boots, shoves his pistols into his belt and holster. His gloves, his cutlass, the Spencer repeater he takes up from the corner beside his bunk.
“You tell me, Rawson, you tell me that guardhouse still has my prisoner in it.”
“Hell, Sergeant, I can’t tell you that but every man in the fort is called to defend it or the woodtrain so—”
“Where’s Captain Molloy?”
“Well how in a month of fucking Sundays could I know that, Sergeant?”
Kohn leaves the barracks and mounts his horse. He gallops her halfway to the guardhouse and stops on the parade ground, not needing to proceed farther. Molloy is standing in the guardhouse doorway.
“I was only following orders, Daniel,” Molloy shouts and Kohn has to strain to hear him over the commotion of horses, clattering kit on running men, barked orders and men mounting the sentry stands around the palisade. Molloy is smiling as he shouts and then begins to cough, a deep and malignant hacking that Kohn can hear clearly above the mounting din of readiness around him. God damn you, Kohn thinks. God damn you to hell, Captain. He turns his mount for the main gate and assembling troops without looking back at Molloy. He is not sure he could face the man if he had to.
HORSES DRAG AT REINS, nipping those around them, riders jerking them to order with gloved fists as the main gates to the fort are hauled open with a shriek of frozen hinges, the popping of winter-solid pine sap, and Kohn scans the horse soldiers gathered and waiting to leave the fort. Over the noise he can hear the faint crackle of rifle fire from some distance away but this is not what concerns him. He scans briefly the orderly files of the newly arrived company of cavalry out of Fort Laramie and disregards them, focusing on the loose rabble of mounted infantry, many in scarves and buffalo hats, several in buffalo coats that Kohn knows will make any fighting that may need to be done difficult and unwieldy. As he notes this, he sees him, one of the coated men. No hat but the heavy hide coat and a blanket roll strapped to the back of his saddle. God damn him! Kohn barges his mount through the rabble as the mass of horsemen begin to move out the gates. Somewhere behind him he hears an officer say to somebody that they are not to pursue the Indians, under no circumstances are they to pursue them.
“You will be back in that cell by day’s end, Private. Do you hear me?” Kohn says, coming as close as he can to O’Driscoll amid the mass of horseflesh and riders.
There are four men around O’Driscoll and they close ranks about him. Hard men. Scarred faces. Wide-eyed mounts keyed for the chase. One of the men speaks in German to him, blond hair spilling from under his kepi, a bugle on a strap around his shoulders, short in the saddle. “You will do better to stay here, Sergeant. No one knows where a ball will find its home once it is fired.”
Kohn says back to the bugler, in English, “I know mine will find a home in your head if you so much as look cross-eyed at me, Private.”
Someone shouts, “Heeya, move out.” O’Driscoll and the men around them spur their mounts and tug reins and they are away at a gallop out the gates. Keeping one eye on O’Driscoll, Kohn follows the pack of riders out onto the plain of winter-dead meadows that lead from the fort to the foothills from where the snapping of muskets has become so rapid that it sounds like a fire catching in dry grass.
MICHAEL O’DRISCOLL RIDES alongside Metzger and Daly and several others from C Company and these men form a phalanx around him. They will not see him taken by the terrible Jew but O’Driscoll knows as he rides that the cavalryman is behind him. He can feel the weight of his eyes on his shoulders, the burn of them, and he knows that if not the Jew cavalryman it will be someone else. Always someone behind him as it has been since his brother felled and killed that boy on the Kilorglin Road back in Ireland. The hot breath of the hunter, the guilt rousing him from sleep ever onward. He shakes these thoughts away. The gallows rope would have ended all this for him. Better the rope maybe, than living with one eye forever cast