by John Jakes
To one of the worried troopers standing there, Charles said, “Run back to Satan and open my right saddlebag. Bring me the tobacco plug you’ll find inside. Easy now, Toby. You’re lucky,” he lied. “An arrow in the leg is nothing. If you get one in your belly or chest, they play the funeral march before you fall down.”
Toby’s mouth wrenched, a sad attempt at a smile. Sweat popped out on his face. Charles pulled the buckskin away from the wound and studied the arrow. “Take hold of my left arm. Hang on tight.”
The trooper rushed back with the tobacco plug. Charles opened his mouth and the trooper dropped it in. Charles started chewing vigorously while he grasped the painted shaft and gently worked it from side to side.
It felt crimped in there. He exerted more pressure. Toby’s eyes bulged. His nails almost dug through Charles’s shirt.
“Easy, easy,” Charles kept saying, the words sounding squishy because of the chewing tobacco. Toby grunted in reaction to the pain, then rolled his shoulders off the ground. “Keep him down,” Charles exclaimed. Two troopers restrained the wounded man.
Blood was pouring from the wound now. Charles tried to imagine his hands were a woman’s, with a woman’s light touch. He continued to work the shaft one way, then the other, back and forth, back and—
He felt it loosed. A lump formed in his throat, big as a rock. “All right, Toby, we’ll be done in just a couple of minutes.” He talked to divert the man’s attention. “Just hang on for a couple of more—” He yanked. Washington Toby screamed and fainted.
Charles sagged. He rocked back on his haunches, holding in his right hand the shaft, its bloody head only slightly bent. In a moment Toby opened his eyes. Groggy, he started to weep.
“Go ahead and cry,” Charles said. “I know it hurts. What I’m going to do now will help some, until we get you to the fort. Tobacco’s an old Plains medicine for wounds.”
He spat several times, filling the wound with brown juice. He kneaded the edges to mix blood and tobacco thoroughly. There was no spurting; no darker blood showed. The arrow had done no serious damage.
He wound on a tourniquet and ordered his men to wrap Washington Toby in blankets and let him rest aboard the train. One of the troopers, a shy boy named Collet, gave Charles a look of admiration.
“You a good officer, Mist’ August.”
When he reached the other side of the train, Gray Owl said to him, “There is one Arapahoe dead. Shall we leave him?”
Charles wiped his mouth. On the point of saying yes, he changed his mind. “If you can repair one of those platforms in the trees, put him on it. Since he’s already dead, I guess we can give him that much. I’ll hold the train.”
Gray Owl gazed at him steadily, then turned and left.
“Lieutenant,” the conductor said, his voice carrying a note of complaint now, “you’ve got to take time to look at the wounded man in here. I think he’s all right, but I’m no doctor.”
Charles nodded and wearily climbed the metal steps. The civilians moved back to allow him through. From between facing seats, boots and yellow-striped cavalry trousers jutted into the aisle. The wounded man leaned against the wall, his right arm limp.
For a moment Charles saw nothing but the wound, a wet red hole in the upper sleeve. Then he took notice of the man. Saw a fine-featured face with glacial blue eyes and russet-colored mustache and beard. Because so much had happened, recognition was a second slow. It hit him as he started to kneel.
“Main,” said the officer. “Or is it May?”
“My name is—” He stopped. What was the use?
In the aisle the conductor said, “This man’s name is Lieutenant August.”
“Hell it is.”
“I’ll have a look at your wound—” Charles began.
“Don’t touch me,” said Captain Harry Venable. “You’re under arrest.”
37
MAJOR GENERAL PHILIP HENRY Sheridan, Department of the Missouri, summoned Grierson to Leavenworth. The two met on the day of Sheridan’s departure on extended leave.
Grierson walked in while Sheridan was still conferring with his aide, Colonel Crosby. Sheridan was thirty-six, single, with a Black Irish swarthiness and a tough air enhanced by a Mongol mustache and soap-locked hair. He intimidated Grierson; it was more than rank, or the traditional tension between officers who’d graduated from West Point and those who hadn’t. Sheridan was famous for being opinionated and ruthless.
