“Yes, sir.” The man found the spectacles in his coat pocket, slipped them on, and held the paper close. “It says a stagecoach from Tombstone was held up near Bisbee late yesterday afternoon.”

  Carlton Smythe swore. “Bandits holding up a civilian passenger conveyance is a problem for the local civilian peace officers, not the United States Army. What in blazes is Colonel Reid at Camp Huachuca thinking?”

  “Sir,” the sergeant said, “the bandits that held up the stage were . . . well . . . Apaches.”

  “You mean Apaches attacked that stagecoach?” Smythe asked.

  “No, Colonel. The message here says that they held it up.”

  “What kind of nonsense is this? Colonel Reid is playing a joke, playing us for fools.”

  “Sir, this is going to every post in two territories,” the sergeant reminded.

  Sam Florence didn’t buy the story, either. “How drunk were the passengers on that coach?” He wasn’t grinning, though.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Florence.” The sergeant major looked at the message. “The driver and the guard were killed. The mules pulling the coach were stolen. Guesses to the number of Indians involved ranged from eight to eighteen. Four passengers—three males and a woman. All robbed.”

  “Robbed?” Grat Holden had spoken for the first time. “Of what?”

  “I can imagine what they took from the woman,” Smythe said.

  The brandy, that one little snifter, must have gone straight to his head, Holden thought.

  But it was only eight-thirty-two in the morning.

  “No, sir,” the sergeant said. “They didn’t molest any of them. And the witnesses, or survivors, or whatever you want to call them, said that the Indians only killed the guard. The driver killed himself.”

  “What did they take?” Holden asked, sharper this time. He wanted to know the answer.

  “Wallets. They don’t give a figure of exactly how much money was stolen. Some watches, jewelry, and they also took the strongbox.”

  “How much did it have in it?” Sam Florence seemed to be following Holden’s line of thinking.

  “It doesn’t say, Mr. Florence. Just that it was money from Tombstone’s Laughlin Mining Corporation to the Bank of Bisbee.”

  “Rogue Apaches?” Smythe questioned, and shook his head. “No, more likely white men, or probably Mexicans being that close to the border, pretending to be Apaches.” He snorted and shook his head. “The Boston Tea Party, Bisbee-style. Thank you for the interruption, Sergeant. Tell Colonel Reid—”

  “Ask Colonel Reid to let us know how much money was in that strongbox,” Holden interrupted his commanding officer. “And ask him if he has heard of any other reports of Apaches robbing civilians.”

  Smythe looked furious, but held his tongue.

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Florence said. “And I don’t know about any Apaches holdin’ up folks around here, but there was a report about some injuns robbin’ a copper mine in Sonora last week, or thereabouts.”

  “Very good, Sergeant. Please, no more interruptions until I have finished my interview with Mr. Florence and Mr. Holden.”

  The sergeant major nodded and bit his lower lip. “There’s one more thing, sir.”

  “Be brief, Sergeant.”

  “Colonel Reid also says that the survivors in the stagecoach said the leader of the Apaches was none other than Crooked Nose hisself.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The front door to the second adobe building on Officer’s Row was locked.

  “You got a key, Colonel?” Sam Florence asked.

  “Of course not. I don’t live here.”

  Florence glanced at Grat Holden, who did not hesitate. He stepped back and kicked hard against the door, which shuddered but did not give. His second kick busted the bolt, and the door slammed open.

  “This is highly improper and in all likelihood illegal,” Colonel Smythe said.

  “So is killing nine soldiers and stealing four wagons of rifles and ammunition,” Holden said with contempt as he entered the quarters of Captain Jed Foster.

  A map of Arizona Territory, a photograph of George Custer surrounded by several officers, and a portrait of George Washington hung on the wall.

  Washington, Holden thought. Should be Benedict Arnold.

  The furnishings, by Arizona and Army standards, seemed quite opulent.

  “You know anything about the captain’s family?” Sam Florence asked as he squatted beside the trunk at the foot of Foster’s four-poster bed.

  Smythe stood in front of the door, outside, on the porch. He wasn’t about to step into Foster’s quarters . . . likely to protect himself from court-martial and dismissal, or even a stay at the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

  “He never talked about it,” Holden answered as he went to the dresser.

