At the stable before dawn, I breathed in the good smell of fresh bedding hay as I all but skipped to Bunny’s stall to get her tacked up for the big day ahead. The stall was empty. I ran outside yelling for Fernie Teague, who was second to Lem and now in charge since Lem was coming with us.
“What you hollerin’ about?” Fernie demanded as he hustled up to me, pulling his long white grooming coat on over his uniform.
“Bunny? Where’s my horse?”
“Oh, right, I was going to tell you first thing—”
“Tell me what?” My heart had stopped dead.
“About Bunny. She took sick. Glanders’s what it looks like.”
Glanders.
I thought my legs would drop out from under me, glanders was that fatal bad.
“Whoa, whoa,” Fernie said. “She ain’t dead yet. Quarantined her over to the back pasture.”
I started to go to her, but Fernie grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Sorry, doc said no one’s allowed to get close to her. People can catch glanders and that ain’t a pretty way to go. Horse or man.”
“I have to take care of—”
“Order’s an order, Cathay. Don’t fret. I’ll leave water and feed for her. She’ll be comfortable.”
“Will you…” I couldn’t finish. “If she’s suffering.”
“Count on it,” he answered. “Comes to it, I’ll put her down gentle and fast. Doc says to give her till tomorrow morning.”
Fernie loaned me a sturdy brown gelding and I made myself forget that I’d never known of an animal to recover from glanders. Like always, I put my sorrow to the side, did what had to be done, and was mounted and ready time we moved out.
Carter’s prediction turned out to be right. When we rode out, heading south toward Mexico where Chewing Bones liked to hole up across the Rio Grande, Drewbott had four white officers riding between him and us. But the man didn’t stop there. He’d also assigned Carter and Grundy to ride directly behind Wager. As soon as I saw that Drewbott had put two gunmen at Wager’s back, I unholstered my carbine and kept it out, resting on the saddle. I held the reins in my left hand, rifle in the right, with my finger on the trigger.
We rode through a land that, while still vast and magnificent, no longer seemed as untroubled as it had when Wager and I scouted it a year ago. The spring rains hadn’t come and where miles of grass should have carpeted the prairie, only stubbly clumps lay here and there. Even the cactus and scrub oak looked exhausted by the drought.
At night, Wager, Lem, and I bedded down with the scouts, far away from the others. Wager had warmed considerably to John Horse. Instead of thinking him a traitor, he asked Horse to tell him again about defeating the United States Army in the swamps of Florida and escaping from capture in that thick-walled prison. He listened to Horse now like the chief was Frederick Douglass sitting amongst us with a plaid wool turban atop his head.
Wager and I both noticed that Horse and his men always spoke of their white commander at Fort Lewis, Lieutenant Bullis, with the same kind of fondness and loyalty that the Buffalo Soldiers who served under Colonels Hatch and Grierson spoke of those officers. Not only did those white COs treat their troops with respect, but they had them doing more soldiering than pick-swinging.
“I guess not all white officers are chickenshit colorphobes,” I said. “Appears we just got stuck with a bad apple.”
“‘Apple’?” Horse whooped. “Drewbott’s a whole barrel of stinking turds is what he is. You need to put in for a transfer to our unit.”
“To scout?” Wager asked.
“Sure. Why not? I’ll get Bullis to request you. Don’t appear Colonel Turd’ll object.”
“And the private?” Wager asked, nodding toward me.
“Oh, sure, the ‘private,’” Horse echoed, winking at the other scouts. “The ‘private,’ sure, I’ll put in for ‘him,’ too.”
“We’d like that,” Wager said.
“And Lem, too?” I asked.
John Horse agreed. The other scouts laughed, apparently delighted that the three of us were, in our various ways, pulling one over on the army. Taking this jolliness as a sign that the Seminole accepted his brand of love, Lem grinned.
This plan, this answer to our prayer, made me half-witted with happiness. As for Wager, the corners of his mouth turned up, which was like him doing handsprings and jumping for joy. I saw us together, settled in beside Blackberry Creek, finishing out our hitches with friends on either side. I wanted badly to take his hand and squeeze it. But though at this campfire we were among friends, I never forgot that enemies were always watching.
At the center of camp, in front of a fire bigger than it needed to be, was Drewbott. Hearing our laughter and being thin-skinned as a dewberry, he believed we were having sport at his expense. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared in agitation as he studied us. Off in the distance a coyote howled and, startled by the sound, Drewbott jerked up so fast the cup of coffee he held splashed down the leg of his pants. He shook his head and glared our way as though, on top of all the other miseries of his life, this, too, was our fault. Was Wager’s fault. His sour expression reminded me so much of Old Mister that a cold bolt of fear lodged beneath my breastbone. I pledged that that shoulder-strapped carbuncle would die before he ever raised a hand to Wager. And that I would do the deadening.