Heaven and Hell

24

A thunderstorm swept the sky and shook the earth. On the flooded road from Leavenworth City, a horseman galloped out of the dark.

The weary sentry stepped into the rain, forcing the rider to halt. A lightning bolt etched the horseman in white. His mustache drooped and his full, tangled beard needed trimming. A poncho-style garment resembling a patchwork quilt hung from his shoulders. He clenched a cold cigar stub in his teeth.

Rain dripped from the bill of the boyish sentry's cap. "State your name and business on the post."

"Get out of my way."

"Mister, I order you to state your name and —"

Seemingly in an eyeblink, the man's hand filled with an Army Colt. With a single flowing motion he cocked and aimed it at the sentry's forehead. Another glitter of lightning revealed the man's eyes under his hat brim. The sentry saw hell in them.

Terrified, the sentry retreated against the guard box. The crotch of his long underwear felt damp suddenly. He waved. "Pass on."

The horseman was already beyond him, at the gallop.

The rain beat on the roof. Jack Duncan poured brandy. Charles accepted his drink without a word. The brigadier didn't like that, or the surprise visitor's filthy appearance, or the haunted fatigue shadows ringing his eyes. Charles had stunned Duncan first by arriving at half past one in the morning, second by announcing that he wanted to join the Army.

"I thought you'd had enough."

"No." Charles flung his head back and swallowed all the brandy.

"Well, Charles Main can't enlist. Neither can Charles May, late of Jefferson Barracks."

"I'll use another name."

"Charles, calm down. You're almost raving. What brought this on?"

He slammed his empty glass on a packing box that served as a table. "Adolphus Jackson pulled me through one of the worst years of my life. He taught me more plains craft than I could quote to you in a week. I'm going to punish the bastards who butchered him."

Duncan's face, puffy with tiredness, showed his disapproval. He pulled his old dressing gown together and retied the sash, pacing past the sheet-iron stove, cold now. "I don't blame you for bearing a grudge for what the Cheyennes did. But I don't think it's an ideal motive for —"

"It's how I feel," Charles interrupted. "Just tell me if I have a chance."

His loud voice roused Maureen. From behind the door of her room she made a sleepy inquiry. With the gentleness of an attentive spouse, the brigadier said, "Go to sleep. Nothing's wrong." Charles stared at the closed door, reminded of Willa's staying here.

"A slim chance, no more," Duncan said in answer to his question. "Do you know the name Grierson?"

"I know Grierson's Sixth Illinois Cavalry. They rode six hundred miles in sixteen days inside the Confederacy to pull Pemberton away while Grant crossed the Mississippi below Vicksburg. That ride was worthy of Jeb Stuart or Wade Hampton: If it's the same Grierson, he was good enough to be on our side."

It pleased Duncan to see Charles show a trace of sardonic humor. "It's the same Grierson. He turned into a damn fine cavalryman for a small-town music teacher scared of horses."

"Scared of —?" Charles couldn't believe it.

"True. A pony kicked him when he was eight. He still bears the scar." Duncan touched his right cheek. "Grierson arrived day before yesterday, to await his recruits for his new regiment. It's one of those that Congress authorized in July. Grierson's desperate for good officers who can teach and lead, but nobody wants to serve in the Tenth Cavalry. The men are being recruited in New York, Philadelphia, Boston — the dregs of the urban poor. Mostly illiterate."

"The Army's full of illiterates''

"Not like these. Grierson's men will all be black."

That gave Charles pause. He helped himself to more brandy, thinking hard.

Duncan explained that a Ninth Cavalry Regiment was being raised in Phil Sheridan's Division of the Gulf; Sherman's division would get the Tenth. "Grierson told me the recruiters have been able to sign up only one private so far. The War Department insists on white officers, well qualified, but Union veterans who want a commission don't want one in the Tenth. You know George Custer?"

"I do. I went against him for a minute at Brandy Station. They say he's a glory-seeking peacock, but he surely won battles."

"Custer is anxious to get back into uniform but even so, he wouldn't touch a commission in the Ninth. He's typical. The soldiers on the Union side fought for the colored man, I suppose, but by and large they don't like him or want anything more to do with him. Grierson's an exception. Quite an idealist."

"What would it take for me to get into the Tenth?"

"More than just the desire. Wartime experience. Examination by a special review board. And you'd need a Presidential pardon. Not as Charles Main, either. Charles Main graduated from the Military Academy. But I wouldn't expect someone like you to be willing to command Negroes."

"If they're any good, why not? I know black people a hell of a lot better than most Yankees do."

"These will be Northern black men. They'll hear your accent first thing. They won't like it."

"I can deal with that"

"Think carefully before you say that. Go forward now and you're off the precipice. No changing your mind —"

"God damn it, I'll command men whose skins are blue if they can kill Indians. What are my chances?"

Duncan thought about it, staring through the flawed glass of his parlor window at the dismal rain. "About even. If Grierson would take you, he could help smooth your way with General Hancock at Division. So could I."

"Could I get a pardon?"

"If you lie about your rank as a scout for Hampton. Scale it down. Say you were an irregular. Are there records to dispute that?"

"Probably not. Most burned up in Richmond, they say."

"Then you should be all right. A pardon will require a different name, and the services of a broker. That'll cost five hundred dollars or so."

Charles uttered a defeated obscenity and sat back, his stark face lighted on one side by the guttering flame of a lamp almost out of oil.

"I'll put up the money," the brigadier said. "I know of a top pardon broker, too. Washington lawyer named Dills, He hand-carries applications to the Clerk of Pardons and the President." A pause. "I still have reservations, Charles. I know you're a fine soldier. But you're going back for the wrong reason."

"When can I see Grierson?"

"Tomorrow, I suppose." Duncan cleared his throat, then sniffed with unmistakable meaning. "After you bathe."

Far away, the storm rumbled. Charles smiled. It reminded Duncan of the grimace of a fleshless skull.

The Tenth Cavalry had temporary offices in one of the frame buildings housing Department of the Missouri headquarters, on the east side of the parade ground. A middle-aged captain hunched behind the desk with the wary air of a man defending a fortification. Over a wide down-curving mouth drooped a large pointed dragoon's mustache, mostly white.

"May I see him, Ike?"

"Think so, General Duncan." The captain knocked and stepped into the inner office.

Tilting his head toward the closed door, Duncan said to Charles, "Ike's been in the regulars twenty years. Tough bird. Down at Sabine Crossroads in '64, he helped clear a wagon train blocking the retreat road when Dick Taylor turned back Nate Banks. He was decorated. Couple of months later he was riding for A. J. Smith when old Smitty repulsed Forrest at Tupelo. That action earned him a field commission."

The captain returned, leaving the door open. The brigadier said, "This is my son-in-law, Charles." They'd already decided he should keep that part of his name. "Captain Isaac Newton Barnes. Regimental adjutant."

"Acting adjutant," Barnes said in a pointed way.

While Duncan went in and shut the door, Charles said, "Pleasure, sir." It paid to be respectful to an adjutant; he usually exercised more power than the Commanding officer.

Ike Barnes scowled at the litter of orders, files and reports on his desk. In profile he resembled an S — round shoulders, concave lower back, sizable paunch. His right eye cocked slightly.

"I hate this job," he said, sitting. "I'm a horse soldier, not a damn clerk. I'll get C Company as soon as the colonel finds somebody else stupid enough to get stuck shuffling all these damn papers."'

A breathless sergeant dashed in. "Captain! Two colored boys on the steamboat landing. They're yours."

"Damn it to hell, Sergeant, you know better than to say colored within a mile of this office. The colonel will not tolerate his regiment being designated the way they were in the war. This is not the Tenth Colored Cavalry, it's the Tenth Cavalry. Excuse me," he snapped at Charles as he followed the noncom out. His formidable paunch seemed to advance separately, like some kind of honor guard. Charles actually managed a smile.

In ten minutes Duncan came out. "He's interested. This time tell the truth, and see if you can work things out." He punched Charles's shoulder. "Luck."

Duncan marched toward the outer door and Charles moved to the inner one. As he passed through, Duncan's image of a man stepping off a precipice flashed through his head.

Colonel Benjamin F. Grierson's huge beard and bold nose lent him a piratical air, enhanced by the facial scar. After inviting Charles to sit, he placed a fresh sheet of paper on his desk near a small gold case holding an ambrotype in an oval matte. Charles presumed the woman to be Grierson's wife.

"I'll be straightforward, Mr. Main. Your interest in the Tenth raises more than one problem. Before we go into them, I'd like to know why you're here. Jack told you that scores of capable officers in this army detest the idea of Negro regiments."

"He did, sir. I'm here because I'm a soldier, and that's all I am. The Southern Cheyennes killed my partner and his nephew a couple of months ago —"

"So Jack said. I'm sorry."

"Thank you. I want to make up for what the Cheyennes did —"

"Not in my regiment, sir," Grierson said, with a touch of ire. "The Tenth won't formulate policy, just carry it out. Our mission from General Sherman is to bolster the military presence on the Plains. It is defensive only. We're to protect the settlers, the travel routes, the railroad construction crews. We are not to attack unless attacked first."

"Sir, I'm sorry if I said —"

"Hear me out, sir. Before we can, carry out our mission, we must teach city men to march, ride, shoot, and behave in a military manner. I'm talking about unlettered men, Mr. Main — porters, waiters, teamsters. Black men who've never before had a chance at a decent career. I fully intend to turn such men into superior soldiers that any commander would be proud to lead. I will do it the way I taught the scales to my beginning music pupils in Illinois. With rigid discipline and constant and relentless drill. That will be the responsibility of my officers. They will have no time for personal vendettas."

"I apologize for my remark, sir. I understand what you're saying."

"Good," Grierson said. "Otherwise I'd not waste time on you." Eyeing Charles in a speculative way, he added, "No, that's dishonest. I am not interviewing you completely by choice, but rather, because of the dire need I already mentioned. I confess, however, to being somewhat reluctant to recruit a Southerner."

Despite a spurt of resentment, Charles kept still.

"You see, Mr. Main, I have a peculiar vision of this country. Peculiar in that it is apparently not shared by the thousands of brevet colonels and generals chasing after a very few low-rank line commissions. I believe in the exact words of Mr. Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal, if not in mind and body and circumstance, then most assuredly in opportunity. I believe we fought the war, whether we realize it or not, in order to extend that vision to the black race. I do know it isn't a popular idea. Many of my fellow officers accuse me of — their words — niggering them to death. So be it. I believe the vision must prevail first of all in this new regiment. If the regiment won't work, then the Army doesn't work, America doesn't work, nothing works. So my officers must cheerfully bear the extra burden of standing between their men and the extreme hostility and prejudice rampant in the Army."

His stare was unwavering, "You're from South Carolina. I don't care about that unless it means you can't live by my rules. If you can't, I don't want you."

Tense now, fearing rejection, Charles said, "I can, sir."

"You can deal honestly, squarely, with Negro soldiers?"

"I got along well with blacks on the plantation where I was raised."

The wrong tack again. Grierson waved with bitter scorn. "Bondsmen, Mr. Main. Slaves. Immaterial here."

Charles's voice hardened a little. "Let me put it another way, sir. No, I won't get along with every last man." Grierson started to retort, but Charles kept on. "I didn't get along with all of the white men in the Wade Hampton Legion or the Second Cavalry in Texas. Every outfit has its share of idiots and berry-pickers. I always warned that kind of man once, but only once. If he kept on, I locked him up. If he still kept on, I got him discharged. I'd behave the same way in the Tenth." He locked his gaze with Grierson's. "Like a professional."

Silence. Grierson stared. Suddenly, between the bushy mustache and luxuriant beard, he flashed a smile.

"A good answer. A soldier's answer. I accept it. Men of the Tenth will be judged on merit, nothing else."

"Yes, sir," Charles said, though his prompt answer made him a little uneasy. He was quick to speak because he wanted to join a regiment, any regiment, and this one was desperate for officers. But he had reservations about the ability of city blacks to become good soldiers — exactly the same reservations he'd had about the white flotsam he'd found at Jefferson Barracks. The bias probably came from his West Point training, but there it was.

Grierson leaned forward. "Mr. Main, I detest liars and cheats and am about to qualify myself as both. You will be required to do the same when the special review board examines you. At least one member, Captain Krug, will bore in hard. He hates every man who wore Confederate gray. His younger brother perished in Andersonville prison."

Charles nodded, filing the name away.

"Now. Particulars." Grierson inked his pen. "You've applied for pardon?"

"The letter will be written today."

"I know about your experience at Jefferson Barracks. What name shall we try this time?"

"I thought it should be something familiar again, so I could answer to it naturally. Charles August. The name August has some family connections."

"August. Good." The pen scratched. "What was your highest rank in Hampton's scouts?"

"Major."

Grierson wrote, None — irregular status (scout).

"It's best that we forget you ever saw West Point. How many Academy men would recognize you now, do you think?"

"Any of them who were there when I was, I suppose. That's how I was discovered at Jefferson Barracks."

"Who identified you?"

"A Captain Venable."

"Harry Venable? I know him. Excellent cavalryman but a pompous little monster. Well, in regard to former classmates you might encounter, we'll just have to chance it. Next point. My officers are supposed to have two years of field experience."

"I do. With the Second Cavalry in Texas."

Dryly, Grierson said, "That was before you changed sides. Let's forget about Texas. The subject might lead someone back to the Academy." Charles watched the scratchy pen move. Prey, exp. — 4 yrs. vols.

They talked for another hour. At the end Grierson knew a lot about Charles's personal life. He knew about Orry, the surrogate father; about Charles's trouble with Elkanah Bent; about the horrifying impact of Sharpsburg, the loss of Augusta Barclay, the frantic search for their son. Finally, Grierson put his notes away and shook Charles's hand. It struck Charles as more ceremonial than friendly. The colonel was still reserving judgment.

"My adjutant will tell you how to prepare for the written test. You should have no trouble with it. The review board is another matter." Grierson walked him to the door, smoothing his beard. "Do something about your appearance. It works against you. Either trim the beard or get rid of it."

"Yes, sir." He stressed the second word, the old West Point way, then snapped his right hand outward in his best cadet salute. Grierson returned it and dismissed him.

After the door closed, Grierson went back to the desk. He gazed at the ambrotype for a moment or so, then started a letter.

In front of the pocket mirror Duncan loaned him, Charles gazed at his soaped face. He hadn't shaved in months. The dangerous edge he'd honed on Duncan's razor pulled and tore when he attacked his beard.

He thought of Grierson's warning about the review board as he pulled the razor down with reckless haste. The edge bit through his beard to rasp the skin. As he stroked, sections of his beard fell around the basin. A new, almost unfamiliar face appeared. More lines. More of time's markings.

"Ahh!" He grabbed a towel and pressed it to his bleeding jaw. When the gash clotted a little, he flung the towel down and attacked the other side of his face. Thinking of Wooden Foot, Boy, Fen, he cut himself deeply a second time, but scarcely felt it.

25

Brigadier Duncan telegraphed the pardon request to the attorney, Dills, and transferred funds to a Washington bank. He dispatched a carefully worded letter to General Sherman at Division, stressing Grierson's need for qualified officers and the outstanding ability of one Charles August. Charles wondered how Sherman would react if he knew "August" was the unkempt trader he'd met on the prairie.

Charles took a room in Leavenworth City but returned to the post every day, trying to get reacquainted with little Gus. The boy would be two in December. He was walking, talking in rudimentary sentences, and still had a certain reserve in the presence of the tall, gaunt man who took him for walks and called himself Pa.

Maureen usually went along on the walks. She continued to disapprove of Charles as a parent — he was, among other things, merely a man — but since his return, he had shown her a new and unpleasant side of his personality. He showed it again as the three of them came back from a stroll along the river one sparkling afternoon. Hand in hand, Charles and little Gus were marching like soldiers. The boy loved the reviews and evening retreats at Leavenworth, and he liked to imitate them. Charles obliged. The two of them moved briskly down the path ahead of Duncan's housekeeper.

A certain number of Indian men always congregated at frontier posts. These hang-around-the-forts subsisted on handouts and menial work. They spent their money for whiskey and let the whites bestow contemptuous names on them, like Sausage Nose, Lazy Man, Fat Woman.

Fat Woman, an obese Sioux in filthy old uniform pants and blouse, appeared on the path, coming toward Charles and his son. Fat Woman stopped, blinked, and reached out to tickle the chin of the smiling boy. Charles whipped up his fist and knocked him down.

Fat Woman yelped and crawled away. Gus hung on to his father's hand, but gave him a wary, scared look. Maureen couldn't keep silent. "That poor defenseless man meant no harm, Mr. Main."

"I don't want red scum like that touching my boy."

"Fa, Fa —" Gus tugged his hand. "March."

"No." Charles yanked his hand away, then seized Gus's shoulder, forcing him along the path. "No more marching."

Later, when Charles had ridden back to Leavenworth, the housekeeper confided to Duncan as he sat soaking in his zinc bathtub. "His moods are as changeable as the weather. Some kind of demon's in him."

"He went through a hideous ordeal. Would you scrub a little lower, my dear? Ah, yes —"

"I realize he did, General." Even in bed she addressed him formally. "But if he doesn't get over it his son will despise him. Augustus is nearly terrified of him now."

"I've noticed." Duncan sighed. "I don't know what to do."

The room at Department headquarters looked west over the parade ground. Charles's table faced the undraped windows. No accident, he decided. Nor was the hour. Half past five by the loudly ticking wall clock. Blinding light streamed into his eyes, making it almost impossible to see the five men facing him at their table in front of the windows.

General Winfield Scott Hancock, U.S.M.A. 1844 and commander of the Department of the Missouri, chaired the examining board. Tall, handsome, composed, he'd greeted Charles cordially at the door and wished him well. How strange, Charles thought, to shake hands with a man who probably had shaken hands with Cousin Orry.

On Hancock's left sat General William Hoffman, commander of the Third Infantry, and of Fort Leavenworth as well. Duncan had said Hoffman loathed the idea of Negro regiments.

To the left of Hoffman sat the officer Charles feared: Captain Waldo Krug, slight, severe-looking, and bald, although he was not much older than Charles. Attached to Hoffman's staff, Krug wore the silver star of a brevet brigadier and was addressed as general. He watched Charles with unconcealed hostility.

To Hancock's right, Captain I. N. Barnes, and, completing the panel, a major named Coulter, a schoolmasterish man wearing oval spectacles. Directly to the left of Charles, a row of chairs was set up for spectators. Only Duncan and Grierson had chosen to attend.

Hancock's glance to the right and left signaled for quiet. "Gentlemen, this is the application hearing of officer candidate Charles August, who has successfully passed the written examination. With nearly perfect marks, I might add."

Krug immediately said, "General Hancock, I move to adjourn the hearing. The candidate is unfit by reason of previous service with the Confederacy."

Grumpily, Hoffman said, "Second that." He was U.S.M.A. 1829 — Lee's class — an old campaigner from the Seminole and Mexican wars.

Hancock set the motion aside, saying that the candidate had shown good faith by signing the oath and applying for a pardon, as General Lee had. That made Krug explode.

"Robert Lee will never be pardoned, no matter how many times he applies. That's fitting for any man who betrayed his country, and I include the candidate."

The scholarly Coulter pushed his glasses down his nose. "I had the impression that hostilities stopped over a year ago, and we were all Americans again. I think we should put the war behind us and —"

"No, sir, I will not put my brother's death by starvation behind me for one moment," Krug said.

Hancock rapped the table to restore order. "Warden Wirz paid for his war crimes on the gallows. He was, and probably will be, the only Confederate officer so punished."

"I'd hang a lot more of them," Krug said, with his eye on Charles.

"Captain," Hancock said, "you will have to desist or disqualify yourself. This hearing will go forward on the basis of the candidate's qualifications."

Krug muttered something unintelligible. Hancock cleared his throat and opened Charles's file. Although it was autumn, the light beating in Charles's eyes felt fiery. He was as nervous as he'd ever been on the eve of battle; certain he'd trip up somehow.

He forced himself to think of Wooden Foot, glittering beads heaped on his eyes. His pulse slowed a little. He sat up straight, straining until his back ached.

"State your name," Hancock said.

"Charles August."

"I have before me the statement of Colonel Grierson which says you served four years with the army of the Confederacy. Please state your unit and rank."

"Scout corps, Wade Hampton Legion. That was later absorbed into larger cavalry divisions during several army reorganizations. But the scouts remained irregulars, without rank." The lie came out smoothly.

"Are there records to prove that?" Barnes asked.

"Yes, I presume, in Richmond."

"Oh, for God's sake," Krug said. "Richmond! Everybody knows the rebs didn't leave a single piece of paper in Richmond. They burned everything. We don't even know how many traitors mustered under their colors, and we never will."

Sharply, Hancock said, "Captain."

"I'm sorry, sir. I am against this. Completely and utterly against it."

Hoffman raised his hand and Hancock gave him leave to speak. Bitingly, Hoffman said to the panel, "If we can't examine the gentleman's records, he will have to supply information. I would like to know his political affiliation."

Charles was unprepared. Grierson and Duncan watched him anxiously. "Why — Democrat, sir."

"Democrat." Hoffman smiled. "Of course. Every unregenerate rebel calls himself a Democrat. Every man who murdered Union prisoners calls himself a Democrat. Every traitor who mixed dangerous compounds to blow up Northern cities or invented hellish schemes to introduce yellow fever to those cities is now merely a Democrat."

Amused, Coulter said, "The general is quite familiar with the campaign oratory of Governor Morton of Indiana, I see. But that election speech you just quoted was meant for civilians, sir. Does it really have a bearing on these proceedings?"

Caught in his plagiarism, Hoffman fumed. Hancock said, "No. I, for one, think that Mr. August is being quite forthcoming. We know there are already hundreds of former Confederates in the United States Army under assumed names." Duncan's start made his wooden chair squeak. Grierson grew interested in the ceiling. "I want to ask the candidate about any military experience prior to the war. I see nothing in the file."

Charles's throat tightened. Was sweat showing on his forehead? Did the sun on his face reveal deceit? Colonel Grierson shifted his scrutiny to the brightly polished toe of his boot. Hancock frowned.

"Mr. August, our time's valuable. Answer promptly, please. What about service prior to the war?"

Charles weighed two murders against another lie and said, "None, sir."

It continued for a half hour, interrupted by an occasional angry objection from Krug or a question from Hoffman that quickly turned to Republican cant. Charles was limp, tired, perspiring heavily when Hancock excused him. He and Duncan and Grierson went out and shut the door.

"They'll approve you," Grierson predicted.

"No, they won't. I botched it."

"To the contrary. You did well. But I must say something that I've already said to Jack. If you're ever found out, I won't be able to help you. I won't compromise the regiment. It comes first. In every other circumstance you can count on me to go to the wall for you."

"Thank you, Colonel. I don't think it'll be necessary for you to worry about —"

The door to the hearing room opened. Ike Barnes, the junior man, stepped out.

"Three to two in favor of commissioning. It's conditional on War Department approval and a pardon." Beaming, Barnes stuck out his hand. "Welcome to the Tenth, Mr. August."

Charles crossed the Missouri on the ferry and rode to St. Louis in leisurely stages, savoring the tangy air and the crimson and gold of the leaves. The calendar kept Willa from making the reunion a physical one, but they slept warm in each other's arms in her bed at the New Planter's House.

When morning came, they kissed and murmured words of affection. Before he dressed, he lathered his face to shave away yesterday's stubble. He whistled while he plied the razor.

"That's very pretty," Willa called from her dressing table. "What is it?"

"This?" He whistled five notes. "Just something that came into my head last year. Whenever I think of Mont Royal, of everything that I loved before the war, I hear that tune."

"There's a piano at the theater. Would you hum it when we're there, so I can write it down for you?"

"Why, yes, of course."

And she did.

"That's my tune?" he asked, staring at the notes, which made no sense to him. She nodded. "Well, if you say so. It'll be a keepsake." He folded the paper carefully. "Maybe I can stop thinking about the past. I've found something better to take its place."

He leaned over and kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes and held his arm.

While she attended to theater business for a couple of hours, he strolled through the bustling streets. Today he wasn't at all troubled by the risk in the strengthening attachment; he was too full of excitement about the commission — an excitement Willa shared until they walked along the levee later, and he told her the reason he'd rejoined the Army. Although he spared her the obscene details, he described the demise of the Jackson Trading Company, and the hatred it had generated.

Willa had a strong reaction. But she kept it to herself, putting her feelings for him above her conscience. She'd never done that before, at least not so far as she could remember.

In her rooms that night, she showed him what she called her prize. It was the large framed photograph of the two of them taken the year before, Willa on the velvet settee with her head in the invisible clamp, Charles with his hand on her shoulder. Amused, he said they looked like figures in a waxworks. She swatted him and said she would retaliate for that by forcing a copy of the picture on him. He said he'd be glad to have it, and halfway meant it.

Over breakfast he learned something else about her. Her birthday was December 25. "Easy to memorize but hard to get anyone to celebrate with so much going on. I'm a horrid cook, but I can do a simple cake and icing. Most years, I even have to buy my own candles." He laughed.

Charles stayed in St. Louis for three more days. He attended a performance each evening. Then Brigadier Duncan summoned him back with a telegraph message. The pardon had been granted.

Willa cried when they said goodbye. She promised that she and Sam would be touring soon, and she'd find him. And love him properly, as she couldn't this time. He was in good spirits as he rode away.

A light drizzle started as Willa walked from the hotel to the theater. She was so preoccupied with Charles, she almost forgot to open her umbrella.

She knew so much about him, yet still knew so little. She sensed a coiled anger within him, an emotion quite different from last year's war-induced malaise. He had an enemy now. That was why she hadn't told him about taking the initiative and starting a local unit of the Indian Friendship Society.

There were six members. A Quaker couple, a Unitarian preacher, an elderly headmistress of a private school patronized by the children of wealthy German merchants, the theater's aging juvenile, Tim Trueblood, and herself. Charles wouldn't have liked to hear about the memorials they had already sent to Congress and the Interior Department.

She reached the theater and found the stage deserted, though she heard Sam's voice somewhere. She closed her umbrella and laid it on the prompter's table. The stage manager shot from behind a flat.

"Not there, not there! If he sees it, he'll go wild."

"That's right, I forgot. No umbrellas on the prompt table. I can't remember all the superstitions. What's he doing?"

"He's behaving a bit strangely. He's been bustling about with Prosperity's feeding dish, and now he's rehearsing in the green room."

"He does insist on doing Hamlet." She and the stage manager exchanged tolerant smiles, and she followed the sound of Trump's resonant voice as it proclaimed Yorick's infinite jest and excellent fancy. She almost stumbled on a crockery bowl of milk. She saw Prosperity curled up nearby, uninterested. She frowned. The bowl smelled peculiar. She picked it up and sniffed it again.

She marched the bowl to the green room, interrupting Sam's rehearsal in front of a long mirror. Despite the lacing of his corset, his black tights couldn't hide his corpulence. He looked silly in that costume, and more so with a wilted yellow chrysanthemum pinned to the front.

"Dear girl —" he began, one thumb hooked in the eye socket of a prop skull. He lost color when Willa extended the bowl at arm's length.

"I'll feed the cat from now on, Sam. You must have mixed up the bowls. She won't touch this one!" Willa passed it under her nose with a stagy sniff. "Cats don't like sour mash whiskey."

Trump almost fell in his haste to get the bowl. "It's nothing. A mere nip to brace me up today."

"And every day for a week. I've wondered why you were so excessively cheerful in the morning." She put the bowl on the table, saying sweetly, "Don't touch it."

Trump beat his breast with an aggrieved air. "Yes, my dear." He studied her from under his eyebrows, laid the skull aside, and put a fatherly arm around her. "You look unhappy. Am I the cause?"

