The Warriors (31 page)

“Julia, go back!”

She didn’t hear. Her head kept turning, her eyes searching for him.

He flung down his rifle, crouched, and ran at the burning breastwork. His left boot slipped on the body of a dead comrade. His leap was bad. He crashed chest-first into the sagging timber.

Fire scorched his ragged blouse. The last two metal buttons dropped off, their threads burned away. The pain on his exposed skin was hideous, but he bore it, scrambling up and over the collapsing fortification. By the time he cleared it, both his sleeves were afire.

He could still see her out there, helpless and unable to locate him. The gray men, pleading with their hands, continued to brush by.

“Julia? Here I am!” He waved his arms. The blue sleeves trailed fire. She’d come all this way to find him. He couldn’t abandon her.

“Here, Julia.
Here!”

A Confederate rifleman stepped from a turbulent cloud of smoke. Shot. Michael felt the ball slam into his belly.

Fire curled up his legs, filling his nostrils with the stench of burned leather. Another ball struck his left shoulder. She turned away in the red musk, shaking her head sadly. She started back to the gargoyle trees where the Rebel wounded flailed and bayed.

“Julia?
Julia!”

Afire and hit, he began to topple forward. A third Rebel ball thumped into his body. Despairing, he continued to fall slowly, so slowly. At the impact of a fourth ball, he heard a deep, sonorous tolling.

He took another bullet in his left thigh. The bell tolled.

He took one in his right arm. The bell tolled.

Soon it was pealing without pause. It was the only sound he heard. It mocked his failure to reach the woman he wanted against all reason. It knelled his death in the Wilderness as he drifted face-first into a pit of dark where ground had been only a moment before.

Someone jabbed his hip.

Terrified, he heard men grumbling. Sounds of motion above the bell’s strident clang.

Michael Boyle’s eyes popped open. He gasped loudly the instant he realized he’d been dreaming again.

He lay on his side in the cramped top bunk. In tiers of three, the bunks lined the walls of the eighty-five-foot railroad car lit at each end by a hanging lamp.

Moment by moment, the nightmare was fading. He searched for another familiar detail, found it in the pale rectangle of the charcoal drawing he’d tacked to the wall beside his head. Once he saw the drawing, he knew, finally and positively, that he was alive and whole.

Dry-mouthed, he scratched his crotch, wondering whether the cooties had gotten him at last. The bell beside the door at the car’s end was being rung to wake the workers. Again he felt a jab on his hip.

He rolled over to face the aisle. The man who occupied the bunk below, Sean Murphy, stood on his own bed, his head on a level with Michael’s eyes. Murphy was fifty or thereabouts, robust, pie-faced, genial. He had surprisingly little gray in his curly, copper-colored hair and huge fan of a beard. He poked Michael a third time.

“Sleep all mornin’, lad, and our boss’ll be on your ass worse than he is already. Rise an’ shine!”

“I’m coming,” Michael growled. He sat up without thinking, banged his head on the wooden roof, and swore.

He swung his legs out of the bunk and jumped down among the other Paddies tumbling from their bunks with varying degrees of speed and ill humor. Murphy’s bright blue-green eyes raked Michael’s six-foot frame; noted the sweat rings under the arms of his long underwear. Murphy clucked his tongue.

“You must have had some night, Michael me boy.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For the last hour ’twas all I could do to catch a few winks. You been tossin’ and babblin’ something awful. What was goin’ through your head?”

Michael stepped on the edge of the empty bottom bunk, reached to the lower end of his own, and dragged out his faded flannel shirt, trousers, and boots. He dumped the clothing in the aisle, where he proceeded to dress amidst the buffeting of earlier risers already stumbling toward the end of the car.

He disliked having to answer Murphy’s question. How could he admit he’d been dreaming of a woman who didn’t belong to him and never would? A woman he’d come all the way out here to escape and couldn’t? Guardedly, he said, “I was back in the Wilderness. The last afternoon, when I got hit.” Michael still bore a scar on his left hip. A Confederate ball buzzing in over the barricades had slammed him out of action—and out of the war.

“You dream of that every other night,” Murphy sighed, helping Michael pull his galluses over his shirt. “That was two years ago, lad. Seems like you’d be forgettin’ it by now.”

