The last commissary wagons and canteeners with their mounted escorts at the very end of the long column passed me. Captain Seawell's trail had joined this road, so I was no longer following their particular track.

After the chuck wagons came the red-clotted hospital carts and litter bearers, and a Ranger scout in buckskins drifted overhead in his dirty little balloon, paddles rowing slow and easy, heading south. "Helloo- a!" I called him. "Helloo-a up there, Ranger!"

He stopped rowing and looked down.

"I'm looking for Captain Seawell!" I shouted. "Important message, sir. He's on mounted patrol with about ten men (...and a woman) - !"

The Ranger pulled open his spyglass and looked north and east. Then he pointed toward William's U. S. Bond Crater.

"Thankee kindly!" I called, waving my kepi.

His shadows stretched a mile east, pointing my way, over the trampled wastes, and the littered path of Lunar rout - muskets abandoned, bayonets stuck in the soil - packs spilled along the sea shore - pennants painted gold with angels and flaming swords, tangled in the boot mangled cactus.

A half mile more took me to the heaped and broken fields, still smoldering hear and there. Still did smoke stain the purpling sky.

Sprawled in my path lay a dead Lunar boy, with bright white trousers, bare feet, and a dark blue army coat upset where his stomach spilled open.

I passed the last hospital tent. Its voluminous canopy glowed bright yellow in the darkening afternoon.

The last pickets were lax. Exhausted, they leaned their chins of the muzzles of their muskets. They let me pass with a simple, "I'm lookin' for my lost mule..."

I walked on through the scattered clumps of Lunar dead, befuddled by the sight, but still searching for Captain Seawell, Sarah, and the Metal Man. After a lonely while I thought I'd settle for Six-Fingers Bourdett.

From somewhere I heard a cry. Some of the dead were still dying. Where was he?

- I heard the whine and sputter of a horse. I saw it struggling along, limping a little. It was an enormous stallion, white as steam. It was the biggest I'd ever seen.

I heard the shout - "Catch'm! - I saw'm first!" A Dough-Boy was running over.

I hurried to the horse; when I touched his neck his great white head jerked up and down. "What's wrong with your leg, boy?" On this side he looked healthy and strong, except for his crazed eyes and hanging tongue.

I looked under. Something was tangled to the side of it, which made it limp. A hussar corpse dragged along with one boot still caught in the stirrup.

The sentry who had shouted - his pockets stuffed to bursting - laughed a little as he ran up to the horse - only to curse as he eyed its lame leg.

"It isn't that bad," I said.

"Isn't that bad, he says," said the man. "Look at that piece of iron sticking out, there!"

A slender shard had imbedded in the muscle.

"Hold the reins," he told me.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of the hussar and found a brightly embroidered cloth, needled by a wife or mother, perhaps. Opening it, he found some paper pesos which he cursed and threw to the side. He wiped his brow with the cloth and threw it down, too. He looked at the flintlock pistol and set it beside him with an ornately carved powder horn. He thought a moment, then unbuttoned the collar of the corpse. "Eureka! I knew it," he cried, snatching up the cross from around the dead neck. He held it up. It was silver. It was an amulet useless but for its weight in greed, now. A bad luck charm. He glanced at me threateningly as if I challenged his claim to the bounty.

Both he and the hussar were handsome blue-eyed fellows, one with the solemn pallor of total resignation, the other ruddy with the sunburnt flesh of victory.

The Dough-Boy grabbed the ear and sawed at it with his knife.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I know a feller, a Texan, who'll pay a dollar an ear. Bet you wish you knew him, too, but you don't." He looked at me. "Tell ya what, though. I'll go fifty-fifty with you. I'll pay you fifty cents a Lunar ear." He went back to his sawing. Finally, he finished, and dropped the grim thing in his haversack.

"Let's bandage up this horse," I said.

"Got any spirits with you, friend?" he smiled hopefully, the sunset in his eyes.

"I'm bone-dry too."

"Well let's fix this horse then you move along. This here's my stretch of stuff."

"I'm looking for Captain Seawell's patrol."

"Think I'll call this horse Old Whitey, like Taylor's horse."

"Let's make a splint so it don't get worse, and take her to the horse doctor."

"Hell, no. Hell, no. Horse doctor'll confiscate'm. I saw'm first. You heard me. He's mine now. Handsome, ain't he? I can doctor him myself." He tore some wrags from the hussar's trousers. "Hold on tight, now. He ain't a-gonna like it, none. But I'm faster than a rattler."

I stroked the horses neck. The man squatted down, lifted his hands, and licked his lips, like he was getting ready to pounce. I hugged the horse's head. His hand darted and the horse lifted me up and dropped me, but I held onto the reins; between me and the corpse the horse couldn't run.

