Captain Davis Norbert twisted the quirley closed between his dirt-grimed thumbs and forefingers, then reached into a pocket of his dark blue cavalry tunic for a sulfur-tipped match and scratched the lucifer to life on his cartridge belt.
He touched the match to the cigarette. Puffing smoke and dropping the match into the finely churned dust at his feet, he glanced around the dilapidated cavalry outpost on the banks of Elkhorn Creek, in a snake-belly bowl surrounded by several Wyoming mountain ranges.
The sun was almost down, and the seven brush-roofed, adobe-brick buildings, including a bunkhouse for the enlisted men, an officer’s quarters no larger than a chicken coop, and a barn and stable, were painted pink and saffron by the fading light. The forlorn little outpost, all but abandoned by the U.S. Army in favor of heavier patrols along the Bozeman Trail, hunkered beneath a broad arch of sky that had been turning all colors of the rainbow for the past hour but was now a sort of purple-green.
All but abandoned except when renegade Indians were rawhiding off their reserves. Or when a contingent from Fort Stambaugh was needed to quell a land or mining war, or, in this case, to help lasso desperadoes cutting a wide swath through this neck of still-wild Wyoming Territory. Norbert and his twelve men—ten privates, a corporal, and a seasoned career sergeant, Jake Pennyman—had arrived here at the Elkhorn Creek outpost in the midafternoon. On their way up from Fort Stambaugh, they’d scouted for sign of the notorious and slippery outlaw gang who called themselves the Vultures, apparently on the run from nefarious doings to the east.
Having had no luck in that regard, and according to orders, Norbert and his men were now awaiting the arrival of Sheriff Dusty Mason from Willow City whom they were to assist by any means possible in running the killers to ground. When Mason would arrive was anyone’s guess. The Vultures, if headed this way through a long corridor between mountain ranges, might very well arrive here first. Most of the gang had originated in Wyoming, so they likely knew of the cavalry outpost, which, since its unofficial abandonment four years ago, was used as shelter by cowpunchers and scores of other passing pilgrims.
Scores of rats, as well, Norbert thought. Drawing deeply on the quirley, he looked toward the long, low bunkhouse in which most of the men not on guard duty or tending the horses in the stable were now eating beans and hardtack or playing poker and shooting occasionally at the vermin who considered the bunkhouse home. Shots rang out occasionally, followed by a raucous stretch of cursing by none other than Sergeant Pennyman himself.
Such an incident had just happened a few minutes ago, and Norbert smiled at the memory. For all his earthy Scottish swagger, Pennyman was a cultured, somewhat pampered city boy at heart and did not cotton to rough conditions. Norbert, who had led the Forward Scouts of the Ninth Missouri Rifles in the War Between the States, harbored no such prejudices. The outpost didn’t bother him, despite he and his men having had to root a family of skunks out of the stable before putting their horses up for the night. He was just glad to have made it out of a certain Georgia prison alive…a prison in which he’d fought the rats for muddy drinking water so badly tainted that it had killed nine out of ten men who drank it.
No, a rat or two, or skunks in his stable, would never bother him again as long as he had food, fresh water, and freedom. He would leave his own musty quarters to the heat and the rats, and sleep out here on the ground. Norbert found fresh air and starlight soothing.
“Riders, Captain!”
An adobe-brick wall partly surrounded the place, on the side facing Elkhorn Creek, from where trouble in the form of Indians had been most likely to come. Originally, the wall had been meant to surround the outpost, but the post had been abandoned before the wall had been finished.
The stockade was only about six feet high, but it offered a modicum of cover for soldiers shooting from behind it. There was a fifteen-foot-high guard tower on each end of the fort, and on the end near where the stockade’s wooden doors used to be, before someone had used them for firewood, stood one of the towers.
Private Homer Early was manning the tower while another guard patrolled the creek on foot and another held the scout on the fort’s northern end, which faced flat, open country rolling up toward the far eastern foothills of the Wind River mountains. Early was pointing beyond the creek now, his head turned toward Norbert, his slender body silhouetted against the sky, which had now turned purple and lime.
“How many?” Norbert called.
“Can’t tell fer sure. Looks like three horses. Comin’ at a trot.”
“Call Scarborough in,” Norbert ordered. Turning toward the bunkhouse, he yelled, “Pennyman!”
When the sergeant’s bulky body appeared in silhouette against the open doorway lit by yellow lamplight, Norbert said, “Riders headed this way. Just three, but bring your men.”
Pennyman saluted with the same hand in which he held a smoldering, half-smoked cigar. Norbert walked into his quarters that stood a ways off from the bunkhouse and barn with its connecting corral, near a springhouse. He stopped just inside the doorway and heard a sharp breath leap out of his throat.
He’d dropped his hand to the Colt .44 holstered on his right hip, but stayed his hand when he saw the yellow eyes of the coyote standing atop his small, square eating table staring back at him. The coyote’s back legs were on Norbert’s chair, its front legs on the table, on either side of the plate on which the captain had left a few scraps of food before he’d wandered out to the parade ground for air.
The coyote gave a low, guttural mewl, then leapt up onto the table and then out the open window on the table’s far side. Its fur glowed tawny gold in a vagrant ray of light before it dropped down beneath the window. It hit the ground outside with a soft grunt and ran toward a clump of brush. It stopped suddenly. Norbert watched it, frowning. The beast growled and sort of mewled, hackles raised, as it stared into the brush. Suddenly, it switched course and ran off around the stables, as though it had been afraid of something in the shrubs.
Norbert blew a relieved breath, chuckling to himself sheepishly at the start the beast had given him. He’d fought so many Indians in the past out here that he supposed he was still looking for a wild-assed Sioux or Arapaho behind every rock and sage shrub.
He grabbed his tan kepi off the table and his Sharps carbine from where he’d leaned it against the wall near his cot and the tack he’d piled on the earthen floor. He opened the Sharps’s breech, making sure it showed brass, then quickly adjusted his kepi on his head and headed outside to see what the fuss was about.
Probably just drifting punchers, but in this country, you never knew…