A Good Day

by James W. Marvin

  “Bad?”

  The answer came from John Dancer, staggering through the gates, holding a rag to the side of his head. Blood showed black in the firelight.

  “She is knifed by her eye.”

  “Jesus! What the Hell’s the breed doin’ here?” asked the non-com. Thought you said a woman.”

  “Sure. But he got troubled and I hit him with the butt of my carbine,” replied the trooper.

  “In your ways you hit out when a man seeks truth,” snarled Dancer.

  “Come on, boy. What happened?”

  “I wish to talk to Major Lovick,” said the half-breed, eyes slitted with anger.

  “Go kiss my ass, breed,” replied the Corporal, spitting in the dirt. “You tell me.” Wishing that Chandler had been the Corporal on duty instead of himself.

  “It was little sonofbitch, Cyrus Quaid! Came and tried to make woman make jig-a-jig with him. Grabbed at her body. She slap him and he take knife, cut her face. Bad. Nearly cut out eye.” Pointing at his own face to show where the squaw had been wounded.

  “That right?” Turning to the troopers: “You see the boy?”

  “Nope,” replied the shorter of the soldiers. “But he could easy have sneaked in through the shadows. Wouldn’t have noticed him.”

  The corporal sighed. “Suppose we best report this to the officer.”

  “Now,” said Dancer, voice still shaking from his anger.

  “In the morning. I’m not goin’ to roust out a gentleman just because one of your sluts has been given a mite of trouble.”

  For a frozen moment the soldier thought that the breed was going to leap at his throat and his hand dropped to the pistol in its heavy holster. But Dancer managed, with a great effort of will, to control himself, turning on his heel and stalking off, back through the gate, throwing down the blood-stained rag.

  “Hey, Dancer!” called the Corporal.

  But he took no notice, carrying on until he was only a blur in the darkness. Then, and only then, did he turn. Calling back towards the fort, his words seemingly not aimed at anyone in particular.

  “It is not ended,” he shouted. “Not ended.”

  Sometime during the night all of the friendly Apaches slipped quietly away, vanishing towards the hills.

  It was just after dawn when it was discovered.

  Within the hour his distraught parents reported that their only child, Cyrus, was missing from Fort Garrett.

  Chapter Five

  “Gone?”

  The sergeant stood rigidly to attention before the rumpled bed of the Major. “Gone, Sir.”

  “Has the place been searched, Haydon?”

  “Yes, Sir. But there’s no sign of him.”

  Corporal Chandler stepped forward. “Couldn’t be hidin’, could he, Sir?”

  Lovick stared at him in disbelief. “Hardly. Not even the Quaid child would do something as malign as that.”

  Crow was a silent onlooker near the door. He’d been roused out with everyone else in Fort Garrett and had tagged along to the quarters of the Commanding Officer. The policy of the shootist was at all times to try and find out what was going on. And Lovick’s rooms were the best place for that.

  The Major seemed to be ageing by five years every time Crow saw him. The lines had deepened around his nose and mouth and his eyes were sunken like sun-dried arroyos into their sockets. His lips were cracked and sore and he tried to moisten them with the tip of his tongue.

  “You’ve searched …?”

  “Everywhere. But the child has clearly gone from us.”

  “Child?” said Crow, speaking for the first time.

  “He is only a boy, Mr. Crow.”

  “I hear he cut another of the Apache women, Major. You figure that for a child’s trick?”

  “I don’t …”

  The shootist carried on as though the officer hadn’t spoken. “Because I don’t and you can sure as Hell bet your pension that the Chiricahuas don’t.”

  “You figure they’ve taken him?”

  For a brief moment Crow paused, weighing his answer carefully.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Lot of things, Major.”

  “Hell, Crow,” interrupted Chandler. “Facts is facts, man.”

  “What facts?”

  The corporal ticked them off on his fingers, looking around the room at the other officers and non-coms. “One. Cyrus Quaid isn’t much liked by the Chiricahua.”

