the Confederates. They rose like targets in a shooting gallery, pouring out rifle fire in sheets as the solitary horseman dashed past.
They couldn’t hit him.
Lieutenant Dunbar heard the firing die. The line of riflemen had run out. As he pulled up he felt something burning in his upper arm and discovered that he’d been nicked in the bicep. The prickle of heat brought him briefly back to his senses. He looked down the line he had just passed and saw that the Confederates were milling about behind the wall in a state of disbelief.
His ears were suddenly working again and he could hear shouts of encouragement coming from his own line far across the field. Then he was aware once more of his foot, throbbing like some hideous pump deep in his boot.
He wheeled Cisco into an about-face, and as the little buckskin surged against the bit, Lieutenant Dunbar heard a thunderous cheer. He looked across the field. His brothers in arms were rising en masse behind the wall.
He laid his heels against Cisco’s side and they charged ahead, racing back the way they had come, this time to probe the other Confederate flank. The men he had already passed were caught with their pants down and he could see them frantically reloading as he sped by.
But ahead of him, down along the unprobed flank, he could see riflemen coming to their feet, the guns settling in the crooks of their shoulders.
Determined not to fail himself, the lieutenant suddenly and impulsively let the reins drop and lifted both his arms high into the air. He might have looked like a circus rider, but what he felt was final. He had raised his arms in a final gesture of farewell to this life. To someone watching, it might have been misconstrued. It might have looked like a gesture of triumph.
Of course Lieutenant Dunbar had not meant it as a signal to anyone else. He had only wanted to die. But his Union comrades already had their hearts in their throats, and when they saw the lieutenant’s arms fly up, it was more than they could bear.
They streamed over the wall, a spontaneous tide of fighting men, roaring with an abandon that curdled the blood of the Confederate troops.
The men in the beechnut uniforms broke and ran as one, scrambling in a twisted mess toward the stand of trees behind them.
By the time Lieutenant Dunbar pulled Cisco up, the blue-coated Union troops were already over the wall, chasing the terrified rebels into the woods.
His head suddenly lightened.
The world around him went into a spin.
The colonel and his aides were converging from one direction, General Tipton and his people from another. They’d both seen him fall, toppling unconscious from the saddle, and each man quickened his pace as the lieutenant went down. Running to the spot in the empty field where Cisco stood quietly next to the shapeless form lying at his feet, the colonel and General Tipton shared the same feelings, feelings that were rare in high-ranking officers, particularly in wartime.
They each shared a deep and genuine concern for a single individual.
Of the two, General Tipton was the more overwhelmed. In twenty-seven years of soldiering he had witnessed many acts of bravery, but nothing came close to the display he had witnessed that afternoon.
When Dunbar came to, the general was kneeling at his side with the fervency of a father at the side of a fallen son.
And when he found that this brave lieutenant had ridden onto the field already wounded, the general lowered his head as if in prayer and did something he had not done since childhood. Tears tumbled into his graying beard.
Lieutenant Dunbar was not in shape to talk much, but he did manage a single request. He said it several times.
“Don’t take my foot off.”
General Tipton heard and recorded that request as if it were a commandment from God. Lieutenant Dunbar was taken from the field in the general’s own ambulance, carried to the general’s regimental headquarters, and, once there, was placed under the direct supervision of the general’s personal physician.
There was a short scene when they arrived. General Tipton ordered his physician to save the young man’s foot, but after a quick examination, the physician replied that there was a strong possibility he would have to amputate.
General Tipton took the doctor aside then and told him, “If you don’t save that boy’s foot, I will have you cashiered for incompetence. I will have you cashiered if it’s the last thing I do.”
Lieutenant Dunbar’s recovery became an obsession with the general. He made time each day to look in on the young lieutenant and, at the same time, look over the shoulder of the doctor, who never stopped sweating in the two weeks it took to save Lieutenant Dunbar’s foot.
The general said little to the patient in that time. He only expressed fatherly concern. But when the foot was finally out of danger, he ducked into the tent one afternoon, pulled a chair close to the bed, and began to talk dispassionately about something that had formed in his mind.
Dunbar listened dumbfounded as the general laid out his idea. He wanted the war to be over for Lieutenant Dunbar because his actions on the field, actions that the general was still thinking about, were enough for one man in one war.
And he wanted the lieutenant to ask him for something because, and here the general lowered his voice, “We are all in your debt. I am in your debt.”
The lieutenant allowed himself a thin smile and said, “Well . . . I have my foot, sir.”
General Tipton didn’t return the smile.
“What do you want?” he said.
Dunbar closed his eyes and thought.
At last he said, “I have always wanted to be posted on the frontier.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere . . . just on the frontier.”
The general rose from his chair. “All right,” he said, and started out of the tent.
“Sir?”
The general stopped short, and when he looked back at the bed, it was with an affection that was disarming.
“I would like to keep the horse. . . . Can I do that?”
“Of course you can.”
Lieutenant Dunbar had pondered the interview with the general for the rest of the afternoon. He had been excited about the sudden, new prospects for his life. But he had also felt a twinge of guilt when he thought of the affection he had seen in the general’s face. He had not told anyone that he was only trying to commit suicide. But it seemed far too late now. That afternoon he decided he would never tell.
And now, lying in the clammy blankets, Dunbar made up his third smoke in half an hour and mused about the mysterious workings of fate that had finally brought him to Fort Sedgewick.
The room was growing lighter, and so was the lieutenant’s mood. He steered his thoughts away from the past and into the present. With the zeal of a man content with his place, he began to think about today’s phase of the cleanup campaign.
CHAPTER VI
Like a youngster who would rather skip the vegetables and get right to the pie, Lieutenant Dunbar passed
