A Thousand Texas Longhorns

by Johnny D. Boggs

Genres: African American Historical

Synopsis

Multiple award-winning author Johnny D. Boggs, one of the most respected and popular writers of Western fiction, brings to life the harsh reality of cattle drives in a powerful, trailblazing adventure inspired by the harrowing true story of the1866 cattle drive from Texas to Montana--and the legendary man who dared the impossible...
The Civil War is over. The future of the American West is up for grabs. Any man crazy enough to lead a herd of Texas longhorns to the north stands to make a fortune--and make history. That man would be Nelson Story. A bold entrepreneur and miner, he knows a golden opportunity when he sees one. But it won't be easy. Cowboys and bandits have guns, farmers have sick livestock, and the Army's have their own reasons to stop the drive. Even worse, Story's top hand is an ornery Confederate veteran who used to be his enemy. But all that is nothing compared to the punishing weather, the deadly stampedes--and the bloodthirsty wrath of the Sioux...
This is the incredible saga of a man named Story. A true legend of the Old West. And the ever-beating heart of the American Dream.

Release date: October 27, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 427

Sample

The first thing he noticed were the trees.

Not a leaf, not a branch, not a twig, and nary a pine needle in sight. Nothing. This high up in the Rockies, with plenty of water, Virginia City, Montana Territory, should have been lumber rich, but Mason Boone turned his head and spit. Log cabins dotted the hills, and wooden-frame buildings lined the main street, with some picket, board-and-batten, and clapboard shacks mixed among a few stone structures. Wood had to be around here somewhere. Smoke puffed out of brick chimneys and iron pipes, and Boone smelled woodsmoke, not coal.

Boone stepped out of the way as a mule-drawn wagon headed toward Nevada City. Wooden wagon, too. The driver didn’t look altogether friendly, and his blue overcoat reminded Boone of damn Yankees. Boone looked in every direction.

Not even a shade tree.

That didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any sun here, either. Just dark clouds, closer to the ground than they ought to be, but although Virginia City sat in a bowl, the elevation topped five thousand feet. For the time being, the only snow could be found in the shady parts, caused by the buildings, or in the dirty piles shoveled off walkways and boardwalks, or swept over any flat-roofed structure. Boone figured his toes had frozen solid after trudging through drifts on his hike here. Around the city, clouds, threatening more snow, obscured peaks of most of the surrounding mountains.

One tree. That’s all I want. Just one tree. Just to sit under. Rest my feet. Scratch my back.

Another wagon driver hollered at Boone to get the hell out of the road.

“Ride around me.” Boone’s tone and eyes must have warned that cackler that Mason Boone wasn’t one to trifle with. Boone looked down one boardwalk—if anybody would actually call those planks a boardwalk—and across the street. Over the rooftops at the hills. Nary a tree. Maybe higher up, behind or above the gray clouds, but not here.

Virginia City, Mason Boone figured, might as well be in Kansas.

“Pies. Fresh-baked pies.”

Discovering the source of the voice, Boone forgot all about trees. What in God’s name had gotten into him? Trees? He was no lumberjack, no carpenter, could barely tell the difference between a sweet gum and an aspen. It might have had something to do with that dream from the past night, another one of those he barely remembered—like most of his dreams, the rare times he ever dreamed—but, more than likely, this preoccupation with trees could be attributed to walking from a piss-poor claim in the Gravelly Range all the way to Virginia City. His feet hurt. Not enough left of his socks to darn. Holes in both boots, if you could call them boots. If some Quinine Jimmy told him that his nose was frostbit and had to be cut off, Boone wouldn’t have cared. He didn’t even stop to look at the wares in the window of the Mechanical Bakery.

He forgot about how much his feet hurt. He forgot about trees. He walked, picking up the pace, when the woman with the pies turned down another street. Boone didn’t catch up with her until she stood in front of the Planter’s House. His focus trained so hard on the raven-haired woman hawking pies, he didn’t even notice the sign above the building on the other side of the street.

