Stamping Ground by Loren D. Estleman Page A

light glinted off gold epaulets on the square shoulders of the man in the middle. A hammer was thumbed back with a brittle crunch. Late, but persuasive as hell. Hudspeth returned the trooper, a callow youth with blond hair and freckles, to his feet. He put several yards between himself and the marshal as quickly as possible.
    â€œHands up, all of you.”
    We did as directed, raising our open palms above our shoulders. Hudspeth was last to comply.
    â€œNow suppose you tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.”
    â€œWe’re federal officers,” growled Hudspeth, after a pause. “I’m Hudspeth. The mean-looking one is Murdock. Here from Bismarck on the injun problem. I got a letter from Abel Flood, federal judge for the territory of Dakota,for Colonel Broderick.” He started to reach inside his coat but stopped when all three rifles rattled.
    â€œKeep your hands up!” The command was metallic. “Colonel Broderick is dead.”
    â€œI know. I wired you this morning to tell you we was coming.”
    The officer turned his head a fraction of an inch toward the soldier Hudspeth had just released. “Go to the telegraph shack. See if there’s a wire from someone named Hudspeth.” When the youth had gone: “The Indian. I suppose he’s a federal officer too.”
    â€œHe’s our guide, and I bet he’s got more white in him than you.”
    The pause that followed put an extra twist in the tension.
    â€œYou make a bad first impression, friend.” The words were bitten off.
    After about a year of silence, the trooper returned bearing a telegraph blank with a spike-hole in the center of it. The officer glanced at it, then handed it back. He lowered his rifle. At a signal from him the others followed suit a moment later. Then he spurred his big black forward into the water. He stopped in front of Hudspeth and ran his eyes over the three of us. They were brown eyes, with flecks of silver in them. His heavy brows were startlingly black in comparison, downward-drawn and prevented from running into each other only by a thin pucker line that went up until it disappeared beneath the forward tilt of his campaign hat. His beard too was black and cropped close to the skin so that it resembled General Grant’s. That came as no surprise. In spite of his dismal presidency, in spite of the endless congressional investigations that had hounded him during his last days in office and after, Grant was still the hero of Appomattox, the hard man on the white horse whose preference for whiskers had inspired men from New York to California to lay aside their razors. Among army officers there were two distinct types, the Grants and the Custers, and you didn’t venture into many posts without finding yourself virtually surrounded by either long-hairs in buckskinjackets or silent men who fingered their beards meaningfully when they could think of nothing significant to say.
    This officer—a major, now that I could make out his insignia away from the sun’s glare—had a long, one might say Roman, nose and the beginnings of jowls beneath his whiskers, which had undoubtedly contributed to his decision to grow them. The sun had burned his flesh to match the red Dakota dust on his saddle. His eyes were not the steely type one expected in men accustomed to command, but large and luminous and cowlike, strangely unintelligent—like Grant’s. His physique beneath the coarse blue tunic (buttoned to the neck, even in that heat) was powerful but beginning to loosen around the thighs and belly. I placed his age at about forty.
    His side arm was an Army Colt with a smooth wooden grip, the rifle he held across his lap, a Spencer. Like his uniform, both were covered with a skin of fine dust. Beneath him his horse was lathered and blowing.
    He took in my face, clothes, horse, the Deane-Adams in my holster, the Winchester in its scabbard, then went on for a similar