"Not really."

"Charles has left, then."

"It's more than his leaving, Sam. He's managed a commission in the Army again."

"The Army's the right place for him. It's what he knows."

"It's the right place for the wrong reason." In a few sentences she described what had happened to Wooden Foot and Boy. By the end, Trump was pale. "He wants retribution. When he talks of it there's a blazing fury in him."

Cautiously, Trump said, "Is it the end for you two, then?"

"Oh, no." A rueful shrug. "It should be, but it's too late. I love him. I know it may bring me grief, and I can't do a thing about it. Mr. Congreve was right about love being a frailty of the mind."

She tried to smile and instead burst out crying. Sam Trump put his arms around her and tugged her in, gently patting her back with both hands while the sobs shook her.

26

Lieutenant August? Come quick."

Charles shot up from the desk. "Someone hurt?"

"Nosir," puffed the recruit. "They taken' down those tents you told us to put up an hour ago. They was ordered to take 'em down."

"What stupid noncom—?"

"It's some general. Krig?"

"Krug. Damn." He grabbed his hat. What a way to start his third day in uniform.

"With all due respect, Captain, what's going on here?"

Krug's gray eyes spiked him. "You'll address me as general."

In a weedy field a half mile outside the main gate, five black recruits, none in uniform yet, struggled to dismantle two A-frames. Tangled canvas hid the fallen poles. Red-faced, Charles pointed at the men. "Why are they striking those tents?"

The raw autumn wind snapped the elbow-length cape of Krug's overcoat. "Because I ordered it. They're to move to the ground immediately west of the steam pump."

"That field is full of standing water."

Krug jutted his jaw. "Change your tone, mister, or I'll have you up on charges. Three quarters of the men on this post would like to see you gone."

Including most of my own, Charles thought. The five recruits watched him as though he were old Salem Jones, Mont Royal's overseer before the war. Through gritted teeth he said, "The barracks assigned us — General — is infested with rats, bats, roaches — it's a damn zoo. While we fumigate it, these men need temporary quarters. Why must they move?"

"Because, August, General Hoffman rode past this morning. He doesn't like to look at nigger soldiers. He wants them out of sight when he travels to and from Leavenworth City. Is that clear enough?"

Charles recalled Grierson's warning about Army bigotry. "Sir, if you insist on this, we'll have to put down lumber to floor the tents. Build walkways —"

"No lumber. They sleep on the ground. They're soldiers, or so we've been led to believe."

"Why the hell are you so angry at me, Krug?"

"Two reasons, mister. One, I still consider you a traitor. Two, the North fought for preservation of the Union, not the glorification of darkies. General Hoffman shares that view. Now move those men."

Krug marched to his horse, mounted, and headed for the gate.

Charles approached the recruits. Slate-colored clouds filled the sky. Dead weeds rattled in the wind, and canvas flapped and snapped. The five black men stared at him with expressions ranging from stoic to sullen.

"Men, I'm sorry. Guess you'll have to move for the time being. I'll try to commandeer some lumber somewhere."

A large walnut-hued man stepped forward. Potiphar Williams, formerly a cook in a Pittsburgh hotel. He could read and write; he'd learned as an adult, in order to understand recipes and prepare menus. Charles had marked him as promising.

Williams said, "We'll hunt the wood. Sir."

"It's my responsibility to —"

"We don't need favors from a white man who rode for the rebs."

Rigid, Charles said, "You get this straight. I didn't go to war to preserve slavery, or the Confederacy, either. I went to fight for my home in South Carolina."

"Oh, yes, sir," Williams said. "My brother and his kin in North Carolina, the only home they had to fight for was the slave cabins they lived in." He turned his back. "All right, boys. Let's pick up and go where the white man tells us."

Ike Barnes, already miserable and in bad temper because of a case of piles, turned the air blue when Charles reported the incident. Grierson went to Hoffman. The general refused to rescind the order. Two of the recruits caught pneumonia from camping on the wet ground. They were sent to the post hospital, causing three white patients to walk out in protest.

The next week, a gaudy troupe of travelers appeared, bound for Fort Riley. The troupe consisted of two white women, a former slave who did the cooking, a little black jockey from Texas, four horses, including a pacer and a racing mare, and dogs: a greyhound, a white pit bull, several hunters.

"Is this a circus or the Army?" Barnes grumbled. "Whatever it is, it's a damn disgrace."

"Agreed," Grierson said. "But you notice we're here, aren't we?"

The two of them and Charles, along with two dozen more of the curious, had gathered to see the elegant young soldier who headed the troupe. As George Custer supervised the loading of his colt Phil Sheridan into a special rail car on the post spur, he shouted boisterously and cracked jokes, playing to the crowd.

Charles remembered Custer vividly from the war. He was still dandified: flowing hair, walrus mustache, bright red scarf, gold spurs. Charles said to Barnes, "I rode against him at Brandy Station. I know he fights to win, but he's too reckless to suit me. I'm thankful I'll never have to serve with him."

The fall produced a smashing Republican victory in the national and state elections. Johnson's catastrophic "Swing Around the Circle" had worked against him and for the Radicals. When Congress eventually convened, the course of Reconstruction would be in Republican hands more surely than ever.

At Fort Leavenworth, meanwhile, in spite of trouble with white men because of their prejudice, and trouble with black men because of his background, Charles again began to savor Army life. He liked the measuring of the days by bugle and trumpet, drum and fife. It had been part of his bone and blood since West Point. In his monastic cubicle in bachelor officers' quarters, some internal clock wakened him every morning at 4:30, fifteen minutes before trumpeters' assembly.

Reveille, guard mount, call for first sergeant's report, mess, fatigue, evening retreat with a formal parade in good weather — he relished every call. His favorite was 4:30 p.m. stable call. At that hour he supervised the new soldiers, many of whom found horses frightening. While trying to correct that and familiarize the men with horse furniture, Charles sneaked in some pleasurable minutes looking after Satan.

Then came some of the day's sweetest music: the gongs and triangles announcing evening mess. The music usually surpassed the fare: hash or slumgullion, baked beans or contractor's beef of dubious color and odor.

Each company of the Tenth was supposed to contain ninety-nine men. But recruits arrived so slowly, Charles wondered if Grierson would ever have a full-strength regiment. The reputation of the Tenth wasn't helped when one recruit ran off, and word reached Leavenworth about trouble in the all-black Ninth Cavalry down in San Antonio. Recruits in the Ninth had clashed with local police and started a riot. Many of them went to jail. "Fine," Grierson snorted when he heard the news. "Just what Hoffman needs to confirm his opinions."

Charles freely admitted responsibility for the desertion. The surly recruit had mistreated one of the horses. Charles had stopped it and assigned extra fatigue duty. "Sure, you would take the side of a nag over a nigger, you piece of Southern shit," the recruit said, and punched him.

Charles had to be pulled off the black man; they said later he was on his way to killing the recruit with his fists. Two nights later the recruit ran away. He was recognized over in City of Kansas, captured and quickly processed with a bobtail discharge. When a man got a bobtail, the section of the discharge dealing with character was shipped off. It was a lifetime mark of dishonor.

C Company was formed. Ike Barnes was the commander, and Floyd Hook, a boyish innocent, the first lieutenant. Charles took the third spot. Sometimes Barnes allowed Floyd or Charles to welcome a new man. Charles developed a little speech that was not entirely facetious.

"Welcome to your new home, sometimes called the government workhouse. In addition to learning to be an outstanding cavalryman, you can look forward to carrying bricks, painting walls, and cutting timber. It's called fatigue duty. Sometimes it's called being a brevet architect."

The black recruits never smiled. It wasn't just the word brevet that threw them, Charles knew. It was his accent.

Patiently, he showed each greenhorn how to roll a pair of socks and stuff it inside his shirt to save bad shoulder bruises at rifle practice. He watched over first attempts to saddle and mount horses. As soon as the recruits didn't fall off, he started revolver and rifle drill, yelling at the men to take their time, hold their pieces steady as they banged away at piles of hardtack boxes, first with their mounts walking, then trotting, then galloping.

"Steady — steady," he would shout. "The odds are that you'll never see combat more than once in your Army career. But on that day, you could live or die by this drill."

The officers became surrogate parents, protecting the newest as best they could from hazing by the old hands — an old hand being someone who had arrived the week before. One new youngster broke down and wept.

"They tol’ me, go get your butter allowance from the mess. Cook'll try to keep it and spend it himself, they said. So watch out. I went to him and said, give me that butter money an' no damn argument." He beat his thighs. "They ain't any butter allowance."

"No. It's an old trick. Look, every new man's hazed. You got through it. You'll be fine."

"But now the others, they call me Butter Head."

"When you get a nickname, it shows they like you."

The recruit wiped his eyes. "That the truth?"

Charles smiled. "The truth." Members of the small officer group in the Tenth were known as Iron Ass and Friendly Floyd.

"What's your nickname, Cap'n?"

The smile grew stiff. "It's lieutenant. I don't have one."

A benefit of duty with the Tenth was, the chance to see little Gus often. Charles managed to visit him almost every day for a few minutes. The boy was warming to his father, no longer so intimidated by him, because Charles's demeanor was softening.

Christmas drew near. For gifts, Charles refused to buy any of the handiwork of the hang-around-the-forts, though the quilled and beaded articles were attractive and cheap. Instead, he shopped in Leavenworth City. He bought a set of brushes for Duncan, perfume for Maureen and Willa, a wooden horse — brightly enameled head and stick with a satin rope rein — for his son. The season brought hops, which he didn't attend, a small candlelit fir tree in Duncan's parlor, and caroling by officers and wives in the cold and starry prairie night.

Then, four days before Christmas — December 21,1866 — the Army got a present it didn't want.

Fort Phil Kearny guarded the Bozeman Trail, which led to the Montana gold fields. The fort's mere existence was provocation to the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes who claimed the land around it. War chiefs with names well known on the Plains — Red Cloud of the Sioux; Roman Nose of the Cheyennes — descended on Kearny with two thousand braves.

Bravado overcoming good sense, one William Fetterman, a captain, said he could smash through the attackers with eighty men. He claimed he could smash through the entire Sioux nation. So he took his men to guard some wagons bringing wood back to the fort, and for Christmas the Army got the Fetterman Massacre. Not one of the eighty survived.

Something unrelenting within Charles took satisfaction from the bad news. Given the massacre, and the resulting outcries for retribution, he believed the Army might move against the Southern tribes. When it did, he'd be there.

For Christmas Willa sent him a small cased ambrotype — their photograph — and a gold-stamped, leatherbound edition of Macbeth with a romantic inscription about the bad-luck play becoming her good luck, because it had brought them together. Accompanying the gifts was a letter full of endearments.

It went on for several paragraphs, pleasing and warming him despite his unaltered concern about entanglement. He had reason for that wariness, he was soon reminded.

At that point, he tossed the letter into Duncan's sheet-iron stove, without reading the rest.

On Christmas Day he realized he had forgotten Willa's twenty-first birthday.

27

To remedy his blunder, Charles turned to Ike Barnes's wife, Lovetta, a tiny woman who could make her voice loud as a steam whistle if necessary. Lovetta took some of Charles's pay and promised to find something a young woman would like. Two days later she brought him an Indian pouch with a shoulder thong and an intricately beaded flap. The sight of it angered him. But he thanked her and dispatched the gift to St. Louis with a note of apology.

Soon after New Year's everyone at Leavenworth began talking about General Hancock's taking the field in the spring to demonstrate in force against the Indians, perhaps even punish those responsible for the Fetterman Massacre. Grierson, meanwhile, despaired of getting his regiment to operational strength. So far the Tenth had but eighty men.

Almost all of them had to enroll in Chaplain Grimes's special classes, to learn the three R's. The low level of recruit literacy put extra burdens on the officers. They handled all the paper­work that would normally be picked up by noncoms.

Still, Charles grudgingly admitted that whatever the city boys lacked in education, they more than made up for with their enthusiasm and diligence. With few exceptions, they behaved well. Insubordination, drunkenness and petty thievery, while not altogether absent, occurred with much less frequency than among white soldiers. Charles guessed motivation had a lot to do with it. The men wanted to succeed; they'd picked the Army, not fled to it.

Motivation and performance failed to impress General Hoffman or his staff. Hoffman ordered surprise inspections of the Tenth's barracks, then cited the soldiers for dirt on the floor and stains on the walls. Dirt blew in because doors and windows didn't fit. Leaky roofs caused the stains. Hoffman ignored explanations and refused requests for repair materials.

The commandant's campaign against what he called "nigger dregs" was relentless. If one of Grierson's officers tried to give a literate recruit some responsibility, the man's reports or memoranda came back from headquarters marked Sloppy or Incorrect. By Hoffman's order, the Tenth had to stand at least fifteen yards from white units during inspection formations. When the weather was mild enough for an evening parade, Hoffman required the Tenth to remain at parade rest; they couldn't march with the white troops, because Hoffman refused to review them.

Horses given to the Tenth were blown-out wrecks from the war, some of them twelve years old. When Grierson protested, Hoffman shrugged. "The Army's on a tight budget, Colonel. We are required to use the arms, ammunition, and mounts already on hand. I'd say those plugs are good enough for niggers."

"General, I respectfully request that my men not be called —"

"As you were, sir. Your men wouldn't even be here if the damned Congress wasn't coddling the coons. I don't have to coddle anyone. Dismissed."

To his officers at mess Grierson said, "We have to pull this regiment together and get off this post. If we don't, something dire will happen. I am not a violent man. I am not a profane man. But if we stay much longer, Hoffman's dead. I will kill that bigoted prick personally."

Charles laughed and joined the applause.

Grierson added, "If Alice knew about Hoffman's effect on my character and vocabulary, she'd divorce me."

Barnes — or the old man as he was commonly called — often lectured C Company on practical matters not taught in official Army texts.

"Men," he said one day, striding down the ranks, preceded by his stomach, "you joined up to be proud of your uniform. That's fine as long as we hang around the fort." His eyes flicked across the earnest, attentive faces, tan and amber, mahogany and ebony. "However, I want each of you to get a new outfit for the field. I don't care what it looks like so long as it's warm, fairly loose, and can be peeled off a piece at a time if the sun's broiling you. For the kind of fighting we may do, you don't want to be weighed down with extra gear or heavy duds. So put together a new uniform — shirt, pants, coat, hat. Buy it. Trade for it. If you steal it, don't get caught."

He gave each side of his mustache a short, neat stroke with his index finger to put a period after the whole business, but added: "The less gov'ment blue I see in this outfit, the happier I'll be."

Sometimes when Charles had a spare hour, he rode to Leavenworth City. The Prairie Dog Saloon on Main Street served forty-rod that was much better than the watery stuff in the officers' bar at the sutler's.

Heading for town one sunny Saturday, he heard gunfire. He soon came upon an expensively dressed civilian who'd picketed his horse by the road and stepped away to a safe distance for some target practice. Charles reined in and watched as the stranger blew down a row of twelve bottles with continual fire from a pair of .44-caliber double-action Colts.

As echoes of the shots reverberated, Charles called, "That's fine shooting."

The marksman ambled over. He was about Charles's age and had long hair and a mustache resembling Custer's. A jutting upper lip somewhat marred his appearance. He wore a fawn claw-hammer coat, green silk waistcoat, and costly tooled boots.

"Thanks," he said. "Do I note a trace of the South in your speech, sir?"

The question had an edge. Charles said, "The border."

"Ah, a Union loyalist. Good. I'm from Troy Grove, Illinois. La Salle County. Abolitionist territory." He offered his hand and Charles leaned down to shake it. "Right now I'm earning the handsome sum of sixty a month riding dispatch for the Army. I'm hoping to sign on to scout for General Hancock this spring."

"You practice a lot, do you?"

"Three, four hours a day. There's no magic to killing somebody who's out to kill you first. It's mostly accuracy, plus a few tricks. Always go for the head, never the chest. A man with a fatal wound in the chest can keep firing long enough to finish you."

"I'll remember. Well, keep it up, Mr. —"

"Jim," the stranger said. "Just Jim."

At the Prairie Dog, Charles mentioned the dandified stranger. The barkeep paled. "Oh, God. You didn't insult him, did you? No, I guess not. You wouldn't be here." "What do you mean? He seemed a polite sort —" "Call him Duck Bill and see how polite he is. One man called him that and he blew him down. That shootist is J. B. Hickok."

Charles knew the name. Everybody knew the name of the feared killer. "He said he's riding dispatch for the Army." "Yeh, him and some braggy kid named Will Cody." Charles let out a low whistle. He had exchanged pleasantries with one of the most dangerous men on the frontier. He was almost as surprised by the mention of Cody. Just as Dutch Henry Griffenstein had predicted, the young Kansan's Golden Rule House hadn't lasted.

In the wet, misty dark, Charles ran toward clustered lanterns, the tail of his nightshirt flapping out of his trousers. Hair in his face, sleep in his eyes, fear drying his mouth, he loped east from the arsenal storehouse to the group of provost's men.

One had pounded on his door to wake him. No one could locate Grierson. The new adjutant, a recommissioned officer named Woodward, wasn't scheduled to arrive till next week. Ike Barnes and Lovetta were taking a short holiday in St. Louis arid Floyd Hook was down with winter influenza.

Sweating, his breath clouding, Charles reached the half-dozen men with lanterns standing some distance from the timber piers of the rail bridge over the Missouri. The metal of their revolvers and carbines gleamed.

"Sir, the darky's one of yours," a corporal said after a slovenly salute. "He won't surrender. We'll have to shoot him."

At the dim edge of the light, squatting behind a pier so that only a white eye and a shyer of his black face showed, was one of the new recruits, Shem Wallis.

"Let me talk to him, Corporal."

"Sir, white or nigger, if a sojer takes the Grand Bounce and resists when he's caught, we got orders to —"

"I said I'll talk to him." Charles shoved the corporal's carbine down and walked away from the muttering men.

The closer he got to Wallis, the more he saw of him. That included black fingers tightened around an Allin Conversion, one of the pieces retooled in 1865 by the Springfield Armory and foisted on the Army. An old-fashioned single-shot gun, but its fifty-five-grain charge could still put a man away.

Wallis acted determined, too. "Lieutenant, you stay there. Like I told those white boys, first one who tries to jump me goes to hell."

Charles's gut hurt. So did his head. "Shem, listen. You shouldn't have clubbed that sentry and tried to desert. But it'll be worse if —"

"I joined up to be proud of what I did!" Wallis yelled. "I didn't join up to kneel down again like a nigger slave with a brush in my hand. I spent my whole damn Sat'day whitewashing some officer's picket fence, and then he come out and inspected and said a jackass could do better."

Charles took a step, another. His breath ghosted around him. "That kind of duty's one of the bad things about the Army, Shem. I thought I explained that."

"You did. I just won't do it no more.".

Six feet from the pier, still walking, Charles held out his hand. "Give me the piece. I know what's ragging you. Too much winter. Everybody feels it."

The old Springfield steadied, pointed at his chest. "I kill you, Lieutenant."

Charles stopped a yard from the pier. "All right, that will take care of one round. You haven't any more. Those boys behind me will finish you. Give up, Shem. You'll spend a while in the guardhouse, but it's better than going to the cemetery. Then you'll come back where you belong. You've got the makings of a good soldier. I mean it. You're a good man."

Hand held out, he resumed his slow walk forward. Wallis jammed the Springfield against his shoulder. Sighted.

Charles watched the muzzle opening grow larger as he walked.

Larger.

And —

Tension in Wallis's upper body indicated a move. Charles shifted his weight and crouched, knowing he was too late to dodge the bullet.

The Springfield dropped. With a forlorn moan, Wallis covered both eyes. Then he straightened up, stepped from behind the pier, and raised his hands. Charles saw some whitewash left between his fingers.

Hancock did announce his intention to take the field as soon as the weather improved. One night in the last week of February, he told an assembly of post officers that his soldiers from Leavenworth would be augmented by men from A. J. Smith's Seventh Cavalry. This combined force would strike out from Fort Riley for Indian country.

"Some of you gentlemen will accompany me. Others will remain here. All of you should be clear about the purpose of the expedition, however. I am under orders from General Sherman to overawe the Indians, and meet with the important chiefs to tell them they must stay away from the rail and wagon routes this summer. If their response is defiance, a warlike attitude, then we'll give them war. No insolence will be tolerated. That is now government policy."

In his next letter to Willa, Charles said nothing about government policy. He suspected she'd hear of it soon enough.

"Sit down, Private," Charles said to Potiphar Williams after the exchange of salutes. Suspicious, the ex-cook took the visitor's chair.

"C Company needs a first sergeant. Lieutenant Hook and I have campaigned for you, Captain Barnes agrees, and I'm happy to say Colonel Grierson has accepted our recommendation. You get the job, not only because you can read and write, but because you've proved yourself a good soldier."

Williams's flash of pride was quickly replaced by the old, barely veiled hostility. "Sir, I 'predate the offer, but I can't take it."

"Don't be so damned stiff-necked. I know you don't like me. It makes no difference. In the war I served with plenty of men I didn't like." Williams cleared his throat. Charles blinked. "Wait. Is it just me, or is there something else?"

"It's —" Williams nearly strangled over it. "Seeing."

"What?"

Williams sagged. "My eyes are bad. I can manage fine in shooting at a rifle target. I can read the letter on the guidon when it's a good way off. Close up, though — well, one reason I left the hotel kitchen was because I couldn't see to carve and chop. Cutting carrots or beans, I had a hell of a time." He showed a long, pale knife scar where his thumb and index finger met. Charles had never noticed it.

"There's an easy remedy, Williams. Let the surgeon test you for spectacles."

Another fidgety silence. "Uh, sir — I can't afford 'em. I send most all my pay to my four brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh."

"I'll loan you the money for God's sake, and don't argue."

After long and careful scrutiny of Charles, Williams asked, "The white officers, they really want me for first sergeant?"

"They do."

"You, too?"

"It was unanimous."

Williams glanced away. "You not so bad as I thought. What you did to help Shem Wallis, that was decent. I'd repay a loan soon as I could."

"Fine. One small warning. You'll be nicknamed Star Gazer or Star Eyes. Every bluebel — uh, trooper with glasses is Star Gazer or Star Eyes."

Williams thought about that. "Well, guess it'd be better than the nickname I got." Charles's eyebrow hooked up. "From Poti­phar the boys got Piss Pot."

Charles laughed. So did Williams. "That's a definite improvement. Congratulations." Charles put his hand out. "Sergeant."

Williams pursed his lips. He studied the white palm and fingers, then gave a little nod, and shook.

It was March 1, 1867. Dignified and handsome, General Winfield Scott Hancock left Fort Leavenworth.

It was a wet, bitter morning. Charles stood among cheering soldiers, wives, and camp followers watching the departure. The post band played all the old favorites including that most trite yet most affecting of marches, "The Girl I Left Behind Me."

National and divisional and departmental colors passed. Companies of infantry plodded forward. Horse-drawn gun carriages bore the light and dependable twelve-pound mountain howitzers. The towering canvas tops of supply wagons sailed slowly by like schooners.

The column was not all Army blue. Bland-faced Osage and Delaware trackers mixed with a few civilians, including Mr. Hickok, who was in tight buckskin breeches and garish orange Zouave jacket. His twin ivory-handled revolvers were prominently displayed. Hickok's mare, Black Nell, stepped along smartly; her rider saluted the crowd with sweeps of his hat. When he spied Charles, he hailed him cordially. The troopers of C Company looked at Charles as if he'd suddenly acquired a holy aura.

A lurching ambulance carried Mr. Davis, who wrote for Harper's Monthly, and Mr. Henry Stanley, who represented, the New York Herald and other papers. Generals Hancock and Sherman wanted a good press.

The old man squirted spit between his teeth and said to Charles, "Know what's in some of those wagons? Pontoon boats, for God's sake."

"Pontoon boats? What for?"

"Why, fordin' rivers. If Hancock spies some Indians and there's to be a scrape, y'see, the Indians are supposed to wait half the day so's Hancock can lay down his pontoon boats and cross over and fight." Another squirt of spit. "Shows you how much old Superb knows about war on the Plains. It don't bode well, Charlie."'

"I still wish we were going."

"Want some red scalps, do you?"

"Yes."

Ike Barnes studied his lieutenant's face and didn't care for the cold, stark look on it. "You'll get your chance," he said, not hiding his disapproval.

28

Charles was officer of the day when another recruit arrived. He seemed unremarkable at first, a stout, round-faced black man in his late twenties carrying all his belongings tied up in a bandanna. A black silk handkerchief overflowed the breast pocket of his old frock coat, which had a hole in one elbow. The toe of his left shoe lacked a top.

"Stand at attention while I take some information." Charles believed in breaking recruits in quickly. He examined the man's papers. "Your name's Magee?"

"Yes, sir." The recruit grinned, the widest, sunniest mouthful of teeth Charles had ever seen in a human being. The infectious smile tickled him out of the gloom caused by the morning rain. Life might have robbed the man in some other respects, but those teeth were perfect.

"Wendell Phillips Magee," he added. "Mama named me for —"

"I know," Charles interrupted. "The abolitionist." He consulted the papers again. "You enlisted in Chicago." Illinois must be a dull state. People kept leaving; people like Hickok and a couple of other gun artists named Earp and Masterson whom Floyd Hook had mentioned to him. "What did you do in Chicago, Magee?"

"Saloon porter. Swamped floors. Emptied spittoons." He didn't seem bitter, only factual. "Took my share of hard knocks from customers 'cause I'm a nigger. When my Aunt Flomella died — she was Mama's sister, my only kin — a piece in a newspaper caught my eye."

"You read, do you?"

"Yes, sir, General."

"I'm a lieutenant."

"Yes, sir, sorry. I write, too. And I can do sums." The recruit had a jolly, breezy air, undaunted by criticism. His fast talk and bright smile were probably defenses against the abuse he'd mentioned. "The newspaper piece said, young men of color, put on Army blue —" Magee startled Charles by snatching the black hanky from his pocket. He pushed the silk into his left fist with his right index finger. "So I said, Magee, that sounds good, don't it?" Quickly, the silk disappeared. "Change your whole life. Black to blue." He picked at the other side of his fist and pulled out a long twist of silk. Bright blue.

Charles laughed. Delighted, Magee waved the hanky up and down with his right hand while displaying his pale left palm, empty. "Black to blue," he repeated, grinning that wondrous grin. "Whole new life, and glad of it." He pocketed the silk.

"Do you know more tricks like that?"

"Oh, yes, sir, General. I learned my first ones from a barkeep soon after I started work, 'round age nine. Picked up plenty more over the years. Coins, cards, cups, and balls. I read about tricks, too. They had conjurers back when knights rode around in armor, did you know that? The Chinee had 'em a couple thousand years ago. Sort of gives a man a sense of being part of a fine old family." Another grin. "Know what I mean?"

Charles thought of Hickok and his pistols. He said, "You must practice a lot."

"Every day. I get lots of good out of magic. I'd do tricks for some of those mean bast — gents who hung 'round the saloon and they'd tip me a coin or two, 'stead of kickin' the shit out of me 'cause I'm colored." Though the smile stayed fixed, a hurt revealed itself for a moment.

"Can you ride a horse?"

"Afraid not, General. But I'm going to learn. I'm mighty proud to be a U.S. soldier, and I mean to be a good one."

"I expect you will be." Charles extended his hand for the customary greeting. "Welcome to the Tenth Cavalry, Magee."

The regiment found the new man good company, a studious pupil at drill, and unfailingly entertaining. On Magee's third day with the regiment, Grierson showed up for 9:00 p.m. tattoo and roll call at the barracks, solely to watch Magee perform. When the colonel asked for a trick, Magee produced a piece of string.

