So it is always, if you listen to the music of the band. Down the street it swings, and the boys and the fools follow it, and there is a great and powerful uplift as the crowds cheer, as feet tap in cadence. Then suddenly your soul is gone with it—gone on ahead to wait for you in the memories where the old men live. The town is far behind, and those who waved you off have gone back home to loneliness and tears. The band is silent and there are no more parades. Only your soul to plod on after—to try to own again, once more before you die.

  “Effen it’s a homestead,” Tyree said, “it’s burnin’ down.”

  Captain MacAfee reined in, and the column rattled and jangled slowly to a stop behind him. Ross Pennell rode up to it from the rear. Brown acid smell of horses. Green acid smell of men. MacAfee sat straight-backed—a miniature man, delicate in bone, but long-limbed. His face was drawn so thinly across the frontal bones of his head that it was as if it had been laced up too tightly in back. His fleshless hands at fifty-six were gray talons, and there was not enough blood left in him, after the years of his service, to take the iridescent blue from his lips.

  “Mr. Pennell,” he spoke haltingly, “this is as far as I go,” and he sat there with his eyes closed, like marbles in his skull. Marbles covered with chicken skin. A worn-out man, old before his time, drained by the Colors, sitting his mount a thousand miles down the wastelands, staring at distant smoke with his eyes closed.

  “Please, sir, I beg your pardon?”

  MacAfee soughed his breath in heavily. “My left arm and leg went dead a ways back—” his voice was thickening and the words were falling clumsily out of his slackened mouth “—and now I’ve gone blind.”

  “Hold steady, sir; I’ll dismount you.”

  “Mr. Pennell, there are only three things to remember out here. Always make them think you are in force, or will be soon. Always frighten them until they stop thinking and take refuge in Medicine. Then turn it against them, spoil its power and break it, so they can’t trust anything. And always treat your luck with respect, so that it will never turn against you. This time I was going to take the patrol down and try to find Spanish Man’s Grave. I wanted to show dirty shirt blue down there and spoil that Medicine for them. The Apaches have been living too long on that old massacre story—believing too much in their immunity. Flout it in their faces, show them that the gods hate them, too, and you’ve gone a long way toward making them behave. I want you to take the patrol down.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take it down just as you say. If you’ll let me have your arm now, I’ll dismount you. You’ll be all right in a minute.”

  “It’s a damn long journey, Mr. Pennell.”

  “Sergeant Tyree!” But MacAfee’s candle guttered before the sergeant could ride in. He died straight-shouldered in the saddle. Only his head snapped. For a moment, the years of habit still held him upright; then he went loose all over and pitched out headfirst. Ross Pennell caught him by the scrawny left arm, and the captain dangled there, toes down, tongue out and head hanging. Both horses shied apart, nostrils wide, blowing, eyes rolling white, heads tossed up in quick panic. Corporal Bartenett threw off and grabbed the captain under the arms.

  Tyree threw off. “My God, Mr. Pennell! He’s dead!”

  For a moment, everyone just stared down at what Royal Forsythe MacAfee had finished with suddenly after fifty-six years of living with it. Then they hauled off their stained hats and dismounted. “MacAfee, R.F., Capt.—from duty to deceased, 2 P.M., 17 Sept.—”

  There were the soft beds back on Claymont Street, white-sheeted, and hand-polished mahogany. Brides’ beds, childbeds, deathbeds in slow, respectable rotation. People said, “I was born in that bed, and my father before me. My mother died in that bed.”

  “Captain MacAfee’s wife died years ago,” Sergeant Tyree said, “and there were two little boys, but they died too. They’re buried at Fort Starke. Never knew the captain to get letters from anyone or send ‘em, in all the eight years I served with him. I guess he’s just like all of us. People kind of forget when you’re away.” Tyree shrugged and looked off down horizon.