"It's stuck," said the man, now missing his kepi. "Got to get a grip on it! Woe, boy, woe. Woe, boy, woe."

Lather dripped from the horse's lip. "I was wondering if maybe we oughtn't to let him run if he wants to," I said, thinking that this kind of doctoring was either going to make the horse's heart go to bust or the brute was going to kick the Dough-Boy's skull in.

"You mean, let it work itself out?" the man said, uncomprehending. "No time for that."

Gently he put his hands on either side the wound, then put his mouth up to the wound, to grab the iron in the pliers of his teeth -

The horse screamed and knocked me back. It stumbled and then jumped forward. It hobbled off fast, dragging the corpse behind it.

The other man got up off the ground with a bloody lip. He shook his head, dizzy. He spat out the iron shard and ran after the horse, but it was too fast. I could see the black shadow of it rushing along insanely, dragging the corpse.

The man came back. "You didn't hold him," he said.

As I walked away, he called, "Hey there, you're bleedin'! Want me to get you to the hospital?"

The vigor of walking, and the blow of the horse, had broken some of the crust of the scabs on my back. In spots my blouse stuck to my wounds.

As I kept walking, the sentry shouted, "Keep a sharp lookout for them lobos...!"

The ground was rising up to the lip of the crater. I lost myself to the heaped and broken fields, heavy with heaped bodies on busted earth and busy little devourers. How many hundreds of draining corpses heaped on the shell-pocked bloody crust of the Moon? Too many for the victors to bury that day, to the wuffling and grunting delight of the big black birds and the waddling armadillos and the hungry little mice.

And Prince-President Franklin Stove?

As it got darker I saw a light high on the lip of the crater. It was a fire. I headed that way. After a while I smelled horses.

They sat in the wreckage of abandoned Camp Tranquility. Captain Seawell was sitting on a Lunar stool beside a Ranger and the engineer, Captain Mansfield. Seawell was going through a gilt box of Lunar maps, smoking a cigar. One Cotton Baler strolled just beyond the ring of light, a guard. A couple other sharpshooters huddled in blankets beside the fire, chatting. They had piled a heap of lunar sabers, pikes, pistols, and even a cannon. As I crept closer, I recognized the guard, Everett Higgleson, by his black eye from the subterranean tussle between Companies F & H.

"Everett - Ssst. It's me. Jack."

"Jack? What are you doing here?"

"Where's Sarah?"

Captain Seawell stood up. "That Jack Borginnis?"

"Yessir."

"What are you doing outside the fort."

"Got permission to look for the mule, sir."

He looked at the scrap of paper Kelly had given me.

"You can't look in the dark. Go on back."

"Did you find the Metal Man, sir?"

Seawell looked back at Mansfield, Mansfield looked back at the Ranger, Wallis Gordon, who said, "I tracked him this far. Just before sunset I thought I saw him in the valley down there, through my spyglass. We'll take it up again if the Earth comes out of the clouds."

"Where's my wife, Captain?"

Seawell looked at me, chewing his cigar. "I'll tell you straight and hope you can take it like a man. She's not your wife any more."

"I want to hear it from her, if you please, sir.'

"Well, I don't blame you. But it will have to wait. Go on back, Borginnis."

"Do you think that Metal Man is a deserter, sir? Or a spy? Or a madman?"

"I have no idea. That's what I aim to find out. I don't know if we can hang Federal property, but I'm supposing we can."

"Captain. Where's Sarah?"

Seawell said, "I'll tell you. But only if first I hear you say she's not your wife any more. I don't want trouble."

"Sarah is the same as she always was, Captain. I won't make no trouble."

Seawell turned and pointed to one of the three enormous Lunar officer's tents beyond the pale of the camp fire.

"Who is it now?" I asked.

"Bourdett," he said.

Him being a Mormon and all, maybe this one would stick, since she's on e of his five wives, maybe it won't matter to her that she's not going to have any of his children, there being plenty around...But they were so far away. So even so, I doubted it would stick. Poor Cactus Queen, I thought. Maybe I should pity Six-Fingers, I thought again. Well, that was that, wasn't it? The war was over, and so was my tumbleweed romance. "Will we be shipped back to New Orleans anytime soon, now, the war being over?"

"What? It's just begun. We expect to hear of a declaration of war by Congress any day now. We got a right to take Venus, now. All right, go on with you. Get on back to the fort," Seawell ordered.

"Yes sir," I said, saluting. I shoved my arms in the Pile straps, shouldered my musket, and marched down from the crater. A hundred yards down, I circled around and climbed back up and walked along the rim of the crater, away from the old Lunar camp. I figured if I was the one who nabbed the Metal Traitor, I'd be a hero.

I still wasn't rid of all my foolish ideas.

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