The Colonel's Lady

Also with us in the wagon was a man named Steuber, a giant of a Dutchman, who kept blinking his small sun-reddened eyes at the unbelievable expanse of Arizona wasteland. He seemed likable enough and was in a good humor. We learned, a little at a time, that he was a professional soldier and had served during the war with a regiment of New York Fire Zouaves.

The others were something else again. There was a fuzzy-faced youth who looked scared, and was probably thinking about deserting even before he was sworn in. His name was Dodson, he said, and his family had been killed up north on the Gila in a Chiricahua raid. He couldn't very well manage a homestead by himself, and besides, he was scared to go back there. So he had listened to the recruiting sergeant and had decided that the Army was the best place he could be. Now he wasn't so sure.

There was also a small, tight-wound man named McCully, who looked as if he might have been a gambler before he had decided on a military life. A fat man named Mayhew, sweating and whisky-bloated, rounded out the cavalry's catch.

We stopped that night near the black, stark peaks of the Santa Catalinas, and Sergeant Skiborsky, who was in charge of the wagon, threw our rations of bacon and hard bread at us. Morgan, the lank man with the cold eyes, smiled the smallest smile in the world. “So this is the cavalry.”

The youth, Dodson, looked at him. “Not yet. We haven't even been sworn in. I guess we won't know what it's really like until then.”

“I know enough,” Morgan murmured, “to know I'm not going to be crazy about it.” The big Steuber, soldierlike, was gathering up sticks of greasewood to build a squad fire with.

The recruits stood guard along with the troopers that night. “It's likely you'll see no Injuns,” Sergeant Skiborsky growled, “but you might as well learn what a cavalry carbine feels like.” He hurled a short rifle at Steuber without warning. Professionally, the big Dutchman grabbed it out of the air without blinking. Skiborsky threw a carbine at me and I managed to hang onto it. He never handed anything to anyone, it seemed. Morgan caught his and for a moment looked as if he might throw it back. Dodson, McCully, and Mayhew were not so lucky. Their carbines fell clattering into the gravel and dust of the desert and Skiborsky grinned evilly, marking them mentally for special attention when he got them to Larrymoor.

“You,” Skiborsky said to me. “You ever been in the Army before?”

“No.”

He grinned that grin again. He put his hands on his hips, leaned his head far over on one shoulder, studying me. “You're a goddamn liar,” he said. “I'll knock it out of you, though, when you get in uniform.”

I could have hit him, but that was what he was hoping I would do. I was as big as Skiborsky, and maybe I looked almost as tough. He felt obligated to prove his own hardness to the others before the wrong idea had a chance to grow. I had been in the Army long enough to understand that.

“I'll be looking forward to it,” I said. “When you're not wearing your stripes.”

“I can take them off right now, bucko.” He grinned. He could have forced a fight then, but maybe he thought better of it and decided to wait and do it before the entire company. Still grinning, he cocked his dirty forage cap over one eye and marched off toward a fire that the troopers had started.

“You take that talk from everybody, mister,” Morgan asked softly, “or just from dog soldiers?”

I must have been wound up. I wheeled on him and hit him before he could get his hands up. Morgan took a quick step backward to keep his balance. He touched the corner of his mouth where blood was beginning to well up from a split lip, and for an instant I could see kill in those eyes of his. Then, surprisingly, he grinned.

“Forget it, Reardon. I was just wondering.”

It was over before it got started. Still, I didn't, have the feeling that Morgan was backing down, or that he would ever back down. In that instant of cold anger I had seen his hand go instinctively to his hip, and I had the uneasy feeling that he would have killed me in a moment, as unfeelingly as if he were brushing away an annoying fly, if he had been wearing a gun. But that moment of blind anger was over, and now he was grinning faintly, with no hate at all that I could see.

“Forget it,” he said again.

“I'm sorry, Morgan. I guess I was wound up.”

The war was over, I kept reminding myself. Had been over for five years and more. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox and the Army of Northern Virginia was no more. Johnson and Hood and even the proud Beauregard had accepted defeat. The Confederacy was no more than a memory, I told myself, and its heroes were all but forgotten, and its traitors were completely forgotten, it seemed. But not by me.

It was more than the war, of course, that kept Caroline in my mind. Long before the war, long before I had even heard of places like Pea Ridge and Chickamauga and Gettysburg; long before then there had been Caroline.

Idly, I watched the cool-eyed Morgan as he rocked uncomfortably in the jolting bed of the escort wagon. What was Morgan running from? I wondered. Steuber, the Dutchman, was easier to figure, but what about the others? Dodson, McCully, Mayhew, and even Sergeant Skiborsky—what had pushed them over the frontier and away from civilization until even a God-forgotten outpost like Fort Larrymoor could seem like a sanctuary to them? Had one of those men ever known and loved a girl like Caroline?

It had been only four days ago that I had seen her. More than five years had passed and I kept telling myself that I had forgotten her, but I hadn't forgotten. Not the sound of her voice, or the brightness of her mouth, or anything else about her. I knew that now, and I knew it then, when I saw her.

