looked haggard in the sallow light from a single lantern dangling from an overhead rafter. Two men stood on either side of him, bracing him against the chair back so he wouldn’t fall forward. In front of O’Hara sat a wooden tub filled with water. O’Hara’s face and hair were wet, his eyes closed, his head drooping downward so that his chin almost rested on his chest.
“He asleep?” Ferguson said.
“Tryin’,” one of the men, Jesse Bob Cavins, said.
“He say anything ’bout them Apache hideouts?” Ferguson asked the other man, a gaunt stringy hardcase named Willy Rawlins.
“Nope. He’s just swallered a lot of water, Hiram.” Rawlins had a West Texas drawl you could cut with a butcher knife if you laid it on a chunk of wood.
“Nothing?” Trask said, a scowl forming on his face.
“Nary,” Rawlins said.
“Says he don’t know nothin’,” Cavins said, “and we near drowneded him ten minutes ago.”
“He have any papers on him?” Trask asked. “Maps, stuff like that?”
“On that table over yonder,” Cavins said, nodding in the direction of a table next to a rolltop desk against one wall.
Trask walked over to the table and picked up an army pouch. He opened it, spread the contents out on the tabletop. Ferguson strode up to stand beside him.
“None of that made any sense to us,” Hiram said. “Army stuff.”
“You ever in the army, Hiram?”
“Nope. Not as a regular. I hauled freight out of Santa Fe and Taos up to Pueblo and Denver. Warn’t no war up yonder.”
Trask opened a folded paper and laid it out flat.
“This here’s a field map,” he said. “If you know how to read ’em, you can find out where you are. Or, in this case, where our young Lieutenant O’Hara has been.”
“Lot of gibberish to me,” Ferguson said.
“There’s numbers on it, in different places.”
“Don’t make no sense.”
“No, not to you and me. But I’ll bet O’Hara there knows what they mean. Did you show him the map? Ask him about it?”
Ferguson looked at the two men flanking O’Hara. They both shook their heads.
“Why not?” Trask asked.
“Yeah, why not?” Ferguson asked.
“We just asked him what you told us to ask him, Hiram.”
“And what was that?” Trask wanted to know, a warning tic beginning to quiver along his jawline.
“Where in hell them Apaches’ camps was,” Rawlins said.
“We asked him about Cochise, too,” Cavins said, a defensive tone to his voice.
“What did he say to those questions?” The tic in Trask’s facial muscles subsided as his jaw hardened. In the silence, the men could almost hear Trask’s teeth grind together.
“He said he didn’t know,” Rawlins said.
“He said he was on the scout, follerin’ orders is all.” Cavins was on the verge of becoming belligerent, and Ferguson shot him a warning glance.
Trask huffed in a breath as if he was building up steam inside him. But he remained calm. He knew men. These would be no trouble. Not Cavins nor Rawlins, not even Ferguson. Trask had observed men like these all his life, and men like O’Hara, as well. He knew the realms of darkness they all harbored. He knew their fears. Torturing men had given him insights that few other men ever even thought about. But he also knew when torture would fail, result only in silence or death.
O’Hara had been Ferguson’s idea, but then he had inside information, a conduit of some kind that led straight into Fort Bowie. An inside man. A man who hated Apaches as much as he did. Hiram knew someone high up in the military, at the post, who knew what O’Hara was scouting. But Hiram didn’t know how to dig that information out of a man like O’Hara, a soldier who held to higher standards than he did.
“Mind if I take a crack at soldier boy?” Trask said. “You got any coffee you can make in here?”
“Long as you don’t mark him up none, Trask,” Ferguson said. “Willy, you put on some Arbuckle’s. Bob, get some kindlin’ started in that potbelly.”
Rawlins walked over to a sideboard built into the wall. Nearby was a potbellied stove with a flat round lid on top. Cavins knelt down and opened the door, picked up a stick of kindling wood and poked around in the ashes.
“Deader’n hell,” he said. “Nary a coal.” Then he set about making a fire.
Rawlins rattled a pot against another, set out the one that made coffee, lifted the lid. He opened an airtight of Arbuckle’s coffee, releasing the aroma of cinnamon. He dipped grinds into the pot, replaced the lid.
“What do you aim to do, Ben?” Ferguson asked.
“Perk this guy up some, first off.”