  “That’s like saying I’m not partial to a dose of the clap, Corporal,” called out a young Lieutenant from the rear of the crowd, earning himself a stern look from the bed-ridden Lovick.

  “Two. He’s cut the face of one of the squaws. And not for the first time, neither. Upset John Dancer and he carries some muscle with them Apaches. Three, the whole damned lot of them up and vanished during the night. One minute there. Next minute, they’ve just plain disappeared in the blackness.”

  “And four, the boy’s gone too,” finished Sergeant Haydon. “Seems like damned simple adding up to me.”

  “You think that they’ve gone to Small Pony?” asked Crow, looking round the crowded room. Wrinkling his nostrils at the strong scent of illness.

  “Must have. Dancer was kin to the chief,” replied one of the officers.

  There was a longish silence, everyone starting off glancing in the direction of Lovick, then looking away again when it became obvious that the Major wasn’t ready to make any decision.

  “Big Cyrus is with his wife, Major,” said Haydon, breaking the quiet.

  “They upset?”

  “Does the sun rise?”

  “Yeah.”

  Haydon coughed to attract Lovick’s attention. “Sir. Major Lovick, Sir?”

  “What … What is it, Sergeant?”

  “Quaid’s talkin’ ‘bout settin’ up a posse of vigilantes and going after his son.”

  “No.” The word was calm and considered.

  “Strong feelings runnin’ round the place, Major,” called the young Lieutenant. Receiving yet another angry stare from his Commanding Officer.

  “That would seem a possibility, Mister, considering it looks like the hostiles have fled to the hills with a young white captive. I would sort of. . . .”A coughing fit made him lie back on his bed, struggling for breath. Finally recovering a little and sitting up again. “As I was saying, I would have sort of expected anger.”

  “You goin’ to seal up Fort Garrett, Major?” asked Chandler.

  “Yes. By God, I will not. . . . !! Oh, this damned illness! I will not have the civilians trying to take over the role of the military.”

  “Then we’ll go after “em?”

  “Indeed, Sergeant. I want a patrol mounted and ready for action within … what is the time?”

  “Little after six, Sir.”

  “A patrol out by eight of the clock. Tell Mr. Quaid I will see him at eleven to give my condolences to him. But apart from the patrol the gates are to be shut and kept that way.”

  “What if Quaid wants …?” began Captain Hewitson, the second-in-command.

  “You have the orders. Nobody leaves. Any man tries then he is arrested. Any rapscallion or sturdy vagabond attempts to raise the rest of the civilians then he is to be dealt with using as much severity as his case might merit.”

  “How many men?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Against Small Pony?” exclaimed Hewitson.

  “Your bowels have been plaguing you, Captain. A touch of the yellow to them, perhaps.”

  “Sir! I protest in …”

  Lovick was clearly feverish. Crow found it hard to see how Hewitson hadn’t gotten together with the rest of the officers to relieve him of his command. But as an ex-officer in the Cavalry himself he knew well enough what a hazardous course of action that could prove. Like removing a Captain from the command of a ship at sea.

  “Protest all you wish, Mister. It is my belief that any twelve men of my force could face up to any twelv
e hundred Indians.”

  Crow thought he heard someone whisper that Custer hadn’t done so well against better odds, but the words were so quiet that he couldn’t be certain.

  “Who will lead?”

  “Lieutenant Carter.”

  “But he has little experience against …”

  Lovick shouted out in anger, making Hewitson jump. “Shut your damned mouth, Captain. The only way for a puppy to learn what life is about is for it to go out and damned well learn it. Carter goes. With Sergeant Haydon. Corporal Chandler. And, let me see … and ten troopers.”

  “That’s thirteen, Major.”

  “I can count well enough, thank you. And I am not superstitious. Provisions for ten days. Usual weapons and ammunition.”

  “That all, Sir?” asked Lieutenant Carter. Crow looked at the young man, feeling a little sorry for the way that he was being dumped in at the bloody end of warfare against the Apaches.

  “Yes. No. And you will take a scout with you, Lieutenant.”

