Novel 1966 - Kilrone (v5.0) (2 page)

Command? What did one do with three troops? Three?…

“My God!” He came to his feet, his face drawn and bloodless. “M Troop…they were to rendezvous with I Troop on the North Fork!”

Barney Kilrone held himself up by the edge of the desk, and his brain struggled against fatigue, for he was all in. He thought of M Troop riding across country, a tired lot of men, riding to a meeting with a company of the vanquished, a company of the dead…and who would keep that rendezvous?

The Bannocks!

Discipline, the habit of soldiering, began to shape its pattern in the mind of Major Frank Paddock. His thoughts began to take formation. He had no plan, of course, to meet this eventuality, but he knew the things to be considered, the responsibilities that were his. M Troop must be warned…somehow.

Two troops remained on the post, two troops comprising just seventy-two effectives, and the whole Bannock operation might be directed toward a piece-meal destruction of the garrison at the post. The Bannocks, led by a shrewd and careful fighter, had ambushed I Troop before they could effect the meeting with M Troop.

With the first troop destroyed, Medicine Dog could now move to ambush the second. If he was aware the post had been warned he would expect a relief force to come…and trust him to know just how many soldiers remained of the post complement, and how many could be spared to leave the fort. And how pitifully few would remain.

“It’s the post he wants,” Paddock said aloud. “He wants the ammunition, the guns, the food, and the horses. If he could draw enough of us away from the post he could strike here.…”

He broke off, and his eyes turned to Kilrone. “Barney, how did you get here? Were you seen?”

“If I’d been seen I wouldn’t be here. Unless they return to the scene of the fight and see my tracks around, they can’t know.”

“Unless they let you come on purpose to draw another troop away from the post.” He sank back into his chair.

It was time for a decision, and Frank Paddock had no decision. He needed time…time. Everything would depend on what he decided. If the troop he sent to the relief of M Troop was caught before it could effect a meeting and was itself destroyed, then the post would be helpless before such an attack as the Bannocks could mount.

For the first time he became aware of the condition of the man across the desk. At once he was on his feet. “Come on, Barney—you’re all in. Come to my quarters.”

Kilrone held back. “Take me to the barracks. To the stables…not to your quarters.”

“Now you’re being the fool.” Paddock took Kilrone’s arm. In a way, he thought, it would be better to have it over. After all the years of waiting it would be a relief.

Betty Considine saw them come out the door, and she came up quickly. “Major Paddock, can I be of help?”

A fourth person might make it easier.…“All right,” he said. “Glad to have you. I know he needs rest, and he seems to have been wounded.”

At Paddock’s quarters, it was Betty who opened the door, and she saw the expression on Denise Paddock’s face when she glimpsed the stranger. She seemed to stiffen, then pale, but she was at once composed. “This way,” she said.

She led the way to the spare bedroom and helped her husband draw off the brush-scratched, desert-worn boots. It was she who noted the blood-stained collar and located the wound. Betty, looking past Denise, saw the dressing on the wound. “He escaped from the Indians?” she asked.

Kilrone, who had kept on his feet until they entered the room, had collapsed at the bedside and now lay on the bed unconscious.

“Why do you ask that?”

“That’s an Indian dressing. I’ve seen them before.”

Paddock looked down at the man on the bed. No, he was not really unconscious, merely sleeping heavily. An Indian had dressed that wound…and he had denied being seen by the Bannocks.

Denise had removed the dressing, and Paddock stared at the puckering wound. “That’s not fresh,” he said.

“Three days,” Betty guessed. “Maybe four.” She had helped her uncle treat too many injured men in these past few years not to know.

An Indian dressing on a wound, and no friendly Indian within miles. A wound several days old, and he had come from the heart of Indian country.

Suppose—one had to suppose everything—suppose the man was a renegade? What better way to scatter the forces of a post and leave it helpless?

Paddock told himself he must forget all he had known of Captain Barnes Kilrone in the past. Nor must he think now of Denise. There was too little time. He had a decision to make.

Captain Mellett and the forty-seven men of M Troop would reach the North Fork by sundown tomorrow. It was doubtful if the Bannocks would attack before daylight the following morning. There was always the possibility that some survivor of the massacre of I Troop would get through to Mellett with a warning, but that was an outside chance. Mellett was a seasoned officer, sure to be careful, but even the best of men could be trapped.

Every minute of delay put Mellet closer to probable death by ambuscade. Between Mellett’s troop and possible massacre stood only the judgment of Major Frank Paddock. And to send out a troop to relieve Mellett would leave the post vulnerable to attack, practically helpless.

His decision had to rest on the word of one man—a man who perhaps could not be trusted…or could he?

Paddock stepped out into the heat and dust of the compound and closed the door behind him. If he could get another troop into position to hit the Bannocks as they attacked Mellett, he would have them between two fires and might wipe them out. It was a challenging thought. This could be enough to erase all his past failures.

But it involved a problem almost too difficult for him to come to grips with—a problem full of uncertainties. Could he get K Troop in position in time to help Mellett? Dare he accept the risk of leaving the post exposed to attack? Suppose the Bannocks had already foreseen that possibility, and even now might have the bulk of their men ready for an attack on the post and its few remaining soldiers?…Or K Troop might fail to reach Mellett in time, and be trapped themselves.

He went back to his desk and stared at the map on the wall. It was ninety miles to the North Fork, and K Troop would have no more than thirty-six hours in which to cover the distance, all of it rough, dangerous country where the enemy might be encountered at any moment.

His thoughts returned to the man who was the source of his information.

What was Captain Barney Kilrone, once considered the most dashing and romantic officer in the Army, doing in Nevada, looking and acting like a renegade?

