Frontier

by Salzer, S. K.

  Harry was examining the ambulance Mrs. Bisbee and little Gene would travel in. It had been winterized with a double thickness of board and canvas and equipped with a tiny, sheet-iron heating stove. Even so, Harry thought mother and son were in for a miserable journey. Once that pitiless cold came for them, he knew it would take more than a little stove and two layers of board and canvas to keep it at bay.

  Mrs. Bisbee had bequeathed her black-and-white milch cow to Frances Grummond, whose pregnancy seemed to become more visible each day. The prized cow was the only milk-producer left, Indians and wolves having claimed the rest. “Keep an eye on Sallie’s fawn,” Mrs. Bisbee whispered to Frances before she and Gene boarded the ambulance. “The filthy creature drinks from the milk bucket!”

  The women waved handkerchiefs and the band played the Bisbees away. The mail team traveled with them for protection. Harry watched the small group move slowly up the Fort Reno Road and disappear from view. Though he did not particularly like the Bisbees, their departure depressed him. His world was shrinking, both in size and population. He was tired of being confined to the stockade day after day, and starting to wonder if his magical western world was ever going to open up the way he thought it would.

  Most days he hung around the hospital hoping for something to do. Horton and Hines rarely gave him work and when they did it was something uninteresting like sweeping up wood shavings or sanding bloodstains off the floor. It was much better when Daniel Dixon was on duty, as he taught Harry how to mix medicines and prepare plasters with oleoresin. Once Dixon showed him how to clean a wound with calomel, the sweet-smelling balsam of the South American copaiba tree. Another time he let Harry ply the sponges while he amputated a soldier’s gangrenous hand. As he operated, he explained the initial injury had not been serious but the flesh mortified because a well-meaning friend had bound the wound too tightly.

  Though he avoided the hospital when Dixon was not there, boredom drove him to it one cold morning. He was about to enter the surgery when he heard voices and stopped at the door. Hines and Horton were talking about Dixon, who was overdue returning from Bozeman.

  “Maybe he’s not coming back,” Hines said. “He’s leaving the service, you know.”

  Harry thought Hines had the features of a rodent and the personality to match.

  “Oh, he’ll come back if he’s able to,” Horton said. “He knows we’re counting on him. Yes, I know he’s leaving and I hate to lose him. He’s the best man I’ve got—no disrespect to you, Hines, but he’s more experienced. I’m trying to convince him to stay on, if only for another year, but I don’t have much hope.”

  “Well, it may be for the best,” Hines said. “He and Reynolds are headed for trouble. That’s plain enough.”

  Horton did not pick up on the invitation to gossip. “Speaking of Reynolds,” he said, “have you looked in on him today? He was—”

  A woman screamed. Harry turned to see Sallie Horton kneeling on the ground, rocking her fawn in her arms. The animal was limp and her muzzle and distended tongue were strangely white.

  Sam Horton ran out the door, almost colliding with Harry, and went to his wife. She wept on his shoulder, then raised her face to the growing crowd.

  “Who did this?” She pointed to an overturned bucket beside the fawn’s body. “Who filled the milk pail with paint? Why, why did you?”

  Horton tried to calm her. “It was an accident, Sallie,” Horton said. “No one would want to hurt Billie.”

  Harry scanned the crowd, his eyes resting on Grummond. A small smile pulled at the corners of the officer’s full red lips.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Dixon wiped the last of the gravy from his plate with a yeast biscuit.

  “You want more?” the woman said. “I’ve got plenty.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m saving room for a piece of that.” He nodded at a layer cake, dark with molasses and dusted with confectioner’s sugar, on the sideboard. “You certainly are a fine cook, Mrs. Story. I never tasted a better stew or a lighter biscuit.”

  The woman beamed at the compliment. “Call me Ellen,” she said, taking his plate, then those of his fellow diners. Ellen Story was a tall, handsome woman with dark hair, brown eyes, and a quick smile. Her baby boy slept in a cradle in a corner of the warm kitchen. Dixon looked around the clean, comfortable room and imagined the woman cutting cake as Rose, the infant in the cradle his son.

