Heaven and Hell

48

The scouts rode in, chased by four yapping dogs. Griffenstein came in, and the Corbin brothers, and a stout young Mexican interpreter who had been raised by the Cheyennes and spoke the language fluently. His name was Romero, so naturally everyone called him Romeo.

California Joe rode a mule. Observing his arrival, Charles watched him sway from side to side, blithely smiling at nothing. "Drunk as a tick," he said later to Dutch Henry. "How can Custer tolerate such a clown?"

Dutch Henry scratched the head of a terrier with a stubby wagging tail. There were now at least a dozen stray dogs around the camp. "I kinda get the impression that the only strong man Custer likes is Custer. Don't really make any difference, does it? You said you wanted to kill Cheyennes. Curly's going to do it."

November came down, skies like dark slate, winds bitter. In the camp on the north bank of the Arkansas, Custer ordered a double-up of rifle drill. Twice daily, men of the Seventh fired at targets set up at one hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards. Cooke's sharpshooters frequently dropped around to jeer and offer superior comments.

Generals Sully and Custer called a meeting of the officers and scouts to review the strategy Sheridan had conceived and gotten approved by Uncle Billy at Division. To Griffenstein, Charles whispered a question about Harry Venable, who was absent. Griffenstein said Venable was getting over a bad case of influenza.

General Sully, U.S.M.A. '41, was a bit older than Orry would have been had he lived. The general had a famous father, Thomas Sully of Philadelphia, the painter of portraits and historical scenes; even a man like Charles, unsophisticated about art, knew Sully's heroic depictions of General Washington's passage over the Delaware.

The artist's son was a dignified sort, with the usual chest-length beard. Although he'd recently failed to find and whip any Indians south of the Arkansas, he had a first-class reputation going back to the Mexican War. He was considered an experienced Indian fighter, having chased the Sioux in the Minnesota Rebellion of '63 and driven them to refuge in the Black Hills. Charles watched Custer closely; the Boy General couldn't entirely hide his resentment of Sully. There was not room for both of them on the expedition, Charles decided.

Using maps, Sully explained that three attack columns would thrust into the Indian Territory simultaneously. A mixed infantry and cavalry column was marching east from Fort Bascom, New Mexico Territory. A second column, Fifth Cavalry troops under Brigadier Eugene Carr, would strike southeast from Fort Lyon, Colorado, toward the Antelope Hills, a familiar landmark just below the North Canadian.

The central column was Sully's, or Custer's, depending whose side you took. It was considered the main attack force. It consisted of eleven troops of the Seventh and five, infantry companies from the Third, Fifth, and Thirty-eighth regiments. The column would strike due south, establish a supply base to be garrisoned by the infantrymen, then push on to trail and harry any Cheyennes or Arapahoes they found encamped in the Territory. The other two columns were like jungle beaters, Sully said, sweeping the Indians ahead of the main column. Charles discovered that all of this was made possible by some old friends of his.

"Your boys from the Tenth," Dutch Henry said after the meeting. "They're posted all along the Smoky Hill now. Wasn't for them, Custer would still be patrolling up there, 'stead of chasing glory down here. Those darkies got a damn fine reputation. Man for man, they're better soldiers than all the white rum heads and peg legs in this army. Nobody much likes to admit it, but it's true."

That brought memories of Magic Magee and Star Eyes Williams; of Old Man Barnes and Colonel Grierson. It brought a thin, pleased smile to Charles's bearded face, too. The first in some time.

One evening at the scouts' cook fire, Charles was eating a late supper when he glanced up to see a mangy yellow dog standing and watching him. Charles kept chewing his piece of jerky. The yellow dog, a stray he'd noticed before, wagged his tail and whined imploringly.

"What the hell do you want?"

On the other side of the fire, Joe Corbin laughed. "That's Old Bob. He's been roaming all over looking for a supply officer. He thinks he's found one."

"Not me," Charles said. He started to chew the jerky again. Old Bob frisked around him, wagging his tail and mewling more like a kitten than a dog. The mournful yellow-brown eyes stayed fixed on Charles. Finally Charles said, "Oh, hell," took the piece of jerky from his mouth, and threw it to the mongrel.

Old Bob was his from then on.

Charles wanted no part of the continuing schism in the Seventh Cavalry. Unfortunately, a man couldn't avoid it. Custer had plenty of enemies, and most of them talked about their feelings whether or not they were asked. One of the bitterest was a capable brevet colonel, Fred Benteen, who commanded H Troop under his actual rank of captain.

"Don't be fooled by how cool he acts, Charlie," he said once. "Underneath, he's smarting over the court-martial. Of course, the Queen of Sheba" — that was what Custer's detractors called Libbie — "keeps telling him how great he is, and innocent as a lamb. He doesn't quite believe it, though. Watch him and you'll notice he runs off to wash his hands ten, twelve, fifteen times a day. No man with a clear conscience does that. This may be Sheridan's campaign but it's Custer's game. He's playing for his reputation."

Custer had plenty of defenders, too. Cooke, of Cooke's Sharpshooters, was a strong and vocal one. So was Captain Louis Hamilton, grandson of Alexander Hamilton. Not unexpectedly, the man who usually spoke ahead of all the rest was the general's younger brother, Brevet Colonel Tom Custer, first lieutenant of D Troop. Charles listened to all the praise from the apologists and took it with appropriate cynicism.

He found one of Custer's partisans likable in spite of his blind loyalty. The man's name was Joel Elliott. He had an ingenuous manner and a reputation for heroism that no one disputed. In the war, without connections, he'd risen from private to captain. In '64, riding with the Seventh Indiana Volunteer Horse in Mississippi, he'd taken a bullet through the lung. He made a miraculous recovery, and after the surrender jumped back into service by taking the competitive officer examination. He'd scored so high, he won a majority. He was Custer's second in command, and led his own three-troop detachment. Charles formed an immediate impression that Elliott was a good soldier.

No mistaking where Elliott stood, though.

"The general's a man of impeccable character," he said. "He quit drinking and smoking years ago. He swears occasionally, but his heart's never in it."

"He wouldn't command black troops, but I've heard it said that he'll sleep with a black whore."

Elliott froze. "A lie. He's faithful to Libbie."

"Sure. She's pumping him up for president."

"Charlie, he isn't a politician, he's a soldier. The winningest soldier I've ever known. That's because he fights aggressively."

"Oh, yes, I've heard how aggressive he was," Charles said, nodding. "He led the Third Michigan to the highest casualty rate of any cavalry outfit in the Union Army."

"Doesn't that say he's a brave man?"

"Or a reckless one. One of these days he could do himself in with that kind of recklessness. His whole command, too."

"By God it better not happen on this campaign. I'm shooting for a brevet. A brevet or a coffin, nothing in between."

Charles smiled sadly at that. Elliott was so earnest. They got along because they argued without personal animosity. It was hard to remember that Joel Elliott was one of the three who'd chased and brought back the infamous quintet of deserters, three of them shot — on Custer's order.

Well, he liked Elliott in spite of it. The young officer was unpretentious, enthusiastic, and most important, a self-taught professional. You could probably depend on him to carry out orders, even bad ones, to the letter. In a hot fight, that counted for a lot.

The weather grew worse, the days dark with the threat of storms that lurked in billowing black clouds in the north. The drilling continued. Farriers tended to the animals, and issued each man a spare front and rear shoe and extra nails, to be carried in a saddle pouch.

The scouts fretted to be away. They had their own encampment, shared with another group, one Charles didn't care for — eleven Osage trackers, led by chief Hard Rope and Little Beaver. Charles disliked their eyes, hiding God knew what treacherous thoughts and schemes, and their ugly flat-nosed faces, and the way they constantly caressed and fussed over their big bows of hedge-apple wood, or came begging among the white scouts for sugar for their coffee. Indians were insane about sweet coffee. They put so much sugar in a cup that what resulted was a damp brown mound they ate rather than drank.

"Just keep them away from me," Charles said to California Joe Milner, whose real name was Moses, not Joe, he'd discovered. Hard Rope had approached Charles — "Me need sugar" was the best English he could manage — and Charles told him to go to hell. California Joe had called him down. "You got to ride with 'em, Main." "I'll ride with them. I don't have to be social." California Joe was in his cups, and pliable. "Well, if that's how it is, that's how it is, I guess," he said.

Charles tended to his gear, curried Satan and fed him extra forage, scrounged scraps for Old Bob, and waited. At the end of the first week of November, the clouds cleared away. Everyone took it as a sign that they'd march soon.

Charles was ready. He felt fit, missed his son, thought of Willa more than was good for him — remembering her was melancholy and painful — and deemed it wisdom, not cowardice, to avoid Handsome Harry Venable.

Inevitably, running messages for Milner, he saw Venable around the encampment at various times, from a distance. On each occasion he managed to walk or ride away quickly. Of course, he knew a confrontation was certain one of these days.

On November 11, the camp stirred with the excitement of new orders. Next day, they marched.

The huge, noisy advance started at daybreak. It was a spectacle unlike any Charles had seen since the war. The supply train carrying winter clothing, food, and forage had grown to four hundred fifty white-topped wagons, an immense cavalcade split into four columns traveling abreast. Two companies of the Seventh rode in front, two formed a rear guard, and the rest were divided to ride wide and protect the flanks of the train. The infantry was assigned to march near the wagons but everyone expected that the lazy foot soldiers would soon be hitching rides, which proved to be the case.

Sully and some other officers took the south bank of the Arkansas while the first of the wagons lumbered in and splashed across. So many wagons, their teamsters swearing and popping whips, created a colossal din, augmented by trumpet calls and the creak of horse gear and the lowing of the beef cattle pushed along between the wagons and the flanking cavalry.

Spruce and boisterous, Custer rode with his point detachment, avoiding Sully. Charles saw Custer on his prancing horse on the north bank, the Seventh's standard, with its fierce eagle clutching sharp golden arrows, unfurled in the wind behind him. The Seventh's mounted bandsmen played "The Girl I Left Behind Me" as accompaniment for the fording.

The land directly south of the river was a kind Charles had seen with Wooden Foot Jackson: a scoured waste of sand hills cut by dry gulches. Travel for the wagons was slow and difficult. Axles snapped. Coupling poles split. The teamsters whipped their mules and oxen pitilessly but fell behind. The mounted soldiers soon drew away, leaving a great billowing rampart of dust in their wake.

Charles, Dutch Henry, and two of the Osages galloped ahead and sited a camp on Mulberry Creek, barely five miles from their departure point. Sully and Custer jointly decided they would go no farther the first day because the wagons were having so much trouble.

In camp, after Charles ate a supper of beans and hardtack, his luck ran out again.

Stiff from being in the saddle all day, he fed Satan and blanketed him against the night chill. He was walking back toward the scout camp when he saw a familiar figure striding down a low knoll on a path that would intersect his. Captain Harry Venable looked neat and unwrinkled after the day's march. The eternal prairie wind lifted his overcoat cape as he stepped in front of Charles.

"Main," he said curtly. His eyes were even bluer, more glacial than Custer's. "Or should I say May? August, perhaps? Which is it this time?"

"I expect you know."

"I do. I spotted you a week ago. I know you saw me. I thought that in light of past circumstances you might be smart enough to get the hell away from this expedition."

"Why? I'm not in uniform. California Joe hired me."

"You're still under Army jurisdiction."

Old Bob, following Charles as he usually did, went up to Venable to sniff. Venable kicked at him. Bob crouched and growled. Charles whistled the dog back to his side. Old Bob obeyed but kept growling.

"Look, Venable, General Custer knows that I rode for the Confederacy. He doesn't object."

"By Christ I do." Venable's russet beard jutted; his face was nasty. Old Bob growled louder. Venable stepped forward. "You reb son of a bitch!"

Charles reacted by shoving his palm hard against Venable's dark blue overcoat. "Take your complaints to the general."

Venable surprised Charles by relaxing, stepping away. A puzzling smile drifted onto his face. "Oh, no. I haven't said a word about our past encounters, and I won't. I want you to myself this time. Pounding your dumb skull at Jefferson Barracks didn't discourage you, and neither did a discharge after you lied your way into the Tenth. I'm going to find something that works. Something permanent."

"Fuck you," Charles said. "Come on, Bob."

Venable ran after him, but Old Bob's growl brought him up short. "It's your job to keep your eyes on the trail ahead," Venable called. "But just remember, I'll be watching your back, every minute."

The threat bothered Charles more than he cared to admit. He wanted to tell someone. He drew Dutch Henry away from the other scouts around the fire and in a few words described the run-in, concluding, "So if you find me shot in the back, get that damn Yankee."

Dutch Henry looked baffled. "Why's he got it in for you?"

"Because of what John Hunt Morgan did to his mother and sister. I'm not responsible for it, for God's sake."

The burly scout gave him a peculiar look, his eyes flecked with points of light from the blazing campfire. "No, and the Injuns we're chasing probably didn't chop up your partners. But you're going to kill them anyway."

"Henry, that's —"

"Different? Mmmm. If you say so. Come on back to the fire, Charlie. It's too damn cold to stand here palavering."

He stumped off toward the wind-tattered flames, leaving Charles motionless, staring after him with a curious strained look on his face. Almost a look of confusion.

On November 13 they advanced to Bluff Creek, where Custer had rejoined the regiment when he came out of exile in Michigan. They made Bear Creek the following day, and the Cimarron, and the Indian Territory, the day after that. There, a winter norther tore down on them, providing a wicked foretaste of the season to come.

Heading east along the Beaver fork of the North Canadian, they still found no trace of hostiles. A day later that changed. Charles and the Corbins discovered a ford with signs of many ponies having passed, but no travois. A war party. They galloped back toward the main body to report:

"Anywhere from seventy-five to one hundred fifty braves, trailing in a northeasterly direction."

''To attack settlements, Mr. Main?" General Sully asked. He'd gathered officers and scouts in his big headquarters tent. The lanterns illuminated faces beginning to show beard stubble, trail dirt, fatigue. Venable lounged at the back. He folded his arms, a signal he distrusted anything Charles might say.

"I don't know any other reason they'd be headed away from Indian Territory in the winter, General."

Custer stepped forward, almost quivering in anticipation of a fight. Was it accidental that he moved in front of Sully, partially hiding him from the others? "How old is the sign?" he wanted to know.

Jack Corbin said laconically, "Two days, most."

"Then if we strike out in the other direction, where they came from, we might find their village with most of the men gone. We could take them by surprise."

"General Custer," Sully said with weighted irony, "that's absurd. Do you for one moment suppose that a military force as large as ours, accompanied by such an immense train of wagons, could have gotten this far into Indian country and remain undetected? They know we're here."

Instead of arguing, Custer said, "What do you think, Main?"

Charles didn't like the unexpected and unsubtle shift of responsibility, but there was no point in feeding Sully's lies, whether he got offended or not. "I think it's entirely possible no one knows we're here. The Indians don't move much this late in the season. That war party has to be an exception. They assume we wouldn't move either."

"You see?" Custer exclaimed to Sully. "Let me take a detachment —"

"No."

"But look here —"

"Permission denied," Sully said.

Custer shut up, but no one in the tent missed the rush of red in his cheeks, or his glare of resentment. Nor did he intend that they should. Charles figured Sully had blundered in a way he would regret.

"My partner, Jackson, said a white man has to turn his notions upside down out here," Charles remarked to Griffenstein after the conference broke up. "Sully won't do it. Same old Army." He sighed.

Charles and the scouts ranged south, hunting for a suitable location for the supply base. They found one about a mile above the confluence of Wolf and Beaver creeks, which joined to form the North Canadian. There was timber, good water, and abundant game. At noon on the eighteenth of November, the forward detachments of the Seventh reached the site.

