by John Jakes
She expected the brigadier back by nightfall. She was glad. She loved him, though he never uttered the word; probably never thought it in connection with her. She finished cutting the biscuits and laid them in rows on an iron sheet for baking after the sun went down; the stove’s heat would take the chill off the shabby rooms.
She thought she heard a wagon somewhere close by. Looking out the window, she saw nothing. On the sill, burnished by sunshine, lay a clumsy six-barrel Allen pepperbox Duncan had bought for her soon after their arrival in Kansas. The Allen dated to the 1840s, but it was dependable for its purpose. In the event of an Indian attack, and impending ravishment, a woman was supposed to use a bullet on herself. The likelihood of Cheyennes or Sioux coming to loot, burn, and rape at a post as civilized as Leavenworth was ridiculous. Nevertheless the custom persisted; most Army women kept a loaded piece handy.
She heard a sound behind her. Gus was there. The sight of him, soon to be denied her, made her all the more blue.
Charles’s son was four. A sturdy boy, he didn’t resemble his father except for the warm brown eyes. Those were definitely Charles Main’s eyes, but the shape of his face was squarer. Gus must have gotten that from his mother, the brigadier’s niece, along with his dark blond hair, which formed a cap of tight curls. This morning he wore a gray work shirt and jeans pants with a strap pinned over the shoulder, and quilled moccasins bought from a hang-around-the-fort.
Gus was a smiling boy, but afraid of his father, which made Maureen all the more resentful of Charles’s return. He was quick-witted, too. Maureen read to him every night. He knew most of his letters already.
“Reeny—” That was his name for her, a corruption from his first attempts to say Maureen. “I want to go out and play.”
“Will you be warm enough?” He nodded. “All right, but stay in the garden where I can see you. Watch out for Indians.”
“There aren’t any Indians except the old fat ones who sit around.”
“You never know, Gus. Just keep your eyes open, because you never know.”
He sighed, feeling put upon, and from behind the partially open door fetched the broomstick horse Duncan had made and painted for Christmas a year ago. The horse was a golden color, with a foamy white mane. Duncan had put amazing realism into the painted eyes on the cutout head.
Gus took hold of the rope rein and was soon galloping up and down beside the garden plot, switching the broomstick with an imaginary quirt and then raising the same hand as a pistol fired by the index finger. Watching the boy romping in the sunshine, Maureen grew sadder still. He made her so happy. Why must she lose him?
She went to her room to lie down for five minutes. Perhaps what she was feeling was the onset of the female vapors; she was no longer a young woman. There was gray in her hair. She was very tired. The five minutes lengthened to fifteen.
Gus had slain about three dozen wild Indians when the wagon creaked out from behind the last dwelling in the row of identical houses. The peddler man wrapped the reins on the brake lever, glanced around as if hunting for customers, then climbed down.
Little Gus stood still, watching. He’d been slightly alarmed by the wagon’s sudden appearance. Although there was no lettering on the side, he knew the wagon belonged to a peddler because some tin pots were hung on hooks above the driver’s seat. Now he was more curious than scared, because the grinning peddler in the plug hat carried a fancy cane with a large gold knob that shone in the sunshine. Something else glittered below the peddler’s left ear. Gold and white, it reminded Gus of similar ornaments he’d seen on the ears of officers’ wives around the post. He’d never seen a man wearing one.
Assisting himself with his cane, the peddler came down behind the row of houses toward the boy. At each house he glanced at the back window, as if continuing to search for ladies to whom he might sell his tinware. The man’s left shoulder was tilted slightly below his right one. From the way the peddler’s mouth worked, Gus had the idea that it hurt the man to walk.
“Good morning, my lad. I’m Mr. Dayton, purveyor of kitchen goods and domestics. What’s your name?”
“Gus Main.”
“Is your mother inside?”
“Don’t have a mother. Reeny takes care of me.” He ran up the steps and peered in the door. He didn’t see Maureen or hear her. “Don’t know where she is. She was making biscuits.”
