked that Satan’s roaring fires of sulfur and brimstone could be no worse than late summer at Fort Abraham Lincoln when the thermometer still hovered at better than ninety degrees come sunset and the clock chiming off nine bells.
    “Thank you, Mr. Burkman.” Custer admired his stocking-footed, blaze-faced sorrel. “Vic looks ready as ever, doesn’t she?”
    Handing the general his reins, John said, “She does that, sir. Even more splendid when you’re in the saddle.”
    “If I didn’t know better, I’d say my orderly was bucking for a promotion!”
    Custer laughed easily as he tightened Vic’s reins to turn his mare toward the massive parade where the troops gathered for review. Most of the men had spent the last few nights in tents off a distance from the post on a shakedown to ready them for what lay ahead on their march across the western prairie.
    “Be sure to fetch Dandy for Mrs. Custer and have him saddled promptly, John,” Custer reminded as he pranced away, waving his big cream-colored hat in the humid dawn air. “Her