Merline Lovelace (8 page)

Another round of bugle calls brought the platoon from the stables behind the barracks. With bridles jingling and hooves thudding on the beaten earth, the squads assembled into a column of fours. First, the scouts in buckskin breeches, blue cavalry shirts and wide-brimmed hats decorated with feathers and
snakeskin bands. Then the drummers and trumpeters, followed by fifty mounted troops led by their officers. The wagons rolled along behind the troops.

“They’re going’ out in light marchin’ order,” the knowledgeable Mary informed Julia. “They’re only carryin’ a little more’n a hundred pounds o’gear apiece. The major likes to move fast, he does.”

To Julia’s untrained eye, it didn’t look as though these men were going out light. Each trooper had rolled spare clothes, an India rubber poncho, a blanket and a half tent at the front of his saddle. A forage sack with extra oats was lashed at the back. They rested atop bulging black leather saddlebags. Currycombs and horseshoe pouches hung from saddle straps, as did water canteens, mugs, coffeepots and skillets.

The troopers themselves presented a formidable appearance. Each was armed with a revolver, crossed ammunition belts and a long hunting knife, in addition to carbines in broad leather slings. Eyes shaded by broad-brimmed slouch hats, they rode erect and alert behind their officers and flag bearers.

The company pennants fluttered bravely in the breeze. Handkerchiefs waved in farewell. Wives called out to their husbands in a chorus of English, Gaelic, German, Norwegian and Sioux. Children and barking dogs raced alongside the column. As the troops trotted past, Andrew issued a command and the regimental band struck up a lively air.

“Oooch, it’s me favorite,” Mary exclaimed. Toes
tapping, hands clapping, she hummed along with the music.

I’m lonesome since I crossed the hill,

And o’er the moor and valley

Such heavy thoughts my heart do fill,

Since parting with m’Sally.

I seek for one as fair and gay,

But find none to remind me

How sweet the hours I passed away,

With the girl I left behind me.

One by one, the women picked up the chorus of the popular folk tune entitled, appropriately Julia thought, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Suddenly, a clear, male tenor soared out above the tramping hooves and jingling bridles.

Now I’m bound for Brighton camp

Kind heav’n then pray guide me

And send me safely back again,

To the girl I left behind me.

Goose bumps raised on Julia’s arms. Without quite knowing how it had happened, she found herself swept up in the emotion of the moment. Her heart thumping, she stood amid the other women, a good
number of whom were now daubing at their eyes with their handkerchiefs. For a moment they were all sisters, each watching, each worrying, each wondering if the men riding out would come back to them. Julia sought out Andrew’s erect figure. Without conscious thought, she murmured a brief, fervent prayer for his safe return.

No one moved until the column had climbed the sloping incline that led to the bluffs. The lilting strains faded on the morning air. Disturbed by the lump that had formed just under her breast, Julia lifted her skirts with one hand and looked around for her daughter. Her light brown ringlets were nowhere to be seen.

“Do you see Suzanne?” she asked Mary.

Rising up on tiptoe, the sergeant’s wife peered around. “There she is.”

Julia followed her pointing arm to the two girls standing in the shade of one of the barracks’ buildings. A wary Suzanne held her precious doll close to her chest while a dark-haired sprite in a fringed buckskin shirt and calico skirt reached out a tentative finger to trace its porcelain features.

“Do you know that girl with her?”

“Oooch, everyone on post knows Little Hen. She’s a sweetheart, don’t y’know? She won’t lead Suzanne into mischief.”

“It’s more likely to be the other way around,” Julia drawled. “Does Little Hen live here in camp?”

“To be sure, she does. Her father’s an Arapaho
scout in Company C. Her mither’s a Brulé Sioux by the name of Walks In Moonlight.”

Although unfamiliar with the customs of the native tribes, Julia had somehow formed the impression that the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho didn’t intermarry.

“Not usually,” Mary confirmed. “I think the story is Lone Eagle stole Walks In Moonlight from her band. She fell in love with him, and begged her father to let her to stay with him. I think she’s a cousin or some such to Yellow Buckskin Girl.”

“Chief Spotted Tail’s daughter?”

“D’you know about her, then?”

“Andrew…Major Garrett…mentioned her name yesterday, when we walked by the river.”

“Did he now?”

The odd note in Mary’s voice drew a questioning look from Julia. “He said he knew her.”

“To be sure he did.”

Curious about the woman whose coffin rested on the raised scaffolding in the cemetery, Julia probed for a little more information.

“She was a beauty,” Mary confided. “’N proud, too. Whenever her father came to treat with the commander, she’d ride about the post on one of her white ponies, all decked out in beadwork and feathers. Half the troopers were hot for her, me own Donovan included, but she had eyes only for one.”

