Chapter Five

 

“And to what do we owe the honor of your presence at our moveable cantonment?” The Lieutenant-Colonel had finally emerged from his field tent and walked along the path of soaked verdure down into the mouth of the weir. He worked his main moustache with a woodchuck-tooth comb.

Bullethead Bertram did not struggle against the two Union men, each of them pinning one of his arms behind his back. He kept his features relaxed. This in turn increased the fretfulness of the Light Colonel, who closely scrutinized him.

“You answered your own question,” Bertram said. “This camp was not here when I left on my mission. He nodded toward the posted guide planted in a mount at the top of the hill, “When I returned, lo and behold.”

The two sentries finished rifling Bertram’s pockets and released him. They handed the revolvers and the field glass to the Colonel. The Colonel bounced the guns in his hands.

“Not bad, but I prefer the Colts Dragoon.” The Colonel nodded toward a Buck Sergeant who had followed him down the hill.

The non-commissioned officer was so freshly introduced to the corps his inverted Chevrons were still sky-blue, rather than stained by sweat and smoke. The Colonel handed Bertram’s guns to his Sergeant.

“My orderly usually prepares my cylinders on the Colt. Mounted on my pacer, I can get off twenty to thirty rounds in the time that it would take a skilled infantryman to get off two or three shots.”

The Colonel did not pass the field glass to his orderly, but rather kept it in his hand. Through some imperceptible sign, he ordered the two mosquito-winged privates to release their catch.

Bertram walked forward, grateful at least that his holdout .41 was still safely curled against his bicep. The weapon chafed on a good day, and the front sight now dug into the muscle, leaving a deep impression. He followed the Colonel to the top of the hill where the commander quickly undid the eyepiece.

As he did so, the flimsy handsaw, still covered with the rusty, congealed blood of the preacher, fell onto the hard-packed clay. “You’d better pick up your little implement.” Bertram leaned over. “Oh, and by the way. I’m keeping your sidearm. I will, however, make a concession this time and allow you keep your cleverly-concealed spring-loader to yourself.”

Bullethead smiled a tad. Whether it was the consanguine bond of age, or something else altogether, rank and politics had faded from the agenda.

“Here,” the Colonel said, giving Bertram his spyglass back. Bullethead replaced his saw in its stowaway sleeve. Then he held the spyglass out toward the open field, the roiling ocean of green, interrupted here and there by blond furrows of wheat and garish yellow corn. On the far horizon, flames lashed the sky with their blazing tongues.

“That is retribution, Union-style,” the Colonel declared. “The inhabitants of the town decided to provide a less than warm welcome to our boys. They killed a detachment of the Eighth Infantry out of Minnesota. They used the decoy of some savage redskin’s interference to lure our men to follow the scent of the red herring all the way from Slumgullion to their deaths.”

Bertram lowered the eyepiece. The Light-Colonel continued, “We still have several men unaccounted for. Either they have been mutilated and left for dead in some unchristian manner, or they have taken the French leave and absconded from their God-decreed duty. All shirkers, though, I can assure you, will end up as wind-chimes before a court of law, wearing neckties Ulysses S. Grant will knot for them himself.”

Bullethead did not know where he fit into this. He waited. A loud boom made the leaves in the trees above them shake in raucous spasms of applause. Autumn would lead the leaves to death, an undignified molting, and the men in blue and gray would soon be joining them in a scattered proliferation across the earth.

“Are you secession?” The Colonel spoke in a flat voice.

“No.”

“Abolition?”

Bertram shook his head. “Indifferent.”

“No,” the Colonel said, looking at the blood covering his hands, his collar, and the spyglass. “You’re a mercenary.” Bertram nodded.

“If,” the Colonel said, “there was enough money on it, you’d take my life.”

Bullethead nodded again. The Colonel smiled. From below them in the watery trench, the smell of sticky, unsalted hominy began to rise.

“You must be hungry,” the Colonel said.

“I must be going.”

The Colonel shook his head. Gunshots rang in the distance. “I am the battalion commander, and as such, am privy to all intelligence which passes our line. Take it from me, this whole area is about to get hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.” The Colonel laughed at his own wit.

“My employer is in that direction.” The Colonel knew in which direction he meant.

“I cannot walk on water and I cannot scale mountains. I must be on my way.”

