The Colonel's Lady (16 page)

But I heard them. I heard Gorgan dismissing the troopers, and then the thud of boots on the packed-clay parade as the officers headed toward headquarters. Maybe a half hour passed before I heard the boots again, this time coming down the row, toward my hut.

Gorgan didn't bother to knock, He pushed the doc open and came in.

“Have you heard?” he said.

I nodded.

“They're dead,” he said hoarsely. “Joseph and Mary! I hope I never see a thing like that again. Almost two full companies, and they're all dead!”

My head jerked up. “What are you talking about?”

“The two companies of infantry that were supposed to reinforce us. Kohi ambushed them.”

Things were moving too fast for me. I couldn't keep them straight in my mind. “But what about—the others?”

“Mrs. Weyland?” he said. “She's captured, it looks like. The escort was killed, all but one trooper. He got away and made it back to Larrymoor this morning. Didn't Sarah tell you?”

I didn't remember. I didn't remember much of anything. But Caroline captured! I had got used to the idea that Caroline was dead, but she wasn't dead at all! Then I thought of something else and I could feel the blood drain from my face.

“If you're thinking what I think you are,” Gorgan said, “you can forget it. Apaches don't take much to rape. They leave that to the white men. Likely they're keeping her as a hostage, and if that doesn't work they'll put her to work, like they would a horse or an ox.”

I knew then that Gorgan had finally put the pieces together. He had guessed about me and Caroline. He knew. Studying me, Gorgan took out a battered cigar and rolled it in his mouth. “Well,” he said, “you'd better start getting your things together. Get down to the quartermaster's and draw emergency ammunition and supplies. We're going to be riding before sundown.”

I thought he was taunting me at first, but then I saw that he meant it.

“Have you forgotten I'm still under arrest?”

“Not any more you're not,” he said, holding a match to his cigar. “The Colonel, I guess, is the one who's crazy. He's stripping the fort naked. He's taking every man who can sit a saddle. I guess we're going to get his wife back, or die trying—which doesn't seem very unlikely at this point.” To punctuate Gorgan's words, the staccato sound of a cavalry bugle sounded “to horse.” Gorgan shot his burned-out match to the floor, turned, and walked out of my hut.

“I almost forgot,” he said, appearing in the doorway. “The Colonel wants to see you. Right away.”

The regiment was already forming on the parade ground as I went up the row toward headquarters. I felt like a different man. I was free—for the present, anyway. Free to walk, to ride, to fight. Free to die—even that was something. But Caroline was alive, and that was the important thing.

I took the steps two at a time when I reached the headquarters building. The place was deserted. Even the clerks and staff officers had left the place in the excitement. But the Colonel was there, standing in front of his desk waiting for me. His face was hard, masklike, as he stared at me.

“Mr. Reardon,” he said flatly, “do you still maintain that the scout report you submitted to this command was accurate?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you were actually at the site of Kohi's stronghold and saw it for yourself?”

“Yes, sir.”

He fingered the flap of his revolver holster, staring past me, a thousand miles into nowhere. “Mr. Reardon,” he said hoarsely, “I want you to find my wife. I want you to bring her back. How you do it, I don't care. As long as I live I shall wish you dead, but on this single point I shall bargain with you. Bring my wife back, Mr. Reardon, and I shall drop all charges against you.”

A dead silence fell between us. Then I said, “You believed my report all along, didn't you, sir?”

“I am not stating my beliefs, Lieutenant. I am grasping at any last chance to get my wife back, no matter how desperate it may be.”

I think I realized for the first time how deeply Colonel Weyland loved his wife. If he hadn't, he would have seen himself dead before bargaining with me. And why else would a career soldier marry a woman who would surely hinder his future as an officer?

It had been obvious all the time, of course. He had been willing to juggle Army law, and even kill, to keep her, but the idea jarred me just the same. I had loved Caroline for so long—it hadn't occurred to me that it could happen to others. At that moment—buried deep somewhere in the midst of hate—I felt pity for him.

I think he knew what I was thinking, for he smiled suddenly, bitterly. “Make no mistake, Lieutenant, this is one mission in which failure will not be tolerated. In war, Mr. Reardon, the penalty for failure is often death.” His eyes glazed. His gaze wandered past me again. “This time,” he said, “the penalty is certain.”

I said nothing.

“Do you understand, Mr. Reardon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you will undertake the mission?”

I said, “I want Caroline back as much as you do, sir.”

He winced visibly, as if I had slapped him. He opened his mouth once, then closed it. “That will be all, Mr. Reardon,” he said tightly.

“Am I to have freedom of movement, freedom of command, sir?”

“That is understood.”

“Do you still intend to take the regiment out, sir?”