  “You’re a lucky man,” he said to Nelson Story at the head of the table. “Luckier than you deserve to be.”

  Story chuckled. “Don’t I know it. Say, I’ve often wondered, how did Carrington feel about me giving him the slip last June?”

  “He wasn’t happy but it’s forgotten now,” Dixon said. “He’s got bigger problems.”

  The door flew open and Story’s half-breed hired man stomped into the cabin, brushing snow from his sleeves. He sat at the table and Ellen brought him a full plate and a steaming mug of coffee. After a few bites he said, “My Crow relatives say there was fighting down south. At the soldier fort on the Piney.”

  Alarm bells rang in Dixon’s head. “At Fort Phil Kearny?” he said.

  The half-breed nodded. “Some soldiers were killed, but my relatives do not know how many. The bluecoats fought badly, they say. They were not brave and could not control their horses. The Sioux are celebrating and fixing to fight them again.”

  Dixon’s first thought was of Rose. “I’ve got to go back,” he said. “I’ll leave first thing in the morning.” He turned to the silent fourth man at the table. The quiet man met Dixon’s eyes reluctantly, anticipating his question.

  “What about it, Gregory?” he said. “Come with me. You’ll be paid—I’ll pay you out of my own pocket if I have to.”

  Jack Gregory shook his head. “Carrington thinks I stole that payroll. You told me that yourself. I don’t fancy wearing Uncle Sam’s watch and chain for the next five years.”

  “I’ll vouch for you,” Dixon said.

  Gregory laughed. “No disrespect, Doc, but that won’t do it.”

  “Like I said before, Carrington’s got bigger problems. You and Ignacio risked your lives to save all those people at the redoubt. He knows it, everyone knows it. That’s what matters. The colonel will recognize that.”

  Gregory raked his hand through his sun-bleached hair. “I’m not so sure. I’d like to help, Dixon, I really would. There’s a lot of good people at Phil Kearny and I don’t want to see them hurt, but going back don’t seem like a good idea. Not from where I sit.”

  Dixon stood up.

  “Think of the women and children, Gregory. Please, I’m asking you to help me.”

  Gregory hesitated. “Mrs. Reynolds and her husband, that officer, the one who left her at Sedgwick. They still there?” he said.

  “They are.”

  Gregory looked down at the table, then at Story. “Well, boss? Can you spare me for a bit?”

  “You do as you please, Jack,” Story said. “Ain’t much going on here now anyhow. Come spring, though, I’ll need you at the cow camp, so keep your hair on. And you too, Dixon. I’m expecting to have that mercantile a going concern by late spring. Not only that, but folks in Bozeman are looking forward to having a doctor in town. They’re counting on it.”

  “I’ll be back,” Dixon said. To himself, he added, and I hope not alone.

  They left at first light with Dixon driving the wagon, his bay tied to the back, his seven-shot Spencer in the rifle stand at his side. Story loaned him four fresh mules to replace his exhausted animals. They would need them for the 130-mile trip to Fort Phil Kearny because the wagon was heavy with grain, medical supplies, and food including scurvy remedies such as potatoes, pickled cabbage, sauerkraut, and casks of vinegar.

  Gregory rode ahead on his Appaloosa stallion. The weather held sunny and mild for the first two days and they made good time, pausing only to take short meals and rest the animals. They made no fires. At night they took turns sleeping two-hour stretches
while the other kept watch. The nighttime sky was a living thing, full of glowing color and motion.

  “Sun dogs by day and the northern lights by night,” Gregory said, as they shared a meal of jerked elk, biscuit, and water. “Signs of change, both. Means something’s coming.”

  Dixon bit off a piece of jerky. “How long did you ride with Quantrill?” he said.

  Gregory stopped chewing. “Why you say that?”

  “Couple things, that saddle for one.” It lay on the ground by the wagon. The name Charley Hart was etched on the leather, barely visible due to heavy and hard use and someone’s attempt to scratch it off. “Wasn’t that a name Quantrill used sometimes?”

