The walk back to the Mastersons’ quarters featured nothing beyond the crunch of shoes on gravel, Victoria well beyond her usual languid stroll. Indecisive, she stood in the tiny alcove they laughingly called a foyer. Her mind made up, she mashed her hat down more firmly.

“Start luncheon, Mary. I’m going to find Lieutenant Masterson.”

Mary warmed the soup and buttered the bread. When they first arrived at Fort Laramie, the two of them had sat down together for lunch and chatted. That ended after Mrs. Stanley popped in unannounced one day and found them sitting together.

Almost, but not quite, in a whisper, Mrs. Stanley set the new bride straight as Mary listened from the kitchen, hearing enough words to be chastised, which was probably the entire intention of the surgeon’s wife: “Not done . . . she’s your servant . . . remember her place . . .” Mary heard the unkind words long after Mrs. Stanley flounced away.

Mary ate in the kitchen, then went onto the porch to watch for Victoria. “I could have told you, had you asked me, that it’s bad form to go traipsing after your husband in a garrison,” Mary said under her breath.

She sat in a rocking chair and indulged in her favorite fantasy of imagining herself aboard an eastbound train. She heard a small noise and glanced over the railing to see an Indian woman with a little girl and a baby on her back. Mary had noticed them last week at the slaughtering floor behind the commissary storehouse. Some of the more bedraggled women stood there during the slaughter, begging silently with their eyes for whatever the army didn’t want.

Victoria had sent her to the storehouse for another pound or two of the endless raisins that some harried clerk had sent their way from Omaha, perhaps mistaking an order of one hundred pounds for one thousand, which meant enough raisins to see them into the twentieth century.

The private in Fort Laramie’s storehouse was equally harried and insisted that she needed ten pounds instead of the more modest two that Victoria had requested. “I don’t care what you do with them,” he said, then gestured toward the slaughterhouse. “Find some Indians.” His face grew solemn. “They’re always hungry.”

Mary had done precisely that. She stopped a woman carrying a bloody bucket of entrails and brains and handed her small daughter a brown paper parcel bunched together and tied with twine. Gesturing with her fingers to her mouth, the universal sign for food that Mary knew from back home, she took some loose raisins from her basket and held them out.

After a glance toward her mother, who nodded, the little one popped the raisins in her mouth, chewed, and smiled. She was a pretty child, with snapping brown eyes and hair neatly bound into two braids.

Here they were again, standing silently at the edge of the porch, looking hopeful. They must have watched her return to this house last week, after she left the storehouse. Gesturing that they come closer, Mary hurried inside to the kitchen and poured more raisins into parcel paper.

She opened the side door and gave the raisins to the child, receiving smiles in return, ample payment. Mary watched them walk toward the slaughter yard again. She noted the child’s ragged dress and wondered if the poor women of Chicago were better off, even with half of their city burned. Mama had told her more than once that charity begins at home.

She walked around to the porch to see Sergeant Blade standing there, looking where she had looked.

“They don’t have much, do they?” he commented. “The clerk in the storehouse told me last week that he was liberal with raisins, and you were, too.”

“I hope that won’t get me thrown in the guardhouse,” Mary said, not certain if levity was the better part of valor, concerning a sergeant.

“No. I expect a lot of us would like to help,” he said, and followed her onto the porch. “I know I would.”

“Can’t you?” she asked, curious.

“That’s a problem with being a first sergeant, Miss Blue Eye. We’re supposed to follow all regulations. Even stupid ones,” he said. “I’ll leave the charity to you.”

What did one do with a sergeant on the porch? Mary knew she couldn’t ask him inside; it wasn’t her house, and no one was home. He solved her problem by indicating the rocking chair while he perched on the porch railing, somehow managing to look dignified while doing it. She decided this was not a man bothered much by inconvenience.

“I’m here to warn you,” he began, with no preliminaries other than a glance over his shoulder toward the parade ground. “You are going to Cheyenne for calico.”

“Apparently your captain’s wife told Mrs. Masterson that the trip was too dangerous for her, but not for me,” Mary said. She wished she could hide the edge to her voice. “After all, we must have calico.”

“You will be all right. I guarantee it. I’m leading the patrol. We are also to escort the paymaster, who is arriving tomorrow from Fort Fetterman, on his way to the railroad in Cheyenne.”

He stood up and didn’t disguise the edge to his voice. “He wants the ambulance to himself.” She saw the discomfort on his face. “That’s partly my doing. I asked if a lady could share it with him. He asked who she was, and I . . .”

“. . . told him Miss Blue Eye, whereupon Major Pettifog decided it was a small ambulance and couldn’t possibly accommodate another person,” Mary finished.

“Bravo, Miss Blue Eye!” Sergeant Blade exclaimed. “Major Pettifog, indeed. Actually, his name is Pettigrew, so you were close.”

“And he doesn’t much care for Indians.” Mary said what she knew he would not say. “I’ve heard it before.”

“Even back East?”

“Not as much there. My skin is light, and I tend to blend in.” She looked at the woman and child in the distance now. “Not so much out here.”

“No, and more’s the pity.” He waved his hand. “Change of subject. Can you ride horseback?”

Mary couldn’t help her smile. “I’ve been riding since I was young. I brought my riding skirt along, but I don’t have a sidesaddle.”

“I’ll find you one. It’ll be a fast trip. Major Pettigrew is eager to return to the comforts of Omaha. I am also informed by an unimpeachable source that there are many dresses for you to sew.”

“Please don’t tell me that Mrs. Masterson made a scene, with tears and demands,” she blurted out.

“I won’t, then,” the sergeant said, amused. “Suffice it to say we all heard a convincing argument for calico.”

Mary sighed.

“How did you get involved in this nonsense? It couldn’t have been your idea.”

She looked over his shoulder to see the Mastersons walking across the parade ground now. “Here they come. I will blame Mrs. O’Leary’s cow back in Chicago. Think of the abuse that poor bovine will suffer in coming years.”

The sergeant chuckled at that. “Tell me quick, because I want to know.”

“Mrs. Masterson was put in charge of a calico ball because she is married to a second lieutenant who only outranks earthworms.”

Aware the Mastersons were advancing, he laughed silently. “You are wise beyond your years, Miss Blue Eye. I suppose you can sew and she cannot, and you’ve suddenly become responsible for a lot of dressmaking because other ladies are equally helpless.”

“Precisely, Sergeant.”

“My name is Rowan.”

“I’m Mary.”

“Ready to ride the day after tomorrow?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

He gave her a small salute that made her smile. There was something in his eyes that reminded her of her own father, although they looked nothing alike. Maybe it was his genuine interest, which she knew she did not merit, because he barely knew her. She could probably tell him anything.

“Sergea . . . Rowan,” she began.

He inclined his head in her direction, an invitation to continue.

“I think . . . I wish we could make dresses for that Indian woman and her little girl who are right here at Fort Laramie,” she said. “I don’t think they’ve rubbed up against much good luck lately if they’re carrying buckets of guts.”

“They haven’t,” Rowan agreed. “Over the Laramie beyond Suds Row, there’s a whole camp of them that get by on handouts. Maybe her man died in a buffalo hunt. Maybe disease took him. They’re on their own. Some people call them Laramie Loafers, but they work so hard to stay alive.” He clapped his hands together, and she saw his frustration. “The West is changing, Mary Blue Eye. It’s not a kind place for people who used to be the lords of the earth.”

“I can understand that,” she replied. “I’ll be ready. Really early?”

“Really early.”