Heaven and Hell

13

Silver fans of water rose as they crossed the stream in the dazzling morning. The richly silted valley glistened after rain. Indians working fields of squash and beans and ripening pumpkins waved their man-made hoes and shouted greetings. Upstream, blurs now, stood the solid post-and-beam lodges, covered with grassy sod; the traders had passed the Indian dwellings on then-way to this ford.

"Kansa," Wooden Foot said, indicating the workers in the fields. "They're called Kaw, too." He led his companions from the shallows into rippling foot-high bluestem. "They get along with 'most everybody. Guess that was typical of all the tribes a long time ago. Even the Cheyennes, when they lived in Minnesota or wherever. It ain't true no more. You'll soon see the reasons."

Passing almost due west, they did:

Emigrant wagons, westbound, with white tops billowing and snapping in the autumn wind.

A coach of the Butterfield Overland Despatch line bound down the Smoky Hill route with clatter and a cloud of dust.

A railroad work camp, double-story office cars lined up on a spur that ended in the middle of a field of thistles, clover, wilted goldenrod.

"This yere's tribal land, Charlie. The Indians been 'customed to roam anywhere they pleased, like them Arabs way on the other side of the world. Long as anyone can remember, they lived off the land's bounty. Chiefly the game and buffla. The Kansa, f'rinstance, they changed their way. Settled down. But not the Cheyennes. They live the old way. So you can't steal their land or shove 'em on a farm and expect 'em to kiss your foot.

That's why some of 'em's killin' people. Didn't you do the same when the Union boys marched all over your land?" "Yes, sir," Charles said, understanding.

In Topeka, Wooden Foot bought a load of tin pots. "The women like these better'n rawhide bags or sewn-up buffla stomachs. They can boil water 'thout all the fuss of droppin' in hot rocks."

The new goods required Fen to pick up some of the burden. The collie pulled a travois that held their tipi poles and cover. He went hours at a time, with only his lolling tongue showing his strain.

From a detachment of cavalry they learned that the big peace conclave, the one Willa had mentioned, had started, down on the Little Arkansas. The captain leading the detachment said, "You boys might have a peaceful winter for once."

"Damn fool," Wooden Foot said after the troopers rode on. Red-faced, he showed a surprising amount of sweat in the winy autumn air. "That captain's one more who don't grasp how the tribes work: He thinks that if a peace chief like old Black Kettle, whom we're goin' to see, makes his mark on a treaty, everybody else just puts their feet up and stores their weapons. Mighty few sojers understand that no one Indian speaks for all Indians. Never did. Never will."

"I guess you think pretty highly of the Southern Cheyennes."

"I do, Charlie. They's the finest horsemen in the world. Finest cavalry, if you want to sharpen a point on it. Also, I been out here long enough to see 'em as different people, not just a bunch of copper-color look-alikes. If some Dog Society man rapes a farmer's wife, like as not the cavalry'll shoot some peaceable old chief, 'cause they can't tell the difference. I was lucky. Pa taught me to see each one separate. They's good ones and they's bad ones, quite like the general run of humans. I loved one enough to take her to wife some years back. She died birthin' a little girl. Baby died a week after."

He coughed suddenly; bent his head forward, jaw clenched, as he grasped a handful of his shirt. Charles reined Satan, leaning left to grip Wooden Foot's arm. "What is it? What's hurting you?"

"Nothin'" — the old trader got his breath — "to speak of."

He gulped, eyes watering. "My pa had a bum heart. He passed it along. Don't let it worry you. Let's travel."

The low hills began to flatten; the willows and cottonwoods to thin out. They rode through shorter buffalo and grama grass, empty of habitation except for the mound towns of black-tailed prairie dogs. Autumn light flooded everything, creating a raw beauty from hills sliced open by wind to reveal striations of white and yellow and orange chalk. Charles couldn't exactly say he was happy, but each day he thought of Augusta Barclay a little less.

"All right, Charlie," Wooden Foot said when they'd forded the Smoky Hill. "Time for you to start school."

"You never know when you'll need speed, Charlie. Boy an' me, we practiced till we can put the tipi up in ten minutes and strike it in half that. With your help I figure we can cut it some more. Notice that the round door always faces east? That way you miss most of the big rain and wind storms outa the west, and you catch the mornin' sun. Also, the tribes like to be reminded that way that it's the Great Spirit who sends 'em light and nourishment. Well, let's hop to, Charlie. Up she goes in eight minutes if you want your supper."

Flickering fire shone on the coil of brass wire. Wooden Foot's hair, long to start with, had grown enough to split into braids. He was winding wire round and round the braid hanging over his left shoulder.

Charles munched some pemmican, a chunk of powdered buffalo meat hardened up after the addition of fat and berries. "If you don't want to bother with that, I can cut your hair with my knife."

"Oh, no. You cut off a man's hair, you take away his life in the hereafter. If a Cheyenne ever gets a haircut, his woman burns the cuttings so nobody does mischief with 'em."

Boy jumped up, excited. "Road! Road!"

Charles looked past Boy's pointing finger to the veil of stars unfurled across the heavens. "That's the Milky Way, Boy."

"It's the Hangin' Road, Charlie," Wooden Foot said. "The trail the Cheyennes travel to the spirit world. The road to the place of the dead."

The trader patted his nephew to calm him, then opened his parfleche, a hide bag decorated with quills and painted designs. From the bag he took a roll of clean, soft animal skin, which he spread by the fire. Next he opened small pots of red and black paint he moistened with spit. He surprised Charles by producing an artist's small brush. With strokes of black he began painting at the upper left corner of the skin. A line of three stick-figure horses and riders. He finished with a smaller four-footed figure out in front.

"What in thunder's that?" Charles asked.

"The start of our winter count. Kind of a picture history of a season in a man's life. Chiefs and braves make 'em." He grinned. "I figure the Jackson Trading Company's important enough to have one this year."

They saw a buffalo herd in seasonal migration southward. By a stream dried to a width of six inches, they waited hours for the herd to pass. It was six or seven miles long, front to back, and a good mile across. Wooden Foot pointed out the old bull leaders.

"One name the tribes got for the buffla is Uncle. Since he provides pretty near everything they eat or use, they figure he's pretty near a relative."

Under an ugly gray sky streaked silver by lightning, Charles held on to his hat and squinted through blowing dust at eight young Indians armed with lances and rifles. They were within hailing distance, so Charles clearly heard them yell, "Sons of bitches. Sons of bitches!"

One brave knelt on his pony's back, thrust out his rear end, and thumbed it with his right hand. Wooden Foot sighed. "They's sure learned all the best we got to teach."

Boy crowded his horse close to his uncle's. Charles rested the Spencer on his right leg, his mouth dry with worry. The lightning streaked east to west, and distant thunder pealed. Behind the braves milled a herd of at least fifty wild stallions, mares, and foals. The white men had stopped when they spied the Indians herding the ponies across some low hills.

"That's money on the hoof, them horses," Wooden Foot said. "Tribal wealth. They won't risk losin' it by comin' after us. They seldom attack 'less they outnumber the other side or they's trapped or provoked. 'Sides, they's near enough to see we got these."

He pumped his rifle up and down over his head a few times. The braves replied with more shaken fists and obscenities. As the wind strengthened and the rain started, they rode away with their herd. It took about ten minutes for Charles to calm down. In wartime combat, he'd never been free of fear, but it seemed sharper and more personal out here. Probably because of the space. All the empty, lonely, beautiful space.

"Dive, Charlie!" Wooden Foot yelled. "Dive and shoot!"

His feet out of the stirrups, Charles threw himself to the left. For a second, falling between the saddle and the grass as Satan galloped, he was sure he'd break his neck.

He didn't. While his legs locked on belly and loin, he shot his left hand under the piebald's neck and hooked it over. Clinging to the piebald's left side in that way, and protected by the horse's body, he tried to forget the prairie flying by beneath him.

"Shoot!" his teacher bellowed. He pulled himself up far enough to snap off a round above the withers of the racing horse. Wooden Foot yelled his approval. "Again!"

After five shots, his arm gave out and he fell off, remembering at the last moment to relax before he hit. The impact left him gasping, half senseless.

Fen ran circles around him, barking. Boy jigged and clapped for him. Wooden Foot pulled him up, slapping his back to help him breathe. "Good, Charlie. Better'n good. Damn fine. You've got a natural talent for plains craft. A real gift, God's truth."

"You think it's important I know how to shoot from behind my horse?" Charles asked with some skepticism.

Wooden Foot shrugged. "The more you know, the better chance you got to save your hair if some wild Cheyenne wants it. They use that little trick in tiltin'. That's a game on horseback, with padded lances. They try to knock each other off. Somebody musta figured out that it's a lot safer shootin' that way, too. How you feel?"

Satan trotted back, dipped his head, and blubbered out breath. Dust-covered, Charles smiled. "Bumped up a good deal. Otherwise I’m fine." .

"Good. I think we should try it again. I mean, you did fall off —"

That night, Wooden Foot added a pictograph to the winter count. The stick figure represented Charles shooting while hanging on the side of his running horse. Charles felt a rush of pride when the trader showed him the finished picture. For the first time in weeks, he slept without dreams of any kind.

They rode on south, still pupil and teacher.

"This yere says Cheyenne." Wooden Foot drew his right index finger rapidly across his left one several times. "What it really says is striped arrow, but it means Cheyenne 'cause they use striped turkey feathers for fletchin'."

Charles imitated the sign a few times. Wooden Foot then clenched his hand, extending index and little fingers. "Horse."

And the hands with fingertips touching, an inverted V. "Tipi."

And a fist at either temple, index fingers raised. "You can guess this one."

"Buffalo?"

"Good, good. Only a thousand more to learn, give or take a few."

The lessons covered various subjects. Wooden Foot rode his horse down a slight slope, back and forth, a continuous Z pattern.

"If an Indian's too far off to see your face or count your guns, this says you're peaceful."

And, as they watched another wild pony herd stream along the horizon to the southeast:

"Thing you got to do out here, Charlie, is turn your notions upside down. White man's rules and ways, they don't operate. F'rinstance, steal a horse back in Topeka, they'll hang you. Out here, runnin' off ten or twenty head from another bunch of lodges is the very bravest of deeds. If we'd learn to parley on Indian terms 'stead of our own, there might be real peace on the plains."

And, kneeling by some tracks in the steel-colored morning:

"What would you read from this, Charlie?"

He studied the marks, a number of nearly identical sets over­lapping and partially obliterating each other. He glanced at Fen, panting from pulling the travois, then at the flat and empty land. "Travois. A whole lot of them, according to those pole tracks. A village."

"Which is what you're s'posed to think. But look back two miles, to where these tracks started. You won't see any dog droppin's. Just horse turds. No dogs, no village. A few braves made these, with stone-weighted poles tied to their waists. In a few blinks of an eye, they can conjure up a village big enough to scare you off. Old fear's a powerful medicine. It can trick you into seein' what you expect to be there, 'stead of what is. Look."

He stood in the stirrups to point, his other hand holding his hat in the keen wind. On a rise to the southeast, so far away the figures were miniature, Charles saw horsemen. Four of them.

"There's your whole village. If you just saw the tracks, you'd ride real wide of it, wouldn't you?"

Charles felt stupid and showed it. Wooden Foot slapped his shoulder, to say it was all part of learning. Then he fired a rifle round over his head. The sound boomed away toward the distant riders, who quickly trotted out of sight. Like the other lessons, it burned into Charles's head with the permanence of a white-hot iron.

Old fear's a powerful medicine. It can trick you into seein' what you expect to be there, 'stead of what is.

Over the fire that night, while adding the incident to the winter count with strokes of black and red, Wooden Foot said in a mild voice, "You forgettin' about her some? The one you lost, I mean?"

"Some." These days he occasionally thought of Willa, too. "I'm grateful to you."

Wooden Foot waved the dainty brush. "All in the job. If I wanted a partner worth the name, I knew I had to pull you out of the glooms. They's just too damn many interestin' things and too many kinds of possible trouble out here for a man to stay sunk in a puddle of grief. Man's got to be alert, to keep his hair."

"I believe you," Charles said. He leaned back on his elbows, warmed by the fire and friendship, feeling a new, if fragile, contentment. He was beginning to feel the same kind of affection for this part of the world that he'd felt for Texas.

About an hour before dawn, a familiar pressure woke him. Too damn much coffee again.

As quietly as he could, he rolled out of his buffalo robe. His breath plumed in the dim light from the embers in the center of the tipi floor. He untied the flap thongs and slipped out the round hole without making a noise.

He heard the horses and mules fretting on their picket line and wondered why. The cold, star-bright night seemed untroubled. One thing sure, if some kind of animal interloper was prowling, Fen would never announce it. He was everything except a watchdog.

Charles walked along the side of a draw, away from the faint glow inside the tipi. He opened his trousers, then his long under­wear. Over the stream of water, he heard a voice.

He cut off the water, jerked his clothes back in place, and reached automatically to his hip.

The holstered Colt wasn't there. He slept with it next to his head. He had his Bowie in its belt sheath, though.

He crept back through the draw and saw silhouettes cast by the fire onto the tipi cover. Two people sitting up, a third standing between them with something stubby in his hand.

A gun.

Licking his chapped mouth and furiously blinking sleep away, Charles crept toward the tipi. The intruder, who must have stolen into the tipi right after he left, and not seen him, was speaking to Boy.

"You lie still, you barrel-headed idiot. If you don't, I'll blow this old fool's brainpan to pieces." The shadow man jammed the shadow gun against Wooden Foot's shadow head to demonstrate. "You fucking old geezer, I want some of your trade goods. And whatever money you got."

"Little early in the season for snowbirds, ain't it?" Wooden Foot remarked. Charles suspected he wasn't as calm as he sounded. "I thought fellas like you ate Army food all winter, then lit out in the spring."

"Shut the fuck up, unless you want me to shoot that prune-eyed cretin."

Very quietly, Wooden Foot said, "No, I don't want you to do that."

"Then fetch me the goods."

"They're in travel bags. Outside."

The man pushed the muzzle of the gun into Wooden Foot's shoulder.

"Let's go."

14

Charles drew his Bowie from its sheath. His heart raced as he started for the tipi. Long strides brought him near the round hole a few seconds before Wooden Foot crawled out.

The trader sensed Charles close by, standing against the tipi, but didn't turn his head to give it away. He was followed by the man with the gun. In the starlight, Charles saw a bearded face, then sleeves with yellow corporal's Stripes. A deserter, all right.

"Hold it there, old man," the man said, straightening. He was stocky and a head shorter than Wooden Foot, who wasn't all that tall. God knew from which fort he'd bolted. Maybe Larned, or the newer one, Fort Dodge.

Charles shifted his weight for the strike. About to speak, the deserter heard or sensed something. He pivoted, saw Charles, fired.

The ball scorched past Charles's cheek and tore through the tipi cover. Charles rammed the knife into the deserter's blue blouse and turned it, skewering him.

"Oh, no," the soldier said, rising on tiptoe. "No." A second later, he was unconscious on his feet. His hand opened, and the gun dropped. His knees unlocked, and Charles supposed he was dead, or nearly so, as he sprawled on the moonlit ground, boneless as a cloth doll. The stinking excretions of death came quickly.

Charles wiped his knife on the grass. "What do we do with him?"

Wooden Foot was puffing as though he'd run a long way. "Leave him" — more gasps — "for the scavengers. He don't deserve no better."

Fen trotted from the dark, whining; he knew something was wrong. Wooden Foot patted him. "That was slick work with the knife, Charlie. You're learnin' fast." He grabbed the blue uniform collar, raising the dead man's head. Moonlight on the lifeless eyes made them shine like coins. "Or did you already know how to do that sort of thing?"

Charles finished cleaning the knife with a wad of dead grass. He shot the Bowie back in the sheath and tapped the handle with his palm. The handle hit the sheath with a soft but distinct click. That was answer enough.

In the tipi, Boy crouched with his arms crossed. Hugging himself hard, he cried big tears. By now Charles understood why the youngster reacted that way. It wasn't merely fright. His poor short-weighted mind sometimes understood that his uncle faced a hard task or a rough situation. He always wanted to help but couldn't send the right orders to his hands or feet or any other part of his body. Twice before, Charles had seen him weep in angry frustration.

Wooden Foot took Boy in his arms. He patted and comforted him. Then he plucked at the front of his own shirt. Charles again noticed the deep red of the trader's face. Wooden Foot saw him staring.

"I told you, it ain't anythin'," he said, almost as angry as his nephew.

Charles didn't pursue it.

In early November, the Jackson Trading Company crossed trails with a half-dozen Arapahoes moving north. All wore their hair heavily dressed with grease, but one, more sensitive than the others to the recent summer sunshine, had hair more golden-brown than black. The scalp showing in the part of each man's hair was painted red.

Wooden Foot talked with the Arapahoes in a combination of sign, rudimentary English, and their own tongue. Charles heard "Moketavato" a few times; he recognized the Cheyenne name of Black Kettle, the peace chief Wooden Foot admired and respected.

He needed no special understanding of Indians to recognize the animosity of the Arapahoes. It snapped in every syllable, every sharp gesture and fiery look. Still, they kept talking with Wooden Foot, squatting in a semicircle opposite him, for almost an hour.

"I don't understand," Charles said after the Arapahoes had ridden away. "They hated the sight of us."

"Sure, they did."

"But they talked to you."

"Well, we hadn't done nothin' to stir 'em up, so they was duty-bound to treat us in a civil manner. Most Indians are like that. Not all, though, so don't be lulled."

"You talked to them about Black Kettle."

Wooden Foot nodded. "He and the Arapahoe peace chief Little Raven touched the pen to that treaty on the Little Arkansas not two weeks ago. The treaty stakes out a new reservation, gives a parcel of land on it to every Cheyenne or Arapahoe who's willin' to live there, and sweetens it to a hundred sixty acres if somebody lost a parent or a husband at Sand Creek. The guv'mint came down hard on what happened there, and they's sendin' Bill Bent, a good man, into the villages this winter to see that the sojers don't do the same thing again. Only trouble is, they was only about eighty Cheyenne lodges at the Little Arkansas. They's some two hundred others roamin' loose, and to them the treaty'll be just so much spit in the wind."

Charles scratched his chin; lengthening stubble was turning into a beard. "Did you find out where Black Kettle's camped?"

"Straight ahead, on the Cimarron. Right where I meant to look for him. Let's travel."

Under the rim of the low bluff, Wooden Foot pointed to littered bones. "Buffla jump. They turn the herd and run it over the edge. Pretty soon the buffla are pilin' up and breakin' legs and generally makin' it easy for the braves to kill 'em."

Two days had passed since their meeting with the Arapahoes. Light snowflakes fell in the windless afternoon, melting as they touched the frost-killed grass. Charles relished the warmth of his cigar and wondered how his son would react to his first sight of a snowfall. He surely wished he could be there to see —

"Jumpin' the herd that way ain't quite as glorious as killin' buffla in a reg'lar hunt. But if winter's closin' in and there ain't enough carcasses put by yet, it's a good quick way to —" He broke off, turned his head. "Hold on."

He ran out of the jump and up to the rim. There he knelt, palms pressed to the ground. "What is it?" Charles said.

"Riders. Comin' fast. Damn. They's two dozen or more. I got a hunch we used up all our good luck on that thievin' snow­bird, Charlie."

Charles ran for Satan, jerking his Spencer from the saddle scabbard. Wooden Foot ordered him to put it away.

"Why?"

" 'Cause we need to see who they are. You want to guarantee you'll be kilt, shoot an Indian without tryin' to palaver first."

Wooden Foot walked along the lip of the jump, thumbs in his cartridge belt, his slow slouching gait indicating a lack of worry. Charles saw plenty in his eyes, though. He slid the Spencer back and joined his partner. Wooden Foot motioned Boy to his side as bareback riders in a wide concave line came galloping down on them.

The Indians wore fringed leggings. Some had scarlet blankets tied around their waists. Six wore huge bonnets of eagle feathers. Charles also noted, not happily, three Army-issue garments, two of them short fatigue jackets with the light blue facings of the infantry, the third an old-style tail coat faced with artillery red. The wearer of the tail coat displayed a couple of medals on the front.

Another Indian, a sleek, thin, notably darker man in his mid-twenties, wore a huge silver cross on a chain around his neck. Strands of some wispy material hung from the sleeves and front of his buckskin coat. Almost all of these decorative strands were black, though Charles did notice a few yellow and gray ones. He assumed the cross, like the Army coats, was stolen.

"Oh, God, Cheyennes," Wooden Foot muttered. "And Dog Society men on top of it. They ain't wearin' their regalia, but I recognize the one in front. This couldn't be worse."

"Who is —?"

The rest of the question about the leader went unheard as the Cheyennes reined in, setting the air ajingle with the small round bells braided into the manes of their ponies. Trade bells, from white men, as were the trade carbines they leveled at the Jackson Trading Company. Besides the guns, the Indians carried bows and arrows.

Fen pulled back and forth in his travois harness, growling. Charles bit down on his cigar, now reduced to a stub by rapid puffing. Boy hid behind his uncle.

The darkest Indian, the one wearing the cross, sawed the air and yelled at them in his own tongue. He had a fine, narrow face, though unusually severe. The red paint with which he and the others had decorated their faces and hands was applied to his left cheek with special care. Two broad parallel strokes bracketed a long white scar curving from the outer tip of his eyebrow down along the line of his jaw, where it took a short upward turn beneath the left corner of his mouth — a red-lined fishhook.

The snow fell faster. The Cheyennes eyed Charles and his partner while the leader continued his harangue. Charles understood an occasional word or sign; Wooden Foot's teaching was beginning to sink in. But he didn't need to know any Cheyenne or sign language to understand that almost all of the leader's remarks were angry and nasty.

Persistently, never raising his voice, Wooden Foot kept replying every few seconds. The leader talked at the same time. Charles heard his partner speak of Black Kettle again. The young leader shook his head. He and his friends laughed.

Wooden Foot sighed. His shoulders slumped. He held up his right hand, asking for a respite. Grinning all the more, the leader yelped something Charles took to be assent.

"Charlie, come on." The trader drew him along the Up of the bluff. Carbine muzzles swung to follow them. Wooden Foot looked as depressed as Charles had ever seen him.

"It don't do much good to say it now, but I was wrong. We shouldn't of talked first. These boys are out for blood."

"I thought they didn't attack unless somebody provoked them."

