Responding to a nod from Magee, Wallis took the jack from the top and put it into the deck. After the cards were squared, Magee again revealed the jack as the top card.
"Jack fancied the ladies, too. He made an innocent remark that a general's wife considered fresh, and that got him busted. But he was ambitious."
Again Magee repeated the effect, managing to produce several blinks from the tracker.
"Sergeant Jack, he got busted so often and climbed back up so often, he was sort of a legend on the Plains. Everybody wanted to be able to spring back like Jack." He turned over the top card, by now familiar, and placed it facedown again. "Everybody liked Jack's brand of ambition, which was powerful. And you know what? Pretty soon it rubbed off on the whole Army. Even the trackers."
He gave Gray Owl the deck with the jack facedown on top. He signed for the Indian to take the card and place it back in the deck. Forehead deeply creased, Gray Owl took the card, held it while he thought, and then carefully slid it in very near the bottom of the deck. Magee took the deck, keeping it in plain sight, and snapped the top card over.
Charles clapped. Wallis whistled. Incredulous, Gray Owl took the jack of diamonds and examined both sides. He bit it lightly with his front teeth. He bent it, waved it, flicked it with a nail. Magee waited.
Gray Owl handed the card back.
And smiled.
A trooper brought more buffalo chips to fling on the fire. Gray Owl's reticence seemed to melt in the heat of a fascination with Magee. "The shamans of my people would honor you."
"Shamans?" Magee didn't know the term. "Do you mean there are Indians who practice hocus-pocus?"
Gray Owl didn't know hocus-pocus. "Magic? Yes. They have strong medicine. I have seen them change white feathers to white stones. I have seen a shaman's body travel invisibly from one tipi to another, fifty steps away."
Magee screwed up his face. "Tunnel," he announced. "They got to be using a tunnel somehow —"
"And even chop a man's head off and put it back. Among the Cheyenne who work miracles, you would be a great man. Honored. Feared."
Magee cast a speculative eye on his deck. Charles said to him, "Keep that in mind if you ever need to save your hair."
During the week spent at Harker reprovisioning and repairing horse gear, Charles daily expected — wished, anyway — that the mail would bring a letter from Willa. None came. He started two of them himself, disliked the apologetic tone that crept in and tore them up. He dispatched a note to Brigadier Duncan instead, enclosing an eagle feather for little Gus.
The detachment rode out again. The warrior societies kept roving, attacking. The war spirit on the Plains burned as hot as the July sun.
Gray Owl talked to Charles now. Even smiled once in a while. They got along. The tracker was expert, far superior to Big Arm, and followed orders without question. Still, Charles wasn't any closer to the secret of Gray Owl's abandonment of his people. Until he understood that, he couldn't confidently manage or entirely trust the Cheyenne.
Three wandering Rees crossed their line of march. The bad-tempered trio complained about a new whiskey ranch that had opened up half a day's ride south. The proprietors, half-breed brothers, sold guns and unbranded whiskey. One of the Rees had nearly died from too much of the whiskey.
Charles decided the story was true, so the detachment veered away southward. Whiskey ranchers were simply saloons out in the wilderness, set up by unscrupulous men to make a profit on arming the Indians and getting them drunk. The soldiers found the ranch amid some sand hills, overran it by firing a few rounds and took the owners into custody without difficulty.
The firearms the half-breeds sold from their place of business — perhaps it had been a homestead once — were rusty, short-barrel, big-bore Hawkens, from that family's works in St. Louis. From the condition of the pieces, Charles guessed they might date from the early manufacturing runs of the 1820s. The whiskey for sale was a dark brown fluid, probably grain alcohol laced with red pepper, tobacco juice, and similar hellish ingredients. Even a pilgrim dying of thirst in a desert would think twice about drinking it.
The two ratty traders also sold the favors of a sad, pudgy Comanche woman, who told Gray Owl she'd been abducted from her husband's lodge in Texas.
When Charles said he intended to send the traders back to Fort Harker and let the Indian Bureau deal with them, the older brother suddenly burst out with a harangue about his fear of jails. Abruptly, he thrust his right hand under his coat. Charles put a bullet through each of his legs before the hand reappeared.
Magee knelt, gingerly lifted the man's lapel, and pried something from the limp fingers; the man had fainted. Magee held up a roll of bank notes.
Charles examined them. "A bribe. With Confederate bills, the damn fool." He flung the paper money in the air. The prairie wind shot it upward and whirled it in clouds of worthless wealth. His eye on the bleeding man, he said, "You can never be sure of what a man's carrying under his coat."
Later that night, upset, Wallis whispered to Magee: "He didn't have to shoot that there trader."
"Yes he did," Magee said, not excusing it, just acknowledging it.
Charles released the woman and sent the brothers back to Harker guarded by a two-man detail. The soldiers burned down the whiskey ranch buildings on July 28, the same day the Army arrested George A. Custer for desertion of duty at Fort Wallace.
The war fires on the Southern Plains spread, and ignited the north, too. On August 1, in a hayfield near Fort C. F. Smith on the Bozeman's Trail, thirty-two soldiers and civilians successfully fought off an attack by several hundred Cheyennes. Next day, in a separate incident later called the "Wagon Box Fight," a small group from Fort Phil Kearny drove off a band of Sioux under Red Cloud.
With understandable pride, the Army soon exaggerated the number of Cheyenne attackers to eight hundred, the number of Sioux to a thousand. The incidents inspired a new confidence. The Plains tribes were not invincible. They'd only seemed invincible because rule-book soldiers couldn't adjust to the Indian style of guerrilla war. When the tribes had to stand and face concentrated Army fire power, they were annihilated.
Back at Fort Harker once more, Charles heard all this and cursed his bad luck at being in the wrong outfit at the wrong time.
The day of the Hayfield Fight turned out to be a day of even greater significance for the Tenth. Captain Armes and thirty-two men of F Company had chased some Cheyennes up the Saline, caught them, then had to shoot their way out in a fifteen-mile running fight. Bill Christy, a popular little man who'd once farmed in Pennsylvania, took a fatal round in the head. Lovetta Barnes snipped up a large cloth dyed black, the old man passed out the strips, and each officer and enlisted man in C Company tied one around his left sleeve. Other companies followed suit. The Tenth mourned the first of its own to fall in combat.
Somewhat better news was that of the impending move of Grierson's headquarters at Fort Riley. He and his men would escape the bigoted General Hoffman at last.
Although the raids on the rail line, the stage road, and isolated homesteads continued, Charles soon saw opportunity slipping away. The Olive Branchers had prevailed in Washington: a peace commission had been formed, and a huge treaty expedition was scheduled for the fall. Once again he prepared to lead his detachment out, hungering for his chance.
"Better come back for this," Barnes said on the morning of the detachment's departure. He gave Charles a handbill printed in circus type on lavender paper.