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not under his command.
    “I’ve been fully briefed on what attitude to expect from you,” Goethals said. “And it’s not my intent to change it. But let’s be gentlemen about this.”
    It was an admonishment I deserved. I sat across from him, putting my valise on the floor.
    Goethals opened a desk drawer and pulled out a sealed envelope. “As promised, this is from the man who sent you here.”
    He handed it to me. I tucked it into the valise.
    “You don’t need to confirm the contents?”
    “That would be an insult to the man who sent me. I wouldn’t be here if I did not trust him.”
    Goethals nodded. “According to that man, you can be trusted too.” He opened a file on his desk and scanned it. “James Holt. You were fourteen in the Dakotas when you and our mutual friend pursued a pair of horse thieves. That’s where you first impressed yourself upon him. Before it became fashionable to want to impress him.”
    “He was deputy sheriff. He asked for help. Didn’t take us long, and they didn’t put up much of a fight. Most horse thieves are scared, desperate, and tired.”
    Those were the golden years of cattle. A darling industry to New York investors, the shipping of fattened cattle from our prime grazing lands to the markets in the east. One of those New Yorkers—devastated by the horrible irony of enduring a Valentine’s Day when his mother and wife died within hours of the other, one from typhoid fever and the other from a kidney ailment—fled to the Dakotas, determined to build a new life. At first the working ranchers, including me, regarded him as a dandy, but his earnestness, while not exactly gaining him true respect, gave us an affection for him.
    “The summer of ’84 is what I have down here,” Goethals said. “You left the area in ’85, and he was gone in ’87.”
    So much unspoken with that date, ’87. Worst winter in a century, everyone said. Eighteen eighty-seven was less than a decade after our family had been among the first to run cattle in the Badlands, and just over a decade after Custer’s ego had led him into defeat and death not far to the south and west of our homestead.
    Eighty-seven. After that winter, the man who had sent me to Panama lost his cattle ranch and went back to New York to resurrect his political career.
    Eighty-seven. It destroyed most of my father’s ranch. Maybe it would have been different if I’d been there. But I’d left in ’85, never to be forgiven for my treachery, and pronounced myself in exile.
    “Then ’98”—Goethals kept his eyes on the file—“you and your father joined our mutual friend in Cuba.”
    “Again, he asked for help.”
    “Was San Juan everything he reported it to be?” Goethals looked up from the files.
    “He tends to color his recollections with a romantic view. Some of us were a little less gung-ho about matters. But as you know, the press favored his recollections, and that was helpful to him.”
    “Again, in Cuba, you impressed him.”
    I stayed silent.
    Goethals turned his attention to a second file on his desk. “Mr. Miskimon passed along a report from the ship stating that you played occasional illegal poker with reasonable success, did little drinking, showed politeness but nothing else to the married and unmarried women who showed interest in you, and mainly sat on the upper deck in the sun and read novels during the trip from New York to Colón. That reveals something about you, I suppose.”
    I let the colonel stew in what his report revealed about me.
    He fixed his gaze on me. “It should be clear that I need to decide for myself if I can trust you.”
    “I don’t know that your opinion will matter. My promise to the man who sent me was to listen. I’ll listen to you for as long as you’d like to talk. That will fulfill my obligation to him. Then I’m on the next train to Colón, and I’ll be off the isthmus by sunset.”
    Goethals frowned. “You’ve come a long way, and you’ve been paid for