  “I won’t have it!” Pennell almost shouted. “There must be some kinfolk somewhere. Somebody who cares if a man lives his life like this. Damn it to hell, he was a captain of cavalry, wasn’t he? All his life he served something, somebody, didn’t he? And is this all there is when it’s finished?” Ross Pennell held out the dirty tied handkerchief with its still-ticking watch and the locket and chain and the Louis d’Or pocket piece—for luck ever since Cerro Gordo. “Is this all there is?”

  Tyree said, “Mr. Pennell, that’s all there is, except that smoke on the horizon. He’s left that too. The watch don’t matter and the locket don’t matter, and neither does the good-luck piece, but the smoke does. You inherit that smoke, I guess, Mr. Pennell. Like it says in law, ‘an heir and an assign…’”

  This far the gods will let a man go—to a cairned grave on a lonesome downslope where he may lie in sleep forever. But here another man takes over, for there is always smoke still ahead and the march goes on. “Prepare to mount—”

  Your first man dead in violence is a sick thing in your mind for many suns and many moons, until the others fade its picture. But you never forget the first white woman you see that the Apaches have worked over.

  It had been a three-sided cabin of clay-chinked rails. No one but a fool or a very brave man would have put it in as far west as that, unless he had pushed out beyond the other people so far that he was lost and didn’t know it.

  There was the scrabbled corn patch lying under the bitter pall of smoke. The hot air held it just off the ground. It rose from the embers of the cabin, coiling lazily in white ropes, spreading, rising straight in a thin veil. Almost burned out when they got there. They saw the two halves of the dog first, and the dust and hair and clotted abomination of the ax, flung under the broken wagon. Flies were there, green and translucent, glutted lazy.

  The name in a torn book was “Alice Downey, Fairfax, Virginia.” The book was Robert Browning’s poems. On other papers that fluttered in the corn there was “Charles Graeme and Alice Downey Graeme, his Wife—” and there were blackened brass drawer pulls and broken splinters of mulberry china and a bent spoon of silver.

  The man was roped and arched in final protest at the little field’s edge. Cold in his agony now, and blue stiff. His outraged face seemed to howl at them for vengeance—to howl in black and tortured silence. He had fought, like a panther. The ground was lacerated with his fight. “I, Charles Graeme, farmer, will hold this land or die on it.”

  Corporal Bartenett found the woman—“Alice Downey Graeme, his Wife.” And there it was, and how can you say what it was? For the ground about showed that fight, too, and there was sickness in all of them as they read the ground, and the dark maroon anger that makes for murder, even though its ice takes the strength from fingers for the moment.

  Thirty Apaches, by the pony marks, blood-drunk and beast hot. Reeking to defile. Hair-tearing hands, grease slick. Fetid-breathed and shrieking with obscenity.

  Sergeant Tyree turned sharp around, as if someone had moved behind him, as if he would draw gun on whoever it was. “Two days,” he growled, “by the condition of the carcasses. Washday Monday—that’s what these clothes is,” and he toed his boot into the strewn and trampled clothing, twisting his leg slowly as he did it, almost as if he were in agony. “A two-day start on us they got, and the girl they got, about ten, eleven years old. See there,” and he pointed. “Her go-to-meetin’ dress.” He shook his head at Pennell’s question. “No,” he said. “I don’t think the girl, yet. Only the mother. But I sure hope the girl ain’t big for her age, ‘cause we gotta long haul to catch up on ‘em, sir. I sure hope she ain’t—”

  Ross Pennell stood still, looking off toward the western horizon again, as if there would be more smoke down there to guide him on. Smoke to the west, drawing a man on down his destiny, on down his years until there was no more Claymont Street behind him forevermore. Until the Chew girls next door, in their white dresses with the pink sashes, their patent-leather slippers and flop-brimmed leghorns, their prayer books and their crocheted mittens—until the Chew girls…

  But there were no Chew girls left in Pennell in that moment. And suddenly there was no place in him for them to come back to if they ever tried.

  “Tyree,” he said, “you and Marcy fix Mrs. Graeme decently for burial. I want her to have something on. Unmarried men clear out of the area… Gustafson and Newkirk, get the man ready… Bartenett, take the rest of the details and unsaddle. Graze wide. Pack train as well. We move out again at seven o’clock.”