"They's always the exception. I'm afraid that's what we drew in the head man of this bunch." Eyeing the dark Indian unhappily, he went on, "He's a war chief, and a mighty young one at that. His name's Man-Ready-for-War. Whites call him Scar. Chivington's men, they killed his ma at Sand Creek. They cut off her hair. I mean all her hair." Back turned to the Indians, he tapped his groin. "Then they hung it out together with a lot of scalps at that Denver theater where Chivington showed off his trophies. Dunno how Scar heard about it — maybe third or fourth hand. They's a number of tame old Indians hangin' around Denver beggin' or stealin' to live. But I know for a fact he did hear about his mama's shame, and he won't forgive or forget that. I guess I wouldn't either. Understandin' his reasons don't help us much, though."

"What about the treaty?"

"You think that counts a pin for him? I told you the treaty chiefs signed for only eighty lodges."

"He did a lot of talking. What does he want?"

"Scar and his friends are gonna take us into the village. Then they'll decide what to do with us."

"Shouldn't that be all right? Isn't it Black Kettle's village?"

Bleakly, Wooden Foot said, "It is, but he ain't come back from the treaty ground yet. He's overdue. Till he gets here, Scar speaks loud. In one way, he's a lot like white folks lookin' at Indians. Can't tell friend from foe, but in his case he don't want to, either."

Charles felt chillier than the falling snow. "What do we do? Grab our guns?"

Wooden Foot turned slightly, enabling him to see his nephew. Boy had his arms wrapped over his chest, clutching; his eyes were huge. "We do that, it's all over. It may be all over at the village, too, but I think I'd rather go there 'fore we dig our heels in. Boy can't defend himself 'gainst a bunch like this. Maybe some of the women'd take pity on him. Keep the men from carvin' him up." He sighed. "Ain't really fair that I ask you to string this out with me. But that's what I'm doin'."

Charles finished the cigar stub and nipped it down on the buffalo bones. The cigar had tasted more savory than usual. He decided it was because it might be the last he'd ever smoke.

"You know I'll go along with you."

"All right. Thanks."

With the trader leading, they walked back to the Cheyennes. Rapidly, Wooden Foot conveyed the decision to accompany the Indians without a fight. The braves smiled, and Scar yipped like a dog, which set Fen dancing in his harness. Scar reached over his shoulder to his arrow quiver and produced a three-foot stick wrapped in red-dyed buckskin decorated with quills. Painted eyes ornamented one end, eagle feathers the other. Dewclaws taken from some animal turned the stick into a rattle, which Scar brandished as he jumped from his pony.

He darted forward, shaking the rattle. Before Charles could sidestep, Scar slashed the rattle against his cheek. Charles swore and brought his fists up. Wooden Foot held him back.

"Don't, Charlie. I said don't. He just counted a coup, a little harder than he ought."

Charles knew about counting a coup by touching a vanquished enemy. It enhanced an Indian's reputation. But again, understanding how things worked didn't help their situation, or lessen his fear.

The dark-eyed Indian threw his head back and yipped and barked. Some of the others took up the cry, driving Fen into a frenzy of jumping and barking. One of the Cheyennes aimed his trade carbine at the dog. Wooden Foot grabbed Fen by the scruff and held him down, getting a nip on his hand for his trouble.

Charles stood rigid, scared and angry at the same time. Boy nuzzled against his side, trying to hide his sad misshapen head in the folds of the gypsy robe. Three of the Cheyennes dismounted and dashed among the pack animals, knifing open the canvas parcels. One Indian crowed over a bunch of porcupine quills. He cut the binding thong and tossed the quills in the air.

Another stabbed into a bag that spilled a diamond waterfall of pony beads. The Indian cupped his hands beneath, filled both, and ran among his friends, distributing some to each. Wooden Foot restrained Fen, clenched his teeth, and said "God damn," over and over.

Scar strutted to the trader and smacked his shoulder with the snake rattle; another coup. He barked louder than ever. The snow accumulated on Charles's hat brim and shoulders and melted in his eyebrows while a strange sense of finality dropped over him. He'd felt something similar on the eve of battle in the war. The premonition was always fulfilled by someone's death.

"Guess you're pretty damn sorry you listened to me," Wooden Foot muttered.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I kept sayin' they was exceptions to everything, only I guess I didn't learn the lesson good enough myself. I'm some teacher."

With more cheer than he felt, Charles said, "Any teacher can make a mistake."

"Yep, but in this case even one's too many. I'm sorry, Charlie. I sure-God hope we don't travel the Hangin' Road 'fore this day's over."

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

The exile traveled down from Pennsylvania to Washington, craggy and cynical and confident as ever despite his wartime misfortunes.

Simon Cameron, who had brokered his votes at the 1860 Republican convention in exchange for a cabinet post, was one of those ambitious, ice-hearted rascals who didn't understand the word defeat. As Secretary of War, he had caused a scandal with his favoritism in handling supply contracts. Lincoln had got rid of him by exiling him to the post of foreign minister to the court of Russia, and the House of Representatives had censured him for corrupt practices. Yet by 1863 he was back, trying to secure a Senate seat from his home state.

He failed, withdrew to Pennsylvania, and proceeded to strengthen his hold on the state machine. I will not be kept out of the national government forever, he wrote to his pupil and campaign contributor Stanley Hazard, when announcing his current visit to Washington.

Stanley invited the Boss to the Concourse Club, to which he had recently been admitted through friendship with Senator Ben Wade and some other high-ranking Republicans. In the club's lavish second-floor rooms, teacher and pupil settled into deep chairs near a marble bust of Socrates. Elderly black men, instructed to be servile, waited on members. One such took Stanley's order and tiptoed away. Immediately, Cameron asked for a donation.

Stanley had expected it. He responded with a pledge of another twenty thousand dollars. Lacking talent, he had to buy friendship and advancement.

Though it was only half past eleven in the morning, Stanley looked puffy about the eyes and dazed. "Feeling faint," he explained.

Cameron said nothing. "How do you find your work with the Freedmen's Bureau?"

"Revolting. Oliver Howard can't forget he's a soldier. The only Bureau men who have his ear are the former generals. I mean to tell Mr. Stanton that I want to be relieved. The trouble is, I don't know where to go if he agrees."

"Have you considered political office?"

Stanley's mouth dropped.

"I'm quite serious. You'd be a great asset in the House." Ah, now he understood. Cameron didn't base the assertion on ability. Stanley would be an asset because he contributed generously and never questioned the orders of party superiors. And obedience was necessary for him, since he didn't have a single original idea about the political process. Still, granting those limits, he found Cameron's suggestion exhilarating.

The stooped black waiter brought their drinks. Stanley's glass contained twice the amount in Cameron's. While his imagination was still soaring, the Boss dashed him down.

"You know, my boy, you'd have a sterling future were it not for one liability."

"You must mean George."

"Oh, no. Your brother's harmless. Idealists are always harmless, because they have scruples. In a tight situation, scruples tame a man, and make his responses completely predictable." Cameron's sly eyes fixed on Stanley as he murmured, "I was referring to Isabel."

Stanley took a few moments to comprehend. "My wife is a —?"

"Major liability. I'm sorry, Stanley. No one denies that Isabel's a clever woman. But she grates on people. She takes too much credit for your success — something most men find offensive." Cameron tactfully ignored his pupil's reddening face; Stanley knew the charges were true.

"She lacks tact," Cameron went on. "A smart politician hides his enmities; he doesn't flaunt them. Worst of all, Isabel no longer has credibility in this town. No one believes her flattery because she is so open about her ambition for social eminence and power."

After a swift look to check on possible eavesdroppers, the Boss lowered his voice. "But if you should ever find yourself — shall we say independent? — and if it should come to pass without any scandal attaching to you personally, I can almost guarantee you eventual nomination to the House seat from your district. Nomination is tantamount to election. We make certain of that."

Astonished and thrilled, Stanley said, "I would love that. I'd work hard, Simon. But I've been married to Isabel for years. I know her. She's a very moral, upright person. You would never find her compromising herself in any, ah, personal scandal."

"Oh, I believe you," Cameron said with sincerity. He thought of Isabel's face; no one would be interested.

"Still, my boy, scandal isn't limited to illicit romance. I've heard rumors about Isabel and a certain factory in Lynn, Massachusetts."

The old pirate. He knew very well that Stanley and his wife had been jointly involved in wartime profiteering through the manufacture of cheap army shoes. Cameron's pointed glance suggested that the truth need not be graven in stone.

The thought of returning to Isabel the kind of scorn and abuse she routinely heaped on him was likewise new, and intoxicating. On her orders, Stanley had abandoned his mistress. He owed Isabel for countless humiliations — and here was the Boss, promising him a prize if he got rid of her.

He didn't want to appear too eager. He exaggerated his sigh. "Boss, I'm sorry, I don't think what you describe will ever happen. However, if by some chance it does, I'll notify you at once."

"I wish you would. Good and loyal party men are hard to find. Women, on the other hand, are available anywhere. Think about it," he murmured, and sipped his drink.

After Cameron left, Stanley could hardly contain his excitement. The Boss had opened a door, and he wanted to leap through. How could he do it?

He refused an invitation to dine with a fellow club member and ate alone, stuffing down huge forkfuls of food, liquefied with great gulps of champagne. As the dessert course arrived — a whole quarter of a blueberry pie, with a creamy sauce — inspiration came, too. He saw a foolproof way to strike at Isabel behind her back, and insure her eventual downfall.

At the same time, the solution would remove him from a situation that, although profitable, bred great anxiety when he considered the possibility of exposure. He could continue collecting his profits for another year, perhaps two. Then, at a time entirely of his choosing —

"Magnificent," he said, and he didn't mean the champagne. Or the pie.

Before he left the Concourse Club, he set the plan in motion. He was astonished by its simplicity, and pleased by his own ingenuity in devising it. Perhaps he'd sold himself short for too long. Perhaps he wasn't the idiot that George and Billy and Virgilia and axe-faced Isabel thought he was.

He handed a sealed note to the elderly white man at the club's entrance desk. "Please put this in his pigeonhole so that he gets it next time he stops by."

"Is it urgent, Mr. Hazard?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Stanley said with an airy wave of his cane.

The doorkeeper read the envelope as Stanley went down the stairs whistling. Mr. J. Dills, Esq. He slipped it into the proper slot, thinking that for the last year or two, he had not seen Mr. Stanley Hazard so high-spirited or so sober in the middle of the day.

15

The sergeant from Fort Marcy left at midnight.

Ashton touched the mussed bed. Still warm. Disgust wrenched her face, then grief. She sat down and held her head while the sadness rolled over her.

She clenched her hands. You're a spineless ninny. Stop it.

No use. With each of tonight's customers — a greaser who lacked the manners of Don Alfredo; an oafish teamster from St. Louis; the soldier — she'd come closer and closer to screaming her frustration and outrage. Here it was November and she was ready to run, and never mind the risks of starvation in the wasteland or cruel punishment if the senora's brother-in-law caught her.

She cried for ten minutes. Then, after she blew out the candle, she spoke to Tillet Main, something she hadn't done since visiting his grave a long time ago.

"I wanted to make you proud of me, Papa. Because I'm a woman, it was harder, but I came close with Lamar Powell. Close isn't good enough, is it? I'm sorry, Papa. I'm truly sorry ..."

Tears again. And waves of hatred. Directed against herself, this place, everything.

That was Tuesday. On Friday, a man walked in and hired her for the entire night.

An old, old man. She'd hit the bottom.

"Close that blasted window, girl. Old wreck like me gets the chilblains this time of year."

He put down a battered sample case with brass corners. "Sure hope you're warmblooded. I want to snuggle up and enjoy a cozy night's sleep."

Lord, what a disgusting specimen, Ashton thought. Age sixty if he was a day. Bland blue eyes, gray hair hanging every which way over his ears and neck, not more than a hundred twenty pounds soaked. At least he looked clean — her only consolation.

Toss, pop, snap, the old man doffed his shabby frock coat, dragged down his galluses, removed pants and shoes. He opened the sample case, revealing a pile of printed sheets, each with an engraving of a fat woman seated at a grand piano. Rummaging among the handbills and items of soiled linen, he found a whiskey bottle.

"For my damn rheumatism." As he sat on the bed, his knee joints snapped like firecrackers. "I'm too old for this traveling all over hell." He swigged whiskey.

Putting on her best professional smile, Ashton said, "What's your name, lover?"

"Willard P. Fenway. Call me Will."

She dimpled. "That's cute. Are you all hot and bothered, Will?"

"No, and I'm not gonna be your lover, either. I hired you for some civilized conversation, a snuggle, and a good long snooze." He peered past the bottle lifted to his lips. "You're a stunner, though. Like that yella dress you got on."

"Will, do you really mean you don't want —?"

"Fucking? No. Don't go all blushy on me, that's a good straightforward word. People who rant and rave about impure speech usually do a lot worse things themselves, only secretly." He stretched out and guzzled some more, admiring her cleavage. "What's your, name?"

For some reason she couldn't explain, she didn't lie to him. "It's Ashton. Ashton Main."

"Southron, aren't you?"

"Yes, but don't you dare ask how I got in a place like this. I hear that twenty times a week."

"You do that much fucking? Damn. Wonderful to be young. Been so long for me, I nearly forget the particulars."

Ashton laughed, genuinely amused. She found the old codger likable. Maybe that was why she hadn't lied. Sitting down by him, she said, "I'll tell you this much. I was widowed unexpectedly here in Santa Fe. This hellhole was the only place I could find work."

"And you don't plan to stay forever, huh?"

"No, sir." She eyed the case. "You some kind of salesman?"

"The word's peddler. The kind I am is starving. There's engraved cards in my coat pocket. Willard P. Fenway, Western Territories Representative, Hochstein Piano Works, Chicago."

"Oh, that explains the picture of the fat lady. You sell a wonderful instrument. I saw Hochstein pianos in all the best homes in South Carolina. That's where I grew up. Say, do you mind if I get ready for bed?" He urged her to do it speedily. "Do you want me in a gown, or bare?"

"The latter, if you don't mind. Keeps a man warmer."

Ashton proceeded to undress, unexpectedly enjoying herself. Fenway waved the empty bottle. "Have to correct one of your remarks. I don't sell Hochsteins, I try to sell 'em. This trip I've only unloaded one Artiste — that's the grand model pictured on the sales sheet. Cattle rancher in El Paso bought it, the dumb, cluck. His wife couldn't read music, just wanted to put on airs. It's probably the only instrument I'll sell for months. The boss saddled me with a territory consisting of the entire damn nation west of the Mississippi, which means my potential customers consist of crooked gamblers, dead-broke miners, drunk soldiers, red Indians, poor sodbusters, Mexes, whores — no offense — and your occasional half-witted rancher's wife. Say, will you hurry up and lie down and keep me warm?"

She blew out the light and jumped under the coverlet and into the curve of his arm. Old and bony as he was, his flesh felt firm, his hand on her shoulder strong. Travel made him hardy, she supposed. His skin smelled lightly and pleasantly of winter-green oil.

"You could certainly sell a piano here," she said. "Maybe not a grand, but a spinet. The patrons are always yelling and screaming for music."

"Won't get it from Hochstein's."

"Why not?"

"Old man Hochstein's a Bible-thumper. Strict as sin in public, 'specially in the company of the old mule he married. On the side, a new chippy services him every week. But that's his only relationship with ladies of your profession. Believe me, if I was allowed, I could put a Hochstein in just half of the sporting houses in Illinois, and retire."

"The market's that rich?"

"Throw in Indiana and Iowa, I could live like a damn earl or duke. Hochstein won't touch the cathouse market, though. Competition won't eith — whoa! Where you going?"

"We need some light. We need a discussion."

A match scraped; a flame brightened the room. She grabbed her blue silk robe with peacocks embroidered on it, a present from the senora. It was part of a batch of clothes the senora had taken from a girl she threw out.

Fenway fussed about being cold. Ashton tucked the worn coverlet under his chin, making soothing sounds, then sat down again. "Willard —"

"Will, goddamn it, Will. I hate Willard."

"Excuse me, Will. You just had a wonderful idea and you don't know it. Wouldn't you like to give that old Mr. Hochstein a kick in the seat? And make a lot of money in the bargain?"

"You bet I would. I been his slave twenty-two years now. But —"

"Would you stand some risk to do it?"

He thought about that. "I suppose. Depends on how much risk, for how much reward."

"Well, you just said you could live like a nobleman by selling pianos to parlor houses in three states. What if you sold them all over the West?"

Fenway looked bludgeoned, barely managing to croak, "My God, girl. You're talking about El Dorado."

She clapped her hands. "Thought so. Will, we're going to be partners.""

"Partners? I've not been here ten minutes —"

"Yes, you have, and we're partners," she said, giving an emphatic toss of her head. "We're going into the piano business. You do know how pianos are made?"

"Sure. The work I don't know how to do myself, I could hire out. But just where would two piano-makers find the forty or fifty thousand dollars it would take to start up? You tell me that."

"We'll find it in Virginia City. Once you help me escape from this damn place."

Ashton leaned forward, the breast of an embroidered peacock bulged by the breast behind it. She smelled Fenway's breath for the first time. Not the usual sewer smell of most customers. He'd sweetened it up by chewing a clove. The clove mingled nicely with the wintergreen. She really liked the old fellow.

"Y'see, Will, my late husband had property in Virginia City. A mine. It belongs to me. All we have to do is get there."

"Why, yes, nothing to it," he said. "It's just a little old hop and a skip to Virginia City. Am I really hearing all this?"

"You surely are. Oh, wait. Have you got any strings on you?"

"You mean wives? Nope. I wore out three, or they wore me out, not sure which." He grinned. Below, someone broke a piece of furniture. Then Ashton heard the culprit yell — Luis. Fenway failed to understand the venomous look that flashed over her face. "You telling me the truth, Miss Ashton? Your husband owned a mine in Nevada?"

"The Mexican Mine."

"Why, I been there. I know that mine. It's a big one."

"I won't lie to you, Will. I don't have a paper to prove I own it. And the marriage license saying I'm Mrs. Lamar Powell got left behind in Richmond."

"If we can reach Frisco, I know a gent who can fix up another paper." Ashton reveled in the way his eyes glowed. He'd begun to see the opportunity. "But that might not be enough —"

She laid his hand on the swelling peacock. "Oh, I've got ways to persuade anybody who's picky."

Fenway was beside himself, turning pink. "Keep talking, keep talking. You may be crazy, but I like it."

"The hardest part — seriously now, Will, no joke — the hardest part will be getting out of here, and out of Santa Fe. The senora, the woman you paid, she's a mean sort. Luis, her brother-in-law, he's worse. Do you have a horse?"

"No. I travel the overland coaches."

"Could you buy two horses over at Fort Marcy, maybe?"

"Yes. I've got enough for that, I think."

"And do you have a gun?"

The color in his face faded fast. "This gonna involve shooting?"

"I cant tell. It might. We need nerve, we need horses, and we need a loaded gun, just in case."

"Well —" A veined hand indicated the sample case. "Root around under those sales sheets. You'll find an Allen pepperbox. She's a good twenty-five years old, but she's popular with traveling men." He cleared his throat. "Afraid mine's for show. No ammunition."

"Then you'll have to buy some."

While he was considering that, the altercation downstairs broke out again. A crashing sound suggested one person breaking furniture on the head of another. Ashton's mouth twisted up meanly when she heard Luis bellow, "Vete, hijo de la chingada. ¿Gonsalvo, y dónde está el cuchillo? Te voy a cortar los huevos."

A ululating yell and hammering footfalls signaled the potential victim's retreat. Fenway's eyes bulged.

"Was that the brother-in-law?"

"Never you mind. We can take care of him — if we have a loaded gun."

"But I'm a peaceable man. I can't handle a loaded gun."

Ashton's sweet smile distracted him from her malicious eyes. "I can." She stroked his cheek, stubbled white at day's end. "So I guess it's up to you to decide, sweet. Would you rather keep dragging around the West, safe and poor, or take a little chance and maybe live rich forever?"

Fenway nibbled his lower lip. In the cantina Luis's rumbling, grumbling voice recapitulated his recent brave triumph over the man who'd fled. Fenway gazed at Ashton and thought, This is surely a piece of work. A remarkable piece of work;

He had no illusions about the girl who was petting and cooing over him. Nor did she disguise what she was. Why, she practically wrote it out on a sign, and would bid anyone who didn't like it to kiss her foot. He'd already taken a fancy to the honey-talking she-wolf.

She planted a chaste kiss on his lips. Moist mouth close to his, warm excited breath bathing his face, she touched him with the little tip of her tongue while a finger fiddled in his ear. "Come on, Will, tell me. Poverty, or pianos?"

His heart thumped at the prospect of her cleavage, the prospect of riches — and the prospect of losing his life.

"What the hell. Let's try pianos. Partner."

Two nights later, with an early winter storm deluging Santa Fe, Will Fenway returned with his sample case, just as he had the preceding evening, when they'd laid their plans. Slightly wild-eyed, he closed the door and leaned against it while the rain hammered the shutters. Ashton snatched the case from his hands and opened it on the bed. "Did you pay for the whole night?"

"No. Couldn't afford it."

"Will —" she complained, cross and nervous.

"Listen, I'm beginning to think this is a damn-fool idea. I spent every cent I've got on ammunition and those two nags, and now the señora and her nasty-looking relative are playing cards downstairs without another soul in the place, 'cause of this rain. They'll hear every sound."

"We'll wait them out."

Ashton removed the Allen pepperbox from the otherwise empty case. She checked the revolving barrels to be sure they were all loaded, then laid her few meager pieces of clothing in the case. She had no rain cape; she'd have to get soaked.

She felt a tightness in her chest, yet she was composed, in a cool sort of way. She laid the Oriental box in the case. "How long have we got?"

"An hour's all I could pay for."

"It'll have to do. We'll go by the back stairs, and through the storeroom. Did you —?"

"Yes. I did everything," he said, snappish because of his fear. "The horses are in that little shed around back. But —"

"But nothing." Ashton began caressing his forehead with her fingers. His skin was no longer cool or tangy with winter-green, but slick, clammy. "Sit down, Will. Sit down and we'll wait till it's a little noisier. Luis gets noisy when he drinks. It'll be all right, trust me."

From a pocket of his old frock coat Fenway took a silver watch, which he snapped open. He placed it on the bed. Both of them stared at the black hands. Ten past nine. The bigger hand ticked over a notch. One more minute gone.

Ashton stood behind him, expertly kneading his tight neck and shoulders. "Now just don't worry. We'll pull it off, slick as anything. Partners as smart as we are, no one can stop us."

Except possibly Luis, who helped himself to another drink so noisily that Ashton and Fenway heard the bottle clinking against the glass.

As time ran away from them, their luck appeared to do a miraculous turnabout. Luis began to serenade himself in a loud tuneless baritone. Señora Vasquez-Reilly said, "No me fastidies," but he kept right on. Five minutes later — nine minutes before ten, the hour at which the señora would ascend the stairs and order Will out — the rainstorm intensified, complete with heavy rolls of thunder.

