and level, that was the answer: get Stone to a sawbones on the double.
Enemy antiaircraft gunners sent up a storm of hate as Moss flew over the front line. He didn't waste time on evasive action, not now. Odds weren't so good as if he'd been dodging all over the landscape, but they were still on his side.
He got away with it. 'Almost home, Percy,' he said. Stone didn't answer. Moss looked back over his shoulder. The observer was slumped to one side, his eyes closed. Moss tried to fly even faster, but the Wilbur was already going flat out.
He landed at as high a speed as he could, using the whole airstrip and taxiing to a stop close to the barracks. He was waving for help before the aeroplane stopped rolling. As soon as it did, he scrambled back into the observer's cockpit.
Blood was everywhere back there: on the walls, on the seat, on the floor, on the camera-and on Percy Stone's flying togs. Moss yanked back the observer's sleeve and jabbed his finger down on the inside of Stone's wrist. He let out a whoop when he felt a pulse.
'Hurry up, dammit!' he shouted. 'He's hurt bad!'
By then the ground crew were already at the bus. They had a stretcher with them. Lefty helped Moss unbuckle Stone and get his limp weight out of the cockpit and down to the ground. 'Can't let him die,' the mechanic said. 'I need his money.' If he was kidding, he was kidding on the square.
He and Byron rushed Stone away. Jonathan Moss looked down at him self. His friend's blood was on his flight suit, on his boots, on his hands. Wearily, he trudged in to make his report to Captain Franklin. No pictures to develop, not today; Stone had got hit before he had the chance to take any- and the camera looked to be hors de combat, too.
Somebody brought him a whiskey. He gulped it down without tasting or feeling it. After what seemed a very long time, the telephone jangled. Lefty got it before Moss could even move from his chair. 'Yeah?' the mechanic said, and again: 'Yeah? All right. Good. Thanks.' He hung up, then turned to Moss. 'Collapsed lung and he's lost a lot of blood, but they think he's gonna pull through.'
'Thank God,' Moss said, and fell asleep where he sat.
Stephen Ramsay sipped coffee from a tin cup, then said, 'Captain Lincoln, sir, ain't this a hell of a war? I've been a cavalryman a long time. When we got into Okmulgee here, I didn't mind fighting like a dragoon, on account of that's what you got to do when you fight in built-up country. But now they've dragooned us into the infantry- and it's not even the Confederate States infantry. Well, not exactly,' he amended.
'You're the captain now, Ramsay,' Lincoln said. 'I'll have you remember I'm a colonel these days.' His hand went to his collar. He didn't wear the three bars of a Confederate captain any more, or the three stars of a Confederate colonel, either. Instead, he had two red costume-jewellery jewels, the newly devised insigne for a colonel in the equally newly devised Creek Nation Army.
Ramsay had shed his sergeant's stripes, too. He wore one red costume-jewellery jewel on either side of his collar. Both he and Lincoln also had red armbands on the left sleeves of their tunics. Other than that, they, unlike the soldiers they were now commanding, retained ordinary Confederate uniform.
'Captain? Me?' Ramsay snorted. 'Doesn't seem real.' He drank some more coffee. It was hot and strong. Past that, he couldn't think of anything good to say about it. After swallowing, he went on, 'Last time I got paid, though, it was a captain's money, so I can't kick about that.'
'Same here-I got a colonel's money,' Lincoln said. 'And we're earning what they pay us, by God. Do you doubt it?'
'When you put it that way, no sir.' Ramsay laughed a little. 'Crazy how things work out, isn't it? We were the first white soldiers in town, we helped the Creeks throw back the damnyankees, so Chief Fixico figures we're the ones to turn his braves into real soldiers.' Under his breath, he added, 'Stupid damn rank badges, anyone wants to know.'
'I told him the same thing.' Lincoln 's chuckle was wry. 'They turned out to be his idea, so we're stuck with them as long as we do this job.' He shrugged. 'I hear tell English officers, when they get hired to bring an Indian maharajah's militia up to snuff-their kind of Indian, I mean, not ours-they have to wear the native-style uniform, too. It could be worse-they could have put us in war paint and feathers.'
