For This We Are Soldiers: Tales of the Frontier Army Read online

  ALSO BY CARLA KELLY

  FICTION

  Daughter of Fortune

  Miss Chartley’s Guided Tour

  Marian’s Christmas Wish

  Mrs. McVinnie’s London Season

  Libby’s London Merchant

  Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career

  Miss Billings Treads the Boards

  Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand

  Summer Campaign

  Miss Whittier Makes a List

  The Lady’s Companion

  With This Ring

  Miss Milton Speaks Her Mind

  One Good Turn

  The Wedding Journey

  Here’s to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army

  Beau Crusoe

  Marrying the Captain

  The Surgeon’s Lady

  Marrying the Royal Marine

  The Admiral’s Penniless Bride

  Borrowed Light

  Coming Home for Christmas: Three Holiday Stories

  Enduring Light

  Marriage of Mercy

  My Loving Vigil Keeping

  Her Hesitant Heart

  The Double Cross

  Safe Passage

  Carla Kelly’s Christmas Collection

  In Love and War

  A Timeless Romance Anthology: Old West Collection

  Marco and the Devil’s Bargain

  Softly Falling

  Paloma and the Horse Traders

  Reforming Lord Ragsdale

  Enduring Light

  Summer Campaign

  Doing No Harm

  NONFICTION

  On the Upper Missouri: The Journal of Rudolph Friedrich Kurz

  Fort Buford: Sentinel at the Confluence

  Stop Me If You’ve Read This One

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  © 2016 Carla Kelly

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, whether by graphic, visual, electronic, film, microfilm, tape recording, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief passages embodied in critical reviews and articles.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Cedar Fort, Inc., or any other entity.

  “A Season for Heroes,” “Mary Murphy,” and “Such Brave Men” originally appeared in Here’s to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army, published by Texas Christian University, 2004. “Break a Leg” originally appeared in A Timeless Romance Anthology: The Western Collection, Mirror Press, 2014.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4621-2704-7

  Published by Sweetwater Books, an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc.

  2373 W. 700 S., Springville, UT 84663

  Distributed by Cedar Fort, Inc., www.cedarfort.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Kelly, Carla, author.

  Title: For this we are soldiers / Carla Kelly.

  Description: Springville, Utah : Sweetwater Books, an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc., [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016028874 (print) | LCCN 2016033464 (ebook) | ISBN 9781462119240 (perfect bound : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781462127047 (epub, pdf, mobi)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nineteenth century, setting. | West (U.S.), setting. | LCGFT: Short stories. | Historical fiction. | Western fiction. | War fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3561.E3928 F67 2016 (print) | LCC PS3561.E3928 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028874

  Cover design by Rebecca Greenwood

  Cover design © 2016 by Cedar Fort, Inc.

  Edited and typeset by Jessica Romrell

  To Susan Porter, who is every bit as courageous as these nineteenth-century ladies, and to Rita Schofield, a traveling buddy who helped me with a plot point.

  Thanks, friends!

  Contents

  Introduction

  Such Brave Men

  Break a Leg

  A Season for Heroes

  Take a Memo

  Mary Murphy

  A Leader of His Troops

  About the Author

  Introduction

  I need to explain this title. The historian in me won’t let me rest until I do.

  In graduate school in Louisiana, I studied American history with the emphasis on the Indian Wars (1854–1890). We were a raucous bunch, and opinionated, but ultimately more skeptical than anything else, as good historians should be.

  I am not sure in which discussion or class this happened, but when one of us would say something attributed to a historical figure, but not likely the actual fact, someone would say, “He didn’t really say that.” Everyone else would chorus, “But he should have!”

  So it is with “For this we are soldiers.” Supposedly this was said by Captain Guy V. Henry, D Company, Third Cavalry, after he was terribly wounded in the face during the Battle of the Rosebud, Montana Territory, June 17, 1876.

  I spent some useful time studying Guy Henry, who was awarded a Medal of Honor for his role in the Battle of Cold Harbor during the Civil War, served with distinction through a long career in the West, fought in Puerto Rico in the Spanish American War, and served briefly as governor of Puerto Rico.

  At the Rosebud, he was shot through the face and knocked off his horse in the middle of a ferocious battle. The bullet entered under his left eye, shattered his cheekbone, blew out some teeth, and came out just under his right eye.

  His life was saved by Shoshone Indian allies who fought the Lakota literally over his body. Later, he was hauled to the first aid station and lay there for a few more hours, with no protection from the sun except his horse’s shadow. In a hard-drinking, betting army, no one would have wagered a dime on Henry’s life expectancy.

  As the story goes, once the battle ended, Guy Henry’s fellow officers came by to inquire how he was. This is where Henry said, “It is nothing. For this we are soldiers.”