"We're going to make it, Will. We're going to do it — now." Ashton tied her lacy mantilla under her chin, a wispy scarf, but better than nothing. Pressing the closed case into his hand, she took the loaded Allen and opened the door. She examined the dim, rancid hall, lit by a single stubby candle in a tin sconce.

The hall stretched straight back to the dark rear stairs, empty. Ashton's breath hissed in and out as she edged forward. She whispered, with her mouth against his ear, "Step easy. Parts of the floor squeak if you come down hard."

With almost exaggerated tiptoe steps, they crept along the hall past the first closed door. Ashton heard the girl inside snoring. Then, on the left, they passed the second door, where they heard no sound at all from Rosa.

Ashton risked going faster on the stairs. It worked until she reached the second step from the top, and Fenway put his weight down on the first one, which gave off a sound like a cat with its tail twisted.

The rain had slackened. The sound carried. And their luck reversed completely again.

Rosa's door opened. Naked, she stepped into the hall, carrying her slops jar. Because of the stair noise, she immediately looked to the left — and saw them.

Her scream probably carried all the way to Fort Marcy. "¡Señora! ¡Señora! ¡La puta Brett, se huye!"

"That's it," Ashton cried, grabbing Fenway's lapels. "Go fast, lover."

She went plunging down the risers two at a time, and if she had missed one by chance, if she'd fallen, she'd have broken her neck.

As if to tease the fugitives along with a little good fortune now that they'd been discovered, Ashton and her partner made it to the storeroom without so much as a stumble. Rosa, however, kept howling, and the instant Ashton started to slip through the maze of old broken crates, the senora's voice joined in, exhorting Luis to hurry.

The door from the cantina opened. An amber rectangle of light laid itself across the floor, revealing the fugitives near the back door.

Luis charged toward them. Ashton fired the pepperbox.

Through the smoke, she saw Luis fall to one side. Then she saw the señora, in the cantina, wiping blood from her cheek. Blood from flying splinters; Ashton's ball had hit the frame of the door, and Luis had merely taken a dive to save himself.

"Come on, Will," Ashton cried, yanking the back door wide and jumping out into the mud and rain.

Panting, Fenway followed. He pushed her to the left and, in doing so, gave her kneecap a ferocious whack with his sample case. She staggered, almost fell. Fenway caught her elbow and guided her. "Not far. That little shed. Here we are, here."

She smelled and heard the fretful animals. Luis appeared at the back door, pouring out a torrent of profanity. He lunged into the open and darted after them, only to pitch over when his right foot slipped in the mud. The way he yelled as he went down told Ashton he'd broken or torn something.

He sprawled on his side, groping toward the fugitives with his left hand. A faint glare of lightning showed his mud-slimed face. From the door, the señora screamed, "Levántate, Luis. Maldita seas. Levántate y síguelos."

"No puedo, puta, me pasa algo a la pierna."

"Mount up, for Lord's sake," Fenway wailed. He was already in the saddle, clutching the handle of his sample case. Ashton seemed to spend an eternity in the few seconds she stared at the tableau behind the cantina: the señora standing there demanding that Luis get up, Luis groping toward them with his outstretched hand while his pained face said he couldn't.

In that momentary eternity, a vivid cavalcade of large and small slurs, insults, unkindnesses passed through Ashton's mind. The señora and Luis were equal offenders, but Luis was the nearer. She stepped two paces toward him, aimed the pepperbox with her arm rigid, and put a ball into his head.

They clattered across the empty central plaza, rain-washed and gleaming. Ashton's horse led. She'd pulled her skirt up between her thighs and rode astride, bent low, watching for obstacles.

From behind, Fenway cried, "Why'd you shoot that man? You didn't have to shoot him, he was down."

"Luis abused me. I hated him," she screamed over her shoulder. Ahead, a pair of soldiers from the fort stepped into her path, rubber ponchos shining in the lightning flashes. One pulled the other back at the last moment; both fell.

As Fenway galloped, the lightning revealed deep dismay on his rain-pelted face. He knew the little Carolina tart was stone-hearted, but he'd never imagined she would go so far as to slay a helpless man. What kind of creature had he hooked up with anyway? Nearly sick from excitement and the motion of the horse, he no longer felt liberated by their escape. Instead, he was gripped by a queasy sense of entrapment.

Accustomed to horses since childhood, Ashton rode expertly, head down over the nag's neck, her only guidance the occasional feeble flare of the lightning. She rode as if hell was behind her and nothing ahead would stop her, and her partner felt dragged along, captured, and pulled by her incredible force of will.

He heard her cry, "We'll make it, honey. We'll outrun those greaser dogs. Keep riding!"

He might indeed outrun any pursuit, he thought as the horse carried him over the slick road like a cork in a typhoon sea, but he doubted he could ever outrun her. It was too late; she'd hooked him.

And she'd committed murder.

With his assistance.

The deputy marshal for the territory and the commandant of Fort Marcy together questioned Señora Vasquez-Reilly, who said to them:

"Of course I can tell you who murdered my sweet, innocent brother-in-law. I can describe her to perfection. I always doubted that she gave me her real name. So whether you ever catch her is up to you."

16

In Richmond, a young doctor made the rounds of the Almshouse wards guided by the matron, Mrs. Pember. The doctor was new, a volunteer, like the others who tended these sad lumps of human refuse.

Here and there a patient gave him a vacant glance, but most paid no attention. One man crouched beside his cot, exploring an invisible wall with the tips of his fingers. Another held a lively silent conversation with unseen listeners. A third sat with his arms crossed and tucked under, straitjacket fashion, weeping without a sound.

The doctor dictated notes to the matron as he proceeded from cot to cot. Near the cot at the end, a man sat hunched on a packing box by an open window. Even this late in the year, smoke still drifted from the burned sections of the city, hazing the thin autumn sunshine.

The man on the packing box was staring out the window, southeast, toward the monuments in the city's Jewish Burying Ground, which was separate from Shockoe Cemetery. His loathing was evident. With her voice lowered, Mrs. Pember said, "Found unconscious in front of the State House, some weeks ago."

Pale and already exhausted by the ordeal of his rounds, the doctor studied the man with mingled disgust and sorrow. Once, the patient might have had a certain physical presence; he was tall enough. Now he looked decayed, shrunken. Skin striations indicated obesity at some past time. Privation had pared away all the fat except for a sizable paunch.

The patient's left shoulder tilted lower than his right. He was barefoot and wore one of the hospital's coarse gowns beneath a filthy old velvet robe donated to the Almshouse. On his head sat a battered plug hat. He glared at Mrs. Pember and the doctor.

Still whispering, the matron said, "He claims he's in constant pain."

"He looks it. Any history?"

"Only what he chooses to tell us. Sometimes he talks about falling from a high bluff into the James River. Then again he says his horse threw him at Five Forks, after the Yankees broke through General Eppa Hunton's lines. He says he was with the reinforcements General Longstreet rushed from Richmond, too late to save —"

"I know all about the fall of Richmond," the doctor interrupted, testy. "Does he have any papers?"

"Sir, how many men have papers since the government burned everything and ran?"

The doctor shrugged to acknowledge the point. He approached the patient. "Well, sir, how are we today?"

"Captain. It's Captain."

"Captain what?"

A long pause. "I can't remember."

Mrs. Pember stepped forward. "Last week, he gave his name as Erasmus Bellingham. The day before yesterday, he said it was Ezra Dayton."

The patient stared at her with strange yellow-brown eyes that held a hint of malice. The doctor said, "Please tell me how you feel this morning, sir."

"Anxious to be out of here."

"In good time. At least do Mrs. Pember the courtesy of taking off that filthy hat when you're indoors." He reached for the plug hat. The matron uttered a warning cry as the patient jumped up and threw the packing box at the doctor with ferocious force.

The box sailed over the doctor's head, thudding in the aisle. The patient lunged. The doctor jumped back, yelling for orderlies. Two country boys in stained smocks raced down the aisle, rushed the man, restrained him, and wrestled him onto his cot. Even with youth and strength in their favor, the patient's flailing fists battered them badly. He hit one orderly so hard, blood oozed from his ear.

Finally, they subdued him, using rope to lash his wrists and ankles to the iron cot frame. The doctor watched from the aisle, shaken. "That man's a lunatic."

"All the other doctors would agree, sir. He's positively the worst case in the Almshouse."

"Violent —" The doctor, shuddered. "A man like that will never get any better."

"It's such a pity, the way the war damaged them."

Angered by the attack, he said, "These wards are too crowded to accommodate pity, Mrs. Pember. When he calms down, force laudanum on him, and a strong purgative. Tomorrow put him out on the street. Use the space for someone we can help."

The fire set during the flight of the Confederate government's highest officials on the night of April 3 had swept from Capitol Square to the river, burning away the commercial heart of Richmond — banks, stores, warehouses, printing plants —something like a thousand buildings in twenty square blocks. Even the sprawling Gallego Flour Mill complex was gone, as were the rail trestles over the James.

Few who walked through the burned zone in succeeding months forgot the sight. It was like prowling the surface of some world out among the stars, a world both alien and tantalizingly familiar. Its hills were mounds of brick and broken limestone. Black timbers were the charred bones of strange and mighty beasts. Sections of buildings stood like the grave markers of the alien race.

Two nights after the Almshouse incident, the patient came stumbling through the mammoth Gallego ruins between the millrace and the Kanawha Canal. He'd been given the shabbiest of used clothing and turned out. He would have paid back those who did it, but for the fact that more important prey demanded his attention.

This evening he was enjoying great lucidity. He recalled in detail his fantasy of parading in the Grand Review. He also remembered the identities of those who had kept him from taking his rightful place in the military history of his country.

Orry Main. George Hazard.

God, how much he owed those two. Ever since they were all cadets at West Point, Hazard and Main had regularly conspired to thwart him. Year after year, one or the other had turned up to interfere with his career. They were responsible for a dizzying succession of falls from grace:

Damage to his reputation in the Mexican War. Charges of cowardice at Shiloh Church. Punitive transfer to New Orleans, and desertion to Washington. Failure in Lafayette Baker's secret police unit, and, finally, desertion to the South, whose people and principles he'd always despised.

All of it could be blamed on Main and Hazard. Their vindictive natures. Their secret campaigns to spread calumnies that had ruined him.

Sometime before he woke in the Almshouse, though exactly how long before, he couldn't remember, he had made inquiries about Main in Richmond. A veteran had recalled Colonel Orry Main's dying on the Petersburg lines. His other enemy, Hazard, was presumably alive. Just as important, each man certainly had a family. He remembered he'd tried to injure one of the Mains in Texas, before the war. Charles — that was his name. Surely there were many other relatives —

He tried to push all that out of mind temporarily and concentrate on the Gallego ruins. After an hour's search he located what he believed to be the right spot. He knelt and dug through the rubble, hearing the sound of swiftly running water. It poured over a giant mill wheel that no longer turned. Like most everything in the South, the wheel was broken.

Sharp fragments of brick hurt his fingers as he dug. Soon the fingers were covered with dust and blood. But he found what he'd buried. His memory hadn't abandoned him altogether.

Clutching the rolled-up oil painting, he moved to a rectangle of brilliant moonlight, there brushing dust from his treasure. The moonlight fell through a window frame high in a jagged section of brick wall. As he brushed the painting, the awl of pain pierced his forehead and began to bore in. Pinpoint lights began to flash —

He remembered his name.

He said it aloud. Beyond three walls standing at right angles to one another, a couple of black squatters by a bonfire turned toward the noise. One ambled over to investigate. After a look at the face of the man in the moonlit rectangle, he left quickly.

With greater power and confidence, the man said it again.

"Elkanah Bent"

Thin, bitter smoke drifted along the spectral walls. The smoke choked him. He coughed while trying to recall the face in the painting ... trying ...

Yes. A quadroon whore.

Where had he gotten her portrait?

Yes. A New Orleans sporting house.

That cued an even more important memory — the purpose of his life. He had redefined it, dedicated himself to it, weeks ago, then forgotten it during the bad period in the Almshouse.

His purpose was to make war.

The other war, the war to free the evil nigger and raise him to the level of the superior white man, was over, and lost. His war was not. He had not yet begun to marshal his forces, his strategic cunning, his superior intelligence, to make war on the families of ...

Of...

Main.

Hazard.

To make war, and to make them suffer by killing loved ones — old, young — one by one. A sweet, slow campaign of obliteration, carried out by the American Bonaparte.

"Bonaparte," he cried to the moon and the smoke. "Bonaparte's masterpiece!"

The squatters left their wind-tattered fire and melted into the dark.

He tapped his plug hat to seat it firmly on his head and squared his tilted shoulders as best he could. The claw-hammer coat they'd given him shone with age and grease in the moonlight. He executed a perfect military pivot and marched, like a man who had never been ill a moment. He strode into the sharp-edged shadow cast by another great broken wall, and there he temporarily vanished.

17

The Jackson Trading Company rode toward Black Kettle's village surrounded by Scar and his braves. The Indians had relieved the white men of their weapons. Charles had refused to surrender his at first, but he relented when Wooden Foot insisted it was for their own good. "Don't give 'em no excuse to kill us, Charlie."

The day darkened. Wind drove the snow into Charles's face with stinging speed. Suddenly he knew the nature of the wispy fringe on Scar's coat.

"I should have recognized it. I saw scalps in Texas. That's hair," he said to Wooden Foot.

"You're right. A Dog Society man can wear that kind of decoration if he counts enough coup and kills enough enemies."

"Some of the fringe is yellow. There are no blond Indians."

"I told you, Charlie, we bought a load of grief this time."

The trader's attention jumped back and forth between Charles and Fen. Straining in the travois poles, the collie barked and barked. Two braves rode up alongside, raising their lances to throw.

"Don't you do that," Wooden Foot yelled, reddening. The braves laughed and veered away, satisfied with the reaction.

The Cheyennes kept toying with their prisoners: riding close, touching them with their hands and coup sticks. Scar galloped next to the pack mules and with his lance slashed another canvas bag. Triangular pony beads cascaded to the snowy ground.

Charles raised his hand. Wooden Foot grabbed it to restrain him.

"Our hair's worth more'n the goods. We just got to put up with them till we figure some way out."

First they came upon eight boys in fur robes stalking game with blunt arrows. Over the next rise they discovered the horse herd, around a hundred ponies, guarded by more boys. A gentle slope ran down to the Cimarron, where tipis stood along the snowy banks. The wind brought the odor of wood smoke.

Quietly, Wooden Foot said, "No matter what they do, don't get mad. Keep your wits, and if I give you a cue real sudden, take it." Charles nodded, though the trader's meaning wasn't entirely clear.

Riding into the village, they created a stir. Old men, mothers with infants in cradleboards on their back, girls, children, dogs poured from the tipis and crowded around, chattering and pointing, and not in a hostile way, Charles thought. Scar was the hostile one. He jumped from his pony and signed for them to do the same.

Charles dismounted. He noticed buffalo hides pegged to the ground, and others stretched on vertical frames, but because of the bad weather, the outdoor work of the village had stopped.

As he looked around, his eyes made contact with the large, intensely curious ones of a girl in the crowd. She had regular, even delicate features, and shining black hair. She was about fifteen, he judged, starting to look away. She gave him a quick smile to show that not all in the village were his enemies.

Scar's braves crowded around. Wooden Foot took the offensive with a flurry of signs and shouting. "Moketavato! I'll speak to him."

"I told you, Black Kettle is not here," Scar said. "There are no peace chiefs to help you; only war chiefs." He spoke to his men. 'Take their goods."

One of the Indians, in a cavalry fatigue blouse, started to slash open Charles's saddlebags. Charles bolted forward to stop him. Wooden Foot yelled a warning, and someone behind him bashed his head with a rifle butt, knocking his hat off. A second blow drove him to his knees. The crowd exclaimed. Fen growled. Scar kicked the collie, making Fen yelp and snap.

The Dog Men swarmed around the pack animals. They cut and tore the bags holding the iron scrapers, hoe blades, tin pots. The crowd pressed forward. Playing to them, Scar ordered his men to distribute the trade goods.

Women and children pushed forward and clamored for this item or that. The young girl was one of the few who held back, Charles noticed as he picked himself up. Here and there, someone's face reproached the display of greed, but most of the villagers paid no attention. Wooden Foot gazed around him with a peculiar expression, as though he had never seen tipis or Cheyennes before.

Suddenly Scar announced, "These whites are devils, who plan to do us harm. Their goods, and their lives, belong to us." His men made gruff noises to agree.

Wooden Foot lost his bemused look. "Scar, this just isn't right. It isn't the way of the People."

Scar squared his shoulders. "It is mine."

"No-good little shit," Wooden Foot said, loud enough to be heard. Scar understood, too. He gestured.

"Kill them."

Charles's stomach seemed to plummet a half mile. Wooden Foot flashed him a sharp look, snatched Boy's hand, and lunged. The sudden move surprised everyone, allowing the trader and Boy to bowl through between two Dog Men. "Run for it, Charlie. This way."

Charles ran for it.

An iron-bladed trade hatchet, hurled by a Dog Soldier, whisked by his ear. Women and old men screamed. Charles darted between two frightened grandfathers and out of the crowd. He didn't understand Wooden Foot's sudden show of cowardice. What good was running? They'd only be caught, again.

Wooden Foot thrust his arm out to indicate a large heavily decorated tipi down a lane to his left. In front of it, snow melting on his gray hair and crossed arms, stood a heavy Indian with a dark, seamed face. Wooden Foot dived past him into the tipi, dragging Boy after him.

Charles kept running. He heard and felt Scar's men close behind. Of all the stupidity, he thought. Cornered in a tipi. Wooden Foot had lost his mind.

He raced toward the old Cheyenne, expecting to be stopped. The gray-haired Indian flicked his eye at the tipi hole and nodded. Feeling hopeless, Charles nevertheless jumped through the oval opening. The Indian immediately stepped in front of it.

A small fire in a shallow pit gave off acrid smoke but little warmth. Crouching in the cold gloom, Charles picked up a stone-headed hatchet lying near him.

"Put that away, Charlie."

"What in hell's wrong with you? They're right outside."

Angry voices verified it. Scar's was loudest. While he snarled, the older Indian spoke in a calm, low voice. The snarls took on a note of frustration. "We don't need weapons now," Wooden Foot said. He pointed over his head.

Hanging there, Charles saw what appeared to be a hat fashioned from the head of a buffalo. A pattern of blue beads decorated it, and the horns were bright with painted designs.

"That's the Buffalo Hat," Wooden Foot said. "Sacred, like the four Medicine Arrows. The hat wards off sickness, and if some fool steals it, the buffalo will go away for good. That old priest outside, he guards it day and night. Anybody who shelters where the hat hangs can't be molested."

"You mean this is a sanctuary, like a church?"

"Yep. Scar can't touch us."

Charles shivered, cooling down as his sweat dried. He felt unexpectedly disgruntled. "Look, the war cured me of inviting fights. But if a fight starts, it galls me to run."

"You mean you think comin' in here's yella."

"Well —"

While the priest continued to argue with Scar, Wooden Foot said, "Didn't I tell you that you got to turn your notions upside down out here? Why do you think Scar's so mad? We just did the biggest thing — I mean the very biggest — any Dog Society man can do. We was about to be beat, murdered, and we got away. That's bigger'n the biggest coup."

The Buffalo Hat priest stooped and entered the tipi. The old Indian smiled in a friendly, admiring way. Charles began to believe what his partner had just said.

The trader and the priest greeted one another with sign. "Half Bear," Wooden Foot said, nodding and smiling. The priest said something in Cheyenne. To Charles the trader explained, "He just said my name. Man-with-Bad-Leg." To Half Bear: "This yere's my partner Charlie, and you remember my nephew, Boy. You know Scar didn't tell it straight, Half Bear. We always come peaceably, just to trade."

Charles understood when Half Bear said, "I know."

"When's Black Kettle gettin' back?"

The old Indian shrugged. "Today. Tomorrow. You stay here. Eat something. Be safe."

"Mighty fine with me, Half Bear." Wooden Foot slapped Boy's shoulder. Boy grinned. Charles did his best to rearrange his notions, the way Wooden Foot had advised.

"My dog's still hitched to the travois, Half Bear."

"I will bring him."

"They took our guns and knives —"

"I will find those, too."

The priest left. Soon Fen lay beside the fire, happily rolling in the dirt.

Charles had a lot of trouble believing that they'd covered themselves with honor by running. He continued to think about it while Half Bear served them berries and strips of smoked buffalo meat. After the meal, the priest arranged fur robes and woven headrests for their comfort.

Early next morning, Black Kettle rode in with a dozen braves. The members of the Jackson Trading Company, having rendered the inside of the tipi very fragrant out of natural necessity, were at last free to step into the open.

In the sunlight that had followed the snow, Cheyennes of all ages again surrounded them, including the pretty girl Charles had noticed. He found himself smiled at, patted, greeted with exclamations of "How!" which he interpreted as a word of approval. Of Scar he saw nothing.

Wooden Foot swelled up like an actor in front of a cheering audience. He grinned all over the place.

"No getting away from it, Charlie. We're heroes."

Better weather brought a resumption of village life outdoors. Bands of boys again stalked rabbits with blunt arrows, training for a tribal hunt when they reached maturity. Women and girls set about their traditional work of scraping hides, stretching them on frames, and then smoke-curing them.

Charles noticed a kind of pupil-and-teacher relationship in an attentive group of girls and mothers addressed by a much older woman. It was instruction by a member of the quilling society, Wooden Foot told him later. Decorative quilling had great religious significance for the Cheyennes, and had to be done in a prescribed way. Only women elected to the society could teach the art.

Black Kettle invited Wooden Foot, Charles, and Boy into his lodge one evening. Charles now knew from conversations with the trader that the Cheyennes had a number of peace chiefs, men of proven bravery and wisdom who advised the tribe when it was not at war. As Wooden Foot stressed, whites always wanted to deal with the chief, but he didn't exist. There were peace chiefs and war chiefs, as well as a chief for each camp — Black Kettle also held that position in his village — and there were leaders of the warrior societies. All of them collectively governed the tribe, which had numbered about three thousand people for as long as anyone could remember. If the tribe never increased, neither had it been diminished by disaster, starvation, or its foes. Charles's respect for the Cheyennes went up another notch when he figured that out.

The peace chief Moketavato was a well-built man of about sixty with braids wrapped in strips of otter fur. He had solemn eyes and an animated, intelligent face. He wore the familiar leggings and breechclout and deerskin shirt, all heavily decorated, and, in his hair, a cluster of eagle feathers and three beaten silver coins strung on a thong. He passed a long calumet to the white men after they all sat down. Just a couple of puffs of the smoke made Charles dizzy. His head filled with fanciful shapes and colors, and he wondered what sort of herb or grass was burning in the pipe bowl.

