Page 36 of For This We Are Soldiers
“Consider the men you lead, sir,” Hiram said quietly. “That’s all I ask.”
Shaw turned his horse away. He stayed that way a long time. When he turned around, Hiram saw resignation, but also heretofore unseen resolution.
“Let’s go find those miserable sinners, Sergeant,” he said and they moved together toward the escort.
A
It took them two days, but they found four of the five miscreants, terrified now because one of their number had been killed by Lakota braves frisky after a winter on the reservation. They found them because Lieutenant Shaw had thought through the matter and gathered his little escort about him.
He showed them the memo, which impressed Hiram. “Gaither, O’Neal, Hales, Carter, and Wizner. Do any of you know these men?”
Fort Fetterman was a small garrison. Everyone knew the deserters as recent recruits from Eastern cities. “They don’t know as much as we do about Indians and for sure not horses, sir,” the corporal said. The other troopers laughed in that superior way of horsemen.
Hiram smiled to himself, pleased to know that C Company’s veteran troopers had just included their Boston-bred lieutenant into the fraternity of battle-tried western soldiers, whether he knew it or not.
“What do you think they’ll do?” Shaw asked the corporal, then included the privates in his question by looking around the little group.
Hiram knew. A glance at his corporal assured him that the men knew their sergeant knew too. They also seemed to understand what was at stake here in the education of an officer becoming fit to lead.
“They’ll head for the Laramie Mountains, sure enough, sir,” the corporal continued, as the troopers nodded. “That’s the quickest way to the railroad.”
“And the stupidest, sir,” offered a private. Everyone laughed and the bond deepened.
“But they don’t know horses and they don’t know Indians,” the corporal continued. “We’ll track them easy enough and find them afoot, sir.” His face grew serious. “If we’re lucky, we’ll find them before any reservation jumpers do.”
And so they left the easy road to Fort Laramie and turned west and then south toward the mountains. Lieutenant Shaw took a moment to acquaint a more-sober Captain Perkins with the change of plans. He came back to Sergeant Chandler, plainly disgusted.
“That paymaster is a disgrace to the uniform, Sergeant,” he said. Hiram gave a silent cheer to hear such a sentiment from the man he had almost been ready to discount as a disgrace, as well.
They made a dry camp that night and rose early in the morning, quiet and determined. An hour after sunrise, following Indian sign now, they heard gunfire to the south at the base of the mountains. It was short work to ride down a handful of hostiles biding their time taking occasional pot shots at four men in a buffalo wallow, most of their horses dead around them, and one of their number. Two Lakota went down under a few well-aimed carbines—C Company was noted for its marksmen—and the rest scattered, gone for good, or at least for now.
Captain Perkins had taken real exception to storing the dead man in his ambulance. Hiram quietly suggested to his lieutenant that they bury the man deep and leave a stone as a marker. Shaw agreed.
Perkins also objected to filling his personal ambulance with saddles from dead horses and two of the deserters, but Shaw ignored him. The remaining two deserters, hands tied together, sat on the one surviving horse. They were quiet, chastened, and relieved to be alive.
A
Fort Fetterman’s escort of the paymaster arrived at Fort Laramie in the late afternoon of June 6. Swearing all manner of recriminations for abuse to his person and vowing lengthy letters to department headquarters in Omaha, and other luminaries higher up the chain of command, Captain Perkins took his leave. No one complained.
The deserters went to the guardhouse. A quiet word from Sergeant Chandler to the duty sergeant sent four other jailbirds under a guard to sluice out the ambulance. A few words with the guard led to a note for a laundress, who took away Mrs. Coates’s soiled bedding to launder. Sergeant Chandler paid for her services out of his own pocket.
“Sergeant, care to walk with me to the Dunlaps?”
“Not certain I’m that brave, sir,” Hiram said honestly.
“Well, walk a little ways with me,” Lieutenant Shaw said, and it sounded more like an order.
They started across the parade ground to Officers Row, but the lieutenant stopped by the flagpole. Hiram looked around, suspecting that Shaw wanted to be out of hearing of the others. He braced himself for the tirade to come. He knew he had worked over the lieutenant and knew that other shoe was destined to drop.
Lieutenant Shaw looked down at his boots. When he raised his eyes to Hiram’s, the sergeant saw something else, and took heart.
“I could have been really stupid two days ago,” Shaw said. “Thanks to you, I wasn’t.”
Hiram made some motion with his hand, startled to hear Shaw’s apology. “It’s part of my job, sir.” He chuckled. “Captain Harvey told me to keep an eye on you.”
“He told me that too,” Shaw continued, following his words with a rueful expression. “He told me, by gadfreys, to listen to my sergeant, because he knew more than I did.” Shaw ducked his head again. “I’ll confess that his words stung.”
He looked up and Hiram saw the resolution he had noted so briefly, back down the trail. “I wanted to ignore you, but you wouldn’t let me.”