Charles, Milner, and the other scouts rode into the woods for game while the infantry fell to chopping trees for a stockade. Additional parties of men began digging wells and latrine trenches, or scything down the frost-killed meadow grass for forage.

Charles flushed a flock of wild turkeys and bagged three with his Spencer. California Joe, temporarily sober, killed a buffalo cow but lost a dozen more that stampeded at the first shot. Most of the scouts brought in a kill of some kind. The expedition would eat better tonight.

Camp Supply rose quickly, a stockade one hundred twenty-six feet on a side, with lunettes at two corners, loopholed block­houses at the other two. Log palisades protected the west and south sides; barrackslike storage buildings served as the north and east walls. The men had pitched their tents outside; the wagons unloaded inside. The expedition had stretched its supply line a distance of one hundred miles from Fort Dodge.

Charles heard that Custer and Sully were arguing almost continuously. Custer was still furious with his rival.

An advance party of white scouts and Kaw trackers appeared in the north, heralding the arrival of General Sheridan and his three-hundred-man escort from the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. Custer saddled up and galloped out to greet the Departmental commander. By nightfall, Little Phil was stumping around the camp, shaking hands and grousing obscenely about the fierce norther and howling sleet storm that had plagued his rapid march from Fort Hays. Sheridan was squat and thickly built, with black eyes and a pointed Mongol mustache. Charles had never seen a New York Bowery bartender, but Little Phil fit his mental picture.

Later in the evening, reclining by the scout fire with Old Bob curled up against his belly, asleep, Charles heard music. He recognized "Marching Through Georgia."

"What the hell's going on, Henry?"

"Why, I'm told old Curly sent his bandsmen to lighten General Sheridan's evening with a serenade. Don't you recognize that tune?" He smirked. "The title should be 'Farewell, General Sully.'"

That was the sixth day after departure from the camp on the Arkansas. General Sheridan took personal charge of the expedition, and then Sully and his staff left suddenly for his headquarters at Fort Harker. It wasn't hard to tell which commander Little Phil had backed in the dispute over rank.

Quartermasters began issuing overcoats lined with buffalo hide, high canvas leggings, and fur mittens and caps to the men of the Seventh. Sheridan ordered Custer and his eleven troops to prepare to march before daylight on the morning of November 23.

The issuing of rations and ammunition continued all night. Horses were inspected and questionable ones replaced. Custer cut a new one, Dandy, from the remuda. The best teams were matched with the soundest wagons, which were loaded with provisions for thirty days.

After dark, a peculiar stillness settled over Camp Supply. Charles had experienced a similar quiet before Sharpsburg, and several times in Virginia. In these last hours before a campaign began in earnest, a man liked to be alone with himself and his Bible or the pencil he used to write a farewell letter to be left behind, just in case. Charles wrote such a note for Duncan to read to little Gus. He was sealing it when Dutch Henry stomped into the tent they shared.

"Guess what we got outside."

"The usual. The wind."

"More'n that now." He held the flap open. Charles saw a slantwise pattern of white. "She's piling up fast. They said it'd be a winter war. Damned if they were fooling."

Old Bob snored now and then, but Charles couldn't sleep. He was already bundled in his gypsy robe, waiting impatiently, when the trumpeters played reveille at 4:00 a.m.

He made sure his compass was secure in a pocket — not even the Osages knew much about the country south of Camp Supply — and stepped outside while Dutch Henry yawned himself awake. The wind howled. Snow pelted his exposed flesh. A drift in front of the tent measured six inches. Not an auspicious start.

Likewise awake early, General Custer sent for Dandy, and with the staghounds Maida and Blucher loping after him, rode alone over to the headquarters encampment. He was greeted by darkness and silence. Everyone was still sleeping.

Not daunted, he called for General Sheridan. Presently Little Phil emerged from his tent, two blankets clutched over his long underwear. An orderly lighted a lantern while Custer patted his fretful horse. The snow blew almost horizontally. With his sleep-slitted eyes, Sheridan resembled a Chinese.

"What do you think of this storm, General?" Sheridan asked.

"Sir, I think nothing could serve our purpose better. We can move. The Indians will not. If the snow lasts a week, I'll bring you some scalps."

"I'll be waiting," said Little Phil, returning the salute of his eager commander.

The trumpets sounded the advance. As usual, the scouts were first, horses struggling to step through the mounting drifts. The wind screamed. It was hard to hear anything else, and the earflaps of Charles's muskrat cap only made matters worse. He had been astounded to see a journalist who'd arrived with Sheridan, a Mr. DeBenneville Keim, climb aboard one of the supply wagons, now lost in the darkness behind the scouts. Perhaps Custer had persuaded the reporter that the expedition would achieve some noteworthy results.

He thought he heard his name. He lifted the left flap of his cap. "What's that?"

"I said," Dutch Henry yelled, "we got an observer from Sheridan's staff. He's right back yonder with old Curly. Guess who."

In the snow-lashed darkness, Charles imagined Venable's eyes and, despite the temperature, felt a hot prickle down his back.

49

When the day dawned, the world stayed white. Charles tied a scarf around the lower part of his face but needles of snow still broke painfully against his exposed skin. The incessant moaning and crying of the storm wore on his nerves.

Soon a snow crust built up on his eyebrows. Satan snorted and struggled through deepening drifts. Snow on the horse's back would shiver and blow away only to be thick again in a few minutes. Looking to the rear, Charles could see nothing, though he heard men back there. One of them shouted that the teamsters, already a mile behind with their foundering wagons, were still losing ground.

Griffenstein dropped back to ride beside him. The two tried to exchange comments about the storm. The strain on their throats wasn't worth it. Each man held a mitten near his face, stiffened fingers curled to give some protection to their only reliable guides in the blizzard, the little needles of their pocket compasses. The compasses kept them headed south.

By 2:00 p.m. Custer ordered a halt for the day. The column was strung along the valley of Wolf Creek, which Charles estimated as no more than fifteen miles from their departure point. Horses and men were as blown out as if they'd marched twice that distance. No one knew if they'd see the wagons again.

Stands of timber bordered the frozen creek; around the trunks the drifts were five and six feet high. Among the leafless trees, Charles spied large dark shapes, motionless, very like statues placed in the wilderness by some crazed sculptor. The statues proved to be buffalo standing with their heads down while the storm raged. Only the noise of men wielding axes roused them and started them staggering away. Marksmen brought down three.

Like ants on a white sand beach. Charles and the other scouts moved through a snowy grove. They dug up fallen limbs protruding from drifts, or cut smaller volunteer trees among the bigger ones; they would at least have fires for warmth, even if they got no food from the lost wagons.

Charles and Dutch Henry piled up their wood and went to feed their mounts on the picket line. Satan acted famished; he finished his small ration of oats so greedily, Charles thought the piebald might chew off his fingers.

Next, mostly using their hands, they dug out snow to create their campsite. When they had the snow down to two or three inches, they stomped it to pack it; it was the best floor they were going to get. Of course as soon as they pitched their two-man tent and started a fire outside, the tent floor melted and soaked their blankets.

As the night lowered, Charles heard heavy creakings and poppings — the wagons and their drivers' whips. General Custer went riding past in the storm, Maida and Blucher loping behind.

Custer's cheeks were red as blistered skin.

"... want to see every last one of those damn malingering teamsters in twenty minutes in my ..."

The general vanished behind a tossed-up cloud of snow. Charles had never seen him in such a bad temper, or heard him curse.

Old Bob, who'd kept up pretty well all day, seemed to know it was a night of misery. He stayed close to Charles, nuzzling his canvas leggings and whining.

They unpacked their skillets, unfolded the handles, melted some snow, and boiled salt pork. Several pieces of hardtack, softened by sticking them in a drift, went into the pork grease and fried up nicely. That and coffee provided a passable meal, though Charles was still frozen, and chafed raw by the rubbing of his layers of clothing. He kept reminding himself of why he was here. He pictured each member of the Jackson Trading Company as he last saw him.

Captain Fred Benteen stomped by, muttering, "Goddamn idiot."

"Who?" Charles asked.

"The general. Do you know what he just did?"

"What?" Griffenstein asked, in a tone that said a mass execution wouldn't surprise him.

"Arrested all the teamsters for being so slow. Tomorrow they're forbidden to ride in their wagons. They have to walk. We won't have any wagons after that."

He went away into the falling snow. Old Bob whined, and Charles rubbed his muzzle and fed him a morsel of boiled pork. From that moment, a formless uneasiness about the expedition began to trouble him. It had nothing to do with the presence of Harry Venable.

Because of Charles's reb background, he was something of a curiosity. Young Louis Hamilton, the likable captain in command of A Troop, brought the journalist around after dark. He introduced him as a phonographic reporter representing the New York Herald.

DeBenneville Keim was eager to talk to Charles. Charles didn't reciprocate, but he poured him a tin cup of coffee to be hospitable. Keim drank some, then pulled a small, worn book from his coat. The title was stamped in gold on the spine. After the War.

"I've been reading Whitelaw Reid, Mr. Main. You were in South Carolina when Sumter fell. Tell me what you think of this passage about Sullivan's Island."

He handed Charles the book. Reid was a nationally famous Union correspondent who had written field dispatches under the name "Agate." He'd been one of the first three journalists into Richmond. Charles blinked several times as melting snowflakes dripped water from his eyebrows onto the page and read:

Keim put a red-ruled notebook on his knee. The pages were filled with the squiggles of phonography, a journalist shorthand. "It's a vivid picture. Was that really how it was?"

A vast sadness rose in Charles. He thought of poor Ambrose Pell. "Yes, but not for very long. And it's all gone now. It'll never come back."

He snapped the book shut and thrust it at Keim. Something strange and bleak on his face forestalled any more questions; Keim directed them to Dutch Henry instead. Charles rubbed Old Bob to silence his growling.

Next day the march resumed, the punished teamsters struggling along on foot. The storm abated. The clouds cleared, but that created another difficulty. The glare of sun on the drifted snowfields was unmerciful on the eyes.

They advanced in a southwesterly direction, following the Wolf, which enabled Charles to put his compass away. He rode well in front with several of the Osages, who kept giving him uneasy stares because he sang to himself, in a raspy near-monotone:

"Where'd you learn that?" Dutch Henry inquired.

"The nigras on the sea islands back home sing it. Church song."

"You make it sound like we're goin' to a funeral."

"I just have a funny feeling about this, Henry. A bad feeling."

"Well, you wanted to be here."

"That I did." Charles shrugged; maybe he was a damn fool. But the uneasiness stayed.

The route of march was planned to take them upstream to a point where they could strike southward to the Antelope Hills near the North Canadian. The bed of Wolf Creek soon turned in a more westerly direction. Once again exhausted from breaking through so many high drifts, and half blinded by a sun not warm enough to melt the snow significantly, they staggered into another campsite on bluffs above the creek. Charles heard that one of the teamsters had pulled a pistol on Curly, who kicked his balls, disarmed him single-handed, and ordered him flogged with knotted rope. Griffenstein said Custer had summoned the phonographic reporter and ordered him not to write a word about the punishment if he wanted to continue with the expedition.

"Kind of stupid to offend a reporter that way, don't you think, Charlie?"

"Not if you're watching your ass. Not if you want to run for President someday."

In the morning they bore away from their westerly course and advanced due south. Here and there a few dark patches of woodland showed on the horizon, like charcoal smears on a clean sheet of drawing paper. Some topography was apparent despite the great amount of snow. From the Wolf, the prairie sloped upward slightly to a ridge line or divide. By afternoon they were on the downward side. They encamped that night about a mile north of the Canadian.

Charles and California Joe did a sweep along the river, which was still flowing very rapidly, considerably over its banks. Massive ice chunks came swirling down with the current. They located a ford that looked passable. More sober than Charles had ever seen him, Joe Milner cautiously walked his mule across it. Suddenly he sank six inches.

"Quicksand. Well, they ain't any other place to cross. She'll have to do."

After he struggled out, they returned and reported. Custer seemed satisfied. Dutch Henry said Major Elliott had already left with three troops, and no wagons, to range up the valley of the Canadian in search of Indians. The Corbin brothers and several of the Osages had gone with Elliott. Dutch Henry finished his remarks with a reminder that tomorrow, Thursday, would be Thanksgiving.

Charles didn't care very much. It was a Northern holiday, and no Army cooks would be serving the traditional big dinner in this frozen wasteland.

Quicksand, icy water, dangerous ice chunks that smashed wheel spokes and lamed two horses caused the Canadian crossing to take more than three hours early on Thanksgiving Day. Every trooper, civilian, and Indian was soggy and dispirited when it was over, but they perked up at the sight of the Antelope Hills straight ahead. Reaching these familiar formations proved they hadn't wandered aimlessly.

The five clustered hillocks were anywhere from one hundred fifty to three hundred feet high. Two were conical, three oblong, and from the highest there was a magnificent view of the country: the twisty Canadian behind and, ahead, a vista of snowfields that seemed to roll on and on forever.

Early in the afternoon, shouts signaled the approach of a rider coming in from the direction Elliott's column had taken. Trumpeters summoned the officers and scouts to Custer's marquee, where there was a great state of excitement. Maida and Blucher leaped and yapped. Custer struck each dog lightly with a riding crop, and they made no more noise.

"Repeat it for those who just got here, Jack," Custer said.

"Major Elliott's about twelve miles or so up the north bank," Jack Corbin said. "There's a crossing, and sign aplenty. 'Bout one hundred fifty hostiles passed over, going a little east of south. The sign ain't more than a day old."

Charles's fingers started to tingle. Excited murmurs greeted the news, and Custer's blister-red face fairly beamed. Handsome Harry Venable, whose hostile looks didn't faze Charles any longer, stated the obvious:

"If we keep on and they do, they'll cross our trail ahead of us. Maybe today."

"Aye God," California Joe said, reeling slightly from some recent refreshment. "It's Thanksgiving Day, and we got Custer's Luck."

Some of the sycophantic officers went "Hear, hear!" and clapped. The anti-Custer men, including Benteen, glowered. Custer himself looked renewed; he couldn't stand still.

"I want the men ready in twenty minutes for a night march. No tents, no blankets. One hundred rounds per man, a little coffee and hardtack, and that's all. We'll take seven wagons and one ambulance. The rest of the baggage train stays here with one troop and the officer of the day. Where is he?"

"Here, sir." Captain Louis Hamilton stepped forward. He looked unhappy. "I beg the general's permission to go with the detachment. I'll bet those damn Indians are close to their lair, and we're going to find it."

"I commend your enthusiasm, Hamilton. I share it." By now Custer was fairly dancing around the marquee. His blood was up, and so was that of almost everyone else. Charles wondered why, after so many months of yearning for revenge, he didn't share the excitement.

Custer continued: "If you can find a substitute in twenty minutes, you're welcome to ride with us."

"Yes, sir," Hamilton exclaimed, like a boy given a handful of candy. He dashed out without bothering to salute. Everyone laughed.

To Jack Corbin, Custer said: "Can you get back to Major Elliott?"

"With a fresh horse I can, General."

"Tell him to continue the pursuit with all vigor. We should intersect with him about dark. Tell him to expect that."

Corbin hurried away. Custer dismissed the others. There was a huge push to leave the marquee. Dutch Henry fairly exploded with good humor. "I think we're gonna get what we come for, Charlie."

The advance sounded in twenty minutes precisely. The designated force, eleven troops and Cooke's Sharpshooters, struck south again through high drifts. Hamilton was along; an officer suffering partial snow blindness had agreed to take charge of the wagons.

