Heaven and Hell (83 page)

Washita 523

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-NT.

IS THIS NOT THE MAN YOU HAVE MENTIONED.

AUTHORITIES IN LEAVEN WORTH CITY HAVE NOT CAUGHT HIM.

COME AT ONCE.

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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.

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

r^

56

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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 527

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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?

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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
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little man in a yarmulke who ran one of the Leavenworth City liveries.

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"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."

"I suspect that's all he had to start with," Charles said. "Was the boy with him?" Steinfeld nodded. "What else did you notice?"

"He was polite. An educated man. He seemed to be canted--is that what I want to say?" Steinfeld lowered his left shoulder slightly.

"Crippled, like this. A war injury, could it be? I also noticed his good vocabulary, and that pearl earring he wore. Very peculiar for a man to wear such an ornament, wouldn't you say?"

"Not if he wanted you to notice that instead of other things. Thank you, Mr. Steinfeld."

Steinfeld stepped back, away from anger so cold it seemed to burn.

Charles bought a spare horse from Steinfeld, a sorrel mare, three years old. Steinfeld said an itinerating Methodist preacher had owned her before he died of a heart seizure.'She had stamina for long rides, he promised.

Charles packed food and ammunition and left Leavenworth in a heavy snowstorm. He tracked in the most logical direction, to the west, along the populated right-of-way of the railroad soon to be renamed Kansas Pacific. He stopped in Secondine, Tiblow, Fall Leaf, Lawrence.

He asked questions. Bent had been seen, but no one remembered. the earring. For some reason he'd abandoned it, just as he'd abandoned the wagon. Two people remembered a boy with curly dark-blond hair. A cafe owner in Lawrence who'd served Bent a buffalo steak said the boy looked worn out, and never spoke. He ate nothing. That is, Bent gave him nothing.

Alternately riding Satan and the sorrel, Charles pushed west through the high drifts left by the storm. He passed a plow train throwing huge fans of white to either side of its locomotive. Buck Creek, Grantville, Topeka1, Silver Lake, St. Mary's.

Nothing.

Wamego, St. George, Manhattan, Junction City.

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Nothing.

But in Junction City he heard that Colonel Grierson was wintering at Fort Riley. Detachments of the Tenth were scattered in the towns and hamlets along the rail line that now stretched more than four hundred miles, to Sheridan, a tiny place near the Colorado border. Work had been stopped at Sheridan in late summer, all hands paid off and discharged until the line received an infusion of cash in the form of a new 530 HEAVEN AND HELL

government subsidy. All the excitement and glamour now belonged to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, ready to meet nose to nose somewhere west of Denver after the weather improved.

Charles pushed on. Snow became sleet, then rain. He slept in the open, or in the corner of a stable if the owner didn't charge him for it.

Kansas Falls, Chapman Creek, Detroit, Abilene. The cow town was largely closed for the winter, but there he picked up the trail again. A man answering Bent's description had bought flour, bacon, and hardtack at Asher's General Store.

Asher happened to be a part-time deputy. An account of the kidnapping had been telegraphed to every peace officer in the state. When Asher had waited on Elkanah Bent he'd seen no sign of a child, but

Bent's description, especially his crippled gait, had registered at once.

Asher had pulled a pistol from under the counter and arrested him. Bent raised his hands. As Asher stepped from behind the counter, Bent seized a spade and brained him. The only others in the store, two elderly men playing checkers, failed to react. Bent had run out, and was not seen in Abilene again.

"Near thing," Asher said to Charles.

"Near isn't good enough. No one saw my boy?"

Asher shook his head.

Solomon, Donmeyer, Salina, Bavaria. Brookville, Rockville, Elm Creek. When he grew impatient, Charles had to back off and think of what he had decided before he set out. It was better to go slowly, methodically, and catch Bent than to hurry and overlook something, thereby losing him.

Even so, he seldom managed to sleep more than two hours a night.

Either nerves woke him, or bad dreams, or the simmering fever he'd developed from too much exposure. He was soon shivering and stumbling
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like someone half dead, his beard down to the middle of his chest and full of hardtack crumbs and tiny scraps of the green outer leaf of cheap cigars. His eyes seemed to have sunk into his head, leaving in their place an illusion of two blurry dark holes. He smelled so bad, and looked so bad with the Washita gunsight gash healed into a scar above his beard line, that respectable people avoided him in the towns he visited to ask his questions.

Which got the same maddening answers.

'Wo, nobody like that has been through here."

"No, haven't seen him."

"No, sorry."

It was early March when he got to Ellsworth. There he picked up the trail so strongly, he knew he was meant to do so.

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"He rested the night and so did his nephew, a pretty child but worn out, half sick, the little lamb." She was a huge, hearty woman with great pink hams for forearms and kind eyes and the accent of the English Midlands. "I rented them my smallest room and he ate breakfast with my boarders the next morning. I recall it because he rudely kept his beaver hat on at the table. He repeated several times that he was going to the Indian Territory. The boy stayed upstairs. The man said he was too sick to take food but he didn't look it to me. I had a strange feeling about the man. A feeling that he hoped to be noticed. I went to see the town marshal a few hours after he rode away, and the marshal said the man was wanted for stealing the boy. The bloody villain!

How I wish I'd done it sooner."

One more witness, a boy Charles met by the river, corroborated her story. Charles rode on south twenty miles before he stopped. He sat on the sorrel in the center of a small creek rushing and overflowing its banks because of a melt. The horses drank thirstily while rain fell. Four or five miles west, misty shafts of sunlight pierced down, lighting the land. In the extreme west, blue showed between the clouds. The rain shower was heaviest in the south, where it hid the horizon.

Charles pondered the situation. Below the Cimarron Crossing at the Territory line lay thousands of square miles of unexplored wilderness.

A man hazarded his life if he went in alone. That Bent would go there with a child was further evidence of his insanity. Charles really had trouble interpreting and explaining Bent's behavior in any rational way. He didn't try very hard, though. Many of the possible explanations
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led to the same ending. An ending he refused to confront.

The rooming house story might of course be a fabrication. Bent might have doubled back after crossing the Smoky Hill. But somehow Charles didn't think so. Bent could have disappeared right after leaving Leavenworth if that was what he wanted. Instead, he'd strung out just enough' of a trail to keep Charles on it-. A trail like a thread waved in front of a cat.

Maybe Bent had flaunted his destination back in Ellsworth with the assumption that Charles would tell himself that further pursuit into the Territory was futile as well as dangerous, and give up. Maybe Bent had played out the string only so he could cut it this way, and ride off laughing. If that was what he figured on, he was wrong. Charles was going in.

But not alone.

532 HEAVEN AND HELL

"Retribution against a child?" Benjamin Grierson said. "That's unspeakable."

"I'd say that describes Bent." Charles sat on a hard chair in the headquarters office of the Tenth Regiment at Fort Riley. He ached deep in his bones. He was too sick to feel much beyond a slight sentimentality over the homecoming.

Colonel Grierson looked gaunter and grayer; the strain of Plains duty showed. But almost as soon as Charles had entered, he'd said that the regiment had fulfilled his expectations, and exceeded them. Now he said:

"What kind of help do you need? Every man in Barnes's troop would like to make up for what happened to you. So would I. We don't have that many fine officers. You were one of the finest."

"Thank you, Colonel."

"You know about President Johnson's Christmas amnesty? He pardoned the last exempted classes. You're not a rebel any longer, Charlie.