Heaven and Hell

56

Charles snugged Satan's girth. The piebald stamped and tossed his head. He was rested and eager.

"Goodbye, Willa."

Bundled in a shawl and shivering — the January thaw was over — she'd walked with him through the night streets to the stable. A whore and her customer, the latter almost too drunk to stand, were the only human beings they'd seen. A lantern burned on the ground by the stable door. Heavy cold mist from the river coiled and eddied a foot above the ground.

"How long will you be away?" she asked.

"Till I find my boy."

"You said they've already lost track of the man who kidnapped him. It may take a long time."

"I don't care. I'll find him if it takes five years. Or ten."

She almost broke down, seeing him hurting so badly. She rose on tiptoe and kissed him hard, holding his arms through the gypsy robe as if she could lend him strength that way. He was going to need so much. Unspoken between them — she didn't dare utter it, nor could he if he was to keep his sanity — was the possibility that Bent had already done to the boy what he'd done to George Hazard's wife.

"Come back to me, Charles. I'll find a place for us."

He didn't answer. He swung up on Satan and looked at her for a moment in a strange, sad way. His left hand stretched down to touch her cheek. Then he kicked Satan with his heels, and horse and man shot from the stable into the mist and dark, gone.

She blew out the lantern, rolled the doors closed, and walked eight blocks to her hotel, heedless of possible danger. A thought chased around in her head like one of those lines of dialogue an actor thought about endlessly because it was hard to speak or difficult to interpret.

Why didn't he say he would come back?

Guilt and nervous collapse had put Maureen in bed. Tinctured opium kept her drowsy. Charles could see her through the open door as he sat scooping up eggs with a biscuit. Duncan, wearing uniform trousers and suspenders over his long underwear, had scrambled the eggs and cooked them too long, giving them a brown crust. Charles didn't know the difference.

They had gone over it a number of times but Duncan seemed determined to do it again, as if still seeking explanations.

"Only a madman would conceive of stealing a child from a busy military post in broad daylight."

"Well, I told you, that's what he is. Back at Camp Cooper, the other officers in the Second Cavalry joked about Bent fancying himself a new Napoleon. Didn't Napoleon's enemies call him crazy? The devil? An ordinary man wouldn't and couldn't do what he did. I don't underestimate him."

Duncan stretched his suspender with his left thumb. His gray hair straggled over his forehead. He turned toward the bedroom; Maureen had cried out in her sleep. It was a few minutes before midnight.

"You're taking all this very coolly, I must say." Duncan was worn out, and it sharpened his voice. "It's your son, not some hilltop redoubt that was lost."

Charles raked a match on the underside of the table and put it to the cigar stub in his teeth. "What do you want me to do, Jack? Rant? That won't help me find Gus."

"You really intend to track Bent yourself?"

"Do you think I'd sit and wait for him to write a letter saying he's hurt Gus? I think he wants to give pain to as many of the Hazards and Mains as he can. I've got to find him."

"How? He has thousands of square miles to hide in."

"I don't know how I'll do it. I'll do it."

"I think it's just prudence to — to consider the possibility that Bent might already —"

"Shut up, Jack." Charles was white. "I refuse to accept that possibility. I absolutely refuse. Gus is alive."

Duncan's eyes roved away, full of misery, full of doubt.

"Yes, he sold me the wagon and the mule," said Steinfeld, a spry little man in a yarmulke who ran one of the Leavenworth City liveries. "That is to say, we traded even, after some haggling. Two horses, cavalry remounts but strong, for his wagon and the worn-out mule. He threw in the tinware he peddled. I gave it to my wife. He didn't have much, only what hung over the driver's seat."

"I suspect that's all he had to start with," Charles said. "Was the boy with him?" Steinfeld nodded. "What else did you notice?"

"He was polite. An educated man. He seemed to be canted — is that what I want to say?" Steinfeld lowered his left shoulder slightly. "Crippled, like this. A war injury, could it be? I also noticed his good vocabulary, and that pearl earring he wore. Very peculiar for a man to wear such an ornament, wouldn't you say?"

"Not if he wanted you to notice that instead of other things. Thank you, Mr. Steinfeld."

Steinfeld stepped back, away from anger so cold it seemed to burn.

Charles bought a spare horse from Steinfeld, a sorrel mare, three years old. Steinfeld said an itinerating Methodist preacher had owned her before he died of a heart seizure. She had stamina for long rides, he promised.

Charles packed food and ammunition and left Leavenworth in a heavy snowstorm. He tracked in the most logical direction, to the west, along the populated right-of-way of the railroad soon to be renamed Kansas Pacific. He stopped in Secondline, Tiblow, Fall Leaf, Lawrence. He asked questions. Bent had been seen, but no one remembered the earring. For some reason he'd abandoned it, just as he'd abandoned the wagon. Two people remembered a boy with curly dark-blond hair. A cafe owner in Lawrence who'd served Bent a buffalo steak said the boy looked worn out, and never spoke. He ate nothing. That is, Bent gave him nothing.

Alternately riding Satan and the sorrel, Charles pushed west through the high drifts left by the storm. He passed a plow train throwing huge fans of white to either side of its locomotive. Buck Creek, Grantville, Topeka, Silver Lake, St. Mary's.

Nothing.

Wamego, St. George, Manhattan, Junction City.

Nothing.

But in Junction City he heard that Colonel Grierson was wintering at Fort Riley. Detachments of the Tenth were scattered in the towns and hamlets along the rail line that now stretched more than four hundred miles, to Sheridan, a tiny place near the Colorado border. Work had been stopped at Sheridan in late summer, all hands paid off and discharged until the line received an infusion of cash in the form of a new government subsidy. All the excitement and glamour now belonged to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, ready to meet nose to nose somewhere west of Denver after the weather improved.

Charles pushed on. Snow became sleet, then rain. He slept in the open, or in the corner of a stable if the owner didn't charge him for it. Kansas Falls, Chapman Creek, Detroit. Abilene. The cow town was largely closed for the winter, but there he picked up the trail again. A man answering Bent's description had bought flour, bacon, and hardtack at Asher's General Store.

Asher happened to be a part-time deputy. An account of the kidnapping had been telegraphed to every peace officer in the state. When Asher had waited on Elkanah Bent he'd seen no sight of a child, but Bent's description, especially his crippled gait, had registered at once. Asher had pulled a pistol from under the counter and arrested him. Bent raised his hands. As Asher stepped from behind the counter, Bent seized a spade and brained him. The only others in the store, two elderly men playing checkers, failed to react. Bent had run out, and was not seen in Abilene again.

"Near thing," Asher said to Charles.

"Near isn't good enough. No one saw my boy?"

Asher shook his head.

Solomon, Donmeyer, Salina, Bavaria, Brookville, Rockville, Elm Creek. When he grew impatient, Charles had to back off and think of what he had decided before he set out. It was better to go slowly, methodically, and catch Bent than to hurry and overlook something, thereby losing him.

Even so, he seldom managed to sleep more than two hours a night. Either nerves woke him, or bad dreams, or the simmering fever he'd developed from too much exposure. He was soon shivering and stumbling like someone half dead, his beard down to the middle of his chest and full of hardtack crumbs and tiny scraps of the green outer leaf of cheap cigars. His eyes seemed to have sunk into his head, leaving in their place an illusion of two blurry dark holes. He smelled so bad, and looked so bad with the Washita gunsight gash healed into a scar above his beard line, that respectable people avoided him in the towns he visited to ask his questions.

Which got the same maddening answers.

"No, nobody like that has been through here."

"No, haven't seen him."

"No, sorry."

It was early March when he got to Ellsworth. There he picked up the trail so strongly, he knew he was meant to do so.

"He rested the night and so did his nephew, a pretty child but worn out, half sick, the little lamb." She was a huge, hearty woman with great pink hams for forearms and kind eyes and the accent of the English Midlands. "I rented them my smallest room and he ate breakfast with my boarders the next morning. I recall it because he rudely kept his beaver hat on at the table. He repeated several times that he was going to the Indian Territory. The boy stayed upstairs. The man said he was too sick to take food but he didn't look it to me. I had a strange feeling about the man. A feeling that he hoped to be noticed. I went to see the town marshal a few hours after he rode away, and the marshal said the man was wanted for stealing the boy. The bloody villain! I wish I'd done it sooner."

One more witness, a boy Charles met by the river, corroborated her story. Charles rode on south twenty miles before he stopped. He sat on the sorrel in the center of a small creek rushing and overflowing its banks because of a melt. The horses drank thirstily while rain fell. Four or five miles west, misty shafts of sunlight pierced down, lighting the land. In the extreme west, blue showed between the clouds. The rain shower was heaviest in the south, where it hid the horizon.

Charles pondered the situation. Below the Cimarron Crossing at the Territory line lay thousands of square miles of unexplored wilderness. A man hazarded his life if he went in alone. That Bent would go there with a child was further evidence of his insanity. Charles really had trouble interpreting and explaining Bent's behavior in any rational way. He didn't try very hard, though. Many of the possible explanations led to the same ending. An ending he refused to confront.

The rooming house story might of course be a fabrication. Bent might have doubled back after crossing the Smoky Hill. But somehow Charles didn't think so. Bent could have disappeared right after leaving Leavenworth if that was what he wanted. Instead, he'd strung out just enough of a trail to keep Charles on it. A trail like a thread waved in front of a cat.

Maybe Bent had flaunted his destination back at Ellsworth with the assumption that Charles would tell himself that further pursuit into the Territory was futile as well as dangerous, and give up. Maybe Bent had played out the string only so he could cut it this way, and ride off laughing. If that was what he figured on, he was wrong. Charles was going in.

But not alone.

"Retribution against a child?" Benjamin Grierson said. "That's unspeakable."

"I'd say that describes Bent." Charles sat on a hard chair in the headquarters office of the Tenth Regiment at Fort Riley. He ached deep in his bones. He was too sick to feel much beyond a slight sentimentality over the homecoming.

Colonel Grierson looked gaunter and grayer; the strain of Plains duty showed. But almost as soon as Charles had entered, he'd said that the regiment had fulfilled his expectations, and exceeded them. Now he said:

"What kind of help do you need? Every man in Barnes's troop would like to make up for what happened to you. So would I. We don't have that many fine officers. You were one of the finest."

"Thank you, Colonel."

"You know about President Johnson's Christmas amnesty? He pardoned the last exempted classes. You're not a rebel any longer, Charlie. You could come back —"

"Never."

There was such fierce finality in it that Grierson immediately said, "What kind of help, then?"

'Two men willing to help me track. In fairness, Colonel, I'll be taking them south."

"How far? South of the Arkansas?"

"If that's where Bent goes."

"At Medicine Lodge the government promised to use its best efforts to keep unauthorized white persons out of the Territory. Wildcat surveyors, whiskey peddlers — the Army enforces that promise."

"I know. The ban might be the reason Bent wants to hide in the Territory."

"You'll have to stand on your own if you're caught there."

"Of course."

"Anyone you take, you must tell them first where you're going."

"Agreed."

"You're sure Bent's there?"

"As sure as you can be about a man with crazy impulses. An English landlady fed Bent in Ellsworth. Then a boy trying to fish in the rain along the Smoky Hill saw him riding due south with my son, the direction he told the lady he was going. The boy with the fishing pole thought it was a father and son on one horse, a dapple gray. My guess is, Bent's going down to bide with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes and the renegade traders because none of them will interfere with him, unless it's to kill him."

"Which they may do. Your damn expedition to the Washita stirred everything up. Sheridan's worked all winter to bully and threaten the tribes into surrendering to the government. Now he's got half the Indians starving and ready to come in and the other half ready to drink blood. Carr and Evans are still in the field. Custer, too. He's operating from Camp Wichita."

Charles digested that. The camp was east of the mountains of the same name, deep in the Territory.

"Consequently, no one can be sure where the Dog Soldiers are holed up. They keep moving to avoid the troops. West of the mountains — up on the Sweetwater beyond the north fork of the Red — they've even spilled into Texas, we heard. You won't know where they'll turn up, or the Army either."

"I'll keep that in mind." Charles fingered the brass cross hanging on a thong outside his gypsy robe. The brass was weathered almost black, and he didn't explain the peculiar ornament to Grierson, who wondered about it. Charles didn't act like a man who'd undergone some religious conversion, but he kept fingering the cross. "One thing, though, Colonel. The Washita wasn't my expedition."

"You mean you didn't plan it"

"And I'm sorry I was there. I saw the newspapers. I read what General Sheridan thought of Black Kettle. A worn-out old cipher, he said. The chief of all the murderers and ropers. A stinking lie. I know."

Grierson didn't argue. "Who do you want?"

"Corporal Magee if he'll go. Gray Owl if you can spare him."

"Take them," Grierson said.

Fort Hays remained a primitive post, one of the poorest in Kansas. Ike Barnes's company had wintered there, in the most undesirable quarters, shanties with stone chimneys from which the mortar was crumbling. In Magee's six-man shanty, the sod roof was so weak that he and the others had pegged up a spare canvas to catch falling dirt, melting snow, and the occasional wandering rattlesnake seeking a warm spot to rest.

Magee sat on his narrow cot late one evening after lights out, in the midst of snores and the sounds of flatulence. A lantern burned on the dirt floor between his feet. With a rag he was rubbing rust specks from the barrel of an old .35-caliber flintlock pistol of German manufacture. The rammer fitted underneath the barrel, and there was a blunt hook on the butt for hanging the weapon on a belt or sash.

He'd bought the pistol for three dollars, after a long search for just such a weapon. He'd sewn a powder bag out of scraps of leather; this lay near him on the blanket of his cot, next to five round lead-colored balls of a size to fit snugly in the pistol muzzle.

Polishing and polishing, he didn't pay much attention as the shanty door opened, admitting a gust of windblown rain and First Sergeant Williams in a dripping rubber poncho.

A sleeper sat upright. "Shut the fucking door! Oh, Sarge, 'scuse me." He lay down again.

The low-trimmed lamp set Williams's spectacles to glowing. "S'posed to have that light out, Magee. What're you doing with that old gun?"

"Uh-uh. New gun. Old trick." It was all the explanation he furnished.

"Well, come on outside," Williams said. "You're going to turn the color of a white man when you see who's back."

Magee, shivering in his underwear in the lee of the shanty, found Captain Barnes, wisely protected by a slicker, holding up a lantern to illuminate the visitor. "Popped out of the dark like a ghost, Magic. Ain't he a sight to behold?"

The old man intended a compliment, and Magic Magee's face almost bloomed into that brilliant, one-of-a-kind smile. But he saw Charles's fever-burned eye sockets and his filthy hands, so held the smile back. Charles said, "Hello, Magic."

"Cheyenne Charlie. I'll be switched."

"Get your clothes on, Magic," Barnes said. "I woke Lovetta and she's put the coffeepot on. Charles says he needs some help. He'll tell you about it."

"Sure," Magee said. "You came to the right man, Charlie. You're still holding my marker."

After the men talked, Lovetta Barnes fed Charles amply and made up a pallet for him near the fireplace. He slept sixteen hours straight, undisturbed by the comings and goings of the old man and his wife. Magic Magee hadn't hesitated about traveling to the Indian Territory. Neither had Gray Owl. Both men looked about the same, though each seemed to have more lines, and deeper ones, in his face. Charles supposed he did too.

They provisioned at the sutler's. Charles bought two spare horses, to bring their total to six, and in the ides of March, with bright sunshine returning and a warm wind blowing in from Texas and the Gulf, the trackers rode south over the Smoky Hill. Their first night out, Charles slept hard in the open air, but he dreamed a nightmare of the three of them riding across the sky on a trail of milky stars. They had blood-smeared faces. They were dead on the Hanging Road.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

The tail of a northeastern snowstorm lashed the capital before dawn on the fourth of March. In the window bay of his bedroom in the I Street mansion, Stanley Hazard scratched his considerable paunch and peered at the drizzle, the mud puddles, the creeping mist. What else could go wrong with today's events?

Andrew Johnson would not be present at the swearing-in. Grant had spurned Johnson's discreet peace feelers in the wake of the Stanton dispute, and announced that he would not ride in the same carriage with Mr. Johnson, or even speak to him. The cabinet dithered. Should there be two carriages? Two separate processions? The matter was resolved when Mr. Johnson decided to stay in his office during the ceremony, signing last-minute bills and saying goodbye to members of the cabinet.

Stanley's unhappiness had a more personal side, however. Through the maneuverings of his wife, who was still snoring in bed, he had been appointed to the prestigious Committee of Managers for the inaugural ball. It was a great coup socially, and for a day or two Stanley was wearily pleased. Then he discovered that staging the ball might be akin to building one of the pyramids.

The committee couldn't agree on or even find a site large enough for the expected crowd. Growing desperate, committee members appealed to Congress for permission to use the Capitol rotunda. The House voted favorably but the Senate, after much empty talk of supporting the idea, voted it down. The President-elect sent a note saying it was all right, he didn't mind if no one honored him with a ball. Isabel's reaction was typical:

"He's canaille. Not a social grace to his name. Who does he think he is to deny us the premier evening of the year?"

Charged with bringing off this premier evening, Stanley and his associates spent hours in acrimonious debate. Should it be called a ball or a reception? The latter. Should it be ten dollars per ticket (admitting a gentleman and two female companions to supper and dancing), or a more modest eight dollars? The former. Should Mr. Johnson be invited in view of his estrangement from Grant over the Stanton matter? He was not invited.

Should the "more affluent coloreds" of the community be included, despite broad opposition? This vexing question was resolved when a representative of the group sent a note saying they would not attend if asked. Isabel said, "At long last those people are displaying a primitive intelligence. They know they'll be snubbed if they show their sooty faces."

The site finally found was large enough — it was the north wing of the Treasury building — but it wasn't ideal, because it was unfinished. Stanley had spent most of the past forty-eight hours on the site. His fine suit covered with plaster dust and specks of paint, he had helped oversee the work of dozens of mechanics completing the decorating and furnishing of the party rooms.

Now, groggy from exhaustion — he had slept little more than two hours — he confronted catastrophic weather. He felt suicidal.

He staggered to his bureau and picked up the admission cards for the ball. They were as big as the pages of a commercial almanac, gaudily lithographed with a heroic bust supposed to combine the features of President-elect Grant and Vice Presidentelect Colfax. It looked like neither. "Vile," Isabel called it. Stanley had whined for twenty minutes to convince her that he had had nothing to do with it. Head down, he stood there wondering whether all this travail was worth it merely to provide Isabel with one more opportunity to maintain her social contacts and ply her devious and hypocritical brand of flattery. As usual, he had no say in the matter.

He swung his head toward the window like a great ox in a yoke. He listened to the drizzle and wished it would grow torrential and wash away all of today's events, and his snoring wife too.

The procession to the Capitol began at ten minutes before eleven. General Grant, a small, compact, retiring man in his forty-seventh year, wore sturdy, sober American black, like all of the gentlemen attending. He rode in an open carriage. Boisterous people who eluded the police lines and dashed into the muddy street reached into the carriage to touch him. He didn't seem to mind.

His escort consisted of eight divisions of marching units. The Washington Grays Artillery of Philadelphia, forty-eight muskets, marched. The Philadelphia Fire Zouaves marched with their twenty-two-man drum corps. The Eagle Zouaves of Buffalo marched, as did the Lincoln Zouaves of Washington, the Butler Zouaves of Georgetown, and the Lincoln Zouaves (colored) of Baltimore. These last were brilliant in white leggings and blue flannel jackets with yellow trim.

The Hibernia Engine Company marched, together with the Naval Academy Band, the Government Fire Brigade and Hose Company Number 5 of Reading, Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court marched. So did the Philadelphia Republican Executive Committee, the Lancaster Fencibles, and Ermentrout's City Band, seventeen pieces. The Grant Invincibles of California marched, along with the Montana Territorial Delegation and the Sixth Ward Republican Club, whose horse-drawn car featured a miniature Constitution complete with anchors, chains, and cannons manned by youths in sailor suits. This car was the clear hit of the parade, generating riotous applause among the throngs on Pennsylvania Avenue.

President-elect Grant seemed pleased and entertained by the spectacle. President Johnson's reaction was unknown; he was still at the White House, signing bills.

Under skies showing ragged gaps in the clouds and occasional swatches of blue, Stanley deposited his wife in their reserved seats. These were directly in front of the platform built over the steps of the Capitol's east front. The platform was crowded with chairs and festooned with bunting and evergreen boughs.

"Where are you going?" Isabel demanded. She wore a dusty-peach jacket and skirt. Colors were more festive this year.

"Inside, to pay my respects. Perhaps shake hands with the general."

"Take me with you."

"Isabel, it's far too dangerous. Look at this unruly mob. Besides" — it was one of the few points he could score with relative impunity — "these public rites are principally for men."

Her equine face wrinkled. "So was the procession, I noticed."

"You sound like a suffragist."

"God forbid. But don't you forget who made a success of Mercantile Enterprises!" Stanley cringed, hands raised. "And watched the books, supervised every expansion, saw to it that our estimable fraud of a lawyer, Dills, didn't rob us of every —"

"Please, Isabel, please," he whispered, his jaundiced complexion fading to paper-white. "Don't say those things, even among strangers. Don't mention that company. We have no connection with it, remember."