  From the doorway, Smythe said, “His parents are dead. They were dead when he joined the Michigan regiment at the outbreak of the War to Preserve Our Union. It’s in his personnel files. No family. No next of kin listed.”

  “No inheritance, most likely,” Florence said, as he drew his revolver and slammed at the lock on the trunk. “Joined for the money the Army offered.”

  “Or for the glory,” Smythe said. “Or the honor. Or for his loyalty to his—” He stopped then.

  Loyalty to his country? Not after stealing new Springfield rifles.

  The third blow from the revolver’s handle broke open the lock. Florence opened the trunk. Holden looked at the top of the dresser. Whiskey bottles. Wine, even champagne. A calendar propped up by the mirror and various photographs of girls slid into the cherrywood sides of the mirror. Holden began going through the drawers.

  “What were your folks like, Holden?” the old scout asked.

  Holden stopped tossing socks and unmentionables—women’s undergarments, spoils of conquests, he figured—and turned. “My parents?” He studied the scout, who did not look back, kept pulling out tintypes, books, and clothes from the trunk.

  “Alive? Dead? Rich? Poor?”

  “Both alive,” Holden said. His lips tightened. Embarrassed, he finally said, “Not . . . poor. Well . . . my father runs a shipping . . . he owns . . . a shipping line in Boston.”

  “Rich then,” Florence said.

  “Very,” Holden admitted.

  “So you go to West Point instead of some fancy school?”

  “I told Father and Mother I wanted to make it on my own.”

  “Jed know that?” The old scout turned and waited for the answer.

  Holden nodded. Then he cursed. “If the damned fool needed money, why didn’t he come to me? I could’ve asked my parents.”

  “Pride,” Colonel Smythe suggested.

  “Nah.” The scout went back to the trunk. “The adventure. To see how far he can push his luck. That’s Jed Foster.”

  Cursing, even angrier at Foster, Holden ripped out a drawer, dumping its contents on the floor then dropping the drawer on the shirts. He moved to the next drawer.

  “Here we go.” Florence rose and sat on the bed. “Bank book.” He began thumbing through it. “What you’d expect for a captain with his taste in liquor, horses, and women.”

  Holden swore again, held up a handful of letters, and ripped the next drawer out. It landed hard on the floor, and the front-facing, carved wood fell off. “Letters demanding payment for”—he read and dropped each letter—“a saddle . . . that Winchester he carries . . . an abor—” He didn’t finish.

  He turned back to the mirror, looked at the faces of the women in the photographs, and saw Sam Florence tossing the bank book onto the bed. Colonel Smythe’s head was bowed.

  “Colonel.”

  Holden heard the scout’s drawl.

  “I think you’d better get word to the commander of the Rurales down in Mexico and the Mexican government.”

  Smythe entered the home, pulled the door shut as best as he could, and leaned against the rifle case next to the door. “There must be another way. We must—I would rather we get those weapons back.”

  “How the hell you gonna do that, Colonel? Those rifles are already across the border in Mexico. And I gotta think that an old injun butcher like Crooked Nose ain’t robbin’ stagecoaches in Bisbee and copper mines across the border for the fun of it. He’s gettin’ money. Money to pay . . . and he ain’t payin’ off Jed Foster’s saloon debts.”

  “I cannot—I will not believe that a Medal of Honor winner like Jed Foster would sell four wagonloads of Springfield rifles to Apaches.”

  “No,” Holden said. “You’re probably right.”

  Florence gave him a questioning look. Smythe looked more hopeful.

  “Four wagons. Crooked Nose would have to rob a lot of stagecoaches and mines to get enough money to pay for those.”

  “An auction,” Florence said. “Sell them to the highest bidder.”

  “That can’t be,” Smythe said.

  Which is when Grat Holden reached inside his pants pocket and pulled out the torn slip of paper. He brought it over to the bed and showed it to Florence. Colonel Smythe walked over, too.

  “I guess I somehow ripped this out of Jed’s jacket when we were fighting outside the canyon near Dos Cabezas. Tore it, anyway. Haven’t been able to make sense of it. Maybe you can help.”

