appearance but cannot determine what it is until he is standing before her. Though she is aware of his presence, she continues folding sheets, ignoring him and moving down the line, removing pegs and loosely folding a shirt, setting it in the crate atop the folded sheets. Kohn sees what it is about her now and recoils slightly. The girl is missing her nose. Scar tissue rigid and welped around the nostrils. Leprosy? he wonders, never knowingly having seen it before but aware that it is common enough in the West. Syphilis? He has heard that galloping syph left long untreated may take the nose or ears. Even the eyes. He has heard many things and knows not what is true. But the woman looks otherwise healthy and the colonel and his wife would hardly have a diseased woman folding their linen. An accident, perhaps. A wounding.
“Excuse me, miss,” Kohn says, unsure what he will say next.
The woman glances at him but does not stop her labors. She moves to a woman’s nightdress and Kohn averts his eyes so as not to be indelicate. “I was told . . . I was led to believe that you worked . . .” He does not know how to put this. “. . . that you were in the hog ranch. In the tavern?” He points in the general direction of where the brothel once stood outside the walls. “That you worked for Mr. Kinney, the sutler.”
The Indian girl glances at Kohn again at the mention of the name—Kinney—and he notices that despite her disfigurement, she is beautiful. To Kohn, in his limited experience, she is tall for an Indian woman. Her eyes are caramel-colored, wide and liquid. She has full breasts and thick round hips under the sweater and cotton dress. She could be anywhere from eighteen to thirty years old and Kohn feels the stirrings of desire for her. He wonders if it is because he knows she was once a whore. Once a whore, he thinks, and regrets thinking it. He has known many wives of men he has soldiered with who had been taken from the ranks of the laundresses and upstairs girls to become solid, upright women. Whoring is no more a permanent curse than soldiering, he thinks. Once a soldier . . . He shrugs these thoughts away.
“Mr. Kinney,” he says again and the woman looks away. The sun is low in the sky, resting for a moment in the nadir between two of the Big Horn mountains, setting aglow the rich brown of the woman’s skin. “Do you speak English?” he asks.
“She doesn’t speak much at all . . .”
Kohn turns to find a woman in her mid-thirties, a white woman he assumes to be Carrington’s wife, examining the yellow stripes on his arm before continuing. Not a natural or long-time army wife or she would not have to think about it. “. . . Sergeant.”
Kohn tips his kepi to the woman. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t know. I’m Sergeant Kohn. I spoke with your husband earlier. I’m investigating the deaths of Mr. Kinney and his wife, ma’am. I was told your serving girl might have been there when—”
“And if she was, Sergeant?” the woman says. She is stern and straight-backed and her diction denotes wealth and education to Kohn. Something else too. Kohn feels embarrassed suddenly, his task low and sullied in the presence of this gentlewoman.
“Forgive me, ma’am. I only thought that she might be able to tell me what happened. There seems to be some talk that it was not Indians who . . . did for the Kinneys, ma’am.”
Mrs. Carrington holds her gaze on Kohn for a long moment. She is a handsome woman and, though stern, there is kindness there as well, Kohn feels. An understanding of things. He does not feel she despises him.
“And what makes you think that, Sergeant?”
“I was told . . . I heard from men around the camp . . .” A low and sullied business this investigating. He wonders how he has come to this place, this set of circumstances. “. . . that she used to work for Mr. Kinney and might be able to aid me in—”
“Work?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“General Cooke sent you, did he?”
“Yes, ma’am. He sent my officer, my company first lieutenant, actually, but he is Company Q, ma’am . . .” He catches himself. “He is injured and in the hospital barracks. I am making the best of our orders but