Days Without End (Days Without End #1) - Sebastian Barry Page 0,22

Man they was. Lige Magan I liked best I can say. Elijah was his full name so I guess he was a wonder worker. Nice ox-faced boy of some forty-five years out of Tennessee. His people had hogs there till the bottom fell out of hogs. The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. So it was with the world, restless, kind of brutal. Always going on. Not waiting for no man. Then John Cole would wax good again and it was like nothing had ailed him. Then down again. Then up again. We was dizzy.

Now it was inching into autumn and those treaty Indians had to make way in their villages for that old murderer called Famine. That filthy dark-hearted scrawny creature that wants the ransom of lives. Because government food that was promised was late or never coming. The major was looking vexed and tormented. His honest heart had made promises, that how he saw it.

It was in the time of noisy weather that the first trouble came. We rode forth to meet it. Thunderstorms busted open the air and threw heaven-cast pails of light over that landscape that had no walls, no ends. God in his farmer’s apron, scattering the great seeds of yellow brightness. The hinterlands beyond the mountains breathing a fiery white breath. Nathan Noland with his tender ears already ruined by years of musket-fire deaf for three days after. Riding in a bruised becalmed gap between that ravenous display and the coming clatter of the rain. Then rain flattening the grasses like bear grease flattens a squaw’s hair. Sergeant Wellington was happy now because Sioux from some village westward had fallen on some strayed emigrants and ripped them from hopeful life. So the colonel had gave him fifty men and said to put a stop to that. Seems it was those Oglala friends of the major but that didn’t stop the order.

First Lieutenant puts us into two companies and he takes twenty men and goes sharp westward by his compass and us and the sergeant set off scouring out a little river ravine where he reckons that village might lie. The watercourse runs for ten miles north-east looks like. The whole country has started to steam because the sunlight is roasting off the rain. The grasses start to sit up again almost naked to the eye. A giant rousing. Three thousand bears throwing off the winter looks like. The stream itself mad as goaded bulls tearing down between its drenched rocks. Meadowlarks larking everywhere looking pleased with themselves and the skeeters in wholesale flocks everywhere. We ain’t feeling cheerful because rocks above you favours the enemy. That’s in all history. We were expecting to see the sergeant’s savages any moment popping up. But we went on all that day and further up the country where there were no streams only the baking silence of the plains. Then the sergeant disgruntled gives the order to retrace our steps and he is cursing that he let the new Pawnee scouts go with the lieutenant. These are very elegant boys in good uniforms better than what I had. But the lieutenant took them.

White men just no good for tracking cross country like this, he said, surprising us. Sounded like praise.

We camped up where our paths had furcated and we slept as best we could in our nightcaps of skeeters. We was happy men to climb out of blankets at earliest dawn. We washed our weary faces in the stream now calmed by the hours passed between. Rains in it must have passed on towards the Platte river and soon enough pour down into the Missouri. Strange to think of all that as we tried to shave our cheeks with blunted razors in the sparkling waters. Handsome John Cole whistling a waltz still residing in him out of New England.

Then we’re just poking about the place there waiting for the lieutenant to come back. Sergeant tells us to dry the lurking rain off our sabres or they will rust for sure. Then we fodder the horses best we can. Ain’t a trooper alive don’t love his horses. Spavined brute is loved. Nothing much to do then. Lige shows his skill at cards again and cleans out Starling Carlton. But we’re only playing for blades of grass, we ain’t got no money till the end of the month, if it comes then. Pawnee scouts were nearly going off last month because their