He, Frank Bell Paddock, had changed, and he knew why; but what had happened to Barney Kilrone?

Chapter 2

F
ROM HIS DESK Paddock could look out of three windows, each offering a different view, and he liked none of them.

From one window he could see the mountains, their lower slopes bare of trees. They were beautiful in their aloof loneliness, but he had no feeling for their beauty, nor for the sweep of plain he saw from the window on the other side—flat, open country stretching to the horizon. Straight before him was a window beside the door that led to the outer office, and from this window he could look out on the parade ground, and could see the doors of the buildings along either side.

Thus, from his desk he could see everyone who moved out there, including those who came and went from his own house, and they were not many. He detested this bleak and lonely post, and he was positive that Denise felt as he did.

She, who had been the center of attention in Paris and Vienna, had only two friends here: Betty Considine, of course, and Stella Rybolt, wife of Lieutenant August Rybolt. There was, he admitted reluctantly, one other friend Denise had, one of whom he disapproved.

Mary Tall Singer was an Indian girl, a Shoshone who had acquired an education when as a child she had attracted the attention of yet another lonely Army wife. For lack of something else to do, the Colonel’s wife had taken the pretty Indian girl into her home, taught her to read, write, and sew, to conduct herself as a lady, and to appreciate literature. By one means or another Mary had acquired books and had read them—from children’s books, easily read, she had before long moved on to the better novels, and to history and poetry.

She now worked as a clerk, assisting the sutler. He was a sober, serious man who had profited by her advice in his dealings with the Indians, and who respected her intelligence and paid her as much as he would have paid a man doing the same job.

Her status at the post was peculiar. Despite the fact that she was an Indian, single and very pretty, she was treated as a white woman in the same position might have been treated. That this was so was due not only to her position in the sutler’s eyes, but to the fact, well known, that she was a friend of Denise Paddock.

Frank Bell Paddock continued to stare gloomily out of the window. He was thinking that Denise had succeeded where he had failed, for at this lonely outpost she had created a world of her own in which she held her position calmly and with assurance. The senior officer at the post was a bachelor, hence Denise had become official hostess at whatever social events were possible.

The fact that she was resented by the other officers’ wives on the post disturbed her not in the least, nor did the fact that they tried to look down on her because of her friendship with Mary Tall Singer.

In Stella Rybolt and Betty Considine she had friends who felt as she did about Mary as well as about much else. Stella Rybolt was a veteran of half a dozen army posts, and she knew all the tricks of making do. Long ago she had accepted the fact that her husband would never be more than a company commander, and she was unconcerned about it. Gus Rybolt was a good, steady man who loved his wife and his duty; he held to regulations, but knew when to look the other way when others did not, just as long as it did not affect the morale of his own men or the safety of the post.

Stella Rybolt had lived twenty-eight of her forty-five years on army posts, most of them on the frontier. She knew the regulations and accepted them as a fact of life, just the same as the rising and the setting of the sun; hence she had no quarrel with the army. She loved the West and its people, but had looked warily at first on Denise Paddock. Knowing Denise’s background, she had half expected her to be a snob. But the first day Denise had smiled, held out her hand, and said, “Mrs. Rybolt, I am new to this post. Don’t let me make any mistakes.”

The following morning the coffee sessions had begun, the first at Stella Rybolt’s, the second at Dr. Hanlon’s; and by the third day Denise was sufficiently settled to have them at her quarters, and the others were envious of the grace and beauty she had given them.

Denise had made the best of each situation as it came, and never was there a word of complaint from her.

Frank Paddock gnawed now at his mustache. He had never liked this country, and one of the reasons he had not liked it was because it symbolized his defeat.

Nobody had started better than he. Nobody was given a better chance to succeed. The year he graduated the betting was that he would be the first in his class to make general, and no takers. Yet here he was, at an almost forgotten post, an almost forgotten man.

But now there was a chance, the first chance in a long time, the last chance he might ever have. If he could ride out there and trap the Bannocks, if he could score a smashing defeat…

It was all he would need. He had a friend, a newspaperman who was now traveling in the West, and he was a man to make much of such a story.

There might be a promotion, there might be a recall to some eastern post. He well knew what an opportunity like that could do for a man. And the chance was here.

At this moment he wanted a drink badly. The bottle was there, nearly full, in his bottom drawer, within reach of his hand. Yet he did not reach for it.

Ambitious he might be, but he was still a soldier, and he was in command. Whatever he did must be done with the utmost skill; and he must take no chance that he could not later explain.

I Troop was gone, Colonel Webb was dead. These things he accepted as fact. Kilrone might be a renegade, but he was not willing to believe it. Nonetheless, it was a thought he must keep in mind.

Mellett would be going into bivouac by now. Trust Mellett to choose his spot well, to select a good defensive position, and to scout the country around while it was still light.

The Bannocks would not attack while he was in position, for they knew what kind of a soldier Mellett was. They would try to catch him on the move, preferably near the point of rendezvous, and until that moment they would keep out of sight. So Paddock had a little time.

He already knew that he would lead the relief force himself. His opportunity lay in victory in the field, not from a desk.

Desperately, he wished for Gus Rybolt. If Rybolt were only here he could leave him in command at the post. He was tough, dependable, every inch a soldier. But Lieutenant Rybolt had gone to Halleck with a guard of six men to escort the pay wagon, and he was not due back for three days. By that time the emergency would have passed, and all would be settled, one way or the other…

Paddock knew that for a victory, a really decisive victory, he would need every man he could get. He made up his mind then to strip the post. A man had to gamble, and he was going to gamble that the Bannocks wanted to take Mellett and M Troop, and that they would not attempt an attack on the post. Carefully he avoided thinking of the alternative. He even avoided thinking of Denise, except to think that he was doing this for her.