The weeks passed, and one day we awoke to the ringing sound of pickaxes and pry bars digging into the stone that underlay much of the desert. Sooner than you’d think, twenty-foot telegraph poles sprouted, running from the far horizon right up to the fort. The black infantry soldiers working that detail shinnied up those poles easy as pie to hang those telegraph lines. The wire, looping from one pole to the next, shone in the setting sun, an endless row of gold necklaces.
Things changed as soon as the contraption was set up. Overnight we went from feeling invisible and invulnerable, lost way out on the prairie where no one and nothing could get at us, to feeling like a big, fat target. Though the only Indians we’d spotted, besides John Horse and his crew, had been lone riders on distant peaks, by the end of the first week of telegrams we felt we were under siege.
Every time a telegram came in, the operator, a white corporal with the wispiest mustache and biggest apple of Adam in the entire single-star state, would tear around the fort yelling the news about every single solitary redskin outrage that occurred anywhere in the entire country. Though it might have been the Sioux up in South Dakota stealing a couple of beeves off a Norwegian settler, or Comanche way off in north Texas burning down a barn, the wire made it seem like the heathens were a vast, united force closing in around us. Drewbott, who’d already shown himself to be a chickenshit of the first order, was powerfully affected by these alarms. He doubled, then tripled the night guard.
Though Drewbott squandered time and worry and scarce supplies on the threat of Indian attack, the fact of the matter was that, in the entire history of the Indian Wars, the heathens only ever attacked a U.S. fort once. They were too smart to hit the places where the men with guns were. Lone farms and stagecoaches were more their cup of tea. If you wanted to mess with Indians, you’d mostly have to go out and track them down. And that was not a chore Colonel Chickenshit much cared for.
Pretty soon, though, reports did start coming in from much closer to home. A band of Mescalero Apache led by a chief name of Chewing Bones had left the reservation they’d been herded onto by Kit Carson over in the Rio Grande Valley. Even though the telegrams kept getting grimmer with news of settlers being burned out, their livestock stolen, women and children kidnapped, and men mutilated in ways so flamboyant my grandmother would have admired them, Drewbott still wasn’t inclined to leave the fort and go off in pursuit of the savages.
Then, late one evening, a telegram came in that changed everything.
As usual, I was in the Sergeant’s office, stuffing myself to bursting with the pleasure of keeping silent company with him. On that particular evening, I was toting up the number of days all the companies had lost to sick call. “Sergeant,” I said, soon as I recorded the totals. “We’ve only lost thirteen days this entire month. C and F,” I said, referring to the two new companies of infantrymen that had joined the regiment, “lost forty-three and twenty-eight.”
Sergeant hid his pride at our company and said, “Malingerers.”
“Shirkers, idlers, loafers, and deadbeats,” I added, parroting back the words I’d learned from the Sergeant. I clung to every word out of his mouth, stored them up, and presented them often as I could for I was ever trying to make a good impression.
“Wastrels, spongers, slouches, and—”
I never learned the next new word he was tossing into my vocabulary for the door burst open and there stood Colonel Drewbott. Sergeant and I sprang to our feet like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes.
The colonel wore a nightshirt stuffed into his britches, one suspender on his shoulder, one off. His hair stood up on the side it’d been slept on. He wobbled at the door, dazed as a goose with a nail in its head until he remembered the telegram in his hand, flapped it at the Sergeant and said, “This just came in from—”
The instant he noticed me, the colonel shut up and handed the wire to the Sergeant. With a sharp eye cast in my direction, Drewbott added, “Mention this to no one until tomorrow. Make a general announcement to all companies tomorrow at assembly. And then set to, boy, set to with a mighty vengeance.” He left without returning our salutes.
Though I’d heard Drewbott say it before—that “boy” business—it still shocked me to hear the Sergeant addressed in such a manner. The Sergeant, busy reading the telegram, seemed not to notice. He finished and looked up. I feared someone had died.
“What?” I asked. “Has the president been assassinated?”
That would of been shocking but not necessarily sad. For the current occupant of the White House, Andrew Johnson, the nincompoop vice president who’d slid his tiny feet into Lincoln’s giant shoes, was currently trying to turn us all back into slaves.
“No, no,” the Sergeant corrected me. “The news is good.” He put his hand over his mouth in a girlish way I’d never thought him capable of and pressed against the smile that formed there. “Very good, indeed.”
“What?” I asked again, for once not feeling the need to add “sir.” The Sergeant suddenly seemed so young and wide-eyed, I was certain I was seeing an expression that had not played across his face since he was a boy.
“I’m not supposed to say,” he said.
“Sergeant, you know me. Who would I tell? I hardly talk to anyone but Powdrell.”
“Hell, you’ll know tomorrow anyway. All right, Cathay.” It pleased me when he called me “Cathay” instead of “Private.” “What would you say if I told you that the military governor of the entire Fifth Military District was going to pin a Marksman medal on you?”
I could not speak.
He thought my surprise was about the medal and said, “I didn’t want to say anything until the award had been approved, but I put you in for it weeks ago.”
But that wasn’t what had shocked me. “Sheridan?” I croaked, for my old commander was the military governor. “General Sheridan is coming here?”
“Week from today. To conduct a general inspection. Custer will be accompanying him. They’ll award all the honors earned until now.”
“The General? He’s going to see me?” I heard the tremble in my voice, for the instant the General set eyes on me, I’d be mustered out and turned onto the prairie to fend for myself. I wondered what’d kill me first: hostiles, wolves, or a rattler. Of course, a chughole’d do it. Horse trips and breaks a leg and a person afoot in the desert is dead.
“I’m as surprised as you are,” the Sergeant went on, beaming. “The first general inspection of the first colored cavalry unit and a presentation of honors by the highest-ranking officer in the district?”
Then I realized I didn’t have to worry about dying of thirst on the desert: once the General exposed me, I’d never make it out of the fort alive. Vikers and his jackals’d see to that.
“Cathay,” the Sergeant went on, more talkative than I’d ever known him to be. “I was having doubts, but this renews my faith in the United States Army. Like all made by man, the army is an imperfect organization filled with members who don’t live up to its ideals. But, say what you will, when it comes to the nut-cutting, the army is fair.” He nodded and, with stern decisiveness, stated, “No matter what the color of your skin, Private, if you serve, if you deserve, you will be recognized.”
“Yessir,” I answered.
“And, just as surely, if you fail to serve, as Drewbott is failing, the army will, I promise you, eventually recognize that, too. No wonder the man’s worried. He knows a reckoning is coming.” The Sergeant nodded, satisfied, then went on. “According to the telegram, both Sheridan and Custer—did I mention that Custer is coming as well? In any case, they have already sent out advance kitchen staff. And since you served with Sheridan during the Rebellion—”
“Well, ‘served with,’ sir,” I interrupted. “I maybe shouldn’t have gone that far—”
“Don’t be modest, Cathay. I’m not saying you were a strategy adviser.”
“No, sir.”
“But you know the man, right?”
“Well, ‘know,’” I crawfished.
“Fine. I’m assigning you to meet with his staff. Show them around. Lots to be done, Private,” he muttered, already drawing up lists in his head. “Lots to be done. Your old general gives a tough inspection. I’ve heard he doesn’t miss a thing.”
“No, sir,” I agreed. “General Philip Sheridan never misses a thing.”