Stryker's Revenge

Chapter 1

Excited, apprehensive, no one wanted to wait until morning. It was the witching hour, dark, but the bandages would come off now.

The desert wind threw itself at the adobe wall of the hospital, rattling the timber door and the windows in their frames. Blowing sand drove through the unquiet night and sifted into the fort’s buildings, coating floors and furnishings, grit grinding into the wool blankets of fretful soldiers, making them toss and turn and groan in hot, troubled sleep.

Attracted by the rectangles of amber light that spilled onto the ground from the hospital windows, a thin, stunted calico cat blinked in the wind like an owl, then climbed onto a sill and looked through a dusty, fly-specked pane.

The cat saw, but could not comprehend, the scene inside. She would never know it, but that night her ignorance of humans and their ways was a rare stroke of good fortune in her hard, desperate life.

There were four people in a room curtained off from the rest of the empty hospital ward. The single guttering oil lamp that hung from a ceiling beam touched three of them with halos of light and shadow, darkness pooling in the hollows of their cheeks and eyes, giving them the austere look of painted medieval saints.

The man sitting up in the bed, the object of their interest, had no face.

His head was wrapped around and around in white cotton, like a museum mummy. Only his eyes, sky blue, frightened, were visible. Those and the gash of his mouth, the bandages above and below stained by the food he’d eaten that day.

His hand, once strong and tanned mahogany brown, but now thin, white and veined with blue, was clasped in both those of the beautiful girl sitting on the man’s bed. Her brown eyes sought his, penetrating the fearful mummy mask, concerned . . . adoring.

“It will be all right, Steve,” she whispered, smiling. “Dr. Decker says you’re as good as new.”

Colonel Abel Lawson beamed at his daughter. “Of course he is, Millie.” He took a step toward the bed and looked down at the bandaged man, grinning from under the sweep of his great dragoon mustache. “It’s been two months, Steve. I’ve never known Surgeon Major Decker to stay sober that long.”

“Indeed, sir, but it’s a state of affairs I intend to remedy as soon as Lieutenant Stryker’s bandages come off,” Decker said. He was a small, gray-haired man, buttoned into a white coat worn over a careless, shabby uniform.

Decker’s eyes moved from the colonel to his daughter and back again. Like a man who can’t swim and stands on the bank of a turbulent river, asking how deep the water is, the doctor’s voice held a note of uncertainty.

“It’s been this long,” he said. He looked at Stryker, as if seeking his support. “It could keep until morning.”

“Nonsense, Major,” Colonel Lawson blustered. “The sooner the lieutenant is back on his feet”—he knew this next would bring smiles, and it did—“and safely wed to my daughter, the better.”

He looked at Stryker. “I need you at my side in Washington, Steve. A few more days for your cuts and bruises to heal, and then a captaincy and the capital, as my aide. It will make your career, especially with my lovely daughter on your arm to dazzle the men and turn the women green with envy.”

“Father, I fear I may have to fend the women off.” Millie smiled as she squeezed Stryker’s hand. “Steve will be quite the handsomest man in Washington, you know.”

“Indeed,” Lawson agreed. “Now, you haven’t changed your mind, Lieutenant—or should I say Captain? Are you still willing to leave this Arizona hellhole for the shady boulevards of the capital?” The colonel, eager to seal the deal, added a barb. “As for myself, I should think you would. It’s not often a junior officer with no connections or social position is given such an opportunity. Your father is a clergy-man, is he not?”

“Papa,” Millie scolded, a frown gathering between her eyebrows, “what a singularly unfortunate thing to say.”

“I speak only the truth, my dear. Lieutenant Stryker is a soldier. He understands such things.”

Stryker tried to smile, but his mouth felt stiff and unyielding under the bandages.

For a moment he felt a surge of panic that quickly passed. As far as he could tell, the bullet wound in his side had healed, thanks to Decker. When the man was sober he was a good doctor, and Stryker told himself that his smashed face was no doubt back to normal.

Time would tell . . . when the bandages were removed.

“I haven’t changed my mind, Colonel,” Stryker said. His voice was a harsh croak, far removed from the usual fine baritone that he had so often used to entertain his fellow officers with selections from Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan’s latest operettas.

He had not lied to Lawson. He hated, with a passion, the silent, brooding desert, its infinite distances, the land and sky scorched to the color of chalk. And there was no honor to be gained fighting Apaches, no medals awarded for killing Stone Age savages.

Without the colonel, he could end up as so many others had done in the frontier army, an aging captain, if he was lucky, with nothing to look forward to but a retirement of genteel poverty eked out in some dusty western town, with stories to tell but no one to listen to them.

As though he’d read the lieutenant’s thoughts, Lawson slapped his hands together and said heartily, “Come now, Major Decker, shall we proceed with the”—he smiled—“unveiling?”

“The Man in the Iron Mask,” Millie whispered. She put a hand to her mouth. “Why did I say that?”

“Understandable, my dear,” Lawson said smoothly. “After all, the only person who has seen Lieutenant Stryker’s handsome features this past two months is Major Decker. A mask indeed, but of cotton, not iron.”

The doctor, a stricken look on his face, leaned over Stryker and whispered into his ear, low enough that only he could hear. “Steve, God help me, I tried my best.”

Stryker swallowed hard, a growing apprehension in him that was but a step away from fear. As Decker began to unroll the bandages, the lieutenant listened into the wind-lashed night, a man afraid of what was to come.

He winced as the cotton gauze ripped away from dried blood, and Decker whispered, “Sorry.”

Stryker stared at the dusty ceiling, which was cob-webbed in the dark corners where the spiders lived. He again felt the spike of panic.

Two months, and in all that time Decker had not let him look into a mirror!

For God’s sake, why not?

Millie’s hands were hot in his own and he felt sweat on her palms. She was breathing unevenly, quiet little gasps that were now coming quicker as the layers of bandages were peeled away.

Outside, in the darkness, the coyotes were talking, and Stryker heard sentries call out to one another. The wind pounded around the eaves of the hospital, as though eager to be let inside and witness what was happening.

Made uneasy by the hunting coyotes and bored with the human activity, the little calico jumped down from the sill and found a sheltered spot behind the wheel of a parked freight wagon. She curled into a ball, nose to tail, but did not sleep.

When she heard the woman’s scream, she jumped to her feet, head lifted, eyes aglow with emerald fire.

“I’m sorry, Steve!” Millie Lawson jumped to her feet. She didn’t look at him again. “I’m so sorry! I can’t. . . . I just can’t—”

She turned and ran to the door, ignoring her father’s call to stop. The girl threw the door open wide, then dashed blindly into the darkness, her sobs drifting behind her like leaves in a wind.

Shocked, his face drained of color, Colonel Abel Lawson pointed an accusing finger at Decker. “Damn you, Major!” he yelled. “Damn you to hell!”

The doctor looked like a man who had just been punched in the gut. “I did my best to piece him together,” he said. There was no defiance in his voice, only weary resignation.

“Then your best wasn’t good enough, was it?” Lawson snapped. “The damned mule doctor could have done better.”

Stryker looked at the two men, then traced his fingertips over his face from forehead to chin. Battling to keep his voice steady, he said quietly, “Major Decker, please bring me a mirror.”

He didn’t look at his reflection or scream until he was alone.

By then, Surgeon Major Decker was already stinking drunk.