He stayed on the bottom step. The peddler had a stale, bad smell, and something in his eyes upset Gus; he didn’t know why. The peddler kept staring at him and rubbing the gold knob of his cane. Gus swallowed, trying to think of something to say.
He pointed suddenly. “What’s that?”
The peddler stroked the bauble hanging from his ear. “Oh, just a little present from someone who owed me something. Would you like to pet my mule? He’s a good old mule. He likes his ears scratched.”
Gus shook his head, determined to have nothing more to do with this pestering, vaguely alarming man. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come along, pet him; he’s hankering for it.” Without warning, the peddler grabbed his hand, so tightly Gus immediately knew something was wrong.
“Gus, who’s out there with you?” It was Maureen. The peddler’s voice had carried, and brought her from her room. She pulled the door open and confronted a sight that frightened her for reasons she couldn’t altogether explain. It was the stranger’s eyes, possibly. Bright as those of a rabid dog she’d seen one time. In his greasy old claw-hammer coat, he didn’t look respectable. He held Gus’s wrist so tightly his fingers were white.
“You’d better let go of that boy, whoever you are,” she said, starting down the steps. With a tremendous grunt, the man raised his cane over his head and bashed her skull.
Maureen pitched backward into the kitchen without a sound. The peddler lifted Gus off the ground, pinning him under his arm and covering his mouth with his left hand. The boy was strong and kicked and tried to cry out. The peddler scarcely had time to scratch something in the dirt with the ferrule of his cane.
The peddler lumbered through muddy garden plots back toward the wagon. All at once he was less confident about the outcome of his plan, which he had based on two principles: surprise and terror.
After locating Charles, and then his child, through Department headquarters—he’d been astonished to find the youngster on the same post where he made his inquiry—he’d prepared with some careful observation. For intervals of five minutes to a half hour during the past two days, he’d watched the movements of those living on officers’ row.
It wasn’t hard to do. Civilians moved about Fort Leavenworth with relative ease. When he first came to the post, he had no trouble convincing the gate sentries that he was a peddler, and that was the also the case when he made his inquiries, and, later, observed the officers’ quarters. He looked like a peddler, which was just what he intended when he bought and outfitted the wagon with money taken from the dead farm couple in Iowa. Twice, while the wagon was parked near officers’ row, people had questioned him, asking if he needed help. He immediately busied himself with one of the mule’s hooves and said no, he could handle it, thanks, and that was that.
The one phase of the plan he’d pondered a long time was night versus day. At night, too many of the officers were in their quarters, while at this hour of the morning he had to deal only with women. Of course that was offset by the additional risk of discovery in daylight. But surprise and shock often slowed people’s reactions. So he’d chosen daylight, audaciously, considering the stroke entirely worthy of the American Bonaparte.
Now he wasn’t so sure. They boy tried to bite his hand. The peddler squeezed harder, until the boy’s muffled noise indicated pain. “And you’ll get worse, a broken neck, if you don’t keep quiet,” the peddler whispered.
At the second-to-last house on the row, an older woman’s round red face looked out the kitchen window and registered astonishment. The woman ran to her door. “What are you doing with the brigadier’
s boy?”
By that time the peddler was up on the wagon. He flung the boy into the back and wrapped his head and mouth with a long rag, just tight enough to keep him quiet until they got off the post.
The hardest part was keeping the mule to a steady, ordinary pace while he drove away from officers’ row. He heard the woman exclaiming behind him and banked on her running first to Duncan’s, to rouse Maureen.
A troop of young cavalry replacements trotted by, going the other way, their drill sergeant cursing them for sloppiness. The peddler heard his captive kick and moan down behind the driver’s seat. He snatched up his cane, reached behind him, and brained the boy twice with the gold knob. The second time, the boy went limp.
The peddler watched to be sure the boy was still breathing, then wiped a spot of blood from the knob and perked up the pace of his mule, rolling toward the sentry box at the gate.