  Ah, but historians are skeptical. It’s a matter of some dispute that Henry could have said anything of the kind, considering the nature of his facial wounds. Many Indian Wars historians, me included, think he probably said nothing at all. This is where we reply, “But he should have!”

  And so Captain Henry should have. It still remains, true or not, one of the better quotations about any soldier in any war, strained to the utmost and soldiering on. The historian in me would never allow anyone to think he really said it, but by golly, what a statement! The fiction writer in me couldn’t waste it.

  This anthology of Indian Wars short stories before you mainly describes another kind of warrior in the Indian Wars—the women and children who followed their husbands and fathers out onto the plains after the Civil War and in many cases spent their entire lives in isolated garrisons from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast.

  The army never officially recognized the wives of officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted men, calling them mere “camp followers.” These army dependents fought their own war against fear and disease and death, and they were no less brave than the men.

  “A Season
for Heroes,” “Mary Murphy,” and “Such Brave Men,” are also found in my collection, Here’s to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier, published by Texas Christian University in 2004, and used here with grateful permission. “Break a Leg” came from A Timeless Romance Anthology: Old West Collection (Mirror Press, 2014). The remaining stories I wrote especially for this anthology.

  And to those of you who have waited for a whole new novel from me, wait a bit longer, please. On November 9, 2015, and January 25, 2016, I had total knee replacements, which put me way behind my writing schedule. This little collection will hopefully fill the gap until I can deliver another novel in 2017.

  People sometimes ask me what my personal favorite books are. My Indian Wars short stories occupy that position, partly because of my love for the subject, and partly because of the wonderful rangers and historians that I met while working at Fort Laramie National Historic Site and Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site. These colleagues remain my dear friends.

  For this we are writers.

  Carla Kelly

  Such Brave Men

  A little paint will make all the difference,” Hart Sanders said as he and his wife surveyed the scabby walls in Quarters B.

  Emma stood on tiptoe to whisper in her husband’s ear. She didn’t want to offend the quartermaster sergeant, who was leaning against the door and listening (she was sure). “Hart, what are these walls made of?”

  “Adobe,” he whispered back.

  “Oh.” Perhaps she could find out what adobe was later.

  Hart turned to the sergeant in the doorway. The man straightened up when the lieutenant spoke to him. “Sergeant, have some men bring our household effects here. And we’ll need a bed, table, and chairs from supply.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Emma took off her bonnet and watched the sergeant heading back to the quartermaster storehouse. Then she turned and looked at her first army home again. Two rooms and a lean-to kitchen, the allotment of a second lieutenant.

  Hart was watching her. Theirs wasn’t a marriage of long standing, but she knew him well enough to know that he wanted to smile but wasn’t sure how she would take that. “Not exactly Sandusky, is it?” he ventured finally.

  She grinned at him and snapped his suspenders. “It’s not even Omaha, Hart, and you know it!”

  But I have been prepared for this, she thought to herself later as she blacked the cook stove in the lean-to. Hart had warned her about life at Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory. He had told her about the wind and the heat and the cold and the bugs and the dirt. But sitting in the parlor of her father’s house in Sandusky, she hadn’t dreamed of anything quite like this.

  Later that afternoon, as she was tacking down an army blanket for the front room carpet, she noticed that the ceiling was shedding. Every time she hammered in a tack, white flakes drifted down to the floor and settled on her hair, the folding rocking chair, and the whatnot shelf she had carried on her lap from Cheyenne Depot to Fort Laramie. She swept out the flakes after the blanket was secure and reminded herself to step lightly in the front room.

  Dinner was brought in by some of the other officers’ wives, and they dined on sowbelly, hash browns, and eggless custard. The sowbelly looked definitely lowbrow congealing on her Lowestoft bridal china, and she wished she had brought along tin plates like Hart had suggested.

  She was putting the last knickknack on the whatnot when Hart got into bed in the next room. The crackling and rustling startled her, and she nearly dropped the figurine in her hand. She hurried to the door. “Hart? Are you all right?” she asked.

  He had blown out the candle, and the bedroom was dark. “Well, sure, Emma. What’s the matter?”

  “That awful noise!”

  She heard the rustling again as he sat up in bed. “Emma, haven’t you ever slept on a straw-tick mattress?”

  “In my father’s house?” She shook her head. “Does it ever quiet down?”

  “After you sleep on it awhile,” he assured her, and the noise started up again as he lay down and rolled over. He laughed. “Well, my dear, be grateful that we’re not in a connecting duplex. This bed’s not really discreet, is it?”

  She felt her face go red, then laughed too, and put down the figurine.

  A

  She had finished setting the little house in order the next morning when Hart came bursting into the front room. He waved a piece of paper in front of her nose.

