by John Jakes
“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 café 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 M
edicine 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 hide 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 rapers. 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.
___________
INAUGURATION.
_____
Commencement of the New Era of Peace and Prosperity.
_____
Ulysses S. Grant Formally
Inducted
Into Office as President.
_____
He Delivers a Brief and
Characteristic Address.
_____
Economy and Faithful Collection
of the
Revenue Demanded.
_____
The Ceremonies Marked
by Unprecedented Display
and Enthusiasm.
_____
Special Dispatches to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Thursday, March 4
The ceremonies attending the inauguration of GEN. ULYSSES . GRANT as the eighteenth President of the United States were today carried out with a completeness and a degree of brilliant success which is a most auspicious augury for the success of the Government, now transferred to such earnest and patriotic hands. …
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
March, 1869. Grant is president. Hostility to him here is understandable, but the national mood is one of optimism. Because he organized military campaigns so successfully, and so often speaks of the need for peace after four bitter years, expectations for his presidency are high. …
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 man
euverings 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 blearily 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.