Thirty seconds more and he was through, giving the sentry on duty an amiable tip of his old beaver hat. In another minute, the wagon pulled to the left and overtook a line of three oxcarts hauling wood to Leavenworth City. The peddler’s wagon passed them smartly and disappeared up ahead.
Charles watched the ticking clock. Half past ten. Willa had promised she’d be back from the Playhouse by eleven-fifteen, so he had a while yet to peruse the St Louis Democrat.
The paper carried an astounding letter, written by Captain Fred Benteen of H Troop. The letter vividly accused Custer of callous abandonment of Major Elliott and his detachment that day in late November. After the one search party had been turned back by hostile fire, Custer had sent out no others, concerning himself only with getting away from the menacing Indians on the bluffs. Exactly as Charles had heard it described, Custer’s plan had been carried out. A march downstream with the band playing convinced the Indians that one or more of the remaining villages would be attacked. The Indians scattered to defend them, Custer countermarched, and his command escaped safely in the darkness. Leaving Elliott’s body and the bodies of sixteen others where they fell.
No two accounts agreed on the number of Indian dead at the Washita. Custer claimed one hundred forty, all adult males, based on a battlefield count. Charles had seen no such count made while he was there. Later reports credited to “scouts” lowered the total to twenty to forty men, including Black Kettle, and an equal number of women and children. Charles believed the lower numbers; General Sully had recently admitted that Plains commanders usually inflated the number of hostiles killed in order to prove their military ability and satisfy a bloodthirsy public.
In early December, Generals Sheridan and Custer had marched back to the Washita and there discovered the bodies of Elliott and his men. Elliott had fallen facedown with two bullets in his head. The others, all stripped, were mutilated, some with throats cut, some decapitated.
And here was Benteen, mocking Custer’s flight with bitter words: Custer, whom the Osage scouts lauded for his stealth by giving him a new name, Creeping Panther; Custer, whom the Olive Branchers were flaying as “another Chivington”—and not without justification, Charles thought. He fingered the brass cross he wore so he wouldn’t forget what a man was capable of doing when he lived without pity, humanity, reason.
He couldn’t believe Benteen had meant the letter for publication, though. Fred Benteen hated Custer but he was an experienced officer; he knew the rules. Charles was sure the paper had gotten hold of the letter in some unusual way. He was embarrassed by the satisfaction he got from seeing Benteen’s accusations in print.
He heard footsteps in the hotel corridor and cocked his head. Ten-forty. Too early for—
She burst in, her face still made up. He tossed the paper aside. “What’s wrong, Willa?”
“This came to the theater, for you. Someone slipped it to Sam onstage and he stopped the performance. Rang down the curtain.”
“Why?” It puzzled Charles that a telegraph message could cause such consternation.
“Read it,” Willa whispered. “Just read it.”
YOUR BOY STOLEN BY FORCE YESTERDAY.
ABDUCTOR SEEN BY MAUREEN WHO COULD NOT STOP HIM.
HE LEFT A WORD MARKED ON THE GROUND. B-E-N-T.
IS THIS NOT THE MAN YOU HAVE MENTIONED.
AUTHORITIES IN LEAVENWORTH CITY HAVE NOT CAUGHT HIM.
COME AT ONCE.
DUNCAN
It took three readings for Charles to believe it. Willa looked stricken, watching the skepticism crumble from his face, to be replaced by something frightening.
On the way north from the Washita it had struck Charles that he was beginning a long and arduous climb back out of the abyss of hell. Now he knew he’d mistaken the point at which he started the climb. The Washita wasn’t hell, but only hell’s doorway; Sharpsburg had been hell’s doorstep, and Northern Virginia, hell’s approach road—
His mind was a chaos of loss, thoughts of Bent’s hatred, Gus Barclay’s death, his failure as a father.
If only I’d been with him—
If only I’d been there—
He looked at the message in his hand. He knew what hell was. He was there.
Book Six
The Hanging Road
YOU AND I ARE both going home today by a road that we do not know.
CROW SCOUT to GENERAL CUSTER
before the Little Big Horn, 1876
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.”