The Colonel's Lady (11 page)

That was the thing that kept running around in my mind. That was the thing I had to know.

I walked for a long while alone in the darkness, to the ammunition magazine, to the stables, back toward headquarters, and finally to the bachelor officers' section of Officers' Row. The dance was beginning to break up and there were sounds of officers and their wives walking in the darkness. Laughter here and there. And the metallic rattle always associated with the cavalry—this time the rattle of dress swords. My adobe hut stood quiet and uninviting at the end of the row, but there was nowhere else to go. I kicked the plank door open and walked in.

“Matt?”

I was just about to strike a match to light the coal-oil lamp. I very carefully put the match back in my pocket and closed the door. The voice was Caroline's.

“Where are you?”

“Here, Matt.” I heard the rustle of her crinoline, smelled the cleanness of her sachet, and she was standing beside me. I didn't think of anything just then. I reached out and brought her against me and kissed her.

“I came as soon as I could, Matt,” she said.

“Not too soon for me. How did you manage it?”

“The Colonel is working again up at headquarters. On a plan of some kind.”

“A battle plan?”

“I think so. Does it matter?”

“No, I guess it doesn't. Come here, closer.”

Time passed. I don't know how much. At last we moved over to the window and looked out from our own black darkness to the paler darkness of the parade. “I'm glad I came,” she said.

“Is there any danger of his— Well, how long will he be at headquarters?”

“For a long time yet. Maybe until dawn. He's been working that way every night for more than a week.” I could feel her shudder as I held her. “He frightens me, Matt. I don't know what goes on in his mind. I thought I did at first, but now he's different.” After a moment of silence she said, “I love you, Matt.”

“You didn't act like it tonight, the way you were dancing with Halan.”

She laughed softly. “You don't need to be jealous of Captain Halan.”

“I'm not jealous.” But I was. And she knew it. Her arms went around my neck and pulled my face down to her.

“You were very handsome tonight, Matt, in your new uniform. I told you that you wouldn't remain a common trooper. Remember?”

“Did you have anything to say about my getting a commission?”

“No, but that doesn't matter. You got it, and that's the important thing. Someday you'll be a general, Matt. I know that too.”

I thought I could see the way Caroline's mind was working. But she was forgetting about her husband. If it wasn't for Weyland, I might be a general someday, at that, with Caroline directing my career for me. Hadn't she made a general out of Weyland? Only he was demoted after the war and sent to the frontier, away from civilization, away from all the things Caroline wanted from life. And Weyland had reached his peak, with no way to go but down. But a younger man...

She was as clear as glass. I could look into her mind and see that she loved me, but that wouldn't stop her from dropping me again if someone else came along with a brighter-looking future. She was a beautiful, spoiled child, and she would never be anything else. I knew it, but it didn't make any difference when I had my arms around her.

“Matt...

“Yes?”

“You said you had to talk to me. What did you want to talk about?”

“It can wait. I want to hold you. That's all I want to do right now.”

“But what was it, Matt?”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Then I guess that's what I wanted to talk about. I tried to hate you, Caroline, but it wasn't any good. On the desert the other day, when we had the brush with Kohi, do you know what I thought about? I thought about you. You're all I ever think about, it seems.”

Her arms tightened. I could feel the warmth of her breath on my neck. “I'm glad, Matt.”

“But it's no good like this. God knows what your husband's got planned for me, but it's something, and it won't be pretty. I shouldn't have taken this commission, but I did it, and now I don't know why.”

“Because you knew I wanted you to, Matt?”

That was the reason and I had known it all along. I had even got to lying to myself. “Yes,” I said, “I guess that's why. But it won't do us any good. I've got to get out of the Army, Caroline. We'll go somewhere, just the two of us. To Mexico, maybe.”

I could feel her stiffen. “Matt, we couldn't do that.”

“We can't stay here. We can't go on like this.”

We stood there, and the night was very quiet. It had been in the back of my mind ever since I saw her in Tucson, I suppose. I had come to Larrymoor for one reason, to take her away. The Colonel knew it now. And he would fight, even kill, to keep her. That was what he was trained for, fighting, killing.

She lay against me, very quiet for a long while. And then she said, “If we went to Mexico, what would happen, Matt? We would have no money, no country, no friends. What would we do, Matt?”

She was right, of course, and what was there to say?

“Give me time, Matt. Have faith in me and believe in me.”

