The Five Dollar Mail Book 3: The Road Home

75: Counter Intelligence

Cover painting by Angela Taratuta. Chapter artwork of Dev made of found images by me. All graphics by me.

Book 1: The Green, Book 2: Lynch's Boys, Book 3: The Road Home, and the Riders & Kickers Anthology are available on Amazon under the name Regina Shelley. So if you hate waiting for chapter posts and/or want a more polished read, the finished product is available now.

Fiona banged on the rough-hewn door of the scout's cabin, impatiently leaning forward as if she could will the door to open. "Mr. Devereaux...are you in there? Mr. Dever..."

The door swung open, and Dev recoiled, clearly startled at the seeing of her. His eyes went wide, then narrowed as he leaned close to her. "Miss Fiona," he muttered in his deep rumble of a voice. "It's risky, you coming over here like...what's wrong?" A look of fear crossed his face at the sight of her red-rimmed eyes. "What happened?"

"Collins is back." She grasped his beefy arm and pushed him back into the cabin, closing the door behind them both and glancing around to see who else was in the room. "Are we alone?"

"Yes, ma'am," he nodded, 'What...?"

"One of the Crow scouts...the young one with the freckles...he's dead." The words tumbled out in a frantic rush. She felt euphoric from the terror of being discovered near the tent by Collins and Stone and the horror she'd felt at seeing the tarp bundled body in the back of the wagon, and paced the worn floorboards as she spoke. "And...and the other scout that went out with that company has come back in shackles. Collins is going to kill him." 

"What?" Dev's face went pale beneath the wild brambles of his salt-and-pepper beard. "Bad Medicine's dead and Wounded's...? What the hell happened?" The air left his lungs in a gasping rush, and he rubbed his watering eyes with his thick fingers. "Boy coming back dead ain't something I want to hear about." When he looked at her again, his dark eyes were bright. "Where's Peltier?"

"Still out with Captain Scarcliff. Mr. Devereaux, I overheard them talking. Collins says he and Bad Medicine were attacked by Lakota and that the scouts deliberately lied about where the attacks were going to be. He says they're colluding with the Lakota, but I don't' believe that because..."

"Because they hate each other." Mr. Devereaux finished for her.

"Exactly. And I've heard exactly how much they hate each other from Storm." She whirled around to face him. "Mr. Devereaux...something is not right. Collins has been wanting to attack the natives around here since we arrived. I think he's set this up as an excuse. I don't think he's told a single shred of truth since he's gotten back."

Devereaux sat down heavily onto the nearest bunk. The rope net beneath the straw ticking groaned and creaked. "This has turned into a bigger mess than even I thought it would," he muttered. "And I was expecting a big damn mess, so that's saying something. Why did they arrest Wounded?"

Fiona placed her hands on the table and stood leaning heavily, her shoulders slumped. "Desertion. I heard Collins say he snuck off in the the direction of a Lakota war party."

"Horseshit." Devereaux locked eyes with her and shook his head. "I know that man well enough to know that didn't happen. And the last place a Crow scout in a blue coat wants to be is anywhere near a Lakota war party. He's being got rid of because he's likely to figure out what's really going on."

Her stomach clutched with fresh panic and she squeezed her eyes shut against the image of Storm riding out with Scarcliff's detachment dressed in a borrowed blue coat. She realized her breath had quickened and nausea clawed at her insides. She tasted acid crawling up the back of her throat.

Devereaux pointed at the chair by the table. "Sit down, Miss Fiona."

"I can't! I'm too...I'm too..." She cringed at the sound of her own voice, grown shrill with tension. "What are we going to do? We can't just sit here!" Her eyes were burning. "We can't sit and do nothing while people are murdered!"

"Not much we can do, trapped in here like rats, Little Firebrand."

"No...there isn't." Fiona got up, her eyes roving around the bunkhouse. "So we need to get untrapped, don't we? Which bunk is..." She winced. "...was... Mr. Bad Medicine's?"

"That one," Devereaux said, pointing. His woolly brows pressed themselves together, forming one long, grimacing serpent across his forehead. "Why?"

She stooped and pulled the rucksack out from beneath the bunk. "I want to borrow something from him." She pulled out a pair of gray wool trousers and held them up, inspecting them. "Mr. Bad Medicine wasn't a big man." she muttered. "In fact, he was nearly my size."

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