Stamping Ground by Loren D. Estleman

gathered together at the buttoned collar of his field-stained tunic. Crisp white stubble showed where his razor had missed that morning, a circle of sticking-plaster where it hadn’t. We played tag with the eye contact for a while and then I lost my patience.
    â€œAll right, disgorge.” I holstered the five-shot. “You look like you swallowed a powder keg.”
    â€œI can’t do it,” he said. His voice fell somewhere between a whisper and the sound you get when you try to rack a shell into the chamber of a repeater with sand in the action. “I don’t care if they bust me again, I can’t watch you three go out there without telling you what’s waiting.”
    Hudspeth gave his cinch a yank and then all was silence. The ticking of the blacksmith’s forge as it cooled grew loud. Somewhere a horse snored.
    â€œWell?” The word exploded from the marshal.
    The trooper lurched ahead without further preamble. His eyes were black hollows beneath the heavy brows. “I’m Hoxie, Jed Hoxie. Twenty years in the service, not counting the two I spent with Stonewall Jackson. I was with that patrol that got hit last night. Cap’n Francis—he was one of them got kilt—he headed it up till one of the injun scouts found the trail of a couple dozen unshod ponies this sideof the James. It could of been friendlies, maybe even métis, but nobody believed that for a minute. None of them has budged a inch from their camps and reservations since this whole thing started, except to hunt, and there ain’t no hunting along the Jim this time of year. No, we knowed who it was all right. When you been out here as long as some of us you get so you can smell ’em. Francis ordered halt and sent a messenger back to the fort for orders from Colonel Broderick. But instead of sending ’em, the old man rode back hisself and took charge of the patrol. He said it was time the job got done right, and he wasn’t going to trust it to no one else. There was forty of us—more than enough, I guess he figured, to deal with Ghost Shirt.
    â€œTheir trail crossed the river a couple of miles south of Jamestown. It was so fresh there was puddles of water in the tracks on the other side. We caught sight of dust clouds a hour or so later. There wasn’t much, what with all the grass, but you can always count on twenty horses kicking up a little when they’re rid hard. This was the hilly country in the Drift Prairie, and the dust was all we seen of ’em. Broderick called column of twos and we give chase at a canter. We was still following the dust cloud when they hit us.
    â€œThey come at us from two sides, one half hitting us in the flank from the left, the other taking us at a angle near the front from the right, just like a pair of scissors. Neatest split cavalry charge I ever did see. They come out of nowhere, whooping it up to beat the band and pounding away with them Spencer repeaters they took from our armory. Broderick went first. Bullet tore clean through his left eye and knocked off the back of his head on its way out. Captain Francis took two in the chest and one in the thigh and bled to death before we could get him back to the fort. We lost our bugler whilst he was blowing recall. He went down with one in his back, wailing on that horn like a sick calf. Bullets was flying all over the place. Once I felt someone tugging at my sleeve, but when I turned to see who it was, there was nobody there. What was there was a hole in theelbow where a hunk of lead kissed it. The injuns made one pass, then turned around and done it again, only backwards, and all the time they was pouring lead into us like grease through a tin horn. We’d of lost a hell of a lot more than twelve men if injuns was any kind of shots.”
    â€œDid you hit any of them?” I asked.
    He shook his head, working his store-bought teeth like a mouthful of chew. “Can’t say for sure. There