He recalled the fire, the smoke, the feeling of forever being cut off from safety and sanity.

“If you’d been there, Sean, I doubt you’d forget it.”

“But the war’s over. I keep remindin’ you of that.”

Michael knotted a red bandana around his neck and finally managed a smile. He was a tall Irishman of thirty-six with fair hair already showing gray, a horizontal white scar across his forehead, and steady golden-brown eyes close to the color of the handlebar mustache he’d grown since coming west. Like his hair, the mustache was gray streaked.

There was no flab left on him, either. He was spare and hard after eleven weeks as a rust eater on what he and the other Paddies referred to as the U-Pay.

“Out of the way, I’m hungry,” a man named Flannagan complained, giving Michael a shove. Michael stiffened. Double-chinned Sean Murphy laid a hand on his arm:

“Easy—
easy!
You’re edgy as the devil this morning.”

Michael let himself be restrained and took no offense. Murphy had become a good friend. Murphy was the man who’d persuaded him to leave the Chicago saloon where he’d been sweeping floors and tending bar. Together they’d ridden the cars west to the end of the existing rail lines, then traveled on to Omaha.

And Murphy’s remark was embarrassingly accurate. Of late, Michael had found Louis Kent’s wife slipping into his dreams with increasing frequency. No matter how far a man fled, apparently certain things could never be outrun.

He’d tried running once before, when he’d finally admitted how he felt about the spoiled and lovely spouse of Amanda Kent’s only son. In a rage, he’d taken her at the family’s country seat up the Hudson River from New York. The way he’d taken her amounted to rape. Almost immediately he’d realized it was more an act of lust than anger; he’d wanted her secretly for a long time. He’d enlisted in the 69th New York to escape the cause of his feelings, but found he couldn’t.

After the Wilderness, the desire to flee had still been with him. But it was complemented by another drive, just as strong. He was sick at heart after seeing so much death. Weary of watching life and property being destroyed. He’d wanted an antidote—a feeling of accomplishing something, building something. So Julia had been one reason but not the only reason he’d left the Washington hospital as soon as he could, accepted his discharge, and headed for new country.

He’d spent a season in Ohio, planting and harvesting corn while Lee gave up to Grant at Appomattox, the bloodletting ended, and the Northern punishment of the beaten enemy commenced. Late in ’65 he’d moved on to Chicago and held unsatisfying menial jobs in a packing house, a tannery, the saloon. During those months, the nation watched in astonishment as Andrew Johnson—“His Accidency, the President”—swung away from his pronouncements about hanging Southerners and began carrying put the conciliatory Reconstruction policies foreshadowed in Lincoln’s 1864 inaugural.

In Ohio and Illinois, too, the memory of Julia stayed with him.

Then crusty widower, Sean Murphy, approached him in the Chicago saloon, and they became drinking companions and eventually friends. Michael listened with interest when Murphy spoke of leaving his poor-paying drayman’s job for higher wages and cleaner work in the open air beyond the Missouri. There, the long-delayed transcontinental railroad was going forward at last. Michael decided to pack his few belongings and join Murphy and a number of other Paddies heading for the prairie.

The men went west in a spirit of hope, enthusiasm and pride, declaring that the Irish had built the Erie Canal, a marvel in its day, and by God they’d build the century’s newest and greatest marvel too—

“No denials, Michael?”

He forced himself from his reverie. “What’s that?”

“I remarked—several hours ago, it seems—that you woke up nervous as an Orangeman in County Cork. Again.”

Michael smiled. “Why, Sean, you should know moodiness is typical of an Irish fellow. Especially when he’s throwing down a mile of rail a day, and working for a bastard to boot.”

Murphy looked unconvinced. He headed up the aisle between the tiered bunks in the eight-foot-high car. He and Michael were now the laggards. Most of the other laborers had piled out the door at the end, where a rack of repeating Spencer rifles gleamed under the hanging lantern.

“I agree it ain’t quite the soft duty I thought it’d be,” Murphy said. “But thirty-five greenback dollars a month is a sight better than what I was earnin’ haulin’ kegs up and down Lake Street. Wait a damned minute, will you? Got to lace up my blasted boot again.”

Murphy knelt. Michael scratched his groin and gazed at the rifles in the racks. Would they be needed against the Sioux or Cheyenne?