  Smythe straightened and demanded indignantly, “Why did you not present this to me when you were first placed under house arrest?”

  “What?” Holden barked. “A ripped piece of paper with a few words? Show that to you . . . as evidence?”

  “Why’d you keep it?” Sam Florence asked.

  “Because if I got court-martialed or if the Army dragged things on much longer, I was going to break out and go to Mexico myself.”

  “Muncie,” Florence said. “That’s means there’s hell to pay for sure.”

  “What’s Muncie? Who’s Muncie.”

  Smythe whispered, “Son of a bitch.”

  Florence nodded. “Yep. Best description I ever heard for Will Muncie.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Bonnie Blue flag popped in the hard wind that scoured the land in Sonora. Colonel Will Muncie stepped out of the verandah and admired the blue flag with the single white star in the center. It was a new flag. The first had been taken by Yankees at Shiloh, a black day, a black mark, to be sure. The second had lasted, though stained with powder, blood, and riddled by grapeshot and bullets, till the shame of Appomattox that led other generals, including Muncie’s superior, to surrender. That flag now had a place of honor, displayed in a glass case, in his library. The newest one came from France.

  So did his uniform.

  A gray frock coat, and, yes, he did feel the warmth of the Mexican sun in late June. He was wearing heavy wool, but no one would ever say William Henry Muncie IV sweated. The collars, cuffs, and piping were blue, for he would always be an infantry officer. Foot soldiers, the mainstay of any army. Those were the men who won battles and won wars and won glory for the cause. How many cavalrymen had Muncie ever seen dead? And artillery soldiers? Muncie scoffed at that thought.

  Spotless brass buttons were arranged in pairs, eight per row. The blue sash was knotted perfectly above his left hip. The black belt fit perfectly over his sash, secured at his midsection by the two-piece oval belt plate, gold-plated, with an embossed wreath circling the CS in the center, and just below the letters the Latin words Sic Semper Tyrannis. Thus Ever To Tyrants.

  He had borrowed that from Virginia, but the words rang true in Texas twenty years ago, just as they applied to Mexico today.

  A saber hung sheathed from his left side. A black leather holster housed his LeMat revolver. His trousers were of a darker gray with twin blue stripes down the sides. The legs of the pants came over his boots made of black Italian leather, which glistened in the sun.

  The French and the Italians would sell anything to anyone, even a new Confederate uniform and boots, fifteen years after it all ended . . . for nothing . . . and left Will Muncie with . . . nothing.

  Maybe not quite nothing.

  Twenty-seven men still rode with him. When he had first crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, having refused to take the oath of allegiance to the victorious United States of America, he had better than a hundred and ten men, plus at least sixteen families of the men who had ridden with him across Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri. He had buried more than a handful. A whole lot more had eventually given up and returned in defeat and disgrace back home to Collin County.

  As if Collin County had ever been home.

  Back in ’61, his neighbors, his friends, had voted against secession. Almost two-to-one against leaving the Union. He had arrived in ’49 with fifteen slaves and a dream of making his fortune in cotton. He couldn’t sell cotton in Collin County. It was too far to get the crops to market. So eventually, he had turned to wheat and corn. Not the glamour one got from cotton, but those crops had made Will Muncie a rich man. At least, by Texas standards.

  They burned his home, the Yankees did. Or rather, his Yankee neighbors did, while he was fighting for the rights of Texas and free Texans, while he was burying his boy, killed in battle by the Yanks at Corinth. So when word reached Muncie in southern Texas that those four hard years had been for naught, Muncie took the men who worshipped him and their families to Mexico. To fight for the French, Maximilian’s boys.

  And when he realized that Maximilian didn’t stand a chance at winning, Muncie had joined the other side. Fought for Juarez, who’d paid a little better, and who’d won.

  Other unreconstructed Rebels had left the defeated South and settled in Mexico. A few even went farther south, into South America, but most of those had gone home. Even Fighting Jo Shelby of Missouri was back praying to God for his country. For all Will Muncie knew, they were even voting Republican and letting the Negroes vote.