  The book tells you how to force the march, but a good sergeant is better than the best of books, and deep anger is better than a sergeant. Space out to fifty-five paces and stagger the odd files twenty yards to the right. That keeps the dust down and gives the mounts air to breathe. Unbit to graze on all halts, even the shortest. Halt ten minutes in the hour, and forty minutes every sixth hour for watering. Trot twenty minutes every second hour, and lead for the full hour before watering call. And talk up the horses. Tell them what you want out of them, for you can always bring a horse in on your side with the right kind of talk. A horse is a child on the surface, but he’s got a mind underneath that is capable of telling him how to die like a gentleman, if the need comes. And a horse can get regiment-conscious as hell, and don’t you ever forget it.

  The patrol had had five full weeks of conditioning before Pennell put them to it on a hot stern chase, for there isn’t anything but a stern chase on the plains—for there is only the trail to follow. They began to force it unbelievably. They cut the bivouac time to half the dark hours, and they ate up the space between themselves and the thirty Apaches with the Graeme girl. But they ate up their own minds doing it; they wore them down like old knife blades. They were all in it—all ten— all reading the trail when it was written, guessing at it when it wasn’t, cramming in food when their bellies screamed, and watching their mounts like young mothers with a first babe. They got crotch stiff and neck stiff, and they stumbled wooden-legged when they led. They gave it all to the horses, and the horses knew it and gave back what they could. Their eyes got red and their beards got foul, but the anger stayed in them, and it stayed cold—frozen in yellow-legged discipline.

  On the day the first Apache fire spot was still warm when Ross Pennell put the palm of his hand on it, the night of that day he put in his own fires. Squad fires. Fifty paces apart along the skyline. Enough fires to indicate two companies and their escort train. The simulated hands of vengeance, clawing upward with crimson fingers for the Apaches to read as fate. Pennell did it almost to dictated order. “Always make ’em think you’re in force...or will be soon.”

  And in three hours again, when the fires were burned down, “Prepare to mount. Mount!”

  “Tyree, tell me about Spanish Man’s Grave.”

  Sergeant Tyree spat left and looked squint-eyed under his hat brim at Ross Pennell. “Can’t rightly tell much, sir. Never been there. Only hearsay. He drawed a picture of it once—Captain MacAfee did. Spanish soldiers ridin’ an’ marchin’ up from Sante Fe coupla centuries ago, all shinin’ in armor and golden helmets, with plumes and yellow silken flags. Must ’a’ been purty.” Tyree shook his head. “But it didn’t work out. The Apaches caught the whole kit and kaboodle of ’em in the tablelands and killed every mother’s son. Got ’em like at the bottom of the well, they say. Ever since then it’s been Apache holy ground. It did something to their bad god for all time. Only their good god lives at the Grave. Once the Apaches get in to Spanish Man’s, they’re safe home. Big and powerful Medicine protects them.”

  “Anybody from Fort Starke ever been there?”

  “No white man was ever there, is what I think. A lot of ’em will lie they was, but I think only them dead caballeros know where it is, and they ain’t a one of ’em ever talked since the massacre.”

  “Tyree,” Pennell said, “I wonder what those Spaniards did wrong?”

  “I ain’t a man to blame dead men,” Tyree said, “but the captain used to say an army ought to have a lotta brains before it shows a lotta flags. He used to say it ought to be able to shoot ‘possible’ before it lets the band play too loud. And he used to say that only a well-trained veteran looks right in a bright uniform, and that dirty uniform shirts make the best empires. But maybe we’ll find out what the Spaniards did wrong, Mr. Pennell. I’ve knowed you was goin’ to the Grave fer four days.”