From below them, near the gulley being converted into a creek from heavy rainfall, several new prisoners were escorted into the camp. They faced far more roughshod treatment than Bertram had been forced to endure. It was a weird gallery, an inverted dais whose arrival drew hoots and caterwauls from the Union soldiers looking up from their hominy grits and letters home.

“Here we are, boys,” the Union man in the lead of the group said. “Form a docket.”

At the front of the group, a Negro in his buckskin, single-breasted vest and tweed shirt held the reins to an iron manacle, which was fitted around the neck of a white man following behind him. The white man was bleeding profusely from a welt on his scraggly head. Behind the white man, another chained link led to a woman, roughly the same age as him and most probably his wife. Wads of desiccated vegetables and hardtack rained down from the men reclining on boulders surrounding the cavern.

The Colonel looked at Bertram. “Let’s see what’s transpiring.”

Bertram couldn’t have cared less, but alas, the evening entertainment was blocking his path. Two soapboxes were offered by some industrious, sadistic hand in the crowd, and the husband and wife were made by the sharp point of the bayonet to stand on the boxes. The private who had ushered the pair and their new Negro master now began to shout for quiet. The whistles and catcalls died, trailing off into a sulfuric hiss.

“I hereby call this auction to order. This Negro master does offer two strong-backed rednecks that have not only seceded from their nation’s Union, but have seceded from common decency, while also taking leave of their senses.” The Union man looked to the Negro, who held the manacle of the white man and woman with a trembling hand.

His discomfort was palpable. His skin was ashen. His temples bobbed in time with his throbbing Adam’s apple. A vein cracked lightening fissures along the length of his woolen scalp.

“Uh...” He looked at his former masters.

Fearing that his hesitation might bring a grinding halt to the proceedings, the Union soldier shouted, “We’ll start the bidding at fifty dollars.”

Mock bids went up from the war-weary men. A few looked away from the affair. The rest basked in it.

“She can take in laundry for Douglas and scrub the puncheon for Attucks’ grandchildren!”

There was a ribald explosion of laughter. Bertram began descending the hill.

“Careful,” the Colonel said. “There are Hessians in this region, a whole guild of mercenaries whose bellies are full of sauerkraut. They fought in the German revolution.”

“I fought in Forty-Eight,” Bertram said, unimpressed, his permanent mark of Ash Wednesday speaking volumes.

“Just steer clear of the Mississippi. They’ve established their Kaserne there, and the Huns are ready to kill any freelancer they find operating in their territory. We can’t stop it.” The Colonel pointed to the scene at the bottom of the hill. “Hell, I cannot even control my own men any longer.”

Bertram parted their ranks, where a few were absorbed with studying the gums and teeth of the prospective washer woman. The two men who had apprehended him now reluctantly allowed Bullethead to pass. He walked around the battlements and sentries, toward the roar of cannon.

Though he had given up smoking years ago, he still had the habit, like many a man in the territories, of marking time and distance by the number of ready-mades it would require him to smoke on the walk from one place to another. He figured himself roughly twenty cigarettes, one heap of blue ashes, away from reaching his goal. There were no standout landmarks to carry him to his destination. His pathfinder skill was something he felt in his blood. The same instinct had guided him through the graveyard of his life where the bodies and the years had accrued indifferently. He would join them eventually, but it was his goal to go by the hand of the one who had made him, and not by the barrel of some random gun.

Besides, he had five-hundred dollars in gold slugs hidden on his person. All he had to do was make it the distance required to burn a New York pack, and then he could receive the rest of his shiny mineral bounty.

He worked his way through the trees, figuring a cannon shot was less likely to reach him here. He crafted scenes in the billowing smoke of his mind, those tinctures, tits, cigars, steaks, baths, spritzes, saunas, oysters, fine china, chandeliers, concertos, finely-appointed rooms, everything all patent leather, Ottoman, oriental, and glazed. The places money could take you and things it could buy.

Thus far, in sixty-seven years, with half his assassination fortune lost to wildcat speculation, he had discovered pain was everywhere. Yet a man could pay it to go away. He was willing to hear the Lord out on whatever salvation it was he was trying to offer, but the middle men God kept sending, the storefront variety, didn’t live half as well as those who concealed horns beneath their top-hats.

These autumnal ruminations were broken metal, shards from some hidden cannon and rifles. It was an ambush meant for the soldiers into whose midst he had accidentally wandered. It felt as if it was the very same grapeshot, which had found his forehead so many years ago, now back upon him, throwing itself through trees it split like lumberjacks, searching for him, making a personal fetish of trying to extinguish him, just one man among the millions.

