The Searchers by LeMay Alan

Author:LeMay, Alan [LeMay, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Leisure Books
Published: 2009-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Daylight still held as Mart and Amos approached the cavalry camp, but it was getting dark by the time they were all the way in. The troopers on duty were red-eyed, but with a harsh edge on their manners, after the night they had spent. An outlying vedette passed them into a dismounted sentry, who called the corporal of the guard, who delivered them to the sergeant of the guard, who questioned them with more length than point before digging up a second lieutenant who was Officer of the Day. The lieutenant also questioned them, though more briefly. He left them standing outside a supply tent for some time, while he explained them to a Major Kinsman, Adjutant.

The major stuck a shaggy head out between the tent flaps, looked them over with the blank stare of fatigue, and spat tobacco juice into the snow.

“My name,” Amos began again, patiently, “is—”

“Huntin’ captives, huh?” The shaggy head was followed into the open by a huge frame in a tightly buttoned uniform. “Let’s see if we got any you know.” Major Kinsman led the way, not to another tent, but to the wagon park. They followed him as he climbed into the wagonbed of a covered ambulance.

Under a wagon sheet, which the adjutant drew back, several bodies lay straight and neatly aligned, ice-rigid in the cold. In the thickening dark inside the ambulance, Mart could see little more than that they were there, and that one or two seemed to be children.

“Have a light here in a minute,” Major Kinsman said. “Orderly’s filling a lantern.”

Mart Pauley could hear Amos’ heavy breathing, but not his own; he did not seem able to breathe in here at all. A dreadful conviction came over him, increasing as they waited, that they had come to the end of their search. It seemed a long time before a lighted lantern was thrust aside.

The bodies were those of two women and two little boys. The older of the women was in rags, but the younger and smaller one wore clean clothes that had certainly belonged to her, and shoes that were scuffed but not much worn. She appeared to have been about twenty, and was quite beautiful in a carved-snow sort of way. The little boys were perhaps three and seven.

“Both women shot in the back of the head,” Major Kinsman said, objectively. “Flash-burn range. Light charge of powder, as you see. The little boys got their skulls cracked. We think this woman here is one taken from a Santa Fe stagecoach not many days back.... Know any of them?”

“Never saw them before,” Amos said.

Major Kinsman looked at Mart for a separate reply, and Mart shook his head.

They went back to the supply tent, and the adjutant took them inside. The commanding officer was there, sorting through a great mass of loot with the aid of two sergeants and a company clerk. The adjutant identified his superior as Colonel Russell M. Hannon. They had heard of him, but never seen him before; he hadn’t been out here very long.

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