Isabel started to reply, realized he was speaking prudently, and said, "All right. But you had better not be gone long."

Clutching his tall hat with one hand, his special ticket with the other, Stanley started through the huge, generally jocular crowd of standees. He wriggled around mounted marshals and passed through a cordon of Capitol Police with heavy batons.

Rumpled, his pearl-gray cravat hanging out of his matching waistcoat, he at last reached the noisy corridor behind the Senate chamber.

He darted onto the Senate floor but saw no sign of his mentor, Ben Wade. The galleries were already packed with a thousand or more spectators. He thought he glimpsed Virgilia but quickly looked away. He wanted no contact.

He roamed among the dignitaries, shaking hands like the important Republican stalwart he was supposed to be. He was somewhat daunted by the rows of gold braid — Sickles, Pleasonton, Dahgren, Farragut, Thomas, and Sherman were already present — and he didn't attempt to greet such famous men. He did congratulate the magisterial Mr. Sumner, about to be sworn in for his fourth Senate term. He greeted Senator Cameron, now returned to power and office; the Boss acted as if he hardly knew Stanton.

He next spoke to Carl Schurz of Missouri, the first German-born citizen to reach the high office of senator. Without preamble, Schurz started to discuss the debt, one of Grant's chief concerns. As a student, Schurz had joined the 1848 revolution, and he was still a political zealot. He talked about greenbacks and specie and fiscal honesty until Stanley excused himself. He found men of conviction such as Schurz intimidating, perhaps because his own convictions were so few and so ordinary. He believed that his wealth would never bring him happiness. He believed his wife was repulsive and his two sons worthless. Levi, whose college career had consisted of one week of study followed by expulsion for knifing a fellow student in a dispute over dice, now owned a half interest in a saloon in New York's Tenderloin, and was also, by his own boast, a successful pimp. Levi's twin, Laban, had managed to get through Yale despite an equally riotous disposition and a bad case of the pox in his second year, and was now establishing himself as a high-status thief, a term Stanley applied to all lawyers.

He went to Wade's office and squeezed up near the closed door. "Sorry, sir," an usher said, "Senator Wade is closeted with General Grant until the ceremonies begin."

"But I am Mr. Stanley Hazard."

"I know," said the usher. "You can't get in."

Smarting, Stanley retired.

Before going outside again, he whisked a slim silver bottle from an inner pocket and refreshed himself with his fifth drink of the morning. At his seat, he told Isabel he had met the President-elect, theoretically a coup because Grant had done little personal campaigning and had attended few party functions. He promised to introduce Isabel at the ball.

"You'd better."

The crowd stretched away on either hand, with the usual hat-throwing and hip-hip-hurrahing punctuated by screams whenever a tree branch gave way and dropped those whose weight had broken it. At 12:15, approximately the hour Andrew Johnson was to shake hands with his cabinet and depart by carriage from the front portico of the White House, the official platform party emerged from the Capitol.

Grant looked dignified in his black suit and straw-colored gloves. Justice Chase nervously administered the oath. Grant took it, bent to kiss the Bible, then delivered a brief address. Isabel's comment on the entire proceeding was, "Pedestrian."

PEACE

The great motto burned in the dark high above. Stanley stood admiring the committee's handiwork. The special illumination was created by gas jets across the front of the Treasury Building. It had been expensive to design and erect, but the effect was spectacular. There, for Washington and all the world to see, was the Republican presence, the Republican pledge.

While Stanley gawked, Isabel complained of the delay. They had joined other formally dressed couples hurrying inside.

A string orchestra serenaded from the balcony of the enormous Cash Room. In a stately setting of Siena and Carrara marble, the specially commissioned allegorical painting "Peace" was on display. The easel was surrounded by a good-sized crowd. Stanley and Isabel unexpectedly bumped into Mr. Stout, just returned to the Senate for a full term. On his arm was a hard-looking woman, much younger, with a tiara of sapphires in her hair. Very coolly, Stout said to them:

"I believe you know my wife, Jeannie?"

Isabel was enraged. This was the young woman who had been Stanley's mistress until Isabel discovered it and ended the affair. She was Jeannie Canary then, a variety-hall singer.

"Ah, yes —" Flustered, Stanley straightened his white tie. "I had the pleasure of watching her, ah, perform on many occasions."

Stout didn't immediately catch the inadvertent double meaning. When he did, he reddened, as if ready to call Stanley out for an old-fashioned duel. Jeannie looked equally piqued. Isabel pulled her husband away. Her eyes were misty. Stanley was astonished; his wife never wept.

"You foul-mouthed beast," she whispered, tearfully looking straight ahead. For once he was too thunderstruck to take the slightest pleasure.

Isabel wouldn't speak to him thereafter. She shook her head to offers of food or wine and refused his limp invitation to waltz. She did follow along when President and Mrs. Grant appeared and Stanley, lemminglike, rushed with dozens of others to present himself. Damnably, Stout and his wife were with the Grants.

Eventually Stanley and Isabel got their turn. Stanley mumbled their names, which Stout repeated. Isabel stared at her husband in a hostile way while the President shook Stanley's hand.

"Ah, yes, Mr. Hazard. The Pennsylvania Hazards. I know your brother George. You were a liaison officer with the Freedmen's Bureau, were you not?"

"Yes, Mr. President, until the end of '67. At that time I retired to oversee my business investments. I must say, sir, your program for the economy is very sound."

"Thank you, sir," Grant said, and turned to greet the next couple.

Isabel was even angrier than before. "You lying wretch. You didn't meet him this morning."

"No. They wouldn't let me into Wade's rooms."

"You've humiliated me sufficiently for one evening, Stanley." She had also seen, and been seen by, everyone important. "Take me home."

Stanley was the first of the Committee of Managers to depart.

Grant noticed. To his wife Julia he said, "Very likable, that Hazard fellow. Strikes me as a man of intelligence and substance."

Senator Stout overheard. If Mr. Grant believes that, we have a naive dolt in our highest office. God save the republic.

"No," the obese man said. Amid the correspondence and sheets on his desk, Madeline saw a cheaply printed paperbound book, Your Sister Sally. She had seen a copy before. An import from Mississippi, the book contained exaggerated descriptions of the ruin and rapine whites could look forward to under a black-dominated legislature. Gettys sold copies at his store.

"Leverett," she said with forced composure. "Mont Royal is earning money. Even rebuilding the house, I have enough to pay off substantially more of the mortgage every year. I hate to see so much interest flow out unnecessarily."

The office was dark wood and deep green plush; Dawkins's special chair was upholstered with the material. "I reiterate the bank's stated policy. No prepayment." He licked his lips. "If you refuse to be flexible, so do we."

"Flexible." Madeline gave it a bitter ring. "You mean close the school. You were a liberal man once. What are you so opposed —?"

"Because these nigger schools are not schools at all. They're centers for political action. All Conservatives oppose them." Conservative was the new label of the anti-Republican coalition of Democrats and former Whigs.

"Wade Hampton's running a school on his plantation. He's an avowed Conservative."

"Yes, but tainted by certain unfortunate views. There is no point in discussing General Hampton. He is a unique case."

He means untouchable. Which I am not.

"Leverett, I wish I could understand. Why are you so completely averse to giving people a decent education?"

"Not people. Nigras. The idea is poisoning South Carolina. First we got those Yankee women teaching down at St. Helena. Then your free school. Now we have public ones. As a result, not only do we have vengeful inferiors trying to govern us, but we have a crushing financial burden in the form of obnoxious school taxes."

"So it comes down to money. To greed."

"Justice! Fairness! The provision in the state constitution calling for public schools was none of my doing. None of Mr. Cooper Main's, either, I might say. We dined together at my home only last week, and I know his state of mind. And the various circumstances responsible for it," he added, flashing her a sharp look. She supposed the banker was referring to Marie-Louise's marriage.

"Your brother-in-law and I are in complete agreement about the schools," Dawkins continued. "Since they were forced upon us by the Federal government, let the Federal government pay for them."

"I get no government money, Leverett."

"But I understand you get many visits from Yankee clerics and bureaucrats who think your school is a model of Radical action. I am surprised the Kuklux have not returned. I don't advocate violence, but you will have only yourself to blame when they do."

57

"Pretty?" Bent said. "Pretty, Gus?" He reached across to his left ear and shook the teardrop earring.

The small fire crackled and snapped in the March wind. They were camped on a barren slope in the Wichita Mountains, granite peaks that rose abruptly from the plain. Two days earlier, north of the mountains, Bent had sighted a cavalry column moving east to west ahead of him. He identified it as cavalry and not an Indian band because of its orderly march, and the colors and guidons raised above it. He'd dragged little Gus to the ground and forced the dapple gray to lie down until the column passed from view. He hadn't felt safe about building a fire until this evening.

He turned his head slightly, presenting the left side of his face to the boy, extra temptation as he jiggled the earring again. "Isn't it pretty?"

In a face unwashed for days, Gus's eyes shone like polished brown stones. Bent's discipline had left its mark in those eyes. It had also left a scabby welt on Gus's chin, another on his forehead, and a bruise like a splatter of mud around his right eye. Bent had reduced the boy to a state of perpetual fear and total dependence; the four-year-old was grateful for every scrap of stale beef and every swallow of tepid water his captor allowed him. He hardly said a word, afraid of goading Bent to anger. He'd learned quickly that the man's anger could flare without clear cause.

Bent kept jiggling the earring. Gus didn't know what his captor expected of him. Bent smiled and the boy decided he wanted him to touch the earring. He flexed his fingers. Raised his hand. Extended it tentatively —

Bent struck him so hard he fell over. He yanked Gus up by his hair, slapped his face twice. "Bad boy. Mustn't grab. If you're a bad boy, then my friend wakes up."

From the pocket of his filthy claw-hammer coat he took the straight razor. Flicked it open. Gus scooted backward, mouth open. He made no sound; Bent whipped him if he was noisy. But he'd seen the razor before. He'd been cut by it.

The campfire rippled silver flashes along the blade. Gus cringed back another foot or so, scooting on his bottom. Bent smiled again. "You know what my friend does to bad boys, don't you? He hurts them."

Bent got to his knees with great speed and flung his arms out above the fire. The edge of the razor sped toward Gus's throat. Gus screamed and fell on his side, covering his face. Bent had pulled his thrust at the last moment, stopping the blade six inches from the boy's neck.

Gus's scream was so piercing, it ruined the sport somehow. In his head Bent heard strange echoes of the cry, punctuated by a weird pinging. He dropped the razor, ran around the fire, and shook the boy by the shoulders. "You are a really bad boy. I told you never to make noise. If you make noise again, I'll let my friend bite you. You know how it feels when he bites you."

Gus began to whimper, wet sounds. Bent took off his plug hat and swabbed his shiny forehead with his sleeve, leaving streaks of dirt. "That's better. Pull up your blanket and go to sleep before I ask my friend to punish you for being so bad."

Carefully, silently, Gus hitched across the ground to a filthy saddle blanket. Lice had long ago migrated from the blanket to his body and hair. His eyes showed over the edge of the blanket after he pulled it up. Bent cleaned some dirt from the razor blade with the ball of his thumb. At certain angles the blade caught the firelight, throwing a scarlet-white reflection into Gus's eyes. The third time it happened, the boy hid beneath the blanket.

It was satisfying to hurt the boy. Each time he did, Bent felt he was hurting Charles Main too. Hurting Gus also had a practical benefit. It forestalled attempts to run. Gus was thoroughly cowed; he didn't chatter or display the energy typical of a four-year-old. When he was awake, he was as silent as a sick old man. Bent had broken him like a horse. He surveyed the huddled shape covered by the blanket. "Good," he said under his breath. "Good."

The picketed dapple gray had lain down on the ground for a roll almost half an hour ago and still hadn't gotten up. The horse looked at Bent with eyes that reminded him of the boy's. He was worn out. His ribs showed and he had sores in his mouth. Bent would have to shoot him in a day or two, and then they would have to travel on foot. At least they could eat the meat.

He put his hat on, folded up his razor, and sat with his back against an uncomfortable granite outcrop. He drew his revolver and laid it beside him, then pulled his own blanket over his legs. He listened for a while to the sullen whine of the wind across the treeless slope. Here and there some stunted brush swayed in a strong gust. It was time to give some thought to the future. He needed a refuge for the summer months. Food was running low, and he faced the constant threat of an Army patrol catching him in the Territory, where he wasn't supposed to be.

For a time, chasing across Kansas, deliberately leaving clues to his whereabouts to torment Gus's father, he hadn't worried about personal safety. Then he'd been forced to brain that storekeeper in Abilene, and soon after he'd aroused the suspicion of the fat slut who ran the rooming house in Ellsworth City. At that point he'd decided the game was no longer worth the risk. Charles Main knew he had the boy, which was good enough for the time being. He cut off his trail by turning south to the Territory, where he felt he could hide safely for an indefinite period. Because of the inherent danger, he was convinced Charles would never follow him.

With his shoulders painfully braced against the granite, he stared down at the dark distances of the lightless plain, thinking of Charles as he'd looked when they served in the Second Cavalry before the war. He was a handsome big lout, with the smarmy good manners typical of Southrons. Bent had found him sufficiently attractive to make an advance, which Charles rebuffed. Bent hated him all the more for that. His eyes shifted to the motionless lump of blanket. He wasn't finished with Gus, or his father, either.

Next day he shot the dapple gray and cut him up. When he insisted that Gus eat half-cooked horse meat, the boy resisted. Bent forced meat into his mouth and Gus vomited all over Bent's boots. He had the sharp edge of the razor against Gus's throat before good sense asserted itself. He needed the boy to fulfill his plan later.

Trembling with an excitement much like that produced by sex, he put the razor away and forced the boy to clean the vomit off his boots with small dry branches broken from the shrubs that clung to the slopes.

He left the old stolen saddle with the corpse of the horse, taking only the saddlebags. As he walked in a westerly direction, away from the mountain where they'd camped, little Gus followed one step behind and one step to his left, like a well-trained pet.

Vermillion Creek fed into the Elm Fork, sometimes called the Middle Fork. The creek ran into the river from the north, somewhat west of the Fork's confluence with the North Fork of the Red. It was a lonely region west-northwest of Fort Cobb, and by Bent's reckoning not far from the Texas border.

The barren Wichitas lay behind them in the east. This land was prairie with a lot of shale showing along the waterways, and thick growths of stunted-looking jack oak and post oak to break the horizon. There was abundant wildlife — plump jackrabbits, prairie chickens, even a deer Bent fired at and missed. They didn't starve; generally he was an excellent shot.

Bent began to feel the restorative effect of the spring weather as he and the boy trudged up Vermillion Creek, exploring. An almost constant wind swayed the patches of wild violet and blue indigo, and brought a pink rain of blossoms from a stand of flowering Judas trees. High overhead, wedges of geese flew north.

One moment Bent heard Gus's split-open shoes rattling the shale, and the next moment there was silence. He turned to discipline the boy but he didn't because of the boy's expression. Gus was looking farther along the creek. His eyes were momentarily free of fear and full of curiosity.

Bent turned around again and caught his breath. A fire hidden below the horizon was sending a thin gray column into the clear sky.

Indians? Quite possible. It could also be something like the camp of buffalo hunters. Bent pushed Gus into the ankle-deep water. "Wash your face and hands. We must look presentable in case we meet white men."

Water flowed through Bent's fingers, darkened by dirt. Gus imitated him, watching him constantly for signs of displeasure. The dirt slowly vanished from the boy's face but the marks of punishment remained.

It was not merely a camp, it was a civilized outpost on the bank of the creek. Completely unexpected, remarkably substantial. The main building, from which the smoke rose, was rectangular, constructed of mud brick with a dirt roof the builder had given a slight pitch for drainage. From concealment in some post oaks Bent look with astonishment at two Indian ponies tied at the front door, which faced the bright creek. A side door opened into a small corral holding a big chestnut and two mules. A small outbuilding, a primitive stable, was half hidden by the main place.

Gus suddenly cried, "Look," and pointed. Bent slapped a hand over Gus's mouth and twisted the boy's head until he made a hurt sound. Only then did Bent take his hand away.

He was intensely curious about the animal that had excited Gus. It was a raccoon, very well fed. Its furry belly dragged the ground as it loped along the front of the main building. Someone's pet?

Bent slipped the saddlebags off his shoulder and unbuttoned his old coat. He brushed the butt of his tied-down revolver to be sure it was clear, then snapped his fingers. Instantly, Gus grasped his hand.

Man and boy approached the building on the rocky shore of the creek. The raccoon spied them and ran off toward the stable. Bent paused near the front door. He heard voices in conversation. He didn't want to be shot as a prowler and yelled, "Hello in there."

"Hello. Who's that?"

The door squeaked open. First out were the muzzles of a shotgun. Then the man holding it appeared. He was poorly dressed, swag-bellied, and had a face that reminded Bent of a flushed Father Christmas. The man's hair, more gray than white, was center-parted and worn in long braids. A beaded band wrapped the end of each braid. Small trade bells tied in the right braid jingled.

"Captain Dayton's my name. My nephew and I are lost. We're bound west."

"Not through the Indian Territory if you know the law," the man said, implying doubt of Bent's honesty.

"We're not in Texas?"

"Not for a few miles yet." The man searched behind Bent, as if looking for soldiers who might entrap him. He scrutinized Bent again. He decided the tall plug-hatted stranger must be just as close to the edge of the law as he was.

Color returned to the man's hands as he relaxed his hold on the shotgun. "I'm Septimus Glyn. This is my ranch."

Not much of a ranch,

Bent thought. "What do you raise, Glyn?"

"Nothing. I sell what the Indian Bureau won't." The man had an assertive manner but he didn't strike Bent as dangerous. A renewed sense of personal importance was energizing him. What if this ignorant trader knew he was speaking to the American Bonaparte? Wouldn't he be amazed?

"I have a little money, Glyn. Do you sell any food?"

Glyn again thought about Bent's surprise appearance in this wilderness. He didn't know what the man was really up to, but he decided a profit merited some risk. "Yes, I do. And whiskey, if you're thirsty. Got something else you might like, too." He stepped aside. "Come in."

Bent strode forward, pulling Gus. "Handsome little boy," Glyn said. "Marked up some."

"Fell off a horse."

Glyn didn't ask questions.

When Bent stepped in, he was startled by the furnishings: two large round pine tables, badly stained; chairs; a wide plank set across nail kegs piled two high with a row of unlabeled bottles on a shelf behind. A red blanket curtained a door, which perhaps led to living quarters.

At one table, two Indians sat with a brown bottle. Both were middle-aged. One was obese. They regarded Bent and the boy with puffy eyes full of suspicion. "They're Caddoes," Glyn said, putting the shotgun on his homemade bar. "Harmless. I run off any Comanches who want whiskey. They're too unpredictable."

So this was one of the illegal whiskey ranches. Bent had heard there were a number of them operating in the Territory. They purveyed weapons, staples, but mostly the whiskey the government didn't want the tribes to have.

The red blanket lifted and Bent saw something else that stunned him. A light-brown Indian girl stood there, her deerskin dress much soiled by food and drink. He thought at first that she was in her thirties. Her eyes were slitted from sleep and her black hair hung loose in uncombed tangles. She had a sullen air. She moved toward Glyn, barefoot, pushing hair off her right ear and eyeing Bent in a bold way. He in turn noticed the fullness of her breasts under the hide dress. He felt an unexpected quiver. He hadn't had a woman, or wanted one, for over a year.

Glyn poured a clear fluid from a bottle. "This is my wife, Green Grass Woman. She's Cheyenne. I took her from her village a year ago. She wanted to see the world, and I've showed her how it looks from flat on her back. She's but eighteen winters. Got a lively taste for gin, though. I taught her to like it, and certain other things." Glyn cleared his throat. "What I mean to say is — she's for sale too."

Bent bobbed his head. He'd already decided he wanted her. He had no intention of paying.

Septimus Glyn served up some slabs of cold venison and whiskey that tasted like it had been spiked with cayenne. It made Bent's lips burn. "Where do you get this stuff?"

"Over in Texas. Dunn's Station. There's a few Rangers over that way, but I dodge them. Once a month I traipse around to the Indian villages. Not many are left now that the Army's come in. The rest of the time I make a living here. They threw me out of the Bureau but I liked the country, so I stayed. I especially like screwing Indian women. They've got a special musky quality. You can find out for two dollars."

"Maybe later. Gus, eat something." The little boy tore up scraps of venison and forced them into his mouth. Looking bilious, he chewed.

Bent decided he'd found his haven. "We really want to make it to California before the winter. But we can pass the night with you if you've no objection."

Glyn shook his head. "Sleep in the stable, or my wagon, parked in back. Cost you a dollar."

"Fine," said Bent. He found a paper dollar in his coat and smoothed out the wrinkles. He gave it to Glyn, not really concerned, because the transfer was to be temporary.

The old Caddoes, defeated men who drank till they staggered, left before sunset. Bent and little Gus put their blankets in the old covered wagon, which was snugger than the shed that served as a stable. Bent repeatedly touched himself; he'd been stiff with excitement most of the afternoon.

He waited several hours, until he could stand it no longer, then crept from the wagon without awakening Gus. He opened the front door of the whiskey ranch with only a single telltale squeak, which didn't matter since there was already a lot of noise, moanings and gruntings, from behind the red-blanketed doorway. Bent drew his revolver.

