Free The Colonel's Lady by Clifton Adams Page B

hate was a pallid, insignificant thing compared to it. Skiborsky's hate was nothing. With Weyland, hate was the man and the rest was nothing. I could still hear his measured breathing as he stood there watching us, and I could see the rage in his colorless eyes. He had said only five words.
    “Get to your barracks, trooper.”
    That was all. He closed his mouth tightly, as though he were afraid to say any more. He stood there without moving and I walked past him and out of the house. Now all I had to do was wait. Pretty soon the sergeant of the guard would come, and maybe the corporal too, and they would take me away to the little two-celled guardhouse behind the stables and there I would stay until a general court-martial was arranged.
    I waited, but the sergeant of the guard didn't come. At last recall sounded and the troopers of A Company came straggling in from whatever details they had been on that afternoon.
    “It looks like you've got this army by the tail, Reardon,” Morgan, who had worked in the stables all day, said dryly.
    I tried to grin, but it didn't feel like a grin on my face.
    “We're goin' on patrol in the mornin',” Steuber said. “You got your field equipment ready?”
    I didn't want to start them wondering any sooner than I had to, so I said I'd better get on it. No one had told me yet that I was under arrest, so I went with the Dutchman and Morgan over to the quartermaster's and drew forage and rations for eight days and two extra bandoleers of carbine ammunition. I expected somebody to be waiting for me when I got back to the barracks, but nobody was there. I made my saddle roll and then went to mess and ate the government dried beans and sowbelly and corn bread, and still nobody tapped me on the shoulder and said come along.
    I couldn't understand it. There was no mistaking the hate—almost a madness—I had seen in Weyland's eyes. It didn't make sense that he wouldn't try to do something about it.
    After the bugle had sounded for the last time that night, and the barracks were plunged into darkness, I began to wonder if Caroline had somehow calmed him down and explained the whole thing away. God knows how she would do it, but if anybody could manage it, Caroline could.
    But common sense told me that wasn't the answer. Weyland wouldn't be calmed and he wouldn't have the thing explained away. The only explanation was that Weyland had, for some reason, decided against a court-martial. He had figured out something better. What could be better than sending me to a government stockade for twenty years, I didn't know. Whatever it was, though, I would learn about it soon enough.

    Reveille was at five-thirty the next morning. At six o'clock the fourteen-man patrol with Captain Halan, a young lieutenant named Loveridge, and a Papago Indian scout formed on the parade. Sergeant Skiborsky, as the senior sergeant on the detail, dressed us up and checked our equipment, and at six-fifteen we rode in columns of twos through the gates of Larrymoor and onto the desert.
    Nobody tried to stop us.
    Nobody came out of the guardhouse at the last minute to say that Trooper Matthew Reardon was under arrest and was to be held for general court-martial for the offense of attacking an officer's wife. I had expected it, but it didn't happen. I tried to put it out of my mind.
    By eight o'clock we had already sweated ourselves dry, and the order was to drink from our canteens only on a command from Captain Halan. We rode north and west from the fort, across the great boulder-strewn desert and into the barren, bleak foothills of the White Mountains. Early that morning we crossed what had once been a telegraph line—Larrymoor's only connection with the outside world—and the poles had been burned to the ground and the bright copper wire was cut in a thousand places. Morgan grinned widely when he saw it.
    The men rode alert that first day, keeping wary eyes on the high, ragged peaks to the north where Kohi's Coyoteros—the