“Goddamn!” He hit the dirt, tapped his arm against the white oak beside him, and the mini .41 greeted his palm. He clutched it in his sweaty hand and he saw, emerging from the camouflage of rising smoke, several men passing him in gray uniforms, working their way through trees which fell at the hand of some unseen axe.

“Best pick yourself up and run,” one of them said before continuing on his charge. Bertram saw the bluecoats at the top of the hill, struggling to reorient the lodged wheel axle of their cannon. It had been preparing for an assault from the other direction. Bertram stood.

From an opposite stand of trees, several rank-and-file columns of blue-coated men, as committed to their course as chess pieces, despite fearing it all somewhere inside, released a volley while marching in step. Fife and drum competed with agonized screams and truncated shouts. Their bodies fell into the cow patties with loud splashes.

The cannon on the hill had finally solved its quandary, and it now unleashed a steel and flame volley to shred several layers of bark from the distal trees and fan out into arteries, kneecaps, and eyes. A lucky boy lost two fingers and kept going as his heart pumped narcotized panic. Less lucky, but still alive, a man hopped on one leg, struggling for balance against a tree until its trunk fell like the mast on a forlorn ship, mashing another two men to flattened Johnny cakes.

Bertram’s world had gone black, and he felt fear for the first time in decades. Now he was smiling. A boy seated across from him, digging into the earth with his hands, caught sight of the old man’s expression, didn’t like it, picked himself up and ran.

“...hit...” A word made it to him, the rest muffled by the rending of the earth, the foundation of the world challenged and then defeated by one cannon and its unbridled hatred. Bullets and guns seemed to have a life beyond their owners. They had only tricked the men, whispered war’s rumors in order to unleash themselves on one-another.

“You’ve been hit.” Bertram heard him this time. A sharpshooter’s wad of one-hundred and fifty grains smacked the boy who was trying to help him in the middle of his face. It peeled his cheek and removed half of his jaw. The skeletal outline beneath the flesh smiled at Bertram and then the boy died.

Bertram put his hand to his head reflexively and laughed. All around him the gray men ran. Some of them fired. If the gray men were defeated and their stand of trees happened to be overrun, it would not bode well for him. He might not meet the Colonel with the forbearance again. For all he knew, the man on the hill might already be dead.

A piece of shot landed in his head, almost exactly where he had been hit years before. It felt neither superficial nor especially deep, though he knew it could potentially mean a burial plot if left unattended for too long. He had no mirror, nor even reflective water to gauge the damage. He stood, woozily, and tried to walk, balancing himself against a tree as he went.

Some charitable soldier scooped him up and continued walking toward the back of the bleeding forest. “I need an ambulance,” Bertram said.

“None available,” a soldier said. It wasn’t an apology, just a statement. Bullethead had no rank in their world, no matter how many notches he had acquired.

He harrumphed and laughed. “You boys must have taken serious casualties.”

“Not really,” the man said, setting him down among the stacked wounded and dying, pitiably moaning and covered with dirt. “The Generals’ wives love to watch the action. When they use the ambulances it affords them a better vantage. They can move from engagement to engagement without endangering their Sunday best.”

Bertram lifted both hands, as if in supplication or preparation for prayer. Then he began clapping, and laughed while he clapped.

“Wonderful,” he said, aloud. His eyeteeth showed as he smiled. Yes, he thought, I have smiled for the first time in fifteen years and laughed for the first time since I lost my virginity some forty years ago. This has truly been a wonderful day. The man beside him gurgled once and died.

* * * *

The sound of a sternwheeler leaving the muddy banks covered the noise of the horses moaning as they died. This Arabian was the last one to go. The other three already lay on the hay floor of the small livery stable. Half-Man wrapped the reigns tightly around the beast’s throat, feeling for the pulse of the carotid and yanking with all of his strength. The horse kicked its legs to the rear, furiously whinnied, and even tried to bite him, all to no avail. It fell into a heap and joined the others.

He had been sure to keep Delilah away from the scene. No need for her to watch this. She was accoutered for the night raiding, hitched under the incandescent prisms thrown by moonbeams against the handfuls of clustered white stars in the opaque sky. Her horse blanket was deliberately lowered over her rump, so that when they rode out of town she would cover her own tracks as she went. Her hooves were also adorned with sarong-like wrapped huaraches in order to mask her footfalls.

