Leaned back in my chair, heels propped on my desk, and Stetson brim down to my nose, I should have been relaxed to the point of snoozing. The marshal's office afforded shade, and with windows and door propped open, it caught a good amount of breeze, making the hot spell tolerable. I'd cleared last night's drunks from the cramped jail cell at the back of the office, and I had no pressing marshal duties until the town's annual Fourth of July celebrations began at noon, more than an hour away.

Yet much as I tried to empty my mind to find sleep, my thoughts kept returning to the latest issue of the Laramie Sentinel, folded and flat on my desk beside my empty coffee cup. A headline filled most of the top half of the front page, bold, black letters two inches high: CUSTER AND TROOPS SLAUGHTERED AT THE LITTLE BIGHORN.

Only nine days had passed since the slaughter. I could remember a time -before telegraph wire and rail tracks crisscrossed the continent-when news of the battle would have taken weeks, even months to cross and escape the frontier. Not now. Because of it, folks spoke and speculated of little else. Was the US Army powerless? Did this mean the Sioux were going to sweep through the settlements? Even here folks worried, where such fears were laughable in the face of simple geographical facts.

Called Greasy Grass by the Sioux, the Little Bighorn river was more than two weeks of hard travel to the north of Laramie, up into the Montana territories. Fed by the Bighorn Mountains directly south, the Little Bighorn wound through, sprawling grassland hills, prime buffalo hunting grounds for the Sioux, who each summer set up encampments made of hundreds of tepees. A war party large enough to threaten Laramie would never undergo the effort and danger of traveling this far south from the Little Bighorn.

Still, nearly three hundred soldiers had been slaughtered, and suddenly to many folks, especially those recently arrived from the east, it seemed like we were again living beyond the frontier.

From conflicting newspaper stories, it was difficult to decide exactly what was truth, but I could guess. George Custer had a reputation for recklessness, and he'd often bragged a handful of troopers could destroy the entire Sioux war force. Some reports said Custer's request for reinforcements had never reached General Terry, who was coming down the Little Bighorn valley from the north. Other reports said Custer and his five companies of the seventh Cavalry-coming from the south to force an intended deadly crossfire upon the Sioux-had disregarded orders to wait for General Terry. Regardless, all reports agreed on the end result. Custer had divided his men into three columns and rode into a short, frenzied battle with no survivors against the Oglala and Hunkpapa Sioux, led by the great chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

I'd met Sitting Bull a year earlier, at a similar summer camp of Sioux tribes, this one in the great grassland basin between the Bighorn and Laramie mountains. My memories of the encounter were painful, not necessarily because of Sitting Bull, his fearsome demeanor, and my close escape from death at his hands, but because of the events before and after. Because of those events, I did not need imagination to understand the screams and moans and horror of shattered bodies behind the ink of the headline on my desk. And because of those events, I'd lost much of what mattered to me. Time and prayer had not eased my pain; the passage of a year of unrelenting sorrow had only served to underscore the gravity of my loss.

Not pleasant thoughts for a bright, hot, lazy, July morning.

I heard the clatter of boot heels on the wooden sidewalk directly outside. I tilted my hat back in time to see Jake Wilson, my deputy, busting through the doorway. A blessed interruption. Or so I thought.

"Grab a shotgun," he said. No excitement shook his voice. Jake doesn't upset easy.

Beauregard rose from his blanket laid beside the potbelly stove, stretched, and wandered over to give Jake's boots a neighborly sniff. As a bumbling puppy, Beau had been forced upon me by well-meaning friends shortly after last summer's events. Beau was black with a tan patch slapped like careless paint across his face, and I was beginning to wonder if he would ever grow enough to match his ungainly paws.

"Sure Jake," I said, still leaning back. "Any particular reason?"

"Just get your hind end out of that chair and follow me. There's time to flap my gums on the way."

I flopped my boots onto the floor, moved to the gun rack at the far side of the office, grabbed a double-barrel, twelvegauge and cracked the barrel open. I popped in two shells and filled my pockets with more. I rested the shotgun in the crook of my right arm and pointed my other hand at Beau, who watched me with a slowly wagging tail.

"Guard," I told him.

Beauregard returned to his blanket and dropped his head onto his paws, eyes steady on the doorway. Not much here to guard, but it didn't hurt to encourage better habits than chewing my spare boots, something Beau and I had discussed on more than one occasion.

I followed Jake into the sunshine. Jake marched purposefully toward Main Street. I was hard pressed to keep pace.

Jake was a broad-chested man of medium height with straw-filled, blond hair and a blocky face. Nothing remarkable about his appearance. Except for his arms. His left arm was massive, his right arm limp and useless, which was why he preferred a revolver to a shotgun.