“Do you propose to make me a general, the way you made Weyland a general?” I said bitterly. “That would be a pretty long wait, even with you working it, Caroline, because the war is over and promotions don't come that fast any more.”

It was a waste of words and I should have known better.

She spoke patiently, the way she would speak to an unreasonable child. “Of course we wouldn't wait until you're a general, Matt. But you'll be one someday.”

“And what about your husband? We've forgotten all about the Colonel, haven't we? Is he going to just sit by and do nothing while you're taking care of my military career? He was the one who handed me my commission— we've forgotten that, too. And he had a reason. A deadly reason, more than likely. What are you going to do about that?”

But nothing was impossible for Caroline. She was Cinderella now and the clock always stopped a minute short of midnight. With her lips against my cheek I could feel her smiling. “Have faith in me, Matt.” She pressed something into my hand—a small, velvet-covered oblong—and closed my fingers around it. “This is what I believe, Matt,” she said softly. “I believe in you, and I believe in myself, and nothing else matters.”

I stood there for a long while after Caroline had gone, still feeling her in the room. Still smelling the scent of her sachet, hearing the crisp rustle of crinoline. Finally I took out a match and lighted the coal-oil lamp and looked at the box in my hand. It was small and flat and covered in black velvet. I opened it and the inside was lined in black velvet, and against the black material, as black as the night, lay two glittering silver stars.

The full meaning of Caroline's gift didn't hit me at first. I reached for a bottle of raw clear whisky—I had credit at the sutler's now, being an officer—poured some into a cup, and drank it down. It dawned on me finally that they were more than mere trinkets, those bright, shimmering, five-pointed pieces of silver. They were the stars of a general officer.

I don't know when I started laughing. There was nothing funny about it. It was insane, if anything, and frightening. But I laughed. I lay face-down on my bunk and pounded the straw-stuffed mattress and howled, and I didn't give a damn who heard me. Yesterday a common trooper, today a second lieutenant, tomorrow a general. Caroline had ambition, anyway, I had to say that for her. It was boundless. And not only for herself, but for me. I rolled and brayed like a jackass. Then suddenly I thought of Colonel Weyland and the things I had seen in those pale eyes of his. I stopped laughing.

I got up and filled a tin mess cup brimful with the sutler's whisky. I drank it.

He held the pointer across his chest, like a carbine. He smiled at us. I could almost feel his pale glance sliding over my face.

“Furthermore, gentlemen, I intend to have these facts. I propose the formation of an independent detail to accompany the next patrol, a detail consisting of four Indian scouts and one officer whose job it will be to gather this intelligence and present it to this headquarters. Of necessity, the scout detail must screen far ahead of the patrol column. It must work every inch of the hills near Kohi's stronghold. To do this, while avoiding direct contact with the hostiles, is the direct responsibility of the officer in charge. Are there any questions, gentlemen?”

There was an uneasy shuffling, but there were no questions. Making the regular patrols was one thing, but being saddled to a suicide mission was something else again. The junior officers, especially the married ones, seemed to shrink as the Colonel studied us, one after the other.

Weyland looked at me, and I thought he smiled, just a little. So this was the way it was going to be, I thought. He had planned it well. It was as clean and neat as a well-used bayonet, and as deadly. Whether or not the scout detail was necessary, I didn't know. If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else.

“Mr. Reardon,” the Colonel said pleasantly, “will be in charge of the detail. Captain Halan, the Lieutenant will accompany your patrol tomorrow morning. That will be all, gentlemen.”

We all mumbled something. We saluted and filed out of the headquarters building, leaving the Colonel standing there in front of his map, smiling. Or maybe I only imagined he was smiling. Halan fell in beside me as we hit the front porch.

“That's quite a job the Colonel cut out for you, Reardon.”

I felt myself grinning, but it was only with my mouth.

“Drop by the orderly room after recall and we'll go over the march orders together. We'll go over the Indian scouts too; they'll likely be as treacherous as the Apaches, once you get them alone.”

“Thanks. I'll do that.”

Gorgan caught me halfway across the parade, headed for Officers' Row. “Now that,” he said dryly, “is what I call starting right in to soldier, without all the dilly-dally that usually goes along with a commission. What has the Colonel got against you, anyway?”

I looked at him sharply, but it was only a question. “Somebody has to do the job.”

