Norton, Andre - Novel 15 (3 page)

 
          
 
Ritchie's chin went up. "Maybe I
am!"

 
          
 
But Sturgis didn't meet the challenge. He
laughed again, and this time
all the
taunt had gone
out of it. "The Lord
forbid
that I should set
your young feet on the path of evil. But neither will I waste a good
drink." He reached for Ritchie's glass. "Let Sam give you a glass of
tiswin, and we'll call it square. It'd take a barrel of that stuff to make your
virtuous head go round."

 
          
 
Ritchie was doubtful of the drink the
bartender had pushed in his direction. It tasted vile, but he downed it, since
it didn't smell like anything stronger than Sturgis had said it was. There was
no afterbite in the throat, and
a gentle
warmth spread
out in his middle section. He was sorry for his suspicions. After all Sturgis
was only trying to show him a good time frontier fashion.

 
          
 
The second glass of tiswin went even better.
But the heat grew inside him, and he was very grateful for a glass
of water which had appeared out of nowhere at his hand.
He swallowed a
good half of it before he discovered that the contents were anything but water.

 
          
 
"What brought you into the army, Johnny
Raw?" Out of the golden fog someone asked the question.

 
          
 
He looked down at his hands resting on the
polished wood before him. They were grimy about the knuckles, and there was a
scar or two where reins had cut and a spur scratch had become infected.

 
          
 
"We lost our money in the crash," he
replied simply. "My father was a heavy investor in railroads, and he went
under. He died of a heart attack last June. There was just enough left to keep
the girls for a while—they went to live with Aunt Emma. I thought if I could
get west and learn something about ranching or mining—"

 
          
 
"You could make a new start." There
was an angry edge to the answer. "Well, you weren't the first, even in
this year of 1859. Travel at the army's expense, serve your five years, save
your pay, and make a new start. Is that it?"

 
          
 
"Yes." Ritchie caught at the edge of
the bar. All of a sudden the floor had swayed. At the same time he felt other
embarrassing symptoms which he had known once or twice before in his life. He
shook his head miserably trying to clear it of the dizzy fog which wrapped him
in.

 
          
 
"Time to go, Johnny Raw—"

 
          
 
A firm hand clamped on his elbow and steered
him through a wild haze of noise and color and smells which added to the
churning in his middle. But he reached the street in time.

 
          
 
Having been thoroughly and miserably sick, Ritchie
still clutched at his companion and allowed himself to be towed along. He
stumbled in the dark but managed to keep his feet. And, although his guide
snorted his impatience and seemed none too sure of his own footing, they
fetched up in time at a door Ritchie dimly recognized as being that of the
barracks.

 
          
 
But there was someone there before them. A
lantern made them blink owlishly, and a voice, metallic hard and cutting,
snapped them to wavering attention.

 
          
 
"A case of the drunk leading the drunk,
is that it, Sturgis? Who's the cub with you?"

 
          
 
Ritchie faced the questioner; the voice had
scraped raw what pride he had left.

 
          
 
"Private Ritchie
Peters, Company K, sir."
Just his luck to be caught up now by an
officer—

 
          
 
The lantern swung. Through its beam Ritchie
caught a glimpse of a smooth chin square set. ''Peters, eh? A little young for
this, aren't you? And don't call me sir! Any more of this sort of thing,
Sturgis, and you'll be up for a non-com's court."

 
          
 
The lantern and the man who had held it turned
away abruptly and swung off across the yard. Sturgis cleared his throat
noisily.

 
          
 
''The mighty Herndon!"
But the sneer was only halfhearted.

 
          
 
Ritchie raised his hands to his whirling head
and felt a return of the miserable sickness. There was something else clawing
at him, too, a feeling that he had lost something, something precious that he
had not known he possessed until it had slipped through his fingers. It was
almost as if that slender, erect shadow had taken it away with him.

 
          
 
Reveille split the wintry dark of the Sunday
morning. Ritchie tried to banish the taste in his mouth by wriggling his tongue
vigorously, found that impossible, and crawled gingerly out of his cocoon of
blankets. His head was all one pounding ache, and he nursed it between his two
hands for a long moment. Then, setting his teeth against the pain and the faint
reminiscent heaving in his mid-section, he pulled on his clothes.

 
          
 
The stables were dreary, and the light of the
lanterns made little headway against the general gloom. Ritchie and his
assigned mount, a thin-legged gray mare, eyed each other with mutual disfavor
and disgust. He started in wielding the currycomb in a wary fashion.

 
          
 
"You have Bess I see—"

 
          
 
Ritchie swiped the back of his hand across his
itching nose and stared sourly over the gray's back at the speaker.