"Works better with rope, but who can afford rope on a porter' pay?"

"You won't afford it on a private's pay either," Sergeant Star Eyes Williams said. The circle of men laughed.

Magee looped the string in one hand and cut the midpoint of the loop with his pocket knife. He then put the pieces back to­gether and tied the cut ends in a knot. He displayed the string full length, snapping out the ends over his head to show the knot in the middle. He wound the string round and round his left fist, tapped it, then snapped it out again. The string was unbroken, the knot gone.

Grierson applauded. "That's very good, Private. How do you do it?"

"Why, General, if I told you that, they wouldn't be calling me Magic Magee much longer, would they?"

"That's already his nickname?" Floyd Hook whispered to Charles, who whispered back, "What else did you expect?"

Puddles of melted snow and an occasional balmy day promised the end of winter. The Tenth grew and continued to train. Barnes, Hook, and Charles drilled their troopers, broke up fights, staged night raids on barracks gambling games and confiscated the dice or decks of cards, wrote letters for the men, listened to romantic or family problems, and prayed for the day they'd ride west for field duty. C Company was nearly up to strength. Departure couldn't come too soon for Charles.

Couriers brought reports of Hancock's campaign to Department headquarters. Hancock had marched southwest to Fort Lamed on the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas and encamped there with fourteen hundred men from the Seventh Cavalry, Thirty-seventh Infantry, and Fourth Artillery. He sent Lieutenant Colonel Edward Wynkoop, former commander at Fort Lyon and now the Interior Department's man in charge of the Southern Agency, to bring the Indians to hear his warning. These were Cheyennes and some Oglala Sioux living together in a big village thirty-five miles up the Pawnee Fork. The outcome of the parlay would be in the next reports.

Barnes said that since the company would leave soon, Charles should pay a brief visit to St. Louis, if he wished. As April grew warmer, Charles took a Missouri boat. He and Willa made love ardently when he arrived, late one afternoon, before her evening performance as Ophelia.

"I'll never remember my lines now," she said, laughing, as she pinned up the silver-pale hair their lovemaking had undone. "At least I'm sufficiently unstrung to play the mad scene." She kissed his mouth. "And thank you for remembering my birthday. I mean at all."

He spanked her bare bottom lightly and they fell out of bed, laughing and tickling each other.

She promised they'd take supper with some other members of the company after the show. The five acts of Hamlet seemed interminable to Charles. Sam Trump ranted and stomped through the Prince's quiet soliloquies and grew so excited in the final duel that he fell down twice, generating hoots.

Rubbing a bruised knee, Trump begged off from supper. That left Charles with Willa, the young prompter-stage manager Finley, and Trueblood, who could be the juvenile only with the help of generous amounts of face powder and rouge. Finley arrived late at the outdoor beer garden; the others were cheerily drinking from mugs of dark German beer. Finley threw a pall on things by showing the day's Missouri Gazette.

"Hancock burned an Indian town."

"What?" Willa's pale eyes lost their merriment.

"Right there." Finley tapped the headlined column. "The chiefs wouldn't come in to powwow. Maybe Hancock's threats scared them, because they ran away and took all their women and children with them. Custer took off after them and found a stage station burned, so Hancock burned down the empty lodges — two hundred fifty of them. It's all there," he said, sitting down and signaling the waiter.

"When did it happen?" Trueblood asked, indignant.

Willa smoothed the paper. "On the nineteenth. My God, nearly a thousand robes destroyed, cooking implements, all of the goods they left behind. How heartless. How outrageous!"

Charles said, "Hancock went out to demonstrate to the chiefs that they'd better keep the peace this summer."

"And now he's guaranteed they won't." She thrust the paper at him. "Read for yourself. Absolutely no connection between the village that Hancock destroyed and the burning of the stagecoach station."

"No connection except that it's all part of the same problem. The chiefs should have come in to talk."

"When General Hancock was so imperious beforehand? I read his statements, Charles. Bombastic. Belligerent."

"Look, I'm tired of listening to this. You know how I lost my partner to the Cheyennes. A fine man who was their friend, who never hurt anyone if they left him alone —"

"And so that's why the Army should be equally brutal? Brutality only begets more of the same, Charles. It lowers the Army to the level of those few Indians who act violently."

"There are more than a few —" he began.

"Well, Washington will hear from the society about this," Trueblood declared. He snatched the paper and snorted as he reread the dispatch.

Charles said, "Every Indian's a potential murderer, Willa. It's their way of life. Like carving up their victims afterward."

Scathingly, she said, "Please." She pushed her plate away. Under the hanging paper lanterns of the beer garden, her eyes flashed with reflected light. The April wind fluttered a wisp of her hair. She stared at Charles with dislike, then stood up. "I'm finished."

They left' an embarrassed Finley and a preoccupied Trueblood. Charles took her arm. She drew away. On the walk to the hotel, he repeatedly tried to start a conversation. Each time she shook her head, or said no, or once, "Please don't. I'm sick to death of your bloodthirsty talk."

In bed they neither made love nor touched after a perfunctory goodnight kiss. Charles slept poorly. In the morning both apologized for bad temper, though neither apologized for any­thing else. He felt resentful about the need to apologize at all.

His river packet left at five. After a late-morning rehearsal, Willa pleaded a headache and wanted to return to the hotel. Charles drew her to a quiet corner backstage. "This might be the last time we meet for a while. Grierson's sending C Company into the field."

Angry tears welling, she said, "I hope you find every ounce of blood you're looking for — though why you're looking at all after four years of war, God knows."

"Willa, I've explained."

"Never mind. Just never mind, Charles. It's probably good that you're leaving your little boy for a time. He's too young to be taught how to hate."

Charles seized her wrist. "There is very good reason for my —"

"There is never a good reason for barbarity." She backed up, struggling, wrenching, until he released her. "Not for the barbarity of the men who killed your friends, nor for yours either. Goodbye, Charles."

Stunned, he watched her whirl and leave. He heard the loud slam of the door to Olive Street.

Turbulent anger mixed with his remorse. He was raking a match on the sole of his boot when Trump waddled from the dark, a stained towel over his bare, pale shoulder.

"I heard a bit of the quarrel. The Indian question again."

"She absolutely doesn't understand —"

"She understands her own position, and she's very serious about it. You've known that for many months. You pushed her too far and forced a choice. Got the one you didn't expect, eh?" The old actor wiped a dab of powder from his cheek. "At least I'm spared the necessity of knocking you down. You hurt her, but you got your punishment."

"Don't talk like a damn fool, Sam. I love her."

"Is that right? Then why do you drive her away?"

He sent a searching look at Charles, and then he walked off.

Charles leaned on the packet's rail, watching the lamps of St. Louis recede in the spring dusk. Water cascaded noisily over the stern paddles.

He had done what Trump said, hadn't he? Driven her away deliberately.

Why? Was it because he feared a greater hurt if the relationship went on? Or was it really because she hated his obsession with the Cheyennes? Hell, he didn't know. Though they were distinct reasons, he kept mixing them up somehow.

He thought of her eyes and hair. Of her passion and her tenderness. Of her wit and her idealism, so energetic and still unmarred by time and reality. She was as fine in her own way as Augusta Barclay, whom he'd also driven off. He saw himself repeating the pattern, scored himself, then tried to deaden the guilt with memories of Wooden Foot, Boy, Fen.

I'm right, God damn it. She isn't a realist. Never will be.

And yet, gazing at a far sparkling constellation overhead, something in him grieved.

29

"Son of a bitch," said Ike Barnes, stomping in.

"Me?" Charles asked, sliding the February Harper's Monthly into the desk. It had been passed all over Leavenworth because of a G. W. Nichols article about Hickok. Nichols had chronicled Hickok's exploits as a scout for General Sam Curtis in the Southwest, as a Union soldier at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, and as a pistol artist without peer. He credited "Wild Bill," as he called him, with slaying at least ten men. Although no one seemed to know where Hickok got his nickname, Charles had no doubt after reading the article that it would soon be known all over America.

"No, not you, don't try to be funny," Barnes said. "The son of a bitch I'm referring to is that son of a bitch Hoffman. When we leave for Riley tomorrow, we can't take our laundresses."

That roused Floyd Hook from a doze; he was a fastidious dresser. "Why the hell not, Captain?"

"Hoffman said so, that's why not. The women are ordered not to leave the post in the wagons of C Company."

Charles scratched his chin, reflecting. "Well, if that's the order, let's obey it. Let's ask the ladies to meet us outside the gate."

The old man blinked. "Damn. Charlie, you've been mean as a mad dog since you came back from St. Louis. But I'm glad I kept you around."

Charles spent the evening with Brigadier Duncan and little Gus. He romped and wrestled with his son, who giggled with delight and then gave his father a long hug before he turned over to go to sleep.

Duncan asked about Willa. "You haven't mentioned her once."

"She's fine. Busy with a new cause." There, unexplained, he dropped it.

The next day dawned clear and perfect. The seventy-two men, three officers, and two wives of C Company prepared to leave the Fort Leavenworth reservation. Grierson shook each officer's hand in turn. "I'm proud of this company and this regiment. I just want to last long enough to lead you men in the field. If I don't get out from under Hoffman by autumn, I'll take the Grand Bounce myself."

"Don't do that, sir," Hook said. "We'll send Lieutenant August to shoot Hoffman for you. He's eager to shoot somebody. Anybody."

Feeling mean as a wolf, Charles didn't dispute it.

The company started to move out. Standing with Satan, patting him, Charles watched the troopers walk their horses past in column of fours. They'd heeded the old man's lecture on a field uniform. Charles saw a variety of shirts of faded gray cotton, yellow kersey, green silk. He saw cavalry pants, jeans pants, Indian leggings. He saw kepis, fur hats, straw hats, even a Mexican sombrero. And he saw many new bowie knives and hand guns.

Charles himself was comfortably dressed in yellow-and-black striped trousers and a soft deerskin shirt. He'd jammed his Army blues into his travel trunk along with his gypsy robe and a new sheepskin-lined winter coat. To get the coat and his new flat-crowned black hat with yellow cord, he'd traded away his caped overcoat.

Magic Magee rode by wearing a black derby with a wild turkey feather in the band. He saw Charles and whipped off a smart salute. The second his hand touched his forehead, the queen of diamonds snapped out between his index and middle fingers. He shoved the card under his left arm, where it disappeared. He rode on, flashing that wonderful smile.

A horseman appeared in the dust cloud billowing behind the wagon carrying Lovetta Barnes, Floyd Hook's haggard young wife, Dolores, and the Hooks' small daughter. Charles tensed, slipping his hand to his Spencer in the saddle scabbard.

Waldo Krug reined in. "Where's Barnes?"

"Head of the column. Sir."

"Well, you tell him that his trickery came to my attention. General Hoffman's putting it into the regiment's permanent record."

Charles pretended innocence. "Trickery, sir?"

"Don't give me that goddamn phony tone. You know the laundresses were expressly ordered not to leave the post with C Company."

"They didn't. It's my understanding that they left an hour ago. Do you mean to say the Army would object if we happened to meet them down the road and did the courteous, gentlemanly thing and offered them a ride?"

"All the way to fucking Fort Riley?" Krug's cheeks boiled with color. "You'll answer to me yet, you bastard."

"Look, Krug. I'm a soldier, exactly like —"

"Bullshit. You're a traitor. You're a disgrace to the uniform you refuse to wear. If Grierson didn't coddle you, I'd have you up for that. You and those niggers, too. Look at them — scruffy as a bunch of Sicilian banditti."

Charles stepped up in the stirrup. "Goodbye. General."

In Leavenworth City, C Company took the laundresses into a wagon. Beyond the town they passed through a belt of farms whose rich black soil already showed green shoots. The white­washed houses and outbuildings had an air of age and permanence, though probably not one was over ten years old.

By choice, the company veered away from the railroad and the parallel line of telegraph poles. A wind rose, whipping the branches of the budding hickories and buttonwoods, willows and elms. Across soft hills hidden by thousands of swaying sunflowers, through gleaming creeks where the wild strawberry grew, sheltered by a cathedral of sky, cleaving an ocean of grass, colors and guidon streaming, C Company rode west.

Charles carried a score of memories of Willa — and a hurt. He hummed the little tune she'd written down for him. He'd packed the music carefully in the folds of his gypsy robe. This morning he found the melody inexplicably sad, so he stopped humming and rode in silence for a while.

The invigorating air and the sunlit country gradually eased his melancholy. In a baritone voice not much better than a monotone, he sang to himself, one of the sweet sad songs he'd first heard when he lazed outside the Mont Royal praise house, the slave chapel, of a Sunday when he was small and trouble-prone and didn't understand the world around him, or the suffering the song expressed.

Hook cantered up beside him.

"Where'd you learn coon songs, Charlie?" "It isn't a coon song, it's a hymn. A slave hymn." "You surely give it a cheerful lilt. Glad to see you feeling good for a change."

Charles smiled and kept his thoughts to himself.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

"Madeline, I now have fourteen pupils working with alphabet and primer, two almost ready to advance to the Second Reader, and Pride is in the second arithmetic series. I want to buy a geography for him, and slates for the rest. We have just three slates for all, not nearly enough."

Head down and pensive, Madeline walked beside the school­teacher on the shore of the Ashley. The spring twilight was settling, hazy and full of shrill nightbird cries. The familiar vista of star-specked water with dense forest beyond usually soothed her. Tonight was different.

"I can't give you any answer but the one you've heard before," she said. "There's no money."

For once the plump teacher seemed to lose her Christian patience. "Your friend George Hazard has it to spare."

Stopping, Madeline said sharply, "Prudence, I have made it clear that I won't beg from Orry's best friend. If we can't survive by our own wits and initiative, we deserve to fail."

"That may be noble, but it does very little to further someone's education."

"I'm sorry you're angry. Perhaps I'm wrong, but those are my views. I'll do all I can to supply what you need as soon as we sell the first rice crop."

"Bother. I see nothing wrong in asking a small donation from a very rich man who —"

"No," Madeline said, though she wondered bitterly how she could ever fulfill the dream of building a new Mont Royal when she couldn't buy even the smallest necessities for its school. "We'll find some other way, I promise."

Prudence gave Madeline a bleak look. The two women returned to the whitewashed house in silence. It was an hour before they made up. Madeline spoke first, though Prudence was clearly just as eager. Even so, Madeline felt the emptiness of her promise as she lay in bed that night, sleepless with worry.

Who against all hope believed in hope. Prudence might still be that sort of person. She was not.

30

Late on a showery Saturday in that same month, a horse-drawn cab took Virgilia to a small brick house on South B Street, behind the Capitol. She looked matronly, and somber in contrast to the color in the front yard, where snowy blossoms shed by two dogwoods dusted deep yellow daffodils. A mock orange tree sweetened the air in a way that was appropriate to a season of renewed hope.

Virgilia's face was drawn, even severe. She rang the bell and exchanged a warm embrace with Lydia Smith, the housekeeper. She followed Lydia to the parlor, where her friend waited with silver tea things.

"Thad —" She caught her breath. He looked white, far older than when she last saw him, months ago. He rose from his chair with great effort.

Lydia tied back draperies to let in more of the gray light, but that did nothing to improve Stevens's appearance. The housekeeper excused herself. Stevens sat down again. Over the patter of rain, Virgilia heard his labored breathing.

"Sorry to have taken so long to accept your invitation,'' she said. "I usually work every Saturday. Today Miss Tiverton's nephew drove down from Baltimore for a visit. He excused me for the afternoon."

"How is the old woman? You've been her companion for — how long now?"

'Ten months." Virgilia added cream to her hot tea and sipped. "Her ninetieth birthday falls next Tuesday. Physically, she has tremendous stamina. But her mind —" A shrug said the rest.

"What do you do for her?"

"Sit with her, mostly. Keep her tidy. Clean her up when I must." In response to Stevens's grimace, she said, "It isn't that bad. I had worse duty in the field hospitals during the war."

"You're putting a good face on it. Now tell me how you really feel about it."

A weary sigh. "I hate it. The monotony is terrible. In the nurse corps, I got used to helping people recover, but Miss Tiverton will never recover. I'm nothing more than a caretaker. I suppose I can't be particular. Jobs for single women are scarce. This was all I could find."

"Perhaps we can do something about that." He was about to say more, but his silver teaspoon slipped from his hand. He leaned down to pick it up, and suddenly clutched his back. He straightened slowly. "My God, Virgilia, it's hell growing old."

"You don't look well, Thad."

"The climate in this town aggravates my asthma. I have trouble breathing, and my head hurts most of the time. No doubt some of the headache comes from warring with that fool in the White House." Virgilia followed this struggle in the Star but felt far removed from it in Miss Tiverton's vast, silent house out in Georgetown.

The congressman leaned toward her, his wig slightly off center, as usual, and they fell to discussing recent events. She expressed her scorn for Secretary Seward's seven-million-dollar folly, the purchase from Russia of the worthless, icebound Alaskan territory. Stevens couldn't confirm or deny rumors that Jefferson Davis would soon be let out of Fortress Monroe, after payment of enormous bail, to await trial.

They soon came back to the struggle between the Congressional Republicans and the President. To further curb Mr. Johnson's power, bills had been passed prohibiting him from direct command of the Army. Any orders now had to be transmitted by General Grant, who was more sympathetic to the Radicals; some were even saying he'd be their candidate for President a year hence. A second bill, the Tenure of Office Act, challenged the President even more directly. He couldn't remove any cabinet official without consent of the Senate.

"Our most pressing problem remains the South," Stevens went on. "Those damned aristocrats in the Dixie legislatures refuse to call the state conventions demanded by the Reconstruction Act. We've put through a second supplementary bill empowering the district military commanders to set up machinery for registering voters, so we can get on with the job. Johnson balks and argues and tries to thwart us at every step. He doesn't understand the fundamental issue."

"Which is —"

"Equality. Equality! Every man has an equal right to justice, honesty, and fair play with every other man, and the law should secure him those rights. The same law that condemns or acquits an African should condemn or acquit a white man. That's the law of God, and it ought to be of the law of the land, but those Southerners choke on the idea, and Johnson repudiates it. And he is supposed to be on our side! I tell you, Virgilia" — he had grown so agitated he spilled tea from the cup he was holding — "I am pushed to desperation by that man. He is obstructionist to the point of being criminal. There is only one remedy."

"What's that?"

"Depose him."

Her dark eyes widened in the watery gloom. "Do you mean impeach him?"

"Yes."

"On what grounds?"

The hawkish old face at last showed a smile. "Oh, we'll find those. Ben Butler and some others are searching. None too soon, either. Andrew Johnson is the most dangerous president in the history of the republic."

Dangerous, or merely obstinate about yielding power to the Congress? Virgilia didn't ask the question of her friend. She found herself surprisingly unconcerned about the whole matter. Prisoned in the Georgetown mansion caring for Miss Tiverton, she no longer felt any connection with important causes.

"All the key members of the Senate agree about impeachment," Stevens continued. "Sam Stout agrees ..."

The sentence trailed off. He was probing. Calmly, she said, "I wouldn't know, Thad. I no longer see him."

"So I heard." There was a pause. "Sam feels his voting base is secure now. Consequently, he's announced his intention to divorce Emily and marry some music-hall tart."

"Her last name's Canary." It sounded like unimportant conversation. But her hands trembled; the news had stunned her. "I wish him well." She really wished him in hell.

Stevens studied her. "You aren't at all content with your present situation, are you?"

"No. I'm not the crusader I was ten years ago, but as I said, I feel very isolated, very useless caring for one elderly woman who will never improve."

"Do you have contact with your family?"

Virgiha avoided his eye. "No. I'm afraid they — they wouldn't welcome it." Sometimes, late at night, she longed for it so deeply it brought tears. That too was probably the result of aging, of softening, and growing away from the entrapments of unbridled emotion.

"Well, my dear, I asked you here not only to see you, but also to discuss a possible change of employment. A position you might find more satisfying because you would be helping the most innocent victims of those damned rebels. Children."

For the second time, he'd stunned her. "What children do you mean?"

"Let me show you. Are you busy tomorrow?"

"No. I'm allowed Sundays to myself." A melancholy smile. "I usually have nothing to do."

"Can you be ready at two? Good. My driver and I will call for you in Georgetown."

At the end of a rutted lane off Tenth Street in the ramshackle Negro Hill section, Stevens and Virgilia came to a white house that showed good care. Two or three large rooms at one side looked like a recent addition; not all of the siding was painted as yet.

When the carriage stopped, Stevens didn't immediately open the door. "What you're looking at is an orphanage for homeless Negro children. The children are sheltered and given basic education until they can be placed with foster parents. A man named Scipio Brown founded the orphanage. He ran it personally until he joined a colored regiment. After his discharge he came back and found more waifs than ever before, chiefly the children of contrabands who fled north and somehow got separated from their youngsters. Last month Brown's assistant, a white girl responsible for teaching the children, left him to marry and move to the West —" He broke off. She wanted to speak.

"Thad, I know Scipio Brown."

"Indeed! I thought it a possibility —"

She nodded. "I met him at Belvedere during the war. My brother George and his wife were operating a branch of Brown's orphanage there. They took in all the children he couldn't handle here in Washington."

"Then you're quite familiar with his work. Good. Are you interested in the vacancy?"

"Perhaps."

"Hardly an enthusiastic answer."

"I'm sorry. It's an honest one." How could she explain that because Stout had abandoned her and she was estranged from her family, she felt little enthusiasm for anything?

He opened the carriage door. "Well, a brief visit will do no harm."

Walking slowly with the aid of his cane, he led her inside. He introduced her to the Dentons, a middle-aged black couple who lived at the orphanage, cooking and cleaning for the twenty-two children presently in residence.

Seven of the youngsters, a clamorous, cheerful lot, were adolescents. The others ranged all the way down to four. Stevens knew each name. "Hello, Micah. Hello, Mary Todd — Liberty — Jenny — Joseph." He clucked and fussed among them, touching hands, kissing cheeks, embracing them as if they were his grand­children. Again Virgilia realized that Thad Stevens was not one of those Radicals who promoted equality for political reasons.

"Here's a handsome friend of mine." Stevens's clubfoot turned awkwardly as he picked up a laughing light brown boy of six. The boy wore a clean, patched shirt and overalls.

"Tad for tadpole. Or Tad Lincoln. Or a tad of trouble. He's a little of each." Stevens hugged and kissed the boy. "Tad, this is my friend Miss Hazard. Can you shake hands?"

Solemn, wary of her, Tad thrust his hand out. Virgilia felt unexpected tears.

"How do you do, Miss Hazard?" Tad said, very properly.

"I —" Dear God, she was stricken silent. The resemblance wasn't exact, yet close enough to bring exquisite pain. He could have been a child of her slain lover, Grady. It took a huge effort to master her shock and say, "I'm very fine, thank you. I hope you are too."

The boy grinned and nodded. Stevens patted him again and put him down. He scurried off. With a sniff, the congressman took note of the pleasing odor drifting from the kitchen. "What's that on the stove, Mrs. Denton?"

"Okra gumbo for supper. Congressman."

They turned at the sound of the front door. A tall, amber-colored man came in, shaking rain off his hat. His shoulders were broad as a stevedore's, his waist small as a girl's. Virgilia guessed him to be around thirty-five now. He immediately gave her his hand.

"How do you do, Miss Hazard? It's very good to see you again."

"Mr. Brown." She smiled, remembering that she'd been attracted by his lean good looks before. He was still handsome, but he'd matured; he charmed her with an easy cordiality:

"I regret we met but once in Lehigh Station. I heard of you often afterward."

"Not in a complimentary way, I imagine:"

"Why, I wouldn't say that." He smiled at her. "The congressman told me you might be interested in helping to teach these children."

"Well —"

"Is that gumbo, Mrs. Denton? I missed my noon meal. Will you join me, Miss Hazard? Thad?"

"It's damp outside, and okra gumbo always warms me up," Stevens said. "I'll have a spoonful or two. You, Virgilia?"

She didn't know how to refuse, and she found she didn't want to. They sat down with bowls of the savory soup. While she chatted with Brown and Stevens, her eyes strayed often to the small, merry boy who reminded her so much of Grady. The sight of his innocent face, untouched as yet by the cruelties his color would inspire, pushed her near to tears again. And then to a sudden, startling thought. Sam was gone. Even at the start of their affair, she had known she probably couldn't hold him forever. Perhaps it was time to put the rancor and grief behind her. Time to care for someone who could benefit from love, as old Miss Tiverton could not.

She saw, like an apparition, the dead Southern soldier in the field hospital. She stared at her hands. Others could not see blood on them, but she could. The blood would never wash away. But she might begin to atone for it.

Finishing his soup, Stevens said he had a late afternoon meeting with members of the Committee of Fifteen. Scipio Brown didn't press Virgilia for an answer, but he expressed his interest in having her at the orphanage and shook her hand strongly to say goodbye. He had a direct way about him, and no small amount of pride in his eyes and his bearing. She liked him. In the carriage lurching south toward the center of the city, Stevens rested his hands on the knob of his cane. She thought of a lion. An old lion, but one still driven by blood instinct.

"I fall in love anew whenever I visit those waifs, Virgilia." "I can understand. They're very appealing." "How do you look on the opportunity there?" She gazed at passing hovels built of scrap lumber and canvas. From muddy lanes and windows without windowpanes or shutters, dark brown faces turned toward the fine carriage. A woman of seventy or more squatted in the drizzle, smoking a corncob pipe and trying to cook bits of food on the top of a tin can set in smoldering wood chips. Rain dripped from the woman's nose and chin. The smoke from her pipe was thin as thread. She was motionless on her haunches; only her eyes moved with the carriage. Eyes that had probably seen shackles, sun-scorched fields, filthy cabins, loved ones torn away and sold — "Virgilia? How —"

"Favorably, Thad. Quite favorably." The old man squeezed her hand. "You would be good for them. I think they would be good for you. I know you cared for Sam. But he belongs to the past, I think."

Weeping at last, Virgilia could only nod and turn away. The old haunted eyes of the squatting woman were lost in the gray murk.

In Georgetown that evening, she gave Miss Tiverton's nephew polite but final notice.

31

Ashton stepped into the June sunshine like a queen emerging from her palace. The building she quitted was not that, but a frame boardinghouse on Jackson Street, right on the edge of one of Chicago's roughest areas, a warren of hovels called Conley's Patch. For months, Ashton had been caged there in a single large, grimy room, together with Will Fenway and his mountains of construction drawings, cost estimates, supplier bids, loan papers. She hated it.

Even more than that, she hated the anonymity Will had imposed on her since leaving Santa Fe. She wanted a photograph of them together; he refused. There must be no pictures of her, ever, he said. What if the senora in Santa Fe still had the authorities hunting for the killer of her brother-in-law? Whenever Will mentioned that, a strange glint came into his watery blue eyes; a look Ashton didn't understand.

This morning, as she stood letting the pleasant sunshine bathe and warm her, she did resemble, if not a queen, then a woman of high station and good income. Her dress and matching hat were bright red silk; there were twelve yards of material in the gored skirt alone. Beneath it, supported by a canvas belt around her waist, a bustle formed by six springlike wires gave a provocative lift to the rear of the skirt. The bustle was a new fashion; very modish. It was hell's torture to put on and wear, but she certainly liked the way it enhanced her sexual appeal.

Unfortunately, on the fringes of Conley's Patch, she appealed to the wrong sorts. A seedy, bleary-eyed roughneck came weaving toward her from a lane between packing-box shanties.

"Hello, lovely." He blocked the plank walk, stinking like a whiskey works. His bloodshot eyes roved over her breasts. "I reckon from that dress you're a working girl. How much?"

