Soult; if it happened to be west of Ohio, Mrs. Soult would be disturbed, it being her firm belief that Ohio was the westernmost point at which a civilized existence could be sustained. She had heard once of a frontiersman who, faced with a howling blizzard, had actually torn pages out of one of Mrs. Browning's books in order to start a fire; Mrs. Soult herself wrote a little poetry, mostly of a devotional nature--the report of the frontiersman and the fire struck her as evidence enough that, beyond Ohio, there was only barbarism and blizzards.

General Scull, secure behind his blinders, was reflecting on the fact that he had abruptly stopped hopping during the siege of Viicksburg. The flea malady, as he called it, that had seized him while in Ahumado's pit had left him because of a particularly loud cannon blast one gray morning in Mississippi. He had been hopping uncontrollably, to the bewilderment of his troops, when the cannon boomed in his ear; since then he had not indulged in a single hop.

Now he had been offered the West, land of distances and sky, the place where the last unpacified aboriginal people dwelled. He had been at a conclave once attended by a few Cheyenne and thought he had never seen a handsomer people.

The necessity of blasting and starving them into line with territorial policy did not appeal to him. It was a job he could happily refuse.

When he remembered Texas, though, he found himself unable to be quite so immediate or so categorical in his refusal. He had enjoyed tramping the plains at the head of his ranger troop--it beat mowing down his cousins from the Carolinas, or Inez's cousins from Georgia. He remembered his sharp engagements with Buffalo Hump, an enemy he had never even really seen, at close range. He remembered the daring thievery of Kicking Wolf, and the loquacity of the tracker Famous Shoes. In particular Scull remembered Ahumado, the Black Vaquero, the pit, the cages, the raw pigeons, and the blistering his brain suffered once the old Mayan had taken off his eyelids.

His friend Freddie Catherwood and his companion Johnnie Stephens had regaled him several times with tales of Chiapas and the Yucatan.

Catherwood had even given him a portfolio of drawings of lost temples in the Yucatan, made on his last journey with Johnnie Stephens.

Ahumado, he recalled, had been a man of the south, of the very regions Catherwood and Stephens had explored. Scull felt he might go someday and see the jungles and the temples, the place that had spawned his shrewdest foe.

But Ahumado, if alive, was in Mexico, whereas Texas was the theater he was being offered. He wondered which of the men he had once led were still alive, and whether Buffalo Hump still held the great Palo Duro Canyon. Scull had kept up, as best he could, with the battle reports from Texas, but it had been years since he had seen Buffalo Hump's name mentioned in connection with a raid. Like most great chiefs, his name had simply dropped from history, once he grew old.

It occurred to him, as he hid behind his blinders, that the one good reason for going back to Texas was Inez. Since there was no way to control her it was no doubt better to turn her loose on a frontier than in the somber streets of Boston.

The cattle business was booming, from what he could read. With cowboys and cattle barons to amuse her Inez might be content, for a year or two.

But Inez was in Cuba, mistress now to the greatest plantation on the island. There was no telling when or if she would return, and, in any case, experience persuaded him that it was seldom wise to return to a theater he had left. There were far too many places in the world that he hadn't seen to waste his years revisiting those he had already been to. Johnnie Stephens had been to Persia and was enthusiastic about it, going on and on about the blue mosques and the long light.

Then there was the impediment of his book. All during the war sentences and paragraphs had boiled up in his brain; he had scribbled them down on every imaginable article, including, on occasion, his saddlebags. He had worn out a whole set of Pickering's excellent little Diamond Classics, thumbing through them during intervals in battle for chance references to eyelids.

When at last he clicked his lenses and brought Colonel Soult back into focus he saw that the man was almost shaking with anxiety. Battle itself could have hardly unnerved him more than his hour in the dim old mansion on Beacon Hill.

"They thought if I came myself, to bring you their respects in person, maybe you would consider a command in the West," Colonel Soult said. "Some part of the West, at least, General." The Colonel saw from the set of General Scull's jaw that he was about to deliver a refusal. Sam Soult had not served as a subordinate to seven generals not to know when he was about to get a no rather than a yes.

"Thank them kindly, Colonel, but as you can see I'm a man of the library now," Scull said. "I've just served five years in a great war --the only struggle that still interests me is the conflict with the sentence, sir--the English sentence." Colonel Soult had got the refusal he expected, but the grounds the General gave confused him.

"Excuse me, General--the sentence?" Colonel Soult replied.

Scull seized a blank sheet of foolscap and waved it dramatically in front of Colonel Soult's face--it might make the man's job easier if he could be sent back to Washington with the conviction that the great General Inish Scull was a little teched.

"See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir-- this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee.

Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, which is why I can't oblige the President, or the generals who sent you here." Then he leaned back and smiled.

"Besides, they just want one to go back and eat dust so they won't have to," he said. "I won't do it, sir. That's my final ^w." "Well, if you won't, you won't, General," Colonel Soult said. It was a dictum he was to repeat to himself many times on the somber train ride back to Washington. General Scull had said no, which meant that he himself could look forward to a posting well west of Ohio, where Mrs. Browning's books were considered little better than kindling. Sam Soult knew well that it would greatly dismay his wife.

Famous Shoes was travelling by night, covering as much ground as he could, when he heard the singing to the south. At first, when he was far from the singer, he thought the faint sound he heard might be a wolf, but as he came closer he realized it was a Comanche, though only one Comanche. All that was very curious. Why would a single Comanche be singing by himself at night, on the llano?

He himself had been to the Cimarron River, where a few old people of his tribe still held out. He had been showing some of the flints he had found while tracking Captain McCrae to some of the oldest of the Kickapoos. Over the years since his discovery he had shown the flints to most of the oldest members of his tribe, and they had been impressed. He had been back several times to the place where he found the flints, and had located so many arrowheads and spearheads that he had to take a sack with him, to carry them. He had found a fine hiding place, too, on the Guadalupe River, a small cave well concealed by bushes, which is where he hid the flints that had been made by the Old p.