So far there’d been only four raids, each one over before Michael even heard about it. The pattern was always the same. He and the other men would be wakened late in the night by yells and the bang of Spencers. They’d tumble outside, rifles in hand, only to find the drovers who guarded the railroad’s cattle firing futile shots into the darkness from which some Indians had come slipping silently to run off half a dozen head.

After the first theft, Michael and Sean Murphy had learned that information about the Plains tribes given them gratuitously in an Omaha saloon was false. They’d been told the hostiles never struck after the sun went down, fearing that if they were slain at night, their spirits couldn’t find the way to the Indian equivalent of heaven. A drover guarding the herd explained the real reason Plains braves generally avoided nocturnal attacks: the gut strings on war bows grew damp and lost their tautness in the night air. Night thievery of cattle was commonplace, however, since it seldom required the discharge of even a single arrow. There’d been no casualties to the railroad men on any of the raids thus far.

But couriers galloping in from further west, where the grade was being prepared, had recently brought disturbing news about the Indians.

Early in the spring, peace commissioners had been dispatched by the Federal Government to attempt to arrange a treaty with the Sioux and Cheyenne. The tribes stood in the way of miners heading north toward the Big Horn Mountains—the Powder River country—where there’d been a gold strike.

The dispatch of the commission sprang from a shift in Congressional policy. Washington now thought it easier to buy peace on the High Plains than to fight for it. According to what Michael had heard, important chiefs of the Oglala and Brulé Sioux had journeyed to Fort Laramie to listen to the offer of one Mr. Taylor of the Indian Office.

The tribes would be given an annuity of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, plus firearms for hunting, if they’d guarantee the safety of whites traveling the Bozeman Trail to the new diggings. The negotiations had proceeded smoothly at first, then they were abruptly ruined by the arrival of a Brulé chief, Standing Elk, who had encountered a column of white soldiers commanded by a Colonel Carrington. The soldiers were on their way to the Powder River country to build stockades.

Red Cloud, the most influential of the Sioux at the Fort Laramie parley, listened to the report of the army column with shock and anger. Offers of peace were being made even as soldiers tramped northwest to seize the disputed territory! Red Cloud and a great many other braves stormed out of the fort, promising war as repayment for the deception. So even though the U-Pay had experienced no serious trouble as yet, every man at the railhead knew circumstances were ripe for it.

“Broke the damn thing!” Murphy exploded. Part of a thong dangled from his hand. He stood up and stuffed the thong in his pocket. Michael turned away from the rifles and the gloomy thoughts they generated. Murphy returned to the subject of a few moments ago.

“I wanted to speak to you about the boss. I agree it’s a damn shame we drew him as head of our gang—”

“I can’t figure out how a Reb got such a good job, Sean.”

“Corkle told me the fellow ran railroad construction crews in the South, before the war.”

“I heard that too. But he’s still a Reb, and this is mostly a Union outfit.”

“All I can guess is, the Casements believe the only war they should fret about is a war with the calendar. They put experienced men where they can get the best use from ’em.

“Suppose so.” Michael nodded. “All that’s past is forgiven—or so you’re always saying,” he added with a wry smile.

“Well, we both understand I’ve been known to prevaricate on occasion.” Murphy grinned. He remained in the door, intentionally blocking Michael’s passage. “There ain’t a hotter Southron at the railhead than the wretch we’re workin’ for—nor one who likes more to keep fightin’ the late, unlamented war. Friend to friend, Michael, you’re a mite too willing to butt heads with him on that subject—not to mention others.”

“I have a reason. No, make it three.”

“Such as?”

“He’s a bully. He’s a loudmouth. And he’s a liar about the war. He won’t admit fighting for the principle of states’ rights was so much blarney. He and his kind may have fought well, but they were fighting for an immoral cause.”

Here Murphy looked dubious; Michael’s remark didn’t reflect the conventional thinking of most Irishmen, who viewed blacks as an economic threat.

“Nigger slavery, y’mean?”

Another nod. “I also get sick of him claiming it’s only the Northern factories that beat the South. He’s partly right, but I’ll tell you this. At the Round Tops, I saw no factories perishing, I saw Irishmen and Dutchmen. In the Wilderness I didn’t see factories perishing, just Yankee boys.”