Heaven and Hell (82 page)

He declared that he wanted to marry that actress in St. Louis, if she'd have him, and settle down to raise little Gus. Maureen heard the boy playing with the building blocks Duncan had sawed and shaped by hand from pieces of birch.

Maureen couldn't deny Charles the raising of his own son, even if she did disapprove of everything about the man, from his raffish dress to his cigars, his temper, and his undependable ways. Here one minute, dashing off the next. He'd stayed three nights and ridden away to see the actress.

No, she couldn't deny Charles; he was the boy's father. On the other hand, ever since the brigadier had brought her from the East, Maureen had hoped, assumed, that the raising and educating of little Gus would fall to her because Charles was too wild and unsettled to manage it. Now he'd come back, saying he wasn't.

Once he took the boy, her dream of the brigadier regularizing their relationship with a marriage proposal would never come to pass. She had almost decided she would have to marry Jack Ford, a white-haired 5i7

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quartermaster sergeant on the post. Ford, Irish, a widower, loved the cavalry life but claimed he loved her almost as much. She didn't love him, though if she married him, at least her life would have some stability.

Duncan's

quarters were quiet except for the sound of Gus playing and the usual drift of noises from the post: trumpet calls, gun caissons rattling, men drilling to shouted cadence. The brigadier was gone again on one of the circuits of the Kansas forts he made every two months with an armed escort. The routine was the same at every post. He would set up a small office while the soldiers queued up outside. The soldiers wore white cotton dress gloves, and each man peeled off the right one when he stepped before the paymaster. After the soldier signed the payroll sheet, Duncan, helped by his orderly, counted the appropriate amount in greenbacks into the soldier's hand. The soldier saluted with his left hand, about-faced, and the next man presented himself. Maureen had watched the procedure at Leavenworth many times.

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 eighteen-forties, 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 quickwitted, too. Maureen read to him every night. He knew most of his letters already.

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"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
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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?"

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"Gus Main."

"Is your mother right 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
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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 on the post, he had no trouble con Washita 521

vincing 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.

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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.

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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 virtually 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 bloodthirsty
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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 face down 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.