“General Herron,” McCormack said with polite deference. “Your delays were mine, as well.”
Herron nodded. “Perhaps, but only so long as the bridge was incomplete and the railroad was behind you. That is no longer the case.”
“Yes, sir. And our rate of progress has increased.”
“Good. Then let me tell you what I want to happen now.” He moved his finger beyond the solid line and out onto the dashed line of the proposed track. “The track will continue, keeping well ahead of you and eventually reaching the Niobrara where Colonel Shafer is laying the groundwork for a wooden trestle. You will continue your work building our stockade forts. I want three more by the time winter hits us.”
“Three?” McCormack said abruptly, then glanced at his general. He sipped his coffee. “Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s a tall order.”
“McCormack, the president’s Homestead Act has passed and goes into effect in the spring of the new year. That means plenty of folk headed our way. I need completed forts that I can garrison. It cannot be like it was last winter.”
“Yes, sir. But, three, sir?”
Herron straightened. He motioned to Noyles for a cup of coffee and invited McCormack to take a seat by the desk. The two senior officers sat. Herron took a long whiff of the strong, black coffee before he sipped it.
“Colonel, I know you to be a sensible man. You don’t make promises you can’t fulfill.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“That also means, however, that you don’t stick out your neck.”
McCormack shifted in his seat, suddenly uneasy. Herron held up a hand to put his colonel at ease. “Let me lay it out simply. Come November, Custer is going to take this election in a cakewalk. He’s fulfilled or begun work on every promise he’s made, and the fiasco with his son back in ‘86 has somehow made him even more sympathetic to the public. The man is scandal-proof, and all of Cleveland’s mud-slinging is working to Custer’s advantage. He’s still playing the Golden-Haired Boy, and it’s working for him. So—and I shouldn’t be telling you anything you haven’t already figured for yourself—Custer is the man who will be calling our shots for the next four years.”
He leaned forward a bit, affecting a conspiratorial tone. “Please him,” Herron said, “and your future brightens.”
McCormack swallowed with difficulty. Herron leaned back in his chair. “But, to please him, you must be willing to take a risk or two.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you understand what that means.”
“Yes, sir. Three forts by winter.”
Herron stood. “Thank you, Colonel. I’m glad we are in agreement. Dismissed.”
The Colonel stood, saluted, and turned to go.
“McCormack.”
“Sir?”
“Leave the china.”
McCormack looked blankly down at the china cup and saucer in his left hand. He handed them to Noyles, mumbled an apology, and left the room.
“He seems fairly well rattled, sir,” his aide said.
Herron grunted. “It’ll be good for him.”
Outside, a train whistle broke the quiet of the peaceful afternoon. Herron reached inside his coat pocket and checked the time on his watch. “Quarter-hour late,” he said as he turned to look out the window.
“Yes, sir,” Noyles said. “I’ll make sure it’s properly noted in the day’s reports.”
The china on the table began to rattle as the train neared the bridge. Herron waited, gazing out toward the footings. He heard the subtle shift in the engine’s tone as it stepped up onto the incline of the bridge’s approach. Then it came into view: all black and appointed with shiny brass. The glass of its lanterns gleamed in the sunlight. Gouts of black smoke erupted from its stack and the whistle blew again, releasing a lonely pair of notes and a billow of steam.
Herron smiled grimly as the locomotive rumbled up onto the bridge deck, pulling its line of cars filled with iron, timber, and supplies for the men further on down the line.
A hundred miles to the end of the line, Herron said silently. And a hundred more before winter if I have anything to say about it.
A hundred more...
Cli-clack. Cli-clack.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
The rhythm of the wheels slowed like a runner with a stitch in his side. George woke slowly, awakened by the change. After a week hitching rides on trains, he’d become attuned to the sound and shifts of the great machines. He cracked open an eyelid.