Marbled scars, like ugly red worms, covered the skin on the upper half of his right arm. Careful and competent as he was, he'd once made the mistake of standing too near a mean-tempered stallion. The stallion had reached around, clamped its teeth into Jake's right biceps, and ripped the entire muscle off the bone. Most men would have fallen in shock, leaving themselves helpless to be stomped to death. Not Jake. I'd decided any man with the presence of mind to escape the stallion was a good man to have at my side. Nothing since my original impression of Jake had changed my mind, nor showed me wrong for hiring him as the town's only deputy. It was part-time work; Jake also ran a livery as well as a man with two good arms.

"Jake," I said as we rounded the comer onto Main Street, "being as we're well on the way, you mind letting me know if we're chasing wild bees, or do you have a reason for working me into a sweat?"

"I told him," he replied, "I told him good, but he wouldn't listen."

"Him?"

"Fancy pants new colonel." That'd be Colonel Ricketts, replacement for the one -who'd been murdered during the events of last summer. Fort Sanders wasn't much of a posting. Just outside of Laramie, it had slowly diminished in importance as the frontier had moved on with the arrival of the rails roughly a decade ago, and I'd heard rumors it might close in the next few years. As an insignificant post, it merited the same in commanders. Since arriving last October, Ricketts had been exceptionally unexceptional in the performance of duties no more spectacular than overseeing parade ground drills.

"I was coming over to visit you anyway," Jake was saying, "and I saw them soldiers coming down the street in formation with Ricketts leading the pack. Dorsey--" John Dorsey, the reporter for the Laramie Sentinel"--was tagging at Ricketts' heels. Along with a mule. So I pulled Dorsey aside and asked him to explain."

Jake snorted. "Couldn't think of a worse combination. Army, newspaper, and mule. Especially with the mule packing a howitzer."

"Howitzer?"

"Sam, it's a small cannon."

"I know that, you knot-headed skunk. A person just don't often hear of a howitzer on a mule's back."

Jake grinned, showing his joy at needling me. "So Dorsey tells me the colonel has in mind a military demonstration. Wants to show the folks - and the newspaper boys - a good reason not to worry about no injun attacks. Says the colonel is tired of listening to complaints from civilians in a panic since Custer."

We both gave that respectful silence. Unimaginable, the total loss of the the finest of our soldiers with the finest of modem weaponry.

For nearly a minute we walked in that silence, passing The First National Bank, its obvious wealth marked by brick construction, where two banks farther along had false-front wooden exteriors high and wide and freshly painted. Board signs of other businesses--dangling from roofs overhanging the sidewalk-read like a town directory. HILLMAN'S EATERY. THE BROADWAY SUITATORIUM. PRESSING-BOOTS & SHOES CLEANED AND SHINED. KELLER'S PHOTO PORTRAITS. MALCOLM'S QUALITY MILL & CABINET WORKS. THE LARAMIE SENTENEL CUSTOM STATIONARY. OVERBAY'S DRESSMAKING & FITTING. GUTHRIE DRY GOODS & CLOTHING. ELVIN & NELSON ATTORNEYS AT LAW. And, sprinkled among those signs were others which well explained my existence in Laramie: the saloons. COMIQUE THEATRE AND DANCE HALL. RED ROSE SALOON--ICED BEER. LARAMIE SALOON AND SPORTING HALL.

A half dozen sidestreets intersected Main, and those quieter streets were the places to find smaller hotels, blacksmiths, harness makers, and liveries. At the far end of Main Street was what I guessed to be our destination-the Union Pacific Hotel, the train station depot and telegraph office almost within its shadows.

It was an easy guess, for I saw soldiers, horses, and a growing crowd of people gathered on the wide street directly in front of the hotel.

"All right, Jake," I prompted, "what kind of demonstration?"

"Ricketts aims to show the range and hitting power of the howitzer. Figures folks will rest at ease knowing what the injuns will come up against if they move into this area."

"But on a mule's back?"

"It's mounted on a special saddle. A new-fangled way to get this kind of firepower quick into the field. Mules take it faster through worse terrain than dragging it around on wheels. Just aim the mule's hind end and fight the fuse."

Jake snorted again. "The colonel believes-and I quotesuch a novel military technique will revolutionize warfare against the Sioux and gain him reknown and promotion."

We were within a hundred yards of the crowd. I had to mop my face against sweat, even with stiff wind blowing in from the Medicine Bow Mountains to the west.

"Jake, you believe different from the colonel?"

"What I believe is your shotgun will come in mighty handy."