The weather had moderated a little; the drifts were melting. In a couple of hours, Hard Rope and another Osage galloped back past Charles, shouting in pidgin, "Me find. Me find." Dutch Henry eyed the trail ahead. Charles nudged Satan to follow the big man's horse. Several of the stray dogs frolicked along too, leaping and barking.

It was a find, all right. Clear sign of the Indian party, as big as Corbin said, with no marks of travois. Braves, then. On a last raid or hunt. The trail continued on through the level, treeless country in a southeasterly direction.

Now there was impromptu singing as they advanced — "Jine the Cavalry" and other Army ditties. Everyone felt warmer, and they had the prospect of an engagement, not just an endless advance through snow. Old Bob kept jumping in the air. He barked almost constantly.

Toward the end of the day the land began to change again. From the level prairie, it sloped slightly downward in a long descent to a horizon-spanning stand of misty timber still miles away. Custer sent Griffenstein ahead with orders to find Elliott and stop his advance until the main column caught up. Elliott was to choose a rendezvous where there was running water and a supply of wood.

Charles judged it to be about five in the afternoon when they reached the edge of the timber. His belly gurgled and contracted painfully. He was sure Satan was just as hungry; none of the horses had eaten anything since 4:00 a.m., hours ago, and Charles had munched only a piece of hardtack, which nearly broke a tooth before he got it softened with spit. He realized that the advance had become one of Custer's ruthless forced marches.

On and on they rode through the mazy timber. Darkness came, and renewed cold. The mushy drifts froze into a hard crust that crackled at each step the horses took; the night seemed alive with a sound like musketry. The dogs barked, sabers clinked, men cursed as the march went on past seven o'clock.

Past eight.

About 9:00 p.m., Charles saw an orange glow ahead. He circled a dark tree trunk and discerned several similar glows. He speeded Satan past the Osages to an expanse of treeless ground. A sentry leaped up to challenge him and Charles shouted, "General Custer's column. Is this Elliott?"

"Yes, we're here."

"We found them," he called over his shoulder. He heard cheering.

Major Elliott's three troops were resting along the steep sides of a stream. Taking advantage of the natural cover the banks afforded, small cooking fires were blazing on the south side. The column prepared to dismount and rest. The air of festivity reminded him of those first blithe days Whitelaw Reid described.

Captain Harry Venable went riding along the line with the good news: "One hour. Saddles and bits off the horses."

The time seemed to fly. Charles dragged the horse furniture off his piebald, dried him as well as he could, and fed him the oats he was carrying. He fed Dutch Henry's mount too, while his friend heated some coffee. That and hardtack was their sumptuous Thanksgiving feast.

At ten sharp, the advance resumed without trumpet calls. Four abreast, the cavalrymen began to move down the steep bank, through the stream and up the other side. The snowfields glittered with a diamond liveliness; a brilliant moon shone.

Little Beaver and another Osage led the column on foot. Because of the noise, the gunshot crackle of the snowcrust, the trackers stayed four hundred yards ahead of the first large group of riders which included the other Osages and the white scouts, all of whom were in single file. Custer rode with this group, surrounded by the noisy dogs.

Charles walked Satan toward what appeared to be a large stump about five feet high. He was startled when the stump moved. Little Beaver had waited for them to catch up.

"Village," he said.

Custer heard. "What's that?" he exclaimed.

"Village near."

"How far?"

"Don't know. But there is a village."

There were aspects of Indian tracking so entangled in mystery and second sight that Charles never tried to understand them. Gray Owl had displayed some of the same intuitions, and whites were foolish to disregard them. Custer didn't.

"Very good, Little Beaver. Back to your place. And quietly, quietly." In the dark they heard a couple of troopers laughing and joshing. Custer wheeled out of line, almost trampling a couple of the dogs. Charles saw his blade-nosed profile against the dark moonlit sky. "No talking. From now on, I'll cut down any man who speaks."

Charles had no doubt he'd do it. His nerves tightened up a notch. The uneasy feeling worsened. The advance continued, the black snake of horses and riders crawling over the moonlit snow without the wagons or the ambulance; Custer had left them behind with Quartermaster Lieutenant Bell.

They seemed to be in a region of ridges that ran east and west, parallel to one another, with narrow valleys between. Saddles creaked. The snow crackled. Far away, a wolf howled; another answered. Once Charles looked back and was almost deluded into seeing buffalo sitting upright on the horses. The bulky overcoats of the troopers created the illusion.

Again they came on the two Osages waiting for the main column. "Smell fire," Little Beaver announced.

Custer controlled Dandy after the horse nearly stepped on Blucher. "I don't."

"Fire," the Indian insisted.

"Go see. Griffenstein, Main, go with him. Arm yourselves."

Charles peeled off his mittens. He yanked the scarf from his face so he could lick his lips, stiff as wood and lacerated by painful cracks. He reached over his shoulder and pulled the Spencer from the sling. With Little Beaver striding between them, the two white men walked their horses across another snowy expanse to some widely spaced trees.

"There's something," Charles exclaimed softly. He pointed to an orange smudge, smaller and dimmer than those spied when they found Elliott. Dutch Henry drew both his revolvers and cocked them. Charles held his Spencer ready.

Black wraiths breathing small clouds of transparent mist into the moonlight, the scouts walked their horses into the trees. Charles smelled the smoke distinctly. A fire, all but gone out, built in the lee of some thorny shrubs.

Satan smelled something strange and didn't like it. Charles patted the piebald to quiet him. When he stirred the fire with a stick, the embers billowed; the light helped him see the ground roundabout. It was a churned mess of snow and mud. He stepped in a barely hardened pod of manure. The aroma mingled with that of the fire.

"A pony herd tried to graze here most of the day, Henry. I'd stake my life that this fire was built by the boys tending the ponies."

"So we can't be but two, three miles from the village?"

"That's right. But whose village?"

"Does it make any damn difference?"

The question threw him. The uneasiness returned. Little Beaver began a shuffling dance step, mumbling and chanting under his breath. He sensed engagement soon.

"I'll give the general the good news," Dutch Henry said, turning his horse's head.

Custer sent the two scouts forward again, walking. Charles's mouth felt like a dry gully. His pulsebeat leaped in his throat so hard it almost hurt. Where the trees thinned out, the moon shone on a strip of snowy ground with a sharply defined irregular edge.

"Careful. That looks like a drop-off," Dutch Henry warned.

Belly down, they crept on the edge. A slope sheered away; difficult for horses, though not impossible.

They were gazing out on a shallow river valley. "Got to be the Washita," Dutch Henry said. The river ran right below, silver in the moonlight, chuckling at them. Its course was roughly east and west. About two miles east, to their left, the river looped to the north and disappeared behind a spur of the hills.

Beyond some open ground on the river's far side, a dark mass suggested more heavy timber. Little else could be seen despite the brilliant moon and incredible display of stars in the heavens. Charles sniffed. He and Dutch Henry both smelled the smoke from across the river.

Over in the timber, a dog barked. Charles's hair almost stood on end. A few seconds later he heard the wail of a baby.

"Can't see the lodges from up here," Dutch Henry said. "Maybe if I get lower, I can count 'em against the sky."

He scrambled down the slope, leaving Charles with the thickening smell of smoke in his nostrils. A tinkling bell suddenly showed him the pony herd, a darker mass of shadow that flowed away behind the timber.

Shortly, Griffenstein came scrambling up again. "We got 'em," he whispered. "The tipis are back in those cottonwoods. Right around fifty of 'em. Let's go."

While they stole away Charles thought, Fifty. But whose are they?

Custer tilted the face of his pocket watch toward the moon. "About three and a half hours till dawn. We'll go in them. Main, gather the officers on the double."

They were together within minutes. Quickly, Custer revealed that they'd tracked the war party to its base, which the column would attack at first light. Charles could hear the excitement that generated. Venable even forgot about giving him intimidating stares.

With unconcealed enthusiasm, Custer improvised his plan on the spot. He split his seven hundred effectives into four detachments, three to support the main one, which would lead the attack from the bluff where Charles and Griffenstein had observed the village. One of the detachments would advance at the sound of band music. Elliott's and Thompson's detachments were to start toward their positions immediately.

"The men remaining here may dismount until it's time to move forward. They may not speak above a whisper. There is to be no other noise. They may not walk around, and even if they're freezing to death, they're not to stamp their feet. No matches are to be lit for pipes or cigars. Any man who disobeys will answer to me personally. Venable, do me a favor. Take Maida and Blucher to the rear and give them to Sergeant Major Kennedy to hold until we advance."

Venable didn't like this odd, menial duty, but he didn't argue. He whistled softly. The staghounds, well trained, leaped to follow him. Custer's fringed gauntlet swept over the other dogs hanging around near the officers. "Main, you and Griffenstein kill these strays."

Charles felt as though a picket pin had been hammered into his head. "What, sir?"

"You heard me. We want surprise on our side. These dogs could give us away. Get rid of them, and right now."

Charles stared and Custer gave it right back, his eyes like black skull-sockets in the gloom. Dutch Henry laid a mitten on Charles's shoulder, either to soothe him or restrain him. Captain Hamilton got things going, ordering a couple of lieutenants: "Bring up some ropes. We'll muzzle them before we do it."

Charles jumped at Old Bob, intending to pick him up and ran him to the rear. Custer snapped, "No. I said every one of them."

"I won't do it."

Custer gave him a long look. "Turning tender-hearted, are we? Get over it before we attack the village." He stalked off, his tiny gold spurs winking in the moonlight.

"Get away from here. Don't watch," Dutch Henry whis­pered.

The lieutenants rushed up with ropes. The men surrounded the dogs, ten in all, and after some struggle and a couple of chases to catch runaways, got them all muzzled and leashed. Charles, meantime, walked into the woods and leaned his forearm against a tree trunk, his face turned toward the village. Then a frantic yelping, though the muzzles controlled its volume. The yelping continued for a while, and so did the sound of frantic claws tearing the crusted snow. Charles didn't know who cut the throat of Old Bob, but he saw the limp yellow body in the redolent heap with all the others. He walked past it quickly. The air was nearly cold enough to freeze the bitter tears in his eyes.

The flanking detachment began to move out in order to get in position by daylight. Those in the main column had a chance for a little more rest. The moonlit snow resembled a strange park of military statues. Motionless soldiers, stood, sat, or lay by their horses. Every man held a rein. A few wrapped their caped coats around their heads and tried to sleep. Most were too tense.

Some of the officers huddled together, looking stout in their heavy overcoats. They whispered with suppressed excitement. Jack Corbin's pony began to stamp and whinny. Corbin couldn't control him. Charles stepped over and pinched the pony's nostrils shut and held them until the pony quieted down. Another Cheyenne trick Jackson had taught him. Corbin whispered his thanks.

Charles crouched beside Satan, passing the rein from hand to hand. Something in him felt wrong, dangerously explosive. California Joe replenished his liquid courage from his seemingly limitless supply of demijohns. He passed the jug to Dutch Henry, who watched for officers, then drank swiftly. Milner offered the jug to Charles. Charles shook his head.

"You don't seem exactly raring to go," California Joe remarked. "Should be a right lively scrap. 'F we hang on to our edge and surprise 'em, we shouldn't have much trouble, either. I thought that's what you wanted. I thought that's why you signed on. Cheyenne Charlie, just bustin' to kill him some —"

"Shut up," Charles said. "Just leave me alone or I'll ram that jug down your throat."

He stood up, walked away. " 'S got into him?" California Joe asked.

Dutch Henry could only shrug.

As the moon descended behind the timber, a thick ground fog began to boil up and spread, creating an eerie effect. Custer kept opening his pocket watch and snapping it shut. Finally, it was time. He tucked the watch away and pushed down the ivory-handled butts of his Webley Bulldog pistols to snug them in the holsters. He issued his last orders. Haversacks to be dropped. Overcoats and sabers to be left behind. No firing until he gave the signal.

Feeling heavy, filthy, tired, Charles swung his right leg over Satan. Custer saw that the column was formed, summoned his trumpeter up beside him, and started to walk Dandy forward through the trees. The ground fog stirred and eddied around the animal's knees.

Suddenly a great gasp went up from the men. Charles turned to the east, where Dutch Henry pointed. There above the trees glimmered a golden spot of light.

"Morning star," someone said. .

The planet was more like a military rocket, blazing as it ascended slowly and majestically while they watched. Custer's face seemed to pick up a little of that awesome golden light.

"By God," he said in a reverent tone. "By God. This expedition is blessed. That's the sign."

They advanced to the irregular bluff above the river. The muffled thudding of so many shod horses sounded thunderous to Charles. Surely there would be some response from the sleeping village. There was; a dog barked. Within seconds, half a dozen more joined in.

Custer held up his right hand and started down the slope. Dandy slipped and skidded, but reached the river without mishap. Others began to descend, the scouts to the right of the trumpeter, who was leading the bandsmen down.

Charles had his gypsy robe tucked up and his Army Colt ready in his belt. He held the Spencer across his knees with one hand. Slowly, with creakings and jinglings and occasional muffled expletives, the force descended to the Washita. Down at the level of the river, where the water turned the air noticeably colder, Charles had a new perspective on the cottonwoods on the other side. Through them, amid them, against the faintly paled sky, he now saw the crossed poles of many tipis.

Whose?

"Trumpeter —" Custer began.

In the dark woods, someone fired a warning shot. Custer said something wrathful. Then several things happened at once. There was a noise on the open ground across the river; whinnying, as of many ponies suddenly disturbed. They'd probably smelled the white men's horses.

From the background of the dark woods, a man with a rifle broke and ran toward the river. Custer saw the Indian coming and raised one of his pistols. "Trumpeter, sound the charge," he yelled, firing from horseback. The Indian flew backward, his rifle spinning out of his hand.

The trumpeter sounded the call. To the far left and right of Charles, and behind him as well, men shouted and cheered. Before the trumpeter finished, the band burst into "Garry Owen," and the Seventh Cavalry poured over the Washita to strike the village.

50

Satan carried Charles over the Washita with a great leap. He hugged the piebald with his knees, was dashed with icy spray when Satan landed in the shallows on the other side. They galloped up the bank. To one side, he saw Griffenstein, a revolver in each fist, a smile on his bearded face.

The daylight was coming. The bleached hide covers of the tipis showed clearly among the cottonwoods. The pictographs were distinctive; there was no doubt that it was a Cheyenne village. To the left and right of the main force, the support columns were moving in, hallooing and cheering. Charles even heard a rebel yell.

The van of the attack swept toward the tipis across a level areas broken by low knolls. The earth shook from the pounding of the horses. Suddenly the sun cleared the horizon, and streaks of orange shimmered on the great curve of the Washita where it bent away north, just east of the village.

The Cheyennes poured from the tipis as the troopers rode down on them. The men struggled with their bows and rifles. Charles was dismayed by the sight of many woman and young children. Some of the sleepy youngsters were crying. The women wailed in fright. Dogs barked and snapped. The sudden fire from the charging cavalry worsened the bedlam.

Breath plumed from Charles's mouth. He was within fifty yards of the first tipis in the trees, but some troopers had already reached them. One shot a dog snapping at the horses. Another put a bullet in the breast of a gray-haired grandmother. The women screamed louder as their men staggered forward to defend them. Against the mounted blue lines they had no chance at all.

The charge carried Charles into a lane between tipis with smoke curling out of their tops. Griffenstein rode ahead of him, pistols cracking. A spindly old man defending himself with the faded red shield of his youth stared at the troopers with stunned eyes. Dutch Henry put a bullet into his open mouth. A great flying fan of blood spread behind the man. It splattered his tipi like paint.

Charles had to rely on Satan not to fall among the panicked Indians, who were yelling and clubbing at the soldiers, and to avoid the cook fires smoldering in the lane. His mind seemed benumbed. He'd yet to fire the Spencer.

