have a full complement, sir,” Carrington shouts down and Kohn recognizes the quartermaster he met some days before.
“We are short horses, sir,” the quartermaster, Captain Brown, shouts back to Carrington. “We will have to make do unless you can impress upon the good general to send us more men and beasts. And bullets, sir.”
Brown smiles and Kohn sees derision in it. A fighting man to a writing commander.
“Do your best, Captain. And under no circumstances are you to pursue any Indians in case of ambush. Defend the woodtrain and return to post, sir.”
“Yessir,” Brown says, spurring his mount and saluting. There is no respect in the gesture. The fort’s gates are opened and the wagons begin to move out, followed by the mounted infantry and a smattering of cavalrymen. One of the two pretorians who was with Brown when Kohn met him stares up at Kohn and Kohn meets his gaze. The big man turns his horse and follows the wagons, his buffalo coat making him look somehow less than human. A mounted bear, a minotaur.
Kohn watches the wagons stretch out across the plain and Carrington points. He raises a spyglass. “There, Captain.”
The adjutant extends his own glass and directs its lens on the hills across the valley and Kohn sees them now himself, tiny silhouettes on a rolling ridge line roughly half a mile away across the valley, east of the hilltop road where the wagon train will pass.
Kohn speaks, “Do the men spot them, sir?”
Carrington claps shut the spyglass. “Spot them! Why they expect them, Sergeant. They are there every day the woodtrain goes out. They are there most nights as well, looking down at us and our activity. Let them have the howitzer, Captain. The gun that shoots twice, as our Sioux friends have named it.”
The adjutant crosses the viewing platform and bellows orders to a cannon crew on a bastion built into the stockade wall. The gun is small, likely a twelve-pounder Kohn reckons, and known as a mountain howitzer. Kohn watches as the men go to work, sighting along the barrel, adjusting the range, loading, ramming. Setting and lighting the fuse.
Detonation rips the still winter air and smoke and flame spit from the cannon’s barrel. The Indians on the hilltop wrench their mounts to the ground by the neck and use them for cover. Kohn follows the arc of the shot, as experienced men can do, by the warp and disturbance of air. He loses it as it falls to the hilltop and then watches it explode, showering the hillside with scorched shrapnel. Moments later one of the Indians pulls his horse to its feet and remounts, shaking his spear at the fort as if willing another shot. Kohn can just make out the sound of the Indian’s shouting and whooping. A second Indian appears to be preoccupied with his horse, still on the ground, and Kohn wonders if the beast has been struck by shrapnel. The Indian kneels to the horse and then stands and leaps up onto the back of his friend’s mount. They leave as the howitzer fires for a second time and the shell explodes over the dying horse and the hilltop empty of Indians.
“That will be enough for today, Captain,” Carrington says.
The adjutant bellows to the gun team to cease firing and his order is repeated.
“You may perform your investigations, Sergeant,” Carrington says, turning to Kohn and handing him back the oilskin wallet containing his and Molloy’s orders. “But let me warn you not to interfere with the mission of the fort. I will not tolerate it.”
“Yessir.”
“And you are to report your findings to me, Sergeant, is that clear? Any prosecutions to be carried out will be sanctioned by myself alone. No suspect leaves this fort without my being informed or you will be subject to court martial proceedings, Sergeant.”
“Yessir,” Kohn says, noting that he has been threatened with court martial more times in the past three days than he was in the whole four years of the war.
Carrington turns back to watching the woodtrain as it begins its climb from the valley floor to the road that runs atop the hills. If I were an Indian, Kohn thinks, that is where I would attack. Maybe the howitzer discourages them. Maybe there is a better ambush site on the descent. Kohn shrugs away the speculation. He wonders if he should ask Carrington if he can interview his wife’s serving maid, the Indian girl the surgeon had mentioned. He decides against