  “Scout, Major?”

  Lovick closed his eyes in seething anger. “Is everyone suffering from some wretched illness? Now it’s deafness.”

  “But, we have no scouts left.”

  “What?”

  Hewitson spoke up. “I’m sorry, Charley. I thought you knew.” His voice was soft, gentle. Trying to reassure the ill man. “The local Apache scouts all left at the same time as the friendly Chiricahuas.”

  “All?”

  Yeah. We figure that John Dancer spoke to them and they went.”

  “With that poor boy,” said Lovick, shaking his head sympathetically.

  “So we …”

  “Mr. Crow will scout for us.”

  “The Hell I will,” replied the shootist.

  “You know this area well?”

  “I do.”

  Lovick smiled. “And they say you know the Indians well enough, Crow.”

  “I’m not a scout for the Cavalry.”

  “You are if I say you are.”

  “No, Major.”

  “And I do say you are.”

  The shootist looked across the room at the invalid. He’d been long enough in the Army to know that the officer commanding a Cavalry fort came a whole lot higher than the Pope and only a few short steps below God Almighty. There wasn’t very much that Major Charles Lovick couldn’t do.

  He could insist on Crow helping, determining that the situation was sufficiently grave for such action.

  “I’ll not operate under duress, Major.”

  “If I order Sergeant Haydon here to draw his pistol and put a ball through your damned head, Crow, then he would do it.”

  “He’d try to do it. I wouldn’t want to push money on whether he’d make it.”

  “But if I order it, then you are a dead man.”

  “Sure. You want to bend the rules some, you can do about anything you want.”

  “I want you to scout for me, Crow.”

  “Ten days.”

  “Ten days,” agreed Lovick.

  “Money.”

  “Ten dollars a day. Bonus of fifty if you find the boy alive.”

  “I figure he’s alive. They’ll likely keep him a while. Then either return him or kill him.”

  “What about a ransom, Crow?” asked Lieutenant Carter.

  The shootist tugged at the lobe of his right ear. Thinking. “Not likely, Mister. Not the way of the Apaches. Not their way.”

  Lovick was lying back again, fingers plucking at the frayed edge of his blanket. But there was a frail smile hovering at the corners of his mouth.

  “I want everyone out but Crow,” he said.

  There was a shuffling and muttering, but the room gradually emptied, everyone filtering out. Crow caught a glimpse of the fresh morning beyond the door of the sickroom and wondered whether he should have made a more positive stand against the officer.

  “You wondering what I’d have done “f you’d said you’d not scout for me?” asked Lovick, hands beneath the blanket.

  “You’d have tried to force me.”

  “Kind of.”

  “Said I could go free after doing it and no charges against me for the fight with your soldier?”

  “No.”

  “Then …?”

  Lovick smiled at the shootist, face peeled apart in a broad grin. And Crow realized that the Cavalryman was critically ill. Whatever kind of consumption it was that was ripping his lungs to shreds of bloodied lace had now bitten so deep into him that the fever had corrupted his mind.

  The man was mad.

  “I’d have used this,” Lovick said. Pulling out a heavy Dragoon pistol from beneath the blankets, easing the hammer down with an audible click. “Put a bullet through you on my own.”

  “Then you’d have had no scout at all, you stupid bastard,” replied the shootist. Feeling his own rage flare at how close he’d been to getting himself cut down in a pool of blood.

  “But I have, Crow. I have. I have you. You and my gallant thirteen. An officer. A Sergeant. Corporal Chandler. Ten of the finest troopers in this unit. And you. You, Mr. Crow. You.”

  The patrol cantered out of the main gates of Fort Garrett at eleven minutes before eight that morning. The sky was gray and there was the taste of rain in the air. It looked like it wasn’t going to be a very nice day.

  Chapter Six

  Crow had left on a whole lot of patrols during his years with the United States Cavalry.

  Small units of three or four men, sneaking out a little after midnight. Into the darkness around Fort Fetterman. A patrol of thirty, out of Fort Phil Kearny.

