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times, and one they’d have again. “Go get yourself a bath, Marshal Flynn,” he suggested with a resigned smile, obviously recognizing the argument as just as hopeless as it had been the last time. “I’ve ridden horses that smelled better’n you.”
     
     
    Nebraska Badlands
     
    A COLD wind whipped through the cottonwoods along the Rosebud River. Snow flurries rode the gusts, falling gently amidst the soldiers from nearby Fort Robinson who labored in the cold. Their breaths were visible in the frosty air even from the height of the ridges that rose above the river. The soldiers were being pushed hard, picking through the rocks that lined the river and piling them carefully into large crates. Some of the rocks contained what appeared to be skeletons within them; outlines of animals that no one had ever seen, trapped inside rocks with no explanation for how they’d gotten there. The soldiers tossed some of these rocks carelessly into stenciled crates along with the rest.
    Another band of soldiers worked atop one of the high hills above the river, searching the ground for something long buried and digging random holes to find and recover it.
    Bartholomew Stringer knelt amidst the scrub ponderosa pine atop the edge of a low butte, his dark eyes narrowed under the low brim of his hat. His second-in-command hunched beside him, the man’s narrow shoulders bent against the brisk wind that whipped down from the Black Hills to the north, into and across the badlands.
    “You sure ’bout all this, Cap?” Frank Alvarado muttered to him as they watched. The man was thin and twitchy. His stringy blond hair hung lank and dirty around his narrow face, and his deep-set eyes were a pale blue that made him seem weak and sickly. He was anything but. Stringer had found him to be hard and tough, his weedy appearance working to his advantage more often than not.
    Stringer glanced at him. He wasn’t used to having his orders questioned. But this was not a normal excursion, so he was giving his band of roughly half a dozen men some leeway. They had traveled all the way from Texas, and most of them had never been somewhere this damn cold. Back home they were known as the Border Scouts, a name retained from ties to the now defunct Confederate army because of the fear it instilled in those who heard it. Here, though, they were nothing but another gang of men with guns. It was a lot to ask of them to give up that esteem and comfort without telling them why they were here.
    Stringer’s patience with their doubts was reaching an end, though.
    “You know about Fort Robinson and the Indians, don’t you Frank?” Stringer asked in a whisper. He was a large man, taller than most and wide along the shoulders. His deep voice was often enough to keep order amidst the ruffians who called him Cap, but his size and his dark eyes helped to remind them just how cruel he could be when they got unruly.
    Alvarado nodded jerkily as he continued to watch the soldiers below.
    Three years ago, the Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife had been captured near Fort Robinson and imprisoned there. He’d tried to escape with his band of Indians and been massacred, effectively ending the Indian Wars in the Nebraska Territory. Stringer hadn’t known a lot about the Cheyenne or the Lakota Sioux at the time, and like most in the country, he hadn’t cared when he’d heard news about the mass death.
    But then he’d met John C. Baird in Denver a week ago, and Baird had told him quite a tale.
    Dull Knife, who’d been called an admirable outlaw, had hidden valuables amidst the clothing and ornamentation of his people as they’d evaded the Federal troops through the Nebraska badlands. Even their guns had been dismantled and hidden amidst blankets and parts of jewelry. The Cheyenne had been poor, though, starving and desperate by the time they’d reached the badlands. Most of the ceremonial trinkets and ancient baubles considered sacred by the elders weren’t of any interest to