“You can pay me as much as the president of our United States makes in his entire term of office, but there ain’t no way I’m a-doin’ either one of their’s laundry!”

  To everyone who had gathered around the sweatbox, the stench got worse.

  Former Sergeant, now prisoner, Ben “Hard Rock” Masterson swung wide, hoping to deliver a blow with all his might, something that would keep this bantam rooster down for the count. He saw Holden swinging, too, the one arm that still worked.

  Masterson felt his punch land, and he was sure Second Lieutenant Grattan Roosevelt Holden III, middle of the Class of 1875, United States Military Academy, wouldn’t know what hit him.

  Or course, Ben Masterson didn’t know what hit him, either.

  They both lay on the ground in a steaming, stinking heap.

  CHAPTER 22

  Grat Holden poured more whiskey from the bottle into his mouth. There was no need to waste time and effort by putting the rye into a glass first. He swished the burning liquid around in his mouth, leaned his head over the tub, and spit the whiskey—and whatever else remained in his mouth—into the ground soaked by two bottles of rye or whatever the post sutler sold as rye. He brought the bottle up again.

  In the bathtub next to him, Ben “Hard Rock” Masterson did the same. Only Masterson’s bottle was labeled IRISH WHISKY, though it tasted pretty much the same as Grat Holden’s bottle of rye.

  It tasted like filth.

  When the third bottle Holden had purchased was empty, he tossed it onto the ground and sank again beneath the suds in the water that had been hot when he had first stepped into the tub. It was on the cold side, especially since the sun had set and the temperature had turned cooler, common for this desert country.

  His head came up, he sucked in air deeply, exhaled with an exclamation, and began rubbing his fingernails with much vigor against his scalp.

  Three bottles were gone. Holden was on his fifth tub.

  Sam Florence sighed and rose from the bench, where he had been whittling. He dropped the stick, folded his pocket-knife, and walked back into the bathhouse. A few moments later, he came out with two bottles. The rye he handed to Lieutenant Grat Holden. The Irish he tossed to the next tub, where Masterson let it splash into the water.

  Masterson was on his fifth bottle, but only his second tub. The post had only ten tubs for enlisted men. The orderlies were beginning to worry about who would have to clean out the tubs when the convicted sergeant and the second lieutenant, who also had recently been placed under house arrest, were finished with their . . . baths.

  Florence waded through the wet ground and found his spot on the bench. He thought about opening up the knife again, trimming another twig into a toothpick, but instead he returned to the building and walked out with a bottle of beer. This he opened. Sitting, he leaned back against the adobe wall and took a healthy swallow.

  In the dirty water, Ben Masterson watched and took a chance. He uncorked the bottle of rye in the filthy water—all the suds had vanished or retreated or disintegrated—and brought the Irish whisky to his lips. Instead of rinsing and spitting, he swallowed.

  The whisky burned a path into his stomach, but Masterson’s fears proved unfounded. He did not die immediately of instant cholera.

  Likewise, Lieutenant Grat Holden must have felt relatively clean, because he stood, reached onto the bench next to the tub, grabbed the bucket, which he lifted and dumped over his head. He exclaimed from the frigidity of the water, tossed the bucket, which made a damp splash on the ground, and found a towel. After drying himself off at least a little, he took his nakedness out of the tub, grabbed a pair of underdrawers on yet another bench, pulled those on, and sat in a camp chair next to Sam Florence. Holden had not forgotten the bottle of rye.

  “Feel better?” Florence asked as he stared at his beer bottle.

  “At least I smell better,” Holden replied.

  “Not sure. This place stinks like a pigpen. Not sure if it’s just all the tubs filled with your messiness. Or yourself.”

  “Yer a couple nitwits,” Ben Masterson said as he pulled again from the bottle of Irish. “Try spendin’ ten days in the sweatbox.”

  If I commanded this post—

  Grat Holden choked down that silly notion. He was a shavetail lieutenant, last in seniority at the fort, maybe last in this man’s entire army. And he wasn’t about to apologize to a man like Ben Masterson.