  They didn’t talk all at once, Ross Pennell and Tyree. A word here and the long miles between, and then another word, for talk is like a chewing twist when men are alone. Bite fresh and something new comes into the flavor. Chew it out alone until it’s flat, then spit and bite again. That way the mind keeps quieter to do its own thinking. Sometimes by moon they spoke. Sometimes in the sun’s heat. A word and then another word, until it wove a slow and inexorable pattern of deep understanding, unadorned with the furbelows of chatter.

  “We’re going to the Grave because the Apaches are going. They’re going because they’re running to Medicine, for protection, to get away from what they think is two companies. Drive ’em to Medicine, turn it on ’em, show ’em it’s no good either! That’s the second thing you always do.”

  Tyree could see Pennell’s white teeth, bare and alkali-dry in the starlight. He said, “Somethin’ crazy about any man who’ll stay out here. Lieutenant. Longer he stays, crazier he gets. Crazier he gets, the more he knows, and the less he knows how he knows. Crazy is like fever. On and off. But every time it comes, it stays a little longer, until you die of it or it breaks. We’re all talking to ourselves now, sir. We’re all worn through the crust now, and we ain’t goin’ to get better till we catch up with the little girl or die trying. We’re worn through, like our pants. Thin and stringy and gristly. Any minute and we can go loco. If we do, I want you to know I can take my lootenints or leave ’em lay. Always could. I take you, sir. But just remember, when we get there, we’re only ten men all told, and there won’t be any trail left in, so’s you can follow it, unless you’ve got the luck of the damned.”

  “That’s the third ingredient, Tyree—respect for your luck.”

  And hours later again: “And, Sergeant Tyree, I think I’ve got that luck, for I am damned now. There is bitter smoke hanging in the elms above Claymont Street and across the brick wall of Christ Churchyard where my father and my mother are buried; there’s somehow a mat of green flies. The people of the United States are a frightened little white girl eleven years old. Tyree, I take you too. Pass the word to halt, dismount and lead.”

  At first you can’t believe it when you come to plains’ end, for no painting can ever show it as it is. The frost blues and the silken yellows of the tablelands. The reds that are watered out to the color of broiled lobster claws. The purples that have distant church music in them. The greens that you can smell for sweet mown grass. All worked into one breathlessness and swept across the horizon. At dawn, there is a golden rim around it. At sundown, nothing contains its endlessness. Ten miles away to the eye, two hundred miles to the march.

  When the night comes down in blue fog so thick that you can hold it at arm’s length in your two clutched hands, the mesas move in on the bivouac and cut the mileage down. And the stars hang under the rims of them so close that you can touch their iciness with the tip of your tongue. But in the morning, just before you open your eyes, the mesas race away again.

  The afternoon that you give up all hope of ever riding them down they turn suddenly to slate gray, shot with dull chrome, and you are in among them. “What now, Mr. Pennell?”

  The faces jerked as Sergeant Tyree said it. The worn and hollow faces. Skin and stubble, with deep and filthy trenches in the cheeks. And one of them crackled, “So here we are; where are we?” And another tried twice, and had to claw it into sound with grimy fingers at his mouth and throat. “They’ll know now we’re only ten men! They can see by daylight, from the high ground, that there are no two companies behind us.”

  “But the Apaches may not be on the high ground!” Pennell snarled at them.

  A hand stretched out, palm upward, dirty fingers clawing. “Apaches always camp high!” the faces said, “no matter where water is, or wood.” And the faces snarled, “Yea-Yea! A fine answer. How high? Tell me—where are they?”

  The horses skittered in fear, twitched deeply in the flank with long nerve whips, tossed up their heads, whistled.

  Pennell threw back his own head and laughed in the jerking faces. “For two days now, by daylight, they could have watched from the high ground and seen that there were no two companies behind us! If they had done so, they would have circled wide to try to hit us from behind. But they didn’t do that, so that means they still believe we are two companies, and they have run to Medicine to get away from us, they’ve run to Spanish Man’s Grave for sanctuary... and that’s what I’ve been trying to make ’em do!”

  “But where is the Grave?” the faces jerked. “You ever been there? I ever been there? Any of us ever been there, mister?”