Afternoon light spilled through the slats and into the boxcar. Crates and boxes were stacked eight feet high. George nestled in his cubby-hole and watched dust swirl in the slanting shafts of light, pushed by drafts that moved and cooled the air, but never cleared it. He reached into the crate beside him and took out another orange. He bit through its bitter rind and into the meat. Sweet juice ran down his fingers and down his throat. He squeezed and mashed the orange and he sucked out the juice and the pulp.
Still listening for changes in the train’s motion, he cast the empty rind into a far corner. He heard no change, which meant that they were not slowing for a stop. But what, then? The car answered his question as it tilted up an incline.
A hill, he wondered? In Yankton?
Then the shafts of sunlight began to break and flash in regular rhythm. George scrambled to his feet and lurched toward the door. He pulled, slid it ajar, and looked out.
Metal beams and braces rushed past. The sound of the wheels on the iron tracks had changed from a dull clatter to a hollow, open sound, like a lone man applauding in an empty theater. Below the rails, there was no ground. George was high up in the air—three or four stories high—and far down beneath him was the turbulent expanse of a great, muddy river.
He looked up as the boxcar passed by a tower of stone and leveled off. An arc of metal shot up from the tower, rising overhead like the iron trail of an artillery rocket. Cables hung from the arc like strings on a colossal harp; strings that kept the bridge deck above the water. The whole of it—strings, arc, and deck—rang with the train’s percussion as it crossed the rails.
It was a marvel and George realized instantly that this was the new bridge that crossed the waters of the Big Greasy. He must have been asleep for much longer than he’d intended, but he didn’t care. After a week of hiding in trains and in railyards, after a week of nursing a cracked skull and waking up headed in the wrong direction, after a week of drinking from puddles and eating what scraps he could buy with the few coins Vincent had left him, he finally felt a twinge of joy and the lifting of the pressure that had sat upon his chest and shoulders. He looked out of the boxcar door. Now across the bridge and back on solid ground, the train settled back into its old rhythm. George took a lungful of relief. He was back on the right side of the Big Greasy, heading home.
But that thought turned around and slapped him as he remembered the whole of the events that still hung, fogged and vague, in his bruised brain.
Homeward bound he was, but as a failure. Vincent’s chicanery had stolen a year’s worth of work and all of George’s hope. He slid down in the open doorway, one leg dangling over the blurring ties, and took an honest inventory of himself.
His shoes were split and wrecked from mud and miles. The knees of his trousers were out from a fall he’d had running for a train. He was hatless. His coat was filthy and rumpled, his shirt was stained and torn. He’d used his tie to replace his broken belt, and he had no idea where he had lost his collar. His chin bore a ten-day beard. He stank. He was hungry. His every joint, bone, and sinew ached or throbbed or just plain hurt. Aside from the questionable clothes on his back he had—he checked in the pouch he still carried—precisely seventeen cents and a chunk of gold the size of a newborn’s fist.
And where to from here? He didn’t know how far the railroad would take him, but even at the farthest he could imagine, he would still be hundreds of miles from the People. His only chance was to wait until the train stopped, buy what food hi
s penurious means allowed, and head out onto the prairie. With luck, a patrol would find him. With good luck, it wouldn’t be an Army patrol.
George slid the door closed and set himself up against a crate. He ate another orange and wished that his coat had pockets.
It was dark when the train began to slow. George grabbed two oranges and slid open the boxcar door.
The air was cool and fresh and the sky was deep and full of far-away stars that shimmered like lights through water. George looked ahead and saw the wan, yellow lamps of a small town. He stepped onto the rung of an iron-bar ladder set into the side of the car and pulled the door closed. When the train had slowed sufficiently, he jumped off and hit the ground running, heading off into the shadows of the town’s outskirts.
The place was hardly worthy of the title “town.” He saw a station house near the tracks with a hand-lettered sign that read “Fort Assurance.” A stone’s throw away he spied a lonely street with three stores, two taverns, and a small chapel at the end. He scanned the horizon and saw a few lights, miles out on the prairie to the north. To the south, though, less than a half-mile off, he saw the black bulk and towers of an Army fort, an unmistakable silhouette beneath the quarter moon.
