“Anytime.”
Croker pushed by him and went out. There had been nothing in the bag for anyone to look at, nothing except the usual things a soldiering man might have. But Croker was suspicious. Of what? Or was he, like Callaghen himself, merely guessing at something? He might know something, or he might simply be of a suspicious mind.
Callaghen shaded his eyes and looked over the desert. The Indians were out there now, you could be sure of that. Captain Hill and only eight men here, with never enough ammunition or food on hand… if the Mohaves only realized it they could sweep over this station at any time.
After bringing the horses into the corrals, Callaghen posted guards. Captain Hill seemed willing to leave matters in his hands, and he was prepared to assume whatever responsibility was given him.
Night came suddenly, as do all desert nights. One moment the sun’s rays were turning the mountain ridges scarlet and gold… and then the sun was gone and the stars were there.
Croker and Beamis had the first guard. Beamis was a raw recruit just out from Pennsylvania. Whatever else Croker was, he was a frontiersman and a soldier. He knew what slackness meant, and he would stand for none of it. Beamis wanted only one thing to get out of the army.
“Can’t you speak to the captain, Sergeant?” he said to Callaghen. “I have no business here. I just got mad at my wife and enlisted to show her. Now I’m not mad at her any more.”
Callaghen had to smile. “Doesn’t pay to move too quick, Beamis. I’m sorry, but you’re in and you’ll have to stay.”
“You mean I can’t get out? What kind of a deal is that?”
“You joined, and now you’ll have to fill out your time. There’s no two ways about it.”
“But what about my wife? She’ll leave me!”
“If she does, you’re better off without her. Settle down, man. You bought your ticket, now take your ride.”
He walked back to the encampment. The moon was rising, and there was already a thin glow over the mountain. It would be a tricky night, for on such a moonlit night shadows appear to move, and one may suddenly develop a feeling that a shadow is an Indian.
It was very still. Captain Hill came outside his quarters. “It’s been a good life, Callaghen,” he said, “and I shall miss it.”
“You’ve been a soldier all your life, sir?”
“Not quite. Before the war I quit for four years. If I’d stayed in I might be a general now. A colonel, at least. But the peacetime army wasn’t much, and I’d had enough duty at the forts on the plains. I quit and opened a store.”
“Like General Grant.”
“Yes, but I was successful. I did quite well, in fact, and then the guerillas burned me out and I lost everything. So I went back into the army. If I’d gone in a year sooner I’d have made it.”
“There are always ifs, sir.”
Hill turned his head to look at Callaghen. “You say you’ve met Sykes before this?”
“Yes, sir. It was he who broke me from sergeant… both times.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Well, you know how some people think about the Irish. We’re despised in a lot of places, and there are even hotels where we aren’t accepted, restaurants where we are refused service. Sykes was worse than most.
“I knew nothing of that, but he was having trouble with his Chinese laundryman. He was berating the man frightfully, and seemed about to strike him. I offered my services.”
“You what?”
“I offered to interpret, sir. I speak Chinese.”
Hill stared at him. “Chinese?You do?”
“I speak seven languages, sir, and half a dozen dialects. Well, sir, he told me what to tell the man and I did, and managed to straighten the matter out. I saluted, and was about to leave when he called me back and told me never, under any circumstances, to interfere again.”
“And then?”
“He was on me, sir. He found out I was Irish, although he should have guessed it before. I got all the rough duty. But it was the girl who really made the difference.”
“A girl?”
“Yes, sir. She came to the post to visit someone she had known as a child, and I was detailed to ride escort when she went riding.
“She kept looking at me, sir, and suddenly she said she had seen me before. She asked me again what my name was, and when I told her she recognized it. She had known me before, Captain… outside of Soochow, in China. I’d come up to an old temple with a small command. I was a major, sir, in Ward’s outfit Gordon’s outfit by that time. The Ever-Victorious Army, they called it. She was just a skinny kid then, and she’d been stopped near the temple. She, her mother, and a doctor had run there for shelter from some of the rebels. We fought our way out of there and took them with us.”
“And you were a major then? You’ve had quite a career, Callaghen.”
He shrugged. “Ward had picked up his army off the waterfronts, Captain. He had scum of the earth, and right alongside them some of the finest fighting men in the world. He enlisted men of all nationalities, and he didn’t screen them. Combat did that for him, and we were in battle almost constantly. Seventy per cent of the men had served in other armies there were a couple of hundred Irishmen in the outfit. When Chinese Gordon took command he had a trained battle outfit. A man couldn’t go wrong with them.”
“Did Sykes know about the girl’s recognizing you?”
“He saw us talking, and he was furious. I was an enlisted man and I was being too friendly. Of course, Malinda spoke up, and in the midst of it her father appeared. He’d always been grateful to me for getting his family out of that situation, so we had a long talk, and Sykes just faded out.
“Two days later I was transferred. They were building a new outfit for frontier service, and I found myself one of the cadre that would form it.”
“And that left him with the girl?”
“No, sir. Malinda had a mind of her own, and she was suspicious about the transfer. No, sir. I am afraid it didn’t do him much good.”
CHAPTER 6
Major Ephraim Sykes was a man of definite mind. Positive in his opinions, he approached every problem knowing that there could be just two possibilities: his way and the wrong way. The opinions he held had been absorbed with his mother’s milk, and nothing subsequent to that time had served to alter even one of them.
He was tall, handsome, immaculate in appearance. He was gracious, polite, and considerate to those he regarded as existing on his level. Others he ignored, or considered only with contempt. An only child, he had been brought up to believe that as an Anglo-Saxon white man of the right church, the right schools, and the right social position, any decision he made was of course the correct one.
He had been born on the right street in a medium-size town where his father operated the largest of the town’s three banks. In school he had been bright but without brilliance, capable but without imagination, and he had graduated close to the top of his class. At the beginning of the War Between the States he had been given a commission, and he had advanced rapidly to the rank of major, partly by virtue of a cavalry charge in which he smashed the enemy at a crucial moment, driving them from their position and so turning the tide of battle.
A fact that he had conveniently forgotten was that the charge had begun when his horse ran away with him, and his men followed. Uncomfortable about the praise that came his way, he had gradually forgotten how the charge had begun, and modestly said it was nothing. He had, he said, been fortunate enough to detect a weakness in the enemy line at that point.
The war ended too soon for him, for he had hoped to become a general or at least a colonel. Failing that, despite the surplus of officers after the war, he had hoped to be sent to a good station where he might win a smashing victory over the Indians the Plains Indians, of course, who had dash and glamour as fighting men.
The immigrant Irish were despised by many of the “right” people, so he despised them. The only Irish with whom he had ever had contact were a group who had settled on the edge of his town to build a spur of track for the railroad. Many of them drank too much, and most of them seemed to be amused by him, and this offended his dignity. In the army he had a few Irishmen in his command, and they, too, drank too much and were amused by him. As his father’s partner, he owned a part of a small shoe-manufacturing plant, as well as the bank. At the plant they hired no Irish, but that attitude was quite frequent at the time, and aroused no comment.