The peace chief's quiet and retiring wife, Medicine Woman Later, served a hearty turtle soup, then bowls of a savory stew. As they ate, Black Kettle apologized for Scar's actions. "The loss of his mother robbed him of reason and warped his nature. We try to curb him, but it is hard. However, your trade goods are safe, and your animals."

As Wooden Foot thanked him, Charles popped another warm morsel of meat into his mouth, following custom by using his fingers. "Delicious stew," he said.

Black Kettle acknowledged that with a smile. "It is my wife's finest, for honored guests."

"Young puppy dog," Wooden Foot said.

Charles almost threw up. He struggled to keep his mouth shut and his face calm while the piece of meat worked its way down his throat against a series of strong spasms. Finally the piece went down, though it didn't settle well. He ate no more, merely made a show of fiddling with the bowl.

"I hope that treaty you signed means peace for a while," Wooden Foot said.

"It is my hope also. Many of the People believe war is better. They believe only war will save our lands." He turned slightly, to include Charles, and spoke more slowly. "I have always thought peace the best path, and I have tried to believe the white man's promises. That is still my way, though fewer and fewer will go with me since Sand Creek. I took the People to Sand Creek because the soldier-chief at Fort Lyon said we would not be harmed if we settled there peacefully. We did, and Chivington came. So now I have no reason to believe promises, no reason but my own burning wish for peace. That is why I touched the pen again. Out of hope, not trust."

"I understand," Charles said. He liked Black Kettle, and saw the liking returned.

Outside the tipi, firelight gleamed, and there was festive music. Boy smiled and marked time in the air with his finger. Charles cocked his head. "Is that a flute?"

"Yes, the courting flute," Black Kettle said. "It is being played at the next tipi. Therefore it is Scar. He does have some interests besides war, which is a boon for the rest of us. Let us look."

They stepped into the twilight and saw Scar, near the adjacent tipi, playing a handmade wooden flute and moving his feet in a shuffling back-and-forth step. Black Kettle spoke a greeting. Scar started to return it, saw the traders and scowled. He blew several sour notes before he got the melody going again.

Tied to Scar's waist thong was a tuft of white fur. Wooden Foot pointed to it. "White-tailed deer. It's a big love charm."

A yellow dog ran by, barking. Fen ran away in pursuit, barking too. From the tipi that Scar was serenading, a young girl emerged — the same girl Charles had noticed the day he arrived. He saw a hand pushing the girl from inside. Evidently parents were forcing her out to acknowledge her suitor.

"It is my sister's child, Green Grass Woman," Black Kettle said to Charles. "She is fifteen winters now. Scar has wooed her for two, and must continue for two more before she can become one of his wives."

The gentle swell of the girl's breast showed that she deserved to be called Woman. She wore leggings and a long ornamented smocklike garment, which was pulled up to her groin and bunched front and back by a rope between her legs. Strands of the rope wrapped her body from waist to knee; she hobbled, rather than walked.

Black Kettle saw Charles's puzzlement. "She's no longer a child but not yet married. Until she's Scar's wife, her father ties the rope at night to guard her virtue."

Green Grass Woman tried to smile at Scar, but it was plain she didn't have much heart for it. Scar looked unhappy and shuffled his moccasined feet faster. Then she noticed the observers. Her reaction to Charles was sudden and obvious.

So was his. The stiffness startled him. Embarrassed about being attracted to someone so young, he turned to one side, hoping nothing showed. He eased his conscience by telling himself it was merely the girl's beauty, the talk of sex, and his relatively long deprivation that caused the reaction.

Black Kettle observed the exchange of glances and chuckled. "I heard that Green Grass Woman regarded you with favor, Charlee."

Scar saw it, too. He glared, stepping between the white men and the girl and turning his back on them. He spoke to her rapidly. She replied with equal speed and obvious tartness, irritating him. He deluged her with more pleading. She tossed her head, grasped the edges of the tipi hole, and stepped over. Before she disappeared, she cast another lovelorn glance at Charles.

Scar's face wrenched, a mask of black and copper in the light of a nearby fire. Clutching the flute, he stamped off.

Fen shot into view, chased by the yellow dog. A baby howled. Wooden Foot sighed.

"Well, I know it ain't your fault. But now that no-good bully's got one more reason to hate us."

Next day they began trading. The weather turned unusually warm for early winter, enabling Wooden Foot to lead Boy to the riverbank at dusk. There, out of sight of the tipis, the trader gave his nephew a much-needed bath, something Boy couldn't do for himself. Charles stripped, waded out, and washed himself clean. He felt reborn.

During the trading sessions, Wooden Foot did all the bargaining. Charles fetched and displayed the goods and tended the horses given in exchange. Along with exposure to the details and complexities of Cheyenne society came a growing respect for the tribe. In some ways the Indians remained primitive; sanitation in the village was negligible, with food scraps and night soil carelessly thrown about. In other respects, Charles found the Cheyennes admirable: instruction of the young, for instance.

The Cheyennes considered manhood not merely something inevitable, but a privilege, carrying great responsibility. At night the sides of this or that tipi would be rolled up and tied while members of one of the warrior societies met inside at the fire, fully painted and dressed in society regalia. A large crowd of boys always gathered, as intended, and watched the men speak and dance and perform some of their less secret rituals.

He never saw any of the village children disciplined, but one afternoon all of them were summoned to Black Kettle's lodge, where a man who had stolen another's buffalo robes was to be punished. The young boys and girls watched as the possessions of the thief and his weeping wife were brought forward. Their blankets were torn and cut to shreds with knives. Other families joined in to smash the thief's clay pots and stamp on his woven backrests. Finally his tipi was slashed apart and the poles thrown on the fire. When the punishment was over and the crowd dispersed, the children took with them a vivid impression of what awaited them if they committed a similar crime when they grew up.

Two Contraries lived in Black Kettle's village. They were bachelors because the honored role of contrary required that. Singled out for exceptional bravery and their ability to think deeply about the ways of the tribe, they lived in tipis painted red and carried great long battle lances called thunder-bows. Their special rank demanded special, difficult behavior of them. They walked backwards. If invited to sit, they remained standing. The first contrary to whom Charles spoke said, "When you are finished trading, you will not leave us." Wooden Foot explained that he meant they would leave. The Contraries were a small, strange, mystical order, each member greatly revered.

The trading continued briskly and profitably for eight days. On the ninth morning Charles woke early to find the dawn sky threatening rain. Wooden Foot wanted to get going. They dismantled and packed their tipi in six minutes — beating their own time was a game Charles now thoroughly enjoyed — and after an hour of elaborate farewells to Black Kettle and the village elders, they rode south, herding fourteen new ponies ahead of them.

The wind smelled warm and wet. The tipis on the Cimarron disappeared behind them, and then the thin columns of smoke rising from them. Jogging easily on Satan, Charles thought of Green Grass Woman, whom he'd encountered often in the little village. Each time, her pretty face left no doubt about her feelings. She was smitten. That flattered his vanity but it also made his hermit's life somewhat harder to bear. One night he'd had an erotic dream in which he lay with the girl. But every time he met her he did nothing more than tip his hat, smile, and mutter pleasantries in English. He wondered if, when he returned to St. Louis, Willa Parker might —

"Look sharp, Charlie." Wooden Foot's sudden warning yanked him from the reverie. He pulled out his Colt as a mounted Indian burst from a stand of cottonwoods beside a meandering creek ahead of them. For a moment Charles expected a war party to follow. But no other horsemen charged out of the trees.

The lone brave galloped toward them. Charles recognized Scar.

Gloomy, Wooden Foot said, "He rode mighty fast and mighty far to get ahead of us. Somethin' must be burnin' him bad — as if that's a big surprise, huh?"

Scar trotted his pony up to them. His dark eyes fixed on Charles. "I have words to say."

"Well, we didn't figure you come out here to take the healthful waters," Wooden Foot said, aggrieved. The sarcasm went right by the Indian, who jumped from his pony and took a wide, solid stance.

"Get down, Charlie," Wooden Foot said, dismounting. "Gotta observe the formalities, God damn it."

When the two traders were on the ground, Wooden Foot keeping hold of the rein of Boy's horse, Scar stamped a foot.

"You shamed me before my people."

"Oh, shit." Wooden Foot sighed. "Anybody shamed anybody, it was you shamed yourself, Scar. We did nothin' to warrant killin'. You know it, and Black Kettle knowed it, and if that's your complaint, why —"

Scar grabbed him, furious. "We will meet at the Hanging Road. You will travel it." His eyes jumped to Charles. "And you."

Dark as a plum, Wooden Foot said, "Let go my shirt." Scar merely twisted it more. The trader shot his hand forward, caught the thong of Scar's breechclout and snapped it. Scar yelled, released him, leaped back as if snake-bit.

"Why, what's this?" Wooden Foot said with exaggerated surprise. He pointed at Scar's exposed genitals. "Sure-God ain't a man."

Inexplicably, Scar screamed and leaped for Wooden Foot's throat. Charles yanked his Colt from the leather. "Hold it!"

The warning brought Scar up short, his fingers inches from Wooden Foot's neck. The trader showed Scar his breechclout. "Gonna have trouble courtin' that girl 'thout this." He tucked the clout under his belt. "Yes, sir, a lot of trouble."

Scar clearly wanted to fight for it, but Charles's Colt, pointed at his head, kept him from doing so. Quietly, Wooden Foot said, "Now you get goin' 'fore my partner puts a bullet where your balls used to be."

Used to be? What the hell was going on?

Scar's departure, for one thing. His disfigured face looked more scarlet than brown. Puffed up as if about to explode, he sprang into the air, caught his pony's mane, flung a leg over, and galloped away.

Charles exhaled as the tension drained. "You're going to have to explain what you did."

Wooden Foot pulled the breechclout from his belt. " 'Member what I said about Cheyennes cuttin' their hair? This is kinda like it. You take a man's clout, he loses his sex. He thinks he ain't a man any more."

Charles watched the Indian galloping fast into the north. "Well, now you and I are even. You gave him a reason to hate us too."

"I did at that," the trader said as the flush left his face. "Pretty dumb, I s'pose." He sniffed. "Enjoyed it, though."

"So did I."

Both men grinned. Wooden Foot clapped Charles on the shoulder, then held his palm to the sky.

"She's gonna be drizzlin' soon. Let's get movin', Boy." As he mounted, he said, with a degree of seriousness, "Guess it's plain we ain't seen the last of that bastard. Hang on to your hair, one and all."

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

About fifty ladies and gentlemen of the district gathered in the clearing at Six Oaks, by the river. Carriages were parked nearby, and horses tethered. The white spectators ringed two-thirds of the open space, with the low, wet ground nearest the river segregated for black coachmen and servants, all of whom had presumably entered into employment contracts with their masters.

The winter day was warm. Long shafts of dust-moted light patterned the tan ground where three middle-aged riders galloped in a line, their lances leveled at the small wood rings hanging on strings tied to tree limbs.

Hooves pounded. The first rider missed all the rings. So did the second. The third, a graybeard, speared one, then another. An old bugle blared in imitation of a herald's trumpet; the crowd rewarded the victor with desultory applause.

While two more riders prepared, a fat woman who entirely filled one of the seats of a shabby open carriage complained to the gentleman standing beside the vehicle.

"I say to you what I said to Cousin Desmond in my last letter, Randall. It is one word, one query. When?"

Her rouged lips made the question juicy with spite. Mrs. Asia LaMotte, one of the innumerable cousins of Francis and Justin, sweated excessively despite the mild temperature, and badly needed a bath. In the wrinkles and creases of her doughy neck, perspiration had hardened her powder into tiny pellets. Randall Gettys found her a disagreeable old woman but never showed it because of her family's social standing and his friendship for Des. Poor Des, doing stevedore's work, nigger's work, on the Charleston docks to support himself.

Gettys made sure no one was close by and listening before he said, "Asia, we cannot simply march to Mont Royal in broad daylight and take action. The fire failed to frighten her. That mephitic school is open again. Of course we all want it abolished, and the slut punished. We don't want to go to prison for it, though. Those damn Yankees from the Bureau are nosing about because of the murder."

Asia LaMotte wasn't persuaded. "You're all cowards. It wants a man with courage."

"I beg your pardon. We have courage — and I speak for your cousin Des as well as myself. What it wants is a man with nothing to lose. We must find him, enlist him, and let him stand the risks. It only means a delay, not abandonment of the plan. Des is as fiery as ever about getting rid of Mrs. Main."

"Then let him show the family by doing something," Asia said with a sniff.

"I tell you, we need —"

He got no further. A white man had tied his horse near the road and was strolling toward the black spectators. He was a young man, with a ruffian's air. He had a dark beard, which showed even though he was closely shaved, and a scar left by a forehead wound. He looked cocky but very poor in his gray homespun clothes, old cavalry boots, and a broad-brimmed campaign hat. In the waistband of his pants he carried a pair of Leech and Rigdon .36-caliber revolvers.

Smiling, he stopped in front of one of the blacks, Asia LaMotte's driver, Poke. Old Poke wore a cloth cap on his gray head. The stranger drew his revolvers and pointed them at Poke.

"I surely do hate to see a nigger not respecting his betters. Take off that hat, boy."

Others around Poke stepped back, leaving the old man isolated and frightened. The two new contestants restrained their horses, fascinated like everyone else by the little tableau.

Vastly amused, the stranger drew back both hammers. "I said take off the hat."

Trembling, Poke obeyed.

"All right, now prove you're genuinely respectful. Kneel down."

"I am a free man —" Poke began.

The stranger touched one of the revolver muzzles to Poke's forehead. "Yes, sir, free to go to hell after the count of five. One. Two. Three —"

By the time the stranger said four, Poke was on his knees.

The stranger laughed, put up his revolvers, patted Poke's head, and acknowledged applause from a few of the spectators. He strolled toward a white-haired man in shabby clothes. Recognition and surprise popped Randall Gettys's eyes as the young man engaged the older in conversation.

"I'll bet that's him," Gettys whispered. "I'll bet a hundred dollars."

"Who?" said Asia, petulant.

"The roughneck Edward Woodville hired. Look, the two of them are thick as anything." He was right; the stranger, chatting amiably, had one hand on the old farmer's shoulder. Gettys said, "Everybody knew Tom wouldn't sign on to work for Edward any more because the Bureau disapproved of Edward's contract. So Edward swore he'd give fifty dollars to any white man who punished the nigger. I'll be right back." He hurried away. Asia looked befuddled.

Gettys mopped his forehead with the big white handkerchief from his breast pocket. Despite the mild temperature, he was dressed in heavy dark-green velvet. He approached Woodville and the stranger. The latter stopped talking, put his thumb near his right-hand revolver, and gave Gettys a stare that froze his gizzard.

Sweating, fawning, Gettys blurted, "Just wanted to say hello, sir. Welcome to the district. I'm Mr. Gettys. I keep the crossroads store and edit our little paper, The White Thunder­bolt"

"You can trust Randall," Woodville said. "He's a good boy."

"I'll take your word," the stranger said. He shook hands, found Gettys's soft and damp, and wiped his palm on his pants. "Captain Jack Jolly. Late of General Forrest's cavalry battalion."

The two mounted men started their horses toward the hanging rings. The crowd hurrahed, but Gettys had eyes only for the stranger. "General Nathan Bedford —?"

"Forrest. Are you hard of hearing or something?"

Gettys flinched away, raising his hands in apology.

Captain Jolly, twenty-four but obviously tough and experienced, chuckled. "That Devil Forrest, as the damnyankees called him. I killed niggers for him at Fort Pillow, and I went the rest of the war riding at his side. Finest soldier in the Confederacy. Joe Johnston said so. He said Forrest would have been number one in the army, except he lacked formal schooling."

Gettys began to experience great excitement. "Do you have kinfolk in these parts, Captain Jolly?"

"No. There's just my brothers and me, traveling and making a profit wherever we can." He smiled at Woodville, who gazed at the ground. The farmer was smiling too.

"Well, this is a fine district," Gettys exclaimed. "Rich in opportunity for men of courage and principle. Perhaps you'd take a drop of corn at my store after the tourney, and let me tell you more. We need residents of your caliber, to help stand off the damn soldiers and the damn Bureau and the damn scalawags among our own people who side with them."

"If you know any of those scalawags," Captain Jack Jolly said, "I'll put them in my gun sights damn quick."

Breathless, Randall Gettys rushed back to Asia LaMotte's carriage. "I must write Des. You see that man with Edward? I've got to persuade him to stay. He's capable of doing what we discussed."

The fat old woman peered at Gettys as if he were speaking Russian. The trumpet blared again. "Don't you understand?" he whispered. "We have the desire and he has the nerve. God has sent our instrument of deliverance."

18

Jasper Dills, Esquire, turned seventy-four on Friday, the twenty-second of December, four days after Secretary of State Seward announced that the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. Childless and a widower for fifteen years, Dills had no relatives with whom he could celebrate, the birthday or the Christmas season. He didn't care. Very little mattered to him any more except his law practice, his position as Washington representative of certain large New York financial interests, and the ceaseless, endlessly fascinating battle for power in the nation's political cockpit.

In the autumn after Appomattox, however, he'd found his practice diminishing. Some of the New York clients shifted their work to younger men; other cases brought to his book-lined office on Seventh Street seemed of an increasingly trivial nature. Fortunately, to offset this, he continued to receive the Bent stipend. It helped pay for memberships in his clubs and the odd bottle of Mumm's with his hotel suppers.

Dills had long ago stopped letting his conscience bother him about the stipend. Two or three times a year he wrote a letter assuring Elkanah Bent's mother that her illegitimate son was alive. According to Dills's latest epistolary fiction, Bent was prospering from cotton acreage in Texas.

The woman never asked Dills for proof of such statements. He'd built up a reservoir of trust since he saw her last, years ago, and he dipped into it now because he simply didn't know what had happened to Bent after Colonel Lafayette Baker, head of the government's secret police force, dismissed Bent for excessive brutality in the course of an arrest. Bent had vanished into Virginia, presumably a deserter to the Southern side.

Should Bent's mother discover that, or any other part of the truth, the stipend would end. The yearly total was substantial, so the mere thought of its loss alarmed the lawyer. At the same time, it didn't grieve him one bit to be shed of dealing personally with Elkanah Bent. An obese malcontent with persecution fantasies, Bent always blamed his career failures on others. Hardly any surprise in that: Bent's late father, a Washington lobbyist named Starkwether, had chosen an unstable woman for his brood mare. She came from a large border-state family that included several persons with histories of mental disorder. One of them had even carried the taint to Washington, although she had managed to control or hide it during years of public scrutiny and personal tragedy.

Bent's mother had never acknowledged her son. He took his name from a farm couple who had raised him in Ohio. He'd gone from Ohio to West Point, and then to failure after failure. By now, his mother was ancient (in the way of the elderly, Dills still thought of himself as middle-aged), but the woman's age didn't matter. Nothing mattered so long as she accepted his lies and wrote bank drafts regularly.

To maintain his high living standard, Dills had recently taken on certain other work. He was a conduit through which five hundred or one thousand dollars could travel to this or that senator willing to use his influence to obtain an Army commission for the applicant. Dills skimmed a percentage for making it unnecessary for such a politician to meet personally and perhaps be seen with a former brevet colonel or brigadier desperately hunting reemployment. Dills fancied that he sanitized the bribe money as it passed from hand to hand.

Dills was also a pardon broker. All sorts of Washingtonians had rushed into that work, including women with no asset other than their sexual favors. A legal background had put Dills in the forefront of brokers. His connections with a few notable Democrats and many powerful Republicans helped too. At the moment he had thirty-nine pardon applications on his desk.

Earlier in the year he'd taken President Johnson an application from Charleston that bore an intriguing name: Main. That was the last name of one of the men Bent held responsible for his various difficulties, starting with his dismissal from West Point. Although the applicant's first name was Cooper and that of Bent's enemy was Orry, they were both South Carolinians, so Dills assumed a connection. He'd never been south of Richmond, but he envisioned the lower part of Dixie as one great heaving sea of cousins, all related and inbred by marriage.

Nature arranged a wet snowfall for Dills's birthday, a further guarantee of an empty office. He locked up and walked three blocks to the hushed rooms of his favorite club, the Concourse. He wandered through the club until he found someone he knew fairly well, a Republican member of the House.

"Wadsworth. Good morning. Join me in a whiskey?"

"Bit early for me, Jasper. But do sit down." Representative Wadsworth of Kentucky laid aside a copy of the Star and signaled a waiter to move a chair. Dills was a tiny man, with tiny hands and feet. Seated in the huge chair, he resembled a child.

The whiskey arrived. Dills saluted his fellow member before he sipped. "What kind of session do you think it will be?" His question referred to the Thirty-ninth Congress, reconvened early in the month.

"Stormy," Wadsworth said. "Issues that go all the way back to Wade-Davis remain unresolved, and the leadership of our party is dedicated to settling them." Wade-Davis, a bill drafted in response to Lincoln's moderate plan for Reconstruction, set much tougher requirements for readmission of the Confederate states. Lincoln had let the bill die with a pocket veto, thereby goading Congressmen Wade and Davis to restate their case in their so-called Manifesto, a blistering document asserting the right of the Congress to control postwar reunification. The Manifesto, published in Greeley's ferociously Republican New York Tribune, marked out the lines of the battle to which Wadsworth referred.

"Stormy, eh?" Dills mused. "Rather a dramatic word." He was thinking melodramatic.

"But entirely appropriate," the congressman said. "Look at the forces already in motion." He ticked them on his fingers. "In both the House and the Senate we have successfully denied seats to the elected representatives from the traitor states. Compliance by those states with the President's few requirements is not enough reparation for the crime of rebellion. Not nearly enough. Two, we have formed the Joint Committee on Reconstruction —"

"The Committee of Fifteen. A direct affront to Mr. Johnson. Really, though, do you construe it entirely as a radical apparatus?

Most of the members are moderates or conservatives. Senator Fessenden, the chairman, is far from radical."

"Oh, come, Jasper. With both Thad Stevens and Sam Stout on the committee, do you have any doubt of its direction? To continue" — he folded another finger down — "Lyman Trumbull is already drafting a Senate bill to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau. If that doesn't provoke His Accidency, I'm Marse Bob Lee."

"I'll grant you that one," Dills said, nodding. Johnson's opposition to the Bureau, on grounds that it interfered with the rights of the separate states, was one of the great running fights of his administration. Dills was reasonably familiar with the Bureau, because of a client, a rich political hack named Stanley Hazard. He was a member of the Pennsylvania family that included George Hazard, the second of Elkanah Bent's declared enemies. Stanley had hired Dills for secret legal work involving ownership of some highly controversial property.