Satan took him on down the lane to the far side of the village. There Charles wheeled back, nearly knocked from his saddle by a collision with two troopers executing the same maneuver. On their faces, in their glinting eyes, he saw an eagerness that didn't distinguish between warrior and woman, society soldier and stripling.

A platoon in double column led by First Lieutenant Godfrey, of K Troop, dashed out of the cottonwoods and away from the village. Waving hats and swinging ropes, the men in the column split right and left, circling the pony herd, which was already beginning to trot away southeast to escape the noise. The troopers managed to turn and surround the ponies. Observing, Charles wondered why General Custer went to the trouble. The ponies were Indian bred and trained; they'd be useless as cavalry remounts.

Powder smoke began to drift in heavy layers. Charles headed Satan back up another lane. He guessed the village to be about the size of their first estimate, fifty tipis. On his left, three troopers pulled one down. Inside the collapsing hide cover, he heard the high-pitched voices of terrified children. The troopers jumped off their horses and riddled the fallen tipi.

The pace of the charge in the lanes slowed now. Men from the detachment that had encircled the village came in, adding to the confusion. Directly ahead of Charles, a woman ran from behind a tipi, a bedraggled woman with unbound hair, holding a small white boy against her shoulder. She clutched the back of his head protectively. Her hands and face were weathered pink; a white woman.

She screamed at the soldiers. "My name is Blinn. Mrs. Blinn." The captive, Charles remembered. "Please don't hurt Willie or —" A volley of shots jerked her like a marionette. Half of the little boy's head sheared off as he and his mother crashed into a tipi, tearing the cover and falling through.

Vomit rose in Charles's throat. He booted Satan past the torn tipi. The slain boy was no older than his own son.

The lanes filled with troopers excitedly firing despite the bucking and balking of their horses. Charles saw one corporal with a bloody sleeve, but no other sign of Army casualties. He walked Satan forward, peering through the trees to the open ground they'd crossed in their charge from the river. There, seated on Dandy on the highest of the knolls, Custer observed the fighting through binoculars.

Down a short lane between tipis, Charles spied Dutch Henry kneeling on the bullet-pierced body of a Cheyenne, whose head he lifted with one hand while he cut quickly around the scalp with the other. The victim was still alive. He screamed. His face was seamed and old. Sixty winters, or more. Charles turned away.

Not all the Cheyennes were so frail and defenseless. Here and there he saw boys of twelve or thirteen using a knife or lance in suicidal duels with soldiers. One of these youngsters leaped from behind a tipi to confront Charles. He was barefoot, wearing only leggings. From the black braid over his right ear dangled a battle memento: someone's cross of tarnished brass, pierced and tied by a thong. The boy had a delicate face. Traces of red showed on his chest. He was either a young Red Shield initiate, or one who aspired to that and imitated his elders by painting himself. All of this registered in the seconds it took for the boy to fit an arrow to his bowstring.

Charles raised his right hand, using sign to tell the youngster to run. The boy's face convulsed with rage as he released the bowstring. Charles flung himself down behind Satan's left side. The arrow sailed over instead of skewering him.

He kicked his left boot out of the stirrup and dropped to the ground with the Spencer. Satan trotted away between the tipis. In the smoky grove, there was now almost constant screaming and wailing from the women. Charles gestured with the rifle and yelled in Cheyenne. "Run away. Run before you're killed." He didn't know why he hazarded his own life this way, except that he'd never bargained on revenging himself on graybeards and children.

The boy wanted no mercy. He fitted another arrow to the bow. Charles dodged to the right, hoping to dive behind the boy's tipi. The boy pulled the arrow back. Charles was still in the open, running bent over. He saw the bowstring go taut. There was no choice. He fired.

The bullet struck the boy's belly with close-range force, ripping it open and lifting him off the ground. He spun and landed on his back in the coals of a banked fire. His hair began to smoke. Charles ran to him and dragged him out of the fire. The metal cross was already hot, scorching his fingers. Charles's mouth tasted bitter; sweat ran down the bridge of his nose into his eyes. A surge of imagination showed him things the dead boy would never see. Another prairie spring; another prairie winter. The great bison herd migrating and covering the land. The adoring eyes of the first woman he took —

Shaken, he tore the brass cross from the boy's braid and jammed it in his pocket. Something demanded that he keep a reminder of what he'd done.

He went on foot to search for Satan. By now the scene inside the village was totally chaotic. The central part was held by the Seventh. Small isolated groups of Cheyennes had taken cover behind trees and in a shallow ditch and a ravine. Detachments quickly formed to concentrate fire on them, and kill them or drive them out. Women attempted to flee in the midst of the shooting, some clutching babies in cradleboards, some literally kicking their youngsters to hurry them along. Wherever the women ran into a line of troopers, they gave up. Most did, anyway. Charles watched an obese old squaw with a small knife fling herself at three troopers. Rifle fire cut her down.

He caught Satan, who was whinnying loudly, not liking the strange smells and sounds of the melee. Charles mounted and galloped toward the side of the village where they'd attacked first. He thought he recognized pictographs on a large tipi over that way. He knew he was right when he saw two Indians on a single pony racing away from the tipi in the direction of the sun-sparkling river. Even through the dense smoke and at a distance, he knew it was Black Kettle, with Medicine Woman Later riding in front of him.

Their pony reached the bank of the Washita. There, a quartet of troopers caught up with them. Black Kettle raised his hands to plead for mercy. A volley hit him and his wife and hurled them both off the pony and into the stream. The frightened pony trampled Medicine Woman Later before gaining the other bank.

"Christ!" Charles said. Intense revulsion was rising in him. All his past pledges to himself and his boast of wanton vengeance shamed him. Wooden Foot Jackson wouldn't want this — a blood price taken in the lives of children, mothers, the peace chief who had befriended the Jackson Trading Company and shielded it for a season from the wrath of Scar.

He jammed the Spencer in the saddle scabbard, put his head down, and raced for the river.

A flying wedge of eight or ten horsemen came up behind him, broke around him, streamed on eastward, churning up muddy snow. A grinning face looked back at him. "Here goes, Main — a brevet or a coffin." Whooping like boys, Major Elliott and his troopers galloped away. Soon, from the east, Charles heard intermittent gunfire.

He trotted Satan toward the river again. The open ground held fallen Cheyennes, mostly men, nearly all dead. He spied one body in blue. The mouth was open, the eyes fixed on the trampled snow. Louis Hamilton — who'd begged not to be left with the wagons when there was glory waiting.

Satan jumped suddenly, sailing over some obstacle Charles hadn't seen. He wrenched around and looked down. Custer's Blucher lay there, an arrow through his throat.

When Charles reached the Washita, he guessed that about twenty minutes had passed since the attack began. Already the gunfire was diminishing. In the village, many of the tipis were down, and the dismounted troopers running to and fro no longer displayed caution; they had won and they knew it.

He dismounted and waded into the flowing cold water, up to his waist. About halfway across, where there was a sandbar, little threads of red spun off into the current. Black Kettle and Medicine Woman Later had fallen together, her body half resting on his. The back of her head protruded from the water. The peace chief's face was submerged and turned up to the light, every wrinkle visible because of the water's clarity.

Charles felt pain in his gut. For this he'd joined the Tenth, and then the Seventh? To perpetrate the murder of a man who'd done nothing but sue for peace, nothing but try to walk the white man's road? In the clear winter morning on the Washita, the scales were falling from his eyes. He was sick with guilt and shame.

He lifted the body of Medicine Woman Later, which was heavy because of her soaked clothing. He carried her to the bank and there lay her on her back. He sloshed into the water again to get Black Kettle. He was now able to see the chief's five bullet wounds, which the woman's body had hidden before. Tears came to his eyes.

Somehow Black Kettle was lighter. Charles picked him up from the icy shallows and lay him across his forearms, heedless of the water cascading from the body and splashing his leggings and soaking his sleeves. He staggered toward the bank — straight into the shadow of a horse and rider.

Charles looked up. Captain Harry Venable extended his hand and aimed his side arm at Charles." The gun was an 1860 Army Colt with some kind of ivory inlay in the butt.

"Leave those bodies where they fell or take their scalps."

"I won't do either one. These poor old people befriended me once."

"You know them?"

"You're damn right. This is Black Kettle, the peace chief. It's his village. He tried to take the village to sanctuary at Fort Cobb and that damn fool Hazen turned him away. This is his reward." The old Indian now felt heavy and sodden in his arms. "Black Kettle was my friend. I mean to bury him right"

Venable smiled then. He had Charles cold for disobedience. He cocked the Colt. There was hardly another sound save the drip of water from Black Kettle's garments and gray hair.

Then, suddenly, the morning air resounded with the assembly call. Venable turned and glanced toward the village: Mounted troopers and those on foot began to move quickly to answer. Charles stared into the Colt's muzzle and figured he'd bought the farm this morning. He realized he could release Black Kettle, reach his pistol, and rid the world of Venable. He didn't move.

The trumpeting delayed Venable's shot by about fifteen seconds. In that interval a horseman galloped by. It was Griffenstein.

He wheeled and dashed between Charles and Harry Venable.

"You drunk?" he yelled at Venable, knocking the officer's Colt from his hand. "The ones we're killin' got red skins, not white."

Another officer spurring for the trees shouted at Venable, telling him to haul his ass. Not fully understanding the confrontation, Dutch Henry recognized its seriousness. He kept an eye on the little Kentuckian as he dismounted, retrieved the Colt, and warily handed it back. Slowly, Charles lowered Black Kettle to the churned snow and mud. He laid him beside his wife.

Venable rammed the revolver in his holster, threw a look at Charles that promised it wasn't over between them, and quirted his horse with his rein. He went speeding among the knolls and the bodies to the village.

"What'n shit was that all about?" Griffenstein wanted to know. He seemed himself now, his face no longer flushed as it had been when Charles saw him with the scalping knife. The scalp was knotted to the scout's rawhide belt by a strand of bloody hair.

"Venable's got an old grudge," was all Charles would say.

"Well, he better hold his water. This is no place to settle scores." For Charles, the words had a meaning the other scout couldn't appreciate.

"I'm obliged to you, Henry," he said.

"Nothing," the other man said with a wave. "Can't stand by and see a friend taken out by some snotty shoulder-straps." By then, Charles had mounted, reluctantly leaving the chief and his wife where he'd put them. Dutch Henry was in high spirits as they turned their horses toward, the assembly point. "Wasn't this a hell of a fine git?"

Charles stared at him. Anger did away with gratitude.

"It was a massacre. Of the wrong people. It's a goddamn disgrace. Look at this." He showed the brass cross with the broken thong. "I took it off a young boy. His whole life ahead of him. I had to shoot him so he wouldn't kill me."

Griffenstein didn't catch on to the depth of Charles's feeling. He reached for the cross. "Got yourself a nice souvenir, anyway."

Charles closed his fist. "Do you think that's why I took it, you dumb ox? This isn't war. It's butchery. Sand Creek all over again."

The burly scout's surprise changed to resentment. "Grow up, Charlie. This here's the way things are."

"Fuck the way things are."

Griffenstein's face changed again. He regarded Charles with the same repugnance a man might show to a carrier of cholera. "I reckon this is where we split. By rights I oughta twist your head off for what you called me. I guess I won't because I guess you've gone crazy. You ride with somebody else from now on."

He moved away. Charles didn't care. Something inside him was dead. Killed here on the Washita.

There was a lot of activity inside the village. A great many soldiers were still riding or bustling around on foot, snatching souvenirs before someone forbade it. Charles saw shirts and trousers stained by scalps hacked from the dead. One young private proudly showed two of them to his friends.

The pony herd, numbering several hundred, had been rounded up by Godfrey's men near the trees on the far side of the village. About fifty women and children had been captured, along with a large quantity of goods. A number of fine saddles, including some Army ones; hatchets and buffalo robes; firearms, bullet molds, and lead; hundreds of pounds of tobacco and flour, and a large winter store of buffalo meat. As Charles jogged in, Custer was detailing Godfrey and his K Troop to gather and inventory the spoils.

Listening to the excited conversations around him, Charles heard claims that several hundred Indians were dead. He doubted it. If each tipi held its usual five or six, that figured to three hundred inhabitants of the village. There were plenty of Indian bodies scattered in the lanes and out on the open ground, but nothing like three hundred. Many of the braves must have escaped. Among the soldiers, only two were known dead: Louis Hamilton and Corporal Cuddy, of B Troop. But then there was Elliott's detachment. No one could say what had become of it.

There was renewed wailing and shrieking. Three of the Osage trackers were gleefully whipping some captive women with switches. "They try to run," an Osage explained. He and the others whipped the women harder, driving them toward a larger group already under guard. From his seasons with Black Kettle's people, Charles thought he recognized more than one of the women. A squaw with thick braids and a bleeding cheek seemed to recognize him, but she was the only one. She said nothing, but her stare was enough to twist knives in his middle.

"General." The sharp voice belonged to Romero, the interpreter. He pushed a bedraggled woman ahead of him. She clasped her hands and bowed her head in front of General Custer, who still looked fresh and energetic. Charles wondered how it was possible; he himself was spent and occasionally dizzy from tiredness and hunger.

"This woman, she say she Mahwissa, sister to Black Kettle," Romero said. Possible, although Charles had never seen the woman before, or heard of a sister during that winter he spent with Jackson. "She say this is not only village on the Washita."

"Where are the others?" Custer asked in the sudden stillness.

Romero found a broken lance shaft and, standing beside the general, drew an upside-down U in the mud. He flared both stems of the U outward, then poked a hole below the left-hand stem. "Here is the village of Black Kettle." Up toward the bend of the U he poked again. "Arapahoes here." Toward the bottom of the other stem of the U, another poke. "More Cheyennes here." Two more pokes near the flared end of that stem. "And more — and Kiowas too. All winter camps. Downstream."

General Custer's ruddiness was gone. He looked pale as the snow on the trees up on the bluffs. Among those trees, Charles thought he detected movement.

"How many in the camps?" Custer asked.

Romero spoke to the woman in Cheyenne. Charles understood enough of her answer to feel a renewed chill.

"To the number of five or six thousand."

The hush befitted a tomb. Somewhere a dog howled. The listening soldiers, so boisterous a little while ago, nervously fingered their side arms.

Somehow the disagreeable news didn't surprise Charles. Custer's impetuous nature was a kind of lightning rod for trouble. He's pushed the pursuit, and the attack, on the unfounded assumption that they were chasing one band of warriors to an isolated village in the valley of the Washita. The night's forced march had left little time for reflection on related questions: Was there only one village? Had the war party actually returned there, or to another village? Even now, they didn't know the answer to the second question. Charles supposed he couldn't score Custer too harshly. He hadn't thought of the questions himself, though they seemed embarrassingly obvious after Romero's revelation.

To his credit, Custer showed no sign of dismay. "We have won a decisive victory over the enemy —" Charles grimaced. He noticed Keim for the first time. The reporter was scribbling in his phonographic notebook. "We will proceed with destruction of this base. We must go about our duties without the slightest indication that we know of the other villages, or care about them. If there are more Indians close by, they won't know our strength.

Someone muttered, "They sure-God know we ain't five thousand."

"Let the coward who made that remark step forward."

No one moved. The general's face flushed again. Charles thought he was more agitated than he let on. Custer opened his mouth, probably to repeat his demand for a confession, but one of the Osages caught his attention with a sudden gesture toward the hoof-torn slopes beyond the river. Three braves with shields and lances rode out of the trees up there. They halted their ponies at the edge, watching. Nearby, other Indians slipped into sight.

