“Y’all ask me,” Templeton groused, “it’s a damn desert.”
“Fayetteville had water.” Pettigrew wiped his dirty and torn sleeve over his powder-grimed face and gave the country a worried look.
“You men just wait,” Butler told them. “Paw said the upper Wind River and the Jackson’s Hole country is, as he put it, ‘some spectacular.’ Said water boiled out of the ground, as if bubbling up from hell.”
“We been in hell already, Cap’n.” Kershaw sounded short. “Think that’s what they called Chickamauga. Remember that place where we was all shot down? All the stink of sulfur and blood and death? Hell busted out on earth, and you could have stopped us from charging into it. Could have ordered us all back.”
Butler’s body spasmed as if his muscles had received a shock. His heart began to thud inside his chest.
“Stop it! Right now!” He swallowed hard, throat oddly tight. “Never mention that day. Not ever! You all hear me?”
He blinked, Apple nervous as the trembling in his hands ran down through the reins. He had proven a good mount—not very energetic, but calm and capable.
“Cain’t never run full tilt through no forest at night th’out running into de trees, Cap’n. An’ dat’s just a fact.”
“Your meaning is unclear, Sergeant.”
“Maybe time’s come foah you t’ recognize you’s runnin,’ and Chickamauga be dem trees.”
The horse sidestepped uneasily as tremors ran through Butler’s body. He couldn’t breathe, as if his lungs were suddenly starved for air.
“Calm, men. Calm,” he ordered, willing himself to breathe; he knotted the muscles in his arms to keep his hands from shaking. Spots had formed in his vision, a darkness creeping in from the sides. He blinked, gasping for air, and felt the world settle back into place.
Panting from the sudden fear, he said, “Sergeant Kershaw, you will never mention that place again. If you do, I will charge you with insubordination.”
“Truth be what it be, Cap’n.”
“Stop it! Go away! Get out!”
Hearing Doc’s words in his own mouth, Butler couldn’t help but hunch down in the saddle, almost flinching as he awaited his sergeant’s response. The only sound was the wind in the sagebrush and cottonwoods and the happy sounds of the river running over stone.
“Sergeant?” Butler snapped.
“Reckon he gone, suh,” Johnny Baker said warily.
Butler fixed his swimming vision, seeing the men, their faces ashen, their torn clothing hanging in tatters. Fear, like cold splinters, shone in their eyes.
“He be back.” Pettigrew shifted uneasily. “That damn Cajun’d do anything t’ keep me from making sergeant.”
“Forced march, men. Forward!” Butler spurred the horse, leading the way at a trot. When he looked behind, the men were following the packhorse at the double-quick.
“Kershaw, what were you thinking, mouthing off like that?”
Butler’s vision of the trail where it skirted a patch of willows shimmered and silvered as tears welled in his eyes.
92
August 20, 1867
Butler poked at the crackling fire with a stick. The men sat in a circle, quiet. Somber. He’d been forced to stop early that day, having pushed the horses too far, too fast. The animals were simply exhausted.
Pettigrew, the complainer, had called it to Butler’s attention when he announced, “Cap’n, keep it up, and you’re gonna kill that hoss. Then where all will y’ be?”
They’d passed beyond the low, piled rock and gravel foothills with their sprinkling of giant boulders—and skirted the base of blood-red sandstone cliffs where the Wind River looped close to the mountains. The range to the north, the Absarokas, were closing in now, jutting ever higher into the crystalline blue of the sky. Soaring gray cliffs, spotted with high snow patches, contrasted with the vault of the heavens.
The river remained a dividing line between worlds. To Butler’s left grew timbered patches with pines, groves of quaking aspen, and thick stands of willow that gave way to white-barked pine then fir-and-spruce-covered slopes.
On the right, across the river, lay a fantastic and colorful landscape—a layer cake of red, white, yellow, brown, and tan formations cut by drainages and eroded into spires, hollows, and patterns mindful of pictures he’d seen of mighty cathedrals.
The fire popped, sparks twirling up toward the night sky. Butler leaned his head back and filled his lungs with the cool, forest-scented air that blew down the valley from the northwest.
“Reckon ya’ll got to admit”—Billy Templeton had mimicked Butler’s posture—“them’s more stars than a feller ever sees back t’ Arkansas.”
“The scientists would tell you the air is thinner here,” Butler told him.
“How could air git thin? It’s jist air, ain’t it?” Johnny Baker asked.
“Something about being higher here than in Arkansas.” Butler smiled faintly as a meteor shot a sliver of light across the blackness.
Coyotes yipped and carried on to the south. Wolves howled in a lonely tremolo to the north, as if in answer.
“Is the water thinner, too?” Phil Vail asked. “Seemed every bit as thick and fast when we forded the river this morning.”
“I don’t know if the water is thinner,” Butler answered. “Maybe everything is. Maybe if we just keep climbing, we’ll become less and less substantial until we’re mere shadows of ourselves. And if we could climb high enough, we’d just vanish into nothingness.”
As soon as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t. Sometimes he could see through the men as it was, only to have them firm up again. Or they’d be in one place one instant, and somewhere different the next.
He glanced around anxiously, nodding to each of them, assuring himself that they were still present. He hadn’t heard from Kershaw since dressing down the sergeant. Not since the near paralysis of fear that had left him weak and whimpering.
Tell me the men didn’t see that.
An officer’s first responsibility was to his men.
Corporal Pettigrew paced nervously where he guarded the packs, and said, “We’re down to seven rounds for the Spencer, Cap’n. A couple of pounds of flour, and a half tin of lard. Reckon come breakfast mess, the last of that antelope is gonna be gone,
