THE GENERAL’S BLUFF
The troops this day had gone into winter-quarters, and sat down to kill the idle time with pleasure until spring. After two hundred and forty days it is a good thing to sit down. The season had been spent in trailing, and sometimes catching, small bands of Indians. These had taken the habit of relieving settlers of their cattle and the tops of their heads. The weather-beaten troops had scouted over some two thousand aimless, veering miles, for the savages were fleet and mostly invisible, and knew the desert well. So, while the year turned, and the heat came, held sway, and went, the ragged troopers on the frontier were led an endless chase by the hostiles, who took them back and forth over flats of lime and ridges of slate, occasionally picking off a packer or a couple of privates, until now the sun was setting at 4.28 and it froze at any time of day. Therefore the rest of the packers and privates were glad to march into Boisé Barracks this morning by eleven, and see a stove.
They rolled for a moment on their bunks to get the feel of a bunk again after two hundred and forty days; they ate their dinner at a table; those who owned any further baggage than that which partially covered their nakedness unpacked it, perhaps nailed up a photograph or two, and found it grateful to sit and do nothing under a roof and listen to the grated snow whip the windows of the gray sandstone quarters. Such comfort, and the prospect of more ahead, of weeks of nothing but post duty and staying in the same place, obliterated Dry Camp, Cow Creek Lake, the blizzard on Meacham’s Hill, the horse-killing in the John Day Valley, Saw-Tooth stampede, and all the recent evils of the past; the quarters hummed with cheerfulness. The nearest railroad was some four hundred miles to the southeast, slowly constructing to meet the next nearest, which was some nine hundred to the southeast; but Boisé City was only three-quarters of a mile away, the largest town in the Territory, the capital, not a temperance town, a winter resort; and several hundred people lived in it, men and women, few of whom ever died in their beds. The coming days and nights were a luxury to think of.
“Blamed if there ain’t a real tree!” exclaimed Private Jones.
“Thet eer ain’t no tree, ye plum; thet’s the flag-pole ’n’ th’ Merrickin flag,” observed a civilian. His name was Jack Long, and he was pack-master.
Sergeant Keyser, listening, smiled. During the winter of ’64-65 he had been in command of the first battalion of his regiment, but, on a theory of education, had enlisted after the war. This being known, held the men more shy of him than was his desire.
Jones continued to pick his banjo, while a boyish trooper with tough black hair sat near him and kept time with his heels. “It’s a cottonwood-tree I was speakin’ of,” observed Jones. There was one—a little, shivering white stalk. It stood above the flat where the barracks were, on a bench twenty or thirty feet higher, on which were built the officers’ quarters. The air was getting dim with the fine, hard snow that slanted through it. The thermometer was ten above out there. At the mere sight and thought Mr. Long produced a flat bottle, warm from proximity to his flesh. Jones swallowed some drink, and looked at the little tree. “Snakes! but it feels good,” said he, “to get something inside y’u and be inside yerself. What’s the tax at Mike’s dance-house now?”
“Dance ’n’ drinks fer two fer one dollar,” responded Mr. Long, accurately. He was sixty, but that made no difference.