Soon the bluffs were crowded with them, and more kept coming. Custer said this expedition was blessed, Charles thought. It's cursed.

51

The easy victory wasn't turning out to be so easy. By eleven, the bluffs across the Washita held hundreds of armed Arapahoes and Cheyennes. Custer fretted while the work of collecting spoils continued. His colors were planted in an improvised hospital area near the center of the village. From there, he issued orders deploying men in a defense perimeter just inside the cottonwoods in case the Indians attacked.

They did. A band of twenty Cheyennes came galloping in from the river bend two miles northeast. They dashed over the open ground between the low knolls and fired into the trees. Standing beside Romero, Charles returned the fire. Custer strode behind the defense line, bucking up the men.

"Don't show yourselves. They're trying to draw us into the open. Conserve your fire — we're low on ammunition. Stand fast. They'll never ride into these woods."

The jingle of his little gold spurs seemed to linger after he went on. Romero gave Charles a disconsolate look; Custer was right about ammunition. If they remained pinned down for much longer, the Indians would be able to charge in without the danger of return fire.

Charles put his second-to-last magazine into the stock of the Spencer and wiped his eyes. They were smarting and watering from tiredness and the smoke. He felt someone watching him. Several paces to the right he saw Dutch Henry Griffenstein. With a contemptuous smile, Griffenstein said something to the soldier next to him. The trooper turned to stare at Charles, and Charles knew he had to find an opportunity to apologize for calling the scout a dumb ox.

After their last sweep the Cheyennes galloped away again, out of range. One brave knelt on his pony and thumbed the seat of his breeches. None of the men in the smoky wood thought it funny.

Charles held his place for two hours. During that time a half-dozen attack parties rode down from the heights, though none came close to the trees. Custer was right; the Indians wanted them in the open.

Behind the defense line, other troopers were busy ripping tipis apart and hacking up the poles with axes. California Joe slipped in from the other side of the wood to report that he'd found three to four hundred more Indian ponies. "Must be eight, nine hundred of 'em now, General," Charles heard him say to Custer, who was again prowling the defense perimeter.

One of the Corbins came to relieve Charles. He stumbled away and stepped behind a bullet-scarred tree to relieve his painfully full bladder. It didn't help much. He was in low spirits, remembering how lively and friendly a peaceful Cheyenne village could be, with music, and courting rituals, and storytelling by a fire after a sinfully big feast of buffalo meat. Black Kettle's village was, by contrast, a graveyard, a plundered graveyard. Those troopers not on the defense line continued to pile up goods from the wrecked tipis; dozens of confiscated buffalo robes, painted arrows by the hundreds.

"Pull that one out," Custer said to his orderly. He pointed to a demolished tipi. "If the cover's undamaged, pack it for me. Then move all these separate heaps together and set them afire." Charles listened despondently. What Custer was doing amounted to burning the homes of a civilian population. The owners of the tipis, if they managed to escape, would die of exposure unless they found shelter somewhere else. He thought that driving the Cheyennes out of the village temporarily should have been enough.

Custer thought otherwise. Soon, on open ground out behind the cottonwoods, flames shot up, leaping eight and ten feet in the air as they consumed the great mountain of torn-down tipis. The hide covers produced a bitter dark smoke that trailed across the winter sky like mourning streamers.

The general ordered up a detachment with Joe Corbin and Griffenstein leading it. As the detachment trotted away east, out of the woodland, Charles asked Milner, "Were are they going?"

California Joe eyed him in a suspicious way; maybe Griffenstein had been talking widely about Charles's behavior. "Hunt for Elliott," was all the chief scout said. His speech had a slur again; evidently he still had his supply of alcohol.

"About time the general started worrying about them," Charles said.

California Joe scowled. "You better keep opinions like that to yourself, mister." He walked away.

There was something fierce building inside Charles; something he was powerless to suppress. It was an anger, blind to subtleties, that encompassed every white man in the cottonwoods, including himself. Gnawing on some hardtack, his only food that day, he had an urge to take his Army Colt and shoot Custer. The foolish impulse passed, but not the anger. He hated what was happening here.

Antlike, a file of men moved toward the great fire carrying robes, quivers, bullet molds — every personal article the foragers could find. The flames shot high again, filling the woods with scarlet light and shifting shadow. If the survivors ever came back, they would also have no food or household goods to sustain them through the winter, which was evidently what Sheridan intended.

As the burning continued, men on the defense line raised a shout. "Bell's coming! Here comes Bell!" Charles and the others ran to the edge of the woods on the river side. Careening toward them from a ford somewhere upstream came their seven wagons. Cheyenhes and Arapahoes galloped on either side, peppering them with arrows and bullets.

The teamsters returned the fire. One warrior dropped. Up on the bluffs, more war parties were assembling, probably to intercept the wagons. They didn't move quickly enough. With Lieutenant Jim Bell whipping up the lead team, the wagons thundered into the grove. Sparks and flames spurted from overheated axle hubs. Bell's wagon veered to avoid a tree, the mules tore the traces, and the wagon tipped and crashed on its side, dumping its load of ammunition chests. The troopers rushed to them and tore them open.

Sooty, a smoking pistol in his hand, Bell staggered to Custer. "Couldn't wait for orders, General. Bunch of 'em surprised us and we had to dash for the ford upstream."

"It's good you did," Custer said. "Now we have the ammunition we need."

Indeed, the troopers seemed revitalized by the arrival of the wagons, which had reached the cottonwoods without serious injury to any of the drivers. The troopers climbed over the wagons and threw more ammunition chests to the ground. With the bonfire blazing and the mules braying and the teamsters shouting and the Cheyenne women wailing and the children crying and the angry Indians again sniping from horseback, Charles began to think he was in some grotto in hell reserved for the damned of the U.S. Cavalry.

More commotion then. The search detachment was riding in from the east. Pale frightened troopers dismounted and talked excitedly. Custer ran to them, shouting for silence. Charles's eye raked the search party. No Griffenstein.

"How far did you go?" Custer demanded.

"Two or three miles," Joe Corbin said. "We ran into hot fire and turned back. We lost one man. We didn't find Elliott."

"All right. I'm sure you did your best," Custer said. Captain Fred Benteen immediately stepped out to confront him.

"General, we can't let it die there. Elliott may be pinned down somewhere. I'll take another detachment —"

"No!" Custer scanned the bluffs above the river, where bands of Indians walked their ponies back and forth, restless from their failure to draw the soldiers out. Seeing Benteen about to protest again, Custer lashed him with a sharp, "No, you will not. Not now. We are in a predicament, and we must get out."

Charles was in a predicament, too. He needed to patch things up and now it was too late. Griffenstein wasn't coming back. It struck him that although he'd talked with Dutch Henry scores of times, he had never once asked about a family. Nor had Griffenstein said anything. He'd been self-contained; an expert plainsman who carried his whole world with him. If he had kin anywhere, Charles couldn't inform them.

Dumb ox. The memory of his words made him feel just the way he had in the last year of the war. Low, and dirty, and ready to hurt someone.

Three o'clock.

A little earlier, squadrons led by Meyers, Benteen, and Hamilton's replacement, Weir, had advanced from the cottonwoods. Charles wasn't privy to Custer's purpose in ordering the advance. Maybe it was meant to demonstrate that he wasn't intimidated. But neither were the Indians. A large body of them charged the soldiers and, after a brisk but indecisive exchange of fire, retreated eastward again while the soldiers galloped back to the trees. Since then, the Indians had not attacked. The soldiers could hope that they had decided to abandon the fight, but Charles doubted it.

Custer looked haggard when he called all the scouts and officers to the standard again. "We must prepare to get out of here. There are some problems. If we just retreat, those savages will chase us, and I don't want a running fight in the dark. The men are spent. So we'll try a feint. In an hour or so, we'll form up with our prisoners and head in that direction." His gauntlet hand pointed northeast. "In line of battle. Just as if we plan to take out the other villages one by one. We'll give them band music and a big show of confidence. They've seen what we did to this nest of enemies. I think they'll run to protect their own lodges. If I'm right, the moment we have full dark we'll be able to countermarch and slip away north."

No one objected to the plan, or even offered a comment; they were too worn out to raise frivolous questions, and what Custer said sounded reasonable.

The general had ashes in his hair and mustache. One of his high cheekbones was daubed with someone's blood. His gleaming eyes reflected the bonfire still burning. He added, "Before we go we must cripple this village. Cripple it completely. Venable —"

"Sir?"

"Take what men you need and cut enough ponies from the herd to carry the prisoners. The rest of you gentlemen, officers and scouts, may then have your pick of any mount in the herd. Then I want Godfrey — where's Godfrey? — ah. Godfrey, at that point you take charge."

"Yes, sir?" Lieutenant Godfrey wiped grime from the corner of his mouth. Charles heard a high ringing in his ears as his dreadful premonition proved to be right.

"Kill the rest of the horses."

"General — sir — that'll be eight hundred at least."

"So be it, Godfrey. We are not going to leave these damned red murderers any remounts. Kill them all."

Now the gray day had sunk into firelit nightmare. Charles leaned against a cottonwood that had a broken arrow shaft embedded in it and twirled the clicking cylinder of his Army Colt, feeding it loads.

Romero hurried by. "Eh, Senor Charlie, give a hand with the remuda. The quicker we kill them, the quicker we get out of here."

"Leave him alone, Romeo," California Joe called. He was busy brushing dirt from a scalp that had fallen from his belt. "Charlie ain't himself right now."

The ringing in his ears persisted. He walked unsteadily toward the huge fire. The heat brought sweat to his filthy face. He closed his eyes, remembering Sport's last gallop in Virginia. The pristine snow stippled red after the gallant gray passed over it, his heart's blood pumping out as he carried Charles back to the safety of the lines.

Eight hundred horses. Eight hundred. He couldn't believe anyone would do that. Not after so much destruction already.

He staggered past the fire, his right cheek scorched by the heat. He stood watching Venable complete his job of cutting out fifty-five mounts for the captive women and children. He and his detail herded the animals to hastily rigged picket lines in the trees. Then they rejoined Godfrey and his four troops of men, who spread out and surrounded the nervous ponies.

On Godfrey's order, men tied ropes into lariats and advanced, intending to catch the horses one at a time. Some of the ponies caught the scent of the soldiers, the white man's scent, and didn't like it. Eyes rolled with fright. Manes tossed.

Lariats sailed through the air. One soldier got a rope over a beautiful sorrel pony. He shouted for someone to come in with a knife and cut the pony's throat. The pony reared and pawed the air. A hoof gashed the soldier's forehead. Blood cascaded into his eyes. He fell on his back and would have been trampled if other troopers hadn't dragged him away.

Godfrey's men tried ropes and knives for fifteen minutes, but the horses hated the soldiers' smell and kicked and bit and reared. "Fetch the general," Godfrey shouted. Charles still stood apart, near the fire, watching.

General Custer came trotting through the trees on Dandy.

"We can't get close enough to slash their throats, General. What shall we do?"

Angered, Custer said, "We have plenty of ammunition now. Use it." He pulled out one of his pistols and shot two ponies through the head. There was a terrible bellowing as they went down. "Do I always have to show you your jobs?" Custer yelled, nearly overrunning Godfrey as he galloped back into the trees.

"Rifles," Godfrey ordered. Men broke away and ran for them. Handsome Harry Venable unbuttoned his dirty overcoat for freer movement, then unholstered his side arm.

"Those with revolvers start using them," Godfrey said. "Otherwise we'll spend the night in this place."

Venable strode right up to a well-built chestnut pony whose eyes shimmered, reflecting the bonfire. The little Kentuckian pressed his lips together like a man about to do a difficult sum. He put his service revolver to the chestnut's eye and fired. Blood and tissue erupted behind the magnificent head.

The shot pealed and reverberated, louder than the loudest prairie thunderstorm. Something went off like a powder charge in Charles's brain. A raw, low sound began in his throat, rising, gaining volume, a long wild cry. He had no memory of starting to move.

52

The horses fell with a strange untormented grace. They fell sideways, the first ones, one into the next. They fell away from the volleying handguns of boyish soldiers, some of whom laughed or shouted, "Well hit." The soldiers knelt and fired round after round into shoulders and ribs, chests and bellies. Blood ran in strong streams, as from coarse sieves, while the horses fell away from their executioners, briefly creating a beautiful orderly pattern much like that of waves flowing outward, outward, on a changing sea tide. Then the pattern lost its beauty and order, because eighty horses had fallen, a hundred had fallen, and there was no more room to die, so some died kneeling. And there was nowhere to flee. Animals that tried to stampede on the far edge of the herd found other boys with carbines there, some with the dirty white pallor of exhaustion, some feebly joshing, some stoic, some patently sick with the loathing of their deed, and from that side, too, the killing began, and soon there was a circle of fire and smoke like a great round ribbon tying up dying animals. As the horses fell and kept falling, the noise grew unbearable, a regular choir of pain. To the smell of pumping blood, which had an appeal for some, there was added the stink of horse bowels emptying in great spasms, and soon the pattern was in complete disorder, full of clashing lines and elements, with here and there a beautiful mute head lifting, the lips peeling back, the long teeth shining, opening to let out a great hopeless cry for mercy that ended when one more good sport of a trooper picked that head to blow apart. In place of the pattern, there grew a mound of shiny, stinking, dying horseflesh; a landmark quite as distinctive as one of the Antelope Hills; a landmark not of nature but of man, there by the Washita.

Charles ran to the perimeter where the young soldiers knelt with revolvers and carbines. He grabbed a blue shoulder. "Put that down. Stop it. Don't kill dumb animals." It sounded perfectly reasoned to him; he had no sense that the words came out in screaming bursts, or that an unfamiliar strength was pumping in him, enabling him to hurl one of the shootists four feet to one side just by gripping his shoulders.

A soldier with eyes as damp and bright as those of the dying horses shied from Charles, warning others near him, "Look out, Cheyenne Charlie's gone crazy."

Charles wondered why the soldier said that. All he wanted was a halt to the killing of the animals, perfectly reasonable.

"Stand aside. I'll deal with him." Charles recognized the voice before he saw Harry Venable, Handsome Harry, small and dapper despite hunger and fatigue and the grime of a forced march.

"Tell them to stop it, Venable." .

"You filthy, craven idiot, we are carrying out the general's orders."

Charles formed fists and beat the air and screamed then, really screamed, because it seemed the only way to get through Venable's studied calm. "Let them go. Let them go free. Stop the killing!"

Venable raised his hand. His spotless, lightly oiled Colt with the ivory grips gleamed a foot from Charles's chest. Only a faint tremor of Venable's chin showed he was wary of the threat presented by the screaming, scruffy man. The carbines and pistols volleyed with a sound like stones thrown on a tin roof. The smells ripened. More than one soldier turned away and puked on the churned-up ground, adding a thin pink slime to the brown, the white, the red.

A speck of vomit flew to Venable's right boot, which was already filthy with mud. The speck seemed to excite him. He whipped the revolver across Charles's face, pulling on it so that the sight cut into Charles's cheek like a dull knife.

"Now, Main, leave the field."

Charles stared at him — a mistake, because Venable was ready. "Hold him," Venable yelled to the soldiers as his knee caught Charles between the legs, a clumsy blow but effective. Dizzy with pain, Charles tried to punch Venable. But he was slow. Two troopers seized his arms and jerked them out full length.

Venable's blue eyes danced. In his finest, softest Kentucky voice, he complimented the soldiers. "Very good, sirs. Now hold him fast."