  And much bigger and grander.

  Even a whole regiment. Senior officers at the head of the patrol, once with a genuine General. And the women lining the parade-ground, some holding back tears. Some not managing. Band playing, the bugles blaring out against the brass of the sunlight. “Garryowen,” accompanying soldiers from the gates of the fort. The marching song so beloved by all blue-bellies.

  “Around her neck, she wears a yellow ribbon …”

  Fort Randall and Fort Sully.

  “She wears it in the springtime and the merry month of May …”

  Fort Reno and Fort Sanders.

  “And if you ask her, why the heck she wears it …”

  Fort Dodge and Fort Sill.

  “She wears it for her lover in the US Cavalry … Cavalry, Cavalry, she wears it for her lover in the US Cavalry.”

  And now Fort Garrett.

  No women.

  No band playing. No singing. Just one officer and two non-coms. Ten troopers.

  And the scout.

  Crow.

  Within a quarter hour of passing through the gates of the fort, Lieutenant James Carter returning the casual salute from the sentries, it had begun to rain.

  A long, drifting rain that slipped in from the sullen wilderness to the north of the fort. The wind had whipped up the chilled orange dust for several hours during the night and the rain was bringing it all on down again. A sickly pale red drizzle that soaked through the coats of the horses, and found every crack and crevice in the men’s slickers, trickling down necks, settling in pools of freezing wetness around the groin.

  Crow rode out front with Carter. Haydon and Chandler were paired behind him, the ten soldiers heeling their mounts along in column of twos, the hooves of the animals clopping mournfully along the rutted, puddled trail.

  This rain make the tracking harder, Mr. Crow?” asked the officer.

  The shootist shook his head. “Less’n it worsens we’ll keep on after them.”

  The Lieutenant was barely twenty, fresh out from the East. Where his spirits had been fired by the stories around his military college about the Indian wars. Long battles with some of the finest light cavalry in the history of fighting. Fought out under a blazing sun with sturdy, bold colleagues. Evening of dancing and parties with bright-eyed maidens hanging on your arm. Rapid promotion with invaluable experience.

  Carter had so
on found out that life is rarely like one expects it to be.

  Fort Garrett was a small pimple on the ass of nowhere. Stuck at what had once seemed a vital communications point on a trail that snaked in from one desolation to another. Run by a dying Major with a command that mixed time-serving, disgruntled veterans and raw recruits. In an Army where petty theft was rife and desertion sometimes reached the proportions of an epidemic.

  And the fighting wasn’t like they’d said.

  In his few months at Garrett, James Carter had only once seen action. A long, tedious chase after a group of four young Chiricahua bucks who’d skipped off and burned a homestead fifteen miles east of the fort. They’d only seen the Apaches as tiny dots ahead of them, leading them round and round and on and on. Carter had lost two men. One to a night ambush and a second when his horse bolted and threw him.

  After a week the Indians had tired of their sport and simply disappeared.

  But Carter had seen the evidence of their passing. The homestead that they’d raided had been owned by a taciturn Belgian with his wife, mother, seven children and a freed slave.

  The Chiricahua had spent some time at the small farm before moving on and the young Lieutenant would never forget the sights that he’d seen there.

  Carter had tried to describe them in a letter home to his widower father. But after several attempts he had given up. There weren’t the words to detail the horrific tortures inflicted on all the family. The way the woman had been used in so many bestial ways before she had been given the doubtful mercy of death.

  The young officer had been sick for several days after the massacre and the gibbering specters of it still rose to haunt him in the waking hours before dawn. Though he had told nobody at the fort, he had already decided that he would leave the Cavalry soon. Probably try and hold out until after Christmas, then take advantage of the spring greening to ride off one morning.

  And never go back.

  Now there was yet another doomed patrol. Charley Lovick was sunk too deep into his own dying to be able to make balanced judgments on military and logistical matters. So here they were, in miserable weather, far too short on man-power, going out after Small Pony and a single kidnapped boy who was, in any case, barely worth the pain of the mother that bore him.