He heard voices from up ahead at the station house and saw a gang of men walking back along the length of the train. Heavy doors slid open with a rumble and a clang, and George decided that he didn’t care whether or not they were looking for stowaways; he didn’t want to be in the vicinity. He crept away, keeping low behind the brush.
He came up behind the two taverns. The sounds of a raspy concertina and sour voices issued forth from the tavern nearest the tracks, and the air surrounding it was laden with the smells of food and bread. George stowed his two oranges around the side. He dipped his hands into a rain barrel to wash the worst away from his hands and face and he raked his hair back with his fingers. He straightened his lapels, brushed his shoulders as clean as he could, and after a deep breath, he stepped up and into the smoke and noise of the tavern.
And panicked.
The clientele was almost entirely military—forage caps, blue wool, brass buttons, gray cotton shirts, and suspenders filled the room—privates and corporals and sergeants. Without thinking, George, the traitorous son of the most famous officer alive, had walked into the midst of the U.S. Army.
His instinct was to turn and leave, but faces had turned his way already, and he knew that to walk out now would raise more eyebrows than would his staying. Besides, he reasoned, if this was where the regulars gathered, the other tavern was probably the de facto officers’ club. So he continued inside, approaching the proprietor with a courteous air.
The man behind the bar looked like he might have been a sergeant himself, years ago. His ruddy cheeks were grizzled with gray stubble. His hair was thin on top and gray as well. His vest puckered, the buttons straining to keep the fabric stretched across his girth, but his arms were meaty, not flabby, and he glared at George with a merciless eye.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“No trouble, sir,” George said. “Just a meal and something to drink, if I might...I have money,” he added quickly.
The taverner was not impressed. “Let’s see it.”
George put his coins gently on the scarred bar-top. A dime. A nickel. Two pennies. In any civilized town it would have been enough for a three-course meal of hefty proportion. In frontier towns, however, George knew prices were often overblown. “Should be enough for something,” he said.
The taverner looked at the coin and then at George. He glanced at his other patrons nearby, but they had lost interest in the quiet bum who had wandered into their favorite haunt. The taverner reached out to take the coins, hesitated, and then took just the dime. “Sit down over there,” he said, pointing to a dark corner of the room. “I’ll bring you something.”
“Many thanks, sir.” George smiled and made his way to the corner. There were no empty tables, but there was one with only a single occupant: a lone sergeant, mute and motionless, one hand on an empty bottle and the other on an empty glass.
“May I?” George asked, indicating one of the empty chairs. The sergeant looked up and blinked. He gestured with a lethargic hand. “Psh,” he said.
George took that as a permission granted and sat down.
“Soldier, you are out of uniform,” the sergeant said. Despite his inebriety, the man spoke with precision, his German accent audible beneath the liquor’s effect.
“I’m a civilian, Sergeant. Just a civilian.”
“Ah. That would explain it.” He looked back down into his empty glass.
The taverner came over to the table. He set down a large bowl of brown stew and a half loaf of hard-crusted bread. Next to that he put a quart-tankard, brimming with foam-topped beer. George saw potatoes, carrots, and hunks of meat in the thick gravy, and his stomach leapt at the aroma. The bread was brown and heavy—a meal in itself. He looked up and the taverner winked at him.
“Y’looked like you could use a break in your run of luck,” he said.
“I surely can,” George said. “Many thanks.”
The taverner left and George turned to his food. “Thank you,” he whispered, unsure if he was thanking the taverner, God, or the spirits that guarded the world. Nor did he care. He just felt grateful for the kindness. Then, slowly, he began to eat.
His companion moved little and said less. He sat as a statue might sit—immobile and frozen in a moment of time—though George noted to himself that no sculptor would have chosen to immortalize such a banal and homely subject. The soldier’s thick, peasant features were neither lovely nor noble, and he wore an expression of insensibility on his face. When he did speak again, it was as if to no one, and to everyone.