She saw him, though, yet did not step back, even though Boone knew he stunk to high heaven. His nose might have been frozen by the wind, but he could smell. Yet penetrating his stench came the delectable aromas of delicacies that had eluded him at that boar’s nest where he had been mining.

He hadn’t seen a woman since Easter.

“Ma’am,” he managed.

“Would you like a pie?”

The voice might have been guarded, and the eyes colder than the wind, but she managed a smile. At least, Boone convinced himself she smiled.

He stared without blinking.

“Ma’am?” This time, many seconds later, it came out as a question.

“A pie,” she said. “Dried apple today. That’s all we have.”

“Dried apple,” he repeated, which came out as if he were speaking Blackfeet. Black hair. Parted at the middle. Dark eyes. Round face. Coat of winter wool. He saw the tray she carried, pies with golden crusts lined in a row. Four pies. Not very big, but deep-dish. From the vacant spots, she must have already sold nine.

“Would you like a pie, sir?”

His eyes came up again. A horse, hitched in front of a business up Jackson Street, began to urinate.

Boone found his voice. “How much?” His right hand reached into the pocket in his denim britches.

“Five dollars.”

He stopped reaching. His hand had gone through the big rip and his fingernails began scratching his thigh. He had used the remnants of his underdrawers the previous night to get a fire going.

Boone stared. “Five . . . dollars?”

She did not debate him.

For a puny pie?

Fellow come all this way, nigh two thousand miles—most of that on the ankle express—well, Boone figured, a man who traveled that far, he deserved a pie. But nobody ever charged five dollars for a pie back in Texas or Tennessee. Besides, Boone didn’t have five cents. Hadn’t seen a dollar in a coon’s age.

“Five . . . dollars?” He stopped scratching his leg, removed his hand from the pocket, stared at his fingernails, noticed the filth. He also saw people stepping out of the Planter’s House, and even more from the building across the street. That’s when he finally saw the sign.

All of a sudden, he felt real thirsty.

“Five dollars.” The raven-haired beauty spoke again. “Maybe you’ll have sufficient funds tomorrow.” She moved back toward Wallace Street.

The men in front of the Liquor Emporium laughed.

Later, Boone figured, he must have gone crazy. All those months on the Ruby, all that hard work—for nothing. The long walk to Virginia City. Not to mention all the miles he had traveled just to get here. Sure, that’d be more than enough to drive a fellow loco. Mason Boone wasn’t the kind of man who’d let some walking whiskey vats drive him to do something stupid. Then again, later, when his brain became less addled, he would also remember that folks back in Smith County had said Mason Boone wasn’t the type of man who’d quit his country and desert.

The pie-selling angel stopped when Boone caught up with her.

“Yes?” There was no warmth in her voice, no humor in those deep, dark eyes. He noticed a slight scar above an eyebrow. Wondered how she had gotten it.

Laughter from the far boardwalk reached him.

Mason Boone smiled. “Maybe,” he said, “we could work out . . . a . . . trade?”

The eyes did not blink. His face suddenly warmed, and he knew why. Damn it all to hell if he hadn’t blushed. The woman should be blushing, or turning red with rage, but it was Boone who felt embarrassed. And now the laughter across the street angered him, and if he had not been so captured by those dark eyes, he would’ve charged across the street like he had charged at Missionary Ridge. Instead, he just looked into eyes like the darkest, deepest mine.

He hated himself.

A kaleidoscope of colors replaced the beautifully shaped face, and pain blinded him, shooting from the top of his head to his toes. Someone had to be screaming, and blood ran between his fingers as Boone tried to squeeze the split in his skull back together.

Maybe Boone let the oaths fly. If anyone still laughed, the roaring in Boone’s ears drowned out that noise. He thought he had drawn his legs up, smelled the mixture of manure and gravel in the dirt, felt as though he had rolled himself up into a ball.

He prayed that he hadn’t messed his britches.

He swallowed snot.

He tasted blood.

For a brief moment, he remembered Kennesaw Mountain and beginning that long, stupid walk.

