Blood on the Grass
The horse's lungs worked like a bellows beneath him, each breath a ragged tearing sound that Daniel Dallas felt through his own ribs, as though the animal's suffering had become his own. Lather foamed white at the gelding's neck, flecks of it spattering back against his thighs, his boots, the worn leather of a saddle that had carried him from Tennessee to this godforsaken stretch of Dakota grass. Behind him, maybe two miles distant, maybe less, the torches bobbed like a string of hungry fireflies against the black velvet of the horizon.
They were not going to stop. He understood that the way a man understands the shape of his own hand in darkness—without needing to look, without needing proof. Captain Wilkes had sworn it to him once, through the bars of a makeshift stockade in Missouri, back before Daniel had put a knife through the wrist of a guard and run into the timber like a jackrabbit flushed from brush. *I'll follow you to hell, Dallas. I'll follow you to the gates and spit you through myself.* Men said things like that in the heat of war and rarely meant them. Wilkes had meant every syllable.
Daniel leaned low over the gelding's neck, murmuring words that meant nothing,…