It happened in front of the Tucson stage office, and there was quite a to-do about it because the cavalry had come all the way from Fort Larrymoor to escort the stage through the Indian country. There had been a crowd of men gathered around, craning their necks to get a look at the senator, or maybe the governor of the territory, or whoever it was who was so important that he got a military escort for that distance. It wasn't a senator or a governor, it turned out, though.

“Who is it?” I asked somebody, before I was close enough to see.

“Missus Weyland,” an old sourdough said, elbowing in for a closer look.

“Who?”

“Gener'l Weyland's wife. Godamighty!” he said, looking at me pityingly. “The jasper that ramrods things up at Larrymoor, I hear.”

I saw her then, sitting there inside the coach, smiling coolly at the commotion she was causing, waiting for the cavalry lieutenant to clear away the crowd and get the stage rolling. It was Caroline, all right. As stiff and proud as a queen, and as beautiful as queens are supposed to be but never are. She didn't see me. I don't think she would have blinked an eye if she had. I stood there looking at her, hating her so much that it made me sick, like a kick in the groin. And loving her too, I suppose. A minute went by, or an hour, and after a while the troopers got the crowd cleared away and the stage rolled off toward Larrymoor. I stood there for a long while after everyone else had gone. Still seeing her.

It was the next day that Skiborsky came through with supplies, scouting for recruits. And now I was headed for Larrymoor, and I couldn't give the reason why because it was one of those things that men do sometimes without any reason at all that they can put into words. I just had to see her again and let her know that there was someone still alive that remembered. I wanted to see that beautiful face of hers. I wanted to see fear in her eyes when she realized that a person's past is never really left behind or forgotten, or that old debts are never shelved for good until they are paid. What I really wanted, I guess, was to see that she paid. Or that was what I told myself I wanted.

And all the time, as I thought of her, we jolted on toward Larrymoor, through the blazing early-summer heat, past ragged hills and mountains and across the gravelly desert. In the wagon bed we sat or scrunched down, trying to hide from the heat, and the monotonous, seemingly endless land crawled by. We crossed the Gila and headed west, skirting the mountains, and finally we crossed the Salt River with its bitter clear water and headed north again. Sergeant Skiborsky grinned and said we were in Coyotero Apache country, but not to worry, you couldn't be killed but once.

We saw no sign of Indians. We did begin to see towering mescal plants now and then, adding a touch of color and brilliance to this dead land, and only seeming to make it look deader than ever. There were also the occasional slender shoots of ocotillos and, in the valleys, deep gamma grass. The needle-thorned chollas were everywhere.

“The Sergeant was right, though,” a soft voice said, jarring me out of my thoughts. “You were in the Army, sometime or other, weren't you?”

The voice belonged to Morgan, who, as one day dragged into another, had become almost friendly. We had taken to sitting together, our backs against the tail gate of the wagon, keeping a small distance from the others. At first I didn't know what he meant. Then I remembered my difference with Sergeant Skiborsky.

My first impulse was to tell Morgan to go to hell, but there didn't seem to be much sense in that. It was an innocent question, one that had probably drifted into his mind from nowhere, and he had unconsciously put it into words. He grinned that very faint grin of his.

“Not that it's any of my business.”

What difference did it make? It was no secret, and I wasn't ashamed of it.

“Yes,” I said. “I was in the Army once.”

“Confederate?”

“That's right.”

He laughed quietly, but it didn't sound much like a laugh. “That's what I thought. So was I, but I'm not goin' to spread it around. They say the bluebelly cavalry can be a hard place for a man with a secesh record.”

I looked at Morgan closely and decided that he was telling the truth. He had the hungry, sunken look that I still remembered seeing on the faces of men during the last days at Petersburg. His eyes were faded and worn out but somehow full of anger, like the eyes of Confederate prisoners coming back from Fort Delaware. Or Yankee prisoners straggling north from Andersonville, for that matter. They all looked pretty much the same toward the end.

“Twenty-first Texas,” he said.

I said, “Thirty-sixth Alabama Horse.”

We didn't shake hands. There were a lot of ex-Confederates in blue uniforms now; it was nothing to base a friendship on.

The long jolting trip was beginning to get on the men's nerves, but later that morning word was passed along that we would be raising Fort Larrymoor before nightfall. We raised something else before then, though. Toward noon one of the point troopers came riding back at the gallop and held a quick conversation with the lieutenant in charge. The column halted, closed up, and the troopers formed tight skirmish lines on both sides before we started to roll again.

The fuzz-faced Dodson was worried. “What is it?” he wanted to know, without directing the question at anyone in particular.

Sergeant Skiborsky turned in the driver's seat, grinning fiercely. “Break out your carbine, bucko. Maybe you'll be findin' out before long.”

“But what's the matter?” the kid demanded nervously.

“Apache's what's the matter!” Skiborsky roared suddenly. “I said break out them carbines!”

We broke out the carbines. We were also issued twenty rounds of ammunition per man before we started to roll again, but neither Skiborsky nor the troopers would give us any more information.

But we found out soon enough what the trouble was. The trooper riding point waved us on from some high ground, and we went up the grade and began rattling down into a rocky valley. We saw the smoke then, and pretty soon we saw the wagon, or what was left of the wagon.

