Once again, a veil of silence fell between the two men as the wagon followed the descending sun on the way back to Prescott. Once again, Ike Silver thought it best not to push Ben Brown into a conversation, unless the black man did the initiating.
“On the way over I started to say somethin’. Remember?”
“I do.” Ike nodded. “About us having something in common.”
“Don’t you care to know what that somethin’ is?”
“I do. If you care to tell me.”
“About the war. You fought in it.”
“I did.”
“On the side of the North?”
Ike nodded.
“I was a soldier, too. On the same side.”
“Is that so?”
“You don’t seem much surprised.”
“Nope.”
“You ever hear of a man, a white man, named Robert Gould Shaw?”
“I did.”
“So did I, while the war was goin’ on. I heard he was organizin’ a unit of black soldiers—the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. So I escaped from down South, made my way on the Underground Railroad and joined up. I was with him at Battery Wagner.”
“Pretty bloody.”
“Led us on a charge hollerin’, ‘Forward, Fifty-fourth!’ He got killed there.”
“I heard that, too.”
“Later on I was in Virginia. Siege of Petersburg.”
“That was even bloodier.”
“Thirteen U.S. colored troops got the Congressional Medal of Honor. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Neither does hardly anybody else. I didn’t get no medal. But I did get a mini-ball.”
“I got mine at Shiloh.”
“So I heard. And that’s what I meant about us havin’ somethin’ in common, Mister Silver.”
“I see what you mean.” Ike smiled. “And there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about, Mister Brown—if you’d care to listen.”
“I’m listenin’.”
As the wagon rounded the corner of a brawny boulder, Quemada, Secorro and the three other Apaches dropped from the top onto the moving wagon and started swinging fists and knives at Ike and Ben.