The Mountain

by David L. Golemon

  “Colonel Thomas, I’m Lieutenant Biddle, C Company, Fort Dodge. We were sent to find you, sir.”

  Thomas tossed his Henry rifle to Gray Dog, who was staring at the man on the ground with hatred in his eyes, and then he confronted the young, fresh-looking lieutenant who stood at least seven inches shorter than the colonel.

  “But you decide to stop off for some sport instead,” John Henry said as he took the man by the tunic collar and shook him. The colonel had been ashamed of army blue since the battle of Bull Run in 1861. He caught himself before his famous temper became apparent.

  “Colonel,” the boy stammered as Thomas released his uniform collar. “We thought they were a band of hostiles that raided into Kansas last week. We thought—”

  “Enough, Lieutenant.”

  “She’s dead, Colonel, shot before this animal started dragging her away,” Dugan said, rising from the body of the young woman.

  “May I attend to my wounded man, sir?” Biddle asked, afraid to look the large man in the eyes. The wounded sergeant had stopped screaming and was mumbling as the blood flowed heavily from his wound. Soon he stopped moving completely and the lips stiffened into a tight line of death.

  “That man fell to enemy fire from the hostiles, and that is what your report will read, Mister, is that clear? If it isn’t, consider yourself under arrest for the illegal killing of an aboriginal family.”

  The lieutenant swallowed hard against the bile rising in his belly. Thomas glared at the new officer until he could bring his boiling blood back down to normal. He was sorely tempted to give the boy a hard whack across the face, but past experience—and the reason for him being out west in the first place—stayed his gauntleted hand.

  “Tend to your other wounded and get these bodies buried.”

  “No, John Henry, leave them,” said Gray Dog as he continued to check for any form of life from the eight Sioux. “They will be found and the death rites performed by their own. More Sioux will come.” Gray Dog looked up after checking for a pulse from a small boy of only six or seven. “More will come.”

  Thomas nodded but didn’t like leaving this innocent family for the wolves. He finally turned to the lieutenant with a scowl. “Now, what in the hell are you doing this far away from Dodge?” he asked as he took a menacing step toward the young man who was reaching into his tunic as quickly as he could. He pulled out a telegram and passed it to Thomas, who was finally joined by Sergeant Major Dugan. The officer appraised the bearded sergeant and his filthy bowler hat and wondered just what sort of soldiers these men were who traveled with a savage and were as arrogant as any two men he had ever seen before.

  “Major Cummings received this telegram from Washington City.”

  John Henry opened the folded paper and read. Dugan, ever curious, held his patience while Thomas finished reading.

  “Well, boyo, has the brass in Washington found a new and better way to have us killed than being stuck out here in Indian territory”—he looked over at the lieutenant—“where it seems young fools have the right to shoot and kill whoever they want?”

  “Who are you?” Biddle asked Dugan.

  “He’s the second name mentioned in this telegram, and he is a sergeant major, in every way your superior, is that also clear, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Dugan raised a brow and snickered at the boy’s naiveté. “Well, since it mentions your old sergeant major, what in the bloody hell does it say?”

  Thomas turned and walked a few steps away and then addressed Gray Dog, who was looking at him, afraid that he would again lose his friend to the war in the east. John Henry winked at him.

  “Feel like traveling?” he asked the young Comanche. He turned back to Dugan. “We’ve been recalled to Washington.”

  “Now, Colonel Darlin’, don’t tell me we’re going to drag dog-head boy with us?”

  “I’m not leaving him again. He comes with us and the Army can go straight to hell if they don’t like it.”

  “Well, we’re probably being recalled just to be put in front of a firing squad anyway.” Dugan smiled at Gray Dog. “Yeah, maybe old dog-head should come along.”

  Gray Dog only watched the two men, who always seemed to be at odds. He knew Dugan was close to the colonel, almost as close as himself, but the man was rougher than a corncob and he took a lot of getting used to.

