and then at the stage station in the near distance.
“Private, go ahead. We’ll walk.”
He didn’t dare look at Mrs. Hopkins, but he could feel her tension. There was that feeling she was weighing her options and finding none.
“It’s not far.”
He started walking, hoping she would come along, but knowing she had no choice. After walking a few feet, he heard her footsteps and he let out the breath he had been holding, and wondered why it mattered to him.
He eased casually into what he had to say. “Mrs. Hopkins, who is Thomas?”
He heard the tears in her voice.
“My son.”
Chapter Three
Somehow, Susanna hadn’t expected that question. Better to forge ahead, even if her teaching career at Fort Laramie ended in the next five minutes.
“Major Randolph, I think my cousin told you that I am divorced. I have a son, name of Tommy, who is in the custody of my former husband. There was nothing I could do. And when Captain Dunklin assumed that …”
“Wait.” The major took her arm, and she needed all her resolve not to draw back from him in fright. “Just sit down on this stump a minute.”
He increased the pressure on her arm, then he stopped suddenly and released her. Susanna remained upright, unsure.
“I’m not going to force you to sit if you don’t want to,” Major Randolph said.
She heard the apology in his voice, which also baffled her. No one in recent memory had apologized to her. She wasn’t even sure she liked it.
“I couldn’t help noticing that look you gave me when I agreed with Captain Dunklin that I was a widow,” she said. “It was a lie and you know it. Please believe me. I did not start that lie.”
“I know you didn’t. I heard the beginning of that pernicious fable, and I thought it was a foolish idea. The fault lies with your cousin.”
Susanna sat down. “Why would Emily do that? All I ever said in my letter to Colonel Bradley is that I was Mrs. Susanna Hopkins, and available to teach.”
The cold from the stump defeated her and she stood up. She looked toward the roadhouse, wanting the warmth, but not wanting more questions from Captain Dunklin.
“If we walk slowly, we won’t freeze,” the major joked. “Why would she do that?” he repeated. “Let me tell you something about army society. It is close-knit, snobbish and feeds on gossip. There is an unhealthy tendency to hold grudges.”
“That sounds as bad as Unity Methodist Church back home,” Susanna murmured.
The major threw back his head and laughed. “It’s this way—the army unit is a regiment, which travels together when it can, but generally finds itself spread over a large geographic area. Many a promising career has withered and died on a two-company post. I could include my own career, I suppose, but I like what I do.”
She didn’t know how it happened, but the major had tucked her arm through his as they strolled along.
“I was a state regimental surgeon during the late war, on loan from the regulars,” he said. “The Medical Department has placed me in the Department of the Platte. There are three companies of the Second Cavalry at Fort Laramie, plus more companies of the Ninth Infantry.”
“You are everyone’s surgeon?”
“I am. The number of surgeons varies. One surgeon, the estimable Captain Hartsuff, is on detached duty at Fort Fetterman, and the contract surgeon—he’s a civilian—is hoping for furlough as soon as I return to Fort Laramie. He’ll be lucky to get it. Contract surgeons have less seniority than earthworms.”
Susanna smiled at that.
“I tend to anyone’s needs—from the garrison, to teamsters, to sporting ladies at the nearest cathouse, to any Indian brave enough to try white man’s medicine.”
He peered at her, and she saw nothing but kindness in his expression.
“But this surgeon is digressing,” he said. “Fort Laramie—a run-down old post—is full of social climbers, backbiters and talebearers. That’s what happens when people live in close quarters and know each other’s virtues and defects.”
She couldn’t help her sigh.
“Yes, it’s daunting. They are a censorious bunch.” He glanced at her again. “If you just do your job, you should brush through this awkwardness with Captain Dunklin.”
“I’m an expert at keeping my head down,” she assured her escort. “But the captain worries me.”
“Dunklin is a tedious bore,” the post surgeon told her. “Let me engage him in conversation so you can escape to your room, which I doubt will be anything fancier than a blanket serving as a sort of amateur wall. A warning—we all snore.”
Major Randolph was as good as his word. She took a bowl of stew from the kitchen to her blanketed-off corner of the sleeping room, while Major Randolph, an efficient decoy, chatted with Captain Dunklin.
Her tiny corner was frigid, the small window opaque with ice, the logs rimed with frost. Huddled on the bed, she drank her soup, which cooled off quickly.
She debated about removing her clothes, then decided against anything beyond her shoes and dress. She drew herself into a ball, her arms wrapped around her knees, wishing for warmth.
There was a gap in the blanket wall and she looked into the main room at Major Randolph’s profile. He was reading now, looking up occasionally to add his mite to the conversation between the other officers. He had an elegant mustache, which he tugged on as he read. She could see no obvious military bearing there; he looked like a man built more for comfort than warfare. He looked like someone she could talk to.
They observed rank even in bed on the men’s side of the curtain: two majors in one bed, and Captain Dunklin in the smaller bed. The two privates who took turns driving the ambulance rolled in their blankets and lay down in front of the cookstove, which looked to Joe like the warmest place in the roadhouse. He hoped Dunklin was cold, sleeping by himself.
John Walters was soon asleep beside him. Joe closed his eyes and did what he always did before sleep came. Starting with South Mountain in 1862, when he had been a new surgeon, he performed a mental inventory of his hardest cases. If he was tired, he never got much beyond South Mountain, because it had been the worst, for reasons that continued to plague him.
The cases that stood out were the ones where he still questioned his decisions. For years, he had wondered if he was the only surgeon who did that. Just last year, he had asked Al Hartsuff if he ever rethought his Civil War cases. Al nodded, drank a little deeper and replied, “All the livelong day, Joe.”
On a bad night, he rethought the whole war. On the worst nights, he relived the death of his wife, as her skirts caught fire on a windy evening by a campfire, and she blazed like a torch. No amount of rethinking ever changed that outcome. Her screams