“Just finishing with the report on the train fight,” he said after returning Grierson’s salute. “Have a chair.” He shoved a sheaf of papers at his aide. “Telegraph the railroad and tell them to get this dog-fucking idiot Hartree out of Kansas. I won’t have vigilantes interfering with the United States Army.”
Colonel Crosby cleared his throat. “Yes, General. It’s delicate, though. The railroad stockholders are still very upset about the Indian threat.”
“Goddamn it, Sam Grant and Crump Sherman put me here to take care of the whore-kissing Indians, and I’ll do it. I have no sympathy for them. The only good Indians I ever saw were dead. Follow my instructions. Hartree goes.”
The aide saluted and retired. When the door closed, Sheridan went to warm his hands at the iron stove. It was late November, gray and bleak.
“Grierson, there is absolutely nothing I can do for Charles Main. Harry Venable came over to Departmental staff to serve with Winnie Hancock last spring. I don’t like the little shit, but he’s a competent soldier.”
“Main is an outstanding one.”
“Yes, but he’s also an unpardoned reb who lied about his war record and the Academy. Twice.”
“I encouraged him the second time, General. I thought he looked first-rate and I wanted him for the regiment. I’m as much to blame as—”
“Don’t say another fucking word. I didn’t hear those last ones, either. I’m well aware of Main’s ability. He came to summer camp just before I graduated. A year or so later I was told that Bob Lee, who was the supe, thought him the finest horseman in the cadet corps. But he’s got to go.”
“They’re only suspending Custer from duty for a year, and look at all the charges brought against—”
“Colonel, I don’t want to hear any more,” the little commander said, leaning on his desk. His black eyes bored into the unhappy cavalryman. “Curly Custer fought for the Union. I’ll tell you something else. He’s a goddamn magnet for men. They’ll slit each other’s throats to serve with him.”
“Some of them. Not the men who testified against him. Not his own commanding officer—”
“Will you for Jesus Christ’s sake shut up? I can’t save Main’s balls on the basis of what happened to Custer. Furthermore, I’m going to drag Curly’s ass back here as soon as I can. I want him in my department, because that pissant treaty will never hold. Now you go back to Main and you tell him I’m sorry but he ought to be grateful that I was able to slide him out with just a bobtail discharge instead of three years’ hard labor with a ball and chain to keep him company.”
Grierson rose, his face showing strain. “Yes, General. Is that all?”
Sheridan’s expression softened as he rolled a cigar between his palms. “It is. Isn’t it enough? Dismissed.”
At Harker next day, Grierson delivered the verdict to Charles, who stood before him in stoic silence. Ever since he’d come upon Harry Venable in the passenger coach, he’d known this moment was inevitable.
“I told you early that I couldn’t save you if someone caught you, Charles. I tried. I tried damn hard. You’re the only one-hundred-percent cast-iron rebel in the regiment, yet you’re the strongest partisan of those Negroes.”
“I don’t do them any special favors, sir. With a couple of exceptions, they’re fine soldiers. They try harder than most.”
“That’s true. During our first year we’ve had the lowest desertion rate in the entire Army, and the lowest rate of disciplinary infractions. I told you I had a vision for the Tenth, and you helped make it work. I’
m just sorry as hell things didn’t work out right for you.”
“I guess a man can be forgiven almost anything these days except being a Southerner.”
“Your bitterness is understandable.” He was silent a moment. Charles watched night settling on the post outside Grierson’s window. The office was freezing. Snowflakes were starting to fall. “What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Get drunk. Find work. Kill some Cheyennes.”
“You’re not over that yet?”
“I’ll never be over that.”
“But you saved the Arapahoe prisoners.” One had died the day after being locked in the Fort Harker guardhouse. The other was comatose in the dispensary, refusing to eat.
“I said kill, sir. I didn’t say torture. There’s a difference.”
Grierson studied the tall, faintly menacing soldier with the furious eyes. In Charles’s case, he thought, the difference was slight. He didn’t say it, however. Stroking his immense beard, he asked, “What about your son?”