He crossed the main room, guided by a glow behind the blanket. The Cheyenne girl was uttering deep, loud moans. Bent peeked past the edge of the blanket. A dim lantern showed him the girl's sweating backside; she was astride the whiskey trader, pumping' up and down with her head thrown back, her eyes closed. Glyn was rubbing her breasts. Both hands were in sight, and his shotgun was leaning against the wall, well out of reach. Good. What counted now was speed.

Bent tore the blanket aside and took three strides to the bed. In that interval, Green Grass Woman shrieked and Glyn's eyes popped open. He started to grab for his shotgun but gave up. "What the hell are you doing in here, Dayton?"

"I want this place," he said, smiling.

"Why, you damn fool, it isn't for sale."

Bent reached past the Indian girl's forearm and shot him above the eyes. He dragged the body to the other room, then went back in, unbuttoned his pants, and rolled her on her back. She took him in, too frightened to do otherwise.

So Bent acquired the whiskey ranch. Two days later three other Caddoes appeared. In broken English they asked about Glyn, whom Bent had buried a half-mile away. "Gone. He sold me the place." The Caddoes didn't question that. He made four dollars on whiskey before they left.

Green Grass Woman didn't seem to care who her man was so long as he permitted her to drink gin. The cheapest, sweetest of gin, Bent discovered after one taste, which he spat out. Septimus Glyn must have been a prime seducer of women to corrupt the young girl so completely. One morning Bent refused her the gin to see what would happen. She begged. He continued to refuse. She wept. He still said no. She fell to her knees and tore at the buttons of his trousers. Astonished, he let her confirm his belief that all women were depraved whores. While she still held his legs, he pushed her head back and poured some gin into her mouth. He didn't see the boy standing at the door, one hand holding the red blanket aside. His feet were bare, his gray work shirt stiff with dirt, his eyes huge in his blank face.

At sunset of the seventh day, Bent began to feel at home. He'd hung up the frayed, cracked oil painting of Madeline Main's mother, and cleaned up the place. Just before the light went, he stepped outside with his arm around Green Grass Woman. Her big soft breast pushed against his side and her lip moved against his in an arousing way.

Little Gus, left largely to himself, had gotten acquainted with the tame raccoon. He was chasing it along the creek bank in the reddening light. The creek shone like flowing blood, and in the cool evening air Bent heard a sound he hadn't heard in a while. Little Gus's merry laughter.

Well, why not let him laugh? He'd be deprived of the chance soon enough. Bent was now set on his plan. He would wait a few more months; perhaps until the autumn or early winter. By then Charles Main would be trying to accustom himself to the idea that his son was lost. At that time, just when he could be expected to be learning to deal with his grief, Bent would move to renew it. Send him news that Gus had remained alive most of the year and had only recently been killed. It would be a double-edged death, guilt compounding the pain. All his days, Charles Main would be haunted by the thought that his son might have lived if he hadn't abandoned the search, as Bent was certain he had by now. Of course he'd have to deliver parts of the boy's body to prove he was dead. His razor would be helpful.

Little Gus's laughter rang through the sundown. Green Grass Woman rested her cheek on Bent's right shoulder. He was happy. The world was good.

58

Charles turned the corner and flattened against the front of the sod house. He held his revolver chest high, cocked. One of the horses whinnied, a faint sound. Gray Owl was holding them about half a mile away in some cottonwoods.

Charles smelled the odor of fireplace ashes. It leaked from the mud chimney, with no trace of smoke. A fire had been banked carelessly, or in haste. Horse droppings in the corral were at least a day old; shod horses had chopped up the ground. No one would farm here, Charles reasoned. They had found the base of some renegade traders.

A muddy boot toe appeared at the far corner of the house. Magic Magee slid around the corner and crept along with his back to the wall. The afternoon light was dimming fast and changing color, to a strange golden-green. Westward, the clouds of a monster storm came toward the house like a carpet unrolling in the sky. Magee watched Charles for a cue. The black man wore his derby with the wild turkey feather, but nothing to identify him as a soldier.

Charles listened at the plank door. The rumbling of the storm would muffle any but the loudest voice. He heard nothing. The wind picked up dust suddenly. Branches of some cottonwoods behind Magee began to toss and clack together. There was going to be a ferocious blow.

The wind dried the sweat gathering in Charles's beard. Magee crept closer, to the opposite side of the door. Charles held up three fingers, then silently mouthed the count. On three, he leaped in front of the door and booted it. Some huge heavy thing hurtled from the darkness straight at his face. He fired twice.

The echoes of the shots sank into the storm's rumble.

Magee's eye followed the bird that had swooped away above Charles's head, almost knocking his hat off. "Gray Owl's helper."

The owl vanished into the dark roiling mass of cloud. With one hand over the other on his Colt, Charles jumped inside the sod house. He smelled the residual odor of tobacco smoke beneath the stronger smell of the ashes. Someone had indeed splashed water on the fire; he saw the bucket. Everything pointed to a quick departure. Who knew the reason?

He put the revolver away. "Tell Gray Owl to bring up the horses. We might as well shelter here until the storm's over;"

Magee nodded and left. There was no need to say anything. Charles's discouragement was evident.

The rain fell, hammering torrents of it. They broke up an old chair and relit the fire. It provided some light but didn't do much to relieve the pervasive damp. The horses neighed loudly and often. The lightning was bright, the thunder-peals deafening.

Gray Owl squatted in a corner with his blanket drawn around him. He looked years older. Or perhaps Charles thought so because he felt that way himself. He gnawed on jerky and watched Magee practicing shuffles and cuts with an old deck.

They'd been searching for two and a half weeks. They'd circled southwest to avoid Camp Supply and had found this house on Wolf Creek. Charles had hoped to question the occupants but whoever they were, they had made an abrupt departure, which made him nervous.

The steady rain deepened his discouragement. It fell hour after hour. Coming down so heavily, it would flood away any sign that might have helped them. Not that they had found much so far, beyond the inevitable tracks of Army detachments on patrol. If there were other human beings round about, perhaps white men trading illegally, this house was the first indication.

Charles lay awake long after the fire went out. His mind kept turning to images of his son, and imaginary ones in which Bent, pictured as Charles remembered him, murdered George Hazard's wife and stole her earring. That detail more than any other filled him with enormous dread. Years ago, in Texas, Bent was marginally sane. Not even that could be said now.

They discovered in the morning that two of the horses had snapped their tethers and escaped.

The storm lasted until noon, flooding low spots and carving new gullies. As they prepared to leave the sod house Charles noticed Magee's face. Saddling his horse, the black man looked gloomy, which wasn't like him.

Gray Owl approached with a certain deference. "How much longer do we search?"

"Until I say otherwise."

"There is no trail to follow. The man and boy could have gone anywhere. Or turned back."

"I know that, but I just can't give up. You go back if you want." There was no resentment in his voice.

"No. But Magee, it is not easy for him to be away." Puzzled, Charles waited. "He has a squaw now. A good Delaware woman whose husband died."

"Until he tells me he wants to go back, we're going on. All three of us."

Gray Owl felt pain for his friend. The pursuit was futile. Not even the cleverest tracker could find a man and a child when the trail was so old and the country so huge and full of hiding places.

One misty morning in a stand of pines — on the ninth of April, by Charles's careful count of the days — the three men stood with hands muzzling the fretful horses while, not a hundred feet away, three troops of cavalry trotted by in a shallow creek. They were Kansas state troops, probably some of the Nineteenth Volunteer Cavalry old Crawford had raised and brought in to support Sherman. Gray Owl's pony tossed his head free and whinnied. Charles cursed under his breath. A yellow-haired lieutenant, a pink-faced farmer boy, glanced sharply to the misty pines. He pulled his horse out of the column and sat staring at the trees. Charles prayed a clumsy wordless prayer. The farmer boy on horseback chewed his lip, doubtful about what he'd heard because the horses and men in the column were quite noisy. He tugged his rein and rode on. In five minutes the splashing stopped; the water flowed calmly again; the troopers were gone.

April brought the crows and the redbirds. Any shower brought a profusion of hoptoads afterward. The sweet blooming fecundity of the spring embittered Charles unreasonably. He slept deeply at night, and had many dreams. He had never felt so tired or hopeless. Conversation among the three men had long ago diminished to the minimum necessary to convey a question or the day's plan.

One morning, early, they spied the distant mass of the southern buffalo herd, returning north with the warm weather. They rode hard and reached the herd in two hours. They killed one cow, gorged themselves on fresh roasted meat, and packed all they would be able to eat before spoilage. Buzzards kept them company, awaiting their departure.

The ride to the buffalo reminded Charles again of the vastness of the Territory. A whole army corps could be maneuvering and they might miss it. He'd convinced himself that he could search the Territory as you'd search a room. He was desperate; he had to think that way. Now he saw the foolishness of it. He was thinking more realistically. That befitted a man who'd partnered with the Jackson Trading Company, but it whittled away his hope.

The mood of his companions didn't help. Magee was morose because of the Delaware woman, and Gray Owl because he couldn't guide them with any success. He was failing in his life's purpose.

They rode for hours without speaking, each man sunk into himself. The Wichitas rose in the south like monuments in a flat field. Wending across the lower slopes of the western side, they found abundant sign. A large number of Indians had pitched their tipis about a week ago. So many Indians — several hundred by Charles's estimate — that time and weather had not yet been able to erase all the traces.

After they camped that night, Charles went searching on foot in the sparkling dewy morning. He discovered a rusted trade kettle which he picked up and pressed with his thumb, immediately making a hole in the thin rust. It was an impoverished village that had camped here.

Gray Owl trudged up. "Come see this," he said.

Charles followed him down to the base of the peak to a set of travois pole tracks that had survived. He knelt to study them.

Between the pole tracks he saw the prints of wide moccasined feet. He brushed his fingers lightly over one print, half obliterating it. The print belonged to a woman, and a heavy one; no man would pull a travois.

Charles pushed his black hat back and said what Gray Owl already knew. "There are no more dogs. They've eaten them. They're starving. They didn't move because they wanted to; they're in flight. From here they could logically go south. Or west, to Texas. Maybe all the way into the llano."

Gray Owl knew the llano — the staked plains; a scrubby, inhospitable wilderness. "West," he said, nodding.

They rode with a little more energy. Here at last was a large group of people, one or more of whom might have seen a white man and a boy. Charles knew the odds against it but at least it was a crumb. Until now, they'd been starving.

The sign of so large a migration was easy to follow. They tracked the village to the North Fork of the Red, then northwestward along it for a day and a half. Suddenly there was confusing sign. The remains of another encampment and, across the river, trampled hoof-marked earth, which showed that a second large body of Indians had joined the first.

Gray Owl left for a day, scouting north and east. He returned at a gallop. "All moved east from here," he said. His skin was free of sweat despite his blanket and the hot spring day.

Magee used his nail to scratch bird droppings from his derby. "Don't make sense. The forts are east."

"Nevertheless, that is the way."

Charles had a hunch. "Let's go up the river a while. Let's see if all of them rode east."

Next morning they found a campsite where perhaps thirty lodges had stood. The day after that, they found the grandfather.

He was resting in cottonwoods with a few possessions from his medicine bundle — feathers, a claw, a pipe — spread around him. The malevolent odor of a chancred leg seeped from under his buffalo robe. He was old, his skin like wrinkled brown wrapping paper. He knew his death was imminent and showed no fear of the oddly assorted trio. Gray Owl questioned him.

His name was Strong Bird. He told them the reason for the great migration eastward. Some six hundred Cheyennes under chiefs Red Bear, Gray Eyes, and Little Robe had decided to surrender to the soldiers at Camp Wichita rather than die of starvation or face the bullets of the soldiers of General Creeping Panther, who was roaming the Territory sweeping up bands of resisters. The grandfather was part of a group that had bolted with Red Bear after he changed his mind about surrendering.

"Thirty lodges," he said, his eyes fluttering shut, his voice reedy. "They are eating their horses now."

"Where, Grandfather?" Gray Owl asked.

"They meant to push up the Sweet Water. Whether they did, I don't know. I know your face, don't I? You belong to the People."

Gray Owl seemed heavily burdened. "Once long ago."

"Age has rotted my flesh. I could not keep up. I asked them to leave me, whether or not the soldiers found me. Will you help me die?"

They hewed down branches and fashioned a burial platform in one of the strongest cottonwoods. Charles carried the old man up to it, with Magee bracing him below. He could barely stand the stench but he got the grandfather settled with his few possessions and left him with warm sun shining on his old face, which was composed and even showed a drowsy smile.

As they rode out, Gray Owl said, "It was a generous thing to help him to the Hanging Road. It was not the deed of the man they named Cheyenne Charlie. The man who wanted to kill many."

"There's only one I want now," Charles said. "I think our luck's changed. I think we're going to find him."

That was his blind hope speaking again. But the sunshine and the springtime buoyed him, and so did the possibility that Red Bear's band of holdouts might have seen a white man. Gray Owl warned Charles and Magee that Red Bear, now a village chief, was formerly a fierce Red Shield Society chief, which no doubt explained why he'd balked at giving up along with the others.

They found the village far up the Sweet Water's right bank. The Cheyennes made no effort to hide themselves. Cooking fires smoked the sky at midday and from a rise, through his spyglass, Charles saw several men with raggy animal pelts on their heads shuffling in a great circle around the edge of the encampment.

The wind brought the trackers the faint thumping of hand drums.

Magee used the spyglass. Uncharacteristically sharp, he said, "What they hell have they got to dance about? Aren't they starving to death?"

"Massaum," Gray Owl said.

"Talk English," Magee said. "That's the name of the ceremony," Charles said. "They put a painted buffalo skull in a trench to represent the day the buffalo came to earth, and the dancers pretend to be deer and elk and wolves and foxes. The ceremony is a plea for food. The old man said they're starving."

Magee rolled his tongue over his upper teeth. "Damn mad about it, too, I guess."

"You don't have to go in with me."

"Oh, sure. I came this far to be a yellow dog, huh? That isn't the kind of soldier somebody trained me to be." Staring at Charles's haggard eyes, at the long pointed beard nearly down to his stomach, Magee suddenly winced. "I'm sorry I sound sore. I just think all this is hopeless. Your boy's gone, Charles."

"No he isn't," Charles said. "Gray Owl? Go in or stay?"

"Go." The tracker eyed the village, but not in a comfortable way. "First, load all the guns."

It was a splendid balmy day. The wrong sort of day for the tragedy of a lost son or a starving belly. The wind floated fluffy clouds overhead and the clouds cast majestic slow-sailing shadows. In and out of the shadows, in single file, the three rode in the Z pattern Jackson had taught Charles.

One of the pelt-clad dancers was first to spy them. He pointed and raised a cry. The drumming stopped. Men and women and children surged toward the side of the camp nearest the strangers. The men were middle-aged or elderly; the warriors were undoubtedly off somewhere searching for food. Well before Charles was within hailing distance, he saw the sun flashing from the metal heads of lances and the blades of knives. He also saw that no dogs frolicked anywhere. The tipis were weathered and torn. There was an air of despair about the village beside the Sweet Water.

The wind still blew in their faces. Charles smelled offal, smoke, and sour bodies. He didn't like all the gaunt angry faces lining up behind the dancers, or the truculent expression of the stout old warrior who strode out to meet them with his eight-foot red lance and his round red buffalo-hide shield. The horns of his headdress were red but faded; he had distinguished himself in war many winters past.

Charles held his hand palm outward and spoke in their language.

"We are peaceful."

"You are hunters?"

"No. We are searching for a small boy, my son." That touched off whispers among some of the grandmothers. Magee caught it too, raising an eyebrow. Those starved old women with their watering eyes acted as if they knew who Charles was talking about. "May we come into the village a while?"

Chief Red Bear thrust his shield out. "No. I know that man beside you. He turned his face from the People to go and help the white devils of the forts. I know you, Gray Owl," he exclaimed, shaking his shield and lance. One of the dancers with a scrap of pelt on his head sank to a half-crouch, his knife moving in a small provocative circle.

"You are soldiers," the chief said.

"We are not, Red Bear —" Gray Owl began.

The chief pointed his lance at the trackers and shouted: "Soldiers. Call Whistling Snake from the Massaum lodge."

Magee brought up his Spencer from the saddle where he'd been resting it. "Don't," Charles said in English. "One shot and they'll tear us up."

" 'Pears they'll do it anyway." There was a slight quaver in Magee's voice; Charles feared that what he said was so. More than a hundred people confronted them. In terms of physical strength each of the Cheyennes was no match. Hunger had shrunk them and age enfeebled them. Numerically, however, they had the fight won before it started.

"Do you know this Whistling Snake?" Charles asked Gray Owl.

"Priest," Gray Owl replied, almost inaudibly. "Ugly face. As a young man he scarred his own flesh with fire to show his magical powers. Even chiefs like Red Bear fear him. This is very bad."

Small boys darted forward to pat the horses. The animals sidestepped nervously, hard to control. Indian mothers chuckled and nudged one another, eyeing the trackers as if they were so much contract beef. Charles didn't know what to do. He had bet on having an ace facedown and turned over a trey.

One last try. "Chief Red Bear, I repeat, we only wish to ask if anyone in your village has seen a white man traveling with a small —"

The crowd parted like a cloven sea. There was a great communal sigh of awe and dread. The old camp chief's gaze was curiously taunting. Along the dirt lane fouled with human waste came the priest, Whistling Snake.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

The small Negro cemetery overlooked the Ashley in the scrubs outside Charleston. The ground around the grave mounds was a musty carpet of brown decaying leaves. Bunches of wilted sunflowers and even a few brown dandelions lay on the graves; the place was poor, and poorly kept.

Des LaMotte knelt and prayed before a wooden marker from which he'd chiseled a shallow circular depression. Into this he had wedged a common-looking plate, chipped at many places on the edge and showing a long crack. On the marker, above the slave's plate, he had carved an inscription.

Where the trees opened on the water, a silver-colored sky shone with a strangely threatening luminescence. The wind, a rising nor'easter, streamed in from the Atlantic. It was too cold for spring. Or maybe Des was feeling the effects of time, and poverty, and his strange inability to come to grips with his enemy. After the travail of war and the passage of years, he no longer wanted vengeance so ferociously. Honor was less important than bread, or keeping possession of his tiny room in town, or preserving clothes he couldn't afford to replace. "LaMotte honor" now had the queer sound of a foreign phrase impossible to translate.

His old ties to the past were gone. Ferris Brixham, dead. Sallie Sue, dead. Mrs. Asia LaMotte, dead; a year and a half now, her insides a feast for a cancer. Now Juba; the last. He had been so crippled at the end, he couldn't crawl from his pallet. Des had fed him and bathed him and cleaned him as if he were some expensive artifact, the last artifact, from a razed house. Juba had died in his sleep, and Des had stared at the corpse by the light of a candle for nearly an hour. His servant's passing reminded him that the human body was frail enough without deliberately endangering it. The hotblood who'd confronted Cooper Main on the plank bridge seemed like a foolish and very distant relative who didn't understand life's realities and whose ideas no longer had any pertinence. Des was old; he was sick; he had fought long enough.

He got ready to stand up. It required mental preparation because he knew his knees would creak and hurt. Strange that the same arthritic trouble that had tormented Juba had now fallen on him, and at a much younger age. He could no longer do a formal dance step gracefully. That was another part of his life that was over. His face, drawn down into sad lines, reflected the attrition of the years, and so did his carroty hair; the white streak was broader, and forked into a trident.

As he started to stand, he heard a horse walking into the cemetery. A hoof snapped a fallen branch. He groaned as he rose and turned, expecting to see some black sharecropper riding his sway-backed animal to a family grave. He was startled to discover a white man. Behind the man the clouds boiled like black soup in a hot kettle.

The stranger was young, scarcely more than twenty. He wore plow shoes and an old black coat with the collar turned up. He had shaved closely, but his black beard showed. The sun had burned his nose and upper cheeks and hands; they looked raw. When the young man climbed down from his milky horse Des saw the back of his neck. Red, from field work.

While the young man walked toward Des, other details registered. Something was wrong with the stranger's left eye; it had the fixed look of blindness. The horse made Des think of Revelations: And his name that sat on him was Death.

"You are Desmond LaMotte?"

"I am, sir."

"I was told I'd find you here."

Des waited. There was a suppressed ferocity about the stranger. Somehow it fit with the rawness of his red face, red hands, red neck, ghastly staring eye; it frightened Des badly.

He saw no sign of a weapon, but his long legs shook when the stranger began reaching into various pockets of his threadbare coat, saying, "I am Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, sir. I have ridden here with instructions to speak to you."

"York County." That was a long way; above Columbia, at the North Carolina border. "I don't know anyone in York County."

"Oh, yes," Tillman said, presenting what he'd found in his pocket. A news clipping already yellowed. The headline startled Des.

THE KUKLUX

DISCOVERY OF THE REMAINS OF DETECTIVE BARMORE

Des's fear sharpened. The nor'easter snapped the corner of the clipping, which came from some paper in Nashville. "I don't understand this, sir —" he began.

