The Bold Frontier

by John Jakes

  “You saw your pa fire off a round at Phil Sheridan?”

  Her eyes drifted to the windblown lace. A bugle pealed somewhere on the prairie. Out past the fence that neatly circumscribed her little house, called the Overton Place after a former owner, a troop of shiny-brown Negro cavalrymen cantered by.

  “No, I never laid eyes on the little fiend. I was in the smokehouse with some of his men who ripped my dress and—took liberties.”

  Rolf Greencastle whistled. All of a sudden he was chilly in the spring air. He’d had a perfectly fine time with Jimmy, as per usual when he paid his weekly visit, but this new twist was disturbing; terrifying. Rolf reached for his fringed deerhide shirt. He pulled it on and smoothed it, then reached beneath to free the necklace of big bear claws he never removed. Rolf was a tall, skinny young man with eight knife and bullet scars at various points on his body.

  “You absolutely sure it was Little Phil?”

  “Yes, it was him. People described him later. Black horse … that funny flat black hat he always wore. It was him, and I’m going to kill him.”

  “Jimmy, I don’t think I’m making myself too clear. Don’t you see that what you said is pretty—well— unusual? You don’t just go tell somebody that you’re going to do a murder.”

  She didn’t say a word; apparently she didn’t agree.

  “Why did you do that, Jimmy?”

  She was tight-lipped and silent a while. Then it kind of erupted in a burst. “Because you’re my friend. You’re not just a customer. After I kill General Sheridan they’re going to lock me up—hang me, probably. I’m going to need a friend to straighten things out. Sell this house and send the money to my sisters in Front Royal.”

  “Well, I appreciate your confidence,” Rolf admitted, touched by her unexpected words. “What I’d rather do, though, is talk you out of it.”

  “You can’t. Sheridan’s villains raped and pillaged the whole Shenandoah, and they wrecked my daddy’s health by throwing him in that Yankee prison, and a Virginian never forgets.”

  “I think I ought to remind you that the war’s been over for three years now.”

  “Not mine, Mr. Greencastle. Mine isn’t over by a damn sight. One more battle to go.”

  And she snapped the cloth so that it popped. Then she wrapped it around the .44-caliber Deringer. He tried to undermine her determination with scorn:

  “If you’re going to kill Sheridan, you bought the wrong gun. That little toy only gives you one shot.”

  She slid out the drawer. “That’s why I bought a pair.” The drawer clicked shut, hiding both Deringers.

  She rose and smoothed her old black bombazine skirt. Rolf Greencastle fleetingly wished that he was just a customer again, not a friend, and didn’t have to concern himself with Jimmy’s mad pronouncement. Which he knew wasn’t so mad. She was a determined thing. Whores had to be to survive.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Rolf. Lieutenant Peebles is due any minute.”

  “All right, but I wish you’d think it over.” In the door he turned back to gaze at her in a pleading fashion. “Please.”

  She gave a little shake of her head.

  “Once a Virginian, always a Virginian.”

  Rolf Greencastle put on his cream-colored Texas hat with its decorative star and red band and left. If General Phil Sheridan did arrive at Fort Dodge as part of his scheduled inspection of the Arkansas River posts now under his command, he was certainly a dead man unless the scout did something about it. But what?

  Rolf lay in his bunk in his underwear with a copy of the Police Gazette in front of his nose. One of those inscrutable turns of fate seemingly designed to torment a man had brought this tattered copy of the paper into the barber shop in Dodge where he went for a semimonthly trim of his luxuriant hair and mustachios. Who should be pictured in an heroic pose on the front page? None other than Jimmy’s announced victim.

  It was four days after his visit to the Overton Place, which Jimmy’s husband and pimp, Nimrod Taylor, had bought and occupied for about three years before he up and disappeared. Jimmy once explained with a sad, resigned look that Nimrod had warned her on their wedding day that he was a restless man. He was also something else, because that day Jimmy had a large yellowing bruise around her left eye. She refused to talk about it. After Nimrod Taylor left, he never came back. At least Jimmy got the Overton Place.