  “All right,” Masterson said as he climbed out of the tub and sat on the edge. He kept his legs and feet in the dirty water until he studied the water and what was floating on the surface, then hurriedly climbed out, splashed his way to the side of the adobe building, and dried himself off slightly before pulling on a muslin shirt and stepping into a pair of cotton underwear.

  He pulled hard on the bottle and sat on a boulder that served as a chair or a clothesline, or a headstone or whatever.

  “All right. I’ll bite. What’s the offer? What keeps me out of Leavenworth, or at least out of the sweatbox?”

  CHAPTER 23

  Grat Holden disappeared inside the laundry and came out wearing a pair of clean, pressed officer’s trousers while dabbing a fresh silk handkerchief against his swollen lips. Eventually, he dipped the tip of the square into the rye and pressed that against his cut, swollen lips. Grimacing, he alternated between bathing his lips, cuts, and bruises with the whiskey-soaked piece of silk and just drinking straight from the bottle.

  Masterson drank from the bottle of Irish as if he were guzzling tea.

  That’s what made Holden pitch the bottle of rye into the filthy water on the ground alongside the tub. He remembered all the times he had seen Captain Foster drinking whiskey or wine or champagne or even beer. One drink became two, which soon turned into twenty. Jed Foster never turned into what folks on the frontier called a mean drunk, but he certainly often kept himself a good distance from sobriety. Holden realized if he were drunk, or even just slightly in his cups, he would not stand a chance against the traitor.

  “We’re going after Foster and those Springfields he stole,” Holden answered Masterson’s question.

  “I don’t believe the capt’n stole nothin’.” The whisky was taking effect, and Masterson’s wounds were starting to heal. He was becoming his arrogant, obnoxious, Army-hating self.

  It was Sam Florence who came to Holden’s defense.

  “It’s true, Hard Rock, for I saw it myself.” Florence took a long pull of beer, swallowed, and tossed the empty all the way into the tub that was the farthest away.

  “Then good for the capt’n. ’Bout time he learnt that this man’s army ain’t good for nothin’. He can make his own fortune in”—Masterson snorted—“private enterprise. Yes, sir. Good for the capt’n.”

  “Good for the captain, maybe,” Holden said. “But not so good for the settlers in Arizona. Or New Mexico. Or the citizens of Sonora.”

  “No skin off my nose, bucko,” Masterson said. “I’ll be in Leavenworth by the time this country’s runnin’ red with blood. Ten years of three square meals and a clean bunk.” Mockingly, he drew in a deep breath as if he were admiring the aromas from Delmonico’s. Exhaling, he said, “Fresh Kansas air and not this rank-smellin’ sheee-iiii—”

  “You ever spent time in Leavenworth, Masterson?” Holden cut him off.

  The prisoner laughed. “I spent time in Colonel Smythe’s solitary chambers. You think any horror tale you can give me about Leavenworth is worse than that? It’s Kansas, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Two days in the sweatbox here,” Holden said. “Ten years in Leavenworth . . . or”—he paused for effect—“an honorable discharge. Free to go your own way. With no provost marshal, no law, nobody trying to put you back in . . . the sweatbox.”

  “Makes nary a difference to me. I just got a bath. You can go ahead and put me in the hellhole and I’ll be good to stay there for another ten days, twenty, thirty. They don’t call me Hard Rock for nothin’.”

  “Where did you earn that handle?” Sam Florence asked, just to say something.

  “Texas.”

  Florence nodded. “I see.”

  So did Grat Holden.

  “Lots of Texans have settled around Douglas,” Holden said, remembering something he had read in one of the Tucson newspapers. “Not to mention the town of Nogales, the one on our side of the border. Even find quite a few Texans over Tucson way.”

  The wind changed direction. It began blowing the stench from the water quickly becoming stagnant in the tubs, toward the three men leaning against the adobe wall to the bathhouse.

  Grat Holden began wishing that he had not pitched his bottle of rye into the nasty water that had soaked into the Arizona sod.

  Suddenly, Ben Masterson yawned. “How do you buckos want to play this? Me and the shavetail fit ourselves to a draw. All this Texas honor and family honor and ever’thing else don’t bother me one way in the least. So if you want me for somethin’, you best start speakin’ my language.”