  Gregory nodded. “I was hoping no one would see that. Me and Bill traded horses last time I saw him. He was in a hurry and his horse was done. That was just before he went to Kentucky, which he shouldn’t have done and I told him so at the time.” He resumed his chewing and raised his eyes to the moving sky. “Yep, I rode with Bill Quantrill and I’m proud to say it. He was the best officer I ever knew and the smartest too. Can’t say the same for some who rode with him—Bill Anderson, Arch Clement, Frank James, that lot—but Quantrill was a man. I’d ride with him again tomorrow.”

  “Did you have any part in that Lawrence business?”

  Gregory shook his head. “I didn’t hook up with him till after that, after Tom Ewing unleashed those murdering Jayhawkers on my people.”

  “I spent some time in Missouri,” Dixon said. “The war was bad there, worse than most places.”

  Gregory swallowed his jerky with a sip of water. “Yes, it was, largely due to Doc Jennison and his cutthroat band of Kansas scum. They came to our farm, looking for Quantrill and his boys. It was summer of sixty-three, right after Lawrence. Pa didn’t know nothing about Quantrill’s whereabouts, but Jennison didn’t believe him. They hung Pa from a tree, right there by the house, with Ma and the girls looking on. When he was near dead they cut him down, asked him again, strung him up again. Three times they did this, finally he just said ‘hell with it’ and put Pa in the barn and set a match to it. Burned it down with him inside, alive. They burned everything, the house, the barn, till there was only the chimney sticking up from the ashes. Ma and the girls had nothing but the clothes on their backs and a wheelbarrow of what they could pull from the flames.” He paused and shook his head, momentarily unable to speak. “There was a Union officer with Jennison that day. That son of a bitch wouldn’t lift a finger to help, not even when Ma told him we were Union people, which we were at the time. That changed.”

  “Where were you when this happened?” Dixon said.

  Gregory laughed. “That’s the good part. I was over to Fort Scott, a soldier in Mr. Lincoln’s army. After they killed Pa, I took the bounce and joined Quantrill at his camp in the Sni Hills. I wasn’t with him long, but long enough to know what he was made of.”

  “Do you know who that Union officer was?” Dixon said.

  Gregory smoothed his mustache with his thumb and first finger. “I do. My sister pointed him out to me later, in Kansas City. He was riding in a big, fancy carriage with a couple of generals, all high and mighty like he was the pharaoh of Egypt. The bastard will pay for what he did. I will put him through.”

  They sat silently, each man following the drumbeats of his past.

  “How about you, Dixon?” Gregory said. “What’s your story?”

  Dixon looked down at his hands. “I lost my wife and daughter,” he said finally. “Laura and Mary. My Kentucky family disowned me when I went to fight with the Union. They were all I had—Laura and Mary—and I killed them.”

  Gregory said nothing, waiting.

  “I didn’t put a gun to their heads but I killed them just the same.”

  He hesitated and the silence grew long.

  “You don’t have to talk about it,” Gregory said. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s not that.” Dixon cleared his throat. “It’s just that I haven’t really spoken of this before. It’s . . . well, it was near the end of the war. I was attending at a prison hospital. It was on an island in the Mississippi, just outside Alton, Illinois. Smallpox Island, they called it.”

  Gregory nodded. “I heard of it.”

  “The prisoners were very sick. Boys the army sent there to die. I felt bad for them, some I even managed to save. They came to trust me, started calling me the Saint of Smallpox Island. I started thinking of myself that way, like some kind of healer hero.” He shook his head. “I stayed longer than I needed to. Longer than I should have.”

  “Weren’t you scared of getting sick yourself?”

  “I immunized myself,” Dixon said. “Most physicians did. I wasn’t sick a day, but I carried the disease on me, carried it back to Laura and Mary when I finally went home. A surgeon knows how to prevent contagion. I should’ve protected them—scrubbed head to toe with lye soap, burned all my old clothes and brought only new ones—but I was in a hurry. I had a letter saying this fellow was hanging around, a rich farmer from Lexington who courted Laura before me.” He took off his hat, ran his hands through his dark hair. “I was wrong to doubt her, but that letter put a poison in me. I knew I’d stayed away too long.”

