“I have been told it was not Indians who killed them, sir. General Cooke himself said this to Captain Molloy.”
“And who told you this, Sergeant?”
“I understand it is taken for a given among the men of the fort, sir.”
“You would do better than listen to the idle speculation of the enlisted soldier, Sergeant,” the adjutant says.
“Of course, sir. Though I believe there was a medical report. A report of death, sir, which stated as much, based on the surgeon’s examination of the bodies.”
“Speculations merely,” Carrington says. “God blast it, Sergeant, do you think I do not have enough to manage without such nonsense as that godless surgeon’s speculations? I forwarded that report to Omaha and thence, I would imagine, it was forwarded to Washington but it can be taken as nothing more than the . . . the assumptions of a surgeon. An army surgeon, I need not remind you, Sergeant.”
Kohn is uncertain as to whether or not he should defend his impressions of the surgeon. Army surgeon he may be but the man seemed sober and learnèd to Kohn. Unusually sane for an army sawbones. He remains silent. From outside he can hear wagons and the suck of hooves in the thawing mud. Skinners’ calls and barking sergeants. Carrington hears them too and stands from his desk.
“Your orders, Sergeant, and the letter.”
He takes them from Kohn and first reads the orders, then opens the letter from Cooke. Without looking at Kohn, the colonel turns and opens a door behind his desk to reveal rough stairs ascending. He mounts them and is followed by his adjutant. Kohn waits for a moment before following the officers up onto the viewing platform he saw from outside. The colonel and the captain stand at a railing and overlook a body of mounted soldiers in buffalo coats gathered around a number of box wagons hauled by mule teams. Civilian drivers and timbermen smoke pipes and cradle repeater rifles. Some of the box wagons have raised sides and behind them sit more soldiers with muskets and crates of ammunition, all manner of saws and axes. Kohn stands behind Carrington at the railing.
“Captain Brown, you do not appear to have a full complement, sir,” Carrington shouts down and Kohn recognizes the quartermaster he met some days before.
“We are short horses, sir,” the quartermaster, Captain Brown, shouts back to Carrington. “We will have to make do unless you can impress upon the good general to send us more men and beasts. And bullets, sir.”
Brown smiles and Kohn sees derision in it. A fighting man to a writing commander.
“Do your best, Captain. And under no circumstances are you to pursue any Indians in case of ambush. Defend the woodtrain and return to post, sir.”
“Yessir,” Brown says, spurring his mount and saluting. There is no respect in the gesture. The fort’s gates are opened and the wagons begin to move out, followed by the mounted infantry and a smattering of cavalrymen. One of the two pretorians who was with Brown when Kohn met him stares up at Kohn and Kohn meets his gaze. The big man turns his horse and follows the wagons, his buffalo coat making him look somehow less than human. A mounted bear, a minotaur.
Kohn watches the wagons stretch out across the plain and Carrington points. He raises a spyglass. “There, Captain.”
The adjutant extends his own glass and directs its lens on the hills across the valley and Kohn sees them now himself, tiny silhouettes on a rolling ridge line roughly half a mile away across the valley, east of the hilltop road where the wagon train will pass.
Kohn speaks, “Do the men spot them, sir?”
Carrington claps shut the spyglass. “Spot them! Why they expect them, Sergeant. They are there every day the woodtrain goes out. They are there most nights as well, looking down at us and our activity. Let them have the howitzer, Captain. The gun that shoots twice, as our Sioux friends have named it.”
The adjutant crosses the viewing platform and bellows orders to a cannon crew on a bastion built into the stockade wall. The gun is small, likely a twelve-pounder Kohn reckons, and known as a mountain howitzer. Kohn watches as the men go to work, sighting along the barrel, adjusting the range, loading, ramming. Setting and lighting the fuse.
