Taynton was convinced there was a mystery to Bones that time and an easy manner would penetrate. Bones had not rejected him as a companion, and seemed to listen with attention when Taynton spoke. He had given nothing away, though, and Taynton was beginning to wonder if he was merely being tolerated by Bones, rather than cultivated. It was a mildly frustrating exercise, getting behind the mask of the new trooper, but Taynton persevered, because there was nothing else of interest to do.
While they curried their mules in the stables’ blistering shade one morning, Taynton informed Drew there was trouble brewing.
“What kind?” Drew asked.
“The worst kind—woman trouble.”
This could only mean Captain Mayles’s wife.
“What about it?”
“What about it? Bones, in this man’s army, you don’t mess with the post commander’s missus, even if she wants you to. It can’t be got away with, not in a place small as this. Dobson got seen last night peeking in her window, and the captain caught him red-handed. Wilson saw the whole thing, had the shitbox door open and could see clear across to the captain’s house with the moonlight and all, and heard every word too. Dobson got called a poltroon. You know what that is, Bones?”
“I believe it’s someone who sniffs the soiled undergarments of females.”
“Is that right? Dobson won’t have liked that one little bit, especially coming from the captain. Those two never have hit it off. I expect it was because of the wife going all fluttery-eyed when Dobson came here last year. Everyone saw it, and now finally the captain sees it too. I bet there’ll be a court-martial.”
“Because he peeked in her window?”
“Sure, why else is he in the guardhouse right this minute—because he likes to be?”
Nothing of this had been discussed at breakfast, so Dobson’s arrest must have been recent. “Taynton, how do you know so much about what happens around here before anyone else does?”
“I keep my eyes open and my nose to the wind. It was Wilson again. Him and Rafferty got the job to put Dobson in there, captain’s orders.”
“They can’t hold a court-martial without a court. Mayles and Dobson are the only officers here.”
“I know it, and that’s why Dobson’ll likely stay where he’s at till there’s more officers arrive, or it rains yellow roses at midnight, whichever one comes first.”
“Taynton, why are you here—I mean, in the army? I’m genuinely curious to know the answer.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, if you’ll tell me the selfsame thing.”
“You first.”
“I run off from my wife. She was a mean woman, Bones. I mean to tell you that woman could skin a man alive at a considerable distance, just with her eyes alone, that’s how powerful of a woman she was, but her biggest crime, as I see it, and I was her husband, her biggest crime was to whale the tar out’n me whenever she’s drunk. Now, most men I wouldn’t tell that to, Bones, but I like you, and I can see you’re a notch or two above the average specimen around these parts, so now I’d appreciate an answer just as honest from you, if you don’t mind.”
“I got the daughter of the governor of Texas pregnant. He would’ve let us marry, just to hush up the scandal, but I ran, because I wasn’t in love with the girl. She was a redhead, Taynton, and a conjure woman one time in New Orleans told me a redheaded woman would be the death of me.”
“Why, that’s practically the same story. Women, that’s what brung us both here.”
“It was indeed.”
“You know, that kind of makes us like brothers, don’t you think?”
“Kind of. Would Mayles really leave Dobson in the guardhouse forever?”
“I expect, unless there’s an Indian attack. He’d get let out then. Dobson’s a crack shot. We had target practice about three, four months back, and Dobson hit the bull’s-eye dead center both times. That’s all the bullets the captain let us have apiece. We’re way down on supplies.”
When they were finished grooming their mules, Drew and Taynton wandered over to the adobe block near the cookhouse that Dobson was confined in. Wilson and Rafferty were lounging nearby. Drew approached a small barred window beside the flimsy door.
“What you want?” demanded Rafferty.
“Speak to the lieutenant,” said Taynton.
“Ain’t allowed,” Wilson informed them.
“Mayles said,” added Rafferty.
“Lieutenant,” Drew called, “can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” came a voice from the shadowed cell. “Who is that?”
“Bones.”