Ashton's lips compressed. One delicate red-gloved hand whipped up her red parasol and laid it hard on his cheek. She shoved her other glove under his nose. The outline of a huge square wedding diamond showed through the fabric.

"You dirty, illiterate wretch. I'm a respectable married woman."

"You look like a whore to me." He reached for her.

Ashton jabbed the point of the parasol into his groin, hard. His eyes practically crossed as he reeled back, clutching himself. A couple of better-dressed gentlemen stepped between Ashton and the derelict.

"Thank you kindly," she said in her sweetest voice. They tipped their derbies while restraining the drunk, and she swept on by, bound for the Van Buren Street bridge. No doubt she was late, and she dared not be late on this important, not to say fateful, day.

Hurrying, she reflected on the clumsy assault. It was at least proof that at age thirty-one, she hadn't lost her looks. If anything, she believed, the passage of time was improving them. It wasn't improving much else. She detested the near-penniless life she led. Often, she couldn't believe how far she and the sometimes' curmudgeonly old man had gone as partners. Santa Fe to San Francisco, to Virginia City and then Chicago.

So much scheming, so much struggle. And so much of the future riding on those drawings of a piano that Will had made, and made over, scores of times, strewing their squalid room with tracing paper as his pencil flew, sometimes until three or four in the morning, as he searched his own experience, and obscure German and French books containing manufacturing diagrams, for ways to cut a dime here, another dime there.

It was all culminating today. Everything. The money brought from Virginia City, slightly over one hundred thousand dollars, carried in a satchel. The two loans negotiated locally to pay rent and the wages of Will's four workmen and the salesman he'd hired away from Hochstein's. To get one of the loans, Ashton had been required to spend the night with a banker, a dreadful man with a hog's belly who heaved on top of her for hours and never once managed to get it up.

After his first fifteen minutes of effort she had decided she didn't want one of the banker's trouser buttons for her box. For most of the night she lay staring past his head into the dark. She envisioned herself richly dressed, wealthy and powerful, thanks to Will's success. She saw herself returning to Mont Royal and confronting the arrogant Madeline with any number of choices, each designed to hurt her and drive her from the family land that was Ashton's by right.

Oh, she'd done a lot for Will Fenway and for their scheme, and almost being crushed to death by the fat, sweaty banker was only part of it. First, she'd seduced a records clerk in San Francisco. Not so bad; he was homely but virile. It took her only a week to pry from him a forged certificate of marriage, showing that she had wed Mr. Lamar Powell on February 1, 1864.

Although she now went by the name Mrs. Willard P. Fenway for convenience, she was actually married to a man who was, so far as she knew, still in Virginia City, Nevada. Ezra Learning was a red-faced, white-haired, sad-eyed widower with no family. He was shy, and a clod around women. Ashton had to arrange a seemingly accidental meeting — a little fainting spell on the street — and pretend to be shy herself, and destitute over the death of Mr. Powell. She did most of the courting, filling Mr. Learning with one full bottle of Mumm's to induce him to propose.

In bed Learning proved a reasonably lively husband. Much more lively than good old Will, who had tried just once, in San Francisco, and at the end of a half hour sighed, "That does it. I like to sleep with you to keep warm, if you don't mind, but I reckon I'm too old for the other part. We'll keep it at partners. What do you say?"

From Ezra Learning she purloined a fly button. He made fairly frequent use of her charms during the eight months of their marriage. He was chief of the local claims office, and naturally happy to assist his own dear wife in establishing her clear title to the Mexican Mine, her late husband's property. She had her marriage certificate, didn't she?

Ashton hired men to reopen the mine, which at first looked highly promising. The silver-bearing ore reduced to the equivalent of one hundred three thousand dollars before the vein ran out. She quietly withdrew the money from her bank account and late one night while Ezra Learning snored, she decamped on the stage with Will Fenway, who had been hiding out in a cheap room, impatiently sketching pianos.

Oh, yes, a complex, labyrinthine path to Chicago, all right. With many confusions and irritations. She posed as Mrs. Fenway but was still Mrs. Learning. She dared not show her beauty to posterity by means of a photograph. Will was adamant about that. When he first mentioned it, a day after they arrived in the city, Ashton threw a shoe at him. Next morning, to get back at him, she marched to Field, Leitner and Co., a fine department store on State Street. There, with money from their bank account — money reserved for the piano company — she bought the scarlet outfit, including the bustle.

Will was furious. He cursed her as she'd never heard him curse before. Ashton realized then that she'd met a man whose strength matched hers. Old and stooped and red-eyed as he was from all the worry and night work, he was neither intimidated by her beauty and haughty airs nor upset when she retaliated for his cursing with screams, saying she'd leave him.

Pushed past his limit, he slapped her. Just once, but hard enough to tumble her onto their mussed bed. Then he showed her his fist.

"You go ahead. I've put my whole soul and all your money into this scheme. If you don't care any more, if you don't want to go back to South Carolina the way you're always saying, you just walk out that door. I'll bank all the money we make, and then I'll find myself another woman."

Ashton was thunderstruck. She pleaded, begged, cried, humbled herself until he agreed to make up. She had not crossed him or defied him since.

This was the reason for her haste as she turned west on Van Buren to the wooden bridge over the south branch of the Chicago River. When strangers eyed the tight red silk on her bodice and the provocative bounce of her bustle, she tossed her head and glared. Her heart belonged to Will and what he was about to reveal today. Her heart was wrapped up in him, and so was her money, not to mention her unshakable determination to return to Mont Royal someday and make them pay — Madeline, Little Miss Goody Brett, Charles — every damn one of them.

West of the river, Chicago became an unlovely near-slum crowded with saloons, lumberyards, woodworking mills, boat jetties on the water, and the bleak, cheap residences of a lot of Irish and Swedes and Bohemians. Here, on Canal Street, a dark stairway led up past a crude depiction of a hand pointing to FENWAY'S PIANO COMPANY.

She dashed up, breathless, and into the loft, which was piled with iron frames, spools of different grades of piano wire, unassembled cases from Schoenbaum's in New Jersey, crates of actions from Seaverns's in Massachusetts. Nothing in the piano was Will Fenway's creation except the design.

"Will, do forgive me —" She rushed to him, contrite. The four young men in leather aprons and portly, pie-faced Norvil Watless, the salesman, smiled and offered greetings as she flung her arms around Will's neck and kissed him. "There was all sorts of wagon traffic on the bridge. I couldn't cross for ten whole minutes."

"Well, I waited," he said, sounding edgy as he tapped fingers on the sheeted object that was the center of attention. "Guess we're all here. Let's take a look."

She noticed the tremor of his hand as he grasped the sheet. She also noticed the red rims at the bottom of his eyes; he needed spectacles and wouldn't buy them. But his shoulders squared as he paused for effect, then whipped off the sheet.

The workmen clapped. "Godamighty, what a beauty," Norvil Watless wheezed. Even Ashton gasped.

The piano was an upright, a style made popular because it fit nicely in those small, new-style Parisian dwellings, appartements, that were all the rage. The case was a lustrous blackish wood with broad streaks in the grain the color of rust. Centered above the keyboard in a gold-leaf wreath, Fenway appeared in Old English script.

"That's a gorgeous rosewood case —" Watless began.

"Brazilian jacaranda," Will corrected. "Cheaper. But call it rosewood anyway."

He stroked the sleek, shiny top, his tiredness seeming to fall away as he explained to Ashton, "I can't build a better one for the money. She's got a full iron frame, overstrung scale —"

"French action," Watless exclaimed. Ashton had learned that a Paris-made upright action was synonymous with fine quality.

"No. I bought the action in the U.S.," Will said. "But the selling sheet says it's French-style, so be sure you get across the idea that it's from Paris. After all, you won't be calling on the most honest customers in the world."

Ashton wanted to say something to please him. "You should be proud, Will."

"I may be proud and bankrupt, too, if she doesn't sell. By the way, it is a she — I named this model the Ashton."

She squealed in surprise, then actually felt touched. She hugged him again, and was aware of the weary sag of his body momentarily resting against hers. He waved. 'Try her out, Norvil."

The salesman pulled up a stool, flexed his fingers, then launched a tentative "Camptown Races."

"Louder, Norvil," Will said.

Norvil played louder.

"Faster." Norvil picked up the tempo. The music seemed to push out through the piano's closed front with a clangorous, slightly metallic sound. Norvil segued into "Marching Through Georgia." You could practically hear the bugles and tramping feet.

One of the workmen did a little jig. "By damn, that's an upright!"

"That's right," Will agreed. "You don't give a damn about sweet, mellow tones in a sporting house. You want noise. Noise, Norvil!"

Norvil obligingly gave them Verdi's "Anvil Chorus." Ashton clapped her little red gloves together, delighted. Will gave her a strange, grave, sideways look, then said, "I can make as many as you sell, Norvil, but if you don't sell any, you can visit me at the poor farm, provided the suppliers haven't beat me to death. Well, guess we'd better open the bottle of sour mash, hadn't we?"

Ashton had never seen a celebration announced with such a lack of zest. It made her a little grave too, reminding her of what would happen if the Ashton upright piano failed.

When Norvil and the workmen finished the bottle, Will closed up the loft, giving them the rest of the day free. He dropped the empty bottle in a trash barrel. "The cards are all dealt, Ashton. We might as well spend our last dollar on a venison steak at the cafe on the corner."

She agreed. Neither said much until they were seated amid pots of wilting ferns, layers of cigar smoke, and an otherwise all-male clientele, most of whom goggled at her spectacular looks.

Her red-gloved hand clasped his. "Will, what's giving you the glooms?"

He avoided her eye. "You don't want to know."

"Yes, I do." She pouted prettily. "Yes!"

His weary red-rimmed eyes fastened on her. "I've never said this to you, because I was never sure we'd get this far. It eats on me, Ashton."

"What?" Now her pretty pout looked forced, nervous. "What?"

"Santa Fe."

"I beg your pardon?"

"What keeps bothering me is Santa Fe. That man Luis you shot when you needn't have." Anger reddened her face. He gripped her wrist, and she felt the strength hidden in his dilapidated old body. "Let me finish. I have nightmares about that man. Bad ones. God knows I'm no pillar of virtue. And I like you, I really do. I like your pertness, your looks, your grit, the ambition you don't cover up with a lot of mealymouthed lies. But there's a certain streak in you that your daddy should have whipped out of you with a willow wand. A mean streak. It made you shoot down a defenseless man. Whether Fenway pianos are a disaster or the mother lode, either way —" The next came after a rush of breath, as if a burden were lifting. "I've resolved that if you ever do something that low again, we're quits. No, don't argue. No excuses. You murdered him." His voice was quiet, so no one could eavesdrop. But she heard it like a roaring wind, cold as January.

He extricated his hand. "Do anything like that again, we're quits, understand?"

Her immediate reaction was renewed rage. Once, Huntoon had said something similar, and she'd jeered, then tongue-lashed him. Now she opened her moist red mouth to do it to Will — and couldn't.

She shivered. Hastily, she examined her choices. She bowed her head.

"I understand."

He smiled. Tiredly, but he smiled. He patted her hand. "All right. I feel better. Let's order up. In fact, let's ruin the whole blasted day and get drunk. It's either all over or just starting. I gave it everything. So did you."

Their eyes met in a strange, tranquil moment of understanding. Why did she admire this frail old man? Because he had pure steel in him? Because he could deliver an edict and make her take it? Unexpectedly, her eyes misted.

"Yes, we did. Let's drink like lords and then let's go to bed."

"I'll probably do nothin' but fall asleep."

"That's all right. I'll keep you warm."

It perked him up, and he actually showed some jocularity as he snapped his fingers for the waiter. "Well, why not? It's all up to Norvil now. Norvil and the whorehouse owners of these great United States."

32

Someone touched his foot.

Awake instantly, Charles flipped his black hat off his face while his right hand jumped to his Colt. The revolver cleared leather and he recognized Corporal Magee, his dark face patterned by sun falling through parched cottonwood leaves.

Charles's hammering heart slowed. "When I'm asleep, yell, don't grab me. Else you're liable to get a bullet."

"Sorry, sir. We got some smoke."

He pointed away southwest where the Smoky Hill River blazed in the noonday like a cutout of tin. A thin black pillar stood in the white sky. Charles scrambled up and ran to find his tracker.

He and his ten-man detachment were patrolling out of Fort Harker along a twenty-five-mile stretch of the stage line south and west of the post. Here the Smoke Hill branch of the Kaw diverged from the surveyed right-of-way of the Union Pacific, Eastern Division. The soldiers had sought relief from the July heat among the river-bottom trees. They didn't find much. The red bandanna around Charles's throat felt like a wet rag. His bare chest shone with sweat.

He found the tracker seated on the ground and rummaging among the bits of root, flints, arrowheads, spent bullets from his medicine bundle, a small drawstring bag traditionally holding a personal collection of articles selected to promote strength, ward off sickness and enemies, and remind the possessor of important aspects of his religion.

The tracker was a Kiowa named Big Arm, assigned to Charles by the old man. He was a handsome Indian, and an expert horseman, but surly. Barnes said he came from a Kiowa band down in north Texas, and had committed the ultimate mistake on a buffalo hunt some years back. He'd gotten impatient, rushed in ahead of the other hunters, and stampeded the herd. No one got so much as one kill. Big Arm's possessions were taken and broken to pieces and he was shunned. He withstood two winters of that, then spitefully deserted to the service of the whites — in this case a bunch of brunettes, or buffalo soldiers as the Plains Indians called them, reminded of the buffalo's coat by the woolly hair of the black men. The troopers tended to like the term buffalo soldier, because the buffalo was revered.

"What do you make of that?" Charles said to Big Arm, in a tone unconsciously goading. He genuinely disliked the Kiowa, who refused to talk with Charles or his men except when necessary.

Big Arm answered with one of his laconic shrugs, then pulled a bright brass telescope from his belt. He started to snap it open. Charles knocked it down.

"How many times do I have to tell you? That thing shines like a mirror. What's burning? The next stage station?"

Big Arm shook his head, sullen. "Too close for stage. Must be new farm. Not here last time I rode the river." For him, that was practically an oration.

Alarmed, Charles yelled, "Wallis. Boots and saddles."

Having served out his sentence in the guardhouse, Shem Wallis had returned to duty and revealed some talent as a trumpeter. He blew the call with sharp, urgent notes. The black troopers heaved to their feet, complaining; it hadn't taken them long to learn that little Army tradition. Charles detailed two to guard the supply wagon and raced for his picketed piebald.

Despite the intense heat he lit a cigar. Nerves. Sweat poured down his chest and back as he trotted from the trees at the head of eight men in column of twos.

The sod house was still standing. It was the shell of a farm wagon producing the smoke. Charles ordered his men into line, and they approached with rifles and pistols ready. The brim of Charles's black hat threw a sharp shadow diagonally across his face. His eyes darted. Suddenly he smelled something foul. "What in hell's that?"

Evidently Big Arm knew. "'Bad," he said.

The line halted at the edge of the trampled dooryard. From horseback, Charles read sign there and in the beaten-down grass at the edge of the homesteader's small, dying vegetable patch. "I count eight ponies, maybe one more." Big Arm's grunt agreed. "How's he know that?" one of his men muttered behind him. Charles preferred to keep them in awe of his plains craft; he never explained that Wooden Foot Jackson had taught him everything, and that hardly a day passed when he didn't remember and use one lesson or another. They didn't know it was that simple. When he had them whipped into shape he might take some of the mystery out of it, and begin to teach them. Not yet, though.

He sent three two-man teams, dismounted, to search the ground in different locations. He led Magee, Big Arm, and another trooper around the square house, which was made of mud brick with a sodded roof. Tall grasses jutted from the sod, a weed patch against the hot sky.

The stench grew worse. "Smells like cooked meat," the trooper said. They turned the back corner and saw what remained of the white homesteader, staked out on the ground. Charles wiped his mouth.

"God. They built fires on him."

Magee, not easily impressed by anything, registered a sick astonishment. "The last one on his chest." The other soldier rushed away to tall grass and threw up.

Charles pushed Magee. "All right, let's go back and find a shovel." Both were eager to get away from the body. Around in front, he discovered Big Arm prodding at the sod house door with his telescope. "For Christ's sake, don't go in there until we're sure it's safe —"

While he was in mid-sentence, Big Arm pushed the door open and stepped inside. A roar flung him out again, a foot off the ground. He landed on his back amid drifting smoke. A hole in the bosom of his buckskin shirt welled red.

Charles jumped against the front of the house beside the door and flattened. "We're soldiers. United States Army. Don't shoot again."

He listened. Heard breathing. Then a whimper. A shadow passed by him on the ground. A circling vulture. "Hold your fire. I'm coming in."

While the others watched, Charles sucked in a breath and stepped into the doorway. "Soldiers," he said, loudly, as he moved forward in almost impenetrable shadow.

The homesteader's wife, a girl with auburn hair, lay in a corner amid broken furniture. Torn pieces of clothing were scattered around. She tried to cover her nakedness while her right hand shook under the weight of her pistol. Charles only glanced at her wet thighs, but it was long enough to humiliate her. He didn't have to ask what they'd done.

Violet eyes filled with tears. "Eulus gave me the gun. I was supposed to save the last bullet for myself. They took the gun away before they — before — is Eulus all right?"

Charles wanted to sink into the ground. "No."

A kind of mad misery glittered in the violet eyes. Her free hand moved across her thighs, as if to rub away the shameful stains. He thought little of it, trying to get hold of his feelings and organize his mind to handle this.

"Look, I'm sorry. Lie back and I'll find a blanket to cover you. Then we'll bring up our wagon to take you — don't!"

He lunged too late. His flung-out hand trembled in the air a yard from her as she pulled the trigger of the pistol she'd slipped into her mouth.

Magic Magee touched Big Arm's body with his beaded moccasin. "I'm only a city boy, Lieutenant, but it seems to me this here tracker didn't know his trade too well."

Charles stared at the white horizon and bit on his old cigar. "Fucking fool. Fucking savages. Fucking Hancock." He turned away to hide a typhoon of emotion.

To Shem Wallis, who had tears in his eyes, Magee said, "Going to be a mighty long summer."

Hancock's War, the press called the spring expedition, recently concluded. Hancock's belligerent demonstration-in-force was meant to promote peace; his impulsive burning of the village on the Pawnee Fork insured war. The Plains tribes saw the destruction of tipis, buffalo robes, willow backrests and other personal possessions as a reenactment of Sand Creek and a direct repudiation of the Little Arkansas Treaty.

And they retaliated.

Bands of young Sioux and Cheyennes led by hot-bloods like Pawnee Killer and Scar were pouring into Kansas, attacking homesteads like the one Charles had found, burning stage stations, swooping down on unarmed construction crews of the

U.P.E.D. laying track in the desperate race to be first to the hundredth meridian. Between Fort Harker, the temporary rail­head, and Fort Hays, an even more primitive post about sixty miles west, the U.P. crews were refusing to work without armed guards.

Down from Sherman at Division came orders assigning cavalry and infantry units to guard the crews. The railroad's own security force, headed by a former Pinkerton agent named J. O. Hartree, supplemented the Army details. Hartree had a reputation as a killer, but that wasn't enough to stop the raids. The directors of the railroad screamed for more men; more guns.

Governor Crawford of Kansas screamed for protection of his citizens and started to raise a special state cavalry regiment. Sherman wanted the Army turned loose: "We must not remain on the defensive. We must follow them on all possible occasions. We must clear out the Indians between the Platte and the Arkansas."

All went well, except for the reaction of the Olive Branchers — these Congressmen, bureaucrats, preachers, journalists who took the Indian side and blamed every Indian outrage on an earlier one by whites. From Boston pulpits and New York editorial rooms, they spoke powerfully and persuasively. They called the Pawnee Fork burning cowardly and provocative. They printed handbills, held rallies and torchlight parades, circulated memorials and more memorials to be sent to President Johnson. One of the strongest constituents of the Olive Branch faction was Willa's Indian Friendship Society — a fact Charles tried not to think about.

Before the incident at the homestead, he had taken his detachment into the field with a good feeling. Patrolling the Smoky Hill and hunting Indians beat living in one of the sorry, rat-infested mud huts that passed for housing at Fort Harker. He'd soon realized, however, that a small detachment lacked the fire­power necessary to pursue and destroy large roving war parties. What's more, they didn't have the authority. They were not supposed to act, only react. The more this sank in, the worse Charles's attitude became, so that by midsummer he felt as murderous as he had when he discovered the bodies of Boy and Jackson.

Charles and his men had undertaken the sickening chore of burying the homesteaders and checking through their few belongings in hopes of identifying them. They found a Bible, but there was no inscription in it. All they had was one name. Eulus. Ironically, in the face of this kind of butchery, the Olive Branchers were temporarily taking control. Senator Henderson, of Missouri, a powerful member of the peace lobby, was introducing a bill to establish yet one more commission to negotiate permanent peace with the Plains Indians.

Like so many in uniform, Charles felt beleaguered, held back from winning a war steadily taking its toll of innocents like the man Eulus and his wife. Charles believed the peace faction would not prevail forever, nor succeed if they did prevail for a little while. Ultimately the Army would have to be turned loose, with permission to fight to win. Then he'd have his chance to fulfill his vow of vengeance made over the mutilated bodies of Wooden Foot and Boy.

As he headed back to Fort Harker with Big Arm's body, Charles told himself that he should be thankful. Although his black brunettes were despised by their white brethren, he could have been somewhere a lot worse. With the Seventh Cavalry, for instance.

The Seventh was a regiment already torn by factionalism and racked with trouble. Custer had taken part in Hancock's expedition and, later, had been sent up the Republican River to chase the Indians. A series of forced marches he ordered started wholesale desertions. One night thirty-five men left. In a fury, Custer sent his brother, Tom, an adjutant, and a Major Elliott in pursuit, with orders to shoot any man they caught.

The pursuers recovered five, wounding three. Custer denied them medical treatment for a while. One died at Fort Wallace, and Charles heard that Custer had boasted about his ability to make snowbirds think twice before flying. Not all of Custer's superiors cared for his disciplinary methods.

Just before departing on patrol Charles had heard something else about the Boy General. Apparently he'd left Fort Wallace without permission, dashing through Fort Hays and Fort Harker in order to find his wife, whose health and safety concerned him. There was, in addition to the Indian problem, the threat of a cholera epidemic on the Plains.

Captain Barnes cast his cocked eye at the stout Indian. "Lieutenant August, this here's your new tracker, Gray Owl."

Charles's heart sank. Compared to this hangdog specimen, Big Arm had been a sparkling personality. The Indian was about forty, bundled up in a buffalo robe despite the weather. He had broad, dark cheeks and a nose like a blunt axe blade. Painted buckskin strips bound his braids but beyond that, Charles saw no design or mark to identify his tribe. Certainly the tracker was neither Delaware nor Osage. Some branch of the Sioux, then? Very puzzling. The Sioux were at war.

Noticing Charles's stare, Barnes said, "He's Southern Cheyenne. He's been tracking for the army long as I've been out here." "I'll be damned. Don't tell me he ran off a buffalo herd too?" "No, but he doesn't like his people. He won't say why." Charles saw a swift flicker of pain in the tracker's eyes, or thought he did. He felt peculiar discussing the Indian as if he weren't there. "Well, come on, Gray Owl. I'll introduce you to my men."

"Yes, thank you," Gray Owl said. Charles nearly fell over. The Cheyenne's speech was clear and almost accent-free. He must have spent a lot of time among white people. He turned out to be better than Big Arm in one respect. He'd answer, and with more than a few words, when addressed. He had another problem, however. He wasn't sullen, but he absolutely refused to smile.

"Y'see, Magic," Charles said to his corporal, "I can't make him perform if I can't reach him. To reach him, I have to know something about him. What he wants, what he likes, who he really is. I've asked twice about the reason he turned against his tribe. He refuses to say. We're building a good detachment. I don't want him spoiling it, the way Big Arm did. We've got to break him down. The first step is to crack that stone face. I figure you're the man to do it."

"I want to tell you a little story," Magee said. "But first I have to check on something. The way I understand it, you've hung around the forts a while, is that right?"

Gray Owl nodded. He sat cross-legged, wrapped in his buffalo robe, showing as much emotion as a rock from the bottom of a creek.

The summer evening carried a hint of a break in the weather, a slight cooling in the breeze out of the northwest, where purple clouds helped bring on the night. The wind flared the campfire and strewed sparks above it. Charles and his men had agreed to pitch tents on the prairie, between the post and the river, to avoid sleeping in those dark, rank huts, on old mattresses filled with moldy straw, ants, lice, and God knew what else.

"Then maybe you know what this is?" Magee said, whipping out a worn deck of cards. "You've seen troopers playing with decks like this, right?"

Another nod.

"Are you sure you know what's in a deck, though?" He fanned the cards. "The spots, the picture cards? See, there's four different kinds of kings, four different —"

"I have looked at cards," Gray Owl interrupted, a flicker of his eyes suggesting annoyance.

"Well, good. Good! I just had to find out, so you'd appreciate the full meaning of this story I'm going to tell you. It's a good story, because it shows how far you can go in this man's army if you've got plenty of ambition. In fact that's the name of the story, the Ambitious Noncom."

Magee knelt in front of Gray Owl. "Now this noncom, he was a mighty quick young fellow named Jack." He turned over the top card, the jack of diamonds. Wallis and another trooper drifted up to watch. "Jack was ambitious as the devil. He wanted to be first sergeant and soon received the promotion."

Magee waved the card for the onlookers. Amused, Charles sat smoking and watching the performance.

"Trouble with Jack, though, he had a saucy tongue. He got smart with one of his officers, and they busted him." He held out the cards. "Lieutenant? Facedown. Anywhere you please."

Charles took the jack and slid it in the middle of the deck. Magee squared the deck on his palm. "But old Jack, he was still ambitious. He worked hard. Before long, he made sergeant again."

Magee turned over the top card. The jack of diamonds.

Gray Owl's eyes closed, a single slow, reptilian blink. It spurred Magee on.

"Poor Jack — spite of all that ambition, he had the common problems of us soldiers. He liked his drop of spirits, and, one night he had several drops too many, which got him busted the second time."

Responding to a nod from Magee, Wallis took the jack from the top and put it into the deck. After the cards were squared, Magee again revealed the jack as the top card.

"Jack fancied the ladies, too. He made an innocent remark that a general's wife considered fresh, and that got him busted. But he was ambitious."

Again Magee repeated the effect, managing to produce several blinks from the tracker.

"Sergeant Jack, he got busted so often and climbed back up so often, he was sort of a legend on the Plains. Everybody wanted to be able to spring back like Jack." He turned over the top card, by now familiar, and placed it facedown again. "Everybody liked Jack's brand of ambition, which was powerful. And you know what? Pretty soon it rubbed off on the whole Army. Even the trackers."

He gave Gray Owl the deck with the jack facedown on top. He signed for the Indian to take the card and place it back in the deck. Forehead deeply creased, Gray Owl took the card, held it while he thought, and then carefully slid it in very near the bottom of the deck. Magee took the deck, keeping it in plain sight, and snapped the top card over.

Charles clapped. Wallis whistled. Incredulous, Gray Owl took the jack of diamonds and examined both sides. He bit it lightly with his front teeth. He bent it, waved it, flicked it with a nail. Magee waited.

Gray Owl handed the card back.

And smiled.

A trooper brought more buffalo chips to fling on the fire. Gray Owl's reticence seemed to melt in the heat of a fascination with Magee. "The shamans of my people would honor you."

"Shamans?" Magee didn't know the term. "Do you mean there are Indians who practice hocus-pocus?"

Gray Owl didn't know hocus-pocus. "Magic? Yes. They have strong medicine. I have seen them change white feathers to white stones. I have seen a shaman's body travel invisibly from one tipi to another, fifty steps away."