He holstered his side arm and stepped in near Charles. He threw a hard punch into his stomach. For a small man, he was very strong. Charles's head came up slowly. Wild-eyed, he spit at Venable, who wiped it off and punched him low in his groin. Then he pounded Charles's head once from the right. Blood and mucus spewed from Charles's nose. He was going down and he couldn't help it.

A great sense of failure enveloped him. He ought to get up. Fight back. He was unable to. It was Jefferson Barracks again.

Venable stood beside Charles's head, his drawn revolver pointed down. Despite the noise of guns and horses, Charles heard the revolver cock. Venable aimed it at the canal of his ear.

"Sir," a soldier said, "sir, he's out of it. Griffenstein told me he has a thing about seeing horses hurt. That oughtn't to merit killing —" Charles couldn't see which young soldier had spoken, but he saw Venable glare, and heard the boy's assertive tone fade away as he added one more gulping, "Sir."

Charles knew he was going to be murdered right there. He watched Venable glance around at witnesses Charles couldn't see except as pairs of blood-spattered boots. Venable hesitated. He couldn't get away with it.

"Pick up the son of a bitch," he said, jamming the Colt in his holster again. "You — and you. Get him on his feet, the damn traitor. We'll let the general settle this."

53

The two soldiers quickstepped him toward the cottonwoods, where a new fire had been built near the general's standard to provide light and warmth as the afternoon darkened. Almost as fast as it had come, the rage diffused, leaving Charles with pains in his body and a vague awareness of having tried to stop the horse slaughter. A sad finality settled on him; he knew at last what he wanted to do. No, stronger than that. Had to do, at all hazards.

General Custer, youthful and somehow rakish and spruce despite his filthy uniform, looked annoyed by Venable's interruption. He had been talking to California Joe, who was saying, "No, sir, I can't find Sergeant Major Kennedy's body no place as yet."

Custer turned from the blazing fire, his right leg slightly bent at the knee, his left hand resting on the hilt of his saber. He always seemed aware of his posture.

"What is it, Captain Venable? Quickly. I intend to march in less than an hour."

"Sir, this man, this damn reb, tried to stop your men from performance of duty." Venable sounded very proper and sententious, although Charles, whose head was clearing and giving him a sense of the enormous trouble he was in, could hear Venable's wrath bubbling underneath. "He attempted to prevent our work with the pony herd."

"Your butchery," Charles said.

"Your tender sensibilities object to that, Mr. Main?" Custer strode over to Charles, addressing him as though Charles did not have an eye swelling shut, a cheek dripping blood, and snot hanging from his nose. "You prefer that we leave healthy horses so the savages can ride them in the spring to commit more atrocities?

General Sheridan charged me with the duty of punishing the Cheyennes and Arapahoes —"

"Black Kettle was a peace chief."

"That's of no consequence. My responsibility is to eradicate the threat to white people —" Why was he talking so much, Charles wondered. To whom was he justifying his actions? He didn't have to do it to a shabby scout of questionable background. Despite his pain, Charles had a sharp sense that Custer was aware that today had damaged him; a sense that he was already on the run. ''A duty which I have this day carried out. Only total war will bring peace to these plains."

"May be, but I don't want any more of it."

"What? What's that?" Custer was caught off guard, his blue eyes confused, then angry again.

"I said I don't want any more of your kind of war. I shouldn't have signed on."

"We should not have engaged you," Custer retorted. California Joe looked ready to sink into the ground.

Charles threw everything into the pot and made his last bet. "I'm leaving. If you want to stop me, you'll have to shoot me. Or order someone to do it."

Venable said, "I would be pleased —"

"Be quiet!" Custer shouted. He was breathing fast, his face ruddier than Charles had ever seen it. "You're rash to suggest that, Mr. Main. I can very easily order you shot. Witnesses to your rebellious behavior will testify to the necessity —"

"You've got enough trouble on your hands." Blood in Charles's beard formed a drop that fell and struck a patch of snow between his boots. He tried to shut out the sounds of the steady small-arms fire, the horses dying. "I saw Mrs. Blinn shot. I saw her son shot."

"I have it on reliable authority that the Cheyennes slew the woman."

"Your men shot her, I saw it. So did others."

"We have no evidence the white woman was the Mrs. Blinn who was abducted from —"

"I heard her name and others did, too." Bleeding, glowering, Charles pushed Custer. The Boy General was momentarily panicked; Charles saw that in the bright blue eyes. "They're not going to call this a battle, they're going to call it a massacre. Babies with bullets in their heads. Women scalped by United States soldiers. A white captive and a peace chief, an old man, murdered. Not a very pretty episode to include in a campaign biography, would you say, General?"

George Custer took one half-step backward; it said everything.

Venable was almost spitting with frustration. "General Custer, no one will believe anything from a man who lied twice to get in the Army."

Charles nodded. "You're right. And I'm really not interested in talking to newspapermen, Mr. Keim or any other. I'm not interested in getting even with anybody. I followed that trail a long time and look where it got me." No one understood what he meant.

His stinging eyes moved over the ruined village, the ashes of the great bonfire, out to the hideous quivering mound of dead and dying horses. "I had to kill a boy this morning. Not a man. A boy. I'll see him in nightmares till I die. I'll see this obscene place, too. I'm sick of this army. I'm sick of soldiers like you who work out their ambitions with human lives. I'm sick of the whole goddamn mess. Now either let me go or shoot me, you miserable excuse for a human being."

Venable stepped in, arm flying back to give Charles a round­house blow to the head. "Leave him alone," Custer said. Venable fairly jerked at the sharp order. Custer wiped his mouth. "Let him go. We have enough to explain already."

"General, you can't permit —"

"Damn you to hell, Captain Venable, close your mouth. Mr. Main —" Custer shook a finger under Charles's nose, his teeth gritted together as if he couldn't trust himself to keep control. "I will give you five minutes to cross the Washita. If you are not north of the river in five minutes, I will order a detachment to pursue and shoot you. You are a disgrace to the Army and a disgrace to manhood. Dismissed, sir."

"Yes, sir" — Charles weighted the words, strung them out — "General — Custer."

There was a long, dangerous moment when they stared at one another. Then, like two bears that had clawed and bloodied each other to exhaustion, they simply turned away, both of them, and gave up the fight.

Little Harry Venable wouldn't give up. He followed Charles through the trees, and Charles took some satisfaction from that. Custer's decision had reduced the Kentuckian to something like a small boy who didn't dare use his fists, only taunts:

"It's a long way to Fort Dodge. I hope the hostiles catch you." They probably will, Charles thought. "I hope they carve your heart out."

Charles stopped. Venable inhaled loudly. Charles stared at him with a twisted smile. "You hopeless little pile of shit. My war's over."

"What?"

He turned and walked on. He knew Venable would never pull his gun.

He found Satan, untied him, patted him, and mounted. He judged the time to be around four, but the November afternoon was exceptionally cloudy and dark. He rode out of the Cheyenne village at a trot, every movement of the piebald painful to him. The flesh around his left eye was puffy, his vision squeezed to a slit. He could do nothing about the gash on his face except let it bleed until it clotted. He could wash at the stream where the Seventh had found Elliott — if he got that far.

An Indian was approaching on the open ground. Charles reined in, reaching for the Spencer in its scabbard. He saw that the hobbling Indian was one of the Osage trackers. The Indian's leggings were soaked. He proudly showed something in his hand.

"Scalp of Black Kettle. Put him in the deep water. He will be bad meat soon."

"You bastard," Charles said, and rode on.

He crossed the Washita. The water rose to his thighs. Satan strained to keep his head out. Charles was shivering and his teeth were chattering when they emerged. A distant trumpet sounded boots and saddles. Without looking, he could picture the various units of Custer's command forming up to march.

All of the Indians were downstream, or else it had grown so dark that he couldn't see them on the bluffs. Going up over the edge where the attack had started, he heard Custer's band playing. He knew the tune from the war. "Ain't I Glad to Get Out of the Wilderness."

No, he wasn't. A devastating truth had come to him during the icy river crossing. He didn't belong in South Carolina any more. He didn't belong in Kansas, trying to raise vegetables or dairy cows. And he didn't belong in the U.S. Army, much as he'd liked some of the men he knew in the Tenth Cavalry. What the soldiers had to do was wrong. Maybe they weren't culprits individually, but together they were. He'd thought he could stomach what the Army had to do. He'd convinced himself he could in order to revenge the Jacksons. And he'd marched all the way to the Washita to find out he was wrong.

There was no place for him in all the world.

Smaller and smaller, horse and rider diminished into the snowfields and the dark of the Indian Territory.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL .

George dined at half past one, his usual time. The Palace was one of Lausanne's fine hotels and had a splendid kitchen. As a regular, in warm weather he had his own small table by the marble rail of the terrace. Now that winter had swept the tourists out of Switzerland, he had moved inside to a table for one beside a tall window overlooking the same terrace. Through the window he could see across the city's center to Lake Geneva, where one of the trim little steamers berthed at the nearby resort of Ouchy was steaming toward the south shore. He noticed that the sunlight was already pale and slanting.

A few dead leaves whirled across the terrace. He finished his dinner, an excellent terrine of lobster, and his bottle of wine, a delicious Montrachet, and left the table. As he crossed the dining room, he spoke politely to a trio of Swiss, bankers who ate there regularly and had grown aware of him as a regular, too.

They often speculated about the American. They knew he was very rich. They knew he lived without companions, except for servants, in a vast, rather forbidding villa that had a splendid view of the hilly town from the Jorat heights. They wondered among themselves what had marked him.

What they saw was a stout, short man, middle-aged — George had observed his forty-third birthday — with wide streaks of white in his neat dark beard. His posture was very correct, yet he seemed somehow defeated. He smoked a great many strong cigars, with nervous movements; he left most of them half finished. He seemed to possess everything and to have suffered in spite of it. He was, unlike most of his countrymen who visited Lausanne, unapproachable. The tourists prattled endlessly; his warmest greeting was a word or two.

Had his wife left him? Was there some other scandal? Ah, perhaps that was it. He bore a certain resemblance to engraved portraits of the new American President, the general, Grant. Could he be a disgraced relative, exiled?

It would remain his secret. Gentlemen did not pry.

At the dining room door, George said a few words to the headwaiter in French, tipped him, collected his stick, hat, and fur overcoat, and crossed the lobby. An heiress from Athens, a striking olive-skinned woman, expensively dressed, took note of him and caught her breath; she was recently widowed. While a porter sorted her luggage, she tried to catch the eye of the imposing stranger. Nothing forward; merely a recognition. He saw her but strode on. She had the sensation of gazing into a snowbound pool in the heart of a winter wood. Dark waters, and cold.

George walked down a sloping street toward the estate agent's, located just beyond the splendid Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame. There, he found the week's mail delivery, a leather pouch which he tucked under his arm. He walked briskly back up the hills. It took more than an hour to reach the villa, but it was his only activity these days, and he forced himself to do it.

The villa also had a terrace, and a handsomely appointed study overlooking it. A fire was already going in the marble hearth. He pulled a chair close to a bust of Voltaire — Lausanne had been a favorite city of his — and examined the contents of the pouch, starting with the two recent numbers of the Nation, the weekly Republican journal started in '65 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin. The publication favored such party causes as honest government and bureaucratic reform. George marked an article for reading later. It dealt with resumption, a return to the gold standard as an antidote to all the inflated paper currency circulated during the war. Hard versus soft money was a passionate issue in his homeland.

Next he unfolded a three-page report from Christopher Wotherspoon. The profits of Hazard's ironworks were up once again. His superintendent recommended substantial political donations to those congressmen and senators who favored strong protective tariffs for the iron and steel industry. He requested approval from George.

There was a rather sad letter from Patricia, written in September, asking what he wanted for Christmas. He could think of nothing. His children had sailed to Europe in the summer, but their visit during the month of July had seemed interminable to him, and, he supposed, to them, since he was uninterested in sightseeing. They had done that for a week, then spent the remainder of the visit playing lawn tennis for hours every day.

Jupiter Smith, who packed the weekly mail pouch, had included three copies of Mr. Greeley's New York Tribune, with items of financial news marked. There was also an elaborately inscribed invitation to a Republican fete celebrating Grant's inaugural in March, and another to the inauguration itself. George threw both into the fire.

He clipped one of his Cuban cigars, which cost him nearly seven dollars each to import, though he no longer kept track of such things. He wasn't an extravagant man in most respects, and if money for small creature comforts ever ran out, he would shrug and then decide what to do.

He lit the cigar and stood by the window. Below the charmingly tiered city he saw another steamer, returning in the late afternoon. From the heights of Jorat it was a mere speck, like himself.

He thought of Orry's widow, a handsome and intelligent woman. He hoped Madeline was weathering the political turmoil in the South. He was not moved to write and inquire. He thought of his son, and of William's decision to read law; George continued to have no strong reaction one way or another. He thought of Sam Grant, an acquaintance from cadet days, and wondered whether he would be a good president, since he had no practical experience. He would probably try to run the government like a military headquarters. Could that be done? With a twinge of shame, he realized that when questions arose about the future of his country, he really didn't care about the answers.

On the lake, the steamer was gone. George remained by the window for some time, smoking and staring at the bright water. He had found there was great comfort in saying nothing, doing nothing, reacting to nothing. Or, as little of each as was possible in order to live. That way, though one became a creature of monotony, one never got hurt.

The lovers embraced in the sharp evening air, safe from observation in the heavy underbrush that had grown up where the formal garden once stood. Marie-Louise almost swooned when Theo's tongue slipped into her mouth. She was frightened but didn't pull away. She locked her hands behind his neck and swayed backward, so that the weight of his heavy wool coat and his body pressed her in a deliciously sinful way. Theo's lips moved over her cheek, her throat. His hand rode up and down on the side of her skirt.

"Marie-Louise, I can't wait any longer. I love you."

"I love you too, Theo. I'm as impatient as you."

"I've found the means. Let's tell her."

"Tonight?"

"Why not? She'll help us."

"I don't know. It's such a big step."

Earnestly, with great affection, he took her right hand between his. "I've cast my lot in South Carolina. And with you. If you're just as sure, there's no reason to wait."

"I'm sure. I'm frightened, though."

"I'll speak for both of us. All you need do is hold fast to my hand."

Marie-Louise felt as if she were dropping through a great dark space toward — what? Something she could only imagine. It would be bliss, or it would be disaster. She swayed and Theo caught her with one hand, a little amused by her girlish romanticism, yet in love with it, too. She whispered, "All right, let's tell her."

He whooped and whirled her around by the waist. A moment later they were hurrying up the dark lawn toward the lighted whitewashed house.

"Resign your commission?" Madeline said, astonished.

"Yes. I notified my superiors yesterday that it was my intention."

While Theo spoke, Marie-Louise stayed half hidden behind him. She held his left hand as though it were a lifeline. The young couple had burst into the house while Madeline was spreading the architect's drawings on the floor to point out details of the new great house to Prudence. In the corner lay some fresh-cut pine boughs intended for Christmas decoration.

"I reached my decision on the basis of two circumstances," Theo continued, with a formality that would have made her smile if his plan was not potentially so disruptive. "First, you said you might find temporary work for me here."

"Yes. I think you'd make an excellent manager for Mont Royal's mill and mining operations. But I never had any intention of precipitating —"

"You didn't," he broke in. "I'm resigning chiefly because of the other circumstance." He stepped forward, blurting, "Last week —"

"Theo." She pointed. "Forgive me, but you're standing on the new Mont Royal."

"Oh, no! I'm so sorry —" He jumped back, let go of Marie-Louise's hand, and knelt to smooth the wrinkle his boot heel had left on the drawing. Prudence smiled. Madeline chided herself for fussiness; it was another sign of age.

"There. Is that all right?"

