December 9, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
THE STAFF OFFICER, A YOUNG CAPTAIN, EYES KOHN with disdain. He says, “A sergeant, here to present orders to a colonel?”
“Yessir.”
Kohn stands at parade rest in an office inside the largest structure in Fort Phil Kearny. The headquarters barracks is constructed of planed logs and painted white both inside and out, unlike most of the hastily erected buildings. Rising from its roof is a lookout platform, allowing a view of the fort entire as well as of the surrounding valley and hills.
“This is most goddamned unusual, Sergeant,” the staff officer says.
“Yessir. My captain is incapacitated, sir. Captain Molloy, 7th Cavalry, sir. On the blue list, under surgeon’s orders. His leg was broken on the journey. We were sent here on General Cooke’s orders, sir.”
Suspicion casts up on the captain’s face. “General Cooke’s orders, Sergeant? Why, you hand them over right this minute. How can—”
“I would prefer to present them to the Colonel himself, sir.”
“Are you giving me guff, sergeant? Goddamn guff, are you?”
“No sir.”
“Then you present me with those orders or you’ll be had up for insubordination faster than you can shit grease.”
“Yessir. But I don’t imagine General Cooke would want our investigations . . . thwarted, sir, as he has ordered them. I thought the colonel should be aware of them. As a courtesy, sir. . . .”
“Thwarted? Investigations?” Now there is more than anger or suspicion in the officer’s voice. A desk man, elevated by his distance from the musket ball and his proximity to power. Nothing like an investigation to pique interest, Kohn thinks, or inspire fear. Investigations linked always to inspections, promotions. Demotions or drummings out of the army. The inspection discovered poor performance of assigned duties . . . recommends dismissal. “What investigations are you talking about?”
“The death of the sutler, Mr. Kinney, and his wife, sir. General Cooke seemed to feel it of great import.”
The officer stares at Kohn in an attempt to detect mockery in his words.
“And why would Cooke want something like that investigated?”
“I don’t know, sir. Only that I was told to present these orders to the colonel.”
The officer stares at Kohn for a long minute and Kohn stares at the whitewashed office wall. He can stay here as long as the officer wants him to. He will eventually see the colonel and the officer knows it.
“Wait here, goddamn it all,” the officer says.
Kohn can hear voices from behind the door, deep, muffled and rising with some urgency. After some minutes of this, the door opens and the adjutant says only, “In.”
Colonel Carrington—late forties, black-bearded, thin, small, academical—is seated behind a desk not unlike the surgeon’s, thick and polished oak and conspicuously grand for an outpost such as this. The colonel appears to Kohn to be a man used to sitting at desks, and from men around the fort he has heard that this impression is not far from wrong. A recruiter during the war, Carrington never lifted so much as a feather duster against the rebels, yet here he is, in command of a fighting fort at the edge of nowhere. A paper colonel given the stage when the lights have dimmed and the big show is over. It’s the way of things in the army. Political connections mean as much as competence. Mean more, most likely.
The one thing the men Kohn has spoken to will concede is that Carrington can build Uncle Sam a grand fort for his money. The men call him Carpenter Carrington. There is little affection in it. Fighting men will love or hate a fighting officer. Indifference is the best they will do for desk dragoons.
“Sir—” Kohn begins. He notes the desk is strewn with official missives, orders, quartermaster’s reports, draughtsman’s drawings. A map labeled “Mountain District and the Dakota Territories” is pinned to the wall.
“Orders, Sergeant. What is this about orders? From Cooke? Cooke sent you?”
The colonel’s voice is nervous, pitched high and clipped, dry-mouthed. He looks away from Kohn and down at the papers on the desk, moving the drawings in front of him, squaring them off amid the clutter of other paperwork. How different from Cooke’s office, Kohn thinks.
“Yessir. And a letter, addressed to you, sir. The orders were issued to my captain but he is—”
“I know that, Sergeant. I’ve been told that. But you have these orders. And you are to fulfil them? An enlisted man? An investigation? Cooke wants an investigation into the death of our sutler? I simply . . .” The colonel looks up again at Kohn and appears to study him.
“Yessir, and his wife. As you must know, sir, Mr. Kinney was brother-in-law to Mr. McCulloch, the Secretary of the Treasury. General Cooke—”
“I know who McCulloch is. Kinney never let us forget the connection. And Cooke . . . Cooke. God d—” Carrington swallows down the oath as if it were a draught of poison. “Blast that man. What else did he say? Tell me, Sergeant. I simply don’t believe he sent you for the sole reason of determining that the sutler and his unfortunate wife were killed by Indians.”
“I have been told it was not Indians who killed them, sir. General Cooke himself said this to Captain Molloy.”
“And who told you this, Sergeant?”
“I understand it is taken for a given among the men of the fort, sir.”
“You would do better than listen to the idle speculation of the enlisted soldier, Sergeant,” the adjutant says.
“Of course, sir. Though I believe there was a medical report. A report of death, sir, which stated as much, based on the surgeon’s examination of the bodies.”
“Speculations merely,” Carrington says. “God blast it, Sergeant, do you think I do not have enough to manage without such nonsense as that godless surgeon’s speculations? I forwarded that report to Omaha and thence, I would imagine, it was forwarded to Washington but it can be taken as nothing more than the . . . the assumptions of a surgeon. An army surgeon, I need not remind you, Sergeant.”