 
          
 
It was Sergeant Herndon who stood there, hands
on hips and a critical gleam in his eyes as he watched Private Peters'
performance.

 
          
 
"And you needn't be so chary of doing
your duty about the hindquarters. She doesn't kick, do you, old lady?" The
latter part of the speech was made in a softer tone than the former, and the
mare nickered and stretched out her head toward her questioner.

           
 
"Doesn't she?" was all Ritchie found
to say, stupidly enough. His headache was now a permanent fixture, and
privately he though that even a good kick upon the seat of that pain might
improve matters some.

 
          
 
But he was not so sunk in his bog of misery as
to ignore Scott Herndon. And, he decided, the Troop Sergeant was not a man to
be overlooked in any company he might desire to frequent.

 
          
 
Taller than Sturgis, the Sergeant moved with
some of the Southerner's instinctive grace, but his shoulders never relaxed,
and his voice had a crisp crack to it which brought hearers to attention. In
that company of bearded men his smooth cheeks seemed youthful until one noted
the square jaw, the firm straightness of his thin lips, and the cold tiredness
of his eyes.

 
          
 
Now he stepped forward and ran his right hand,
encased to Ritchie's amazement in a white glove, along the flank of the mare.
He held up smudged fingers, and Ritchie flushed.

 
          
 
Doggedly the boy set to work again, expecting
the Sergeant to make
himself
scarce after that
unvoiced reproof-to try his method of inspection elsewhere down the line. But,
instead, Herndon held out a grayish sack.

 
          
 
"When you saddle up, put this gunny sack
under your blanket.
Keeps a horse from getting a sore back.
In this country a man's life depends upon the health of his mount —a dead horse
may mean a dead dragoon."

 
          
 
"Thank you, sir." Ritchie stretched
the coarse stuff between his hands.

 
          
 
"Don't call me sir." The voice was
chill, remote. And he heard the stamp of departing boot heels.

 
          
 
"High-n-mighty been on your neck?"
Sturgis, his blue eyes dark rimmed and bloodshot, his face a trifle puffy in
the wavering light, peered in from the next half stall.

 
          
 
Ritchie was trying out the gunny sack on Bess,
smoothing out the stuff so that no pucker or wrinkle remained. Sturgis emerged
an inch or two further.

 
          
 
"I see he has—presenting you with his
little invention for the comfort of these four-legged instruments of torture.
Company K has style; so it has, so it has." The Southerner was evidently
repeating some oft-heard quotation. "We can't give up and drop in our
tracks after riding full gallop after the Apaches, so we can't! We just leap
from our saddles, deploy in about five acres of saw-toothed rocks, and wipe 'em
out! Ha! Let me tell you this, son—straight words from one who knows—
it's
hard work, this snatching the laurels from the fair
brow of fame. And
it's
stiff-backed bell sharps like
Herndon who make it all the harder." He spat a length of straw out of his
mouth and went back to work.

 
          
 
But the shrill notes of the bugle echoing
across the parade ground brought him out again.

 
          
 
"Sick call," he identified
unnecessarily. "Lord, I feel dead, but I doubt if Doc would agree with me
on that diagnosis. You don't look so spruce yourself."

 
          
 
Ritchie tried to grin. But the wan stretch of
skin he achieved was almost too much for his face.

 
          
 
"I thought you said that tiswin was
harmless," he began.

 
          
 
Sturgis waved a hand. "Well, if you will
mix gin with it, what do you expect? And wasn't our worthy sergeant aroused to
see one of his new lambs in such a state? Now what is the matter, babe? You
needn't ball those fists at me. If you can't take a joke and learn to hold your
drinks, you're in for a tough time in this army."

 
          
 
Ritchie quickened his pace. He knew now the
trick Sturgis had played on him. A wink to the bartender had put up the gin,
and safely stupefied by it, he would have been the free and easy spender
Sturgis wanted as an evening's companion. He'd been a green Johnny Raw all
right.
Funny that the Southerner hadn't gone through with the
whole plan instead of getting him back to the barracks.
But let Sturgis
or anyone else try to catch him like that a second time!

 
          
 
A little righteous anger, he discovered, is
the right prescription to relieve bodily misery. He was able to get through
parade without disgracing himself. Since it was Sunday, they were treated to a
discourse from the Colonel, during which Ritchie's mind roamed freely and none
too happily. But there was no drill, and he was able to eat all the bean soup
and have that hot liquid settle his stomach in its proper place once more.

