"S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

"My Crow scouts reconnoitered the Sioux encampment and reported it contained thousands of
warriors."

"So on the word of a few . . . aborigines, you not only abandoned the offensive but ordered a general
withdrawal from the area? Colonel, are you aware that expert witnesses have testified that no Indian
band has ever been seen in the numbers you allege, in all the history of the frontier?"

"There were enough of them to defeat General Crook six days earlier, on the Rosebud."

"May I remind you, Colonel, that General Crook is not on trial hereтАФ"

And at last the dry sour voice of little Phil Sheridan: "It is the finding of this court that on June 24, 1876,
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was guilty of dereliction of duty and of cowardice in the
face of the enemy, in that he did fail to attack the hostiles as ordered . . . . "



He hears the voices now without bitterness or chagrin; all the old emotions are gone, leaving only a
profound and bottomless fatigue. Too tired for fighting old battles, too tired, he thinks dully, ever to fight
againтАФ



"Fight them, Autie." Tom Custer, arguing, urging. "They're railroading you. They've been out to get you
ever since you exposed the way they're starving the reservation Indians. Now Sheridan's making you the
scapegoat for his botched campaign."
Libbie: "Yes, Autie you've got to fight back, it isn't right, they can't do thisтАФ"

But of course they could, that was never in doubt, no army ever let a lieutenant colonel fight his own
generals, not even a lieutenant colonel who had once been a general himself.

Well, Libbie was gone now, of a fever the doctors said, but then the medical profession did not
recognize a broken heart as a cause of death. And Tom, good faithful Tom, resigning his own
commission in protest against his brother's disgrace, only to be gunned down on a Kansas street by a
vicious thug named Wyatt Earp, whom he had accurately but unwisely accused of cheating at cards.

***

His eyes move, now, his gaze dropping to the revolver in his lap: the same big English .45 he carried on
that last campaign against the Sioux, a good reliable weapon, faster to fire and load than the
standard-issue Army Colt. True, in the end there was no occasion to use it. . . .

Not, at least, on anyone else; there were, to be sure, plenty of times afterward when he found himself
considering the ultimate alternative. He wonders why he never did it. Maybe, he thinks, I am a coward
after all.

But he might have taken that route, in the end, but for the letter: "Dear Genl Custer, pardon my
fammilierty but I fot the Rebs under you & now I read about your trobles & I say it is a HтАФl of a thing
after all you done for our Countrie. You shoud come to Drakia, a White man has a real show hear. They