“Maybe so. But you don't know anything about Kohi, or Apaches, or the country we're going into. One patrol you've been on. After twenty patrols you still wouldn't be fit for a job like this. Why didn't the Colonel get a contract scout from Tucson to handle it? There are plenty of men who know every hill and gully up here like they know the scars on their hands.”

I grinned. “Why don't you ask the Colonel?”

“I'd like to.”

I had a feeling that Gorgan was putting together a lot of small pieces of information in his mind, and in that methodic way of his he was building an answer that was uncomfortably close to the truth. He glanced at me thoughtfully, and then looked away. When we got across the parade ground Gorgan said, “Well, it's something to think about, but I haven't got time for it now.” He flicked a white gauntlet at me and walked off toward his company orderly room.

After taking a dozen steps or so he paused and turned. “I almost forgot,” he called. “My wife said to tell you you're invited to supper tonight, if you haven't got something better to do.”

I wasn't eager to take supper with the Gorgans, for there was always a chance that I could meet Caroline once more before the patrol pulled out the next morning. But I couldn't think of any reasonable way of getting out of it at the moment.

With reluctance I called, “Thanks. That will be fine.”

It was still early in the morning and the companies were just beginning to form for drill. I headed toward my hut to wait for recall. Being on special duty is all right for a time, but after a while you begin to miss the steadying routine of company life. Time goes by heavy and sluggish. It was quiet—too quiet—inside the hut, and my part-time striker had already come and gone, having buffed my boots and brushed my uniforms and straightened things around. I noticed that my whisky was about two fingers lower in the bottle than it had been an hour before, but that's to be expected when you have a striker to do for you. I found myself automatically reaching for the bottle and sloshing some of the rotgut into a mess cup.

I needed a drink. It was too early in the morning for that kind of thing, but I didn't care. I poured and threw it down and shuddered as it hit my stomach.

But the whisky didn't help. I stood at the hut's single window and watched the line companies make intricate, dusty patterns on the bald parade. But what I saw was Weyland.

It was a strange feeling, knowing that a man had deliberately and cold-bloodedly set out to kill you, and that the complicated machinery of execution had already been set in motion and there was nothing you could do to stop it. I had wondered at first why he hadn't drawn his revolver on the spot and killed me, but a thing like that would have been too simple for the Colonel. Too much of the drama would have been lost. He liked to plan these things, the way he planned his action against an enemy in the field. Any damn fool could draw a gun and kill a man, but it took a great deal of military maneuvering to do it the way the Colonel was doing it.

It wasn't as fast as the direct way, and not as clean, maybe, but I would be just as dead when it was over, and that was the important thing. The device, of course, was simple, like all effective military devices.

A scout detail.

It would look good on the books. There would be none of the unpleasantness of a court-martial. But a scout detail—the kind the Colonel planned—was as good as a one-way ticket to the post cemetery. I corked the bottle and went over to A Company to talk to Halan.

Halan wasn't there when I got there, so I sat in the Captain's chair and went through the morning report to kill time. Morgan, I saw, was pulling company duty for insubordination, and I grinned at that. The usual number of men put in requests to see the doctor, as they always did when their turn at patrol came up. Sergeant Roff came in as I was putting the morning report away.

“Good morning, Sergeant.”

“Good morning... sir.”

I wasn't prepared for the cold, courteous hate that he managed to put into those words. Now the Sergeant's ugliness was more than physical. It was a live hate behind his eyes.

“I want to offer my congratulations, sir, on getting your commission,” he said, and there was a definite sneer touching the corners of his mouth. “It came fast, didn't it, sir?” he said. “I've been in this man's cavalry a long time, sir, and I've never seen a commission come as fast. If the Lieutenant will pardon me, sir, for mentioning it.”

It was broad, low comedy, the way Roff put it, coming down hard on the word “sir” every chance he got. Contempt was unmistakable in his voice, but there was nothing obvious that you could call on him. I smiled slightly as he stood there as stiff and straight as a ramrod, a brazen burlesque of military courtesy, and I couldn't blame him for being angry. The man had given his life to the Army. Over the years he had worked and sweated and maybe even prayed for a pair of gold bars like the ones I now wore on my shoulders. If I had earned them, it would have been something else, but I hadn't earned them and Roff wasn't going to let me forget it.

So I couldn't blame him for the way he felt. But I was glad when recall sounded and Captain Halan came into the orderly room.