"I'm here to explain it to you. The story says the man's body was found in some woods, along with an empty pocketbook and part of his K.K.K. rig."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"I am here to explain that, too. This white man, Barmore, he failed to carry out an order from the Grand Dragon over there in Tennessee." Tillman plucked the clipping from Des's pale hand: "The Grand Dragon of Carolina wanted to show you that the Invisible Empire won't be disobeyed."

Des felt a keen, hurting urge to make water. The stranger's good eye had a fanatic glitter. The wind, near gale force now, shot leaves past them in swirling clouds. Old tree limbs creaked. One broke off and sailed away.

"I've not disobeyed a single order," Des protested.

"And you won't disobey the one I'm here to give you, either. Your klavern hasn't controlled this district like it should. Everybody in the state knows about that woman at Mont Royal, coining money left and right with her mill and her phosphates while she runs that nigger school."

Des's gut hurt. "We tried to burn the school —"

"Tried," Tillman said, the initial T sending little sprays of spit into Des's face. "Tried is no good. You botched it. Now the damn Yankee politicians and Bible-thumpers are coming down to see it and praise it, and you do nothing. It's a stench in the nostrils of God-fearing white men. You're to get rid of it, La-Motte. You're to get rid of it or you'll go the same way Barmore went in Tennessee."

"Do you know who you're talking to?" Des shouted. "I fought the whole war in the Palmetto Rifles. An elite regiment. What did you do? Stay home with the rest of the redneck farmer boys?"

"You shit-face Charleston snob!" He was spitting again; there was something primitive and utterly dangerous about him. "I lay sick two years, trying to get well enough to join up. I lost the sight of this eye and I lost two brothers to war wounds and another to the camp fever. I'm foursquare for the South and the white race, and I've killed to prove it. I ride for the Klan in York County, and I'm to give you just one warning. The Grand Dragon of Carolina wants some blood down here. Nigger blood. That Main woman. Get your den together, get rid of her school, then get rid of her." Scornful of Des's fright, he held up the clipping. The wind tore the edges. "Understand?"

"I — I do."

"That goes for the rest of your klavern, too."

"Believe me, Tillman, I want what you want. What the Klan wants. But we had opposition last time and we'll have more now. There's nigger militia at Mont Royal —"

"Nobody gives an ounce of rat pee if all the archangels from glory are on guard with their harps and halos," Tillman said. "Either she's gone in thirty days or you're gone. I will return with pleasure to execute the sentence."

He stared at Des until Des looked away. Then, with a snicker, he tucked the clipping into the side pocket of Des's coat. He strode against the wind to his milky horse and mounted nimbly. "Good day, sir," he said, and rode out of the burying ground, his black coat the same color as the sky ahead of him.

Des leaned against a tree, weak. He read the Barmore story, then read it again. He didn't doubt the authenticity of the visitor's credentials, or the seriousness of the warning. The stranger, Benjamin Ryan Tillman of York County, was one of the most daunting human beings he'd ever met. He made Des think of Romans who slew Christians, and of the Inquisitors of Spain.

Carolina would hear from the young redneck if the darkies didn't rise up and kill him to save themselves first.

In the howling wind he rode Juba's mule back to Charleston.

At dusk he set out for the Dixie Store at Summerton. Arriving there, he instructed Gettys to buy explosives. Gettys stuttered that it was too dangerous. Des told him to ride to Savannah, or upriver to Augusta if necessary. He told him it was the Klan's order. He told him the Klan's sentence if they failed. After that Gettys didn't argue.

59

Though Whistling Snake was at least seventy winters, he walked with the vigor of a young man. His neck and forearms had a taut, sinewy look. His pure white hair was simply parted and braided without adornment. He wore a hide smock that long use had buffed to the color of dull gold. A plain rawhide belt gathered the smock at his waist. In his right hand, chest high, he held a fan of matched golden eagle feathers two feet wide from tip to tip.

Charles couldn't remember seeing another old man with such an aura of strength. Or human eyes quite so arrogant and unpleasant. The right iris was only partly visible, hidden by a lip of puckered flesh. Scar's face was smooth by comparison with that of Whistling Snake's, which looked as though his flesh had melted from temple to jaw, then been pushed and twisted into ridges as it hardened. Indentations like large healed nail wounds stippled the ridges of flesh. The man was hideous, which only made him seem stronger.

"They say they search for his son," Red Bear told the priest, with a nod at Charles.

Whistling Snake regarded them, fanning himself with a small rotation of his bony wrist. A toddler, a plump bare girl, started toward him, reaching out. Her mother snatched her back and clutched her, dread in her eyes.

The priest shook the fan at Magee. "Buffalo soldier. Kill them."

"Damn you," Charles said, "there are other black men on the Plains besides buffalo soldiers. This is my friend. He is peaceful. So am I. We are looking for my little boy. He was stolen by another white man. A tall man. He may be wearing a woman's bauble, here."

He pulled his earlobe. An elderly Cheyenne covered his mouth and popped his eyes. Charles heard the excited buzz of the women before Red Bear's glare silenced them. Charles's stomach tightened. They'd seen Bent.

The priest fanned himself. "Kill them." The brown iris shifted in its trench of hard scar tissue. "First that one, the betrayer of the People."

Gray Owl's pony began to prance, as if some invisible power flowed from the priest to unnerve and befuddle his enemies. The pony neighed. Gray Owl kneed him hard to control him. His face showed uncharacteristic emotion. Fear.

Magee spoke from the side of his mouth, in English. "What's that old bastard saying?"

"He told them to kill us."

Magee swallowed, visibly affected. "They better not. I want to get out of here with my wool on my head. I want to see Pretty Eyes again." The squaw, Charles assumed. "I'm not going to cash in here. I been trounced by nigger-hating saloon trash —"

The priest pointed his fan, exclaiming in Cheyenne, "Stop his tongue."

"I been cussed by white soldiers not fit to shine a real man's boots. I won't let some old fan-waving Indian just wave me off this earth, whisssh!" There was a strange, fear-born anger prodding Magee. He shook his derby the way Whistling Snake had shaken his fan. "You tell him he doesn't touch a wizard."

"A —?" Startled, Charles couldn't get the rest out.

"The biggest, the meanest of all the black wizards of the planetary universe. Me!" Magee flung his hands in the air like a preacher; he was back in Chicago, encircled, with only his wits to forestall a beating.

Red Bear retreated from him. A fat grandfather protected his wife with his arm. Magee looked baleful sitting there on his horse, arms upraised, shouting. "I will level this village with wind, hail, and fire if they touch us or don't tell us what we want to know." A moment's silence. Then he yelled at Charles like a topkick. "Tell 'em, Charlie!"

Charles translated. Where he faltered, as with the word for hail, Gray Owl supplied it. Whistling Snake's fanning grew rapid. Red Bear watched the priest for a reaction; Whistling Snake was temporarily in control of things. "He is a great worker of magic?" Whistling Snake asked.

"The greatest I know," Charles said, wondering if he was insane. Well, what was the alternative to this? Probably immediate annihilation.

"I am the greatest of the spell-workers," the priest said. Charles translated. Magee, calmer now, sniffed.

"Cocky old dude."

"No," Charles said, pointing to Magee. "He is the greatest."

For the first time, Whistling Snake smiled. He had but four teeth, widely spaced in his upper gum. They were fanglike, as if he'd filed them that way. "Bring them in," he said to Red Bear. "Feed them. After the sun falls, we will test who is the greatest wizard. Then we will kill them."

He studied Magee over the tips of the fan feathers. His laugh floated out, a dry chuckle. He turned and walked majestically into the village.

Magee looked numb. "My God, I never figured he'd take me up on it."

"Can you show him anything?" Charles whispered.

"I brought a few things, always do. But it's only small stuff. That old Indian, he's got a power about him. Like the devil was singing in his ear."

"He's only a man," Charles said.

Gray Owl shook his head. "He is more than that. He is connected to the mighty spirits."

"Lord," Magee said. "All I got is saloon tricks."

The prairie sunshine had a precious glow then; this morning might be the last they'd be privileged to see.

The Cheyennes put the three of them in a stinking tipi with old men guarding the entrance. A woman brought bowls of cold stew too gamy to eat. Before dark, the villagers lit a huge fire and began their music of flute and hand drum.

An hour of chants and shuffling dances went by. Charles chewed on his only remaining cigar, nursing a superstitious certainty that they wouldn't get out of this, if he smoked it. Gray Owl sat in his blanket as if asleep. Magee opened his saddlebags, rummaged in them to take inventory, closed them, then did it all over again ten minutes later. The shadows of dancing, shuffling, stomping men passed over the side of the tipi like magic lantern projections. The drumming grew very loud. Charles reckoned two hours had passed when Magee jumped up and kicked his bags. "How long they going to string us out?"

Gray Owl raised his head. His eyes blinked open. "The priest wants you to feel that way. He can then show a different, calm face."

Magee puffed his cheeks and blew like a fish, twice. Charles said, "I wish I hadn't got us into —"

"I did it," Magee said, almost snarling. "I got us here. I'll get us out. Even if I am just a nigger saloon magician."

A few minutes later, guards escorted them outside. A hush came over the ring of people around the fire. The men were seated. The women and children stood behind them.

The evening was windless. The flames pillared straight up, shooting sparks at the stars. Whistling Snake sat beside Chief Red Bear. The latter had a bleary smile, as though he'd been drinking. Whistling Snake was composed, as Gray Owl had predicted. His fan lay in his lap.

A place was made for Charles to sit. Red Bear signed him to it. Gray Owl was roughly hauled back with the women, further punishment for his betrayal. The grandfather on Charles's left drew a trade knife from his belt and tested the edge while looking straight into Charles's eyes. Charles chewed the cold cigar.

Red Bear said, "Begin."

Magee spread his saddlebags flat on the ground. Charles thought of the campflre circle as a dial. Magee was at twelve o'clock, Whistling Snake sat fanning himself at nine o'clock, and he was seated at three, with Gray Owl behind him at four or five.

Magee cleared his throat, blew on his hands, reached up for his derby, and tumbled it brim over crown all the way down his arm to his hand. An old grandfather laughed and clapped. Whistling Snake's slitted eye darted to him. He stopped clapping.

His face already glistening with sweat, Magee pulled his blue silk from a saddlebag and stuffed it into his closed fist. He chanted, "Column left, column right, by the numbers, hocus-pocus."

Red Bear showed a slight frown of curiosity. Whistling Snake regarded the distant constellations, fanning himself. Charles's belly weighed twenty pounds. They were doomed.

Magee pulled a black silk from his fist and popped the fist open to show it empty. He waved the silk like a bullfighter's cape, displaying both sides, and sat down. Whistling Snake deigned to glance at Charles. The four filed teeth showed, in supreme contempt.

Whistling Snake handed his fan ceremoniously to Red Bear. He rose. From his robe he produced a wide-mouth bag made of red flannel. He crushed the bag, turned it inside out, displayed both sides, balled it again. Then suddenly he began a singsong chant and started a hopping sidestep dance around the circle. As he danced and chanted, he held the top corners of the bag by the thumb and index finger of each hand;

The heads of two snakes with gleaming eyes suddenly rose from the mouth of the bag, as if the snakes were crawling straight up to the stars. People gasped. Charles was momentarily mystified. Then, as the snakes dropped back into the bag, he noticed their lack of flexibility. Magee, cross-legged by his saddlebags, glanced at him with a disgusted look. He too had identified the snakes as snakeskin glued over wood.

The Cheyennes thought it an impressive trick, however. Chanting and dancing, Whistling Snake went all the way around the fire, revealing the climbing snakes at each quarter. He finished the circuit and crumpled the bag a last time before he sat. He fanned himself with evident satisfaction.

The Cheyenne faces shone in the glow of the fire. The atmosphere of lighthearted sport was gone. Whistling Snake watched the black soldier as if he were game to be cooked and devoured.

Magee produced a quilled bag. From the bag he took three white chicken feathers. He put two in his leather belt and changed the third to a white stone. He held the stone in his mouth as he changed the next two feathers. He took the three stones from his mouth one at a time and with one hand passing over and under the other he changed the stones back to feathers. When he had three feathers in his belt, he concealed them all in one fist and waved over it. He opened his mouth and lifted out three feathers. He showed his empty hands, reached behind the head of a seated man, and produced three white stones.

He eyed the crowd, awaiting some sign of wonder or approval. He saw hard glaring eyes. Charles realized Magee had not offered a word of patter during the trick. The black soldier sat down with a defeated look.

Whistling Snake drew himself up with supreme hauteur. Again he handed the village chief his fan. He showed his palms to the crowd; Charles saw the heavy muscles on his forearms. Tilting his head back and chanting, the priest stepped forward close to the fire and laid his right palm directly into the flame.

He kept it there while slowly lowering his left till they were parallel. His face showed no sign of pain. No stutter or falter interrupted his singsong chant. Magee sat stiff as a post, his eyes brimming with curiosity and admiration. He had momentarily forgotten that the Cheyenne wanted to kill him and take his wool and hang it up in his lodge. He was wonderstruck by the magic.

A great rippling sigh — "Ah! Ah!" — ran around the circle, and there were smiles, grunts, scornful looks at the three interlopers. Slowly, Whistling Snake lifted his left hand from the fire. Then his right. White hairs on his forearms above his wrists curled and gave off tiny spurts of smoke. His palms were unblistered; not even discolored.

Charles looked at Gray Owl, who exhibited as much expression as the granite of the Wichitas. Trying to hide what they all knew, no doubt. Magee flung Charles another look that was almost apologetic. Charles smiled as if to urge him not to worry. With a defeated air, Magee climbed to his feet. Charles snatched a faggot from the fire and with the hot end lit his last cigar.

From a saddlebag Magee pulled a leather pouch which he carefully laid on the ground. He next took out a small hand-carved wood box which he opened and displayed. The box held four lead-colored balls of a kind Charles hadn't seen for years. Magee plucked one out and carefully placed it between his teeth. Then he closed the box and put it away. With a sudden flourish, he yanked a pistol from the saddlebag.

Several Cheyennes jumped up, readying their knives or lances. Magee quickly gave them the peace sign. He balanced the pistol on his palm and slowly turned in a complete circle, so all could see it. Where had he found an old flintlock? Charles wondered. The barrel showed no rust. Magee had cleaned it well.

With slow, ceremonious motions, Magee opened the leather pouch and inverted it, letting powder trickle into the barrel. Suddenly he stamped his right foot twice, as if bitten by an insect.

Along with most of the others, Charles looked down and didn't see anything.

Magee pinched off the flow of powder and tossed the pouch aside. He found a patch in his pocket and wrapped it around the ball he took from his teeth. He slipped ball and patch into the barrel, unsnapped the ramrod underneath, and with careful twisting motions seated the ball. He replaced the ramrod and primed the pan.

Fat sweat drops rolled down Magee's cheeks. He wiped his hands on his jeans pants. He signed for Charles to stand up.

Astonished, Charles did. Magee glanced at Red Bear. The chief's attention was fixed on him. Whistling Snake saw that and frowned. His fan moved rapidly, stirring the hair at the ends of his white braids.

"What I did before was just play," Magee said. "I am going to kill King Death before their eyes. Tell them."

"Magic, I don't understand what —"

"Tell them, Charlie."

He translated. Hands covered mouths. The fire popped and smoked. If silence had weight, this was crushing.

Magee faced about in precise military fashion. He used his hands to make a parting motion. Those in front of him jumped up and shoved one another until a yard-wide lane was cleared. Magee summoned Charles to him with a bent finger. He gave Charles the old flintlock pistol and looked hard and earnestly into his eyes.

"When I say the word, I want you to shoot me."

"What?"

Magee leaned up on tiptoe, his mouth next to Charles's ear. "You want to get out of here? Do it." He made a puckering sound, as if kissing the white man. Several Cheyennes giggled over the strange ways of the interlopers.

Magee snapped the brim of his derby down to snug it; the shadow bisected his nose. In the shadow, his eyes gleamed like discs of ivory. He took ten long strides, rapidly, along the cleared lane, his posture soldier-perfect. He stopped, knocking his heels together, at attention. He about-faced. He was standing a foot from a tipi with a great ragged hole in its side.

"Aim the pistol, Charlie."

Christ, how could he?

"Charlie! Aim for the chest. Dead center."

Charles felt the sweat crawling down into his beard. Whistling Snake leaped up, his fan flicking very fast. Red Bear rose too. Charles drew the hammer back. Magee's shirt was taut over his ribs and belly. Charles's arm trembled as he extended it. He couldn't — he wouldn't —

Magic Magee said, "Now."

He said it loudly, a command. Charles responded to the tone as much as to the word. He fired. Sparks glittered, the priming pan ignited, the pistol banged and kicked upward.

Charles saw a puff of dust, as if something had struck Magee's chest three inches below the breastbone. Magee stepped back one long pace, staggering, closing his eyes, snapping his hands open, fingers shaking as if stiffened by a lightning charge. Then his arms fell to his sides. He opened his eyes. Whistling Snake's fan hung at his side.

"Where is the bullet?" Whistling Snake cried. "Where did it strike?"

In a drill-ground voice, Magee said, "King Death is dead. You will answer our questions and release us without harm or I will bring back King Death, riding the winds of hail and fire, and this village will be finished." He shouted, "Tell them."

Charles translated quickly. Gray Owl's guards had drifted away from him, as awed as he was. While Charles spit the words out, trying to make them as fierce as Magee's, he scanned the trooper's shirt. He saw no sign of a tear. Magee brushed his shirt off as if something had tickled him.

Red Bear listened to the threats and instantly said, "It shall be so."

Whistling Snake screamed in protest. The sound broke the moment. The Cheyennes rushed forward to swarm around Magee, touch him, pat him, feel his black curls. Charles stared at the old flintlock pistol, felt the warm barrel. King Death was dead, and there through rifts in the surging, laughing crowd was the banner of his conqueror. The familiar huge white smile of Magee, the wizard.

Red Bear prepared a pipe while Gray Owl attended to the horses. Charles didn't want the forgiving mood to fade, didn't want to linger and possibly lose their advantage and their lives. Ceremony required that he sit at the fire with Red Bear, however.

Magee sat on his right. The village chief and several of the tribal elders passed the pipe.

Red Bear had forced Whistling Snake to join the group. When his turn came he passed the pipe without smoking. He snatched a handful of ashes from the edge of the fire and flung them at Charles's crossed legs. They covered his pants and the toes of his boots with gray powder. Red Bear exclaimed and berated the priest, who merely dusted his hands and folded his arms. Red Bear looked embarrassed, Gray Owl upset.

Since the ashes did no real damage, Charles forgot about it. Having finished hid cigar, he was grateful for a deep lungful of pipe smoke, though as always, the unknown mixture of grasses the Cheyennes smoked left him light-headed and euphoric, not a good thing at a time like this.

Red Bear was not only polite but respectful. After asking Charles to describe again the white man he sought, he said, "Yes, we have seen that man, with a boy. At the whiskey ranch of Glyn the trader, on Vermilion Creek. Glyn is gone and they are staying there. I will tell you the way."

He pointed south. Charles was so dizzy with relief, his eyes watered.

Silently, the People formed a long lane through which the three trotted out. Looking back, believing their luck would break any moment, Charles heard Gray Owl laugh deep in his chest. A single figure remained by the campfire, apart from the others. Charles saw Whistling Snake raise his golden feather fan and disdainfully walk away.

They put miles and all of the rest of the night behind them before Charles permitted a stop. Spent men and spent horses rested on the prairie in the cool dawn. Charles knelt beside his black friend.

"All right, I know you don't tell your secrets, but this is one time you will. How did you do it?"

Magee chuckled and produced the hand-carved wooden box. He removed one of the round gray balls and displayed it sportively, just out of Charles's reach. "An old traveling magician taught me the trick back in Chicago. Always wanted to do it for an audience, but till this winter I couldn't afford the right pistol. Saved my pay for it. First thing I did was to short the powder. You never saw it because everybody looked down for a few seconds when I pretended a bug bit me. A little misdirection. But that's only half of it. The trick won't work without this."

"That's a solid ball of lead."

Magee dug his thumbnail with its great cream-colored half-moon into the pistol ball. The nail easily cracked the surface of the ball. "No, it isn't solid, it's melted lead brushed all over something else."

He caught the ball between his palms and rubbed them hard back and forth. He showed the crushed remains, tawny dust. "The rest is just good old Kansas mud. Hard enough to build a house, but not hardly hard enough to kill a man."

He blew on his palm. The dust scattered against the sun and pattered on the ground. He laughed.

"What d'you say we ride and find your boy?"

An hour later, Charles remembered to ask about the ashes on his boots. Gray Owl immediately lost his air of good humor. With a grieved expression, he rode a few moments before he answered.

"It is a curse. As the ashes touch you, so will failure and death."

60

This time they rode in swiftly from the river road. They were less concerned with noise than with surprise. A dozen blacks who belonged to the district militia lived at Mont Royal, scattered over the acreage in wood shanties or little tabby houses. The less time given them to wake up and come running with their old muskets or rifles, the better. That was the agreed strategy when the Klansmen mustered at the crossroads, and they followed it.