“‘Bones, sir.’”
“Bones, sir. Just wondered if you were all right in there, Lieutenant.”
“My physical comfort doesn’t concern me, Bones, but I want word of this illegal action to be passed on to the appropriate officers at Fort Stanton.”
“I’d be happy to do that for you, sir. I’ll leave today if you give me a direct order.”
“Consider it given.”
“You quit talkin’ to him,” warned Wilson.
“He’s talking to me,” said Drew, and Wilson looked to Rafferty for advice. Rafferty shrugged, so Wilson allowed the conversation to continue, but he frowned mightily to make his disapproval known.
“Get yourself mounted and deliver the facts, Bones,” ordered Dobson.
“Might have trouble there,” said Taynton. “Nobody leaves the post unless Captain Mayles says he can.”
“I’ll take the responsibility, Bones. Draw your supplies and get going. We have an unbalanced officer in charge here, be sure and tell them that.”
“Wait a minute now,” said Rafferty. “He goes and leaves, the captain, he’ll want to know who give him the order, and we’ll have to tell him it was you, Lieutenant, and then we’ll be in there with you because we let someone speak to you.”
“You two will accompany Bones to Fort Stanton.”
“Can I go too, Lieutenant?” asked Taynton.
“Yes. All of you draw the necessary supplies and leave, and try not to attract attention.”
The troopers looked at each other. Anything that moved in the general area of Fort Mobley attracted attention, since inactivity was the norm. There were doubts, too, concerning the questionable nature of Dobson’s authority. Mayles’s orders would be flouted if they did what the lieutenant wanted. If Dobson had been popular, or even considered less of a fool than Mayles, their allegiance would not have been so reluctant, but Dobson was no friend of the common man.
“Well?” said Taynton.
Wilson shook his head. “I don’t know.…”
“There’s women at Fort Stanton,” hinted Taynton.
Rafferty and Wilson appeared equally indecisive. Taynton looked to Drew for enthusiasm. “He gave us the order,” Drew said. “We can do it.”
“Not unless we let you,” Wilson reminded him.
“We’d all get court-martialed,” Rafferty stated.
Taynton made sounds of disgust, but the guards seemed to have made up their minds. They signaled this by standing straighter and glaring at the troopers who had caused temptation to be dangled before them by approaching the guardhouse. Taynton and Drew began a casual meandering away from the area. “You men!” came the voice of Lieutenant Dobson. “Where are you going! You have your orders …!”
When they were a short distance off, Taynton said, “Why don’t we bust Dobson out of there and let him saddle his own mule and go tell them at Stanton what happened.”
Drew considered it. “Better get him out tonight. Mayles might go ahead and have him shot tomorrow.”
Both men asked themselves, through the afternoon and evening, why it was that they were prepared to assist a man neither of them liked, and the answer, arrived at mutually, was the simple need to see what would happen. Even more than Drew, Taynton desired action of some kind; a year at Fort Mobley, in which time he had not had the opportunity to kill a single Indian, had frustrated his appetite for an
event of some kind, an adventure or experience he could remember for the rest of his life. Studying the character of his fellow troopers, even the interesting ones like Bones, was beginning to pall as a hobby.
The sole topic of conversation before taps was the plight of Dobson. Sheckley, who had delivered meals to the prisoner, said the lieutenant appeared to be in good spirits; certainly everyone on the post had heard the off-key hymns rising like crooked smoke above the adobe guardhouse. The state of Captain Mayles’s mental health was also debated, the consensus being that the man was certifiably insane, not for having jailed Dobson over the window-peeking incident, but for caring at all that anyone would want to steal his grimly unattractive wife from him in the first place. “Hell,” said one trooper, “I was him, I would’ve give ’em the two best mules and hoped they run off together.” Dora Mayles had been seen behind the curtains of the captain’s house, staring across the parade ground at the tiny box enclosing her brave cavalier. “Bet she wisht she could put old Mayles in there instead, and bake the starch out’n him.”