"A friend of mine," Dills continued, "close to the Bureau says they're hearing all sorts of horror stories from the South. Stories of Negroes tricked into signing work contracts that are virtually slave labor agreements."

"Yes, precisely," Wadsworth said. "Mississippi enacted its Black Code in November. Among other things, they stipulate that a Negro can be arrested, even beaten, if he's accused of vagrancy. Who's to say what that is? Is it occupying the same sidewalk as a white man? Merely passing through a town? It now appears that each of the erring sisters will enact similar codes, to guarantee a docile work force. They're fools down there, Jasper, arrogant fools. Apparently the war taught them nothing. Those of us in the Congress must take over their instruction."

"Johnson will continue to resist."

"Of course. And when you speak of him, you raise the great central issue to which all the others are related. Where does political sovereignty rest? Not with the President or his army, in my opinion. Military conquests made by the United States, whether foreign or domestic, can be policed only by the Congress. I believe that, Thad Stevens believes that, Ben Wade believes that. And we have a three to one majority in Congress to make our view prevail. Over the corpse of Mr. Johnson's political future, if need be," Wadsworth concluded with a smug smile.

"Perhaps your word stormy hardly covers it, then. Should we say cataclysmic?''

Wadsworth shrugged. "Label it however you wish. Andrew Johnson is headed for disaster."

That subject exhausted, Wadsworth remarked that he had just returned from New York, where he'd seen Joe Jefferson starring in his own adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. "Friends saw it in September at the Adelphi in London. They said it was a huge hit, not to be missed. I concur. You must see it, Jasper."

Dills replied that the theater didn't interest him.

"Literature, then? Have you read that amusing story about the California jumping frog? It's being reprinted everywhere. It's by some young sprout of a writer named Clemens."

Dills said he didn't like fiction. He didn't deem it immoral, as many clerics did; he only thought it inconsequential, unrelated to the real world.

Wadsworth rose and consulted his pocket watch. "My dear Jasper," he said wryly, "does anything in the world interest you?"

Seated in the plush chair, his tiny feet inches above the carpet, Dill said, "Power interests me. Who has it? Who is losing it? Who is scheming to regain it?"

"Then you've certainly spent your life in the right town. And you've got a damn good show ahead of you. If you're a gambler, bet on my side — to win. Oh, by the way, I saw the announcement on the members' board. Happy birthday, Jasper."

Wadsworth left, his final words serving as the only celebration for Jasper Dills this year. No matter; Dills was content with his clubs, his whiskey, his stipend from Bent's mother — and his choice seat for the coming struggle.

"Cataclysmic" might not be an exaggeration, he thought. As Wadsworth said, one merely had to consider the forces involved, and the stakes. They were enormous. Nothing less than political control of Southern legislatures and Southern votes, which in turn meant control of Southern land and Southern wealth. In the course of Dills's recent work for Stanley Hazard, his oafish client had shown some figures that vividly illustrated just how rich the pickings were.

His imagination liberated by a second drink, Dills tried to foresee events. Certainly the issue of the Freedmen's Bureau would touch off a new civil war. But the poor clod from Tennessee would be outgeneraled by a Stevens, a Wade, a Stout, a Sumner. Johnson merely wanted to be fair and constitutionally correct; they wanted to turn a minority party into the ruling party, with Negro votes tipping the balance. Johnson fought for principle, as did a few of the radicals. But the radicals as a group, fought for a more inspiring cause: their own craving for power.

Suddenly, pleased and smiling, Dills murmured, "A circus. That's a better metaphor than weather, or war." He immediately refined it to a Roman circus. With Mr. Johnson the Christian surrounded by ravening lions.

There was no doubt how the contest would end. But it would certainly be worth watching. He must step up his pardon work, his influence peddling in connection with Army commissions, and even the number of letters perpetuating the fictions about Elkanah Bent. All of it would help him hold on to his box seat for the bloody spectacle soon to be enacted in the Washington arena.

19

The voice reached the remote corners of the House floor and every seat in the packed gallery, including Virgilia Hazard's in the front row. It was the morning of January 8, 1866.

Virgilia had listened to the speaker many times. Even so, he still had the power to send a shiver down her spine. Those who heard Representative Sam Stout, Republican of Indiana, for the first time always marveled that such a magnificent voice issued from such an unlikely body. Stout was round-shouldered and pale as a girl kept out of the sun. His thick brows and wavy, oil-dressed hair looked all the blacker by contrast.

Congressman Stout was Virgilia's lover. For some time he'd kept her in a four-room cottage on Thirteenth Street, up in the Northern Liberties. He refused to do more than that, refused to be seen in public with her, because he was married to a flat-chested drab named Emily, and because he had enormous ambition. This morning he was on the threshold of a great step upward. His speech was intended to remove any doubt about his qualifications.

During the first ten minutes, he had reiterated the familiar Radical positions. The South had in fact seceded, and Lincoln had been wrong to call the act constitutionally impossible. By seceding, the Confederate states had "committed suicide" and so were subject to regulation as "conquered provinces." Virgilia knew the argument, and the key phrases, by heart.

Knuckles white on the podium, Stout built to his climax. "And so, a philosophic chasm separates this deliberative body from the chief executive. It is a chasm so broad and deep, it cannot, perhaps should not, be bridged. Our opponent's view of the Constitution and the attendant political process epitomizes all that we reject — most especially a leniency toward the very people who nearly destroyed this republic."

He expected reaction there, and got it. Below, in special seats on the House floor, several senators led the applause. Among them Virgilia recognized the aristocratic Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, caned by a South Carolina hotspur at his Senate desk before the war; he'd almost died of the injury. So different from Sumner and Thad Stevens in some respects, Sam Stout was like them in one essential way: he believed in the moral lightness of Negro equality, not merely in the political exploitation of it.

"I have a vision for this nation," he said after the applause subsided. "A vision I fear the chief executive does not share. It is a vision in which I see a willful and arrogant people humbled and rendered powerless, their corrupt society overturned, while another people, an entire race, is lifted from enforced inequality to a new and rightful position of full citizenship. It is a vision the leadership of this Congress must and will fulfill, while casting into ignoble disgrace and ruin any group or individual daring to oppose it."

His dark eyes raked the audience. "The chief executive has employed time and the calendar to circumvent the elected representatives of the people. While Congress was in recess, he implemented his own illicit program. So let there be no misunderstanding. His actions cannot go unnoticed. Nor can they be forgiven. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down. God bless and promote the noble crusade of this Congress. He will surely bring us victory. Thank you."

Virgilia rose for the standing ovation. Warm and not a little aroused by the rhetoric, she couldn't wait to speak to Sam and praise him. The speech had become more openly hostile to Johnson since he'd read her the draft last Saturday. She clapped so hard her hands hurt.

George's sister was forty-one now, and had the sort of mature, full-bosomed figure that a majority of men considered the ideal. Her monthly allowance from her lover enabled her to dress well, though she was careful never to attract attention with gaudiness. Today her dress and Eton were a deep maroon. Her fur-trimmed winter bonnet, cape, and gloves were a complimentary dark gray. She had learned to use cosmetics to minimize facial scars left by childhood pox.

A tide of frock-coated admirers threatened to engulf Stout on the House floor. Watching, Virgilia was touched with a familiar longing. She loved Sam and still wanted to marry him and bear children for him, even though her age, and his ambition, made the dream hopeless. Worse, she'd lately heard gossip about his seeing another woman. By not speaking to him about it, not confronting him, she was trying to deny the existence of the rumor. Trying and failing.

The Speaker gaveled for a recess. Virgilia fought her way downstairs, where she exchanged enthusiastic words with Senator Sumner. "Brilliant," he declared. "Exactly on the mark." As usual, his tone prohibited disagreement.

Stout came through the doors, colleagues behind him, journalists and well-wishers converging in front. Virgilia joined the rush but suddenly pulled up short, her heart plummeting. Stout's eyes met hers and immediately shifted away, without recognition. She knotted her gloved hands together and watched her lover vanish in the crowd.

A voice startled her. "Wasn't that a tocsin, Virgilia? Wasn't that a call to war?"

She turned, struggling to smile. "It surely was, Thad. How are you?"

"Much better since I heard Sam speak. The schism with Congress is entirely in the open now. Johnson will soon be on the run."

Virgilia had met Thad Stevens at a government function in the spring. He knew her family, and their shared ideals had quickly drawn them together. He had soon become her confidant; he was the only person she had told about her relationship with Stout, and her earlier one with the escaped slave, Grady. There was a new word for mixed marriage, "miscegenation," but it didn't apply to her. She and Grady had lived together out of wedlock. Stevens was understanding because of his principles and his great affection for his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Smith.

He guided her outside to the cool, pale sunshine washing over the Hill. At the other end of the muddy mall stood the unfinished monument to George Washington. Stevens said, "Governor Morton is a wise man to entrust Sam with the appointment."

Joy animated Virgilia's face. "You mean it's definite?"

"By this evening it will be. Sam must leave the Committee of Fifteen because we require nine House members, but he'll continue to guide our work behind the scenes."

"I can't wait to see him and congratulate him." Stout had promised to take supper with her that evening.

"Yes, well —" Stevens coughed, a curious uneasiness in his eyes. "It would be wise not to expect too much of Sam for a while. He'll be overwhelmed with the details of the new appointment."

Virgilia heard the warning but she was too excited, and too ardent about her lover, to pay serious attention.

When the war broke out, Virgilia Hazard had been adrift and emotionally exhausted. The grief of loss coupled with almost twenty years of abolitionist activity had drained her.

During those two decades she'd quarreled often with others in the Hazard family, especially George, over his friendship with the Mains, a clan of slave-owning Southerners. Her strong views had eventually driven her away from the family and into her relationship with Grady, who had been the property of Ashton Main's husband before Virgilia helped him escape. She and Grady had joined John Brown's small band of militant abolitionists, and had taken part in his raid on Harpers Ferry in '59. Army bullets had ended Grady's life there.

Soon after the start of the war, Virgilia had joined the Union nurse corps. In a field hospital, driven by a need to avenge Grady, she'd let a wounded Confederate soldier bleed to death. Only Sam Stout's covert intervention had spared her arrest and almost certain imprisonment. After that, they had become lovers.

At the time, Virgilia had thought that what she'd done was entirely right and justified. She had seen herself as a soldier at war, not a murderess. Lately, though, exhausted by regret and a strengthening wish to call back the deed — restore the soldier's life — she had found a new idealism; an idealism purified by the guilt she expected to live with for the rest of her life.

She no longer despised her brother George for liking Orry Main, or her brother Billy for marrying Brett. She had no wish to punish the South, as Sam and other Republicans did. Merely putting some of the key Republican tenets into law would be punishment enough. That was evident from the so-called Black Codes the various states were enacting to thwart the Freedmen's Bureau.

Virgilia meditated on all this as she stirred the juice of a pot roast on the cast-iron stove in her little cottage. A light, cold rain had begun to fall at dusk, when her mantel clock chimed half after five. Now it rang half past six. Still no sign.

Wait. Above the pattering rain she heard wheels creak and a horse plopping through mud. She ran to the back door, pushed aside the curtain and watched Sam's covered buggy pull into the little shed at the rear, safe from discovery by anyone passing on Thirteenth Street. A moment later, the congressman appeared, striding toward the house. Virgilia's smile faded. He hadn't unhitched the horse.

She opened the door while he was fishing for his key. "Come in, darling. Here, give me your hat. What a wretched night."

He walked in without looking at her. She closed the door and brushed water from the brim of his tall stovepipe hat. "Take off your cape. I'll have supper ready in —"

"Never mind," he said, still avoiding her eyes. He moved through the small dining room to the front of the cottage. Water oozed from his high-topped shoes and glistened on the polished floor. "I have an urgent meeting with Ben Butler."

"Tonight? What can possibly be so pressing?"

His annoyance showed as he warmed his hands at the fire in the parlor hearth. "My new responsibilities." He turned as she approached, and she was caught short by what she saw in his dark eyes. More exactly, by what she didn't see. She might have been merely another constituent, and not a very familiar one.

"Since Senator Ivey can't serve out his term because of ill health," Stout said, "Governor Morton has announced my appointment as Ivey's replacement. In two years I'll ask the state organization to nominate me for a full term. In the meantime, I'll be able to push our program through and bring that damned Tennessee tailor to heel."

She took hold of his shoulders, exclaiming, "Senator Stout! Thad said it might happen. Oh, Sam, I'm so proud of you."

"It's a very great honor. And a great responsibility."

Virgilia pressed against him, relishing the feel of his hard body squeezing her breasts. When she slipped her arms around his waist, she felt him stiffen.

The magnificent voice dropped lower. "It will call for certain adjustments in my life."

She withdrew her hands slowly. "What kind of adjustments?" He cleared his throat and watched the fire. "At least have the courage to look me in the eye, Sam."

He did, and in the fire-flecked irises she saw rising anger. "An end to these meetings, for one. People have gotten wind of them, don't ask me how. It was probably inevitable. Gossip is the grist of this town. You can't even keep a toothache private. In any case, looking beyond the Senate to higher office — an ambition, I remind you, that I have never concealed —"

In the silence, Virgilia whispered, "Go on, Sam. Finish."

"For the sake of that future, I must shore up the public side of my life. Be seen more often with Emily, distasteful as that —"

"Is it Emily?" Virgilia broke in. "Or someone else? I've heard gossip, too."

"That remark's unworthy of you."

"Perhaps. I can't help how I feel."

Emotion hardened his voice. "I am not required to explain myself or any of my actions to you. That was part of our agreement. It still is. Therefore I don't choose to reply to your question."

From the iron stove she heard the hiss of the pot roast boiling dry. She smelled the burning meat and paid no attention. Stout laid down the curt, cold syllables one after another:

"I almost expected this kind of reaction from you. That's why I decided to make short work of parting. I will deposit the equivalent of six months of support in your bank account. After that it will be necessary for you to take care of yourself."

He walked away. A moment later she shook herself out of stunned immobility. "And that's how it ends? With a few sentences, and dismissal?"

He kept walking, through the smoke clouding off the stove where the scorching smell thickened. Virgilia's fingers raked her dark hair, loosening pins. The hair spilled over her left shoulder. She didn't notice.

"Is this how you treat someone who's helped and advised you, Sam? Someone who's cared for you?"

At the back door, hat in hand, he turned again. She saw open hostility.

"I am a United States senator now. Other people have a greater claim on me."

"Who? That variety hall slut people talk about? Is that who you're off to see, that Miss Canary? Tell me, Sam." Screaming it, she ran at him. Her fist flew up. Stout caught her wrist and forced her arm down.

"You're shouting loud enough for them to hear you at Willard's. I don't know this person you're talking about —" She sneered at him; the lie showed in his eyes. "And although it's none of your affair, I am spending the evening, as I told you, with Butler and several other gentlemen. The topic is how to thwart Mr. Johnson."

He pulled the door open. The rain, falling harder, almost hid the shed at the back of the yard. "And now, Virgilia, if I have offered you sufficient explanation, perhaps you'll grant me leave to go. I didn't want to part on these terms. Unfortunately you forced it."

He thumped his hat on his head and stalked down the steps.

"Sam," she cried, and again, "Sam!" when he raced the buggy down the lane beside the house. The flying hooves of the horse flung up mud. Specks of it struck her cheek as she clung to the post supporting the porch canopy.

The buggy swerved to the right and disappeared.

"Sam ..." The word dissolved into sobbing. She flung both arms around the post, trying to hold it as if it were a living creature. The slanting rain soaked her hair and streaked her face, dissolving the mud so that it ran like dark tears.

Early the next afternoon, at her bank, Virgilia inquired about the balance in her account. She found it increased by the exact amount of six months' support.

Numb, stumbling once, she returned to the chilly winter sunshine and walked all the way home, carrying the burden of her certainty. She had seen the last of Senator Samuel G. Stout, Republican of Indiana. Unless, of course, she joined crowd when he spoke and listened like any other commoner.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

Captain Jack Jolly and his family settled in a grove of live oaks near the Dixie Store. The family consisted of its patriarch, young Jack, and his two married brothers, twenty and twenty-one years old but already greatly experienced in the ways of surviving without working. The wife of the older had been a whore in Macon; the wife of the younger, fifteen years older than her husband, came from Bohemia, couldn't speak English, and had arms as massive as a coal miner's. Three dirt-caked infants lived ' with the Jollys — none of the adults was quite sure which man had fathered which youngster — and several wild dogs hung around their trash-strewn encampment.

Their tents were made of blankets stolen at gunpoint from the homes of freedmen. They also owned a mule and mule cart gotten the same way. Supplies were obtained by the simple expedient of a trip to Gettys's store.

On his way there in the dim March twilight, Captain Jolly stepped aside and tipped his old campaign hat as a handsome, big-breasted woman driving a wagon went by, heading in the direction of Charleston. Much taken with the tightness of the woman's dress, Jolly bowed toward the wagon's tailgate and called out, inviting her in explicit language to stop and let him pleasure her. The woman flung him a look and drove on. Jolly was amused by her spunk, infuriated by the rejection.

At Gettys's store, he found what he wanted, a shiny new oil lantern. "This suits me," he said, starting out.

"Jolly, you're going to send me to bankruptcy," Randall Gettys exclaimed. "The price is four dollars."

"Not to me." He drew one of his Leech and Rigdon revolvers. "Ain't that so?"

Gettys darted behind the counter. He'd been a fool to invite Jolly and his tatty kinfolk to settle along the Ashley. The man was as dangerous as a rabid dog, and about as sensible. He and his family survived by thieving or taking corn rations on draw day in Charleston. One of the women told fortunes, and the Bohemian lady sold herself, he'd heard.

"All right," Gettys said, sweat steaming his spectacles. "But I'm keeping an account, because my friend Des and I, we're going to want you to do that little service we discussed."

Jolly grinned, showing brown stumps of teeth. "Wish you'd say when. I'm gettin' impatient. Hell, I don't even know who I'm s'posed to get rid of."

"She was just here, driving her wagon. Maybe you passed her on the road."

"That handsome black-haired woman? Why, my God, Gettys, I'll do her for free, no pay expected. Provided you let me have an hour with her, private, before I blow out her lamps."

Gettys mopped his damp face with the inevitable pocket handkerchief. "Des insists we wait for a pretext. A good, safe one. We don't want those infernal Bureau soldiers investigating and going to Washington to testify, the way they're doing with Tom's murder."

"I don't know a damn thing about no murder," Jolly said, no longer smiling. "If you bring it up once more, acting like I do, your lamps will go out prompt."

He scratched his crotch. "As to the other matter, you all just let me know. I'll do it clean, without a trace. And have a fine time while I'm at it."

"I know this is difficult for you," Thaddeus Stevens said. "Please collect yourself and continue only when you're completely ready."

Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois groaned to protest Stevens's emotional tone. The congressman from Pennsylvania could manipulate a hearing until it began to resemble a tear-laden melodrama, which was exactly what he was doing with the poorly dressed black man seated at the table facing the committee members. Sitting behind the committee in one of the chairs for observers, Senator Sam Stout made a note to speak to the leadership about Washburne's unseemly display.

The witness wiped his cheeks with pale palms and finally struggled on with his testimony:

"Ain't much more to tell, sirs. My little brother Tom, he said no to Mr. Woodville's contrack. He was scared when he done it, but down in Charleston, Colonel Munro, he tol' him it was a bad contrack. The contrack say Tom mustn't ever go off the farm without old Woodville sayin' he could. And he got to be respeckful an' polite all the time or he get no pay. An' he couldn't keep dogs — Tom loved to hunt. He kep' two fine hounds."

A heavy despair pressed down on Stout as he listened. Witness after witness had reported on outrageous work contracts drawn up by Southern farmers who still wanted to be called master. Stout put some of the blame on ignorance, promoted by the South's insularity. Men such as the one who had tried to contract with the deceased had grown up with an agricultural system based on intimidation, fear, and bondage. They probably couldn't imagine any other kind. So they kept writing these damned sinful contracts.

The witness was watching Stevens. "Go on, sir, if you're able," Stevens prompted gently.

"Well, like I say, the Colonel, he tol' Tom not to sign the contrack. So next day Tom went back and tol' old Mr. Woodville. Tom come over to take supper that night, which was the last time I saw him. He said Woodville got pretty mad with him. Two days later they found Tom lyin'" — the voice of the witness broke — "lyin' dead."

From the adjacent chair, Orpha Munro put his arm around the weeping black man. To the clerk Stevens said, "Let the record clearly show that the murder occurred as a consequence of the man Tom's refusal to work under terms amounting to slavery."

"I must beg the pardon of my colleague." Snappish, Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland waved his pen. "I am in sympathy with this gentleman's loss. But he has brought forth no evidence to demonstrate conclusively a relationship between the unfortunate slaying and the events preceding it."

Stout glared at the Democrat, a politician of distinguished background who was nevertheless proving an obstructionist on the committee. Stevens too looked choleric. "Do you wish the record to so state, Senator?"

"I do, sir."

"Let it be done," Stevens said.

"I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania," Johnson said, satisfied and not the least grateful.

No matter, Stout thought, controlling his anger. He and Stevens and the core group of Republican idealists in the Congress were very happy with the bulk of the testimony the committee had received. Black witnesses and Bureau officers from state after state had told' stories of physical and legal abuse of freedmen — while the President kept asserting that Congress had no right to intervene.

But the Tennessee tailor was on the run, while the Republican cause was blessed by accidents like the Memphis rioting. Further, to counter a possible court decision declaring the civil rights bill unconstitutional, there was already in preparation a Fourteenth Amendment, which would restate the bill's essential guarantees: full citizenship for all blacks and denial of representation to any state withholding the franchise from eligible males over twenty-one.

The Joint Committee on Reconstruction would soon be ready to write its report, which no doubt would focus on the South's effort to abridge freedom by illegal means, especially by enforcement of the Black Codes. The report would offer massive evidence of this activity and once again affirm the supremacy of the Congress in setting matters right. And if that didn't finish Johnson with the public, Stout and his fellow Radicals would write a second freedmen's bill to extend the Bureau's life. Johnson would veto it again, and be overridden again. Freedom's army was on the march, and Sam Stout was one of its commanding officers.

The elderly witness had once more broken down. He sobbed into his hands despite Munro's efforts to calm him. Stevens left the table. Stout rose. He and Stevens exchanged glances as the latter moved down to put a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of the witness.

