Rose’s misery worsened as the day progressed. Every jolt of the wheels along the washboard road sent a rocket of pain up her spine. In her desperation she discovered the pain was less if she traveled on her hands and knees and Mark found her in this position during a rest stop. He went looking for Sam Horton, the regiment’s chief surgeon, and found him eating gingersnaps with Margaret Carrington and her two sons, twelve-year-old Harry and Jimmy, age six.
“Excuse me, Doctor,” Mark said, tipping his hat to Margaret, “but I wonder if you might look in on Rose? I think she has a fever.”
The plump surgeon got to his feet, brushing crumbs from his immaculate serge trousers. “Of course, Reynolds. I’ll fetch my bag.”
By the time he got there Margaret was already inside the ambulance sitting by the younger woman’s side. Rose lay on her back, a patchwork quilt drawn up to her chin. Despite the day’s heat, she was shivering.
“It’s nothing,” she said, looking at Horton with red-rimmed eyes. “I told Mark not to bother you.”
“Shush now.” The physician sat on the bed, measured her pulse at the wrist, then placed the smaller end of a belled, wooden stethoscope against her chest and leaned forward, listening with closed eyes.
“Too fast,” he said. “When did this start, my dear?”
“This morning.”
“Do you have pain? Headache? Stomach? Any bowel complaint?”
“I do have a headache.”
Horton took from his bag two glass vials—one blue, the other green—and gave them to Jerusha.
“This is quinine,” he said, raising the blue vial. “Give her a teaspoonful every hour. This”—he raised the green—“is laudanum. Of this, four drops every three hours. No more, no less. Keep her comfortable and make sure she takes plenty of water. Do you understand?”
Jerusha nodded and Horton turned back to his patient. “We’ll be at Fort Sedgwick this evening,” he said. “I can do more for you there.”
Margaret insisted on traveling in Rose’s ambulance the rest of the afternoon. Despite the difference in their ages, the two women had grown close during the long weeks at Fort Kearney. Rose was intelligent and, like Margaret, fond of reading novels. Most important, she did not try to impress or curry favor with her the way some of the other officers’ wives did.
At sundown the column pulled into Fort Sedgwick, a run-down collection of sod buildings on the South Platte River. Mark carried Rose to the blockhouse, hastily converted by the post quartermaster into a lady’s sickroom. Harry Carrington watched the effortless way he carried her, even as he climbed the steps of the blockhouse, as if she weighed no more than a box of groceries. Harry wished he was strong enough to carry her like that.
Semiconscious, Rose was only vaguely aware of being moved, of being placed on a mattress that smelled of fresh hay and pipe tobacco. Her bones ached and her clothes were wet with sweat. She drifted into a troubled sleep, at times struggling for consciousness like a drowning swimmer fighting for the surface. Always she failed, sinking back into the dark and suffocating depths. The fever burned inside her, taking her to a different time and place. She saw her favorite brother, Tim, killed in ’61 at Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, standing alone on a hillside of glowing autumn colors. She tried to call out to him, to warn him of the Rebel sharpshooter in the tree, but could not make a sound. He jumped when the bullet hit him, then lay crumpled and still on the ground. As his spirit left his body, floating heavenward, she heard the faint and distant sound of a string orchestra, a soothing melody of violins and violoncello, clarinets and flute, French horns and tuba, alternating with a chorus of booming male voices, then the crunch of wheels on gravel.
A gentle hand lifted her head and pressed a cool cup of water, sweet as wine, to her lips. She opened her eyes expecting to see Mark but instead found herself looking into the eyes of a stranger. They were alone in the red twilight.
“Who are you?” Her voice was raspy and hardly recognizable as her own. “Where is Doctor Horton? Where is my husband?”
She tried to sit, but the stranger pushed her back on the pillow. The room spun and she thought she would be sick.
“You’re a strong woman, Mrs. Reynolds,” he said. “Stronger than most. I believe you’ve turned the corner today. You had me worried.”
Exhausted, Rose closed her eyes and dreamed of water. She woke to a sunlit room and ravenous hunger. As if on cue, Jerusha appeared carrying an ironstone mug.
