by John Jakes
The first lieutenant needed that coat. The fire produced almost no warmth. The room felt like an icehouse. How cold was it outside? Ten below? During this kind of late-winter storm, the temperature sometimes dipped even lower than that.
Bent was on his feet now. His small eyes, pricked by the light of several oil lamps, grew thoughtful as he studied the map tacked to the jacal wall. The recently opened stagecoach line connected Fort Smith with El Paso and California. Part of the route lay along the military road that ran southwest from Camp Cooper. The coach was lost somewhere out there.
“I expect they just stopped till the storm blows over,” O’Dell said.
“That’s the logical assumption, naturally. But we mustn’t permit that to lull us into complacence. What if there was a wreck? What if passengers are hurt? In need of assistance? We must send a search party. I have already spoken with the commandant, and he’s in agreement.”
“Sir, that’s a norther outside! The wind’s going sixty miles an hour. Ice is already an inch thick on everything. We should at least wait until morning before—”
Bent interrupted: “The commandant left the timing entirely to my discretion. The detachment will leave within the hour.” He avoided O’Dell’s eyes as he went on, “Ten men, I think. With extra rations and whiskey. Put Lieutenant Main in command.”
O’Dell was so stunned he couldn’t bring himself to send a noncom to waken Charles. He went in person, taking ten minutes just to fight through the storm to the barracks. Shivering in his long underwear, Charles sat up, a bewildered expression on his face.
“Tonight? God above, Lafe, is he crazy?”
“I’d say so. But of course circumstances protect him. The coach is way late, and it’s remotely possible that the passengers do need help.”
“More likely they’re holed up. Or dead. I think the son of a bitch means to kill me.”
“Just because you turned him down that time?” O’Dell sounded skeptical.
“I know it’s senseless, but what else could it be?”
Charles flung off the layers of blankets and hides under which he had been trying to keep warm. “I don’t know why he wants me out of the way so badly, but I sure as hell won’t give him the satisfaction. I won’t let him squander the lives of good men, either. I’ll come back and bring the whole detachment with me, don’t you worry.”
He sounded more confident than he felt. He put on every hickory shirt and pair of cord pants he owned, while the Texas norther screamed outside like someone gone mad.
The eleven mounted soldiers left Camp Cooper at one in the morning. The wind-driven sleet had coated everything. But it wasn’t deep, as snow would have been, so they were able to keep to the wagon road. The footing was extremely treacherous, however. They traveled no more than a mile in four hours. By then Sergeant Breedlove was calling Bent every name he knew and, when he ran out of those, invented some.
Charles had wrapped a long wool scarf around his ears and the lower part of his face. He might as well have worn gauze. His face felt like a block of wood. He could barely move his lips to issue orders.
The men cursed and complained, but they kept on. They followed in single file behind him, recognizing that he was riding on the point, taking the brunt of the wind and risking himself by being first to cross the treacherous ground.
At daybreak the wind abruptly shifted to the southwest. Then it moderated. Rips appeared in the clouds, with the glow of sunrise showing through. Half an hour later, as they picked their way across a landscape that still resembled glass, Breedlove croaked, “Look, sir. Down the road.”
A slender column of smoke rose to the clearing sky. “I’ll wager it’s the coach,” Charles said in an equally hoarse voice. “They’re probably tearing it apart and burning it to keep warm. Looks like it’s about a mile away.”
A mile and a half, as it turned out. It took them more than three hours to reach the source of the smoke. The coach lay on its side with its two near wheels and doors missing. Part of the door had not yet been consumed by the nearby fire. Just as the detachment came close enough to discern that, Breedlove’s roan slipped and lamed the left forefoot.
The other troopers saw to the survivors of the accident—the coach driver, guard, and three male passengers who were nearly comatose. Charles heard the driver mumbling about the vehicle’s overturning on glare ice. Nearby lay the frozen corpses of three of the horses; the other three had galloped into the storm to die.
Charles watched Breedlove finish his examination of the injured roan. Reluctantly, he offered the sergeant his revolver.
