Chieftain (Historical Romance) by Nan Ryan Page A

stop and catch her breath. Hands clasping her side, she frowned with dismay. Now she was certain of what she had only suspected before.
    Lois Harkins was having an illicit affair with the very married Captain Daniel Wilde!

Seven
    I n the coolgray of the breaking October dawn, a solitary soldier came out of the silent, darkened barracks.
    Brass bugle tucked under his arm, campaign hat on his head, uniform neatly pressed, the young trooper yawned, then stepped down off the barracks porch and into the empty quad.
    He turned and headed in a northwesterly direction, passing the rows of darkened sandstone troopers’ barracks. Opposite the barracks, directly across the wide quadrangle, was officers row. In the center of the line of the officers’ quarters stood the commanding officer’s residence.
    At the southernmost end of the parade ground were the administration, quartermaster and clerk’s offices. And, set alone and apart from the offices but bordering the parade ground, was the one-room schoolhouse.
    The various buildings formed a rectangle around the fort’s large parade ground, where, at the center, a flagpole rose to meet the Oklahoma sky.
    Behind the enlisted-mens’ barracks was the school-teacher’s cottage. The bakery. The regimental hospital. The post surgeon’s residence. The chapel. The mess hall. The ordnance, quartermaster and commissary warehouses. In back of the warehouses was “Suds Row,” where the laundresses were quartered.
    Farther on outwere the stables. A big hay field. A well-tended garden patch that supplied fresh fruits and vegetables to the troops and the officers’ wives. Many of those wives could frequently be seen out in the garden, hoe in hand, bonnet on head, weeding the various vines. Or, down on their knees, skirts ballooning, basket over one arm, picking produce.
    Directly outside the fort was a growing civilian community. A general mercantile store that doubled as the stage station. A tailor shop. A blacksmith. An apothecary. A card-and-billards parlor. An undertaker.
    No saloons.
    Saloons were strictly against government policy on a reservation. But liquor was readily available nonetheless, no matter how hard the Indian agent, Double Jimmy, and the army tried to put a stop to its flow.
    In a couple of back rooms in the false-fronted businesses lining the wooden sidewalks, shot glasses of whiskey were served to paying patrons on makeshift rough plank bars that could be easily dismantled and hidden away at the drop of a hat.
    Drunkenness was not all that uncommon. Occasionally there were knife fights and shootings, usually involving the shiftless, ne’er-do-well white troublemakers who hung around the fort.
    East of thefort were the buildings of the Comanche-Kiowa Indian agency. Double Jimmy lived there in a small two-room cottage. Similar dwellings housed other agency employees. Near the modest residences were a corn grinder, a sawmill and an Indian goods warehouse.
    Still farther out and stretching in every direction as far as the eye could see were the conical buffalo-hide tepees of the reservation tribes.
    On this very early Monday morning, the fort, the civilian community, the agency and the vast reservation were all quiet. Everyone was sleeping.
    Private Preston Calame, bugle in hand, stepped into position beneath the parade ground’s flagpole. He licked his dry lips, drew a long, deep breath, raised the bugle to his mouth and blew the rousing notes of reveille.
    The fort was bugle-blasted to life.
    Maggie’s eyes flew open after the first couple of notes from Private Calame’s horn. Her cottage, just around the corner of the bakery, was near the parade ground. Pistol, dozing before the door, instantly awakened, jumped up and barked a cheerful good morning to his sleepy mistress.
    “Be quiet!” Maggie scolded, then groaned and snuggled farther down into the warm bedcovers. She closed her eyes and sighed. Then yelped and sat up straight when Pistol raced across the room,