'Creeks don't seem to go in for that kind of thing much,' Ramsay said. 'You look around at this place-the way it was before the fighting started, anyway-and it could be anybody's town. You wouldn't know red-uh, Indians-had built it.'
You had to be careful about saying redskins hereabouts. The Indians didn't like it for beans. Ramsay had the idea Negroes didn't like being called niggers, either, but he didn't let that stop him. It was different with the Creeks, though. They weren't just hewers of wood and drawers of water. By law and by treaty, they were every bit as much Confederate citizens as he was. Up till manumission, they'd kept slaves of their own.
'Captain Ramsay?' That was Moty Tiger, probably-no, certainly-the best sergeant Ramsay had. He was the young fellow who'd apologized to Ramsay when he suddenly got a lesson in what foxholes were worth. Now his broad bronze face was worried.
When Moty Tiger worried, Ramsay figured he ought to worry, too. 'What's up, Moty?' he asked, getting to his feet.
'I've got a discipline problem, Captain,' the Creek sergeant said carefully.
'Well, let's see what we can do about that,' Ramsay said. The Indian with the picturesque name turned and led him down the trench, presumably toward whoever was involved in the discipline problem.
Ramsay kicked at the muddy dirt as he followed. The Creek Nation Army-both regiments of it-had an inordinate number of discipline problems. Part of that was because the men had been under military discipline for only a few weeks. They chafed under it, like barely broken horses. And part of it was that they were Indians, and maybe less used to taking orders from anybody than a like number of whites would have been.
They particularly didn't like taking orders from their own people. They accepted it better from their white officers. Ramsay didn't think that was because he was white, as he would have if he were dealing with Negroes. But the Creeks seemed to figure that, as a real live working soldier, he knew what he was doing, whereas to them their non-coms were the same kind of amateurs they were.
'Ten-shun!' Moty Tiger called as he came up to the knot of Indians gathered around a fire. The Creeks got to their feet, not with the alacrity Confederate regulars would have shown, but fast enough that Ramsay couldn't gig them about it. In lieu of uniforms, which hadn't arrived yet from back East, they wore denim pants, flannel shirts with red armbands like Ramsay's, and a variety of slouch hats.
'All right, what's going on here?' Ramsay asked with something close to genuine curiosity.
'He gave me the shit duty again!' one of the Creeks exclaimed.
'Somebody's got to have it, Perryman,' Ramsay said. 'We don't take the honey buckets to the pit and cover it up, we'd get even worse stinks than we have already, and we'd start getting sick before long, too. No way to keep clean or anything close to it, but we've got to do what we can.'
'Those damn buckets are disgusting,' Perryman said. 'Hauling them is nigger work, not soldier work.'
'Mike, we ain't got no niggers here,' Moty Tiger said, more patiently than Ramsay would have expected. 'All we got is us, and if we don't do it, nobody will. And it's your turn.'
'Is it your turn?' Ramsay asked Mike Perryman; there was always the chance Moty Tiger was picking on his fellow Indian, which would have to be stopped if it was happening. But, reluctantly, Perryman nodded. 'Then you've got to do the job,' Ramsay told him. 'I've done it myself, on manoeuvres and out in the field. Take 'em to the pit, fling 'em in, cover everything up, and then you can pretend it never happened.'
'You really did that?' Perryman asked, his black eyes scanning Ramsay's face, searching for a lie.
But it was the truth. Ramsay nodded with a clear conscience. 'You're a soldier now,' he said. 'This isn't a lark and it isn't a game. It isn't pretty. It isn't a whole lot of fun. But it's what needs doing. So-are you going to be a soldier, or are you going to be an old soldier, somebody who's always complaining and carrying on when he's got no cause to? You said yourself your sergeant wasn't being unfair. If you don't do the job, somebody else will have to, and that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the men in your squad.'
He waited to see what would happen. He didn't want to have to punish Mike Perryman. He'd already seen that punishment didn't work as well with the Creeks as it did with white soldiers. The Indians only resented you more.