“Shoot him. I’ll do it if you can’t.”
The sergeant couldn’t stand to look at his fallen mount any longer. “How will I get back to camp?”
“The same way as the passengers. Riding behind someone else. I’ll take you.”
“Lieutenant, I know—I know you prize Palm as much as I prize Old Randy. Any horse that carries a double load very far in this kind of weather will be wore out long before we reach camp. As good as dead. You carry me and you’ll have to shoot Palm, too. I’ll ride with one of the men.”
“Goddamn it, don’t argue. A man’s more important than a horse. You’ll ride with me.”
They sounded like shrill children. Two troopers helped the glassy-eyed coach guard toward one of the horses. Breedlove stared at the revolver, then at his fallen mount. He shook his head.
“I can’t. If you’ll do it for me, I’ll be in your debt forever.”
“Turn the other way.”
Breedlove did, squinting into the flare of the morning sun on the fields of ice. Charles raised the gun and prayed the mechanism wasn’t frozen; to prolong this would be torture for the sergeant. Slowly he squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked. The echo boomed away into space, followed by Old Randy’s startled bellow of pain. Chunks of flesh were blown from the other side of the roan’s head. They landed on the ice, smoking.
Sergeant Breedlove covered his face with his hands and cried.
Half a mile this side of the post, Palm sank down, unable to go farther. Heartbroken, Charles put two bullets into the horse. Then he and Breedlove walked the rest of the way with blood oozing inside their boots. The post physician told Charles he had come close to losing three toes from frostbite.
He slept eighteen hours. Shortly after he woke, Breedlove paid a call and offered a nervous apology.
“I sure had you figured wrong, Lieutenant. I am one hundred percent sorry for that. You showed plenty of sand when it counted. I’ve never seen that in any of the Southrons in this regiment.”
“Not in Colonel Lee or Van Dorn?”
“No.”
“Well, believe me, it’s there, in just about the same measure as in other men. Yankees, for example,” Charles added with a wry smile. “Maybe you never looked for it, Sergeant.”
“Yes,” Breedlove mumbled, shamefaced. “Something to that, all right.”
That night Charles wrote a letter to Orry, a letter long overdue. His accumulated anger could be heard in the harsh, rasping sound of his pen on the paper. After the salutation, he came directly to the point.
I am fortunate to be alive to send this to you, for reasons I shall shortly describe. I know you will find it startling, but know that I am being truthful when I say I am now almost certain that my company commander wishes to see me come to harm because of fancied slights and incidents of insubordination which exist more in his own mind than in fact. Orry, I have somehow become mixed up with a d——d lunatic, and since he is about your age and an Academy man, I hasten to ask whether perchance you know him.
Charles paused to stab his quill into the ink pot again. The shimmering flame of his desk lamp shifted shadows back and forth on his bleak face. His eyes revealed his confusion and his wrath as he added the next:
His name is Elkanah Bent.
45
BENT’S PLAN HAD FAILED. Disastrously. Not only had Charles Main survived the rescue trip in weather that coul
d have left him dead or maimed for life, he and his detachment had been cited in General Orders from headquarters of the Department of Texas. The citation spoke of “performance of a humanitarian mission in the face of extreme natural hazards,” and it became part of each man’s permanent record. The commandant had hosted a banquet for the detachment and toasted Main’s bravery.
Privately, the commandant called Bent’s judgment and courage into question.
“When I put you in charge of the emergency, Captain, I never imagined for a moment that you would send men out before the storm-showed signs of abating. I further note that you did not lead the detachment, choosing to remain here while permitting Lieutenant Main to absorb the brunt of the danger. I won’t make an issue of those lapses for one reason only. Thanks to Main, all turned out well and no lives were lost. The angels were on your side. This time.”
The criticism burned. Bent immediately ceased his harassment of Orry Main’s cousin, and in fact went out of his way to praise him—always when others were listening. But it was hard to do. As a result of the ride in the storm, the first sergeant was now Charles’s staunch partisan, as were most of the enlisted men. With O’Dell also supporting Charles, Bent was completely isolated. He held Charles responsible. No longer was Charles just a convenient representative of the Mains. Bent now hated him personally.