Her sideways glance told Julia exactly who that “one” was.

“She was sickly, though. It was the lung disease that took her, I’m told. Everyone was surprised to hear she wanted to be buried here, at the fort. Her father wrapped her body and put it on a travois. One o’the other of her ponies pulled the little cortege for fifteen days until Spotted Tail and his band reached Fort Laramie. The whole post turned out for the funeral, don’t y’know?”

“No,” Julia murmured. “I didn’t.”

“They wrapped her in a white buffalo skin ’n placed her in a pine coffin. The band played a funeral dirge that brought tears to me eyes, I can tell you, when they raised her on the scaffolding.”

Her bosom heaving, Mary concluded her tale with a sigh.

“The post chaplain said the words, and her friends left gifts for her to take with her to the next world. Colonel Maynadier, the post commander at the time, presented a pair of leather gauntlets to keep her hands warm on the journey. The major…”

She paused, sending another quick glance toward her companion.

“The major?” Julia echoed.

“The major tucked something wrapped in oilcloth among the rest of the gifts. It disappeared soon after, along with most of the other presents. To this day, no one knows what it was.”

An odd, prickly sensation formed in Julia’s chest. It took a moment for her to recognize the feeling for
what it was. When she did, disgust rippled through her.

She couldn’t be jealous of a dead woman. She had no right to be jealous of
any
woman Andrew might have taken a special liking to over the years…even though he’d thought himself still married to Julia.

Still, she couldn’t dismiss an irrational, illogical and quite ridiculous sense of pique as she called to Suzanne and made her way back to Suds Row.

A
s the days passed, Andrew occupied Julia’s thoughts more than she wanted to admit—particularly at night.

With Suzanne tucked beside her on the rustling, straw-filled mattress, she lay awake, swatting at mosquitoes while her mind drifted from Andrew to Philip and back again with irritating inconstancy. They were so different, her two husbands, and yet alike in ways that caused Julia more than one twinge of acute discomfort.

Both were handsome rogues. Both had appeared in her life at a time she was particularly vulnerable. Both had deserted her, one to slip back through the Confederate lines to carry vital shipping information to his spymasters in Washington, the other to follow the tide of dreamers who thought to make their fortunes in Montana’s gold fields.

Yet for all their seeming similarities, their differences ran bone deep. Philip would stake his fortune—
and the welfare of his wife and daughter—on the next turn of the cards. Andrew, Julia was coming to grudgingly admit, took his responsibilities very seriously. He’d displayed more concern for her and Suzanne in the short time they’d been at Fort Laramie than Philip had in years. Wishing she could empty her thoughts of both men, Julia tossed and turned and thumped the straw-stuffed pillow in irritation.

Thankfully, her work kept her too busy during the day to fret. She bent over the washtubs most mornings, but with half the company absent she found time in the afternoons to add a few feminine touches to her stark living quarters. Mary Donvan helped with both advice and an extra pair of hands. Maria Schnell came as well, bringing with her a length of cheerful, green-checked gingham for curtains.

Much to Julia’s surprise, Little Hen’s mother also appeared with a welcome gift late one summer evening. A tall, slender woman with the lustrous black eyes and thick braids of her people, she wore an exquisitely beaded and fringed buckskin shirt belted over her blue calico skirt. As reserved and quiet as the daughter who tagged at her heels, Walks In Moonlight declined all offers of refreshments.

“I came only to bring you this.” With a shy smile, she passed Julia a thick bundle. “It is the same in army quarters as in a tipi. A woman has few places to store things.”

Unfolded, the bundle proved to be a fringed calfskin pouch. Porcupine quills and thousands of the tiny
Italian glass beads carried to the plains by traders had been worked into a stunning pattern of red, white and green.

“I can’t take this,” Julia protested, awed by the artisanship. “It’s far too fine.”

“It is a gift,” Walks In Moonlight replied with simple dignity. “One I have made with my own hands, to thank the mother of Suz-anne for inviting Little Hen into her home.”

“Little Hen is welcome any time.”

“Not all would say this.”

No, Julia was forced to admit silently, they wouldn’t. She’d resided at the fort long enough to know most of the whites shared Colonel Cavanaugh’s dislike of the Indians. Too many troopers had lost friends, too many wives had worried and wept as husbands rode off to relieve garrisons under attack or to seek retribution for a raid.

Even those Indians considered nonhostile often were treated with contempt. Many of those who lived across the river had camped at the post so long they’d become known as the Laramie Loafers. Descendents or relatives of the scouts and interpreters employed by the Army, they made a precarious living by running errands for the troopers, hunting game, selling pelts to the sutler or, as Maria Schnell had explained to Julia, offering services no decent woman should talk about.

