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159 13 A gainst his better judgment, Bose had joined the buffalo soldiers. After the journey down through Santa Fe and Las Cruces, the Medicine Hat paint and mule had gotten him safely over the Pecos wasteland to the Palo Pinto country, where he found that Doctor Ikard, his father, was dead of a heart attack. It didn’t matter to one soul that he had once fed soup to Cynthia Ann Parker, or that he’d gone up the cattle trails with Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, or that he had ridden off with bronc peelers and killed a Comanche in a fight with a band led by the one who turned out to be Cynthia Ann Parker’s son. The half-breed killer was the one who fired up these people’s conversation. He was believed to be everywhere at once, stealing every horse, leading every raid. Quanah Parker, Quanah Parker—it was like he was a fondly remembered nephew gone wrong. Bose was bone-sore and tired of sleeping on the ground. He followed up on Goodnight’s advice to approach the land office people at the courthouse in Jacksboro, rebuilt since the great Indian raid and the war but mostly a shambles of whorehouses and saloons. Certainly, those people told Bose—he could buy a little farmland from the state of Texas. Though of course it was none of their affair how he paid for the implements and seed. All that really mattered in Texas now was the darkness of his skin. With the government in Austin run by abolition Republicans and pompous black fools who couldn’t read as well as he could—elected because those were the only groups allowed to vote—the hostility toward black people 160 seemed more severe than it had been before the war. Freedmen who tried to farm cotton and compete with ignorant white sharecroppers were routinely burned out or lynched. The first order of the Reconstructionists was to disband and outlaw the ranger companies. Men in the communities that were being raided could ride out at night and strike back in the unobserved plains as they had for a century, but if they got caught, they could go to jail and forfeit all they had. The army was supposed to do all the protecting now. Fort Richardson wasn’t finished enough to merit the name, but because the short rolling hills between Texas settlement and the Indian Territory had become a no-man’s land, it was on its way to having a garrison of over six hundred men, the biggest military post in the country. Bose never would have taken the army’s oath if he hadn’t fallen under the spell of the one the Indians called Bad Hand, also the No-Finger Chief. Unlike Colonel Goodnight, who took the title because nobody in Pueblo, Colorado, could call him on it, Ranald Mackenzie was a real colonel, a graduate of West Point. Men who served under him out here learned that in the last three years of the war between the states, he fought in thirteen battles and got shot six times, one time most severely, in the lung. That wasn’t counting the horse that got blown in half right under him in his very first action, leaving shrapnel in his knee. Mackenzie was a slight man, clean-shaven except for reddish sideburns that grew past prominent ears and down his jaws. When he was thinking hard or trying to relax he had a habit of loudly cracking his knuckles, which drew attention to the fact that the right one was mangled by one of his battle wounds, missing the middle and third fingers, though he could waggle the stumps. The wound left him just enough control and steadiness of his hand to fire a gun, but it was an ugly thing. The colonel did not like to be saluted, for returning salutes drew attention to his hand; in formations and parades where it was required, he wore gloves. Bose never saw him with his clothes off, so he couldn’t say precisely where all he had been hit. [54.159.186.146] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:49 GMT) 161 He just saw the hand, the limp, and the spasms of pain. When they came on he coiled up sweating and cussing and grew clumsy. Bose had drifted into Fort Richardson just to have a look. It was at a place called Lost...