“Beef broth,” she said, setting the mug on a table beside the bed. “Can you take it?”
Rose nodded and Jerusha helped her sit, packing pillows behind her back. Dizzy and light-headed, Rose sipped the broth slowly till the mug was half-empty. Feeling better, she took stock of her surroundings.
The room was small, with a canvas roof and log walls chinked with plaster. A cannon stood in the center, its muzzle pointed toward a small square window. The wall on either side was pierced with a double row of loopholes, one high and the other low, for standing and kneeling gunmen. Jerusha’s straw-tick mattress was on the floor.
The broth was hot and salty and sat heavily in her empty stomach. Still, she forced herself to finish it. Outside, the soldiers began to drill. Rose heard an officer’s staccato commands, the rattle of muskets, the rhythmic pounding of boots on the ground.
“Good morning, ladies.” A tall man appeared at the open door wearing a surgeon’s linen jacket over civilian clothing. “May I come in?”
The door was low and he had to stoop to enter. His face was familiar and strange at the same time, like someone she had met in a dream. He smiled as he walked to her bedside.
“It’s good to see you eating,” he said. “You’re feeling better then?”
“Yes, much better, though there’s a dreadful ringing in my ears.”
“An effect of the quinine. It will pass.”
He had a pleasing voice, deep and resonant, with a barely discernable Southern drawl. Rose found it relaxing and wanted him to keep on talking. Instead he gave her his hand. “We haven’t met properly. My name is Daniel Dixon. I’m the post surgeon. I’ve been looking after you the last few days—with Jerusha’s most competent help.”
Rose understood he wanted her to know any delicate issues had been addressed by another female.
“You’ve had dengue fever. Breakbone fever, the men call it. You had an additional complication”—he paused—“which resulted in some blood loss, but this resolved naturally. You shouldn’t have any future problems.”
Again, she understood what he was saying. “I’m afraid I’ve been a burden to you,” she said. “I’m sorry. Why did Sam Horton fob me off on you? Where is he?”
Dixon dropped his eyes and sat in the chair by her bed. “First things first,” he said. “I need to check your pulse.” He held a finger to her wrist. “A bit fast yet, but steady and strong. Much better than before.”
“Where is Doctor Horton?” she said. “Where is my husband?”
He looked uncomfortable and Rose knew something was wrong. “Lieutenant Reynolds asked me to give you this before he left.” Dixon removed an envelope from his jacket pocket and, when she did not take it, put on the table beside the mug. A fat fly crawled along the mug’s lip.
“What do you mean, before he left?” Rose said. “What are you talking about?”
“Your husband’s regiment moved out two days ago,” he said. The words struck her like a blow to the stomach. She closed her eyes, remembering the music she heard at the height of her fever—the strings and the brasses—and realized it was no dream but the regiment’s musical farewell to Fort Sedgwick. Mark was gone. He had abandoned her in this savage place.
She could not look at Dixon. She did not want to see the pity in his eyes.
“You need rest,” he said. “I’ll look in on you later.”
Only after he left did Rose reach for Mark’s letter, opening it with a shaking hand.
June 3, 1866
Fort Sedgwick, Dakota Territory
My dearest Rose,
It pains me to leave you in this hole but the regiment moves in the morning and I must go with it. Carrington depends on me and I cannot hang back. Sam Horton assures me you will recover soon, otherwise I would not go.
Of course you must come on soon as you can. I’ve left Spicer behind to assist you. Carrington says a supply train bound for Fort Laramie will arrive at Sedgwick within the week. If you’re strong enough—and I trust you will be—you and Spicer must join it. Naturally your little outfit will travel much faster than ours. We should be reunited at Laramie, if not before, as you may well overtake us.
Be brave, my darling, and know that I await you with anxious arms.
Your loving husband, Mark
P.S. The Indians have been quiet this spring between Sedgwick and Laramie so you need have no concerns on that score.
She looked up to see Jerusha in the doorway. Rose thought she saw a smile, unpleasant, like a sneer, but immediately Jerusha’s face became the usual mask, revealing nothing.
“Please heat some water, Jerusha,” Rose said. “I want to wash my hair.”
