had helped rare him but more for my brother & what was become of him. I did of a sudden yearn to be out of the darkness of that covered bridge & into the light of the morning so badly I had to stop myself from running.
Now that I am after writing all this I do reckon perhaps it was the War that was the cause of the wicked things to come. Tom was a different man after his wounding & the War made peacetime a trial for him but can this be excuse for all that I will tell you Sir? Betimes it is hard for me to think that Tom & myself share the same blood at all. I love him as he is my brother but I do also hate him May God Forgive Me for writing it.
My heart did weep for that pitiful calf though I cannot imagine why for there has been so much killing since that day & there was so much before it. But it stays in my mind all the same & I go back to it. If Harris did not thieve back that calf we rared up—
Oh I cannot write another G__D___ word it is too cold in this Guardhouse cell & your terrible Jew will not feed the stove for to spite me.
5
November 12, 1866—Post of Omaha, Nebraska Territory
LIKE ANY CAVALRY MAN, HE CLAIMS HE CAN SLEEP IN the saddle but this is a stupor more than sleep, a pale purgatory of half-consciousness and in its thrall, Molloy dreams of the boy, of a Tennessee river town that for five days would not surrender.
“Sir?”
Molloy starts and his mount feels it through the saddle, the streak of fear charging through her master, and this unsettles her and she snorts and shakes her mane. The Indian takes the mare’s ear between his fingers and rubs and squeezes it until she settles. The mare eyes the Indian and wills her master to wake, her eyeballs wide in their sockets. She too dreams of the war sometimes and twitches in her stall, her legs pumping, pumping in her sleep, galloping.
Molloy’s heartbeat runs hard in his chest and, though he cannot remember his dream, he knows of what he has been dreaming. He dreams of nothing else.
“Kohn, Corporal Kohn.” His voice is weak. He clears his throat. They have traveled only as far as the loafer camp just outside the main gates of the Post of Omaha and Molloy is shaken to discover how briefly he’s been asleep. He blinks and gazes in surprise at the tipis and drying frames hung with strips of goat and buffalo meat. At dogs in the dust. An Indian woman wrapped in a shawl splintering crates for firewood. “What is it, Kohn, for the love of God?”
“Sir, this is Jonathan. He’s the scout we’ve been recommended by the adjutant.”
Molloy turns to the rider stroking his mare’s ear. “An Indian scout for Indian country.”
“Something like that,” Kohn says.
“He’s a Pawnee. A real, goddamn Wolf Pawnee,” Rawson says.
“Jonathan is a queer name for a Pawnee, is it not?” Molloy says.
The Indian holds Molloy’s gaze and there is perhaps the hint of a smile at his lips. His hair is shorn to a stripe down the center of his skull with the top of the stripe dyed bright red. Four black tattooed lines run from his lower lip down his chin and he wears a buttonless blue army tunic open over a breastplate of beads and bear claws. Two bandoliers of conical rifle and pistol rounds cross his chest. He sits, on a cavalry saddle that is much worn, on the back of a brown and white pony four hands shorter, at least, than Molloy’s cavalry mount. He wears two Colt pistols in a sash of blue cloth tied around his waist and a Spencer repeater rests in a scabbard strapped to his saddle. Nine cured scalps hang from the buffalo hide shield strapped to his back with leather ties.
Kohn says, “He won’t tell his Indian name to whites. Says we can’t pronounce it properly. The adjutant told me that. I’ve paid him half his wages up front from your purse, sir.”
Molloy waves this fact away. “Why . . . ” His lips are parched and he wets them with his tongue. He pulls the cork from his canteen, drinks and winces. “Why do we need an Indian scout, pray tell, Kohn? Surely the trail north is well enough marked.”