ody felt as if they were on fire. His fingers curled,
grasping at empty air.

He buckled on his belt with his pistol and his Bowie knife, stumbled out
of his tent and stood beside it, pissing in the tall grass.

He was facing the Rock River, less than a quarter-mile wide here, a
sheet of sparkling blue water bordered by forest. Lined up along the
bank before him were a dozen big box-shaped flatboats. The tents of his
own militia battalion and of two others were spread over the grassland
around him.

He suddenly sensed that something was wrong. He hadn't heard the bugler
blow the dozen notes signaling the start of the day. He saw now that the
men weren't assembled but were wandering aimlessly about the camp.

What the hell was it Greenglove had said?

_By tomorrow there won't be any company._

Down near the flatboats a big crowd was gathered. One man, standing on a
barrel, was addressing them. His voice, shrill and insistent, carried to
Raoul on the warm June air, but he couldn't make out what the man was
saying.

Raoul didn't like this. He didn't like this at all.

He started walking toward the river and found Levi Pope and Hodge Hode
squatting in front of a fire, making coffee simply by boiling water with
coffee grounds in it.

"Sorry for your loss, Colonel," said Pope.

Hearing Pope speak of what happened at Victoire was like being kicked in
a spot that was already bruised. Raoul had to pause a moment before he
could speak.

"Thank you. Your family come through all right?" He dreaded what he
might hear in answer.

"Your sister wrote a letter for my missuz," Pope said. "They came
through tolerably. Thanks to the way you fortified the trading post.
That was mighty foresighted, Colonel."

Raoul's chest expanded and he felt a little better. This was how he'd
hoped the men would react, not blaming him for the tragedy as that
bastard Greenglove had.

"Levi's letter told as how my boy Josiah made it to the trading post
too," Hodge said. "Mr. Cooper even let him do some shootin' at the
redskins."

_Mr. Cooper? Since when did David Cooper get to be so high and mighty?_

"I need some of that coffee," Raoul said. Hodge strained the grounds out
of the coffee by pouring it through a kerchief into a tin cup and handed
the cup to Raoul.

The black liquid scalded Raoul's lips and tongue, and didn't treat him
any better when it bit into his whiskey-burned stomach.

"Anything to eat?"

With a bitter grunt, Lev