Bits jingled and saddles creaked and hooves rap-rapped the sandy road as they neared the whitewashed house with the beams and rafters of a much larger, two-floor structure rising near it. The roof beams were slanting black lines across the stars and the quarter moon. Passing from under the heavy trees, the Klansmen trotted along the road to the old slave quarters. The silvery light of the sky gave a sheen to their robes and hoods. A short distance ahead, on the right, they saw the lighted windows of the school, and people moving inside. All the better.

Riding beside Gettys at the head of the column, Des La-Motte felt a blessed calm descend. This was like a homecoming; like the docking of a vessel after a long and uncertain sea voyage. This night would finish it.

The other Klansmen were equally confident. One spoke to another, jocular; the listener laughed.

Pistols slipped out from underneath robes. Hammers clicked back. A rifle muzzle shimmered as the metal caught the moon's light. Des kept his hands free. He was in command, and his was the privilege of putting a match to the fuse of the dynamite.

"You ladies about through?" Andy said, yawning rather than speaking it. "Must be close on to eleven." He was sitting on a small desk with iron legs which was pushed into a corner beside others like it. His back was braced against the new blackboard. One of the volumes of his set of Kent's Commentaries lay across his lap; he'd been underlining lightly with a pencil.

Fifteen minutes ago, he'd walked over from, the cottage to collect Jane. She and Prudence and Madeline and a thin golden-colored eleven-year-old named Esau had spent the evening finishing the cleaning of the school — washing the sparkling new windows Andy had puttied in night before last, scouring the floor. Madeline and Jane used soapy rags but Prudence, as if somehow purifying herself by making the task harder, scrubbed in the old primitive way of the Low Country, with a handful of moss dipped in water.

"It feels later than that." Madeline straightened, stiff and chilly. Her wine-colored skirt was soaked around the hem. She dropped her rag in a wood bucket. The windows gleamed with reflections of two lamps burning on stools. "We're done. We can put the furniture back tomorrow."

"Esau, you were kind to help," Jane said, patting him. "But it's too late for a boy your age to be awake. Andy and I will walk you home."

"I wanted to help," the boy said. "It's my school."

Madeline smiled, twisting a strand of gray hair away from her forehead and tucking it in so it wouldn't fall again. She was spent, but it was not an unpleasant feeling. All evening they'd worked in the relaxed, easy way of good friends, and now the school was freshly whitewashed and cleaned of the eternal mildew of the Low Country — ready for the visitors from Connecticut.

She bent to pick up the bucket. Her glance fell across the front window, bright with reflections of the lamps. Behind them, something red shimmered. Instantly, she knew who was out there.

She had time only to say, "They've come." A shotgun blew out the front window. One of the pellets nicked Madeline's sleeve as she flung herself against the wall by the front door. Flying glass opened a cut in the cheek of the bewildered Esau. Prudence heaved to her feet, the clump of moss dripping water on the floor so carefully scrubbed and dried.

Madeline heard horses, and men shouting the word nigger, and she knew her sense of peace had been false. She heard a man say, "Light the dynamite."

"Oh my God," Jane said.

Andy flung his book aside. "Somebody's got to go wake the militiamen. Miss Madeline, you take the others out the back, and I'll do it."

Her voice cracking, Jane said, "No, you don't dare. They're right outside."

"I'll run in the trees beside the road. Stop talking. Move." He shoved them, first Madeline, then Prudence, who was still breathing hard from the work; she was too stout to run far. Madeline signaled Esau to her side, pulled him against her skirt, and cradled his head with her hand. She could feel him trembling.

"Come on out, niggers. You stay in there, you're going to die."

Madeline recognized the voice of Gettys. Andy flung the globe at the side window, breaking it. The distraction drew a volley of fire on that side of the building. Andy used the cover of the noise to break the back window with his lawbook. He pushed Madeline again. "Hurry up!"

Jane hung behind, tears tracking down her cheeks. She knew what might happen if he ran for help. Her dark eyes begged him silently. His refused her. He gave her a swift kiss on her cheek and said his parting words:

"Don't forget I love you. Now go on."

Madeline climbed through the window. Then Prudence lifted Esau through the jagged opening, and Madeline lowered him to the ground. Andy jumped through the side window and ran into the dark, arms pumping.

A Klansman yelled, "There goes one." Horses whinnied. At least two went pounding in pursuit. The sound of three gunshots rolled back through the night, overlapping, reverberating. Jane had just jumped to the ground after Prudence. She gave one terrible short scream of grief and pain. She knew he was dead.

"The dynamite," someone shouted in front.

"Lit," someone else yelled. Something thumped inside and rolled on the floor. Above the glass sawtooths in the lower window frame, a snaky line of smoke rose.

Madeline pushed Prudence and dragged Esau. "Get away from the building. Run."

"Which way?" Prudence gasped.

"Straight ahead," Madeline said, pulling the boy. Straight ahead lay a heavy belt of water oaks with spiny yucca growing between. If they could break through that, they'd reach the marsh. The path across was solid but narrow; difficult to find and follow even in daylight. It would take luck and the bright moon for a successful escape.

"Hold hands," she said, groping and finding Prudence's pudgy fingers, cold and damp with her fear. With her other hand, Madeline hurried Esau into the darkness that rose like a wall behind the school.

Low-growing yuccas stabbed her legs. Spanish moss caressed her face like threatening hands. She saw nothing ahead, no light-glossed waters of the marsh. She'd forgotten how thick and deep the woods were.

Esau began to cry. Behind them, a fiery cavern opened in the night, spilling red light over them. They felt the concussion as the dynamite blew the school walls outward and the roof upward. Madeline saw half a desk sail up through the fiery glare as if it were the lightest of balloons. They ran on, hearing the triumphant yells and hoots of the Klansmen.

Madeline ran faster. A pain spread outward from the center of her breasts as she breathed with greater and greater difficulty. The school was gone. Andy was gone. Prudence was weeping. "I can't go any faster, I can't."

"If you don't we'll all die." With a surge of effort, Madeline ran through a patch of burrs that ripped her hem and scraped her ankles like tiny spurs. But they were through the trees — through and standing in shallow water with the moonlit salt marsh spread before them.

She pushed a fist into her breast, trying to stop the pain. She scanned the marsh, searching for the path over to Summerton. She'd taken it often, but always in daylight, and now, badly scared, she had trouble remembering where it was. The moon-dazzle on the water and the reed thickets confused her all the more.

"They're coming," Jane whispered. Madeline heard them.

"This way." She started across a muddy space, praying her memory wouldn't mislead her.

Two dismounted Klansmen dragged Andy's body from the dark to the firelight. The back of bis head was gone, and his shirt was soaked dark red from collar to waist. Des looked at the body, then snatched off his hood as he ran around the burning ruins of the school

"I saw them run into the trees." He waved in that direction with his old four-pound Walker Colt.

"I'll come with you," Gettys said from behind his hood. His soft white gentleman's hands looked incongruous clutching a shiny pump gun.

"You stay here and take charge of the others. Some of those nigger militia boys may show up. If you have to retreat, disband and scatter."

"Des" — Gettys whined it like a child denied a toy — "I've waited nearly as long as you to exterminate that mongrel woman. I've just as much right —"

Des jammed the old Walker's muzzle under Gettys's chin, twisting the fabric of his hood. "You have no rights. I'm in charge." He had to hurry; the white was flickering at the borders of his mind. He didn't want another spell to knock him out and cheat him of success. And there was Tillman's warning.

Gettys was stubborn. He started to protest again. Des flung his pistol hand back, then forward, bashing Gettys's hood so hard the storekeeper nearly fell over. Gettys saw the demented glaze of Des's eyes. With that pale trident in his carroty hair, he looked like some sort of devil.

"All right, Des. They're yours."

Madeline sensed the others faltering; so was she. They were in water six inches deep, struggling over a muddy bottom that sucked them down and slowed them. The moon's reflections on the water tricked the eye, and the reeds swaying and rattling in the wind only heightened the visual confusion. Somehow she'd led them off the narrow path. And Prudence was breaking down. She staggered along sobbing and muttering gibberish.

"Oh, Lord Jesus." That was Jane, looking behind them because of a sudden noise. Madeline stopped, holding Esau's hand tightly.

First she heard the splashing of the pursuer. He was making no effort to be quiet. Then she saw him, a great ungainly figure with immense hands. One held a gun.

"I'm coming for you niggers." The strong, clear voice rolled over the marsh. A frightened heron rose from the reeds, flapping away. "You're going to die tonight, all of you."

Prudence moaned. She dropped to her knees in the water, hands clasped, head down, mumbling a prayer.

"Will you get up?" Enraged, Madeline bent over the teacher. Only that saved her when Des fired two shots. Esau was crying again.

Madeline shook Prudence. "If you don't get up, he'll kill us. We've got to keep going."

He was coming again, all elbows and lifting knees, a strange terrible scarecrow dancing across the marsh, brandishing his gun. The three women and the boy started to run. Madeline's grief was almost beyond bearing; clumsily but completely, it was all ending tonight. The school, Andy, their own lives. Those ludicrous hooded men still had the power to destroy.

She found the path. She held to it for ten yards, then stumbled, twisting her ankle badly. Prudence lagged again, out of breath, giving up. Jane jerked Prudence's arm, exactly as if it were the halter of a reluctant mule. The night was peaceful except for the loud breathing of the fugitives and the steady splash of LaMotte. Coming on. Closing the distance.

He fired a third shot. Prudence flung her arms over her head as if in praise, then fell and sank under the water.

Jane crouched, hands rattling the reeds, probing the water. "I can't find her. I can't — wait, I've got her." Groaning, she pulled the teacher's head and shoulders out. Water cascaded from Prudence's nose and eyes and mouth. The eyes were without life. Madeline bit her knuckle; at the last, Prudence's hope had failed her.

Esau sniffled, striving not to cry. Madeline took his hand and started on. She refused to surrender herself to execution even though she knew they were finished. Jane's moonlit face showed that she knew it too. With Esau between them they walked on, their last act of doomed defiance.

Between the pursuer and the place where Prudence fell, the bull alligator swam silently, submerged. He was sixteen feet from snout to tail tip and weighed six hundred pounds. His dark hemispherical eyes broke the surface. There was great commotion in the water, and something threatening just ahead. The alligator's nostrils cleared the water as his jaw opened.

Des knew he had them. They were no longer running, only walking at a pace that would allow him to catch them in another minute or so. He was sopping, scummy with mud, yet strangely buoyant; he seemed to dance through the water, just as he'd danced for so many years on the polished ballroom floors of the great houses the Yankees had destroyed along with everything else that was fine in the South. The white light lanced his head, spikes of it shooting in from both sides to meet behind his eyes. He felt exalted but anxious. He prayed silently to allay the anxiety. "God, let the light hold back until I've caught them. God, if You have ever favored me as a member of Your chosen race, spare me another few moments —"

The white sizzled and fused, consuming the dark in his mind. He smelled cannon smoke. He heard shells whistling in. He ran through the water screaming, not aware that the women were barely fifty feet ahead. His screams were full of zeal, full of joy:

"Forward the Palmetto Rifles! Charge to the guns! Glory to the Confederacy!"

Something like a club struck him: the alligator's huge lashing tail. Des fired a bullet at the moon as he went down. Then, as the alligator closed his jaws on his torso, he felt a sensation like dozens of heavy nails piercing his flesh. The alligator killed him in the customary way, holding him in the vise of its jaws until he drowned.

Only then was the body allowed to rise and float. Amid the blood eddying in the marsh water, the alligator began to feed by biting off Des's left leg at the groin.

Shouts and a burst of gunfire surprised and alarmed the Klansmen waiting for Des where the embers of the school gave off dull light and enormous heat. Gettys heard someone order them to throw down their arms. "To the road," he exclaimed, booting his mount.

Because he fled first, leaving the others momentarily bunched together, one of the blacks had a clear shot with his militia rifle. As Gettys galloped into the turn to the entrance lane, the bullet slammed his shoulder and knocked him sideways. He kicked free of the stirrups, terrified of being dragged. He fell in a vicious clump of yucca as the other Klansmen streamed by, robes flying. Gettys bleated, "Don't leave me," as the last horses galloped away.

Barefoot men approached on the run. A black hand snatched off his scarlet hood. Randall Gettys stared through steamed spectacles at six black faces, and six guns, and fainted.

"It's all right, Esau," Madeline said, trying to calm the crying boy. It was hard, because she was on the verge of tears herself. Andy was gone, Prudence was gone — God, the toll.

Suddenly, clear in the moonlight behind her, she saw the bubbling, roiling water, then a flash of scaly hide. An arm was briefly raised to the sky like some grisly Excalibur. It sank.

Jane leaned her cheek on Madeline's and wept.

With perfect clarity, she saw Des LaMotte's severed hand pop to the surface and float, shiny white as a mackerel. Something snapped it under and the marsh water was smooth and still again.

61

A grove of wind-blasted pecan trees shaded the bend in Vermilion Creek. Magee sat by one, his derby inverted in front of his outstretched legs. With hard snaps of his wrist he sailed card after card into the hat. He didn't miss.

Satan and two other horses were tied to a low limb; Gray Owl had left his pony behind and ridden the rangy bay. Charles hunkered near the trees on the shore of the purling creek. The sun was at the zenith. The spring day was balmy, and he sweated under his shirt and gypsy robe.

Above him, throwing a dark bar across his face, a leafless limb jutted over the creek. He studied the limb, judging its strength. The April wind caressed his eyes and beard. It was too fine a day for matters of fear and death —

"Look sharp, Charlie."

Magee emptied the cards from the derby and put it on as he stood up. They heard hooves splashing in the shallows. Charles drew his Army Colt. Gray Owl trotted from behind a clump of budding willows, hunched in his blanket. The bay was winded and glistening, not used to such a heavy rider.

Charles holstered his revolver and dashed down the bank to meet the tracker. "Did you find it?" Gray Owl nodded. "How far?"

"One mile, no more." The Cheyenne's expression was characteristically glum. "I saw a small boy."

The noonday sun seemed to explode in Charles's eyes. He felt a dizziness. "Is he all right?"

Gray Owl clearly didn't want to answer. He chewed his bottom lip. "I saw him sitting outside the house feeding a raccoon. His face —" Gray Owl touched his left cheek. "There are marks. Someone has hurt him."

Charles wiped his mouth.

Magee scuffed a boot in the shale. "Anyone else around?"

"I saw an old Kiowa-Comanche come out with a whiskey jar, get on his pony, and ride away. Then I saw a Cheyenne woman leave the big house and go to a small one, where I heard hens. She brought back two eggs."

"He has a squaw?" Charles said.

"Yes." The tracker's eyes were full of misery. "She is a young woman. Very dirty and sad."

"Did you see the man Bent?" Gray Owl shook his head. "No one saw you — not the boy or the squaw?" The tracker shook his head again. "You're certain?"

"Yes. There are some post oaks near it. A good hiding place."

Magee rubbed his hands together, trying to treat this as something ordinary, another field exercise. "We can come in from three different sides —"

"I'm going in alone," Charles said.

"Now that's damn foolishness."

"Alone," Charles said, with a look that killed further protest.

He returned to the trees where he pulled off his gypsy robe. He folded it and put it on the ground. He picked up his Spencer, checked the magazine, snugged his black hat down over his eyes, and walked back to Magee and the tracker.

"I'll watch myself, don't worry. If you hear any shooting, come up fast. Otherwise stay here."

He said it with the officer's tone and the officer's challenging stare. Magee fumed. Gray Owl gazed at the bright water, full of foreboding.

He won't know me, Charles thought as he stalked along the creek bank. Not with this beard down to my belly. He was thinking of Gus but it applied equally to Elkanah Bent. He couldn't imagine how Bent looked after ten years. It was immaterial. He just wanted to get the boy away safely. That was the most important issue, the boy.

The spring air was gentle as a woman's hand. It reminded him of similar days in Northern Virginia when hundreds of poor boys died in sunny meadows and glades. Those thoughts, and what Gray Owl said about Gus being marked, put a bitter taint on his anxiety.

He saw the post oaks ahead. Beyond them he glimpsed a structure of mud brick. Smoke drifted out of a chimney at one end, like a twist of sea-island cotton pinned to the sky. Charles thought he heard a child's voice. His hand on the Spencer grew white.

He tried to purge himself of fear. Impossible. His heart lubbed so hard it sounded like an Indian drum in his ear. He knew he would probably have one chance, no more.

He crouched and peered from behind a post oak. He almost cried at the sight of his son seated on the ground doling corn kernels to the raccoon one at a time. The raccoon took a kernel in his forepaws and stood on his hind legs like a paunchy little man in a mask while he ate the kernel. Then he wobbled over to Gus for more. The boy fed him with absolutely no trace of pleasure on his sad, gruel-colored face.

Even from a distance Charles saw the scabbed-over cuts and the bruise around Gus's eye. The boy's feet were so filthy Charles almost thought he was wearing gray stockings. Gus sat in the dirt near the front door of the whiskey ranch. The door was closed.

Charles saw a handsome chestnut horse and two mules in the corral at the end of the building. He saw the outbuilding where the squaw had gotten the eggs, and he heard a hen flutter and cluck. The loudest sound was the gurgling of Vermilion Creek.

He almost couldn't move because of his worry that he'd make a mistake. He tried to forget the size of the stakes and look at the situation as some kind of abstract problem. It helped, a little. He counted five, and on the last count stepped from behind the post oaks into the open, where his son could see him.

Gus noticed him. His mouth flew open. Fearing he'd cry out, Charles put a hand to his lips to signal silence.

He could tell the boy didn't recognize him, a stranger popping up in the wilderness, beard and hair matted, eyes sunken. He held perfectly still.

Gus dribbled the remaining kernels on the ground but he made no sound.

The raccoon loped forward and began to feast. Charles kept every sense tuned for other noises — a voice, a door's creak. He heard nothing but the water. He took three long strides toward his son, raised his hand, and motioned, a great hooking sweep toward his chest. Come here.

Gus stared, clearly anxious about the stranger now. Charles wanted to shout, tell him who he was. He didn't dare. He gestured again. And a third time.

Gus stood up.

Charles was jubilant. Then the boy began to back toward the building, keeping his eyes on the stranger.

Oh God, he's scared. He still doesn't know me.

Gus sidestepped toward the closed door, ready to dart inside. Desperate, Charles crouched and laid his Spencer on the ground. He extended and spread his arms. The muscles were so tight he shook from shoulder to wrist.

Somehow the inviting outstretched arms reassured the boy. His face changed, showed a hesitant smile. He cocked his head slightly.

Charles said in a loud whisper, "Gus, it's Pa."

Wonder spread over the boy's face. He started to walk toward Charles.

The front door of the whiskey ranch banged open.

Bent was yawning as he stepped out. He wore an old plug hat and Constance Hazard's teardrop earring on his left ear. His claw-hammer coat shone as though grease had been spread on it with a knife. He was older, paunchier, with seams in his face, and scraggly eyebrows, and thick uncombed hair hiding the back of his neck. His left shoulder was lower than his right.

Bent saw Charles and didn't know him. Charles snatched the Spencer and leveled it at Bent's grimy waistcoat, which was secured by one button. "Hands in the open," he said loudly, standing.

Bent lifted his hands away from his sides, peering and blinking at the wild man with the rifle. Charles started forward — slow, careful steps. Bent's brambly eyebrows shot upward.

"Charles Main?"

"That's right, you bastard."

"Charles Main. I never thought you'd follow me into the Territory."

"Your mistake." Charles halved the distance between the post oaks and the house, then halted. "I know what you did to George Hazard's wife." Bent reacted, stepping backward, startled. "I can see that you hurt Gus. I don't need much of an excuse to splatter your head all over that house. So don't even breathe hard. Gus, come over to Pa. Now!"

He watched Bent rather than his son. The boy couldn't grasp his sudden release. As if to test it, he looked at Bent and took a step toward his father. Two steps. Three.

An Indian woman in a dirty buckskin shift came out the door carrying a bucket of night slops. She had a sleepy, sullen look. Charles thought she resembled someone he'd met when he rode with Jackson. Then, stunned, he realized it was Green Grass Woman.

She saw him, recognized him, dropped the slops, and screamed. Gus spun around, alarmed. Bent jumped, and in an instant he had the boy.

Charles's head filled with denials of what he saw. Bent was smiling, the old sly smile Charles remembered with such loathing. Bent's begrimed hand clamped on Gus's throat. His other hand came out of his coat pocket with a razor. He shook it open and laid the shimmering flat of it against Gus's cheek.

"Put your guns down, Main." Charles stared, his forehead pounding with pain. Bent turned the blade. The edge indented Gus's cheek. The boy cried out.

Bent held him fast. "Put them down or I'll cut him."

Charles laid the Spencer in the shale in front of him, and his Army Colt beside it. "Now the knife." He added his Bowie to the pile. The sight of Charles unarmed pleased Bent. His smarmy smile broadened, became almost cordial. Failure pressed on Charles like an invisible block of granite.

"Pick up those things, you bitch. Main, step to the side. More — more —"

Green Grass Woman ran toward the weapons in a kind of crablike crouch. As she took them up, she gave Charles a pleading look and spoke in English. "He said it was a trader's boy, a bad trader."

Charles shrugged in a bleak way. "What are you doing here?"