Detonation rips the still winter air and smoke and flame spit from the cannon’s barrel. The Indians on the hilltop wrench their mounts to the ground by the neck and use them for cover. Kohn follows the arc of the shot, as experienced men can do, by the warp and disturbance of air. He loses it as it falls to the hilltop and then watches it explode, showering the hillside with scorched shrapnel. Moments later one of the Indians pulls his horse to its feet and remounts, shaking his spear at the fort as if willing another shot. Kohn can just make out the sound of the Indian’s shouting and whooping. A second Indian appears to be preoccupied with his horse, still on the ground, and Kohn wonders if the beast has been struck by shrapnel. The Indian kneels to the horse and then stands and leaps up onto the back of his friend’s mount. They leave as the howitzer fires for a second time and the shell explodes over the dying horse and the hilltop empty of Indians.
“That will be enough for today, Captain,” Carrington says.
The adjutant bellows to the gun team to cease firing and his order is repeated.
“You may perform your investigations, Sergeant,” Carrington says, turning to Kohn and handing him back the oilskin wallet containing his and Molloy’s orders. “But let me warn you not to interfere with the mission of the fort. I will not tolerate it.”
“Yessir.”
“And you are to report your findings to me, Sergeant, is that clear? Any prosecutions to be carried out will be sanctioned by myself alone. No suspect leaves this fort without my being informed or you will be subject to court martial proceedings, Sergeant.”
“Yessir,” Kohn says, noting that he has been threatened with court martial more times in the past three days than he was in the whole four years of the war.
Carrington turns back to watching the woodtrain as it begins its climb from the valley floor to the road that runs atop the hills. If I were an Indian, Kohn thinks, that is where I would attack. Maybe the howitzer discourages them. Maybe there is a better ambush site on the descent. Kohn shrugs away the speculation. He wonders if he should ask Carrington if he can interview his wife’s serving maid, the Indian girl the surgeon had mentioned. He decides against this and will find another way to do it. Or perhaps he will return to his quarters, lie down on his bunk with a bottle and do nothing at all until Molloy recovers.
“You are dismissed, Sergeant,” Carrington says.
Kohn comes to attention and snaps out a salute. The colonel and his adjutant ignore him, watching the woodtrain.
16
HOW WE GOT UP AS HORSE SOLDIERS & TOM BROKE CAPT. BROWN’S MOUNT
FROM FT. LEAVENWORTH IN KANSAS WE DID SHIFT KIT & caboodle in the spring to Ft. Caldwell in the Nebraska Territory. (This was where I did overhear Gen. Sherman tell the ladies to keep account of their journeys West & had the notion to do it myself.)
Here the soldiers detailed to the 18th Infantry Regiment began to arrive forming 8 skeleton companies of the 2nd Battalion. Most of these boys arriving were fresh as new baked bread on a windowsill with but a few veterans of the War like ourselves mixed in. We were thin on the ground I can tell you.
You would not believe it Sir (or maybe you would because you know how the Army works!) but the detachment of Cavalry promised to us got shanghaied & sent somewhere else altogether. This being the case a plan was made by the bigwigs to fit some of us infantry Bills out as Mounted Infantry which does sound like a fine plan until you learn how little time most of the new take ons had around horses. Sure they are city mice most of them & about as easy with a beast as they are with a rifle. Afraid of the horses 1/2 the lot while the other 1/2 knows not which end is the arse & which the eyes. But my brother & I did know a thing or 2 at least about them & soon for the price of $1.50 each paid to Sgt. Nevin we did find ourselves mounted & saving mightily on bootleather.
I write of this because it was detailed to the Battalion
’s horses that we came to meet Capt. Frederick Brown who is also called Mad Fred by the men of the 18th. He is called this out of respect & awe & not mockery if you can reckon it. For though he is the Quartermaster here at Ft. Phil Kearny he is also the most terrible harrier of the Sioux & Cheyanne you would ever like to meet.
But surely you have already met him yourself Sir. Did he show you his collection of scalps? They are on fine display tacked to the logs above his bed & in the blockhouse in the Pinery so that he may work & dream to his soovaneers of butchered red men. He at first did string them from his saddle like Mr. Lo does himself but The Carpenter noted this & ordered him to take them down that it was not right & proper for a soldier (an officer & Quartermaster no less!) to be gallivanting himself across the plains of America kitted out much like the savages he is fighting. Carrington did not order him to stop the scalping mind you only to take them pelts down from where they could be seen by the women & civilians about the fort & Mad Fred did as he was ordered all the while with a smirk at his lips that any fool could see. For like all others he obeys Carrington’s orders out of duty & not love but that is another story.