Drew and Taynton kept out of the discussion until Osgood asked why they had gone over to talk with Dobson at all.
“We thought he might need cheering up,” Drew said.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” added Taynton.
“It’s everyone’s business when troopers start chumming with officers. Just curious to know what you see in him.”
“We see someone in a hole, Osgood. When you see something like that, you go ask if there’s anything they need, officer or not. Even if it was you in there, I’d go ask if you needed anything.”
“It’s still sucking around the wrong man,” put in Fannin. “That Dobson, he give me guard duty seven nights running last December, including Christmas Day, the snake, and all because I didn’t clean his room perfect one time.”
Others joined in with a list of Dobson’s unjust punishments. No one seemed concerned for the man’s welfare. Fort Mobley was without any shred of camaraderie among the ranks or loyalty to the officers. There was not any sense of conquering and holding hostile lands for the white race, nor any patriotic respect for the flags of nation and unit that sometimes hung like neglected laundry from the parade ground pole and sometimes did not. His training had not prepared Drew for this. He despised the place, as did everyone else, but with a sense of his own superiority over the commonplace grumblings and idleness of the rest. He and Taynton seemed to be the only ones with any kind of spirit, and perhaps Dobson too, even if his personality was odious and his professional qualities largely absent; it had taken spirit of some kind to sneak a glimpse of the captain’s wife in a state of semi-undress.
In the barracks, surrounded by a stifling effluvium of the day’s trapped heat, Drew and Taynton found it easier than most to remain sleepless. They rose a little before midnight and crept outside. Quietly passing by the few troopers who risked censure by spending the night outdoors, they watched for signs of light or movement across the empty parade ground. The guardhouse squatted in moonlight like a square rock. Dobson had ceased his hymn singing at sundown. “Now,” whispered Taynton, and they hurried across the open space, their socks raising small puffs of dust. Drew grasped the window bars and lifted himself up to hiss, “Dobson … Lieutenant, sir … Wake up …”
There was no sound or movement within the cell. Drew could see little but darkness beyond the bars. “Lieutenant Dobson …! Hey! Wake up, sir …!”
“Hush it down,” Taynton pleaded.
“He’s not there.”
“Huh?”
“I think I see a hole in the far wall.”
Drew dropped down and they skirted the guardhouse. The hole was at ground level, big enough to allow a thin man like Dobson through. Chunks of dry adobe were scattered around.
“Be darned if he didn’t kick his way out. Think he’s got himself mounted by now?”
“Let’s check the stables,” Drew said. His opinion of Dobson had been raised by the audacity of the escape.
A lamp was lit and a count made of the mules. Two were gone. “Took a spare,” said Taynton. “Smart feller. Probably walked them a fair distance off so’s not to wake anyone up.”
“Well, our hearts were in the right place. He had more initiative than we thought.”
“Be hell to pay come morning.”
“Guaranteed.”
Taynton’s prediction was given a personal slant at the dawn roll call, when Captain Mayles demanded information on the prisoner’s jailbreak. Osgood hesitated only a moment before declaring, “It was Bones and Taynton, sir. Fannin and me saw them both creeping around with no boots on over in the stable.”
Mayles seemed to quiver from top to bottom. His waxed mustaches twitched perceptibly, and his coloring darkened.
“Bones! Taynton! Step forward!”
As they did so, Taynton murmured to Osgood from the side of his mouth, “You’re a dead man.”
“To my office!” snapped Mayles, turning on his heels.
Drew and Taynton followed him there, and stood before the worm-eaten desk of their commander, whose agitation was so great he could not sit, but had to pace back and forth between the dusty yellow squares of his two windows.
“Are you responsible for this? Speak only the truth!”
“Captain, me and Bones were in the stable, all right, but only because we heard something in there. We thought it might be a cougar.”
“A cougar? Were you armed?”