"Yes. No harm done. You mentioned a second circumstance affecting your decision."

He gulped and leaped: "I've located an Army chaplain in Savannah who is willing to marry us."

Marie-Louise didn't breathe. She grasped Theo's hand again and held it tightly. The four lamps around the room shed an uncompromising light on Madeline's lovely but lined face. "Even though Marie-Louise isn't of legal age?" she asked.

He nodded, tugging at his cravat and then his mustache. "Yes. The chaplain — well, he doesn't like rebs very much. I told him Mr. Main was in the Confederate Navy Department and that's all it took.

Madeline sat back, frowning. "You put me in a very hard position. I can't condone such defiance of Cooper. And Judith."

"We're not asking that you condone it —" Theo began.

"Only that you give us a day or two," Marie-Louise pleaded. "Just don't tell Papa until we're back. Theo will do it then."

"That will still make me a party to deceiving him."

"Say that you knew nothing about it," Theo responded.

"Marie-Louise disappeared and I knew nothing, about it?" He blushed, recognizing the foolishness of it. "No. I'd have to be prepared to assume my share of blame." She was silent a moment. "I don't think I want that."

Marie-Louise rushed to her, almost in tears. "If Theo speaks to Papa first, you know Papa will say no. He'll go on saying it till hell freezes."

"Marie-Louise," Theo said, stunned. Refined girls didn't say such things.

"Well, it's true. If you won't let us go, Aunt Madeline, we'll never be able to marry. Never."

Prudence went to comfort her; the young teacher was growing fatter, and tended to waddle. Madeline reflected on the situation, wondering why, now that the Klan seemed to have retreated in silence, and construction was about to start, this new problem had to be brought to her.

She wanted to stand by her refusal and spare herself another scene with Cooper. Then she remembered Orry describing what he'd put Brett and Billy through before the war, when he was uncertain about the wisdom of a Carolina girl marrying a Northern officer. He'd withheld his permission and kept them in torment when hardly anything else could have stopped them.

She studied the lovers. Did she have the right to deny them? Marie-Louise was right; Cooper would be unreasonable. But who was she to judge whether their love was genuine, mature, worthy of the permanent bond of marriage? Had her first burst of love for Orry been mature? No, far from it.

"Well, I'll probably rue it. But I am an incurable sentimentalist. I'll grant you forty-eight hours." Prudence clapped. "You may also have use of my elegant wagon for your bridal carriage," she added, wryly.

"I'll not have a Yankee soldier for a son-in-law," Cooper shouted at his wife after the young man spoke his rehearsed speech, took Cooper's abuse, and left, disappointed and noticeably pale. "I'll get the authorities on him. There is some legal way to undo it."

"There's no practical way," Judith said. "Your daughter spent two nights with him in Savannah."

"Madeline's to blame."

"No one's to blame. Young people fall in love."

"Not my only child, not with carpetbagging carrion." Saying that he'd spend the night in his office at the shipping company, he stormed out.

About one in the morning, a knock woke Judith. She found Cooper on the stoop. Two acquaintances had brought him home from the Mills House saloon bar, where he'd drunk bourbon whiskey most of the evening. He had then made insulting remarks to an Army major and probably would have attacked him if all the whiskey hadn't come heaving up suddenly.

The apologetic gentlemen carried Judith's limp and reeking husband upstairs. She followed with the lamp. She saw the gentlemen out, then undressed and washed Cooper, and sat by him until he woke, about half past two. His first words, after a few groans, stunned her:

"Let her lie in that dirty bed she's made with the Yankee. I'll not open the doors to this house to her, ever again."

She burst out crying, angry tears. "Cooper, this is too much. You're carrying your stupid partisanship to ridiculous lengths. I refuse to be separated from my own child. I'll see her whenever I wish."

"Not here," he yelled. "I'll give orders to the servants, and you'd better not defy them. I no longer have a daughter."

He flung the cover off and skidded across the polished floor to be sick in a basin. Judith bent her head in misery.

54

He sat in the chair at the rear of the third box, stage right. He chose the seat to avoid the spill of the stage lights. He didn't want her to see him until the moment he chose.

She lay on a divan upstage. The pillow used to smother her had fallen on the floor. Once he detected an unprofessional flicker of her eyelids. Her silver-blond hair, full to her shoulders, shone with the lovely luster he remembered. He felt no affection for her. His left hand, palm down, worked along his left thigh, as if the motion somehow could restore the severed muscle that had left him unable to leap nimbly in stage duels or perform romantic roles convincingly.

"Then you must speak of one that lov'd not wisely but too well —"

Trump's blackamoor make-up ran from the heat of the stage. It ran in distinct streaks, so that his face resembled zebra skin. Though he ranted to excess, the observer thought he did a generally creditable job. In fact, for a provincial effort, the production was quite good. Good, that is, in every respect but the performance of Trump's Desdemona. She was clearly having an off night.

The man in the box found himself unexpectedly entertaining the thought that Trump's Othello might be a passable importation for a three-week slot still open at the New Knickerbocker. With a new leading lady — Mrs. Parker would be in no shape to perform, ever again. He slipped his hand into his left pocket and reassuringly felt what New York toughs called a dock rat's drinking jewelry. Horseshoe nails, bent into finger rings.

"I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, and smote him — thus."

Sam Trump impaled himself on the prop dagger, staggering this way, then the other, his hand clenched aloft to indicate mortal pain. Mr. Trueblood, playing Lodovico, cheated down in order to regain the stage and cried, "O bloody period!"

Almost over; four speeches more. Then the important part of the evening's drama would commence.

"... no way but this," Sam cried, and fell on Willa with unusual vigor. It knocked the breath out of her, hurt her ribs, and almost made her eyes fly open. She shifted under his sweaty weight, hissing through closed lips:

"Sam, your knee—"

"Killing myself, to die upon a kiss." His head and torso rose and slumped a second time. Sam did love to prolong his stage deaths.

She heard Lodovico corner the Spartan dog, Iago, and threaten him with torture for his plotting. "... Myself will straight abroad, and, to the state, this heavy act with heavy heart relate."

The interval before the curtain thumped down seemed endless. Sam inadvertently kneed Willa's stomach as he struggled to his feet, the blackface dripping from his chin. "Are you ill, my dear? It was not good tonight." He jumped away without waiting for her answer. "Places for the call. Places!"

She bowed from her spot in line, again glimpsing the house, scarcely a third full. Very poor, even for the month of January. The curtain fell. Sam looked hopefully toward the curtain puller, anticipating a second call, but the applause was already gone. The actors walked offstage without saying much to each other. Everyone knew they'd been down. Willa simply shook her head at Sam, admitting her guilt, and joined the exodus.

She'd been cross ever since arriving at the theater. Bad temper was an inevitable failing of hers on those rare occasions when illness struck. For three days she'd been suffering from a stomach complaint. She'd felt a chill all evening and a dull ache in her middle; it robbed her performance of energy and conviction.

Sam wiped his embroidered sleeve across his face and chased after her, "Willa, my dearest, we simply must inject more life into —"

'Tomorrow," she broke in, slumping in a dejected way. "I promise, Sam. I know I was bad tonight. I'm sorry. I want to go straight to the hotel. I still feel terrible. Good night."

The burly man with the spongy bulbous nose left the box, turning up the sealskin collar of his overcoat to help hide his face. Not that he knew any of these loud, rude provincials in the audience. Or anyone in the company except the person he'd come to find.

He walked unhurriedly down the stairs and paused for a moment by the gaslit board in the lobby. Photographs of the artists were tacked to it. He studied the one identified as Mrs. Parker. The name had reached him in New York, as a rumor, and he'd next seen it on a crumpled Trump's Playhouse handbill brought back at his request by a traveling acquaintance. He had taken a long rail journey to investigate. His effort had been rewarded.

He slipped away from the lighted lobby, turned the corner, and crossed the street. The severed muscle had left him permanently lamed. It showed in an awkward side-to-side list as he walked.

In a patch of shadow opposite the stage entrance, he settled down to wait. Street lamps paled and their light diffused in a mist rising from the river. A foghorn blared. Chilled, he drew on a pair of yellow-dyed gloves. Then he took a thin silver flask from an inner pocket and drank some brandy. The flask flashed, reflecting a street lamp. The light revealed large initials engraved in the metal: C. W. Claudius Wood.

Willa tied her cape as she hurried out the door to Olive Street. She felt grimy and uncomfortable; she wanted to bathe and sleep. She tucked her hands into her fur muff and turned right, her heels tapping loudly on the planks, like staccato blows of a carpenter's hammer. Usually she waited for one of the actors to escort her. Tonight she was impatient. It had been a truly miserable performance, and a miserable Christmas season as well. Of course she'd joined in the caroling and gift-giving and the company's Yule feast, held on the stage. But whenever she smiled or chatted, she was acting; acting every minute.

President Andrew Johnson's Christmas gift to the nation had been unconditional amnesty for any Confederate still unpardoned. It was a landmark event, second only to the surrender, perhaps, but it had little meaning for her. There was no longer anyone close to her who was touched by the amnesty. Indeed, because it was such a potent reminder of Charles, the only emotion it generated was a bitter sadness.

At the first corner she stopped, having a distinct sense of some — some presence nearby. She turned and scanned the shadows across the way. Nothing.

She heard male and female voices as the troupe came out of the Playhouse a block behind her. If she lingered, Sam might catch her and lecture her again. So she hurried on, her breath trailing in a cool misty plume. She was feeling so low, she didn't want to see or speak to another human being.

Wood pursued her steadily, without noise, from a safe distance. When they reached the hotel block, Willa paused and glanced over her shoulder again. Wood held still beside the black rectangle of a bakery window.

As soon as she went on, he moved. He bobbed sideways at every step, a cripple robbed of the agility and panache a leading man needed. Well, the culprit, the thief, would soon be caught and subjected to a fitting justice. In his pocket, through the thin' glove leather, the pads of his fingertips indented under the sharp pressure of the filed heads of the horseshoe nails bent into rings.

Warmth, light, the familiar smells of dusty plush and spittoons. Willa was so tired she almost staggered. She crossed the lobby to the marble staircase. A sleepy clerk with an oily forelock like a question mark roused himself. He held up a finger. "Mrs. Parker, there's a gentleman —" Her skirt disappeared around the first landing. Her heels rang sharply on the marble. "— waiting," he finished in the silence.

Wood crossed the lobby with an air of confidence, holding the key to his own room in another hotel so it was visible to the clerk leaning on the marble counter. The clerk studied him, tried to place him, couldn't. A guest who'd signed the ledger before he came on duty? Certainly that must be it. He wouldn't forget a man with such a pronounced limp.

The clerk turned the book so that he could examine the page of flowery signatures. By that time Wood was on the empty stairs. Just above the landing, out of sight of the lobby, he began to climb two steps at a time, pulling himself along by grasping the rail. His limp didn't slow him; it was the engine that powered his rapid ascent through the half-dark.

She turned left down the gaslit corridor, fumbling for her key. She reached her door, inserted the key, and was startled to discover that it didn't turn.

She touched the door. Her blue eyes flew wide. Unlocked?

He slipped the horseshoe-nail rings over the index, middle, and ring fingers of his gloved right hand and adjusted them so the filed heads of the nails were outward. He remembered that he must rake and slash, not punch, because the heads could cut through the dyed leather as easily as they could shred her face.

He stepped from the landing, saw her at the door. Walking rapidly, he said, "Willa."

Willa turned and saw the man limping toward her through widely spaced pools of light cast by the hall fixtures, trimmed low in their frosted mantles. She recognized him, though he was different — heavier, and there was more scarlet in his spongy nose. He bobbed from side to side like some child's toy, something wrong with one leg.

Then it came in a rush. The New Knickerbocker. The Macbeth dagger. She hadn't put enough distance between them, and she'd given him a potent motive for hunting her: that limp, ruinous for a leading player. What stunned her most, knotting her aching stomach as he rushed at her with alarming speed, were his eyes. They were pitiless.

"Well," Wood said, stopping. "My dear Mrs. Parker. My dear Desdemona."

"Were you in the audience?"

He nodded, licking his lips. "You were wretched, you know. I do fear it's your last leading role. When I finish with you, you'll be fit for nothing but rouged character women. Hags."

She smelled the brandy on him. Her impulse was to bolt. It was the way she usually dealt with unpleasantness. But Wood's mass and height intimidated her. If she moved, he'd be on her instantly. She searched the corridor.

"Go on," Wood said, amused. He raised his yellow glove. He wore what appeared to be rings made of bent nails, the blued heads outward. "Run, yell. Before any of the guests wake and reach us, I'll have your face in tatters. Which is the way I intend to leave it." His left hand started for her throat, there at the door to her room. "The lovely Miss Parker. Lovely no more."

Willa flung herself back against the door. It opened, and she sprawled on the floor in the dark room smelling of furniture too long undusted. A sad little fir tree, totally brown, stood in a corner, its needles and tinsel strewn through the oblong of light cast from the hallway.

Wood swung his fisted right hand, and the sharp nailheads, down toward her face. Some intruder, some stranger who'd been hiding over in the dark window alcove, swept by above her. She saw light reflect from an eye, saw a multicolored cape swirl. Was it possible? Smelling the staleness of a smoked cigar, she knew it was.

"I heard you blustering outside," he said. "What do you want with this young lady?"

"There's a gentleman —" The clerk had tried to tell her. A gentleman waiting. He must have talked or bribed his way in with a passkey. "We're old friends. She won't mind."

"Stay out of this," Woods blustered, even though the man in the patchwork robe, a man with a ruffian's long beard in which the scab of a healed cut showed, now had him backed all the way across the corridor, to the wall.

"Charles," she called from the room, "that's Claudius Wood."

He turned his head, startled. "The man in New York?"

Wood's damp eyes bulged. Everything had reversed in a moment. He was wild to get away. Struggling up, Willa said, "Yes. He found me somehow and — watch out."

Wood drove his fisted right hand at the stranger's face. Though the bearded man looked worn out, he was agile and strong. He sidestepped the punch, grabbed Wood's extended arm, and pulled it back across the hall full speed. The clenched fist struck hard on the frame of Willa's door. The sharpened nailheads sliced yellow leather, sliced fingers like sausages. Blood spurted. Charles pulled Wood by the front of his overcoat to position him, then punched him once. Wood caromed off the wall and sat down, finished just that quickly.

The night clerk summoned two members of the St. Louis foot police. The police shouted at the guests milling in the corridor, silencing their complaints, ignoring their questions. The younger policeman handcuffed Wood, and Willa led the other into her parlor.

The bearded man gave his name as Charles Main. No local address as yet. He'd ridden in from the west tonight.

"And you're Mrs. Parker. The wife and I, we enjoyed you as Desdemona very much. It's gratifying to have culture in St. Louis," the older of the two policemen said, flustered in the presence of a celebrity. With her statement about Wood's attack and motive, and Charles as a witness, it took but ten minutes for the policemen to satisfy themselves about Wood's guilt. In the hall, Wood alternately mumbled obscenities and raged like an incoherent child, further convincing the policemen that the young woman and her bearded friend were telling the truth.

"You'll have to sign a deposition, Mrs. Parker," the policeman said. "You, too, sir. But I doubt you'll be going anywhere tonight, will you?"

"And no further than the theater tomorrow," she said.

"Present yourselves at the station as soon as convenient. We'll charge the assailant, and lock him up until then."

And so the threat of Wood came to nothing. The policemen hauled him off, his fine overcoat smeared with his own blood, and left Charles and Willa standing in the dusty parlor amid the tinsel and litter of brown needles. Willa was so stunned and so happy to see him, she wanted to cry.

"Oh, Charles," was all she could say as she went to his arms.