  In the bunk, Major General Philip Sheridan stared at Rolf from within the engraving as if he were infuriated with the scout. The man had a reputation for a temper, and for peppering almost every sentence he spoke with some kind of obscenity, plain or invented. To Rolf, the new commander of the Department of the Missouri looked like an Irish bartender from New York City (Rolf had never seen any of that species, but he had a fair imagination). With his fierce black eyes and squat, bull-like build, and the some how sinister soap-lock hanging down in the center of his forehead, Phil Sheridan looked like one hard son of a bitch. Rolf Greencastle had seen a few other pictures of the general, and none was any friendlier.

  He tossed the paper aside, hiding the face. “She’ll never do it,” he said.

  Then he considered what he knew about Jimmy.

  Suppose she really did murder Phil Sheridan; did she have much to lose thereby? No. Mrs. Jemima Sturdevant Taylor had apparently lived a pretty wretched life till now. She’d inherited the same dark moods, the glooms, that she said contributed to her father’s death. Officers on the post had informed Rolf that on at least two occasions after her husband left, Jimmy had tried to commit suicide. Those scars on her left wrist were the evidence. When she was up, she was bright as a sunbeam, but at other times, there was no telling what dark, tormented thoughts rolled around in the depths of her soul.

  In Dodge they said she had once grabbed a kitchen knife and mortally injured a teamster who had asked for more than he’d paid for and then began to abuse her when she refused. Evidently she thought a wife had to suffer beatings, but not an independent working girl. According to the story, the teamster was not well liked; he died and Jimmy was released after one night in jail and no more was said.

  The image of a gleaming knife sliding into some hairy back, with a consequent gout of blood, caused Rolf to cover his eyes there in the bunk, and change his tune.

  “She’ll do it.”

  He fidgeted for half an hour, trying to think of some scheme to forestall the assassination. He was not a bright fellow, and he knew it, so he didn’t have much confidence in the scheme he finally concocted. But he could come up with no other right then. He found a tack and slipped it in the pocket of his buckskin coat, together with the engraving of Sheridan ripped from the Gazette.

  He saddled Kid, his swift-running little piebald, and set out from his cabin at the edge of town to ride the five miles along the Arkansas to the fort. It was a mean, gusty late-winter day, but you could smell April primping just around the corner. General Sheridan was scheduled to arrive at Fort Dodge the first week in April.

  On the post, he nonchalantly tied Kid outside the adobe barracks that housed B Troop, waited until no one was paying attention, then stole inside. Luckily the dayroom was empty. He tacked Sheridan’s picture to the notice board, slipped his sheath knife from under his jacket and proceeded to stab holes all over Little Phil’s face.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” asked Captain Tipton.

  “Oh, I was just in the neighborhood,” Rolf said.

  Captain Tipton’s face proclaimed his skepticism. “I never knew you to be so social, Rolf.” The captain, whose behind-the-back nickname was Moon Face, was a pale, pudgy young man with a flaxen mustache and small oval spectacles. He’d once been a professor of geography at a young ladies’ academy in Kentucky, a land of divided loyalties during the war. Rolf didn’t know which flag Moon Face Tipton had followed, and Moon Face didn’t say. That he was wearing Army blue meant nothing.

  “Well, the fact is, Captain, I’m worried about this here visit of Phil Sheridan’s next
month.”

  “It’s just a routine inspection of all the posts in the department. Hancock before him made the same tour. Every new commander does it.”

  “Yes, but it might be dangerous for him to stop at Fort Dodge.”

  Now he had Moon Face Tipton’s full attention. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “Well, sir, I was just in the dayroom of B Troop, looking for a fellow that owes me a ten spot. On the notice board I saw this newspaper picture of Sheridan. Somebody cut it up pretty bad with a knife.”

  “You’re jesting.”

  “Sir, I am not.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. Why—?”

  “Captain, there aren’t more’n one or two other generals hated more than Phil Sheridan. Uncle Billy Sherman, for sure, and maybe that cavalry commander of his, Kil-what’s-his-name.”

  “Patrick. Kilpatrick.”