“Well, nossir, we weren’t. It was just in back of my mind, about there being a cougar—the mules would’ve been kicking their stalls down—but we sure heard something.”
“We investigated, sir. It was our duty.”
“And you found?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“No missing mules?”
“The lieutenant must still have been around, sir,” said Taynton. “There were no animals missing. It was probably the lieutenant we heard, and when we left, that’s when he took them and snuck off.”
“Doubtless. Send Osgood and the other fellow he mentioned to me, then wait outside.”
“Yessir.”
Following the captain’s interview with Osgood and Fannin, Drew and Taynton were sent back inside. “I’m told you two were talking with the prisoner yesterday.”
“We passed an innocent moment or two outside the guardhouse, sir. We were talking with Rafferty and Wilson.”
“No word passed between the prisoner and yourselves?”
“Well, he did start talking through the window, sir. It would’ve seemed like impoliteness not to answer.”
Mayles studied them both for a moment, then ordered Rafferty and Wilson brought before him.
Within an hour of reveille, Captain Mayles had made his decision. Joint responsibility for the breakout was assigned to the two guards and their partners in conversation. They were to draw supplies and set off after Lieutenant Dobson without delay. The rest of the troop had scouted around the fort and found fresh tracks leading south by east, toward Fort Stanton. The four would be accompanied—just in case they had somehow connived at the escape—by Osgood and Fannin. Sergeant Shrike would be in charge of the pursuit.
As Drew led his mule from the stable to the supply room for hardtack and ammunition, Dora Mayles slid from behind the company latrine and thrust something soft into his hand. “For the lieutenant,” she breathed, and hastily turned away. Drew looked at the fine embroidery around the silk handkerchiefs edges. A heart was stitched into a corner.
The seven manhunters assembled before the captain’s porch for last-minute instructions. Mayles had put on his dress uniform for the occasion. A lengthy split smiled from the left shoulder seam; the captain’s wife had been neglecting her duties with thimble and thread.
“When you apprehend the escapee, you will relieve him of any weapons he may have, and escort him directly here. You will deliver him to me in good condition, or I’ll know the reason why. If you should fail to catch him, you will all
face the consequences. Sergeant, be on your guard.”
As Shrike led his small band away from the fort, he experienced a mounting sense of futility over the enterprise. Dobson was already long gone, and his crime had been trivial. There was no need for such an expedition as this to redress so insignificant a wrong as window peeking. Shrike knew that whatever orders he issued while in pursuit of the lieutenant, the men would obey only those they considered appropriate. He fully expected half of them to desert, since that was the average rate for disappearances ever since he had been at Mobley, and he could see why men were inclined to do it. He sometimes wished he had the nerve himself to desert, but knew he never would; the army was his life, and without it he would be nothing. He anticipated trouble, though, if he should return minus half his contingent. With luck, there might be viable explanations for the reduced number—heat exhaustion, Indian attack, possibly even ambush by the lieutenant, if they ever caught up with him. These conditions would tend to exonerate him in the eyes of Mayles. Shrike had his hopes, like any man.
Of the six under the sergeant’s command, only Drew and Taynton felt any excitement over being dispatched into the desert on this mission to recapture Dobson. Rafferty and Wilson were sullen, hurt that they were under suspicion regarding the lieutenant’s escape, both hoping for a quick resolution to the hunt. Osgood regarded his inclusion as the price he was obliged to pay for having implicated Bones and Taynton in the Dobson affair. He was hoping for some opportunity to kill or injure Bones, should any kind of action be engaged in, but he would have to ensure that his handiwork had the appearance of being the natural consequence of battle. Fannin was terrified to be out in the wilderness with nothing but guns and fellow troopers to keep him from harm. It was some comfort to have Osgood riding alongside, but lately Fannin had been dreaming of his own death and, being a superstitious man, was inclined to surrender all notion of escaping the fate he suspected lay waiting for him under the scorching sun. If there had been more moisture in his body, Fannin would have wept.