  “What we want,” Holden said, “and the only thing Colonel Smythe wants is for you to accompany us across the border . . . out of uniform . . . to fetch back those stolen rifles. And bring back the man who stole them, Captain Jed Foster.”

  “Plain enough,” Masterson said. “Here’s my answer. No. You hear that?”

  Holden shot a quick glance at Sam Florence, then, without waiting for any signal from the old scout, decided to call Ben Masterson’s bet.

  “Very good, Sarge . . . Trooper Masterson. I’ll escort you back to your . . . cell.”

  The color seemed to leave Ben Masterson’s face.

  “Not so fast, Lieutenant Holden.” Suddenly, he drew in a deep breath of the foul air, held it, and somehow managed to exhale without gagging or vomiting. “Let’s enjoy some of this fresh Arizona Territory air. Always smells so refreshing on a night like this.”

  Silence.

  Then Masterson asked, “What’s in it for me?”

  “The colonel, as I’ve previously stated, will grant you an honorable discharge.”

  “And my sentence?”

  “Set aside. Vacated. You’ll be free to go wherever you want, with whoever you want, whenever you want.”

  Masterson considered this. “It won’t get me far . . . on the pay . . . of a sergeant . . . busted to trooper . . . and with the money I owe at the post sutler’s . . . and the hog ranch . . . and the saloons at the border line . . . not to mention over in Dos Cabezas.”

  Tired of playing games when time was essential, Holden sang out, “How much do you want, Masterson?”

  Masterson froze. He was no good at playing that kind of game. Fifteen dollars would be a fortune to him, but not for a rich man’s son like the lieutenant. He said at last, “You can’t pay me enough, Lieutenant. Besides, what would prevent you from just murderin’ me once I found your boy and you cleared your honor?”

  “What would prevent you from murdering me in my sleep fifteen miles outside this post?”

  Masterson grinned.

  “Make me a proposition, Lieutenant,” he said after a while.

  That’s when Grat Holden realized exactly what he had over Sergeant-now-Trooper, Ben Masterson.

  “Here’s what I can offer you, Ben. I can give you a chance at getting the man who shot Sergeant Byron Lusk dead out of his saddle.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Just because you are both out of uniform,” Colonel Carlton Smythe reminded, “does not mean you do not salute your commanding officer.”

  Grat Holden and Ben Masterson gave lazy salutes. The colonel, his right hand preoccupied with the decanter of brandy, did not return the salute. Once he set the glass on the cabinet, he raised his snifter and looked at the two men in disgust.

  Their faces and hands were bruised and swollen. They dressed like ruffians. Smythe did not like Army men out of uniform. He did not even care for the standards many of the officers adopted in the desert, but he had allowed that.

  Holden wore civilian boots, stovepipe style, a reddish color with thick square toes and long mule-ear pulls that flopped toward his Mexican spurs. Stuck inside the boots were gray-striped trousers. A navy bib-front shirt, flowing red and white polka-dot bandanna, tan vest, and tan hat completed his getup. His revolver remained the thumb-busting Schofield .45, but the lieutenant had replaced his Army-issue belt and holster for a shell belt, and the holster was tied down on his right leg. A pair of deerskin gloves were stuck inside the gunbelt.

  Even with his military bearing and posture, Grat Holden would pass for a civilian, Smythe decided. The battered face certainly helped.

  Masterson wore nondescript black boots, tan-colored canvas trousers, a boiled shirt of large black and white check, but no vest. He also sported a blue silk bandanna and a wide-brimmed, flat-crowned straw hat. He had a pair of double-action Colt Lightning revolvers—one nickel-plated with an ivory handle and the other blued with walnut grips—stuck butt forward in a red sash. A bandolier holding shells for the revolvers hung over his left shoulder.

  He doesn’t look military at all, Smythe thought and sipped his brandy. Then again, Ben Masterson had never been military. Never.

  “Long arms?” Smythe asked.

  “Winchester,” Holden answered.

  “Springfield,” Masterson said.

  “That’s an Army rifle, Masterson,” Smythe reminded him.

  “I stole it,” Masterson said, and grinned.

