Nothing of much account happened during our first few days in the field except that we drank the water wagon dry. Drewbott sent word down that water would not be a concern as he possessed a map of the savages’ water sources. He meant the map that had been drawn up from the locations Wager and I had scouted a year ago. We camped that night beside the first water we’d found, and mapped on that last trip. It had been a creek back then but was now barely a trickle.
On the morning of the fifth day, John Horse and his men left out before dawn, headed to the Klatt Ranch on Sulfur Draw, seventy miles away, where the last reported renegade attack had taken place. The scouts would cut for sign and pick up the trail from there. Drewbott and Carter studied the water map and sent down word that we were making for Playa del Oro, thirty miles south. We splashed the slurry of coffee and grounds left at the bottom of our cups into the embers of our breakfast fires and Wager passed among his men reminding them, “Fill up your canteens. All of you. No man leaves without a full canteen.”
Before they could obey, Drewbott, with Carter and Grundy flanking him and Vikers and his boys bringing up the rear, marched over. The bolt of fear lodged in my chest twisted tighter. Drewbott stopped a ways from our campsite and bellowed, “Allbright!”
With a quick glance at me, Wager strode over, snapped off a salute, and waited at attention.
“First Sergeant Allbright!” Drewbott rumbled out, loud enough for everyone to hear. The men halted what they were doing. Saddles were held out frozen in front of them, one man’s carbine hung open, waiting to be loaded, a mule danced about at the end of a rein waiting to be harnessed, and the men going to fill canteens halted.
When everyone’s attention was on him, Drewbott announced, “First Sergeant Allbright, you are hereby relieved of your command and demoted to corporal. I am brevetting Corporal Vikers to the rank of first sergeant. He will assume your duties, effective immediately.”
“What are the charges?” Wager asked, not a speck of the shock that had gripped me and the rest of the detachment showing on his face or in his voice.
Vikers stepped forward with Wager’s sextant and spyglass and Drewbott announced, “These were found in your saddlebag.”
“Of course they were,” Wager answered calmly. “They’re always in my saddlebag. How else am I supposed to map and navigate?”
“That’s about enough of your smart lip, boy,” Drewbott snapped. “You’re not on this expedition to do either one. We have a white officer, Grundy, to do that. So, since you clearly knew that there would be no mapping, why would you bring these instruments along?”
Wager said nothing.
“Admit it,” Drewbott thundered with such force and suddenness that the officers beside him widened their eyes. That was when I saw that Drewbott had the red-eyed gauntness of a man who wasn’t sleeping right. “You are searching for your confederates out there!” He held a trembling finger out toward the vast emptiness.
For the first time, I saw worry wrinkle Wager’s face.
“First Sergeant Vikers,” Drewbott ordered. “The command is yours.”
Vikers, chest puffed out, stepped up and ordered, “Boots and saddles, men! Boots and saddles! Get a move on! Colonel expects us to make forty miles today! He wants to be splashing about in Playa del Oro by nightfall! Are we going to do it for the colonel?” he yelled out.
We all recognized Vikers’s toadying up to the master for the sign of the bad overseer that it was, and Greene and Caldwell were the only ones to hurrah him back. So Vikers, staring threats, asked again. This time everyone except me, Wager, and Lem yelled agreement.
As we rode off, Wager betrayed no more emotion than a statue carved from marble. Only I saw how his jaw bunched from the rage he was swallowing down. He separated himself from us and I knew to let him be.
The sun rose and, as the dry miles got dryer and hotter, it came out that many of the men, rushed by Vikers to saddle up, had not filled their canteens at the creek we’d camped next to. Worse, Vikers was not enforcing water discipline. He hadn’t made the men nurse along what water they did have, the way Wager would of. By noon, a fair number of the men, mostly the new recruits, had already drained what little water they had. They didn’t worry overly much, though, for we were making for a marked water hole, the large shallow lake called Playa del Oro that we had mapped spring before last.
I told Lem about how Wager and I had seen more different kinds of animals gathered at Playa del Oro than Noah had on his Ark. Skittish pronghorn, snorty wild horses, braying burros, a flock of spindly-legged cranes, skunk, lizards, javelina. I told him how flocks of white wing dove rose and settled upon the broad, shallow lake thick as leaves whirled by an autumn wind. We’d even seen the prints of puma, wolves, and the long-nailed track of a bear pressed into the mud around the banks of the shallow lake.
In anticipation of this vast watering hole, Lem made free with his water, gulping down what he had.
“Wait,” I told him. “Best if you ration what you got. Save some for tomorrow.”
“Why?” he asked. “Tomorrow we be splashing with the cranes.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Look.” I pointed to the sky.
“What? Nothing up there. Not even a cloud to give us a bit of shade.”
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Last time we were here, sky was full of white wing dove flocking this way. And, have you seen a single pronghorn? They’ve left, Lem. That’s a bad sign. I’m telling you, slow down.”
Lem stoppered his canteen and we rode on.
Playa del Oro sat atop a high mesa. The climb was steep and the footing unsteady. The sound of men panting and the clatter of horse hooves unloosing torrents of loose rock filled the hot, dry air. Full dark was coming on by the time we approached the mesa. The parched men pushed hard to reach the top where the broad water hole waited.
The first ones to reach the peak stopped dead. We gathered up next to them and gazed out on a vast dry depression scaled with curls of crisp gray dirt.
Drewbott made a great show of unfurling Wager’s map and calling out, “Either Allbright got these coordinates wrong or this ‘playa’ he reported never existed in the first place.”
I watched the muscles of Wager’s jaw work, grinding so hard I could hear the sound, but he did not utter a word. Not at that and not when Drewbott sent out a couple of his officers to scout the area, ordering them, “Find the water that Corporal Allbright says is supposed to be here.” I wanted to scream at Drewbott that only an idiot would expect water to always be where it had been in a desert.
Without a word, Wager pulled an entrenching spade off of one of the supply mules and walked out across the Playa. I followed. The disks of sun-baked dirt crunched beneath our boots. Near the center of the shallow basin, we commenced to dig. Wager with the spade. Me with my saber. When we got down far enough, water seeped slowly into the hole. Sad that I had to dirty it, I flattened the kerchief Wager had given me down into the puddle to filter out the mud, sank my cup into it, then held it up and called out, “Who’s thirsty?”
Soon all of the recruits and most of the men were digging. Drewbott and his officers, along with Vikers and his bunch, stood away and pretended to be amused at us “wallowing like pigs in the muck.” When all the men were done, we led the horses out to drink at the seeps.
That night, Lem, Wager, and I made camp as far from the others as we could go without officially deserting. Stars spangled the sky from one edge of the mesa to the other. Even when the three of us were alone, Wager didn’t speak, just studied the sky like he’d find an answer to this ultimate betrayal of all he had once believed in up there. When I heard Lem snoring, I moved my bedroll next to Wager. He took no notice of me. He was too occupied in parsing out how his grand ideas and noble thoughts had let him down. He was finding his way to knowing what I knew: the time for noble thoughts had passed. We were captives and we had to escape.
The moon went down and the stars settled around us, so close and radiant it seemed like I could flap my arms, swim up through them, and lead Wager and Lem to freedom.