• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1819 0

were proving insufficient to contain my ardent attentions to the many lovely women who were innocently drawn to the still-bright windows of McCreery’s store. Sara became quite impatient with my behavior and was on the verge of leaving me to my fate when she caught sight of something across the street. Following her indication I turned around to see a cab pulling up in front of Number 808, from which Marcus and Lucius Isaacson stepped rather wearily. Perhaps it was the wine, or the events of recent days, or even the weather; but I was absolutely overjoyed at the sight of them, and, leaping over the hedges, I dashed across Broadway to offer profuse greetings. Sara followed at a more rational pace. Both Lucius and Marcus had apparently seen a good amount of the sun during their sojourn on the high plains, for their skins had darkened considerably, giving them a warm, healthy look. They seemed very glad to be back, though I wasn’t sure they’d stay that way once they heard about Kreizler’s resignation.

“It’s amazing country out there,” Marcus said, as he pulled their bags off of the hansom. “Puts an entirely different perspective on life in this city, I can tell you that.” He sniffed at the air. “Smells a lot better, too.”

“We were shot at on one train ride,” Lucius added. “A bullet went right through my hat!” He showed us the hole by poking a finger through it. “Marcus says that it wasn’t Indians—”

“It wasn’t Indians,” Marcus said.

“He says that it wasn’t Indians, but I’m not so sure, and Captain Miller at Fort Yates said—”

“Captain Miller was just being polite,” Marcus interrupted again.

“Well, that may be,” Lucius answered. “But he did say—”

“What did he say about Beecham?” Sara asked.

“—he did say that, although most of the larger bands of Indians have been defeated—”

Sara grabbed him. “Lucius. What did he say about Beecham?”

“About Beecham?” Lucius repeated. “Oh. Well. A great deal, actually.”

“A great deal that comes down to one thing,” Marcus said, looking at Sara. He paused, his large brown eyes full of meaning and purpose. “He’s our man—he’s got to be.”

CHAPTER 38

* * *

Tipsy as I was, the Isaacsons’ news, related as we got them some food at the St. Denis, sobered me up in a hurry:

Apparently Captain Frederick Miller, now in his early forties, had been assigned to the headquarters of the Army of the West in Chicago as a promising young lieutenant in the late 1870s. He had chafed under the boring strictures of staff life, however, and asked to be sent farther west, where he hoped to see active service. This request was granted and Miller was dispatched to the Dakotas, where he was twice wounded, the second time losing an arm. He returned to Chicago but declined to take up his staff duties again, electing instead to command part of the reserve forces that were kept on hand for civil emergencies. It was in this capacity that, in 1881, he’d first come across a young trooper named John Beecham.

Beecham had told his recruiting officer in New York that he was eighteen at the time of his enlistment, though Miller doubted that this was true—even when the still-green trooper had arrived in Chicago, six months later, he seemed younger than that. However, boys often lie about their age in order to enter the military, and Miller had thought little of it, for Beecham had shown himself to be a good soldier—well disciplined, attentive to detail, and efficient enough to have made corporal within two years. True, his persistent requests to be sent farther west to do some Indian fighting had annoyed Beecham’s superiors in Chicago, who weren’t particularly anxious to have their better noncommissioned officers lost to the frontier; but overall, Lieutenant Miller had been given little reason to be anything but satisfied with the young corporal’s performance until 1885.

In that year, however, a series of incidents in several of Chicago’s poorer sections had exposed a disturbing facet of Beecham’s personality. Never a man with many friends, Beecham had taken to going into immigrant neighborhoods during his off-duty