Then he pictured the pine trees, even saw his ma and pretty Janice Terry, and smelled the scent of pine trees, pine sap, and felt the warmth of a fireplace back home in Tyler. Folks up here in Alder Gulch thought Texas was just like Kansas and Wyoming, some flat, treeless plain. They’d never seen the Piney Woods. Boone wished he had never left.

He heard that woman’s voice.

“Nelson. Don’t.” The last word came out as a scream.

Just before Boone disappeared into blackness darker than that pie-seller’s eyes.

Dried-apple pies toppled onto the boardwalk and streets. Four of them, ruined—twenty dollars’ worth of baking, lost—but Ellen Story could not, would not, think about that. She let the tray she had fashioned rattle on the stones, brushed past her husband, and knelt by the stinking, bearded young man who clutched his bleeding head. His hat—if one could call it a hat—rolled over toward the groggery. His hands turned crimson before they slipped from that fine, dark hair. His eyes fluttered, eventually rolling up and out of sight, and he let out a heavy sigh.

“Get up, Ellen . . . And you . . . you best go about your business.”

Looking up, she found her husband pointing the Navy Colt’s barrel at the men lounging in front of the Liquor Emporium’s entrance. They must have stepped out from their afternoon of idleness to witness the fun. Most of them disappeared for more drinking, but two moved down the street toward hobbled horses. Even the men standing in front of the Planter’s House began to find safer climes.

“Ellen. I said, ‘Get up.’”

There he stood, king of the world. Times like this, she wondered what she’d ever seen in him back in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Well, that wasn’t quite the truth. She knew exactly what she’d seen in Nelson Gile Story. About an inch under six feet tall, nigh two hundred pounds, with blond hair and blue-gray eyes, he wasn’t hard on the eyes like most of her would-be Jayhawker suitors. “Got a head for business,” Pa had told her. “And the Midas touch,” said her older brother, John. Nelson Story worked hard; of that she had no uncertainty. Any man who hauled wood for her father couldn’t fear calluses or be allergic to sweat. Back then, eastern Kansas, spitting distance from Missouri, could be the devil on courtships.

Nelson Story came from Ohio. The Trents started off in Kentucky before Ellen’s pa moved to Platte County, Missouri, when John was a youngster. Ellen was Missouri-born, but Pa moved the family to Kansas Territory in ’54 so when it came time to vote for statehood, the more Kentuckians and Virginians casting ballots, Ma explained later, the better chance Kansas could become a slave state. Well, that hadn’t worked out, but Pa never had been the luckiest or smartest man Ellen had known.

Nelson Story, on the other hand, was something else. So her father decided to forget about his Southern leanings, Democratic tendencies, and that forlorn hope of becoming rich enough to own a bevy of slaves.

In those years, Ellen rarely saw this side of Nelson Story, though a few gossips let stories slip out about him knifing a neighbor’s forearm up in Ohio, beating a man half to death in Monticello Township, using a Colt to buffalo a drunkard in Liberty—much as he had just done to this poor fellow.

“Ellen . . . I won’t tell you . . .”

“Shut your mouth, Nelson.” Her black eyes burned. Her husband blinked. “Hand me your bandanna.”

First he pouted, started to say something else, thought better of that mistake, and finally slid the Navy into the holster on his left hip. Another .36 remained holstered on the right hip. “For balance,” Thomas Dimsdale, editor of the Montana Post, often joked. “Montana wind would spin Nelson like a top if he didn’t carry two revolvers.”

She took the piece of frayed calico and pressed it against the man’s head, trying to be gentle yet hard enough to stanch the flowing blood. A wave of nausea struck her, and she hated herself for this. Her husband despised weakness, but, closing her eyes, she drew in a deep breath, held it as long as she could, and hoped she would not throw up black tea and fresh biscuits onto this poor man. When her eyes opened, Nelson Story squatted beside her, his hand out, eyes maybe a tad softer now.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

Their gazes locked.

“It’s my bandanna, Ellen,” Nelson said.

