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By Root 1448 0

there was a Dry Gulch Hill on every Pacific island where the Montaneer regiment had seen action, but none had been more treacherous than this. This one was about as high as a football field is long, a desolate muddy hump that had been given an artillery haircut, leaving only palm snags and a general air of determined destruction. With a completeness like that of fog, the stench of corpses of Japanese soldiers rotting in the sun hung over the trails up the hill. The fighting had moved on, and high on the most recently battered section of slope the first two stretcher bearers to arrive were at work amid the wounded and worse than wounded under an embankment that had become an aid station. The one in charge glanced around as a second pair of bearers came slipping and sliding up the trail, cursing the red mud. "Where you been, sightseeing?"

"Stopped for cigars and caviar, what the hell do you think?" the lead man snapped back. "Murray's carry strap gave out and we had to pull up to tie the sonofabitch together. What's the picture here?"

"Couple for us, one for the body squad. The others can still walk, more or less." The man in charge turned to the last of the stretcher squad. "Hey, Murray, you're from Missoula, aren't you?" He pointed to a laid-out figure shaded by a poncho. "That one's Standish—conked out, loss of blood."

"Yeah, we played pool together," Murray reflected. "Dan's a live wire." He lowered his voice. "Is he going to make it, you think?"

"Got the tourniquet on him in time, he ought to pull through." The first man swung a bothered gaze toward a still body beyond Standish's breathing one. "One there that didn't. Their medic—always hate to see that. Don't know him. You?"

Murray stepped over for a closer look, shaking his head this time. "Never had the chance to. Poor devil didn't have time to get his boots broken in."

"Fish out his tags, Murray—the chaplain is getting finicky, doesn't like to touch guys when he does the mort report. Let's get at this."

The mortal remains of one more man in uniform no longer the business of the stretcher bearers, they turned away from the dog tag-marked body of Dex Cariston.

Good God Almighty, Dex—if you ended up thinking anything like that. Why that conscientious? Couldn't you just sit out the war?

He could only try to imagine the change of heart or mind or guts or wherever a conscience as restless as Dex's was seated.

"I'm doing what I can to keep blood in people," back there amid the warless parachutes of the smoke-jumper camp, "instead of letting it out of them."

Fine, well, and good, Dex, that was your decision, as large as life itself. But then? What got to you? The hundredth time some yokel along the Seeley Lake road shouted "yellowbelly" at you? The feeling of odd man out, nagging at you in those nights you struggled to sleep? You were made of stronger stuff than that, though, you could shrug those off even if they did get under your skin. No, it took something that hurt you down to the bone, and I was a witness to it coming. You died of gossip. Mere goddamn gossip.

Slumped against the wire room wall, the two messages crumpled and then uncrumpled in his helpless hands, Ben numbly added and subtracted elements in the weighing of both lives. Gossip was never mere if you were a mercantile prince, an heir with rivals to the prideful fortunes of the Cariston name, was it. And if you sliced conscience with a blade of disdain like Danzer's, there was nothing unnatural about skewering a rival not even going through the motions of serving in uniform, right, Slick Nick? Talk about enemy action. The war didn't invent that particular one. Goddamn Danzer, I did what I could to head him off while I was on the ship. But all he had to do was wait until people forgot that shark piece a little bit and then have his wolf pack of haberdashers start the gossip about Dex, the conchie who would not serve his country in uniform.

And Tepee Weepy fit into this—where? TPWP and the colonel, simply lost in the forest of good intentions? He felt entitled to doubt that. Yet as furiously