As for Half-Man, he had finally yielded. He was what they had always wanted him to be. He wore a white-boned breastplate vest. His war bonnet was of the straight up and down variety, marking him as a Plainsman. A macana was sheathed on his back and he held the now-powdered and wadded Chevalier musket in his hands. He walked toward the only lighted establishment in the town.

Two flat-wicked lamps on either side of the entrance threw light across a coat of arms and the words Coronet Hotel. He crossed the threshold into a lobby made of linden wood. Two men sat at a table in the lobby enjoying strong evening victuals.

Half-Man walked to the front desk. The hotelier-clerk, half-obscured by a baggage cart, looked up. “Yes?”

He was seasoned enough to stifle any indignation he may have felt at the arrival of a red man. For one, this one looked like a member of some traveling medicine show; maybe he could have been celebrated, possibly given complimentary appointments to the Coronet on some state senator’s dime.

“May I help you?” The hotelier still couldn’t bring himself to say sir. He had once stealthily accommodated a Negro pugilist who was dating a famous female aeronaut balloonist, but he would not call any of them sir.

“About fifteen years ago,” Half-Man said, “members of my adopted tribe went on a war party. They captured a stage, hogtied the men, and searched in the stage’s boot. They found no tobacco, no whiskey, and no weapons. All they found were what looked like little buttons without eyes or holes. They left it all there. Looking back on that night,” Half-Man said, “it occurs to me that I could be living comfortably on that loot, rather than hawking furs, if my tribe had not been so ignorant of the white man’s ways.”

The clerk did not understand, or did not want to understand. “What?” The two men at the other end of the lobby still sat. Half-Man leveled his weapon at the hotelier. “I would like some buttons, please.”

The man released an effeminate yelp. The two men at the table looked up startled toward the front desk.

* * * *

Upstairs, someone knocked at Adele Pferdmann’s door. She put down her worn copy of Simplicissimus and rose. She wrapped her ermine blanket around her thin chambray gown and opened the door. An old Chinese woman bowed with prayerful hands and entered.

“Oh,” Adele said, wishing she spoke Chinese, or at least a little more English. She handed her laundry to the woman, trying to match her for obeisance. “Danke,” she said.

The woman smiled, bowed, and left with the laundry.

* * * *

Downstairs, Half-Man heard the starburst spurs, spin, and pointed the Chevalier at the Sheriff in one motion. The man held up his hands.

The other man standing behind the Sheriff spoke in a heavy Swedish accent, “Is everything alright?”

“Now, now, red man,” the Sheriff said, “it’d be a pity to kill me outside my own bailiwick. You’re going to get hard time either way. Let’s not cross that threshold where there’s nothing left for it but to jerk you to Jesus, on a gallows pole.” The Sheriff lowered one of his hands and held it out to Half-Man.

“What say you to coming quietly with me?” His nose twitched, hoisting his mustache as if by some invisible string. The clerk behind them all dared not move.

“‘Sides,” the Sheriff said, amiably, “that there antique is probably worth more unfired than if you use it. I haven’t seen one of those since I was a whippersnapper.”

The report wasn’t any louder than the snap of fingers. It blew the Sheriff into a baggage cart, which he attempted to use to right himself before staggering into the far wall. He left a streak of bloody palm-prints smeared there, and fell into a dead pile. The Swede was already face-down on the ground with his hands interlocked behind his head, coughing from the heavy bank of floating blue smoke. The desk clerk was attempting to beat the fire out of a lace curtain.

Half-Man slung his Chevalier on his back and slid the macana from its case. He looked at the clerk. “The buttons.”

* * * *

Another knock sounded on the door. Adele rose this time in her chambray pajamas, more unabashed, leaving the ermine on the bed behind her, grateful the Chinese woman had returned. Adele hadn’t handed her those silk undergarments, which she had withheld for fear it would be a Chinese man and not a woman who would be receiving her laundry. She had been in this town for less than a week, and was not sure how it all worked.

“Good evening,” Half-Man said. He took her hand and pulled her from the room.

“Was? Warum?”

“Me no speak-um French,” Half-Man said bitterly. “Me Savage. Me steal white woman like in Illustrated Tales.” His laugh was caustic.

He pulled her down the stairs. She had no choice but to follow him along the wraparound banister. Below, under a gray cloud, one man was dead in a bloody pile, while the other two were sleeping the slumber which the macana club had rendered.

Half-Man attempted to lead her out the front door of the building. She stopped, almost slipping on the trailing silk of her chambray.