Without waiting, he moved his right hand down and pressed the rag tighter on the man’s wound. Withdrawing her hand, Ellen looked away from the stranger, but the wreckage of her morning’s baking made her sob, “Oh.” She hadn’t meant to say anything.

Nelson Story glanced at the busted pies. “It’s all right,” he said.

“No, it is not.”

Not in a town like Virginia City, Idaho Territory. No, it was Montana Territory now, since the federal government had carved Montana out of Idaho and who knows what other territories. She still had trouble remembering that they now lived in Montana Territory, not Idaho Territory, but Nelson always told her it didn’t matter the name, hell was hell no matter who claimed it. Ellen had been selling pies since they had arrived in Bannack City, due west, back in the early summer of ’63. She figured to earn her keep, and in this country, where a pie could sell for five bucks, a husband and wife needed to work together or go bust.

Twenty dollars’ worth of pies. Gone to dust.

She looked at the stranger, still breathing at least, and the bleeding appeared to have slowed. She remembered the shock on his gaunt face when she had told him how much a pie of hers would cost. Man had to be a greenhorn. A hundred-pound sack of flour cost twenty-eight dollars these days, and folks thought that was a blessing. A year ago, a person would have thought he had haggled his way to glory if he paid under ninety bucks for a sack. Butter still went for a buck-fifty a pound; that same price could fetch you an egg, providing it wasn’t as big as a goose egg. Onions went for forty-five cents a pound, and when Nelson had learned how much merchants were charging for potatoes, he had hitched up a wagon, driven all the way to Fort Hall, and returned with a wagonload of spuds that he sold for two bits each.

Midas touch. Nelson still had that. Sometimes, though, that touch landed a little harder. The stranger moaned.

Still wearing sleeve garters and a visor, Mr. Bagley eased his way down Jackson Street and cleared his throat before he knelt. “I’ll take care of him,” he said softly, and lowered his right hand toward the blood-soaked bandanna. He did not look at Ellen, but he nodded at Nelson. “You get Miz Ellen back home.” He slowly removed the bandanna. “Iffen he needs a stitch or two, I got some fishing line that should fix him up.” The rag returned. “Don’t worry. He won’t die. Not with a head this hard.” He winked at her husband. “Hard as you buffaloed him, Nelson, I thought you’d done cleaved his head down to his gizzard.”

Nelson rose, thanked the merchant, and extended his right hand toward Ellen. She let him lift her to her feet, and after another wave of nausea passed, she gave Mr. Bagley an appreciative nod. God bless him. Relief swept through her whole body. She could have kissed him on the streets, harelip and all.

Nelson picked up the tray she had dropped, and moved to his bay gelding, which was looking bored at the intersection of Wallace Street.

“I’ll take care of your horse, Mr. Story,” someone called out from in front of the newspaper office on the corner. The youngster weaved between a pack mule and a farm wagon, and gathered the reins. “You boarding him at Montee’s place?”

Nelson nodded. “Yes, at the Big Horse Corral. Thank you, bub.”

“My pleasure, sir. My pleasure.” Boy and horse moved down Wallace Street.

“Let’s go home, Ellen,” Story said.

As cabins went in Virginia City, theirs was, well, a cabin. This evening, it still smelled of flour and dried apples, and the winter kitchen remained a mess. As Nelson hung his gun belt on the elk horn, she pulled out her purse and laid gold dust, nuggets, silver dollars, and even some U.S. scrip on the table.

“A hundred and eighty dollars,” she announced. “Or close to it.”

He laid his hat, crown down, on the desk, and moved to the table, fingering a gold nugget.

“You don’t have to bake pies anymore, Ellen,” he said at last.

“I like to . . .” she started. She was about to say help, but Nelson would not like to hear that, so she changed her ending. “Cook.”

“Yeah.” He ran the back of his hand against his face. He needed a shave. “But maybe you’d like someone to cook for you, for us, for a change.”

She moved away from the table.

His right hand reached inside a coat pocket and slowly pulled out a leather pouch. He loosened the drawstring and shook out nuggets that spilled into the mixing bowl. The stones—much bigger than the ones Ellen had earned for her pies—glittered in the candlelight. Ellen’s lips parted, but she found no words.