  “Yes, sure. Sir, you know as well as I do, this Plains army contains a lot of men who enlisted under different names than their real ones. A lot of former Rebs,” he added with breathy melodrama, in case Tipton didn’t get it the first time.

  “I’ll grant you that’s true,” Moon Face said. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Well, sir, I thought you might go up the line to your boss, the adjutant, and have him tell General Sheridan that he ought to stay away. Tell him that he ought to bypass this fort.”

  “Tell him not to visit a post he commands? Tell one of the toughest, most determined soldiers who ever served in the United States Army that he shouldn’t come here because someone cut up his picture?” Rolf sank into his rickety chair. Of course he’d failed; he just wasn’t a smart enough fellow. “I think you might as well try to stop one of Mr. Shakespeare’s hurricanoes.” It was all Tipton could do to keep from sounding supercilious. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been studying Pliny again, and I’d like to return to him.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Rolf slouched out, humiliated.

  Humiliated but not whipped.

  He wasn’t going to let the murder take place. He must use force on Jimmy. Restrain her physically from going anywhere near Fort Dodge while Sheridan was there inspecting it. He knew he wasn’t glib enough to talk Jimmy out of her plan, so physical force was the only answer. He needn’t hurt her—wouldn’t ever do that—but he could lock her up and sit with her. For days, if necessary.

  He stole into the B Troop dayroom again, to remove the picture of Phil Sheridan. Since his last visit, someone had penciled obscene words on the general’s cheeks and forehead. It made him look all the madder.

  During the next few days he blew around and around like a weathervane. “She’ll never do it.” “She’ll do it.” The two sentences became his litany.

  He had never thought about Jimmy much when he wasn’t with her, but now that she was endangered he thought about her a lot. He was surprised by the constancy and the urgency of these new feelings.

  Riding past the Overton Place one showery afternoon, he saw her out in back, where the chicken yard sloped away toward the river. Three bottles of different size and color reposed on a log. Ten feet away, Jimmy extended her right hand. He saw a little squirt of smoke, then heard the crack as the amber bottle on the left exploded.

  She heard Kid passing. Turned. Recognized him and raised her hand with the .44-caliber murder weapon over her head and waved. He snatched off his hat and waved back. “She’ll do it,” he said in a strangled voice. “By God she will.”

  Another blast from the other Deringer seemed to verify it.

  On the night before General Sheridan’s scheduled arrival, a dismal night of rain that made the Arkansas rush and roar, Rolf slanted his hat brim over his forehead to drip water and rode Kid to the Overton Place. He carried no weapons, but his saddlebags bulged with groceries bought in Dodge that afternoon. He was prepared for a long siege.

  As he approached through the rain, opened the gate in front of the farmhouse, rode in, he heard a horse nicker. Then he saw the animal tied out in front. Regulation Army saddle. Did Jimmy have a customer from the fort?

  He picketed Kid to the fence by the gate and walked to the porch. If she was entertaining someone, he’d just have to huddle out by the hen house until the man left. He’d just check to make sure; Jimmy never locked her front door even during business hours.

  Sheltered by the porch roof, he eased the door open. Lamplight and the smell of dust drifted out. Beyond the closed door of the bedroom, bedsprings squeaked and groaned, and a bullish voice exclaimed. “Oh, that’s mighty fucking good, oh my Lord yes …”

  Rolf Greencastle would have lit out immediately for the hen house but for the intrusion of that obscenity into the unseen customer’s declaration of pleasure. That word set his hair to crawling under his hat. An unbelievable premonition gripped him. Held him rigid on the porch a good five minutes, while similar professions of pleasure, similarly punctuated with all sorts of bad language, convinced him that his suspicion was correct and that, somehow, he was caught in one of those inexplicable apocalyptic disasters that left total carnage and sorrow in their wake.

  Blood rushed to his head. His eyes felt bulgy as he flung the door wide and cannoned across the parlor, nearly knocking over a flickering lamp with a pearly globe. He took a deep, hurtful breath—this was worse than the time he’d ridden carelessly over a rise and come upon half a dozen young men of the Southern Cheyenne tribe, each and every one in a bad mood—and prayed for God and Jimmy to forgive him. But he had to know.

