ideas today. Hang this man at once. Visit the goat-buggering colonel. Visit a colonel, Kohn, of our own free will? Can you hear yourself at all when you talk such balls?”
“No sir, only I thought—”
“Stop thinking, Daniel. You’ll do yourself an injury.”
They exit the fort at the main, north-facing gate. Sentries stand picket on the palisade and a sergeant and several men glass the hills from a raised bastion in anticipation of the returning woodtrain. Beside them, an artillery crew loads and chocks the mountain howitzer.
A worn path takes them from the front of the fort along its western palisade, past the steam-powered sawmill and to the collection of tipis on the Little Piney River that is the fort’s source of water. The ground is frozen in places, thawing mud in others, and is hard going for Molloy on his crutches. As they make their way toward the loafer camp, Kohn scans the hills and grazing fields, the woods at the riverside. He does not like being exposed, outside the fort with the captain in his state of limited mobility. It is odd, he thinks. He feels exposed and diminished without his horse in the way another man might without his clothes.
Coming to the loafer camp, Kohn stops at a tipi somewhat removed from the others. A large dog lounges in front of the dwelling and opens its eyes at their approach but does not rise. The tipi flap is closed but opens as if their approach has been observed from a distance and Jonathan steps out into the cold.
“Brave scout, my left leg has come to thank you, sir,” Molloy says.
Jonathan nods.
“We are in need of your services, Jonathan. Come with us, good man.”
Again, Jonathan nods. He turns and reenters the tipi, speaks to someone inside, then steps out to rejoin them.
“And who is that, my Pawnee friend? A visitor perhaps?” Molloy says, winking at the scout. He smells the whiskey on Jonathan’s breath and his stomach knots with yearning.
“My woman,” Jonathan says, walking ahead of Kohn and Molloy, passing the tipis of the few friendly Northern Cheyenne families wintering in the shadow of the fort. Dogs bark and nip at their heels and Molloy swings a crutch good-naturedly at one.
“Your wife has joined you? What luck,” he says.
“It’s not his proper wife, sir. It’s his ‘winter wife’ he calls her,” Kohn says.
“Ah yes, if only we foolish Christians were allowed such an option, the sum of our marital happiness would be greatly increased. Jews, Daniel, I believe to be similarly proscribed in their preference for seasonal wives?”
“Yessir,” Kohn says. Then, “Jonathan, we need to speak Indian to the whore . . . the squaw, Two Doves. Can you speak her tongue?”
Jonathan nods and continues walking. They reach the end of the small collection of Cheyenne tipis and follow the narrow river, sheened with a thin layer of ice, around a bend that takes them from view of the fort. Some fifty yards around the bend, in a rough clearing littered with the detritus of past floods, is a solitary tipi. It is smaller than the others they have passed, its buffalo hide coverings dulled gray with age, rotting and fire-scorched and holed in places. In front of the tipi, extending out from its entry flap, an awning constructed of lodgepoles and more tattered hides provides meager shelter from the elements for those outside the tipi. A fire smolders under the awning, a rusting, battered pot half-buried in its ashes. Next to this fire, on a pile of thick buffalo rugs, sits a woman staring into the fire, her eyes watering with the cold or the smoke.
“Two Doves?” Kohn says as they step under the awning. “Are you Miss Two Doves?”
Jonathan says something to her and gestures with his hands. Kohn knows there is a universal sign language that the disparate Indian tribes use to communicate and that there are common words to many of the tribes, much in the way of French and Italian or German and Yiddish.
To nobody she says, “My cookpot is here because the bluecoats no like sniff of dog stew when they in tipi. Two Doves cook out in the cold.”
Jonathan squats on his haunches close to the woman and gestures at Molloy and Kohn. He speaks to her, slowly, clearly, while signing with his hands, but the woman does not—will not—look at him.
Staring into the fire, she is silent for a long moment. When it comes, her English is broken but clear. “I