  “Guess what?” he shouted. “D Company is going on detached duty to Fetterman! We leave tomorrow!”

  “Do I get to come?” she asked.

  “Oh, no. We’ll be gone a couple of months. Isn’t it exciting? My first campaign!”

  Well, it probably was exciting, she thought, after he left, but that meant she would have to face the house alone. The prospect gleamed less brightly than it had the night before.

  D Company left the fort the next morning after Guard Mount. She was just fluffing up the pillows on their noisy bed when someone knocked on the front door.

  It was the adjutant. He took off his hat and stepped into the front room, looking for all the world like a man with bad news. She wondered what could possibly be worse than seeing your husband of one month ride out toward Fetterman—wherever that was—and having to figure out how to turn that scabrous adobe box into a house, let alone a home.

  “I hate to tell you this, Mrs. Sanders,” he said at last.

  “Tell me what?”

  “You’ve been ranked.”

  Emma shook her head. Whatever was he talking about? Ranked?

  “I don’t understand, Lieutenant.”

  He took a step toward her, but he was careful to stay near the door. “Well, you know, ma’am, ranked. Bumped. Bricks falling?”

  She stared at him and wondered why he couldn’t make sense. Didn’t they teach them English at the academy? “I’m afraid it’s still a mystery to me, Lieutenant.”

  He rubbed his hand over his head and shifted from one foot to the other. “You’ll have to move, ma’am.”

  “But I just did,” she protested, at the same time surprised at herself for springing to the defense of such a defenseless house.

  “I mean again,” the lieutenant persisted. “Another lieutenant just reported on post with his wife, and he outranks your husband. Yours is the only quarters available, so you’ll have to move.”

  It took a minute to sink in. “Who? I can’t …”

  She was interrupted by the sound of boots on the front porch. The man who stepped inside was familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite place him until he greeted her; then she knew she would never forget that squeaky voice. He was Hart’s old roommate from the academy, and she had met him once. She remembered that Hart had told her how the man spent all his time studying and never was any fun at all.

  “Are you taking my house?” she accused the lieutenant.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Sanders,” he said, but he didn’t sound sorry at all.

  “But … but … didn’t you just graduate with my husband two months ago? How can you outrank him?” she asked, wanting to throw both of the officers out of her home.

  He smiled again, and she resisted the urge to scrape her fingernails along his face. Instead, she stamped her foot, and white flakes from the ceiling floated down.

  “Yes, ma’am, we graduated together, but Hart was forty-sixth in class standing. I was fifteenth. I still outrank him.”

  As she slammed the pots and pans into a box and yanked the sheets off the bed, she wished for the first time that Hart had been a little more diligent in his studies.

  Two privates moved her into quarters that looked suspiciously like a chicken coop. She sniffed the air in the one-room shack and almost asked one of the privates if the former tenants she ranked out had clucked and laid eggs. But he didn’t speak much English, and she didn’t feel like wasting her sarcasm.

  Emma swept out the room with a vigor that made her cough, and by nightfall when she crawled into the rustling bed
, she speculated on the cost of rail fare from Cheyenne to Sandusky.

  The situation looked better by morning. The room was small, to be sure, but she was the only one using it, and if she cut up a sheet, curtains would make all the difference. She hung up the Currier and Ives lithograph of sugaring off in Vermont and was ripping up the sheet when someone knocked at the door.

  It was the adjutant again. He had to duck to get into the room, and when he straightened up, his head just brushed the ceiling. “Mrs. Sanders,” he began, and it was an effort. “I hope you’ll understand what I have to tell you.”

  Emma sensed what was coming and braced herself, but she didn’t want to make it easy on him. “What?” she asked, seating herself in the rocking chair and folding her hands in her lap. As she waited for him to speak, she remembered a poem she had read in school called “Horatio at the Bridge.”

  “You’ve been ranked out again.”

  She was silent, looking at him for several moments. She noticed the drops of perspiration gathering on his forehead and that his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he swallowed.

  “And where do I go from here?” she asked at last.

  He shuffled his feet and rubbed his head again, gestures she was beginning to recognize. “All we have is a tent, ma’am.”

  “A tent,” she repeated.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  At least I didn’t get attached to my chicken coop, she thought, as she rolled up her bedding. She felt a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that Hart’s roommate and his wife—probably a little snip—had been bumped down to her coop by whoever it was that outranked him. “Serves him right,” she said out loud as she carried out the whatnot and closed the door.

  The same privates set up the tent at the corner of Officers Row. It wasn’t even an officer’s tent. Because of the increased activity in the field this summer, only a sergeant’s tent could be found. The bedstead wouldn’t fit in, so the private dumped the bed sack on the grass and put the frame back in the wagon. She started to protest when they drove away, but remembering his shortage of useful English, she saved her breath. They came back soon with a cot.