Magee screwed up his face. "Tunnel," he announced. "They got to be using a tunnel somehow —"

"And even chop a man's head off and put it back. Among the Cheyenne who work miracles, you would be a great man. Honored. Feared."

Magee cast a speculative eye on his deck. Charles said to him, "Keep that in mind if you ever need to save your hair."

During the week spent at Harker reprovisioning and repairing horse gear, Charles daily expected — wished, anyway — that the mail would bring a letter from Willa. None came. He started two of them himself, disliked the apologetic tone that crept in and tore them up. He dispatched a note to Brigadier Duncan instead, enclosing an eagle feather for little Gus.

The detachment rode out again. The warrior societies kept roving, attacking. The war spirit on the Plains burned as hot as the July sun.

Gray Owl talked to Charles now. Even smiled once in a while. They got along. The tracker was expert, far superior to Big Arm, and followed orders without question. Still, Charles wasn't any closer to the secret of Gray Owl's abandonment of his people. Until he understood that, he couldn't confidently manage or entirely trust the Cheyenne.

Three wandering Rees crossed their line of march. The bad-tempered trio complained about a new whiskey ranch that had opened up half a day's ride south. The proprietors, half-breed brothers, sold guns and unbranded whiskey. One of the Rees had nearly died from too much of the whiskey.

Charles decided the story was true, so the detachment veered away southward. Whiskey ranchers were simply saloons out in the wilderness, set up by unscrupulous men to make a profit on arming the Indians and getting them drunk. The soldiers found the ranch amid some sand hills, overran it by firing a few rounds and took the owners into custody without difficulty.

The firearms the half-breeds sold from their place of business — perhaps it had been a homestead once — were rusty, short-barrel, big-bore Hawkens, from that family's works in St. Louis. From the condition of the pieces, Charles guessed they might date from the early manufacturing runs of the 1820s. The whiskey for sale was a dark brown fluid, probably grain alcohol laced with red pepper, tobacco juice, and similar hellish ingredients. Even a pilgrim dying of thirst in a desert would think twice about drinking it.

The two ratty traders also sold the favors of a sad, pudgy Comanche woman, who told Gray Owl she'd been abducted from her husband's lodge in Texas.

When Charles said he intended to send the traders back to Fort Harker and let the Indian Bureau deal with them, the older brother suddenly burst out with a harangue about his fear of jails. Abruptly, he thrust his right hand under his coat. Charles put a bullet through each of his legs before the hand reappeared.

Magee knelt, gingerly lifted the man's lapel, and pried something from the limp fingers; the man had fainted. Magee held up a roll of bank notes.

Charles examined them. "A bribe. With Confederate bills, the damn fool." He flung the paper money in the air. The prairie wind shot it upward and whirled it in clouds of worthless wealth. His eye on the bleeding man, he said, "You can never be sure of what a man's carrying under his coat."

Later that night, upset, Wallis whispered to Magee: "He didn't have to shoot that there trader."

"Yes he did," Magee said, not excusing it, just acknowledging it.

Charles released the woman and sent the brothers back to Harker guarded by a two-man detail. The soldiers burned down the whiskey ranch buildings on July 28, the same day the Army arrested George A. Custer for desertion of duty at Fort Wallace.

The war fires on the Southern Plains spread, and ignited the north, too. On August 1, in a hayfield near Fort C. F. Smith on the Bozeman's Trail, thirty-two soldiers and civilians successfully fought off an attack by several hundred Cheyennes. Next day, in a separate incident later called the "Wagon Box Fight," a small group from Fort Phil Kearny drove off a band of Sioux under Red Cloud.

With understandable pride, the Army soon exaggerated the number of Cheyenne attackers to eight hundred, the number of Sioux to a thousand. The incidents inspired a new confidence. The Plains tribes were not invincible. They'd only seemed invincible because rule-book soldiers couldn't adjust to the Indian style of guerrilla war. When the tribes had to stand and face concentrated Army fire power, they were annihilated.

Back at Fort Harker once more, Charles heard all this and cursed his bad luck at being in the wrong outfit at the wrong time.

The day of the Hayfield Fight turned out to be a day of even greater significance for the Tenth. Captain Armes and thirty-two men of F Company had chased some Cheyennes up the Saline, caught them, then had to shoot their way out in a fifteen-mile running fight. Bill Christy, a popular little man who'd once farmed in Pennsylvania, took a fatal round in the head. Lovetta Barnes snipped up a large cloth dyed black, the old man passed out the strips, and each officer and enlisted man in C Company tied one around his left sleeve. Other companies followed suit. The Tenth mourned the first of its own to fall in combat.

Somewhat better news was that of the impending move of Grierson's headquarters at Fort Riley. He and his men would escape the bigoted General Hoffman at last.

Although the raids on the rail line, the stage road, and isolated homesteads continued, Charles soon saw opportunity slipping away. The Olive Branchers had prevailed in Washington: a peace commission had been formed, and a huge treaty expedition was scheduled for the fall. Once again he prepared to lead his detachment out, hungering for his chance.

"Better come back for this," Barnes said on the morning of the detachment's departure. He gave Charles a handbill printed in circus type on lavender paper.

Charles recalled some remarks of Willa's about a tour. And for a moment he was amused. The type in which Sam Trump's name was set was twice the size of Mr. Shakespeare's. A magnifying glass would have helped him read the line containing Mrs. Parker.

"That is her, ain't it?" the old man asked. "The one you talked about a while back?"

"It is," Charles said, his smile fading.

"Well, you got my permission to bring the detachment in the night before, 'less you're in a jam." Inked on the bottom of the handbill were the words Ft. Harker Nov. 3 — Ellsworth City Nov. 4.

So he rode out that morning with the knowledge that he would see Willa again, and the feeling that he wanted to see her. He wondered what a reunion would be like. Happy? Explosive? Would it give him a worse dose of the pain that had been with him like a toothache ever since he rode away from her in St. Louis?

Come November, he'd certainly find out.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

Randall Gettys's reaction to news of a political organizer in the district was exactly what Madeline anticipated. Fury. He could barely concentrate on the monthly report of profits from his Dixie Store. The report was mailed to an address in Washington, D.C., as were similar reports from all forty-three Dixie Stores now operating in South Carolina.

The firm to which Gettys sent his reports, his orders for goods and twice-yearly bank drafts — the store's enormous profits — was called Mercantile Enterprises. He knew nothing about the people behind it. Whoever the Yankee owners might be, they stayed well hidden. On two occasions they'd communicated instructions through an attorney who signed himself J. Dills, Esq.

Gettys finished the report and glanced at a poorly printed wall calendar bearing the escutcheon of the reorganized Charleston & Savannah Rail-Road. Today was Saturday. He could anticipate a brisk sale of corn whiskey to Captain Jolly and some of the other whites in the district — perhaps even some lively fun should a darkly foolish venture to the Summerton crossroads on this, the recognized day of the week for the white man to enjoy himself. On the bottom of the calendar Gettys had written Des due on Oct. 1. First thing he'd do when his friend was released was tell him about this new outrage, the club for niggers. Meanwhile, he had other correspondence accumulated from the past couple of weeks. There was a pathetic request from a cousin who needed a loan for an eye operation; Gettys tore it up. Two tatty circulars from German-run junk shops in Charleston advertised the finest goods and the complete libraries of leading Carolina families at sacrifice prices. Gettys threw them out.

At the bottom of the pile he found a wallpaper envelope bearing the address of Sitwell Gettys, another cousin. Sitwell was a schoolmaster, and a loyal Democrat, up in York County, perhaps the most ardently Southern part of the state. Sitwell had enclosed a yellowing clipping from the Pulaski, Tenn. Citizen which you may find of interest.

Indeed he did. The brief paragraphs described a white men's social or sporting club formed some months ago in Pulaski by several war veterans. What intrigued Gettys was the fact that the members went roving at night in fantastic costumes that concealed their faces. They visited freedmen considered uppity, claiming to be Confederate dead risen to life, and evidently succeeded in terrifying them.

The club had a curious name. If Randall remembered his schooling in the classics, the word kuklos meant circle, and the name of the organization had obviously been derived from that. He re-read the clipping with mounting excitement, then speared it on a nail he used as a wall spindle. When Des got out of jail, he must be told about the new Kuklux Klan. It offered an amazingly simple solution to their very own problem, anonymity. With Des's approval, he would try to get more details.

The bell clanged. Under dark gray clouds, in air heavy with dampness, Cooper helped Marie-Louise up the dented metal steps of the single passenger car.

He hated going back in the car. The journey down had been bad enough. Half the car's seats were gone, and every window glass. The car had been almost empty on its slow chugging journey south to Coosawhatchie Station, but now, from the rear of the car, Cooper saw that every seat was filled with civilian or military passengers.

At the car's head end, standing beneath one of several huge holes in the roof, an immense black woman with a bundle in hand timidly studied the seats. That damn Sickles had made it permissible for her to board a car with white passengers. But not one man rose to offer his seat.

A rumble of thunder said the clouds would soon spill their moisture. With a lurch and a squeal of rusty iron wheels, the locomotive jerked the car forward. Dense green undergrowth, the fecund forest of the Low Country, slid slowly past the open windows, into which butterflies and insects flew.

"Here, lean against this part of the wall," Cooper said to his daughter. "It's cleaner than the rest."

Marie-Louise thanked him with her dark eyes and started to change position. Just then a young man, a civilian with a boyish pale face, curling mustache, and the vivid blue eyes and light hair of a German or Scandinavian, vacated his seat. He gestured for the black woman to take it.

Over the squealing of the wheels Cooper heard other passengers mutter. The Negress shook her head. The young man smiled and gestured again, urging her. Clutching her bundle, the woman hesitantly approached the seat. The man sitting beside the window immediately vacated it. The timid black woman sat down.

The man who had left gave the younger man a glare. Another passenger across the aisle reached for a knife in his belt. His stringy wife restrained his hand. The young civilian saluted the couple with a mocking tilt of his hat and walked to the front end of the car, crossing his arms and leaning there, showing no sign of regret over his act of courtesy.

As the young man settled himself, he noticed Marie-Louise at the other end of the car. Cooper saw color rush to his daughter's cheeks. Then he saw the immediate interest on the face of the young civilian.

A thunderclap. Hard rain began to fall through the holes in the roof. "Here, stand closer," Cooper said, opening the umbrella he'd brought along for such an emergency.

With most of the passengers getting soaked, the train of the Charleston & Savannah line labored northward. Cooper stared at the back of the black woman's head. He was outraged. What next, then? Mixed marriage? Sickles and the Radicals were intent on destroying Southern civilization.

He didn't forget the young civilian. Nor did Marie-Louise, though for entirely different reasons.

33

It was the season of changes. The prairie grass yellowed, and leaves of the elm and persimmon trees began to flame with color.

There were changes in command. Johnson, through General Grant, ordered Generals Hancock and Sheridan to exchange posts. Hancock was being disciplined for his adventure on the Pawnee Fork, Sheridan for his too-strict enforcement of Reconstruction in the Fifth Military District in New Orleans; he was a favorite of the Radicals, but of few others in Washington.

Sheridan came to the Plains for a swift inspection, though he was due for extended leave and wouldn't assume full command until sometime in late winter. Charles knew a few things about the Yankee, Academy class of '53. He was small, Irish, ceaselessly and inventively foulmouthed. He was accustomed to waging war and whining. Charles wondered how the command change would fit with this autumn's peace initiative, what many in the Army sneered at as "the Quaker Policy."

There were changes in the fates of great enterprises. It was clear that the Union Pacific in Nebraska would reach the one hundredth meridian first, probably in October. The U.P.E.D. had lost the contest, and Charles heard that as many as twelve hundred might be put out of work. This didn't include the gun-happy security men of J. O. Hartree, some of whom rode every passenger train. Charles also heard the line might change its name to something more individual. Kansas Pacific was mentioned.

There were fundamental changes in the proud but strife-torn Seventh Cavalry. Custer was remanded to Leavenworth, and was there facing court-martial on charges preferred by one of his disgruntled captains, Bob West, and his own commandant, A. J. Smith. The charges were numerous, but the serious ones were the abandonment of his command at Fort Wallace, the dash east to find Libbie, and shooting the deserters. Charles heard that the Boy General was confident of the outcome and talked a lot about his deeply religious nature. Charles was cynical; when caught, scoundrels often mantled themselves in the flag or proclaimed their Christian conversion.

It was, most of all, a season fraught with the possibility of change for the Plains Army. They were held in confined patrol duty while the great Peace Commission, which had already failed to achieve even one successful meeting with the Northern Sioux, turned south through autumnal Kansas to try again with the Southern tribes.

The sky was the color of blued metal the day the cavalcade left Harker. Drums and fifes played one hundred fifty troopers of the Seventh off the post to the melody of their signature march, "Garry Owen." A detachment of infantry followed, then Battery B of the Fourth Artillery, hauling two of the new Gatling guns. Charles wondered if a Gatling really could fire one hundred fifty rounds a minute from its ten hopper-fed revolving barrels. Ike Barnes said Gatlings overheated quickly, and jammed. The Seventh had not tested a Gatling; Custer called them worthless toys, and A. J. Smith refused to authorize ammunition for test firing, afraid the War Department would dock his pay for it.

High-wheeled canvas-topped Army ambulances conveyed the Commissioners and their retinue of civilians. The commission numbered seven: Senator J. B. Henderson of Missouri who had sponsored the bill establishing it; Indian Affairs Commissioner N. G. Taylor; Colonel Sam Tappan, the first Army man to fight vigorously for a Sand Creek investigation; General John Sanborn, one of the authors of the Little Arkansas Treaty; fastidious General Alfred Terry, in command of the Department of the Dakotas; and General C. C. Augur, Department of the Platte, who had replaced Sherman after the latter made some intemperate criticisms of the commission and got yanked to Washington to answer to Grant. The man in charge was General William Harney, a massive white-bearded soldier with a considerable reputation as an Indian fighter. Certainly, a fine, martial lot to be responsible for damping fires on the Plains, Charles thought as he watched the caravan depart southward toward Fort Lamed.

Governor Crawford was with the expedition, and Senator Ross as well. Eleven reporters and a photographer trailed along in the ambulances and supply wagons, which numbered sixty-five. The wagons were loaded with crates of trade goods, including knives and glass beads, surplus Army dress uniforms, campaign hats, and boots, and thirty-four hundred old bugles — a brilliantly stupid inspiration of General Sanborn's.

The wagons carried less pacific gifts as well: barrels of black powder; boxes of trade rifles, percussion caps, paper cartridges. Civilians and Army men were already at odds over distributing these presents. Olive Branchers said they would only arm the tribes for more war. Others, notably General Terry, said no present was more meaningful or necessary to nomadic people who hunted their food. It was the classic debate, which Charles had heard before, and of which he was contemptuous. The only sure instrument of peace was a gun in the hands of a U.S. soldier.

He watched the caravan disappear, wondering what kind of insolent Indians they would confront. Bands of Cheyenne military society men were still roaming Kansas, destroying the stage stations and attacking trains and work crews. Charles didn't doubt Scar and his friends were among them. Who would be left to lie to the Commissioners, saying that their few voices spoke for hundreds of others?

His name was Stone Dreamer. He was frail; eighty winters. All his teeth were gone, and his hair resembled a few thin strands of gray wool. Yet he had proud eyes, and his wits hadn't deserted him, as old men's wits so often did.

He was called Stone Dreamer because of his youthful vision-seeking. When he went apart, fasting and praying to the One Who Made All Things, his eyes blurred briefly, and then the various-sized stones on the ground rose into the air, hovered before him, and spoke in turn about deep, important matters.

Stones, like so many natural objects, were holy to the Cheyennes. Stones symbolized permanence, the unchanging verities of life, the everlasting earth, and the One who shaped it from nothing. Stone Dreamer's vision taught him that, compared to these things, the ambitions, loves, hatreds of a mortal were blades of grass tossed by a windstorm. They were as nothing.

When he returned from the wilderness, he told the council of his vision. The elders were impressed. Here was a young man clearly meant for a special life. He was instructed to become a Bowstring, a member of the society of the brave, the pure, and the celibate, who could be equally comfortable slaying enemies in battle or philosophizing on issues of peace and tribal life.

So he joined and rose through the ranks. Bowstring, Bowstring Society leader, village chief when he grew too old for fighting, peace chief when he grew older still. In October of 1867, he put up his tipi with two hundred fifty others sheltering about fifteen hundred Cheyennes at the western end of the natural basin of the Medicine Lodge Valley. This was' three days' ride from the sun-dance ground to be used by the great caravan of white chiefs with guns who were moving down from the north to make peace with the five Southern tribes.

About three thousand Comanches, Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches and Arapahoes encamped within twenty miles of the treaty site. They were eager for the gifts of soap and brass bills, tin cups and iron pans, blankets and calico, as well as the weapons described to them by Murphy, the Indian superintendent, who had ranged lower Kansas ahead of the great caravan, urging the tribes to come in. The Cheyennes would not go as close as the other tribes because they had certain memories uniquely their own. Chivington. Sand Creek. The Pawnee Fork.

The peace parley began at the site not far above the demarcation line between Kansas and the Indian Territory. A special emissary rode all the way to the Cheyenne encampment to ask that they, too, meet with the white chiefs. In due course, all the elders were consulted. "What do you think, Stone Dreamer?" he was asked.

"We should go," he said. "But not for the gifts. We should go because it is folly to wage a war that cannot be won. The white men are too many. We are too few. If we do not live in harmony with them, they will trample us to nothing."

He hated to say such bitter words, but he believed them. A renegade whiskey peddler, Glyn, had once showed Stone Dreamer a picture of a white man's town; it was an engraving of Fifth Avenue in New York, from Leslie's, though Stone Dreamer didn't know any of those specifics. He merely covered his mouth and popped his eyes at the inexpressible wonders he saw on the page.

He saw rows of solid structures he presumed were forts, lining both sides of a broad way. Along this way, scores of horse-drawn vehicles traveled in both directions, surrounded by hundreds of people on foot. This was but one tiny part of one white man's village, the trader said, and there were hundreds of such villages.

So Stone Dreamer, who wanted to pass his final winters sensibly, at peace, spoke for accommodation. Some others, among them his friend the peace chief Black Kettle, agreed. Other war chiefs including the unquestionably brave Roman Nose did not. Nor for the most part did the younger men, especially those rising to leadership in the soldier societies. When Stone Dreamer considered the headstrong behavior of this group, he sadly concluded that age no longer generated respect, and traditional tribal discipline was breaking down. One of the most feared and admired young men, also undeniably brave but needlessly cruel in Stone Dreamer's opinion, ranted and swore that he'd never submit to the white chiefs while he could draw breath.

These words of Man-Ready-for-War carried special weight, for it was almost certain that he would be chosen a Dog-String Wearer next spring at the annual reorganization of his society. The Dog-String was a wide hide sash, about nine feet long and decorated with paint, quills, and eagle feathers. Four Dog Society men were awarded the sash each year. Those so honored for bravery wore the sash in battle, slipping it over the head by means of a long center slit.

The bottom of the Dog-String bore either a red-painted wood peg or a shorter slit to accommodate the point of a lance. If a battle went badly, it was the privilege of the Dog-Strings to peg or pin their sashes to the ground, signaling their intent to stand and give their lives, so the others might escape. A Dog-String Wearer's death was special, heroic, and was described in song and tale long after his bones went to dust and blew away.

Man-Ready-for-War and young men like him spoke more persuasively than old men like Stone Dreamer. So the Cheyennes remained apart in the valley of the Medicine Lodge, while other great Indian chiefs — frail Satank, who proudly wore a medal graven with the head of James Buchanan; bearlike Santana, another feared Kiowa, who favored a U.S. Artillery officer's coat — led their deputations to the conference ground, listened to the soothing words of the white chiefs, made their marks on a treaty paper that gave away still more of their tribal land, and then, rewarded, reveled in the distribution of the trade goods and guns.

Still the Cheyennes remained apart, though contrary pressure began to grow because of the gifts. Man-Ready-for-War sneered at the idea of a birthright sold for a few bolts of cheap cloth or pistols he had heard were defective. Sadly, Stone Dreamer decided that his wish to live out his last winters peaceably was to be denied.

The shadows of October lengthened and grew cooler. Then, almost on the day when the white chiefs were to pull down their great canvas marquees and ride away, a last emissary came riding among the heavily armed Cheyennes, bringing a last plea for them to come in. Stone Dreamer argued for it almost all of one night. Finally, about four hundred who were willing to face the scorn and wrath of the rest agreed to go in, since about fifteen hundred Arapahoes were also going. Stone Dreamer took heart.

He rode to the conference ground as part of a mounted band, careful to stay near his wise and good friend Black Kettle, and away from a party of Dog Society men who decided to go at the last minute. For what purpose Stone Dreamer wasn't sure, unless it was to replenish their arms or, more likely, make trouble. At one point some of these heavily armed Dog Soldiers rode near him, and he overheard jocular talk of a fierce demonstration for the whites.

Stone Dreamer wore his finest tribal raiment, while Black Kettle wore a long blue robe and the tall hat of a U.S. dragoon. This was not so offensive, in Stone Dreamer's view, as the Army coats some of the Dog men wore in lieu of traditional shirts. The plundered coats bore holes torn by lead balls or lance points that had killed the original wearers. Some of the young men made it even worse by pinning on stolen medals, or hanging Christian crosses around their necks.

In the failing light, the pale and melancholy light of a dying day, the Cheyennes reached the creek and saw on the far side the marquees and Army tents, the wagons and horses and massed blue uniforms of the Commission party. The Dog Soldiers immediately began to wave lances and rifles, howl and hoot and sing. Several charged straight across the creek in a threatening way. The white-bearded chief in charge of the Commission held up his hand to signal restraint to his men. Stone Dreamer saw many Army rifles gleaming as the howling braves splashed through the creek. At the last moment they checked, and rocked with laughter at the expense of the anxious whites.

The white-bearded general lowered his arm. There beneath the marquee, he had not changed his position even slightly during the charge. A brave warrior, Stone Dreamer decided.

After an evening's feast the Cheyennes encamped near the much larger band of Arapahoes. In the morning the Cheyenne and Arapahoe chiefs seated themselves in a wide semicircle just in front of the Commission's main marquee. Stone Dreamer and his fellow chiefs faced the white chiefs, who were attended by strange men scribbling on tablets, and surrounded by a much larger body of soldiers whose brass buttons winked as brightly as their carbines and revolvers.

Through an interpreter the white chiefs presented their message: a very reasonable message, Stone Dreamer thought:

"We have among us wicked men who wish to profit by the calamities of both sides, and these bad men continually seek war. We now think these bad men told wicked lies to General Hancock last spring."

The smooth words of the white chiefs held bitter truths:

"Perhaps some of your young braves with more blood than brains will oppose your making peace with us. Such men must be cast away. Their councils are death. A war long continued will only end in the total destruction of the Indian because his numbers are less."

Stone Dreamer remembered the picture of the white village, which to this day burned in his nightmares, and he nodded to Black Kettle, who nodded back.

The white chiefs wisely addressed the most galling issue:

"As long as the buffalo ranges on the Plains, we are willing that you should hunt him provided you keep the treaties made at the Little Arkansas. But the herds of buffalo are becoming fewer and thinner every year ..."

Angered, Stone Dreamer interrupted. "I ask the white chiefs who is to blame for that? Our young men say the buffalo are now hunted for sport, not merely to sustain life. You do not need the buffalo to sustain life, as we do. What are we to do if you rob us of them?"

The white chiefs had a saddening answer:

"In lieu of buffalo you must have herds of oxen, flocks of sheep, droves of hogs, like the white man."

Buffalo Chief of the Cheyennes arose with a hot reply:

"We are not farmers. We spring from the prairie. We live by it. You think that you are doing a great deal for us by giving presents, yet I say if you gave us all the goods you could give, we would still prefer our own life, to live as free as we have always done."

And when the white chiefs raised the issue of raids on homesteads and the rail line, Little Raven of the Arapahoe was prepared.

"It is you who should instruct your young men at the forts as to their duty. They are mostly children. You must stop them from running wild. That provokes war."

The blue-coated soldiers disliked the speech, and some made menacing motions with their weapons. The white chiefs calmed them, and as the day wore on the pugnacity of the Indians wore away, while the hunger for the gifts and guns increased. To tempt them, the white chiefs put forth their terms:

The Arapahoes and the Cheyennes must withdraw from Kansas, and settle with the other three Southern tribes on a special reserve of forty-eight thousand square miles to be set aside in the Indian Territory. On this land, with special Indian agents to mediate for them, the five tribes would live. Buildings would be put up to house a doctor, an agriculturist, a miller, a school­teacher, a blacksmith, and any other white persons necessary for converting a race of nomads to farmers. There would be an annual dole from the White Father besides.

In return, the Indians must promise to stop their war on the wagon and rail traffic on the Santa Fe, Smoky Hill, and Platte River routes. They must promise to stay out of Kansas, although they would be permitted to hunt buffalo on open land below the Arkansas for as long as the herds lasted. When hunting, they were never to venture nearer than ten miles to any road or fort.

Again Stone Dreamer sighed. How could so few agree to such sweeping terms on behalf of so many? Many important chiefs — Tall Bull, Medicine Arrows, Big Head, Roman Nose — and hundreds of the People were not here.

Yet ultimately it was done, agreed to by a few chiefs who mingled their regret with a sad realism. They touched the pen to a document never read and translated for them.

Not all of the signers of the treaty paper were cheerful about it. Bull Bear roared. "Well, as you are so earnest, so shall I be." Instead of merely touching the pen, he drove it down on the document so hard the point snapped.

The day-long conference was nearly over, and Stone Dreamer was starting to hear an excited buzzing about the gifts. Suddenly, the white chief Terry leaped up and pointed.

A dust trail in the west signaled a rider speeding to the encampment beside the creek. Soon they saw him. A lone man, at the gallop. Stone Dreamer's heart fell. He recognized Man-Ready-for-War.

He came in full regalia, in one hand his eight-foot lance with its glittering head of trade steel, in the other his snake rattle with clicking antelope dewclaws. He had painted his face with red pigment mixed with buffalo fat, leaving only the long hooking scar uncolored.

While blue-garbed soldiers raised their weapons around the central marquee, Scar leaped from his pony and marched to the treaty table. Stone Dreamer clasped his hands. His hair blew like a gray curtain across his anxious eyes. The sunset wind seemed cold as deep winter.

Scar gazed with contempt at the other men from his society, who huddled together, shame-faced. Then he flung a look at the seated Cheyenne chiefs. It was clear what he thought of them.

He surveyed the spread-out parchments, the assortment of fine quills and silver inkstands. Through the interpreter, he spoke swiftly and with passion:

"This paper is the work of devils who betray the People. What good is the white man's promise? The only promise he keeps is the promise to steal our land. And what good are the marks of toothless old weaklings such as those seated here? How can they presume to give away land the Spirit gave to all the People? They can't, and we Dog Men won't allow it. We will carry on the war until all of you white devils and your white women and your white infants are dead."

The commissioners leaped up and exclaimed. Scar laughed, exuberant over the reaction. Before they could stop him, he shot the tip of his lance beneath the treaty table and heaved upward.

Parchment flew. Pens dropped. Ink spilled. Someone fired a shot, and an elderly Arapahoe cringed. Laughing heartily, Man-Ready-for-War walked back to his pony with a slow, haughty stride. He scrambled up, flung the commissioners another look scorning them for lacking the courage to retaliate, and rode away into the nimbus of light on the western hills.