When she was gone Rose gave way to tears. How could he do this? Surely Colonel Carrington would have allowed Mark to stay if he had requested it. Doubt, like a rat, nibbled a tunnel into her thoughts. She remembered her oldest brother’s words on the night she and Mark announced their engagement. “What’s the hurry, Rose?” Joe had said. “Get to know him better. If he loves you, he’ll wait.”
Joe disliked—or distrusted—Mark for some reason Rose did not understand. She sensed it. But nothing Joe could say would have made a difference, for she was determined to marry Mark Reynolds and she would not wait. No man had ever affected her as Mark did. From the moment he walked through the doors of the Blair house that warm June night he had occupied her every thought. Her love for him was like a cavalry guidon, flying full in the wind, or a church bell ringing clear and true. He felt the same—she was sure of it. A woman knows these things. So why had he left her? She must have been disgusting in her illness; sweaty, foul-smelling, not feminine. She should never have let him see her that way. It was her own fault; she should have kept him away.
Jerusha returned with a porcelain basin and a steaming bucket of water. On shaking legs Rose climbed from the bed to the chair, took the empty basin in her lap, and leaned over it as Jerusha poured the hot water over her head. Though her scalp was tender from fever, she did not complain as Jerusha vigorously lathered her hair with a lemon-scented soap, the fragrance Mark liked. Yes, she had been disgusting. The suds floating in the basin were brown in color, as if they had just bathed an animal.
That night Rose lay sleepless in her bed, thoughts churning and boiling inside her skull. She imagined the challenges ahead and knew she had to make herself strong to survive them. The frontier was no place for womanly softness.
At midnight, with the moon shining through the square cannon portal and Jerusha asleep on her straw mattress, Rose pulled a pair of scissors from her sewing basket. Then, without a mirror and without lighting a candle, she took the scissors to her hair, so thick it was still damp from washing, and cropped it till it was short as a boy’s, watching her hair fall like long satin ribbons to the puncheon floor.
Chapter Three
Rose did not see much of Dixon after her recovery. Fevers, dysentery, and injuries to the men kept him and the assistant surgeons busy. Every evening she wrote to Mark, sending a packet of letters wrapped in red ribbon with each departing mail team. Anxious to join him, she asked to accompany one of the teams on its journey north, but Sedgwick’s commanding officer refused even to consider it.
“Mrs. Reynolds, you don’t know what you’re asking,” Captain Carter said. He was thin and tired-looking with stringy gray hair. “Do you imagine I would send a young woman out there with only a mail team to protect her? You’d last as long as a snowball on a beach.”
His patronizing tone made her angry. “You exaggerate the danger, surely. I doubt General Sherman would have encouraged the officers to bring their families along if things were as bad as you say. Why, he said we would have a wonderful adventure. Those were his very words—I heard him!”
Carter shook his head. “Sherman is the best officer I ever knew, but he doesn’t know the situation here. He underestimates the Indians and the difficulty of the country itself.”
Carter was reluctant even to let Rose travel with the supply train when at last it arrived, three weeks overdue. In truth, it was hardly a train at all but a collection of five wagons under the leadership of Lieutenant Frank Anderson. He was accompanied by his wife, Clara, and infant son, Rollo.
“I suppose you must go, Mrs. Reynolds,” Carter said with a sigh, “but it’s against my better judgment. If it were up to me I’d send you back East on the next stage.”
He said this forcefully and Rose’s surprise showed on her face.
“You remind me of my daughter, you see,” he said. “Caroline, she would be about your age now, if she had lived. . . .” He turned his head. “This country is hard on women, Mrs. Reynolds. Do be careful.”
Rose said she would and impulsively kissed him on the cheek.
It took Anderson an entire day to get his wagons and livestock across the South Platte. Shifting beds of quicksand lay just inches below the river’s deceptively calm yellow surface, and it was hard to know where it could be forded safely. A man might walk from bank to bank without wetting his trouser cuffs one day and sink to his shoulders the next.
They used a flatboat to cross the wagons, with one group of men on board poling the boat forward and another on shore pulling hand over hand on a double cable strung over the water. Rose took this time for a final visit to the post sutler.