  The three officers remaining, Knight, Fountain and Truett, walked to him, stopped, came to attention, and snapped their salutes.

  Without returning the salutes, Muncie nodded at the new flag.

  “What do you think?”

  Mexico had aged him. Sonora wasn’t as green as Collin County. The soil wasn’t rich. It was a hard, hard, hard place to live. No, one didn’t live there. People just tried to survive. And he had. Survived . . . endured. He would turn sixty years old soon. The sun had bronzed him. The fighting had left him haggard, gaunt, and he had developed a nagging cough that some feared was consumption, though Muncie had never spit up blood. His nose was crooked, and he still wore the black patch over the left eye the Yankees had taken from him at Yellow Bayou along the Atchafalaya in miserable Louisiana back in ’64. Frijoles and enchiladas and Mexican beer had added a paunch to his midsection, but no one ever doubted him, and no one ever disobeyed one of his orders.

  “Like old times, Cuhnel,” Knight said.

  Pleased, Muncie nodded. “I despised the flag our government chose for us. All of them. The battle jack. The so-called national flags. Red, white, and blue. Always red, white, and blue, just like the flag of our enemy. This flag”—he nodded, and his one blue eye gleamed—“blue and white. That’s all the colors we need. Blue for the infantry. Blue for our blood. And white. White . . . for the color of our skin.” He called out a name. “Sergeant Winters.”

  One of the last of the men who had joined him from Collin County stepped forward. He held a rifle, still slippery with grease, in his gloved hands.

  “Report.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Nelson Winters had raised horses in Collin County, just six miles from Muncie’s farm. He should have served in the cavalry, as well as he rode, but he swore by Will Muncie. And he was a damned fine shot.

  He held the gun toward the officers. “Trap-door model. Not much different from Springfield’s previous model, the ’73. Here’s your trap door. What the Yanks call a breechblock. It’s on a hinge. Here’s your hinge. Here’s how you open it. Like this. Slide the cartridge in here. Shut the door. Cock the hammer and you’re ready to fire. Shoots a forty-five-seventy. Same as the old model.” He held the weapon out for inspection.

  Winters went on. “Barrel thirty-two and one-half inches. They done a good job of bluin’ the barrel. You got a front sight here with a hood over it, and here, this rear jump sight will go up to twelve hundred yards.” He butted the weapon on the ground, holding it straight next to his body, which went into rigid attention. “As you can see, total length is a little better than four feet.” The gun came up perfectly to his shoulder. “You can put a sling on it. Good for carrying on a march. Stock’s walnut. Metal is case-hardened.” He let Truett hold the weapon.

  “Heavy,” said the man from Dallas.

  “Yes, suh,” Winters said. “Nine pounds, thirteen ounces. Shoots a forty-five-caliber cartridge with four hundred and five grains of power, weight seventy grains.”

  “How does it shoot?” Fountain asked.

  “The Yankee tested it, suh, when I met him near the Texas border. Then I tested this one. At two hundred yards, the bullet penetrated a chunk of white pine eleven inches deep. When I moved that target back to a thousand yards, the penetration was eight and one-half inches.”

  “Not much of a difference,” Fountain said.

  “I reckon you’s right, suh. Pretty accurate, too. Lot better than the old models we have, them from ’61.”

  “But not a repeater,” Truett said.

  “No, suh. But a good man, and we’ve got good men, can get off eight to ten shots a minute. It’s no muzzleloader, suh, like we had in the war.”

  “I dislike using a Yankee gun,” the colonel said. He smiled then, evil mischief showing in his one eye. “Unless I’m using them on Yankees.”

  Uneasily, the men laughed with their commander.

  “So is it better than the model the Yanks have been using?” Knight asked. “The ’73 Springfield?”

  “Haven’t fired it enough to know for certain,” the old horse wrangler said, “but it packs a wallop.” He massaged his right shoulder. “Likely left a bruise after only ten shots. But right now, suh, all we have are the old muzzle-loaders that we fit with back durin’ the war. And what we’ve managed to steal or buy or borrow since then. These is new rifles. There’s gotta be somethin’ to be said for that.”