How Few Remain Read Free Page A

horse’s back and thudded to the ground, where, after rolling a couple of times, he lay still. “Good shot,” his brother said. “Hell of a good shot.”
    “We’ve got ’em now,” Custer said. The first Kiowas had to be over the line. He didn’t care. “We won’t let ’em get away. Every last redskin in that band is ours.” How his men cheered!
    And then all of Custer’s ferocious joy turned to ashes. Tom pointed off to the east, from which direction a squadron of cavalry was approaching at a fast trot. All the Kiowas were over the line by then. They reined in, whooping in their incomprehensible language. They knew they were safe.
    Custer knew it, too. Chasing the Kiowas into Indian Territory, punishing them, and then riding back into Kansas with no one but the Indians the wiser, was one thing. Doing it under the watchful eyes of that other cavalry squadron was something else again. Hating those horsemen, hating himself, Custer held his hand high to halt his men. They stopped on the Kansas side of the line.
    The approaching cavalrymen wore hats and blouses of a cut not much different from those of Custer’s troopers. Theirs, though, were gray, not the various shades of blue the U.S. cavalry used. And a couple of their officers, Custer saw, were in the new dirt-brown uniforms the Confederate States had adopted from the British. The limeys called that color khaki; to the Rebs, it was butternut.
    One of those Confederate officers rode toward Custer, waving as he moved forward. Custer waved back: come ahead. The Rebel captain proved to be a fresh-faced fellow in his twenties; he would have been wearing short pants during the War of Secession. Seeing him made Custer feel every one of his forty-one years.
    “Good mornin’ to you, Colonel,” the captain drawled, noddingin a way that looked friendly enough. “You weren’t planning on riding over the international border by any chance, were you?”
    “If I was, you’ll never prove it, Captain—” Custer tried for cool detachment. What came out was a frustrated snarl.
    By the way the Confederate cavalryman smiled, he heard that frustration—heard it and relished it. He bowed in the saddle. The Rebs were always polite as cats … and always ready to claw, too. “I’m Jethro Weathers, Colonel,” he said. “And you’re right—I’ll never prove it. But you and the United States would have been embarrassed if I’d come along half an hour later and found your men inside the territory of the Confederate States.”
    He sounded disappointed he and his troopers hadn’t caught Custer
in flagrante delicto
. Custer’s frustration boiled into fury: “If your government would keep those murdering redskinned savages on your side of the border, we wouldn’t want to go over yonder”—he waved south, into Indian Territory—”and give ’em what they deserve.”
    “Why, Colonel,” Captain Weathers said, amusement in his voice, “I have no proof at all those Kiowas ever entered the territory of the United States. As far as I can see, you were leading an unprovoked punitive expedition into a foreign country. Richmond would see things the same way, I’m sure. So would London. So would Paris.”
    Tom Custer spoke up: “There’s a dead Kiowa, maybe half a mile north of here.”
    That didn’t faze Weathers a bit: “For all I know, you’ve already been into the Confederate States, murdered the poor fellow, and then hauled him back into the USA to justify raiding Confederate soil.”
    A flush spread up Custer’s face; his ears went hot at the sheer effrontery of that. “You—dashed Rebs will pay one day for giving the redskins guns and letting them come up and raid white men’s farms whenever it strikes their fancy.”
    “This is our territory, Colonel,” Captain Weathers said, amused no more. “We shall defend it against the incursion of a foreign power—by which I mean the United States. And you have no call—none, sir, none whatever—to get up on your