Novel 1966 - Kilrone (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF Page A

way—but it was her quiet competence that had impressed him. He had a vague recollection of her examining his wound.
    “Hayes,” he said suddenly, “I’m new at this post. If a man had to leave here, with a party of women and children, is there any place he could go? Some place in the hills, I mean? A place a man could defend?”
    “You’d need time. You ain’t a-goin’ to have it.” Hayes looked straight at him. “You stayin’ here?”
    “They’ll need me.”
    “Good luck.”
    Ben Hayes rode across the grounds toward the stables. He would be catching some sleep himself.
    “Mr. Kilrone?” he turned his head and saw Betty Considine standing beside him. “You should be resting. You’re suffering from exhaustion and from the results of your wound.”
    “And you?”
    “I am tired.” She spoke quietly, with no plea for sympathy. “It has been a long day.”
    He started back toward Paddock’s quarters, keeping pace with her. “I often wonder who chooses the locations for these posts,” he commented. “They are always in the hottest, driest, windiest, or coldest places.”
    “I heard you tell Ben you were staying.”
    “Well, you said I need rest. This is as good a place as any for that. I always swore when I left the Army I’d find a place near an army post where reveille would wake me up…and then I’d turn over and go to sleep again.”
    She laughed. “And did you?”
    “No. I found that I missed the Army too much. There’s always the temptation to go back, you know, because it’s safe.”
    “Safe?” She sounded incredulous.
    “Of course. If you’re an enlisted man your decisions are all made for you. If you’re an officer there’s the regulations, and the fact that everything has to go through channels. If things go wrong or you make a mistake, you can always find somebody else to blame. You don’t have to worry about where you will eat or sleep, or how you’ll pay medical bills, and the margins within which you can operate, so far as behavior is concerned, are well laid out.”
    “So why did you leave the service? Or have you?”
    “Oh, I left it, all right! A situation developed with an Indian agent of whom I didn’t approve, but it seemed it was not my business to approve or disapprove, so I went to work and gathered evidence. I built a very careful case, affidavits, physical evidence…everything.
    “My commanding officer warned me that the Indian agent was a personal friend of a very important man in the War Department, and if I persisted my career was very likely at an end.”
    “You persisted?”
    “Yes.”
    “What happened?”
    “My carefully built case was lost somewhere in transit, and I was given the word that promotions would be nonexistent for me…at least until there was a change of administration.”
    “You resigned?”
    “Yes…and then I went to see the Indian agent. We discussed the situation, and then he resigned, too. And left for a healthier climate.”
    They stood outside the door. “And then?”
    “I went down into Mexico looking for a lost gold mine, rode as a shotgun messenger for a stage company, ramrodded a cattle drive, staked a mining claim in Colorado until I was starved out, fought through a revolution in Central America, went east guarding a gold shipment.”
    “And now?”
    “Drifting…looking for a place to light.”
    She was disappointed, although what difference it could make to her she did not know. It seemed a pointless existence. Of course, many men were doing just what Kilrone was doing, but for him it seemed wrong. He had been a young officer with a future.
    They still stood there outside Paddock’s quarters. “You’re staying with Mrs. Paddock?” he asked.
    “Only tonight. I live over there.” She indicated a house two doors away. “Dr. Hanlon is my uncle. He is the post surgeon.”
    “Carter Hanlon? Wasn’t he stationed at Fort Concho for a while?”
    “Yes. Did you know him?”
    “He plugged up a couple of holes for