* * * *
Smalls led the way down a bridle track, and fifteen minutes' walk brought them to the pasture.
The meadow circled a little cluster of pines and rocks, and was in turn surrounded by thicker trees, forming a badly cooked doughnut. The cold rain had faded into a drizzle, which would become snow as soon as the temperature dropped a degree or two more. Valentine, the crisis in town past, felt suddenly exhausted as he led his wet column northeast into the clearing. He heard stamping sounds of nervous horses under the trees as they splashed across a tiny creek swollen from the winter rain.
The meadow was too close to town. Valentine hurried his men toward a fire set under a rock overhang. Old cuts of carpet hanging from the rock made a shelter somewhere between a tent and a shack. Smalls ran ahead.
"Hank, you there? Wake up boy, your mother's here."
"Yes, Pa," a sleepy voice said from under the overhang. Valentine saw a bow and a quiver of arrows hung in the branches of a nearby tree. Joints of meat, cut from an animal that was probably a mule, also hung in the boy's camp.
A blanket-draped boy emerged, looking to be about thirteen years old and in the midst of a growth spurt. He wore brown corduroy pants, topped with a leather-trimmed blue shirt decorated with a gold star, similar to the one on the flag outside Station 46.
"Don't let the uniform bother you, sir," Smalls said, closing up the blanket on the boy's shoulders so it covered the star. "He spends a lot of time out in the woods on his own, and it's better if he's in the Honor Guard."
Valentine didn't have to ask what the Honor Guard was. Most Kurian Zones had it in one form or another; paramilitary training and indoctrination for the youth. A good record for a child usually meant safety for the parents. Valentine had seen a dozen forms of it in his travels under an assumed identity in the Kurian Zone, but he found it obscene here in what had been the Ozark Free Territory, as if his childhood church had been converted into a brothel.
"Hank, these are some Southern Command soldiers," Smalls said. "They're going to take us with them." Mrs. Smalls nodded.
"Uhh, with the horses?" the boy asked.
"Yes. Go and start rounding them up."
"Yessir."
"Just a second. Where'd these joints come from?" Smalls asked.
"Wounded mule. Wandered in two days ago with a wagon team; smelled out the other horses I suppose. I quick hid the wagon and the harnesses, and put 'em with our horses. Some searchers came through and didn't know the difference, so we're up five head for sly-trading."
"You say there was a wagon?" Valentine asked.
"Yessir. It was kinda shot up."
"Did the searchers find it?"
"Sorta. I put her the middle of the field like it'd been parked there when a team was unhitched. There wasn't much in it, just a big load of lumber, so they didn't look twice at it. They asked if I was gonna build a hut out here. I said it was for a smokehouse. I was more worried about them finding the Texas driving rig I'd tossed in the creek, or them noticing new horses missing brands."
"Where?" Valentine asked, so intensely that the boy shrank against his mother in fear.
"Sorry, Hank, is it? My name's David, and I was in charge of those wagons. Where is it?"
"Just the other side of these trees, sir. C'mon, I'll show you."
"Corporal Botun," Valentine ordered. "Keep everyone together here. C'mon, Jefferson, let's see what we can do with this rig."
Valentine followed the boy and Smalls, the tall Texas teamster at his side. At a word from Narcisse, the marine carrying her trailed along. They cut through a mixture of pine and hickory and came to the other side of the meadow ringing the boy's wooded campsite. The wagon stood there, its battered wooden sides dark and wet in the night's gloom. Valentine couldn't restrain himself. He ran and jumped up into the bed of the wagon like a mountain goat leaping to a higher rock.
A load of wooden four-by-four beams, coated with preservative resin, lay in the bed of the wagon. The raindrops beaded up and ran off like flowing tears. Tears that matched those on Valentine's face, concealed by the drizzle. He couldn't do anything about the dead men he'd failed. But now he could do something for those still living. Shaking, he turned to Narcisse.
"Quickwood," Narcisse said, looking into the wagon from atop the marine's shoulders.
"What kinda wood?" Smalls said.
Valentine sank to his knees in the bed of the wagon, running his hands along the beams. "Mister Smalls, I owe your boy a mountain of gratitude."
"Why's that? For finding your wagon?"
"A lot more. Hank might have just saved the Free Territory."