  “I guess old George B. McClellan finally got his way and reached out and grabbed us.”

  Thomas quickly and briefly smiled for the first time.

  “Oh, no, McClellan isn’t in command any longer. We received word that General Grant turned the Rebs back in Tennessee and George Meade whooped Lee in Pennsylvania … somewhere called Gettysburg.”

  “Then who in the hell recalled us?” Dugan asked, perplexed, as he was expecting to be either court-martialed or designated to the west for the rest of his career. Thomas handed Dugan the telegram.

  The sergeant major opened it, observing the colonel’s smile. He lowered his eyes and read the words slowly. He wasn’t as accomplished as Gray Dog at reading, but he managed. It was the one name at the bottom of the telegram that gave him chills. He folded the telegram and then walked away a few paces, still seeing that name—Stanton.

  “The secretary of war?”

  “Yes, but he would never have sent that without authorization,” Thomas said as he accepted the telegram back from Dugan.

  “Who, then, Colonel?”

  “I imagine the order came from the president.”

  “President? You mean President Lincoln?” Dugan said as the color drained from his face.

  “Yes, at least he was president before our little trip to the western climes.”

  The young lieutenant just stared at the filthy men before him. Just who in the hell were these two that they received personal messages from not only Secretary of War Stanton, but also from Abraham Lincoln?

  * * *

  Two hours later Gray Dog, Sergeant Major Dugan, and Colonel John Henry Thomas were riding east toward Fort Dodge and closer to the madness that had overtaken the nation.

  They assumed they were heading back to war against their brothers in the south.

  4

  FEDERAL CONFEDERATE PRISONER OF WAR CAMP, FORT LAFAYETTE, NEW YORK

  AUGUST 1864

  The fort was built on a small rock island lying in the Narrows between the lower end of Staten Island and Long Island, opposite Fort Hamilton. Hamilton was designed and built by Robert E. Lee, then a major in the United States Army, and overlooked the older post that housed the rebellious men of the Confederacy. The crowded conditions would have shocked most northerners, who complained so bitterly about the treatment of Union soldiers in camps such as Andersonville. If the truth had been known, Fort Lafayette was almost as bad. There was no funding to keep prisoners fed and clothed with the massive slaughter still continuing in the south. Lafayette held mostly commissioned and noncommissioned officers the Union would never exchange back to the South for Union officers. The men here were considered much too valuable to the Confederate war effort and would remain interned for the duration.

  The man stood six-foot-three. Most of the weight he had been able to maintain through the early yea rs of the war had long since departed. Confederate Lieutenant Colonel Jessop Taylor stood over Lieutenant Giles Pentecost, a boy of only twenty, who stared up at him from the ragged cot where he lay dying. It had been six days since the four nurses and the constantly drunk country doctor had been to the camp to treat the sick. That left most of the care and healing to the other prisoners of the camp, and they were losing a battle with the elements, the food, the lack of cold-weather clothing, and the biggest killer of all, typhoid fever. This was what young Pentecost and over a thousand other prisoners were dying from. The rest were sick with malnutrition, trench foot, and the filth of living in such close quarters.

  “We tried, didn’t we, Colonel?” the boy said as his eyes stared at a spot to his right where Jessy Taylor wasn’
t standing. Taylor stepped to the side, hoping the boy could see him better. He didn’t. The eyes were covered in white film and the face was drawn. Taylor reached down and took the boy’s hand. He had to pry the filthy blanket from his fingers to do so.

  “We gave them hell, Giles, old boy.”

  The young lieutenant went into a fit of shivers as another prisoner stepped to the cot and handed Colonel Taylor a wet cloth. He nodded to the other thin prisoner, who was starting to suffer the chills of the early onset of the same illness. Taylor used his free hand to apply the cloth to the boy’s forehead. Thankfully Pentecost closed his milky eyes as the coolness touched his burning skin.