She had a little Christmas whiskey left and poured a glass to warm him. She took a little bit herself; it soothed away some of the pain in her stomach. She curled up on a settee and got him talking, because he had a strange, harried look. "Where have you been? What have you been doing?"

"Something that proved you were right and I was wrong."

"I don't understand. Is your son —?"

"Gus is fine. Hardly knows me, I must say. I saw him at Leavenworth for three days, then came to find you." He took her hand. "I went to the Indian Territory, scouting for Custer. I need to tell you about it."

She listened for an hour. It began to rain, the slanting downpour dispelling the mist. Charles had an odd, cold aura, she thought. An aura of the far plains, of deep winter, enhanced by a faintly rank smell that even his malodorous cigars didn't mask.

He needed a bath, and he certainly needed scissors taken to his beard; it was thick as overgrown underbrush.

The whiskey warmed both of them. He interrupted his story at the point where Custer and his men discovered Indians on the bluffs after they took the village. He said he wanted to make love to her.

Reddening, she said of course, but he caught the slight hesitation, and frowned. She told him she'd been ill for the last few days, and wasn't over it. Then love-making could wait, he said. But he was very cold. She led him to the bedroom. He undressed while she put on her flannel gown. They climbed under the covers and he put his arm around her and went on talking.

"I was wrong to chase after the Cheyennes, trying to cancel one death with another. Look what it got me." He held up the tarnished metal cross hanging around his neck on a thong. "The revenge of killing a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Isn't that a fine accomplishment?"

She brushed his lined forehead with her palm. "So you left —"

"For good."

"To go where?"

"I told you, to find my son. Find you."

"And what now?"

"Willa, I don't know. When I crossed the Washita that last time, I said to myself, there isn't a place for me anymore. I can't think of one."

"I'll find one." She leaned close, rubbing her palm on the raw brush of his side-whiskers. "I'll find one for both of us if you'll let me. Will you?"

"I love you, Willa. I want to be with you and my boy. That's all I want. I'm just not sure —" His bleak eyes showed the terrible doubt. "I'm not sure even you can find a place. I don't know if there's any place on this earth that I belong."

55

Two days later, at Fort Leavenworth, Maureen cut biscuit dough with a tin cutter in the kitchen alcove of the brigadier's quarters. During the night the direction of the wind had changed, clearing the clouds and bathing the post in a flow of warm southerly air. The sun sparkled in pools of melted snow in the garden patch below the window. Maureen had propped the door open with her flatiron to let the breeze clean out some of the stale smells of winter.

January thaw usually restored her spirits. This morning she still felt blue. She'd felt that way ever since Mr. Charles swooped out of nowhere almost a week ago, announcing he was through with soldiering. He declared that he wanted to marry that actress in St. Louis, if she'd have him, and settle down to raise little Gus. Maureen heard the boy playing with the building blocks Duncan had sawed and shaped by hand from pieces of birch.

Maureen couldn't deny Charles the raising of his own son, even if she did disapprove of everything about the man, from his raffish dress to his cigars, his temper, and his undependable ways. Here one minute, dashing off the next. He'd stayed three nights and ridden away to see the actress.

No, she couldn't deny Charles; he was the boy's father. On the other hand, ever since the brigadier had brought her from the East, Maureen had hoped, assumed, that the raising and educating of little Gus would fall to her because Charles was too wild and unsettled to manage it. Now he'd come back, saying he wasn't.

Once he took the boy, her dream of the brigadier regularizing their relationship with a marriage proposal would never come to pass. She had almost decided she would have to marry Jack Ford, a white-haired quartermaster sergeant on the post. Ford, Irish, a widower, loved the cavalry life but claimed he loved her almost as much. She didn't love him, though if she married him, at least her life would have some stability.

Duncan's quarters were quiet except for the sound of Gus playing and the usual drift of noises from the post: trumpet calls, gun caissons rattling, men drilling to shouted cadence. The brigadier was gone again on one of the circuits of the Kansas forts he made every two months with an armed escort. The routine was the same at every post. He would set up a small office while the soldiers queued up outside. The soldiers wore white cotton dress gloves, and each man peeled off the right one when he stepped before the paymaster. After the soldier signed the payroll sheet, Duncan, helped by his orderly, counted the appropriate amount in greenbacks into the soldier's hand. The soldier saluted with his left hand, about-faced, and the next man presented himself. Maureen had watched the procedure at Leavenworth many times.

She expected the brigadier back by nightfall. She was glad. She loved him, though he never uttered the word; probably never thought it in connection with her. She finished cutting the biscuits and laid them in rows on an iron sheet for baking after the sun went down; the stove's heat would take the chill off the shabby rooms.

She thought she heard a wagon somewhere close by. Looking out the window, she saw nothing. On the sill, burnished by sunshine, lay a clumsy six-barrel Allen pepperbox Duncan had bought for her soon after their arrival in Kansas. The Allen dated to the 1840s, but it was dependable for its purpose. In the event of an Indian attack, and impending ravishment, a woman was supposed to use a bullet on herself. The likelihood of Cheyennes or Sioux coming to loot, burn, and rape at a post as civilized as Leavenworth was ridiculous. Nevertheless the custom persisted; most Army women kept a loaded piece handy.

She heard a sound behind her. Gus was there. The sight of him, soon to be denied her, made her all the more blue.

Charles's son was four. A sturdy boy, he didn't resemble his father except for the warm brown eyes. Those were definitely Charles Main's eyes, but the shape of his face was squarer. Gus must have gotten that from his mother, the brigadier's niece, along with his dark blond hair, which formed a cap of tight curls. This morning he wore a gray work shirt and jeans pants with a strap pinned over the shoulder, and quilled moccasins bought from a hang-around-the-fort.

Gus was a smiling boy, but afraid of his father, which made Maureen all the more resentful of Charles's return. He was quick-witted, too. Maureen read to him every night. He knew most of his letters already.

"Reeny —" That was his name for her, a corruption from his first attempts to say Maureen. "I want to go out and play."

"Will you be warm enough?" He nodded. "All right, but stay in the garden where I can see you. Watch out for Indians."

"There aren't any Indians except the old fat ones who sit around."

"You never know, Gus. Just keep your eyes open, because you never know."

He sighed, feeling put upon, and from behind the partially open door fetched the broomstick horse Duncan had made and painted for Christmas a year ago. The horse was a golden color, with a foamy white mane. Duncan had put amazing realism into the painted eyes on the cutout head.

Gus took hold of the rope rein and was soon galloping up and down beside the garden plot, switching the broomstick with an imaginary quirt and then raising the same hand as a pistol fired by the index finger. Watching the boy romping in the sunshine, Maureen grew sadder still. He made her so happy. Why must she lose him?

She went to her room to lie down for five minutes. Perhaps what she was feeling was the onset of the female vapors; she was no longer a young woman. There was gray in her hair. She was very tired. The five minutes lengthened to fifteen.

Gus had slain about three dozen wild Indians when the wagon creaked out from behind the last dwelling in the row of identical houses. The peddler man wrapped the reins on the brake lever, glanced around as if hunting for customers, then climbed down.

Little Gus stood still, watching. He'd been slightly alarmed by the wagon's sudden appearance. Although there was no lettering on the side, he knew the wagon belonged to a peddler because some tin pots were hung on hooks above the driver's seat. Now he was more curious than scared, because the grinning peddler in the plug hat carried a fancy cane with a large gold knob that shone in the sunshine. Something else glittered below the peddler's left ear. Gold and white, it reminded Gus of similar ornaments he'd seen on the ears of officers' wives around the post. He'd never seen a man wearing one.

Assisting himself with his cane, the peddler came down behind the row of houses toward the boy. At each house he glanced at the back window, as if continuing to search for ladies to whom he might sell his tinware. The man's left shoulder was tilted slightly below his right one. From the way the peddler's mouth worked, Gus had the idea that it hurt the man to walk."

"Good morning, my lad. I'm Mr. Dayton, purveyor of kitchen goods and domestics. What's your name?"

"Gus Main."

"Is your mother inside?"

"Don't have a mother. Reeny takes care of me." He ran up the steps and peered in the door. He didn't see Maureen or hear her. "Don't know where she is. She was making biscuits."

He stayed on the bottom step. The peddler had a stale, bad smell, and something in his eyes upset Gus; he didn't know why. The peddler kept staring at him and rubbing the gold knob of bis cane. Gus swallowed, trying to think of something to say.

He pointed suddenly. "What's that?"

The peddler stroked the bauble hanging from his ear. "Oh, just a little present from someone who owed me something. Would you like to pet my mule? He's a good old mule. He likes his ears scratched."

Gus shook his head, determined to have nothing more to do with this pestering, vaguely alarming man. "I don't think so."

"Oh, come along, pet him; he's hankering for it." Without warning, the peddler grabbed his hand, so tightly Gus immediately knew something was wrong.

"Gus, who's out there with you?" It was Maureen. The peddler's voice had carried, and brought her from her room. She pulled the door open and confronted a sight that frightened her for reasons she couldn't altogether explain. It was the stranger's eyes, possibly. Bright as those of a rabid dog she'd seen one time. In his greasy old claw-hammer coat, he didn't look respectable. He held Gus's wrist so tightly his fingers were white.

"You'd better let go of that boy, whoever you are," she said, starting down the steps. With a tremendous grunt, the man raised his cane over his head and bashed her skull.

Maureen pitched backward into the kitchen without a sound. The peddler lifted Gus off the ground, pinning him under his arm and covering his mouth with his left hand. The boy was strong and kicked and tried to cry out. The peddler scarcely had time to scratch something in the dirt with the ferrule of his cane.

The peddler lumbered through muddy garden plots back toward the wagon. All at once he was less confident about the outcome of his plan, which he had based on two principles: surprise and terror.

After locating Charles, and then his child, through Department headquarters — he'd been astonished to find the youngster on the same post where he made his inquiry — he'd prepared with some careful observation. For intervals of five minutes to a half hour during the past two days, he'd watched the movements of those living on officers' row.

It wasn't hard to do. Civilians moved about Fort Leavenworth with relative ease. When he first came to the post, he had no trouble convincing the gate sentries that he was a peddler, and that was the also the case when he made his inquiries, and, later, observed the officers' quarters. He looked like a peddler, which was just what he intended when he bought and outfitted the wagon with money taken from the dead farm couple in Iowa. Twice, while the wagon was parked near officers' row, people had questioned him, asking if he needed help. He immediately busied himself with one of the mule's hooves and said no, he could handle it, thanks, and that was that.

The one phase of the plan he'd pondered a long time was night versus day. At night, too many of the officers were in their quarters, while at this hour of the morning he had to deal only with women. Of course that was offset by the additional risk of discovery in daylight. But surprise and shock often slowed people's reactions. So he'd chosen daylight, audaciously, considering the stroke entirely worthy of the American Bonaparte.

Now he wasn't so sure. They boy tried to bite his hand. The peddler squeezed harder, until the boy's muffled noise indicated pain. "And you'll get worse, a broken neck, if you don't keep quiet," the peddler whispered.

At the second-to-last house on the row, an older woman's round red face looked out the kitchen window and registered astonishment. The woman ran to her door. "What are you doing with the brigadier's boy?" .

By that time the peddler was up on the wagon. He flung the boy into the back and wrapped his head and mouth with a long rag, just tight enough to keep him quiet until they got off the post.

The hardest part was keeping the mule to a steady, ordinary pace while he drove away from officers' row. He heard the woman exclaiming behind him and banked on her running first to Duncan's, to rouse Maureen.

A troop of young cavalry replacements trotted by, going the other way, their drill sergeant cursing them for sloppiness. The peddler heard his captive kick and moan down behind the driver's seat. He snatched up his cane, reached behind him, and brained the boy twice with the gold knob. The second time, the boy went limp.

The peddler watched to be sure the boy was still breathing, then wiped a spot of blood from the knob and perked up the pace of his mule, rolling toward the sentry box at the gate.

Thirty seconds more and he was through, giving the sentry on duty an amiable tip of his old beaver hat. In another minute, the wagon pulled to the left and overtook a line of three oxcarts hauling wood to Leavenworth City. The peddler's wagon passed them smartly and disappeared up ahead.

Charles watched the ticking clock. Half past ten. Willa had promised she'd be back from the Playhouse by eleven-fifteen, so he had a while yet to peruse the St. Louis Democrat.

The paper carried an astounding letter, written by Captain Fred Benteen of H Troop. The letter vividly accused Custer of callous abandonment of Major Elliott and his detachment that day in late November. After the one search party had been turned back by hostile fire, Custer had sent out no others, concerning himself only with getting away from the menacing Indians on the bluffs. Exactly as Charles had heard it described, Custer's plan had been carried out. A march downstream with the band playing convinced the Indians that one or more of the remaining villages would be attacked. The Indians scattered to defend them, Custer countermarched, and his command escaped safely in the darkness. Leaving Elliott's body and the bodies of sixteen others where they fell.

No two accounts agreed on the number of Indian dead at the Washita. Custer claimed one hundred forty, all adult males, based on a battlefield count. Charles had seen no such count made while he was there. Later reports credited to "scouts" lowered the total to twenty to forty men, including Black Kettle, and an equal number of women and children. Charles believed the lower numbers; General Sully had recently admitted that Plains commanders usually inflated the number of hostiles killed in order to prove their military ability and satisfy a bloodthirsy public.

In early December, Generals Sheridan and Custer had marched back to the Washita and there discovered the bodies of Elliott and his men. Elliott had fallen facedown with two bullets in his head. The others, all stripped, were mutilated, some with throats cut, some decapitated.

And here was Benteen, mocking Custer's flight with bitter words: Custer, whom the Osage scouts lauded for his stealth by giving him a new name, Creeping Panther; Custer, whom the Olive Branchers were flaying as "another Chivington" — and not without justification, Charles thought. He fingered the brass cross he wore so he wouldn't forget what a man was capable of doing when he lived without pity, humanity, reason.

He couldn't believe Benteen had meant the letter for publication, though. Fred Benteen hated Custer but he was an experienced officer; he knew the rules, Charles was sure the paper had gotten hold of the letter in some unusual way. He was embarrassed by the satisfaction he got from seeing Benteen's accusations in print.

He heard footsteps in the hotel corridor and cocked his head. Ten-forty. Too early for —

She burst in, her face still made up. He tossed the paper aside. "What's wrong, Willa?"

"This came to the theater, for you. Someone slipped it to Sam onstage and he stopped the performance. Rang down the curtain."

"Why?" It puzzled Charles that a telegraph message could cause such consternation.

"Read it," Willa whispered. "Just read it."

YOUR BOY STOLEN BY FORCE YESTERDAY.

ABDUCTOR SEEN BY MAUREEN WHO COULD NOT STOP HIM.

HE LEFT A WORD MARKED ON THE GROUND. B-E-N-T.

IS THIS NOT THE MAN YOU HAVE MENTIONED.

AUTHORITIES IN LEAVENWORTH CITY HAVE NOT CAUGHT HIM.

COME AT ONCE. DUNCAN

It took three readings for Charles to believe it. Willa looked stricken, watching the skepticism crumble from his face, to be replaced by something frightening.

On the way north from the Washita it had struck Charles that he was beginning a long and arduous climb back out of the abyss of hell. Now he knew he'd mistaken the point at which he started the climb. The Washita wasn't hell, but only hell's doorway; Sharpsburg had been hell's doorstep, and Northern Virginia, hell's approach road —

His mind was a chaos of loss, thoughts of Bent's hatred, Gus Barclay's death, his failure as a father.

If only I'd been with him —

If only I'd been there —

He looked at the message in his hand. He knew what hell was. He was there.