On the bottom of the report, as a postscript, Captain Merriweather had written in his own hand: “The morning after dictating this document I greatly regret to tell you that Major Lovick’s illness became terminal and he passed peacefully away in his sleep. By a grim irony the boy Quaid was also found dead when his parents went to rouse him the same morning. His throat had been cut and our belief is that a warrior from the band of Small Pony managed somehow to sneak in past our guards and killed him in revenge. I am investigating with a view to punishing the sentry on watch for slackness. There will also, when the weather and circumstances permit, be a patrol to try and find the Chiricahua responsible for this fresh outrage. But in honesty I do not foresee much hope of success in this.”
Crow had left Fort Garrett a little after dawn that morning.
He’d woken early and after dressing made his way by an indirect route to the livery stables. Waking the soldier on guard there and readying the black stallion for a quick departure from Garrett. He’d had enough of it. Seen enough. All that was left was the tidying up of the one loose end.
The sentry swung open the gate for him and gave the shootist a wave. Watching the solitary, black-clad figure as it rode out into the pearly light. He watched the feathering of breath from the horse in the cold of the dawn and the splash of gold at the neck of the man called Crow where he still wore his Cavalry kerchief.
When Crow was a couple of miles from Fort Garrett he reined in the black. Dismounting and doing something that he hadn’t been able to do earlier.
Drawing the two and half feet of razored steel that he wore on his left hip. The honed-down 1860 Army saber with the brass hilt. Unsheathing it and kneeling in the cool light of morning. Tearing up a handful of dry grass and wiping the blade clean of the blood.
The fresh blood.
Standing again and looking around him. Seeing the sun beginning to rise with a serene majesty in the east.
“Yeah,” he said to himself. “It’s goin’ to be a good day. A real good day.”