Even so, he seldom managed to sleep more than two hours a night. Either nerves woke him, or bad dreams, or the simmering fever he'd developed from too much exposure. He was soon shivering and stumbling like someone half dead, his beard down to the middle of his chest and full of hardtack crumbs and tiny scraps of the green outer leaf of cheap cigars. His eyes seemed to have sunk into his head, leaving in their place an illusion of two blurry dark holes. He smelled so bad, and looked so bad with the Washita gunsight gash healed into a scar above his beard line, that respectable people avoided him in the towns he visited to ask his questions.
Which got the same maddening answers.
"No, nobody like that has been through here."
"No, haven't seen him."
"No, sorry."
It was early March when he got to Ellsworth. There he picked up the trail so strongly, he knew he was meant to do so.
"He rested the night and so did his nephew, a pretty child but worn out, half sick, the little lamb." She was a huge, hearty woman with great pink hams for forearms and kind eyes and the accent of the English Midlands. "I rented them my smallest room and he ate breakfast with my boarders the next morning. I recall it because he rudely kept his beaver hat on at the table. He repeated several times that he was going to the Indian Territory. The boy stayed upstairs. The man said he was too sick to take food but he didn't look it to me. I had a strange feeling about the man. A feeling that he hoped to be noticed. I went to see the town marshal a few hours after he rode away, and the marshal said the man was wanted for stealing the boy. The bloody villain! I wish I'd done it sooner."
One more witness, a boy Charles met by the river, corroborated her story. Charles rode on south twenty miles before he stopped. He sat on the sorrel in the center of a small creek rushing and overflowing its banks because of a melt. The horses drank thirstily while rain fell. Four or five miles west, misty shafts of sunlight pierced down, lighting the land. In the extreme west, blue showed between the clouds. The rain shower was heaviest in the south, where it hid the horizon.
Charles pondered the situation. Below the Cimarron Crossing at the Territory line lay thousands of square miles of unexplored wilderness. A man hazarded his life if he went in alone. That Bent would go there with a child was further evidence of his insanity. Charles really had trouble interpreting and explaining Bent's behavior in any rational way. He didn't try very hard, though. Many of the possible explanations led to the same ending. An ending he refused to confront.
The rooming house story might of course be a fabrication. Bent might have doubled back after crossing the Smoky Hill. But somehow Charles didn't think so. Bent could have disappeared right after leaving Leavenworth if that was what he wanted. Instead, he'd strung out just enough of a trail to keep Charles on it. A trail like a thread waved in front of a cat.
Maybe Bent had flaunted his destination back at Ellsworth with the assumption that Charles would tell himself that further pursuit into the Territory was futile as well as dangerous, and give up. Maybe Bent had played out the string only so he could cut it this way, and ride off laughing. If that was what he figured on, he was wrong. Charles was going in.
But not alone.
"Retribution against a child?" Benjamin Grierson said. "That's unspeakable."
"I'd say that describes Bent." Charles sat on a hard chair in the headquarters office of the Tenth Regiment at Fort Riley. He ached deep in his bones. He was too sick to feel much beyond a slight sentimentality over the homecoming.
Colonel Grierson looked gaunter and grayer; the strain of Plains duty showed. But almost as soon as Charles had entered, he'd said that the regiment had fulfilled his expectations, and exceeded them. Now he said:
"What kind of help do you need? Every man in Barnes's troop would like to make up for what happened to you. So would I. We don't have that many fine officers. You were one of the finest."
"Thank you, Colonel."
"You know about President Johnson's Christmas amnesty? He pardoned the last exempted classes. You're not a rebel any longer, Charlie. You could come back —"
"Never."
There was such fierce finality in it that Grierson immediately said, "What kind of help, then?"
'Two men willing to help me track. In fairness, Colonel, I'll be taking them south."
"How far? South of the Arkansas?"
"If that's where Bent goes."
"At Medicine Lodge the government promised to use its best efforts to keep unauthorized white persons out of the Territory. Wildcat surveyors, whiskey peddlers — the Army enforces that promise."
"I know. The ban might be the reason Bent wants to hide in the Territory."
"You'll have to stand on your own if you're caught there."
"Of course."
"Anyone you take, you must tell them first where you're going."
"Agreed."
"You're sure Bent's there?"
"As sure as you can be about a man with crazy impulses. An English landlady fed Bent in Ellsworth. Then a boy trying to fish in the rain along the Smoky Hill saw him riding due south with my son, the direction he told the lady he was going. The boy with the fishing pole thought it was a father and son on one horse, a dapple gray. My guess is, Bent's going down to bide with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes and the renegade traders because none of them will interfere with him, unless it's to kill him."
"Which they may do. Your damn expedition to the Washita stirred everything up. Sheridan's worked all winter to bully and threaten the tribes into surrendering to the government. Now he's got half the Indians starving and ready to come in and the other half ready to drink blood. Carr and Evans are still in the field. Custer, too. He's operating from Camp Wichita."
Charles digested that. The camp was east of the mountains of the same name, deep in the Territory.
"Consequently, no one can be sure where the Dog Soldiers are holed up. They keep moving to avoid the troops. West of the mountains — up on the Sweetwater beyond the north fork of the Red — they've even spilled into Texas, we heard. You won't know where they'll turn up, or the Army either."
"I'll keep that in mind." Charles fingered the brass cross hanging on a thong outside his gypsy robe. The brass was weathered almost black, and he didn't explain the peculiar ornament to Grierson, who wondered about it. Charles didn't act like a man who'd undergone some religious conversion, but he kept fingering the cross. "One thing, though, Colonel. The Washita wasn't my expedition."
"You mean you didn't plan it"
"And I'm sorry I was there. I saw the newspapers. I read what General Sheridan thought of Black Kettle. A worn-out old cipher, he said. The chief of all the murderers and ropers. A stinking lie. I know."
Grierson didn't argue. "Who do you want?"
"Corporal Magee if he'll go. Gray Owl if you can spare him."
"Take them," Grierson said.
Fort Hays remained a primitive post, one of the poorest in Kansas. Ike Barnes's company had wintered there, in the most undesirable quarters, shanties with stone chimneys from which the mortar was crumbling. In Magee's six-man shanty, the sod roof was so weak that he and the others had pegged up a spare canvas to catch falling dirt, melting snow, and the occasional wandering rattlesnake seeking a warm spot to rest.
Magee sat on his narrow cot late one evening after lights out, in the midst of snores and the sounds of flatulence. A lantern burned on the dirt floor between his feet. With a rag he was rubbing rust specks from the barrel of an old .35-caliber flintlock pistol of German manufacture. The rammer fitted underneath the barrel, and there was a blunt hook on the butt for hanging the weapon on a belt or sash.