Black Kettle brought both hands over his face, shamed and angry. Stone Dreamer felt tears he didn't bother to hide. Their brother chiefs looked unhappy, anxious. One of the white chiefs, Taylor, snarled at the men scribbling on tablets.

"Strike that speech from your notes," he told them. "Any man whose paper prints it will no longer have credentials west of the Mississippi. This is a successful conference. Report it that way."

It was a season of changes. The Southern Cheyennes withdrew to their villages on the Cimarron, there to winter peacefully with their trade goods and guns while awaiting removal to their new reservation. Charles heard about Scar's oration when the contingent of the Seventh returned to Fort Harker. He also heard that a mere four hundred or five hundred Cheyennes had represented three thousand members of the tribe. That almost amounted to no representation. "Well," he said, tiny glints showing in his eyes, bright like the point of a polished knife. His mouth lifted slightly at the corners.

All the handbills for the forthcoming visit of Trump's players showed a change. The performance at Fort Harker had been stricken out.

"I hear your lady friend's responsible," Barnes told Charles. "She found out the brass wouldn't let any colored boys into the same hall with whites. Our men, y'understand. Your friend sent a letter saying that she and Trump had talked it over, and the Army at Fort Harker could go fry. You want to see her, you'll have to traipse on over to Ellsworth."

Just like Willa, he thought. Crusading was an unchangeable part of her nature. It was one reason, though not the main reason, that he continually warned himself to stay away from her. Then he would remember the silver-gold glint of her hair, and her vivid merry eyes, and the feel of her in his arms —

He knew he'd traipse to Ellsworth, no matter what the consequences.

34

Trump's players performed in Frank's Hall, City of Kansas, then ferried over the river to repeat their show at the Leavenworth post hall the following night. The troupe consisted of Sam, Willa, Tim Trueblood, and a stout character actress, Miss Suplee. A large trunk held their few simple props and costume pieces. Willa had argued Sam out of such encumbrances as a stock of "genuine" diamond rings, the sort of trinket given away on Saturday night by many touring companies.

Brigadier Duncan attended the Shakespearean evening. He'd invited Willa to stay with Maureen until her train left for Fort Riley the next afternoon at five. "I imagine you're anxious to see my grand-nephew," he said. Willa said she was.

"Why, he's grown remarkably," she said next day. Duncan had just returned for the noon meal, instead of taking it in the officers' mess. Little Gus kept scrambling off his chair. Duncan ordered him back, good-natured but firm about it.

"He'll be three come the end of this year." The brigadier spooned into the hot turtle soup Maureen had prepared. The boy, sturdy and towheaded, jumped off his chair and seized Willa's hand.

"She's all thumbs," he said to Duncan, and broke into a shrieking laugh. "All thumbs, all thumbs! Thumbs on her head, thumbs on her arms." He was red-faced, convulsed.

"What is he talking about, Willa?"

"After you left this morning, I brought a bowl of corn-meal mush to the table. I was careless and dropped the bowl. It cracked. I was annoyed with myself and said I was all thumbs. He sees the picture in his imagination."

"All thumbs," Gus cried, jumping up and down until Duncan shushed him. The boy obeyed but he couldn't be repressed for long. He tugged her hand again. "Another walk. Aunt Willa?"

She noticed Duncan's keen look, turned pink. "After your nap, but not until."

Maureen scooped him up and carried him to bed. His legs kicked and his arms waved in uninhibited merriment. "All thumbs!" He was giggling as the door closed.

Duncan said, "Aunt Willa." He tilted his head with an approving smile.

"I didn't prompt him. It was his idea."

Over the noise of a troop of mounted men riding by on the parade ground, Duncan said, "You'd like to be more than his aunt. That would be good for him. And for his father."

"Well —" A bit nervous about it, she shrugged. "I would. But I'm not sure how Charles would feel. He's a wonderful man, but there's a strange, distant streak in him."

"The war." Willa gazed at the brigadier, her pale eyes as quizzical as his had been a few moments ago. "The war did that to a lot of soldiers. On top of it, Charles lived through the massacre of a man who befriended him."

"I understand. I just don't know how long someone can use the past to excuse present behavior."

Duncan frowned. "Until the patience of others is exhausted, I suppose. Patience, and affection too."

She concentrated on folding her napkin. "Never the latter. But the former — I don't know. My patience grows very thin sometimes. I refuse to deny everything I believe just to please Charles."

"Charles is strong, like you. Right or wrong, he won't abandon this vendetta against the Indians."

"And I hate it. I hate it for what it is, and for what it does to him." She paused. "I'm almost afraid to see him at Ellsworth."

The old soldier reached out and closed his thick-knuckled hand over hers. She turned away, overcome with embarrassing tears. The squeeze of his powerful fingers said he understood her fear. His eyes said she had some cause for it.

Charles's detachment came in the night before the performance. He found Ike Barnes with Floyd Hook, discussing details of a C Company club modeled after the International Order of Good Templars, a society to promote temperance. There were chapters at many Western posts. As the old man explained, the epidemic Army problem of drunkenness hadn't spread into his troop, and the club would help insure that it wouldn't. First Sergeant Star Eyes Williams would be responsible for calling the initial meeting.

Tense about seeing Willa again, yet eager too, Charles shaved and spruced up in a clean uniform with big yellow bandanna and regulation hat. Since he'd stabled Satan to rest him, he took another company horse for the five-mile ride along the north bank of the Smoky Hill to what was officially called the Addition to Ellsworth. As he rode, he whistled the music Willa had written out. His Carolina music, he called it.

Much of the original site platted by the Ellsworth Town Company had been destroyed in June when the normally placid Smoky Hill overflowed its banks and washed away flimsy cottages and stores. Scarcely had they disappeared when the town promoters bought new land, on higher ground to the northwest. They filed a new plat in Sauna to create the Addition, which showed every sign of becoming the real town of Ellsworth. It already had its own depot to supplement the one at Fort Harker; the first passenger train had rolled in from the east July 1.

The town also had cattle pens and chutes, testifying to the developers' faith that Ellsworth could become a shipping point for the trail herds pushing up Chisholm's Trail from Texas. Ellsworth boosters derided Abilene, about sixty miles east, and its promoter, Joe McCoy, even though McCoy had received his first big herd in September.

The November evening was clear and bitter. Charles was bundled in his thigh-length double-breasted buffalo coat. Weaving through wagon and horse traffic on the Addition's rutted main street, he saw half a dozen wagons approaching in a line. Red-stained tarpaulins mounded over the bed of each. Broad swipes of dried blood marked the wagon sides. Riding ahead of the wagons was a young man Charles recognized. The horseman next to the young man recognized Charles.

"Howdy. You're Main. We met at the Golden Rule House."

Charles wasn't accustomed to hearing his right name, but he didn't let on. "I remember. You're Griffenstein." He peeled off his gauntlet and leaned over to shake hands.

"This here's my boss, Mr. Cody."

Charles shook hands with the young man too. "Griffenstein said you wouldn't stay in the hotel business. Are you two hunters for the railroad?" He'd recognized the blood smell pervading the air.

Cody said, "For Goddard Brothers, the railroad's meat contractor. They pay five hundred a month, and me and my boys guarantee them all the buffalo meat they need to feed their crews. We knock 'em down fast, which makes it a profitable trade."

Charles studied the wagons, their reeking cargoes silhouetted against twilight stars in a rosy sky shading up to deep blue. Dutch Henry Griffenstein was amused by something. "You don't know the meanin' of fast till you watch Buffalo Bill work. He knocks down eleven, twelve bison in the time it takes most of us to load a Winchester."

"Mighty boring, though," Cody said. "Wouldn't mind scouting again. We'd better hustle, boys. It's almost dark."

He waved the wagons ahead and rode on. Dutch Henry grinned inside his huge chest-length beard. "You ever get tired of soldiering, Main, look us up. We can always use another good shot."

After Dutch Henry trotted off, Charles looked at both sides of the street, to see if there was anyone who might have overheard his name.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors are melted into air, into thin air."

With flamboyant gestures, Sam Trump boomed Prospero's farewell to the audience. This portion had been purloined from the end of the Act IV masque. Trump was confident no one would detect the theft.

A half circle of chimneyed lamps lit the improvised stage. Blankets hung on rope served as side curtains. The theater was the dining-room of the unfinished Drovertown Hotel, a room heavy with the smell of new pine lumber.

Charles had arrived too late for a seat on the benches brought in for the evening. He stood at the back, among some other bachelor officers from the fort. Seated in front of him were officers, their wives, and plainly dressed townspeople, but not a single black soldier.

Over the heads of the audience, Willa spied him only moments after he came in. She immediately fumbled one of Juliet's lines from the balcony scene. She was playing against Trump's giggle-inducing Romeo. Not only was Trump paunchy and too old, but he slapped his heart with both hands at any reference pertaining to romance.

The audience, however, starved for entertainment, clearly loved the Shakespearean excerpts, and listened attentively for two hours. During that time only one tipsy teamster had to be removed.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on ... and our little life is ended with a sleep." With but a breath between, he jumped to the epilogue of The Tempest, squeezing every syllable of the text for its juice. "... or else my project fails, which was to please ..." Charles fidgeted from foot to foot, while the actor fairly begged the audience for applause. "As you from crimes would pardoned be ... let your indulgence set me free."

Trump's last line was spoken as he swooped into a low bow, anticipating his ovation. He got it. Willa, Trueblood, and the stocky character woman dashed from behind the blankets. All linked hands and bowed. Ike Barnes's wife jumped up and yelled, "Bravo, bravo," which prompted Trump to step forward for a solo bow. He knocked over a lamp. A soldier in the front row stamped on the leaking oil as it flamed, preventing a disaster. Trump paid no attention.

Each time Willa bowed, her eyes remained on Charles. He held his hands high so she could see him clapping. Lord, how pretty she was, and how he warmed at the sight of her. For a moment he felt peaceful; free of spite, the past — all his pain.

As the audience broke up, he joined others moving forward to congratulate the company. "Dear boy," Trump cried, spying Charles and lunging out to have his hand shaken. "How splendid to have you here. I'm glad you saw us this evening. This tour is a triumph. I'm sure they're already hearing of it in the East. When they send for us, I'll have to cancel the rest of the itinerary." And off he went to another admirer.

Charles strode to Willa, took hold of her arms, and kissed her forehead. "You were wonderful."

She slipped a hand behind his back and hugged him. "And you're very bad for my acting. Will you take me out of here?"

"Right now," he said, clasping her hand.

"I'd like to walk," she said. He reminded her about the cold. "I have an old wool coat, very heavy, and a muff."

So they set out, walking away from the unfinished two-story Drovertown Hotel. Suddenly they were facing a rolling black prairie with white and yellow stars sparkling above it.

"Don't you want supper?" he asked. "Aren't you starved after all that work?"

"Later. I want to hear about you." She fairly blushed. "Are you all right?"

"I'm all right." She linked arms with him. He commended her for refusing to play Fort Harker. "Sam told me the tour's been a triumph. You can tell me the truth."

She laughed. "Fort Riley was fair. The audience was off somehow, or we were. I caught Sam trying to sneak to the sutler's just before curtain."

"Did you play Leavenworth?"

"Yes. The audience there was fine."

"Did you have a chance to see my boy?"

"I did. He's wonderful, Charles. Very smart. The brigadier said he'd trained himself with the chamber pot before he was eighteen months old." Charles cleared his throat. She laughed a second time. "Oh, that's right, proper females don't mention such things to gentlemen. The looseness of my profession is showing again."

Amused, he said, "I knew about the chamber pot."

"I should have guessed. The brigadier did say it's difficult for him to handle Gus, because he adores the boy, and spoils him even though he doesn't intend it. He shows him your photograph constantly. Gus knows who you are. He missed you." Another squeeze of his arm. "I miss you, too. Buy me supper and ply me with a little wine and I'll show you how much."

She turned, directly in his path. She flung up an arm, hand around his neck, and pulled him into a kiss. He put both arms around her waist and felt her cold mouth warm quickly. They held one another in silence. Then something in Charles began to push away, distancing him from her.

"Oh, I have missed you. I love you, Charles. I can't help it." She didn't pause, the conventional signal that she expected him to say it in reply. She didn't want to push him. "Perhaps you'll get to see more of Gus now. There seems to be peace on the Plains."

They resumed their walk, going up a small round hill on crackling frost-killed grass. At the summit they stopped, awed by the gigantic canopy of stars.

At length he answered her. "It's always peaceful in the winter."

"Yes. But what I mean is, now there's the Medicine Lodge Treaty. That should promote —"

"Willa, let's not start. You know that the subject of Indians always causes a muss between us." Did he want that? Was that why he put a certain testiness into his tone?

She heard it; it irked her. "Why should we not discuss it, Charles? It's a meaningful treaty."

"Come on. No treaty is meaningful, and Medicine Lodge was worse because only a few chiefs touched the pen. Did you read the dispatches Mr. Stanley wrote for the New York Tribune? The stupid commissioners didn't even read the entire treaty to Black Kettle and the rest. The chiefs wanted to accommodate the commissioners, they wanted the goods and guns, so they signed." By this point she'd separated her arm from his. "As soon as they realize what they gave away, they'll repudiate the treaty. If the Dog Society men don't kill them first."

"And that's what you want, I suppose?" She faced him, her face dim in the starlight. Her breath was a white cloud that spread and disappeared.

"I want the men who killed my friends. I wish you wouldn't bring it up."

"I bring it up because I care about you."

"Oh, hell." He pivoted away.

"You want the treaty to fail." She was losing control, something unusual for her; he heard it in the unsteadiness of her voice.

"Willa, I told you what I want. As for the rest of it, you're still on stage. Dreaming! The Cheyennes won't quit until they're penned up or killed. That may not be pretty, that may not please you or your Quaker friends who bleed their hearts out for a bunch of savages they never have to deal with, but that's how it is, and you ought to wake up."

"I'm awake, thank you. I thought you might have changed a little. You won't give the treaty a chance."

"Because that's useless, goddamn it. Henry Stanley said it. General Sherman has been saying it for two years."

"And what all of you prophesy eventually comes true? Why don't you prophesy peace for a change?"

"By God, you're the most blind, unrealistic —"

"You're the one who's blind, Charles. Blind to what you're becoming. Some sort of — of hate-filled creature who lives to kill. I don't want a man like that."

"Don't worry, you haven't got one — even though you chase damn hard."

He was shouting. She cried out, "Bastard!" and struck at him with her open hand. He deflected it and stepped back. He was altogether stunned when he realized that even as she cursed him, she was crying.

He stood like a dolt under the autumn stars, watching her flying figure race back toward the lamps of the Addition. "Willa, wait. It isn't safe for a woman to be by herself —"

"You be quiet!" she yelled over her shoulder. She stopped and faced him. "You don't know how to behave like a decent human being. You drive everyone away. The war did it, Duncan says. The war, the war — I'm sick of the war and I'm sick of you."

She turned and ran on. He heard her weeping. The sound faded slowly, and then he lost her running figure against the black shapes of the flimsy buildings of the new town.

He walked slowly along the side of the Drovertown Hotel to the rail in front where he'd tied his mount. He was lifting his boot to the stirrup when someone lurched out of the heavy shadow. The man had been concealed there, waiting. Charles jumped back, panicky because he'd left his sidearm at the fort. The moment the attacker stepped into the light from a saloon next door, Charles saw the chrysanthemum on his lapel, and smelled the gin.

"You damned, base cad!" Sam Trump's face was blotched by anger. His temples were stained by hair dye that had run. He raised his fist, intending to strike Charles's head. Charles took hold of his forearm and with no trouble kept it away. Trump twisted and struggled.

"Let go, damn you, Main. I'm going to give you what I promised you for hurting that fine young woman."

"I didn't hurt her. We just had an argument."

"You did more than argue. She ran in sobbing. She has iron courage, and I have never seen her so devastated." He tried to lift a knee and kick Charles's groin through the furry overcoat. Charles easily threw him off balance. The actor cried out and landed on his rump.

Trump's breathing was strident. He moved tentatively on the ground, as if he'd twisted something. "It must give you satisfaction to injure persons weaker than yourself. You're no better than those savages you purport to hate. Take yourself out of my sight."

Charles hauled his boot back, ready to kick the old fool. Then reason took hold. He mounted the troop horse and quickly trotted away up the street, shaking with anger and self-loathing. If there had been anything at all left between him and Willa Parker, it was gone now.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

In the autumn dusk, Andy Sherman hurried through the hamlet of Summerton. A soldier, one of the registrars, was hauling down the American flag hung outside the abandoned cabin taken over by the military. Nearby, a corporal chatted with a barefoot white girl winding a strand of her hair round and round her finger. Andy marveled. In some ways, the war might never have happened at all.

In other ways it remained a hard reality. On the dark porch of the store, someone in a rocker watched him go by, following his progress by turning his head. Dying light flashed off the glass ovals of spectacles. Andy could fairly smell the hostility.

After walking a mile more, he turned off the river road onto a narrow track fringed by palmetto and prickly pear. The moon hung above the trees now, a brilliant white circle. A black boy with bad teeth guarded the road with an old squirrel rifle. Andy nodded and started by. The boy barred him with the rifle, sheepishly. "Passwords, Sherman."

Passwords, a secret grip — Andy found it childish and insulting. Unfortunately most of the club members enjoyed such things.

"Liberty," he said. "Lincoln. League."

"God bless General Grant. Pass on, brother."

He entered the cabin after being inspected by Wesley, a bullet-headed black man with a pistol in his belt. Wesley assisted the club's organizer and was suited to the task; he was a bully.

A look of dislike passed between them. Andy slipped to a back bench, noting about twenty others present, young and old. The organizer nodded a greeting from the end of the cabin where he stood before a framed portrait of Lincoln swagged with a piece of dirty bunting.

Nothing about Lyman Klawdell impressed Andy. Not his shabby clothes and jutting teeth, not his whining Yankee voice or tied-down Colt revolver. Klawdell called for a lantern to be blown out, which left a single candle burning on a crate near the portrait. The candle lighted Klawdell's chin and long nose from beneath. His eyes gleamed in the black hollows of the sockets. The eerie effect produced some nervous shivers and grins.

Klawdell rapped a gavel on the crate. "Meeting of the Union League Club, Ashley River District, now in session. Praise God, praise freedom, praise the Republican Party."

"Amen," the listeners responded in unison. Andy remained silent. To be a free man did you have to recite on cue?

"Boys —" If any of the others took Klawdell's word as an insult, Andy saw no sign. "We are approaching a momentous day for South Carolina. I refer to the special election to call the constitutional convention that will set this state on the right path at last. We must have a convention in order to thwart His Accidency, Mr. Johnson" — groans, jeers — "who has proved no friend of the colored man. He continues to work against the Congress as it seeks to guarantee your rights —"

Andy saw bewilderment on many faces, the result of Klawdell's two-dollar words. To impress men, did you have to confuse them?

"— and lately has perpetrated an even greater outrage, suspending the powers of one of your best friends, the Honorable E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War and loyal supporter of our beloved President Lincoln. Johnson wants to keep Stanton from doing his job because he's doing it so well. It's Mr. Stanton who sent the soldiers to protect you. Johnson also wants to test a fine law which the Congress passed to prevent exactly this sort of interference. Do you know what's going to happen to Johnson?''

The men answered, "No." Andy grimaced. Klawdell thumped his gave.

"Your Republican friends are going to twist Johnson's tail. They may even throw him out of office."

That produced a lot of applause and foot-stomping. "All right, settle down," Klawdell snapped. "We have important business here at home too. How many of you boys have gone to Summerton and signed up to vote in favor of the convention?"

Hands were raised, all but Andy's and that of an old man. Klawdell didn't like Andy and singled him out, pointing with the gavel. "Explain yourself, Sherman."

Affronted, Andy leaped to his feet. "I work all day just to stay alive. They won't sign you up at night, which is the only time I've got free."

"Come on, tell the truth," Klawdell said. "That woman who runs Mont Royal won't let you register. She pretends to be a friend of the colored but she isn't. Why don't you speak out and denounce her the way you should?"

"Because she is a friend, and I won't lie about her."

Klawdell licked his lips. "Sherman, some of these boys felt the same way about their masters for a while. Do you know what happened to them?"

"I do." He pointed to Rafe Hicks, a tan youth with a dirty bandage tied around his head. "Some of 'em jumped after dark, and got the hell beat out of them."

"Then take a lesson. Denounce her."

"I will not. You want that, I'm out of this club."

He walked quickly to the door, tight inside. Wesley blocked his way, just itching to pull his pistol. Andy stopped, fisted his hands, and stared Wesley down. In a low voice he said, "You try to stop me, Wesley, you're going to have broken bones. Or worse."

Wesley cursed and started to draw. Klawdell whipped out his revolver and used the butt for a gavel. "All right, all right, everybody calm down. We need your vote more than we need a fight in here, Sherman. If you're willing to register —"

"I am. I just have to find time."

"Then we'll forget about the rest."

Andy gave him the same kind of hard stare he'd given Wesley. Then he returned to his bench. A couple of the men he had to step over to reach his seat leaned far back, afraid that even a touch might anger him. Andy felt some small satisfaction, but bitterness too. The League men were pouring into the South — to help educate the freedmen, they said. Why did that education have to include sowing distrust, even hatred, of good white friends? Andy could never think of Madeline as anything but white.

Klawdell resumed. "The special convention will be a great thing, boys. But it will never be convened unless a majority of South Carolina voters approve. Sherman and Newton have got until November 19 to sign up."

The old man, Newton, said, "But we got to do that in Summerton, Captain. Gettys and his friends, like that Captain Jolly, they say, don't stop in Summerton, nigger. Move right on through."

"Why do you think there are two soldiers at the crossroads, Newton? Not just to sign you up. To make sure no one interferes with you when you do it. You tell Gettys and his pals to lean down and kiss your ass."

As the clapping and laughter burst out, Andy winced again. Somehow the tone here was all wrong. His black friends and neighbors were being treated like children. He almost stood and walked out for good. Only the club's larger purpose, more important than Klawdell's behavior, kept him from it.

Klawdell saw Andy's resentment and took a more moderate tone. "I'll say it again, Sherman — we need you and Newton both. Every vote counts. Sign up. Please."

Well, that was better. "Don't worry. I will."

"Praise God," Klawdell exclaimed. He put his revolver away and grabbed the gavel. "All right, let's hear it." Whack went the gavel. "What's the party for the colored man?"

All but Andy said, "Union Republican."

Whack "Who are your enemies?"

"Johnson. Democrats."

Whack, whack. "Who'd steal away the rights we fought and bled to give you, the rights Abe Lincoln died to give you?"

"Democrats!"

"Now tell me the name of your true friends."

They stomped for each word. "Union — Republicans."

"Who's going to take over this state?" Now Klawdell was shouting. "Who's going to take over this whole country and run it right?"

"Union Republicans! Union Republicans!" The stomping shook the cabin. Andy kept his mouth shut, his hands laced together, his work shoes tight against each other on the floor. He scowled as the others swayed and clapped and filled the cabin with their din. "Union Republicans! Union Republicans!" Some of the men glared at Andy. He glared right back, damned if he'd act like someone's trained dog. He continued to sit straight as a rod, in silent protest.

The next day, about an hour before sunset, Andy appeared at the Summerton crossroads. Walking swiftly, he approached the flag-decorated cabin. The corporal stepped out, shook his hand, and escorted him inside.

Through the window of the Dixie Store, Randall Gettys watched. When Andy reappeared in ten minutes and started for home, looking pleased, Gettys immediately penned a letter to Des in Charleston.

He then wrote his cousin Sitwell, up in York County.

35

Charles, Gray Owl, and the ten-man detachment returned to the field, patrolling the railroad east of Fort Harker. On that segment of the line Indian attacks weren't as frequent as they were between Harker and Fort Hays to the west, but neither were they unknown.

They experienced a spell of unusually hot weather. Warm air shimmered over the plains, creating silver lakes in the distance; lakes that vanished long before a man reached them. On a sunny morning, the soldiers were walking their horses in columns of twos just to the north of a line of low rolling hills. On the other side, parallel with the hills, ran the railroad and the telegraph.

Charles was thankful to be moving again. It helped ease his feelings of sadness and anger about Willa. Except for that, he felt good about things. He had a fine horse; Satan ran strongly, wasn't nervous about gunfire, and had exceptionally good wind. He had ridden the piebald long enough so that horse and man could almost sense one another's thoughts.

He was equally satisfied with his men. He dropped back toward Gray Owl at the rear and inspected them. They all rode competently, and a few, such as Magee, had a real flair for it. Those who'd kept their regulation trousers had reinforced them with canvas patches on the seat and thigh. Brims of straw hats and bills of chasseur kepis shaded their eyes. A bedroll with extra clothing hung over the front of each man's McClellan saddle. The saddle also carried lariat, picket pin, canteen, and a tin plate. A saddle sheath by the right knee held the rifle; at Charles's suggestion, his men had left their generally useless bayonets behind.

They passed him two by two, each with sheath knife on the left hip, holster with pistol butt forward on the right. Only one man had retained a regulation cartridge box on his belt. The rest kept their metal in bandoliers or belts they'd sewn themselves. For former city boys they were a fierce-looking lot; they really did resemble roving bandits ready for any eventuality.

Shem Wallis rode by. Charles heard him say to Corporal Magic Magee, "Lord, it's hot. I can't believe it's November. When we gonna noon?"

"Pretty soon," Magee said. "Here, watch this coin." .

Charles called out to Wallis, "We'll stop there." He pointed to a grove of bare trees some distance ahead and to the left. Since trees usually grew in the damp bottomland, they might find a stream, and cottonwood bark for the horses to forage on.

Charles dropped all the way back beside Gray Owl. The men liked the tracker, but Magee had really taken to him because Gray Owl was always such a fine audience for his sleights. Charles still hadn't learned a thing about his past, especially why he'd abandoned his people. The tracker seemed to be relaxed and in a good mood, so Charles decided to try again.

"Gray Owl, if you're going to track for me, I'd like to know some things about you. Tell me about your family."

The Indian hunched inside his buffalo robe. Despite the heat, no perspiration showed on his lined face. He thought for a while before he answered. "My father was a great chief named Crooked Back. My mother was a white woman he captured. They say she was fair and light-haired. She has been dead a long time."

This surprising information was a wedge. "Any other family?"

"No. Eight winters past, my sister traveled the Hanging Road. Five winters past, my only brother followed. Both were carried off by the same sickness. The one your people brought to us that we had never suffered before."

"Smallpox?"

"Yes." Gray Owl gave Charles a long look, and he felt a stab of guilt. The Indian gazed ahead at the heat devils.

Charles cleared his throat. "What I'd really like to know is why you're willing to track for the Army."

"When I was a young man, I went to seek my vision in order to become a warrior and find the purpose of my life. In the sweat lodge I burned out the poisons of doubt and hate and headstrong selfishness. I painted my face white to purify it and went apart, as seekers must, to a dangerous place. A lonely place, with grass so tall and dry, the smallest spark could ignite a great fire to consume me." .

Charles held his breath. He was getting somewhere.

"Three days and nights I lay hidden in tall grass, crying out for my vision. I ate nothing. I drank nothing. I was rewarded. The Wise One Above, the holy spirit you white men call God, began to speak from the clouds, and from pebbles in a stream, and from a snake passing by. I saw myself hollow and smooth as a dry reed, ready to be filled.

"God moved then. All the grasses bent, each blade pointing north toward the ancient Sacred Mountain. In the empty sky, an eagle appeared. It swooped low over my head and flew west. Then, from the center of the sun, a great owl descended. The owl spoke a while. Then the sun blinded me."

"Did the owl become your helper bird?"