“I've been talking to the Colonel,” he said. “I'll be frank, Reardon—I don't think this scout detail is a job for you. I tried to get the Colonel to put another, more experienced officer in charge, but he seems to have his mind set on you, for some reason.” He smiled, but the smile seemed a trifle weary. “I'm afraid,” he said, “that I built you up too high in that report. The Colonel thinks there's not another officer on the post capable of handling this scout. He quotes from my report to back his judgment.” He sat down and shoved an opened box of cigars across the desk. “Have one.”

“Thanks.”

We held matches to them and the dry tobacco blazed and crackled. I understood that Halan had been trying to get Weyland to put him on the scout detail. I wanted to thank him for trying to save my skin, but there was no way to do it. He sat and puffed, watching the bluish smoke cloud the small room.

“Anyway,” Halan said finally, “I got four of our best Indians lined up for you, and maybe that will be some help. You'll have Juan and Black Buffalo, both Papagos; and Walking Fox and Red Hand, two Pimas. Papagos and Pimas work pretty well together. They don't squabble among themselves and they both hate Apaches. Watch them, Reardon, and learn what you can from them. The sutler's not allowed to sell them whisky, but you'll have to watch them and keep them away from tiswin. Apaches make the stuff in shallow pits and cover it up to let it ferment. Indians have noses like bloodhounds when it comes to smelling it out. It's against department orders to let civilians or native scouts take part in fighting, so keep firearms away from them. Let them keep their knives and hatchets, though. Where you'll be, knives and hatchets will do you more good than guns, anyway.”

I nodded, and Halan talked on and on, and I began to appreciate his understanding of this frontier country and its people. He understood a little of the Apache tongue, and had even talked once with Kohi. He had met Mangas Coloradas, chief of the Mimbreno Apaches, and Cochise of the Chiricahuas, during one of the brief periods of peace between the whites and the Indians.

Halan put his cigar down and shoved a map case at me and a pair of regulation binoculars. “You'll need these,” he said, and smiled without humor. “The Colonel wants a map drawn of Kohi's stronghold. He wants to know how many warriors Kohi has and how many reinforcements are coming up from the south. It's a big job and it looks like it's all yours, Reardon. Good luck.”

There was nothing much to say to that. Captain Halan sat back and closed his eyes and thought his own thoughts. Maybe he was already writing me off the roster and wondering who he was going to get to take my place.

It was a long day, from that point on. I went to the quartermaster's and drew supplies for myself and the four scouts. I inspected the horse I was to ride and saw that he was cared for and then I went back to the hut and cleaned my carbine and revolving pistol. I went outside finally and looked at those high, ragged hills, and they looked peaceful and sleepy under the numbing beat of the sun. I began to think that all my fears were imagined. There was nothing more normal than a scouted detail when you wanted information about the enemy. Things like that happened all the time. Sometimes the details came back and sometimes they didn't; that was all a part of fighting a war. But then I would remember the Colonel, and I would know that it was no ordinary detail.

I went back in the hut and studied the bottle of whisky, which was almost empty, but I didn't touch it this time. I wondered if there was any way I could see Caroline before the patrol pulled out the next morning.

Thinking of her excited me, stirred me, and I imagined that if I closed my eyes I could reach out and touch her. Caroline was real, even in my thoughts. She was all woman—she was all
women,
it seemed, in this heat-drugged desert, in this last outpost of nowhere called Larrymoor. She was Sweetbriar and another, better way of living, but most of all she was Caroline', with eager lips and willing body, and she was softness where everything else was hard, and I couldn't get her out of my mind.

On impulse I went outside and walked up the row of huts occupied by bachelor officers, past the larger houses belonging to the married officers and their families, and finally I came to Caroline's house and there I stopped.

She was in there somewhere. I knew it. I could feel her in there, watching me, maybe. Smiling at me. Laughing at me. Heaven alone knew what Caroline would be doing. I thought if I stood there long enough she would see me and give me a sign.

“Haven't you ever seen a post commander's house before?”

The voice shook me. I snapped my head around to see Gorgan coming out of the headquarters building. He was grinning, but I had a feeling that there was something behind that grin, and I didn't know what it was.

“I just finished clearing my ammunition issue through the quartermaster,” I said. It didn't make sense, but Gorgan didn't notice. Or pretended not to notice.

“Don't forget supper tonight,” he said, walking on past, toward the stables.

I said something, turned, and walked back toward my hut. What was going on in that brain of Gorgan's? Could he look through me, the way I had a feeling he was doing, and see what was going on in my mind? Did he somehow know about me and Caroline?