  He paused and his voice was husky when he spoke again.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I first saw the signs in them. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t true but I knew it was. They died quickly, Laura first, then the baby girl. She wasn’t even two.”

  Gregory looked away. It was not polite to gawk at a man when he was overcome. The northern lights were fading and the icy world was still but for the munching of the horses and mules in their nose bags.

  “People die, Dixon. You know that more than anybody. It’s no good beating yourself up.” Gregory spoke clumsily, unfamiliar with the vocabulary of comfort. “What I’m saying is, you ought not blame yourself.” Gregory wrapped himself in his buffalo robe and stretched out under the wagon. In less than two minutes he was snoring.

  They made Fort Smith at sundown on the third day. Kinney could not tell them more than they knew about the fight at Fort Phil Kearny. After five hours of warm, uninterrupted sleep they were ready to move on. Jim Bridger, his face gray with pain, could not leave with them. “The rheumatism ain’t never been this bad before,” he said. “Tell the colonel I won’t see him till spring.”

  Kinney gave Dixon and Gregory a five-man escort in return for two kegs of vinegar and three barrels of pickled cabbage. “You’ll be glad of these when the scurvy comes,” Dixon said, “and it will.”

  Soon after they started out the weather took a turn for the worse. The thermometer mounted on the wagon never topped twenty degrees and the wind was keen as a knife edge. It blew all day, died at night, and returned with new vigor in the morning. They saw no Indians until dusk on the second day after leaving Fort Smith. As they neared Fort Phil Kearny, eight Sioux warriors appeared, riding on the hills parallel to their short column. They made no move to attack.

  “Why don’t they attack?” Dixon said.

  “Saving themselves for something bigger, probably,” Gregory said, “or maybe they don’t like the odds.”

  He gestured toward the south where Dixon was relieved to see twelve soldiers riding toward them. When they got close enough Dixon recognized Captain James Powell in the lead.

  “Hello, Dixon,” Powell said with his usual sideways grin. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again. You were born under a lucky star, doctor. Who’s your friend?”

  Dixon introduced Jack Gregory and if the name meant anything to him Powell did not show it. They continued on to the fort.

  “No Indian trouble then?” Powell said.

  “Those are the first we’ve seen,” Dixon said. As he spoke, the Indians turned their ponies and vanished over the crest of the hill.

  “Like I said, doctor, a lucky star. You hear about Bingham and Bowers? Indians killed them.”

  “I heard there was trouble but no names.” Dixon wa
s not surprised to learn Bingham had been killed.

  “Five others wounded,” Powell said. “Reynolds for one.”

  Dixon did not ask how serious Reynolds’s injuries were—he’d find out soon enough. “What happened?” he said.

  Powell shrugged. “The usual. Sioux hit the wood train, the colonel sent Fetterman out with the mounted infantry, Bingham had the cavalry. He was supposed to drive the Indians back over Lodge Trail Ridge but—I don’t know what happened. Bingham lost his head, I guess, abandoned his men, then found himself surrounded. Could be his horse ran away with him, no one can say. Anyhow, the colonel finally saw action. Didn’t piss down his leg like everyone expected him to.”

  “Any trouble since?” Gregory said.

  “No, but there will be. There’s more Indians around than ever, always signaling with flags and mirrors. It makes your skin crawl.”

  Dixon scanned the shadowy hills. “That’s why we didn’t see any Indians,” he said. “They’re here.”

  “At least we’re finally drilling the men,” Powell said. “I’ve got the cavalry and Fetterman has the infantry. If anybody can make soldiers of them, he can. Now that Reynolds is down, Grummond’s got the mounted infantry and I don’t envy him. Micks and Eye-tyes the lot, they ride like pumpkins.”

  Dixon wasn’t listening. If Reynolds was badly hurt, how would it affect Rose? And what about Gregory? How was he going to finesse his return with Carrington? Dixon didn’t know if Gregory stole the payroll money and he didn’t care. He risked his life to help get these supplies to Fort Phil Kearny. There was no way he would let Jack Gregory be jailed.