Senator Johnson showed disapproval of Steven's behavior. Reporters in the back of the hearing room' scribbled swiftly. Good, Stout thought as he slipped to the door. Tomorrow morning they could look forward to some favorable copy in friendly papers, commending Stevens, and hence all Republicans, for continuing to comfort the oppressed.

20

On the winter count, Wooden Foot painted the Jackson Trading Company inside a tipi under a tiny Buffalo Hat. Outside he added two stick figures waving hatchets and a third with stick hands covering the fork of his stick legs. Whenever Boy saw that part of the picture he put his hands over his mouth, Indian fashion, and giggled.

As the snowdrifts began to melt, a white visitor rode into the Cheyenne village where the traders had wintered. Broad smiles and shouting greeted him. Mothers raised their babes to touch the black cassock visible under a buffalo robe. Wooden Foot presented Charles to the weathered, gray-haired Jesuit missionary.

Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet was sixty-five now, a legendary figure. Born in Belgium, he'd emigrated to America as a young man. In 1823, he'd left the Catholic novitiate near St. Louis to begin his remarkable career on the Plains. He not only proselytized the Indians, he also became their partisan. Some of his journeys took him as far as the Willamette Valley. To the Sioux, the Blackfeet, the Cheyennes, and other tribes he was "Blackrobe," a confessor, a mediator, a spokesman in councils of the white men, a friend.

Over the evening fire, DeSmet displayed good humor and a broad knowledge of Indian affairs. There was no doubt of his loyalty:

"Mr. Main, I say to you that if the Indians sin against the whites, it is only because the whites have greatly sinned against them. If they become angry, it is because the whites provoked them. I accept no other explanation. Only when Washington abandons truculence as an official policy will peace prevail on these plains."

"What do you think the chances are that it will happen, Father?"

"Poor," DeSmet said. "Greed too often conquers a godly impulse. But that does not defeat me or discourage me. I will strive to bring a peaceable kingdom till God calls me home."

Three roads carried most of the traffic west of the Missouri. The old Overland Trail to Oregon followed the valley of the Platte, with a newer branch, Bozeman's Trail, veering off to the Montana gold fields. The Santa Fe Trail ran southwest to New Mexico. Lying between the northern and southern routes, the Smoky Hill Road followed the river along a generally westerly route to the Colorado mines.

In May of '66 the Jackson Trading Company met another white man while still thirty miles south of the Smoky Hill. The man drove a covered wagon, wore braids, and had cut the hair over his forehead in bangs, then greased it so that it stood up. He was fat, with a face that reminded Charles of a Father Christmas who'd just come off a week's binge. He greeted the traders cordially and invited them to camp the night with him.

"No thanks. We're in a hurry, Glyn," Wooden Foot said, not smiling. He signaled his companions to ride on. Once past the wagon, Charles looked over his shoulder and reacted with surprise at the sight of an Indian girl, fourteen or fifteen, peeking at them from the back of it. He had an impression of prettiness ruined by too much eating; the girl had the multiple chins of a woman of middle age.

"Surely was obvious you didn't like that man," Charles said. "Competition, is he?"

"Not for us. He peddles spirits and guns. Name's Septimus Glyn. Worked for the Upper Arkansas Agency a while. Even the Indian Bureau couldn't stomach him. He sneaks around sellin' what he shouldn't, and every season or so he picks out some young girl, honeys her up with promises, gives her the jug till she grows fond of it, then takes her away with him. When she's no good for anything but whorin', he sells her."

"I saw a girl in the wagon."

"Don't doubt it." Disgusted, Wooden Foot didn't turn around to verify it. "Must be a Crow. He's cut his hair Crow style. They're a handsome people, but he'll ruin her looks 'fore he's done, the no-good whoremaster."

Charles watched the wagon receding on the rim of the gray plain and was glad he hadn't been forced to socialize with Septimus Glyn. When he saw Willa Parker, he must tell her that not all whites exploited the Indians. Jackson didn't. Neither did the Jesuit priest. He hoped that little bit of information would be pleasing. He found himself wanting to please her.

They reached the Smoky Hill route with their forty-six ponies; all their trading goods were gone. Wooden Foot repeatedly said his new partner brought him luck.

They'd seen no white men other than Glyn south of the Smoky Hill. Once on the trail, though, they fought eastward against a tide of galloping cavalry troops, Overland coaches, emigrant wagons. One party of wagons, driven two and three abreast, refused to allow them any clearance, and so the traders had to halloo their pack mules and ponies between the wagons, eating dust. Twice, oxen nearly trampled Fen. Two valuable ponies ran away.

After the traders got through the wagons, they reined up. They looked as though they'd coated their faces in yellow flour. The dust made their eyes all the larger and whiter.

"Swear to God, Charlie, I never seen so many greenhorn wagons this early in the season."

"And the traffic's bound to make the Sioux and Cheyennes mad, isn't it?"

"You're right," Wooden Foot said.

Charles watched the canvas tops lurching west. "I had a strange reaction when those wagons wouldn't give us room. All of a sudden I understood how the Indians feel."

Thirty miles outside Fort Riley, Kansas, they saw the first stakes marking the route of the oncoming railroad. Every mile or so thereafter, they passed piles of telegraph poles waiting to be planted. One pile was nothing but ashes and charred wood. "The tribes are 'bout as partial to the talkin' wires as they are to set­tlers," Wooden Foot remarked.

They rode on. Weather-burned and toughened by his return to a life outdoors, Charles felt fit and very much in harmony with his surroundings. His burned-out feeling was disappearing, replaced by renewed energy and a zest for living. If he was not yet healed, healing had begun.

The morning was warm. He cast off his gypsy robe, pushed up the sleeves of his long Johns, and lit a cigar, noticing eight more vehicles coming toward them over the prairie. These turned out to be high-wheeled canvas-covered U.S. Army ambulances, each pulled by two horses. Mounted soldiers formed a moving defense ring around the vehicles. "Who the hell's this?" Wooden Foot said.

They ran their mules and ponies in a circle and waited. The ambulances stopped. A colonel jumped down and greeted them. A second officer hopped out of the lead wagon, a stringy fellow with a hawk face and bristly red hair mixed with gray. His face startled Charles more than his three stars did.

"Morning," said the general. "Where have you gentlemen come from?"

"The Indian Territory," Wooden Foot said.

"We wintered with the Cheyennes," Charles said.

"I am on an inspection tour. What's their state of mind?"

"Well," Wooden Foot said, cautious, "considerin' that no one chief or village represents the whole shebang, I guess I'd say the tribe's mood is distrustful. Black Kettle, the peace chief, he told us he didn't know how long he could hold his young men back."

"Oh yes?" said the general, bristling. "Then I'd better talk to that redskin. If one more white man is scalped out here, I won't be able to hold my men back, either."

After that he calmed down. Charles puffed on his cigar and exhaled blue smoke. The general gave him a keen look. "Did I detect a trace of Southern speech, sir?"

"More than a trace, General. I rode for Wade Hampton."

"An able soldier. You like cigars, sir." Charles nodded. "I do, too. You're welcome to a fresh one of mine while we cook up some food."

"No thanks, General. I'm anxious to head on east and visit my son."

"Safe journey, then." The stringy officer gave them a casual salute and he and the colonel returned to their ambulance.

As soon as they got the horses moving, Wooden Foot said, "You know that shoulder-straps?"

"Sure. That is, I've seen pictures. His bummers burned a whole lot of my home state."

"Lord God, you don't mean that's Uncle Billy Sherman?" "Yes, I do. Wonder what he's doing out here?"

At Riley, they learned the answer. Sherman had commanded the Division of the Mississippi since shortly after Charles passed through Chicago. He'd shifted his headquarters to St. Louis, and then, in March, had persuaded Grant to create a Department of the Platte, to shrink the unwieldy Department of the Missouri and promote better management of both within the Division. This displeased John Pope, the commander of the Missouri Department.

There were inevitable Army rumors to go with the facts. The larger administrative unit would soon be renamed Division of the Missouri. Sherman thought the Department of the Platte's commander, St. George Cooke, too old at fifty-six. He wanted Winfield Hancock, "Superb" Hancock of Gettysburg, to replace Pope. He wanted Congress to authorize new infantry and cavalry regiments, assigning some of them to Plains duty, although it couldn't be done in time to help the 1866 travel season.

Charles got the idea that Sherman had strong, largely negative views about Indians, yet did not want to become involved in making policy that affected them. "Sheriffs of the nation," that was Sherman's definition of the Army's role. Pope was more of an activist. He had insisted that emigrant trains organize before leaving jumping-off points such as Leavenworth. Otherwise, he said, his regiments wouldn't be responsible for them.

At the sutler's, Charles picked up a letter from Duncan. "Why, he's a whole lot closer than when I left. They transferred him to Fort Leavenworth in January. Let's hurry up and sell those horses."

By the first of June all the animals were gone, having fetched just over two thousand dollars for the company. The traders rode east and, at Topeka, banked their money, each man keeping fifty dollars for personal expenses. On the winter count Wooden Foot painted three sacks bearing dollar signs. He and Charles shook hands, Charles hugged Boy, and they agreed to rendezvous on the first of September.

With a sly look, Wooden Foot said, "Bound anyplace 'sides Leavenworth? Case I need you, understand."

"Oh" — Charles settled in Satan's saddle — "maybe St. Louis. Have a barber work me over." His beard had grown long and thick. "Take in a show. I met that actress, remember."

"Mmm, that's right. Nearly slipped my mind." Charles smiled. "The saucy freethinker who doesn't give a snap if people scorn her for invitin' a gent to supper."

"That's the one."

"You been so impatient, I figured you had somethin' in mind. So it's that there Augusta."

Suddenly bleak, Charles said, "Augusta was my son's mother. She's dead. I've never mentioned her name."

"Not woke up you haven't. You talk in your sleep, Charlie. I figured it was a happy dream. I'm sorry."

"That's all right."

"I want you to feel good. You're my friend. It was damn lucky we met up at Jefferson Barracks."

"I feel the same."

"Say hello to your youngster and don't get yourself kilt in no tavern fights."

"Not me," Charles said, and rode away.

A road ran due north from Leavenworth City to the military reservation. Charles cantered along this two-mile stretch, passing neat farm plots and the headquarters of Russell, Majors and Waddell, a huge enclave of parked wagons, piled-up freight, penned oxen, noisy and profane teamsters. The river flowed along out of sight under the high bluff on his right.

The ten-square-mile post contained department headquarters, barracks and support faculties for six companies, and the large quartermaster's depot serving the forts to the west. Colonel Henry Leavenworth had established the original cantonment in 1827, on the Missouri's right bank near its confluence with the Kaw.

Jack Duncan's quarters were typical of Western military posts. Spartan rooms furnished with an old sheet-iron stove and whatever furniture the occupant brought, bought, or built from crates and lumber. Normally, the brigadier would have lived in smaller space — "Old Bedlam," the bachelor officers' quarters — but he'd ranked a married captain and thus moved him, his wife, and baby out of married quarters, so that he and Maureen and Gus could move in. This happened frequently to junior officers; the term for it was "the bricks falling in."

Charles couldn't believe how much his son had grown since last autumn. Little Gus walked around Duncan's parlor so fast, swaying, that Charles was constantly starting to dive for the boy, to catch him if he fell. It amused Duncan.

"No need for that. He's damn steady."

Charles quickly saw this was so. "He doesn't know me, Jack."

"Of course not." Duncan held out his hands. "Gus, come to Uncle." The boy clambered to his lap without hesitation. Duncan pointed to the visitor. "That's your father. Want to go to your father?"

Charles reached out to take him. Gus screamed.

"I think it's your beard," Duncan said.

Charles saw no humor in it. He struggled for over an hour to tempt Gus onto his lap. But after he finally did, he soon had him clinging to his thumbs and laughing as he bounced him up and down on his knee. Maureen appeared from the kitchen and expressed disapproval. Charles didn't stop.

Duncan leaned back and lit a pipe. "You look good, Charles. The life agrees with you."

"I miss Augusta and always will. Apart from that, I've never been happier."

"This Adolphus Jackson must be a fine fellow."

"The best." Charles cleared his throat. "Jack, I need to say something else about Augusta. Well, actually, about a woman I met in St. Louis. An actress in one of the theaters there. I'd like to pay her a call. But I don't want to dishonor Gus's memory."

Soberly, Duncan said, "You're a decent and considerate man. There are many who wouldn't even worry. I don't expect you to live like an anchorite the rest of your life. Augusta wouldn't expect it either. A man needs a woman, that's a fact of life. Go to St. Louis as soon as you want."

"Thank you, Jack." He beamed at Maureen, still hovering near and frowning over his rag-bag wardrobe, his tangled beard, his way of handling his son. Charles just ignored it.

"Life's too good to be believed," he said, gazing at his son, whose features had begun to favor his mother.

Duncan smiled. "I'm glad. We all went long enough feeling the other way in the late unpleasantness."

Up went the curtain. The players joined hands and stepped to the apron. Trump pulling the others along and then snatching off his woodcutter's cap. He waved the cap to acknowledge the applause, thus drawing attention from the others in the company. He unpinned his good-luck chrysanthemum from his coarse tunic and tossed the wilted flower, more brown than white, into the audience. An obese man caught it, examined it, threw it away.

The company bowed again. Then Trump took a third, solo, bow. The woman playing his wife exchanged long-suffering looks with Willa, who was prettily dressed in a high-waisted gown for her role as one of the young lovers. The play was Moliere's Physician in Spite of Himself, which had been "amplified and emended by Mr. Trump," according to posters outside. It seemed to Charles, standing up and clapping hard in the front box at stage left, that the unraveling of the farcical plot about a woodcutter pretending to be a famous doctor had stopped completely at least four times while Sam Trump performed comic monologues that didn't sound like the rest of the play; one described hotels with peculiar French names. The largely male audience roared, apparently understanding some local references.

Charles really didn't care how much Trump had rewritten Moliere. Like most of those out front, he was taken with Willa Parker's stage presence. From her first entrance, she'd captured everyone. Not with conventional beauty but with some intangible power that drew the eye and held it when she was on stage. Maybe all great performers had that quality.

He extended his hands over the rail, still clapping. The movement drew Willa's attention to the box. Charles had paid for a bath and beard trim and had bought an inexpensive brown frock coat and matching trousers. Willa saw him, recognized him, and reacted with what he perceived as surprise, then pleasure.

Charles nodded and smiled. Suddenly Willa's glance shifted to a box on the opposite side. An empty box, though the curtain still moved, stirred by someone leaving.

The stage curtain rolled down, revealing painted messages about restaurants and shops. The applause died. The audience of men and a very few ladies with escorts began to file out. Charles wondered what, or who, had brought that flash of anxiety to Willa's face.

Eager and surprisingly nervous, he hurried around to the stage entrance, where he'd stopped the teamster from beating his horse last year. He handed the doorkeeper half a dollar, being pushed from behind by other gentlemen equally intent on going inside. Because of his height, Charles could look over most of the well-wishers, stagehands, and performers backstage.

He saw Sam Trump at the entrance to a corridor leading to dressing rooms. In order to visit anyone, people had to pass Trump and compliment him.

Charles did so enthusiastically. Eyes glassy with joy, Trump said, "Thank you, dear boy, thank you." Brown dye trickled from behind his ears. "Yours is a familiar face. Was it Boston? I have it! Cincinnati."

"St. Louis. I have a beard now." He extended his hand. "Charles Main."

"Of course. I remember it clearly." He didn't. "Frightfully glad you caught us tonight. I'm anticipating sold-out houses starting tomorrow." His eyes had already hopped over Charles's shoulder, hunting the next admirer. Charles slipped by, smelling sweat on Trump but no spirits. Willa must have succeeded in drying him out.

All the dressing-room doors were open except the last on the right. He suspected that was hers, since a short, neatly dressed man was already waiting outside.

As Charles approached, the man turned. Instantly, Charles recognized the unnaturally stiff posture, the trimmed goatee and waxy mustache points, the shoes with a high polish, the clothes without a wrinkle.

Willa's admirer was the man who'd kept him out of the Army. Captain Harry Venable.

21

Charles's nerves wound tight as he walked up to Harry Venable. The dapper officer apparently didn't recognize him, though he understood Charles's intent. Charles read the lettering painted on the door. MSR. PARKER. He stepped forward to knock and Venable slipped in front of him.

"Excuse me. Mrs. Parker's engaged."

Charles looked down into the glacial eyes, tilting his head to exaggerate the height difference. "Fine. Shall we let her tell me that?" He reached over Venable's shoulder and knocked.

Venable turned scarlet. Willa called out, asking him to be patient a moment. Venable said, "What the hell are you smiling about?"

"Handsome Harry Venable" — Charles began rubbing the knuckles of his left hand — "West Point class of '59."

Flustered, Venable tried to identify the bearded stranger. Charles continued, "Last time we met, you had some helpers. I see you haven't any now. If there's some sort of dispute, perhaps we can settle it fairly this time." His teeth gleamed in his beard but the smile wasn't friendly. He kept rubbing his knuckles. Venable recognized him.

Then the door opened. All in a rush, Willa seized him and hugged him. "Charles! I couldn't believe it when I saw you in the box —" She stepped back, gripping his arms while she studied him. She wore a pastel wrapper, an outer layer of gauzy material with opaque satin beneath. Delicate transparent butterflies decorated the gauze. Although tightly belted, the gown didn't quite hide her cleavage. A spot of cold cream glistened on her nose. With strands of her silver-blond hair hanging free, she looked unkempt and absolutely lovely.

"Here, do come in while I take off the rest of this make-up." As she tugged him into the dressing room she dabbed a cloth behind her ear; it came away orange.

Through this, Venable stood rigid, shoulders back, unable to conceal his fury. Good actress that she was, Willa smiled and spoke to him graciously. "Colonel, I'm so sorry to refuse again. Mr. Main and I have a long-standing engagement. I'm sure you understand."

She closed the door.

"I have a long-standing engagement to beat the hell out of that little toad. He's the one who recognized me at Jefferson Barracks."

"Well, he's still stationed there." Willa snatched pins from the dressing table and began pinning up her hair. The small room was a confusion of costumes, personal clothing, make-up pots and brushes, playscripts, all the clutter increased by its reflection in the table mirror. "He saw the play four nights ago and he's been hounding me ever since. Oh, Charles, you've been gone so long."

"It's a long way to the Indian Territory." He found himself gazing into her blue eyes with more intensity than he planned.

"I know. And I thought you'd never get back. When I saw you, halfway through the first act, I nearly walked into that bench."

"I didn't think you saw me until the curtain call."

"Oh, long before that. I kept dropping lines."

"I didn't notice."

"You aren't supposed to notice." On tiptoe, she kissed his cheek, then hugged him again. Her body felt very soft and ripe beneath the butterfly gauze. "May we have supper?"

"Absolutely." He grinned. "No snails this time."

"All right. Wait for me in the hall. I'll be ready in two minutes." She couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice.

In the hall, he saw no sign of Venable. It was a relief. He felt too grand to interrupt the evening with a brawl. He knew that, one to one, he could easily beat the small man, so a fight would mean an inevitable load of guilt afterward;

Just before Charles and Willa left the theater, she waved to Sam Trump standing in the wings with Prosperity, the theater cat, in his arms. Trump broke off his conversation with a stage­hand and nodded to acknowledge them. He gave Charles a peculiar stare, then watched them as they vanished through the Olive Street door.

On the sidewalk, something made Charles stop. She said, "What is it? Oh." She saw him too, across the street in the shadow cast by the wooden Indian chief in front of the tobacconist's. Discovered, Venable executed a right face and hurried around the corner.

Willa shivered. "What a strange man."

"Maybe he won't show up again, now that I'm here."

"Back at the dressing room there was a moment when he looked ready to murder you, Charles."

"He tried it once. Didn't get away with it." He reached over to pat the mittened hand on his right arm. "I'm for supper. The New Planter's House?"

"Why not? It's convenient. I've moved there. Yes, out of the scene loft." They began walking arm in arm through the night streets. "The playhouse has been in the black since February. Not by much, but in the black. The company has established a local following, so the hotel management offered me rooms at a reduced rate. Evidently Mr. Trump and Mrs. Parker are now welcome all over town."

He chuckled; the faint cynicism he heard reminded him of her maturity. He remarked on it as they sat in the familiar dining room, both of them with juicy venison steaks. This time, he'd ordered.

"You're flattering me," she began.

"No. Telling the truth. Not only are you very — well — worldly for someone your age, but you're brighter than most men I know."

A little gesture deprecated the praise. "If it's at all true, and I'm not sure it is, maybe it's because I grew up in the theater. Knowing plays made me hungry for other kinds of books. And my father was liberal about education for girls. He believed in it."

They fell to discussing what had happened to her since their last meeting. Trump's St. Louis Playhouse had assembled its permanent company. "Actors are now willing to sign contracts for a season, because I've convinced them Sam won't drink up the profits." The company had four plays in repertory and was starting to think about touring. "Do you know there isn't a decent theater between here and Salt Lake City? I should imagine that all those new towns going up along the railroad would be ideal for a traveling company with its own tent."

"And the Army posts, too," he said. A waiter poured rich dark coffee from a silver pot. "You do love the life, don't you?"

"Yes, I do. But — here I go, brazen again." Her cheeks colored as she gazed at him. "I thought about you often during the winter."

That gaze ignited something in him. He knew he should retreat; could not.

"I thought about you, Willa."

She drew her hands into her lap. Very quietly, she said, "I don't know what you do to me. I'm shaking like an ingenue making her first entrance. I can't drink this coffee. I don't want anything more." A long pause. "Would you escort me up to my rooms?"

"Yes. Gladly."

And so, much sooner than he'd ever anticipated, it happened to them, in the small bedroom dimly lit by gaslight from the adjoining sitting room. She moaned a little, expectant, as their hands worked, strewing clothes everywhere. While she unpinned her silver-and-gold hair and shook it out, Charles gently, carefully touched one small, firm breast, then the other. "Oh, I'm so glad there's you in this world, Charles," she said, moving beneath him, drawing him down. She ran her palm round and round on his chest, kissed his throat, sought his mouth. He felt tears of happiness on her cheeks.

"I'm not altogether a scarlet woman," she whispered. "There's been but one other man, and that only twice, from curiosity. Each time was a botch, so I'm not experienced. I hope this —"

"Hush," he said, kissing her. "Hush."

She was soft and thick and golden where he entered her. She arched high as they found the rhythm together. Her heels and calves held him, and he lost every worry about entanglements and their consequences. He thought of nothing but the ardent, open warmth of this singular and passionate young woman who inspired him to love with all of his body and mind.

Abruptly, wakefulness returned. He didn't know where he was. He thrashed; turned; saw the gaslit sitting room through the half-open door. His movement roused her.