Most of it was ashes by the time we got there, and odds and ends of household furniture were scattered around, smoking and hot. And covering the valley was a stench that a man will never forget once he has smelled it, the stench that comes from the sizzling frying of human flesh. Dodson looked as if he were going to be sick. Mayhew quickly produced a bottle of whisky from God knows where and drank deeply.

Morgan was standing in the bed of the wagon when the column halted, his jaw set but no emotion showing in those eyes of his. Skiborsky dropped down from the wagon seat and came around to the back.

“On the ground, the lot of you.”

Dodson shook his head, swallowing fast. “Not me—” he started, but before he could finish the Sergeant had grabbed him by the leg and jerked him out of the wagon. With his left hand he caught the front of the boy's shirt, and with his right hand he cuffed Dodson's face, once, twice, three times, every blow as sharp as a rifle crack.

“In the cavalry,” Sergeant Skiborsky snarled, “orders are to be followed.”

The rest of us began dropping over the side of the wagon.

“Reardon,” Skiborsky jabbed a finger at me, “you and Steuber get spades out of the other wagon and start diggin' graves, three of them. Morgan, you and McCully give 'em a hand.” He paused for a moment, looking at Dodson and Mayhew, grinning a grin that was no grin at all, but a fierce expression of hate and powerful disgust. “Dodson,” he barked, “you and Mayhew get the bodies and wrap them in blankets and lay them out for burial. And,” he added brutally, “the first one that pukes gets his face smashed with the butt of a carbine. Is that clear?”

Dodson was almost ready to cry. At that moment, I guess, he was wishing that he had stayed on the homestead, Indians or no Indians. Mayhew was concentrating on keeping the whisky down, his eyes almost closed, breathing hard through his mouth.

We went to work, with Skiborsky supervising. The lieutenant and the troopers had ridden up to high ground to make sure that Apache wasn't sitting in ambush.

“Goddamn,” Steuber grunted, trying to sink a spade into the sun-baked ground. We cleared off the rocks from a space big enough for three narrow graves and began digging. We worked until our shirts were soaked and our backs stinging with sweat, and then we turned the spades over to Morgan and McCully.

“You two,” Skiborsky bellowed, “come over here.”

We went over to the wagon. It was the first time I had ever seen the results of an Apache massacre. I had heard about them. I had seen artists' drawings of them in Harper's Weekly. But I wasn't prepared for the real thing. I guess nobody ever is, the first time.

“Take a good look,” the Sergeant said grimly. “Maybe it'll give you an idea the way Apache makes war. They never heard of gentlemen's war out here, but people never realize that until they run into it.”

There were a man and a woman and a small boy, you could tell what they were by the rags of clothing they still had on, but that was the only way. Their faces were drawn and puckered, the way, I learned, that all faces look after a scalping. The skin had slipped down from the naked, red-glistening skulls, folding shapelessly over the eyes. Their lax mouths hung open, gaping, as though silent scream on scream were still coming from them.

“Apaches don't usually scalp,” Skiborsky said heavily, “unless they're crazy mad or drunk on tiswin. Then there's no mutilation bloody enough to satisfy them. These people were lucky,” he said, as the green-faced Dodson and Mayhew began to wrap the bodies in blankets. “They were killed clean and then scalped; the Coyotero ain't that considerate very often, when he's mad. They
could
have been spread-eagled over an anthill with their mouths pried open and their tongues cut out.” The Sergeant wiped his face on his filthy yellow cavalry neckerchief.

Completely expressionless, the big Steuber began turning the dead man over with the toe of his boot.

“What the hell are you doin'?” Skiborsky demanded.

The Dutchman shrugged. “Maybe he's got money on him. Money won't do him no good now.”

“Goddamn you,” the Sergeant grated, “get back to diggin'. If you stop before the graves are finished I'll tear your black heart open with a carbine bullet.”

Steuber looked hurt. He couldn't see anything wrong in it. After all, a man's belongings can't do him any good if he's dead.

“Move!” Skiborsky yelled.

The Dutchman moved, slowly, reluctantly, still eyeing the dead man's pockets, wondering if there was anything in them he could use. Skiborsky was silent for a moment, watching Mayhew and Dodson take the sagging blankets away. I thought I could see a subtle change take place in the Sergeant as he watched the operation. A part of his hard, cavalry-conditioned crust seemed to fall away, and what I saw underneath was a man who had already seen too much of what we were now seeing for the first time. Skiborsky was a man who for years had rubbed shoulders with death and had laughed at it. He looked like a man who had forgotten how to laugh.

I said, “You didn't know them, did you? The dead man and his wife and his kid?”

He looked at me without actually seeing me. “I know them. Not their names, but I've seen a thousand just like them, and I know them, all right. They're goddamn fools. They keep movin' west, right into the Indian country, and we can't hold them back. The Army threatens them and Apache kills them and still they keep comin'. Goda-mighty, what do they expect to find out here in this God-forgotten desert? Why don't they stay home?”

“Maybe they haven't got a home,” I said. “Maybe that's the reason they keep coming.”