  Suddenly the young lieutenant’s eyes opened and seemed to fix on Taylor.

  “Why didn’t General Stuart come back for us?”

  Taylor didn’t know how to answer. They had performed a rearguard action to stall and make time for Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to escape from the Virginia countryside more than a year past. The action had caused the surrender of Taylor’s regiment, which never received orders to fall back after Jeb Stuart’s escape. They had been in a series of camps since their capture and had finally arrived in New York and Fort Lafayette last fall. Since that time Taylor had lost more than three hundred men to disease and starvation.

  Taylor recalled that dark, rainy night on the outskirts of Antietam. General Robert E. Lee had praised Taylor in the Richmond newspapers, saying it was a classic textbook example of a rearguard action. Taylor thought differently. The heroic James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart had escaped the trap but had never sent word back to Taylor to break off the action and return to the Army of Northern Virginia. Taylor knew Stuart to be a brilliant commander, but that night he had fallen far short of his reputation, just as he had at Gettysburg in July the previous year when he became a missing element in Lee’s attack in Pennsylvania.

  He finally looked back at the boy with his customary answer to that infernal question. The boy was staring at nothing. He had died. Taylor gazed at the face of the young man who had been barely old enough to shave, and then angrily tossed the now-dry cloth into a corner.

  “We’ll take care of the lieutenant.”

  Taylor finally stood on shaky legs and faced the man he had been with since the start. Sergeant Major Ezekiel McCandless nodded that he too was saddened at the loss of the brave boy. Taylor brushed a hand through his dirty brown hair. He felt the lice crawling on his fingers when he lowered his hand but made no move to shake off the pests.

  “That’s eight just this morning. We have to plant them now; the heat’s going to turn them fast, I reckon.”

  Jessy Taylor angrily pushed past his sergeant major and stepped outside into the hot sun. His gray undershirt was already soaked through with sweat and it was only eight in the morning. He looked toward the high fence and the guards who patrolled it. One was eating an apple and staring at him, and was soon joined by the commandant of the camp, Major Nelson Freeman, a Boston abolitionist’s son who held no love for the Confederacy or the men who fought for her. Taylor saw a cruel smile cross the major’s features. He actually nodded his head in greeting at Taylor and then moved off with his hands behind his back as if he was pleased another Rebel was on his way to hell. Colonel Taylor knew he would kill that man someday for his cruelty at Lafayette.

  McCandless ordered two men to carry the body away to join the others who had died that morning and the previous night. The sergeant major used the tattered remnants of his uniform jacket to wipe sweat from the sides of his thickly bearded face.

  “We have to get the men out of here, Colonel. Anything is better than dying like pigs in a filthy pen.”

  Taylor glanced back up at the smiling guard on the wall, who tossed his half-eaten apple down into the muddy yard where six men immediately started fighting for it.

  “The last that I heard, Ezra, most people feed their pigs.” Taylor’s eyes never left the corporal, who was now laughing at the winner of the fight for the apple core. The man was covered in mud, as was his trophy, yet he ate the apple without concern for the filth.

  “And yes, it is time for us to take what’s left of our boys and get the hell out of here.”

  “’Bout damn time too.”

  Taylor looked at the sergeant major, who had lost more than seventy pounds himself, and nodded. “I want officers’ call at sixteen hundred; all noncoms will attend. We have to start gathering information, as much as we can get. I need to know what harbor is the closest. We’ll never be able to get anywhere overland; we have to make our escape by sea. That means the Yank guards who are known to be loose-tongued have to be handled right to get what information we need.”

  While Taylor spoke he continued to spy the retreating form of the camp commandant as he made his way around the stone battlements.

  The most renowned Confederate cavalry officer outside of Jeb Stuart, a classmate at West Point, had made up his mind to get his men out of Lafayette or die trying.

  CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK CITY

  Professor Lars Ollafson waited patiently, tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons that walked around his bench. He held the satchel between his feet as his eyes scanned the area around him. The people of the city avoided the park for the most part, since the army had taken it over for training. Several Union soldiers walked past, laughing as they made their way from the Sheep Meadow at the center of Central Park. Ollafson watched the soldiers leave, and then as his eyes moved he spied the man he had been waiting for. The young student walked to the bench and sat. He unfolded a New York Herald and started to read.

  “I have the lockbox secured, Professor. The artifacts will be well guarded.”

  Ollafson didn’t respond as he tossed the last of the bread onto the ground. He carefully used his shoe to slide the satchel toward his student.

  “Is that everything, Professor?”

  “All except for the two planks. I still need them for the president’s meeting with the war department.”

  “I thought you were not to be included on the expedition. I was under the impression the president refused to let you go.”

  Ollafson stood. “With the ace I have up my sleeve, young man, I don’t see how Mr. Lincoln can leave me out of it.” He finally looked down and spared the boy a brief smile. “I mean, he does not know what is really there, does he? The expedition has taken far too long to plan and coordinate. If the president’s chosen officer does not arrive from the west soon, all will be lost.”

  “I don’t understand,” the boy said as he finally lowered the newspaper to look at his former Harvard professor.

  “It has taken me more than a year to get the expert translation of the symbols, and now I will explain the real reasons we must get to our find before anyone else.” The smile grew on Ollafson’s face as he turned and started to walk away. “The president cannot refuse me when he’s informed. There is too much at stake.”

  “What, Professor? What is more important than the artifact?”

  “God, young Simon. God.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later the student carried the heavy satchel toward the New York Bank and Trust Company in Times Square. There he would deposit the satchel in a safe where no one could access the material except Ollafson himself. He smiled as the doorman opened the glass door for him.

  “Deposit vaults?” he asked.

  “Second floor, sir,” the doorman said. The former student in Ollafson’s Harvard religious studies course nodded and moved toward the stairs.

  Just as he stepped onto the marble-tiled second-floor landing, he was confronted by two uniformed New York City policemen. They deftly grabbed the young man by the arms and steered him toward a room where another man in civilian attire was waiting with the door opened. The student started to say something, but that was when the club silenced him and he went limp in the two men’s hands. The satchel fell to the floor and the man holding the door smiled and retrieved it, following the three inside the empty office.

  The
two men dumped the boy unceremoniously on the wooden floor. The one on the left knelt over the young student.

  “Ah, we must have hit him too damn hard. He’s not breathing.”

  The civilian looked unconcerned as he stepped over the boy’s dead body, removed an envelope from his jacket pocket, and handed it over to the corrupt policeman. He opened it, saw the bills inside, and then nodded and the two policemen left the room. The man waited until their footsteps retreated, and then he dropped to a knee and opened the satchel.

  He was shocked to discover it filled with papers. Old paper, new paper, a few rocks, but no artifacts. He angrily emptied the bag and then tossed the satchel as he searched in vain for the material he had been hired to retrieve. Frustrated, he pushed at the gathered papers, knowing he had just wasted a thousand dollars and would have to face the people who had hired him for the job, and they were far more unforgiving of failure than even himself.

  He cursed his luck, realizing that Professor Ollafson had removed all evidence of the artifact from his satchel before handing it over. As he was about to stand, something caught his eye. He reached out and turned over a large and very thick paper and studied the design upon it. His brow furrowed and he reached up and removed his top hat, then took the paper to a window so he could see in the dim lighting of the room. He held the paper up as the light revealed strange designs on its surface. It looked to be copied from something. A rubbing, perhaps—he wasn’t sure. He decided that maybe he wasn’t left empty-handed after all.

  When the well-dressed man with satchel in hand stepped from the bank building, ignoring the pleasantries of the doorman, he could not help but see the strange drawings and writings on the pages he had recovered. They were burned into his retinas and he could not shake them free from his brain.