  He probably planned on stealing it, too, Smythe figured. A man like Masterson would desert as soon as he got close enough to Mexico. He might even kill Holden along the way . . . would make things a whole lot easier to explain to the Springfield Armory, General Willcox, the secretary of war, and the president of the United States if the mission failed. As it most certainly would.

  “Horses?” the colonel asked.

  “Not Army,” Holden answered. “Civilian saddles. No brand on the horses. We got them from a trader in Dos Cabezas. We thought about a pack mule but decided against it. A mule would just slow us down. The horses we got can run.” He seemed to know what Smythe was thinking. “I paid for them with my money, sir. Not the Army’s.”

  “Very good,” Smythe said as he made his way to his desk, sipping the brandy as he crossed the room.

  He did not sit, but set the snifter, now empty, on some reports he had no interest in reading. He pressed his hands against the wooden top and stared at the two men before him.

  “You will ride out immediately. You have no orders. Understand that. You are working on your own, at your own risk. If you are caught below the border by Mexicans, you are on your own. There will be no help from this side of the border. You understand that. You must understand that.”

  “We got it, Colonel, darlin’,” Masterson said.

  Smythe pressed his lips together. “Here is what I can do for you.” He moved to the map that hung on the wall.

  “Captain Garrison has this crazy idea that he wants to try. He served in the Signal Corps. The Apaches have been cutting our telegraph wires, as well you know, and then they splice the wires with rubber bands. Makes it hard to find out where the connection has been broken. Garrison thinks he can devise another way for Army patrols to communicate with one another.”

  He tapped a spot on the map. “I am allowing this experiment. He will be posted at the top of this peak. The plan is to communicate with another few men here”—he tapped another spot more to the north—“and one more here.” That was closer to Bisbee. “I have informed Mr. Garrison that Sam Florence might try to send a signal from here.” He tapped a rise below the border.

  “Colonel,” Masterson said, “even with a spyglass, a body ain’t gonna be able to see no red signal flags that far—”

  “Not signal flags, you damned fool,” Smythe said. “Flashes of light. From a mirror. Mr. Garrison has a friend at Fort Whipple in Virginia, where they have been experimenting with this type of telegraphy. They call it a heliograph. With our fine sun in this godforsaken desert, Mr. Garrison believes this territory is the perfect place to communicate by this . . . heliography. He suggests that a heliograph signal can be seen up to thirty miles.”

  Holden cleared his throat. “What does this have to do with us, Colonel?”

  “You will carry a heliograph mirror in your saddlebags. If you are successful, you can climb a hill and signal to the closest point.” He tapped the spots on the mountain again.

  “You do know Morse code, don’t you?” the colonel added sarcastically.

  “They still require that at West Point, Colonel,” Holden said.

  “Then you will send the message ‘Happy Independence Day.’ ”

  Holden frowned.

  “You have until the sun sets on the Fourth of July to get that message delivered. If I have no word from you or Mr. Garrison or anyone by that time, I will be sending word to Washington and the Springfield Armory that those four wagonloads of rifles were stolen. And that you two are missing, absent without leave.”

  Smythe returned to his desk and sat down. “Carry on, gentlemen.”

  Holden headed for the door.

  Masterson followed, pausing long enough to say, “Ain’t you gonna wish us luck, Colonel, darlin’?”

  He slammed the door shut before Carlton Smythe could respond.

  CHAPTER 25

  They taught you at West Point that, if you were commissioned in the cavalry, a horse could walk four miles an hour, trot six miles an hour, and gallop nine miles an hour. By resting your mount for five minutes each hour, varying your speeds, leading the horse on occasion, and putting it into a gallop to keep the muscles loose, you could make forty miles a day.

  Which would have put Grat Holden and Ben Masterson across the Mexican border in a day and a half, maybe two. It wasn’t an easy trail south.

  Holden decided not to follow the Army’s recommendations. They had two Morgan horses, both browns, and they loped them out of Fort Bowie and rode hard in a hard country.

  Four hours later, when they first spotted the buzzards circling in the pale sky, they reined in their mounts and let them breathe. Holden drew the Winchester from the scabbard. Masterson checked the cylinders in his double-action .38-caliber revolvers, slipped both back into his sash, and pulled out the heavy Springfield carbine, which he braced against his thigh, the barrel pointed skyward.