He had learned one lesson, however. Never again would he send his second lieutenant into jeopardy while remaining behind. He’d go along and find some way to dispatch Charles personally, perhaps in the thick of a skirmish. He had used that technique successfully in the past.
But the passing weeks denied him an opportunity. The Texas frontier remained quiet. Soon a new worry was gnawing at Bent. It began when he first noticed a subtle but unmistakable change in Charles’s behavior. Charles continued to be courteous to his company commander—courteous almost to a fault—but he had abandoned even the slightest pretense of cordiality.
Bent realized Charles had identified him as an enemy. The question was, had Charles done anything about it? Had he, for example, mentioned Bent’s name in a letter to Orry Main? And was it possible that Orry had already warned his cousin to be on guard? Delivery of mail to most of the Texas forts was slow, with service frequently interrupted for weeks or even months by bad weather in the Gulf, by the activities of hostile Indians, or simply by slipshod handling of mail sacks. Still, by now Orry could have informed Charles of the reason for Bent’s animosity.
Bent knew he dare not dismiss that potential danger. But as for abandoning his plans—never. Nothing but the saving of his own skin, his own reputation, came before revenge against the Mains and the Hazards. He need only wait and, at the appropriate moment, strike. Warnings from Orry Main would hardly help the young lieutenant survive an attack carried out at an unexpected moment.
As the days dragged on and a clear chance still failed to present itself, Bent’s frustration mounted. Occasional Indian raids were reported to Camp Cooper, but the Second fired no shots in anger because no detachment could ever catch the marauders. Closer at hand, Katumse was saying his people had been treated so dishonorably on the reservation that the tribe’s only possible response was war, unremitting and without mercy. But the chief never did more than threaten.
In the East the war of words over slavery raged on. Senator Douglas thundered that the Lecompton constitution violated squatter sovereignty. Senator Hammond of South Carolina retorted that the Little Giant’s opinion was of no consequence; Southerners no longer needed the approval of, or alliance with, the North. “Cotton is king!” Hammond declared.
In Illinois a lawyer and former congressman named Lincoln prepared to challenge Douglas for his Senate seat. Addressing the Republican state convention in Springfield, Lincoln attacked slavery, but not those who owned slaves, and sounded a warning with words from the twelfth chapter of Matthew: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
In a month-old paper, Bent read the quotation over and over. He took it not as a cautionary remark but as a statement of the inevitable. Secession first, then war. Often he closed his eyes and envisioned himself as a triumphant general on a corpse-littered battlefield. The mangled bodies were merely so much stage decoration; he was the actor everyone watched and admired.
From the first of May until mid-June, Camp Cooper received no general mail delivery, only official dispatches delivered by courier. Finally two bulging sacks arrived with some supply wagons. One sack, months old, had mistakenly been sent to Fort Leavenworth and only then forwarded to Texas. In each sack there was a letter from Orry. Charles eagerly tore them open, only to discover the first had been written in January, the second around the first of March, two weeks before Bent had sent the rescue expedition into the storm. Hence, neither had anything to say in response to the question about the commander of Company K.
Bent’s chance to strike at Charles came in August, in the midst of another drought. A frightened farmer rode into the post on a mule. The commandant summoned Bent, saying to him:
“It’s the Lantzman farm. Two miles beyond Phantom Hill.”
Phantom Hill was an abandoned fort whose smoke-scarred chimneys were landmarks. “I live close by the Lantzman place,” the white-haired fanner explained. “They seen Penateka Comanches in the neighborhood, so they holed up and sent me for help.”
“Penatekas, you say.” Bent frowned. “Reservation Indians?”
“It’s more likely they belong to Sanaco’s band,” said the commandant. Sanaco was another chief, Katumse’s rival. He had refused to settle on the reserve and had scorned Katumse for doing so.