“He’ll have to live on Jack Duncan’s charity a while longer.”
“Well, keep in touch with him. A man can stand to lose a lot of things, but not his loved ones.”
Charles shrugged. “Maybe it’s already too late. God knows I’ve lost everything else.”
Another silence. Grierson could barely stand it. He avoided Charles’s eyes as he said, “You’re to be off the post by morning. But no one will protest if it takes you a little longer to say goodbye.”
“It won’t, Colonel. A quick and clean cut’s always the best kind.”
“Charles—”
“Do I have the colonel’s permission to go?”
Grierson nodded. He returned the salute and watched Charles pivot, leave, and shut the door. Then he slumped in his chair and looked at the cased photograph of his wife. “Alice, I hate this goddamned world sometimes.”
The snow fell harder. Charles collected his few belongings and went on his round of farewells. The sentries on duty in the icy dark still snapped to with salutes; indeed, they seemed more respectful than ever.
In the bachelor officers’ quarters he said goodbye to Floyd Hook. Floyd was unkempt, unshaven. He’d returned from a patrol a week ahead of Charles to discover that his wife had run off with a driver for the Butterfield Overland Despatch line. She’d taken their three-year-old daughter, too. Charles had heard that Dolores Hook had tried to kill herself by swallowing something last year. Some Army wives just buckled under the worry and loneliness. Floyd looked like he was starting to buckle, too. He reeked of beer. Charles spent ten minutes trying to cheer him up and failed.
In the married officers’ quarters he said goodbye to Ike Barnes and little Lovetta, who wept and hugged him like a mother. The old man, always less than loquacious and ever fearful of showing sentiment, nevertheless squeezed Charles’s arm repeatedly and kept his head turned away, unwilling or unable to speak.
Charles found Gray Owl sitting cross-legged, asleep in the dark under the eave at the back of the sutler’s. The tracker was wrapped in several blankets and buffalo robes; one covered his head like a monk’s cowl. “You’ll die of exposure,” Charles warned after he woke Gray Owl from his doze.
“No. I can stand any weather but a blizzard. I taught myself long ago.” Gray Owl stood up, shedding the robes and blankets. He gripped Charles’s shoulder and stared into his eyes. “I will miss you. You are a good man. What you did, sparing the captives in spite of your hatred, that was good.”
Charles had no reply except another tired shrug. Gray Owl asked the same question that Grierson had, to which Charles answered, “I don’t know what I’ll do or where I’ll go. Off by myself, more than likely. The colonel let me keep my Spencer, and Satan.”
“I think we are much alike,” the tracker said. “Outcasts. I went apart from the People when they lost their way.”
Gray Owl watched the slanting snow driven on the wind. “Like my father, I took a captured white woman for my wife. I treated her well and loved her very much. Three winters past, while I led the society men and the young warriors to the herd for the final hunt of the year, some jealous squaws tormented my wife with sharp sticks. She bled her life away, and no one would punish the women for their cruelty. The brother of the woman who led the others, a hate-filled man named Scar, praised them and told their story many times. When I returned and saw all this, I knew the People had strayed too far for me to lead them back. So I turned from them, forever. But if you are ever lost, Charles, and I can lead you to safety, I will.”
“Thanks,” Charles said, almost inaudibly. He was anxious to hurry through the rest of his goodbyes. It was beginning to hurt too much.
He embraced Gray Owl and left the Cheyenne resettling himself against the log wall of the sutler’s. From a few steps away, he looked back. In the lamp-lit dark he saw Gray Owl’s shoulders and blanket cowl dusted with white, like some strange stunted shrub that had died in the winter.
In this weather the men of the Tenth had no choice but to hole up in the foul, cramped huts that served as Fort Harker barracks. Charles stepped around the corner of the hut in which most of his detachment was bunking. Through the plank door, above the keening night wind, he heard Magic Magee’s voice.
He shifted his buffalo overcoat and muskrat cap with earflaps to his left arm and eased the door open a couple of inches. By the light of oil lamps, he saw Magee kneeling on the dirt floor. “Now boys, you will observe that in this hand I have a stack of three ordinary tin cups, like we drink from every day. Say, would you slide back, Sergeant Williams? I need more space.”