The Loafers were despised by their Sioux brethren on the plains, who’d rather war to the death than live
on the white man’s bounty. Likewise, they were scorned by the Crow and Arapaho scouts, traditional enemies of the Sioux. Julia could only imagine how difficult it must be for a proud Brulé Sioux like Walks In Moonlight to live among the dregs of her tribe and the enemies of her people.

She must love the warrior who stole her from her band very much, Julia thought, suppressing a twinge of envy for the calm serenity in the woman’s face.

“Thank you for the gift. As you said, there’s next to no storage in these quarters. I can certainly make good use of this pouch.”

“You are welcome.”

Julia was tempted to ask her about her cousin, Yellow Buckskin Girl, but Walks In Moonlight left before she could decide how to introduce the topic.

This one was different, the Sioux thought as she made her way along the row of houses. This Julia Bon-neaux looked out at the world with eyes as yet undimmed by the tears and grief that came to so many women—white and red—whose lives were inextricably bound with those of the horse soldiers.

And yet, if the rumors were true, Suz-anne’s mother had once been the major’s woman. Walks In Moonlight had heard the gossip. The residents of the tipis across the river enjoyed a juicy tale as much as the residents of the post. Although she knew each woman must find her own way, Walks In Moonlight couldn’t imagine leaving the major’s bed for an
other’s. He had a brave heart, a true heart. Lone Eagle trusted him, as he did few others.

At the thought of her husband, so fierce, so proud, a smile feathered her heart. How she’d fought him! Those first weeks and months after he’d stolen her in a raid on her village, she’d clawed his face, left teeth marks on his neck and arms, called down every curse she knew on his head. Once, she’d snatched away his hunting knife and had come within an inch of disemboweling him.

He’d kept her, despite the urging of his band to let the wild one go. Despite the scratches and teeth marks. Despite the threat of savage retribution by her uncle, Spotted Tail. Lone Eagle had ridden out alone to meet Spotted Tail and returned bloodied and battered. But he’d paid the outrageous bride price Walks In Moonlight had insisted was her worth, and he’d kept her.

From that day on, she’d shared his bed. For him, she’d forsaken her own band. For him, she lived here, in the shadow of the white man’s fort, and endured the small indignities that came her way every day. Like the stares and muttered comments that marked her progress.

Head high, face expressionless, she tucked her daughter’s hand firmly in hers and made her way to her tipi.

Women weren’t the only visitors Julia received during her first weeks on Suds Row.

Private Rafferty showed up at regular intervals, as did Andrew’s striker, a short, wiry private with coal black hair and a pugnacious chin. Bowery-born and a New Yorker to the soles of his boots, Private O’Shea’s bristling air made Suzanne nervous at first. He overcame her timidity by presenting her with a gift that almost displaced her precious doll in her affections—a squiggly little prairie dog pup. With Julia’s reluctant permission, the striker hunkered down on his heels and held out the shoebox he’d lined with bits of wool from the scratchy army-issue blankets.

“One of the horses stomped on the mother during drill this morning,” he told the wide-eyed five-year-old. “This little one was squeaking fit to beat the band. Mind you keep it away from the dogs outside. They’ll make a treat of it.”

“I will,” the girl promised solemnly as she took the box he handed her. She poked a tentative finger at the furry creature, squealing when it wrapped its tiny paws around the tip.

“I’m going to call her Daisy,” she announced.

“But we don’t know it’s a her, darling.”

“It doesn’t matter. She’s the same color as the inside of a flower,” Suzanne explained earnestly.

“Oh, well. In that case…”

“Can I go show Little Hen, Mama?”

“Yes, of course.”

A delighted Suzanne scampered out. Between the pup, the relative freedom she enjoyed on the protected post and the fast friendship she’d formed with Little
Hen, the girl’s dislike of her new surroundings was slowly subsiding.

Gradually Julia, too, became more and more absorbed in daily life at Fort Laramie. Since the officers’ wives didn’t quite know how to receive her, and the other laundresses had yet to fully accept the “lady” in their midst, she occupied a sort of social no-man’s-land. Yet sufficient activities occurred on the post that crossed all lines and ranks to keep her busy.

An amateur theatrical group formed by talent drawn from all ranks put on melodramas and minstrel shows that thrilled their audiences. Company teams waged fierce battles on baseball and cricket fields during long summer evenings, cheered on by enthusiastic supporters. Church services were held on Sundays in the post administration building, and once a week a former college professor who’d succumbed to the lure of the West and enlisted as a trooper conducted lectures on botany and butterflies in the library. Hops, formal dress dances and even masked balls often filled the night with music. Julia received numerous invitations, but, remembering the near disaster of her first hop, refused most.