Our Capt. Brown is undaunted as they come. He is as fearless as my brother & you might say it does be madness in him & not courage at all that makes him such a man for the Hurly Burly but I am not one to say it for though he did ride myself & Tom into a fair few bloody scraps he also got us out of them Thanks Be To God.
I will describe our meeting him because there is something in my mind that tells me if we did not come to his attentions well then I may rightly not of come to the tight spot where I do now find myself.
But meet Mad Fred we did coming out for to select a horse for breaking one morning himself & Lt. Bisbee. We came upon them at the corral smoking cheroots & looking over the horse flesh before them.
Now you know well yourself that manys the officer does keep his own personal mount for riding but this Army after the War is a different place altogether from before & many cannot afford this nowadays. So as my brother & I forked hay & slung buckets Capt. Brown & young Lt. Bisbee wandered among the beasts & from the side of our eyes we watched them pat flanks tug lips back & lift the hooves of the more gentle of the herd. Some of the horses would start & scatter when a body came near so these horses would likely be the finer of the mounts among them sure even a fool could tell it by looking but there are fools & then there are officers. (No offence to you Sir.)
Well in fairness Lt. Bisbee did have some knowledge of horse flesh for all the good it did him. He was jumped by some of Red Cloud’s Braves out on a scout shortly after we set up here in this Valley. The savages left him his prick & balls attached which was some good fortune I suppose but nothing much more of him was left alone. It is said his own mother would not of known his face if it was she that found him. God Rest Him but he was a kind soul & a good officer who did know his horses.
But that was later & that morning we watched the 2 of them as if we were not watching at all which is the way all soldiers watch their officers & come to know far more about them than any officer imagines.
So we knew from the off Tom & myself that the mount Capt. Brown finally chose though it was the fairest in appearance in the pen a big fine quarterhorse with some Indian paint mixed in & white socks well we did know that horse was in no way broken & had no mind to be. And perhaps poor Lt. Bisbee knew as well that beast was no good for a weak rider like the captain but him being of lesser rank & a softer sort of gentleman said nothing but took a coil of rope from where it hung on a post & fashioned a lasso from it.
“Give me that rope Bisbee,” says Capt. Brown all full of bluster. I saw Tom smile a smidge at this & pat the muzzle of a kindly piebald. My brother then rested his elbow on that horse’s bowed back & set himself to watching like he might a theatre play or music show.
In the Gaelic says I to Tom, “A dollar he never gets that loop round her neck before Taps be drummed out.”
“I would sooner hold a Loco to a dollar & watch it burn than take your wager brother.”
A smile came to my lips & I ducked behind that placid pony too so no one would see it. There I set up with my brother to watch that madman lassoo just about everything in the corral except that horse. He did even manage to rope a horse nearly losing his arms from their sockets in the doing but it was not the horse he was trying for & I learnt much in the way of new oaths & curses in English. (There are many things you cannot imagine doing to a horse but Capt. Brown could imagine them & roared more than once how he would do them to that mare!)
I tell you 7 or 8 times Mad Fred flung out that rope & once he even drew his pistol in a rage & threatened to shoot the white stocking mare if she did not heave to but that mare had more things on her mind hopping & snorting to send the other horses in the pen away in a fearful whinny of horse bodies & rising dust.
“Are you certain you want that one Sir?” says Lt. Bisbee in a mannerly way that would be hard for most men to manage. There was no judgement or mockery in his voice above the water but surely it lurked beneath making his words all the more merry for the rest of us.
Well Capt. Brown’s face was red & his hat cocked cattywampus. A pure state he was in & we 2 brothers & some other boys now in a gather at the fence fought hard to keep from showing the deep cut of our mirth. Truly Mad Fred & his mare did be a better show than the best motleyed harlequin in London Town or Dublin.