“That is also understood, Lieutenant. Isn't it obvious that I cannot sit by and do nothing as long as my wife is in the hands of savages?”

There was no use arguing that, I knew, so I said nothing. I saluted and walked out.

“Evidently,” the Colonel said, “Kohi has elected to make one last desperate attempt to force the white soldiers out of Arizona. The savages have asked for a fight, gentlemen, and a fight they shall have. We shall meet this uprising directly, on the savages' own ground, if they elect to fight there....” He talked on, a perfect picture of military confidence. He didn't mention Caroline. “The route of march will be screened by an independent detail under the command of Mr. Reardon....” If the Colonel felt the uneasy surprise among his officers, he did not show it. I could feel Gorgan and the others watching me, wondering.

After officers' call I caught Gorgan as he walked toward his company.

“Will you take the job, Gorgan?” I asked.

“Screening with your detail?”

“It's more than that.”

He took soiled gauntlets from his belt and pulled them on his hands. “There's something I've got to know first,” he said, looking at me. “Before, I figured it was none of my business, but now it looks like it's everybody's business. What is it between you and the Colonel?”

I couldn't lie to him. I couldn't dodge it.

“It's a long story, Gorgan. And not a very pretty one.”

“I'd like to hear it anyway.”

So I told him, as well as I could and as briefly as I could. About Caroline, and Sweetbriar, and Three Fork Road. I didn't tell him about the day the Colonel had found us, but Gorgan could fill that in. The Lieutenant was still watching me carefully.

“Do you still love her?” he asked abruptly.

“God knows, Gorgan. I wish to heaven I was sure.”

“So the detail's job isn't to screen,” he said, “it's to get Mrs. Weyland back.” He shook his head. “It can't be done, Reardon. Not this way. Maybe, in time, we could bargain with Kohi for her return, but that's the only way now. If he wants to keep her, he'll keep her, even if he has to kill her.”

“But I've got to try, Gorgan! If she were your wife, wouldn't you try?”

He sighed. He looked older, more tired than I had ever seen him. “All right, Reardon,” he said finally. “I'll select the detail from my company.”

It was late that afternoon, with a blood-cast sky at our backs, when we rode out of Larrymoor with drums beating, guidons flying. The women of the fort came out to watch in silence as their men rode off to do battle. Young women, old, wind-dried and solemn-faced, they raised tiny scraps of handkerchiefs as we passed. They were dry-eyed, most of them. They would do their crying later, when the men had gone and could not see them. The skeleton force of troopers left behind lounged near the gates, spitting, scratching, joking with friends as they went by. Colonel Weyland and Major Burkhoff sat their mounts like stone figures until we had cleared the gates.

The column stretched out on the desert, putting the fort behind it. I nodded to Gorgan and he kneed up with his detail of twelve men.

“Are we heading straight for the stronghold?” Gorgan asked.

“The Colonel's taking the main column that way. He's looking for a fight and there's no way to stop it. I figure Halan's patrol ought to be somewhere to the west of here. If we can pick them up before morning, maybe we can learn something about where Kohi's going to hit next.”

“You don't figure they've gone back to the stronghold?”

“They've just tasted blood. Kohi can't hold them back now. Anyway, he's setting out to drive the dog soldiers out of the White Mountains, and he can't do that by running to his stronghold and fighting a defensive war.”

Gorgan spat into the dust. “It's your detail.”

We pulled away from the column and rode at a gallop toward the dying sun.

According to the march orders, Halan's patrol was supposed to be bivouacked that night at a place called Fire Rock, on the edge of the desert. We reached the place about an hour before sunup the next morning. The patrol wasn't there.

Gorgan and I looked at each other, thinking of the two companies of infantry. The cavalry escort that had gone with Caroline.

“What do you think?” I said.

Gorgan rubbed his face. “Do you know the march route Halan was to take?”

“Yes.”

“Then we'd better start out in the direction they would be coming from.”

We unbitted and loosened cinches and let our horses rest for a while. The early morning was dead quiet. We waited out the few minutes of blackness that always comes before the dawn, then we climbed into saddles again and headed into the foothills. I kept telling myself that lame horses could have slowed the patrol and maybe Halan had decided not to come on to Fire Rock that day. But I didn't believe it. We rode as quietly as we could, higher into the hills—the freakish, piled-up boulders called hills in that country. The eastern sky began to pale. The horizon—what we could see of it—became edged in red, and the red crawled up in the darkness, like blood spilled on a blotter.

Gorgan reached over and held my reins. “Do you hear that?”

I heard it. Little round balls of sound. The casual, unimportant sound of rifle fire in the distance. I looked at Gorgan and we were both thinking that dawn was Apache's favorite time to attack. Behind me, I could hear the nervous sounds of the troopers working carbines in and out of the leather boots.