  He opened the bedroom door.

  A fat-bottomed little man rolled over on his back and shouted, “Who the profanity are you? What the obscenity is going on here?”

  “Rolf, oh Rolf,” Jimmy said, trying to cover herself with the bedding. She sounded more grief-stricken than angry. As for Rolf, his aching eyeballs were fixed on the soap-lock of the enraged chap leaping from the bed and seizing his yellow-striped trousers while throwing all sorts of obscene invective at the stunned intruder trembling in the doorway.

  “Will you get the shit out of here, you bugeyed intrusive little son of a bitch?” screamed General Philip Henry Sheridan; for it was the very same.

  “General Sheridan, please calm down,” Jimmy said. Rolf could not see her just then, the general was in the way. But he distinctly heard the cocking of the Deringer. Sheridan heard it too, and it arrested his angry rush to dress and depart. His little white corporation quivered above the waist of the regulation trousers he was hastily buttoning. Rolf reckoned him to be in his middle thirties, with careworn lines around his black eyes.

  “I have a gun pointed at your back, General,” Jimmy added.

  “You have what?”

  The barefoot Sheridan spun around and his disbelief quickly evaporated. Jimmy was sitting up in bed, one hand clasping the sheet over her bosom, the other pointing the hideout pistol at Sheridan’s chest, which was white as a bottle of milk.

  “General, how did this happen?” Rolf gasped.

  “Who the double profanity wants to know? Who the repeated obscenity are you?”

  “Just someone who wants to save your life if possible, General.”

  “Rolf,” Jimmy said, “I don’t want to shoot you too. My mind’s made up. He’s going to die. Don’t make more bloodshed.”

  Water dripped from Rolf’s chin. At first he thought it was rain but then he realized he was indoors, and it was sweat. The low-trimmed lamp at the bedside, the heavy draperies closed and securely tied that way, gave the room a confined, sultry air. The air of a tomb, he thought, wishing he hadn’t.

  Sheridan was struggling into his shirt, one moment looking miffed, the next letting his anxiety flicker through; the man was clearly no fool. “General, how the devil did you get over here?” Rolf exclaimed. “You’re not supposed to arrive till tomorrow.”

  “Arrived early,” Sheridan barked. “And I found this letter—this charming letter—” He indicated a paper sticking from the pocket of his b
louse, which lay over the back of a chair half hidden by his rain-dampened caped overcoat. “From someone who signed herself Daughter of Joy. It was a very fetching missive.” He sounded outraged. “It was a special invitation to one of our, ahem, country’s heroes to enjoy an hour in the grove of Venus—free of charge.” By now Rolf’s mind had begun to edit out all of the simple and compound obscenities with which Sheridan filled these and all his other sentences.

  “And you fell for it?” Rolf asked. In other circumstances, you might have heard the crash of an idol coming off its pedestal.

  “Well, sir, God damn it, I am a bachelor—a man like any other. A man with appetites! A man with feelings!”

  “You didn’t have any feelings when you burned my daddy’s farm on the Valley Pike in Shenandoah County, Virginia, and sent him off to Detroit, Michigan, to catch the glooms and die.”

  “Shenandoah County?” Sheridan muttered. He turned to the bed. “I remember that place of course, but not your father. What was his name?”

  Jimmy whipped her other hand onto the hideout pistol’s grip, and the sheet fell, baring her breast. She took no notice. Her beautiful eyes burned. Rolf knew the end was at hand.

  “Cosgrove Sturdevant was his name. He took a shot at you because your damned brute soldiers had ruined our farm and carried me off to rape me. For punishment you sent him to prison up north. A poor helpless middle-aged farmer!”

  General Phil Sheridan gathered himself and hooked his thumbs in the waist of his trousers, further revealing his potbelly, of which he took no notice. In a hard, strong voice, he said, “I do remember that incident. And you are wrong about it.” He stepped toward the bed. “What happened was—”