Gray Owl was startled; Charles knew more of the tribe's ways than he'd suspected. "Yes. I keep a great owl's claw with me always." He tapped his medicine bundle, a drawstring bag tied to his belt. "And always, if I ask, a great owl will appear and guide me when I am lost or confused. I learned my purpose from the owl and from the eagle."

"What is your purpose?"

"It was to help the People find the way. To lead them to winter camps and to ceremony grounds for the great summer festivals. To track the buffalo south with the snows and north with the green grass. When I returned from seeking my vision I donned a warrior's regalia, but thereafter always followed my purpose."

"To lead the People. But now you're leading us. Why?"

Gray Owl's face turned stony. "The People strayed so far from the right way that not even God could lead them back. It is time to rest. Shall I search those trees ahead?"

It was as if a curtain had fallen in Trump's theater. Frustrated, Charles nodded. The Cheyenne dug in his moccasins and raced his pony away toward the distant grove.

Ten miles east, a westbound passenger train left the hamlet of Solomon and crossed the line into Saline County. In the freight car, two men polished their guns while two others played cards.

In the second-class passenger car, a young woman on her way to join her husband at Fort Harker gazed through the window at the stark landscape. She'd never been west of the Mississippi before. Her husband was a sergeant recently transferred to the Seventh Cavalry.

In the seat ahead of her, a cavalry officer wearing a silver oak leaf intently studied a book on tactics. At the end of the car the conductor counted ticket stubs. The other passengers talked or dozed, and no one happened to glance toward the south side of the train. There, about a mile from the right-of-way, a line of twenty mounted men started down a low hill and, at the bottom, began to ride rapidly toward the train.

While they waited for Gray Owl, Magee pulled out his piece of practice rope. He handed the rope to another trooper, Private George Jubilee, then crossed his wrists and asked Jubilee to tie him. Jubilee's father, a fugitive slave, had chosen the last name after he found sanctuary in Boston.

"Good and tight," Magee said. Sliding his horse closer, Jubilee concentrated on looping the rope around Magee's wrists several times. He didn't notice the momentary stiffening of Magee's spine, the slight shudder of his forearms, the sudden appearance of veins on the dark brown backs of his fisted hands. Charles saw it from his vantage point, though; he'd seen Magee's escapes and was alert to the trick. Magee was almost undetectably putting tension on the rope while Jubilee finished his loops and tied two knots.

Jubilee sat back on his saddle, smug about his handiwork. Magee began to twist his hands in opposite directions, his nostrils flaring. He grunted once and suddenly, faster than Charles could follow, his hands were apart. The rope was still knotted around his left wrist. He'd created just enough slack to allow him to work a hand free.

Magee smiled lazily and picked at the knots while Private Jubilee stared, dumbfounded. He was relatively new to the troop and to Magee's tricks.

Gray Owl returned in ten minutes. He was paler than Charles had ever seen him.

"Whites have passed here," he said with suppressed fury. 'There are dead men and dead horses among the trees. The bodies have been despoiled."

Charles took the head of the column, ordered his buffalo soldiers to the trot, and led them toward the grove. Well before they reached it, he saw the meandering stream he expected, a narrow ribbon of yellow water along the grove's north perimeter.

A rank smell floated from the leafless trees. Charles recognized it. He's smelled the same stench at Sharpsburg and Brandy Station and other places where the dead lay a long time after the firing stopped. One of his younger men leaned to the right and shuddered with the dry heaves.

Charles unsheathed his saber and raised it to signal a halt. The saber was a useless weapon in the field, except where it would serve as a standard, something bright and visible to rally around. "I'll go in first. The rest of you water your horses."

He dismounted, shifted the saber to his left hand, and drew his Colt. He approached the grove with caution. Gray Owl followed without permission; Charles was conscious of him as a shadow flicking over the sere grass to his left.

From the edge of the grove he saw a dead horse, then two more. Warriors' horses, usually left alive so that their owners would have fine mounts in paradise. This probably meant that someone other than Indians had shot them.

He swallowed, took a few more steps, and spied the three decomposing bodies. Stripped of raiment, they lay amid broken sections of wooden platforms. Upright timbers that had supported the platforms still stood in the center of the grove. Forcing himself, Charles moved closer to inspect the naked corpses. Near them he found the splintered shafts of several brightly painted arrows. Everything else had been looted.

He heard the anger in Gray Owl's voice. "Do you know what has happened?"

"I do. It's the custom of your people to put their dead on these burial platforms if the winter ground is too hard to dig. These were special men — war chiefs, camp chiefs, maybe society leaders — because they were buried this way when the ground isn't frozen."

Nearer to the sky on the platforms, the dead thus passed more quickly along the Hanging Road to paradise. It was also customary for the Cheyennes to deposit personal treasures, weapons, and a favorite mount, so the dead man wouldn't lack for anything in the afterlife. Oddly, despite his hatred of the Cheyennes, Charles found himself sickened by the desecration.

"Look more closely," Gray Owl said to him. The tracker was almost stammering with rage. "Go. Look!"

Charles stepped forward but soon halted again, pale. Not only were the funeral garments gone, but also chunks of flesh, hacked from arms, legs, and torsos. In the fist-sized cavities, maggots swarmed.

"Jesus Christ. What for?" This was something entirely new.

Gray Owl shouted, "Bait." He waved wildly at the stream. "Fishing bait. I saw this once before. A soldier of the Seventh bragged that he had done it." Tears ran from Gray Owl's eyes. For a moment Charles thought the Cheyenne might pull his knife and stab him. "The white man is filth. He counts coup on the dead."

"Your own people sometimes —" he began, thinking of Wooden Foot and Boy, the violet-eyed girl in the sod house. He stopped, because those atrocities couldn't cancel this one.

A long wail in the east broke the silence. A westbound train.

Gray Owl turned and left the grove. At that moment he clearly hated Charles and every other white man. Then why in hell did he track for them?

Distantly, again from the east, he heard faint crackling. He dashed out of the grove, glad to do so. He waved his saber and his revolver. "Mount. There's gunfire."

Three troopers at the stream raised dripping faces as he shouted again, "Mount!" He wigwagged the saber over his head and ran toward Satan, the horror in the grove and the complexity of the resulting emotions mercifully banished by the sudden, urgent need to act.

The twenty Indians divided, half of them charging around the rear of the chugging U.P.E.D. passenger local. The parallel columns dashed ahead, to attack the train from both sides.

In the second-class coach, the sergeant's wife looked through a window across the aisle and saw brown horsemen riding bareback, their black hair streaming. Some brandished guns, some their hunting bows. At the head of the coach an older woman jumped up, then fainted. "My God, Lester, Cheyennes," a man cried to his traveling companion.

"Arapahoes," said the cavalry officer in the seat ahead of the woman. "You can tell by the unbound hair." He snatched out his service revolver, broke the window with three blows of his elbow, and fired a round. He missed.

The sergeant's wife stared with disbelief at a fierce painted face hovering not three feet from her. It wasn't a man, she realized, but a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen. He jammed a trade musket to his cheek while he gripped his racing pony with his knees. The boy and the white woman stared at each other for a protracted moment, nothing save the glass and the shining barrel between them.

"Down," the russet-bearded officer yelled at her. He stood and took aim at the Indian. The young brave saw him and shot first. The colonel's body jerked, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he sank to the floor.

A man screamed, "We're all gonna die here!"

"The hell we are," the conductor shouted. "There's railroad men hiding aboard this train."

Concealed in the freight car, J. O. Hartree smiled at his three companions when he heard the hoofbeats, the shrill yells, the first shots. He was a plump, relatively young man, with soft good looks, wavy hair, and a long drooping mustache waxed to points. He had a piously insincere smile and mean eyes.

"Turk, you stand beside me," he said, quickly pulling on shiny leather gloves. He rolled up the sleeves of his white silk shirt and flexed his knees to be sure he had the feel of the moving train. He couldn't use his hands for support once they went into action.

Hartree and his hired shootists had been riding the line for weeks, hoping for this sort of opportunity. All summer the tribes had raided the line's construction sites, terrorized the workers, and butchered a few who foolishly strayed off by themselves. Hartree was under orders to convince the damned red men that they couldn't strike the line with impunity. It was a mission he enjoyed.

He smoothed the front of his green satin waistcoat embroidered with two rearing antelope, majestic pronghorns. "Red, when I give the word, slide the door open. Then help Wingo load the guns." On the floor lay eight powerful .45-caliber Sharps buffalo rifles, four for each shooter. J. O. Hartree planned carefully.

Two bullets thumped outside of the car. Over other noise,

Hartree heard windows breaking. The passengers were under attack. Well, he'd give this red filth a real surprise.

"Let's have the first two rifles, Red. Cock the hammers and rear triggers. Turk, if you fire before I say so, I'll put the first bullet in you."

Charles and his detachment came over the nearby rise in line formation, charging. Billowy smoke streamed out above the train. Howling Indians with unbound hair galloped alongside. The Indians saw the troopers and reacted with surprise and confusion.

The train was about a quarter mile to the soldiers' left, chugging along with many of its coach windows blown out. Charles gripped Satan with his knees and steadied his Spencer, knowing he had only a small chance of a hit with the piebald bouncing under him.

An Indian swung his bow up and aimed at Magic Magee, riding on Charles's left. Charles leaned that way and struck Magee's shoulder with his palm. Magee lurched over and for a moment hung down close to his horse's neck. That was the moment the arrow hissed through the space where his throat had been a few seconds earlier.

Magee dragged himself upright and flung Charles a look of appreciation. Shem Wallis took aim and blew the bowman off his pony. The Indians were slowing their pace now, outnumbering the soldiers but inferior in fire power. Charles yelled orders and half the troopers peeled away to circle the end of the train and go after the Indians glimpsed on the other side.

Drawing near the train, with the wind beating in his face, Charles raised the Spencer again. Then something happened for which the soldiers were altogether unprepared.

J. O. Hartree ran his hand along the barrel of the Sharps, silently starting a ten-count. Snick! Whump! He heard arrows striking the car. He took a firmer stance beside Turk and finished the count.

"Open it."

The door squealed as it rolled. Morning light flashed on the double-triggered Sharps held by the two shootists. An Arapahoe goggled at the sudden appearance of the railroad men. Hartree's brown eyes sparkled and his pious smile broadened. "Blow them down, Turk."

Because the rear triggers had been cocked, each front trigger was a hair trigger, needing merely a touch to fire the piece. Smoke and noise erupted from the door of the freight car. The Indian rifleman flipped off the bare back of his pony was instantly trampled by the horses of two other Arapahoes, unable to avoid him.

Incredibly, beyond the racing Indians, Hartree saw a bunch of those black nigger cavalrymen, raffish as bandits. The soldiers and their white officer, likewise racing beside the train, shouted for the railroad men to stop shooting; they were directly in the line of fire. Hartree ignored them, passed the hot buffalo gun behind him, and received another. His next shot missed, but it blew off the straw hat of a nigger, who immediately crouched down over his horse.

"You got my marker now," Magee shouted as he galloped beside Charles. "That red bastard almost had me."

Charles shouted back, "Those idiots on the train are going to kill us." He pumped his Spencer up and down over his head. "Hold your fire! That's an order! Hold —"

The shootist in the green embroidered vest snapped off a round to show how much he cared about the order. The Arapahoes, caught between the railroad men and the galloping soldiers, recalculated the odds; the leader motioned for them to drop back. Soon all of them were behind the train, dodging bullets from the troopers on the far side. They returned fire briefly with arrows and guns. One Indian flung his arms up and slid off his pony, blood running down his chest. The others immediately sheared away south, out of danger.

All of it happened in less than two minutes. Charles was furious. His first good chance at avenging Wooden Foot was nearly gone and he hadn't dropped a single Indian. Not one.

"You want us to chase 'em, Lieutenant August?" one of his men yelled.

Charles wanted to answer in the affirmative. But he was required to take charge of the damaged train and any wounded. He presumed there were some. He saw not a single human face in the shot-out windows of the coach.

"No, God damn it, I don't."

Angry that the soldiers might spoil the show, J. O. Hartree said, "Someone yank the cord. Stop the train. I want prisoners." As quickly as it began, all firing stopped, and the train jerked and slowed and jerked again as the brakes took hold.

Charles and his men brought their horses alongside the train, which bristled with painted arrow shafts. As the Rogers locomotive came to a stop, clouds of steam drifted up, mingling with settling dust. Charles watched the green-vested man jump from the freight car and strut forward. One close look at the man's face and Charles knew there'd be trouble.

36

Charles slid his Spencer back in the scabbard and trotted to the freight car. Three more civilians jumped down; a ratty lot. The plump man in the shiny gloves and green satin waistcoat was obviously in charge, and as the moments passed Charles liked his pushy swagger less and less.

"J. O. Hartree," the man said, as though the name should mean something. In the shot-up car, the excited voices of people in shock could be heard. Displeased by the lack of recognition, Hartree added, "Chief of railroad security."

"Lieutenant August, Tenth Cavalry. You beat us to it. We hardly fired a shot." His regret was evident.

"We've been riding the line and laying for the red bastards. You saw what cowards they are."

"You've got that wrong, Mr. Hartree. An old friend once said you have to turn your notions upside down on the Plains. If my detachment loses a man the Army will send another in a month. If the Indians lose a man it takes five or ten years for a boy to grow up to replace him. They're not cowards, just damn careful."

Putting the man down bled off some of Charles's anger. But Hartree didn't like it. "I don't need a lecture from you," he said. A disheveled woman raised herself into one of the broken windows, saw the black soldiers, and sank out of sight with a horrified look on her face. Hartree shielded his eyes against the sun and squinted eastward, through the dust still drifting behind the train.

"Boys, I see at least one of them alive back there. Bring him in. We'll make an example of him."

"What are you talking about?" Charles asked. Hartree ignored him. Magee scowled and punched a dent out of his derby.

The conductor appeared on the coach platform. "We've got a wounded man in here."

Charles said, "Hurt bad?"

"Flesh wound. He's awake."

"Let me check my own first." He'd no sooner said it than Wallis rode into sight at the rear of the train, waving his kepi. "Lieutenant? Toby's down. Arrow in his leg." Charles swore. "One Indian down over here, too."

Hartree said to the redheaded shootist, "Get him." He and the others hurried off.

Charles handed his rein to one of his troopers and stepped up close to Hartree. Hartree's men, meantime, reached an Arapahoe who had fallen near the caboose. The redhead kicked the body, rolled it over, shook his head, and proceeded on toward another Arapahoe, who was crawling on hands and knees, bleeding from a shoulder wound.

The Indian staggered up and tried to run. Redhead caught him and dragged him back. The other two shootists vanished behind the train in search of the other brave.

A couple of men appeared at the blown-out windows. Charles heard some slapping sounds, and an anxious voice. "Wake up, May Belle. You're all right. Don't take on so. Those are just nigger soldiers."

The wounded Arapahoe came lurching toward Charles, pushed by the redhead. Blood poured down the Indian's arm and dripped from his fingers. Dismounted and hurt, the brave looked harmless and ordinary. One of Hartree's men emerged from behind the train carrying an Indian in his arms. "Hurt leg," the man shouted. "Can't walk."

"Drop him right there," Hartree called back. "You're not his goddamn nurse." The man let go, and the Indian screamed when he hit the ground.

"Listen, Hartree," Charles said, "I think we'd better clear up one matter. It's the Army's responsibility to convey prisoners to Fort Harker."

"You don't have a thing to do with it, mister. The scum attacked railroad property." He grabbed the shiny shoulder-length hair of the Arapahoe prisoner and twisted. "The railroad will deal with them." He squatted and wiped his glove on yellowed grass at trackside. "Greasy damn bastards."

Hartree's eyes flicked back and forth between the bleeding prisoner and the Indian lying on his back at the rear of the train. Stroking his mandarin mustache, he suddenly made up his mind.

"This one's in better shape. He goes free after we take care of his friend. I want this boy to see what we do to red men who threaten railroad property. I want him to tell the others. Turk, fetch those picket pins from my valise."

The shootist named Turk scrambled back into the freight car. Charles was beginning to have a very bad feeling. Turk jumped down again with two of the sharp metal pins used to picket horses. Slowly, hoping to attract no attention, Charles wandered back to Magee, who had dismounted.

Hartree took the picket pins. He tossed them up and caught them in front of the wounded Arapahoe. Charles leaned close to Magee and muttered in his ear. Magee said, "Yessir, I’ll see if anybody up front is hurt." He walked toward the locomotive carrying his Springfield rifle.

More passengers were peering from the coach. Hartree addressed them. "Gentlemen — and you ladies especially — I respectfully ask that you stay in there while I deal with these savages. I intend to punish one of them in a way consistent with their treatment of white captives. The lesson will benefit every white man and woman in Kansas."

"Back off, Hartree," Charles said. "I told you this is the Army's responsibility."

Two of Hartree's shootists raised their buffalo rifles. Hartree said, "No, sir, this is railroad business. Don't interfere unless you want several dead niggers to explain to your commanding officer."

A trooper grabbed his sidearm. Gray Owl reached out to stay his hand. "We're on the same side. Or we're supposed to be."

Charles glanced toward the engine cab. Magee had vanished. Hartree tossed the picket pins to Turk. "Go back to that other man and tie him down. Spreadeagle him. Nail those two pins through his private parts."

Charles turned white. The conductor gripped the platform stair rail and said, "Mr. Hartree, that's pretty extreme."

Hartree yelled, "Shut your damn mouth or well save a pin for you. Turk?" The man trotting toward the rear of the train turned back. "Be sure you rip off his clout first. Red, take this dirty scum back there to watch."

The Arapahoe whose arm dripped blood was dragged away. He looked sick. Charles swallowed sour saliva.

Gray Owl was gazing at the train. Suddenly his mouth dropped open. Charles warned him with a look, holding motionless while he watched a wild turkey feather, then a black derby, rise above the roof line of the freight car. Magic Magee climbed into sight, unseen by Hartree or the passengers below.

Charles felt sweat gather and drip from his nose. Slowly, Magee lifted his Springfield to his shoulder. He aimed at the back of the green satin waistcoat. At the rear of the train, one of Hartree's men spied Magee and yelled, just as Charles spoke.

"Turn around, Mr. Hartree. If you crucify that Indian, it'll cost your life."

Hartree spun, saw Magee, clenched his fists. "Shit." He flung a look at his men, who were too far away to do him much good. Charles drew his Army Colt and cocked it. Hartree pivoted back, his face scarlet.

"You interfering bastard, the railroad'll have your ass."

Charles said to his troopers, "Collect those three and put them in the freight car. The Indians can travel in the caboose."

Hartree let out a stream of accusations and foul language, until the men in the coach protested. Magee signaled Gray Owl. The tracker ran forward and caught Magee's Springfield when he tossed it down. Magee hung from the roof of the car, and dropped.

"Well done," Charles said to him. "You can tear up the marker."

"Oh, no, sir. This wasn't anything. The marker's a big one. Anytime you need some help, you ask."

Emotion welled in Charles. Until now he hadn't quite realized what good soldiers these men had become. They were able to respond quickly, obey orders, and generally do a lot more than just shoot an enemy. He felt a rush of pride.

Magee took charge of putting Hartree and his shootists in the freight car, which he then closed, posting two guards outside. The security chief could be heard stomping and swearing.

The conductor again appealed to Charles for help with the wounded man.

"Is he bad?"

"No, not bad, but —"

"Then I want to see to my own first." He was testy, because he was doing things he didn't want to do: controlling gun-crazy civilians; saving wounded Indians. Every damn thing but the one thing he'd joined up to do.

He climbed up and over the platform of the passenger coach, completely missing the intense look Gray Owl gave him; a look that carried new respect and regard.

Private Washington Toby, a lanky mulatto boy from Philadelphia, lay next to the caboose with blood all over his fine buck­skin pants. A broken arrow jutted from his leg. Toby clutched his leg while he swore and wept from pain.

"Lie back, Toby." Charles tried not to let his anxiety show. "Let go of your leg."

Reluctantly, Toby did so. Charles knelt and pulled out his Bowie knife. He lengthened the slip in the buckskin to more than a foot. Ever since the tribes had replaced stone arrowheads with ones of strap or sheet iron, arrow wounds were terrible. If the iron hit bone, it often crimped around it, making extrication an agony. Of course if the arrow cut a muscle, or nicked a blood vessel —

To one of the worried troopers standing there, Charles said, "Run back to Satan and open my right saddlebag. Bring me the tobacco plug you'll find inside. Easy now, Toby. You're lucky," he lied. "An arrow in the leg is nothing. If you get one in your belly or chest, they play the funeral march before you fall down."

Toby's mouth wrenched, a sad attempt at a smile. Sweat popped out on his face. Charles pulled the buckskin away from the wound and studied the arrow. "Take hold of my left arm. Hang on tight."

The trooper rushed back with the tobacco plug. Charles opened his mouth and the trooper dropped it in. Charles started chewing vigorously while he grasped the painted shaft and gently worked it from side to side.

It felt crimped in there. He exerted more pressure. Toby's eyes bulged. His nails almost dug through Charles's shirt.

"Easy, easy," Charles kept saying, the words sounding squishy because of the chewing tobacco. Toby grunted in reaction to the pain, then rolled his shoulders off the ground. "Keep him down," Charles exclaimed. Two troopers restrained the wounded man.

Blood was pouring from the wound now. Charles tried to imagine his hands were a woman's, with a woman's light touch. He continued to work the shaft one way, then the other, back and forth, back and —

He felt it loosed. A lump formed in his throat, big as a rock. "All right, Toby, we'll be done in just a couple of minutes." He talked to divert the man's attention. "Just hang on for a couple of more —" He yanked. Washington Toby screamed and fainted.

Charles sagged. He rocked back on his haunches, holding in his right hand the shaft, its bloody head only slightly bent. In a moment Toby opened his eyes. Groggy, he started to weep.

"Go ahead and cry," Charles said. "I know it hurts. What I'm going to do now will help some, until we get you to the fort. Tobacco's an old Plains medicine for wounds."

He spat several times, filling the wound with brown juice. He kneaded the edges to mix blood and tobacco thoroughly. There was no spurting; no darker blood showed. The arrow had done no serious damage.

He wound on a tourniquet and ordered his men to wrap Washington Toby in blankets and let him rest aboard the train. One of the troopers, a shy boy named Collet, gave Charles a look of admiration.

"You a good officer, Mist' August."

When he reached the other side of the train, Gray Owl said to him, "There is one Arapahoe dead. Shall we leave him?"

Charles wiped his mouth. On the point of saying yes, he changed his mind. "If you can repair one of those platforms in the trees, put him on it. Since he's already dead, I guess we can give him that much. I'll hold the train."

Gray Owl gazed at him steadily, then turned and left.

"Lieutenant," the conductor said, his voice carrying a note of complaint now, "you've got to take time to look at the wounded man in here. I think he's all right, but I'm no doctor."

Charles nodded and wearily climbed the metal steps. The civilians moved back to allow him through. From between facing seats, boots and yellow-striped cavalry trousers jutted into the aisle. The wounded man leaned against the wall, his right arm limp.

For a moment Charles saw nothing but the wound, a wet red hole in the upper sleeve. Then he took notice of the man. Saw a fine-featured face with glacial blue eyes and russet-colored mustache and beard. Because so much had happened, recognition was a second slow. It hit him as he started to kneel.

"Main," said the officer. "Or is it May?"

"My name is —" He stopped. What was the use?

In the aisle the conductor said, "This man's name is Lieutenant August."

"Hell it is."

"I'll have a look at your wound —" Charles began.

"Don't touch me," said Captain Harry Venable. "You're under arrest."

37

Major General Philip Henry Sheridan, Department of the Missouri, summoned Grierson to Leavenworth. The two met on the day of Sheridan's departure on extended leave.

Grierson walked in while Sheridan was still conferring with his aide, Colonel Crosby. Sheridan was thirty-six, single, with a Black Irish swarthiness and a tough air enhanced by a Mongol mustache and soap-locked hair. He intimidated Grierson; it was more than rank, or the traditional tension between officers who'd graduated from West Point and those who hadn't. Sheridan was famous for being opinionated and ruthless.

"Just finishing with the report on the train fight," he said after returning Grierson's salute. "Have a chair." He shoved a sheaf of papers at his aide. "Telegraph the railroad and tell them to get this dog-fucking idiot Hartree out of Kansas. I won't have vigilantes interfering with the United States Army."

Colonel Crosby cleared his throat. "Yes, General. It's delicate, though. The railroad stockholders are still very upset about the Indian threat."

"Goddamn it, Sam Grant and Crump Sherman put me here to take care of the whore-kissing Indians, and I'll do it. I have no sympathy for them. The only good Indians I ever saw were dead. Follow my instructions. Hartree goes."

The aide saluted and retired. When the door closed, Sheridan went to warm his hands at the iron stove. It was late November, gray and bleak.

"Grierson, there is absolutely nothing I can do for Charles Main. Harry Venable came over to Departmental staff to serve with Winnie Hancock last spring. I don't like the little shit, but he's a competent soldier."

"Main is an outstanding one."

"Yes, but he's also an unpardoned reb who lied about his war record and the Academy. Twice."

"I encouraged him the second time, General. I thought he looked first-rate and I wanted him for the regiment. I'm as much to blame as —"

"Don't say another fucking word. I didn't hear those last ones, either. I'm well aware of Main's ability. He came to summer camp just before I graduated. A year or so later I was told that Bob Lee, who was the supe, thought him the finest horesman in the cadet corps. But he's got to go."

"They're only suspending Custer from duty for a year, and look at all the charges brought against —"

"Colonel, I don't want to hear any more," the little commander said, leaning on his desk. His black eyes bored into the unhappy cavalryman. "Curly Custer fought for the Union. I'll tell you something else. He's a goddamn magnet for men. They'll slit each other's throats to serve with him."

"Some of them. Not the men who testified against him. Not his own commanding officer —"

"Will you for Jesus Christ's sake shut up? I can't save Main's balls on the basis of what happened to Custer. Furthermore, I'm going to drag Curly's ass back here as soon as I can. I want him in my department, because that pissant treaty will never hold. Now you go back to Main and you tell him I'm sorry but he ought to be grateful that I was able to slide him out with just a bobtail discharge instead of three years' hard labor with a ball and chain to keep him company."

Grierson rose, his face showing strain. "Yes, General. Is that all?"

Sheridan's expression softened as he rolled a cigar between his palms. "It is. Isn't it enough? Dismissed."

At Harker next day, Grierson delivered the verdict to Charles, who stood before him in stoic silence. Ever since he'd come upon Harry Venable in the passenger coach, he'd known this moment was inevitable.

"I told you early that I couldn't save you if someone caught you, Charles. I tried. I tried damn hard. You're the only one-hundred-percent cast-iron rebel in the regiment, yet you're the strongest partisan of those Negroes."

"I don't do them any special favors, sir. With a couple of exceptions, they're fine soldiers. They try harder than most."

"That's true. During our first year we've had the lowest desertion rate in the entire Army, and the lowest rate of disciplinary infractions. I told you I had a vision for the Tenth, and you helped make it work. I'm just sorry as hell things didn't work out right for you."

"I guess a man can be forgiven almost anything these days except being a Southerner."

"Your bitterness is understandable." He was silent a moment. Charles watched night settling on the post outside Grierson's window. The office was freezing. Snowflakes were starting to fall. "What will you do?"

"I don't know. Get drunk. Find work. Kill some Cheyennes."

"You're not over that yet?"

"I'll never be over that."

"But you saved the Arapahoe prisoners." One had died the day after being locked in the Fort Harker guardhouse. The other was comatose in the dispensary, refusing to eat.

"I said kill, sir. I didn't say torture. There's a difference."

Grierson studied the tall, faintly menacing soldier with the furious eyes. In Charles's case, he thought, the difference was slight. He didn't say it, however. Stroking his immense beard, he asked, "What about your son?"