“My father was a soldier,” he said. “As was his father. My great-grandfather was a soldier as well; he fought against you colonists in Penn’s Sylvania. He liked it here, in America, and always wanted to come back and live here. He wanted to be an American soldier.”
George ate as the sergeant spoke, nodding politely though the man paid him no mind at all.
“A long line of soldiers, and I am the first one—” He looked at George and poked himself in the chest with a meaty finger. “The first one to become an American soldier. Me.” He stared into his glass once more. “Me. Ülrich Schmidt. An American soldier. And a good one, no matter what they say.”
George paused in his meal. “No matter what who says?”
The soldier rounded on George with the same pointed finger. “I am American soldier, now,” he said, his speech starting to slur. “And I should not have to work with them. Side by side with them. I should not have to.”
“With whom?”
The sergeant tried to focus on George, failed, and turned back to his glass. “The Schwarze,” he said. “They make me work with Schwarze. Me. An American soldier, down in the ditch with Schwarze.” He shrugged. “So I get into a fight. And now they throw me out. Me.”
“You’ve been discharged? For fighting?” George knew the type of man this was—bigoted and fearful, hanging onto prejudices that placed him at a comfortable height above the black man. He did not care for such men, but fighting was hardly a court-martial offense.
The sergeant shrugged again. “The Schwarzer died,” he said. “But to throw me out, after twenty years of service, and now, just when things are getting better.”
Now that’s a first, George thought. A soldier saying the Army is improving. “How is it getting better?” he asked.
The sergeant waved a vague hand. “Everything,” he said. “New forts. New quarters. New quartermasters. Even new rifles, and repeating rifles, to boot.”
George’s heart thudded. If the Army soldiers were given repeaters, that would wipe out any advantage the People’s soldiers could achieve. “When did you get repeating rifles?” he asked.
“Not yet. Not yet. Soon, though. But by then I’ll be out.”
“You mean they haven�
�t distributed them yet?”
“No.” The sergeant was becoming annoyed. “They have not even arrived yet. There’s a shim...a shipment due in a month or so. An armory shipment.”
Now George’s heart began to pound. “When? When is the shipment?”
“A month or two,” the sergeant said.
“When, exactly?” George pressed.
The sergeant glared at him. “Do you think they would tell me? I do not know. Ask the stationmaster.”
George’s mind was racing. Repeaters. For the army. To keep them out of the army’s hands would be a boon, but if he could get them to the People instead...
He ate the last two bites of his meal, took a long draught of the beer, and left.
The station office—little more than a shack by the tracks —was dark. The train that had brought George into town had headed out after its brief stop, and the stationmaster had obviously closed up for the night. George crept around the outside.
It was a one-room office with two windows and a door. The door was locked when George tried it, and the windows were as well. Peering through the dusty panes, he could see a desk, a table, two chairs, and some cabinets. Papers, both loose and bound with twine, covered the tops of the desk and table. He could not see a safe of any kind, so the schedules were somewhere in the piles of paper. He inspected the window. If he broke out the small pane in the middle, he could reach the latch and—
“Can I help you?”
George spun and found himself face to face with a man who had come around the building. He was small and bespectacled. He carried a sheaf of papers in one hand and a key ring in the other. His shirt was coming untucked and a tuft of his hair stuck up like a rooster’s comb.
“Are you the stationmaster?”
“Yes, I am,” the man said, his words slow and suspicious. “What can I do for you?”
“I need some information. About a train schedule.”
The stationmaster visibly relaxed. “Oh, is that all,” he said. “It’s rather late, but let’s see what we can do.” He stepped forward and jingled the keys until he found the right one. He undid the lock and the hasp, and the door creaked open with a push. “Just a moment while I light a lamp.”
The Spirit of Thunder Page 26