there with his arms behind his head his eyes up at the stars. After some time he did reply, “There is f______ snakes everywhere Michaeleen. Every G__ D____ place in the world there is snakes of some sort.”
He said this in English & I understood it very well.
So he did promise to abide by the skinner’s orders but still he laid his eyes & something more upon that girl before we arrived to hammer down stakes here in the Powder River country. It was 5 or so days later when the march hauled up at Ft. Laramie in the Dakota Territory. I will tell you about it but not now. Now I am tired & so cold it is hard to remember the baking heat of them days. It seems so long ago though it is less than a year. A lifetime ago it does feel since there was heat in my bones or sun on my back. So much is come to pass since then.
24
December 15, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
UNDER LOW, GRAY SKIES, KOHN WATCHES THE BUSY blacksmith’s shop in the bitter cold on the morning after his meeting with the informants in buffalo coats. It snowed during the night but the heat from the smithy’s fires has melted a halo of bare mud around the building. From his place in front of the quieter mechanic’s shop, some fifty yards distant, he can hear the hiss of the bellows and the roar of the forge from the smithy’s. The clank of a hammer on an anvil.
Kohn has not seen the blacksmith himself but he has seen men whom he assumes to be his protection. Big men with mustaches worn long and upturned like the horns of bulls, they come to the open door of the shop or stand and smoke under the shoeing area outside which is covered by a slanting, wood-shingled roof. The mustaches are uniform and sinister and so similar that they must be worn as a sign of affiliation. Two of the men wear pistols in holsters and the three others, Kohn assumes, have them stuffed in belts beneath their tunics, knives in boots no doubt. One or two of them squat to pare and shoe horses as they are brought in but in their wariness—the way they eye the yard and the passersby, the way they stroll to cover the back and front of the shop—they reveal themselves to be on picket at the smith’s, convincing Kohn that his visitors were correct and Sweetman the blacksmith does indeed possess something as valuable and coveted as the ledgers.
Kohn wears two pistols, his Remington in a cavalry holster and a Colt Baby Dragoon in his own belt, but hopes they will not see use. Earlier it occurred to him to consult Molloy about how to proceed but he decided against it. The officer was sleeping that morning when he went to visit him and one of the surgeon’s orderlies told Kohn that Molloy had suffered fits in the night and so the surgeon had dosed him once more with laudanum. It was not an unusual thing for drunks drying out to suffer, the orderly told him, and not much harm in the long run just so long as he don’t swally his tongue. Hell, the orderly said to Kohn, the lieutenant will dry out fine and dandy and be fit to drink again in no time at all.
The cold riding hard on his impatience, Kohn makes his decision and crosses from the mechanic’s to the blacksmith’s shop, having seen enough to know that he will be better to go in daylight, with the comings and goings of cavalrymen and civilian drovers alike providing him what safety he will need.
He enters the shop, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the forge-lit gloom within. The air is superheated by the brick forge and two open, raised fire pits and Kohn begins to sweat under his coat. A big man in a leather apron worn over an undershirt with its sleeves cut away tongs a horseshoe still glowing orange from the forge over to a tub of water. He plunges the shoe into the water and it hisses and steams. The smith then lifts it from the water and tosses it into a wooden bin full of shoes with a loud clank.
The smith’s head is shaved tight against lice, like many of the men in the fort. His mustaches are worn long, the same as the men