Nelson laughed. “And that’s not the half of it. That there . . .” His chin jutted toward the mixing bowl. “That’s just from Alder Gulch. The half interest I put in with Ben Christenot’s claim in Pine Grove. And over at Oro Cache. You wouldn’t believe what those are assaying at. I scarcely believe it myself.”

Midas touch. In Ellen’s head, her brother John’s words rang like the Liberty Bell.

Sweeping her into his arms, Nelson kissed her hard.

Then someone knocked on the door.

He cursed softly, stared at her briefly, then crossed to the door, his hand resting on the butt of a holstered revolver.

“Yes,” he called.

“Nelson,” came the muffled voice. “It’s Ben.”

The right hand slipped off the walnut butt and moved toward the door, which he pulled open slightly, glanced at Ellen, and stepped through the opening. The door remained partly open, but Ellen did not eavesdrop. She tried to think of what Nelson had just told her. Were they rich? She fingered one of the nuggets, rubbing off sugar and flour.

Once the door opened, Nelson stepped inside, pulled on his hat, and found the gun rig. As he buckled the belt, he looked at Ellen.

“Don’t wait up,” he told her. “And pull in the latch string.”

The door closed behind him.

The potatoes on John Catlin’s plate were cold. Same with the gravy. Even the beef. The waitress at the La Porte Dining Palace refreshed his coffee and moved on. Catlin broke the dam of mashed potatoes with his spoon, but no waterfall broke free, no flood of brown drenched his beef, for the gravy had congealed. Which didn’t surprise him. For at least fifteen minutes, he had just stared at the food.

Chair legs scraped the floor as Steve Grover sat, uninvited, holding his own cup of coffee. Sipping, Grover shook out a copy of Daily State Sentinel. Catlin looked across the small café—Palace was a misnomer—to see if he knew anyone else in the restaurant. He hadn’t thought to look when he first sat down, but unless someone was hiding, Grover and Catlin were the only ones here. No, there was a gent with a silk hat by the table near the window that looked out onto the alley. Spooning lemon cake.

“How long you been here?” Catlin asked.

“Just got here, got a cup of water dyed with coffee. You were so focused on your chow you didn’t even hear me say ‘Afternoon, Captain.’”

“Oh.” Catlin eyed his food. Grover studied the newspaper.

“At two dollars a year,” Grover said, “a man would think there’d be something worth reading.”

“You subscribe to an Indianapolis newspaper?”

“No.” He turned the page. “Found it on a bench outside of Marston’s.”

“You getting a photograph or ambrotype taken?”

“Neither.” Grover flipped to another page. “Just walking past. He’s closed on Sundays anyhow.” He peered over the top of the paper. “You ever get a likeness made of yourself?”

Catlin nodded. “Indianapolis. Before we marched south. Tintype. Mailed one, no, must’ve been two, to Ma and Pa in Michigan. I got four. Must have kept one for myself. Don’t know what I did with the other.”

“How much did that cost?”

He shrugged. “Two bits. Four. Dollar. Don’t rightly recall.”

Grover returned to the newspaper, went to another page, looked at Catlin again. “How’d you know it was an Indianapolis newspaper?”

“I left it on the bench outside Wallace’s Grocery House.”

“You subscribe to the Sentinel?”

“No. I found it in the trash box outside of Culver’s.”

“You buying a book or crockery?” Grover asked.

“Where?”

“At Culver’s.”

“No. He’s closed, too. It being Sunday. I just looked down by chance, saw it, picked it up.”

“Wonder how it got all the way up here. The paper, I mean.”

“Drummer, I warrant.”

“Most likely. Wonder how it got from Culver’s to Marston’s.”

“That’s a mystery for sure.” Catlin looked at his plate, sighed. “You don’t read the Herald?”

“Charlie Powell don’t put nothing in his paper except advertisements for blood pills. You?”

Catlin was too late trying to cover his yawn. “Excuse me. I’ll pick one up now and then. When I find one at the grocery or Culver’s store.”

