December 21, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
AT THE TABLE IN FRONT OF THE GUARDHOUSE WOODSTOVE, Molloy sits with Michael O’Driscoll. In front of him is a quartermaster’s ledger, its pages thick and swollen with damp.
“I’m told it is true that your brother has run to the hills, Private, and he has taken his Sarah with him and the colonel’s missus is without a parlormaid this morning.”
The prisoner smiles. “I am only sorry I am not with him but one of us free is better than none all the same, God go with them. I have made my choices in this life.”
“You chose this guardhouse, didn’t you? There was no call for it. There is little enough in the way of evidence, Private, little enough to point to your guilt.”
“There is enough of it inside me, sir.”
“Guilt is a hard thing on a man. I know it. But you overestimate the choices you have in life, Private, I imagine.”
After some moments of silence, Michael O’Driscoll says to Molloy, “We met, sir, once in the war. You did save the brother and myself and we are in your debt.”
“Kohn has told me this but I am ashamed to say, Míceál, that I do not remember it.” Molloy pronounces Michael as an Irish speaker would and the prisoner smiles.
“I did write of it in this.” The prisoner gently pushes the ledger across the table in front of the captain.
“Of course you did.”
“I am no scholar, sir.”
“You are wise enough to know the truth, Míceál, I can see it in you.”
“I have tried to know it and to write it, sir. My story, and Tom’s, well, it is there as best as I could put it. What happened to them in the shebeen—”
“What your brother did, perhaps, Míceál?”
“It’s not my brother,” Michael says. “He—I did tell you all of it in them pages in front of you.”
“You’ve told me some of it, Private, but not the whole of it.”
“Sure, when does any man get the whole of any story? We take what we do get and use what we need and go on about things from there, sure. There does be no whole story, sir, only the one we do choose to tell.”
“And you have chosen to tell me that you are guilty of the killings in the tavern.”
“It is there on the page, sir. You may hang me now and be done with it but the truth is that them three are dead but so is Ridgeway and the guilt I feel is for that. He was my friend and I did fail him and my neck will fit the noose for it, I tell you.”
“Whisht, Míceál,” Molloy says. “Whisht and fetch me a light from the stove for this cheroot.”
Michael returns from the stove with the lit cigar and hands it to Molloy, who puffs the tip to burning orange. “Tell me this, Míceál. Your friend, the picture-maker. Would he see you hanged for what you claim you did? For what your brother did?”
“For what I did, sir.”
“Would he see you hanged? A friend?”
The prisoner is silent for a long moment. “I don’t know, sir.”
“And if the situation were reversed? If you were dead and some blame could be attached to the action or inaction of a friend in its cause, would you have your friend hanged for it?”
“I would not. Of course not, sir. But there is what I want and what is right in the eyes of God and—”
“God’s eyes are not on this place, Private. He is looking the other way if He’s not blinded altogether by what we get up to down here.”
The guardhouse door opens and a breathless private enters. “The woodtrain is under a big attack, sir, bigger than any before, and Colonel Carrington has ordered all men here released to defend it, sir.”
The private carries a ring of keys and begins to unlock the large cell at the far end of the room where seven men are held for various offenses.
“All men here, Private?”
“Yessir, but he didn’t say nothing about your prisoner. I don’t know what that means you is to do with him. I’m only a dog private, sir. Uncle don’t pay me for what’s ’bove my shoulders, sir.”
“Nor does he any of us, Private. Think not another moment about it but go about your business,” Molloy says, pulling on his cheroot. The racking cough recommences and when it stops Molloy wipes a ribbon of blood and spittle from his chin with his coat sleeve. He then takes a bottle from under his coat and pours out two measures into tin coffee mugs on the table.
“You will share a sup with me before you go, Míceál? Céard a déarfá le deoch an dorais?”
Michael O’Driscoll says back to him, “An dorais, sir?”
“The woodtrain is under attack, Private. All hands are needed. Any man who can hold a gun. You can hold a gun I have been told.”
“But sir—”
“I have made a choice, Private. It is time for you to make yours. Deoch an dorais, Míceál?”
Michael O’Driscoll watches as the men from the cell emerge blinking into the light of the open guardhouse door. One or two of them are refusing to leave the cell and the private remonstrates with them in the cell’s doorway, a winter’s incarceration preferable to what awaits them outside the palisade.
“Thank you, sir. Deoch an dorais.” A drink for the door. O’Driscoll raises his mug to the officer. “For friends dead before us.”
“And those soon to be dead,” says Brevet Captain Martin Molloy, raising the tin mug to his lips. He pauses before drinking. “And take your story with you when you go. I know well what is in it already.”