bottle before handing it to Kohn. Kohn passes it to the Indian without drinking.
“So would you have them scouting for us bluecoats as well, Jonathan?” Kohn asks.
Jonathan drinks and hands the bottle to Molloy, deliberately passing Rawson. He does not think the private worthy of the whiskey. He should be sitting outside the light of the fire. Though he stole the eggs, he remembers, and they had been fine to eat with flourcakes. I will give him the bottle the next time, because he took the eggs from the travelers.
He says, “They will scout for the bluecoats if they want to do it. It is good sometimes. You can buy fine things with the greenbacks of a soldier’s pay. But maybe the Sioux are all dead when they are of the age to scout. And when the Sioux are gone, and the Cheyenne, then the Pawnee will have no need to scout for you.”
“The enemy of my enemy becomes my closest friend,” Kohn says and Jonathan does not respond.
“You hold your liquor well, Jonathan,” Molloy says. His voice is loud and Kohn wonders can the pilgrims hear him in the ring of wagons a mile away. So what if they can? He hopes it keeps them from sleep, the unneighborly sons of bitches.
Molloy continues, gesturing with the bottle, and Kohn pities him. “I have been given to think that you Indians do not hold your liquor quite so well and you appear to disprove this.” Molloy again raises the bottle in a toast. Kohn shakes his head.
Jonathan takes the bottle back from the officer. “And I have been told that white soldiers do not hold their liquor well. The lieutenant does not disprove this.” He takes a long drink and passes the bottle to Rawson and for the first time since his harassment of the Sioux women and children, Jonathan smiles.
Kohn smiles back at him. Molloy has closed his eyes.
Just when Kohn thinks he is asleep, Molloy smiles and says, “Well done, Jonathan. Quite right, quite right.”
Moments later the officer is snoring. Kohn reaches over and takes Molloy’s pipe from his hand, taps the ashes from it into the fire and puts it in his own tunic pocket for when Molloy awakes and searches for it. They ran out of the cheroots he likes some days ago.
“I’ll take first guard, Rawson. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn. Jonathan, you’ll take over from Rawson.”
The scout nods.
“I think we’ll once again be without Captain Molloy’s company standing picket this evening.”
THE SOUND OF HOOVES in the dirt wakes Kohn and he sees only the black silhouette of the Pawnee riding out of their camp. The fire is burned down to dim orange embers. A faint line of dawn light scores the eastern horizon. Near on six, Kohn thinks. Where is Jonathan going? His ears prick at a sound out of place on the plains, out of place in the dawn’s fading darkness. The morning is cold and still, a dusting of frost on his blankets, his breath a thick, warm fog about his face. There, again, the sound. A woman screaming. And the howling, whooping shouts recalling the Confederate rebel yell but different.
He throws off his blankets, sleeping as he is in his buffalo coat and hat.
“Sir,” he shakes Molloy and hears the officer groan. “Sir! The pilgrims, sir. There is something happening with them. Jonathan has gone.”
Rawson wakes now. “What’s that?” He leaps up and in terror looks left, right. His rifle is beside the tent canvas he has used for a pillow and he grabs it and this time no one tells him to put it away. The horses have been left loosely saddled but with their reins picketed to stakes in the ground.
“Lift up the pickets on the horses, Rawson, and tighten the saddles. Sir, wake up, sir.” He shakes Molloy and the officer wakes. “Sir, there is something wrong with the pilgrims. I can hear shouting. A woman.”
Molloy stares at Kohn. He understands the urgency in Kohn’s voice but cannot make sense of the soldier’s words. In his mind, in his dream, he is at home and speaking Irish to a woman he knows is his sister. His mother is scolding them for speaking Irish instead of English but in his dream he cannot speak anything else and he wakes to this. He tries to stand and crumbles back into his bedroll, his body locked in cramp. Cold, Jesus in heaven, cold. Bile rises in his throat and