"He'll have to live on Jack Duncan's charity a while longer."

"Well, keep in touch with him. A man can stand to lose a lot of things, but not his loved ones."

Charles shrugged. "Maybe it's already too late. God knows I've lost everything else."

Another silence. Grierson could barely stand it. He avoided Charles's eyes as he said, "You're to be off the post by morning. But no one will protest if it takes you a little longer to say good­bye."

"It won't, Colonel. A quick and clean cut's always the best kind."

"Charles —"

"Do I have the colonel's permission to go?"

Grierson nodded. He returned the salute and watched Charles pivot, leave, and shut the door. Then he slumped in his chair and looked at the cased photograph of his wife. "Alice, I hate this goddamned world sometimes."

The snow fell harder. Charles collected his few belongings and went on his round of farewells. The sentries on duty in the icy dark still snapped to with salutes; indeed, they seemed more respectful than ever.

In the bachelor officers' quarters he said goodbye to Floyd Hook. Floyd was unkempt, unshaven. He'd returned from a patrol a week ahead of Charles to discover that his wife had run off with a driver for the Butterfield Overland Despatch line. She'd taken their three-year-old daughter, too. Charles had heard that Dolores Hook had tried to kill herself by swallowing something last year. Some Army wives just buckled under the worry and loneliness. Floyd looked like he was starting to buckle, too. He reeked of beer. Charles spent ten minutes trying to cheer him up and failed.

In the married officers' quarters he said goodbye to Ike Barnes and little Lovetta, who wept and hugged him like a mother. The old man, always less than loquacious and ever fearful of showing sentiment, nevertheless squeezed Charles's arm repeatedly and kept his head turned away, unwilling or unable to speak.

Charles found Gray Owl sitting cross-legged, asleep in the dark under the eave at the back of the sutler's. The tracker was wrapped in several blankets and buffalo robes; one covered his head like a monk's cowl. "You'll die of exposure," Charles warned after he woke Gray Owl from his doze.

"No. I can stand any weather but a blizzard. I taught myself long ago." Gray Owl stood up, shedding the robes and blankets. He gripped Charles's shoulder and stared into his eyes. "I will miss you. You are a good man. What you did, sparing the captives in spite of your hatred, that was good."

Charles had no reply except another tired shrug. Gray Owl asked the same question that Grierson had, to which Charles answered, "I don't know what I'll do or where I'll go. Off by myself, more than likely. The colonel let me keep my Spencer, and Satan."

"I think we are much alike," the tracker said. "Outcasts. I went apart from the People when they lost their way."

Gray Owl watched the slanting snow driven on the wind. "Like my father, I took a captured white woman for my wife. I treated her well and loved her very much. Three winters past, while I led the society men and the young warriors to the herd for the final hunt of the year, some jealous squaws tormented my wife with sharp sticks. She bled her life away, and no one would punish the women for their cruelty. The brother of the woman who led the others, a hate-filled man named Scar, praised them and told their story many times. When I returned and saw all this, I knew the People had strayed too far for me to lead them back. So I turned from them, forever. But if you are ever lost, Charles, and I can lead you to safety, I will."

"Thanks," Charles said, almost inaudibly. He was anxious to hurry through the rest of his goodbyes. It was beginning to hurt too much.

He embraced Gray Owl and left the Cheyenne resettling himself against the log wall of the sutler's. From a few steps away, he looked back. In the lamp-lit dark he saw Gray Owl's shoulders and blanket cowl dusted with white, like some strange stunted shrub that had died in the winter.

In this weather the men of the Tenth had no choice but to hole up in the foul, cramped huts that served as Fort Harker barracks. Charles stepped around the corner of the hut in which most of his detachment was bunking. Through the plank door, above the keening night wind, he heard Magic Magee's voice.

He shifted his buffalo overcoat and muskrat cap with ear-flaps to his left arm and eased the door open a couple of inches. By the light of oil lamps, he saw Magee kneeling on the dirt floor; "Now boys, you will observe that in this hand I have a stack of three ordinary tin cups, like we drink from every day. Say, would you slide back, Sergeant Williams? I need more space."

Charles smiled for the first time in quite a while. He watched Magee pluck one cup from the stack and invert it on the floor with a swift, sweeping motion. Magee placed the other cups similarly, in a line.

"What I am about to show you, boys, is one of the incredible mysteries of the ages. Back in Chicago, somebody told me that way over in some old tombs in Egypt, there are pictures of a magician doing this same cups and balls trick. Here's the ball. An ordinary little sphere of cork."

He showed it between the index and middle finger of his right hand, then pushed it into his left, or appeared to push it, making it vanish.

"Shem, where's the ball?"

"Gone," Wallis said.

"Gone where?"

"Don't know,"

"Why, come on. It's gone traveling." With zest, Magee raised the first cup to reveal the cork ball.

He took the ball, made it vanish in his hand, and revealed it under the second cup. Charles had watched him often enough to know the secret: four balls, one loaded in each cup beforehand and kept from falling out by Magee's skill in inverting the cups and snapping them down fast on the hard ground.

Magee started his patter again, but Williams felt the door­way draft, raised a hand, and reached for his sidearm. "Somebody out there?"

Charles opened the door wide and went in. "Only me, watching the show. I'm off, boys. I brought this coat and cap. Sell them to whoever you can and put the money in the company fund."

A couple of muttered thank-yous followed, but that was it. Charles felt self-conscious. So did the men. The smiles they tried were thin and sad. He stood there above the ring of black faces, his black hat slanted forward over his eyes. Snow was melting and dripping from the brim. The corners of his gypsy robe scraped the dirt.

He cleared his throat. He felt as awkward and nervous as he had the first time he was called to a West Point blackboard to recite. "I just want to say — you men are good soldiers. Any officer would be —" The words caught. He cleared his throat again. "Proud, to lead you."

"We proud to have you lead us, too," Shem Wallis said. "They give you a bad deal, those generals."

"Yes, well, sometimes that's all there is to life. A hell of a bad deal." He shook his right arm gently. In the crook lay his rifle. "At least Colonel Grierson let me keep my Spencer and my horse."

Star Eyes got to his feet, rubbing his knuckles back and forth over his mouth. Charles noticed the scar from the man's hotel days. Haltingly, Williams said, "Since I was about the first man to speak against you, I guess I should be the one to take it all back. For a Southerner, you're a real white man."

The soldiers laughed at the unconscious racism in the remark. Charles smiled. Flustered, Williams put out his hand.

"We'll miss you, C. C."

Charles's hand stopped in midair. "What?"

"He said C. C," Washington Toby answered. His leg was still bandaged, but he was able to get around.

"It means Cheyenne Charlie," Magee said. "Cheyenne 'cause you're so fond of them."

"Well, Cheyenne Charlie. I guess that nickname fits. I like it. Many thanks."

He turned and started out. "Sir? I clean forgot," Williams said, reaching inside his plaid flannel outer shirt, one of two worn over his regular blouse and long underwear. "This was stuck in my desk for a week. Guess they put it there while we was riding the railroad."

Charles took the pale gray envelope, inscribed in a familiar hand. He held it between thumb and fingertips, tapping it thoughtfully while his eyes froze again.

"Thanks. Night," he said, and left. The last thing he heard as he shut the door was Magic Magee calling out:

"Don't forget about the marker."

At the sentry post nearest the stable, a fire had been lighted against the freezing cold. Charles walked toward the tatters of flame driven horizontally by the prairie wind.

He'd put on gauntlets and he was carrying his Spencer in his left hand, the stock leaning against his shoulder, the blued barrel jutting up behind him. His boots crunched the accumulating snow as he quickened his step, anxious to be away.

As he passed the sentry's fire, he tossed Willa's unopened letter into the flames. He was quickly hidden by the dark inside the stable. Ten minutes later the sentry heard hooves in the snow, receding fast, the only sign of the rider's passing into the vast winter night.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

Des LaMotte talked about it, too, with Gettys and Captain Jolly, in Jolly's shanty.

It was two weeks before Christmas; dark, drizzly weather. Des was worn to emaciation by his months in prison. Jolly in contrast looked fit, was sporting a new linen duster he'd stolen from a traveler. He was busy with a greasy rag that he slid back and forth on the barrel of one of his Leech and Rigdons, burnishing it.

"We have got to do something besides talk," Des declared. There was a wounded quality in his friend's eyes, Getty's observed. Des would say almost nothing about his time behind bars, but it was evident that it had been a harrowing experience.

Jolly spat on the barrel and caressed it with the rag. "Shit, that's all we ever do, sit around and talk. She's sending her darky to the convention. Why don't I just hunt him up and blow him down?"

"Because then it'll be something else, some other issue or outrage, until she turns the whole district into high niggerdom."

"LaMotte, I'm tired of this," Jolly said. "Do you want to get rid of her or don't you?"

"You know I do."

"Then let's do it. Otherwise you're just a dog with a bark and no teeth."

The tall dancing master reached for Jolly's throat. The captain quickly set the muzzle of his revolver against Des's palm. He grinned. "Go on. Try to choke me. I'll put a ball through your hand into your skull."

Red-faced, Des lowered his hand. "You just don't understand, do you? I want her dead but I don't want to go to prison for it. I've been there, in prison" — he was sweating — "terrible things can happen to a man of intelligence and sensibility. Vile things not even physical strength can prevent."

Gettys decided it was time to relieve Des's misery. He drew a packet from his old velvet coat. "If you all can stop your spatting, I think we've got the answer. My cousin Sitwell traveled all the way to Nashville for a secret conclave —" He saw Jolly's puzzlement and took pleasure in saying with a superior air, "Convention, Captain. Meeting. He brought this back."

He showed a wrinkled broadsheet with a big, bold heading. TENNESSEE TIGER. The tiger, a steel engraving, crouched ferociously in front of a Stars and Bars. "Read the poem," Gettys said, pointing it out.

Des read it aloud. "Niggers and Leaguers, get out of the way. We are born of the night —" Captain Jolly's interest perked up. Des said, "You mean they allow publication of this sort of thing in Tennessee?"

"And similar things in a lot of other places, Sitwell informed me. You don't see any names, do you? Read on."

"Born of the night, and we vanish by day. No rations have we but the flesh of man. And love niggers best... the Kuklux Klan."

Des stared at the others with slowly dawning understanding. Loftily, Gettys explained to Jolly, "The Kuklux is that club for skylarking and scaring darkies. Sitwell says it's turned into something more. A white man's defense league. Klaverns are springing up all over the South."

"What's that?" Jolly said.

"Klavern? It means a Klan den, a local chapter. They have a regular constitution, called the Prescript, and a whole lot of fancy titles and rituals. And robes, Jolly. Robes that hide a man's face." Grinning, he tapped the captain's sleeve with the broadsheet. "Know who's going 'round the South helping to set up the klaverns? The head man of the Klan. The Imperial Wizard. Your old friend Forrest."

"Bedford himself?" Jolly's tone was reverential. Service with Forrest's cavalry remained the high point of his life, and for a moment he was in the past, remembering how they had campaigned. In the worst rainstorms, through winter sleet, riding with the blood up, faced always with the possibility of death and never turning from it, because they rode for the cause of the white race.

As Jolly thought of his great leader, he kept losing track of his surroundings, the shanty that smelled of stale food, discarded coffee grounds, urine. He kept seeing the general on his great war-horse, King Philip. And the niggers. The wailing, terrified niggers of Fort Pillow —

It was in '64 that Jolly had helped Forrest invest the garrison forty miles north of Memphis. After capturing Fort Pillow, Forrest had busied himself elsewhere, allowing his men to deal with the prisoners. They dealt with them with gun, sword, torch. Jolly had personally driven six nigger privates into a tent at gunpoint, then ordered his first sergeant to set fire to it. He could hear the niggers screaming now. The memory made him smile.

After Fort Pillow, the North howled "atrocity" and "massacre." Forrest insisted that he hadn't ordered the killings, and had been elsewhere when they took place. But neither had he restrained his men.

Lowering his voice, Gettys said, "Cousin Sitwell's friends in York County have invited Forrest there to help start a klavern. I'd say we need one on the Ashley, too."

Des's carroty hair glowed in the light of the kerosene lamp behind him. "Can we get Forrest here? Send him a telegraph message?"

"Yes, and I'll pay for it from store profits," Gettys said with enthusiasm. "Got plenty to spare. Where do we send it?"

Jolly stroked his close-shaven face with the gunsight, raking the disfiguring scar because it itched like the devil. A nigger corporal at Fort Pillow had given him that with a skinning knife, a moment before Jolly put one of his Leech and Rigdons against the buck's eye and fired.

"Mississip," Jolly said. "Sunflower Landing. That's the general's plantation in Coahoma County. Last I heard, he was trying to farm again. You sign my name to the message, Gettys — no, shut up. Do like I tell you. Sign Captain Jackson Jerome Jolly. The general will come here for one of his officers, I promise you."

He leaned back, pleased. Again he dragged the metal sight back and forth over the Fort Pillow scar.

"Things is finally movin', boys. We're about ready to declare open season on uppity nigger women."

38

The night local chugged up the Lehigh Valley in a thunderstorm. Near Bethlehem, George's attorney, Jupiter Smith, fell asleep, leaving his client to stare out the window at the rainy dark.

The men rode in a private car at the back of the train. Built to George's specifications, the car had furniture upholstered in red plush, fine wood paneling, and etched glass dividers to screen the dining table. Years ago, Stanley had bought a similar car for the Hazards; a rail accident had destroyed it. George had scorned the wasteful expenditure until a year ago, when he began to see a certain sense in it. Pittsburgh was fast becoming the state's iron and steel center. George wanted Hazard's to have an important part in that expansion, and he expected to travel there often. He decided he'd worked hard and deserved to travel comfortably.

The train was almost an hour late. Yawning, he rested his forehead against the window and watched raindrops on the other side. He wished the engineer would speed up. He'd been away four nights. He knew men who could leave their wives for weeks and enjoy it. He couldn't. He imagined Constance in their warm bed at Belvedere. He'd be there soon, his body curled around hers, holding her as they slept.

Constance heard a strange sound.

She put down her hairbrush, rose, and walked to the dormer nearest the canopied double bed. She wondered about the noise, because both the children were away at school and the house was empty except for the servants in a remote wing.

Frowning, she pushed the window open six inches. Lightning glittered behind the laurel-covered mountains. The misty night sky was reddened by light leaching up from Hazard's furnaces. Rain blew in, dampening her face and her powdered cleavage. She'd chosen the Chinese silk bed gown because George was coming home tonight. He was late.

She stared into the storm, trying to recall the sound. But it was difficult. She assumed some piece of debris had been lifted by the wind and flung against the dormer. It was two and a half stories above the lawn, but the wind was strong.

Constance was tired, but happily so. She'd spent the evening in the kitchen, helping to bake pastries for the holiday. Every cranny of Belvedere was awash in pleasant scents that spoke of Christmas: the yeasty smell of bread dough; the tang of the huge blue spruce tree down in the parlor; the smoky sweetness of perfumed candles that burned throughout the mansions until very late in the evening. She looked forward to the warmth and festivity of Christmas — to the children being home from their schools, to the family being together.

Over the noise of the rain, she heard a distant whistle. She smiled. That was his train. She closed the window, leaving it unlatched as she always did. Seated again, she gave her gleaming red hair twenty more strokes, then performed her customary evening inspection of the woman in the mirror.

A woman not unattractive for her age, Constance believed. But definitely overweight, by at least thirty pounds. Most days she ate sparingly, inspired by the previous evening's mirror inspection. And yet she gained weight. Who would have thought that a happy life could include that kind of struggle?

Smiling drowsily again, she stretched. George should be home and in bed within a half hour. Thoughts of him drew her attention to a small velvet box lying amid her pins and cosmetic pots and brushes. He was such a dear, generous man. He liked giving her presents, even when there was no special occasion. The velvet box held the latest — earrings.

She took them out. Two large pearls were clasped in tapered mountings of filigreed gold. The effect was that of teardrops. She held one up beside her earlobe, pleased with the effect. She thought of how much she loved her husband, how good their life was after four years of war and separation.

Gazing at the mirror, she didn't see the dormer window slowly begin to open.

Taking the full brunt of the storm, a contorted figure had clung to the roofpeak of the dormer when Constance opened the window in response to the strange sound. Presently she had closed it, but the figure had remained still as a gargoyle on a cathedral.

Down among the misted town lights at the foot of the mountain, an arriving train whistled into the depot. The man on the roof had paid no attention, caught up in what was about to happen. Tonight was the culmination of years of waiting. Months of wandering and planning. Days of skulking about the town asking questions. Then more waiting, until nature provided the cover of this thunderstorm. Tonight, the guilty would begin to pay for thwarting and hurting him.

The climb to the dormer, using slippery gutters, ornamentation, windowsills, had taken a half hour. The wetness, the slickness of everything increased the difficulty. So did his own memories of the fall into the James, the ghastly pain lancing his body as it caromed from rock to rock. He was proud, very proud of himself for overcoming those memories and the accompanying fright, and for making the climb successfully.

He had waited a few moments, then reached down from the roof of the dormer. He worked grimy fingers into the thin space between the frame and the upper edge of the window. A wind gust tore the stolen top hat from his head. He grabbed for it, causing his right foot to slip and scrape the roof. The hat sailed away. He clenched his teeth, cursing silently. Just such a noisy slip had brought Hazard's wife to the window the first time.

He hung in a strained position, waiting. Nothing happened. Evidently she hadn't heard the second scrape. Slowly, he crept down the side of the dormer and with great care pried the window open.

Squinting through the narrow opening, he saw a gaslit room, handsomely furnished. Beyond a canopied bed a woman sat at a dressing table, holding earrings to her ears to study the effect.

He pulled the window open, stretched a crippled leg over the sill, and jumped into the room.

Switchmen with lanterns uncoupled the private car. Above the dim lights of town George saw the shining windows of Belvedere on its terraced peak. To his left the sky shimmered red; the night crews at Hazard's were at work.

Preparing to leave the car, he enjoyed a rare moment of tranquillity. In Pittsburgh he and Jupe Smith had negotiated the purchase of McNeely's Foundry. McNeely, a premier Pennsylvania ironmaster, had died in late summer, and George had stepped in to try to buy the foundry from the heirs. McNeely's was ideal for conversion to the new Bessemer process.

Tonight he was coming home on the crest of success. He had McNeely's in his pocket, and here in Lehigh Station, Hazard's was operating day and night, turning out everything from rails and architectural wrought iron to iron frames for a growing Chicago piano manufacturer, Fenway's. George felt very good about all of it, and in that way he reflected the prevailing mood of the North. The North was enjoying almost unprecedented growth and prosperity. In the wake of four years of carnage and deprivation — years that had clearly shown war of any kind to be unthinkable — Americans of all classes exhibited a fierce dedication to turning a profit. Out of ashes, the industrial phoenix was rising triumphantly.

No credit was due the politicians. George thanked God that he'd gotten out of Washington before the war ended. He couldn't stand to be there now, enduring the sordid intrigues and partisan schisms. Indeed, some conversations he'd had in Pittsburgh suggested that a great many citizens were growing tired of the political war. They were tired of Johnson's harangues about constitutional principle, tired of the Radicals' maneuvering to impeach him, and, sadly, they were tired of the issue of Negro rights.

As always, the politicians failed to recognize a changing mood, or chose to ignore it. But the signals were clear. In the fall elections, the Republicans had been turned out in New York and Pennsylvania and their majorities whittled away in Ohio, Maine, and Massachusetts. Referenda on black suffrage had been defeated in Kansas, Minnesota, and Ohio, states thought to be enlightened.

Despite a weakening hold on the electorate, the Radicals continued on their narrow course. Johnson remained the Arch-Apostate, or the "arch-demon," as Mr. Boutwell, of the House Judiciary Committee, called him. The committee had brought in a 5-4 vote to impeach, although some moderate Republicans with whom George agreed — Wilson of Iowa who wrote the committee's minority report was one — refused to take part in the blood sport. So did the House as a whole. On December 7, it had rejected impeachment, 108-57.

Unfortunately the Radicals remained undeterred. They would find grounds. Stanley's crony and patron, Wade, was already in place as president of the Senate. The Congress might well name him President of the United States if Johnson could be removed.

Virgilia's friend Thad Stevens wanted him gone. Some said nothing else kept the old Radical alive. Stevens and his crowd wanted Johnson on trial for "monstrous usurpations of power," and one defeat in the House wouldn't spell the end of it. God, how vicious some men became when dogma drove them.

"Finally," Jupe Smith groaned. He pressed his upper dentures with his thumb and collected his carpetbag and umbrella. The men said good night to the Welsh porter and the black chef who traveled with the car. It was only a few feet from the covered platform to the waiting Lehigh Station hackney.

"Sorry we're late, Bud," George said, shaking water off his hat as he climbed in. "A fallen tree blocked the track for an hour. Thanks for waiting."

"Glad to," Bud said through the roof slot. "By the way, Mr. Hazard. Been a man askin' for you in town the last day or so."

George moved to give the grumbling lawyer more room. "Who?"

"Didn't say his name. Queer lookin' bird, though. Looks like he was crippled in the war. Leon at the Station House Hotel told him you was away for a while. I s'pose it's just some fella wantin' to sell you something."

"I get my share of those, God knows."

"If this fascinating conversation is over," Jupe said, "I'd like to get to bed. I'm an old man."

"You don't have a corner on that, Jupe." George's bones ached; was he coming down with influenza? He signaled Bud and the hackney lurched off through the almost deserted streets.

One moment the mirror was empty, then his image filled it. She pushed away from the dressing table. She was so stunned and terrified that she didn't notice the earring as it dropped from her left hand. The other pearl-and-gold teardrop bobbed on her right earlobe.

He leaped at her, clapped his left hand over her mouth, and pushed his right knee into her back. "You be quiet. One sound and I'll kill you." He pulled her back harder against his knee to demonstrate his intent. Her back bowed painfully.

Terror crippled her mind. Her eyes flew over the image in the glass, trying to make some sense of it. Who was this stubbled, paunchy hobgoblin in rain-soaked clothes? His eyes were dark and disturbed. The nails of the hand on her mouth were black underneath; he smelled of dirt.

"Don't know who I am, do you? I'm an old friend." He chuckled. A little rope of spit descended from his lip, broke, struck, and made a dark spot on the shoulder of her gown. "An old, old friend of your husband's. Down in Mexico, he and his lickspittle crony Main, they called me Butcher. Butcher Bent."

Under his hand, Constance screamed — or tried to. She knew the name. George thought Elkanah Bent had died, or at least disappeared. But there he was, in the glass, chortling as his right hand dipped into his soiled coat, which was missing all its buttons. He drew something into the light.

"Butchers kill cows. You'd better be careful."

He shook the straight razor's blade open. It glittered in the gaslight. Constance thought she'd faint. Her mind cried out: George! Children!

No. They weren't here. They couldn't help.

Slowly, tantalizingly, Bent lowered the razor past her eyes to her throat. Suddenly he jerked it inward.

Another muffled scream. Only then did Constance realize he'd turned the razor at the last moment. It was the dull top edge pressing her neck.

"Now I'm going to let you go, you dirty cow. I want to ask you some questions. If you yell, you're finished. Do you understand about keeping quiet? Blink your eyes if you do."

Her eyes reflected in the mirror, huge. She blinked four times instead of once. Gaslight flashed on the razor's blade as he lifted it away and then, slowly, his foul-smelling hand.

Constance nearly collapsed. "Please, oh, God, please don't hurt me."

"Tell me what I want to know and I won't." He stepped back, almost affable. "I promise you I won't."

Ashamed of her fear, yet unable to overcome it, she turned on the padded seat to face him. "Can I — can I trust you?"

He giggled. "What choice do you have? But, yes, you can. I only want information. About the people who ruined me. About their families. Start with your husband's bosom friend, Orry Main. Did he really die at Petersburg?"

"Yes." Constance held her hands between her knees, digging nails into her palms. She neither felt the pain nor saw the small seep of blood onto her gown. "Yes, he did."

"He had a wife —"

How could she endanger Madeline, or any of them? Struck silent by conscience, she stared at him, her mouth open. Bent yanked her hair. "We made a bargain. No answers" — he waggled the flashing razor inches from her eyes — "it's all over."

"All right, all right."

He withdrew the razor. "Better. I really don't want to harm an innocent woman. Tell me about Main's widow. Where is she?"

"Mont Royal Plantation. Near Charleston."

He grunted. "And your own husband?"

On the way up to Belvedere this moment, Constance remembered. She must hold Bent in conversation, detain him until George arrived. The train was in; it couldn't take long. Oh, but what if he'd missed the train? Dear God, what if —?

"Mrs. Hazard, I don't have infinite patience." The man's left shoulder hung below his right one, giving him a look of vulnerability. Strange, then, that she'd never seen a more commanding, terrifying figure.

"George —" She licked dry lips. "George is in Pittsburgh on business."

"You have children."

New, cold terror. She hadn't imagined he would —

"Children," he snarled.

"Away at school, both of them."

"I think your husband had a brother."

Which one did he mean? Better to name the most distant. "In California. With his wife and son."

It Worked. The man acted disappointed. He didn't ask for specifics. "And there was a relative of Orry Main's. A soldier I met in Texas. His names was Charles. Where is he?"

"So far as I know, he's in the Army again, out in Kansas." she was so frightened, so desperate to please him and save her life, she quite abandoned caution. "He went out there after the war, with his little boy."

The man smiled suddenly. "Oh, he has a child, too. What branch of the Army is Charles serving with?"

"The U.S. Cavalry. I don't know exactly where."

"Kansas will do. So many children. I hadn't thought of children. That's interesting."

Constance was again on the verge of uncontrollable trembling. Just then, to her amazement, the filthy, rain-soaked man stepped back. "Thank you. I believe you've told me all I need to know. You've been very helpful."

She sagged, close to hysteria. "Thank you. Oh, God, thank you."

"You may stand up if you like."

"Thank you, thank you so very much." She pushed both palms against the padded seat and swayed to her feet, the tears bursting forth, tears of relief that he was going to spare her life. He smiled and stepped forward.

"Here, careful. You're unsteady." His free hand grasped her elbow. Rotten breath gusted from his mouth. The smile on his face grew huge, and his eyes luminous, all in an instant.

"Cow bitch." One cool, silver, feather-light stroke cut her throat.

He stood over her, watching the blood gout and clutching the immense hardness between his legs. He flung down the razor, spied the teardrop earring she's dropped, plucked it up, dipped it in her blood, held it in front of his eyes, and smiled at the red on the gold. He finished his work in less than a minute and climbed out the way he'd come in.

George unlocked his front door. The hackney clattered away down the hill.

He climbed the great staircase two steps at a time, humming. His anticipation and a blissful euphoria made him hum louder as he strode along the upstairs hall, pooled by low-trimmed gas­lights. Hard rain pelted the mansion. He turned the bedroom doorknob, saying as he stepped through, "Constance, I'm —"

The unbelievable sight silenced him. He dropped his carpet­bag, running forward. He reached down to lift her, certain she was only unconscious. He couldn't recognize the significance of the blood sopping the carpet, the great throat wound.

He saw the open dormer window, the rain driving in to soak the carpet. He saw one of the teardrop earrings he'd given her, but not the other.

The mirror caught his attention. He moved toward it, choking on the stench of the wet wool rug. On the mirror, in blood, were four letters.

B E N T

He looked from the mirror to the open window to his motionless wife. The bottom of the T on the mirror grew, swelled, blood accumulating in a fat drop that finally burst. The blood trickled down from the upright of the T, making it longer and longer.

"I thought he was dead," George said, not aware that he was screaming.