Molloy smokes his cheroot and says nothing for some time. Then, “Sometimes the best work is done by doing nothing, Daniel. I was often told this by my schoolmasters.”
“I can only imagine, sir.”
“I will be fit soon enough to aid you. Hale and hearty as ever I was. Until then do nothing else. There is nothing to be gained from our finding out what everyone here already knows. The man and his wife are not, by your account, sorely missed and not worth losing blood for. Mind yourself, Daniel. I’ll have no one to wash my arse for me if you ship a knife in the guts for the sake of a man and his missus already homesteading with the devil.”
“The prospect of washing your arse again, sir, is call enough to keep looking into things. A knife in the guts might just be preferable.”
21
COL. CARRINGTON’S OVERLAND TRAVELLING CIRCUS & HOW TOM MET HIS SWEETHEART
ALL THAT I PUT DOWN ABOUT HOW YOURSELF & myself once met Sir well that is not important. Your coming was the reason I began to put words to these pages but they are not the reason I continue. I feel now that I am seeing the course of things for myself for the 1st time & by writing it down the twists & turns of how I got from there to here in this icy Guardhouse become clear to me. And so while I did commit to this testament because of you I continue it for to explain to myself how I was brought to this impasse this woeful site of sadness & confinement & guilt. But perhaps it is not the guilt that you imagine.
Anyway it is Tom’s girl who I will write about now for she is one cause of all this surely. That cutnose whore well she does be a key in the lock to this sorry tale. For our story is likely no different from the stories of a hundred other Irish Greenhorn veteran soldier boys up til when my brother met her. As I did write before Sir if we were not made horse soldiers well then the brother may of never met her but be ever careful what you wish for in this life as the saying goes.
Of course Tom likely would of seen her or even poked her as that b_____ of a Sutler kept only so many hogs on his ranch & it was the only place for 1000 miles around this fort for a lonely Bill to sojourn of a payday but there is no telling he would of picked her over the other 4 girls. Sure was not one of them a fine fat doll with hair as thick as molasses & most of her teeth in the bargain? She labours for herself now from a tee pee just beyond the stockade with no pimp to take a cut of her earnings & fair wind to her for there be far too many bosses in the world for it to be a fair one. There does be 1 less now I am not sorry to say if I am put to it God Forgive Me.
So Tom may of come to know the cutnose girl or even to like her perchance for it is not rare in this world that a soldier grows fond of a whore & not at all rare that they might marry. But it is not likely in the case of my brother that he might of fell so hard for her if we stayed run of the mill foot soldiers when we set out for the Powder River country from Ft. Caldwell in Nebraska we 2 brothers among the multitudes in what the men came to call Carrington’s Overland Travelling Circus.
And God In Heaven what an A Number 1 Circus it was with 2 battalions the 2nd & 3rd nearly 1000 men most of them Sunday Soldiers or fresh fish we did call them though 1/2 again of these would be posted elsewhere along the way & not serve here at Phil K at all. We were maybe 200 of us mounted on horseback with 200 or more wagons & Army ambulances carrying every tool seed barrel or box under the sun & all the civilians the wives & children too of the officers & long-serving NCOs. We even brung with us a broke down saw mill with its boiler in more than