her that, but he didn’t know if she set much store by mere words. She had probably heard plenty of them. He would just have to show his appreciation.
“You already are a good wife,” he whispered back. “Better go to sleep, because I intend to wake you up later on tonight.”
“If I don’t beat you to it,” she said. “Remember? Partners?”
She beat him to it.
As she thought about the matter a week later, still in Cheyenne, Susanna decided that the greatest blessing of marriage to Joe Randolph so far was the certainty that no matter what happened, she wasn’t by herself in times of trouble.
When she woke up in tears that first morning, he held her close, singing a ribald song he must have learned in the late war, so vulgar that she gasped and then laughed.
“It takes no imagination to rhyme luck and pluck,” he joked. “Those Ohio regiments were full of farm boys with saucy tongues and vivid imaginations.” His eyes grew distant. “I wish I could have saved more of them.”
“You saved all you could, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
She knew Joe was a man of duty, but she had to chuckle to herself how he had to drag himself out of bed every morning to ride his borrowed horse to Fort Russell for the court-martial of a captain that Crook had found wanting during the Powder River campaign.
“I’d rather spend two hours just staring at your nice ankles than listening to fifteen minutes of why the army should slap this poor captain’s wrist because he decided to dismount his men for a while on a freezing cold morning to boil coffee. It made no difference in the outcome of the battle. He convinced me; hell, he convinced all of us. Court-martial duty is a pain,” Joe told her one evening, as he lay with his head in her bare lap.
And so it went. She recalled him to duty each morning, laughed when he grumbled, sent him out the door, and slept for another hour or two. A court-martial honeymoon was not for the faint of heart, she decided, at least for the major. For her part, it was idle luxury to lie in bed, think about the night before, then take a long soak in the tub down the hall and think about the night to come. She decided her husband had a certain talent. Maybe that came from knowing more about female anatomy than most men.
She spent her afternoons with more purpose, writing to her uncle in Shippensburg, asking to be kept abreast of attempts to find Tommy. Joe suggested that she compose a notice to be sent to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska papers—following a probable path to Cheyenne—asking for the whereabouts of a tall twelve-year-old with a dark blaze in his blond hair, and brown eyes, with a mole on his cheekbone, answering to the name of Tommy Hopkins.
One night, lying satiated with her equally sated husband, Susanna composed the announcement, pausing a long time over Nick Martin’s description. “We daren’t mention Saint Paul, or no editor will print this, no matter how much money we send,” she told her husband, who looked nearly comatose. “Joe, you are surely the most satisfied-looking man in the territory.”
“I expect I am,” he told her, all complacence. “Certainly the happiest man at the court-martial table. I show up every morning with a big grin on my face. They all hate me now.” He took a nip of her neck and looked over her shoulder at her announcement.
“‘Tall, silent, long dark hair’ should do it. We dubbed him Nick Martin. I wonder what his name is.”
She took the announcement to the newspaper editor, who promised to send it out. He looked at her with some sympathy. “Your son, ma’am?” he asked.
She nodded, unable to help the tears that welled in her eyes. She left the newspaper office as quickly as she could, and spent the next hour composing herself by feeding pigeons in a straggly park that was Cheyenne’s attempt at gentility. The sun was warm on her face, now that it was nearly May.
She walked back to the hotel, suddenly wishing to return to Fort Laramie and the post surgeon’s house, to cook for him, to smooth his way however she could, and to teach her pupils in the commissary storehouse. It was time to plan a year-end program for the parents, before the fathers had to mount up or march out for Montana Territory and a summer