He turned around. Six. Before the crowd comes. Bring the glass, Anna said. Leonard did not sleep much that night.
He sat on a box by his fire with his bad hip out in front of him and thought about June of 1882, which he had spent six years not thinking about, and which came back whole. An escort detail out of Fort Kio. 11 Men and two wagons caught in the open below Wolf Crossing on the powder by better than 30 riders holding the high ground on both sides. Two days pinned, two men dead, water gone, no relief coming because nobody knew where they were. Paul was the scout on that detail and he had his wife with him.
He was 3 days from mustering out and she had ridden down from the tongue to meet him and come home together and nobody in that country thought a thing about it. On the first afternoon, Paul went up the west slope with the sharps to get an angle. About 400 yd up and he took a bullet through the meat of his right shoulder and he came back down on his belly with his arm hanging. Leonard cut the shirt off him and lay beside him all that night while the man shook and the arm swelled black to the elbow and Leonard was lying right there at first light when Anna took the rifle out of her husband's hands. She went up the slope with it.
Nobody sent her. There was nobody left to send. She got into the rocks Paul had been trying to reach and lay there close to an hour in the cold without moving. One of the men behind the wagon said out loud that she had frozen, that she couldn't do it. And Paul said from the ground with his teeth locked, "Leave her alone.
She's waiting on the light." The man running that fight for the other side was standing on a rock on the far bluff. The army later put the distance at 900 yd. It was one shot and it ended the whole thing inside 20 minutes. 11 Men walked out of Wolf Crossing. Nine of them because of that shot.
He remembered the rest of it, too, which was the part that had sat in him like a stone ever since. Two officers arguing in a tent about what could and could not go on a form. And Anna standing outside that tent with her husband's blood dried on her sleeve, saying, "Put it under Paul's name. He's the one they'll believe. And if you put mine on it, they'll say it never happened at all.
They had done what she asked. They had done it gladly. It solved their whole problem in one stroke. The following spring, the army sent a presentation sharps up the Tongue River with a silver plate on the wrist of it. And cut into that plate was a place, a date, a distance, and a man's name.
Leonard had told himself for six years that it was not his to tell. He got up off the box and stood looking at the dark where the firing line was. 6 Years, he said out loud to a horse. And she's 8 miles up the river the whole time. Arthur Kimell came out to the flats that evening in a buggy because half the town had.