Longarm and the War Clouds by Tabor Evans

Longarm looked around at the mud-brick buildings surrounding the parade ground.
    Morning drills were over; the parade ground itself was nearly vacant. It was a dry flat scored with the marks of thousands of boots and spurs. The flag standing in the center of it flapped and flashed in the wind and sun. One soldier in a battered tan kepi was pushing a wheelbarrow slowly around, stopping to shovel horseshit.
    Soldiers, looking too young to be here, lounged around out front of the enlisted men’s barracks, half out of uniform. They owned the weary, bored expressions of most of the other soldiers Longarm had seen stationed at remote outposts for months on end. When boredom and frustration didn’t plague these men, the threat of bloody, possibly slow, excruciating death, often did.
    â€œHow’s it feel to be back on an army outpost?” Longarm asked War Cloud, who stood beside the federal lawman, casting his gaze slowly around the buildings encircling the parade ground.
    â€œIt feels good. It feels like home. I wouldn’t want to live here again permanent-like, Custis, but you know I am a warrior, like all Apaches. And being around other warriors feels like the right place for me.”
    He glanced at Magpie standing off his right shoulder and asked the girl in Coyotero if she remembered the place. She looked around, pursed her lips, arched her brows, and hiked her shoulders with indifference.
    It was an odd gesture for a young Apache woman, one that told Longarm that more of the White Eyes’ culture had rubbed off on her than she probably would have admitted. Or maybe more than she was consciously aware of.
    â€œShall we, gentlemen . . . and . . . Miss Magpie?” Kilroy slung the saddlebags containing the stolen stagecoach money over his shoulder and gestured toward a low, brush-roofed adobe on the opposite side of the parade ground, sandwiched between the fort barber shop and the officers’ and noncommissioned officers’ barracks. The low shack bore a plank attached to a post near the steps leading up onto a narrow stoop, and the plank had the words FORT COMMANDER burned into it.
    While a trooper led their horses off toward the stables at the rear of the camp, Captain Kilroy and the fort’s visitors tramped across the parade ground, lifting little puffs of dust with every step. Longarm followed the captain up the gray wooden steps, flanked by War Cloud and Magpie. The captain knocked once on the half-open door, called, “Major Belcher, visitors to see you, sir.”
    The captain received no reply, but he pushed the door wide and walked inside the office bearing a desk much too large for the small space. Longarm had heard the clattering from the porch, and it was louder now as he doffed his hat and walked into the room to stand beside the captain, on the other side of the commanding officer’s messy desk. The desk was flanked by a large, framed map of southern Arizona Territory and northern Mexican Sonora.
    The clattering continued to emanate through a door that stood six-inches open, behind and right of the commanding officer’s desk. It sounded as though someone were pounding a hammer.
    But then Longarm heard the guttural growls and groans and, being no stranger to such sounds himself, recognized them even before, canting his head slightly to one side, he peered into the room beyond the door.
    It was a small bedroom. Longarm could see part of a bed and a dresser to the right of the bed’s foot. A brown-skinned girl was leaning forward against the dresser, standing sideways to Longarm. She was completely naked. A yellow dress lay crumpled around her delicate, brown, bare feet.
    The girl leaned into her outstretched arms, hand clasping the front side of the dresser. What was making the hammering sounds was the dresser being smacked against the wall as someone rammed the girl from behind. Her cherry-tan, brown-tipped breasts bounced sharply with each