After a saber drill, Hazen drew Charles aside.
"Private May, I got a queer feeling you ain't no Carolina militiaman. You try to look clumsy, but I saw some of your moves when you thought I was watchin' somebody else." He thrust his chin out and shouted. "Where were you trained? West Point?"
Charles looked down at him. "Wade Hampton Legion. Sir."
Hazen shook a finger. "I catch you lyin', it'll go hard. I hate liars near as much as I hate snobs from the Point — or you Southron boys."
"Yes, sir," Charles said loudly. He kept staring. Hazen looked away first, which shamed him to anger.
"I want to see what you're made of. A hundred laps of the riding ring, quick time. Right now. March!"
After that, Corporal Hazen stayed on him, yelling, criticizing, questioning him daily about his past and forcing him to lie. Despite Hazen — maybe, in a strange way, because of him; because Hazen recognized an experienced soldier — Charles felt happy to be back in the Army. He'd always liked the dependable routine of trumpet calls, assemblies, drills. He still felt a shiver up his backbone when the trumpeters blew "Boots and Saddles."
He kept to himself and didn't find a bunky, a partner. Most soldiers paired up to ease their work load and share their miseries, but he avoided it. He survived three weeks that way, although not without some sudden bouts of despondency. Thoughts of the past would return suddenly, the burned-out feeling would grip him, and he'd call himself a prize fool for donning Army blue again. He was in that kind of mood one Saturday night when he left the post and crossed the main approach road to the nameless town of tents and shanties on the other side.
Here a lot of noncoms lived with their wives, who took in post laundry to supplement Army pay. Here civilians hawked questionable whiskey in big tents, docile Osage Indians sold beans and squash from their farms nearby, and elegant gentlemen ran all-night poker and faro games. Charles had even seen a few earnestly stupid recruits betting on three-card monte or the pea and shells.
Other amenities were available in any tent with a red lantern hung in front. Charles called at one of these and spent a half hour with a homely young woman anxious to please. He walked out physically relieved but depressed by memories of Gus Barclay and a feeling that he'd dishonored her.
Two young boys ran after him as he walked through the tent town. They taunted him with a chant:
"Soldier, soldier, will you work?
No indeed, I'll sell my shirt..."
The public certainly held the Army in high esteem. As soon as the war ended, soldiers had again become the unwashed, the unwanted. Nothing ever changed.
He'd been at Jefferson Barracks four weeks when orders came through: He and seven other recruits were given twelve hours to prepare to leave on a steamer bound up the Missouri River to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, all the way across the state of Missouri. Established in 1827 by Colonel Henry Leavenworth, the great cantonment on the right bank of the river was the most important post in the West. It was headquarters for the Department of the Missouri and the supply depot for all the forts between Kansas and the Continental Divide. At Leavenworth they would find transportation, they were told, to carry them to duty with the Sixth Cavalry, down on the northern Texas frontier. The prospect pleased Charles. He'd loved the natural beauty of Texas when he was stationed at Camp Cooper before the war.
While a thunderstorm flashed and roared above the barracks, he packed his carpetbag and a small wooden footlocker in which he kept his Army-issue clothing. He put on his blue blouse, which had a roll collar, and his kepi with the enlisted man's version of the cavalry's crossed sabers. The storm quickly diminished, and he walked through light rain to the tent town, whistling a jaunty march version of the little tune that reminded him of home.
The storm had toppled some of the smaller tents and muddied the dirt lanes. Charles headed for the largest and brightest of the drinking tents, the Egyptian Palace, whose owner came from Cairo, Illinois. The tent was shabby. A piece of canvas divided an area for officers from the one for enlisted men and civilians. The whiskey was cheap and raw, but Charles felt a rare contentment as he sipped it.
Right after he'd ordered a second drink, a trio of noisy noncoms stumbled in. One was Corporal Hazen, wobbling. Evidently he'd been drinking for some time. He spied Charles at the end of the plank bar and made a remark about a foul smell.
Charles stared at him until he looked away and shrilly ordered a round for his friends. Charles was thankful Hazen didn't feel like pushing it. He felt too good.
That lasted ten minutes.
Passing by on his way to the officers' entrance, a small, slight man saw a familiar face among the enlisted men inside. He looked away, took three more steps, then halted, his mouth open. He about-faced and peered into the smoky tent —
There was no mistake.
Color rose in his face as he went in. The men noticed his look and stopped talking.
The officer walked toward the end of the bar with an aggressive swagger — probably to make up for standing only five feet six. His shoulders were pulled back with the stiffness of someone preoccupied with Army formality. Everything about him suggested fussiness: the waxy points of his mustache, the impeccable trim of his goatee.
Yellow facings and trouser stripes identified him as cavalry. A lieutenant colonel's silver-embroidery oak leaf decorated his shoulder straps. He marched down the bar and, as he passed a burly, bearded civilian wearing a notched turkey feather in his hair and a buckskin coat decorated with porcupine quills and gaudy diamond-shaped pony beads, he accidentally bumped the man's arm, spilling whiskey.
"Hey, you jackass," the man said. As he turned, the beads on his coat shot darts of reflected light through the tent. A brindle dog at his feet responded to his tone and growled at the officer, who strode on without apology, tightly clutching the hilt of his dress sword.
"Cap'n Venable, sir," Charles heard Hazen say as the officer reached the three noncoms. The silver oak leaf was from a wartime brevet, then.
"Hazen," the man said, striding on. Charles watched him, and the back of his neck started to itch. He didn't recognize the officer. Yet something about the man bothered him.
Venable halted two feet from Charles. "I saw you from the street, Private. What's your name?"
Charles tried to place the accent. Not truly Southern, but similar. One of the border states? He said, "Charles May. Sir."
"That's a damn lie." The officer snatched the whiskey glass from Charles's hand and threw the contents in his face.
A sudden uproar of talk; then, just as suddenly, silence. Whiskey dripped from Charles's chin and ran off the edge of the plank bar. Charles wanted to hit the little rooster but held back because he didn't understand what was happening. He was certain there was some mistake.
"Captain —" he began.
"You'll address me as colonel. And don't bother to keep on lying. Your name isn't May; it's Charles Main. You graduated from West Point in 1857, two years before I did. You and that damn reb Fitz Lee were thick as this." The officer held up two fingers. Instantly, the bearded face acquired a past that Charles remembered.
He bluffed. "Sir, you're mistaken."
"The hell. You remember me, and I remember you. Harry Venable. Kentucky. You put me on report four times for a messy room. Twenty skins each time. I damn near accumulated two hundred and took the Canterberry Road because of you."
Even in a stupor, Hazen caught on. He wiped his nose and exclaimed to his friends, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I spot it?" He stepped away from the bar, in case Charles tried a dash to the entrance.