"Have a care how you talk to me, mon colonel," Armand said in a voice that sounded like millstones grinding together, "I am your one friend. Otto Wegner and Eli Greenglove turned on you, Hodge Hode is dead, Levi Pope has joined the Regulators."
It's true. I have no other friends but Armand. I have no family. What's happened to me?
"Damn it, it is plain stupid to talk about fighting the Regulators, Armand. Kill Cooper and we'd have a countywide war on our hands."
"I believe we could frighten the Regulators into backing down, mon colonel—if we showed some courage."
That's a jab at me.
Whiskey and anger almost made Raoul lash out again at Armand, but he felt a sudden fear that Armand would turn on him and he would be all alone.
Raoul brooded for a time, then finally spoke.
"Wait till I get the lead mine opened up next spring. We'll go up to Galena, you and I, and we'll recruit the roughest, meanest miners we can find. And we'll make it plain to them that they'll have two jobs—to dig for lead and to fight Regulators. When we've got enough of them down here, we'll take on Cooper and his crowd in the next election. I'll spread whiskey and money around and our boys will beat up anybody who says he won't vote our way. Smith County will belong to us again, Armand."
He heard hurried footsteps echoing on the split-log floor of the fort's main room. Someone rapped on his office door. Like a swimmer coming up from the bottom of a lake after a dive, Raoul rose up out of his comfortable whiskey haze.
"Who's there?" he growled.