“Nein! No!” She had refused to leave the hotel, deciding to limit the sense of dislocation and homesickness. Her meals, laundry, books, baths, and music all came to her. Whether he wanted to take her to the moon or to the end of the street was immaterial. She didn’t want to go with him, or with anyone else, except for her father.

He gripped the macana in its sleeve on his back, already greased with blood. Her eyes widened to saucers, and he released his hold on the bludgeon.

He slapped her with the back of his hand, and she fainted in his arms.

* * * *

Half-Man hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her out to the hitching post. The barge on the river, which earlier had been preparing to undock, was now gone. The night was a little darker and quieter than it had been when he first entered the hotel. None of the townspeople appeared to have awakened from the shots and scuffling, not even any of the guests upstairs, aside from this handpicked girl who he now threw across Delilah’s back.

They rode into the waking sun, which gradually widened across the sky.

* * * *

The first hotel guest to rise and descend the stairs for his breakfast found the dead Sheriff and the two unconscious men. Last night he had dismissed the sounds as the backfiring of some untended corn perhaps left in a covered Dutch oven. He roused the hotel clerk with a glass of pump water, while the Swede, still too deeply in the throes of his concussion, remained where he was.

The clerk, ever mindful of his reputation, had the guest first help him drag the dead Sheriff into the icehouse and then carry the napping Swede to a pallet in the back room. He did all of this before contacting the Deputy, who berated him for it.

“You think your bookings mean more than the safety of this town’s folk?” He wore a butternut Kossuth hat on his head and a Walker Colt on his belt. He scratched his cleft pallet, the only space on his face naked of either scar or hair. It was all a ruse, a naked design to hide his fear at being the newly-anointed Sheriff, and also his sadness over losing an uncle. True, he had been an uncle who admittedly berated him as a ne’er-do-well but an uncle nonetheless.

“Okay,” the Deputy said. “Here’s what I want. I want you to tell the coroner to look at Barrett’s body and prepare a report. When that other fellow wakes, tell him I want to talk to him too.”

The clerk, still rubbing his head, said, “Do you want to meet him at the hotel?”

“Hell no,” the Deputy said. “I got me a jail to run. Not just drunks neither. We got a boy up on murder, capital-style, and he ain’t even been arraigned yet. I got to wait for the federal marshals to come and arrange transfer to Jessup.”

“Okay,” the clerk said. “You’re the Sheriff.”

“Yeah,” the Deputy said, trying it on. “I’m the Sheriff.”

Just as the coroner was “putting a bow” on the murder scene, as the Deputy-now-Sheriff put it, they discovered the grisly scene in the stables. The four horses were crowded into the manger, in a strangely coiled pile of warm brown flesh.

“Sick bastard,” the new Sheriff said. “You say he was an Indian?”

“That’s correct, Sheriff,” the clerk said. He held a cold rock to the side of his head.

“All gussied up and ready for the warpath. Hmm...” The Sheriff cogitated and let it marinate for a moment. A newly-deputized member of his crew handed him a tailor-made of Prince Albert to smoke. It burnt tangy and strong in the air, the smell reminding the desk clerk of the Chevalier’s blast.

“He had a really old rifle, more smoke than shot. I was frankly surprised at the meager report.”

“Yeah,” the Sheriff said, absently. “Pre-percussion, I’m guessing. Every shot’s a roll of the dice with them ancient blunderbusses.” Then, to the Deputy, “You say you got no tracks leaving town?”

“Neither a fart nor a whisper.”

“Well, I imagine that red man lighted for the territories, riding stowaway on Pharaoh’s steamer. Probably floating on her right now and living on steerage biscuits. Chicken-shit savage.” His nostrils flared smoke like pistons. “Way I figure it, you say your hotel is light two guests according to your ledger?”

“Two boarders, two rooms,” the clerk said, “brother and sister. Pferdmann by name, and German.”

Some dim flint sparked in the corner of the Sheriff’s mind. “Yep, these two rich? They loaded?”

“They come from good stock,” the clerk allowed.

“Yep,” the Sheriff said again. “Looks like we got a ransom job. A little bit above a redskin’s pay-grade. Someone put him up to this. He’s got the boy and the girl riding on that boat. Might have some coconspirators along for the ride. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pharaoh’s don’t reach her destination. Earle,” the Sheriff said to his Deputy, “find out where that steamer ports next. Have a posse ready to meet her, and I’m talking five, six strong-backed men ready to commandeer a pirate’s galleon. That’s the gospel.”