"She used to belong to the owner of this place," Bent said. "I sell her. She'll hump man or beast for gin, but you won't have the pleasure. I have other things in mind." His face wrenched. Charles remembered how crazy he was. "You bitch, hurry up!" The cry echoed away. The wind blew.

Bent eyed Charles and giggled. "Now, Main. Now we're going to enjoy this unexpected reunion. I'm going to give the orders. You'll obey them to the letter unless you want this child to bleed to death before your eyes. When I say forward march, you come this way and take two steps through the door. Not one or three, two, keeping your hands raised at all times. Any mistake, any disobedience, I'll slit him."

Bent could barely contain his good humor. "All right. Forward — march." .

Hands above his head, Charles walked to the house.

Magee strode away from the pecan trees carrying his rifle in the crook of his arm. The wind fluttered the wild turkey feather in the band of his derby.

Gray Owl called out, "He said wait."

"He's been gone too long." Magee kept walking.

"Wait. That was his order."

Magee broke stride. Stopped, stared across the bright water at a pair of redbirds swooping in the sunshine. With a fretful look down Vermilion Creek, he turned and slowly walked back to the tracker wrapped in his blanket.

62

The room reminded Charles of a sutler's. The dirt floor bore the imprints of boots, moccasins, bare feet. Dark lumps of cold food scummed the tops of two tables. The chair where Bent ordered him to sit creaked and swayed when he put his weight on it.

Then he saw the crookedly hung portrait. He stared at the woman for about ten seconds before recognition went off in his head like a shell.

"That picture —" He had trouble enunciating clearly. Fear for Gus dulled his mind, slowed his reactions. And coming on the portrait here, he felt propelled into some unreal place, some world where anything was possible, and nothing was sane.

With effort he finished the thought. "Where did you get it?"

"Recognize the subject, do you?" Bent laid the knife, the Spencer, and the Army Colt on the plank bar, then carefully positioned the open razor within easy reach.

"My cousin Orry's wife. It's a bad likeness."

"Because it's her mother. A whore in New Orleans. A quadroon." Bent took a coarse, heavy rope from a box beneath his shelf of bottles. "You don't act surprised that she's a nigger."

"I know Madeline has black blood. But I never expected to see a picture like that."

"Nor find me, I venture to say." Bent was all false politeness. "Hands together, raised in front of you."

Charles didn't respond. Bent struck him with his fist. Blood leaked from Charles's right nostril. He raised his hands and Bent looped the rope around his wrists.

Charles's mind was still sluggish, awash with rage against this stubbled, crippled man who moved with obvious discomfort. He raged at himself, too. He'd failed outside. His mistake would cost his life. He saw it in the feverish shine of Elkanah Bent's eyes as Bent looped the rope a third and fourth time.

All right, his life was forfeit. But there was Gus.

Bent's color was high. Constance's teardrop earring swayed like a pendulum gone wild. Bent had pierced his earlobe to hold the post. Green Grass Woman, so soiled and sad, watched Charles with unconcealed pity. It prickled the hair on his neck, that look. She knew what was coming. She clutched Gus to her side, protecting him while she could.

The boy gazed at him with eyes so dull Charles wanted to weep. He had seen the same lack of life in the eyes of wounded young men the night after Sharpsburg. He had seen the same whipped-animal stare in aging black men who feared jubilo, freedom, as much as they feared a master.

But Gus was not yet five years old.

Bent snugged the rope and knotted it. Charles had been exerting pressure against the ropes, but Magee's trick didn't seem to have gained him much slack. Another defeat.

"Do you know how I think of myself?" Bent asked pleasantly.

Charles let the hate pour. "Yes, Orry told me. The new Napoleon." He spat in the dirt.

Bent smashed his fist in Charles's face. Gus hid behind Green Grass Woman's hip.

Breathing noisily, no longer smiling, Bent said, "Did he also explain that he and Hazard ruined me at the Academy, and in Mexico? Destroyed my reputation with lies? Turned my superiors against me? I was born to lead great armies. Like Alexander. Hannibal. Bonaparte. Your tribe and Hazard's kept me from it."

Bent wiped a ribbon of saliva from his lip. Charles heard birds chirping outside the closed door. The cold ashes on the hearth had a familiar woody smell. The world was lunatic.

Bent picked up the razor and lightly passed the blade over the ball of his thumb. His smile returned. Reasonably and persuasively, he said, "I do think of myself as America's Bonaparte, and it's justified. But I'm forced to be watchful because every great general is besieged by little men. Inferior men, jealous of him, who want to pull him down. Tarnish his greatness. The Mains are like that. The Hazards are like that. So I am not only the commander, I'm also the executioner. Rooting out plotters. Betrayers. The enemy. Hazards. Mains. Till they're all gone."

"Let my boy go, Bent. He's too small to harm you."

"Oh, no, my dear Charles. He's a Main. I've always intended that he die." Green Grass Woman uttered a low sound and averted her head. "I planned to wait several months, until you'd given him up for lost. Then, when I killed him —"

"Don't say that in front of him, goddamn you."

Bent snatched Charles's beard, yanked it up, forcing his head back. He laid the razor against Charles's throat. "I say whatever I please. I am in command." He edged the razor deeper. Charles felt pain. Blood oozed. He closed his eyes.

Bent giggled and withdrew the razor. He cleaned the blade in the armpit of his coat.

Charming again, he said, "After I disposed of him, I planned to send you certain — parts, so you would know. Several fingers. Toes. Perhaps something more intimate."

"You fucking madman," Charles said between his teeth, out of control, starting to rise from the chair. Bent grabbed Gus's hair. The boy yelped and pounded small fists against Bent's leg. Bent slapped him, knocked him down, kicked his ribs. Gus rolled on his side and clutched his stomach, whimpering.

"Stand up, boy." Bent boomed like a revival preacher. How many men lived in that perverted body? How many different voices spoke from that one crazed brain? "Stand up. That's a direct order."

"Don't," the Cheyenne girl said. "Oh, don't. He's so little —"

He slammed her in the stomach with his fist. She fell against the wall, clawing at the rough logs, knees scraping the dirt. "You'll be the next for execution if you say another word." He flourished the razor over his head, silver steel death. "Up, boy!"

Whimpering again, not quite crying, Gus tottered up. Bent seized him and pulled him against his legs, turning him at the same time. He put his free hand under Gus's chin and straightened his head with a wrench, so Charles and his son were face-to-face.

"After him, and after you," Bent said, "the next will be the family of Hazard's brother, in California. I'll exterminate the lot of you before I'm done. Think of that, dear Charles."

Gently, caressingly, he drew the razor over Gus's right cheek. Gus screamed. A thread of blood unwound itself on the pale flesh.

"Think of that while the executioner carries out the general's order."

Magic Magee said, "Shit," which stupefied Gray Owl, because the soldier had an inordinately clean vocabulary for someone in his profession. Magee jumped up from beneath the pecan tree with the big branch over Vermilion Creek. "I don't care about his orders, something's wrong."

Gray Owl started to call him back again. Magee was striding fast. Gray Owl hesitated only a moment before hurrying after him.,

Tears rolled from Gus's eyes and diluted the blood on his cheek. Charles was consumed with a rage like sickness. He pulled his hands apart between his knees. The rope burned the backs of his wrists. Suddenly the left hand slid a little, slippery. He was bleeding. He pulled his left hand toward him but the largest part, just below the knuckles, held fast against the rope and wouldn't slip through. No use. No use.

Magee laid one hand on the corral rail. The chestnut and the mules smelted him and tossed their heads. "Now, now," he said, "don't take on. I'm friendly."

He slid between two of the rails. The chestnut neighed. "Don't do that," Magee said, wanting to shoot the blasted horse. He nodded sharply to Gray Owl, who clutched his rifle and padded out of sight, going to the front door. Magee had told him to wait until he called him in. Charles had to be inside. He wasn't in the combination stable and henhouse, or in the abandoned trader's wagon.

Magee didn't know what he'd find just inside the corral door but he hoped the door didn't open directly to the main room. He was sweating as if it were August. Just as he reached for the latch string, a fat raccoon shot around the back corner and ran right up and poised by the door.

"Scat," Magee whispered. He kicked the air. The tame raccoon wouldn't budge. He wanted in, probably for food. He'd give Magee away.

Baffled, Magee held still about fifteen seconds. Then, clearly, he heard a small boy cry out. With a glum face he drew his knife.

"I'm sorry, mister." He swooped down and killed the raccoon with one stroke.

Gus bled from the cut on his cheek. Charles wished the boy would faint, but he hadn't.

Bent's head was blessedly free of pain and those queer hurtful lights. The general's orders were just and right, and the executioner's duties were a joy. He couldn't prolong it much longer, though. The cutting, right in front of the boy's straining, terrified, mad-eyed father, had given him a huge painful erection.

He laid the razor on Gus's throat.

Charles saw the blued muzzle push out between the door frame and the red blanket. He'd heard nothing from that part of the house, not a sound. Loudly, Magee said, "Mr. Bent! You better turn around and see this gun."

There was a slow, tortured moment when Charles knew Bent would cut Gus's throat. Instead, like a soldier, he obeyed the commanding voice. He turned. Magee stepped from behind the blanket.

Charles hurled himself out of the chair and flung Gus down. Bent bellowed, realizing his error. Charles leaped away, stumbled over his son, and fell. Green Grass Woman jumped at Bent and began to claw and pummel him. Magee aimed but she was in his line of fire. Bent shoved her and lashed downward with the razor, laying open her skirt and slashing her thigh. She cried out. A second push toppled her. Bent went for Charles, the razor shining.

Magee shot him. The bullet struck the back of his left thigh. He spiraled down and flopped with his hand flung out. Charles rolled over, his wrists still tied. He reached, pulled the razor from Bent's hand, and threw it. Magee shouted something. A rectangle of light fell over Charles and his son. Gray Owl crouched in the door with his rifle.

"Want me to finish him?" Magee asked. Bent stared, realizing he was unarmed, caught.

"Not in front of the boy. Cut me loose."

Magee freed Charles with his knife, which was bloodstained. Charles knelt, trembling.

"Gus, it's Pa. I know I look terrible, but it's Pa. Pa," he repeated, with an extra puff to the P, as if that word alone could make the link.

The boy drew away, using his hands in the dirt to pull himself. Some frightened witless animal peered from his eyes. Charles extended both arms, hands spread, as he'd done outside. "Pa."

Suddenly the tears broke, racking the boy, great gulps and shudders. He wailed and ran to Charles. Charles enfolded him and held him. He held Gus a long time, until the tiny body stopped shuddering.

Green Grass Woman's gashed leg bled heavily. She had lost consciousness after she fell. Magee raised her skirt and inspected the wound. As dispassionately as a physician, he wiped some blood from her thick pubic hair. "I used to doctor drunks in the saloon when they pulled stickers on each other. I can tie this off. Be painful for her to walk for a while, but I think she'll be all right."

From his pouch Gray Owl took some roots, which he crumbled and mixed with a few drops of creek water, working the material to a paste on a flat stone brought from outside. He searched the smaller room and found a piece of clean cloth. Magee was busy tying Bent's hands with part of the rope that had bound Charles. He was careful to brace Bent's arms behind his back and loop the rope with no possibility of slack. He wasn't gentle.

"How about his leg?" Charles asked.

"Grazed, that's all. I'd say leave it alone. Serve him right if the gangrene got it."

Gray Owl knelt beside the exhausted boy. His brown hands were gentle as he worked some of the gray-green paste into the cheek wound. "He may be scarred, the way Cheyenne boys are scarred from the Sun Dance."

"Sun Dance hooks go in the chest, not the face."

"Yes," the tracker said sadly. "There is nothing to be done. He will heal."

"Even if he heals he'll be scarred," Charles said.

He returned the Army Colt to his holster, bandaged his rope-burned wrist, and went behind the bar. There he found another coil of rope. He slipped his left arm through and carried it on his shoulder. Bent stood by the door, his pant leg bloody. He blinked in the sunshine. He seemed docile.

Charles drank two swallows of the vile bar whiskey in hopes of staving off the shock that was an inevitable consequence of violence. He walked over to Bent. It was all he could do to keep from putting the Colt to Bent's head and firing it.

"Magic, come along, will you? Keep the boy here, Gray Owl."

Bent cringed in the doorway. A lemon-colored butterfly flirted around his head and flew on. "Where am I going?"

The sun struck the gold filigree of Constance's earring and made it shine. Charles felt the impulse coming and couldn't stop it, or didn't want to stop it. He seized the earring and jerked downward. The post tore out most of Bent's earlobe. He howled and crashed against the door. Charles kicked his ass and drove him into the hot bright light.

The soft air did nothing to take the taste of dirt and bad whiskey and corruption from Charles's mouth. He had never felt the burned-out feeling so strongly. It tasted like sand and alum in his mouth. It hurt like salt and vinegar in a wound.

Palm over his bloody ear, Bent was abject. "Please — where?"

"You white trash," Magee said, imperial in his wrath. "You're going to hell."

"Where?"

Charles leaned close, to be sure Bent heard him. "Waterloo."

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

Nothing was left of Millwood or Sand Hills. All of Wade Hampton's land was gone in the wake of forced bankruptcy the previous December. Rising taxes, shrinking crop income, investments worth forty cents on the dollar — it all culminated in a single tidal wave of disaster. Over a million dollars in debt had driven him down.

Hampton and his wife, Mary, now lived in sharply reduced circumstances: a modest cottage on a scrap of land he'd managed to keep. The Hamptons welcomed Madeline and insisted she stay the night on an improvised bed in the room the general used for an office.

Hampton's age showed, but he was still vigorous and ruddy. While Mary served tea, he left with his pole and creel. He came back in an hour with four bream for their supper. Mary set to work boning the fish and Hampton invited Madeline into the office. He cleared a place for his cup on the paper-strewn desk and in doing so had to move a handsome gold-stamped volume, which he showed to her.

"Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention in New York last July."

"I read that you were a delegate."

Without bitterness, he said, "The Republicans named it the reb convention. Bedford Forrest was a delegate. Peter Sweeney, the sachem of Tammany, too — very odd bedfellows, but that's the Democratic party for you."

"It's about General Forrest and his Klan that I've come to speak to you. I want the culprits punished."

"What have the authorities done?"

"Nothing so far. It's been over two weeks. If too much time goes by, other things will take precedence and it will all be forgotten. I'll not have that. My teacher and the freedman at least deserve simple justice for a memorial."

"I concur. I'll tell you a fact about Forrest. He's ready to deny his connection with the Klan and order it to disband. It has gone too far even for him."

"No consolation to Andy's wife, or Prudence Chaffee's brothers and sisters."

"I understand your bitterness. Grant despises the Klan. Permit me to write him. I shall also ask General Lee to do so. We're on good terms. On behalf of all the investors in the little insurance company I organized in Atlanta, I asked him to assume the presidency. He declined. He's happy presiding at the college up in Lexington. But we're friends, and his word will carry weight." She glimpsed his melancholy as he stroked his side-whiskers and mused, "Now and again there is some small benefit in being a war-horse who came through it alive."

She noted the care with which he'd chosen the last word, leaving others — unhurt; unmarked — unspoken.

When Randall Gettys began to recognize his surroundings, Colonel Orpha C. Munro called on him. The hospital matron warned him that he couldn't stay long. With an acerbic smile he assured her that he could accomplish his mission quickly. "I am here at the request and on the authority of President Grant."

The matron unfolded a screen for privacy. Munro sat down beside the bed. Gettys resembled an intimidated child, the sheet tucked up to his pale chin and his pudgy fingers nervously playing with it. In the melee at Mont Royal he'd broken the right lens of his spectacles, which he'd had no chance to replace. He watched his visitor from behind a pattern of cracks radiating from the center of the lens.

With deceptive friendliness, Munro said, "It's my duty to inform you that the small hand press kept at your Dixie Store for printing your newspaper has been confiscated. You are no longer in the business of disseminating hatred, Mr. Gettys."

Gettys waited, certain there was worse to come.

"I would take a horsewhip to you if that were permissible. I'd do it despite your wound, because I find you and all your kind richly deserving of it. You're like the doomed Bourbons of France — kings too filled with arrogance to forget the past, and too stupid to learn from it."

Munro drew a long breath, forcing restraint on himself. "However, the recourse I mentioned is denied me. I suppose that's best. Using a horsewhip would pull me down to your level. Let me instead pose a question." Something hard, even a bit sadistic, showed in his eyes. "Do you know of the Dry Tortugas?''

"Small islands, aren't they? Off the Floridas."

"Quite right. The government now sends Carolina prisoners to the Dry Tortugas. A godforsaken spot, especially in the summer months. Blistering heat. Insects and rats and vermin. Wardens only a little less depraved than the inmate population." Munro smoothed his gauntlets, which he'd laid on his knee. He smiled. "New prisoners are subjected to certain — initiations, while the wardens look the other way. Without steady nerves and a strong constitution, a prisoner sometimes fails to survive the ordeal, which I understand can be savage. After all, when men are penned up together, without women —"

"My God, what has it all to do with me? I'm a gentleman."

"You're nevertheless going to the Dry Tortugas, for the murder of the freedman Sherman and the teacher Prudence Chaffee."

"I didn't kill them," Gettys exclaimed, his voice rising toward shrillness. "You can't send me to some — some bestial place like that."

"We can and we will. If you didn't actually commit the crimes, you belonged to the unlawful combination bearing responsibility."

Gettys's hand shot to the braided sleeve, clutching. "I'll give you the names of those in our klavern. Every last one."

"Well." Munro cleared his throat. "That might put a different coloration on it, being a cooperative witness." He concealed his amusement. He had expected a quick capitulation. He had inquired extensively about die character of Randall Gettys.

Gettys's pink face sweated. "If you keep me out of prison, I'll give you something else useful."

Colonel Munro was nonplussed. Cautiously, he said, "Yes?"

"I'll tell you about the Dixie Stores. People think it's a Southern company. Some old rebs hiding behind a name and committing usury. Well —"

Gettys hitched higher against the pillow, practically babbling in his haste to save himself. "It isn't that at all. The owner, the people bleeding this state, may be some of the very people who pose as high-minded Yankee reformers. My store and all the others like it are owned by a firm called Mercantile Enterprises. I don't send my receipts and reports to Memphis or Atlanta, I send them to a Yankee lawyer in Washington, D.C. I'll give you his name and address. I'll turn over the records. Is that enough to keep me from the Dry Tortugas?"

From the end of the ward a young man's delirious voice called for his Nancy, and water. Colonel Orpha C. Munro recovered his composure. "I think it may be, Mr. Gettys. I do indeed think so."

63

Bent said, "You don't understand what you're doing."

Charles and Magee ignored him. Charles held the bridle he'd put on one of the mules from the corral. Magee, astride the frisky chestnut, pulled on the rope to test it. The rope was tied to the branch of the pecan tree hanging over Vermilion Creek. A few brilliant white clouds floated in the blue northwest. The day was sweet and summerlike.

"Lean your head down," Magee said.

Bent refused. Tears rolled down into the stubble on his cheeks. "To do this is criminal."

Charles was weary of the man's ranting. He glanced at Magee, who knocked Bent's plug hat off. It landed in the creek and sat upside down in the purling water. Magee yanked Bent's head down by the hair and slipped the noose over. He snugged the noose with one pull.

Blood still leaked from Bent's torn earlobe. His wound was soaking his left pant leg. He cried now, spewing wrath and self-pity. "You're trash, ignorant trash. You're robbing the nation of its greatest military genius, you and this lowlife nigger."

"God above," Magee said. He was too astounded to be mad.

Bent shook his head violently, as if he could get rid of the rope that way. "You can't do it. You can't deprive the world of the new Bonaparte." His voice was so loud that redbirds along the creek flew up in alarm.

Charles brought his Colt from his hip, cocked it, and held the muzzle an inch from Bent's mouth. "Shut up." He looked in the direction of the whiskey ranch, not wanting the outcries to carry. His son and the Cheyenne girl had had enough. Bent saw the determined eyes behind the revolver and struggled to control himself. He bit his lip; but the tears kept rolling from the corners of his eyes.

The pecan limb cast a dark shadow over Charles's face. He didn't want to go through with this. He was sick of killing. He reminded himself that Bent represented an obligation that was more than personal. He owed this to Orry and George; especially to George, for his wife. He owned it to Green Grass Woman and God knew how many others Bent had wronged over the past twenty-five years.

Charles stepped back from the mule.

"You can't! Military genius is a rare gift —"

Charles slid the Army Colt into the holster and flexed the fingers of his right hand, brushing the tips over his palm in a cleansing motion. A male and female cardinal flew frantically round and round above the creek, frightened by the shouting.

"You're killing Bonaparte!"

He positioned his hand to slap the mule. A final look at Bent, to be sure he was real — then his arm and hand moved in a blur. The sound of the slap was loud. The chestnut tossed his head and Magee reined him hard as the mule bolted. The rope hummed taut and Bent's weight made the pecan limb creak.

Bent seemed to glare down at Charles. But his neck was already broken. The shadow of his body moved slowly back and forth across Charles's face before he turned away, unable to stand the sight.

"I'll catch the mule."

"Let me," Magee said softly. "You go back to your boy."

