Free Stamping Ground by Loren D. Estleman

rattled the revolvers together, stared from one face to the other. Then:
    â€œThey’re all yours, Sergeant. Put them up in Colonel Broderick’s quarters and post a guard at the door. And try to resist the urge to give Murdock your rifle again.” He turned and strode out stiffly. The troopers who had crowded around the door at the sound of gunfire stood aside to let him through.
    â€œSome fight, A.C.,” said Pere Jac on our way out.
    â€œSure you was close enough to see it?” snarled Hudspeth.
    â€œIt is the meek who shall inherit the earth. I fight only for what is mine.”
    â€œAt least you didn’t try to break my neck.” Bright eyes slid murderously in my direction.
    â€œBetter a broken neck than a bullet in the belly,” I said.
    Burdett told us to be quiet.
    Broderick’s late home, one of a row of officers’ quarters housed in a single building near the north wall of the fort, was equipped with a sitting room and a bedchamber with two narrow beds. We were told he had shared it with his wife before the Indian troubles had forced her to return to their permanent home in Ohio. The furnishings were spartan and, except for the hand-sewn lace curtains beginning to yellow on the windows of the bedroom, masculine. The rooms smelled strongly of bootblack.
    Hudspeth and I wrestled for a while with a supper of stringy long-horn beef and vegetables taken from what was left of the colonel’s wife’s garden, which was brought in to us by a seasoned-looking horse soldier, then we gave up and pushed our plates aside. Only Jac, his teeth and gums toughened by years of gnawing at leather-tough pemmican, went on eating. His chewing and the ticking of the clock on the mantel were the loudest sounds for some time. Outside, the boards on the porch creaked beneath the shifting weight of our restless guard.
    â€œThis is your stamping ground, Jac,” Hudspeth said finally. The sound of a human voice after all that silence made me jump. “Where’s the best place around here for a bunch of injuns to hole up?”
    â€œThe possibilities are endless.” The old métis dipped a spoon in the gravy on his plate and began drawing lines on the bare surface of the table. “There are many buttes and sheltered washes, any one of which would serve Ghost Shirt’s purpose. The best is here, just west of the James River.” He made a wet X on the other side of the line that represented the body of water. “An abandoned mission, once used by Mormons and built to withstand fierce attack. Twenty well-armed braves could stand off an army from its battlements for months.”
    â€œYou think that’s it?”
    He shrugged. “Who is to say? If he is the brilliant chief the stories claim he is, that is where he will be. But I have never met him, and so I have nothing else on which to base my judgment.”
    â€œI’ve heard them same stories, so there must be something to ’em. I’ll gamble on it. Murdock?”
    â€œI’m in the pot.” I had gotten up from the table to listen for the guard. I laid my hand upon one of the rock-solid timbers that held up the wall of our prison. “Now all we have to do is figure out a way to get past the guard, fight our way through a hundred or so armed troopers, and scale a sixteen-foot wall. I hope one of you has something in mind, because I’m fresh out of suggestions.”
    â€œ ‘The foolish despise wisdom and instruction,’ ” quoted Pere Jac approvingly. Something in the way he said it made Hudspeth and me look at him. Smiling, he was tracing pagan symbols absent-mindedly on the table with the edge of his spoon.

Chapter Six
    They made quite a pile, the lighter items such as Mrs. Broderick’s lace curtains and the sheets and ticking from the beds on the bottom with the colonel’s heavy uniforms and whatever else we could find that would burn heaped on top. Hudspeth and I