“I guess,” Gorgan said, “we know now why Halan didn't make it to Fire Rock.” We put iron to our mounts and began the steady climb in the direction the sound was coming from.

We reached a high ledge and the sound of gunfire became suddenly louder. Below us now we could see the stringy clouds of black powder smoke drifting sluggishly across a rocky gully where the patrol had dug in for the attack. Without speaking, Gorgan and I swung down from our saddles, drawing our carbines as we hit the ground.

“Two men for horse-holders,” Gorgan called.

Two troopers came forward at the trot, bunched the reins together, and led the horses down from the ledge. I remembered, for some reason, what Gorgan had said about the frontier cavalry not being cavalry at all, but infantry merely riding to battle on horses. It was true now, at least.

We couldn't see the Indians, but they could see us. The heavy lead bullets from their Henrys spat against the rocks behind us as Gorgan got his troopers spread out and we began working down toward the gully.

Gorgan was the first to reach the gully, rolling, stumbling, falling into the draw. I came after him, and the troopers from E Company were right on top of us. The men of the patrol were busily sighting and firing over the lip of the gully, hardly noticing us as we fell in beside them. I saw Morgan leaning across the clay breastwork, firing with intense concentration. Steuber, the big Dutchman, farther down, cursed as he dug a bad round out of his carbine. I saw Skiborsky then, on down toward the end of the gully. I ducked my head and headed toward him.

“Where's Captain Halan, Skiborsky?”

The Sergeant turned. He didn't grin that fierce grin of his this time. His face was gray. He looked sick. “By God, you do manage to get here just in time,” he said. “I'll say that for you. The Captain's on down the draw a way. He's shot.”

“How bad?”

“I don't know. I haven't had time to see.”

I moved on down the gully and almost fell across Halan, sprawled limp on the floor of the draw. He had caught a bullet about an inch above his belt buckle, and another one up higher, into the lungs. His face was yellow, the cast of death. The only thing alive was his eyes.

I knelt beside him and opened his collar and tried to move some rocks away from his head. His mouth moved. He tried to speak but only bubbles of blood came out.

I bent down close. “What is it, Halan? What do you want to say?”

He tried again. “Leave me... alone... Mr. Reardon. Let me... die in peace.”

“What have you got against me, Halan? You were my friend once, not long ago. What did I do to you, anyway?”

He closed his eyes and more blood bubbled silently from the corners of his mouth. He said nothing more. Halan was through talking, forever. I knelt there for a long time, a heaviness inside me. Strangling white smoke drifted down the gully. Carbines crashed. What was it, Halan? What did I do to make you hate me? Halan smiled thinly in death. A trooper came up behind me and said, “Is there anything I can do, Lieutenant?”

I shook my head.

I untied Halan's neckerchief and spread it over his face. Automatically, I began to go through his pockets in search of any personal effects that he would want sent back east somewhere—if there was anybody back there who cared. There wasn't much there: two crushed cigars, a few coins, a pocket knife. Then I went cold inside as my fingers touched something else.

I held them in my hand, those two glittering five-pointed pieces of silver, staring at them. I imagined that something snapped inside me.

“Reardon!” I heard Gorgan calling. “Get up here! Here they come!”

They came, all right. But at that moment I didn't care if there were ten of them or a thousand. I picked up a carbine somewhere and began firing over the breastwork —firing automatically, because that was what I had been trained to do—but I hardly saw the naked brown bodies as they came on, melted away, and came on again. What I saw were those stars that I had taken from Halan's pocket—the twins to the ones Caroline had given to me.

I must have gone a little crazy for a few minutes. I leaped up to the lip of the draw, yelling curses and swinging the carbine like a club as the Apaches began to filter through our patrol's curtain of fire. There was a vicious pleasure in hitting, in lashing out savagely and feeling the jar of my wrists as I smashed a skull or broke a bone, maiming, ripping, slashing. In the back of my mind I could hear the troopers yelling, and some of them had climbed up to join me. I could see Steuber hacking, slashing like a crazy man, towering above the Indians and wading through them swinging his saber two-handed, like Death wielding a bloody scythe. I could see Morgan fighting viciously, wolflike for the sake of violence.

But I saw those things only in the back of my mind. What I really saw at that moment was Caroline. I saw her clearer than I had ever seen her before. And I understood at last Halan's sudden hatred for me, for I knew now that he had seen those stars that Caroline had given me. The twins to the ones she had given him. I didn't remember at the time, but later I recalled the day Halan had come into my hut with Weyland's orders for me. I had emptied my pockets before shaving. The stars, along with other odds and ends, had been on the table where Halan could see them.

And he had seen them. And from that moment on he had hated me, for it was then that he knew that Caroline had belonged to me as well as to him.