“How’d your winter wheat make out?”

“Slim. Yours?”

“About the same. Spring wheat was average.”

“Mine, too.”

“Figure this spring’ll be better.”

Catlin nodded. “If we get some decent rain.”

Silence.

“Come to church?”

“Got here too late. You?”

“I just got here.”

A month, or maybe just a minute, passed.

“Well, I know why you left this on the bench. Nothing worth reading in Indianapolis, either.”

“There’s always something worth reading,” Catlin said.

“What?”

Sighing, Catlin took the paper, turned to the second page, and tapped at the quotation below the paper’s name and the date.

Grover nodded, took the paper, and slid it to the side of the table.

Catlin plowed the potatoes with his fork, preparation, he figured, for spring. If spring ever returned.

Grover slurped. Catlin farmed the mashed potatoes. The gravy hardened. The waitress walked by without checking on either.

“You know what I like to read in any newspaper?” Grover asked.

“What?” Catlin said.

Grover picked up the paper again and tapped a column on the front page. “The railroad schedules. Bellefontaine Railway . . .” Catlin feared his friend would start reading the whole damned table, trains arriving from the east, and the west, the expresses, plus everything else, but, no, Steve Grover condensed things considerably, and even Indianapolis lacked a bevy of railroads. “The Atlantic and Great Western Railway . . .”

“You plan on taking a trip?”

“Where would I go?”

Catlin shrugged. “Lake Michigan?”

“Wouldn’t need to pay money for a train ticket to see that. Could march there if I had a mind to. I sure know how to march.”

Catlin smiled with understanding.

“You ever seen Lake Michigan?”

Catlin looked up, surprised at the question, and his answer. “Can’t rightly say I have. You?”

Grover’s head shook.

Another round of silence.

“Funny,” Grover said.

“What’s that?”

“Lake Michigan.” Grover sipped his coffee. “The two of us. We saw so much of the South. Even Washington City. And we haven’t seen a big lake that’s, what, twenty miles north of us? If that.”

Catlin grinned. “You want to go?”

“Where?”

“Lake Michigan.”

Grover shook his head. “Not in winter.”

“Maybe come spring.”

The head shook again. “We’ll be plowing.” Another taste of weak coffee. “Besides. It’s just a bunch of water.”

Catlin thought about tasting the meal he’d paid for. Decided against it.

“Ran into Missus Yoho at Alvord’s store yesterday,” Grover said.

“How’s she doing?”

“Got the catarrh.”

“I see.”

“Getting better.”

“There are remedies.”

Grover tapped the newspaper. “Papers are full of advertisements for cures. Especially in Charlie’s Herald. Last time I saw a copy, anyhow.”

“Must be an epidemic.”

“You ever caught it?”

“Don’t think so. But I don’t rightly know what the catarrh is.”

“Me, neither.”

Two months passed. Or maybe it was just a couple of minutes.

“It’s just a cold,” Grover said. “Something like that.”

“What’s that?”

“The catarrh.”

“Yeah. Congestion. Runs down the back of your throat.”

“Huh?”

“Catarrh.”

“Yeah. I know what it is.”

“Most people do.”

“Old Banash seemed to have it from Louisville to Atlanta.”

“Likely still has it. Where did he hail from?”

Grover thought. “Union Mills?”

“I thought it was Unionville.”

“Might’ve been. Union-something.”

“Or maybe Rensselaer.”

They grinned. Sipped coffee. Which still wasn’t good. Catlin wondered how his dinner would taste if he’d bother to eat. Then again, he knew how it tasted. Hell, that’s all everyone ate here whenever they came to town to splurge on a meal, something they didn’t have to cook themselves. And when they ate at home, this is the same blessed meal they’d cook.

“She asked if I’d speak to the Unconditional Union Girls of La Porte,” Grover said.

“Who?”

“Missus Yoho.”

Catlin had to reconnoiter to figure out where Mrs. Yoho came into the conversation. “Speak about what?” he asked after a moment.