 
          
 
He kicked across the yard later, wishing that
he could take Bess, in spite of her forbidding attitude, and ride off into the
hills. But a mounted pass was more than a recruit could hope for. With a sigh
he tramped back to the barracks and improved the hour by putting a super-shine
on every piece of equipment that would take polish. Several card games were in
progress, but since the last payday was so far in the past, only the most
hardened gamblers clung to the stakes they chiseled by vast proficiency out of
one another. Ritchie dropped his carbine in the rack and went exploring.

 
          
 
Sturgis, when Ritchie had refused a second
invitation to do the town, had slammed off on his own, and the newcomer felt
rather alone as he toured the barracks room looking at the trophies and loot
assembled by Company K during its campaigning. The veterans of the troop held
aloof from the recruits. They inhabited a world of their own with
incomprehensible jokes and allusions to past events as its language, shutting
out those who could not understand.

 
          
 
But the room itself was worth close inspection.
Above, a ceiling of strips of canvas kept the centipedes and other summer
livestock from falling on one's head. Round-bellied, brightly patterned clay
jars hung on twisted cords from the beams, ready to cool water in the heavy
midsummer heat. A row of baskets so tightly woven from grass and roots that
they could be used for washbasins—and were— sat on a bench in the middle of the
room.

 
          
 
The walls were a lace work of spears tipped
with beautifully chipped obsidian points, quivers of coyote and mountain lion
skin, some still holding arrows, and bows of wood and horn. Ritchie was
guessing at the history of an oddly shaped pair of savagely roweled spurs,
which dangled, rusty and useless, from one nail, when a man thrust his head in
at the outer door.

 
          
 
"Hey, fellas!"
His voice carried down the room. "Diego is here with that thar performin'
dog o' hissen—!"

 
          
 
There was a concentrated rush for the door in
which Ritchie was borne along. And a few seconds later he found himself one of
a tight circle on the parade ground where a mushroom-hatted Mexican stood
bowing to the company.

 
          
 
A small white rough-coated dog sat quietly at
his feet. Its forelegs and shoulders had been forced into a blue military
jacket, and aslant on its head was a miniature copy of the broad-brimmed
dragoon hat. At a hissed word of command it arose to its hind feet, holding
between its fore-paws a small carbine whittled out of wood.

 
          
 
Following Diego's orders the dog went through
the manual of arms. Its whiskered face showed an expression of boredom, but it
came to life when some of the men tossed it bits of pork filched from the
kitchen.

           
 
"Smart dog, Diego.
Give yo' a double-eagle fur him!" came out of the audience.

 
          
 
Diego showed yellow-white teeth in a discreet
grin.

 
          
 
"Thees dog are ver' ver' smart, si,
senores. An' where does thees senor geet heem one double-eegal?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, Benny, where?" demanded
several of the would-be-buyer's friends. "Bin a-holdin' out on yore
pals?"

 
          
 
"Robbed the paymaster, Benny?"
inquired someone else. "Maybe that's why he ain't bin around, boys!"

 
          
 
"Ah—Diego would trust me—" began
Benny.

 
          
 
But the Mexican showman shook his head firmly.
"Diego trusts no man, senor. That ees why he ees still frien's weeth many.
Perro," he spoke to the dog. "Where ees Apache'— you fin'!"

 
          
 
The dog dropped its toy gun and ran in
widening circles through the crowd—the men edging out to let it through.
Finally it stopped short before a man on the very outskirts of the circle and
began to bark sharply.

 
          
 
For one amazed moment Ritchie thought that
Perro had really discovered one of the enemy in their midst, for the man's
black hair was pulled back by a red headband such as the desert warriors
favored, a blanket was draped about his shoulders, and the feet and legs the
dog was now snarling at were covered with the high, bootlike moccasins of the
mesa men.

 
          
 
The man stood perfectly still and did not even
appear to notice the dog now working itself into a frenzy of barks and growls.
Diego had approached slowly, but now he took a sudden stride and grabbed at
Perro's collar, jerking back with a force which half strangled the animal.

 
          
 
"Your pardon, Senor
Scout."
He touched his hand to the brim of his hat, but the mockery
in that gesture was plain.

           
 
“Perro mistakes the counterfeit for the real.
You weel excuse heem, please."

 
          
 
"Sure—" The one word came in the
soft drawl of a Mountain Man as the moccasined feet turned and the red-crested
figure drifted off toward the Colonel's quarters.

 
          
 
Perro's mistake seemed to put an end to the
show because Diego refused all urging to continue and departed out of the gate.
All but a few die-hards who followed the showman to the road went back to the
warmth of the barracks.