In the sundown's dusty orange afterglow, Charles sat on a nail keg, watching the creek. He drank the last of some coffee Magee had brewed. The soldier had killed and cleaned and hearth-broiled one of the chickens but Charles had no appetite for it. Instead of the creek, flawed black glass streaked with colored highlights, he kept seeing Bent's eyes just before the rope sang its last low note. Bent's eyes became a mirror of his own life. In the vengeful Bent he recognized himself, a humiliating image. He was no better. He spilled the bitter-tasting coffee on the ground and went inside.

He crossed the main room, lifted the red blanket screening the doorway, saw his boy sleeping on the old straw-filled mattress in the bedroom. He walked to the bed. Even asleep, Gus had a pinched, anxious look. Charles touched the oozing cut on his left cheek. The boy moaned and turned. Pierced by guilt, Charles drew his hand back. He walked out and let the red blanket drop in place.

Gray Owl sat at a table, enveloped in his blanket, his eyes fixed on some infinity beneath the scarred wood. Magee rested in one chair with his boots on another. He munched some hardtack, his practice deck of cards fanned out in front of him. Green Grass Woman sat on a nail keg with hands clasped and eyes downcast. She looked old, worn, full of despair. Coming in from outside, Charles had found her with a bar bottle. He'd taken it out of her hand and emptied it outside, then done the same with the others.

Now he walked over to her. She raised her head and he saw a flickering image of the young, fresh girl who'd listened to Scar's courting flute with a saucy confidence that the world was hers, along with any man in it that she chose. He remembered the lovelorn looks she gave him that winter in Black Kettle's village. Somehow the memory hurt.

He spoke in Cheyenne. "How did you get here?"

She shook her head and started to cry.

"Tell me, Green Grass Woman."

"I listened to promises. A white man's lies and promises. I tasted the strong drink he gave me and I wanted more."

"This was Bent?"

"Mister Glyn. Bent killed him."

He had a dim recollection of a seedy trader named Glyn. He'd met him when he rode with the Jacksons. No doubt it was the same man.

"Let me look at the dressing."

There was an echo of girlish shyness in the way she drew up the deerskin skirt just far enough. The bandage showed staining but it would do until morning. Green Grass Woman could walk on the slashed leg, though probably not without plenty of pain. That focused Charles's mind on a responsibility that became more inevitable the longer he thought about it.

"I need to take you back to the People."

Gray Owl straightened up, alert, anxious. The girl's eyes showed fright. "No. They would scorn me. What I did was too shameful."

Charles shook his head. "There isn't a man or woman on God's earth who isn't in need of forgiveness for something. The nearest village is Red Bear's. I'll take you there and talk to him."

She started to protest, but she didn't. Gray Owl didn't protest either. Evidently the idea was reasonable.

Magee scooped up his deck and squared it. "Glad we're going to get out of here. Something bad about this place."

"Gray Owl and I will take her," Charles said to him. "I want you to put Gus on one of those mules and ride straight through to Brigadier Jack Duncan at Fort Leavenworth. Will you do that?"

Magee frowned. "I dunno, Charlie. I hate to send you back to those Indians without your wizard. That Whistling Snake, he's probably still burning."

"There won't be any more trouble." It was a declaration, not a certainty. The prospect of returning to the Cheyennes did bother him, but the duty seemed unavoidable. "We'll ride in and out in an hour. Now listen. At Leavenworth, I'd like you to send a telegraph message for me. I saw some paper in the other room. I'll write it out."

"All right," Magee said.

The burned-out feeling consumed Charles. He strode to the door, flung it open, stared at thousands of stars gleaming more brightly than usual in the clear air. He thought of the Hanging Road. He'd nearly traveled it this year. He was so tired. "God, I wish I had a cigar," he said.

In the morning he wrote the telegraph message and saw it safely stowed in Magee's saddlebag along with the flintlock pistol, powder bag, and box of fake ammunition. Charles pulled the nails from the corners of the oil portrait and rolled it up. It was dry and brittle. A corner broke off. He tied the painting carefully with a strip of rawhide.

From a blanket he'd washed and hung over the corral rail to dry, he cut a large square which he slit with his knife, making a small poncho for Gus much like his own gypsy robe. He lifted the boy onto the horse blanket he'd tied to the mule with braided rope; there was no spare horse furniture in the stable.

Gus looked like a little old man, scarred and pale. "Hug your pa," Charles said. The boy took a long, deep breath. He was wary. The hurt flickered in his eyes.

Charles hugged him instead. "I'll make it all right, Gus. I'll come to Uncle Jack's soon and it will be all right."

He wasn't sure, though. It would take months, perhaps years, of attention and love. The hidden scars might never heal. He hugged the boy fiercely, arms around his waist.

Gus laid one hand on the top of his father's head. After a moment he drew it away. His face was sober, without emotion. Well, the touch was a start.

To Magee he said, 'Take care of him."

"Count on it," he answered.

Charles and Gray Owl watched until the soldier and the boy vanished on the hazy horizon to the northeast.

The tracker helped Charles pull down two corral rails and shorten them with a rusty axe. They rigged a travois for Green Grass Woman. It was another sunny day, with a light breeze. The Cheyenne girl said nothing as the two men carried her to the travois.

Charles had already saddled Satan; they'd brought the horses back late yesterday. Passing Bent's corpse was unavoidable. The buzzards had already feasted on the American Bonaparte, and plucked his clothes to bloody rags.

"This is an evil place," Gray Owl said, seated on his pony. "I am glad to go."

'Take the travois a little way down the creek, to those post oaks. I'll be there in a few minutes."

Gray Owl moved out, leading the mule. Green Grass Woman exclaimed softly as the travois bumped over a sharp stone. Gray Owl looked apologetic. His pony plodded on. The Cheyenne girl held her bandaged leg and watched the sky.

Charles carried the rusty axe inside. He kicked over a nail keg and chopped it apart. Next he demolished a table and two chairs. He struck with hard blows, letting pain jolt through the handle and up his arms.

He piled up the wood and set fire to it with one of his last matches. He left the whiskey ranch burning behind him.

They reached Red Bear's village on the Sweet Water in pouring rain. No one threatened Charles, and those few people who peeked out to watch the arrival hung back, properly awed because they remembered the bearded white man who commanded a black wizard. The black wizard wasn't with him, but surely his medicine was.

Of Whistling Snake they saw nothing. Charles turned Green Grass Woman over to the care of Red Bear's stout and toothless wife. Green Grass Woman was not of Red Bear's village, but the chief knew about her.

"She will go with us to the white fort," Red Bear said in his tipi. Seated by the fire, Charles used a bone spoon to eat some stew. He no longer worried about the origin of the stew meat.

"You're going to give up to the soldiers?"

"Yes. I have decided it after much thought and consultation with others. If we do not give up we will starve or be shot. All in the village have agreed to go except for eight of the Dog Men, who refuse to quit. I said I would not lead grandfathers and infants to death just to preserve the honor of the Dog Men. It wounds my pride to go to the soldiers. I was brave once too. But I have learned that bravery and wisdom sometimes cannot walk together. Life is more precious than pride."

Charles wiped stew from the corner of his mouth. He said nothing.

He hadn't slept in twenty-four hours. But he wanted to be on his way. Red Bear endorsed that. "The Dog Men know you are here. They are angry."

Then the wise thing was to hurry out of the village. Ceremoniously, he thanked Red Bear's kindly wife and the chief for welcoming them. He said he would like to say goodbye to Green Grass Woman. The chief's wife led him to a nearby tipi where she'd made the girl comfortable. Beside a small fire, bundled in a buffalo robe, Green Grass Woman lay with her head and shoulders elevated by a woven backrest. Charles took her hand.

"You'll be all right now."

The puffy eyes welled with new tears. "No man will ever have me. I love you so. I wish you had lain with me once."

"So do I." He leaned down, holding his beard aside, as he kissed her mouth lightly. She cried in silence; he could feel her shaking. He caressed her face, then stood and slipped through the oval hole into the slackening rain.

Stars began to shine through translucent clouds blowing across the sky. Red Bear saw them to the edge of the camp, then turned back. The freshening wind tossed Charles's beard. He patted Satan, watched the clearing sky, began to hum the little melody that reminded him of home. Beside him, Gray Owl trotted his pony and observed his friend cautiously. What the Indian saw brought a fleeting smile.

They spied a lone horseman motionless on a low rise ahead and thought nothing of it. Some boy on duty with the horses, Charles assumed. He angled the piebald toward the stream to avoid passing too near the sentinel. The Indian suddenly loped down off the rise to intercept them.

"What's this?" Charles wondered aloud. Then his mouth dried. The Cheyenne was speeding toward them, booting his pony. In one hand he carried a lance, in the other a carbine with long feathers tied to the muzzle. Something about the rider's head and torso reminded him of —

Gray Owl reined in, despair in his eyes.

"Man-Ready-for-War," he said.

And so it was. Older now, but still handsome, though there was a famished, fugitive look about him. He wore his regalia and full paint. Around his neck hung his wing-bone whistle and the stolen silver cross. From shoulder to hip ran a wide sash painted yellow and red and heavily quilled and feathered. When Charles saw the sash he remembered Scar had been chosen a Dog-String Wearer.

In the light of the clearing sky, the huge white scar fish-hooking from the tip of the brow down around the jawbone was quite visible. Satan snorted nervously, smelling the Cheyenne pony as it trotted up.

"Others told me you were here," Scar said.

"We have no quarrel anymore, Scar."

"Yes. We do."

"Damn you, I don't want to fight you."

Wind fluttered the golden eagle feathers tied to the barrel of the carbine. Scar rammed his lance point in the muddy earth. "I have waited for you many winters. I remember how the old one tore away my manhood."

"And I remember how you repaid him. Let it go, Scar."

"No. I will pin my sash to the earth here. You will not pass by unless it is to walk the Hanging Road."

Charles thought a moment. In English, he said to Gray Owl, "We can bolt and outrun him."

Gray Owl's morose old eyes were despairing again. He pointed to the rise. The starlight showed that four warriors had appeared there to insure they would not escape.

Sick at heart, Charles flung off his black hat. He pushed the gypsy robe over his head and laid it across his saddle. He dismounted, handed Satan's rein to Gray Owl and drew his Bowie from his belt, and waited.

64

Scar drove his lance down through the slit at the end of his sash, pinning it. The lance vibrated as he let go. Charles understood what the sash said. To the death.

The Dog Society man began to mutter and chant. He untied a thong at his waist to free a wood-handled axe. He raised axe and carbine over his head in some ritual supplication Charles didn't understand. Then he ran the edge of the iron head along the carbine's barrel, back and forth, a whetstone rasp. Sparks spurted.

I've had enough,

Charles thought. Texas, Virginia, Sharpsburg, the Washita. Augusta, Constance, Bent's razor — is it endless?

With a grunt, Scar threw the carbine away. The gun tumbled barrel over stock and landed unseen in the dark. Chanting louder, he kicked out of his moccasins. He sidled around to the right, presenting his shoulder and forearm. He showed the axe, then began to swing it clockwise in a small taunting circle. Suddenly he struck out straight toward Charles, the blade horizontal.

The ground was soggy, the grass still brown and scant after the winter freezes. Charles's foot slipped as he raised the Bowie in both hands and blocked the axe blow, edge against edge. Scar's force drove his arm on. The axe head slid off the knife and whistled past Charles's ear. Charles stabbed at the lunging body, a hard target in the starry dark. He missed.

Scar's sash limited his movement, Charles's only advantage. He knew that if he just walked away, out of Scar's reach, the four riders would come down for him. So he had to finish it here, God help him.

Once more Scar came sidling in, rotating the axe in the clockwise circle. He swung. Charles ducked. He swung again. Charles ducked again, but he felt the iron pluck at his hair. He stabbed upward. Pricked the inside of Scar's left sleeve. The Dog Soldier leaped away nimbly, turning like a dancer to unwind the sash twisted around him.

Charles crouched, both hands high in the traditional stance of the knife fighter. The Bowie twinkled in the starlight. Already the two men had churned their little patch of ground to choppy mud. It sucked at Charles's boots as he sidestepped, awaiting the next feint or slash.

Scar chanted and tossed his axe to his left hand. Charles shifted to counter the move. Turning toward Scar's left hand opened the left side of his body to attack. Without warning, Scar tossed the axe back, laughing deep in his belly as he chopped with his right hand.

Charles's right-to-left parry slashed the inside of Scar's forearm. Scar reacted by jerking the axe upward. Charles reached for it with his left hand and Scar kicked with his right foot. The hard blow struck Charles's groin. He reeled, lost his balance in the mud, fell.

Scar screeched like a boy who'd won a game. He jumped on Charles with both knees, then rolled him from his side to his back. He seized Charles's knife hand and pushed it over his head into the mud. The axe swung high, a black wedge against a familiar milky veil of stars.

The axe came down. Charles wrenched his head the other way; felt the blade scrape his hair before it buried in the mud. He twisted his knife hand and pricked Scar's knuckles. Scar yelled, more surprised than hurt.

Charles tried to jerk his knife hand free. Scar held fast. Charles smelled the rancid grease Scar had used to dress his body before he applied his paint. Scar swung the muddy axe down again, and again Charles twisted away. The wrenching movement freed his knife hand. He spiked the Bowie through the upper part of Scar's left arm.

The Dog Society man dropped the axe. The blunt top of the blade bounced off Charles's temple. Scar was breathing harshly, in pain. Charles clamped the Cheyenne's chin in his left hand, his right hand with the knife well inside Scar's bleeding left arm. He felt the chin clamped in his left hand turn to flaccid weight. The wound was draining Scar quickly. Charles had only to reach up and cut his throat.

"Stab him,'' Gray Owl said from the dark^.

Charles's knife hand began to shake. Scar hung over him like a meal sack someone was filling; it became heavier and heavier.

Reach up.

He couldn't do it. He pushed with his left hand and rolled from underneath as Scar tumbled away. He'd whipped him. That was enough.

He felt a hand snatch at his right thigh before he comprehended what it was. Gray Owl ran forward as Scar sat up, cocking the Army Colt he'd plucked from Charles's holster. Despite the mud coating the piece, the mechanism worked. Gray Owl stepped in front of Charles to shield him, and the two Cheyennes exchanged shots. The tracker took the one meant for Charles.

Scar's head flung backward in the mud with a sloppy splash. He was hit, though Charles couldn't tell where. Up on the rise, the ponies of the four riders neighed and tossed their heads. Gray Owl sank to his knees and discharged three more rounds at them. In Cheyenne, he shouted that Scar was killed. The Indians hastily formed a file and trotted out of sight.

Gray Owl exhaled, a weary sound. Charles scraped mud out of his eyes and crawled toward the tracker as he relaxed and slipped down onto his back. In the village someone raised an alarm.

Charles lifted Gray Owl in his arms. The tracker's shirt was slippery with mud and blood. The starlight whitened his face, which showed a remarkable repose.

"I found the way for us, my good friend. Now I go on."

"Gray Owl, Gray Owl," Charles said in a broken voice.

"I go on as my vision foretold. I go —"

"Gray Owl."

"There." With a tremor in his hand, Gray Owl reached for the veil of stars. The Hanging Road. His hand fell back to the bosom of his shirt and Charles heard the rattle and felt the shudder as he died.

He held Gray Owl's body while he studied that of Scar, motionless with the Army Colt in his hand. He knew there was something he should do but exhaustion and confusion kept it from him a few moments. Then he remembered. He envisioned a platform high in a tree, nearer to heaven. It was his duty to build that for Gray Owl, a good man. He had believed his gods wanted him to lead others, even if that led him to exile, and the white man's path, and death. To the end he was faithful to the vision. Charles wished he had something as strong to believe in.

But he did. He remembered Gus. He remembered Willa.

Gently he laid the body on the muddy grass. He slipped twice gaining his feet. He heard clamorous voices behind him. Red Bear and his people. They would help him build Gray Owl's resting place. He turned around to wait for them.

Dying but not dead, Scar raised himself a few inches and shot Charles in the back.

GEO HAZARD

CARE OF HAZARDS

LEHIGH STATION PENNSYLVANIA

THE CRIMINAL BENT APPREHENDED AND EXECUTED IN THE INDIAN TERRITORY ON THE 27TH INST. I HAVE THE EARRING.

CHARLES MAIN

FT LEAVENWORTH KANS

BY TELEGRAPH

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

"Unfortunate," said the Boss. "Very unfortunate, Stanley. I thought you'd make an excellent congressman from your district when Muldoon retires at the end of the next term. You're well known, you can afford to campaign, your positions are highly principled."

Stanley knew what that last meant. He was obedient to orders from the state machine, which was under his guest's absolute control.

The two of them were seated near the bust of Socrates at the Concourse, Stanley's favorite club. Stanley's face had a pale and saggy look these days. He was standing fast in the face of daily exposes, principally in the Star. Although Stanley was forty-seven and his guest, Simon Cameron, seventy, Stanley felt that the Boss was the more vigorous. He'd stayed slim. His hair showed no sign of thinning and his gray eyes revealed none of the dullness of imminent senility that Stanley noted in some men Cameron's age. The Boss had returned to the Senate in '67, and had never been so powerful. Political intrigue agreed with him.

Reflective, Cameron sipped his Kentucky whiskey. A warm spring twilight gilded the windows near them. "As to circumstances now," he resumed, "I must be candid with you. Usury may not be illegal but it is certainly unpopular. And Northerners have grown tired of flogging the South. The Dixie affair has actually generated a surge of sympathy for the victims of carpetbag profiteers." He raised a hand to placate his host. "That's a newspaper term, my boy, not mine. But it is regrettable that the moment Dills was confronted with that Klansman's confession, be caved in."

Stanley snapped his fingers to summon one of the servile waiters. He called for another round so blithely, Cameron was puzzled. Stanley was under enormous pressure because of the stories linking him to ownership of Mercantile Enterprises, which owned the forty-three Dixie Stores throughout South Carolina. Almost daily Stanley made a public denial of his guilt; he explained nothing, merely professed his innocence with the determination of old Stonewall resisting the enemy at First Bull Run. Given Stanley's past behavior, Cameron expected him to be not only visibly tired, which he was, but also completely unnerved, which he was not. Remarkable.

Stanley said, "I presume Dills cooperated in hopes of keeping what's left of his practice. In the past year or so his circumstances have been greatly reduced. No one's sure about the reason. He had to resign from this club, for example. He couldn't afford it any longer."

"Like our friend Dills, I presume you'd like to keep something, too? Such as your good name?" The lean old Scotsman's face showed a familiar severity. "You have no political future without it."

"I have nothing to do with the Dixie Stores, Simon. Nothing." There; another sign of Stanley's surprising new assertiveness. Until recently he'd been timid about using the Boss's first name. "I have stated and restated that to the press, and I'll continue to say it, because it's true."

Cameron puffed his lips out and moved his tongue behind them as if trying to dislodge an irritating seed. "Well, yes, but to be candid, my boy, in the Republican hierarchy, they don't believe you."

Stanley sighed. The elderly black man in a fusty formal suit offered his silver tray. Stanley took his glass, which contained twice as much whiskey as the one given Cameron. "Then perhaps I had better be somewhat more forthcoming. I do aspire to that House seat. Of course, to clear myself completely would be hard. Emotionally."

Cameron, who could read most men easily, was thrown. "What are you talking about?"

A swift glance showed Stanley there were no members close enough to hear. A magnificent tall clock behind the periodical table chimed, six sweet, deep notes.

"I'm talking about the Dixie Stores. When they were established, I admit that family funds were used. I had no knowledge of it at the time, however. I was too busy overseeing General Howard's programs at the Bureau." His eyes, so like a mournful hound's, actually sparkled now. "Mr. Dills can verify that all of the stock of Mercantile Enterprises is registered in the name of my wife, Isabel."

The senator from Lancaster nearly spilled his drink.

"Are you saying she operated the stores?"

"Yes, and she started them on her own initiative, after a visit to South Carolina. Of course I discovered it eventually, but I have never had any knowledge of the details."

The older man guffawed. Stanley took offense but quelled his resentment. Cameron shook a long finger. "Are you telling me that you absolutely deny any association with the Dixie scandal?"

"I am. I do."

"You expect the party and the public to believe that?"

"If I keep saying it," Stanley returned calmly, "I expect they will, yes. I knew nothing. Isabel is an intelligent and driven woman. The shares belong to her. I did not know."

Simon Cameron tried to align this bland, imperturbable Stanley with the timid naive man he had advised to look into some sort of profitable Army contract early in the war. Stanley had grown enormously rich selling shoddy shoes. He had also changed while Cameron's attention was elsewhere. The Boss couldn't find the old Stanley in the new one.

Relaxed in the leather chair, he gave a grudging laugh. "My boy, that congressional seat may not be out of reach after all. You are very convincing."

"Thank you, Simon. I had a master teacher.'

Cameron presumed Stanley was referring to him. He took note of the clock. "Will you join me for supper?"

Stanley handed Cameron another surprise when he said, "Thank you, but I can't. I have invited my son here to dine."

Laban Hazard, Esquire, just twenty-three and only two years out of Yale, had already established a Washington practice. It was not prestigious, but it was profitable. The majority of Laban's clients were murderers, perpetrators of stock frauds, and husbands charged with adultery. Laban was a slight, fussy young man whose earlier handsomeness was fast being eroded by too little sunshine and too much Spanish sherry.