"Are you all right?"

"I was caught in a dream."

Tenderly, she brought her naked warmth against his side. Kissed his shoulder. "Was it bad?"

"I think so. It's slipped away already."

After a pause she said, "You called out several times. A name." Another pause. "Not mine."

Upset, he struggled up on his elbow. "No, no," she said. "It's ail right, Charles. You need to talk about it. There's something I need to talk about, too. Tomorrow," she murmured, drawing his back against her bare breasts, reaching over to close and softly stroke his eyes.

In the early morning hours, for the sake of propriety, he dressed and left the hotel. He walked boldly, even noisily, from the staircase to the lobby doors. The clerk, leaning on his palm, opened one eye. Because Charles acted as though he had nothing to hide, the clerk immediately went back to dozing.

Charles took a room at a cheaper hotel and next morning called for Willa with a rented buggy. She'd packed a lunch hamper. They drove into the country upriver, settling down to picnic in a pretty grove of elms and sycamores, many with wild bitter­sweet twined around their trunks. The grove smelled of the mint growing there. In the sunlit field just to the north, wild asters and bloodroot and jack-in-the-pulpit grew amid stands of nettle and poison ivy.

"An embarrassing question," Charles said as he helped unpack the hamper: thick summer sausage rounds between pumpernickel fresh from one of the local German bakeries, a corked jug of foamy ginger beer. "Last night, was my beard —? That is —"

"Yes, rough as those nettles over there," she said, teasing. "Notice all this extra face powder? You left indelible evidence of our scandalous behavior."

She leaned close, kissed him lightly. "Which I thoroughly enjoyed and do not in the least regret. Now —" She spread a checked cloth in the shade. The buggy horse switched his tail to drive off flies. A stately stern wheeler appeared in the north, bound for St. Louis. "I want to tell you something, so that we have no secrets. I didn't come to Sam's theater entirely by choice, though now I'm very glad that I did. I was running away from a man named Claudius Wood."

She told the story of New York, the Macbeth dagger, Edwin Booth's kindness. It put him sufficiently at ease so that he could tell her about Augusta Barclay, that they were lovers but never married. He did hedge the ending a bit, merely saying the war separated them before she died. He didn't reveal that he'd initiated the separation, to spare her loss and emotional pain if he were killed. Ironically, he was the one left grieving, and wary of another involvement.

And yet here he was —

While they finished their picnic the sun's angle changed. The Mississippi flowed quietly again, the stern wheeler's wake completely gone. The grove grew warm. Sweat ran down the neck of Charles's open shirt.

Willa invited him to put his head in her lap and rest. He asked her permission to smoke a cigar, lit it, then said, "Tell me who you really are, Willa. Tell me what you like and what you don't."

She thought a bit, gently caressing his beard. "I like early mornings. I like the way my face feels after I scrub it. I like the sight of children sleeping, and I like the taste of wild berries. I like Edgar Poe's verse and Shakespeare's comedians. Parades. The sea. And I'm shamelessly in love with standing on a stage while people applaud." She bent to kiss his brow. "I've just discovered I like sleeping with my arms around a man, though not just any man. As for things I don't like — well, stupidity. Needless unkindness in a world already hard enough. Pomposity. People with money who think that money alone makes a person worthy. But most of all" — another soft kiss — "I like you. I think I love you. There, I've let down the mask Pa taught me to keep in place so there'd be fewer wounds from life. I think I loved you the moment I saw you."

His eyes on the river, he said nothing. He felt as if he teetered on the edge of a vast abyss, about to fall.

They kissed, murmured things, fondled one another, till her sweet breath grew warm as the brilliant summer day. "Love me, Charles," she said, mouth on his ear. "This place, this moment."

"Willa, once is fairly safe, but — what if I got you with child?"

"What a strange man you are. So many wouldn't even worry. There are far worse things. I'd not trap you with a baby." She saw his reaction. "That bothers you."

"Scares me. I couldn't stand to lose someone else I cared about. Once was enough."

"So better not to care?"

"I didn't say that."

"Well, no guilt feelings. Whatever happens, happens just for the moment." Again she kissed him.

Even as he bore her gently backward to the soft mat of browned grass and fallen sycamore leaves, he knew that they had gone too far for either of them to escape without hurt.

Except when she was rehearsing or performing, they spent every hour of the next four days together.

He related his experiences with the Jackson Trading Company; what he'd learned of the ways of the Southern Cheyennes; how he'd grown to respect them, and to admire leaders such as Black Kettle. She was pleased he'd moved away from the typical white man's truculence, an attitude born of greed, mistrust and, she suspected, general ignorance of the Indians and their concerns.

"We always fear what we don't understand," she said.

They found a photographer's gallery and sat for a portrait. Willa giggled when the fussy man tightened her head clamp behind the velvet settee. "Look pleasant — pleasant!" the man cried from underneath the black camera drape. Standing at her side, Charles rested his hand on her shoulder and adopted a severe expression. Willa kept giggling, from nervousness and joy, and the photographer waited ten minutes until she calmed down.

She wanted to know what sort of man he was, what he liked. Lying in bed with her after the Saturday night performance of Richard III, he thought a while and said:

"I like horses, good cigars, sunset with a glass of whiskey. The blue of the sky in South Carolina — no painter ever put such a blue on canvas. I like the clear air in Texas after a hard rain. In fact I like all of the West that I've seen.

"I like the strength you find in most black people. They're survivors, fighters. Yankees wouldn't believe a Southerner saying that.

"I love my family. I love my son. I love my best friend, Billy, who's gone to California with his wife, my cousin.

"I hated the last two years of the war and what they did to people, me included. I hate the politicians and the parlor patriots who thumped the tub until the fighting started. They never had to live through days and nights of battle — the grimmest, most draining work I've ever done. They never had to advance through an open meadow toward enemy entrenchments, watching their friends fall around them, and pissing their pants with fear — excuse me," he said, his voice all at once low and harsh.

She kissed the corner of his mouth. "It's all right. I'd like to meet your son. Would you let me visit Fort Leavenworth? I could come on a Missouri steamer, perhaps in August. August is a theater's worst month. I'm sure Sam would let an understudy replace me."

Fearing the entanglement, he still said, "I'd like that."

The day after, he hugged and kissed her at the stage door, and then mounted Satan. America's Ace of Players appeared suddenly, shooing Willa inside so he could speak privately.

Trump stepped close to the frisky piebald. "What I have to say is quite simple, sir. You may have the idea that because I am a play actor, I am an effete weakling. To the contrary. I am but fifty, in my prime, and strong."

He raised his fist and forearm at a right angle. Charles might have laughed but for the severity of the actor's expression. Trump grasped Satan's headstall and jutted his jaw.

"Willa fancies you, Mr. Main. A marble statue could see that. Well and good. She's a splendid girl — and like my own daughter. So if you trifle with her — if you should in any way hurt her — as God is my witness" — he exhibited his fist again — "I will grind you down, sir. I will find you and grind you down."

"I don't intend to hurt her, Mr. Trump."

The actor released the headstall. "Then a safe journey to you. With my blessing."

But he would have to hurt her in some way, Charles realized as he cantered west from the city. He was in love with her, and confused about it; vaguely angry that he'd let it go so far, wanted it to go that far. But he had. So he had to undo it, and soon.

22

When Charles reached Fort Leavenworth, Duncan told him that in late July, Johnson had signed a bill increasing the number of infantry regiments from nineteen to forty-five and, of more pertinence on the Plains, where distances were vast, the number of cavalry regiments from six to ten.

The brigadier, who now wore the olive-green trim of the divisional paymaster's department, was excited about the news. "It means that by next year we'll be able to demonstrate in force against the hostiles."

Charles chewed an unlit cigar and said nothing. Like Sherman, Jack Duncan believed the tribes must inevitably be driven onto reservations if the West was to be made safe for white settlers and commerce. Duncan saw nothing improper in this appropriation of Indian land, and Charles knew he couldn't change Duncan's mind, so he didn't try. Instead, he announced Willa's forthcoming visit,

"Ah," Duncan said, smiling.

"What does that mean — ah? She isn't coming just to see me. She wants to look over halls that the company could rent for a tour."

"Oh, of course," Duncan said soberly. He was delighted to see Charles react to teasing. Perhaps the young man was recovering from the despondency that had haunted him for so long.

Willa arrived in late August. She had already visited City of Kansas — some were calling it Kansas City — on the opposite shore of the Missouri, and Leavenworth on the near side. She said Frank's Hall in City of Kansas was an ideal auditorium.

Duncan's frame residence on officers' row, on the north side of the parade ground, contained an extra room Maureen used. She kept little Gus there in a homemade rocker-crib. She invited Willa to share her bed and the young actress accepted without hesitation. Maureen approved of Willa's adaptability, and in fact she did fit in well. She chatted easily about Sam Trump and the playhouse, and listened attentively to talk of Army life and the Indian problem. She didn't conceal that she stood with the Indians against the great majority of settlers and Army professionals. It didn't nettle Duncan as badly as Charles had expected. The brigadier argued with Willa, but clearly respected her as an intelligent adversary.

The first evening, after the women retired, Duncan poured two whiskeys in the parlor. The open window brought in strong, sweet yeast fumes from the post bakery nearby. For a few minutes, Duncan complained about the paymaster's department. It was thankless work; the officers who rode from fort to fort with soldiers' wages could never travel fast enough to please the men.

Presently he said, "That's a fine young woman. A bit free-thinking, to be sure. But she'd make a splendid —"

"Friend," Charles said, and bit down on his cigar.

"Exactly." Duncan decided not to push Willa's cause further at the moment. Charles looked fierce. He might not be as ready to resume normal life as Duncan had thought.

Where oaks and cottonwoods shaded the bluff above the fort's steamboat landing, Charles and Willa went walking on the last day of her visit. Gus rode on his father's shoulder, happily surveying the world from his perch. Pleasant sounds drifted through the Sunday air: yells and cheers of soldiers playing baseball; the chug of the post steam engine pumping water.

Willa was nervous and a little unhappy. Here at the fort, Charles was less demonstrative than he'd been in St. Louis. She was in love with him — there was no escaping that — but she knew she'd better not say it too often. The bleak, exhausted look that showed in his eyes occasionally said he wasn't ready for an emotional commitment.

Still, she couldn't bring herself to pretend disinterest. So amid the dapple of sun and the shadows of reddening leaves stirring in the breeze, she took Charles's son in her arms. There he rested contentedly, gazing over her shoulder at squirrels racing along tree limbs of picking up decaying green hickory nuts that had fallen in midsummer.

"Gus is a wonderful boy," she said. "You and his mother brought a fine son into the world."

"Thank you." Hands in pockets, Charles stared at the glinting river a hundred and fifty feet below them. Common sense told Willa she shouldn't press. But she loved him so much —

"This has been a grand visit. I hope I'll be invited again."

"Certainly, if it's convenient for you."

Gus laid his head on Willa's shoulder and put his thumb in his mouth. His eyes closed and his face softened, blissful. Willa touched Charles's sleeve. "You're treating me as though we just met."

He frowned. "I don't mean to, Willa. It's just that I get the feeling Jack and Maureen are both — well — pushing us together. That's no good. Week after next, I'm going out to meet Wooden Foot at Fort Riley. I've said it before: trading isn't the safest work, even though most of the Southern Cheyennes are my partner's friends. I don't want to get involved. Suppose we went out one season and never came back. It wouldn't be fair to you."

Her blue eyes snapped. "Oh, come, Charles. Life's always full of risks like that. Who are you really sparing, me or yourself?"

He faced her. "All right. Myself. I don't want to go through what I went through before."

"You think I'm delicate? Sickly? That I'm going to collapse tomorrow, and you'll lose me? By the way, I'm not pregnant" Her use of that generally unmentionable word startled him. "I'll be around for a good long while yet. Your excuse won't wash."

"I can't help it."

"And I thought women were the fickle sex."

He turned away, staring upriver again. The cool breeze fluttered his beard. The low-slanting sun lit Willa's hair till it shone like fine white gold. "Charles, what in God's name did the war do to you?"

He didn't answer.

Undone by his stoniness, she found herself irked again. "We can be friends — casual lovers — but nothing else?"

He looked at her. "Yes."

"I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm not sure I like it. I'll tell you when you come back from this next trip. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to the brigadier's quarters. It's gotten chilly." She lifted Gus and handed him to his father, and walked away.

She knew that a display of temper would probably drive him off. Yet she couldn't do anything about it. She was angry at her untouchable enemy — the pain left in him by the death of the boy's mother. Reason, even affection, might never overcome something so deeply wounding. How could she fight it? Only by hanging on. By demonstrating that Charles could love her without risk, though not without commitment.

She hated for the visit to end on a dismal note, but it did. When they parted at the steamer landing, he kissed her cheek, well away from her mouth. He said nothing about visiting St. Louis in the spring, only thanked her for coming. As she went aboard the stern wheeler, little Gus waved and waved.

The steamer churned into the current and Willa watched man and boy grow smaller. Charles looked unhappy and confused. That was exactly how she felt.

But she couldn't deny that she was in love. So she wouldn't give up.

It was going to be a long winter.

As August dwindled away, Charles grew impatient to be moving. He left a day early, and no regrets about it, except for Gus. The boy now called him Fa, and readily came to him for hugs or sympathy. Charles was sad that the whole process of getting reacquainted would have to be repeated next spring. As for Willa, he tried to suppress his feelings for her, hopeful that he'd made it clear that any closer involvement was impossible.

He said goodbye to the brigadier and Maureen on a sunny afternoon. Maureen's final word was a tart, "You ought to marry that girl, sir. She said there's no longer a Mr. Parker, and she's a grand person."

Rather abruptly, Charles said, "Traders don't make good family men."

He didn't get as far as he'd planned the first day. In midafternoon, passing through the Salt Creek Valley, Kickapoo Township, Satan threw a shoe. By the time a local blacksmith replaced it the sun was going down. Charles put up at the Golden Rule House, a place Duncan had talked about with enthusiasm:

"It's only been open a short time but it's already famous up and down the river. The proprietor's a generous young fellow. He'll cut the price of your meal and pour whiskey free if he's had a few himself. If he keeps on, he'll go bankrupt. But it's wonderful while it lasts."

So it proved. The atmosphere in the converted house was noisy and convivial. The owner, though just twenty, was one of those authentic characters who gave the West its flavor. Already well under the influence by six o'clock, the young Kansan regaled his guests with a long story about driving an Overland coach and suddenly being attacked by a huge band of Sioux. He claimed he drove them off with a combination of shouted threats and rifle fire, saving coach and passengers.

Charles shared a table with a huge, amiable man about his own age, who introduced himself as Henry Griffenstein. He said he hailed from one of the German settlements in the upland section of Missouri known as the Little Rhineland.

' "That's why I'm Dutch Henry to my friends. Right now I'm bullwhacking wagons to Santa Fe. Who knows what I'll be doing next year?"

Charles chewed a chunk of buffalo steak, then pointed his fork at the talkative young man tending bar. "I don't think I believe that story. Especially the number of Sioux he got rid of. But he's a damn fine storyteller,"

"Damn fine stage driver, too," Dutch Henry said. "Besides that, he's handled freight wagons and scouted for the Army. He rode Pony Express at fourteen — he says."

"How'd he get in the hotel business?"

"He and Louisa opened the place after they got hitched in January. I don't think he can last cooped up like this. He's too full of ginger. Not to mention the gift of gab."

"Gather 'round, boys," the young man shouted, waving his customers in. "I want to tell you about riding with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry in the war. Jennison's Jayhawkers. Real hard cases. We — wait, let's all have a refill first."

He poured generous drinks for his listeners, wobbling noticeably as he did so. From the way he knocked back his whiskey, Charles judged him to be something of a hard case himself.

"What'd you say his name was?" he asked Dutch Henry.

"Cody. Will F. Cody."

On horseback with their pack mules in single file, the Jackson Trading Company rode over the autumn prairie, bound for the land beyond the hazy blue horizon to the south. They rode beside the same trampled buffalo trail they'd followed to Indian Territory the year before. In the northwest, dark gray clouds raced toward the apex of the sky. Every half minute or so the clouds lit up, white within.

Above the traders a hawk rode the air currents. Red-tailed and dusky gray of body, she sank and soared in great spirals, her heavy wings spread to their full fifty inches.

Charles alternately watched the hawk and the storm clouds. Wooden Foot said the hawk was looking for mice and gophers, either of which she could see from high above. Suddenly the hawk turned, flexed her wings hard and flew straight away into the rough air beginning to blow out of the north. Charles wondered if something had alarmed her.

The land here undulated, so that the prospect ahead was that of a series of continual rises, none higher than six feet. It was late afternoon. At about the same hour two days ago, they'd crossed the Smoky Hill Road, on which wagons still creaked west with as much speed as their drivers could manage, smelling winter in the crisp September air. At Fort Riley, an officer had told Charles that something like a hundred thousand emigrant wagons had traveled through during the summer.

You wouldn't know it here. They'd ridden past an isolated farm at sunset yesterday. Two youngsters had waved at them from the feed lot, and Boy had laughed and gurgled long after the children were left behind. They'd seen no human beings since. In an old Harper's Weekly picked up at Riley, Charles had read an amazing article about the great mountain chain of Asia, the Himalayas. "Special from New Delhi by Our Roving Correspondent." He was fascinated by the description of that remote region, which surely couldn't be emptier than this prairie under the brow of the approaching storm.

The wind picked up. High as Satan's knees, the dry, brittle grama grass seethed. It struck Charles that the piebald was nervous. The other animals were too including Fen. The border collie kept running in circles ahead of them, barking.

The dog loped away down the other side of the next rise and disappeared. Only the disturbed motion of the grass marked his trail. Charles studied the sky again. "I wonder why that hawk all of a sudden —"

He stopped, noticing more agitation in the grass. It rippled as though an invisible man was rushing toward them, creating a path but remaining unseen.

"It's Fen," Wooden Foot said above the whistling wind. "Wonder what the devil's biting him?" He reached for his rifle scabbard. "Boy, stick close."

Boy nudged his horse toward the trader's. "I'll have a look," Charles said, touching Satan with his boot heels.

The piebald trotted about fifty feet to the summit of the rise. Grit and bits of windblown grass flew into Charles's eyes. He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand as he topped the rise.

At the bottom, a line of nine men sat on ponies, waiting.

From the center of the line Scar gazed up at him. He and the others wore leggings painted with red stripes, and red paint on their faces, arms, and bare chests. Each wore the Dog Society cap, with a narrow beaded band and feathers from a golden eagle and a raven; the feathers were gathered and tied so they stood up straight. Each man had an eagle-bone whistle on a thong around his neck and carried bow and arrow plus a trade rifle or musket. It was full war regalia.

Scar saw that register on Charles's face. He grinned and pumped his rifle up and down. The others barked and howled.

Wooden Foot and Boy came riding up behind Charles. "Oh my God, Charlie, this is it. This ain't no accident. I shouldn't of tore that clout off him. He's been waitin' all summer. He knew we'd prob'ly come back this way."

Charles started to ask whether they should signal for a parley. The fiery spurt and bang of an Indian rifle made the very idea foolish.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

Andrew Johnson and his entourage invaded Ohio, the home state of Ben Wade, Stanley's powerful friend and sometime benefactor. At Cleveland, a major stop, a large and friendly crowd greeted the presidential party at the depot. Outside, a special decorative arch over the street expressed support for the visit.

THE CONSTITUTION, it said. WASHINGTON ESTABLISHED IT. LINCOLN DEFENDED IT. JOHNSON WILL PRESERVE IT.

Johnson was pleased, From that point, matters began to deteriorate.

At dusk, the Boy General strode down the corridor of Cleveland's Kennard Hotel with Secretary of State Seward. The Secretary's neck still bore red scars from the knife attack of one of John Wilkes Booth's fellow conspirators, who had struck at Seward on the same night that Lincoln was shot.

The Boy General was nervous. This was Ben Wade's fiefdom; Radical country. The President had taken to the rails for the avowed purpose of laying the cornerstone of a Stephen Douglas memorial in Chicago. Actually he was stopping along the way to attack the Republicans.

The strategy might have worked had not a large press contingent, including Mr. Gobright of the Associated Press, decided to accompany the President. The reporters wanted to file a new dispatch at every stop, so it was impossible for Johnson to deliver one prepared speech time after time. He was forced to do what he did so badly — extemporize.

The Boy General's tension was reflected in his bouncing stride and darting blue eyes. Lean, with an aura of high energy, George Armstrong Custer wore a trim civilian suit that showed his slimness to advantage. Small gold spurs jingled on his polished boots. Libbie urged him to wear spurs to remind people of his war exploits.

For a while, because of those exploits, he'd been the talk of the country — an audacious cavalry general with a remarkable talent for victory. Custer's luck, someone had christened it. Like some magic dust, it had covered him all during the war, bringing him success in the field and fame in the press.

Then came peace, the shrinking Army, and obscurity again. When he mustered out in Texas some months ago, he'd held the rank of captain.

Now he was beginning a slow and deliberate journey back to prominence. In a crucial meeting with Secretary of War Stanton he'd secured a captaincy for his loyal brother Tom, and for himself a lieutenant colonelcy in one of the new Plains regiments. He would soon return to active duty with the Seventh Cavalry.

He considered it a fine opportunity because the Seventh's commander, General Andrew Jackson Smith, was a thirty-year veteran — an old, tired, and exceedingly vain man. Smith also had responsibility for the entire district of the Upper Arkansas, so Custer assumed that day-to-day command of the Seventh would fall to him. That was ideal for making the regiment his own, in spirit if not in fact.

He didn't regard the Seventh as a final stopping point, however. Politicians were already promoting Grant as a candidate for President, and Libbie Custer had focused her husband's eye on that same high office. He was fascinated, but he and Libbie agreed that he needed some spectacular military achievement to propel him to eminence again. Meantime, he could polish his reputation by making this swing with Johnson. Or so he'd thought at the beginning; now the trip was turning out quite badly.

Custer's long wavy curls bounced on his shoulders and his glance leaped ahead to the open doors of a parlor. He spied Secretary Welles, Admiral Farragut, and other dignitaries. Grant had hurried on to Detroit, pleading indisposition. Privately, Custer believed the indisposition came from a bottle — or possibly from rumors of trouble in Cleveland.

The twenty-seven-year-old soldier hoped the rumors were false. Ohio was his native state, and he'd gotten behind Johnson because he always liked Southerners, even when he fought them. He'd flatly refused a command in one of the new colored regiments, the Ninth, and he believed that if the Republican Party could thrive only with the votes of ex-slaves, it should die.