Kohn is uncertain as to whether or not he should defend his impressions of the surgeon. Army surgeon he may be but the man seemed sober and learnèd to Kohn. Unusually sane for an army sawbones. He remains silent. From outside he can hear wagons and the suck of hooves in the thawing mud. Skinners’ calls and barking sergeants. Carrington hears them too and stands from his desk.
“Your orders, Sergeant, and the letter.”
He takes them from Kohn and first reads the orders, then opens the letter from Cooke. Without looking at Kohn, the colonel turns and opens a door behind his desk to reveal rough stairs ascending. He mounts them and is followed by his adjutant. Kohn waits for a moment before following the officers up onto the viewing platform he saw from outside. The colonel and the captain stand at a railing and overlook a body of mounted soldiers in buffalo coats gathered around a number of box wagons hauled by mule teams. Civilian drivers and timbermen smoke pipes and cradle repeater rifles. Some of the box wagons have raised sides and behind them sit more soldiers with muskets and crates of ammunition, all manner of saws and axes. Kohn stands behind Carrington at the railing.
“Captain Brown, you do not appear to have a full complement, sir,” Carrington shouts down and Kohn recognizes the quartermaster he met some days before.
“We are short horses, sir,” the quartermaster, Captain Brown, shouts back to Carrington. “We will have to make do unless you can impress upon the good general to send us more men and beasts. And bullets, sir.”
Brown smiles and Kohn sees derision in it. A fighting man to a writing commander.
“Do your best, Captain. And under no circumstances are you to pursue any Indians in case of ambush. Defend the woodtrain and return to post, sir.”
“Yessir,” Brown says, spurring his mount and saluting. There is no respect in the gesture. The fort’s gates are opened and the wagons begin to move out, followed by the mounted infantry and a smattering of cavalrymen. One of the two pretorians who was with Brown when Kohn met him stares up at Kohn and Kohn meets his gaze. The big man turns his horse and follows the wagons, his buffalo coat making him look somehow less than human. A mounted bear, a minotaur.
Kohn watches the wagons stretch out across the plain and Carrington points. He raises a spyglass. “There, Captain.”
The adjutant extends his own glass and directs its lens on the hills across the valley and Kohn sees them now himself, tiny silhouettes on a rolling ridge line roughly half a mile away across the valley, east of the hilltop road where the wagon train will pass.
Kohn speaks, “Do the men spot them, sir?”
Carrington claps shut the spyglass. “Spot them! Why they expect them, Sergeant. They are there every day the woodtrain goes out. They are there most nights as well, looking down at us and our activity. Let them have the howitzer, Captain. The gun that shoots twice, as our Sioux friends have named it.”
The adjutant crosses the viewing platform and bellows orders to a cannon crew on a bastion built into the stockade wall. The gun is small, likely a twelve-pounder Kohn reckons, and known as a mountain howitzer. Kohn watches as the men go to work, sighting along the barrel, adjusting the range, loading, ramming. Setting and lighting the fuse.
Detonation rips the still winter air and smoke and flame spit from the cannon’s barrel. The Indians on the hilltop wrench their mounts to the ground by the neck and use them for cover. Kohn follows the arc of the shot, as experienced men can do, by the warp and disturbance of air. He loses it as it falls to the hilltop and then watches it explode, showering the hillside with scorched shrapnel. Moments later one of the Indians pulls his horse to its feet and remounts, shaking his spear at the fort as if willing another shot. Kohn can just make out the sound of the Indian’s shouting and whooping. A second Indian appears to be preoccupied with his horse, still on the ground, and Kohn wonders if the beast has been struck by shrapnel. The Indian kneels to the horse and then stands and leaps up onto the back of his friend’s mount. They leave as the howitzer fires for a second time and the shell explodes over the dying horse and the hilltop empty of Indians.
“That will be enough for today, Captain,” Carrington says.
The adjutant bellows to the gun team to cease firing and his order is repeated.
“You may perform your investigations, Sergeant,” Carrington says, turning to Kohn and handing him back the oilskin wallet containing his and Molloy’s orders. “But let me warn you not to interfere with the mission of the fort. I will not tolerate it.”
“Yessir.”
“And you are to report your findings to me, Sergeant, is that clear? Any prosecutions to be carried out will be sanctioned by myself alone. No suspect leaves this fort without my being informed or you will be subject to court martial proceedings, Sergeant.”
“Yessir,” Kohn says, noting that he has been threatened with court martial more times in the past three days than he was in the whole four years of the war.
Carrington turns back to watching the woodtrain as it begins its climb from the valley floor to the road that runs atop the hills. If I were an Indian, Kohn thinks, that is where I would attack. Maybe the howitzer discourages them. Maybe there is a better ambush site on the descent. Kohn shrugs away the speculation. He wonders if he should ask Carrington if he can interview his wife’s serving maid, the Indian girl the surgeon had mentioned. He decides against this and will find another way to do it. Or perhaps he will return to his quarters, lie down on his bunk with a bottle and do nothing at all until Molloy recovers.
“You are dismissed, Sergeant,” Carrington says.
Kohn comes to attention and snaps out a salute. The colonel and his adjutant ignore him, watching the woodtrain.