* * * *

Several hundred feet away, on the muddy banks of the hard-packed Mississippi, a man moaned, stretched across the length of a pickle barrel. He opened his mouth, gargled, and then he released a great dry-heave, followed by a mudslide of oatmeal and pea-green brine.

“Mein Gott.”

“You’ll need him.” Rainer kicked the barrel and it rolled away, leaving Pferdmann the younger to splash in the mud.

“Wo?”

Rainer looked toward the Mississippi. Something so perfect, a poor man’s Danube dream turned into the River Styx by a game of cards, or many games of cards.

“You gambled away the rest of your monthly allowance,” Rainer said. “If you want to eat for the rest of the month, you can sweep the Kaserne. Geld ist kaput.”

Klaus wiped the vomit from his face. “Ich bin kaput. Fertig.”

“Ja.” For the first time in many moons, Rainer agreed with him. “Your sister is gone, kidnapped by some savage tier in the nacht.”

A bit of sobriety passed across Klaus’s face followed by a flush and pallor. He held his stringy, gin-matted hair in his hands and pulled the locks.

“Und,” Rainer said, “Your vater ist coming today. Heute.”

“Scheise.” There was no other word for it. Klaus moaned and sobbed. “Ich bin tote.”

He continued crying, groping blindly for the pickle barrel, seeking somewhere to hide. Rainer wouldn’t allow him the reprieve. He picked his employer’s son up and hoisted him over his shoulder. He gingerly made his way through the mud, away from the river. Rainer realized he could not blame the water or its wicked boats. Klaus would have found a way to ruin his inheritance on land, sea, or, if he could book passage with the aeronaut, up in the sky above.

As they crested the muddy hill, two men carried a body from the icehouse adjoining the Coronet. Someone dumped a chamber pot from their window and someone else on the ground chastised them to use an outhouse like a decent Christian.

“You cannot stay in the hotel any longer,” Rainer said. “Your allowance will not permit it, and I imagine your father will want you to stay closer to the guild.”

The firm of Hessian und Habsburg had their headquarters in a wood-chinked cabin across the town, more than half a mile from the nearest bar, barge, or Black-Eyed Susan’s. All would miss Klaus Pferdmann’s business. None would get it any more. Rainer would see to that.

Klaus stopped as they passed the hotel. “My De Sade,” he said.

“Vas?” Rainer squinted at him.

“My riding crop,” Klaus Pferdmann said. “My implements.”

“Hey there! Stop!”

Rainer turned. It was that milquetoast, inbred hayseed, the Deputy. Rainer, not really grasping American rank structure, saw the man now had the star on his chest and knew it meant something having to do with the constabulary. No matter, he would not yield to this man’s authority. He yielded only to Adolph Pferdmann and perhaps to a well-armed detachment of Union Cavalry.

“Who are you?” The Sheriff spoke to both of them.

The clerk answered before either could speak in their broken English. “The gentleman on the left is a mercenary. These people were given Sheriff Barrett’s blessing to stay as long as they wanted, on account of a sealed, stamped, and signed territorial writ. This man,” the clerk used the finger with which he had been pointing to scratch his head, “this man is Klaus Pferdmann. He’s the brother of the young lady in question.”

The new Sheriff blushed.

“I thought you said they was kidnapped,” the new Deputy said, “and put aboard the sternwheeler, boss?”

The Sheriff gritted his teeth and spoke through the side of his jaw. “I know what I said, Pete. I was there when I said it.”

He turned to Klaus. “Did you see the red man take your sister aboard Pharaoh’s?”

“Pharaoh’s?” Klaus Pferdmann laughed and said something which none of them understood.

Rainer knew Klaus could speak fluent English, but he preferred to disclose that only when it suited him. Experience had taught him it never suited him when it involved the Law.

Rainer addressed the Sheriff. “He says only bad woman, cigarette, and drink are on the faro boat. No schwester, keine red man.” He shrugged his massive hammy shoulders. “Es Tut mir leid.”

The two Germans turned and continued walking toward the Kaserne. At some point, Klaus Pferdmann had begun to regain both his legs and composure on the walk up the hill. He was no longer shaking in the grips of his delirious tremens nor was he crying from the fear of his father’s impending arrival.

The Sheriff stood with the clerk and his neophyte deputy watching him, having grown even redder than he had been a moment before, if such a thing were possible.