Nearing the parlor doors, Custer said to Seward, "Do you think the President should be cautioned again, Mr. Secretary? Reminded of Senator Doolittle's warning?" In a confidential memo, Doolittle had said that Johnson's enemies never gained advantage from his written opinions, only from his spontaneous answers to questions or heckling.

"I do, George. I'll take care of it," Seward said.

They entered the parlor. Fashionably dressed men and women surrounded the President and a young woman who resembled him — Mrs. Martha Patterson, his daughter. She traveled as Johnson's hostess because his wife, Eliza, was an invalid.

While Seward slipped in close to the President, Custer circled to the French windows. He studied the crowd below. About three hundred and growing, he estimated. He listened to its communal voice. Noisy, but not particularly cheerful. People at the depot had laughed a lot.

He stepped into the center of the balcony doorway. As he expected, it got a reaction.

''There's Custer!"

That produced some whistles and applause. He started to wave, but checked when he heard booing. His normally ruddy face darkened and he quickly stepped back into the parlor. Perhaps he ought to leave town, as Grant had.

Libbie swooped into the room, drawing attention as she always did. What a lovely creature he'd married, he thought, going to her. Vivid dark eyes, full bosom, the kind of tiny waist other women envied.

She took his arm and whispered, "How is the crowd, Autie?"

"Not friendly. If he does anything more than thank them, he's a fool."

Smiling, he led his wife to the large group. "Mr. President," he said, with warmth. "Good evening."

The crowd in St. Clair Street was growing impatient. Chinese lanterns across the front of the Kennard Hotel cast a sickly pale light on the upturned faces. Ugly faces, many of them, revealing the ugly tempers beneath.

A man at the back of the crowd observed the people carefully. He wore a shabby overcoat and a Union campaign hat with the crossed metal cannon of the artillery. Another man slipped up beside him. "Everyone's in place," the second man said.

"Good. I trust they know what to do."

"I went over it 'fore I paid them."

Secretary Seward appeared on the balcony and introduced the President. The stocky, swarthy Andrew Johnson walked out and raised his hands to acknowledge the scanty applause.

"My friends and constituents, thank you for your generous welcome to Cleveland. It is not my intention to make a speech —"

The man in the campaign hat smirked. The idiot nearly always said that, throwing his audiences an obvious cue. One of the hired men took it. "Then don't."

Laughter. Clapping. Johnson gripped the balcony rail. "You hecklers seem to follow me everywhere. At least have the courtesy —"

"Where's Grant?"

"I regret that General Grant is unable to appear with me. He —" Groans covered the rest.

"Why don't you want colored men to vote in Dixie?" someone yelled.

Seward touched Johnson's sleeve to caution him. The President pulled his arm away. "Cast the mote from your own eye before you worry about your neighbor's," he cried. "Let your own Negroes vote here in Ohio before you campaign to extend the franchise down South."

The voices began a crescendo from various points in the crowd:

"You're spineless."

"Prison's too good for Jeff Davis!"

"Hang him. Hang him!"

Johnson exploded. "Why don't you hang Ben Wade?" Loud booing, which only goaded the President. "Why don't you hang Wendell Phillips and Thad Stevens while you're at it? I tell you this. I have been fighting traitors in the South and I am prepared to fight them in the North."

"You're the traitor," someone cried over the booing and hissing. "You and your National Union Party. Traitors!"

The taunt enraged the President. He shook a finger at the mob. "Show yourself, whoever said that. No, of course you won't. If ever you shoot someone, you'll do it in the dark, from behind."

A tumult of oaths and boos greeted that. Johnson roared over it, his temper irrevocably lost:

"The Congress has done this. The Congress has poisoned your minds against me while failing to do anything of its own to restore the Union. Instead, they divide the American people, conqueror against conquered, Republican against Democrat, white against black. Had Abraham Lincoln lived, he too would be suffering the vicious enmity of the power-crazed Radical clique —" Frantic, Seward kept trying to pull him inside. "— the merchants of hatred who now control our House and Senate, and seek to intimidate and control me."

"Liar!" someone screamed. Johnson's jaw worked, but no one could hear him over the mounting roar. He shook a fist. "Liar, liar," the chant began, louder at each utterance.

At the back of the crowd, the man in the Union campaign hat, who had hired and planted people on instructions from an intermediary, allowed himself a smile. The plan had worked perfectly. Johnson was in a fury, and the reporters would have every word of the debacle on the telegraph wire by midnight. Johnson foolishly thought he could attack Wade with impunity. The man in the campaign hat was sure the senator had arranged and paid for the disruption, though of course there was no provable link. That was the reason for intermediaries.

"Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!"

The roar was a sweet sound. It meant a generous bonus. The man in the campaign hat walked rapidly away from the chanting mob. At the telegraph window of the railway station, he picked up a blank and a stubby pencil and began to block out the message announcing his success to the intermediary who had hired him. On the first line he printed MR. S. HAZARD, WASHINGTON, D.C.

From the pines of South Carolina came turpentine, shipped out of Charleston in kegs. Most of the black stevedores carried but one at a time up the plank to whatever steamer they were loading. Des LaMotte, reduced to their level because there were still no fine families to employ him, carried two.

He worked in gentleman's linen breeches, soiled and torn. He balanced a keg on each shoulder. When he first tried it, the rims left red welts that later bled. Now a ridge of scar tissue had toughened both shoulders.

He detested the work, and all those nameless, faceless Negrophiles in the North who had forced him into it. Yet he took a certain crazed pride in doing more, carrying more, than the strongest buck. He soon became a figure of note on the Charleston docks, an immense white man with bulging arm muscles and the neatly tended chin beard of a rich planter.

He refused to speak to any of the black stevedores unless some circumstance of the job required it. On his second day, he'd almost knocked down a darky who approached him about joining a new Longshoremen's Protective Association. The man opened his appeal with remarks about a burial aid fund, so much contributed each week to guarantee that funeral expenses would be met when necessary.

When Des heard that, his mind flashed white. He quelled his murderous impulses but couldn't banish them. How could the ignorant African understand the depth and subtlety of Des's affection for his wife, Sally Sue, or his commander, Ferris Brixham? Those were the only funerals Des cared about, funerals enshrined in memory.

The incident left him shaken, because he'd come close to killing the stevedore. How long until he really turned on one of them? He realized that by working among freed Negroes, he was playing a dangerous game with his own life. Somehow he didn't care.

In the hot sunshine of a Carolina autumn that was more like summer, he sweated rivers of salt sweat as he labored up the plank of the coastal steamer Sequoiah again and yet again, muscles twisting like ropes under his raw-burned skin. He allowed none of his pain to show on his face.

More than pain and the tiny Low Country gnats deviled him this morning. He'd received a note from Gettys. It said that Captain Jolly, the trash they planned to employ to pull the trigger on Madeline Main, had filled himself with stolen corn whiskey, then gone off to try to wreck the school.

Idiot, Des thought, simmering. He heaved a keg to his right shoulder, and then another to his left. His knees buckled a little as he absorbed the weight.

He was as impatient as ever to see the Mains brought down, starting with Colonel Orry Main's widow. He didn't want to hang for the crime, though. And Mr. Cooper Main of Tradd Street, while having no truck with the occupying soldiers, had quite enough influence to turn the soldiers in pursuit of Des if he grew suspicious.

So he had been lying low all these weeks, awaiting a suitable pretext. He believed a nigger uprising inevitable. Some hot night, inflamed by spiritous liquors and the agents of the Yankee government, the freedmen would go wild. There would be arson, rapine, hell to pay for any man with white skin. Such an outbreak was the sort of screen he needed.

And now Jolly had drawn attention to himself, and to Mont Royal. Jolly was accustomed to doing whatever he pleased, terrorizing both whites and niggers in the Ashley district. Well, he wouldn't do as he pleased with the Main woman. Des had already sent off a reply to Gettys demanding that Jolly be restrained until ordered to act.

Groaning and sweating, Des bent his back and struggled up the plank step by painful step. A trio of elegant young ladies, one of whom, Miss Leamington of Leamington Hall, had been a pupil, came promenading along the crowded quay under their parasols. Threadbare dresses told of their poverty, but the easy arrogance of their class — something understood by Des, and even shared — showed in their amused looks at the stevedores and their lively chat.

Miss Leamington stopped suddenly. "Dear me. Is that —?" Des hunched to hide his head behind a cask. "No, it couldn't be."

"What, Felicity? What couldn't be?"

"You see that white man carrying kegs like a nigger? For a moment I thought he was my old dancing master, Mr. LaMotte. But Mr. LaMotte's a white man through and through. He would never demean himself that way."

The young ladies passed on without glancing back. Who cared to waste a second look on dirt?

That was Friday. All night the memory of Miss Leamington's scorn kept Des awake. He drifted to sleep on his sodden pallet around four, waking several hours late for work. He dressed without eating and hurried toward the docks, hearing the blare of a small band on Meeting Street.

When he reached Meeting, he was prevented from crossing by a parade. He saw niggers marching in formation, each man wearing a frock coat of white flannel with dark-blue facings and matching white trousers. They were festive, waving and chatting with people in the mixed crowd that had turned out to watch. At the head of the parade, two men carried a banner.

CHARLESTOWNE VOL. FIRE CO.

Number 2

"BLACK OPAL"

Des stood in the third row of the crowd, glaring as the firemen passed. Behind the marchers, horses decorated with flowers pulled two pumping units. Small American flags were tied to the burnished brass rails of the pumpers. Des's hands knotted at his sides. All that black skin, those Yankee flags — it was almost more than he could tolerate.

A shiny-cheeked, strapping buck waved to someone at Des's left. "How'd you do. Miss Sally? Fine morning."

Des turned to look. The name Sally resonated in his head with sharp echoes. He saw a fat, trashy girl waving a hanky at the fireman, who grinned at her as if he wanted to stroll right over and lift her skirts.

Miss Sally was a white girl. She waved and waved her hanky, taking notice of the nigger, demeaning herself, her race. Des felt as if the blood would burst his temples.

A small five-piece marching band, part of the fire company, had been counting cadence with drumsticks clacked together. Now the brasses struck up "Hail, Columbia!" and the white slut beamed so broadly at the fireman, he blew her a kiss.

Which she returned.

Des's huge hands flew up, one fastening on a shoulder at his left, one at his right. He parted the human wall. Someone protested, hurt, as he lunged into the street.

Then his mind turned to flame, and he remembered nothing.

23

The Cheyenne's rifle shot blew out the left eye of Wooden Foot's horse. Amid blood and animal bellowing, the trader tumbled into the wind-whipped grass. Charles was already dismounted. He grabbed his Spencer and slapped Satan to send him trotting away. Boy, upset by the sudden attack, vainly tried to control the pack mules from horseback.

"Get down, get off your horse," Charles shouted. The Cheyennes rushed their ponies up the rise. A bullet snapped Charles's hat brim; the hat sailed away. He yelled at Boy again but the howls of the Indians and the bray of the mules competed. But after a few seconds, Boy understood the look on Charles's face and slipped clumsily to the ground.

Wooden Foot knelt and shot at the Cheyennes nearing the top of the rise. He missed. Charles fired as the brave next to Scar flung a feathered lance. Charles dodged it. The Indian took Charles's bullet, blasted off his pony.

Everything was noise and confusion. A few miles west, lightning sizzled down from approaching storm clouds and struck the dry prairie. The grass smoked and sparked. Boiling, tumbling, the black clouds sped on toward the Cheyennes and the embattled traders.

Boy cried out. Charles saw him stagger, clutching a reddened sleeve. A lance had grazed him. Tears of pain and bewilderment rolled down his face.

Wooden Foot shouted, "Behind you, Charlie," and fired his long gun almost simultaneously. Charles pivoted and saw a mounted Cheyenne about to hammer him with a stone-headed war club. Charles shot at the red-painted face, but not soon enough to stop the blow. The club pounded his shoulder with an impact that drove him sideways. The Cheyenne sagged from his pony, his face a sheet of blood.

The storm clouds passed over like a lid closing on the world. Thunder rolled. Lightning glittered. On the wind from the west, Charles smelled smoke. He saw Scar jabbing at Wooden Foot with his lance, from horseback.

The Cheyennes crowded their ponies in close, though with less zeal since a couple of their own had fallen. Wooden Foot dodged back; Scar's thrust missed. He thrust again. The trader gripped his rifle with both hands and used it like a staff to deflect the lance. His face was flushed.

Charles levered a round into the Spencer, aimed at Scar, and pulled the trigger. The rifle jammed.

Another Cheyenne rode by and lanced Charles's right arm. A rush of blood followed the hot pain. He dropped the Spencer, yanked out his Bowie, and drove the blade into the Indian's side. The Indian screamed and jerked forward over his pony's neck. The pony raced away, taking the Indian and the protruding steel too.

Determined to finish Wooden Foot, Scar worked his pony in again; Wooden Foot blocked his thrusts expertly with his rifle. Scar's face showed his frustration. The struggle was taking a toll on Wooden Foot, though. His cheeks were dark as plums.

Charles found himself momentarily free of adversaries. Then he saw why. Three Cheyennes were riding down on the mules and Boy. Weeping, the youngster struck at them feebly, as if swatting flies. One brave jumped down and grabbed Boy. Fen leaped from concealment in the grass as if sprung. The collie's jaws closed on the Cheyenne's forearm. Another Indian beat at the dog with the butt of his trade rifle.

Amid the buffeting of the gale wind, the white flashing of the lightning, Wooden Foot uttered a strange choked cry. Drawing his Colt and dodging as a Cheyenne shot at him, Charles saw his partner lurch sideways in the high grass. Wooden Foot gasped, as if he couldn't get air. He plucked the front of his beaded shirt as if to tear something out.

Charles remembered seeing Wooden Foot's face flushed the same way before. "It ain't nothing —" But it was: a heart seizure, brought on by the enormous strain of the attack.

Scar had his hatchet in hand, raised high. Charles fired. The prancing of Scar's pony caused the bullet to miss the target and ping the hatchet blade. Charles jumped in front of Wooden Foot to shoot again. Scar quickly trotted away down the rise, bent low over his pony.

Blood leaked from Charles's wound. He yelled in frustration, a wordless raw cry of rage, because two things demanded attention at once: Wooden Foot, kneading his shirt with both hands and trying to get air in his lungs, and three dismounted Cheyennes who were dragging Boy out of sight beyond another part of the rise. Fen chased after them, foam flying from his jaws. Wooden Foot's fingers clawed beads loose from his shirt. They sparkled and winked in the lightning glare.

Charles couldn't help both of them. He chose the one visibly near and in peril of instant death.

Wooden Foot swayed backward. Charles caught him with his left hand while firing at the nearest Cheyenne with his right. Because of his wound, his gun arm throbbed and shook. His bullet sped yards wide of the target.

The Cheyennes were going to finish them, so all Charles could do was go out fighting. He knelt and worked his knee under his partner's sagging back. The trader braced there, his eyes wide, his limp hands falling away from his shirt. Helpless, Charles watched the color leach from his face.

Wooden Foot recognized his partner. He tried to touch Charles but couldn't lift his hand. Beyond the rise, Fen abruptly stopped barking, then yelped once.

Charles put his ear near Wooden Foot's mouth. He thought he heard, "Thanks for all —" Bright lightning whited out everything. When he recovered his sight he almost cried. Wooden Foot's eyes were still open but nothing lived behind them.

From over the rise the three Cheyennes appeared and recaptured their ponies. They trotted down toward Scar, who was waiting at the spot where Charles had first seen the Indians.

Charles raced toward the place where Boy had disappeared. As he ran, the storm threw bits of grass and particles of dirt into his eyes. When Scar saw Charles move away from Wooden Foot's body, he signaled his remaining cohorts to ride toward it.

Charles passed two fallen pack mules bleeding to death from bullet wounds. Lightning blazed. The ground rocked under him. He sensed rather than saw a fence of fire spring up behind him, where lightning had struck again. "Boy?" he shouted, struggling up the rise on legs shaking with weakness. "Boy, answer me."

The lightning answered, a scorching sizzling swordstroke straight down into the hollow between rises, the place the three dismounted Cheyennes had just quitted. Grass smoked, glowed orange, then burst into flame. Godamighty, the end of the world, Charles thought as he stumbled down the slope toward a dry stream bed. On the near side, trampled grass glistened wet and black. Amidst that blood lay something as shapeless as a potato sack.

Over the rise behind him, flames six feet high burned in a rampart of scarlet, orange, white. The rampart spread forward and backward and sideways simultaneously. Once in Texas he'd seen a similar prairie fire. It destroyed forty square miles.

He reached the shapeless thing and gazed down, driven past feeling by shock. Boy lay with his sadly swollen head resting in the dry stream bed. A blade had split him open from throat to groin. From the chest cavity already swarming with flies protruded the remains of Fen. A leg, the bone visible in bloody fur; part of the collie's snout and skull, including an eye. Other pieces were strewn on the glistening grass.

Charles stared at the butchery no more than five seconds, but it might as well have been a century. Finally he turned and started back up the rise and the fire rampart behind it. Wooden Foot's dead, Boy's dead, he thought. I'll go next but I've got to take that scarred bastard with me.

From the rise he saw Scar and five others sitting their ponies some distance away, appearing and disappearing behind the blowing smoke. The Cheyennes had shifted slightly to the south of their original position and despite the smoke, Charles recognized something new on their faces: apprehension; or at least doubt. The fire, had advanced nearly halfway up the rise where the Jackson Trading Company had made its futile stand.

Sweat dripping from his face, he stumbled back to the place he'd left Wooden Foot. It's Sharpsburg all over again, he thought. It's Northern Virginia all over again.

Behind fuming smoke, Scar smiled. Charles wondered about that as he staggered to Wooden Foot's corpse. Looking down, he choked.

His partner's pale body lay denuded of clothing. A red hole between the legs crawled with flies. Bloody genitals had been forced into Wooden Foot's mouth. On his eyes the Cheyennes had poured little mounds of diamond and triangle pony beads.

The fire made them sparkle. Scar had a fine touch when it came to barbarity.

"You bastards," Charles screamed. "You filthy, inhuman bastards."

Scar stopped smiling. Charles pointed his Colt at the Cheyenne leader, steadying it with bloody hands. Smoke thickened, hiding Scar and the others. Charles squeezed off a round. Another. Another. Until the cylinder emptied.

By then the wall of smoke and fire completely hid the Cheyennes. To reach Charles they'd have to ride through or very wide around one of the ends that kept extending north and south. Gusty wind blew his hair. The fire roaring on the slope lit his wild face as if it were noonday.

The smoke parted again. The Cheyennes were still there. Every one of Charles's shots had missed. Scar signaled the others to advance.

One Cheyenne shook his head, then another. They had no more stomach for the shouting madman on the rise protected by a wall of fire and smoke. Though they didn't understand his words, they understood the meaning of his yelling. "Come on, show me how brave you are! You killed an old man and a boy and a dog. Let's see what you can do with me!"

One of the reluctant Cheyennes shook his head again, emphatically. That displeased Scar. He grabbed the last man to shake his head. The Cheyenne knocked Scar's hand away, turned his mount, and rode off into the stormy darkness.

Four others followed in single file. Left alone, Scar gave Charles a scornful look before he joined the retreat.

"Come back, goddamn it. You yellow sons of bitches!"

The starch went out of him as the fire once more leaped high and hid them. Charles kept yelling at Scar. "You deserve to be wiped off the earth, you and your whole tribe. I'll find a way, you can count on that."

Count on that ... count on that...

He turned and moved from the heat and glare. Using his wounded arm, he tried to jam his Colt into the holster. He kept missing. The gunsight ripped his pants and dug his leg so that it bled. He neither saw nor felt it. From his left hand dangled Wooden Foot's personal parfleche, which he didn't remember snatching off his partner's dead horse.

The storm front flew on eastward, miles away now. A light rain started, not strong enough to put out the fire. Charles staggered among the dead mules to see what else he might salvage from the disaster. Two mules were still alive, unhurt. With their reins gathered in his left hand he started back toward the rise.

The fire stopped him. The great white-and-scarlet wall now curved across the main rise and around to his right, behind the continuation of the rise shielding the creek bed where Boy and Fen had died. As he watched, the fire completely engulfed the rise where Wooden Foot's body lay.

I can't even bury them.

At that, he wept tears of wrath.

By a lucky chance — his only luck of the day — Charles found his piebald about two miles northeast of the fire site. He was riding one of the two mules and leading the other. A wide strip of cloth torn from his trousers and twisted with a stick had stopped the bleeding of his right arm. The wound hurt and needed attention, but it was far from fatal.

When he came on Satan, standing head down, still as marble except for the movement of his eye, Charles changed mounts and headed on into the north, his emotions a raw mass of sorrow and outrage. At dusk he stopped to rest and camp. He built a buffalo-chip fire, then chewed some pemmican from his own parfleche. Two bites and his belly ached. Four bites, it all came up.

After the storm the sky cleared, leaving him huddled in a cold breeze under brilliant stars. Shivering, he opened Wooden Foot's parfleche. He found the paint pots and the rolled-up winter count. He untied the thong and spread it at his feet.

Although he couldn't explain the reason, something compelled him to try to finish it. He opened the pot of black, moistened the brush, dipped it in, and poised it over the pictograph history of the Jackson Trading Company's final year.

He studied the various figures Wooden Foot had painted, including the three of them in the sanctuary of the Buffalo Hat tipi. How he had misunderstood that incident. It had fooled him into believing the Cheyennes were capable of compassion. They weren't. Only the sanctity of the object, the hat, had saved the traders. The Cheyennes hated all whites, and never mind if they had reasons. They had no reasons good enough to justify the barbarity he had seen. They simply hated whites. The same way he now hated every last one of them.

His bleak face reflecting the campfire, he laboriously painted three exceedingly crude stick figures, a dog and two men. The second figure was to the right and slightly above the first, and the third similarly elevated above the second, as though all stood on an invisible stair.

Trying to conceive a way to picture the Hanging Road above the figures, he faltered. Should he paint wavy lines for the Milky Way? No. Five-pointed stars. He did one, corrected two of the points, then two others, and found himself with a solid blob instead of an open star figure.

He flung the brush into the fire, then the paints. He held the edges of the pictograph and studied each image in turn, finally purged of any impulse to cry. He still grieved, but the grief had hardened. His own life, which he'd tried so hard to reconstruct over the past winter, had been destroyed as quickly and surely as the grass in the path of the prairie fire.

Sharpsburg all over again —

Northern Virginia all over again —

Nothing changes.

Christ!

He laid the winter count on the fire and watched it burn. They want killing, I'll give them killing, he thought. I know more about it than they do. I had five hundred thousand expert teachers.

The figures on the pictograph blackened and burned while he watched, seeking to remember every fiery image.