In the club dining room, over excellent lamb cutlets, Stanley explained his predicament, and his decision to speak in more detail to prove his innocence. Laban listened with an unreadable expression. Under the gaslight his carefully combed hair resembled the pelt of an otter just out of a creek.

At the end of Stanley's long monologue, his son smiled. "You prepared well, Father. I don't think you'll even need counsel if the shares are registered as you say. I'll be pleased to represent you in any unforeseen circumstances, however."

"Thank you, Laban." A syruplike sentimentality flowed through Stanley. "Your wretched twin brother is unredeemable, but you gladden my heart. I am happy I took the initiative in reuniting us."

"I too," Laban said. He belched. "Sorry." The S sound was prolonged; Laban had already drunk one sherry too many.

"Will you contact the Star for me? I'd like a private meeting with their best reporter, as soon as possible." Stanley's voice was pitched low. There was no mistaking what he wanted his son to do.

"I'll take care of it first thing tomorrow." Laban twirled his wineglass. Then, avoiding his father's eye, he said, "You know I have always had difficulty feeling affection for my mother."

It was uttered in a monotone; Laban was in his lawyerly mode. He made the personal confession sound ordinary.

"I know that, my boy," Stanley murmured. He felt triumphant; he would survive, and ascend to new heights. "But we mustn't harbor ill feelings. She will need compassion when the storm breaks."

Three days later, Saturday, Stanley was in the stable behind the I Street mansion. In shirt sleeves and already fortified by two morning whiskeys, he was admiring his matched bay carriage horses. They were the joy of his life; they symbolized the benefits of wealth.

"Stanley."

Her harpy voice brought him around to face the wide doorway. A pale sun was trying to break through the night mist from the Potomac. The stable had a friendly smell — earth, straw, manure. Stanley saw a copy of the Star in Isabel's hand.

"Please leave us alone, Peter," he said. The young black groom knuckled his eyebrow and left.

Isabel was ashen. She shook the newspaper at her husband. "You fat vile bastard. When did you do this?"

'Transfer the shares? Some time ago."

"You won't get away with it."

"Why, I think I already have. I had a congratulatory note from Ben Wade yesterday. He commended my honesty and courage in the face of a draconian choice. He lauded my future as a Republican. I understand the White House considers me exonerated."

Isabel detected the spite in his treacly tone. She started to revile him, then thought better of it. She felt the weight of her nearly fifty years, and she was suddenly afraid of this pudgy man in disarrayed linen whom she'd held in contempt for so long. She crossed over to him.

"What are we going to do, Stanley?"

He stepped away from her imploring hand. "I am going to institute divorce proceedings. Laban has agreed to handle matters. I can't condone the policies of your Carolina stores."

"My —?"

"I have my future to think of," he went on. Isabel's face showed a sick disbelief. "However, I've instructed Laban to arrange for transfer of five hundred thousand dollars to your personal account. Consider it a sort of parting gift, even though you served me ill as a wife."

"How dare you say that? How dare you?"

Suddenly Stanley was quaking. "Because it's true. You constantly humiliated me, belittled me in front of my sons while they were growing up. You deprived me of the one woman who ever cared about me."

"That music hall slut? You simpleton. She wanted your purse, not your privates."

"Isabel. That's revolting." Deep within, some little gnome of spite laughed aloud. Isabel prided herself on refinement. He'd finally broken her.

He continued. "That remark is further proof of my assertions. Even so, I'll still give you the money to tide you through the scandal. All I ask in return is that you stay away from me. Forever."

The blooded bays nuzzled one another from their adjacent stalls. Shafts of brightening sun speared down from the hayloft. Outside, hidden by the mist, Peter whistled a minstrel song. Isabel's astonishment turned to rage.

"I taught you too well. I taught you too much."

"That's true. Growing up, I never thought very highly of myself or my abilities. Neither did Mother. Neither did George. You convinced me I could become successful if I wasn't overly scrupulous about how I did it." Christ, how he hated her. He was openly nasty for the first time. "In your old age you can take pride in that accomplishment."

"I did too much for you," Isabel screamed, charging at him, fists flying. She was slight; no match for him, flabby as he was. Stanley didn't mean to hurl her away so hard. She struck her shoulder against an empty stall and cried out, then sat down. Bewildered, she gazed at her twisted skirt. She'd gotten manure all over it.

The young black groom dashed into the wide doorway and checked there, a silhouette against the sunlit mist. Stanley was startled by the strength of his own voice:

"Nothing wrong, Peter. Go about your work."

"I was too good to you," Isabel said, leaning her head against the stall and weeping. "Too good."

Blinking, Stanley said, "Yes, I would have to agree, even though I don't imagine it was intentional on your part. And when you were too good to me, you made a grave mistake, Isabel." He smiled. "Please be out of the house in twenty-four hours or I'll be forced to lock you out. I must excuse myself now. I'm thirsty."

He marched away into the mist, leaving her to stare at the filth on her skirt.

65

Richard Morris Hunt designed the mansion. It occupied the entire block between Nineteenth and Twentieth on South State Street. To lure so fashionable an architect to Chicago had been a great feat. As with most everything else, Will Fenway found that overpaying by a third got him what he wanted.

The extravagance didn't concern him. It was impossible to spend his money as fast as he made it. The Fenway factory had expanded three times, the firm was ten months behind with orders, and, late in '68, Will's sales director, LeGrand Villers, had added three more company travelers, based in London, Paris, and Berlin. Will was beginning to think there were more whorehouses in the world by far than decent Christian homes.

Will Fenway was already sixty-eight when he engaged Hunt. He knew he wouldn't live more than a decade or so, and he wanted to enjoy himself. He asked Hunt to build him the largest, most ostentatious house possible. Mr. Hunt had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and was the foremost apostle of French Second Empire architecture, considered by people of taste to be no mere revival of an old style, but the essence of modernity.

Hunt designed a granite castle of forty-seven rooms with mansard roofs on its three wings, and a spendthrift use of marble columns, marble floors, and marble mantels throughout. Will's billiard room was large enough to hold a small cottage; Ashton's ballroom would have accommodated three. Only one incident marred construction of the house. At the top of each mansard slope was a cast-iron cresting. Ashton one day discovered that Hunt had ordered these manufactured from his design by Hazard's of Pittsburgh. She flew into a rage and sent a letter discharging Hunt. In reply, her husband received an angry telegram from the architect. Will was forced to leave the factory, where he usually worked a minimum of twelve hours Monday through Saturday, and jump on a train for the East. He begged for several hours to get Hunt to overlook the insulting letter.

The crisis passed, and the Fenways moved into the mansion early in the summer. They spent many pleasant hours discussing and selecting a name for the house. Every important residence had a name. He wanted to call it Chateau Willard; Willard was a miserable man's name, but somehow it had an impressive ring when connected to a house. In choosing the name he suspected that he lacked taste, but he figured his money compensated for it, and people would therefore excuse his lapses, so he might as well go ahead with whatever pleased him. "Chateau Willard," he declared.

Ashton rebelled. Instead of nestling sexlessly in his arms that night, she moved into her own three-room suite. She stayed four days and nights, until he came tapping at her door to apologize. She let him in on the condition that they modify the name to Chateau Villard, with the accent on the second syllable. He seemed relieved, and agreed.

The year 1869 brought a riot of prosperity to the owners of Chateau Villard. Will couldn't believe the sums flowing in, or the number of Fenway uprights shipped out. A magnificent Fenway grand piano was already in the design stage, and there were orders in hand for the unbuilt instrument. Given all this, Ashton realized she was finally in a position to explore ways to revenge herself on her family. As a first step, she asked Will for a personal bank account. After some consultation with the Fenway Piano Company's bookkeepers, he established it with an opening balance of two hundred thousand dollars. In February Ashton decided she'd pay a visit to South Carolina as soon as weather and her schedule permitted. She had no definite idea of how she would proceed against her brother and Orry's widow; she merely wanted to search for possibilities.

The staff of Chateau Villard expanded from three persons to twelve, including two stable hands, during the first three months of what was to become the 1869 spending spree. Ashton bought paintings, sculpture, and books by the crate. A two-thousand-dollar red morocco set of the works of Dickens excited Will's admiration — he touched and smelted the books reverently when they were delivered — but he remained an unpretentious man, and only read such things as Alger's stories of plucky and enterprising young fellows who succeeded, or the coarse frontier humor of Petroleum B. Nasby, or nickel novels like Spitfire Saul, King of the Rustlers. Although Will had seen the reality of the West, he seemed fonder of the falsification of it.

Ashton tried to get acquainted with the occupants of the mansions above and below Chateau Villard. To the north lived Hiram Buttworthy, a harness millionaire, a Baptist, a man who kept a spittoon in every corner of every room and had a wife so ugly she looked like she belonged in one of his harnesses. Mrs. Buttworthy, a society leader, didn't approve of the flamboyant Southerner who obviously had not married her husband for his youth, his looks, or his prospects for a long life.

To the south of Chateau Villard, apparently without a spouse, lived a suffragist named Sedgwick; whose outspoken views and tart tongue reminded Ashton of her sister — which was enough to engender permanent dislike at their first, and only, meeting. Ashton wasn't discouraged by her inability to get along with her neighbors. The fault was theirs. Isolation from jealous inferiors, she had long ago decided, was one of the prices of great physical beauty.

Will bought a summer cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey. He bought it sight unseen. If the seaside resort suited President and Mrs. Grant, it was good enough for him. He bought a sixty-foot lake sailer, a splendid gleaming yacht with an auxiliary steam plant, which he anchored in a costly slip near the mouth of the Chicago River. Ashton was asked to name the yacht. She christened it Euterpe after finding the muse of music depicted in one of the seldom-opened books in their large library. Reading the book for nearly an hour made her cross and gave her a headache. She was thirty-three, but her interests had changed little since girlhood. She valued her appearance, and men, and power and money, and found everything else both extraneous and annoying.

Will's money gained them certain entrées but not others. A choice table among the palm fronds in the Palmer House dining room was always available, no matter how many people were ahead of them. Yet older women of better background happily accepted Ashton's donations to charities such as the Chicago Foundling Center but they politely ignored her expressions of interest in joining the menu committee for the annual dinner.

Ashton's application for membership in the Colonial Dames was denied.

Her husband had simpler aspirations. He found a convivial group of friends in his lodge, the International Order of Odd Fellows. He hated organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the Patrons of Husbandry, collectives that threatened the capitalist — that is, him.

Ashton's planned visit to South Carolina was delayed by an inspection trip to the furnished cottage at the Jersey shore. She found the parlor walls decorated with gaudy chromos of the Rockies and the California coast. Will greatly admired the cheap art, and said this was his kind of place.

But they were too early for the summer season, so Ashton pouted and wheedled until he took her to New York, where they saw Bryant's Minstrels, Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, and Mr. Booth's production of Romeo and Juliet. Tickets for this last were in such demand, Will had to pay a scalper one hundred twenty-five dollars for each. Then he fell asleep in the second act, and snored.

Ashton bought three trunks of new clothes. City streets were in such deplorable shape, a lady's skirt got soiled and water-stained within a few weeks of the first wearing. Ashton never bothered to have such garments cleaned; she threw them out. Occasionally, she saw them later on her servants, retrieved from the rag bin.

Will didn't mind. He admired his wife's opulent figure and loved to see her smartly dressed. She was welcome to all the cash he would have spent on a large wardrobe for himself. He got by on a few stiff white collars, two pairs of bright checked trousers, a favorite floral waistcoat, and a solid gold watch chain and enormous gold nugget cuff links. In an assembly of these, and without a coat, he felt supremely fashionable. The hell with what anyone thought.

"I'm going to miss you," Villers said, drawing his hand slowly between Ashton's legs.

"I won't be gone that long, darling. A week or two —"

"Forty-eight hours without this has gotten to be too much for me."

She laughed, took his hand, pressed the palm against her left breast, and wiggled pleasurably.

LeGrand Villers was a vigorous man with a thick head of curly dark blond hair. A Northerner, he had once dealt cards for a living on the Mississippi boats, and although he wasn't much in the looks department, he was extremely masculine and had a persuasive way about him. In the two years since he'd wandered into the Fenway offices seeking temporary work to pay some gambling debts, he had risen from supply room clerk to salesman to manager of the sales force, and had seduced Ashton along the way. Villers was unequivocally the best-endowed lover Ashton had ever known. In token of this, he was represented in her Oriental box by two buttons.

Ashton's belly and thighs were splashed with sun spilling through a porthole above the bunk. Euterpe swayed gently with the lap of the river in the slip. The main stateroom had a warm, private feel this June morning. The master and the mate never sobered up and came aboard until past noon, which made the yacht an ideal place of assignation.

"Well, I admit you drive me crazy too, LeGrand." Powell had been handsomer, but not quite as virile.

"And you really don't think Will knows about us after all these months?"

"He knows I have lovers, though we don't discuss it. He understands that I'm a young woman with, ah, needs."

"One of which seems to be a need to go to Carolina. I can't imagine why. I visited Georgia once. Just a lot of darkies and air-headed girls and mush-mouthed whelps who mumble 'yes, sir' while thinking up ways to fleece you."

"LeGrand, I ought to throw you out of my bed for that. I'm a Southerner." She'd just demonstrated it with a heavy dose of the accent she had gradually suppressed during her years of residence in the North. She had gotten used to everything in the North but the howling white storms of the Chicago winter, which must be some kind of curse God had placed on Yankees.

"I want to see my family," she added. Her eyes were like blue-black agates. "A friendly visit."

"Friendly?" Villers toyed with her again. "I've never heard you say anything friendly about those people."

She arranged her unbound hair on each shoulder and eyed the ticking clock nearby. Only a quarter to eleven. Fine.

"Why, I've changed, LeGrand. People do change."

He snickered. "Learned to cover up how much you hate 'em, is that what you mean?"

Ashton stroked his blocky jaw. "I knew I liked you for something besides what's in your trousers. Now don't you tell my secret. Come on over here and do your duty."

A dockhand passing on the pier five minutes later noticed Euterpe showing a slight roll in the water, which was unusual for such a calm day.

"The hack is here to take you to the depot, madam."

"Load the luggage, Ramsey."

The butler bowed and retired. Despite his clipped British speech — the reason Will had chosen him over other applicants — Ashton considered him just another slave. He was chained by wages instead of shackles, but that didn't entitle him to any better treatment. Part of the joy of servants, and of the vanished peculiar institution, was having other human beings in fear of your every word.

Will strolled out of the billiard room. The gold nugget links were so large his cuffs sagged. Although he'd aged, he looked much healthier and sprier than he had when Ashton met him in Santa Fe. Success sat well on him.

His lively blue eyes admired his wife a moment. Then he patted her cheek, as if she were a favorite cat.

"Behave yourself."

Ashton felt a little jolt. She saw nothing but warmth in his glance, but his remark reminded her of his warning after she shot the senora's brother-in-law without good cause. No one but Will could inspire the same little thrill of fear she enjoyed inspiring in others.

"Yes, sweetheart. Always," she said.

She registered at the Mills House as Mrs. W. P. Fenway, Chicago. The staff naturally took notice of an attractive woman traveling alone with eleven large pieces of luggage. But no one got a very clear look at her features; she was heavily veiled. There was nothing to reveal that she was a Main.

Ashton deplored the condition of lovely Charleston, which still showed many ravages of war. Darkies lounged everywhere with an air of impertinence that would have gotten them horse-whipped when she was a child. There were still some Yankees in blue uniforms to be seen.

She hired a closed carriage for a tour. The Battery brought back memories of the exciting weeks when Sumter lay besieged. She stood by the harbor while her driver waited at a discreet distance. She looked seaward, a splendid figure of a woman with her waist whaleboned to sixteen inches. She wore velvet the color of fine Burgundy, yards and yards of it in her full flaring skirt with bustle. It was hellishly hot, but the effect was worth it. Strollers enjoying the summer air wondered about the expensively dressed, rather melancholy woman gazing across the water to the Atlantic. Were her thoughts romantic? Was she sweetly musing over some lost love?

I hate you, Billy Hazard. Everything might have been different if you'd loved me instead of my prissy little sister.

Ashton blamed not only Billy but also Orry, Cooper, and Madeline for her exile and her ghastly months of whoredom — and never mind that Lamar Powell had enchanted her with his plans for a new Confederacy of which she was to be first lady. As she considered all she'd lost because of the self-righteous behavior of her own family, she felt the old hatred renew itself. She sniffed and dabbed her eyes dry with her glove and returned to the carriage, ordering the driver to proceed slowly along East Bay.

There she surveyed the house where she'd lived with poor Huntoon. She felt no emotion except contempt.

On narrow Tradd Street, passing the gate of Cooper's residence, she recoiled against the carriage cushions as a woman came out. Cooper's plain-as-bread wife, older but still sharp-nosed and flat-bosomed. Ashton averted her face despite the veil. She called for the driver to go faster. There wasn't a shred of doubt — she hated them all.

During the next few days she learned some surprising things. For one, Orry had never made it home from the war. After ordering Ashton and Huntoon out of Richmond for their role in the Powell conspiracy, he'd gone on duty on the Petersburg lines, where some Yankee had shot him.

Ashton briefly examined her reactions to that. She felt neither sorrow nor remorse, only more anger at her gaunt one-armed brother. His death cheated her of an important opportunity for reprisal, and she didn't like it.

Madeline was living alone, prosperous but despised because of her scalawag ways. Ashton heard about the Klan outrage at Mont Royal and the new house under construction, and then, from a tipsy journalist with whom she flirted, she learned something else which truly excited her. Everyone in town knew it. Mont Royal was heavily mortgaged.

"A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Fenway," said Leverett Dawkins, enthroned in his special office chair. "How might the Palmetto Bank be of service this morning?"

Ashton sat with perfect posture on the edge of his visitor's chair. The careful way she drew her shoulders back emphasized the line of her full bosom, something the banker did not miss. She watched his eyes slide upward to her face — the poor fool obviously thought his attention had gone undetected — and she knew she had the advantage. She was familiar with Dawkins's name but she had never met him; therefore he would never associate her with the Main family.

Outwardly composed but inwardly straining, she said, "I want to inquire about property in the district. I have old family ties in South Carolina. I treasure the Charleston area and I would like to have a home here."

"I see. Go on, please."

"When I was driving on the Ashley River road the day before yesterday, I saw a lovely plantation that captured my heart. I've been back twice since then to observe it, and my feeling remains the same. I hoped you would be able to tell me something about the property."

"To which plantation do you refer, ma'am?"

"I was told the name of it is Mont Royal."

"Ah, the Main plantation," he said, leaning back. "The owner is Mr. Cooper Main of this city."

Hearing her brother's name startled and confused Ashton. Fortunately her heavy black veil hid her momentary disarray. She recovered, saying smoothly, "I thought a woman controlled the place —"

"You're referring to the owner's sister-in-law, Mrs. Orry Main." Ashton noted a certain distaste when he said that. "Yes. She lives there by arrangement with Mr. Main. She's a sort of resident manager, responsible for the operation of Mont Royal. But Mr. Main holds the title."

Carefully: "Might the plantation be available for sale?"

He thought it over. He considered what he knew of Cooper's feelings about the Negro school, and his hatred of Madeline Main's complicity in the marriage of his daughter to the Yankee. Dawkins's visitor raised a new and most interesting possibility, one in which he saw a dual advantage. Profit, and ridding the bank of a relationship that had grown irksome.

"There is a substantial mortgage on Mont Royal," he said. "Held by this institution."

She already knew that, but didn't let on. "Oh, what luck! Do you suppose the owner, this Mister, ah —"

"Main," he prompted.

"Would he sell if the mortgage could be paid off as part of the transaction?"

"Naturally I can't speak for him, but it's always a possibility. If you would be interested in making an offer, the bank would be happy to act as your representative. For a fee, of course."

"Of course. I'd insist on it. And upon some other conditions as well. My husband, Mr. Fenway, is a wealthy man. In fact, he's richer than Midas. Do you know Fenway's Piano Company?"

"Who does not? Is that your husband? Well, well."

"If Mr. Main found out who was trying to buy his plantation, he might inflate the price unreasonably."

"We can make sure that doesn't happen. If we act in your behalf, you can maintain complete anonymity until the sale is consummated." That pleased her, he saw. "You mentioned conditions in the plural —"

Her heart was beating so hard, she almost shook. Here it was — the chance for the perfect reprisal she'd dreamed about for years. Fighting to keep tension from her voice, she said, "I would want the sale to be completed very quickly. Within a matter of a few days. I would want to take title, and possession, before I return to Chicago."

He frowned for the first time. "What you ask is irregular, Mrs. Fenway. And difficult."

She sat back, as if withdrawing her friendliness. "Then I'm sorry —"

"Difficult," he repeated, swiftly raising one hand. "But not impossible. We would bend every effort."

"Excellent," she said, relaxing. "That's just excellent. Perhaps we can move on to specifics? A suggested offering price. Please name the figure. Not unreasonable, mind. But high enough to be irresistible to this Mr. Cooper Main. That's the magic word, Mr. Dawkins."

She lifted the black veil slowly to let him gaze on her sweet poison smile. He was entranced by the wet gleam of her lips and the even white beauty of her teeth as she whispered to him:

"Irresistible."