“Have the Indians harmed anyone?” Bent asked.
The farmer shook his head. “Lantzman reckoned they wanted to sport awhile—maybe a day or two—’fore they drove off his horses.”
“I fail to understand why the whole family didn’t get out.”
“Lantzman’s oldest son, he’s crippled. Sickly. Can’t ride too good. Lantzman’s a stubborn coot, too. Figures he and his boys can hold off a half-dozen hostiles till help arrives. ’Sides, he knows that if the family lights out, the Injuns are liable to burn the place just for meanness.”
The commandant put the matter in Bent’s hands. After the stagecoach fiasco, Bent wanted to appear competent as well as prudent. He feigned deep thought for ten seconds, only then saying:
“Half a dozen. You’re sure Lantzman saw no more than that?”
“I’m sure, Cap’n.”
Bent had no reason to doubt the statement. Marauding bands of Comanches were seldom large; this one sounded typical. He pondered again, then said, “I’ll take twenty men, including both lieutenants and our tracker, Doss.”
The commandant looked dubious. “Are you positive you don’t want the entire troop?”
Panic clogged Bent’s throat momentarily. His judgment was once more suspect. He brazened ahead.
“Twenty-four against six should be a safe margin, sir. Especially when they’re men like mine.”
The touch of braggadocio pleased his superior. Bent left quickly, excited and not a little fearful at the thought of taking the field against hostiles. He was not eager to do it. But leading a detachment against a band of Comanches, albeit a small one, would look good on his record. It might even offset the blemish left by the coach incident.
He sent his orderly to find O’Dell and Main. He described the situation at Lantzman’s and ordered them to have twenty men ready with field gear and two days’ rations in one hour. A provision wagon would follow at a slower pace.
Both lieutenants saluted and hurried toward the door. Just as Charles left, he gave the captain a quick glance. God, how Bent loathed his swaggering manner, the beard that made him resemble a hairy animal, his relationship with the men—everything about him. But if he were lucky, Main would soon go to his grave. In his room Bent opened his footlocker and took out his spanking new Allen and Wheelock Army Model .44. He laid the blued octagonal barrel in his palm and caressed it as he thought
of his second lieutenant’s face. Unless the Comanches had melted away by the time the detachment reached Lantzman’s, there would surely be a chance for a well-placed but seemingly stray shot.
Bent shivered with expectation.
The double column sped southwest along the wagon road. The countryside was parched. No rain had fallen for three weeks. Charles realized an electrical storm could ignite a dangerous fire and, if they were unlucky, force them to detour for miles.
Such pessimistic thoughts were unusual for him, but he had a bad feeling about this expedition. The weather contributed. So did the absence of First Sergeant Breedlove, who had left on furlough a week ago. Charles’s new roan was unfamiliar and somewhat skittish. But the chief cause of his uneasiness rode at the head of the column.
Captain Bent was the only member of the detachment correctly uniformed in yellow-trimmed fatigue jacket, regulation light blue trousers, and flat kepi-style forage cap. The others wore clothing better suited to the climate and terrain. Charles’s shirt of blue flannel was the lightest one he owned. His pants were white and, for the moment, still fairly clean. At his belt hung his Colt and his bowie. A saddle scabbard carried his two-year-old Harpers Ferry rifled musket. A slouch hat protected his eyes from the sun.
Charles doubted Bent had the ability to lead this kind of expedition. Indian fighting was new to the Army. During Professor Mahan’s entire course he had devoted only one hour to a discussion of it. But it was more than Bent’s inexperience that generated the feeling of distrust. Charles felt Bent had within him a streak of evil, perhaps madness, and for God knew what inexplicable reason, it was directed against him.
The terrain was monotonous. Low, seared hills. Ravines. Creeks dried to a trickle by the drought. Haze dulled the sun and turned it to a defined disk in the sky. A sultry wind blew.
Doss located Indian signs several times. Small parties, he said. The tracks were a day or two old. It made Charles uneasy to think that the emptiness of the countryside might be deceptive.