Grover smiled and tapped the folded newspaper. “How I preserved the Union.”

“Oh.” Catlin wondered if the beef might be halfway decent. “I got asked to speak once.”

“To the Unconditional Union Girls?”

Catlin shook his head. “St. Rose’s Academy.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I told the headmistress to ask me another time. After the wheat crop was in.”

“Oh. You get asked to talk a lot?”

Catlin looked at his friend. “I don’t get to town often.”

“Yeah. What brought you into town today?”

“Run some errands.”

“Not much open on a Sunday.”

“I know.”

“Is anything open in La Porte on a Sunday?”

Catlin shrugged. “The Dining Palace. Church. Livery.”

“What I figured. What errands did you run?”

“I run . . . away from the farm.”

Grover smiled. “Yeah. Me, too.”

The bell above the door jingled. Cold air came in. Hot air came out.

“See you, hon,” the waitress told the fellow with the silk hat.

The door closed. The waitress went back to reading a penny dreadful.

“What did you tell her?” Catlin asked after another season came and went.

“Who?”

“Missus Yoho.”

“Oh.” He slurped more coffee.

Catlin waited.

“Well?”

“What?”

“What did you tell Missus Yoho?”

“Nothing.” He wiped his nose. “Oh, I guess I told her to ask me next time, when I had more time.”

“It’s December, Steve. You won’t have less time than right now.”

“Well.”

They drank. Catlin gave up on his dinner and slid the plate toward Grover. “You hungry?” Catlin asked.

“You aren’t going to eat this?”

Catlin shook his head.

“Off your feed?”

“Just not hungry.”

“My pa wouldn’t let me get up from the supper table till I’d cleaned my plate.” He raised his head, suspicious. “You want me to pay for . . . ?”

“No, Steve. Eat. It’s cold. But it’s on me.”

“Well, I can’t say I’m hungry.” But the plate was empty three minutes later, and Steve Grover wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat.

“They know how to make good roast beef and mashed potatoes here, that’s for sure.”

“It’s their specialty.”

“Maybe it’s the catarrh,” Grover said.

Catlin looked up, his face blank.

“What’s ailing you,” Grover explained.

“Nothing’s ailing me, Steve. Except . . .”

“What?”

Catlin smiled. “Boredom.”

Grover’s face surprised Catlin. His old friend—friend for something that felt like twenty years now, when it would be just four come spring—knew what he meant, when half the time, John Catlin couldn’t figure that out himself.

“Remember what you said?” Grover asked.

“When?”

“In Washington City. During the Grand Review.”

Before Catlin’s head shook, Grover answered his own question. “You said, ‘Steve, we’re going home at last.’ Remember? That’s exactly what you said.” He drained the coffee with two final slurps and set the empty mug beside the plate. “Here we are, walking past President Abraham Lincoln, Sherman, Grant, Sheridan, ladies throwing flowers at us, swooning, men cheering, and after all we’d been through, you just wanted to get home.”

Catlin smiled. “All I wanted to do was get home after we first saw the elephant.”

“Me, too,” Grover said. “Best time of my life, but I was too scared to know it.”

“Me, too.”

“Horse apples.”

Catlin looked up.

“You were born to soldier, John. Captain Sabin said you took to infantry faster than crap flowed through a goose. Made fifth sergeant before I could shoulder a musket. Captain after Atlanta. Missus Yoho ought to ask you to speak about . . .” The words trailed off.

Catlin remembered. Twenty-five years old when he had joined the fight in August of 1862. All that marching and drilling in the Indiana summer. Meeting Steve Grover. Meeting hundreds of other men.

“Lake Michigan,” Catlin said.

“Huh.”

“I was just thinking. I’d never seen anything before we enlisted. Well, Ohio. Maybe I ought to go see Lake Michigan.”

“You seen Ohio, John?”

“I was born in Ohio. Can’t say I remember much about it. Pa and Ma had the wanderlust. They’re living in Michigan now. Never seen Michigan, either. We sure saw a lot of country.”

Grover drank coffee. “I don’t think you’d want to see