Royal Spicer, Mark’s striker, accompanied her. A tall Kentuckian with a square head and broad shoulders, Spicer seldom let Rose out of his sight and sometimes even did her laundry. The other men teased him for his slavish devotion but he didn’t care.
“Lieutenant Reynolds told me to look out for you,” he said, “and that’s what I aim to do. Them boys don’t bother me none. They’re just jealous because the company I’m keepin’ is a lot prettier than what they’re lookin’ at.”
Rose welcomed his company especially when she had business with Mr. Adams, the post sutler, an oily fellow with suspicious eyes and a narrow, bullet-shaped head. His store was dark and smelled of smoke, herring, and cheese. On this hot June afternoon two Winnebago women stood at the long wooden counter while one of Adams’s assistants poured flour and sugar into their upturned skirts. Half-naked children squatted at their feet, eating bits of cracker off the earthen floor. Rose found the Indian children, with their big, brown eyes and long curling lashes, quite beautiful. She chose two calico patterns and paid for them quickly, cutting short Adams’s attempts at conversation. She and Spicer walked out into the bright sunlight to find a crowd on the street watching a soldier kicking an Indian curled at his feet. A jacket with a first sergeant’s chevrons lay in the dirt beside him.
“Run, find an officer!” Rose said to Spicer. “Quick, before he kills him.”
As she spoke a stocky man in faded civilian clothing and a sweat-stained black hat pushed his way through the crowd and stepped between the Indian and the red-faced soldier.
“This don’t involve you, Gregory,” the sergeant said. “I got no truck with you. That buck was stealing my coat. I caught him red-handed. Ha! I caught the redskin red-handed!” He looked around to see if any in the crowd caught his joke but no one was laughing.
Gregory reached down and pulled the Indian to his feet. He was just a boy, no more than fourteen, with blood running from his nose and mouth. Gregory spoke to him briefly in the boy’s language then turned to the sergeant.
“He says different,” Gregory said. “He says you left your coat on that wagon and he was returning it to you.”
“And I guess you believe him,” the soldier said.
“Fact is, I do. I k
now this boy. He’s no thief.”
But the sergeant’s blood was up. “Step aside, harelip,” he said. “I aim to teach that Injun a lesson.”
He lunged but Gregory was faster, striking the soldier’s chin, not with his fist but with the flat of his hand and then following up with a blow from the elbow, all part of one lightning movement. The sergeant’s head snapped back and he dropped like a stone, lying motionless in the dirt. The boy turned and ran.
As Gregory searched the crowd to see if the sergeant had any supporters, Rose studied him with interest. His green eyes were pale against his sun-darkened skin and his features were strong and well-formed. He would have been perfectly handsome, she thought, if not for the scar of a harelip, barely visible under his mustache.
Rose asked Spicer who he was.
“Jack Gregory, the scout. He’ll be coming with us. Anderson hired him to guide us to the regiment.”
Back at the river they discovered the water level had dropped more than a foot, making the flatboat unusable. Since only Rose’s ambulance and the troops had yet to cross, Anderson ordered them to proceed on foot. The men waded through the knee-deep, fast-flowing water, holding on to the cable with one hand and their carbines with the other. Rose’s ambulance followed. She chose to ride on the driver’s bench beside a Mexican teamster who wore a black patch over one eye. Halfway across he turned to her and stuck out a hand.
“My name is Ignacio,” he said with a smile. He had beautiful white teeth.
She noticed his middle finger ended at the knuckle in a red, bulbous knob with a sharp bit of darkened bone sticking from the puckered flesh. She did not want to take his hand but rudeness was never acceptable. That was one of her dead mother’s lessons that stuck.
“Rose Reynolds,” she said. “So nice to meet you.”
Not far from their wagon, three men crossing on horseback pitched into a deep hole. Two managed to make the shore by holding on to their horses’ tails but the third man panicked and tried to swim. His eyes, wide with terror, met Rose’s as he fought the water. His friends tried to save him but the young soldier sank below the surface before they could reach him. His body was recovered downstream an hour later.
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