The peddler lumbered through muddy garden plots back toward the wagon. All at once he was less confident about the outcome of his plan, which he had based on two principles: surprise and terror.
After locating Charles, and then his child, through Department headquarters — he'd been astonished to find the youngster on the same post where he made his inquiry — he'd prepared with some careful observation. For intervals of five minutes to a half hour during the past two days, he'd watched the movements of those living on officers' row.
It wasn't hard to do. Civilians moved about Fort Leavenworth with relative ease. When he first came to the post, he had no trouble convincing the gate sentries that he was a peddler, and that was the also the case when he made his inquiries, and, later, observed the officers' quarters. He looked like a peddler, which was just what he intended when he bought and outfitted the wagon with money taken from the dead farm couple in Iowa. Twice, while the wagon was parked near officers' row, people had questioned him, asking if he needed help. He immediately busied himself with one of the mule's hooves and said no, he could handle it, thanks, and that was that.
The one phase of the plan he'd pondered a long time was night versus day. At night, too many of the officers were in their quarters, while at this hour of the morning he had to deal only with women. Of course that was offset by the additional risk of discovery in daylight. But surprise and shock often slowed people's reactions. So he'd chosen daylight, audaciously, considering the stroke entirely worthy of the American Bonaparte.
Now he wasn't so sure. They boy tried to bite his hand. The peddler squeezed harder, until the boy's muffled noise indicated pain. "And you'll get worse, a broken neck, if you don't keep quiet," the peddler whispered.
At the second-to-last house on the row, an older woman's round red face looked out the kitchen window and registered astonishment. The woman ran to her door. "What are you doing with the brigadier's boy?" .
By that time the peddler was up on the wagon. He flung the boy into the back and wrapped his head and mouth with a long rag, just tight enough to keep him quiet until they got off the post.
The hardest part was keeping the mule to a steady, ordinary pace while he drove away from officers' row. He heard the woman exclaiming behind him and banked on her running first to Duncan's, to rouse Maureen.
A troop of young cavalry replacements trotted by, going the other way, their drill sergeant cursing them for sloppiness. The peddler heard his captive kick and moan down behind the driver's seat. He snatched up his cane, reached behind him, and brained the boy twice with the gold knob. The second time, the boy went limp.
The peddler watched to be sure the boy was still breathing, then wiped a spot of blood from the knob and perked up the pace of his mule, rolling toward the sentry box at the gate.
Thirty seconds more and he was through, giving the sentry on duty an amiable tip of his old beaver hat. In another minute, the wagon pulled to the left and overtook a line of three oxcarts hauling wood to Leavenworth City. The peddler's wagon passed them smartly and disappeared up ahead.
Charles watched the ticking clock. Half past ten. Willa had promised she'd be back from the Playhouse by eleven-fifteen, so he had a while yet to peruse the St. Louis Democrat.
The paper carried an astounding letter, written by Captain Fred Benteen of H Troop. The letter vividly accused Custer of callous abandonment of Major Elliott and his detachment that day in late November. After the one search party had been turned back by hostile fire, Custer had sent out no others, concerning himself only with getting away from the menacing Indians on the bluffs. Exactly as Charles had heard it described, Custer's plan had been carried out. A march downstream with the band playing convinced the Indians that one or more of the remaining villages would be attacked. The Indians scattered to defend them, Custer countermarched, and his command escaped safely in the darkness. Leaving Elliott's body and the bodies of sixteen others where they fell.
No two accounts agreed on the number of Indian dead at the Washita. Custer claimed one hundred forty, all adult males, based on a battlefield count. Charles had seen no such count made while he was there. Later reports credited to "scouts" lowered the total to twenty to forty men, including Black Kettle, and an equal number of women and children. Charles believed the lower numbers; General Sully had recently admitted that Plains commanders usually inflated the number of hostiles killed in order to prove their military ability and satisfy a bloodthirsy public.
In early December, Generals Sheridan and Custer had marched back to the Washita and there discovered the bodies of Elliott and his men. Elliott had fallen facedown with two bullets in his head. The others, all stripped, were mutilated, some with throats cut, some decapitated.
And here was Benteen, mocking Custer's flight with bitter words: Custer, whom the Osage scouts lauded for his stealth by giving him a new name, Creeping Panther; Custer, whom the Olive Branchers were flaying as "another Chivington" — and not without justification, Charles thought. He fingered the brass cross he wore so he wouldn't forget what a man was capable of doing when he lived without pity, humanity, reason.
He couldn't believe Benteen had meant the letter for publication, though. Fred Benteen hated Custer but he was an experienced officer; he knew the rules, Charles was sure the paper had gotten hold of the letter in some unusual way. He was embarrassed by the satisfaction he got from seeing Benteen's accusations in print.
He heard footsteps in the hotel corridor and cocked his head. Ten-forty. Too early for —
She burst in, her face still made up. He tossed the paper aside. "What's wrong, Willa?"
"This came to the theater, for you. Someone slipped it to Sam onstage and he stopped the performance. Rang down the curtain."
"Why?" It puzzled Charles that a telegraph message could cause such consternation.
"Read it," Willa whispered. "Just read it."
YOUR BOY STOLEN BY FORCE YESTERDAY.
ABDUCTOR SEEN BY MAUREEN WHO COULD NOT STOP HIM.
HE LEFT A WORD MARKED ON THE GROUND. B-E-N-T.
IS THIS NOT THE MAN YOU HAVE MENTIONED.
AUTHORITIES IN LEAVENWORTH CITY HAVE NOT CAUGHT HIM.
COME AT ONCE. DUNCAN
It took three readings for Charles to believe it. Willa looked stricken, watching the skepticism crumble from his face, to be replaced by something frightening.
On the way north from the Washita it had struck Charles that he was beginning a long and arduous climb back out of the abyss of hell. Now he knew he'd mistaken the point at which he started the climb. The Washita wasn't hell, but only hell's doorway; Sharpsburg had been hell's doorstep, and Northern Virginia, hell's approach road —
His mind was a chaos of loss, thoughts of Bent's hatred, Gus Barclay's death, his failure as a father.
If only I'd been with him —
If only I'd been there —
He looked at the message in his hand. He knew what hell was. He was there.
BOOK SIX
THE HANGING ROAD
You and I are both going home today by a road that we do not know.
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