“Fine. I’ve got nothing but time,” Jonas replied.
“Very well.” Pinkerton stuck out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”
Hollister shook his hand, surprised at the strength of the elderly man’s grip. He didn’t see the pistol until it was right up under his chin and he felt his fingers start to hurt as the grip turned to iron.
“Just two more things, Major Hollister. You may think you have the upper hand here, and given the gravity of this situation, you might be right. But never forget who is in charge. And never, ever, mention President Lincoln to me again. Are we clear?”
Hollister’s eyes rolled downward, looking at the pistol jammed against his flesh.
“Yes. We’re clear,” Hollister said.
“Excellent,” Pinkerton replied, the pistol vanishing as quickly as it appeared. “Excellent. Now excuse me, Major, while I call upon Colonel Whitman’s clerk to make a few changes in these documents.”
Hollister watched the stooped older man gather up the papers and scurry out of the room.
“Huh…” he said to the empty room.
Chapter Five
Chee shuffled along until he cleared the gates of the prison and stopped while one of the guards bent down to undo the irons binding his legs. Pinkerton’s papers had made him a free man, something he didn’t understand yet, but the colonel had insisted on proper protocol for the release of the prisoner, and that meant leg irons until he left the Leavenworth grounds.
Chee felt a massive weight fall away when the last padlock was undone. The guard said nothing, merely gathered up the chains and returned inside the prison. Chee heard the giant doors shut and the steel bar snap into place, and for the first time in months felt as if he could take a deep breath. He looked down at the sergeant major’s stripes on his blue blouse and brushed away a piece of lint on his left arm. One more thing he didn’t understand. He’d gone into Leavenworth busted all the way down to private but he‘d only been a corporal when he was arrested and court-martialed in the first place. Now he was Sergeant Major Chee. White people are strange, he thought.
He walked up the main street of Leavenworth, not bothering to look at the shops or glance in the windows. No one paid any attention to him. He looked like a normal soldier on some errand, not a man who had been locked away in a hole for the last nineteen months. He picked up his pace, hoping to meet up with Major Hollister before Colonel Whitman, the army, or whoever was responsible for his freedom changed their mind and locked him up again.
Chee had been thrown in the box after the fight with McAfee. The temperature inside the all-steel four-foot- square box was well over one hundred degrees and it was just about big enough for Chee to sit in if he didn’t stretch out his legs. Chee wasn’t afraid of much, but he didn’t like cramped spaces. A few hours later Hollister had come with two guards to tell him that they were both being released. He thought it might be a cruel joke Hollister was playing on him. Maybe he was a rat bastard like the rest of the inmates. But it seemed to be true. It was like a miracle, and though he hadn’t understood much of what Hollister had said, he agreed right away.
Chee caught a glimpse of black-and-brown fur darting across the far end of an alley off Leavenworth’s main street and smiled to himself. It was Dog. He had waited in the countryside surrounding Leavenworth for him to be released. Dog had no doubt been living off the land, hunting the prairie and scrounging for food while Chee was incarcerated. But each night Chee had heard his familiar howl, a signal from Dog that he was still there, and while he might not have understood why Chee was locked up, he would wait there until he got out.
Dog was a variety of unknown breeds. He was big, with a crazy twist of brown-and-black fur. He looked more like a wolf than a dog, and as a result, his presence tended to make folks uncomfortable. He had learned to keep to the shadows, avoiding contact with most humans. He’d been shot at more than a few times, but never hit, and it was enough to make him dislike guns a great deal.
Chee darted down the alleyway, calling out quietly, “Dog! Dog!” and was nearly bowled over when the giant beast burst out from behind a stack of crates lined up near the back door of a general store. He jumped up, putting his paws on Chee’s shoulders, and licked his face enthusiastically.
“It’s good to see you too, boy,” Chee said, rubbing the animal’s chest. He cradled the mutt’s head in his hands and looked him over. There was a slight tear in his left ear that hadn’t been there when Chee had gone to prison, a scar from the hard living Dog had done the last year and a half.
When Chee had joined the army at age nineteen, he’d been stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. While off duty he liked to ride across the surrounding countryside. On one of his rides in the late spring he had found Dog as a young pup, wandering alone, half starved and nearly dying of thirst. Chee gave him water and some jerky from his saddlebags and carried the pup back to Fort Sill with him.
Fort Sill was an open post on the frontier, and Chee was able to keep the pup in a small overturned crate behind his barracks. With regular food and water Dog grew quickly and in a few months weighed well over one hundred pounds. He took to roaming the countryside around the fort but was always outside Chee’s barracks in the morning. Chee’s sergeant overlooked the fact that soldiers weren’t allowed to keep pets, mainly because he was a little scared of both the solitary Chee and the dog.
One night three troopers returned to the barracks too drunk to know better, when one of them pulled his pistol and fired a couple of rounds at Dog. Neither shot hit him, but Chee heard the shots and came bursting out the back door of the barracks to investigate. He arrived in time to see the trooper point his pistol at Dog again, and with great speed and efficiency removed the pistol from the trooper’s hand. The man slumped to the ground, unconscious.
It could have ended there. Chee was a corporal, the three troopers were privates. But the other two men took exception to Chee’s intervention and attacked him. The drunks were hardly a challenge for Chee, given that his father was half-Chinese and his grandfather had taught him Shaolin kung fu. But one of the men pulled a bowie knife from his boot, and when Chee threw the man across his hip without removing the blade from his attacker’s hand first, the man fell on it and bled out before they could get him to the post’s surgeon.
The remaining two men testified against Chee, saying he went crazy and attacked all three of them. Even though Chee had an exemplary record, he was a mixed-race loner and was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to Leavenworth. Chee remembered riding in the prison wagon all the way to Kansas, watching Dog follow along, mostly keeping out of sight.
And here he was, nineteen months later. “Come on Dog,” Chee said. “We got somewhere to be.” He took the alley east and stayed off the main street. As a “mixed mutt” himself, Chee knew enough about people to realize even his army uniform wouldn’t give him a free pass if some bully decided to make trouble. Chee could handle himself, but he didn’t want to be late meeting the major.
Not when there were so many questions he needed to ask.
Chapter Six
Torson City Mining Camp, Colorado
The deserted mining camp (Shaniah found it humorous that the humans had called it a city) lay less than half a mile below her. She sat astride Demeter in a stand of quaking aspen trees lining the small canyon rim above the “city.” It was nothing more than a few buildings, hastily constructed: a general store, a saloon, three sheds filled with mining equipment, and a few low-slung structures that looked to be barracks or bunkhouses in which the miners slept.
The sun had just set and the western sky had taken on a rust tone, which probably meant rain was coming. Archaics like Shaniah were not comfortable with water. In almost any form it made them weak. When her race was cursed, back in the ancient days, they were technically rendered soulless and therefore burned by the touch of consecrated holy water. Over the centuries her people had learned to tolerate unconsecrated water, but Malachi and his band, now partaking of human blood, would be severely burned by water and even killed by enough holy