The Fourth of July came and went with a dress parade, a lively band concert, fireworks and a drunken brawl at Coffee’s saloon that resulted in one dead trooper, a number of severely injured buffalo skinners and several soiled doves with cuts from flying bottles.
A mounted troop from the post had to be called out to quell riot.

The brawl provided the laundresses with considerable fodder for gossip. In their brutally frank way, they aired both their opinions of the women who serviced the troopers for a dollar a poke and their relief that the boyos found some outlet for their juices. Names like Fat Sarah, One-Eyed Sue and Calamity Jane were bandied back and forth across the washtubs.

Calamity Jane’s exploits as Indian scout, buffalo hunter and enterprising prostitute astounded Julia, but she now realized the women on the frontier led lives that would astonish most Easterners. Even the women on the post enjoyed freedoms and responsibilities that were unheard of in the rigid societies they’d come from.

Wives of the businessmen and hoteliers streaming into Wyoming in the wake of the railroaders appeared to value their independence as well. Already there was talk of designating this area as a separate territory, with its capital in the new city of Cheyenne that had sprung up to the south. The delegation that had traveled back East to petition Congress for territorial designation had included among its articles of incorporation the shocking proposal that women in Wyoming be enfranchised with the vote.

Yet Julia didn’t really appreciate the differences between the society she’d left and her life on the post until almost two weeks after Andrew had ridden out.
To the shrill delight of everyone on the post, the regimental paymaster arrived. Escorted by a heavily armed patrol, his armored wagon rattled down the hill just before noon.

“It’s near on to two months since we were paid,” an excited Mary Donovan exclaimed, shooing Julia inside to take off her apron and tidy her hair. “Hurry now, dearie. You’ll need to be there when your squad steps up to the line.”

“Can we come, Mama?” Suzanne danced at Julia’s side, Little Hen trailing a step or two behind. “We can take Daisy, too. See, Little Hen and I made her a collar and a leash out of a scrap of calico.”

Smiling at the sight of the pup wiggling at the end of a colorful string, Julia glanced from her daughter to her dark-eyed playmate. As Mary had indicated, Little Hen was a sweetheart. Her glossy black braids hung past her waist, and her shy smiles lit up her round, chubby face. Invariably neat in her beautifully beaded buckskin shirts and calico skirts, she made a perfect companion for Suzanne, who even her doting mama recognized possessed a tendency toward prissiness.

“Best leave them here,” Mary advised with a shake of her head. “We’ll be standin’ in line for hours, waitin’ for our pay.”

“I’ll take you to the sutler’s store afterward,” Julia promised instead. “You can pick out your own licorice twists or peppermint sticks.”

“And a sugar cracker for Daisy?”

“I don’t know if prairie dogs like sugar crackers,
ma petite.
”

“This one does,” Suzanne declared firmly.

“All right, a sugar cracker for Daisy.”

With the promise of those delicious treats dancing before their eyes, the girls happily retreated inside the house.

Excitement crackled through the air like summer lightning as Julia hurried to the sun-baked parade ground with Mary. Trooper after trooper had already lined up behind their officers. Seated at a table flanked by guards, the paymaster doled out greenbacks as each man’s name was called. The pay of those not present to collect it was either issued to his legal wife if she possessed a signed authorization or locked away in the post strongbox.

As Mary had warned, paying the garrison proved to be a long, time-consuming process. Each private received his basic thirteen dollars a month. To that was added any additional monies for special duties, like hospital steward or company bugler. Then the paymaster had to deduct amounts owed the quartermaster for lost or damaged equipment, new uniforms or extra stores. He also deducted a dollar from each troop’s allotted share and four dollars from the officers’ to pay their laundress.

When her company had finally been processed, the paymaster called Julia forward and counted her pay into her hand. She moved slowly away from the table, staring down at the stack of bills in her palm.

“Oooch, I know it isn’t as much as the others have drawn,” Mary said consolingly, “but you’ve only been at it fer three weeks, don’t y’know?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Don’t feel bad, dearie. That’ll cover the supplies you’ve drawn from the quartermaster and leave a bit left over to buy Suzanne a nice treat at the sutler’s.”

“I don’t feel bad, truly. It’s just…well…I’ve never…”

Mary’s shrewd blue eyes filled with understanding. “You’ve never earned a fistful o’cash by the sweat o’yer brow, is that it?”

“I’ve never earned
any
amount of cash,” Julia admitted, closing her fist around the bills. “My father owned a shipping line and gave me all the pin money I could spend on fripperies and such. Even after he died and my uncle took over, I never lacked for funds.”

“Your husband—not the major, your second husband—is he swimming in lard, too?”