Charles smiled for the first time in quite a while. He watched Magee pluck one cup from the stack and invert it on the floor with a swift, sweeping motion. Magee placed the other cups similarly, in a line.
“What I am about to show you, boys, is one of the incredible mysteries of the ages. Back in Chicago, somebody told me that way over in some old tombs in Egypt, there are pictures of a magician doing this same cups and balls trick. Here’s the ball. An ordinary little sphere of cork.”
He showed it between the index and middle finger of his right hand, then pushed it into his left, or appeared to push it, making it vanish.
“Shem, where’s the ball?”
“Gone,” Wallis said.
“Gone where?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why, come on. It’s gone traveling.” With rest, Magee raised the first cup to reveal the cork ball.
He took the ball, made it vanish in his hand, and revealed it under the second cup. Charles had watched him often enough to know the secret: four balls, one loaded in each cup beforehand and kept from falling out by Magee’s skill in inverting the cups and snapping them down fast on the hard ground.
Magee started his patter again, but Williams felt the doorway draft, raised a hand, and reached for his sidearm. “Somebody out there?”
Charles opened the door wide and went in. “Only me, watching the show. I’m off, boys. I brought this coat and cap. Sell them to whoever you can and put the money in the company fund.”
A couple of muttered thank-yous followed, but that was it. Charles felt self-conscious. So did the men. The smiles they tried were thin and sad. He stood there above the ring of black faces, his black hat slanted forward over his eyes. Snow was melting and dripping from the brim. The corners of his gypsy robe scraped the dirt.
He cleared his throat. He felt as awkward and nervous as he had the first time he was called to a West Point blackboard to recite. “I just want to say—you men are good soldiers. Any officer would be—” The words caught. He cleared his throat again. “Proud to lead you.”
“We proud to have you lead us, too,” Shem Wallis said. “They give you a bad deal, those generals.”
“Yes, well, sometimes that’s all there is to life. A hell of a bad deal.” He shook his right arm gently. In the crook lay his rifle. “At least Colonel Grierson let me keep my Spencer and my horse.”
Star
Eyes got to his feet, rubbing his knuckles back and forth over his mouth. Charles noticed the scar from the man’s hotel days. Haltingly, Williams said, “Since I was about the first man to speak against you, I guess I should be the one to take it all back. For a Southerner, you’re a real white man.”
The soldiers laughed at the unconscious racism in the remark. Charles smiled. Flustered, Williams put out his hand.
“We’ll miss you, C. C.”
Charles’s hand stopped in midair. “What?”
“He said C. C,” Washington Toby answered. His leg was still bandaged, but he was able to get around.
“It means Cheyenne Charlie,” Magee said. “Cheyenne ’cause you’re so fond of them.”
“Well, Cheyenne Charlie. I guess that nickname fits. I like it. Many thanks.”
He turned and started out. “Sir? I clean forgot,” Williams said, reaching inside his plaid flannel outer shirt, one of two worn over his regular blouse and long underwear. “This was stuck in my desk for a week. Guess they put it there while we was riding the railroad.”
Charles took the pale gray envelope, inscribed in a familiar hand. He held it between thumb and fingertips, tapping it thoughtfully while his eyes froze again.
“Thanks. Night,” he said, and left. The last thing he heard as he shut the door was Magic Magee calling out:
“Don’t forget about the marker.”
At the sentry post nearest the stable, a fire had been lighted against the freezing cold. Charles walked toward the tatters of flame driven horizontally by the prairie wind.
He’d put on gauntlets and he was carrying his Spencer in his left hand, the stock leaning against his shoulder, the blued barrel jutting up behind him. His boots crunched the accumulating snow as he quickened his step, anxious to be away.
As he passed the sentry’s fire, he tossed Willa’s unopened letter into the flames. He was quickly hidden by the dark inside the stable. Ten minutes later the sentry heard hooves in the snow, receding fast, the only sign of the rider’s passing into the vast winter night.