We did not know Brown was 1/2 mad then & only thought him too proud to admit how little he knew of horses him being a behind the lines Q.M. & an artillery man in the War & not much in the way of a Dragoon as perhaps he had a mind to make himself.
Says the Mad Capt. back, “No Bisbee I am as sure as the G__ D____ day is long I will have that particular one D___ his eyes.”
“Her eyes,” says Bisbee but not so Capt. Brown can hear him & showing his kindliness & fair minded manner he cast a wink my way letting us know he was enjoying himself as much as the rest of us watching that lassoo sail through the clear blue sky at nothing time & time again while that white stocking mare pranced away with a flick of her arse like a whore meeting a man with no money.
“Sir?” says Tom of a sudden fair shocking me & putting me in mind to worry. It was a riot of a performance altogether but I feared the brother might be for showing up the Q.M. Some of the boys at the fence did see things the same way & shoved off with the look of the busy bee about them.
“Sir?” the brother said again leaving me at the sag backed pony to approach Capt. Brown.
“Not now Private G__ D___ it all. Not now,” says Capt. Brown tossing the lassoo to catch on a fence post some feet away from the mare.
Tom did salute & say, “Only can I snare your mount for you Sir?”
Even I had trouble understanding Tom’s question & so stepped forward with my heart up in my throat.
Says I, “He wants to know can he loop your horse for you Sir? Tis not something an officer need be at when there is us Bills detailed just for it. Our 1st Shirt would be sore to hear we let you rope your own Sir.”
The Capt. cast an eyeball at us then & we stood the both of us to attention. Says I, “He is a fine man for the ponies Sir my brother.”
For a moment there was silence causing me to wonder would the Q.M. draw his Colt again & shoot us both down dead for interrupting his labours. The last remaining boys watching from the fence moved away for fear of catching some of that officer’s rage.
Well I can tell you I wished now the brother & myself could of done the same & leave the lunatic Capt. to it for his gaze upon us was as hot as the desert sun & in them eyes of his (which I did not dare look into) there shone flickers of the terrible wild warrior he has inside him.
Even the horses put a halt to their shunting about & waited for the man to speak. Even the birds did whisht their singing in the branches is the way I remember it.
Says the Capt., “I am not sure how to take such an offer from two Paddy Bills who seem to have forgotten their place in t
he world. How would you take such an offer Lt. Bisbee?” He did not look over at the Lt. as he spoke but stared only upon us there in front of him with terrible venom in his eyes.
Well that Lt. Bisbee was a good man & a better officer I am telling you Sir. May God Keep Him but he did reply to Brown, “I would say there is no offence in it Sir. No Bill in this whole Army would be such a blockhead as not to know that insolence & insubordination would bring hell down upon his back. I cannot imagine these boys are so blockheaded are you boys?”
He was an educated man Lt. Bisbee & it took me a moment to reckon up what he said but I did not mistake the warning in it.
“No Sir,” I said to him. “We are only meaning a good turn for an officer of the 18th as we do be detailed to the herd anyways Sir.”
“And you boys are surely sober aren’t you?” says he back to me.
“We are sober as Mohamedans Sir.”
Now the brother put his spoke in but in such a jumble from his mouth that I cut him off in the ditch altogether. Says I, “Only that my brother is after telling me what a fine horse is that mare Sir.”
In a fit of nerves I did doff my kepi & put it back on & spoke directly to Capt. Brown for the 1st time. “And only that he would be much obliged if you let him snare & break her to the gun for you Sir. For she would make a fine mount in battle or parade & it is a rare horse that does make both.”
After a moment the Capt. said, “Can this brother of yours who is so G__ D___ good with horses not speak his own mind Pvt.?”
“He can Sir but you would be hard put understand it. His mouth is 1/2 kaput Sir.”
The Capt. stepped over to us & Tom squared himself up like to be inspected by him near snapping himself up to attention again while Capt. Brown took a long gander at my brother’s mug. He did this from below looking up at him as our Mad Fred is not so tall a man & this perhaps goes part the road in explaining the way he carries on for it is well known that oft times the shortest man does be the tallest bastard in a room. I have seen this to be especially true of the officer class.
Wolves of Eden Page 12
